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Transcript for Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money | Lex Fridman Podcast #276

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #276 with Michael Saylor.
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Introduction

Michael Saylor
(00:00:00)
Remember George Washington, you know how he died? Well-meaning physicians bled him to death. And this was the most important patient in the country, maybe in the history of the country, and we bled him to death trying to help him. So when you’re actually inflating the money supply at 7%, but you’re calling it 2% because you want to help the economy, you’re literally bleeding the free market to death. But the sad fact is, George Washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good. And the majority of the society, most companies, most conventional thinkers, the working class, they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death, they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:00)
The following is a conversation with Michael Saylor, one of the most prominent and brilliant Bitcoin proponents in the world. He is the CEO of MicroStrategy, founder of Saylor Academy, graduate of MIT. And Michael was one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers I’ve ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with. He can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization and human history, and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains, markets, governments and financial systems. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Michael Saylor.

Grading our understanding

Lex Fridman
(00:01:43)
Let’s start with a big question of truth and wisdom. When advanced humans or aliens or AI systems, let’s say, five to 10 centuries from now, look back at earth on this early 21st century, how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics, or even about engineering, science, life, death, meaning, intelligence, consciousness, all the big interesting questions?
Michael Saylor
(00:02:12)
I think they would probably give us a B minus on engineering, on all the engineering things, the hard sciences.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:23)
A passing grade.
Michael Saylor
(00:02:25)
We’re doing okay. We’re working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and electricity, transport systems and nuclear power, and space flight and the like. And if you look at the walls that the great court at MIT, it’s full of all the great thinkers and they’re all pretty admirable. If you could be with Newton or Gauss or Madame Curie or Einstein, you would respect them. I would say they’d give us a D minus on economics, an F plus or a D minus.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:08)
You see, they have an optimistic vision. First of all, optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you’ve listed, not everybody, but most people you’ve listed is just over the past couple of centuries, and maybe stretches a little farther back. But mostly all the cool stuff we’ve done in engineering is the past couple of centuries.
Michael Saylor
(00:03:26)
Archimedes had his virtues. I studied the history of science at MIT, and I also studied aerospace engineering. And so I clearly have a bias in favor of science. And if I look at the past 10,000 years, and I consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition, I think it’s a wash. For every politician that came up with a good idea, another politician came up with a bad idea. And it’s not clear to me that most of the political and philosophical contributions to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much. I mean, we’re still taking guidance and admiring Aristotle and Plato and Seneca and the like. And on the other hand, if you think about what has made the human condition better, fire, water, harnessing of wind energy, try to row across an ocean, not easy.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:34)
And for people who are just listening or watching, there’s a beautiful sexy ship from 16th, 17th century.
Michael Saylor
(00:04:43)
This is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship, which is of the type that the Dutch East Indias Company used to sail the world and trade. So the original was made sometime in the 1600s. And then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:04)
Both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best. And just imagine just like rockets flying out the space, how much hope this filled people with, exploring the unknown, going into the mystery, both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans. What’s out there? What’s out there to be discovered?
Michael Saylor
(00:05:24)
Yeah, the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon, risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one. In 1900, I suppose the average life expectancy is 50. During the Revolutionary War, while our founding fathers were fighting to establish life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, the constitution, average life expectancy was 32, somewhere between 32 and 36. So all the sound and the fury doesn’t make you live past 32, but what does? Antibiotics, conquest of infectious diseases. If we understand the science of infectious disease, sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70, and that happened fast. That happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that. And I think if you look at the human condition, you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you’re on the… 200 is a lot. Okay, 200 is a lot. So a kilowatt-hour is all the energy that a human, a trained athlete can deliver in a day.

(00:06:50)
And probably not 1% of the people in the world could deliver a kilowatt-hour in a day. And the commercial value of a kilowatt-hour, the retail value is 11 cents today, and the wholesale value is 2 cents. And so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition, and it’s like at best to wash one way or the other. And then if you look at the contribution of John D. Rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil, and the energy in oil, liquid energy. Or the contribution of Tesla, as we deliver electricity. And what’s the impact on the human condition if I have electric power, if I have chemical power, if I have wind energy? If I can actually set up a reservoir, create a dam, spin a turbine, and generate energy from a hydraulic source, that’s extraordinary. And so our ability to cross the ocean, our ability to grow food, our ability to live, it’s technology that gets the human race from a brutal life where life expectancy is 30, to a world where life expectancy is 80.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:19)
You gave a D minus to the economists. So are they too, like the politicians, the wash in terms of there’s good ideas and bad ideas, and that tiny delta between good and bad is how you squeak pass the F plus onto the D minus territory?
Michael Saylor
(00:08:36)
I think most economic ideas are bad ideas.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:39)
Most?
Michael Saylor
(00:08:42)
Take us back to MIT and you want to solve a fluid dynamics problem. Design the shape of the hull of that ship. Or you want to design an airfoil, a wing. Or if you want to design an engine or a nozzle in a rocket ship, you wouldn’t do it with simple arithmetic, you wouldn’t do it with a scalar. There’s not a single number, right? It’s vector math. Computational fluid dynamics is n-dimensional, higher-level math, complicated stuff. So when an economist says the inflation rate is 2%, that’s a scalar. And when an economist says it’s not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low, monetary velocity is low. That’s another scalar. Okay.

(00:09:34)
So the truth of the matter is, inflation is not a scalar. Inflation is an n-dimensional vector. Money velocity is not a scalar. Saying, “What’s the velocity of money?” Oh, it’s slow or it’s fast. It ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through? And the same way that, what’s the speed of sound? Okay, well, what is sound, right? Sound is a compression wave. It’s energy moving through a medium, but the speed is different. So for example, the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water. And sound moves faster through water, it moves faster through a solid, and it moves faster through a stiffer solid. So there isn’t one.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:27)
What is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model? Is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong?
Michael Saylor
(00:10:37)
I think that the fundamental problem is, if you see the world as a scalar, you simply pick the one number which supports whatever you want to do, and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:57)
In general, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Eric Watson has been talking about this with Gage Theory, so different kinds of approaches from the physics world, from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics. So Gage Theory is one way that comes from physics. Do you find that a way of exploring economics, interesting? So outside of cryptocurrency, outside of the extra technologies and so on, just analysis of how economics works, do you find that interesting?
Michael Saylor
(00:11:30)
Yeah, I think that if we’re going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics, we have to apply much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:43)
So simulation perhaps, or…
Michael Saylor
(00:11:45)
Yeah. When I was at MIT I studied system dynamics. They taught it at the Sloan school. It was developed by Jay Forrester who was an extraordinary computer scientist. And when we created models of economic behavior, they were all multidimensional nonlinear models. So if you want to describe how anything works in the real world, you have to start with the concept of feedback. If I double the price of something, demand will fall and attempts to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases. There’ll be an instant demand change, and there’ll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing.

(00:12:37)
So it’s common sense, but most economics, most classical economics, it’s always taught with linear models, fairly simplistic linear models. And oftentimes, I’m really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic. For example, if you read any article in New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, right, they just refer to there’s an inflation number or the CPI, or the inflation rate is X. And if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation, generally they’re all based upon the idea that inflation equals CPI, and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:32)
So at the very least, we should be considering inflation and other economics concept is a nonlinear, dynamical system. So nonlinearity, and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact, maybe through simulation, maybe have some interesting models around that.
Michael Saylor
(00:13:50)
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product, every service, and every asset and every place, over time?

Inflation

Lex Fridman
(00:14:01)
You said table. Some of that also is the task of visualization, how to extract from this complex set of numbers, patterns that somehow indicate something fundamental about what’s happening. So summarization of data is still important. Perhaps summarization not down to a single scale of value, but looking at that whole sea of numbers, you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector? What does it maybe change over time, maybe different geographical regions, things of that nature. I think that’s, I don’t know even what that task is. That’s what you could look at machine learning, you can look at AI with that perspective, which is how do you represent what’s happening efficiently, as efficiently as possible? That’s never going to be a single number, but it might be a compressed model that captures something beautiful, something fundamental about what’s happening.
Michael Saylor
(00:15:02)
It’s an opportunity for sure. If we take, for example, during the pandemic, the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero, and to start buying assets, in essence printing money. And the defense was, there’s no inflation. But of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down, so it was illegal to buy anything. It was either illegal or it was impractical, so it would be impossible for demand to manifest. So of course, there is no inflation. On the other hand, there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy, for example, you lowered the interest rates to zero. At one point, we saw the swap rate on a 30-year note go to 72 basis points. Okay. That means that the value of a long-dated bond immediately inflates.

(00:16:09)
So the bond market had hyperinflation within minutes of these financial decisions. The asset market had hyperinflation. We had what you call a K-shaped recovery, what we affectionately call a K-shaped recovery. Main street shut down, Wall Street recovered all within six weeks. The inflation was in the assets, in the stocks, in the bonds. If you look today, you see that typical house, according to the Case-Shiller index today is up 19.2% year over year. So if you’re a first time home buyer, the inflation rate is 19%. The formal CPI announced a 7.9%. You can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket, a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer. I think that the fundamental failing of economists is, first of all, they don’t really have a term for asset inflation.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:24)
What’s an asset? What’s asset hyperinflation? You mentioned bottom market swap rate and asset is where the majority of the hyperinflation happen. What’s inflation? What’s hyperinflation? What’s an asset? What’s an asset market? I’m going to ask so many dumb questions.
Michael Saylor
(00:17:40)
In the conventional economic world, you would treat inflation as the rate of increase in price of a market, basket of consumer products, defined by a government agency.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:56)
So they have traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying. The government selects like toilet paper, food toaster, refrigerated electronics, all that kind of stuff. And it’s like a representative basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer.
Michael Saylor
(00:18:19)
They define a synthetic metric. I mean, I’m going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car, and you should eat three hamburgers a week. Now, 10 years go by and the apartment costs more. I could adjust the market basket via, they call them hedonic adjustments. I could decide that it used to be a 1970 needed a thousand square feet, but in the year 2020, you only need 700 square feet because we’ve miniaturized televisions and we’ve got more efficient electric appliances. And because things have collapsed into the iPhone, you just don’t need as much space. So now it may be that the apartment costs 50% more, but after the hedonic adjustment, there is no inflation because I just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:11)
So the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power.
Michael Saylor
(00:19:17)
Pretty much. I guess, my criticism of economists is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea, which is the rate at which the price of things go up. They’ve been captured by mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued CPI or government issued PCE or government issued PPI measure, which was never the rate at which things go up. It’s simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track, go up. Now, the problem with that is two big things. One thing is the government gets to create the market basket, and so they keep changing what’s in the basket over time.

(00:20:13)
So I mean, if I said three years ago, you should go see 10 concerts a year, and the concert tickets now cost $200 each. Now it’s $2,000 a year to go see concerts. Now I’m in charge of calculating inflation. So I redefine your entertainment quota for the year to be eight Netflix streaming concerts, and now they don’t cost $2,000. They cost nothing, and there is no inflation, but you don’t get your concerts right? So the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket, but in my opinion, that’s not the biggest problem. The more egregious problem is the fundamental idea that assets aren’t products or services. Assets can’t be inflated.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:02)
What’s an asset?
Michael Saylor
(00:21:03)
A house, a share of Apple stock, a bond, a Bitcoin is an asset or a Picasso painting.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:17)
Not a consumable good, not an apple that you can eat.
Michael Saylor
(00:21:23)
Right. If I throw away an asset, then I’m not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it. So what happens if I change the policy such that, let’s take the class example. A million dollar bond at a 5% interest rate gives you $50,000 a year in risk-free income. You might retire on $50,000 a year in a low cost jurisdiction. So the cost of social security or early retirement is $1 million when the interest rate is 5%. During the crisis of March of 2020, the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points. So now the cost of that bond is $10 million. The cost of social security went from a million dollars to $10 million. So if you wanted to work your entire life, save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a $50,000 salary, living on a beach in Mexico, wherever you wanted to go, you had hyperinflation, the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of some amount of time.

(00:22:30)
In fact, in that case, that was over the course of about 12 years. As the inflation rate ground down, the asset traded up. But the conventional view is, “Oh, that’s not a problem because it’s good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond.” Or what’s the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19%? It’s an awful problem for a 22-year-old that’s starting their first job, that’s saving money to buy a house. But it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say, “Well, housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation, and now the economy’s got more wealth.” And so that’s viewed as a benefit.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:20)
So what’s being missed here? The suffering of the average person or the struggle, the suffering, the pain of the average person, like metrics that captured that within the economic system. When you’re talking about-
Michael Saylor
(00:23:38)
One way to say it is, a conventional view of inflation as CPI understates the human misery that’s inflicted upon the working class and on mainstream companies, by the political class. And so it’s a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class. It’s a massive shift to power from the free market to the centrally governed or the controlled market. It’s a massive shift to power from the people to the government. And maybe one more illustrative point here, Lex is, what do you think the inflation rate’s been for the past a 100 years?
Lex Fridman
(00:24:25)
Oh, we talking about the scalar again?
Michael Saylor
(00:24:28)
If you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was, what is it? You remember when Jerome Powell said, our target’s 2%, but we’re not there. If you go around the corner, I have posted the deed to this house sold in 1930, okay. And the number on that deed is $100,000, 1930. And if you go on Zillow and you get the Z estimate-
Lex Fridman
(00:24:58)
Is it higher than that? No?
Michael Saylor
(00:25:00)
$30,500,000. So that’s 92 years, 1930 or 2022, and in 92 years, we’ve had 305X increase in price of the house. Now if you actually calculate, you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately 6.5% a year every year for 92 years. And there’s nobody in government, no conventional economists who would ever admit to an inflation rate of 7% a year in the US dollar over the last century. Now, if you dig deeper, I mean, one guy that’s done a great job working on this is Saifedean Ammous, who wrote the book, The Bitcoin Standard. And he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about 7% a year all the way up to the year 2020.

(00:26:03)
If you look at the S&P index, which is a market basket of scarce, desirable stocks, it returned about 10%. If you talk to 10% a year for a 100 years, the money supply is expanding at 7% a 100 years. If you actually talk to economists or you look at the economy and you ask the question, “How fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year?” Generally about two to 3%, the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half, 3% improvement a year.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:39)
As measured by GDP. Are you okay with that question?
Michael Saylor
(00:26:44)
I’m not sure I’d go that far yet, but I would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff, and if you ask the question, “How much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year?” Or, “What’s the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months?” You’d be hard-pressed to say, we get 2% better. Typical investor thinks they’re 10% better every year. So if you look at what’s going on really, when you’re holding a million dollars of stocks and you’re getting a 10% gain a year, you’re really get a 7% expansion of the money supply. You’re getting a two or 3% gain under best circumstances. And another way to say that is, if the money supply stopped expanding at 7% a year, the S&P yield might be 3% and not 10%. It probably should be.

(00:27:42)
Now, that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions. Like, if I borrow a billion dollars and pay 3% interest and the money supply expands at seven to 10% a year, and I ended up making a 10% return on a billion dollars investment, paying 3% interest, is that fair? And who suffered so that I could do that? Because in an environment where you’re just inflating the money supply and you’re holding the assets constant, it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply, and the difference in asset appreciation is going to be a function of the scarce, desirable quality of the assets, and to what extent can I make more of them, and to what extent are they truly limited in supply?
Lex Fridman
(00:28:37)
Yeah. So we will get to a lot of the words you said there, the scarcity and so connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets. But you also said, so the expansion of the money supply, which is put in other ways, is printing money. And so is that always bad? The expansion of the money supply, just to put some terms on the table so we understand them. You nonchalantly say it’s always on average expanding every year. The money supply is expanding every year by 7%. That’s a bad thing. That’s a universally bad thing.
Michael Saylor
(00:29:17)
It’s awful. I guess to be precise, it’s the currency. I would say money is monetary energy or economic energy, and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium. So if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange, it has to find its way into currency, but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold. If the money flows into property, it’ll probably hold its value much better. If the money flows into currency… If you had put a $100,000 in this house, you would have 305X return over 92 years. But if you had put the money a $100,000 into safe deposit box and buried it in the basement, you would’ve lost 99.7% of your wealth over the same time period. So the expansion of the currency creates a massive inefficiency in the society, what I’ll call an adiabatic lapse. What we’re doing is we’re bleeding the civilization to death.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:30)
What’s the adiabatic… What’s that word?
Michael Saylor
(00:30:31)
Adiabatic lapse.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:32)
Adiabatic.
Michael Saylor
(00:30:34)
In aerospace engineering, you want to solve any problem. They start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system. And what that means is a closed system.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:44)
Okay.
Michael Saylor
(00:30:44)
So-
Lex Fridman
(00:30:45)
I’ve got it.
Michael Saylor
(00:30:45)
… I’ve got a container. And in that container, no air leaves and no air enters. No energy exits or enters. So it’s a closed system.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:54)
So you got the closed system lapse.
Michael Saylor
(00:30:57)
Okay, I’m going to use a-
Lex Fridman
(00:31:00)
There’s a leak in the ship.
Michael Saylor
(00:31:03)
… physical metaphor for you, because you’re into jujitsu. You got 10 pints of blood in your body, and so before your next workout, I’m going to take one pint from you. Now you’re going to go exercise, but you’ve lost 10% of your blood. You’re not going to perform as well. It takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets. So what if I tell you every month you got to show up and I’m going to bleed you? Okay, so if I’m draining the energy, I’m draining the blood from your body. You can’t perform. Adiabatic lapse is when you go up an altitude. Every thousand feet, you lose three degrees.

(00:31:45)
You go at 50,000 feet, you’re 150 degrees colder than sea level. That’s why you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees, you’re minus 70 degrees. Why is the temperature falling? Temperature’s falling because it’s not a closed system, it’s an open system. As the air expands, the density falls, the energy per cubic, whatever falls, and therefore the temperature falls. The heat’s falling out of the solution. So when you’re inflating, let’s say you’re inflating the money, the currency supply by 6%, you’re sucking 6% of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:34)
So the currency, this ocean of currency, that’s a nice way for the economy to function. It’s being inefficient when you expand the money supply, but it’s the liquid. I’m trying to find the right adjective here. It’s how you do transactions at a scale of billions.
Michael Saylor
(00:32:54)
Currency is the asset we use to move monetary energy around, and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the boulevard.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:04)
Selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient, or you can’t transact between billions of people with houses.
Michael Saylor
(00:33:14)
Yeah. Properties don’t make such good mediums of exchange. They make better stores of value and they have utility value if it’s a ship or a house or a plane or a bushel of corn.

Government

Lex Fridman
(00:33:29)
Can we zoom out, keep zooming out into, we reach the origin of human civilization, but on the way ask, you gave economists a D minus. I’m not even going to ask you what you give to governments. Do you think their failure, economists and government failure is malevolence or incompetence?
Michael Saylor
(00:33:53)
I think policy makers are well-intentioned, but generally all government policy is inflationary and it’s inflammatory and inflationary. So what I-
Michael Saylor
(00:34:00)
… and all government, it’s inflammatory and inflationary. So what I mean by that is when you have a policy pursuing supply chain independence, if you have an energy policy, if you have a labor policy, if you have a trade policy, if you have any kind of foreign policy, a domestic policy, a manufacturing policy, every one of these, a medical policy, every one of these policies interferes with the free market and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper, more efficient way. So when you layer them on top of each other, they all have to be paid for. If you want to shut down the entire economy for a year, you have to pay for it, right? If you want to fight a war, you have to pay for it, right? If you don’t want to use oil or natural gas, you have to pay for it. If you don’t want to manufacture semiconductors in China and you want to manufacture them in the U.S., you got to pay for it.

(00:35:03)
If I rebuild the entire supply chain in Pennsylvania and I hire a bunch of employees and then I unionize the employees, then not only am I… I idle the factory in the Far East, it goes to 50% capacity. So whatever it sells, it has to raise the price on, and then I drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the U.S. because I’m competing against them, right? I’m changing that condition. So everything gets less efficient, everything gets more expensive, and of course, the government couldn’t really pay for its policies and its wars with taxes. We didn’t pay for World War I with tax. We didn’t pay for World War II with tax. We didn’t pay for Vietnam with tax. In fact, when you trace this, what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes. It pays for-
Lex Fridman
(00:35:54)
Because it’s super painful to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you’re doing with taxes, with taxpayer money because they feel the pain.
Michael Saylor
(00:36:05)
That’s one interpretation or it’s just too transparent. If people understood the true cost-
Lex Fridman
(00:36:12)
Of war, they wouldn’t want to go to war.
Michael Saylor
(00:36:15)
If you were told that you would lose 95% of your assets and 90% of everything you will be ever will be taken from you, you might re-prioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:31)
But you’re still saying incompetence not malevolence. So fundamentally, government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is how you look at it.
Michael Saylor
(00:36:42)
I think a lack of humility, if people had more humility than they would realize-
Lex Fridman
(00:36:51)
Humility about how little they know, how little they understand about the function of complex systems.
Michael Saylor
(00:36:58)
It’s a phrase from Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven where he says, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” I think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience in life causes you to reevaluate that. So I’ve done a lot of things in my life and generally, my mistakes were always my good ideas that I enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150% of my attention to prosper. So I think people pursue too many good ideas, and they all sound good, but there’s just a limit to what you can accomplish. And everybody underestimates the challenges of implementing an idea, and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that.

(00:37:58)
And so I think it’s an overconfidence that causes an over-exuberance in pursuit of policies. As the ambition of the government expands, so must the currency supply. I could say the money supply, but let’s say the currency supply. You can triple the number of pesos in the economy, but it doesn’t triple the amount of manufacturing capacity in the set economy, and it doesn’t triple the amount of assets in the economy. It just triples the pesos. So as you increase the currency supply, then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly. And the confidence of all of the institutions, the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will collapse.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:53)
If we take a tangent on a tangent, and we will return soon to the big human civilization question. So if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can’t afford, what’s the best form of government? Anarchism. Libertarianism. So there’s not even armies. There’s no borders that’s anarchism-
Michael Saylor
(00:38:53)
The least.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:23)
The smallest possible, the less the-
Michael Saylor
(00:39:27)
The best government would be the least, and the debate will be over that.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:32)
When you think about this stuff, do you think about, “Okay, government is the way it is, I, as a person that can generate great ideas, how do I operate in this world?” Or do you also think about the big picture? If we start a new civilization somewhere on Mars, do you think about what’s the ultimate form of government? What’s at least a promising thing to try?
Michael Saylor
(00:40:02)
I have laser eyes on my profile on-
Lex Fridman
(00:40:05)
Yes-
Michael Saylor
(00:40:05)
… Twitter, Lex.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:06)
… we’ve noticed. What does that mean?
Michael Saylor
(00:40:07)
And the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:13)
Yes.
Michael Saylor
(00:40:14)
And if I look at the civilization, I would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective. Half, 50%, I don’t know, it’s worth $500 trillion worth of problems? Money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it equates to all the products, all the services and all the assets that we have and whatever we’re going to have. So that’s half. The other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and military and political and philosophical and natural. And I think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems, and they are all honorable professions and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialists in all those areas. I think that what I could offer its constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood. It’s a much bigger problem than we understand it to be.

(00:41:37)
We need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition. All government policy is inflationary. And another pernicious myth is inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena. A famous quote by Milton Friedman, I believe, it’s like, it’s a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply. It’s a nice phrase and it’s oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation. But again, it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is. If I had a currency which was completely non-inflationary, if I never printed another dollar and if I eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth, we’d still have inflation, and we’d have inflation as long as we have government that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in themself inflationary, and generally, they all are.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:43)
So in general, inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that’s government collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people’s resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations in some tricky ways. Whatever the options ever are available.
Michael Saylor
(00:43:08)
Hiding the cost is like the tertiary thing. The primary goal is the government will attempt to do good, right? And-
Lex Fridman
(00:43:18)
That’s the primary problem?
Michael Saylor
(00:43:21)
They will attempt to do good and they will do good imperfectly, and they will create oftentimes as much damage… more damage than the good they do. Most government policy will be iatrogenic. It will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it, but it is what it is. The secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they’re actually paying for it in a suboptimal fashion. They’ll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good. The tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they’re collapsing the currency. So for example, if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and look at the numbers printed by the Fed, they’ll say, “Oh, it looks like the dollar’s lost 95% of its purchasing power over 100 years.” They sort of fess up that there’s a problem, but they make it 95% loss over 100 years. What they don’t do is realize it’s a 99.7% loss over 80 years.

(00:44:34)
So they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy, which they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends, and they underestimate the cost. And they’re oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong. The mental model that it’s okay, we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar, and we don’t see 2% inflation yet, and the money velocity is low, and so it’s okay if we print trillions of dollars. Well, the money velocity was immediate. The velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10,000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy. I think Nic pointed out when you spoke to him, he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle, right? So you spend a million dollars in the consumer economy, you can move it six times a year.

(00:45:59)
You put the million dollars into gold, gold will sit in a vault for a decade. Okay? So the velocity of money through gold is 0.1. You put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week. The settlement is T+2. Maybe you get to 2:1 leverage, you might get to a money velocity of 100 a year. In the stock market, you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours. And if you’re offshore, they’re trading with 20x leverage. So if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage, you just went to 7,000. So the velocity of the money varies. I think the politicians, they don’t really understand inflation and they don’t understand economics, but you can’t blame them because the economists don’t understand economics. Because if they did, they would be creating multivariate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing and every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets.

(00:47:12)
And then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results. And that’s a high bandwidth requirement, and I think that people don’t really want to embrace it. There’s that phrase, you can’t tell people what to think, but you can tell them what to think about. The most pernicious thing is I get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it’s happening to you, you don’t appreciate that it’s a bad thing and you think it’s a good thing. So if housing prices are going up 20% year over year, and I say this is great for the American public ’cause most of them are homeowners, then I have misrepresented a phenomena. Inflation is 20%, not 7%, and then I have misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative, and people will stare at it. And you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it’s warming them up and they’re going to save on their heat cost.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:22)
It does seem that the cruder of the model, whether it’s economics, whether it’s psychology, the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want. And not in a malicious way, but just like it’s some kind of emergent phenomena, this narrative thing that we tell ourselves. So you can tell any kind of story about inflation. Inflation is good. Inflation is bad. Like the cruder the model, the easier it is to tell a narrative about it. So if you take an engineering approach, I feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system.
Michael Saylor
(00:49:06)
Honestly, if you went to 100 people on the street and you ask them to define inflation, how many would say it’s a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time?
Lex Fridman
(00:49:22)
No.
Michael Saylor
(00:49:22)
Not many.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:23)
Not many.
Michael Saylor
(00:49:25)
If you went to them and you said, “Do you think 2% inflation a year is good or bad?” The majority would probably say, “Well, I heat it’s good.” The majority of economists would say 2% inflation a year is good, and of course, look at the ship next to us. What if I told you that the ship leaked 2% of its volume every something? The ship is rotting 2% a year. That means the useful life of the ship is 50 years. Now, ironically, that’s true. Like a wooden ship had a 50-year to 100- year life. 100 would be long, 50 years, not unlikely. So when we built ships out of wood, they had a useful life of about 50 years, and then they sunk and they rotted. There’s nothing good about it. You build a ship out of steel and it’s 0 as opposed to 2% degradation, and how much better is 0% versus 2%?

(00:50:25)
Well, 2% means you have a useful life of it’s half life of 35 years. 2% is a half life of 35 years. That’s basically the half life of money in gold. If I store your life force in gold, under perfect circumstances, you have a useful life of 35 years. 0% is a useful life of forever. So 0% is immortal, 2% is 35 years average life expectancy. So the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is a silly notion. But the tragic notion is it was 7 into 70 or 10 years.

(00:51:12)
The money has had a half life of 10 years except for the fact that in weak societies and Argentina or the like, the half-life of the money is three to four years; in Venezuela, one year. So the United States dollar and the United States economic system was the most successful economic system in the last 100 years in the world. We won every war. We were the world’s superpower. Our currency lost 99.7% of its value, and that means horrifically every other currency lost, right? In essence, the other ones were 99.9, except for most that were 100% because they all completely failed. And you’ve got a mainstream economic community that thinks that inflation is a number and 2% is desirable. It’s like, remember George Washington? You know how he died?
Lex Fridman
(00:52:16)
No.
Michael Saylor
(00:52:18)
Well-meaning physicians bled him to death. Okay? The last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them in the modern world. I think we understand that oxygen is carried by the blood cells, and if… There’s that phrase, triage phrase, what’s the first thing you do in an injury? Stop the bleeding. Single first thing, right? You show up after any accident, I look at you, stop the bleeding because you’re going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out. So it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death. And this was the most important patient in the country, maybe in the history of the country, and we bled him to death trying to help him.

(00:53:14)
So when you’re actually inflating the money supply at 7% but you’re calling it 2% because you want to help the economy, you’re literally bleeding the free market to death. But the sad fact is George Washington went along with it ’cause he thought that they were going to do him good. And the majority of the society, most companies, most conventional thinkers, the working class, they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind. And the people that are bleeding them to death, they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and they’re understanding of energy and engineering and the economics that are at play is crippled by these mental models.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:11)
But that’s both the bug in the future of human civilization that ideas take hold, that unite us. We believe in them, and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by, as an average, just the fact of the matter, a lot of people believe the same thing. They get together and they get some shit done because they believe that thing. And then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive. But on average, the ideas seem to be progressing in a direction of good. Let me just step back. What the hell are we doing here, us humans on this earth? How do you think of humans? How special are humans? How did human civilization originate on this earth, and what is this human project they’re all taking on? You mentioned fire and water, and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea. I always thought you can get the demons out in that way, but that was a recent invention. So what’s this thing we’re doing here?

War and power

Michael Saylor
(00:55:20)
I think what distinguishes human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is our ability to engineer. We’re engineers, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:55:31)
To solve problems or just build incredible cool things?
Michael Saylor
(00:55:38)
Engineering, harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it. From the point that we actually started to play with fire, that was a big leap forward. Harnessing the power of kinetic energy and missiles, another step forward, every city built on water. Why water? Well, water’s bringing energy, right? If you actually put a turbine on a river or you capture a change in elevation of water, you’ve literally harnessed gravitational energy, but water’s also bringing you food. It’s also giving you a cheap form of getting rid of your waste. It’s also giving you free transportation. You want to move one ton blocks around, you want to move them in water. So I think the human story is really the story of engineering a better world. And the rise in the human condition is determined by those groups of people, those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy, right?

(00:56:55)
If you look the Greek civilization, they built it around ports and seaports and water and created a trading network. The Romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of engineering. The aqueducts are a great example. If you go to any big city, you travel through cities in the Med, you find that the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5,000 people without running water. And then if you can find a way to bring water to it it increases by a factor of 10. And so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy that eventually takes the form of air power. That ship, look at the intricacy of those sails. Just the model is intricate. Now, think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sails to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:59)
It’s thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the effectiveness, the efficiency of this ship as it sails thru water. And we should also note there’s a bunch of cannons on the side. So obviously-
Michael Saylor
(00:58:18)
Another form of engineering, energy harnessing with explosives.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:23)
To achieve what end? That’s another discussion. Exactly.
Michael Saylor
(00:58:27)
Suppose we’re trying to get off the planet, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:58:30)
Well, there’s a selection mechanism going on, so natural selection it’s’… However evolution works, it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator/prey dynamic, that you want to be the bigger fish, that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole. We as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing. It seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we’re ultimately tend towards cooperation. We like peace. If you just look at history, we want things to be nice and calm. But just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on, and they have a resetting the palette effect. It’s one that’s full of just immeasurable human suffering, but it’s like a way to start over.
Michael Saylor
(00:59:34)
We’re clearly apex predator on the planet. And I Googled something the other day, “What’s the most common form of mammal life on the earth?”
Lex Fridman
(00:59:47)
By number of organisms?
Michael Saylor
(00:59:48)
Count.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:49)
By count?
Michael Saylor
(00:59:49)
And the answer that came back was human beings.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:52)
Really?
Michael Saylor
(00:59:52)
I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it, right? It says apparently if we’re just looking at mammals, the answer was human beings are the most common, which was very interesting to me. I almost didn’t believe it, but I was trying to figure out, 8 billion or so human beings-
Lex Fridman
(01:00:06)
Yeah, It’s a lot.
Michael Saylor
(01:00:07)
… there’s no other mammal that’s got more than 8 billion. If you walk through downtown Edinburgh and Scotland and you look up on this hill and this castle up on the hill and you talk to people and the story is, “Oh, yeah, well, that was a British castle. Before, it was a Scottish castle. Before, it was a pick castle. Before, it was a Roman castle. Before, it was some other Celtic castle. Before, it was…” Then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other, under the other. And you get the conclusion that 100,000 years ago, somebody showed up and grabbed the high point, the apex of the city, and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked them off the hill. And it’s been a nonstop never-ending fight by the aggressive, most powerful entity, family, organization, municipality, tribe, whatever-
Lex Fridman
(01:01:08)
All for the hill.
Michael Saylor
(01:01:09)
For that one hill, going back since time immemorial. And you scratch your head and you think, it seems like it’s just this never-ending-
Lex Fridman
(01:01:24)
But doesn’t that lead-
Michael Saylor
(01:01:25)
… wheel.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:25)
… if you just… all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result. It seems that war, just like your laser eyes, focuses the mind on the engineering tasks.
Michael Saylor
(01:01:39)
It is that, and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful. And we throw that phrase out, but no one thinks about what that phrase means. Like who’s the most powerful or the most powerful side one, but they don’t think about it. And they think about power, energy delivered in a period of time. And then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear. And then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without, and steel is more powerful than bronze.

(01:02:21)
And if you look at the Romans, they persevered with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you smithereens. You study the history of the Balearic slingers and you think we invented bullets, but they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago that could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head. And so there was never a time when humanity wasn’t vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:02)
And absolute power is when a leader is able to control large amount of humans, they’re facing the same direction, working in the same direction to leverage energy.
Michael Saylor
(01:03:17)
The most organized society wins. When the Romans were dominating everybody, they were the most organized civilization in Europe. As long as they stayed organized, they dominated. And at some point, they over-expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed. And I guess you could say the struggle of human condition. It catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other. Anybody that rejects ocean power gets penalized. You reject artillery, you get penalized. You reject atomic power, you get penalized. If you reject digital power, cyber power, you get penalized. And the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they’re able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:20)
Well, that’s a really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments and companies, once they get a few good ideas, they seem to stick with them. They reject new ideas. It’s almost whether that’s emergent or however that evolved, it seems to have a really interesting effect, ’cause when you’re young, you fight for the new ideas. You push them through, then a few of us humans find success, then we get complacent. We take over the world using that new idea, and then the new young person with a better new idea challenges you. As opposed to pivoting, you stick with the old and lose because of it, and that’s how empires collapse. And it’s just both at the individual level that happens with two academics fighting about ideas or something like that. And at the human civilization level, governments. They hold on to the ideas of old. It’s fascinating.
Michael Saylor
(01:05:24)
An ever-persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shifts, and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives. Or the paradigm shifts when there’s a war, and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening. And if they totally disagree, their society collapses and they’re replaced by that new thing.

Dematerializing information

Lex Fridman
(01:05:57)
A lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water. What about this whole digital thing that’s happening, been happening over the past century? Is that still engineering in your mind? You’re starting to operate in these bits of information?
Michael Saylor
(01:06:19)
I think there’s two big ideas. The first wave of ideas were digital information, and that was the internet wave been running since 1990 or so for 30 years. And the second wave is digital energy. So if I look at digital information, this idea that we want to digitally transform a book, I’m going to dematerialize every book in this room into bits and then I’m going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people, and I’m going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity, if I can dematerialize music, books, education, entertainment, maps, that is an incredibly exothermic transaction.

(01:07:14)
It’s a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization and we give off massive amounts of energy. If you look at what Carnegie did, the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time, and he gave away his entire fortune. And now we can give a better library to every six-year-old for nothing, and so what’s the value of giving a million books to 8 billion people? That’s the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation. And when we do it with maps, I transform the map. I put it into a car. You get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map. And how much better is that than a Rand McNally Atlas right here? It’s like a million times better.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:03)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:08:00)
Atlas right here, it’s like a million times better.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:03)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:08:03)
So the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things, which were non-conservative. That is, I could take Beethoven’s 5th Symphony played for by the best orchestra in Germany and I could give it to a billion people and they could play it 1000 times each at less than the cost of the one performance, right? So I deliver culture and education and erudition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails. And the consequences of the human race are first order generally good, right? The world is a better place. It drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like Apple, and Amazon, and Facebook, and Google, and Microsoft, right? That is the first wave. The second wave,-
Lex Fridman
(01:08:58)
Do you mind? Sorry to interrupt, but that first wave, it feels like the impact that’s positive. You said the first order impact is generally positive. It feels like it’s positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive, and then we may not actually truly be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity and just progress and human civilization until we look back centuries from now. Or maybe, like just looking at the impact of Wikipedia.
Michael Saylor
(01:09:37)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:40)
Giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people. If you can just linger on that for a second, what’s your sense of the impact of that?
Michael Saylor
(01:09:56)
I would say if you’re a technologist philosopher, the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology, that it’s almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way. So let’s take example. I have a foundation, the Saylor Academy and the Saylor Academy gives away free education, free college education to anybody on earth that wants it. And we’ve had more than a million students. And if you go and you take the physics class, the lectures were by the same physics lecturer that taught me physics at MIT, except when I was at MIT, the cost of the first four weeks of MIT would’ve drained my family’s life, collective life savings for the first last 100 years.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:52)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:10:53)
100 years worth of my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, they saved every penny they had after 100 years, they could have paid for one week or two weeks of MIT. That’s how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was. So I went on scholarship. I was lucky to have a scholarship, but on the other hand, I sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and I was right up in the rafters. It’s an awful experience on these uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously. And the stuff we upload, you can start it and stop it and watch it on your iPad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it’s absolutely free.

(01:11:42)
So I think about this and I think you want to improve the human condition? You need people with postgraduate level education. You need PhDs, and I know this sounds kind of elitist, but you want to cure cancer and you want to go to the Stars fusion drive. We need new propulsion, right? We need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science, be it biology, or propulsion, or material science, or computer science. You’re not doing that with an undergraduate degree. You’re certainly not doing it with a high school education, but the cost of a PhD is like a million bucks. There’s like 10 million PhDs in the world. If you check it out. There’s 8 billion people in the world. How many people could get a PhD or would want to? Maybe not 8 billion, but a billion, 500 million. Let’s just say 500 million to a billion. How do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people, all of them specializing in, and I don’t have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are. I mean, your life is interviewing these experts and there’s so many, right? It’s amazing. So how do I give a multimillion dollar education to a billion people? And there’s two choices. You can either endow a scholarship, in which case you pay $75,000 a year. Okay. 75, let’s pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person. I can do it that way. And you’re never, even if you had a trillion dollars, if you had $10 trillion to throw at the problem and we’ve just thrown $10 trillion at certain problems, you don’t solve the problem, right? If I put $10 trillion on the table and I said, educate everybody, give them all a PhD, you still wouldn’t solve the problem. Harvard University can’t educate 18,000 people simultaneously or 87,000 or 800,000 or 8 million. So you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience. So you put it all as streaming on demand, computer generated education, and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it.

(01:14:07)
It’s like the human condition is being held back by 500,000 well-meaning average algebra teachers. I love them. I mean, please don’t take of offense if you’re an algebra teacher, but instead of 500,000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again, what you need is one or five or 10 really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or a billion times a year for free. And if we do that, there’s no reason why you can’t give infinite education, certainly in science, technology, engineering, and math, right, infinite education to everybody with no constraint. And I think the same is true, right, with just about every other thing. If you want to bring joy to the world, you need digital music. If you want to bring enlightenment to the world, you need digital education. If you want to bring anything of consequence in the world, you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it, something like 100 times more efficiently as a start, but a million times more efficiently is probably optimal. That’s hopeful. Maybe you have a chance.

(01:15:36)
If you look at all of these space endeavors and everything, we’re thinking about getting to Mars, getting off the planet, getting to other worlds. Number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine. People dreamed about flying for thousands of years, but until the internal combustion engine, you didn’t have enough energy, enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem. And the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master. And each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation, of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:27)
There are certain problems like education that could be solved through this process of dematerialization. And by the way, to give props to the 500K algebra teachers, when I look at YouTube for example, one possible approach is each one of those 500,000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance. And if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process, like the market of education where the best ones rise up, that’s a really interesting way, which is the best day of your life, the best lesson you’ve ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people. So all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world. Now, traveling across planets, you still can’t solve that problem with dematerialization. What you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer, like you don’t need to have astronauts on the ship. You can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain
Michael Saylor
(01:17:41)
Touching on those points. You’d love for the 500,000 algebra teachers to become 500,000 math specialists, and maybe they clump into 50,000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50,000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:57)
Yeah. Yes.
Michael Saylor
(01:17:58)
That’s the same as when I give you 11 cents worth of electricity. And you don’t have to row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat. Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:09)
Yes.
Michael Saylor
(01:18:10)
It would be a lot better. That you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things. Right. With regard to technology, one thing that I learned studying technology, when you look at S-curves, is until you start the S-curve, you don’t know whether you’re 100 from viability, 1000 years from viability or a few months from viability. So,-
Lex Fridman
(01:18:42)
Isn’t that fun? That’s so fun. The early part of the S-curve is so fun because you don’t know.
Michael Saylor
(01:18:50)
In 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10,000 reasons why humans will never fly.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:58)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:18:58)
Right. And in 1903, the Wright brothers flew, and by 1969 we’re walking on the moon. So the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary. But for the 100 years and 200 years before, they were just back and forth and nobody was close. And that’s the happy part. The happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25,000 miles an hour in 66 years. The unhappy part is I studied aeronautical engineering at MIT in the 80s. And in the 80s we had Gulfstream aircraft, we had Boeing 737s, we had the space shuttle. And you fast-forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft. The efficiency of the engines was 20, 30% more.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:55)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:19:55)
Right. We slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. In fact, the Global Express, the Gulfstream, these were all engineered in the 70s, some in the 60s. The fuselage silhouette of a Gulfstream of a G5 was the same shape as a G4 is the same shape as a G3, is the same shape as a G2. And that’s because they were afraid to change the shape for 40 years because they worked it out in a wind tunnel. They knew it worked. And when they finally decided to change the shape, it was like a $10 billion exercise with modern supercomputers and computational fluid dynamics.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:40)
Why was it so hard? What is that wall made of that you slammed into?
Michael Saylor
(01:20:46)
The right question is, so why does the guy that went to MIT that got an aeronautical engineering degree, spent his career in software? Why is it that I never a day in my life with the exception of some Air Force Reserve work, I never got paid to be an aeronautical engineer, and I worked in software engineering my entire career.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:03)
Well, maybe software engineering is the new aeronautical engineering in some way. Maybe you hit fundamental walls until you have to return to it centuries later, or no.
Michael Saylor
(01:21:17)
The National Gallery of Art was endowed by a very rich man, Andrew Mellon, and you know how he made his money? Aluminum. Okay. And you know what kind of airplanes you can create without aluminum? Nothing. Nothing, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:21:37)
So it’s a materialist problem.
Michael Saylor
(01:21:39)
Okay. So 1900, we made massive advances in metallurgy, right? I mean, that was US Steel, that was iron to steel, aluminum, massive fortunes were created because this was a massive technical advance. And then we also had the internal combustion engine and the story of Ford and General Motors and DaimlerChrysler and the like is informed by that. So you have no jet engines, no rocket motors, no internal combustion engines, you have no aviation. But even if you had those engines, if you were trying to build those things with steel, no chance. You had to have aluminum. So there’s two pretty basic technologies, and once you have those two technologies, stuff happens very fast. So tell me the last big advance in jet engines. There hasn’t been one there. The last big advance in rocket engines. Hasn’t been one. The big advances in spaceship design, from what I can see are in the control systems, the gyros and the ability to land, right, in a stable fashion. That’s pretty amazing, landing a rocket.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:53)
Also in the, at least according to the Elon and so on, the manufacture of more efficient and less expensive manufacturer of rockets. So it’s a production, whatever that you call that discipline of at scale manufacture, at scale production. So factory work, but it’s not 10X. I mean maybe it’s 10X over a period of a few decades.
Michael Saylor
(01:23:18)
When we figure out how to operate a spaceship on the water in your water bottle for a year.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:26)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:23:27)
Right. Now, then you’ve got a breakthrough. So the bottom line is propulsion technology, propellants, and the materials technology, they were critical to getting on that aviation S-curve. And then we slammed into a wall in the 70s and the Boeing 747, the Global Express, the Gulfstream, these things were, the space shuttle, they were all pretty much reflective of that. And then we stopped. And at that point, you have to switch to a new S-curve. So the next equivalent to the internal combustion engine was the CPU, and the next aluminum equivalent was silicon.

(01:24:07)
So when we actually started developing CPUs, transistor gave way to CPUs. And if you look at the power, right, the bandwidth that we had on computers and Moore’s law, right? What if the efficiency of jet engines had doubled every three years, right, in the last 40 years where we be right now? Right. So I think that if you’re a business person, if you’re looking for a commercially viable application of your mind, then you have to find that S-curve. And ideally you have to find it in the first five, six, 10 years. But people always miss this. Let’s take Google Glass, right? Google Glass was an idea 2013. The year is 2022. And people were quite sure this was going to be a big thing but,-
Lex Fridman
(01:25:03)
And it could have been at the beginning of the S-curve.
Michael Saylor
(01:25:07)
But fundamentally, we didn’t really have an effective mechanism. I mean, people getting vertigo and their,-
Lex Fridman
(01:25:14)
But you didn’t know that at the beginning of the S-curve, right? I mean, maybe some people had a deep intuition about the fundamentals of augmented reality, but you don’t know that. You don’t have those, you’re looking through the fog. You don’t know.
Michael Saylor
(01:25:28)
So the point is, we’re year zero in 2013, and we’re still year zero in 2022 on that augmented reality. And when somebody puts out a set of glasses that you can wear comfortably without getting vertigo, right, without any disorientation that managed to have the stability and the bandwidth necessary to sync with the real world, you’ll be in year one. And from that point, you’ll have a 70 year or some interesting future until you slam into a limit to growth.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:03)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:26:04)
And then it’ll slow down. And this is the story of a lot of things, right? I mean, John D. Rockefeller got in the oil business in the 1860s, and the oil business as we understood it became fairly mature by the 1920s to 30s. And then it actually stayed that way until we got to fracking, which was like seven years later, and then it burst forward, so.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:33)
The interesting story about Moore’s law though is that you get this constant burst of S-curves, on top of S-curves, on top of S-curves. It’s like the moment you start slowing down or almost ahead of you slowing down, you come up with another innovation, another innovation. So Moore’s law doesn’t seem to happen in every technological advancement. It seems like you only get a couple of S-curves and then you’re done for a bit. So I wonder what the pressures there are that resulted in such success over several decades and still going.
Michael Saylor
(01:27:07)
Humility dictates that nobody knows when the S-curve kicks off, and you could be 20 years early or 100 years early. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, they were designing flying machines hundreds and hundreds of years ago. So humility says you’re not quite sure when you really hit that commercial viability. And it also dictates you don’t know when it ends. When will the party stop? When will Moore’s law stop and we’ll get to the point where they’re exponentially diminishing returns on silicon performance and just like we got exponentially diminishing returns on jet engines, and it just takes an exponential increase in effort to make it 10% better, but while you’re in the middle of it, then you know can do things.

(01:28:01)
So the reason that the digital revolution is so important is because the underlying platforms, the bandwidth and the performance of the components, and I say the components are the radio protocols, mobile protocols, the batteries, the CPUs, and the displays. Right. Those four components are pretty critical. They’re all critical in the creation of an iPhone. I wrote about it in the book, The Mobile Wave, and they catalyzed this entire mobile revolution. Because they have advanced and continue to advance, they created the very fertile environment for all these transformations. And the digital transformations themselves, right, they call for creativity in their own. Right.

(01:28:59)
I think the interesting thing about let’s take digital maps. Right. When you conceptualize something as a dematerialized map, right, it becomes a map because I can put it on a display like an iPad or I can put it in a car like a Tesla. But if you really want to figure it out, you can’t think like an engineer. You need to think like a fantasy writer. This is where it’s useful if you played Dungeons and Dragons and you read Lord of the Rings and you studied all the fantasy literature, because when I dematerialize the map, first I put 10 million pages of satellite imagery into the map. Right.

(01:29:43)
That’s a simple physical transform. But then I start to put telemetry into the map, and I keep track of the traffic rates on the roads, and I tell you whether you’ll be in a traffic jam if you drive that way, and I tell you which way to drive. And then I start to get feedback on where you’re going. And I tell you, the restaurant’s closed and people don’t like it anyway. And then I put an AI on top of it and I have it drive your car for you. And eventually the implication of digital transformation of maps is I get into a self-driving car and I say, take me someplace cool where I can eat.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:20)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:30:20)
Right. And how did you get to that last step? Right. It wasn’t simple engineering. There’s a bit of fantasy in there, a bit of magic.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:30)
Design, art, whatever the heck you call it, it’s whatever. Yeah. Fantasy injects magic into the engineering process. Imagination precedes great revolutions in engineering. It’s like imagining a world, like of what you can do with the display. How will the interaction be? That’s where Google Glass actually came in, augmented reality, virtual reality, people are playing in the space of sci-fi, imagination.
Michael Saylor
(01:31:00)
They called it a moonshot. They tried, it didn’t work, but to their credit, they stopped trying.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:05)
And then there’s new people. They keep dreaming. Dreamers all around us. I love those dreamers. And most of them fail and suffer because of it, but some of them win Nobel Prizes or become billionaires.
Michael Saylor
(01:31:18)
Well, what I would say is if half the civilization dropped what they were doing tomorrow and eagerly started working on launching a rocket to Alpha Centauri, it might not be the best use of our resources because it’s kind of like if half of Athens in the year 500 BC eagerly started working on flying machines. If you went back and you said, what advice would you give them, you would say, it’s not going to work until you get to aluminum. And you’re not going to get to aluminum until you work out the steel and certain other things. And you’re not going to get to that until you work out the calculus of variations and some metallurgy. And there’s a dude Newton that won’t come along for quite a while and he’s going to give you the calculus to do it. And until then, it’s hopeless.

(01:32:09)
So you might be better off to work on the aqueduct or to focus upon sales or something. So if I look at this today, I say there’s massive profound civilization advances to be made through digital transformation of information. And you can see them. This is not the story of today, right? It’s 10 years old, what we’ve been seeing.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:36)
We’re living through different manifestations of that story today too though, like social media, the effects of that is very interesting because ideas spread even, you talk about velocity of money, the velocity of ideas keeps increasing.
Michael Saylor
(01:32:51)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:52)
So Wikipedia is a passive store. It’s a store of knowledge. Twitter is like a water hose or something. It’s like spraying you with knowledge whether you want it or not. It’s like social media is just like this explosion of ideas. And then we pick them up and then we try to understand ourselves because the drama of it also plays with our human psyche. So sometimes there’s more ability for misinformation, for propaganda to take hold. So we get to learn about ourselves, we get to learn about the technology that can decelerate the propaganda, for example, all that kind of stuff. But the reality is we’re living, I feel like we’re living through a singularity in the digital information space, and we don’t have a great understanding of exactly how it’s transforming our lives.
Michael Saylor
(01:33:43)
And this is where money is useful as a metaphor for significance. Because if money is the economic energy of the civilization, then something that’s extraordinarily lucrative that’s going to generate a monetary or a wealth increase is a way to increase the net energy and the civilization. And ultimately, if we had 10 times as much of everything, we’d have a lot more free resources to pursue all of our advanced scientific and mathematical and theoretical endeavors. So let’s take Twitter. Right. Twitter’s something that could be 10 times more valuable than it is. Right. Twitter could be made 10 times better.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:27)
Oh, by the way, I should say that people should follow you on Twitter. Your Twitter account is awesome.
Michael Saylor
(01:34:30)
Thank you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:32)
It could be made 10 times better. Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(01:34:34)
Yeah, Twitter can be made 10 times better. If we take YouTube or take education, we could generate a billion PhDs. And the question is, do you need any profound breakthrough in materials or technology to do that? The answer is not really. Right. So if you want to, you could make Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, all these things better. The United States government, if they took 1% of the money they spend on the Department of Education and they simply poured it into digital education and they gave degrees to people that actually met those requirements, they could provide 100X as much education for one 100th of the cost, and they could do it with no new technology. That’s a marketing and political challenge.

(01:35:30)
So I don’t think every objective is equally practical. And I think the benefit of being an engineer or thinking about practical achievements is when the government pursues an impractical objective or when anybody, an entrepreneur, not so bad with an entrepreneur because they don’t have that much money to waste. When a government pursues an impractical objective, they squander trillions and trillions of dollars and achieve nothing. Whereas if they pursue a practical objective or if they simply get out of the way and do nothing and they allow the free market to pursue the practical objectives, then I think you can have profound impact on the human civilization.

(01:36:20)
And if I look at the world we’re in today, I think that there are multi- trillion 10, 20, $50 trillion worth of opportunities in the digital information realm yet to be obtained. But there’s hundreds of trillions of dollars of opportunities in the digital energy realm that not only are they not obtained, the majority of people don’t even know what digital energy is. Most of them would reject the concept. They’re not looking for it. They’re not expecting to find it. It’s inconceivable because it is a paradigm shift, but in fact, it’s completely practical. Right under our nose. It’s staring at us, and it could make the entire civilization work dramatically better in every respect.

Digital energy and assets

Lex Fridman
(01:37:18)
So you mentioned in the digital world, digital information is one, digital energy is two, and the possible impact on the world and the set of opportunities available in the digital energy space is much greater. So how do you think about digital energy? What is it?
Michael Saylor
(01:37:41)
So I’ll start with Tesla. He had a very famous quote. He said, “If you want to understand the universe, think in terms of energy, vibration< and frequency." And it gets you thinking about what is the universe? And of course, the universe is just all energy. And then what is matter? Matter is low frequency energy. And what are we? We're vibrating, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I can turn a tree into light. I can turn light back into a tree. If I consider the entire universe, and it's very important because we don't really think this way. Let's take the New York disco model. If I walk into a nightclub and there's loud music blaring in New York City, what's really going on there? Right. If you blast out 14 billion years ago, the universe is formed. Okay, that's a low frequency thing. The universe. Four and a half billion years ago, the sun, maybe the earth are formed. The continents are 400 million years old. The shift that New York City is on is some hundreds of millions of years, but the Hudson River is only 20,000 years.

(01:38:58)
There’s a building that’s probably 50 years old. There’s a company operating that disco or that club, which is five to 10 years old. There’s a person, a customer walking in there for an experience for a few hours. There’s music that’s oscillating at some kilohertz, and then there’s light.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:20)
Right.
Michael Saylor
(01:39:20)
And you have all forms of energy, all frequencies, right, all layered, all moving through different medium. And how you perceive the world is the question of at what frequency do you want to perceive the world? And I think that once you start to think that way, you’re catalyzed to think about what would digital energy look like and why would I want it? And what is it? So why don’t we just start right there. What is it? The most famous manifestation of digital energy is Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s a crypto asset. It’s a crypto asset that has monetary value.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:08)
Can we just linger on that? Bitcoin is digital asset that has monetary value. What is a digital asset? What is monetary? Why use those terms versus the words of money and currency? Is there something interesting in that disambiguation of different terms?
Michael Saylor
(01:40:30)
I’d call it a crypto asset network. The goal is to create a billion dollar block of pure energy in cyberspace, one that I could then move with no friction at the speed of light. Right. It’s the equivalent to putting a million pounds in orbit. How do I actually launch something into orbit? Right. How do I launch something into cyberspace such that it moves friction free? And the solution is a decentralized proof-of-work network. Right. Satoshi’s solution was, I’m going to establish protocol running on a distributed set of computers that will maintain a constant supply of never more than 21 million Bitcoins subdividable by 100 million Satoshis each transferable via transferring private keys. Now, the innovation is to create that in a ethical, durable fashion. Right. The ethical innovation is I want it to be property and not a security. A bushel of corn, an acre of land, a stack of lumber, and a bar of gold and a Bitcoin are all property. And that means they’re all commonly occurring elements in the world.
Michael Saylor
(01:42:00)
… they’re all commonly occurring elements in the world. You could call them commodities, but commodity is a little bit misleading, and I’ll tell you why in a second. But they’re all distinguished by the fact that no one entity or person or government controls them. If you have a barrel of oil and you’re in Ukraine versus Russia versus Saudi, Arabia versus the US, you have a barrel of oil, right? And it doesn’t matter what the premier in Japan or the mayor of Miami Beach thinks about your barrel of oil, they cannot wave their hand and make it not a barrel of oil or a cord of wood. And so property is just a naturally occurring element in the universe.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:49)
Why use the word ethical? And sorry, I may interrupt occasionally. Why ethical assigned to property?
Michael Saylor
(01:42:58)
Because if it’s a security, a security would be an example of a share of a stock or a crypto token controlled by a small team. And in the event that something is a security because some small group or some identifiable group can control its nature, character, supply, then it really only becomes ethical to promote it or sell it pursuant to fair disclosures. So, I’ll give you maybe practical example. I’m the mayor of Chicago. I give a speech. In my speech, I’ll say, “I think everybody in Chicago should own their own farm and have a chicken in the backyard and their own horse and an automobile.” That’s ethical. I give the same speech and I say, “I think everybody in Chicago should buy Twitter stock. Sell their house or sell their cash and buy Twitter stock.” Is that ethical? Not really. But at that point you’ve entered into a conflict of interest because what you’re doing is you’re promoting an asset which is substantially controlled by a small group of people, the board of directors or the CEO of the company.

(01:44:18)
So, how would you feel if the president of the United States said, “I really think Americans should all buy Apple stock,” especially if you worked at Google. But if you worked anywhere, you’d be like, “Why isn’t he saying buy mine?” Right? A security is a proprietary asset in some way, shape or form. And the whole nature of securities law, it starts from this ancient idea, thou shalt not lie, cheat or steal. Okay? If I’m going to sell you securities or I’m going to promote securities as a public figure or as an influencer or anybody else. If I create my own Yo-Yo coin or Mikey coin, and then there’s a million of them, and I tell you that I think that it’s a really good thing, and Mikey coin will go up forever and everybody buys Mikey coin and then I give 10 million to you and don’t tell the public, I’ve cheated them.

(01:45:22)
Maybe if I have Mikey coin and I think there’s only 2 million Mikey coin, and I swear to you there’s only 2 million, and then I get married and I have three kids and my third kid is in the hospital and my kid’s going to die and I have this ethical reason to print 500,000 more Mikey coin or else people are going to die, and everybody tells me it’s fine, I’ve still abused the investor, right? It’s an ethical challenge. If you look at ethics laws everywhere in the world, they all boil down to having a clause which says that if you’re a public figure, you can’t endorse a security. You can’t endorse something that would cause you to have a conflict of interest.

(01:46:08)
So, if you’re a mayor, a governor, a country, a public figure, an influencer, and you want to promote or promulgate or support something using any public influence or funds or resources you may have, it needs to be property. It can’t be security. So, it goes beyond that, right? I mean, would the Chinese want to support an American company? As soon as you look at what’s in the best interest of the human race, the civilization, you realize that if you want an ethical path forward, it needs to be based on common property, which is fair. And the way you get to a common property is through an open permissionless protocol. If it’s not open, if it’s proprietary and I know what the code says and you don’t know what the code says, that makes it a security.

(01:47:05)
If it’s permissioned, you’re not allowed on my network. Or if you can be censored or booted off my network, that also makes it a security. When I talk about property, I mean the challenge here is how do I create something that’s equivalent to a barrel of oil in cyberspace? And that means it has to be a non-sovereign bearer instrument, open, permissionless, not censorable, right? If I could do that, then I could deliver you 10,000 dematerialized barrels of oil and you would take settlement of them and you would know that you have possession of that property, irregardless of the opinion of any politician or any company or anybody else in the world.

(01:48:05)
That’s a really critical characteristic. And it actually is, it’s probably one of the fundamental things that makes Bitcoin special. Bitcoin isn’t just a crypto-asset network. It’s easy to create a crypto-asset network. It’s very hard to create an ethical crypto-asset network because you have to create one without any government or corporation or investor exercising into influence to make it successful.

Oil barrel vs Bitcoin

Lex Fridman
(01:48:37)
So open, permissionless, noncensorable. So basically no way for you without explicitly saying so, outsourcing control to somebody else. So it’s a kind of, you have full control. Even with a barrel of oil, what’s the difference between a barrel of oil and a Bitcoin to you? Because you kind of mentioned that both are property. You mentioned Russia and China and so on. Is it the ability of the government to confiscate? In the end, governments can probably confiscate no matter what the asset is, but you want to lessen the effort involved.
Michael Saylor
(01:49:21)
And barrel oil is a bucket of physical property. Liquid property.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:27)
That’s very [inaudible 01:49:27].
Michael Saylor
(01:49:27)
And Bitcoin is a digital property.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:27)
But it’s easier to confiscate a barrel of oil.
Michael Saylor
(01:49:32)
It’s easier to confiscate things in the real world than things in cyberspace, much easier.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:38)
So, that’s not universally true. Some things in the digital space are actually easier to confiscate because just the nature of how things move easily with information, right?
Michael Saylor
(01:49:50)
I think in the Bitcoin world, what we would say is that Bitcoin is the most difficult property that the human race possesses or has yet invented to confiscate. And that’s by virtue of the fact that you could take possession of it via your private keys. So, if you’ve got your 12 seed phrases in your head, then that would be the highest form of property, right? Because I literally have to crack your head open and read your mind to take it. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t extract it from you under duress, but it means that it’s harder than every other thing you might own. In fact, it’s exponentially harder.

(01:50:29)
If you consider every other thing you might own. A car, a house, a share of stock, gold, diamonds, property rights, intellectual property rights, movie rights, music rights. Anything imaginable, they would all be easier by orders and orders of magnitude to seize. So, digital property in the form of a set of private keys is by far the apex property of the human race. In terms of ethics, I want to make one more point. It’s like I might say to you, “Lex, I think Bitcoin is the best, most secure, most durable crypto asset network in the world, it’s going to go up forever and there’s nothing better in the world.

(01:51:11)
I might be right, I might be wrong, but the point is because it’s property, it’s ethical for me to say that. If I were to turn around and say, “Lex, I think the same about MicroStrategy stock, MSTR, that’s a security. Okay? If I’m wrong about that, I have civil liability or other liability because I could go to a board meeting tomorrow and I could actually propose we issue a million more shares of MicroStrategy stock. Whereas the thing that makes Bitcoin ethical for me to even promote is the knowledge that I can’t change it. If I knew that I could make it 42 million instead of 21 million and I had the button back here, then I have a different degree of ethical responsibility.

(01:52:05)
Now, I could tell you your life will be better if you buy Bitcoin, and it might not. You might go buy Bitcoin, you might lose the keys and be bankrupt and your life ends and your life is not better because you bought Bitcoin. But it wouldn’t be my ethical liability any more than if I were to say, “Lex, I think you ought to get a farm. I think you should be a farmer. I think a chicken in every pot, you should get a horse. I think you’d be better.” I mean, they’re all opinions expressed about property, which may or may not be right that you may or may not agree with. But in a legal sense, if we read the law, if we understand securities law… And I would say most people in the crypto industry, they didn’t take companies public and so they’re not really focused on the securities law. They don’t even know the securities law.

(01:52:58)
If you focus on the securities law, that would say you just can’t legally sell this stuff to the general public or promote it without a full set of continuing disclosures signed off on by a regulator. So, there’s a fairly bright line there with regard to securities, but when you get to the secondary issue, it’s how do you actually build a world based on digital property if public figures can’t embrace it or endorse it? You see? So, you’re not going to build a better world based upon Twitter stock, if that’s your idea of property, because Twitter stock is a security, and Twitter stock is never going to be a non-sovereign bearer instrument in Russia, right? Or in China, it’s not even legal in China.

(01:53:55)
It’s not a global permissionless, open thing. It will never be trusted by the rest of the world, and legally it’s impractical. But would you really want to put a hundred trillion dollars worth of economic value on Twitter stock if there’s a board of directors and a CEO that could just get up and take half of it tomorrow? The answer is no. So, if you want to build a better world based on digital energy, you need to start with constructing a digital property, and I’m using property here-
Lex Fridman
(01:54:28)
Open, permissionless, [inaudible 01:54:30]-
Michael Saylor
(01:54:30)
In the legal sense, but I would also go to the next step and say property is low frequency money. So, if I give you a million dollars and you want to hold it for a decade, you might go buy a house with it and the house is low frequency money. You converted the million dollars of economic energy into a structure called a house. Maybe after a decade you might convert it back into energy. You might sell the house for currency and it’ll be worth more or less depending upon the monetary climate you sell in.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:08)
The frequency means what here? How quickly it changes state>
Michael Saylor
(01:55:13)
How quickly does something vibrate? If I transfer $10 from me to you for a drink, and then you turn around and you buy another, right? We’re vibrating on a frequency of every few hours. The energy is changing hands, but it’s not likely that you sell and buy houses every few hours. The frequency of a transaction in real estate is every 10 years, every five years. It’s much lower frequency transaction. And so when you think about what’s going on here, you have extremely low frequency things, which we’ll call property. Then you have mid-frequency things. I’m going to call them money or currency. And then you have high frequency, and that’s energy.

(01:56:09)
And that’s why I use the illustration of you got the building, you got the light and you got the sound, and they’re all just energy moving at different frequencies. Now, Bitcoin is magical and it is truly the innovation. It’s like a singularity because it represents the first time in the history of the human race that we managed to create a digital property, properly understood. It’s easy to create something digital, right? Every coupon and every scan on Fortnite and Roblox and Apple TV credits and all these things, they’re all digital something, but they’re securities, right?

(01:56:53)
Shares of stock are securities. Whenever anybody transfers, when you transfer money on PayPal or Apple Pay, you’re transferring in essence, a security or an IOU. So, transferring a bearer instrument with final settlement in the internet domain or in cyberspace, that’s a critical thing. And anybody in the crypto world can do that. All the cryptos can do that. But what they can’t do, what 99% of them fail to do is be property. They’re securities.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:27)
Well, there’s a line there I’d like to explore a little further. For example, what about when you… Like Coinbase or something like that, when there’s an exchange that you buy Bitcoin in, you start to move away from this kind of, some of the aspects that you said makes up a property, which is this noncensorable and permissionless and open. So, in order to achieve the convenience, the effectiveness of the transfer of energy, you have to leverage some of these [inaudible 01:58:10] that remove the aspects of property. So, maybe you can comment on that.

Layers of Bitcoin

Michael Saylor
(01:58:14)
Let me give you a good model for that. If you think about the layer one of Bitcoin, the layer one is the property settlement layer, and we’re going to do 350,000 transactions or less a day, a hundred million transactions a year is the bandwidth on the layer one. And it would be an ideal layer of one to move a billion dollars from point A to point B with a massive security. The role of the layer one is two things. One thing is I want to move a large sum of money through space with security. I can move any amount of Bitcoin in a matter of minutes for dollars on layer one.

(01:58:59)
The second important feature of the layer one is I need the money to last forever. I need the money indestructible, immortal. So, the bigger trick is not to move a billion dollars from here to Tokyo. The big trick is to move a billion dollars from here to the year 2140. And that’s what we want to solve with layer one. And the best real metaphor in New York City would be the granite or the schist. What you want is a city block of a bedrock. And how long has it been there? Millions of years it’s been there. And how fast do you want it to move? You don’t. In fact, the single thing that’s most important is that it not deflect. If it deflects a foot in a hundred years, it’s too much. If it deflects an inch in a hundred years, you might not want that.

(01:59:53)
So, the layer one of Bitcoin is a foundation upon which you put weight. How much weight can you put on it? You put a trillion, 10 trillion, a hundred trillion, a quadrillion. How much weight’s on the bedrock in Manhattan, right? Think about hundred story buildings. So, the real key there is the foundational asset needs to be there at all. The fact that you can create a hundred trillion dollars layer one that would stand for a hundred years, that is the revolutionary breakthrough first time.

(02:00:27)
And the fact that it’s ethical, right? It’s ethical and it’s common property, global, permissionless. Extremely unlikely that would happen. People tried 50 times before and they all failed. They tried 15,000 times after, and they’ve all been… They’ve all generally failed. 98% have failed and a couple have been less successful. But for the most part, that’s an extraordinary thing. Now-
Lex Fridman
(02:00:54)
Just really quickly pause, just to define some terms. If maybe people don’t know, layer one that Michael’s referring to is in general what people know of as the Bitcoin technology originally defined. Which is there’s blockchain, there’s a consensus mechanism of proof of work, low number of transactions, but you can move a very large amount of money.

(02:01:22)
The reason he’s using the term layer one is now that there’s a lot of ideas of layer two technologies that built on top of this bedrock that allow you to move a much larger number of transactions, sort of higher frequency, I don’t know how would terminology want to use, but basically be able to use now something that is based on Bitcoin to then buy stuff, be a consumer, to transfer money, to use it as currency. Just to define some terms.
Michael Saylor
(02:01:54)
Yeah. So, the layer one is the foundation for the entire cyber economy, and we don’t want it to move fast. What we want is immortality. Immortal, incorruptible, indestructible. That’s what you want, integrity from the layer one. Now there’s layer two and layer three and layer two I would define as an open, permissionless, non-custodial protocol that uses the underlying layer one token as its gas fee.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:34)
So, what’s custodial mean and how does the different markets… Like is Lightning network-
Michael Saylor
(02:02:40)
So, Lightning Network would be an example of a layer two, non-custodial. The Lightning Network will sit on top of layer one. It’ll sit on top of Bitcoin and it solves… What you want to do is solve the problem of, “It’s well and fine. I don’t want to move a billion dollars every day. What I want to move is $5 a billion times a day.” So, if I want to move $5 a billion times a day, I don’t really need to put the entire trillion dollars of assets at risk every time I move $5. All I really need to do is put a hundred thousand dollars in a channel or a million dollars in a channel, and then I do 10 million transactions where I have a million dollars at risk.

(02:03:27)
And of course, it’s kind of simple. If I lower my security requirement by a factor of a million, I can probably move the stuff a million times faster. And that’s how Lightning works. It’s non-custodial because there’s no corporation or custodian or counterparty you’re trusting, right? There’s the risk of moving through the channel. But Lightning is an example of how I go from 350,000 transactions a day to 350 million transactions a day. So, on that layer two, you could move the Bitcoin in seconds for fractions of pennies.

(02:04:08)
Now, that’s not the end all, be all because the truth is there are a lot of open protocols. Lightning probably won’t be the only one. There’s an open market competition of other permissionless, open source protocols to do this work. And in theory, any other crypto network that was deemed to be property, deemed to be non-security, you could also think of as potentially a layer two to Bitcoin. There’s a debate about are there any and what are they? And we could leave that for a later time.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:43)
But why do you think of them as layer two as opposed to contending for layer one?
Michael Saylor
(02:04:50)
Yeah, actually, if they’re using their own token, then they are a layer one. If you create an open protocol that uses the Bitcoin token as the fee, then it becomes a layer two. Bitcoin itself incentivizes its own transactions with its own token, and that’s what makes it layer one.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:11)
Okay, what’s layer three then?
Michael Saylor
(02:05:13)
Layer three is a custodial layer. So, if you want to move Bitcoin in milliseconds for free, you move it through Binance or Coinbase or Cash App. This is a very straightforward thing. I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you think about it that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of layer threes. There may be dozens of layer twos. I mean, Lightning is a one, but it’s not the only one, anybody can invent something. And we can have this debate about custodial, non-custodial.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:50)
Don’t you think there’s a monopolization possibilities at layer three. You mentioned Binance, Coinbase. What if they start to dominate and basically everybody’s using them practically speaking, and then it becomes too costly to memorize the private key in your brain or like a cold storage of layer one technology.
Michael Saylor
(02:06:19)
The idealists fear the layer threes because they think… And especially they detest, they would detest a bit… There’s almost like a layer four, by the way, if you want to. A layer four would be, I’ve got Bitcoin on an application, but I can’t withdraw it. So, I’ve got an application that’s backed by Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin is sealed. It’s a proprietary example, and I’ll give you an example of that. That would be like Grayscale. If I own a share of GBTC, so I own a security. Actually, you could own MSTR. If you own a security or you own a product that has Bitcoin embedded in it, you get the benefits of Bitcoin, but you don’t have the ability to withdraw the asset.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:07)
To get on the security market at layer four? Am I understanding this correctly?
Michael Saylor
(02:07:12)
I don’t know if I would say… Not all securities are layer four, but anything that’s a proprietary product with Bitcoin embedded in it where you can’t withdraw the Bitcoin is another application of Bitcoin. If you think about different ways you can use this, you can either stay completely on the layer one and use the base chain for your transactions, or you can limit yourself to layer one and layer two, Lightening. And the purist would say, “We stay there, get your Bitcoin off the exchange.” But you could also go to the layer three.

(02:07:50)
When Cash App supported Bitcoin, they made it very easy to buy it, and then they gave you the ability to withdraw. When PayPal or I think Robinhood let you buy it, they wouldn’t let you withdraw it and it was a big community uproar and people, they want these layer threes to make it possible to withdraw the Bitcoins. You can take it to your own private wallet and get it off the exchange. I think the answer to the question of, “Well, is corruption possible?” Is corruption is possible in all human institutions and all governments everywhere. The difference between digital property and physical property is when you own a building in Los Angeles and the city politics turn against you, you can’t move the building.

(02:08:36)
And when you own a share of a security that’s like a US traded security and you wish to move to some other country, you can’t take the security with you either. And when you own a bunch of gold and you try to get through the airport, they might not let you take it. So, Bitcoin is advantageous versus all those because you actually do have the option to withdraw your asset from the exchange. If you had Bitcoin with Fidelity and you had shares of stock with Fidelity, and if you had bonds and sovereign debt with Fidelity, and if you own some mutual funds and some other random limited partnerships with Fidelity, none of those things can be removed from the custodian. But the Bitcoin, you can take off the exchange, you can remove from the custodian.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:35)
It’s still possible though-
Michael Saylor
(02:09:36)
There’s a deterrent.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:36)
Yes.
Michael Saylor
(02:09:37)
There’s a deterrent. That’s an anti-corrupting element. And the phrase is, “An armed society is a polite society,” right? Because you have the optionality to withdraw all your assets from the crypto exchange, you can enforce fairness. And at the point where you disagree with their policies, you can within an hour move your assets to another counterparty or take personal custody of those assets and you don’t have that option with most other forms of property. You don’t have as much optionality with any other form of property on earth. And so what makes digital property distinct is the fact that it has the most optionality for custody.

(02:10:23)
Now, coming back to this digital energy issue, the real key point is the energy moves in milliseconds for free on layer threes. It moves in seconds or less than seconds on layer twos, it moves in minutes on the layer one. And I don’t think it makes any sense to even think about trying to solve all three problems on the layer one because it’s impossible to achieve the security and the incorruptibility and immortality if you try to build that much speed and that functionality and performance.

(02:10:58)
In fact, if you come back to the New York model, you really wanted a block of granite, a building and a company. That’s what makes the economy right? If I said to you, “You’re going to build a building, but you can only have one company in it for the life of the building,” it would be very fragile, very brittle. What company a hundred years ago is still relevant today? You want all three layers because they all oscillate at different frequencies. And there’s a tendency to think, “Well, it’s got to be this L1 or that L1.” Not really. And sometimes people think, “Well, I don’t really want any L3.”

(02:11:38)
But companies, it’s not an even/or. Companies are better than crypto asset networks at certain things. If you want complexity, you want to implement complexity or you want to implement compliance or customer service. Companies do these things well. We know you couldn’t decentralize Apple or Netflix or even YouTube. The performance wouldn’t be there and the subtlety wouldn’t be there. And you can’t really legally decentralize certain forms of banking and insurance because they would become illegal in the political jurisdiction they’re in.

(02:12:19)
So, unless you’re a crypto anarchist and you believe in no companies and no nation states, which is just not very practical, not anytime soon. Once you allow that nation states will continue and companies have a role, then the layered architecture follows, and the free market determines who wins. For example, there are layer threes that let you acquire Bitcoin and withdraw Bitcoin. There are other applications that let you acquire but not withdraw it, and they don’t get the same market share, but they might give you some other advantage. There are certain layer threes, like Jack Dorsey’s Cash App where they just incorporated Lightning, an implementation of it.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:15)
Into Cash App?
Michael Saylor
(02:13:16)
So, that makes it advantageous versus an application that doesn’t incorporate Lightning. If you think about the big picture, the big picture is 8 billion people with mobile phones served by a hundred million companies doing billions of transactions an hour. And the companies are settling with each other on the base layer in blocks of 80 million at a time. And then the companies are trading with the consumers in proprietary layers, like layer three. And then on occasion, people are shuffling assets across custodians with Lightning layer two, because you don’t want to pay $5 to move $50. You want to pay a 20th of a penny to move $50.

(02:14:10)
And so all of these things create efficiency in the economy. And Lex, if you want to consider how much efficiency. If you gave me a billion dollars in 20 years, I couldn’t find a way to trade with another company or a counterparty in Nigeria. No amount of money. Give me %10 billion, I couldn’t do it because you get shut down at the banking level. You can’t link up a bank in Nigeria with a bank in the US. You get shut down at this credit card level because they don’t have the credit card, so they won’t clear. You get shut down at the compliance FCPA level because you wouldn’t be able to implement a system that interfaced with somebody else’s system if it’s not in the right political jurisdiction.

(02:15:04)
On the other hand, three entrepreneurs in Nigeria on the weekend could create a website that would trade in this Lightning economy using open protocols without asking anybody’s permission. So, you’re talking about something that’s like a million times cheaper, less friction, and faster to do it if you want to get money to move.

Bitcoin’s role during wartime

Lex Fridman
(02:15:27)
What do you think that looks like? So, now there’s a war going on in Ukraine. There’s other wars, Yemen, going on throughout the world. In this most difficult of states that a nation can be in, which is at war, civil war, or war with other nations, what’s the role of Bitcoin in this context?
Michael Saylor
(02:15:51)
I mean, Bitcoin is a universal trust protocol. A universal energy protocol, if you will. English is one. What I see is a bunch of fragmentation of applications-
Michael Saylor
(02:16:00)
Okay. What I see is a bunch of fragmentation of applications. For example, the Russian payment app is not going to work in Ukraine.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:09)
Right.
Michael Saylor
(02:16:09)
The Ukraine payment app is not going to work in Russia. The US payment apps won’t work either of those places as far as I know. So in Argentina, their payment app may not work in certain parts of Africa. So what you have is different local economies where people spin up their own applications compliant with their own local laws or in war zones, not compliant, but just spinning up.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:41)
So how do you build something that’s not compliant? What is the revolutionary act here when you don’t agree with the government or what you want to free yourself from the… So here’s the thing. When a nation is really at war, especially if it’s an authoritarian regime, it’s going to try to control the pipe, lock everything down, the spread of information. How do you break through that? Do you do the thing that you mentioned, which is you have to build another app essentially that allows you to flow of money outside the legal constraints placed on you by the government? So basically break the law, is that possible?
Michael Saylor
(02:17:23)
Metaphorically speaking, if you want to break out of the constraints of your culture, you learn to speak English. For example, it’s not illegal to speak English. Even if it is, does it matter? But English works everywhere in the world if you can speak it, and then you can tap into a global commerce and intelligence network. So Bitcoin is a language. So you learn to speak Bitcoin or you learn to speak Lightning, and then you tap into that network in whatever manner you can.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:53)
But the problem is it’s still very difficult to move Bitcoin around in Russia and Ukraine now during war. And there was a sense to me that the cryptocurrency in general could be the savior for helping people. There’s millions of refugees that are moving all around. It’s very difficult to move money around in that space to help people.
Michael Saylor
(02:18:18)
I think we’re very early. We’re very embryonic here. If you look at the-
Lex Fridman
(02:18:23)
Who’s we? Sorry, we as a human civilization or we operating in the cryptocurrency space?
Michael Saylor
(02:18:28)
I think the entire crypto economy is very embryonic and the human race’s adoption of it is embryonic. We’re like 1%, 2% down that adoption curve. If you take Lightning for example, the first real commercial applications of Lightning are just in the last 12 months. So we’re like year one. We might be approaching year two of commercial Lightning adoption. And if you look at Lightning adoption, Lightning’s not built into Coinbase, is not built into Binance, is not built into FTX. Cash App just implemented the first implementation, but not all the features are built into it. There’s a few dozen, a dozen Lightning wallets circulating out there.

(02:19:15)
So I think that we’re probably going to be 36 months of software development. At the point that every Android phone and every iPhone has a Bitcoin wallet or a crypto wallet in it of sorts, that’s a big deal. If Apple embraced Lightning, that’s a big deal.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:37)
So the adoption is the thing… In a war zone adoption, the people who struggle the most in war are people who weren’t doing that great before the war started. They don’t have the technological sophistication.

Jack Dorsey

Michael Saylor
(02:19:53)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:53)
The hackers and all those kinds of people will find a way. It’s just regular people who are just struggling to make day by day living. And so if the adoption permeates the entire culture, then you can start to move money around in the digital space. If you can psychoanalyze Jack Dorsey for a second. So he’s one of the early adopters or he’s one of the people pushing the early adoption, this layer three, so inside Cash App. What do you make of the man of this decision as a business owner, as somebody playing in the space? Why did he do it and what does that mean for others at the scale that might be doing the same? So incorporating Lightning networking, incorporating Bitcoin into their products.
Michael Saylor
(02:20:46)
I think he’s been pretty clear about this. He feels that Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment for billions of people that are unbanked and have no property rights in the world. If you want to give an incorruptible bank to 8,000,000,000 people on the planet, that’s the same as asking the question, “How do you give a full education through PhD to 8,000,000,000 people on the planet?” And the answer is a digital version of the 20th century thing running on a mobile phone, and Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace, is run by incorruptible software and it’s for everybody on earth.

(02:21:36)
So I think when Jack looks at it, he’s very sensitive to the plight of everybody in Africa. If you look at Africans, you’re going to give them banks. You’re not going to put a bank branch on every corner. That’s an obscene waste of energy. You’re not going to run copper wires across the continent. That’s an obscene waste of energy. You’re not going to give them gold. So how are you going to provide people with a decent life?

(02:22:03)
The metaphor I think is relevant here, the biological metaphor, Lex, is type one diabetic. If you’re a type one diabetic, you can’t form fat. And if you can’t form fat, then you can’t store excess energy. Fat is the ultimate organic battery, and if you’ve got 30 pounds of it, you can go 60 days without eating. But if you can’t generate insulin, you can’t form fat cells. And if you can’t form fat cells and store energy, then you can eat yourself to death. You will eat and you will die. You’ll starve to death. So the lack of property rights is like being a type one diabetic. And so if you look at most people everywhere in the world, they don’t have property rights, they don’t have effective bank and their currency is broken.

(02:22:56)
What are the two things that in theory would serve as the equivalent of an organic battery or an economic battery to civilization? It would be I have a currency which holds its value and I can store it in a bank. So a risk-free currency derivative. I pay you your money, you take your life savings, you put it in a bank, you save up for your retirement, you live happily ever after. That’s the American dream, right? That’s the idyllic situation. The real situation is there are no banks. You can’t get a bank account. So I give you your pay in currency and then I double the supply and I give it to my cousin, or I give it to whatever cause I want or I use it to buy weapons. And then you find a loaf of bread costs triple next month as what it costs and your life savings is worthless.

(02:23:53)
And so in that environment, everybody’s ripped back to Stone Age barter. And the problem with that, even Stone Age barter, is you’re going to carry your life savings on your back. And what happens when the guy with a machine gun points it at your head and just takes your life savings? So I think from Jack’s point of view, he thinks that, this is maybe too strong, but these are my words, life is hopeless for a lot of people and Bitcoin is hope because it gives everyone an engineered monetary asset that’s a bearer instrument and it gives them a bank on their mobile phone and they don’t have to trust their government or another counterparty with their life force.

(02:24:46)
So there’s a secondary thing I think he’s interested in, which is… The first thing is the human rights issue. And the second thing would be the friction to trade cross borders is so great. You like AI. So I’ll give you a beautiful notion. Maybe one day there’ll be an artificially intelligent creature in cyberspace that is self-sufficient and rich.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:21)
It would have sovereignty. You mean-
Michael Saylor
(02:25:23)
Can a robot own money or property? How about can a Tesla car? Can I actually put enough money in a car for it to drive itself and maintain itself forever? Or can I create an artificially intelligent creature in cyberspace that is endowed such that it would live 1,000 years and continue to do its job? We have a word for that in the real world. It’s institution, Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford. Right? There are institutions with endowments that go on in perpetuity, but what if I wanted to perpetuate a software program?

(02:26:04)
And with something like digital property with Bitcoin and Lightning, you could do it. And on the other hand, with banks and credit cards, you couldn’t ever. So you can create things that are beautiful and lasting and what’s the difference in speed? Well, so I can either trade with everybody in the world at the speed of light, friction-free in 24 hours writing a Python script, or I can spend $100 billion to trade with a few million people in the world after it takes them six months of application. The impedance is like a 10,000,000 to one difference, and the metaphors are literally like launching something in orbit versus almost orbit or vacuum sealing something. Does it last forever and does it orbit forever or does it go up and come down and burn up? Right? And I think Jack is interested in putting freedom in orbit, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:27:22)
Putting freedom-
Michael Saylor
(02:27:23)
Putting freedom in orbit. And he said it many times, he said, “The internet needs a native currency.” Right? And no political construct or security can be a native currency. You need a property and you need a property that can be moved 1,000,000 times a second. Can you oscillate it at 10 kilohertz or 100 kilohertz? And the answer is only if it’s a pure digital construct, permissionless and open. And so I think that he’s enthusiastic as the technologist and he’s enthusiastic as the humanitarian. And what he’s doing is to support both those areas. He’s supporting the Bitcoin and the Lightning protocol by building them into his products, but he’s also building the applications which you need at the Cash App level in order to commercialize and deliver the functionality and the compliance necessary, and they’re related.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:23)
And I should also say he’s just a fascinating person for a random reason that I couldn’t even explain if I tried. I met him a few days ago and gave him a great big hug in the middle of nowhere. There was no explanation. He just appeared. That’s a fascinating human. His relationship with art, with the world, with human suffering, with technology is fascinating. I don’t know what his path looks like, but it’s interesting that people like that exist. And in part, I’m saddened that he no longer is involved with Twitter directly as a CEO because I was hoping something inside Twitter would also integrate some of these ideas of what you’re calling digital energy to see how social networks, something I’m really interested in and passionate about, could be transformed.

(02:29:19)
Let me ask you, just for educational purposes. Can you please explain to me what Web3 and the beef between Jack and Mark Andreessen is exactly? Did you see what happened? Sorry to have you analyze Twitter like it’s Shakespeare, but can you please explain to me why there was any drama over this topic?
Michael Saylor
(02:29:42)
First of all, Web3 is a term that’s used to refer to the part of the economy that’s token finance. So if I’m launching an application and my idea is to create a token along with the application and issue the token to the community so as to finance the application and build support for it, I think that that’s the most common interpretation of Web3. There are other interpretations too, so I’m just going to refer to that one. And I think the beef in a nutshell, not articulated, but I’ll articulate it, is whether or not you should focus all your energy creating applications on top of an ethical digital property like Bitcoin or whether you should attempt to create a competitor to it, which generally would be deemed as a security by the Bitcoin community?

(02:30:40)
So I’m going to put on my Bitcoin hat here. Right? If it’s driven by a venture capitalist, well, it’s a security. If there’s a CEO and a CTO, it’s a security. All these projects, they’re companies. Foundations are companies. Right? If you call them a project or a foundation, it doesn’t make it not a security. They’re all in essence, collections of individuals that are issuing equity in the form of a token. And if there’s a pre-mine, an IPO, an ICO, a foundation or any kind of protocol where there’s a group of engineers that have influence over it, then to a securities lawyer or to most Bitcoiners, and definitely to anybody that’s steeped in securities law, you look at it and say, “Well, that passes the Howey test.” It looks like a security. It should be sold to the public pursuant to disclosures and regulations, and you’re just ducking the IPO process. Right?

(02:31:50)
And so now we get back to the ethical issue. Well, the ethical issue is if you’re trading it as a commodity and representing it as a commodity, while truthfully it’s a security, then it’s a violation of ethics rules and it’s probably illegal.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:07)
Well, you keep leaning on this. Let me push back on that part. Maybe you can educate me, but you keep leaning on this line of securities law, with all due respect to lawyers, as if that line somehow defines what is and isn’t ethical. I think there’s a lot of correlation as you’ve discussed, but I’d like to leave the line aside. If the law calls something a security, it doesn’t mean in my eyes that it is unethical. There could be some technicalities and lawyers and people play games with this kind of stuff all the time. But I take your bigger point that if there’s a CEO, if there’s a project lead that’s fundamentally… Well, that to you is fundamentally different than the structure of Bitcoin.
Michael Saylor
(02:32:54)
It’s not that creating securities is unethical. I created security. I took a company public. Right? That’s not the unethical part. It’s completely ethical to create securities. Block is a security, all companies are securities. The unethical part is to represent it as property when it’s a security and to promote it or trade it as such.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:16)
This whole promotion, that’s also a technical thing because what counts as not as promotion is a legal thing and you get in trouble for all these things, but that’s the game that lawyers play. There’s an ethical thing here, which is like what’s right to promote a not? To me, propaganda is unethical, but it’s usually not illegal.
Michael Saylor
(02:33:45)
You roll clock back 20 years, right? All the boiler room pump and dump schemes were all about someone pitching a penny stock-
Lex Fridman
(02:33:52)
Sure.
Michael Saylor
(02:33:53)
Selling swampland in Florida. And if you roll the clock forward 20 years, and I create my own company and I represent it as the same thing, and I don’t make the disclosures, you’re just one step removed from the boiler room scheme, and that’s what’s distasteful about it. There are ways to sell securities to the public, but there are expectations. Maybe we could forget about whether the security laws are ethical or not, right? I will leave that alone. We’ll just start with the biblical definition of ethics.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:29)
Yes.
Michael Saylor
(02:34:29)
Don’t lie, cheat or steal. So if I’m going to sell something to you, I need to fully disclose what I’m selling to you, and that’s a matter of great debate right now. So I think that that’s part of the debate, but the other part of the debate is whether or not we need more than one token, we need at least one. Right?
Lex Fridman
(02:34:30)
Yes.
Michael Saylor
(02:34:58)
We need at least one digital property.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:59)
One is better than zero.
Michael Saylor
(02:35:01)
Because zero means there is no digital economy.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:05)
Yes.
Michael Saylor
(02:35:06)
And by the way, the conventional view of maximalists is they think there’s only one and everything else isn’t. That’s not the point I’m going to make. I would say we know there is at least one digital property and that is Bitcoin. If you can create a truly decentralized, non-custodial bearer instrument that is not under the control of any organization that is fairly distributed, then you might create another or multiple and there may be others out there. But I think that the frustration of a lot of people in the Bitcoin community, and I share this with Jack, is we could create $100 trillion of value in the real world simply by building applications on top of Bitcoin as a foundation. And so continually trying to reinvent the wheel and create competitive things is a massive waste of time and it’s diversion of human creativity. It’s like we have an ethical good thing, and now we’re going to try to create a third or a fourth one. Why?

Bitcoin conflict of interest

Lex Fridman
(02:36:29)
Well, let’s talk about it. So first of all, I’m with you, but let me ask you this interesting question because we talked about properties and securities. Let’s talk about conflict of interest. You said you could advertise… You have a popular Twitter account. It’s hilarious and insightful. You do promote Bitcoin in a sense. I don’t know if you would say that, but do you think there’s a conflict of interest in anyone who owns Bitcoin, promoting Bitcoin? Is it the same as you promoting farming?
Michael Saylor
(02:37:03)
I would say no. There’s an interest. I think that you can promote a property or an idea to the extent that you don’t control it. I think that the point at which you start to have a conflict of interest is when you’re promoting a proprietary product or proprietary security. A security in general is proprietary asset. So for example, if you look at my Twitter, you’ll find that I make lots of statements about Bitcoin. You won’t ever see me making a statement that say micro strategy stock will go it forever. I’m not promoting a security MSTR because at the end of the day, MSTR is a security. It is proprietary. I have proprietary interest in it. I have a disproportionate amount of control and influence on the direction. Whereas-
Lex Fridman
(02:38:01)
The control is the problem. The control is the problem because you have interest in both. If Bitcoin is as successful as we’re talking about, you very possibly can become the richest human on earth given how much you own in Bitcoin. The wealthiest, not the richest. I don’t know what those words mean.
Michael Saylor
(02:38:22)
I would benefit economically.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:24)
You would benefit economically.
Michael Saylor
(02:38:26)
That’s true.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:26)
So the reason that’s not conflict of interest is because the word property that Bitcoin is an idea and Bitcoin is open-
Michael Saylor
(02:38:37)
It’s because I don’t own it. I don’t control it. In essence, the ethical line here is could I print myself 10,000,000 more Bitcoin or not? Right?
Lex Fridman
(02:38:51)
Or can anyone? Right? It’s not just you. It’s can anyone? Because can you promote somebody else’s? Yes, I guess you can. Can you promote Apple when you have no stake?
Michael Saylor
(02:39:04)
You could have a Twitter account where you promote oil or you promote camping or you promote family values or promote a carnivore diet or promote the Iron Man, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:39:16)
But you’re not going to get wealthier if you promote camping because you can’t own a stake in… You own a lot of Bitcoin. What is that? Don’t you own the stake in the idea of Bitcoin?
Michael Saylor
(02:39:31)
Yeah, I would grant you that.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:34)
But the lack of control is the fundamental ethical line that you don’t have… All you are is you’re a fan of the idea. You believe in the idea and the power of idea.
Michael Saylor
(02:39:47)
Yeah, I think-
Lex Fridman
(02:39:47)
You can’t take that idea away from others.
Michael Saylor
(02:39:51)
Let me give you some maybe easier examples. If you were the Head of the Marine Corps and someone came to you and said, “I created Marinecoin, and the twist on Marinecoin is I want you to tell every Marine that they’ll get an extra Marinecoin when they get their next stripe. And then I’m going to let you buy Marinecoin now, and then after you buy Marinecoin, I want you to promote it to them.” At some point, if you start to have a disproportional influence on it, or if you’re in a conversation with people with disproportionate influence becomes conflict of interest and it would make you profoundly uncomfortable, I think, if the Head of the Marine Corps started promoting anything that looked like a security.

(02:40:45)
Now, if the Head of the Marine Corps started promoting canoeing, you might think he’s wacky. Maybe that’s a waste of time and a distraction. But to the extent that canoeing is not a security, not a problem, unless you… Ultimately, the issue of decentralization is really a critical one.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:08)
So not having a head. Can Bitcoin be replicated? So all the things that you’re saying that make it a property, can that be replicated? Have any other-
Michael Saylor
(02:41:23)
I think it’s possible to create other crypto properties.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:26)
Does the having a head of a project, a thing that limits its ability to be a property if you try to replicate a project? Is that the fundamental flaw?
Michael Saylor
(02:41:40)
No. Look, I think the real fundamental issue is you just never want it to change. If you really want something decentralized, you want a genetic template that substantially is not going to change for 1,000 years. So I think Satoshi said it at one point. He said, “The nature of the software is such that by version 0.1, its genetic code was set.” If there was any development team that’s continually changing it on a routine basis, it becomes harder and harder to maintain its decentralization because now there’s the issue of who is influencing the changes?

(02:42:23)
So what you really want is a very, very simple idea. The simplest idea, I’m just going to keep track of who owns 21,000,000 parts of energy? And when someone proposes big functional upgrades, you don’t really want that development to go on to base layer. You want that development to go on to layer threes because now Cash App has a proprietary set of functionality and it’s a security. And if you’re going to promote the use of this thing, you’re not going to promote the layer three security because that’s an edge to a given entity and you’re trusting the counterparty. You’re going to promote the layer one or at most the layer two.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Lex Fridman
(02:43:13)
Okay, so one of the fascinating things about Bitcoin, and sorry to romanticize certain notions, but Satoshi Nakamoto that the founder is anonymous. Maybe you can speak to whether that’s useful, but also I just like the psychology of that to imagine that there’s a human being that was able to create something special and walk away. Though first, are you Satoshi Nakamoto?
Michael Saylor
(02:43:40)
I’m certain I’m not. No, actually I think the providence is really important, and if I were to look at the highlighted points, I think having a founder that was anonymous or stood anonymous is important. I think the founder disappearing is also important. I think that the fact that the Satoshi coins never moved is also important. I think the lack of an initial coin offering is also important. I think the lack of a corporate sponsor is important. I think the fact that it traded for 15 months with no commercial value was also important. I think that the simplicity of the protocol is very important. I think that the outcome of the block size wars is very important and all of those things add up to common property. They’re all indicia, indicators of a digital property as opposed to security.

(02:44:45)
If there was a Satoshi sitting around, sitting on top of $50 billion worth of Bitcoin, I don’t think it would cripple Bitcoin as property, but I think it would undermine its digital property. And if I wanted to undermine a crypto asset network, I would do the opposite of all those things. I would launch one myself. I would sell 25% or 50% to the general public. I would pre-mine some stuff or early mine it and I would keep an influence on it. Those are all the opposite of what you would do in order to create common property. And so I see the entire story as Satoshi giving a gift of digital property to the human race and disappearing.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:38)
Do you think it was one person? Do you have ideas of who it could be?
Michael Saylor
(02:45:41)
I don’t care to speculate.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:45)
But do you think it was one person?
Michael Saylor
(02:45:47)
I think it was one person, maybe in conjunction with a bunch of others. It might’ve been a group of people that were working together, but certainly there’s a Satoshi.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:56)
It’s just so fascinating to me that one person could be so brave and thoughtful. Or do you think a lot of his accent, like the block size wars, the decision to make a block a certain size, all the things you mentioned led up to the characteristics that make Bitcoin property? Do you think that’s an accident or was it deeply thought through? This is almost like a history of science question.
Michael Saylor
(02:46:22)
They tried 40 of them, right? I think there’s a history of attempting to create something like this, and it was tried many, many times and they failed for different reasons. And I think that it’s like Prometheus tried to start a fire 47 times and maybe the 48 time it sparked, and that’s how I see this. This is the first one that sparked, and it sets a roadmap for us. And I think if you’re looking for any one word that characterize, it’s fair. The whole point of the network is it’s a fair launch, a fair distribution. I have Bitcoin, but I bought it. In fact, at this point, we’ve paid $4 billion of real cash to buy it. If I was sitting on the same position and I had it for free or I bought it for a nickel, a coin, or a penny of coin, the question is, was it fair? And that’s a very hard question to answer, right? Did you acquire the Bitcoin that you own fairly? And if you roll the clock back, you could have bought it for a nickel or a dime, but that was when it was 1,000,000 times more likely to fail, right? When the risk was greater, the cost was lower, and then over time, the risk became lower and the cost became greater.

(02:47:50)
And the real critical thing was to allow the marketplace absent any powerful, interested actor, right? If Satoshi had held 1,000,000 coins and then stayed engaged for 10 more years, tweaking things in the background, there’d still be that question. But what we’ve got is really a beautiful thing. We’ve got a chain reaction in cyberspace or an ideology spreading virally in the world that has seasoned in a fair, ethical fashion. Sometimes it’s a very violent, brutal fashion with all the volatility, and there’s been a lot of sound and fury along the way.

Volatility

Lex Fridman
(02:48:36)
How do you psychoanalyze? How do you deal from a financial, from a human perspective with the volatility? You mentioned you could have gotten it for a nickel and the risk was great. Where’s the risk today? What’s your sense?
Michael Saylor
(02:48:50)
We’re 13 years into this entire activity. I think the risk has never been lower. If you look at all the risks, the risks in the early years are is the engineering protocol proper? One megabyte, block size, 10 minute clock frequency, cryptography is first, will it be hacked or will it crash? 730,000 blocks and it hasn’t crashed. Will it be hacked? Hasn’t been hacked. It’s a Lindy thing, right? You wait 13 years to see if it’ll be hacked. But on the other hand, with $1 billion, it’s not as interesting a target as it is with $ 100 billion. And when it gets to be worth $1 trillion, then it’s a bigger target.

(02:49:34)
So the risk has been bleeding off over time as the network monetized. I think the second question is, will it be banned? You couldn’t know. It literally could have been banned many times early on. In fact, 2013, I tweeted on the subject. I thought it would be banned. I made a very infamous tweet.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:57)
Infamous tweet, yeah.
Michael Saylor
(02:49:58)
I thought it was going to be banned. In 2014, the IRS designated it as…
Michael Saylor
(02:50:00)
In 2014, the IRS designated it as property and gave it property tax treatment. They could have given it a tax treatment where you had to pay tax on the unrealized capital gains every year, and it probably would’ve crushed it to death. Right? So it could have been in any number of places banned by a government, but in fact, it was legitimized as property. And then the question is, would it be copied? Will it be something better than that? And it was copied 15,000 times. And you know the story of all those, and they either diverged to be something totally different and not comparable, or someone trying to copy a non-sovereign bearer instrument store of value found that their networks crashed to be 1% of what Bitcoin is. So now we’re sitting at a point where all those risks are out of the way.

(02:50:59)
I would say that year one of institutional adoption is it started August 2020. That’s when MicroStrategy bought $250 million worth of Bitcoin and we put that out on the wire. We were the first publicly traded company to actually buy Bitcoin. I don’t think you could have found a $5 million purchase from a public company before we did that. So that was like a gun going off. And then in the next 12 months, Tesla bought Bitcoin, Square bought Bitcoin. I’d say now we’re in year two of institutional adoption. Should be 24 publicly traded Bitcoin miners by the end of this quarter. So you’re looking at 36 publicly traded companies, and you’ve got at least in the range of $50 billion of Bitcoin on the balance sheet of publicly traded companies and hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap of Bitcoin-exposed companies. So I would say the asset, decade one was entrepreneurial experimental. Decade two is a rotation from entrepreneurs to institutions and it’s becoming institutionalized. So maybe decade one, you go from zero to a trillion and in decade two you go from 1 trillion to 100 trillion.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:22)
What about government adoption? You said institutional adoption, are governments important in this, maybe making it some governments incorporating it as a currency into their banks, all that kind of stuff? Is that important? And if it is, when will it happen?
Michael Saylor
(02:52:42)
It’s not essential for the success of the asset class, but I think it’s inevitable in various degrees over time. But the most likely thing to happen next is large acquisitions by institutional investors of Bitcoin as a digital gold, where they’re just swapping out gold for digital gold and thinking of it like that. The government entities most likely to be involved with that would be sovereign wealth funds. If you look at all the sovereign wealth funds that are holding big tech stock equities, the Swiss, the Norwegians, the Middle Easterners, if you can hold big tech then holding digital gold would be not far removed from that. That’s a non-controversial adoption.

(02:53:33)
I think there are opportunities for governments that are much more profound. If a government started to adopt Bitcoin as a Treasury Reserve asset, that’s much bigger than just an asset investment that’s 100X bigger. And you could imagine, that’s like a trillion dollar opportunity. Like any government that wanted to adopt it as a Treasury Reserve asset would probably generate a trillion or more of value. And then the thing that people think about is, “Well, will oil ever be priced in Bitcoin or any other export commodity?” I think there’s $1.8 trillion or more of export commodities in the world, and right now they’re all priced in dollars. I think that this is a colorful thing, but not really that relevant. You could sell all that stuff in dollars. The relevant decision that any institution makes, whether they’re a nonprofit, a university, a corporation, or a government, is what’s your Treasury Reserve asset? And if your Treasury Reserve asset is the peso, and if the peso is losing 20% or 30% of its value a year, then your balance sheet is collapsing within five years.

(02:54:57)
And if the Treasury Reserve asset is dollars in currency derivatives and US Treasuries, then you’re getting your seven… Right now it’s probably 15% or more monetary inflation. We’re running double the historic average. You could argue triple. Somewhere between double and triple depending upon what your metric is. So, do I think it’ll happen? I think that they’re conservative, but they have to be shocked, and I think there is a shock. The late Russian sanctions are a big shock that when the West sees $300 billion worth of Russian gold in currency derivatives, I think you got the famous quote by Putin that we have to rethink our Treasury strategies. And that pushes everybody toward a commodity strategy, “What commodities do I want to hold?” I think that’s got a lot of people thinking. I think it’s got the Chinese thinking. Everybody wants to be the reserve currency, so if I buy $50 billion worth of dollars every year, then I buy 500 billion over a decade and I probably pay $250 billion of inflation costs on the backs of my citizens in a decade.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:20)
So inflation could be one of the sources of shock. You wonder if there is a switch to Bitcoin whether it would be a bang or a whimper. What is the nature of the shock of the transition?
Michael Saylor
(02:56:32)
I think that the year 2022 is pretty catalytic for digital assets in general and for Bitcoin in particular. The Canadian trucker crisis I think educated hundreds of millions of people and made them start questioning their property rights and their banks. I think the Ukraine war was a second shock, but I think that the Russian sanctions was a third shock. And I think hyperinflation in the rest of the world is a fourth shock. And then persistent inflation in the US is a fifth shock.

(02:57:14)
So I think it’s a perfect storm. And if you put all these events together, what do they signify? They signify the rational conclusion for any person thinking about this is, “I’m not sure if I can trust my property. I don’t know if I have property rights. I don’t know if I can trust the bank. And if I’m politically at odds with the leader of my own country, I’m going to lose my property. And if I’m politically at odds with the owner of another country, I’m still going to lose my property. And when push comes to shove, the banks will freeze my assets and seize them.”

(02:57:56)
And I think that that is playing out in front of everybody in the world such that your logical response would be, “I’m going to convert my weak currency to a strong currency. Like, I’ll convert my peso and lira to the dollar. I’m going to convert my weak property to strong property. I’m going to sell my building Downtown Moscow, and I’d rather own a building in New York City. I’d rather own in a powerful nation than be stuck with a building in Nigeria or a building in Argentina or whatever. So I’m going to sell my weak properties to buy strong properties. I’m going to convert my physical assets to digital assets. I’d rather own a digital building than own a physical building, because if I had a billion dollar building in Moscow, who can I rent that to? But if I have a billion dollar digital building, I can rent it to anybody in any city in the world, anybody with money, and the maintenance cost is almost nothing, and I can hold it for 100 years.” So it’s an indestructible building.

(02:59:09)
And then finally, I want to move from having my assets in a bank with a counterparty to self-custody assets. It is not just Ukraine, but this is like the story in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, South America. You don’t really want to be sitting with $10 million in a bank in Istanbul. The bank’s going to freeze your money, convert it to lira, devalue the lira, and then feed it back to you over 17 years, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:59:42)
So self-custody assets would be layer one Bitcoin?
Michael Saylor
(02:59:46)
Self-custody assets is like if I got my own hardware wallet and I’ve either got… Your highest form of self-custody would be Bitcoin on your own hardware wallet or Bitcoin on your own self-custody. And the other thing people think about is, “How do I get crypto dollars tether some stable coin?” If you had a choice, would you rather have your money in a bank in a war zone in dollars or have your money in a stable coin on your mobile phone in dollars? I mean, you would take the latter risk rather than the former risk.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:26)
In a war zone, definitely, yeah.
Michael Saylor
(03:00:29)
And you can see that happening. We’ve gone from 5 billion in stable coins to 200 billion in the last 24 months. So I do think there’s massive demand for crypto dollars in the form of a US dollar asset. Everybody in the world would say, “Yeah, I want that.” Well, unless you’re just an extreme patriot. But most people in the world would say, “I want that.” And then a lesser group of people would say, “I think I want to be able to carry my property in the palm of my hand so I have self-custody of it.”

Bitcoin price

Lex Fridman
(03:01:04)
So Bitcoin price has gone through quite a roller coaster. What do you think is the high point it’s going to hit?
Michael Saylor
(03:01:12)
I think it’ll go forever. I mean, I think the Bitcoin, it’s going to climb in a serpentine fashion. It’s going to advance and come back and it’s going to keep climbing. I think that the volatility attracts all the capital into the marketplace. And so the volatility makes it the most interesting thing in the financial universe. It also generates massive yield and massive returns for traders, and that attracts capital. We’re talking about the difference between 5% return and 500% return.

(03:01:49)
So the fast money is attracted by the volatility. The volatility has been decreasing year by year by year. I think that it’s stabilizing. I don’t think we’ll see as much volatility in the future as we have in the past. I think that if we look at Bitcoin and model it as digital gold, the market cap goes to between 10 and 20 trillion. But remember, gold is defective property. Gold is dead money. You have a billion dollars of gold that sits in a vault for a decade, it’s very hard to mortgage the gold. It’s also very hard to rent the gold. You can’t loan the gold. No one’s going to create a business with your gold.

(03:02:36)
So gold doesn’t generate much of a yield. So for that reason, most people wouldn’t store a billion dollars for a decade in gold. They would buy a billion dollars of commercial real estate property. The reason why is because I can rent it and generate a yield on it that’s in excess of the maintenance cost. So if you consider digital property, that’s 100 to $200 trillion addressable market. So I would think it goes from 10 trillion to 100 trillion as people start to think of it as digital property.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:08)
What does that mean in terms of price per coin?
Michael Saylor
(03:03:11)
At 500,000, that’s a $10 trillion asset. At 5 million, that’s 100 trillion dollars asset.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:20)
So you think it crosses a million it can go even higher?
Michael Saylor
(03:03:24)
Yeah, I think it keeps going up forever. I mean, there’s no reason we couldn’t go to 10 million a coin. Because digital property isn’t the highest form, right? Gold was that low frequency money. Property is a mid-frequency money, but when I start to program it faster, it starts to look like digital energy. Then it doesn’t just replace property, then you’re starting to replace bonds. It’s 100 trillion in bonds, there’s 50 to 100 trillion in other currency derivatives. And these are all conventional use cases. I think that there’s 350 trillion to $500 trillion worth of currency, currency derivatives in the world. When I say that, I mean things that are valued based upon fiat cash flows. Any commercial real estate, any bond, any sovereign debt, any currency itself, any derivatives to those things, they’re all derivatives and they’re all defective. And they’re all defective because of this persistent seven to 14% lapse which we call inflation or monetary expansion.

(03:04:41)
Can we switch subjects to talk about the energy side of it-
Lex Fridman
(03:04:45)
Sure.
Michael Saylor
(03:04:45)
… like the innovative piece?
Lex Fridman
(03:04:48)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(03:04:48)
Let’s just start with this idea that I’ve got a hotel worth a billion dollars with 1,000 rooms. When it becomes a dematerialized hotel-
Lex Fridman
(03:04:58)
I love that word so much, by the way, dematerialized hotel.
Michael Saylor
(03:05:01)
We’re a cross from the Fontainebleau here. Imagine the Fontainebleau is dematerialized. The problem with the physical hotel is I got to hire real people moving subject to the speed of sound and physics laws and Newton’s laws, and I can rent it to people in Miami Beach. But if it was a digital hotel, I could rent the room to people in Paris, London and New York every night, and I can run it with robots. And as soon as I do that, I can rent it by the room hour, and I can rent it by the room minute. And so I start to chop my hotel up into 100,000 room hours that I sell to the highest bidder anywhere in the world. And you can see all of a sudden the yield, the rent, and the income of the property is dramatically increased.

(03:05:50)
I can also see the maintenance cost of the property falls. I get on Moore’s Law and I’m operating in cyberspace. So I got rid of Newton’s laws, I got rid of all the friction and all those problems, I tapped into the benefits of cyberspace. I created a global property. I started monetizing at different frequencies. And of course, now I can mortgage it to anybody in the world. You’re not going to be able to get a mortgage on a Turkish building from someone in South Africa. You have to find someone that’s local to the culture you’re in. So when you start to move from analog property to digital property, it’s not just a little bit better, it’s a lot better. And what I just described, Lex, is like the DeFi vision. It’s the beauty of DeFi flash loans, money moving at high velocity. At some point, if the hotel is dematerialized, then what’s the difference between renting a hotel room and loaning a block of stock? I’m just finding the highest best use of the thing.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:05)
It feels like the magic really emerges though when you build a market of layer two and layer three technologies on top of that. So maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong, but for all these hotels and all these kinds of ideas, it’s always touching humans at some point and the consumers or humans, business owners and so on. So you have to create interface. You have to create services that make all of that super efficient, super fun to use, pleasant, effective, all those kinds of things. And so you have to build a whole economy on top of that.
Michael Saylor
(03:07:44)
Yeah. I happen to think that won’t be done by the crypto industry at all. I think that’ll be done by centralized applications. I think it’ll be the citadels of the world, the high speed traders of the world, the New Yorkers. I think it’ll be Binance, FTX, and Coinbase as a layer three exchange that will give you the yield and will give you the loan and the best terms. Because ultimately, you have to jump these compliance hoops. BlockFi can give you yield, but they have to do it in a compliant way with the United States jurisdiction. So ultimately, those applications to use that digital property and either give you a loan on it or give you yield on it, are going to come from companies.

(03:08:33)
But the difference, the fundamental difference is it could be companies anywhere in the world. So if a company in Singapore comes up with a better offering, then the capital is going to start to flow to Singapore. I can’t send 10 city blocks of LA to Singapore to rent during a festival, but I can send 10 blocks of Bitcoin to Singapore. So you’ve got a truly global market that’s functioning in this asset, and it’s their second order asset. For example, maybe you’re an American citizen and you own 10 Bitcoin and someone in Singapore will generate 27% yield in the Bitcoin but legally you can’t send the money to them or the Bitcoin to them, it doesn’t matter. Because the fact that that exists means that someone in Hong Kong will borrow the 10 Bitcoin from somebody in New York, and then they will put on the trade in Singapore, and that will create a demand for Bitcoin, which will drive up the price of Bitcoin, which will result in an effective tax-free yield for the person in the US that’s not even in the jurisdiction.

(03:09:43)
So there’s nothing that’s going on in Singapore to drive up the price of your land in LA. But there is something going on everywhere in the world to drive up the price of property in cyberspace if there’s only one digital Manhattan. And so there’s a dynamic there which is profound because it’s global. But now let’s go to the next extreme. I’m still giving you a fairly conventional idea, which is, let’s just loan the money fast on a global network and let’s just rent the hotel room fast in cyberspace. But let’s move to maybe a more innovative idea. The first generation of internet brought a lot of productivity, but there’s also just a lot of flaws in it. For example, Twitter is full of garbage. Instagram DMs are full of garbage. Your Twitter DMs are full of garbage. YouTube is full of scams. Every 15 minutes there’s a Michael Saylor Bitcoin giveaway spun up on YouTube. My Office 365 inbox is full of garbage, millions of spam messages. I’m running four different email filters. My company spends million dollars a year to fight denial of service attacks and all sorts of other security things.

(03:11:03)
There are denial of service attacks everywhere against everybody in cyberspace all the time. It’s extreme. And we’ll all beset with hostility, right? You’ve been a victim of it in Twitter. You go on Twitter and people post stuff they would never say to your face. And then if you look, you find out that the account was created three days ago and it’s not even a real person. So we’re beset with phishing attacks and scams and spam bots and garbage. Why? The answer is because the first generation of internet was digital information, and there’s no energy. There’s no conservation of energy in cyberspace. The thing that makes the universe work is conservation of energy.

(03:11:49)
If I went to a hotel room, I’d have to post a credit card. And then if I smash the place up, there’d be economic consequences, maybe there’d be criminal consequences, there might be reputational consequences. A lamp might fall on me. But in the worst case, I can only smash up one hotel room. Now imagine I could actually write a Python script to send myself to every hotel room in the world every minute, not post a credit card, and smash them all up anonymously.

(03:12:26)
The thing that makes the universe work is friction, speed of sound, speed of light, and the fact that ultimately it’s conservative. You’re either energy or you’re matter, but once you’ve used the energy, it’s gone, and you can’t do infinite everything. That’s missing in cyberspace right now. And if you look at all of the moral hazards and all of the product defects that we have in all of these products, most of them, 99% of them, could be cured if we introduced conservation of energy into cyberspace. That’s what you can do with high-speed, digital property, high-speed Bitcoin. And by high-speed, I mean not 20 transactions a day, I mean 20,000 transactions a day. So how do you do that? Well, I let everybody on Twitter post 1,000 or 10,000 satoshis via a Lightning badge, “Give me an orange check.” If you put up 20 bucks once in your life, you could give 300 million people an orange check. Right now you don’t have a blue check, Lex. You’re a famous person, I don’t know why you don’t have a blue check. Have you ever applied for a blue check?

Twitter verification

Lex Fridman
(03:13:46)
No.
Michael Saylor
(03:13:46)
There are 360,000 people on Twitter with a blue check. There are 300 million people on Twitter. So the conventional way to verify accounts is elitist, archaic.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:02)
How does it work? How do you get a blue check? I mean, I’ve worked-
Michael Saylor
(03:14:05)
You got to apply and wait six months, and you have to post three articles in the public mainstream media that illustrates you’re a person of interest.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:15)
Interesting.
Michael Saylor
(03:14:15)
Generally, they would grant them to CEOs of public companies. The whole idea is to verify that you are-
Lex Fridman
(03:14:24)
Who you are.
Michael Saylor
(03:14:24)
… who you say you are. But the question is, why isn’t everybody verified? There’s a couple of Threads on that. One is some people don’t want to be doxed, they want to be anonymous. But they’re even anonymous people that should be verified, because otherwise you’re subjecting their entire following to phishing attacks and scams and hostility. But the other-
Lex Fridman
(03:14:51)
What’s the orange verification, so this idea? Can you actually elaborate a little bit more? If you put up 20 bucks…
Michael Saylor
(03:14:57)
Yeah, I think everybody on Twitter ought to be able to get an orange check if they could come up with like $10.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:03)
What is the power of that orange check? What does that verify exactly?
Michael Saylor
(03:15:08)
You basically post a security deposit for your safe passage through cyberspace. The way it would work is, if you’ve got $10 once in your life, you can basically show that you’re creditworthy. And that’s your pledge to me that you’re going to act responsibly. So you put the 10 or the $20 into the Lightning wallet, you get an orange check. Then Twitter just gives you a setting where I can say, “The only people that could DM me are orange checks. The only people that can post on my tweets are orange checks.” So instead of locking out the public and just letting your followers comment, you lock out all the unverified. And that means people that don’t want to post $10 security deposit can’t comment.

(03:15:54)
Once you’ve done those two things, then you’re in a position to monetize malice. Monetize motion or malice for that matter, but let’s just say for the sake of argument you post something and 9,700 bots spin up and pitch their whatever scam. Right now you sit and you go report, report, report, report, report, report. And if you spend an hour, you get through half of them, you waste an hour of your life, and they just spin up another 97 gazillion because they’ve got a Python script spinning it up. So it’s hopeless. But on the other hand, if you report them, and they really are a bot, Twitter’s got a method to actually delete the account. They know that they’re bots. The problem is not they don’t know how to delete the account, the problem is there are no consequences when they delete the account. So if there are consequences, Twitter, they could just seize the $10 or seize the $20 because it’s a bot, it’s a malicious criminal act or whatever as a violation of the platform rules. You end up seizing $10,000, give half the money to the reporter, and half the money to the Twitter platform.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:08)
That’s a really powerful idea, but that’s adding friction akin to the kind of friction you have in the physical world. You have consequences. You have real consequences.
Michael Saylor
(03:17:19)
It’s putting conservation of energy.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:21)
Conservation of energy, but-
Michael Saylor
(03:17:22)
There’s no friction. There’s no nothing on this earth. I mean, you can’t walk across the room without friction. Friction is not bad. Unnecessary friction is bad. So in this particular case, you’re introducing conservation of energy, and in essence, you’re introducing the concept of consequence or truth into cyberspace. And that means if you do want to spin up 10 million fake-less Fridmans…
Lex Fridman
(03:17:54)
It’s going to cost-
Michael Saylor
(03:17:55)
It’s going to cost you $100 million to spin up 10 million fake Lexes.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:00)
But the thing is, you could do that with the dollar, but your case, you’re saying that it’s more tied to physical reality when you do that with Bitcoin?
Michael Saylor
(03:18:10)
Yeah. Well, let’s follow up on that idea a bit more. If you did do it with the dollar, then the question is, how does six billion people deposit the dollars? Could you do it with a credit card? How do you send dollars? Well, you have to dox yourself. It’s not easy.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:31)
Sure.
Michael Saylor
(03:18:31)
So you’re talking about inputting a credit card transaction, doxing yourself, and now you’ve just eliminated the two billion people that don’t have credit cards or don’t have banks. You’ve also got a problem with everybody that wants to remain anonymous. But you’ve also got this other problem, which is credit cards are expensive transactions, low frequency, slow settlement. So do you really want to pay 2.5% every time you actually show a $20 deposit? Maybe you could do a kludgy version of this for a subset of people.

(03:19:09)
It’s 10% is good if you did it with conventional payment rails. But what you can’t do is the next idea, which is I want the orange badge to be used to give me safe passage through cyberspace tripping across every platform. So how do I solve the denial of service attacks against a website? I publish a website, you hit it with a million requests. Okay, now how do I deal with that? Well, I can lock you out and I can make it a zero trust website, and then you have to be coming at me through a trusted firewall or with a trusted credential. But that’s a pretty draconian thing. Or I could put it behind a Lightning wall. A Lightning wall would be I just challenge you, “Lex, you want to browse my website, you have to show me your 100,000 satoshis. Do you have 100,000 satoshis?”

(03:20:10)
Click. Okay. Now you click away 100 times or 1,000 times. And after 1,000 times, I’m like, “Well, now Lex, you’re getting offensive, I’m going to take a satoshi from you or 10 satoshis, a microtransaction. You want to hit me a million times? I’m taking all your satoshis and locking you out.” What you want to do is you want to go through 200 websites a day, and what you want every time you cross a domain, you need to be able to in a split second prove that you’ve got some asset. And now when you cross back, when you exit domain, you want to fetch your asset back.

(03:20:48)
So, how do I in a friction-free fashion browse through dozens or hundreds of websites, post a security deposit for safe passage, and then get it back? You couldn’t afford to pay a credit card fee each time. When you think about 2.5% as a transaction fee, it means you trade the money 40 times and it’s gone. It’s gone.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:14)
Yeah. So you can’t do this hopping around through the internet with this kind of verification that grounds you to a physical reality. It is a really, really interesting idea. Why hasn’t that been done?
Michael Saylor
(03:21:27)
I think you need two things. You need an idea like a digital asset like Bitcoin, that’s a bearer instrument for final settlement. And then you need a high-speed transaction network like Lightning, where the transaction cost might be a 20th of a penny or less. And if you roll the clock back 24 months, I don’t think you had the Lightning Network in a stable point. It’s really just the past 12 months. It’s an idea you could think about this year, and I think you need to be aware of Bitcoin as something other than a scary speculative asset. So I really think we’re just at the beginning.

Second best crypto

Lex Fridman
(03:22:12)
The embryonic stage. I have to ask, Michael Saylor, you said before there’s no second best to Bitcoin. What would be the second best? Traditionally there’s Ethereum with smart contracts, Cardano with proof of stake, Polkadot with interoperability between blockchains, Dogecoin has the incredible power of the meme, privacy with Monero. I just can keep going. There’s, of course, after the block size wars the different offshoots of Bitcoin.
Michael Saylor
(03:22:48)
I think if you decompose or segment the crypto market, you’ve got crypto property, Bitcoin is the king of that, and other Bitcoin forks that wanted to be a bearer instrument, store of value would be a property, a Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin, something like that. Then you’ve got cryptocurrencies. I don’t think Bitcoin is a currency because a currency I define in nation-state sense. A currency is a digital asset that you can transfer in a transaction without incurring a taxable obligation. So that means it has to be a stable dollar or a stable euro or a stable yen, a stable coin.

(03:23:30)
So I think you’ve got cryptocurrencies, Tether, Circle, most famous. I think you’ve got crypto platforms, and Ethereum is the most famous of the crypto platforms, the platform with smart contract functionality, et cetera. And then I think you’ve got just crypto securities. It’s just like my favorite whatever meme coin, and I love it because I love it, and it’s attached to my game or my company or my persona or my whatever. I think if you pushed me and said, “Well, what’s the second best?” I would say the world wants two things…
Michael Saylor
(03:24:00)
And said, “Well, what’s the second best?” I would say the world wants two things. It wants crypto property as a savings account, and it wants cryptocurrency as a checking account. And that means that the most popular thing really is going to be a stablecoin dollar. And there’s maybe a fight right now, might be Tether, right? But a stable dollar, because I feel like the market opportunity… It’s not clear that there’ll be one that will win. The class of stable dollars is probably a one to $10 trillion market easily. I think that in the crypto platform space, Ethereum will compete with Solana and Binance Smart chain and the like-
Lex Fridman
(03:24:44)
Are there certain characteristics of any of them that stand out to you? Don’t you think the competition is based on a set of features? Also… So the set of features that a cryptocurrency provides, but also the community that it provides, don’t you think the community matters and the adoption, the dynamic of the adoption both across the developers and the investors?
Michael Saylor
(03:25:07)
If I’m looking at them, the first question is what’s the regulatory risk? How likely is it to be deemed a property versus security? And the second is what’s the competitive risk? And the third is what’s the speed and the performance? All those things lead to the question of what’s the security risk? How likely is it to crash and burn? And how stable or unstable is it? And then there’s the marketing risk. There are different teams behind each of these things and communities behind them. I think that the big cloud looming over the crypto industry is regulatory treatment of cryptocurrencies and regulatory treatment of crypto securities and crypto platforms. And I think that won’t be determined until the end of the first Biden administration. For example, there are people that would only US FDIC insured banks to issue cryptocurrencies. They want JP Morgan to issue a crypto dollar backed one-to-one.

(03:26:11)
But then in the US right now, we have Circle and we have other companies that are licensed entities that are backed by cash and cash equivalents, but they’re not FDIC insured banks. There’s also a debate in Congress about whether state-chartered banks should be able to issue these things. And then we have Tether and others that are outside of the US jurisdiction. They’re probably not backed by cash and cash equivalents. They’re backed by stuff, and we don’t know what stuff. And then finally you have UST and DAI, which are algorithmic stablecoins, that are even more innovative, further outside the compliance framework. So if you ask who’s going to win, the question is really, I don’t know. Will the market decide or will the regulators decide? If the regulators get out of the way and the market [inaudible 03:27:03] Well then it’s an interesting discussion.

(03:27:05)
And then I think that all bets are off if the regulators get more heavy-handed with this. And I think you could have the same discussion with crypto properties, like the DeFi exchanges and the crypto exchanges, the SEC would like to regulate the crypto exchanges, they’d like to regulate the DeFi exchanges. That means they may regulate the crypto platforms, and at what rate and in what fashion? And so I think that I could give you an opinion if it was limited to competition under the current regulatory regime. But I think that the regulations are so fast moving and it’s so uncertain that you can’t make a decision without considering the potential actions of the regulators.

Dogecoin

Lex Fridman
(03:27:55)
I hope the regulators get out of the way. Can you steel man the case that Dogecoin is, I guess the second best cryptocurrency, or if you don’t consider Bitcoin a cryptocurrency, but instead a crypto property-
Michael Saylor
(03:28:08)
I would classify it as crypto property, because the US dollar is a currency. So unless your crypto asset is pegged algorithmically or stably to the value of the dollar, it’s not a currency, it’s a property or it’s an asset.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:22)
So then can you steel man the case that Dogecoin is the best cryptocurrency then? Because Bitcoin is not even in that list.
Michael Saylor
(03:28:32)
The debate is going to be whether it’s property or security, and there’s a debate whether it’s decentralized enough. So let’s assume it was decentralized. Well, it’s increasing at not quite what, 5% a year inflation rate, but it’s not 5% exponentially. It’s like plus 5 million, 5% something capped than is less… I forget the exact number. It’s an inflationary property. It’s got a lower inflation rate than the US dollar, and it’s got a much lower inflation rate than many other fiat currencies. So I think you could say that.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:11)
But don’t you see the power of meme, the power of ideas, the power of fun or whatever mechanism is used to captivate a community?
Michael Saylor
(03:29:25)
I do. But there are meme stocks. It doesn’t absolve you of your ethical and securities liabilities if you’re promoting it. I don’t have a problem with people buying a stock. It’s just… The way I divide the world is there’s investment, there’s saving, and there’s speculation, and there’s trading. So Bitcoin is an asset for saving. If you want to save money for a hundred years, you don’t really want to take on execution risk or the like. So you’re just buying something to hold forever. For you to actually endorse something as a property, if you said to me, “Mike, what should I buy for the next a hundred years?” I’d say, “Well, some amount of real estate, some amount of scarce collectibles, some amount of Bitcoin. You can run your company.” But running your company is an investment.

(03:30:21)
So the savings are properties. If you said, “What should I invest in?” I’d say, “Well, here’s a list of good companies, private companies. You could start your own company. That’s an investment.” If you said, “What should I trade?” Well, I’m trading as a proprietary thing. I don’t have any special insight into that. If you’re a good trader, you know you are. If you said to me, “What should you speculate in?” We talk about meme stocks and meme coins, and it sits up there, it sits right in the same space with what horse should you bet on and what sports team should you gamble on, and should you bet on black six times in a row and double down each time? It’s fun, but at the end of the day, it’s a speculation, right? You can’t build a civilization-
Lex Fridman
(03:31:14)
On speculation.
Michael Saylor
(03:31:15)
… on it. It’s not an institutional asset. And in fact, where I’d leave it right is Bitcoin is clearly digital property, which makes it an institutional grade investable asset for a public company, a public figure, a public investor, or anybody that’s risk-adverse. I think that the top 100 other cryptos are like venture capital investments. And if you’re a VC, and if you’re a qualified technical investor and you have a pool of capital and you can take that kind of risk, then you can parse through that and form opinions.

(03:31:49)
It’s just orders of magnitude more risky because of competition, because of ambition and because of regulation. And if you take the meme coins, it’s like when some rapper comes out with a meme coin, it’s like maybe it’ll peak when I hear about it. SHIB was created as the coin such that it had so many zeros after the decimal point that when you looked at it on the exchanges, it always showed zero, zero, zero, zero. And it wasn’t until six months after it got popular that they started expanding the display so you could see whether the price had changed.

Elon Musk

Lex Fridman
(03:32:27)
That’s speculation. Maybe you can correct me, but you’ve been critical of Elon Musk in the past in the crypto space. Where do you stand on Elon’s effect on Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general these days?
Michael Saylor
(03:32:42)
I believe that Bitcoin is a massive breakthrough for the human race that will cure half the problems in the world and generate hundreds of trillions of dollars of economic value to the civilization. And I believe that it’s in an early stage, where many people don’t understand it and they’re afraid of it, and there’s FUD, and there’s uncertainty, there’s doubt and there’s fear, and there’s a very noisy crypto world, and there’s 15,000 other cryptos that are seeking relevance. And I think most of the FUD is actually fueled by the other crypto entrepreneurs. So the environmental FUD and the other types of uncertainty that’s around Bitcoin, generally, they’re not coming from legitimate environmentalists, they don’t come from legitimate critics. They actually are guerrilla marketing campaigns that are being financed and fueled by other crypto entrepreneurs because they have an interest in doing so.

(03:33:48)
So if I look at the constructive path forward, first, I think it’d be very constructive for corporations to embrace Bitcoin and build applications on top of it. You don’t need to fix it. There’s nothing wrong with it. When you put it on a layer two and a layer three, it moves a billion times a second at the speed of light. So every beautiful, cool DeFi application, every crypto application, everything you could imagine you might want to do, you can do with a legitimate company and a legitimate website or mobile application sitting on top of Bitcoin or lightning if you want to. So I think that to the extent that people do that, that’s going to be better for the world. If you consider what holds people back, I think it’s just misperceptions about what Bitcoin is. So I’m a big fan of just educating people. If you’re not going to commercialize it, then just educate people on what it is.

(03:34:59)
So for example, Bitcoin is the most efficient use of energy in the world by far. Right? Most people, they don’t necessarily perceive that or realize that, but if you were to take any metric energy intensity, you put $2 billion worth of electricity in the network every year and it’s worth $850 billion. There is no industry in the real world that is that energy efficient. Not only that energy efficient, it’s also the most sustainable industry. We do surveys, 58% of Bitcoin mining energy is sustainable. So there’s a very good story, in fact, every other industry, planes, trains, automobiles, construction, food, medicine, everything else, it’s less clean, less efficient. So-
Lex Fridman
(03:35:52)
So the basic debate was-
Michael Saylor
(03:35:54)
I wouldn’t say there is a debate. I would just say that to the extent that the Bitcoin community had any issue with Elon, it was just this environmental uncertainty that he fueled in a couple of his tweets, which I think just is very distracting.
Lex Fridman
(03:36:13)
Well, that was one of them, but I think it’s the Bitcoin maximalists, but generally the crypto community, what you call the crypto entrepreneurs are… It’s also they’re using it for investment, for speculation, and therefore get very passionate about people’s, celebrities, including you, famous people, saying positive stuff about any one particular crypto, a thing you can buy in Coinbase. And so they might be unhappy with Elon Musk that he’s promoting Bitcoin and then not, and then promoting Dogecoin, then not. There’s so much emotion tied up in the communication on this topic, and I think that’s where a lot of the-
Michael Saylor
(03:37:08)
Look, I don’t have a criticism of Elon Musk. He’s free to do whatever he wishes to do. It’s his life. In fact, Elon Musk is the second-largest supporter of Bitcoin in the world. So I think that the Bitcoin community tends to eat its own quite a bit. It tends to be very self-critical, and instead of saying, “Well, Elon is more supportive of Bitcoin than the other 10,000 people in the world with serious amounts of money,” they focus upon…
Lex Fridman
(03:37:43)
Yeah, this is strange. Eating your own is just…
Michael Saylor
(03:37:46)
I think he’s free to do what he wants to do. I think he’s done a lot of good for Bitcoin in putting it on the balance sheet of Tesla and holding it, and I think that sent a very powerful message.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(03:38:00)
Do you have advice for young people? So you’ve had a heck of a life, you’ve done quite a lot of things, start before MIT, but starting with MIT, is there advice you have for young people, in high school and college, how to have a career that can be proud of, how to have a life they can be proud of?
Michael Saylor
(03:38:24)
I was asked by somebody for quick advice for his young children. He had twins, when they enter adulthood. He said, “Give me your advice for them,” in a letter. “I’m going to give it to them when they turn 21,” or something. I was at a party and then he handed me this sheet of paper, and I thought, “Oh, he wants me to write it down right now.” So I sat down, I started writing and I figured, “Well, what would you want to tell someone at age 21?”
Lex Fridman
(03:38:54)
You wrote it down.
Michael Saylor
(03:38:55)
So I wrote it down. Then I tweeted it and it’s sitting on Twitter. But I tell you what I said. I said, “My advice, if you’re entering adulthood, focus your energy, guard your time, train your mind, train your body, think for yourself, curate your friends, curate your environment, keep your promises, stay cheerful and constructive, and upgrade the world.” That was the 10.
Lex Fridman
(03:39:32)
Upgrade the world. That’s an interesting choice of words. Upgrade the world. Upgrade the world.
Michael Saylor
(03:39:39)
It’s like an engineer’s [inaudible 03:39:42]
Lex Fridman
(03:39:41)
It’s a very, yeah, it is a very engineering themed… Keep you promises too, that’s an interesting one.
Michael Saylor
(03:39:50)
I think most people suffer because they don’t focus. You got to figure out… I think the big risk in this world is there’s too much of everything.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:00)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(03:40:02)
You can sit and watch chess videos a hundred hours a week and you’ll never get through all the chess videos. There’s too much of every possible thing, too much of every good thing. So figuring out what you want to do, and then… Everything will suck up your time. There’s a hundred streaming channels to binge-watch on. You got to guard your time and then train your body, train your mind, and control who’s around you, control what surrounds you. So ultimately, in a world where there’s too much of everything, then your success-
Lex Fridman
(03:40:44)
It’s like those laser eyes, you have to focus on just a few of those things.
Michael Saylor
(03:40:51)
Yeah. I got a thousand opinions we could talk about, and I could pursue a thousand things, but I don’t expect to be successful. I’m not sure that my opinion in any of the 999 is any more valid than the leader of thought in that area. So how about if I just focus upon one thing and then deliver the best I can in the one thing. That’s the laser eye message. The rest get you distracted.
Lex Fridman
(03:41:22)
How do you achieve that? Do you find yourself, given where you are in life, having to say no a lot, or just focus comes natural when you just ignore everything around you? So how do you achieve that focus?
Michael Saylor
(03:41:36)
I think it helps if people know what you’re focused on.
Lex Fridman
(03:41:40)
So everything about you just radiates that, people know. People know this is-
Michael Saylor
(03:41:44)
If they know what you’re focused on, then you won’t get so many other things coming your way. If you dally or if you flirt with 27 different things, then you’re going to get approached by people in each of the 27 communities. Right?
Lex Fridman
(03:42:03)
You mentioned beginning a PhD, and given your roots at MIT, do you think there’s… There’s all kinds of journeys you can take to educate yourself. Do you think a PhD or school is still worth it, or is there other paths through life?
Michael Saylor
(03:42:23)
Is it worth it if you had to pay for it? Is it worth it if you spend the time on it?
Lex Fridman
(03:42:27)
The time and the money is a big cost?
Michael Saylor
(03:42:31)
I think…
Lex Fridman
(03:42:32)
Time, probably the bigger one. Right?
Michael Saylor
(03:42:34)
It seems clear to me that the world wants more specialists. It wants you to be an expert and to focus on in one area. It’s punishing generalists, jack-of-all-trades, especially people that are generalists in the physical realm. Because if you’re a specialist in the digital realm, you might very well… You’re the person with 700,000 followers on Twitter and you show them how to tie knots, or you’re the banjo player with 1.8 million followers, and when everybody types banjo, it’s you, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:43:13)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(03:43:14)
And so the world wants people that do something well, and then it wants to stamp out 18 million copies of them. And so that argues in favor of focus. Now, the definition of a PhD is someone with enough of an education that they’re capable of or have made… I guess to get a PhD, technically you have to have done a dissertation where you made a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge. And if you haven’t done that, technically you have a master’s degree, but you’re not a doctor. So if you’re interested in any of the academic disciplines that a PhD would be granted for, then I can see that being a reasonable pursuit. But there are many people that are specialists… you know the Agadmator?
Lex Fridman
(03:43:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Saylor
(03:44:06)
The Agadmator on YouTube. He’s the world’s greatest chess commentator.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:13)
Yeah.
Michael Saylor
(03:44:15)
I’ve watched his career, and he’s got progressively better, and he’s really good.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:18)
He’s going to love hearing this.
Michael Saylor
(03:44:19)
If the Agadmator ever hears this, I’m a big fan of the Agadmator. I have to cut myself off, right? Because otherwise you’ll watch the entire Paul Morphy saga for your weekend. But the point really is, YouTube is full of experts who are specialists in something, and they rise to the top of their profession. Twitter is too. The internet is. So I would advocate that you figure out what you’re passionate about and what you’re good at, and you do focus on it, especially if… If the thing that you’re doing can be automated… The problem is, back to that 500,000 algebra teacher type comment, the problem is if it is possible to be automated, then over time, someone’s probably going to automate it, that squeezes the state space of everybody else. Like after the lockdowns, it used to be there are all these local bands that played in bars and everybody went to the bar to see the local band, and then during the lockdown, you would have these six super groups, and they would all get 500,000 or a million followers, and all these smaller local bands just got no attention at all.
Lex Fridman
(03:45:47)
Well, the interesting thing is one of those 500,000 algebra teachers is likely to be part of the automation. So it’s an opportunity for you to think, “Where’s my field, my discipline, evolving into?” I talked to a bunch of librarians, just happen to be friends with librarians. Libraries will probably be evolving, and it’s up to you as a librarian to be one of the few that remain in the rubble.
Michael Saylor
(03:46:18)
If you’re going to give commentary on Shakespeare plays, I want you to basically do it for every Shakespeare play. I want you to be the Shakespeare dude. Because just like, Lex, you’re like..
Lex Fridman
(03:46:29)
I don’t know what kind of…
Michael Saylor
(03:46:31)
You’re the deep thinking podcaster, or you’re the podcaster that goes after the deep intellectual conversations. And once I get comfortable with you, and I like you, then I start binge-watching Lex. But if you changed your format through 16 different formats so that you could compete with 16 different other personalities on YouTube, you probably wouldn’t beat any of them, right? You would probably just kind of sink into the, you’re the number two or number three guy. You’re not the number one guy in the format. And I think the algorithm, right? The Twitter algorithm and the YouTube algorithm, they really reward the person that’s focused on message, consistent. The world wants somebody they can trust that’s consistent and reliable, and they kind of want to know what they’re getting into, because, and this is taken for granted maybe, but there’s 10 million people vying for every hour of your time. And so the fact that anybody gives you any time at all is a huge-
Lex Fridman
(03:47:44)
Is amazing.
Michael Saylor
(03:47:45)
… privilege, right? And you should be thanking them and you should respect their time.
Lex Fridman
(03:47:50)
It’s interesting. Everything you said is very interesting. But of course, from my perspective and probably from your perspective, my actual life has nothing to do with, it’s just being focused on stuff. In my case, it’s like focus on doing the thing I really enjoy doing and being myself, and not caring about anything else. I don’t care about views or likes or attention. And that just maintaining that focus is the way, from an individual perspective, you live that life. But yeah, it does seem that the world and technology is rewarding the specialization and creating bigger and bigger platforms for the different specializations. And then that lifts all boats actually, because the specializations get better and better and better at teaching people to do specific things, and they educate themselves. Just everybody gets more and more knowledgeable and more and more empowered.
Michael Saylor
(03:48:46)
The reward for authenticity more than offsets the specificity with which you pursue your mission. Another way to say it is “Nobody wants to read advertising.” If you were to spend a hundred million dollars advertising your thing, I probably wouldn’t want to watch it, but-
Lex Fridman
(03:49:07)
That’s so Fascinating.
Michael Saylor
(03:49:07)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:49:07)
That’s so fascinating.
Michael Saylor
(03:49:09)
We see the death of that. And so the commercial shows are losing their audiences, and the authentic specialist or the authentic artist are gaining their audience.

Mortality

Lex Fridman
(03:49:24)
And that’s a beautiful thing. Speaking of deep thinking, you’re just a human. Your life ends. You’ve accumulated so much wisdom, so much money, but the ride ends. Do you think about that? Do you ponder your death, your mortality? Are you afraid of it?
Michael Saylor
(03:49:46)
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation’s mission is to make education free for everybody forever. And if I’m able to contribute to the creation of a more perfect monetary system, then maybe that foundation will go on forever.
Lex Fridman
(03:50:09)
The idea, the foundation of the idea, so not just… Each of the foundations.
Michael Saylor
(03:50:17)
It’s not clear we’re on the s-curve of immortal life yet. That’s a biological question. And you asked that on some of your other interviews a lot. I think that we are on the threshold of immortal life for ideas or immortal life for certain institutions or computer programs. So if we can fix the money, then you can create a technically perfected endowment. And then the question really is what are your ideas? What do you want to leave behind? And so if it’s a park, then you endow the park, right? If it’s free education, you endow that. If it’s some other ethical idea, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:51:02)
Does it make you sad that there’s something that you’ve endowed, some very powerful idea of digital energy that you put out into, you help put it into the world, and that your mind, your conscious mind, will no longer be there to experience it. It’s just gone forever.
Michael Saylor
(03:51:27)
I’d rather think that the thing that Satoshi taught us is you should do your part during some phase of the journey, and then you should get out of the way. I think Steve Jobs said something similar to that effect in a very famous speech one day, which is “Death is a natural part of life and it makes way for the next generation.” And I think the goal is you upgrade the world, right? You leave it a better place, but you get out of the way. And I think when that breaks down, bad things happen. I think nature cleanses itself. There’s a cycle of life.

Meaning of life

Lex Fridman
(03:52:15)
And speaking of one of great people who did also get out of the way is George Washington. So hopefully when you get out of the way, nobody’s bleeding you to death in hope of helping you. What do you think, to do a bit of a callback, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What’s the meaning of life? Why are we here? We talked about the rise of human civilization. It seems like we’re engineers at heart. We build cool stuff, better and better use of energy, channeling energy to be productive. Why? What’s it all for?
Michael Saylor
(03:52:55)
You’re getting metaphysical on me.
Lex Fridman
(03:52:57)
Very. There’s a beautiful boat to the left of us. Why do we do that? This boat that sailed the ocean? Then we build models of it to celebrate great engineering of the past.
Michael Saylor
(03:53:08)
To engineer is divine. You can make lots of arguments as why we’re here. We’re either here to entertain ourselves or we’re here to create something that’s beautiful or something that’s functional. I think if you’re an engineer, you entertain yourself by creating something that’s both beautiful and functional. So I think all three of those things, it’s entertaining, but it’s ethical. You got to admire the first person that built a bridge, crossing a chasm, or the first person to work out the problem of how to get running water to a village, or the first person to figure out how to dam up a river, or mastered agriculture, or the guy that figured out how to grow fruit on trees or created orchards, and maybe one day had 10 fruit trees. He is pretty proud of himself.
Lex Fridman
(03:54:03)
So that’s functional. There is also something to that, just like you said, that’s just beautiful. It does get you closer to, like you said, the divine. Something… When you step back and look at the entirety of it. A collective of humans, using a beautiful invention or creation, or just something about this instrument is creating a beautiful piece of music, that seems just right. That’s what we’re here for. Whatever the divine is, it seems like we’re here for that. And I, of course, love talking to you because from the engineering perspective, the functional is ultimately the mechanism towards the beauty.
Michael Saylor
(03:54:53)
Isn’t there something beautiful about making the world a better place for people that you love, your friends, your family, or yourself? When you think about the entire arc of human existence, and you roll the clock back 500,000 years, and you think about every struggle of everyone that came before us, and everything they had to overcome in order to put you here right now, you got to admire that, right? You got to respect that.
Lex Fridman
(03:55:30)
That’s a heck of a gift they gave us. It’s also a heck of a responsibility. Don’t screw it up.
Michael Saylor
(03:55:39)
If I dropped you 500,000 years ago and I said, figure out steel refining, or figure out silicon chips, fab reproduction, or whatever it is.
Lex Fridman
(03:55:52)
To fly, or fire.
Michael Saylor
(03:55:53)
You’d be like, “Ugh.” And so now we’re here, and I guess the way you repay them is you fix everything in front of your face you can. And that means, to someone like Elon, it means get us off the planet. To someone like me, it’s like, I think fix the energy and the system,
Lex Fridman
(03:56:14)
And that gives me hope. Michael, this was an incredible conversation. You’re an incredible human. It’s a huge honor you would sit down with me. Thank you so much for talking today.
Michael Saylor
(03:56:23)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Lex.
Lex Fridman
(03:56:26)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Saylor. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with a few words from Francis Bacon “Money is a great servant, but a bad master.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #318 with Nick Lane.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Nick Lane
(00:00:00)
Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic, which is to say they release energy. If you have hydrogen and CO2, and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to, say, 50 degrees centigrade, and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing’s going to happen. But thermodynamically that is less stable. Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. Why doesn’t that happen is because of the kinetic barriers. That’s where you need the spark.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:38)
The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science, and life ever written, including his two most recent titles, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, and The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Nick Lane.

Origin of life

Lex Fridman
(00:01:09)
Let’s start with perhaps the most mysterious, the most interesting question that we little humans can ask of ourselves. How did life originate on earth?
Nick Lane
(00:01:21)
You could ask anybody working on the subject, and you’ll get a different answer from all of them. They will be pretty passionately held opinions, and they’re opinions grounded in science, but they’re still really at this point, they’re opinions. Because there’s so much stuff to know, that all we can ever do is get a small slice of it, and it’s the context which matters. So, I can give you my answer. My answer is, from a biologist’s point of view, that has been missing from the equation over decades, which is: well, what does life do on earth? Why is it this way? Why is it made of cells? Why is it made of carbon? Why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes? There’s all these interesting questions about cells, that if you then look to see: well, is there an environment on earth, on the early earth 4 billion years ago that kind of matches the requirements of cells?

(00:02:16)
Well, there is one. There’s a very obvious one. It’s basically created by whenever you have a wet rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents, which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads and electrical charges on kind of cell-like pores that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does. So, it seems so beautiful and so obvious, that I’ve spent the last 10 years or more trying to do experiments. It turns out to be difficult, of course. Everything’s more difficult than you ever thought it was going to be, but it looks, I would say, more true rather than less true over that ten-year period. I think I have to take a step back every now and then and think, “Hang on a minute. Where is this going?” I’m happy it’s going in a sensible direction.

(00:03:02)
And I think then you have these other interesting dilemmas. I’m often accused of being too focused on life on earth, too kind of narrow-minded and inward looking, you might say. I’m talking about carbon, I’m talking about cells. And maybe you or plenty of people can say to me, “Oh, yeah, but life can be anything. I have no imagination.” And maybe they’re right, but unless we can say why life here is this way, and if those reasons are fundamental reasons or if they’re just trivial reasons, then we can’t answer that question. So, I think they’re fundamental reasons, and I think we need to worry about them.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:40)
Yeah, there might be some deep truth to the puzzle here on earth that will resonate with other puzzles elsewhere that will… solving this particular puzzle will give us that deeper truth. So, what do this puzzle… You said vents, hydrogen, wet. So, chemically, what is the potion here? How important is oxygen? You wrote a book about this.
Nick Lane
(00:04:07)
Yeah. And I actually just came straight here from a conference where I was chairing a session on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life. Of course, it matters, but it matters most to the origin of life to be not there. As I see it, we have this… Life is made of carbon basically, primarily, organic molecules with carbon-carbon bonds. And the building block, the Lego brick that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans is carbon dioxide. And to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules, we need to strap on hydrogen. And so we need… And this is basically what life is doing, it’s hydrogenating carbon dioxide. It’s taking the hydrogen that bubbles out of the earth in these hydrothermal vents, and it sticks it on CO2. And it’s kind of really as simple as that. And actually thermodynamically, the thing that I find most troubling is that if you do these experiments in the lab, the molecules you get are exactly the molecules that we see at the heart of biochemistry and the heart of life.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:10)
Is there something to be said about the earliest origins of that little potion, that chemical process? What really is the spark there?
Nick Lane
(00:05:24)
There isn’t a spark. There is a continuous chemical reaction. And there is kind of a spark, but it’s a continuous electrical charge, which helps drive that reaction.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:37)
So, literally spark.
Nick Lane
(00:05:39)
Well, the charge at least. But yes, a spark in that sense is… We tend to think in terms of Frankenstein. We tend to think in terms of electricity, and one moment you zap something and it comes alive. And what does that really mean? It’s come alive. And now what’s sustaining it? Well, we are sustained by oxygen, by this continuous chemical reaction. And if you put a plastic bag on your head, then you’ve got a minute or something before it’s all over.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:07)
So, it’s some way of being able to leverage a source of energy?
Nick Lane
(00:06:11)
Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic, which is to say they release energy. If you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade, and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing’s going to happen. But thermodynamically that is less stable, two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. So, why doesn’t that happen? It’s because of the kinetic barriers. That’s where you need the spark.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:49)
Is it possible that life originated multiple times on earth? The way you describe it, you make it sound so easy.
Nick Lane
(00:06:57)
There’s a long distance to go from those first bits of prebiotic chemistry to, say, molecular machines, like ribosomes.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:05)
Is that the first thing that you would say is life? If I introduce the two of you at a party, you would say that’s a living thing?
Nick Lane
(00:07:15)
I would say as soon as we introduce genes information into systems that are growing anyway, so I would talk about growing protocells, as soon as we introduce even random bits of information into there. I’m thinking about RNA molecules, for example. It doesn’t have to have any information in it. It can be completely random sequence, but if it’s introduced into a system which is in any case growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself, then any changes in that sequence that allow it to do so better or worse are now selected by perfectly normal natural selection.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:51)
But it’s a system-
Nick Lane
(00:07:52)
So, that’s when it becomes alive to my mind.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:54)
… that’s encompassed into an object, that keeps information, and evolves that information over time or changes that information over time.
Nick Lane
(00:08:06)
Yes, exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:06)
In response to the enzymes.
Nick Lane
(00:08:07)
So, it’s always part of a cell system from the very beginning.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:11)
So, is your sense that it started only once because it’s difficult or is it possible it started in multiple occasions on earth?
Nick Lane
(00:08:18)
It’s possible it started multiple occasions. There’s two provisos to that. One of them is oxygen makes it impossible really for life to start. So, as soon as we’ve got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn’t going to keep starting over. So, I often get asked by people, “Why can’t we have life starting? If it’s so easy, why can’t life start in these vents now?” And the answer is, if you want hydrogen to react with CO2 and there’s oxygen there, hydrogen reacts with oxygen instead. You get an explosive reaction that way. It’s rocket fuel. So, it’s never going to happen. But for the origin of life earlier than that, all we know is that there’s a single common ancestor for all of life. There could have been multiple origins, and they all just disappeared.

(00:09:03)
But there’s a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. And they’re not quite as diverse, but nearly, and they are very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to account, as well, for why they’re so different and yet so similar. And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:29)
Can you describe the difference that’s interesting there, how they’re similar, how they’re different?
Nick Lane
(00:09:34)
Well, they’re different in their membranes primarily. They’re different in things like DNA replication. They use completely different enzymes, and the genes behind it for replicating DNA.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:44)
So, they both have membranes, both have DNA replication.
Nick Lane
(00:09:48)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:48)
The process of that is different.
Nick Lane
(00:09:51)
They both have DNA. The genetic code is identical in them both. The way in which it’s transcribed into RNA, into the copy of a gene, and the way that that’s then translated into a protein, that’s all basically the same in both these groups, so they clearly share a common ancestor. It’s just that they’re different in fundamental ways as well. And if you think about, “Well, what kind of processes could drive that divergence very early on?” I can think about it in terms of membranes, in terms of the electrical charges on membranes, and it’s that makes me think that there were probably many unsuccessful attempts and only one really successful attempt.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:30)
Can you explain why that divergence makes you think there’s one common ancestor? Can you describe that intuition? I’m a little bit unclear about why the leap from the divergence means there’s one. Do you mean the divergence indicates that there was a big invention at that time from one source?
Nick Lane
(00:10:50)
Yes. As I imagine it, you have a common ancestor living in a hydrothermal vent. Let’s say there are millions of vents and millions of potential common ancestors living in all of those vents, but only one of them makes it out first. Then you could imagine that that cell is then going to take over the world and wipe out everything else. And so what you would see would be a single common ancestor for all of life, but with lots of different vent systems, all vying to create the first life forms, you might say.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:25)
So, this thing is a cell, a single-cell organism?
Nick Lane
(00:11:28)
Well, we’re always talking about populations of cells, but yes, these are single-celled organisms.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:33)
But the fundamental life form is a single cell. So, they’re always together, but they’re alone together. There’s a machinery in each one individual component, that if left by itself would still work, right?
Nick Lane
(00:11:50)
Yes, yes, yes. It’s the unit of selection is a single cell. But selection operates over generations and changes over generations in populations of cells, so it would be impossible to say that a cell is the unit of selection in the sense that unless you have a population, you can’t evolve, you can’t change.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:07)
Right, but there was one Chuck Norris, that’s an American reference, cell that made it out of the vents or the first one?
Nick Lane
(00:12:19)
So, imagine then that there’s one cell gets out and it takes over the world.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:23)
It gets out in the water. It’s floating around.
Nick Lane
(00:12:25)
Well, deep in the ocean somewhere. But actually two cells got out. And they appear to have got out from the same vent because they both share the same code and everything else. So unless all… We’ve got a million different common ancestors in all these different vents, so either they all have the same code, and two cells spontaneously emerged from different places, or two different cells, fundamentally different cells, came from the same place. So, either way, what are the constraints that say, “Not just one came out or not half a million came out, but two came out.”? That’s kind of a bit strange. So, how did they come out? Well, they come out because what you’re doing inside a vent is you’re relying on the electrical charges down there to power this reaction between hydrogen and CO2 to make yourself grow.

(00:13:17)
And when you leave the vent, you’ve got to do that yourself. You’ve got to power up your own membrane. And so the question is: well, how do you power up your own membrane? And the answer is, well, you need to pump. You need to pump ions to give an electrical charge on the membrane. So, what do the pumps look like? Well, the pumps look different in these two groups. It’s as if they both emerge from a common ancestor, and as soon as you’ve got that ancestor, things move very quickly and divergently. Why does the DNA replication look different? Well, it’s joined to the membrane. The membranes are different. The DNA replication is different because it’s joined to a different kind of membrane. So, there’s interesting… This is detail you may say, but it’s also fundamental because it’s about the two big divergent groups of life on earth that seemed to have diverged really early on.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:03)
It all started from one organism, and then that organism just start replicating the heck out of itself with some mutation of the DNA. So, there’s a competition through the process of evolution. They’re not trying to beat each other up. They’re just trying to live life.
Nick Lane
(00:14:24)
They are just replicators.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:25)
Yeah. Well, let’s not minimize their… They’re just trying to chill. They’re trying to relax up in the… But there’s no sense of trying to survive. They’re replicating-
Nick Lane
(00:14:36)
There’s no sense in which they’re trying to do anything. They’re just kind of an outgrowth of the earth, you might say.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:42)
Of course, the aliens would describe us humans in that same way.
Nick Lane
(00:14:46)
They might be right.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:47)
It’s primitive life. It’s just ants that are hairless or mostly hairless.
Nick Lane
(00:14:53)
Overgrown ants.

Panspermia

Lex Fridman
(00:14:54)
Overgrown ants. Okay. What do you think about the idea of panspermia, the theory that life did not originate on earth and was planted here from outer space or pseudo-panspermia, which is like the basic ingredients, the magic that you mentioned was planted here from elsewhere in space?
Nick Lane
(00:15:14)
I don’t find them helpful. That’s not to say they’re wrong. So pseudo-transpermia, the idea that the chemicals, the amino acids, the nucleotides are being delivered from space. Well, we know that happens. It’s unequivocal. They’re delivered on meteorites, comets and so on. So, what do they do next? That’s, to me, the question. Well, what they do is they stock a soup, presumably they land in a pond or in an ocean or wherever they land. And then a best possible case scenario is you end up with a soup of nucleotides and amino acids. And then you have to say, “So now what happens?”

(00:15:46)
And the answer is, “Oh, well, they have to go ‘bloop’ and become alive.” So, how did they do that? You may as well say that a miracle happened. I don’t believe in soup. I think what we have in a vent is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it’s a small bit. So, you’ve got a kind of continuous self-organization and growth from the very beginning. You never have that in a soup.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:17)
Isn’t the entire universe and living organisms in the universe, isn’t it just soup all the way down? Isn’t it all soup?
Nick Lane
(00:16:26)
No, no, soup almost by definition doesn’t have a structure.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:29)
But soup is a collection of ingredients that are randomly [inaudible 00:16:34].
Nick Lane
(00:16:34)
But they’re not random. We have chemistry going on here. We have membranes forming which are effectively oil-water interactions.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:44)
There’s a process going on. Okay, so it feels like there’s a direction to a… directed process.
Nick Lane
(00:16:47)
There are directions to processes, yeah. And if you’re starting with CO2, and you’ve got two reactive fluids being brought together and they react, what are they going to make? Well, they make carboxylic acids, which include the fatty acids that make up the cell membranes. And they form directly into bilayer membranes. They form like soap bubbles. It’s spontaneous organization caused by the nature of the molecules. And those things are capable of growing and are capable, in effect, of being selected. Even before there are genes, we have this. So, we have a lot of order, and that order is coming from thermodynamics. And the thermodynamics is always about increasing the entropy of the universe, but if you have oil and water and they’re separating, you are increasing the entropy of the universe, even though you’ve got some order, which is the soap and the water are not miscible.

(00:17:37)
To come back to your first question about panspermia properly, that just pushes the question somewhere else, even if it’s true. Maybe life did start on Earth by panspermia, but so what are the principles that govern the emergence of life on any planet? It’s an assumption that life started here, and it’s an assumption that it started in a hydrothermal vent or it started in a terrestrial geothermal system. The question is: can we work out a testable sequence of events that would lead from one to the other one? And then test it, and see if there’s any truth in it or not. With panspermia, you can’t do any of that.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:14)
But the fundamental question of panspermia is: do we have the machine here on earth to build life?
Nick Lane
(00:18:21)
Not yet.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:23)
Is the vents enough? Is oxygen and hydrogen, and whatever the heck else we want, and some source of energy and heat, is that enough to build life?
Nick Lane
(00:18:36)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:37)
Well, of course you would say that as a human, but there could be aliens right now chuckling at that idea. Maybe you need some special sauce, special elsewhere sauce. So, your sense is we have everything here.
Nick Lane
(00:18:54)
This is precisely the question. When I’m talking in schools, I like to start out with the idea of: we can make a time machine. We go back 4 billion years, and we go to these environments that people talk about. We go to a deep sea hydrothermal vent, we go to a kind of Yellowstone Park type place/environment, and we find some slime that looks like we can test it. It’s made of organic molecules. It’s got a structure which is not obviously cells, but is this a stepping stone on the way to life or not? How do we know? Unless we’ve got an intellectual framework that says, “This is a stepping stone, and that’s not a step…” We’d never know. We wouldn’t know which environment to go to, what to look for, how to say this. So, all we can ever hope for, because we’re never going to build that time machine, is to have an intellectual framework that can explain step by step, experiment by experiment, how we go from a sterile inorganic planet to living cells as we know them.

(00:19:52)
And in that framework, every time you have a choice, it could be this way or it could be that way, or there’s lots of possible forks down that road, did it have to be that way? Could it have been the other way, and would that have given you life with very different properties? And so if you come up with… It’s a long hypothesis, because as I say, we’re going from really simple prebiotic chemistry all the way through to genes and molecular machines. That’s a long, long pathway. And nobody in the field would agree on the order in which these things happened, which is not a bad thing because it means that you have to go out and do some experiments and try and demonstrate that it’s possible or not possible.

What is life?

Lex Fridman
(00:20:29)
It’s so freaking amazing that it happened though. It feels like there’s a direction to the thing. Can you try to answer from a framework of: what is life? So, you said there’s some order and yet there’s complexity, so it’s not perfectly ordered, it’s not boring. There’s still some fun in it. And it also feels like the processes have a direction through the selection mechanism. They seem to be building something, always better, always improving. Maybe it’s-
Nick Lane
(00:21:15)
That’s a perception.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:16)
That’s our romanticization of things are always better. Things are getting better. We’d like to believe that.
Nick Lane
(00:21:23)
You think about the world from the point of view of bacteria, and bacteria are the first things to emerge from whatever environment they came from, and they dominated the planet very, very quickly, and they haven’t really changed. 4 billion years later they look exactly the same.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:36)
So, about 4 billion years ago, bacteria started to really run the show, and then nothing happened for a while?
Nick Lane
(00:21:44)
Nothing happened for 2 billion years. Then after 2 billion years, we see another single event, origin, if you like, of our own type of cell, the eukaryotic cells, so cells with a nucleus and lots of stuff going on inside. Another singular origin. It only happened once in the history of life on earth. Maybe it happened multiple times, and there’s no evidence everything just disappeared. But we have to at least take it seriously that there’s something that stops bacteria from becoming more complex, because they didn’t. That’s a fact, that they emerged 4 billion years ago, and something happened 2 billion years ago, but the bacteria themselves didn’t change. They remain bacterial. So, there is no necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It’s very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that the planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:36)
But we’ll get to that, because that’s a brilliant invention, and there’s a few brilliant inventions along the way. But what is life? If you were to show up on earth, but take that time machine, and you said, asking yourself the question, “Is this a stepping stone towards life?” As you step along when you see the early bacteria, how would you know it’s life? And then this is a really important question when you go to other planets and look for life: what is the framework of telling a difference between a rock and a bacteria?
Nick Lane
(00:23:12)
The question’s kind of both impossible to answer and trivial at the same time. And I don’t like to answer it because I don’t think there is an answer. I think we’re trying to describe-
Lex Fridman
(00:23:22)
Those are the most fun questions. What do you mean, there’s no answer?
Nick Lane
(00:23:24)
There is no answer. There’s lot… There are at least 40 or 50 different definitions of life out there, and most of them are, well-
Lex Fridman
(00:23:31)
Not convincing.
Nick Lane
(00:23:32)
… obviously bad in one way or another. I can never remember the exact words that people use, but there’s NASA working definition of life, which more or less says, “A self-sustaining system capable of evolution,” or something along those lines. And I immediately have a problem with the words self-sustaining, because it’s sustained by the environment. And I know what they’re getting at. I know what they’re trying to say, but I pick a hole in that. And there’s always wags who say, “But by that definition, a rabbit is not alive. Only a pair of rabbits would be alive because a single rabbit is incapable of copying itself.” There are all kinds of pedantic, silly, but also important objections to any hypothesis.

(00:24:19)
The real question is: what is… We can argue all day, or people do argue all day about: is a virus alive or not? And it depends on the content. In fact, most biologists could not agree about that. So, then what about a jumping gene, a retro element or something like that? It’s even simpler than a virus, but it’s capable of converting its environment into a copy of itself. And that’s about as close… This is not a definition, but this is a kind of description of life, is that it’s able to parasitize the environment, and that goes for plants as well as animals and bacteria and viruses, to make a relatively exact copy of themselves, informationally exact copy of themselves.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:04)
By the way, it doesn’t really have to be a copy of itself, it just has to be… you have to create something that’s interesting. The way evolution is, so it is extremely powerful process of evolution, which is basically make a copy of yourself and sometimes mess up a little bit.
Nick Lane
(00:25:24)
Yes. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:25)
Okay. That seems to work really well. I wonder if it’s possible to-
Nick Lane
(00:25:28)
Mess up big time?
Lex Fridman
(00:25:29)
Mess up big time as a standard, as the default.
Nick Lane
(00:25:32)
It’s called the hopeful monster, and-
Lex Fridman
(00:25:34)
It doesn’t work?
Nick Lane
(00:25:36)
In principle, it can. Actually, it turns out, I would say that this is due a reemergence. There’s some amazing work from Michael Levin. I don’t know if you came across him, but if you haven’t interviewed him, you should interview him.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:49)
Yeah, in Boston. I’m talking to him in a few days.
Nick Lane
(00:25:53)
Oh, fantastic.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:56)
So I mentioned off… There’s two people that, if I may mention. Andrej Karpathy is a friend who’s really admired in the AI community, said, “You absolutely must talk to Michael and to Nick.” So, of course I’m a huge fan of yours, so I’m really fortunate that we can actually make this happen. Anyway, you were saying.
Nick Lane
(00:26:16)
Well, Michael Levin is doing amazing work basically about the way in which electrical fields control development. And he’s done some work with Planarian worms or flatworms, where he’ll tell you all about this, so I won’t say any more than the minimum, but basically you can cut their head off and they’ll redevelop a new head. But the head that they develop depends. If you knock out just one iron pump in a membrane, so you change the electrical circuitry just a little bit, you can come up with a completely different head. It can be a head which is similar to those that diverged 150 million years ago or it can be a head which no one’s ever seen before, a different kind of head. Now that is really, you might say, a hopeful monster.

(00:26:59)
This is a kind of leap into a different direction. The only question for natural selection is: does it work? Is the change itself feasible as a single change? And the answer is yes. It’s just a small change to a single gene. And the second thing is it gives rise to a completely different morphology. Does it work? And if it works, that can easily be a shift. But for it to be a speciation, for it to continue, for it to give rise to a different morphology over time, then it has to be perpetuated. So that shift, that change in that one gene has to work well enough that it is selected and it goes on.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:41)
And copied enough times to where you can really test it.
Nick Lane
(00:27:44)
So, the likelihood it would be lost, but there’ll be some occasions where it survives. And yes, the idea that we can have sudden fairly abrupt changes in evolution, I think it’s time for rebirth.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:54)
What about this idea that… kind of trying to mathematize a definition of life and saying how many steps… the shortest amount of steps it takes to build the thing, almost like an engineering view of it? Do you find that at all compelling?
Nick Lane
(00:28:10)
I like that view, because I think that, in a sense, that’s not very far away from what a hypothesis needs to do to be a testable hypothesis for the origin of life. You need to spell out, here’s each step and here’s the experiment to do for each step. The idea that we can do it in the lab, some people say, “Oh, we’ll have created life within five years.” But ask them what they mean by life. We have a planet 4 billion years ago with these vent systems across the entire surface of the planet, and we have millions of years if we want it. I have a feeling that we’re not talking about millions of years. I have a feeling we’re talking about maybe millions of nanoseconds or picoseconds. We’re talking about chemistry, which is happening quickly.

(00:28:53)
But we still need to constrain those steps, but we’ve got a planet doing similar chemistry. You asked about a trajectory. The trajectory is the planetary trajectory. The planet has properties. It’s basically… It’s got a lot of iron at the center of it, it’s got a lot of electrons at the center of it. It’s more oxidized on the outside, partly because of the sun, and partly because the heat of volcanoes puts out oxidized gases. So, the planet is a battery. It’s a giant battery. And we have a flow of electrons going from inside to outside in these hydrothermal vents, and that’s the same topology that a cell has. A cell is basically just a micro-version of the planet.

(00:29:34)
And there is a trajectory in all of that, and there’s an inevitability that certain types of chemical reaction are going to be favored over others. And there’s an inevitability in what happens in water, the chemistry that happens in water. Some will be immiscible with water and will form membranes and will form insoluble structures. Water’s a… Nobody really understands water very well. And it’s another big question for experiments on the origin of life: what do you put it in? What kind of structure do we want to induce in this water? Because the last thing it’s likely to be is just kind of bulk water.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:11)
How fundamental is water to life, would you say?
Nick Lane
(00:30:14)
I would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water’s extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. And carbon is everywhere. So, those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found 1,000 life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:42)
Now the reverse question. If you found a puddle of water elsewhere and some carbon… No, just a puddle of water. Is a puddle of water a pretty good indication that life either exists here or has once existed here?
Nick Lane
(00:31:00)
No.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:02)
So, it doesn’t work the other way.
Nick Lane
(00:31:05)
I think you need a living planet. You need a planet which is capable of turning over its surface. It needs to be a planet with water. It needs to be capable of bringing those electrons from inside to the outside. It needs to turn over its surface. It needs to make that water work and turn it into hydrogen. So, I think you need a living planet, but once you’ve got the living planet, I think the rest of it is kind of thermodynamics all the way.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:29)
So, if you were to run Earth over a million times up to this point, maybe beyond, to the end, let’s run it to the end, how much variety is there? You kind of spoke to this trajectory, that the environment dictates chemically, I don’t know in which other way, spiritually, dictates the direction of this giant machine, that seems chaotic, but it does seem to have order in-
Lex Fridman
(00:32:00)
… seems chaotic, but it does seem to have order in the steps it’s taking. How often will bacteria emerge? How often will something like humans emerge? How much variety do you think there would be?
Nick Lane
(00:32:15)
I think at the level of bacteria, not much variety. I think we would get how many times you say you want to run it a million times? I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:28)
Oh, wow. Nice.
Nick Lane
(00:32:29)
Because I think there’s some level of inevitability that a wet, rocky planet will give rise through the same processes to something very… I think this is not something I would have thought a few years ago, but working with a PhD student of mine, Stuart Harrison, he’s been thinking about the genetic code and we’ve just been publishing on that. There are patterns that he has discerned in the code that if you think about them in terms of we start with CO2 and hydrogen and these are the first steps of biochemistry, you come up with a code which is very similar to the code that we see.

(00:33:03)
So, it wouldn’t surprise me any longer if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code that was not very different to the genetic code that we have here without it just being transferred across, there’s some inevitability about the whole of the beginnings of life, in my view.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:18)
That’s really promising because if the basic chemistry is tightly linked to the genetic code, that means we can interact with other life if it exists out there.
Nick Lane
(00:33:30)
Well, that’s potentially the guess, yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:32)
That’s really exciting if that’s the case. Okay. But then bacteria-
Nick Lane
(00:33:36)
Then we’ve got bacteria.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:37)
Yeah.
Nick Lane
(00:33:39)
How easy is photosynthesis? Much harder, I would say.

Photosynthesis

Lex Fridman
(00:33:44)
Let’s actually go there. Let’s go through the inventions.
Nick Lane
(00:33:47)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:49)
What is photosynthesis and why is it hard?
Nick Lane
(00:33:52)
Well, there are different forms. I mean, basically you’re taking hydrogen and you’re sticking it onto CO2 and it’s powered by the sun. The question is where are you taking the hydrogen from? And in photosynthesis that we know in plants, it’s coming from water. So you’re using the power of the sun to split water, take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO2, and the oxygen is a waste product and you just throw it out, throw it away. So it’s the single greatest planetary pollution event in the whole history of the earth.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:21)
The pollutant being oxygen?
Nick Lane
(00:34:22)
Yes. Yeah. It also made possible animals, you can’t have large active animals without an oxygenated atmosphere, at least not in the sense that we know on earth.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:33)
So that’s a really big invention in the history of earth.
Nick Lane
(00:34:35)
Huge invention, yes. And it happened once, there’s a few things that happened once on earth and you’re always stuck with this problem once it happened, did it become so good so quickly that it precluded the same thing happening ever again? Or are there other reasons? And we really have to look at each one in turn and think, “Why did it only happen once?” In this case, it’s really difficult to split water, it requires a lot of power and that power you’re effectively separating charge across a membrane. And the way in which you do it, if it doesn’t all rush back and kind of cause an explosion right at the site requires really careful wiring.

(00:35:11)
And that wiring, it can’t be easy to get it right because the plants that we see around us, they have chloroplasts. Those chloroplasts were cyanobacteria ones. Those cyanobacteria are the only group of bacteria that can do that type of photosynthesis, so there’s plenty of opportunity but-
Lex Fridman
(00:35:29)
There’s not many bacteria. So who invented photosynthesis?
Nick Lane
(00:35:31)
The cyanobacteria or their ancestors.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:34)
And there’s not many-
Nick Lane
(00:35:36)
No other bacteria can do what’s called oxygenic photosynthesis. Lots of other bacteria can split. I mean, you can take your hydrogen from somewhere else, you can take it from hydrogen sulphide bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent, grab your two hydrogens, the sulphur is the waste now.

(00:35:52)
You can do it from iron, you can take electrons… So the early oceans, were probably full of iron, you can take an electron from ferrous iron, so Iron 2+ and make it Iron 3+, which now precipitates as rust, and you take a proton from the acidic early ocean, stick it there now you’ve got a hydrogen atom, stick it onto CO2, you’ve just done the trick. The trouble is you bury yourself in rusty iron and with sulphur can bury yourself in sulphur. One of the reasons oxygenic photosynthesis is so much better is that the waste product is oxygen, which just bubbles away.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:26)
That seems extremely unlikely and it’s extremely essential for the evolution of complex organisms because of all the oxygen.
Nick Lane
(00:36:36)
Yeah, and that didn’t accumulate quickly either.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:39)
So it’s converting, what is it? It’s converting energy from the sun and the resource of water into the resource needed for animals?
Nick Lane
(00:36:50)
Both resources needed for animals. We need to eat and we need to burn the food, and we’re eating plants which are getting their energy from the sun and we’re burning it with their waste product, which is the oxygen. So there’s a lot of circularity in that, but without an oxygenated planet, you couldn’t really have predation. You can have animals, but you can’t really have animals that go around and eat each other. You can’t have ecosystems as we know them.

Prokaryotic vs eukaryotic cells

Lex Fridman
(00:37:19)
Well, let’s actually step back. What about eukaryotic versus prokaryotic cells, prokaryotes, what are each of those and how big of an invention is that?
Nick Lane
(00:37:31)
I personally think that’s the single biggest invention in the whole history of life.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:34)
Exciting. So what are they? Can you explain?
Nick Lane
(00:37:39)
Yeah. So I mentioned bacteria and archaea, these are both prokaryotes. They’re basically small cells that don’t have a nucleus. If you look at them under a microscope, you don’t see much going on. If you look at them under a super resolution microscope, then they’re fantastically complex. In terms of their molecular machinery, they’re amazing. In terms of their morphological appearance under a microscope, they’re really small and really simple.

(00:38:03)
The earliest life that we can physically see on the planet are stromatolites, which are made by things like cyanobacteria and they’re large superstructures, effectively biofilms plated on top of each other, and you end up with quite large structures that you can see in the fossil record. But they never came up with animals, they never came up with plants, they came up with multicellular things filamentous cyanobacteria for example, they’re just long strings of cells. But the origin of the eukaryotic cell seems to have been what’s called an endosymbiosis so one cell gets inside another cell, and I think that that transformed the energetic possibilities of life. So what we end up with is a kind of supercharged cell, which can have a much larger nucleus with many more genes all supported.

(00:38:54)
You could think about it as multi-bacterial power without the overhead. So you’ve got a cell and it’s got bacteria living in it, and those bacteria are providing it with the energy currency it needs. But each bacterium has a genome of its own, which costs a fair amount of energy to express, to turn over and convert into proteins and so on. What the mitochondria did, which are these power packs in our own cells, they were bacteria once and they threw away virtually all their genes, they’ve only got a few left.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:25)
So mitochondria is, like you said, is the bacteria that got inside a cell and then throw away all this stuff it doesn’t need to survive inside the cell and then kept what?
Nick Lane
(00:39:35)
So what we end up with, so it kept always a handful of genes in our own case, 37 genes, but there’s a few protists which are single-celled things that have got as many as 70 or 80 genes so it is not always the same, but it’s always a small number. And you can think of it as a pared-down power pack where the control unit has really been kind pared down to almost nothing. So it’s putting out the same power, but the investment in the overheads is really pared down, that means that you can support a much larger nuclear genome. So we’ve gone up in the number of genes, but also the amount of power you have to convert those genes into proteins. We’ve gone up about fourfold in the number of genes, but in terms of the size of genomes and your ability to make the building blocks, make the proteins, we’ve gone up a hundred thousand fold or more, so it’s huge step change in the possibilities of evolution.

(00:40:29)
And it is interesting then that the only two occasions that complex life has arisen on earth, plants and animals, fungi you could say are complex as well, but they don’t form such complex morphology as plants and animals, start with a single cell they start with an oocyte and a sperm fused together to make a zygote. So we start development with a single cell and all the cells in the organism have identical DNA, and in the brain, you switch off these genes and you switch on those genes and the liver, you switch off those and you switch on a different set. And the standard evolutionary explanation for that is that you’re restricting conflict, you don’t have a load of genetically different cells that are all fighting each other and so it works.

(00:41:14)
The trouble with bacteria is they form these biofilms and they’re all genetically different, and effectively they’re incapable of that level of cooperation they would get in a fight.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:26)
Okay, so why is this such a difficult invention of getting this bacteria inside and becoming an engine, which the mitochondria is? Why do you assign it such great importance? Is it great importance in terms of the difficulty of how it was to achieve or great importance in terms of the impact it had on life?
Nick Lane
(00:41:46)
Both. It had a huge impact on life because if that had not happened, you can be certain that life on earth would be bacterial only.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:56)
And that took a really long time to-
Nick Lane
(00:41:58)
It took 2 billion years and it hasn’t happened since to the best of our knowledge, so it looks as if it’s genuinely difficult. And if you think about it then from just an informational perspective, you think bacteria, they structure their information differently. So a bacterial cell has a small genome, you might have 4,000 genes in it. But a single E. coli cell has access to about 30,000 genes, potentially. It’s got a metagenome where other E. coli out there have got different gene sets and they can switch them around between themselves. And so you can generate a huge amount of variation, and they’ve got more. An E. coli. metagenome is larger than the human genome, we own 20,000 genes or something, and they’ve had 4 billion years of evolution to work out what can I do and what can’t I do with this metagenome. And the answer is, you’re stuck, you’re still bacteria.

(00:42:54)
So they have explored genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they’ve had twice as long at least, and they’ve got much larger populations, and they never got around this problem. So why can’t they? It seems as if you can’t solve it with information alone. So what’s the problem? The problem is structure.

(00:43:16)
If the very first cells needed an electrical charge on their membrane to grow, and in bacteria it’s the outer membrane that surrounds the cell, which is electrically charged, you try and scale that up and you’ve got a fundamental design problem, you’ve got an engineering problem, and there are examples of it. And what we see in all these cases is what’s known as extreme polyploidy, which is to say they have tens of thousands of copies of their complete genome, which is energetically hugely expensive, and you end up with a large bacteria with no further development. What you is to incorporate these electrically charged power pack units inside with their control units intact, and for them not to conflict so much with the host cell that it all goes wrong, perhaps it goes wrong more often than not, and then you change the topology of the cell.

(00:44:10)
Now, you don’t necessarily have any more DNA than a giant bacterium with extreme polyploidy, but what you’ve got is an asymmetry. You now have a giant nuclear genome surrounded by lots of subsidiary energetic genomes they’re the control units that are doing all the control of energy generation.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:32)
Could this have been done gradually or does it have to be done, the power pack has to be all intact and ready to go and working?
Nick Lane
(00:44:40)
I mean, it’s a kind of step changing in the possibilities of evolution, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s going to still require multiple, multiple, generations. So it could take millions of years, it could take shorter time there’s another thing I would like to put the number of steps and try and work out what’s required at each step and we are trying to do that with sex, for example. You can’t have a very large genome unless you have sex at that point so what are the changes to go from bacterial recombination to eukaryotic recombination? What do you need to do? Why do we go from passing around bits of DNA as if it’s loose change to fusing cells together, lining up the chromosomes, recombining across the chromosomes, and then going through two rounds of cell division to produce your gametes? All eukaryotes do it that way.

(00:45:24)
So again, why switch? What are the drivers here? So there’s a lot of time, there’s a lot of evolution, but as soon as you’ve got cells living inside another cell, what you’ve got is a new design, you’ve got new potential that you didn’t have before.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:39)
So the cell living inside another cell, that design allows for better storage of information, better use of energy, more delegation, like a hierarchical control of the whole thing. And then somehow that leads to ability to have multi-cell organisms?
Nick Lane
(00:46:00)
I’m not sure that you have hierarchical control necessarily, but you’ve got a system where you can have a much larger information storage depot in the nucleus, you can have a much larger genome. And that allows multi-cellularity, yes, because it allows you… It’s a funny thing, to have an animal where I have 70% of my genes switched on in my brain and a different 50% switched on in my liver or something, you’ve got to have all those genes in the egg cell at the very beginning, and you’ve got to have a program of development which says, “Okay, you guys switch off those genes and switch on those genes, and you guys you do that.” But all the genes are there at the beginning. That means you’ve got to have a lot of genes in one cell and you’ve got to be able to maintain them and the problem with bacteria is they don’t get close to having enough genes in one cell. So if you were to try make a multicellular organism from bacteria, you’d bring different types of bacteria together and hope they’ll cooperate and the reality is they don’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:58)
That’s really, really tough to do, combinatorially.
Nick Lane
(00:47:00)
We know they don’t because it doesn’t exist.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:02)
We have the data as far as we know. I’m sure there’s a few special ones and they die off quickly. I’d love to know some of the most fun things bacteria have done since?
Nick Lane
(00:47:12)
Oh, I mean, they can do some pretty funky things. This is broad brushstroke that I’m talking about, but it’s, yeah.

Sex

Lex Fridman
(00:47:19)
Generally speaking. So another fun invention, us humans seem to utilize it well, but you say it’s also very important early on is sex. So what is sex? Just asking for a friend. And when was it invented and how hard was it to invent, just as you were saying, and why was it invented? How hard was it? And when?
Nick Lane
(00:47:45)
I have a PhD student who’s been working on this-
Lex Fridman
(00:47:45)
On sex?
Nick Lane
(00:47:47)
… and we’ve just published a couple of papers. On sex, yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:50)
Nice. Where do you publish these? Is it biology, genetics, journals?
Nick Lane
(00:47:55)
This is actually PNAS, which is Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:00)
So like, broad, big, big picture stuff?
Nick Lane
(00:48:02)
Everyone’s interested in sex.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:03)
Yeah.
Nick Lane
(00:48:04)
The job of biologist is to make sex dull.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:08)
Yeah, that’s a beautiful way to put it. Okay, so when was it invented?
Nick Lane
(00:48:13)
It was invented with eukaryotes about 2 billion years ago. All eukaryotes share the same basic mechanism that you produce gametes, the gametes fuse together. So a gamete is the egg cell and the sperm, they’re not necessarily even different in size or shape. So the simplest eukaryotes produce what are called motile gametes, they’re all like sperm and they all swim around, they find each other, they fuse together, they don’t have much going on there beyond that. And then these are haploids, which is to say we all have two copies of our genome, and the gametes have only a single copy of the genome. So when they fuse together, you now become diploid again, which is to say you now have two copies of your genome, and what you do is you line them all up and then you double everything.

(00:49:01)
So now we have four copies of the complete genome, and then we crisscross between all of these things. So we take a bit from here and stick it on there and a bit from here, and we stick it on here, that’s recombination. Then we go through two rounds of cell division. So we divide in half, so now the two daughter cells have two copies and we divide in half again, now we have some gametes, each of which has got a single copy of the genome. And that’s the basic ground plan for what’s called meiosis and syn-gametes, that’s basically sex.

(00:49:31)
And it happens at the level of single-celled organisms and it happens pretty much the same way in plants and pretty much the same way in animals and so on. And it’s not found in any bacteria, they switch things around using the same machinery and they take up a bit of DNA from the environment. They take out this bit and stick in that bit, and it’s the same molecular machinery they’re using to do it.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:50)
So what about the, you said find each other this kind of imperative to find each other. What is that?
Nick Lane
(00:49:58)
Well, you’ve got a fuse cells together. So the bottom line on all of this is bacteria, I mean, it’s kind of simple when you’ve figured it out and figuring it out this is not me, this is my PhD student, Marco Colnaghi. And in effect, if you’re doing lateral, you’re E. coli cell, you’ve got 4,000 genes, you want to scale up to a eukaryotic size. I want to have 20,000 genes and I need to maintain my genome so it doesn’t get shot to pieces by mutations, and I’m going to do it by lateral gene transfer.

(00:50:32)
So I know I’ve got a mutation in a gene, I don’t know which gene it is because I’m not sentient, but I know I can’t grow, I know all my regulation systems are saying, “Something wrong here, something wrong, pick up some DNA, pick up a bit of DNA from the environment.” If you’ve got a small genome, the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA from the environment is much higher than if you’ve got a genome of 20,000 genes. To do that, you’ve effectively got to be picking up DNA all the time, all day long and nothing else, and you’re still going to get the wrong DNA. You’ve got to pick up large chunks, and in the end, you’ve got to line them up, you’re forced into sex, to coin a phrase.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:10)
So there is a kind of incentive-
Nick Lane
(00:51:18)
If you want to have a large genome, you’ve got to prevent it mutating to nothing and that will happen with bacteria, so there’s another reason why bacteria can’t have a large genome. But as soon as you give eukaryotic cells the power pack that allows them to increase the size of their genome, then you face the pressure that you’ve got to maintain its quality. You’ve got to stop it just mutating away.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:38)
What about sexual selection? So the finding like, “I don’t like this one. I don’t like this one. This one seems all right.” At which point does it become less random?
Nick Lane
(00:51:52)
It’s hard to know.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:54)
Because eukaryotes just kind of float around just kind of have… It’s kind of like Tinder these days.
Nick Lane
(00:51:59)
Yeah I mean, it’s their sexual section election in single-celled eukaryotes. There probably is, it’s just that I don’t know very much about it. By the time we-
Lex Fridman
(00:51:59)
You don’t hang out with eukaryotes?
Nick Lane
(00:52:06)
Well, I do all the time, but you know?
Lex Fridman
(00:52:07)
You can’t communicate with them, yeah.
Nick Lane
(00:52:08)
Yeah. Peacock or something.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:11)
Yes.
Nick Lane
(00:52:13)
The kind of standard, this is not quite what I work on, but the standard answer is that it’s female mate choice, she’s looking for good genes and if you can have a tail that’s like this and still survive, still be alive, not actually have been taken down by the nearest predator, then you must’ve got pretty good genes despite this handicap you are able to survive.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:36)
So those are human interpretable things like with a peacock. But I wonder, I’m sure echoes of the same thing are there with more primitive organisms, basically your PR, like how you advertise yourself that you’re worthy of? Yeah,
Nick Lane
(00:52:54)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:54)
So one big advertisement is the fact that you survived it all.
Nick Lane
(00:52:57)
Yeah, let me give you one beautiful example of an algal bloom, and this can be a sign of bacteria, this can be in bacteria. So if suddenly you pump nitrate or phosphate or something into the ocean and everything goes green, you end up with all this algae growing there, a viral infection or something like that can kill the entire bloom overnight. And it’s not that the virus takes out everything overnight, it’s that most of the cells in that bloom kill themselves before the virus can get onto them. And it’s through a form of cell death called programmed cell death. And we do the same thing, this is how we have the gaps between our fingers and so on, it’s how we craft synapses in the brain. It is fundamental again, to multicellular life.

(00:53:47)
They have the same machinery in these algal blooms. How do they know who dies? The answer is they will often put out a toxin and that toxin is a kind of challenge to you. Either you can cope with the toxin or you can’t. If you can cope with it, you form a spore and you will go on to become the next generation. You form kind of a resistant spore, you sink down a little bit, you get out of the way, you can’t be attacked by a virus if you’re a spore or at least not so easily. Whereas if you can’t deal with that toxin, you pull the plug and you trigger your death apparatus and you kill yourself.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:27)
It’s truly life and death selection.
Nick Lane
(00:54:29)
Yeah, so it’s a challenge, and this is a bit like sexual selection. They’re all pretty much genetically identical, but they’ve had different life histories. So have you had a tough day? Did you happen to get infected by this virus? Or did you run out of iron? Or did you get a bit too much sun? Whatever it may be. If this extra stress of the toxin just pushes you over the edge, then you have this binary choice, either you’re the next generation or you kill yourself now using this same machinery.

DNA

Lex Fridman
(00:54:57)
It’s also actually exactly the way I approach dating, but that’s probably why I am single. Okay. What about, if we can step back, DNA just mechanism of storing information, RNA, DNA, how big of an invention was that? That seems to be fundamental to something deep within what life is, is the ability, as you said, to kind of store and propagate information. But then you also kind of inferred that with you and your students’ work, that there’s a deep connection between the chemistry and the ability to have this kind of genetic information. So how big of an invention is it to have a nice representation, a nice hard drive for info to pass on?
Nick Lane
(00:55:46)
Huge, I suspect. I mean, but when I was talking about the code, you see the code in RNA as well, and RNA almost certainly came first. And there’s been an idea going back decades called the RNA world because RNA in theory can copy itself and can catalyze reactions. So it kind of cuts out this chicken and egg loop.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:07)
The DNA, it’s possible is not that special?
Nick Lane
(00:56:09)
So RNA is the thing that does the work really, and the code lies in RNA. The code lies in the interactions between RNA and amino acids and it still is there today in the ribosome, for example, which is just kind of a giant ribozyme, which is to say it’s an enzyme that’s made of RNA.

(00:56:28)
So getting to RNA, I suspect is probably not that hard. But getting from RNA, there’s multiple different types of RNA now, how do you distinguish? This is something we’re actively thinking about, how do you distinguish between a random population of RNA? Some of them go on to become messenger RNA, this is the transcript of the code of the gene that you want to make. Some of them become transfer RNA, which is kind of the unit that holds the amino acid that’s going to be polymerized. Some of them become ribosomal RNA, which is the machine, which is joining them all up together.

(00:57:07)
How do they discriminate themselves? There’s some kind of phase transition going on there, I don’t know, it’s a difficult question and we’re now in the region of biology where information is coming in. But the thing about RNA is very, very good at what it does but the largest genomes supported by RNA are RNA viruses like HIV, for example. They’re pretty small. And so there’s a limit to how complex life could be unless you come up with DNA, which chemically is a really small change but how easy it is to make that change? I don’t really know. As soon as you’ve got DNA, then you’ve got an amazingly stable molecule for information storage, and you can do absolutely anything. But how likely that transition from RNA to DNA was? I don’t know either.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:54)
How much possibility is there for variety in ways to store information? It seems to be very, there’s specific characteristics about the programming language of DNA.
Nick Lane
(00:58:06)
Yeah, there’s a lot of work going on on what’s called the Xeno DNA or RNA. Can we replace the bases themselves, the letters if you like, in RNA or DNA? Can we replace the backbone? Can we replace, for example, phosphate with arsenate? Can we replace the sugar ribose or deoxyribose with a different sugar? And the answer is yes, you can within limits there’s not an infinite space there. Arsenate doesn’t really work if the bonds are not as strong as phosphate, it’s probably quite hard to replace phosphate. It’s possible to do it.

(00:58:43)
The question to me is, why is it this way? Is it because there was some form of selection that this is better than the other forms and there were lots of competing forms of information storage early on, and this one was the one that worked out? Or was it kind of channeled that way, that these are the molecules that you’re dealing with and they work? And I’m increasingly thinking it’s that way that we’re channeled towards ribose phosphate and the bases that are used, but there are 200 different letters kicking around out there that could have been used.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:17)
It’s such an interesting question. If you look at, in the programming world in computer science, there’s a programming language called JavaScript, which was written super quickly, it’s a giant mess, but it took over the world.
Nick Lane
(00:59:30)
Sounds very biological.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:31)
It was kind of a running joke that surely this can’t be… This is a terrible programming language, it’s a giant mess. It’s full of bugs, it’s so easy to write really crappy code but it took over all of front end development in the web browser. If you have any kind of dynamic interactive website, it’s usually running JavaScript and it’s now taking over much of the backend, which is the serious heavy duty computational stuff. And it’s become super fast with the different compilation engines that are running it, so it really took over the world. It’s very possible that this initially crappy derided language actually takes everything over.

(01:00:14)
And then the question is, did human civilization always strive towards JavaScript or was JavaScript just the first programming language that ran on the browser and still sticky? The first is the sticky one, and so it wins over anything else because it was first. And I don’t think that’s answerable, right? But it’s good to ask that. I suppose in the lab you can’t run it with programming languages, but in biology you can probably do some kind of small scale evolutionary test to try to infer which is which?
Nick Lane
(01:00:54)
Yeah, I mean, in a way, we’ve got the hardware and the software here, and the hardware is maybe the DNA and the RNA itself, and then the software perhaps is more about the code. Did the code have to be this way? Could it have been a different way? And people talk about the optimization of the code, and there’s some suggestion for that. I think it’s weak, actually. But you could imagine you can come out with a million different codes and this would be one of the best ones.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:22)
Well, we don’t know this. We don’t know this.
Nick Lane
(01:01:25)
People have tried to model it based on the effect that mutations would have. So no, you’re right, we don’t know because that’s a single assumption that a mutation is what’s being selected on there and there’s other possibilities too.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:39)
I mean, there does seem to be a resilience and a redundancy to the whole thing.
Nick Lane
(01:01:43)
Yep.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:43)
It’s hard to mess up in the way you mess it up often is likely to produce interesting results.
Nick Lane
(01:01:52)
Are you talking about JavaScript or the genetic code now?
Lex Fridman
(01:01:54)
Both.
Nick Lane
(01:01:55)
Yeah? Well, I mean, it’s almost, biology is underpinned by this kind of mess as well. And you look at the human genome and it is full of stuff that is really either broken or dysfunctional or was a virus once or whatever it may be, and somehow it works and maybe we need a lot of this mess. We know that some functional genes are taken from this mess.

Violence

Lex Fridman
(01:02:15)
So what about, you mentioned predatory behavior.
Nick Lane
(01:02:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:20)
We talked about sex. What about violence? Predator and prey dynamics? When was that invented? And poetic and biological ways of putting it, how do you describe predator prey relationship? Is it a beautiful dance or is it a violent atrocity?
Nick Lane
(01:02:43)
Well, I guess it’s both, isn’t it? I mean, when does it start? It starts in bacteria, you see these amazing predators Bdellovibrio is one that Lynn Margulis used to talk about a lot. It’s got a kind of a drill piece that drills through the wall and the membrane of the bacterium, and then it effectively eats the bacterium from just inside the periplasmic space and makes copies of itself that way, so that’s straight predation. There are predators among bacteria.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:08)
So predation in that, sorry to interrupt, means you murder somebody and use their body as a resource in some way?
Nick Lane
(01:03:17)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:18)
But it’s not parasitic in that you need them to be still alive?
Nick Lane
(01:03:23)
No, no. I mean, predation is you kill them really.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:26)
Murder.
Nick Lane
(01:03:27)
Parasitis, you kind of live on them.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:30)
Okay. But it seems the predator is the really popular tool?
Nick Lane
(01:03:35)
So what we see, if we go back 560, 570 million years before the Cambrian Explosion, there is what’s known as the Ediacaran Fauna, or sometimes they call Vendobionts, which is a lovely name and it’s not obvious that they’re animals at all. They’re stalked things, they often have fronds that look a lot like leaves with kind of fractual branching patterns on them and-
Nick Lane
(01:04:00)
… branching patterns on them. And the thing is they’re found, sometimes, geologists can figure out the environment that they were in and say, “This is more than 200 meters deep because there’s no sign of any waves. There’s no storm damage down here,” this kind of thing. They were more than 200 meters deep, so they’re definitely not photosynthetic. These are animals, and they’re filter feeders. We know sponges and corals and things are filter-feeding animals; they’re stuck to the spot. And little bits of carbon that come their way, they filter it out, and that’s what they’re eating. So no predation involved in this, beyond stuff just dies anyway, and it feels like a very gentle, rather beautiful, rather limited world, you might say. There’s not a lot going on there.

(01:04:49)
And something changes. Oxygen definitely changes during this period. Other things may have changed as well. But the next thing you really see in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion. And what do we see there? We’re now seeing animals that we would recognize, they’ve got eyes, they’ve got claws, they’ve got shells. They’re plainly killing things or running away and hiding. So we’ve gone from a rather gentle, but limited world, to a rather vicious, unpleasant world that we recognize, which leads to kind of arms races, evolutionary arms races, which again is something that when we think about a nuclear arms race, we think, “Jesus, we don’t want to go there. It’s not done anybody any good.” In some ways, maybe it does do good. I don’t want to make an argument for nuclear arms, but predation as a mechanism forces organisms to adapt, to change, to be better, to escape, or to kill. If you need to eat, then you’ve got to eat. A cheetah is not going to run at that speed unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping. So it leads to much greater feats of evolution would ever have been possible without it, and in the end, to a much more beautiful world. So it’s not all bad, by any means.

(01:06:17)
But the thing is, you can’t have this if you don’t have an oxygenated planet because it’s all, in the end, it’s about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat? And if you don’t have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you’ve got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out. And that means you can have, instead of having one or two trophic levels, you can have five or six trophic levels, and that means things can eat things that eat other things and so on, and you’ve gone to a level of ecological complexity, which is completely impossible in the absence of oxygen.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:51)
This reminds me of the Hunter S. Thompson quote that, “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.” The history of life on Earth unfortunately is that of violence, just the trillions and trillions of multi-cell organisms that were murdered in the struggle for survival.
Nick Lane
(01:07:17)
It’s a sorry statement, but yes, it’s basically true.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:20)
And that somehow is a catalyst from an evolutionary perspective for creativity, for creating more and more complex organisms that are better and better at surviving-
Nick Lane
(01:07:30)
Survival of the fittest, if you just go back to that old phrase, means death of the weakest. Now, what’s fit? What’s weak? These are terms that don’t have much intrinsic meaning, but the thing is, evolution only happens because of death.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:45)
One way to die is that the constraints, the scarcity of the resources in the environment, but that seems to be not nearly as good of a mechanism for death than other creatures roaming about in the environment. When I say environment, I mean the static environment, but then there’s the dynamic environment of bigger things trying to eat you and use you for your energy.
Nick Lane
(01:08:10)
It forces you to come up with a solution to your specific problem that is inventive and is new and hasn’t been done before. So it forces literally change, literally evolution on populations. They have to become different.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:27)
And it’s interesting that humans have channeled that into more… I guess what humans are doing is they’re inventing more productive and safe ways of doing that. This whole idea of morality and all those kinds of things, I think they ultimately lead to competition versus violence. Because I think violence can have a cold, brutal, inefficient aspect to it, but if you channel that into more controlled competition in the space of ideas, in the space of approaches to life, maybe you can be even more productive than evolution is. Because evolution is very wasteful. The amount of murder required to really test the good idea, genetically speaking, is just a lot. Many, many, many generations.
Nick Lane
(01:09:21)
Morally, we cannot base society on the way that evolution works.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:26)
But that’s an invention, right, to morality?
Nick Lane
(01:09:27)
But actually, in some respects, we do, which is to say, “This is how science works. We have competing hypotheses that have to get better, otherwise they die.” It’s the way that society works. In Ancient Greece, we had Athens and Sparta and city states, and then we had the Renaissance and nation states, and universities compete with each other tremendous amount, companies competing with each other all the time. It drives innovation. And if we want to do it without all the death that we see in nature, then we have to have some kind of societal-level control that says, “Well, there’s some limits, guys, and these are what the limits are going to be,” and society as a whole has to say, “Right, we want to limit the amount of death here, so you can’t do this and you can’t do that.” Who makes up these rules, and how do we know? It’s a tough thing, but it’s basically trying to find a moral basis for avoiding the death of evolution and natural selection and keeping the innovation and the richness of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:27)
I forgot who said it, but that murder is illegal… Probably Kurt Vonnegut. Murder is illegal except when it’s done to the sound of trumpets and at a large scale. So we still have wars, but we are struggling with this idea that murder is a bad thing. It’s so interesting how we’re channeling the best of the evolutionary imperative and trying to get rid of the stuff that’s not productive, trying to almost accelerate evolution. The same kind of thing that makes evolution creative, we’re trying to use that.
Nick Lane
(01:11:07)
I think we naturally do it. I don’t think we can help ourselves to it.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:11)
It’s so hard to know.
Nick Lane
(01:11:12)
Capitalism as a form is basically about competition and differential rewards. But society, and we have a, I keep using this word, moral obligation, but we cannot operate as a society if we go that way. It’s interesting that we’ve had problems achieving balance. For example, in the financial crash in 2009, do you let banks go to the wall or not, this kind of question. In evolution, certainly, you let them go to the wall. And in that sense, you don’t need the regulation because they just die. Whereas if we as a society think about what’s required for society as a whole, then you don’t necessarily let them go to the wall, in which case you then have to impose some kind of regulation that the bankers themselves will, in an evolutionary manner, exploit.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:08)
Yeah, we’ve been struggling with this kind of idea of capitalism, the cold brutality of capitalism that seems to create so much beautiful things in this world, and then the ideals of communism that seem to create so much brutal destruction in history. We struggle with ideas of, “Well, maybe we didn’t do it right. How can we do things better,” and then the ideas are the things we’re playing with, as opposed to people. If a PhD student has a bad idea, we don’t shoot the PhD student. We just criticize their idea and hope they improve.
Nick Lane
(01:12:42)
You have a very humane [inaudible 01:12:43].

Human evolution

Lex Fridman
(01:12:44)
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know how you guys do it. The way I run things, it’s always life and death. Okay. So it is interesting about humans that there is an inner sense of morality, which begs the question of, how did homo sapiens evolve? If we think about the early invention of sex and early invention of predation, what was the thing invented to make humans? What would you say?
Nick Lane
(01:13:17)
I suppose a couple of things I’d say. Number one is you don’t have to wind the clock back very far, five, six million years or so, and let it run forwards again, and the chances of humans as we know them is not necessarily that high. Imagine as an alien, you find planet Earth, and it’s got everything apart from humans on it. It’s an amazing, wonderful, marvelous planet, but nothing that we would recognize as extremely intelligent life, space-faring civilization. So when we think about aliens, we’re kind of after something like ourselves or after a space-faring civilization. We’re not after zebras and giraffes and lions and things, amazing though they are. But the additional kind of evolutionary steps to go from large, complex mammals, monkeys, let’s say, to humans doesn’t strike me as that long a distance. It’s all about the brain. And where’s the brain and morality coming from? It seems to me to be all about groups, human groups and interactions between groups.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:22)
The collective intelligence of it.
Nick Lane
(01:14:24)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:24)
Yeah.
Nick Lane
(01:14:25)
The interactions, really. And there’s a guy at UCL called Mark Thomas, who’s done a lot of really beautiful work, I think, on this kind of question. I talk to him every now and then, so my views are influenced by him. But a lot seems to depend on population density. The more interactions you have going on between different groups, the more transfer of information, if you like, between groups, of people moving from one group to another group, almost like lateral gene transfer in bacteria. The more expertise you’re able to develop and maintain, the more culturally complex your society can become. And groups that have become detached, like on Easter Island, for example, very often degenerate in terms of the complexity of their civilization.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:13)
Is that true for complex organisms in general, population density-
Nick Lane
(01:15:19)
Really matters.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:19)
… is often productive?
Nick Lane
(01:15:19)
Really matters. But in human terms, I don’t know what the actual factors were that were driving a large brain, but you can talk about fire, you can talk about tool use, you can talk about language, and none of them seem to correlate especially well with the actual known trajectory of human evolution in terms of cave art and these kind of things. That seems to work much better just with population density in number of interactions between different groups, all of which is really about human interactions, human-human interactions, and the complexity of those.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:58)
But population density is the thing that increases the number of interactions, but then there must have been inventions forced by that number of interactions that actually led to humans. So Richard Wrangham talks about that it’s basically the beta males had to beat up the alpha male, so that’s what collaboration looks like is when you’re living together, they don’t like, our early ancestors, don’t like the dictatorial aspect of a single individual at the top of a tribe, so they learn to collaborate how to basically create a democracy of sorts, a democracy that prevents, minimizes, or lessens the amount of violence, which essentially gives strength to the tribe and make the war between tribes versus the dictator [inaudible 01:16:55]-
Nick Lane
(01:16:55)
I think one of the most wonderful things about humans is we’re all of those things. We are deeply social as a species, and we’re also deeply selfish. And it seems to me the conflict between capitalism and communism is really just two aspects of human nature, both of which are-
Lex Fridman
(01:17:11)
We’ve got both.
Nick Lane
(01:17:11)
We have both. And we have a constant kind of vying between the two sides. We really do care about other people, beyond our families, beyond our immediate people. We care about society and the society that we live in. And you could say that’s a drawing towards socialism or communism. On the other side, we really do care about ourselves. We really do care about our families, about working for something that we gain from, and that’s the capitalist side of it. They’re both really deeply ingrained in human nature.

(01:17:38)
In terms of violence and interactions between groups, yes, all this dynamic of if you’re interacting between groups, you can be certain that they’re going to be burning each other and all kinds of physical, violent interactions as well, which will drive the kind of cleverness of, how do you resist this? Let’s build a tower. What are we going to do to prevent being overrun by those marauding gangs from over there? And you look outside humans, and you look at chimps and bonobos and so on, and they’re very, very different structures to society. Chimps tend to have an aggressive alpha male-type structure, and bonobos, there’s basically a female society, where the males are predominantly excluded and only brought in at the behest of the female. We have a lot in common with both of those groups.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:29)
And there’s, again, tension there. Probably chimps, more violence, the bonobos, probably more sex. That’s another tension. How serious do we want to be? How much fun we want to be?

Neanderthals


(01:18:44)
Asking for a friend again, what do you think happened to Neanderthals? What did we cheeky humans do to the Neanderthals, homo sapiens? Do you think we murdered them? How do we murder them? How do we out-compete them, or do we out-mate them?
Nick Lane
(01:19:01)
I don’t know. I think there’s unequivocal evidence that we mated with them.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:06)
Yeah. We always try to mate with everything.
Nick Lane
(01:19:07)
Yes, pretty much. There’s some interesting… The first sequences that came along were in mitochondrial DNA, and that was back to about 2002 or thereabouts. And what was found was that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was very different to human mitochondrial DNA-
Lex Fridman
(01:19:23)
Oh, that’s so interesting.
Nick Lane
(01:19:24)
And you could do a clock on it, and it said the divergent state was about 600,000 years ago or something like that, so not so long ago. And then the first full genomes were sequenced maybe 10 years after that, and they showed plenty of signs of mating between. So the mitochondrial DNA effectively says no mating, and the nuclear genes say, yeah, lots of mating, but we don’t know-
Lex Fridman
(01:19:48)
How is that possible? Sorry, can you explain the difference between mitochondrial DNA-
Nick Lane
(01:19:51)
Sorry, yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:53)
… and nucleus?
Nick Lane
(01:19:53)
I’ve talked before about the mitochondria, which are the power packs in cells. These are the pared-down control units is their DNA. It’s passed on by the mother only. And in the egg cell, we might have half a million copies of mitochondrial DNA. There’s only 37 genes left. And it’s basically the control unit of energy production. That’s what it’s doing.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:18)
It’s a basic, old-school machine that does energy production.
Nick Lane
(01:20:21)
It’s got genes that were considered to be effectively trivial because they did a very narrowly defined job, but they’re not trivial in the sense that that narrowly defined job is about everything that is being alive. So they’re much easier to sequence. You’ve got many more copies of these things, and you can sequence them very quickly.

(01:20:42)
But the problem is, because they go down only the maternal line, from mother to daughter, your mitochondrial DNA and mine, it’s going nowhere. It doesn’t matter. Any kids we have, they get their mother’s mitochondrial DNA, except in very, very rare and strange circumstances. So it tells a different story, and it’s not a story which is easy to reconcile always. And what it seems to suggest, to my mind at least, is that there was one-way traffic of genes probably going from humans into Neanderthals rather than the other way around.

(01:21:18)
Why did the Neanderthals disappear? I don’t know. I suspect they were probably less violent, less clever, less populous, less willing to fight. I don’t know. I think we probably drove them to extinction at the margins of Europe.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:37)
And it’s interesting how much, if we ran Earth over and over again, how many of these branches of intelligent beings that have figured out how to leverage collective intelligence, which ones of them emerge, which ones of them succeed? Is it the more violent ones? Is it the more isolated one? What dynamics result to more productivity? And I suppose we’ll never know. The more complex the organism, the harder it is to run the experiment in the lab.
Nick Lane
(01:22:10)
Yes. And in some respects, maybe it’s best if we don’t know.

Sensory inputs

Lex Fridman
(01:22:15)
Yeah. The truth might be very painful. What about, if we actually step back, a couple of interesting things that we humans do? One is object manipulation and movement, and of course, movement was something that was done… That was another big invention, being able to move around the environment. And the other one is this sensory mechanism, how we sense the environment. One of the coolest high-definition ones is vision. How big are those inventions in the history of life on Earth?
Nick Lane
(01:22:50)
Vision, movement, again, extremely important going back to the origin of animals, the Cambrian explosion, where suddenly you’re seeing eyes in the fossil record. And it’s not necessarily… Again, lots of people historically have said, “What use is half an eye,” and you can go in a series of steps from a light-sensitive spot on a flat piece of tissue to an eyeball with a lens and so on if you assume no more than… I don’t remember. This was a specific model that I have in mind, but it was 1% change or half a percent change for each generation how long would it take to evolve an eye as we know it, and the answer is half a million years. It doesn’t have to take long. That’s not how evolution works. That’s not an answer to the question. It just shows you can reconstruct the steps and you can work out roughly how it can work.

(01:23:44)
So it’s not that big a deal to evolve an eye. But once you have one, then there’s nowhere to hide. Again, we’re back to predator-prey relationships. We’re back to all the benefits that being able to see brings you. And if you think philosophically what bats are doing with ecolocation and so on, I have no idea, but I suspect that they form an image of the world in pretty much the same way that we do. It’s just a matter of mental reconstruction.

(01:24:10)
So I suppose the other thing about sight, there are single-celled organisms that have got a lens and a retina and a cornea and so on. Basically they’ve got a camera-type eye in a single cell. They don’t have a brain; what they understand about their world is impossible to say, but they’re capable of coming up with the same structures to do so. So I suppose then, is that once you’ve got things like eyes, then you have a big driving pressure on the central nervous system to figure out what it all means.

(01:24:44)
And then we come around to your other point about manipulation, sensory input, and so on about now you have a huge requirement to understand what your environment is and what it means and how it reacts and how you should run away and where you should stay put.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:59)
Actually on that point, let me… I don’t know if you know the work of Donald Hoffman, who uses the argument, the mechanism of evolution, to say that there’s not necessarily a strong evolutionary value to seeing the world as it is, so objective reality, that our perception actually is very different from what’s objectively real. We’re living inside an illusion and we’re basically… The entire set of species on Earth, I think, I guess, are competing in a space that’s an illusion that’s distinct from, that’s far away from physical reality as defined by physics.
Nick Lane
(01:25:46)
I’m not sure it’s an illusion so much as a bubble. We have a sensory input, which is a fraction of what we could have a sensory input on, and we interpret it in terms of what’s useful for us to know to stay alive. So, yes, it’s an illusion in that sense, but-
Lex Fridman
(01:26:00)
So it’s a subset-
Nick Lane
(01:26:02)
… a tree is physically there, and if you walk into that tree, it’s not purely a delusion. There’s some physical reality to it.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:10)
So it’s a sensory slice into reality as it is, but because it’s just a slice, you’re missing a big picture. But he says that that slice doesn’t necessarily need to be a slice. It could be a complete fabrication that’s just consistent amongst the species, which is an interesting, or at least it’s a humbling realization that our perception is limited and our cognitive abilities are limited. And at least to me, his argument from evolution, I don’t know how strong that is as an argument, but I do think that life can exist in the mind.
Nick Lane
(01:26:55)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:56)
In the same way that you can do a virtual reality video game and you can have a vibrant life inside that place, and that place is not real in some sense, but you could still have a vibe… All the same forces of evolution, all the same competition, the dynamics between humans you can have, but I don’t know if there’s evidence for that being the thing that happened on Earth. It seems that Earth-
Nick Lane
(01:27:25)
I think in either environment, I wouldn’t deny that you could have exactly the world that you talk about, and it would be very difficult to… the idea in Matrix movies and so on, that the whole world is completely a construction, and we’re fundamentally deluded. It’s difficult to say that’s impossible or couldn’t happen, and certainly we construct in our minds what the outside world is. But we do it on input, and that input, I would hesitate to say it’s not real because it’s precisely how we do understand the world. We have eyes, but if you keep someone, and apparently this kind of thing happens, someone kept in a dark room for five years or something like that, they never see properly again because the neural wiring that underpins how we interpret vision never developed.

(01:28:19)
When you watch a child develop, it walks into a table. It bangs its head on the table and it hurts. Now you’ve got two inputs. You’ve got one pain from this sharp edge, and number two, probably you’ve touched it and realized it’s there, it’s a sharp edge, and you’ve got the visual input. And you put the three things together and think, “I don’t want to walk into a table again.” So you’re learning, and it’s a limited reality, but it’s a true reality. And if you don’t learn that properly, then you will get eaten, you will get hit by a bus, you will not survive. And same if you’re in some kind of, let’s say, computer construction of reality. I’m not in my ground here, but if you construct the laws that this is what reality is inside this, then you play by those laws.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:05)
Yeah. Well, as long as the laws are consistent. So just like you said in the lab, the interesting thing about the simulation question, yes, it’s hard to know if we’re living inside a simulation, but also, yes, it’s possible to do these kinds of experiments in the lab now more and more. To me, the interesting question is, how realistic does a virtual reality game need to be for us to not be able to tell the difference? A more interesting question to me is, how realistic or interesting does the virtual reality world need to be in order for us to want to stay there forever or much longer than physical reality, prefer that place, and also prefer it not as we prefer hard drugs, but prefer it in a deep, meaningful way in the way we enjoy life itself?
Nick Lane
(01:29:59)
I suppose the issue with the matrix, I imagine that it’s possible to delude the mind sufficiently that you genuinely in that way do think that you are interacting with the real world, when in fact, the whole thing’s a simulation. How good does a simulation need to be able to do that? Well, it needs to convince you that all your sensory input is correct and accurate and joins up and make sense. Now, that sensory input is not something that we’re born with. We’re born with a sense of touch. We’re born with eyes and so on, but we don’t know how to use them. We don’t know what to make of them. We go around, we bump into trees. We cry a lot. We’re in pain a lot. We’re basically booting up the system so that it can make head or tail of the sensory input that it’s getting. And that sensory input’s not just a one-way flux of things. It’s also you have to walk into things. You have to hear things. You have to put it together.

(01:30:53)
Now, if you’ve got just babies in the matrix who are slotted into this, I don’t think they have that kind of sensory input. I don’t think they would have any way to make sense of New York as a world that they’re part of. The brain is just not developed in that way.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:10)
Well, I can’t make sense of New York in this physical reality either. But yeah, but you said pain and the walking into things. Well, you can create a pain signal, and as long as it’s consistent that certain things result in pain, you can start to construct a reality. Maybe you disagree with this, but I think we are born almost with a desire to be convinced by our reality, like a desire to make sense of our reality.
Nick Lane
(01:31:39)
Oh, I’m sure we are, yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:40)
So there’s an imperative… So whatever that reality is given to us, like the table hurts, fire is hot, I think we want to be deluded in the sense that we want to make a simple… Einstein’s simple theory of the thing around us, we want that simplicity. So maybe the hunger for the simplicity is the thing that could be used to construct a pretty dumb simulation that tricks us. So maybe tricking humans doesn’t require building a universe.
Nick Lane
(01:32:11)
No, this is not what I work on, so I don’t know how close to it we are-
Lex Fridman
(01:32:16)
I don’t think anyone works on this.
Nick Lane
(01:32:16)
But I agree with you-
Lex Fridman
(01:32:16)
Mark Zuckerberg.
Nick Lane
(01:32:18)
Yeah, I’m not sure that it’s a morally justifiable thing to do, but is it possible in principle? I think it’d be very difficult, but I don’t see why in principle it wouldn’t be possible. And I agree with you that we try to understand the world, we try to integrate the sensory inputs that we have, and we try to come up with a hypothesis that explains what’s going on. I think, though, that we have huge input from the social context that we’re in. We don’t do it by ourselves. We don’t kind of blunder around in a universe by ourself and understand the whole thing. We’re told by the people around us what things are and what they do, and the languages coming in here and so on. So it would have to be an extremely impressive simulation to simulate all of that.

Consciousness

Lex Fridman
(01:33:08)
Yeah. Simulate all of that, including the social construct, the spread of ideas and the exchange of ideas. I don’t know. But those questions are really important to understand as we become more and more digital creatures. It seems like the next step of evolution is us becoming partial… All the same mechanisms we’ve talked about are becoming more and more plugged in into the machine. We’re becoming cyborgs. And there’s an interesting interplay between wires and biology, zeroes and ones and the biological systems, and I don’t think we’ll have the luxury to see humans as disjoint from the technology we’ve created for much longer. We are, in organisms, that’s [inaudible 01:33:56].
Nick Lane
(01:33:56)
Yeah. I agree with you, but we come really with this to consciousness, and is there a distinction there? Because what you are saying, the natural end point says we are indistinguishable, that if you are capable of building an AI, which is sufficiently close and similar, that we merge with it, then to all intents and purposes, that AI is conscious as we know it. And I don’t have a strong view, but I have a view, and I wrote about it in the epilogue to my last book.

(01:34:37)
Because 10 years ago I wrote a chapter in a book called Life Ascending about consciousness. And the subtitle of Life Ascending was The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, and I couldn’t possibly write a book with a subtitle like that that did not include consciousness, and specifically consciousness as one of the great inventions. And it was in part because I was just curious to know more and I read more for that chapter. I never worked on it, but I’ve always… How can anyone not be interested in the question?

(01:35:09)
And I was left with the feeling that, A, nobody knows, and B, there are two main schools of thought out there with a big kind of skew in distribution. One of them says, oh, it’s a property of matter. It’s an unknown law of physics. Panpsychism, everything is conscious. The sun is conscious. It’s just a matter… A rock is conscious. It’s just a matter of how much. And I find that very unpersuasive. I can’t say that it’s wrong. It’s just that I think we somehow can tell the difference between something that’s living and something that’s not. And then the other end is it’s an emergent property of a very complex, central nervous system. I never quite understand what people mean by words like emergence. There are genuine examples, but I think we very often tend to-
Nick Lane
(01:36:00)
…and examples, but I think we very often tend to use it to plaster over ignorance. As a biochemist. The question for me then was, okay, so it’s a concoction of a central nervous system. A depolarizing neuron gives rise to a feeling, to a feeling of pain or to a feeling of love or anger, or whatever it may be. So what is then a feeling in biophysical terms in the central nervous system, which bit of the wiring gives rise to, and I’ve never seen anyone answer that question in a way that makes sense to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:41)
And that’s an important question to answer.
Nick Lane
(01:36:43)
I think if we want to understand consciousness, that’s the only question to answer because certainly an AI is capable of out-thinking and it is only a matter of time. Maybe it’s already happened in terms of just information processing and computational skill. I don’t think we have any problem in designing a mind, which is at least the equal of the human mind. But in terms of what we value the most as humans, which is to say our feelings, our emotions, our sense of what the world is in a very personal way that I think means as much or more to people than their information processing. And that’s where I don’t think that AI necessarily will become conscious because I think it’s the property of life.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:33)
Well, let’s talk about it more. You’re an incredible writer, one of my favorite writers. So let me read from your latest book, Transformer is what you write about consciousness. “‘I think therefore I am,’ said Descartes is one of the most celebrated lines ever written. But what am I, exactly? And artificial intelligence can think too by definition and therefore is yet few of us could agree whether AI is capable in principle of anything resembling human emotions, of love or hate, fear and joy, of spiritual yearning, for oneness or oblivion, or corporeal pangs of thirst and hunger. The problem is we don’t know what emotions are,” as you were saying, “What is the feeling in physical terms? How does a discharging neuron give rise to a feeling of anything at all? This is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, the seeming duality of mind and matter, the physical makeup of our innermost self. We can understand in principle how an extremely sophisticated parallel processing system could be capable of wondrous feats of intelligence. But we can’t answer in principle whether such a supreme intelligence would experience joy or melancholy. What is the quantum of solace?”

(01:38:54)
Speaking to the question of emergence, there’s just technical… There’s an excellent paper on this recently about this phase transition emergence of performance in neural networks on problem of NLP, natural language processing. So language models, there seems to be this question of size. At some point, there is a phase transition as you grow the size of the neural network. So the question is, this is somewhat of a technical question that you can philosophize over.

(01:39:32)
The technical question is, is there a size of a neural network that starts to be able to form the kind of representations that can capture a language and therefore be able to not just language, but linguistically capture knowledge that’s sufficient to solve a lot of problems in language? Like be able to have a conversation and there seems to be not a gradual increase, but a phase transition and they’re trying to construct the science of where that is, what is a good size of a neural network and why does such a face transition happen. Anyway, that points to emergence that there could be stages where a thing goes from being you’re very intelligent toaster to a toaster that’s feeling sad today and turns away and looks out the window sighing having an existential crisis.
Nick Lane
(01:40:30)
I’m thinking of Marvin The Paranoid Android.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:33)
Well, no, Marvin is simplistic because Marvin is just cranky.
Nick Lane
(01:40:38)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:39)
He’s-
Nick Lane
(01:40:40)
So easily programmed.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:41)
Yeah. Easily programmed. Non-stop existential crisis. You’re almost basically… What is it? Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky like just constantly complaining about life. No, capturing the full rollercoaster of human emotion, the excitement, the bliss, the connection, the empathy, and all that kind of stuff. And then the selfishness, the anger, the depression, all that kind of stuff. Capturing all of that and be able to experience it deeply. It’s the most important thing you could possibly experience today. The highest highs. The lowest lows. This is it. My life will be over. I cannot possibly go on that feeling and then after a nap, you’re feeling amazing. That might be something that emerges.
Nick Lane
(01:41:33)
So why would a nap make an AI being feel better?
Lex Fridman
(01:41:42)
First of all, we don’t know that for a human either, right?
Nick Lane
(01:41:45)
But we do know that that’s actually true for many people much of the time. Maybe you’re utterly depressed and you have a nap and you do in fact feel better.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:53)
Oh, you are actually asking the technical question there is… So there’s a biological answer to that. And so the question is whether AI needs to have the same kind of attachments to its body, bodily function, and preservation of the brain’s successful function. Self-preservation essentially in some deep biological sense.
Nick Lane
(01:42:17)
I mean to my mind it comes back round to the problem we were talking about before about simulations and sensory input and learning what all of this stuff means and life and death. That biology, unlike society, has a death penalty over everything. And natural selection works on that death penalty that if you make this decision wrongly, you die. And the next generation is represented by beings that made a slightly different decision on balance. And that is something that’s intrinsically difficult to simulate in all its richness I would say. So what is-
Lex Fridman
(01:43:09)
Death in all its richness. Our relationship with death or the whole of it? So when you say richness, of course, there’s a lot in that which is hard to simulate. What’s part of the richness that’s hard to simulate?
Nick Lane
(01:43:27)
I suppose the complexity of the environment and your position or the position of an organism in that environment, in the full richness of that environment over its entire life, over multiple generations with changes in gene sequence over those generations. So slight changes in the makeup of those individuals over generations. But if you take it back to the level of single cells, which I do in the book, and ask how does a single cell in effect know it exists as a unit, as an entity. I mean, ‘no’, obviously it doesn’t know anything, but it acts as a unit and it acts with astonishing precision as a unit. And I had suggested that that’s linked to the electrical fields on the membranes themselves and that they give some indication of how am I doing in relation to my environment as a real-time feedback on the world.

(01:44:28)
And this is something physical which can be selected over generations that if you get this wrong, it’s linked with this set of circumstances that I’ve just… As an individual, I have a moment of blind panic and run. As a bacterium or something you have some electrical discharge that says blind panic and it runs whatever it may be. And you associate over generations, multiple generations that this electrical phase that I’m in now is associated with a response like that. And it’s easy to see how feelings come in through the back door almost with that kind of giving real-time feedback on your position in the world in relation to how am I doing?

(01:45:22)
And then you complexify the system and yes, I have no problem with phase transition. And can all of this be done purely by the language, by the issues with how the system understands itself? Maybe it can, I honestly don’t know, but the philosophers for a long time have talked about the possibility that you can have zombie intelligence and that there are no feelings there, but everything else is the same. I mean I have to throw this back to you really. How do you deal with the zombie intelligence?
Lex Fridman
(01:46:03)
So first of all, I can see that from a biologist perspective, you think of all the complexities that led up to the human being, the entirety of the history of four billion years that in some deep sense integrated the human being into this environment and that dance of the organism and the environment. You could see how emotions arise from that and then our emotions are deeply connected and creating a human experience and from that you mix in consciousness and the full mess of it. But from a perspective of an intelligent organism that’s already here like a baby that learns it doesn’t need to learn how to be a collection of cells or how to do all the things he needs to do. The basic function of a baby, as it learns, is to interact with its environment, to learn from its environment, to learn how to fit into the social society.
Nick Lane
(01:47:03)
And the basic response of the baby is to cry a lot of the time.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:07)
Cry. Well maybe convinced the humans to protect it or to discipline it, to teach it, whatever. I mean we’ve developed a bunch of different tricks, how to get our parents to take care of us, to educate us, to teach us about the world. Also, we’ve constructed the world in such a way that it’s safe enough for us to survive in and yet dangerous enough to learn the valuable lessons they are still hard with corners, so we can still run into them. It hurts like hell. So AI needs to solve that problem, not the problem of constructing this super complex organism that leads up to run the whole… To make an apple pie, to build the whole universe. You need to build a whole universe. I think the zombie question is, it’s something I would leave to the philosophers because, and I will also leave to them the definition of love and what happens between two human beings when there’s a magic that just grabs them like nothing else matters in the world.

(01:48:20)
And somehow you’ve been searching for this feeling, this moment, this person your whole life, that feeling. The philosophers can have a lot of fun with that one. And also say that that’s just… You could have a biological explanation, you could have all kinds of… It’s all fake. It’s actually Ayn Rand will say it’s all selfish. There’s a lot of different interpretations. I’ll leave it to the philosophers. The point is the feeling sure as hell feels very real. And if my toaster makes me feel like it’s the only toaster in the world, and when I leave and I miss the toaster and when I come back, I’m excited to see the toaster and my life is meaningful and joyful and the friends I have around me get a better version of me because that toaster exists. That sure as hell feels-
Nick Lane
(01:49:12)
I mean-
Lex Fridman
(01:49:12)
…conscious toaster.
Nick Lane
(01:49:13)
…is that psychologically different to having a dog?
Lex Fridman
(01:49:16)
No.
Nick Lane
(01:49:16)
Because I mean most people would dispute whether we can say a dog… I would say a dog is undoubtedly conscious, but some people would say-
Lex Fridman
(01:49:24)
But there’s degrees of consciousness and so on. But people are definitely much more uncomfortable saying a toaster can be conscious than a dog. And there’s still a deep connection. And you could say our relationship with the dog has more to do with anthropomorphism. Like we kind of project the human being onto it.
Nick Lane
(01:49:42)
Maybe.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:43)
We can do the same damn thing with a toaster.
Nick Lane
(01:49:45)
Yes, but you can look into the dog’s eyes and you can see that it’s sad, that it’s delighted to see you again. I don’t have a dog by the way. It’s not that I’m a dog person. I’m a cat person-
Lex Fridman
(01:49:55)
And dogs are actually incredibly good at using their eyes to do just that.
Nick Lane
(01:49:59)
They are. Now, I don’t imagine that a dog is remotely as close to being intelligent as an AI intelligence, but it’s certainly capable of communicating emotionally with us.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:12)
But here’s what I would venture to say. We tend to think because AI plays chess well and is able to fold proteins now, well that it’s intelligent. I would argue that in order to communicate with humans, in order to have emotional intelligence, it actually requires another order of magnitude of intelligence. It’s not easy to be flawed. Solving a mathematical puzzle is not the same as the full complexity of human-to-human interaction. That’s actually we humans just take for granted the things we’re really good at. Nonstop people tell me how shitty people are at driving. No, humans are incredible at driving. Bipedal walking, walking, object, manipulation. We’re incredible at this. And so people tend to-
Nick Lane
(01:51:04)
Discount the things we all just take for granted.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:07)
And one of those things that they discount is our ability, the dance of conversation and interaction with each other, the ability to morph ideas together, the ability to get angry at each other and then to miss each other, to create a tension that makes life fun and difficult and challenging in a way that’s meaningful, that is a skill that’s learned and AI would need to solve that problem.
Nick Lane
(01:51:33)
I mean, in some sense what you’re saying is AI cannot become meaningfully emotional, let’s say, until it experiences some kind of internal conflict that it’s unable to reconcile these various aspects of reality or its reality with a decision to make. And then it feels sad necessarily because it doesn’t know what to do. I certainly can’t dispute that. That may very well be how it works. I think the only way to find out is to do it and-
Lex Fridman
(01:52:05)
And to build it and leave it to the philosophers if it actually feels sad or not. The point is the robot will be sitting there alone having an internal conflict, an existential crisis, and that’s required for it to have a deep meaningful connection with another human being. Now does it actually feel that? I don’t know.
Nick Lane
(01:52:24)
But I’d like to throw something else at you which troubles me on reading it. Noah Harari’s book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. And he’s written about this kind of thing on various occasions and he sees biochemistry as an algorithm and then AI will necessarily be able to hack that algorithm and do it better than humans. So there will be AI better at writing music that we appreciate, the Mozart ever could, or writing better than Shakespeare ever did, and so on, because biochemistry is algorithmic and all you need to do is figure out which bits of the algorithm to play to make us feel good or bad or appreciate things. And as a biochemist, I find that argument close to irrefutable and not very enjoyable. I don’t like the sound of it, that’s just my reaction as a human being. You might like the sound of it because that says that AI is capable of the same kind of emotional feelings about the world as we are because the whole thing is an algorithm and you can program an algorithm and there you are. He then has a peculiar final chapter where he talks about consciousness in rather separate terms and he’s talking about meditating and so on and getting in touch with his inner conscious. I don’t meditate, I don’t know anything about that. But he wrote in very different terms about it as if somehow it’s a way out of the algorithm. Now it seems to me that consciousness in that sense is capable of scuppering the algorithm. I think in terms of the biochemical feedback loops and so on, it is undoubtedly algorithmic. But in terms of what we decide to do, it can be much more… Based on an emotion we can just think, ah, I don’t care. I can’t resolve this complex situation.

(01:54:20)
I’m going to do that. And that can be based on in effect a different currency, which is the currency of feelings and something where we don’t have very much personal control over. And then it comes back around to you and what are you trying to get at with AI? Do we need to have some system which is capable of overriding a rational decision which cannot be made because there’s too much conflicting information by effectively an emotional judgmental decision that just says do this and see what happens? That’s what consciousness is really doing in my view.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:53)
Yeah. And the question is whether it’s a different process or just a higher-level process. The idea that biochemistry is an algorithm is to me an oversimplistic view. There’s a lot of things that the moment you say it it’s irrefutable, but it simplifies-
Nick Lane
(01:55:17)
I’m sure it’s an extremely complex-
Lex Fridman
(01:55:18)
…and in the process loses something fundamental. So for example, calling a universe an information processing system. Sure, yes, you can make that. It’s a computer that’s performing computations, but you’re missing the process of the entropy somehow leading to pockets of complexity that creates these beautiful artifacts that are incredibly complex and they’re like machines. And then those machines are through the process of evolution are constructing even further complexity. Like in calling universe information a processing machine, you’re missing those little local pockets and how difficult it’s to create them.

(01:56:05)
So the question to me is if biochemistry is an algorithm, how difficult is it to create a software system that runs the human body, which I think is incorrect? I think that is going to take so long, I mean, that’s going to be centuries from now to be able to reconstruct a human. Now what I would venture to say, to get some of the magic of a human being, what we’re saying with the emotions and the interactions and like a dog makes a smile and joyful and all those kinds of things, that will come much sooner. But that doesn’t require us to reverse engineer the algorithm of biochemistry.
Nick Lane
(01:56:44)
Yes, but the toaster is making you happy.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:47)
Yes.
Nick Lane
(01:56:48)
It’s not about whether you make the toaster happy.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:51)
No, it has to be. It has to be. It has to be. The toaster has to be able to leave me happy.
Nick Lane
(01:56:58)
The toaster has to be happy. Yes. But it’s the toaster is the AI in this case is a very intelligent-
Lex Fridman
(01:57:00)
Yeah. The toaster has to be able to be unhappy and leave me. That’s essential.
Nick Lane
(01:57:06)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:07)
That’s essential for my being able to miss the toaster. If the toaster is just my servant that’s not, or a provider of services like tells me the weather makes toast, that’s not going to deep connection. It has to have internal conflict. You write about life and death. It has to be able to be conscious of its mortality and the finiteness of its existence and that life is for its temporary and therefore it needs to be more selective with the kind of people it hangs out with.
Nick Lane
(01:57:38)
One of the most moving moments in the movies from when I was a boy was the unplugging of HAL in 2001 where that was the death of a sentient being and HAL knew it. So I think we all kind of know that a sufficiently intelligent being is going to have some form of consciousness, but whether it would be like biological consciousness, I just don’t know. And if you’re thinking about how do we bring together, I mean obviously we’re going to interact more closely with AI, but are we really? Is a dog really like a toaster or is there really some kind of difference there? You were talking biochemistry is algorithmic, but it’s not single algorithm and it’s very complex. Of course, it is. So it may be that there are again conflicts in the circuits of biochemistry, but I have a feeling that the level of complexity of the total biochemical system at the level of a single cell is less complex than the level of neural networking in the human brain or in an AI.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:52)
Well, I guess I assumed that we were including the brain in the biochemistry algorithm because you have to-
Nick Lane
(01:58:59)
I would see that as a higher level of organization of neural networks. They’re all using the same biochemical wiring within themselves.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:06)
Yeah. But the human brain is not just neurons, it’s the immune system. It’s the whole package. I mean, to have a biochemical algorithm that runs an intelligent biological system, you have to include the whole damn thing. And it’s pretty fascinating. It comes from an embryo. The whole… I mean boy. I mean if you can… What is the human being? Because it’s-
Nick Lane
(01:59:33)
But if you look-
Lex Fridman
(01:59:34)
…just some code. And then, so DNA doesn’t just tell you what to build, but how to build it. I mean the thing is impressive and the question is how difficult is it to reverse engineer the whole shebang?
Nick Lane
(01:59:52)
Very difficult.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:54)
I would say it’s… I don’t want to say impossible, but it’s much easier to build a human than to reverse engineer… To build a fake human, human-like thing than to reverse engineer the entirety of the process, the evolution of that.
Nick Lane
(02:00:15)
I’m not sure if we are capable of reverse-engineering the whole thing. If the human mind is capable of doing that. I mean I wouldn’t be a biologist if I wasn’t trying, But I know I can’t understand the whole problem. I’m just trying to understand the rudimentary outlines of the problem. There’s another aspect though, you’re talking about developing from a single cell to the human mind and all the subsystems that are part of the immune system and so on. This is something that you’ll talk about I imagine with Michael Levin, but so little is known about… You talk about reverse engineers. So little is known about the developmental pathways that go from a genome to going to a fully wired organism. And a lot of it seems to depend on the same electrical interactions that I was talking about happening at the level of single cells and its interaction with the environment. There’s a whole electrical field side to biology that is not yet written into any of the textbooks, which is about how does an embryo develop into or a single cell develop into these complex systems.

(02:01:32)
What defines the head, what defines the immune system, what defines the brain, and so on? That really is written in a language that we’re only just beginning to understand. And frankly biologists, most biologists are still very reluctant to even get themselves tangled up in questions like electrical fields influencing development. It seems like mumbo jumbo to a lot of biologists and it should not be because this is the 21st century biology. This is where it’s going, but we’re not going to reverse engineer a human being or the mind or any of these subsystems until we understand how this developmental processes work, how electricity and biology really works, and if it is linked with feelings or with consciousness and so on. In the meantime, we have to try, but I think that’s where the answer lies.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:22)
So you think it’s possible that the key to things like consciousness are some of the more tricky aspects of cognition might lie in that early development, the interaction of electricity and biology? Electrical fields, oh God.
Nick Lane
(02:02:40)
But we already know the EEG and so on is telling us a lot about brain function, but we don’t know which cells, which parts of a neural network is giving rise to the EEG. We don’t know the basics. The assumption is, I mean we know it’s neural networks, we know it’s multiple cells, hundreds or thousands of cells involved in it, and we assume that it’s to do with depolarization during action potentials and so on. But the mitochondria which are in there have much more membranes than the plasma membrane of the neuron.

(02:03:08)
And there’s a much greater membrane potential and it’s formed in, very often parallel Christi, which are capable of reinforcing a field and generating fields over longer distances. And nobody knows if that plays a role in consciousness or not. There’s reasons to argue that it could, but frankly, we simply do not know and it’s not taken into consideration. You look at the structure of the mitochondrial membranes in the brains of simple things like Drosophila, the fruit fly, and they have amazing structures. You can see lots of little rectangular things all lined up in amazing patterns. What are they doing? Why are they like that? We haven’t the first clue.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:52)
What do you think about organoids and brain organoids and so in a lab trying to study the development of these in the Petri dish development of organs, do you think that’s promising or do you have to look at the whole systems?
Nick Lane
(02:04:08)
I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t know much about it. The people who I’ve talked to who do work on it say amazing things can happen and a bit of a brain grown in a dish is capable of experiencing some kind of feelings or even memories of its former brain. Again, I have a feeling that until we understand how to control the electrical fields that control development, we’re not going to understand how to turn an organoid into a real functional system.

AI and biology

Lex Fridman
(02:04:36)
But how do we get that understanding? It’s so incredibly difficult. I mean, you would have to… One promising direction, I’d love to get your opinion on this. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of DeepMind and AlphaFold with protein folding and so on. Do you think it’s possible that that will give us some breakthroughs in biology trying to basically simulate and model the behavior of trivial biological systems as they become complex biological systems?
Nick Lane
(02:05:11)
I’m sure it will. The interesting thing to me about protein folding is that for a long time, my understanding, this is not what I work on, so I may have got this wrong, but my understanding is that you take the sequence of a protein and you try to fold it, and there are multiple ways in which it can fold. And to come up with the correct confirmation is not a very easy thing because you’re doing it from first principles from a string of letters, which specify the string of amino acids. But what actually happens is when a protein is coming out of a ribosome, it’s coming out of a charged tunnel and it’s in a very specific environment which is going to force this to go there now and then this one to go there and this one to come like that. And so you’re forcing a specific conformational set of changes onto it as it comes out of the ribosome.

(02:05:58)
So by the time it’s fully emerged, it’s already got its shape. And that shape depended on the immediate environment that it was emerging into one letter, one amino acid at a time. And I don’t think that the field was looking at it that way. And if that’s correct, then that’s very characteristic of science, which is to say it asks very often the wrong question and then does really amazingly sophisticated analyses on something having never thought to actually think, well, what is biology doing? And biology is giving you a charged electrical environment that forces you to be this way. Now did DeepMind come up through patterns with some answer that was like that? I’ve got absolutely no idea. It ought to be possible to deduce that from the shapes of proteins. It would require much greater skill than the human mind has. But the human mind is capable of saying, “Well, hang on, let’s look at this exit tunnel and try and work out what shape is this protein going to take.” And we can figure that out.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:00)
Well, that’s really interesting about the exit tunnel. But sometimes we get lucky and just like in science, the simplified view or the static view will actually solve the problem for us. So in this case, it’s very possible that the sequence of letters has a unique mapping to our structure without considering how it unraveled. So without considering the tunnel, that seems to be the case in this situation where the cool thing about proteins, all the different shapes that it can possibly take, it actually seems to take very specific unique shapes given the sequence.
Nick Lane
(02:07:36)
That’s forced on you by an exit tunnel. So the problem is actually much simpler than you thought. And then there’s a whole army of proteins which changed the conformational state, chaperone proteins, and they’re only used when there’s some presumably issue with how it came out of the exit tunnel, and you want to do it differently to that. So very often the chaperone proteins will go there and will influence the way in which it folds. So-
Nick Lane
(02:08:00)
… go there and will influence the way in which it falls. So there’s two ways of doing it. Either you can look at the structures and the sequences of all the proteins, and you can apply an immense mind to it, and figure out what the patterns are and figure out what… Or, you can look at the actual situation where it is and say, “Well, hang on, it was actually quite simple.” It’s got a charged environment and then of course, it’s forced to come out this way. And then, the question will be, “Well, do different ribosomes have different charged environments? What happens if a chaperone…” You’re asking a different set of questions to come to the same answer, in a way which is telling you a much simpler story, and explains why it is. Rather than saying, “It could be. This is one in a billion different possible conformational states that this protein could have,” you’re saying, “Well, it has this one because that was the only one it could take, given its setting.”
Lex Fridman
(02:08:48)
Well, yeah, I mean, currently humans are very good at that kind of first principles thinking, of stepping back.
Nick Lane
(02:08:54)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:54)
But I think AI is really good at collecting a huge amount of data, and a huge amount of data of observation of planets, and figure out that Earth is not at the center of the universe, that there’s actually a sun, we’re orbiting the Sun. But then, you can, as a human being ask, “Well, how do solar systems come to be? What are the different forces that are required to make this kind of pattern emerge?” And then, you start to invent things like gravity. I mean, obviously-
Nick Lane
(02:09:26)
Is it something [inaudible 02:09:26]-
Lex Fridman
(02:09:26)
I mixed up the ordering of gravity wasn’t considered as a thing that connects planets, but we are able to think about those big picture things as human beings. AI is just very good to infer simple models from a huge amount of data. And the question is, with biology, we kind of go back and forth how we solve biology. Listen, protein folding was thought to be impossible to solve. And there’s a lot of brilliant PhD students that worked one protein at a time, trying to figure out the structure, and the fact that it was able to do that…
Nick Lane
(02:10:03)
Oh, I’m not knocking it at all, but I think that people have been asking the wrong question.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:09)
But then, as the people start to ask better and bigger questions, the AI kind of enters the chat and says, “I’ll help you out with that.”
Nick Lane
(02:10:22)
Can I give you another example from my own work? The risk of getting a disease as we get older, there are genetic aspects to it. If you spend your whole life overeating, and smoking, and whatever, that’s a whole separate question, but there’s a genetic side to the risk, and we know a few genes that increase your risk of certain things. And for probably 20 years now, people have been doing what’s called GWAS, which is genome-wide association studies.

(02:10:55)
So you effectively scan the entire genome for any single nucleotide polymorphisms, which is to say a single letter change in one place that has a higher association of being linked with a particular disease or not. And you can come out with thousands of these things across the genome. And if you add them all up and try and say, “Well, so do they add up to explain the known genetic risk of this disease?” And the known genetic risk often comes from twin studies, and you can say that if this twin gets epilepsy, there’s a 40 or 50% risk that the other twin, identical twin, will also get epilepsy. Therefore, the genetic factor is about 50%, and so the gene similarities that you see should account for 50% of that known risk.

(02:11:46)
Very often, it accounts for less than a 10th of the known risk. And there’s two possible explanations, and there’s one which people tend to do, which is to say, “Ah, well, we don’t have enough statistical power. Maybe there’s a million. We’ve only found a 1,000 of them, but if we find the other million, they’re weakly related, but there’s a huge number of them, and so we’ll account for that whole risk.” Maybe there’s a billion of them, [inaudible 02:12:10]. So that’s one way. The other way is to say, “Well, hang on a minute. You’re missing a system here. That system is the mitochondrial DNA,” which people tend to dismiss, because it’s small and it doesn’t change very much.

(02:12:27)
But a few single letter changes in that mitochondrial DNA, it controls some really basic processes. It controls not only all the energy that we need to live, and to move around, and do everything we do, but also biosynthesis, to make the new building blocks, to make new cells. And cancer cells very often take over the mitochondria and rewire them, so that instead of using them for making energy, they’re effectively using them as precursors for the building blocks, for biosynthesis. You need to make new amino acids, new nucleotides for DNA. You want to make new lipids to make your membranes and so on. So they kind of rewire metabolism.

(02:13:06)
Now, the problem is that we’ve got all these interactions between mitochondrial DNA and the genes in the nucleus that are overlooked completely, because people literally throw away the mitochondrial genes, and we can see in fruit flies that they interact and produce big differences in risk. So you can set AI onto this question of exactly how many of these base changes there are, and that’s just one possible solution, that maybe there are a million of them and it does account for the greater part of the risk, or the other one is they aren’t. It’s just not there, that actually the risk lies in something you weren’t even looking at. And this is where human intuition is very important, and there’s this feeling that, “Well, I’m working on this, and I think it’s important, and I’m bloody minded about it.” And in the end, some people are right. It turns out that it was important. Can you get AI to do that, to be bloody minded?
Lex Fridman
(02:14:03)
And that, “Hang on a minute, you might be missing a whole other system here that’s much bigger,” that’s the moment of discovery, of scientific revolution. I’m giving up on saying AI can’t do something. I’ve said it enough times about enough things. I think there’s been a lot of progress. And instead, I’m excited by the possibility of AI helping humans. But at the same time, just like I said, we seem to dismiss the power of humans.
Nick Lane
(02:14:37)
Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:38)
We’re so limited in so many ways that kind of, in what we feel like dumb ways, like we’re not strong, we’re kind of, our attention, our memory is limited, our ability to focus on things is limited, in our own perception of what limited is. But that, actually, there’s an incredible computer behind the whole thing that makes this whole system work. Our ability to interact with the environment, to reason about the environment, there’s magic there.
Nick Lane
(02:14:38)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:14)
And I am hopeful that AI can capture some of that same magic, but that magic is not going to look like a Deep Blue playing chess.
Nick Lane
(02:15:22)
No.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:23)
It’s going to be more interesting.
Nick Lane
(02:15:24)
But I don’t think it’s going to look like pattern finding, either. I mean, that’s essentially what you’re telling me it does very well at the moment. And my point is it works very well where you’re looking for the right pattern, but we are storytelling animals. And a hypothesis is a story. It’s a testable story, but a new hypothesis is a leap into the unknown, and it’s a new story, basically. And it says, “This leads to this, leads to that.” It’s a causal set of storytelling.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:54)
It’s also possible that the leap into the unknown has a pattern of its own.
Nick Lane
(02:15:58)
Yes, it is.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:59)
And it’s possible that it’s learnable.
Nick Lane
(02:15:59)
I’m sure it is. There’s a nice book by Arthur Koestler on the nature of creativity, and he likens it to a joke where the punchline goes off in a completely unexpected direction, and says that this is the basis of human creativity, that some creative switch of direction to an unexpected place is similar to a… I’m not saying that’s how it works, but it’s a nice idea, and there must be some truth in it. Most of the stories we tell are probably the wrong story, and probably going nowhere, and probably not helpful, and we definitely don’t do as well at seeing patterns in things.

(02:16:41)
But some of the most enjoyable human aspects is finding a new story that goes to an unexpected place. And again, these are all aspects of what being human means to me. And maybe these are all things that AI figures out for itself, or maybe they’re just aspects… But I just have the feeling sometimes that the people who are trying to understand what we are like, if we wish to craft an AI system which is somehow human-like, that we don’t have a firm enough grasp of what humans really are like, in terms of how we are built,
Lex Fridman
(02:17:21)
But we get a better understanding of that. I agree with you completely. We try to build a thing and then we go, “Hang on in a minute, there’s another system here.” And that’s, actually, the attempt to build AI that’s human-like is getting us to a deeper understanding of human beings. The funny thing that I recently talked to Magnus Carlsen, widely considered to be the greatest chess player of all time, and he talked about AlphaZero, which is a system from DeepMind that plays chess. And he had a funny comment, he has a kind of dry sense of humor, but he was extremely impressed when he first saw AlphaZero play, and he said that it did a lot of things that could easily be mistaken for creativity.

(02:18:09)
So he refused, as a typical human, refused to give the system sort of its due, because he came up with a lot of things that a lot of people are extremely impressed by, not just the sheer calculation, but the brilliance of play. So one of the things that it does in really interesting ways is it sacrifices pieces. So in chess, that means you basically take a few steps back in order to take a step forward. You give away pieces for some future reward. And that, for us humans, is where art is in chess. You take big risks that, for us humans, those risks are especially painful, because you have a fog of uncertainty before you. So to take a risk now based on intuition of, “I think this is the right risk to take, but there’s so many possibilities,” that that’s where it takes guts. That’s where art is, that’s that danger.

(02:19:14)
And then, AlphaZero takes those same kind of risks, and does them even greater degree, but of course, it does it from where you could easily reduce down to a cold calculation over patterns. But boy, when you see the final result, it sure looks like the same kind of magic that we see, and creativity, when we see creative play on the chess board. But the chess board is very limited, and the question is, as we get better and better, can we do that same kind of creativity in mathematics, in programming, and then eventually in biology, psychology, and expand into more and more complex systems?
Nick Lane
(02:20:04)
I used to go running when I was a boy, and fell running, which is to say running up and down mountains, and I was never particularly great at it, but there were some people who were amazingly fast, especially at running down. And I realized, in trying to do this, that there’s three possible ways of doing it, and there’s only two that work. Either, you go extremely slowly and carefully, and you figure out, “Okay, there’s a stone. I’ll put my foot on this stone, and then there’s a muddy puddle I’m going to avoid.” And it’s slow, it’s laborious. You figure it out, step by step, or you can just go incredibly fast, and you don’t think about it at all. The entire conscious mind is shut out of it, and it’s probably the same playing table tennis or something. There’s something in the mind which is doing a whole lot of subconscious calculations about exactly…

(02:20:54)
And it’s amazing. You can run at astonishing speed down a hillside, with no idea how you did it at all. And then, you panic and you think, “I’m going to break my leg if I keep doing this. I’ve got to think about where I’m going to put my foot.” So you slow down a bit and try to bring this conscious mind in, and then you do, you crash. You cannot think consciously while running downhill. And so it’s amazing how many calculations the mind is able to make.

(02:21:21)
Now, the problem with playing chess or something, if you were able to make all of those subconscious, forward calculations about what is the likely outcome of this move now in the way that we can by running down a hillside or something, it’s partly about what we have adapted to do. It’s partly about the reality of the world that we’re in. Running fast downhill is something that we better be bloody good at, otherwise we’re going to be eaten. Whereas, trying to calculate multiple, multiple moves into the future is not something we’ve ever been called on to do. Two or three, four moves into the future is quite enough for most of us, most of the time.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:00)
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, just solving chess, we may not be as far towards solving the problem of downhill running as we might think, just because we solved chess. Still, it’s beautiful to see creativity. Humans create machines. They’re able to create art, and art on the chessboard and art otherwise. Who knows how far that takes us? So I mentioned Andrej Karpathy earlier. Him and I are big fans of yours. If you’re taking votes, his suggestion was you should write your next book on the Fermi paradox. So let me ask you, on the topic of alien life, since we’ve been talking about life and we’re a kind of aliens, how many alien civilizations are out there, do you think?
Nick Lane
(02:22:58)
Well, the universe is very big, but not as many as most people would like to think is my view, because the idea that there is a trajectory going from simple cellular life like bacteria, all the way through to humans, seems to me there’s some big gaps along that way, that the eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have is the biggest of them. But also, photosynthesis is another. Another interesting gap is a long gap from the origin of the eukaryotic cell to the first animals. That was about a billion years, maybe more than that, and a long delay in where oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere.

(02:23:42)
So from the first appearance of oxygen in the Great Oxidation Event to enough for animals to respire was close to 2 billion years. Why so long? It seems to be planetary factors. It seems to be geology, as much as anything else, and we don’t really know what was going on. So the idea that there’s a kind of an inevitable march towards complexity and sentient life I don’t think is right. Not to say it’s not going to happen, but I think it’s not going to happen often.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:17)
So if you think of Earth, given the geological constraints and all that kind of stuff, do you have a sense that life, complex life, intelligent life happened really quickly on Earth, or really long? So just to get a sense of are you more sort of saying that it’s very unlikely to get the kind of conditions required to create humans, or is it, even if you have the condition, it’s just statistically difficult?
Nick Lane
(02:24:46)
I think, I mean, the problem, the single great problem at the center of all of that, to my mind, is the origin of the eukaryotic cell, which happened once, and without eukaryotes, nothing else would’ve happened, and that is something that-
Lex Fridman
(02:24:59)
Because you’re saying it’s super important, the eukaryotes, but-
Nick Lane
(02:25:02)
I’m saying tantamount of saying that it is impossible to build something as complex as a human being from bacterial cells.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:09)
Totally agree in some deep, fundamental way, but it’s just like one cell going inside another. Is that so difficult to get to work right, that like [inaudible 02:25:18]-
Nick Lane
(02:25:18)
Well, again, it happened once, and if you think about, I’m in a minority view in this position, most biologists probably wouldn’t agree with me anyway, but if you think about the starting point, we’ve got a simple cell, it’s an archaeal cell, we can be fairly sure about that. So it looks a lot like a bacterium, but is in fact from this other domain of life. So it looks a lot like a bacterial cell. That means it doesn’t have anything. It doesn’t have a nucleus, it doesn’t really have complex endomembrane. It has a little bit of stuff, but not that much, and it takes up an endosymbiont. So what happens next? And the answer is basically everything to do with complexity.

(02:26:02)
To me, there’s a beautiful paradox here. Plants, and animals, and fungi all have exactly the same type of cell, but they all have really different ways of living. So a plant cell is photosynthetic, they started out as algae in the oceans and so on. So think of algal bloom, single-cell things. The basic cell structure that it’s built from is exactly the same, with a couple of small differences. It’s got chloroplasts as well, it’s got a vacuole, it’s got a cell wall, but that’s about it. Pretty much everything else is exactly the same in a plant cell and an animal cell. And yet, the ways of life are completely different. So this cell structure did not evolve in response to different ways of life, different environments. I’m in the ocean doing photosynthesis, I’m on land running around as part of an animal, I’m a fungus in a soil, spinning out long kind of shoots into whatever it may be, mycelium.

(02:27:03)
So they all have the same underlying cell structure. Why? Almost certainly, it was driven by adaptation to the internal environment, of having these pesky endosymbionts that forced all kinds of change on the host cell. Now, in one way, you could see that as a really good thing, because it may be that there’s some inevitability to this process. It’s as soon as you’ve got endosymbionts, you’re more or less bound to go in that direction. Or, it could be that there’s a huge fluke about it, and it’s almost certain to go wrong in just about every case possible, that the conflict will lead to, effectively, war, leading to death and extinction, and it simply doesn’t work out. So maybe it happened millions of times and it went wrong every time, or maybe it only happened once, and it worked out because it was inevitable. And actually, we simply do not know enough now to say which of those two possibilities is true, but both of them are a bit grim.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:52)
But you’re leaning towards we just got really lucky in that one leap. So do you have a sense that our galaxy, for example, has just maybe millions of planets with bacteria living on it?
Nick Lane
(02:28:07)
I would expect billions, tens of billions of planets with bacteria living on it, practically. I mean, there’s probably what, 5 to 10 planets per star, of which I would hope that at least one would have bacteria on. So I expect bacteria to be very common. I simply can’t put a number otherwise. I mean, I expect it will happen elsewhere. It’s not that I think we’re living in a completely empty universe.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:31)
That’s so fascinating.
Nick Lane
(02:28:32)
But I think that it’s not going to happen inevitably, and there’s something… That’s not the only problem with complex life on Earth. I mentioned oxygen, and animals, and so on as well. And even humans, we came along very late. You go back 5 million years, and would we be that impressed if we came across a planet full of giraffes? I mean, you’d think, “Hey, there’s life here. There’s a nice planet to colonize or something.” We wouldn’t think, “Oh, let’s try and have a conversation with this giraffe.”
Lex Fridman
(02:29:00)
Yeah, I’m not sure what exactly we would think. I’m not exactly sure what makes humans so interesting from an alien perspective or how they would notice. I’ll talk to you about cities, too, because an interesting perspective of how to look at human civilization. But your suns… I mean, of course you don’t know, but it’s an interesting world, it’s an interesting galaxy, and it’s an interesting universe to live in, that’s just like every sun, like 90% of solar systems have bacteria in it. Imagine that world, and the galaxy maybe has just a handful, if not one intelligent civilization. That’s a wild world.
Nick Lane
(02:29:00)
It’s a wild world.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:53)
I didn’t even think about that world. There’s a kind of thought that one of the reasons it would be so exciting to find life on Mars, or Titan, or whatever is like if life is elsewhere, then surely, statistically, that life, no matter how unlikely you curry us multicellular organisms, sex, violence, what else is extremely difficult? I mean, photosynthesis, is figuring out some machinery that involves the chemistry and the environment to allow the building up of complex organisms, surely that would arise. But man, I don’t know how I would feel about just bacteria everywhere.
Nick Lane
(02:30:38)
Well, it would be depressing, if it was true. I suppose, depressing-
Lex Fridman
(02:30:42)
[inaudible 02:30:42].
Nick Lane
(02:30:42)
I don’t think-
Lex Fridman
(02:30:43)
I don’t know what’s more depressing, bacteria everywhere, nothing everywhere.
Nick Lane
(02:30:47)
Yes, either of them are chilling. But whether it’s chilling or not I don’t think should force us to change our view about whether it’s real or not.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:57)
Yes, yes.
Nick Lane
(02:30:58)
And what I’m saying may or may not be true.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:00)
So how would you feel if we discovered life on Mars? It sounds like you would be less excited than some others, because you’re like, “Well…”
Nick Lane
(02:31:09)
What I would be most interested in is how similar to life on Earth it would be. It would actually turn into quite a subtle problem, because the likelihood of life having gone to and fro between Mars and the Earth is quite… I wouldn’t say high, but it’s not low. It’s quite feasible. And so if we found life on Mars and it had very similar genetic code, but it was slightly different, most people would interpret that immediately as evidence that there’d been transit one way or the other, and that it was a common origin of life on Mars or on the Earth, and it went one way or the other way.

(02:31:43)
The other way to see that question, though, would be to say, “Well, actually the whole beginnings of life lie in deterministic chemistry and thermodynamics, starting with the most likely abundant materials, COâ‚‚, and water, and wet, rocky planet,” and Mars was wet and rocky at the beginning and will, I won’t say inevitably, but potentially almost inevitably come up with a genetic code which is not very far away from the genetic code that we already have. So we see subtle differences in the genetic code, what does it mean? It could be very difficult to interpret.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:14)
Is it possible, do you think, to tell the difference of something that truly originated…
Nick Lane
(02:32:19)
I think if the stereochemistry was different, we have sugars, for example, that are the L form or the D form, and we have D sugars and L amino acids right across all of life. But lipids, the bacteria have one stereoisomer and the bacteria have the other, the opposite stereoisomer. So it’s perfectly possible to use one or the other one. And the same would almost certainly go for… And I think George Church has been trying to make life based on the opposite stereoisomer. So it’s perfectly possible to do, and it will work. And if we were to find life on Mars that was using the opposite stereoisomer, that would be unequivocal evidence that life had started independently there.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:09)
So hopefully, the life we find will be on Titan, on Europa or something like that, where it’s less likely that we shared… And it’s harsher conditions, so there’s going to be weirder kind of life?
Nick Lane
(02:33:20)
I wouldn’t count on that, because-
Lex Fridman
(02:33:22)
Of water.
Nick Lane
(02:33:22)
… life started in deep sea hydrothermal vents here.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:22)
It’s a harsh-
Nick Lane
(02:33:27)
It’s pretty harsh, yeah. So Titan is different. Europa is probably quite similar to Earth, in the sense that we’re dealing with an ocean. It’s an acidic ocean there, as the early Earth would’ve been. And it almost certainly has hydrothermal systems. Same with Enceladus. We can tell that from these plumes coming from the surface, through the ice. We know there’s a liquid ocean and we can tell roughly what the chemistry is. For Titan, we’re dealing with liquid methane and things like that. So that would really, if there really is life there, it would really have to be very, very different to anything that we know on Earth.

Evolution

Lex Fridman
(02:34:00)
So the hard leap, the hardest leap, the most important leap is from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. What’s the second, if we were ranking? You gave a lot of emphasis on photosynthesis.
Nick Lane
(02:34:17)
Yeah, and that would be my second one, I think. But it’s not so much… I mean, photosynthesis is part of the problem. It’s a difficult thing to do. Again, we know it happened once, we don’t know why it happened once, but the fact that it was kind of taken on board completely by plants, and algae, and so on as chloroplasts, and did very well in completely different environments, and then on land and whatever else, seems to suggest that there’s no problem with exploring. You could have a separate origin that explored this whole domain over there that the bacteria had never gone into.

(02:34:59)
So that kind of says that the reason that it only happened once is probably because it’s difficult, because the wiring is difficult. But then, it happened at least 2.2 billion years ago, right before the GOE, maybe as long as 3 billion years ago, when some people say there are whiffs of oxygen, there’s just kind of traces in the fossil, in the geochemical record that say maybe there was a bit of oxygen then. That’s really disputed. Some people say it goes all the way back 4 billion years ago, and that it was the common ancestor of life on Earth was photosynthetic. So immediately, you’ve got groups of people who disagree over a 2 billion-year period of time about when it started.

(02:35:41)
But let’s take the latest date when it’s unequivocal. That’s 2.2 billion years ago, through to around about the time of the Cambrian explosion, when oxygen levels definitely got close to modern levels, which was around about 550 million years ago. So we’ve gone more than one and a half billion years, where the Earth was in stasis. Nothing much changed. It’s known as the Boring Billion, in fact. Probably, stuff was… That was when Eukaryotes arose somewhere in there, but it’s… So this idea that the world is constantly changing, that we’re constantly evolving, that we’re moving up some ramp, it’s a very human idea, but in reality, there are kind of tipping points to a new stable equilibrium, where the cells that are producing oxygen are precisely counterbalanced by the cells that are consuming that oxygen, which is why it’s 21% now and has been that way for hundreds of millions of years. We have a very precise balance.

(02:36:46)
You go through a tipping point, and you don’t know where the next stable state’s going to be, but it can be a long way from here. And so if we change the world with global warming, there will be a tipping point. Question is where, and when, and what’s the next stable state? It may be uninhabitable to us. It’ll be habitable to life, for sure, but there may be something like the Permian extinction, where 95% of species go extinct, and there’s a 5-to-10 million year gap, and then life recovers, but without humans.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:16)
And the question, statistically, well, without humans, but statistically, does that ultimately lead to greater complexity, more interesting life, more intelligent life?
Nick Lane
(02:37:25)
Well, after the first appearance of oxygen with the GOE, there was a tipping point which led to a long-term stable state that was equivalent to the Black Sea today, which is to say oxygenated at the very surface and stagnant, sterile… Not sterile, but sulfurous lower down. And that was stable, certainly around the continental margins, for more than a billion years. It was not a state that led to progression in an obvious way.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:55)
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting to think about evolution, like what leads to stable states, and how often are evolutionary pressures emerging from the environment? So maybe other planets are able to create evolutionary pressures, chemical pressures, whatever, some kind of pressure that say, “You’re screwed unless you get your shit together in the next 10,000 years.”
Nick Lane
(02:38:23)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:23)
Like, a lot of pressure. It seems like Earth, the Boring Billion might be explained in two ways. One, it’s super difficult to take any kind of next step. And the second way it could be explained is there’s no reason to take the next step.
Nick Lane
(02:38:39)
No, I think there is no reason. But at the end of it, there was a snowball Earth. So there was a planetary catastrophe on a huge scale, where the ice, the sea was frozen at the equator, and that forced change in one way or another. It’s not long after that, a hundred million years, perhaps after that, so not a short time, but this is when we begin to see animals. There was a shift, again, another tipping point that led to catastrophic change that led to a takeoff then. We don’t really know why, but one of the reasons why that I discussed in the book is about sulfate being washed into the oceans, which sounds incredibly parochial.

(02:39:23)
But the issue is, I mean, what the data is showing, we can track roughly how oxygen was going into the atmosphere from carbon isotopes. So there’s two main isotopes of carbon that we need to think about here. One is carbon-12, 99% of carbon is carbon-12, and then 1% of carbon is carbon-13, which is a stable isotope. And then, there’s carbon-14, which is a trivial radioactive, it’s trivial amount. So carbon-13 is 1%, and life and enzymes, generally, you can think of carbon atoms as little balls bouncing around, ping-pong balls bouncing around. Carbon-12 moves a little bit faster than carbon-13.
Nick Lane
(02:40:00)
… bouncing around, ping-pong balls bouncing around. carbon-12 moves a little bit faster than carbon-13 because it’s lighter and it’s more likely to encounter an enzyme, and so it’s more likely to be fixed into organic matter. Organic matter is enriched, and this is just an observation. It’s enriched in Carbon-12 by a few percent compared to carbon-13 relative to what you would expect if it was just equal. If you then bury organic matter as coal or oil or whatever it may be, then it’s no longer oxidized. Some oxygen remains left over in the atmosphere and that’s how oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere.

(02:40:37)
You can work out historically how much oxygen there must’ve been in the atmosphere by how much carbon was being buried. You think, well, how can we possibly know how much carbon was being buried? The answer is, well, if you’re burying carbon-12, what you’re leaving behind is more Carbon-13 in the oceans, and that precipitates out into limestone. You can look at limestones over these ages and work out what’s the Carbon-13 signal. That gives you a feedback on what the oxygen content.

(02:41:03)
Right before the Cambrian explosion, there was what’s called a negative isotope anomaly excursion, which is basically the carbon-13 goes down by a massive amount and then back up again 10 million years later. What that seems to be saying is the amount of carbon-12 in the oceans was disappearing, which is to say it was being oxidized. If it’s being oxidized, it’s consuming oxygen and that should … A big carbon-13 signal says the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 is really going down, which means there’s much more carbon-12 being taken out and being oxidized.

(02:41:44)
Sorry, this is getting too complex, but-
Lex Fridman
(02:41:46)
Well, it’s a good way to estimate the amount of oxygen.
Nick Lane
(02:41:49)
If you calculate the amount of oxygen based on the assumption that all this carbon-12 that’s being taken out is being oxidized by oxygen, the answer is all the oxygen in the atmosphere gets stripped out, there is none left. Yet the rest of the geological indicators say, no, there’s oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s a paradox and the only way to explain this paradox just on mass balance of how much stuff is in the air, how much stuff is in the oceans and so on, is to assume that oxygen was not the oxygen, it was sulfate. Sulfate was being washed into the oceans. It’s used as an electron acceptor by sulfate-reducing bacteria just as we use oxygen as an electron acceptor, so they pass their electrons to sulfate instead of oxygen.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:32)
Bacteria did?
Nick Lane
(02:42:33)
Yeah, so these are bacteria. They’re oxidizing carbon, organic carbon with sulfate passing the electrons onto sulfate, that reacts with iron to form iron pyrites or fool’s gold, sinks down to the bottom, gets buried out of the system. This can account for the mass balance. Why does it matter? It matters because what it says is there was a chance event. Tectonically, there was a lot of sulfate sitting on land as some kind of mineral. Calcium sulfate minerals, for example are evaporitic and because there happened to be some continental collisions, mountain building, the sulfate was pushed up the side of a mountain and happened to get washed into the ocean.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:24)
I wonder how many happy accidents like that are possible.
Nick Lane
(02:43:27)
Yeah, statistically it’s really hard. Maybe you can rule that in statistically or rule out, but this is the course of life on Earth. Without all that sulfate being raised up, the Cambrian explosion almost certainly would not have happened and then we wouldn’t have had animals and so on and so on.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:44)
This explanation of the Cambrian explosion. Let me actually say in several ways, so folks who challenge the validity of the theory of evolution will give us an example that the Cambrian explosion is like this thing is weird. Now I’m not well studied in this.
Nick Lane
(02:44:02)
Oh, it’s weird. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:11)
The question I would have is what’s the biggest mystery or gap in understanding about evolution? Is it the Cambrian explosion? If so, first of all, what is it? In my understanding, in the short amount of time, maybe 10 million years, 100 million years, something like that, a huge number of animals, a variety, diversity of animals were created. Anyway, there’s five questions in there. Is that the biggest mystery to you about evolution?
Nick Lane
(02:44:44)
No, I don’t think it’s particularly a big mystery really anymore. There are still mysteries about why then? I’ve just said being washed into the oceans is one. It needs oxygen and oxygen levels rose around that time. Probably before that, they weren’t high enough for animals. What we’re seeing with the Cambrian explosion is the beginning of predators and prey relationships. We’re seeing modern ecosystems and we’re seeing arms races, and we’re seeing the full creativity of evolution unleashed. I talked about the boring billion. Nothing happens for one and a half, one billion years, one and a half billion years.

(02:45:29)
The assumption and this is completely wrong, this assumption is then that evolution works really slowly and that you need billions of years to affect some small change and then another billion years to do something. It’s completely wrong. Evolution gets stuck in a stasis and it stays that way for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years. Stephen J. Gould used to argue this, he called it punctuated equilibrium, but he was doing it to do with animals and to do with the last 500 million years or so where it’s much less obvious than if you think about the entire planetary history. Then you realize that the first 2 billion years was bacteria only. You have the origin of life, 2 billion years of just bacteria, oxygenic, photosynthesis arising here. Then you have a global catastrophe, snowball Earths, and great oxidation event, and then another billion years of nothing happening, and then some period of upheavals and then another snowball Earth. Then suddenly you see the Cambrian explosion.

(02:46:23)
This is long periods of stasis where the world is in a stable state and is not geared towards increasing complexity. It’s just everything is in balance. Only when you have a catastrophic level of global level problem, like of snowball Earth, it forces everything out of balance and there’s a tipping point and you end up somewhere else. Now, the idea that evolution is slow is wrong. It can be incredibly fast. I mentioned earlier on that in theory it would take half a million years to invent an eye, for example, from a light sensitive spot. It doesn’t take long to convert one kind of tube into a tube with nobbles on it into a tube with arms on it, and then multiple arms, and then one end is a head with it starts out as a swelling. It’s not difficult intellectually to understand how these things can happen.

(02:47:18)
It boggles the mind that it can happen so quickly, but we’re used to human time scales. What we need to talk about is generations of things that live for a year in the ocean, and then a million years is a million generations. The amount of change that you can do can affect in that period of time is enormous. We’re dealing with large populations of things where selection is sensitive to pretty small changes. Again, as soon as you throw in the competition of predators and prey and you’re ramping up the scale of evolution, it’s not very surprising that it happens very quickly when the environment allows it to happen.

(02:47:58)
I don’t think there’s a big mystery. There’s lots of details that need to be filled in. The big mystery in biology is consciousness.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:11)
The big mystery in biology is consciousness? Well, intelligence is a mystery too. You said biology, not psychology, because from a biology perspective, it seems like intelligence and consciousness all are the same weird, all the brain stuff.
Nick Lane
(02:48:37)
I don’t see intelligence as necessarily that difficult, I suppose. I see it as a form of computing, and I don’t know much about computing.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:46)
Well, you don’t know much about consciousness either. Oh, I see, I see, I see, I see. That consciousness you do know a lot about as a human being.
Nick Lane
(02:49:00)
No, no. I can understand the wiring of a brain in pretty much the same way as a computer in theory, in terms of the circuitry of it. The mystery to me is how this system gives rise to feelings, as we were talking about earlier on.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:23)
Yeah, I think we oversimplify intelligence. I think the dance, the magic of reasoning is as interesting as the magic of feeling. We tend to think of reasoning as running a very simplistic algorithm. I think reasoning is the interplay between memory, whatever the hell is going on, the unconscious mind, all of that.
Nick Lane
(02:49:55)
I’m not trying to diminish it in any way at all. Obviously, it’s extraordinarily exquisitely complex, but I don’t see a logical difficulty with how it works.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:06)
Yeah, no, I agree with you, but sometimes, yeah, there’s a big cloak of mystery around consciousness.
Nick Lane
(02:50:16)
Let me compare it with classical versus quantum physics. Classical physics is logical and you can understand the language we’re dealing with. It’s almost at the human level, we’re dealing with stars and things that we can see. When you get to quantum mechanics and things, it’s practically impossible for the human mind to compute what just happened there.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:39)
Yeah, that is the same. It’s like you understand mathematically the notes of a musical composition, that’s intelligence. But why it makes you feel a certain way? That is much harder to understand. Yeah, that’s really, but it was an interesting framing that that’s a mystery at the core of biology. I wonder who solves consciousness. I tend to think consciousness will be solved by the engineer, meaning the person who builds it, who keeps trying to build the thing, versus biology is such a complicated system. I feel like the building blocks of consciousness from a biological perspective are that’s the final creation of a human being, so you have to understand the whole damn thing. You said the electrical fields, but electrical fields plus, plus everything, the whole shebang.
Nick Lane
(02:51:47)
I’m inclined to agree. My feeling is from my meager knowledge of the history of science is that the biggest breakthrough has usually come through from a field that was not related to. If anyone is not going to be a biologist who solves consciousness, just because biologists are too embedded in the nature of the problem. Then nobody’s going to believe you when you’ve done it because nobody’s going to be able to prove that this AI is in fact conscious and sad in any case and any more than you can prove that a dog is conscious and sad, so it tells you that it is in good language and you must believe it.

(02:52:24)
But I think most people will accept if faced with that, that that’s what it is. All of this probability though of complex life. In one way, I think why it matters is that my expectation I suppose is that we will be over the next 100 years or so, if we survive it all, that AI will increasingly dominate. Pretty much anything that we put out into space looking for the universe, for what’s out there will be AI. It won’t be us, we won’t be doing that, or when we do, it will be on a much more limited scale. I suppose the same would apply to any alien civilization.

(02:53:12)
Perhaps rather than looking for signs of life out there, we should be looking for AI out there, but then we face the problem that I don’t see how a planet is going to give rise directly to AI. I can see how a planet can give rise directly to organic life, and if the principles that govern the evolution of life on Earth apply to other planets as well. I think a lot of them would, then the likelihood of ending up with a human-like civilization capable of giving rise to AI in the first place is massively limited. Once you’ve done it once, perhaps it takes over the universe and maybe there’s no issue, but it seems to me that the two are necessarily linked, that you’re not going to just turn a sterile planet into an AI life form without the intermediary of the organics first.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:09)
You have to run the full evolutionary computation with your organics to create AI?
Nick Lane
(02:54:15)
How does AI bootstrap itself up without the aid, if you like, of an intelligent designer?

Fermi paradox

Lex Fridman
(02:54:20)
The origin of AI is going to have to be in the chemistry of a planet, but that’s not a limiting factor. Let me ask the Fermi Paradox question. Let’s say we live in this incredibly dark and beautiful world of just billions of planets with bacteria on it and very few intelligent civilizations, and yet there’s a few out there. Why haven’t we at scale seen them visit us? What’s your sense? Is it because they don’t exist? It it because-
Nick Lane
(02:55:02)
Well, they don’t exist in the right part of the universe at the right time. That’s the simplest answer for it.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:08)
Is that the one you find the most compelling or is there some other explanation?
Nick Lane
(02:55:14)
No, it’s not that I find it more compelling, it’s that I find more probable and I find all of them. There’s a lot of hand waving in this, we just don’t know. I’m trying to read out from what I know about life on Earth to what might happen somewhere else. It gives to my mind a bit of a pessimistic view of bacteria everywhere and only occasional intelligent life. Running forward, humans only once on Earth and nothing else that you would necessarily be any more excited about making contact with than you would be making contact with them on Earth.

(02:55:50)
I think the chances are pretty limited and the chances of us surviving are pretty limited too. The way we’re going on at the moment, the likelihood of us not making ourselves extinct within the next few 100 years, possibly within the next 50 or 100 years seems quite small. I hope we can do better than that. Maybe the only thing that will survive from humanity will be AI and maybe AI once it exists, and once it’s capable of effectively copying itself and cutting humans out of the loop, then maybe that will take over the universe.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:24)
There’s an inherent sadness to the way you described that, but isn’t that also potentially beautiful that that’s the next step of life? I suppose from your perspective, as long as it carries the flame of consciousness somehow.
Nick Lane
(02:56:41)
I think yes, there can be some beauty to it being the next step of life. I don’t know if consciousness matters or not from that point of view, to be honest with you, but there’s some sadness, yes, probably because I think it comes down to the selfishness that we were talking about earlier on. I am an individual with a desire not to be displaced from life. I want to stay alive, I want to be here. I suppose the threat that a lot of people would feel is that we will just be wiped out, so there will be potential conflicts between AI and humans, and that AI will win because it’s a lot smarter.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:25)
Boy, would that be a sad state of affairs if consciousness is just an intermediate stage between bacteria and AI.
Nick Lane
(02:57:34)
Well, I would see bacteria as being potentially a primitive form of consciousness anyway. The whole of life on Earth to my mind-
Lex Fridman
(02:57:43)
Is conscious.
Nick Lane
(02:57:44)
… Is capable of some form of feelings in response to the environment. That’s not to say it’s intelligent, though it’s got his own algorithms for intelligence, but nothing comparable with us. I think it’s beautiful what a sterile planet can come up with. It’s astonishing that it’s come up with all of this stuff that we see around us and that either we or whatever we produce is capable of destroying all of that is a sad thought, but it’s also hugely pessimistic. I’d like to think that we’re capable of giving rise to something which is at least as good, if not better than us as AI.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:24)
Yeah, I have that same optimism, especially a thing that is able to propagate throughout the universe more efficiently than humans can or extensions of humans, some merger with AI and humans, whether that comes from bioengineering of the human body to extend its life somehow to carry that flame of consciousness and that personality and the beautiful tension that’s within all of us, carry that through to multiple planets, to multiple solar systems all out there in the universe. That’s a beautiful vision. Whether AI can do that or bio engineered humans can, that’s an exciting possibility. Especially meeting other alien civilizations in that same way.

(02:59:14)
Do you think aliens have consciousness?
Nick Lane
(02:59:16)
If they’re organic, yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:18)
Organic, connected to consciousness?
Nick Lane
(02:59:20)
I think any system which is going to bootstrap itself up from planetary origins. Let me finish this and then I come onto something else … but from planetary origins is going to face similar constraints, and those constraints are going to be addressed in similar basic engineering ways. I think it will be cellular, and I think it will have electrical charges, and I think it will have to be selected in populations over time. All of these things will tend to give rise to the same processes as the simplest fix to a difficult problem. I would expect it to be conscious, yes, and I would expect it to resemble life on Earth in many ways. When I was about 15 or 16, I remember reading a book by Fred Hoyle called The Black Cloud, which I was a budding biologist at the time and this was the first time I’d come across someone really challenging the heart of biology and saying, “You are far too parochial. You’re thinking about life as carbon-based. Here’s a life form which is kind of dust, interstellar dust on a solar system scale.”

(03:00:28)
It’s a novel, but I felt enormously challenged by that novel because it hadn’t occurred to me how limited my thinking was, how narrow-minded I was being. Here was a great physicist with a completely different conception of what life be. Since then, I’ve seen him attacked in various ways. I’m reluctant to say the attacks make more sense to me than the original story, which is to say even in terms of information processing, if you’re on that scale and there’s a limit of the speed of how quickly can something think, if you’re needing to broadcast across the solar system, it is going to be slow.

(03:01:16)
It’s not going to hold a conversation with you on the timelines that Fred Hoyle was imagining, or at least not by any easy way of doing it, assuming that the speed of light is a limit. Then again, you really can’t. This is something Richard Dawkins argued long ago and I do think he’s right. There is no other way to generate this level of complexity than natural selection. Nothing else can do it. You need populations and you need selection in populations and an isolated interstellar cloud. Again, there’s unlimited time and maybe there’s no problems with distance, but you need to have a certain frequency of generational time to generate a serious level of complexity. I just have a feeling it’s never going to work.
Lex Fridman
(03:02:11)
Well, as far as we know. Natural selection, evolution is really a powerful tool here on Earth, but there could be other mechanisms. I don’t know if you’re familiar with cellular automaton, but complex systems that have really simple components and seemingly move based on simple rules when they’re taken as a whole, really interesting complexity emerges. I don’t know what the pressures on that are. It’s not really selection, but interesting complexity seems to emerge, and that’s not well understood exactly why that complexity emerges.
Nick Lane
(03:02:46)
I think there’s a difference between complexity and evolution. Some of the work we’re doing on the origin of life is thinking about how do genes arise? How does information arise in biology? Thinking about it from the point of view of reacting COâ‚‚ with hydrogen, what do you get? Well, what you’re going to get is carboxylic acids, then amino acids. It’s quite hard to make nucleotides. It’s possible to make them, and it’s been done and it’s being done following this pathway as well, but you make trace amounts. The next question, assuming that this is the right way of seeing the question, which maybe it’s just not, but let’s assume it is well, how do you reliably make more nucleotides? How do you become more complex and better at becoming a nucleotide generating machine? The answer is, well, you need positive feedback loops, some form of autocatalysis.

(03:03:40)
That can work and we know it happens in biology. If this nucleotide, for example, catalyzes COâ‚‚ fixation, then you’re going to increase the rate of flux through the whole system, and you’re going to effectively steepen the driving force to make more nucleotides. This can be inherited because there are forms of membrane heredity that you can have and there are effectively, if a cell divides in two and it’s got a lot of stuff inside it and that stuff is basically bound as a network which is capable of regenerating itself, then it will inevitably regenerate itself.

(03:04:17)
You can develop greater complexity, but everything that I’ve said depends on the underlying rules of thermodynamics. There is no evolvability about that. It’s simply an inevitable outcome of your starting point, assuming that you’re able to increase the driving force through the system. You will generate more of the same, you’ll expand on what you can do, but you’ll never get anything different than that. It’s only when you introduce information into that as a gene, as a small stretch of RNA, which can be random stretch, then you get real evolvability. Then you get biology as we know it, but you’ll also have selection as we know it.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:00)
Yeah. I don’t know how to think about information. That’s the memory of the system. At the local level, it’s propagation of copying yourself and changing and improving your adaptability to the environment, but if you look at Earth as a whole, it has a memory. That’s the key feature of it.
Nick Lane
(03:05:25)
In what way?
Lex Fridman
(03:05:27)
It remembers the stuff it tries. If you were to describe Earth, I think evolution is something that we experience as individual organisms. That’s how the individual organisms interact with each other, there’s a natural selection. But when you look at Earth as an organism in its entirety, how would you describe it?
Nick Lane
(03:05:56)
Well, not as an organism. The idea of Gaia is lovely and James Lovelock originally put Gaia out as an organism that had somehow evolved and he was immediately attacked by lots of people. He’s not wrong, but he backpedaled somewhat because that was more of a poetic vision than the science. The science is now called Earth systems science, and it’s really about how does the world regulate itself so it remains within the limits which are hospitable to life, and it does it amazingly well. It is working at a planetary level of integration of regulation, but it’s not evolving by natural selection. It can’t because there’s only one of it. It can change over time, but it’s not evolving. All the evolution is happening in the parts of the system.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:50)
Yeah, but it’s a self-sustaining organism.
Nick Lane
(03:06:53)
No, it’s self-sustained by the sun.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:56)
Right, you don’t think it’s possible to see Earth as its own organism?
Nick Lane
(03:07:03)
I think it’s poetic and beautiful, and I often refer to the Earth as a living planet, but it’s not in biological terms an organism, no.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:14)
If aliens were to visit Earth, what would they notice? What would be the basic unit of light that would notice?
Nick Lane
(03:07:24)
Trees probably, it’s green and it’s green and blue. I think that’s the first thing you’d notice is it stands out from space as being different to any of the other planets.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:33)
Would notice the trees at first because the green?
Nick Lane
(03:07:36)
Well, I would. I notice the green, yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:38)
Yeah. Then probably notice to figure out the photosynthesis and then-
Nick Lane
(03:07:43)
Probably notice cities a second there, I suspect. Maybe first. If they arrived at night, they noticed cities first, that’s for sure.

Cities

Lex Fridman
(03:07:50)
Yeah, it depends the time. You write quite beautifully in Transformers. Once again, I think you opened the book in this way. I don’t remember. From space describing Earth, it’s such an interesting idea of what Earth is. Hitchhiker’s Guide summarizing it as harmless or mostly harmless. It’s a beautifully poetic thing.

(03:08:15)
You open Transformers with “From space, it looks gray and crystalline, obliterating the blue-green colors of the living Earth. It is crisscrossed by regular patterns and convergence striations. There’s a central amorphous density where these scratches seem lighter. This ‘growth’ does not look alive, although it has extended out along some lines and there is something grasping and parasitic about it. Across the globe, there are thousands of them varying in shape and detail, but all of them, gray, angular, inorganic, spreading. Yet at night they light up, glowing up the dark sky, suddenly beautiful. Perhaps these cankers on the landscape are in some sense living. There’s a controlled flow of energy. There must be information and some form of metabolism, some turnover of materials. Are they alive? No, of course not. They are cities.”

(03:09:17)
Is there some sense that cities are living beings? You think aliens would think of them as living beings?
Nick Lane
(03:09:25)
Well, it’d be easy to see it that way, wouldn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(03:09:29)
It wakes up at night, they wake up at night.
Nick Lane
(03:09:33)
Strictly nocturnal, yes. I imagine that any aliens that are smart enough to get here would understand that they’re not living beings. My reason for saying that is that we tend to think of biology in terms of information and forget about the cells. I was trying to draw a comparison between the cell as a city and the energy flow through the city and the energy flow through cells and the turnover of materials. An interesting thing about cities is that they’re not really exactly governed by anybody. There are regulations and systems and whatever else, but it’s pretty loose. They have their own life, their own way of developing over time.

(03:10:24)
In that sense, they’re quite biological. There was a plan after the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren was making plans not only for St. Paul’s Cathedral, but also to rebuild in large Parisian-type boulevards, a large part of the area of central London that was burnt. It never happened because they didn’t have enough money I think, but it’s interesting what was in the plan. There were all these boulevards, but there were no pubs and no coffee houses or anything like that. The reality was London just grew up in a set of jumbled streets.

(03:11:03)
It was the coffee houses and the pubs where all the business of the City of London was being done. That was where the real life of the city was. No one had planned it. The whole thing was unplanned and works much better that way. In that sense, the cell is completely unplanned. It’s not controlled by the genes in the nucleus in the way that we might like to think that it is, but it’s an evolved entity that has the same flux, the same animation, the same life. I think it’s a beautiful analogy, but I wouldn’t get too stuck with it as a metaphor.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:32)
See, I disagree with you. I disagree with you. I think you are so steeped. Actually, the entirety of science, the history of science is steeped in a biological framework of thinking about what is life. Not just biological, is very human-centric too, that the human organism is the epitome of life on Earth. I don’t know, I think there is some deep fundamental way-
Lex Fridman
(03:12:00)
On earth, I don’t know. I think there is some defundimental way in which a city is a living being in the same way that a-
Nick Lane
(03:12:10)
It doesn’t give rise to an offspring city. So it doesn’t work by natural selection, it works by, if anything, memes, it works by.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:19)
Yeah. But isn’t it-
Nick Lane
(03:12:20)
Copying itself conceptually as a mode of being?
Lex Fridman
(03:12:24)
So, maybe memes, maybe ideas are the organisms that are really essential to life on Earth. Maybe it’s much more important about the collective aspect of human nature, the collective intelligence than the individual intelligence. Maybe the collective humanity is the organism and the thing that defines the collective intelligence of humanity is the ideas. And maybe the way that manifests itself is cities maybe, or societies or geographically constrained societies or nations and all that kind of stuff. From an alien perspective, it’s possible that that is the more deeply noticeable thing, not from a place of ignorance.
Nick Lane
(03:13:08)
Yes, but what’s noticeable doesn’t tell you how it works. I don’t have any problem with what you’re saying really, except that it’s not possible without the humans. We went from a hunter-gatherers type economy, if you like, without cities, through to cities. And as soon as we get into human evolution and culture and society and so on, then yes, there are other forms of evolution, other forms of change. But cities don’t directly propagate themselves, they propagate themselves through human societies. And human societies only exist because humans as individuals propagate themselves. So there is a hierarchy there. And without the humans in the first place, none of the rest of it exists.
Lex Fridman
(03:13:54)
So for you, life is primarily defined by the basic unit on which evolution can operate on Earth.
Nick Lane
(03:14:02)
I think it’s really important thing. Yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:04)
Yeah. And we don’t have any other better ideas than evolution for how to create life.
Nick Lane
(03:14:10)
I never came across a better idea than evolution. Maybe I’m just ignorant and I don’t know. And you mentioned that’s automator and so on, and I don’t think specifically about that, but I have thought about it in terms of selective units at the origin of life and the difference between evolvability and complexity or just increasing complexity, but within very narrowly defined limits. The great thing about genes and about selection is it just knocks down all those limits. It gives you a world of information in the end, which is limited only by the biophysical reality of what kind of an organism you are, what kind of a planet you live on and so on. And cities and all these other forms that look alive and could be described as alive, because they can’t propagate themselves can only exist as the product of something that did propagate itself.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:05)
Yeah, there’s a deeply compelling truth to that kind of way of looking at things, but I just hope that we don’t miss the giant cloud among us.
Nick Lane
(03:15:18)
I kind of hope that I’m wrong about a lot of this because I can’t say that my worldview is particularly uplifting, but in some sense it doesn’t matter if it’s uplifting or not, science is about what’s reality. What’s out there? Why is it this way? And I think there’s beauty in that too.

Depression

Lex Fridman
(03:15:39)
There’s beauty in darkness. You write about life and death sort of at the biological level. Does the question of suicide, why live? Does the question of why the human mind is capable of depression? Are you able to introspect that from a place of biology? Why our minds, why we humans can go to such dark places? Why can we commit suicide? Why can we go suffer? Suffer, period, but also suffer from a feeling of meaninglessness of going to a dark place that depression can take you? Is this a feature of life or is it a bug?
Nick Lane
(03:16:30)
I don’t know. If it’s a feature of life, then I suppose it would have to be true of other organisms as well. And I don’t know. We were talking about dogs earlier on and they can certainly be very sad and upset and may mooch for days after their owner died or something like that. So I suspect in some sense it’s a feature of biology. It is probably a feature of mortality. It’s probably a… But beyond all of that, I guess there’s two ways you could come at it. One of them would be to say, well, you can effectively do the math and come to the conclusion that it’s all pointless and that there’s really no point in me being here any longer. And maybe that’s true in the greater scheme of things. You can justify yourself in terms of society, but society will be gone soon enough as well. And you end up with a very bleak place just by logic.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:26)
In some sense, it’s surprising that we can find any meaning at all.
Nick Lane
(03:17:30)
Well, maybe this is where consciousness comes in that we have transient joy, but with transient joy, we have transient misery as well. And sometimes with everything in biology, getting the regulation right is practically impossible. You will always have a bell-shaped curve where some people unfortunately are at the joy end and some people are at the misery end, and that’s the way brains are wired. And I doubt there’s ever an escape from that. It’s the same with sex and everything else as well, where dealing with you can’t regulate it. So anything goes. It’s all part of biology.

Writing

Lex Fridman
(03:18:12)
Amen to that. Let me, on writing in your book, Power, Sex and Suicide. First of all, can I just read off the books you’ve written, if there’s any better titles and topics to be covered, I don’t know what they are. It makes me look forward to whatever you’re going to write next. I hope there’s things you write next. So first you wrote Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World as we’ve talked about this idea of the role of oxygen in life on Earth. Then wait for it, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Then Life Ascending: The 10 Great Inventions of Evolution. The Vital Question, the first book I’ve read of yours, the Vital Question: Why is Life the Way It Is? And the new book Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death. In Power, sex and Suicide, you write about writing or about a lot of things, but I have a question about writing.

(03:19:13)
You write in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Ford Prefect spends 15 years researching his revision to the Guide’s entry on the Earth, which originally read, “Harmless,” by the way, I would also as a side question, I would like to ask you what would be your summary of what Earth is.

(03:19:34)
But you write, “His long essay on the subject is edited down by the guide to read “Mostly Harmless.” I suspect that too many new editions suffer similar fate, if not through absurd editing decisions, at least through a lack of meaningful change in content. As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed since the first edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published, and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions. Some say that even Darwin lessened the power of his arguments in the Origin of species through his multiple revisions in which he dealt with criticisms and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction. I prefer my original to speak for itself even if it turns out to be wrong.”

(03:20:23)
Let me ask the question about writing, both your students in the academic setting, but also writing some of the most brilliant writings on science and humanity I’ve ever read. What’s the process of writing? How do you advise other humans? If you were to talk to young Darwin or the young you and just young anybody and give advice about how to write and how to write well about these big topics, what would you say?
Nick Lane
(03:20:57)
I suppose there’s a couple of points. One of them is, what’s the story? What do I want to know? What do I want to convey? Why does it matter to anybody? And very often the biggest, most interesting questions, the childlike questions are the one that actually everybody wants to ask, but daren’t quite do it in case they look stupid. And one of the nice things about being in science is the longer you’re in, the more you realize that everybody doesn’t know the answer to these questions and it’s not so stupid to ask them after all.

(03:21:36)
So trying to ask the questions that I would’ve been asking myself at the age of 15, 16 when I was really hungry to know about the world and didn’t know very much about it and wanted to go to the edge of what we know but be helped to get there. I don’t want too much terminology. And so I want someone to keep a clean eye on what the question is. Beyond that, I’ve wondered a lot about who am I writing for? And that was in the end, the only answer I had was myself at the age of 15 or 16. Because even if you just don’t know who’s reading it, but also where are they reading it? Are they reading it in the bath or in bed or on the metro or are they listening to an audiobook? Do you want to have a recapitulation every few pages because you read three pages at a time?

(03:22:41)
Or are you really irritated by that? You’re going to get criticism from people who are irritated by what you’re doing and you don’t know who they are or what you’re going to do that’s going to irritate people. And in the end, all you can do is just try and please yourself. And that means what are these big, fun, fascinating, big questions, and what do we know about it? And can I convey that? And I kind of learned in trying to write, first of all, say what we know. And I was shocked in the first couple of books how often I came up quickly against all the stuff we don’t know.

(03:23:21)
And if you’re trying to… I realized later on in supervising various physicists and mathematicians who are PhD students and I know their math is way beyond what I can do. But the process of trying to work out what are we actually going to model here, what’s going into this equation? It’s a very similar one to writing, what am I going to put on a page? What’s the simplest possible way I can encapsulate this idea so that I now have it as a unit that I can kind of see how it interacts with the other units? And you realize that, well, if this is like that and this is like this, then that can’t be true.

(03:23:58)
So you end up navigating your own path through this landscape and that can be thrilling because you don’t know where it’s going. And I’d like to think that that’s one of the reasons my books have worked for people because this sense of thrilling adventure ride, I don’t know where it’s going either.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:14)
So finding the simplest possible way to explain the things we know and the simplest possible way to explain the things we don’t know and the tension between those two, that’s where the story emerges. What about the edit? Do you find yourself to the point of this editing down to most harmless. To arrive at simplicity, do you find the edit is productive or does it destroy the magic that was originally there?
Nick Lane
(03:24:44)
No, I usually find… I think I’m perhaps a better editor than I’m a writer. I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:51)
Put a bunch of crap on the page first and then see where the edit takes it.
Nick Lane
(03:24:56)
But then there’s the professional editors who come along as well. And in Transformer, the editor came back to me after I’d sent… Two months after I sent the first edition, he’d read the whole thing and he said, “The first two chapters prevent a formidable hurdle to the general reader, go and do something about it.” And that was the last thing I really wanted to hear.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:18)
But your editor sounds very eloquent in speech.
Nick Lane
(03:25:21)
Yeah. Well, this was an email, but I thought about it. The bottom line is he was right. And so I put the whole thing aside for about two months, spent the summer, this would’ve been I guess last summer, and then turned to it with full attention in about September or something and rewrote those chapters almost from scratch. I kept some of the material, but it took me a long time to process it, to work out what needs to change, where does it need to… I wasn’t writing in this time, how am I going to tell this story better so it’s more accessible and interesting. And in the end, I think it worked. It is still difficult, it’s still biochemistry, but he ended up saying, “Now it’s got a barreling energy to it.” And because he’d told me the truth the first time I decided to believe that he was telling me the truth the second time as well and was delighted.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(03:26:13)
Could you give advice to young people in general, folks in high school, folks in college, how to take on some of the big questions you’ve taken on. Now you’ve done that in the space of biology and expand it out, how can they have a career they can be proud of or have a life they can be proud of?
Nick Lane
(03:26:35)
Gosh, that’s a big question.
Lex Fridman
(03:26:40)
I’m sure you’ve gathered some wisdom that you can impart.
Nick Lane
(03:26:46)
So the only advice that I actually ever give to my students is follow what you’re interested in. Because they’re often worried that if they make this decision now and do this course instead of that course, then they’re going to restrict their career opportunities. And there isn’t a career path in science. There is but isn’t. There’s a lot of competition. There’s a lot of death symbolically. So who survives? The people who survive are the people who care enough to still do it. And they’re very often the people who don’t worry too much about the future and are able to live in the present. If you do a PhD, you’ve competed hard to get onto the PhD, then you have to compete hard to get a post-doc job and you have the next bond maybe on another continent, and it’s only two years anyway, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to get a faculty position at the end of it.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:51)
And there’s always the next step to compete. If you get a faculty position, you get a tenure, and with tenure you go full professor and full professor, then you go to some kind of whatever the discipline is, there’s an award. If you’re in physics, you’re always competing for the Nobel Prize, there’s different awards and then eventually you’re all competing to… There’s always a competition.
Nick Lane
(03:28:12)
So there is no happiness. Happiness does not lie.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:15)
If you’re looking into the future, yes.
Nick Lane
(03:28:16)
And if what you’re caring about is a career, then it’s probably not the one for you. If though, you can put that aside. And I’ve also worked in industry for a brief period and I was made redundant twice, so I know that there’s no guarantee that you’ve got a career that way either.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:37)
Yes.
Nick Lane
(03:28:40)
So live in the moment and try and enjoy what you’re doing. And that means really go to the themes that you’re most interested in and try and follow them as well as you can. And that tends to pay back in surprising ways. I don’t know if you’ve found this as well, but I found that people will help you often, if they see some light shining in the eye and you are excited about their subject and just want to talk about it. And they know that their friend in California’s got a job coming up, they’ll say, “Go for this. This guy’s all right.” They’ll use the network to help you out if you really care. And you’re not going to have a job two years down the line, but what you really care about is what you’re doing now, then it doesn’t matter if you have a job in two years time or not. It’ll work itself out if you’ve got the light in your eye. And so that’s the only advice I can give. And most people probably drop out through that system because the fight is just not worth it for them.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:49)
Yeah, when you have the light in your eye, when you have the excitement for the thing, what happens is you start to surround yourself with others that are interested in that same thing that also have the light. If you really are rigorous about this, I think it takes effort to make…
Nick Lane
(03:30:07)
Oh, you’ve got to be obsessive. But if you’re doing what you really love doing, then it’s not work anymore, it’s what you do.
Lex Fridman
(03:30:13)
But I also mean the surrounding yourself with other people that are obsessed about the same thing because depending on-
Nick Lane
(03:30:19)
Oh, that takes some work as well.
Lex Fridman
(03:30:20)
Yes.
Nick Lane
(03:30:21)
And luck
Lex Fridman
(03:30:21)
Finding the right mentors, the collaborators. Because I think one of the problem with the PhD process is people are not careful enough in picking their mentors. Those are people… Mentors and colleagues and so on, those people are going to define the direction of your life, how much you love a thing. The power of just the few little conversations you have in the hallway is incredible. So you have to be a little bit careful in that sometimes you just get randomly almost assigned. Really pursue, I suppose, the subject as much as you pursue the people that do that subject. So both the whole dance of it.
Nick Lane
(03:31:09)
They kind of go together really.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:10)
Yeah, they do. They really do. But take that part seriously, and probably in the way you’re describing it, careful how you define success because-
Nick Lane
(03:31:22)
You’ll never find happiness in success. I think there’s a lovely quote from Robert Louis, Stevenson, I think, who said, “Nothing in life is so disenchanting as attainment.”
Lex Fridman
(03:31:33)
Yeah. So in some sense, the true definition of success is getting to do today, what you really enjoy doing, just what fills you with joy. And that’s ultimately success. Success isn’t the thing beyond the horizon, the big trophy, the financial-
Nick Lane
(03:31:54)
I think it’s as close as we can get to happiness. That’s not to say you’re full of joy all the time, but it’s as close as we can get to a sustained human happiness is by getting some fulfillment from what you’re doing on a daily basis. And if what you’re looking for is the world giving you the stamp of approval with a Nobel Prize or a fellowship or whatever it is, then I’ve known people like this who they’re eaten away by the anger, the kind of caustic resentment that they’ve not been awarded this prize that they deserve.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:30)
And the other way, if you put too much value into those kinds of prizes and you win them, I’ve gotten the chance to see that the more “successful” you are in that sense, the more you run the danger of growing ego so big that you don’t get to actually enjoy the beauty of this life. You start to believe that you figured it all out, as opposed to, I think what ultimately the most fun thing is being curious about everything around you, being constantly surprised and these little moments of discovery, of enjoying beauty in small and big ways all around you.

(03:33:12)
And I think the bigger your ego grows, the more you start to take yourself seriously, the less you’re able to enjoy that.
Nick Lane
(03:33:17)
Oh man, I couldn’t agree more.

Earth

Lex Fridman
(03:33:20)
So the summary from harmless to mostly harmless in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, how would you try to summarize Earth? And if you had to summarize the whole thing in a couple of sentences and maybe throw in meaning of life in there, why? Maybe is that a defining thing about humans that we care about the meaning of the whole thing? I wonder if that should be part of the… These creatures seem to be very lost.
Nick Lane
(03:33:58)
Yes. They’re always asking why. That’s my defining question is why. People used to made a joke, I have a small scar on my forehead from a climbing accident years ago, and the guy I was climbing with had dislodged a rock and he shouted something, he shouted, “Below,” I think, meaning that the rock was coming down and I hadn’t caught what he said. So I looked up and he went smashed straight on my forehead, and everybody around me took the piss saying, “He looked up to ask why.”
Lex Fridman
(03:34:32)
Yeah, but that’s a human imperative, that’s part of what it means to be human. Look up to the sky and ask why.
Nick Lane
(03:34:42)
So your question, define the Earth. I’m not sure I can do that. The first word that comes to mind is living, I wouldn’t like to say mostly living, but perhaps.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:57)
Mostly living. Well, it’s interesting because if you were to write The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I suppose say our idea that we talked about, the bacteria is the most prominent form of life throughout the galaxy in the universe. I suppose that Earth would be kind of unique and would require-
Nick Lane
(03:35:22)
There’s abundance in that case.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:24)
Yeah.
Nick Lane
(03:35:25)
It’s profligate, it’s rich. It’s enormously, enormously living.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:29)
So how would you describe that it’s not bacteria, it’s…
Nick Lane
(03:35:36)
Eukaryotic.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:39)
Yeah.
Nick Lane
(03:35:39)
Well that’s the technical term, but it is basically.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:46)
Yeah. [inaudible 03:35:47]
Nick Lane
(03:35:47)
How would I describe that? I’ve actually really struggled with that term because the word… There’s few words quite as good as eukaryotic to put everybody off immediately. You start using words like that and maybe they’ll leave the room. Krebs cycle is another one that gets people to leave the room.
Lex Fridman
(03:36:06)
That’s interesting.
Nick Lane
(03:36:07)
So I’m trying to think, is there another word for eukaryotic that I can use? And really the only word that I’ve been able to use is complex, complex cells, complex life and so on. And that word, it serves one immediate purpose, which is to convey an impression, but then it means so many different things to everybody that actually is lost immediately. And so it is kind of…
Lex Fridman
(03:36:36)
Well, that’s a noticeable from the perspective of other planets, that is a noticeable face transition of complexity is the eukaryotic. What about the harmless and the mostly harmless? Is that kind of…
Nick Lane
(03:36:51)
Probably accurate on a universal kind of scale. I don’t think that humanity is in any danger of disturbing the universe at the moment.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:02)
At the moment, which is why the mostly, we don’t know. Depends what Elon is up to. Depends how many rockets. I think-
Nick Lane
(03:37:10)
It’ll be still even then a while, I think, before we disturb the fabric of time and space.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:17)
Was the aforementioned Andrej Karpathy. I think he summarized earth as a system where you hammer it with a bunch of photons. The input is like photons and the output is rockets. If you just-
Nick Lane
(03:37:37)
Well, that’s a hell of a lot of photons before it was a rocket.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:40)
But maybe in the span of the universe, it’s not that much time. And I do wonder what the future is, whether we’re just in the early beginnings of this Earth, which is important when you try to summarize it or we’re at the end where humans have finally gained the ability to destroy the entirety of this beautiful project we’ve got going on now with nuclear weapons, with engineered viruses, with all those kinds of things.
Nick Lane
(03:38:10)
Or just inadvertently through global warming and pollution and so on. We’re quite capable. We just need to pass the point.
Lex Fridman
(03:38:18)
[inaudible 03:38:18]
Nick Lane
(03:38:18)
I think we’re more likely to do it inadvertently than through a nuclear war, which could happen at any time. But my fear is we just don’t know where the tipping points are and we will kind of think we’re smart enough to fix the problem quickly if we really need to. I think that’s the overriding assumption that, “We’re all right for now. Maybe in 20 years time it’s going to be a calamitous problem, and then we’ll really need to put some serious mental power into fixing it.” Without seriously worrying that perhaps that is too late and that however brilliant we are, we miss the boat.
Lex Fridman
(03:38:59)
And just walk off the cliff. I don’t know. I have optimism in humans being clever descendants.
Nick Lane
(03:39:05)
Oh, I have no doubt that we can fix the problem, but it’s an urgent problem and we need to fix it pretty sharpish.
Lex Fridman
(03:39:14)
And-
Nick Lane
(03:39:14)
I do have doubts about whether politically we are capable of coming together enough to not just in any one country, but around the planet to… I know we can do it, but do we have the will? Do we have the vision to accomplish it?
Lex Fridman
(03:39:31)
That’s what makes this whole ride fun. We don’t know, not only do we not know if we can handle the crises before us, we don’t even know all the crises that are going to be before us in the next 20 years. The ones, I think, that will most likely challenge us in the 21st century are the ones we don’t even expect. People didn’t expect World War II at the end of World War I.
Nick Lane
(03:39:57)
Not at the end of World War I, but by the late 1920s, I think people were beginning to worry about it.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:03)
Yeah, no, there’s always people worrying about everything. So if you focus on the thing that-
Nick Lane
(03:40:08)
People worry about, yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:09)
Because there’s a million things people worry about and 99.99999% of them don’t come to be. Of course, the people that turn out to be right, they’ll say, I knew all along,” but that’s not an accurate way of knowing what you could have predicted. I think rationally speaking, you can worry about it, but nobody thought you could have another world war, the war to end all wars. Why would you have another war? And the idea of nuclear weapons just technologically is a very difficult thing to anticipate, to create a weapon that just jumps orders of magnitude and destructive capability. And of course, we can intuit all the things like engineered viruses, nanobots, artificial intelligence. Yes, all the different complicated global effects of global warming. So how that changes the allocation of resources, the flow of energy, the tension between countries, the military conflict between countries, the reallocation of power.

(03:41:06)
Then looking at the role of China and this whole thing with Russia and growing influence of Africa and the weird dynamics of Europe and then America falling apart through the political division, fueled by recommender systems through Twitter and Facebook. The whole beautiful mess is just fun. And I think there’s a lot of incredible engineers, incredible scientists, incredible human beings, that while everyone is bickering and so on online for the fun of it, on the weekends, they’re actually trying to build solutions. And those are the people that will create something beautiful. At least that’s the process of evolution. It all started with a Chuck Norris single cell organism that went out from the vents and was the parent to all of us. And for that guy or lady or both, I guess, is a big thank you. And I can’t wait to what happens next. And I’m glad there’s incredible humans writing and studying it like you are. Nick, it’s a huge honor that you would talk to me.
Nick Lane
(03:42:12)
This has been fantastic.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:13)
This is really amazing. I can’t wait to read what you write next. Thank you for existing and thank you for talking today.
Nick Lane
(03:42:24)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:26)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Nick Lane. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Steve Jobs. “I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #336

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #336 with Ben Shapiro.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
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Table of Contents

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Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Ben Shapiro
(00:00:00)
The great lie we tell ourselves is that people who are evil are not like us. They’re class apart. Everybody in history who has sinned is a person who’s very different from me. Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton, he’s fond of doing a thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand If they had lived in Alabama in 1861, how many of you would be abolitionists? And everybody raises their hand and he says, “Of course that’s not true.” The best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:32)
Do you ever sit back in the quiet of your mind and think, Am I participating in evil?
Lex Fridman
(00:00:41)
The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, host of the Ben Shapiro show, co-founder of The Daily Wire, and author of several books, including The Authoritarian Moment, The Right Side of History and Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. Whatever Your political leanings, I humbly asked that you tried to put those aside and listen with an open mind trying to give the most charitable interpretation of the words we say. This is true in general for this podcast, whether the guest is Ben Shapiro or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, I will talk to everyone from every side, from the far left to the far right, from presidents to prisoners, from artists to scientists, from the powerful to the powerless, because we are all human, all capable of good and evil, all with fascinating stories and ideas to explore.

(00:01:44)
I seek only to understand, and in so doing, hopefully add a bit of love to the world. This is Lex Fridman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Ben Shapiro.

Kanye ‘Ye’ West

Lex Fridman
(00:02:01)
Let’s start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by Ye formerly known as Kanye West about Jewish people?
Ben Shapiro
(00:02:09)
They’re awful and antisemitic and they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre death con 3 tweet, and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think that was the Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian stuff, and then Jews running all of the media, Jews being in charge of the financial sector. Jewish people… I called it on my show, there’s Sherman Nazism, and it is. It’s like right from protocols of the Elders of Zion type stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:43)
Do you think those words come from pain, where they come from?
Ben Shapiro
(00:02:47)
And it’s always hard to try and read somebody’s mind what he looks like to me, just having experience in my own family with people who are bipolar is he seems like a bipolar personality. He seems like somebody who is in the middle of a manic episode. And when you’re manic, you tend to say a lot of things that you shouldn’t say, and you tend to believe that they’re the most brilliant things ever said. The Washington Post, posted an entire piece speculating about how bipolarism played into the stuff that Ye was saying, and it’s hard for me to think that it’s not playing into it, especially because even if he is an anti-Semite, and I have no reason to suspect he’s not given all of his comments, if he had an ounce of common sense, he would stop at a certain point. And Bipolarism tends to drive you well past the point where common sense applies.

(00:03:37)
So I would imagine it’s coming from that. From his comments, I would also imagine that he’s doing the logical mistake that a lot of anti-Semites or racist or bigots do, which is somebody hurt me, that person is a Jew, therefore all Jews are bad. And that jump from a person did something to me I don’t like, who’s a member of a particular race or class, and therefore everybody of that race or class is bad. That’s textbook bigotry and that’s pretty obviously what Ye’s, engaging in here.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:07)
So jumping from the individual to the group.
Ben Shapiro
(00:04:09)
That’s the way he’s been expressing it, right? He keeps talking about his Jewish agents, and I watched your interview with him and you kept saying this, “So just name the agents. Just name the people who are screwing you.” And he wouldn’t do it. Instead, he just kept going back to the general, the group, the Jews in general. That’s textbook bigotry, and if we’re putting any other context, he would probably recognize it as such.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:30)
To the degree that’s what fuels hate in the world. What’s the way to reverse that process? What’s the way to alleviate the hate?
Ben Shapiro
(00:04:38)
When it comes to alleviating the stuff that he’s saying, obviously debunking it, making clear that what he’s saying is garbage. But the reality is that for most people who are in any way engaged with these issues, I don’t think they’re being convinced to be antisemitic by Ye. I think that there’s a group of people who may be swayed that antisemitism is acceptable because Ye is saying what he’s saying and he’s saying so very loudly and he’s saying it over and over. But for example, there were these signs that were popping up in Los Angeles saying, Ye is right. That group’s been out there posting antisemitic signs on the freeways for years, and their groups like that posting antisemitic signs where I live in Florida, they’ve been doing that for years, well before Ye was saying this sort of stuff. It’s just like the latest opportunity to jump on that particular bandwagon. But listen, I think that people do have a moral duty to call that stuff out.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:34)
So there is a degree to which it normalizes that idea that Jews control the media, Jews control X institution. Is there a way to talk about a high representation of a group like Jewish people in a certain institution like the media or Hollywood and so on without it being a hateful conversation?
Ben Shapiro
(00:06:02)
Sure, of course. A high percentage of higher than statistically represented in the population, percentage of Hollywood agents are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of lawyers generally are probably Jewish. A high percentage of accountants are probably Jewish. Also, A higher percentage of engineers are probably Asian. Like the statistical truths are statistical truths. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people who are being talked about. They’re a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one arena or another. Ranging from the cultural to sometimes the genetic. There are certain areas of the world where people are better long distance runners because of their genetic adaptations in those particular areas of the world. That’s not racist, that’s just fact. What starts to get racist is when you are attributing a bad characteristic to an entire population based on the notion that some members of that population are doing bad things.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:58)
Yeah, there’s a jump between… It’s also possible that record label owners as a group have a culture that Fs over artists.
Ben Shapiro
(00:07:09)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:09)
Doesn’t treat artists fairly. And it’s also possible that there’s a high representation of Jews in the group of people that own record labels, but it’s that small, but a very big leap that people take from the group that own record labels to all Jews.
Ben Shapiro
(00:07:27)
For sure. And I think that one of the other issues also is that antisemitism is fascinating because it breaks down into so many different parts, meaning that if you look at of different types of antisemitism, if you’re a racist against black people, it’s typically because you’re racist based on the color of their skin.

(00:07:44)
If you’re racist against the Jews, you’re antisemitic. Then there are actually a few different ways that breaks down. You have antisemitism in terms of ethnicity, which is like Nazi antisemitism. You have Jewish parentage, you have Jewish grandparent, therefore your blood is corrupt and you are inherently going to have bad properties. Then there’s old school religious antisemitism, which is that the Jews are the killers of Christ, or the Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys, and therefore Judaism is bad and therefore Jews are bad. And the way that you get out of that antisemitism historically speaking is mass conversion, which most antisemitism for a couple thousand years actually was not ethnic. It was much more rooted in this sort of stuff. If a Jew converted out of the faith, then the antisemitism was alleviated.

(00:08:28)
And then there’s a bizarre antisemitism that’s political antisemitism, and that is members of a group that I don’t like are disproportionately Jewish. Therefore all Jews are members of this group or are predominantly represented in this group. So you’ll see Nazis saying the communists are Jews. You’ll see communist saying the Nazis are Jews. Or you’ll see communist saying that the capitalists rather are Jews. And so that’s the weird thing about antisemitism. It’s like the Jews behind every corner. It’s basically a big conspiracy theory. Unlike a lot of other forms of racism, which are not really conspiracy theory, antisemitism tends to be a conspiracy theory about the levers of power being controlled by a shadowy cadre of people who are getting together behind closed doors to control things.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:12)
The most absurd illustration of antisemitism, just like you said, is Stalin versus Hitler over Poland that every bad guy was a Jew. So every enemy… There’s a lot of different enemy groups, intellectuals, political and so on. Military. And behind any movement that is considered the enemy for the Nazis and any movement that’s considered the enemy for the Soviet army are the Jews. What is the fact that Hitler took power teach you about human nature? When you look back at the history of the 20th century, what do you learn from that time?

Hitler and the nature of evil

Ben Shapiro
(00:09:53)
There are a bunch of lessons too. Hitler taking power. The first thing I think people ought to recognize about Hitler taking power is that the power had been centralized in the government before Hitler took it. So if you actually look at the history of Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republic had effectively collapsed. The power had been centralized in the Chancellor and really under Hindenburg for a couple of years before that. And so it was only a matter of time until someone who was bad grabbed the power. And so the struggle between the reds and the browns in Nazism, in pre Nazi Germany led to this up spiraling of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler in through the front door, not through the back door, he was elected.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:35)
So you think Communists could have also taken power?
Ben Shapiro
(00:10:37)
There’s no question Communists could have taken power. There were serious force in pre Nazi Germany.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:41)
Do you think there was an underlying current that would’ve led to an atrocity if the communist had taken power?
Ben Shapiro
(00:10:47)
Wouldn’t have been quite the same atrocity, but obviously the Communists in Soviet Russia at exactly this time were committing the Holodomor. So there were very few good guys in terms of good parties. The moderate parties were being dragged by the radicals into alliance with them to prevent the worst case scenario from the other guy, so if you look at… I’m fascinated by the history of this period because it really does speak to how does a democracy break down? The 1920s, Weimar Republic was a very liberal democracy. How does a liberal democracy break down into complete fascism and then into genocide? And there’s a character who was very prominent in the history at that time named Franz von Papen, who was actually the second to last chancellor of the Republic before Hitler. So he was the chancellor, and then he handed over to Schleicher, and then he ended up collapsing, and that ended up handing power over to Hitler.

(00:11:37)
It was Papen who had stumped for Hitler to become chancellor. Papen was a Catholic Democrat. He didn’t like Hitler. He thought that Hitler was a radical and a nut job, but he also thought that Hitler being a buffoon, as he saw it, was going to essentially be usable by the right forces in order to prevent the communists from taking power, maybe in order to restore some legitimacy to the regime because he was popular in order for Papen to retain power himself. And then immediately after Hitler taking power, Hitler basically kills all of Papen’s friends. Papen out of ‘loyalty’ stays on. He ends up helping the Anschluss in Austria. All this stuff is really interesting, mainly because what it speaks to is the great lie we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us. They’re class apart. People who do evil things, people who support evil people, they’re not like us.

(00:12:29)
And that’s an easy call everybody in history who has sinned is a person who’s very different from me. Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton, he’s fond of doing a thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand If they had lived in Alabama in 1861, how many of you would be abolitionists? And everybody raises their hand and he says, “Of course that’s not true.” The best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over.

(00:13:01)
And so you have to be very cautious in how you approach these issues and the back and forth of politics, the bipolarity of politics or polarization in politics might be a better way to put it, makes it very easy to fall into the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots that eventually could theoretically allow you to support somebody who’s truly frightening and hideous in order to stop somebody who you think is more frightening and hideous. And you see this kind of language by the way now, predominating almost all over the western world. My political enemy is an enemy of democracy. My political enemy is going to end the republic. My political enemy is going to be the person who destroys the country we live in. And so that person has to be stopped by any means necessary, and that’s dangerous stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:46)
So the communists had to be stopped in Nazi Germany, and so they’re the devil. And so any useful buffoon, as long as they’re effective against the communists would do. Do you ever wonder because the people that are participating in evil may not understand that they’re doing evil. Do you ever sit back in the quiet of your mind and think, Am I participating in evil?
Ben Shapiro
(00:14:10)
So my business partner and I, one of our favorite memes is from… There’s a British comedy show, the name escapes me, of these two guys who are members of the SS and they’re dressed in the SS uniforms and the black uniforms, the skulls on them, and they’re saying to each other, one says to the other guy, “You notice the British, the symbol is something nice, it’s like an eagle. But ours it’s a skull and crossbones. You see the Americans, you see the blue uniforms very nice and pretty. Ours are a jet black. Are we the baddies?” And that’s it. And the truth is, we look back at the Nazis and we say, “Of course they were the baddies. They wore black uniforms and they had jack boots and they had this and that.” And of course they were the bad guys. But evil rarely presents its face so clearly.

(00:14:55)
So yeah, I think you have to constantly be thinking along those lines and hopefully you try to avoid it. You can only do the best that a human being can do. But yeah, the answer is yes. I would say that I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on whether I’m doing the right thing and I may not always do the right thing. I’m sure a lot of people think that I’m doing the wrong thing on a daily basis. But it’s definitely a question that has to enter your mind as a historically aware and hopefully morally decent person.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:27)
Do you think you’re mentally strong enough if you realize that you are on the wrong side of history to switch sides? Very few people in history seem to be strong enough to do that.
Ben Shapiro
(00:15:37)
I think that the answer I hope would be yes. You never know until the time comes and you have to do it. I will say that having heterodox opinions in a wide variety of areas is something that I have done before. I’m the only person I’ve ever heard of in public life who actually has a list on their website of all the dumb stupid things I’ve ever said. So where I go through and I either say, “This is why I still believe this, or this is why what I said was terrible and stupid.” And I’m sure that list will get a lot longer.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:09)
Yeah, I look forward to new additions to that list.
Ben Shapiro
(00:16:09)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:12)
It actually is a super, super long list. People should check it out. And it’s quite honest and raw. It’s interesting to ask you, given how pro-life you are about, Ye’s, comments about comparing the Holocaust to the 900, 000 abortions in the United States a year.
Ben Shapiro
(00:16:33)
So I’ll take this from two angles. As a pro-life person, I actually didn’t find it offensive because if you believe as I do that unborn and pre-born lives deserve protection, then the slaughter of just under a million of them every year for the last almost 50 years is a historic tragedy on par with a holocaust. From the outside perspective, I get why people would say there’s a difference in how people view the pre-born as to how people view, say a seven year old who’s being killed in the Holocaust, like the visceral power and evil of the Nazi shoving full grown human beings and small children in the gas chambers, can’t be compared to a person who even from pro-life perspective, may not fully understand the consequences of their own decisions or from a pro-choice perspective, fully understands the consequences, but just doesn’t think that that person is a person. That, that’s actually different.

(00:17:20)
So I understand both sides of it. I wasn’t offended by Ye’s comments in that way though, because if you’re a pro-life human being, then you do think that what’s happening is a great tragedy on scale that involves the dehumanization of an entire class of people, the pre-born.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:36)
So the philosophical you understand the comparison.
Ben Shapiro
(00:17:39)
I do. Sure.

Political attacks on the left and the right

Lex Fridman
(00:17:41)
So in his comments, in the jumping from the individual to the group, I’d like to ask you… You’re one of the most effective people in the world that are attacking the left, and sometimes it can slip into attacking the group. Do you worry that’s the same kind of oversimplification that Ye’s, doing about Jewish people that you can sometimes do with the left as a group?
Ben Shapiro
(00:18:05)
So when I speak about the left, I’m speaking about a philosophy not really speaking about individual human beings as the leftist like group, and then try to name who the members of this individual group are. I also make a distinction between the left and liberals. There are a lot of people who are liberal who disagree with me on taxes, disagree with the foreign policy, disagree with me on a lot of things. The people who I’m talking about generally, and I talk about the left in the United States, are people who believe that alternative points of view ought to be silenced because they are damaging and harmful simply based on the disagreement. So that’s one distinction.

(00:18:38)
The second distinction again is when I talk about the right versus the left, typically I’m talking about a battle of competing philosophies. And so I’m not speaking about, typically… It would be hard to, if you put a person in front of me and said, “Is this person of the left or of the right?” Having just met them, I wouldn’t be able to label them in the same way that if you met somebody in the name of Greenstein, you’d immediately go Jew, or you make a black person, they’re a black person. And that the adherence to a philosophy makes you a member of a group. If I think the philosophy is bad, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you as a person are bad. But it does mean that I think your philosophy is bad.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:11)
So the grouping is based on the philosophy versus something like a race. The color of your skin or race as in the case of the Jewish people. So it’s a different thing. You can be a little bit more nonchalant and careless in attacking a group because it’s ultimately attacking a set of ideas.
Ben Shapiro
(00:19:30)
It is really nonchalant in attacking the set of ideas. And I don’t know that nonchalant would be the way I’d put it. I try to be exact, you don’t always hit. But if I say that I oppose the Communists and then presumably I’m speaking of people who believe in the Communists philosophy. Now the question is whether I’m mislabeling, whether I’m taking somebody who’s not actually a communist and then shoving them in that group of Communists, that would be inaccurate.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:54)
The dangerous thing is it expands the group as opposed to you talking about the philosophy you’re throwing everybody who’s ever said, “I’m curious about communism. I’m curious about socialism.” There’s like a gradient. It’s like to throw something at you, I think Joe Biden said, “Maga Republicans.” I think that’s a very careless statement because the thing you jump to immediately is all Republicans.
Ben Shapiro
(00:20:19)
All Republicans voted for Trump.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:21)
Vote for Trump versus I think in the charitable interpretation that means a set of ideas.
Ben Shapiro
(00:20:28)
My actually problem with the maga Republicans line from Biden is that he went on in the speech that he made in front of Independence Hall to actually trying to define what it meant to be a maga Republican who was a threat to the republic, was the kind of language that he was using. And later on in the speech, he actually suggested, “There are moderate Republicans and the moderate Republicans are people, people who agree with me on the inflation reduction acts.” It’s like, that can’t be the dividing line between a maga Republican and a moderate Republican is somebody who agrees with you. You got to name me a Republican who disagrees with you fairly strenuously, but is not in this group of threats to the republic. You make that distinction, we can have a fair discussion about whether the idea of election denial, for example, makes somebody a threat to institutions.

(00:21:11)
That’s a conversation that we can have. And then we’ll have to discuss how much power they have, what the actual perspective is, delve into it. But I think that he was being over broad and labeling all of his political enemies under one rubric. Now again, in politics, this stuff happens all the time. I’m not going to plead clean hands here because I’m sure that I’ve been in exact. But somebody who would be good in that particular situation is for somebody to read me back the quote and I’ll let you know where I’ve been inaccurate. I’ll try to do that.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:37)
And also you don’t shy away from humor and occasional trolling and mockery and all that kind of stuff for the fun, for chaos, all that kind of stuff?
Ben Shapiro
(00:21:45)
I try not to do trollery for trollery’s sake, but if the show’s not entertaining and not fun, people aren’t going to listen. And so if you can’t have fun with politics… The truth about politics is we all take it very seriously because it has some serious ramifications. Politics is Veep, it is not House of Cards. The general rule of politics is that everyone is a moron unless proven otherwise, that virtually everything is done out of stupidity rather than malice. And that if you actually watch politics as a comedy, you’ll have a lot more fun.

(00:22:12)
And so the difficulty for me is I take politics seriously, but also I have the ability to of flip the switch and suddenly it all becomes incredibly funny because it really is like if you just watch it from a pure entertainment perspective and you put aside the fact that it affects hundreds of millions of people. Then watching President Trump being president, he’s one of the funniest humans who’s ever lived watching Kamala Harris be Kamala Harris and talking about how much he loves Venn diagrams or electric buses. That’s funny stuff. So if I can’t make fun of that, then my job becomes pretty morose pretty quickly.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:43)
Yeah, it’s funny to figure out what is the perfect balance between seeing the humor and the absurdity of the game of it versus taking it seriously enough because it does affect hundreds of millions of people. It’s a weird balance to strike. It’s like I am afraid with the internet that everything becomes a joke.
Ben Shapiro
(00:23:03)
I totally agree with this. I will say this, I try to make less jokes about the ideas and more jokes about the people in the same way that I make jokes about myself. I’m pretty self-effacing in terms of my humor. I would say at least half the jokes on my show are about me when I’m reading ads for Tommy John and they’re talking about their no wedgie guarantee, I’ll say things like that would’ve helped me in high school because it would’ve, just factually speaking. So if I can speak that way about myself, I feel like everybody else can take it as well.

Quebec mosque shooting

Lex Fridman
(00:23:31)
Difficult question. In 2017, there was a mosque shooting in Quebec City, six people died, five others seriously injured. The 27 year old gunman consumed a lot of content online and checked Twitter accounts a lot, of a lot of people. But one of the people he checked quite a lot of is you 93 times in the month leading up to the shooting. If you could talk to that young man, what would you tell him? And maybe other young men listening to this that have hate in their heart in that same way. What would you tell them?
Ben Shapiro
(00:24:03)
You’re getting it wrong. If anything that or anyone else in mainstream politics says drives you to violence, you’re getting it wrong. Now again, when it comes to stuff like this, I have a hard and fast rule that I’ve applied evenly across the spectrum. And that is I never blame people’s politics for other people committing acts of violence unless they’re actively advocating violence. So when a fan of Bernie Sanders shoots up a congressional baseball game, that is not Bernie Sanders’s fault. I may not like his rhetoric. I may disagree with him on everything. Bernie Sanders did not tell somebody to go shoot up a congressional baseball game when a nut case in San Francisco goes and hits Paul Pelosi with a hammer. I’m not going to blame Kevin McCarthy, the house speaker for that. When somebody threatens Brett Kavanaugh, I’m not going to suggest that that was Joe Biden’s fault because it’s not Joe Biden’s fault.

(00:24:49)
We can play this game all day long. And I find that the people who are most intensely focused on playing this game are people who tend to oppose the politics of the person as opposed to actually believing sincerely that this has driven somebody into the arms of the God of violence. But I have 4.7 million Twitter followers. I have 8 million Facebook followers, I have 5 million YouTube followers. I would imagine that some of them are people who are violent. I would imagine that some of them are people who do evil things or want to do evil things. And I wish that there were a wand that we could wave that would prevent those people from deliberately or mistakenly misinterpreting things as a call of violence. It’s just a negative byproduct of the fact that you can reach a lot of people. And so if somebody could point me to the comment that I suppose ‘drove’ somebody to going literally murder human beings, then I would appreciate it.

(00:25:45)
So I could talk about the comment, but don’t… Mainly because I just think that if we remove agency from individuals, and if we blame broad scale political rhetoric for every act of violence the people who are going to pay the price are actually the general population because free speech will go away. If the idea is that things that we say could drive somebody who is unbalanced to go do something evil, the necessary byproduct is hate, is that speech is a form of hate. Hate is a form of violence, speech is a form of violence. Speech needs to be curbed. And that to me is deeply disturbing.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:25)
So definitely that man, that 27 year old man is the only one responsible for the evil he did. But what if he and others like him are not nut cases? What if they’re people with pain, with anger in their heart? What would you say to them? You’re exceptionally influential and other people like you that speak passionately about ideas. What do you think is your opportunity to alleviate the hate in their heart?
Ben Shapiro
(00:26:55)
If we’re speaking about people who aren’t mentally ill and people who are just misguided, I’d say to him the thing I said to every other young man in the country, you need to find meaning and purpose in forming connections that actually matter in a belief system that actually promotes general prosperity and promotes helping other people. And this is why the message that I most commonly say to young men is, It’s time for you to grow up, mature, get a job, get married, have a family, take care of the people around you, become a useful part of your community. Never at any point in my entire career suggested violence as a resort to political issues. The whole point of having a political conversation is that it’s a conversation. If I didn’t think that it were worth trying to convince people of my point of view, I wouldn’t do what I do for a living.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:45)
So violence doesn’t solve anything?
Ben Shapiro
(00:27:47)
No, it doesn’t.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:49)
As if this wasn’t already a difficult conversation. Let me ask about Ilhan Omar, you’ve called out her criticism of Israel policies as antisemitic. Is there a difference between criticizing a race of people like the Jews and criticizing the policies of a nation like Israel?
Ben Shapiro
(00:28:13)
Of course. I criticize the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis, I would assume from a different angle than Ilhan Omar does. But yeah, I criticize the policies of a wide variety of states. And to take an example, I’ve criticized Israel’s policy in giving control of the temple mounts to the Islamic walk, which effectively prevents anybody except for Muslims praying up there. I’ve also criticized the Israeli government for their Covid crackdown. You can criticize the policies of any government, but that’s not what, Ilhan Omar does. Ilhan Omar doesn’t actually believe that there should be a state of Israel. She believes that Zionism is racism and that the existence of a Jewish state in Israel is in and of itself the great sin. That is a statement she would make about no other people in no other land. She would not say that the French don’t deserve a state for the French.

(00:28:54)
She wouldn’t say that Somalis wouldn’t deserve a state in Somalia. She wouldn’t say that that Germans don’t deserve a state in Germany. She wouldn’t say for the 50 plus Islamic states that exist across the world, that they don’t deserve states of their own. It is only the Jewish state that has fallen under her significant scrutiny. And she also promulgates laws about one specific state in the form of suggesting, for example, that Israel is an apartheid state, which it is most eminently not considering that the last unity government in Israel included an Arab party, that there are Arabs who sit on the Israeli Supreme Court and all the rest. And then beyond that, obviously she’s engaged in some of the same antisemitic ropes that you heard from Ye. The stuff about, it’s all about the Benjamins, that American support for Israel is all about the Benjamins, and she’s had to be [inaudible 00:29:36] by members of her own party about this stuff before.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:38)
Can you empathize with the plight of Palestinian people?
Ben Shapiro
(00:29:41)
Absolutely. Some of the uglier things that I’ve ever said in my career are things that I said very early on. When I was 17, 18, 19, I started writing a syndicated column, I was 17, I’m now 38. So virtually all the dumb things… I’d say virtually all, many of the dumb things, the plurality of the dumb things that I’ve said came from the ages of, I would say 17 to maybe 23. And they are rooted again in sloppy thinking. I feel terrible for people who have lived under the thumb and currently live under the thumb of Hamas, which is a national terrorist group, or the Palestinian authority, which is a corrupt oligarchy that steals money from its people and leaves them in misery or Islamic Jihad, which is an actual terrorist group.

(00:30:18)
The basic rule for the region, in my view, is if these groups were willing to make peace of Israel, they would have a state literally tomorrow. And if they are not, then there will be no peace. And it really is that simple. The formulas typically used, it’s become a bit of a bumper sticker, but it happens to be factually correct. If the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there would be a state. If the Israelis put down their guns, there’d be no Israel,
Lex Fridman
(00:30:45)
You get attacked a lot on the internet.
Ben Shapiro
(00:30:47)
Oh yeah, you noticed.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:49)
I got to ask you about your own psychology. How do you not let that break you mentally? And how do you avoid letting that lead to a resentment of the groups that attack you?
Ben Shapiro
(00:31:02)
So there are a few-
Lex Fridman
(00:31:00)
… that meant of the groups that attack you.
Ben Shapiro
(00:31:02)
I mean, so there are a few sort of practical things that I’ve done. So, for example, I would say that four years ago, Twitter was all-consuming. Twitter is an ego machine, especially the notifications button, right? The notifications button is just people talking about you all the time and the normal human tendency as, Wow, people talking about me, I got to see what they’re saying about me. Which is a recipe for insanity. So my wife actually said, “Twitter is making your life miserable. You need to take it off your phone.” So Twitter is not on my phone. If I want to log onto Twitter, I have to go onto my computer and I have to make the conscious decision to go onto Twitter and then take a look at what’s going on.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:33)
I could just imagine you, there’s a computer in the basement; you dissent in to check Twitter in the darkness-
Ben Shapiro
(00:31:39)
That’s pretty much, I mean, if you look at when I actually tweet, it’s generally in the run-up to recording my show, or when I’m prepping for my show later in the afternoon, for example.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:47)
That doesn’t affect you negatively, mentally, like put you in a bad mental space.
Ben Shapiro
(00:31:50)
Not particularly if it’s restricted to what’s being watched. Now I will say that I think the most important thing is you have to surround yourself with a group of people who you trust enough to make serious critiques of you when you’re doing something wrong, but also that they have your best interest at heart. Because the internet is filled with people who don’t have your best interests at heart and who hate your gods. So you can’t really take those critiques seriously or it does wreck you. The world is also filled with sycophants, right? The more successful you become, there are a lot of people who will tell you you’re always doing the right thing.

(00:32:21)
I’m very lucky. I got married when I was 24, my wife was 20, so she’s known me long before I was famous or wealthy or anything. So she’s a good sounding board. I have a family that’s willing to call me out on my bullshit as you talk to Ye about. I have friends who are able to do that. I try to have open lines of communications with people who I believe have my best interests at heart. But one of the sort of conditions of being friends is that when you see me do something wrong, I’d like for you to let me know that so I can correct it, and I don’t want to leave that impressions out there.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:51)
The sad thing about the internet, just looking at the critiques you get, I see very few critiques from people that actually want you to succeed, want you to grow. I mean, they’re not sophisticated. I don’t know, they’re cruel. It’s not actual critiques; it’s just cruelty.
Ben Shapiro
(00:33:09)
That’s most of Twitter. I mean, as I said, Twitter is a place to smack, and be smacked. I mean, anybody who uses Twitter for an intellectual conversation I think is engaging in category error.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:21)
I use it to spread love. I think it’s [inaudible 00:33:24]-
Ben Shapiro
(00:33:24)
You’re the only one. It’s you and no one else, my friend.

Elon Musk buying Twitter

Lex Fridman
(00:33:26)
Right. On that topic, what do you think about Elon buying Twitter? What are you hopeful on that front? What would you like to see Twitter improve?
Ben Shapiro
(00:33:36)
So I’m very hopeful about Elon buying Twitter. I mean, I think that Elon is significantly more transparent than what has taken place up till now. He seems committed to the idea that he’s going to broaden the Overton window to allow for conversations that simply were banned before. Everything ranging from efficacy of masks, with regard to COVID to whether men can become women and all the rest. A lot of things that would get you banned on Twitter before without any sort of real explanation. It seems like he’s dedicated to at least explaining what the standards are going to be and being broader in allowing a variety of perspectives on the outlet, which I think is wonderful. I think that’s also why people are freaking out. I think the kind of wailing and mashing of teeth and wearing of sad cloth and ash by so many members of the legacy media, I think a lot of that is because Twitter essentially was an oligarchy in which certain perspectives were allowed and certain perspectives just were not. That was part of a broader social media-reimposed oligarchy in the aftermath of 2017. So in order for just to really understand, I think what it means for Elon to take over Twitter, I think that we have to take a look at of the history of media in the United States in two minutes or less, the United States, the media for most of its existence, up until about 1990, at least from about 1930s until the 1990s, virtually all media was three major television networks, a couple major newspapers and the wire services. Everybody had a local newspaper with wire services that basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy. McClatchy, Reuters, AP, AFP, et cetera. So that monopoly oligopoly existed until the rise of the internet. There were sort of pokes at it in talk radio and on Fox News, but there certainly was not this plethora of sources.

(00:35:15)
Then the internet explodes and all of a sudden you can get news everywhere, and the way that people are accessing that news is… You’re, I believe, significantly younger than I am. But we used to do this thing called bookmarking, where you would bookmark a series of websites and then you would visit them every morning, and then social media came up.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:33)
Is this on AOL or-
Ben Shapiro
(00:35:34)
Yeah, exactly. You had the dial-up and it’s actually a can connected to a string and it would go. Then there came a point where social media arose and social media was sort of a boon for everybody because you no longer had to bookmark anything. You just followed your favorite accounts and all of them would pop up and you follow everything on Facebook and it would all pop up and it was all centralized. For a while everybody was super happy because this was the brand new wave of the future, made everything super easy.

(00:35:58)
Suddenly outlets like mine were able to see new eyeballs because it was all centralized in one place. You didn’t have to do it through Google optimization. You could now just put it on Facebook and so many eyeballs were on Facebook, you’d get more traffic. Everybody seemed pretty happy with this arrangement until precisely the moment Donald Trump became president. At that point, then, the sort of pre-existing supposition of a lot of the powers that be, which was, “Democrats, are going to continue winning from here on out, so we can sort of use these social media platforms as ways to push our information and still allow for there to be other information out there.” The immediate response was, “We need to reestablish this siphoning of information. It was misinformation and disinformation that won Donald Trump the election. We need to pressure the social media companies to start cracking down on misinformation and disinformation.”

(00:36:44)
Actually see this in the historical record. I mean, you can see how Jack Dorsey’s talk about free speech shifted from about 2015 to about 2018. You can see Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown in 2018, which he talked about free speech in its value, and by 2019 he was going in front of Congress talking about how he was responsible for the stuff that was on Facebook, which is not true. He’s not responsible for the stuff on Facebook. It’s a platform. Is AT&T responsible for the stuff you say on your phone? The answer is typically no. So when that happened, because all the eyeballs had now been centralized in these social media sites, they were able to suddenly control what you could see and what you could not see. The most obvious example was obviously leading up to 2020, the election; the killing of the Hunter Biden story is a great example of this.

(00:37:25)
So Elon coming in and taking over one of the social media services and saying, “I’m not playing by your rules. There’s not going to be this sort of group of people in the halls of power who are going to decide what we can see and here. Instead, I’m going to let a thousand flowers bloom. There’ll be limits, but it’s going to be on more case-by-case basis. We’re going to allow perspectives that are mainstream but maybe not mainstream in the halls of academia or in the halls of media. Let those be said.” I think it’s a really good thing. Now that comes with some responsibilities, I think, on his personal part, which would be to be, for example, I think more responsible and dissemination of information himself. Sometimes he got himself in trouble the other day for tweeting out that story about Paul Pelosi that was speculative and untrue.

(00:38:11)
I don’t think what he did is horrific. He deleted it when he found out that it was false. That’s actually a free speech working. He said something wrong, people ripped into him, he realized he was wrong, and he’s deleted it, which seems to be a better solution than preemptively banning content, which only raises more questions than it actually stops. With that said, as the face of responsible free speech, and that’s sort of what he’s pitching at Twitter, he I think should enact that himself and be a little more careful in the stuff that he tweets out.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:39)
Well, that’s a tricky balance. The reason a lot of people are freaking out is because one, he’s putting his thumb on the scale by saying he is more likely to vote Republican. He’s showing himself to be center-right, and just having a political opinion versus being this amorphous thing that doesn’t have a political opinion. I think, I haven’t talked to him about it, but if I were to guess, he’s sending a kind of signal that’s important for Twitter, the company itself, because if we’re being honest, most of the employees are left-leaning. So you have to send a signal like a resisting mechanism to say, since most of the employees are left, it’s good for Elon to be more right to balance out the way the actual engineering is done to say, “We’re not going to do any kind of act activism inside the engineering.” If I were to guess, that’s the effective aspect of that mechanism.

(00:39:34)
The other one by posting the Pelosi thing is probably to expand the Overton window. Like saying, “We could post stuff, we could post conspiracy theories and then through discourse figure out what is and isn’t true.”
Ben Shapiro
(00:39:48)
Yeah, again, like I say, I mean, I think that is a better mechanism in action than what it was before. I just think it gave people who hate his guts the opening to slap him for no reason. But I can see the strategy of it for sure. I think that the general idea that he’s pushing right where the company had pushed left before, I think that there is actually unilateral polarization right now in politics, at least with the regard of social media in which one side basically says, the solution to disinformation is to shut down free speech from the other side. The other side is basically people like me are saying, the solution to disinformation is to let a thousand… I’d rather have people on the left also being able to put out stuff that I disagree with than for there to be anybody who’s sort of in charge of these social media platforms and using them as editorial sites.

(00:40:37)
I mean, I’m not criticizing MSNBC for not putting on right wing opinions. I mean that’s fine. I run a conservative site. We’re not going to put up left wing opinions on a wide variety of issues because we are conservative site. But if you pitch yourself as a platform, that’s a different thing. If you pitch yourself as the town square, as Elon likes to call it, then I think Elon has a better idea of that than many of the former employees did. Especially now that we have that report from the Intercept suggesting that there are people from Twitter working with DHS to monitor “disinformation” and being rather vague about what disinformation meant.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:08)
Yeah, I don’t think activism has a place in what is fundamentally an engineering company that’s building a platform. The people inside the company should not be putting a thumb on the scale of what is and isn’t allowed. You should create a mechanism for the people to decide what is and isn’t allowed. Do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter? Should his account be restored?
Ben Shapiro
(00:41:33)
His account should be restored. This is coming from somebody who really dislikes an enormous number of Donald Trump’s tweets. Again, he’s a very important political personage. Even if he weren’t, I don’t think that he should be banned from Twitter or Facebook in coordinated fashion. By the way, I hold that opinion about people who I think are far worse than Donald Trump. Everyone knows I’m not Alex ones guy. I don’t like Alex Jones. I think Alex Jones parades-
Lex Fridman
(00:41:59)
You think Alex should be back on Twitter?
Ben Shapiro
(00:42:01)
I do actually. Because I think that there are plenty of people who are willing to say that what he’s saying is wrong. I’m not a big fan of this idea that because people I disagree with and people who have personally targeted me… By the way, I mean, Alex Jones has said some things about me personally that I’m not real fond of it.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:01)
You guys are not-
Ben Shapiro
(00:42:21)
Well, we’re not besties. No, it turns out, yeah, all I’ve said is I don’t really enjoy his show. He’s said some other stuff about the anti-Christ and such, but that’s a bit of a different thing, I suppose. Even so, I’m just not a big fan of this idea. I’ve defended people who have really gone after me on a personal level; have targeted me. The town square is online. Banning people from the town square is unpersoning them. Unless you violated a criminal statute, you should not be unpersoned in American society as a general rule. It doesn’t mean that companies that are not platforms don’t have the ability to respond to you. I think Adidas is right to terminate its contract with Kanye, for example, with Ye, but Twitter ain’t Adidas.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:08)
So the way your stance on free speech to the degree it’s possible to achieve on a platform like Twitter is you fight bad speech with more speech, with better speech. So if Alex Jones and Trump was allowed back on in the coming months and years leading up to the 2024 election, you think that’s going to make for a better world in the long term?
Ben Shapiro
(00:43:36)
I think that on the principle that people should be allowed to do this, and the alternative being a group of thought bosses telling us what we can and cannot see. Yes. So I think in the short term it’s going to mean a lot of things that I don’t like very much. Sure. [inaudible 00:43:49] the cost of doing business. I think that one of the cost of freedom is people doing things that I don’t particularly like, and I would prefer the freedom with all the stuff I don’t like than not the freedom.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:01)
Let me linger on the love a little bit. You and a lot of people are pretty snarky on Twitter, sometimes to the point of mockery derision, even a bit of, if I were to say, bad faith in the kind of mockery, and you see it as a war. I disagree with both you and Elon on this. Elon sees Twitter as a war zone, or at least has saw it that way in the past. Have you ever considered being nicer on Twitter as a voice that a lot of people look up to? That if Ben Shapiro becomes a little bit more about love, that’s going to inspire a lot of people or no? Is it just too fun for you?
Ben Shapiro
(00:44:42)
The answer is yes. Sure. It’s occurred to me. Let’s put it this way. There are a lot of tweets that actually don’t go out that I delete. I’ll say that Twitter’s new function, that 30 seconds function, is a friend of mine. Every so often, I’ll tweet something, and I’ll think about it in a second. I’ll be like, “Do I need to say this? Probably not.”
Lex Fridman
(00:44:57)
Can you make a book published after you pass away of all the tweets that you didn’t send?
Ben Shapiro
(00:45:06)
I don’t know. My kids are still going to be around. I hope-
Lex Fridman
(00:45:09)
[inaudible 00:45:09]-
Ben Shapiro
(00:45:09)
The legacy.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:11)
Yeah.
Ben Shapiro
(00:45:11)
I mean, sure, the answer is yes. There’s a good piece of what we would call [inaudible 00:45:15]. This is like, he’s giving a muse and schmooze right now. This is the kind of be a better person stuff. I agree with you. I agree with you. Yeah, I mean, I will say that Twitter is sometimes too much fun. I try to be at least, if not even, handed, then equal opportunity in my derision. I remember that during the 2016 primaries, I used to post rather snarky tweets about virtually all of the candidates Republican and Democrat.

(00:45:45)
Every so often, I’ll still do some of that. I do think actually the amount of snark on my Twitter feed has gone down fairly significantly. I think if you go back a couple of years, it was probably a little more snarky. Today, I’m trying to use it a little bit more in terms of strategy to get out information. Now that doesn’t mean I’m not going to make jokes about, for example, Joe Biden. I will make jokes about Joe Biden. He’s the president of the United States. Nobody else will mock him. So the entire comedic establishment has decided they actually work for him.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:12)
So the president of the United States, no matter who they are, get the snark [inaudible 00:46:17]-
Ben Shapiro
(00:46:16)
Yes. President Trump, I think, is fairly aware that he got the snark from me as well. When it comes to snaring the president, I’m not going to stop that. I think the president deserves to be snark.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:24)
So you’re not afraid of attacking Trump?
Ben Shapiro
(00:46:26)
No, I mean, I’ve done it before.

Trump and Biden

Lex Fridman
(00:46:30)
Can you say what your favorite and least favorite things are about President Trump and President Biden one at a time? So maybe one thing that you can say is super positive about Trump and one thing super negative about Trump?
Ben Shapiro
(00:46:44)
Okay, so the super positive thing about Trump is that because he has no preconceived views that are establishmentarian, he sometimes willing to go out of the box and do things that haven’t been tried before, and sometimes that works. I mean, the best example being the entire foreign policy establishment telling him that he couldn’t get a Middle Eastern deal done unless he centered the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Instead, he just went right around that and ended up cutting a bunch of peace deals in the Middle East or moving the embassy in Jerusalem. Sometimes he does stuff and it’s really out of the box and it actually works. That’s awesome in politics and neat to see.

(00:47:16)
The downside of Trump is that he has no capacity to use any sort of… There’s no filter between brain and mouth. Whatever happens in his brain is the thing that comes out of his mouth. I know a lot of people find that charming and wonderful, and it is very funny. But I don’t think that it is a particularly excellent personal quality in a person who has as much responsibility as President Trump has. I think he says a lot of damaging and bad things on Twitter. I think that he seems consumed in some ways by his own grievances, which is why you’ve seen him focusing on election 2020 so much. I think that that is very negative about President Trump. So I’m very grateful to President Trump is a conservative for many of the things that he did. I think that a lot of his personality issues are pretty severe.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:02)
What about Joe Biden?
Ben Shapiro
(00:48:05)
So I think that the thing that I like most about Joe Biden, two things. One, Biden seems to be a very good father by all available evidence. There are a lot of people who have put out tape of him talking to Hunter, and Hunter’s having trouble with drugs or whatever. I keep listening to that tape and thinking, “He seems like a really good dad.” The stuff that he’s saying to his son is stuff that, God forbid, if that were happening with my kid, I’d be singing to my kid. So you can’t help but feel for the guys. He had an incredibly difficult go of it with his first wife and the death of members of his family and then Beau dying. I mean, that kind of stuff obviously is deeply sympathetic. He seems like a deeply sympathetic father.

(00:48:51)
As far as his politics, he seems like a slap-on-the-back kind of guy, and I don’t mind that. I think that’s nice so far as it goes. It’s sort of an old school politics where things are done with handshake and personal relationships. The thing I don’t like about him is I think sometimes that’s really not genuine. I think that that’s sometimes. I think that’s his personal tendency, but I think sometimes he allows the prevailing wins of his party to carry him to incredibly radical places, and then he just doubles down on the radicalism in some pretty disingenuous ways, and there I would cite the Independence Day speech, or the independence hall speech, which I thought was truly one of the worst speeches I’ve seen a president give.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:30)
So you don’t think he’s trying to be a unifier in general?
Ben Shapiro
(00:49:32)
Not at all. I mean, that’s what he was elected to do. He was elected to do two things; not be alive and be a unifier. Those were the two things. When I say not be alive, I don’t mean physically dead. This is where the snark comes in. But what I do mean is that he was elected to not be particularly activists. Basically, the mandate was, “Don’t be Trump, be sane, don’t be Trump, calm everything down.” Instead he got in, he’s like, “What if we spend 7 trillion? What if we pull out of Afghanistan without any sort of plan? What if I start labeling all of my political enemies, enemies of the republic? What if I start bringing Dylan Mulvaney to the White House and talking about how it is a moral sin to prevent the general mutilation of minors?”

(00:50:13)
I mean, this kind of stuff is very radical stuff, and this is not a president who has pursued a unifying agenda, which is why his approval rating sank from 60% when he entered office to low 40s or high 30s today, unlike President Trump, who never had a high approval rating. Trump came into office and he had a 45% approval rating, and when he left office he had about a 43% approval rating, and bounced around between 45 and 37, pretty much his entire presidency. Biden went from being a very popular guy coming in to a very unpopular guy right now, and if you’re Joe Biden, you should be looking in the mirror and wondering exactly why.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:41)
Yeah. Do you think that pulling out from Afghanistan could be flipped as a pro for Biden in terms of he actually did it?
Ben Shapiro
(00:50:47)
I think it’s going to be almost impossible. I think the American people are incredibly inconsistent about their own views on foreign policy. In other words, we like to be isolationist, until it comes time for us to be defeated and humiliated. When that happens, we tend not to like it very much.

Hunter Biden’s laptop

Lex Fridman
(00:51:03)
You mentioned Biden being a good father. Can you make the case for and against the Hunter Biden laptop story for it being a big deal and against it being a big deal?
Ben Shapiro
(00:51:15)
Sure. So the case for it being a big deal is basically twofold. One is that it is clearly relevant if the president’s son is running around to foreign countries picking up bags of cash because his last name is Biden, while his father is vice president of the United States. It raises questions as to influence peddling for either the vice president or the former vice president using political connections. Did he make any money? Who was the big guy, right? All these open questions, that obviously implicates the questions to be asked.

(00:51:44)
Then the secondary reason that the story is big is actually because the reaction of the story. The banning of the story is in and of itself a major story. If there’s any story that implicates a presidential candidate in the last month of an election and there is a media blackout including a social media blackout, that obviously raises some very serious questions about informational flow and dissemination in the United States.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:03)
So no matter how big of a deal the story is, it is a big deal that there’s a censorship of any relevant story?
Ben Shapiro
(00:52:10)
When there’s a coordinated collusive blackout. Yeah, that’s a serious and major problem. So those are the two reasons why it would be a big story. A reason why it would not be a big story, perhaps, is if it turns out, and we don’t really know this yet, but let’s say that that Hunter Biden was basically off on his own, doing what he was doing, being a derelict or drug addict or acting badly, and his dad had nothing to do with it, and Joe was telling the truth and he really knew. But the problem is, we never actually got those questions answered. So if it turned out to be nothing of a story, the nice thing about stories that turned out to be nothing is that after they turned out to be nothing, they’re nothing.

(00:52:44)
The biggest problem with this story is that it wasn’t allowed to take the normal life cycle of a story, which is original story breaks, follow-on questions are asked, follow-on questions are answered. Story is either now a big story or it’s nothing. When the life cycle of a story is cut off at the very beginning when it’s born, then that allows you to speculate in any direction you want. You can speculate, “It means nothing. It’s nonsense. It’s a Russian laptop. It’s disinformation,” or on the other hand, “This means that Joe Biden was personally calling Hunter and telling him to pick up a sack of cash over in Beijing, and then he became president and he’s influence pedaling.”

(00:53:18)
So this is why it’s important to allow these stories to go forward. So this is why actually the bigger story for the moment is not the laptop, it’s the reaction to the laptop because it cut off that life cycle of the story. Then at some point I would assume that there will be some follow-on questions that are actually answered. I mean, the House is pledging if it goes Republican, to investigate all of this. Again, I wouldn’t be supremely surprised if it turns out that there was no direct involvement of Joe in this sort of stuff. Because it turns out, as I said before, that all of politics is veep.

(00:53:46)
This is always the story with half the scandals that you see is that everybody assumes that there’s some sort of deep and abiding clever plan, that some politician is implementing it, and then you look at it and it turns out now it’s just something dumb, right? This is perfect example of this, President Trump with the classified documents in Maralago. So people on the [inaudible 00:54:05], “It’s probably nuclear codes. Probably he’s taking secret documents and selling them to the Russians or the Chinese.” The real most obvious explanation is Trump looked at the papers and he said, “I like these papers.” Then he just decided to keep them right. Then people came to him and said, “Mr. President, you’re not allowed to keep those papers.” He said, “Who are those people? I don’t care about what they have to say. I’m putting them in the other room, in a box.”

(00:54:24)
Which is, it is highly likely that that is what happened. It’s very disappointing to people, I think, when they realize it. I mean, you know this better than I do, but the human brain is built to find patterns. It’s what we like to do. We like to find plans and patterns because this is how we survived in the wild; is you found a plan, you found a pattern, you cracked the code of the universe. When it comes to politics. The conspiracy theories that we see so often, often it’s largely because we’re seeing inexplicable events. Unless you just assume everyone’s more on. If you assume that there’s a lot of stupidity going on, everything becomes quickly explicable. If you assume that there must be some rationale behind it. You have to come up with increasingly convoluted conspiracy theories to explain just why people are acting the way that they’re acting. I find that, I don’t say 100% of the time, but 94% of the time the conspiracy theory turns out just to be people being dumb, and then other people reacting in dumb ways to the original people being dumb.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:15)
But it’s also to me in that same way, very possible, very likely, that Hunter Biden getting money in Ukraine, I guess, for consulting and all that kind of stuff is nothing burger, is he’s qualified, he’s getting money as he should. There’s a lot of influence pedaling in general, that’s not it corrupt.
Ben Shapiro
(00:55:35)
I think the most obvious explanation there probably is that he was fake influence pedaling. Meaning he wants Ukraine and he’s like, “Guess what? My dad’s Joe,” and they’re like, “Well, you don’t have any qualifications in oil and natural gas, and you don’t really have a great resume, but your dad is Joe.” Then that was the end of it. They gave him a bag of cash, hoping he would do something. He never did anything.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:51)
I think you’re making it sound worse than it is. I think this in general consulting is done in that way. It’s not like you’re not-
Ben Shapiro
(00:55:51)
I agree with.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:58)
It’s not like he is some rare case, and this is an illustration of corruption. If you can criticize consulting, which I would-
Ben Shapiro
(00:56:06)
That’s fair.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:06)
… which they’re basically not providing. You look at a resume and who’s who. If you went to Harvard, I can criticize the same thing. If you have Harvard on your resume, you’re more likely to be hired as a consultant. Maybe there’s a network there of people that you know and you hire them in that same way. If your last name is Biden… There’s a lot of last names that sound pretty good at it, right?
Ben Shapiro
(00:56:29)
That’s for sure, for sure, for sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:31)
It’s not like [inaudible 00:56:32]-
Ben Shapiro
(00:56:31)
Hunter Biden admitted that much, by the way, right. In an open interview. He was like, “If your last name weren’t Biden when you got that job?” He is like, “Probably not.” And you’re right.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:37)
That’s an honest-
Ben Shapiro
(00:56:38)
I agree with you.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:39)
It’s not like he’s getting a ridiculous amount of money. He was getting a pretty standard consulting kind of money, which also would criticize because they get a ridiculous amount of money. But sort of even to push back on the life cycle or [inaudible 00:56:52] madness, the side that was concerned about the Hunter Biden laptop story. I don’t know if there is a natural life cycle of a story because there’s something about the virality of the internet that we can’t predict that a story can just take hold and the conspiracy around it builds, especially around politics, where some popular sexy interpretation of a story that might not be connected to reality at all will become viral. That from Facebook’s perspective is probably what they’re worried about is organized misinformation campaign that makes up a sexy story or sexy interpretation of the vague story that we have, and that has an influence on the populace.
Ben Shapiro
(00:57:39)
I mean, I think that’s true. But I think the question becomes, who’s the great adjudicator there? Who adjudicates when the story ought to be allowed to go through even a bad life cycle or allowed to go viral as opposed to not. Now, that’s one thing if you want to say, “Okay, we can spot the Russian accounts that are actually promoting this stuff. They belong to the Russian government. Got to shut that down.” I think everybody agrees. This is actually one of the slides that’s happened linguistically that I really object to is the slide between disinformation and misinformation. You noticed there was this evolution. In 2017, there was a lot of talk about disinformation. There was Russian disinformation. The Russians were putting out deliberately false information in order to skew election results, was the accusation. Then people started using disinformation or misinformation, and misinformation is either mistaken information or information that is, “out of context” that becomes very subjective very quickly as to what out of context means.

(00:58:24)
It doesn’t necessarily have to be from a foreign source; it can be from a domestic source. It could be somebody misinterpreting something here. It could be somebody interpreting something correctly, but PolitiFact things that it’s out of context, and that sort of stuff gets very murky very quickly. So I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook, I mean, Zuckerberg was on with Rogan and talking about how the FBI had basically said lookout for Russian interference in the election, and then all of these people were out there saying that the laptop was Russian disinformation. So he basically shut it down. That sort of stuff is frightening, especially because it wasn’t Russian disinformation. I mean, the laptop was real. So the fact that you have people who seemed to… Let’s put it this way, maybe this is wrong. It seems as though when a story gets killed preemptively like this, it is almost universally a story that negatively affects one side of the political aisle.

(00:59:12)
I can’t remember the last time there was a story on the right that was disinformation or misinformation where social media stepped in and they went, “We cannot have this. This cannot be distributed. We’re going to all colludes that this information is not distributed.” Maybe in response to the story being proof false, it gets taken down. But, well, what made the Hunter Biden thing so amazing is that it wasn’t relieving in response to anything. It was like the story got posted. There were no actual doubts expressed as to the verified falsity of the story. It was just supposition that it had to be false and everybody jumped in. So I think that confirmed a lot of the conspiracy theories people had about social media and how it works.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:46)
So if the reason you want to slow down the viral spread of a thing is at all grounded in partisanship, that’s a problem. You should be very honest with yourself and ask yourself that question, ” Is it because I’m on the left or on the right that I want to slow this down?” Versus, is it hate, bipartisan hate speech? But it’s really tricky. But like you, I’m very uncomfortable in general, but then you kind of slowing down with any kind of censorship. But if there’s something like a conspiracy theory that spreads hate, that becomes viral. I still lean to let that conspiracy theory spread because the alternative is dangerous, more dangerous.
Ben Shapiro
(01:00:34)
It’s sort of like the ring of power. Everybody wants the ring because with the ring, you can stop the bad guys from going forward. But it turns out that the ring gives you enormous power, and that power can be used in the wrong ways, too.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:44)
You had The Daily Wire, which I’m a member of.
Ben Shapiro
(01:00:50)
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:51)
I recommend everybody sign up to it. It should be part of your regular diet, whether you’re on the left and the right, the far left or the far right. Everybody should be part of your regular diet. Okay. That said, do you worry about the audience capture aspect of it because it is a platform for conservatives and you have a powerful voice on there. It might be difficult for you to go against the talking points or against the stream of ideas that is usually connected to conservative thought. Do you worry about that?
Ben Shapiro
(01:01:25)
I mean, the audience would obviously be upset with me and would have a right to be upset with me if I suddenly flipped all of my positions on a dime. I have enough faith in my audience that I can say things that I think are true and that may disagree with the audience on a fairly regular basis, I would say. But they understand that on the deeper principle, we’re on the same side, at least, I hope, that much from the audience. It’s also why we provide a number of different views on the platforms, many of which I disagree with, but are sort of within the generalized range of conservative thought. It’s something I do have to think about every day though. Yeah, I mean, you have to think about, “Am I saying this because I’m afraid of taking off my audience or am I saying this because I actually believe?”
Ben Shapiro
(01:02:00)
I’m afraid of ticking off my audience or am I saying this because I actually believe this? And that’s a delicate dance a little bit. You have to be sort of honest with yourself.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:10)
Somebody like Sam Harris is pretty good at this, at fighting and saying the most outrageous thing that he knows. He almost leans into it. He knows it will piss off a lot of his audience. Sometimes you almost have to test the system. It’s like if you feel, you almost exaggerate your feelings just to make sure to send a signal to the audience that you’re not captured by them. So speaking of people you disagree with, what is your favorite thing about Candace Owens and what is one thing you disagree with her on?

Candace Owens

Ben Shapiro
(01:02:46)
Well, my favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things that nobody else will say. My least favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things that nobody else will say. I mean, listen, she says things that are audacious and I think need to be said. Sometimes I think that she is morally wrong. I think the way she responded to Kanye, I’ve said this clearly was dead wrong and morally wrong.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:07)
What was her response?
Ben Shapiro
(01:03:08)
Her original response was that she proffered confusion of what Ye was actually talking about and then she was defending her friend. I wish that the way that she had responded was by saying, “He’s my friend and also he said something bad and antisemitic.” I wish that she had said that.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:25)
Right away.
Ben Shapiro
(01:03:26)
Right away.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:27)
Yeah. I think you can also… This is the interesting human thing. You can be friends with people that you disagree with and you can be friends with people that actually say hateful stuff, and one of the ways to help alleviate hate is being friends with people that say hateful things.
Ben Shapiro
(01:03:44)
And calling them out on a personal level when they do say wrong or hateful things.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:50)
From a place of love and respect, and privately.
Ben Shapiro
(01:03:53)
Privately is also a big thing. I mean like the public demand for denunciation from friends to friends is difficult. And I certainly have compassion for Candace given the fact that she’s so close with Ye.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:07)
Yeah, it breaks my heart sometimes the public fights between friends and broken friendships. I’ve seen quite a few friendships publicly break over COVID. COVID made people behave their worst in many cases, which breaks my heart a little bit because the human connection is a prerequisite for effective debate and discussion and battles over ideas. Has there been any argument from the opposite political aisle that has made you change your mind about something If you look back?
Ben Shapiro
(01:04:45)
So I will say that the… I’m thinking it through because I think that my views probably on foreign policy have morphed somewhat. I would say that I was much more interventionist when I was younger. I’m significantly less interventionist now.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:00)
Can you give an example?
Ben Shapiro
(01:05:03)
Sure. I was a big backer of the Iraq war. I think now in retrospect, I might not be a backer of the Iraq war. If the same situation arose again based on the amount of evidence that had been presented or based on the sort of willingness of the American public to go at it. If you’re going to get involved in a war, you have to know what the endpoint looks like and you have to know what the American people really are willing to bear. The American people are not willing to bear open-ended occupations. And so knowing that you have to consider that going in. So on foreign policy, I become a lot more of a, I’d say almost Henry Kissinger realist, in some ways. When it comes to social policy, I would say that I’m fairly strong where I may have become slightly convinced actually by more of the conservative side of the aisle on things like drug legalization.

(01:05:53)
I think when I was younger I was much more pro-drug legalization than I am now, at least on the local level. On a federal level, I think the federal government can’t really do much other than close the borders with regard to fentanyl trafficking, for example. But when it comes to how drugs ruin local communities, you can see how drugs ruin local communities pretty easily.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:09)
Which is weird because I saw you smoke a joint right before this conversation.
Ben Shapiro
(01:06:13)
It’s my biggest thing. I mean, I try to keep that secret.

War in Ukraine

Lex Fridman
(01:06:15)
Right. Well that’s interesting about intervention. Can you comment about the war in Ukraine? So for me it’s a deeply personal thing, but I think you’re able to look at it from a geopolitics perspective. What is the role of the United States in this conflict? Before the conflict, during the conflict, and right now in helping achieve peace?
Ben Shapiro
(01:06:38)
I think before the conflict, the big problem is that the West took almost the worst possible view, which was encourage Ukraine to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but don’t let them in. And so what that does is it achieves the purpose of getting Russia really, really, really ticked off and feeling threatened, but also does not give any of the protections of NATO or the EU to Ukraine. I mean Zelensky is on film when he was a comedy actor making that exact joke. He has Merkel on the other line and she’s like, “Oh, welcome to the NATO.” And he’s like, “Great.” And she’s like, “Wait, is this Ukraine on the line? Oops.” But so that sort of policy is sort of nonsensical. If you’re going to offer alliance to somebody, offer alliance to them, and if you’re going to guarantee their security, guarantee their security and the West failed signally to do that.

(01:07:23)
So that was mistakes in the run up to the war. Once the war began, then the responsibility of the West began and became to give Ukraine as much material as is necessary to repel the invasion. And the West did really well with that. I think we were late on the ball in the United States. It seemed like Europe led the way a little bit more than the United States did there. But in terms of effectuating American interests in the region, which being an American is what I’m chiefly concerned about, the American interests were several fold. One is preserve borders. Two is degrade the Russian aggressive military because Russia’s military has been aggressive and they are geopolitical rival of the United States. Three, recalibrate the European balance with China. Europe was sort of balancing with Russia and China, and then because of the war they sort of rebalanced away from China and Russia, which is a real geo-strategic opportunity for the United States.

(01:08:17)
It seemed like most of those goals have already been achieved at this point for the United States. And so then the question becomes what’s the off ramp here and what is the thing you’re trying to prevent? So what’s the best opportunity, what’s the best case scenario, what’s the worst case scenario? And then what’s realistic? So best case scenario is Ukraine forces Russia entirely out of Ukraine, including Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea. That’s the best case scenario. Virtually no one thinks that’s accomplishable, including the United States. The White House has basically said as much, it’s still cool to imagine particularly Crimea, the Russians being forced out of Crimea.

(01:08:46)
The Ukrainians have been successful in pushing the Russians out of certain parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, but the idea they’re going to be able to push the entire Russian army completely back to the Russian borders, that would be at best a very, very long and difficult slog in the middle of a collapsing Ukrainian economy, which is a point that Zelensky has made. It’s like it’s not enough for you guys to give us military aid. We’re in the middle of a war, we’re going to need economic aid as well. So it’s a pretty open-ended and strong commitment.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:09)
Can I take a small tangent on that and best case scenario, if that does militarily happen, including Crimea, do you think there’s a world in which Vladimir Putin would be able to convince the Russian people that this was a good conclusion to the war?
Ben Shapiro
(01:09:27)
So the problem is that the best case scenario might also be the worst case scenario. Meaning that there are a couple of scenarios that are sort of the worst case scenario and this is of the puzzlement of the situation. One is that Putin feels so boxed in, so unable to go back to his own people and say, “We just wasted tens of thousands of lives here for no reason,” that he unleashes a tactical, a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. Nobody knows what happens after that. So we put NATO planes in the air to take out Russian assets, so Russians start shooting down planes, does Russia then threaten to escalate even further by attacking an actual NATO civilian center or even Ukrainian civilian center with nuclear weapons? Where it goes from there nobody knows because nuclear weapons haven’t been used since 1945. So that is a worst case scenario.

(01:10:08)
It’s an unpredictable scenario that could devolve into really, really significant problems. The other worst case scenario could be a best case scenario. It could be a worse, we just don’t know, is Putin falls, what happens after that? Who takes over for Putin? Is that person more moderate than Putin? Is that person a liberalizer? It probably won’t be Navalny, if he’s going to be ousted, it’ll probably somebody who’s a top member of Putin’s brass right now and has capacity to control the military, or it’s possible the entire regime breaks down. What you end up with is Syria in Russia where you just have an entirely out of control region with no centralizing power, which is also a disaster area. And so in the nature of risk mitigation, in sort of an attempt at risk mitigation, what actually should be happening right now is some off ramp has to be offered to Putin.

(01:10:55)
The off ramp likely is going to be him maintaining Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk. It’s probably going to be a commitment by Ukraine not to join NATO formally, but a guarantee by the West to defend Ukraine in case of an invasion of it borders again by Russia like an actual treaty obligation, not like the BS treaty obligation and when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the nineties, and that is likely how this is going to have to go. The problem is that requires political courage, not from Zelensky, it requires courage from probably Biden because the only… Zelensky is not in a political position where he can go back to his own people who have made unbelievable sacrifices on behalf of their nation in freedom and say to them, “Guys, now I’m calling it quits. We’re going to have to give them Luhansk and Donetsk and give Putin an off ramp.”

(01:11:39)
I don’t think that’s an acceptable answer to most Ukrainians at this point in time. From the polling data and from the available data we have on the ground, it’s going to actually take Biden biting the bullet and being the bad guy and saying to Zelensky, “Listen, we’ve made a commitment of material aid. We’re offering you all these things, including essentially a defense pact. We’re offering you all this stuff, but if you don’t come to the table then we’re going to have to start weaning you off.” There will have to be a stick there, it can’t just be a carrot. And so that will allow Zelensky, if Biden were to do that, it allows Zelensky to blame Biden for the solution everybody knows has to happen. So Zelensky can go back to his own people and he can say, “Listen, this is the way it has to go. I don’t want it to go this way, but it’s not my… I’m signing other people’s checks, right? I mean, this is not my money.”

(01:12:22)
And Biden would take the hit because he wouldn’t then be able to blame Ukraine for whatever happens next, which has been the easy road off I think for a lot of politicians in the West. It’s for them to just say, “Well this is up to the Ukrainians to decide. It’s up to the Ukrainians to decide.” Well is it totally up to the Ukrainians to decide, because it seems like the West is signing an awful lot of checks and all of Europe is going to freeze this winter?
Lex Fridman
(01:12:42)
This is the importance of great leadership by the way. That’s why the people we elect is very important. Do you think there’s power to just one on one conversation, or Biden sits down with Zelensky, and Biden sits down with Putin, almost in person? Or maybe I’m romanticizing the notion, but having done these podcasts in person, I think there’s something fundamentally different than through a remote call and also a distant kind of recorded political type speak, versus like man to man.
Ben Shapiro
(01:13:16)
So I’m deeply afraid that Putin outplays people in the one-on-one scenarios because he’s done it to multiple presidents already. He gets in one-on-one scenarios with Bush, with Obama, with Trump, with Biden, and he seems to be a very canny operator and a very sort of hard-nosed operator in those situations. I think that if you were going to do something like that, like an actual political face-to-face summit, what you would need is for Biden to first have a conversation with Zelensky where Zelensky knows what’s going on. So he’s aware and then Biden walks in and he says to Putin on camera, “Here’s the offer, let’s get it together, let’s make peace. You get to keep this stuff.” And then let Putin respond how Putin is going to respond. But the big problem for Putin, I think, and the problem with public facing forum, maybe it’s a private meeting.

(01:14:04)
If it’s a private meeting, maybe that’s the best thing. If it’s a public facing forum, I think it’s a problem because Putin’s afraid of being humiliated at this point. If it’s a private meeting, then sure, except that again, I wonder whether when it comes to a person as canny as Putin and to a politician that I really don’t think is a particularly sophisticated player in Joe Biden. And again this is not unique to Biden, I think that most of our presidents for the last 30, 40 years have not been particularly sophisticated players. I think that’s a risky scenario.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:40)
I still believe in the power of that because otherwise, I don’t know. I don’t think stuff on paper and political speak will solve these kinds of problems because from the Zelensky perspective, nothing but complete victory will do. As a nation, has people sacrificed way too much and they’re all in. If you look at, because I traveled to Ukraine, I spent time there. I’ll be going back there hopefully also going back to Russia, just speaking to Ukrainians, they’re all in. They’re all in.
Ben Shapiro
(01:15:13)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:14)
Nothing but complete victory.
Ben Shapiro
(01:15:15)
Yep, that’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:16)
And so for that, the only way to achieve peace is through honest human to human conversation. Giving both people a way to off ramp to walk away victorious. And some of that requires speaking honestly as a human being, but also for America to the… Actually, not even America, honestly, just the president be able to eat their own ego a bit and be the punching bag a little. Just enough for both presidents to be able to walk away and say, “Listen, we got the American president to come to us.” And I think that makes the President look strong, not weak.
Ben Shapiro
(01:15:59)
I mean, I agree with you. I think it would also require some people on the right, people like me, if it’s Joe Biden, to say, “If Biden does that, I see what he’s doing and it’s the right move.” I think one of the things that he’s afraid of to steel man him, I think one of the things he’s afraid of is he goes and he makes that sort of deal and the right says, “You just cower in front of Russia, you just gave away Ukraine,” whatever it is. But it’s going to require some people on the right to say that that move is the right move and then hold by it, if Biden actually performs that move.

Rhetoric vs truth

Lex Fridman
(01:16:24)
You’re exceptionally good at debate. You wrote How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them. You’re kind of known for this kind of stuff, just exceptionally skilled, the conversation, the debate, at getting to the facts of the matter and using logic to get to the conclusion in the debate. Do you ever worry that this power… Talk about the ring, this power you were given has corrupted you and your ability to see what’s… To pursue the truth versus just winning debates?
Ben Shapiro
(01:16:58)
I hope not. I so I think one of the things that’s kind of funny about the branding versus the reality is that most of the things that get characterized as “Destroying” in debates with facts and logic, most of those things are basically me having a conversation with somebody on a college campus. It actually isn’t like a formal debate where we sit there and we critique each other’s positions or it’s not me insulting anybody. A lot of the clips that have gone very viral is me making an argument and then they’re not being an amazing counter argument. Many of the debates that I’ve held have been extremely cordial. I take the latest example about a year ago I debated Ana Kasparian from Young Turks. It was very cordial, it was very nice, right? Yeah. That’s sort of the way that I like to debate. My rule when it comes to debate and or discussion is that my opponent actually gets to pick the mode in which we work.

(01:17:43)
So if it’s going to be a debate of ideas and we’re just going to discuss and critique and clarify, then we can do that. If somebody comes loaded for bear, then I will respond in kind, because one of the big problems I think in sort of the debate/ discussion sphere is very often misdiagnosis of what exactly is going on. People who think that a discussion is debate and vice versa. And that can be a real problem. And there are people who will treat what ought to be a discussion as, for example, an exercise and performance art. And so what that is mugging or trolling or saying trolley things in order to just get to the… That’s something I actually don’t do during debate. I mean, if you actually watch me talk to people, I don’t actually do the trolling thing. The trolling thing is almost solely relegated to Twitter and me making jokes on my show. When it comes to actually debating people. That sounds actually a lot. What we’re doing right now is just the person maybe taking just an adverse position to mine. And so that’s fine. Usually half the debate or discussion is me just asking for clarification of terms. “What exactly do you mean by this?” So I can drill down on where the actual disagreement may lie. Because some of the time people think they’re disagreeing and they’re actually not disagreeing. When I’m talking with Ana Kasparian, and she’s talking about how corporate and government have too much power together, I’m like, “Well, you sound like the Tea Party. You and I are on the same page about that.” That sort of stuff does tend to happen a lot in discussion. I think that when discussion gets termed “Debate”, it’s a problem, when debate gets termed “Discussion”, it’s even more problematic because debate is a different thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:11)
And I find that your debate and your conversation is often in good faith. You’re able to steel man on the other side, you’re actually listening, you’re considering the other side. The times when I see that “Ben Shapiro destroys leftist”, it’s usually just like you said, the other side is doing the trolling because I mean the people that do criticize you for that interaction is the people that usually get destroyed are like 20 years old and they’re usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree in terms of being able to use logic and reason and facts and so on.
Ben Shapiro
(01:19:46)
And that’s totally fine, by the way. I mean if people want to criticize me for speaking on college campuses where a lot of political conversation happens both right and left, that’s fine. I mean, I’ve had lots of conversations with people on the other side of the aisle too. I mean, right. I’ve done podcasts with Sam Harris and we’ve talked about atheism, or I’ve done debates with Ana Kasparian, or I’ve done debate with Cenk Uygur, or I’ve had conversations with lots of people on the other side of the aisle. In fact, I believe I’ve the only person on the right who recommends that people listen to his shows on the other side of the aisle. I mean, I say on my show, on a fairly regular basis, that people should listen to Pod Save America. Now, no one on Pod Save America will ever say that somebody should listen to my show.

(01:20:17)
That is verboten. That is not something that can be had. It’s one of the strangenesses of our politics. It’s what I’ve called the “Happy Birthday Problem”, which is I have a lot of friends who are of the left and are publicly of the left and on my birthday they’ll send you a text message, ” Happy birthday”, but they will never tweet happy birthday, less they be acknowledging that you were born of woman and that this can’t be allowed. So on the Sunday special, I’ve had a bevy of people who are on the other side of the aisle, a lot of them ranging from people in Hollywood like Jason Blum, to Larry Wilmore, to Sam, to just a lot of people on the left.

(01:20:50)
I think we’re in the near future, probably going to do a Sunday special with Ro Khanna, the California congressperson. Very nice guy. I had him on the show. That kind of stuff is fun and interesting. But I think that the easy way out for a clip that people don’t like is to either immediately clip the clip, it’s like a two minute clip and clip it down to 15 seconds where somebody insults me and then that goes viral, which is, welcome to the internet. Or to say, “Well, you’re only debating college… You’re only talking to 20…” I mean, I talked to a lot more people than that. That’s just not the stuff you’re watching.

Infamous BBC interview

Lex Fridman
(01:21:20)
You lost your cool in an interview with BBC’s Andrew and Neil, and you were really honest about it after, which was kind of refreshing and enjoyable. As the internet said, “They’ve never seen anyone lose an interview.” So to me, honestly, it was like seeing Floyd Mayweather Jr. or somebody knocked down. Can you take me through that experience?
Ben Shapiro
(01:21:44)
Here’s that day. That day is I have a book released, didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before, and this is the last interview of the day, and it’s an interview with BBC. I don’t know anything about BBC, I don’t watch BBC, I don’t know any of the hosts. So we get on the interview and it’s supposed to be about the book and the host, Andrew Neil doesn’t ask virtually a single question about the book. He just starts reading me bad, old tweets. Which I hate, I mean, it is annoying and it’s stupid and it’s the worst form of interview when somebody just reads you bad, old tweets. Especially when I’ve acknowledged bad, old tweets before.

(01:22:14)
And so I’m going through the list with him and this interview was solidly 20 minutes. I mean, it was a long interview and I make a couple of particularly annoyed mistakes in the interview. So annoyed mistake number one is the ego play. So there’s a point in the middle of the interview where I say, “I don’t even know who you are,” which was true. I didn’t know who he was. It turns out he was a very famous person in Britain. And so you can’t make that ego play.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:37)
But even if he’s not famous, that’s not…
Ben Shapiro
(01:22:39)
It’s a dumb thing to do and it’s an ass thing to do. So, saying that was more just kind of peak silliness. So, that was mistake.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:48)
I enjoyed watching that. It was like, “Oh, Ben is human.”
Ben Shapiro
(01:22:51)
Yes, I’m glad somebody enjoyed it. So, there’s that. And then the other mistake was that I just don’t watch enough British TV. So the way that interviews are done there, are much more adversarial than American TV. In American TV, If somebody is adversarial with you, you assume that they’re a member of the other side. That’s typically how it is. And so I’m critiquing some of his questions at the beginning and I thought that the critique of some of his questions is actually fair. He was asking me about abortion and I thought he was asking it from a way of framing the question that wasn’t accurate. And so I assumed that he was on the left, because again, I’d never heard of him. And so I mischaracterize him and I apologize later for mischaracterizing him. We finally go through the interview. It’s 20 minutes. He just keeps going with the bad, old tweets.

(01:23:31)
And finally I got up and I took off the microphone, and I walked out. And immediately I knew it was a mistake. Within 30 seconds of the end of interview, I knew it was a mistake. And that’s why even before the interview came out, I believe I corrected the record that Andrew Neil is not on the left, that’s a mistake by me. And then took the hit for a bad interview. And so as far as what I wish I had done differently, I wish I had known who he was. I wish I’d done my research. I wish that I had treated it as though there was a possibility that it was going to be more adversarial than it was.

(01:24:03)
I think I was incautious about the interview because it was pitched as, “It’s just another book interview,” and it wasn’t just another book interview, it was treated much more adversarially than that. So I wish… That’s on me. I got to research the people who are talking to me and watch their shows and learn about that. And then obviously the kind of gut level appeal to ego or arrogance, that’s a bad look and shouldn’t have done that. And losing your cool is always a bad look.

Day in the life

Lex Fridman
(01:24:27)
So the fact that that became somewhat viral and stood out just shows that it happens so rarely to you. So just to look at the day in the life of Ben Shapiro, you speak a lot, very eloquently, about difficult topics. What goes into the research, the mental part… And you always look pretty energetic and you’re not exhausted by the burden, the heaviness of the topics you’re covering day, after day, after day, after day. So what goes through the preparation mentally, diet wise, anything like that? When do you wake up?
Ben Shapiro
(01:25:06)
Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up, usually that’s my baby daughter who’s two and a half. We hear on the monitor usually about 6:15, 6:20 AM So I get up, my wife sleeps in a little bit. I go get the baby, then my son gets up, and then my oldest daughter gets up. I have eight, six, and two. The boy is the middle child.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:26)
Is that both the source of stress and happiness?
Ben Shapiro
(01:25:28)
It’s the height of both, right? I mean, it’s the source of the greatest happiness. So the way that I characterize it is this, when it comes to sort of kids in life, so when you’re single, your boundaries of happiness and unhappiness, you can be a zero in terms of happiness, you can be a 10 in terms of happiness. Then you get married and it goes up to a 20 and a negative 20, because your happiest stuff is with your wife, and then the most unhappy stuff is when something happens to your spouse, it’s the worst thing in the entire world. Then you have kids and all limits are removed. So the best things that have ever happened to me are things where I’m watching my kids and they’re playing together and they’re being wonderful and sweet and cute and I love them so much. And the worst things are when my son is screaming at me for no reason because he’s being insane and I have to deal with that, or something bad happens to my daughter at school or something like that.

(01:26:08)
That stuff is really it. So yes, the source of my greatest happiness, the source of my greatest stress. So they get me up at about 6:15 in the morning. I feed them breakfast. I’m kind of scrolling the news while I’m making the eggs and just updating myself on anything that may have happened overnight. I go into the office, put on the makeup and the wardrobe or whatever, and then I sit down and do the show. A lot of the prep is actually done the night before because the news cycle doesn’t change all that much between kind of late at night and in the morning. So I can supplement in the morning. So I do the show.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:39)
So a lot of the preparation, thinking through what are the big issues in the world is done the night before?
Ben Shapiro
(01:26:44)
Yeah. And that’s reading pretty much all the legacy media. So I rip on legacy media a lot, but that’s because a lot of what they do is really good and a lot of what they do is really bad. I cover a lot of legacy media, so that’s probably covering Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Daily Mail. And then I’ll look over at some of the alternative media. I’ll look at my own website, Daily Wire, I’ll look at Breitbart, I’ll look at The Blaze, I’ll look at maybe The Intercept. I’ll look at a bunch of different sources, and then I will look at different clips online. So Media Eye comes in handy here, [inaudible 01:27:14] comes in handy here, that sort of stuff.

(01:27:16)
Because my show relies very heavily on being able to play people so you can hear them in their own words. And so that’s sort of the media eye. So I sit down, I do the show, and then once I’m done with the show, I usually have between… Now it’s like 11:15 in the morning maybe, because sometimes I’ll prerecord the show. So it’s 11:15 in the morning, I’ll go home and if my wife’s available, I’ll grab lunch with her. If not, then I will go and work out. I try to work out five times a week with a trainer, something like that. And then I will…
Lex Fridman
(01:27:49)
Just regular gym stuff.
Ben Shapiro
(01:27:52)
Weights and plyometrics and some CrossFit kind of stuff. I mean beneath this mild stool lies a hulking monster. And so I’ll do that. Then I will do reading and writing. So I’m usually working on a book at any given time.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:14)
You shut off the rest of the world for that?
Ben Shapiro
(01:28:17)
So I put some music in my ears. Usually Brahms, or Bach, sometimes Beethoven, or Mozart, it’s those four. Usually those are on rotation.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:23)
No rap?
Ben Shapiro
(01:28:23)
No rap. No rap. Despite my extraordinary rendition of “WAP”. Yeah, I’m not in fact a rap man.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:29)
Do you still hate “WAP”, the song?
Ben Shapiro
(01:28:32)
I will say I do not think that it is the peak of western civilized art.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:37)
Okay.
Ben Shapiro
(01:28:37)
I don’t think that a hundred years from now people will be gluing their faces to a “WAP”, and protest at the environment.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:41)
But about Brahms the rest will still be around.
Ben Shapiro
(01:28:44)
Yes. I would assume if people still have a functioning prefrontal cortex in any sort of taste.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:48)
Strong words from Ben Shapiro. So you got some classical music in your ears and you’re focusing, are you at the computer when you’re writing?
Ben Shapiro
(01:28:56)
Yeah, at the computer. Usually we have a kind of room that has some sun coming in, so it’s nice in there. Or I’ll go up to a library that we just completed for me. So I’ll go up there and I’ll write and read.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:07)
With physical books?
Ben Shapiro
(01:29:08)
Yeah, I love physical books. And because I keep Sabbath, I don’t use Kindle because when I’m reading a book and I hit Sabbath, I have to turn off the Kindle. So that means that I have tons and tons and tons of physical books. When we moved from Los Angeles to Florida, I had about 7,000 volumes. I had to discard probably 4,000 of them. And then I’ve built that back up now. So I’m probably going to have to go through another round where I put them somewhere else. I tend to tab books rather than highlighting them because I can’t highlight on Sabbath. So I have the little stickers and I put them in the book. So a typical book from me, you can see it on the book club, will be filled with tabs on the side. Things that I want to take note… Actually, I’d gotten a person who I pay to go through and write down in files the quotes that I like from the book, so I have those handy.

(01:29:53)
Which is a good way for me to remember what it is that I’ve read. Because I read probably somewhere between three and five books a week, and then in a good week five, and then I write, I read, and then I go pick up my kids from school at 3:30. So according to my kids, I have no job. I’m there in the mornings until they leave for school. I pick them up from school, I hang out with them until they go to bed, which is usually 7:30 or so. So I’m helping them with their homework and I’m playing with them, and I’m taking them on rides in the brand new Tesla, which my son is obsessed with.

(01:30:27)
And then I put them to bed and then I sit back down, I prep for the next day, go through all those media sources I was talking about, compile kind of a schedule for what I want the show to look like, and run a show. It’s very detail oriented. Nobody writes anything for me. I write all my own stuff. So every word that comes out of my mouth is my fault. And then hopefully I have a couple hours or an hour to hang out with my wife before we go to bed.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:48)
The words you write, do you edit a lot or does it just come out, you’re thinking, “What are the key ideas I want to express?”
Ben Shapiro
(01:30:54)
No, I don’t tend to edit a lot. So I thank God I’m able to write extraordinarily quickly. So I write very, very fast. In fact, in a previous life I was…
Lex Fridman
(01:31:02)
You also speak fast, so it’s similar.
Ben Shapiro
(01:31:04)
Yeah, exactly. And I speak in paragraphs, so it’s exactly the same thing. In a previous life I was a ghost writer, so I used to be sort of known as a turnaround specialist in the publishing industry. And it’d be somebody who came to the publisher and says, “I have three weeks to get this book done. I don’t have a word done.” And they would call me up and be like, “This person needs a book written.” And so in three weeks I’d knock out 60,000 words or so.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:25)
Is there something you can say to the process that you follow to think. How you think about ideas like you… Stuff is going on in the world and trying to understand what is happening. What are the explanations? What are the forces behind this? Do you have a process or just you wait for the muse to give you the interpretation of the world?
Ben Shapiro
(01:31:45)
Well, I don’t think it’s a formal process, but because I read… So there’s two ways to do it. One is that sometimes the daily grind of the news is going to refer back to core principles that are broader and deeper. So I thank God, because I’ve read so much on so many different things of a lot of different point of views. Then if something breaks and a piece of news breaks, I can immediately channel that into, in the mental Rolodex, these three big ideas that I think are really important. And then I can talk at length about what those ideas are and I can explicate those. And so for example, when we were talking about Musk taking over Twitter before, and I immediately go to the history of media, that’s me tying it into a broader theme. And I do that, I would say fairly frequently. Well, we’re talking about say, subsidization of industry, and I can immediately tie that into, okay, what’s the history of subsidization in the United States going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and forward through FDR’s industrial policy, and how does that tie into of broader economic policy internationally? So it allows me to tie into bigger themes because what I tend to read is mostly not news. What I tend to read is mostly books. I would say most of my media diet is actually not the stuff… That’s the icing on the cake, but the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in…
Ben Shapiro
(01:33:00)
… on the cake, but the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in history, econ, geography, social science that I’m reading every week, and so that stuff allows me to think more deeply about these things. That’s one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is Russia breaks in the news. I don’t know anything about Russia. I immediately go and I purchase five books about Russia and I read all of them. Well, the fortunate thing for me and the unfortunate thing about the world, and the unfortunate thing about the world is that if you read two books on a subject, you are now considered by the media an expert on the subject. That’s sad and shallow, but that is the way that it is.

(01:33:39)
The good news for me is that my job isn’t to be a full expert on any of these subjects, and I don’t claim to be. I’m not a Russia expert. I know enough on Russia to be able to understand when people talk about Russia, what the system looks like, how it works and all of that, and then to explicate that for the common man, which a lot of people who are infused with the expertise can’t really do. If you’re so deep in the weeds that you’re a full on academic expert on a thing, sometimes it’s hard to translate that over to a mass audience, which is really my job.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:02)
Well, I think it’s funny with the two books you can actually get a pretty deep understanding if you read and also think deeply about it. It allows you to approach a thing from first principles. A lot of times if you’re a quote, unquote, “expert,” you get carried away by the momentum of what the field has been thinking about, versus stepping back, “All right, what is really going on?” The challenge is to pick the right two books.
Ben Shapiro
(01:34:30)
Right. Usually, what I’ll try to find is somebody who knows the topic pretty well, or a couple people, and have them recommend books. A couple years ago I knew nothing about Bitcoin. I was at a conference and a couple of people who you’ve had on your show actually were there and I asked them, “Give me your top three books on Bitcoin.” Then I went and I read nine books on Bitcoin. So if you read nine books on Bitcoin, you at least know enough to get by. So I can actually explain what Bitcoin is and why it works or why it doesn’t work in some cases and what’s happening in the markets that way, so that’s very, very helpful.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:02)
Well, Putin is an example, that’s a difficult one to find the right books on. I think The New Tsar is the one I read where it was the most objective.
Ben Shapiro
(01:35:11)
The one I read I think about Putin, it was one called Strongman and it was very highly critical of Putin, but it gave a good background on him, at the very least.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:20)
Yeah. I’m very skeptical of things that are critical of Putin, because it feels like there’s activism injected into the history. The way The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is written about Hitler I like because there’s almost not a criticism of Hitler. It’s a description of Hitler, which it’s easier to do about a historical figure, which with William Shirer with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it’s impressive because he lived through it. But it’s very tough to find objective descriptions about the history of the man in a country of Putin, of Zelensky, of any difficult … Trump was the same. I feel like-
Ben Shapiro
(01:36:00)
That’s the hero villain archetype, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:36:00)
Right.
Ben Shapiro
(01:36:01)
It’s like either somebody’s completely a hero or completely a villain, and the truth is pretty much no one is completely a hero or completely a villain. In fact, I’m not sure that I love descriptions of people as heroes or villains, generally. I think that people tend to do heroic things or do villainous things. The same way that I’m not sure I love descriptions of people as a genius, my dad used to say this when I was growing up, he used to say he didn’t believe that there were geniuses. He said he believed that there were people with a genius for something, because yes, there are people who are very high IQ and we call them geniuses, but does that mean that they’re good at EQ stuff? Not necessarily, but there are people who are geniuses at EQ stuff. In other words, it would be more specific to say that somebody’s a genius at engineering than to say just broad spectrum they’re a genius. That does avoid the problem of thinking that they’re good at something that they’re not good at. It’s a little more specific.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:46)
So because you read a lot of books, can you look back and it’s always a tough question because so many, it’s like your favorite song, but are there books that have been influential in your life that are impacting your thinking, or maybe ones you go back to that still carry insight for you?
Ben Shapiro
(01:37:02)
The Federalist Papers is a big one in terms of how American politics works. The first econ book that I thought was really great because it was written for teenagers essentially, is one called Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. It’s 150 pages. I recommend it to everybody 15 and up. It’s easier than say, Thomas Sowell’s Basic Econ, which is four or 500 pages.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:20)
It’s looking what at macroeconomics, microeconomics-
Ben Shapiro
(01:37:23)
Mm-hmm, macro-
Lex Fridman
(01:37:23)
… that kind of stuff?
Ben Shapiro
(01:37:23)
Macro.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:23)
Macro.
Ben Shapiro
(01:37:27)
Then in terms of, there’s a great book by Carl Truman called Rise and Triumph for the Modern Self, which I think is the best book in the last 10 years. That’s been impactful on some of the thoughts I’ve been having lately.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:37)
What’s the key idea in there that’s [inaudible 01:37:38]
Ben Shapiro
(01:37:38)
The key idea is that we’ve shifted the nature of how identity is done in the West from how it was historically done, that basically for nearly all of human history, the way that we identify as human beings is as a mix of our biological drives and then how that interacts with the social institutions around us. So when you’re a child, you’re a bunch of unfettered biological drives and it’s your parents’ job to civilize you. Civilize you literally means bring you into civilization. You learn the rules of the road. You learn how to integrate into institutions that already exist and are designed to shape you. It’s how you interact with those institutions that makes you you. It’s not just a set of biological drives.

(01:38:12)
Then in the modern world, we’ve really driven toward the idea that what we are is how we feel on the inside without reference to the outside world, and it’s the job of the outside world to celebrate and reflect what we think about ourselves on the inside. So what that means is that we are driven now toward fighting institutions because institutions are in positions. So everything around us, societal institutions, these are things that are crimping our style. They’re making us not feel the way that we want to feel, and if we just destroy those things, then we’ll be freer and more liberated. It’s a, I think, much deeper model of how to think about why our social politics particular, are moving in a particular direction is that a ground shift has happened in how people think about themselves. This has had some somewhat shocking effect in terms of social politics.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:56)
There’s negative consequences in your view of that, but is there also a positive consequence of more power, more agency to the individual?
Ben Shapiro
(01:39:05)
I think that you can make the argument that institutions were weighing too heavily in how people form their identity, but I think that what we’ve done is gone significantly too far on the other side. We basically decided to blow up the institutions in favor of unfettered feeling/identity. I think that that is not only a large mistake, I think it’s going to have ramifications for everything from suicidal ideation to institutional longevity in politics and in society more broadly.

Abortion

Lex Fridman
(01:39:31)
Speaking about the nature of self, you’ve been an outspoken proponent of pro-life. Can we start by you tried to steel man the case for pro-choice that abortion is not murder ,and a woman’s right to choose is a fundamental human right freedom.
Ben Shapiro
(01:39:51)
I think that the only way to steel man the pro-choice case and be ideologically consistent is to suggest that there is no interest in the life of the unborn that counter weighs at all freedom of choice. What that means is we can take the full example or we can take the partial example. If we take the full example, what that would mean is that up until point of birth, which is the Democratic Party platform position that a woman’s right to choose ought to extend for any reason whatsoever up to point of birth. The only way to argue that is that bodily autonomy is the only factor. There is no countervailing factor that would ever outweigh bodily autonomy. That would be the strongest version of the argument. Another version of that argument would be that the reason that bodily autonomy ought to weigh so heavily is because women can’t be the equals of men If this institutes of biology are allowed to decide their futures.

(01:40:50)
If pregnancy changes women in a way that it doesn’t change men, it’s a form of sex discrimination for women to ever have to go through with pregnancy, which is an argument that was made by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, kind of. Those are the arguments, the softer version is the more, I would say, emotionally resonant version of the argument, which is that bodily autonomy ought to outweigh the interests of the fetus up till point X. Then people have different feelings about what point X looks like. Is it up to the point of viability? Is it up to the point of the heartbeat? Is it up to 12 weeks or 15 weeks? That really is where the American public is, broadly speaking, not state by state where there are various really, really varied opinions. But broadly speaking, it seems like the American public by polling data wants somewhere between a 12 and 15 week abortion restriction. They believe that up until 12 or 15 weeks, there’s not enough there to not be specific, but to be how people feel about it to outweigh a woman’s bodily autonomy. then beyond that point, then there’s enough of an interest in the life of the pre-born child that’s developed enough then now we care about it enough that it outweighs a woman’s bodily autonomy.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:52)
What’s the strongest case for pro-life in your mind?
Ben Shapiro
(01:41:57)
The strongest case for pro-life is that from conception, a human life has been created. It is a human life with potential. That human life potential with potential now has an independent interest in its own existence.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:09)
If I may just ask a quick question, so conception is when a sperm fertilizes an egg?
Ben Shapiro
(01:42:15)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:17)
Okay. Just to clarify, the biological beginning of what conception means.
Ben Shapiro
(01:42:21)
Because that is the beginning of human life. Now there are other standards that people have drawn. Some people say implantation in the uterus, some people will suggest viability, some brain development or heart development. But the clear dividing line between a human life exists in a human life does not exist, is the biological creation of an independent human life with its own DNA strands and et cetera, which happens at conception. Once you acknowledge that there is that independent human life with potential, and I keep calling it that because people sometimes say potential human life, it’s not a potential human life; it’s a human life that is not developed yet to the full extent that it will develop. Once you say that, and once you say that it has its own interest, now the burden of proof is to explain why bodily autonomy ought to allow for the snuffing out of that human life. If we believe that human life ought not to be killed for quote, unquote, “no good reason.” You have to come up with a good reason. The burden of proof has now shifted.

(01:43:14)
Now you will find people who will say, “Well, the good reason is that it’s not sufficiently developed to outweigh the mental trauma or emotional trauma that a woman goes through if, for example, she was raped or the victim of incest.” That is a fairly emotionally resonant argument, but it’s not necessarily dispositive. You can make the argument that just because something horrific and horrible happened to a woman does not rob the human life of its interest in life. One of the big problems in trying to draw any line for the self-interest of life in the human life is that it’s very difficult to draw any other line that doesn’t seem somewhat arbitrary. You say that independent heartbeat, well, people have pacemakers. If you say brain function, people have various levels of brain function as adults. If you say viability, babies are not viable after they are born. If I left a newborn baby on a table and did not take care of it would be dead in two days. So once you start getting into these lines, it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly. So if you’re looking for a bright line moral rule, that would be the bright line moral rule, and that’s the pro-life case.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:19)
Well, there’s still mysterious difficult scientific questions of things like consciousness. So does the question of consciousness, how does it come into play into this debate?
Ben Shapiro
(01:44:33)
I don’t believe that consciousness is the sole criterion by which we judge the self-interest in human life. So we are unconscious a good deal of our lives. We will be conscious again. When you’re unconscious, when you’re asleep, for example, presumably your life is still worth living. If somebody came in and killed you, that’d be a serious moral quandary at the very least.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:56)
But the birth of consciousness, the lighting up of the flame, the initial lighting up of the flame, there does seem to be something special about that. It’s a mystery of when that happens.
Ben Shapiro
(01:45:08)
Well, Peter Singer makes the case that basically self-consciousness doesn’t exist until you’re two-and-a-half. So he says that even in infanticide should be oka. He’s the bioethicist over at Princeton. So you get into some real dicey territory once you get into consciousness. Also, the truth is that consciousness is more of a spectrum than it is a dividing line, meaning that there are people with various degrees of brain function, we don’t actually know how conscious they are. You can get into eugenic territory pretty quickly when we start dividing between lives that are worth living based on levels of consciousness and lives that are not worth living based on levels of consciousness.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:41)
Do you find the aspect of women’s freedom, do you feel the tension between that ability to choose the trajectory of your own life versus the rights of the unborn child?
Ben Shapiro
(01:45:59)
In one situation, yes. In one situation, no. If you’ve had sex with a person voluntarily and as a product of that you are now pregnant, no. You’ve taken an action with a perfectly predictable result, even if you took birth control. This is the way that human beings have procreated for literally all of human existence, and by the way, also how all mammals procreate. The idea that this was an entirely unforeseen consequence of your activity, I find I have less sympathy for you in that particular situation because you could have made decisions that would not lead you to this particular impasse. In fact, this used to be the basis of marriage was when we were a apparently more terrible society. We used to say that people should wait until they get married to have sex, a position that I still hold.

(01:46:40)
The reason for that was because then if you have sex and you produce a child, then the child will grow up in a two-parent family with stability, so not a ton of sympathy there. When it comes to rape and incest, obviously heavy, heavy sympathy. So that’s why I think you see, statistically speaking, a huge percentage of Americans, including many pro-life Americans, people who consider themselves pro-life would consider exceptions for rape and incest. One of the dishonest things that I think happens in abortion debates is arguing from the fringes. This tends to happen a lot, is pro-choice activists will argue from rape and incest to the other 99.8% of abortions, or you’ll see people on the pro-life side argue from partial birth abortion to all of abortion, that you actually have to take on the mainstream case and then decide whether or not that’s acceptable or not.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:22)
But to you, the exception, just ethically without generalizing it, that is a valid ethically exception.
Ben Shapiro
(01:47:29)
I don’t hold that there should be an exception for rape or incest because again, I hold by the bright line rule that once a human life with potential exists, then it has its own interest in life that cannot be curbed by your self-interest. The only exception that I hold by is the same exception that literally all pro-lifers hold by, which is the life of the mother is put in danger.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:48)
Such a tough, tough topic because if you believe that that’s the line, then we’re committing mass murder.
Ben Shapiro
(01:47:55)
Well, or at least mass killing, so I would say that murder typically requires a level of mens rea that may be absent in many cases of abortion, because the usual follow-on question is, “Well, if it’s murder, why don’t prosecute the woman?” The answer is because the vast majority of people who are having abortions don’t actually believe that they’re killing a person. They have a very different view of what is exactly happening. I would say that there are all sorts of interesting hypotheticals that come in to play when it comes to abortion, and you can play them any which way. Let’s put this way, there are gradations of wrongs. I don’t think that all abortions are equally blameworthy, even if I would ban virtually all of them. I think that there are mitigating circumstances that makes well being wrong, some abortions less morally blameworthy than others. I think that I can admit a difference between killing a two-week-old embryo in the womb and stabbing a seven-year-old in the face. I can recognize all that while still saying I think that it would be wrong to terminate a pregnancy.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:00)
Do you think the question of when life begins, which I think is a fascinating question, is it a question of science or a question of religion?
Ben Shapiro
(01:49:08)
When life begins is a question of science. When that life becomes valuable enough for people to want to protect it is going to be a question that is beyond science. Science doesn’t have moral judgements to make about the value of human life. This is one of the problems that … Sam Harris and I have had this argument many times and it’s always interesting because Sam is of the opinion that you can get to ought from is, that science says is therefore we can learn ought. So human flourishing is the goal of life. I always say to him, “I don’t see where you get that from evolutionary biology.” You can assume it, just say you’re assuming it, but don’t pretend that that is a conclusion that you can draw straight from biological reality itself because obviously that doesn’t exist in the animal world, for example. Nobody assumes the innate value of every ant.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:51)
I think I know your answer to this, but let’s test it because I think you’re going to be wrong. So there’s a robot behind you. Do you think there will be a time in the future when it will be unethical and illegal to kill a robot because they will have sentience? My guess is you would say, “No, Lex, there’s because there’s a fundamental difference between humans and robots. I just want to get you on record because I think you’ll be wrong.
Ben Shapiro
(01:50:18)
It depends on the level of development, I would assume of the robots. You’re assuming a complexity in the robots that eventually imitates what we in the religious life would call the human soul-
Lex Fridman
(01:50:29)
Yes.
Ben Shapiro
(01:50:29)
The ability to choose freely, for example-
Lex Fridman
(01:50:31)
Yes.
Ben Shapiro
(01:50:31)
… which I believe is the capacity for human beings.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:35)
The ability to suffer?
Ben Shapiro
(01:50:36)
Yeah. If all of that could be proved and not programmed, meaning the freely willed capacity of a machine to do X, Y, or Z.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:50)
Could not pinpoint exactly where it happens in the program.
Ben Shapiro
(01:50:54)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:55)
Yeah.
Ben Shapiro
(01:50:55)
It’s not deterministic.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:56)
Yeah.
Ben Shapiro
(01:50:57)
Then it would raise serious moral issues for sure. I’m not sure I know the answer to that question.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:02)
Are you afraid of that time?
Ben Shapiro
(01:51:03)
I’m not sure I’m afraid of that time any more than I’d be afraid if aliens arrived on in the world and had these characteristics.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:11)
Well, there’s just a lot of moral complexities and they don’t necessarily have to be in the physical space, they can be in the digital space. There’s an increased sophistication in the number of bots on the internet, including on Twitter. As they become more and more intelligent, there’s going to be serious questions about “What is our moral duty to protect ones that have or claim to have an identity itself?”
Ben Shapiro
(01:51:32)
That’ll be really interesting. Actually, what I’m afraid of is the opposite happening, meaning that people … the worst that should happen is that we develop robots so sophisticated that they appear to have free will and then we treat them with human dignity. That should be the worst that happens. What I’m afraid of is the opposite, is that if we’re talking about this particular hypothetical that we develop robots that have all of these apparent abilities and then we dehumanize them, which leads us to also dehumanize the other humans around us, which you could easily see happening, and the devaluation of life to the point where it doesn’t really matter. People have always treated, unfortunately, newly discovered other humans this way. So I don’t think there’s actually a new problem. I think it’s a pretty old problem. It’ll just be interesting when it’s made of human hands.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:14)
Yeah, it’s an opportunity to either celebrate humanity or to bring out the worst in humanity, so the derision that naturally happens, like you said with pointing out the other. Let me ask you about climate change. Let’s go from the meme to the profound philosophy.

Climate change

Ben Shapiro
(01:52:34)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:34)
Okay. The meme is, there’s a clip of you talking about climate change and saying that =
Ben Shapiro
(01:52:38)
Oh, The Aquaman meme.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:39)
You said that for the sake of argument, and, “If the water level rises five to 10 feet in the next 100 years, people will just sell their homes and move.” Then the meme was, “Sell to who?” Can you argue both sides of that?
Ben Shapiro
(01:52:52)
That the argument that they’re making as a straw man, the argument that I’m making is over time, I don’t mean that if a tsunami’s about to hit your house, you can list it on eBay. That’s not what I mean, obviously. What I mean is that human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt. It’s actually our best quality, and that as water levels rise, real estate prices in those areas tends to fall, that over time, people tend to abandon those areas. They tend to leave, they tend to, right now, sell their houses and then they tend to move. Eventually, those houses will be worthless and you won’t have anybody to sell to. But presumably not that many people will be living there by that point, which is one of the reasons why the price would be low because there’s no demand.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:26)
So it’s over 100 years, so all of these price dynamics are very gradual relative to the other price dynamics-
Ben Shapiro
(01:53:32)
Correct. That’s why the joke of it, of course, is that I’m saying that tomorrow there’s a tsunami on your doorstep and you’re like, “Oh, Bob will buy my house.” Bob ain’t going to buy your house. We all get that, but it’s a funny name. I’ll admit, I laughed at it.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:44)
How is your view on climate change, the human contribution to climate change, what we should do in terms of policy to respond to climate change? How has that changed over the years?
Ben Shapiro
(01:53:54)
I would say the truth is for years and years, I’ve believed that climate change was a reality and that anthropogenic climate change is a reality. I don’t argue with the IPCC estimates. I know climatologists at places like MIT or Caltech and they know this stuff better than I do. So the notion that climate change is just not happening or that human beings have not contributed to climate change, I find doubtful. The question is to what extent human beings are contributing to climate change, is it 50%? Is it 70%? Is it 90%? I think there’s a little bit more play in the joints there, so it’s not totally clear. The one thing I do know, and this I know with factual accuracy, is that all of the measures that are currently being proposed are unworkable and will not happen. So when people say Paris Climate Accords, even if those were imposed, you’re talking about lowering the potential trajectory of climate change by a fraction of a degree.

(01:54:44)
If you’re talking about Green New Deal, net zero by 2050, the carbon is up there in the air and the climate change is going to happen. Also, you’re assuming that geopolitical dynamics don’t exist, so everybody’s going to magically get on the same page and we’re all going to be imposing massive carbon taxes to get to net zero by 2050, hundreds of times higher than they currently are. Now, that’s not me saying that, that’s Klaus Schwab saying this of the World Economic Forum who’s a big advocate of exactly this policy. The reality is that we’re going to have to accept that at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change is baked into the cake by the end of the century. Again, not me talking, William Nordhaus, the economist who just won the Nobel Prize on this stuff talking. So what that suggests to me is what we’ve always known, human beings are crap at mitigation and excellent in adaptation.

(01:55:26)
We are very bad at mitigating our own fault. We are very, very good at adapting to the problems as they exist, which means that all of the estimates that billions will die, that there will be mass starvation, that we’ll see the migration in just a few years of hundreds of millions of people. Those are wrong. What you’ll see is a gradual change of living. People will move away from areas that are inundated on the coast. You’ll see people building sea walls. You’ll see people adapting new technologies to suck carbon out of the air. You’ll see geoengineering. This is the stuff that we should be focused on. The bizarre focus on what if we just keep tossing hundreds of billions of dollars at the same three technologies over and over in the hopes that if we subsidize it, this will magically make it more efficient, I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that that is going to be the way that we get ourselves out of this. Necessity being the mother invention, I think human beings will adapt because we have adapted and we’ll continue to adapt.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:17)
So to the degree we invest in the threat of this, it should be into the policies that help with the adaptation versus the mitigation?
Ben Shapiro
(01:56:25)
Right, seawalls, geoengineering, developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. Again, if I thought that there was more hope for the green technologies currently in play than subsidization of those technologies, I might be a little bit more for, but I haven’t seen tremendous progress over the course of the last 30 years in the reliability of, for example, wind energy or the ability to store solar energy to the extent necessary to actually power a grid.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:48)
What’s your thoughts on nuclear energy? Is it [inaudible 01:56:51]
Ben Shapiro
(01:56:50)
Nuclear energy is great. Nuclear energy is a proven source of energy, and we should be radically extending the use of nuclear energy. To me, honestly, this is a litmus test question as to whether you take climate change seriously. If you’re on right or left and you take climate change seriously, you should be in favor of nuclear energy. If you’re not, I know that you have other priorities.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:09)
Yeah, the fascinating thing about the climate change debate is the dynamics of the fearmongering over the past few decades, because some of the nuclear energy was tied up into that somehow. There’s a lot of fear about nuclear energy. It seems like there’s a lot of social phenomena, social dynamics involved versus dealing with just science. It’s interesting to watch. On my darker days, it makes me cynical about our ability to use reason in science to deal with the threats of the world.
Ben Shapiro
(01:57:39)
I think that our ability to use reason and science to deal with threats of the world is almost a timeframe question. So I think, again, we’re very bad at looking down the road and saying … because people can’t handle, for example, even things like compound interest. The idea that if, “I put a dollar in the bank today, that 15 years from now that’s going to be worth a lot more than a dollar,” people can’t actually see that. So the idea of, “Let’s foresee a problem then we’ll deal with it right now as opposed to 30 years down the road.” Typically, we let the problem happen and then we solve it and it’s bloodier and worse than it would’ve been if we had solved it 30 years ago, but it is, in fact, effective. And sometimes it turns out the solution that we’re proposing 30 years in advance is not effective and that can be a major problem as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:17)
Well, that’s then the steel man, the case for fearmongering, for irrational fearmongering, we need to be scared shitless in order for us to do anything. I’m generally against that, but maybe on a population scale, maybe some of that is necessary for us to respond appropriate for two long-term threats. We should be scared shitless.
Ben Shapiro
(01:58:40)
I don’t think that we can actually do that, though. First of all, I think that it’s platonic lies or generally bad. Then second of all, I don’t think that we actually have the capacity to do this. I think that the people who are the elites of our society who get together in rooms and talk about this stuff, and I’ve been in some of those meetings at my synagogues Friday night, actually. No, but I’ve been-
Lex Fridman
(01:59:00)
I was going to make the joke but I’m glad you did.
Ben Shapiro
(01:59:02)
Yeah, I’ve been in rooms like Davos-like rooms, and when people discuss these sorts of topics and they’re like, “What if we just tell people that it’s going to be a disaster with tsunamis and day after tomorrow?” It’s like, you guys don’t have that power. You don’t. By the way, you’d dramatically undercut your own power because of COVID to do this stuff, because a lot of the, “What if we scare the living hell out of you to the point where you stay in your own house for two years and we tell you you can’t send your kids to school? Then we tell you that the vaccine is going to prevent transmission? Then we also tell you that we need to spend $7 trillion in one year and it won’t have any inflationary effect?” And it turns out you’re wrong on literally all of those things. The last two years have done more to undermine institutional trust than any time in probably American history. It’s pretty amazing.

God and faith

Lex Fridman
(01:59:45)
Yeah, I tend to agree with the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Let me ask you back to the question of God, and a big ridiculous question, who’s God?
Ben Shapiro
(01:59:57)
Who is God? I’m going to use the Aquinas formulation of what God is, that if there is a cause of all things, not physical things, if there is a cause underlying the reason of the universe, then that is the thing we call God, so not a big guy in the sky with a beard. He is the forest underlying the logic of the universe, if there is a logic to the universe, and he is the creator in the Judeo view of that universe. He does have an interest in us living in accordance with the laws of the universe that if you’re a religious Jew are encoded in the Torah. But if you’re not a religious Jew, it would be encoded in the natural law by Catholic theology.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:47)
Why do you think God created the universe or as is popularly asked, what do you think is the meaning behind it? What’s the meaning of life?
Ben Shapiro
(02:00:56)
What’s the meaning of life? I think that the meaning of life is to fulfill what God made you to do and that is a series of roles. I think that human beings, and here you have to look to human nature rather than looking to big questions. I’ve evolved something that I’ve really been working on, I’m writing a book about this actually, that I call colloquially role theory. Basically the idea is that the way that we interact with the world is through a series of roles, and those are also the things we find most important and most implementable. There’s virtue ethics which suggests that if we act in accordance with virtue like Aristotle, then we will be living the most fulfilled and meaningful life. Then you have deontological ethics like content ethics, it’s a rule-based ethic. You follow the rules, then you’ll find the meaning of life.

(02:01:49)
Then what I’m proposing is that there’s something that I would call role ethics, which is there are a series of roles that we play across our lives, which are also the things that we tend to put on our tombstones and find the most meaningful. So when you go to a cemetery, you can see what people found the most meaningful because it’s the stuff they put on the stone that has four words on it, like beloved father, beloved mother, sister, brother, and you might have a job once in a while, a creator, a religious person. These are all roles that have existed across societies and across humanity, and those are the things where we actually find meaning. The way that we navigate those roles brings us meaning. I think that God created us in order to fulfill those roles for purposes that I can’t begin to understand because I ain’t him.

(02:02:34)
The more we recognize those roles and the more we live those roles and then we can express freedom within those roles, I think that the liberty exists inside each of those roles and that’s what makes all of our lives different and fun. We all parent in different ways, but being a parent is a meaningful role. We all have spouses, but how you interact that relationship is what makes your life meaningful and interesting. That is what we were put on earth to do. If we perform those roles properly, and those roles do include things like being a creator, we have a creative instinct as human beings, being a creator, being an innovator, being a defender of your family, being a social member of your community, which is something that we’re built to do. If we fulfill those roles properly, then we will have made the world a better place than we inherited it. And we’ll also have had the joy of experiencing the flow they talk about in psychology where when you engage in these roles, you actually do feel a flow.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:26)
So these roles are a fundamental part of the human condition?
Ben Shapiro
(02:03:29)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:30)
The book you’re working on is constructing a system to help us understand these roles?
Ben Shapiro
(02:03:37)
It’s looking at, let’s assume that all that’s true. The real question in the book is, how do you construct a flourishing and useful society in politics?
Lex Fridman
(02:03:46)
So a society level, if this is our understanding of a human being, how do we construct a good society?
Ben Shapiro
(02:03:52)
Right. Exactly, because I think that a lot of political theory is right now based in either J.S. Mill kind of thought, which is, all that a good politics does is it allows you wave your hand around until you hit somebody in the face-
Ben Shapiro
(02:04:00)
All that a good politics does allows you to wave your hand around until you hit somebody in the face, or a [inaudible 02:04:05] thought, which is what if we constructed society in order to achieve the most for the least, essentially? What if we constructed society around what actually makes humans the most fulfilled, and that is the fulfillment of these particular roles?

(02:04:20)
And where does liberty come into that? How do you avoid the idea of a tyranny in that? Right? You have to be a mother, you must be a father, you must be a… Where does freedom come into that? Can you reject those roles totally as a society and be okay? The answer probably is not. So you need society that actually promotes and protects those roles, but also protects the freedom inside those roles.

(02:04:39)
And that raises a more fundamental question of what exactly liberty is for. And I think that both the right and the left actually tend to make a mistake when they discuss liberty. The left tends to think that liberty is an ultimate good. That simple choice makes a bad thing good, which is not true. And I think the right talks about liberty in almost the same terms sometimes. And I think that’s not true either. The question is whether liberty is of inherent value or instrumental value. Is liberty good in and of itself or is liberty good because it allows you to achieve X, Y or Z?

(02:05:09)
And I’ve thought about this one a lot and I tend to come down on the latter side of the aisle. I mean, you asked me areas where I move, this may be an area where I’ve moved. Because I think when you think more shallowly about politics, or maybe more quickly, because this is how we talk in America, is about liberties and rights, we tend to think that the right is what make… not the political right, rights make things good, liberties make things good.

(02:05:28)
The question really is what are those rights and liberties for? Now, you have to be careful so that doesn’t shade into tyranny, right? You can only have liberty to do the thing that I say that you can do. But there have to be spheres of liberty that are roiling and interesting and filled with debate, but without threatening the chief institutions that surround those liberties. Because if you destroy the institutions, liberties will go too. If you knock down the pillars of the society, the liberties that are on top of those pillars are going to collapse. And I think that if people are feeling as though we’re on the verge tyranny, I think that’s why.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:59)
This is fascinating by the way, it’s an instrumental perspective on liberty. That’s going to give me a lot to think about. Let me ask a personal question. Was there ever a time that you had a crisis of faith where you questioned your belief in God?
Ben Shapiro
(02:06:14)
Sure. Let’s call it a crisis of faith and an ongoing question of faith, which I think is, I hope most religious people… And the word Israel in Hebrew, Israel, means to struggle with God. That’s literally what the word means. And so the idea of struggling with God, if you’re Jewish or Bnei Yisrael, the idea of struggling with God, I think is endemic to the human condition. If you understand what God’s doing, then I think you’re wrong. And if you think that that question doesn’t matter, then I think you’re also wrong. I think that God is a very necessary hypothesis.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:49)
So struggle, the struggle with God, is life. That is the process of life.
Ben Shapiro
(02:06:53)
That’s right. Because you’re never going to get to that answer otherwise you’re God and you aren’t.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:57)
Why does God allow cruelty and suffering in the world? One of the tough questions.
Ben Shapiro
(02:07:02)
So we’re going deep here. There’re two types of cruelty and suffering. So if we’re talking about human cruelty and suffering, because God does not intervene to prevent people from exercising their free will, because to do so would be to deprive human beings of the choice that makes them human. This is the sin of the Garden of Eden basically, is that God could make you an angel, in which case you wouldn’t have the choice to do the wrong thing. But so long as we are going to allow for cause and effect in a universe shaped by your choice, cruelty and evil are going to exist.

(02:07:33)
And then there’s the question of just the natural cruelty and vicissitudes of life. And the answer there is, I think that God obscures himself. I think that if God were to appear in all of his glory to people on a regular basis, I think they would make faith and you wouldn’t need it. There’d be no such thing as faith. It would just be reality, right? Nobody has to prove to you that the sun rises every day. But if God is to allow us the choice to believe in him, which is the ultimate choice from a religious point of view, then he’s going to have to obscure himself behind tragedy and horror and all those other things.

(02:08:05)
I mean, there’s a fairly well known capitalistic concept called [foreign language 02:08:08] in Judaism, which is the idea that when God created the universe, he sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these things to happen.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:15)
So God doesn’t have an instrumental perspective on liberty?
Ben Shapiro
(02:08:21)
In a chief sense He does. Because the best use of liberty is going to be belief in Him. And you can misuse your liberty. There will be consequences if you believe in an afterlife, or if you believe in sort of a generalized better version of life led by faith, then liberty does have a purpose. But He also believes that you have to give people from a cosmic perspective the liberty to do wrong without threatening all the institutions of society. I mean, that’s why it does say in the Bible that if man sheds blood, by man shall his blood be shed, right? There are punishments that are in biblical thought for doing things that are wrong.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:56)
So for a human being who lacks the faith in God, so if you’re an atheist, can you still be a good person?
Ben Shapiro
(02:09:02)
Of course, a hundred percent. And there are a lot of religious people who are crappy people.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:06)
How do I understand that tension?
Ben Shapiro
(02:09:08)
Well, from a religious perspective, what you would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live in accordance with a set of rules that don’t damage other people without believing in God. You just might be understanding the reason for doing that wrong, is what a religious person would say. There’s the conversation, again, that I had with Sam, basically, is you and I agree, I said this to Sam, you and I agree on nearly everything when it comes to morality, we probably disagree on 15 to 20% of things. The other 80% is because you grew up in a Judeo-Christian society and so did I. We grew up 10 miles from each other around the turn of the millennium. So there’s that.

(02:09:40)
You can perfectly well be an atheist living a good, moral, decent life, because you can live a good, moral, decent life with regard to other people without believing in God. I don’t think you can build a society on that because I think that that relies on the sort of goodness of mankind, natural goodness of mankind. I don’t believe in the natural goodness of mankind.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:58)
You don’t?
Ben Shapiro
(02:09:59)
No. I believe that man has created both sinful and with the capacity for sin and the capacity for good.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:04)
But if you let them be on their own, doesn’t-
Ben Shapiro
(02:10:09)
Without social institutions to shape them, I think that that’s very likely to go poorly.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:13)
Oh, interesting. Well, we came to something we disagree on, but that might reflect itself in our approach to Twitter as well. I think if humans are left on their own, they tend towards good. They definitely have the capacity for good and evil. But when left on their own, I tend to believe they’re good.
Ben Shapiro
(02:10:36)
I think they might be good with limits. What I mean by that is that what the evidence, I think, tends to show, is that human beings are quite tribal. So what you’ll end up with is people who are good with their immediate family and maybe their immediate neighbors, and then when they’re threatened by an outside tribe, then they kill everyone. Which is sort of the history of civilization in the pre-civilization era, which was a very violent time. Pre-civilization era was quite violent.

Tribalism

Lex Fridman
(02:10:58)
Do you think on the topic of tribalism in our modern world, what are the pros and cons of tribes? Is that something we should try to outgrow as a civilization?
Ben Shapiro
(02:11:08)
I don’t think it’s ever going to be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I think it’s a natural human condition to want to be with people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs. And I think trying to obliterate that in the name of a universalism, likely leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences. Utopian sort of universalism has been failing every time it’s tried, whether you’re talking about, now it seems to be sort of a liberal universalism, which is being rejected by a huge number of people around the world in various different cultures. Or you’re talking about religious universalism, which typically comes with religious tyranny or you’re talking about communistic or Nazi-ist sort of universalism, which comes with mass slaughter.

(02:11:49)
So this is, universalism I’m not a believer in. I think that you have some values that are fairly limited that all human beings should hold in common. And that’s pretty much it. I think that everybody should have the ability to join with their own culture. I think how we define tribe is a different thing. So I think that tribes should not be defined by innate physical characteristics, for example. Because I think that, thank God, as a civilization, we’ve outgrown that. And I think that that is a childish way to view the world. All the tall people aren’t a tribe. All the black people [inaudible 02:12:25], all the white people aren’t a tribe.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:26)
So the tribes should be formed over ideas versus physical characteristic.
Ben Shapiro
(02:12:30)
That’s right. Which is why, actually, to go back to the beginning of the conversation, when it comes to Jews, I’m not a big believer in ethnic Judaism. As a person who takes Judaism seriously, Judaism is more to me than you were born with a last name like Berg or Stein. And so-
Lex Fridman
(02:12:46)
Hitler would disagree with you.
Ben Shapiro
(02:12:47)
He would disagree with me. But that’s because he was a tribalist, right? Who thought in racial terms.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:51)
Maybe robots will help us see humans as one tribe. Maybe that, as long as-
Ben Shapiro
(02:12:56)
This is Reagan’s idea, right? Reagan said, “Well if there’s an alien invasion, then we’ll all be on the same side. So I’ll go over to the Soviets and we’ll talk about it.”
Lex Fridman
(02:13:02)
There’s some deep truth to that. What does it mean to be a good man? The various roles that a human being takes on in this Role Theory that you’ve spoken about. What does it mean to be a good…
Ben Shapiro
(02:13:17)
It means to perform… Now, I will do Aristotle. It means to be, perform the function well. What Aristotle says, is the good is not like moral good, moral evil in the way that we tend to think about it. He meant that a good cup holds liquid, a good spoon holds soup. It means that a thing that is broken can’t hold those things, right? So the idea of being a good person means that you are fulfilling the function for which you were made. It’s a teleological view of humanity.

(02:13:44)
So if you’re a good father, this means that you are bringing up your child in durable values that is going to bring them up healthy, capable of protecting themselves and passing on the traditional wisdom of the ages to future generations, while allowing for the capacity for innovation. That’d be being a good father. Being a good spouse would mean protecting and unifying with your spouse and building a safe family and a place to raise children. Being a good citizen of your community means protecting the fellow citizens of your community while incentivizing them to build for themselves. It becomes actually much easier to think of how to…

(02:14:18)
This is why I like the Role Theory because it’s very hard, since sort of in Virtue Theory to say be generous. Okay, how does that manifest? I don’t what that looks like. Sometimes being generous might be being not generous to other people. When Aristotle says that you should be benevolent, what does that mean? This is very vague. When I say be a good dad, most people sort of have a gut level understanding of what it means to be a good dad. And mostly, they have a gut level understanding what it means to really be a really bad dad. And so what it means to be a good man is to fulfill those roles, as many of them as you can properly and at full function. And that’s a very hard job.

(02:14:51)
And I’ve said before that, because I engage a lot with the public and all of this, the word great comes up a lot. What is it to be a great leader? What is it to be a great person? And I’ve always said to people, it’s actually fairly easy to be great. It’s very difficult to be good. There are a lot of very great people who are not very good. And there are not a lot of good people. And most of them, frankly, most good people die, mourned by their family and friends and two generations later they’re forgotten. But those are the people who incrementally move the ball forward in the world sometimes much more than the people who are considered great.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:20)
“Understand the role in your life that involves being a cup and be damned good at it.”
Ben Shapiro
(02:15:25)
Exactly. That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:27)
“Hold the soup.” It’s very
Ben Shapiro
(02:15:29)
Jordan Peterson [inaudible 02:15:31].
Lex Fridman
(02:15:30)
It’s very like [inaudible 02:15:32] or Jordan Peterson.
Ben Shapiro
(02:15:32)
Exactly.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(02:15:33)
I think people will quote you for years and years to come on that. What advice would you give, a lot of young people look up to you, what advice, despite their better judgment? No, I’m just kidding. Only kidding. They seriously look up to you and draw inspiration from your ideas, from your bold thinking. What advice would you give to them? How to live a life worth living, how to have a career they can be proud of and everything like that?
Ben Shapiro
(02:16:02)
So live out the values that you think are really important and seek those values in others would be the first piece of advice. Second piece of advice, don’t go on Twitter until you’re 26.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:13)
Why 26?
Ben Shapiro
(02:16:14)
Because your brain is fully developed at that point. As I said early on, I was on social media and writing columns from the time I was 17. It was a great opportunity. And as it turns out, a great temptation to say enormous numbers of stupid things when you’re young. I mean, you’re kind of trying out ideas and you’re putting them on, you’re taking them off. And social media permanentizes those things and engraves them in stone and then that’s used against you for the rest of your life. So I tell young people this all the time, if you’re going to be on social media, be on social media but don’t post, watch, if you want to take in information. And more importantly, you should read books.

(02:16:45)
As far as other advice, I’d say engage in your community. There’s no substitute for engaging in your community. And engage in interpersonal action because that will soften you and make you a better person. I’ve become a better person since I got married. I’ve become an even better person since I’ve had kids. So you can imagine how terrible I was before all these things. And engaging your community does allow you to build the things that matter on the most local, possible level.

(02:17:11)
I mean the outcome, by the way, of the sort of politics, of the politics of fulfillment that I was talking about earlier, is a lot of localism. Because the roles that I’m talking about are largely local roles. So that stuff has to be protected locally. I think we focus way too much in this country and others, on world beating solutions, national solutions, solutions that apply to hundreds of millions of people. How we get to the solutions that apply for 5, and then we get to the solutions that apply to 20, and then we get to the solutions that involve 200 people or 1,000 people. Let’s solve that stuff. And I think the solutions at the higher level flow bottom up, not top down.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:41)
What about mentors and maybe role models? Have you had a mentor or maybe people you look up to, either you interacted on a local scale, like you actually knew them or somebody you really looked up to?
Ben Shapiro
(02:17:53)
For me, I’m very lucky, I grew up in a very solid, two-parent household. I’m extremely close with my parents. I’ve lived near my parents literally my entire life with the exception of three years of law school. And right now, they live a mile and a half from us.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:05)
What did you learn about life from your parents and your father?
Ben Shapiro
(02:18:13)
Oh man, so many things from my parents.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:16)
Good and bad.
Ben Shapiro
(02:18:16)
That’s a hard one. I mean, I think the good stuff from my dad is that you should hold true to your values. He’s very big on, you have values, those values are important, hold true to them.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:25)
Did you understand what your values are, what your principles are early on?
Ben Shapiro
(02:18:29)
Fairly quickly. Yeah. Yeah. And so he was very big on that, which is why, for example, I get asked a lot in the Jewish community why I wear a kippah. And the answer is, it never occurred to me to take off the kippah. I always wore it. Why would I take it off at any point? That’s the life that I want to live. And that’s the way it is. So that was a big one from my dad.

(02:18:48)
From my mom, practicality. My dad is more of a dreamer. My mom is much more practical. And so the sort of lessons that I learned from my dad are that you can have… This is the counter-lesson, is that you can have a good idea, but if you don’t have a plan for implementation, then it doesn’t end up as reality. And I think actually, he’s learned that better over the course of his life too.

(02:19:06)
But my dad, from the time I was very young, he wanted me to engage with other adults and he wanted me to learn from other people. And one of his roles was if he didn’t know something, he would find somebody who he thought did know the thing for me to talk to. That was a big thing. So I’m very lucky. I have wonderful parents.

Andrew Breitbart


(02:19:22)
As far as of other mentors, in terms of the media, Andrew Breitbart was a mentor. Andrew, obviously, he was kind of known in his latter days, I think more for the militancy than when I was very close with him.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:34)
So for somebody like me who knows more about the militancy, can you tell me what makes him a great man?
Ben Shapiro
(02:19:42)
Well, what made Andrew great is that he engaged with everyone. I mean everyone. So there are videos of him rollerblading down the boulevard and people would be protesting and he would literally rollerblade up to them and he would say, “Let’s go to lunch together.” And he would just do this. That’s actually who Andrew was.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:57)
What was the thinking behind that? Just-
Ben Shapiro
(02:19:58)
That’s who he was. He was just careless. He was much more outgoing than I am actually. He was very warm with people. For me, I would say that with Andrew, I knew Andrew for, say I’m around 16, he passed away when I would’ve been 28. So I knew Andrew for 10, 12 years. And people who met Andrew for about 10 minutes knew Andrew 99% as well as I knew Andrew. Because he was just all outfront, like everything was out here. And he loved talking to people. He loved engaging with people. And so this made him a lot of fun and unpredictable and fun to watch and all of that.

(02:20:34)
And then I think Twitter got to him. Twitter is one of the lessons I learned from Andrew, is the counter-lesson, which is Twitter can poison you. Twitter can really wreck you. If you spend all day on Twitter, reading the comments and getting angry at people who are talking about you, it becomes a very difficult life. And I think that in the last year of his life, Andrew got very caught up in that because of a series of circumstances.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:54)
It can actually affect your mind, it can actually make you resentful, all that kind of stuff.
Ben Shapiro
(02:20:57)
I tend to agree with that. But the lesson that I learned from Andrew is engage with everybody. Take joy in the mission that you’re given. And you can’t always fulfill that, sometimes it’s really rough and difficult. I’m not going to pretend that it’s all fun and rainbows all the time, because it isn’t. And some of the stuff that I have to cover, I don’t like. And some of the things I have to say, I don’t particularly like. That happens. But that’s what I learned from Andrew.

(02:21:22)
As far as sort of other mentors, I had some teachers when I was a kid who said things that stuck with me. I had a fourth grade teacher named Miss Genetti who said, “Don’t let potential be written on your tombstone.” Which is a pretty-
Lex Fridman
(02:21:22)
That’s a good line.
Ben Shapiro
(02:21:35)
It’s a great line, particularly to a fourth grader. There was a guy in 11th grade, English teacher named Anthony Miller, who was terrific, really good writer. He had studied with James Joyce at Trinity College in Dublin. And so he and I really got along and he helped my writing a lot.

Self-doubt

Lex Fridman
(02:21:51)
Did you ever have doubt in yourself? I mean, especially as you gotten into the public eye with all the attacks, did you ever doubt your ability to stay strong, to be able to be a voice of the ideas that you represent?
Ben Shapiro
(02:22:03)
Definitely. I doubt my ability to say what I want to say. I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blowback of saying it, meaning that that’s difficult. I mean, again, to take just one example, in 2016, the ADL measured that I was the number one target of antisemitism on planet earth. That’s not fun. It’s unpleasant. And when you take critiques, not from anti-Semites, but when you take critiques from people generally, we talked about near the beginning, how you surround yourself with people who are going to give you good feedback. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Sometimes people are giving you feedback and you don’t know whether it’s well motivated or poorly motivated. And if you are trying to be a decent person, you can’t cut off the mechanism of feedback.

(02:22:42)
And so what that means is sometimes you take to heart the wrong thing or you take it to heart too much, you’re not light enough about it. You take it very, very seriously. You lose sleep over it. Man, I can’t tell you the number of nights where I’ve just not slept because of some critique somebody’s made of me. And I’ve thought to myself, maybe that’s right. And sometimes it is right.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:00)
Some of that is good, to stew in that criticism, but some of that can destroy you. Do you have a shortcut? So Rogan has talked about taking a lot of mushrooms, since you’re not into the mushroom thing, what’s your escape from that when you get low, when you can’t sleep?
Ben Shapiro
(02:23:17)
Usually, writing is a big one for me. So the writing for me is cathartic. I love writing. That is a huge one. Spending time with my family. Again, I usually have a close circle of friends who I will talk with in order to bounce ideas off of them. And then, once I’ve kind of talked it through, I tend to feel a little bit better. Exercise is also a big one. I mean, if I go a few days without exercise, I tend to get pretty grumpy pretty quickly. I mean, I got to keep the six pack going somehow, man.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:46)
There you and Rogan agree. Well, we haven’t, aside from Twitter, mentioned love. What’s the role of love in the human condition? Ben Shapiro?

Love

Ben Shapiro
(02:23:57)
Man, don’t get asked for love too much. In fact, I was-
Lex Fridman
(02:24:02)
You don’t get that question on college campuses?
Ben Shapiro
(02:24:04)
No, I typically don’t actually. In fact, we were at an event recently, a Daily Wire event. And in the middle of this event, it’s a meet and greet with some of the audience. And in the middle of this event, this guy walks by with this girl, they’re talking and they’re talking to me and their time kind of runs, the security’s moving them. And he says, “No, no, no, wait. Hold on a minute.” And he gets down on one knee and he proposes the girl in front of me. And I said to him, “This is the weirdest proposal in human history. What is happening right now? I was your choice of cupid here?” He said, “Well, we actually got together because we listened to your show.” And I said, “I can perform a Jewish marriage right now. We’re going to need a glass, we’re going to need some wine. It’s going to get weird real fast.” But yeah, so love doctor, I’m typically not asked too much about.

(02:24:45)
The role of love is important in binding together human beings who ought to be bound together. And the role of respect is even more important in binding together broader groups of people. I think one of the mistakes that we make in politics is trying to substitute love for respect or respect for love. And I think that’s a big mistake. So I do not bear tremendous love in the same sense that I do for my family for random strangers. I don’t. I love my family, I love my kids. Anybody who tells you they love your kid as much as you love your kid is lying to you. It’s not true. I love my community more than I love other communities. I love my state more than I love other states. I love my country more than I love other countries. That’s all normal and that’s all good.

(02:25:29)
The problem of empathy can be when that becomes so tight-knit that you’re not outward looking, that you don’t actually have respect for other people. So in the local level, you need love in order to protect you and shield you and give you the strength to go forward. And then beyond that, you need a lot of respect for people who are not in the circle of love. And I think trying to extend love to people who either are not going to love you back or are going to slap you in the face for it, or who you’re just not that close to, it’s either it runs the risk of being ersatz and fake or it can actually be counterproductive in some senses.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:04)
Well, there’s some sense in which you could have love for other human beings just based on the humanity that connects everybody. So you love this whole project that we’re a part of. And actually, sort of another thing we disagree on, so loving a stranger, like having that basic empathy and compassion towards a stranger, even if it can hurt you, I think it’s ultimately, that to me, is what it means to be a good man. To live a good life is to have that compassion towards strangers. Because to me, it’s easy and natural and obvious to love people close to you, but to step outside yourself and to love others, I think that’s the fabric of a good society. You don’t think there’s value to that?
Ben Shapiro
(02:26:56)
I think there can be, but I think we’re also discussing love almost in two different senses. Meaning that when I talk about love, what I think of immediately is the love I bear for my wife and kids or my parents or my siblings.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:08)
Or friendship.
Ben Shapiro
(02:27:09)
Or the love of my close friends. But I think, that using that same term to describe how I feel about strangers, I think would just be inaccurate. And so that’s why I’m suggesting that respect might be a more solid and realistic foundation for the way that we treat people far away from us or people who are strangers. Respect for their dignity, respect for their priorities, respect for their role in life. It might be too much of an ask, in other words.

(02:27:36)
There might be the rare human being who’s capable of literally loving a homeless man on the street the way they do loves his own family. But if you respect the homeless man on the street, the way that you respect your own family, because everyone deserves that respect, I think that you get to the same end without forcing people into a position of unrealistically expecting themselves to feel a thing they don’t feel.

(02:27:58)
One of the big questions in religion that comes up is God makes certain requests that you feel certain ways. You’re supposed to be [foreign language 02:28:05], you’re supposed to be happy about certain things or you’re supposed to love thy neighbor as thyself. Right? You’ll notice that in that statement, it’s thy neighbor, it’s not just generally anyone. It’s love thy neighbors. In any case, the-
Lex Fridman
(02:28:17)
I think that extends to anyone that follows you on Twitter, thy neighbor. Because God anticipated the social network aspect. That is not constrained by geography.
Ben Shapiro
(02:28:27)
I’m going to differ with you on the interpretation on that. But in any case, the sort of extension of love outwards might be too big an ask. So maybe we can start with respect and then, hopefully, out of that respect can grow something more if people earn their way in. Because I think that one of the big problems when we were talking about universalism, is when people say, “I’m a world citizen. I love people of the other country as much as I love myself, or as much as I love my country,” it tends to actually lead to an almost crammed down utopianism. That, I think, can be kind of difficult.

(02:29:01)
Because with love comes a certain expectation of solidarity. And I think, right, I mean, when you love your family, you love your wife, there’s a certain level of solidarity that is required inside the home in order to preserve the most loving kind of home. And so if you love everybody, then that sort of implies a certain level of solidarity that may not exist. So maybe the idea is, for me, start with respect and then maybe as people respect each other more, then love is an outgrowth of that. As opposed to starting with love, and then hoping that respect develops.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:27)
Yeah, there’s a danger that word becomes empty, and instead is used for dogmatic kind of utopianism versus-
Ben Shapiro
(02:29:36)
I mean, this is the way that, for example, religious theocracies very often work. We love you so much, we have to convert you.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:42)
So let’s start with respect. What I would love to see after our conversation today, is to see a Ben Shapiro that continues the growth on Twitter of being even more respectful than you’ve already been. And maybe one day, converting that into love on Twitter. That would, if I could see that in this world, that would make me die a happy man.
Ben Shapiro
(02:30:04)
Wow. I can make that happen for you.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:06)
A little bit more in love in the world. For me, as a gift, for me.
Ben Shapiro
(02:30:10)
I’ll try to make that happen. I do have one question. I’m going to need you to tell me, which jokes are okay? Are jokes still okay?
Lex Fridman
(02:30:16)
So yeah, can I just run your Twitter from now on? You just send it to me.
Ben Shapiro
(02:30:20)
A hundred percent. I’ll prescreen you the jokes and you can tell me if this is a loving joke or if this is a hate-filled [inaudible 02:30:26].
Lex Fridman
(02:30:25)
People will be very surprised by all the heart emojis that start popping up on your Twitter. But thank you so much for being bold and fearless and exploring ideas. And your Twitter aside, thank you for being just good faith in all the arguments and all the conversations you’re having with people. It’s a huge honor. Thank you for talking to me.
Ben Shapiro
(02:30:44)
Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:46)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ben Shapiro. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

(02:30:53)
And now, let me leave you with some words from Ben Shapiro himself. “Freedom of speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people from engaging in thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality.”

(02:31:13)
Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #445

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #445 with Vivek Ramaswamy.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:00:00)
The way I would do it, 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing, shut down agencies that shouldn’t exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not unelected bureaucrats. Merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can’t have both.

(00:00:29)
It’s an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There’s the entitlement state, it’s the welfare state, presents itself in the form of the regulatory state. That’s what we’re talking about. And then there’s the foreign nanny state where effectively we are subsidizing other countries that aren’t paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology, in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we’ve done that, we’ve revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:11)
The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths: The Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican Party. Before all that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity and backbone. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Vivek Ramaswamy.

Conservatism

Lex Fridman
(00:02:02)
You are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas, so you’re the perfect person to ask. What is conservatism? What’s your, let’s say, conservative vision for America?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:02:14)
Well, actually this is one of my criticisms of the modern Republican Party and direction of the conservative movement is that we’ve gotten so good at describing what we’re against. There’s a list of things that we could rail against, wokeism, transgender ideology, climate ideology, COVIDism, COVID policies, the radical Biden agenda, the radical Harris agenda, the list goes on. But actually what’s missing in the conservative movement right now is what we actually stand for. What is our vision for the future of the country? And I saw that as a deficit at the time I started my presidential campaign. It was in many ways the purpose of my campaign because I do feel that that’s why we didn’t have the red wave in 2022. They tried to blame Donald Trump. They tried to blame abortion. They blamed a bunch of individual specific issues or factors. I think the real reason we didn’t have that red wave was that we got so practiced at criticizing Joe Biden that we forgot to articulate who we are and what we stand for.

(00:03:17)
So what do we stand for as conservatives? I think we stand for the ideals that we fought the American Revolution for in 1776. Ideals like merit. That the best person gets the job without regard to their genetics. That you get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character. Free speech, an open debate, not just as some sort of catchphrase, but the idea that any opinion, no matter how heinous, you get to express it in the United States of America. Self-governance and this is a big one right now, is that the people we elect to run the government, they’re no longer the ones who actually run the government. We, in the conservative movement, I believe, should believe in restoring self-governance where it’s not bureaucrats running the show, but actually elected representatives.

(00:04:03)
And then the other ideal that the nation was founded on that I think we need to revive and I think as a north star of the conservative movement is restoring the rule of law in this country. You think about even the abandonment of the rule of law at the southern border. It’s particularly personal to me as the kid of legal immigrants to this country. You and I actually share a couple of aspects in common in that regard. That also though means your first act of entering this country can’t break the law. So there’s some policy commitments and principles, merit, free speech, self-governance, rule of law. And then I think culturally what does it mean to be a conservative is it means we believe in the anchors of our identity, in truth, the value of the individual family, nation and God beat race, gender, sexuality and climate. If we have the courage to actually stand for our own vision. And that’s a big part of what’s been missing. And it’s a big part of not just through the campaign, but through a lot of my future advocacy, that’s the vacuum I’m aiming to fill.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:06)
Yeah, we’ll talk about each of those issues. Immigration, the growing bureaucracy of government, religion is a really interesting topic, something you’ve spoken about a lot, but you’ve also had a lot of really tense debates. So you’re a perfect person to ask to steel man the other side.

Progressivism

Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:05:24)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:25)
So let me ask you about progressivism.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:05:27)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:27)
Can you steel man the case for progressivism and left- wing ideas?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:05:31)
Yeah, so look, I think the strongest case, particularly for left-wing ideas in the United States, so in the American context, is that the country has been imperfect in living up to its ideals. So even though our founding fathers preached the importance of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and freedom, they didn’t practice those values in terms of many of our founding fathers being slave owners, inequalities with respect to women and other disempowered such that they say that that created a power structure in this country that continues to last to this day. The vestiges of what happened even in 1860 in the course of human history isn’t that long ago and that we need to do everything in our power to correct for those imbalances in power in the United States.

(00:06:15)
That’s the core view of the modern left. I’m not criticizing it right now, I’m steel manning it, I’m trying to give you I think a good of why the left believes they have a compelling case for the government stepping into correct for historical or present inequalities. I can give you my counter rebuttal of that, but the best statement of the left, I think that it’s the fact that we’ve been imperfect in living up to those ideals. In order to fix that, we’re going to have to take steps that are severe steps if needed to correct for those historical inequalities before we actually have true equality of opportunity in this country. That’s the case for the left-wing view in modern America.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:51)
So what’s your criticism of that?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:06:52)
So my concern with it is even if that’s well-motivated, I think that it recreates many of the same problems that they were setting out to solve. I’ll give you a really tangible example of that in the present right now. I may be alone amongst prominent conservatives who would say something like this right now, but I think it’s true, so I’m going to say it. I’m actually even in the last year, last year and a half, seeing actually a rise in anti-black and anti-minority racism in this country, which is a little curious. When over the last 10 years we got as close to Martin Luther King’s promise land as you could envision, a place where you have every American, regardless of their skin color, able to vote without obstruction, a place where you have people able to get the highest jobs in the land without race standing in their way.

(00:07:38)
Why are we seeing that resurgence? In part, it’s because of I believe that left-wing obsession with racial equity over the course of the last 20 years in this country. And so when you take something away from someone based on their skin color, and that’s what correcting for prior injustice was supposed to do, the left-wing view is you have to correct for prior injustice by saying that whether you’re a white, straight, cis, man, you have certain privileges that you have to actually correct for. When you take something away from somebody based on their genetics, you actually foster greater animus towards other groups around you. And so the problem with that philosophy is that it creates several problems with it, but the most significant problem that I think everybody can agree we want to avoid is to actually fan the flames of the very divisions that you supposedly wanted to heal.

(00:08:28)
I see that in our context of our immigration policy as well. You think about even what’s going on in, I’m from Ohio, I was born and raised in Ohio and I live there today, the controversy in Springfield, Ohio. I personally don’t blame really any of the people who are in Springfield, either the native people born and raised in Springfield or even the Haitians who have been moved to Springfield. But it ends up becoming a divide and conquer strategy and outcome where if you put 20,000 people in a community where, 50,000 people, where the 20,000 are coming in don’t know the language, are unable to follow the traffic laws, are unable to assimilate, you know there’s going to be a reactionary backlash. And so even though that began perhaps with some type of charitable instinct, some type of sympathy for people who went through the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti and achieved temporary protective status in the United States, what began with sympathy, what began with earnest intentions actually creates the very division and reactionary response that supposedly we say we wanted to avoid. So that’s my number one criticism of that left-wing worldview.

(00:09:34)
Number two is I do believe that merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can’t have both. And the reason why is no two people, and I think it’s the beautiful things, true between you and I, between you, I and all of our friends or family or strangers or neighbors or colleagues, no two people have the same skillsets. We’re each endowed by different gifts. We’re each endowed with different talents. And that’s the beauty of human diversity.

(00:10:08)
And a true meritocracy is a system in which you’re able to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential without anybody standing in your way. But that means necessarily there’s going to be differences in outcomes in a wide range of parameters, not just financial, not just money, not just fame or currency or whatever it is. There’s just going to be different outcomes for different people in different spheres of lives. And that’s what meritocracy demands. It’s what it requires. And so the left’s vision of group equity necessarily comes at the cost of meritocracy. And so those would be my two reasons for opposing the view is one is it’s not meritocratic, but number two is it often even has the effect of hurting the very people they claimed to have wanted to help. And I think that’s part of what we’re seeing in modern America.

DEI

Lex Fridman
(00:10:52)
Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban, a great conversation. I think it’s on your podcast actually.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:10:58)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:58)
Yes. Yeah, it was great.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:10:59)
Yeah, he was a good guy to talk to.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:00)
It was great. Okay. Well, speaking of good guys, he messages me all the time with beautifully eloquent criticism. I appreciate that, Mark. What was one of the more convincing things he said to you? You’re mostly focused on kind of DEI.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:11:15)
So let’s just take a step back and understand because people use these acronyms and then they start saying it out of muscle memory and stop asking what it actually means. DEI refers to capital D, diversity, equity and inclusion, which is a philosophy adopted by institutions principally in the private sector, companies, nonprofits and universities, to say that they need to strive for specific forms of racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity. And it’s not just the D, it’s equity in ensuring that you have equal outcomes as measured by certain group quota targets or group representation targets that they would meet in their ranks. The problem with the DEI agenda is in the name of diversity, it actually has been a vehicle for sacrificing true diversity of thought. So the way the argument goes is this, is that we have to create an environment that is receptive to minorities and minority views, but if certain opinions are themselves deemed to be hostile to those minorities, then you have to exclude those opinions in the name of the capital D diversity. But that means that you’re necessarily sacrificing actual diversity of thought.

(00:12:21)
I can give you a very specific example. That might sound like, “Okay, well, is it such a bad thing if an organization doesn’t want to exclude people who are saying racist things on a given day?” We could debate that. But let’s get to the tangible world of how that actually plays out. I, for my part, have not really heard in ordinary America people uttering racial epithets if you’re going to restaurant or in the grocery store. It’s not something I’ve encountered, certainly not in the workplace. But that’s a theoretical case, let’s talk about the real world case of how this plays out. So there was an instance, it was a case that presented itself before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, one of the government enforcers of the DEI agenda. And there was a case of a woman who wore a red sweater on Fridays in celebration of veterans and those who had served the military and invited others in the workplace to do the same thing.

(00:13:08)
And they had a kind of affinity group, you could call it that, a veteran type affinity group, appreciating those who had served. Her son had served as well. There was a minority employee at that business who said that he found that to be a microaggression. So the employer asked her to stop wearing said clothes too, the office. Well, she still felt like she wanted to celebrate, I think, it was Friday was the day of the week where they did it. She still wore the red sweater and she didn’t wear it, but she would hang it on the back of her seat, put it on the back of her seat at the office. They said, “No, you can’t do that either.” So the irony is in the name of this capital D diversity, which is creating a supposedly welcoming workplace for all kinds of Americans by focusing only on certain kinds of so-called diversity, that translates into actually not even a diversity of your genetics, which is what they claim to be solving for, but also a hostility to diversity of thought.

(00:14:01)
And I think that’s dangerous. And you’re seeing that happen in the last four years across this country. It’s been pretty rampant. I think it leaves America worse off. The beauty of America is we’re a country where we should be able to have institutions that are stronger from different points of view being expressed. But my number one criticism of the DEI agenda is not even that it’s anti-meritocratic, it is anti-meritocratic, but my number one criticism is it’s actually hostile to the free and open exchange of ideas by creating often legal liabilities for organizations that even permit certain viewpoints to be expressed. And I think that’s the biggest concern.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:35)
I think what Mark would say is that diversity allows you to look for talent in places where you haven’t looked before and therefore find really special talents, special people. I think that’s the case he made.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:14:50)
He did make that case and it was a great conversation. And my response to that is great, that’s a good thing. We don’t need a three-letter acronym to do that. You don’t need special programmatic DEI incentives to do it because companies are always going to seek in a truly free market, which I think we’re missing in the United States today for a lot of reasons, but in a truly free market, companies will have the incentive to hire the best and brightest or else they’re going to be less competitive versus other companies. But you don’t need ESG, DEI, CSR regimes in part enforced by the government to do it.

(00:15:23)
Today, to be a government contractor, for example, you have to adopt certain racial and gender representation targets in your workforce. That’s not the free market working. So I think you can’t have it both ways either. It’s going to be good for companies and companies are going to do what’s in their self-interest. That’s what capitalists like Mark Cuban and I believe. But if we really believe that, then we should let the market work rather than forcing it to adopt these top-down standards. That’s my issue with it.

Bureaucracy

Lex Fridman
(00:15:45)
I don’t know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind wish there’s a good ideal, to bully people and to do bad things. I don’t know what it is.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:16:06)
This has less to do with left-wing versus right-wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal. So part of what you’ve seen with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure. So you’ve seen that in several different spheres of American life. You could even talk about in the military. You think about our entry into Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the state objectives that we had. And I think by all accounts, it was a policy move we regret. Our policy ranks and our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq, invading a country that really by all accounts was not at all responsible for 9/11. Nonetheless, if you’re part of the US military or you’re General Mark Milley, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism than you would actually talk about the military’s actual substantive failures.

(00:17:11)
It’s what I call the practice of blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability. You could say the same thing with respect to the educational system. It’s a lot easier to claim that, and I’m not the one making this claim, but others have made this claim, that math is racist because there are inequitable results on objective tests of mathematics based on different demographic attributes. You can claim using that then math is racist. It’s a lot easier to blow that woke smoke than it is to accept accountability for failing to teach black kids in the inner city how to actually do math and fix our public school systems and the zip code coded mechanism for trapping kids in poor communities in bad schools. So I think that in many cases, what these bureaucracies do is they use the appearance of signaling this virtue as a way of not really advancing a social cause, but of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from criticism.

(00:18:05)
So in many ways, bureaucracy, I think, cars the channels through which much of this woke ideology has flowed over the last several years. And that’s why part of my focus has shifted away from just combating wokeness because that’s just a symptom, I think, versus combating actual bureaucracy itself. The rise of this managerial class, the rise of the deep state. We talk about that in the government, but the deep state doesn’t just exist in the government. It exists I think in every sphere of our lives, from companies to nonprofits to universities. It’s the rise of we call the managerial class, the committee class, the people who professionally sit on committees, I think are wielding far more power today than actual creators, entrepreneurs, original ideators and ordinary citizens alike.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:54)
Yeah, you need managers, but as few as possible. It seems like when you have a giant managerial class, the actual doers don’t get to do. But like you said, bureaucracy is a phenomena of both the left and the right. This is not-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:19:13)
It’s not even a left or right, it’s just transcends that, but it’s anti-American at its core. So our founding fathers, they were anti-bureaucratic at their core actually, they were the pioneers, the explorers, the unafraid. They were the inventors, the creators. People forget this about Benjamin Franklin who signed the Declaration of Independence, one of the great inventors that we have in the United States as well. He invented the lightning rod. He invented the Franklin stove, which was actually one of the great innovations in the field of thermodynamics. He even invented a number of musical instruments that Mozart and Beethoven went on to use. That’s just Benjamin Franklin. So you think, “Oh, he’s a one-off.” Everybody say, okay, he was the one zany founder who was also a creative scientific innovator who happened to be one of the founders of the country. Wrong, it wasn’t unique to him. You have Thomas Jefferson. What are you sitting in right now? You’re sitting on a swivel chair. Okay. Who invented the swivel chair?
Lex Fridman
(00:20:08)
Thomas Jefferson?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:20:09)
Yes, Thomas Jefferson.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:10)
Yeah.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:20:10)
Funny enough, he invented the swivel chair while he was writing the Declaration of Independence, which is insane.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:14)
You’re the one that reminded me that he drafted, he wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:20:21)
And he was 33 when he did it while inventing the swivel chair.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:24)
I like how you’re focused on the swivel chair. Can we just pause on the Declaration of Independence? It makes me feel horrible.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:20:31)
But the Declaration of Independence part, everybody knows. What people don’t know, he was an architect. So he worked in Virginia, but the Virginia State Capital Dome, so the building that’s in Virginia today where the state capital is, that dome was actually designed by Thomas Jefferson as well. So these people weren’t people who sat on professional committees, they weren’t bureaucrats, they hated bureaucracy. Part of Old World England is Old World England was committed to the idea of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy and monarchy go hand in hand. A monarch can’t actually administer or govern directly, it requires bureaucracy, a machine to actually technocratically govern for him. So the United States of America was founded on the idea that we reject that Old World view. The Old World vision was that we the people cannot be trusted to self-govern or make decisions for ourselves. We would burn ourselves off the planet, is the modern version of this, with existential risks like global climate change, if we just leave it to the people and their democratic will.

(00:21:33)
That’s why you need professional technocrats, educated elites, enlightened bureaucrats to be able to set limits that actually protect people from their own worst impulses. That’s the Old World view and most nations in human history have operated this way, but what made the United States of America itself, to know what made America great, we have to know what made America itself, what made America itself is we said hell no to that vision, that we the people, for better or worse, are going to self-govern without the committee class restraining what we do. And the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and I could give you examples of John Adams or Robert Livingston, you go straight down the list of founding fathers who were inventors, creators, pioneers, explorers, who also were the very people who came together to sign the Declaration of Independence. And so yeah, this rise of bureaucracy in America in every sphere of life, I view it as anti-American actually. And I hope that conservatives and liberals alike can get behind my crusade certainly to get in there and shut most of it down.

Government efficiency

Lex Fridman
(00:22:36)
Yeah, speaking of shutting most of it down, how do you propose we do that? How do we make government more efficient? How to make it smaller? What are the different ideas of how to do that?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:22:48)
Well, the first thing I’ll say is you’re always taking a risk. Okay, there’s no free lunch here. Mostly, at least. You’re always taking a risk. One risk is that you say I want to reform it gradually, I want to have a grand master plan and get to exactly what the right end state is and then carefully cut with a chisel, like a work of art, to get there. I don’t believe that approach works. I think that’s an approach that conservatives have taken for many years. I think it hasn’t gotten us very far. And the reason is if you have an eight-headed hydra and you cut off one of the heads, it grows right back. So that’s the risk of not cutting enough. The other risk you could take is the risk of cutting too much. To say that I’m going to cut so much that I’m going to take the risk of not just cutting the fat, but also cutting some muscle along the way, but I’m going to take that risk.

(00:23:36)
I can’t give you option C, which is to say that I’m going to cut exactly the right amount, I’m going to do it perfectly. Okay, you don’t know ex-ante, you don’t know beforehand that it’s exactly how it’s going to, so that’s a meaningless claim. It’s only a question of which risk you’re going to take. I believe in the moment we live in right now, the second risk is the risk we have to be willing to take. And we haven’t had a class of politician, Donald Trump in 2016 was I think the closest we’ve gotten and I think the second term will be even closer to what we need, but short of that, I don’t think we’ve really had a class of politician who has gotten very serious about cutting so much that you’re also going to cut some fat, but not only some fat, but also some muscle.

(00:24:19)
That’s the risk we have to take. So the way I would do it, 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing, shut down agencies that shouldn’t exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules not unelected bureaucrats. And that is the single greatest form of economic stimulus we could have in this country, but it is also the single most effective way to restore self-governance in our country as well. And it is the blueprint for, I think, how we save this country.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:57)
That’s pretty gangster, 75%. There’s this kind of almost meme like video of Argentinian President Javier Milei, where on a whiteboard, he has all the I think 18 ministries lined up and he’s ripping, “Department of Education, gone,” and he’s just going like this. Now, the situation in Argentina is pretty dire and the situation in the United States is not, despite everybody saying the empire is falling, this is still, in my opinion, the greatest nation on earth. Still, the economy is doing very well. Still, this is the hub of culture, the hub of innovation, the hub of so many amazing things. Do you think it’s possible to do something like firing 75% of people in government when things are going relatively well?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:25:59)
Yes, in fact, I think it’s necessary and essential. I think things depends on what your level of well really is, what you’re benchmarking against. America’s not built on complacency. We’re built on the pursuit of excellence. And are we still the greatest nation on planet earth? I believe we are. I agree with you on that. But are we great as we could possibly be or even as we have been in the past, measured against our own standards of excellence? No, we’re not. I think the nation is in a trajectory of decline. That doesn’t mean it’s the end of the empire yet. But we are a nation in decline right now. I don’t think we have to be. But part of that decline is driven by the rise of this managerial class, the bureaucracy sucking the lifeblood out of the country, sucking the lifeblood out of our innovative culture, our culture of self-governance.

(00:26:47)
So is it possible? Yeah, it’s really possible. I’ll tell you one easy way to do it. This is a little bit, I’m being a little bit glib here, but I think it’s not crazy, at least as a thought experiment. Get in there on day one, say that anybody in the federal bureaucracy who is not elected, elected representatives obviously were elected by the people, but the people who are not elected, if your social security number ends in an odd number, you’re out, if it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your social security number starts in an even number, you’re in and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75% reduction done. Literally, stochastically, okay, one of the virtues of that, it’s a thought experiment, not a policy prescription, but one of the virtues of that thought experiment is that you don’t have a bunch of lawsuits you’re dealing with about gender discrimination or racial discrimination or political viewpoint discrimination.

(00:27:42)
Actually, the reality is you’ve at mass, you didn’t bring the chisel, you brought a chainsaw, I guarantee you do that on day one and do step two on day two, on day three, not a thing will have changed for the ordinary American other than this size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it. And most people who have run a company, especially larger companies know this, it’s 25% of the people who do 80 to 90% of the useful work, these government agencies are no different. So now imagine you could do that same thought experiment, but not just doing it at random, but do it still at large scale while having some metric of screening for those who actually had both the greatest competence as well as the greatest commitment and knowledge of the Constitution.

(00:28:26)
That I think would immediately raise not only the civic character of the United States, now we feel, okay, the people we elect to run the government, they’ve got the power back, they’re running the government again, as opposed to the unelected bureaucrats who wield the power today, it would also stimulate the economy. The regulatory state is like a wet blanket on the American economy. Most of it is unconstitutional. All we require is leadership with a spine to get in there and actually do what conservative presidents have maybe gestured towards and talked about, but have not really effectuated ever in modern history.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:00)
And by the way, that kind of thing would attract the ultra-competent that actually want to work in government.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:29:05)
Exactly. Which you’re missing today because right now, the government would swallow them up. Most competent people feel like that bureaucratic machine will swallow them whole. You clear the decks of 75% of them, real innovators can then show up.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:18)
Yeah. There’s kind of this cynical view of capitals where people think that the only reason you do anything is to earn more money, but I think a lot of people would want to work in government to build something that’s helpful to a huge number of people.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:29:32)
Yeah. Well, look, I think there’s opportunities for the very best to have large scale impact in all kinds of different institutions in our universities to K through 12 education, through entrepreneurship, I’m obviously very biased in that regard. I think there’s a lot you’re able to create that you couldn’t create through government. But I do think in the moment that we live in where our government is as broken as it is and as responsible for the declining nature of our country, yeah, I think bringing in people who are unafraid, talented and able to have an impact could make all of the difference. And I agree with you, I don’t think actually most people, even most people who say they’re motivated by money, I don’t think are actually motivated by money. I think most people are driven by a belief that they can do more than they’re being permitted to do right now with their skillsets. I’ve run a number of companies and one of the things that I used to ask when I was, I’m not day-to-day involved in them anymore, but as a CEO, I would ask when I did interviews, in the first company I started, at Roivant, for four years in, company was pretty big by that point, I would still intent on interviewing every candidate before they joined, screening for the culture of that person. I can talk a lot more about things we did to build that culture. But one of the questions I would always ask them naturally just to start a conversation, it’s a pretty basic question, is why did you leave your last job or why are you leaving your last job? I’ll tell you what I didn’t hear very often, is that I wasn’t paid enough. And maybe they’d be shy to tell you that during an interview, but there’s indirect ways to signal that. That really wasn’t at all even a top 10 reason why people were leaving their job.

(00:31:21)
I’ll give you what the number one reason was, is that they felt like they were unable to do the true maximum of what their potential was in their prior role. That’s the number one reason people leave their job. And by the way, I would say that as I’m saying that in a self boastful way that we would attract these people. I think that’s also true for most of the people who left the company as well, Roivant. And that was true at Roivant, it’s at other companies I’ve started. I think the number one reason people join companies and number one people leave companies, whether they’ve been to join mine or to leave mine in the past, have been that they feel like they’re able to do more than they’re able to with their skillset than that environment permits them to actually achieve. And so I think that’s what people hung for.

(00:32:06)
When we think about capitalism and true free market capitalism, and we used words earlier like meritocracy, it’s about building a system, whether it’s in a nation or whether it’s even within an organization, that allows every individual to flourish and achieve the maximum of their potential. And sometimes it just doesn’t match for an organization, where let’s say the mission is here and somebody’s skillsets could be really well aligned to a different mission, then the right answer is it’s not a negative thing, it’s just that person needs to leave and find their mission somewhere else. But to bring that back to government, I think part of what’s happened right now is that the rise of that bureaucracy in so many of these government agencies has actually obfuscated the mission of these agencies. I think if you went to most federal bureaucracies and just asked them what’s the mission, I’m just making one up off the top of my head right now, the Department of Health and Human Services, what is the mission of HHS in the United States of America? I doubt somebody who works there, even the person who leads it, could give you…
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:33:00)
I doubt somebody who works there, even the person who leads it, could give you a coherent answer to that question. I just heavily doubt it. And you could fill in the blank for any range of… Department of Commerce, and we could just go straight down the list of each of these other ones, what is the mission of this organization?

(00:33:16)
You could even say for the US military, what’s the purpose of the US military, the Department of Defense? I can give you one. I think it is to win wars, and more importantly, through its strength, to avoid wars, that’s it.

(00:33:27)
Well, okay, if that’s the mission, then you know, okay, it’s not tinkering around and messing around in some foreign conflict where we feel like it sometimes, and other ones where we don’t. And who decides that, I don’t really know, but whoever the people are that decide that, we follow those orders.

(00:33:40)
No, our mission is to protect the United States of America, to win wars, and to avoid wars, boom, those three things. What does protecting the United States of America mean? Number one, the homeland of the United States of America and the people who reside there. Good, that’s a clear mission.

(00:33:55)
The Department of Health and Human Services, maybe, could be a reasonable mission to say that I want to make America the healthiest country on Planet Earth, and we will develop the metrics and meet those metrics, and that’s the goal of the Department of HHS, to set policies, or at least to implement policies that best achieve that goal.

(00:34:12)
And maybe that’s the right statement of mission, maybe it’s not, but one of the things that happens is, when you’re governed by the committee class, it dilutes the sense of mission out of any organization, whether it’s a company or government agency or bureaucracy.

(00:34:24)
And once you’ve done that, then you lose the ability to track the best and the brightest, because in order for somebody to achieve the maximum of their potential, they have to know what it’s towards. There has to be a mission in the first place.

(00:34:34)
Then you’re not getting the best and brightest, you get more from the committee class, and that becomes a self-perpetuating downward spiral, and that is what the blob of the federal bureaucracy really looks like today.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:45)
Yeah, you said something really profound. At the individual scale of the individual contributor, doer, creator, what happens is, you have a certain capacity to do awesome shit, and then there’s barriers that come up. We have to wait a little bit. This happens, there’s friction always. When humans together are working on something, there’s friction. And so, the goal of a great company is to minimize that friction, minimize the number of barriers. And what happens is, the managerial class, the incentive is for it to create barriers.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:35:15)
It’s what it does. That’s just by the nature of a bureaucracy, it creates sand in the gears to slow down whatever the other process was. Is there some room for that somewhere in certain contexts? Sure.

(00:35:25)
It’s like a defensive mechanism that’s designed to reduce dynamism. But I think when that becomes cancerous in its scope, it then actually kills the host itself, whether that’s a school, whether that’s a company, whether that’s a government.

(00:35:43)
And so, the way I think about it, Lex, is, there’s sort of a balance of distributed power. And I don’t mean power in the Foucault sense of social power, but I mean just power in the sense of the ability to affect relevant change in any organization between what you could call the founder class, the creator class, the everyday citizen, the stakeholder class, and then the managerial class.

(00:36:08)
And there’s a role for all three of them. You could have the constituents of an organization, say in a constitutional republic, that’s the citizen, you could have the equivalent of the creator class, the people who create things in that polity, and then you have the bureaucratic class that’s designed to administer and serve as a liaison between the two.

(00:36:25)
I’m not denying that there’s some role somewhere for people who are in that managerial class, but right now, in this moment in American history, and I think it’s been more or less true for the last century, but it’s grown, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s advent of the Modern Administrative State, metastasizing through FDR’s New Deal and what was required to administer it, blown over and metastasizing further through LBJ’s Great Society, and everything that’s happened since, even aided and abetted by Republican presidents along the way like Richard Nixon, has created a United States of America where that committee class, both in and outside the government and our culture, wields far too much influence and power relative to the everyday citizen stakeholder and to the creators, who are, in many ways, constrained, hamstrung, shackled in straitjacket from achieving the maximum of their own potential contributions.

(00:37:20)
And I certainly feel that myself. I probably identify as being a member of that creator class most closely. It’s just what I’ve done, I create things. And I think we live in an environment in the United States of America where we’re still probably the best country on earth where that creator has that shot, so that’s the positive side of it, but one where we are far more constrictive to the creator class than we have been when we’ve been at our best, and that’s what I want to see change.

Education

Lex Fridman
(00:37:46)
Can you steelman the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular department, Department of Education, and are saying that the amount of pain that will be caused by closing it and firing 75% of people will be too much?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:38:02)
Yeah. So, I go back to this question of mission, right? A lot of people who make arguments for the Department of Education aren’t aware why the Department of Education was created in the first place, actually. So that might be a useful place to start, is that this thing was created, it had a purpose, presumably. What was that purpose?

(00:38:22)
It might be at least a relevant question to ask before we decided what are we doing with it or not, what was the purpose of this thing that we created? To me, it seems to be a highly relevant question.

(00:38:32)
Yet, in this discussion about government reform, it’s interesting how eager people are to skip over that question and just to talk about, “Okay, but we’ve got the status quo, and it’s just going to be disruptive,” versus asking the question of, okay, this institution was created, it had an original purpose, is that purpose still relevant? Is this organization at all fulfilling that purpose today?

(00:38:51)
To me, those are some relevant questions to ask. So, let’s talk about that for the Department of Education. Its purpose was relevant at that time, which was to make sure that localities, and particularly states, were not siphoning taxpayer dollars away from predominantly Black school districts to predominantly White ones.

(00:39:13)
And that was not a theoretical concern at the time. It was happening, or there was at least some evidence that that was happening in certain states in the South. And so, you may say you don’t like the federal solution, you may say you like the federal solution, but like it or not, that was the original purpose of the US Department of Education, to make sure that, from a federal perspective, that states were not systematically disadvantaging Black school districts over predominantly White ones.

(00:39:36)
However noble and relevant that purpose may have been six decades ago, it’s not a relevant purpose today. There’s no evidence today of states intentionally mapping out which are the Black versus White school districts and siphoning money in one direction versus another.

(00:39:51)
To the contrary, one of the things we’ve learned is that the school districts in the inner city, many of which are predominantly Black, actually spend more money per student than other school districts for a worse result, as measured by test scores and other performance, on a per-student basis, suggesting that there are other factors than the dollar expenditures per school determining student success, and actually suggesting that even the over-funding of some of those already poorly run schools rewards them for their actual bureaucratic failures.

(00:40:23)
So, against that backdrop, the Department of Education has, instead, extrapolated that original purpose of what was a racial equality purpose, to, instead, implement a different vision of racial equity through the ideologies that they demand in the content of the curriculum that these public schools actually teach.

(00:40:39)
So, Department of Education funding, so federal funding, accounts for about, I’m giving you round numbers here, but around 10% of the funding of most public schools across the country. But that comes with strings attached.

(00:40:52)
So, in today’s Department of Education, this didn’t happen back in 1970, but it’s happening today, ironically it’s funny how these things change with the bureaucracies that fail, they blow oak smoke to cover up for their own failures, what happens with today’s Department of Education?

(00:41:05)
They effectively say you don’t get that funding unless you adopt certain goals deemed at achieving racial or gender equity goals. And in fact, they also intervene in the curriculum where there’s evidence of schools in the Midwest or in the Great Plains that have been denied funding because Department of Education funding, so long as they have certain subjects like Archery…

(00:41:25)
There was one instance of a school that had archery in its curriculum. I find that to be pretty interesting, actually. I think you have different kinds of physical education. This is one that combines mental focus with physical aptitude, but hey, maybe I’m biased, it doesn’t matter.

(00:41:40)
Whether you like archery or not, I don’t think it’s the federal government’s job to withhold funding from a school because they include something in their curriculum that the federal government deems inappropriate where that locality found that to be a relevant locus of education.

(00:41:53)
So, what you see then is an abandonment of the original purpose. That’s long past. You don’t have this problem that the Department of Education was originally formed to solve, of siphoning money from Black school districts to White school districts and laundering that, effectively, in public funds, that doesn’t exist anymore.

(00:42:08)
So, they find new purposes instead, creating a lot more damage along the way. So, you asked me to steelman, and can I say something constructive rather than just pounding down on the other side? One way to think about this is, for a lot of these agencies, were many of them formed with a positive intention at the outset? Yes. Whether that positive intention existed, I’m still a skeptic of creating bureaucracies, but if you’re going to create one, at least make it, what shall we call it, a taskforce. Make it a taskforce.

(00:42:45)
A taskforce versus an agency means, after it’s done, you celebrate, you’ve done your work, pat yourself on the back, and then move on, rather than creating a standing bureaucracy which actually finds things to do after it has already solved or addressed the first reason it was born in the first place.

(00:43:02)
And I think we don’t have enough of that in our culture. Even if you have a company that’s generated tons of cash flow, and it’s solved a problem, let’s say it’s a biopharmaceutical company that developed a cure to some disease, and the only thing people knew at that company was how to develop a cure to that disease, and they generated a boatload of cash from doing it, at a certain point you could just give it to your shareholders and close up shop.

(00:43:22)
And that’s actually a beautiful thing to do. You don’t see that happen enough in the American consciousness, in the American culture of, when an institution has achieved its purpose, celebrate it, and then move on. And I think that that culture in our government would result in a vastly restrained scope of government, rather than, today it’s a one-way ratchet.

(00:43:39)
Once you cause it to come into existence, you cause new things to come into existence, but the old one that came into existence continues to persist and exist as well, and that’s where you get this metastasis over the last century.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:50)
So, what kind of things do you think government should do that the private sector, the forces of capitalism would create drastic inequalities or create the kind of pain we don’t want to have in government?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:44:01)
So, the question is, what should government do that the private sector cannot? I’ll give you one. Protect our border. Capitalism, it’s never going to be the job of capitalists, or never going to be the capability or inclination of capitalists to preserve a national border.

(00:44:15)
And I think a nation, it’s literally, I think, one of the chapters of this book, “A nation without borders is not a nation.” It’s almost a tautology, an open border is not a border. Capitalism is not going to solve that. What’s going to solve that is a nation.

(00:44:27)
Part of the job of the federal government is to protect the homeland of its nation, in this case, the United States of America. That’s an example of a proper function of the federal government, to provide physical security to its citizens.

(00:44:40)
Another proper role of that federal government is to look after, or in this case it could be state government, to make sure that private parties cannot externalize their costs onto somebody else without their consent. It’s a fancy way economists would use to describe it. What does that mean?

(00:44:59)
It means if you go dump your chemicals in somebody else’s river, then you’re liable for that. It’s not that, okay, I’m a capitalist and so I want to create things, and I’m going to do hell or high water, whether or not that harms people around me.

(00:45:10)
The job of a proper government is to make sure that you protect the rights of those who may be harmed by those who are pursuing their own rights through a system of capitalism.

(00:45:18)
In seeking prosperity, you’re free to do it, but if you’re hurting somebody, else without their consent, in the process, the government is there to enforce what is really just a different form of enforcing a private property right.

(00:45:31)
So, I would say that those are two central functions of government, is to preserve national boundaries in the national security of a homeland, and number two is to protect and preserve private property rights and the enforcement of those private property rights. And I think, at that point, you’ve described about 80 to 90% of the proper role of a government.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:50)
What about infrastructure?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:45:52)
Look, I think that most infrastructure can be dealt with through the private sector. You can get into specifics. You could have infrastructure that’s specific to national security. No, I do think that military industrial base is essential to provide national security. That’s a form of infrastructure.

(00:46:05)
I don’t think you could rely exclusively on the private sector to provide the optimal level of that protection to a nation. But interstate highways, I think you could think about whether or not that’s a common good that everybody benefits from but nobody had the incentive to create. I think you could make an argument for the existence of interstate highways.

(00:46:23)
I think you could also make powerful arguments for the fact that, actually, you could have enough private sector co-ops that could cause that to come into existence as well. But I’m not dogmatic about this.

(00:46:35)
But broadly speaking, 80 to 90% of the goal of the federal government, I’m not going to say 100, 80 to 90% of the goal of the existence of a federal government, of government, period, should be to protect national boundaries and provide security for the people who live there, and to protect the private property rights of the people who reside there.

(00:46:55)
If we restore that, I think we’re well on our way to a revival of what our founding fathers envisioned, and I think many of them would give you the same answer that I just did.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:03)
So, if we get government out of education, would you be also for reducing this as a government in the states for something like education?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:47:13)
I think if it goes closer to municipalities and the states, I’m fine with that being a locus for people determining as… For example, let’s just say school districts are taxed at the local level.

(00:47:23)
For that to be a matter for municipalities and townships to actually decide, democratically, how they actually want that governed, whether it’s balance between a public school district versus making that same money available to families in the form of vouchers or other forms of ability to educational savings accounts, or whichever mechanism it is, to opt out of that, if that’s done locally, I’ll have views on that that tend to go further in the direction of true educational choice and diversity of choice.

(00:47:51)
The implementation of charter schools, the granting of state charters, or even lowering the barriers to granting one, I favor those kinds of policies. But if we’ve gotten the federal government out of it, that’s achieved 75% of what I think we need to achieve, that I’m focused on solving other problems, and leave that to the states and municipalities to cover from there.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:10)
So, given this conversation, what do you think of Elon’s proposal of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump Administration, or really, any administration?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:48:21)
Well, I’m, of course, biased because Elon and I had discussed that for the better part of the last year and a half, which I think it’s a great idea. It’s something that’s very consistent with the core premise of my presidential candidacy.

(00:48:33)
I got to know him, as I was running for US president, in a couple of events that he came to, and then we built a friendship after that. So, obviously, I think it’s a great idea.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:41)
Who do you think is more hardcore on the cutting, you or Elon?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:48:46)
Well, I think Elon’s pretty hardcore. Because I said 75% of the federal bureaucrats, and while I was running for president, he said, “You need to put, ‘At least 75%’.” So I agree with him.

(00:48:58)
I think it would be a fun competition to see who ends up more hardcore. I don’t think there’s someone out there who’s going to be more hardcore than he or I would be. And the reason is, I think we share in common a willingness to take the risk and see what happens.

(00:49:17)
The sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. That much I guarantee you. Is there are going to be some broken glass and some damage? Yes, there is. There’s no way around that. But once you’re willing to take that risk, then it doesn’t become so scary anymore. And here’s the thing, Lex, so it’s easy to say this, let’s talk about where the rubber hits the road here. Even in a second Trump term this would be the discussion. President Trump and I have had this conversation, but I think we would continue to have this conversation, is where does it rank on our prioritization list, because there’s always going to be a trade-off.

(00:49:50)
If you have a different policy objective that you want to achieve, a good policy objective, whatever that is, you could talk about immigration policy, you could talk about economic policy, there are other policy objectives, if you’re going to trade off a little bit, in the short-run, the effectiveness of your ability to carry out that policy goal, if you’re also committed to actually thinning out the federal government by 75%…

(00:50:15)
Because there’s just going to be some clunkiness there’s just going to be frictional costs for that level of cut. So the question is, where does that rank on your prioritization list?

(00:50:23)
To pull that off, to pull off a 75% reduction in the size and scale of the federal government, the regulatory state, and the headcount, I think that only happens if that’s your top priority. You could do it at a smaller scale, but at that scale, it only happens if that’s your top priority.

(00:50:39)
Because then, as President, you’re in a position to say, “I know in the super short run, that might even make it a little bit harder for me to do this other thing that I want to do, and use the regulatory state to do it, but I’m gonna pass on that.

(00:50:52)
I’m gonna pass that up, I’m gonna bear that hardship and inconvenience because I know this other goal is more important on the scale of decades and centuries for the country.” So it’s a question of prioritization. And certainly, my own view is that, now is the moment where that needs to be a top priority for saving this country.

(00:51:12)
And if there’s one thing about my campaign, if I was to do it again, I would be even clearer about… Actually, I talked about a lot of things in the campaign, and we can cover a lot of that too. But if there’s one thing that I care about more than anything else, it’s dismantling that bureaucracy.

(00:51:27)
And moreover, it’s an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There’s the entitlement state, there’s the welfare state, presents itself in the form of the regulatory state, that’s what we’re talking about, and then there’s the foreign nanny state where, effectively, we are subsidizing other countries that aren’t paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them.

(00:51:52)
If I was to summarize my ideology in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms; the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we’ve done that, we’ve revived the Republic that I think would make George Washington proud.

Military Industrial Complex

Lex Fridman
(00:52:11)
So, you mentioned Department of Education, but there’s also the Department of Defense.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:52:15)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:16)
And there’s a very large number of very powerful people that have gotten used to and a budget that’s increasing, and the number of wars and military conflicts that’s increasing. So, if we could just talk about that.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:52:16)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:32)
So this is the number one priority. It’s like there’s difficulty levels here. The DOD would be, probably, the hardest, so let’s take that on. What’s your view on the Military Industrial Complex, Department of Defense, and wars in general?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:52:50)
So, I think the nanny state, I’m against it overall, I’m against the foreign policy nanny state as well. Let me just start from that as the starting-off point, and then I’ll tell you about my views on the DOD and our Defense. First of all, think that… And I think that it was easy for many people from the neocon school of thought to caricature my views with the media at their side, but actually, my own view is, if it’s in the interest of the United States of America to provide certain levels of protection to US allies, we can do that as long as those allies actually pay for it.

(00:53:22)
And I think it’s important for two reasons. The less important reason, it’s still an important reason, the less important reason is, it’s still money for us. It’s not like we’re swimming in a cash surplus right now. We’ve got a $34 trillion national debt, and growing, and I think pretty soon the interest payments are going to be the largest line item in our own federal budget.

(00:53:39)
So, it’s not like we have money willy-nilly to just hand over for free. That’s the less important reason, though. The more important reason is that it makes sure that our allies have actual skin in the game to not have skewed incentives to actually enter conflicts where they’re not actually bearing the full cost of those conflicts. So, take NATO for example, most NATO countries, literally a majority of NATO countries today do not pay or contribute 2% of their GDP to their own National Defense, which is supposedly a requirement to be in NATO. So the majority of NATO countries are failing to meet their basic commitment to be in NATO in the first place.

(00:54:24)
Germany particularly is, I think, arbitraging the hell out of the United States of America. And I don’t think that… I’m not going to be some shrill voice here saying, “So therefore, we should not be supporting any allies or providing security blankets.” No, I’m not going in that direction. What I would say is, you’ve got to pay for it.

(00:54:43)
Pay for your fair share, A, because we’re not swimming in excess money ourselves, but B, is, it tells us that you actually have skin in the game for your own Defense, which actually then makes nations far more prudent in the risks that they take, whether or not they’re in a war, versus if somebody else is paying for it and somebody else is providing our security guarantee, yeah, I might as well take the gamble and see where I end up at the end of a war, versus the restraint that that imposes on the decision-making of those allies.

(00:55:09)
So, now, let’s bring this home to the Department of Defense. I think the top goal of the US Defense Policy establishment should be to provide for the national defense of the United States of America. And the irony is, that’s what we’re actually doing most poorly.

(00:55:27)
Other than the Coast Guard, we’re not really using the US Military to prevent crossings at our own southern border and crossings at our other borders. In fact, the United States of America, our homeland, I believe is less secure today than it has been in a very long time.

(00:55:41)
Vulnerable to threats from hypersonic missiles where China and Russia… Russia certainly has capabilities in excess of that of the United States, missiles. Hypersonic means faster than the speed of sound that could hit the United States, including those carrying nuclear warheads.

(00:55:55)
We are more vulnerable to super EMP attacks, Electromagnetic Pulse attacks, that could, without exaggeration, some of this could be from other nations, some of this could even be from solar flares, cause significant mass casualty in the United States of America.

(00:56:10)
If the electric grid’s gone, it’s not exaggeration to say, if that happened, planes would be falling out of the sky because our chips really depend on those, well, will be affected by those electromagnetic pulses. More vulnerable to cyber attacks. I know people, okay, start yawning and say, “Okay, boring stuff, super EMP, cyber,” or whatever.

(00:56:27)
No. Actually, it is pretty relevant to whether or not you actually are facing the risk of not getting your insulin because your refrigerator doesn’t work anymore or your food can’t be stored or your car or your ability to fly on an airplane is impaired. So, I think that these are risks where our own National Defense spending has been wholly inadequate.

(00:56:49)
So, I’m not one of these people that says decrease versus increase National Defense spending. We’re not spending it in the right places. The number one place we need to be spending it is actually protecting our National Defense, protecting our own physical homeland.

(00:57:01)
And I think we actually need an increase in spending on protecting our own homeland. But that is different from the agenda of foreign interventionism and foreign nanny state-ism for its own sake, where we should expect more and demand more of our allies to provide for their own national defense and then provide the relevant security guarantees to allies where that actually advances the interest of the United States of America. So, that’s what I believe.

(00:57:24)
And I think this process has been corrupted by what Dwight Eisenhower famously in his farewell address called the Military Industrial Complex in the United States. But I think it’s bigger than just the… I think it’s easy to tell the tales of the financial corruption.

(00:57:39)
It’s kind of cultural corruption and conceit that just because certain number of people in that expert class have a belief, that their belief happens to be the right one because they can scare you with what the consequence would be if you don’t follow their advice.

(00:57:54)
And one of the beauties of the United States is, at least in principle, we have civilian control of the military. The person who we elect to be the US President is the one that actually is the true Commander in Chief. I have my doubts of whether it operates that way.

(00:58:08)
I think it’s quite obvious that Joe Biden is not a functioning Commander in Chief of the United States of America, yet, on paper, supposedly we’re still are supposed to call him that. But at least in theory, we’re supposed to have civilian control of the US Military.

(00:58:21)
And I think that one of the things that that leader needs to do is to ask the question of, again, the mission. What’s the purpose of this US Military in the first place? At the top of the list should be to protect the homeland and the people who actually live here, which we’re failing to do. So, that’s where I land on that question.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:38)
Wait, okay, there’s a lot of stuff to ask. First of all, on Joe Biden, do you mean he’s functionally not in control of the US Military because of the age factor or because of the nature of the presidency?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(00:58:48)
It’s a good question. I would say, in his case it’s particularly accentuated because it’s both. In his case, I don’t think anybody in America, anymore, believes that Joe Biden is the functioning President of the United States of America. How could he be?

(00:59:03)
He wasn’t even sufficiently functioning to be the candidate after a debate that was held in June. There’s no way he’s going to be in a position to make the most important decisions on a daily and demanding basis to protect the leading nation in the world.

(00:59:15)
Now, more generally, though, I think we have a deeper problem, that even when it’s not Joe Biden, in general, the people we elect to run the government haven’t really been the ones running the government, it’s been the unelected bureaucrats in the bureaucratic deep state underneath that’s really been making the decisions.

(00:59:33)
I’ve done business in a number of places. I’ve traveled to Japan. There’s an interesting corporate analogy. Sometimes, if you get outside of politics, people can, I find, listen, and pay attention a little bit more, because politics, it’s so fraught right now that if you start talking to somebody who disagrees with you about the politics of it, you’re just butting heads but not really making progress.

(00:59:53)
So, let’s just make the same point, but go outside of politics for a second. So, I was traveling Japan, I was having a late night dinner with a CEO of a Japanese pharmaceutical company.

(01:00:04)
And it takes a while to really get him to open up, culturally speaking in Japan, a couple of nights of karaoke, and whatnot, maybe late night restaurant, whatever it is. Well, we built a good enough relationship where he was very candid with me.

(01:00:20)
He said, “I’m the CEO of the company. I could go and find the Head of a research unit and tell him, ‘Okay, this is a project we’re no longer working on as a company. We don’t wanna spend money on it, we’re gonna spend money somewhere else.’ And he’ll look me in the eye and he’ll say, ‘Yes, sir, yes sir.’.

(01:00:37)
I’ll come back six months later and find that they’re spending exactly the same amount of money on those exact same projects. And I’ll tell him, ‘No, we agreed. I told you that you’re not gonna spend money on this project, and we have to stop now. We should have stopped six months ago.’ Get a slap on the wrist for it.

(01:00:51)
He says, ‘Yes, sir, I’m sorry. Yes. No, no, no, of course, that’s correct.’ I come back six months later, same person is spending the same money on the same project.” And here’s why. Historically in Japan, and I should say, in Japan, this is changing now, it’s changing now, but historically, until very recently, and even to an extent now, it’s near impossible to fire people.

(01:01:13)
So, if somebody works for you and you can’t fire them, that means they don’t actually work for you. It means in some deeper, perverse sense, you work for them because you’re responsible for what they do, without any authority to actually change it.

(01:01:29)
So, I think most people who have traveled in Japan and Japanese corporate culture through the 1990s and 2000s and 2010s, and maybe even some vestiges in the 2020s, wouldn’t really dispute what I just told you. Now, we’re bringing it back to the more contentious terrain.

(01:01:44)
I think that’s basically how things have worked in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government of the United States of America. You have these so-called Civil Service protections on the books. Now, if you really read them carefully, I think that there are areas to provide daylight for a truly constitutionally, well-trained President to act.

(01:02:04)
That’s a contrary view that I have that bucks conventional wisdom. But apart from that caveat, in general, the conventional view has been, the US president can’t fire these people. There’s 4 million federal bureaucrats, 99.9% of them can’t be touched by the person who the people who elected to run the Executive Branch can’t even fire those people.

(01:02:23)
It’s the equivalent of that Japanese CEO. And so, that culture exists every bit as much in the federal bureaucracy of the United States of America as they did in Japanese corporate culture through the 1990s.

(01:02:34)
And that’s a lot of what’s wrong with not just the way that our Department of Defense is run and our Foreign Policy establishment is run, but I think it applies to a lot of the Domestic Policy establishment as well.

(01:02:45)
And to come back to the core point, how are we going to save this republic? This is the debate in the Conservative Movement right now. So, this is maybe a little bit spicy for some Republicans to swallow right now, and my top focus is making sure that we win the election, but let’s just move the ball forward a little bit and skate to where the puck is going here, okay?

(01:03:06)
Yes, let’s say we win the election, all is well and dandy. Okay, what’s the philosophy that determines how we govern? There’s a little bit of a fork in the road amongst Conservatives where there are those who believe that the right answer now is to use that regulatory state and use those levers of power to advance our own pro-Conservative, pro-American, pro-worker goals.

(01:03:29)
And I’m sympathetic to all of those goals, but I don’t think that the right way to do it is to create a Conservative regulatory state that replaces a Liberal regulatory state. I think the right answer is actually to get in there and shut it down. I don’t want to replace the left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state. I want to get in there and actually dismantle the nanny state.

(01:03:49)
And I think it has been a long time in the United States, maybe ever in modern history, that we’ve had a Conservative leader at the national level who makes it their principal objective to dismantle the nanny state in all of its forms; the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy in nanny state.

(01:04:12)
That was a core focus of my candidacy. One of the things that I wish, and this is on me, not anybody else, that I should have done better, was to make that more crystal clear as a focus without getting distracted by a lot of the shenanigans, let’s just say, that happened as side-shows during a presidential campaign. But call that a lesson learned, because I do think it’s what the country needs now more than ever.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:39)
Yeah, it’s a really, really powerful idea. It’s actually something that Donald Trump ran on in 2016-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:04:48)
Is to drain the swamp.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:49)
… drain the swamp. I think by most accounts, maybe you can disagree with me, he did not successfully do so. He did fire a bunch of people, more than usual, but-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:04:59)
Can I say a word about the conditions he was operating in, because I think that’s why I’m far more excited for this time around, is that a lot has changed in the legal landscape. So, Donald Trump did not have the Supreme Court backdrop in 2016 that he does today.

(01:05:14)
So, there’s some really important cases that have come down from the Supreme Court. One is West Virginia versus the EPA. I think it’s probably the most important case of our generation.

(01:05:23)
In 2022 that came down and said that if Congress has not passed a rule into law itself through the halls of Congress, and it relates to what they call a major question, a major policy or economic question, it can’t be done by the stroke of a pen by a regulator, an unelected bureaucrat either.

(01:05:41)
That quite literally means most federal regulations today are unconstitutional. Then, this year comes down a different big one, another big one from the Supreme Court in the Loper-Bright case, which held that, historically, for the last 50 years in this country, the doctrine has been, it’s called Chevron Deference. It’s a doctrine that says that federal courts have to defer to an agency…
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:06:00)
Federal courts have to defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law. They now tossed that out the window and said, “No, no, no. The federal courts no longer have to defer to an agency’s interpretation of what the law actually is.” The combination of those two cases is seismic in its impact for the regulatory state. There’s also another great case that came down, was SEC versus Jarkesy, and the SEC is one of these agencies that embodies everything we’re talking about here.

(01:06:27)
The SEC, among other agencies, has tribunals inside that not only do they write the rules, not only do they enforce those rules, they also have these judges inside the agency that also interpret the rules and determine and dole out punishments. That doesn’t make sense if you believe in separation of powers in the United States, so the Supreme Court put an end to that and said that that practice at the SEC is unconstitutional. Actually, as a side note, the Supreme Court has said countless practices and rules written by the SEC, the EPA, the FTC in recent years, were outright unconstitutional.

(01:06:58)
Think about what that means for a constitutional republic, that supposedly, these law enforcement agencies, the courts have now said, especially this year, the courts have now said that their own behaviors actually break the law. So the very agencies entrusted with supposedly enforcing the law are actually behaving with utter, blatant disregard for the law itself. That’s un-American, it’s not tenable in the United States of America, but thankfully, we now have a Supreme Court that recognizes that.

(01:07:31)
So whether or not we have a second Trump term, well, that’s up to the voters, but even whether or not that now takes advantage of that backdrop the Supreme Court has given us to actually gut the regulatory state, we’ll find out. I’m optimistic, I certainly think it’s the best chance that we’ve had in a generation in this country, and that’s a big part of why I’m supporting Donald Trump and why I’m going to do everything in my power to help him, but I do think it is going to take a spine of steel to see that through.

(01:08:03)
And then after we’ve taken on the regulatory state, I think that’s the next step, but I do think there’s this broader project of dismantling the nanny state in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy in any state. Three-word answer, if I was to summarize my worldview and my presidential campaign in three words, shut it down.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:25)
Shut it down. Okay, so the Supreme Court cases you mentioned, there’s a lot of nuance there.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:08:32)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:32)
I guess it’s weakening the immune system of the different departments.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:08:36)
Yeah. It’s a good way of putting it.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:37)
Okay. On the human psychology level, so you basically kind of implied that for Donald Trump or for any president, the legal situation was difficult. Is that the only thing really operating?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:08:52)
Probably not.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:53)
Isn’t it also just on a psychological level just hard to fire a very large number of people. Is that what it is? Is there a basic civility and momentum going on?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:09:04)
Well, I think there’s one other factor. So you’re right to point, the legal backdrop is a valid and understandable excuse and reason. I think there are other factors at play too. So I think there’s something to be said for never having been in government, showing up there the first time, and you’re having to understand the rules of the road as you’re operating within them, and also having to depend on people who actually aren’t aligned with your policy vision, but tell you to your face that they are.

(01:09:36)
And so I think that’s one of the things that I’ve admired about President Trump is he’s actually been very open about that, very humble about that, to say that there’s a million learnings from that first term that make him ambitious and more ambitious in that second term. But everything I’m talking to you about, this is what needs to happen in the country. It’s not specific to Donald Trump. It lays out what needs to be done in the country. There’s the next four years, Donald Trump is our last, best hope and chance for moving that ball forward. But I think that the vision I’m laying out here is one that hopefully goes even beyond just the next two or four years of really fixing a century’s worth of mistakes.

(01:10:12)
I think we’re going to fix a lot of them in the next four years if Donald Trump’s president. But if you have a century’s worth of mistakes that have accumulated with the overgrowth of the entitlement state in the US, I think it’s going to take probably the better part of a decade at least to actually fix them.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:25)
I disagree with you on both the last and the best hope. Donald Trump is more likely to fire a lot of people, but is he the best person to do so?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:10:37)
We’ve got two candidates, right? People face a choice. This is a relevant election. One of my goals is to speak to people who do not agree with 100% of what Donald Trump says. And I can tell them, you know what? I don’t agree with a hundred percent of what he says. And I can tell you as somebody who ran against him for US President, that right now he is, when I say the last, best hope, I mean in this cycle, the last, best hope that we have for dismantling that bureaucratic class.

(01:11:05)
And I think that I’m also open about the fact that this is a long run project, but we have the next step to actually take over the next few years. That’s kind of where I land on it. I mean, you talked to him I guess a few weeks ago. I saw you had a podcast with him, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:11:20)
Mm-hmm.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:11:20)
What was your impression about his preparedness to do it?
Lex Fridman
(01:11:24)
My impression is his priority allocation was different than yours. I think he is more focused on some of the other topics that you are also focused on.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:11:30)
Border. Laser focused on.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:32)
And there is a tension there, just as you’ve clearly highlighted.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:11:37)
We share the same priority with respect to the southern border, and those are near term fixes that we can hit out of the park in the first year. But at the same time, I think we got to think also on decade long time horizon. So my own view is I think that it is my conviction and belief that he does care about dismantling that federal bureaucracy, certainly more so than any Republican nominee we have had, certainly in my lifetime. But I do think that there are going to be competing schools of thought where some will say, “Okay, well, we want to create a right-wing entitlement state to shower federal subsidies on favored industries while keeping them away from disfavored industries and new bureaucracies to administer them.”

(01:12:19)
I don’t come from that school of thought. I don’t want to see the bureaucracy expand in a pro-conservative direction. I want to see the bureaucracy shrink in every direction. And I do think that, from my conversations with Donald Trump, I believe that he is well-aligned with this vision of shrinking bureaucracy, but that’s a longer-term project.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:38)
There’s so many priorities at play here, though. You really do have to do the Elon thing of walking into Twitter headquarters-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:12:44)
Shut it down.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:45)
… with a sink. Right? Let that sink in. That basically firing a very large number of people. And it’s not just about the firing, it’s about setting clear missions for the different departments that remain. Hiring back because you over fire. Hiring back based on meritocracy. It’s a full-time… and it’s not only full-time in terms of actual time’s, full-time psychologically, because you’re walking into a place unlike a company like Twitter, an already successful company. In government, everybody around you, all the experts and the advisors are going to tell you you’re wrong. And it’s a very difficult psychological place to operate in because you’re constantly the asshole. And the certainty you have to have about what you’re doing is nearly infinite because everybody, all the really smart people are telling you, “No, this is a terrible idea. Sir, this is a terrible idea.”
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:13:52)
You have to have this spine of steel to cut through what that short-term advice is you’re getting. And I’ll tell you, certainly, I intend to do whatever I can for this country, both in the next four years and beyond, but my voice on this will be crystal clear and President Trump knows that’s my view on it, and I believe he shares it deeply, is that all else equal, get in there and shut down as much of the excess bureaucracy as we can. Do it as quickly as possible. And that’s a big part of how we save our country.

Illegal immigration

Lex Fridman
(01:14:24)
Okay, I’ll give you an example that’s really difficult. Tension, given your priorities. Immigration, there’s an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the United States. You’ve spoken about mass deportation.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:14:38)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:39)
That requires a lot of effort. Money. I mean, how do you do it and how does that conflict with the shutting it down?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:14:48)
Sure. And so it goes back to that original discussion we had is what are the few proper roles of the federal government? I gave you two. Of the government, period. One is to protect the national borders and sovereignty of the United States, and two is to protect private property rights. There’s a lot else. Most of what the government’s doing today, both at the federal and state level, is something other than those two things. But in my book, those are the two things that are the proper function of government. So for everything else, the federal government should not be doing, the one thing they should be doing is to protect the homeland of the United States of America and the sovereignty and sanctity of our national borders.

(01:15:23)
So in that domain, that’s mission aligned with a proper purpose for the federal government. I think we’re a nation founded on the rule of law. I say this as the kid of legal immigrants. That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law. And in some ways, if I was to summarize a formula for saving the country over the next four years, it would be a tale of two mass deportations. The mass deportations of millions of illegals who are in this country and should not be, and then the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington D.C.

(01:15:53)
Now, all else equal, could say that those are intention, but I think that the reality is anything outside of the scope of what the core function of the government is, which is protecting borders and protecting private property rights, that’s really where I think the predominant cuts need to be. And if you look at the number of people who are looking after the border, it’s not even 0.1% of the federal employee base today. So 75% isn’t 99.99%, it’s 75%. It would still be a tiny fraction of the remaining 25%, which I actually think needs to be more rather than less. So it’s a good question, but that’s where I land on when it’s a proper role of the federal government, great. Act and actually do your job. The irony is 99.9999% of those resources are going to functions other than the protection of private property rights and the protection of our national physical protection.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:43)
There is a lot of criticism of the idea of mass deportation though. So one-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:16:47)
Fair enough.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:47)
… it will cause a large amount of economic harm, at least in the short term. The other is there would be potentially violations of our higher ideals of how we like to treat human beings, in particular separation of families, for example, tearing families apart. And the other is just the logistical complexity of doing something like this. How do you answer some of those criticisms, I guess?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:17:15)
Fair enough. And I would call those even, not even criticisms, but just thoughtful questions. Even to somebody who’s really aligned with doing this, those are thoughtful questions to ask. So I do want to say something about this point on how we think about the breakage of the rule of law in other contexts. There are 350,000 mothers who are in prison in the United States today who committed crimes and were convicted of them. They didn’t take their kids with them to those prisons either, right? So we face difficult trade-offs in all kinds of contexts as it relates to the enforcement of law.

(01:17:46)
And I just want to make that basic observation against the backdrop of if we’re a nation founded on the rule of law, we that there are trade-offs to enforcing the law, and we’ve acknowledged that in other contexts. I don’t think that we should have a special exemption for saying that somehow we weigh the other way when it comes to the issue of the border. We’re a nation founded in the rule of law. We enforce laws, that has costs, that has trade-offs, but it’s who we are. And the easiest fact I can cite is 350,000 or so mothers who are in prison and did not take their kids to prison with them.

(01:18:19)
Is that bad? Is it undesirable for the kids to grow up without those 350,000 mothers? It is, but it’s a difficult situation created by people who violated the law and faced the consequences of it, which is also a competing and important priority in the country. So that’s in the domestic context.

(01:18:36)
As it relates to this question of mass deportations, let’s just get very practical because all that was theoretical. Very practically, there’s ways to do this. Starting with people who have already broken the law, people who have not just broken the law of entering but are committing other crimes while already here in the United States. That’s a clear case for an instant mass deportation. You have a lot of people who haven’t integrated into their communities. You think about the economic impact of this, a lot of people are in detention already. A lot of those people should be immediately returned to their country of origin, or at least what is called a safe third country.

(01:19:07)
So safe third country means even if somebody’s claiming to seek asylum from political persecution, well, move them to another country that doesn’t have to be the United States of America that they passed through, say, Mexico before actually coming here. Other countries around the world are doing this. Australia is detaining people. They don’t let them out and live a normal, joyful life because they came to the country. They detain them until their case is adjudicated. Well, the rates of fraud in Australia, of what people lie about, what their conditions are, is way lower now than in the United States because people respond to those incentives.

(01:19:37)
So I think that in some ways, people make this sound much bigger and scarier than it needs to be. I feel we’re taking a deeply pragmatic approach, and the North Star for me is I want the policy that helps the United States citizens who are already here. What’s that policy? Clearly, that’s going to be a policy that includes a large number of deportations. I think by definition, it’s going to be the largest mass deportation in American history. Sounds like a punchline at a campaign rally, but actually, it’s just a factual statement that says if we’ve had the by far largest influx of illegal immigrants in American history, it just stands to reason, it’s logic that, okay, if we’re going to fix that, we’re going to have the largest mass deportation in American history.

(01:20:14)
And we can be rational. Start with people who are breaking the law in other ways here in the United States. Start with people who are already in detention or entering detention now. That comes at no cost and strict benefit. There isn’t even a little bit of an economic trade-off. Then you get to areas where you would say, okay, the costs actually continue to outweigh the benefits, and that’s exactly the way our policy should be guided here. I want to do it in as respectful and as humane of a manner as possible.

(01:20:41)
The reality is, I think one of the things we got to remember, I’ll give you the example I gave with the Haitian case in Springfield, town that I spent a lot of time in growing up in Ohio. I live about an hour from there today. I don’t blame the individual Haitians who came here. I’m not saying that they’re bad people because in that particular case, those weren’t even people who broke the law in coming here. They came as part of a program called Temporary Protective Status. Now, the operative word there was the first one, “temporary”. There have been all kinds of lawsuits for people who, even 8, 10, 12, 14 years after the earthquake in Haiti where many of them came, when they’re going to be removed, there are allegations of racial discrimination or otherwise.

(01:21:22)
No. Temporary protective status means it’s temporary, and we’re not abandoning the rule of law when we send them back, we’re abandoning the rule of law when we let them stay. Now, if that has a true benefit to the United States of America, economically or otherwise, go through the paths that allow somebody to enter this country for economic reasons, but don’t do it through asylum-based claims or Temporary Protected Status. I think one of the features of our immigration system right now is it is built on a lie and it incentivizes lying. The reason is the arguments for keeping people in the country, if those are economic reasons but the people actually entered using claims of asylum or refugee status, those two things don’t match up.

(01:22:03)
So just be honest about what our immigration system actually is. I think we do need dramatic reforms to the legal immigration system to select purposely for the people who are going to actually improve the United States of America. I think there are many people, I know some of them. I gave a story of one guy who I met who is educated at our best universities or among our best universities. He went to Princeton. He went to Harvard Business School. He has a great job in the investment community. He was a professional tennis player. He was a concert pianist. He could do a Rubik’s cube in less than a minute. I’m not making this stuff up. These are hard facts. He can’t get a green card in the United States. He’s been here for 10 years or something like this.

(01:22:40)
He asked me for the best advice I could give him. I unfortunately could not give him the actual best advice, which would be to just take a flight to Mexico and cross the border and claim to be somebody who is seeking asylum in the United States. That would have been morally wrong advice, so I didn’t give it to them. But practically, if you were giving him advice, that would be the best advice that you actually could give somebody, which is a broken system on both sides. People who are going to make those contributions to the United States and pledge allegiance to the United States and speak our language and assimilate, we should have a path for them to be able to add value to the United States. Yet they’re not the ones who are getting in.

(01:23:14)
Our immigration system selects for people who are willing to lie. That’s what it does. Selects for people who are willing to say they’re seeking refugee status or seeking asylum when in fact, they’re not. And then we have policymakers who lie after the fact using economic justifications to keep them here. But if it was an economic justification, that should have been the criteria you used to bring them in the first place, not this illusion of asylum or refugee status. There was a case, actually, even the New York Times reported on this, believe it or not, of a woman who came from Russia fleeing Vladimir Putin’s intolerant, anti-LGBTQ regime. She was fleeing persecution by the evil man, Putin.

(01:23:53)
She came here and eventually when she was pressed on the series of lies, it came out that, and she was crying finally, when she broke down and admitted this, she was like, “I’m not even gay. I don’t even like gay people.” That’s what she said. And yet she was pretending to be some sort of LGBTQ advocate who was persecuted in Russia when in fact, it was just somebody who was seeking better economic conditions in the United States. I’m not saying you’re wrong to seek better economic conditions in the United States, but you are wrong to lie about it, and that’s what you’re seeing a lot of people, even in this industry of quote, unquote, tourism to the United States, they’re having their kids in the United States. They go back to their home country, but their kids enjoy birthright citizenship. That’s built on a lie.

(01:24:31)
You have people claiming to suffer from persecution. In fact, they’re just working in the United States and then living in these relative mansions in parts of Mexico or Central America after they’ve spent four or five years making money here. Just abandon the lie. Let’s just have an immigration system built on honesty. Just tell the truth. If the argument is that we need more people here for economically filling jobs, I’m skeptical the extent to which a lot of those arguments actually end up being true. But let’s have that debate in the open rather than having it through the back door saying that it’s refugee and asylum status when we know it’s a lie, and then we justify it after the fact by saying that that economically helps the United States.

(01:25:03)
Cut the dishonesty. And I just think that that is a policy we would do well to expand every sphere. We talk about from the military industrial complex to the rise of the managerial class, to a lot of what our government’s covered up about our own history to even this question of immigration today. Just tell the people the truth, and I think our government would be better serving our people if it did.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:24)
Yeah, in the way you describe eloquently, the immigration system is broken in that way that is built fundamentally on lies. But there’s the other side of it. Illegal immigrants are used in political campaigns for fearmongering, for example. So what I would like to understand is what is the actual harm that illegal immigrants are causing? So one of the more intense claims is of crime, and I haven’t studied this rigorously, but the surface level studies all show that legal and illegal immigrants commit less crime than US born citizens.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:26:08)
I think it’s true for legal immigrants. I think it’s not true for illegal immigrants.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:12)
That’s not what I saw.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:26:14)
And this is part of why I wrote this book and the book is called Truths. So better darn well have well-sourced facts in here. Can’t be made up Hypotheses, hard truths. And there’s a chapter where, even in my own research on it, Lex, I know a lot about this issue from my time as a presidential candidate, but even in writing the chapter on the border here, I learned a lot from a lot of different dimensions and some of which even caused me to revise some of my premises going into it, okay. My main thesis in that chapter is forget the demonization of illegal or legal immigrants or whatever, as you put it, fearmongering. Just put all that to one side.

(01:26:55)
I want an immigration system that is built on honesty. Identify what the objective is. We could debate the objective. We might have different opinions on the objectives. Some people may say the objective is the economic growth of the United States. I air that argument in this book, and I think that that’s insufficient, personally. Personally, I think the United States is more than just an economic zone. It is a country. It is a nation bound together by civic ideals. I think we need to screen not just for immigrants, who are going to make economic contributions, but those who speak our language, those who are able to assimilate and those who share those civic ideals and know the US history even better than the average US citizen who’s here. That’s what I believe.

(01:27:38)
But even if you disagree with me and say, “No, no, the sole goal is economic production in the United States,” then at least have an immigration system that’s honest about that rather than one which claims to solve for that goal by bringing in people who are rewarded for being a refugee, we should reward the people in that model, which I don’t even think should be the whole model. But even if that were your model, reward the people who have demonstrably proven that they would make economic contributions to the United States, not the people who have demonstrated that they’re willing to lie to achieve a goal.

(01:28:10)
And right now, our immigration system, if it rewards one quality over any other, if there’s one parameter that it rewards over any other, it isn’t civic allegiance to the United States, it isn’t fluency in English, it isn’t the ability to make an economic contribution to this country. The number one human attribute that our immigration system rewards is whether or not you are willing to lie. And the people who are telling those lies about whether they’re seeking asylum or not are the ones who are most likely to get in. And the people who are most unwilling to tell those lies are the ones who are actually not getting in.

(01:28:44)
That is a hard, uncomfortable truth about our immigration system. And the reason is because the law says you only get asylum if you’re going to face bodily harm or near-term risk of bodily injury based on your religion, your ethnicity, or certain other factors. And so when you come into the country, you’re asked, “Do you fulfill that criteria or not?” And the number one way to get into this country is to check the box and say yes. So that means just systematically, imagine if you’re a university, Harvard or Yale or whatever, you’re running your admissions process, the number one attribute you’re selecting for isn’t your SAT score, it isn’t your GPA, it isn’t your athletic accomplishments. It’s whether or not you’re willing to lie on the application. You’re going to have a class populated by a bunch of charlatans and frauds.

(01:29:29)
That’s exactly what our immigration system is doing to the United States of America, is it is literally selecting for the people who are willing to lie. Let’s say you have somebody who’s a person of integrity says, “Okay, I want a better life for my family, but I want to teach my kids that I’m not going to lie or break the law to do it.” That person is infinitely less likely to get into the United States. I know it sounds provocative to frame it that way, but it is not an opinion. It is a fact that that is the number one human attribute that our current immigration system is selecting for.

(01:29:59)
I want an immigration system centered on honesty. In order to implement that, we require acknowledging what the goals of our immigration system are in the first place. And there we have competing visions on the right, okay? Amongst conservatives, there’s a rift. Some conservatives believe, I respect them for their honesty, I disagree with them, believe that the goal of the immigration system should be to, in part, protect American workers from the effects of foreign wage competition. That if we have immigrants, it’s going to bring down prices and we need to protect American workers from the effects of that downward pressure on wages. It’s a goal. It’s a coherent goal. I don’t think it’s the right goal, but many of my friends on the right believe that’s a goal, but at least it’s honest. And then we can design an honest immigration system to achieve that goal if that’s their goal. I have other friends on the right that say the sole goal is economic growth, nothing else matters. I disagree with that as well. My view is the goal should be whatever enriches the civic quality of the United States of America. That includes those who know the language, know our ideals, pledge allegiance to those ideals, and also are willing to make economic contributions to the country, which is one of our ideals as well.

(01:31:03)
But whatever it is, we can have that debate, I have a very different view. I don’t think it’s a proper role of immigration policy to make it a form of labor policy because the United States of America is founded on excellence, we should be able to compete. But that’s a policy debate we can have. But right now, we are not even able to have the policy debate because the whole immigration policy is built on not only a lie, but on rewarding those who do lie. And that’s what I want to see change.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:25)
Just to linger a little bit on the demonization and to bring Ann Coulter into the picture, which I recommend people should listen to your conversation with her, I haven’t listened to her much, but she had this thing where she’s clearly admires and respects you as a human being. And she’s basically saying. You’re one of the good ones. And this idea that you had this brilliant question of what does it mean to be an American? And she basically said, “Not you, Vivek.” But she said, “Well, maybe you, but not people like you.” So that whole kind of approach to immigration, I think is really anti-meritocratic fundamentally.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:32:14)
Maybe even anti-American.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:14)
Anti-American, yeah.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:32:16)
So I want to confront this directly because it is a popular current on the American right. And the reason I’m not picking on Ann Coulter specifically is I think actually it’s a much more widely shared view, and I just give her at least credit for willing to articulate it, a view that the blood and soil is what makes for your American identity or genetic lineage. And I just reject that view, I think it’s anti-American. I think what makes for an American identity is your allegiance, your abiding allegiance to the founding ideals of this country and your willingness to pledge allegiance to those ideals.

(01:32:49)
So those are two different views. I think that there is a view on the American right right now that says that we’re not a creedal nation, that our nation’s not about a creed. It’s about a physical place and a physical homeland. I think that view fails on several accounts. Obviously, every nation has to have a geographic space that it defines its own. So obviously we are, among other things, a geographic space. But the essence of the United States of America, I think is the common creed, the ideals that hold that common nation together.

(01:33:22)
Without that, a few things happen. First of all, American exceptionalism becomes impossible. And I’ll tell you why. Every other nation is also built on the same idea. Most nations have been built on common blood and soil arguments, genetic stock. Italy or Japan would have a stronger national identity than the United States in that case, because they have a much longer standing claim on what their genetic lineage really was. The ethnicity of the people is far more pure in those contexts than in the United States. So that’s the first reason. American exceptionalism becomes impossible.

(01:33:55)
The second is there’s all kinds of contradictions that then start to emerge. Your claim on American identity is defined based on how long you’ve been here. Well, then the Native Americans would have a far greater claim of being American than somebody who came here on the Mayflower or somebody who came here afterwards. Now, maybe that blood and soil view is, no, no, it’s not quite the Native Americans. You only have to start at this point and end at this point. So on this view of blood and soil identity, it has to be okay, you couldn’t have come before a certain year, then it doesn’t count. But if you came after a certain year, it doesn’t count either. That just becomes highly uncompelling as a view of what American national identity actually is.

(01:34:32)
Versus my view that American national identity is grounded on whether or not you pledge allegiance to the ideals codified in the Declaration of Independence and actualized in the US Constitution. And it’s been said, some of my friends on the right have said things like, people will not die for a set of ideals. People won’t fight for abstractions or abstract ideals. I actually disagree with that. The American Revolution basically disproves that. The American Revolution was fought, for anything, over abstract ideals that said that, you know what? We believe in self-governance and free speech and free exercise of religion. That’s what we believe in the United States, which is different from Old World England.

(01:35:11)
So I do think that there is this brewing debate on the right, and do I disagree like hell with Ann Coulter on this? Absolutely. And did I take serious issue with some of the things she told me? Absolutely. But I also believe that she had the stones to say, if I may say it that way, the things that many on the right believe but haven’t quite articulated in the way that she has. And I think we need to have that debate in the open.

(01:35:35)
Now, personally, I think most of the conservative movement actually is with me on this, but I think it’s become a very popular counter in the other direction to say that your vision of American identity is far more physical in nature. And to me, I think it is still ideals-based in nature. And I think that that’s a good debate for the future for us to have in the conservative movement. And I think it’s going to be a defining feature of what direction the conservative movement goes in the future.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:02)
Quick pause. Bathroom break?

Donald Trump

Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:36:03)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:04)
Let me ask you to, again, steel man the case for and against Trump. So my biggest criticism for him is the fake electors scheme, the 2020 election, and actually the 2020 election in the way you formulate it in the Nation of victims is just the entirety of that process, instead of focusing on winning, doing a lot of whining. I like people that win, not whine, even when the refs are biased in whatever direction.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:36:36)
So look, I think the United States of America, I preach this to the left, I preach it to my kids, we got to accept it on our own side too, we’re not going to save this country by being victim, we’re going to save this country by being victorious. And I don’t care whether it’s left-wing victimhood, right-wing victimhood. I’m against victimhood culture. The number one factor that determines whether you achieve something in life is you. I believe that. It’s not the only factor that matters. There’s a lot of other factors that affect whether or not you succeed. Life is not fair, but I tell my kids the same thing. The number one factor that determines whether or not you succeed in achieving your goal is you. If I tell it to my kids and I preach it to the left, I’m going to preach that to our own side as well.

(01:37:14)
Now, that being said, that’s just a philosophy, okay? That’s a personal philosophy. You asked me to do something different, and I’m always a fan. The standard I hope that people hold me to when they read this book as well, is I try to do that in this book, is to give the best possible argument for the other side. You don’t want to give some rinky-dink argument for the other side and knock it down. You want to give the best possible argument for the other side and then offer your own view or else you don’t understand your own. So you asked me what’s the strongest case against Donald Trump? Well, I ran for US President against Donald Trump. So I’m going to give you what my perspective is. I think it’s nothing of what you hear on MSNBC or from the left attacking him to be a threat to democracy. I think all of that’s actually nonsense.

(01:37:57)
I actually think it is, if you were making that case, and he has my full support as you know, but if you were making that case, I think for many voters who are of the next generation, they’re asking a question about, “How are you going to understand the position that I’m in as a member of a new generation?” The same criticism they had of Biden, they could say, “Oh, well, are you too old? Are you from a different generation that’s too far removed from my generation’s concerns?” And I think that that’s in many ways a factor that was weighing on both Trump and Biden. But when they played the trick of swapping out Joe Biden, it left that issue much more on the table for Donald Trump.

(01:38:36)
So you’re asking me to steel man it, that’s what I would say is that when I look at what’s the number one issue that I would need to persuade Independent voters of to say that, no, no, no, this is still the right choice is even though the other side claims to offer a new generation of leadership, here’s somebody who is one of the older presidents we will have had who was elected. How do we convince those people to vote from? That’s what I would give you in that category.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:57)
Right. But I get it. And you share a lot of ideas with Donald Trump. So I get when you’re…
Lex Fridman
(01:39:00)
And you share a lot of ideas with Donald Trump, so I get when you’re running for president that you would say that kind of thing, but there’s other criticism you could provide, and again, on the 2020 election.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:39:11)
Let me ask you, you spoke to Donald Trump recently, what’s your top objection to potentially voting for Donald Trump, and let me see if I can address that?
Lex Fridman
(01:39:20)
The 2020 election, and not in the… What is it? TDS objection. It’s just I don’t think there’s clear definitive evidence that there was voter fraud.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:39:37)
Let me ask you about a different area.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:38)
Hold on a second. Hold on a second, hold on a second. I think there’s a lot of interesting topics about the influence of media, of tech, and so on, but I want a president that has a good, clear relationship with the truth and knows what truth is, what is true, and what is not true. And moreover, I want a person who doesn’t play victim, like you said, who focuses on winning and winning big, and if they lose, walk away with honor and win bigger next time, or channel that into growth and winning in some other direction. So, just the strength of being able to give everything you got to win and walk away with honor if you lose, and everything that happened around 2020 election, it just goes against that, to me.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:40:31)
So I’ll respond to that.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:32)
Sure.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:40:33)
Obviously, I’m not the candidate, but I’m going to give you my perspective nonetheless. I think we have seen some growth from Donald Trump over that first term in the experience of the 2020 election, and you hear a lot of that on the campaign trail. I heard a lot of that even in the conversation that he had with you. I think he is more ambitious for that second term than he was for that first term, so I thought that was the most interesting part of what you just said is, you’re looking for somebody who has growth from their own experiences. Say what you will, I have seen, personally I believe, some meaningful level of personal growth and ambition for what Donald Trump hopes to achieve for the country in the second term that he wasn’t able to, for one reason or another, COVID, you could put a lot of different things on it, but in that first term.

(01:41:20)
Now, I think the facts of the backdrop of the 2020 election actually really do matter. I don’t think you can isolate one particular aspect of criticizing the 2020 election without looking at it holistically. On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, we saw a systematic, bureaucratically, and government-aided suppression of probably the single most important piece of information released in the eve of that election, the Hunter Biden laptop story, revealing potentially a compromised US presidential candidate, his family was compromised by foreign interests, and it was suppressed as misinformation by every major tech company.

(01:42:02)
The New York Post had its own Twitter account locked at that time, and we now know that many of the censorship decisions made in the year 2020 were actually made at behest of US bureaucratic actors in the deep state threatening those tech companies to do it or else those tech companies would face consequence. I think it might be the most undemocratic thing that’s happened in the history of our country, actually, is the way in which government actors, who were never elected to the government, used private sector actors to suppress information on the eve of an election that based on polling afterwards likely did influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. That was election interference of the highest order.

(01:42:44)
So I think that that’s just a hard fact that we have to contend with, and I think a lot of what you’ve heard in terms of complaints about the 2020 election, whatever those complaints, oh, have been, take place against the backdrop of large technology companies interfering in that election in a way that I think did have an impact on the outcome. I personally believe if the Hunter Biden laptop story had not been suppressed and censored, Donald Trump would’ve been unambiguous… The President of the United States right now would be Donald Trump. No doubt about it in my mind if you look at polling before and after the impact that would’ve had on the independent voter.

(01:43:15)
Now you look at… Okay, let’s talk about constructive solutions because I care about moving the country forward. What is a constructive solution to this issue of concerns about election integrity? Here’s one. Single-day voting on election day as a national holiday with paper ballots and government-issued voter ID to match the voter file. I favor that. We do it even in Puerto Rico, which is a territory of the United States. Why not do that everywhere in the United States? And I’ll make a pledge. I’ll do it right here, right? My pledge is, as a leader in our movement, I will do everything in my power to make sure we are done complaining about stolen elections if we get to that simple place of basic election security measures.

(01:44:04)
I think they’d be unifying too. Make election day a national holiday that unites us around our civic purpose one day, single-day voting on election day as a national holiday with paper ballots and government-issued voter ID to match the voter file. Let’s get there as a country, and you have my word, I will lead our movement in whatever way I can to make sure we are done complaining about stolen elections and fake ballots. And I think that fact that you see resistance to that proposal, which is otherwise very practical, very reasonable, nonpartisan proposal, I think the fact of that resistance actually provokes a lot of understandable skepticism, understandable skepticism of what else is actually going on, if not that, what exactly is going on here?
Lex Fridman
(01:44:53)
Well, I agree with a lot of things you said. Probably disagree, but it’s hard to disagree with a Hunter Biden laptop story whether that would’ve changed the results in the election.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:45:04)
We can’t know obviously.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:05)
Right.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:45:05)
I looked at some post-election polling about the views that would’ve had and I can’t prove that to you, but that’s my instinct, it’s my opinion.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:12)
I think that’s just one example, maybe a sexy example of a bias in the complex of the media and there’s bias in the other direction too, but probably there’s bias. It’s hard to characterize bias as one of the problems.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:45:30)
Let me ask you one question about… Bias is one thing, bias in reporting. Censorship is another. So I would be open-minded to hearing an instance, and if I did hear it, I would condemn it, of the government systematically ordering tech companies to suppress information that was favorable to Democrats, suppress that information to lift up Republicans. If there was an instance that we know of government bureaucrats that were ordering technology companies covertly to silence information that voters otherwise would’ve had to advantage Republicans at the ballot box to censor it, I would be against that, and I would condemn that with equal force as I do to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression, and censorship of the origin of COVID-19, all happened in 2020. These are hard facts. I’m not aware of one instance. If you are aware of one, let me know because I would condemn it.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:27)
Most people in tech companies are privately… Their political persuasion is on the left, and most journalists, majority of journalists, are on the left, but to characterize the actual reporting and the impact of the reporting in the media and the impact of the censorship is difficult to do, but that’s a real problem, just like we talked about a real problem in immigration.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:46:54)
But there’s two different problems, I just want to sort them out, right? I have problem with both. You talked about two issues, and I think both are important, but they’re different issues. One is bias in reporting. One is censorship of information. So bias in reporting, I felt certainly, the recent presidential debate moderated by ABC was biased in the way that it was conducted, but that’s a different issue from saying that voters don’t get access to information through any source.

(01:47:23)
So, this Hunter Biden laptop story, we now know that it contains evidence of foreign interference in potentially the Biden administration and their family’s incentive structure. That story was systematically suppressed. So, in the United States of America, if you wanted to find that on the internet through any major social media platform or through even Google search, that story was suppressed or downplayed algorithmically that you couldn’t see it. Even on Twitter, if you tried to send it via direct message, the equivalent of email, sending a peer-to-peer message, they blocked you from even being able to send that story using private messages. That is a different level of concern. That’s not bias at that point. That’s outright interference in the election.

(01:48:13)
Let’s do a thought experiment here. Let’s suppose that Russia orchestrated that. What would the backlash be? Let’s say the Russian government orchestrated the US election. They interfered in it by saying that tech companies… They worked with them covertly to stop US citizens from being able to see information on the eve of an election. There would be a mass uproar in this country if the Russian government orchestrated that. Well, if actors in the US government bureaucracy or the US technology industry bureaucracy orchestrated the same thing, then we can’t apply a different standard to say that if Russia did it, it’s really bad and interfered in our election. But if it happened right here in the United States of America… And by the way, they blamed Russia for it, falsely, on the Russian disinformation of the Hunter Biden laptop story that was a false claim. We have to apply the same standard in both cases, and so the fact that if that were Russian interference, it would’ve been an outcry, but now it happened domestically, and we just call that, “Hey, it’s a little bit of bias ahead of an election.” I don’t think that that’s a fair characterization of how important that event was.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:11)
Okay, so the connection of government to platform should not exist. The government, FBI, or anybody else should not be able to pressure platforms to censor information. Yes, we could talk about Pavel Durov and the censorship there. There should not be any censorship, and there should not be media bias, and you’re right to complain if there is media bias, and we can lay it out in the open and try to fix that system. That said, the voter fraud thing, you can’t right a wrong by doing another wrong. If there’s some shitty shady stuff going on in the media and the censorship complex, you can’t just make shit up. You can’t do the fake electors scheme, and then do a lot of shady, crappy behavior during January 6th and try to shortcut your way just because your friend is cheating at Monopoly when you’re playing Monopoly. You can’t cheat. You shouldn’t cheat yourself. You should be honest and with honor and use your platform to help fix the system versus cheat your way.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:50:21)
So, here’s my view, has any US politician ever been perfect throughout the course of American history? No, but if you want to understand the essence of what was going around in 2020, the mindset of the country? We had a year where people in this country were systematically locked down, told to shut up, sit down, do as they’re told unless they’re BLM or Antifa rioters, in which case it’s perfectly fine for them to burn cities down. We were told that we’re going to have an election, a free and fair election, and then they were denied information systematically heading into that election, which was really important, and in this case, damning information about one of the parties. And then you tell these people that they still have to continue to shut up and comply. That creates, I think, a real culture of deep frustration in the United States of America.

(01:51:08)
And I think that the reaction to systematic censorship is never good. History teaches us that it’s not good in the United States. It’s not good in other points in the history of the United States. The reaction to systematic, coordinated censorship and restraints and the freedom of a free people is never good. And if you want to really understand what happened, one really wants to get to the bottom of it rather than figuring out who to point fingers at, that really was the essence of the national malaise at the end of 2020 is, it was a year of unjust policies including COVID-19 lockdowns, systematic lies about it, lies about the election that created a level of public frustration that I think was understandable.

(01:51:53)
Now, the job of leaders is to how do you channel that in the most productive direction possible, and to your question, to the independent voter out there evaluating, as you are, do I think that Donald Trump has exhibited a lot of growth based on his experience in his first term, and what he hopes to achieve in his second term? The answer is, absolutely yes, and so, even if you don’t agree with everything that he’s said or done in the choice ahead of us in this election, I still believe he’s unambiguously the best choice to revive that sense of national pride, and also prosperity in our country, so people aren’t in the condition where they’re suffering at behest of government policies that leave them angry and channel that anger in other unproductive ways. No, the best way to do it is actually, actions do speak louder than words, implement the policies that make people’s lives better, and I do think that that’s the next step of how we best save the country.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:47)
Are you worried if in this election, it’s a close election, and Donald Trump loses by a whisker, that there’s chaos that’s unleashed, and how do we minimize the chance of that?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:53:03)
I don’t think that that’s a concern to frame narrowly in the context of Donald Trump winning it or losing it by whisker, this is a man, who in the last couple of months, in span of two months, has faced two assassination attempts. We’re not talking about theoretical attempts. We’re talking about gunshots fired. That is history changing in the context of American history. We haven’t seen that in a generation, and yet now that has become normalized in the US, so do I worry we’re skating on thin ice as a country? I do. I do think it is a little bit strange to obsess over our concerns, national or media concerns, over Donald Trump when, in fact, he’s the one on the receiving end of fire from assailants who reportedly are saying exactly the things about him that you hear from the Democratic machine.

(01:53:58)
And I do think that it is irresponsible, at least for the Democratic Party to make their core case against Donald Trump. It was Joe Biden’s entire message for years that he’s a threat to democracy and to the existence of America. Well, if you keep saying that about somebody against the backdrop conditions that we live in as a country, I don’t think that’s good for a nation. And so, do I have concerns about the future of the country? Do I think we’re skating on thin ice? Absolutely. And I think the best way around it is really through it, through it in this election, win by a landslide. I think a unifying landslide could be the best thing that happens for this country, like Reagan delivered in 1980 and then again in 1984. And in a very practical note, a landslide minus some shenanigans, is still going to be a victory. That is how we unite this country.

(01:54:46)
And so, I don’t think 50.001 margin where cable news is declaring the winner six days after the election, I don’t think that’s going to be good for the country. I think a decisive victory that unites the country, turns the page on a lot of the challenges of the last four years, and says, “Okay, this is where we’re going. This is who we are, and what we stand for.” This is a revival of our national identity and revive national pride in the United States regardless of whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. That I think is achievable in this election too, and that’s the outcome I’m rooting for.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:19)
So just to pile on, since we’re still manning the criticism against Trump, is the rhetoric… I wish there was less of, although at times it is so ridiculous, it is entertaining, I hate Taylor Swift type of tweets or truths or whatever. I don’t think that’s-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:55:42)
He’s a funny guy. The reality is different people have different attributes. One of the attributes for Donald Trump is, he’s one of the funnier presidents we’ve had in a long time. That might not be everybody’s cup of tea. Maybe different people don’t want… That’s not a quality they value in their president. I think at a moment where you’re also able to make… I will say this much is, everybody’s got different styles. Donald Trump’s style is different from mine. But I do think that if we’re able to use levity in a moment of national division, in some ways, I think right now is probably a role where really good standup comedians could probably do a big service to the country if they’re able to laugh at everybody 360 degrees, so they can go up there and make fun of Donald Trump all they want, do it in a lighthearted manner that loves the country, do the same thing to Kamala Harris with an equal standard. I think that’s actually good for the country. But I think I’m more interested, Lex, as you know, in discussing the future direction of the country, my own views. I was a presidential candidate who ran against Donald Trump, by the way, and is supporting him now. But I just prefer engaging on the substance of what I think each candidate’s going to achieve for the country rather than picking on really the personal attributes of either one, right? I’m not criticizing Kamala Harris’s manner of laugh, or whatever one might criticize as a personal attribute of hers that you may hear elsewhere. And I just think our country’s better off if we have a focus on both the policies, but also, who’s going to be more likely to revive the country, that I think is a healthy debate headed to an election. Everybody has their personality attributes, their flaws, what makes them funny and lovable to some people, makes them irritating to others, I think that that matters less heading into an election.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:22)
I love that you do that. I love that you focus on policy and can speak for hours on policy. Let’s look at foreign policy.

War in Ukraine

Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:57:29)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:30)
What kind of peace deal do you think is possible, feasible, optimal in Ukraine? If you sat down, you became president. If you sat down with Zelenskyy and sat down with Putin, what do you think is possible to talk to them about? One of the hilarious things you did, which were intense and entertaining, your debates in the primary, but anyway, is how you outgrow the other candidates that didn’t know any regions. They wanted to send money and troops, and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and they didn’t know any of the regions in Ukraine. You had a lot of zingers in that one. But anyway, how do you think about negotiating with world leaders about what’s going on there?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(01:58:17)
Yeah, so look, let’s just get the self-interest of each party on the table, and to be very transparent about it. From everyone’s perspective, they think the other side is the aggressor, or whatever. Just get it on the table. Russia is concerned about NATO shifting the balance of power away from Russia to Western Europe when NATO has expanded far more than they expected to, and frankly, that Russia was told that NATO was going to expand. It’s an uncomfortable fact for some in America, but James Baker made a commitment to Mikhail Gorbachev in the early nineties, where he said NATO would expand not one inch past East Germany. Well, NATO has expanded far more after the fall of the USSR than it did during the existence of the USSR, and that is a reality we have to contend with. That’s the Russian perspective.

(01:59:05)
From the Western perspective, the hard fact is Russia was the aggressor in this conflict, crossing the boundaries of a sovereign nation, and that is a violation of international norms, and it’s a violation of the recognition of international law of nations without borders are not a nation. And so, against that backdrop, what’s the actual interest of each country here? I think if we’re able to do a reasonable deal that gives Russia the assurances it needs about what they might allege as NATO expansionism violating prior commitments, but get codified commitments for Russia, that we’re not going to see willy-nilly behavior of just randomly deciding they’re going to violate the sovereignty of neighboring nations and have hard assurances and consequences for that. That’s the beginnings of a deal.

(01:59:49)
But then, I want to be ambitious for the United States. I want to weaken the Russia-China alliance, and I think that we can do a deal that requires, that gives some real gifts to Russia conditioned on Russia withdrawing itself from its military alliance with China. And this could be good for Russia too, in the long run, because right now, Vladimir Putin does not enjoy being Xi Jinping’s little brother in that relationship. But Russia’s military combined with China’s naval capacity, and Russia’s hypersonic missiles, and China’s economic might, together those countries in an alliance pose a real threat to the United States. But if as a condition for a reasonable discussion about where different territories land, given what’s occupied right now, hard requirements that Russia remove its military presence from the Western hemisphere. People forget this, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, we don’t want a Russian military presence in the Western hemisphere. That too, would be a win for the United States, no more joint military exercises with China off the coast of the Aleutian Islands.

(02:00:50)
The kinds of wins that the United States wants to protect the West’s security, get Russia out of the Western hemisphere, certainly out of the North American periphery, and then also make sure that Russia’s no longer in that military alliance with China, in return for that, able to provide Russia some things that are important to Russia. We’d have to have a reasonable discussion about what the territorial concessions would be at the end of this war to bring it to peace and resolution and what the guarantees are to make sure that NATO is going to not expand beyond the scope of what the United States has at least historically guaranteed. That I think together would be a reasonable deal that gives every party what they’re looking for, that results in immediate peace, that results in greater stability, and most importantly, weakening the Russia-China Alliance, which I think is the actual threat that we have so far, no matter who in this debate of more or less Ukraine funding has really failed to confront, that I think is the way we de-escalate the risk of World War III, and weaken the threats to the West by actually dismantling that alliance.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:50)
So from the American perspective, the main interest is weakening the alliance between Russia and China.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:01:57)
Yes, I think the military alliance between Russia and China represents the single greatest threat we face. So, do a deal that’s very reasonable across the board but one of the main things we get out of it is weakening that alliance, so no joint military exercises, no military collaborations. These are monitorable attributes. If there’s cheating on that, we’re going to immediately have consequences as a consequence of their cheating. But we can’t cheat on our own obligations that we would make in the context of that deal as well.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:27)
There might be some extremely painful things for Ukraine here. So Ukraine currently captured a small region in Russia, the Kursk region, but Russia has captured giant chunks, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson regions, so it seems given what you’re laying out, it’s very unlikely for Russia to give up any other regions that’s already captured.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:02:49)
I actually think that that would come down to the specifics of the negotiation. But the core goals of the negotiation are peace in this war, weaken the Russia-China Alliance. And for Russia, what do they get out of it? Part of this is… Here’s something that’s not negative for Ukraine but that could be positive for Russia as part of that deal because it’s not a zero-sum game alone with Ukraine on the losing end of this. I think reopening economic relations with the West would be a big win for Russia, but also a carrot that gets them out of that military relationship with China. So I do think that the foreign policy establishment has historically been, at the very least, unimaginative about the levers that we’re able to use.

(02:03:27)
Actually, I was a little bit critical of Nixon earlier in this discussion for his contribution to the overgrowth of the US entitlement state and regulatory state, but I’ll give Nixon credit here on a different point, which is that he was imaginative of being able to pull red China out from the clasp of the USSR. He broke the China-Russia alliance back then, which was an important step to bring us to the near end of the Cold War. So I think there’s an opportunity for similar unconventional maneuver now of using greater reopened economic relations with Russia to pull Russia out from the hands of China today. There’s no skin off Ukraine’s back for that, and I do think that’s a big carrot for Russia in this direction. I do think that will involve some level of territorial negotiation as well, that out of any good deal, not everyone’s going to like a hundred percent of what comes out of it, but that’s part of the cost of securing peace is that not everyone’s going to be happy about every attribute.

(02:04:19)
But I could make a case that an immediate peace deal is also now in the best interest of Ukraine. Let’s just rewind the clock. We’re looking at now, let’s just say we’re early 2022, maybe June of 2022, Zelenskyy was ready to come to the table for a deal back then until Boris Johnson traveled when he had his own domestic political travails to convince Zelenskyy to continue to fight. And that goes to the point where when nations aren’t asked to pay for their own national security, they have what the problem is of moral hazard, of taking risks that really are suboptimal risks for them to take because they’re not bearing the consequences of taking those risks, not fully in the cost.

(02:04:57)
If Ukraine had done a deal back then, I think it is unambiguous that they would’ve done a better deal for themselves than they’re doing now after having spent hundreds of billions of dollars and expended tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives. So the idea that Ukraine is somehow better off because it failed to do that deal before is a lie. And if we’re not willing to learn from those mistakes of the recent past, we’re doomed to repeat them again. So, this idea that it would be painful for Ukraine, you know what’s been painful, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people continuing to die without any increased leverage in actually getting the outcome that they want.

(02:05:36)
So, I think there’s an opportunity for a win-win-win, a win for the United States and the West more broadly in weakening the Russia-China alliance, a win for Ukraine in having an agreement that is backstopped by the United States of America’s interests that provides a greater degree of long-run security to the future existence of Ukraine and its sovereignty and also stopping the bloodshed today. And I think a win for Russia which is to reopen economic relations with the West and have certain guarantees about what the mission-creep or scop-creep of NATO will be. There’s no rule that says that when one party, before full outright World War, starts at least, there’s an opportunity for there to actually be a win for everybody on the table rather than to assume that a win for us is a loss to Russia, or that anything positive that happens for Russia is a loss for the United States or Ukraine.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:25)
Just to add to the table some things that Putin won’t like, but I think are possible to negotiate, which is Ukraine joining the European Union and not NATO, so establishing some economic relationships there, and also splitting the bill, guaranteeing some amount of money from both the Russia and the United States for rebuilding Ukraine. One of the challenges in Ukraine, a war-torn country, is how do you guarantee the flourishing of this particular nation, right? So, you want to not just stop the death of people and the destruction but also provide a foundation on which you can rebuild the country and build a flourishing future country.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:07:11)
Out of this conversation alone, there are a number of levers on the table for negotiation in a lot of different directions, and that’s where you want to be, if there’s only one factor that matters to each of the two parties, and those are their red line factors, then there’s no room for negotiation. This is a deeply complicated, historically intricate dynamic between Ukraine and Russia, and between NATO and the United States, and the Russia-China Alliance, and economic interests that are at issue combined with the geopolitical factors. There are a lot of levers for negotiation, and the more levers there are, the more likely there is to be a win-win-win deal that gets done for everybody.

(02:07:56)
So I think it should be encouraging the fact that there are as many different possible levers here, almost makes certain that a reasonable practicable peace deal as possible in contrast to situation where there’s only one thing that matters for each side, then I can’t tell you that there’s a deal to be done, there’s definitely a deal to be done here, and I think that it requires real leadership in the United States playing hardball, not just with one side of this, not just with Zelenskyy or with Putin, but across the board hardball for our own interest, which are the interests of stability here, and that that will happen to well serve both Ukraine and Russia in the process.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:30)
If you were president, would you call Putin?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:08:31)
Absolutely, in any negotiation, you got to manage when you’re calling somebody and when you’re not, but I do believe that open conversation and the willingness to have that as another lever in the negotiation is totally fair game.

China

Lex Fridman
(02:08:43)
Okay, let’s go to the China side of this. The big concern here is that the brewing cold, or God forbid, hot war between the United States and China and the 21st century. How do we avoid that?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:08:59)
So a few things. One is, I do think, the best way we also avoid it is by reducing the consequences to the United States in the event of that type of conflict because, at that point, what you’re setting up for, if the consequences are existential for the United States, then what you’re buying yourself in the context of what could be a small conflict is an all-out great war. So, the first thing I want to make sure we avoid is a major conflict between the United States and China, like a world-war-level conflict. And the way to do that is to bring down the existential stakes for the US. And the way we bring down the existential stakes for the US, is make sure that the United States does not depend on China for our modern way of life.

(02:09:41)
Right now, we do, okay, so right now, we depend on China for everything from the pharmaceuticals in our medicine cabinet, 95% of ibuprofen, one of the most basic medicines used in the United States, depends on China for its supply chain. We, depend on China, ironically, for our own military-industrial base. Think about how little sense that makes actually. Our own military, which supposedly exists to protect ourselves against adversaries, depends for its own supplies, semiconductors, and otherwise, on our top adversary, that doesn’t make sense. Even if you’re a libertarian in the school of Friedrich von Hayek, who somebody I admire as well, even then, you would not argue for a foreign dependence on adversary for your military. So, that’s the next step we need to take, is at least reduce US dependence on China for the most essential inputs for the functioning of the United States of America, including our own military.

(02:10:36)
As a side note, I believe that means not just on-shoring to the United States. It does, but if we’re really serious about that, it also means expanding our relationships with allies like Japan, South Korea, India, the Philippines. And that’s an interesting debate to have because some on the right would say, “Okay, I want to decouple from China, but I also want less trade with all these other places.” You can’t have both those things at the same time. You can have one or the other. You can’t have both. And so, we have to acknowledge and be honest with ourselves that there are trade-offs to declaring independence from China. But the question is, what are the long-run benefits?

(02:11:07)
Now, you think about the other way to do this is strategic clarity. I think the way that you see World Wars often emerge is strategic ambiguity from two adversaries who don’t really know what the other side’s red line is or isn’t, and accidentally crosses those red lines. And I think we need to be much clearer with what are our hard red lines and what aren’t they. And I think that’s the single most effective way to make sure this doesn’t spiral into major world war.

(02:11:34)
And then, let’s talk about ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict on the terms that I just discussed with you before. Weakening the Russia-China Alliance not only reduces the risk that Russia becomes an aggressor, it also reduces the risk that China takes the risks that could escalate us to World War III as well. So I think that geopolitically, you got to look at these things holistically, that end of the Russia-Ukraine war in that peace deal deescalates not only the Russia-Ukraine conflict but the risk of a broader conflict that includes China as well, by also weakening China.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:12:00)
… of a broader conflict that includes China as well by also weakening China because Russia also has hypersonic missiles and missile capabilities that are ahead of that China’s. If Russia is no longer in the military alliance with China, that changes China’s calculus as well. So that’s kind of I think, more strategic vision we need in our foreign policy than we’ve had since certainly the Nixon era. I think that you need people who are going to be able to challenge the status quo, question the existing orthodoxies, the willingness to use levers to get great deals done that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten done. And that’s why I do think someone like Donald Trump in the presidency, and obviously I ran for president as an outsider and a businessman as well. I think this is an area, our foreign policy is one where we actually benefit from having business leaders in those roles rather than people who are shackled by the traditional political manner of thinking.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:53)
I think the thing you didn’t quite make clear, but I think implied is that we have to accept the red line that China provides of the one China policy.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:13:02)
Both sides need to have their red lines, both sides need to have their red line. So we can get into specifics, but it’s going to vary depending on the circumstances. But the principle that I would give you is that we have to have a hard red line that’s clear. I think that that hard red line, and I was clear during my campaign on this, so I’ll say it again, is I think that we have to have a clear red line that China will not and should not for any time in the foreseeable future, annex Taiwan. I do think that for the United States, it probably is prudent right now not to suddenly upend the diplomatic policy we’ve adopted for decades of what is recognizing the one China policy in our position of quiet deference to that.

(02:13:41)
And understand that that may be the red line is the national recognition of Taiwan as an independent nation would be a red line that China would have. But we would have a red line to say that we do not in any circumstance tolerate the annexation by physical force and anytime in the foreseeable future when that’s against the interest of the United States of America. So those are examples, but the principle here is you asked how do we avoid major conflict with China? I think it starts with clear red lines on both sides. I think it starts with also lowering the stakes for the United States by making sure we’re not dependent on China for our modern way of life. And I think it also starts with ironically using a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war as a way of weakening the Russia-China alliance, which in the other direction of weakening China has significant benefits to us as well.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:27)
But what are you do when china says very politely, ” We’re going to annex Taiwan whether you like it or not.”
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:14:35)
Against the backdrop that I just laid out, that’s not going to happen. That wouldn’t happen if we actually make sure that we are crystal clear about what our red lines and priorities are. We’re also dependent on Taiwan right now for our own semiconductor supply chain. So China knows that’s going to draw us into serious conflict in that circumstance. So against the backdrop of clearly drawn red lines against the backdrop of Russia no longer automatically being in China’s camp, that’s a big lever. I think also strengthening our relationship with other allies where we have room to strengthen those relationships, like India. And I’m not just saying that because my name is Vivek Ramaswamy, right? I’m saying it because it’s strategically important to the United States to understand that God forbid, in a conflict scenario, China would perceive some risk to the Indian Ocean or the Andaman Sea no longer being reliable for getting Middle Eastern oil supplies.

(02:15:21)
There’s a lot of levers here, but I think that if we are both strategically clear with our allies and with our adversaries about what our red lines are, what our priorities are, reasonable deals that pull Russia out of the hands of China and vice versa, reasonable allies and relationships that cause China to question whether it can continue to have the same access to Middle Eastern oil supplies as it does today. And then clear red lines with China itself about what we definitely aren’t okay with and understand that they may have certain red lines to, that allows us, I think to still avoid what many people will call the unavoidable conflict, the Thucydides trap against the circumstance of when there’s a rising power against the backdrop of a declining power conflict always becomes inevitable. That’s a theory. It’s not a law of physics and I don’t think that, A, we have to be a declining power, and B, I don’t think that that has to necessarily result in major conflict with China here.

(02:16:14)
It’s going to require real leadership, leadership with a spine and you don’t have to judge based on international relations theory to form your view on this. Four years under Trump, we didn’t have major conflicts in the Middle East, in places like Russia, Ukraine. We were on the cusp of war with North Korea when Obama left office and Trump took over. Four years under Biden, less than four years under Biden and Harris, what do you have? Major conflicts in the Middle East. Major conflict in Russia, Ukraine, judged by the results. And I mean I would say that even if you’re somebody who disagrees with a lot of Donald Trump and you don’t like his style, if you’re single issues, you want to stay out of World War III, I think there’s a pretty clear case for why you go for Trump in this election.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:55)
So Prime Minister Modi, I think you’ve complimented him in a bunch of different directions, one of which is when you’re discussing nationalism.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:17:02)
Yeah, I believe that someone I’ve gotten to know actually reasonably well for example, recently is Giorgia Meloni, who’s a leader of Italy, told her the same thing. One of the things I love about her as a leader of Italy is that she does not apologize for the national identity of the country and that she stands for certain values uncompromisingly and she doesn’t give a second care about what the media has to say about it. One of the things I love last time I spoke to her when she was in the US when we sat down was she talked about she doesn’t even read the newspaper, she doesn’t read and watch the media and it allows her to make decisions that are best for the people.

(02:17:37)
And there are elements of that in Modi’s approach as well, which I respect about him, is he doesn’t apologize for the fact that India has a national identity and that the nation should be proud of it. But I’m not saying that because I’m proud of Meloni or Modi for their own countries. I’m American. I think there are lessons to learn from leaders who are proud of their own nation’s identity rather than apologizing for it. And I think it’s a big part of, it’s why I ran for president on a campaign centered on national pride. It’s also why I’m not only voting for but actively supporting Donald Trump because I do think he’s going to be the one that restores that missing national pride in the United States. And I touch on this as well in the book, there’s a chapter here, it says, “Nationalism isn’t a bad word.”

(02:18:20)
I think nationalism can be a very positive thing if it’s grounded in the actual true attributes of a nation. And in the United States that doesn’t mean no nationalism because that was not what the national identity of the United States was based on in the first place. But a civic nationalism grounded in our actual national ideals, that is who we are. And I think that that is something that we’ve gotten uncomfortable with in the countries to say that, “Oh, I’m proud of being American and I believe in American exceptionalism.” Somehow that’s looking down on others. No, I’m not looking down on anybody, but I’m proud of my own country. And I think Modi’s revived that spirit in India in a way that was missing for a long time, right? India had an inferiority complex, a psychological inferiority complex, but now to be proud of its national heritage and its national mythmaking and its national legacy and history.

(02:19:08)
And to say that every nation does have to have a kind of mythmaking about its past and to be proud of that, it’s like Malcolm X actually said this here in the United States, he said, “A nation without an appreciation for its history is like a tree without roots, it’s dead.” And I think that that’s true not just for the United States, I think it’s true for every other nation. I think leaders like Meloni in Italy, leaders like Modi in India have done a great job that I wish to bring that type of pride back in the United States. And whatever I do next, Lex, I’ll tell you this is I think reviving that sense of identity and pride, especially in the next generation is one of the most important things we can do for this country.

Will Vivek run in 2028?

Lex Fridman
(02:19:54)
Speaking of what you do next, any chance you run in 2028?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:20:00)
Well, I’m not going to rule it out. I mean that’s a long time from now and I’m most focused on what I can do in the next chapter for the country. I ran for president, a million things that I learned from that experience that you can only learn by doing it. It was very much a fire first aim later when getting into the race. There was no way I could have planned and plotted this out as somebody who was coming from the outside. I was 37 years old, came from the business world, so there was a lot that only could learn by actually doing it and I did, but I care about the same things that led me into the presidential race and I don’t think the issues have been solved. I think that we have a generation that is lost in the country. It’s not just young people.

(02:20:41)
I think it’s all of us in some ways are hungry for purpose and meaning at a time in our history when the things that used to fill that void in our heart, they’re missing. And I think we need a president who both the right policies for the country seal the border, grow the economy, stay out of World War III, end rampant crime. Yes, we need the right policies, but we also need leaders who in a sustained way revive our national character, revive our sense of pride in this country, revive our identity as Americans, and I think that that need exists as much today as it did when I first ran for president. I don’t think it’s going to be automatically solved in just a few years. I think Donald Trump is the right person to carry that banner forward for the next four years.

(02:21:28)
But after that, we’ll see where the country is headed into 2028 and whatever I do, it’ll be whatever has a maximal positive impact on the country. I’ll also tell you that my laser focus maybe as distinct from other politicians on both sides is to take America to the next level, to move beyond our victimhood culture, to restore our culture of excellence. We got to shut down that nanny state, the entitlement state, the regulatory state, the foreign policy nanny state, shut it down and revive who we really are as Americans, and I’m as passionate about that as ever. But the next step is not running for president. The next step is what happens in the next four years, and that’s why over the next four weeks I’m focused on doing whatever I can to make sure we succeed in this election.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:14)
Well, I hope you run because this was made clear on the stage in the primary debates. You have a unique clarity and honesty in expressing the ideas you stand for and it would be nice to see that. I would also like to see the same thing on the other side, which would make for some badass, interesting debates.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:22:38)
I would love nothing more than a kick-ass set of top-tier Democrat candidates. After four years of Donald Trump, we have a primary filled with actually people who have real visions for the country on both sides, and the people of this country can choose between those competing visions without insult or injury being the way. I would love nothing more than to see that in 2028.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:03)
Who do you think? So for me, I would love to see in some kind of future where it’s you versus somebody like Tim Walz. So to Tim Walz, maybe I’m lacking in knowledge, is first of all, a good dude, has similar to you, strongly held if not radical ideas of how to make progress in this country. So to just be on stage and debate honestly about the ideas, there’s a tension between those ideas. Is there other people? Shapiro’s interesting also.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:23:38)
I would like to take on in earnest, in civil but contested context of a debate. Who do we want to take on? You want to take on somebody who disagrees with you but still has deep ideology of their own. I think John Fetterman is pretty interesting, right? He’s demonstrated himself to be somebody who is thoughtful, able to change his mind on positions, but not in some sort of fake flip-floppity, flippity-floppity way. But in a thoughtful evolution, somebody’s been through personal struggles, somebody who I deeply disagree with on a lot of his views and most of his views. But who I can at least say he comes across at least as somebody who has been through that torturous process of really examining your beliefs and convictions and has when necessary, been able to preach to his own tribe where he thinks they’re wrong.

(02:24:26)
I think it’s interesting. I think that you have in a number of other leaders probably emerging at lower levels on the left. Not everybody’s going to necessarily come from Washington DC. In fact, the longer they’re there, the more they in some ways get polluted by it. I think the governor of Colorado, he’s an interesting guy. He’s got a more libertarian tendency. I don’t know as much about his views on it from a national perspective, but it’s intriguing to see somebody who has at least libertarian freedom-oriented tendencies within the Democratic Party. I think that there are a number of, I mean, I don’t foresee him running for president, but I had a debate last year when I was running for president with Ro Khanna who say what you will about him. He’s an highly intelligent person and is somebody who is at least willing to buck the consensus of his party when necessary.

(02:25:13)
I think he recently, I would say lambasted, he phrased it very delicately, but criticized Kamala Harris’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains. So I like people who are willing to challenge the orthodoxies in their own party because it says they actually have convictions. And so whoever the Democrats put up, I hope it’s someone like that. And for my part I have and continue to have beliefs that will challenge Republicans, that on the face of it may not be the policies that poll on paper as the policies you’re supposed to adopt as a Republican candidate, but what a true leader does doesn’t just tell people what they want to hear. You tell people what they need to hear and you tell people what your actual convictions are. And this idea that I don’t want to create a right-wing entitlement state or a nanny state, I want to shut it down.

(02:26:02)
That challenges the precept positions of where a lot of the conservative movement is right now. I don’t think the bill to cap credit card interest rates is a good idea because that’s a price control just like Kamala Harris’s price controls and it’ll reduce access to credit. I don’t think that we want a crony capitalist estate showering private benefits on selected industries that favor us or that we want to expand the CFPB or the FTC’s remit, and somehow we’re going to trust it because it’s under our watch. No, I believe in shutting it down. That challenges a lot of the current direction of the conservative movement. I believe in certain issues that, or maybe even outside the scope of what Republicans currently care about right now.

(02:26:41)
One of the things that I oppose, for example, is this is not a top issue in American politics, but just to give you a sense for how I think and view the world, I’m against factory farming of a large scale of, you could sort of say putting the mistreatment of, it’s one thing to say that you need it for your sustenance and that’s great. But it’s another to say that you have to do it in a factory farming setting that gives special exemptions from historical laws that have existed that are the product of crony capitalism. I’m against crony capitalism in all its forms. I’m against the influence of mega money in politics. I don’t think that’s been good either for Democrats or Republicans. Some of those views I think are not necessarily the traditional Republican orthodoxy reading chapter and verse from what the Republican Party platform has been. It’s not against the Republican Party platform, but it’s asking what the future of our movement is.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:32)
Some of these things are hard, like getting money out of politics.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:27:36)
Getting mega money, getting mega money.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:37)
The mega money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so long as it exists, you got to play the game. I mean, if you’re going to play to win, I think one of the things I realized is that you just can’t compete without it, but you want to win the game in order to change the game. And I think that that’s something that I keep in mind as well.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:54)
You have written a lot, you’re exceptionally productive. But even just looking book-wise written basically a book a year for the last four years. When you’re writing, when you’re thinking about how to solve the problems of the world to develop your policy, how do you think?
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:28:11)
I need quiet time, extended periods of it that are separated from the rush of the day to day or the travel actually think a lot better when I’m working out and physically active. So if I’m running, playing tennis, lifting, somehow for me, that really opens up my mind and then I need a significant amount of time after that with a notebook. Usually carry around a notebook everywhere I go and write it down in there.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:38)
Is the notebook full of chaotic thoughts or is it structured? Does it-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:28:42)
Sometimes it’s chaotic, sometimes it’s structured. It’s a little bit of both. Sometimes I have a thought that I know I don’t want to forget later, I’ll immediately jot it down. Other times on the flight over here, I had a much more structured layout of, I got a lot of different projects in the air, for example, and I cross pollinate, I was in the shower this morning, had a bunch of thoughts, collected those on my plane ride over here. So I think that writing is something in all of its forms that helps me. It’s one of the things actually helped me this year was actually writing this book. You’re going through a presidential campaign, you’re going at super speed. And if I was to do the presidential campaign again, the thing I would do is actually to take more structured breaks. I don’t mean breaks isn’t just like vacations, but I mean breaks to reflect on what’s actually happening. Probably the biggest mistake I made is last time around heading into the first debate, I was like in nine different states over seven days.

(02:29:36)
I would’ve just taken that as a pause where halfway through you’ve established relevance, now make sure the country sees who you actually are in full rather than just the momentum competitive driven version of you. And I just think that taking those moments to just take stock of where you are, do some writing. I didn’t do much writing during the presidential campaign. I enjoy writing. It’s part of how I center myself. It’s part of what this book allowed me to do is, okay, I ran that whirlwind of a campaign. The first thing I started doing after I collected myself for a couple of weeks was take the pen and start writing. And I was committed to writing that book. Whether or not anybody read it, I was just writing it for myself. And actually it started in a very different form. It was very personal reflection oriented. So most of that, funny enough I’ve learned about writing the books, Lex, is-
Lex Fridman
(02:30:24)
Just edit it out.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:30:25)
It just didn’t end up in the book because it went in a different direction than what’s interesting for a publisher to publish. And so for each of my books, the things that I started writing ended up never in the book anyway, just because the topic ended up morphing. But the journey that led me to write this book, a lot of it in this book is still in there. This is my fourth book in four years. You’re right. And I hope it’s the most important one, but it is certainly the product of an honest reflection that whatever it might do for the reader, it helped me to write it.

(02:30:53)
And I think that’s one of the things that I learned from this campaign is not just all the policy lessons, but even just as a matter of personal practice, the ability to take spaces of time to not only physically challenge yourself, work out, et cetera, but to give yourself the space to reflect, to recenter yourself on the why. Had I done that, I think I would’ve been even more centered on the mission the whole time. Rather than you get attacked on the way you’re thrown off your tilt or thrown off your balance, it becomes a lot harder for someone else to do that to you if you’ve really centered yourself on your own purpose. It’s probably one of my biggest learnings.

Approach to debates

Lex Fridman
(02:31:32)
So you’ve mentioned the first primary debate, so more than almost basically anybody I’ve ever seen you step into some really intense debates, And you’re on podcasts in general in all kinds of walks of life, whether it’s debates with sort of protestors or debates with people that really disagree with you, like the radical opposite of you. What’s the philosophy behind that, and what’s the psychology of being able to be calm through all of that, which you seem to be able to do.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:32:06)
Well, I enjoy debate and for me, I think just in ordinary life, forget about a formal debate setting. Whenever I’ve received criticism or a contrary view, my first impulse is always, “Are they right?” I mean it’s always a possibility, right? And most of the time what happens is you understand the other side’s argument, but you emerge with a stronger conviction in your own belief, you know your own beliefs better if you can state the best argument for the other side, but sometimes you do change your mind, and I think that that’s happened over the course of my life as well. I think no one’s a thinking human being unless that happens once in a while too. And so anyway, just the idea of the pursuit of truth through open debate and inquiry, that’s always just been part of my identity, part of who I am. I’m wired that way.

(02:32:51)
I thrive on it, I enjoy it. Even my relationships with my closest friends are built around heated debates and deep-seated disagreements. And I just think that’s beautiful, not just about human relationships, but it’s particularly beautiful about America, right? Because it’s part of the culture of this country more so than other countries in China, India, Asian cultures even a lot of European cultures are very different where that’s considered not genteel behavior. It’s not the respectful behavior. Whereas for us, part of what makes this country great is you could disagree like hell and still get together at the dinner table at the end of it. I think we’ve lost some of that, but I’m on a bit of a mission to bring that back. And so whether it’s in politics or not, I’m committed in that next step, whatever the path is over the next four years, one of the things I’m committed to doing is making sure that I go out of my way to talk to people who actually disagree with me. And I think it’s a big part of how we’re going to save our country.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:55)
Are they right? Is a thing I actually literally see you do. So you are listening to the person.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:34:01)
For my own benefit, to be honest, selfish.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:03)
You also don’t lose your shit. So you don’t take it personally. You don’t get emotional, but you get emotional sort of in a positive way. You get passionate, but you don’t get… I’ve never seen you broken to where they get you outraged, probably because you just love the heat.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:34:23)
I love the heat and I’m a curious person, so I’m always curious about what’s motivating the person on the other side. That curiosity I think is actually the best antidote because if you’re just trying to stay calm in the face of somebody attacking you, that’s kind of fake. But if you’re kind of curious about them, genuinely just wondering, I think most people are good people inherently. We all maybe get misguided from time to time, but what is it that’s moving that person to go in such a different direction than you?

(02:34:53)
I think as long as you’re curious about that, I mean the climate change protestors that have interrupted my events, I’m as fascinated by the psychology of what’s moving them and what they might be hungry for as I am concerned about rebutting the content of what they’re saying to me. And I think that that’s certainly something I care to revive. We don’t talk about in politics that much, but reviving that sense of curiosity I think is in a certain way, one of the ways we’re going to be able to disagree, but still remain friends and fellow citizens at the end of it.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:27)
I agree with you. I think fundamentally most people are good. And one of the things I love most about humans is the very thing you said, which is curiosity. I think we should lean into that.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:35:38)
You’re a curious person. I know this podcast is basically born of your curiosity, I’m sure. And so I just think we need more of that in America that kind of… Remember when I talked about our founding fathers, we were joking about it, but they were inventors, they were writers, they were political theorists, they were founders of a nation. They kind of had that boundless curiosity too. And I think part of what’s happened culturally in the countries we’ve gotten to this place where we’ve been told that, “Stay in your lane. You don’t have an expert degree in that, therefore you can’t have an opinion about it.” I don’t know. I think it’s a little bit un-American in terms of the culture of it.

(02:36:15)
And yeah, it’s one of the things I like about you and why I was looking forward to this conversation too, is it’s cool to have intellectual interests that span sports to culture, to politics, to philosophy. And it’s not like you just have to be an expert trained in one of those things to be able to engage in it, but actually maybe, just maybe you might even be better at each of those things because you’re curious about the other, the Renaissance man, if you will. I think we’ve lost a little bit of that concept in America, but it’s certainly something that is important to me. And this year it’s been kind of cool. After leaving the campaign, I’ve been doing a wide range of things. I’ve been picking up my tennis game again. I practiced at the Ohio State-
Lex Fridman
(02:36:57)
You’re damn good at tennis. I was watching you-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:37:00)
I used to be better, but I’m picking it up again.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:02)
Somebody online was trying to correctly, I think you shot a very particular angle of that video. I think they were criticizing your backhand was weak potentially because you’re-
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:37:13)
That would be fair criticism. But it’s gotten better again. It’s gotten better recently. I’ve been playing, I’ve been practicing with the Ohio State team in the morning. They’re like number one in the country or close to it. Now the guys on the team play, but there’s a couple coaches who were recently on the team, one of whom used to be, a guy used to play within the juniors who invited me out. So I hit with them in the mornings alongside the team. My goal-
Lex Fridman
(02:37:36)
Oh, don’t say it.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:37:38)
I should be careful here. Oh no, my hips are telling others, so I’ve been playing so many days a week-
Lex Fridman
(02:37:44)
No, no, please don’t.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:37:46)
… that I set a goal for myself to play in a particular tournament, but we’ll see if that happens or not.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:51)
No, no.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:37:51)
But regardless if it’s been fun to get back into tennis, I was an executive producer in a movie, something I’ve never done before. It was called City of Dreams. It’s about a story of a young man who was trafficked into the United States. It’s a thriller, it’s a very cool movie to be a part of. I have actually started a couple companies, one company in particular that I think is going to be significant this year, guiding some of the other businesses that I’ve gotten off the ground in the past. So for me, I’m re-energized now where I was involved in the thick of politics for a full year there. And getting a little bit of oxygen outside of politics, doing some things in the private sector has actually given me a renewed sense of energy to get back into driving change through public service.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:38)
Well, it’s been fun watching you do all these fascinating things, but I do hope that you have a future in politics as well, because it’s nice to have somebody that has rigorously developed their ideas and is honest about presenting them and is willing to debate those ideas out in public space. So I would love for you and people like you to represent the future of American politics. So Vivek, thank you so much. For every time I’m swiveling this chair, I’m thinking of Thomas Jefferson.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:39:11)
It’s good. That was my goal.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:12)
So big shout out to Thomas Jefferson for the swivel chair, and thank you so much for talking today, Vivek. This was fun.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:39:18)
Thank you, man. One final fact on Thomas Jefferson, whether you cut this or not.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:22)
Of course.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:39:23)
He wrote 16,000 essays in his life, letters, right? So he said, “I’ve written four books in four years.” That is nothing compared to how prolific this guy was. Anyway, anyway, good stuff, man. Thanks for having me.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:37)
Neither of us will ever live up to anything close to Thomas Jefferson.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:39:41)
I love your curiosity, man. Thanks for reading the book and appreciated your feedback on it as well. And hopefully we’ll do this again sometime.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:47)
Yep. Thank you brother.
Vivek Ramaswamy
(02:39:48)
Thanks dude.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:50)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy. 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 hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler | Lex Fridman Podcast #444

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #444 with Vejas Liulevicius.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Vejas Liulevicius
(00:00:00)
And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine, not a natural disaster, not bad harvests, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape.

(00:00:18)
You put very well some of the implications of this case study in how things look in the abstract versus in practice, and those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or purifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to have vengeance visited upon them reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, there’s a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole and which is supposed to have accurate statistics, all of this is founded upon a foundation of sand.

(00:01:15)
A deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside does damage, and not least of that is this phenomenon of a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized will be winnowed again and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent.

(00:01:49)
Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war on the Eastern Front, not a peace treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border every generation hundreds of miles east in order to keep winning more and more living space and with analogy to other frontiers to always give more fighting experience and more training and aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers. In terms of nightmarish visions, this one’s right up there.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:29)
The following is a conversation with Vejas Liulevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the reign, and the fall of communism. Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics, the communist ideology that has led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century. We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Vejas Liulevicius.

Marxism

Lex Fridman
(00:03:10)
Let’s start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:03:17)
I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact, and in some ways they were actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose. That history is not just random events, but that rather it’s history, we might say, with a capital H, history moving in a deliberate direction, history having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in.

(00:03:47)
At the same time, in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might give it an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process. And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is a science of revolution that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and meaningful, rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts, a total liberation of the human person and that moreover that was inevitable, that that was pre-programmed and destined in the order of things, when you add to that the notion that there’s also room for heroism and the individual role, this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination.

(00:04:43)
Earlier thinkers who were socialists had already dreamt of or projected futures where all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve some sort of perfection. Marx added these other elements that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions that he decried as merely utopian socialism.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:05)
So there’s a million questions I could ask there. So on the utopian side. So there is a utopian component to the way he tried to conceive of his ideas.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:05:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress, Marx would’ve gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you’re not scientific, you’re not rational, you are not laying out the iron laws of history. You’re merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic.

(00:05:36)
That said, hidden among Marx’s insistence that there are laws and structures as history moves through class conflict, modes of production towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown and people finally being freed from necessity, smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements. And there, they come especially at the end in which Marx sketches the notion of what things will look like after the revolution has resolved all problems.

(00:06:18)
There, vagueness sets in. It’s clear that it’s a blessed state that’s being talked about. People no longer exploiting one another, people no longer subject to necessity or poverty, but instead enjoying all of the productivity of industrialization that hitherto had been put to private profit now collectively owned and deployed. The notion that one will be able to work at one job in the morning and then engage in leisure activity at yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon. All of this free of any contradictions, free of necessity, free of the ordinary irritations that we experience in our the ordinary lives, that’s deeply utopian. The difference was that Marx charted a route towards that outcome that presented itself as cutting-edge science and moreover having the full credibility that science commanded so much, especially in the 19th and early 20th century.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:22)
So there is a long journey from capitalism to communism that includes a lot of problems. He thought once you resolve the problems, all the complexities of human interactions, the friction, the problems will be gone.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:07:37)
To the extent that they were based on inequalities and on man’s exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about the history of communism, you have to include the fact that this often tragic and dramatic history produced a lot of jokes. Jokes that were in part reactions sometimes to the ideological claims made by people like Marx. And one of the famous jokes was that what’s the difference between capitalism and communism? And the joke’s answer was capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and communism is the exact opposite.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:18)
Yeah, you actually have electron humor. I love it. And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way. Okay, there’s again, a million questions. So you outline a set of contradictions, but it’s interesting to talk about his view. For example, what was Marx’s view of history?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:08:37)
Marx had been a student of Hegel. And Hegel as a German idealist philosopher had announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History is not a collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that the true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history, history with a capital H, something that’s transcendent and meaningful was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of historical development. And that idea was the idea of human freedom. So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone making history and having an impact. It was the idea itself striving to come to fruition, striving to come to an evermore perfect realization.

(00:09:28)
In the case of Hegel, in this very Prussian and German context, he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state because he thought that governments are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws and on the ideal of a state of the rule of law, in German the Rechtsstaat. That was a noble dream. At the same time, as we recognize from our perspective, state power has been put to all sorts of purposes besides guaranteeing the rule of law in our own times.

(00:10:01)
What Marx did was to take this characteristic insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards the realization of an idea and flipped it on its head. Marx insisted that Hegel had so much that was right in his thinking, but what he had neglected to keep in mind was that in fact, history is based on matter. So hence, dialectical materialism, dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea.

(00:10:42)
And so Marx adapts a lot of ideas of Hegel. You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to that earlier training, but now taken in a very different direction. What remained though was the confidence of being on the right side of history. And there are few things that are as intoxicating as being convinced that your actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also destined to be successful.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:14)
And also that you have the rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:11:21)
Absolutely. So Engels, when he gives the graveside eulogy for his beloved friend Marx, claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history, the Darwin of history. That he had done for the world of politics and of human history what Darwin had done with this theory of evolution, understanding the hidden mechanism, understanding the laws that are at work and that make that whole process meaningful rather than just one damn thing after another.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:59)
What about the sort of famous line that history of all existing societies is the history of class struggles? So what about this conception of history as a history of class struggle?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:12:10)
Well, so this was the mode of force that Karl Marx and Engels saw driving the historical process forward. And it’s important to keep in mind that class conflict doesn’t just mean revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings. It’s the totality of frictions and of clashes, conflicts of interest that appear in any society.

(00:12:34)
And so Marx was able in this spirit that he avowed was very scientific to demarcate stages of historical transformation, primitive communism in the prehistoric period, then moving towards what was called state slavery. That’s to say the early civilizations deploying human resources and ordering them by all powerful monarchs. Then private slavery in the ancient period. And then moving to feudalism in the Middle Ages. And then here’s where Marx is able to deliver a pronouncement about his own times, seeing that the present day is the penultimate, the next to last stage of this historical development, because the feudal system of the Middle Ages and the dominance of the aristocracy has been overcome, has been displaced by the often heroic achievements, astonishing achievements in commerce and in world-building of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, who have taken the world into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the class below them, which is the working class or the proletariat.

(00:13:48)
And so this sort of conflict also, by the way, obtains within classes, so the bourgeoisie are going to be gravediggers Marx announces of their own supremacy because they’re also competing against one another. And members who don’t survive that competition get pressed down into the subordinate working class, which grows and grows and grows to the point where at some future moment, the inevitable explosion will come and a swift revolution will overturn this penultimate stage of human history and usher in instead the dictatorship of the working class and then the abolition of all classes because with only one class remaining, everyone is finally unified and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:43)
The dictatorship of the working class is an interesting term. So what is the role of revolution in history?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:14:50)
So this in particular for Marx, I think is a really key moment, which is what makes that such a good question. In his vision, the epic narrative that he’s presenting to us, revolution is key. It’s not enough to have evolutionary change. It’s not a question of compromises. It’s not a case of bargaining or balancing interests. Revolution is necessary as part of the process of a subjugated class coming to awareness of its own historical role. And when we get to the proletariat, this working class in its entirety to whom Marx assigns this epic Promethean role of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity, a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role in salvation history that they’ll be playing in this secular framework, they need revolution and the experience of revolution in order to come into their own. Because without it, you’ll only have half-hearted compromise and something less than the consciousness that they then need in order to rule, to administer, and to play the historical role that they’re fated to have.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:00)
How did he conceive of a revolution, potentially a violent revolution stabilizing itself into something where the working class was able to rule?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:16:15)
That’s where things become a good deal less detailed in his and Engels accounts. The answer that they proposed in part was this is for the future to determine, so all of the details will be settled later. I think there was allied to this was a tremendous confidence in some very 19 century ideas about how society could be administered and what made for orderly society in a way where if the right infrastructure was in place, you might expect society to kind of run itself without the need for micromanagement from above.

(00:16:56)
And hence, we arrive at Marx’s tantalizing promise that there will be a period where it will be necessary to have centralized control and there might have to be, as he puts it, despotic inroads against property in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents everybody rather than representing particular class interests that are in conflict with other classes, the state will eventually wither away, so there won’t be need for it.

(00:17:28)
Now, that’s not to say that pure stasis arrives or that the stabilization equals being frozen in time. It’s not as if that is what things will look like. But instead, the big issues will be settled and henceforth people will be able to enjoy lives of, as he would consider it, in authentic freedom without necessity, without poverty as a result of this blessed state that’s been arrived at.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:54)
Despotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:18:02)
Dispossession, dispossession of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is never standing still, right? So he’d probably argue in this dynamic vision of how history unfolds that there’s always conflict and it’s always moving, propelling history forward towards its predestined ending.

(00:18:23)
In the way he saw this climax was that as things did not stay the same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting worse and hence their revolutionary potential was growing. And at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie, were also facing diminishing returns as they competed against one another with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more elements of what had been the middle class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down into the working class. For Marx, this is really a key part. I mean, it’s a key part of this whole ratchet effect that’s going to produce this final historical explosion.

(00:19:14)
And in German, the word given to that process was verehlendung, which is very evocative. Elend means misery, so it’s the growing misery. When this gets translated into English, the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory. The words that get used are immiseration or pauperization, meaning more and more people are being turned into paupers. But for Marx, that prediction is really key.

(00:19:44)
And even in his own lifetime, there were already hints that in fact, if you looked sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he had expected. In fact, although there had been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic, Wild West stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers labored might be ameliorated.

(00:20:28)
Moreover, the middle class rather than dwindling and dwindling, seemed to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers or the appearance of new kinds of people like white-collar workers or technical experts. So already in Marx’s own lifetime, and then especially in what follows Marx’s lifetime, this becomes a real problem because it puts a stick into the spokes of this particular historical prediction.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:53)
Can you speak to this realm of ideas, which is fascinating, this battle of big ideas in the 19th century. What are the ideas that were swimming around here?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:21:03)
Yeah, yeah. Well, to describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt because Europe is being wracked and being put through the wringer of nationalism, demands for self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule, demands to redraw the map. The tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution meant that in the course of about a generation, you would’ve seen the world around you change in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar. You’d be able to travel across the landscape at speeds that have been unthinkable when you were a child. So it’s enormous change and demands for yet more change.

(00:21:53)
And so it’s a great mix of ideas, ideologies, the old and the new religious ideas, religious revivals, as well as demands for secularization. And stepping into all of this are Marx and Engels together in what has been called, I think with justice, one of the most important and influential intellectual partnerships of history.

(00:22:22)
They were very different men. They were both German by origin. Marx had trained as an academic. He had married the daughter of a baron. Because of his radical ideas, he had foreclosed or just found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went the route of radical journalism. Engels was very different. Engels was the son of an industrialist and the family owned factories in Germany and in England. So he was most definitely not a member of the proletariat that he and Marx were celebrating as so significant in their future historical role.

(00:23:03)
There were also huge differences in character between these men. Marx, when people met him, they were astonished by his energy and his dynamism. They also saw him as a man who felt determined to dominate arguments. He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits. We might mention among other things, that he impregnated the family maid and didn’t accept responsibility for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to support his growing family. That’s where Engels came in. Engels essentially from his family fortune and then from his journalism afterwards supported both himself and the Marx family for decades. And so in a sense, Engels made things happen.

(00:24:04)
In the mysterious way that friendships work, the very differences between these men made them formidable as a dynamic duo because they balanced off one another’s idiosyncrasies and turned what might’ve been faults into potential strengths. British historian, A.J.P. Taylor always has a lovely turn of phrase, even when he’s wrong about a historical issue. In this case, he was right. He said that Engels had charm and brilliance, Marx was the genius. And Engels saw himself as definitely the junior partner in this relationship. But here’s the paradox. Without Engels, pretty clearly Marx would not have gone on to have the sort of lasting historical impact in the world of ideas that he had.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:49)
Just to throw in the mix, there’s interesting characters swimming around. So you have Darwin. He has a… I mean, it’s difficult to characterize the level of impact he had. Even just in the religious context, it challenges our conception of who we are as humans. There’s Nietzsche who’s also, I don’t know, hanging around the area. On the Russian side, there’s Dostoevsky. So it’s interesting to ask maybe from your perspective, did these people interact in the space of ideas to where this is relevant to our discussion, or is this mostly isolated?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:25:32)
I think that it’s a part of a great conversation. I think that in their works, they’re reacting to one another. Dostoevsky’s thought ranges across the condition of modernity and he definitely has things to say about industrialization. I think that they react to one another in these oblique ways rather than always being at each other’s throats in direct confrontations. And that’s what makes the 19th century so compelling as a story just because of the sheer vitality of the arguments that are taking place in ways big and small.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:09)
Well, we should say here, when you mentioned Karl Marx, maybe the color red comes up for people and they think the Soviet Union, maybe China, but they don’t think Germany necessarily. It’s interesting that Germany is where communism was supposed to happen.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:26:28)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:29)
And so can you maybe speak to that tension?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:26:33)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a factor in the entire history that we’re referencing. Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans. Many of their preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves even as they were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class, their clearly, their entire formation had been affected by their German background.

(00:27:05)
And it’s very true, as you point out, that Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out, also in Britain, also in France, also eventually in the United States. But it’s Germany by virtue of its central location and then its rapid development later than Britain or France in industrialization give it the special role in Marx’s worldview.

(00:27:34)
And so it’s a lasting irony or a central irony of this whole story that when a government establishes itself that claims to be following Marx’s prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, a place that did not match the requirements of being industrialized, developed, well on its way in this historical process. And nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense that what they were doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble. It was a risk because in fact, the revolution to really take hold had to seize power in Germany. And that’s why immediately after taking power, they’re not sure they’re going to last. Their hope, their promise of salvation is that a workers’ revolution will erupt in Germany, defeated Germany in order to link up with the one that has been launched in this unlikely Russian location and henceforth great things will follow that do hue to Marx’s historical vision.

(00:28:52)
The last thing to mention about this is that this predominance of Germany in the thinking of Marx had two other reflections. One was that German socialists and later communists organize in order to fulfill Marx’s vision and they produce something that leaves other Westerners in awe in the late 19th century. And that’s the building of a strong German workers movement and a Social Democratic Party. That Social Democratic Party by 1912 is the largest party in German politics by vote. And there’s the possibility they might even come to power without needing radical revolution, which again, also goes against Marx’s original vision of the necessity for a revolution. Workers around the world, or rather radical socialists look with admiration and awe at what the Germans have achieved and they see themselves as trying to do what the Germans have done.

(00:29:59)
The final point is growing up during the Cold War, one thought that, well, if you want to represent somebody as being a communist, that person has to have a Russian accent, because Russia after all, the homeland of this form of government, the Soviet Union, that must be the point of origin. Before the Bolsheviks seized power, in order to really be a serious radical socialist, you needed to read German because you needed to read Marx, and you needed to read Kautsky, and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition. And it’s only after the Soviet seizure of power that this all changes. So there’s lots of Marx of that phenomenon.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:42)
Which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in Germany is such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different trajectories it could take. And we’ll talk about it. If we return to the 19th century, you’ve said that Marx’s chief rival was Russian anarchist…

Anarchism

Lex Fridman
(00:31:00)
Marx’s chief rival was Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” So what kind of future did Bakunin envision?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:31:17)
Well, Bakunin in some things agreed with Marx, and in many others, disagreed. He was an anarchist rather than hewing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quote suggests, that revolution and sheer confrontation and overthrow the existing state of things, not compromise, was going to be the way to get there, but his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser, that both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking, the free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another, rejected the state as a form of organized violence, and rejected traditional religious ideas that he saw as buttressing hierarchies.

(00:32:26)
So Bakunin is part of a broader movement of socialists and anarchists who were demanding change and envisioning really fundamental transformation, but his particular anarchist vision steers him into conflict with Marx, and he makes some prophetic remarks about the problems with the system that Marx is proposing. You should add to this that the very fact that Marx is a German by background and Bakunin is Russian adds a further nationalist or element of ethnic difference there. Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping German authoritarianism might insinuate its way into a movement that hewed too closely to having hierarchies in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies, and his anarchist convictions are not in question here. They led him into conflict with Marx, and Marx railed against him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled from The International.

(00:33:31)
One of the things though that also makes Bakunin so significant is Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists where they try to make common cause, and you have to say that in every case, it ends badly for the anarchists, because the communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement. The anarchists who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days of the Russian Revolution or the Russian Civil War, or whether it was then in the Spanish Civil War, the anarchists found themselves targeted by the communists precisely because of their skepticism about what turned out to be an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription for a successful revolution.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:36)
If we can take that tangent a little bit, so I guess anarchists were less organized.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:34:43)
Yeah, by definition.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:44)
Yeah. Why do you think anarchism hasn’t been rigorously tried in the way that communism was? If we just take a complete sort of tangent, in one sense, we are living in an anarchy today because the nations are in an anarchic state with each other, but why do you think there’s not been an anarchist revolution?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:35:11)
Well, I think that probably some anarchists would beg to differ, right? They would see communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put anarchist ideas into place. Bakunin flitted from one area of unrest to another, hoping to be in on finally the founding of the sort of free communes that he had in mind.

(00:35:36)
Another key point in all of this is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term, and so when you point out quite correctly that we have an anarchic international situation, that’s the Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man. Generally, except if you’re talking about nihilists in the Russian revolutionary tradition, anarchists see anarchy as a blessed state and one where finally, people will be freed from the distorting influence of hierarchies, traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities. So for them, anarchy growing out of the liberation of the human being is seen as a positive good and peaceful.

(00:36:24)
Now, that’s at odds with the prescription of someone like Bakunin for how to get there. He sees overthrow as being necessary on the route to that, but as we point out, it’s absolutely key to this entire dynamic that to be an anarchist means that your efforts are not going to be organized the way a disciplined and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:50)
Yeah, it’s an interesting stretch that a violent revolution will take us to a place of no violence or very little violence. It’s a leap.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:37:01)
It’s a leap, and it points to a phenomenon that would’ve enraged Marx and would’ve been deeply alienating to others in the tradition who followed him, but that so many scholars have commented on, and that’s that there is a religious element. Not a vowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marx’s vision, to the tradition that follows Marx, and just think of the correspondences, right? Marx himself positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that’s a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end times is this final revolution that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven. There’s the working class playing the role of humanity in its struggle to be redeemed, and scholar after scholar has pointed this out.

(00:38:12)
Reinhold Niebuhr back in the 1930s had an article in The Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union’s communism as a religion. Eric Voegelin, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to Louisiana State University and wrote tomes about the new phenomenon of political religions in the modern period. And he saw fascism and Nazism and Soviet communism as bearing the stamp of political religions, meaning ideologies that promised what an earlier age would’ve understood in religious terms. Voegelin called this the eschaton and said that these end times, the eschaton, was being promised in the here and now, being made imminent, and he warned against that saying the results are likely to be disastrous.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:11)
So that’s actually a disagreement with this idea that people sometimes say that the Soviet Union is an example of an atheistic society. So when you have atheism as the primary thing that underpins the society, this is what you get. So what you’re saying is a kind of rejection of that, saying that there’s a strong religious component to a communism.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:39:39)
A hidden component, one that’s not officially recognized. I had a chance to witness this actually. When I was a child, my family, I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian-American family, and my father, who was a mathematician, got a very rare invitation to travel to Soviet Lithuania, to the University of Vilnius to meet with colleagues. And at this point, journeys of more than a few days or a week were very rare to the Soviet Union for Americans, and the result was that I had unforgettable experiences visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev’s Day.

(00:40:20)
And among the things I saw, there was a museum of atheism that had been established in a church that had been ripped apart from inside and was meant to embody the official stance of atheism. And I remember being baffled by the museum on the inside because you would expect exhibits, you would expect something dramatic, something that will be compelling, and instead, there was some folk art from the countryside showing bygone beliefs, there were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors, and that was pretty much it. But as a child, I remember being reproved in that museum for not wearing my windbreaker, but instead carrying it on my arm, which was a very disrespectful thing to do in an official museum of atheism.

(00:41:18)
When I was able to visit the Soviet Union later for a language course in the summer of 1989, one of the obligatory tours that we took was to file reverently past the body of Lenin outside the Kremlin in the mausoleum at Red Square, and communist mummies, like those of Lenin, earlier, Stalin had been there as well, communist mummies like Mao or Ho Chi Minh really, I think, speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility, reverence for relics of great figures, almost saintly figures, so that even what got proclaimed as atheism turned out to be a very demanding faith as well, and I think that’s a contradiction that other scholars have pointed out as well.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:08)
Yeah, that’s a very complicated discussion. When you remove religion as a big component of a society, whether something like a framing of political ideologies in a religious way is the natural consequence of that.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:42:23)
We hear nature abhorring a vacuum, and I think that there are places in human character that long for transcendental explanations, that it’s not all meaningless. In fact, there’s a larger purpose, and I think it’s not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes has in part come from, on the one hand, religious believers, and on the other hand, from disillusioned true believers in communism who find themselves undergoing an internal experience of revulsion, finding that their ideals have not been followed through on.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:05)
So this topic is one of several topics that you eloquently describe as contradictions within the ideas of Marx. So religious, there is a kind of religious adherence versus also the rejection of religious dogma that he stood for. We’ve talked about some of the others, the tension between nationalism that emerged when it was implemented versus what communism is supposed to be, which is global, so globalism. Then there’s the thing that we started talking with, is the individualism. So history is supposed to be defined by the large collection of humans, but there does seem to be the singular figures, including Marx himself, that are really important. Geography of global versus restricted to certain countries, and tradition. You’re supposed to break with the past under communism, but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions in history.
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:44:07)
That’s right, that’s right. I think that that last one is especially significant because it’s deeply paradoxical. Trying to outline these contradictions by the way is like subjecting Marx to the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out internal contradictions, things that are likely to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in what’s supposed to be a completely set and durable and effective framework. The one about tradition, Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions that have hemmed people in – these earlier ways of thinking, earlier social structures – and to constantly renovate.

(00:44:53)
And what happens instead is a tradition of radical rupture emerges, and that’s really tough, because imagine in the last stages of the Soviet Union where keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society. There are discontents and demands that are going to clash, especially when someone like Gorbachev is proposing reforms and things are suddenly thrown open for discussion. The very notion that you have the celebration of revolutionaries and the Bolshevik legacy at a time when the state wants to enforce stability and an order that’s been received from the prior generation, think of Brezhnev’s time, for instance. All of that is an especially volatile mix and unlikely to work out very durably in the long run.

The Communist Manifesto

Lex Fridman
(00:45:52)
I would love to talk about the works of Marx, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. What can we say that’s interesting about the manifestation of his ideas on paper?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:46:05)
Well, the first thing to note obviously is that those two works are very different. Das Kapital is an enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out because Engels begged him to stop revising. “Please, just finally get it into press,” and then the rest, Engels had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Marx passed away. It’s a huge work. By contrast, the Communist Manifesto is a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide, in spite of its comparative brevity.

(00:46:43)
The Communist Manifesto moreover is also something of the nature of having a delayed fuse, you could say, because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe, the work is contrary to what people often believe. That pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national or liberal demands. The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard over the din of other far more prominent actors. It is, however, in the aftermath that this work takes on tremendous significance and becomes popularly read and popularly distributed.

(00:47:28)
It’s especially the episode, the bloody episode of the Paris Commune in 1871 which comes to be identified with Marx. Even though it was not purely inspired by Marx alone, nor were all of the Communards devoted Marxists, it’s the identification of this famous or infamous episode in urban upheaval that really leads to worldwide notoriety for Marx and attention to those works.

(00:47:59)
And they’re very different in form. Das Kapital is intended to be the Origin of Species of its realm of economic thought, and represents years and years of work of Marx laboring in the British Museum library, working through statistics, working on little bits and pieces of a larger answer to big historical questions that he believes that he’s arrived at. Its tone is different from that of the Communist Manifesto, which is a call to arms. It announces with great confidence what the scheme of history will be, but rather than urging that the answer might be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it’s also a clarion call to make the revolution happen and is intended to be a pragmatic, practical statement of how this is to play out, and starts in part with those ringing words about a ghost or a specter haunting Europe, the specter of communism, which wasn’t true at the time, but decades later, most definitely is the case.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:10)
Is there something we could say about the difference between Marxian economics and Marx’s political ideology, so the political side of things and the economics side of things?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:49:24)
So I think that Marx would probably have responded that in fact, those things are indivisible. The analysis as purely theoretical certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow out of that economic analysis are political. Marx and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice. So it’s not enough to dispassionately analyze. It’s a call to action as well, because if you’ve delivered the answer to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action.

(00:50:14)
You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they’ve heard from their high school history teachers that Marxism was just a theoretical construct that was the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice. Marx would have been furious to hear this and it’s almost heroically wrong as a historical statement, because Marx insisted that all previous philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really necessary is to change it. So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx’s theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality, but Marx would have seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory.

(00:51:10)
There’s a kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities and the political prescription is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them, in the real history of communist regimes, you’ve actually seen periods where the economics becomes detached from the politics. And I’m thinking in particular of the new economic period early in the history of the Soviet Union when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow, in a limited way, some elements of private enterprise, just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all. And there are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it’s seen as necessary for a short while, and then Stalin will wreck it entirely.

(00:52:22)
Or consider for that matter China today, where you have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise, as long as it retains political control. So some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would’ve expected, and this points to a really key problem or question for all of the history of communism. It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself, and that could be expressed in the following way. An original set of ideas is going to evolve, it’s going to change, because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it’s communism or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any living set of ideas, or when do you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different that it actually breaks with the tradition, and that’s an insoluble problem. You probably have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

(00:53:40)
It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today. Is China in a meaningful sense a communist country anymore? And there’s a diversity of opinion on this score. Or if you’re looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea, which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a God king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism? Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete reversal of?

(00:54:20)
I tend to want to take an anthropological perspective in the history of communism and to take very seriously those people who avow that they are communists and this is the project that they have underway. And then after hearing that avowal, I think as a historian, you have to say, well, let’s look at the details. Let’s see what changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there’s a larger pattern to be discerned here. So it’s a very, very complicated history that we’re talking about.

Communism in the Soviet Union

Lex Fridman
(00:54:51)
Let’s step back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and let’s steel man the case for communism. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the people there, not in this way where we could look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it?
Vejas Liulevicius
(00:55:16)
Well, clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people, and part of this story overall has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience. I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century, the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, so much of the compelling case for communism came from the confidence that people in the West more generally placed in science, the notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that, and watch the quotation marks, “science” were crazy, like phrenology, so-called scientific racism that tried to divide humanity up into discreet blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly scientific or rational.

(00:56:25)
So there were horrors that followed from those invocations of science, but its prestige was enormous, and that in part had to do with the lessening grip of religious ideas on intellectual elites, more generally, processes of secularization, not total secularization but processes of secularization in Western industrial societies, and the sense that here’s the doctrine that will allow escape from wars brought on by capitalist competition, poverty and economic cycles and depressions brought on by capitalist competition, the inequalities of societies that remain hierarchical and class-based. And this claim to being cutting edge science, I think allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in the prescription that they have for the future. And that paradoxically, the confidence that you have in broad strokes the right set of answers for how to get to the future also allows you to take huge liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow, as long as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched by this master plan.

(00:57:56)
So ultimately, some of the predictions of someone like Lenin, that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that governments will essentially be able to run themselves, and that the model he had in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices. Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office, and he thought, “Why can’t you organize governments like this where you don’t need political leaders, you don’t need grand visions? You have procedures, you have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that’s not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good.”

(00:58:49)
When you think of the experiences with bureaucracy in the 20th century, one’s hair stands on end to have the comparative naiveté on display with a prediction like that, but it derives from that confidence that it’s all going to be okay because we understand. We have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this final configuration of humanity.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:14)
Yeah, the certainty of science, in quotes, and the goal of utopia gets you in trouble. But also, just on the human level, from a working class person perspective, from the industrial revolution, you see the growing inequality, wealth inequality, and there is a kind of, you see people getting wealthy, and combined with the fact that life is difficult, life in general, life is suffering for many, for most, for all if you listen to some philosophers. And there is a powerful idea in that the man is exploiting me, and that’s a populist message that a lot of people resonate with because to a degree, it’s true in every system. And so before you know how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves, it is really powerful to say, “Here, beyond the horizon, there’s a world where the rich man will not exploit my hard work anymore,” and I think that’s a really powerful idea.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:00:22)
It is. At the same time though, it kind of points to a further problem and that’s the identity of the revolutionaries. It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements and then the founding elites of communist countries in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power turn out to be something quite different from people who have spent their lives in factories experiencing the industrial revolution firsthand. There’s a special role here for intellectuals, and when Marx and Engels write into the Communist Manifesto the notion that certain exceptional individuals can rise above their class origins in a way other people can’t and transcend their earlier role, their materially determined role in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole and ally themselves with the working class and its struggle for communism, this sort of special role that they carved out for themselves is enormously appealing for intellectuals, because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers is going to appeal to intellectuals.

(01:01:33)
That gap, that frequent reality of not being in touch with the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent is a very frequent theme in this story. It also speaks to a crucial part of this story, which is the breaking apart or the Civil War, the war of brother against…
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:02:00)
Apart or the Civil War, the War of brother against brother, the fraternal struggle that splits socialism and splits followers of Marx. And that’s in the aftermath of the First World War in particular, or during this traumatic experience. The way in which Lenin encourages the foundation of radical parties that will break with social democracy of the sort that had been elaborated, especially in places like Germany, scorning their moderation. And instead announcing a new dispensation, which was the Leninist conception of a disciplined, hardcore professional revolutionaries who will act in ways that a mere trade union movement couldn’t.

(01:02:47)
And what this speaks to is a fundamental tension in radical movements. Because left to their own devices, Lenin announces, workers tend to focus on their reality, their families, their workplace. Want better working conditions, unionize, and then aim to negotiate with employers or to agitate for reforms on the part of the state to improve their living conditions. And then they’re happy for the advances that they have won. And for Lenin, that’s not enough, because that’s a half measure. That’s the sort of thing that leads you into an accommodation with the system rather than the overthrow of the system. So there’s a constant tension in this regard that plays itself out over the long haul.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:38)
Let’s go to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. How did communism come to power in the Soviet Union?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:03:48)
It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum. And the power vacuum was created by the First World War, and the effect that it had as a total war. Unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that, in many ways, was a traditional, almost feudal monarchy, only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that the rest of Europe had undergone. For this reason, communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn’t have expected, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire. Lenin is absolutely vital to this equation because he’s the one who presses the process forward.

(01:04:32)
Ironically, given the claim of communist leaders to having the key to history, just a few months previous in exile in Switzerland Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced that he may not even live to see the advent of that day. But then when revolution does break out in the Russian Empire in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back. And when he does get back as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German high command, a step that they’ll later live very much to regret. He is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power that brings his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the socialist movement, to power and then to build the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:33)
Even he was surprised how effective and how fast the revolution happened?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:05:39)
He was, although I think that he would’ve agreed that what was necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies. It scrambles all sorts of earlier debates. It renegotiates the status of the individual versus an all-powerful state and the claims of the state. Because to win, or even just to survive in World War I, you need to centralize, centralize, centralize, and to put everything onto an authoritarian wartime footing in country after country. So Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how the entire globe already was connected. And there’s a chain of capitalist development that is connecting different countries so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks, if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes and start a chain reaction. That’s what he intended to do and has the chance to do in the course of 1917. Incidentally, just to get a sense of the sheer chaos and the human, on an individual human level, what the absence of established authority meant. There’s few works of literature that is powerful as Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago for giving the whole sweep of contending forces in a power vacuum. It’s an amazing testimony to that time and place.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:41)
You said that Bolsheviks saw violence and terror as necessary. Can you just speak to this aspect of their… Because they took power, so this was a part of the way they saw the world.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:07:54)
Right. And it had antecedents. Even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of most faithful disciple of Marx, and most true to the received theory in practice, there’s other influences, earlier influences that operate in the Russian context that were not operative, let’s say, in the German context. Here you have to step back and think about the nature of Tsarism, which had maintained, still, into the 20th century, the notion of a divine right to rule. That God had ordained the Tsarist system and its hierarchies. And that to question these was sinful and politically not advisable. The restrictive nature of Russian society at this point dominated by the Tsarist establishment, its harshness, its reactionary nature meant that people who in another context, in another country might’ve been reformers, could instead very easily be provoked into becoming revolutionaries. And Lenin is a perfect example of this. Because his older brother was executed as a result of being in a radical revolutionary movement, who was arrested and executed for association with terrorism.

(01:09:26)
Earlier generations of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism and resistance against the Tsarist regime. And this included people who call themselves nihilists. And these nihilists were materialists who saw themselves ushering in a new age by absolute rejection of earlier religious traditions and aiming for material answers to the challenges of the day. Among them was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who wrote what’s been called the worst book ever written. It was, in fact, one of Lenin’s favorite books, in Russian it’s [foreign language 01:10:12]. In English it gets translated What is to Be Done. And it’s a utopian novel about revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways, new ways, non-traditional ways in order to help usher in the coming revolution. Lenin loved the work and said it had the great merit of showing you how to be a revolutionary. So there’s the Marxist influence, and then there’s Russian populist nihilist influence, which is also a very live current in Lenin’s thinking.

(01:10:50)
When you add these things together, you get an explosive mix. Because Lenin, as a result, and part of this family trauma of his brother, becomes a absolutely irreconcilable enemy of the Tsarist regime and sets about turning himself into what you might call a guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a machine to produce revolutionary change. And I mean that with little hyperbole. Lenin at one point shared with friends that he loved listening to music, but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. What a revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute steely resolve. So Lenin worries even fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single-minded focus to revolution. He spends his days thinking about the revolution. He probably dreamt about the revolution. So 24/7 it’s an existence where he’s paired off other human elements, quite deliberately, in order to turn himself into an effective instigator of revolution. So, when the opportunity comes in 1917, he’s primed and ready for that role.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:15)
It’s interesting that Russian nihilism had an impact on Lenin. Traditionally nihilist philosophy rejects all sorts of traditional morality. There’s a kind of cynical dark view. Where’s the light?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:12:28)
The light is science. The light is science and materialism.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:32)
Oh boy.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:12:33)
The nihilists, some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they were famous for wearing blue tinted spectacles, kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century as a way of shielding their eyes from light. But also having a dispassionate and realistic view of reality outside. So nihilists, as the name would suggest, do reject all prior certainties, but they make an exception for science and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely new mode of existence.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:09)
For most people, I think, nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, by the name of The Big Lebowski. Nihilists appear there, and I think they summarize the nihilist tradition quite well. But it is indeed fascinating. And also it is fascinating that Lenin, and I’m sure this influenced Stalin as well, that hardness was a necessary human characteristic to take the revolution to its end.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:13:40)
That’s right. So prior generations of nihilists or populists had resembled Lenin’s single-mindedness by arguing that one needed total devotion for this. To play this role in society, it was not enough to be somewhat committed. Total commitment was necessary. And the other theme that’s at work here obviously is, if we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia. It’s the theme of needing to adapt to local conditions. So Marxism or communism in Vietnam, or in Cuba, or in Cambodia, or in Russia will be very different in its local adaptations and local themes and resonance than it was in Germany where Marx would’ve expected all of this to unfold.

Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin

Lex Fridman
(01:14:45)
Let’s talk about Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, this little interplay that eventually led to Stalin accumulating, grabbing, and taking a hold of power. What was that process like?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:15:00)
Lenin’s supreme confidence leads the party through some really difficult steps that involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country would’ve agreed to a so Draconian, so harsh a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because the larger prize. He even says that he’s not going to bother to read the treaty because shortly that treaty is going to be a dead letter. His expectation is revolution’s going to break out everywhere, especially after we’ve raised the standard, first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:48)
We should probably say that that treaty, to some small degree, maybe you can elaborate now or later, lays the groundwork for World War II, because there is… Resentment is a thing that with time can lead to just extreme levels of destruction.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:16:06)
Right. For German sensibilities, for German nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially won World War I. And only a turn of events that many of them couldn’t even follow or conceive of, the arrival of American troops, the tipping of the balance in the West, led to that reversal. One of the many scholars and contemporaries pointed out that Germany, between the wars, was full of people who were convinced that Germany had actually not lost the war, however that victory of theirs was defined. So most definitely that groundwork is laid. And incidentally, this is something we can talk about later, World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that. And as time goes by, I think historians are going to focus on those linkages even more. But Lenin also in his leadership against the odds, leads the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Civil War where most betting people would’ve given them very slight odds of even surviving, given how many enemies they faced off against.

(01:17:17)
Lenin’s insistence upon discipline and upon good organization allowed the Bolsheviks to emerge as the winners. And yet a great disappointment follows. Lenin, as we said, had expected that revolution will break out soon everywhere and all it’ll be necessary for the Bolsheviks to do, having given the lead, is to link up with others. So he considered that what would be established would be a red bridge between a communist Russia, and once Germany inevitably plunged ahead into its revolutionary transformation, a communist Germany. That doesn’t end up happening. On the contrary, what happens in Germany is a out-and-out shooting war between different kinds of socialists. When Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name of the Weimar Republic, the government is a government of Social Democrats, moderate Social Democrats who are fearful of what they see as Russian conditions of disorder and who are not necessarily in sympathy with the Leninist vision of tightly-organized authoritarian rule. So communists who revolt in Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries, hardened front fighters and nationalist radicals hired by the German socialist government. And the result is a wound that just won’t heal in the German socialist movement as a result of this fratricide. It frustrates Lenin’s ambitions. So too does the fact that Poland, rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany. The Poles, yet again, play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course of historical events. It’s in the aftermath of these unexpected turns that Lenin and his colleagues realize that they’re in this for the long haul. It’s necessary to wait longer. They don’t lose hope or confidence, you might say, in the eventual coming of international workers revolution.

(01:19:39)
But it’s been deferred, it’s been put off. So the question then arises, what do you build within a state that’s established called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union? Lenin, as a result of an assassination attempt, is deeply affected in his health and would’ve loved to continue for years longer to steer the regime. But he’s sidelined because of his declining health. And there emerges a contest. A contest between a very charismatic leader, Leo Trotsky on the one hand, who is an amazing orator, who is an intellectual, who has traveled widely in the world, who has seen much of the world, and who is a brilliant writer. A far-ranging intellect, and is seen as extremely radical because of his demand for permanent revolution, the acceleration of revolutionary processes to drive history forward, to strike while the iron is hot. And on the other hand is an extremely unlikely contender for power.

(01:20:57)
That’s a man who’s probably the antithesis of charisma if you were to meet him in person. A guy with a squeaky, somewhat high-pitched voice, not well-suited to revolutionary oratory. His face pockmarked with the scars of youthful illness and whom, moreover, doesn’t speak a fine sophisticated Russian. But speaks a Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian Empire from which he came. And that was Stalin. I know that you already have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin, the brilliant biographer of Stalin who has so many insights on that subject. The one thing that, even after reading about Stalin, that never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate. A man who’s a conciliator. Someone who’s calm when others are excited. Someone who is able because of his organizational skills to resolve merely theoretical disputes with practical solutions.

(01:22:17)
Now, to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point about Stalin’s leadership, Stalin’s brutality and eliminating his opposition. The cult of personality that, against all odds, got built up around Stalin so successfully and the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as Genghis Khan with a telephone. A brutal dictator with ancient barbarism allied to the use of modern technology. While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement and in the state. It’s a cliche because it’s true, that personnel is policy. Trotsky is increasingly sidelined and then demonized and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union and later murdered in Mexico City. For Stalin, eliminating his enemies turned out to be the solution that he was most comfortable with.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:29)
From that perspective, there’s a lot of fascinating things here. So one, is that you can have a wolf, a brutal dictator in moderate clothing. Just because somebody presents as moderate-
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:23:45)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:45)
… doesn’t mean they can’t be one of the most destructive, not the most destructive, humans in history. The other aspect is, using propaganda you can construct an image of a person. Even though they’re uncharismatic not attractive, their voice is no good. All of those aspects, you can still have… There’s still, to this day, a very large number of people that see him as a religious type of god-like figure. So the power of propaganda there.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:24:19)
Today, we would call that curating the image, right?

Stalin

Lex Fridman
(01:24:21)
Curating the image. But to the extent to which you can do that effectively is quite incredible. So in that way also Stalin is a study of the power of propaganda. Can we just talk about the ways that the power vacuum is filled by Stalin, how that manifests itself? Perhaps one angle we can take is how was the secret police used? How did power manifest itself under Stalin?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:24:49)
Well, before getting to the secret police, I would just want to add the other crucial element, which is Lenin’s patronage. Stalin doesn’t brawl his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate. He’s co-opted and promoted to positions of importance by Lenin who sees him as a somewhat rough around the edges, not very sophisticated, much less cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks. But dependable, reliable, and committed revolutionary. One of the things that’s emerged, especially after archives opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union and we were able to read more and more the communications of Lenin, is that it’s not the case that we’re talking here about an unconnected series of careers. Rather there are connections to be made. It’s true that towards the end of his life, Lenin came to be worried by complaints about Stalin’s rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks. And in his testament, he warned against Stalin’s testimonies.

(01:25:56)
Lenin fundamentally saw himself as irreplaceable, so that doesn’t really help in a succession struggle. Stalin is able to rely on a secret police apparatus that had been built up under Lenin already. It’s very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that the Cheka or the Extraordinary Commission is established as a secret police to terrify the enemies, beat down the opponents of the regime, and to keep an eye on society more generally. The person who’s chosen for that task also is an anomaly among Bolsheviks. That is a man of Polish aristocratic background, Feliks Dzierzynski, who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix. Here’s a man about whom a cult of personality also is created. Dzierzynski is celebrated in the Soviet period as the model of someone who’s harsh but fair, an executioner but with a heart of gold. Somebody who loves children. Somebody who has a tender heart, but forces himself to be steely willed against the opponents of the ideological project of the Bolsheviks.

(01:27:22)
Dzierzynski is succeeded by figures who will be absolutely instrumental to Stalin’s exercise of power, and they’re not immune either. Stalin, in his purges, takes care also to purge the secret police as a way of finding others upon whom to deflect blame for earlier atrocities and to produce a situation where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain of what’s going to happen next and feel their own position to be precarious. Incidentally, there are other influences that probably wrought to bear here as well. It gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a lot of time flipping through Machiavelli’s The Prince. It seems that Stalin’s personal copy of The Prince, nobody knows where that is, if it still exists. But historians have found annotations in works by Lenin that Stalin, who was a voracious reader, as it turns out, made in the back of one of the books. Which sounds almost like a commentary on Machiavelli’s, almost but not quite, suggestion that the ends justify the means.

(01:28:38)
Stalin’s own writing says that if someone is strong, active, and intelligent, even if they do things that other people condemn, they’re still a good person. So Stalin’s self-conception of himself is someone who along these lines and in line with Lenin’s emphasis on practical results and discipline, somebody who gets things done. That’s the crucial ethical standard. And ultimately in criticisms by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality, this question of, what is the ethical standard? What is the ethical law? We’ll bring this question into focus because by the… And this goes back to Marx as well, incidentally. The notion that any ethical system, any notion of right or wrong is purely a product of class identity. Because every class produces its distinctive ideas, its distinctive religion, its distinctive art forms, it’s distinctive styles. Means that with no one transcendent or absolute morality, it’s all up for grabs. And then it’s a question of power and the exercise of power with no limits, untrammeled by any laws whatsoever. Dictatorship in its purest form. Something that Lenin had avowed, and then Stalin comes to practice even more fully.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:08)
Not that it’s possible to look deep into a person’s heart, but if you look at Trotsky, you could say that he probably believed deeply in Marxism and communism. Probably the same with Lenin. What do you think Stalin believed? Was he a believer? Was he a pragmatist that used communism as a way to gain power and ideology as part of propaganda? Or did he, in his own private moments, deeply believe in the utopia?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:30:35)
That’s an excellent question. And you’re quite right, we cannot peer into the inmost recesses of somebody’s being and know for sure. My intuition, though, is that this may be a false alternative, a false dichotomy. It’s natural enough to see somebody who does monstrous things to say, “Well, this ideology is being used as a cover for it.” My suspicion is that these were actually perfectly compatible in his historical role. The notion that there’s an ideology, it gives you a master plan for how history is going to develop and your own power, the increase of that power to unprecedented proportions. Your ability to torment even your own faithful followers in order just to see them squirm, which Stalin was famous for, to keep people unsettled. To me, it seems that, for some people, those might not actually be opposed, but might even be mutually reinforcing, which is a very scary thought.

Holodomor

Lex Fridman
(01:31:44)
It’s terrifying, but it’s really important to understand. If we look at when Stalin takes power at some of the policies. The collectivization of agriculture. Why do you think that failed so catastrophically, especially in the 1930s with Ukraine and Poland and more?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:32:09)
I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular, but also communists more generally have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture. Agriculture, as a very vital, obviously, but also very traditional and old form of human activity has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well. In a place like Russia or the Russian Empire peasants, throughout history, for centuries, had wanted one thing, and that was to be left alone to farm their own land. That’s their utopia. And that, for someone like Marx who had a vision of historical development and transcendence-
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:33:00)
… who had a vision of historical development and transcendence and progress as being absolutely key does not mesh at all with that vision. For that reason, when Marx comes up with this tableau, this tremendous display of historical transformation taking place over centuries and headed towards the final utopia, the role of farmers there is negligible. Peasants get called conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes in Marx’s historical vision because they’re limited in their horizon. They farm their land, their plot, and don’t have greater revolutionary goals beyond working the land and having it free and clear.

(01:33:49)
By contrast, industrialization, that’s progress. I mean, images that today would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist’s sensibility. Smokestacks, belching smoke, the byproducts of industry, a landscape transformed by the factory model. That’s what Marx, and then later the Bolsheviks, have in mind. Similarly, the goal even as articulated in Marx’s writings, is to put agriculture and farming on a factory model so that you won’t need to deal with this traditional role of the independent farmer or the peasant. Instead, you’ll have people who benefit from progress, benefit from rationalization by working factory farms.

(01:34:37)
So, in approaching the question of collectivization, we have to keep in mind that for Stalin and his comrades who are bound and determined to drag Russia kicking and screaming into the modern age and not to allow it be beaten because of its backwardness, as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture are not what they have in mind. And in their rank of desired outcomes, industrialization, especially massive heavy industry is the sine qua non, that’s their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below.

(01:35:16)
So in that case, the crucial significance of collectivization is to get a handle on the food situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis like during the Civil War, when the cities are starving, industry is robbed of labor and the factories are at a standstill. So, this is really the core approach to collectivization, to put the productive capacities of the farmers in a regimented way, in a state-controlled way under the control of the state.

(01:35:53)
This produces vast human suffering because for the farmers, their plot of land that they thought they had gained as a result of the revolution is now taken away. They no longer have the same incentives they had before to be successful farmers. In fact, if you’re a successful farmer and maybe have a cow as opposed to your neighbors who have no cow, you’re defamed and denounced as a kulak, a tight-fisted, exploiter, even though you might be helping to develop agriculture in the region that you’re from.

(01:36:29)
So, the result is human tragedy on a vast scale. And allied to that incidentally is Stalin’s sense that this is a chance to also target people who are opposed to the Bolshevik regime for other reasons, whether it’s because of their Ukrainian identity, whether it’s because of a desire for a different nationalist project. For Stalin, there are many motives that roll into collectivization. And the final thing to be said is you are quite right that collectivization proves to be a failure because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp on the problems of agricultural production.

(01:37:17)
By the end of the Soviet Union, they’re importing grain from the West in spite of having some tremendously rich farmland to be found worldwide. And the reason for that had to do in part, I think with the incentives that had been taken away. Prosperous individual farmers have a motive for working their land and maximizing production. By contrast, if you are an employee of a factory style agricultural enterprise, the incentives run in very different directions. And the joke that was common for decades in the Soviet Union and other communist countries with similar systems was, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

(01:38:05)
Even labor, which is rhetorically respected and valorized in practice is rewarded with very slim rewards. And the last point, immobility. The collectivization reduces the mobility of the peasants who are not allowed because of internal passports to move to the cities unless they have permission. They’re locked in place. And I got to say, at the time and afterwards, that looked a lot like feudalism or neo-feudalism in terms of the restrictions on workers in the countryside.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:42)
It is a terrifying, horrific and fascinating study of how the ideal, when meeting reality, fails. The idea here is to make agriculture more efficient, so be more productive, so the industrialized model. But the implementation through collectivization had all the elements that you’ve mentioned that contended with human nature. First with the kulaks, so the successful farmers were punished. And so then the incentive is not just to be a successful farmer, but to hide.

(01:39:22)
Added to that, there’s a growing quota that everybody’s supposed to deliver on that nobody can deliver on. And so now, because you can’t deliver on that quota, you’re basically exporting all your food and you can’t even feed yourself. And then you suffer more and more and more and there’s a vicious downward spiral of you can’t possibly produce that. Now there’s another human incentive where you’re going to lie. Everybody lies on the data.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:39:49)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:49)
And so even Stalin himself probably, as evil or incompetent as he may be, was not even getting good data about what’s even happening. Even if he wanted to stop the vicious downward cycle, which he certainly didn’t, but he wouldn’t be even able to. So, there’s all these dark consequences of what on paper seems like a good ideal. And it’s a fascinating study of things on paper-
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:40:20)
Yes. That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:21)
… when implemented, can go really, really bad.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:40:23)
That’s right. And the outcome here is a horrific manmade famine. Not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a manmade famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well some of the implications of this case study and how things look in the abstract versus in practice. And those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union.

(01:41:02)
The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or prettifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to have vengeance visited upon them reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, there’s a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole, and which is supposed to have accurate statistics. All of this is founded upon a foundation of sand. That’s inadvertent. That’s not an intended side effect.

(01:41:46)
But what you described in terms of the internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural society was absolutely not inadvertent. That was deliberate. The doctrine was you bring civil war. Now had there been social tensions before? Of course there had. Had there been envies, had there been differentiations in wealth or status? Of course there had been, but a deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside does damage, and not least of that is this phenomenon of a negative selection.

(01:42:25)
Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized will be winnowed again and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. And this pattern incidentally gets transposed and in tremendously harrowing ways also to the entire group of Russian intelligentsia and intellectuals of other peoples who are in the Soviet Union. They discover similarly that to be independent, to have a voice which is not compliant, carries with it tremendous penalties, especially in Stalin’s reigns of terror.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:23)
Again, a difficult question about a psychology of one human being, but to what degree do you think Stalin was deliberately punishing the farmers and the Ukrainian farmers? And to what degree was he looking the other way and allowing the large-scale incompetence, the horrific incompetence of the collectivization of agriculture to happen?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:43:53)
Well, I think it was both things, right? I mean, there were not only sins of omission, but also sins of commission. Incidentally, one should add, I don’t think for Stalin it was personal. These are people who are very remote from him. He, never coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way. Attributed to him is the quote that, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” I think he in action certainly acted in a way that would vindicate that. But the process of collectivization was not just a bureaucratic snafu following on bureaucratic snafu. There was the mobilization of communist youth, of military, of party activists to go into the regions and to search for hidden food, to extract the food where it could be found.

(01:44:50)
And we have testimony to this in the case of people who later became dissidents, like Lev Kopelev, who wrote in his memoirs about how he was among those who were sent in to enact these policies, and he saw families with the last food being taken away even as signs of starvation were visible already in the present. And yet he did not go mad. He didn’t kill himself. He didn’t fall into despair because he believed, because he had been taught and believed at least then that this was justified. This was a larger historical process and a greater good would result even from these enormities. So, I think that this was quite deliberate.

The Great Terror

Lex Fridman
(01:45:39)
Following this, as you’ve mentioned, there was the process of the Great Terror, where the intellectuals, where the Communist Party officials, the military officers, the bureaucrats, everybody. 750,000 people were executed, and over a million people were sent to the Gulag. What can you say by way of wisdom from this process of the Great Terror that Stalin implemented from ’36 to ’38?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:46:15)
Well, the terror had a variety of victims. There were people who were true believers and who were Bolsheviks, who were especially targeted by Stalin because he aimed to revenge himself for all the sort of condescension that he’d experienced in that movement before. And also to eliminate rivals or potential rival power centers and members of their families. And then there were people who simply got caught up in a process whereby the repressive organs in the provinces were sent quotas. You have to achieve your quota and maybe even better yet, overachieve your quota, over perform. That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies in the age of the terror.

(01:47:03)
What’s so horrifying is the way in which a whole society stood paralyzed in this process and how neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night and people would be wary of talking about it. Resistance, at least in these urban centers, was entirely paralyzed by fear when, if one had somehow find a way to mobilize ,somehow a way to resist the process, the results might’ve been different. There’s an astonishing book… I mean, there are so many great books that have come out quite recently even on these topics.

(01:47:46)
Orlando Figes has a amazing book called The Whisperers that traces several families’ history in the Stalin period, and it’s a testimony to how a whole society and some of its most intelligent people got winnowed again and again and again in that process of negative selection that we talked about. The lasting dislocation and scars that this left and the way in which how people were not able to talk about these things in public because that would put you next on the list, suspected of having less than total devotion to the state.

(01:48:28)
I think one of the things that also is so terrifying about the entire process is even total devotion wasn’t enough. The process took on a life of its own, and I think that it might even have surprised Stalin in some ways. Not enough to short-circuit the process, but the notion where people were invited to denounce neighbors, coworkers, maybe even family members, meant that ever larger groups of people would be brought into the orbit of the secret police, tortured in order to produce confessions. Those confessions then would lead to more lists of suspects of people who had to be investigated and either executed or sent to the gulags. The uncertainty that this produced was enormous.

(01:49:28)
Even loyalty was not enough to save people. The stories, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is full of stories of dedicated communists who find themselves in the Gulag and are sure that some mistake has been made. And if only comrade Stalin would hear about this terrible thing that has happened to them, surely it would be corrected and nothing like this would… Everyone else, by contrast, accused of terrible crimes, there must be some truth behind that. So, talk about ways of disaggregating a society, ways of breaking down bonds of trust. This left lasting traces on an entire society that endured to this very day.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:17)
Yeah, there again, a fascinating study of human nature, that there essentially was an emergent quota of confessions of treason. So, even though the whole society was terrified and were through terror, loyal, there still needed to be a lot of confessions of people being disloyal, so you’re just making up now. At a mass scale, stuff is being made up. And it’s also the machine of the secret police starts eating itself because you want to be confessing on your boss. It is just this weird, dark, dynamic system where human nature just it at its worst.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:51:06)
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:09)
Why, if we look at this deep discussion we had about Marxism, to what degree can we understand from that lens why the implementation of communism in the Soviet Union failed in such a dark way? Both in the economic system with agriculture and industrialization, and on the human way with just violation of every possible human right and the torture and the suffering and gulags and all of this?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:51:42)
Well, I think some of it comes back to the ethical grounding that we mentioned earlier. The notion that ethics are entirely situational and that any ethical system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality, a particular material reality, and that leaves the door wide open. So, I think that that aspect was present from the very beginning. I think that the expectations of Marx, that the revolution would take hold and be successful in a developed country, played a role here as well.

(01:52:24)
Russia, which compared to the rest of Europe, was less developed even before the First World War is in a dire state after all of the ravage and the millions of deaths that continue even after the war has ended in the West. That leaves precious little in the way of structural restraints or a functioning society that would say, “Let’s not do things this way.” I think that in retrospect, that special role carved out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical development allowed for people to step into those roles and appoint themselves executors of this ideological vision. So, I think those things played a role as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:18)
Now, it’s hard to do counterfactual history, but to what degree is this basically that the communist ideals create a power vacuum and a dictator type figure steps in, and then it’s a roll of the dice of what that dictator is like? So can you imagine a world where the dictator was Trotsky. Would we see very similar type of things? Or is the hardness and the brutality of somebody like Stalin manifested itself in being able to look the other way as some of these dark things were happening more so than somebody like Trotsky who would presumably see the realizations of these policies and be shocked?
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:54:00)
Well, counterfactuals are hard, like you said. And one very quickly gets off into really deep waters in speculation. There were contemporaries and there have been scholars since who suggest that Trotsky, by all indications might’ve been even more radical than Stalin in the tempo that he wanted to achieve. Think of the slogan of permanent revolution. Trotsky also, who dabbled in so many things in his intellectual life, also spoke in almost utopian terms that are just astonishing to read.

(01:54:38)
In utopian terms about the construction of the new man and the new woman, and that out of the raw material of humanity, once you really get going, and once you’ve established a system that matches your hopes for the future, it’ll be possible to reconfigure people. And talk about ambition, to create essentially the next stage in human evolution, a new species growing out of humanity. Those don’t sound like very modest or limited approaches, and I guess we just really won’t know.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:12)
Do some of the destructive characteristics of communism have to go hand in hand? So, the central planning that we talked about, the censorship with the secret police, the concentration of power in one dictatorial figure. And let’s say again with the secret police, the violent oppression.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:55:34)
One should add to those factors that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own, the sheer fact that communism comes to power in most of these instances as a result of war. As a result of the destruction of what came before and a power vacuum. So, think of the Russian revolutions in the wake of the fall of Tsarism. Think of the expansion of Stalin’s puppet regimes into Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II and the Red Army moving into occupied areas in Eastern Europe, although they announced that they’re coming as liberators. Consider the foundation of communist China on the heels of World War II, and yet more Chinese civil war. Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam. It’s likely that this already is a key element in setting things up for further crisis because upon seizure of power, if your expectation is, “Well, it ought to be relatively easy to get this system rolling and put it on a basis that’s after all, we have the roadmap to the future,” there will follow frustrations and impediments and resistance. And there’s a ratchet effect then there because it’ll produce more repression, producing even more problems that follow.

(01:57:06)
What drives the whole thing forward, though, especially in its Leninist version, but already visible with Marx and Engels is the insistence on confidence. If you have the key to the future, all of these things are possible and necessary. This leads to an ethos. I think that that’s very hard for historians to quantify or to study in a methodical way, but it’s the insistence that you hear with Lenin and then especially with Stalin, that to be a Bolshevik means to be hard, to be realistic, to be consequential, meaning you don’t shy away from doing what needs to be done. Even if your primordial ethical remainders from whatever earlier experience you have, rebel against it.

(01:58:03)
Under Stalin, there’s a constant slogan of the Bolshevik tempo. The Bolsheviks, there’s no fortresses that they can’t storm. They can do everything. And in a way, this is the assertion that its will over everything. History can be moved forward and accelerated and probably your own actions justified as a result, no matter what they were, if you are sufficiently hard and determined and have the confidence to follow through. And then that obviously raises the ultimate question, what happens when that confidence ebbs or erodes or when it’s lost?

Totalitarianism

Lex Fridman
(01:58:39)
If we go to the 1920s to the home of Karl Marx. Fascism, as implemented by the Nazi party in Germany, was called the National Socialist German Workers Party. So, what were the similarities and differences of fascism, socialism, how it was conceived of in fascism and communism? And maybe you could speak to the broader battle of ideas that was happening at the time and battle of political control that was happening at the time.
Vejas Liulevicius
(01:59:15)
Well, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of terms that are in play here, right? And when we speak of fascism, fascism in its original sense is a radical movement founded in Italy, which though it had been allegedly on the winning side of World War I is disappointed with the lack of rise in national prestige and territory that commences after the end of the. So bizarrely enough, it’s a socialist by the name of Benito Mussolini, who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the state. The people at large united in a militaristic way, on the march, ready to attack, ready to expand. A complete overthrow of liberal ideas of the rights of the individual or of representative democracy, and instead, vesting power in one leader, in his case, the Duce, Mussolini, in order to replicate in peacetime the ideal of total military mobilization in wartime. Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired and borrow heavily from fascist ideology, there also are different emphases that they include, and that includes their virulent racism from the outset, which in addition to a glorification of the state, glorification of the leader and preparation for national greatness, race is absolutely core. And it’s that racial radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea, along with anti-Semitism, the demonizing in particular of the Jews and this insane racialist cosmology that the Nazis avow.

(02:01:17)
It is the assertion that the Nazis will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people, unity in the society that leads them to give themselves this odd name of national socialist. Some leaders like Goebbels among the Nazis, accent the socialist part to begin with. Others put the accent firmly on the nationalist part. In part, the term they chose for their movement was meant to be confusing. It was meant to take slogans or words from different parts of the political spectrum, to fuse them into something unfamiliar and new, and claim that they’d overcome all earlier political divisions. The Nazis claimed that they were a movement, not a party, even though their party was called a party.

(02:02:13)
So, what did Nazism and Bolshevism and Communism share, or how were they opposed to one another? What we need to start with, by making clear, they were ideological arch enemies. In both worldviews, the opposite side represented the ultimate expression of the evil that needed to be exercised from history in order for their desired utopia to be brought about. And this leads to strange and perverted beliefs about reality. From the perspective of the Nazis. The Nazis claimed that because they saw the Jews as a demonic element in human history, the Bolsheviks didn’t really believe all of this economic dialectical materialism. They were in fact a racial conspiracy, it was alleged.

(02:03:06)
And so the Nazis used a term of Judeo-Bolshevism to argue that communism is essentially a conspiracy steered by the Jews, which was complete nonsense. For their part, the communists, and from the perspective of the Soviet Union, the Nazis were in essence a super capitalist conspiracy. If the cosmological enemy are the capitalists and the owners, the exploiters, then all of the rigamarole about race and nationalism are distractions. They’re meant to fool the poor saps who enlist in that movement. It’s essentially steered by capitalist owners who, it is claimed, are reduced to this desperate expedient of coming up with this thuggish-
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:04:00)
… To this desperate expedient of coming up with this thuggish party that represents the last gasp of capitalism. So, bizarrely enough, from the Communist perspective, the rise of the Nazis can be interpreted as a good sign because it means that capitalism is almost done because this is the last undisguised, naked face of capitalism nearing its end. Beyond this ideological total opposition, in terms of their hoped-for futures, the reality is that there were aspects that were shared on either side. That included the conviction that they could agree that the age of democracy was done and that the 19th century had had its day with experiments with representative democracy, the claims of human rights, classical liberal ideas, and all of this had been revealed as bankrupt.

(02:05:10)
It had gotten you what? It got you, first, the First World War as a total conflict leaving tens of millions dead. And then, economically, The Great Depression, showing that the end was not far away. This produced, at one in the same time, both ideological opposition and instances, a vastly cynical cooperation. In terms of the Weimar Republic, it’s obvious, with the benefit of hindsight, that German democracy had ceased to function even before Hitler comes to power. But in the process of making democracy unworkable in Germany, the extremes, the Nazi Stormtrooper Army with their brown shirts and the Communist street fighters, had cooperated in heightening an atmosphere of civil war that left people searching for desperate expedience in the last days of the Weimar Republic.

(02:06:26)
The most compelling case of their cooperation was the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on August 23rd, 1939, which enables Hitler to start World War II. A Non-Aggression Pact, in official terms, it contained secret clauses whereby the Nazis and the Soviets meeting in Moscow under Stalin’s wary eye, had agreed on territorial division of Eastern Europe and making common cause as each claiming to be the winner of the future. So, in spite of their oppositions, these were regimes that were able, very cynically, to work together to dire effect. In the course of the 1950s, in particular, there arose political scientists who also crafted an explanation for ways in which these regimes, although they were opposed to one another, actually bore morphological resemblances.

(02:07:38)
They operated in ways that, in spite of ideological differences, bore similarities. And such political scientists, Hannah Arendt, chief among them, crafted a model called Totalitarianism, borrowing a term that the Fascists had liked about themselves, to define regimes, like the Nazis, like Stalin’s Soviet Union, for a new kind of dictatorship that was not a backwards-cast revival of ancient barbarism but was something new, a new form of dictatorship that laid total claims on hearts and minds, that didn’t want just passive obedience but wanted fanatical loyalty. That combined fear with compulsion in order to generate belief in a system, or at the very least, atomize the masses to the point where they would go along with the plans of the regime.

(02:08:38)
This model has often met with very strong criticism on the grounds that no regime in human history has yet achieved total control of the population under its grip. That’s true, but that’s not what Hannah Arendt was saying. Hannah Arendt was saying, “There will always be inefficiencies, there will be resistance, there will be divergences.” What was new was not the alleged achievement of total control, it was the ambition, the articulation of the ambition that it might be possible to exercise such fundamental and thoroughgoing control of entire populations. And the final frightening thought that Arendt kept before her was, “What if this is not a model that comes to us from benighted uncivilized ages? What if this is what the future is going to look like?” That’s a horrifying intuition.

Response to Darryl Cooper

Lex Fridman
(02:09:41)
So let me ask you about Darrell Cooper, who is a historian and podcaster, did a podcast with Tucker Carlson, and he made some claims there and elsewhere about World War II. There are two claims that I would love to get your perspective on. First, he stated that Churchill was “The chief villain of the Second World War.” I think Darrell argues that Churchill forced Hitler to expand the war beyond Poland into a global war. Second, the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, in death camps was an accident, a by product of global war. And in fact, the most humane extermination of prisoners of war possible, given the alternative, was death by starvation. So I was wondering if you can respond to each of those claims.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:31)
Well, I think that this is a bunch of absurdity and it would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious in its implications. To address the points in turn, Churchill was not the chief villain of the Second World War. The notion that Churchill allegedly forced Hitler to escalate and expand a conflict that could have been limited to Poland, that assertion is based on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was. The Nazi worldview and racism was not a ideology that was limited in its application, it looked toward world domination. In the years since the Nazis had come to power, they sponsored programs of education called geopolitics, which urged Germans to think incontinence, think incontinence, to see themselves as one of the superpowers that would battle for the future of the world. Now in retrospect, we of course can see that Germany was not in a position to legitimate a claim like that but the Nazis aims were anything but limited.

(02:11:59)
In particular, this sort of argument has been tried out in different ways before. In previous decades, there had been attempts by historians who were actually well-read and well-published to argue that World War II had been, in part, a contingent event that had been brought about by accidents or miscalculations. And such explanations argued that, if you put Hitler’s ideology aside you actually could interpret him as a pretty traditional German politician in the stripe of Bismarck. Now, when I say it like that I think you can spot the problem immediately, when you put the ideology aside. To try to analyze Hitler’s acts or alleged motives, in the absence of the ideology that he himself subscribed to and described in hateful detail in Mein Kampf and other manifestos and speeches, is an enterprise that’s doomed to failure justifiably.

(02:13:17)
The notion that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies was an event that simply happened as a result of unforeseen events, and that it was understood as somehow being humane, also runs contrary to the historical fact. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis unleashed a killing wave in their so-called Operation Tannenberg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers who were given the name of the units of the Einsatzgruppen in order to wipe out the Polish leadership and also to kill Jews.

(02:14:03)
This predates any of the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis, moreover, in many different expressions of their ideology, had made clear that their plans, you can read this in Mein Kampf, for Eastern Europe, were subjugation and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, so I consider both of these claims absolutely untenable, given the facts and documents.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:36)
So do you think it was always the case that Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:14:41)
I think, as you can read in Mein Kampf, this is what’s necessary in order to bring that racial utopia to pass. And so, while the timetable might be flexible, while obviously geopolitical constellations would play a role in determining when such a thing might be possible, it was most definitely on his list. And I would want to add, that in my own scholarship I’ve worked to explore some of these themes a little bit further. My second book, which is entitled The German Myth of the East, which appeared with Oxford University Press, examines centuries in the German encounter with Eastern Europe and how Germans have thought about Eastern Europe, whether in positive ways or in negative ways.

(02:15:36)
And one thing that emerges from this investigation is that even before the Nazis come to power in Germany there are certainly negative and dehumanizing stereotypes about Eastern Europeans, some of them activated by the experiences of German occupation in some of these regions during the First World War. But the Nazis take the very most destructive and most negative of all those stereotypes and make them the dominant ones, making no secret of their expected future of domination and annihilation in the East.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:17)
The idea of Lebensraum, is it possible to implement that idea without Ukraine?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:16:26)
Hitler has Ukraine in his horizon as one of the chief prizes. And the Nazis then craft extensive plans, a master plan that they work on in draft, after draft, after draft, even as the balance of the war is turning against them on the Eastern front. This master plan is called the Generalplan Ost, meaning the general plan for the East. And it foresees things like mega highways on which the Germanic master race will travel to vacation in Crimea, or how their settlements will be scientifically distributed in the wide open spaces of Ukraine for agriculture that will feed an expanded and purified Germanic master race. So this was not peripheral to the Nazi ambitions, but central.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:19)
As I best understand, there is extensive and definitive evidence that the Nazis always wanted to invade the Soviet Union and there was always a racial component, and not just about the Jews. They wanted to enslave and exterminate the Jews, yes, but the Slavic people, the Slavs. And if he was successful at conquering the Soviet Union, I think the things that would be done to the Slavic people would make the Holocaust seem insignificant. In my understanding in terms of the numbers and the brutality and the viciousness in which he characterized the Slavic people.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:18:13)
In their worldview, the Jews were especially demonized. And so, the project of the domination of Eastern Europe involves this horrific program of mechanized, systematized, bureaucratically organized, and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish populations. What the Nazis expected for the Slavs had a longer timeline. Himmler expected, the head of the SS. The SS is given a special mission to be part of the transformation of these regions ethnically, and Himmler, in his role of envisioning this German future in Eastern Europe, gives such a chilling phrase. He says that while certain Slavs will fall victim immediately, some proportion of Slavs will not be shipped out or deported or annihilated but instead they will remain as slaves for our culture. And in that one phrase, Himmler managed to defile and deface everything that the word culture had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and artists in the centuries before the Nazis.

(02:19:36)
The notion of slaves for our culture was part of his longer term expectation. And then, there’s finally a fact that speaks volumes about what the Nazis planned for the east. Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war on the Eastern Front, not a peace treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border, every generation, hundreds of miles east in order to keep winning more and more living space. And with analogy to other frontiers, to always give more fighting experience and more training and aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers. In terms of nightmarish visions, this one’s right up there.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:30)
And always repopulating the land conquered with the German, the Aryan race, so in terms of race, repopulating with race. Enslaving the Slavic people and exterminating them. Because there’s so many of them, it takes a long time to exterminate.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:20:48)
And even in the case of the Germans themselves, the hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda about unity and about German national identity was, the Nazis envisioned relentless purges of the German genetic stock as well. So among their victims are people with disabilities, people who are defined as not racially pure enough for the future, even though they are clearly Germans by identity. The full scale and the comprehensive ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking as they are horrifying.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:35)
One of the other things I saw Daryl tweet was that what ended up happening in the Second World War was the worst possible thing that could have happened, and I just also wanted to comment on that. Which I can imagine a very large number of possible scenarios that could have happened that are much, much worse, including the successful conquering of the Soviet Union. As we said, the kind of things that would be done, and the total war ever ongoing for generations, which would result in hundreds of millions of deaths and torture and enslavement, not to mention the other possible trajectory of the nuclear bomb.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:22:21)
That’s right, that’s right. I would think that the Nazis with atomic weapons, with no compunctions about deploying them, would rank up there as even worse than the horrors that we saw.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:32)
Now, let me steel man a point that was also made as part of this, that the oversimplified narrative of sort of, to put it crudely, Hitler bad, Churchill good, has been used and abused by neocons and warmongers and the military industrial complex, in the years since, to basically say this particular leader is just like Hitler or maybe Hitler of the 1930s and we must invade now before he becomes the Hitler of the 1940s. That has been applied in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, and God forbid, that can be also applied in the war with China in the 21st century. So yes, warmongers do sure love to use Hitler and apply that template to wage war. We should be wary of that and be careful of that, both the over application of this historical template onto the modern world and of warmongers in general.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:23:40)
Yeah, and I think that nobody should like oversimplified narratives. We need subtle and accurate narratives.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:47)
And also, I just would like to say that probably, as we’ve been talking about Stalin and Hitler, are singular figures. And just as we’ve been talking about the implementation of these totalitarian regimes, they are singular in human history, that we never saw anything like it and I hope, from everything it looks like, we’ll never see anything like it again.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:24:13)
I mean, there’s certainly striking and unique historical characters in the record. One of the things that’s so disturbing about Hannah Arendt’s model of totalitarianism is, the leader can be changed. The system itself demands that there be a leader who allegedly is all-powerful and all-knowing and prophetic and the like, but whether particular figures are interchangeable in that role is a key question.

Nazis vs Communists in Germany

Lex Fridman
(02:24:49)
Let me go back to the 1920s and sort of ask another counterfactual question. Given the battle between the Marxists and the Communists and National Socialists, was it possible and what would that world look like if the Communists indeed won in Germany as Karl Marx envisioned, and it made total sense given the industrialized expanse that Germany represented. Was that possible and what would it look like if it happened?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:25:22)
I would think that the reality was probably very remote, but that was certainly their ambition. German Communists get quoted as saying, “After Hitler, it’s our turn.” Their sentiment was that the arrival of Nazism on the scene was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism was. In hindsight, that’s almost impossible to believe because what happens is, the Nazis with their characteristic brutal ruthlessness, simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists who are supposed to be waiting to take over. So that’s forestalled. A further hypothetical that gets raised a lot is, couldn’t the social Democrats and the Communists have worked together to keep Hitler out of power?

(02:26:23)
That’s where the prior history comes into play. The very fact that the German revolution in 1919 sees Socialists killing Socialists produces a dynamic that’s so negative that it’s nearly impossible to settle on cooperation, added to the fact that the Communists see the Social Democrats as rivals for the loyalty of the working class. In terms of just statistical likelihood, a lot of experts at the time felt surely the German army is going to step in, and the most likely outcome would have been a German general shutting down the democracy and producing a military dictatorship. It says a lot about how dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was, that some people in retrospect would have felt that that military dictatorship would’ve been preferable, if it had obviated the need for the ordeal under the Nazis.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:42)
What do you think Marx would say about the 20th century? Let’s take it before we get to Mao and China, just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:27:58)
That’s a really good question. I think that Marx was flexible in his expectations about tactics and strategies, even as he was sure that he had actually cracked a big intellectual problem of what the future’s going to look like. So how it would play out, he was a man who had to deal with a lot of disappointments because in revolutionary uprising after revolutionary uprising, whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, whether it was in Poland, whether it was in the Paris Commune, this is it. This is the outbreak of the real thing, and then it doesn’t end up happening. So I think that he’d probably have tried to be patient about the turn of events.

(02:28:55)
We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely that a workers’ revolution would break out in the Russian Empire because for that you needed lots of industrial workers and they didn’t have a lot of industry. There’s a footnote to add there, and it proves his flexibility. A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking, “Might it not be possible for Russia to escape some stages of capitalist development? I mean, do you have to rigidly follow that scheme?” And Marx’s answer was convoluted, but it wasn’t a no, and that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of possible scenarios. I think he would certainly have been very surprised at the course of events as it unfolded because it didn’t match his expectations at the outset.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:55)
Not to put this on him, but would he be okay with the price of [inaudible 02:30:02] for the utopian destination of communism? Meaning, is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:30:12)
Well, we don’t know what Marx would say if he were posed that question deliberately, but we do know in the case of a Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who was a prolific and celebrated British historian of the 19th and 20th centuries. And he was put this question in the ’90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he stated forthrightly that because the Soviet Union failed such sacrifices were inordinate. But if the experiment had succeeded and a glorious future had been open for mankind as a result of the Soviet Union’s success, that would lead to a different reply. And that is one person’s perspective.

Mao

Lex Fridman
(02:31:12)
So that takes us to the other side of the world. The side that’s often in the West, not considered very much when we talk about human history, Chinese dynasties, empires, are fascinating, complex, and there’s just a history that’s not as deeply explored as it should be. And the same applies to the 20th century. So Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, in July 1921. Among them, as you talk about, was Mao. What was the story of Mao’s rise to power?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:31:53)
So Mao takes a page from the book of Lenin by adapting or seeking to adapt Marx’s ideology to a context that would have surprised Marx significantly. And that is, not only to set the revolution in, an as yet, not industrialized country, but moreover to make the peasants, rather than being conservative sacks of potatoes, to make them into the prime movers of the success of this political venture. That’s a case of the phenomenon that we talked about earlier. When is an adaptation of an ideology or a change to an ideology a valid adjustment that you’ve made or adaptation? And when is it already so different that it’s something entirely distinct? Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question for the Chinese context and, by implication, other non-Western parts of the world. This was, in part, Mao’s way, whose ambition was great, to put himself at the head of a successful international movement and to be the successor to Stalin, whose role he both admired and resented, from having to be the junior partner. To take an example of a masterwork and a major milestone in the history of Communism, the Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, who was at first a committed Communist and then later became disillusioned and wrote a three-volume study of Marxist thought, called Currents of Marxism. In that book, when he reaches Maoism, KoÅ‚akowski essentially throws up his hands and says, “It’s hardly you’d even know what to do with this,” because putting the peasantry in the vanguard role is something that is already at variance with the original design.

(02:34:17)
But Marx says this is an improved version. This is an adapted and truer version of Marxism for the Chinese context. In case after case in Mao’s rise to power, we see a really complicated relationship with Stalin. He works hard to gain Stalin’s support because The Common Turn, the international organization headquartered in Moscow working to encourage and help revolutionaries worldwide, is skeptical about the Chinese Communists to begin with, and believes that China still has a long way to go before it’s reached the stage where it’s ripe for Communist revolution, and in a way that’s more orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:35:00)
Hey, that’s more orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing. Mao Chafes under Stalin’s acknowledged leadership of international communism as a movement. And in 1950, when Mao goes to visit Stalin in Moscow, in order to sign a treaty of cooperation, he’s left waiting for days and days and days in a snub that is meant to show him that you’re just not as important as you might think you are. And then when Stalin dies in 1953, Mao feels the moment is ready for him to step into the leadership position surpassing the Soviet Union. So many of Mao’s actions like the Great Leap Forward and the agricultural disasters that follow from that are literally attempts to outdo Stalin, to outperform Stalin, to show that what Stalin was not able to do, the Chinese Communist regime will be able to bring off. And the toll for that hubris is vast.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:14)
Yeah. In the darkest of ways, he did outdo Stalin.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:36:17)
That’s right. In the statistics.

Great Leap Forward

Lex Fridman
(02:36:19)
The Great Leap Forward ended up killing approximately 40 million people from starvation or murder. Can you describe the Great Leap Forward?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:36:30)
It was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible for the peasant masses out of their conviction in the rightness of the Chinese Communist cause to industrialize China overnight. That involved things like creating small smelting furnaces in individual farm communes. It involved folding together farming territories into vast communes of very large size that were, just because of their sheer gigantism, supposed to be by definition more efficient than small-scale farming. It ended up producing environmental disasters and campaigns to eliminate birds or insects.

(02:37:25)
Were supposed to demonstrate mastery over nature by sheer acts of will. These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural techniques that were pioneered by a crackpot biologist by the name of Trofim Lysenko that produced more agricultural disaster that involved things like plowing to depths that were not practical for the seeds to germinate and grow but were supposed to produce super plants that would produce bumper harvests and outpace the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. So, the context for all of this is a race to get first to the achievement of full-scale communism.

(02:38:18)
One of the themes that I think it’s so valuable to pursue and to take seriously in the history of communism is what concrete promises were made. In the case of China, Mao made promises and projections for the future that were worrying even to some of his own assistants. He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961, perhaps by 1973, China would be the winner in this competition and it would’ve achieved full communism so that which Marx had sketched as the endpoint of humanity would be achieved first by the Chinese. Later, his own comrades, when he passed from the scene, felt the need to tamper that a little bit and promised that they would achieve full communism by the year 2000. Such promises are helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people, the prospect of real successes just around the corner. But what happens when the date arrives and you haven’t actually achieved that goal? That’s one ticking time bomb that played a role in the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union and the case of China must have been something similar.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:41)
So there’s a lot of other elements that are similar to the Soviet Union. Maybe you could speak to the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:39:51)
The Hundred Flowers Campaign is a chance for Mao who has felt that he has lost prestige and lost standing in the party because of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward to regain some of that momentum. And the whole Hundred Flowers Campaign officially titled The Rectification Campaign to set things right is still shrouded in mystery. Historians disagree about how to interpret what Mao was actually up to. The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and intellectuals to share ideas and to engage in constructive criticism, to propose alternatives, and to let a full discussion happen.

(02:40:45)
And then after some of them had ventured that to come in and purge them, to punish them ruthlessly for having done what he had invited them to do. That is the most cynical variant. Some historians argue that Mao himself was not prepared for the ideas that he himself had invited into the public square and that he grew anxious and worried and angry at this without having thought this through in a cynical way to begin with. The end result is the same. The end result is once again negative selection. The decimation of those who are most venturesome, those who are most talented and intelligent are punished relentlessly for that.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:30)
And just a general culture of censorship and fear and all the same stuff we saw in the Soviet Union.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:41:37)
That’s right. I mean, think of the impact on officials who are loyal servants of the regime and just want to get along. The message goes out loud and clear. “Don’t be venturesome, do not propose reforms. Stick with the tried and true and that’ll be the safe route even if it ends in ultimately stagnation.”
Lex Fridman
(02:41:54)
So, as the same question I asked about the Soviet Union, why do you think there was so much failure of policies that Mao implemented in China during his rule?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:42:07)
Mao himself had a view of human beings as being, as he put it, beautiful blank pieces of paper upon which one can write new characters. And that is clearly at variance with what you and I know about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world. I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one-size-fits-all for a country as big and as varied in its communities as China, inevitably, such an imposition of one model was going to lead to serious malfunctions. And so much of what other episodes in Chinese history had showed the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity economically of the Chinese people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes. What we’ve seen since, after Mao passes from the scene and with the forms of Deng Xiaoping one sees just how much of those energies had been forcibly suppressed for so long and now we’re allowed to re-emerge.

China after Mao

Lex Fridman
(02:43:21)
Mao died in 1976. You wrote that the CCP in ’81, looking back through the lens of historical analysis, said that he was 70% correct. Seven zero, exactly, 70% correct.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:43:38)
Yeah. Not 69, not 71.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:42)
Not 71. The scientific precision, I mean we should say that again and again. The co-opting of the authority of science by the Soviet Union, by Mao, by Nazi Germany, Nazi Science is terrifying and should serve as a reminder that science is the thing that is one of the most beautiful creations of humanity but is also a thing that could be used by politicians and dictators to do horrific things. And-
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:44:19)
His essence is questing, not certainty.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:23)
Yeah.
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:44:23)
Constant questing.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:24)
Exactly. Humility, intellectual humility. So how did China evolve after Mao’s death to today?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:44:36)
Well, I think that there is… Without denouncing Mao, without repudiating Mao’s 70% correctness, the regime actually undertook a new venture. And that venture was to open up economically to gain access to world markets and to play a global role always with the proviso that the party retained political supremacy. It’s been pointed out that while Khrushchev tries in the Soviet Union in 1956, especially with a secret speech in which he denounces Stalin’s crimes, he tries to go back to the founders’ intentions of Lenin. Nothing like that, it’s argued, is possible in the Chinese case because Mao was not the equivalent of Stalin for communist China. Mao was the equivalent of Lenin. Mao was the founder. So there’s no repudiating of him. They’re stuck with that formula of 70% and acknowledging that there were some problems, but by and large, arguing that it was the correct stance of the party and its leader that was paramount.

(02:45:56)
And the results of this wager are where we are today. China has been transformed out of all recognition in terms of not all of the living standards of the country, but many places. Its economic growth has been dramatic and the new dispensation is such that people will ask, “Is this a communist country anymore?” And that’s probably a question that haunts China’s current leadership as well. With Chairman Xi, we’ve seen a return to earlier patterns, Xi insisting that Mao’s achievement has to be held as equal to that of the reform period. Sometimes imitations or nostalgia for the Mao period or even the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution are part of this volatile mix. But all of this is outward appearance. Statistics can also be misleading, and I think that very much in question is China’s further revolution in our own times.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:11)
In the West, China is often demonized and we’ve talked extensively today about the atrocities that results from… Atrocities both internal and external that result from communist nations.

(02:47:33)
But what can we say by way of hope to resist the demonization? How can we avoid cold or hot war with China, we being the West or the United States in the 21st century?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:47:54)
Well, you mentioned in the context of the claims of science, humility as a crucial attribute. I think that humility, sobriety, realism are tremendously valuable in trying to understand another society, another form of government. And so, I think one needs to be very self-aware that projection onto others of what we think they’re about is no substitute for actual study of the sources that a society like that produces. It’s declarations of what matters most to them, the leadership’s own pronouncements about what the future holds. I think that matters a lot more than pious hopes or versions of being convinced that inevitably everyone will come to resemble us in a better future.

North Korea

Lex Fridman
(02:48:52)
You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour, what are we supposed to think about North Korea and their declaration they’re supposedly a communist nation? What can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just a hopelessly simple answer, “This is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state?”
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:49:21)
I think the answer that our historian can give is a historical answer that we have to inquire into what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today. Where you have a regime that’s claiming to be communist or has an even better version of Marx’s original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called Juche. How does that mesh with the reality that we’re talking about a dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy if that’s what it is? I think that examining as much as we can learn about a closed society that goes about its every day in ways that are inscrutable to us is very, very challenging. But the only answer when an example like this escapes your analytic categories, probably there’s a problem with your analytical categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:29)
Yeah. So there’s a component here and it relates to China as well to bring somebody like John Mearsheimer into the picture. There’s a military component here too, and that is ultimately how these nations interact, especially totalitarian nations interact with the rest of the world. Nations interact economically, culturally, and militarily. And the concern with countries like North Korea is the way for them to be present on the world stage in the game of geopolitics is by flexing their military might and they invest a huge amount of their GDP into the military. So I guess the question there to discuss in terms of analysis is how do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a communist system and what lessons can we take from history and apply it to that? Or should we simply just ignore and look the other way as we’ve been hoping it doesn’t get out of hand?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:51:42)
Yeah. There’s a realist’s see states following their own interests and prioritizing their own security, and there’s probably not much that could be done to change that. But conflict arising as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or misinterpretation, those are things that policymakers probably do have some control over. I think that there’s internal processes that’ll work their way out in even as opaque place as North Korea. It’s also the reality, just as we saw with the divided Germanys, that it’s a precarious kind of twinned existence when you have countries that are across the border from one another that are derived from what used to be a single unit that now are a real life social science experiment in, “What kind of regime do you get with one kind of system, what sort of regime you get with another kind of system?” And that’s a very unstable setup as it turns out.

Communism in US

Lex Fridman
(02:52:57)
Now let us jump continents and in the 20th century look to North America. So you also have lectured about communism in America, the different communist movements in America. It was also founded in 1919 and evolved throughout through a couple of red scares. So what was the evolution of the Communist Party and just in general communist in America?
Vejas Liulevicius
(02:53:28)
It’s fascinating to observe this story because one longstanding commonplace had been that socialism has less purchase or radical socialism in the United States than in European countries. So, to the extent that that was true, it was an uphill battle for the communists to get established in the United States, but it makes it all the more interesting to follow the development of the movement. And there were two challenges in particular that played a role in shaping the American Communist experience. One was the fact that, to begin with, the party was often identified with immigrants. The communities that had come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong socialist contingents. And when this break happens within the socialist movement between radical socialists and more moderate socialists, there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to help shape the American Communist movement. But the result was that, for many American workers, they saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference of this movement as something that was unfamiliar.

(02:54:58)
It would only be with the rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder, a American-born political leader with vast ambitions for creating an American communist movement that that image would start to be modified. Earl Browder had a meteoric rise and then fall over the promise he made that went by the slogan Communism is 20th Century Americanism. The notion was that communism could find roots in American political discourse and experience. Where Earl Browder fell a foul of other communists was in his expectations during World War II, that it might be possible for the Soviet Union and the United States to make their current cooperation permanent and to come to some sort of accommodation that would moderate their rivalry. As it turns out, with the dawning already of Cold War tensions that would later flower more fully, that was unacceptable. And the movement divested itself of Earl Browder.

(02:56:13)
Another point that shaped American perceptions of the communist movement in the United States involved issues of espionage. During the 1930s and the 1940s, American communists, not all of them obviously, but select members of the movement were called upon by Soviet intelligence to play a historical role by gathering information, winning sympathies… One of the most amazing books of the 20th century is the book written by Whitaker Chambers, who had served as a Soviet spy, first a committed communist, then a Soviet spy, and then later a renegade from those allegiances. His book is entitled Witness, published in 1952, and it’s one of the most compelling books you could ever read because it’s so full of both the unique character of the author in all of his idiosyncrasies and a sense of huge issues being at stake ones upon which the future of humanity turns. So, talk about the ethical element being of importance there. Through the apparatus of the state, the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies into America’s military as well as government institutions. One great irony is that when Senator McCarthy in the ’50s made vast claims about communist infiltration of the government apparatus, claims that he was unable to substantiate with details, that reality had actually been closer to the reality of the 1930s and the 1940s, than his own time. But the Association of American Communists with the foreign power of the Soviet Union and ultimately an adherence to its interests did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing for American communists. An example, of course, was the notorious Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.

(02:58:41)
The American Communist Movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda. Before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to world peace. Just after the signing of the pact, they had to proclaim that this was a great win for peace and for human harmony and to completely change their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany. There were many American communists who couldn’t stomach this and who in disillusionment simply quit their party memberships or drifted away. But it’s a fascinating story of the ups and downs of a political movement with radical ambitions in American political history.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:37)
Yeah, the Cold War and the extensive levels of espionage, combined with Hollywood created basically firmly solidified communism as the enemy of the American ideal sort of embodied. And not even the economic policies of the political policies of communism, but like the word and the color red with the hammer and sickle, Rocky IV, one of my favorite movies-
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:00:10)
Well, that’s canonical, right?

Russia after Soviet Union

Lex Fridman
(03:00:12)
Yeah. I mean, it is a bit of a meme, but meme becomes reality and then enters politics and is used by politicians to do all kinds of name-calling. You have spoken eloquently about modern Russia and modern Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe. How did Russia evolve after Stalin and after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:00:46)
Well, I think the short answer is without a full historical reckoning that would’ve been healthy about the recent past in ways that’s not very surprising because given the economic misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment, it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection. But after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with new sources, after an initial period marked by such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now and the today. And the result is that there’s been less than would be healthy of a taking stock, a reckoning. Even in assigning of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past, no Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

(03:02:29)
In other ex-communist countries, there was also precious little in the way of legal proceedings that would’ve established responsibility. And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals a very important one, as it turns out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize information, to create knowledge and transparency about what the reality had been in the past. In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today, instead of a clear-eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin upon replacing Yeltsin was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied, eclectic, and often mutually contradictory historical memories or packages of memories.

(03:03:31)
So on the one hand, in Putin’s Russia, the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light because Lenin by producing federalism as a model for the Soviet Union, laid a time bomb at the base of that state that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts as nations regained their independence. While Stalin, it’s acknowledged exacted a dreadful toll, but also was effective as a representative of Russian statehood.

(03:04:14)
This produced where we are today. It’s a commonplace echoed by many that Russia without Ukraine is a nation-state or could be a nation-state. Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire. Putin, who is not really seeking a revival of Stalin’s rule, but still is nostalgic about earlier forms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood to the exclusion of other values has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite different from what he likely expected.

(03:05:01)
And I think that timing is crucial here. It’s fascinating to try to imagine, “What if this attempt to re-digest Ukraine into an expanded Russian imperial territory had taken place earlier?” I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians has produced a very different dynamic and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia for the past, packaged however it might be, and however nostalgic it might be made to appear. And there, I think that Putin’s expectations in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned. His expectation was that Ukraine would be divided on this score and that some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome-
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:06:00)
Some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome the advance of Russian forces, and instead, there has been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance that continues to this day.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:15)
It’s interesting to consider timing and also individual leaders, Zelensky, you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would’ve folded much easier, and Zelensky, I think, surprised a lot of the world, this comedian, somehow becoming essentially an effective war president. So put that in the bin of singular figures that define history.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:06:52)
That surprises.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:54)
How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends?
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:06:57)
I’m very pessimistic on this score actually, and for the reasons we just talked about how these things escape human management or even rationality. I think that war takes on a life of its own as accumulated suffering actually eliminates possible compromises or settlements that one might talk about in the abstract. I think that it’s one thing for people far away to propose trades of territory or complicated guarantees or arrangements that sound very good in the abstract and that will just be refused by people who have actually experienced what the war has been like in person and what it has meant to them and their families and everyone they know in terms of lives destroyed. I think that peacemaking is going to face a very daunting task here, given all that’s accumulated, and I think in particular, just from the last days of the launching of missile attacks against indiscriminate or civilian targets, that’s not easy to turn the corner on.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:31)
Let me ask a political question. I recently talked to Donald Trump and he said if he’s elected before he has sworn into office, he’ll have a peace deal. What would a peace deal like that look like, and is it even possible, do you think? So we should mention that Russia has captured four regions of Ukraine now. Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson. Also, Ukraine captured part of the Kursk region within Russia. So just like you mentioned, territory is on the table. NATO, European Union is on the table. Also funding and military help from the United States directly to Ukraine is on the table. Do you think it’s possible to have a fair deal that from people, like you said, far away where both people walk away, Zelensky and Putin, unhappy, but equally unhappy and peace is negotiated?
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:09:34)
Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike probably. I think my concern is about the part of the equation that involves people just being desperately unhappy, laying the foundations for more trouble to come. I couldn’t imagine what that looks like, but that’s, once again, these are things that escape human control in the details.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:00)
Laying the foundation for worse things to come. So it’s possible you have a ceasefire that lays the foundation for a worse warrant and suffering in a year, in five years, in 10 years.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:10:17)
In a way, we may already be there because ratifying the use of force to change borders in Europe was a taboo since 1945 and now look where we are. If that is validated, then it sets up incentives for more of the same.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:39)
If you look at the 20th century is what we’ve been talking about with horrendous global wars that happened then, and you look at now, and it feels like just living in the moment, with the war in Ukraine breaking the contract of, you’re not supposed to do territorial conquest anymore in the 21st century that then the just intensity of hatred and military tension in the Middle East with the Israel, Iran, Palestine, just building and then China calmly, but with a big stick, talking about Taiwan. Do you think a big conflict may be on the way? Do you think it’s possible that another global war happens in the 21st century?
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:11:40)
I hope not, but I think so many predictions reach their expiration dates and get invalidated. Obviously, we’re confronting a dire situation in the present.

Advice for Lex

Lex Fridman
(03:11:57)
As a historian, let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give on interviewing world leaders, whether it’s people who are no longer here, some of the people we’ve been talking about, Hitler, Stalin, Mao or people that are still here, Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Kamala Harris, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping. As a historian, is it possible to have an interesting conversation, maybe as a thought experiment? What kind of conversation would you like to have with Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in the 1920s?
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:12:33)
First of all, I mean the answer’s very clear. I would never presume to advise you about interviewing world leaders and prominent people because the roster that you’ve accumulated is just astonishing. But I know what I might aim for and that is, I think, in historical analysis, in trying to understand the role of a particular leader, the more one understands about their prior background and formative influences, the better a fix, I think, one gets on the question of what are their expectations? In German, there’s a beautiful word for this. Germans managed to mash together several words into one even better word, and in German, it’s Erwartungshorizont, the horizon of expectation. So in the case of figures like Churchill or Hitler, their experience of World War I shaped their actions in World War II. Their values were shaped in their childhood. Is there a way of engaging with someone you’re interviewing even obliquely that gives a view in on their sense of what the future might hold?

(03:13:58)
Obviously such people are expert at being guarded and not being pinned down, but the categories in which they’re thinking a sense of what their own ethical grounding might be or their ethical code that gives hints to their behavior. It gets said, and again, it’s a cliche because it’s true, that one of the best measures of a person, especially a leader, is how they treat people from whom they don’t expect anything. Are they condescending? Are they, on the contrary, fundamentally interested in another person, even if that person can’t help them or be used in some way? Speaking of prominent world leaders to interview, there’s Napoleon.

(03:14:45)
Napoleon, psychologically, must have been a quite amazing person to make a bid for mastery of Europe and then already thinking about the mastery of the world. But contemporaries who met Napoleon said that it was very disturbing to talk with him because meeting with him one-on-one revealed that he could talk to you but look like he was looking right through you as if you were not fully real. You were more in the nature of a character on a chessboard, and for that reason, some of them called Napoleon, the master of the sightless stare. So if you’re talking with a world leader and he or she has a sightless stare, that’s probably a bad sign. But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints about the moral compass or the future expectations of a leader that emerge in one of your wonderful conversations.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:44)
You put it brilliantly in several ways, but the moral compass getting sneaking up to the full nuance and complexity of the moral compass, and one of the ways of doing that is looking at the various horizons in time about their vision of the future. I imagine it’s possible to get Hitler to talk about the future of the Third Reich and to see in ways what he actually visions that as, and similar with Stalin. But of course, funny enough, I believe those leaders would be easier to talk to because there’s nothing to be afraid of in terms of political competition. Modern leaders are a little bit more guarded because they have opposition often to contend with, and constituencies. You did a lot of amazing courses including for the great courses on the topic of communism. You just finished the third, so you did a series of lectures on the rise of communism, then communism and power, and then decline and fall…
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:17:00)
Decline of communism.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:02)
When I was listening to these lectures, can’t possibly imagine the amount of work that went into it. Can you just speak wisely? What was that journey like of taking everything your expertise on Eastern Europe, but just bringing your lens, your wisdom, your focus onto this topic and what it takes to actually bring it to life?
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:17:30)
Journey is probably just the right word because it’s this week that the third of that trilogy, Decline of Communism, is being released. It felt like something that I very much wanted to do because the history that’s narrated there is one that is so compelling and often so tragic that it needs to be shared. The vast amount of material that one can include is probably dwarfed by the amount that actually ends up on the cutting room floor. One could probably do an entire lecture course on every single one of those lecture topics that got broached. One of the great satisfactions of putting together a course like this is also being able to give further suggestions for study to the listeners and in some cases, to introduce them to neglected classics or books that make you want to grab somebody by the lapels and say, “You’ve got to read this.”

(03:18:36)
There’s probably few things that are as exciting as a really keen and targeted reading recommendation. In addition, I’ve also done other courses on the history of World War I, on the diplomatic history of Europe from 1500 to the present, a course on the history of Eastern Europe, and also a course on dictatorships called Utopia and Terror, and then also a course on Explorers and a course on turning points in modern history. Every single one of those is so rewarding because you learn so much in the process and it’s really fantastic.

Book recommendations

Lex Fridman
(03:19:18)
I should highly recommend that people sign up. First of all, this is the great courses where you can buy the courses individually, but I recommend people sign up for great courses plus, which I think is like a monthly membership where you get access to all these courses and they’re just incredible. I recommend people watch all of yours. Since you mentioned books, this is an impossible question and I apologize ahead of time, but is there books you can recommend just in your own life that you’ve enjoyed, whether really small or some obvious recommendations that you recommend people read? It is a bit like asking what’s your favorite band kind of thing.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:20:03)
That’s right. Would a book that got turned into a movie be acceptable as well?
Lex Fridman
(03:20:09)
Yes.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:20:11)
In that case, all of us reflect on our own childhoods and that magical moment of a reading a book or seeing a movie that really got you launched on some particular set of things that you’re going to find fascinating for the rest of your life. There’s a direct line to the topics we were talking about today from myself in the Chicagoland area as a kid, seeing the film of Dr. Zhivago and then later reading the novel on which it was based by Pasternak. Even though the film had to be filmed on location in Spain pretending to be revolutionary Russia, it was magical for the sheer sweep and tragedy and human resilience that it showed the very way in which a work of literature or a cinematography could capture so much.

(03:21:09)
I’m still amazed by that. There’s also, in the spirit of recommending neglected classics, my favorite author, is now a late Canadian author by the name of Robertson Davies, who wrote novel after novel in a mode that probably would get called magical realism but is so much more. Robertson Davies was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and Jungian philosophy, but in literary form, he managed to create stories that blend the mythical, the mystical, and the brutally real to paint a picture of Canada as he knew it, Europe as he knew it, and the world as he knew it. He’s most famous probably for the Deptford Trilogy, three novels in a series that are linked and they’re just masterful if only there were more books like that.
Lex Fridman
(03:22:22)
The Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business, the Manticore, World of Wonders, and you got a really nice beard.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:22:30)
Yes, it was an amazing beard, very 19th century.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(03:22:36)
Beautiful. What advice would you give to young people today that have just listened to us talk about the 20th century and the terrifying prospects of ideals implemented into reality? By the way, many of the revolutions are carried out by young people, and so the good and the bad and the ugly is thanks to the young people. So the young people listening today, what advice would you give them?
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:23:07)
It comes down to one word, and that one word is read. As a college teacher, I’m concerned about what I’m seeing unfolding before us, not my classes, but classes in which students are asked to read very little or maybe in some cases not at all, or snippets that they are provided digitally. Those have their place and can be valuable, but the task of sitting down with a book and absorbing its message, not agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications, learning how to think within the categories and the values of the author is going to be irreplaceable, and my anxiety is that with college bookstores now moving entirely to the paperless format, it changes how people interact with texts.

(03:24:12)
If the result is not a renaissance and a resurgence of reading, but less reading, that will be dreadful because the experience of thinking your way into other people’s minds that sustained reading offers is so crucial to human empathy, a broadening of your own sensibilities of what’s possible, what’s in the full range of being human, and then what are the best models for what has been thought and felt and how people have acted, otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators and the ability of artificial intelligence to give us versions of realities that never existed and never will, and like.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:00)
It’s a really interesting idea. So let me give a shout-out to Perplexity that I’m using here to summarize and take quick notes and get little snippets of stuff, which is extremely useful. But books are not just about information transfer, just as you said, it’s a journey together with a set of ideas and it’s a conversation, and getting a summary of the book is the cliche thing is it’s really getting to the destination without the journey. The journey is the thing that’s important, thinking through stuff.

(03:25:35)
I’ve been surprised, I’ve learned, I’ve trained my brain to be able to get the same thing from audiobooks. Also, it’s a little bit more difficult because you don’t control the pacing. Sometimes pausing is nice, but you could still get it from audiobooks. So it’s an audio version of books and that allows you to also go on a journey together and sometimes more convenient. You could take it to more places with you, but there is a magical thing. I also trying to train myself mostly to use Kindle, the digital version of books, but there is, unfortunately, still a magical thing about being there with the page.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:26:14)
Audiobooks are definitely not to be scorned because as people have pointed out, the original traditions of literature were oral. So that’s actually the 1.0 version, and combining these things is probably the key. I think one of the things I find so wonderful about the best lectures that I’ve heard is it’s a chance to hear someone thinking out loud, not laying down the law, but taking you through a series of logical moves, imaginative leaps, alternative suggestions, and that’s much more than data transfer.
Lex Fridman
(03:26:57)
The use case of AI as a companion as you read is really exciting to me. I’ve been using it recently to basically, as you read, you can have a conversation with a system that has access to a lot of things about a particular paragraph. I’ve been really surprised how my brain, when given some extra ideas, other recommendations of books, but also just a summary of other ideas from elsewhere in the universe that relates to this paragraph. It sparks your imagination and thought, and you see the actual richness in the thing you’re reading.

(03:27:35)
Now, nobody, to my knowledge, has implemented a really intuitive interaction between AI and the text, unfortunately, partially because the books are protected under DRM, and so there’s a wall where the AI can’t access the thing. So if you want to play with that kind of thing, you have to break the law a little bit, which is not a good thing. But just like with music, Napster came up, people started illegally sharing music, and the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music revolutionized everything and made the sharing of music much easier. So there is some technological things that can enrich the experience of reading, but the actual painful, long process of reading is really useful. Just like boredom is useful.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:28:31)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:32)
It’s also called just sitting there.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:28:33)
Underrated Virtue.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:36)
Of course, you have to see the smartphone as an enemy, I would say, of that special time. You have to think because social media companies are maximized to get your engagement. They want to grab your attention, and they grab that attention by making you as braindead as possible and getting you to look at more and more and more things. So it’s nice and fun and it’s great. Recommend it highly. It’s good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counter force to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time, taking a journey through an expert eloquently conveying that idea and growing by having a conversation with that idea and a book is really, really powerful. So I agree with you totally. What gives you hope about the future of humanity? We’ve talked about the dark past, what gives you hope for the light at the end of the tunnel?

Hope

Vejas Liulevicius
(03:29:42)
We talked indeed about a lot of latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature. But I find hope in another aspect of human nature, and that is the sheer variety of human reactions to situations. The very fact that history is full of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, the will to build up even after the horrors have passed, this, to me, is an inexhaustible source of optimism. There are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned or the problem is a synonym for cultural appropriation is world history. Trade, transfer of ideas, influences. Valuing that which is unlike your own culture is also a form of appropriation, quite literally, and so that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experiences so unlimited as history testifies, gives me great hope for the future.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:03)
The willingness of humans to explore all of that with curiosity. Even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:31:13)
That’s right. Unceasingly.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:16)
Vejas, thank you so much for your incredible work, your incredible lectures, your books, and thank you for talking today.
Vejas Liulevicius
(03:31:22)
Thank you for this such a fun chat.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:25)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vejas Liulevicius. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. “History repeats itself; first as a tragedy, second as a farce.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome | Lex Fridman Podcast #443

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #443 with Gregory Aldrete.
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Ancient vs modern world

Gregory Aldrete
(00:00:00)
Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal’s plan is, “I’m not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I’m going to invade Italy. I’m going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they’ll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back, so this is a reasonable plan.”

(00:00:51)
Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants. Dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in Northern Italy. Romans send an army. Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story, sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes them out.

(00:01:12)
Rome gets clever this time. They say, “Okay, Hannibal’s different. We’re going to take two years, raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal.” They do this, and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80, 000 Romans about, and he comes up with strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it’s this famous strategy where he basically sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides. And in one afternoon at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Now, just to put that in perspective, that’s more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:03)
The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Gregory Aldrete.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:23)
What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:02:28)
Well, the easy answer, the one you often get is technology, and obviously, there’s huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, more structural things. I would say, first of all, childhood mortality. In the ancient world, and this is true, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the industrial Revolution, about 30 to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty.

(00:02:57)
I mean, put yourself in the place of average inhabitant of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids probably would’ve died. You would’ve buried your children. And nowadays, we think of that as an unusual thing, and just psychologically, that’s a huge thing. You would’ve seen multiple of your siblings die. If you were a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it to let’s say age 13, you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out. Those kind of grim mortality statistics, I think, are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:37)
But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think the same elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism and the cynicism, the underlying forces that result in war, all of that, permeates human history?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:03:56)
Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is roughly constant. And for me, as an ancient historian, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources, but they’re the things that give us those little glimpse into everyday life. Stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction. Whenever I read some of those, I’ll have this moment of feeling, ” Oh, I know exactly how that person felt.” Here across 2000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have this spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity.

(00:04:40)
I think, as a historian, the way you begin to understand an alien, a foreign culture, which is what these cultures are, is to look for those little moments of sympathy. But on the other hand, there’s ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us. You also look for those moments where you just think, “How the hell could these people have done that? I just don’t understand how they could have thought or acted in this way.” It’s lining up those moments of sympathy and kind of disconnection that I think is when you begin to start to understand a foreign culture or an ancient culture.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:14)
I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details and the little pieces, because that is the thing that makes up life. The big picture is nothing without the details.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:05:23)
Yep, yep, and those details would bring it to life. I mean, it’s not the grand sweep of things. It’s seeing those little hopes and fears. Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just basically everybody’s a farmer. Everybody’s a small family farmer, and we forget this.

(00:05:42)
I was just writing a lecture for my next Great Courses course, and I was writing about farming in the ancient world. I was really thinking if we were to write a realistic textbook of let’s say the Roman Empire, nine out of 10 chapters should be details of what it was like to be a small-time family farmer, because that’s what 90% of the people in the ancient world did. They weren’t soldiers, they weren’t priests, they weren’t kings, they weren’t authors, they weren’t artists. They were small-town family farmers, and they lived in a little village. They never traveled 20 miles from that village. They were born there. They married somebody from there. They raised kids. They mucked around in the dirt for a couple decades and they died. They never saw a battle. They never saw a work of art. They never saw a philosopher. They never took part in any of the things we define as being history. So that’s what life should be, and that’s representative.

Romans’ relationship to the past

Lex Fridman
(00:06:37)
Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:06:43)
And it is the important stuff. I mean, that’s true. There’s a reason we focus on that.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:48)
That’s a good reminder though. If we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like, we have to represent it fully.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:06:56)
And I would say let’s not forget them. Let’s not forget what life was like for 80, 90% of the people in the ancient world, the ones we don’t talk about, because that’s important too.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:06)
The Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful, influential, and impactful empire in human history. What are some reasons for that?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:07:18)
Yeah. I mean, Rome has been hugely influential, I think, just because of the image. I mean, there’s all these practical ways. I mean, the words I’m using to speak with you today, 30% are direct from Latin. Another 30% are from Latin descended languages. Our law codes, I mean, our habits, our holidays, everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world. But the image of Rome, at least again in Western civilization, has really been the dominant image of a successful empire. I think that’s what gives it a lot of its fascination, this idea that, “Oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire,” and there’s a lot of other empires. I mean, we could talk about ancient China, which arguably was just as big as Rome, just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time. But at least in Western civilization, Rome is the paradigm.

(00:08:14)
But Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it’s both the empire when it was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model, and it’s the Roman Republic when it was a pseudo-democracy, which is a different model. It’s interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those. The United States, Revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model. But other people, Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the Empire. Victorian Britain as a model.

(00:08:48)
Rome itself has different aspects. But what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past. One of the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, not just as something inspirational, but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life. Today, especially in the United States, we don’t have much of a relationship with the past. We see ourselves as free agents just floating along, not tethered to what came before.

(00:09:28)
The classical story that I sometimes tell in my classes to illustrate this is Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings. They were kind of unhappy with their kings. Around 500 BC, they held a revolution and they kicked out the kings, and one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus. 500 years later, 500 years down the road, a guy comes along, Julius Caesar, who starts to act like a king. If you have trouble with kings in Roman society, who are you going to call? Somebody named Brutus. Now as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time, who is one of Julius Caesar’s best friends, Marcus Junius Brutus. Now, before I go further with the story, and I think you probably know where it ends, I talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture. I mean, if you went to an aristocratic Roman’s house and opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet. If you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks. When a Roman aristocrat died, they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at that moment. They hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door. Every time you entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors.

(00:10:53)
Every child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors. He would’ve known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did. When somebody new in the family died, there would be a big funeral and they would talk about all the things their ancestors had did. The kids in the family would literally take out those masks, tie them onto their own faces, and wear them in the funeral procession. You were wearing the face of your ancestors. So you as an individual weren’t important, you were just the latest iteration of that family, and there was enormous weight, huge weight to live up to the deeds of your ancestors. The Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with your own family. Every Roman kid who is let’s say an aristocratic family could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries. I can’t go beyond my grandparents, I don’t even know, but that’s maybe 100 years. It’s a completely different attitude towards the past.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:52)
And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors, even the ones we can name, is not as intense as it was in Roman times.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:11:59)
No, no. I mean, it was obsessive and oppressive. It determined what you did.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:00)
Oppressive, oh.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:12:05)
Yes. Because there’s that weight for you to act like your ancestors did.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:08)
Not to speak sort of philosophically, but do you think it was limiting to the way that society develops to be deeply constrained by the-
Gregory Aldrete
(00:12:18)
Yes. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:18)
Limiting in a good way or a bad way, you think?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:12:21)
Well, like everything, it’s a little of both. But the bad, on the one hand, it gives them enormous strength and it gives them this enormous connection. It gives them guidance. But the negative is what’s interesting, is it makes the Romans extremely traditional minded and extremely conservative, and I mean conservative in the sense of resistant to change.

(00:12:40)
In the late Republic, which we’ll probably talk about later, Rome desperately needed to change certain things, but it was a society that did things the way the ancestors did it, and they didn’t make some obvious changes, which might have saved their Republic. That’s the downside is that it locks you into something and you can’t change.

(00:12:58)
But to get us back to the Brutus’s, 500 years after that first Brutus got rid of kings, Julius Caesar starts to act like a king, one of his best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus. And literally, in the middle of the night, people go to Brutus’s house and write graffiti on it that says, “Remember your ancestor?” And another one is, I think, “You’re no real Brutus.” And at that point, he really has no choice. He forms a conspiracy. On the Ides of March 44 BC, he and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar, and kill him for acting like a king. The way I always pose this to my students is, “How many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather did?”
Lex Fridman
(00:13:48)
That’s commitment.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:13:50)
That’s the power of the past. That’s a society where the past isn’t just influential, but it dictates what you do. And that concept, I think, is very alien to us today. We can’t imagine murdering our best friend because of what some incredibly distant ancestor did 500 years ago. But to Brutus, there is no choice. You have to do that.

(00:14:11)
A lot of societies have this power of the past. Today, not so much, but some still do. About a decade ago, I was in Serbia and I was talking to some of the people there about the breakup of Yugoslavia and some of the wars that had taken place where people turned against their neighbors, basically murdered people they had lived next to for decades. When I was talking to them, some of them actually brought up things like, “Oh, well, it was justified because in this battle in 12 whatever, they did this.” And I was thinking, “Wow, you’re citing something from 800 years ago to justify your actions today.” That’s a modern person who still understands the power of the past, or maybe is crippled by it, is another way to view it.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:55)
This is an interesting point and an interesting perspective to remember about the way the Romans thought, especially in the context of how power is transferred, whether it’s hereditary or not, which changes throughout Roman history. It’s interesting. It’s interesting to remember that, the value of the ancestors
Gregory Aldrete
(00:15:13)
Yep, and just the weight of tradition.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:15)
The weight of tradition.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:15:16)
For the Romans, the mos maiorum is this Latin term, which means the way the ancestors did it, and it’s kind of their word for tradition. For them, tradition is what your forefathers and mothers did, and you have to follow that example, and you have to live up to that.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:31)
Does that mean that class mobility was difficult? If your ancestors were farmers, there was a major constraint on remaining a farmer, essentially.

Three phases of Roman history

Gregory Aldrete
(00:15:40)
I mean, the Romans all like to think of themselves as farmers, even filthy rich Romans. It was just their national identity is the citizen soldier farmer thing. But it did, among the aristocrats, the people who kind of ran things, yeah, it was hard to break into that if you didn’t have famous ancestors. It was such a big deal that there was a specific term called a novus homo, a new man, for someone who was the first person in their family to get elected to a major office in the Roman government because that was a weird and different and new thing. You actually designated them by this special term. Yeah, you’re absolutely right.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:19)
If we may, let us zoom out, it would help me, maybe it’ll help the audience to look at the different periods that we’ve been talking about. You mentioned the Republic. You mentioned maybe when it took a form of empire and maybe there was the age of kings. What are the different periods of this Roman, let’s call it, what? The big-
Gregory Aldrete
(00:16:37)
Roman history.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:38)
Roman history. And a lot of people just call that whole period Roman Empire loosely, right?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:16:44)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:44)
Maybe can you speak to the different periods?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:16:45)
Yes, absolutely. Conventionally, Roman history is divided into three chronological periods. The first of those is from 773 BC to 509 BC, which is called the monarchy. All the periods get their names from the form of government. This is the earliest phase of Roman history. It’s when Rome is mostly just a fairly undistinguished little collection of mud huts, honestly, just like dozens of other cities of little mud huts in Italy. That early phase, about 750 to around 500 BC is the monarchy. They’re ruled by kings.

(00:17:20)
Then there’s this revolution, they kick out the kings, they become a Republic. That lasts from 500 BC roughly to about either 31 or 27 BC, depending what date you pick as most important, but about 500 years. The Republic is when they have a Republican form of government. Some people idealize this as Rome’s greatest period, and the big thing in that period is Rome first expands to conquer all of Italy in the first 250 years of that 500 year stretch. And then, the second 250 years, they conquer all the Mediterranean basin roughly. This is this time of enormous successful Roman conquest and expansion.

(00:17:59)
And then, you have another switch up and they become ruled by emperors. Back to the idea of one guy in charge, though the Romans try to pretend it’s not like a king, it’s something else. Anyway, we can get into that. But they’re very touchy about kings, so they have emperors. Roman Empire, the first emperor is Augustus. Starts off as Octavian, switches his name to Augustus when he becomes emperor. He kind of sets the model for what happens.

Rome’s expansion


(00:18:26)
And then, how long does the Roman Empire last? That’s one of those great questions. The conventional answer is usually sometime in the fifth century, so the 400s AD, so about another 500 years, let’s say. So nice kind of even division, 500 years of Republic, 500 years of empire. But you can make very good cases for lots of other dates for the end of the Roman Empire. I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, so another 1500 years, but that’s a whole other discussion. But so that’s your three phases of Roman history,
Lex Fridman
(00:18:59)
And in some fundamental way, it still persists today, given how much of its ideas define our modern life, especially in the western world.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:19:08)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:09)
Can you speak to the relationship between ancient Greece and Roman Empire, both in the chronological sense and in the influence sense?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:19:19)
Well, I mean, ancient Greece comes… The classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC. That’s when you have the great achievements of Athens. It becomes the first sort of true democracy. They defeat the Persian invasions. A lot of famous stuff happens in the 400s, let’s say. So that is contemporaneous with Rome, but the Greek civilization, in a sense, is peaking earlier. And one of the things that happens is that Greece ends up being conquered by Rome in that second half of the Roman Republic between 250 and about 30 BC. And so, Greece falls under the control of Rome and Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture. They themselves see the Greeks as a superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated, great art, great philosophy, all this. Another thing about the Romans is they’re super competitive. One of the engines that drives Romans is this public competitiveness, especially among the upper classes. They care more about their status and standing among their peers than they do about money or even their own life, so there’s this intense competition.

(00:20:36)
When they conquer Greece, Greek culture just becomes one more arena of competition. Romans will start to learn Greek. They’ll start to memorize Homer. They’ll start to see who can quote more passages of Homer in Greek in their letters to one another because that increases their status. Rome absorbs Greek civilization, and then the two get fused together.

(00:20:59)
The other thing I should mention in terms of influences that’s really huge on Rome is the Etruscans, and this is one that comes along before the Greeks. The Etruscans were this kind of mysterious culture that flourished in northern Italy before the Romans, so way back 800 BC. They were much more powerful than the Romans. They were a loose confederation of states. For awhile, the Romans even seemed to have been under Etruscan control. The last of the Roman kings was really an Etruscan guy pretty clearly. But the Etruscans end up giving to Rome, or you could say Rome ends up stealing perhaps, a lot of elements of Etruscan culture. Many of the things that we today think of as distinctively Roman, our cliches of what a Roman is, actually aren’t truly Roman, they’re stuff they stole from the Etruscans. Just a couple examples, the toga. What do you think of a Roman? It’s a guy wearing a toga, and the toga is the mark of a Roman citizen. Well, that’s what Etruscan kings wore, probably.

(00:21:59)
Gladiator games. We associate those very intensely with the Romans. Well, they probably stole that from the Etruscans. A lot of Roman religion. Jupiter is a thunder God, all sorts of divination. The Romans love to chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future, that comes from the Etruscans. Watching the flight of birds to predict the future, that comes from the Etruscans. There’s a lot of central elements of what we think of as Roman civilization, which actually are borrowings, let’s say, from these older, slightly mysterious Etruscans.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:33)
I mean, that’s a really powerful thing. It’s a powerful aspect of a civilization to be able to, we can call it stealing which is a negative connotation, but you can also see its integration basically. Yes, steal the best stuff from the peoples you conquer or the peoples that you interact with.

(00:22:53)
Not every empire does that. There’s a lot of nations and empires that when they conquer, they annihilate versus integrate. And so, it’s an interesting thing to be able to culturally… The form that the competitiveness takes is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas in culture versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:23:19)
Yeah, and I think you’ve exactly put your finger on one of the, let’s say, secrets of Rome’s success, which is that they’re very good at integrating non-Romans or non-Roman ideas and kind of absorbing them.

(00:23:34)
One of the things that’s absolutely crucial early in Roman history, when they’re just one of these tiny little mud hut villages fighting dozens of other mud hut villages in Italy, why does Rome emerge as the dominant one? Well, one of the things they do is when they do finally succeed in conquering somebody else, let’s say another Italianate people, they do something very unusual because the normal procedure in the ancient world is let’s say you conquer another city, you often kill most of the men, enslave the women and children, steal all the stuff, right? The Romans, at least with the Italians, conquer the other city, and sometimes they’ll do that, but sometimes they’ll also then say, “All right, we’re going to now leave you alone and we’re going to share with you a degree of Roman citizenship.” Sometimes they’d make them full citizens, more often they’d make them something we call half citizens, which is kind of what sounds like you get some of the privileges of citizenship, but not all of them. Sometimes they would just make them allies, but they would sort of incorporate them into the Roman project.

(00:24:33)
They wouldn’t necessarily ask for money or taxes, which is weird too. But instead, the one thing they would always, always demand from the conquered cities in Italy is that they provide troops to the Roman army. The army becomes this mechanism of Romanization where you pull in foreigners, you make them like you, and then they end up fighting for you. Early on, the secret to Rome’s military success is not that they have better generals. It’s not that they have better equipment. It’s not that they have better strategy or tactics. It’s that they have limitless manpower, relatively speaking. They lose a war and they just come back and fight again, and they lose again, and they come back and they fight again, and eventually they just wear down their enemies because their key thing of their policy is we incorporate the conquered people.

(00:25:25)
The great moment that just exemplifies this is pretty late in this process. They’ve been doing this for 250 years just about, and they’ve gotten down to the toe of Italy, they’re conquering the very last cities down there. One of the last cities is actually a Greek city. It’s a Greek colony. It’s a wealthy city, and so when the Romans show up on the doorstep and are about to attack them, they do what any rich Greek colony or city does, they go out and hire the best mercenaries they can. They hire this guy who thinks of himself as the new Alexander the Great, a man named Pyrrhus of Epirus. He’s a mercenary. He is actually related to Alexander distantly. He has a terrific army, top-notch army. He’s got elephants. He’s got all the latest military technology. The Romans come and fight a battle against him, and Pyrrhus knows what he’s doing. He wipes out the Romans.

(00:26:12)
He thinks, “Okay, now we’ll have a peace treaty. We’ll negotiate something. I can go home.” But the Romans won’t even talk. They go to their Italian allies and half-citizens, they raise a second army, they send it against Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus says, ‘Okay, these guys are slow learners. Fine.” He fights them again, wipes them out, thinks, “Now we’ll have a peace treaty.” But the Romans go back to the allies, raise a third army and send it after Pyrrhus. When he sees that third army coming, he says, “I can’t afford to win another battle. I win these battles, but each time I lose some of my troops and I can’t replace them, and the Romans just keep sprouting new armies.” So he gives up and goes home.

(00:26:55)
Rome kind of loses every battle, but wins the war. Pyrrhus one of, actually, his officers has a great line as they’re going back to Greece. He says, “Fighting the Romans is like fighting a hydra,” and a hydra is this mythological monster that when you cut off one head, two more grow in its place, so you can just never win.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:17)
That’s fascinating.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:27:18)
So that’s the secret to Rome’s early success.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:21)
It’s not the military strategy. It’s not some technological asymmetry of power. It’s literally just manpower.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:27:28)
Mm-hm. Early on.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:28)
Early on.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:27:30)
And later, the Romans get very good… We’re into the empire phase now. Once they have emperors into the AD era of kind of doing the same thing by drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented local leaders of the people they conquer. When they go someplace, let’s say they conquer tribe of what to them as barbarians, they’ll often take the sons of the barbarian chiefs, bring them to Rome and raise them as Romans.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:02)
Damn.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:28:02)
And so, it’s that whole way of turning your enemies into your own strength. The Romans start giving citizenship to areas they conquer. Once they move out of Italy, they aren’t as free with the citizenship, but eventually they do. They make Spain, lots of cities in Spain, they make all citizens and other places. And soon enough, the Roman emperors and the Roman senators are not Italians, they’re coming from Spain or North Africa or Germany or wherever.

(00:28:32)
As early as the second century AD of the Roman Empire, so the first set of emperors, the first 100 years were all Italians, but right away at the beginning of the second century AD you have Trajan, who’s from Spain. The next guy, Hadrian’s from Spain, and then a century later, you have Septimius Severus, who’s from North Africa. You would later get guys from Syria. I mean, the actual leaders of the Roman Empire are coming from the provinces.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:56)
That’s brilliant.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:28:57)
And it’s that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for you, making them want to be part of your empire, that I think is one of Rome’s strengths.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:07)
Taking the sons is a brilliant idea and bringing them to Rome, because a kind of generational integration.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:29:15)
The Roman military, later in the empire, is this giant machine of half a million people that takes in foreigners and churns out Romans. The army is composed of two groups. You have the Roman Legionaries who are all citizens, but then you have another group that’s just as large, about 250,000 of each, 250,000 Legionaries, 250,000 of the second group called Auxiliaries. Auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered warlike people that the Romans enlist as Auxiliaries to fight with them. They serve side by side with the Roman legions for 25 years. At the end of that time, when they’re discharged, what do they get? They get Roman citizenship, and their kids then tend to become Roman Legionaries.

Punic wars


(00:30:04)
Again, you’re taking the most warlike and potentially dangerous of your enemies, kind of absorbing them, putting through this thing for 25 years where they learn Latin, they learn Roman customs, they maybe marry someone who’s already a Roman or a Latin woman. They have kids within the system, their kids become Roman Legionaries, and you’ve thoroughly integrated what could have been your biggest enemies, right? Your greatest threat.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:28)
That’s just brilliant, brilliant process of integration. Is that what explains the rapid expansion during the late Republic?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:30:36)
No. There it’s more the indigenous Italians who are in the army at that point. They haven’t really expanded the Auxiliaries yet. That’s more something that happens in the Empire. Yeah, so back it up. We have that first 250 years of the Roman Republic, from about 500 to let’s say 250 BC. And in that period, they gradually expand throughout Italy, conquer the other Italian cities, who are pretty much like them. They’re people who already speak similar languages or the same language, have the same gods. It’s easy to integrate them. That’s the ones they make the half citizens and allies.

(00:31:13)
Then in the second half of that period, from about 250 to let’s say 30 BC, Rome goes outside of Italy, and this is a new world because now they’re encountering people who are really fundamentally different. So, true others. They do not have the same gods. They don’t speak the same language. They have fundamentally different systems of economy, everything.

(00:31:34)
Rome first expands in the Western Mediterranean, and there their big rival is the city state of Carthage, which is another city founded almost the same time as Rome that has also been a young, vigorously expanding aggressive empire. In the Western Empire at this time, you have two sort of rival groups, and they’re very different because the Romans are these citizen soldier farmers…
Gregory Aldrete
(00:32:00)
Because the Romans are these citizen soldier farmers, so the Romans are all these small farmers, that’s the basis of their economy, and it’s the Romans who serve in the army. So the person who is a citizen, is also really by main profession, a farmer, and then in times of war, becomes a soldier.

(00:32:19)
Carthage is an oligarchy of merchants, so it’s a very small citizen body. They make their money through maritime trade, so they have ships that go all over the Mediterranean. They don’t have a large army of Carthaginians. Instead, they hire mercenaries mostly to fight for them, so it’s almost these two rival systems. It’s different philosophies, different economies, everything.

(00:32:45)
Rome is strong on land. Carthage is strong at sea. So there’s this dichotomy, but they’re both looking to expand and they repeatedly come into conflict as they expand. So Carthage is on the coast of North Africa, Rome’s in Central Italy. What’s right between them? The island of Sicily. So the first big war is fought purely dictated by geography. Who gets Sicily, Rome or Carthage? And Rome wins in the end, they get it, but Carthage is still strong. They’re not weakened. So Carthage is now looking to expand.

(00:33:16)
The next place to go is Spain. So they go and take Spain. Rome, meanwhile, is moving along the coast of what today’s France. Where are they going to meet up? On the border of Spain and France. And there’s a city, at this point in time called Saguntum. The second big war between Rome and Carthage is over. Who gets Saguntum?

(00:33:34)
So, I mean, you can just look at a map and see this stuff coming. Sometimes geography is inevitability, and I think in the course of the wars between Rome and Carthage called the Punic Wars, there is this geographic inevitability to them.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:47)
Can you speak to the Punic Wars? There’s so many levels on which we can talk about this, but why was Rome victorious?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:33:56)
Well, the Punic Wars really almost always comes down to the second Punic War. There’s three. There’s three Punic Wars. The first is over Sicily, Rome wins. The second is the big one, and it’s the big one because Carthage at this point in time, just by sheer luck, coughs up one of the greatest military geniuses in all of history.

(00:34:15)
This guy, Hannibal Barca, he was actually the son of the Carthaginian general who fought Rome for Sicily. Hamilcar was his father, but Hannibal is this just genius, just absolute military genius. He goes to Spain. He’s the one who kind of organizes stuff there, and now he knows the second war with Rome is inevitable. And so, the question is how do you take down Rome? He’s smart. He’s seen Rome’s strength. He knows it’s the Italian allies.

(00:34:45)
So Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this?

(00:35:06)
Hannibal’s plan is, I’m not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I’m going to invade Italy. So I’m going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire, and my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they’ll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me, because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back, so this is a reasonable plan.

(00:35:37)
So Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants, dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in Northern Italy. Romans send an army. Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story, sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes them out.

(00:35:57)
Rome gets clever this time. They say, okay, Hannibal’s different. We’re going to take two years, raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal. So they do this, and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history, Hannibal’s facing this army of 80,000 Romans about, and he comes up with a strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it’s this famous strategy where he basically sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides, and in one afternoon at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans.

(00:36:36)
Now, just to put that in perspective, that’s more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam. I mean, the Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted three days and was one of the bloodiest battles of civil war, I think the actual deaths at that were maybe like 15,000. So this is a bloodshed of an almost unimaginable scale.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:01)
It’s also brutal…
Gregory Aldrete
(00:37:02)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:03)
… just to slaughter.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:37:03)
I mean, it’s just mind boggling to think of that. So now, this is Rome’s darkest hour. This is why the second Punic War is important, because there’s that Nietzsche phrase, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” this is the closest Rome comes to death in the history of the Republic. Hannibal almost kills Rome, but no, it’s not much of a spoiler.

(00:37:28)
Rome’s going to survive, and from this point on, they’re going to be unbeatable, but this is the crisis. This is the crucible. This is the furnace that Rome passes through, that is the dividing point between when they’re one more up and coming empire and when they’re clearly the dominant power in the Mediterranean.

(00:37:44)
So what do they do about Hannibal? Well, they’re smart. We’re not going to fight Hannibal. We’re not going to give Hannibal the chance to kill more Romans. So they adopt a strategy that they’ll follow Hannibal, when they raise a couple more armies, follow Hannibal round, but whenever Hannibal turns and tries to attack them, the Romans just back off. No, thank you. We’re not going to let you give you a chance.

(00:38:07)
Meanwhile though, they’re not scared of other Carthaginians, so they raise a couple more armies and they send these to Spain, for example, and start attacking the Carthaginian holdings there. And by luck or necessity, Rome comes up with its own brilliant commander at this point, a guy named Scipio, and he wins victories in Spain, conquers Spain. Then, he crosses into North Africa and starts to conquer that and ends up threatening Carthage directly.

(00:38:34)
And poor Hannibal, undefeated in Italy, has now been walking up and down Italy or marching up and down Italy for 12 years looking for another fight, and the Romans won’t give it to them. They’ve been attacking all these other areas and chipping away at Carthaginian power.

Conquering Greece


(00:38:52)
So finally, after more than a decade in Italy, Hannibal is called back to defend the homeland, defend Carthage from Scipio. The two meet in a big battle. This should be one of the great battles of all times the Battle of Zama, but Hannibal’s guys are kind of old by this point. Scipio has all the advantages. He wins. Carthage is defeated. So that’s pretty much the end of Carthage.

(00:39:15)
The city survives, and then 50 years later, the Romans wipe it out, but that’s not much of a war. But from this moment on, from the second Punic War, which ends in 201 BC, Rome is undisputably the most powerful force nation in the Mediterranean world, and having conquered the West, they’re now going to turn to the East, which is the Greek world, and the Greek world is older. It’s richer, it’s the rich part, half of the Mediterranean, it’s culturally more sophisticated. It’s the world left by Alexander the Great, that’s ruled by the descendants of his generals.

(00:39:50)
And the Greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the Romans. I mean, to the Greeks, the Romans are these uncouth sort of savage barbarians, but they’re going to get a real shock because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal. And when they go East, they’re going to just defeat the Greeks relatively easily, one after the other.

(00:40:11)
And there’s a famous historian named Polybius who is a Greek whose city was captured by the Romans. He later becomes a friend to the Scipio family. He actually teaches some of the Scipio children about Greek culture. And he writes a history of Rome and his motivation for writing this is he says, at the beginning of this book, he says, “Surely there can be no one so incurious as to not want to understand how the Romans could have conquered the entire Greek world in 53 years,” because that seems unimaginable to him.

Scipio vs Hannibal


(00:40:46)
So he’s writing this entire history as a way to try and understand how did the Romans do it? We were these wonderful superior people, and they came around in 50 years, bang, that’s the end of us. So that’s his motivation.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:59)
Could you maybe speak to any interesting details of the military genius of Hannibal or Scipio? At that time, what are some interesting aspects this double envelopment idea?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:41:10)
I mean, Hannibal is good because he understood how to use different troop types and to play to their strengths and how to use terrain. So I mean, this is basic military stuff, but he did it really well. So one is his victories against the Romans, for example, is when the Romans are marching along the edge of a lake and their army is strung out in marching formations.

(00:41:32)
They’re not kind of in combat formation, but they’re strung out along the edge of this lake. It’s misty. There’s not good visibility, and he ambushes them along this lakeside, so Lake Trasimene, and it’s just using the terrain, understanding this. Again, Hannibal is very much outnumbered, but he’s able to use the terrain and to take the enemy by surprise.

(00:41:51)
At Cannae, he’s working against the expectations. So the traditional thing you do in the ancient world is the two armies would line up on opposite sides of a field, you’d put your best troops in the middle, you’d put your cavalry on the sides, you’d put your lightly armed skirmishers beyond those, and then the two sides kind of smack together, and the good troops fight the good, and you see who wins.

(00:42:15)
Now, Hannibal is hugely outnumbered by this giant phalanx of heavy infantry, which is what the Romans specialized in. They’re very good at sort of heavily armed foot soldiers. So he knows I don’t want to go up against that. I don’t have that many of that troop type. My guys aren’t as good as the Romans anyway.

(00:42:33)
So he lines up some of his less good troops in the center against the big menacing Roman phalanx, and he tells them, “Okay, when the Romans come, you’re not really trying to win, just hold them up. Just delay them,” and even tells them you can give ground, so you can retreat and sort of let the line form a big kind of C-shaped crescents, let the Romans sort of advance into you, but just hold that line.

(00:42:58)
And meanwhile, he puts his cavalry and his good troops on the side, and so on the sides, those good troops defeat the Romans, and then they kind of circle in behind the Romans and attack that big menacing Roman phalanx from the rear where it’s very vulnerable. And so, Hannibal catches the Romans in this sort of giant cauldron just with people closing in from both sides, and they get pressed together. They can’t fight properly, they panic, and they’re all slaughtered.

Heavy infantry vs Cavalry


(00:43:27)
And that strategy of double envelopment, of sort of going around both sides becomes the model for all kinds of military strategies throughout the rest of history. I mean, the Germans use this in their Blitzkrieg in World War II, a lot of it was kind of that go around the sides and envelop the enemy. On the eastern front, they had a bunch of these cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the Soviet, the Russian army, and do the same thing.

(00:43:54)
Supposedly even in the Gulf War, it was part of the US strategy for the invasion of Iraq to do this kind double envelopment maneuver. So it’s something that for the rest of military history, has been an inspiration to other armies.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:06)
Can you speak to maybe, the difference between heavy infantry and cavalry, the usefulness of it in the ancient world?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:44:12)
The ancient world, sort of from the Greeks through the Romans, there’s this consistent line of focusing on heavy infantry. So going back to Greece when they’re fighting, let’s say Persia, which at the time, was the superpower of the ancient world and vastly richer, vastly larger than Ancient Greece, tons more men, but the Persians tended to be archers, tended to be light horsemen tended to be light infantry.

(00:44:40)
Whereas the Greeks specialized in what are called hop lights, which is a kind of infantrymen with very heavy body armor, a helmet, a spear, and a really big heavy shield. And they would get in that formation where you kind of make the shields overlap and just form this solid mass bristling with spear points and just slowly kind of march forward and grind up your enemy in front of you. And so, that’s that sort of block of heavy infantry.

(00:45:07)
The advantage is head on against other things, they tend to win. The disadvantage is it’s slow moving. It’s vulnerable from the sides and the rear, so you got to protect those, but if you can keep frontally faced, it’s pretty much invincible. And that’s taken even further by Alexander the Great who comes up with the idea, well, what if we even give them a longer spear? So Greek spears were six to eight feet long. Alexander the Great, arms his armies with the sarissa, which is this 15 foot, almost a pike, this extra long spear.

(00:45:41)
And so, when the spear is that long, you don’t even hardly need the shields anymore. So it’s just this incredibly powerful thing in frontal attack, and that’s what he uses to make himself ruler of the known world. He goes and conquers the Persian Empire and makes himself the Persian king of kings with this phalanx of troops armed with the sarissa. So that’s very powerful.

(00:46:03)
The Romans go a little bit different route. They have heavy infantry, but they focus more on fighting with short swords, so it’s get up close and kind of stab. And the other thing the Romans do is they focus on flexibility and subdividing their army. So Alexander’s phalanx was a mass of let’s say, 5,000 guys and it was one unit.

(00:46:27)
The Roman army is organized in an ever decreasing number of subunits. So you have a group of eight guys who are a contubernia, the men who share a tent, you take 10 of those and they form a century of 80 men. You take a bunch of those and you form a cohort. If you forget a bunch of those, you form a legion.

(00:46:44)
So the Romans are able to subdivide their army, and the big sticking point comes at 197 BC at the Battle of Cynoscephalae, when the Roman Legion goes up against one of the descendants of Alexander the Great, who’s using his military system. So this is the new Roman system with flexibility versus the old invincible Alexander system with the heavily armed sarissa with those long 15-foot poles.

Armor


(00:47:10)
And the key moment in the battle is where they lock together And in a head-on clash, the Macedonians are going to win, but the Romans have the flexibility to break off a little section of their army, run around to the side, and attack that formation from the side, and they win the battle. So they prove tactically superior because of their flexibility. So it’s always development and counter development in military history.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:34)
A fascinating, brutal testing, ground of tactics and technology
Gregory Aldrete
(00:47:38)
Adaptation, you have to keep adapting.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:41)
That’s, I think, the key thing. One of the fascinating things about your work, you study Roman life life in the ancient world, but also the details, like we mentioned, you are an expert in armor. So what kind of, maybe you could speak to weapons and most importantly, armor that were used by the Romans or by people in the ancient world.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:48:05)
I do military history. So I mean, the Romans specialized in, I mean, early on they have pretty random armor, and it’s not standardized. I mean, remember, there’s no factories in the ancient world, so nobody’s cranking out 10,000 units of exactly the same armor. Each one is handmade. Now, there can be a degree of standardization, even as early as Alexander, there was a certain amount of standardization, but each one is still handmade, and that’s important to keep in mind, each weapon, each piece of armor.

(00:48:34)
Armor develops over time to fit the tactics. So the Greek hoplites, are very heavy armor. The Roman infantrymen early in the public is lighter. Eventually they get this typical sort of chain mail shirt, helmet shield, the classic sort of Roman legionary, I would say, is the one of the first and second centuries AD, so the early Roman Empire, and this is the guy who wore bands of steel arranged in sort of bands around their body. So it looks almost like a lobster’s shell, right? And this is a thing called the lorica segmentata.

(00:49:06)
So it’s solid steel, which is very good protection, but it’s flexible because it has these individual bands that provide a lot of movement. And then, you have a helmet, you have a square shield that’s kind of curved, and you have the short sword, the Roman gladius and that’s the classic Roman legionary. Later, more things develop.

(00:49:26)
My personal relationship with armor is I got, really by accident, involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that was used, especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the linothorax, which apparently was made only out of linen and glue. So this seems a little odd that that’s not the sort of material once you want metal or something, but we had clear literary references that people, including Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander mosaic found at Pompeii that shows him wearing one of these funny types of armor.

(00:50:05)
The catch is none survived. It’s organic materials. So we don’t have any of them and archaeologists like to study things that survive. So we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze, Roman armor made of steel or sort of proto steel, but this thing, this linothorax was a mystery. And one of my undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartel, had a real, well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:34)
As one should.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:50:35)
He had Alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek, and he was a smart student. He was really smart. And so, he, one summer, made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexander just for fun. And he said, “Can you give me some articles so I could do a better job?” So he used some scholarly articles about this armor, and with typical academic arrogance, I said, “Why, Scott, of course I will. I’ll give you some references,” and I went and looked and there weren’t any. So at that point, I was like, “Huh, tell you what, why don’t you and I look into this and try to do a reconstruction using only the materials they would’ve had in the ancient world?” And little did I know at the time, I thought, maybe I’ll get an article out of this, I mean, it ended up being a tenure project involving 150 students, a couple dozen other faculty members, and having three documentaries made out of it. And Scott and I ended up writing a scholarly book on this. So this is how, you never know where your next project’s going to come from.

(00:51:34)
So it started with this undergraduate turned into this huge thing, but it’s what we did. We first said, “All right, what are all the sources for this armor?” And in the end, we found 65 accounts of it in ancient literature by 40 different authors. So we have literary descriptions, and then we looked at ancient art, and we were able to identify about a thousand images in ancient art, in vase paintings, pottery, bronze sculpture, tomb paintings, all these different things showing this armor.

(00:52:05)
And then, using those two things, we tried to backwards engineer a pattern to say, “Well, if this is what the end product look like, what does it have to look like when you make it?” And then we tried to reconstruct one of these things using only the glue and materials. So we had to use animal glues, rabbit glue. We had to end up sort of making our own linen, which comes from the flax plant. So we had to grow flax, harvest it, using only techniques in the ancient world, so modern flax goes through chemical processes. No, we had to do this the old-fashioned way, spin it into thread, so the thread into fabric, glue it all together.

(00:52:41)
And then, the fun part was once we made these things, we subjected them to ballistics testing. So we shot them with arrows, which again were wooden reconstruction arrows, using bronze arrowheads that were based on arrowheads found on ancient battlefields to determine how good protection would this thing have been. And of course, the kind of fun one that everyone always likes and that the documentaries always want is at one point they’re like, “Well, can you put Scott in one of these and shoot him?” And we’re like, “Okay.” I mean, at that point, we’ve done about a thousand test shots. I grew up shooting bows and arrows. I knew exactly how far that was going to go. So it’s one of these, don’t do this at home kids.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:19)
So there’s a million questions to ask here, but in general, how well, in terms of ballistics, does it work? Can it withstand arrows or direct strikes from swords and axes and stuff like that?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:53:30)
Bottom line is a one centimeter thick linothorax, laminated, or even sewn. It doesn’t have to be laminated. Layer of linen is about as good protection as two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest, comparable, body armor of bronze at the time. And we’re talking fourth century, fifth century BC here, so classical and Hellenistic Greece, and that would’ve protected you from, let’s say, random arrow strikes on the battlefield. So you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn’t have gone through.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:06)
What are the benefits? Is there a major weight difference?
Gregory Aldrete
(00:54:09)
Yes. So the benefits of this are, it’s much lighter than metal armor. So the linothorax is about 11 pounds. A bronze cuirass of comparable protection would’ve been about 24 to 6 pounds. The chain mail shirt would be about 28, 27 pounds. It’s cooler. I mean, the Mediterranean is a hot place with the hot sun. Even today, a linen shirt is something you wear when you want to be cool. So it’s much lighter, that gives your troops greater endurance on the battlefield. They can run farther, fight longer. It’s cheaper. You don’t need a blacksmith who’s a specialist to make it.

(00:54:46)
In fact, probably, this is interesting, any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these because they were the ones who spun thread and sewed it into fabric. So I can easily see in a household a mother making this for her son, a wife making it for her husband. So it’s a form of armor you could have made domestically that would’ve been maybe not the greatest armor, but pretty good, pretty comparable to bronze armor.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:14)
And it’s amazing that you used all the materials they had at the time and none of the modern techniques, but I should probably say, maybe you can speak to that, they were probably much better at doing that than you are, right? Because again, generational, it’s a skill. It’s a skill that probably has practiced across decades, across centuries [inaudible 00:55:32].
Gregory Aldrete
(00:55:32)
I mean, in terms of producing the fabric, I’m sure they could do it 10 times faster than we could just, that’s a speed thing, but it’s still incredibly labor-intensive where I think there’s a big difference between our reconstruction and ancient ones is in the glue. So we ended up using a kind of least common denominator glue. We used rabbit glue because it would’ve been available anywhere and it’s cheap.

(00:55:55)
But in the ancient world, they did have basically the equivalent of super glues. I mean, we found, for example, a helmets that were fished out river in Germany that had metal parts glued together that after 2,000 years of immersion and water were still glued together. So they had some great glues. We just don’t know what the recipes for them were. So we went the opposite tack and said, “Well, we’re just going to make something that we know they could have made.” So it was at least this good, you know what I’m saying?
Lex Fridman
(00:56:22)
But actually, this is a materials thing, but I think glue, aside from helping glue things together, it can also be a thing that serves as armor. So if you glue things correctly, the way it permeates the material that is gluing, can strengthen the material…
Gregory Aldrete
(00:56:44)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:44)
… the integrity of the material. That’s an art and the size probably that they understood deeply.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:56:48)
The process of lamination did add something. So there’s actually a huge debate among scholars and actually a sort of amateur archeologist that was this linothorax thing glued together or was it simply sewn together? Was it composite, partially linen, partially leather, or other materials? And my honest answer is I think it’s all of the above, because again, every piece of armor in the ancient world was an individual creation.

(00:57:11)
So I think if you had some spare leather, you put that in. If you wanted to make one that was just sewn together, or even quilted stuffed with stuff you do that, maybe you were good at gluing stuff, you use that. So I think there’s no one answer. We investigated one possibility because we just had limited time and money and resources, but I think all these other things existed at the same time and we’re variants of it.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:34)
Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I love it. Sort of answering really important questions about, in this case, armor about military equipment and technology that archeologists can’t answer by using all the literary, so all the sources you can to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time, and actually doing ballistic testing. It’s really cool. It’s really cool that you see that there’s a hole in the literature and nobody studied it, and going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncover this. I don’t know, I think it’s an amazing mystery about the ancient world.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:58:18)
I mean, shifting from just sort of Roman history in general to my research that I’ve done as a scholar, the theme that runs throughout my scholarship is practical stuff. I’m interested, how did this actually work in the ancient world? So there’s people who are much more theoretical, who look at the symbolic meaning of something. I’m simpler. I just want to know how did this work? So almost all of my books that I’ve written, have started with some just how did something work, and I’m trying to just figure out that aspect of it, and that’s just, maybe it’s a personality thing.

(00:58:48)
I also have a sciency background, so I think I’ve used a lot of that. Even though I’m a humanist and a historian, I’ve used a lot of hard science in my work. I did a book on floods where I had to get really heavy into vectors of disease and hydraulics and engineering and all that stuff, and I think, again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background, helps with those sorts of projects.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:12)
Well, like you said, I think the details help you understand deeply the big picture of history. And I mean, Alexander the Great wore this thing.
Gregory Aldrete
(00:59:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:19)
This is-
Gregory Aldrete
(00:59:20)
And I should say by the way, it does drop out of use around Roman times. And I think what’s going on there is technology that with bronze, it’s hard to keep a sharp edge on things, but once you get into metals, which approximate steel, you can get sharper, and a key factor to penetrating fabric is the edge on the arrowhead.

(00:59:43)
So as soon as you start to get something more like a razor edge, it’s going to go through it more easily. Also, there’s changes in the bows that are being used. You start to get eastern horse archers showing up with composite bows, which are much more powerful. And so, it just becomes outdated as frontline military equipment. What’s interesting is by the Roman period, people are still wearing it, but it’s now things like when I go hunting, if I’m hunting lions, I wear this. There’s an actual source that says, “It’s really good for hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and stops them from penetrating. One emperor wears one of these under his toga. It’s kind of like a, not bulletproof vest, but stab proof vest. So again…

Alexander the Great

Lex Fridman
(01:00:22)
Awesome.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:00:22)
… it’s not to fight in the frontline of legions, but it’ll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So it still has those uses where you’re not up against top line military equipment
Lex Fridman
(01:00:33)
To honor aforementioned undergraduate student who loves Alexander the Great, we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for a little bit. Why was he successful, do you think, as a conqueror, probably one of the greatest conquerors in the history of humanity?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:00:49)
Yeah, and I mean, that is then he one of the greatest heroes or one of the greatest villains in humanity, too. It’s like Julius Caesar. He’s famous for conquering Gaul. Well, about a million people were killed and a million enslaved in that. So does it make him a horrible person or one of our heroes?

(01:01:04)
But Alexander is a combination of two things, one is he really just was a skilled individual, and he was one of those guys who had it all. He was smart, he was athletic, and he was supremely charismatic. I mean, it’s obviously one of these people that would walk into a room and everyone just kind of gravitates to him. He had that magic that made him an effective leader.

(01:01:25)
And secondly, he was lucky because it wasn’t all him. He inherited a system created by his father, Philip II. So he was in the right time at the right place and had this instrument placed in his hands, and then he had the intelligence and the charisma to go use it. So it’s one of these coming together of different things, but often his father’s contribution, I think, is not recognized as much as it is.

(01:01:52)
It’s his father who reformed the Macedonian army, who came up with that system of equipping them with the sarissa, this extra long spear that made them really effective, created the mixed army. So one of the keys to Alexander’s successes, in a tactical sense, is that his army was composed of different elements: heavy cavalry, light cavalry, heavy infantry, light infantry, missile troops, and he understand that he can use these in different and flexible ways on the battlefield; whereas a lot of warfare before then had just been, you line up, two sides smashed together.

(01:02:25)
So he did clever things with this army that was a better tool than others did. And then, he was just supremely ambitious. I mean, he cared about his fame, which I guess his ego, but he clearly cared about that more than he did about things like money. He was indifferent to that, and he did have a grand vision. So he did have this vision of trying to unite the world, both politically under his control, but also culturally, and this is an interesting thing.

(01:02:55)
So he was very open, in fact, insistent of trying to meld together the best elements of all the different cultures. So he, himself, was a Macedonian, but he admired Greek culture. So he pretty much adopted Greek culture as his own. When he conquers Persia, he starts adapting elements of Persian culture. He dresses in Persian clothing. He marries a Persian woman. He sort of forces thousands of his troops to marry local women. He appoints Persians to positions of power. He integrates Persian units into his military. He really wanted to fuse all these things together. And some people see this as a very enlightened vision that, “Oh, he’s not just, I want to conquer people and now they’re my slaves,” that he was really trying to create this one culture that was sort of the best of everything. Others see it, of course, as a form of cultural imperialism. You’re destroying other cultures and trying to warp or twist them into something, but what I think is interesting is that this vision he had of uniting cultures creates very problematic tensions among his own followers because the-
Gregory Aldrete
(01:04:00)
Tensions among his own followers, because the Macedonians, his original troops, did not like this on the whole. They wanted the old model where we conquer you, you’re our slaves. We don’t want to share stuff with you. We don’t want you joining us in the army. We don’t want you appointed to positions of power. We are your conquerors and that’s it. And so, Alexander had to deal with a lot of friction from his own oldest, most loyal elements at the way he was being in their eyes, too generous to the conquered.

(01:04:31)
So Alexander is one of these interesting personalities because every generation sees him in a new light and focuses on different things. So for some, he’s this enlightened visionary who was taught by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, and they say, “Well, this influenced him.” Others see him as an egomaniacal warmonger, just I’m out to kill and gain glory. There was a book a couple of decades ago, it says, “Oh, he’s just an alcoholic,” which he probably was. Yeah. So you get all these competing images, and the great thing is, we don’t really know what the true Alexander was or what his motivations were. It’s a mixed message.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:09)
Why do you think the Roman Empire lasted while the Greek Empire as the Alexander expanded, did not?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:05:21)
That’s a clear answer. So Alexander’s Empire fragmented the moment he died. And so his empire was all about personal loyalty. It was his charisma holding it together, his personality. And he completely failed to create a structure so that it would continue after his death. And of course, he died young. He didn’t think he would die when he did, but still, you should put something in place.

(01:05:44)
So his was a flash in the pan. It was, he had this spectacular conquest in 10 years. He conquered what was then most of the known world, but he had no permanent structure in place. He didn’t really deal with the issue of succession. It fell apart instantly. The Romans are much more about building a structure. I mean, as we talked about a little, they were very good about incorporating the people they conquered into the Roman project. I mean, they’re oppressive, they’re imperialistic as well. Let’s not whitewash them. I mean, they had moments when they would just wipe out entire cities. But on the whole, they were much more about trying to bring people into the Roman world. And I think that was one of their strengths, is that they were open to integration and bringing in different people to keep rejuvenating themselves.

Roman law

Lex Fridman
(01:06:34)
One of the most influential developments from the Roman Republic was their legal system. And as you mentioned, it’s one of the things that still lasted to this day in many of its elements. So it started with the Twelve Tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this legal system and the Twelve Tables?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:06:51)
Yeah. I mean, Roman law is one of their most significant, maybe the most significant legacy they have on the modern world. So I mean, just to start at that end of it, something like 90% of the world uses a legal system, which is either directly or indirectly derived from the Roman one. So even countries that you wouldn’t think are really using Roman law, kind of are, because all the terminology, all that comes from Roman law. And the Romans, their first law code was this thing, the Twelve Tables. So this is way back in the middle republic and it was a typical early law code. So most of the stuff it concerns are agricultural concerns. So if I have a tree and its fruit drops onto your property, who owns the fruit? If my cow wanders into your field and eats your grain, am I responsible? I mean, I love these early law codes that are all about this farmer problems.

(01:07:45)
But law codes are hugely important because you need a law code to enable people to live in groups. So they’re the transitional thing that lets human beings live together without just resorting to anarchy. And most of the early law codes are agricultural, like Hammurabi’s Code in Mesopotamia. Most of them are retaliatory, meaning eye for an eye type justice. So you do something to me, it gets done to you. But they’re this necessary precondition for civilization, I would say, and the Twelve Tables is that. It’s a crude law code. It has a lot of goofy stuff in it. It has things about if you use magic, this is the punishment, but it’s that basic agrarian society law code. Now, that’s typical in many societies. Where the Romans are different is, they keep going. They keep developing their law code. And by the late republic, the Romans just get really into legal stuff.

(01:08:41)
I don’t know why, but the Romans are very methodical organized people. So maybe this has something to do with it. But their law code just keeps getting more and more complicated and keeps expanding to different areas. And they start to get jurists who write sort of theoretical things about Roman law. And eventually, it becomes this huge body both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws. And in the 6th century AD, so the 500s, the Roman Emperor, Justinian, who is an emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire by this point, the Byzantine Empire, compiles all this together into something that today, we just loosely called Justinian’s Code of Roman law, and that survives. And so that becomes the basis for almost all the legal systems around the world and it’s very complicated. And Roman law, I think is really fun. Because on the one hand, it’s really dry, but it also preserves these wonderful little vignettes of daily life. So you get these great, just entertaining law cases.

(01:09:42)
One of my favorite, and this may not even be a real case, this might be a hypothetical that they would use to train Romans or law students, is one day, a man sends a slave to the barber to get a shave. And the barber shop is adjacent to an athletic field and two guys are on the athletic field throwing a ball back and forth. And one of them throws the ball badly, the other guy fails to catch it. The ball flies into the barber shop, hits the hand of the barber, cuts the slave’s throat, he dies. Who’s liable under Roman law? Is it the athlete one who threw the ball badly? Is it athlete two who failed to catch it? Is it the barber who actually cut the slave’s throat? Is it the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his slave to get a shave in a place adjacent to a playing field? Or is it the Roman state rezoning a barber shop next to an athletic field? What do you think?
Lex Fridman
(01:10:35)
Well, do they resolve the complexity of that with the right answer?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:10:39)
We don’t have the answer.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:40)
We don’t have the answer.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:10:41)
It’s a case without the answer. We have various jurists commenting on this one, but we don’t have what was actually ruled. But it’s just a great little sort of vignette. And that’s how complicated Roman law got, that it was dealing with these weird, esoteric questions. There’s another one where a cow gets loose and runs into an apartment building, goes up onto the roof and crashes down three stories into a bar on the ground floor, and kicks open the taps to the wine jug and all the wine flows out. Who’s at fault? I mean, this seems to have happened, as crazy as it sounds. And Roman testamentary law is great. I mean, something like 20% of Roman law has to do with wills and what you do with the will and what makes a will valid. You have to have seven witnesses and you have to have a guy named, the liber [inaudible 01:11:31] to witness it, and the witnesses have to be adult men who can’t be blind and all this other stuff.

(01:11:36)
So it’s just great. It’s fun to mess around in this, but it always contains these little nuggets about what happens. I mentioned I wrote a book on floods. And there were all these law cases about if a flood strikes the city and picks up my piece of furniture in my apartment building and carries it out the door and deposits it in another apartment building, does that guy now own my furniture because it’s now legally within his apartment? Or can I go in there and repossess it because the flood took it out of my apartment? This is the stuff law is handled and that’s how sophisticated Roman law got.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:08)
Did corrupt, unfair things seep into the law?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:12:11)
Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s biased in favor of the wealthy, obviously. And I mean, Roman law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics. So one of the way that politicians, up and coming politicians, aspiring politicians could sort of make their name or become famous was by either prosecuting or defending people in Roman law courts. And especially during the late Roman Republic, you get a lot of really sensational, what today we’d call celebrity law cases. So this is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of very melodramatic kinds of things. And I mean, the most famous Roman order of all time, Cicero, is a guy who made his entire career in the law courts. And that’s how he made his reputation, was able to parlay that into political power and eventually was elected to the highest office in the Roman government. But it’s purely because of his skill, his facility, using words at giving speeches in public.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:13)
So they loved the puzzle and the game of law, the sort of untangling really complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws that help you tangle and untangle the situations.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:13:28)
Yes. And law cases, again, especially in the late republic, also became a form of public spectacle.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:33)
Right.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:13:33)
So Rome did not have law courts in a building locked away. A lot of these cases were held in the Roman Forum in the open, and audiences would just come to be entertained. And the people presenting the speeches, they were playing as much to this audience as they were to let’s say, the jury or a judge. And that became a big part of the cases. So that’s all tied up in the Roman orator too.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:57)
So we’re talking a bit about the details of the laws. Is there some big picture laws that are new innovations or profound things like all Roman citizens are equal before the law, founding fathers type in the United States, in the western world, these big legal ideas?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:14:17)
I think maybe one of the things that was really stressed in Roman law early on, even as early as the Twelve Tables, is the notion of Roman citizenship. So if you were a Roman citizen, it came with a set of both privileges and obligations. So the obligations where you’re supposed to fight in the Army, you were supposed to vote in elections. The privileges were, you had the protection of Roman law. And at least in theory, if not in practice, everybody was equal under that law. Now of course, keep in mind, we’re talking about men here. And even at the height of the Roman Empire, so let’s say second century AD, there were about 50 million human beings living within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, maybe 6 million were actual citizens. So we tend to go, “Oh, it’s so great. If you’re a citizen, you have all these things.”

(01:15:08)
Well, adult free men who are not slaves, who are not resident foreigners, they have this great stuff. And that’s always a tiny minority of all the human beings who existed in this society. But still, the notion, the notion of citizenship is huge. And citizens, for example, early on, you had to be tried at Rome if you were accused of something. And there’s this very famous moment in Sicily where an abusive governor who’s corrupt is punishing a citizen arbitrarily. And this person cries out, “Civis Romanus Sum,” meaning, “I am a Roman citizen.” And it really was this hugely loaded statement that that gives me protections. It is wrong for you to do this to me. It’s wrong for you to beat me because I am a citizen and that gives me certain protections. So that notion of citizenship is something that I think, the Romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a lot of civilizations today, where citizenship means something. It’s a special status.

Slavery

Lex Fridman
(01:16:13)
So you mentioned slaves, slavery, that’s something that is common throughout human history. What do we know about their relationship with slavery?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:16:25)
Well, Roman slavery, a couple of just reminders at the beginning, first of all, it’s not racial slavery. So for people in the United States, you tend to think of slavery through this racial lens. So slaves in ancient Roman society could be any color, ethnicity, gender, origin, whatever. It’s an economic status. Now, having said that, slavery is fundamentally horrific to human dignity because it is defining a human being as an object. And very famously, a Roman agricultural writer who’s writing about farms, just as a kind of side says, “On your farm, you have three types of tools. You have dumb tools.” And by dummy, means can’t speak. So that’s like shovels, picks, things like this, wagons. “You have articulate tools which are animals, and you have articulate tools which are human beings, slaves.” And for him, these are all just categories of tools. It’s so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that way.

(01:17:29)
So Roman slavery is odd in that it doesn’t have this racial component. It’s horrible in the way all slavery is horrible, but the other thing about is it’s not a hard line. It’s a permeable membrane, and many people move back and forth across it. So you have many people in the Roman world who were born a slave who gained their freedom through one means or another. And you have many others who were born free and become slaves. And you have some who go back and forth. There’s a great Roman tombstone of this guy who says, “I was born a free man in Parthia. I was enslaved. Then I gained my freedom and I became a teacher or something, and I had a life, and now I’m a Roman citizen.” So it’s this whole back and forth across all these boundaries multiple times.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:13)
Oh, so there’s probably a process like an economic transaction.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:18:18)
The most common source of slaves in the Roman world was war. So wherever the Roman army went, in its wake would be literally a train of slave traders. So you’re in war, you capture an enemy city, you whack the people over the head, and you turn around if you’re a soldier and you sell them to one of these slave traders that’s following the army around, literally. So that’s probably the biggest source of slaves. Another big source is just children of slaves or slaves. And some people could literally sell either themselves or their children into slavery due to economic necessity, or privation or something. So as terrible as that sounds, a father could sell a child if he needed money.

(01:19:04)
Once you were a slave though, the experience of slavery varied a lot because a lot of the slaves were agricultural slaves. So they would work like in the American South, big plantations. They might be chained. They were probably abused. That’s very similar to slavers as we think of it in let’s say, the Caribbean, South America or the United States prior to the Civil War, that kind of slavery. But a lot of Roman slaves were also some of the more skilled people. And this seems a little weird. So if you’re a rich person, you have slaves, it’s actually a good investment for you to train your slaves in a profession. So a lot of Roman doctors, scribes, accountants, sort of, all this sort of thing, barbers, were slaves. Because if you train this person, and then they produce a lot of money for you, you get that money.

(01:19:57)
And those slaves would sometimes be given an incentive to work hard where they could… And this is just sort of an agreement between the master and the slave. If they earned a certain amount of money, X amount of money, they could then buy their own freedom from the master. So this was your incentive to work harder if you were trained let’s say, as a doctor. “I work really hard, I can buy myself out of slavery.” Or a lot of masters would free their slaves in their wills.

(01:20:24)
So when they died, they would say, “I manumit this slave and that slave.” So it was a weird institution in that elements were just as horrible as what we think of as slavery and just as exploitative. And like I say, the overall notion of slavery is intensely dehumanizing, but yet, there was this wide range of types of slaves. And the odd thing is, in the city of Rome, many of the worst jobs, so if you’re just a laborer hauling crap around at the docks or things like that, you might well be a free person and a slave would hold a skilled job. And that seems a little strange or counterintuitive to us, but you see how in the Roman economy it sort of works.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:08)
And that could be one of the things that would be surprising to us coming from the modern day to the ancient world, is just the number of slaves. So you mentioned one of the things we don’t think about is that most of the people are farmers. And then the other thing is just the number of slaves.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:21:24)
And there’s a big debate. How many slaves were there? What percentage of the populace, let’s say in the city of Rome, were slaves? And this is something historians like to argue about a lot. And we keep coming back to this theme of sometimes it’s the little things that illustrate stuff well. And for slaves, the one that always gets me is some slaves, and these would be sort of the more abused slaves, they would literally put little bronze collars on them with a tag that said, “Hi, my name is Felix. I’m the slave of so-and-so. I’ve run away. If you catch me, return me to the temple of so-and-so, and you’ll get a reward.”

(01:21:59)
So it’s a dog tag, except this is a human being. And you can see these in museums. I mean, you can go to a museum today and see this little bronze collar with a tag on it that’s talking about a human being as if they’re this kind of animal that’s run away. And this is very telling too. We’re talking about Roman law. Under Roman law, technically, when a slave runs away, the crime that he’s committing is theft because he’s stolen himself from his master. So again, it’s this very dehumanizing view of it.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:30)
And just a reminder to people in America thinking about this, we have a certain view and picture to what slavery is, a reminder that all of human history, most of human history has had slaves of all colors, of all religions. That’s within us, to select a group of people, call them the other, use them as objects, abuse them. And I would say, as a person who believes the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, all of us, every person listening to this is capable of being owner of a slave if they’re put in the position, of capable of hating the other, of forming the other, of othering other people. And we should be very careful not to look ourselves in the mirror and remind ourselves that we’re human. It’s easy to think, “Okay, well, there’s these slaves and slave owners through history. And I would’ve never been one of those.” But just like as we would be farmers, we could be both. If we went back into history, we could be both slaves and slave owners, and all of those are humans.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:23:45)
I mean, just to build on that, I’d say the othering of others is a morally corrosive thing to do.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:52)
Yeah. So this fascinating transition between the republic to the empire, can we talk about that? How does the republic fall?

Fall of the Roman Empire

Gregory Aldrete
(01:24:02)
Oh, boy. Okay. So the Roman Republic on the one hand is incredibly successful. Right? In a short period of time, it’s expanded wildly. It’s conquered the Mediterranean world. It’s gained tons of wealth. The contradiction here is that Rome’s very success has made almost every group within Roman society deeply unhappy and boiling with resentment. So this is the contradiction. Enormous success on the surface, you end up with this boiling pot of resentment and unhappiness. So let’s break this down. Who’s unhappy? Well, the people fighting Rome’s wars, the common farmers who went off to fight. They joined the army. They went and fought. They’ve come back. They’ve seen Rome get wealthy. They’ve seen their generals get wealthy. They’ve conquered all these areas. All this money and stuff is flowing back to Rome. But when they’re discharged from the army, they don’t get that much. So they feel like, “I spent the best years of my life fighting for my country, I deserve a reward. I haven’t gotten it.”

(01:25:07)
So you have a lot of veterans who are now unemployed or underemployed. Many of them have sold their small family farms when they went off to join the army, and now they don’t have them. So that group’s unhappy, the veterans. You have the aristocrats who on the surface, the ones who are doing well, they’re the politicians and the generals. But as time goes on, the ones who get the plum appointments, who get the good general ships, starts coming from a smaller and smaller subset of the aristocrats. The Scipios and their friends start to dominate. So you end up where most of the aristocratic class is feeling, “Hey, I’m left out. I didn’t get what I deserved.” What about the half citizens and the allies? The Italians who have fought for Rome, who stayed loyal when Hannibal invaded, they didn’t go over to his side. Well, they feel rightfully, “We stayed loyal to Rome. We fought for them. We deserve our reward. We should be full citizens.” But the Romans are traditional. They’re conservative. They don’t like change. They don’t give them that.

(01:26:07)
What about all the slaves? Well, they’ve conquered all these foreigners. They’ve sold them. Now, many of them are working these plantations, big plantations owned by rich people that used to be little family farms. The slaves are obviously unhappy. So you end up with a society where it’s incredibly successful by about 100 BC, but almost every group that composes it feels like, “I haven’t shared in the benefits of what’s happened or I’ve been exploited by it.” So they all end up intensely unhappy. And the next 100-year period from 133 to 31 BC is called the Late Roman Republic. And it’s a time of nearly constant internal strife, ultimately culminating in multiple rounds of civil war.

(01:26:51)
So Roman society literally breaks apart, turns on itself, and goes to war with itself over not equitably sharing the benefits of conquest and of empire. So it’s a lesson about not sharing the benefits of something in a society, but concentrating it in one little group. And the other thing that happens is among the aristocrats, they start to get more and more ambitious. So in the past, there was a lot of ideology of, the state is more important than the person. If you were a little Roman kid, you would’ve been told these stories of Roman heroes. And they’re all about self-sacrifice, putting the state before you, about modesty, about these values. Well, by the late republic, you have a succession of strong men. And it is a chain. So it goes, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, where each one pushes the boundaries of the Roman Republic a little bit, pushes at the structures of the institutions of the Republic, and they’re motivated by personal gain. They’re putting themselves above the state.

Julius Caesar


(01:27:59)
So at the same time, you have lots of groups unhappy in society, and you get these strong men who are now undermining the institutions, chipping away at the things that have been shared, things holding the state together. And in the end, they just become so ambitious, they’re like, “I don’t care about the state. I’m going to try and make myself ruler of Rome.” So I mean, this is going to culminate obviously in Julius Caesar who does succeed in making himself dictator for life of the Roman Republic, which is tantamount to king, and he gets assassinated for it. But he’s the end point of this progression of people who really undermine the institutions, the republic, through their own personal greed.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:43)
So the resentment boils and boils and boils, and there’s this person that puts themselves above-
Gregory Aldrete
(01:28:48)
And they exploit it. They’re demagogues.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:49)
Yeah.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:28:50)
They exploit it.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:50)
But Caesar puts himself above the state. And that I guess, the Roman people also hate.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:28:58)
Well, I mean, it’s a love-hate because Caesar is very successful at playing to the Roman people. So he becomes their hero where he says, “I’ll be your champion against the state who doesn’t care about you.” So Caesar will do things where he’ll put on big shows for the people, and it’s cynical. I mean, he’s doing this to further his own political power, but he’s presenting himself as a populist in essence, even though he aspires to be a dictator. Right? But it’s a way of winning the people’s support because that’s a tool for him and his struggle with other aristocrats.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:34)
So a dictator in populist clothing.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:29:37)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:39)
But he gets-
Gregory Aldrete
(01:29:40)
When convenient. Other times, he’ll play to the aristocracy.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:44)
And when he gets assassinated, another civil war explodes?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:29:50)
That’s an interesting moment, because all these things have been leading up to Caesar and it really is a chain of men. So it starts with this guy, Marius, who was one of the first to start making armies loyal to him, rather than to the state. That’s a step in the wrong direction. Right? The army should be loyal to the state, not to an individual general. They shouldn’t look for him to rewards. Marius breaks that, makes a precedent. One of his protegees is a guy named Sulla. Sulla comes along and he ends up marching on Rome with his army and taking it over. And he says, “Well, I’m just doing it for the good of the state.” But that’s another precedent. Now you’ve had someone attacking their own capital city, even if they say they’re doing it for the right reasons.

(01:30:31)
Then Pompey comes along, and Pompey just breaks all kinds of things. He starts holding offices when he’s too young to do so. He raises personal armies from his own wealth. He disobeys commands. He manipulates commands. He does all kinds of stuff. But in the end, he sides with the Senate when sort of forced. And finally, Caesar comes along and Caesar’s just shamelessly, “No, it’s about me. I’m going to push it.” And he is the one who wins a civil war against the state and Pompey, takes over Rome and says, “Now, I’m going to be dictator.” And dictator is a traditional office in the Roman state, but dictators were limited to no more than six months in power. And Caesar says, “Well, I’ll be dictator for life,” which of course, is king. He gets killed for it.

(01:31:17)
So Caesar succeeded in taking over the state as one man, but he couldn’t solve the problem. How do you rule Rome as one person and not get killed for looking like a king? That’s the dilemma, the riddle that Caesar leaves behind him. He did it. He seize power as one guy, but how do you stay alive? How do you come up with something that the people will accept? And Caesar did some other things which are bad. He was arrogant. He didn’t even pretend that the Senate were his equals. He just railroaded them around. He didn’t respect them. He named a month after himself, July, Julius. He did egotistical things. So that pissed people off. They didn’t like it. And when Caesar dies, it’s this interesting moment. The Republic is sort of dead by then. You’re going to have a hard time reviving it. You’ve broken too many precedents, but there’s a power vacuum now. Caesar’s gone, what’s going to happen next?

Octavian’s rise


(01:32:18)
And you have a whole group of people who want to be the next Caesar. So the most obvious is Mark Antony, who is Caesar’s right-hand man, his lieutenant. He’s a very good general. He’s very charismatic. Everybody expects Mark Antony to just become the next Caesar. But there’s also another of Caesar’s lieutenants, a guy named Lepidus, sort of like Antony, but not quite as great as him. There’s the Senate itself, which wants to reassert its power, kind of become the dominant force in Rome again. There’s the assassins who killed Caesar, led by Brutus, and another guy, Cassius, they now want to seize control. And finally, there’s a really weird dark horse candidate to fill this power vacuum. And that’s Julius Caesar’s grandnephew, who at the time, is a 17-year-old kid named Octavian. Who cares? He’s nobody. Absolutely nobody. But when Caesar’s will is opened after his death, so posthumously read in his will, Caesar posthumously… And this is a little weird, posthumously adopts Octavian as his son. Now again, who cares? Antony gets the troops. Antony gets the money. The other people get everything.

(01:33:26)
What does Octavian get? He gets to now rename himself, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. Who cares? Well, around the Mediterranean, there’s about 12 legions full of hardened soldiers who are just used to following a guy named Gaius Julius Caesar. And even though it’s not quite logical, this 18-year-old, he’s now an 18-year-old kid, inherits an army overnight. So he becomes a player in this game for power. And the next 30, 40 years is going to be those groups all vying with one another. There’s another candidate too, Pompey’s son. Pompey was Caesar’s great rival. He has a couple of sons. And one of them, a guy named Sextus Pompey, basically becomes a warlord who seizes control of Sicily, one of the richest provinces, has a whole Navy. He’s vying to be one of the successors too. So for the next 40 years, it’s as you said, another civil war to see which guy emerges. Is it going to be the Senate? Is it going to be the assassins? Is it going to be Antony? Is it going to be Lepidus? Is it going to be Sextus Pompey? Is it going to be Octavian?
Lex Fridman
(01:34:31)
So now, looking back at all that history, it just feels like history turns on so many interesting accidents. Because Octavian later renamed Augustus, turned out to be actually… It depends on how you define good, but a good king/emperor, different than Caesar in terms of humility, at least being able to play, not to piss off everybody. But it could have been so many other people. That could have been the fall of Rome. So it’s a fascinating little turn of history. Maybe Caesar saw something in this individual. It’s not an accident that he was in the will.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:35:11)
Yeah. I mean, Caesar clearly did see something in him. And Octavian, I mean, to cut to the end, is the one who emerges from all that as the victor. We can talk about how he does it, but he’s the one who ends up in the same position as Caesar. It takes him 30 years, but he defeats all the foes. He’s the sole guy. He now faces Caesar’s riddle. How do you rule Rome as one guy and not get killed? And Octavian, what makes him stand out, what makes him fascinating to me, is he wasn’t a good general. In fact, he was a terrible general. He lost almost every battle he commanded. But what he is, is he’s politically savvy and he’s very good at what today we would call, manipulation of your public image and propaganda. So he basically defeats Mark Antony partially by waging a propaganda war against him.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:36:00)
Antony partially by waging a propaganda war against him. Antony starts out as a legitimate rival, and there are two Romans vying for power. At the end of this war, propaganda war, Octavian has managed to portray Antony as a foreign aggressor, allied with an enemy, king or queen, in this case, Cleopatra, and who is an official enemy of the Roman state, and that’s all propaganda. So, he takes what’s a civil war and makes it look like a war against a foreign enemy. And when Octavian becomes the sole ruler, he looks at what Caesar did wrong, and he very carefully avoids the same mistakes.

(01:36:41)
So, the first thing is just how he lives his life. He’s very modest. He lives in an ordinary house like other aristocrats. He wears just a plain toga, nothing fancy. He’s respectful to the Senate.

(01:36:51)
He treats them with respect. He eats simple foods. I mean, he’s someone who cared about the reality of power, not the external trappings. Clearly there’s some rulers who love, “I want to dress in fancy clothes. I want to be surrounded by gold.

(01:37:05)
Everything. This is what makes me feel good.” Octavian is the opposite. He doesn’t care about any of that. He wants real power. And then, the other thing is, how is he going to rule Rome without looking like a king?

(01:37:16)
And his solution to this is brilliant. He basically pretends to resign from all his public offices and not pretends he does. So, he holds no official office. But what he does is he manipulates so that the Roman Senate votes him the powers of the key Roman offices, but not the office itself. So, the highest office in the Roman state is the consul.

(01:37:40)
Consuls have the power to command armies, do all sorts of things, run meetings of the Senate. Octavian gets voted the powers of a consul so he can command armies control meetings of the Senate, do all this. But he’s not one of the two consuls elected for every year. So, he’s just floating or drifting off to the side of the Roman government. He gets the power of a Tribune, which has all sorts of powers.

(01:38:04)
He can veto anything he wants, but he’s not one of the Tribunes elected for anyone. So, the state, the Republic appears to continue as it always has. Each year they hold the same elections, they elect the same number of people, notionally, those people are in charge. But floating off to the side, you have this guy Octavian, who has equivalent power, not just to any one magistrate official, but to all of them. So, any moment he can just pop up and say, “No, let’s not do this.

(01:38:31)
Let’s do something else.” And he also keeps the army under his personal control.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:36)
Isn’t this a fascinating story? What do you think is the psychology of Augustus, of Octavian?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:38:41)
Yeah. And he later changed his name to Augustus when he becomes the first emperor. The other thing he does is he hides his power behind all these different names.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:47)
The greatest strategy.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:38:49)
Caesar called himself dictator for life, right? So, everybody knew what he was. Octavian. We even have a source that talks about it. He says he wondered what to call himself. “Do I call myself king?

(01:38:57)
No, he can’t do that. Dictator for life. No way. Maybe I’ll call myself Romulus. That was the founder of Rome. No, no.

(01:39:02)
Romulus was a king.” And finally, a solution is he takes a bunch of titles, which are all ambiguous, and no one of them sounds that impressive, but collectively they are. So, for example, one of the titles he gets is Augustus, which is something tied to Roman religion. Something that is Augustus in Latin has two possible meanings. One is someone who is Augustus is very pious. They respect the Gods deeply. Well, that sounds nice, doesn’t it? Well, on the other hand, an alternative meaning for Augustus is something that is itself divine. So, is he just a deeply religious, pious person, or is he himself sacred? There’s that ambiguity.

(01:39:47)
He calls himself Princeps, which means first citizen. “Okay, what the hell does that mean? Am I a citizen just like everybody else? Or am I the first citizen, which means I’m superior to all the others?” So, every title he takes has this weird ambiguity.

(01:40:03)
He calls himself Imperator, which is traditionally something that soldiers shout at, a victorious general who’s won a battle. And now he takes this as a permanent title. So, it implies he’s a good general. And by the way, it’s from Imperator that we get the word emperor, an empire. So, originally it’s a military title, a spontaneous military acclamation.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:25)
It’s just fascinating that he figured out a way through public image, through branding to gain power, maintain power, and still pacify the boiling turmoil that led to the civil wars.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:40:44)
Yeah. Well, two things I think work in his favor as well. One is he brings peace and stability. So, by this point, the Romans have experienced a hundred years almost of civil war and chaos. So, at that point, your family, maybe you’ve had family members die in these wars or been prescribed, your property has been confiscated, who knows what. And here’s a guy who brings peace and stability and doesn’t seem oppressive or cruel or whatever.

(01:41:12)
So, you’re like, “Okay, fine, I don’t care. Maybe he’s killed the Republic, but at least we’re not dying in the streets anymore.” So, that’s a big thing he does.

(01:41:21)
And secondly, even though Augustus always seemed sickly his constitution, he lives forever. He rules for like 50 years, and by the time he dies, there’s no one literally almost left alive who can remember the Republic. So, at that point, by the time he dies, this is the only system we know.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:43)
That’s another just fascinating accident of history, because as we talked about with Alexander the Great, who knows if he lived for another 40 years, if over time the people that hate the new thing die off and then their sons and come into power, that could be a very different story. Maybe we’ll be talking about the [inaudible 01:42:07].
Gregory Aldrete
(01:42:06)
That’s a fluke of fate, but it’s hugely influential on history.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:09)
You mentioned Cleopatra. If we go back to that, what role did she play? Another fascinating human being.

Cleopatra

Gregory Aldrete
(01:42:17)
Cleopatra is interesting. I mean, she was a direct descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals Ptolemy. When Alexander’s empire had broken up Ptolemy, this general had seized control of Egypt, made it his kingdom. And she 10 generations later, is a descendant of this Macedonian general. So, Egypt had been ruled by, in essence, foreigners, these Macedonian dynasty of kings.

(01:42:44)
And often they literally were ruled by the same dynasty because they had a habit of marrying brothers to sisters. And Cleopatra was in fact originally married to her younger brother. But despite that, she seems to have intensely identified with Egypt. In fact, she seems to have been the first one of all these Ptolemy kings who actually bothered to learn to speak Egyptian. So, she seems to really have cared about Egypt as well.

(01:43:13)
And she was clearly very smart, very clever. And so, she’s living at a time during the late Republic when Rome is having all these civil wars. And Egypt is really the last big independent kingdom left around the shores, the Mediterranean, everything else has been conquered by Rome. So, she is in this very precarious position where clearly she wants to maintain Egyptian independence, but Rome is this juggernaut that’s rolling over everything. She ends up meeting Julius Caesar when Caesar comes to Egypt chasing Pompey, his great rival, after he defeats Pompey, Pompey runs to Egypt thinking he’ll find sanctuary there, and the Egyptians kill him and chop off his head.

(01:43:54)
And when Caesar lands, they hand it to him and say, “Here have a present.” And she, of course, famously ends up having a love affair with Caesar. Was that a genuine love or was she just using this as a way to try and keep Egypt independent to give it some status? We don’t know. After she does have several kids with Caesar.

(01:44:15)
After Caesar’s assassinated, and the Roman world is having another civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony. Mark Antony is basing himself in the east. He meets Cleopatra and he has a big love affair with her. And this one seems pretty genuine. I mean, Antony and Cleopatra, there’s a lot of stories about them partying together.

(01:44:35)
They liked to cosplay and dress up as different gods. So, Cleopatra would dress up as the goddess Isis and Antony would dress up as the god Dionysus in a leopard skin, and they’d have these big parties and stuff, and they end up together fighting against Octavian. And in the end, they’re defeated by Octavian and Antony commits suicide. Cleopatra there’s differing accounts of her death. She may have also killed herself, or she may actually have been killed by Octavian to just get her out of the way.

(01:45:10)
But she’s an interesting figure because she was clearly a very smart woman who managed to keep Egypt alive as an independent state. She seemed to have actually cared about Egypt and identified with it and succeeded at a time with all these famous people in being a real mover and shaker and a force in events.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:30)
I mean, she’s probably one of the most influential women in human history.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:45:35)
She certainly… Again, she’s someone that her image is incredibly important. And I mean, one of the interesting things, the whole question of gender in the Roman world, I mean, this gets into Roman sources, but of course it’s a heavily male dominated history. And I mean, men and women did not have equality in ancient Rome. It’s a male dominated society. It’s misogynist in many ways.

(01:45:57)
But what I’m constantly struck by is when you start, again, delving into the sources, you always hear, “Okay, well, there was this one woman who was a philosopher, and she’s an exception to the rule. And yeah, okay, she’s fine.” And then, you start looking into, “Oh, and there’s also 60 other female philosophers. Well, it’s not so much an exception anymore. Or Cleopatra is the one queen.

(01:46:19)
She’s this strong queen.” And then, you look, “Well, there was this other queen here. There was this queen here. There was this queen here who led armies, and here’s another one who led armies.” And again, it’s like, well, are they exceptions to the rule or is just the history that was written, which is written by men a little bit selective in how it portrays them, because the sources are all these male elites who have very definite ideas about women.

(01:46:41)
The conventional notion has always been that business in the Roman Empire was a male field. Well, but then there’s this woman, Eumachia in Pompeii who actually had the largest building in Pompeii, right on the forum named after her with a giant statue of her. And she was a patron to a bunch of the most important guilds in Pompeii. Okay. She’s the exception to the rule.

(01:47:02)
Oh, but then there’s these other four women we have from Pompeii who also were patrons of guilds. And then, there’s this woman, Plancia Magna in this other place, and she was the most important patron in the town and put up all these statues. So, at some point, when do you start to say, “Well, maybe women did play more of a role, but they just haven’t been recorded in the sources in the way that maybe they deserve to be.”
Lex Fridman
(01:47:24)
Yeah, that’s a fascinating question. Is it the bias of society, or is it the bias of the historian?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:47:30)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:31)
The bias of the society that the historian is writing about, or the bias of the actual history.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:47:34)
And the bias of the historians who have written history up to this point. I was just writing a lecture, which was about this woman Musa who has a crazy story, and she ties into Augustus, actually. Augustus, his biggest diplomatic triumph that he boasted about constantly was that about 50 years before him, the Romans had sent an expedition into Parthia, this neighboring kingdom led by Crassus, and they’d gotten wiped out. So, it was this big disaster, military disaster. And the standards of the Roman legions, the eagles, that each Roman legion carried, had been captured by the Parthians.

Musa of Parthia


(01:48:13)
And this is the most humiliating thing that can happen to a Roman legion to have its eagles captured. And Augustus desperately wanted to negotiate with the Parthians to get these eagles returned. Okay? This was his big diplomatic thing. So, he was constantly sending these embassies to Parthia. On one of these embassies, he sent along as a gift to the Parthian King, a slave woman named Musa.

(01:48:36)
Musa seems to have pleased the king of Parthia because she becomes one of his concubines, and then she gives birth to a son by the king, and eventually she becomes upgraded to the level of wife. And Musa eventually murders the Parthian king, arranges it so that her son becomes the king of Parthia, and she’s really ruling the whole empire behind the scenes as his mother. So, this is a literal rags to riches story of a slave, someone who starts out a slave and becomes the queen of an empire, almost as large and powerful as Rome. Okay. But yet, how often do we hear about Musa?

(01:49:22)
And when you look in traditional histories of Roman, Parthian relations, and I went and looked at this because I was just writing this lecture, most of those histories didn’t even mention her. They just talked about her son, like he had just come out of nowhere and become the new heir to the Parthian throne when it was all her doing clearly. Now, that’s selective editing of history by historians to downplay the role that this woman played. And there’s a lot of examples like that.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:51)
That’s fascinating.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:49:52)
She got overthrown after a few years. There was a revolution against her, and we don’t know what happened to her then, but she’s a really interesting figure. And by the way, Augustus didn’t negotiate the return of the Parthian standards and got them back, and he was so proud of this that this is what he constantly boasted about. And the most famous statue of Augustus, the Augustus from Prima Porta, which is in the Vatican today, he’s wearing a breastplate. And on the breastplate right in the middle of the stomach is a Parthian handing over a golden eagle legionary standard to a Roman.

(01:50:23)
So, this is what Augustus thought of as his greatest achievement. And that embassy that arranged that was the one that sent Musa to Parthia.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:32)
So, Augustus marks the start of the Roman Empire.

Augustus’ political system

Gregory Aldrete
(01:50:37)
Yep.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:37)
You’ve written that Octavian Augustus would become Rome’s first emperor, and the political system that he created would endure for the next half a millennium. This system would become the template for countless later empires up through the present day, and he would become the model emperor against whom all subsequent ones would be measured. The culture and history of the Mediterranean Basin, the western world, and even global history itself, were all profoundly shaped and influenced by the actions and legacy of Octavian.

(01:51:09)
He was the founder of the Roman Empire, and we still live today in the world that he created. So, what on the political side of things and maybe beyond, what is the political system that he created?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:51:24)
Well, I mean, I think Octavian/Augustus is the same guy, is one of the most influential people in the history because he did found the Roman Empire. So, he’s the one who oversaw this transition from Republic to Empire, and he sets the template which every future emperor follows. So, just in the most obvious way for the next either 500 or 1500 years, depending how long you think the Roman Empire lasted for, everyone is trying to be Augustus. They all take on the same titles. Every Roman emperor after him is Caesar, Augustus, Imperator, Pater patriae, all these titles he has, they take too.

(01:51:59)
And so, he’s hugely influential for Western civilization, all this. But beyond just that literal thing, which is already 500 years, 1500 years, he becomes the paradigm of the good ruler, so of an absolute ruler who is nevertheless just does good things, builds public works as popular. So, if we jump ahead, let’s say to the Middle Ages, the most significant ruler of the early Middle Ages is Charlemagne. He’s the guy who unites most of Europe. He becomes the paradigm for all medieval kings after him.

(01:52:35)
Well, what is the title that the Pope gives to Charlemagne? Because there’s this famous moment when the Pope acknowledges Charlemagne as the preeminent European king and crowns him on Christmas day of the year 800. And the title that the Pope gives to Charlemagne is Charles, that’s Charlemagne Augustus, Emperor of the Romans. He’s giving him the title of Augustus because that’s the nicest thing he can think of to say to Charlemagne is to say, “You’re the new Augustus. You’re emperor of the Romans.”

(01:53:09)
So, that image is hugely powerful, and that persists on and on. I mean, even the literal names of most rulers afterwards come from this. In Russia, the Czars are Caesars. That’s where Czar comes from. Prince comes from Princeps, first citizen, one of the titles.

(01:53:29)
Emperor comes from Imperator, one of the titles of Augustus. When Napoleon becomes Emperor, what does he call himself? First consul, which is like Princeps, and then he calls himself emperor. I mean, everybody wants to be this kind of ruler. So, he’s the paradigm of this for the rest of history.

(01:53:48)
And you can see that as both a positive and a negative legacy. It’s like Alexander. I mean, everybody wants to be the next Alexander. Now, nobody does become the next Alexander. Nobody’s as successful as him.

(01:54:00)
But a lot of people try and you can see that either as, oh, inspirational or awful, because lots of people killed lots of other people and started lots of wars trying to be the next Alexander. At least Augustus has this notion of good rulership that you’re not just a great powerful person, but you’re a good ruler somehow.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:23)
Can you speak to the kind of political system he created? So, how did he consolidate power as you spoke to a bit already, and what role did the Senate now play? How were the laws? Who was the executive? How is power allocated and so on?
Gregory Aldrete
(01:54:41)
Yeah, so once the empire begins, let’s say 27 BC, so in 31 BC, Octavian defeats Antony at the Battle of Actium. So, that’s the moment he becomes the sole ruler. And then, in 27 BC, a couple years later, he settles the Roman Republic is how it’s referred to, which is basically sets up his system. And in this system, on the surface, it all looks the same. You still have a Senate, each year there’s elections, all the Roman citizens vote, they elect magistrates who notionally are in charge of Rome.

(01:55:16)
But as I mentioned off to the side, you now have this figure of Augustus who controls everything behind the scenes, and that continues. So, this political system he establishes continues. And in reality, I would say Augustus at that point is again a king. It really is one man controlling the state. Even if notionally, it’s still continuing as a republic.

(01:55:41)
They are electing magistrates, but the magistrates only do what the emperor tells them. But it’s this formal versus informal power, the formal structure as a republic, the way things really work informally is it’s a monarchy. Now, if you asked Augustus, what did he do? Did you become a king? He said, and he says this explicitly, “No, no, no.

(01:56:03)
What I did is I refounded the Roman Republic.” That’s how he phrases it.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:09)
This guy is good at framing.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:56:11)
He’s so good at propaganda. I’ll give you one more example that I love. Augustus actually writes his own autobiography, which is very rare and survives. So, here we have the autobiography of one of the pivotal figures in history. And if you had conquered the world, let’s say starting at the age of 18, what would you call your autobiography?

(01:56:29)
It’d be something like, “How I conquered the world,” right? Augustus calls his, derace quae feci, which the best literal translation is stuff I did. I mean, it’s the most modest title for someone who could have given the most grandiose title. And the first line of it is at the age of 18, when the liberty of the Republic was oppressed by a faction, I defended it. Now, the way I might phrase that sense is at the age of 18, I fought a civil war against another Roman and conquered the Roman state.

(01:57:02)
But no, he defended the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. That’s propaganda, and it works.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:11)
It is propaganda, but is there a degree to which he also lived it? That kind of humility, establishing that humility is a standard of the way government operates. So, it’s not a literal direct balance of power, but it’s a cultural balance of power where the emperor is not supposed to be a bully and a dictator.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:57:31)
I would really like to know what Romans of his time thought. If you were alive at that moment, would you honestly believe, “Oh, okay, we’ve got this guy Augustus, but he’s brought peace. He’s just keeping in charge for a while until things settle down. We’ve just had a hundred years of civil war. I think we still have a republic,” or would you say, “Nah, we have a king now.”

(01:57:54)
And I don’t know what the answer to that is. I will tell you that it takes 200 years before we have the first Roman source that bluntly calls Augustus a king. So, 200 years, it takes the Romans 200 years to admit to themselves. And that’s a guy who comes along 200 years later and says, “Hey, Augustus, he looks like a king. He acts like a king. Let’s just call him a king, because he had every aspect of a king except the patriae Title.”
Lex Fridman
(01:58:25)
Maybe I’m buying his propaganda, and maybe I’m a sucker for humility, but I suspect that the Romans bought it, and I also suspect he himself believed it. I mean, there is such thing as good kings. There’s kings that understand the downside, the dark side of absolute power and can wield that power properly.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:58:48)
And to give both sides here, Augustus wasn’t all nice. I mean, there were moments where he was extremely cruel. So, early in his career when he’s still fighting, when he’s… for power, he goes all in on prescriptions, which is where he and Anty and other people basically post lists of their enemies and say, “It’s legal for anyone to kill these people.” And so, hundreds are massacred there, including Cicero, the Great Order is prescribed and killed. There’s moments when he’s really cruel.

(01:59:16)
One slave once gets him angry, and he has him tortured in particularly cruel manner. So, I mean, on the one hand, he had this clemency. On the other hand, he could be really hard-nosed and hard edged, and I think he was a very calculating person.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:30)
Yeah. So, the thing I would love to know is what he was actually behind the mask.
Gregory Aldrete
(01:59:36)
Yes. I mean, that to me is one of those, if you could invite a historical person to dinner or whatever, I want to know what the real Augustus was, what he really thought he was doing, because he’s an enigma and he has this great moment when he dies. What’s his dying lines on his deathbed? He says, “If I’ve played my part, well dismiss me from the stage with applause.”

(01:59:57)
So, he’s seeing himself as an actor that his whole life was acting this role, which is again, all that manipulation and public image. He was brilliant at that. But who’s the real guy? What was behind that image?
Lex Fridman
(02:00:09)
And by the way, as long as we’re talking about brutality, I think you’ve mentioned in a few places that there’s a lot of brutality going on. At the time, Caesar just killing very large numbers of people brutally.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:00:28)
I mean, Caesar, his campaigns in Gaul are interesting because for a long time they were held up as, oh, genius general. Look at the amazing things he did. But another way to view it is he provoked and he truly provoked a war with people who were not that interested in fighting Rome and just repeatedly attacked different tribes for the sole purpose of building up his career, his prestige, his status, gaining territory, making himself wealthier. And he basically conquers all of modern France and Belgium and some of Switzerland. So, this is a big chunk of Europe gets conquered.

(02:01:06)
Hundreds of thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands of people enslaved to further one guy’s career. I mean, if you wanted, could call Caesar a war criminal, and I think that wouldn’t be unfair. But on the other hand, some people see him as a great hero. I mean, to talk about history and its reception, it’s quite interesting to see how Caesar has been viewed by different generations. So, at different points in time, the received wisdom on Caesar was very different.

(02:01:37)
So, back in the, let’s say the 1920s or ’30s, there were a number of scholarly things written which looked at Caesar as an admirable figure. He’s a strong man who knows what Rome needed and was going to give it to them. And of course, that’s the era when fascism was trendy and was seen as a positive thing. And then, you get Hitler and World War II and all of sudden fascism is not so favored anymore. And then, in that post-war generation, all of a sudden Caesar’s terrible.

(02:02:05)
He’s a dictator. He is destroying the Republic. So, often histories that are written tell you a lot more about the time they’re written than they do about the subject they’re written about.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:17)
Do we know what did Hitler or Stalin think about the Roman Empire?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:02:22)
I mean, certainly they borrow a lot of the trappings. I mean, Nazi, Germany borrows a lot of iconography from ancient Rome. I mean, they carry it around little military standards with eagles on them, just like the Romans. But then everybody does that. I mean, the US has eagles as their standards.

(02:02:38)
Mussolini had them. Napoleon had eagle standards for his military. So, a lot of people like that imagery.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:49)
You mentioned Cicero. He’s a fascinating figure. On the topic of Roman oratory, who was Cicero?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:02:56)
Cicero was a new man. So, he’s someone who didn’t have famous ancestors. So, he was at a disadvantage. And I think Cicero is really interesting for a couple of reasons. One is he wrote an incredible amount.

(02:03:09)
I think we have almost more words from Cicero than any other author that survived, and it’s all kinds of stuff. It’s philosophical treatises, it’s books about how to be a good public speaker. He published volume after volume of his personal letters to his friends. He published these things. So, there’s tons of stuff from him.

Cicero


(02:03:28)
And secondly, he’s interesting because he lived at this incredibly important time in the late Republic when things were falling apart. But he seems to have been born with none of the natural advantages that all these other people had. So, he was a lousy general. He didn’t come from a wealthy family. He didn’t come from a famous aristocratic family.

(02:03:49)
He didn’t have a lot of these advantages, but yet he ended up being right at the center of things, rose to the highest elected office in the Roman state on the basis of one skill. And that was his ability with words, his ability to get up in front of a crowd and persuade them of what he wanted them to believe. And oratory, public speaking was absolutely central to life at Rome. There were just all these events where people had to get up and give speeches. So, in courtrooms, at funerals, in the Senate to the people of Rome, at games, I mean just constantly, there were these opportunities for giving speeches.

(02:04:27)
So, if you are good at this, that was a huge advantage in your political career. And Cicero was the best. He was arguably the best public speaker of all time.

(02:04:40)
Some people claim. And he lived right in this era, and he parlayed that skill with words into this very successful political career. He was one of the guys involved with all this stuff with Caesar and Pompey and all the other things going on, Octavian, Mark Antony.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:54)
And you’ve written, which is fascinating. It’s fascinating when the echoes of people from a distant past are seen today. The same stuff is seen today, not just like some of the beautiful legal stuff that we’ve been talking about, but the tricks, let’s say the shitty stuff we see in politics.

(02:05:14)
So, many of the rhetorical tricks you wrote, such as mudslinging, exaggeration, guilt by association, ad hominem attacks, name-calling, fearmongering, us versus them, rhyme, and so on and so forth. So, I’m guessing it worked given that we still have those today.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:05:28)
Yeah, I mean, one of the things Cicero did is he wrote at least three of these handbooks about how to be a good public speaker. So, we know a lot about that. We have his own speeches that survive. And then, we have later people after Cicero who wrote about what Cicero did too. So, we know a lot about what he did.

(02:05:45)
And the key to Cicero’s whole enterprise about persuading an audience, let’s say either it is speech to the people or in the courtroom is Cicero believed that people are fundamentally ruled by emotion. So, if you can touch their emotions, all sorts of other things become less important. If you can get a jury emotionally worked up and fear, anger, or particularly powerful there, then the facts might not matter, the truth might not matter, evidence might not matter, reason might not matter. Emotion is the key to everything. So, Cicero used what I would arguably call a lot of tricks to get his audiences emotionally riled up.

(02:06:32)
And you can just go through these and they’re all the stuff you were saying, name-calling, mudslinging, us versus them arguments, ad hominem attacks, incredibly sophisticated. All this stuff that we think of today is, oh, very sophisticated techniques for propaganda and persuasion. It’s not new. People aren’t coming up with that much that’s new outside the realm of technology, human nature is the same. Cicero understood human psychology.

(02:07:00)
He knew how to play on people. He knew how to play on their emotions, and he would do just… I mean, I want to say hilarious, but they’re depressingly hilarious things. He thought it’s important to use props. So, he said, “People are visual. They will respond emotionally to visual things in a way that just words alone won’t work.”

(02:07:20)
So, he says, “An order is just like an actor and like an actor he has to prepare his stage and use props and things as visual cues to stir up the audience. So, for example, once he was defending a man in a court case who had just had a new baby born to him, and Cicero literally delivered the defense oration for this guy while cradling his newborn son in his arms, you can imagine, “Oh, cute little baby. Jury, how could you find him guilty and leave this cute baby without a father to take care of him?” Another time, he was defending a guy who had a photogenic son, a young boy, and Cicero literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech, and again said-
Gregory Aldrete
(02:08:00)
Literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech, and again said, “Look at his eyes brimming with tears, thinking about his father being punished. How could you leave this wonderful boy without a father to care for him?”

(02:08:13)
Another time someone didn’t have a photogenic kid, so he propped up his old parents in the courtroom and said, “Look at this nice old couple. You won’t want to take their son away.” That kind of stuff; I mean, it’s manipulative.

(02:08:26)
Cicero, by the way, I should say also had philosophical beliefs about defending the republic and such. But he wasn’t above using these things. Even though he may have had altruistic or high notions of what he was doing, he also wasn’t above using these kind of rhetorical tricks.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:43)
Also you mentioned to me that you studied the gestures they used.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:08:48)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:49)
This is one of those on the theme of extremely interesting details of life.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:08:55)
This was actually my dissertation, and it was my first book as well.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:59)
That’s amazing. That’s amazing.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:09:01)
Again, I told you I like practical stuff. This all started with I kept reading about people like Cicero giving speeches in ancient Rome, lots of speeches. They would give a speech in the Forum with 10,000, 20,000 people.

Gestures


(02:09:14)
And the thought occurred to me, “Well, in ancient Rome, you don’t have microphones. You don’t have loudspeakers. So how does someone give a speech outdoors in a windy place, not acoustically sound, to 20,000 people?” They just can’t hear you. Part of the answer, it turns out, well, part of it’s oratorical training. You learn how project your voice. But some of it too is that the Romans actually had this system of gestures that orators like Cicero would use to accompany their speeches. And what I ended up doing is combining two types of evidence again.

(02:09:47)
So I looked at the rhetorical handbooks like Cicero’s. And also there’s this guy, Quintilian, who lived about 100 years after Cicero, who wrote this long thing called the Institutio Oratoria, which has a description of all types of oratorical stuff, including about 40 pages on gestures.

(02:10:05)
So he actually says, “When you put your fingers like this, it means such and such.” It turns out Roman orators had a system of sign language that they would use to augment their speeches. But here’s the fun part. It wasn’t like modern American Sign Language, where a gesture means the same thing as a word.

(02:10:23)
Instead; and this goes back to Cicero; a certain gesture would indicate a certain emotion that you were meant to feel when you heard the words. It’s like your body is adding an emotional gloss to your speech. You’re saying words, and then you’re indicating how you think those words should make you feel.

(02:10:44)
And even more fun, the Romans believed that, “If I make certain hand gestures, you will almost involuntarily feel certain emotion.” So if you’re skilled, you can manipulate your audience by playing on their emotions.

(02:10:58)
This might sound weird or improbable, but the metaphor that Cicero himself uses is he says, “Think about music. Everybody knows that certain musical tones will make you feel a certain way.”

(02:11:10)
Think of movies today: in a horror movie, they’re going to play strident, tense music. In a romantic scene, you’re going to have strings, and it’ll make you feel a certain way. When you hear the Jaws theme, you feel tense.

(02:11:22)
Cicero said, “The orator’s body is like a lyre.” A lyre is a musical instrument. “And you have to learn to play on your own body as a musical instrument to affect the emotions of your audience.”
Lex Fridman
(02:11:33)
I think he might be onto something, especially given how central public speaking was in Roman culture.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:11:39)
Yeah. And a lot of the Roman oratorical gestures: I could probably do some, and you could probably guess what emotion they’re meant to be.

(02:11:45)
For example, there’s one where you hold up your hands to the side and push like this. This is the gesture, and what that means is mild aversion. I don’t like something.

(02:11:56)
Now if I couple this with turning my face to the side, that; pushing off to one side, turning my face away, it’s a strong aversion. That’s like fear or something.

(02:12:06)
If I clench my fist and press it to my chest, that’s anger or grief. If I slap my thigh, again, that’s indication of anger. So a lot of these make sense. I mean, they’re natural gestures.

(02:12:18)
Now, some are really weird and artificial. I mean, one of my favorite of these is if you hold your hand up open, then curl the fingers in one by one, and then flip it out; this sort of thing; that, to the Romans meant “wonder,” which you sort of see.

(02:12:35)
But again, if you’ve been raised in a societal context where you’re used to the notion that this gesture means this emotion, when someone does it, you’re probably going to feel that emotion.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:46)
Yeah. It’s like memes today: if it goes viral, [inaudible 02:12:49]
Gregory Aldrete
(02:12:48)
You know what it’s supposed to mean.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:50)
It percolates through the culture.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:12:51)
It has that affect.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:51)
It has power. I mean, and it’s actually interesting that we don’t use gestures as much in modern day.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:12:58)
Well, I mean for me, I just love analyzing modern political figures in terms of their body language.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:03)
Yes.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:13:04)
Because how you deliver a speech is often more important than what you say.

(02:13:10)
In fact, in the ancient world, the most famous Greek orator was a guy named Demosthenes. And once a guy came up to Demosthenes and said, “Demosthenes, tell me: what are the three most important things in giving a speech?”

(02:13:23)
And Demosthenes said, “Well, they are delivery, delivery, and delivery.” That even the most brilliant speech, if accompanied by a boring delivery, is going to be less effective than a terrible speech given in an engaging and exciting or funny way.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:41)
Speaking of modern day and gestures, what do you think of Donald Trump, who has these very unique kind of gestures? I don’t know the degree to it’s true, but he uses these handshakes when he pulls people in, that kind of stuff. What do you make of that?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:13:56)
I mean, Trump gesticulates a lot, but it’s a fairly narrow set of gestures. I mean, if you watch him for a bit, he kind of has the same small set of gestures.

(02:14:06)
I want to say they’re not natural in that they’re not illustrating what he’s saying. It’s more just punctuation points. I think of his as more kind of these punctuation points for just going along with what he’s saying.

(02:14:20)
There are speakers who truly can use their hands and arms and faces creatively. You watch them and it’s really enhancing the speech. I mean, just historically, Martin Luther King: he’s famous for a lot of good speeches, content. He was a good gesticulator, too. He knew how to use his body.

(02:14:40)
On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was a phenomenal gesticulator. If you watch some of his speeches; even just turn off the sound and watch them; he’s doing all kinds of stuff. And he’s really emphasizing his points in a very creative way.

(02:14:55)
This is what’s fascinating about oratory and public speaking, is it’s this two-edged sword. You can use these techniques for good, or you can absolutely use them for evil. You know?
Lex Fridman
(02:15:07)
Yeah.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:15:08)
The very same techniques in the hands of MLK, you say, “This is wonderful, this is fantastic.” In the hands of Hitler, you say, “This is awful. Look, he’s persuading a nation to commit atrocities.”
Lex Fridman
(02:15:20)
I encourage people to watch the speeches of Hitler. The oratory skill there, to be able to channel the resentment and the frustration of a people, and control it and direct it to any direction he wants through speaking alone.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:15:41)
Yeah, it’s the visual embodiment of the words, where he’s talking about Weimar Germany being taken advantage of, supposedly, and all this stuff. You’re right, he’s channeling the resentment of the people and using that to his personal advantage and for cynical, evil really, purposes. But oratory is like that.

(02:16:01)
The question I always end up asking my students, after studying Cicero and all these techniques, I say, “Okay, this is great oratory. But do you like this? Is this good that this works on human beings?”
Lex Fridman
(02:16:13)
I remember Noam Chomsky once was asked, “Why do you speak in such a monotone way?”

(02:16:18)
And he said, “Well, I want the truth of my statement, the content of my statements to speak; that I don’t want you to get deluded by me because I’m such a charismatic and eloquent speaker. The more monotone I speak, the more you’ll listen to the content of the words.”
Gregory Aldrete
(02:16:34)
Right. I want you just focusing on the content and not being distracted.

(02:16:38)
I’ll tell you also with Cicero: one of the things that he and other people who write about Roman oratory do is to say, “And you can do this stuff badly,” in which case it backfires horribly.

(02:16:49)
So you can have people who attempt to gesticulate. Again, modern politicians, you’ll see this sometime where they feel like, “I’m supposed to be making hand gestures,” and they’re terrible at it. And it undercuts it.

(02:17:00)
Cicero and Quintilian give some very amusing examples from ancient Rome. He says, there was this one guy who when he spoke, looked like he was trying to swat away flies because there were just these awkward gestures. Or another who looked like he was trying balancing a boat in choppy seas.

(02:17:17)
And my favorite is there was one orator who supposedly was prone to making, I guess, languid supple motions. They actually named a dance after this guy, and his name was Titius. And so Romans could do the Titius, which is this dance that was imitating this orator who had these comically bad gesticulation.

(02:17:40)
So not enough gesticulation is a problem. Too much gesticulation is a problem. You have to hit the sweet spot. It has to seem natural. It has to seem varied. It has to conform to the meaning of the words, not distract from it.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:54)
Yeah, natural, authentic to who you are.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:17:57)
Authentic.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:57)
Which is when people try to copy the gestures of another person, it usually doesn’t go well.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:18:02)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:02)
You have to interpret, integrate into your own personality and so on.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:18:07)
But gestures is really fun.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:08)
It’s fascinating.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:18:09)
I enjoyed my dissertation a lot doing that. Because what I was trying to do there was to literally reconstruct them, so to say, “What were the actual gestures?”

(02:18:18)
I did that by comparing the literary accounts of the handbooks with, again, Roman art: looking at statues of Romans and things, and just trying to say, “Okay, what were some of the gestures they actually used here?”
Lex Fridman
(02:18:28)
And in that way, the people from that time come to life, in your mind, in your work, which is fascinating.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:18:35)
Well again, it’s this pragmatic thing. I want to know, “Okay, how does this work?”
Lex Fridman
(02:18:39)
Could we talk about the role of religion in the Roman Empire? What’s the story there?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:18:49)
I mean, religion’s interesting. Because in my mind, the rise to dominance in a lot of the world of monotheistic religions is one of the huge turning points, because it’s just such a different mentality.

(02:19:05)
I mean, it’s very, very different where you say, “There’s one God, and it’s my God,” versus, “Okay, I believe in this god, but there’s an infinite number of legitimate gods.” And nowadays, particularly in the West, we tend to view the monotheistic perspective as the norm. But for more than half of human history, it was not.

Religion in Rome


(02:19:28)
It used to be the notion in a lot of Roman history, up until about 300 AD, the idea was, “Well, there’s just a ton of gods floating around. Maybe you worship that one, and I worship these two that I like. And the guy across the street worships the oak tree in his backyard, and it’s all good.”

(02:19:46)
They’re all legitimate things, versus, “Oh, no, no, no. Now there is one God, and only one God that’s the correct answer.” And as soon as you do that, religion becomes foregrounded in your decision making much more. I mean, the Romans had religion, but it wasn’t really driving anything, if you know what I mean. It was auxiliary to things, rather than a central force. For a lot of Roman history, you had standard, I guess, pagan polytheism where there’s a bunch of gods. There’s certain gods who are associated with the Roman state. There would be prayer said to those gods on behalf of the Roman state. But you weren’t trying to execute the will of Zeus or something, or Jupiter or Mars or anybody else.

(02:20:34)
And in your private life, it was the same thing. You might ask certain gods for help, but it wasn’t as much of a dominant thing in your own existence. So I think that’s a real transition point where religion started to become so foregrounded.

(02:20:48)
And as soon as you get the monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular; it really shifts how people start to think about themselves in relationship to the world around them.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:59)
So Jesus was born during the rule of Emperor Augustus.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:21:03)
Yep. Which is kind of neat, that really influential people in the realm of political events and religious events co-existed. What are the odds?
Lex Fridman
(02:21:14)
I mean, yeah, there’s certain moments in history where just a lot of interesting, powerful people come together and make history. And he was crucified under Emperor Tiberius’ rule.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:21:25)
Yep.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:26)
Why were the ideas of Jesus seen as a threat by the emperor?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:21:32)
The thing that causes conflicts between the Romans and Christians is a little bit strange. It’s all with this where the Romans had a tradition of on the emperor’s birthday, saying a prayer basically wishing him good luck. But technically it’s in the form of sacrificing to that part of the emperor that might become divine after his death. To the Romans, this is the equivalent of a patriotism act: saying The Pledge of Allegiance or something to the country.

(02:22:05)
But of course, to Christians, this is worshiping another God. And I think there’s almost a failure of communication here, that the Romans just at least initially didn’t quite understand.

(02:22:14)
This is really problematic for these people, because they’re coming from a polytheistic perspective where, “Yeah, everybody has different gods. So what? This isn’t a religious problem. This is a political one. Then why won’t you send good wishes to the emperor? If you’re a loyal Roman, this is something you should want to do.”

(02:22:33)
And many of the early Christians, I think would’ve been fine with that. But it took the form of what they were asked to do was to basically worship another God. And that was the sticking point.

(02:22:46)
And this is where I think movies have warped some of our images of Roman history: that Hollywood loves to depict very early Christians. I’m talking, like, first 200 years here after the ministry of Christ as a group, that all the Romans were obsessed with, that they were constantly trying to persecute and all this. Honestly, I think the Romans at that point were more just indifferent or didn’t know what was going on.

(02:23:13)
And if you look at some of the primary sources of that time, I mean, there’s this very famous letter by a guy named Pliny who was a Roman governor of a province in the East. He had the habit of writing letters to the Roman emperor at the time, who was Trajan, every time he had a problem with being governor.

(02:23:31)
This is great. This is the two highest governmental officials in the Roman world hammering out policy between them, the emperor and one of his governors. This is about 100 years, 100 AD about.

(02:23:43)
And Pliny says, “Hey, Emperor, I had this issue. I had these people come before me called Christians. I don’t quite know what to do with them. What should my policy be? Here’s what I know about them.” And what he knows is almost nothing. I mean, it’s this almost comic-like garbling.

(02:24:00)
” They have this weird thing where they get together on some day of the week and they swear oaths to one another not to do bad stuff,” which is of course his garbled understanding of the 10 Commandments. “And then they have breakfast together and they eat food,” and this is communion. But he doesn’t get that that’s what’s going on. And so he’s really ignorant.

(02:24:21)
But I think that the broader point is, okay, this is one of the best-educated, best-traveled Romans who has the most experience in the empire, has been all over the empire, and what does he know about Christianity? Basically nothing.

(02:24:37)
So if one of the best-educated, most widely traveled guys really doesn’t know much about them, that suggests that not many people did at this point in time.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:48)
At this time, was a fringe movement that really did-
Gregory Aldrete
(02:24:50)
Yeah, very fringe. I mean, it was one of hundreds of little mystery religions, the Romans thought of it as. These are religions that have some sort of revealed knowledge and that make more personal appeals to people.

(02:25:03)
Now, stepping back from this in a broad way, I think you can say that Christianity really was different in some ways, and had some things that maybe the Romans should rightfully have viewed as a threat. I mean, the Romans are a people very focused on this world: citizenship, what you do.

(02:25:20)
Christianity, in essence, has a focus on the next world. So this world isn’t as important as what you’re setting yourself up for.

(02:25:27)
And even worse, from a Roman perspective, I’m kind of saying, “Okay, if I were a Roman,” Romans are all about making distinctions between people. Citizen, non-citizen, man, woman, free, slave.

(02:25:41)
Christianity comes along and says, “In God’s eyes, you’re all equal.” Now, that’s a pretty problematic idea if you’re deeply invested in Roman hierarchy. And I think it is no surprise that among the earliest converts to Christianity are women and slaves, and in particular, female slaves.

(02:26:05)
Now, who are they? They’re the people at the rock bottom of the Roman hierarchy of status, which the Romans are obsessed with status. But here’s a religion that says, “That doesn’t matter.”

(02:26:16)
And in that same letter to Pliny, Pliny says, “Okay, in this group of Christians I’ve heard about, their leaders are two female slaves they call ‘deaconesses.'” Now, this is really early. This is before the church exists, right? There’s no church structure yet. And who is leading the local congregation of Christians? Two slave women.

(02:26:39)
So that’s an interesting moment, and that’s not necessarily the image we get of early Christianity. But you can see how for people in this social structure, that would be very appealing to them. And in some ways, yeah, it is sort of a threat to the Roman system because they’re challenging it.

(02:26:56)
Now, the irony is, of course, 300 years after the life of Christ, the emperor converts to Christianity. And another 100 years later under Theodosius, it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire. So all of a sudden you have this flip-flop, where now the state itself is not just converted to Christianity, but actively promoting it and now persecuting pagans.

(02:27:21)
And the reason the emperors do that is one of the biggest problems for emperors at that point in time is legitimacy. That there’s tons of civil wars where you have lots of different people saying, “I’m emperor.” So lots of generals declaring themselves emperor.

(02:27:37)
Now under a polytheistic religion, you’re all just fighting. It doesn’t matter. But if you say there is only one God, then if that God picks someone to be His emperor, they’re the only legitimate emperor. Right?

(02:27:56)
So there is a real advantage to emperors now becoming Christian. Because they can say, “We’re now a Christian empire and there’s only one God, and I’m the guy that God picked to be emperor, that means all these other people claiming to be emperors are illegitimate.”
Lex Fridman
(02:28:14)
Do you think that? Or is there other factors that explain why Christianity was able to spread?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:28:20)
Well, that’s why it’s appealing to the emperors. And we’re talking here, I mean, the religious answer is people see the light, right? It’s a faith-based thing. I’m looking at this as a historian.

(02:28:32)
So putting aside religious feeling and saying, “Okay, if I’m doing an analysis of this as a social phenomenon, what would be appealing to people?” And there is that very compelling reason for emperors to want to go to Christianity because it helps them with their biggest problem, which is legitimacy.

(02:28:48)
Now, if you’re an ordinary person, what is the appeal of Christianity? Well, we already looked at a couple of them. One of them is that it promises you a reward in the afterlife.

(02:28:58)
I mean, the Roman and Greek notions of the afterlife aren’t that appealing. Either you just turn into dust, or at best you turn into this kind of ghost thing that floats around something that looks like a Greek gymnasium, which is like a bunch of grassy fields. It’s not so hot.

(02:29:14)
So here you’re offered the idea of, “Oh, you go to paradise forever. That sounds really good.” And secondly, for a lot of people in Roman society, that notion of, “Here’s something that says I’m valuable as a human being. It doesn’t matter whether I’m free or slave. It doesn’t matter whether I’m Roman or non-Roman. It doesn’t matter if I’m man or woman. Here’s something that says I have equal value.” That’s enormously appealing.

(02:29:37)
And finally, early Christians, I mean, they honestly, a lot of them do good works. They take care of the sick, they feed the poor. I mean, if you look at Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, that’s the stuff He really hammers. If we look at the words of Jesus when He says, “What do you do to be a Christian?”

(02:29:51)
A lot of it is take care of the unfortunate, take care of people who are sick, take care of people who are starving. And a lot of the early Christians really take that seriously. They are helping people out. So that’s appealing.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:07)
They’re the good kind of populist, and populist messages spread.

(02:30:14)
Let me ask you about gladiators.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:30:17)
Switch our pace here.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:19)
What role did they play in Roman society?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:30:23)
I mean, okay, gladiator games obviously become a popular form of entertainment. And they’re one of the ones that’s captured people’s imaginations for all sorts of reasons. I mean, it’s dramatic.

(02:30:33)
But also I think it’s that apparent contradiction. That in so many ways, Roman society seems familiar to us. In so many ways, it seems sophisticated and appealing. Law is wonderful, all this. But yet, for fun, they watched people fight to the death. So how do you reconcile these things?

(02:30:53)
Gladiators, I find very interesting because they’re an example of what historians call status dissonance. It’s someone who in society has high status in some ways, and very low or despised status in another.

(02:31:12)
So gladiators, most of them were slaves, the lowest of the low in Roman society, right? Also, they’re fighting for other people’s pleasure, and dying sometimes for other people’s pleasure.

(02:31:25)
And the Romans had a real thing about this: your body being used for others’ pleasure. Even a humble working person who hired themselves out for labor, the Romans thought that was innately demeaning, because you’re using your body for someone else’s benefit or pleasure.

(02:31:42)
They didn’t have this notion of the dignity of hard labor or something. They thought the only noble profession was farming, okay, because there you generate something and you’re producing it for yourself. But if you work for someone else, you’re demeaning yourself. And gladiator’s the worst of the worst, right? You’re performing for someone else’s pleasure. So on the one hand, they’re very low status. But on the other hand, successful gladiators get famous. People admire them, women find them attractive, they’re celebrities. This is the status dissonance. You have these people who, on the one hand, formally are very low status in society, but yet are very popular on the other hand.

(02:32:23)
Another kind of myth about gladiators is that they were just dying all the time. I mean, you watch movies, and again, they’ll always throw a bunch of gladiators and they all die. I think some scholars did a study of, like, 100 fights we know of where we know some details. And I think 10% of those ended in the death of one of the people.

(02:32:44)
So gladiators are a lot more like boxing matches, where you’re watching a display of skill between two people who are more or less evenly matched in terms of their abilities. And probably they’ll survive, though there’s a chance that one of them might get injured. In fact, one might die.

(02:33:04)
Having said all that, in the end, you really are having people fight and potentially die for the pleasure of an audience. And anthropologists and Roman historians like to speculate, “Why did the Romans do this?”

(02:33:17)
The Romans address it. I mean, there’s a famous thing where a Roman says, “We Romans, we’re a violent people. We’re a warlike people. And so it’s fitting that we should be accustomed to the sight of death and violence.” Kind of works.

(02:33:34)
There’s a more symbolic interpretation that says, “The amphitheater is an expression of Roman dominance,” a symbolic expression. Because what you have are all segments of Roman society gathered together to control the fate of others.

(02:33:50)
You have foreigners, you have wild animals, you have criminals, you have other people. And we are symbolically asserting our dominance over those groups by determining, “Do you live or do you die?” And that kind of works, too.

(02:34:06)
And the cynical one is, humans like violence. I mean, when people watch a hockey game, what gets them most excited? The fight. When people watch car racing, there’s a crash. What’s going to be shown on the news? It’s the crash. There’s something dark in human nature sometimes that likes violence. And maybe the Romans are just being more honest about it than we are.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:28)
I think Dan Carlin has a really great episode called Painfotainment. I think in that episode, he suggests the hypothetical: that if we did something like a gladiator games today to the death, that the whole world would tune in.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:34:44)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:45)
Especially if it was anonymous. We have a thin veil of civility, underneath which would probably still be something deep within us would be attracted to that violence.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:34:57)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, is it human nature? Why do people slow down when there’s a car wreck and try and see what’s happening?

(02:35:04)
On the other hand, to be fair, I mean there were Romans at the time who morally objected to them and said, “This is morally degenerate to take pleasure in this, and that’s wrong.” So I think in all eras, you have a diversity of opinions. There’s no unanimous take on what this is or what this means.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:23)
Who usually were the gladiators? Was it slaves? Was it-
Gregory Aldrete
(02:35:26)
Well, the most common source, again, is prisoners of war. If you conquer some people and they seem to be warlike, you might well consign some of them to fight in the arena.

(02:35:36)
And the other thing about gladiators is they were highly trained professionals. The gladiator schools who trained them were spending a lot of money to train these people. And it wasn’t just, “We take some guy and throw them into the arena,” like you see in movies all the time. These were people that you’d invested a lot of money, and that’s why you don’t really want to see them killed.

(02:35:58)
But yeah, mostly they’re prisoners of war. I mean, in very rare instances you might have a free person volunteering, or even selling themselves to fight as gladiators. But much more common was that.

(02:36:11)
And what’s interesting is some people wouldn’t do it. I mean, there’s a lot of instances of gladiators refusing to fight and committing suicide, which you don’t hear. There was one German who was supposed to fight as a gladiator. Instead, he stuck his head between the spokes of a wagon that was spinning and snapped his own neck.

(02:36:31)
There were a group of 29 Germans who all said, “We’re not going to fight for the Romans’ pleasure.” And they strangled one another the night before they were supposed to fight. So I mean, you have people sort of objecting to being complicit in this kind of performance as well,
Lex Fridman
(02:36:47)
And they also had interest in animals.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:36:50)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:51)
Humans fought animals, exotic animals.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:36:54)
And animals fought animals.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:56)
Animals fought animals.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:36:56)
The Romans were a little weird with their animal thing. They loved exotic animals, but mostly they liked to see exotic animals die.

(02:37:04)
I mean, there was an enormous industry collecting wild beasts, transporting them to Rome: which is no easy matter to transport elephants and giraffes and rhinos, particularly in this era of technology. But they were draining Africa and bringing lions and all these things and sacrificing them.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:25)
And what about the different venues? I mean, there’s the legendary Colosseum. What is the importance of this place?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:37:32)
Well, the Colosseum’s real name is the Flavian Amphitheater. It’s interesting because for a long time, Rome always had a chariot racing arena, the Circus Maximus. But it didn’t have a permanent gladiatorial venue until relatively late, till about 80 AD, during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian. He built this thing. He built the Flavian Amphitheater; he was from the Flavian family of emperors. And he did it as a deliberate act of propaganda.

(02:38:03)
Before him had been Nero, who was seen as a crazy or bad emperor. One of Nero’s indulgences is he had built this enormous palace for himself called the Golden House. It was kind of this pleasure palace with 50 dining rooms and all this stuff, and it was basically wasting a ton of money on him.

(02:38:25)
So right on the site where Nero had his Golden House, Vespasian says, “I’m going to erect a new building on top of it that’s going to be for the pleasure of the people.” So it was very much a political statement, that “My dynasty is going to be about serving Romans, not serving ourselves.” That’s why he builds the Flavian Amphitheater.

(02:38:47)
The funds he uses from it is basically from looting Jerusalem. Because the other thing he had done just before this is he had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there, in fact, he and his son Titus. And so this is what he now builds in Rome is his gift to the people of Rome.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:04)
But it’s interesting to think about that place, to think about that relationship with violence across centuries for spectacle, watching people fight. And like you said, only 10% of the time it led to the death. But I read that still a lot of people died. A lot of gladiators were killed.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:39:26)
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:27)
There’s numbers there that’s crazy. I read a full 100,000 dead. This includes gladiators, slaves, convicts, prisoners, and so on. That’s a lot of people.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:39:39)
The Flavian Amphitheater is really interesting too, just as a piece of technology, and as influence on later world. I mean, almost every sporting arena today owes something to the Flavian Amphitheater, the Colosseum, in terms of construction.

(02:39:52)
It was amazingly sophisticated building. I mean, it had retractable awnings and elevators and ramps that things could just pop up into the arena from below. And it-
Gregory Aldrete
(02:40:00)
… just pop up into the arena from below. And it had very well-designed passages where everybody could file in and file out very efficiently, and they were all numbered. So I mean, it’s one of, I think, the most influential buildings in history, just because of the way that all these buildings we go to today, they’re all kind of variants on it and using some of the ideas from it.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:21)
And the Romans took their construction seriously.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:40:25)
Oh, yeah. They were good at that. So they were excellent engineers. And the Romans were excellent engineers, especially when it came to what you might think of as humble stuff. I mean, today, we tend to think of, oh, a Roman building as shining white marble, right? Well, the core of that building was probably concrete, and the marble is just a superficial facade. And if you think about the Colosseum in Rome today, all the marble has been stripped off that building. And what you see is the concrete core, the structural core that’s left, and the Romans, I mean, they didn’t invent concrete, but they just used it more creatively than anyone had before. And if you look at buildings like the Greeks built, they’re all rectilinear, they’re all rectangles or squares, and they always have a lot of columns because you need to hold the roof up.

(02:41:09)
The Romans, because of their use of concrete, could build wooden frames, they could have curves, they could have domes, they could have all kinds of stuff. And it just explodes the architectural possibilities. They also made a lot of use of the vault. So if you cut rocks and arrange them so that they form a curve, you could have big vaulted spaces. And they were just brilliant with their mix of things. I mean, the Pantheon is the best preserved Roman building, and it’s another brilliant building, incredibly influential. I mean, every capitol building in the world or museum is an imitation of the Pantheon. The capitol in Washington, D.C., the Capitol in Madison, where I’m from, Wisconsin, Austin, where we are now, they’re all Pantheons. It’s a big dome with a triangular pediment and some columns on the front.

(02:41:57)
So it’s just an amazingly influential building. But it’s brilliant because the way it’s constructed is the concrete at the bottom of the dome is both thicker and has a denser formulation, so it’s heavier where it needs to bear the weight. And then as you get further up the dome, it gets narrower and narrower, and they mix in different types of rock. So at the top, you’re using pumice, that very light volcanic stone. So where you want it to be light, it’s light, and it’s here 2,000 years later. I mean, look around you. How many buildings that we’re building` now do you think are going to be here in 2,000 years? I suspect not many.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:31)
And it’s not only that they lasted, but they were beautiful, or at least in our current conception of beauty.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:42:37)
Yeah, I mean, Vitruvius, his principles are things should be functional and they should be aesthetically pleasing. So that’s a winning combination, I think.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:46)
Yeah, they pulled that off pretty well. If you could talk about the long line of emperors that made up the Roman Empire, how were they selected?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:42:55)
Oh, boy. We’ve been talking about Augustus’ great achievements and how clever he was with propaganda and all, this is his great failure. So his great failure is that he did not solve was the problem of succession. How do you ensure that the next person who follows you is not just the best person but is qualified? And he fails to do it. So the principle he settles on is heredity. So the nearest blood relative. And he goes through all these people, all these young kids in his family die that he keeps trying to make the heir, and he ends up making his heir Tiberius, who he never liked, it was his stepson, he didn’t like him, but he ends up inheriting it. And the next set of emperors, the Julio-Claudians, which is the family that Augustus starts, they all basically are who is the nearest male relative to the previous emperor. And that’s how we get a lot of crazy emperors like Caligula or Nero.

(02:43:53)
And then the next family, the Flavians, the first guy is kind of an Augustus, it’s Vespasian, the one who builds the Flavian Amphitheater, and then one of his sons takes over, Titus, who’s okay, and then the next son takes over, Domitian, who’s nuts again. So heredity just isn’t working, And Rome fights a couple civil wars, and in 98 AD, we’re 100 years now into the Empire, and they look back at this track record and say, “Okay, we’ve been picking our emperors by heredity and we’ve gotten some real duds here, some real problematic people. Is there a way to fix this?”

(02:44:27)
And this is one of the few instances where the Romans, who I keep saying are very traditional and resist change, I think actually make a change and realize we got to do something different. And so the next guy looks around and says, “Okay, forget who’s my nearest male relative, who’s the best qualified to be emperor after me? I’ll pick that person and then I’ll adopt him as my son.” So they kind of stick with heredity. Now, it’s this fake adoption, and you end up with a lot of old guys adopting middle-aged adults as their son, which is a little strange, but it works.

Emperors


(02:45:01)
And so for the next 80 years, you have only five emperors, and they’re often called the Five Good Emperors, they’re not related necessarily by blood, they sort of picked the best qualified guy, and they’re all sound, competent, good emperors. And the 2nd century AD, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, is often regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire. And a lot of that comes from you have political stability, you have a succession of decent guys being emperor who rule relatively wisely, promote good policies. There’s other things working to Rome’s advantage, but that’s good. And then where it falls apart is where the last guy, Marcus Aurelius, looks around and says, “Who’s the best qualified guy to succeed me? What a coincidence, it’s my own dear son.”, who turns out to be a psycho. And then it all goes downhill.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:53)
And some people place the sort of the collapse of the Roman Empire there at the end of Marcus Aurelius’ rule.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:46:00)
Yeah, so 180 AD is one common date for an early date for the end of the Roman Empire when you… Because from then on, it’s a mixed bag of good and bad emperors.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:11)
At the very least, this period is when the Roman Empire is at its height on all different kinds of perspectives.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:46:18)
Certainly geographically. I mean, at this point, stretches from Britain to Mesopotamia, from Egypt up to Germany. Like I said, probably about 50 million people within its boundaries. Within those boundaries, there’s relative peace. So I mean, sometimes people talk about the Pax Romana. I mean, the Romans are fighting lots of people, but within the boundaries, you have relative peace. There’s relative economic prosperity. I mean, nothing in the ancient world is that prosperous. It’s just a different sort of economy, but it’s pretty stable. There’s no huge disasters happening yet. Some plagues start in Marcus Aurelius’ reign. But yeah, this is pretty much seen as the high point of the Roman Empire, and I think it is. I think that there’s truth to that.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:01)
Let me ask the ridiculously oversimplified question, but who do you think is the greatest Roman emperor or maybe your top three?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:47:10)
Greatest emperor? I tell you what, I’ll tell you my favorite Roman who wasn’t an emperor, and that’s Marcus Agrippa, who was Augustus’ right-hand man. So Agrippa’s this interesting guy who is extremely talented. He’s a terrific general. He’s a terrific admiral. He’s a great builder. He is kind of like the troubleshooter for Augustus. He’s the guy who wins the Battle of Actium for Augustus. So literally, Augustus would not have become the first emperor without Agrippa. When Augustus rebuilds the city of Rome, it’s Agrippa that he gives the job to. Agrippa rebuilds the campus marshes. He builds the first version of the Pantheon. He personally goes through the sewers to clean them out. And he just has this great set of qualities that he’s very self- effacing.

(02:48:01)
I think he likes power, he wants real power, but he realizes I don’t have that kind of clever politician’s ability to be the front guy, so I’ll just serve my friend, Augustus, loyally. They were childhood friends. I’ll win the battles for Augustus and I’ll let him take all the credit, but I’ll be his number two guy, and that’s what I’m good at. And he realizes his limitations. I mean, so many people don’t. So many people are like, “Oh, I just want to keep grabbing for more and more and more when it’s not something they’re good at.” And I think Agrippa says, “I’m good to this point and I’ll play that role and no more, and that’ll give me a lot of power, but I’m not going to press it.” And yeah, he’s just very hardworking, he’s modest, he’s self-effacing, he’s highly competent.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:49)
I wonder how many people in history that are like the drivers, the COO of the whole operation that we don’t really think about or don’t talk about enough to where they’re really the mastermind?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:49:02)
Or the ones who make something possible. I mean, even in this conversation today, you would not have Alexander the Great without his father Philip II having built that army and handed it to him on a silver platter. Octavian would never have become emperor without Agrippa. So they play central roles sometimes. But if I had to pick an emperor, I’d probably pick Augustus just because of his influence and because I admire the thing Agrippa didn’t have, his political savvy, his manipulation of image and propaganda. All that, I find very fascinating. Though I’m not sure he’s a great human being, but he’s a really interesting figure.

The greatest Roman

Lex Fridman
(02:49:42)
Whether he’s good or bad, he was extremely influential on defining just the entirety of human history that followed. Probably one of the most influential humans ever. Nevertheless, if you ask in public who the most famous Roman emperor is, would that be Marcus Aurelius potentially?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:50:03)
I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:05)
He’s up there.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:50:05)
That’s a good question.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:05)
Right?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:50:06)
He’s real famous because he was a stoic philosopher and he wrote this book, the Meditations.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:10)
I mean, it’s interesting. Stoicism as a philosophical ideology had a role to play during that time. I mean, the tragic fact that… Did Nero murder Seneca?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:50:26)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:26)
Well, he drove him to suicide, let’s say. There’s a lot of interesting questions there, but one is the role, especially when it’s hereditary, the role of the mentor, who advises who with the Aristotle and Alexander the Great, that dance of who influences and guides the person as they become and gain power is really interesting.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:50:50)
Well, I mean, one of the big questions with the Roman emperors, and we’ve been talking about some of them, is why did so many seem to be either crazy or just sadists? I don’t know that there’s a good answer to that. I mean, people have theories. Oh, Caligula got a brain fever and changed after that or something. But I think there’s a lot of maybe truth in the notion that the ones who seem to go craziest quite often are the ones who become emperor at a young age. And there is something about that old cliche that absolute power corrupts absolutely, especially if your own personality isn’t really fully formed yet. You know what I’m saying? I think take anybody when they’re a teenager, if you all of a sudden said, you have unlimited power, what would that do to you? How would that warp your personality? I mean, look at all the… [inaudible 02:51:40] like the Disney stars who sort of go wrong or something because they get rich and famous at this very young age.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:46)
Yeah. Fame, power, and even money, if you get way too much of it at a young age, I think we’re egotistical, narcissistic, all that kind of stuff as babies. And then when we clash with the world and we figure out the morality of the world, how to interact with others, that other people suffer in all kinds of ways, understand the cruelty, the beauty of the world, the fact that other people suffer in different ways, the fact that other people are also human and have different perspectives, all of that, in order to develop that, you shouldn’t be blocked off from the world, which power and money And fame can do.

Marcus Aurelius

Gregory Aldrete
(02:52:25)
And conversely, a lot of the emperors we regard as, quote, “good emperors”, are the ones who become emperor at a middle-aged or something, where their personalities are fully formed, where they’re not going to really become different people. And so that works in that theory too. I mean, I don’t think it’s absolute. And of course, the greatest exception is Octavian Augustus, who starts as rise to power as a teenager. Somehow doesn’t seem to go nuts.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:52)
Yeah, history has a lot of-
Gregory Aldrete
(02:52:53)
It’s not an absolute, but it doesn’t help to get that much power at a young age, I think.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:58)
What does it take to be a successful emperor, would you say?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:53:01)
So you say, what does it take to be a good Roman emperor? If you were going to draw up a job description, seeking Roman emperor, what are the qualities and qualifications you would put on it? Obviously, you would put responsible, good understanding of military, economics, whatever, ability to delegate. But just to be fun, let’s consider how much does it matter whether the emperor is good or bad? Because in the ancient world, what does it affect really if you’re say a peasant in Spain, if the emperor is crazy Nero or good Vespasian? I mean, how does that affect your day-to-day life? How does it affect you if you’re a peasant in Italy? Which is the average inhabitant. I mean, the crazy emperors mostly affect the people within the sound of their voice. So yeah, they go crazy. They murder senators, they murder members of their own family. They do wacky stuff. But a lot of that is constrained to the immediate surroundings around them. And meanwhile, the mechanism of the Roman Empire is just grinding along as it would anyway, I mean, the governors are running their provinces, stuff’s happening.

(02:54:16)
I mean, I guess an emperor can start a war, he can maybe raise taxes, but that would be the ways that he’s affecting the whole empire. And here, we get into technology does matter. We’re dealing with a world where, let’s say you’re in Rome and you’re the emperor and you want to send a message to a province far away, let’s say Judea, that message might take one or two months to get there and one or two months to get a reply. So how much influence as emperor are you really having over that province? I mean, those people pretty much have to make their own decisions and then just say to you, “This is what we did. I hope that’s okay.” Because otherwise, nothing gets done if they’re waiting four months for a decision.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:58)
Even in the realm of ideas, they can’t get on TV and on the radio and-
Gregory Aldrete
(02:55:05)
Communication-
Lex Fridman
(02:55:06)
… broadcasts.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:55:07)
… is so slow and so uncertain in ways that today, with the ability to instantaneously talk to people across the world, we can’t even imagine. And the Roman Empire is huge. I mean, it is months to send a message and get an answer. So here, you have the emperor in Rome, yeah, he affects who’s around him, and he can affect even common people. I mean, there’s crazy emperors who are at the games and they’re bored and they say, “We’ll take that whole section of the crowd and throw them to the lions or something.” There, you’re being affected by the emperor, but if you’re outside the range of his sight and voice, do you care who the emperor is-
Lex Fridman
(02:55:40)
So the big one-
Gregory Aldrete
(02:55:42)
… most of the time?
Lex Fridman
(02:55:42)
That’s a really important idea to remember. Same with the US president, frankly, in terms of the grand arc of history, what is the actual impact? But I would say the big one is probably starting wars, major global wars or ending them in both directions. And then taxation too, as you said. What was the taxation? What was the economic system? What was the role of taxation in the Roman Empire?
Gregory Aldrete
(02:56:10)
Romans are really weird with this. So in the Republic, once they started to acquire overseas provinces, they had to decide, well, what are we going to do with these provinces? And they, in the end, settled on this notion of, we’ll put a Roman governor in charge. We’ll collect some sort of taxes. But they often didn’t collect the taxes directly. Instead, they would sell contracts to private businesses to collect taxes.

(02:56:36)
So the private businesses would bid and say, “All right, if you give us the contract to collect taxes in Sicily, we’ll give you X number of money up front and then we go out and try to collect enough to make back that money and make ourselves a profit.” And this is a terrible system, because obviously, they’re going to go and try and squeeze as much as they can out of Sicily. And these companies were called publicans, publicani. And in the Bible, there’s a phrase, publicans and sinners, and that should give you an idea how they’re viewed. So everybody hated these tax collectors, and it was a really kind of dumb system because the publicans were going out and squeezing way more than they should in an unhealthy way from the provinces. And the Roman state was doing this kind of weird thing that they should have been doing themselves.

(02:57:25)
And over time, that shifts a bit and it becomes more like your standard taxation. And a lot of the taxation ends up being in kind too. So it’s like, okay, we’re taxing you, you pay it in wheat if you’re a farmer or something, not necessarily in cash. So in many ways, the Roman economy is underdeveloped. They didn’t have a lot of the sophisticated systems that we have today, and it probably held them back in some ways. And again, they have that resistance to change. The Romans also had weird notions about just business and profit making, that at least originally, there was this notion that’s shameful, again, the only thing that’s a worthwhile profession is farming.

(02:58:09)
So rich Romans would get involved in what we would call business manufacturing, particularly long distance trade with ships, but they would often do it through sort of front companies or employees who did it on their behalf, officially, and then they funneled the profits to the guy funding it because they don’t want to be soiled with business, which is beneath them. So the Romans had a lot of weird attitudes about the economy that I think in some ways didn’t help.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:36)
But nevertheless, they had many of the elements of the modern economic system with taxation, the record keeping.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:58:43)
They were good at record keeping. So the Romans… I mean, the census is a Roman word. They’re the ones that came up with that.
Lex Fridman
(02:58:48)
And obviously, the laws around everything.
Gregory Aldrete
(02:58:51)
Yes. So in certain ways, yes, they were extremely sophisticated. And of course, the biggest thing about people in the ancient world and today is that they weren’t stupider than us. I mean, sometimes you get this assumption, oh, well, in the ancient world, they just weren’t as smart or something. No, no, no. They were fully as intelligent as we were. They didn’t have access to the same technology as we do, but that doesn’t mean they were any less smart.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:14)
Can we talk about the Crisis of the Third century and the aforementioned Western and Eastern Roman Empires, how it’s split?

Taxes

Gregory Aldrete
(02:59:23)
Yeah. So I mean, after Rome starts to go downhill as you enter the 3rd century, so the 200s, so we’re moving out of the golden era now, I mean, a famous Roman historian, Cassius Dio, who lived right at that moment, very famously wrote of the transition of Marcus Aurelius to what follows, “Our kingdom now descends from one of gold, to one of rust and iron.” So even people who were alive at the time had a distinct sense something is going downhill here. And that’s interesting, because usually, great historical moments are retroactive. And I mean, here’s a guy who said, “Oh, something’s going wrong. Something’s really going badly now.”

(03:00:06)
And a lot of it becomes that the secret is out that what makes an emperor is who commands the most swords. And so you start to get rebellions by various Roman generals, each declaring himself emperor. So you’d always had this to a certain degree, but they had kept it in check during the 2nd century AD. But in the 3rd century, you sometimes get three or four generals in different parts of the empire, all declaring themselves emperor, and then they all rush off to Rome to fight a multi-way civil war.

(03:00:36)
And of course, while they’re doing this, the borders are undefended, so barbarians start to see opportunity and come across and start raiding, they start burning and pillaging farms, the civil wars are destroying cities and farms. So the economy is kind of tanking. Then there’s less money coming in as taxes. So when one guy finally wins, he jacks up the tax rate to try and make up for it, but now, there’s fewer people able to pay, and it’s all just a vicious cycle. The Romans start to debase the coinage, which means you take in a gold coin, you melt it down, mix it in with 10% something less valuable, and then stamp it and say it’s worth the same. Well, people aren’t stupid. They’re going to know that’s only 90% of that gold coin.
Lex Fridman
(03:01:19)
They’ve invented inflation.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:01:20)
Inflation. And you get horrific inflation uncontrolled. So the economy goes downhill, barbarians are raiding, you have internal instability. In one year, you have something like eight or nine different guys go through as emperor in 238. So it’s a mess. And it looks like the Roman Empire is going to fall in around the mid-3rd century. So this is the crisis. And then the kind of shocking development is late in that 3rd century, they actually stabilize the empire. So you have a series of these kind of army emperors who are just good generals who managed to push the barbarians out, reestablish the borders. It’s actually a whole group of them, but often, they get clumped under the most successful, the last guy, who’s Diocletian, who comes in, and he tries to stabilize the economy.

(03:02:12)
One of the things he does is he issues a new solid gold coin that he guarantees is solid gold. And he calls it a Solidus, a solid coin. He famously issues a price edict where he says, “This is the maximum it’s legal to charge for any good or service.” So it’s attempt to curb inflation. And that’s not going to work, but it helps. Kind of amusingly on Diocletian’s price edict, can you guess what the most expensive sort of item is? Hiring a lawyer. So some things never change, right?

Division of the Roman Empire

Lex Fridman
(03:02:46)
Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, in that system, there’s probably a huge amount of lawyers.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:02:51)
I mean, even lawyer isn’t quite the right word. Romans didn’t have true lawyers, but they had people you would hire to do legal stuff or give you legal advice. But anyway, no, the price edict is actually is really fascinating, because it’s this long list of stuff. And you can see a good pair of shoes, a bad pair of shoes, how much each costs, and you can see the relative value of things. So what was food versus clothing, what was going to the barber versus hiring a doctor, all that kind of stuff. So it’s a really fun document to just mess around with. But anyway, so Diocletian stabilizes, basically, the empire and these other guys as well and gives it a new lease on life. So it seems by the end of the 3rd century, that Rome is going to continue.

(03:03:33)
And then as we go into the 4th century, you have the really dramatic thing where Constantine comes along and converts to Christianity. And at the time he converts, the percentage of Christians in the Empire is small, 10% at most, something like that. Who knows? But it’s quite small. And all of a sudden, you have this weird thing where now, the emperor belongs to this new religion. What does this mean? You can debate a lot how sincere Constantine’s conversion was. It’s a little bit of a weird thing where he clearly is using it as a way to fire up the troops before a crucial battle to say, “Hey, I just had this dream and this god promised us victory if we put his magic symbol on our shields.”

(03:04:15)
And this would be okay, except that he had done this a couple times before. So one time, it was Helios the Sun god, one time, it was another god. Even after he converts, he continues to mint coins and stuff with other gods on them. He continues to worship other gods. But he also kind of seems sincere in his conversion. It’s just, I think the question is how much does he understand his new religion maybe more than, is it sincere. But that’s a real turning point.

(03:04:43)
So now, as we go into the 4th century, we have this thing with Constantine, the new religion. And the other thing that happens is the empire is really just too big to govern effectively. It’s that thing we’re talking about. It’s too large, the communication is too slow and it starts to naturally fragment. And at times, they try systems where they split it into four. So under Diocletian, he tries the tetrarchy, where he splits the empire into four, and you actually have sort of four emperors working together as a team. More commonly, it just splits east, west. So from that point on, you really start to have the history of the Western Empire going in one direction, the Eastern Empire in the other. You tend to have two emperors, though there are moments occasionally where they reunite. So that’s a big development as well. And that’s a turning point.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:32)
So the most common date that people say, maybe you can correct me on this, that the Roman Empire fell was 476 AD. They’re referring to the “fall”, quote, unquote, of the Western Roman Empire. So why did the Roman Empire fall?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:05:49)
Yeah, this is a real game. Pick your favorite date for the fall of the Roman Empire. 476 is a very common one. And what happens in that year is a barbarian king comes down into Italy and deposes a guy named Romulus Augustulus, which is an amazing name. It’s combining the names of the founder of Rome, Romulus, with Augustus, the second founder of Rome. And so some people say that’s the end of the Roman Empire. Sure. But others say it’s 410, when Alaric sacks Rome for the first time. Others say it’s 455, when the Vandals come and sack Rome and do a much more thorough job of it this time. Some say it’s 180, when Marcus Aurelius picks poorly in succession. Some say it’s 31, when Octavian wins the Battle of Actium and kills the Roman Republic. Or you can go past that date and say it’s 1453 when the Eastern Roman Empire finally falls.

(03:06:47)
And I mean, the Eastern Empire is legitimately the Roman Empire. If you were to go and ask them, “Who are you?” They wouldn’t say, “We’re the Byzantines, we’re the Eastern Roman Empire.” They would just say, “We’re the Romans.” And they have a completely legitimate claim to do that. So this whole game of when does the empire fall is problematic. And the other thing is all those dates about invasions that cluster around the 400s, so 410, 455, 476, you have to ask yourself, who counts as a real Roman by that point? Because for a while now, the Romans themselves are often coming from barbarians, are crossing that boundary, Roman generals. They might get raised as a Hun, then serve with the Roman army for a while, then not, or a Visigoths or not. That’s been going on for a long time. So what makes someone a real Roman? How do you tell that the guy kicked out in 476, was a, quote, “real Roman”, and the barbarian king who took his place wasn’t? That’s a very arbitrary decision.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:52)
There’s so many interesting things there. So of course, you described really eloquently the decline that started after Marcus Aurelius, and there’s a lot of competing ideas there. And the tensions-
Gregory Aldrete
(03:08:04)
Just to interrupt you, I hate wishy-washy answers, which is what I kind of said. So I will give you this, I think by the end of the 5th century AD, the Western Roman Empire has transformed into something different. So I don’t know what date I can pick for that, but I can say by around 500, I don’t know that we can call whatever exists there the Roman Empire anymore.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:26)
And of course, the barbarians make everything complicated because they seem to be willing to fight on every side, and they’re like fluid, which they integrate fast, and it just makes the whole thing really tricky to say, yeah, who’s a Roman, who is not? And at which point did it-
Gregory Aldrete
(03:08:43)
And barbarians have been forming large parts of the Roman army for centuries. Yeah, it’s extremely fluid and not at all just clear sides here. So it’s a mess.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:54)
From a military perspective, perhaps, what are some things that stand out to you on the pressure from the barbarians, the conflicts, whether it’s the Hans or the Visigoths?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:09:07)
There was a military strategist, guy named Edward Luttwak, who wrote this book, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, which was basically about frontiers and how did the Romans define their frontier? And everybody’s jumped on this and argued about it and says it’s wrong and all, but started this debate among Roman historians about, yeah, what does frontier mean to the Romans? Did they conceive of their empires having a border or was it always expanding or what? And did they have a grand strategy? I mean, today, militaries have a strategy where we want to achieve this, we want to exert force here. We want to protect these areas. Did the Romans even visualize their empire in that sort of grand strategic way? And it’s a real debate. I mean, there’s some things that suggest, “Oh, here, they tried to rationalize the border and short it by taking or shorten it by taking this territory.” Other people see as just kind of random. So that’s an interesting take, is how do the Romans conceive of empire?

(03:10:06)
I mean, if you look back at someone like Virgil, at the time of Augustus, he said, well, the Gods granted Rome empire without end. So it’s that open-ended thing. But even under Augustus, he seems to be pulling back and saying, “Well, I’m going to kind of stop at the Rhine. I’m going to kind of stop at the Danube. We don’t need to keep expanding forever in the way we’ve been doing.” So I mean, that’s an interesting concept of how do the Romans see their empire? Does it have a boundary? What are those boundaries? What does that mean?
Lex Fridman
(03:10:36)
And then barbarians were very much making that boundary even more difficult to kind of define it even if you wanted to.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:10:44)
Right. And again, the other fun debate is were these invasions, when the Visigoths crossed the Danube come into the Roman Empire, is this an invasion as it was originally described, or is it a migration as some scholars have started calling it? Because the Visigoths were fleeing pressure from another Gothic group, and they were fleeing pressure from the Huns. And I mean, a lot of the early Gothic peoples who come into the Roman Empire are basically seeking asylum. They’re saying, “Will you give us a piece of territory to live on within the boundaries of the empire? And in return, we will fight for you against external enemies.” And the Romans make these deals with some of the Goths. In fact, they made a pretty good deal with the Goths, one group of Goths to do exactly that. You can settle within the boundaries. We’ll feed you, we’ll give you a certain amount of stuff, and you fight for us. And then the Romans treated them really badly. They kind of didn’t supply what they had promised, and so they turned against the Romans with good reason. So the Romans blundered in these things too.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:45)
So is it correct that the Visigoths fought on the side of the Romans against Attila the Hun?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:11:50)
Some of them did. So again, there were various groups on both sides of those battles. So Attila is the famous Hun, and he comes into the Roman Empire and seems to be heading right for…
Gregory Aldrete
(03:12:00)
He comes into the Roman Empire and seems to be heading right for Rome to knock it off, and everybody is so scared of the Huns that this weird coalition comes together of the Romans plus various barbarian groups against Attila and league with some other barbarian groups, and they fight a huge battle and it’s more or less a stalemate. So Attila gets stopped and he says, “All right, we’re going to just rest up for a year. Next year, we’ll go finish off the Romans.” Next year comes, he heads down into Italy, he’s heading straight for Rome, and the Pope goes and meets Attila, and they have lunch together at this river.

(03:12:37)
And at the end of the lunch, Attila goes back and says, “Eh, I changed my mind. We’re going to go back up to France, hang around for another year. We’ll finish off the Romans later.” And Christian sources say, “Saints appeared in the sky with flaming swords and scared away Attila.” Some other sources say, “Well, the Pope gave Attila a huge bribe to go away for a while,” believe whichever you like, but then Attila ends up dying on his wedding night before he comes back under mysterious circumstances and so that never materializes. And the Huns kind of fragment after his death.
Lex Fridman
(03:13:12)
So what was the definitive blow by the barbarians, by the Visigoths?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:13:17)
The barbarians are so many different groups,. And weirdly, I think an important one that sometimes people tend to focus on the Huns and the Goths, the Vandals end up going to Spain, conquering Spain, and then crossing over into North Africa and kind of conquering North Africa as well. And Spain and North Africa were some of the main areas that food surpluses were collected from and sent to Rome to feed the City of Rome. And it’s after those Vandal invasions of the takeover of those areas that the population of Rome plummets. So I think that’s an interesting moment, where the City of Rome had always been this symbol, and already it was no longer the capital.

(03:14:01)
The emperors had moved to Ravenna, a little bit north, because it was surrounded by swamps, so it was more defensible. But there is something important about that old symbolic capital now just collapsing in terms of population, numbers, really no longer having importance because literally its food supply is cut off by losing those areas of the empire. And of course, the capital… Constantine had founded a new second capital at what used to be Byzantium, a Greek city on the Bosporus, which becomes Constantinople. He names it not very modestly after himself, and that now is really the dominant city for any of the Roman Empire’s eastern or western.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:42)
So if you’re actually living in that century, the 5th century, it’s kind of like the Western Roman Empire dies with a whimper. It’s not like-
Gregory Aldrete
(03:14:50)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:50)
It’s a bunch of strife.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:14:51)
There’s a lot of moments you can pick. There’s an earlier one in the 300s when the Romans lose a big battle to some barbarians that symbolically is important. But yeah, I don’t think there’s one clear cut moment. And again, I don’t know that it is the barbarians that cause, quote, “the fall of the Roman Empire.” I mean, this is the other game as people like to say, “When did the Roman Empire fall?” The other big question is why. Why did the Roman Empire fall? If you define it as falling. And I mean, barbarian invasions was the traditional answer. So there’s a French historian famously said, “The Roman Empire didn’t fall. It was murdered.” It was killed by barbarians, but I mean there’s other explanations. I mean, some people say it was Christianity.

(03:15:38)
Some say it was a climate that the Roman Empire flourished during this moment of luck when just the climate was good, and then you get this sort of late Roman little ice age and everything goes downhill and that’s what caused it. There’s some that say things like disease. There were a whole series of waves of plague that started to hit under Marcus Aurelius and continued after him, which seemed to have caused real serious death and economic disruption. I mean, that’s a decent explanation. Another popular one is moral decline, which I don’t think really works well. You even get the people saying lead poisoning, but that’s not true because they were drinking out of the same pipes when the empire was expanding, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:16:23)
Yeah, that’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. But often, we kind of agree that’s something that you’ve talked about quite a bit is the military perspective is the one that defines the rise and fall of empires. You have a really great lecture series called The Decisive Battles of World History, which is another fascinating perspective to look at world history. What makes a battle decisive?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:16:50)
The easiest definition is it causes an immediate change in political structure. So who’s in charge? So the classic decisive political battle is Alexander beats King Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela. And in that moment, we switch from the ruler of the entire huge Persian empire being Darius to now being Alexander, from it being Persian to being controlled by the Macedonians. So there is a one afternoon has this dramatic switch over a enormous geographic area, so that’s a decisive battle and that you see that immediate change.

(03:17:27)
Other types of decisive battles are ones that might have more unforeseen long-term effects. You may not realize this is decisive at the time, but from a longer perspective it is. And often, those are ones that either allow some new people or idea or institution to either grow or have its growth curbed. So at various points, we have empires that were expanding and basically were stopped at some battle. And so you say, “Well, if they been stopped there, they might have gone on to dominate this whole area.” Or conversely, you could say, “Rome wasn’t…” They were one place before the second Punic War. After the second Punic War, they were its dominant force. So you could pick one of those battles and say that was decisive in setting them on this new path.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:15)
It’s also an opportunity to demonstrate a new technology. And if that technology is effective, it changes history because that was either tactical or literally the technology used. So how important is technology, that technological advantage in war?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:18:34)
Huge. I mean, the history of warfare is basically the history of technological change often. So I mean, there’s all the great moments of transition. For a long time, we fought with hand-to-hand, with metal weapons, then you start to have the gunpowder revolution, which causes all sorts of shifts there. There’s big changes. Planes, when they become a huge force. I mean, World War II is this crazy time where planes go from literally biplanes, string and wood, to jets four years later, so that’s this moment of incredibly fast technological change. Going into World War II, everybody thinks it’s all about battleships. Who’s got the biggest battleships? Four years later, battleships are just junk. Let’s just scrap them. It’s all about aircraft carriers and that’s everything war at sea. So you have these moments of, particularly in warfare, almost accelerated technological change where things happen very rapidly and the civilization or the nation or the army that adapts more quickly to the new technology will often be the one that wins, and we’ve seen that story over and over and over again in
Lex Fridman
(03:19:47)
It’s also interesting how much geography that you mentioned a few times affects wars, the result of wars, the rise and fall of empires, all of it. As silly as it is, it’s not the people or the technology, it’s like sometimes literally that there’s rivers.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:20:04)
I think there’s a real geographic determinism to civilization itself. I mean, if you look at where civilization arose, it’s in Mesopotamia and sort of a swampy land between two rivers. It’s in the Nile River Delta where the same situation, it’s in the Indus River where you have the same thing, and it’s along the Yellow Rivers and the Yangtze Rivers where it’s the same thing. So I mean, that is geographically determined where those great civilizations of Asia or Europe are going to arise. It’s very much determined by that. And often, the course of history has that strong geographical determination. I mean, you can argue that all of Ancient Egyptian society is based around the cycle of the Nile flood because it was so predictable and everything depended on it, and their whole religion actually develops around that.

(03:21:01)
And Mesopotamia the same thing, the way their religion develops is a reaction to the particular geographic environment that those people grew up in. So that’s a very profound influence on civilization. One of my professors once said to me, “The best map of the Roman Empire isn’t any of these maps with political borders. It would be a map that shows the zone in which it’s possible to cultivate olives.” So if you simply get a map and map onto it where you could grow olives during this time, let’s say, 1st century AD, it corresponds exactly, I mean really closely, to the areas that are most heavily Romanized. Now, I’m not going to say that, but there is something to that where Roman culture spread successfully is where people grow the same crops. And that’s just one of those fundamental things.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:56)
Yeah. I mean, you so beautifully put that the perspective can change dramatically how you see history, I mean, you could probably tell world history through what? Through olives, cinnamon and gold.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:22:10)
Yeah, that’s become really trendy is to look at history through objects. And I mean, for the Romans, diet is huge. I mean, probably 80% of the people in the Roman world ate basically a diet of olive oil, wine, and wheat, right? That those three crops are the basic crops that they subsisted on. And just the way you have to grow those crops, where you grow them, that dictates so much about culture, and the Romans saw it that way. One of my favorite documents from the ancient world… And they define civilization that way. So the Romans civilized people ate those crops and non-civilized people ate different food.

Decisive battles


(03:22:53)
So there’s this letter from a Greek, who was serving as an administrator in the Roman government, and he gets posted to Germany, to the far north. And he writes these pathetic letters back home to his family saying, “The inhabitants here lead the most wretched existence of all mankind for they cultivate no olives, and they grow no grapes.” So to him, that was hell, being posted to an area where they eat these terrible foreign foods.

(03:23:24)
And of course, the cliche for the Romans of what barbarians eat is red meat. They’re herders, so they’re not farmers, but they follow herds of cow around, which a totally different lifestyle. They eat dairy products, and they drink beer. And I tell my students sometimes that if you were to stick a Roman in a time machine and send them to where we live, which I teach in Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Roman would step out, look around, see all the beer, the brats, and the cheese, say, “I know who you guys are. You’re barbarians.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:56)
Barbarians. That’s another way to draw the boundary between olive oil, wine, wheat, and meat, dairy, and beer.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:24:03)
But it’s more fundamental because it’s different forms of life because if you’re a farmer, you grow certain crops. And if you’re a farmer, you tend to stay in one place. You tend to build cities. If you’re following herds of cows around, you don’t build cities, you have a totally different lifestyle. So it’s diet, but it’s more fundamental underlying things about your entire culture.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:25)
And many of the barbarians were nomadic tribes.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:24:28)
Some of them are, yeah, definitely.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:31)
Fascinating. I mean, this is just yet another fascinating way to-
Gregory Aldrete
(03:24:35)
It’s dietary determinism, geographic determinism. Yeah, these things are big.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:39)
On the topic of war, it may be a ridiculous span of time and scale, but how do you think the world wars of the 20th century compare to the wars that we’ve been talking about of the Roman Empire, of Greece, and so on?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:24:55)
I mean, what’s interesting about some of the Roman civil wars, particularly, is that they are world wars at the time. So let’s take the war after the assassination of Julius Caesar. We’ve talked about that one a lot. That was fought. There were battles there fought in Spain, in North Africa, in Greece, in Egypt, in Italy. I mean, truly across the entire breadth of the Mediterranean involving at least seven or eight different factions of Romans, and that was the world to them.

(03:25:26)
I mean, that’s very similar in a way to our modern world wars where this was a global conflict, at least as they envisioned the world they knew of. And if we sort of, I don’t know, somehow factor for transportation time, I mean, I think you can argue that that was a bigger war than World War II. In World War II, if you hopped on a plane, you could get from the US to China in a week or something, right? In little hops. I mean, in the ancient world, if you wanted to go from Spain to Egypt, it would take you a month. So they were fighting across a larger space- time zone in terms of their technology to move, then World War II took place across.
Lex Fridman
(03:26:05)
So in a sense, World War II was quite contained.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:26:10)
Smaller. Yeah. I mean, if we adjust for that sort of factor, so that was a global war, I think that would be very familiar.
Lex Fridman
(03:26:16)
How do you think the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons changed war?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:26:23)
Yeah. I mean, that’s the now we can destroy the world and truly kind of destroy civilizations wholesale, and that does seem to be a new thing. I mean, no matter what the Romans did, they didn’t have that choice, that ability to think, “I can do something that will end life as we know it at least, on the planet,” and that’s a very different perspective. And I think weird and interesting moment right now, I mean, I’m getting way beyond ancient history here, but for a long time, we had this sort of stasis with the nuclear standoff, with mutually assured destruction between the US sort of block of nations and the Soviet ones, and it worked. Now, we’re entering this kind of time when a lot more countries are going to start becoming nuclear capable. We might have a resurgence of just building new weapons, platforms with China, seems very eager to expand their nuclear arsenal in all sorts of ways. So it’s unnerving time, let’s say, right now.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:29)
And it’s a terrifying experiment to find out if nuclear weapons… When a lot of nations have nuclear weapons, is that going to enforce civility and peace, or is it actually going to be a destabilizing and ultimately civilization destroying?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:27:44)
Right. I mean, it was weirdly stable when it was a bipolar world where you had just sort of those two blocks. Now with a multipolar world with access to these weapons, I don’t know. I mean, we’re kind of jumping out of the ancient world, but I’ll tell you one thing that’s always fascinated me in this sort of comparison of ancient/ modern is how people don’t learn the lessons of the past in military history. And the very specific example, that in my lifetime I’ve seen play out twice, is just certain places people make the same mistakes over and over again. So a nice example is Afghanistan or roughly that sort of northern Pakistan-slash-into-what-is-Afghanistan. I mean, that is a geographic region that over and over again, the best most sophisticated armies in the world have invaded and have met horrible failure.

(03:28:36)
And that goes all the way back to Alexander the Great tried to conquer that area. The Mongols tried to do it. The Huns tried to do it. The Mughals tried to do it. Victorian Britain tried to do it. The Russians tried to do it. The Americans tried to do it. And they made the very same mistakes over and over and over again. And the two mistakes are not understanding the terrain, that it’s a rocky mountainous area that people can always hide in caves. And it’s not understanding the fundamentally tribal nature of that area that that’s where the real allegiance is in these tribes. It’s not in a centralized government. And that’s the same era Alexander made, as the British made in the 19th century, as the Russians, as the Americans. And it’s so depressing as a historian who studies history to see these things being repeated over and over again and you know exactly what’s going to happen.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:36)
For leaders not to be learning lessons of history. You co-wrote a book precisely on this topic, The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What have the Greeks and Romans Done For Us? What are the some key elements of antiquity that are reflected in the modern world?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:29:55)
Yeah. It’s a book that my wife and I wrote together, and it is trying to make people understand how deeply rooted are current actions in almost every way. Even things that we think are just truly unique parts of our culture or things that we think are just innate to human nature or actually rooted in the past. So this is another power of the past thing, and this is just a long specific list of examples really. So I mean, we go through government and education and intellectual stuff and art and architecture and a lot of the things we’ve been talking about today, language, culture, medicine. But even things like habits, the way we celebrate things, the way we get married. Our married rituals have all sorts of things in common with Roman weddings.
Lex Fridman
(03:30:46)
The calendar.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:30:46)
The calendar, the words, we’re using Julius Caesar’s calendar. I mean, Pope Gregory did one tiny little twist, but Caesar’s the one who basically came up with our current calendar with 365 days, 12 months, leap years, all that. So we’re living law. There’s just no way to escape the power of the past. And what I believe very ardently is that you can’t make good decisions in the present, and you can’t make good decisions about the future without understanding the past. And that’s not just true with your own life, but it’s in understanding others. So it’s not only your own past you have to understand, but you have to understand other people, what’s influencing them. So you can’t interact with others unless you understand where they’re coming from. And the answer to where they’re coming from is where they came from and what shaped them and what forces affect them. So I think it’s absolutely vital to have some understanding of the past in order to make competent decisions in the present.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:45)
What are some of the problems when we try to gain lessons from history and look back? We’ve spoken about them a bit, the bias of the historian, maybe what are the problems in studying history and how do we avoid them?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:32:01)
Probably the biggest problems are the sources themselves, the incompleteness of them, and this gets more intense the farther back we go in time.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:13)
Yes.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:32:14)
So if you say, “I want to write a book about the 19th century,” there is more material available for almost any topic you want to pick than you could possibly go through in your lifetime. If you say, “I want to write a book about the Roman world,” this is a very different thing. In my office, I have a bookshelf that’s, I don’t know, eight feet high, 10 feet wide, and it contains pretty much all the main surviving Greek and Roman literary texts, okay?
Lex Fridman
(03:32:43)
Wow.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:32:44)
One bookshelf, it’s a big bookshelf, but that’s what we use to interpret this world. Now, there’s a lot of other types of texts. There’s papyri. There’s all sorts of things. There’re inscriptions. There’s archaeological evidence, so there’s other stuff, but honestly, 99% of things about the world I study are lost. So then you get into all the issues is what we have surviving a representative example. We know it’s not. For example, all the literary texts are written by one tiny group, elite males. So that’s a problem there. There’s the problem of bias. We know that they’re not necessarily telling us the truth. They have an agenda. They’re representing history in a certain way to achieve certain things, then there’s the problem of transmission. I mean, all those texts are copies of copies of copies of copies, and everybody knows that game, where you whisper sentence to someone and then go around the room, are you going to get that same sentence back?

(03:33:43)
Well, every ancient text we have has gone through that process. So this is a real problem, and that’s just with the sources. And this is the historic era. When you move back just a little earlier to the prehistoric era or to civilizations that don’t have written sources surviving. And some of these are ancient Mediterranean ones. I mean, anything goes. I mean, one of the jokes is that museums, archaeological museums, are full of objects which are labeled cult object. It’s some religious object. And I think the honest label that should be on that thing is we have no idea what the hell this is, but I want to believe it’s something important. So I’m going to say it’s a religious object, but in reality, it’s an ancient toilet paper roll holder or something. And it’s a huge problem when you try to interpret a civilization without written texts.

(03:34:37)
And my favorite little story that kind of illustrates this is, in the 19th century, this German who had gone to school in England, one of the best educated guys of his time, goes to North Africa and is poking around in the desert. And he finds this site with these huge stone monoliths, 10 feet tall in pairs, and there’s a lintel stone across the top, so sort of two posts with a stone across the top, and there’s a big stone in front of them too. And so he looks at this stuff and he says, “Well, what does this remind me of?” It reminds me of Stonehenge, right? And there’s even a site where there’s multiple of these kind of in a square. So he goes back and talks about this and an Englishman goes and studies them, and he finds a ton of these sites and he finds some of them where there’s 17 of these pairs.

(03:35:28)
And so he goes back, and he writes a whole book about how clearly the Celtic peoples who once lived in Britain came originally from North Africa because he’s found this site and he reconstructs the religion where obviously they practice religious rituals here, and they had rites of passage. They squeezed between the things and the altar stones have this basin. So they had blood sacrifice and all this, and it seemed reasonable. And then you ask some locals, “Well, what’s that stuff out in the desert there?” And they mean, “Oh, the old Roman olive oil factory.” And those are the remains of an olive press, and we’re back to olives. I keep dwelling on olives. Olives don’t grow in England or Germany. So this is cultural bias. If all you have is physical evidence, you’re going to interpret that evidence through your own cultural biases.

(03:36:17)
So if you’re an Englishman and you see big stone uprights like this, you’re going to think Stonehenge. If you’re from the Mediterranean, you’re going to think olive press. So that’s a salutary example I think of the dangers of interpreting physical evidence when you don’t have written evidence to go along with it. And think today, if our civilization were to blow up in a nuclear war and archaeologists were to dig this up, how might they misinterpret things? I mean, if they were to dig up a college dorm like where I work, and that’s what you had for the civilization. You’d probably go in the dorm rooms, you’d find all these little rooms, and maybe in every room you’d find this mysterious plastic disc. And so everybody has these, so it must be a cult object. And it’s round. So obviously, they’re sun worshipers. And if you can decipher the inscription, you’ll see that obviously they all worship the great sun god Wham-O. It’s like, what do you find in every dorm room? A Frisbee. So that’s the level of interpretation you have to beware of. And there’s examples, where we’ve done exactly this.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:28)
So we have to have intellectual humility when we look back into the past. But hopefully, if you have that without coming up with really strong narratives, if you look at a large variety of evidence, you can start to construct a picture that somewhat rhymes with the truth.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:37:47)
Yes. I mean, as a professional historian, that’s what you do. You attempt to reconstruct an image of the past that is faithful to the evidence you have as filtered through what you can perceive of both the biases and the problems of the source material and your own biases. And it’s a interpretation, it’s a reconstruction, but it’s a lot like science, where you’re in a process of constantly reevaluating it, and saying, “Okay, here’s some new evidence. How do I work this into the picture? How do I now adjust it?” And that’s what’s fun.

(03:38:21)
I mean, it’s a mystery. It’s you’re being a detective and trying to reconstruct and to understand a society. It’s even more fun where it’s, yeah, you have to try to empathize. Empathy is a great human thing, to empathize with people who are not yourself, and we should do this all the time with just the people we encounter. But this is what we’re doing with ancient civilizations. And as I talked about earlier, sometimes you’ll feel great sympathy there. Sometimes you’ll feel incomprehension. But by being aware of both of those, you can maybe begin to get some grasp, however tentative, on the truth as you might perceive it,
Lex Fridman
(03:38:59)
To ask a ridiculous question. When our time, you and I, we together become ancient history, when historians, let’s say, 2, 3, 4,000 years from now, look back at our time, and you try to look at the details and reconstruct from that the big picture, what was going on, what do you think they’ll say?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:39:23)
I would guess it’ll be something that’s actually more of a commentary on whatever’s going on at that point than on the reality of us because that’s what we tend to do. I’ll tell you what I’d like to have them say, is to say, “In this civilization, I can detect progress,” that they have advanced in some way, whether kind of in moral terms or in self-awareness, or have learned from what’s come before. I mean, that’s all you can try and do is do a little bit better than whatever came before you to look back at what happened and try to do something. Livy, I mean, one of the great Roman historians, the beginning of his work, A History of Rome, which is this massive thing, he says, “The utility and the purpose of history is this. It provides you an infinite variety of experiences and models, noble things to imitate and shameful things to avoid.” And I think he’s right.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:19)
And they would perhaps be better at highlighting which shameful things we started avoiding and which noble things we started imitating. With the perspective of history, they’ll be able to identify or maybe with the bias of the historians of the time. Well, in that grand perspective, what gives you hope about our future as a humanity, as a civilization?
Gregory Aldrete
(03:40:43)
We have curiosity. I think curiosity is a great thing that you want to learn something new. I think the human impulse to want to learn new stuff is one of our best characteristics. And at least up to this point, what makes us special is the ability to store up an accumulation of knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to the next generation. I mean, that’s really all we are. We’re the accumulation of the knowledge of infinite generations that’ve come before us. And everything we do is based on that. Otherwise, we’d all just be starting ground zero kind of just from the beginning. So our ability to store up knowledge and pass it on, I think is our special power as human beings. And I think our curiosity is what keeps us going forward.
Lex Fridman
(03:41:31)
I agree. And for that, I thank you for being one of the most wonderful examples of that, of you, yourself, being a curious being and emanating that throughout, and inspiring a lot of other people to be curious by being out there in the world and teaching. So thank you for that and thank you for talking today.
Gregory Aldrete
(03:41:47)
No, I enjoyed it. It’s fun. I obviously like talking about this stuff.

Hope

Lex Fridman
(03:41:51)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gregory Aldrete. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Julius Caesar, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Donald Trump Interview | Lex Fridman Podcast #442

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #442 with Donald Trump.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
I don’t know if you know this, but some people call you a fascist.
Donald Trump
(00:00:03)
Yeah, they do. So I figure it’s all right to call them a communist. Yeah, they call me a lot worse than I call them.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:08)
A lot of people listening to this, myself included, that doesn’t think that Kamala is a communist.
Donald Trump
(00:00:15)
I believe you have to fight fire with fire.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:17)
Politics is a dirty game.
Donald Trump
(00:00:19)
It is a dirty game. That’s certainly true.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:21)
How do you win at that game?
Donald Trump
(00:00:24)
They suffer from massive Trump derangement syndrome, TDS, and I don’t know if it’s curable from their standpoint.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:35)
I think we would probably have a better world if everybody in Congress took some mushrooms perhaps?
Donald Trump
(00:00:41)
First of all, medical marijuana has been amazing. I’ve had friends and I’ve had others and doctors telling me that it’s been absolutely amazing.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:53)
The list of clients that went to the island has not been made public.
Donald Trump
(00:00:57)
Yeah, it’s very interesting, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman
(00:01:03)
The following is a conversation with Donald Trump on this, the Lex Friedman Podcast.

Psychology of winning and losing

Donald Trump
(00:01:09)
They’re getting smaller and smaller.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:11)
They’re getting smaller.
Donald Trump
(00:01:11)
Right?
Lex Fridman
(00:01:13)
People do respect you more when you have a big camera for some reason.
Donald Trump
(00:01:15)
No, it’s cool. And about 20 guys that you pay a fortune to. Right?
Lex Fridman
(00:01:18)
All right. Okay. You said that you love winning. And you have won a lot in life, in real estate, in business, in TV and politics. So let me start with a mindset, a psychology question. What drives you more, the love of winning or the hate of losing?
Donald Trump
(00:01:41)
Maybe equally, maybe both. I don’t like losing and I do like winning. I’ve never thought of it as to which is more of a driving force.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:51)
You’ve been close with a lot of the greats in sport. You think about Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali, you have people like Michael Jordan, who I think hate losing more than anybody. So what do you learn from those guys?
Donald Trump
(00:02:06)
Well, they do have something different. The great champions have something very different, the sports champions. And you have champions in other fields, but you see it more readily in sports. You see it over a weekend or you see it during a game. And you see that certain people stand out and they keep standing out. But it’s there for you, it doesn’t take a lifetime to find out that somebody was a winner or a loser. And so the sports thing is very interesting. But I play golf with different people and there’s a different mindset among champions. There’s really a very different mindset. There’s a different thought process.

(00:02:50)
Talent wise, sometimes you can’t tell the difference in talent. But at the end of a weekend, they seem to win and it’s very interesting. As an example, Tiger or Jack Nicklaus, he was a phenomenal winner and he does have a different way about him and Tiger has a different way about him and Michael Jordan. There’s never one, you would think that there’d be one way. Arnold Palmer was the nicest guy you’d ever meet. And then you have some champions that aren’t really nice, they’re just focused on doing their job. So there’s not one type of person. But the one thing I would say that everybody seems to have in common is they’re very driven. They’re driven beyond.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:39)
They don’t seem to give up easily.
Donald Trump
(00:03:41)
They don’t give up. They don’t give up, but they do seem to be, they have a passion that’s maybe more than people that don’t do as well.

Politics is a dirty game

Lex Fridman
(00:03:51)
You’ve said that politics is a dirty game-
Donald Trump
(00:03:54)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:54)
… in the past.
Donald Trump
(00:03:56)
It is a dirty game. That’s certainly true.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:59)
So if it is a game, how do you win at that game?
Donald Trump
(00:04:02)
Well, you win at that game by getting the word out and by using sense. You have to have a feeling where it’s going. You also have to have a feeling of what’s right. You can’t necessarily just go what’s popular, you have to do what’s good for a country if you’re talking about countries. But you have to get the word out and you have to just continuously, like for instance, you have a great show, you have a great podcast, it’s very well watched. And I’m sitting here and I do this, a lot of people see it and I do other things and a lot of people see that. And I go traditional also, you have traditional television, which is getting a little bit older and maybe less significant, could be less significant, I don’t know. But it’s changing a lot.

(00:04:48)
The whole plane of platform is changing a lot. It’s changed a lot in the last two, three years. But from a political standpoint, you have to find out what people are doing, what they’re watching and you have to get on. I just see that these platforms are starting to dominate, they’re getting very big numbers. I did Spaces with Elon and they got numbers like nobody’s ever heard before. So you wouldn’t do that on radio, you wouldn’t do those numbers, no matter how good a show, you wouldn’t do those numbers on radio, you wouldn’t do on television.

Business vs politics

Lex Fridman
(00:05:28)
You’ve been successful in business, you’ve been successful in politics. What do you think is the difference between gaining success between the two different disparate worlds?
Donald Trump
(00:05:37)
Yeah, and they’re different, very different. I have a lot of people that are in business that are successful and they’d like to go over to politics and then you realize they can’t speak, they choke. It’s hard to make a speech in front of, let’s say you’re talking about a big audience, but I get very big audiences. And for many people it’s virtually impossible to get up and speak for an hour and a half and have nobody leave. It’s not an easy thing to do. And it’s an ability. But I have many people that are very, very successful in business, would love to do what I did. And yet, they can’t pull the trigger. And in many cases, I don’t think it would work. Almost for everybody, it’s not going to work. It’s a very tough thing to do. It’s a big transition.

(00:06:35)
Now, if you talked about people in the business and politics going into business, likewise, that wouldn’t generally work out so well either. It’s different talents, it’s different. I have somebody that wants to go into politics so bad, but he’s got a little problem, he’s got stage fright. Now, he’s a total killer, but if he gets up onto a stage in front of people, he doesn’t do well, to put it mildly actually. He does badly.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:03)
So you have to be able to make hard decisions like you do in business, but also be able to captivate an audience.
Donald Trump
(00:07:09)
Look, if you’re a politician, you have to be able to speak in front of large crowds. There are a lot of people who can’t do that. I’ve seen it. They can’t even think about doing it and they don’t. There are many people in business right now, I could name them, but I don’t want to embarrass anybody, they’ve been talking about running for president for 15 years. And they’re very big in business, very well known actually, but it takes guts to run. For president, I can tell you it takes guts to run. It’s also a very dangerous profession if you want to know the truth, but dangerous in a different sense too. But it takes a lot of courage to run for president. It’s not easy. But you have and you know the same people as I do, there are a lot of people that would like to run for president that are very, very successful in business, but they don’t have the guts to do it and they have to give up a lot.

War in Ukraine

Lex Fridman
(00:08:05)
One of the great things about people from the business world is they’re often great deal makers and you’re a great deal maker and you’ve talked about the war in Ukraine and that you would be able to find a deal that both Putin and Zelenskyy would accept. What do you think that deal looks like?
Donald Trump
(00:08:24)
I think the deal and I wouldn’t talk about it too much because I think I can make a deal if I win as president-elect, I’ll have a deal made guaranteed. That’s a war that shouldn’t have happened. It’s terrible. Look, Biden is the worst president in the history of our country and she’s probably worse than him. That’s something that should have never happened, but it did happen. And now it’s a much tougher deal to make than it would’ve been before it started. Millions of people, I think the number’s going to be a lot higher when you see this all at some point to iron out, I think the numbers are going to be, the death numbers are going to be a lot higher than people think. When you take a look at the destruction and the buildings coming down all over the place in Ukraine, I think those numbers are going to be a lot higher.

(00:09:12)
They lie about the numbers. They try and keep them low. They knock down a building that’s two blocks long, these are big buildings and they say one person was mildly injured. No, no, a lot of people were killed. And there are people in those buildings and they have no chance. Once they start coming down, there’s no chance. So that’s a war that absolutely has to get done. And then you have Israel and then you have a lot of other places that are talking war. The world is a rough place right now and a lot of it’s because of the fact that America has no leadership. And I believe that she’ll be probably worse than Biden. I watched the interview the other night, it was just a softball interview.

Kamala Harris interview on CNN

Lex Fridman
(00:09:59)
So you would like to see her do more interviews, challenged more.
Donald Trump
(00:10:03)
I don’t know. I can’t believe the whole thing is happening. We had a man in there that should have never been in there. They kept him in a basement. They used COVID. They cheated, but they used COVID to cheat. Then they cheated without COVID too. But you had somebody in there and now we have a woman that is not, she couldn’t do an interview. This was a really soft interview. This is an interview where they’re giving her multiple choice questions, multiple guess, I call it multiple guess. And I don’t think she did well. I think she did very poorly.

Trump-Harris debate

Lex Fridman
(00:10:36)
How do you think you’ll do in the debate coming up, that’s in a few days?
Donald Trump
(00:10:39)
So I’ve done a lot of debating, only as a politician. I never debated. My first debate was the Rosie O’Donnell debate, the famous Rosie O’Donnell debate, the answer. But I’ve done well with debates. I became president. Then the second time, I got millions more votes than I got the first time. I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win, you can’t not when. And I got millions of more votes on that and lost by a whisker. And look what happened to the world with all of the wars and all of the problems. And look what happened with inflation because inflation is just eating up our country, eating it up. So it’s too bad. But there are a lot of things that could happen. We have to get those wars settled. I’ll tell you, you have to get Ukraine done. That could end up in a third world war. So could the Middle East. So could the Middle East.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:39)
So maybe let’s talk about what it takes to negotiate with somebody like Putin or Zelenskyy. Do you think Putin would be willing to give up any of the regions that are already captured?
Donald Trump
(00:11:49)
I don’t know. I can tell you that all of this would’ve never happened and it would’ve been very easy because you don’t have, that question wouldn’t be asked. That’s a tougher question. Once that starts happening because he has taken over a lot of territory, now I guess they’re insurgents now too. Right? So it’s a little bit interesting that that’s happening and that it can happen. And it’s interesting that Putin has allowed that to happen. Look, that’s one that should have never started. We have to get it stopped. Ukraine is being demolished. They’re destroying a great culture that’s largely destroyed.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:32)
What do you think works better in those kinds of negotiations? Leverage of let’s say friendship, the carrot or the stick, friendship or sort of the threat of using the economic and military power?
Donald Trump
(00:12:46)
So it depends on who the person is. Everyone’s different. Negotiation is interesting because it depends on who the person is. And then you have to guess or know through certain knowledge, which is more important, the carrot or the stick. And with some people, it’s the stick. And with some people, it’s the carrot. I think the stick probably is generally more successful in that we’re talking about war. But the kind of destruction that we’re witnessing now, nobody’s ever seen. It’s a terrible thing. And we’re witnessing it all over. We’re witnessing it in all parts of the world and a lot of things are going to get started. Look what’s going on with China. Look at Japan, they’re starting to rearm now. They’re starting to rearm because China’s taken over certain islands and there’s a lot of danger in the war right now, in the world.

China


(00:13:46)
And there’s a great possibility of World War III and we better get this thing done fast because five months with people like her and him, he’s checked out, he just goes to the beach and thinks he looks good in a bathing suit, which he doesn’t, he’s sort of checked out. Hey look, you can’t blame him. That was a coup, they took it over. They took over the presidential deal. The whole presidential thing was taken over in a coup. He had 14 million votes. He had no votes, not one. And nobody thought it was going to be her. Nobody wanted it to be her. She was a joke until six weeks ago when they said we’re going to have to, politically, they felt they had to pick her. And if they didn’t pick her, they thought there would be a problem. I don’t know if that’s right or not. I actually don’t think it’s right, but they thought it was right. And now, immediately the press comes to their aid.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:48)
If we can go back to China, on negotiation, how do we avoid war with China in the 21st century?
Donald Trump
(00:14:56)
Well, there are ways. Now here’s the problem. If I tell you how and I’d love to do it, but if I give you a plan, I have a very exacting plan how to stop Ukraine and Russia. And I have a certain idea, maybe not a plan, but an idea for China. Because we do, we’re in a lot of trouble. They’ll be in a lot of trouble too, but we’re in a lot of trouble. But I can’t give you those plans because if I give you those plans, I’m not going to be able to use them, they’ll be very unsuccessful. Part of it is surprise, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:15:31)
Right.
Donald Trump
(00:15:31)
But they won’t be able to help us much.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:35)
So you have a plan of what to say to Putin when you take office?
Donald Trump
(00:15:39)
Yeah, I know [inaudible 00:15:40]. No, I had a very good relationship with him and I had a good relationship with Zelenskyy too, but had a very good relationship with Putin.

2020 election

Lex Fridman
(00:15:47)
Tough topic, but important. You said lost by whisker. I’m an Independent, I have a lot of friends who are Independent, many of whom like your policies, like the fact that you’re a dealmaker, like the fact that you can end wars, but they are troubled by what happened in the 2020 election and statements about widespread fraud and this kind of stuff, fake election scheme. What can you say to those Independent voters to help them decide who to vote for?
Donald Trump
(00:16:24)
Right. I think the fraud was on the other side. I think the election was a fraud. And many people felt it was that and they wanted answers. And when you can’t challenge an election, you have to be able to challenge it, otherwise it’s going to get worse, not better. And there are lots of ways to solve this problem. Go to paper ballots. Do it easy way, I mean the paper ballots and you have voter ID and you have same day voting and you have proof of citizenship, which is very important because we have people voting that are not citizens. They just came in and they’re loading up the…
Donald Trump
(00:17:00)
They just came in and they’re loading up the payrolls, they’re loading up everything. They’re putting students in schools. They don’t speak a word of English, and they’re taking the seats of people that are citizens of our country. So look, we have the worst border in the history of the world. We have coming into our country right now, millions and millions of people at levels that nobody’s ever seen. I don’t believe any country’s ever seen it. And they would use sticks and stones not to make it happen, not to let it happen. We don’t do anything. And we have a person who was the border czar, who now said she wasn’t really the border czar, but she was, she was the border czar, but she was in charge of the border. And we have her and she’s saying very strongly, “Oh, I did such a good job.” She was horrible, horrible. The harm she’s done…

(00:17:56)
But we have people coming in from other countries all over the world, not just South America, and they’re coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from mental institutions and insane asylums and they’re street criminals right off the street. They take them and they’re being given to our country, drug dealers, human traffickers. We’re destroying our country. This is a sin what’s been allowed to take place over the last four years. We’re our country. And we’ll see how that all works out, but it’s not even believable. And now you see, you saw in Aurora, Colorado, a group of very tough young thugs from Venezuela taking over big areas including buildings. They’re taking over buildings. They have their big rifles, but they’re taking over buildings.

(00:18:52)
We’re not going to let this happen. We’re not going to let them destroy a country. And in those countries,, crime is way down, they’re taking them out of their prisons, which is good because good for them. I do the same thing. By the way, if I ran one of those countries, any country in the world, I would make sure that America has every one of our prisoners, every one of our criminals would be here. I can’t believe they’re going so slowly, but some are. But they all are doing it and we can’t let that happen. They’re emptying out their prisons and their mental institutions into the United States of America. We can’t let that happen.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:29)
So a lot of people believe that there was some shady stuff that went on with the election, whether it’s media bias or big tech, but still the claim of widespread fraud is the thing that bothers people.
Donald Trump
(00:19:42)
Well, I don’t focus on the past. I focus on the future. I mean, I talk about how bad the economy is, how bad inflation is now, bad things like… Which is important. Afghanistan was, in my opinion, the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to our country. And because of that, I think Putin went in when he said how stupid we were. Putin went in, but it was the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. I really believe that. But we left 13 dead soldiers, think of it, 13 dead soldiers, many soldiers horrifically hurt, with arms and legs and everything else gone. We left hostages behind. We left Americans behind. We left military equipment, the likes of which nobody’s ever left behind before. Billions and billions of dollars of equipment. They’re now selling the equipment. They’re one of the largest arms dealers in the world.

(00:20:45)
And very sad, very sad. And we were there for a long time. I was going to get out. We were getting ready to get out. Then we got interrupted by the election, but we would’ve been out with dignity and strength. We were having very little problem with the Taliban when I was there, because they knew it was going to be tough. I dealt with Abdul. Abdul was the leader, and we got along fine. He understood, but they were shooting, they were killing a lot of our people before I came down. And when I got there, I spoke to him, I said, “You can’t do it. Don’t do it anymore.” We went 18 months before this happened, this horrible day happened. We went 18 months and nobody was shot at or killed.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:33)
What do you think that was? The carrot or the stick, in that case, in Afghanistan?
Donald Trump
(00:21:37)
The stick, definitely the stick.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:38)
So the threat of military force.
Donald Trump
(00:21:40)
That was the stick, yeah. It doesn’t have to be, but that was the stick.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:44)
Well, let me just linger on the election a little bit more. For this election, it might be a close one. What can we do to avoid the insanity and division of the previous election, whether you win or lose?
Donald Trump
(00:21:58)
Well, I hope it’s not a close one. I mean, I don’t know how people can vote for somebody that has destroyed our country, the inflation, the bad economy. But to me, in a way, the worst is what they’ve allowed to happen at our border where they’ve allowed millions of people to come and hear from places that you don’t want to know about. And I can’t believe that there’s going to be a close election. We’re leading in the polls and it looks close, but I think in the end it’s not going to be a close election.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:29)
What do you think is the right way to solve the immigration crisis? Is mass deportation one of the solutions you would think about?
Donald Trump
(00:22:35)
Well, you’ve got to get the criminals out of here fast, right? The people from mental institutions, you got to get them back into their mental institution. No country can afford this. It’s just too much money. You look at what’s happening in New York and Chicago and LA and lots of places, and you take a look at what’s happening. There’s no country can afford this. We can’t afford it, and we’ve got to get the bad ones out immediately and the rest have to be worked on. It’s happened before. Dwight Eisenhower was sort of a moderate president, moderate type person, but he hated when he saw people pouring into the country, and they were nothing like. Now, I probably got elected in 2016, because of the border, and I told people what was happening and they understood it. And I won the election.

(00:23:25)
And I won the election, I think because of the border. Our border is 25 times worse right now than it was in 2016. I had it fixed too. I had it the last week of the famous chart that I put up was exactly that, you know the chart. When I looked to the right, I said, “There’s the chart.” Bing. That was not a pleasant experience, but the chart that I put up said, and that was done by border patrol. That was the lowest number that we’ve ever had come into our country in recorded history and we have to get it back to that again. We will.

Project 2025

Lex Fridman
(00:24:04)
Let me ask you about Project 2025. So you’ve publicly said that you don’t have any direct connection to-
Donald Trump
(00:24:09)
Nothing. I know nothing about it. And they know that too. Democrats know that. And I purposely haven’t read it, because I want to say to you, I have no idea what it’s all about. It’s easier, than saying I read it and all of the things. No, I purposely haven’t read it and I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard about things that are in there that I don’t like, and there’s some things in there that everybody would like, but there are things that I don’t like at all. And I think it’s unfortunate that they put it out, but it doesn’t mean anything, because it has nothing to do with me. Project 25 has absolutely nothing to do with me.

Marijuana

Lex Fridman
(00:24:52)
You posted recently about marijuana and that you are okay with it being legalized, but it has to be done safely. Can you explain your policy there?
Donald Trump
(00:25:03)
Well, I just put out a paper and first of all, medical marijuana has been amazing. I’ve had friends and I’ve had others and doctors telling me that it’s been absolutely amazing, the medical marijuana. And we put out a statement that we can live with the marijuana. It’s got to be a certain age, got to be a certain age to buy it. It’s got to be done in a very concerted, lawful way. And the way they’re doing in Florida, I think is going to be actually good. It’s going to be very good, but it’s got to be done in a good way. It’s got to be done in a clean way. You go into some of these places, like in New York, it smells all marijuana. You’ve got to have a system where there’s control. And I think the way they’ve done it in Florida is very good.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:59)
Do you know anything about psychedelics? So I’m not a drug guy, but I recently did Ayahuasca and there’s a lot of people that speak to the health benefits and the spiritual benefits of these different psychedelics. I think we would probably have a better world if everybody in Congress took some mushrooms perhaps. Now I know you don’t. You stay away from all of that stuff. I know also veterans use it for dealing with PTSD and all that kind of stuff. So it’s great. And it’s interesting that you’re thinking about being more accepting of some of these drugs, which don’t just have a recreational purpose, but a medical purpose, a treatment purpose.
Donald Trump
(00:26:44)
So we put out a statement today, we’re going to put out another one probably next week, be more specific, although I think it’s pretty specific and we’ll see how that all goes. That’s a referendum coming up in some states, but it’s coming up and we’ll see how it does. I will say it’s been very hard to beat it. You take a look at the numbers, it’s been very hard to beat it. So I think it’ll generally pass, but you want to do it in a safe way.

Joe Rogan

Lex Fridman
(00:27:14)
Speaking of marijuana, let me ask you about my good friend, Joe Rogan. So you had a bit of tension with him. So when he said nice things about RFK Junior, I think you’ve said some not so nice things about Joe, and I think that was a bit unfair. And as a fan of Joe, I would love to see you do his podcast, because he is legit the greatest conversationalist in the world. So what’s the story behind the tension?
Donald Trump
(00:27:42)
Well, I don’t think there was any tension. And I’ve always liked him, but I don’t know him. I only see him when I walk into the arena with Dana and I shake his hand. I see him there and I think he’s good at what he does, but I don’t know about doing his podcast. I guess I’d do it, but I haven’t been asked and I’m not asking them. I’m not asking anybody.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:09)
It sounds like a challenging negotiation situation.
Donald Trump
(00:28:11)
No, it’s not really a negotiation. And he’s sort of a liberal guy, I guess, from what I understand. But he likes Kennedy. This was before I found this out, before Kennedy came in with us. He’s going to be great. Bobby’s going to be great. But I like that he likes Kennedy. I do too. He is a different kind of a guy, but he’s got some great things going. And I think he’s going to be beyond politics. I think he could be quite influential and taking care of some situations that you probably would agree should be taken care of.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:45)
The Joe Rogan post is an example. I would love to get your psychology about behind the tweets and the post on truth. Are you sometimes being intentionally provocative or are you just speaking your mind and are there times where you regret some of the truths you’ve posted?
Donald Trump
(00:29:04)
Yeah, I do, but not that often, honestly. I do a lot of re-posting. The ones you get in trouble with are the re-posts, because you find down deep, they’re into some group that you’re not supposed to be re-posting. You don’t even know if those groups are good, bad or indifferent. But the re-posts are the ones that really get you in trouble. When you do your own words, it’s sort of easier. But the re-posts go very, and if you’re going to check every single little symbol, and I don’t know, it’s worked out pretty well for me. I mean, I tell you, truth is very powerful, truth. And it’s my platform and it’s been very powerful, very, very powerful. Goes everywhere. I call it my typewriter. That’s actually my typewriter.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:54)
What are you doing usually when you’re composing a truth, are you chilling back on a couch?
Donald Trump
(00:30:00)
Couches, beds.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:01)
Okay.
Donald Trump
(00:30:02)
A lot of different things. I mean-
Lex Fridman
(00:30:03)
Late at night and just-
Donald Trump
(00:30:06)
I’d like to do something late at night. I’m not a huge sleeper, but whenever I do, I’m past three o’clock, they criticize you the next day. Trump was up. True thing. Okay. Trump was true thing at three o’clock in the morning and there should be no problem with that. And then when you think about time zones, how do they know that you are in a time zone, like an Eastern Zone, but every time I do it after 2:00 or three o’clock, it’s like, “Why is he doing that?” But it’s gotten… Truth has become a very successful platform, and I like doing it and it goes everywhere. As soon as I do it, it goes everywhere.

Division

Lex Fridman
(00:30:54)
The country seems more divided than ever. What can you do to help alleviate some of that division?
Donald Trump
(00:30:59)
Well, you can get rid of these two people. They’re terrible. They’re terrible. You don’t want to have them running this country. They’re not equipped to run it. Joe, just Joe, it’s a disaster. And Kamala, I think she’ll end up being worse than him. We’ll see. I think a lot’s now, the convention’s over with, and I see I’m leading and just about all the polls now. They had their little honeymoon period as they call it, and we’ll see how that all goes. Who knows?
Lex Fridman
(00:31:31)
From my personal opinion, I think you are at your best when you’re talking about a positive vision of the future versus criticizing the other side.
Donald Trump
(00:31:40)
Yeah, I think you have to criticize though. I think they’re nasty. They came up with a story that I looked down and I called soldiers that died in World War I, suckers and losers. Okay. Now number one, who would say that? Number two, who would say it to military people? Nobody. It was a made-up story. It was just a made-up story. And they like to repeat it over again. They know it was made up. I have 26 witnesses that nothing was said. They don’t want to hear about that. She lied on McDonald’s. She said that she worked at McDonald’s. It’s not a big lie, but it’s a big lie. So they just went and they checked and unless she can show something, they don’t talk about the presses are going to follow up with it, but I’ll keep hammering it. But she never worked at McDonald’s. It was just sort of a cool thing to say, “Hey, I worked at McDonald’s.”

(00:32:41)
But one of the worst was two days ago. I went to Arlington at the request of people that lost their children. They’ll always be children to those people. You understand that. That’s not politically incorrect thing to say. The mother comes up, “I lost my child,” but the child is a soldier. And lost the child, because of Biden and because of Kamala, just as though they had the gun in their hand, because it was so badly handled. It should have been done at Bagram, which is the big air base. It shouldn’t have been done at a small little airport right in the middle of town where people stormed it. It was a true disaster and they asked me if I’d come and celebrate with them. Three years. Three years. They died three years ago.

(00:33:37)
And I said, “I’m going to try.” I got to know them, because I brought them here, actually. One night they almost all came here and they said, “I wonder if Trump will actually come and see us?” I heard they were here. I came. We stayed for four hours listening to music up on a deck, right upstairs. Beautiful. And they were great people. So they called me over the last couple of weeks and they said, “We’re going to have a reunion, our three-year reunion.”
Donald Trump
(00:34:00)
… couple of weeks and they said, “We’re going to have a reunion, our three year, would you be able to come?” And it was very hard for me to do it logistically, but I said, “I’ll get it done.” And I got there and we had a beautiful time. I didn’t run away. I didn’t just walk in, shake hands and walk out like people do. And I wasn’t looking at my watch like Joe Biden does. And it was amazing. I did it for them. I didn’t do it for me. I don’t need the publicity. I get more publicity probably than anybody. You would know that better than me, but I think maybe more than anybody, maybe more than anybody that’s ever lived, I don’t know. But I don’t think anyone could have anymore. Every time you turn on the television, there’s like nine different stories all on different topics in the world.

(00:34:48)
As an example, you interview a lot of people, good people, successful people. Let’s see how you do with this interview versus them. I can tell you right now you’re going to get the highest numbers you’ve ever had by sometimes a factor of 10. But when a Gold Star Family asks me to come in and spend time with them, and then they said, sir… We did a ceremony. And then we went down to the graves, which was quite a distance away. They said, “Sir, would you come to the grave?” And then they said, when we were there… It’s very sad actually because these people shouldn’t have died. They shouldn’t have died. They died because of Biden and because of Kamala, they died because just like if they pulled the trigger. Now, I don’t know if that’s controversial to say, but I don’t think it is.

(00:35:47)
Afghanistan was the most incompetently run operation I think I’ve ever seen. Military or otherwise, they’re incompetent. But the families asked me if I’d go, I did go. Then the families said, “Could we have a picture at the tombstone of my son?” And we did. Son or daughter. There was a daughter too. And I took numerous pictures with the families. I don’t know of anybody else that was in the pictures, but they were mostly families, I guess. That was it. And then I left. I spent a lot of time with them. Then I left and I get home that night and I get a call that the Biden administration with Kamala is accusing me of using Arlington for publicity. I was in the news. Just the opposite. Just the opposite. And actually, did you see, it just came out? The families actually put out a very strong statement defending me. They said, “We asked them to be there.”
Lex Fridman
(00:36:44)
Well, politicians and the media can play those games. And you’re right, your name gets a lot of views. You’re probably legit the most famous person in the world. But on the previous thing, in the spirit of unity, you used to be a Democrat. Setting the politicians aside, what do you respect most about people who lean left, who are Democrats themselves or of that persuasion, progressives liberals, and so on?
Donald Trump
(00:37:15)
Well, look, I respect the fact that everybody’s in there, and to a certain extent, life is what you do while you’re waiting to die, so you might as well do a good job. I think in terms of what’s happening now, I think we have a chance to save the country. This country’s going down and I called it with Venezuela, I called it with a lot of different countries. And this country’s going down if we don’t win this election, the election coming up on November 5th is the most important election this country’s ever had because if we don’t win it, I don’t know that there’ll be another election and it’s going to be a communist country or close.

Communism and fascism

Lex Fridman
(00:38:01)
There’s a lot of people listening to this, myself included, that doesn’t think that Kamala is a communist.
Donald Trump
(00:38:09)
Well, she’s a Marxist.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:11)
Her father’s a Marxist.
Donald Trump
(00:38:12)
That’s right.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:13)
And she’s advocating-
Donald Trump
(00:38:13)
That’s a little unusual.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:15)
She’s advocating for some policies that are towards the direction of democratic socialism, let’s say. But there’s a lot of people that know the way government works and they say, well, none of those policies are going to actually come to reality. It’s just being used during the campaign to… Groceries are too expensive. We need them cheaper, so let’s talk about price controls. And that’s never going to come to reality.
Donald Trump
(00:38:39)
It could come to reality. Look, she came out with price control. It’s been tried like 121 different times at different places over the years, and it’s never worked once. It leads to communism, it leads to socialism, it leads to having no food on the shelves, and it leads to tremendous inflation.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:00)
It’s just-
Donald Trump
(00:39:01)
A bad idea.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:02)
… whenever we use terms like communism for her, and I don’t know if you know this, but some people call you a fascist.
Donald Trump
(00:39:08)
Yeah, they do, so I figure it’s all right to call them a communist. They call me a lot worse than I call them.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:14)
They do indeed. It is just sometimes-
Donald Trump
(00:39:16)
It’s interesting though, they’ll call me something that’s terrible and then I’ll hit them back and they’ll say, “Isn’t it terrible what Trump said?” I said, “Well, wait a minute. They just called me…” I believe you have to fight fire with fire. I believe they’re very evil people. These are evil people. We have an enemy from the outside and we have an enemy from within. And in my opinion, the enemy from within are radical left lunatics. And I think you have to fight back.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:44)
Whenever there’s a lot of fighting fire with fire, it’s too easy to forget that there is a middle of America that’s moderate and sees the good in both sides and just likes one side more than the other in terms of policies. Like I said, there’s a lot of people that like your policies, that like your skill in being able to negotiate and end wars and they don’t see the impending destruction of America.
Donald Trump
(00:40:15)
We had no wars when I was president. That’s a big thing. Not since 78 years as that happened, but we had no wars When I was president, we defeated ISIS, but that was a war that was started that we weren’t anywhere near defeating. But think of it, I had no wars and Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary said, “The world has to have Trump back because everybody was afraid of Trump.” Now that’s what he said, so I’m not using that term, but I think they respected me. But he said, “China was afraid. Russia was afraid. Everybody was afraid.” And I don’t care what word they use, it probably that’s even a better word if you want to know the truth, but let’s use the word respect.

(00:40:56)
They had respect for me. They had respect for the country. I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the Russian pipeline. Nobody else could have done that. I ended it. It was done. Then Biden comes in and he approved it, so we are defending Germany in these other countries for peanuts compared to what it’s worth, and they’re paying the person we’re defending them against billions and billions of dollars for energy. I said, “How does that work?” And we had it out with them and it worked out good. And they paid hundreds of billions of dollars. Or you wouldn’t even have a NATO right now. You wouldn’t have NATO if it wasn’t for me.

Power

Lex Fridman
(00:41:36)
As the leader of the United States, you were the most powerful man in the world. As you mentioned, not only the most famous, but the most powerful. And if you become leader again, you’ll have unprecedented power. Just on your own personal psychology, what does that power do to you? Is there any threat of it corrupting how you see the world?
Donald Trump
(00:41:56)
No, I don’t think so. Look, I’ve been there for four years. I could have done a big number on Hillary Clinton. I thought it looked terrible to take the president’s wife and put her in prison. She’s so lucky I didn’t do anything. She’s so lucky. Hillary is a lucky woman because I had a lot of people pushing me too. They wanted to see something, but… I could have done something very bad. I thought it looked so bad. Think of it, you have the President of the United States, and you also had Secretary of State, she was, but you’re going to put the president’s wife in prison. And yet when I got out, they have all these hoaxes.

(00:42:37)
They’re all hoaxes, but they have all these dishonest hoaxes just like they did in the past with, Russia, Russia, Russia. That was a hoax. The 51 different agencies or agents, that was a hoax. The whole thing was a hoax. There were so many hoaxes and scams. But I didn’t want to put her in jail, and I didn’t. And I explained it to people. They say, “Lock her up. Lock her up.” We won. I said, “We don’t want to put her in jail. We want to bring the country together. I want to bring the country together. You don’t bring the country together by putting her in jail.” But then when I got out, they went to work on me. It’s amazing. And they suffer from massive Trump derangement syndrome, TDS, and I don’t know if it’s curable from their standpoint.

UFOs & JFK

Lex Fridman
(00:43:36)
A lot of people are very interested in the footage of UFOs. The Pentagon has released a few videos, and there’s been anecdotal reports from fighter pilots, so a lot of people want to know, will you help push the Pentagon to release more footage, which a lot of people claim is available.
Donald Trump
(00:43:57)
Oh yeah, sure, I’ll do that. I would do that. I’d love to do that. I have to do that. But they also are pushing me on Kennedy, and I did release a lot, but I had people come to me and beg me not to do it. But I’ll be doing that very early on. Yeah, no. But I would do that.

Jeffrey Epstein

Lex Fridman
(00:44:16)
There’s a moment where you had some hesitation about Epstein releasing some of the documents on Epstein. Why the hesitation?
Donald Trump
(00:44:23)
I don’t think… I’m not involved. I never went to his island, fortunately, but a lot of people did.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:33)
Why do you think so many smart, powerful people allowed him to get so close?
Donald Trump
(00:44:42)
He was a good salesman. He was a hailing, hearty type of guy. He had some nice assets that he’d throw around like islands, but a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them.
Lex Fridman
(00:44:59)
It’s just very strange for a lot of people, that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public.
Donald Trump
(00:45:08)
It’s very interesting, isn’t it? It probably will be, by the way, probably.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:13)
If you’re able to, you’ll be-
Donald Trump
(00:45:15)
Yeah, I’d certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy’s interesting because it’s so many years ago. They do that for danger too, because it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera, so Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing but I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:36)
That’s great to hear. What gives you strength when you’re getting attacked? You’re one of the most attacked people in the world.
Donald Trump
(00:45:43)
I think you can’t care that much. I know people that care so much about everything, like what people are saying, you can’t care too much because you end up choking.

Mortality and religion

Lex Fridman
(00:45:55)
One of the tragic things about life is that it ends. How often do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?
Donald Trump
(00:46:02)
I have a friend who’s very, very successful, and he’s in his 80s, mid 80s, and he asked me that exact same question. I turned it around and I said, “Well, what about you?” He said, “I think about it every minute of every day.” And then a week later, he called me to tell me something. And he starts off the conversation by going, “Tick tock, tick tock.” This is dark person in a sense, but it is what it is. If you’re religious, you have I think a better feeling toward it. You’re supposed to go to heaven, ideally, not hell, but you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good. I think our country’s missing a lot of religion. I think it really was a much better place with religion. It was almost a guide. To a certain extent it was a guide. You want to be good to people. Without religion there are no guardrails. I’d love to see us get back to religion, more religion in this country.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:09)
Well, Mr. President, thank you for putting yourself out there, and thank you for talking today.
Donald Trump
(00:47:13)
Look, I love the country. I want to see the country be great, and we have a real chance at doing it, but it’s our last chance and I appreciate it very much.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:22)
Thank you.
Donald Trump
(00:47:23)
Thank you.

Lex AMA

Lex Fridman
(00:47:25)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Donald Trump. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, as I’ve started doing here at the end of some episodes, let me make a few comments and answer a few questions. If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama or get in touch with me for whatever other reason at lexfridman.com/contact. I usually do this on a T-shirt, but I figured for this episode, I’ll keep my suit and tie on, so first, this might be a good moment to look back a bit. I’ve been doing this podcast for over six years, and I first and foremost have to say thank you. I’m truly grateful for the support and the love I’ve gotten along the way. It’s been, I would say, the most unlikely journey.

(00:48:16)
And on most days, I barely feel like I know what I’m doing. But I wanted to talk a bit about how I approach these conversations. Now, each conversation is its own unique puzzle, so I can’t speak generally to how I approach these, but here it may be useful to describe how I approach conversations with world leaders, of which I hope to have many more and do a better job every time. I read a lot of history and I admire the historian perspective. As an example, I admire William Shirer, the author of many books on Hitler, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He was there and lived through it and covered it objectively to the degree that one could. Academic historians, by the way, criticize him for being a poor historian because he editorialized a little too much. I think those same folks criticized Dan Carlin and his Hardcore History podcast.

(00:49:15)
I respect their criticism, but I fundamentally disagree, so in these conversations with world leaders, I try to put on my historian hat. I think in the realm of truth and public discourse, there’s a spectrum between the ephemeral and the eternal. The outraged mob and clickbait journalists are often focused on the ephemeral, the current thing, the current viral shitstormer of mockery and derision. But when the battle of the day is done, most of it will be forgotten. A few true ideas will remain, and those the historian hopes to capture. Now, this is much easier said than done. It’s not just about having the right ideals and the integrity to stick by them. It’s not even just about having the actual skill of talking, which I still think I suck at, but let’s say it’s a work in progress. You also have to make the scheduling work and set up the entirety of the environment in a way that is conducive to such a conversation.

(00:50:19)
This is hard, really hard with political and business leaders. They are usually super busy and in some cases super nervous because, well, they’ve been screwed over so many times with clickbait got you journalism, so to convince them and their team to talk for two, three, four, five hours is hard. And I do think a good conversation requires that kind of duration. And I’ve been thinking a lot about why. I don’t think it’s just about needing the actual time of three hours to cover all the content. I think the longer form with a hypothetical skilled conversationalist, relaxes things and allows people to go on tangents and to banter about the details because I-
Lex Fridman
(00:51:00)
… agents and to banter about the details, because I think it’s in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brought to light. Anyway, I look forward to talking to more world leaders and doing a better job every time as I said. I would love to do interviews with Kamala Harris and some other political figures on the left and right, including Tim Walz, AOC, Bernie, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary. And on the right, J.D. Vance, Vivek, George W. and so on. And on the topic of politics, let me say, as an immigrant, I love this country, the United States of America. I do believe it is the greatest nation on earth, and I’m grateful for the people on the left and the right who step into the arena of politics to fight for this country that I do believe they all love as well.

(00:51:52)
I have reached out to Kamala Harris, but not many of the others. I probably should do a better job with that, but I’ve been doing most of this myself, all the reach out, scheduling, research prep, recording and so on. And on top of that, I very much have been suffering from imposter syndrome with a voice in my head constantly pointing out when I’m doing a shitty job. Plus a few folks graciously remind me on the internet, the very same sentiment of this aforementioned voice. All of this, while I have the option of just hiding away at MIT, programming robots and doing some cool AI research with a few grad students, or maybe joining an AI company or maybe starting my own, all these options make me truly happy. But like I said, on most days I barely know what I’m doing, so who knows what the future holds. Most importantly, I’m forever grateful for all of you for your patience and your support throughout this rollercoaster of the life I’ve been on. I love you all.

(00:52:51)
Okay, now let me go on to some of the questions that people had. I was asked by a few people to comment on Pavel Durov’s arrest and on X being banned in Brazil. Let me first briefly comment on the Durov arrest. Basic facts, Pavel Durov is CEO of Telegram, which is a messenger app that has end-to-end encryption mode. It’s not on by default, and most people don’t use the end-to-end encryption, but some do. Pavel was arrested in France on a long list of charges related to “criminal activity” carried out on the Telegram platform, and for “providing unlicensed cryptology services.” I think Telegram is indeed used for criminal activity by a small minority of its users, for example, by terrorist groups to communicate. And I think we all agree that terrorism is bad.

(00:53:47)
But here’s the problem. As the old saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And there are many cases in which the world unilaterally agrees who the terrorists are, but there are other cases when governments, especially authoritarian inclined governments, tend to propagandize and just call whoever’s in the opposition, whoever opposes them, terrorists. There is some room for nuance here, but, to me at this time, it seems to obviously be a power grab by government wanting to have backdoor access into every platform so they can have censorship power against the opposition. I think generally governments should stay out of censoring or even pressuring social media platforms, and I think arresting a CEO of a tech company for the things said on the platform he built is just nuts. It has a chilling effect on him, on people working at Telegram and on people working at every social media company, and also people thinking of launching a new social media company.

(00:54:50)
Same as the case of X being banned in Brazil. It’s, I think, a power grab by Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice in Brazil. He ordered X to block certain accounts that are spreading “misinformation.” Elon and X denied the request, then de Moraes threatened to arrest X representatives in Brazil, and in response to that X pulled the representatives out of Brazil obviously to protect them. And now X, having no representatives in Brazil, apparently violates the law. Based on this de Moraes banned X in Brazil. Once again, it’s an authoritarian figure seeking censorship power over the channels of communication.

(00:55:34)
I understand that this is complicated because there are evil people in the world and part of the role of government is to protect us from those evil people. But as Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” It’s a trade-off, but I think in many places in the world, many governments have leaned too far away at this time from liberty.

(00:56:02)
Okay, next up I got a question on AI, which I emotionally connected with. I’ll condense it as follows. “Hello, Lex. I’m a programmer and I have a deep fear of slipping into irrelevance because I am worried that AI will soon exceed my programming skills.”

(00:56:23)
Let me first say that I relate to your fear. It’s scary to have a thing that gives you a career and gives you meaning to be taken away. For me, programming is a passion, and if not for this podcast, it would probably at least in part be my profession so I get an uncomfortable feeling every time, Claude, the LLM I use for coding at this time just writes a lot of excellent approximately correct code. I think you can make a good case that it already exceeds the skill of many programmers, at least in the same way that the collective intelligence of stack overflow exceeds the skill of many individual programmers, but in many ways it still does not. But I think eventually more and more the task, the professional programming will be one of writing natural language prompts. I think the right thing to do, and what I’m at least doing is to ride the wave of the ever improving code generating LLMs and keep transforming myself into a big picture designer versus low-level tinkerer. What I’m doing and what I recommend you do is continually switch to whatever state-of-the-art tool is for generating code. For me, currently I recently switched from VS Code to Cursor, and before that it was Emacs to VS Code switch. Cursor is this editor that’s based on VS Code that leans heavily on LLMs and integrates the co-generation really nicely into the editing process. It makes it super easy to continually use the LLMs. What I would advise and what I’m trying to do myself is to learn how to use it and to master its co-generation capabilities. I, personally, try to now allocate a significant amount of time to designing with natural language first versus writing code from scratch, so using my understanding of programming to edit the code that’s generated by the LLM versus writing it from scratch and then using the LLM to generate small parts of the code. I see it as a skill that I should develop in parallel to my programming skill.

(00:58:34)
I think this applies to many other careers too. Don’t compete with AI for your job, learn to use the AI to do that job better. But yes, it is scary in some deep human level, the threat of being replaced. But at least I think we’ll be okay.

(00:58:55)
All right, next up, I got a very nice audio message and question from a gentleman who is 27 and feeling a lot of anxiety about the future. Just recently he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and he’s thinking about going to grad school for biomedical engineering, but there is a lot of anxiety. He mentioned anxiety many times in the message. It took him an extra while to get his degree, so he mentioned he would be 32 by the time he’s done with his PhD, so it’s a big investment. But he said in his heart he feels like he’s a scientist. I think that’s the most important part of his message, of your message. By the way, I’ll figure out how to best include audio and video messages in future episodes.

(00:59:37)
Now onto the question. Thank you for telling me your story and for submitting the question. My own life story is similar to yours. I went to Drexel University for my bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees, and I took a while just as you’re doing. I did a lot of non-standard things that weren’t any good for some hypothetical career I’m supposed to have. I trained and competed in Judo and Jiu Jitsu for my entire 20s, got a black belt from it. I wrote a lot, including a lot of really crappy poetry. I read a large amount of non-technical books, history, philosophy, and literature. I took courses on literature and philosophy that weren’t at all required for my computer science and electrical engineering degrees, like a course on James Joyce. I played guitar in bars around town. I took a lot of technical classes, many, for example, on theoretical computer science that were way more than were needed for the degree. I did a lot of research and I coded up a bunch of projects that didn’t directly contribute to my dissertation. It was pure curiosity and the joy of exploring.

(01:00:54)
Like you, I took the long way home, as they say, and I regret none of it. Throughout that, people around me and even people who love me wanted me to hurry up and to focus, especially because I had very little money, and so I had a sense like time was running out for me to take the needed steps towards a reasonable career. And just like you, I was filled with anxiety and I still am filled with anxiety to this day, but I think the right thing to do is not to run away from the anxiety, but to lean into it and channel it into pursuing with everything you got, the things you’re passionate about.

(01:01:36)
As you said, very importantly, in your heart you know you’re a scientist, so that’s it. You know exactly what to do. Pursue the desire to be a scientist with everything you got. Get to a good grad school, find a good advisor and do epic shit with them. And it may turn out in the end that your life will have unexpected chapters, but as long as you’re chasing dreams and goals with absolute unwavering dedication, good stuff will come of it. And also try your best to be a good person. This might be a good place to read the words If by Roger Kipling that I often return to when I feel lost and I’m looking for guidance on how to be a better man.

(01:02:18)
“If you can keep your head when all about your losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about, don’t deal in lies or being hated, don’t give weight to hating and yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise. If you can dream and not make dreams your master. If you can think and not make thoughts your aim. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools or watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn out tools. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss. If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they’re gone and so hold on when there’s nothing in you except the will, which says to them, hold on. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue or walk with kings nor lose the common touch. If neither foes, nor loving friends can hurt you. If all men count with you, but none too much. If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it. And which is more, you’ll be a man, my son.”

(01:04:05)
Thank you for listening and see you next time.

Transcript for Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism | Lex Fridman Podcast #441

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #441 with Cenk Uygur.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Cenk Uygur
(00:00:00)
Communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship. It creates a power vacuum. When you say, “Hey, there’s no structure of power here. We’re all equal. It’s a flat line,” one guy usually gets up, because that’s human nature, and goes, “I don’t think so. I think if you’re going to leave a power vacuum, I’m going to take that power vacuum.”

(00:00:25)
Corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves competition and wants the free markets. When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope because you don’t have the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing. You don’t have real news. When you’re in the online world, it’s chaotic. And don’t get me wrong, it’s got plenty of downsides, but within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge. Trump is a massive risk because of all the things we talked about earlier, but there is a percentage chance that he’s such a wild card that he overturns the whole system, and that is why the establishment is a little scared of him.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:11)
The following is a conversation with Cenk Uygur, a progressive political commentator and host of The Young Turks. As I’ve said before, I will speak with everyone, including on the left and the right of the political spectrum, always in good faith, with empathy, rigor, and backbone. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate, ineloquent things, and I frequently change my mind as I’m learning and thinking about the world. For all this, I often get attacked, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. But just know that I’m aware when I fall short and I will keep trying to do better. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Cenk Uygur.

Progressivism

Lex Fridman
(00:02:03)
You wrote a book.
Cenk Uygur
(00:02:04)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:05)
A manifesto that outlines the progressive vision for America. So the big question, what are some defining ideas of progressivism?
Cenk Uygur
(00:02:14)
Yes. So in order to do that, Lex, we got to talk about where we are in the political spectrum. And in fact, there’s two different spectrums now. People often think of left, right, and that’s true, that exists, but layered on top of that is now populist versus establishment. So I’m center-left on the left, right spectrum, but I’m all the way on that populist end of the second spectrum. So where does progressivism lie within that? Well, I would argue that it’s exactly in those places. It’s populist and it’s on the left, but it is not far left. So far left is a different animal, and we could talk about that in a little bit. So in terms of what makes a progressive, so expand the circle of liberty and justice for all, and equality of opportunity. Now people will say, well, that seems pretty broad and all American, but is it? Think about it.

(00:03:16)
So expand the circle of liberty. Everybody’s in favor of that, right? No, absolutely not. Certainly the King of England was not in favor of expanding the circle of liberty, and the Founding Fathers said, “We’re going to expand it.” And they expanded it to propertied white men. And then progressives have been … they’re progressives because they expanded the circle of liberty. They, then from then on, as we were perfecting the union, progressives always say, “Expand it further. Include women, include people without property, include all races.” And at every turn, conservatives fight against it. So that doesn’t mean if you’re a conservative today, you don’t want to include women or minorities, et cetera. But today you would say, for example, “Well, I don’t want to expand the circle of liberty to, for example, undocumented immigrants.” And maybe you’re right about that, and we could have that discussion in terms of a specific philosophy.

(00:04:08)
And I don’t believe that undocumented immigrants should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines. But I do believe in expanding liberty overall. And the contours of that are what’s interesting. And then you see justice for all. Everybody’s for justice. No. Right now, marijuana possession is still illegal in a lot of parts of the country. Now, a lot of right-wingers and left-wingers agree that it should be legal. But for my entire lifetime, black people have been arrested at about 3.7 times the rate of white people and the entire country has been fine with it. So is that justice? No. Black people smoke marijuana at the same rate. Black people get arrested about four times the rate. That is an injustice that an enormous percentage of the country was comfortable with. Well, progressives aren’t comfortable with it. We want justice for all.

(00:04:55)
So equality of opportunity is an interesting one because the far left will say, at least some portions of them will say, equality of results. So progressives just want a fair chance, so free college education, but afterwards you don’t get to have exact same results as either the wealthiest person or we’re not all going to be equal. We don’t have equal talent, skills, abilities, et cetera.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:21)
There’s a lot of questions I can ask there. So on the circle of liberty, yes, so expanding the number of people whose freedoms are protected. But what about the magnitude of freedom for each individual person? So expanding the freedom of the individual and protecting the freedoms of an individual. It seems like progressives are more willing to expand the size of government where government can do all kinds of regulation, all kinds of controls in the individual.
Cenk Uygur
(00:05:49)
So Lex, what we’re probably going to talk about a lot today is balance. And so a lot of people think, “Oh, I am on the right, I’m on left.” And that comes with a certain preset ideology. So the right is always correct. The left is always correct. So there’s two problems with that. Number one, how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology if you’re an independent thinker? It’s literally, by definition, not possible. If you say, “I lent my brain to an ideology that was created 80 years ago or eight years ago or 800 years ago, and I’m not going to change it,” you’re saying, “I don’t think for myself I bought into a culture.” And by the way, there’s a lot of different forms of culture you could buy into: religion, politics, sometimes racial, et cetera. So that’s why you need, actually, balance. The second reason you need balance, other than independent thought, is because the answer is almost never black and white.

(00:06:47)
And that gets into a really interesting nuance because mainstream media, in my opinion, is the matrix, and its job is to delude you into thinking corporate rule is great for you and we should never change it and the status quo is wonderful. So they have created a false middle. What mainstream media calls moderate, is actually, in my opinion, extremist corporate ideology. So for example, they’ll say, Joe Manchin is a moderate. None of his positions are moderate other than potentially gun control in West Virginia. He’s not for gun control. The people of West Virginia are not for gun control, generally speaking. And he uses that, and they usually have these shiny objects where they’re like, “You see this? I’m a moderate because of guns,” or, “I’m a moderate because I’m a Democrat from West Virginia.”

(00:07:36)
But wait, let’s look at your positions. You’re against paid family leave, that polls at 84%. So you’re a radical corporatist who say that women should be forced back into work the day after they have birth. You’re against a higher minimum wage, you’re for every corporate position, and they all poll at 33% or less. So Joe Manchin is not at all a moderate, and this applies to almost every corporate Republican and every corporate Democrat. They’re all extremists in supporting what I call corporatism. So you have to get to a balance in order to get to the right answer.

Communism

Lex Fridman
(00:08:11)
So that’s an interesting distinction here. So you’re actually, as far as I understand, pro-capitalism, which is an interesting place to be. That’s the thing that probably makes you center-left and then still populist. You’re full of beautiful contradictions, let’s say this, which will be great to untangle. But what’s the difference between corporatism and capitalism? Is there a difference?
Cenk Uygur
(00:08:33)
Yeah, so I really believe in capitalism. I don’t think that there’s really a second choice. Where it gets super interesting is the distinction between capitalism and socialism, because that’s not at all as clear as people think it is. And people often say socialism and communism as synonyms when they’re not synonyms. And so I view it as there’s basically four distinct areas. It’s obviously a spectrum. Everything is a spectrum. On one end, you have communism on the left and on the other end you have corporatism on the right. And I would argue that capitalism is in the middle. And so communism, we know, state owns all property. You’re not allowed to have private property. So I will piss off a lot of people in this show. So I’m asking for their patience. Please hear me out and because, don’t worry, I’m going to piss off the other side too.

(00:09:32)
So communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship because it is not built for human nature. We’re never going to act like that. It’s not in our DNA. You could try to wish it into existence than they have, and it never works. And it’s because once you have almost no rules in terms of, “Oh, we’re all equal,” even though communism eventually winds up having an enormous amount of rules, it creates a power vacuum. When you say, “Hey, there’s no structure of power here. We’re all equal. It’s a flat line,” one guy usually gets up because that’s human nature, and goes, “I don’t think so. I think if you’re going to leave a power vacuum, I’m going to take that power vacuum.”
Lex Fridman
(00:10:23)
That’s actually a really interesting way to put it, because when everyone is equal, nobody is in power, and human nature is such that there’s everybody [inaudible 00:10:33] that there’s a will to power. So when you create a power vacuum, somebody’s going to fill it. So the alternative is to have people in power, but there’s a balance of power, and then there’s a democratic system that elects the people in power and keeps churning and rotating who’s involved.
Cenk Uygur
(00:10:47)
That is exactly it, Lex. You got it exactly right, in my opinion. Okay, so that’s why communism never works and can never work. So it’s an idea of we’re all going to work as hard as we possibly can and take only what we need. Where? When has that ever happened in the history of humanity? We’re just not built that way. So we can get into that debate with my friends on the left, et cetera. Now, corporatism is just as extreme and just as dangerous, and that is basically what we have in America now. What we have in America now, and this is another giant trick that the Matrix played on everybody, that they did a shell game, and all of a sudden extreme corporatists like Manchin, and almost every Republican in the Senate, are moderates. Oh my God, Mitch McConnell, all of a sudden, is a moderate and et cetera, as long as you’re not a populist, populists are never moderate.

(00:11:43)
But if you love corporations and corporate tax cuts and everything in favor of corporations, you’re magically called a moderate when you actually, according to the polling, have super extreme positions that the American people hate. And by the way, that’s part of the reason for the rise of Trump. We can come back to that. But the second shell game is taking out capitalism, putting in corporatism, but still calling it capitalism. Okay, so what is corporatism? It is when corporations slowly take over the system and create monopoly and oligopoly power. So that snuffs out equality of opportunity. So how do they do that? When people say the system is rigged, they oftentimes can’t explain it that well. And then mainstream media goes, “Oh, you sound conspiratorial. It was rigged, yeah. I wonder how.” Yeah, super easy to explain it.

(00:12:37)
Here’s one of dozens of examples: carried interest loophole. So that is for hedge funds, private equity, the top people on Wall Street, that’s part of their income. They get 2 and 20, right? So 2% is a flat fee no matter what happens to the fund. And 20% of the profits of the fund goes back to the people who invested it. It’s not their money, it’s not their investment. What they’re getting is actually just income, and should be taxed at the highest rate. But it’s because of this loophole, it’s taxed at a much lower rate, at around 20%. So do you know at what income level you go above 20% if you’re a regular Joe? It’s at $84,000 a year. So these billionaires are getting the same tax rate as people making $84,000 a year. It’s unbelievably unfair. And that’s corporatism taking over and starting to rig the rules. I’m going to pay less taxes. You are going to pay more taxes.

(00:13:37)
So again, I can give you dozens of those examples. So in mergers so that they get to oligopoly power, that’s how you rig a system. Lowering the corporate tax rates, making sure that there is no real minimum wage, making sure there’s no universal healthcare. We all become indentured servants of corporations. They take away power from the average guy, give it to the most powerful people in the world. But the most important distinction, Lex, is that corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves competition and wants the free markets.

(00:14:14)
And I remember we started Young Turks back in 2002, so we’ve been around for 22 years, longest running daily show on the internet ever. And so we were pre Iraq war and the Iraq war starts, and Dick Cheney starts handing out no-bid contracts. I’m like, what part of capitalism is a no-bid contract? You can’t negotiate drug prices. That’s the most anti-free market thing I have ever heard. It’s almost like communism for corporations. They get everything and you get nothing. So it’s preposterous, it’s awful, and it kills the free markets, and it’s killing this country, and it is the main ideology and religion of the establishment.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:04)
Are all companies built the same here? So when you say corporatism, it seems like just looking here at the list by industry lobbyists, it seems like there are certain industries that are worse offenders than others, like pharmaceuticals, like insurance, oil and gas. So it seems to me it feels wrong to just throw all companies into the same bucket of they’re all guilty.
Cenk Uygur
(00:15:36)
No, they’re not all guilty. So let’s make a bunch of distinctions here. So first of all, first of all, are they “guilty?” No. They’re doing something that is logical and natural. So if you’re a company, do you want to pay higher taxes or lower taxes? Of course you want to pay lower taxes. Do you want to have higher employee costs or lower employee costs? Of course you want lower employee costs. But the government needs to understand that and protect us from that power that they are going to exercise to get to those results. And if you think free markets is there is no government, you read it wrong. Go back and reread Adam Smith. He says, you must protect against monopoly power. If you do not protect against monopoly power, you’ll have no free markets. And he’s absolutely right. So second distinction is between small business and big business. That’s why Republicans will always be like, “Oh, we’re doing this for small business. That’s why we got the biggest oil companies in the world, 30 billion in subsidies.” What happened to small business? So I run a small business. And so if people were to say like, “Hey, maybe there should be exemptions for some of the regulations if your company has less than five employees, 10 employees, 50 employees, et cetera,” there’s some logic in that. Because businesses have different stages of growth and they have different interests and different needs in those stages of growth. And we want to facilitate small business growth because that’s great for the economy, that’s great for markets freedom, et cetera. But the bigger corporations, even there, there’s a third distinction. It isn’t that there are certain industries that are worse, there’s just that there are industries that are better at lobbying.

(00:17:19)
So anyone who right now, number one donor in Washington, a lot of people make a mistake. They think it’s APAC or they think it’s the oil companies or the banks. No, it’s big pharma. And who has the most power in this country? Big pharma. So we can’t even negotiate the drug prices. I mean, look, guys, think about it this way. That’s like saying, “Okay, here’s a bottle of water.” And normally in the free market that would cost about a dollar. For Medicare, the drug companies come in and go, “No, I’m not charging a dollar for that water. I’m charging a hundred dollars. And the government has to say, “Yes, sir, thank you, sir. Of course, sir, we’ll pay $100.” That’s why it’s compared to communism, because I can’t imagine anything more diametrically opposed to the free market than you, the consumer have to pay whatever the hell a corporation charges. That’s insanity. Let alone the patents, let alone the fact that the American people pay for the research and then they make billions of dollars off of it and we get nothing but robbed by them.

(00:18:22)
So it’s about lobby power. Oil companies have huge lobby power. Defense contractors have huge lobby power. It’s not that they’re more evil, it’s just that they have figured out the game better and they have basically taken the influence they need to capture the market, capture the government, and snuff out all competition, or a lot of competition.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:41)
Well, figured out the game better. So I think a lot of companies are good at winning the right way by building better products, by making people happier with the work they’re doing and the winning at the game of capitalism. And then there’s other companies that win at the game of lobbying, and I just want to draw that distinction because I think it’s a small subset of companies that are playing the game of lobbying. It’s like big pharma.
Cenk Uygur
(00:19:11)
So Lex, first of all, you have to set rules for what makes sense, not, “Oh, I don’t like this industry,” or “I don’t like this company,” or, “Hey, this company is not doing that much lobbying at this point. They will later when they realize what’s going on.” So for example, in my opinion, APAC has totally bought almost all of Congress. And so now other countries are going to wake up and go, “Wait, you could just buy the American government?” So APAC is going to spend about $100 million dollars in this cycle, and then they’re getting 26 billion back. So every country in the world is soon going to realize, oh, take American citizens that live there, get them a tremendous amount of money and just buy the U.S. government. But for corporations, they’ve already realized that on a massive scale.

(00:19:58)
So for example, in the two industries you gave: automotive. So in New Jersey, about a decade or ago or so, one of the most powerful lobbies is car dealerships. So at the national level, you’ve got pharma and you’ve got defense contractors, et cetera. At the local level guys who have huge power, number one is utilities. Number two is real estate. And then car dealerships are hilariously among the top because it’s local businesses that are financing the politicians at the local level. So they passed a law saying that you have to sell through dealerships. But Tesla doesn’t sell through dealerships, and it was intended to bully, intimidate, and push out Tesla, out of the market. They then did that in a number of different states throughout the country.

(00:20:45)
So does that make any sense in a democracy? Of course not. Why do you have to sell your product through a specific vehicle or medium? You could sell it any way you like. That’s the most anti-free market thing possible. Why? It was just total utter corruption. But it’s perfectly legal. The Supreme Court legalized bribery. So then what happened in that case? So then Elon came in and gave campaign contributions and reversed it. So now we’re in a battle where it’s an open auction. Different companies are buying different politicians, and then they’re pretending to have debates about principles and ideas, etc.

(00:21:22)
So now let’s look at tech. In the beginning, Facebook was not spending any money in politics, or almost any money in politics. So what happens? They’re getting hammered, they get pulled into congressional hearings and Facebook’s got fake news and oh my God, all these trouble from Facebook. Then Facebook does the logical thing. Oh, it turns out I need to grease these sons of bitches. So then they hire a whole bunch of Republicans consultants. They go grease all the Republicans and most of the corporate Democrats, and then all of a sudden we’re no longer talking about Facebook at all and Facebook are angels. And now we’ve turned our attention to who? Facebook’s top competitor, TikTok. Funny how that works.

(00:22:06)
And by the way, then Donald Trump goes “Oh TikTok’s a big dangerous company working with China.” And then Jeff Yaz comes in on this cycle, part owner of TikTok, and he doesn’t want TikTok banished, of course. So he gives Trump a couple of million dollars. Trump turns around the next day and goes, “We love TikTok. TikTok’s a good company.”
Lex Fridman
(00:22:29)
So that’s a big contributor to influencing what politicians say and what they think. But it’s not the entire thing, right?
Cenk Uygur
(00:22:36)
No, it is. It’s 98%. I’ll go on mainstream media and they’ll be like, “Oh, I see what you’re saying. I can see how that influences politicians about 10%.” I’m like, “No, no, it’s 98%.” And even a lot of good people think it’s 50/50. They have principles and they have money. No, they have money and this smidge of principles. That’s why I wanted to clarify 98 too.

Capitalism

Lex Fridman
(00:22:58)
Okay, so how do we fix it? So it’s really interesting and nice that you have pro-capitalism and anti-corporatism. So how do we create a system where the free market can rule. Where capitalism can rule, we can have these vibrant flourishing of all these companies competing against each other and creating awesome stuff.
Cenk Uygur
(00:23:20)
So in the book, I call it democratic capitalism as opposed to Bernie’s democratic socialism. We can get into that distinction in a minute. But so as Adam Smith said, and anyone who studies capitalism knows, you need the government to protect the market as well as the people. Why do we have cops? Because if we don’t have cops, somebody’s going to go, “Well, I like Lex’s equipment. Why don’t I just go into his house and take it?” So you need the cops to protect you, and that’s the government. So people say, “Oh, I hate big government.” Do you? It depends, right? If your house is getting robbed, all of a sudden you like the government. But you also need cops on Wall Street because if you allow insider trading, the powerful are going to rob you blind and the little guy’s going to get screwed.

(00:24:05)
So that’s this easy example. And so if you don’t have those cops, the bad guys are going to take over. They’re going to set the rules, rig the rules in their favor. So that’s why you need regulation. And so the Republicans on purpose made regulation a dirty word. They’re like, “Oh, all regulation is bad.” And then sometimes on the left, people fall for the trap of all regulation is good. A guy, I like has a great analogy on this, Matt Stoller, he’s one of the original, I would argue, progressives. And there’s about four of us, I’m sure there’s more, but that have stayed true to the original meaning of progressivism and populism: me, Matt Stoller, David Sirota, Ryan Grim. And it used to be in that original blogger group, there was guys like Glenn Greenwald and other interesting cats, but they went in different directions.

(00:24:59)
So Matt has a great line. He says, “If somebody comes up to you and says, how big a pipe do you want?” There is no answer for that. It depends on the job, doesn’t it? What are we doing? What are we building? I am going to tell you the size of the pipe depending on the project. So when people say, “Are you in favor of regulation or against it?” that’s an absurd question. Of course you need regulation. It just means laws. So don’t kill your neighbor is a regulation. So my idea is a simple one, and one we’re going to keep coming back to, balance. So when my dad was a small business owner in New Jersey and they inspected the elevator six times a year, that was over regulation. And I said to my dad, “So should they not inspect it at all?” I’m a young kid growing up and he said, “Oh no, you got to inspect it at least twice a year.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because in Turkey, sometimes they don’t inspect it and then the elevator falls.” So balance of reason, correct regulation to protect the markets and to protect the American people.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:06)
Yeah, but finding the right level of regulation, especially in, for example, in tech, something I’m much more familiar with, is very difficult because people in Congress are living in the 20th century before the internet was invented. So how are they supposed to come up with regulations?
Cenk Uygur
(00:26:24)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:24)
That’s the idea of the free market, is you should be able to compete. The market regulates, and then the government can step in and protect the market from forming monopolies, for example, which is easier to do.
Cenk Uygur
(00:26:24)
But that’s a form of regulation.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:38)
But then there’s more checking the elevator twice a year. That’s a more sort of specific watching, micromanaging.
Cenk Uygur
(00:26:46)
So Lex, here’s the deal. There’s no way around the laws are made by politicians. So you can’t give up then and go, “Oh, it’s a bunch of schmucks.” I think most politicians are just servants for the donor class. The media makes it sound like they’re the best of us. “Oh, they deserve a lot of honor and respect,” and they kiss their ass et cetera. I think generally speaking, they’re usually the worst of us, especially in this corporatist structure. Because they’re the guys who their number one talent is, “Yes sir. No sir. What would you like me to do with your donor money, sir? Absolutely, I’ll serve you completely. Or 98%.” So in this structure, the politicians are the worst of us. But at some point you need somebody elected to be your representative, to do democratic capitalism, so that you have capitalism, but it’s checked by the government on behalf of the people.

(00:27:41)
It’s the people that are saying, “These are the rules of the land and you have to abide by them.” So how do you get to the best possible answer which is related to an earlier question you asked, Lex, which is the number one thing you have to do is get big money out of politics? Everything else is near impossible as long as we are drowned in money and whoever has more money wins. And by the way, when it comes to legislation, again, that’s true about 98% of the time. We predict things ahead of time. People are like, “Wow, how did you know that bill wasn’t going to pass or was going to pass?” It’s the easiest thing in the world. And we literally teach our audience on the Young Turks, “Watch, you’ll be able to see for yourself.” And now our members comment in, they do these predictions. They’re almost always right because it’s so simple. Follow the money.

(00:28:33)
So if you get big money out of politics, and I could explain how to do that in a sec, then you’re at a place where you’ve got your best shot at honest representatives that are going to try their best to get to the right answer. Are they going to get to the right answer out of the gate? Usually not. So they pass a law, there’s something wrong with the law, they then fix that part. It is a pendulum. You don’t want it to swing too wildly, but you do need a little bit of oscillation in that pendulum to get to the right balance.

Corruption

Lex Fridman
(00:29:03)
By the way, I was listening to Joe Biden from when he was like 30 years old, the speeches, he was eloquent as hell. It’s fun to listen to actually. And he has a speech he gives or just maybe a conversation in Congress, I’m not sure where, where he talks about how corrupt the whole system is, and he’s really honest and fun. And that Joe Biden was great, by the way, that guy. I mean, age sucks. People get older. But he was talking quite honestly about having to suck up to all these rich people and that he couldn’t really suck up to the really rich people. They said, “Come back to us 10 years later when you’re more integrated into the system.” But he was really honest about it, and he’s saying, “That’s how it is. That’s what we have to do. And that really sucks that that’s what we have to do.”
Cenk Uygur
(00:29:57)
So we did a video on our TikTok channel, then and now, of Joe Biden. This is when I was trying to push Biden out.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:05)
We should say you were one of the people early on, saying Biden needs to step down.
Cenk Uygur
(00:30:10)
Yeah, I started about a year ago because I was positive that Biden had a 0% chance of winning. And it turned out, by the way, two days before he dropped out, his inside advisors inside the White House said, “Yeah, near 0% chance of winning.” So we were right all along.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:27)
You got a lot of criticism for that, by the way. But yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(00:30:28)
We can come back to that. Yes, I did. And which makes it Tuesday for me. I get a lot of criticism for everything. And by the way, Democratic Party, you’re welcome. But Biden’s a really interesting example. I’m really glad you brought it up. So the video on TikTok was just showing Biden then, Biden now. And you’re right, Biden was so dynamic. When you see how dynamic he was, we did side-by-side, and then you see him now going “I can barely finish.” Anyways, you’re like, “Oh, that’s not the same guy. I get it.” And that got 5 million views because it resonates. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, of course”.

(00:31:08)
But when he first started, to the point you’re making Lex, he wanted … In fact, I know because I talked to him about this, his very first bill was anti-corruption. Why? Because at that point, everything changes in 1976 to 78, the Supreme Court decisions that basically legalize bribery.

(00:31:25)
But remember Biden is ancient. So he’s coming into politics at a time when money has not yet drowned politics. And in fact, the American population is super-pissed about the fact that it’s begun. They don’t like corruption. So early Biden, because he’s reading the room, is very anti-corruption. And the first bill he proposes is to get money out of politics. But as Biden goes on for his epic 200-year career in Washington, he starts to get not more conservative, more corporate, because he’s just taken more and more money. By the middle of his career. He has a nickname, the Senator from MBNA. Okay.
Cenk Uygur
(00:32:00)
Nickname, the Senator from MBNA. Okay. MBNA was a credit card company based in Delaware, and the reason he had that nickname is because there isn’t anything Joe Biden wouldn’t have done for credit card companies and corporations based in Delaware, which are almost all corporations, okay? So he became the most corporate senator in the country, and hence the most beloved by corporate media. Corporate media has protected him his entire career until about a month ago. So, for example, in the primaries, both in 2020 and 2024, if you said the Senator from MBNA, I guarantee you almost no one in the audience has heard of it. If you heard of it, good job.

(00:32:41)
You know politics really well, but the reason you didn’t hear of it is because the mainstream media wouldn’t say, “That’s outrageous of Joe Biden to be such a corporate stooge.” They’d say, “That’s outrageous of you to point out something that’s true and something we reported on earlier.” So they protected him at all costs. Now, finally, when you get to this version of Joe Biden, he can’t talk, he can’t walk, he bears no resemblance to the young guy who came in saying that money in politics was a problem. Now he’s saying money in politics is the solution. In 2020, he said, “Well, I can raise more money than Bernie. I can kiss corporate ass better than Bernie. I’m the biggest corporate kisser in the world. So, I’m going to raise a billion dollars and you need to support me.”

(00:33:28)
Now, of course, he doesn’t say it in those words, but that was the message to the establishment. Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Obama, Clyburn, everybody goes, “Oh, that’s right. Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, not Bernie.” I don’t know that there’s anybody in the country who instinctually dislikes Bernie more than Barack Obama.

Money in politics

Lex Fridman
(00:33:46)
That’s an interesting… I’m not taking that tangent at this moment. You mentioned mainstream media. What’s the motivation for mainstream media to be corporatist also?
Cenk Uygur
(00:33:55)
So first of all, they’re giant corporations. So, they’re all multi-billion dollar corporations. In the old days, we had incredible number of media outlets. So, you go to San Francisco, there’d be at least two papers and there’d be a paperboy. I’m going all the way back, paperboy on each corner, and they’re competing with one another. Literally, they’d be catty corner and one guy’s going, “Oh, here are all this details.” They’re trying to get an audience. They’re trying to get people interested. So, they’re populist, they’re interesting, they’re mark breakers, they’re challenging the government. Fast forward to now, or not now, but about a decade ago, five years ago, in that ballpark, now there’s only six giant media corporations left.

(00:34:40)
It’s an oligopoly, and they’re all multi-billion dollar corporations. They all want tax cuts. Especially about 20 years ago during the Iraq War, half of them are defense contractors. So, they’re just using the news as marketing to start wars like the Iraq War. Then GE, which owned MSNBC, makes a tremendous amount of money, so much more money from war than it does for media. That media is a good marketing spend for these corporations. Now, that’s part of it, that they themselves want the same exact thing as the rest of corporations do for corporate rule, lower tax cuts, deregulation, so they can merge, et cetera. But the second part of it is arguably even more important. So, where does all that money in politics go?

(00:35:27)
So for example, in 2022, it’s just a midterm election. No presidential should be lower spending. A ridiculous $17 billion are spent on the election cycle. Where does the $17 billion go? Almost all of it goes into corporate media, mainstream media, television, newspapers, radio. They’re buying ads like nuts. So, we have a reporter at TYT, David Schuster. He used to work at MSNBC, Fox News, et cetera. David once did a piece about money and politics at a local NBC news station, and his editor or GM spiked the story. David goes into his office and asks him, “So why? This story is true. It’s a huge part of politics. If we’re going to report on this issue, we got to tell you what’s actually happening.”

(00:36:17)
So he says, “David, come here.” He puts his arm around his shoulders, takes him to the big newsroom, and he goes, “You see all this? Money in politics paid for that.”
Lex Fridman
(00:36:28)
That’s really fascinating. So, big corporations, they’re giving money to politicians through different channels, and then the politicians are spending that money on mainstream media. So, there’s a vicious cycle where it’s in the interest of the mainstream media not to criticize the very corporations that are feeding that cycle. It’s not actually direct, it’s not like corporations are… Because I was thinking one of the ways is direct advertisement. Pharmaceuticals obviously advertise a lot on mainstream media, but there’s also indirect, which is giving the politicians money or super PACs and the super PACs and the spend money on…
Cenk Uygur
(00:37:11)
That’s why mainstream media never talks about the number one factor in politics, which is money. We all know. I mean, now as we talked about earlier, we see it with our own eyes, open auction. Any country, any company, anybody that has money, the politicians will now literally say, “I am now working for this guy,” as Trump says, “because he gave me a strong endorsement,” which means a lot of money. The press never covers it, almost never, right? So you’re telling me you’re doing an article on the infrastructure build or build back better, et cetera. You are not going to mention the enormous amount of money that every lobbyist spent on that bill. That’s absurd. That’s absurd. That’s 98% of the ballgame.

(00:37:57)
The reason they hide the ball is because they don’t want you to know this whole thing is based on the money that they are receiving. By the way, one more thing about that, Lex. It’s that the ads themselves actually, they work and they work pretty well, but that’s not the main reason you spend money on ads. You spend the money on ads to get friendly coverage from the content, from the free media that you’re getting from that same outlet. So, since every newspaper and every television station and network knows that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are their top clients, they’re going to get billions of dollars from them. They never really criticized the Republican and Democratic Party. On the other hand, if you’re an outsider, they’ll rip your face off.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:48)
That’s also really interesting. So, if you’re an advertiser, if you’re big pharma and you’re advertising, it’s not that the advertisement works. It’s that the hosts are too afraid, not explicitly, just even implicitly. They’re self-censoring. They’re not going to have any guests that are controversial, anti-big pharma, or they’re not going to make any jokes about big pharma. That continues and expands. That’s really interesting.
Cenk Uygur
(00:39:18)
Sometimes it’s super direct. When I was a host on MSNBC, I had a company that I was criticizing in my script and management looked at it. By the way, I used to go off prompter a lot and it drove him crazy, not because I wasn’t good at it. I think my ratings went up whenever I went off prompter, but because they couldn’t pre-approve the script. What do they want to pre-approve? Hey, are you going to criticize one of our sponsors, one of our advertisers, et cetera? So we had a giant fight over it, and the compromise was I moved them lower in the script but kept them in the story. So, sometimes it’s super direct like that, but way more often it’s implicit. It’s indirect. You don’t have to say it. So, I give you a spectacular example of it, so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly.

(00:40:10)
So, since GE is a giant defense contractor, they own MSNBC at the time of the Iraq War. They fired everyone who was against the Iraq War on air. So, Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Ashleigh Banfield, but Ashleigh Banfield, they did something different with. She was a rising star at the time. She goes and gives a speech in Kansas, not really even having a policy position, but just talking about the actual cost of this Iraq War and how we should be really careful. They hate that. So, they take their rising star and they take her off-air and she goes, “Okay, good. Let me out of my contract. It’s okay, I’ll go.” Because she was such a star at that time, she could have easily gotten somewhere else. They go, “No, we’re not going to let you out of your contract.”

(00:40:53)
Why not? Were you going to pay me to do nothing? Yeah, not only that, we’re moving your office. Where are you moving it to? They literally moved it into a closet and they made sure that everybody in the building saw her getting taken off the air and moved into a closet. The closet is the memo, right? That’s the memo to the whole building, you better shut up and do as you’re told, okay? So that way, I don’t have to tell you and get myself in trouble. It’s super obvious. There are guardrails here, and you are not allowed to go beyond acceptable thought. Acceptable thought is our sponsors are great, politicians are great, the powerful are great.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:33)
So how do we begin to fix that, and what exactly are we fixing? Is it the influence of the lobbyists? It feels like companies have found different ways to achieve influence. So, how do we get money out of politics?
Cenk Uygur
(00:41:50)
So it’s very difficult but doable and we will do it, but in order to do it, the populist left and the populist right have to unite. By the way, that is why we have the culture wars.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:01)
That’s why you’re voting for Trump.
Cenk Uygur
(00:42:04)
No chance. So, we can get into that in a minute. So, the culture wars are meant to divide us. If we get united, we have enough leverage and power to be able to do it, but you can’t do it through a normal bill. Because if you do it on a bill, the whole point of capturing the Supreme Court was to make sure that they kill any piece of legislation that would protect the American people.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:24)
You’re saying the Supreme Court is also captured by this?
Cenk Uygur
(00:42:27)
Oh, 100%. Okay. So, let me explain. Again, people for the uninitiated, they think, “Oh, that sounds conspiratorial.” Well, in this case, that’s actually somewhat true because people now know about this. It’s the Powell memo, the most infamous political memo in history. Lewis Powell writes a memo for the Chamber of Commerce in 1971. That’s basically a blueprint for how the Chamber of Commerce can take over the government. Lewis Powell explains, one of the most important things you have to do is take over the media, but even more important than that is taking over the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of what is allowed and not allowed. He says, “We need ‘activist judges’ to help business interests on the court.”

(00:43:17)
Then Nixon reads the memo and goes, “That sounds like a really good idea. How about I put you on the Supreme Court?” He puts Lewis Powell, the guy who wrote the memo, on the Supreme Court where he’s the deciding vote in Bellotti and Buckley. So, those two decisions are 1976 to 1978, and what they say is, yeah, I read the Constitution and it says that money’s speech. No, it isn’t. No, it didn’t. That’s not even close to true. They just made it up. They said, “Okay, in corporations, they’re human beings.” No, they’re not. That’s preposterous. They have the same inalienable rights as human beings and citizens do. Money is speech and speech is an inalienable right. So, corporations can spend unlimited money in politics, and there goes our democracy, gone.

(00:44:10)
So, Citizens United just shot a dead horse with a Gatling gun and made it worse and put it on steroids, but it was already dead in 1978. For the rest of your life, you’ll see this. Every chart about the American economy starts to diverge in 1978. 1938 to 1978, we have golden 40 years of economic prosperity. We create the greatest middle class the world has ever seen and our productivity is sky-high, but our wages match our productivity. After 1978, productivity is still sky-high best in the world. Oh, American worker’s lazy, not remotely true. We work our ass off, but we just flatline. They’ve been flatlining for about 50 years straight. The reason is because the Supreme Court made bribery legal. So, in order to get past the Supreme Court, you only have one choice.

(00:45:09)
That’s an amendment. So, you have to get an amendment. Amendments are very difficult. So, for example, you need two-thirds of Congress to even propose the amendment. So, well, why would Congress propose an amendment that would take away their own power? Because almost everybody in Congress got there through corruption. Their main talent is I can kiss corporate ass better than you can. A person with more money in Congress wins 95% of the time, but the good news is the founding fathers were geniuses, and they put in a second outlet. They said, “Or two-thirds of the states can call for a convention where you can propose an amendment. After an amendment is proposed, then three-quarters of the states have to ratify it.”

(00:45:55)
That’s what makes it so difficult, because getting three-quarters of the states, there’s so many red states, so many blue states, getting three-quarters of the states to agree is near impossible. But there is one issue that the whole country agrees on, 93% of Americans believe that politicians serve their donors and not their voters. So, this is the one thing we can unite on. If we unite on this, we push our states to call for a convention. We all go to the convention together, we bring democracy alive, and we propose amendments to the Constitution. The best amendment gets three-quarters of the states to ratify. You go above the Supreme Court and you solve the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:33)
So if 93% of people want this, why hasn’t it happened yet? I mean, the obvious answer is there’s corporate control of the media and the politicians, but it seems like our current system and the megaphone that a president has should be able to unite the populace left and right. So, it shouldn’t be that difficult to do. Why hasn’t a person like Trump who’s a billionaire or on the left, a rich businessman run just on this and win?
Cenk Uygur
(00:47:06)
Well, eventually they will. So, that’s why I actually have a lot of hope, even though things seem super dark right now. That’s why I was for Bernie, so I can come back to that, but why hasn’t Trump done it? It’s easy. He’s like, “What am I, a sucker? The guy gives me money. I do what the guy wants. Why would I get rid of that? That’s how I got into power. So, that’s how I’m doing it now.” I go to [inaudible 00:47:29] and say, “Give me $100 million and I’ll let Israel annex the West Bank. So, I’ll go to the oil companies and give me $1 billion and I’ll give you tax subsidies. I’ll let you drill. I’ll take away regulation. Why would I stop that?”
Lex Fridman
(00:47:41)
You think he likes money more than he likes being popular? Because there’s a big part of him that’s a populist in the sense that he loves being admired by large masses of people.
Cenk Uygur
(00:47:55)
You’re absolutely right, but that is the fault of MAGA. So, MAGA, you’re screwing populists in a way that is infuriating and smart libertarians like Dave Smith have figured this out. That’s why he’s just as mad at Trump as I am. It’s because he took a populist movement and he redirected it for his own personal gain. MAGA, figure it out. Come on. So, if you say, “Oh, you think Democrats have figured out that these politics…” No, they largely haven’t figured it out either. I think there’s Blue MAGA, and I could talk about that as well. But for those of us on the populist left, yeah, we’re not enamored by politicians.

(00:48:37)
For example, when Bernie does the wrong thing, we call him out. Bernie is not my Goddamn uncle. I don’t like him for some personality reason. It’s not a cult of personality. You do the right thing, I love you for it. You do the wrong thing, I’m going to kick your ass for it. But Donald Trump does this massive ridiculous corruption over and over again. MAGA is like, “I’m here for it. Love it. As long as you’re doing the corruption, I’m okay with it.”
Lex Fridman
(00:48:59)
What does Trump say about getting money out of politics?
Cenk Uygur
(00:49:01)
He says nothing about it. MAGA, why haven’t you held him to account? So when Bernie helped Biden take out $15 minimum wage from the Senate bill on the first bill that was introduced in the Biden administration, we went nuts. We did a petition. We sent in videos to Bernie, our audience going, “Don’t kill it, Bernie. Don’t kill it.” So Bernie then reintroduced it as an amendment. It got voted down, but he did the right thing. That is us holding our top leader accountable and saying, “You better get back on track because we’re not here for you and your personal self-aggrandizement. We’re here for policy.” If MAGA was actually here for policy, they would’ve absolutely leveled Trump on the fact that he… I mean, remember what he ran on drain the swamp. That’s why he won in 2016.

(00:49:51)
So, I predicted on ABC right after the DNC and Hillary Clinton was up 10, 12 points, whatever she was, and I said, “Trump would win.” The whole panel laughed out loud. They’re like, “Get a load of this crazy guy.” I said, “He’s a populist who seems to hate the establishment in a populist time. Drain the swamp is a great slogan. I knew he would win when he was in a Republican debate and he said, ‘I paid all these guys. Before I paid them, and they did whatever I wanted.'” I was like, “That’s so true.” People will love that, and especially Republican voters will love that. I actually have a lot of respect for Republican voters because they actually genuinely hate corruption.

Fixing politics

Lex Fridman
(00:50:36)
So what would an amendment look like that helps prevent money being an influence in politics?
Cenk Uygur
(00:50:44)
So I started a group called Wolf-PAC.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:48)
Nice name.
Cenk Uygur
(00:50:48)
Thank you, wold-pac.com. The reason why I named it Wolf-PAC is because everyone in Washington I knew would hate that name. It’s a populist name. Everybody in Washington snickers, “Now you’re supposed to name it Americans for America and just trick people,” et cetera. No, no, no. Wolf-PAC means we’re coming for you, okay? We’re not coming for you in a weirdo physical or violent way. We’re coming for you in a democratic way, okay? So we’re going to go to those state houses. We’re going to get them to propose a convention and we did it in five states, but then the Democratic Party started beating us back. We’ll get to that. So, we are going to overturn your apple cart and we’re going to put the American people back in charge. So, what does the amendment say?

(00:51:32)
Number one, a lot of people will have different opinions on what it should say, and that’s what you sort out in a convention. So, for example, one of the things that conservatives can propose, which makes sense, is term limits. Because the reason why these super old politicians are in charge is because they provide a return on investment. So, if you give to Biden, Pelosi, or McConnell, they’re going to deliver for you. They love that return on investment. They don’t want to risk it on a new guy. The new guy might have principles, ew, or might want to actually do a little bit for his voters, boo. Every corrupt system has these old guys hanging around that help maintain power, et cetera. So, my particular proposal in the amendments would be a couple of things.

(00:52:21)
One is end private financing of elections. Look, if you’re a businessperson, you’re a capitalist, you know this with absolute certainty. If somebody signs your check, that’s the person you work for. So, if private interests are funding politicians, the politicians will serve private interests. Then you’re going to get into a fight like Elon did in New Jersey where the car dealerships and Tesla are getting into an auction. Can I hear $100,000, $1 million, $2 million, $3 million? Now you got to go bribe the government official. That’s called a campaign contribution. This is a terrible system. End the private financing, go to complete public financing of elections.

(00:53:07)
That’s when conservatives, because they’ve been propagandized by corporate media. Yes, mainstream media got into your head too. Right-wing media got into your head too, and right-wing media also financed by a lot of this corrupt interest. So, they tell you, “Oh, you don’t want to publicly finance. Oh, my God. You’d be spending like $1 billion on politicians.” Brother, they’re spending trillions of dollars of your money because they’re financed by the guys that they’re giving all of your money to.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:32)
So can you educate me? Does that prevent something like Citizen United? So super PACs are all gone in this case. So, indirect funding is also-
Cenk Uygur
(00:53:41)
Indirect funding’s gone, direct funding’s gone. You have to set up some thresholds. Not everybody can just get money to run. You have to prove that you have some popular support. So, signature gathering, you would still allow for small money donations like up to $100, something along those lines.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:00)
Not 5,000 or whatever it is now.
Cenk Uygur
(00:54:02)
Yeah, I think 5,000 is too high, but those are fine debates. But you basically want to create an incentive. Everything is about incentives and disincentives. Again, capitalists realize this better than anyone else. So, you want to set up an incentive to serve your voters, not your donors. So, if you take away private donors, well, there goes that incentive and that’s gigantic. Then if you set up small grassroots funding as a way to get past the threshold to get the funding to run an election, well, then good, because then you’re serving small donors, which are generally voters. So, that’s what you want. Ending private financing is critical, but the second thing is ending corporate personhood. This is where you get into a lot of fights because you have two reasons.

(00:54:49)
One is some folks have a principled position against it, and they say, “Well, I mean the Sierra Club is technically a corporation. ACLU is technically a corporation. So, if you end corporate personhood, then that could endanger their existence.” No, it doesn’t endanger their existence at all. So, it doesn’t endanger GM or GE’s existence. It doesn’t endanger anybody’s existence. Corporations exist. We’re not trying to take them away. I would never do that, right? That’s not smart, that’s not workable, et cetera. We’re just saying they don’t have constitutional rights. So, they have the rights that we give them. By the way, read the founding fathers. This is also in my book. They hated corporations. The American Revolution was partly against the British East India Company.

(00:55:39)
So, the Tea Party in Boston was against that corporation. They threw their tea overboard. It was not against the British monarchy. All the founding fathers warned us over and over again, watch out for corporations, because once they form, they will amass money and power and look to kill off democracy. They were totally right. That’s exactly what happened. So, it’s not that you don’t have them. It’s that through democratic capitalism, you limit their power. You can give them a bunch of rights. You say, “Hey, you have a right to exist. You have a right to do this, this, and this, but you do not have constitutional rights of a citizen.” So you don’t have the right to speak to a politician by giving them a billion dollars.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:29)
You believe that the people will be able to find the right policies to regulate and tax the corporations such that capitalism can flourish still?
Cenk Uygur
(00:56:40)
Yes. You know why? Because I’m a real populist, and I believe in the people. So, I drive the establishment crazy because they don’t believe in the people. They think, “Oh, have you seen MAGA? Have you seen these guys? Have you seen the radicals on the left? We’re so much smarter. You know how many Ivy League degrees we have? We know what we’re doing.” No, you don’t. No, everybody to some degree looks out for their own interests. Why I like capitalism and why I love democracy is because it’s the wisdom of the crowd. So, in the long run, the crowd is right. Oftentimes in the short term, we’re wrong. But the wisdom of the crowd in the long run is much, much better than the elites that run things.

(00:57:23)
The elites say, “Well, we’re so smart and educated, so we’re going to know better what’s good for you.” No, brother. You’re going to know what’s better for you. So, here’s something that a lot of people get wrong on the populist left and right. They think, “Oh, those guys are evil.” They’re not evil. I’ve met them. I worked at MSNBC, I worked on cable, I went to Wharton, Columbia Law, et cetera. I know a lot of those guys. So, they’re not at all evil. They don’t even know that they’re mainly serving their own interests. They just naturally do it.

(00:57:52)
So, they think the carried interest loophole makes a lot of sense. They think corporate tax cuts makes a lot of sense. You not getting higher wages, you not having healthcare, it makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense, but they get themselves to believe it. That’s another portion of the invisible hand of the market.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:10)
So there’s problems with every path. So, the elite, like you mentioned, can be corrupted by greed, by power, and so on. But the crowd, I agree with you, by the way, about the wisdom of the crowd versus the wisdom of the elite, but the crowd can be captured by a charismatic leader. I’m probably a populist myself. The problem with populism is that it can’t be and has been throughout history captured by bad people.
Cenk Uygur
(00:58:38)
But if you say to me, trust the elites or trust the people, I’m going to trust the people every single time.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:44)
Well, that’s why you’re such an interesting… I don’t want to say contradiction, but there’s a tension that creates the balance. So, to me, in the way you’re speaking might result in hurting capitalism. So, it is easy in fighting corporatism to hurt companies, to go too far the other way.
Cenk Uygur
(00:59:07)
Yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:08)
So when you talk about corporate tax, so what’s the magic number for the corporate tax? If it’s too high, companies leave.
Cenk Uygur
(00:59:20)
Companies have so much power right now. This pendulum has swung so far. Guys, we’re almost out of time. The window’s closing. The minute private equity buys all of our homes, the residential real estate market, we’re screwed. We’re indentured servants forever. There goes wealth creation for the average American. So, you’re right, Lex, that it’s not a contradiction. It’s a tension that is inevitable to get to balance. The reason why people can’t figure me out, they’re like, “Well, you’re on the left, but you’re a capitalist, et cetera.” That’s not a contradiction. That’s getting to the right balance. In order to do that, if you say, “Well, if we change the system, I’m afraid of change because what if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction?”

(01:00:12)
Well, then you would be opposed to change at all times. So, if you do that, it actually reminds me of the Biden fight. So, I’m like, “Guys, he has almost no chance of winning. He stands for the establishment. He can’t talk.” But then the number one pushback I’d get from Democrats was, yeah, but what if we change? It’s so scary. We don’t know about Kamala Harris. What if it’s not Kamala Harris? It’s so scary, don’t change. Yeah, but if you say change might be worse, it also might be better. You’re at zero. Anything is better, right? Right now, in terms of corruption in America, we’re at 98% corruption. So, we’ve got 2% decency left. Brother, this is when you want change.

(01:01:05)
Lex, if you actually have wisdom of the crowd, just like in supply and demand and how it works in economics, it works the same way in a functioning democracy. You go too far, you come back in. So, for example, when Reagan came into office, me and my dad and my family, we were Republicans. Why? At that point, the highest marginal tax rate was at 70%. 70% is too high. Then he brought it all the way down to 28%. That’s too low. That’s how the system modulates itself. Already we were headed towards corruption because it’s the 80s now. We’re past 78, magic 78 marker.

(01:01:48)
Even Carter was way more conservative economically than people realize because we’re already getting past it by the time it’s in his administration. But the bottom line is, yes, whenever you have real wisdom of the crowd, whether it’s in business or in politics, you’re going to have fluctuation. You’re going to have that pendulum swinging back and forth. You don’t want wild swings, communism, corporatism, right? You want to get to hey, where’s the right balance here between capitalism and what people think is socialism?
Lex Fridman
(01:02:17)
Yeah. So, I guess I agree with most of the things you said about the corruption. I just wish there would be more celebration of the fact that capitalism and some incredible companies in the history of the 20th century has created so much wealth, so much innovation that has increased the quality of life on average. They’ve also increased the wealth inequality and exploitation of the workers and this stuff, but you want to not forget to celebrate the awesomeness that companies have also brought outside the political sphere just in creating awesome stuff.
Cenk Uygur
(01:02:53)
Look, I run a company. So, I don’t want companies to go away, and I don’t want you to hate all companies. I think Young Turks is a wonderful company. We provide great healthcare, we take care of our employees, we care about the community, et cetera. We’re building a whole nation online on those principles and the right way to run a company. But guys, we’re at the wrong part of the pendulum. The companies have overwhelming power and they’re crushing us. We’re like that scene in Star Wars with the trash compactor is closing in on them. The walls are closing in. We’re almost out of time because they’ve captured the government almost entirely. They’re only serving corporate interests. We’ve got to get back into balance before it’s too late. That’s why I care so much about structural issues. So, I form Justice Democrats, so that’s AOC, et cetera, right? People know it as the squad. They know it as just Democrats, et cetera. I’m one of the co-founders of that, and my number one rule was no corporate PAC money. So, you’re not allowed to take corporate PAC money. By the way, now, Matt-
Cenk Uygur
(01:04:00)
Okay, so you’re not allowed to take corporate PAC money. By the way. Now Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley have stopped taking corporate PAC money and they’ve become, to some degree on economic issues genuine populists. It’s amazing. It happens overnight. All of a sudden they’re talking about holding corporations accountable, et cetera. Now just Democrats wind up having other problems. They got too deep into social issues, not economic issues.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:24)
There’s a general criticism of billionaires, right? This idea. Now you could say that billionaires are avoiding taxes and they’re not getting taxed enough. But I think under that flag of criticizing billionaires is criticizing all companies that do epic shit. That build stuff.
Cenk Uygur
(01:04:45)
Oh, okay. So-
Lex Fridman
(01:04:46)
That create stuff. That’s what I’m worried about. I don’t hear enough genuine… I like celebrating people. I like celebrating ideas. I just don’t hear enough genuine celebration of companies when they do cool things.
Cenk Uygur
(01:05:01)
So are you, right, not about companies, but about capitalism? Yes. Because you look at life expectancy 200 years ago, and you look at it now and you go, wow, holy shit, we did amazing things. And what happened in the last 200 years? We went from dictatorships more towards democracy, wisdom of the crowd. We went from serfs and indentured servants and a nobility that holds the land to more towards capitalism. And boom, the crowd is right. Things go really well. The advances in medicine are amazing, and medicine is a great example. And on our show, I point all those things out and I say, look, we hate the drug companies because of how they’ve captured the government, right? But we don’t hate the drug companies for creating great drugs. Those drugs save lives. They just saved my life. They saved countless millions upon millions of lives.

(01:05:57)
So the right idea isn’t shut down drug companies. The right idea is don’t let them buy the government, right? And I know we get back into our instinctual shells, so on the left they’ll be, oh, we should get rid of all billionaires. Why? How does that fix the system? Tell me how it fixes the system, and I’m all ears. My solution is end private financing. Then you can be a billionaire all you like. You can’t buy the government. That’s a more logical way to go about it. I’ve never worn an Eat the Rich shirt, and it drives me crazy. I’m like, “You would’ve eaten FDR.” Right? And FDR is the best president, the most populous president in my opinion. And so no, there’s wonderful rich people. Of course, of course there’s a range of humanity. But you don’t want to get rid of the rich. You don’t want to get rid of companies, but you also don’t want to let them control everything.

(01:06:51)
Here, I’ll give you an example that’s really, and that informs a lot of how I think about things, which is my dad. So my dad was a farmer in southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border. No money. In fact, his dad died when he was six months old. And so they were saddled with debt and no electricity in his house. As poor as poor gets. And he wound up living the American dream. And so how did he do that? What made the difference? Well, what made the difference is opportunity. So I’m a populist because my dad was in the masses, and the elites say the masses are no good. We’re smart, you’re not. We’re educated, you are not. At meritocracy, we talk about that. We have earned merit. And if you’re poor or middle-class, you have not earned merit. Okay? You’re useless and worthless. And I hate that.

(01:07:51)
So what did Turkey do back in the 1960s that liberated my dad? They provided free college education. You had to test into it, but the top 15% got a free college education at the best colleges in Turkey. And my uncle saved all of our lives when he came to my dad and said, “Do you like working on this farm?” And my dad’s like, “Fuck no.” It’s super hot. It’s super hard. They got to get up at four in the morning. If they’re lucky, they have a family next door gives them a mule. If they’re not, they got to carry the shit themselves. So my uncle told him, work just as hard in school and you’ll be able to get a house, a car, pretty girls, et cetera. My dad works his ass off, gets into the school, and he comes out of a mechanical engineer and starts his own company.

(01:08:40)
He creates a company in Turkey, hires hundreds of people. He then moves to America, creates a company here, hires tons of people. Do I hate companies? No. My dad set up two companies and I saw how much it benefited people. I saw how much employees would come up to my dad 20, 30 years later in the street and hug him. And they’d tell me, as a young kid, your dad’s the most fair boss we ever had. And we love him for it. That’s how you run a company. And he taught me the value of hard work.

(01:09:09)
But the reason I brought it up here is because he taught me, look, skill and ability is a genetic lottery. So you’re not going to just get the rich to win all the genetic lottery. No. There’s going to be tons of poor kids and middle-class kids who are just as good if not better. You have to provide them the opportunity, the fair chance to succeed. You have to believe in them. So this isn’t about disempowering anyone. It’s about empowering all of those kids who are doing the right thing, who are smart and want to work hard so they could build their own companies and add to the economy.

Meritocracy & DEI

Lex Fridman
(01:09:47)
What in general is your view on meritocracy?
Cenk Uygur
(01:09:50)
So I love meritocracy. I wish that we lived in a meritocracy and I want to drive towards living in a meritocracy. So that’s why I don’t like equality of results. So now people that are on the left will get super mad at that and go, what do you mean? Well, okay, brother, let’s say you’re at work and you got one guy who’s working his ass off. Another guy, that’s going, I don’t care. I’m not going to do it. Well, the guy who works super hard has to pick up the slack. Now he’s working twice as hard and now you want the same results? You want the same salary as that guy? No brother. No. He’s working twice, four times, 10 times harder than you. That’s not fair. Fairness matters. We were in the suburbs of Jersey, but we wound up in Freehold eventually, and we lived across a farm, which is… In central Jersey, it happens. And it was called Fair Chance Farm. I was like, how did I get, this is amazing, right? And I love that. That’s the essence of America, and that’s what I want to go back to. So we’ve got to create that opportunity, not just because it’s the moral thing to do, but because it’s also the economically smart thing to do. If you enable all those great people that are in lower income classes and middle income classes, you’re going to get a much better economy, a much stronger democracy. So that’s the direction we go.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:16)
So again, it’s about balance, but what do you think about DEI policies say in academia and companies? So the movement as it has evolved, where’s that on the balance? How far is it pushing towards equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity?
Cenk Uygur
(01:11:41)
So now we’re getting into social issues. So this is where we all rip each other apart, and then the people at the top laugh their off at us and go, we got them fighting over trans issues. They’re killing each other. It is hilarious. And they’re so busy, they don’t realize we’re running the place. Right? Okay, but let’s engage. Some people will look at DEI and go, well, that just gives me an opportunity just like anyone else. I love DEI. And other person will look at it and go, no, that says that you should be picked above me. And I hate DEI. So the reality of DEI is a little bit more complicated, but you got to go back. So first, did we need affirmative action in the 1960s? Definitely. Why? All the firefighter jobs in South Carolina, as an example, are going to white guys.

(01:12:31)
All the longshoremen jobs in New York, LA, wherever you have it, are all going to white guys because that’s how the system was. Yes, also in the north. So we now are in a civil rights era. We decide we’re going to go towards equality. Minorities, in that case, mainly black Americans, had to find a way to break in. If you’re a longshoreman and it’s a good job, you naturally pass it on to your son. I get your instinct, I don’t hate you for it. But we got to let black kids also have a shot at it. So you need it in the beginning, but at a certain point you have to phase it out.

(01:13:06)
So when I was growing up, it’s now in the late ’80s, early ’90s, I hated affirmative action and I’ve been principled on it from day one. And to this day, I’m not in favor of affirmative action. I say it on the show all the time. Why? I’m a minority. Being a Turk. I grew up Muslim, I’m an atheist now, but generally speaking, a Muslim is certainly a minority in America and pretty much a hated one overall. But I didn’t check off Muslim or Turkish or any ethnicity when I applied to college because I believe in a meritocracy as we were talking about. But we don’t really have a meritocracy now, so I can come back to that, so I didn’t check it off because I didn’t want an unfair advantage, because I want to earn it. I want to earn it. So now I’m in law school and I’m hanging out with right-wingers because at that point I’m a Republican, and one of the guys says to me about a black student going to Columbia, he says, oh, I wonder how he got in here.

(01:14:13)
God, that is the problem with affirmative action. It devalues the accomplishments of every minority in the country. You have to transition away from it. If you don’t, it sets up a caste system. And that caste system is lethal to democracy. So does DEI go too far? In some instances, yes. But is it a boogeyman that’s going to take all the white jobs and make them black as Trump would say, black jobs, and give minorities too much power, et cetera? No. The idea isn’t to rob you and to give all the opportunity to minorities. The idea is to make it equal. But as the pendulum swings, did it swing too far in some directions? Yes. The left can’t acknowledge that and the right can’t acknowledge that, of course, at some point you got to give a chance for others to break in so they have a fair chance.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:03)
By the way, Michelle Obama had a good line about the black jobs in the DNC speech-
Cenk Uygur
(01:15:07)
Great line. I loved that.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:08)
Where somebody should tell Trump that the presidency might be just one of those black jobs. Anyway, but why do you think the left doesn’t acknowledge when DEI gets ridiculous? Which it, in certain places and in certain places at a large scale has gotten ridiculous.
Cenk Uygur
(01:15:28)
Because people are taught to just be in the tribe they’re in. And to believe it a hundred percent. I’ve gotten kicked out of every… I might be the most attacked man in internet history, partly because we’ve been around forever. And partly because I disagree with every part of the political spectrum, because I believe in independent thought. And the minute you vary a little bit, people go nuts. And so the far left tribe is going to go with their preset ideology, just like the far right tribe is.

(01:16:02)
So for example, on trans issues, we’ve protected trans people for over 20 years in The Young Turks. We fought for equality for trans people and for all LGBTQ people for two decades. We did it way before anyone else did. When Biden came out in favor of gay marriage in 2013, we’re like, this is comically late. So we were all supposed to congratulate him in the year 2013 that he thinks gay people should have the same rights as straight people? And that he had to push Obama to get there? So on the other hand, I’m like, guys, if you allow trans women to go into professional sports, not at the high school level, but professional sports, but let’s say they go into MMA or boxing and a trans woman, I mean, it happens in boxing, it happens in MMA, punches a biological woman so hard that she kills her. So you’re going to set back trans rights 50 years. I’m not trying to hurt you, I’m trying to help you. You have to do bounds of reason.

(01:17:07)
So when I say simple things like that, and I say, you can give LeBron James every hormone blocker on planet earth, he’s still going to dominate the WNBA. Okay? It would be comical. He might score a hundred points a night. And they’ll say, that’s outrageous. And some have called me Nazi for saying that trans women or that professional leagues should make their own decisions on whether they allow trans women in or not. So why do they say that? Because they’re so besieged, they think we cannot give an inch. We cannot give any ground. If you give any ground, you’re a Nazi. Okay? So we’ve got to get out of that mindset. You can’t function in a democracy and be in an extreme position and expect the rest of the country to go towards your extreme position.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:57)
So why do you think we are not in a meritocracy?
Cenk Uygur
(01:18:00)
Because of the corruption. So for example, but there’s also, remember, corporate media is the matrix and they plug you into cable in the old days. Now, it’s a little bit different because of online media, but especially 10 years ago, and remember we started 22 years ago. So I’ve been losing my mind over how obvious corporate media corruption has been for decades now, but no one acknowledged it until online media got stronger. But one of the myths that corporate media creates is the myth of meritocracy. Not that meritocracy can’t exist or shouldn’t exist, but they pretend it exists today. So the problem with that myth, Lex, is that it gets people thinking, well, if they’re already rich, they must have merited it by definition. So all the rich have merit. And the reverse of that, if you’re poor or middle class, well, you must not have merited wealth. So you’re no good. We don’t have to listen to you. And that’s a really dangerous, awful idea.

(01:19:05)
And so if we get to a meritocracy one day, I’ll be the happiest person in America. But right now it’s… Look here I’ll give you an example that I put in the book, and it’s not us, this other folks at this YouTube video. I can’t even quite find who they were, but it was a brilliant video, and they said, we’re going to do a hundred yard race. But hold on before we start, anyone who has two parents take two steps forward. Anyone who went to college, take another two steps forward. Anyone who doesn’t have bills to pay for education anymore, take two steps forward. They do all these things. And then at the end, before they start, somebody’s 20 yards from the finish line, and a lot of people are still at the starting line, and then they go, okay, now we’re going to run a race. And the guy who was right next to the finish line wins and they go, meritocracy. Okay?
Lex Fridman
(01:19:57)
So the challenge there is to know which disparities when you just freeze the system and observe are actually a result of some kind of discrimination or a flaw in the system versus the result of meritocracy, of the better runner being ahead.
Cenk Uygur
(01:20:12)
That’s right. There are some parts that are easy to solve, Lex. So if you donated to a politician and he gave you a billion dollar subsidy, that’s not meritocracy.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:24)
So if you follow on the money, you can see the flaws in the system.
Cenk Uygur
(01:20:27)
Exactly. And again, nothing’s ever perfect. At any snapshot of history or of the moment, you’re going to be at some point in the pendulum swing. But if you trust the people and you let the pendulum swing but not wildly, then you’re going to get to the right answers in the long run.

Far-left vs far-right

Lex Fridman
(01:20:45)
So you think this woke mind virus that the right refers to is a problem, but not a big problem?
Cenk Uygur
(01:20:54)
No. So the right wing drives me crazy. So look, guys, your instincts of populism is correct. Your instincts of anti-corruption is correct, right? And I love you for it. And so in a lot of ways, the right-wing voters figured out the whole system’s screwed before left-wing voters did. I shouldn’t say left-wing voters, because progressives and left-wing have been saying it for not only decades, but maybe centuries. But democratic voters. A lot of democratic voters, some of them actually like this current system, a lot of them have been tricked into liking this current system. And the left should be fighting against corruption harder than the right. But right now, unfortunately that’s not the case.

(01:21:38)
So there’s a lot that I like about right-wing voters. But you guys get tricked on social issues so easily. So how many people are involved in trans high school sports and a girl who should have finished first in that track race in the middle of Indiana finished second. First of all, this is the big crime? And how many people are involved about 7? 13? Out of a country of 330 million people? And you can’t see that that’s a distraction? And everything they did that is bait that the right wing media puts out there, they run after. I mean, Tucker Carlson doing insane segments about Eminem should be sexier. Mr. Potato Head has gender issues. Guys, get out of there. Get out of there. It’s a trap. Okay?
Lex Fridman
(01:22:31)
Yeah, that doesn’t mean that there’s… Absolutely. It doesn’t mean that there’s larger scale issues with things like DEI that aren’t so fun to talk about or viral to talk about on an anecdotal scale. DEI does create a culture of fear with cancel culture, and it does create a culture that limits the freedom of expression, and it does limit the meritocracy in another way. So you’re basically saying, forget all these other problems. Money is the biggest problem.
Cenk Uygur
(01:23:07)
So first of all, on AOC, as an example, and I don’t mean to pick on her, but she won through the great work of her and Saikat Chakrabarti and Corbyn Trent and others who were leaders of the Justice Democrats that went and helped her campaign. They were critical help. And we all told her the same thing. So it’s not about me, me, me. And so we all said, you’ve got to challenge the establishment and you’ve got to work on money in politics first, because if you don’t work on money in politics and you don’t fix that, you’re going to lose on almost all other issues. But she didn’t believe us because it’s uncomfortable. And all the progressives that went into Congress, they drive me crazy. They think, oh, no, no, you’re exaggerating. And the minute they get in, all of a sudden, my colleagues. Your colleagues hate you and they’re going to drive you out. You’re a sucker. And Jamaal Bowman, Corey Bush, what did they do? They drove them out. Marie Newman drove them out. And because they’re not on your side, they’re not your colleagues.

(01:24:11)
And what happened to $15 minimum wage? And I remember talking to one of those Congress people, I leave out the name, and saying, hey, you know they’re not going to do $15 minimum wage. And he is like, “Oh, Cenk, you’re out of the loop. Nancy Pelosi assured us that they are going to do $15 minimum wage.” I’m like, “I love you, but you’re totally wrong. Moneyed interests are not going to do $15 minimum wage. You have to start fighting now.” And they didn’t get it. So they lost on almost all those issues. It’s all about incentives and disincentives and rules. If you don’t fix the rules, you’re going to constantly run into the same brick wall.

(01:24:47)
Now, the second issue that we were talking about is in the culture wars. The rest of us are stuck between the two extreme two-percenter on both sides. So the two two-percenter on the left goes, if you’re a white woman, you need to shut up and listen now, okay? That’s ridiculous. No, you don’t. If you’re a white woman, you have every right to speak out. You have every right that every other human being has. And so would I love for all of us to listen to one another, to have empathy for one another and go, hey, I wonder how a right-winger thinks about this. I wonder how a left-Winger thinks about this. I wonder why they think that way, right? I love that and I want that. So I want you to listen, but I don’t want you to shut up. So that 2% gets extreme and I don’t like it.

(01:25:35)
But on the right wing, you got your 2% who think that that’s all that’s happening on the left, and that’s all that’s happening in American politics, and they think the entire left believes that tiny 2%, and so they hate the left, and they’re like, oh, I’m not going to shut up. Oh, I’m not going to wear a mask. I’m not going to do any of these things and I’m not going to do anything. That’s a freedom. And then a Republican comes along and goes, oh yeah, that thing you call freedom, that’s deregulation for corporations because you shouldn’t really have freedom. Companies should have freedom. And then the guy goes, “Yeah, freedom for ExxonMobil.” No brother, they tricked you.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:12)
Yeah, the 2% on each side is a useful distraction for for the corruption of the politicians via money still. I’m talking about the 96% that remains in the middle and the impact that DEI policies has on them.
Cenk Uygur
(01:26:25)
So here’s where it gets absurd. I’ll give you a good example of absurdity. So in a school, I believe in California, they noticed that Latino students were not doing as well in AP and honors classes. So they canceled AP and honors classes. Oh, come on. What are you doing? That’s nuts. No, your job is to help them get better grades, get better opportunity, et cetera. That’s the harder thing to do, and the right thing to do. Your job isn’t, I’m going to make everything equal by taking away the opportunity for higher achievement for other students. If that’s what you’re doing and you think you’re on the left, you’re not really on the left. I actually think that’s like an authoritarian position that no progressive in their right mind would be in favor of. But it’s all definitional. So here’s another example of definitional. Communism. They say, oh my god, Kamala Harris is a communist.

(01:27:24)
Well, you’re telling on yourself brothers and sisters, when you say that that means A, I don’t know what communism means, and B, I don’t have any idea what’s going on in American politics. Kamala Harris is a corporatist. That’s her problem. Not that she’s a communist, she’s on the other end of the spectrum. The idea that Kamala Harris would come into office and say, that’s it. There’s no more private property. We’re going to take all of your homes and it’s now government property, then all your cars, et cetera. She was not going to get within a billion miles of that. Her donors would never allow her to get within a billion miles of that. That is so preposterous that when you say something like that, it’s disqualifying. I can’t debate someone who thinks that Democrats are communists when they’re actually largely corporatists. You see what I’m saying?
Lex Fridman
(01:28:12)
Yeah. So let’s go there. So when people call her a communist, they’re usually referring to certain kinds of policies. So do you think, I mean, it’s a ridiculous label to assign to Kamala Harris, especially given the history of communism in the 20th century and what those economic and political policies have led to, the scale of suffering that led to, and it just degrades the meaning of the word, but to take that seriously, why is she not a communist? So you said she’s not a communist because she’s a corporatist. That can’t be… Okay. Everybody in politics is a corporatist-
Cenk Uygur
(01:28:54)
Almost.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:54)
Almost everybody in politics is a corporatist, but that doesn’t mean that corporations have completely bought their mind. They have an influence in their mind on issues that matter to those corporations-
Cenk Uygur
(01:29:05)
Yep.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:06)
Right?
Cenk Uygur
(01:29:06)
Yep.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:07)
Outside of that, they’re still thinking for the voters because they still have to win the votes.
Cenk Uygur
(01:29:12)
Barely.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:13)
Okay.
Cenk Uygur
(01:29:14)
So here, let me give you examples so you see what I’m saying. So if you just wanted votes, you would do a lot of what Tim Walz did. And by the way, a lot of what Bernie did, that’s why Bernie who had no media coverage went from 2% in 2015 to by the end about 48% because he’s just doing things that were popular and that American people wanted, et cetera, because he’s not controlled by corporations. By the way, neither is Tom Massie on the right wing side, on the Republican side. So it’s not all, that’s why I always say almost all. Right? So if you’re doing things that are popular, people love it. So today, what would Kamala Harris do if she actually just wanted to win? So number one, she was trying to pass paid family leave right now. Why? It polls at 84% and even 74% of Republicans want it.

(01:30:07)
Why? Because it says, hey, when you have a baby, you should get 12 weeks off. Bond with your baby. Right now, in a lot of states that don’t have paid family leave, you have to go back to work the very next day, or you have to use all of your sick days, all your vacation days, just have one or two weeks with your baby. So conservatives love paid family leave, liberals love paid family leave. That’s why it polls so high. So why isn’t she proposing it? It’s not in her economic plan. Tim Walz already passed it in Minnesota. He showed how easy it was. If you want votes, and then you know what’s going to happen if you propose paid family leave, the Republicans are going to go, no, our beloved corporations don’t want to spend another dollar on moms, and they fall for that trap, and then you are in an infinitely better shape.

(01:30:53)
So why doesn’t she do it? She doesn’t do it because her corporate donors don’t want her to do it. $15 minimum wage, layup. Over two thirds of the country wants it because it not only gives you higher wages for minimum wage folks, but it pushes wages up for others. And what do the elites say? Oh, that’s going to drive up inflation. No, you shouldn’t get paid anymore. Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. So you’re saying all the other prices should go up, but the only thing that shouldn’t go up is our wages? No, our wages should go up. So these are all easy ones.

(01:31:25)
Here’s another one. Anti-corruption. Why isn’t she running on getting money out of politics? It polls at over 90%. Why isn’t Trump running on it anymore? He won when he ran on it in 2016, he didn’t mean a word of it, but he ran on it. It was smart. They don’t do it because their corporate donors take their heads off if they do it.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:43)
So in contradiction to that, why did she propose to raise the corporate tax rate from, whatever, 21% to 28%?
Cenk Uygur
(01:31:51)
Because that’s easy, because that is something that’s super popular and she’s not going to do it. That’s why. So guys, this is where I break the hearts of Blue MAGA. Blue MAGA thinks, oh my God, these Democrats, they’re angels, and the right wing is, and the Republicans are evil, and they work for big business, but not Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden. Right? Okay. Well, Donald Trump took the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. So that’s trillions of dollars that got transferred because guys, you got to understand if the corporations don’t pay it, we have to pay it because we’re running up these giant deficits and eventually either they’re going to, not eventually, they keep raising our taxes in different ways that you’re not noticing. They keep increasing fees and fines and different ways for the government to collect money. So we’re paying for it.

(01:32:44)
And on top of that, eventually they’re going to cut your Social Security and Medicare because they’re going to say, oh, we don’t have any options left anymore. You don’t have any options left any more because you kept giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations, so we’re going to have to pay for that.

(01:32:56)
So then Biden says, oh my God, I’m going to bring corporate taxes back up to 28%. I’m like, wait, hold on. They were at 35. You already did a sleight of hand and said 28. Okay? Then he gets into office and Manchin says, no, 25, that’s the highest I’ll go. And he goes, okay, fine. 25. And then while you’re not looking, they just dump it. They don’t even do 25. It’s still at 21. So hear me now, quote me later. I do predictions on the show all the time because you should hold me accountable. You should hold all your pundits accountable. If you held all your pundits accountable, we’d be the last man standing. And that’s what happened. Okay? So I guarantee you she will not increase corporate taxes.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:38)
So would the same be the case for price controls or the anti-price gouging that she’s proposing?
Cenk Uygur
(01:33:43)
So it’s not price controls, it’s anti-price gouging?
Lex Fridman
(01:33:46)
It is price controls, but I mean minimum wage is price controls also.
Cenk Uygur
(01:33:50)
Now we’re going to get into a lot of minutiae, but I’ll try to keep it broad. So price controls are a disaster. They never work. If you say, oh, here’s a banana. It has to stay at a dollar a pound, make up a number. Well supply and demand’s going to move. And so the minute it moves to $2 or where the price should be, then you’re going to run into shortages. And we all know this, it’s a bad idea. But are there laws against price gouging? There already are, and they’re a good idea. So, why? You have a natural disaster? All of a sudden, the water that was a dollar, now they’re charging a hundred dollars. The government has to come in, democratic capitalism, they come in and go, no, I’m going to protect the people. So you’re not allowed to price gouge, maybe charge $2, et cetera, but you’re not going to charge a hundred. But it is temporary. We get that done, we end the problem there, and then we bring it back to a normal supply and demand. Okay?

(01:34:45)
So that’s what she’s proposing. That’s all political because the price gouging has already passed. They did it in ’21 and ’22, and so now the grocery stores are actually a low-margin business. She says grocery stores, that’s how I know she doesn’t mean it because the grocery stores weren’t the problem. Consumer goods were the problem.

(01:35:05)
Those companies-
Lex Fridman
(01:35:06)
She’s following the polls where most people will say that the groceries are too expensive. So she’s just basically address… Saying the most popular thing. Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(01:35:15)
A hundred percent. And you could tell in which proposals she means it and which proposals she doesn’t because of the framing, right? So this is a mediocre example, but in housing, she said, we have to stop private equity from buying houses in bulk. I’m like, huh, curious that they put the word in bulk there. Why does it have to be in bulk? Why don’t we just stop them from buying any residential home? You could set up normal boundaries, right? For example, Charlie Kirk was on The Young Turks this week-
Lex Fridman
(01:35:48)
By the way. Sorry to take that tangent. I really enjoyed that conversation. I really enjoyed that you talked to… That was civil. You guys disagreed pretty intensely, but there was a lot of respect. I really enjoyed that.
Cenk Uygur
(01:36:00)
Thank you brother.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:01)
That was beautiful. You and Charlie Kirk and I think-
Lex Fridman
(01:36:00)
Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(01:36:00)
Thank you, brother.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:01)
That was beautiful. You and Charlie Kirk, and I think Anna was there.
Cenk Uygur
(01:36:04)
Yeah, that’s right.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:06)
That’s nice.
Cenk Uygur
(01:36:06)
Yeah. Quick tangent, look, I’ve done a lot of yelling online, okay? I yell when, A, there’s an issue that you should be passionate about, 40,000 people, 25,000 women and children slaughtered in Gaza. If you’re not emotionally upset by that and you think it’s no big deal, I think that’s a problem. But when you add gaslighting on top, that’s what drives me crazy. Then when you add filibustering on top, then that sets me off. So, for all my life, right wing has gone on cable and filibustered. They take up so much more time than the left wing guests. The left wing guests always like go, “Okay. Well, I’m offended, he’s taking up too much time.” No, brother, go over the top. Go over the top. You’re not going to talk over me. I’m going to talk over you, okay?

(01:36:57)
Then when you gaslight and you go, “Oh no, 1,200 people in Israel being killed is awful,” which it is, but 40,000 people being killed in Gaza, it’s no big deal. We should keep giving them money, keep killing, keep killing, and that’s normal. No, it’s not normal. I’m not going to let you say it’s normal. That’s nuts. We were against the Iraq War. There was only two shows that were on the air nationally that were against the Iraq War, us and Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. At the time, I used to yell all the time because mainstream media would gaslight the fuck out of us. We’re going to be greeted as liberators, me and Ben Mankiewicz on the air. Ben doesn’t yell as much. He’s now the host of Turner Classic Movies, but he’s saying it in a calm way. I’m saying it in a screaming way.

(01:37:44)
We’re not going to be greeted as liberators. When you drop a bomb on someone’s head, they don’t greet you as a liberator. Stop saying insane things. Seven out of 10 Americans thought that Saddam Hussein had personally attacked us on 9/11. We got lied into that war by corporate media, okay? Now, there’s a couple of good things that Trump has done. One is get people to realize corporate media is the matrix and get them to an anti-war position. He himself doesn’t have an anti-war position, but his voters do and that’s a positive. We can come back to that.

(01:38:17)
But these days, the reason why the Charlie Kirk conversations are going great, and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell, and historically though, go back again 10 years, 20 years, we’ve always been respectful when someone comes on our show and we have a debate. As long as they’re not yelling, I match the tenor of the host, right? You and I are having a reasonable conversation. I’m not raising my voice. I’m not yelling at you for no reason. So, now when Charlie’s not going to battle anymore for talking points, I’m shutting off my mind, all I’m doing is yelling at you, then I’m going to yell back at him. But now he’s saying, “Okay, let’s have a reasonable conversation.” Great. I love it. I love reasonable conversations.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:01)
It was great. It was refreshing. What were we talking about, you buying up housing?
Cenk Uygur
(01:39:07)
Yes. So, Charlie, when he was on, said, “Hey, listen, I think that there should be a cap though.” I forget if he said 10 billion or 100 billion in assets. If you have less than that, you should still be able to do real estate as an investment, even if it’s residential. But above that, it gets to… Okay, that’s good. No problem. We can have a debate about that and we can figure out, “Is the right number 10, 100, 20, 5?” No problem. You could put in reasonable limitations, but we got to get them to stop buying the homes. So, when Kamala Harris says, “Oh, we’ll stop them from buying homes in bulk,” I’m like, “Okay, there’s the loophole.” So they’re going to use that loophole. Besides which, it’s not going to pass. Wall Street owns the government.

(01:39:48)
So, there’s no way corporate Republicans and Democrats, which are about 98% of politicians, are going to limit private equity. So, when do we ever get a little bit of change? When Democrats are in charge, they do 5 to 15% of their agenda. That’s not because they’re warm-hearted. It’s a release valve, right? Oh, see, under Obama, we got about 5% change. What was that? That was Obamacare. That was most of the change that we got. What’s the greatest part of Obamacare? Now, a lot of right-wing also agree, almost all of right-wing agree about this portion, which is they got rid of the bias against pre-existing conditions. Why did they do that particularly? Because the country was about to get in a fucking rage. We all have pre-existing conditions.

(01:40:40)
If you deny me when I’m sick, what the fuck is the point of insurance? The anger had gotten to a nuclear level. So, release valve, get rid of pre-existing conditions. Let’s go back to just milking them regularly. Oh, by the way, put in a mandate so that they have to buy it from us, right? Do you know who originally came up with Obamacare? The Heritage Foundation. It was their proposal. Romney did it in Massachusetts. It was called Romneycare. So, I think this is a super important election, but I’ve earned the credibility to be able to say that, because in 2012, I said, “This is a largely unimportant election.” Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s policies on economic issues are near identical. Obamacare was literally Romneycare.

(01:41:26)
Right now, the left says, “Oh, the Heritage Foundation, it’s so dangerous, Project 2025.” Well, brother, they’re the ones who wrote Obamacare, and you say, that’s the greatest change in the world, right? So that’s why the Democrats, yeah, I’ll take the 10% change overall. I think Biden did about 15%. Obama did 5%, but they’ll also march you backwards by deregulating like Clinton did and Obama did, the bank bailouts like Obama did. But 10% is better than 0%, but it’s not to help you. It’s the release valve, so the system keeps going.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:00)
Is it possible to steelman the case that not all politicians are corporatists or maybe how would you approach that? For example, this podcast has a bunch of sponsors. I give zero fucks about what they think about what I’m saying. They have zero control over me. Maybe you could say that’s because it’s not a lot of money, or maybe I’m a unique person or something like this. I would like to believe a lot of politicians are this way, that they have ideas. While they take money, they see it as a game that you accept the money, go to certain parties, hug people and so on, but it doesn’t actually fundamentally compromise your integrity on issues you actually care about.
Cenk Uygur
(01:42:57)
I could steelman almost anything. I could steelman Trump. I could steelman conservatives easily, right? Corporate politician is a hard one. So, first, it’s not all politicians. We could start out nice and easy. Tom Massie, now, Hawley and Gates not taking corporate PAC money. Bernie, the squad, they don’t take corporate PAC money. You could disagree on either end of those folks on social issues, but generally they are 1,000 times less corrupt. They’re more honest. Part of the reason you might hate this squad is because they’re so honest. They tell you their real opinion on social issues that you really disagree with. A lot of the corporate politicians won’t do that because they’re trying to get as many votes as possible, so they can fillet their donors when they get into office and do all their favors for them. But you see, I’m already falling apart on the steelmanning of corporate politicians.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:50)
Let’s zoom in on that. So, if you take corporate PAC money, that’s it. You’re corrupted. Say you’re a politician, you’re a president, you’re a human being. You’re a person with integrity. You’re a person who thinks about the world. You’re saying, “If I was a corporate PAC and I gave you a billion dollars, I could tell you anything.”
Cenk Uygur
(01:44:14)
So everything is a spectrum. Humanity is a spectrum. So, can you find outliers who could take corporate PAC money and still be principled enough to resist this lure? Yeah, I would hope that I would be a person like that, but I wouldn’t take corporate PAC money. But if you force me to, I think I would still stay principled and do it. Could you find 10, 20 other people in the country? Yeah, but on average, that is not what will happen. What will happen is they will take the money and do exactly as they are told.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:49)
See, I think most people have integrity. Okay, hold on. So, what I’m more worried about is when you take corporate-backed money, it’s not that you are immediately sold. It is over time.
Cenk Uygur
(01:45:02)
Over time. That’s true.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:04)
Yeah, I get it. But I wonder if the integrity that I think most people have can withstand the gradual slippery slope of the effect of corporate money, which if what I’m saying is true that most people have integrity, one of the ways to solve the effect of corporate money is term limits, because it takes time to corrupt people. You can’t buy them immediately, and then the term limits can be issued. Cenk is shaking his head.
Cenk Uygur
(01:45:38)
Yeah, no. So, look, you’re right that over time it gets way worse. As we talked about earlier, Biden’s a great example of that comes in anti-corruption, winds up being totally pro-corruption by the end, but he was also here for almost all of it as we started in a world that was not run by money in politics and is now completely run by money in politics. Does it get worse over time? Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona is a great example of that, comes in as a progressive, doesn’t want to take PAC money, cares about the average person, et cetera. Over time, she becomes the biggest corporatist in the Senate and a total disaster. But if you say that the majority of politicians have… I don’t know if this is what you’re saying, majority of politicians have integrity.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:27)
No, let’s start at the majority of human beings. I think that politicians are not a special group of sociopaths.
Cenk Uygur
(01:46:38)
I think they are.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:39)
They lean a little bit towards that direction, but they’re not only sociopaths going to politics. It’s like you have to have some sociopathic qualities, I think, to go into politics, but they’re not complete sociopaths. I think they do have integrity because sometimes for very selfish reasons, it’s not all about money, even for a selfish person, for a narcissist. It’s also about being recognized for having had positive impact on the world.
Cenk Uygur
(01:47:06)
Yeah, I get it. All right, so let’s break it down. So, first, human beings, then we’ll get to politicians. Do human beings have integrity? Well, it’s a spectrum. So, some people have enormous integrity, some people have no integrity. So, there is not one type or character. So, some people have a ton of empathy for other human beings, and they literally feel it. I feel the pain of someone else, and I’m not alone. Most people feel the pain of someone else. If you see it on video, a baby being hurt, overwhelming majority of human beings will go, “No!” Right? You have empathy. That’s a natural feeling that you have. Some people have no empathy because they’re on the extreme end of the spectrum, serial killers and Donald Trump.

(01:47:56)
So, I’m partly joking, but not really. He has never demonstrated any empathy that I have ever seen for any other human being. I’m going to trigger some right-wingers because they think every terrible thing he said is out of context or joking or not real or fake news. But his chief of staff didn’t make it up. He called people who went into the military suckers and losers. Why? Why did he say that? Just hang with me for a second. Don’t have your head explode. Okay? I’m not saying to Lex. I’m saying to the right-wingers out there.

(01:48:27)
So, the reason is because if you’re like Trump and you literally don’t feel the empathy, you’d think, “Why the hell would I go in the military, get killed for someone else? What a sucker. No, I’m going to stay out of the military. I’m going to stay alive. I’m going to make a ton of money and I’m going to look out for myself.” He assumes because everybody does this, you assume that everyone thinks like you do, but they don’t. So, Trump assumes everybody’s as much of a dirt bag as he is, because he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel the empathy. So, he’s like, “Yeah, you’d be an idiot, a sucker and a loser to go into the military and have sacrifice for other people.” So you see the spectrum.

(01:49:08)
Even if you think Trump’s not on that end and you think I’m wrong about that, you get that there are people on that end. So, you have a spectrum of integrity, empathy, et cetera. That’s what I would call your hardware. You layer on top of that your software, and the software is cultural influences, your parents, media, your friends. All these are cultural influences. So, now when you’re in certain industries, they value more integrity. So, religious leaders, if you’re doing it right, which is also very rare, but if you’re doing it right, you’re supposed to have empathy for the poor, the needy, the whole flock. So, that profession is incentivizing you towards empathy and integrity.

(01:49:54)
Even then, a giant amount of people abuse it, but okay, good. In politics, it creates incentives for the opposite, no integrity. That software, to your point, over time gets stronger and stronger and stronger until it takes over. Now, you might have someone with a lot of integrity like Tom Massie, the Republican from Kentucky. Whether I agree with him or disagree with him on policy, I get that the brother is actually doing it based on principles. There isn’t any amount of money you can give Tom Massie for him to change his principles. Why? He’s on the principled end of the spectrum as a human being, so is Bernie. They’re on the same part of that spectrum.

(01:50:39)
But for most people, the great majority of the spectrum, if you overload them with software that incentivizes them to not have integrity, they will succumb. Now let’s switch to politicians in particular. Why do I think that they’re on average far more likely to be on the sociopathic part of the spectrum? Because of the incentives and disincentives. So, this changes every congressional cycle. When just Democrats were winning a lot, it got all the way down to 87.5%. But on average for congressional elections, the person with more money wins 95% of the time.

(01:51:17)
It doesn’t matter if they’re a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat or any ideology they have, 95%. So, now let’s say you got the 5% that went in that are not hooked on the money. Well, they’re going to get a primary challenge, then they’re going to get a general election challenge. 95% of the time, the one with more money wins. So, eventually, this system cycles through until almost only the corrupt are left.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:43)
One second. Is that real, 95%? So if you have more money, 95% of the time you win, huh?
Cenk Uygur
(01:51:53)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:56)
I like to believe that’s less the case, for example, for higher you get.
Cenk Uygur
(01:52:02)
Yes, that’s true. You’re right. So, you know why? So the presidential race is ironically in some ways the least corrupt. So, let’s dive into why. If you’re running a local race anywhere in the country, you’re going to get almost no press coverage, meaning a congressional race, right? If you’re running a Senate race in the middle of Montana, you’re going to get almost no media coverage. So, that’s where your money in politics has the most effect, because then you could just buy the airwaves. You outspend the other guy, you get all the ads, plus you get the friendly media coverage because you just bought a couple of million dollars of ads in the middle of Montana. So, the local news loves you, the TV stations, the radio stations, the papers.

(01:52:43)
So, some of the papers are principled. They might say, “Oh, no,” but overall, they’re not calling you a radical. They’re not calling you anything and you’re buying those races. But when you get to the presidential race, that’s much harder, because presidential race, you have earned media, free media that overwhelms paid media. Perfect examples is 2016. Hillary Clinton outraces Trump by about two to one, but she loses anyway. Why? Because Trump got almost twice as much earned media as she did. The earned media is better. It’s inside the content. It is definitely better. So, in a presidential election, as long as you got past the primary, you could actually win with not that much money.

(01:53:27)
That’s part of the reason why I have hope, Lex, because all you got to do is get past a Republican or democratic primary. Now that’s very, very, very difficult, but Trump did it, right? Now, he took it in the wrong direction, but he did leave a blueprint for how to do it. So, once you get to the general election, you’re off to the race. You could do any goddamn thing you like. Okay, you could be super popular. You don’t have to give a shit about the donors. You can get into office. You could bully your own party and the other party into doing what you want, and you can get everything done. You could even get money out of politics. So, don’t lose hope. I mean, we even started Operation Hope at TYT and our first project was to knock Biden out.

(01:54:07)
Everybody said, “You guys are nuts. That’s totally impossible.” We knocked Biden out. Did we do it alone? Of course not. We were a small part of it, but we laid the groundwork for hope and we laid the groundwork for when he flopped in the debate. People had already been told, remember, he’s bad, he’s old, he’s not right. The debate proved it. If we hadn’t done that groundwork, and not just Young Turks obviously, but Axelrod and Carville and Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, et cetera, Charlamagne tha God, Jon Stewart, all these people helped a lot. So, that when the debate happened, it confirmed the idea that out there that he was too old and couldn’t do it. So, my point is if you lose hope, you’re done for. Then they’re definitely going to win, right?

(01:54:54)
Hope is the most dangerous thing in the world for the elites. So, whether you’re right-wing or left-wing, I need you to have hope and I need you to understand it’s not misplaced. We just got to get past the primary, and we’re going to turn this whole thing around.

Donald Trump

Lex Fridman
(01:55:07)
Basically, a presidential candidate who’s a populist, who in part runs on getting money out of politics. Okay. Well, then let’s talk about Donald Trump. So, to me, the two biggest criticisms of Trump is the fake election scheme. Out of that whole 2020 election, the fake election scheme is the thing that really bothers me. Then the second thing across a larger timescale is the counterproductive division that he’s created in let’s say our public discourse. What are your top five criticisms of Trump?
Cenk Uygur
(01:55:48)
Okay, so number one, I have the same exact thing as you. The fake electors scheme is unacceptable, totally disqualifying. So, the fake electors scheme was a literal coup attempt. So, he doesn’t win the election. For folks who don’t know, I need to explain why it’s a coup attempt because you just throw out words and then people get triggered by the words and then they go into their separate corners. So, the January 6th rioters, they were not going to keep the building. That was not a coup attempt. It’s not like, “Oh, the MAGA guys have the building. I guess they win, right?” No, that was never going to happen. So, what was the point of the January 6th riot? It was to delay the proceedings. Why did it matter that they were going to delay the proceedings?

(01:56:34)
Because if you can’t certify the election, they wanted general confusion and chaos so that the Republicans in Congress could say, “Well, we don’t know who won, so we’re going to have to kick it back to the states.” The states, they had the fake electors ready. Remember, the fake electors are not Trump’s electors. Both candidates have a slate of electors, Biden’s electors and Trump’s electors. They go to the Trump electors first in this plan, and half the Trump electors go, ” No, I’m not going to pretend Trump won the election when he didn’t win the election.” So they’re like, “Shit, now we’ve got to come up with fake electors.” So they enlist these Republicans who go, “Yeah, I’ll pretend Trump won,” right?

(01:57:13)
So they sign a piece of paper. That’s fraud, and that’s why a lot of them are now being prosecuted in the different states. So, the idea is the Republican legislators then go, “We’re sending these new electors in and we think Trump won Arizona and Georgia and Wisconsin.” That was the idea. That was the plan. Then you come back to the House. At that point when there are two different sets of electors, the constitutional rule is the House decides, but the House decides not on a majority because the Democrats had the majority at the time, they decide on a majority of the states. They vote by state, and the Republicans had the majority of the states. So, in that way, you steal the election. Even though Trump didn’t win, you install him back in as president.

(01:58:04)
That is a frontal assault on democracy, and I loathe it. Then Trump on top just blabbers out, “Well, sometimes if there’s massive fraud in an election,” in other words, I think I won. I don’t even think that. I’m just saying that I won. He says, “You can terminate any rule, regulation, or article even in the Constitution.” No, brother, you cannot terminate the Constitution because you’d like to do a fake electors scheme and do a coup against America. Fuck you. Okay? So I’m never going to allow this want-to-be tyrant to go back into the White House and endanger our system. So, you want to endanger the corrupt system. I’m the guy. Okay, let’s go get that corrupt system and tear it down.

(01:58:48)
If you want to endanger the real system, democracy, capitalism, the Constitution, then I’m your biggest enemy. So, I’m never going to take that risk. You see it every time he goes to talk to a dictator. Look, guys, I’m asking you to be principled, right? I asked the left of that, and we drive away some of our audience when we do that. So, we got the balls to do that to our own side. So, for the right wing, be honest, if it was Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Kamala Harris that went and wrote “love letters” to a communist dictator who runs concentration camps, you would say, “Communist! We knew it. Look at that.” Trump literally says about Kim Jong Un, “We wrote love letters to one another. We fell in love.”

(01:59:36)
If a Democrat said that, they’d be politically decapitated, their career would be instantly over. But Trump, whenever it’s Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, don’t get into Russia, Russia, Russia, but it’s just that he’s a strong man, right? Kim Jong Un or Viktor Orbán, Duterte in the Philippines, anytime it’s a strong man that says, “Screw our Constitution, screw our rules. I want total loyalty to one person,” Trump loves them. He loves them. He said once, he’s like, “Oh, it’s great. You go to North Korea or China. When the leader walks in, everybody applauds and everybody listens to what he says. That’s how it should be here.” No, brother, that’s not how it should be here. You hate democracy. You want to be the sole guy in charge. As a populist, you should loathe Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:29)
I agree on the fake electors scheme. Can you steelman and maybe educate me on… There’s a book Rigged that I started reading. Is there any degree to which the election was rigged or elections in general are rigged? So I think the book Rigged, the main case they make is not that there’s some shady fake ballots. It’s more the impact of mainstream media and the impact of big tech.
Cenk Uygur
(02:00:58)
So rigged is another one of those words that triggers people and is ill-defined, right? So let’s begin to define it. So, the worst case of rigged is we actually changed the votes. So, a lot of Trump people think that that’s what happened. Nonsense, that didn’t happen at all. Okay? By the way, some on the left thought the votes were changed in the 2016 primary, and it was literally rigged against Bernie. No, that did not happen. That is a massive crime and is very risky and is relatively easy to get caught. People who are in power are not interested in getting caught. They’re not interested in going to jail, et cetera. It is a very extreme thing. Could it happen? Yes, it could happen. Have I seen any evidence of it happening in my lifetime? Not really.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:49)
Given how much people hate this, you probably just need to find evidence of one time, one vote being changed, where you can trace them saying something in some room somewhere. That would just explode. That evidence just doesn’t seem to be there.
Cenk Uygur
(02:02:07)
By the way, for the right-wing who say, “Verify the vote,” goddamn right, verify the vote, right? So you want to have different proposals like paper ballots, recounts, hand recounts, which by the way, you had not the paper ballots, but the three recounts and a hand recount in Georgia. In so many of these swing states, he lost, he lost, he lost. There was no significant voter fraud. Now, second thing in terms of rigging is voter fraud. The right-wing believes, “Oh, my God, there’s voter fraud everywhere.”

(02:02:36)
Not remotely true. Heritage Foundation does a study. They want to prove it so badly. It turns out, no matter how they moved the numbers, the final number they got was it happens 0.0000006% of the time. It almost never happens. They found like 31 instances over a decade or two decades.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:01)
What counts as voter fraud?
Cenk Uygur
(02:03:04)
A lot of times these days, it’ll be Republicans who do it because it’ll be… It’s not nefarious. It’s a knucklehead who goes in, goes, “Oh, I heard they’re having the illegals vote. So, I voted for me and my mom, even though she’s dead. But that’s fair. They’re doing it.” No, brother, that’s not fair. That’s not how it works. You’re under arrest.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:22)
So what about non-citizens voting?
Cenk Uygur
(02:03:25)
It’s preposterous. Of course, non-citizens shouldn’t vote and they don’t vote.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:30)
But you don’t have to prove citizenship when you’re voting, right?
Cenk Uygur
(02:03:34)
No, you do. I mean, so it depends on what you mean by prove and when you vote, right? So you are not allowed to vote as an undocumented immigrant. So, that happens up front. Again, it’s a hall of mirrors. There’s so many different ways to create mirages. So, the Republicans will say, “Well, when you go to the voting booth, they don’t make your show a passport.” Yeah, that’s true. But you showed it earlier when you registered, and we can get into voter ID laws. There’s all sorts of things. We will speed up the spectrum, right? So these things almost never happen. Voter fraud happens super rarely and not enough to swing elections. By the way, sometimes if there is an issue, they’ll redo an election.

(02:04:16)
There is actually a process for that. It happened in North Carolina because Republicans did voter fraud in this one district. It wasn’t the candidate himself. It was this campaign person, and they did ballot harvesting, but ballot harvesting, again, it depends on what you mean. If you’re just collecting ballots, that’s okay. He changed the ballots. That’s not okay. So, they had to redo that election. So, now the real place where it gets rigged is before elections. There’s two main ways that things get rigged. One is almost exclusively… No, that’s not fair. I was going to say Republicans, but Democrats do it too in a different way. So, Republicans would come in. Brian Kemp is the king of this in Georgia. So, he was against Trump doing it ex post facto.

(02:05:01)
He’s like, “No, you idiot. We don’t cheat after the election. We cheat before the election.” Okay? So they’ll go, “Well, I mean, you got to clear out the voter rolls every once in a while.” That’s true because people die. People move and you got to clean out the voter rolls. So, then they come in and they go, “We will clean them out mainly in Black areas.” Okay? Oh, look at that. There goes a couple of million Black voters. Well, some of those, I suppose, are real voters, but they’ll have to re-register and then they’ll find that out on election day. Oh, well, sorry, you couldn’t vote this time. Remember to re-register next time. So, do they go, “Hey, we’re going to take Black people off the voter rolls.” No.

(02:05:38)
What they do is we’re having more issues in these districts. Here’s another way they do it. How many voting booths do you have in the area? So primarily Republican areas will get tons of voting booths. So, you don’t have to wait in line. You go in, you vote, you go to work, no problem. You’re in a Black area, run in a Republican state. All of a sudden, hey, look that city. Well, we sent you four voting booths. Oh, you got a million people there. Well, what are you going to do? I guess you got to wait in line the whole day. You can’t go to work, et cetera. So, that’s the way of-
Lex Fridman
(02:06:12)
I refuse to believe it’s only the Republicans that do that, I would say.
Cenk Uygur
(02:06:18)
So that’s why I paused.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:20)
Yeah, that just seems too obvious to do by both sides.
Cenk Uygur
(02:06:25)
No, the Democrats are so weak, Lex. They mainly don’t do that. But they do do the third thing, which is gerrymandering. So, both Republicans and Democrats.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:33)
Also, they have favorite flavors of messing with the vote. Okay.
Cenk Uygur
(02:06:38)
Yeah. So, gerrymandering is the best way to rig an election. That way the politicians pick their voters, instead of the voters picking their politicians. So, all these districts are so heavily gerrymandered that the incumbent almost can’t lose. They’ll push most of the voters into one district, most of the voters in another district, because they don’t want competition. So, then you’re screwed. The vote isn’t rigged, but the district is rigged, so that the incumbent wins almost no matter what, right? So that’s why we’ve gotten so polarized, because the gerrymandering creates like 90% of seats that are safe. So, they don’t have to compromise. They don’t have to get to a middle. They could just be extreme on either side because they already locked it up. Okay.

(02:07:31)
So, that’s the number one way to rig an election. Now, finally, the last part of it, maybe the most important, maybe even more important than gerrymandering, and that’s the media. So, it just happened to RFK Junior. It happened to Bernie in 2015. It happens to any outsider, right or left. The media if you’re an outsider will say, “Well, radical…” Number one, they don’t platform you, right? So they’re not going to have you on to begin with. Nobody’s even going to find out about you. If nobody finds out about you, you’re done for, right? So Bernie broke through that because-
Cenk Uygur
(02:08:00)
… about you’re done for, right? So Bernie broke through that, because he was so popular, and the rallies were so huge that local news couldn’t help but cover him. Jesus Christ, what are all these people doing in the middle of the city? And he slowly broke through that. But do you know that in 2015, as he’s doing this miraculous run against Hillary Clinton, nobody thinks he has a chance. And here comes Bernie, and he’s almost at 48%. He had seven seconds of coverage on ABC that year. They just will not put you on. That is the number one way they rig an election. Bobby Kennedy, Jr. sitting at 20% in a primary, no town hall. 20% is a giant number. And you’re not going to do a town hall. You’re not going to do a debate. 12% in the general election. A giant number in a general election. No town hall, no debate. If no one finds out about you, they don’t know to vote for you, if they don’t find out your policies. Corporate media rigs elections more than anything else in the world.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:03)
Now, this is something you’ve been a bit controversial about. But the general sort of standard belief is that there’s a left-leaning bias in the mainstream media, because as I think studies show a large majority of journalists are left-leaning. And then that there’s a bias in Big Tech. Employees of Big Tech companies from search engines to social media are left-leaning. And there that’s a huge majority is left-leaning. So the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias that was the left.
Cenk Uygur
(02:09:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:38)
So first of all, I think you’ve argued that that’s not true, that there’s a bias in the other direction. But whether there’s a bias or not, do you think that, how big of an impact that has on the result of the election?
Cenk Uygur
(02:09:51)
Okay, so let’s break that down. Tech and media are totally different. So let’s do media first, then we’ll do tech. So on mainstream media, or corporate media, and I actually think that right-wing media like Fox News is part of corporate media. They just play good cop, bad cop. And so in that realm, the bias is not right or left, except on social issues. And that’s where that image comes from. On social issues, yes, the media is generally on the left. And right-wing, sorry, but this started in the 1960s, and the right-wing got super mad at mainstream media saying that black people were equal to white people. That’s not the case anymore. Okay. Right-wing calm down. I’m not calling you all racist. But in the 1960s was there racism? Of course. Of course, they wouldn’t even let black kids into the schools, right?

(02:10:42)
There was massive segregation in the south, but a lot in the north as well. And at that point in mainstream media says, “Well, I mean they are citizens, they should have equal rights.” And the right-wing goes, “Bias.” Okay, yeah, I mean, you’re kind of right, it is a bias. It is a bias towards equality in that case. But that is perceived as on the left. Now, fast-forward to today, you don’t have that on the racial issues as obviously as much as you had it back then. But on gay marriage that existed for a long time, where the media is like, “Well, they kind of should have the same rights as straight people.” And the right-wing went, “Bias.” So okay, you’re kind of right about that. But at the same time, I would argue their position is correct. But can they go too far? Of course they can go too far.

(02:11:31)
Okay. Now, but that’s not the main deal, guys. That’s to distract you. The main deal is economic issues. And again, we say it ahead of time, and you can see if we’re right or wrong. So we will tell folks when we get to an economic bill, you’ll see all of a sudden the guys who theoretically disagree, Fox News and MSNBC close ranks. And you just saw it happen with price gouging, that issue of price gouging. All of a sudden there’s a lot of MSNBC hosts, CNN hosts, Washington Post writes an op-ed against it. And everybody panics is like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can’t control anything a corporation does. This is wrong. This is wrong.” Oh, what happened? I thought you guys hated each other. All of a sudden, you totally agree. Fascinating.

(02:12:13)
Okay. Same thing happened on increasing wages. When they were talking about increasing the minimum wage, Stephanie Ruhle, giant [inaudible 02:12:20] against it on MSNBC. All of a sudden Fox News and MSNBC agree. Do not touch beloved corporations. So now that gets us to our real bias. It’s not left or right. It’s pro-corporate, for all the reasons we talked about before, corporate media, corporate politicians. So if you don’t believe me today, whether you’re on the right or the left, watch. Next time an economic issue, where do they fall, how do they react? When anytime it’s a corporate issue, where does the media go? So that’s the real bias of the media. And so since the real bias of the media is pro-corporations, that is not a left-wing position. That is considered more of a right-wing position. I even think that’s a misnomer, because to be fair to right-wing voters, they’re not pro-big business. They’re not pro-corruption, but the Republican politicians are. So it gets framed as a right-wing issue.

(02:13:14)
So if you think that the corporate media is too populist, you just don’t get it. They aren’t, they hate populism. So now when you turn to tech. So tech’s a complicated one, because yeah, people write the code. If they’re left-wingers, they’re going to have certain assumptions, and they might write that into the codes or the rules. But they’re also, generally speaking, wealthy. They’re usually white. They’re usually male. And those biases also go in, and there’s a lot of people on the left who object to that bias, right? But that’s a fair and interesting conversation, and one we have to be careful of, and one we could hopefully find a middle ground on, but that’s not the major problem. The major reason why Big Tech gets attacked is because they are competitors of who? Social media competes with mainstream media.

(02:14:10)
So mainstream media has been attacking Big Tech from day one, pretending that they’re really concerned. Yeah, they’re really concerned, because that’s their competition, and they’re getting their ass handed to them. So I did a story on The Young Turks about CNN article, about all the dangers of social media. I’m like, “Guys, this is written by their advertising department.” Okay. And in fact, they go to the advertisers and they find a rando video on YouTube or Facebook out of billions of videos, and they’re like, “Look, your ad is on this video. Do you denounce and reject every Big Tech company and every member of social media?” And the advertisers is like, “Shit. Yeah, I do.” Meanwhile, they’re doing MILF Island on TV. Okay.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:03)
I didn’t know that. I need to check it out.
Cenk Uygur
(02:15:05)
There’s literally a show that came out recently, where it’s moms and their sons. And they fuck each other.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:12)
Oh wow.
Cenk Uygur
(02:15:13)
Okay. They don’t have sex with their mom. They have sex with a different mom.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:17)
Got it.
Cenk Uygur
(02:15:18)
Or they date. But then the show is, oh, then they go off into a corner, et cetera, right? I’m like, you’re doing this kind of the worst degrading, ridiculous, immoral programming, and then you found a video on YouTube that has a problem. Get the fuck out of here. You’re just trying to kneecap your competition.

Joe Biden

Lex Fridman
(02:15:36)
Let’s talk about the saga of Joe Biden. So over the past year, over the past few months. Can you just rewind. Maybe tell the story of Joe Biden as you see from the election perspective?
Cenk Uygur
(02:15:52)
Yeah. So about a year ago, I am looking at the polling. And first of all, I have eyes and ears. So whenever I see Biden, I’m like, this is a disaster. And then I go and talk to real people. And when I say real people, I mean not in politics. That’s not their job. Because people involved in politics or media have a certain perspective, and it’s colored by all of the exchanges in mainstream media, social media, et cetera. Real people aren’t on Twitter having political fights. They’re not watching CNN religiously, et cetera. Whenever I was at a barbecue, ” You guys all Democrats?” In some barbecues. “Yeah.” What do you guys think of Joe Biden? Almost in unison, “Too old.” Every real person said too old. So I look at what real people are saying. That’s why I thought Trump was going to win in 2016.

(02:16:45)
I go in the middle of Ohio, I can’t see a Hillary Clinton sign for hundreds of miles. It is Trump paraphernalia everywhere. So that’s not end all, be all. You could say it’s anecdotal, but you begin to collect data points. But then the real data points are in polling. Okay. So now I’m looking at Biden polling, he’s in the thirties. No incumbent in the thirties has ever come back to win. I’m like, it’s already over. Then all of a sudden, oh my God, Trump takes the lead with Latinos. It’s double over. By later in the process, Trump took the lead with young voters. I’m like, “This is the most over election in history.” A Democrat cannot win if they’re not winning young voters. That’s impossible. Trump’s cutting into his lead with black voters. This thing is over. And I go tell people, and they’re like, “You are crazy.” Why do they think I’m crazy? Because MSNBC is lying to them 24/7, telling them that Joe Biden created sliced bread, and the wheel, and fire. And my favorite talking point was, he’s a dynamo behind the scenes.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:55)
Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(02:17:56)
I’m like, “Okay, let me get this right.” It’s like an SNL skit, right? I’m like so behind the scenes, he’s like, all right, Sally, get me the memo on that and we’re okay, we’re going to do this, and I’m in command of the material. Then he goes in front of the cameras.” Anyways.” Why would any politician do that? Why would they be terrible in front of the camera and great off camera? It doesn’t make any sense. But once you get people enough propaganda, and MSNBC created blue MAGA, they’ll believe anything. So they believe that Biden was dynamic and young, and that he was the best possible candidate to beat Donald Trump. When in reality, he was about the only Democrat who couldn’t beat Donald Trump.

(02:18:36)
So number one, I don’t co-sign on a bullshit. I don’t care which side you’re on. Number two, as you heard earlier, I can’t have Trump winning. It endangers the country. It endangers our constitution, et cetera. So I’m going to do something about it. And so I start something called Operation Hope on The Young Turks. And we ask the audience, “What should we do?” So there’s different projects in Operation Hope. But the first project that pops up is knock Biden out of the race. And so then I ask our paying members on TYT, I say, “Guys, you’re going to vote, and then I’m going to do what you tell me to do. If you say no, I like Biden, or I think Biden’s the best candidate, or even if he isn’t, we’re not going to be able to win on this, so don’t do it.” Should I enter the primary against Biden?

(02:19:25)
Okay. 76, 24, go, enter. I’m a populist. You tell me to go. You’re my paying members, you’re my boss. I’m going to go. Okay. So I enter the primary. Now, I’m not born in the country, so people are going to freak out about that. I’m a talk show host. The establishment media despises me, so I’m not going to get any airtime. In fact, we consider hiring the top booking agent in New York. We talked to him, and he says, “Well, I’m actually in New York this week.” And he says, “I’m going to go talk to those guys, and I’ll come back to you.” And he was really decent, because normally he charges a lot. Just take the money, right? And go, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ll get you out.” But he was a wonderful guy. He said, “I talked to them, you’re banned. So don’t do it. You’re banned at CNN. You’re banned at MSNBC, and I think you’re banned on Fox News, but I’m not sure.”

(02:20:21)
Okay. So long odds, why do you do it? Because if you think we’re going to crash into the iceberg, you might as well bum rush the captain’s course. I’m lunging at the wheel. So what difference can I make? Well, I can make a difference by going on every show on planet Earth and going, “He’s too old. He’s in the thirties. He has no chance of winning, no chance of winning.” I go on Charlemagne Show, Breakfast Club, right? Charlemagne agrees. All of a sudden we’re having Buzz. And then people go, “Oh, Charlemagne said he has no chance of winning.” Then Charlemagne’s on the Daily Show, talks to Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart does a segment. This is not necessarily causal, but Buzz is building. So then Jon Stewart does a segment, if you remember, and people got super pissed at him, too old, can’t win. And all that buzz is building.

(02:21:08)
Meanwhile, unrelated to us, David Axelrod and James Carville, and I’m like, “Guys, figure it out. Who does Axelrod speak for?” The top advisor for Barack Obama. Who is James Carville, the top advisor for? The Clintons. This is the Clintons and the Obama sending their emissaries to say, “We can read a poll. He’s going to lose. Change direction.” So when the debate happens, we laid the groundwork. If we hadn’t laid the groundwork, debate would’ve been the first time that Blue MAGA would’ve thought, “Oh, maybe Biden can’t win.” But since all of us said it, and strange bedfellows, I loathe Nancy Pelosi, but she was on our side. I got a lot of issues with Bill Maher. He was on our side. I got a lot of issues with Axelrod and Carville, and they were on our side. So the people who believed in objective reality kind of independently made a plan. Let’s show people objective reality. And we did. And we drove him out, and it made all the difference.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:11)
So you think he stepped down voluntarily, or was he forced out?
Cenk Uygur
(02:22:15)
Both. So again, it depends on what you mean. So was he forced out? Of course he was forced out. You think he just woke up and he is like, “Oh, yeah, you know what? Screw my legacy. I don’t want to be a two term president. I’ll just drop out for no reason.” No, we forced them out. Of course we did. And when I say we, I had a tiny, tiny, tiny role. The people who had the major roles, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and all those folks. But even they were not the main driving force. The number one driving force were the donors. What is the source of power of Bernie or Massey? The people. What is the source of power for Biden? The donors. The donors made Biden. He is the donors’ candidate. And that’s why he told the donors, nothing will fundamentally change. If you say Lex, “No Cenk, I think you’re too extreme that Biden works for the donors 98%. I think he only works for them 80% or 55%.” Fine. We could have that debate.

(02:23:12)
But you can’t argue that it isn’t his source of power. And you can’t argue it anymore, even if you were going to argue it earlier, because once the donors said, “We’re not giving you any more money.” He didn’t have any options. He couldn’t go on. But was he forced out at knife point or something? No. So was it voluntary? Yeah. Ultimately, if Biden decided to stay in, there was nothing we could do about it. And so he had to voluntarily make that decision. But he voluntarily made it, because he had no choice left.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:41)
Yeah. I wish he stepped down voluntarily from a place of strength. So I think presidents, I think politicians in general, especially at the highest levels, want legacy. And to me at least, one of the greatest things you could do is to walk away at the top. I mean, George Washington, to walk away from power is I think universally respected, especially if you got a good speech to go with it and you do it really well, not in some kind of cynical or calculated or some kind of transactional way, but just as a great leader. And maybe be a little bit even more dramatic than you need to be in doing it. Yeah, I thought that would be a beautiful moment. And then launch some kind of democratic process for electing a different option.
Cenk Uygur
(02:24:36)
Not only did I agree with you 100%, I reached one of his top advisors, one of the guys you see in the press all the time, as in his inner circle. I never said that before, because we were in the middle of it. And I’m never going to betray anyone’s confidence. And I’ll never say who it was. Okay. But he was gracious enough to meet with me as I was about to enter the primary. And look, it is smart too, because get information, intelligence, et cetera. Is this guy going to be trouble, or not trouble? But at least he took the meeting. And the case I made is exactly the one you just said, Lex. This about 10 months ago. I said, “If he drops out now, they build statues of him, the Democrats.” If you are right-wing or you hate him, I get it.

(02:25:23)
But the Democrats would’ve said he beat Trump and protected democracy in 2020, and he steps down graciously now to make sure we beat Trump again in 2024, and he lets go of power voluntarily. He’s going to be a hero, an absolute hero. But if he doesn’t, you’re going to force all of us to kick the living crap out of him, and tell everybody he’s an egomaniac, which he is. And he’s doing this so that he could be… If you don’t know Washington in that bubble, if you’re a one-term president, you’re a loser. If you’re a two-term president, you have a legacy, and you’re historic. He’s running for one reason, and one reason only. My legacy. I will be a two-term president. I will be considered historic. I’m like, brother, now you’re going to be considered a villain, the villain of the story. You’re handing it right back to Trump. You’re not going to win.

(02:26:17)
And you know, look at the numbers. Any political professional knows you’re not going to win. So you have hero or villain, and you get to choose. But if you think you’re going to be a hero and beat Trump, that is not a choice you have. That is not going to happen. And they didn’t believe us. But by then they did.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:34)
Were you troubled by how Kamala Harris was selected after he stepped down?
Cenk Uygur
(02:26:41)
Yes and no. So I argued for an open convention. And so if Biden had stepped down when we were trying to get people into the primary, knock him out, then that would’ve been a perfect solution. Then all the governors could go in, Walz, Beshear, Whitmer, Kamala Harris goes in, obviously they have a real primary at that point. Me, at later Dean Phillips came in. Me, Dean, and I mean, Maryanne wouldn’t drop out. Me and Dean would definitely drop out. Because our whole point was get other people in the race, make sure we win. Okay. Then you would’ve had a great primary, it would’ve been the right way to do it, both morally, constitutionally, et cetera. But also as a matter of politics, because you would’ve gotten a lot of coverage for your young, exciting candidates, and you would’ve legitimized the idea of that you’re protecting democracy.

(02:27:31)
Okay. So that didn’t happen because of Biden. It is what it is. So now when Biden drops out, at least do a vestige of democracy. Go to the convention and do what it’s designed to do, which is pick a candidate. Ezra Klein made a great case for this in the New York Times podcast that he did. That made a huge difference, and he was great for doing that. So I believe in an open convention. But I know Democrats that love to anoint, because they don’t trust the people. So they think the elites are geniuses, don’t worry, we’ll pick the right candidate. Yeah, I remember when you picked Hillary Clinton, how’d that work out? And I remember when you said Joe Biden was the right candidate in 2024. How’d that work out? Do not anoint.

(02:28:12)
But in the end, they didn’t. So what happened was, Biden does the first announcement, he either forgot or on purpose didn’t put Kamala Harris in there. So there’s all this kumbaya now. Nah, they don’t like each other. And Biden’s been screwing her over the entire time she’s been vice president. So he doesn’t put her in the original statement. And I’m like, “Whoa.” I do a live video of media. I’m like, “Kamala. Harris is not in the statement.” In the middle of my video, they put out a second one going, okay, okay, fine, Kamala Harris, because that’s too much for the president not to endorse his Vice president.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:45)
I think it was really somebody stormed into the room and said, “You absolutely must.”
Cenk Uygur
(02:28:50)
I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but probably. Or they planned, I don’t know. But the bottom line is it was glaring that he didn’t put her in the first letter. Okay. So he had to put her in the second one. Fine, no problem. But Obama, Pelosi and Schumer did not endorse Kamala Harris. That’s huge. Normally the Democrats would all endorse her, and would all say she’s anointed, shut up everybody. And then MSNBC would scream, “Shut up. Shut up. She’s anointed.” But they didn’t do that. So then Kamala Harris had to win over the delegates. And I thought she would win them over in the convention. But she locked them up in two days. And I know, because I delegates, because I ran. And the delegates are calling me saying, “She’s getting on a zoom right now with us.” She went to all the states and worked her ass off, and locked up enough delegates to get the nomination in two days.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:47)
Yeah. But come on, its Biden endorsed.
Cenk Uygur
(02:29:47)
Of course.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:50)
But why is that an of course? Why not say sort of layout Walz and Shapiro and Kamala Harris, and the options to say, lets at least the facade of democracy, of a democratic process.
Cenk Uygur
(02:30:05)
There’s what should happen and what is likely to happen. So should Biden not have endorsed? Yeah, of course. I think Biden should have done the same thing as Obama and Pelosi and not endorse, and say, “Hey, we’d love to have a process where we figure out who the right nominee is.” And at that point, I’m really worried about Kamala Harris, because she’s doing word salads nonstop. So I’m like, “Don’t make the same mistake we did before, and just pick someone out of a hat. Test them. Test them. You get stronger candidates when you test them.” The authoritarian nature of the DNC drives me crazy. They don’t believe in testing candidates. They don’t believe in letting their own voters decide. And look, when we were in the primary, they canceled the Florida election. And they took me, Dean and Marianne off the ballot in North Carolina and Tennessee. I’m like, “Guys, if you’re going to make a case for democracy in the general election and you cancel elections in the primaries, do you not get how ridiculous you look, how hypocritical you look?”

(02:31:05)
So I didn’t want Biden to endorse anyone. But I’m shocked that they didn’t all endorse her. Because normally what happens is they all endorse. So bottom line Lex is, did she earn it in a perfect system, not even close, right? But did she earn it enough in this imperfect way where at least she showed some degree of competence that assuaged my concerns? Yes. So because a normal Democrat would bungle that. Like Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have talked to the delegates. She would assume that she’s the queen, and that they would all bow their heads. So the fact that she did elementary politics correct, for Democrats that’s like a big win.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:47)
It just really frustrated me, because it smelled of the same thing of fucking over Bernie in 2015, 2016, and RFK, and just the anointing aspect. Now, they seem to have gotten lucky in this situation that it’s very possible that Kamala Harris would’ve been selected through a democratic process. But I have to say, listening to the speeches at the DNC, Walz was amazing. Shapiro was really strong. And Kamala actually was much better as compared to her as a candidate previously.
Cenk Uygur
(02:32:21)
Yep.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:22)
But personally don’t think she would’ve been the result of a democratic process.
Cenk Uygur
(02:32:25)
So you don’t often give your opinions. But when you give the opinions, I actually agree a huge percentage of the time, in this conversation. So I fought for Shapiro in the primary. And when she was trying to pick for a VP, because I thought there’s no way she’s going to pick Walz. He’s way too, not just progressive, but more importantly populist, right? So I didn’t think she’d go in that direction. And Shapiro actually did a bunch of populist things in Pennsylvania. That’s part of the reason why he’s so popular in Pennsylvania. He looks like a smooth talking politician, but his actions are pretty good. And so Shapiro was great, Walz was great. The Obamas are legendary. Even Clinton at his advanced age makes terrific points in a speech, where you go, “Well, that one’s hard to argue with.” And so I’m shocked at the competence of the DNC, shocked at it.

(02:33:12)
`But of all those, Lex, so you can give a good speech, and the Obamas give a mean speech. But I saw Obama as president. He didn’t deliver on that. But the one guy that stood out is Walz. And the reason is because he’s a real person.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:29)
Yeah, real person, populist.
Cenk Uygur
(02:33:32)
We all got to work towards picking the most genuine candidates. So here on the right-wing side, for example, I would prefer a Marjorie Taylor Greene to a Mitch McConnell any day. Marjorie Taylor Greene is genuine. She might be genuinely not, so I don’t agree with her. She might be even more right-wing than others, but I believe that she means it. And I’ll take that any day over a fraud corporatist like Mitch McConnell, who’s just going to do what his donor’s command of him, et cetera.

Bernie Sanders

Lex Fridman
(02:34:03)
I got to ask you, because I also love Bernie, still got it. I love Bernie. I always have. I think he might still do it, but I enjoyed his conversations with Tom Hartman. He’s a genuine one, like Bernie. Even if you disagree with him, that’s a genuine human being.
Cenk Uygur
(02:34:21)
Yep.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:21)
So just talk about that. Does it trouble you that he’s been fucked over in 2015, 2016, and again, 2020. And why does it keep forgiving people?
Cenk Uygur
(02:34:35)
Yeah. So I love Bernie for the same reason you were saying. Because he’s a real person. He’s a populist. He means it. And that is so rare in politics. I feel like I’m Diogenes, and I went looking for the one honest man and found it in Bernie. And so I did a video in 2013 saying, Bernie Sanders can beat Hillary Clinton in a primary. In 2013, that video exists. Because why did I think that? I didn’t say it of any of the corporate politicians and the guys who were supposed to challenge her and stuff. Because populist and honest. And the country’s dying for an honest populist, dying for it. So love the brother. Now, that doesn’t mean that he’s right on strategy. And he drives me crazy on strategy. So two elements of that. Number one, in 2016 and in 2020, for God’s sake attack your opponent.

(02:35:29)
You said something about Trump that I disagree with, where I’m defending Trump. Okay. You don’t like what he did to the public discourse. No, I don’t mind it. And I’ll tell you why. Because at least he got a little bit past the fakeness. He’s a con man and he’s a fraud overall, and he does everything for his own interest, but at least he doesn’t speak like a bullshitting politician. And he’s not wrong that you have to bully your own party to amass enough power to get things done. And he showed that that’s possible. So the problem with the Democrats is civility. So my whole life, they’re like, “Oh, no, no, no, don’t say anything. Let’s lose with civility.” So for example, in debates, whether it’s on TV, online, or whatever, Democrats or people on the left are always saying, “I’m offended.” I never get offended. No, after I’m done, you’re going to be offended. Okay, fight back, fighting back wins.

(02:36:31)
And we couldn’t get Bernie to fight back. In 2020 he was one state away. He won the first three states. He crushed in Nevada. All we needed was South Carolina. But in order to get South Carolina, we all knew, everybody on his campaign. Everyone who’s in progressive media, we all knew you’ve got to attack Biden. If you don’t, they’re just going to tsunami you. The corporate medias and the corporate politicians are going to run roughshod over you. You have to make the case against them. And so two times Bernie flinched. One in 2016, in the Brooklyn debate, they asked, “Did the money that Hillary Clinton taken from the banks affect her votes?” And he said, “No.” Of course it affected our votes. Of course it did. You have to say yes, and you have to show it and prove it.

(02:37:17)
The bankruptcy bill. When she was First Lady, she was totally in favor of the American people and against the bankruptcy bill, because it has the banks, you can’t discharge any debts, credit card debt and bank debt, et cetera. It’s an awful bill. It’s one of the most corporatist bills. She was on the right side as a First Lady. She becomes a senator, takes banker money, and all of a sudden she flips over to the banker side. Say it Bernie, for God’s sake, say it. Then in one of the debates in 2020, his team prepares attacks against Biden. They’re not personal, they’re not like… You can sense by now, if I’m in a political race, my objective is rip the other guy’s face off.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:02)
Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(02:38:03)
Politically, rhetorically, never physically.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:05)
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Cenk Uygur
(02:38:07)
But I would get it to a point where they’d think, I don’t know if I’m going to vote for Cenk, but I know I’m not voting for the other guy. Okay, so you got to do that if you want to win. So they prepare this. He says, “I’m going to do it.” He goes out in the podium and doesn’t do it. Because he can’t. He’s too damn nice. He just can’t attack the other guy. Now that’s problem number one in strategy. Problem number two is something you alluded to. So Biden gets into office. Bernie thinks they’re friends. They’re not friends. Biden’s just using him. So he used them to get the credibility. And then he eviscerates 85% of the progressive proposals that Bernie put forward. Biden throws away $15 minimum wage. That was Bernie’s signature issue. Doesn’t even propose the public option. Dumps paid family for no reason. I can go on and on. And Bernie co-signs on it, because he thinks he’s in an alliance. He thinks Biden’s on his side, and he thinks we’re going to get things done.

(02:39:04)
And to be fair to Bernie, like I said earlier, Obama got only 5% of his agenda passed. And Biden got 15%. Okay. So you’re right, Bernie, you got three times more than under Obama. But you’re wrong, that is not fundamental change. And without fundamental change, we’re screwed.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:23)
Let me ask you about another impressive speech, AOC. Is it possible that she’s the future of the party, future president?
Cenk Uygur
(02:39:32)
No. So AOC, in my opinion, lost her way. And so-
Lex Fridman
(02:39:39)
In which way?
Cenk Uygur
(02:39:41)
So it’s tough talking about these things, because people take it so personally. And that’s why you’ll see very few politicians on our shows. Because we give super tough interviews, and the words out in the street, don’t go on The Young Turks, they’ll ask you super hard questions. So only a couple do it. Like Ro Khanna does it, he’s brave-
Cenk Uygur
(02:40:00)
Right. Only a couple do it like Ro Khanna does it. He’s brave, and we’ll get into shouting matches sometimes in the middle of bills and stuff, but at least he’s there to defend his position. I respect him for that. Tim Ryan, a little bit more of a conservative Democrat when he was in the house. He would take on any debate, et cetera. There’s a couple of good guys that do it, but generally they don’t. This relates to AOC because when AOC is running we do 34 videos on her. We get her millions of views. We founded Just Democrats and now launched it on the show. Our audience, Ryan Grim documents in one of his books, our audience raises $2.5 million for those progressive candidates overall. And at that point, AOC and all those Rashida Tlaib, et cetera, they’re all dying to come onto Young Turks.

(02:40:50)
Makes sense. I would too, of course. It’s not because it’s The Young Turks, any media outlet. And most media outlets, almost all the media outlets reject them. We cover AOC more than all the other press combined, and she wins for a number of reasons. That’s one of the reasons. But there’s many others, and she did a terrific job herself. She then takes Saikat and Corbin who were the… Saikat was the head of Just Democrats and Corbin was Communications Director for Just Democrats. Then Saikat made one of the most brilliant political decisions arguably in American history, he called me and he said, “Cenk, I’m going to go from head of Just Democrats to running AOCs campaign.” And I’m like, “Well, the other candidates are going to get pissed, and you’re staking the entire enterprise on one candidate.” And I’m like, “Saikat, I’m not in it. I’m doing the media arm. You’re in the trenches. You’re the guy making the decisions, so I’m going to trust whatever you say. You sure?” And he said, “I’m sure.”

(02:41:51)
Him and Corbin go over to AOCs campaign. AOC then wins, that miraculous win. Then she hires Saikat to be her Chief of Staff, and she hires Corbin to be her Communications Director. Within six months, they’re gone. And once they’re gone, AOC then goes on an establishment path. Because why were they gone? Oh, they insulted one of her colleagues. Yeah, that colleague who’s a total corporatist and was selling out one of her policy proposals. If you don’t call out your own side, you’re never going to get anything done. But if you call out your own side, you become persona non grata, and it is super uncomfortable. And we couldn’t get them to do things that were uncomfortable. Now, she’s going to find that outrageous, and she’s going to be very offended by that, and she’s going to point to a bunch of things she did that were uncomfortable.

(02:42:44)
And to be fair to her, she has. Until that speech, she was pretty good on Palestine when we desperately needed it. She was pretty good on a bunch of issues. Cori Bush did that campaign on evictions, et cetera, on the capital steps. That was great. AOCs original spit-in in Pelosi’s office. At that point we’re all still on the same team. It’s a spectacular success. Me, Corbin and Saikat are saying, “Do it again. Do it again.” Not don’t abuse it, don’t be a clown and do it every other day. But when it matters, you need to be able to challenge Pelosi. And in my opinion, she just got to a point where she got exhausted being uncomfortable. It’s really hard, the media hates you and they keep pounding away and calling you a radical and you’re destroying the Democratic Party, you’re destroying unity. Whereas if you go along, all of a sudden you’re a queen. And now all of a sudden the mainstream media is saying, oh, AOC, she could be the [inaudible 02:43:46].
Lex Fridman
(02:43:45)
There’s some degree to which you want to sometimes bide your time and just rest a bit. And I think from my perspective, maybe you can educate me, she seems like a legit, progressive, legit even populist, charismatic, young, a lot of time to develop the game of politics, how to play it well enough to avoid the bullshit. I guess she doesn’t take corporate PAC money?
Cenk Uygur
(02:44:13)
That’s right. No, she’s still true on that.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:16)
As far as just looking over the next few elections, who’s going to be running? Who’s going to be a real player? To me she seems like an obvious person that’s going to be in the race.
Cenk Uygur
(02:44:31)
While I fight for the ideal, I’m very practical. For example, she wins, and then one cycle later after 2020, there’s these guys who want to “force” the vote, and it was on the speakership of Nancy Pelosi, and they wanted to use it to get Medicare for All. I’m like, “Guys, forcing a vote is a terrific idea. On the speakership, okay, who’s your alternative?” “Oh, we don’t have an alternative.” Already giant red flag. “What’s the issue you’re looking to have them vote on?” “Medicare for All.” “Oh, you don’t know politics.”

(02:45:18)
I love Medicare for All. We have to get Medicare for All. But if that’s the first one you put up without gaining any leverage, you’re going to get slaughtered. Put up something easy, force a vote on $15 minimum wage, or pick another one that’s easy, paid family leave. These are all polling great. Because if you force a vote on that, you can actually win. And if you win, you gain leverage, and then you do the next one and the next one. And then you do Medicare for All. Not bullshit gradualism that the corporate Democrats do, but actually strategically, practically building up power and leverage and using it at the right times.

(02:45:55)
If I thought that’s what AOC was doing, I would love it. I don’t need her to force a vote on Medicare for All, I don’t need her to go on some wild tangents that don’t make any sense and is only going to diminish her power. But when they eviscerated all the progressive proposals in Build Back Better, how did that happen? Manchin and Sinema used every ounce of leverage they had. They said, “I’m just not going to vote for it. I don’t care. The status quo was always perfect for my donors, so I don’t need you. I vote no. Now, take out everything I want,” and Biden did.

(02:46:35)
Progressives had to push back and say, “Here is two to three proposals. Not everything, not everything. Two to three proposals. They all poll over 70%. They’re all no-brainers, and they’re all things that Joe Biden promised. We want those in the bill, otherwise we’re voting no.” At that point, what would’ve happened is the media would’ve exploded and they would’ve said, AOC and the rest are the scum of the earth, they’re ruining the Democratic Party. We’re not going to get the bill. They’re the worst. You have to withstand that. If you cannot withstand a nuclear blast from mainstream media, you’re not the person. You have to run that obstacle course to get to change. If they had stood their ground, they definitely would’ve won on one to two of those issues. Instead, they went with a strategy that was called, it was literally called, Trust Biden.

Kamala Harris

Lex Fridman
(02:47:32)
All right, so big question. Who wins this election, Kamala or Trump? And what’s Kamala’s path to victory? And if you can steel, man, what’s Trump’s path to victory?
Cenk Uygur
(02:47:46)
There’s not enough information yet. Since I make a lot of predictions on air and then brag about it unbearably, people are always, they’ll stop me in the streets and they’ll be like, “Predict this. Predict my marriage.” “Brother, I don’t know anything about your marriage. How can I possibly predict something without having any information?” In the case of this campaign, right now I got Kamala Harris at 55% chance of winning, which is not bad. Doesn’t mean she’s going to win by 55 because then that would be a 10 point margin. That’s not going to happen. But I say around 51 to 55, but it’s nowhere near over because of a lot of things. One, the Democrats are still seen as more establishment and people hate the establishment. Two, if war breaks out in the Middle East, which is now unfortunately bordering on likely, if that war breaks out, all bets are off.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:44)
Do you mean a regional war?
Cenk Uygur
(02:48:46)
Yeah, like Iran, Israel gets to be a real thing, not just a pinprick and a little bombing here and an assassination there. No, we’re going to war. If that happens, then all bets are off and no one has any idea who’s going to win. And if they’re pretending that they know, that’s ridiculous because it’s so unpredictable. And then the third bogey for her is if she goes back to word salads.

(02:49:16)
There’s three phases of Kamala Harris’s career. She’s not necessarily any different in terms of policy. You can frame it in a bad way, you could frame it in a good way. You could say, oh, she’s just seeing which way the wind is blowing. And then, oh, she’s a tough cop prosecutor, and then she’s doing justice reform when people want justice reform. Oh, she’s a waffler.

(02:49:39)
Or you could paint it as she’s pretty balanced. She prosecuted serious criminals very harshly, but then on marijuana possession got them into rehab. And you know what? That’s actually what you should do. I’m not talking about policy so there you could have one of those views about Kamala Harris, and I get it. I’m talking about stylistically. Kamala Harris until the second debate in the primaries in 2020 is a very competent politician who’s in line to be the next Obama. She’s killing it. District attorney, attorney general, senator. And then the first debate, if you remember, she won. She had that great line about, “There was a little girl on that bus that was integrating the schools, and that girl was me.” And Biden being the knucklehead that he is, he’s caught on tape going… Don’t have that reaction, brother, because she’s criticizing his segregation policy on buses back in the ’70.

(02:50:46)
Anyways, so she’s doing terrific. And then after that debate until Biden drops out is a disaster area for Kamala Harris’s career. In the primary she starts falling apart. She can’t strategize right, she’s for Medicare for All. No, she’s not, she’s for Medicare for some. What’s Medicare for some? I don’t know. And she goes to the next debate and Tulsi Gabbard kicks her ass. And then goes to the third debate, gets her kicked again, and she’s starting to drift away. Then at this point, and this is funny, I have more votes for president than Kamala Harris does, because Kamala Harris dropped out before Iowa because that’s how much of a disaster her campaign turned into when she was leading. She was leading.

(02:51:33)
Then she becomes vice president and Biden, probably because of that bus line, Jill Biden caught tremendous feelings over that line. Biden’s like, here, have this albatross around your neck. It’s called immigration. Good luck. I’m not going to do anything about it. I’m not going to change policy, but I’m putting you in charge of it to get your ass handed to you. And she does, so that’s a disaster. And then she starts doing interviews where she’s like, “We have to become the change, the being, but not the thing we were and the unbecoming.” And you’re, what is going on? Why can neither one of them speak?

(02:52:12)
But then the third act shocks me. Biden steps down, she goes and grabs all those delegates in a super competent way that we talked about earlier. And then she goes out and gives a speech. I’m, oh, that speech is good. Okay, and another one, another one. I’m, wait a minute, these are good speeches. No more word salads. Then she picks Tim Walz and shocks the world. I’m like, that’s the correct VP pick. That is a miracle. And then she goes and does the economically populist plan, all those proposals about housing that people care about, grocery prices that people care about. Real or not real, that is correct political strategy. This Kamala Harris is back to the original Kamala Harris, who was a very competent, skilled politician.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:58)
And as I was telling you offline, whoever’s doing her TikTok is blowing up and they’re doing risky, edgy stuff.
Cenk Uygur
(02:53:08)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:53:09)
I did not expect that from somebody that comes from the Biden camp of just be safe, be boring, all this stuff.
Cenk Uygur
(02:53:17)
You have to give Kamala Harris ultimate credit, because she’s the leader of the campaign and she makes the final decisions. But there’s apparently a couple of people inside that campaign that are ass kickers, and they have convinced her to take risk, which Democrats never take. And it is correct to take risks. You cannot get to victory without risk. The vice president pick is the bellwether. When Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine, I said, “That’s it, she’s going to lose.” Because Tim Kaine is playing prevent defense. He’s wallpaper. He’d be lucky to be wallpaper, he’s just a white wall. And when he speaks it’s white noise. He never says anything interesting, he’s the most boring pick of all time. That saying, we already won. Ha, ha.

(02:54:02)
If Kamala Harris had picked Mark Kelly, that’s the Tim Kaine equivalent. Oh, he’s an astronaut. I don’t give a shit that he’s an astronaut. What is he saying? Is he a good politician? Does he have good policies? Is he exciting on the campaign trail? Is he going to add to your momentum? Mark Kelly, he might be a good guy, but number one, he’s a very corporate Democrat. And number two, it’s like watching grass grow. He’s terrible at speaking if you ask me. I thought, for sure she’s going to pick Mark Kelly, because that’s what a normal Democrat does. Or if they want to go wild and crazy, they’ll go to Beshear. I was, please let it be Shapiro, because he’s at least not bad. He’s done some populous things and he’s strategic, he’s really smart. I need smart candidates. Dumb candidates don’t help. They don’t have a mind of their own. They can’t take risks. They’re not independent thinkers. They’re going to lose. She picks the smartest, most populous candidate. Boom, boom, we got a winner. That’s a good campaign.

Harris vs Trump presidential debate

Lex Fridman
(02:55:00)
Speaking of risks, when they debate, when Kamala and Trump debate, what do you think that’s going to look like? Who do you think is going to win?
Cenk Uygur
(02:55:12)
Oh, that’s not close. Kamala Harris will win unless she falls apart. Unless she goes back to the bad era. That’s risk number three.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:19)
Well, hold on a second. Oh, I guess in a debate, you can have pre-written. It seems like when she’s going off the top of her head is when the word salad sometimes comes out. Sometimes.
Cenk Uygur
(02:55:31)
Well, we’ll have to see because she hasn’t done any tough interviews, she hasn’t really been challenged. I hope to God that doesn’t happen.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:39)
That she doesn’t fall apart, you mean?
Cenk Uygur
(02:55:40)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:40)
I hope she does a bunch of interviews, right?
Cenk Uygur
(02:55:42)
Oh, definitely, definitely. This is going to sound really funny. I’m too honest, but I am in the context of Kamala Harris probably shouldn’t come on The Young Turks. We do a really tough interview and it would hurt her.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:57)
Do you though? It’s tough, but you’re pretty respectful. Maybe I’m okay with a little bit of tension. You’re pretty respectful. Even when you’re yelling, there’s respect. You don’t do a got you type thing. There’s certain things you could do. You said this in the past, you can say a lot in from the past that’s out of context. It forces the other person to have to define the context, just debate type tactics over and over. You don’t seem to do that. You just ask them questions generally and then you argue the point, and then you also hear what they say. The only thing I’ve seen you do sometimes tough, that you sometimes interrupt. You speak over the person if they are trying to do the same.
Cenk Uygur
(02:56:48)
Right. Only if they’re filibustering.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:50)
Yeah, if they’re filibustering. But that’s a tricky one. That’s a tricky one.
Cenk Uygur
(02:56:54)
Right. No, but Lex, the problem for her coming on our show isn’t that we would be unfair to her, it’s that we would be fair. We would ask questions she is going to have trouble answering.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:06)
All the corporate stuff.
Cenk Uygur
(02:57:07)
Right. Biden said he was going to take the corporate tax rate to 28%, and he barely tried. You say you’re going to take it to 28%, why should we trust you? You guys said $15 minimum wage, and then you took it out of the bill. Why should we trust you? Those are very tough questions. She’s never going to get that in mainstream media. Mainstream media is going to have faux toughness, but in reality they’re going to be softballs. And so the debates, you’re right Lex, is a little bit easier because Sarah Palin proved that you could just memorize scripted talking points. And she admitted it later, she was super nervous, she memorized the talking points. And no matter what they asked, she just gave the talking point. Which by the way, people barely noticed because that’s what all politicians do, she just admitted it.

(02:58:01)
And so, no, Trump’s a disaster in a debate. He’s a one man wrecking crew of his own campaign. Any competent debater would eviscerate Donald Trump. On any given topic, when he says something… Here, let’s take one lunatic conspiracy theory that he just had recently. And by the way, if you’re a right-winger and you keep getting hurt every time I say he’s a lunatic, or I insult Donald Trump, you sound like a left-winger. I’m offended. I’m offended, I’m offended. Get over it. Get over it. We have disagreements, hear what the other side is saying. And by the way, I say the same thing to the left. I say, you think everybody on the right’s evil, you’re crazy. No, they just have a different way of looking at the world. Which by the way, is an interesting conversation, we should talk about that in a minute too. I do it to both sides.

(02:58:56)
But Trump says, “Oh, I don’t think there’s anyone at Kamala Harris’s rallies, all the pictures are AI.” Let’s say he says that in a debate because he’s liable to say anything. You just say, okay, so you think every reporter that was there, every photographer that was there, every human being that was there, they’re all lying. They have a conspiracy of thousands of people, but none of them were actually there. Do you understand how insane you sound?
Lex Fridman
(02:59:30)
This is a good place to, can you steel man the case for Trump?
Cenk Uygur
(02:59:36)
Trump is a massive risk because of all the things we talked about earlier, but there is a percentage chance that he’s such a wild card that he overturns the whole system. And that is why the establishment is a little scared of him. If he’s in office… Here, I’ll give you a case of Donald Trump doing something right. Something wrong first and then something right. He bombs Soleimani , the top general of Iran, and kills him. That risks World War Three, that risks a giant war with Iran that devolves. Iran is four times the size of Iraq. If you’re anti-war, you should have hated that he assassinated Soleimani.

(03:00:13)
But after the assassination, Iran doesn’t want to get into it even though they’re in a rage and they do a small bombing. You could tell if it’s a small or a big one. That’s them saying, we don’t really want war, but for our domestic crowd we have to bomb you back. And that’s when the military industrial complex comes to Trump and says, “No, you have to show them who’s tough and bomb this area.” And Trump says, “No, they did a small bombing, not a large bombing. I don’t want the war. I’m not going to do that bombing.” That was his shining moment.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:46)
For me one of the biggest steel man for Trump is that he has both the skill and the predisposition to not be a warmonger. He, I think better than the other candidates I’ve seen, is able to end wars and end them, now, you might disagree with it, but in a way where there’s legitimately effective negotiation that happens. I just don’t see any other candidate currently being able to sit down with Zelensky and Putin and to negotiate a peace treaty that both are equally unhappy with.
Cenk Uygur
(03:01:25)
On the one hand, almost all other politicians are going be controlled by the military-industrial complex, and that complex wants to bleed Russia dry, and that’s what the Ukraine War is doing. It’s a double win for the defense contractors. Number one, every dollar we send to Ukraine is actually not going to Ukraine, it’s going to US defense contractors, and then they are sending old weapons to Ukraine. The money is to build new weapons for us. A lot of people don’t know that. The defense contractors want that war to go on forever, and they’re an enormous influence in Washington.

(03:02:04)
The second win is they’re depleting Russia. And Russia has gotten themselves into a quagmire, like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they’re bleeding out. The military-industrial complex wants Russia to bleed out for as long as humanly possible. They actually care more about their own interest, of course, than they do about Ukrainian interests. In fact, there’s a good argument to be made that Ukraine could have gotten a peace deal earlier and we prevented it. But the bottom line now is probably how a deal gets done is they let go of three more areas in Ukraine. They already lost Crimea. They’d have to let go of three more regions. And that is tough because at that point Russia’s a little bit encouraged. Every time they do an invasion, they get more land. They might not get all the land they wanted, but they get a lot of land. It’s a very difficult issue.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:02)
But literally, which person, if they become president, will end the war?
Cenk Uygur
(03:03:09)
Trump will end that war because Trump will go in and he loves Russia and Putin anyway.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:13)
I just disagree with, he loves Russia, the implication of that. Meaning he’ll do whatever Putin tells him. I think…
Cenk Uygur
(03:03:23)
He’ll do 90% of what Putin tells him.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:25)
I just disagree with that. I think he wants to be the person that says, fuck you to Putin while patting him-
Cenk Uygur
(03:03:35)
No way.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:36)
… on the back, but out negotiating Putin.
Cenk Uygur
(03:03:40)
I don’t like talking about Russia because there’s so much emotions that go into that topic. The right wing, the minute you mention Russia, they’re like, oh, it’s a hoax and all this baggage that comes with it, et cetera. To me, Russia’s not any different than Saudi Arabia or Israel for Trump. You give me money, I like you. You buy my apartments, I like you. If you don’t give me money, I don’t like you. It’s not that complicated. Okay, don’t worry about the Russia part of it. The bottom line is Trump thinks, what do I care about those three regions of Ukraine? I want to get this thing done. He’ll go and he’ll say, “Ukraine, we’re going to withdraw all help unless you agree to a peace deal with Russia, and Russia wants those three regions, that’s the peace deal. That’s it.” Ukraine will lose a part of their country and we get to a peace deal.
Lex Fridman
(03:04:36)
See, I hope not. I hope not. I think Trump sees themselves and wants to be a great negotiator, and I personally want the death of people to end. And I think Trump would bring that much faster. And I disagree with you, at least my hope is that he would negotiate something that would be fair.
Cenk Uygur
(03:05:05)
His anti-war record is so complicated because moving the embassy in Israel and killing the top Iranian general were super provocative, and they could have easily triggered a giant war there. And then you know what’s going to happen if you get into any kind of real war? Trump’s going to want to prove his buttons larger. Then he’s going to do massive, ridiculous bombings. I worry about nukes. And so we had Giuliani on the show, on the RNC, and I asked him this question. I said, “He keeps saying, ‘Oh, they wouldn’t do it if I was in charge.'” I’m like, “What does that mean? Because it sounds like what it means is they wouldn’t do it because they know if they did it, I would do something insane like attack Russia or use nukes.” And Rudy said, “Yeah, that’s what it means.”

(03:05:56)
That means you have to at least bluff that, and you have to get them to believe that he’s a madman. That’s the madman theory of Nixon. And Rudy said that too. He was very clear about it. But the problem is, if you get your bluff called. And so if you actually attack Russia, you’re going to start World War Three. That’s why, yeah, if you could just get away with bluffing, maybe. But he’s playing a very dangerous game, and he massively increased drone strikes. On the other hand, he didn’t bomb Iran further, and on the other hand, he started the process of withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not black and white, complicated record.

(03:06:40)
And one thing, I’ll give him another piece of credit here. I think I’m taking this steel manning too far, but the credit was that he changed the rhetoric of the right wing. They went from the party of Dick Cheney, War is great, and all Muslims are evil. And so he hates Muslims too, but that’s a different thing. But, oh, we have to attack the enemy. We have to start wars, et cetera. To now the Republican voters are generally anti-war and hate Dick Cheney. Oh, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. That’s a great thing that Trump did, even if he didn’t mean it. Even if he does these provocative things that could lead to a much worse war. Even if I’m worried that he’ll be so reckless he’ll start a bigger war. At least he did that, right, and so I’m happy to have our right wing brothers and sisters join us in the anti-war movement. And I’m not being a jerk about it. I love it.

(03:07:40)
And so this is another thing the left does wrong from time to time, which is if you agree with a right-winger 2%, they’ll be, “Oh, welcome in. Come on, vote for Trump. Come on in. Yeah, woohoo. Water’s warm.” If you disagree with the left 2%, they’re, “That’s it. You’re banished and you’re a Nazi.” ” Well, brother, how are we going to win an election if you’re banishing everybody there is. Hold up. These Republican voters are coming at your anti-war position. Take the win. “No, they’re [inaudible 03:08:14] and I won’t deal with them.” “Even when they agree with you? That doesn’t make any sense. That doesn’t make any sense. Take the win.” When Charlie Kirk says yes to paid family leave, when Patrick Bette-David on his program roughly says yes to paid family leave, take the win.

RFK Jr

Lex Fridman
(03:08:31)
RFK Jr. You said some positive things for a while about RFK Jr. and I think you said you would even consider voting for him given the slate of people. This was at the time when Biden was still in. What do you think about him? What do you think about RFK Jr. as a candidate, as a person? He’s been on the show, right? Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(03:08:55)
Yeah, so he was on our show. People loved that interview, you could check it out anytime.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:59)
That’s great.
Cenk Uygur
(03:09:01)
And why do people love it whether they’re right or left? Because we’re fair. We actually asked him about his policy position, he explained them. I challenge him, and then he explains, and we give him a fair hearing. But I knew Bobby a little bit before he ran when he was an environmental lawyer. And his legal work is excellent, and he’s been on the right side of most of the issues for most of his life. A, I like him on that. Two, on his wildlife, the dead bear and the worms and all that stuff. There’s two important lessons you should get out that. Well, one’s just about Bobby, but the other one’s a general one that’s really important for you to know no matter what you think of Bobby Kennedy.

(03:09:47)
On the personal front, I have a friend that’s very similar to him. In fact, he’s one of my best friends. And I know why. This is my theory on why Bobby and my friend led a wild life. Both of their dads died young. When my friend’s dad died, he was 18, and his dad died in his arms. And he has a motto, “What is lived cannot be unlived.” If I had a great time and I thought it was hilarious to dump a dead bear in Central Park, then I lived it and I had a great time and nothing you could do about it. And sometimes that’ll get you in trouble, and sometimes you’ll have a fantastic time. And obviously, Bobby’s dad was killed when he was young, and maybe that got into his head of, you better live strong and live an interesting life. And so I don’t begrudge him that. Even if I begrudge some of the things that he did in that life, I get why he did it. I don’t hate him like other people hate him for some of those personal stuff.

(03:10:52)
And I like him for all the things that he did positive. Holding fossil fuel companies accountable, protecting communities that had poison dumped into the rivers, et cetera. The thing that affects everybody is when he gets… Corporate media smeared the hell out of him, and they didn’t allow him to speak. And then they did the needle in a haystack trick. Whenever it’s an insider, they find the best parts of their lives and then they amplify it. Joe Biden is average Joe from Scranton. Mother fucker’s been in DC for the last 52 years, you think we don’t have eyes and ears? Average Joe from Scranton, who are you kidding?

(03:11:38)
There’s a guy named Fred Thompson who’s an actor, and he was a senator from Tennessee later. And he had this great little trick that he would do. There’s a red pickup truck that he would campaign with so he looks like a regular Joe. But he’s a millionaire actor. But here’s the funny part. He would drive to the red pickup truck in a limo, and he would drive back from the campaign event in a limo. But the press never reported the limo, they only reported him in the red pickup truck.
Cenk Uygur
(03:12:00)
Never reported the limo. They only reported him in the red pickup truck, as if that’s what he drives. See, that’s the theater of politics. Why? Because Fred Thompson was a corporate Republican, so they loved him. So they go, “Yeah, sure, yeah, red pickup truck. Oh, good old Fred Thompson, right?” But if you’re an outsider and they don’t like you, then they’re going to look at the haystack of your life and they’re going to try to find needles. So they’ve done this to Trump, they’ve done this to Bernie, they’ve done this to Bobby Kennedy Jr. And with Bobby, they’re like, ooh, there’s some juicy needles in here. So they find those and they go, you see this? The only thing you should know about Bobby, Kennedy Jr. is that he found a dead bear and put it in Central Park. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I found another one.

(03:12:50)
The other thing you should know about Bobby is that he once said in a divorce deposition that he had a brain worm that, by the way, it turns out that affects millions of people and is not that big a deal, right? But look, he is a radical. Ah, he is. This defines him completely. The spectacular case of that actually happened to me. So I ran for Congress in 2020 and The New York Times, LA Times CNN, they all butchered me with needles. Okay? So they said, “He has a long history of making anti-Muslim jokes.” Well, first of all, they didn’t even say jokes. They said anti-Muslim rhetoric. I’m like, I am Muslim. I mean, I’m an atheist, but I grew up Muslim. My family’s Muslim, my background’s Muslim. You don’t think that’s relevant in the story? And they did it based on one joke I told about, and they said, oh, also, of course they say that I’m anti-Semitic, that’s like, you start with that.

(03:13:47)
That’s just baked in for everyone, right? So they said, I had made a joke about how Orthodox Jews and Muslims, they think that getting into heaven is a little bit of a fashion contest. So the Orthodox Jews go in there with the Russian coats from the 1800s and the giant Russian hat, the Muslims going with their robe and the skull cap and stuff. And God’s looking around going, “No, no, no. Ooh, nice outfit. Come on in.” Right? Do you really think the creator of the universe gives a damn to what you wear? Okay? So New York Times took that and said, “Long history of being anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim.”
Lex Fridman
(03:14:27)
Right.
Cenk Uygur
(03:14:27)
Okay, so there’s this, oh, this is a famous one, relatively. I did a joke about bestiality like a dozen years ago…
Lex Fridman
(03:14:37)
Very nice.
Cenk Uygur
(03:14:38)
So I started out to joke nice and dry, and I go, “Look, is the horse going to object if he’s the one getting pleasure?” Now, Anna is my co-host. She’s younger at that time, and she’s like, “That seems like a bad idea, Cenk.” I’m like, “Of course it’s a bad idea,” but I’m being dry. But some people are laughing in the studio and stuff. And then I say, “If I was emperor of the world, I would make that legal.” And they cut the tape. If you watch the rest of the tape, I say, “Now, would the horse object? Nah.” But they cut the tape. Originally, a right-winger did that. And then a establishment troll in that primary started putting out those tapes to everyone. Jake Tapper retweeted it, didn’t look to see if it’s edited or not edited. The New York Times implied that bestiality was part of my agenda. Jesus Christ.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:36)
Please tell me that’s part of your Wikipedia. The bestiality thing is part of your…
Cenk Uygur
(03:15:42)
I don’t know. I don’t know. But guys, so in those stories, I’m not important. And even Bobby Kennedy Jr. is not important. What it reveals about the media is what’s important. So they’re going to find those needles, whether it’s… And even if they don’t have the needles, you know what? We’ll cut the tape before your joke’s punchline. So we’ll just run it and we’ll lie about you. Who cares, right? And so, oh, they also said that I had David Duke on to share his anti-Semitic point of view. If you watch the interview, I told David Duke, “You’re an anti-Semite. You’re a racist, you’re a bigot. You’re an idiot.” It was the toughest interview he’s probably ever had in his life. And other journalists got mad at that part, and they were like, “No, guys, you’re just flat out lying. I watched the interview. Did any of you watch the interview? He takes the guy’s head off.” And so The New York Times issued a correction on that one. So they’re like, okay, fine. He was being sarcastic when he said, “Sure, you’re not racist, Dave.”
Lex Fridman
(03:16:45)
One of the sources of hope to all this is there’s a lot of independent media now, but mainstream media has a lot of power still and carries a lot of power. You think they’re going to die eventually?
Cenk Uygur
(03:16:57)
Yeah, definitely. So two things about that that are super important. First of all, this is why I tell people to have hope. I don’t believe in false hope. So if you think Kamala Harris is your knight in shining armor, and she’s going to come in, she’s going to get money out of politics, she’s going to ignore the donors, that’s false hope. It’s crazy talk, right? So why am I in favor of Kamala Harris? I’m going to live to fight another day. I’m worried that Trump’s going to end the whole thing, and then we’re not going to have an opportunity to actually get a populist to win. And I’m encouraged by some of the things she’s doing, and maybe she does even 25% of her agenda, but I’m not going to give you false hope that she’s your savior. But I believe massively in hope. And number one, it’s true to the point that we were talking about earlier, Lex and how last 200 years have been choppy but overall fantastic.

The Young Turks


(03:17:46)
Terrible things have happened in that time period. Some of the worst things that have ever happened in history. But overall life expectancy is higher, incomes are higher, health is better, et cetera. So hope is not misplaced. It’s real. It’s empirical. So now we talked about how you could get money out of politics, and that’s a legitimate hope, but media is another place where we have huge hope. So of all the corporate robots, the most important robot is media. So when mainstream media has you hooked in at the back of your neck, you’re going to believe all these fairy tales about how politicians are nice people and they’re trying to do the right thing, and donor money doesn’t have any influence on them. So once you unplug from the matrix, well then you begin to see, oh yeah, hey, look, he took the donor money, did what the donors wanted, he took the donor money, did what the donors want, 98% of the time.

(03:18:41)
So then you see clearly. So now what’s happening at large, mainstream media is losing their power. And now online media, swarming, swarming, swarming, swarming. And so this goes back to why I started the Young Turks. So let me touch on that here and then we can come back to it if you want. So in 1998, I write an email to my friends and I say, “Online video is going to be television.” And unsurprisingly, and they say, “You’re nuts. That’s never going to happen.” At that point, we’re still doing AOL dial-ups, like… Online video barely exists and television’s mammoth. I say, “Guys, it’s just a matter of logic.” For me, there’s so many ironies, I’m known for yelling online sometimes, but in reality, I’m obsessed with logic. So when you have gatekeepers, gatekeepers pick based on what they want, what the powerful want, in that case, advertisers, politicians, et cetera, they’re never going to design programming as good as wisdom of the crowd.

(03:19:50)
When people start doing online video, I’m like, boom, there’s no gatekeepers. This is democratized. Wisdom of the crowd’s going to win. So if you start with no money… And let’s pick a different example, not the Young Turks. Let’s say Phil DeFranco. He’s been around forever and he also does news. And so Phil starts doing a show and he doesn’t have any money, he’s just like us. And so what does he have to do to get an audience? He has to do a show that is really popular. He’s got to figure out a way, how do I get their attention? How do I keep their attention? And he starts doing a great show. And so every year it’s us and Phil for best news show for like a decade.

(03:20:33)
And meanwhile, I’m back over at CNN, Wolf Blitzer still droning on from a teleprompter. You put Wolf Blitzer online without the force of CNN with him, he gets negative seven views. No one’s interested in what Wolf Blitzer has to say. It’s not personal. I don’t know the brother. I’m just saying institutionally, logically, et cetera. So I’m like, these guys are going to win. So when YouTube starts, we go on YouTube right away. We’re the first YouTube partner. So I am literally the original YouTuber, okay?
Lex Fridman
(03:21:07)
Nice.
Cenk Uygur
(03:21:08)
Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO, the late Susan Wojcicki, a wonderful woman. And if that triggers you again on the right, you’re wrong. She was a terrific person. And when she started her own YouTube channel, I was the first interview ’cause we were the first YouTube partner. So I love that. But let me connect it back to the hope. When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope because you don’t have the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing, you don’t have real news. When you’re in the online world, it’s chaotic. And don’t get me wrong, it’s got plenty of downsides. But within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge. And so for example, Young Turks has had dozens of fights with different creators throughout history. Why? When you’re number one in news online, the algorithm rewards anyone attacking you because then you get into their algorithmic loop.

(03:22:08)
It’s not an accident that we’ve been attacked dozens of times. One, we’re independent thinkers. So anyone, if we don’t match their ideology, they’re going to attack us. But number two, they get in our algorithm loop. It’s too hard to resist. So all of a sudden they think that we’re being funded by Nancy Pelosi or the CIA, and oh, we’re off to the races. There’s another fight. But our competition is a graveyard. And so we’ve won almost all of those fights. Why? Because we try really hard to stick with the truth, with logic, and we don’t do audience capture. Even if our audience is going in one direction, we don’t think it’s right. Anna and I will come out and go, “No, sorry guys. Love you, but rent control is not a good idea,” et cetera. So in that world, the people, it’s going to take a while, guys, but people who are telling the truth are eventually going to rise up.

(03:23:04)
And when they do, now we’re free. Now, the second part is even more devastating for mainstream media, because I’m a businessman, I keep looking at the revenue for CNN cetera, and they have a massive problem, and people don’t realize how big the problem is. That thing’s going to capsize. I don’t talk about it often because I don’t want more competition. I also have a company in the online world, et cetera, but I’m too honest, I got to say it. I got to say it. So they have two revenue streams. One is ads. That’s why they serve advertisers and politicians are huge advertisers as we mentioned. The second revenue stream, depending on the company, is arguably more important, which is subscribers. So now what happens in a business normally is, so they started out low and then they got high, and now they got a ton of subscribers.

(03:24:02)
At its peak cable has a hundred million households. So they’re raking in unbelievable money from subscriber fees, and they got advertising on top. So when you’re all the way up here, your costs start to rise. Why do they rise? Because then the on-air talent has leverage. And as an example, there’s many others. And so the on-air talent, like Sean Hannity says, “I do a program that brings in X amount of maybe a hundred million, maybe 200 million, so give me 40 million a year.” And they do. Sean is making 40 million a year last I checked, okay? So I don’t know if he’s still getting that kind of money, and I’m just spacing out on reporting, but that’s a monster. So they have all these giant costs, but the minute you go from a hundred million, now I think around 70 million, you just lost a giant chunk of your revenue. Now when your costs are higher than your revenue, nighty night, it’s been nice knowing you.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:00)
Yeah, it’s going to collapse and it’s going to be painful.
Cenk Uygur
(03:25:03)
But what we need guys is, sorry, last thing on that is, we need the print guys like AP, Reuters, Intercept, The Lever, [inaudible 03:25:13] Runs whatever Ryan’s working on now, [inaudible 03:25:15] Ryan Grim said it. We need those badly. We need someone to collect actual information and do the best they can in presenting it in an objective way. We all got to support that. So you can’t lose text, that’s so important. The TV guys are just actors. You can lose them overnight and it won’t hurt you. It’ll help you.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:33)
Yeah, it’s going to be a messy battle for truth, because the reality is there’s a lot of money to be made and a lot of attention to be gained from drama farming. So just constantly creating drama. And sometimes drama helps find the truth like we were mentioning, but most of the time it’s just drama and it doesn’t care about the truth. It just cares about drama. And then the same as conspiracy theories. Now, some conspiracy theories have value and depth, and they allow us to question the institutions, but the bottom line is conspiracy theories get clicks. And so you can just keep coming up random conspiracy theories, many of them don’t have to be grounded in the truth at all. And so that’s the sea we’re operating in. And so it’s a tricky space too.

Joe Rogan

Cenk Uygur
(03:26:25)
But Lex, look at all the people who are the biggest now, because we’ve now had a couple of decades at this, and I mean as an industry. So I would argue you’re huge and you don’t do that. You don’t do the conspiracy theories. You don’t do the drama at all. Rogan is huge. Yeah, maybe there’s drama, but he’s genuine. I got a lot of issues with some of his policies. I’ve mixed opinions on Joe in a lot of different ways, but I don’t doubt that he’s genuine and people can sense that. And he’s huge. We’re genuine, we’re huge. So this is the market beginning to work.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:09)
So speaking of Joe, let me ask you about this.
Cenk Uygur
(03:27:12)
Here we go.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:13)
I didn’t actually know this, but when I was prepping for this conversation, I saw that you actually said at some point in the past that you can beat up Rogan in a fight.
Cenk Uygur
(03:27:21)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:22)
No, you said that you have a shot. It’s a non-zero probability.
Cenk Uygur
(03:27:25)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:25)
Do you still believe this?
Cenk Uygur
(03:27:27)
Yes. But the probability is dropping. It’s dropping every day.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:31)
I think it’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. I wrestled and did Jiu-Jitsu and judo and all the kinds of fighting sports my whole life. And I just observed a lot of really confident, large guys roll into gyms. He’s ripped, he could deadlift, he could talk all kinds of shit. And he beliefs he’s going to be the next world champion and he just gets his ass kicked.
Cenk Uygur
(03:27:56)
Yeah, of course. Okay. And I saw this Israeli MMA fighter take on an anti-Semite who was huge and thought that… He believed in Nick Fuentes conspiracy theories or something. And the MMA fighter dismantled him, and I loved it. And then we tweeted back and forth, et cetera. So guys, first, let me just assure you, I get it. So now let me tell you why I said it and then why I think it’s a non-zero chance. So Michael Smerconish had written this blog, I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago on Huffington Post. We were both bloggers at that point and about the wussification of America.

(03:28:40)
Now, he was saying the left is a bunch of wussies, right? So I wrote a blog saying, “Hey, Michael, I would rather debate you. So if you want to debate about how we’re wussies, let’s do it. Let’s find them. But you are mentioning physicality and how you guys are tougher. So if you prefer only in a prescribed setting, and we’re not going to go do it in the streets like idiots, but if you want, we’ll have a boxing match or whatever you want, and we’ll see who’s tougher.”

(03:29:08)
And he panicked and he cried to mommy, which was Ariana Huffington, and said, “Oh, Cenk’s intimidating me.” Okay, all right, well who’s the wussy now, bitch? So that is not to actually get into a fight with poor Michael Smerconish, right? It’s to prove, hey, don’t use rhetoric like that. That’s dumb. And this is me proving that it’s dumb. Okay? So now Joe had said, I forget what he said at the time, and he said something similar. And I’m up to hear with Joe at that point. I don’t know if we’ll ever talk yet, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:29:41)
But you’ve been in a show and that was a good conversation.
Cenk Uygur
(03:29:44)
It was a great conversation.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:45)
That was a while back. Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(03:29:46)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:46)
I hope he has you on again.
Cenk Uygur
(03:29:47)
Yeah. So I get it.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:50)
I bet you I don’t like this take you have, a lot. I bet you he hates it because him as an MMA commentator, he gets to hear so many bros.
Cenk Uygur
(03:30:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:30:02)
It’s all about the mindset, bro. Now, to [inaudible 03:30:06], the point you’re making, which I do think it’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said, but the actual intent, which is whether you’re left or right, there’s strong people on the left, mentally strong, physically strong. I think the whole point is not that you can beat them, but you are willing to fight if you need to.
Cenk Uygur
(03:30:30)
A hundred percent.
Lex Fridman
(03:30:31)
So it’s not like I believe I could beat him, it’s like all this calling the people on the left wussies or whatever. I’m willing to step in the fight, even if I’m on train, even if I’m a out of shape, I’m willing to fight. Yeah, I get it. I understand that. But it’s just pick a different person. That’s why I wrote down my genuine curiosity is if you can beat up Alex, Alex Jones versus Cenk, the legitimate is I would pay for that. Because you’re both untrained. You both got I would say, the spirit.
Cenk Uygur
(03:31:04)
No, no. Look, I’ll give the same fairness. I think I got an 8% chance of being beating Rogan.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:11)
You’re [inaudible 03:31:12].
Cenk Uygur
(03:31:12)
I know, I got it. Hold on.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:14)
All right.
Cenk Uygur
(03:31:14)
And I think to be fair, Alex has an 8% chance of beating me.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:17)
Oh, wow. Okay.
Cenk Uygur
(03:31:19)
Yeah. Because you never know. He catches you on a lucky punch. I got punched in the ear once and you lose your balance and then you’re in a lot of trouble. So I can get lucky. Alex Jones can get lucky. It’s me against Rogan is harder. If you said to me you don’t have 8% chance, but Alex does. Okay, I’m not going to… It’s fine. So why does Alex stand almost no chance, if you ask me. So first of all, it’s not just because I’m big and he’s big. One, I wrestled.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:50)
Oh, you wrestled?
Cenk Uygur
(03:31:50)
Yeah, if you wrestle then… I watched this show with my kids, Physical 100, it’s like a Korean show where they try to find out who’s the best athlete. They have one thing where they have to wrestle away the ball and keep it, this big giant ball. I’m like, every wrestler is going to win. Every MMA fighter is going to win. And every time they win and they’re like, “Dad, how’d you know that?” Because we get trained, we’re not going to lose to a non-wrestler in a wrestling contest. It’s not going to happen. So you can get lucky, but it’s unlikely. So one, wrestling, now, that was from a long time ago, but at least the mechanics, right? Number two, I’ve gotten into about 30 actual street fights in my life. And you can say street fights not the same as MMA, of course, that’s true. Obviously true, right? But it’s not no experience, it’s some experience. And the most important part of a street fight is being able to take a punch to the face.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:41)
Knowing what it feels like to get punched in the face, yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(03:32:44)
So I’ve been punched in the face, I don’t know, dozens of times in my life. I used to start fights by saying, “I’ll let you take the first punch.” So I didn’t start the fights, they just started ’cause they punched me in the face. And then for Alex, the main thing, and also true for Rogan, is it’s about willpower. So if Joe has a 92% chance, in my opinion, of knocking me out or beating me, because he has the skill and he’s trained and he knows what he’s doing. So all the willpower in the world isn’t going to help you if you get kicked upside the head, right? But in the unlikely circumstances that I’ve worn him down, then I’m a little bit more in the ball game ’cause I got willpower. For Alex, he doesn’t have the willpower I have, okay? Because to me, the idea of losing to Alex Jones is unthinkable. I would do anything not to lose, anything.
Lex Fridman
(03:33:42)
Let me just say, so that’s beautiful. I love this. I would pay a lot of money to watch the two of you just even wrestle. But with Joe, I think I have to say, it’s like it 0.0001% chance, you have a chance before you even get to the mentality. And the other thing is, on the mentality side, one of the fascinating things about Joe is he’s actually a sweetheart in person, like this. But there’s something that takes over him when he competes.
Cenk Uygur
(03:34:13)
Brother, we’ve been around 22 years in the toughest industry in the world.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:17)
I understand, yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(03:34:19)
If you have any idea how hard it’s to run a 75 person company and make money online and survive after all the guys who took billions of dollars went down.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:28)
I hear you.
Cenk Uygur
(03:34:28)
Tremendous willpower. But overall, this is not the hill I’m dying on. Okay? Joe would win, I get it.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:37)
I think we’re all allowed one kind of blind spot, I suppose.
Cenk Uygur
(03:34:43)
So you don’t think a big guy that still is in good shape, that was a wrestler that’s been on a lot of street fights, you still think 0.0001?
Lex Fridman
(03:34:54)
It depends on the street fights. But yeah, 0.001. I just see technique-
Cenk Uygur
(03:34:57)
Okay, yeah. And it’s such a minute disagreement because, so take me out of it. So you take out the willpower part of blah, blah, blah. I think it’s one to 2%. Yeah, he could catch the guy on about and get lucky.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:08)
I think it’s because I’ve talked to… So I trained with a coach named John Donaher, and we talk about this a lot. And I think technique is the thing that also feeds the willpower. It actually builds up your confidence in the way that nothing else does in the more actionable way, because you won’t need that much willpower.
Cenk Uygur
(03:35:31)
No.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:32)
If the technique is backed, you don’t have to be a tough guy to win debates if you’re just fucking good at debates. So I think people just don’t understand the value in sport and especially in combat of technique.
Cenk Uygur
(03:35:46)
Now, a great irony is I actually totally agree with that. That’s why made a mention of the Physical 100. Technique’s going to win almost every time. We’re having a debate about whether it’s eight or one or 0.01, it’s either way, technique wins. We agree.

Propaganda

Lex Fridman
(03:36:02)
Okay, beautiful. One of the controversial things you’ve done, in the nineties as a student at UPenn, you publicly denied the Armenian Genocide, which is the mass murder of over a million Armenians in 1915 and ’16 in the Ottoman Empire. You have since then publicly and clearly changed your mind on this. Tell me the process you went through to change your mind.
Cenk Uygur
(03:36:34)
So when you’re a kid, you’re taught a whole bunch of things. That’s the software that we talked about earlier. So cultural software is media, family, friends, social media, et cetera. And so growing up in any tribe, whether it’s a religious tribe or an ethnic tribe, you are going to get indoctrinated into that tribe’s way of thinking. So you take a Turkish person who’s super progressive, loves Bernie, believes with all their heart and peace, and you tell them something about Kurds and they’ll say, “Oh no, not those guys. They’re terrible and evil and we have to do what we do to them.” You see, that’s the tribe taking over.

(03:37:13)
And so you tell any religious person what’s wrong with the other religions, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s totally true.” You get to their religion, tribe takes over, “No, how dare you. I’m offended.” So I grew up with Turkish propaganda. So I’ll tell you a couple of funny instances of it. When we were kids, we’d go to Turkish American Day Parade. I’m like 10 or 12 years old, it’s in the middle of New York because I grew up in Jersey. That’s why I got in all those fights.

(03:37:42)
And we would chant in Turkish, Turkey is the biggest country. There’s no other country that’s even big. And I was like, this is crazy. I’m like, “Dad, isn’t this crazy? America’s big, China’s big. Why are we chanting this nonsensical chant?” So that’s the beginning of beginning to realize your indoctrination. I’m in college and I read about some battle that the Ottoman Empire lost, and I’m like, that can’t be right. The Turks have only lost one war, World War I, right? And I was like, oh my God, I’m an idiot. I got taught that in third grade in Turkey. Of course, that’s not true. That’s ridiculously untrue. All those thoughts are in your head, you don’t even realize it. And so on the Armenian Genocide, I read the Turkish version, and the Turkish version has all of these as evidence. So it’s real in that it exists.

(03:38:29)
But here, I’ll give you a great example of it. I think it was Colonel Chesters, some random American military guy after World War I and he says about the Armenians after the mass march, the forced marches, he says, “They returned to the area fat and entirely unmassacred.” Okay? I’m like, Hey, that’s an American Colonel that’s saying that. So that’s obviously true. You see that it didn’t happen, or at least in the way that the Armenians say. Now as a grownup, I look at it and I go, are you kidding me? That guy’s obviously trying to get a contract with the Turkish government, right? Nobody returns from a forced march fat and entirely unmassacred, right? So that’s propaganda. And that one was so indoctrinated that it was tough to let go. So in at Penn, I write that op ed, et cetera, and then over the course of time… And so Anna and I disagree on things from time to time, and we’ve been co-hosting now for… She’s been at the Young Turks for 18 years and co-hosting for almost 18.

(03:39:34)
And so she’s Armenian. And by the way, I love America. Look, we came to America because we love this country, land of hope and opportunity. That’s part of why I fight so hard for the average American, for the American idea. So here’s a Turk and an Armenian doing a show together, and it becomes the number one online news show. That’s the beauty of America. So she’s telling me things and we’re having some on-air discussions about it, et cetera. And then it just dawned on me like, no, this too was obviously propaganda. So at that point, once you realize that, it becomes easier. That’s why I’m trying to unplug people from the matrix, because once you realize it’s propaganda, oh my God, it gets infinitely easier to start telling what’s true or not true.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:20)
So maybe by way of advice, how do you know when you’re deluded by propaganda? How do you know when you’re not plugged into the matrix, when you’re plugged into the matrix?
Cenk Uygur
(03:40:32)
You have to keep testing it against objective reality. They said something, did it happen or did it not happen? So here, here’s an easy one. Alex Jones for a long time, especially under Obama, kept saying. “They’re going to put us on FEMA camps. I tell you, they’re going to stuff us all in the FEMA camps, and they’re going to put us there, they’re going to let us out. I know it. I know for sure.” Nobody’s been in a FEMA camp. Obama left, there was no FEMA camps. So when I asked for the right wing conspiracy guys, “Guys, has any of their things ever come true? They always say all these crazy things that never, ever happened. So the third time it doesn’t happen, can you please start to wonder, maybe I’m on the wrong side.” But that’s not just for right-wingers, that’s easy, right?

(03:41:18)
But it’s also for mainstream media, and that’s where I get the biggest pushback. Because my tribe is what the kids call PMC, professional management class, okay? Their careers, you go up the ladder, you have this route, that route, et cetera. And so for that class, the status quo is pretty good. So when Biden gives you 15% change, you’re like, what else do y’all want? That’s amazing. He just course corrected a little bit, now it’s perfect. But for the average guy who needs a hundred percent change, not 15, they look at it and they go, what the fuck? He only did 15% and everybody’s declaring him a hero. So those are the hardest guys to get through on. And those are the guys who get most mad at me, not the right-wingers, the establishment. That’s why I’m nails on a chalkboard for them because I’m on the left, but I call out their crap and their marketing and propaganda.

(03:42:18)
And that’s why I mentioned earlier, he might not even consciously know it, but no one dislikes Bernie more than Obama because if Bernie got into office, he’d embarrass Obama by doing a lot more change. And Obama told us the change wasn’t possible. He could only get 5%. And so if Bernie does 50%, then Obama’s humiliated and his record and his legacy is ruined. So I don’t think he makes that conscious decision, but his subconscious, it’s a way of thinking. So if you’re watching Morning Joe, test them, he says something that Biden is for $15 minimum wage. When Biden takes it out of the bill, know that Morning Joe was lying to you. He says that Biden said he was for the public option, but he never even proposed it. When Morning Joe still defends him and you see an objective reality, Biden didn’t actually propose that bill, you know that they’re lying to. Test it against objective reality. Did it actually happen or didn’t it?

Conspiracy theories

Lex Fridman
(03:43:22)
I mean, there’s some of that [inaudible 03:43:23], some of the conspiracy theories. Do you think there’s some value to the conspiracy theories that come from the right, but actually more so come from the anti-establishment? For me, there’s a lot that raise a bit of a question. A lot of them could probably be explained by corporatism and the military industrial complex. But there’s also a lot of them could be explained by creepiness and shadiness in human nature. Epstein is an example of that. There’s a lot of ways to explain Epstein, including the basic creepiness of human nature.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:00)
… including the basic creepiness of human nature. But there could be bigger explanations underlying it.
Cenk Uygur
(03:44:07)
Sometimes when we have long, thoughtful conversations like this, I’ll say it depends a lot.
Lex Fridman
(03:44:13)
Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(03:44:13)
And then people get frustrated by that. But then, you’re frustrated by the world because it depends.

(03:44:18)
So, conspiracy theories. If you say, “Are they all right or are they all wrong? Are any of the questions wrong?” It depends what is the conspiracy theory. If it’s some of the absurd ones we’ve mentioned here, God, it’s easily disproven. On the other hand, there’s a conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination. Which one is the conspiracy theory? That Lee Harvey Oswald, from 12 miles away, shot a magic bullet that went like this and hit 13 people, and came out Kennedy’s brain? Or that the government might have wanted to cover up an assassination of the President for whatever reason? Come on.

(03:45:03)
Now, I’m of course doing hyperbole. The JFK enthusiasts will be like, “No, it didn’t. The bullet actually go like this. It didn’t actually hit 13 people.” I’m kidding, guys. But in terms of is that conspiracy theory real, that JFK was not just killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Almost certainly. If you read real books, with tons of information, the most likely culprit is Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA that he hired. Back when there was a deep state, there actually was a deep state. They did coups against other countries’ leaders all the time. But they tell us, “Oh, they wouldn’t do it to our own leader.” But remember, it’s not the CIA. He’d left the CIA already.

(03:45:49)
I don’t know if it was ex-CIA guys, I don’t know if the Mob was involved. I don’t know any of those details. But I know some things that are obvious. That bullet didn’t magically hit him from over there. Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Jack Ruby was a mobster who, on the record, had said that he hated Kennedy. All of a sudden, he became patriotic overnight and shot the assailant, who was unguarded. Maybe. Less likely.

(03:46:15)
Okay, so let’s speed up though. My point is, yeah, some conspiracy theories could be true. It depends on objective reality. You get to Epstein. Again, I always do it ahead of time because I want you to test me and see does it match objective reality. I said the minute that it happened, you’ll have your answer based on whether the video in the hallway worked or not. If the video in the hallway works, they’ll be just as many conspiracy theories, but it’ll actually show actually who went in and didn’t go in. But if the video in the hallway doesn’t work, they definitely killed him.

(03:46:55)
A couple of days later, “Oh, the video in that particular hallway happened to not be working. The guards both happened to be on break at the same time. And the most notorious pedophile criminal in the country happened to be unguarded. That is the one time he decided to hang himself.” Listen, man. The only way you believe that is you got mainstream media to get you to believe that the minute the phrase conspiracy theory is mentioned, you have to shut off your mind. And you have to believe whatever the media tells you.
Lex Fridman
(03:47:31)
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting, you just mentioned. Do you think the CIA has not grown in power?
Cenk Uygur
(03:47:37)
No, no. They’ve greatly waned in power.
Lex Fridman
(03:47:40)
Interesting.
Cenk Uygur
(03:47:41)
In the old days, the CIA has an actual deep state, because the country was run by a bunch of families. You go to Yale, the Skull and Bones thing was real. You go to Harvard. Look at the Dulles family. Half of them go into government, the other half go into banking. Why are the Central American countries called the Banana Republics? Because we, America, did a coup against one of those countries because a banana company wanted it. Because they’re like, “How dare you charge whatever you want for your natural resource? We American corporations have the right to all of your natural resources at the lowest possible rate.”

(03:48:21)
“Allen, get rid of these guys.” And Allen would. And sometimes, they would go extra judicial, like potentially with the JFK assassination. By the way, if you pissed off J. Edgar Hoover, he was just going to put a bullet in your head and we were done with you. Fred Hampton, among others.

(03:48:46)
But nowadays, that’s not how the world works. A small number of families cannot control a country and an economy this size. New people pop up. Well, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t part of those families. Elon Musk wasn’t part of those families. Neither was Bezos. For you to believe those conspiracy theories, you have to think that Bezos and Musk, et cetera, were like, “Oh, you guys are still running the country? No problem. Go ahead.” They’re not going to do that.

(03:49:17)
Now we’ve gotten into a system where it’s the invisible hand of the market that runs the country. But unfortunately, it’s only for the powerful. It’s more of a machine. This is super interesting and ties to what we were talking about earlier, Lex. Which is that they don’t do political assassinations anymore. They do character assassinations. That’s the needle in the haystack thing.

(03:49:42)
If you do an assassination of someone, you build up their status. They become a martyr and you build up their cause. But if you do a character assassination, you smear the cause with the person. The cause goes down, not up. The market found a better way of getting rid of agitating outsiders.
Lex Fridman
(03:50:03)
Well, that’s one of the conspiracy theories with Epstein, is that he’s a front for, I guess CIA, and they’re getting data on people, like creepy pedophile kind of data. They can use to then threaten character assassination, to in this way, put the people in their pockets.
Cenk Uygur
(03:50:29)
Look, we’re not in on it so there’s no way we can know. But I just always go back to logic. He has dirt on a lot of powerful people. He dies in a way that is an obvious murder and not a suicide. Then you begin to think, “Who would have enough power to be able to get away with that crime?” That is a very limited number of either people or governments.
Lex Fridman
(03:50:59)
Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(03:51:01)
That’s probably your answer without knowing anything that’s internal.
Lex Fridman
(03:51:06)
Yeah. It’s crazy we don’t have the list of clients.

Israel-Palestine


(03:51:09)
What is the best way to achieve stability and peace in Israel and Palestine in the current situation and in the next five, 10 years?
Cenk Uygur
(03:51:20)
If people wanted to get to peace, it’s relatively straightforward. There’s already a deal that was negotiated. The Saudis agreed to it, and they’re an important player in this game. The Palestinians and the Israelis have initially agreed to it. Even Hamas has kind of agreed to it. That deal exists and is just waiting on the shelf to get done.

(03:51:41)
It’s pretty straightforward. Israel gets out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but they keep X percentage. It used to be 4%, then it went up to 6%. It’s probably a higher number now. The Palestinians keep losing leverage as we go.

(03:51:56)
You remember how hard it was to get a deal on Ukraine, I thought. That’s a very complicated one. Israel is much more straightforward. You get the hell out of the occupied territories, keep some of the … Those settlements are the worst thing. They’re a cancer. But anyway, I don’t know. But there is an answer to the settlements, and it’s probably that Israel keeps them, even though that drives me crazy. No right of return for Palestinians. There will be symbolic right of return for a couple of families. Palestinians go, “Oh, no way.” Guys, you have no leverage. Take the deal. Take the deal. You’re not going to get a right of return. Israel is not going to allow millions of Palestinians to go and vote in Israel. It would end the Jewish State. You have to get to a practical solution. Honestly, the number one person blocking it now is Netanyahu. That’s obvious. That doesn’t take a lot of courage to say that. He says publicly, “I don’t want a Palestinian State. I’m against a two-state solution.” He’s been monstrous. He’s one of the worst terrorists of my lifetime. That’s easy.

(03:53:00)
The right wing of Israel has lot its mind. The Smotrich, and the Ben-Gvirs openly talking about ethnic cleansing, and driving them into other Arab countries. It’s the definition of ethnic cleansing. I know that the Arabs are going to take the deal. Saudi Arabia cannot wait to take the deal because they just want to get business going.
Lex Fridman
(03:53:25)
Do you think Hamas takes the deal?
Cenk Uygur
(03:53:28)
I have a solution where you don’t need Hamas. But yes, Hamas would definitely take the deal. Hamas already publicly said that they would even get rid of that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.

(03:53:39)
We hear so much propaganda in American media. It’s maddening. This idea that you don’t deal with Hamas is so dumb. The reason it’s dumb is you don’t negotiate with your friends, you negotiate with your enemies. “Well, I don’t want to negotiate with them. I don’t like them.” Well then, you’re not going to get to peace. But still, there is a path that doesn’t include Hamas. Make a deal with Fatah, that runs the West Bank. Right now, Fatah went into Gaza Strip, they wouldn’t be able to manage it because they don’t have enough credibility. They’re mainly seen as in cahoots with occupiers, whereas Hamas is hardcore and fighting against the occupiers. But if Fatah delivers not only a peace deal, but a Palestinian state, then they come in as heroes. You make the deal with them, you let them run the Gaza Strip, and you empower them to drive out Hamas. That way, they do your dirty work for you, in a sense.

(03:54:42)
But good, because Hamas is a terrorist organization. They’re not helpful. Especially if the Palestinians get a state, the violence has to stop immediately. That’s the whole point. The trade is you get a state, Israel gets safety and peace.
Lex Fridman
(03:54:57)
So no more rockets at Israel?
Cenk Uygur
(03:54:59)
No more rockets. If you do any other rockets, and Israel does the barbaric thing they just did, even I would say, “Hey, brother, we had a peace deal.” If you violate a peace deal and you do a bomb, they’re going to do a bomb and they’re bomb is much larger.

(03:55:18)
By the way, can it work? It already has worked. Israel already did it with Egypt. Egypt was 100 times Hamas. Egypt gathered all the Arab armies and actually physically invaded Israel when Israel could lose. They did it several times.

(03:55:36)
Lex, at the time, not just the right, the war hawks, but most people thought, “There’s no way Egypt will keep that peace deal. Oh, they’re suckers. We’re giving them the Sinai Peninsula back. Then they’re just going to keep bombing and attacking us.” There hasn’t been a single bomb from Egypt since the peace deal. Peace deals work. War gets you more war. Peace deals get you peace.

(03:56:04)
This is true of all of life. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you’re saying, “Well, I’m not positive that a peace deal is going to be perfect. 12 more rockets might be fired.” Well, brother, what do we have now? We have endless rockets now. If Israel is supposed to be a safe haven for Jews, and I get it, and I want it. Then become a safe haven. The way that you’re a safe haven is stop the occupation. It’s not complicated.

(03:56:38)
Let’s be honest. The reason the right wing government of Israel is not stopping the occupation is because they want to take more and more land. They have, throughout time, taken way more of the West Bank than they had originally. Now Netanyahu is saying, “I want a corridor in the middle of Gaza. I want a corridor at the border of Egypt.” Now we’re back to occupying Gaza physically, let alone through power, et cetera.
Lex Fridman
(03:57:07)
Bibi has to go.
Cenk Uygur
(03:57:09)
Definitely.
Lex Fridman
(03:57:10)
What’s the role of US in making a peace deal like that happen?
Cenk Uygur
(03:57:17)
It’s going to sound outlandish, but I can get you a ceasefire almost overnight if Bibi’s gone. Because the Israeli negotiators have said publicly … Not publicly, it got leaked and it was in the Israeli press. “You have to give us a little bit of wiggle room. If you don’t give us a little bit of wiggle room, obviously they’re not going to do the deal.” He’s like, “I know.” That’s why he’s not giving them the wiggle room.

(03:57:43)
Don’t ask for land in Gaza. Get the hell out of Gaza. You ceasefire. That’s the easy part. The hard part is the occupation, ending the occupation. Even that, I can get it to you in two months, as long as Israel actually wants a deal. Go to an election, get rid of Netanyahu. Put in Benny Gantz. Is Benny Gantz an angel? No. He’s the one that ordered all the bombings of Gaza to begin with.

(03:58:11)
Look, Benny Gantz has got massive war crimes on his record, so don’t worry, he’s not a softie. But he’s not my favorite guy in the world, to say the least. But Benny Gantz can do a peace deal if he wants to.

(03:58:26)
Look, only one group of people can actually settle this. Well, there’s actually two groups of people. One is the Israeli population. You vote in someone who wants to do a peace deal, you’ll get a peace deal. Number two is the American President. If I’m the American President … I’m saying in a hypothetical. Or any American President that actually wants to get a peace deal done. You just say, “I’m going to cut the funding.” Israel will do the deal immediately. They don’t say they want to cut the funding, because APAC gives them $100 million. It’s not complicated. Not 1% complicated.
Lex Fridman
(03:59:00)
Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(03:59:01)
Lex, tell me this. If the US President said, “I’m going to cut the funding,” do you think that it might have a giant problem for Netanyahu, might it hurt his government, might they have to go to an election? Would the Israeli politicians, let alone the population, begin to really, really worry that they’re going to lose an enormous source of funding and weapons?
Lex Fridman
(03:59:22)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Cenk Uygur
(03:59:23)
Why wouldn’t we use our leverage? It’s crazy not to use our leverage.
Lex Fridman
(03:59:28)
Yeah. This is where we go back to this deal man of Trump. It feels like he’s the only one crazy enough to use that leverage.
Cenk Uygur
(03:59:38)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(03:59:39)
By crazy, I mean in the good kind of sense. Bold enough, not giving a shit about convention, not giving a shit about pressures, and money, and influence, and all that kind of stuff.
Cenk Uygur
(03:59:48)
Yes, but with the biggest asterisk in the history of the world. Which is 12% chance he does that, and that’s great. But a huge chance he does the opposite and he goes … Let’s call it 80 again. 80%, “Oh, yeah, Miriam wanted me to give the West Bank to Israel, so you have it, guys, now. You can just occupy the whole thing forever.” A giant war. “Oh, yeah, I’m going to prove how tough I am. I going to nuke Iran.” Oh, no! What are you doing? What are you doing?

(04:00:18)
Trump is a massive risk. He’s an enormous amount of risk. If you were running a company and not a country, would you hire Trump as your CEO? Everyone watching just screamed inside their heads, “No!” You would never take that kind of risk with your company. You got an 80% chance the guy’s going to blow up the company. No way, no way. You know it, too. Especially if you’re a business man, you know you’re not going to hire that loose cannon to run your company. It’s unacceptable risk.

(04:00:48)
But you’re not wrong, we talked about it earlier. But as part of that risk, there’s a sliver in there that he could accidentally do the right thing.

Hope

Lex Fridman
(04:00:56)
We talked a lot about hope in this conversation. Zooming out, what gives you hope about the future of this whole thing? Of humanity, not just the United States. Of us humans on Earth.
Cenk Uygur
(04:01:07)
Why am I center left and not center right? It gets to that question. You look at the polling, not just here in America, but in almost any country, and it almost always breaks out to two-thirds to one-third. Two-thirds of the people say, “Let’s be empathetic. Let’s share. Let’s do equality, justice. Let’s be fair.” One-third goes, “No. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.” That’s just the nature of humanity.

(04:01:37)
Usually, the same third goes, “No change.” Another two-thirds go, “Well, some change.” Because if you don’t do any change, you’re never going to get to the right answer. For the wisdom of the crowd to work, for free markets to work, for everything to work, you have to keep changing because the times change, and the culture changes, and the situation changes. That why there’s amendments in the Constitution, because you need to be able to change the document from time to time. Be careful with it. But you need to allow for an avenue for change.

(04:02:11)
Now why does the one-third keep winning in so many different places? Because they have more money and power. By the way, if you’re more selfish, you’re more likely to get more money and power. I wish that weren’t the case, but it is. These are not blanket rules, they’re on average. That third winds up winning in so many circumstances.

(04:02:34)
But the bottom line is, we are a species that requires consent. I’m a stone-cold atheist. I don’t think we’re kind of like apes, I think we are apes. All the scientists out there are going, “Well, of course we are.” Everyone else is going, “That’s crazy.” When you look at it as a species, different species react in different ways. Snakes have no empathy because it’s not in their DNA. That’s why we have a sense of what a snake does. The good news is, for higher level apes like us, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, we all roughly want consent.

(04:03:21)
A chimpanzee, for example, who has a violent reputation and they are violent, and unfortunately we’re pretty close to them. But what people don’t know is a leader doesn’t win through violence, especially for bonobos. They win by picking lice off of other chimpanzees, by going and doing favors. Going to do a hunt, getting food, and giving it to someone else. Because what they’re gathering is the consent of the governed. That’s how you become the alpha. You don’t do it through physical dominance, you do it through consent. That’s how we’re hardwired, that’s in our DNA.

(04:03:57)
That two-thirds, in the long run, will win. We will have empathy, we will have change. That’s the hope that we’re all looking for.
Lex Fridman
(04:04:08)
Hope has got the numbers, it seems like.
Cenk Uygur
(04:04:12)
Yeah. In fact, one more thing, Lex.
Lex Fridman
(04:04:14)
Yes.
Cenk Uygur
(04:04:15)
Look at history. Hope and change always win. Again, conservatives don’t catch feelings. There is a need conservatives, because you have to balance things out. If you just had even that wonderful two- thirds, that still wouldn’t be the ideal system. You need a Winston Churchill if you’re in the middle of World War II. You need someone to say regulating six inspections of the elevators is too many. You need that balance, and conservatives have a role, and it’s a really important role.

(04:04:46)
But having said that, they’re assigned to losing throughout history because they’re fighting on losing ground. A conservative says, “No change, but the world is constantly changing so they’re destined to lose. That’s why the Founding Fathers went against the British Monarchy. That’s why the Civil Rights movement won. They didn’t win overnight. It took them 100 years to get equal rights, let alone past slavery. We won on women’s rights, we won on gay rights. We keep winning. But every snapshot in time makes it feel like we’re losing. There’s a bad guy in charge. We are living under corporate rule, et cetera. But in the long tide of history, change always wins.

(04:05:32)
The empathetic, generally speaking left wing … But again, don’t worry about the titles. People get obsessed with the labels. The two-thirds that’s empathetic, that includes a lot of right wingers. You win at the end in history every single time. We fight forward. We’re tough when we need to be. We need that willpower to win any fight. But we’re civil and respectful to the other side because they are us.

(04:06:02)
Progressives, all the time, we say, “Look …” This was the ending of my book. Which is for conservatives, you have a lot of empathy for inside the wagons. Conservatives are great to their family, generally speaking. To their community, to their church, to anyone that’s inside the wagons. But they set up electric fences and barbed wire around their wagons. If you’re on the outside, you’re the others and you’re going to get electrified. It’s constantly. I like to think the left wing has wider wagons. We view the world as more us and not you.

(04:06:43)
The good news of that is, if we win, we’re not going to do Medicare for only the left. We’re going to Medicare for all. You’re all going to get universal healthcare. We’re going to do higher wages for all. The right wing is not going to be left out. Lex, I’m going to tell you a fun story. It’s about my family. I’m sure that parts of it are apocryphal, because it’s from 500 years ago. But it gives you a sense of the old Mark Twain quote, if it’s really Mark Twain’s. Of, “Change happens really gradually, and then all of a sudden.” My mom’s last name in Turkish is Yavaşça, it means slowly. It’s a weird name, even in Turkish.

(04:07:34)
One day, we’re walking past a mosque in Istanbul when I’m a kid. It says on the mosque, “Yavaşça.” We’re like, “What is this?” It’s a small, little mosque. We go inside. My dad starts the Imam questions. He says, “Why is the mosque named that?” He said, “You don’t know?” Because my dad said, “My wife’s last name is Yavaşça.” He’s like, “Oh my God.” He’s like, “Your ancestor was the Admiral of the Ottoman Navy when they conquered Constantinople.”

(04:08:13)
Grandpa, from 5, 600 years ago, came up with the idea. You can’t ever conquer Constantinople because there’s a giant chain underneath the Bosphorus. All the ships get stuck on the chain, there’s cannons on both sides. Half the ancient navies in the world are at the bottom of the Bosphorus. It hasn’t been conquered in over 1000 years, nobody thinks it can be conquered. Grandpa comes up with the idea of, “Why don’t we build giant wooden planks over land and grease them? And pass our fleet over land, onto the other side.” Everybody goes, because whenever anybody proposed a new idea, no matter how logical it is, they go, “Oh, that’s impossible. No way it’s going to work. Oh, you’re crazy. This is an unconquerable city. What are you guys even doing?”

(04:08:54)
Every day, Mehmed the Conqueror comes up to Grandpa and says, “All right. How’s your plan to do this project going?” Grandpa says, “Slowly.” He names him Commander Slowly.
Lex Fridman
(04:09:08)
Yeah.
Cenk Uygur
(04:09:09)
One night, after the whole thing’s done. They had passed the entire Ottoman fleet over the land. Wind up in the middle of the Bosphorus, and the Holy Roman Empire concedes. They surrender. Because change happens really gradually, and then all of a sudden.
Lex Fridman
(04:09:27)
Good story. Well, Cenk, thank you for fighting for that change for many years now. For over two decades now. Thank you for talking today.
Cenk Uygur
(04:09:39)
Appreciate it, Lex. Thank you for having the conversation.
Lex Fridman
(04:09:42)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cenk Uyhgur. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

(04:09:48)
Now let me leave you with some words from Hannah Arendt. “Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means. Namely, through the state and a machinery of violence. Thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in the apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”

(04:10:15)
Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #440 with Pieter Levels.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Pieter Levels
(00:00:00)
So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos, and it was … Stable Diffusion by itself is not doing that well. The faces look all mangled, and it doesn’t have enough resolution or something to do that well. But I started seeing these base models, these fine-tuned models, and people would train on porn, and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense, body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, there’s still core of porn there, of naked people. So I need to prompt out, and everybody needs to do this with AI startups, with imaging, you need to prompt out the naked stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:36)
You have to keep reminding the model, “You need to put clothes on the thing.”
Pieter Levels
(00:00:39)
Yeah. “Don’t put naked,” because it’s very risky. I have Google Vision that checks every photo before it’s shown to the user to check for NSFW.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:45)
Like a nipple detector? Oh, an NSFW detector.
Pieter Levels
(00:00:48)
Because the journalist gets very angry.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:52)
The following is a conversation with Pieter Levels, also known on X as levelsio. He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programed shipped and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful. In most cases, he did it all by himself while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities, programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch, using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP and SQLight. He builds and ships quickly, and improves on the fly, all in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures, with a raw honesty of a true indie hacker.

(00:01:40)
Pieter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people. This was an honor and a pleasure for me. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Pieter Levels.

Startup philosophy

Lex Fridman
(00:02:03)
You’ve launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most failed, but some succeeded. What’s your philosophy behind building the startups that you did?
Pieter Levels
(00:02:14)
I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups, because most people in startups, they build a company and they raise money and they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money. And I don’t really raise money. I don’t use VC funding, I do everything myself. I’m a designer, I’m the developer, I make everything, I make the logo. So for me, I’m much more scrappy. And because I don’t have funding, I need to go fast. I need to make things fast to see if an idea works. I have an idea in my mind and I build it like a mini startup, and I launch it very quickly, within two weeks or something, of building it. And I check if there’s demand and if people actually sign up and not just sign up, but if people actually pay money. They need to take out their credit cards, pay me money, and then I can see if the idea is validated. And most ideas don’t work, as you say, most fail.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:05)
So there’s this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that works, launch it, see if people like it, improving it really, really quickly to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that. That whole rapid process is how you think of-
Pieter Levels
(00:03:22)
Yeah. I think it’s very rapid. If I compare it to, for example, Google or big tech companies, especially Google right now is struggling. They made transformers, they invented all the AI stuff years ago and they never really shipped. They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it. And it’s because these big organizations, it can make you very slow. So being alone by myself on my laptop, in my underwear in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast and I don’t need to ask legal for, “Oh, can you vouch for this?” I can just go and ship.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:02)
Do you always code in your underwear? Your profile picture, you’re slouching on a couch in your underwear, chilling on a laptop.
Pieter Levels
(00:04:10)
No, but I do wear shorts a lot and I usually just wear shorts and no T-shirt, because I’m always too hot. I’m always overheating.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:16)
Thank you for showing up not just in your underwear but wearing shorts.
Pieter Levels
(00:04:20)
I still wearing this for you, but …
Lex Fridman
(00:04:21)
Thank you. Thank you for dressing up.
Pieter Levels
(00:04:23)
I think it’s because since I go to the gym, I’m always too hot.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:26)
What’s your favorite exercise in the gym?
Pieter Levels
(00:04:28)
Man, overhead press.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:29)
Overhead press, like shoulder press?
Pieter Levels
(00:04:30)
Yeah. But it feels good because you’re doing … You win. Because what is it? I do 60 kilos, so it’s 120 pounds or something. It’s my only thing I can do well in the gym. And you stand like this and you’re like, “I did it.” Like a winner pose.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:44)
It’s a victory thing.
Pieter Levels
(00:04:45)
A victory pose. I do bench press, squats, dead lifts.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:49)
Hence the mug, “Talking to my therapist,” and it’s a deadlift.
Pieter Levels
(00:04:53)
Yeah. Because it acts like therapy for me.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:55)
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Pieter Levels
(00:04:55)
Which is controversial to say. If I say this on Twitter, people get angry.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:59)
Physical hardship is a kind of therapy. I just rewatched Happy People a Year in the Taiga, that Warner Herzog film where they document people that are doing trapping, they’re essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round. And there’s a deep happiness to their way of life because they’re so busy in it, in nature. There’s something about that physical toil.
Pieter Levels
(00:05:25)
Yeah, my dad taught me that. My dad always did … there was construction in the house. He was always renovating the house. He breaks through one room and then he goes to the next room and he’s just going in a circle around the house for the last 40 years. But so he’s always doing construction in the house and it’s his hobby. And he taught me, when I’m depressed for something, he says, “Get a big mountain of sand or something from construction, and just get a shovel and bring it to the other side and just do physical labor, do hard work, and do something, Set a goal, do something.” And I did that with startups too.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:02)
Yeah, construction is not about the destination, man. It’s about the journey. Sometimes I wonder, people who are always remodeling their house, is it really about the remodeling or is it-
Pieter Levels
(00:06:03)
No, no. It’s not.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:12)
Is it about the project-
Pieter Levels
(00:06:13)
It’s a journey.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:13)
The puzzle of it.
Pieter Levels
(00:06:14)
No, he doesn’t care about the results. Well, he shows me, he’s like, “It’s amazing.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s amazing.” But then he wants to go to the next room. But I think it’s very metaphorical for work, because I also … I never stop work. I go to the next website or I make a new one or I make a new startup. So I’m always … It gives you something to wake up in the morning and have coffee and kiss your girlfriend and then you have a goal, “Today I’m going to fix this feature,” or “Today I’m going to fix this bug,” or something. “I’m going to do something.” You have something to wake up to. And I think maybe especially as a man, also women, but you need a hard work. You need an endeavor, I think.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:52)
How much of the building that you do is about money? How much is it about just a deep internal happiness?
Pieter Levels
(00:06:59)
It’s really about fun, because I was doing it when I didn’t make money. That’s the point. So I was always coding, I was making music. I made electronic music, drum and bass music 20 years ago, and I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is a meaningful work that’s so important, it’s so fun. It’s so fun to have a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:20)
But the interesting thing is you built a lot of successful products and you never really wanted to take it to that level where you scale real big and sell it to a company or something like this.
Pieter Levels
(00:07:32)
Yeah. The problem is I don’t dictate that. If more people start using, if millions of people suddenly start using it and it becomes big, I’m not going to say, “Oh, stop signing up to my website and paying me money.” But I never raised funding for it. And I think because I don’t like the stressful life that comes with it. I have a lot of founder friends and they tell me secretly, with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and stuff, and they tell me, “Next time, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it like you, because it’s more fun, it’s more indie, it’s more chill, it’s more creative.” They don’t like this. They don’t like to be manager, where you become a CEO, you become a manager. And I think a lot of people that start startups, when they become a CEO, they don’t like that job actually, but they can’t really exit it, but they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, doing something creative.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:24)
Yeah. But it’s interesting how people are pulled towards that, to scale, to go really big. And you don’t have that honest reflection with yourself, what actually makes you happy? Because for a lot of great engineers, what makes them happy is the building, the “individual contributor,” where you’re actually still coding or you’re actually still building, and they let go of that and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have a impact at scale, if you truly believe in a thing you’re doing.
Pieter Levels
(00:08:55)
Look at Elon, he’s doing things million times bigger than me, and would I want to do that? I don’t know, you cannot really choose these things, but I really respect that. I think Elon’s very different from VC founders. VC start … it’s software … There’s a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There’s a lot of dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think. And I never have concrete evidence about it, but your gut tells you something’s going on with companies getting sold to friends and VCs and then they do reciprocity, and there’s shady financial dealings. With Elon, there’s not. He’s just raising money from investors and he’s actually building stuff. He needs the money to build stuff, hardware stuff. And that I really respect.

Low points

Lex Fridman
(00:09:34)
You said that there’s been a few low points in your life, you’ve been depressed and building is one of the ways you get out of that. But can you talk to that? Can you take me to that place? That time when you were at a low point?
Pieter Levels
(00:09:47)
So I was in Holland and I graduated university and I didn’t want to get a normal job and I was making some money with YouTube because I had this music career and I uploaded my music to YouTube and YouTube started paying me with AdSense, $2,000 a month, $2,000 a month. And all my friends got normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people in university hang out, you chill at each other’s houses, you go party. But when people get jobs, they only party in the weekend and they don’t hang anymore in the week because you need to be at the office. And I was like, “This is not for me. I want to do something else.” And I was started getting this, I think it’s Saturn return. When you turn 27, it’s some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you’re born.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:28)
I’m learning so many things.
Pieter Levels
(00:10:29)
It’s some astrology thing.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:31)
So many truly special artists died when they were 27.
Pieter Levels
(00:10:35)
Exactly. There’s something with 27, man. And it was for me. I started going crazy, because I didn’t really see my future in Holland, buying a house, going living in the suburbs and stuff. So I flew out. I went to Asia, started digital nomading, and did that for a year. And then that made me feel even worse because I was alone in hotel rooms looking at the ceiling, “What am I doing with my life? This is …” I was working on startups and stuff, and YouTube, but I was like, “What is the future here? Is this something …” while my friends in Holland were doing really well and with a normal life, so it was getting very depressed and I’m a outcast.

(00:11:12)
My money was shrinking, I wasn’t making money anymore, a lot. I was making $500 a month or something. And I was looking at the ceiling thinking, “Now I’m 27, I’m a loser.” And that’s the moment when I started building startups. And it was because my dad said, “If you’re depressed, you need to get sand, get a shovel, start shoveling, doing something. You can’t just sit still.” Which is an interesting way to deal with depression. It’s not, “Oh, let’s talk about it,” it’s more, “Let’s go do something.” And I started doing a project called 12 Startups in 12 months where every month I would make something like a project and I would launch it with Stripe so people could pay for it.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:49)
So the basic format is, try to build a thing, put it online, and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it.
Pieter Levels
(00:11:55)
Yeah. I’m not sponsored by Stripe, but add a Stripe Checkout button.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:58)
Is that still the easiest way to just pay for stuff, stripe?
Pieter Levels
(00:12:02)
100%. I think so.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:03)
It’s a cool company. They just made it so easy, you can just click and …
Pieter Levels
(00:12:06)
Yeah. And they’re really nice. The CEO, Patrick, is really nice.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:09)
Behind the scenes, it must be difficult to actually make that happen. Because that used to be a huge problem-
Pieter Levels
(00:12:15)
Merchant …
Lex Fridman
(00:12:16)
Just adding a thing, a button where you can pay for a thing.
Pieter Levels
(00:12:20)
Dude. Dude, I know this because when I was-
Lex Fridman
(00:12:22)
Trustworthy.
Pieter Levels
(00:12:23)
… nine years old, I was making websites also and I tried to open a merchant account. It was before Stripe, you would have … I think it was called Worldpay. So I had to fill out all these forms and then I had to fax them to America from Holland with my dad’s fax. And my dad, it was in my dad’s name, and he just signed for this. And he started reading these terms and conditions, which is, he’s liable for $100 million in damages. And he was like, “I don’t want to sign this.” I’m like, “Dad, come on. I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet.” And he signed it and we faxed it to America, and I had merchant account, but then nobody paid for anything, so that was the problem. But it’s much easier now. You can sign up, you add some codes and…

12 startups in 12 months

Lex Fridman
(00:13:02)
So 12 startups in 12 months. Startup number one, what were you feeling? What were you … Sitting behind the computer, how much do you actually know about building stuff at that point?
Pieter Levels
(00:13:18)
I could code a little bit because I did the YouTube channel and I would make websites for the YouTube channel, it was called Panda Mix Show. And it was these electronic music mixes like dubstep or drum and bass or techno, house.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:29)
I saw one of them had Flash. Were you using Flash?
Pieter Levels
(00:13:32)
Yeah, my CD album was using Flash. I sold my CD.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:36)
Kids, Flash was a-
Pieter Levels
(00:13:38)
Flash was cool.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:38)
… software. This is the break, that-
Pieter Levels
(00:13:41)
Like grandpa, but Flash was cool.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:42)
Yeah. And there was … what was it called? Boy, I should remember this, ActionScript. There’s some kind of programming language.
Pieter Levels
(00:13:48)
Yeah, yeah. ActionScript. It was in Flash. Back then, that was the JavaScript.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:51)
The JavaScript, yeah. And I thought that’s supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet. I invested so many hours in learning that-
Pieter Levels
(00:13:51)
And Steve Jobs killed it.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:58)
Steve Jobs killed it.
Pieter Levels
(00:13:58)
Steve Jobs said, ” Flash Sucks, stop using it,” and everyone’s like, “Okay.”
Lex Fridman
(00:14:03)
That guy was right though, right?
Pieter Levels
(00:14:04)
Yeah, I don’t know. Well, it was a closed platform, I think, and-
Lex Fridman
(00:14:08)
Closed? You could just …
Pieter Levels
(00:14:09)
But this is ironic, because Apple, they’re not very open, but back then Steve was like, “This is closed, we should not use it, and it has security problems,” I think, which sounded like a cop-out, like he just wanted to say that to make it look bad. But Flash was cool.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:22)
Yeah, it was cool for a time. Listen, animated GIFs were cool for a time too. They came back in a different way, as a meme, though. I remember when GIFs were actually cool, not ironically cool. On the internet you would have a dancing rabbit or something like this, and that was really exciting.
Pieter Levels
(00:14:42)
You had the Lex homepage, everything was centered and you had Pieter’s homepage and the under construction GIF, which was a guy with a helmet and the lights, it was amazing.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:56)
And the banners. That’s how … Before Google AdSense you would have banners for advertising.
Pieter Levels
(00:15:00)
It was amazing.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:01)
And a lot of links to porn, I think. Or porny-type links.
Pieter Levels
(00:15:04)
I think that was where the merchant accounts … people would use for. People would make money a lot. The only money made on internet then was porn, or a lot of it.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:12)
Yeah, it was a dark place. It’s still a dark place, but there’s beauty in the darkness. Anyway, so you did some basic HTML …
Pieter Levels
(00:15:20)
Yeah. But I had to learn the actual coding, so this was good. It was a good idea to … every month launch a startup, so I could learn to code, learn basic stuff. But it was still very scrappy, which is on purpose, because I didn’t have time to spend a lot of … I had a month to do something, so I couldn’t spend more than a month and I was pretty strict about that. And I published it as a blog post. I think I put it on Hacker News and people would check, “Oh, did you actually …” I felt accountability because I put it public, that I actually had to do it.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:50)
Do you remember the first one you did?
Pieter Levels
(00:15:52)
I think it was Play My Inbox, because back then my friends, we would send cool … It was before Spotify, I think. 2013, we would send music to each other, YouTube links. “This is a cool song, this is a cool song.” And it was these giant email threads on Gmail and they were unnavigable. So I made an app that would log into your Gmail, get the emails and find ones with YouTube links, and then make a gallery of your songs, essentially Spotify. And my friends loved it.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:21)
Was it scraping it? What was it, an API?
Pieter Levels
(00:16:23)
No, it uses POP. POP or IMAP. It would actually check your email. So it had privacy concerns, because it would get all your emails to find YouTube links, but then I wouldn’t save anything. But that was fun. And that first product already would get press, it went on, I think, some tech media and stuff, and I was like, “This is cool.” It didn’t make money, there was no payment button, but it was actually people using it. I think tens of thousands of people used it.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:51)
That’s a great idea. I wonder why don’t we have that? Why don’t we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate information?
Pieter Levels
(00:17:01)
Yeah. You could tell Gmail, “Don’t give me all the emails, just give me the ones with YouTube links or something like that.”
Lex Fridman
(00:17:06)
There is a whole ecosystem of apps you can build on top of the Google, but people don’t really-
Pieter Levels
(00:17:12)
Never do this. I never see them-
Lex Fridman
(00:17:13)
They build … I’ve seen a few like Boomerang, there’s a few apps that are good, but I wonder what … Maybe it’s not easy to make money.
Pieter Levels
(00:17:22)
I think it’s hard to get people to pay for these extensions and plugins. Because it’s not a real app, so it’s not … people don’t value it. People value it, “Oh, a plugin should be free. When I want to use a plugin in Google Sheets or something, I’m not going to pay for it. It should be free,” which is … But if you go to a website and you actually … “Okay, I need this product, I’m going to pay for this because it’s a real product.” So even though it’s the same code in the back, it’s a plugin.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:44)
Yeah. You could do it through extensions, Chrome extensions from the browser side.
Pieter Levels
(00:17:49)
Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions? Barely anybody.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:52)
Nobody.
Pieter Levels
(00:17:52)
So that’s not a good place to make money, probably.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:54)
Yeah, that sucks.
Pieter Levels
(00:17:55)
Chrome extension should be a extension for your startup. You have a product, “Oh, we also have a Chrome extension.”
Lex Fridman
(00:18:01)
I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that, where you could pay for it easily … I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions, like improvements for social media.
Pieter Levels
(00:18:15)
Like GPTs.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:17)
GPTs, yeah.
Pieter Levels
(00:18:18)
These ChatGPTs, they’re going to charge money for it, now you get a rev share, I think, from Open AI, I made a lot of them also.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:24)
Why? We’ll talk about it. So let’s rewind back. It’s a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months. What’s it take to build a thing in 30 days? At that time, how hard was that?
Pieter Levels
(00:18:37)
I think the hard part is figuring out what you shouldn’t add, what you shouldn’t build, because you don’t have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to build the product, actually, because there needs to be something they pay for. Do you need to build a login system? Maybe no. Maybe you can build some scrappy login system. For photo AI, you sign up, you pay with Stripe Checkout and you get a login link. And when I started out, there was only a login link with a hash, and that’s just a static link, so it’s very easy to log in. It’s not so safe, what if you leak the link? And now I have real Google login, but that took a year. So keeping it very scrappy is very important to … because you don’t have time. You need to focus on what you can build fast.

(00:19:17)
So money, Stripe, build a product, build a landing page. You need to think about, “How are people going to find this?” So are you going to put it on Reddit or something? How are you going to put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer? If you say, “Hey, it is my new startup, you should use it,” no, nobody … It gets deleted. Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have, on a subreddit and you solve that problem, say, “What’s up, people. I made this thing that might solve your problem,” and maybe, “It’s free for now.” That could work. But you need to be very … Narrow it down, what you’re building.

Travelling and depression

Lex Fridman
(00:19:53)
Time is limited. Actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser, I still feel like a loser sometimes. Can you speak to that feeling, to that place of just feeling like a loser? Because I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now listening to this and feeling like a loser.
Pieter Levels
(00:20:18)
Okay. So I think it’s normal if you’re young that you feel like a loser, first of all.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:21)
Especially when you’re 27.
Pieter Levels
(00:20:23)
Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:24)
There’s a peak.
Pieter Levels
(00:20:26)
Yeah. Yeah. I think 27 is the peak. And so I would not kill yourselves, it’s very important. Just get through it. But because you have nothing, you have probably no money, you have no business, you have no job. Jordan Peterson said this. I saw it somewhere, “The reason people are depressed is because they have nothing. They don’t have a girlfriend, they don’t have or boyfriend, they don’t have …” You need stuff, or a family. You need things around you. You need to build a life for yourself. If you don’t build a life for yourself, you’ll be depressed. So if you’re alone in Asia in a hostel looking at the ceiling and you don’t have any money coming in, you don’t have a girlfriend, you don’t … of course you’re depressed. It’s logic. But back then, if you’re in the moment you think, “This is not logic, there’s something wrong with me.”

(00:21:04)
And also I think I started getting anxiety and I think I started going a little bit crazy where I think travel can make you insane. And I know this because I know that there’s digital nomads that … they kill themselves. And I haven’t checked the comparison with baseline people suicide rate, but I have a hunch, especially in the beginning when it was a very new thing 10 years ago, that it can be very psychologically taxing, and you’re alone a lot. Back then when you travel alone, there was no other digital moments back then, a lot. So you’re in a strange culture, you look different than everybody. I was in Asia, everybody’s really nice in Thailand, but you’re not part of the culture. You’re traveling around, you’re hopping from city to city. You don’t have a home anymore. You feel disrooted.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:51)
And you’re constantly an outcast in that you’re different from everybody else.
Pieter Levels
(00:21:55)
Yes, exactly. But people treat you … Like Thailand, people are so nice, but you still feel like a outcast. And then I think the digital nomads I met then were all … it was shady business. They were vigilantes, because it was a new thing. And one guy was selling illegal drugs. It was an American guy, was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans on this website, there were a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. There was a lot of shady things going on there. And they didn’t look like very balanced people. They didn’t look like people I wanted to hang with. So I also felt outcast from other foreigners in Thailand, other digital nomads. And I was like, “Man, I made a big mistake.” And then I went back to Holland and then I got even more depressed.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:32)
You said digital nomad. What is digital nomad? What is that way of life? What is the philosophy there? And the history of the movement?
Pieter Levels
(00:22:38)
I struck upon it on accident, because I was like, “I’m going to graduate university and then I need to get out of here. I’ll fly to Asia,” because I’d been before in Asia. I studied in Korea in 2009, study exchange. So I was like, “Asia is easy, Thailand’s easy. I’ll just go there, figure things out.” And it’s cheap. It’s very cheap. Chiang Mai, I would live for $150 per month rent for private room, pretty good. So I struck upon this on accident. I was like, “Okay, there’s other people on laptops working on their startup or working remotely.” Back then nobody worked remotely, but they worked on their businesses, and they would live in Columbia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali. They would live in more cheap places.

(00:23:16)
And it looked like a very adventurous life. You travel around, you build your business, there’s no pressure from your home society. You’re American, so you get pressure from American society telling you what to do, “You need to buy a house,” or “You need to do this stuff.” I had this in Holland too. And you can get away from this pressure, and you can feel like you’re free. There’s nobody telling you what to do. But that’s also why you start feeling like you go crazy, because you are free, you’re disattached from anything and anybody. You’re disattached from your culture, you’re disattached from the culture you’re probably in because you’re staying very short.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:49)
I think Franz Kafka said, “I’m free, therefore I’m lost.”
Pieter Levels
(00:23:53)
Man, that’s so true. That’s exactly the point. And freedom, it’s the definition of no constraints. Anything is possible, you can go anywhere. And everybody’s like, “Oh, that must be super nice. Freedom, you must be very happy.” And it’s the opposite. I don’t think that makes you happy. I think constraints probably make you happy. And that’s a big lesson I learned then.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:14)
But what were they making for money? So you’re saying they were doing shady stuff at that time?
Pieter Levels
(00:24:19)
For me, because I was more like a developer, I wanted to make startups and there was drugs being shipped to America, diet pills and stuff. Non FDA-approved stuff. We would sit with beers and they would laugh about all the dodgy shit they’re doing.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:37)
Ah, that part of … Okay, I see.
Pieter Levels
(00:24:38)
That kind of vibe, sleazy e-com vibe. I’m not saying all e-com is sleazy, but you know this vibe.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:44)
It could be a vibe. And your vibe was more-
Pieter Levels
(00:24:47)
Make cool stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:48)
“Build cool shit that’s ethical.”
Pieter Levels
(00:24:50)
Yeah. You know the guys with sports cars in Dubai, these people, e-com, “Bro, you got to drop ship and you’ll make $100 million a month,” there was people with this shit, and I was like, “This is not my people.”
Lex Fridman
(00:25:01)
Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with any of those individual components-
Pieter Levels
(00:25:04)
No, no judgment.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:05)
… but there’s a foundation that’s not quite ethical. What is that? I don’t know what that is, but I get you.
Pieter Levels
(00:25:12)
No, I don’t want to judge. I know that for me it wasn’t my world, it wasn’t my subculture. I wanted to make cool shit, but they also think their cool shit is cool, so … But I wanted to make real startups and that was my thing. I would read Hacker News, Y Combinator, and they were making cool stuff, so I wanted to make cool stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:30)
That’s a pretty cool way of life, just if you romanticize it for a moment.
Pieter Levels
(00:25:34)
It’s very romantic, man. It’s colorful, if I think about the memories.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:39)
What are some happy memories? Just working cafes or working in … Just the freedom that envelops you with that way of life. Because anything is possible. You can just get off of the-
Pieter Levels
(00:25:53)
Oh, I think it was amazing. I would make friends and we would work until 6:00 AM in Bali, for example, with Andre, my best friend who is still my best friend, and another friend. And we would work until the morning when the sun came up, because at night the coworking space was silent. There was nobody else. And I would wake up 6:00 PM or 5:00 PM, I would drive to the coworking space on a motorbike. I would buy 30 hot lattes from a cafe …
Lex Fridman
(00:26:24)
How many?
Pieter Levels
(00:26:24)
30. Because there was like six people coming, or we didn’t know. Sometimes people would come in.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:30)
Did you say three, zero, 30?
Pieter Levels
(00:26:32)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:33)
Nice.
Pieter Levels
(00:26:34)
And we would drink four per person or something. Man, it’s Bali, I don’t know if they were powerful lattes, but they were lattes. And we’d put them in plastic bag and then I would drive there and all the coffee was falling everywhere. And then we’d go into the coworking station and have these coffees here and we’d work all night. We’d play techno music and everybody would just work in there. This would … Literally business people, they would work in their startup and we’d all try and make something. And then the sun would come up and the morning people, the yoga girls and yoga guys would come in after the yoga class at 6:00 and they say, “Hey, good morning.” We looked like this, and we’re like, “What up? How are you doing?” And we didn’t know how bad we looked, but it was very bad. And then we would go home, sleep in a hostel or a hotel, and do the same thing, and again and again and again. And it was this lock-in mode, working. And that was very fun.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:26)
So it’s just a bunch of you, techno music blasting all through the night?
Pieter Levels
(00:27:31)
More like (singing).
Lex Fridman
(00:27:33)
Oh, so rapid pace.
Pieter Levels
(00:27:33)
Like industrial, not like this cheesy-
Lex Fridman
(00:27:36)
See, for me, it’s such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how I feel about a thing. So the faster it is, the more anxiety I feel, but that anxiety is channeled into productivity. But if it’s a little too fast, I start … the anxiety overpowers.
Pieter Levels
(00:27:51)
So you don’t like drum and bass music?
Lex Fridman
(00:27:52)
Probably not.
Pieter Levels
(00:27:53)
No, it’s too fast.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:55)
For working. I have to play with it. You can actually … I can adjust my level of anxiety. There must be a better word than anxiety. It’s like a productive anxiety that I like, whatever that is.
Pieter Levels
(00:28:07)
It also depends, what kind of work you do. If you’re writing, you probably don’t want drum and bass music. I think for code, industrial, techno, this kind of stuff, fast, it works well because you really get locked in and combined with caffeine, you go deep. And I think you balance on this edge of anxiety, because this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety and you want to be on the edge of anxiety with this techno running. Sometimes it gets too much, it’s like, “Stop the techno, stop the music.” But those are good memories. And also travel memories. You go from city to city and it feels like it’s jet set life. It feels very beautiful. You’re seeing a lot of cool cities, and-
Lex Fridman
(00:28:46)
What was your favorite place that you remember you visited?
Pieter Levels
(00:28:50)
I think still Bangkok is the best place. Bangkok and Chiang Mai. I think Thailand is very special. I’ve been to the other place, I’ve been to Vietnam and I’ve been to South America and stuff. I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life people have there.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:08)
Everything’s cheap and good.
Pieter Levels
(00:29:10)
Well, Bangkok is getting expensive now, but Chiang Mai is still cheap. I think when you’re starting out, it’s a great place. Man, the air quality sucks, it’s a big problem. And it’s quite hot. But that’s a very cool place.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:22)
Pros and cons.
Pieter Levels
(00:29:23)
I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do love not just because of that, but I like Brazil. The problem still is the safety issue. It’s like in America, it’s localized. It’s hard for Europeans to understand, safety is localized to specific areas. So if you go to the right areas, it’s amazing. Brazil’s amazing. If you go to the wrong areas, maybe you die.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:44)
Yeah. That’s true.
Pieter Levels
(00:29:45)
But it’s not true in Europe. Europe’s much more average.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:48)
That’s true. That’s true. You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. It’s more averaged out. I like it when there’s strong neighborhoods. When you’re like, “You cross a certain street and you’re in the dangerous part of town.” I like it. There’s certain cities in the United States like that, I like that. And you’re saying Europe is more [inaudible 00:30:07]
Pieter Levels
(00:30:06)
But you don’t feel scared?
Lex Fridman
(00:30:06)
Well, I don’t. I like danger.
Pieter Levels
(00:30:07)
Well, you do BJJ.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:08)
Well, no. Not even just that. I think danger is interesting, so … Danger reveals something about yourself, about others. Also, I like the full range of humanity. So I don’t like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.
Pieter Levels
(00:30:23)
I have friends like these, I’m with friends that are exactly like this. They go to the broken areas. They like this reality. They like authenticity more. They don’t like luxury, they don’t like-
Lex Fridman
(00:30:34)
Oh yeah, I hate luxury.
Pieter Levels
(00:30:35)
Yeah, it’s very European of you.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:38)
Wait, what was that? That’s a whole nother conversation. So you quoted Freya Stark, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.” Do you remember a time you awoken in a strange town and felt like that? We’re talking about small towns or big towns? Or …
Pieter Levels
(00:31:00)
Man, anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog post and it was a common thing when you would wake up, and this was … Because I have this website, I started a website about this digital nomads called nomadlist.com, and it was a community, so it was 30,000 other digital nomads, because I was feeling lonely. So I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely. I started organizing meetups and making friends. And it was very common that people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are for the first half minute. And they had to look outside, ” Where am I? Which country?” Which sounds really like privileged, but it was more funny. You literally don’t know where you are because you’re so disrooted? But there’s something … Man, it’s like Anthony Bourdain. There’s something pure about this vagabond travel thing. It’s behind me, I think. Now I travel with my girlfriend, it’s very different. But it is romantic memories of this vagabond, individualistic solo life. But the thing is it didn’t make me happy, but it was very cool. But it didn’t make me happy, it made me anxious.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:03)
There’s something about-
Pieter Levels
(00:32:00)
Very cool, but it didn’t make me happy, right? It made me anxious.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:03)
There’s something about it that made you anxious. I don’t know, I still feel like that. It’s a cool feeling. It’s scary at first, but then you realize where you are, and I don’t know, it’s like you awaken to the possibilities of this place when you feel like that.
Pieter Levels
(00:32:03)
That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:18)
It’s great, and it’s even when you’re doing basic travel, like go to San Francisco or something else.
Pieter Levels
(00:32:23)
Yeah, you have the novelty effect, like you’re in a new place, like here things are possible. You don’t get bored yet, and that’s why people get addicted to travel.

Indie hacking

Lex Fridman
(00:32:33)
Back to startups, you wrote a book on how to do this thing, and gave a great talk on it, how to do startups, the book’s called MAKE: Bootstrapper’s Handbook.
Pieter Levels
(00:32:44)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:44)
I was wondering if you could go through some of the steps. It’s idea, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit. There’s a lot of fascinating ideas in each one, so idea stage, how do you find a good idea?
Pieter Levels
(00:32:56)
So, I think you need to be able to spot problems. So for example, you can go in your daily life, like when you wake up and you’re like, “What is stuff that I’m really annoyed with that’s like in my daily life that doesn’t function well?” And that’s a problem that you can see, okay, maybe that’s something I can write code for, and it will make my life easier. So, I would say make a list of all these problems you have, and an idea to solve it, and see which one is viable, you can actually do something, and then start building it.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:25)
So, that’s a really good place to start. Become open to all the problems in your life, like actually start noticing them. I think that’s actually not a trivial thing to do, to realize that some aspects of your life could be done way, way better, because we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts.
Pieter Levels
(00:33:44)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:45)
Like for example, doorknobs, like design of certain things.
Pieter Levels
(00:33:50)
The new Lex Fridman doorknob, [inaudible 00:33:53]-
Lex Fridman
(00:33:53)
That one I know how much incredible design work has gone into. It’s really interesting, doors and doorknobs, just the design of everyday things, forks and spoons. It’s going to be hard to come up with a fork that’s better than the current fork designs, and the other aspect of it is you’re saying in order to come up with interesting ideas, you got to try to live a more interesting life.
Pieter Levels
(00:34:15)
Yeah, but that’s where travel comes in, because when I started traveling, I started seeing stuff in other countries that you didn’t have in Europe for example, or America even. If you go to Asia, dude, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this. The WeChats, all these apps that they already had before we had them, these everything apps. Right now Elon’s trying to make X this everything app like WeChat, same thing. Indonesia or Thailand, you have one app that you can order food, or if you can order groceries, you can order massage, you can order car mechanic, anything you can think of is in the app, and that stuff, for example, that’s called arbitrage.

(00:34:53)
You can go back to your country and build that same app for your country for example. So, you start seeing problems, you start seeing solutions that other people already did in the rest of the world, and also traveling in general just gives you more problems, because travel is uncomfortable. Airports are horrible, airplanes are not comfortable either. There’s a lot of problems you start seeing, just getting out of your house.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:20)
I mean, in a digital world, you can just go into different communities, and see what can be improved by-
Pieter Levels
(00:35:25)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:25)
… in that.
Pieter Levels
(00:35:27)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:28)
What specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do you do idea dumps? Do you have a document where you just keep writing stuff?
Pieter Levels
(00:35:35)
Yeah, I used to have… Because when I wasn’t making money, I was trying to make this list of ideas to see… So I need to build… I was thinking statistically, “All right, I need to build all these things and one of these will work out probably. So, I need to have a lot of things to try,” and I did that. Right now, I think because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So for example, AI, when I found out about… When Stable Diffusion came or ChatGPT and stuff, all these things were like… I didn’t start working with them, because I had a problem. I had no problems, but I was very curious about technology, and I was playing with it, and figuring out… First, just playing with it, and then you find something like, “Okay, Stable Diffusion generates houses very beautiful and interiors.”
Lex Fridman
(00:36:21)
So, it’s less about problem solving, it’s more about the possibilities of new things you can create.
Pieter Levels
(00:36:25)
Yeah, but that’s very risky, because that’s the famous solution trying to find a problem, and usually it doesn’t work, and that’s very common with startup funnels, I think. They have tech, but actually people don’t need to tech, right?

Photo AI

Lex Fridman
(00:36:38)
Can you actually explain? It’d be cool to talk about some of the stuff you’ve created. Can you explain the photoai.com?
Pieter Levels
(00:36:46)
Yeah, yeah. So, it’s like fire your photographer. The idea is that you don’t need a photographer anymore. You can train yourself as an AI model, and you can take as many photos as you want anywhere, in any clothes, with facial expressions, like happy, or sad, or poses, all this stuff.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:02)
So, how does it work? You sent me a link to a gallery of ones done on me, which is-
Pieter Levels
(00:37:10)
Yeah, so on the left you have the prompts, the box. Yeah, so you can write… So, model is your model, this is Lex Fridman. So, you can write model as a blah, blah, blah, whatever you want, then press the button, and it will take photos. It will take like one minute.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:21)
60 photos. What are you using for the hosting, for the compute?
Pieter Levels
(00:37:24)
Replicate.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:25)
Okay.
Pieter Levels
(00:37:25)
Replicate.com. They’re very, very good.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:29)
Interface-wise, it’s cool that you’re showing how long it’s going to take. This is amazing, so it’s taken a… I’m presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet.
Pieter Levels
(00:37:37)
Yeah, so I went to Google Images, typed in Lex Fridman, I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in a gallery, and you can use your cursor to… So, some don’t look like you. So, the hit-and-miss rate is, I don’t know, say like 50/50 or something.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:53)
But when I was watching it [inaudible 00:37:55], it’s been getting better and better and better.
Pieter Levels
(00:37:56)
It was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad, but still people signed up to it.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:03)
There’s two Lexes. It’s great. It’s getting more and more sexual. It’s making me very uncomfortable.
Pieter Levels
(00:38:08)
Man, but that’s the problem with these models. No, we need to talk about this, because the models in-
Lex Fridman
(00:38:12)
Sure.
Pieter Levels
(00:38:12)
… Stable Diffusion, so the photorealistic models that are fine-tuned, they were all trained on porn in the beginning, and it was a guy called Hassan. So, I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos and it was… Stable Diffusion by itself is not doing that well. The faces look all mangled, and it doesn’t have enough resolution or something to do that well, but I started seeing these base models, these fine-tuned models, and people would train on porn, and I would try them, and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense, like body anatomy, but if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, there’s still core of porn there, like of naked people. So, I need to prompt out, and everybody needs to do this with AI startups, with imaging, you need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a naked [inaudible 00:39:00]-
Lex Fridman
(00:38:59)
You have to keep reminding the model, “You need to put clothes on the thing.”
Pieter Levels
(00:39:02)
Yeah, don’t put naked, because it’s very risky. I have Google Vision that checks every photo before it’s shown to the user to check for [inaudible 00:39:09]-
Lex Fridman
(00:39:08)
Like a nipple detector?
Pieter Levels
(00:39:09)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:11)
[inaudible 00:39:11] detector.
Pieter Levels
(00:39:11)
Because the journalists get very angry if they-
Lex Fridman
(00:39:13)
If you sexualize-
Pieter Levels
(00:39:14)
There was a journalist, I think ,that got angry that used this and it was like, “Oh, it showed a nipple,” because Google Vision didn’t detect it. So, that’s like these kind of problems you need to deal with. That’s what I’m talking about. This is with cats, but look at the cat face. It’s also kind of mangled.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:34)
I’m a little bit disturbed.
Pieter Levels
(00:39:36)
You can zoom in on the cat if you want. This is a very sad cat. It doesn’t have a nose.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:42)
It doesn’t have a nose, wow.
Pieter Levels
(00:39:44)
Man, but this is the problem with AI startups, because they all act like it’s perfect, like this is groundbreaking, but it’s not perfect. It’s really bad half the time.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:53)
So, if I wanted to sort of update model as-
Pieter Levels
(00:39:55)
Yeah, so you remove this stuff, and you write whatever you want, like in Thailand or something, or in Tokyo.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:03)
In Tokyo?
Pieter Levels
(00:40:04)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:06)
And-
Pieter Levels
(00:40:07)
You could say like at night with neon lights. You can add more detail to [inaudible 00:40:11]-
Lex Fridman
(00:40:11)
I’ll go in Austin. Do you think it’ll know-
Pieter Levels
(00:40:13)
Yeah, Austin-
Lex Fridman
(00:40:13)
… in Texas? In Austin, Texas?
Pieter Levels
(00:40:14)
With cowboy hat?
Lex Fridman
(00:40:15)
In Texas, yeah.
Pieter Levels
(00:40:17)
As a cowboy.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:21)
As a cowboy. It’s going to go so towards the porn direction. It’s [inaudible 00:40:25]-
Pieter Levels
(00:40:25)
Man, I hope not. It’s the end of my career.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:28)
Or the beginning, it depends. ” We can send you a push notification when your photos are done.” All right, cool.
Pieter Levels
(00:40:34)
Yeah, let’s see.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:35)
Oh, wow, so this whole interface you’ve built?
Pieter Levels
(00:40:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:38)
This is really well done.
Pieter Levels
(00:40:40)
It’s all jQuery. So, I still use jQuery?
Lex Fridman
(00:40:41)
Yes-
Pieter Levels
(00:40:42)
The only one?
Lex Fridman
(00:40:42)
… still-
Pieter Levels
(00:40:43)
After 10 years?
Lex Fridman
(00:40:43)
… to this day. You’re not the only one. The web is PHP, the stack-
Pieter Levels
(00:40:43)
It’s PHP and jQuery, yes, and SQLite.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:50)
You’re just one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still openly talking about it, but everyone’s using PHP. If you look, most of the web is still probably PHP and jQuery.
Pieter Levels
(00:41:01)
I think 70%. It’s because of WordPress, right? Because the blogs are-
Lex Fridman
(00:41:04)
Yeah, that’s true.
Pieter Levels
(00:41:05)
Yeah-
Lex Fridman
(00:41:06)
That’s true.
Pieter Levels
(00:41:06)
I’m seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. All the JavaScript frameworks are so… What do you call it, like wieldy. It takes so much work to just maintain this code, and then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:23)
Yeah. Can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML, JavaScript with jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. So, that’s a really simple stack, and you get stuff done really fast with that. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?
Pieter Levels
(00:41:47)
I think it’s accidental, because that’s the thing I knew. I knew PHP, I knew HTML, CSS, because you make websites, and when my startups started taking off, I didn’t have time to… I remember putting on my to-do list like, “Learn Node.js,” because it’s important to switch, because this obviously is much better language than PHP, and I never learned it. I never did it, because I didn’t have time. These things were growing like this, and I was launching more projects, and I never had time. It’s like, “One day I’ll start coding properly,” and I never got to it.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:19)
I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It’s still a to-do item for me to really learn Node.js or Flask or these kind of-
Pieter Levels
(00:42:27)
React [inaudible 00:42:28]-
Lex Fridman
(00:42:28)
Yeah, React, and it feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these, but you can get stuff done so fast with vanilla versions of stuff.
Pieter Levels
(00:42:44)
Yeah, it’s like software developers if you want to get a job, and there’s people making stuff, like startups, and if you want to be entrepreneur, probably you maybe shouldn’t, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:42:55)
I really want to measure performance and speed. I think there’s a deep wisdom in that. I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing, this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I’m not sure what to say about that, because definitely you shouldn’t build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C for example, C++ when you’re building systems engineering is like… There’s a lot of benefits for a pointer safety, and all that kind of stuff. So I don’t know, but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don’t care about how you do it.
Pieter Levels
(00:43:33)
Man, this is my most controversial take, I think, and maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like this frameworks now that raise money, they raise a lot of money. They raise 50 million, 100 million, $200 million, and the idea is that you need to make the developers, and new developers, like when you’re 18 or 20 years old, get them to use this framework, and add a platform to it where the framework can… It’s open source, but you probably should use the platform, which is paid to use it, and the cost of the platforms to host it are 1,000 times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or VPS on DigitalOcean. So, there’s obviously a monetary incentive here. We want to get a lot of developers to use this technology, and then we need to charge them money, because they’re going to use it in startups, and then the startups can pay for the bills.

(00:44:25)
It kind of destroys the information out there about learning to code, because they pay YouTubers, they pay developer influencers a big thing to… And same thing what happens with nutrition and fitness or something, same thing happens in developing. They pay this influencer to promote this stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it, and then a lot of people are like, “Wow, use this.” And I started noticing this, because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, “What are you using?” I would say, “Just PHP, jQuery. Why does it matter?”

(00:44:56)
And people would start attacking me like, “Why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?” And I say, “I don’t know, because this PHP thing works, and I don’t really optimizing for anything. It just works.” And I never understood why… I understand there’s new technologies that are better and it should be improvement, but I’m very suspicious of money, just like lobbying. There’s money in this developer framework scene. There’s hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencer or whatever. It can’t all go to developers. You don’t need so many developers for a framework, and it’s open source to make a lot of more money on these startups.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:32)
So, that’s a really good perspective, but in addition to that is when you say better, it’s like, can we get some data on the better? Because I want to know from the individual developer perspective, and then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, how many security holes result-
Pieter Levels
(00:46:00)
PHP was not good with security for a while, but now it’s [inaudible 00:46:03]-
Lex Fridman
(00:46:03)
In theory, is it though?
Pieter Levels
(00:46:05)
Now it’s good.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:06)
No, now as you’re saying it, I want to know if that’s true, because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet.
Pieter Levels
(00:46:15)
It could be true.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:16)
Is it just overrepresented? Same with WordPress.
Pieter Levels
(00:46:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:19)
Yes, there’s a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don’t know if that’s true. I know it gets attacked a lot, because it’s so popular. It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, like super complicated software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build a thing.
Pieter Levels
(00:46:50)
Man, 100%, and it’s the same thing with big corporations… 80% of the people don’t do anything. It’s not efficient, and if your benchmark is people building stuff that actually gets done. And for society, if we want to save time, we should probably use the technology that’s simple, that’s pragmatic, that works, that’s not overly complicated, it doesn’t make your life like a living hell.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:18)
And use a framework when it obviously solves a direct problem that you-
Pieter Levels
(00:47:23)
Yeah, of course. I’m not saying you should code without a framework. You should use whatever you want, but yeah, I think it’s suspicious. And I think [inaudible 00:47:32], when I talk about it on Twitter, there’s this army comes out, there’s these framework armies. Man, something my gut tells me-
Lex Fridman
(00:47:40)
I want to ask the framework army, what have they built this week? It’s the Elon question, “What did you do this week?”
Pieter Levels
(00:47:45)
Yeah, did you make money with it? Did you charge users? Is it a real business? And yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:52)
So going back to the cowboy, first of all-
Pieter Levels
(00:47:54)
Some don’t look like you, right? But some do.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:56)
Every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I’m also just looking at the interface. It’s really well done. So, this is all just jQuery, and this is really well done. So, take me through the journey of Photo AI. Most of the world doesn’t know much about Stable Diffusion or any of the generative AI stuff. So you’re thinking, “Okay, how can I build cool stuff with this?” What was the origin story of Photo AI?
Pieter Levels
(00:48:21)
I think it started, because Stable Diffusion came out. So Stable Diffusion like this… The first generative image AI model, and I started playing with it. You could install on your Mac… Somebody forked it and made it work for MacBooks. So, I downloaded it and cloned the repo, and started using it to generate images, and it was amazing. I found it on Twitter, because you see things happen on Twitter, and I would post what I was making on Twitter as well, and you could make any image.

(00:48:50)
So, essentially you write a prompt, and then it generates a photo of that or image of that in any style. They would use artist names to make like a Picasso kind of style and stuff, and I was trying to see, what is it good at? Is it good at people? No, it’s really bad at people, but it was good at houses, so architecture for example, I would generate architecture houses. So, I made a website called thishousedoesnotexist.org, and it generated… They called like house porn at that one. Houseporn is like a subreddit, and this was Stable Diffusion, like the first version. So it looks really… You can click for another photo. So, it generates all these non-existing houses.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:34)
It is house porn.
Pieter Levels
(00:49:35)
But it looked kind of good, especially back then.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:37)
It looks really good.
Pieter Levels
(00:49:38)
Now, things look much better.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:42)
That’s really, really well done, wow.
Pieter Levels
(00:49:46)
And it also generates a description.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:50)
And you can upvote… Is it nice? Upvote it.
Pieter Levels
(00:49:52)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:52)
Man, there’s so much to talk to you about. The choices here is really well done.
Pieter Levels
(00:49:57)
This is very scrappy. In the bottom, there’s like a ranking of the most upvoted houses. So, these are the top voted, and if you go to all time, you see quite beautiful ones. Yeah. So this one is my favorite, the number one. It’s kind of like a…
Lex Fridman
(00:50:10)
How is this not more popular?
Pieter Levels
(00:50:12)
It was really popular for a while, but then people got so bored of it. I think, because I was getting bored of it, too, just continuous house porn, everything starts looking the same, but then I saw it was really good at interior, so I pivoted to interiorai.com, where I tried to upload first generate interior designs, and then I tried to do… There was a new technology called image-to-image where you can input an image, like a photo, and it would kind of modify the thing. So, you see it looks almost the same as Photo AI. It’s the same code essentially.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:46)
Nice.
Pieter Levels
(00:50:47)
So, I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived, and I would ask like, “Change this into, I don’t know, maximalist design,” and it worked and it worked really well. So I was like, “Okay, this is a startup,” because obviously interior design AI, and nobody’s doing that yet. So, I launched this and I was successful and within a week, made 10K, 20K a month, and now still makes like 40K, 50K a month, and it’s been like two years. So then I was like, “How can I improve this interior design? I need to start learning fine-tuning.”

(00:51:18)
And fine-tuning is where you have this existing AI model and you fine tune it on the specific goal you wanted to do. So, I would find really beautiful interior design, make a gallery, and train a new model that was very good at interior design, and it worked, and I used that as well. And then for fun, I uploaded photos of myself, and here’s where it happened, and to train myself. And this would never work, obviously, and it worked, and actually it started understanding me as a concept. So, my face worked and you could do different styles, like me as a… Very cheesy, medieval warrior, all this stuff. So I was like, “This is another startup.” So, now I did avatarai.me. I couldn’t get the dot com, and this was [inaudible 00:52:01]-
Lex Fridman
(00:52:01)
Is it still up?
Pieter Levels
(00:52:03)
Yeah, avatarai.me. Well, now it’s forwards to Photo AI, because it pivoted.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:06)
Got it.
Pieter Levels
(00:52:07)
But this was more like cheesy thing, so this is very interesting, because this went so viral. It made I think like 150K in a week or something, so most money I ever made. This is very interesting. The big VC companies, like Lensa, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me, I didn’t have iOS app, they quickly build an iOS app that does the same, and they found technology, and it’s all open technology, so it’s good, and I think they made like $30 million with it. They became the top grossing app after that, and-
Lex Fridman
(00:52:40)
How do you feel about that?
Pieter Levels
(00:52:41)
I think it’s amazing, honestly, and it’s not like-
Lex Fridman
(00:52:44)
You didn’t have a feeling like, “Oh, fuck. [inaudible 00:52:45]-“
Pieter Levels
(00:52:45)
No, I was a little bit sad, because all my products would work out, and I never had real fierce competition, and now I have fierce competition from a very skilled high talent. I was developer studio or something, and they already had an app. They had an app in the app store for I think retouching your face or something, so they were very smart. They add these avatars to there, it’s a feature. They had the users, they do a push notification to everybody who have these avatars. Man, I think they made so much money, and I think they did a really great job, and I also made a lot of money with it, but I quickly realized it wasn’t my thing, because it was so cheesy. It was like kitsch. It’s kind like me as a Barbie or me as a… It was too cheesy.

(00:53:29)
I wanted to go for, what’s a real problem we can solve? This is going to be a hype, this going to be… And it was a hype, these avatars. It’s like, “Let’s do real photography. How can you make people look really photorealistic?” And it was difficult, and that’s why these avatars worked, because they were all in a cheesy Picasso style, and art is easy, because you interpret… All the problems that AI has with your face are artistic if you call it Picasso, but if you make a real photo, all the problems of your face, you look wrong. So, I started making Photo AI, which was a pivot of it where it was like a photo studio where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer, needing a studio. You just type it, and I’ve been working on it for the last year.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:14)
Yeah, it’s really incredible. That journey is really incredible. Let’s go to the beginning of Photo AI, though, because I remember seeing a lot of really hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right?
Pieter Levels
(00:54:15)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:27)
Yeah, so there’s a tweet here, “Sold $100,000 in AI-generated avatars.”
Pieter Levels
(00:54:36)
Yeah, and it’s a lot. It’s a lot for anybody. It’s a lot for me making 10K a day on this.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:42)
That’s amazing. That’s amazing.
Pieter Levels
(00:54:46)
And then the [inaudible 00:54:48] tweet. That’s the launch tweet, and then before there is the me hacking on it.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:53)
Oh, I see. Okay, so October 26th, 2022.
Pieter Levels
(00:54:54)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:00)
” I trained an ML model on my face…”
Pieter Levels
(00:55:05)
Because my eyes are quite far apart, I learned when I did YouTube, I would put my DJ photo, my mixture, and people would say I look like a hammerhead shark. It was like the top comment, so then I realized my eyes are far apart.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:18)
Yeah, the internet helps you figure out what you look like.
Pieter Levels
(00:55:20)
Yeah, it helps you realize how you look.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:21)
Boy, do I love the internet.
Pieter Levels
(00:55:23)
That’s a thirst trap.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:26)
Well, what is… Is this… Wait.
Pieter Levels
(00:55:27)
It’s water from the waterfall, but the waterfall is in the back. So, what’s going on?
Lex Fridman
(00:55:34)
How much of this is real?
Pieter Levels
(00:55:35)
It’s all AI.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:36)
It’s all AI?
Pieter Levels
(00:55:38)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:39)
That’s pretty good though, for the early days.
Pieter Levels
(00:55:40)
Exactly, but this was hit or miss, so you had to do a lot of curation, because 99% of it was bad. So, these are the photos I uploaded.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:47)
How many photos did you use? “Only these. I’ll try more up-to-date pick later.” Are these the only photos you uploaded?
Pieter Levels
(00:55:55)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:55)
Wow. Wow, okay, so you were learning all this super quickly. What are some interesting details you remember from that time for what you had to figure out to make it work? And for people just listening, he uploaded just a handful of photos that don’t really have a good capture of the face and he’s able to [inaudible 00:56:16]-
Pieter Levels
(00:56:16)
I think it’s cropped. It’s like a crop by the layout, but they’re square photos, so they’re 512×512, because that’s Stable Diffusion.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:24)
But nevertheless, not great capture of the face. It’s not like a collection of several hundred photos that are 360 [inaudible 00:56:34]-
Pieter Levels
(00:56:34)
Exactly, I would imagine that, too, when I started. I was like, “Oh, this must be some 3D scan technology,” right?
Lex Fridman
(00:56:39)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(00:56:39)
So, I think the cool thing with AI, it trains the concept of you. So, it’s literally learning just like any AI model learns. It learns how you look, so I did this and then I was getting DMs, like Telegram messages like, “How can I do the same thing? I want these photos, my girlfriend wants these photos.” So I was like, “Okay, this is obviously a business,” but I didn’t have time to code it, make a whole app about it. So, I made an HTML page, registered a domain name, and this not even… It was a Stripe payment link, which means you have literally a link to Stripe to pay, but there’s no code in the back. So, all you know is you have customers that paid money.

(00:57:19)
Then, I added a Typeform link. So, Typeform is a site where you can create your own input form, like Google Forms. So, they would get an email with a link to the Typeform or actually just a link after the checkout, and they could upload their photos, so enter their email, upload the photos, and I launched it, and I was like… Here, first still, so it’s October 2022, and I think within the first 24 hours was like… I’m not sure, it was like 1,000 customers or something, but the problem was I didn’t have code to automate this, so I had to do it manually. So the first few hundred, I just literally took their photos, trained them, and then I would generate the photos with the prompts, and I had this text file with the prompt, and I would do everything manually, and it quickly became way too much, but that’s another constraint. I was forced to code something up that would do that, and that was essentially making it into a real website.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:12)
So, at first it was the Typeform and they uploaded it through the Typeform-
Pieter Levels
(00:58:15)
It was a Stripe checkout Typeform.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:17)
An image, and then you were like, “That image is downloaded.” Did you write a script to export, like download [inaudible 00:58:21]-
Pieter Levels
(00:58:21)
No, it just downloaded the images myself. It was an unzipped zip file.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:24)
Literally, and you unzipped it-
Pieter Levels
(00:58:25)
Yeah, unzip-
Lex Fridman
(00:58:25)
One by-
Pieter Levels
(00:58:26)
Yes, because, “Do things, don’t scale,” Paul Graham says, right? And then I would train it and I would email them the photos, I think from my personal email, say, “Here’s your avatars,” and they liked it. They were like, “Wow, it’s amazing.”
Lex Fridman
(00:58:40)
You emailed them with your personal email-
Pieter Levels
(00:58:43)
Because they didn’t have an email address on this domain.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:45)
And this is like 100 people?
Pieter Levels
(00:58:47)
Yeah, and then you know who signed up? Man, I cannot say, but really famous people, really, really like billionaires, famous tech billionaires did it. And I was like, “Wow, this is crazy,” and I was so scared to message them, so I said, “Thanks so much for using my sites.” He’s like, “Yeah, amazing app, great work.” So, it’s like this is different than normal reaction.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:07)
It’s Bill Gates, isn’t it?
Pieter Levels
(00:59:08)
I cannot say anything.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:12)
Just like shirtless pics.
Pieter Levels
(00:59:14)
GDPR, like privacy.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:15)
Right.
Pieter Levels
(00:59:15)
European regulation. I cannot share anything, but I was like, “Wow,” but this shows, so you make something, and then if it takes off very fast, it’s validated. You’re like, “Here’s something that people really want.” But then also I thought, “This is hype. This is going to die down very fast,” and it did, because it’s too cheesy.”
Lex Fridman
(00:59:34)
But you have to automate the whole thing. How’d you automate it? So, what’s the AI component? How hard was that to figure out?
Pieter Levels
(00:59:41)
Okay, so that’s actually in many ways the easiest thing, because there is all these platforms already back then. There was platforms for fine tune Stable Diffusion. Now, I use Replicate, back then I used different platforms, which was funny because that platform, when this thing took off, I would tweet… Because I tweet always like how much money these websites make, and then… So, you call it vendor, right? The platform that did the GPUs, they increased their price for training from $3 to $20 after they saw that I was making so much money. So, immediately my profit is gone, because I was selling them for $30, and I was in a Slack with them saying, “What is this? Can you just put it back to $3?” They say, “Yeah, maybe in the future. We’re looking at it right now.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? You just took all my money,” and they’re smart.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:24)
Well, they’re not that smart, because you also have a large platform, and a lot of people respect you, so you can literally come out and say that, but they’re not-
Pieter Levels
(01:00:33)
Yeah, but I think it’s kind of dirty to cancel a company or something. I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere, but there was no elsewhere back then.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:40)
Right.
Pieter Levels
(01:00:41)
So, I started talking to other AI model, ML platforms. So, Replicate was one of those platforms, and I started DMing the CEO say, “Can you please create…” It’s called DreamBooth, this fine-tuning of yourself. “Can you add this to your site, because I need this, because I’m being price gauged?” And he said, “No, because it takes too long to run. It takes half an hour to run and we don’t have the GPUs for it.” I said, “Please, please, please.” And then after a week, he said, “We’re doing it, we’re launching this.” And then this company became… It was not very famous company, it became very famous with this stuff, because suddenly everybody was like, “Oh, we can build similar avatar apps,” and everybody started building avatar apps and everybody started using Replicate for it, and that was from these early DMs with the CEO, like Ben Firsh, very nice guy. And he was like… They never price-gauged me, they never treated me bad, they always been very nice. It’s a very cool company. So, you can run any ML model, any AI model, LLMs, you can run on here.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:36)
And you can scale-
Pieter Levels
(01:01:37)
Yes, they scale. Yeah, yeah, and I mean you can do now, you can click on the model and just run it already. It’s like super easy. You log on with GitHub-
Lex Fridman
(01:01:45)
That’s great.
Pieter Levels
(01:01:45)
And by running it on the website, then you can automate with the API. You can make a website that runs the model.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:50)
Generate images, generate text, generate video, generate music, generate speech-
Pieter Levels
(01:01:53)
Video, like [inaudible 01:01:55]-
Lex Fridman
(01:01:54)
… fine tune models.
Pieter Levels
(01:01:55)
They do anything, yeah. It’s a very cool company.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:58)
Nice, and you’re growing with them essentially. They grew because of you, because it’s a big use case.
Pieter Levels
(01:02:03)
Yeah, the website even looks weird now. It started as a machine learning platform that was like… I didn’t even understand what it did. It was just too ML. You would understand, because you’re in the ML world. I wouldn’t understand it.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:16)
Now, it’s newb friendly.
Pieter Levels
(01:02:17)
Yeah, exactly, and I didn’t know how it worked, but I knew that they could probably do this and they did it. They built the models and now I use them for everything, and we trained, I think now like 36, 000 people already.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:32)
But is there some tricks to fine-tuning to the collection of photos that are provided? How do you-
Pieter Levels
(01:02:38)
Yes, man, there’s so many hacks.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:39)
The hacks, yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:02:40)
It’s like 100 hacks to make it work.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:41)
What are some interesting-
Pieter Levels
(01:02:43)
I’m giving my secrets now.
Lex Fridman
(01:02:44)
Well, not the secrets, but the more insights maybe about the human face and the human body. What kind of stuff gets messed up lot?
Pieter Levels
(01:02:53)
I think people… Well, man, that’s another thing, people don’t know how they look. So, they generate photos of themselves and then they say, “Ah, it doesn’t look like me,” but you can check the training photos, it does look like you, but you don’t know how you look. So, there’s a face dysmorphia of yourself that you have no idea how you look.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:12)
Yeah, that’s hilarious. I mean, I’ve got… One of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So, I get to really have to come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound.
Pieter Levels
(01:03:29)
Everybody, but-
Lex Fridman
(01:03:30)
People often don’t, right?
Pieter Levels
(01:03:32)
Really?
Lex Fridman
(01:03:32)
You have a distorted view perspective.
Pieter Levels
(01:03:35)
I would make a selfie how I think I look that’s nice, other people think that’s not nice, but then they make a photo of me. I’m like, “This is super ugly.” But then they’re like, “No, that’s how you look, and you look nice.” So, how other people see you is nice. So, you need to ask other people to choose your photos. You shouldn’t choose them yourself, because you don’t know how you look.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:56)
Yeah, you don’t know what makes you interesting, what makes you attractive, or all this kind of stuff.
Pieter Levels
(01:04:00)
Yeah, [inaudible 01:04:00]-
Lex Fridman
(01:04:00)
And a lot of us… This is a dark aspect of psychology, we focus on some-
Lex Fridman
(01:04:00)
And a lot of us, this is a dark aspect of psychology, we focus on some small flaws. This is why I hate plastic surgery, for example. People try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive.
Pieter Levels
(01:04:12)
I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes, the stuff about you that looks ugly to you, and it’s probably what makes you original, makes you nice, and people like it about you. And it’s not like, “Oh, my god.” And people notice it, people notice your hammerhead eyes, but it’s like, “That’s me. That’s my face. So, I love myself.” And that’s confidence, and confidence is attractive.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:31)
Yes.
Pieter Levels
(01:04:32)
Right?
Lex Fridman
(01:04:32)
Confidence is attractive. But yes, understanding what makes you beautiful. It’s the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful, it’s the breaking of the average face makes you beautiful, all of that. And obviously different from men and women of different ages, all this kind of stuff.
Pieter Levels
(01:04:33)
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:47)
But underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when the face comes alive, that also is the thing that makes you beautiful. But anyway, you have to figure all that out with AI.
Pieter Levels
(01:04:58)
Yeah. One thing that worked was, people would upload full body photos of themselves, so I would crop the face, right? Then the model knew better that we’re training mostly the face here. But then I started losing resemblance of the body ’cause some people are skinny, some people are muscular, whatever. So, you want to have that too. So, now, I mix full body photos in the training with face photos, face crops, and it’s all automatic. And I know that other people, they use, again, AI models to detect what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those. It’s all about training data, and it’s with everything in AI, how good your training data is, in many ways, more important than how many steps you train for, like how many months, or whatever, with these GPUs. The goals.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:43)
Do you have any guidelines for people of how to get good data, how to give good data to fine tune on?
Pieter Levels
(01:05:48)
The photos should be diverse. So, for example, if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirts, the model will think that I’m training the green shirts. So, the things that are the same every photo are the concepts that are trained. What you want is your face to be the concept that’s trained and everything else to be diverse different.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:10)
So, diverse lighting as well. Diverse everything.
Pieter Levels
(01:06:12)
Yeah, outside, inside. But there’s no, this is the problem, there’s no manual for this. And nobody knew. We were all just, especially two years ago, we’re all hacking, trying to test anything, anything you can think of. And it’s frustrating. It’s one of the most frustrating and also fun and challenging things to do because with AI, because it’s a black box. And Karpathy, I think, says this, “We don’t really know how this thing works, but it does something, but nobody really knows why.” We cannot look into the model of an LLM, what is actually in there. We just know it’s a treaty matrix of numbers, right? So, it’s very frustrating because some things that would be, you think they’re obvious that they will improve things, will make them worse. And there’s so many parameters you can tweak. So, you’re testing everything to improve things.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:04)
I mean there’s a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that studies that tries to figure out, tries to break things apart and understand how it works. But there’s also the data side and the actual consumer-facing product side of figuring out how you get it to generate a thing that’s beautiful or interesting or naturalistic, all that kind of stuff. And you’re at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face. And humans really care about the human face.
Pieter Levels
(01:07:30)
In very vain. Like me, I want to look good in your podcast, for example. Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:36)
And then one of the things actually would love to rigorously use photo AI, because for the thumbnails, I take portraits of people. I don’t know shit about photography. I basically used your approach for photography like Googled, “How do you take photographs? Camera, lighting.” And also it’s tough because maybe you could speak to this also, but with photography, no offense to any, they’re true artists, great photographers, but people take themselves way too seriously. Think you need a whole lot of equipment. You definitely don’t want one light, you need five lights…
Pieter Levels
(01:08:19)
Man, I know.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:19)
And you have to have the lenses. I talked to a guy, an expert of shaping the sound in a room because I was thinking, “I’m going to do a podcast studio, whatever. I should probably do a sound treatment on the room.” And when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And that’s when I realized, “You know what? I don’t need experts in my life.”
Pieter Levels
(01:08:50)
You kicked him out of the house?
Lex Fridman
(01:08:52)
No, I didn’t kick him. I said, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Pieter Levels
(01:08:54)
“Thank you. Great tips. Bye.”
Lex Fridman
(01:08:56)
I just felt like there is… Focus on whatever the problems are, use your own judgment, use your own instincts, don’t listen to other people, and only consult other people when there’s a specific problem. And you consult them not to offload the problem onto them, but to gain wisdom from their perspective. Even if their perspective is ultimately one you don’t agree with, you’re going to gain wisdom from that. And just, I ultimately come up with a PHP solution, PHP and jQuery solution to-
Pieter Levels
(01:09:26)
PHP studio.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:27)
The PHP studio. I have a little suitcase. I use just the basic consumer type of stuff. One light. It’s great.
Pieter Levels
(01:09:36)
Yeah. And look at you, you’re one of the top podcasts in the world, and you get millions of views, and it works. And the people that spend so much money on optimizing for the best sound, for the best studio, they get 300 views. So, what is this about? This is about that. Either you do it really well or also that a lot of these things don’t matter. What matters is probably the content of the podcast. You get the interesting guest.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:57)
Focus on the stuff that matters.
Pieter Levels
(01:09:58)
Yeah. And I think that’s very common. They call it gear acquisition syndrome, like GAS, people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff. There was a meme recently. What’s the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before you even started doing the hobby, right? Marketing. Marketing does that to people. They want you to buy this stuff. But man, you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone if the content is good enough. And it will probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:30)
So, the reason I brought that up with photography, there is wisdom from people. And one of the things I realized, you probably also realized this, but how much power light has to convey emotion. Just take one light and move it around, says you sit in the darkness, move it around your face. The different positions are having a second life potentially. You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It’s interesting. You can make people attractive, you can make them ugly, you can make them scary, you can make them lonely, all of this. And so you start to realize this. And I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people.
Pieter Levels
(01:11:16)
Guest photos. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:17)
Guest photos, for example, that’s a small use case, but for me… I suppose it’s an important use case because I want people to look good, but I also want to capture who they are. Maybe my conception of who they are, what makes them beautiful, what makes their appearance powerful in some ways. Sometimes it’s the eyes, oftentimes it’s the eyes, but there’s certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful. It’s also awkward for me to take photographs, so I’m not collecting enough photographs for myself to do it with just those photographs. If I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with lighting, all that kind of stuff-
Pieter Levels
(01:11:59)
You should do this and you should probably do it yourself. You can use photo AI, but it’s even more fun if you do it yourself. So, you train the models, you can learn about control nets. Control nets is where, for example, your photos and your podcasts are usually from the angle, right? So, you can create a control net face pose that’s always like this. So, every model, every photo you generate uses this control net pose, for example. I think would be very fun for you to try out that stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:22)
Do you play with lighting at all? Do you play with lighting pose with the…
Pieter Levels
(01:12:25)
Man, actually this week or recently some new model came out that can adjust the light of any photo. But also AI image with Stable Diffusion. I think it’s called Relights. And it’s amazing. You can upload like a light map. So, for example, red, purple, blue and use the light map to change the light on the photo you input. It’s amazing. There’s, for sure, a lot of stuff you can do.

How to learn AI

Lex Fridman
(01:12:54)
What’s your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art AI tools available, like you mentioned new model’s coming out all the time. How do you pay attention? How do you stay on top of everything?
Pieter Levels
(01:13:08)
I think you need to join Twitter, X. X is amazing now and the whole AI industry’s on X. And they’re all anime avatars. It’s funny because my friends ask me this, “Who should I follow to stay up to date?” And I say, “Go to X and follow all the AI anime models that this person is following or follows.” And I send them some URL and they all start laughing like, “What is this?” But they’re real people hacking around in AI. They get hired by big companies and they’re on X. And most of them are anonymous. It’s very funny. They use anime avatars. I don’t. But those people hack around and then they publish what they’re discovering. They took out papers, for example. So, yeah, definitely X.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:51)
Almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people.
Pieter Levels
(01:13:55)
Yeah, it’s a good time now.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:57)
Well, but also just brings happiness to my soul ’cause there’s so much turmoil on twitter.
Pieter Levels
(01:14:06)
Yeah, like politics and stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:07)
There’s battles going on. It’s like a war zone, and it’s nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff.
Pieter Levels
(01:14:14)
Yeah, a hundred percent. I like Twitter for that most, building stuff, seeing other, because it inspires you to build and it’s just fun to see other people share what they’re discovering and then you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to make something too.” It’s just super fun. And so if you want to start going on X, and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models. And when you have something that you manually enter stuff, you set the parameters, something that works, you can make an app out of it or a website.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:42)
Can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and better and better, photo AI?
Pieter Levels
(01:14:48)
So, I had this photo AI and a lot of people using it. There was like a million or more photos a month being generated. And I discovered I was testing parameters, increase the step count of generating photo or changing the sampler, like a scheduler. You have DPM tools, all these things I don’t know anything about, but I know that you can choose them and you generate image and they have different resulting images. But I didn’t know which one were better. So, I would do it myself, test it, but then I was like, “Why don’t I test on these users?” ‘Cause I have a million photos generated anyway, so on like 10% of the users, I would randomly test parameters and then I would see if they would, because you can favor the photo or you can download it, I would measure if they favor it or like the photo. And then I would A/B test and you test for significance and stuff, which parameters were better and which were worse.
Lex Fridman
(01:15:37)
So, you starting to figure out which models are actually working well.
Pieter Levels
(01:15:41)
Exactly. And then if it’s significant enough data, you switch to that for all the users. And so that was the breakthrough to make it better. Just use the users to improve themselves. And I tell them when they sign up, “We do sampling, we do testing on your photos with random parameters.” And that worked really well. I don’t do a lot of testing anymore because I reached a diminishing point where it’s good, but there was a breakthrough. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:03)
So, it’s really about the parameters, the models, and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you.
Pieter Levels
(01:16:13)
But actually, so Stable Diffusion, I used 1.5, 2.0 came out as Stable Diffusion, Excel came out, all these new versions, and they were all worse. And so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it’s also not like what do you call “neutered.” They neutered to make it super with safety features and stuff. So, most of the people are still on Stable Diffusion 1.5. And meanwhile Stable Diffusion, the company went, the CEO left. A lot of drama happened because they couldn’t make money. They gave us this open source model that everybody uses. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars. They didn’t make any money with. There are not lots. And they did an amazing job, and now everybody uses open source model for free and it’s amazing. It’s amazing.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:04)
You’re not even using the latest one, you’re saying?
Pieter Levels
(01:17:06)
No, and the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from it, early, small, people like me who make these small apps that are using the model. And now they’re starting to charge money for the new models, but the new models are not so good for people. They’re not so open source, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:17:20)
Yeah. It is interesting because open source is so impactful in the AI space, but you wonder what is the business model behind that? But it’s enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that they’re using the open source models.
Pieter Levels
(01:17:34)
So, it’s like those frameworks, but then they didn’t bribe enough influence to use it and they didn’t charge money for the platform.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:42)
So, back to your book and the ideas, you didn’t even get to the first step, generating ideas. So, you had no book and you’re filling it up. How do you know when an idea is a good one? You have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one that you actually try to build?
Pieter Levels
(01:18:01)
Man, mostly you don’t know. Mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build. I cannot build a space company now, right? Would be quite challenging, but I can build something-
Lex Fridman
(01:18:09)
Did you actually write down like “space company”?
Pieter Levels
(01:18:11)
No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool because you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it. And you can hire someone to launch the thing. So, all you need is the robot that goes to the asteroid and the robotics’ interesting. I want to also learn robotics. So, maybe that could be-
Lex Fridman
(01:18:30)
I think both the asteroid mining and the robotics is…
Pieter Levels
(01:18:33)
Yeah, together.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:40)
I feel like [inaudible 01:18:40].
Pieter Levels
(01:18:39)
No, exactly. This is it. “We do this not because it’s easy, but because we thought it would be easy.” Exactly. That’s me with asteroid mining. Exactly. That’s why I should do this.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:51)
It’s not nomadlist.com. It’s asteroid mining. Gravity is really hard to overcome.
Pieter Levels
(01:18:59)
Yeah. But it seems, man, I sound like idiot. Probably not. But it sounds quite approachable. Relatively approachable. You don’t have to build the rockets.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:06)
Oh, you use something like SpaceX to get out space.
Pieter Levels
(01:19:07)
Yeah, you hire SpaceX to send this dog robots or whatever.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:12)
So, is there actually existing notebook where you wrote down “asteroid mining”?
Pieter Levels
(01:19:15)
No. Back then I used Trello.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:17)
Trello. Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:19:17)
But now I use Telegram. I rather than saved messages. I have an idea, I write it down.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:22)
You type to yourself on Telegram?
Pieter Levels
(01:19:24)
Because you use WhatsApp, right? I think. So, you have “message to yourself” thing also. Yeah, so like a notepad.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:28)
So, you’re talking to yourself on Telegram.
Pieter Levels
(01:19:30)
Yeah. You use like a notepad, not forget stuff. And then I pin it.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:33)
I love how you’re not using super complicated systems or whatever. People use Obsidian now. There’s a lot of these, Notion, where you have systems for note-taking. You’re notepad.exe guy.
Pieter Levels
(01:19:48)
Man, I saw some YouTubers doing this like… There’s a lot of these productivity gurus also and they do this whole iPad with a pencil. And then I also had an iPad and I also got the pencil, and I got this app where you can draw on paper, draw like a calendar. People, students use this and you do coloring and stuff. And I’m like, “Dude, I did this for a week. And then I’m like, ‘What am I doing in my life?’ I can just write it as a message to myself and it’s good enough.”
Lex Fridman
(01:20:14)
Speaking of ideas, you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be a brilliant idea. The reason for this you think is the first idea submerges from your subconscious and was actually boiling your brain for weeks, months, sometimes years in the background. The eight hours of thinking can never compete with a perpetual subconscious background job. So, this is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus the first idea that pops into your mind. And sometimes there is subconscious stuff that you’ve been thinking about for many years. That’s really interesting.
Pieter Levels
(01:20:46)
I mean like, “It emerges.” I wrote it wrong because I’m not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, it comes from like a water. Your subconscious is in here, it’s boiling. And then when it’s ready, it’s like ding. It’s like a microwave, it comes out. And there you have your idea.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:01)
You think you have ideas like that?
Pieter Levels
(01:21:02)
Yeah, all the time. A hundred percent.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:04)
It’s just stuff that’s been there.
Pieter Levels
(01:21:05)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:06)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:21:06)
And also it comes up and I send it back, send it back to the kitchen to boil more.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:12)
Not ready yet. Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:21:13)
And it’s like a soup of ideas that’s cooking. It’s a hundred percent. This is how my brain works, and I think most people.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:18)
But it’s also about the timing. Sometimes you have to send it back, not just because you’re not ready, but the world is not ready.
Pieter Levels
(01:21:24)
Yeah. So, many times, like startup founders are too early with their idea. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Robots

Lex Fridman
(01:21:30)
Robotics is an interesting one for that because there’s been a lot of robotics companies that failed, because it’s been very difficult to build a robotics company make money ’cause there’s the manufacturing, the cost of everything. The intelligence of the robot is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from wish to make money. There’s this long line of robotics companies that have tried, they had big dreams, and they failed.
Pieter Levels
(01:21:54)
Yeah, like Boston Dynamics. I still don’t know what they’re doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it’s amazing. But I feel like a lot of these companies don’t have, it’s like a solution looking for a problem for now. Military obviously uses. But do I need a robotic dog now for my house? I don’t know. It’s fun, but it doesn’t really solve anything yet. I feel the same with VR. It’s really cool. Apple Vision Pro is very cool. It doesn’t really solve something for me yet. And that’s the tech looking for a solution, but one day will.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:24)
When the personal computer, when the Mac came along, there was a big switch that happened. It somehow captivated everybody’s imagination. The application, the killer apps became apparent. You can type in a computer.
Pieter Levels
(01:22:38)
But they became apparent immediately. Back then they also had this thing where like, “We don’t need these computers. They’re like a hype.” And it also went in like waves.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:49)
Yeah. But the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people’s minds would start opening up to it a little bit, the possibility of it. Right now, for example, with the robotics, there’s very few robots in the homes of people.
Pieter Levels
(01:23:03)
Exactly, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:04)
The robots that are there are Roombas, so the vacuum cleaners, or they’re Amazon Alexa.
Pieter Levels
(01:23:11)
Or dishwasher, I mean, it’s essentially a robot.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:13)
Yes, but the intelligence is very limited, I guess, is one way we can summarize all of them except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent, but is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you. That’s just one example. I sometimes think about that as if some people in this world were born in the whole existence is like, they were meant to build the thing. I sometimes wonder what I was meant to do. You have these plans for your life, you have these dreams?
Pieter Levels
(01:23:49)
I think you’re meant to build robots.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:51)
Okay. Me personally. Maybe. Maybe. That’s a sense I’ve had, but it could be other things. Hilariously not be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people, which is weird because I always was anxious about talking to people. It’s like a…
Pieter Levels
(01:24:09)
Really?
Lex Fridman
(01:24:10)
Yeah, I’m scared of this. I was scared. Yeah, exactly.
Pieter Levels
(01:24:14)
I’m scared of you.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:15)
It’s just anxiety throughout, social interaction in general. I’m an introvert that hides from the world. So, yeah, it’s really strange.
Pieter Levels
(01:24:23)
Yeah, but that’s also kind of life, like life brings you to, it’s very hard to super intently choose what you’re going to do with your life. It is more like surfing. You’re surfing the waves, you go in the ocean, you see where you end up.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:38)
Yeah. And there’s universe has a kind of sense of humor.
Pieter Levels
(01:24:41)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:42)
I guess you have to just allow yourself to be carried away by the waves.
Pieter Levels
(01:24:46)
Exactly. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:48)
Have you felt that way in your life?
Pieter Levels
(01:24:50)
Yeah, all the time. Yeah. I think that’s the best way to live your life.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:54)
So, a allow of whatever to happen. Do you know what you’re doing in the next few years? Is it possible that it’ll be completely changed?
Pieter Levels
(01:25:00)
Possibly. I think relationships, you want to hold the relationships, right? You want hold your girl and you want her to become wife and all this stuff. But I think you should stay open to where, for example, where you want to live. We don’t know where we want to live, for example. That’s something that will figure itself out. It will crystallize where you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live, for example. What you’re going to do? I think that’s a really good way to live your life. I think most stress comes from trying to control, like hold things. It’s kind of Buddhist. You need to lose control, let it lose. And then things will happen. When you do mushrooms, when you do drugs, like psychedelic drugs, the people that start, that are control freaks, get bad trips, right? ‘Cause you need to let go. I’m pretty control freak actually. And when I did mushrooms when I was 17, it was very good. And then at the end it wasn’t so good ’cause I tried to control it. It was like, “Ah, now it’s going too much. Now, I need to… Let’s stop.” Bro, you can’t stop it. You need to go through with it. And I think it’s a good metaphor for life. I think that’s a very tranquil way to lead you life.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:05)
Yeah, actually when I took ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already that you can’t control anything. I think I probably learned that the most in jiu-jitsu. So, just let go and relax. And that’s why I had just an incredible experience. There’s literally no negative aspect of my ayahuasca experience, or any psychedelics I’ve ever had. Some of that could be with my biology and my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control. Just surf the waves.
Pieter Levels
(01:26:34)
Yeah. For sure. I think most stress in life comes from trying to control.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:38)
So, once you have the idea, step two, build. How do you think about building the thing once you have the idea?
Pieter Levels
(01:26:45)
I think you should build with the technology that you know. So, for example, Nomad List, which is like this website I made to figure out the best cities to live and work as digital nomads, it wasn’t a website. It launched as a Google spreadsheet. So, it was a public Google spreadsheet anybody could edit. And I was like, “I’m collecting cities where we can live as these nomads with the internet speeds, the cost of living, other stuff.” And I tweeted it. And back then, I didn’t have a lot of followers. I have a few thousand followers or something. And I went viral for my skill viral back then, which was five retweets and a lot of people started editing it. And there was hundreds of cities in this list from all over the world with all the data. It was very crowdsourced. And then I made that into a website.

(01:27:29)
So, figuring out what technology you can use, that you already know. So, if you cannot code, you can use spreadsheet. If you cannot use a spreadsheet, whatever, you can always use, for example, a website generator like Wix or something, or Squarespace, right? You don’t need to code to build a startup. All you need is an idea for a product, build something like a landing page or something, put a Stripe button on there, and then make it. And if you can code, use the language that you already know and start coding with that and see how far you can get. And you can always rewrite the code later. The tech stack it’s not the most important of a business when you’re starting out a business. The important thing is that you validate that there’s a market, that there’s a product that people want to pay for. So, use whatever you can use. And if you cannot code, use spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:19)
And the crowdsourcing element is fascinating. It’s cool. It’s cool when a lot of people start using it. You get to learn so fast. I’ve actually did the spreadsheet thing. You share a spreadsheet publicly, and I made it editable.
Pieter Levels
(01:28:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:37)
It’s so cool.
Pieter Levels
(01:28:38)
Interesting things start happening.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:39)
Yeah, I did it for a workout thing ’cause I was doing a large amount of pushups and pull ups every day.
Pieter Levels
(01:28:44)
Yeah, I remember this man. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:47)
While it’s like Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything’s allowed. So, people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new sheets, new tabs, and it just exploded. And one of the things that I really enjoyed is there’s very few trolls because actually other people would delete the trolls. There would be this weird war of like, they want to protect the thing. It’s an immune system that’s inherent to the thing.
Pieter Levels
(01:29:18)
It becomes a society in a spreadsheet.

Hoodmaps

Lex Fridman
(01:29:20)
And then there’s the outcasts who go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages and they like, “I don’t want to be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet, so I’m going to at the bottom.” I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that used that to its benefit, that’s really nice. Any kind of voting system, any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really, really, really fascinating. So, anyway, so Nomad List is great. I would love for you to talk about that. But one sort of way to talk about it is through you building hood maps. You did an awesome thing, which is document yourself building the thing and doing so in just a handful of days, like 3, 4, 5 days. So, people should definitely check out the video in the blog post. Can you explain what hood maps is and what this whole process was?
Pieter Levels
(01:30:17)
So, I was traveling and I was still trying to find problems, and I would discover that everybody’s experience of a city is different because they stay in different areas. So, I’m from Amsterdam and when I grew up in Amsterdam, or I didn’t grow up, but I lived there in university, I knew that center is like, in Europe, the centers are always tourist areas, so they’re super busy. They’re not very authentic, they’re not really Dutch culture, it’s Amsterdam tourist culture. So, when people would travel to Amsterdam I would say, “Don’t go to the center, go to southeast of the center, the Jordaan or the Pijp or something.” More hipster areas. I was like, “A little more authentic culture of Amsterdam.”

(01:30:54)
That’s where I would live and where I would go. And I thought this could be an app where you can have a Google Maps and you put colors over it. You have areas that are like color-coded, like red is tourist, green is rich, green money, yellow is hipster. And you can figure out where you need to go in the city when you travel. ‘Cause I was traveling a lot, I wanted to go to the cool spots.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:13)
So, just use color.
Pieter Levels
(01:31:15)
Color. Yeah. And I would use a canvas. So, I thought, okay, what do I need? I need to…
Lex Fridman
(01:31:19)
Did you know that you would be using a canvas?
Pieter Levels
(01:31:22)
No, I didn’t know it was possible ’cause I didn’t know-
Lex Fridman
(01:31:24)
This is the cool thing. People should really check it out.
Pieter Levels
(01:31:27)
This is how it started.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:27)
Because you’re honestly capture so beautifully the humbling aspects or the embarrassing aspects of not knowing what to do. It’s like, “How do I do this?” And you document yourself. Yeah, you’re right, “Dude, I feel embarrassed about myself.”
Pieter Levels
(01:31:45)
Oh, really? Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:31:45)
It’s called being alive. Nice. So, you don’t know anything about Canvas is HTML5 thing that allows you to draw shapes.
Pieter Levels
(01:31:58)
Draw images, just draw pixels essentially. And that was special back then because before you could only have elements, right? So, you want to draw a pixel, use a Canvas. And I knew I needed to draw pixels ’cause I need to draw these colors. And I felt like, okay, I’ll get a Google Maps, I frame Embeds, and then I put a div on top of it with the colors. And I’ll do opacity 50, so it kind of shows. So, I did that with Canvas, and then I started drawing. And then I felt like obviously other people need to edit this ’cause I cannot draw all these things myself. So, I crowdsourced it again.

(01:32:31)
And you would draw on the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server. It would put it in the database. And then I would have a robot running like a cron job, which every week would calculate, or every day would calculate like, “Okay, so Amsterdam Center, there’s like six people say it’s tourists, this part of the center, but two people say it’s like hipster. Okay, so the tourist part wins, right?” It’s just an array. So, find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map. So, if most people say it’s tourists, it’s tourists, and it becomes red. And I would do that for all the GPS corners in the world.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:05)
Can we just clarify, as a human that’s contributing to this, do you have to be in that location to make the label or do you-
Pieter Levels
(01:33:12)
People just type in cities and go berserk and start drawing everywhere.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:16)
Would they draw shapes or would they draw pixels?
Pieter Levels
(01:33:18)
Man, they drew crazy stuff, like offensive symbols. I mentioned they would draw penises.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:23)
I mean that’s obviously a guy thing.
Pieter Levels
(01:33:25)
I would do the same thing, draw penises.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:28)
When I show up to Mars and there’s no cameras, I’m drawing a penis on the same-
Pieter Levels
(01:33:31)
Exactly. Man, I did it in the snow. But the penises did not become a problem ’cause I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So, most people would use it fairly. So, just say if I had enough crowdsource data, so you have all these pixels on top of each, it’s like a layer of pixels, and you choose the most common pixel. So, yeah, it’s just like a poll, but in visual format. And it worked. And within a week, I’d had enough data. And it was like cities that did really well, like Los Angeles, a lot of people started using it. Like most data’s in Los Angeles.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:02)
Because Los Angeles has defined neighborhoods. And not just in terms of the official labels, but what they’re known for. Did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels?
Pieter Levels
(01:34:18)
Colors, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:19)
As colors?
Pieter Levels
(01:34:20)
So, I use like, I think you can see there’s like hipster, tourist, rich, business. There’s always a business area and then there’s a residential. Residential is gray. So, I thought those were the most common things in the city, kind of.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:32)
And a little bit meme-y, like it’s almost fun to label it.
Pieter Levels
(01:34:35)
Yeah, I mean obviously it’s simplified, but you need to simplify this stuff. You don’t want to have too many categories. And it’s essentially like using a paintbrush, where you select the color in the bottom, you select the category and you start drawing. There’s no instruction. There’s no manual. And then I also add a tagging so people could write something on a specific location, so, “Don’t go here,” or like, “Here’s nice cafes and stuff.” And man, the memes that came from that. And I also added uploading so that the tags could be uploaded. So, the memes that came from that is amazing. People in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff. It would go viral in all these cities. You can allow your location, and then we’ll probably send you to Austin.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:17)
Okay, so we’re looking… Oh, boy. “Drunk hipsters.”
Pieter Levels
(01:35:28)
“AirBroNBros.”
Lex Fridman
(01:35:30)
” AirBroNBros.” “Hipster Girls who do Cocaine.”
Pieter Levels
(01:35:33)
I saw a guy in a fish costume get beaten up here.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:36)
Yep, that seems also accurate.
Pieter Levels
(01:35:38)
“Overpriced and underwhelming.”
Lex Fridman
(01:35:43)
Let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate. Let’s see. “Dirty 6th.” For people who know Austin, know that that’s important to label. 6th Street is famous in Austin. “Dirty Sixth drunk frat boys,” accurate. ” Drunk fat bros,” continued on Sixth, very well known.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:03)
“Drunk douchebros.”
Lex Fridman
(01:36:00)
Drunk frat bros continued on sixth. Very well then.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:01)
Douche bros.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:02)
Was Sixth drunk douche bros.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:06)
Go from frat to douche.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:07)
Douche. It’s very accurate so far.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:09)
Really?
Lex Fridman
(01:36:11)
They only let hot people live here. I think that might be accurate.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:17)
I think the district. Exercise freaks on the river. Yeah, that’s true.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:24)
Dog runners. Accurate.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:25)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:26)
Saw a guy in the fish costume get beat up here.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:28)
I want to know that story.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:30)
So that’s all user contributed.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:32)
Yeah. And this is stuff I couldn’t come up with because I don’t know Austin. I don’t know the memes here and the subcultures.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:37)
And then me as a user can upvote or down vote this.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:37)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:40)
So this is completely crowd sourced.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:42)
Because of Reddit up vote, down vote. Took it From there.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:45)
Yeah. That’s really, really, really powerful. Single people with dogs. Accurate. At which point did it go from colors to actually showing the text?
Pieter Levels
(01:36:53)
I think I added the text a week after. And so here’s the pixels.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:59)
So that’s really cool. The pixels, how do you go from that? That’s a huge amount of data.
Pieter Levels
(01:36:59)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:02)
So we’re now looking at an image where it’s just a sea of pixels that are colored different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes some sense?
Pieter Levels
(01:37:14)
I think here the problem was that you have this data but it’s not locked to one location.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:14)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:37:20)
So I had to normalize it. So when you draw on the map, it’ll show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate like latitudes, longitudes. But the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals because it’s very specific. It’s like this specific part of the table. So what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing decimals, which I discovered, so that you’re talking about this neighborhood or this street. So that’s what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this and then it starts going to a grid and then you have a grid of data. You get a pixel map kind of.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:56)
And then you said it looks kind of ugly so then you smooth it.
Pieter Levels
(01:38:00)
Yeah, I started adding blurring and stuff. I think now it’s not smooth again because I liked it better. People like the pixel look. Yeah, a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral and every time my maps bill like Map Box, I had to stop using… I first used Google Maps. It went viral and Google Maps, it was out of credits and I had to… So funny, when I launched, it went viral, the map didn’t load anymore. It says over the limits. You need to contact enterprise sales. And I’m like, “But I need now a map and I don’t want to contact enterprise sales. I don’t want to go on a call schedule with some calendar.”

(01:38:36)
So I switched to Map Box and then had Map Box for years and then it went viral and I had a bill of $20,000. It was last year. So they helped me with the bill. They said you can pay less. And then I now switched to an open source kind of map platform. So it’s a very expensive product and never made any dollar money, but it’s very fun but it’s very expensive.
Lex Fridman
(01:38:58)
Where do you learn from that experience? Because when you leverage somebody else’s through the API.
Pieter Levels
(01:39:06)
Yeah, I don’t think a map hosting service should cost this much, but I could host it myself, but that would be… I don’t know how to do that, but I could do that.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:17)
Yeah, it’s super complicated.
Pieter Levels
(01:39:19)
I think that the thing is more about you can’t make money with this project. I try to do many things to make money with it and it hasn’t worked.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:26)
You talked about possibly doing advertisements on it or somehow or people sponsoring it. Yeah. But it’s really surprising to me that people don’t want to advertise on it.
Pieter Levels
(01:39:37)
I think map apps are very hard to monetize. Google Maps also doesn’t really make money. Sometimes you see these ads, but I don’t think there’s a lot of money there. You could put a banner ad, but it’s kind of ugly and the project, it’s kind of cool. So it’s kind of fun to subsidize it. It’s a little bit part of Nomad List. I put it on Nomad List in the cities as well. But I also realized you don’t need to monetize everything. Some products are just cool and it’s cool to have hood maps exist. I want this to exist, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:40:08)
Yeah. There’s a bunch of stuff you’ve created that I’m just glad exists in this world. That’s true. And it’s a whole nother puzzle and I’m surprised to figure out how to make money off of it. I’m surprised maps don’t make money, but you’re right. It’s hard. It’s hard to make money because there’s a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life.
Pieter Levels
(01:40:26)
So where do you put the ad? If you have a website, you can put a ad box or you can do a product placement or something. But you’re talking about a map app where 90% of the interface is a map. So what are you going to do? It’s hard to figure out where is this.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:40)
Yeah. And people don’t want to pay for it.
Pieter Levels
(01:40:42)
No, exactly because if you make people pay for it, you lose 99% of the user base and you lose the crowdsource data. So it’s not fun anymore. It stops being accurate. So they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data, but then yeah, it’s fine. It doesn’t make money, but it’s cool.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:59)
But that said, Nomad List makes money.
Pieter Levels
(01:41:02)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:03)
So what was the story behind Nomad List?
Pieter Levels
(01:41:05)
So Nomad List started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now the second city here. And I was working on my laptop. I met other Nomads there and I was like, “Okay, this seems like a cool thing to do, working on your laptop in a different country, kind of travel around.” But back then the internet everywhere was very slow. So the internet was fast in, for example, Holland or United States, but in a lot of parts in South America or Asia, it was very slow like 0.5 megabits. So you couldn’t watch a YouTube video.

(01:41:37)
Thailand weirdly had quite fast internet, but I wanted to find other cities where I could go to work on my laptop, whatever and travel. But we needed fast internet, so I was like, “Let’s crowdsource this information with a spreadsheet.” And I also needed to know the cost of living because I didn’t have a lot of money. I had $500 a month. So I to find a place where the rent was $200 per month or something where I had some money that I could actually rent something and there was Nomad List and it still runs. I think it’s now almost 10 years.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:09)
So it’s just to describe how it works. I’m looking at Chiang Mai here. There’s a total score. It’s ranked number two.
Pieter Levels
(01:42:16)
Yeah, that’s like a Nomad score.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:17)
4.82 by members, but it’s looking at the internet. In this case it’s fast.
Pieter Levels
(01:42:24)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:24)
Fun, temperature, humidity, air quality, safety, food safety, crime, racism or lack of crime, lack of racism, educational level, power grid, vulnerability to climate change, income level.
Pieter Levels
(01:42:40)
It’s a little much.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:41)
English. It’s awesome. It’s awesome. Walkability.
Pieter Levels
(01:42:44)
I keep adding stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:45)
Because for certain groups of people, certain things really matter and this is really cool. Happiness. I’d love to ask you about that. Night life, free wifi, AC, female friendly, freedom of speech.
Pieter Levels
(01:42:58)
Not so good in Thailand.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:00)
Values derived from national statistics. I like how that one has-
Pieter Levels
(01:43:04)
I need to do that because the data sets are usually national. They’re not on city level. So I don’t know about the freedom of speech between Bangkok or Chiang Mai. I know them in Thailand.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:12)
This is really fascinating. So this is for city, is basically rating all the different things that matter to you, internet. And this is all crowdsourced.
Pieter Levels
(01:43:21)
Well, so it started crowdsource, but then I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from public source like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets, United Nations and you can download a lot of data there, which you can freely use. I started getting problems across with data where for example, people from India, they really love India and they would submit the best scores for everything in India and not just one person, but a lot of people they would love to pump India. And I’m like, “I love India too, but that’s not valid data.”

(01:43:55)
So you started getting discrepancies in the data between where people were from and stuff. So I started switching to data sets and now it’s mostly data sets, but one thing that’s still crowdsourced is people add where they are, they add their travels to their profile and I use that data to see which places are upcoming and which places are popular now. So about half the ranking you see here is based on actual digital nomads who are there. You can click on a city, you can click on people and you can see the people, the users that are actually there. And it’s like 30,000, 40,000 members. So these people are in Austin now and…
Lex Fridman
(01:44:29)
1,800 remote workers in Austin now, of which eight plus members checked in, members who will be here soon and go… This is amazing.
Pieter Levels
(01:44:36)
Yeah. So we have meetups. So people organize their own meetups and we have about I think 30 per month. So it’s like one meetup a day and I don’t do anything. They organize themselves. So it’s a whole black box, it just runs and I don’t do a lot on it. It pulls data from everywhere and it just works.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:56)
Cons of Austin is too expensive, very sweating, humid now, difficult to make friends.
Pieter Levels
(01:45:00)
Difficult to make friends. Interesting, right? I didn’t know that.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:02)
Difficult to make friends.
Pieter Levels
(01:45:04)
In Austin.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:04)
But this all crowd source but mostly it’s pros.
Pieter Levels
(01:45:07)
Yeah. Austin’s very good.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:08)
Pretty safe, fast internet.
Pieter Levels
(01:45:09)
I don’t understand why it says not safe for women. Check the data set. It feels safe. The problem with a lot of places like United States is that it depends per area.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:18)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:45:18)
So if you get city level data or nation level data, it’s like Brazil is the worst because the range in safe and wealthy and not safe is huge. So you can’t say many things about Brazil.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:31)
So once they actually show up to the city, how do you figure out what area, where to get fast internet? For example, for me it’s consistently a struggle to figure out. Hotels with fast wifi, for example. Okay, okay. I show up to a city, there’s a lot of fascinating puzzles and I haven’t figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. When I show up to a city, figuring out where I can get fast internet connection, and for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that’s quiet.
Pieter Levels
(01:46:04)
Right. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:05)
That’s not easy.
Pieter Levels
(01:46:06)
Construction sounds.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:07)
All kinds of sounds. You get to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world and also the quality of the room because the more… The emptier the room, and if it’s just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there’s echoes in the room. Anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don’t have tables. They don’t have normal…
Pieter Levels
(01:46:29)
It’s this weird desk, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:46:31)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:46:31)
It’s not a center table.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:33)
Yeah. And if you want to get a nicer hotel where it’s more spacious and so on, they usually have these boutique fancy looking like modernist tables that don’t…
Pieter Levels
(01:46:33)
Yeah. It’s too design-y.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:44)
It’s too design-y. They’re not really real tables.
Pieter Levels
(01:46:47)
What if you get IKEA?
Lex Fridman
(01:46:49)
Buy IKEA?
Pieter Levels
(01:46:50)
Yeah. Before you arrive, you order an IKEA. Nomads do this. They get desks.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:54)
I feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have the desk unless you stay in there for a long time. Just the entire assembly, all that. Airbnb is so unreliable. The range in quality that you get is huge. Hotels have a lot of problems, pros and cons. Hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what’s actually going to be in the room.
Pieter Levels
(01:47:19)
And that’s a problem. Fake photos, man.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:23)
If I could have the kind of data you have on Nomad List for hotels.
Pieter Levels
(01:47:26)
Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:28)
And I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too.
Pieter Levels
(01:47:30)
Yeah, the booking fees, affiliate, right? I thought about this idea because we have the same problem. I go to hotels and there’s specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff, but even if you go to… Some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:44)
And each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms. Some are more expensive, some are cheaper and so on. But you can get the details of what’s in the room, what’s the actual layout of the room, what is the view of the room.
Pieter Levels
(01:47:58)
3D scan it.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:58)
I feel like as a hotel you can win a lot. So first you create a service that allows you to have high resolution data about a hotel. Then one hotel signs up for that. I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives that don’t give any information. And I feel like there’ll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site and you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money.
Pieter Levels
(01:48:24)
I think it’s true, but the problem is with these hotels, it’s same with airline industry. Why does every airline website suck when you try book a flight? It’s very strange. Why does it have to suck? Obviously there’s competition here. Why doesn’t the best website win?
Lex Fridman
(01:48:35)
What’s the explanation for that?
Pieter Levels
(01:48:36)
Man, I’ve thought about this for years. So I think it’s like I have to book the flight anyway. I know there’s a route that they take and I need to book, for example, Qatar Airlines and I need to get through this process. And with hotels, similar. You need a hotel anyway. So do you have time to figure out the best one? Not really. You kind of just need to get the place booked and you need to get the flight and you’ll go through the pain of this process. And that’s why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff because they don’t have an incentive to improve it because generally only for a super upper segment of the market I think like super high luxury, it affects the actual booking.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:17)
I don’t know. I think that’s an interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My theory would be that great software engineers are not allowed to make changes. Basically there’s some kind of bureaucracy,. There’s way too many managers. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and great engineers show up, they try to work there and they’re not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave. And so they have a lot of mediocre software engineers. They’re not really interested in improving any other thing.

(01:49:45)
And literally they would like to improve the stuff, but the bureaucracy of the place, plus all the bosses, all the high up people are not technical people probably. They don’t know much about web development. They don’t know much about programming, so they just don’t give any respect. You have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. If you were a great programmer, would you want to work at America Airlines or…
Pieter Levels
(01:50:16)
No. No.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:19)
I’m torn on that because I actually, as somebody who loves program, would love to work at America Airlines so I can make the thing better.
Pieter Levels
(01:50:27)
Yeah. But I would work there just to fix it for myself.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:30)
Yeah, for yourself. And then you just know how much suffering you’re alleviated, how much frustration-
Pieter Levels
(01:50:37)
For all society.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:38)
You imagine all the thousands, maybe millions of people that go to that website and have to click a million times. It often doesn’t work. It’s clunky, all that kind of stuff. You’re making their life just so much better.
Pieter Levels
(01:50:38)
Much better.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:50)
Yeah. But there must be an explanation that has to do with managers and bureaucracies.
Pieter Levels
(01:50:54)
I think it’s money. Do you know Booking.com?
Lex Fridman
(01:50:57)
Sure.
Pieter Levels
(01:50:58)
So it’s the biggest booking website in the world. It’s Dutch actually. And they have teams because my friend worked there. They have teams for a specific part of the website, like a 10 by 10 pixels area where they run tests on this. So they run tests and they’re famous for this stuff like, “Oh, there’s only one room left,” which is red letters like, “One room left. Book now.” And they got a fine from the European Union about this. Kind of interesting.

(01:51:21)
So they have all these teams and they run the test for 24 hours. They go to sleep, they wake up next day, they come to the office and they see, “Okay, this performed better.” This website has become a monster, but it’s the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world. It’s number one. So that shows that it’s not about user experience. It’s about, I don’t know, about making more money and not every company, but if they’re optimizing, it’s a public company. If they’re optimizing for money…
Lex Fridman
(01:51:47)
But you can optimize for money by disrupting, making it way better.
Pieter Levels
(01:51:50)
Yeah, but this always started… They start with disrupting. Booking all started as a startup, 1997, and then they become the old shit again. Uber now starts to become like a taxi again. It was very good in the beginning. Now it’s kind like taxis now in many places are better. They’re nicer than Ubers. So it’s like the circle.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:08)
I think some of it is also just it’s hard to have ultra competent engineers. Stripe seems like a trivial thing, but it’s hard to pull off. Why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click, which I think is a genius idea. Make buying easier. Make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button, one scene, you bought the thing, as opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn’t work like with the airlines.
Pieter Levels
(01:52:39)
You remember the forms with delete? You could click next, submit and with 404 or something or your internet would go down, your modem. Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:47)
And I would have an existential crisis. The frustration would take over my whole body and I would just want to quit life for a brief moment there. Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:52:56)
I’m so happy the form stays in Google Chrome now if something goes wrong. But Google somebody at Google and prove society with that, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:53:03)
Yeah. And one of the challenges at Google is to have the freedom to do that.
Pieter Levels
(01:53:08)
They don’t anymore.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:09)
There’s a bunch of bureaucracy, yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:53:09)
At Google.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:11)
There’s so many brilliant, brilliant people there, but it just moves slowly.
Pieter Levels
(01:53:16)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:16)
I wonder why that is and maybe that’s the natural way of a company, but you have people like Elon who rolls in and just fires most of the folks and always push the company to operate as a startup even when it’s already big.
Pieter Levels
(01:53:29)
But Apple does this. I started in business school. Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups. So it’s three to five people, they make something, they have multiple teams make the same thing. The best team wins. So I think you need to emulate a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial. And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to come up with new ideas and do it better.

Learning new programming languages

Lex Fridman
(01:53:52)
So one of the things you do really, really well is learn a new thing. You have an idea, you try to build it, and then you learn everything you need to in order to build it. You have your current skills, but you learn just the minimal amount of stuff. So you’re a good person to ask how do you learn? How do you learn quickly and effectively and just the stuff you need? Just by way of example, you did a 30 days learning session on 3D where you documented yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about 3D.
Pieter Levels
(01:54:25)
Yeah, I tried to learn virtual reality because this was same as AI. It came up suddenly 2016, 2017 with I think HTC Vive, these big VR glasses before Apple Vision Pro. And I was like, “Oh, this is going to be big so I need to learn this.” And I know nothing about 3D. I installed I think Unity and Blender and stuff, and I started learning all this stuff because I thought this was a new nascent technology that was going to be big. And if I had the skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think with learning, for me, I think learning is so funny because people always ask me, “How do you learn to code? Should I learn to code?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” Every day I’m learning. It’s kind of cliche, but every day I’m learning new stuff.

(01:55:08)
So every day I’m searching on Google or asking out ChatGPT how to do this thing, how to do this thing. Every day I’m getting better at my skill. So you never stop learning. So the whole concept of how do you learn, well, you never end. So where do you want to be? Do you want know a little bit? Do you want to know a lot? Do you want to do it for your whole life?

(01:55:25)
So I think taking action is the best step to learn. So making things. You know nothing, just start making things. Okay, so how to make a website. Search how to make a website or nowadays you ask ChatGPT, “How do I make a website? Where do I start?” It generates codes for you. Copy the code, put it in a file, save it. Open it in Google Chrome or whatever. You have a website and then you start tweaking with it and you start, “Okay, how do I add a button? How do I add AI features nowadays?” So it’s like by taking action, you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or tutorials.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:57)
Actually I’m always curious. Let me ask perplexity. How do I make a website? I’m just curious what it would say. I hope it goes with really basic vanilla solutions. Define your website’s purpose, choose a domain name, select a web hosting provider. Choose a website, a builder or a CMS website. Build a platform. Wix.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:20)
It tells Wix or Squarespace is what I said. Make a landing page.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:23)
How do I say if I want to program it myself? Design your website, create essential pages.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:29)
Yeah. Even tells you to launch it, right? Start promoting it.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:31)
Launch your website. Well, you could do that.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:34)
Yeah, but this is literally it.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:34)
If you want to make a website.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:35)
This is the basic like Google Analytics.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:38)
But you can’t make Nomad Lists with this web.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:38)
You can.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:41)
With Wix.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:43)
No, you can get pretty far, I think.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:43)
You get pretty far.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:45)
Website builders are pretty advanced. All you need is a grid of images that are clickable that open another page.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:51)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(01:56:52)
You can get quite far.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:53)
How do I learn to program? Choose a programming language to start with.
Pieter Levels
(01:57:03)
FreeCodeCamp is good.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:07)
Work through resources thematically. Practice coding regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistency is key. Join programming communities like Reddit’s… Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty good.
Pieter Levels
(01:57:20)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:20)
It’s pretty good.
Pieter Levels
(01:57:21)
So I think it’s a very good starting ground because imagine you know nothing and you want to make a website, you want to make a startup. That’s why, man, the power of AI for education is going to be insane. People anywhere can ask this question and start building stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:57:37)
Yeah, it clarifies it for sure. And just start building, keep build, build. Actually apply the thing, whether it’s AI or any of the programming for web development. Just have a project in mind, which I love the idea of 12 startups in 12 months or build a project almost every day. Just build a thing and get it to work and finish it every single day. That’s a cool experiment.
Pieter Levels
(01:58:05)
I think that was the inspiration. There was a girl who did 160 websites in 160 days or something, literally mini websites, and she learned to code that way. So I think it’s good to set yourself challenges. You can go to some coding bootcamp, but I don’t think they actually work. I think it’s better to do for me out of the dark self-learning and setting yourself challenges and just getting in. But you need discipline. You need discipline to keep doing it. And coding, coding is very… It’s a steep learning curve to get in. It’s very annoying. Working with computers is very annoying, so it can be hard for people to keep doing it.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:45)
Yeah. That thing of just keep doing it and don’t quit, that urgency that’s required to finish a thing. That’s why it’s really powerful when you documented this, the creation of Hood Maps or a working prototype that there’s just a constant frustration, I guess. It’s like, “How do I do this?” And then you look it up and you’re like, “Okay.” You have to interpret the different options you have and then just try it. And then there’s a dopamine rush of like, “It works. Cool.”
Pieter Levels
(01:59:16)
Man, it’s amazing. And I live streamed it. It’s on YouTube and stuff. People can watch it and it’s amazing when things work. Look, it’s just amazing that I don’t look far ahead. So I only look, okay, what’s the next problem to solve? And then the next problem. And at the end you have a whole app or website or thing. But I think most people look way too far ahead. It’s like this poster again. You don’t know hard it’s going to be so you should only look for the next thing, the next little challenge, the next step, and then see where you end up.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:49)
And assume it’s going to be easy.
Pieter Levels
(01:59:52)
Yeah, exactly. Be naive about it because you’re going to have very difficult problems. A lot of the big problems won’t be even technology, will be public. Maybe people don’t like your website. You’ll get canceled for a website for example. A lot of things can happen.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:06)
What’s it like building in public you do openly where you’re just iterating quickly and you’re getting people’s feedback? So there’s the power of the crowdsourcing, but there’s also the negative aspects of people being able to criticize.
Pieter Levels
(02:00:20)
So man, I think haters are actually good because I think a lot of haters have good points and it takes stepping away from the emotion of your website sucks because blah, blah, blah. And you’re like, “Okay, just remove this.” Your website sucks because personal. What did he say? Why did he not like it? And you figure out, okay, he didn’t like it because the signup was difficult or something or the data. They say, no, this data is not accurate or something. I need to improve the quality of data. This hater has a point because it’s dumb to completely ignore your haters. And also, man, I think I’ve been there when I was 10 years old or something. You’re on the internet. You’re just shouting crazy stuff. That’s like most of Twitter or half of Twitter. So you have to take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, man, you need to grow a very thick skin on Twitter, on X. But I mute a lot of people. I found out I muted already 15,000 people recently. I checked,\. So in 10 years I muted 15,000 people. So that’s like…
Lex Fridman
(02:01:16)
That’s one by one manual?
Pieter Levels
(02:01:18)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:18)
Oh wow.
Pieter Levels
(02:01:19)
So 1,500 people per year. And I don’t like to block because then they get angry. They make a screenshot and they say, “Ah, you blocked me.” So I just mute and it disappear and it’s amazing.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:29)
So you mentioned Reddit. So Hood Maps, did that make it to the front page of Reddit?
Pieter Levels
(02:01:34)
Yeah. Yeah, it did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It did. It was amazing. And my server almost went down and I was checking Google Analytics was like 5,000 people on the website or something crazy. And it was at night and it was amazing. Man, I think nowadays, honestly, TikTok, YouTube reels, Instagram reels, a lot of apps get very big from people making TikTok videos about it. So let’s say you make your own app, you can make a video for yourself like, “Oh, I made this app. This is how it works, blah, blah, blah, and this is why I made it, for example, and this is why you should use it.” And if it’s a good video, it will take off and you will get… Man, I got $20,000 extra per month or something from one TikTok video. It made a photo guy.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:18)
By you or somebody else by somebody else?
Pieter Levels
(02:02:19)
By some random guy. So there’s all these AI influencers that they write about. They show AI apps and then they ask money later when a video goes viral. All I can do, do it again and send me $4,000 or something. I’m like, ” Okay.” I did that, for example. But it works. TikTok is a very big platform for user acquisition and organic. The best user acquisition I think is organic. You don’t need to buy ads. You probably don’t have money when you start to buy ads. So use organic or write a banger tweets that can make an app take off as well.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:50)
Well, yeah, fundamentally create cool stuff and have just a little bit of a following enough for the cool thing to be noticed. And then it becomes viral if it’s cool enough.
Pieter Levels
(02:03:00)
Yeah. And you don’t need a lot of followers anymore on X and a lot of platforms because TikTok, X, I think it’s Instagram reels also, they have the same algorithm now. It’s not about followers anymore. It’s about they test your content on a small subset, like 300 people. If they like, it’ll get tested to a thousand people and on and on. So if the thing is good, it will rise anyway. It doesn’t matter if you have half a million followers or a thousand followers or more.

Monetize your website

Lex Fridman
(02:03:24)
What’s your philosophy of monetizing, how to make money from the thing you build?
Pieter Levels
(02:03:27)
Yeah. So a lot of starters, they do free users, so you could sign up and could use an app for free, which it never worked for me well because I think free users generally don’t convert. And I think if you have VC funding, it makes sense to get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get millions of people come in predictably how much they convert and give them a free trial, whatever, and then they sign up. But you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to make it work that you need… It’s very difficult.

(02:03:57)
I think it’s best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning. So show your app, what are you doing on your landing page. Make a demo, whatever, video. And then if you want to use it, pay me money. Pay $10, $20, $40. I would ask more than $10 per month like Netflix, $10 per month. But Netflix is giant company. They can afford to make it so cheap, relatively cheap. If you’re an individual like an indie hacker, you are making your own app. You need to make at least $30 or more on a user to make it worth it for you. You need to make money.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:31)
And it builds a community of people that actually really care about the product.
Pieter Levels
(02:04:34)
Also, yeah, making a community like making a Discord is very normal now. Every AI app has a Discord and you have the developers and the users together in a Discord, and they ask for features. They build together. It’s very normal now. And you need to imagine if you’re starting out, getting a thousand users is quite difficult. Getting a thousand pages is quite difficult. And if you charge them like $30, you have 30K a month and it’s a lot of money.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:59)
That’s enough to…
Pieter Levels
(02:05:00)
Live a good life.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:01)
Yeah, live a pretty good life. That could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.
Pieter Levels
(02:05:04)
Yeah. So that’s another thing. I make sure my profit margins are very high, so I try to keep the costs very low. I don’t hire people. I try to negotiate with AI vendors now like, “Can you make it cheaper?” Which I discovered this. You can just email companies and say, “Can you give me discount? It’s too expensive.” And they say, “Sure, 50%.” I’m like, “Wow, very good.” And I didn’t know this. You can just ask. And especially now it’s kind of recession, you can ask companies like, “I need a discount.” You don’t need to be asshole, about it. Say, “I need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company. Maybe a discount here and there?” And they say, “Sure.” A lot of them will say yes, 25% discount, 50% discount. Because you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something. It’s not.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:53)
And also you’re a public facing person.
Pieter Levels
(02:05:56)
That helps also.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:57)
And there’s love and good vibes that you put out into the world. You’re actually legitimately trying to build cool stuff. So a lot of companies probably want to associate with you because you’re trying to do.
Pieter Levels
(02:06:06)
Yeah, it’s like a secret hack. But I think even without….
Lex Fridman
(02:06:08)
Secret hack. Be a good person.
Pieter Levels
(02:06:10)
It depends how much discount they will give. They’ll maybe give more, but that’s why you should shit post on Twitter, so you get discounts maybe.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:19)
Yeah. Yeah. And also when it’s crowdsourced, paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam.
Pieter Levels
(02:06:29)
Also. Yeah. Yeah. It gives you high quality users.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:30)
High quality users.
Pieter Levels
(02:06:32)
Free users are, sorry, but they’re horrible. It’s just millions of people especially with AI startups. You get a lot of abuse, so you get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app, just hacking it and whatever.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:44)
There’s something on the internet. You mentioned like 4Chan discovered Hood Maps.
Pieter Levels
(02:06:49)
Yeah, but I love 4Chan. I don’t love 4Chan, but you know what I mean. They’re so crazy, especially back then. It’s kind of funny what they do.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:58)
Actually, what is it? This new documentary on Netflix, Anti-Social Network or something like that. That really was fascinating. Just 4Chan, just the spirit of the thing, 4Chan.
Pieter Levels
(02:06:58)
People misunderstand 4Chan.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:10)
It’s so much about freedom and also the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking the man.
Pieter Levels
(02:07:18)
That’s it. It’s just anti-system.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:20)
But for fun. The dark aspect of it is you’re having fun, you’re doing anti-system stuff, but the Nazis always show up.
Pieter Levels
(02:07:31)
That shift started happening.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:32)
It’s drifting somehow. Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(02:07:34)
Like school shootings and stuff. So it’s a very difficult topic. But I do know, especially early on, I think 2010, I would go to 4Chan for fun and they would post crazy offensive stuff. And this was just to scare off people. So we’d show to other people, say, “Hey, do you know this internet website 4Chan? Just check it out.” And they’d be, “Dude, what the fuck is that?” I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand. That’s to scare you away. But actually when you go through scroll, there’s deep conversations.” And they would already be… This was like a normie filter to stop. So kind of cool. But yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:03)
It goes dark.
Pieter Levels
(02:08:00)
They’re like stop. So, cool, but yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:03)
It goes dark.
Pieter Levels
(02:08:04)
It goes dark, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:05)
And if you have those people show up, they’ll for the fun of it, do a bunch of racist things and all that kind of stuff you were saying.
Pieter Levels
(02:08:11)
Yeah. I think it was never… Man, I’m not a fortune, but it was always about provoking. It’s just provocateurs.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:17)
But the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can damage a good thing. A little poison in a town is always good. It’s like the Tom Waits thing, but you don’t want too much, otherwise it destroys the town. It destroys the thing.
Pieter Levels
(02:08:35)
Yeah. But they’re like pen testers, penetration testers, hackers. They just test your app for you and then you add some stuff. I had a NSFW word list. They would say bad words, so when they would write bad words, they would get forwarded to YouTube, which was a video. It was a very relaxing video that ASMR with glowing jelly, streaming like this to relax them or cheese melting on the toast to chill them out.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:05)
Yeah, I like it. But actually, a lot of stuff, I didn’t realize how much originated in Forchand in terms of memes. Rick Roll, I didn’t understand… I didn’t know that Rick Roll originated in Forchand. There’s so many memes, most of the memes that you think it takes-
Pieter Levels
(02:09:17)
The word roll I think comes from Forchand, not the word roll, but in this case, in the meme use, you would get roll doubles because every… It was post IDs on Forchand. So, they were random. So, if I get doubles, this happens or something. So, you’d get two-two… Anyway, it’s like a betting market on these doubles on these post IDs. There’s so much funny stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:38)
Yeah. That’s the internet that’s purist. But yeah, again, the dark stuff seeps in and it’s nice to keep the dark stuff to some low amount. It’s nice to have a bit of noise in the darkness, but not too much. But again, you have to pay attention to that with… I guess spam in general, you have to fight that with Nomad list. How do you fight spam?

Fighting SPAM

Pieter Levels
(02:10:01)
Man, I use GPT-4o. It’s amazing. So, I have user input, I have reviews, people can review cities and I don’t need to actually sign up. It’s anonymous reviews and they write whole books about cities and what’s good and bad. So, I run it through GPT-4o and I ask, is this a good review? Is it offensive? Is this racist or some stuff? And then, it sends message in Telegram, it rejects reviews, and I check it and man, it’s so on point. It’s so-
Lex Fridman
(02:10:31)
Automated.
Pieter Levels
(02:10:32)
Yes, and it’s so accurate. It understands double meanings. I have GPT-4o running on the chat community. It’s a chat community of 10,000 people, and they’re chatting, and they start fighting with each other and I used to have human moderators was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator. This guy is biased or something. I have GPT-4o and it’s really, really, really, really good. It understands humor. You could say something bad, but it’s like a joke and it’s not offensive so much so it shouldn’t be deleted. It understands that.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:05)
I would love to have a GPT-4o based filter of different kinds for X.
Pieter Levels
(02:11:15)
Yeah. I thought this week, I tweeted a fact check. You can click fact check and then GPT-4o… Look, GPT-4o is not always right about stuff, but it can give you a general fact check on a tweet. Usually, what I do now when I write something difficult about economics or something about AI, I put in GPT-4o, I say, “Can you fact check it?” Because I might’ve said something stupid.

(02:11:35)
And the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the replies like, “Oh, you said this wrong.” And then, the whole tweet doesn’t make sense anymore. So, I ask GPT-4o to fact check a lot of stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:44)
So, fact check is a tough one, but it would be interesting to rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is. That seems more doable. That seems like more doable. It seems like a GPT thing because that’s less about the truth and it’s more about the rigor of the thing.
Pieter Levels
(02:12:04)
Exactly. And you can ask that. You can ask in the prompt, I don’t know, for example, do you think… Create a ranking score of X Twitter replies where should this post be if we rank on, I don’t know, integrity, reality, fundamental deepness or something, interestness, and it would give you that a pretty good score probably. Elon can do this with Grok. He can start using that to check replies because their reply section is chaos.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:32)
Yeah. And actually the ranking or the reply is not great.
Pieter Levels
(02:12:35)
Doesn’t make any sense.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:35)
It doesn’t make sense.
Pieter Levels
(02:12:36)
No.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:36)
And I would like to sort in different kinds of ways.
Pieter Levels
(02:12:39)
Yeah. And you get too many replies now. If you have a lot of followers, I get too many replies, I don’t see everything, and a lot of stuff I just miss and I want to see the good stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:49)
And also the notifications or whatever, it’s just complete chaos. It’d be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways, sort it in interesting ways. Because I feel like I miss a lot. And what surfaced for me is just a random comment by a person with no followers. That’s positive or negative. It’s like okay.
Pieter Levels
(02:13:09)
If it’s a very good comment, it should happen, but it should probably look a little bit more like, do these people have followers because they’re probably more engaged in a platform, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:13:17)
Oh no, I don’t even care about how many followers. If you’re ranking by the quality of the comment, great, but not just randomly chronological just a sea of comments.
Pieter Levels
(02:13:28)
Yeah. It doesn’t make sense.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:29)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(02:13:31)
X could be very proof of that, I think.

Automation

Lex Fridman
(02:13:33)
One thing you espouse a lot, which I love is the automation step. So, once you have a thing, once you have an idea, and you build it, and it actually starts making money, and it’s making people happy, there’s a community of people using it. You want to take the automation step of automating the things you have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running indefinitely. Can you explain your philosophy there? What you mean by automate?
Pieter Levels
(02:14:01)
Yeah. So, the general theory of starters would be that when it starts, you start making money, you start hiring people to do stuff, do stuff that you like marketing, for example, do stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself. And whatever, community management, and organizing meetups for Nomad List, for example, that would be a job, for example.

(02:14:18)
And I felt like I don’t have the money for that and I don’t really want to run a big company with a lot of people because there’s a lot of work managing these people. So, I’ve always tried to automate these things as much as possible. And this can literally be like for Nomad List, it’s not a different other starters, it’s like a webpage where you can organize your own meetup, set a schedule, a date, whatever.

(02:14:42)
You could see how many Nomads will be there at that date. So, there will be actually enough Nomads to meet up. And then, when it’s done, it sends a tweet out on the Nomad List account, there’s a meetup here, it sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there, who are going to be there. And then, people show up on a bar, and there’s a meetup, and that’s fully automated. And for me, it’s so obvious to make this automatic, why would you have somebody organize this? It makes more sense to automate it, and this with most of my things, I figure out how to do it with codes and I think especially now with AI, you can automate so much more stuff than before because AI understands things so well. Before I would use if statements. Now, you ask GPT, you put something in GPT-4o in the API and it sends back, this is good, this is bad.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:29)
Yeah. So, you basically can now even automate subjective type of things.
Pieter Levels
(02:15:35)
This is the difference now and that’s very recent.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:38)
But it’s still difficult to… That step of automation is difficult to figure out how to, because you’re basically delegating everything to code. It’s not trivial to take that step for a lot of people. So, when you say automate, are you talking about cron jobs?
Pieter Levels
(02:15:56)
Yes. Man, a lot of cron jobs.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:57)
A lot of cron jobs.
Pieter Levels
(02:16:00)
Literally, I log into the server and I do pseudo cron tab dash E, and then I go into edit and I write hourly. And then, I write PHP, do this thing dot PHP, and that’s a script, and that script does a thing and it does it then hourly. That’s it. And that’s how all my websites work.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:19)
Do you have a thing where it emails you, or something like this, or emails somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong?
Pieter Levels
(02:16:25)
I have these webpages I make, they’re called health checks, so it’s like healthcheck.php. And then, it has emojis, it has a green check mark if it’s good, and a red one if it’s bad, and then it does database queries. For example, what’s the internet speed in, for example, Amsterdam? Okay, it’s a number. It’s 27 point megabits, so it’s accurate number. Okay, check, good. And then, it goes to the next and it goes on all the data points.

(02:16:49)
Did people sign up in the last 24 hours? It’s important because maybe the sign-up broke. Okay, check, somebody sign up. Then I have uptimerobot.com, which is for uptime, but it can also check keywords. It checks for an emoji, which is the red X, which is if something is bad. And so, it opens that health check page every minute to check if something is bad. Then if it’s bad, it sends a message to me on Telegram saying, “Hey, what’s up?” It doesn’t say, “Hey, what’s up?” It sends me alert.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:15)
Hey. Hey, sweetie.
Pieter Levels
(02:17:16)
This thing is down and then I check. So, within a minute of something breaking, I know it, and then I can open my laptop and fix it. But the good thing is the last few years, things don’t break anymore. And definitely 10 years ago when I started, everything was breaking all the time. And now it’s almost last week it was like 100.000% uptime and these health checks are part of the uptime percentage. So, it’s like everything works.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:41)
You’re actually making me realize I should have a page for myself, one page that has all the health checks just so I can go to it and see all the green check marks.
Pieter Levels
(02:17:53)
It feels good to look at.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:54)
It’d just be like, okay.
Pieter Levels
(02:17:54)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:17:55)
All right. We’re okay, everything’s okay. And you can see when was the last time something wasn’t okay and it’ll say never or meaning you’ve checked since last cared to check, it’s all been okay.
Pieter Levels
(02:18:11)
For sure. It used to send me the good health checks. It all works. It all works. It all works.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:16)
But it’s been so often.
Pieter Levels
(02:18:18)
And I’m like, this feels so good. But then I’m like, okay, obviously it’s not going to… You need to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones and now that’s the case.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:24)
I need integrate everything into one place. Automate everything. They have also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication of this podcast is done all… Everything is just on automatically, it’s all clipped up, all those kind of stuff. But it would be nice to automate even more. Translation, all those kind of stuff would be nice to automate.
Pieter Levels
(02:18:46)
Yeah. Every JavaScript, every PHP error gets sent to my telegram as well. So, every user, whatever user it is, doesn’t have to be page user. If they run into an error, the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my Telegram from all my websites.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:04)
So, you get a message.
Pieter Levels
(02:19:05)
So, I get a uncalled variable error, whatever, blah-blah-blah. And then, I’m like, okay, interesting. And then, I go check it out, and that’s a way to get to zero errors because you get flooded with errors in the beginning and now it’s like nothing almost.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:19)
That’s really cool. That’s really cool.
Pieter Levels
(02:19:22)
But this is the same stuff people, they pay very big SaaS companies like New Relic for, to manage the stuff. So, you can do that too. You can use off the shelf. I like to build myself. It’s easier.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:34)
Yeah, it’s nice. It’s nice to do that automation. I’m starting to think about what are the things in my life I’m doing myself that could be automated.
Pieter Levels
(02:19:43)
Ask ChatGPT, give your day, and then ask it what parts should automate.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:48)
Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption of social media, both the output and the input.
Pieter Levels
(02:19:55)
Man, that’s very interesting. I think there’s some starters that do that. They summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter with AI. I think the guy called swyx or something, he does a newsletter. It’s completely AI generated. We have the cool new stuff in AI.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:11)
Yeah, I would love to do that. But also across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all this kind of stuff, just like, “Okay, can you summarize the internet for me for today?”
Pieter Levels
(02:20:22)
summarizeinternet.com.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:23)
Yeah, dot com. Because I feel like it pulls in way too much time, but also I don’t like the effect it has some days on my psyche.
Pieter Levels
(02:20:33)
Because of haters or just general content, like politics?
Lex Fridman
(02:20:37)
Just general. No, no, just general. For example, TikTok is a good example of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use TikTok. I just feel like-
Pieter Levels
(02:20:45)
Yeah. I don’t use it anymore.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:47)
Empty somehow and I’m uninspired. It’s funny in the moment I’m like, “Haha, look at that cat doing a funny thing.” And then, you’re like, “Oh, look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music.” And then, you’re like 10 minutes later you’re like, I feel way dumber and I don’t really want to do much for the rest of the day.
Pieter Levels
(02:21:06)
Yeah. My girlfriend sat, she saw me watching some dumb video and she’s like, “Dude, your face looks so dumb as well.” Your whole face starts going like, “Oh, interesting.”
Lex Fridman
(02:21:19)
With X sometimes for me too, I think I’m probably naturally gravitating towards the drama.
Pieter Levels
(02:21:26)
Aren’t we all?
Lex Fridman
(02:21:27)
Yeah. And so, following AI people, especially AI people that only post technical content has been really good because then I just look at them, and then I go down rabbit holes of learning new papers that have been published, or good repost, or just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff, and the kind of things that they retweet, and that’s the rabbit hole. I go, and I’m learning and I’m inspired, all that kind of stuff. It’s been tough. It’s been tough to control that.
Pieter Levels
(02:21:52)
It’s difficult. You need to manage your platforms. I have a mute board list as well, so I mute politics stuff because I don’t really want it on my feed, and I think I’ve muted so much that now my feed is good. I see interesting stuff. But the fact that you need to modify, you need to mod your app, your social media platform just to function and not be toxic for you for your mental health. That’s a problem. It should be doing that for you.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:18)
It’s some level of automation. That would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier.
Pieter Levels
(02:22:27)
You need to spend $42,000 a month, which my friends do. Yeah, you can do that.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:32)
No. But still, even if you do that, that you’re not getting… There’s limitations that don’t make it easy to do automate because the thing that they’re trying to limit abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train in LLM or something like this. But if I just want to figure out ways to automate my interaction with X system or with Instagram, they don’t make that easy.

(02:22:55)
But I would love to automate that and explore different ways how to leverage LLMs to control the content I consume, and maybe publish that, and maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. But there’s not enough access to get-
Pieter Levels
(02:23:11)
Yes, you could screen cap your phone. It can be an app that watches your screen with you.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:16)
You could, yeah.
Pieter Levels
(02:23:17)
But I don’t really know what it would do. Maybe it can hide stuff before you see it.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:22)
I have that. I have Chrome extensions… I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. For example, on my main computer, I hide all views, and likes, and all that on YouTube content that I create. So that I don’t-
Pieter Levels
(02:23:37)
That’s smart, doesn’t affect you.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:38)
It doesn’t, yeah. So, you don’t pay attention to it. I also hide parts… I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything. It’s the same with YouTube.
Pieter Levels
(02:23:38)
I have the same, I have this extension.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:50)
Well, I wrote my own because it’s easier because it keeps changing. It’s not easy to keep it dynamically changing, but they’re really good at getting you to be distracted and starting to-
Pieter Levels
(02:24:03)
Related account, related post. I’m like, I don’t want related.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:04)
And 10 minutes later you’re like or something that’s trending.
Pieter Levels
(02:24:07)
I have a weird amount of friends addicted to YouTube and I’m not addicted. I think because my attention span is too short for YouTube. But I have this extension, YouTube Unhook, which hides all the related stuff. I can just see the video and it’s amazing, but sometimes I need to search a video how to do something, and then I go to YouTube and then I had these YouTube shorts. These YouTube shorts, they’re algorithmically designed to just make you tap them. And then, I tap, and then I’m like five minutes later with this face and you’re just stuck. And what happened? I was going to play the coffee mix, the music mix for drinking coffee together in the morning, like jazz. I didn’t want to go to shorts. So, it’s very difficult.

When to sell startup

Lex Fridman
(02:24:54)
I love how we’re actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved with a startup. Okay. So, what about the exit? When and how to exit?
Pieter Levels
(02:25:03)
Man, you shouldn’t ask me because I never sold my company.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:07)
All the successful stuff you’ve done, you never sold it?
Pieter Levels
(02:25:10)
Yeah, it’s sad. So, I’ve been in a lot of acquisition like deals and stuff, and I learn a lot about finance people as well there, manipulation, and due diligence, and then changing the valuation. People change the valuation after. So, a lot of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes six months. It’s a classic. It takes six to 12 months. They want to see everything.

(02:25:33)
They want to see your stripe, and your code, and whatever. And then, in the end, they’ll change the price to lower because you’re already so invested. So, it’s like a negotiation tactic. I’m like, “No, I don’t want to sell.” And the problem with my companies is they make 90% profit margin. Companies get sold with multiples, multiples of profit or revenue.

(02:25:57)
And often the multiple is three times, three times or four times or five times revenue or profit. So, in my case, they’re all automated, so I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell and then I can still sell the same company. You know what I mean? I can still sell it for three to five times. So, financially, it doesn’t really make sense to sell unless the price is high enough. If the price gets to six or seven or eight, I don’t want to wait six years for the money, but if you give me three years, nothing, I can wait.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:27)
So, that means there are really valuable stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and the crowdsource content, but the people themselves, the user base.
Pieter Levels
(02:26:39)
Yeah. For Nomad List, it’s a community. Yeah,
Lex Fridman
(02:26:41)
So, I could see that being extremely valuable. I’m surprised that-
Pieter Levels
(02:26:44)
Yeah. Nomad List is it’s my baby. It’s my first product I took off and I don’t really know if I want to sell it. It’s something would be nice when you are old because you’re still working in this. It has a mission, which is like people should travel anywhere, and they can work from anywhere, and they can meet different cultures. And that’s a good way to make the world get better.

(02:27:03)
If you go to China and live in China, you’ll learn that they’re nice people. And a lot of stuff you hear about China’s propaganda, a lot of stuff is true as well, but it’s more you learn a lot from traveling. And I think that’s why it’s a cool product to not sell. AI products, I have less emotional feeling with AI products like Photo AI, which I could sell. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:27:23)
Yeah. The thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you’re going to miss the company you created.
Pieter Levels
(02:27:31)
And the meaning it gives you. This is very famous like depression after startup finance sold their company. They’re like, this was me. Who am I? And they immediately start building another one. They never can stop. So, I think it’s good to keep working until you die. Just keep working on cool stuff and you shouldn’t retire. I think retirement is bad probably.

Coding solo

Lex Fridman
(02:27:52)
So, you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work solo. What’s the thinking behind that?
Pieter Levels
(02:27:58)
I think I’m not so good working with other people. Not like I’m crazy, but I don’t trust other people.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:03)
To clarify, you don’t trust other people to do a great job?
Pieter Levels
(02:28:07)
Yeah. And I don’t want to have this consensus meeting where we all… You have a meeting with three people and then you get these compromise results, which is very European. I don’t know if they call it polder model where you put people in the room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise in politics. And I think it breeds averageness.

(02:28:28)
You get an average idea, average company, average culture, you need to have a leader or you need to be solo and just do it. Do it yourself, I think. And I trust some people, like with my best friend Andre, I’m making a new AI startup, but it’s because we know each other very long and he’s one of the few people I would build something with, but almost never.
Lex Fridman
(02:28:52)
So, what does it take to be successful when you have more than one? How do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people?
Pieter Levels
(02:28:59)
So, he codes, I should post on Twitter. Literally, I promote it on Twitter. We set product strategy. Like I said, this should be better, this should be better. But I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby, so I was like I cannot do Ruby. I’m in PHP.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:14)
So, have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time?
Pieter Levels
(02:29:19)
Never in my life.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:24)
What do you think is behind that?
Pieter Levels
(02:29:26)
I don’t know. It was always just me sitting on my laptop coding.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:30)
No, you’ve never had another developer who rolls in and-
Pieter Levels
(02:29:33)
I’ve had once where with Photo AI, there’s a AI developer, Philip. I hired him to do the… Because I can’t write Python and AI stuff is Python. And I needed to get models to work, and replicate, and stuff and I needed to improve Photo AI. And he helped me a lot for 10 months he worked.

(02:29:48)
And man, I was trying Python working with NumPy, and package manager, and it was too difficult for me to figure this shit out. And I didn’t have time. I think 10 years ago, I would’ve time to sit, go do all-nighters to figure this stuff out with Python. It’s not my thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:04)
It’s not your thing. It’s another programming language. I get it. AI, new thing, got it. But you’ve never had a developer roll in, look at your PHP jQuery code, and yes. Like in conversation or improv, they talk about yes and basically, all right.
Pieter Levels
(02:30:20)
I had for one week-
Lex Fridman
(02:30:21)
Understand-
Pieter Levels
(02:30:22)
And then, it ended.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:22)
What happened?
Pieter Levels
(02:30:23)
Because he wanted to rewrite everything in-
Lex Fridman
(02:30:26)
No, that’s the wrong guy.
Pieter Levels
(02:30:27)
I know.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:27)
He wanted to rewrite in what?
Pieter Levels
(02:30:29)
He wanted to rewrite, he said is jQuery, we can’t do this. I’m like, okay. He’s like, “We need to rewrite everything in Vue.js.” I’m like, “Are you sure? Can’t we just like keep jQuery?” He’s like, “No, man.” And we need to change a lot of stuff. And I’m like, okay. And I was feeling we’re going to clean up shit, but then after weeks, it’s going to take way too much time.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:50)
I think I like working with people where when I approach them, I pretend in my head that they’re the smartest person who has ever existed. So, I look at their code or I look at the stuff they’ve created and try to see the genius of their way. You really have to understand people, really notice them. And then, from that place, have a conversation about what is the better approach.
Pieter Levels
(02:31:15)
Yeah. But those are the top tier developers and those are the ones that are tech ambiguous. So, they can learn any tech stack. And that’s really few, it’s top 5%. Because if you try higher devs, no offense to devs, but most devs are not… Man, most people in general jobs are not so good at their job, even doctors and stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:15)
That’s too sad.
Pieter Levels
(02:31:35)
When you realize this, people are very average at the job, especially with dev and with coding, I think. So sorry if-
Lex Fridman
(02:31:41)
I think that’s a really important skill for a developer to roll in and understand the musicality, the style-
Pieter Levels
(02:31:48)
That’s it, man. Empathy, it’s code empathy.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:51)
It’s code empathy.
Pieter Levels
(02:31:51)
Yeah, it’s a new word, but that’s it. You need to understand, go over the code, get a holistic view of it and man, you can suggest we change stuff for sure. But look, jQuery is crazy. It’s crazy I’m using jQuery. We can change that.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:05)
It’s not crazy at all. jQuery is also beautiful and powerful and PHP is beautiful and powerful. And especially as you said recently, as the versions evolved, it’s much more serious programming language now. It’s super-fast. PHP is really fast now. It’s crazy. JavaScript-
Pieter Levels
(02:32:24)
Much faster than Ruby, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:25)
… really fast now. So, if speed is something you care about, it’s super-fast. And there’s gigantic communities of people using those programming languages. And there’s frameworks if you like the framework. So, whatever, it doesn’t really matter what you use. But also, if I was a developer working with you, you are extremely successful. You’ve shipped a lot.

(02:32:46)
So, if I roll in, I’m going to be like, I don’t assume you know nothing. Assume Pieter is a genius, the smartest developer ever. And learn from it. And yes, and notice parts in the code where, “Okay, okay, I got it, here’s how he’s thinking.” And now if I want to add another little feature, definitely needs to have emoji in front of it, and then just follow the same style and add it.

(02:33:17)
And my goal is to make you happy, to make you smile, to make you like, “Haha, fuck, I get it.” And now you’re going to start respecting me, and trusting me, and you start working together in this way. I don’t know. I don’t know how hard it is to find developers.
Pieter Levels
(02:33:32)
No, I think they exist. I think I need to hire more people, I need to try more people.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:33)
Try people, yeah.
Pieter Levels
(02:33:36)
But that costs a lot of my energy and time. But it’s 100% possible. But do I want it? I don’t know. Things run fine for now. Okay, you could say, okay, Nomad List looks clunky. People say the design is clunky. Okay, I’ll improve the design. It’s like next to my to-do list, for example. I’ll get there eventually.

Ship fast

Lex Fridman
(02:33:54)
But it’s true. You’re also extremely good at what you do. I’m just looking at the interfaces of Photo AI, you would jQuery, how amazing is jQuery? But you can see these cowboys are getting… There’s these cowboys. This is a lot. This is a lot. But I’m glad they’re all wearing shirts. Anyway, the interface here is just really, really nice. I could tell you know what you’re doing. And with Nomad List, extremely nice, the interface.
Pieter Levels
(02:33:54)
Thank you, man.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:25)
And that’s all you.
Pieter Levels
(02:34:27)
Yeah, everything is me.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:29)
So, all of this and every little feature, all of this-
Pieter Levels
(02:34:32)
People say it looks ADHD or ADD. It’s so much because it has so many things. And design these days is minimalist, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:34:40)
Right, I hear you. But this is a lot of information, and its useful information, and it’s delivered in a clean way while still stylish and fun to look at. So, minimalist design is about when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool.
Pieter Levels
(02:34:56)
Yeah, it’s very cool. It’s pretentious, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:34:58)
Pretentious or not, the function is useless. This is about a lot of information delivered to you in a clean and when it’s clean, you can’t be too sexy. So, it’s sexy enough.
Pieter Levels
(02:35:09)
Yeah. This is I think how my brain looks. There’s a lot of shit going on. It’s like drawing bass music. It’s very tk-tk-tk-tk.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:15)
Yeah. But this is still pretty, the spacing of everything is nice. The fonts are really nice, very readable, very small-
Pieter Levels
(02:35:23)
Yeah, I like it as you know, but I made it so I don’t trust my own judgment.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:26)
No, this is really nice.
Pieter Levels
(02:35:27)
Thank you, Lex.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:28)
The emojis are somehow… It’s a style. It’s a thing.
Pieter Levels
(02:35:32)
I need to pick the emoji. It takes a while to pick them.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:35)
There’s something about the emojis is a really nice memorable placeholder for the idea. If it was just text, it would actually be overwhelming if it was just text. The emoji really helps. It’s a brilliant addition. Some people might look at it. Why do you have emojis everywhere? It’s actually really… For me, it’s really-
Pieter Levels
(02:35:53)
People tell me to remove the emoji.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:54)
Yeah. Well, people don’t know what they’re talking about.
Pieter Levels
(02:35:56)
Take it next to the picture.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:58)
I’m sure people will tell you a lot of things. This is really nice. And then, using color is nice. Small font, but not too small. And obviously, you have to show maps, which is really tricky.
Pieter Levels
(02:36:11)
Yeah. Nice.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:12)
No. This is really, really, really nice. Okay, how this looks when you hover over it, it’s-
Pieter Levels
(02:36:20)
Like the CSS transitions.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:21)
No, I understand that, but I’m sure there’s… How long does it take you to figure out how you want it to look? Do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent two weeks?
Pieter Levels
(02:36:30)
No, it’s iterative. It’s like 10 years of add a CSS transition here or do this or-
Lex Fridman
(02:36:35)
Well, see these are rounded now?
Pieter Levels
(02:36:35)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:36:38)
If you wanted to, round is probably the better way, but if you want it to be rectangular, sharp corners, what would you do? You just go-
Pieter Levels
(02:36:45)
So, I go through the index at CSS, and I do command F and I search border radius 12px. And then, I replace with border radius zero. And then, I do command enter and it’s Git deploys… It pushes it to the GitHub, and then sends a web book, and then deploys to my server and it’s live in five seconds.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:04)
You often deploy it to production? You don’t have a testing ground?
Pieter Levels
(02:37:08)
No. So, I’m famous for this because I’m too lazy to set up a staging server on my laptop every time. So, nowadays, I just deploy to production and man, I’m going to be canceled for this. But it works very well for me. Because I have a lot have PHP, Lint and JSON, so it tells me when there’s errors. So, I don’t deploy, but literally, I have like 37,000 Git commits in the last 12 months or something. So, I make small fix, and then come out, enter and sends to GitHub. GitHub sends a web to server, web server pulls it, deploys the production and is there.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:45)
What’s the latency of that from you pressing command?
Pieter Levels
(02:37:47)
One second, can be one to two seconds.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:50)
So, you just make a change and then you’re getting really good at not making mistakes basically?
Pieter Levels
(02:37:53)
Man, 100% you’re right. People are like, “How can you do this, where you get good at not taking the server down?” Because you need to code more carefully. But look, it’s idiotic in any big company. But for me it works because it makes me so fast. Somebody will report a bug on Twitter and I do a stopwatch.

(02:38:11)
How fast can I fix this bug? And then, two minutes later, for example, it’s fixed. And it’s fun because it’s annoying for me to work with companies where you report a bug and it takes six months. It’s horrible. And it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve their problems. But it’s crazy.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:29)
I don’t think it’s crazy. I’m sure there’s a middle ground, but I think that whole thing where there’s a phase of testing, and there’s the staging, and there’s the development, and then there’s multiple tables and databases that you use for the state, it’s-
Pieter Levels
(02:38:29)
Filing.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:46)
It’s a mess. And there’s different teams involved. It’s no good.
Pieter Levels
(02:38:49)
I’m like a good funny extreme on the other side.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:51)
But just a little bit safer, but not too much. It would be great.
Pieter Levels
(02:38:55)
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:38:56)
And I’m sure that’s actually how X now, how they’re doing rapid improvement. That’s exactly-
Pieter Levels
(02:39:01)
They do because there’s more bugs and people complain about like, “Oh look, he bought this Twitter and now it’s full of bugs.” Dude, the shipping stuff, things are happening now. And it’s a dynamic app now.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:10)
Yeah. The bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening. The bugs are the feature because it shows that the team is actually building shit.
Pieter Levels
(02:39:16)
A hundred percent.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:17)
Well, one of the problems is like I see with YouTube, there’s so much potential to build features, but I just see how long it takes. So, I’ve gotten a chance to interact with many other teams. But one of the teams is MLA, multi-language audio. I don’t know if you know this, but in YouTube you can have audio tracks in different languages for overdubbing.

(02:39:40)
And there’s a team and not many people are using it, but every single feature, they have to meet and agree. And there’s allocate resources. Engineers have to work on it. But I’m sure it’s a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval because it has to not break the rest of the site, whatever they do. But if you don’t have enough dictatorial top down, when-
Lex Fridman
(02:40:00)
… have enough dictatorial top-down like we need this now. It’s going to take forever to do anything multi-language audio, but multi-language audio is a good example of a thing that seems niche right now, but it quite possibly could change the entire world. When I upload this conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consume, every single video can be watched and listened to in those different … It changes everything. And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this. They got the compute. They got the user base. They have the experience of how to do this. So, multi-language audio should be-
Pieter Levels
(02:40:46)
High priority feature, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:40:47)
Yeah. That’s high priority and it’s a way … Google’s obsessed with AI right now, they want to show off that they could be dominant in AI. That’s a way for Google to say, “We used AI.” This is a way to break down the walls, that language craze.
Pieter Levels
(02:41:01)
The preferred outcome for them is probably their career, not the overall result of the cool product.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:07)
I think they’re not selfish or whatever. There’s something about the machine-
Pieter Levels
(02:41:12)
The organization.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:12)
The organizational stuff that just [inaudible 02:41:14]-
Pieter Levels
(02:41:14)
I have this when I report box on big companies I work with. I talk to a lot of different people in DM and they’re all really trying hard to do something. They’re all really nice and I’m the one being kind of asshole because I’m like, “Guys, I’m talking to 20 people about this for six months, nothing’s happening.” They say, ” Man, I know, but I’m trying my best.” And yeah, so it’s systemic.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:34)
Yeah. It requires, again, I don’t know if there must be a nicer word, but a dictatorial type of top-down the CEO rolls in and just says for YouTube, it’s like MLA, get this done now. This is the highest priority.
Pieter Levels
(02:41:48)
I think big companies, especially in America, a lot of it is legal. You need to pass everything through legal. And you can’t like, man, the things I do, I could never do that in a big corporation because everything has to be probably get deployed, has to go through legal.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:01)
Well, again, dictatorial. You basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot. I’ve seen a lot of leaders do this. Ignore the lawyers. Ignore comps.
Pieter Levels
(02:42:10)
Exactly. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:11)
Ignore PR. Ignore everybody. Give power to the engineers. Listen to the people on the ground, get this shit done and get it done by Friday. That’s it.
Pieter Levels
(02:42:20)
And the law can change. For example, let’s say you launch this AI dubbing and there’s some legal problems with lawsuits, so the law changes, there will be appeals, there will be some Supreme Court thing, whatever, and the law changes. So, just by shipping it, you change society, you change the legal framework. By not shipping, being scared of the legal framework all the time, you’re not changing things.

Best IDE for programming

Lex Fridman
(02:42:39)
Just out of curiosity, what ID do you use? Let’s talk about your whole setup. Given how ultra productive you are that you often program in your underwear slouching on the couch, does it matter to you in general? Is there a specific ID you use? VS Code?
Pieter Levels
(02:42:57)
Yeah, VS Code. Before, I used Sublime text. I don’t think it matters a lot. I think I’m very skeptical of tools when people think they say it matters, right? I don’t think it matters. I think whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast. And the shortcuts, for example, IDE. I love Sublime text because I could use multi-cursor. You search something and then I could make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing and the VS Code doesn’t really have that as well.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:27)
Sublime is the first editor where I’ve learned that. And I think they just make that super easy. So, what would that be called? Multi-edit.
Pieter Levels
(02:43:35)
Multi-cursor.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:35)
Multi-cursor edit thing, whatever.
Pieter Levels
(02:43:38)
So good.
Lex Fridman
(02:43:39)
I’m sure almost every editor can do that. It’s just probably hard to set up.
Pieter Levels
(02:43:44)
Yeah, VS Code’s not so good at it, I think, or at least I tried it. But I would use that to process data, like data sets. For example, from World Bank. I would just multi-cursor mass change everything. But yeah, VS Code. Man, I was bullied into using VS Code because Twitter would always see my screenshots of Sublime text and say, “Why are you still using Sublime text, Boomer. You need to use VS Code.” I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll try it.” I got a new MacBook and then I never install. I never copy the old MacBook. I just make it fresh, like a clean format C Windows, clean starts. And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll try VS Code.” And it’s stuck, but I don’t really care. It’s not so important for me.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:23)
Wow. The format C reference, huh?
Pieter Levels
(02:44:25)
Dude, it was so good. You would install windows and then after three or six months, it would start breaking and everything gets slow. Then you would restart, go to DOS, format C, you would delete your hard drive and then install the Windows 95 again. It was so good times. And you would design everything. Now, I’m going to install it properly. Now, I’m going to design my desktop properly.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:47)
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s peer pressure, but I used Emacs for many, many years and I love Lisp, so a lot of the customization is done in Lisp. It’s a programming language. Partially, it was peer pressure, but part of it is realizing you need to keep learning stuff. The same issue with jQuery. I still think I need to learn NodeJS for example, even though that’s not my main thing or even close to the main thing. But I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff. And even if you don’t choose to use it long term, you need to give it a chance. So, your understanding of the world expands.
Pieter Levels
(02:45:23)
Yeah, you want to understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you. It would be stupid not to even try it.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:30)
It’s more about the concepts I would say, than the actual tools expanding. And that can be a challenging thing. So, going to VS Code and really learning it, all the shortcuts, all the extensions, and actually installing different stuff and playing with it, that was an interesting challenge. It was uncomfortable at first.
Pieter Levels
(02:45:46)
Yeah, for me too. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:47)
Yeah. But you just dive in.
Pieter Levels
(02:45:48)
It’s like NeuroFlex, like you keep your brain fresh, this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:52)
I got to do that more. Have you given React a chance?
Pieter Levels
(02:45:56)
No, but I want to learn. I understand the basics. I don’t really know where to start.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:03)
But I guess you got to use your own model, which is build the thing using it.
Pieter Levels
(02:46:09)
No, man, so I kind of did that. The stuff I do in jQuery is essentially a lot of it is like I start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there, not based on that, but just on accident. I keep going long enough that I built the same. I start getting the same problems everybody else has and you start building the same frameworks kind. So, essentially I use my own framework of-
Lex Fridman
(02:46:29)
So, you basically build a framework from scratch that’s your own, that you understand it.
Pieter Levels
(02:46:32)
Kind of, yeah, with Ajax calls, but that’s essentially the same thing. Look, I don’t have the time. And I think saying you don’t have the time is always a lie because you just don’t prioritize it enough. My priority is still running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable now than learning front end framework. It’s just more impact.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:53)
I guess you should be just learning every single day a thing.
Pieter Levels
(02:46:58)
Yeah, you can learn a little bit every day, a little bit of React or I think now Next is very big, so learn a little bit of Next. But I call them the military industrial complex. But you need to know, know it anyway.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:11)
You got to learn how to use the weapons of war and then you can be a peacemaker.
Pieter Levels
(02:47:11)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:16)
Yeah, I mean, but you got to learn it in the same exact way as we were talking about, which is learn it by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it.
Pieter Levels
(02:47:25)
The frameworks are so complicated and it changes so fast. So, it’s like where do I start? And I guess it’s the same thing when you’re starting out making websites, where do you start as GPT-4, I guess. But yeah, it’s just so dynamic. It changes so fast that I don’t know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it. Maybe some combination of few Next with PHP Laravel. Laravel is like a framework for PHP. I think that it could benefit me. Maybe Tailwind for CSS, like a styling engine. That stuff could probably save me time.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:58)
But yeah, you won’t know until you really give it a try. And it feels like you have to build, if maybe I’m talking to myself, but I should probably recode my personal one page in Laravel. Or even though it might not have almost any dynamic elements, maybe have one dynamic element, but it has to go end to end in that framework or end-to-end build in NodeJS. Some of it is figuring out how to you even deploy the thing.
Pieter Levels
(02:48:29)
I have no idea. All I know is right now, I would send it to GitHub and it sends it to my server. I don’t know how to get JavaScript running. I have no clue. So, I guess I need a pass like Vercel or Heroku, those kind of platform.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:44)
I actually just gave myself the idea of I just want to build a single webpage, one webpage that has one dynamic element and just do it in every single, in a lot of frameworks.
Pieter Levels
(02:48:59)
Ah, on the same page?
Lex Fridman
(02:49:01)
Same exact page.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:03)
All the same?
Lex Fridman
(02:49:03)
Kind of page.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:04)
That’s smart page. That’s a cool project. You can learn all these frameworks. And you can see the differences. That’s interesting.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:08)
How long it takes to do it.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:09)
Yeah, stopwatch.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:11)
I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated. Because it should probably do some kind of thing where it accesses the database and dynamically is changing stuff.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:23)
Some AI stuff, some LLM stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:25)
Yeah. It doesn’t have to be AI LLM, but maybe API call.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:29)
But then you do it API.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:29)
API call to something.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:30)
Yeah. To replicate, for example. And then that would be a very cool part.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And time it. And also report on my happiness. I’m going to totally do this.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:41)
Because nobody benchmarks this. Nobody’s benchmark developer happiness with frameworks. Nobody’s benchmark the shipping time.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:47)
Just take a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There’s five main ways of doing it. So, there’s backend and frontend.
Pieter Levels
(02:49:58)
This stuff confused me, too. Like React now apparently has become backend or something that used to be only frontend and you’re forced to do now backend also. I don’t know. And then.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:07)
But you’re not really forced to do anything, according to the internet. It’s actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things. So, the standard, you go to the ice cream shop, there’s a million flavors. I want vanilla. If I’ve never had ice cream in my life, can we just learn about ice cream? I want vanilla. Sometimes they’ll literally name it vanilla. But I want to know what’s the basic way, but not dumb, but the standard canonical common.
Pieter Levels
(02:50:42)
Yeah. I want to know the dominant way.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:43)
Yeah, the dominant way.
Pieter Levels
(02:50:44)
Like the 6% of developers do it like this. It’s hard to figure that out. That’s the problem.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:50)
Yeah, maybe LLMs can help. Maybe you should explicitly ask what is the dominant-
Pieter Levels
(02:50:54)
Because they usually know the dominant. They give answers that are the most probable kind of, so that makes sense to ask them. And I think honestly, maybe what would help is if you want to learn or I would want to learn a framework, hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together. I’ve never done that, but I’ve thought about it. So, that would be a very fast way to take their knowledge in my brain.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:19)
I’ve tried these kinds of things. What happens is it depends, if they’re a world-class developer, yes. Oftentimes, they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options. So, they have this dogmatic talking down to you, “This is the right way to do it.” It’s like, “No, no, no, we’re just exploring together. Okay, show me the cool thing you’ve tried,” which is it has to have open mindedness to NodeJS is not the right way to do web development. It’s like one way. And there’s nothing wrong with the old LAMP, PHP, jQuery, vanilla JavaScript way. It just has its pros and cons and you need to know what the pros and cons are.
Pieter Levels
(02:52:06)
Yeah, but those people exist. You could find those people probably.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:08)
Yeah.

Andrej Karpathy

Pieter Levels
(02:52:09)
If you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpathy sitting next to you. He does these YouTube videos. It’s amazing. He can teach it to a five-year-old about how to make LLM. It’s amazing. Imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you, “Let’s make LLM together.” Holy shit. It would be amazing.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:26)
Yeah. I mean, Karpathy has its own style and I’m not sure he’s for everybody. For example, a five-year-old. It depends on the five-year-old.
Pieter Levels
(02:52:35)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:36)
He’s super technical.
Pieter Levels
(02:52:37)
But he’s amazing because he’s super technical and he’s the only one who can explain this stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius. If you can explain without jargon, you’re like, “Wow.”
Lex Fridman
(02:52:48)
And build it from scratch.
Pieter Levels
(02:52:50)
Yeah, it’s like top tier, like, what a guy.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:53)
But he might be anti-framework because he builds from scratch.
Pieter Levels
(02:52:57)
Exactly. Yeah. Actually he probably is. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:53:00)
He’s like you, but for AI.
Pieter Levels
(02:53:02)
Yeah. So, maybe learning framework is a very bad idea for us. Maybe we should stay in PHP and script kiddie and the…
Lex Fridman
(02:53:08)
But you have to maybe by learning the framework, you learn what you want to yourself build from scratch.
Pieter Levels
(02:53:14)
Yeah. Maybe learn concepts, but you don’t actually have to start using it for your life, right? Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:53:19)
And you’re still a Mac guy, or was a Mac guy.
Pieter Levels
(02:53:21)
Yeah, yeah. I switched to Mac in 2014. It was because when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like, “Dude, get a MacBook. It’s the standard now.” I’m like, “Wow, I need to switch from Windows.” And I had three screens, like windows. I had this whole setup for music production. I had to sell everything. And then I had a MacBook and I remember opening up this MacBook box and it was so beautiful. It was this aluminum. And then I opened it. I removed the screen protector thing. It’s so beautiful. And I didn’t touch it for three days. I was just looking at it really. And I was still on the Windows computer. And then I went traveling with that.

(02:53:56)
And all my great things started when I switched to Mac, which sounds very dogmatic, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:54:01)
What great things are you talking about?
Pieter Levels
(02:54:03)
All the businesses started working out. I started traveling. I started building startups. I started making money. It all started when I switched to Mac.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:10)
Listen, you’re making me want to switch to Mac. So, I either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux. But Windows for most stuff like editing or any Adobe products.
Pieter Levels
(02:54:27)
Yeah, like Adobe stuff, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:54:28)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess you could do Mac stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What do you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons?
Pieter Levels
(02:54:35)
I think the Finder is horrible. Mac.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:38)
The what is horrible?
Pieter Levels
(02:54:38)
The Finder. Oh, you don’t know the Finder? So, there’s the Windows Explorer.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:41)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(02:54:42)
Windows Explorer is amazing.
Lex Fridman
(02:54:42)
Thank you for talking down on me.
Pieter Levels
(02:54:44)
The Finder is strange, man. There’s strange things. There’s this bug where if you send, attach a photo on WhatsApp or Telegram, it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click Enter and you send all your photos, all your files to this chat group, happened to my girlfriend. She starts sending me photo, photo, photo. So, Finder is very unusual, but it has Linux. The whole thing is it’s Unix-based.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:06)
So, you use the command?
Pieter Levels
(02:55:08)
Yeah, all the time. All the time. And the cool thing is you can run, I think it’s like Unix, like Debian or whatever. You can run most Linux stuff on MacOS, which makes it very good for development. I have my Nginx server. If I’m not lazy in set up my staging on my laptop, it’s just the Nginx server, the same as I have on my cloud server, the same way the websites run. And I can use almost everything, the same config files, configuration files, and it just works. And that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff, I think.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:41)
Yeah. Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(02:55:43)
Real Ubuntu is better, of course, but.
Lex Fridman
(02:55:45)
Yeah, I’m in this weird situation, where I’m somewhat of a power user in Windows and let’s say Android and all the much smarter friends I have all using Mac and iPhone. And it’s like-
Pieter Levels
(02:56:03)
But you don’t want to go through the peer pressure.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:06)
It’s not peer pressure. It’s one of the reasons I want to have kids is that I would love to have kids as a baseline, but there’s a concern. Maybe there’s going to be a tradeoff or all this kind of stuff. But you see these extremely successful smart people who are friends of mine, who have kids and are really happy they have kids. So, that’s not peer pressure, that’s just a strong signal.
Pieter Levels
(02:56:28)
Yeah. It works for people.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:29)
It works for people. And the same thing with Mac. It’s like I don’t see, fundamentally, I don’t like closed systems. So, fundamentally, I like Windows more because there’s much more freedom. Same with Android. There’s much more freedom. It’s much more customizable. But all the cool kids, the smart kids are using Mac and iPhone. It’s like, “All right, I need to give it a real chance,” especially for development, since more and more stuff is done in the cloud anyway. Anyway. But it’s funny to hear you say all the good stuff started happening. Maybe I’ll be like that guy too. When I switched to Mac, all the good stuff started happening.
Pieter Levels
(02:57:10)
I think it’s just about the hardware. It’s not so much about the software. The hardware is so well-built, right? The keyboard.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:15)
Yeah. But look at the keyboard I use.
Pieter Levels
(02:57:16)
It is pretty cool.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:19)
That’s one word for it. What’s your favorite place to work?
Pieter Levels
(02:57:23)
On the couch.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:24)
Does the couch matter? Is the couch at home or is it any couch?
Pieter Levels
(02:57:28)
No, like hotel couch. In the room.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:31)
In the room.
Pieter Levels
(02:57:31)
But I used to work very ergonomically with a standing desk and everything, perfect, eye height, screen, blah, blah, blah. And I felt like, man, this has to do with lifting too. I started getting RSI, like a repetitive strain injury, like tingling stuff. And it would go all the way on my back. And I was sitting in a coworking space like 6:00 AM, sun comes up and I’m working and I’m coding and I hear a sound or something. So, I look left and my neck gets stuck and I’m like, “Wow. Fuck.” And I’m like, “Am I dying? And I’m probably dying.”
Lex Fridman
(02:58:05)
Yeah, probably dying.
Pieter Levels
(02:58:06)
I don’t want to die in a coworking space. I’m going to go home and die in peace and honor. So, I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack. And I walked to the street and got on my motorbike, went home and I lied down on a pillow with my legs up and stuff to get rid of this … Because it was my whole back. And it was because I was working like this all the time. So, I started getting a laptop stand everything ergonomically correct.

(02:58:34)
But then I started lifting. And since then, it seems like everything gets straightened out. Your posture, you’re more straight. And I’d never have RSI anymore, representative strain injury. Never tingling anymore. No pains and stuff. So then, I started working on the sofa and it’s great. It feels you’re close to the … I sit like this legs together and then a pillow and then a laptop, and then I work.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:02)
Are you leaning back?
Pieter Levels
(02:59:06)
Together like legs and then-
Lex Fridman
(02:59:07)
Where’s the mouse? Using the-
Pieter Levels
(02:59:09)
No. So, everything’s trackpad on the MacOS, on the MacBook. I used to have the Logitech MX mouse, the perfect ergonomic mouse-
Lex Fridman
(02:59:17)
You’re just doing this little thing with the thing.
Pieter Levels
(02:59:19)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:19)
One screen?
Pieter Levels
(02:59:20)
One screen. And I used to have three screens. So, I come from the, I know where people come from. I had all this stuff, but then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop. It’s a 16-inch MacBook, so it’s quite big. But having it one there is amazing because you’re so close to the tools. You’re so close to what’s happening. It’s like working on a car or something. Man, if you have three screens, you can look here, look there, you get also neck injury actually.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:45)
Well, I don’t know. This sounds like you’re part of a cult and you’re just trying to convince me. I mean, but it’s good to hear that you can be ultra-productive on a single screen. I mean, that’s crazy.
Pieter Levels
(02:59:57)
Command Tab. You Alt Tab. When it’s Alt Tab. MacOS is Command Tab, you can switch very fast.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:02)
So, you have the entire screen is taken out by VS Code, say you look at the code. And then if you deploy a website, you what? Switch screen.
Pieter Levels
(03:00:10)
Command Tab to Chrome. I used to have this swipe screen. You could do different screen spaces. I was like, “Ah, it’s too difficult. Let’s just put it all on one screen on the MacBook.”
Lex Fridman
(03:00:21)
And you can be productive that way.
Pieter Levels
(03:00:23)
Yeah, very productive, yeah. More productive than before.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:27)
Interesting. Because I have three screens and two of them are vertical. On the side.
Pieter Levels
(03:00:31)
Yeah, the codes, right, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:32)
For the code, you can see a lot.
Pieter Levels
(03:00:34)
No, man, I love it. I love seeing it with friends. They have amazing battle stations, right, it’s called. It’s amazing. I want it, but I don’t want it.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:42)
You like the constraints.
Pieter Levels
(03:00:44)
That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:44)
There’s some aspect of the constraints, which once you get good at it, you can focus your mind and you can.
Pieter Levels
(03:00:50)
Man, I’m suspicious of more. Do you really need all the stuff? It might slow me down actually.
Lex Fridman
(03:00:55)
That’s a good way to put it. I’m suspicious of more. Me too. I’m suspicious of more in all ways, in all walks-
Pieter Levels
(03:01:01)
Because you can defend more. You can defend. Yeah. My developer, I make money. I need to get more screens. I need to be more efficient. And then you read stuff about Mythical Man-Month, where hiring more people slows down a software product project that’s famous. I think you can use that metaphor maybe for tools as well. Then I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that buying so much stuff, but they’re not that productive. They have the best, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything. They’re not that productive. And it’s also fun. It’s all from my laptop in a backpack. It’s nomad, minimalist.

Productivity

Lex Fridman
(03:01:35)
Take me through the perfect ultra productive day in your life. Say where you get a lot of shit done and it’s all focused on getting shit done. When are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early, super late?
Pieter Levels
(03:01:52)
Yes. So, I go to sleep at 2:00 AM usually, something like that and before 4:00 AM. But my girlfriend would go sleep midnight. So, we did a compromise like 2:00 AM. So, I wake up around 10:00, 11:00, no, more like 10:00. Shower, make coffee. I make coffee, like drip coffee, like the V60, the filter. And I boil water and then put the coffee in and chill, live with my girlfriend, and then open laptops, start coding, check what’s going on, bugs or whatever.
Lex Fridman
(03:02:23)
How stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer coding?
Pieter Levels
(03:02:28)
So, I used to need really long stretches where I would do all-nighters and stuff to get shit done. But I’ve gotten trained to have more interruptions where I can-
Lex Fridman
(03:02:37)
Because you have to.
Pieter Levels
(03:02:39)
This is life. There’s a lot of distractions. Your girlfriend asks stuff, people come over, whatever. So, I’m very fast now. I can lock in and lock out quite fast. And I heard people, developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing. Before, they’re like, “Ah, I cannot work.” But they get used to it and they get really productive in short time because they only have 20 minutes. And then shit goes crazy again. So, another constraint, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:03:02)
Yeah. It’s funny.
Pieter Levels
(03:03:03)
So, I think that works for me. And then cook food and stuff. Have lunch, steak and chicken and whatever.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:11)
You eat a bunch of times a day. So, you said coffee, what are you doing?
Pieter Levels
(03:03:14)
Yeah, so a few hours later, cook foods. We get locally sourced meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that. And then second coffee and then go some more. Maybe go outside for lunch. You can mix fun stuff.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:27)
How many hours are you saying a perfectly productive day you’re doing programming? If you were to kill it, are you doing all day basically?
Pieter Levels
(03:03:35)
You mean the special days where …
Lex Fridman
(03:03:36)
Special days.
Pieter Levels
(03:03:37)
… girlfriend leaves to Paris or something and you’re alone for a week at home, which is amazing. You can just code. It’s like you stay up all night and eat chocolates.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:45)
Yeah, chocolate.
Pieter Levels
(03:03:47)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Let’s remove girlfriend from picture. Social life from picture. It’s just you.
Pieter Levels
(03:03:53)
Man, that shit goes crazy.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:55)
Because when shit goes crazy.
Pieter Levels
(03:03:56)
And now shit goes crazy.
Lex Fridman
(03:03:57)
Okay. Let’s rewind. Are you still waking up? There’s coffee. There’s no girlfriend to talk to. There’s no-
Pieter Levels
(03:04:04)
Now we wake up like 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM.
Lex Fridman
(03:04:11)
Because you went to bed at 6:00 PM.
Pieter Levels
(03:04:13)
Yeah, because I was coding. I was finding some new AI shit. And I was studying it and it was amazing. And I cannot sleep because it’s too important. We need to stay awake. We need to see all of this. We need to make something now. But that’s the times I do make new stuff more. So, I think I have a friend, he actually books a hotel for a week to leave his … And he has a kid too. And his girlfriend and his kid stay in the house and he goes to another hotel. Sounds a little suspicious, right? Going to a hotel.

(03:04:39)
But all he does is writing or coding. He’s a writer and he needs this alone time, this silence. And I think for this flow state, it’s true. I’m better maintaining stuff when there’s a lot of disruptions than creating new stuff. I need this. It’s common, this flow state, this uninterrupted period of time. So, yeah, I wake up 1:00, 2: 00 PM, still coffee, shower, we still shower. And then just code non-stop. Maybe my friend comes over, comes over anyway.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:10)
Just some distraction.
Pieter Levels
(03:05:11)
Yeah. Also, Andre, he codes too, so he comes over. We code together. We listen. It starts going back to the [inaudible 03:05:17] days. Yeah, coworking days.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:19)
So, you’re not really working with him, but you’re just both working.
Pieter Levels
(03:05:22)
Because it’s nice to have the vibe where you both sit together on the couch and coding on something and actually, it’s mostly silent or there’s music and sometimes you ask something, but generally, you are really locked in.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:34)
What music are you listening to?
Pieter Levels
(03:05:37)
I think techno, like YouTube techno. There’s a channel called HOR with a umlaut, like H-O like double dot. It’s Berlin techno, whatever. They film it in a toilet with white tiles and stuff. And very cool. And they always have very good industrial-
Lex Fridman
(03:05:57)
Industrial, so fast-paced heavy.
Pieter Levels
(03:05:59)
Kind of aggressive.
Lex Fridman
(03:05:59)
Yeah. That’s not distracting to your brain?
Pieter Levels
(03:06:03)
No, it’s amazing. I think distracting, man, jazz. I listen, coffee jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up and it’s kind like this piano starts getting annoying. It’s like it’s too many tones. It’s like too many things going on. This industrial techno is like these African rain dances. It’s this transcendental trance.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:23)
That’s interesting because I actually mostly now listen to brown noise. Noise.
Pieter Levels
(03:06:30)
Yeah. Wow.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:31)
Pretty loud.
Pieter Levels
(03:06:31)
Wow.
Lex Fridman
(03:06:33)
And one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever. So, I’m sure to techno, if I actually give it a real chance, my brain would get used to it. But with noise, what happens is is something happens to your brain. I think there’s a science to it, but I don’t really care. You just have to be a scientist of one, study yourself, your own brain. For me, it does something. I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time. After about a couple of minutes, everything, every distraction just disappears. And it goes like, shh. You can hold focus on things really well. It’s weird. You can really focus on a thing. It doesn’t really matter what that is. I think that’s what people achieve with meditation. You can focus on your breath, for example.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:24)
It’s just normal brown noise. It’s not like binaural.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:26)
No.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:27)
Just normal brown noise.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:28)
It’s like, “Shh.”
Pieter Levels
(03:07:28)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:30)
White noise, I think it’s the same. It’s like big noise, white noise. Brown noise, I think it’s like bassier.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:36)
Yeah. It’s more diffused. More dampened.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:39)
Dampened.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:40)
Yeah, I can see that.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:40)
No sharpness.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:41)
Yeah, sharp brightness.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:43)
Yeah, brightness.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:43)
Yeah, yeah. I can see that. And you use a headphone, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:07:45)
Yeah, headphones.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:46)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:47)
I actually walk around in life often with brown noise.
Pieter Levels
(03:07:51)
Dude, that’s like psychopath shit, but it’s cool.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps. It drowns out their screams.
Pieter Levels
(03:08:00)
Jesus Christ.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:02)
I said too much.
Pieter Levels
(03:08:03)
Man, I’m going to try brown noise.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:05)
With the murder or for the coding? Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:08:06)
For the coding, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:07)
Okay, good. Try it. Try it. But you have to with everything else, give it a real chance.
Pieter Levels
(03:08:12)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:13)
I also, like I said, do techno-y type stuff, electronic music on top of the brown noise. But then control the speed, because the faster it goes, the more anxiety. So, if I really need to get shit done, especially with programming, I’ll have a beat. And it’s great. It’s cool. I say it’s cool to play those little tricks with your mind to study yourself. I usually don’t like to have people around because when people, even if they’re working, I don’t know, I like people too much. They’re interesting.
Pieter Levels
(03:08:45)
Yeah, In coworking space, I would just start talking too much.
Lex Fridman
(03:08:48)
Yeah. So, there’s a source of distraction.
Pieter Levels
(03:08:50)
Yeah, in the coworking space, we would do a money pot, like a mug. So, if you would work for 45 minutes and then if you would say a pair of words, you would get a fine, which is like $1. So, you’d put $1 to say, “Hey, what’s up?” So, $3 you put in the mug. And then 15 minutes free time, we can party whatever. And then 45 minutes again working and that worked. But you need to shut people up or they…
Lex Fridman
(03:09:16)
I think there’s an intimacy in being silent together that maybe I’m uncomfortable with, but you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it with close friends to just sit there in silence for long periods of time and doing a thing.
Pieter Levels
(03:09:36)
Dude, I watched this video of this podcast. It was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating and they were interviewing each other or whatever like a podcast. And suddenly after a question, it’s like, “Yeah, yeah.” And they were just silent for three minutes and then they said, “That was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing.” I was like, “Wow, pretty cool.”
Lex Fridman
(03:09:58)
Elon’s like that. And I really liked that. You’ll ask a question, I don’t know, what’s a perfectly productive day for you? I just asked. And you just sit there for 30 seconds thinking.
Pieter Levels
(03:10:12)
Yeah. He thinks.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:15)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:10:16)
That’s so cool. I wish I could think more about … But I want to show you my heart. I want to go straight from my heart to my mouth to saying the real thing. And the more I think, the more I start filtering myself and I want to just throw it out there immediately.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:34)
I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that. I do that as well. And in team setting, when you’re thinking, brainstorming and you allow yourself to just think in silence. Because even in meetings, people want to talk. It’s like no, you think before you speak. And it’s okay to be silent together. If you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas.
Pieter Levels
(03:10:57)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:58)
So, okay, this perfect day, how much caffeine are you consuming in this day?
Pieter Levels
(03:11:03)
Man, too much. Because normally two cups of coffee. But on this perfect day, we go to four maybe. So, we’re starting to hit the anxiety levels.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:12)
So, four cups is a lot for you?
Pieter Levels
(03:11:15)
Well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them. It’s like 20 grams of coffee powder in the V60. So, my friends call them nuclear coffee because it’s quite heavy.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:24)
Super strong.
Pieter Levels
(03:11:25)
It’s quite strong. But it’s nice to hit that anxiety level where you’re almost panic attack, but you’re not there yet. But that’s like, man, it’s super locked in. Just like, it’s amazing. But I mean, there’s a space for that in my life. But I think it’s great for making new stuff. It’s amazing.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:47)
Starting from scratch, creating a new thing.
Pieter Levels
(03:11:48)
Yes. I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for two weeks. Every few, no, every year. At least. Maybe every quarter, I don’t know. And just sit and make some without, they’re amazing. But no-
Pieter Levels
(03:12:00)
Make some shits without… They’re amazing, but no disturbances. Just be alone, and then people can make something very amazing.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:09)
Just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains like we showed before.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:11)
Exactly, we can do that.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:12)
There’s a movie about that.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:13)
With the laptops.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:14)
They didn’t do much programming though.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:16)
Yeah, you can do a little bit of that.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:17)
Okay.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:18)
And then a little bit of shipping. Can do both.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:21)
It’s different, Broke Back Mountain.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:23)
But they need to allow us to go. You need like a man cave, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:12:25)
Yeah, to ship.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:26)
Yeah, to ship.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:27)
Get shit done. Yeah. It’s a balance. Okay, cool. What about sleep, naps and all that? You’re not sleeping much?
Pieter Levels
(03:12:34)
I don’t do naps in a day. I think power naps are good, but I’m never tired anymore in the day. Man, it’s also because of gym, I’m not tired. I’m tired when I want to… When it’s night, I need to sleep.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:45)
Yeah. Me, I love naps.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:47)
I sleep very well.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:47)
I love naps.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:47)
Yeah?
Lex Fridman
(03:12:49)
I don’t care. I don’t know. I don’t know why. Brain shuts off, turns on. I don’t know if it’s healthy or not. It just works.
Pieter Levels
(03:12:53)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:12:55)
I think with anything, mental, physical, you have to be a student of your own body and know what the limits are. You have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general, because a lot of the advice is just a good baseline for the general population.
Pieter Levels
(03:13:09)
It’s not personalized, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:13:10)
But then you have to become a student of your own body, of your own self, of how you work. Yeah. I’ve done a lot. For me, fasting was an interesting one because I used to eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy, because everybody says that you have to eat a lot, multiple meals a day, but I realized I can get much stronger, feel much better if I eat once or twice a day.
Pieter Levels
(03:13:38)
Yeah, me too. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:13:39)
It’s crazy.
Pieter Levels
(03:13:39)
I never understood the small meal thing. Yeah, it didn’t work for me.
Lex Fridman
(03:13:42)
Let me just ask you, it’d be interesting if you can comment on some of the other products you’ve created. We talked about NomadList, Interior AI, Photo AI, Therapist AI. What’s Remote OK?
Pieter Levels
(03:13:52)
It’s a job board for remote jobs. Because back then, 10 years ago, there was job boards, but it was not really specifically remote job, job boards. So I made one. First on NomadList, I made Nomad Jobs, like a page. And a lot of companies started hiring and it paid for job posts. So I spin it off to Remote OK, and now it’s the number one or number two biggest remote job boards. And it’s also fully automated. People just post a job and people apply. It has profiles as well. It’s like LinkedIn for remote work.
Lex Fridman
(03:14:23)
Just focus on remote only?
Pieter Levels
(03:14:25)
Yeah. It’s essentially like a simple job board. I discovered job boards are way more complicated than you think, but yeah, it’s a job board for remote jobs. But the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posts. Man, it’s good money, B2B. You start with 2.99, but at the peak, when the feds started printing money like 2021, I was making 140K a month with Remote OK with just job posts. And I started adding crazy upsells, like rainbow-colored job posts. You can add your background image. It’s just upsells, man. And you charge a thousand dollars for an upsell. It was crazy. All these companies just upsell, upsell. Yeah, we want everything. Job posts would cost $3,000, $4,000. And I was like, “This is good business.” And then the feds stopped printing money and it all went down, and it went down to like 10K a month from 140. Now it’s back, I think it’s 40. It was good times.

Minimalism

Lex Fridman
(03:15:22)
I got to ask you about, back to the digital nomad life, you wrote a blog post on the reset and in general, just giving away everything, living a minimalist life.
Pieter Levels
(03:15:33)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:33)
What did it take to do that, to get rid of everything?
Pieter Levels
(03:15:37)
10 years ago was this trend in the blog. Back then, blogs were so popular, it was like a blogosphere and it was like the 100 Things Challenge.
Lex Fridman
(03:15:43)
What is that, the 100 Things Challenge?
Pieter Levels
(03:15:44)
I mean, it’s ridiculous, but you write down every object you have in your house and you count it. You make a spreadsheet and you’re like, “Okay, I have 500 things.” You need to get it down to 100. Why? It was just the trend. So I did it. I started selling stuff, started throwing away stuff. And I did MDMA and ecstasy 2012. And after that trip, I felt so different and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away. I swear.
Lex Fridman
(03:16:11)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:16:12)
And I started throwing shit away and I felt that it was almost like the drug sending me to a path of, you need to throw all your shit away. You need to go on a journey. You need to get out of here. And that’s what the MDMA did, I think. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:16:26)
How hard is it to get down to 100 items?
Pieter Levels
(03:16:29)
Well, you need to sell your PC and stuff. You need to go on eBay, and then… Man, going eBay selling all your stuff is very interesting because you discover society. You meet the craziest people. You meet every range from rich to poor, everybody comes to your house to buy stuff. It’s so funny. It’s so interesting. I recommend everybody do this.
Lex Fridman
(03:16:46)
Just to meet people that want your shit.
Pieter Levels
(03:16:48)
Yeah. I didn’t know. I was living in Amsterdam and I didn’t know I have my own subculture or whatever, and I discovered the Dutch people as they are from eBay. So I sold everything.
Lex Fridman
(03:16:59)
What’s the weirdest thing you had to sell and you had to find a buyer for? Not the weirdest, but what’s memorable?
Pieter Levels
(03:17:05)
So back then, I was making music and we would make music videos with a Canon 5D camera. Back then, everybody’s making films and music videos of that. And we bought it with my friends and stuff, and it was kind of like I had to sell this thing too, because it was very expensive, like 6K or something. But it meant that selling this, meant that we wouldn’t make music videos anymore. I would leave Holland. This stuff we were working on would end. And I was saying, “This music video stuff, we’re not getting big, we’re not getting famous in this or successful. We need to stop doing this.” This music production also, it’s not really working. And I felt very bad for my friends because we would work together on this and to sell this camera that we’d make stuff with and-
Lex Fridman
(03:17:49)
It was a hard goodbye.
Pieter Levels
(03:17:50)
It was just a camera, but it felt like, “Sorry guys, it doesn’t work and I need to go.”
Lex Fridman
(03:17:56)
Who bought it? Do you remember? It was some guy who couldn’t possibly understand the journey.
Pieter Levels
(03:18:03)
The motion of it.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:03)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:18:03)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:05)
He just showed up here, “Here’s the money. Thanks.”
Pieter Levels
(03:18:07)
Yeah. But it was cutting your life like, “This shit ends now and now we’re going to do new stuff.”
Lex Fridman
(03:18:12)
I think it’s beautiful. I did that twice in my life. I gave away everything, everything, everything, like down to just pants, underwear, backpack. I think it’s important to do. It shows you what’s important.
Pieter Levels
(03:18:26)
Yeah. I think that’s what I learned from it. You learn that you can live with very little objects, very little stuff, but there’s a counter to it. You lean more on the stuff, on the services. Right? For example, you don’t need a car, you use Uber, right? Or you don’t need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants when you’re traveling. So you lean more on other people’s services, but you spend money on that as well. So that’s good.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:49)
Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world. It gives you complete freedom to go into another city, to…
Pieter Levels
(03:18:58)
With your backpack.
Lex Fridman
(03:18:58)
With a backpack. There’s a freedom to it. There’s something about material possessions and having a place and all that, that ties you down a little bit spiritually. It’s good to take a leap out into the world, especially when you’re younger, to like-
Pieter Levels
(03:19:12)
Man, I recommend if you’re 18, you get out of high school, do this, go travel and build some internet stuff, whatever. Bring your laptop and it’s an amazing experience. Five years ago, I’d still go to university, but now I’m thinking like, “No, maybe skip university.” Just go first, travel around a little bit, figure some stuff out. You can go back to university when you’re 25. You can like, “Okay, now I learned to be successful in business.” You have money. At least now, you can choose what you really want to study. Because people at 18, they go study what’s probably good for the job market. Right? So it probably makes more sense. If you want that, go travel, build some businesses and go back to university if you want.
Lex Fridman
(03:19:49)
So one of the biggest uses of a university is the networking. You gain friends, you meet people. It’s a forcing function to meet people. But if you can meet people out into the world by travel-
Pieter Levels
(03:20:00)
Man, and you meet so many different cultures.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:02)
I mean, the problem for me is if I traveled at that young age, I’m attracted to people at the outskirts of the world. For me-
Pieter Levels
(03:20:10)
Where?
Lex Fridman
(03:20:11)
No, not geographically.
Pieter Levels
(03:20:12)
Oh, the subcultures.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:14)
Yeah, the weirdos, the darkness.
Pieter Levels
(03:20:17)
Yeah, me too.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:18)
But that might not be the best networking at 18 years old.
Pieter Levels
(03:20:22)
No, but, man, if you’re smart about it, you can stay safe. And I met so many weirdos from traveling. That’s how travel works. If you really let loose, you meet the craziest people and it’s the most interesting people. It’s just I cannot recommend it enough.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:39)
Well see, the thing is that when you’re 18, I feel like depending on your personality, you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be normie. You still have to learn how to fit into society. For a person like me, for example, who’s always an outcast, there’s always a danger for going full outcast. And that’s a harder life. If you go full artists and full darkness, it’s just a harder life.
Pieter Levels
(03:21:07)
You can come back, you can come back to normie.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:09)
That’s a skill. I think you have to learn how to fit into polite society.
Pieter Levels
(03:21:16)
But I was a very strange outcast as well. And I’m more adaptable to normie now.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:21)
You learned it. Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:21:23)
After 30s, you’re like… Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:25)
But I mean, it’s a skill you have to learn.
Pieter Levels
(03:21:27)
Yeah. Man, I feel also that you start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less shit you have. You start becoming more normie because you become more chill with yourself and more happy and it makes you uninteresting, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:21:43)
Yes, yes, yes.
Pieter Levels
(03:21:45)
The crazy people are always the most interesting. If you’ve solved your internal struggles and your therapy and stuff and you become… It’s not so interesting any more maybe.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:56)
You don’t have to be broken to be interesting, I guess is what I’m saying.
Pieter Levels
(03:21:59)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:22:00)
What kind of things were left when you minimalized?
Pieter Levels
(03:22:03)
So the backpack, Macbook, toothbrush, some clothes, underwear, socks. You don’t need a lot of clothes in Asia because it’s hot. So you just wear swim pants, swim shorts, you walk around flip-flops. So very basic, T-shit. And I go to the laundromat and wash my stuff. And I think it was like 50 things or something. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:22:27)
Yeah, it’s nice. As I mentioned to you, there’s the show alone. They really test you because you only get 10 items and you have to survive out in the wilderness, and an ax. Everybody brings an ax. Some people also have a saw, but usually, Axe does the job. You basically have to, in order to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make-
Pieter Levels
(03:22:52)
Learned in Minecraft.
Lex Fridman
(03:22:55)
Everything I learned about life, I learned in Minecraft, bro. Yeah, yeah. It’s nice to create those constraints for yourself, to understand what matters to you, and also, how to be in this world. And one of the ways to do that is just to live a minimalist life. But some people, I’ve met people that really enjoy material possessions and that brings them happiness. And that’s a beautiful thing. For me, it doesn’t, but people are different.
Pieter Levels
(03:23:23)
It gives me happiness for two weeks.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:24)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:23:25)
I’m very quickly adapting to a baseline hedonistic adaptation very fast.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:31)
Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:23:31)
But man, if you look at the studies, most people get a new car, six months, get a new house, six months. You just feel the same. You’re like, “Wow, should I buy all the stuff?” Studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:46)
And so, you don’t even need to go through the whole journey of getting it. Just focus on the thing that’s more permanent.
Pieter Levels
(03:23:54)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:54)
Like building shit.
Pieter Levels
(03:23:56)
Yeah. People around you, people you love, nice food, nice experiences, meaningful work, exercise, those things make you happy, I think. Make me happy for sure.

Emails

Lex Fridman
(03:24:07)
You wrote a blog post, “Why I’m unreachable and maybe you should be too.” What’s your strategy in communicating with people?
Pieter Levels
(03:24:14)
Yeah. So when I wrote that, I was getting so many DMs as you probably have a million times more. And people were getting angry that I wasn’t responding. And I was like, “Okay, I’ll just close down these DMs completely.” Then people got angry that I closed my DMs down, that I’m not like, man of the people.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:31)
You’ve changed, man.
Pieter Levels
(03:24:32)
Yeah, you’ve changed, like this… And I’ll explain why. I just don’t have the time in a day to answer every question. And also, people send you crazy shit, man, like stalkers and people write their whole life story for you, and then ask you for advice. Man, I have no idea. I’m not a therapist. I don’t know. I don’t know this stuff.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:52)
But also, beautiful stuff.
Pieter Levels
(03:24:54)
No, absolutely sure.
Lex Fridman
(03:24:55)
Like life story. I’ve posted a coffee forum if you wanted to have a coffee with me, and I’ve gotten an extremely large number of submissions. And when I look at them, there’s just beautiful people in there, beautiful human beings and really powerful stories. And it breaks my heart that I won’t get to meet those people. So there’s part of it is just like, there’s only so much bandwidth to truly see other humans and help them or understand them, or hear them, or see them.
Pieter Levels
(03:25:24)
Yeah. I have this problem that I try, I want to try help people and also like, “Oh, let’s make startups,” and whatever. And I’ve learned over the years that generally for me… And it sounds maybe bad, but I helped my friend Andre, for example. He came up to me in the coworking space. That’s how I met him. And he said, “I want to learn to code. I want to do startups. How do we do it?” I said, “Okay, let’s go, install Nginx. Let’s start coding.”

(03:25:47)
And he has this self energy that he actually, he doesn’t need to be pushed, he just goes and he just goes, and he asks questions and he doesn’t ask too many questions. He just goes, goes and learns it. And now, he has a company and makes a lot of money, has his own startups. And the people that ask me for help, but then I gave help, and then they started debating it. Do you have that? People ask you for advice and they go against you to say, “No, you’re wrong because…” I’m like, “Okay, bro, I don’t want to debate. You asked me for advice, right?” And the people who need to push generally, it doesn’t happen. You need to have this energy for yourself.
Lex Fridman
(03:26:25)
Well, they’re searching. They’re searching. They’re trying to figure it out. But oftentimes, their search, if they successfully find what they’re looking for, it’ll be within. Sounds very like spiritual sounding, but it’s really figuring that shit out on your own. But they’re reaching, they’re trying to ask the world around them like, “How do I live this life? How do I figure this out?” But ultimately, the answer is going to be from them working on themselves. And literally, it’s the stupid thing, but Googling and doing like searching-
Pieter Levels
(03:26:54)
Yeah. So I think it’s procrastination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination. How do you become successful podcasters? Bro, just start. Just go.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:06)
Just go.
Pieter Levels
(03:27:07)
And I would never ask you how to be a successful podcaster. I would just start it, and then I would copy your methods. I would say, “Ah, this guy has a black background. We probably need this as well.”
Lex Fridman
(03:27:16)
Yeah, try it. Yeah, try it. And then you realize it’s not about the black background, it’s about something else. So you find your own voice, keep trying stuff.
Pieter Levels
(03:27:22)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:23)
Imitation is a difficult thing. A lot of people copy and they don’t move past it.
Pieter Levels
(03:27:28)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:28)
You should understand their methods, and then move past it. Find yourself, find your own voice, find your own-
Pieter Levels
(03:27:34)
Yeah, you imitate, and then you put your own spin to it. And that’s like creative process. That’s literally the whole… Everybody always builds on the previous work. You shouldn’t get stuck.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:41)
24 hours in a day, eight hours of sleep. You break it down into a math equation. 90 minutes of showering, cleaning up, coffee, it just keeps whittling down to zero.
Pieter Levels
(03:27:52)
Man, it’s not this specific, but I had to make an average or something.
Lex Fridman
(03:27:55)
Yeah. Firefighting. Oh, I like that. One hours of groceries and errands. I’ve tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day, especially when my life was simpler. It’s really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time and what you enjoy doing. How many minutes it takes to be happy, doing the thing that makes you happy, and how many minutes it takes to be productive? And you realize, there’s a lot of hours in the day if you spend it right.
Pieter Levels
(03:28:23)
Yeah. A lot of it is wasted. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:24)
For me, the biggest battle for the longest time is finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus into really deep work. Just like zoom in and completely focused, cutting away all the distractions.
Pieter Levels
(03:28:41)
Yeah, me too.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:41)
That’s the battle. It’s unpleasant. It’s extremely unpleasant.
Pieter Levels
(03:28:43)
We need to fly to an island, make a man cave island where everybody can just code for a week and just get shit done, make new projects.
Lex Fridman
(03:28:53)
Yeah, yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:28:54)
But man, they called me psychopath for this because it says one hours of sex, hugs, love. Man, I had to write something. They were like, “Oh, this guy’s psychopath. He plans his sex in specific hour.” Bro, I don’t, but-
Lex Fridman
(03:29:06)
They have a counter for hugs.
Pieter Levels
(03:29:08)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Click, click, click.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:12)
It’s just a numerical representation of what life is.
Pieter Levels
(03:29:15)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:16)
It’s like one of those, when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life.
Pieter Levels
(03:29:21)
Oh dude, this is dark. Yeah, man. Don’t want to look at that too much.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:21)
Holy shit.
Pieter Levels
(03:29:24)
Yeah, man. How many times you see your parents? Jesus, man. It’s scary, man.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:29)
That’s right. It might be only a handful more times.
Pieter Levels
(03:29:30)
Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:33)
You just look at the math of it. If you see them once a year or twice a year-
Pieter Levels
(03:29:36)
Yeah. FaceTime today.
Lex Fridman
(03:29:38)
Yeah. I mean, that’s dark when you see somebody you like seeing, like a friend that’s on the outskirts of your friend group. And then you realize, “Well, I haven’t really seen him for three years.” So how many more times do we have that we see each other? Yeah.
Pieter Levels
(03:30:00)
Do you believe that friends just slowly disappear from your life? Your friend group evolves, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:30:07)
It does. It does.
Pieter Levels
(03:30:08)
There’s a problem with Facebook. You get all these old friends from school when you were 10 years old back when Facebook started. You would add friend them, and then you’re like, “Why are we in touch again? Just keep the memories there. It’s a different life now.”
Lex Fridman
(03:30:21)
Yeah. I don’t know. That might be a guy thing or I don’t know. There’s certain friends I have that we don’t interact often, but we’re still friends. Every time I see him… I think it’s because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories. I guess it’s like nothing has changed. Almost like we’ve been talking every day, even if we haven’t talked for a year. So that’s…
Pieter Levels
(03:30:46)
Yeah, this deep issues.
Lex Fridman
(03:30:47)
Yeah. So I don’t have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group. And then there’s some people I interact with a lot. It depends, but there’s just this network of good human beings that I have a real love for them and I can always count on them. If any of them called me in the middle of the night, I’ll get rid of a body, I’m there. I like how that’s a definition of friendship, but it’s true. It’s true.
Pieter Levels
(03:31:18)
True friend.

Coffee

Lex Fridman
(03:31:20)
You become more and more famous recently. How’s that affect you?
Pieter Levels
(03:31:24)
It’s not recently, because it’s this gradual thing, right? It keeps going. And I also don’t know why it keeps going.
Lex Fridman
(03:31:32)
Does that put pressure on you to… Because you’re pretty open on Twitter and you’re just basically building shit in the open and just not really caring if it’s too technical, if it’s any of this, just being out there. Does it put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more collected and…
Pieter Levels
(03:31:53)
Man, I think the opposite, right? Because the people I follow are interesting, because they say whatever they think and they shape or whatever. It’s so boring that people start tweeting only about one topic. I don’t know anything about their personal life. I want to know about their personal life. You do podcasts, you ask about life stuff of personality. That’s the most interesting part of business or sports. What’s behind the sport, the athlete right behind the entrepreneur? That’s interesting stuff.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:18)
To be human.
Pieter Levels
(03:32:19)
Yeah. Like I shared a tweet, it went too far. We were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged, but it’s just real stuff. Because Jensen Huang, the Nvidia guy, he says he started cleaning toilets.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:32)
That was cool. You tweeted something about the Denny’s thing. I forget.
Pieter Levels
(03:32:36)
Yeah. It was recent. Nvidia was started in a Denny diner table.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:41)
And you made it somehow profound.
Pieter Levels
(03:32:43)
Yeah. This one, this one.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:45)
Nvidia, a $3 trillion company was started in a Denny’s, an American diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company. What’s the first and second space?
Pieter Levels
(03:32:56)
The home office. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:32:59)
And then the in-between, the island.
Pieter Levels
(03:32:59)
I guess, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:33:00)
The island.
Pieter Levels
(03:33:01)
Yeah. You need a space to congregate, man. And I found history on this. So 400 years ago in the coffee houses of Europe, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment happened. Because they would go to coffee houses, they would sit there, they would drink coffee and they would work. They would work, they would write, and they would do debates, and they would organize marine routes. Right? They would do all the stuff in coffee houses in Europe, in France, in Austria, in UK, in Holland. So we were always going to cafes to work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff. And when you asked me to come on here and we flew to America, and the first thing I realized was that I’ve been to America before, but we were in this cafe and there’s a lot of laptops. Everybody’s working on something and I took this photo. And then when you’re in Europe, large parts of Europe now, you cannot use a laptop anymore. No laptop, which I understand.
Lex Fridman
(03:34:01)
But that is to you, a fundamental place to create shit, is in that natural, organic co-working space of a coffee shop.
Pieter Levels
(03:34:10)
Well, for a lot of people. A lot of people have very small homes and co-working spaces are boring. They’re private, they’re not serendipitous, they’re boring. Cafes are amazing because random people can come in and ask you, “What are you working on?” And not just laptops. People are also having conversations like they did 400 years ago, debates or whatever. Things are happening. And man, I understand the aesthetics of it. It’s like, “Start up bro. Shipping is a bullshit startup.”

(03:34:40)
But there’s something more there. There’s people actually making stuff, making new companies that the society benefits from. We’re benefiting from Nvidia, I think. The US GDP for sure is benefiting from Nvidia. European GDP could benefit if we build more companies. And I feel in Europe, there’s this vibe and this… You have to connect things, but not allowing laptops in cafes is part of the vibe. It’s like, “Yeah, we’re not really here to work. We’re here to enjoy life.” I agree with this. Anthony Bourdain, this tweet was quoted with Anthony Bourdain photo of him with cigarettes and a coffee in France, and he said, “This is what cafes are for.” I agree.
Lex Fridman
(03:35:15)
But there is some element of entrepreneurship. You have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off towards that dream, and then feel each other’s energy as they interact with. That’s one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there, is the cafes. There’s a bunch of dreamers that you can make fun of them for like, everybody thinks they’re going to build a trillion-dollar company, but-
Pieter Levels
(03:35:38)
Yeah. And it’s off, so not everybody wins. 99% of the people will be bullshit [inaudible 03:35:41].
Lex Fridman
(03:35:41)
But they’re working their ass off.
Pieter Levels
(03:35:42)
Yeah. And they’re doing something. And you need to pass this startup bro like, “Oh, it’s started one level.” No, it’s not. It’s people making cool shit. And this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your country and your region. And I think in Europe, that’s a big problem. We have a very anti- entrepreneurial mindset.
Lex Fridman
(03:36:03)
Dream big and build shit. This is really inspiring, this pin tweet of yours. All the projects that you’ve tried and the ones that succeeded.
Pieter Levels
(03:36:13)
There’s very few.
Lex Fridman
(03:36:13)
Mute life.
Pieter Levels
(03:36:14)
This was for Twitter to mute, to share the mute list.
Lex Fridman
(03:36:20)
Yeah. Fire calculator, no more Google, maker rank, how much is my side project worth, climate finder, ideasai, airlinelist-
Pieter Levels
(03:36:30)
Airlinelist still runs, but it doesn’t make money. Airlinelist compares the safety of airlines. Because I was nervous to fly, so I was like, “Let’s collect all the data on the crashes for all the airplanes.”
Lex Fridman
(03:36:40)
Bali sea cable. Nice. That’s awesome. Make village, nomad gear, 3D and virtual reality dev, play my inbox, like you mentioned. There’s a lot of stuff.
Pieter Levels
(03:36:54)
Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman
(03:36:54)
I’m trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours.
Pieter Levels
(03:36:56)
You can go to the highlights tab. It has all the good shit.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:00)
There you go.
Pieter Levels
(03:37:01)
This was Dubai.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:02)
POV, building an AI startup. Wow. You’re a real influencer.
Pieter Levels
(03:37:09)
And if people copy this photo now and they change the screenshots, it becomes like a meme, of course.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:16)
This is good.
Pieter Levels
(03:37:16)
That’s how Dubai looks. It’s insane.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:19)
That’s beautiful architecture. It’s crazy, the story behind the cities.
Pieter Levels
(03:37:22)
Yeah, the story behind, for sure. So this is about the European economy, where…
Lex Fridman
(03:37:27)
European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs. And today, I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence. 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950. Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950.
Pieter Levels
(03:37:42)
Yeah. So the median founding of companies in US is something like 1960, and the median… The top companies, right? And the median in Europe is 1900 or something. So it’s here, 1913 and 1963. So there’s a 50-year difference.
Lex Fridman
(03:37:58)
It’s a good representation of the very thing you were talking about, the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples.
Pieter Levels
(03:38:06)
But Europe used to be entrepreneurial. There was companies founded in 1800, 1850, 1900. It flipped around 1950 where America took the lead. And I guess my point is, I hope that Europe gets back to… Because I’m European, I hope that Europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again. Because right now, all the old dinosaur companies control the economies. They’re lobbying with the government. Europe is also, they’re infiltrated with the government where they create so much regulation. I think it’s called regulatory capture, where it’s very hard for a newcomer to enter an industry because there’s too much regulation. So actually, regulation is very good for big companies because they can follow it. I can’t follow it, right? If I want to start an AI startup in Europe now, I cannot because there’s an AI regulation that makes it very complicated for me. I probably need to get notaries involved. I need to get certificates, licenses. Whereas in America, I can just open my laptop. I can start an AI startup right now mostly.

E/acc

Lex Fridman
(03:39:06)
What do you think about EAC, Effective Accelerationist movement?
Pieter Levels
(03:39:09)
Man, you had Beff Jezos on. I love Beff Jezos and he’s amazing. And if EAC is very needed to similarly create a more positive outlook on the future, because people have been very pessimistic about society, about the future of society, climate change, all this stuff. EAC is a positive outlook on the future. Technology can make us… We spend more energy. We should find ways to of course, get clean energy, but we need to spend more energy to make cooler stuff and go into space and build more technology that can improve society. And we shouldn’t shy away from technology. Technology can be the answer for many things.
Lex Fridman
(03:39:53)
Yeah, build more. Don’t spend so much time on fear-mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some was okay, some was good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and doing so unapologetically. It’s a refreshing reminder of what made United States great, is all the builders. Like you said, the entrepreneurs. We can’t forget that in all the discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff.
Pieter Levels
(03:40:20)
Yeah. Look at China. China is now at the stage of America. What? Like 1900 or something. They’re building rapidly insane. And obviously, China has massive problems, but that comes with the whole thing. America is beginning also with massive problems. Right? But I think it’s very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to… You get to this point where you’re complacent, you’re comfortable, and then you can either go this or you can go this way. You’re from here, you go like this, and then you can go this or this. I think you should go this way and…
Lex Fridman
(03:40:56)
Go up.
Pieter Levels
(03:40:56)
Yeah, go up. And I think the problem is the mind culture. So EUAC, I made EUAC, which is the European version.
Lex Fridman
(03:40:56)
I get it.
Pieter Levels
(03:41:06)
I made hoodies and stuff. So a lot of people wear this, make Europe great again hat. I made it red first, but it became too like Trump. So now, it’s more like European blue, make Europe great again.

Advice for young people

Lex Fridman
(03:41:19)
All right. Okay. So you had an incredible life. Very successful, built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same?
Pieter Levels
(03:41:32)
Man, I would listen to nobody. Just do what you think is good and follow your heart. Right? Everybody peer presses you into doing stuff you don’t want to do. And they tell you like parents, or family, or society and tell you. But try your own thing because it might work out. You can steer the ship. It probably doesn’t work out immediately. You probably go into very bad times like I did as well, relatively, right? But in the end, if you’re smart about it, you can make things work and you can create your own little life of things as you did, as I did. And I think that should be more promoted. Do your own thing. There’s space in economy and in society for, do your own thing. It’s like little villages, everybody would sell. I would sell bread. You would sell meat. Everybody can do their own little thing. You don’t need to be a normie, as you say. You can be what you really want to be.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:25)
And go all out doing that thing.
Pieter Levels
(03:42:28)
Yeah, you got to go all out. Because if you half ass it, you cannot succeed. You need to go lean into the outcast stuff. Lean into the being different and just doing whatever it is that you want to do. Right?
Lex Fridman
(03:42:42)
You got a whole ass it.
Pieter Levels
(03:42:44)
Yeah. Whole ass it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:46)
This was an incredible conversation. It was an honor to finally meet you.
Pieter Levels
(03:42:49)
It was an honor to be here, Lex.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:50)
To talk to you and keep doing your thing. Keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you’re building.
Pieter Levels
(03:42:57)
Thank you, Man.
Lex Fridman
(03:42:59)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Pieter Levels. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Drew Houston, Dropbox co-founder. By the way, I love Dropbox. Anyway, Drew said, “Don’t worry about failure. You only have to be right once.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling | Lex Fridman Podcast #439

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #439 with Craig Jones.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
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Table of Contents

Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction

Craig Jones
(00:00:00)
I like to match looks from time to time.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:04)
Thank you.
Craig Jones
(00:00:04)
In an homage.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:05)
You look sexy. How many legs did you break in Eastern Europe?
Craig Jones
(00:00:09)
Three or four.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:11)
To send a message or just for your own personal enjoyment?
Craig Jones
(00:00:14)
If she wins, I’ll personally give her a million dollars. If I can foot lock her, we’re going to collaborate together in an OnlyFans sex tape.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:27)
Did she agree to this?
Craig Jones
(00:00:28)
She shook on it.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:30)
You do have an OnlyFans channel. Is that still up?
Craig Jones
(00:00:32)
After August 17th? It’s going to be fire.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:35)
It’s going to be on fire.
Craig Jones
(00:00:36)
Honestly, when we talk about secret investor, I think that could fund the entire tournament.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:40)
I missed all that. What gives you hope?
Craig Jones
(00:00:42)
That you can still make fun of anything as long as it’s funny.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:48)
The following is a conversation with Craig Jones, martial artist, world traveler and one of the funniest people in the sport of submission grappling. While he does make fun of himself a lot, he is legitimately one of the greatest submission grapplers in the world. Underneath the veil of nonstop sexualized Aussie humor and incessant online trolling, he is truly a kindhearted human being who’s trying to do good in the world. Sometimes he does so through a bit of controversy and chaos.

(00:01:22)
Like with a new CJI tournament that has over $2 million in prize money. It’s coming up this Friday and Saturday. Yes, the same weekend as the prestigious ADCC tournament. The goal of CGI tournament is to grow the sport. You’ll be able to watch it for free online, live on YouTube and other places. All ticket profits go to charity, mainly to cancer research. I encourage you to support the mission of this tournament by buying tickets and going to see the event in person.

(00:01:58)
Craig gave me a special link that gives you a 50% discount on the tickets. Go to lexfreeman.com/cji and it should forward you to the right place. They’re trying to sell the last few tickets now. It’s a good cause. Go buy some. Also let me say, as a fan of the sport, I highly encourage you to watch both CJI and ADCC. To celebrate athletes competing in both. From CJI with Nicky Ryan, Nicky Rod, or Ruotolo Brothers, Ffion Davis, McKenzie Dern, and more.

(00:02:29)
To ADCC with Gordon Ryan, Nicholas Meregali, Giancarlo Bodoni, Rafael Lovato, Jr., Mica Galvao, and more. I have a lot of respect for everyone involved. I trained with many of them regularly and consider many of them friends. Including Craig Gordon and of course John Danaher, who I will talk to many, many more times on this podcast. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, I invite you all to come to the pool with Craig Jones and me.

$1 million in cash

Lex Fridman
(00:03:04)
When you brought the $1 million in cash on Rogan’s podcast, did you have security with you?
Craig Jones
(00:03:11)
We had security, but only by Joe Rogan’s request. He said, “You’re really going to bring it? Do you have security?” I said, “No.” He’s like, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll send my security.”
Lex Fridman
(00:03:21)
You were going to do it without security?
Craig Jones
(00:03:22)
Yeah, we we’re going to wing it. I was told not to tell anyone, but I sent pictures of it to everyone I know. That was probably a security risk.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:31)
Yeah. It’s just you in a car with a bag of cash.
Craig Jones
(00:03:34)
Yeah, it was a company that sponsors me, shuffle.com. It was their friend. A friend of theirs, so a guy that’s never met me before just took the risk to show up to a stranger’s house with a million dollars in cash to bring to Joe Rogan. It was a big risk of him.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:47)
He just put it in the car and drove it.
Craig Jones
(00:03:49)
Drove it over there, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:50)
Yeah. With no security except Joe.
Craig Jones
(00:03:52)
Except Joe.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:53)
That’s common sense.
Craig Jones
(00:03:54)
Then Joe said he’d never seen a million dollars before, but I don’t know if I believe him.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:59)
That’s what everyone says. That’s what Pablo Escobar probably says also. What’s your relationship with risk, especially with the risk of death?
Craig Jones
(00:04:07)
I would say I’m very risk averse.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:09)
You are? No, you’re not. That’s a lie.
Craig Jones
(00:04:13)
My relationship with risk. I like a bit of excitement. I like a bit of adventure. I’m more about the adventure, but I will not let the risk get in the waiver. Also, obviously just got back from Ukraine. I’m happy to take a few risks if it’s part of what the locals want me to do. In Kazakhstan, we did some things that were dangerous. If the locals are like, come along, join in on this activity, I feel personally obligated to go with them.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:41)
It’s not about the risk. You’re not attracted to risk, you’re attracted to adventure and the risk is a thing you don’t give a damn about.
Craig Jones
(00:04:49)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:49)
If it comes along with it.
Craig Jones
(00:04:50)
Sometimes the best adventures involve the most risk, unfortunately.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:54)
Speaking of which, you went to Ukraine, like you said, twice, recently.
Craig Jones
(00:04:57)
Twice. Really pushed the limit there.
Lex Fridman
(00:04:59)
Including to the front?
Craig Jones
(00:05:01)
To the front.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:02)
Tell me the full story of that from the beginning. How did you end up in Ukraine?

Kazakhstan

Craig Jones
(00:05:08)
We’re in Kazakhstan. We’re doing some filming in Kazakhstan, and obviously Borats still a very traumatic memory for them, and some of my jokes felt like they don’t go as well in that neck of the woods. We had some difficulty filming out there. We filmed this horse game. Have you ever heard of Kok boru?
Lex Fridman
(00:05:26)
Thanks to you, yes.
Craig Jones
(00:05:26)
It’s a game, a very, very old game. They cut a goat or a sheep. I didn’t get too close to look at it. But they cut its head and legs off and they use it as some form of bull and then they’ll have up to a thousand guys on horses violently trying to pick this up and drop it in the other end’s goals basically. The goals used to be concrete, now it’s just a top. But local business owners will throw down huge amounts of money for the winners.

(00:05:53)
These horses have been trained from a very young age. The riders have been trained. I’ve never ridden a horse before. We wanted to film something that made it look like I was going to go into the horse pit, into the Kok boru pit. However, the drunk stunt man that we used just decided that when he took my horse reigns, he would take me straight into the pit instead of ending the shot there. I was in there amongst I guess the horse riders, the Kok boru riders, and we weren’t leaving.

(00:06:23)
We just were in there for quite a while. He could talk English pretty well actually. He’s like, “Oh, I thought you’d want to check it out from the inside.” Then while we’re in there, someone picked up the carcass and a wave of horse riders came at me. I was quite concerned at that point because they’re bashing into each other and obviously they’re angry. They’re seeing a foreigner in there. I was wearing basically Biggie Smalls COOGI looking sweater, so I stood out.

(00:06:51)
They definitely didn’t like that I was participating in a game that they probably trained their whole life for and that amount of money they could win is very, very significant and there’s me in there. They’re also pointing out Borat, Borat. Thinking I was making Borat jokes, which again, very traumatic memory for the people at Kazakhstan.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:07)
Were you making Borat jokes?
Craig Jones
(00:07:09)
No, but I guess it’s the same type of humor. I’m not pretending to be Kazak. I’m just there being an idiot and enjoying the local culture. But we’re over there in Kazakhstan and we did that. That was obviously a bit risky.
Lex Fridman
(00:07:23)
Did they learn to love you?

Ukraine

Craig Jones
(00:07:24)
I think they learned to love me and then to hate me again. It was a bit of all encompassing relationship for the Kazak people. But we basically abandoned ship. It was proven too difficult to film some things, some sensitive subjects over there. I said, “Where should we go next?” I just looked at the map and I was like, “We’re near Ukraine.” Ukraine was a place that I’d been offered to teach a Jujitsu seminar prior to I guess the full scale war commencing and we’re looking for a bit of adventure, something interesting to film.

(00:07:54)
Following the news, obviously very controversial in the news, people have very strong opinions. I was like, ” Let’s go over there. Let’s do a charity event. Let’s do something. Let’s train with the people and really experience of ourselves.” We set up the seminar. Turned out to be the biggest seminar for Jujitsu in Ukraine history. Which is wild considering obviously they are at war. But everyone came together to support it. One of the soldiers there, one of my friends there, good friend now, who’s on the front line, he made a comment on there.

(00:08:24)
He said, “Hey, this is a seminar to donate profits to the soldiers, but we’re on the front line.” I was like, “You know what, I’ll come to you.” He’s like, “Listen, I can’t promise you’ll survive, but I’ll promise you’ll have a good time.” I said, “That’s all I needed to hear.” We connected and my friend Roman, we went really, really close. I think we were at the closest 0.7 kilometers from the front line. Obviously very surreal experience to be over there seeing basically how the battles fought with those drones.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:57)
How long ago was this?
Craig Jones
(00:08:58)
I think it would’ve been March or April. We went there. We went, basically spent two nights up on the front line. Went back to Kjiv and that was it for that trip. In terms of crazy stuff that happened, obviously just the people living. You download the air defense tracker. At any time there could be an air siren going off, an air alert on your phone. Could be like drones heading your way, planes are in the air, missiles flying. Then those missiles will change direction and stuff, so the air alert, you don’t know if it’s heading a different direction, but they just warn everyone. You live under a constant state of fear basically. Then on that first trip, the heaviest moment was, I was going downstairs in the hotel to work out, which is honestly a rare thing these days, doing something healthy with myself.
Lex Fridman
(00:09:46)
You’re working out.
Craig Jones
(00:09:47)
Getting in the gym, pumping some iron. This was divine intervention that a hypersonic missile was shot down by the patriot event system, just like five minutes from the hotel. The whole hotel and the attached gym just shook like crazy. Some people started freaking out. Most people went to leave to go outside, which I don’t think is recommended, but you want to see what’s going on out there.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:10)
This was in Kyiv?
Craig Jones
(00:10:11)
This was in Kyiv. It got shot down and then some of the local troops actually took me to the site of where just part of the missile had landed in the ground and left this huge of indentation. They’d already cleared up most of the, I guess, shrapnel from the missile. I don’t know if I should or if I was legally allowed to do this, but I took some of that missile back home with me. I don’t know where I left it actually. But I thought maybe that would raise some alarm bells and airport scans. But I took it regardless. That was basically the crazy thing that happened on that first trip.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:44)
The Patriot Defense System is incredible. That’s an incredible piece of technology that’s from the United States. It’s expensive but it’s incredible. Then so that’s protecting Kjiv.
Craig Jones
(00:10:55)
That’s protecting Kjiv, yeah. That was at the time where US hadn’t voted to I guess keep funding the weapons over there. It was a tense moment because I think, I don’t know, everyone was thinking when do those air defense missiles run out? That was a heavy moment for me thinking, look at what it shot out the sky. Imagine if they didn’t have that. But that was probably the most surreal moment. But Kjiv largely, life goes on most of the time as per normal. I was faced with crazy messages and comments, even just posting that video. Like I’m getting paid by Ukraine and stuff. It’s just like people just don’t understand that life has to go on like Kjiv here, the front lines far away. The cities have to largely try to operate as normal or just life will not go on in those villages and cities.
Lex Fridman
(00:11:48)
Well, it’s human nature as well. It’s not just Kjiv, it’s Kharkiv, it’s even Donetsk, Khartsyzk. People get accustomed to war quickly. It’s impossible to suffer for prolonged periods of time, so you adjust and you appreciate the things you still have.
Craig Jones
(00:12:04)
Yeah, some bolder moves out there. I love seeing people that just crazy stuff’s going on from the war and they don’t even react to it. They don’t go to the bomb shelter. It’s like a bolder move. I’m not going to change my lifestyle. Actually on that first trip as well, something else that I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to do was go to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, I believe troops came through Belarus and there was some fighting going on in Chernobyl.

(00:12:28)
I think the whole world got concerned at that point if any sort of radiation leaked. But Chernobyl, as it stands, the troops back down and it’s completely covered in mines. Very, very difficult to go to Chernobyl. Basically as a tourist or as I guess a idiot like myself should really probably not be allowed in a place like that. But we were able to get there. We passed four security checkpoints. It took two attempts. First time we tried to go in there was with the special forces guy, we cleared two security gates. Then they stopped us and basically threatened us with arrest. Rightfully so. Really have no business going to Chernobyl. We made a connection. I won’t say who this connection was, but he had heard about what I had done with a charity event and opened some doors for us to be able to go to Chernobyl. We got to see Chernobyl. We had some filming restrictions there just because it was a crazy military conflict at one point. We got to actually see Chernobyl. Chernobyl always been a dream of mine to see. It’s just such an interesting place and to see it under these conditions, very, very strange.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:35)
Yeah, what was that like? There’s no civilians there now.
Craig Jones
(00:13:39)
It’s just completely empty. I guess it’s like the fantasy you have. I imagine people go on tours of Chernobyl back in the tourist days when it was a tourist spot and it would be busy full of tourists. We got basically a private tour, so we got to really feel that abandoned vibes. I guess I was interested in it from playing Call of Duty and then Chernobyl series, all the documentaries and stuff. But very, very strange place to go visit.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:04)
It is now a minefield like a lot of parts of Ukraine. That’s one of the dark, terrifying aspects of wars. How many mines are left even when the war ends for decades after? Mines everywhere. Because de-mining is extremely difficult and that could continually kill people.
Craig Jones
(00:14:28)
I don’t think it’ll be a tourist spot for a very long time. Because if you were thinking about areas to de-mine when the conflict ends, an area where if you accidentally trigger a mine could cause a radiation leak. It’s probably going to be very low on the list. Tourism for Chernobyl, who knows how long until that returns.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:44)
Why do you think you were able to get to Chernobyl? Why don’t you think the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian soldiers don’t see you as a threat?
Craig Jones
(00:14:55)
Maybe they were hoping that I did step on a mine. Maybe my jokes didn’t go too well there.
Lex Fridman
(00:14:59)
Your connection was actually Putin, he was trying to get rid of you.
Craig Jones
(00:15:01)
Putin, yeah. I don’t know. We felt pretty safe when we’re there. There was an air alert went off. They were more concerned with me dying just for the PR side of things. It’s like Australian tourist.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:15)
In one of your videos actually heard Ukrainian language. They were talking about, we don’t want to lose an athlete. That’s what they’re saying as they’re loading the rocket launcher.
Craig Jones
(00:15:28)
Oh yeah, the rocket launcher. I showed a rocket launcher with the troops on the first trip. But the second trip I went back to, which was only maybe four to five weeks ago. This time we went to some crazier spots. We went to Odessa, which has been hit a ton.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:42)
I really enjoyed the video of old man stretching and exercising on the Odessa shore.
Craig Jones
(00:15:48)
Yeah, what is it, a local custom?
Lex Fridman
(00:15:50)
Well, Odessa people are known historically to be wild.
Craig Jones
(00:15:54)
That was wild. It was abrasive to the eyes, but I appreciated it. Especially a middle-aged man in underwear with a beer belly doing a Sundance at dusk. That would frighten many people.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:06)
Yeah. The battleship would turn around. Yeah, so where else?
Craig Jones
(00:16:10)
We went Odessa, we briefly went back to Kjiv. I made a connection with the police chief, basically the entire country last time. He had said to me that if I wanted to go somewhere really heavy in terms of action, we could go to Kherson. He’s like, “I’ll personally escort you to Kherson.” I was just like, well, here we have an invitation for adventure. I think it’s a great idea to go. I thought, you know what? I’ll completely lie to my camera man and tell him it’s a safe trip to go on so that he can pass that information onto his fiance and she won’t have any concerns.

(00:16:51)
We basically take this huge journey all the way down to Kherson. We switch at a city outside, I can’t remember the name, but we had to switch into armored vehicles. I remember the guy that picked this up there said, “Hey, give me a phone number for someone to call to recover your bodies.” He said that in a joking way, but I think he was serious. But I said, “Just leave it.” I don’t think they need it. I didn’t think there’d be much left probably if we get hit over there.

(00:17:15)
But we go basically into Kherson. I think Kherson’s population used to be like 250,000 now it’s basically all military down to 50,000. We went into the police basically station in the bunker underneath, the top of the building was destroyed. Then one of the local guys just took us on a city tour. Which again, we had some filming restrictions because obviously anytime something’s hit, I guess the other side wants to be able to see what damage has been done.

(00:17:44)
If you take any footage of recently destroyed buildings, that’s going to help them recalibrate and target the next shot. Kherson being so heavily hit, it’s basically within range of every single thing Russia has. Every form of weapon. Drones. Before we took the tour, he put some drone blocking things on top of the car, which didn’t look reassuring. He also took a helmet out the back of the car, which I thought he was going to give to me, but he just threw it in the back of the pickup truck and said, “Oh, you won’t need this, you’ll be dead anyway.”

(00:18:14)
I was like, “Oh, I’ve made a great life decision with this little Kherson tour.” But then we took a tour of the city and Kherson used to be a beautiful beach city by the Nepo River, but basically it’s just the river that separates Russia from, I guess the Russian land they’ve taken from Kherson. Kherson split across that river and there’s just Russians on the other side of the river and Ukrainians on this side. Very, very dangerous spot.

(00:18:44)
Kharkiv makes a lot of press because of the long range missiles that hit, but Kherson’s just being hit all the time. We took this tour, we went along the river. We went to within one kilometer of the front line. That was the closest we got. After this point, we heard artillery strike. Because you’re in an armored vehicle, it sounds further away than it is. Obviously the sound doesn’t get in. I thought it sounded far away. We could see some smoke that actually appeared closer in the distance.

(00:19:16)
The guy driving us took us to a point where a large building was blocking us from, I guess the angle at which the missile would’ve came from. I thought everything was cool, thought that must’ve been off in the distance. Then we heard two more strikes hit very, very close. They sounded really loud. Then I think he’s radioed in to see if everything’s safe, if we can leave this point. Then we basically raced back. But I started to realize we were in danger at any point where he really sped the car up or took evasive movements in the car.

(00:19:48)
But we got out of there and I think I had someone translate it later and basically he was checking to see if the roads were clear for us to leave. Ultimately ended up being someone died and a few people injured from that blast, which was less than half a kilometer from us. Basically they were radioing saying, end the tour, come back to the police station.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:09)
Artillery is terrifying. There’s just shelling and it’s the destructive power of artillery is insane.
Craig Jones
(00:20:17)
Yeah, it’s constant all the time. You hear that noise and you’re like, is that coming or going? Very concerning.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:23)
Right. You don’t know. You don’t know. Just like that, it could be you, gone.
Craig Jones
(00:20:30)
Last time, the village we went to, basically it was the day we left. We stayed there overnight. The day we left, it just started getting extremely shelled and the soldier we were with just took a selfie video of us and basically the location we were in just hearing just artillery strike after artillery strike, just being like, oh, you guys left and the fun began. They take it in good spirit. I was trying to use their energy to reassure myself. But I guess when they see it every day, they’re more adjusted to it. They’re not freaking out every time something crazy that goes on.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:09)
Well, they have to. They have to be in good spirit. You have to be joking and laughing.
Craig Jones
(00:21:15)
The guys are always laughing and joking. They were laughing and joking at me quite a bit, holding weapons, trying to shoot weapons and stuff. They got a lot of enjoyment out of me shooting the RPG.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:24)
Yeah, they’re probably still telling stories of that crazy Australian American that rolled in.
Craig Jones
(00:21:32)
They helped me out though in my marketing campaign for the tournament. We were able to secure a Lada, classic Soviet Union car. We towed it, we painted it with the logos of the other event, the ADCC, and we got to shoot some RPGs at it. Great experience. Great fun.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:49)
Yeah, it’s a very creative marketing campaign.
Craig Jones
(00:21:52)
Very dangerous one.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:53)
I don’t think Coke or Pepsi are going to do that one. It’s very innovative.
Craig Jones
(00:21:57)
It was a bold move. Luckily they let me get away with posting it. But when we were there, it was basically at a shooting range and we cleared them out for a while. We’d blown up the car, we’d set it on fire, we’d done all this sort of stuff. I remember we were trying to blow it up. It wasn’t quite hitting, one of the missiles was lodged in under the car, so it was risky. That could have gone off at any moment. But we needed to get it to ignite. We needed to get a shot where it was on fire. The logo of the enemy tournament was basically on fire. We poured gasoline on it. We shot the gasoline tank. That didn’t work. That must be a movie trick or something. Then we decided we had light on fire, a rag and just throw it into the blown out back window. I’m with this guy, special forces guy, and we throw the rag in the back.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:42)
Like soaked in gasoline rag?
Craig Jones
(00:22:44)
Yeah. We start running. He’s like, “Stop, stop.” He’s like, “It didn’t go off.” We’re sitting there quite close to the car, lighting it, trying to light more. As we walk back to the car, then we just hear the car ignite. He’s like, “Run, run, run.” We came quite close to death already at that point. But we wanted to get the shot, some photos in front of the burning logos. But we had told the guys at the shooting range to basically give us 10 minutes or so, so we could take the photos.

(00:23:14)
I don’t know if they didn’t wait the full 10 minutes or if we took too long, but they started firing at the targets anyway. Then the ricochets were flying very, very close to us over our head. One landed right by my leg. We’re like, “Shit, we better get out of here.” Obviously not much safety concerns at that point, but we survived basically artillery strikes. We survived a bit of friendly fire with the bullets coming our way. But again, I was strangely calm because the other guys were calm. But then afterwards they said to me, they were like, “oh bro, if you got shot, we’d just have to dump your body at a hospital. We wouldn’t be able to explain why you’re here blowing up cars.”
Lex Fridman
(00:23:49)
Right. You’re American and athlete, international celebrity.
Craig Jones
(00:23:54)
They’d be like, what is he doing on the front line? There’s no real good explanation for it. But through even to the jokes and stuff, it’s good to highlight what’s actually happening over there. It’s obviously very, very bad.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:08)
What’s the morale of the soldiers like? Is there still an optimism? Is there still a hope?
Craig Jones
(00:24:14)
There’s the battle fatigue and as they say, all the heroes die early. The guys, the real heroes that are willing to sacrifice themselves, they’re the ones that are going to get taken out quick. Unfortunately that’s the reality from over there. But their thoughts are mostly that it’s going to be a prolonged war. When I ask them about how fast the front line moves, they’re like, “Oh, could take six months to move one 200 meters.”

(00:24:39)
It just feels like it’s going to go on forever. From the Ukrainian side’s perspective, those guys talk to me about how when they hear radio intercepts of Russian soldiers marching to the same frontline spot, is that basically they’re marching into certain death at certain locations. Based on the radio transmissions, they know they’re going to die, but they head forth anyway. Straightforward into Ukrainian position. Which is just wild to me, I guess World War II, they just keep throwing troops at it. You see a ton of footage they take themselves, which is mind-blowing. Obviously some of this footage doesn’t make it to the internet because it’s got important details in those conflicts. But they’re showing first person perspectives of trench warfare. It’s just crazy to see what some of these guys have gone through.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:32)
I went to a lot of the same places as well, including Kherson. What was your sense of the place?
Craig Jones
(00:25:41)
Kherson was like, it was just so destroyed. I think at this point most of the civilians are gone. I saw a lot of just elderly people left behind, especially a lot of old men. I just think they’re just like, hey, I’ve lived in my whole life, I’m just never leaving. No matter the level of danger, those guys just remain. Then it’s largely just, I guess military in Kherson. But that place felt very, very dangerous. I didn’t realize until we got there, just quite how destroyed it is.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:12)
How did that experience change you? Just seeing war, head on.
Craig Jones
(00:26:18)
How it changed me? I guess just realizing a lot of these soldiers are just, you distance yourself from them thinking that they’re something separate. But really speaking to a lot of the Ukrainian soldiers, my friend Roman, he hadn’t lived in Ukraine for eight years. He lived in France, he had a life, he’s got a wife over there, he’s got a daughter. He basically volunteered to come back to protect his mom and brother who still live there.

(00:26:47)
I used to view them military guys, because in Australia and I guess in the US, they don’t have this conscription ongoing right now. Whereas obviously there’s guys like Roman who volunteered, but then there’s a lot of Ukrainian soldiers that were conscripted into the war. It’s like you just realize how a lot of these guys are everyday people. They’re just in this crazy situation. Where Roman felt obligated to return to Ukraine. From my perspective, anyone from Australia or US, it’s just a different perspective on those. They feel different to the regular people fighting in Ukraine, from my perspective.
Lex Fridman
(00:27:26)
Yeah, it’s defending the land that is your home.
Craig Jones
(00:27:30)
Yeah, Japan was coming for Australia, I guess in World War II. They attacked the north. But really there was no foot battle and there was no soldiers on the ground within Australia. I guess US too during World War II. It’s like a completely different perspective from our recent histories compared to if you were a Ukrainian and there’s Russians within the defined border. Their responsibility to protect their homeland and their family, it’s just something you can’t imagine. But also after having spent time with them, you can see why they feel such a strong sense of obligation to protect Ukraine, protect their family and friends.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:09)
In a lot of cases, the soldiers using their own funds to buy equipment. Whether it’s bullets, whether it’s guns, whether it’s armor. Is that still what you saw?
Craig Jones
(00:28:23)
Yeah, in terms of the weapons, America provides weapons. We saw a wide selection of weapons. Some of those would be old Soviet weapons, like obviously the RPG we shot and what we shot out of it is all Soviet. It’s very old weaponry. Then you’ve got US weapons that have been given as well. But in terms of the basic soldiers equipment, if they want good quality stuff, that might be the difference between them surviving the winter or the summer just in the extreme temperature range.

(00:28:56)
They have to pay for that all themselves. They always joke about when foreign soldiers come over to train them. A lot of foreign soldiers come to learn about the drone technology they’ve developed on a budget is they always joke with them about how everything from most countries is basically supplied. All the good quality standard equipment they’d need is just supplied by the government. But in Ukraine, obviously funding is very stretched.

(00:29:22)
These guys to have the best equipment. They have to basically find money to pay for it themselves. They’ll do that by seeking donations. Best way to get donations would be to grow social media profiles. That’s when you see a lot of social media warfare from a perspective of gaining fame to secure donations for their battalion to be able to fight better or protect themselves. Also, some of the social media warfare, I guess is psychological warfare against the enemy. You’ll see private Telegram groups where they’re showing what they’ve done to the enemy, what the enemy’s done to them. It’s just crazy.
Lex Fridman
(00:29:58)
Yeah, there’s Telegram groups on both sides and basically some of it is propaganda, some of it is psychological warfare. Some of it is just the human nature of being, of increasing your own morale and the morale of the people around you by showing off successfully killing other human beings. Which are made other in war. The nature of this war has evolved. Drones have become more and more prevalent. Consumer level, cheap drones. Can you speak to that? Have you seen the use of FPE drones?
Craig Jones
(00:30:33)
Yeah, so basically like a three to $500 drone. I think it’s like carbon fiber, 3D printed and they can attach different forms of weaponry to it, whether it’s just dropping a frag. They could drop a mine out of it. I know they were talking about how they had a liquid that could basically burn through a lot of cars and tanks so the person inside basically melt alive. Which sounds horrible. But what’s mind-blowing to me is you could have a $3 million Russian tank that could be destroyed by a $300 drone.

(00:31:05)
Which is just crazy how fast the war changes. I think they’re the world leaders in budget drone technology. They didn’t obviously don’t have the budget for these crazy, elaborate massive drones. I did see some higher budget, bigger drones over there, but for the most part, those FPV drones is really how most of the battles are fought. You’re seeing the cameras on them. You can see basically kamikaze drone will chase someone down and they have that footage.

(00:31:35)
That’s what the police chief said to me when he gifted me one of the drones they used. He basically said, he’s like, “Artillery is scary, but a drone will follow you into a building.” It’s a haunting thing to think about. They’ll see the drone, they’ll hear the drone, they might try to shoot it down or they might try to run. But if it’s a kamikaze one, those guys are pretty good at flying them. It’s going to chase the soldiers down. A lot of soldiers like pretending to be dead. It’s really crazy, some of the footage out there with those FBV drones.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:07)
It’s a terrifying tool of war and tool of psychological war and used by both sides increasingly.
Craig Jones
(00:32:14)
Yeah, both sides use it. I remember I was with Roman in Morshyn and he had his break period. He was allowed to leave the country because he basically volunteered to join the army. Ukrainian men can’t really leave Ukraine right now. But Roman, I was in Morshyn and this was a surreal experience for him. We went to the beach and there was some tourists there flying a drone, and you just saw his instinctual reaction to that drone sound in the sky, flashback to that.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:43)
Currently, they’re all, as far as I know, all human controlled, so FPV. But to me, increasingly terrifying notion is of them becoming autonomous. It’s the best way to defend against the drone that’s FPV controlled is for AI to be controlling that drone. Just have swarms of drones that are $500 controlled by AI systems. That’s a terrifying possibility that the future of warfare is essentially swarms of drones on both sides. Then maybe swarms of drones, say between US and China over Taiwan.
Craig Jones
(00:33:18)
That would be wild. They do those crazy drone light shows where they do those performances with the lights and stuff. They’re already pretty sophisticated with pre-programming.
Lex Fridman
(00:33:26)
Those are pre-programmed. The low level control, flight control of those is done autonomously. But there’s a interface for doing the choreography that’s hard coded in. But adding increasing levels of intelligence to the drone where you can detect another drone, follow it and defend yourself. In terms of the military on both sides as the Ukraine war, that’s the technology, that’s like the most wanted technology is drone defense. How are you defending as drones on both sides? Anybody that comes up with an autonomous drone technology is going to help whichever side uses that technology to gain a mill-
Lex Fridman
(00:34:00)
… is going to help whichever side uses that technology to gain a military advantage. And so, there’s a huge incentive to build that technology but then, of course, once both sides started using that technology, then there’s swarms of autonomous drones who don’t give a shit about humans, just killing everything in sight on both sides. And that’s terrifying because there’s civilian deaths that are possible that are terrifying, especially when you look 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now.
Craig Jones
(00:34:30)
Yes, it’s surreal. When we went to coastline, it was the entire sky is just full of drones. At any given time, they could decide to come and attack. So, they could just sit there forever waiting, waiting for you to come out of that building. They’ll wait a long time when someone goes and hides inside. Or potentially, if it’s an open window, fly straight through the open window to get people.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:52)
Yeah. So, you’re not even safe indoors.
Craig Jones
(00:34:54)
Yeah, there’s nowhere to hide and they can wait for a very, very long time.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:58)
And as far as I know, even politicians, you’re in danger everywhere in Ukraine. So, if you want to do a public speaking thing and doing it outside, you’re in danger because it’s very difficult to detect those drones, it could be anywhere. It’s a terrifying life where you don’t know if you’re safe at any moment anywhere in Ukraine.
Craig Jones
(00:35:19)
Well, sure. It’s crazy with what happened to Trump, I thought maybe the next attack on a public figure might come in the form of drone technology, something along those lines. I wonder how they protect against that here.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:33)
If that happens, just imagine the insanity that would ensue. Because we understand the idea of a gunman with a rifle shooting somebody but, just a drone, just imagine the conspiracy theories. Who controlled that drone?
Craig Jones
(00:35:48)
Where’d it come from? Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:49)
And now, everybody, that will just cause chaos.
Craig Jones
(00:35:53)
And the range is ever-increasing. One of the battalions in Ukraine, because those FPV drones have short range, pretty short range, but they were able to attach it to one of the larger drones with a signal booster so they could potentially go up to 30, 40 kilometers into the distance. So, the drone that hits you could be flown by someone so far away from you. And if they did that domestically, that would be very frightening to think of the sphere of where it could have come from.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:22)
When you’ve talked to the soldiers there, did they have a hope or a vision how the war will end?
Craig Jones
(00:36:28)
No, really. I guess it just seems to everyone that there’s going to be no middle ground.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:36)
When I was there, there’s a optimism that they would be victorious definitively. And so, is there still that optimism and, also, are they ready for prolonged war?
Craig Jones
(00:36:52)
I think it would be a soldier by soldier basis. I know each of them had a different perspective. I remember I would ask them about, in terms of US politics and their fears, because the first trip I went there, US hadn’t agreed to resupply weapons. So, it was a very different feeling in the air there of concern over what was going to happen but they still remained quite optimistic that, no matter who got in, they felt would do the right thing. But in terms of prolonged war, most people think it’s going to go for a very long time. The children’s hospital that just was bombed in Kyiv, anytime there’s a moment like that, that reignites everything and I think it happens on both sides.

(00:37:35)
So, I know that there was an attack in Crimea, there was an attack on a beach, I guess, and I don’t know if that attack on the hospital was retribution for that but that’s the energy that is felt. They might have battle fatigue but, when something happens to civilians, especially kids, on your side, reinvigorates the energy to fight for as long as necessary. And in terms of the case by case basis, one of my friends, Dmitri, over there who trains jiu-jitsu in the gym, he was very passionate about it just because of the history. He brought out documents of his grandfather being executed by the USSR. So, I know that when the war started, basically, he took a bicycle helmet and his AK-47 and went out into the streets and he’s like, “I’d rather be dead than live under Russian rule again.” So, very case by case basis, personal history for them, I think.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:35)
Did they comment on US politics whether they hoped for Trump or for, in that situation, Biden now Harris to win the presidential election?
Craig Jones
(00:38:45)
I think most of the guys try to keep it pretty positive. You know what I mean? Some people did think that maybe, if Trump was elected, he wouldn’t continue to fund it but they really try to stay optimistic. Most of the people I spoke to really try to remain optimistic that they would be protected if it comes down to it. But obviously, there was a nine-month period where they weren’t refunded. So, as that stretched … Obviously, they’re refunded now but it takes a lot of time to get that equipment back to the points at which they need it. So, if ammunition had ran out, Patriot defense system had ran out, really, really scary prospect there. I don’t know, I guess no one knows what’s going to happen there.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:29)
Did you lie to people and say you were close to the president so they can be nice to you so they can convince you to continue the funding?
Craig Jones
(00:39:35)
I’m an Australian diplomat. Other than that-
Lex Fridman
(00:39:38)
Diplomat. That could be a nice way in.

Bali

Craig Jones
(00:39:39)
Yeah, that would’ve been a nice way to the top. Luckily, for me, most of the places I travel to, jiu-jitsu gives me access to so many different individuals, it’s super bizarre. Oligarchs, royalty, I guess, tech wizards, it’s a strange group of people, a code around the world of just I get strange access just for being good at wrestling dudes.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:05)
Yeah, martial arts, there’s a code and there’s a respect, a mutual respect. Even if you don’t know anything about the other person, if you’ve both have done martial arts, there’s similar things with judo, with jiu-jitsu, with grappling, all of that. I don’t know what that is.
Craig Jones
(00:40:20)
Yeah, it’s like an inner circle. Because this film project we’re working on, it’s focused on that is, because of the history I have in jiu-jitsu and traveling and doing seminars and just getting access to strange experiences from the local, strange in a positive way, and participating in those experiences, that’s what I wanted to focus this travel show on was the community of jiu-jitsu. People around the world really has no ethnic background, religious background, even level of wealth, as cheesy as it sounds, it’s a good equalizer on the mats and that community, camaraderie knows no limits there.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:58)
Including mats, the shadiest mats in some small town in the middle of nowhere?
Craig Jones
(00:41:04)
100%. Even Sheikh Tahnoun who started ADCC, I know, when he went to the US and he studied there, he would train at a very simple gym, he wouldn’t declare who he was. I watched a documentary produced about the story of Sheikh Tahnoun and how he studied in America, basically, in anonymity. The people that his gym didn’t know who he was in his country and he trained there, he trained with him for years, cleaned the mats like anyone else. And then they didn’t realize who he was until he said, “Hey, I want to invite you to my country,” but he actually meant, basically as royalty, come and then they realized who this guy was and the significance of him.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:46)
That’s gangster, that’s great. One of the things I love about no-Gi jiu-jitsu is you don’t see rank. So, on a small scale, there’s no hierarchy that emerges when you have the different color belts, everybody’s the same. It’s nice.
Craig Jones
(00:41:59)
Yeah, you get to see the skill.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:01)
The skill speaks but there’s just a mutual respect and whatever. You can quickly find out who … I actually wonder if I would be able to figure out the rank of a person. Can you usually figure out how long a person has been doing jiu-jitsu?
Craig Jones
(00:42:14)
I like to think, with some of the aggressive clothing choices I’ve made and sold in the sport, that that should be a beacon, that that person is a blue belt. Has, hopefully, some talent because they’re fearlessly provoking the other party there.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:28)
Oh, it’s like in the jungle, whenever there’s an insect that’s red that is really flamboyant looking, that means they’re dangerous.
Craig Jones
(00:42:37)
It’s a target, yeah, though being flamboyant. If you come on the mats with something pink, pinky or something, people are circling in fast especially in Eastern Europe.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:47)
Okay. So, yeah, you mentioned the project, can you talk about that? I saw there’s a preview that you showed, Craig Jones Gone Walkabout.
Craig Jones
(00:42:56)
Gone Walkabout, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:42:58)
So, you showed a preview in Indonesia where you’re both celebrating and maybe poking a bit of fun at Hicks and Gracie.
Craig Jones
(00:43:07)
Hicks and Gracie, yeah. So, I like to match looks from time to time-
Lex Fridman
(00:43:07)
Thank you, thank you.
Craig Jones
(00:43:12)
… in an homage.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:13)
You look sexy.
Craig Jones
(00:43:14)
It’s comfortable, actually, I enjoy it.
Lex Fridman
(00:43:16)
Yeah. You should keep it.
Craig Jones
(00:43:18)
I’ll only we wear this now. I’ll wear this for the Gabi match. Yeah, we’re trying to do a documentary series because the way I see it is I want to grow the sport of jiu-jitsu. And this sounds funny to say now because I’m doing a tournament but everyone tries to do it through competition. But as we know, most jiu-jitsu gyms you visit, a very small percentage of people compete, let alone compete regularly. You’ll go to gyms that could be brown or black belts that don’t know many of the big name competitors. So, my thoughts were we’re never going to grow this sport by competition, we’re going to grow it by appealing to the large majority of people that do it which are just people that enjoy it for the benefits it provides to them whether health or psychological.

(00:44:04)
And obviously, many people are inspired by Anthony Bourdain, basically it’s looking at what he did with food by showing the very interesting characters in the food culture, the food industries, especially with street food, and building around that. So, I’m trying to look at jiu-jitsu like a giant cult. Scientology isn’t starting with Planet Xenu, it’s starting with John Travolta and Tom Cruise. So, if we can create a documentary travel series highlighting the diverse, interesting people that participate in the sport, in that sense, I hope it can grow but also doing some charity work along the way. We’ll release the Indonesia Bali episode pretty soon but, as an Australian, I do do a lot of damage culturally around the world so I’d like to do some good as well.

(00:44:50)
We’ve done a lot of damage to Bali, so give back to local communities. We have an Australian there that runs an academy, Akademi Kristus, he’s one of the guys we’re donating a portion of the ticket sales to from our event but he basically went straight into a Balinese slum, started teaching jiu-jitsu on a mat under a tree and then slowly, through donations, has built a gym. And his real focus is not just taking money from people and gifting it to them to help the community but to teach them skills. So, he’ll take a lot of the disadvantaged kids and he’ll teach them things like photo editing so they can get that work from the internet, really. Incredible guy.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:31)
It’s good to know that you see yourself as the John Travolta of jiu-jitsu.
Craig Jones
(00:45:34)
Many masseuses have accused me of the same thing, unfortunately. All lies.
Lex Fridman
(00:45:39)
Yeah, there’s a lot of similarities between the two of you. So, you mentioned Anthony Bourdain. What do you like about the guy? What do you find inspiring and instructive about the way he was able to, as you said, scratch beneath the surface of a place?
Craig Jones
(00:45:56)
I just felt like he was very authentic, wasn’t afraid. This is something I had trouble with when we first started doing the travel show, it’s easy to do a travel show if you only say positive things about a place. But he would find a very creative way to show what’s good and bad, a very honest reflection of the place so that’s something I would strive to do. However, in some places, it’s very difficult. You know what I mean? For example, Kazakhstan, if I were to say something negative about Kazakhstan, they’d be like, “Who’s this foreign idiot talking about our culture?” And I think that was what was incredible about Bourdain is he could talk about both the good and bad of places and he would do it in such a way that it was tasteful and was respected by the locals.
Lex Fridman
(00:46:38)
Yeah, that’s actually a skill that you’re incredibly good at. You make fun of a lot of people but there’s something … Maybe there’s an underlying respect, maybe it’s the accent, maybe … I don’t know what it is. There’s a love underneath your trolling.
Craig Jones
(00:46:52)
I like to think so. Hopefully, yeah. Gabi Garcia, there’s a deep passionate love underneath the trolling.

CJI

Lex Fridman
(00:47:00)
Yeah. Speaking of which, let’s talk about CJI. You’re putting on the CJI tournament, it’s in about a week, same weekend as ADCC, $3 million budget, two divisions, two super fights, winner of each division gets $1 million, everyone gets $10,000. How do you even say that? Plus one?
Craig Jones
(00:47:24)
10,000 plus one, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:25)
Plus one. Just to compete. So, it’s August 16th and 17th, everybody should get tickets. Same weekend as ADCC’s which is August 17th. Okay. So, what’s the mission of what you’re doing there?
Craig Jones
(00:47:39)
The mission has always been, first and foremost, increased athlete pay. So, ADCC has invested a ton into the sport. Obviously, I mentioned Sheikh Tahnoun, Sheikh Tahnoun has done so much for the sport of grappling, particularly no-Gi grappling. So, he’s growing it, he has funded this for a very, very long time but we’ve hit a point since 2017 where the audience, the crowd watching live and at home behind a paywall has grown considerably. We had things like Metamoris, we had the Eddie Bravo Invitational, Polaris, all these professional events that have also contributed to growing the sport. And obviously, people like Gordon Ryan have definitely increased the popularity of the sport but the payment for ADCC has never gone up despite, again, the growth of it.

(00:48:34)
So, what I did, a lot of fans were asking me earlier in the year, they said, “Craig, are you going to do ADCC?” and I said, “That is a big commitment of time, energy, expenses on steroids to get my body ready for a tournament that I’ll probably lose.” And if I lose on day one, I make $0. If I lose in the final, which I have done a couple times, I only get $6,000. I think third place is 3,000, fourth place is 1,000. So, if you make day two, you get paid. But for me personally, seeing ADCC in 2022, you’re looking out to a sold out crowd of 10,000 people. It’s on FloGrappling which you know paid quite a bit of money for the streaming rights, I can’t comment on what that number would be, and then you go home, despite having put in all that effort, with only 6,000 and they basically … The argument is you’re paid in exposure. But again, there’s many ways to expose yourself. You know what I mean? That’s just one of the platforms to do so. My problem was that they announced that they were going to go from Thomas & Mack to T-Mobile which is a jump in quality of stadium but not a significant jump in seating. So, we’ve gone from 11,000 seat arena to I think a 15, 16,000 seat arena. And I knew that FloGrappling would’ve had to pay more money because now the sport’s growing so much and I can personally track the growth of the sport through selling instructional DVDs, instructional online products. Because that keeps growing and we’re targeting those white and blue belts vulnerable to internet marketing and that audience continues to grow and those will be the people that largely watch ADCC, events like this.

(00:50:19)
So, I simply said, in response to a lot of fans asking me, “Are you going to do ADCC?” and I just simply made a video saying, “No, probably not, probably not. It’d be nice to make some more money.” And then I listed a bunch of sports, such as cockbar, that you get paid more to win cockbar. In the villages of Kazakhstan, the payment structures higher. And I received a very aggressive response not from any of Sheikh Tahnoun’s people but from, basically, who runs the event today. One of those guys amongst giving me death threats said, “Hey, T-Mobile costs $2 million, you don’t know what you’re talking about in terms of business and production.” And he’s probably right but, to me, $2 million is a waste of money for a jiu-jitsu event, I don’t think we’re at that level yet. That’s where the UFC hosts events. $2 million, that’s an expensive, expensive venue.

(00:51:10)
So, we argued a bit on the internet and he said, “Hey, if you don’t like it, why don’t you go get $2 million and put on your own tournament?” And I said, “I might just do that.” And one of my anonymous friends kindly donated a $3 million budget and I actually messaged him before the show to say, “Hey, we won’t reveal your identity,” because, obviously, anyone that has money is going to get asked for more money or ask for money from others. So, he wants to remain anonymous but he basically just said to enjoy the trolling aspect of it and also contribute to the sport of jiu-jitsu.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:46)
Well, that’s good to know that the anonymous funder appreciates you for who you are, Craig Jones.
Craig Jones
(00:51:52)
He sees my true identity and he wants to provoke … It’s trolling for a good cause. But basically we were able to find Thomas & Mack Event Center, which was their original venue, and it just happened to be available that same weekend which we’re very happy about. And so, we booked that out, we decided to … ADCC pays 10,000 to the winner, we were like, “You know what? We’ll pay $10,000 plus one to show up.” So, to show up in our event, you’re going to get paid more than to win ADCC. And not only that, we’re going to broadcast it for free. So, on Meta, X and YouTube, you’ll be able to watch this event for free.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:31)
That’s amazing.
Craig Jones
(00:52:32)
It’s very considerate to the FloGrappling streaming platform, I believe, to have also a free alternative on the same weekend. And the brilliance of this whole thing is I was largely criticized for not knowing anything about business but the people criticizing me decided to host a tournament, a 15,000 seat arena, they decided to take sponsors, they decided to use a streaming platform which sells subscriptions based on the athletes that would enter it but not give any of the talent, the athletes, a contract which gave me this beautiful position to basically say, “Hey, what do you prefer? The prestige of an ADCC gold medal or money?” And that’s the feud so far and we put that out into the world.

(00:53:18)
I didn’t chase too many athletes down. Obviously, a lot of these guys really need money. So, you throw a million dollars out there, people are jumping on board. So, initially we started getting, we got two local guys here in Austin, the Tackett brothers, they jumped in first and they’re great kids. They really legitimize the whole thing because, if we’d pick certain athletes, just B team guys straight away, it’s already looking a bit dodgy but we’ve got some legitimate athletes. Especially the under 80 kilo divisions, full of, minus two or three guys, that’s the best people in the world in that weight division. And as we started to grow our roster here, what happened, I’m going to say this, allegedly, for legal reasons, is that the first move ADCC did was they matched the female pay to the men’s pay.

(00:54:07)
So, the women always traditionally got paid less, I think $6,000 for first place. As soon as we had Ffion Davies, the reigning champion, come across to do a super fight with us, bang, ADCC raised the prize money of the women’s division to equal the men’s. So, me, being a feminist activist throughout many of my years on this earth, immediately got women’s pay raised in the sport of jiu-jitsu, equalize basically, which went counter to everything the promoter had said because he said it was out of his control. To raise money, he said only the ADCC, I guess coming directly from the Sheikh or the Sheikh’s guys, could raise the prize money, he got it raised.

(00:54:46)
And then what happened was, once we started getting some of these big names here, so some of the best guys from ADCC would be in this division. We’ve got a bunch of champions or medalists or, really, the top betting favorites for their divisions there, they started, and again, I can’t emphasize this enough, allegedly, paying show money which has never historically been done before to keep athletes in their show.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:10)
So, you’re saying, allegedly, there were some under the table payments by ADCC? Do you have secret documents proving this?
Craig Jones
(00:55:18)
I do have the documents.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:18)
Okay.
Craig Jones
(00:55:19)
Now, some of the guys obviously told me, you know how it is, you slap million dollars on the table, it looks great. That was me proving I had the money, which wasn’t even my money to begin with, but it was basically me saying, “Hey, the money’s real”. I don’t know why but, strangely, a lot of people don’t believe me when I’m telling the truth.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:33)
I don’t know why they wouldn’t.
Craig Jones
(00:55:34)
But what logically happens is they’re like, “Oh, look how much money he has. Give us more show money,” so they’re negotiating with me. There was one particular Brazilian businessman manager, I won’t say his name, but he looks like the thing from Fantastic Four and he was a manager for some of these athletes and he would take a massive 20% cut. So, what he, and I got to pay respect to this because it actually caused trauma to the other team as well, but I would invite an athlete to CJI, he would go to the other organization and he would say to them, “Hey, what sort of deal could you give me to keep this guy? You want to keep him in your event?” And he would use CJI to leverage more show money for his guys of which he gets to grease the wheels with 20% for himself.

(00:56:27)
However, at CJI, everyone gets $10,001 across the board and a million dollars prize money so there’s no room for, really, negotiation for the tournament aspect of us. So, he has a vested interest in putting his guys in ADCC because he can negotiate show money and he can basically take 20% of that for himself. But really, for the sport of grappling, this is incredible across the board because, by us stealing or at least borrowing a bunch of athletes from ADCC, ADCC had to fill their divisions. So, they filled their divisions with many other competitors that wouldn’t have ordinarily had the chance to do ADCC. And really, although we’ve scheduled it the same weekend, ours is actually Friday, Saturday, ADCC being Saturday, Sunday, our day starts pretty late. So, we start 5:00 PM Saturday.

(00:57:18)
So, really, ultimately it was a big marketing ploy to go head-to-head pretending like we’re making the fans choose but the fans will be able to watch both events. You’ll be able to go all day Friday for us. You’ll sadly miss the ADCC Hall of Fame ceremony where you’ll see many of great speakers, public speakers, philosophers tell their stories about hardship just like at the end of any jiu-jitsu seminar or beginning if you’re blessed like that. You might have a 45-minute monologue about how they’re more knowledgeable than doctors, lawyers, classic black belt technique. But you will miss that, unfortunately.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:53)
With great metaphors about lions and-
Craig Jones
(00:57:55)
About lions, yes. About being a humble lion most importantly.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:59)
Humility is important.

Gabi Garcia

Craig Jones
(00:58:00)
But you can watch all that Friday, you could watch most of ADCC Saturday. And then Saturday night, in Las Vegas, I’ll be doing what many men have done before and that is wrestling a giant woman.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:16)
Can you speak to that? How are you preparing for this moment of violence on a Saturday night with Gabi Garcia?
Craig Jones
(00:58:24)
So, Gabi Garcia is the legend of women’s grappling. I think she’s won more than anyone else. So, between me and her, we would at least have 15 to 20 world championships, I’d imagine. She’s huge, I say that in an endearing way. She might be 6″4′, 6″3′ and her weight varies depending on what time of the day it is between 220 and 275 pounds but she’s going to be coming in quite big and strong. Me, I am about 179 pounds right now and at 5″11′. So, I’ve got a significant size disadvantage, she has the credentials but we’re going to scrap it out, scrap it out and see who’s best, the greatest woman’s competitor of all time or a guy that’s never won anything.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:17)
Has it added some complexity to the picture that there’s some sexual tension in the room whenever the two of you are together?
Craig Jones
(00:59:23)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:24)
Or maybe I’m being romantic but it seems like you’ve slowly started to fall in love with each other.
Craig Jones
(00:59:29)
It’s been three years of seduction, it’s been a long time.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:33)
It’s inspiring for many young men that follow you and look up to you. Just the romantic journey that you’ve been on, it’s truly inspiring.
Craig Jones
(00:59:43)
Yeah, I would say it’s a motivational message to the guy that keeps sending DMs to a girl on Instagram for years that maybe, after three years, it could also happen for you too. No matter her height and weight, I think persistence is the key here.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:01)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:00:03)
And we do have a wager on the line.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:05)
What’s the wager?
Craig Jones
(01:00:06)
This might be the first wager of its kind, I would hope, in combat sports history. If she wins, I’ll personally give her a million dollars. If I can footlock her, we’re going to collaborate together in an OnlyFans sex tape.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:24)
Did she agree to this?
Craig Jones
(01:00:26)
She shook on it.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:29)
Great. You do have an OnlyFans channel, is that still up?
Craig Jones
(01:00:33)
After August 17th, it’s going to be fire.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:36)
It’s going to be on fire.
Craig Jones
(01:00:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:37)
Wow.
Craig Jones
(01:00:38)
I think that and, honestly, when we talk about secret investor, I think that could fund the entire tournament. It’d be that success.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:43)
That’ll be the only paywalled thing about this tournament is your OnlyFans.
Craig Jones
(01:00:47)
Yeah, it’s going to be a spiritual experience for me.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:51)
Yeah, wow. Okay, I’m fully distracted now. Can you talk about the rule set?

The Alley

Craig Jones
(01:00:59)
So, we’re using the angled walls inspired by karate combat. Karate combat did those angled walls.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:07)
Those are awesome. You’re calling it the alley. That’s really, really interesting. So, it’s like in a pit, I guess, and the angled walls are-
Craig Jones
(01:01:14)
Yeah. So, karate combat have a square pit, we have a rectangular alley. We like the visual of just you’re in the alley with someone you know. We both know what goes on in an alley, I know a couple of things that could go on back there.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:27)
What’s second thing? Nevermind, I got it.
Craig Jones
(01:01:30)
But why this is brilliant, why the angled walls are brilliant for grappling is because any grappling tournament, this goes without question, this goes for IBJJF, ADCC, the reset is one of the most annoying aspects of the sport and one of the aspects of the sport that some of the sneakier guys take advantage of. There’s guys out there that are brilliant at playing the edge open, the ref will reset them or they’ll shoot a takedown near the edge and you might watch … And, again, I’m picking on ADCC here. But you might watch an ADCC match where 90 seconds of a 10-minute match is the referee grabbing them, bringing them back to the center or trying to recreate something of a position that landed outside. Not only is that boring to me and it could be bias. Again, it’s happened to me in events where the ref’s gone, “Stop,” I’ve stopped, he’s moved a little bit more and then there’s an adjustment in the reset. It’s cheating to a certain extent but it’s just more of an annoyance. They bring it back, they reset it to the best of their ability in the center.

(01:02:35)
The angled wall mitigates that and it mitigates it in such a way that it’s a disadvantage to be pushed up against the angled wall. You’re very easily taken down against the angled wall. You could use a cage like the UFC does or any MMA organization, however, cage wrestling can be slow. You’re obviously at the vertical and it can stagnate there, guys are very good at using split squats to really defend that position. And for me, personally, I don’t love the cage for grappling, I’d like to differentiate it for grappling. What holds people back from using the alley or a pit-like structure is the viewing, the viewing angle. Because obviously, if you are one of the VIPs or you pay for an expensive seat, that angled wall is above you. A cage, you can see into, an elevated platform stage you can see clearly into because it’s basically flat but the athletes could fall off and injure themselves.

(01:03:32)
So, if something happens, UFC fire passes the elevated flat stage. It’s scary to be near the edge, you go off, you’re going to land on concrete. You might want to do that to the other guy if you, that way, inclined. But the alley, the angled wall solves all those problems, very minimal referee interference. Again, the only thing that holds people back is the expense of building it. But again, when you’re spending someone else’s money, you will spare no expense in production. So, we’ve spent a lot of money on the alley and we’ve really gone out of our way to create an experience that, around the alley, we’ve elevated everything so that the people watching will be able to see down into it. Because your instinctual thought is, “Oh, it sounds great but how am I going to see in it unless I’m far up?” You’d need a coliseum-like structure which is basically what we’ve attempted to create so that you get both a perfect place to wrestle, to grapple in as well as a perfect viewing angle for the fans.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:32)
Well, I think it’s an amazing idea. What about the jiu-jitsu on a slant? You’ve triangled somebody on a slant.
Craig Jones
(01:04:41)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:41)
Is there some interesting aspects about the actual detailed techniques of how to be effective using a slant?
Craig Jones
(01:04:46)
I’ll be honest, I competed for karate combat twice, never once did I ever step foot into the pit. Just, again, like you said before the podcast, if there’s a right way of doing things, I’m probably doing it the opposite.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:59)
The wrong way. I actually no idea why people take advice from you but they do.
Craig Jones
(01:05:05)
I’m mostly an inspirational speaker at this point, I think.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:07)
Yeah. You and Tony Robbins are like this.
Craig Jones
(01:05:10)
Same size at least. But in terms of the training for, obviously, the athletes, it’s very difficult. Some of these guys have gone out there and built their own angled walls.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:18)
Yeah, I saw that. There’s a cool video of that.
Craig Jones
(01:05:20)
They’re getting into that. That’s a smart thing to do. There’s a million dollars on the line, you should probably invest in that. But I also like a new surface that no one’s competed on, no one’s gamed it yet, we’re going to see it unfold. UFC, when people started figuring out how to use the cage, we’re going to see this unfold in front of our very eyes how the strategies work for this. The other thing we’ve done too is we’re doing rounds. So, qualifying rounds would be three five-minute rounds, the final would be five fives. Why I want to do that is to incentivize action. We’re going to incentivize action through penalizing people but we really want … I love a short burst, a break and the guys can go hard again. I don’t like a jiu-jitsu match where the guy takes the back early and he’s like, “Oh, if I keep this position, I’ve won,” and that’s something that people that don’t compete don’t realize.

(01:06:15)
If you get a good position early, you get up on the points, you just sit there and go, “Oh, let’s ride this to the end.” That’s why I want rounds so that you might take the guy’s back, you’re really incentivize to get that finish. And the way we’re trying to grow the sport is to steal the MMA scoring structure which a lot of people criticize because they think it’s overly complicated, they don’t understand it. But to the mass audience, they understand a 10-point must understand a decision in that sense, they understand it being scored round by round. So, we’re trying to appeal to a broader audience here but we think, based on the structure, based on how hard we’ll call stalling penalties, based on you wanting to finish your opponent quick to have a better chance at a million dollars. Because it’s 10,001 to show up and a million to win, if you aren’t first, you lost, there’s no reward for second place. So, I’m punishing the one position I’ve only ever been able to achieve in tournaments.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:10)
Are you worried that, because of how much money is on the line, people will play careful?
Craig Jones
(01:07:19)
A very generous friend of mine has provided this money. I’m like, “Unless you guys go out there and try to kill each other and put it all on the line, I just won’t do it again. I’m giving you guys a massive platform”. We’ve turned down offers from streaming platforms that wanted to buy the rights to this event because the marketing’s gone very well. We’re turning down money to grow the sport. The ADCC promoter said he wanted to grow the sport so what he did is he put it behind a paywall and he used the money from the paywall to buy more expensive arena. I don’t think that’s how you grow the sport, I think you grow the sport like comedians do these days. Guys like Mark Normand will release a special for free, Andrew Schulz did it first, released a special for free-
Craig Jones
(01:08:00)
Norman will release a special for free. Andrew Schulz did it first, released a special for free and it grew his audience massively. I think that’s what jiu-jitsu needs. We need an exciting show that’s not behind a paywall that’ll grow the sport, grow the audience, and really then, ultimately, we can get to a level where it could be behind a paywall. But I just don’t think we’re there, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:23)
Yeah, I think million dollars is a lot of money, but the opportunity here, because it’s open and freely accessible by everyone is to put on a show.
Craig Jones
(01:08:31)
And then, you get a million every year. This is a crazy, exciting event. The funding is going to be so easy year after year. And the other aspect we’re doing to it is, unfortunately, I’m not going to make any money off this thing. It’s a nonprofit and the money from charity…
Lex Fridman
(01:08:47)
Except the OnlyFans, but whatever.
Craig Jones
(01:08:49)
Yeah, that’s the real cash cow. But that’s the real work too.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:52)
Yeah. And that’s not for charity, that’s for your personal bank account, the OnlyFans. Are you also…
Craig Jones
(01:08:58)
So, that’ll be for the follow-up therapy. But that’ll be expensive gig for whoever takes that on board.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:05)
Love hurts.
Craig Jones
(01:09:07)
That physically will, yeah. Ticket proceeds to charity. So, obviously, we’ve got the $3 million budget, we’ve got production expenses, we’ve got the team of staff to hire. But if we could sell this thing out, we could potentially donate a ton of money to charity. One of those charities is Tap Cancer Out.

(01:09:25)
And what’s great about this is Rich Byrne is a black belt from New York, who’s in the banking world. He used to run an event called KASAI Grappling. He went through cancer. He basically had a very aggressive cancer. He had it treated. And now, he basically has said to us that whatever we donate from the profits of the event, he’s going to match dollar for dollar.

(01:09:49)
And we’ve also had another guy who wants to remain anonymous, agree to match dollar for dollar as well. So, the more ticket sales revenue we can create here, the more we can actually give back to charity. So, it’s really all round. It’s going to be a great event.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:04)
Yeah, Tap Cancer Out is great. And all the charities that the athletes have been selecting are great. What’s been the hardest? You are wearing a suit, so you figured out how to do that, but…
Craig Jones
(01:10:14)
The tie was difficult for sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:15)
Tie was difficult, but you figured it out and congratulations on that. But you’ve never run a tournament? No.
Craig Jones
(01:10:24)
I’ve never wrestled a big woman either. Well, I have, but not in this form.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:30)
Not in a competitive environment for OnlyFans. What’s been the hardest aspects of actually bringing this to life?
Craig Jones
(01:10:38)
The first one was people believing it was real.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:40)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:10:40)
That was quite difficult. And then, communicating with the athletes. That’s basically my responsibility is securing these guys, getting these guys to commit to things. It’s very difficult. There’s a reason a few athletes in every sport really stand out and it’s kind of professionalism and kind of the way they market themselves. And I think those two things do go hand in hand.

(01:11:04)
So, we’re in a sport… Isn’t that funny? Where a lot of these guys do have managers. I think in MMA things would be a lot easier for the promoter because you’re not talking directly to the athlete. You’re talking to a guy who might, who’s obviously taking a cut, but like, peace, there’s a middleman.

(01:11:20)
So, in a situation where you’re talking directly to the athlete, can be very difficult, can be very annoying, can be very hard to reach these guys. They can be very non-committal. That for me has been one of the biggest challenges. The guys that I speak to that are like, “I’m in.” And then, they’re like, “I’m out. I’m in,” like navigating this area.

(01:11:37)
One other aspect is because we did this basically from idea to event will be less than three months, three and a half months. So, it’s like we’re having to do so much in such a short period of time. Little things like, of the show and money we’ve given them. They’re expected to basically secure their own flight and hotel to the event with cutting down on staff because that would be one of the… If I had to coordinate, getting these guys flights, I would just jump off a building. It’s hard enough to get them to agree to the event, let alone coordinate, “Hey, what date do you want to come in?” It’s like herding cats.

(01:12:13)
So, really just the interpersonal stuff’s been difficult. Obviously, going up against ADCC, the legacy event has been pretty difficult as well. Well-established, huge history. They’ve been selling tickets for two years. Everyone’s known it’s been coming for two years. That thing was largely sold out before we even announced the event. So, we’re going head-to-head with this event. So, from a ticket sales perspective, very difficult.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:38)
What’s been Reddit question? What’s been the most surprising people who turned down on your invite?
Craig Jones
(01:12:44)
Oh, I mean, we can name names. I mean, obviously, Conan, he was a semi in, semi out. His suggestion was actually to do a second and third place prize rather than a million. And I’m like, “No, we want all or nothing. It’s all or nothing here.” That’s a better spectacle, better entertainment, probably more injuries, but it’s all or nothing. Mica Galvão, the one that got away.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:12)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:13:12)
That’s sad. But we got the Ruotolos. The Ruotolos props to these kids because Kade’s the reigning champion. These are two of the best guys in the sport. Allegedly, were offered pretty significant show money to stay. But they hit me up and they said, “Hey, promise us one thing. We’re on opposite sides of the brackets and we’ll fight to the death in the final for the million.” And we know… Everyone knows that. Well, we’ve seen them compete against each other multiple times.

(01:13:42)
So, that was not a surprise because I know they’re good kids. But to basically turn down allegedly show money to do this event, to support the event, to me is incredible. Mica Galvão, things would be more complicated there. Obviously, Mica officially joined ADCC before he secured the Ruotolos. Kade beat him in the final. Mica’s personally motivated to face off against Kade, so he didn’t know Kade was in our event before he agreed to ADCC.

(01:14:10)
There’s more to that story too, in terms of Mica doing ADCC because a bunch of the kids in his team, I think they’re being flown out to do the ADCC kids event. So, there’s his two teammates, well, at least one of his teammates will be doing the ADCC 66 kilo division. So, his dad, his coach, doesn’t really want to split time between two events. That’s a difficulty for athletes there. But obviously, disappointing. We couldn’t secure Mica.

(01:14:37)
Mica said he was about the legacy, so he wanted to be the youngest guy ever to double Grand Slam, which is basically win all the Gi events and win the ADCC that same year. My thoughts were, if I was in his position, and I never was obviously a prodigy, a talent like that is I thought he had a position to make a statement in the sport to kind of as cheesy it sounds, be on the right side of history, to have turned down a double Grand Slam, to be in an event that supports athlete pay.

(01:15:13)
Again, I don’t overly criticize him. But I think in terms of your legacy and reputation, to be at a point and choose to do that is much more memorable than him getting that double Grand Slam, which I’m sure he will win the ADCC 77 kilo division this year, but it’ll be somewhat tarnished anyway. So, I do feel bad for some of the athletes that win this year and potentially people will be like, “Oh, yeah, but there was half the people weren’t in the division.” I feel bad for those guys.

(01:15:41)
But at the end of the day, most of these guys had an opportunity to be a part of an event that really there’s no downside to. You have a chance to be paid more money than you’ve ever been paid in your life. You are selling tickets that are going to go to charity, and it’s not behind a paywall. So, anyone, anywhere in the world can stream this event, watch it, and there’s no barrier to entry in terms of finances.

Gordon Ryan and Nicholas Meregali

Lex Fridman
(01:16:08)
Was there ever any chance that Gordon Ryan would enter?
Craig Jones
(01:16:15)
I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:16)
Is that something you tried?
Craig Jones
(01:16:17)
Me and Gordon don’t text each other too often. I tag him on Instagram and things, but he doesn’t respond.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:22)
Tell me about your history with Nicholas Meregali.
Craig Jones
(01:16:25)
My history with Nicholas Meregali, actually it dates back to a time where probably he does not even remember back when I used to wear a kimono. So, I went to Abu Dhabi World Pro. I was chasing my gi dreams. I lost in… I can’t even remember. Again, probably the final. You know me, I probably lost in the final against Tommy Langacker in the weight division. This was the last year they did the absolute. I went into the absolute. I made it all the way to the semis. Nicholas Meregali destroyed me in the gi. I did hit a nice little reversal on him though, he passed my guard and I somehow reversed him from side control. That’s the only part of the match I share. After which, he swept me, submitted me.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:06)
You reversed him from side control?
Craig Jones
(01:17:08)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:09)
Okay. So, that could be an instructional.
Craig Jones
(01:17:12)
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:14)
But right place, right time though. All right.
Craig Jones
(01:17:15)
But then, years later I left the team, Meregali replaced me. So, they’ve brought in a more credentialed, handsome, doesn’t speak as well, but they’ve brought him in. He’s my replacement. He’s coming to the team. We faced off at ADCC. I do a heavier division thinking… I looked at the names and I was like, “That looks like an easier division.” And I had two teammates at that time that were in my 88 and I was like, “Those guys will have to face all first round. I’ll have to face one of them second round the way they do the seating and the structure of the bracket.”

(01:17:48)
So, I was like, “I’ll do 99, I’ll leave 88 for the boys.” They both lost my division first round, unfortunately. So, I faced off against Meregali beginning of day two. Lot of pressure because Danaher used to corner me, used to be my coach. Now, he’s cornering the Brazilians who used to complain about as the enemy. And I’m like, “What’s going on over here?” It’s like karate kid stuff. I face off against Meregali. I go hard early because I think he can’t defend leg locks.

(01:18:18)
For the first three minutes, I’m just attacking legs, legs, legs. I ended up sweeping him, getting on top. No points before the points period. But I’m very tired. I’m very tired at this point. Meregali’s big. There’s some guys that get juiced up to hit a certain weight. That’s what I did to enter this division. You can’t keep your gas thing. Meregali’s just a big dude. Who knows if he’s on the juice or not. But he’s just naturally sits around 230 pounds or even 225.

(01:18:46)
When you’re naturally that big, you gas tanks a bit better. Again, if you balloon yourself up on every substance possible, gas tanks surprisingly not too good. So, we have a bit of a close one. Decision goes my way. Ultimately, finals next. I lose that. But that is sort of our competitive history. We were meant to have a match that had been pre-booked immediately after ADCC.

(01:19:08)
So, we agreed to this before ADCC. I was like, “The price is right, I’m in.” So, I signed up for it and I’m thinking ADCC that we’re going to face off soon after. Meregali chose instead to have some vacation time. He wanted to go on vacation. He went to relax, bit of relaxation down in Brazil. So, the match is scrapped.

(01:19:29)
Flo hit me up and they say, “Can you do February?” And this was about the time that Volk fought Islam in Perth. I was like, “No, I can’t do February because I’ll be helping Volkanovski. That’s going to take precedence over this match.” Flo goes, “You know what? We announce it anyway. We’ll sell those tickets anyway. We’ll get the people hyped. And then, we’ll just have you pull out.” And I’m like, “All right, do it.” I’m like, “Do whatever you want. That’s fuck, and probably not a good idea.” But they do that.

(01:19:56)
And then, people keep trying to rebook this match. But now, I barely even train anymore. I’m busy being a promoter, traveling around. So, now instead of facing in competition again, which I would do if the price was right, they’d have to pay me very well. Two of the shows have offered me the match, but the money, terrible.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:16)
What do you think is a number that would convince you?
Craig Jones
(01:20:21)
It would have to be, I would think half a million dollars. Otherwise, I just can’t be bothered.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:26)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:20:26)
You know what I mean? It have to be worth it because to put a price on a guy that takes himself as serious as Meregali. Meregali is a very serious man. He’s talking about authenticity. He’s talking about words he doesn’t even understand. For me, to give him the opportunity to live in a world where he had won the last match against me, it’s hard to put a price on that. When people say it’s not about the money, it’s not about the money. It’s about me waking up every day knowing that he knows he lost to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:54)
So, you think you’ve gotten it in his head?
Craig Jones
(01:20:56)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:57)
How do you think he would do if you were to face him for the said $500,000?
Craig Jones
(01:21:02)
For the $500?
Lex Fridman
(01:21:03)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:21:04)
I think over five minutes I beat anyone in the world. But…
Lex Fridman
(01:21:08)
You still think you got it?
Craig Jones
(01:21:09)
I still think I got it. Gabi about to find out too.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:15)
All right. So, you’re going to make a statement with Gabi that it’ll be a match she remembers.
Craig Jones
(01:21:22)
Yeah, yeah, she for sure. I think the fans will remember it as well. I’m open to it. If we do this match, I’m taking it very serious. But we’d be open to rematches. I’ve always said, I would have an MMA fight with her. I wouldn’t be afraid to hit a big woman.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:40)
So, unlike with Meregali, if you win, you’re not going to ride out off to the sunset with Gabi.
Craig Jones
(01:21:45)
I’m a bit of a romantic. I think she deserves a few finishes, not one, and hit the bed that night.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:51)
So, you think you can actually beat Nicholas Meregali?
Craig Jones
(01:21:54)
I think so, yeah. I mean, you could throw a riddle at him before the match. That had fucking complicate things for him for the next hour.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:00)
Will you and Gordon ever get along again?
Craig Jones
(01:22:04)
I think so. I think we need… The origins of MDMA was couples therapy in the ’70s in Houston, I believe. I believe something like that for us could resolve these underlying issues.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:14)
You’re a man of Reddit because they suggested that you should consider ketamine therapy sessions.
Craig Jones
(01:22:18)
Just imagine a therapist sitting down with him. They’ll be like, “Clear the schedule for the next couple of weeks.”
Lex Fridman
(01:22:25)
With all due respect, Craig, I can’t imagine a therapist sitting down with you. That would be a terrifying.
Craig Jones
(01:22:30)
I do have a therapist. Actually, they prescribed me Vyvanse. He’s quite confident in my…
Lex Fridman
(01:22:35)
This is… You met him in Bali or where did you?
Craig Jones
(01:22:39)
It’s a Russian website.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:41)
It’s the old Sean Connery thing. It’s not a therapist. It’s just something that’s spelled the same.
Craig Jones
(01:22:47)
I think me and Gordon, a debate of some type would be awesome.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:51)
Like a political debate?
Craig Jones
(01:22:52)
Yeah, me representing Kamala Harris, and him representing Donald Trump. That would be…
Lex Fridman
(01:22:57)
So, intellectual sparring.
Craig Jones
(01:22:59)
An intellectual battle, a battle of wits.

Trolling

Lex Fridman
(01:23:02)
Can you just speak to your trolling? Is there underneath it all? Is there just a respect the human beings you go after?
Craig Jones
(01:23:12)
For sure. They have to be worthy of being attacked. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(01:23:15)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:23:15)
Like if someone attack… That’s the thing, it’s like you want a worthy adversary, not in a sense of, I don’t want to battle someone that has better banter than me because I’m going to lose. But I want to battle someone with a profile large enough that it doesn’t look like you’re just…
Lex Fridman
(01:23:32)
Who do you think is the biggest troll or shit talker in martial arts?
Craig Jones
(01:23:36)
Renato Laranja.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:38)
Yeah. Well, you can’t even put him in the… He’s in the other class of human being.
Craig Jones
(01:23:44)
He’s overqualified.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:46)
Chael Sonnen comes to mind.
Craig Jones
(01:23:48)
Chael is good.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:48)
You versus Chael, who’s a better shit talker? If you look the entirety of the career.
Craig Jones
(01:23:53)
Chael is better. I mean, I don’t think if you can shit talk in MMA, because there’s far worse consequences for you. If you’re still willing to do it when really violent things can happen to you. I mean, I’m getting death threats, but he has a certainty of violence against his opponents at MMA.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:12)
So, on Reddit, somebody said you are a coral belt level troll and just happened to be good at jiu-jitsu. So, what did it take for you to rise to the ranks of trolling from white belt to black belt to coral belt? And what’s your journey with talking shit?
Craig Jones
(01:24:29)
That’s a good question. Hey, I think it would’ve happened after I moved to America because in Australia, we just on a daily basis say some of the worst things you could ever imagine.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:39)
Like in private life?
Craig Jones
(01:24:40)
Yeah, we just trying to ruin each other’s day. In a way, that’s so blase, you’re going back and forth. And the guy that actually gets upset and says some real shit, that’s your victory. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(01:24:40)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:24:54)
You’re like, “Oh, we got you, you actually… That actually, bothers you. All right, we’ll take that as a victory.”
Lex Fridman
(01:24:58)
All right. So, when you come to America and everybody takes themselves a little too seriously, those are just a bunch of victims that you can take advantage of.
Craig Jones
(01:25:06)
An Australian entering American banter is like, neo getting these matrix skills. You’re just like, “Whoa, I see everything coming.”
Lex Fridman
(01:25:14)
Do you ever look in the mirror and regret how hard you went in the paint at somebody?
Craig Jones
(01:25:22)
I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:22)
So, you’re proud of yourself?
Craig Jones
(01:25:25)
I think what I offer is some balance. It’s like I’m bringing some justice. Ultimately, it’ll probably come back in spades to me.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:35)
Yeah. I don’t know, as a fan of yours, as a fan of Gordon’s also. But as a fan of yours, I see the love behind it. I don’t know. It seems always just fun. The shit talking seems fun.
Craig Jones
(01:25:46)
I wish you’d buy it back. It doesn’t buy back anymore though.

ADCC

Lex Fridman
(01:25:49)
What’s your relationship like with Mo the organizer of ADCC?
Craig Jones
(01:25:55)
I mean, it’s been a love-hate relationship. I guess that…
Lex Fridman
(01:25:57)
Like with Gabi?
Craig Jones
(01:25:59)
Like any good relationship, if you don’t get blocked to the end of it, will you really in love to begin with?
Lex Fridman
(01:26:04)
Right.
Craig Jones
(01:26:05)
That’s my thoughts anyway. But so, in terms of my friendship with Bob, me and Mo were really close friends for a long time. We’d talk a lot. He was instrumental in us moving Danaher desk squad to Puerto Rico. He lives in Puerto Rico, spends most of his time in Puerto Rico. I’ve spent time with him in Florida, California. But in terms of our relationship, I’m trying to think of an exact time where it went south, but I guess in my… Him being the ADCC organizer, in my attack of athlete compensation was taken personally, which is obviously going to ruin whatever friendship you had.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:52)
And that started around the time you were thinking about CJI.
Craig Jones
(01:26:56)
I mean, to be honest, CJI was a result of the response of my discussion of athlete compensation. So, me and Mo had been close friends even after the Danaher team broke up. We were still close friends for quite a while after that. But it does complicate things when someone is, for all intents and purposes, he as an ADCC competitor and he runs ADCC, the event, he’s in control of it now, he is your boss. So, that does complicate our friendship.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:30)
Have you had a conversation since you announced CJI?
Craig Jones
(01:27:33)
Have we had a conversation…
Lex Fridman
(01:27:37)
When did you get blocked?
Craig Jones
(01:27:38)
I honestly didn’t get blocked. I was just joking. Nah, honestly, we had a disagreement about athlete compensation. I said, “Let’s do a podcast and talk about it because I’m a big fan of transparency. If you think I’m an idiot for thinking athletes should get paid more, tell me in. Show it to me.” And I’ve made public statements.

(01:28:02)
Other people have asked why we don’t get paid more money. You can both tell me and the world at the same time, the grappling world at the same time, but was not interested in doing a podcast. Again, maybe he thought I was going to hit him with some gotcha questions or something. But really, at the end of the day, I personally believe you’ve got nothing to hide. If you are confident in the business decisions you’ve made, then there’s no got you moment that I could actually do.

(01:28:29)
I could easily… I would have done the podcast if I look like a complete idiot would’ve released it anyway because it’d be a good message to where we are in the sport. But again, considering what I know about Thomas & Mack’s price, which I believe we’re paying $200,000 for, and T-Mobile’s $2 million. How do you justify no increase in athlete pay? Well, we have a $1.8 million increase in venue cost.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:52)
So, you’re saying that there could potentially be poor business decisions, poor allocation of money that could be reallocated better to support the athletes?
Craig Jones
(01:29:00)
Yeah, I’ve never once thought this was some organization when most like stealing money from self. I’m just saying that… And again, the road to hell is paved with good intention. So, he might fully think that what he is doing is going to grow the sport. I’m going about it in a completely different way. I don’t think we need T-Mobile. I don’t think we need it behind a paywall. I think we need cheap venue, still maintain good quality production. Release it for free. If you want something to grow, present it for free.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:35)
Is there a future where the two of you talk?
Craig Jones
(01:29:36)
Yeah, for sure. He keeps insisting on talking face-to-face. I don’t have a problem with that, but my argument is, this is a public feud. The public… This is… We’re having a disagreement. Let’s settle the disagreement in a way that answers the question to the fans. Because if one of us is a complete idiot that I believe the world of people following this story are entitled to know which one of us is an idiot.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:06)
If you talk to him, would you be good faith? Would you turn off or turn the troll down from 11 to a three?
Craig Jones
(01:30:14)
I don’t even think I need a troll. It might just say, “Hey, show us the books.” You know what I mean? Honestly, when our event’s done, we’re going to be pretty transparent. Obviously, we are run as a nonprofit. We’re going to be pretty transparent about everything. And I mean, obviously, ultimately, all the views we get.

(01:30:34)
When FloGrappling, when an event on FloGrappling or Fight Pass or any other streaming provider, unless it’s a pay-per-view, you’re not going to know how many people watched. So, that’s one aspect of what we’re doing is we’re going to have a visual guide to how many people off hands of grappling.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:53)
Yeah, transparency in all of its forms. That’s what bothers me about the IOC with the Olympics is that there’s this organization that puts on an incredible event, but it’s completely opaque, it’s not transparent and the athletes don’t get paid almost at all. So, it’s usually from sponsorships and they sell distribution, broadcast distribution. And so, it’s mostly pay walled after the fact. It’s very… Unless you’re a super famous athlete or a famous event, it’s hard to watch. I don’t know the early rounds of the weightlifting or the judo or all of the competitions where most of those athletes get paid almost nothing and they’ve dedicated their whole life like, they’ve sacrificed everything to be there and we don’t get to watch them openly.

(01:31:42)
And in many cases, you can’t even pay for it. With IOC, I’ve got to experience this because I’ll have podcast conversations with judoka for example, and I put a little clip in a podcast and the Olympics channel takes it down immediately. So, they have all the videos uploaded private, they’re private.
Craig Jones
(01:32:03)
Oh, to flag the copyright.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:05)
They just flag the copyright automatically. From the private videos, they could release, they could release somewhere, even if it’s paywall, which I’m against. But paywall, but make it super easily accessible. So, the FloGrappling model is still okay. I’m against it. But if you do a really good job of it, okay, I can understand a membership fee, but it should be super easy to use.

(01:32:25)
But in the case of the Olympics, first of all, in the case of the Olympics, the whole point of the Olympics is for it to be accessible to everybody. So, paywalling goes against the spirit of the Olympic Games. And I will say the same is probably true for many sports I grappling, especially from major events like ADCC that I feel like they should be openly accessible to everybody on every platform. But what was the decision like for you to make it accessible on YouTube and X and…
Craig Jones
(01:32:53)
Well, I mean, just because basically it’s going to grow the sport. You know what I mean? If you have to subscribe to a platform to watch something, you have a mild interest in, a mild curiosity in, there’s a financial barrier there. So, I want to open it up because again, we have an investor who’s contributing and is happy for it to be spent this way, happy for us not to be held hostage by these streaming providers.

(01:33:25)
And really like, again, I’m not making accusations against FloGrappling or UFC Fight Pass. They are making the right business decision by not providing streamer numbers because that’s leverage that those people can use against the streaming provider. But for me as an individual athlete that really wants to understand the metrics of how many people actually watch this sport to leverage that in my own sponsorship negotiations, then if I’m in a position to have this out free and also give every athlete involved the same metrics and information, you’ll literally be able to see the spikes when you compete and you’ll be able to take that and present it for opportunities for sponsorships, for businesses to say, “Look, how many views this got.” I was one of the most viewed moments of this event, so I want to put the power back in the athlete and take it away from the host.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:21)
And it creates a lot of incentive for the athlete to make it exciting.
Craig Jones
(01:34:25)
Yeah, this is your time. It might never happen again. I fully intend to run this every year. That’s the goal. But again, it might never happen again.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:34)
Is there a possible future where the 2026 ADCC is run by Craig Jones?
Craig Jones
(01:34:39)
Could I take over ADCC? I think from an ADCC perspective, it would make a lot of sense. I think it would make a lot of sense to wait, to see if this event turns into fire festival first before you commit to something like that. But I think a more modern approach to the promotion of the event, again, I keep going back to the comedians. You know what I mean? If you want to grow your brand, whatever that may be, provide content for free and you can paywall.

(01:35:11)
Eventually, you can grow the audience, create the audience free. I think, again, if your goal is to create a huge sport here, then it’s like if we’re already a niche sport and competition aspect of that, is it even smaller niche? Then, we need to grow that providing this content for free.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:31)
Well, having just chatted with Elon Musk who fundamentally believes that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, that to me, if the universe has a sense of humor, you would certainly, Craig Jones would certainly be running ADCC, which would be, I mean, it would just be beautifully hilarious.
Craig Jones
(01:35:51)
It would be a poetic ending. It would be an underdog story, from a man that could never win the event to running the event on behalf of the Sheik Tahnoon.

Training camp

Lex Fridman
(01:36:03)
So, I saw B-Team videos of the CJI camp, people training super hard. So, you aside who don’t seem to do things in a standard way, what does it take to sort of put yourself in a peak shape, peak performance for a huge event like the CJI or the ADCC?
Craig Jones
(01:36:25)
I mean, psychologically, it’s really, really brutal. For me, anytime I’m leading up to any event of any meaningful significance, it’s horrible on a psychological level because you’re always thinking about, “Are you training enough? Are you doing enough?” If you feel any signs of sickness, injury, the stress levels increase, your sleep quality decreases, it’s all those little subtle things that’s so hard to mitigate.

(01:36:51)
So, whether you feel like you’re training hard enough, you’re over training. Those to me are the most difficult aspects. And I think really, those are an individual thing and that’s really something where a coach can provide what he thinks to you is the right amount of work. And I think that’s different for different people. I think Nicky Rod could do eight hours a day, you know what I mean? I think Nick Ryan, 8 minutes.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:15)
I saw a video of Nick Ryan with a trashcan throwing up.
Craig Jones
(01:37:19)
Yes. He’s being good.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:20)
And the top comment is like, “That’s him doing the warmup.”
Craig Jones
(01:37:25)
That is satisfying to watch, honestly.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:28)
Yeah. But yeah, so you’re supposed to train hard enough to where you have this confidence that you’re prepared.
Craig Jones
(01:37:35)
Yeah, I mean, and it’s an impossible thing to grasp. It’s like some of the best performances I’ve had, I’ve been called up last minute or I’ve been sick or my camp’s been horrible. And for me, personally, I’ve gone in there and thought, “Oh, relax.” Almost like, oh, well, you got caught up a week ago, you’re injured, you missed four weeks of your camp. And I went in there super relaxed and accepting of the result and performed much better.

(01:38:04)
Sometimes, when I know three months out, I’ve got an event coming up and that event only happens every two years. It just the stress of that alone, I personally on an individual level, more of a, I’d rather wing it. I’d rather be in the stands and just roll down. Like Gunnar Nelson, I remember he had a brilliant performance in an ADCC absolute. And he was out drinking the night before. He had no idea he was competing the next day. He was in the stands eating ice cream and they called his name out for the absolute, and he went out there and I believe he got bronze. I believe he beat Jeff Monson.

(01:38:36)
So, it’s like, it’s different for different people. Obviously, you don’t want that to be the standard. You’ve got to be putting in the work at all times. But even now in my crazy travel schedule where I don’t train anywhere near like I used to. As long as your game is technical, and as long as your body’s in good condition, I believe you can still train well against world-class guys. You might not be able to do an hour straight, but if you’re technique-orientated, you’re just losing fitness.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:08)
So, is it possible to out cardio Craig Jones? Is your game fundamentally a technique-based game?
Craig Jones
(01:39:15)
For Sure, for sure, yeah. I’ve never wanted to win anything bad enough to train properly for it.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:19)
Right. But isn’t that the secret to your success being lazy?
Craig Jones
(01:39:23)
I think so. I think that’s the only logical explanation. And I also use it as mind games too. Again, no one knows whether what I’m saying is true or not.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:34)
Right.
Craig Jones
(01:39:34)
And I’m not saying this story to say anything bad about my opponent at that time, but I booked two matches and two consecutive weekends. And I’ve been traveling, I think I just got back from one of my trips. I’ve been over international, so I don’t even know where the fuck I was. But…
Lex Fridman
(01:39:52)
Yeah, you’re in Texas right now, by the way. Just in case you forgot.
Craig Jones
(01:39:55)
Texas, just for you. I just came back for you.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:57)
Thank you, man, it’s an honor.
Craig Jones
(01:39:58)
But I hadn’t really even trained. I couldn’t train. I was traveling, just had no ability to train. I trained for a week. I had the Phil Rowe match. And I said to myself, I was down in Mexico City and I said, “You know what? If you win this match, you got to face Lovato next week. Don’t go out and party, don’t celebrate the victory. But as a 32-year-old man at that time, hitting a flying triangle submission, I thought that deemed a worthy afterparty.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:29)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:40:29)
And we got out of control that night. And it wasn’t until the next day I woke up, I was like, “Oh, I have Lavato next weekend.” But people don’t know whether I’m telling the truth or not. But it’s also, I’m almost too honest because I’ll be doing an interview saying, “Yeah, I was out party and I barely trained.” The opponent looks into that and they question it, “Is he telling the truth? Is he baiting me? Is he really that unconcerned?” You know what I mean? It’s almost a psychological battle in and of itself, but for the most part it’s true.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:56)
So, to you, being psychologically relaxed is extremely important, just not giving in them, I wonder what that is.
Craig Jones
(01:41:02)
Not too much pressure. I don’t want…
Lex Fridman
(01:41:03)
Pressure.
Craig Jones
(01:41:04)
I don’t like the pressure.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:05)
But you like the pressure when it comes to internet shit talking.
Craig Jones
(01:41:10)
Well, I mean, you get a silently sit back and think about a good response.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:14)
Yeah. How important is it to just go crazy hard rounds leading up to competitions like that? You said sort of Nicky Rod, but on average for athletes at world-class level, do you have to put in the hard rounds?
Craig Jones
(01:41:30)
Yeah, I think you have to put in the hard rounds. It depends at what point in your career you are. I think someone like Nick Ryan might almost train too technically too often. And when he comes to competition, it’s a confronting experience when someone hits him hard and he fills that pressure. So, I think different people require different things. When Nicky Rod is breaking the spine of a 37-year-old father, a three-bus driver, it might be time for him to train in a more technical manner. So, it’s like you’ve got to cater it to what they need. And again, depending on the opponent, it’s a game of-
Craig Jones
(01:42:00)
To cater it to what they need. And again, depending on the opponent, it’s a game of strategy. For me, when I was more active, I look at an opponent that I want, that I could steal some clout from, off of which the clout, you can make money. And I think to myself, “What’s the best rule set I can beat them in?”

(01:42:17)
That’s the strategy. And then how would I beat them in that rule set? So there’s so many strategic layers to go above and beyond just the training for me. But nowadays I like to, if I train short duration, high intensity, that’s the best for me. I don’t like this six little, like 10, six minute rounds, whatever. I don’t like this long training. For me, it’s too much toll on the body. I think I go to the gym, maybe the first round’s slightly light, and then just bang it out. Two hard rounds tops, a little bit of problem solving. Get out of there. Because you want to feel a little bit of the competition intensity. That feels the best on my body.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:02)
When you’re traveling, you’re doing seminars and you’re just doing Jiu-Jitsu with folks, are you training with them? I’m sure, from everything I see, people would love to train with you.
Craig Jones
(01:43:13)
Yeah, they want to. I mean, I don’t know what it is. Obviously, I guess it’s like people want to play basketball with a basketball star or something, you know what I mean? But I guess you play one-on-one with a basketball player, there’s no great risk of injury. That’s the real problem is if you don’t roll at your seminar, the seminar participants don’t feel like they’ve got the full experience. But, there’s snipers at these seminars. There’s these sharks that are circling wanting to attack you, and you have to look it… You look at it from both perspectives. I think you should provide excellent technique. Excellent question and answer time. And I think you should roll a little bit. For the most part, these days I’ll just roll 30 minutes straight. I’ll just do 10 guys, three minutes, no break. 30 minutes straight. I might even get the guy to pick, again if you… Some of these guys come in hot.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:11)
Yeah, it’s terrifying, man. Because the thing is with Anthony Bourdain sort of analogy here, you’re exploring all parts of the world. You just want to be there in the culture, teach good techniques and just socialize. You don’t want to… There’s just a bunch of killers that are trying to murder you.
Craig Jones
(01:44:31)
Yeah. To them they’re like, “I get to test myself against a world-class athlete today.” And to you, you’re like, “Oh, I’m in Odessa. I’d like to get to know the people.”
Lex Fridman
(01:44:42)
Yeah, exactly.
Craig Jones
(01:44:43)
“Try some food, have a couple drinks and enjoy the place.” But to them it’s time to go. You got to rope it open a bit. If I meet pressure with pressure, I get tired. But if I don’t provide resistance where they think there should be resistance now it slows their pace down. They get shocked a bit. But 100%. If I’m at a seminar and someone’s rolling too hard with me, if I feel like I might get hurt, I’ll 100% rip a submission on them. You know what I mean?

(01:45:15)
It’s like, you’re confronted with a threat. You have to meet it with a threat. It’s like, I’ve spoken about this with Ryan Hall. Ryan Hall will give them a warning and then gone. And I think it’s perfectly acceptable. I won’t endanger them for no reason, but if you are coming hot, you better tap fast. If I feel a threat, you better tap. I’m not going to break it for the sake of breaking it. But if you do some crazy shit that might potentially hurt me and I get a submission and I’m tired. If you are fresh, you can catch a heel hook, hold it tight. The guy tries to wiggle out. You got it.

(01:45:53)
If you’re tired and you’ve been nice with a heel hook and then they slip out and club you in the head, then next time is going to be the last time.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:04)
Well last time, see you’re another level, you and Ryan Hall are just world-class. But for me, I’m trying to find, navigate through this. ‘Cause I’d like to be able to roll 10 rounds for fun, for cultural.
Craig Jones
(01:46:16)
Oh, but they’re coming for you too.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:19)
And unfortunately ripping submissions or knee on belly, some kind of dominant position, people don’t hear the message at all. Or if I let them submit me a bunch of times, they don’t calm down either. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to solve that puzzle. Because I’d like to keep rolling with people across the world for many more years to come. But it’s tough.
Craig Jones
(01:46:43)
You can’t do it. If you’ve reached any level of notoriety, whether it’s in the sport or just as a celebrity, you’re better off to just have three, four trusted training partners and train privately. That’s the sad situation. People used to say, “Oh, you could be such and such and go to any gym.” No. Those days are over now. Now, if you show up and you have any sort of name, they’re coming to kill. Honestly, you’re better off. It’s so much safer. Training is about trusting. Trust is built from safe rounds.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:18)
Yeah.
Craig Jones
(01:47:19)
Strangers are scary.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:22)
I don’t know. I’m trying to develop a radar when I look at a person, trying to figure out. Are they…
Craig Jones
(01:47:27)
Are they from Eastern Europe? I’ll tell you what the most [inaudible 01:47:31]. That’s a good one. You know what? Anyone that wears a Pitbull sports rash guard or anyone from the country of Poland, be ready.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:40)
Oh, Polish people go hard.
Craig Jones
(01:47:41)
People go hard. I’ve never had a flow roll with a Polish person.

Breaking legs

Lex Fridman
(01:47:45)
Somebody on Reddit asked, “How many legs did you break in Eastern Europe?”
Craig Jones
(01:47:49)
Three or four.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:51)
To send a message or just for your own personal enjoyment?
Craig Jones
(01:47:54)
I don’t enjoy it.
Lex Fridman
(01:47:57)
You don’t enjoy the violence.
Craig Jones
(01:47:58)
It is humorous after the fact though. I mean it’s just like, “Hey bro, I’m jet lagged, I’m tired. I’m here for you guys. Why are you trying to hurt me?” If I get a submission tap, don’t hesitate at all. Don’t hesitate. I mean, Jiu-Jitsu’s dangerous. It’s a dangerous thing. And when strangers are going crazy, they think they’re getting invites to CJI if they tap me. It’s just wild.

Advice for beginners

Lex Fridman
(01:48:27)
So speaking of which, just for the hobbyist, for a person just starting out, what wisdom can you provide? Say, you were tasked with coaching a beginner, a hobbyist beginner. How would you help them become good in a year? What would be the training regimen? What would be their approach? Mental, physical in terms of practice in Jiu-Jitsu.
Craig Jones
(01:48:53)
I mean honestly picking safe training partners and trying to understand the positions and not just freaking out. You might escape if you freak out, but you also might be stuck in something and you injure yourself. So I think if you can… It’s just about longevity. If you can find a pace to train at and a sort of intensity and the right people you could potentially train five years without injury. It’s really about how you move. If you are always moving in an explosive way, eventually you’re going to do that from a position in which you can’t move and then something’s going to tear. And you also want to be able to trust training partners to not go too crazy and inflict too much pain. You know what I mean? It’s like, yeah, I think I’ve managed to avoid a lot of injuries. I just never roll too athletically, explosively. I think I’m probably incapable of moving at that rate of speed.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:55)
So that’s part of it is you the way you move. But I guess you also don’t allow anybody to put you in a really bad position in terms of hurting you.
Craig Jones
(01:50:03)
I let them put me in bad position, but I try to stay relaxed at all times. That’s the key here is, I mean, yeah, obviously you’ve got the cheesy, keep it playful. But it’s like if you can remain calm in bad positions, that is a skill. That’s your confidence not in yourself, but that the other guy’s incapable of submitting you. That’s the ultimate confidence. You can give him whatever you want.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:27)
So the thing you want as a beginner is to focus on minimizing injury by relaxing, by not freaking out.
Craig Jones
(01:50:34)
Yes. Keeping it at a pace so you can understand what just happened.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:37)
The thing is how do you know if you’re freaking out or not? As a beginner. It feels like a…
Craig Jones
(01:50:42)
Yeah if you’re panicking.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:43)
Yeah, that’s a good… I mean I see a lot of beginners breathing, starting to breathe hard, they tense up. That’s probably, underneath that is panic.
Craig Jones
(01:50:53)
If you can make someone panic, you’ll fatigue them. It’s the same, it’s like even if you higher level and you’re worried about getting your guard passed, it’s the panic that leads to fatigue in your guard retention. But if you’re so flexible, you remain calm. I think it’s because you’re not panicked.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:09)
Fear is the mind killer. But also you have one of the more innovative games in Jiu-Jitsu history. How’d you develop that? How do you continue throughout your career? How were you innovating? What was your approach to learning and figuring positions out? Figuring submissions out?
Craig Jones
(01:51:29)
I mean, financial motivation. If you can hit moves that no one else knows how to do, you can sell those instructions. But also it keeps it interesting. I mean it can get stagnant and boring. A lot of people get to blue belt, they’re good at one thing. They only do that one thing. I think it’s finding creative ways to beat people. And sometimes creativity is in how they respond to it. So if you can find a humiliating move to do to someone, well, not even necessarily humiliating, but a move that is unexpected. When you get hit with something you don’t expect, I think that is sort of really one of the most fun aspects of it. You know what I mean? You train to stay better than the people you’re better than. That’s what keeps you in the game. And finding creative ways to beat those people is some of the most entertainment.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:19)
So that’s just something that brings you joy, by doing the unexpected.
Craig Jones
(01:52:25)
If you get swept with something that you don’t think should work, I think that’s fulfillment.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:32)
So your game is even a bit trolly, interesting. But what’s the actual process of, with the Z Guard, all the innovative stuff you’ve done there, how do you come up with ideas there?
Craig Jones
(01:52:41)
Just studying tape. Just study. Study tape and try to reverse engineer. If I see something or I train with someone, and it feels… You know when you have those moments where you’re like, “Oh, I don’t even know what they’re doing here.” And if you can put someone in a position they don’t understand, that’s also where they panic. So it’s creating different ways to make people panic. But also, I mean just innovation, like having fun with it. I guess the artistic aspect of it is fun. You can be creative in how you can beat people.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:12)
Did you say artistic or autistic?
Craig Jones
(01:53:15)
Both. Both.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:15)
Okay. Just checking. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve come up with? What’s some of the cooler ideas you’ve come up on the mat?
Craig Jones
(01:53:25)
I don’t think I’ve come up with anything, but I’ve popularized things. Like certain styles of leg entry. I definitely didn’t invent them, but I popularized them. Octopus guard, playing more from turtle, sort of the pinning style of game. Because of my jokes online, put me in a position of power in the sport so that when I post content, it can popularize a move or at least an instructional popularize a game. But still, I’m not trying to sell inauthentic products. I’m still, I want the technique to work, be…
Lex Fridman
(01:53:59)
Functional.
Craig Jones
(01:53:59)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:00)
But put some humor on top of it. Like power bottom. Your instructional names are pretty good. And you changed that one. I saw the name of that.
Craig Jones
(01:54:06)
I mean unfortunately Meta, the ads were not appreciating some of that humor, so we had to soften the titles a bit.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:15)
You got a phone call from the man that said, “Change this.”
Craig Jones
(01:54:18)
I didn’t. Allegedly, the company hosting it did.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:23)
Right. What do you think about Zuck in general? The fact that he trains Jiu-Jitsu. Have you got a chance to train with him? You’ve trained with Volk?
Craig Jones
(01:54:32)
I haven’t trained with him. I met him when Volk fought Ilia. We’ve spoken briefly. Interesting guy for sure, loves Jiu-Jitsu, loves MMA. Is really intending to compete in something I think.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:47)
Competing in Jiu-Jitsu, intends to compete in MMA, has a beginner’s mind, is humble about it. It’s interesting. Was he ever in consideration for CJI?
Craig Jones
(01:54:56)
Oh, I mean we would love to have him. We’d love to have him, but he’s coming off of ACL surgery. Think he’s returned to sport August. I think he’d be back training again soon.

Volk

Lex Fridman
(01:55:06)
Yeah. What your relationship has been like with Volkanovski, like what have you learned about martial arts, about grappling in different domains? Just training with him.
Craig Jones
(01:55:17)
I mean for me personally, what’s so interesting about Volkanovski is his, I guess where he came from. It’s like you have pre-existing ideas of what a UFC champion is. Again, I would say it’s similar to when I started training Jiu-Jitsu and I first traveled to America and got to train with some really famous people. You realize how relatable they are in some aspects. Volkanovski trains a freestyle and it is humble beginnings. Humble origins. It’s a small gym in a small sort of beach side city. They’re run on puzzle mats. You know what I mean? If you think UFC champion, you don’t think puzzle mat gym, you know what I mean? He’s not training at American Top Team, he’s not at one of these big gyms. So to me it just shows what you’re capable of through hard work and sort of self-educating in such an isolated place.

(01:56:11)
It’s insane to me that he’s still considered probably the pound for pound best featherweight ever in my opinion. And he’s basically come across and started late from a rugby background. But also in terms of what I’ve learned on a technical level, I’ve picked up a lot of stuff from him in sort of grappling exchanges. How to get back up. Obviously, wall wrestling. In terms of how hard he trains, how hard he works the cardio aspect is insane. His cardio workouts are absolutely insane.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:42)
So he is the opposite of you, essentially.
Craig Jones
(01:56:44)
Complete opposite of me probably publicly and privately as an athlete. Yeah. The amount of work he puts in and just his sheer mental willpower. I remember there’s been a couple of times where I’ve watched him do weight cuts where like, ” That’s horrible.” You’re watching your friend, obviously we started as basically I would help him in certain Jui Jitsu aspects, and then becomes a close friend of yours.

(01:57:10)
But the whole process of the MMA fight is horrible, especially when you care about the person fighting because some of those weight cuts you see are awful. You’re basically seeing guys’ eyes roll back in their head, like him just powering through a five kilo, 10 pound cut. And just constantly talking about how easy it is. But while clearly, I mean these guys look like they’re dying. To push through that, and then to push through some of the moments in his fight. To watch him be completely relaxed until five minutes before the fight and then he starts talking about, “You’re never going to take this belt away from my family.” He’s thinking about his family before he fights, his kids. You see the character change. It’s just absolutely insane to watch.

(01:57:59)
On the other side of that is obviously watching the ups and downs. It’s been so many ups. The last two have been downs. So you’re seeing the full spectrum of the highest highs and the lowest lows.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:13)
How’s he able to deal psychologically with loss?
Craig Jones
(01:58:16)
I don’t know. Obviously he’s still hungry, still motivated. Obviously I thrive in a losing environment, but him on the other hand, I’m not sure. We don’t talk too much on that level. Obviously we check in as friends, see what he’s up to, see what he’s planning. We were trying to get him a grappling match at CJI. I won’t say the reasons it fell through, but we were setting one up with Mikey Musumeci, but we couldn’t get it done.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:46)
And you can’t say the reasons why.
Craig Jones
(01:58:47)
I can’t say the reasons, but would’ve been awesome.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:49)
Do you think you could have set that up if you had more time? Part of the challenge here is for some of these gigantic matchups, I feel like it takes time.
Craig Jones
(01:59:00)
Being the promoter. Tournament, not as bad. The superfights really, really difficult. I don’t think we could have set it up with more time, that particular match. But that was the dream. That’s what we were hoping to do.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:14)
But there’s a lot of other interesting matchups that you could have possibly gotten through if there’s more time.
Craig Jones
(01:59:18)
Yeah, I’d love to see, I mean personally I really want to see Volks and Ortega have an actual grappling match. We saw him get out of those deep submissions and apply a ton of ground power. I’d love to see them just have a grappling match. I’d love to see more of the UFC stars have grappling matches, especially if they’ve had any head trauma in a fight. It’s like, “Hey, let’s keep them busy.” As you see, some of those guys go crazy if they can’t train.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:44)
What about the fights against Makhachev? You think Volk can beat him?
Craig Jones
(01:59:48)
I think the first fight showed he could beat him, for sure showed it’s possible. Even in the second fight, when he reversed the grappling exchange. I wish he’d tried to take Makhachev down. I really think he has a huge strength advantage against Makhachev and I personally believe he has a fence wrestling advantage. You might not see it in a sense of the technical hip tosses and things like that really, but I do believe Volk’s one of the best, if not the best cage wrestler in the world.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:19)
But who do you think wins in a grappling match?
Craig Jones
(02:00:21)
That would be interesting. Would be interesting. The problem is two almost to while you are a champion like Islam is you could just never book them. You could never get it.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:32)
What do you think makes the Dagestani wrestlers and fighters so good?
Craig Jones
(02:00:36)
I think personally, those guys are just like, they just love it. It’s just about, it’s how they train. It’s a fight to the death, you know what I mean? It’s just built in them. They don’t want to concede an inch ever. I think for MMA and wrestling, that can be very, very good. I think sometimes when those guys come over to Jiu-Jitsu specific events, they get leglocked. They fall into traps. Overly aggressive or overly evasive. But I think the way they train just is perfect for a fight. A fight, they can just forward pressure, eat some shots, grind a guy against the wall. Fence wrestling is technical. Jiu-jitsu is far more technical.

(02:01:17)
There’s way more things you can do in a grappling scenario from top and bottom than I think against the wall. So a grinding nature of how they train works really good to walk a guy down and take him down against the wall. And then obviously with ground and pound, very good to hold a guy down. So I think just never conceding an inch in training. It’s just they’ve done that since they were born, basically.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:42)
So you learn how to grind somebody down?
Craig Jones
(02:01:44)
Yeah, they’re just trying to break each other at all times. Trying to have some dominance over their friends and who they train with.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:52)
But you think in the grappling context, that will not always translate?
Craig Jones
(02:01:57)
Not when you can pull guard and submit from your back. I think that sort of negates some of that grinding pressure. I think that has to be met with more slow technical lateral movement. I think that’s the way you… That would be the dream for me is that guy just comes straight forward into my guard. That grinding approach works well if he’s taken me down and got already close to me. But if I’m laying flat on my back and he’s standing and he has to engage, he has all that danger at range. But if he can connect to my body before we go down, now we’re in his world again. I think.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:34)
I wonder if it’s like, at his prime could be versus you for example. Who do you think wins there?
Craig Jones
(02:02:40)
Buggy choke for sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:41)
Buggy choke. No way. I know you’re joking.
Craig Jones
(02:02:45)
We get in with a buggy, I reckon.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:47)
Really? So you can get a buggy choke at the highest level. Can you educate me on that? That legitimately can work? At the highest level?
Craig Jones
(02:02:56)
Buggy choke for sure. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:58)
Really?
Craig Jones
(02:02:58)
Catch anyone.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:00)
Really? Okay.
Craig Jones
(02:03:02)
You’re not a buggy believer.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:05)
I’m not a buggy hater either. I’m just, I’m agnostic on the buggy choke.
Craig Jones
(02:03:11)
Khabib would go to sleep for sure.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:13)
Yeah?
Craig Jones
(02:03:13)
Yeah. There’s no way he would tap to a buggy choke. Who was it? I faced recently, I faced a Russian guy from Tata. I couldn’t buggy him. I was trying a closed guard one though, sort of. It is harder to pull off, but I had to put him to sleep twice at the end of the match with a triangle. But he was just willing. I don’t know, Eastern European guys, it’s like they’re treating it like a real fight.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:37)
Have you ever gone hard with a Dagestani person? Grappling, wrestling, any of the fighters, any of the MMA guys?
Craig Jones
(02:03:48)
Have I, have I, have I? I mean they do train hard. They do train hard. When I did the seminar in Odessa, it was at a school, but another school in the city brought like 10 Dagestani guys. All of them went insanely hard. I was like, “Guys,” it’s a small sample size, but they all wanted to be broken.

Future of jiu jitsu

Lex Fridman
(02:04:09)
What do you think, you as the wise sage of Jiu-Jitsu, if you look 10, 20 years out, how do you think the game is going to evolve? The art of it.
Craig Jones
(02:04:17)
The art of it. I mean, I think obviously people are going to keep innovating, perfecting certain things, throwing out information, bad sort of techniques, bad sort of… But I mean it’s so hard to predict. It’s like that’s the game of making money off the instructionals is predicting where we go next. It’s so, so difficult.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:36)
What do you think is going to be the most popular submissions on CGI and ADCC this year? Is it going to be footlocks or rear naked?
Craig Jones
(02:04:43)
I think actually CGI, I think there’s going to be a lot of guys that don’t tap, that take injuries. A small concern is that a guy wins the match but is so injured he can barely go onto the next match. Win the battle, lose the war.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:59)
We are going to see that. Aren’t we? People refusing to tap.
Craig Jones
(02:05:03)
Actually we did the walkthrough yesterday and we were like, “One ambulance is not enough. Get a second one here.” If they take one guy injured to hospital, we can’t continue until an ambulance comes back. So these guys are going to go, everyone will be Dagestani for a day. That’s what I think this tournament will achieve.

(02:05:23)
But progression, it’ll just be the integration of wrestling into Jiu-Jitsu. I think that would be the most exciting way the sport could progress. It’s basically folk style wrestling, but an integration of submissions from the standing position too. If you just follow the rules of you should always be fighting to get on top, whether that’s a submission that leads to a sweep or a sweep. And you should be trying to avoid being pinned. And as long as the game revolves around that and guys engage each other offensively on their feet, that would be the most exciting, best way to watch the sport.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:02)
Yeah. When I show the sport of Jiu-Jitsu, the most exciting stuff is whenever both people want to be wrestling, scrambling, wrestling, they both want to get on top.
Craig Jones
(02:06:11)
Yeah, the scramble.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:11)
That looks like fighting versus guard stuff.
Craig Jones
(02:06:15)
I’m a guy that totally agrees with you, but if I think the guy’s a better wrestler, I’ll concede. It’s like that’s the hard part.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:23)
But then the whole crowd will then mock you ceaselessly, as they should for conceding.
Craig Jones
(02:06:29)
That’s what the million should be. We should have a tournament or a round-robin thing where it’s like the million goes to the most exciting man, who took the most risks.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:37)
I mean, in a way that’s what’s going to happen because this is quite open. So the benefit of being exciting is you’re going to be glorified on social media and if you’re going to be boring and stall, you’re going to be endlessly sort of willified.
Craig Jones
(02:06:52)
Forget about medals, social media glory is all that matters.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:56)
Well, in a certain sense, on a basic human level, yeah. I mean not all that matters. But if you’re going to stall, you’re going to become a meme I feel like, especially with CGI. Are the refs going to try to stop stalling?
Craig Jones
(02:07:11)
Yeah, we’re going to penalize them hard. Hit them hard, get that boring shit out of here.

Steroids

Lex Fridman
(02:07:16)
So what percentage of athletes would you say are on steroids? Is it a hundred percent?
Craig Jones
(02:07:22)
Anyone that’s ever beaten me, they’re taking more steroids than me. I don’t know. I wanted to test them, but not to do anything bad, but just in the name of science to see what people are running. It’s so hard to say because you train with people and they don’t even tell you what they’re on. I tell the world what I’m on and they go, “Look at you, you’re not taking any steroids.” It’s like such a secret thing. I personally think it’s almost impossible to say, but occasionally you look at a guy and you’re pretty certain.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:56)
The looks of it. But it could also go the other way. Certain people are just genetically built and they look like they are. And then there’s probably others like yourself.
Craig Jones
(02:08:07)
It’s a self-defense mechanism. You’d rather assume that that guy was on steroids than his genetics are so far superior to yours. You’re like, “Nah, it must be steroids.”
Lex Fridman
(02:08:19)
Yeah, that’s the part of accusations of people being on steroids that I hate. It’s like without data, people are just like, it’s a way they can say that somebody’s cheating without… Because I like celebrating people and sometimes people aren’t on steroids and they aren’t cheating and they’re just fucking good.
Craig Jones
(02:08:36)
What about Gabby Garcia?
Lex Fridman
(02:08:38)
I think she’s beautiful, strong. You’re a lucky man to share the mat with her. You should be honored. I am betting a huge amount of money on her, so…
Craig Jones
(02:08:51)
Me too.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:53)
Either way, you’re going to get paid.
Craig Jones
(02:08:54)
She’s paying 11 to one.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:56)
I bet on love as well. So we are aligned in that way.
Craig Jones
(02:08:59)
Love will prevail.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:00)
Okay, you put Alex Jones to sleep. Just to reflect back on that, what was…
Craig Jones
(02:09:09)
He was too woke. He needed it.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:11)
So that’s you fighting the woke mind virus or whatever?
Craig Jones
(02:09:14)
I think it was on the pulse too much.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:15)
What was that like? I didn’t see the full video. I just saw a little clip.
Craig Jones
(02:09:20)
I thought he was dead for a second. But I, for some strange reason, couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t know. I was like, please wake up.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:26)
There’s something funny about it. Yeah.
Craig Jones
(02:09:28)
I was like, his blood pressure is higher than mine. I hope that didn’t cook him.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:32)
Yeah, that would be quite sad.
Craig Jones
(02:09:34)
It’s so crazy.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:35)
Murder somebody.
Craig Jones
(02:09:36)
Yeah, he’s probably the most just entertaining human being ever. He just says the… Like, off-air. He’s always on. He’s always ready to say some wild shit.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:52)
The craziest shit possible. What’s it like going to sleep? I somehow have never gone to sleep.
Craig Jones
(02:09:58)
I went to sleep one time. Lachlan Charles was demonstrating a technique on me, but I woke up straight away. But for 10 seconds I didn’t know who I was, where I was, what I was doing. But that’s it. That’s the only time I went out.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:07)
Saw anything.
Craig Jones
(02:10:09)
Didn’t feel good though. Some people say it feels good. Did not feel good.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:12)
You were like what? Panicked. Lost.
Craig Jones
(02:10:12)
Yeah. I just didn’t know what was going on.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:17)
Yeah. And then you load it… That must be a cool feeling to load it all back in. Realize, “Where am I?” I feel like that sometimes at a hotel when I’m traveling. It’s like, “Where the fuck am I again?” When you wake up. Maybe that’s what it’s like.
Craig Jones
(02:10:29)
Some people push it too far. David Carradine.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:33)
What? I’m too dumb to get that joke.
Craig Jones
(02:10:39)
Autoerotic asphyxiation.

Hope

Lex Fridman
(02:10:40)
Oh, good. Thank you. Thank you. Now I know. So given all the places you’ve gone, all the people you’ve seen recently, what gives you hope about this whole thing we’ve got going on? About humanity, about this world? We start war sometimes. We do horrible things to each other sometimes. Amidst all that. What gives you hope?
Craig Jones
(02:11:04)
That you can still make fun of anything. As long as it’s funny. That’s what I’m fighting for. People talk about cancel culture. I just think the joke wasn’t funny enough. Had poor delivery.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:19)
Well, thank you for being at the forefront of making fun of everything and anything. And thank you for talking today, brother.
Craig Jones
(02:11:25)
Thank you bro.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:27)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Craig Jones. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Anthony Bourdain. “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly. You leave marks behind, however small, and in return, life and travel leaves marks on you.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.