This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #466 with Jeffrey Wasserstrom.
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I was first in China in 1986, and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. You would know, but his face wasn’t everywhere, the newspaper wasn’t dominated with stories about him, and quotations from his words and things like that. So with Xi Jinping, you’ve had a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past.
So that’s a key commonality, and a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down in a sense that he talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but he also really, his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was the Monkey King about this legendary figure who is this Monkey King who could turn the heavens upside down. So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a way to improve things.
Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very, very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up like that, people on the streets clamoring. So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it’s not manifesting itself. He doesn’t like the idea of people on the streets in anything that can’t be controlled. So there are a lot of ways that they’re similar, a lot of ways they’re different.
They’re also different, and this fits with this orderliness that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China. And Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part, and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior, whereas Mao like things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a feudal way of thought that it held China back. So you can come up with things that they’re similar and you can come up with things where they’re really opposites. But they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party, and that’s been a continuity, and that connects them to the leaders in between them too as well.
Another thing that connects these Axial Age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation, the elite, and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped decide how you should run a polity. Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence, and things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end.
And he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers were… These were all parallels, and there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism.
Even something that in the West we often think of as a kind of quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers. In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.
And for Confucius, he said, so we should study the texts, we should study how the sages of old behaved, that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward looking. It wasn’t arguing for progress, it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. So it was also a kind of conservative. So in all kinds of ways, it’s irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.
Xi Jinping and before him to some extent, Hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit, the Olympics, it was more of this kind of mix it all together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. So Xi Jinping says that Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model, but so is Confucius. And there’s really… they had so little in common, but they both, in his mind and the minds of others, suggest a kind of power and greatness of the Chinese past.
But Xi Jinping I think continually is kind of not choosing. And if he wants to say, “Well, look at the Great Wall, look at this wonderful… In fact that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor.” Who by the way, didn’t build anything like the Great Wall you see today. He built walls, and they were fine, they were good, but the Great Wall itself didn’t come into being until many centuries later. But still, this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that as a, in many ways, a nationalist above all else, Xi Jinping is a supporter of the party and single-party rule. That’s something he clearly believes in, and he’s a nationalist, he wants to see China be great and acknowledge this great on the world stage.
And I think that shows through in all kinds of things, even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that people could be remolded potentially. And China was one of the few places where they didn’t kill the last emperor. The last emperor, the idea was that he could become… anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this, a good member of this polity through the kind of education, often it was a very kind of forceful form of education, but I think that’s a carryover from the Confucian times.
And over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracy should be run, not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your career, a bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing could set you on the road to a good career. In China, you had the civil service exam tradition.
So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing of scholarly pursuits, but then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there’s an ambivalence to it or a contradiction again there.
One thing that happened there was families would pull together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there was always a tension of that, so what if you don’t succeed?
Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. You had this issue, and then it became something, well, the system was out of whack, and it needed a new leader.
And also there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters, Mencius, had this idea, which can be seen as a crude justification for a rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven, if he doesn’t act like a true emperor, if he’s not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there’s no obligation to show deference for a ruler who’s not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that if the rebellion isn’t justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed. But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed, and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it’s an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral dimension to it, but it also, it’s when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.
And I think getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which is strong in a lot of tradition. It also a kind of… what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness on who’s getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided, this leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism, which really seems to subvert this whole idea of kind of meritocracy.
And the 1989 protests of Tiananmen, even though kind of in the Western press particularly was discussed as a movement for democracy, but a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism, and the sense that people, despite all the talk… I mean, despite the fact that most people seem to be having to study really hard to pass these exams to get good positions in universities, that some of them were being handed out via the kind of back door. And that led to a kind of outrage. I mean, that’s true in many places, but I think it gives a special anger against nepotism because of that, the way in which so much emphasis is put on kind of the standard exam way of getting ahead.
And it’ll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in ’86 when I was there in Shanghai in late ’86, and students protested, and this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the Culture Revolution or at least since ’76.
And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussion of democracy by this physicist, Fang Lizhi, who was a kind of often thought a Chinese Sakharov. He was a liberalizing intellectual.
But one of the things that students in Shanghai, where some of the most intense protests that year took place, were frustrated about was a rock concert of all things that Jan and Dean, the American surf rock band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big, and they were touring China. It was the first time in Shanghai that there’d been a rock concert. And the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward, was letting them be more part of the world. And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. And at the concert, some students got up to dance because that’s what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert, and the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this would’ve symbolized what was a feint toward openness that really didn’t have follow-through; we’re going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance.
And so the protests went on for a little while in ’86, and posters went up. The officials at universities said, “Now this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the Culture Revolution. We can’t go back to that.” And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said, this is new Red Guardism. And the students didn’t want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly, and they thought, we’re not like the Red Guards. We don’t want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. The analogy partly sort of scared them, and also it meant that the government was really serious about dealing with them.
So then in 1989, the protest restart, and there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. The space for them… Students are thinking about doing something in 1989. It’s a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more importantly, it’s the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May Fourth Movement of 1919.
And the May Fourth Movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some member leading founders of it had been student activists then, it was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. And so the students thought the anniversary of that movement was always marked, commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past, and so there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something.
And then a leader, Hu Yaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party, he had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after partly taking a fairly light stance toward the ’86, ’87 protests. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up. He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping’s potential successor, and he dies unexpectedly. And there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. And the students take advantage of the opening of there having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members. They said, “So some people are dying too young, some people don’t seem like they’re ever going to die.”
So they begin these sorts of protests. This is in April of ’89. And the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop quickly, and they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in People’s Daily that says, “This is creating chaos,” which is a code term for take us back to the Culture Revolution. And this time the students say, “No, we’re just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that there’s too much corruption and nepotism. There’s not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party.” And so they keep up the protests.
And there’s a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily. And so there’s sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro-managing of their private lives on campuses.
So the protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It’s an anti-corruption movement, it’s a call for more democracy movement, it’s a call for more freedom of speech movement, but it’s also a kind of… has some counterculture elements that are like, there are rock concerts on the square, the most popular rock musician, Cui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he’s there. There’s a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one.
And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc. It was actually, in many ways, I think more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the Communist Bloc, which was about moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties empowered to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them.
So there was a kind of disjuncture, happened at the same time as moves to end communism. But of course, so there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square. It seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement to just have a kind of course correction. But then there’s also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership. And clearly the people who are more political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the upper hand. And this is not going to be tolerated. And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out. Students from around the country are pouring in to Beijing to join this movement. They don’t want to end the movement when they’ve just arrived. So it’s actually one thing that keeps it going is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay.
And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form a independent labor union. And that really, the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent, they might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of potential intellectual leaders of the country. And admiration for scholars is part of this that people turn out when students protest, something very different from the American case where there’s a kind of often suspicious of student activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else.
But in China, there had been, from the history of the 20th century, a sense of students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in. And there’s a massacre near Tiananmen Square on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early on June 4th. And the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something that People’s Liberation Army is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression, and they’re acting like an invading force.
And they try, for the first months after it, to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about Tiananmen a lot. They talk about these things. They show images of the tank man. The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that in fact, there’d first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons. And there had been many, many people, some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers, who were just mowed down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn’t work.
And then I think the claim had to be made to try to suppress discussion of the event and particularly to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of the line of tanks. Whatever the tanks did to him or not, the main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city. The image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule, and they really didn’t want to have that image out there in the world.
Again, I think you have the People’s Liberation Army looking like an invading force, and that’s what the Chinese Communist Party in a sense can’t deal with now. Even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989, and they do tell a version of this, and some people believe this, I think, is that in 1989, China went one route of not having the Communist Party dramatically change or relinquish control, and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another. And you could say, “Well, look.” And after 1989, the Chinese economy boomed. Life got better for people in China. Life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet blocs. “Actually, maybe this was the right way to go.” And you can make that kind of argument, but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks, you just have a different kind of image of heroism.
And you mentioned about the power of the image, and I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something, has taken to heart the power of the image after that, because we saw this when there were protests in Hong Kong. The government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of crowds out of control. And initially in 2014, and again initially in 2019, there were very orderly crowds, and it had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images of peaceful protests until there were some incidents, as there almost always are, of violence by crowds, and then they would show those images over and over again.
They also worked very hard, when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s, to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police. And they tried very hard and managed to success because the Western press was often saying, “Will this be another Tiananmen? Will there be a massacre, or will there be soldiers on the streets?” The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without the use of shooting to kill on the streets. They were shooting to wound. There was bean-bag shot. There were rubber bullets. There was enormous amounts of tear gas. There was even tear gas let fly inside subway stations in 2019.
And all these things are really brutalizing, but they don’t make the kind of images that sear in the mind the way something like the Tiananmen tank man image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm, a young woman, that became another of the iconic images during Vietnam War. Those images really can have an extraordinary power, and I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are very few photographs allowed of the Xinjiang extra-legal detention camps. There is an awareness of how much power a photograph of a certain type can have.
And there’s been somebody who’s like another figure like this who’s disappeared. A couple of years ago in Beijing, there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge, Sitong bridge in Beijing. And it was extraordinary. It had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country. It was denunciation of Covid policies, but also a dictatorial rule. And the banner, somehow he managed to have it up and get it long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he’s disappeared, and there hasn’t been a show trial or even a secret trial, and again, we don’t know if he’s still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn’t want a competing story out there. They don’t want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking.
So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don’t want them to get. Even though you know that some people will get it, you just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you’ll get through a search. So a lot of tech-savvy or globally minded, tapped-in Chinese people will use a VPN to jump over the firewall. But it’s work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN. So you just create friction so that, okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding. You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those exist and in operation, and I think the fear is the easiest side to say what’s blocked.
So I’m always interested in things that you would expect to be censored that aren’t censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarianism. You can read Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism. You’re not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state of anything, but it’s not specifically about China. And so censorship is most restrictive when it’s things that are actually about China. Things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, there’s intense kind of censorship of that, and certain events in that way. But something through allegory, something through imagining a place that looks a lot like a Communist Party-ruled state so that people are going to read it…
There were things that were banned up until the very last period of Gorbachev’s rule, things banned in the Soviet Union, that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. You’ve been able to since 1985. Again, it’s not about China. And actually, for some people within China in the mid-1980s, where they focused on the part of 1984 that’s the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people, for some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present.
And then by the ’90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren’t having fun. Some people would read 1984 and say, “Look, this is the world we’re living in. It’s a Big Brother state.” But others said, “Well, that has some similarities to us, but he wasn’t talking about a country like ours. Look, we’ve got supermarkets. We’ve got McDonald’s. We’ve got fast trains. We’re living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did, and this isn’t like that bleak world he was imagining.”
And in fact, in 1949, Orwell sent his former teacher a copy in 1984 and said, “Look, I’ve written this.” Basically, it’s almost a little Oedipal. “I’ve written this book that displaces yours.” He didn’t say that. He just said, “I want you to have this.” But he had criticized Brave New World in reviews, having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before, realizing the totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China, not that he mentions China, and he just said, “It’s a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population,” basically saying, “More like what was in my book than in yours.”
And this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that really show you how to connect the dots, that gets taken out. I think with China I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World, except Tibet and Xinjiang being more the crude boot-on-the-face, 1984 style of control. But then during the Covid lockdowns, when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that had seemed much more the Brave New World style had their Orwellian moment. So now, I think there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments.
In Thailand, which I’ve been working on recently, you have this lèse-majesté laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the King. And so in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around. And there’s a way in which you can say at the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia… You can have an event that’s about the country one over that you can say basically anything you want, but when it gets to the things in the place where you are, it’s touchy.
I should give credit for that insight. Shibani Mahtani co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong Among The Braves. She was talking about that, that in Singapore at the Foreign Correspondence Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn’t say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club. But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club saying kinds of things that he couldn’t say in Singapore.
And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondence Club, and then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about the culture in this foreign correspondence club, and there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia saying things very directly and then said, “And there are things going on in Thailand that we’re not going to talk about.” Self-censorship can be a very powerful thing.
And that idea, I think, underpins the whole idea of freedom of speech in the United States. You don’t want to censor any, even dangerous, speech, because that will permeate everything else. You won’t be able to have great scientists. You won’t be able to have great journalists. You won’t be able to have… I don’t know. I’m obviously biased towards America, and I think you do need to have that full-on freedom of speech. But this is an interesting case study, and that’s actually something that you speak about, that Mao, if he were alive today and visited China, would be quite surprised. And you give the Nanjing bookstores an example. Can you just speak to this? If Mao visited China, let’s go with that thought experiment, what would he recognize? What would he be surprised by?
Although I said, it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s. He was a participant in the May 4th movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for the best ideas circulating. So he might say, “Well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this.” So some of the coolest bookstores, the things that I just was amazed could exist in the early 2000s… So you can still buy copies in 1984 and you can still get some of these other things, but that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I’m not sure you’d get permission to translate some of those things now. There’s more of a sense of caution.
And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability to the situation in China, some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones… Not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station and it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. But then it just got less and less space to operate under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing, and it then had to close in Shanghai.
And it’s just been reopened in DC as JF Books, and it’s become in this really interesting cultural hub. And I’m really delighted; it’s where I’m going to hold the launch for my next book when it comes out in June, this book on the Milk Tea Alliance about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can’t exist in Shanghai. So places like that, they stop being able to exist on the mainland, then they could still exist in Hong Kong, but now in Hong Kong, one of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn’t feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there, and it’s reopened in upstate New York.
And it is a porous system. It’s more porous than in North Korea, things like that. So even if there’s that fear, friction and flooding which Roberts talks about that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government, there’s still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued, or they see an image sent by a friend of theirs on social media, will share them something on WeChat that it doesn’t get picked up by the sensors, but they look at it carefully and they say, “Oh, well, wait a minute. That contradicts what the government’s official line is.” So there’s still ways in which that creativity and freedom of thinking persists.
To be fair, I think the United States is often guilty of this very United States-centric view of history. Similar with Europe. Europe has a very Europe sense of history. I often enjoy talking to people from different backgrounds, from different parts of the world, talking to them about World War II, because it’s clear that you’ve read certain of the story a lot of times and not the other chapters of the story. The Western front in Europe and the Eastern front in Europe and then Japan and China’s role in World War II, and the history around that before and after World War II of China, is not often talked about in the United States. And I’m sure, if I could venture a guess, that the opposite is true in China. I certainly know the opposite was true in the Soviet Union and even in Europe that directly experienced, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy. They all have very different ways of speaking and thinking and reading about World War II. And the same goes across all of history and all of culture.
So yes, it’s always good to question the mainstream narrative in your country, and looking outside is just harder to do in China based on all the reasons you’ve mentioned. And if I can, I just want to give a shout-out. Thank you. I’ll look at her work. Margaret Roberts, the fear, the friction, and the flooding. Her ideas. I can already tell there’s a lot of brilliance here. Fear: this is the most traditional form involving overt threats and punishments for accessing and sharing such sensitive information. However, Roberts finds that fear-based censorship is used selectively, mainly targeting high-profile individuals such as-
So two things come to mind to mention. One is Christina Larson, a very bright journalist, friend of mine who’s now working on other things but was working in China, and she wrote about this in MIT technology review. She said, you need to think about China as having the best, as well as the worst internet experience in the world. And you think about it with… You think of the worst is easy. The great firewall, you try to search for what happened, you search for him with the tank man, you won’t get it. You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him, search for things about Xinjiang, and it makes it seem like it’s a place where people are happy rather than massive extra legal detention camps and where your life can be ruined by things you have no control over.
But she said, on other ways when it comes to consumer playing to your pleasures and things, it was really advanced. A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. And I remember around the time that I had read that I was in Shanghai, and somebody was explaining it to me. They were talking about going out to eat. I said, oh, we’ve got such and such. And I said, oh, that’s like Yelp. He said, well, yeah, but Yelp just tells you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. We’ve got one that can tell you which part of the restaurant you want to sit in, because there’s a waiter that’s in a really bad mood and people have posted enough information to do this. Or what the best dish there is in the last week. Forget about these sort of sloth.
And you had a lot of things that were like, smart city and control, you can learn things about ease of movement. And Singapore had some of these things tested too. You had way before you… You go into an underground parking lot now in the US, and you find out whether there are any empty spaces on a floor. That was something that was years before in Singapore. And you used money less often there because you had a transponder that would automatically pay for your parking and things. And it was something that can be very seductive. So the other line besides best and worst internet that I always like is, William Gibson who wrote one of the other important dystopian novels of the present, Neuromancer. He wrote a rare, for him, non-fiction piece about Singapore, where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty. And there are times when-
There’s this great book by a Uyghur poet. He talks about how people were just starting to disappear off the streets and they were being accused of being radicalized and being potential terrorists. And the cues could be something like, somebody giving up smoking, or not drinking alcohol. Because that was seen as something that sometimes went along with becoming more devoted to Islam, and more devoted to something, a particular version of it. So he talked about how a group of the poets, or writers, when they get together, they would… Whether or not any of them drank, they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their table, because it was simply a way of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kind of clues. So you really have this dark side of, Xinjiang is this example. And Tibet also with incredible tight control. There’s more of that kind of push on personal life in other parts of China as well.
But I think the question of whether we give up too much, and who can abuse what we do give up, is something that is being asked in the United States now, about big tech companies, as well. It’s asked about governments, but it’s also asked about big tech, and what you have as a trade- off. But I hadn’t thought about it till this conversation, which I can tell is why people find it stimulating to have these extended conversations. Because you have set lines, but then the conversation goes and you think in a different way. So what I used to always say about China after 1989 was, the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power, and they realized that the Soviet Union, Soviet Bloc was falling apart. They knew that one reason why people, and this is the simple way of… One way I think you have to understand why communism fell in Eastern Europe, was partly about ideals and thirst for freedom and that, but also people knew that people… East Germans knew that West Germans were having more fun and getting better stuff.
And when some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went to was this department store, to see if the images of better food and more choices were available there. And it was true. And I think this is as human as the desire for more freedom. So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, they never articulated it this way, but how can we try to get to a stage where we don’t have things like Tiananmen, again? Well, what if we try to make a deal with people? We’ll give them more choices in their daily life. We’ll give them better stuff, we’ll give them more choices at the store, we’ll give them more choices about what to read too, we’ll give them more choices in consumer goods and intellectuals, consumer goods they want or to watch the movies and read the books that other people like them around the world are reading.
So we’ll give them more choices. We won’t open the floodgates completely, but we’ll give them more choices, but not give them more choices at the ballot box or in politics. And this was the new social compact. Allow us to keep ruling, and we’ll make sure that you’re living better than the last generation in terms of choices, and in terms of material goods. Now, one of the things that’s happening now is the Chinese Communist Party, the economy isn’t booming the way it was before. The sense of clearly, we’re living better materially than the generation before, it’s not as easy an argument to make when you have growth rates and things like that. But the Communist Party makes different kinds of arguments now about the rest of the world is in chaos and we’re stable. But the thing that I now am going to think about differently is, the argument was we’ll give you more choices, and you’ll have more of a private life, more of this. But now in the period we are globally, now there’s a new kind of suspicion about the degree of any kind of private choices.
There was an idea that the post Tiananmen generation was promised to have a little bit more space away from the prying eyes of the state. And now globally we worry about the prying eyes of whether it’s the state, or whether it’s tech companies. It’s a different moment. What does it mean to say you have more choices?
And what she talks about the changes in China as she was covering it from the mid-2010s on was… And I think this really is Xi Jinping’s, one of his [inaudible 01:13:11] on the country, is there’s a narrowing of spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country. And this goes against the grain of a pattern in the post Tiananmen period of allowing more space for civil society, but also allowing way Muslims felt that they didn’t have to choose between being their Muslim identity and their Chinese identity. But there’s more and more of a kind of… We see this in Xi Jinping becoming impatient with Hong Kong where there was a way of which, okay, this is a city that’s part of the PRC, but it really operates very differently. He seems to be uncomfortable with difference, I guess. He’s not alone and strongmaned this way, of wanting to impose a singular vision of what Chinese identity means, what loyalty to the status quo means. So there’s been a tightening of over all the borders.
And even one thing Xi reported on was, inner Mongolia. It’s been seen as an unproblematic frontier area, and who cares if there was some revival of Mongolian language. But under Xi, there’s been a less patience with those kinds of difference. There’s been more of a resurgence of the patriarchy. All kinds of things have happened under him. But, how much is it just him? Or how much is it also a mood or group within the party? Some of these trends I think began before he took power in late 2012. I think really my own feeling going to China fairly often from the mid 1990s till about 2018 was that until 2008, the year of the Olympics, each trip it would feel like, oh, there’s just more space. There’s more breathing room for… It’s not becoming a liberal democracy. But I would notice things that felt like, I’m surprised that that happens. That there just felt… People felt less worried about what they were saying, and what they were doing. That trend line up until about 2008.
But from the Olympics and then the financial crisis after that, the Chinese Communist Party felt I guess more… It’s still insecure, but it felt cockier in some ways. And you had like, okay, maybe we can start asserting more control over things. So I think that’s been stronger under Xi Jinping’s time and power. And Xi was already the designated successor. By 2008, he was in charge of security for the Olympics. And the Olympics was supposed to be a moment, possibly of more opening up, because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right wing dictatorship and moved toward democracy. And some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way, and it went quite the opposite.
There were some false expectations about him that some people thought, he’s going to be a reformer, because his father was a liberalizing figure. That doesn’t work that way. And he does seem to care about orderliness. He does seem to care about certain things. He wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China’s deep past. We know he’s a strong nationalist and a cultural nationalist as well as political nationalists. But beyond that, we don’t have that much of a sense of what makes him tick. We get little hints. There was a secret speech, that leaked out, that he talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed, because the leadership didn’t pay enough attention to ideology. And he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So I imagine if he and Putin never have a heart-to-heart conversation, one thing they’d find to agree on is this distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was… That was the wrong way to do things.
And the answer they had is that, under my watch, that’s not going to happen. And the reason why my party deserves to rule is because it can reassert China’s place in the world. And both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party predicated themselves on this nationalistic story of being in a position to prevent that from happening again.
Another kind of person who was vulnerable, or this case more likely to be blocked from China. The Communist party is particularly concerned about people from outside of China who are amplifying the voices of people within China, or exiles from China who the government would like to silence. So the Dalai Lama… You had scholars who worked on Tibet and had connections to Dalai Lama where early people would have trouble going to the PRC. Then scholars who worked on Xinjiang, and were connected to Uyghurs. But there also were people who were personally connected to dissidents, or exiles who would amplify their voices, or translate their work, would promote them. That then it wasn’t about necessarily danger if you got in China, but you were more likely to be denied a visa if you were the kind of person who was doing that. So I wrote critical op-eds about the Chinese Communist Party. I published them in some high-profile places. I’ve written a lot about Tiananmen, wrote about human rights issues, all that.
And I kept getting visas to go to China. I testified to a Congressional executive joint committee on China about the Tiananmen protests on the 25th anniversary of it. And some people said, oh, that’s the kind of thing that would lead to you not getting a visa. I got a visa right after that. Now I think it might be different. Now some of these expectations have been changed. There have been people who’ve been very surprisingly gotten in trouble. These two Canadians who were clearly, it was a kind of tit for tat, partly because of TechMaven’s relative being held in Canada. So it was kind of there. It was also not picking a fight with Americans, but there were certain kinds of things that you could map out what was the thing to do. And so I went in the 2010s having written forcefully about Tiananmen, and I didn’t feel dangerous.
I felt there was an awareness in some cases of what… If I was giving a public talk, there was awareness of what it was. There was sometimes, you didn’t want to get your host who had brought you to a university in trouble by saying something that would get them in trouble. I think it was often that, you were more vulnerable if you were within China, or you were connected China in different ways. For me, it’s been confusing these last few years. I wrote one piece about this, about I’m not going to any part of the PRC for the time being. But I always thought that Hong Kong was a place that I’d be free to go, even if the things got difficult. I didn’t get a visa for the mainland. You didn’t need a visa for Hong Kong. With the Mainland, I had kept a distance from the dissidents that I was writing about. With Hong Kong, I felt that these rules kind of didn’t apply, and I was more connected to them. More friends with some of them.
And then with this crackdown that’s come on Hong Kong, and there are exiles from Hong Kong who have bounties on their heads. And so now I feel that, it’s not necessarily that anything would happen to me if I went to Hong Kong, but I feel I would be very closely watched. I wouldn’t want to meet with some of my friends there who aren’t the side profile. I don’t want to go to a place where I would feel that I was toxic in some way.
And just to show you the limits of anybody who thinks they can predict what’s going on in Chinese politics. Predictability is just very hard in general, in the world. But I think the consensus among us, and these were some of the most knowledgeable foreign scholars on China. Was this was somebody who really had probably topped out because he was meeting with us. He must not be heading anywhere up. And then after Tiananmen, he becomes the top leader in China. But he had a kind of, you could pick things out from being in a room. He liked to show off his cosmopolitanism. Xi Jinping talks, gives these speeches about all the foreign authors he likes and has read, but it’s all very scripted, at least in his own head too. It’s very carefully done to present a certain image of himself.
And we really don’t get many senses of what he’s like in unguarded moments, or has them. And sometimes we get the illusion of them. Like there was an image of him and Obama in their shirt sleeves at a Sunnylands meeting. And the photo would show them walking and talking, but there’s no translator in the image. And so you’re like, how are they talking? What language are they using? How is this? Or is it just a kind of… Of course there are exchanges with top leaders. And Trump will say they’re friends, or these kinds of things, where there’s a language of… Xi Jinping can talk about somebody, or some country being friend, but we don’t have a sense of what makes him tick as a person. So maybe you should ask him about Ernest Hemingway, and see if he really gets excited about him. Because in generic things, he talks about all these. You can feel him ticking things off about, oh yes, I’m glad to be in England, the country of Shakespeare and this. And he goes off these set things.
But Hemingway, there’s some sense that he had some special feeling, which fits in with some of the macho side that would be… Interestingly, he doesn’t mention Orwell as one of his favorite British authors as much. He says he likes Victor Hugo a lot. And that became a little tricky, because Do You Hear The People Sing from Les Miserables became one of the protest songs in Hong Kong. And how do you get in this position where you… And actually Victor Hugo is a rare Western author who’s had a pretty steadily positive image in China, even under periods of criticism of all Western authors are problematic. Because Victor Hugo famously wrote a statement denouncing the European destruction of the old summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, at the end of the second Opium war. He said, how can we claim to be civilized when we’ve destroyed one of the great creations of civilization? So that made him a long-term friend to the Chinese nation.
Mark Twain has had a pretty good reputation, because he was a critic of American imperialism. But anyway, I think if you do get to talk to Xi Jinping, talk to him about Ernest Hemingway and Victor Hugo. And I’ll be curious to see if those were the ones who really resonated.
There’s Gui Minhai, the kind of person who was vulnerable. He was born in China. He is a Swedish citizen and he was spirited out of Thailand into the Mainland. And the reason why he was on the radar of the Communist party was because the publishing house in Hong Kong that he was connected to was publishing works about the top tier of the Chinese Communist Party, and contradicting the vision of them as a certain kind of moral exemplars. And that’s different from writing things about China has a bad human rights record or something like that, in ways like I did. These were books that were-
And when there are discussions, when there’s praise for him and his showing toughness, that also works well. So I think the argument among, at least some China specialists, is to say the Chinese Communist Party likes predictability, and Xi Jinping seems to like predictability in particular. And Donald Trump clearly isn’t a predictable figure. So there might be a way in which this is unsettling. But I think the other part of it is the Chinese Communist Party wants under Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping wants to gain more allies around the world, to be seen with more respect around the world. And at the moment is in a position where he can present himself as an orderly, thoughtful gradualist figure. In some ways, I think as much as there’s tension between the two capitals, there’s a way that things are going in a way that benefits Xi Jinping, and can conceive it. That doesn’t explain what their personal relationship is, and how they actually see each other when they’re in the room together.
But anyway, let me, if I can lay out this particular complexity we’re in now, this trade war between us and China. Now, you’re not an economist. In fact, you think deeply about the history of peoples and the history of China. You think about culture, you think about protests and the movements and so on. And there’s some degree to which this trade war is less about the economics. Now that layer is also very important and we could discuss it, but there’s also a deeply cultural standoff almost happening here, which would be interesting. So in April, as people know, Trump escalated a trade war with China using tariffs, raising them on Chinese imports to 145%. Xi Jinping then responded by raising tariffs on US goods to 125%, and suspending exports on certain rare earth minerals and magnets to the US. The Chinese government also indicated, it would limit the import of Hollywood films, and restricted certain American companies from operating in China.
Now after that, Xi Jinping broke silence on April 11th, and again on April 14th, and since, basically saying that China is not backing down and positioned himself in China as the “responsible superpower,” that promotes, as you were saying, the promoter of the reasonable multilateral global trading framework in a stable global supply chain. He said “For over 70 years, China’s progress has been built on self-reliance and hard work, never on handoffs from others, and it remains unafraid of any unjust oppression. Also, he said there are no winners in a trade war and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation. This was all set as part of a tour of Southeast Asia, and he was calling on China and the European Union to defend international rules opposing unilateral bullying. At the same time, I saw that China’s escalating internal propaganda, including interestingly, it would be nice to talk to you about it, the use of the Mao Zedong 1953 speech during the Korean War where he says, “We will never yield.” My question is, with this standoff, who do you think will blink first? Where does this go?
So there is a way of positioning vis-a-vis other parts of the world, that is crucial part of this, that I think, I guess I’m circling around it, but there’s a tendency in discussions of US-China relations to think about it in terms of a bilateral discussion or dispute. Even though time and again, we realize that places other than the United States are key variables in these things. So the US and China being at odds in the Mao era, what changed things dramatically for that wasn’t so much even a change in… Yes, Nixon was the one who went to China, but what made it possible for Nixon to go to China was that the Sino-Soviet split happened, that actually it was tensions between China and the Soviet Union that altered equations for the United States and China.
I happened to be in China in 1999 when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and three Chinese citizens died. And there was tremendous discontent about that, anger about that it within China. And there were some rare protests that the government allowed to happen, but students were worked up about it, and there were protests outside the American Embassy and the British Embassy. That happened. And then in 2001, there was a spy plane incident that happened. So there was a lot of discussion that the next decade was going to see US-China tensions being the major force in the world. 9/11 happened. It was a dramatic reset for the trajectory that the US and China were on, which these are two totally different things, the Sino-Soviet split and 9/11. But in both cases, no matter how careful you were at parsing what was likely to be the next five years for US-China relations get dramatically changed by something that happened that wasn’t the US and China. And in the current situation, the trade war, I know that it’ll be very important that China can try to increase sales of consumer products to Europe.
This is something that Europe’s view about the United States is changing right now. These are all kinds of variables that are outside of simply Washington and Beijing as being the two actors. And sometimes, Beijing can’t control what’s happening outside, and sometimes Washington can’t. So I guess this is simply saying that when you’re watching and you’re trying to keep the eye on the ball, it matters a lot what India’s relationship to China and the United States is. So all of these are happening there. So I think that’s it, that it’s both tremendously important what’s going on between China and the United States, but it’s important to remember that they’re not the only players in this dynamic.
So then there’s a way of playing to the nationalist sentiments of some part of the population. So then in a sense, it’s hopeful that I think in some ways right now, Xi Jinping is not looking desperate in the eyes of the world. If he can focus on potentially being seen more positively in other parts of the world by seeming like a force for stability, seen as somebody who’s supporting rather than challenging some elements of the global order, that might lessen the chances of a rash action toward Taiwan. That would be a kind of desperation move.
But since you brought it up, we’ll talk about Hong Kong, but let’s talk about Taiwan and maybe there’s some parallels there. Given Xi Jinping’s emphasis on the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and the unification with Taiwan being a crucial part of his vision for China, what do you think are the chances? And how willing is he to use force to annex, to forcibly gain control over Taiwan in the coming years?
So 1997 was this kind of expiration date for the lease of this large amount of territory of what we now think of as Hong Kong. It’s a large amount of territory that the rest of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, depend on for energy, water, and food. So it would’ve been very hard to just transfer those parts to the Peoples Republic of China. So a deal needed to be struck of what would happen in 1997. And the deal was about transferring sovereignty of all of Hong Kong, all these parts, to the People’s Republic of China. And I carefully say transfer sovereignty, not give it back to the People’s Republic of China, because it never belonged to the People’s Republic of China. It was part of the Qing Empire, which was a different country, a different state that then anyway, but this needed to be transferred.
And the deal that was struck was that the London side wanted to do something to protect what was going to happen to the people there. And remember, this is not what usually happens to colonies. Colonies usually go from being part of an empire to being some degree of self-governed. And because of that, the Chinese representative of the UN insisted that Hong Kong was not a colony, and Macau was not a colony, because then they would have to be decolonized and go to independent. So anyway, there was an understanding that something would have to happen in 1997, and London wanted some protection for the people in Hong Kong, who they knew were living in a very different way than people lived under Communist party rule. There was a different kind of rule of law. There wasn’t democracy, but there was some degree of input in governance.
The colonial authority and the power most powerful person in Hong Kong was appointed by London. After 1997, the most powerful person would probably have to be somebody who could work with Beijing. But in this negotiation, something was come up with, called One Country, Two Systems. And Hong Kong would become part of the People’s Republic of China in diplomatic terms. It wouldn’t have its own military, but it would have its own system for 50 years, was the idea, from 1997 until 2047. There was a tension from the beginning over what that other system, what was going to be the part that was going to be separate. And clearly, everybody agreed it would need to have a different economic system. It had capitalism, so people agreed on that. But there was tension from the start of, well, what about legal? What about political, cultural and other things?
And things were written into this deal, which would be over time, Hong Kong, people would govern Hong Kong, but Beijing thought they would govern Hong Kong, but it would be a Hong Kong person who Beijing played a role in choosing. But the reason why Taiwan is relevant to all this is, in 1984, as they were discussing this, the Chinese Communist Party said, and will come up with this arrangement and people in Taiwan should pay attention to it, because it could provide a model for what could happen with them being absorbed into the people’s Republic of China. So the idea was Beijing said, “Hey, people in Taiwan, watch what happens to Hong Kong after 1997, and think about it as a model for what could happen with you,” saying, watch how smoothly it will go. Over time, people in Hong Kong started saying, well wait, Beijing keeps sort of nibbling away, chipping away at these things that make us separate, and especially after 2008.
There were reasons why Beijing went especially light on Hong Kong early after 1997. Beijing wanted to WTO, they wanted to host the Olympics. A big move against Hong Kong then could have endangered those things. Also at that point, the PRC was heavily dependent on economics in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong economy. Also, just something because I’m a university person. In 1997 when Hong Kong became part of the People’s Republic of China, then Hong Kong universities were the only universities in the PRC that were considered totally world-class. Hong Kong University and Chinese University of Hong Kong were highly rated institutions. And at that point, Peking University, Beijing, Beida and Tsinghua were not yet considered world-class institutions, because they didn’t have the kind of academic freedom and humanities that was at that point needed to be higher ratings.
Over time, that difference started to go away, because global ratings of universities stopped caring as much about academic freedom and things like that. And Beijing universities surpassed Hong Kong ones. So by the 2010s, when you started to have these protests in Hong Kong pushing back against what was called mainlandization, and clamping down, Hong Kong protesters in 2014 put up a banner. At the time when Beijing was holding the line against Hong Kong, people wanted to have real elections to choose the chief executive, rather than one where there were elections, but only people who Beijing approved of basically could run. Hong Kong activists put up a banner saying, “Hey, Taiwan, look at Hong Kong. Taiwan beware. Hong Kong’s today. It could be Taiwan’s tomorrow.” So basically spinning the one country, two systems argument, and saying, “Yeah, Taiwan. You should watch what happens here.”
So one way to think of Chinese leaders since Mao is that Mao and those after him, wanted to make China bigger territorially than it had been, to try to reclaim land. Under Mao, Tibet, which had been not part of China, became part of the People’s Republic of China. Mao offered something a little bit like one country, two systems to it. Isabel Hilton, who writes wonderfully about Tibet, has talked about the parallels with the Hong Kong system. And some Hong Kong activists saw parallels as well. Tibet was supposed to go its own way as part of the people’s Republic of China in the 1950s. And then by 1959, the center got restless, tried to interfere more. Local people pushed back against it. And a workable, what seemed like it might work out somehow against all odds, explodes. And the Dalai Lama goes into exile. The Dalai Lama, who before that had thought maybe he and Mao could work together, that didn’t work.
Hong Kong, a new version of the experiment happens, and it becomes clear in the 2010s that it’s not really workable, that the center is less patient, needs Hong Kong less. The Hong Kong people feel it’s more of a now or never period to push back. You could say that Deng Xiaoping oversaw the deal that got Hong Kong and Macau to become part of the People’s Republic of China. He could point to that, even though he died during 1997, but he had achieved that kind of deal. Xi Jinping could argue, you could argue, he finished the deal of making Hong Kong fully a part of the people’s Republic of China, doing away with this degree of difference. And you could say that that then is a stepping stone toward Taiwan. Or you could say that in the South China Sea Islands build up, might be enough for him to put his stamp on having been the kind of leader who expanded Beijing’s reach.
He probably wants both. Probably, to the extent, he would like Taiwan to become part of the People’s Republic of China, which it has never been. But the hope was, it could happen through a kind of more gradual absorption, and people in Taiwan being willing to think of that. And yet in part because of what’s happened to places like Hong Kong, there’s a fiercer, a stronger sense of Taiwan identity now than there was at an earlier point. And less parties that are more willing to try to negotiate some kind of tighter connection with the PRC, are often doing badly in elections there because of this mood.
And you had some people in the city of an older generation saying, “Why couldn’t they have just been more patient?” “Why did these protests force the hand of the people in power?” But I think that age has a lot to do with it, that if there was this kind of gradual erosion or there was going to be this process of doing away with the things that made Hong Kong really special and that people loved passionately about it, including this freer press, or just freer associational life and things like that. If you were 17 in 2019, and people were saying by 2047 it will all be gone, or maybe it’ll even all be…
There’s also a sense of frustration with an older generation not having done enough to resolve issues. These are things with Hong Kong, with climate change, with Thailand, the place that I’ve been working on lately. One of the slogans in 2020 when there was a push for democracy was let it end with this generation, which, again, expressed this sense of gradual solutions are fine, but we are carrying more of a burden of what we’re going to live with that. So with the 2019, also the protests, some of the things that were being chipped away at by Beijing in 2012, there was an effort to impose mainland style patriotic education, saying, well, who cares how civics is taught? But actually that has a lot to do with the larger political story. And the protesters that year, young people stood up and actually got the government to blink. The local authorities backed down on that bringing in mainland style education.
2014, the protest was to try to get full voting rights for the chief executive. The government didn’t blink on that. That was something where they held the line. It was a big, colorful, exciting protest, but in the end, it hit a dead end. 2019 there even bigger protests, and at first it seems like surprising what the issue was. The issue was an extradition law that would have people, potentially, who committed crimes in Hong Kong being tried for them if the mainland wanted them on the mainland. Now, the difference, they’re really different court systems. Hong Kong never had democracy under the British, but it did have a stronger rule of law and more independent courts. Courts that sometimes decided things that went the other way than what the government wanted.
And the mainland doesn’t have that kind of court system. 98, 99% conviction rate. In Hong Kong if you’re arrested, even for before 2020, if you were arrested, even under a politically-related charge, you were out on bail and giving interviews with the press. On the mainland, that didn’t happen. So I think in 2019, even having lost the battle over voting, this idea that, okay, we’ve really got to take a last stand to defend the rule of law and a degree of separation of powers. That doesn’t sound like a clearly obvious thing for slogans, but it is something that I think we’ve realized in this country and in other countries as well, is something that can really be definitive about where things are going politically.
What I think the government hoped, and what Beijing certainly hoped, was that some of the protesters would start doing militant actions, violent actions that would alienate the populace from the protests. And the protesters did do some of those things, but they tended to attack, the violence was often against property. And when there were occasionally violence against people, people within the movement would apologize or try to distance themselves from that. Meanwhile, the government was never apologizing or distancing itself from the police. And that created a dynamic where they had these enormous numbers of people who were previously on the fence about things turning up for these protests and leading to them being giant. And this was a city that sometimes had the misunderstood reputation as being one where people didn’t care that much about politics. They just focused on living a good life. But there was a sense that they wouldn’t have that possibility if you had a police, and the police used to be really highly respected in Hong Kong, but have lost that.
And sometimes a new generation will say, “Look at what they did. That was exciting, but we want to put our mark on things by [inaudible 02:12:39] generation.” So there were these 1986 protests that fizzled out that helped lay the groundwork for the 1989 ones. In Hong Kong, there were the 2012 and 2014 ones that laid the groundwork 2019. Some of the times, it was the same activists out on the streets again, but sometimes it was a younger generation said, “Yeah, okay, but that failed. So what can we do differently?” And we see this in cases in the US and we see it around the world, of the percolating of things that happen, sometimes in conversations that continue, that happen. And sometimes failures can seem like dead ends, but over a long period of time we see them as succeeding. And it can seem irrational to try to do something after the last three times people have tried to do it have failed. But then occasionally, history shows that the third time or the fifth time or the 20th time actually does succeed. There’s enough countervailing. In Eastern Europe, you would say in 1956, there was a rising, it was crushed. In ’68 they were rising, was crushed. Poland 1981, martial law imposed. In 1989, what were East German protesters thinking when they poured out onto the streets, and then it happened, but this time it wasn’t. So I think there’s a way in which social movements are fundamentally unpredictable and there are just times when, against all seeming odds, something that seemed like it would be there forever, just no longer is.
And I think it’s a strange thing because there’s also often an impatience in movements of people wanting immediate results. But as a historian, looking at situations, I’ve mentioned Eastern Europe and Central Europe, but Europe, Taiwan was a right-wing dictatorship under a version of martial law for decades. And at each stage, it would seem that people struggling to change it were on a quixotic, impossible mission, or South Korea was in a similar situation. And then in the late 1980s, you start to have those things unravel. And it’s partly because of a steady resistance. It’s partly because something in the world changes, but there’s often a combination of those things. So I’m interested in that whole, we know that what happened in Hong Kong in the short run didn’t work, and I don’t see a way in which the national security laws reversed or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean that it was a completely impossible effort, even though we know the result in that case was to have this failure.
And my new Milk Tea Alliance book that I’ve just written, I dedicate it to two people who’ve lived through a variety of these things. One is a Burmese activist who was involved in a failed uprising in 1988. He then was an exile who didn’t know whether he could ever see his brothers who he loves back in Burma. And then something magical changed. And in the 2010s, it seemed that there was a democratization that turned out to be a false dawn. He was able to go back and now he’s, again, when there’s been a coup and a crackdown, he’s now again cut off. And at one point, I was asking him about how he feels about this when he’s still trying to raise awareness globally about what’s happening in Myanmar. He said, “I feel helpless but not hopeless.” I think how does somebody maintain hope in that?
And the other person I dedicated to Miklós Haraszti is a Hungarian friend of mine who was an activist before ’89 and saw this amazing thing happen was communism, a communist party rule ending. He was part of the process that came and he was friends with Havel, and Havel’s there and Poland’s changing and all of this exhilarating moment, but ends up being a critic of Orbán and following a tightening of controlling, a rolling back of many of the things that were victorious then. But this, the no straight road, that actually there’s something about, it can be disquieting when these unexpected things are blows to where you thought direction history was going. But history just shows you that history doesn’t have a direction. There isn’t a straight road.
And so then there was a sense of relief, I think, when there was as unified a western, NATO, including the United States response. And then there’s a concern about the Trump presidency because of Ukraine. At the same time, there’re mixed signals. So I’m sure there are people there who are both saying, “Trump is going to be tough toward the Chinese Communist Party,” and others are going to say, “But if he’s not as supportive of Ukraine, what does that say for the defensive?” So they’re not the same situations, but all people have, in a sense, sometimes with unknowable situations, is to look at things that have any degree of parallel connections in other places.
You’re saying no, you have to say no with a military force behind it. Then what do you do? And every step in this, it’s such an unstable, non-linear, dynamical system where anything could just, unintended consequences can happen and it could just escalate in a matter of days, if not hours. And so this is where I think it’s really important to find mechanisms and tactics and strategies for de-escalation, which is why this trade war that’s happening, one of the nice things of being so connected by trade is it creates a disincentive for any of this posturing. Because I do agree with you. I think it will start, as these things often do, as a military, early steps posturing in order to maintain power internally. So China will just create military conflict, conflict of different kinds in order to distract. But then how does that escalate?
And he said, “But that’s really silly. That’s a really silly argument because Americans know that down river from there, what would be flooded out was the place where their iPhones are built and they want their iPhones.” So this notion he is making through a humorous point, the way in which interconnectedness can be a check. And interconnectedness can be in all kinds of ways. The flows of people between places and having people from one place living in another, traveling to another, studying in another, that can actually be something that helps to stabilize the world. And I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind.
There were a group of foreign powers, including Tsarist Russia, that had gained big concessions out of China when, in 1900, The Boxer Uprising had taken place and then been crushed by a consortium of foreign powers who had gotten privileges and indemnities out of that. And the newly formed Soviet Union renounced those. Said that was the old order. That was imperialism. And so, Marx’s ideas were attractive to some Chinese thinkers, but Lenin was very attractive because of his combination of anti-imperialism and his notion of a vanguard party leading a country forward. So there was a small communist party, a bigger nationalist party. They were involved in these protests against warlords and against imperialists. And while Sun Yat-sen was alive, Sun Yat-sen got the two parties to work together because Sun Yat-sen wasn’t a Marxist. He didn’t believe in class struggle, but he admired Lenin and Leninism. And so, he said that actually The Communist Party and The Nationalist Party may have had different views of the path forward for China, but they agreed on who the enemies were and the enemies were the warlords who were keeping China weak and too willing to compromise with Japan, and foreign imperialism. So China needed to get rid of the warlords and become a stronger country, and then they could sort it out of what road to take. Sun Yat-sen dies in 1925, and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, is initially keeps the alliance going with the Communist Party, but in 1927, he turns against the communists and tries to carry out a purge against The Communist Party members.
After World War II, after the two parties have brokered a truce and sort of worked together against Japan, there’s a civil war between the nationalists and the communists. And against all odds, the Communist party wins. The Communist Party gets support from the Soviet Union. The Nationalists get support from the United States, even though neither of them are quite doing things the way that their backer would like them to. But there also is a way in which, and this is something I think the Communist Party leaders remember, there’s a feeling that the Nationalist Party doesn’t really believe its own rhetoric. That, in fact, all it cares about is having power, and that it’s internally corrupt. Chiang Kai-shek himself isn’t viewed as sort of personally corrupt, but family members, and there’s an idea that there’s just a small band of people that are benefiting. And there’s a kind of disgust with the Nationalists. The Nationalists end up in retreat in Taiwan. That’s why Taiwan then becomes the Republic of China.
There’s an uprising there that Chiang Kai-shek’s people, the Nationalists, repress. And there starts being from the late-nineteen forties on this long period of martial law on Taiwan. And there becomes then this period where the mainland’s under the control of a Leninist party, believes in one party rule, and believes that it was a very bad in Chinese history when China was unable to stand up to imperialists. Taiwan’s controlled by a Leninist party that believes in one-party rule, limits on participation, believes that it was a bad time when China was being bullied by imperialists. What distinguishes, Chiang Kai-shek has a personality cult, Mao has a personality cult. They have a lot in common, but one clear thing that makes them different is Chiang Kai-shek says that what’s wrong with the Communist Party is they’ve abandoned Chinese traditional values of Confucianism. And Mao says that on the nationalists, what’s really bad is they are still wedded to these traditional Chinese values of Confucianism.
So cycling back to where we began with Mao and Xi, you could actually say Xi Jinping in some ways is living out the dream that Chiang Kai-shek had of one- party rule and also kind of celebrating Confucianism.
And there was this struggle between people who were more gradualist, more let’s try to work more kind of rationally, and the more utopian side with Mao. And both The Great Leap Forward and then later the cultural revolution were Mao’s efforts to do things dramatically, even at the risk of chaos, even at the risk of undoing a lot of the slow building of state building going on. Then there were other figures who were more concerned with incremental moves. And then, after Mao’s death, one of those figures, Deng Xiaoping ends up being the next long-term paramount leader.
Early in the Chinese Communist Party history and power, there was the connection to the Soviet Union. Mao and Stalin had a connection. After Stalin’s death, Mao was haunted by the move toward de-Stalinization and the moves by Khrushchev, and thus laid the groundwork for the Sino-Soviet split. But there was also this kind of obsession with doing things differently that Mao had in that case as well. And you have factional struggles, you have all kinds of things that are happening simultaneously.
And so, there’s always been a way of trying to separate out the kind of Mao of the periods when things were not going horribly. And I think Xi Jinping would think that Mao having managed to fight the Korean War to a standstill, which is how the history of that period is described in the PRC. He said, “Look, you had so many different forces of the more developed world fighting on one side, and that war did not end in a defeat for North Korea and for the Chinese side.” So yeah, Xi Jinping, I think, wants to be seen as an inheritor of Mao, continuer of one side of the Mao legacy, but clearly circling back to where we began, not the Mao who liked to stir things up, not the Mao who believed in mobilizing youth on the streets, not the Mao who let things get out of control, but the Mao who was responsible for strengthening the nation.
Mao could alternate that certain points he thought there should be an alliance with, or he said that China should be able to work with Japan, because he said it at one point. He said, “Well, without Japanese imperialism, the Communist Party wouldn’t have risen because we wouldn’t have had this ability to unite the people.” We have seen in the post-Mao period, some leaders playing on sort of anti-Japanese sentiment because of the history of Japanese aggression. Or there can be anti-American sentiment because of the history of American roles in imperialism, or it can be played in a different way. The United States certainly tried that. The United States didn’t have formal colonies in Asia the way that Britain and France did and tried to present itself differently.
But these things are also kind of in flux. And now we’re in this very unusual in flux period. At the beginning of the imposition of tariffs. There were leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea all together in photo ops, which was not something that, being on the same side. So I think this is also just a kind of broader lesson to not assume that configurations will always stay.
I hope it can be seen by some, at least within Beijing, as a miscalculation too. The People’s Republic of China wanted soft power, and Hong Kong films were admired around the world, this industry. There was a way in which creativity flourished. I guess it would be just the hope for more spaces where that kind of creativity and openness where things can flourish. I’d love to think that there actually are a variety of things in Taiwan that if those could become broader norms, not that Taiwan’s perfect, it has its own internal problems, but there are many really attractive things about it right now. Different kinds of things that flourish. So maybe a setting in which Taiwan and in its post martial law, post-Leninist incarnation would be something that we could think of more.
And there have been protesters in a lot of other parts of the world. I used to say from Minneapolis to Minsk, because in 2020 there were protests in the US and in Belarus where there were activists who were talking about the Hong Kong idea of sort of trying to focus on be water, more flexible protest tactics. And clearly in Thailand, there were people who looked at things to learn from Hong Kong, even in defeat. There’s a New Zealand-based China specialist, Geremie Barmé, who talks about the other China, which can exist within China, physical China, or elsewhere. Which is this equally attached to Chinese traditions, but thinking of those traditions as including not just Confucianism but Taoism, not just hierarchy, but also openness to cosmopolitanism. Not just nationalism, but cosmopolitanism.
And I think there are some elements of that, that even in failure, the Hong Kong movements, the Hong Kong protests of the 2020s were a last flourishing of that. And we can see some elements of that in, we can think of Taiwan, elements of that is another China as well. I think not allowing the particular version of Chineseness that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping wants to make people think of as the essence of Chinese. China has multiple cultural strands, multiple traditions that people can tap into. And it’s something richer and more admirable, I think, than this narrowed down version.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 0:16 – Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong
- 3:45 – Confucius
- 11:15 – Education
- 19:21 – Tiananmen Square
- 30:36 – Tank Man
- 40:36 – Censorship
- 1:16:33 – Xi Jinping
- 1:34:41 – Donald Trump
- 1:38:34 – Trade war
- 1:51:23 – Taiwan
- 2:01:36 – Protests in Hong Kong
- 2:33:55 – Mao Zedong
- 2:55:36 – Future of China
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Jeffrey Wasserstrom.
The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Jeffrey Wasserstrom.
Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong
Lex Fridman
You’ve compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past. What are the parallels between the two leaders, and where do they differ? Xi Jinping, of course, is the current leader of China for the past 12 years, and Mao Zedong was the communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. So what are the commonalities, what are the differences?
You’ve compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past. What are the parallels between the two leaders, and where do they differ? Xi Jinping, of course, is the current leader of China for the past 12 years, and Mao Zedong was the communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. So what are the commonalities, what are the differences?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So the biggest commonality of them is that they’re both the subject of personality cults, and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him, collections of his speeches. And when Mao was alive, you might’ve thought that’s sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China. But after Mao’s death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power.
So the biggest commonality of them is that they’re both the subject of personality cults, and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him, collections of his speeches. And when Mao was alive, you might’ve thought that’s sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China. But after Mao’s death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power.
I was first in China in 1986, and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. You would know, but his face wasn’t everywhere, the newspaper wasn’t dominated with stories about him, and quotations from his words and things like that. So with Xi Jinping, you’ve had a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past.
So that’s a key commonality, and a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down in a sense that he talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but he also really, his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was the Monkey King about this legendary figure who is this Monkey King who could turn the heavens upside down. So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a way to improve things.
Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very, very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up like that, people on the streets clamoring. So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it’s not manifesting itself. He doesn’t like the idea of people on the streets in anything that can’t be controlled. So there are a lot of ways that they’re similar, a lot of ways they’re different.
They’re also different, and this fits with this orderliness that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China. And Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part, and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior, whereas Mao like things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a feudal way of thought that it held China back. So you can come up with things that they’re similar and you can come up with things where they’re really opposites. But they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party, and that’s been a continuity, and that connects them to the leaders in between them too as well.
Confucius
Lex Fridman
So there’s some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of Communism and the ideas of Confucianism. So let’s go all the way back. You wrote that in order to understand the China of today, we have to study its past. So the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius?
So there’s some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping espouses the ideas of Communism and the ideas of Confucianism. So let’s go all the way back. You wrote that in order to understand the China of today, we have to study its past. So the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
First of all, we don’t know that much about the historic Confucius. He’s around the same time as figures like Socrates. And like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So you can have a lot of fun with these sort of Axial Age thinkers and what they had in common.
First of all, we don’t know that much about the historic Confucius. He’s around the same time as figures like Socrates. And like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So you can have a lot of fun with these sort of Axial Age thinkers and what they had in common.
Another thing that connects these Axial Age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation, the elite, and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped decide how you should run a polity. Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past that the lines between inferior and superior were clear, and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence, and things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end.
And he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers were… These were all parallels, and there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism.
Even something that in the West we often think of as a kind of quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers. In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.
Lex Fridman
So stable hierarchy was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything including politics.
So stable hierarchy was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything including politics.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah. And there was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven this kind of non-personified deity like the emperor was to the minister. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven.
Yeah. And there was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven this kind of non-personified deity like the emperor was to the minister. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven.
And for Confucius, he said, so we should study the texts, we should study how the sages of old behaved, that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward looking. It wasn’t arguing for progress, it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. So it was also a kind of conservative. So in all kinds of ways, it’s irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.
Lex Fridman
So that’s the interesting thing about Xi Jinping and the China of today is there is that tension of Confucianism and communism where communism, Marxism is supposed to let go of history. And Confucianism, there’s a real veneration of history that’s happening in China of today. So they’re able to wear both hats and balance it.
So that’s the interesting thing about Xi Jinping and the China of today is there is that tension of Confucianism and communism where communism, Marxism is supposed to let go of history. And Confucianism, there’s a real veneration of history that’s happening in China of today. So they’re able to wear both hats and balance it.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah. You could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious Monkey King tradition, which was what Mao connected to.
Yeah. You could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious Monkey King tradition, which was what Mao connected to.
Xi Jinping and before him to some extent, Hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit, the Olympics, it was more of this kind of mix it all together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. So Xi Jinping says that Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model, but so is Confucius. And there’s really… they had so little in common, but they both, in his mind and the minds of others, suggest a kind of power and greatness of the Chinese past.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So this platonic notion of greatness, and that you could say that’s a thread that connects for Xi Jinping the great history, multi-thousand year history of China.
Yeah. So this platonic notion of greatness, and that you could say that’s a thread that connects for Xi Jinping the great history, multi-thousand year history of China.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah. And it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China jumping forward a bit in 221 BC. He is anti-scholars, he burns books, and he doesn’t venerate these kind of rituals and things. So he was very much against the things that Confucius stood for. And Mao in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor, he said, “Well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. Scholars can be a pain.” So he said, “If you have to choose between Confucianism and that.”
Yeah. And it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China jumping forward a bit in 221 BC. He is anti-scholars, he burns books, and he doesn’t venerate these kind of rituals and things. So he was very much against the things that Confucius stood for. And Mao in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor, he said, “Well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. Scholars can be a pain.” So he said, “If you have to choose between Confucianism and that.”
But Xi Jinping I think continually is kind of not choosing. And if he wants to say, “Well, look at the Great Wall, look at this wonderful… In fact that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor.” Who by the way, didn’t build anything like the Great Wall you see today. He built walls, and they were fine, they were good, but the Great Wall itself didn’t come into being until many centuries later. But still, this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that as a, in many ways, a nationalist above all else, Xi Jinping is a supporter of the party and single-party rule. That’s something he clearly believes in, and he’s a nationalist, he wants to see China be great and acknowledge this great on the world stage.
Education
Lex Fridman
Boy, so many contradictions always with Stalin, he was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction, it also permeates through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping. But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, “People are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning.” So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Can you speak to this Confucius’s idea of education, and how much does it permeate to the China of today?
Boy, so many contradictions always with Stalin, he was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction, it also permeates through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping. But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, “People are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning.” So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Can you speak to this Confucius’s idea of education, and how much does it permeate to the China of today?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Sure. So there’s an optimism to this, there’s an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good. And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they’ll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it was a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. And it did have this idea, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education.
Sure. So there’s an optimism to this, there’s an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good. And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they’ll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it was a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. And it did have this idea, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education.
And I think that shows through in all kinds of things, even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that people could be remolded potentially. And China was one of the few places where they didn’t kill the last emperor. The last emperor, the idea was that he could become… anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this, a good member of this polity through the kind of education, often it was a very kind of forceful form of education, but I think that’s a carryover from the Confucian times.
And over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracy should be run, not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your career, a bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing could set you on the road to a good career. In China, you had the civil service exam tradition.
So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing of scholarly pursuits, but then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there’s an ambivalence to it or a contradiction again there.
Lex Fridman
But to which degree, this idea of meritocracy that’s inherent to the notion that we all start at the same line, there’s a meritocratic view of human nature there? Or if you work hard and you learn things, you will succeed. And so the reverse, if you haven’t succeeded, that means you didn’t work hard, and therefore do not deserve the spoils of the success. Does that carry over to the China of today?
But to which degree, this idea of meritocracy that’s inherent to the notion that we all start at the same line, there’s a meritocratic view of human nature there? Or if you work hard and you learn things, you will succeed. And so the reverse, if you haven’t succeeded, that means you didn’t work hard, and therefore do not deserve the spoils of the success. Does that carry over to the China of today?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
There’s such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil service exams, but the question was if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams.
There’s such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil service exams, but the question was if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams.
One thing that happened there was families would pull together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there was always a tension of that, so what if you don’t succeed?
Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. You had this issue, and then it became something, well, the system was out of whack, and it needed a new leader.
And also there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters, Mencius, had this idea, which can be seen as a crude justification for a rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven, if he doesn’t act like a true emperor, if he’s not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there’s no obligation to show deference for a ruler who’s not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that if the rebellion isn’t justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed. But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed, and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it’s an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral dimension to it, but it also, it’s when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.
Lex Fridman
Okay, so it’s meritocracy with an asterisk. It does seem to be the case, maybe you can speak to that, that in the Chinese education system, there seems to be a high value for excellence. Hopefully I’m not generalizing too much, but from the things I’ve seen, there are certain cultures, certain peoples that it’s just part of the value system of the culture that you need to be a really good student. Is that the case with the China of today?
Okay, so it’s meritocracy with an asterisk. It does seem to be the case, maybe you can speak to that, that in the Chinese education system, there seems to be a high value for excellence. Hopefully I’m not generalizing too much, but from the things I’ve seen, there are certain cultures, certain peoples that it’s just part of the value system of the culture that you need to be a really good student. Is that the case with the China of today?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
There’s been a lot of emphasis on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at some subjects and having… There isn’t the civil service exam, but there is the Gaokao, an exam that really can determine where you get what kind of institution you get into.
There’s been a lot of emphasis on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at some subjects and having… There isn’t the civil service exam, but there is the Gaokao, an exam that really can determine where you get what kind of institution you get into.
And I think getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which is strong in a lot of tradition. It also a kind of… what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness on who’s getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided, this leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism, which really seems to subvert this whole idea of kind of meritocracy.
And the 1989 protests of Tiananmen, even though kind of in the Western press particularly was discussed as a movement for democracy, but a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism, and the sense that people, despite all the talk… I mean, despite the fact that most people seem to be having to study really hard to pass these exams to get good positions in universities, that some of them were being handed out via the kind of back door. And that led to a kind of outrage. I mean, that’s true in many places, but I think it gives a special anger against nepotism because of that, the way in which so much emphasis is put on kind of the standard exam way of getting ahead.
Tiananmen Square
Lex Fridman
I hope it’s okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. Since you mentioned Tiananmen Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history, throughout history in general, what happened in Tiananmen Square?
I hope it’s okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. Since you mentioned Tiananmen Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history, throughout history in general, what happened in Tiananmen Square?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So in 1989, this massive movement took place, the story of it’s largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood in other places in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the former Soviet Bloc. So I think it’s often conflated with what was going on there. And so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals, and to try to support the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing and opening up form that had taken shape after Mao’s death. And in a sense, the student generation of ’89, and I was there in ’86 when there were some sort of warm-up protests, there was a kind of frustration with what they felt was a half-assed version of what they were talking about, that the government was saying, the party was saying, we believe in reforming and opening up, we need to liberalize, we need to give people more control of their fate. And the students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm, and that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that suggested the party needed to be pressed to really, really move in that direction.
So in 1989, this massive movement took place, the story of it’s largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood in other places in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the former Soviet Bloc. So I think it’s often conflated with what was going on there. And so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals, and to try to support the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing and opening up form that had taken shape after Mao’s death. And in a sense, the student generation of ’89, and I was there in ’86 when there were some sort of warm-up protests, there was a kind of frustration with what they felt was a half-assed version of what they were talking about, that the government was saying, the party was saying, we believe in reforming and opening up, we need to liberalize, we need to give people more control of their fate. And the students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm, and that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that suggested the party needed to be pressed to really, really move in that direction.
And it’ll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in ’86 when I was there in Shanghai in late ’86, and students protested, and this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the Culture Revolution or at least since ’76.
And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussion of democracy by this physicist, Fang Lizhi, who was a kind of often thought a Chinese Sakharov. He was a liberalizing intellectual.
But one of the things that students in Shanghai, where some of the most intense protests that year took place, were frustrated about was a rock concert of all things that Jan and Dean, the American surf rock band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big, and they were touring China. It was the first time in Shanghai that there’d been a rock concert. And the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward, was letting them be more part of the world. And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. And at the concert, some students got up to dance because that’s what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert, and the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this would’ve symbolized what was a feint toward openness that really didn’t have follow-through; we’re going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance.
And so the protests went on for a little while in ’86, and posters went up. The officials at universities said, “Now this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the Culture Revolution. We can’t go back to that.” And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said, this is new Red Guardism. And the students didn’t want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly, and they thought, we’re not like the Red Guards. We don’t want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. The analogy partly sort of scared them, and also it meant that the government was really serious about dealing with them.
So then in 1989, the protest restart, and there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. The space for them… Students are thinking about doing something in 1989. It’s a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more importantly, it’s the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May Fourth Movement of 1919.
And the May Fourth Movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some member leading founders of it had been student activists then, it was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. And so the students thought the anniversary of that movement was always marked, commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past, and so there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something.
And then a leader, Hu Yaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party, he had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after partly taking a fairly light stance toward the ’86, ’87 protests. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up. He had been sort of Deng Xiaoping’s potential successor, and he dies unexpectedly. And there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. And the students take advantage of the opening of there having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members. They said, “So some people are dying too young, some people don’t seem like they’re ever going to die.”
So they begin these sorts of protests. This is in April of ’89. And the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop quickly, and they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in People’s Daily that says, “This is creating chaos,” which is a code term for take us back to the Culture Revolution. And this time the students say, “No, we’re just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that there’s too much corruption and nepotism. There’s not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party.” And so they keep up the protests.
And there’s a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily. And so there’s sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro-managing of their private lives on campuses.
So the protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It’s an anti-corruption movement, it’s a call for more democracy movement, it’s a call for more freedom of speech movement, but it’s also a kind of… has some counterculture elements that are like, there are rock concerts on the square, the most popular rock musician, Cui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he’s there. There’s a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one.
And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc. It was actually, in many ways, I think more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the Communist Bloc, which was about moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties empowered to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them.
So there was a kind of disjuncture, happened at the same time as moves to end communism. But of course, so there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square. It seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement to just have a kind of course correction. But then there’s also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership. And clearly the people who are more political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the upper hand. And this is not going to be tolerated. And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out. Students from around the country are pouring in to Beijing to join this movement. They don’t want to end the movement when they’ve just arrived. So it’s actually one thing that keeps it going is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay.
And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form a independent labor union. And that really, the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent, they might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of potential intellectual leaders of the country. And admiration for scholars is part of this that people turn out when students protest, something very different from the American case where there’s a kind of often suspicious of student activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else.
But in China, there had been, from the history of the 20th century, a sense of students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in. And there’s a massacre near Tiananmen Square on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early on June 4th. And the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something that People’s Liberation Army is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression, and they’re acting like an invading force.
Lex Fridman
So this is where famously the tanks roll in.
So this is where famously the tanks roll in.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
The tanks roll in, and I think also you have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank. That’s a banned image within China. And I really think the reason why it’s so considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People’s Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force.
The tanks roll in, and I think also you have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank. That’s a banned image within China. And I really think the reason why it’s so considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People’s Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force.
Tank Man
Lex Fridman
Can we talk about that, who’s now called the Tank Man, the man that stood in front of the row of tanks? This was on June 5th in Tiananmen Square. What do we know about him? What do you think about him, the symbolism?
Can we talk about that, who’s now called the Tank Man, the man that stood in front of the row of tanks? This was on June 5th in Tiananmen Square. What do we know about him? What do you think about him, the symbolism?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
It’s an amazing symbol. He’s on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks, and it’s unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there’s some interesting things about…
It’s an amazing symbol. He’s on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks, and it’s unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there’s some interesting things about…
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
… act of incredible bravery. And there’s some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end he climbs up on the tank and the tank swerves. It doesn’t run him over. And the Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, “Look, the Western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint. Look at this. He wasn’t mowed down.” And they tried this whole story with Tiananmen initially of saying, “Look, the students were out of control. Everybody should remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution, and the army showed restraint.” And there were a small number of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their tanks during… Once the massacre began, people got outraged and they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of footage, the Communist Party could say, “Look. Actually look at this. The heroes, the martyrs, were these soldiers.”
… act of incredible bravery. And there’s some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end he climbs up on the tank and the tank swerves. It doesn’t run him over. And the Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, “Look, the Western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint. Look at this. He wasn’t mowed down.” And they tried this whole story with Tiananmen initially of saying, “Look, the students were out of control. Everybody should remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution, and the army showed restraint.” And there were a small number of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their tanks during… Once the massacre began, people got outraged and they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of footage, the Communist Party could say, “Look. Actually look at this. The heroes, the martyrs, were these soldiers.”
And they try, for the first months after it, to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about Tiananmen a lot. They talk about these things. They show images of the tank man. The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that in fact, there’d first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons. And there had been many, many people, some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers, who were just mowed down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn’t work.
And then I think the claim had to be made to try to suppress discussion of the event and particularly to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of the line of tanks. Whatever the tanks did to him or not, the main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city. The image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule, and they really didn’t want to have that image out there in the world.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. We’re watching the video now. He’s got, what, grocery bags in his hands? It’s such a symbolic, “I’ve had enough,” that kind of statement.
Yeah. We’re watching the video now. He’s got, what, grocery bags in his hands? It’s such a symbolic, “I’ve had enough,” that kind of statement.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah, and it’s probably not a student. It’s often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. And it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man baring his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during what we think of as Prague Spring. That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. And in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. But that was an image… What was so powerful in that was saying, “We’re not going to put up with this invasion.”
Yeah, and it’s probably not a student. It’s often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. And it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man baring his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during what we think of as Prague Spring. That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. And in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. But that was an image… What was so powerful in that was saying, “We’re not going to put up with this invasion.”
Again, I think you have the People’s Liberation Army looking like an invading force, and that’s what the Chinese Communist Party in a sense can’t deal with now. Even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989, and they do tell a version of this, and some people believe this, I think, is that in 1989, China went one route of not having the Communist Party dramatically change or relinquish control, and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another. And you could say, “Well, look.” And after 1989, the Chinese economy boomed. Life got better for people in China. Life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet blocs. “Actually, maybe this was the right way to go.” And you can make that kind of argument, but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks, you just have a different kind of image of heroism.
Lex Fridman
It’s one of my favorite photographs or snapshots ever taken, videos ever taken, so I apologize if we linger on it. Sometimes you don’t understand the symbolic power of an image until afterwards, and perhaps that’s what the Chinese government didn’t quite understand. They lost information more than [inaudible 00:35:39]. So I have to ask, what do you think was going through that man’s head? Was it a heroic statement? Was it a purely primal guttural, “I’ve had enough”?
It’s one of my favorite photographs or snapshots ever taken, videos ever taken, so I apologize if we linger on it. Sometimes you don’t understand the symbolic power of an image until afterwards, and perhaps that’s what the Chinese government didn’t quite understand. They lost information more than [inaudible 00:35:39]. So I have to ask, what do you think was going through that man’s head? Was it a heroic statement? Was it a purely primal guttural, “I’ve had enough”?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
It’s so interesting to just speculate, and we just don’t know, because he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important, because one of the students’ main demands was, then I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square, would’ve been to say, “We want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic, that our goals are patriotic.” We’re not here to take China back into the Cultural Revolution. We’re here to express our love for the country if it goes in the right way. So will you admit that?”
It’s so interesting to just speculate, and we just don’t know, because he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important, because one of the students’ main demands was, then I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square, would’ve been to say, “We want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic, that our goals are patriotic.” We’re not here to take China back into the Cultural Revolution. We’re here to express our love for the country if it goes in the right way. So will you admit that?”
And you mentioned about the power of the image, and I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something, has taken to heart the power of the image after that, because we saw this when there were protests in Hong Kong. The government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of crowds out of control. And initially in 2014, and again initially in 2019, there were very orderly crowds, and it had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images of peaceful protests until there were some incidents, as there almost always are, of violence by crowds, and then they would show those images over and over again.
They also worked very hard, when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s, to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police. And they tried very hard and managed to success because the Western press was often saying, “Will this be another Tiananmen? Will there be a massacre, or will there be soldiers on the streets?” The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without the use of shooting to kill on the streets. They were shooting to wound. There was bean-bag shot. There were rubber bullets. There was enormous amounts of tear gas. There was even tear gas let fly inside subway stations in 2019.
And all these things are really brutalizing, but they don’t make the kind of images that sear in the mind the way something like the Tiananmen tank man image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm, a young woman, that became another of the iconic images during Vietnam War. Those images really can have an extraordinary power, and I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are very few photographs allowed of the Xinjiang extra-legal detention camps. There is an awareness of how much power a photograph of a certain type can have.
Lex Fridman
So nobody knows what happened to the tank man?
So nobody knows what happened to the tank man?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
What do you think happened to the tank man?
What do you think happened to the tank man?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
I assume he was killed.
I assume he was killed.
Lex Fridman
Killed.
Killed.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
I assume he was just disappeared. It’s interesting because very often, figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and not allowed to get enough medical care, so you can talk about him having died earlier than he should have. But there’s been relatively few for political crimes recently, sentencing to death and things like that. It’s much more just remove them, imprison them. But the tank man, there was never a trial, even a trial that was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared.
I assume he was just disappeared. It’s interesting because very often, figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and not allowed to get enough medical care, so you can talk about him having died earlier than he should have. But there’s been relatively few for political crimes recently, sentencing to death and things like that. It’s much more just remove them, imprison them. But the tank man, there was never a trial, even a trial that was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared.
And there’s been somebody who’s like another figure like this who’s disappeared. A couple of years ago in Beijing, there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge, Sitong bridge in Beijing. And it was extraordinary. It had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country. It was denunciation of Covid policies, but also a dictatorial rule. And the banner, somehow he managed to have it up and get it long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he’s disappeared, and there hasn’t been a show trial or even a secret trial, and again, we don’t know if he’s still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn’t want a competing story out there. They don’t want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking.
Censorship
Lex Fridman
How much censorship is there in modern-day China by the Chinese government?
How much censorship is there in modern-day China by the Chinese government?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
There’s a lot of censorship. One of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there’s fear, which is this direct censorship thing, like banning things. But there’s also friction. She has three Fs, fear, friction, and flooding, and she says they’re all important, and I think this is true not just of China, but in other settings too.
There’s a lot of censorship. One of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there’s fear, which is this direct censorship thing, like banning things. But there’s also friction. She has three Fs, fear, friction, and flooding, and she says they’re all important, and I think this is true not just of China, but in other settings too.
So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don’t want them to get. Even though you know that some people will get it, you just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you’ll get through a search. So a lot of tech-savvy or globally minded, tapped-in Chinese people will use a VPN to jump over the firewall. But it’s work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN. So you just create friction so that, okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding. You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those exist and in operation, and I think the fear is the easiest side to say what’s blocked.
So I’m always interested in things that you would expect to be censored that aren’t censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarianism. You can read Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism. You’re not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state of anything, but it’s not specifically about China. And so censorship is most restrictive when it’s things that are actually about China. Things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, there’s intense kind of censorship of that, and certain events in that way. But something through allegory, something through imagining a place that looks a lot like a Communist Party-ruled state so that people are going to read it…
There were things that were banned up until the very last period of Gorbachev’s rule, things banned in the Soviet Union, that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. You’ve been able to since 1985. Again, it’s not about China. And actually, for some people within China in the mid-1980s, where they focused on the part of 1984 that’s the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people, for some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present.
And then by the ’90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren’t having fun. Some people would read 1984 and say, “Look, this is the world we’re living in. It’s a Big Brother state.” But others said, “Well, that has some similarities to us, but he wasn’t talking about a country like ours. Look, we’ve got supermarkets. We’ve got McDonald’s. We’ve got fast trains. We’re living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did, and this isn’t like that bleak world he was imagining.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You’ve actually spoken about and described China’s more akin to the dystopian world of Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot. I’ve recently, over the past couple of years, reread Brave New World a couple of times, and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st Century might be more defined to the degree it is dystopian, any of the nations are, by Brave New World than by 1984.
Yeah. You’ve actually spoken about and described China’s more akin to the dystopian world of Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot. I’ve recently, over the past couple of years, reread Brave New World a couple of times, and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st Century might be more defined to the degree it is dystopian, any of the nations are, by Brave New World than by 1984.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more one than the other, and there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other, I think. And if we just think about control through distraction and playing to your sense of pleasure… One thing that people forget sometimes, or don’t know, is that Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, taught Eric Blair, who became George Orwell, when he was a student at Eden. And they were rivals.
There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more one than the other, and there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other, I think. And if we just think about control through distraction and playing to your sense of pleasure… One thing that people forget sometimes, or don’t know, is that Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, taught Eric Blair, who became George Orwell, when he was a student at Eden. And they were rivals.
And in fact, in 1949, Orwell sent his former teacher a copy in 1984 and said, “Look, I’ve written this.” Basically, it’s almost a little Oedipal. “I’ve written this book that displaces yours.” He didn’t say that. He just said, “I want you to have this.” But he had criticized Brave New World in reviews, having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before, realizing the totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China, not that he mentions China, and he just said, “It’s a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population,” basically saying, “More like what was in my book than in yours.”
Lex Fridman
I have to say, I think Huxley might be really on to something there. Truly a visionary. Although to give points to Orwell, I do think as far as just a philosophical work of fiction, 1984 is a better book, because Brave New World does not quite construct the philosophical message thoroughly because 1984 contains many very clearly, very poetically defined elements of a totalitarian regime.
I have to say, I think Huxley might be really on to something there. Truly a visionary. Although to give points to Orwell, I do think as far as just a philosophical work of fiction, 1984 is a better book, because Brave New World does not quite construct the philosophical message thoroughly because 1984 contains many very clearly, very poetically defined elements of a totalitarian regime.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Oh, and the dissection of language is so amazing.
Oh, and the dissection of language is so amazing.
Lex Fridman
Language.
Language.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
No, I think you’ve got a point there, and I went back and reread Brave New World, and it’s fascinating but it’s very messy.
No, I think you’ve got a point there, and I went back and reread Brave New World, and it’s fascinating but it’s very messy.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
I think there’s a clarity to Orwell’s 1984. There’s a clarity to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, similarly, the construction of the elements, and she was a big fan of both 1984 and Brave New World, so there’s a way they go forward. It’s not exactly a sequel, but Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited in the ’50s.
I think there’s a clarity to Orwell’s 1984. There’s a clarity to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, similarly, the construction of the elements, and she was a big fan of both 1984 and Brave New World, so there’s a way they go forward. It’s not exactly a sequel, but Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited in the ’50s.
Lex Fridman
Yes, he did. Right. That’s in
Yes, he did. Right. That’s in
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
And he mentions China there. He says that in Mao’s China, they’re combining the two things of this. And I’m really fascinated by that, because they published in China, on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It’s called the Dystopian Trilogy, and it’s a box set where you have Zamyatin’s We, who then inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That’s one book. And then there’s Animal Farm and 1984 is the second book. And then the third volume is Huxley’s Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. And it was published in complex characters. You can buy it in Hong Kong. But I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland, and it’s all the same except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out.
And he mentions China there. He says that in Mao’s China, they’re combining the two things of this. And I’m really fascinated by that, because they published in China, on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It’s called the Dystopian Trilogy, and it’s a box set where you have Zamyatin’s We, who then inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That’s one book. And then there’s Animal Farm and 1984 is the second book. And then the third volume is Huxley’s Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. And it was published in complex characters. You can buy it in Hong Kong. But I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland, and it’s all the same except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out.
And this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that really show you how to connect the dots, that gets taken out. I think with China I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World, except Tibet and Xinjiang being more the crude boot-on-the-face, 1984 style of control. But then during the Covid lockdowns, when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that had seemed much more the Brave New World style had their Orwellian moment. So now, I think there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments.
Lex Fridman
I see why it could give a sense, after you’ve thoroughly internalized the fear, that you have complete freedom of speech, just don’t mention the government. So you can talk about totalitarianism. You can talk about the darkest aspects of human nature. You can even talk about the government in a metaphorical, poetic way that’s not directly linkable, but the moment you mention the government, it’s like a dumb keyword search.
I see why it could give a sense, after you’ve thoroughly internalized the fear, that you have complete freedom of speech, just don’t mention the government. So you can talk about totalitarianism. You can talk about the darkest aspects of human nature. You can even talk about the government in a metaphorical, poetic way that’s not directly linkable, but the moment you mention the government, it’s like a dumb keyword search.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah. And I think it’s one of these really good examples of how China’s distinctive, but it’s not unique. You have other settings where you have these no-go zones that you learn, and one example is in Singapore. So the National University of Singapore has a world-class history department, but no Singapore historian in it, nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore. Because it’s incredibly wide-ranging what you can do, analyze, but when you’re actually talking about the family that’s been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets to be touchy.
Yeah. And I think it’s one of these really good examples of how China’s distinctive, but it’s not unique. You have other settings where you have these no-go zones that you learn, and one example is in Singapore. So the National University of Singapore has a world-class history department, but no Singapore historian in it, nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore. Because it’s incredibly wide-ranging what you can do, analyze, but when you’re actually talking about the family that’s been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets to be touchy.
In Thailand, which I’ve been working on recently, you have this lèse-majesté laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the King. And so in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around. And there’s a way in which you can say at the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia… You can have an event that’s about the country one over that you can say basically anything you want, but when it gets to the things in the place where you are, it’s touchy.
I should give credit for that insight. Shibani Mahtani co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong Among The Braves. She was talking about that, that in Singapore at the Foreign Correspondence Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn’t say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club. But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club saying kinds of things that he couldn’t say in Singapore.
And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondence Club, and then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about the culture in this foreign correspondence club, and there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia saying things very directly and then said, “And there are things going on in Thailand that we’re not going to talk about.” Self-censorship can be a very powerful thing.
Lex Fridman
One of the things I learned about all of this, which is interesting, I want to learn more, is about the human psychology, the ability of the individual mind, to compartmentalize things. It does seem like you could not live in a state of fear as long as you don’t mention a particular topic. My intuition would be about the human mind. If there’s anything you’re afraid of talking about, that fear will permeate through everything else. You would not be able to do great science, great exploration, great technology.
One of the things I learned about all of this, which is interesting, I want to learn more, is about the human psychology, the ability of the individual mind, to compartmentalize things. It does seem like you could not live in a state of fear as long as you don’t mention a particular topic. My intuition would be about the human mind. If there’s anything you’re afraid of talking about, that fear will permeate through everything else. You would not be able to do great science, great exploration, great technology.
And that idea, I think, underpins the whole idea of freedom of speech in the United States. You don’t want to censor any, even dangerous, speech, because that will permeate everything else. You won’t be able to have great scientists. You won’t be able to have great journalists. You won’t be able to have… I don’t know. I’m obviously biased towards America, and I think you do need to have that full-on freedom of speech. But this is an interesting case study, and that’s actually something that you speak about, that Mao, if he were alive today and visited China, would be quite surprised. And you give the Nanjing bookstores an example. Can you just speak to this? If Mao visited China, let’s go with that thought experiment, what would he recognize? What would he be surprised by?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao going [inaudible 00:53:44] pondering this really cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and what books were for sale. And I thought about how he’d be like, “What’s going on? Is the Communist Party not in control?” He talked about how art and politics needed to in some ways go together, and you’ve got all these kind of things. He also would have been shocked by all… There were all these books about how to start your own cafe and bar and celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. All of these things just wouldn’t compute from his time.
So I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao going [inaudible 00:53:44] pondering this really cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and what books were for sale. And I thought about how he’d be like, “What’s going on? Is the Communist Party not in control?” He talked about how art and politics needed to in some ways go together, and you’ve got all these kind of things. He also would have been shocked by all… There were all these books about how to start your own cafe and bar and celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. All of these things just wouldn’t compute from his time.
Although I said, it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s. He was a participant in the May 4th movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for the best ideas circulating. So he might say, “Well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this.” So some of the coolest bookstores, the things that I just was amazed could exist in the early 2000s… So you can still buy copies in 1984 and you can still get some of these other things, but that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I’m not sure you’d get permission to translate some of those things now. There’s more of a sense of caution.
And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability to the situation in China, some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones… Not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station and it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. But then it just got less and less space to operate under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing, and it then had to close in Shanghai.
And it’s just been reopened in DC as JF Books, and it’s become in this really interesting cultural hub. And I’m really delighted; it’s where I’m going to hold the launch for my next book when it comes out in June, this book on the Milk Tea Alliance about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can’t exist in Shanghai. So places like that, they stop being able to exist on the mainland, then they could still exist in Hong Kong, but now in Hong Kong, one of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn’t feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there, and it’s reopened in upstate New York.
Lex Fridman
Wow.
Wow.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So you have this phenomenon of bookstores. There’s also a few bookstores called the Nowhere Bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei and The Hague, and I heard one maybe is going to open in or is open in Japan too. My sometime collaborator, Amy Hawkins, who covers China for The Guardian, wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon, carrying on the conversations that people thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn’t, and imagine someday being able to hold in China but maybe can’t.
So you have this phenomenon of bookstores. There’s also a few bookstores called the Nowhere Bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei and The Hague, and I heard one maybe is going to open in or is open in Japan too. My sometime collaborator, Amy Hawkins, who covers China for The Guardian, wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon, carrying on the conversations that people thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn’t, and imagine someday being able to hold in China but maybe can’t.
Lex Fridman
So first of all, boy, do I love America. And second of all, it makes me really sad, because there’s a very large number of incredible people in China, incredible minds, and maybe I’m romantic about this, but books is a catalyst for brilliant minds to flourish, and without that…
So first of all, boy, do I love America. And second of all, it makes me really sad, because there’s a very large number of incredible people in China, incredible minds, and maybe I’m romantic about this, but books is a catalyst for brilliant minds to flourish, and without that…
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I do think about, and sometimes people will think because of censorship and that, there’s an idea of brainwashing within China, population control. And I periodically will get students from the mainland, and I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes. I teach Chinese history, and I feel like, okay, now I’m contradicting the version of the past that’s been drumbeat into them. But I’ll still get students who are incredible free thinkers who have come through that system and it just doesn’t hold or there are limits to it. Some of them are people who just got curious by something.
So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I do think about, and sometimes people will think because of censorship and that, there’s an idea of brainwashing within China, population control. And I periodically will get students from the mainland, and I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes. I teach Chinese history, and I feel like, okay, now I’m contradicting the version of the past that’s been drumbeat into them. But I’ll still get students who are incredible free thinkers who have come through that system and it just doesn’t hold or there are limits to it. Some of them are people who just got curious by something.
And it is a porous system. It’s more porous than in North Korea, things like that. So even if there’s that fear, friction and flooding which Roberts talks about that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government, there’s still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued, or they see an image sent by a friend of theirs on social media, will share them something on WeChat that it doesn’t get picked up by the sensors, but they look at it carefully and they say, “Oh, well, wait a minute. That contradicts what the government’s official line is.” So there’s still ways in which that creativity and freedom of thinking persists.
Lex Fridman
That’s really beautiful to hear. I mean, fundamentally, the human spirit is curious and wants to understand, and in some, especially the young people, as we mentioned, are suspicious of authority in the best kind of way, and so they’re always asking kinds of questions, but we always have the child, the young person inside us, always asking, “Maybe I’m being lied to in all these kinds of ways.” But still, it’s sad, because if you’re not deliberately doing that or if there’s not a spark of possibility that comes before you as just a regular citizen of China, you might never really ask, “Maybe there’s a whole different perspective on world history.”
That’s really beautiful to hear. I mean, fundamentally, the human spirit is curious and wants to understand, and in some, especially the young people, as we mentioned, are suspicious of authority in the best kind of way, and so they’re always asking kinds of questions, but we always have the child, the young person inside us, always asking, “Maybe I’m being lied to in all these kinds of ways.” But still, it’s sad, because if you’re not deliberately doing that or if there’s not a spark of possibility that comes before you as just a regular citizen of China, you might never really ask, “Maybe there’s a whole different perspective on world history.”
To be fair, I think the United States is often guilty of this very United States-centric view of history. Similar with Europe. Europe has a very Europe sense of history. I often enjoy talking to people from different backgrounds, from different parts of the world, talking to them about World War II, because it’s clear that you’ve read certain of the story a lot of times and not the other chapters of the story. The Western front in Europe and the Eastern front in Europe and then Japan and China’s role in World War II, and the history around that before and after World War II of China, is not often talked about in the United States. And I’m sure, if I could venture a guess, that the opposite is true in China. I certainly know the opposite was true in the Soviet Union and even in Europe that directly experienced, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy. They all have very different ways of speaking and thinking and reading about World War II. And the same goes across all of history and all of culture.
So yes, it’s always good to question the mainstream narrative in your country, and looking outside is just harder to do in China based on all the reasons you’ve mentioned. And if I can, I just want to give a shout-out. Thank you. I’ll look at her work. Margaret Roberts, the fear, the friction, and the flooding. Her ideas. I can already tell there’s a lot of brilliance here. Fear: this is the most traditional form involving overt threats and punishments for accessing and sharing such sensitive information. However, Roberts finds that fear-based censorship is used selectively, mainly targeting high-profile individuals such as-
Lex Fridman
… ship was used selectively mainly targeting high profile individuals such as journalists or activists. For the average citizen, the risk of punishment is relatively low, and fear alone is not the main deterrent. She goes on to describe the friction and the flooding. The friction is a tax on information access, and flooding is less visible than fear of friction, but is a powerful tool for shaping the information environment. Flooding one scares me, more and more flooding one is the brave new world.
… ship was used selectively mainly targeting high profile individuals such as journalists or activists. For the average citizen, the risk of punishment is relatively low, and fear alone is not the main deterrent. She goes on to describe the friction and the flooding. The friction is a tax on information access, and flooding is less visible than fear of friction, but is a powerful tool for shaping the information environment. Flooding one scares me, more and more flooding one is the brave new world.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah, it is. And I think it’s a whole kind of, the world of short attention spans and social media, and how this all works. And Chinese Communist Party leaders… I brought up Singapore and Deng Xiaoping and some leaders were looking at that and they’re looking at… There are all kinds of things that it both… Going to Singapore can sometimes make you feel like you’re in this futuristic setting, in terms of a lot of things that eventually came to other parts of the world would be tried out there. And I think the seductiveness is that, some of these things are really… They both add to convenience at the same time they strip away. They’re collecting information about you, which can be also something that can make your life easier, at the same times it’s stripping you away of… We talk about the siloing of information and targeting of ads and targeting of news.
Yeah, it is. And I think it’s a whole kind of, the world of short attention spans and social media, and how this all works. And Chinese Communist Party leaders… I brought up Singapore and Deng Xiaoping and some leaders were looking at that and they’re looking at… There are all kinds of things that it both… Going to Singapore can sometimes make you feel like you’re in this futuristic setting, in terms of a lot of things that eventually came to other parts of the world would be tried out there. And I think the seductiveness is that, some of these things are really… They both add to convenience at the same time they strip away. They’re collecting information about you, which can be also something that can make your life easier, at the same times it’s stripping you away of… We talk about the siloing of information and targeting of ads and targeting of news.
So two things come to mind to mention. One is Christina Larson, a very bright journalist, friend of mine who’s now working on other things but was working in China, and she wrote about this in MIT technology review. She said, you need to think about China as having the best, as well as the worst internet experience in the world. And you think about it with… You think of the worst is easy. The great firewall, you try to search for what happened, you search for him with the tank man, you won’t get it. You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him, search for things about Xinjiang, and it makes it seem like it’s a place where people are happy rather than massive extra legal detention camps and where your life can be ruined by things you have no control over.
But she said, on other ways when it comes to consumer playing to your pleasures and things, it was really advanced. A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. And I remember around the time that I had read that I was in Shanghai, and somebody was explaining it to me. They were talking about going out to eat. I said, oh, we’ve got such and such. And I said, oh, that’s like Yelp. He said, well, yeah, but Yelp just tells you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. We’ve got one that can tell you which part of the restaurant you want to sit in, because there’s a waiter that’s in a really bad mood and people have posted enough information to do this. Or what the best dish there is in the last week. Forget about these sort of sloth.
And you had a lot of things that were like, smart city and control, you can learn things about ease of movement. And Singapore had some of these things tested too. You had way before you… You go into an underground parking lot now in the US, and you find out whether there are any empty spaces on a floor. That was something that was years before in Singapore. And you used money less often there because you had a transponder that would automatically pay for your parking and things. And it was something that can be very seductive. So the other line besides best and worst internet that I always like is, William Gibson who wrote one of the other important dystopian novels of the present, Neuromancer. He wrote a rare, for him, non-fiction piece about Singapore, where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty. And there are times when-
Lex Fridman
I shouldn’t laugh.
I shouldn’t laugh.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
But it is. It’s a powerful… He’s not welcomed in Singapore, let’s just say. But he talked about how when he wanted to try to… He went to Japan a lot in the 1980s at a time when Japan was a place where you got a sense of what the future might hold. So the dark side of this, the surveillance state at its worst, which we see in Xinjiang in places. And there, again, it may seem like I’m just obsessed with science fiction. And there it really is minority report. It’s this kind of like you do certain kinds of behaviors, and we’re seeing this other places too. We’re seeing versions of it in the US as well. Where it’s like, oh, we can tell from a pattern that you are the kind of person who might do X, so in Xinjiang when they were starting to round people up…
But it is. It’s a powerful… He’s not welcomed in Singapore, let’s just say. But he talked about how when he wanted to try to… He went to Japan a lot in the 1980s at a time when Japan was a place where you got a sense of what the future might hold. So the dark side of this, the surveillance state at its worst, which we see in Xinjiang in places. And there, again, it may seem like I’m just obsessed with science fiction. And there it really is minority report. It’s this kind of like you do certain kinds of behaviors, and we’re seeing this other places too. We’re seeing versions of it in the US as well. Where it’s like, oh, we can tell from a pattern that you are the kind of person who might do X, so in Xinjiang when they were starting to round people up…
There’s this great book by a Uyghur poet. He talks about how people were just starting to disappear off the streets and they were being accused of being radicalized and being potential terrorists. And the cues could be something like, somebody giving up smoking, or not drinking alcohol. Because that was seen as something that sometimes went along with becoming more devoted to Islam, and more devoted to something, a particular version of it. So he talked about how a group of the poets, or writers, when they get together, they would… Whether or not any of them drank, they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their table, because it was simply a way of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kind of clues. So you really have this dark side of, Xinjiang is this example. And Tibet also with incredible tight control. There’s more of that kind of push on personal life in other parts of China as well.
But I think the question of whether we give up too much, and who can abuse what we do give up, is something that is being asked in the United States now, about big tech companies, as well. It’s asked about governments, but it’s also asked about big tech, and what you have as a trade- off. But I hadn’t thought about it till this conversation, which I can tell is why people find it stimulating to have these extended conversations. Because you have set lines, but then the conversation goes and you think in a different way. So what I used to always say about China after 1989 was, the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power, and they realized that the Soviet Union, Soviet Bloc was falling apart. They knew that one reason why people, and this is the simple way of… One way I think you have to understand why communism fell in Eastern Europe, was partly about ideals and thirst for freedom and that, but also people knew that people… East Germans knew that West Germans were having more fun and getting better stuff.
And when some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went to was this department store, to see if the images of better food and more choices were available there. And it was true. And I think this is as human as the desire for more freedom. So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, they never articulated it this way, but how can we try to get to a stage where we don’t have things like Tiananmen, again? Well, what if we try to make a deal with people? We’ll give them more choices in their daily life. We’ll give them better stuff, we’ll give them more choices at the store, we’ll give them more choices about what to read too, we’ll give them more choices in consumer goods and intellectuals, consumer goods they want or to watch the movies and read the books that other people like them around the world are reading.
So we’ll give them more choices. We won’t open the floodgates completely, but we’ll give them more choices, but not give them more choices at the ballot box or in politics. And this was the new social compact. Allow us to keep ruling, and we’ll make sure that you’re living better than the last generation in terms of choices, and in terms of material goods. Now, one of the things that’s happening now is the Chinese Communist Party, the economy isn’t booming the way it was before. The sense of clearly, we’re living better materially than the generation before, it’s not as easy an argument to make when you have growth rates and things like that. But the Communist Party makes different kinds of arguments now about the rest of the world is in chaos and we’re stable. But the thing that I now am going to think about differently is, the argument was we’ll give you more choices, and you’ll have more of a private life, more of this. But now in the period we are globally, now there’s a new kind of suspicion about the degree of any kind of private choices.
There was an idea that the post Tiananmen generation was promised to have a little bit more space away from the prying eyes of the state. And now globally we worry about the prying eyes of whether it’s the state, or whether it’s tech companies. It’s a different moment. What does it mean to say you have more choices?
Lex Fridman
It’s almost like you have two knobs. One is 1984 and one is a brave new world. At first they turn up the brave new world more choices, and now they’re turning up the 1984… Keeping the choices, but turning up the 1984 with more surveillance. So the choices you make have to be more public. Do you have a sense that the thing we’ve been talking about, the increase in censorship, does that predate Xi Jinping? Is Xi Jinping a part of that increase in censorship? What is that dynamic? What role does Xi Jinping play in what China has gone through over the past, let’s say a decade and a half?
It’s almost like you have two knobs. One is 1984 and one is a brave new world. At first they turn up the brave new world more choices, and now they’re turning up the 1984… Keeping the choices, but turning up the 1984 with more surveillance. So the choices you make have to be more public. Do you have a sense that the thing we’ve been talking about, the increase in censorship, does that predate Xi Jinping? Is Xi Jinping a part of that increase in censorship? What is that dynamic? What role does Xi Jinping play in what China has gone through over the past, let’s say a decade and a half?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
That’s a really great question. I was actually just writing a review of two books. One is called, The Xi Jinping Effect, which was just a bunch of scholars and academic volume looking at, take this topic and that topic. How much as Xi Jinping as a person really affected it? And they come up with all kinds of answers. But there’s a book I really like. Emily Fang of NPR has a new book out called, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom.
That’s a really great question. I was actually just writing a review of two books. One is called, The Xi Jinping Effect, which was just a bunch of scholars and academic volume looking at, take this topic and that topic. How much as Xi Jinping as a person really affected it? And they come up with all kinds of answers. But there’s a book I really like. Emily Fang of NPR has a new book out called, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom.
And what she talks about the changes in China as she was covering it from the mid-2010s on was… And I think this really is Xi Jinping’s, one of his [inaudible 01:13:11] on the country, is there’s a narrowing of spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country. And this goes against the grain of a pattern in the post Tiananmen period of allowing more space for civil society, but also allowing way Muslims felt that they didn’t have to choose between being their Muslim identity and their Chinese identity. But there’s more and more of a kind of… We see this in Xi Jinping becoming impatient with Hong Kong where there was a way of which, okay, this is a city that’s part of the PRC, but it really operates very differently. He seems to be uncomfortable with difference, I guess. He’s not alone and strongmaned this way, of wanting to impose a singular vision of what Chinese identity means, what loyalty to the status quo means. So there’s been a tightening of over all the borders.
And even one thing Xi reported on was, inner Mongolia. It’s been seen as an unproblematic frontier area, and who cares if there was some revival of Mongolian language. But under Xi, there’s been a less patience with those kinds of difference. There’s been more of a resurgence of the patriarchy. All kinds of things have happened under him. But, how much is it just him? Or how much is it also a mood or group within the party? Some of these trends I think began before he took power in late 2012. I think really my own feeling going to China fairly often from the mid 1990s till about 2018 was that until 2008, the year of the Olympics, each trip it would feel like, oh, there’s just more space. There’s more breathing room for… It’s not becoming a liberal democracy. But I would notice things that felt like, I’m surprised that that happens. That there just felt… People felt less worried about what they were saying, and what they were doing. That trend line up until about 2008.
But from the Olympics and then the financial crisis after that, the Chinese Communist Party felt I guess more… It’s still insecure, but it felt cockier in some ways. And you had like, okay, maybe we can start asserting more control over things. So I think that’s been stronger under Xi Jinping’s time and power. And Xi was already the designated successor. By 2008, he was in charge of security for the Olympics. And the Olympics was supposed to be a moment, possibly of more opening up, because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right wing dictatorship and moved toward democracy. And some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way, and it went quite the opposite.
Xi Jinping
Lex Fridman
You mentioned that we don’t know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping, or the party apparatus. And that question going back to Confucius of hierarchy and how does the power within this very strict one state work, what can we say, what do we know about the structure of this Communist party apparatus? How much internal power struggle is there? How much power does Xi Jinping actually have? Is there any insight we have into the system?
You mentioned that we don’t know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping, or the party apparatus. And that question going back to Confucius of hierarchy and how does the power within this very strict one state work, what can we say, what do we know about the structure of this Communist party apparatus? How much internal power struggle is there? How much power does Xi Jinping actually have? Is there any insight we have into the system?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist, and now is an editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an important piece a few years ago about just, we should really be straight about what a black box of the Chinese elite politics are. And really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did used to have more of a sense of these ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy, and things like that. And they were also basic, partly based on personalities and personal ties, but we did have a sense you could map out these kinds of rival power bases and things. And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It’s very hard to know other than this small group around him, how it works. We don’t have a major defector who says, yeah, this is how Xi Jinping… We have Xi Jinping self-presentation, and a lot of things that are then said about him.
James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist, and now is an editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an important piece a few years ago about just, we should really be straight about what a black box of the Chinese elite politics are. And really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did used to have more of a sense of these ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy, and things like that. And they were also basic, partly based on personalities and personal ties, but we did have a sense you could map out these kinds of rival power bases and things. And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It’s very hard to know other than this small group around him, how it works. We don’t have a major defector who says, yeah, this is how Xi Jinping… We have Xi Jinping self-presentation, and a lot of things that are then said about him.
There were some false expectations about him that some people thought, he’s going to be a reformer, because his father was a liberalizing figure. That doesn’t work that way. And he does seem to care about orderliness. He does seem to care about certain things. He wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China’s deep past. We know he’s a strong nationalist and a cultural nationalist as well as political nationalists. But beyond that, we don’t have that much of a sense of what makes him tick. We get little hints. There was a secret speech, that leaked out, that he talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed, because the leadership didn’t pay enough attention to ideology. And he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So I imagine if he and Putin never have a heart-to-heart conversation, one thing they’d find to agree on is this distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was… That was the wrong way to do things.
Lex Fridman
Not manly enough?
Not manly enough?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah, not strong enough about really keeping control. And for Putin it would be that it led to the Soviet Union, to the loss of an empire. But for Xi Jinping, there is a bit of being haunted by what happened to the Soviet Union. And I’m not going to be the leader who sees the diminishment of this landmass that was, in a sense, rebuilt over time for Mao. And then Deng Xiaoping. You have the story, a very powerful story about the Chinese past, that the Chinese Communist party makes a lot out of. But the Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist party was Mao’s great rival, also made a lot out of. And that has a partial basis, in fact was that from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, China, which had been the strong force in the world, got bullied, and nibbled away at by foreign powers. And it’s important to realize there are elements of that story that are very true.
Yeah, not strong enough about really keeping control. And for Putin it would be that it led to the Soviet Union, to the loss of an empire. But for Xi Jinping, there is a bit of being haunted by what happened to the Soviet Union. And I’m not going to be the leader who sees the diminishment of this landmass that was, in a sense, rebuilt over time for Mao. And then Deng Xiaoping. You have the story, a very powerful story about the Chinese past, that the Chinese Communist party makes a lot out of. But the Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist party was Mao’s great rival, also made a lot out of. And that has a partial basis, in fact was that from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, China, which had been the strong force in the world, got bullied, and nibbled away at by foreign powers. And it’s important to realize there are elements of that story that are very true.
And the answer they had is that, under my watch, that’s not going to happen. And the reason why my party deserves to rule is because it can reassert China’s place in the world. And both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party predicated themselves on this nationalistic story of being in a position to prevent that from happening again.
Lex Fridman
This is a bit of a tricky question, but is it safe for journalists, for folks who write excellent books about the topic to travel to China?
This is a bit of a tricky question, but is it safe for journalists, for folks who write excellent books about the topic to travel to China?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
I think there are all kinds of different things about safety or not. I think until recently, at least the people who were most vulnerable were people of Chinese descent. People originally from China who had gone abroad and coming back, or even people who were Chinese Americans who went there. There was a higher expectation that they should be on board. So you had early cases. My friend Melissa Chan was an early person kicked out when she was working for Al Jazeera, and reporting on Xinjiang. So that’s one kind of person who was vulnerable because of this expectation that they should be somehow more loyal.
I think there are all kinds of different things about safety or not. I think until recently, at least the people who were most vulnerable were people of Chinese descent. People originally from China who had gone abroad and coming back, or even people who were Chinese Americans who went there. There was a higher expectation that they should be on board. So you had early cases. My friend Melissa Chan was an early person kicked out when she was working for Al Jazeera, and reporting on Xinjiang. So that’s one kind of person who was vulnerable because of this expectation that they should be somehow more loyal.
Another kind of person who was vulnerable, or this case more likely to be blocked from China. The Communist party is particularly concerned about people from outside of China who are amplifying the voices of people within China, or exiles from China who the government would like to silence. So the Dalai Lama… You had scholars who worked on Tibet and had connections to Dalai Lama where early people would have trouble going to the PRC. Then scholars who worked on Xinjiang, and were connected to Uyghurs. But there also were people who were personally connected to dissidents, or exiles who would amplify their voices, or translate their work, would promote them. That then it wasn’t about necessarily danger if you got in China, but you were more likely to be denied a visa if you were the kind of person who was doing that. So I wrote critical op-eds about the Chinese Communist Party. I published them in some high-profile places. I’ve written a lot about Tiananmen, wrote about human rights issues, all that.
And I kept getting visas to go to China. I testified to a Congressional executive joint committee on China about the Tiananmen protests on the 25th anniversary of it. And some people said, oh, that’s the kind of thing that would lead to you not getting a visa. I got a visa right after that. Now I think it might be different. Now some of these expectations have been changed. There have been people who’ve been very surprisingly gotten in trouble. These two Canadians who were clearly, it was a kind of tit for tat, partly because of TechMaven’s relative being held in Canada. So it was kind of there. It was also not picking a fight with Americans, but there were certain kinds of things that you could map out what was the thing to do. And so I went in the 2010s having written forcefully about Tiananmen, and I didn’t feel dangerous.
I felt there was an awareness in some cases of what… If I was giving a public talk, there was awareness of what it was. There was sometimes, you didn’t want to get your host who had brought you to a university in trouble by saying something that would get them in trouble. I think it was often that, you were more vulnerable if you were within China, or you were connected China in different ways. For me, it’s been confusing these last few years. I wrote one piece about this, about I’m not going to any part of the PRC for the time being. But I always thought that Hong Kong was a place that I’d be free to go, even if the things got difficult. I didn’t get a visa for the mainland. You didn’t need a visa for Hong Kong. With the Mainland, I had kept a distance from the dissidents that I was writing about. With Hong Kong, I felt that these rules kind of didn’t apply, and I was more connected to them. More friends with some of them.
And then with this crackdown that’s come on Hong Kong, and there are exiles from Hong Kong who have bounties on their heads. And so now I feel that, it’s not necessarily that anything would happen to me if I went to Hong Kong, but I feel I would be very closely watched. I wouldn’t want to meet with some of my friends there who aren’t the side profile. I don’t want to go to a place where I would feel that I was toxic in some way.
Lex Fridman
Right. One, you’re walking on eggshells, and two, you can get others in trouble. That kind of dynamic is complicated. So it’s fascinating that Hong Kong is now part of that calculus. So I’ve gotten a chance to speak to a bunch of world leaders. Do you think it’s possible that I would be able to do an interview with Xi Jinping?
Right. One, you’re walking on eggshells, and two, you can get others in trouble. That kind of dynamic is complicated. So it’s fascinating that Hong Kong is now part of that calculus. So I’ve gotten a chance to speak to a bunch of world leaders. Do you think it’s possible that I would be able to do an interview with Xi Jinping?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
If you do, I would be very pleased, because I could watch that interview, and get some insights about Xi, which have been very hard to get. It’s been really difficult. There’ve been very few discussions. He doesn’t give press conferences. There’s a variety of things. And this is different from some of his predecessors. Jiang Zemin famously was interviewed by Barbara Walters, and asked about Tiananmen, and he tried to make out that it wasn’t a big deal, the variety of things. But he had relatively spontaneous conversation. I was going to say he’s the only Chinese leader I’ve met, but I met him before he was a major, major leader. He was the party secretary, or mayor of Shanghai. It matters because the party secretary is the more important role. But anyway, he just met with a group of foreign scholars who were going over to Shanghai in ’88 for a conference on Shanghai history.
If you do, I would be very pleased, because I could watch that interview, and get some insights about Xi, which have been very hard to get. It’s been really difficult. There’ve been very few discussions. He doesn’t give press conferences. There’s a variety of things. And this is different from some of his predecessors. Jiang Zemin famously was interviewed by Barbara Walters, and asked about Tiananmen, and he tried to make out that it wasn’t a big deal, the variety of things. But he had relatively spontaneous conversation. I was going to say he’s the only Chinese leader I’ve met, but I met him before he was a major, major leader. He was the party secretary, or mayor of Shanghai. It matters because the party secretary is the more important role. But anyway, he just met with a group of foreign scholars who were going over to Shanghai in ’88 for a conference on Shanghai history.
And just to show you the limits of anybody who thinks they can predict what’s going on in Chinese politics. Predictability is just very hard in general, in the world. But I think the consensus among us, and these were some of the most knowledgeable foreign scholars on China. Was this was somebody who really had probably topped out because he was meeting with us. He must not be heading anywhere up. And then after Tiananmen, he becomes the top leader in China. But he had a kind of, you could pick things out from being in a room. He liked to show off his cosmopolitanism. Xi Jinping talks, gives these speeches about all the foreign authors he likes and has read, but it’s all very scripted, at least in his own head too. It’s very carefully done to present a certain image of himself.
And we really don’t get many senses of what he’s like in unguarded moments, or has them. And sometimes we get the illusion of them. Like there was an image of him and Obama in their shirt sleeves at a Sunnylands meeting. And the photo would show them walking and talking, but there’s no translator in the image. And so you’re like, how are they talking? What language are they using? How is this? Or is it just a kind of… Of course there are exchanges with top leaders. And Trump will say they’re friends, or these kinds of things, where there’s a language of… Xi Jinping can talk about somebody, or some country being friend, but we don’t have a sense of what makes him tick as a person. So maybe you should ask him about Ernest Hemingway, and see if he really gets excited about him. Because in generic things, he talks about all these. You can feel him ticking things off about, oh yes, I’m glad to be in England, the country of Shakespeare and this. And he goes off these set things.
But Hemingway, there’s some sense that he had some special feeling, which fits in with some of the macho side that would be… Interestingly, he doesn’t mention Orwell as one of his favorite British authors as much. He says he likes Victor Hugo a lot. And that became a little tricky, because Do You Hear The People Sing from Les Miserables became one of the protest songs in Hong Kong. And how do you get in this position where you… And actually Victor Hugo is a rare Western author who’s had a pretty steadily positive image in China, even under periods of criticism of all Western authors are problematic. Because Victor Hugo famously wrote a statement denouncing the European destruction of the old summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, at the end of the second Opium war. He said, how can we claim to be civilized when we’ve destroyed one of the great creations of civilization? So that made him a long-term friend to the Chinese nation.
Mark Twain has had a pretty good reputation, because he was a critic of American imperialism. But anyway, I think if you do get to talk to Xi Jinping, talk to him about Ernest Hemingway and Victor Hugo. And I’ll be curious to see if those were the ones who really resonated.
Lex Fridman
One of the things, and it’s a strange thing that I’ve become aware of having spoken with world leaders. I’m distinctly aware that there’s a real possibility that the black box we mentioned, that the Communist party of China will listen to the words I’m saying now. And so I have to wonder how much that affects my possible tourist-like trip to China. Because there’s a difference between an influencer that does fun things, plays video games, and goes over to China, and somebody that actually covers China to some degree. Whether critical or supportive or nuanced or any kind of way, in a full spectrum of ideas you can have about China, including Chinese history. Whether that’s going to be seen carefully, analyzed carefully, and have repercussions when you travel. And because of the black box nature, and because it’s, for me, personally, just a culture that’s very different than anything I’m familiar with, it makes me a bit nervous.
One of the things, and it’s a strange thing that I’ve become aware of having spoken with world leaders. I’m distinctly aware that there’s a real possibility that the black box we mentioned, that the Communist party of China will listen to the words I’m saying now. And so I have to wonder how much that affects my possible tourist-like trip to China. Because there’s a difference between an influencer that does fun things, plays video games, and goes over to China, and somebody that actually covers China to some degree. Whether critical or supportive or nuanced or any kind of way, in a full spectrum of ideas you can have about China, including Chinese history. Whether that’s going to be seen carefully, analyzed carefully, and have repercussions when you travel. And because of the black box nature, and because it’s, for me, personally, just a culture that’s very different than anything I’m familiar with, it makes me a bit nervous.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
It’s certainly gotten harder for journalists to operate in China. There was a way in which now journalists will look back to the early two thousands, and it was really quite extraordinary what they could do. Well, you have a lot of listeners. I think there isn’t that tight a watching of what an academic writes about the Chinese Communist Party. But there are certain things that clearly are tightly policed. And one is, discussions at the private life of Chinese leaders, and their families, and issues of really following money trails for corruption and things like that. So there was the case of the Hong Kong booksellers who were kidnapped. And one of them is still in a Chinese prison, he would be a good example.
It’s certainly gotten harder for journalists to operate in China. There was a way in which now journalists will look back to the early two thousands, and it was really quite extraordinary what they could do. Well, you have a lot of listeners. I think there isn’t that tight a watching of what an academic writes about the Chinese Communist Party. But there are certain things that clearly are tightly policed. And one is, discussions at the private life of Chinese leaders, and their families, and issues of really following money trails for corruption and things like that. So there was the case of the Hong Kong booksellers who were kidnapped. And one of them is still in a Chinese prison, he would be a good example.
There’s Gui Minhai, the kind of person who was vulnerable. He was born in China. He is a Swedish citizen and he was spirited out of Thailand into the Mainland. And the reason why he was on the radar of the Communist party was because the publishing house in Hong Kong that he was connected to was publishing works about the top tier of the Chinese Communist Party, and contradicting the vision of them as a certain kind of moral exemplars. And that’s different from writing things about China has a bad human rights record or something like that, in ways like I did. These were books that were-
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
… ways like I did. These were books that were exposes, or some of them kind of gossipy and lightly sourced, some of them much more serious, but they were about something that the Communist party leadership wants to make a no-go zone. And I’ve thought sometimes that Xi Jinping seems to have Lei’s majesty envy, but I don’t think it’s general criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party as a authoritarian structure, or place that doesn’t deserve to rule in very general terms. I don’t think that’s something that they then pick you up at the border and say, “No, we can’t let that person in,” because people are let in. And it’s not rational. It’s not a rational process. There are people who’ve been denied visas. It seems pretty inexplicable. There are things that now I think the rules are changing very quickly, all over the world, for what’s safe to say and do.
… ways like I did. These were books that were exposes, or some of them kind of gossipy and lightly sourced, some of them much more serious, but they were about something that the Communist party leadership wants to make a no-go zone. And I’ve thought sometimes that Xi Jinping seems to have Lei’s majesty envy, but I don’t think it’s general criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party as a authoritarian structure, or place that doesn’t deserve to rule in very general terms. I don’t think that’s something that they then pick you up at the border and say, “No, we can’t let that person in,” because people are let in. And it’s not rational. It’s not a rational process. There are people who’ve been denied visas. It seems pretty inexplicable. There are things that now I think the rules are changing very quickly, all over the world, for what’s safe to say and do.
Lex Fridman
Well, either way, I do know that the Communist Party and likely Xi Jinping himself, watched my conversation with Prime Minister Modi. They responded to it. And I will definitely go to China and I hope to talk to Xi Jinping. It’s a fascinating, historic, ancient culture and is the major player on the world stage in the 21st century. And it would be fascinating to understand the mind of the leader of that great superpower. Speaking of leaders, what do we understand about the relationship between Xi Jinping, and our current President of the United States, Donald Trump? Is there really a human connection, something approximating a friendship as they’ve spoken about? Or is it just purely real politic maneuvering? World leaders playing a game of chess? Or is it a bit of both?
Well, either way, I do know that the Communist Party and likely Xi Jinping himself, watched my conversation with Prime Minister Modi. They responded to it. And I will definitely go to China and I hope to talk to Xi Jinping. It’s a fascinating, historic, ancient culture and is the major player on the world stage in the 21st century. And it would be fascinating to understand the mind of the leader of that great superpower. Speaking of leaders, what do we understand about the relationship between Xi Jinping, and our current President of the United States, Donald Trump? Is there really a human connection, something approximating a friendship as they’ve spoken about? Or is it just purely real politic maneuvering? World leaders playing a game of chess? Or is it a bit of both?
Donald Trump
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
There’s a degree to which I think there’s some confusion about a couple of things. One is when there’s a sense that Trump is uniquely tough on the Chinese Communist Party, he has periodically said things about praising Xi Jinping as a leader, even sort of having praising Xi Jinping’s strength and things. So I think for some ways, for the personality cult of Xi Jinping, some of this is useful, because the story that the Chinese Communist Party, they need to tell a story about why they deserve to keep ruling. And one of their stories is that because the world is a dangerous place, and there’s not enough respect for China. So when there’s very tough talk about China coming out of the White House, that’s useful. And then the other part is about Xi Jinping being just the right person to have at the helm.
There’s a degree to which I think there’s some confusion about a couple of things. One is when there’s a sense that Trump is uniquely tough on the Chinese Communist Party, he has periodically said things about praising Xi Jinping as a leader, even sort of having praising Xi Jinping’s strength and things. So I think for some ways, for the personality cult of Xi Jinping, some of this is useful, because the story that the Chinese Communist Party, they need to tell a story about why they deserve to keep ruling. And one of their stories is that because the world is a dangerous place, and there’s not enough respect for China. So when there’s very tough talk about China coming out of the White House, that’s useful. And then the other part is about Xi Jinping being just the right person to have at the helm.
And when there are discussions, when there’s praise for him and his showing toughness, that also works well. So I think the argument among, at least some China specialists, is to say the Chinese Communist Party likes predictability, and Xi Jinping seems to like predictability in particular. And Donald Trump clearly isn’t a predictable figure. So there might be a way in which this is unsettling. But I think the other part of it is the Chinese Communist Party wants under Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping wants to gain more allies around the world, to be seen with more respect around the world. And at the moment is in a position where he can present himself as an orderly, thoughtful gradualist figure. In some ways, I think as much as there’s tension between the two capitals, there’s a way that things are going in a way that benefits Xi Jinping, and can conceive it. That doesn’t explain what their personal relationship is, and how they actually see each other when they’re in the room together.
Lex Fridman
And whether that matters or it’s a part of the calculus at all, because after all, they are leaders of superpowers. I think for Trump, it matters. Personal relationships matter, but of course we see a lot. We know a lot about Donald Trump, we know a lot about the White House. And actually, let me just say as a tangent for whatever you think about this particular White House, one of the things I really like is that every single member of the cabinet is willing to talk for many hours every single week, talk about what they think, how they see the world, explain Donald Trump’s approach. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with what they’re saying. Maybe you say they’re dishonest, maybe they’re misrepresenting, but there’s a lot of information. That’s something we don’t have with China. And as a fan of history, for me, and as a fan of deep political analysis of the world, it makes me sad, because it’s a very asymmetrical amount of information.
And whether that matters or it’s a part of the calculus at all, because after all, they are leaders of superpowers. I think for Trump, it matters. Personal relationships matter, but of course we see a lot. We know a lot about Donald Trump, we know a lot about the White House. And actually, let me just say as a tangent for whatever you think about this particular White House, one of the things I really like is that every single member of the cabinet is willing to talk for many hours every single week, talk about what they think, how they see the world, explain Donald Trump’s approach. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with what they’re saying. Maybe you say they’re dishonest, maybe they’re misrepresenting, but there’s a lot of information. That’s something we don’t have with China. And as a fan of history, for me, and as a fan of deep political analysis of the world, it makes me sad, because it’s a very asymmetrical amount of information.
Trade war
But anyway, let me, if I can lay out this particular complexity we’re in now, this trade war between us and China. Now, you’re not an economist. In fact, you think deeply about the history of peoples and the history of China. You think about culture, you think about protests and the movements and so on. And there’s some degree to which this trade war is less about the economics. Now that layer is also very important and we could discuss it, but there’s also a deeply cultural standoff almost happening here, which would be interesting. So in April, as people know, Trump escalated a trade war with China using tariffs, raising them on Chinese imports to 145%. Xi Jinping then responded by raising tariffs on US goods to 125%, and suspending exports on certain rare earth minerals and magnets to the US. The Chinese government also indicated, it would limit the import of Hollywood films, and restricted certain American companies from operating in China.
Now after that, Xi Jinping broke silence on April 11th, and again on April 14th, and since, basically saying that China is not backing down and positioned himself in China as the “responsible superpower,” that promotes, as you were saying, the promoter of the reasonable multilateral global trading framework in a stable global supply chain. He said “For over 70 years, China’s progress has been built on self-reliance and hard work, never on handoffs from others, and it remains unafraid of any unjust oppression. Also, he said there are no winners in a trade war and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation. This was all set as part of a tour of Southeast Asia, and he was calling on China and the European Union to defend international rules opposing unilateral bullying. At the same time, I saw that China’s escalating internal propaganda, including interestingly, it would be nice to talk to you about it, the use of the Mao Zedong 1953 speech during the Korean War where he says, “We will never yield.” My question is, with this standoff, who do you think will blink first? Where does this go?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So I think one persistent, there’s a lot to unpack there, of a historian too. I think that the reference to being bullied by a foreign power is something that comes up periodically, and plays to this notion of a hundred years of national humiliation that’s been talked about by generations now of Chinese leaders, to talk about that period from the 1840s to the 1940s. There were a group of foreign powers who were involved in bullying China in one way or another, and you can selectively pick one or another. So there is a way in which this can be. And if Xi Jinping gives that kind of speech in Southeast Asia, he’s speaking to a place where there is knowledge of times of the past when the United States was an aggressive force there. It’s also a part of the world where there have been times when China has been that.
So I think one persistent, there’s a lot to unpack there, of a historian too. I think that the reference to being bullied by a foreign power is something that comes up periodically, and plays to this notion of a hundred years of national humiliation that’s been talked about by generations now of Chinese leaders, to talk about that period from the 1840s to the 1940s. There were a group of foreign powers who were involved in bullying China in one way or another, and you can selectively pick one or another. So there is a way in which this can be. And if Xi Jinping gives that kind of speech in Southeast Asia, he’s speaking to a place where there is knowledge of times of the past when the United States was an aggressive force there. It’s also a part of the world where there have been times when China has been that.
So there is a way of positioning vis-a-vis other parts of the world, that is crucial part of this, that I think, I guess I’m circling around it, but there’s a tendency in discussions of US-China relations to think about it in terms of a bilateral discussion or dispute. Even though time and again, we realize that places other than the United States are key variables in these things. So the US and China being at odds in the Mao era, what changed things dramatically for that wasn’t so much even a change in… Yes, Nixon was the one who went to China, but what made it possible for Nixon to go to China was that the Sino-Soviet split happened, that actually it was tensions between China and the Soviet Union that altered equations for the United States and China.
I happened to be in China in 1999 when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and three Chinese citizens died. And there was tremendous discontent about that, anger about that it within China. And there were some rare protests that the government allowed to happen, but students were worked up about it, and there were protests outside the American Embassy and the British Embassy. That happened. And then in 2001, there was a spy plane incident that happened. So there was a lot of discussion that the next decade was going to see US-China tensions being the major force in the world. 9/11 happened. It was a dramatic reset for the trajectory that the US and China were on, which these are two totally different things, the Sino-Soviet split and 9/11. But in both cases, no matter how careful you were at parsing what was likely to be the next five years for US-China relations get dramatically changed by something that happened that wasn’t the US and China. And in the current situation, the trade war, I know that it’ll be very important that China can try to increase sales of consumer products to Europe.
This is something that Europe’s view about the United States is changing right now. These are all kinds of variables that are outside of simply Washington and Beijing as being the two actors. And sometimes, Beijing can’t control what’s happening outside, and sometimes Washington can’t. So I guess this is simply saying that when you’re watching and you’re trying to keep the eye on the ball, it matters a lot what India’s relationship to China and the United States is. So all of these are happening there. So I think that’s it, that it’s both tremendously important what’s going on between China and the United States, but it’s important to remember that they’re not the only players in this dynamic.
Lex Fridman
Also on top of this, how much cultural will is there to not surrender to bullying? How much of that is there? Like you said, the century of humiliation, both for Xi Jinping and the Chinese populace, like willingness to go through some short-term pain to not be humiliated?
Also on top of this, how much cultural will is there to not surrender to bullying? How much of that is there? Like you said, the century of humiliation, both for Xi Jinping and the Chinese populace, like willingness to go through some short-term pain to not be humiliated?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
The story that’s been intensively told about the past is something that provides the possibility for this to matter a lot. That is something that, it’s so much a part of the legitimating story of the Chinese Communist Party. And then you have to look at, are there things that are happening that aid the Chinese Communist Party’s story? So the rise of what can seem like, or is anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States, can feed that propaganda story. So certainly during COVID, there was a way that if you’re the Chinese Communist Party and you’re saying, “We get a disproportionate amount of blame for whatever happens in the world,” then if there were things you could point to in the foreign media or from foreign governments, then that helps you. So I think there is a setup here where, certainly for Xi Jinping, I think the desire to not be seen weak is crucial.
The story that’s been intensively told about the past is something that provides the possibility for this to matter a lot. That is something that, it’s so much a part of the legitimating story of the Chinese Communist Party. And then you have to look at, are there things that are happening that aid the Chinese Communist Party’s story? So the rise of what can seem like, or is anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States, can feed that propaganda story. So certainly during COVID, there was a way that if you’re the Chinese Communist Party and you’re saying, “We get a disproportionate amount of blame for whatever happens in the world,” then if there were things you could point to in the foreign media or from foreign governments, then that helps you. So I think there is a setup here where, certainly for Xi Jinping, I think the desire to not be seen weak is crucial.
Lex Fridman
Sometimes I wonder how much of these leaders operate on pure ego, because politically and on a human level, they don’t want to come off as losers in a standoff, versus coming to a economic win-win for both nations. And I worry that there is a real pride here, that the center of Humiliation has deeply saturated the populace, the Communist Party, this idea where they’re just not going to back down. And that I think will cause tremendous pain in the short term for the United States, I think for China and the world, because it completely transforms the supply chain of everything. There is a global nature, there is a multilateral nature of all the economic partnerships that are formed throughout the 21st century. And this protectionist, nationalistic kind of ideology goes in the face of all of that, and it’s going to create a huge amount of pain for regular Americans. But also, I worry that this increases now decreases the chance of a global war or conflict of different kinds. Do you see a hopeful possibility for resolution, for de-escalation here?
Sometimes I wonder how much of these leaders operate on pure ego, because politically and on a human level, they don’t want to come off as losers in a standoff, versus coming to a economic win-win for both nations. And I worry that there is a real pride here, that the center of Humiliation has deeply saturated the populace, the Communist Party, this idea where they’re just not going to back down. And that I think will cause tremendous pain in the short term for the United States, I think for China and the world, because it completely transforms the supply chain of everything. There is a global nature, there is a multilateral nature of all the economic partnerships that are formed throughout the 21st century. And this protectionist, nationalistic kind of ideology goes in the face of all of that, and it’s going to create a huge amount of pain for regular Americans. But also, I worry that this increases now decreases the chance of a global war or conflict of different kinds. Do you see a hopeful possibility for resolution, for de-escalation here?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
It’s a hard time to figure out what you can, to hopeful angles. I guess what’s hard to even balance these things out, so one of the things that I’ve thought about when you talk about rising chances of war, that often Taiwan comes to mind with China. And one of the things that I’ve thought of is that for Xi Jinping, that military action against Taiwan would be increased by a sense of desperation, a sense of losing popularity, or a sense of not having a good story to tell about why he and the party deserves to lead.
It’s a hard time to figure out what you can, to hopeful angles. I guess what’s hard to even balance these things out, so one of the things that I’ve thought about when you talk about rising chances of war, that often Taiwan comes to mind with China. And one of the things that I’ve thought of is that for Xi Jinping, that military action against Taiwan would be increased by a sense of desperation, a sense of losing popularity, or a sense of not having a good story to tell about why he and the party deserves to lead.
So then there’s a way of playing to the nationalist sentiments of some part of the population. So then in a sense, it’s hopeful that I think in some ways right now, Xi Jinping is not looking desperate in the eyes of the world. If he can focus on potentially being seen more positively in other parts of the world by seeming like a force for stability, seen as somebody who’s supporting rather than challenging some elements of the global order, that might lessen the chances of a rash action toward Taiwan. That would be a kind of desperation move.
Lex Fridman
The complicated thing here is that if he gives in, he can come off as the responsible person who cares about the world, or he can come off weak. If he doesn’t give in and even escalates the tariffs, although I think he said no more escalation on the China front, then he comes off strong, but also the equally unreasonable person who doesn’t care about the world, who only cares about his own ego, and maybe some aspect of the Communist Party maintaining power, because just like with Tiananmen Square and the tank man, you don’t know once you make the decision how the world will read that decision, what kind of things will become viral memes about the telling of that story. And of course, in part, I think Donald Trump’s reach is much wider, because he’s constantly out there. And I think there’s a more reserved, less messaging out of Beijing. So it’s a really chaotic environment in which to make strong decisions.
The complicated thing here is that if he gives in, he can come off as the responsible person who cares about the world, or he can come off weak. If he doesn’t give in and even escalates the tariffs, although I think he said no more escalation on the China front, then he comes off strong, but also the equally unreasonable person who doesn’t care about the world, who only cares about his own ego, and maybe some aspect of the Communist Party maintaining power, because just like with Tiananmen Square and the tank man, you don’t know once you make the decision how the world will read that decision, what kind of things will become viral memes about the telling of that story. And of course, in part, I think Donald Trump’s reach is much wider, because he’s constantly out there. And I think there’s a more reserved, less messaging out of Beijing. So it’s a really chaotic environment in which to make strong decisions.
Taiwan
But since you brought it up, we’ll talk about Hong Kong, but let’s talk about Taiwan and maybe there’s some parallels there. Given Xi Jinping’s emphasis on the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and the unification with Taiwan being a crucial part of his vision for China, what do you think are the chances? And how willing is he to use force to annex, to forcibly gain control over Taiwan in the coming years?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
I’ll frame it in a way that I think does lead into talking about Hong Kong, because I think these are connected issues. In 1984, the year, not the book this time, that’s when a deal was struck basically, between London and Beijing over what would happen to Hong Kong. So Hong Kong Island became a British colony at the end of the first Opium war, the 1840s. And then Kowloon Peninsula near there became a British colony in 1860 after the second Opium war. But then there was a large amount of territory of what we now think of as Hong Kong, called the New Territories, that became under British control in 1898, but was not a colony. It was a 99-year lease.
I’ll frame it in a way that I think does lead into talking about Hong Kong, because I think these are connected issues. In 1984, the year, not the book this time, that’s when a deal was struck basically, between London and Beijing over what would happen to Hong Kong. So Hong Kong Island became a British colony at the end of the first Opium war, the 1840s. And then Kowloon Peninsula near there became a British colony in 1860 after the second Opium war. But then there was a large amount of territory of what we now think of as Hong Kong, called the New Territories, that became under British control in 1898, but was not a colony. It was a 99-year lease.
So 1997 was this kind of expiration date for the lease of this large amount of territory of what we now think of as Hong Kong. It’s a large amount of territory that the rest of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, depend on for energy, water, and food. So it would’ve been very hard to just transfer those parts to the Peoples Republic of China. So a deal needed to be struck of what would happen in 1997. And the deal was about transferring sovereignty of all of Hong Kong, all these parts, to the People’s Republic of China. And I carefully say transfer sovereignty, not give it back to the People’s Republic of China, because it never belonged to the People’s Republic of China. It was part of the Qing Empire, which was a different country, a different state that then anyway, but this needed to be transferred.
And the deal that was struck was that the London side wanted to do something to protect what was going to happen to the people there. And remember, this is not what usually happens to colonies. Colonies usually go from being part of an empire to being some degree of self-governed. And because of that, the Chinese representative of the UN insisted that Hong Kong was not a colony, and Macau was not a colony, because then they would have to be decolonized and go to independent. So anyway, there was an understanding that something would have to happen in 1997, and London wanted some protection for the people in Hong Kong, who they knew were living in a very different way than people lived under Communist party rule. There was a different kind of rule of law. There wasn’t democracy, but there was some degree of input in governance.
The colonial authority and the power most powerful person in Hong Kong was appointed by London. After 1997, the most powerful person would probably have to be somebody who could work with Beijing. But in this negotiation, something was come up with, called One Country, Two Systems. And Hong Kong would become part of the People’s Republic of China in diplomatic terms. It wouldn’t have its own military, but it would have its own system for 50 years, was the idea, from 1997 until 2047. There was a tension from the beginning over what that other system, what was going to be the part that was going to be separate. And clearly, everybody agreed it would need to have a different economic system. It had capitalism, so people agreed on that. But there was tension from the start of, well, what about legal? What about political, cultural and other things?
And things were written into this deal, which would be over time, Hong Kong, people would govern Hong Kong, but Beijing thought they would govern Hong Kong, but it would be a Hong Kong person who Beijing played a role in choosing. But the reason why Taiwan is relevant to all this is, in 1984, as they were discussing this, the Chinese Communist Party said, and will come up with this arrangement and people in Taiwan should pay attention to it, because it could provide a model for what could happen with them being absorbed into the people’s Republic of China. So the idea was Beijing said, “Hey, people in Taiwan, watch what happens to Hong Kong after 1997, and think about it as a model for what could happen with you,” saying, watch how smoothly it will go. Over time, people in Hong Kong started saying, well wait, Beijing keeps sort of nibbling away, chipping away at these things that make us separate, and especially after 2008.
There were reasons why Beijing went especially light on Hong Kong early after 1997. Beijing wanted to WTO, they wanted to host the Olympics. A big move against Hong Kong then could have endangered those things. Also at that point, the PRC was heavily dependent on economics in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong economy. Also, just something because I’m a university person. In 1997 when Hong Kong became part of the People’s Republic of China, then Hong Kong universities were the only universities in the PRC that were considered totally world-class. Hong Kong University and Chinese University of Hong Kong were highly rated institutions. And at that point, Peking University, Beijing, Beida and Tsinghua were not yet considered world-class institutions, because they didn’t have the kind of academic freedom and humanities that was at that point needed to be higher ratings.
Over time, that difference started to go away, because global ratings of universities stopped caring as much about academic freedom and things like that. And Beijing universities surpassed Hong Kong ones. So by the 2010s, when you started to have these protests in Hong Kong pushing back against what was called mainlandization, and clamping down, Hong Kong protesters in 2014 put up a banner. At the time when Beijing was holding the line against Hong Kong, people wanted to have real elections to choose the chief executive, rather than one where there were elections, but only people who Beijing approved of basically could run. Hong Kong activists put up a banner saying, “Hey, Taiwan, look at Hong Kong. Taiwan beware. Hong Kong’s today. It could be Taiwan’s tomorrow.” So basically spinning the one country, two systems argument, and saying, “Yeah, Taiwan. You should watch what happens here.”
So one way to think of Chinese leaders since Mao is that Mao and those after him, wanted to make China bigger territorially than it had been, to try to reclaim land. Under Mao, Tibet, which had been not part of China, became part of the People’s Republic of China. Mao offered something a little bit like one country, two systems to it. Isabel Hilton, who writes wonderfully about Tibet, has talked about the parallels with the Hong Kong system. And some Hong Kong activists saw parallels as well. Tibet was supposed to go its own way as part of the people’s Republic of China in the 1950s. And then by 1959, the center got restless, tried to interfere more. Local people pushed back against it. And a workable, what seemed like it might work out somehow against all odds, explodes. And the Dalai Lama goes into exile. The Dalai Lama, who before that had thought maybe he and Mao could work together, that didn’t work.
Hong Kong, a new version of the experiment happens, and it becomes clear in the 2010s that it’s not really workable, that the center is less patient, needs Hong Kong less. The Hong Kong people feel it’s more of a now or never period to push back. You could say that Deng Xiaoping oversaw the deal that got Hong Kong and Macau to become part of the People’s Republic of China. He could point to that, even though he died during 1997, but he had achieved that kind of deal. Xi Jinping could argue, you could argue, he finished the deal of making Hong Kong fully a part of the people’s Republic of China, doing away with this degree of difference. And you could say that that then is a stepping stone toward Taiwan. Or you could say that in the South China Sea Islands build up, might be enough for him to put his stamp on having been the kind of leader who expanded Beijing’s reach.
He probably wants both. Probably, to the extent, he would like Taiwan to become part of the People’s Republic of China, which it has never been. But the hope was, it could happen through a kind of more gradual absorption, and people in Taiwan being willing to think of that. And yet in part because of what’s happened to places like Hong Kong, there’s a fiercer, a stronger sense of Taiwan identity now than there was at an earlier point. And less parties that are more willing to try to negotiate some kind of tighter connection with the PRC, are often doing badly in elections there because of this mood.
Protests in Hong Kong
Lex Fridman
2047 is 50 years from the 1997 handover that you were talking about with Hong Kong. On top of that, 2049 is a hundred years from Mao taking power. It feels like at that moment, China could take Taiwan, because it does seem that there’s a kind of value for history in China, and they take these days very seriously. On the other hand, as you have studied, there is some tensions, and displeasure, and protests, some of the biggest in human history in Hong Kong. And so put all of that together, and so many possible trajectories of human history could happen here.
2047 is 50 years from the 1997 handover that you were talking about with Hong Kong. On top of that, 2049 is a hundred years from Mao taking power. It feels like at that moment, China could take Taiwan, because it does seem that there’s a kind of value for history in China, and they take these days very seriously. On the other hand, as you have studied, there is some tensions, and displeasure, and protests, some of the biggest in human history in Hong Kong. And so put all of that together, and so many possible trajectories of human history could happen here.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah, I’m particularly interested in youth movements. And one of the things, I think generation is such an important factor. And people know that generation’s important, but somehow, sometimes people think that if you divide people up into economic groups, you divide people up into a racial or ethnic class, that groups, that that somehow is more tangible. But I think with things like the Hong Kong protests, that there was a process of what was seen as mainlandization, of Beijing just moving to make the things that were really distinctive about Hong Kong less distinctive, and minimizing the differences. And this process sped up dramatically after the 2019 protests. And there was just partly with the distraction of COVID and the distraction of the world, there was this imposition of this national security law that basically did away with the differences.
Yeah, I’m particularly interested in youth movements. And one of the things, I think generation is such an important factor. And people know that generation’s important, but somehow, sometimes people think that if you divide people up into economic groups, you divide people up into a racial or ethnic class, that groups, that that somehow is more tangible. But I think with things like the Hong Kong protests, that there was a process of what was seen as mainlandization, of Beijing just moving to make the things that were really distinctive about Hong Kong less distinctive, and minimizing the differences. And this process sped up dramatically after the 2019 protests. And there was just partly with the distraction of COVID and the distraction of the world, there was this imposition of this national security law that basically did away with the differences.
And you had some people in the city of an older generation saying, “Why couldn’t they have just been more patient?” “Why did these protests force the hand of the people in power?” But I think that age has a lot to do with it, that if there was this kind of gradual erosion or there was going to be this process of doing away with the things that made Hong Kong really special and that people loved passionately about it, including this freer press, or just freer associational life and things like that. If you were 17 in 2019, and people were saying by 2047 it will all be gone, or maybe it’ll even all be…
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
By 2047, it’ll all be gone, or maybe it’ll even all be gone in 10 years. Then you’re talking about living most of your life in a Hong Kong that isn’t the Hong Kong you really love. Whereas if you were 80, you were like, “Why can’t they be patient?” And people in between had all kinds of other things. This is one thing that leads to, often logically, there’s a rationality toward younger people being more militant about certain kinds of things. I think we see the same thing with climate change, with climate activism. You’re talking about whatever projection is of when things are going to get worse further down. The younger you are, the more of your life is going to live in that scenario. And there’s a logic for more of that impatience.
By 2047, it’ll all be gone, or maybe it’ll even all be gone in 10 years. Then you’re talking about living most of your life in a Hong Kong that isn’t the Hong Kong you really love. Whereas if you were 80, you were like, “Why can’t they be patient?” And people in between had all kinds of other things. This is one thing that leads to, often logically, there’s a rationality toward younger people being more militant about certain kinds of things. I think we see the same thing with climate change, with climate activism. You’re talking about whatever projection is of when things are going to get worse further down. The younger you are, the more of your life is going to live in that scenario. And there’s a logic for more of that impatience.
There’s also a sense of frustration with an older generation not having done enough to resolve issues. These are things with Hong Kong, with climate change, with Thailand, the place that I’ve been working on lately. One of the slogans in 2020 when there was a push for democracy was let it end with this generation, which, again, expressed this sense of gradual solutions are fine, but we are carrying more of a burden of what we’re going to live with that. So with the 2019, also the protests, some of the things that were being chipped away at by Beijing in 2012, there was an effort to impose mainland style patriotic education, saying, well, who cares how civics is taught? But actually that has a lot to do with the larger political story. And the protesters that year, young people stood up and actually got the government to blink. The local authorities backed down on that bringing in mainland style education.
2014, the protest was to try to get full voting rights for the chief executive. The government didn’t blink on that. That was something where they held the line. It was a big, colorful, exciting protest, but in the end, it hit a dead end. 2019 there even bigger protests, and at first it seems like surprising what the issue was. The issue was an extradition law that would have people, potentially, who committed crimes in Hong Kong being tried for them if the mainland wanted them on the mainland. Now, the difference, they’re really different court systems. Hong Kong never had democracy under the British, but it did have a stronger rule of law and more independent courts. Courts that sometimes decided things that went the other way than what the government wanted.
And the mainland doesn’t have that kind of court system. 98, 99% conviction rate. In Hong Kong if you’re arrested, even for before 2020, if you were arrested, even under a politically-related charge, you were out on bail and giving interviews with the press. On the mainland, that didn’t happen. So I think in 2019, even having lost the battle over voting, this idea that, okay, we’ve really got to take a last stand to defend the rule of law and a degree of separation of powers. That doesn’t sound like a clearly obvious thing for slogans, but it is something that I think we’ve realized in this country and in other countries as well, is something that can really be definitive about where things are going politically.
Lex Fridman
Well, I should also say, I mean it’s more dramatic than it sounds with extradition because it gives power to mainland China to imprison political activists and then try them in a very different way. So it’s not just even a different system. It gives another lever, and a powerful one, to punish people that speak against China.
Well, I should also say, I mean it’s more dramatic than it sounds with extradition because it gives power to mainland China to imprison political activists and then try them in a very different way. So it’s not just even a different system. It gives another lever, and a powerful one, to punish people that speak against China.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
And I mentioned the Hong Kong booksellers who were spirited over the border, and one of them was still in prison, for having published things in Hong Kong that it was supposed to be okay to publish in Hong Kong, but not on the mainland. And yet they ended up being charged. So yeah, there was a clear sense that if they didn’t protest, then would they be able to protest later?
And I mentioned the Hong Kong booksellers who were spirited over the border, and one of them was still in prison, for having published things in Hong Kong that it was supposed to be okay to publish in Hong Kong, but not on the mainland. And yet they ended up being charged. So yeah, there was a clear sense that if they didn’t protest, then would they be able to protest later?
Lex Fridman
So this was one of maybe the biggest protests in history?
So this was one of maybe the biggest protests in history?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Percentage-wise.
Percentage-wise.
Lex Fridman
Percentage-wise.
Percentage-wise.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Because the ways, why I make that claim, because there were a million to 2 million people in the biggest protests. And this is of 7.5 million people.
Because the ways, why I make that claim, because there were a million to 2 million people in the biggest protests. And this is of 7.5 million people.
Lex Fridman
Crazy.
Crazy.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So if you think about what that means, it’s just enormous. I mean, yeah, there were some very daring protests around that period, the Hong Kong ones, and the year after that there were protests in other places. The protests in Belarus where again, it was taking big risks, but if people have a feeling that it’s a last moment. So yeah, these were giant and the protests kept growing. I think they kept growing in part, and this happens, why protests grow, it’s always hard to figure out. But in the case of Tiananmen and the case of Hong Kong 2019, if people feel that the protesters have the moral high ground in one way or another, and what tipped it that way in Hong Kong, I think, was really that the police were using really strong arm methods and the government was never apologizing or never saying, “We need to investigate that.” And I think what really kept the protests going was they became a referendum on the right to protest itself.
So if you think about what that means, it’s just enormous. I mean, yeah, there were some very daring protests around that period, the Hong Kong ones, and the year after that there were protests in other places. The protests in Belarus where again, it was taking big risks, but if people have a feeling that it’s a last moment. So yeah, these were giant and the protests kept growing. I think they kept growing in part, and this happens, why protests grow, it’s always hard to figure out. But in the case of Tiananmen and the case of Hong Kong 2019, if people feel that the protesters have the moral high ground in one way or another, and what tipped it that way in Hong Kong, I think, was really that the police were using really strong arm methods and the government was never apologizing or never saying, “We need to investigate that.” And I think what really kept the protests going was they became a referendum on the right to protest itself.
What I think the government hoped, and what Beijing certainly hoped, was that some of the protesters would start doing militant actions, violent actions that would alienate the populace from the protests. And the protesters did do some of those things, but they tended to attack, the violence was often against property. And when there were occasionally violence against people, people within the movement would apologize or try to distance themselves from that. Meanwhile, the government was never apologizing or distancing itself from the police. And that created a dynamic where they had these enormous numbers of people who were previously on the fence about things turning up for these protests and leading to them being giant. And this was a city that sometimes had the misunderstood reputation as being one where people didn’t care that much about politics. They just focused on living a good life. But there was a sense that they wouldn’t have that possibility if you had a police, and the police used to be really highly respected in Hong Kong, but have lost that.
Lex Fridman
Maybe you can speak to some of the dynamics of this. First of all, you were there in the early days, as I understand. How does the protest of this scale … explode as it did? It starts with small groups of students, of the youth. Maybe you can speak to, in general, from all the studying of youth protests, how does maybe anger, maybe ideological optimism, maybe the desire for revolution and for better times amongst a small group of students, how does that become a movement and how does that become a gigantic protest?
Maybe you can speak to some of the dynamics of this. First of all, you were there in the early days, as I understand. How does the protest of this scale … explode as it did? It starts with small groups of students, of the youth. Maybe you can speak to, in general, from all the studying of youth protests, how does maybe anger, maybe ideological optimism, maybe the desire for revolution and for better times amongst a small group of students, how does that become a movement and how does that become a gigantic protest?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So protests, one of the things that some of the most impressive books I’ve been reading about other places have been emphasizing is that protests are often preceded by other protests that may seem like dead ends, but actually provide people with the skills and scripts and repertoires to then carry out things on a larger scale after that. So you often, we get captivated by a moment that seems to come out of nowhere, but it often doesn’t. The ground has been laid by, it can be by an earlier generation that passes on the stories about it or it can be just a few years before.
So protests, one of the things that some of the most impressive books I’ve been reading about other places have been emphasizing is that protests are often preceded by other protests that may seem like dead ends, but actually provide people with the skills and scripts and repertoires to then carry out things on a larger scale after that. So you often, we get captivated by a moment that seems to come out of nowhere, but it often doesn’t. The ground has been laid by, it can be by an earlier generation that passes on the stories about it or it can be just a few years before.
And sometimes a new generation will say, “Look at what they did. That was exciting, but we want to put our mark on things by [inaudible 02:12:39] generation.” So there were these 1986 protests that fizzled out that helped lay the groundwork for the 1989 ones. In Hong Kong, there were the 2012 and 2014 ones that laid the groundwork 2019. Some of the times, it was the same activists out on the streets again, but sometimes it was a younger generation said, “Yeah, okay, but that failed. So what can we do differently?” And we see this in cases in the US and we see it around the world, of the percolating of things that happen, sometimes in conversations that continue, that happen. And sometimes failures can seem like dead ends, but over a long period of time we see them as succeeding. And it can seem irrational to try to do something after the last three times people have tried to do it have failed. But then occasionally, history shows that the third time or the fifth time or the 20th time actually does succeed. There’s enough countervailing. In Eastern Europe, you would say in 1956, there was a rising, it was crushed. In ’68 they were rising, was crushed. Poland 1981, martial law imposed. In 1989, what were East German protesters thinking when they poured out onto the streets, and then it happened, but this time it wasn’t. So I think there’s a way in which social movements are fundamentally unpredictable and there are just times when, against all seeming odds, something that seemed like it would be there forever, just no longer is.
Lex Fridman
And that’s the case you make for when the odds seem impossible, it’s still worthwhile?
And that’s the case you make for when the odds seem impossible, it’s still worthwhile?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
It doesn’t mean that it will work, but I think history has enough examples of things that you thought. I mean, it explains why certain figures are so inspirational for generations of activists, that people read. There’s a reason why people talk about Václav Havel. Whereas if Václav Havel had died in 1988, people would’ve said, “Oh, maybe he was a great writer,” but his political project, he didn’t live to see come. But then he lives to ’89 and becomes against all expectations. So Rebecca Solnit, she’s got a new book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, and she’s talking about taking a longer view of some struggles that achieve things after the point when people might’ve imagined that they had run into dead ends. And she’s talking about keeping your eye on the gains that happen, even incrementally, and the ways in which the need to take a longer term perspective on some of these things.
It doesn’t mean that it will work, but I think history has enough examples of things that you thought. I mean, it explains why certain figures are so inspirational for generations of activists, that people read. There’s a reason why people talk about Václav Havel. Whereas if Václav Havel had died in 1988, people would’ve said, “Oh, maybe he was a great writer,” but his political project, he didn’t live to see come. But then he lives to ’89 and becomes against all expectations. So Rebecca Solnit, she’s got a new book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, and she’s talking about taking a longer view of some struggles that achieve things after the point when people might’ve imagined that they had run into dead ends. And she’s talking about keeping your eye on the gains that happen, even incrementally, and the ways in which the need to take a longer term perspective on some of these things.
And I think it’s a strange thing because there’s also often an impatience in movements of people wanting immediate results. But as a historian, looking at situations, I’ve mentioned Eastern Europe and Central Europe, but Europe, Taiwan was a right-wing dictatorship under a version of martial law for decades. And at each stage, it would seem that people struggling to change it were on a quixotic, impossible mission, or South Korea was in a similar situation. And then in the late 1980s, you start to have those things unravel. And it’s partly because of a steady resistance. It’s partly because something in the world changes, but there’s often a combination of those things. So I’m interested in that whole, we know that what happened in Hong Kong in the short run didn’t work, and I don’t see a way in which the national security laws reversed or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean that it was a completely impossible effort, even though we know the result in that case was to have this failure.
Lex Fridman
So the protests are generally worthwhile. I mean they do give, as I look at the description of the migratory routes ideas take, they do seed ideas in the minds of people and then they live with those ideas and they share those ideas. They deliberate through those ideas. They might travel to different places of the world and then those ideas return and rise up again and again and again. There’s two parts of the world that I think are fascinating … and unpredictable. So one is Iran, which the trajectory that place takes might have a complete transformative effect on the Middle East. Then the other one is China, where the protests, whether it’s in Taiwan or Hong Kong or maybe other influential parts of China, those ideas percolating up and up again might have a completely transformative effect on the world.
So the protests are generally worthwhile. I mean they do give, as I look at the description of the migratory routes ideas take, they do seed ideas in the minds of people and then they live with those ideas and they share those ideas. They deliberate through those ideas. They might travel to different places of the world and then those ideas return and rise up again and again and again. There’s two parts of the world that I think are fascinating … and unpredictable. So one is Iran, which the trajectory that place takes might have a complete transformative effect on the Middle East. Then the other one is China, where the protests, whether it’s in Taiwan or Hong Kong or maybe other influential parts of China, those ideas percolating up and up again might have a completely transformative effect on the world.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So maybe this is another case where, so the Chinese Communist Party, leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, they do know about history and they care about history. And one history they know is the Chinese Communist Party was almost destroyed in 1927. I mean it was if you were taking odds on what are the chances that this ragtag group that’s being pursued by Chiang Kai-shek to try to determine, and yet over time, they somehow managed to ride it out and eventually come to power. There’s an awareness of the ways in which the seemingly impossible can happen. It doesn’t mean it will. I mean, this is why I think, and one of the really tragic or heartrending things is you can have situations in which movements that seem to be pursuing an impossible end result, they achieve that result. And then after another period, the country goes into another really difficult period or it seems that the successes are being rolled back.
So maybe this is another case where, so the Chinese Communist Party, leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, they do know about history and they care about history. And one history they know is the Chinese Communist Party was almost destroyed in 1927. I mean it was if you were taking odds on what are the chances that this ragtag group that’s being pursued by Chiang Kai-shek to try to determine, and yet over time, they somehow managed to ride it out and eventually come to power. There’s an awareness of the ways in which the seemingly impossible can happen. It doesn’t mean it will. I mean, this is why I think, and one of the really tragic or heartrending things is you can have situations in which movements that seem to be pursuing an impossible end result, they achieve that result. And then after another period, the country goes into another really difficult period or it seems that the successes are being rolled back.
And my new Milk Tea Alliance book that I’ve just written, I dedicate it to two people who’ve lived through a variety of these things. One is a Burmese activist who was involved in a failed uprising in 1988. He then was an exile who didn’t know whether he could ever see his brothers who he loves back in Burma. And then something magical changed. And in the 2010s, it seemed that there was a democratization that turned out to be a false dawn. He was able to go back and now he’s, again, when there’s been a coup and a crackdown, he’s now again cut off. And at one point, I was asking him about how he feels about this when he’s still trying to raise awareness globally about what’s happening in Myanmar. He said, “I feel helpless but not hopeless.” I think how does somebody maintain hope in that?
And the other person I dedicated to Miklós Haraszti is a Hungarian friend of mine who was an activist before ’89 and saw this amazing thing happen was communism, a communist party rule ending. He was part of the process that came and he was friends with Havel, and Havel’s there and Poland’s changing and all of this exhilarating moment, but ends up being a critic of Orbán and following a tightening of controlling, a rolling back of many of the things that were victorious then. But this, the no straight road, that actually there’s something about, it can be disquieting when these unexpected things are blows to where you thought direction history was going. But history just shows you that history doesn’t have a direction. There isn’t a straight road.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And there’s the idealism of youth can lead to things like the Russian Revolution. And then you get Stalin with [inaudible 02:21:41] and the purges and all of that entailed. So a successful protest and a successful revolution might have unintended consequences that far overshadow whatever ideals and dreams you had fighting for the working class, whatever it was in that particular case, that can cause immeasurable suffering. So there is no direction to history. There’s just some lessons we pick up along the way and we hopefully try to help humanity flourish and we barely know what we’re doing. And now we have nuclear weapons.
Yeah. And there’s the idealism of youth can lead to things like the Russian Revolution. And then you get Stalin with [inaudible 02:21:41] and the purges and all of that entailed. So a successful protest and a successful revolution might have unintended consequences that far overshadow whatever ideals and dreams you had fighting for the working class, whatever it was in that particular case, that can cause immeasurable suffering. So there is no direction to history. There’s just some lessons we pick up along the way and we hopefully try to help humanity flourish and we barely know what we’re doing. And now we have nuclear weapons.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
And some of it is also, though, sometimes the people who I find really admirable, it’s not about trying to create totalistic change, but they focus on trying to do what they can for the things they believe in within constrained circumstances. And in Thailand, they’ve hit a roadblock now, again, over trying to bring about electoral change. A party that did really well was then disqualified. And some of the activists I know are focusing on local efforts to improve a neighborhood, to keep a neighborhood from suffering from a unthinking gentrification. They’re thinking small, they’re thinking sometimes about just what can we do to improve the life of people within certain, how can we build, how can we contribute to the kinds of social groups that might make some incremental improvement to being the world that we want to live in. People do that in all kinds of ways.
And some of it is also, though, sometimes the people who I find really admirable, it’s not about trying to create totalistic change, but they focus on trying to do what they can for the things they believe in within constrained circumstances. And in Thailand, they’ve hit a roadblock now, again, over trying to bring about electoral change. A party that did really well was then disqualified. And some of the activists I know are focusing on local efforts to improve a neighborhood, to keep a neighborhood from suffering from a unthinking gentrification. They’re thinking small, they’re thinking sometimes about just what can we do to improve the life of people within certain, how can we build, how can we contribute to the kinds of social groups that might make some incremental improvement to being the world that we want to live in. People do that in all kinds of ways.
Lex Fridman
What parallels can we draw between Taiwan and Hong Kong? What do you think are the people of Taiwan are thinking, looking at Hong Kong?
What parallels can we draw between Taiwan and Hong Kong? What do you think are the people of Taiwan are thinking, looking at Hong Kong?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Well, I think the way that things developed in Hong Kong have undermined the trust in any story coming out of Beijing. That there’s a place within Xi Jinping’s version, at least the People’s Republic of China, for a place where people live very different kinds of lives. And I think a lot of people in Taiwan think of them, feel they’re living a very different life than on the mainland. So in that way, I think Hong Kong was an important … example that way. And there were connections between, there was a Taiwan protest in 2014 before the big protest in Hong Kong by people who were young people who felt the government then was moving too much toward working together with Beijing. So they’ve been interconnected stories, and I think we sometimes miss how people within a region are looking at what other people in the region are doing and are taking clues from it about how to agitate for the things they care about, what the risks are, what the dangers are. But the autocrats within different parts per region are looking at each other too, as well as globally.
Well, I think the way that things developed in Hong Kong have undermined the trust in any story coming out of Beijing. That there’s a place within Xi Jinping’s version, at least the People’s Republic of China, for a place where people live very different kinds of lives. And I think a lot of people in Taiwan think of them, feel they’re living a very different life than on the mainland. So in that way, I think Hong Kong was an important … example that way. And there were connections between, there was a Taiwan protest in 2014 before the big protest in Hong Kong by people who were young people who felt the government then was moving too much toward working together with Beijing. So they’ve been interconnected stories, and I think we sometimes miss how people within a region are looking at what other people in the region are doing and are taking clues from it about how to agitate for the things they care about, what the risks are, what the dangers are. But the autocrats within different parts per region are looking at each other too, as well as globally.
Lex Fridman
In part because there’s a great dependence in the United States on TSMC and in that way on Taiwan for different supply chains, for electronics, for semiconductors, for a lot of our economy, there’s been a lot of nervousness about Taiwan. What are the chances that there is some brewing military conflict over this question of Taiwan in the coming decades and how can we avoid it?
In part because there’s a great dependence in the United States on TSMC and in that way on Taiwan for different supply chains, for electronics, for semiconductors, for a lot of our economy, there’s been a lot of nervousness about Taiwan. What are the chances that there is some brewing military conflict over this question of Taiwan in the coming decades and how can we avoid it?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
It’s one of these really worrisome issues that there isn’t an easy, I think experts who tell you they know what X, Y, & Z about this is are deluding themselves probably. There’s so many variables.
It’s one of these really worrisome issues that there isn’t an easy, I think experts who tell you they know what X, Y, & Z about this is are deluding themselves probably. There’s so many variables.
Lex Fridman
Maybe you could just elaborate the possible clues we have.
Maybe you could just elaborate the possible clues we have.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So with talking to people in Taiwan and from Taiwan, there are a couple things that are clear. One is that daily life in Taiwan is not people waking up each morning living their life based on the fact that they’re in such a perilous predicament. That it’s life goes on and a lot of people feel very, very fortunate to be in Taiwan. There are many reasons why it seems like a great place to live, in many ways. But at the same time there is an awareness of things that increase precariousness. And there was a lot of concern with the invasion of Ukraine and watching how the response to that was, and there was a sense of it being analogous. There was a sense that Xi Jinping would be watching the response to Putin and seeing what he would do then.
So with talking to people in Taiwan and from Taiwan, there are a couple things that are clear. One is that daily life in Taiwan is not people waking up each morning living their life based on the fact that they’re in such a perilous predicament. That it’s life goes on and a lot of people feel very, very fortunate to be in Taiwan. There are many reasons why it seems like a great place to live, in many ways. But at the same time there is an awareness of things that increase precariousness. And there was a lot of concern with the invasion of Ukraine and watching how the response to that was, and there was a sense of it being analogous. There was a sense that Xi Jinping would be watching the response to Putin and seeing what he would do then.
And so then there was a sense of relief, I think, when there was as unified a western, NATO, including the United States response. And then there’s a concern about the Trump presidency because of Ukraine. At the same time, there’re mixed signals. So I’m sure there are people there who are both saying, “Trump is going to be tough toward the Chinese Communist Party,” and others are going to say, “But if he’s not as supportive of Ukraine, what does that say for the defensive?” So they’re not the same situations, but all people have, in a sense, sometimes with unknowable situations, is to look at things that have any degree of parallel connections in other places.
Lex Fridman
Do you think Xi Jinping knows what he’s going to do in the next five, 10 years with Taiwan? Or is it really, there’s a loose historical notion that Taiwan should be part of China. Would Xi Jinping and the Communist Party believe that?
Do you think Xi Jinping knows what he’s going to do in the next five, 10 years with Taiwan? Or is it really, there’s a loose historical notion that Taiwan should be part of China. Would Xi Jinping and the Communist Party believe that?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
That loose idea was accepted. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao both thought that these two places were part of, somehow, destined to be the same. It was just, under that period, Chiang Kai-shek thought, how long until I take over the mainland and it all becomes the Republic of China? This is not now something that any leader in Taiwan is believing. There is a degree to which that remains a sense within the Chinese Communist Party leadership as a eventuality. I don’t think there’s a set plan, in part because I think it is also dependent on what the costs in various realms would be of doing that. I think it still does … I think it’s still, one scenario would be possibly a sense of becoming strong enough to not have to worry about consequences. I think another, I still think, to some extent more, would be a sense of weakness or precarity of maintaining power domestically and needing to do something to distract.
That loose idea was accepted. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao both thought that these two places were part of, somehow, destined to be the same. It was just, under that period, Chiang Kai-shek thought, how long until I take over the mainland and it all becomes the Republic of China? This is not now something that any leader in Taiwan is believing. There is a degree to which that remains a sense within the Chinese Communist Party leadership as a eventuality. I don’t think there’s a set plan, in part because I think it is also dependent on what the costs in various realms would be of doing that. I think it still does … I think it’s still, one scenario would be possibly a sense of becoming strong enough to not have to worry about consequences. I think another, I still think, to some extent more, would be a sense of weakness or precarity of maintaining power domestically and needing to do something to distract.
Lex Fridman
And another complexity about this is it’s not always so clear, the line between no conflict and conflict. So there’s a lot of gray zone tactics of nonviolent pressure that China could exude. So you could do non-military violence, it could then escalate that to nonviolent military intimidation. And all of this has consequences for the United States because there’s a messaging thing going on here. And then of course that could then go to a full-on do-as-you’re-told actions that come at a high risk of a hot military conflict. So basically just don’t do military violence, but just full-on pressure, ordering Taiwan to do things. And there, it’s like the only way to respond is with violence. You’re completely trapped.
And another complexity about this is it’s not always so clear, the line between no conflict and conflict. So there’s a lot of gray zone tactics of nonviolent pressure that China could exude. So you could do non-military violence, it could then escalate that to nonviolent military intimidation. And all of this has consequences for the United States because there’s a messaging thing going on here. And then of course that could then go to a full-on do-as-you’re-told actions that come at a high risk of a hot military conflict. So basically just don’t do military violence, but just full-on pressure, ordering Taiwan to do things. And there, it’s like the only way to respond is with violence. You’re completely trapped.
You’re saying no, you have to say no with a military force behind it. Then what do you do? And every step in this, it’s such an unstable, non-linear, dynamical system where anything could just, unintended consequences can happen and it could just escalate in a matter of days, if not hours. And so this is where I think it’s really important to find mechanisms and tactics and strategies for de-escalation, which is why this trade war that’s happening, one of the nice things of being so connected by trade is it creates a disincentive for any of this posturing. Because I do agree with you. I think it will start, as these things often do, as a military, early steps posturing in order to maintain power internally. So China will just create military conflict, conflict of different kinds in order to distract. But then how does that escalate?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
As if all that wasn’t complicated enough, Taiwan isn’t just one place or one island. There are islands that are closer to mainland Xianmen and degrees of integration and anyway, but your comment about integration of trade and being a check on, there’s a Chinese writer who, fascinating guy, Han Han, who was a race car driver and a filmmaker and a bad boy novelist. Anyway, in his heyday, he was an interesting blogger who was testing the edges of things. And he had this blog post where he was talking about, this was in the early 2000s. He was talking about how China was building the massive Three Gorges Dam project, this [inaudible 02:32:53]. And he said, “Some people are saying building these dams, it could be so easy for the Americans to just bomb them and destroy our country, because it would be a massive flood.”
As if all that wasn’t complicated enough, Taiwan isn’t just one place or one island. There are islands that are closer to mainland Xianmen and degrees of integration and anyway, but your comment about integration of trade and being a check on, there’s a Chinese writer who, fascinating guy, Han Han, who was a race car driver and a filmmaker and a bad boy novelist. Anyway, in his heyday, he was an interesting blogger who was testing the edges of things. And he had this blog post where he was talking about, this was in the early 2000s. He was talking about how China was building the massive Three Gorges Dam project, this [inaudible 02:32:53]. And he said, “Some people are saying building these dams, it could be so easy for the Americans to just bomb them and destroy our country, because it would be a massive flood.”
And he said, “But that’s really silly. That’s a really silly argument because Americans know that down river from there, what would be flooded out was the place where their iPhones are built and they want their iPhones.” So this notion he is making through a humorous point, the way in which interconnectedness can be a check. And interconnectedness can be in all kinds of ways. The flows of people between places and having people from one place living in another, traveling to another, studying in another, that can actually be something that helps to stabilize the world. And I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind.
Mao Zedong
Lex Fridman
Since you mentioned the Long March and the unlikely coming to power with the Communist Party, let’s go back. We began comparing Xi Jinping and Mao. Let’s go back to Mao. How did Mao come to power?
Since you mentioned the Long March and the unlikely coming to power with the Communist Party, let’s go back. We began comparing Xi Jinping and Mao. Let’s go back to Mao. How did Mao come to power?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
The road to Mao coming to power, we need to first say that China was under rule by emperors until 1911, overthrown by an upheaval that was partly by people who wanted to change China into a republic, but also some people who wanted to get rid of the last dynasty was a group of Manchu-ruling families. So they saw them as ethnic outsiders. So it was a strange combination of ethnic nationalists who wanted China back under the control of Han Chinese. Other people who thought the time for rule by emperors was over and wanted to establish a republic. And Sun Yat-sen became a provisional president of this newly formed Republic of China. But then-
The road to Mao coming to power, we need to first say that China was under rule by emperors until 1911, overthrown by an upheaval that was partly by people who wanted to change China into a republic, but also some people who wanted to get rid of the last dynasty was a group of Manchu-ruling families. So they saw them as ethnic outsiders. So it was a strange combination of ethnic nationalists who wanted China back under the control of Han Chinese. Other people who thought the time for rule by emperors was over and wanted to establish a republic. And Sun Yat-sen became a provisional president of this newly formed Republic of China. But then-
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
… President of this newly formed Republic of China. But then he got nudged out of power by a military strongman. And then there was a period where the country was really divided. Republic of China didn’t have a strong government, but there were then two groups. One rallied around Sun Yat-sen had founded something that became known as The Nationalist Party. And then, there was a small group of people who formed a communist party. Mao was one of them. These were intellectuals who were part of the May 4th movement of 1919. They were inspired by Marxist ideas, but they were also just inspired by the Russian Revolution. Russia was nearby. It seemed good to think with. It had a largely rural population, and somehow it seemed to be getting strong in the world. And there was this interest in how China could do that. And the newly formed Soviet Union did something very important.
… President of this newly formed Republic of China. But then he got nudged out of power by a military strongman. And then there was a period where the country was really divided. Republic of China didn’t have a strong government, but there were then two groups. One rallied around Sun Yat-sen had founded something that became known as The Nationalist Party. And then, there was a small group of people who formed a communist party. Mao was one of them. These were intellectuals who were part of the May 4th movement of 1919. They were inspired by Marxist ideas, but they were also just inspired by the Russian Revolution. Russia was nearby. It seemed good to think with. It had a largely rural population, and somehow it seemed to be getting strong in the world. And there was this interest in how China could do that. And the newly formed Soviet Union did something very important.
There were a group of foreign powers, including Tsarist Russia, that had gained big concessions out of China when, in 1900, The Boxer Uprising had taken place and then been crushed by a consortium of foreign powers who had gotten privileges and indemnities out of that. And the newly formed Soviet Union renounced those. Said that was the old order. That was imperialism. And so, Marx’s ideas were attractive to some Chinese thinkers, but Lenin was very attractive because of his combination of anti-imperialism and his notion of a vanguard party leading a country forward. So there was a small communist party, a bigger nationalist party. They were involved in these protests against warlords and against imperialists. And while Sun Yat-sen was alive, Sun Yat-sen got the two parties to work together because Sun Yat-sen wasn’t a Marxist. He didn’t believe in class struggle, but he admired Lenin and Leninism. And so, he said that actually The Communist Party and The Nationalist Party may have had different views of the path forward for China, but they agreed on who the enemies were and the enemies were the warlords who were keeping China weak and too willing to compromise with Japan, and foreign imperialism. So China needed to get rid of the warlords and become a stronger country, and then they could sort it out of what road to take. Sun Yat-sen dies in 1925, and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, is initially keeps the alliance going with the Communist Party, but in 1927, he turns against the communists and tries to carry out a purge against The Communist Party members.
Lex Fridman
He’s the head of the nationalists?
He’s the head of the nationalists?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
He’s the head of the nationalists. And he has some very different … He’s a kind of culturally more conservative figure. But what’s important in part about this is there are some members of the Chinese Communist Party who accept the basic ideas of Marxism, of revolution comes from the cities. But Mao has this idea that actually he loves this idea of peasant rebellions in China’s past is driving history forward. And he starts writing about how, well, maybe in China’s case actually the peasantry farmers can be a radical force. And so, The Communist Party’s on the run. It’s being pushed around, but the nationalists are trying to exterminate them. But eventually, and the nationalists and the Communists ally again after Japan invades China in the 1930s. They formed what’s called The Second United Front. But during this period, Mao is emerging as taking leadership in the Chinese Communist Party and his idea of a different kind of vision of communist revolution that has the revolutionary vanguard somehow being the peasantry.
He’s the head of the nationalists. And he has some very different … He’s a kind of culturally more conservative figure. But what’s important in part about this is there are some members of the Chinese Communist Party who accept the basic ideas of Marxism, of revolution comes from the cities. But Mao has this idea that actually he loves this idea of peasant rebellions in China’s past is driving history forward. And he starts writing about how, well, maybe in China’s case actually the peasantry farmers can be a radical force. And so, The Communist Party’s on the run. It’s being pushed around, but the nationalists are trying to exterminate them. But eventually, and the nationalists and the Communists ally again after Japan invades China in the 1930s. They formed what’s called The Second United Front. But during this period, Mao is emerging as taking leadership in the Chinese Communist Party and his idea of a different kind of vision of communist revolution that has the revolutionary vanguard somehow being the peasantry.
After World War II, after the two parties have brokered a truce and sort of worked together against Japan, there’s a civil war between the nationalists and the communists. And against all odds, the Communist party wins. The Communist Party gets support from the Soviet Union. The Nationalists get support from the United States, even though neither of them are quite doing things the way that their backer would like them to. But there also is a way in which, and this is something I think the Communist Party leaders remember, there’s a feeling that the Nationalist Party doesn’t really believe its own rhetoric. That, in fact, all it cares about is having power, and that it’s internally corrupt. Chiang Kai-shek himself isn’t viewed as sort of personally corrupt, but family members, and there’s an idea that there’s just a small band of people that are benefiting. And there’s a kind of disgust with the Nationalists. The Nationalists end up in retreat in Taiwan. That’s why Taiwan then becomes the Republic of China.
There’s an uprising there that Chiang Kai-shek’s people, the Nationalists, repress. And there starts being from the late-nineteen forties on this long period of martial law on Taiwan. And there becomes then this period where the mainland’s under the control of a Leninist party, believes in one party rule, and believes that it was a very bad in Chinese history when China was unable to stand up to imperialists. Taiwan’s controlled by a Leninist party that believes in one-party rule, limits on participation, believes that it was a bad time when China was being bullied by imperialists. What distinguishes, Chiang Kai-shek has a personality cult, Mao has a personality cult. They have a lot in common, but one clear thing that makes them different is Chiang Kai-shek says that what’s wrong with the Communist Party is they’ve abandoned Chinese traditional values of Confucianism. And Mao says that on the nationalists, what’s really bad is they are still wedded to these traditional Chinese values of Confucianism.
So cycling back to where we began with Mao and Xi, you could actually say Xi Jinping in some ways is living out the dream that Chiang Kai-shek had of one- party rule and also kind of celebrating Confucianism.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. There’s elements you’ve spoken about, the elements of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao that Xi Jinping kind of combines. You’ve also mentioned an interesting, if we had a hundred hours to talk about, there’s another interesting side effect, a similarity that you talk about where Xi Jinping’s wife is out there, a known entity, a part of his public image. And same was the case with Chiang Kai-shek.
Yeah. There’s elements you’ve spoken about, the elements of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao that Xi Jinping kind of combines. You’ve also mentioned an interesting, if we had a hundred hours to talk about, there’s another interesting side effect, a similarity that you talk about where Xi Jinping’s wife is out there, a known entity, a part of his public image. And same was the case with Chiang Kai-shek.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yes. And both of them, they had high-profile wives who were celebrity figures and made a good impression globally and were more like kind of first ladies. But both Chiang Kai-shek and Xi Jinping oversaw a period of emphasizing more traditional patriarchal values in China. And one of the things I didn’t mention before, Xi Jinping has been very, in this idea of trying to do away with difference within PRC, he’s been pushing against any kinds of feminist movements.
Yes. And both of them, they had high-profile wives who were celebrity figures and made a good impression globally and were more like kind of first ladies. But both Chiang Kai-shek and Xi Jinping oversaw a period of emphasizing more traditional patriarchal values in China. And one of the things I didn’t mention before, Xi Jinping has been very, in this idea of trying to do away with difference within PRC, he’s been pushing against any kinds of feminist movements.
Lex Fridman
So going back to Confucius.
So going back to Confucius.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah, yeah. In some ways. There are people who will argue for a less patriarchal Confucius, but it fits with that mode.
Yeah, yeah. In some ways. There are people who will argue for a less patriarchal Confucius, but it fits with that mode.
Lex Fridman
So now, that gets us close to Mao consolidating power.
So now, that gets us close to Mao consolidating power.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Then the story after 1949 with Mao is there were divisions within the Communist Party over sort of … Mao was impatient. He wanted to transform the country quickly. He had a utopian streak. He thought just as the peasantry could, you didn’t have to stick to the traditional pattern of moving slowly to socialism and then to communism. The Great Leap Forward was this disastrous policy of his that imagined China outdoing the West in a kind of quick industrialization move like this. And it just didn’t work. And all kinds of things were wrong. We’d need a whole other session to do The Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution. But one of the simple ways to think about it is Mao made these disastrous moves and then was partially sidelined and then wanted to get back to power.
Then the story after 1949 with Mao is there were divisions within the Communist Party over sort of … Mao was impatient. He wanted to transform the country quickly. He had a utopian streak. He thought just as the peasantry could, you didn’t have to stick to the traditional pattern of moving slowly to socialism and then to communism. The Great Leap Forward was this disastrous policy of his that imagined China outdoing the West in a kind of quick industrialization move like this. And it just didn’t work. And all kinds of things were wrong. We’d need a whole other session to do The Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution. But one of the simple ways to think about it is Mao made these disastrous moves and then was partially sidelined and then wanted to get back to power.
And there was this struggle between people who were more gradualist, more let’s try to work more kind of rationally, and the more utopian side with Mao. And both The Great Leap Forward and then later the cultural revolution were Mao’s efforts to do things dramatically, even at the risk of chaos, even at the risk of undoing a lot of the slow building of state building going on. Then there were other figures who were more concerned with incremental moves. And then, after Mao’s death, one of those figures, Deng Xiaoping ends up being the next long-term paramount leader.
Lex Fridman
He led to decades of economic progress as economic reforms led to record-breaking growth for China and so on. But I got to linger on The Great Leap Forward a bit, enough to understand modern-day China. So as people know, as I’ll show, I’ll talk about in other episodes, The Great Leap Forward, this agricultural collectivization and rapid attempt to industrialize has killed 30 to 45 million people. It’s one of, if not the greatest, atrocities in human history. How could Mao be so catastrophically wrong on the policy of collectivization and be so unwilling to see the atrocity and the suffering he’s causing enough to change course?
He led to decades of economic progress as economic reforms led to record-breaking growth for China and so on. But I got to linger on The Great Leap Forward a bit, enough to understand modern-day China. So as people know, as I’ll show, I’ll talk about in other episodes, The Great Leap Forward, this agricultural collectivization and rapid attempt to industrialize has killed 30 to 45 million people. It’s one of, if not the greatest, atrocities in human history. How could Mao be so catastrophically wrong on the policy of collectivization and be so unwilling to see the atrocity and the suffering he’s causing enough to change course?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So with The Great Leap Forward, it has caused this incredible famine, just incredible devastation. One of the things that happened was getting very bad information. There was a sense that officials were afraid that if they gave bad news, if they admitted that they were failing to meet these giant targets that were being set, that would be seen as a political mistake. So it got to be a survival mechanism to pass on unrealistic reports on what was going. So some of it was a culture of fear around a great leader that led to not getting accurate information. So that was one part of the dynamic. Ego was a big part of it. There were all kinds of things that were unmoored.
So with The Great Leap Forward, it has caused this incredible famine, just incredible devastation. One of the things that happened was getting very bad information. There was a sense that officials were afraid that if they gave bad news, if they admitted that they were failing to meet these giant targets that were being set, that would be seen as a political mistake. So it got to be a survival mechanism to pass on unrealistic reports on what was going. So some of it was a culture of fear around a great leader that led to not getting accurate information. So that was one part of the dynamic. Ego was a big part of it. There were all kinds of things that were unmoored.
Early in the Chinese Communist Party history and power, there was the connection to the Soviet Union. Mao and Stalin had a connection. After Stalin’s death, Mao was haunted by the move toward de-Stalinization and the moves by Khrushchev, and thus laid the groundwork for the Sino-Soviet split. But there was also this kind of obsession with doing things differently that Mao had in that case as well. And you have factional struggles, you have all kinds of things that are happening simultaneously.
Lex Fridman
There’s something I learned about called Gray’s Law, which states any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. So I would say when 30 to 45 million people die, it doesn’t really matter what the explanation is. That’s a longer discussion. But the interesting discussion that connects to everything we’ve been talking about is how is Mao seen in modern day China? What has Xi Jinping said about Mao?
There’s something I learned about called Gray’s Law, which states any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. So I would say when 30 to 45 million people die, it doesn’t really matter what the explanation is. That’s a longer discussion. But the interesting discussion that connects to everything we’ve been talking about is how is Mao seen in modern day China? What has Xi Jinping said about Mao?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So before Xi Jinping, there was this kind of assessment of Mao as having been, in the early ’80s, of being 70% right, 30% wrong.
So before Xi Jinping, there was this kind of assessment of Mao as having been, in the early ’80s, of being 70% right, 30% wrong.
Lex Fridman
I guess Mao’s own analysis of Stalin was that Stalin was 70% right and 30% wrong. And so, they apply the same kind of-
I guess Mao’s own analysis of Stalin was that Stalin was 70% right and 30% wrong. And so, they apply the same kind of-
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Logic there. Yeah.
Logic there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Mathematical analysis to Mao.
Mathematical analysis to Mao.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Yeah. But Xi Jinping has had a different way of talking about this, and he’s talked about the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China and the second 30 years and says that we should not use the successes of one to criticize the other, that we need to see where we are today as benefiting from both those first 30 years and those second 30 years, which implicitly, or he sometimes talks about a new era, It suggests that in many ways he sees China as now in a post-reform era, we can think about a third stage. And there are people who write about it in that way.
Yeah. But Xi Jinping has had a different way of talking about this, and he’s talked about the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China and the second 30 years and says that we should not use the successes of one to criticize the other, that we need to see where we are today as benefiting from both those first 30 years and those second 30 years, which implicitly, or he sometimes talks about a new era, It suggests that in many ways he sees China as now in a post-reform era, we can think about a third stage. And there are people who write about it in that way.
And so, there’s always been a way of trying to separate out the kind of Mao of the periods when things were not going horribly. And I think Xi Jinping would think that Mao having managed to fight the Korean War to a standstill, which is how the history of that period is described in the PRC. He said, “Look, you had so many different forces of the more developed world fighting on one side, and that war did not end in a defeat for North Korea and for the Chinese side.” So yeah, Xi Jinping, I think, wants to be seen as an inheritor of Mao, continuer of one side of the Mao legacy, but clearly circling back to where we began, not the Mao who liked to stir things up, not the Mao who believed in mobilizing youth on the streets, not the Mao who let things get out of control, but the Mao who was responsible for strengthening the nation.
Lex Fridman
Can I ask you about the 1953 speech? Can you just watch it real quick? This particular speech is about, in 1953, at the end of the Korean War, saying China will not surrender. Well, let’s actually just listen to it.
Can I ask you about the 1953 speech? Can you just watch it real quick? This particular speech is about, in 1953, at the end of the Korean War, saying China will not surrender. Well, let’s actually just listen to it.
Mao Zedong
[foreign language 02:51:04].
[foreign language 02:51:04].
Lex Fridman
The speech reads, “As to how long this war will last. We’re not the ones who can decide. It used to depend on President Truman. It will depend on President Eisenhower or whoever will become the next US president. It’s up to them. But no matter how long this war is going to last, we will never yield. We will fight until we completely triumph.” Yeah. So this is the version of Mao that you’re speaking to that it is still celebrated today. And from the Chinese perspective, I guess they could tell the story about that particular proxy war that they triumphed. What do you think about that speech, about these performances? I don’t know how much you’ve listened to Mao speeches.
The speech reads, “As to how long this war will last. We’re not the ones who can decide. It used to depend on President Truman. It will depend on President Eisenhower or whoever will become the next US president. It’s up to them. But no matter how long this war is going to last, we will never yield. We will fight until we completely triumph.” Yeah. So this is the version of Mao that you’re speaking to that it is still celebrated today. And from the Chinese perspective, I guess they could tell the story about that particular proxy war that they triumphed. What do you think about that speech, about these performances? I don’t know how much you’ve listened to Mao speeches.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Well, he had a really difficult accent to make sense of, and native speakers of Chinese can have trouble with his speech. That one was less hard to follow than some of them.
Well, he had a really difficult accent to make sense of, and native speakers of Chinese can have trouble with his speech. That one was less hard to follow than some of them.
Lex Fridman
What explains the accent?
What explains the accent?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Well, he’s just from Hunan and he had a heavy accent. And this is another complicated side of Mao. He was both anti-intellectual and very intellectual. He liked to write poetry and to fashion himself as that, but he also liked to be seen as incredibly earthy and critical of intellectuals. And if he had an animus toward wanting to, even though he was intellectual, he had that anti-intellectualism. But no, I think what’s interesting about that speech in part is how, and even the depiction of Korean War as being the war against America and resist America and support Korea. I think it fit with his idea that it wasn’t just about China. It wasn’t about China working in self-interest, but siding with the underdog countries against the hegemonic ones. And that was another part of Mao’s desire to see China as representing the kind of third world and the countries that had felt the brunt of Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism, and trying to find one or another country’s imperialism to focus on. And that point, he was focusing on America, which is something that can have particular resonances now.
Well, he’s just from Hunan and he had a heavy accent. And this is another complicated side of Mao. He was both anti-intellectual and very intellectual. He liked to write poetry and to fashion himself as that, but he also liked to be seen as incredibly earthy and critical of intellectuals. And if he had an animus toward wanting to, even though he was intellectual, he had that anti-intellectualism. But no, I think what’s interesting about that speech in part is how, and even the depiction of Korean War as being the war against America and resist America and support Korea. I think it fit with his idea that it wasn’t just about China. It wasn’t about China working in self-interest, but siding with the underdog countries against the hegemonic ones. And that was another part of Mao’s desire to see China as representing the kind of third world and the countries that had felt the brunt of Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism, and trying to find one or another country’s imperialism to focus on. And that point, he was focusing on America, which is something that can have particular resonances now.
Mao could alternate that certain points he thought there should be an alliance with, or he said that China should be able to work with Japan, because he said it at one point. He said, “Well, without Japanese imperialism, the Communist Party wouldn’t have risen because we wouldn’t have had this ability to unite the people.” We have seen in the post-Mao period, some leaders playing on sort of anti-Japanese sentiment because of the history of Japanese aggression. Or there can be anti-American sentiment because of the history of American roles in imperialism, or it can be played in a different way. The United States certainly tried that. The United States didn’t have formal colonies in Asia the way that Britain and France did and tried to present itself differently.
But these things are also kind of in flux. And now we’re in this very unusual in flux period. At the beginning of the imposition of tariffs. There were leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea all together in photo ops, which was not something that, being on the same side. So I think this is also just a kind of broader lesson to not assume that configurations will always stay.
Future of China
Lex Fridman
If you look out into the 21st century, what are some of the best possible things that could happen in the region and globally with China at the center of the world stage? What are the possible trajectories you could see culturally, economically, politically, in terms of partnerships and all this kind of stuff?
If you look out into the 21st century, what are some of the best possible things that could happen in the region and globally with China at the center of the world stage? What are the possible trajectories you could see culturally, economically, politically, in terms of partnerships and all this kind of stuff?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
It’s such such a hard moment to be imagining these things. I’ve long wanted to see a return of China to this path toward a more … I wasn’t one of the people who imagined that there would be this convergence of China’s emergence into evolution into a liberal capitalist kind of country. But I’d love to see a return to that more kind of tolerance of diversity within China, variations within China, of more space for civil society. And it’s a hard time to even imagine that, because Hong Kong kind of represented that place that was somehow within. It was an amazing thing, I think looking backward, sorry, rather than forward. I think it’s really extraordinary how much leeway was given to Hong Kong for a period there. That was really special. No Communist Party-run country had ever had a city within it that had as free a press as Hong Kong had then, as much tolerance for protests.
It’s such such a hard moment to be imagining these things. I’ve long wanted to see a return of China to this path toward a more … I wasn’t one of the people who imagined that there would be this convergence of China’s emergence into evolution into a liberal capitalist kind of country. But I’d love to see a return to that more kind of tolerance of diversity within China, variations within China, of more space for civil society. And it’s a hard time to even imagine that, because Hong Kong kind of represented that place that was somehow within. It was an amazing thing, I think looking backward, sorry, rather than forward. I think it’s really extraordinary how much leeway was given to Hong Kong for a period there. That was really special. No Communist Party-run country had ever had a city within it that had as free a press as Hong Kong had then, as much tolerance for protests.
I hope it can be seen by some, at least within Beijing, as a miscalculation too. The People’s Republic of China wanted soft power, and Hong Kong films were admired around the world, this industry. There was a way in which creativity flourished. I guess it would be just the hope for more spaces where that kind of creativity and openness where things can flourish. I’d love to think that there actually are a variety of things in Taiwan that if those could become broader norms, not that Taiwan’s perfect, it has its own internal problems, but there are many really attractive things about it right now. Different kinds of things that flourish. So maybe a setting in which Taiwan and in its post martial law, post-Leninist incarnation would be something that we could think of more.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and you’re right, Taiwan and especially Hong Kong, it’s a truly special place, it’s a case study. It doesn’t make sense that that would happen, but it happened. History is full of wonderful things like this. And I guess can clarify, you think the protests of 2019, the protests in ’20, they’re mostly a failure? Is there still a possibility that Hong Kong rises and its way of life, its way of being, the democratic ideals, not necessarily full-on democracy or this kind of thing, but would actually in a sense permeate China, not the other way around?
Yeah, and you’re right, Taiwan and especially Hong Kong, it’s a truly special place, it’s a case study. It doesn’t make sense that that would happen, but it happened. History is full of wonderful things like this. And I guess can clarify, you think the protests of 2019, the protests in ’20, they’re mostly a failure? Is there still a possibility that Hong Kong rises and its way of life, its way of being, the democratic ideals, not necessarily full-on democracy or this kind of thing, but would actually in a sense permeate China, not the other way around?
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
So that was a hope early on, and there were ways in which some parts of Hong Kong’s style even permeated across the border. I think it’s hard to see it now with how Hong Kong has changed, but I hesitate to, I mean, an awareness of the unpredictability of things. There’s no way to know what kind of thing there would be for Hong Kong later. I do think there are things about Hong Kong that even in the failure of the movement have had repercussions that are not all negative. I think the Hong Kong spirit, which is being kept alive in diaspora communities around the world, is really interesting. There are things that are spreading. I think Hong Kong represented a vision of a different way of being Chinese, a different notion of Chineseness. And I think that is something that exists.
So that was a hope early on, and there were ways in which some parts of Hong Kong’s style even permeated across the border. I think it’s hard to see it now with how Hong Kong has changed, but I hesitate to, I mean, an awareness of the unpredictability of things. There’s no way to know what kind of thing there would be for Hong Kong later. I do think there are things about Hong Kong that even in the failure of the movement have had repercussions that are not all negative. I think the Hong Kong spirit, which is being kept alive in diaspora communities around the world, is really interesting. There are things that are spreading. I think Hong Kong represented a vision of a different way of being Chinese, a different notion of Chineseness. And I think that is something that exists.
And there have been protesters in a lot of other parts of the world. I used to say from Minneapolis to Minsk, because in 2020 there were protests in the US and in Belarus where there were activists who were talking about the Hong Kong idea of sort of trying to focus on be water, more flexible protest tactics. And clearly in Thailand, there were people who looked at things to learn from Hong Kong, even in defeat. There’s a New Zealand-based China specialist, Geremie Barmé, who talks about the other China, which can exist within China, physical China, or elsewhere. Which is this equally attached to Chinese traditions, but thinking of those traditions as including not just Confucianism but Taoism, not just hierarchy, but also openness to cosmopolitanism. Not just nationalism, but cosmopolitanism.
And I think there are some elements of that, that even in failure, the Hong Kong movements, the Hong Kong protests of the 2020s were a last flourishing of that. And we can see some elements of that in, we can think of Taiwan, elements of that is another China as well. I think not allowing the particular version of Chineseness that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping wants to make people think of as the essence of Chinese. China has multiple cultural strands, multiple traditions that people can tap into. And it’s something richer and more admirable, I think, than this narrowed down version.
Lex Fridman
And I hope for a future where both Hong Kong and Beijing have bookstores that carry 1984, Brave New World, and all of your books. And I can’t wait to visit them and enjoy the intellectual flourishing of incredible people. What a beautiful world to live in. The Chinese people, all the people I’ve met, it’s just so great to interact with a totally different culture. You can feel the roots run deep through ancient history that are very different. And it’s amazing. It’s amazing that Earth produced Chinese people, Indian people, the Slavic people. There’s just all kinds of variants, and we’re all have our own weirdnesses and quirks and so on. Everybody has brilliant people. We all start shit with each other every once in a while. But I hope now that we have nuclear weapons, and I hope now that we have technology that connects us, we’ll actually collaborate more than we fight each other. And thank you for being one of the people that shows off the beauty of this particular peoples, of the entire region, really, of Southeast Asia. And it’s an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much.
And I hope for a future where both Hong Kong and Beijing have bookstores that carry 1984, Brave New World, and all of your books. And I can’t wait to visit them and enjoy the intellectual flourishing of incredible people. What a beautiful world to live in. The Chinese people, all the people I’ve met, it’s just so great to interact with a totally different culture. You can feel the roots run deep through ancient history that are very different. And it’s amazing. It’s amazing that Earth produced Chinese people, Indian people, the Slavic people. There’s just all kinds of variants, and we’re all have our own weirdnesses and quirks and so on. Everybody has brilliant people. We all start shit with each other every once in a while. But I hope now that we have nuclear weapons, and I hope now that we have technology that connects us, we’ll actually collaborate more than we fight each other. And thank you for being one of the people that shows off the beauty of this particular peoples, of the entire region, really, of Southeast Asia. And it’s an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for having me on.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Confucius. “When anger rises, think of the consequences.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Confucius. “When anger rises, think of the consequences.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Robert Rodriguez: Sin City, Desperado, El Mariachi, Alita, and Filmmaking | Lex Fridman Podcast #465
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #465 with Robert Rodriguez.
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Jim Cameron was like that. So when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him because I was such a big fan. I was about to go do Desperado and I went, “Hey, I just took a three-day Steadicam course because I can’t afford a Steadicam operator, so I’m going to operate Steadicam myself on Desperado.” Now if he was just my peer, he’d say, “Oh, I did the same thing,” and I’m going to do the same thing. That would be hanging out with somebody of your I, but you want somebody who’s above that. Do you know what he said? He goes, “I bought about a Steadicam, but not to operate it. I’m going to take it apart and design a better one. Us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He’s designing all new systems. That’s the guy you want to hang out with, not someone who’s doing what you’re doing.
We put so much of the world around them. When you see the city, we put a blue screen way in the back to just make the city keep going, but we built the sets there, the town, we built the real set. So everything was very tangible and real, and that way she had to fit into that world and be as real as that because if it was all done in CG, well then now you can fudge everything. But if you put her in a real environment, that’s a real challenge. And just like with our movies, you watch it all fall apart, you watch this thing blow up, you watch this thing not work, everything just falls apart in front of your face. Then that’s when you roll up your sleeves and creatively figure out a way around it and by the end, you have a result that’s better than what you sought out. Sift through the ashes of your failure and you’ll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you’re not looking for it, you don’t find it.
He’s building a new thing now called Brass Knuckle Films where he’s opening up the filmmaking process so that fans can be a part of it as he creates his next four action films. I’ll probably go hang out at his film studio a bunch as this is all coming to life. His work has inspired a very large number of people, including me to be more creative in whatever pursuit you take on in life and have fun doing it. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Robert Rodriguez.
One movie, it was even a low budget movie, they had rigged a car to implode because I was going to throw a guy at it, so we needed the car to implode and then we were going to throw them and marry it together. The car guy goes, “Yeah, we’re going to have three cars rigged.” “Three cars? Why you…” “Well in case one doesn’t work, and then we have a second way throwing away.” “We don’t have all night to go shoot take after take we’re doing Just give one car and if it doesn’t work, we’ll figure it out,” because you don’t have time to do it again. Sometimes it’s such a long setup. So I go, “No, I’m good with just going…” In Grindhouse movie. They only had one take. So that’ll make it more authentic.
We get to there and I go, “Do you have any body parts and stuff we can throw up or something you can shoot up. “I didn’t realize it’s so high to get past that second floor.” And he’s like, “No, I don’t. I can give you a fireball. I can give you a nice fireball with propane, but it burns away really quick.” “Like how fast?” “Like that but it’ll be big and orange.” “Okay, we’ll shoot it in slow motion so it lasts a little longer because it just goes poof.”
So I told the actors, I know how big this fireball is going to be, but just walk really fast and just look real determined and then just keep walking. Don’t stop and turn around because you might get your eyebrows singed. So they take off and it goes, and in slow motion, it looks great, right? I remember showing to Jim Cameron before it came out and his hand went up. He’d never seen that before, six months later Dusk Till Dawn came out. So I liked how much it looked so much that in Dusk Till Dawn, I did it again. So those movies came out within six months of each other. That’s why it turned into a thing because people saw it.
And so I thought, “How about for the opening of George Clooney and Quentin walking out of the gas station that we have the whole place just blowing up and they just keep talking like it’s not happening. Take it another step further so I’m not just doing the same thing. Okay, that one, it’s like, “Okay, you’re going to walk out and it’s all in one take. So we’re only going to do one take. We’re going to blow the thing up. We’re going to start with just some smaller explosions. Then when they’re further away and it’s safer, then we’ll do the big fireballs.” So we’re going and you’re nervous if one of them trips up a line and the pressure’s on them, it’s not just you that’s nervous, you’re nervous for them. They’re the ones who got to walk out, do that whole speech, get in the car and drive away. What if the car doesn’t star? There’s a lot of things that could happen.
Well guess what happens? The thing you would not expect, they go in, they come out, they start talking, shoot it perfect, great, we can move on. And the camera guy goes, I don’t know what happened, but just like you had a little snafu here he goes, we have an auto-focus on the Steadicam. We have a focus thing. It just went like this, I felt it go whack all the way out of focus and whack for a second back. It just reset itself. We don’t know why it did that because it’s radio-controlled and we can’t tell because we’re shooting film. So we’re like, “Oh, shit. Let’s watch the dailies. Sure enough, let’s see if we can, maybe I can scratch the film right there.” No, it goes completely out focus and back in focus within a second. Now we got to res-hoot it. So we had to wait till we’re back in that location. We rigged it for two more takes just in case. So that thing that was supposed to be the one take is three takes.
The other thing that happened was the front of the Dusk Till Dawn bar, that same guy that did those explosions, he packed a bunch of explosives behind the actors. When the actors come running out of the bar at the end of the movie and there’s an explosion through the door because all the vampires are blowing up. He didn’t put like 10 times the amount of stuff. It blew out, you see it in the movie. You see this huge fireball going up and if you watch closely, you see it already start to catch the whole place on fire. The whole front of that, which is foam, is catching on fire, and I cut just before you see that it’s on fire, and that was the first shot at that bar because we weren’t going to start shooting the other stuff till night.
So first shot is that, and the set’s ruined, burned to a crisp. The neon lights blew up. So we couldn’t even, Cheech goes, “Well, I guess I’m not doing my speech tonight,” but right away, this is what happens. My first AD, Doug Arnikowski comes over to me and I go over to him. Guys came out with the fire hoses. The fire hoses weren’t even any water. The thing was just scorching. The whole production design team was in tears because they had just spent weeks building this thing and it was up in smoke and charred. I said, “Let’s just keep shooting. Let’s just keep shooting because it looks really kind of cool like this.”
Yeah, they’re going to have to come repair it and we’ll have to come back, but it’s all black and charred. That’s why that whole scene with George Clooney and Cheech and the building’s black, we didn’t go over there and touch that up. That’s real flame that burned and it ended up looking great. So then the next week when we came back to shoot that other shot that didn’t work, we came back and they had repaired it and we shot all the night stuff, which is the majority of the stuff in front of it. So sometimes you got to roll with it and look at the blessing you get because of there’s a mistake. You probably actually got a better take by doing it later with them. And then you had this incredible look for the end of the movie that looked apocalyptic. If it had looked just clean, you would’ve actually seen that it was kind of a foam set. This made it look better. So I kind of let the universe push you where you’re supposed to go.
But that’s the process and that’s life and that’s wash, rinse, repeat the rest of your life. That’s what everything’s going to be like. It’s just like a movie because when you think about it, you’re writing a story for a film and you’re also writing the story of your life at the same time. How are you going to react to things? Well, how do you make your character react to things? You make him kind of super human. Why don’t you just make yourself that way? You’re writing your own story and you start really seeing, the more you get into storytelling that life imitates art and art limitates life. But the process is also the same.
Because already her point of view is exactly what you’re saying. She’s not looking at all. She’s just concentrating on what didn’t follow her plan and not seeing the gift of everything else that’s there. So she goes very reluctant. It was so perfect. I wish we had filmed it. She goes, “I learned a good lesson the hard way,” and I said, “That still sucks. I say, when you follow your instinct, if you follow your own instinct to go start a business or go make this movie, or it wasn’t someone saying, go over there and you’ll make a million dollars. It was your instinct and you fail sometimes. The only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. You fail. You have to really sift through.” It’s like the silver lining, but I call it sift through the ashes of your failure and you’ll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you’re not looking for it, you don’t find it. I’m going to tell you one, and I tell them the four room story. I said, I made a movie called Four Rooms. It didn’t make any money. When Quentin asked me, Hey, do you want to make a movie with me and two other filmmakers? It’s an anthology. It’s on New Year’s Eve, it’s in a hotel. You have to use the bill. We’re not going to know what each other’s making and we make it and we put it together. The hand went up right away, just instinctually. That sounds, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll go make that with you. Now, should I ask the audience, I like to throw it to the audience and her. Should I have not raised my hand that quick? Shouldn’t I have done a little studying first or should I just go blind instinct? Or should you do instinct with some studying?
Okay, well, I could have gone and studied and I would’ve found that anthologies never work. Even when it’s Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, they bomb because people can’t quite rip the hand. What is this Twilight Zone? I don’t want to go see that, but that’s not, I still said, “Yeah, I think I should still go by instinct.: So my instinct was to raise my hand. We go make that movie because I love short films. I made bedhead and short films and I thought, oh, here’s aw . If this works, I can make short films in anthologies and I can have the best of both worlds.
Got that to work. Yeah, the audience can’t quite wrap their end, and then it feels like the movie’s starting three times. So I make that movie, it bombs. Now I could feel real bad about that, but if you really think about it, you go, “Well, why did I sign up for it? Did I raise my hand because I thought it was going to go be this big financial success? No, I did it to work with my friends to do something creative, to try something, but that’s still not good enough. I need to really sift through the ashes and if I looked through the ashes of that failure, I find two keys to my biggest successes in there. While I was on the set, they said, it has to be new. So I thought, I’m just going to do like bedhead. I’m going to have two little kids that are running around in this room and we have to use the bellhop as a babysitter.
Well, it’s New Year’s. Let’s dress everybody in tuxedos because it’s New Year’s. They’re all going to go out, but the parents leave without them. When I saw Antonio and his wife, I thought, wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies and these two little kids, one of them keeps falling asleep on the set. He’s so young, they barely tie their shoes. They don’t know. Parents are spies. They have to go save them. Okay, there’s five of those movies now.
The other one was, I really love making short films. I really want this anthology thing to work. What if it’s three stories, like a three-act structure, not four, same director, not four different directors. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again? Well, because I had already done one and figured out how I could do it better, and that’s Sin City. Those are by far two of my biggest successes that came directly from that failure. So I always say, follow your instinct. If it doesn’t work, just go. Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. So where’s the key in that? The ashes of the failure. Because if I had an instinct, that means I was on the right track. I didn’t get the result I want. That’s because the result might be something way bigger that I don’t have the vision for, and the universe is pushing me that way.
Just go. Maybe in 10 years they’ll think it’s great. I’m just going to commit to making a body of work, a body of work. Some will succeed, some will over-perform, some will underperform. It’s not your job. You just want to be a creative person. Just create, stop thinking about movie per movie and worrying so much about each one or project to project. If you’re a business person, just commit to making a body of work like an artist would do, and you don’t know what the masterpieces are going to be or which someone’s going to come and say, “Oh, that one that bombed there is some really creative stuff in there.” It’s not for you to decide. You just go and do it.
Good thing I didn’t sell it then. With time, you look back and you go, wow, I got an agent the next month. He wasn’t even going to help me sell it. He said, “Oh, if you can get $20,000 for it, take it.” I chased those people down for those contracts, Spanish market for months, and they never answered me back. And then Columbia ended up buying it for 10 times as much, and we released it and did a sequel and did another sequel. If you look back in time, good thing I didn’t get my way. My way had this for revision and it needed to do that, which you would never know. You don’t know that going through.
So just if you don’t have the answer right away, or even in 10 years, go, well, maybe it’s coming in 20 years. Don’t let anything slow you down. Just keep plowing forward. Committing to making your thing happen. Don’t get shook up by something that you might not have an answer for.
So when I first started, I didn’t have any money, so I still play like I don’t have money. So I had Super ,. My dad had a Super 8 camera, but I couldn’t afford it. I shot two rolls that you had to buy the film, shoot two minutes. I shot two rolls of that. It’s another same amount of money that it cost to buy it, whatever that was, 12 bucks or whatever to develop it. You get it. There’s no sound. Most of the shit’s out of focus. But then my dad, who sold cookware, had a VCR, one of the first home VCRs for the market that he would play his sales tapes to his salesman. And it came with a camera attached, like this cable you got coming out.
Imagine if that had to go into your VCR for you to even see what it’s shooting. It’s this old camera manual focus, manual iris and twelve-foot cable. And I would start making movies with that instead. Now I have for $8, I have a two-hour erasable tape of sound and picture. So I got into digital basically really early I was doing, which was really frowned upon back then and continued to be all the way to when I was using it for real in the early two thousands before everyone realized, “Oh, that’s the future.”
First I would cut in camera and that VCR, that old VCR had a really great pause button that they stopped making that when you hit pause, it stopped right there and it stopped with a clean cut. It didn’t have all this color bars like the later ones had, and it had an audio dub feature where you could add another second soundtrack to it. So if I have people talking, I could hit audio dub and add sound effects so I could have two tracks on the same one.
So that was my filmmaking kit for a while until I needed to start doing real editing and my dad bought a second VCR for his business. I stole his other one, and I found that if I hooked him together, I could play on one and used that pause button on the second. And this was the limitation. This is what taught me how to edit in my head, is that if I shot a bunch of footage, I needed to shoot very little footage so I could find it because sometimes you shoot out of order, so when I cut it, I have to cut in linear order because if you push pause, it’s a nice clean cut, but it only holds for five minutes.
You have five minutes before the machine shuts off. So you got to find your next shot within five minutes and do that. Otherwise, if you have to start the machine over, it added all these color bars and it would be all screwed up. So I’d have to sit there and not move for all day while I cut knowing what the next shot was. And once I had it cut, I would then add some sound effects to it. Remember, because I have the audio dub function, but now if I want to add music, I take that tape, which has two tracks now into the first deck and put it into the VCR. Again, one generation of loss, but I have a little cassette tape player with the music, and I do a Y splitter so I can add the music and just like that, that’s being resourceful with what you have.
And I made award-winning short films that way on video. There were some festivals that would allow video, not many, but they would always win. And there were always funny, as I stumbled upon Spy Kids that way, I wanted to make these action movies in my backyard. But when you’re a teenager, you don’t know anybody who can come be your action star, and if you just bring your high school buddies, well, they just look like high school kids. So I used my little brothers and sisters because one of 10, third oldest, they’re just sitting around watching cartoons anyway, and I made them the action stars just to learn. And I found those things would be a winning formula. They’d win every festival I’d send them to.
So Bedhead was my first time using a film camera. It was a windup film camera. I got in film school. I went to film school for one semester and realized I already knew more than the film students because they taught you a whole other outdated way of doing it. So I thought, I’m just going to use that film camera to make a low budget movie, a definitive film version that I can send to all film festivals of these action kids, which is a precursor to Spy Kids bit. Bedhead’s a precursor to Spy Kids.
So when I got that crappy World War II camera they gave us in film school. I was so pissed. Like, this is the camera. I’ve been trying to get my hands. I could have bought this for 50 bucks at a pawn shop. Old Bell and Howell wind up, you couldn’t even see through the lens you were seeing through an approximation of the lens, but you could shoot slow motion. I could do reverse photography. If I filmed upside down, I could do, because if I do a fast push into her, I’ll never get the focus in. So I started with it in focus, went back, pulled backwards on a chair, and then reversed it, flipped it, and now it looks like it stops on a dime in focus.
So a lot of the story came from the limitations or actually the freedoms of that camera. I couldn’t have done that story on video. So when I saw, wow, okay, I can do reverse photography, I can do stop-motion. She has to have special powers because if she has special powers, then I can utilize, I can really milk this camera for all it can get. This is one of my shots I love the most is where she’s standing there and the chair, she makes a chair come all the way up to her and it goes all the way up to her face. Now, if I did it normally, where would I even put the strings for that, right?
And it even exposed and Mariachi the same way. You have to think about it. I shot Mariachi on film with a bar of 16 millimeter camera. I didn’t know how to use it. I called up a place in Dallas that rented that kind of equipment and I said, “I have an AR-16s here, two motor looking things. One has a 24 and one has a bunch of numbers.” “Oh, that’s a variable speed motor. That means you can do different speed.” “I can shoot slow motion with this? Oh wow.” “Do you have a torque motor?” “I don’t know.” “What is that?” “Is there something on the side of the magazine?” Yeah, now you can just look up on YouTube and it shows you how to use it. I was doing it by phone that way, and then I went and shot the movie right then and I didn’t know if any of it was exposing or if the film camera was working until I finished the whole movie. So imagine you have to go down to Mexico, shoot for two weeks, come back, send it off to the lab. You want to talk about being nervous?
So the first one I thought, let me just shoot it, one take each, because my friend Carlos lives in Mexico. If we shoot two takes, most of the cost is to film. I’ve just doubled my budget, so let me just shoot one take. Some of it’s going to not come out, but I’m not going to know what, I’m not going to shoot a safety one. That doubles my… Let me see. Some things might come out. I expected like 70% of it to maybe be okay, but 30% I might have to come reshoot, which is fine. I just drive back there and then I just reshoot just those shots, right?
So I just went, “Let’s shoot.” We stop, we come back. Then I send it off to develop, because we’re shooting two weeks consecutively. To get film shipped back and forth from Mexico to see if it came out, you just couldn’t do it. I just had to double down on it, do it. One take everything. I remember one time I was telling the actor, “Man, I told you to run through that shot.” And he goes, “Oh, let me do it again.” “No one take, dude. Just think about it. Next time, do what I say.” I didn’t think anyone was going to see it. And because you don’t think anyone’s going to see it, you end up doing something remarkable, which is, “Well, I’m just going to make something for myself.”
Because if I was making a movie that was going to go to Sundance, I wouldn’t have made that movie. I would’ve thought, “Okay, I got to get serious.” But because I made this movie that was just entertaining myself, like Bedhead, it entertained audiences. So that naivete is really important when you’re starting out or at any point in your life. Be naive about what things going to, and just do something for yourself. That taught me a very valuable lesson. I didn’t want anybody to see it. I just thought, one take, one take. When I got back home, a bunch of stuff didn’t come out, but I’m like, “I’m not going back to Mexico. I’ll figure out a way to edit around it and make the movie shorter and that’s just going to be the movie.” And then that’s the one that won Sundance.
It’s like this is the key to your next success, cards. Because when you go see a therapist, you’re not going to them for the answers. You’re going to them for the questions. You’ve got the answers inside. What you don’t have are the questions. A lot of times we ask ourselves very unempowering questions like, “Why am I such a loser?” I can think of 10 answers right now, but if you go, “What three things can I do today that’ll not just change my life, but everyone around me?” Take steps of that. Take out your cards and start writing them down. You won’t come up with three, you’ll come up with 15.
I’m like, well, how? Because you’re asking yourself and you’ll see them. So when I was doing that movie, I thought, okay, he’s a guitar player for real, and he gets mixed up with the guy with a case. So how about he walks into a bar? So I write down that, he walks into a bar, bar, trying to get work. Bartender looks at him, “We don’t hire mariachis, get the hell out of here.” So he leaves. After that whole scene explaining who he is and what his story is. Then the shooter comes in with a guitar case full of weapons. He’s also dressed in black and he shoots the place up. Now if that was a short film, that’s how you’d start a short film. But this is a feature movie, so shit, I got to figure out how to tell a feature. I’m going to need a few more cards before that.
So I’m going to need, well, who’s this bad guy? How about he’s in jail? I had read a story, this crazy story about a guy who was in jail in Mexico, and he was running his drug business from the jail as protection. He could walk out anytime, but it was to have the cops be his enforcers basically. So introduced that guy, he’s in jail making phone calls and someone puts a hit on him. So we have action right away. There’s a hit on him. He kills those guys because it’s his operation. He’s not in jail. All the cops are working for him and he tells that guy on the phone, the main bad guy, “I’m going to come to town. I’m going to kill all your guys and I’m going to come kill you.”
So then he gets in his truck and you see them bring him a guitar case full of weapons. He passes the mariachi on the way to town, and now it’s his story. The baton gets turned to mariachi. Mariachi is doing a voiceover. It’s easy to shoot. We can do the voice later. We don’t have to do sync sound. There was even a scene when he walks into town where we saw these coconuts, a guy cutting coconuts and we, “Oh, let’s go film over there.” So we filmed the guy giving him a coconut with a straw in it, and he walks out. I’m like, “Shit, man, you forgot to pay the guy.” “Well, let’s shoot that.” “No, there’s one take. I’ll just put in the voiceover that they give away free coconuts in this town,” and for years, people in other countries would go, “They really give away free coconuts?” No, it’s because we forgot to show him paying. Little happy accidents.
So now look, you’re already building a movie. So it’s like now he goes in the bar. Now he’s mixed up and the bad guy says, “Find the guy with a guitar case full of weapons.” Then he goes and meets the girl. So you just start your movie, visually, you can start seeing your movie. And I’ve used this for business things, I’ve used this for ideas, for manifesting stuff.
I totally believe it, because when you start doing this, you go, “Where are these answers coming from? I’m asking the right question, but how come the answers just keep coming like this?” I believe, because I do so many different jobs, I’ve learned this over the years. When I was in 2002, I was like, “How is it that I’m the production designer, the composer,” which I don’t even know how to read or write music, and I’m writing orchestral score and I’m doing the editing and I’m doing the cinematography. I haven’t been trained for any of these. I never went to school for these specifically. Must be something about creativity.
So I went on Amazon, it’s 2002. I look up creative books. Anything that has creativity in the title, I just ordered it. And I’ve got a bunch of books on creativity, and I was reading them through. One of them was really speaking to me. “Yeah, that’s it.” That’s the process. And then it says gels and mediums, and I’m like, “Oh, this is a book specifically about painting,” but it applies to music, editing, cinematography, writing, it’s all the same. So that’s when I realized that creativity is 90% of any of those jobs. The technical part of setting up the cameras, of writing a script in format or reading or writing music, that’s 10% of that.
How many musicians don’t read or write music and they’re fantastic? It’s because 90% what they do is creative. Now I believe that that same person, even if they only do music, could literally jump from job to job creatively and do a superior job than most technicians.
And this is the main thing I learned was that I’m writing music for an orchestra. I’m like, “I don’t even know what I’m doing. Why is that coming out?” I don’t feel like I’m doing it. I feel like I picked up the pen. I feel like I had the idea to do the cards, but then when everything just starts coming out so quickly, like that’s how fast I wrote that movie. I go, I really feel like something else has taken over. So this is what my belief is, because I hear it in different realms. You ask Keith Richards, “How do you come up with these riffs?” He goes, “I don’t. I don’t. They’re floating around the sky and I pull them out first.” You ask asked Jimmie Vaughan, “How do you play guitar, those solos?” He goes, “It’s like a radio. Once you get a tune just right, you can’t even believe what’s coming through.”
So I believe, I call it the creative spirit. There’s a spirit assigned to all of us that’s creative, that doesn’t have hands. It needs you to pick up the pen, pull out the cards, and then when you start getting in the flow and you’re like, “Whoa,” it’s writing. That’s that. And if you can have that mindset, you take your ego out of it and go, “All I need to do is be a good conduit for this thing. Be a good pipe and it’s going to come through.” So you don’t ever have to get hung up on that question you had. Well, what happens when you can’t come up… It wasn’t me to begin with. If it’s not coming out, it’s because I’m blocking it and if I were to do this and I’m flowing, and if I were to say, “Wow, I just wrote 10 cards. I don’t know if I can write more. How did I do that?” You just shut the pipe because your ego got in the way. You just clogged it because it gets pissed off that you think it’s you.
It’s not you. It’s like, “Dude, just open up. Let me through, pick up the fucking pen.” And I learned this when I was 19, when I had a daily cartoon strip. I had to draw a comic strip every day to get paid. And I would be like, I’d have to draw one drawing and draw another drawing. Then it’s like, okay, these kind of go together. It was a process, and sometimes I just felt like I wish I could just envision it, sit back. I’m going to try that method. I went home and I would sit back and just try to get in sofa, try the sofa method. I’m just going to try to picture the comic strip, and as soon as I got on that thing that’s funny, then I’ll just go draw that, right? Be done in a half hour. Why waste three hours?
I’d sit there and sit there and sit there. My deadline would be coming up, got like 30 minutes. I’m like, “Oh, shit.” Got to go sit and draw it out. And it’s like, “Oh, okay, I got this drawing. Oh, this kind of goes with that. If I make another drawing, I have my strip.” That’s the only way to do it. If you don’t get up, the creative spirit, ain’t going to come visit you if you’re doing this. It needs your hands and it’s not going to fucking reward you for sitting there, waiting for… You have to jump in and do it.
And people, when they say, “Oh, well, I’m not ready,” how pissed off is that spirit now? It’s waiting for you to feel like you’re ready. It’s not you. Just start doing the action and it’s going to come through and the ideas will come and the answers will come because it’s not you. And if you can take your ego out of life, you’ll be blessed with this never ending flow of ideas because don’t take ownership for it and know that if it’s not coming out, it’s because you’re just clogging it because this thing’s got endless ideas.
He’s suddenly waxing philosophical about the creative processing going, “I never knew how my dad did Mariachi until we did this project together.” And I realized he didn’t know either. He didn’t know how he was going to do it. He figured it out day by day. Every challenge that got thrown at him, he had to figure it out. And that’s the biggest lesson. Most people never start, and that’s the biggest thing. Don’t wait till you’re ready or that’ll be on your tombstone. “Here lies so-and-so. He was never ready.” And you don’t want to be that guy. Jump in. Know it’s not you, you just got to be the hands and that relieves a lot of pressure from you because then you don’t have to ever have to do anything really. You just have to be the hands.
And what was cool is that because I just had them go through the whole scene again, so I would go ahead and record them, like grabbing the bottle or any action they did, opening the suitcase. I’d have all the sound effects too. I just had to sync it by hand. That’s a lot of work for me, but I got great sound that way. Because If I had had a sync camera, the mic would’ve been so far, we would’ve had to go get new sound effects, but because the camera’s off, I could record everything close up, so there was some blessing to that.
They try something and if you’re enjoying it, they know that the audience is going to enjoy it or if it makes you cry, so sometimes you don’t have to tell them a lot sometimes. And if you do have something very specific to tell them, they usually go with it. But I always just like to see what they do. And a lot of times they just are in the zone, because again, they’re getting that flow too. You create the right environment, everyone’s getting this inspiration that’s all tied together that you never could have directed. It’s just like you just create that space where we’re all going to be open to it and it’s going to drop in our lap. And I’m going to point it out when it does, because you may not feel like you know how to play this role yet, but I say not knowing is the other half of the battle and the more important part.
That’s the part we’re going to discover, and when it happens, I’m going to point it out and it’s going to be like magic and we’re just going to go, “Okay, we’re accepting it,” and we do it. And it gets people in that kind of headspace, and then we’re all open to it, to where the character’s supposed to go, what it’s supposed to sound like, instead of me being very manipulative to get a certain thing. I don’t know, it’s just whatever feels good.
There’s a shot in… I’m lighting Sin City myself. I have my crew setting lights and I have this great shot of Clive Owen and where he’s holding down Benicio’s head in the toilet. Benicio’s not there. It’s just a close up of him at this point, and I’m practicing my shot. I’m zooming in slow in his face and people are still walking behind him on the green screen setting lights, and I’m like, “I’m rolling. We’re ready to go. We’re getting this. I can already tell we’re already in the moment. What you’re doing right now, just keep holding that look. Now one jolt, like he’s starting to fight back, but you don’t even flinch. Cut. Okay, nevermind. You guys can stop moving that shit. We already got the shot.”
We sit down, Mickey starts delivering the take. I’m like, “Hold on, hold on a second.” I brought my camera over. Zoom in. “Just adjust that light real quick,” because I’m the DP. Because if I had another director of photography, they’d be like, “Oh, no, no, we have to relight,” and all this stuff. It’s like, “No, no, let’s just do this. Let’s go. He’s doing it right now.” And I go, and that performance is just right then. And so you can feel that when you’re also, you’re operating and you’re the camera guy and you’re the DP. It’s like high-tech guerrilla filmmaking. Yeah, we’re on a green screen, but it’s like all the crew needs are marching orders. “Just put a light back there, hitting them harder. This is a 5K, make that a 10K. It’s got to be stronger.”
They don’t need to know that I’m going to make that a lamp post later. They just need marching orders for the moment so I can just kind of tell people, “Do this, do this, do that,” and then I know what I can accomplish with the actor and then everything else falls into place later because I’m going to put all that in later. Once you know how to do a lot of jobs like that, you can just move at the speed of thought, which is where the actors love being, creatively. Because nobody knew what green screen was back then.
They’re like, “What is this again?” So I explained it as, “Well, it’s kind of like doing theater, but instead of a black curtain behind you with a prop, it’ll be a green curtain and you might just have a cup or just a steering wheel, but it’s just you and the other actors just like this and everything else will be painted in later. We’re just talking. We’re locked in. If we stay locked in, we’ll look great when there’s rain coming down and we’re on a ship later.” But it comes down to this, right? It was so fun to do those kind of movies.
So then in Toronto we met and we met first on a… Because I knew I was going to be doing a panel discussion with him. They asked us to do a panel discussion about violence in movies in the ’90s, even though it was only ’92. So we’re on a panel together, and that’s where I met him and he’s like, “Hey, you’re Robert Rodriguez, your agent told me about you.” And I was like, “Yeah, I saw your movie Reservoir Dogs.” And he goes, “Oh, well you got to come to my screening, and I’m going to come see yours.” So he came to Mariachi and I videotaped the audience reactions because they were insane, insane reactions to it. But I have the first screening he saw of Mariachi sitting next to me laughing. He’s laughing at everything. He was just the best audience. I have his recording of the first time he saw Mariachi.
And it’s like, oh man, I don’t like the movie anymore. This guy’s kind of a dick, so I cannot do that. I’m going to have to go be who they imagine made that movie. So I wrote out my whole intro. It was like a 20-minute intro. Because no one had ever heard of anybody making a movie for no money, much less without a crew, much less, the way I did it was just very new. Nobody knew it was possible. So my whole intro is like, “You’ll see the Columbia logo slapped in front. It probably cost more than the whole movie.” And then I go through, “This is how I made it with a wheelchair for a dolly, a turtle. I wrote around things I had,” I mentioned the turtle, the pit bull, the bus, the ranch, all that stuff.
So then when they see the movie… In fact, I think my wife was in the audience, she said, “At Sundance, people are laughing so much at your intro, they just wanted to hear a story like this so badly. I heard someone next to me say, ‘I’m going to vote for his movie.'” They hadn’t even seen the movie yet, just because the story was so good, they wanted that movie to be great. And when they see the turtle, big cheers. When they see the pit bull, big cheers. When they see the school bus, cheers. But then when they see how we use it and he slams into it and falls in it, they fucking lose their minds because they know how I put it together. They know that the rubber bands and the popsicle sticks, because I already set it up.
And so that’s why that audience, I just taped the reaction, they’re so with it. The context is so key. You can watch Mariachi and go, “Hey, yeah, this looks like a $7,000 movie,” but if you know the story behind it, suddenly… I was curious. I hadn’t seen it in a long time. I was watching it for the 20th anniversary, we did a screening. And the first few shots come up and I’m like, “Oh yeah, well, it looks like a $7,000 movie.” And then it keeps going. And once we’re in the jail cell and the shooting’s happening, and I realized, oh my God, we had these blanks that only fired one shot and it would jam. So I had to show it going, use the sound effect, cut to the other guy, cut back, have another one go.
I’d have to do these editing tricks and then repeat a few frames so it looks like a machine gun. All these stuff that I’m start sweating as I’m watching it going, “I can’t believe I made this movie with that freaking camera.” I don’t know how I did. I couldn’t even see. I’m there with this long lens pulling my own focus. When I finally had to do a real movie, I was operating the camera on my first real movie with a crew, and I get the camera and a guy comes over and he focuses for you. You go, “That’s your job, you focus? Shit, I had to do my own focusing on the last movie.” I was so hard. You’re trying to focus on a guy while you’re filming. You don’t know where you are, and it’s just, I couldn’t believe how much easier it is when you have a crew.
Let me show you how cheapskate I was, I did not spend on anything. So when you see him walking around with a guitar case, it’s a shitty cardboard one I got from home. I had to get a heavier one to put the guns in. So we borrowed one, but it had this material ripped off the top so you could see the wood. It was just the wood on top so it didn’t match the other one because it wasn’t all black and I was too cheap to paint it black. I didn’t want to spend money on paint. So you see that cardboard case, he puts it down and when he goes to open it, I cut to the other one. Once the wood is…
That’s not the head space you were in when you made the first one. You weren’t hesitant like that. You’re just… So try to keep that very naive and that’s why I say commit to a body of work. I know a lot of filmmakers get stuck on their second one and then go further because they get crippled by the success of the first one and they start asking, “Oh shit, how did I do that? How can I do that again?” And you get deeper and deeper in a hole you can’t get out of.
If I can make Zorro as good as that one, the one that people said, it’s like people don’t know how good they had it with that guy. But I started thinking, I even said, “Man, I just rewatched Temple of Doom last night. I don’t know how I’m going to do the Zorro movie. I’ve just never done anything like that.” You start getting afraid because you go, the second thing he said, “Oh Rob, you’re going to do fine.” But then I started thinking, this guy, at that time, you may not know the era, but this was like mid-nineties, he was making the biggest, best movies of all and people would shit all over this guy. They would throw so much, they were so jealous. Press, audience, everyone was just hits at them, just throwing rocks at him for everything.
So I asked him, because you don’t know how resilient you can be, so I said, “Man, how do you do it? What do you do when people just throw rocks at you all day long?” He goes, “Oh, Robert, you just don’t blink.” And I was like, whoa, now I see how he got through it. Just don’t blink. Just like you know what’s coming, don’t blink. And to him say it is like a Clint Eastwood line, right?
It’s like, well, I guess I could just keep doing that but, that’s not as much as I can’t wait to keep doing another season. But I didn’t know how to get to that point. So I thought, you know what? I got to this job so early, I was in the early twenties. I bet there’s some other job out there that exists that I don’t even know about because I don’t know other jobs. So I looked up, you’re not going to believe it, but I literally bought Jobs for Dummies.
But then I started working with my kids when we did, I had a TV show called Rebel Without a Crew based on that, where I found filmmakers who had only made a short film that hadn’t made a feature. I picked this diverse group of filmmakers, gave them $7,000, and we documented them making a feature two weeks like I did. You can bring one person. I had Carlos Gallardo, the producer and star of Mariachi, “Bring one person, can be your cameraman or you can be your sound guy, whatever. But it’s only that for the shoot and you’d have to do the whole thing.” And I saw those guys by the time they’re like, “I don’t know how we’re going to make this movie.” By the first week of shooting, they’re already talking about their next feature. They became so confident because their idea of what impossible is drops really quick when you take it.
But I brought my son aboard as my number one who hadn’t been working with me in a while. He wrote Sharkboy and Lavagirl when he was seven, but then he hadn’t really been working on my crew, so he didn’t know how to operate the sound equipment, the separate sound system and all that. I didn’t show him until the day of filming because I knew we’re documenting it would make a better tutorial. So by getting them working on the movies together, they came to me super excited. By the end of the day I thought for sure, oh, they’re going to hate this even though it’s only two weeks. They’ve got other interests. They don’t want to be filmmakers. I thought they were going to be like, “All right, I’m out of here,” after one day.
But instead he came to me and his brother who acted in it and he went, “Dad, the actor didn’t show up after the first day. The location didn’t match the script at all. We asked you how we were going to solve the problems and you’re like, ‘I don’t know, figure it out.'” We thought Dad’s stumped for once, is he stumped finally? But then by the end of the day, his eyes were all wide. We figured it out. They went, oh, they don’t realize this is the creative process. Every day is like that. And in life too, every day you don’t know if your machine’s going to not work or you’re going to get a flat tire or you get fired that day. So life is very unpredictable, just like a movie set.
So I realized I’m going to make them all work on my movies now because it’s teaching them about life. I’m teaching them very little about the film make, it’s about life lessons, about how you take on something impossible, turn chicken shit to chicken salad and make it work. And that’s the strive, that’s life, that’s the process of life. So many people say, “Well, I’m not ready to make my projects.” You’re not ready for life either. You’re like this all day, you’re dodging shit that’s going on. How come art has to be perfect? It’s like it should be the same, life and art should be the same.
So even though they’re already acting, they’re already being creative, we’re already making a movie. Like you said, that’s already a really great creative endeavor. When we would sneak off and paint, you could tell it’s firing a whole other part of their brain. It was funny, I think Josh Brolin’s girlfriend said, Josh said, “Hey, my girlfriend just said,” she said, his wife now, but at the time, “Are you guys doing drugs? You leave the set and you come back and you’re all excited.” and I go, “No, we’re painting. We’re painting. But that makes sense that you say that because when you get your creativity firing, it’s more powerful than any drug.” And we would come back and he’d be on the set going, “Is it bad that I’m still thinking about the painting?” And I’m like, “No, I think it’s good. I think it’s all good.” But you can tell it’s opening a whole other part of their creative brain.
So you can be doing acting in a movie and the painting’s still going to tap, it shows how much untapped potential your creative brain has. So the more you can do, the more you’re firing off. And it was so cool. I remember we did one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt was painting. We came in and the table was like this and they said, we have a problem. You want him to throw the cards out, the playing cards out, but it’s so slick they go sliding off the table and we both look at it and we both got the solution at the same time. Oh, just have them throw them, wherever they go and then we’ll place them. And then digitally, it’s even better that he looks like he gets them all perfectly laid out to show what a card shark he is.
But that’s what we have to do because we not going to, we’ll be here all day if we’re trying to get, if we’re going to worry about where they go, just go bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, and then we’ll place the cards down and everyone will pick them up and then we’ll marry the two in post. You just come up with creative solutions better, easier because you were just solving crazy creative solutions in the other one, what paint medium do I use? What kind of gel am I going to use? So when you come back to your main job, which is filmmaking, you’re like, “Oh, I can figure this out in two seconds.” So it helps you creative problem solve.
So that’s basically working with my kids made me realize, oh, now I know exactly what I want to do for the next 10 years. I only want to make movies with my kids because I’m mentoring them, but they’re teaching me shit the age I was when I made Mariachi and Desperado. And their ideas are really sharp. So the mentoring goes both ways and it’s like the greatest parenting you can do because you’re building a project together and in the same boat together, figuring it out and it’s family time. You’re like checking all the boxes.
So I thought my filmmaking going forward is going to be checking all the boxes in life. So I’m not not spending time with my family. We’re actually giving them lessons that they can go do, anything they want in life because they’re going to have different interests. But now it’s kind of like going to college and this college is like the best college because it pays you to learn, you get to do these crazy skills. My son is conducting the orchestra, the James Bond Orchestra in London for the Spy Kid score, the score he wrote, because I can’t write at his level because he was always our best piano player. And you get the charge out of working with him.
And then by making a label, there’s this weird phenomenon that happens if you guys want to take your game to another level, I stumbled upon this idea. My son, that was my counterpart on that movie, Racer, he was my sound guy, like I said, came up with Sharkboy and Lavagirl when he was little, he became my writer, co-writer, co-producer, he had come to me and said, “I want to do VR type movie.” And I said, “Oh, well let me show you,” as an example of creativity and manifest, I said, “Let me show you how it works. Let’s make a company. We’ll make a company called Double R, Double R Productions.” Because we all have double R names, all the kids. So if anyone ever wants to do anything, we can use our company.
So let’s make a logo and I’ll make t-shirts and notepads and stuff because once you have a company, you now have to make things for that company. Just like the advice I gave to people, stop aspiring, make a business card that says writer, director, cinematographer, I did, editor, because then now you have to conform to that identity. So now if I create a label like Double R, we’re going to come up with ideas. We’ll call up VR companies and say, “Hey, we have company, a VR company. Would you like us to make you a film for you to sell your headsets?” So yeah, they gave us a budget. They’re dying for content. They gave us a budget. We shot a 20-minute action movie we call The Limit with Michelle Rodriguez and Norman Reedus where you’re in an action movie with them. And it was killer. They made us a big Double R logo, animated logo.
Later that year we did Red 11, same logo. That movie went to Directors’ Fortnight and Cannes. Festivals were paying us to come talk about how we made that movie. That’s when we’re doing the cards, throwing the cards out, because they wanted their audiences, they knew they would love that. So we could have had a whole gig just continuing to get paid to go to the Fed. Usually you pay to Feds, go to the Feds, you don’t get paid. That’s what a success that was. But then we had to make We Can Be Heroes. So we had to stop, but We Can Be Heroes was a Netflix movie where they asked me to make a Spy Kids type thing. And so I thought, oh, okay, I’ll just do it with superheroes, that’s there I wrote it with my kids, based it on some of their personalities. It’s the most watched and rewatched movie in Netflix history.
Like nothing can touch it because kids just keep watching it over because it’s kids with superpowers, no one’s ever done that before and they couldn’t believe it. I’d heard anecdotally that’s how the Spy Kids where people said, “Oh, that kid’s watching over and over on video.” But you can’t keep track of that. You can on Netflix because their thing is people completing a movie, a lot of people don’t complete a movie and it still counts as a view. They may watch five minutes and change the channel. So do you complete a movie? That’s really where they really value. Not only do they complete, but re-watch, re-watch, re-watch per household so many times and nothing can touch it.
If you ask Netflix right now, what do you need more of? They’ll say, “Action, action, action. We don’t have enough action. The last regime didn’t leave us enough action. We need action.” They’ll pay a premium for an action film that we can make at a lower cost. A $20 million action film is very cheap. Studios don’t know how to make them that cheap. That’s why they’ll pay for an independent to go do it. And right now that’s the key is to be independent because a lot of studios that can’t even green light anything because things are so expensive they don’t want to lose their ass, but they need action films. So let’s make something that everybody needs and let’s make it at a price and we’ll make it in my studio because I got my own studio and I can keep all the costs down because we have all the costumes and props and sets from 25 years of filmmaking to keep the cost down and we’ll have the audience gets to invest. It’s not crowdfunding or Kickstarter, you are actually an investor.
Anyone who puts money in can pitch their idea for an action film to me. And I’m going to make one of the four films in that slate from one of those ideas because I want the audience to win. I want the audience to win and be a part of it because the audience is an afterthought in Hollywood. They make a movie, they show the audience the movie, “Go tell your friends now so you all spend money on our movie.” Well where’s your cut of that? So I want them to be successful. So if any of the movies in the slate do well, they make money off that one and then sequels or anything. But they’re all going to do well because everyone needs an action movie or we’re going to keep the cost down.
Escape from New York has the best example of a ticking time clock because he’s literally got bombs in his neck and he’s got a watch that shows him, he’s constantly clocking it, how little time he has and he gets you so like, oh my God, is he going to make it? That’s the best use of that. And no one’s ever topped that ticking time clock. All the other ones seem artificial in comparison. Aliens, we got to get off this planet now because this whole thing’s going to blow up. There’s a timeline, it’s already urgent, but now there’s an extra timeline on it. This is what happens.
“No, no, dude, if I knew anyone was going to see this, I would’ve shot it completely different. Give me $2,000. I’ll go reshoot half of it,” just knowing people are going to see it I want something. And the head of the studio is really smart. He said, “You don’t know what you have here. It’s something really special. Let’s just take it and tell you what happened.” Tell you what? Toronto did great, like I said, it won Sundance. So now we had to put it out, but I was like, I would’ve said, “Don’t show that movie.” But they also questioned the ending and didn’t come into play because we ended up making Desperado. The girl in Desperado doesn’t die. We didn’t do that. We didn’t kill Salma, but that’s what needed to happen in El Mariachi.
Quentin called me one time. People would always say like, “Oh, Reservoir Dogs. He borrowed from this movie Hong Kong actually from called City on Fire about these guys they’re all criminals and they kill each other, whatever.” And he said, “Hey, they’re showing a double feature called East Looks West and West looks East. They’re showing Reservoir Dogs with City On Fire, the one they say I borrowed from. And they’re showing Mariachi with a Hong Kong film called Run where they ripped off Mariachi.” They just took the whole story. It had two Chinese actors in Mexico with guitar cases. Ones, they just followed it beat by beat.
So we’re watching it and it was like scene by scene. They just remade it without even getting the rights or anything. It was so fun to watch. So we saw Mariachi first, then we watched that one and I’m like, “What’s this big brothel scene though? This isn’t my movie.” Oh, the bad guy, oh, there’s a scene in my movie where the bad guy has two girls in bed with him and they figured that was a whorehouse, but it was just this apartment. So they got this whorehouse, they reinterpreted it and they have helicopter shots and all kinds of big thing. And the action was awesome. But then the girl’s really good. And then midway through the movie I’m like, “Oh shit, she’s going to die because I killed her in mine. I don’t want her to die. I like this actress. It’s really great. And they have a really great love story.” I go, “Well, I hope they changed that part.” No, they kill her. So I felt bad twice because I sealed her fate. I sealed her fate, because…
And then he thought, well, what if I put some together like a lizard with a snake and it’s a slizard, or you have a spider monkey, which is literally spider legs and a monkey top. So he makes that, and then he thought, hey, why don’t I make them a little bit bigger for kids that have big hands? And it got out of control and they turn into these huge creatures and now they’re trying to eat them. So he’s hiding. And the kids find him hiding and he says this one line that people keep coming, it’s on the internet a lot. This meme about this, “Why is this line in this movie?” It’s so wild. I thought I wanted Steve to come up to the camera and he’s lost in his own creative world.
And he says, “I can’t even go outside because my own creations are going to eat me.” And he comes up to the camera, he goes, “Do you think God hides in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he created here on Earth?” it’s really just for a moment, this thing. And it’s like, because you feel like that way when you’re creating stuff, you’re creating something and then now it’s taking all life on its own. And it’s like, oh no, now this character has to die. I didn’t want that. This domino effect of creation. And you start thinking, well, this must be what creation, maybe he is hiding up there because look, he didn’t expect all this shit to happen, giving us free will and all that.
I tell people, your parents say, “Watch out who your peers are,” when you’re younger that means one thing but once you get older, surround yourself around people who swing much farther than you. But that’s really true. I mean, just by being around him and working with him, you get, by osmosis, you learn stuff and it just ups your game because they’re just swing way beyond you.
Jim Cameron was like that. So when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him because I was such a big fan. I was about to go do this Desperado and I went, “Hey, I just took a three-day Steadicam course because I can’t afford a Steadicam operator, so I’m going to operate Steadicam myself on this Desperado.” Now if he was just my peer, he’d say, “Oh, I did the same thing and I’m going to do the same thing.” That would be hanging out with somebody of your ilk, but you want somebody who’s above that. You know what he said? He goes, “I bought a Steadicam, but not to operate it, I’m going to take it apart, design a better one.” Us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He’s designing all new systems. That’s the guy you want to hang out with, not someone who’s doing what you’re doing.
So surround yourself by those kinds of people. And that’s when you learn things like don’t blink. Somebody who’s really swinging for the senses and accomplishing so much. And Quentin was like that. So I met him at the festivals. He saw Mariachi, he loved it. We came up, we talked, and he said, “You’re going to like my next film I’m writing right now, Pulp Fiction.” So I thought, “Man, I’m going to put this guy, he’s so fun. I’m going to put him, I’m going to write him in my Desperado script, which I was writing.” So that was before Pulp Fiction and all that when I had cast him, I didn’t know he was going to go become such a household name. I just was drawn to his energy and I’d already written him in. And I met Steve Buscemi there, and I was like, “I’m writing a character for Steve Buscemi.”
But then I went back to the Sony lot where I was working on Desperado and Quentin and I ended up having offices right next to each other on the Sony lot by accident. I didn’t even know that. I just met him. And I go back and he was, because originally Pulp Fiction was for TriStar because Danny DeVito was a producer and he was going to make it for TriStar. So he was there writing Pulp Fiction and I was writing Desperado. So I’d go show him storyboards from Desperado, he’d come act out scenes of Pulp Fiction. And we got to be really good friends that way. We’d go eat lunch at Versailles across the street, the Sony lot.
And then Sony passed on Pulp Fiction. It’s too weird, it’s too long, $ 8 million movie or 7 million, “They’re like, ah, we’re going to go make the next Pauly Shore movie instead. People don’t understand this thing.” And Miramax got it. And they’d just been bought by Disney. So they produced, their first film was Pulp Fiction. And then that thing went to Cannes and it was a whole thing.
But what I loved about his story is that when he made Pulp Fiction, he had a director screening, he showed it to some directors and I wasn’t able to go. But anyway, I had dinner with him once, and it was in my journal because I keep a journal, at 2: 40 AM after I dropped him off at his house, I said, “Oh wait, how did your movie come out?” Pulp Fiction, he just finished it and he went, “It’s done. It still feels like a movie Quentin would make. It doesn’t feel like a real movie.” And I was like, “That’s fine. What do you mean?”
” It feels like one of those movies I would make, like Reservoir Dogs doesn’t feel like a real movie.” And I was trying to be the supportive friend going, oh man, he was so excited about this movie, now he’s bummed about it. And I was like, “Well, it should be different. Should be like…” He’s like, wouldn’t have it, drove off. So I thought, oh, I guess that wasn’t the one. So I went home and I called some of the directors that were at the screening and they go, “Yeah, this isn’t the one for him.” None of them saw it. None of them saw it. But I know you’re surprised.
So he said, “There’s one person.” I go, “Oh yeah, who is your Spielberg?” Goes, “Kathryn Bigelow. Without a doubt she’s the only one who said there’s something here.” No one else was saying that.” He said, “In fact,” because he remembered suddenly, he’d forgotten the story but if it wasn’t in my journal, I would’ve forgot it too. He goes, “In fact, one of my friends even said, I want to sit you-“
But it’s not like they have all the… Proximity is huge. Proximity will change your life. Did for me. Just being around those guys. They didn’t teach me, “Hey, I’m going to teach you how to make a movie.” Just being next to them, being in their world, just ups your game. And you’re able to do things you weren’t able to do before. You get ideas you didn’t get to do before I did. I’ll show you one of my painting things.
You’re not going to believe this freaking thing. I had a painter friend in Germany, Sebastian Kruger, he gives a workshop once a year. I said, “I’m going to go there, and I bet I’ll learn more about directing by watching this guy paint, than I will by watching another director.” Because that’s just, now, I know how creativity works. You’re going to learn lessons outside of the box by doing that. And I tried to practice before going out there. I was doing a Danny Trejo, I’ll show you the before and after. You’re not going to freaking believe what you see, but it really tells the story of how important proximity is.
So I do this painting, it’s like, “Ah, it fucking looks garbage.” I’ll show you, it looks like garbage. I can’t do paintings that are just like… See, you never should say, “I can’t,” because you just cut your leg off. But I couldn’t at the time paint, just paintbrush into paint and then right on the canvas like that, without using some kind of medium. Which this guy Sebastian Kruger would do. So first I did a digital painting of Danny Trejo, just to get the framing and all that
So I get there, and he’s doing a Mick Jagger. And he starts with a mid-tone. He starts blocking in the face with a little tiny drawing of where the face goes. He starts doing that. He starts adding some highlights. There’s the photo, his reference. And I’m like, “Why are you concentrating so much on the cheek first?” And he was like, “It’s different every time.” Every, and I go, what paints are you using?” And he’s like, “It was regular acrylic paint.” “What brushes do you have?” “Regular brushes?” And I’m like, “How come mine doesn’t look like yours?”
“Well, let me try what he’s doing. You start with a mid-tone. I’m going to do that Danny again, start with a mid-tone. I’ll start adding some highlights.” And I did that, and everybody kept coming over going, “Did you just do that?” And I was like, “Yeah, I don’t know how,” but it’s very cartoony still. He’s doing a very realistic Mick Jagger. Look how real that is. And you’re just watching, and he doesn’t teach you anything. He just starts painting. So this is the photo he had as a reference, but then this is his painting. Right?
So I called him when we were doing Desperado and I said, “Would you ever consider doing an action?” “Oh man, I’d love to do action.” You know, he said something… So I said, “Well, I got a movie for you. I got a movie for you. It’s the sequel to Mariachi.” And so, Salma I found in Mexico television. She couldn’t get work in the U.S., because of the roles that are [inaudible 01:51:05]-
So I’m watching Univision, and then there’s Salma as a guest, and she’s a big soap star down there in Mexico. And she comes out, she’s beautiful, she’s funny, everyone’s laughing. She’s Salma. Everyone that we know, now. And she starts talking about, what I gather from what she’s saying, that she’s having trouble finding any work in the U.S. because of her accent. And then Paul Rodriguez says, “Well, say something in English.” And she says, and she sounds just like she does now. And he goes, “That’s great.” And she goes, “I know, I know.” And I went, “I think this is the girl.”
So I called her in my office, and I videotaped our first meeting together. So I have that somewhere.
The studio didn’t see it. They were like, “What? She hasn’t done anything. Why don’t you just hire somebody else, who already has a name?” I said, “Well, if we just give her one movie, then she’ll be someone who’s in a movie, and then you can keep casting.” So I made a whole nother movie with her in English, called Road Racers. It was my second film for Showtime. A really cool little Rebel Without a Cause type movie. And I gave her a role in that, so we’d have an example of her doing English. And they still were like, “We need a screen test. We need to have a screen test with a bunch of other actresses.” So I said, “Sure, let’s do that.”
So I went over to her house the night before the screen test, and we worked on the scene, which is the best scene. Where she’s operating on his arm, and they’ve got all this chemistry. And I was just directing her through it completely, down to, “When you pick up the water, and you hand him the water, don’t scream, “Oh, hot water!” Just be like, “Hot water,” while he’s spitting it out, and it’s going to be a big dramatic action with a very light delivery. And so, we got it down to a science.
The next day we, show up, Antonio does a scene with all the girls who come in. He does it with her. Clearly, they’ve got amazing chemistry. She just nails it. He’s great. He loves her, too. Studio’s like, “Okay, you can hire her.” Reluctantly, like that. But once they saw the footage come as we were shooting, and they saw it on the big screen when they were watching the dailies, then they were like, “Oh my God.” And then they saw it. Then they saw what I saw when I met her.
But sometimes, like you say, what do you do when people are like, “Hey, how come you’re using these…?” Just know that not everyone’s going to see it. You may have the only vision, just keep going. There’s an instinct that tells you to keep going that way. You’ll get proved right or wrong, or maybe you’re slipping on the first two rocks, or whatever. But follow your instinct, because everyone’s going to have an opinion, and it’s not necessarily the right one. And when you’re an independent filmmaker, you can make those decisions that change people’s career, that changes the world.
And that’s why you want to remain independent. That’s why what’s happening now in the industry is great, because I have to make movies like the way I started, which is what I’ve always liked to do. Which is just doing it where we create our own destiny. We go, “Hey, we’re going to make a movie. We’re going to make it for this budget, so we can make it. And the story’s going to be so character-driven and cool, we’re going to be able to get big actors to be in it because they’re going to want to be in it.”
So, Danny Trejo, you asked me about Danny Trejo. It’s great story.
And I gave it to him. “You got the role, just start practicing with that.” And he gets up, and he walks out. He didn’t have to say anything because there’s no dialogue. He walks out, holding the… We get to the set, and he kept saying, “Put me in, Coach. Give me a line, give me a line.” It’s like, “No, no, you’re such a nice guy, you’re going to blow the whole mystique. I want this guy to feel like the most evil, scary guy of all. And you’re such a nice guy.” I didn’t let him talk till Dusk Till Dawn. But one thing I noticed was that the town we shot in, the Mexican town, which is the same town I shot Mariachi. We went back there, because I wanted to pay back the city. So we had this big movie there.
And they didn’t really know Antonio, because he was in European movies. Salma hadn’t come to the set yet. But they saw Danny Trejo there in his vest, looking like a Mexican icon. They would go like this. Everyone thought he was the star. And I just know magnetism when I see it, and I went, “This guy’s got something.” So I went to him and I said, “I got a movie we’re going to do someday.” This was ’94. We didn’t make this movie for 15 years. “Machete. You’re going to be machete.” I had an idea for Machete then, it wasn’t the same story. I had seen a story, actually, the guy from Mariachi sent me this funny story. He said, “Hey, look at this story,” that the USDA, and FBI sometimes, would hire a Mexican federale to come do a job for 25 grand that they didn’t want to get their own guys killed on. I said, “That’s Machete. The guy that they pay,” but he’s not doing it for the money. It turns out he has to get this guy that escaped Mexico, and that’s the twist. So that was the original story I had.
I said, “We’re going to do this someday.” And we talked about it for years, and never did it. Never got around to doing it. So when I did Spy Kids, I put him in Spy Kids and I said, “Hey, let’s pay tribute to that character we never got to make, and you’ll be Uncle Machete.” He’s a gadget guy, but he’s got a mysterious past. But then a few years later, Quentin and I were doing Grindhouse, and he’d already done Dusk Till Dawn with me. I was building my own Latin star system. Salma showed up in a bunch of my movies. Cheech shows up in every movie. Danny shows up there. I brought Cheech out of retirement, put him in my movie. I needed to create my own Latin star system, because all my scripts… Because when you write in your own voice, you’re going to write, probably somebody that’s Latin. So you need to have a star system that matches that, so that you don’t have trouble casting. And people are like, “Well, you can’t hire this person.” So I built up my own star system. So Danny was one of my stars.
So after we’re doing Grindhouse, we had to do fake trailers for Grindhouse. And I told Quentin, “I know what trailer I’m going to do, for the movie I never got to make with Danny called Machete. That’ll be so fun to finally get that out of our system.” And doing a trailer is so fun. It’s two days of shooting, just still being that resourceful guy, we asked this company that had a digital camera we wanted to use, “Can you send it to us for a couple of day screen test? I mean, camera test. Instead of shooting a camera test, we shot the trailer. So we got a free camera, shot the trailer with him, and it’s just the money shots. Him opening his vest full of machetes, him aiming that gun, him in a waterfall with two gals. And I just came up with this really funny trailer, and we shot it.
People were screaming at the premiere, you couldn’t even hear it. They just wanted that movie so badly, because there was blaxploitation in the ’70s. There was never mexploitation. It felt like this should have existed, but it didn’t. So a Mexican superhero, they’d just never seen anything like that. Now, you know. But even his mom calls him Machete. He just became this guy, and of 250 movies that he’s been in, Machete is most famous one. So for five years, five years, people would come up to us and say, “Where’s Machete? When is that movie coming out?” And we were like, “It’s not a real movie, but when it looks real, we want to see that movie.”
So we finally made the movie because people just asked for it. And I was adamant about, being resourceful again, “All those shots that are in the trailer are really great. I got to reverse engineer the trailer into a movie, so that I can use that shot that’s in the trailer. Like this girl in the waterfall. Why would this girl be in the waterfall?” Thought of a really clever way that he gets the bad guy. “Her face is kind of covered by this hair. We’ll cast Lindsay Lohan, there.” Or, “The senator, we’ll switch it out for Robert De Niro.” Well, I just reversed engineered it, so every time there’s a shot in the trailer, it’s in the movie, but I shot all the footage around to lead up to it. That’s another fun creative exercise, is to reverse engineer something you just did like this, on the day. You just threw a bunch of cards out, basically, with that trailer. And now you got to go make a movie using all those cards. That’s a creative exercise that I thought so satisfying, so fun.
You know, I gave a Lady Gaga her first two movies. Because after Machete she said publicly, she said, “I saw Machete, and my song Americano should have been in Machete.” I thought, “She saw Machete?”
So by doing that job, I mean, I’ve worked on some big stuff. And I realized finally, after many years, because I’ve always edited. I realized, “This is why movies cost so much.” There could be 150, 200 people on the crew, and I swear not one of them knows how to edit. Not one. So they’re getting the wrong stuff, they’re having to reshoot shit. The editor is in a room somewhere, useless. Calling after the fact, “We still need to get this close up,” or, “You got to reshoot that, because it doesn’t match,” because no one knows editing. So if you just know that, you’re already miles ahead of 99% of Hollywood. But that’s just how I learn, by accident, so I kind of stumbled upon it. And I realized that’s what the problem is, because across the board I’m watching them going, “That’s not going to match. You guys are just spending money, sending crews out, shooting stuff for this. It’s a clusterfuck. Let me show you.”
And that’s how, in Sin City, Bruce Willis. Nine days.
So I’m going to show you this test. Okay, so for Dusk Till Dawn, the TV series, I would always shoot the first episode and the last episode of a seven or eight episode season. There was three seasons. By the time we got to the third season, I was doing Alita, so I couldn’t do the big finale episode, and my actor who plays the George Clooney character, D.J. Cotrona, he’s somebody who wanted to be a writer, and was writing. He wrote Fight and Flight, it’s this movie that’s going to come out, with Josh Hartnett. That’s his, he wrote it. After doing this. He was like, “Man, hearing you talk, you know what? I got…” This is what I love about, you inspire people, the feedback loop inspires you back. He said, “Man, hearing in your talk for Red 11, and the cards. I’ve got a script that’s partially written, I’m just going to go crank it out in… I’m going to cut off the phone in three days. I’m going to finish that thing in three fucking days.”
So anyway, he came to me with this idea. He said, “Oh man, I was hoping you’d do the last episode of Dusk Till Dawn, because I had this great idea for a scene. We’re in a zombie town, a Western town. We have one of those guns where you have to pull the hammer back, before you can fire.” So I thought, “What if I have a gun that’s empty, and I got bullets in the other hand? And I bump into a zombie, the bullets go flying, I jump and I catch all the bullets, and shoot the guy before I hit the ground.” Okay, that’s kind of a real cool, Desperado type thing. But dude, this is a seven-day shoot, for these episodes. Everyone on the crew will have a different idea on how to do that. A stunt guy will put you on wires, because you have to do all that action.
Or, the DP isn’t even operating the camera. It’s a camera guy. The director doesn’t know how to shoot. He’s not operating the camera. Your editor is in a room somewhere. VFX guys aren’t there. You’re not going to be able to ask them how to do it. But I am my own VFX, I came up with how we did all the shots in Sin City, and all the Spy Kids movies. “We need one guy to come do it. I’ll come do it for you. I’ll come do it, because I’m already going to be there, because I have to shoot a second unit fight scene for the other actor who wanted a cool fight scene.” So I was already doing that. “And when it comes to your scene, we’ll switch places, because it’s got to be done quick, because… You got to shoot it in 20 minutes because you got a ton of other shit you got to shoot, and you’ll just never get it. You won’t even get it in a film schedule, in a regular movie schedule. It’s just too crazy. You need somebody with a vision to do the whole thing.”
“So this is what it would look like if you were on the set. I’m going to show you the footage, and I’m going to show you the scene. I’m going to have to show it to you a couple of times, because you’re not going to believe what you’re about to see. So if you were on the set, this is what it would look like.”
So I get there, they say, “We’re ready for that scene.” So I get over there to the set and I go, “Okay, where are you coming out of?” And he goes, “This building.” “Where are you getting the bullets from?” “That body.” “Okay, bring that body closer. Okay, stunt guy, bring a pad over. I want to see you just jump, and start to twist as if you’re turning. I just want to see how much air time you can get to get any action in, before you hit the pad.” He starts to jump, he barely starts jumping, he’s already hitting the pad. So I was like, “Okay, that ain’t going to work. You get out of here. D.J., you’re going to do it.” I have no idea how I’m going to do this. I hadn’t thought about it before, but now you’re there-
At one point, I wanted to lower it so, “Just flip it upside down. We’ll flop it later. Give me the main camera. Okay, D.J., start running towards that bullets, and grab it, and pretend like it gets shot out of your hand.” I shoot it in a slow motion, but I’m showing you how it would look on the set. Okay, now the bullets are flying. Now I’m going to add those digitally, and I’m going to hold the bullets up to the light in each angle, so that they know what it’s supposed to look like, so they can match that. Otherwise it’ll look phony.
“Now, first jump, I just want you to commit to just jumping out, and just look at the barrel. Just look at the barrel on your hands, when you’re jumping, because that’ll look like you’re looking at the bullets. And just don’t even think about that you’re going to catch a bullet, don’t think about that you’re going to start turning. Just stretch your body out. Get a really graphic…” Look how cool that looks.
See, I look and the sun’s right there, hasn’t gone behind the building yet. That, and then my camera, I lowered my camera down, and I got that.
“I want you just to finish by turning, and cocking the hammer back, and firing before you hit the ground.” I’ll give you two takes for that. Almost gets it there, and then we do a second take. Boom. Nah, the other one was probably a little better, even though you don’t really see it. I’ve got to go do everything now. I got to cut it. I got to add the sound effects myself, I got to put the music in myself, because music guys would just end up filling it with music and ruin it. Sound effects guys would just fill it full of sound effects, and ruin it. I want all the sound to drop out, so as he’s jumping, all you hear is the wind in his jacket, the clinking of the bullets as they’re bouncing off. So you have this breathless moment, no music, cut the music. And that moment you cut it, so that you’re like, “I wonder if he’s going to make it,” right?
So I go home, I cut it. Before I even have the visual effects in, I just cut it that night, because I cut my own sound effects. I cut my sound effects in. You can already tell it’s going to work. You can already see, even with the bullets not there, you can tell by the sound where they’re going to be. It’s going to work. I call them up and said, “Dude, this is going to work great.”
So then I go to the effects guys and I go, “Okay, there’s the bullet in this frame, and the next frame is here,” because I used to animate. “And the next frame, it’s there. Then it hits the barrel, and then it starts bouncing this way. I want it that clear so we can follow that a bullet was supposed to go in, and that it bounced way over there. And then this bullet bounced way over there.” And they send it back, and a bunch of bullets come down. “No, guys, listen to what I say. I’m going to show you again. I’m going to draw it to you again. Just the sound will play like there’s multiple bullets flying. I don’t need to see all those bullets, or the eye’s not going to know where to go.” So then they got it right-
Now here’s another thing you didn’t notice. He hits this ground in the first shot. Watch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You didn’t even notice it, because I didn’t play the sound there. So if you don’t hear it, you don’t see it. And if you don’t see it, but you play a sound, you hear it. And you see it in your mind, right? So check that out now, with the sound on, and you’ll see both those parts play completely different now.
Right. Now you hear it. Right, see? Like, I know you can get away with that, because I know editing. And if I don’t play the sound, I can go ahead and milk that shot as long as I want. I’ll make him be in the air longer, even though he’s actually touching the ground, by not playing the sound. And that comes from, you said directing, but it’s not. Directing, people can direct and say, “This is what I want.” But to actually execute it, you need to be a craftsman. And to be a craftsman, you have to learn all those crafts.
I had a Spy Kids in the theater every year, three years in a row not being pre-planned. Every year there was a Spy Kids. Now the third one was the biggest one, biggest cast, mostly green screen, video game and the first digital 3D movie ever. So getting visual effects companies to make that, we realized, oh, I shot it with two cameras. That means each effect shot has to be done twice from a different angle. So I went to the studio midway through that and said, “There’s not going to be a movie in the theaters in time. You’re going to have to push the date back.” And they said, “Okay, we’ve never heard you panic. We’ll push the date back for you.” They called back 10 minutes later. I was like, oh, thank God. Because it’s really complicated. I didn’t know it was going to be this complicated, but I wanted a challenge.
And they said, McDonald’s will sue us for $20 million if you move the date. You have to have a movie in the theater. We started shooting that movie in January of 2003. It was in 3D in theaters by July. That’s the fastest any effects movie has ever been done.
So I think that works in your favor because then you come up with stuff. And you’re going to feel so enriched by doing the idea that you’re not going to care if it gets picked or not. You’re going to love this idea so much it could turn into 10 other things you never even thought about. That’s the beauty of doing a project. Nothing ever goes to waste. So many ideas that were sitting around that I’d come up with and put a lot of time in are now like, oh, I can do these now. I know how to finish it now.
He was like, I don’t know how the fuck he’s going to do this. It’s impossible. He’d just done Terminator 2 a few years before. It’s like that was state of the art. So Alita was going to be the movie he did first to prepare for Avatar. And so he had already done some prep work on it. It was based on a manga. But before they did that, they just started doing some tests for Avatar. And then as they got deeper into the test for Avatar to prepare for Alita, they went, I guess we’re making Avatar first. So Alita got kind of pushed to the side and they ended up doing it, which ended up becoming such a journey to make that movie, to get the technology to build it, to make it, because I remember visiting him on the set.
I mean I’ve known him so long. I was on the set of Titanic. That’s how long I’ve been around this guy. I was on the set of Titanic. I was on the set with Sarah Connor and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Furlong for the 3D ride he made for Universal a few years later. So I mean I feel like I’ve been around him a lot of his career.
And to be able to visit the set of Avatar and remember him showing me artwork they did, very photorealistic and he goes, “Curious to see how photo-real it will be when we’re finally done with this process.” Because you don’t get to see it until it’s almost done. And I was like, wow. He’s just shooting blind. Talk about me shooting Mariachi, not seeing the footage. He’s making this whole movie, not even knowing what the end result’s going to look like at all. Because you’re not going to know till you get there. And when you get there, if you don’t like it, there’s not a lot you can do.
So just seeing him do that and have that success really made it easier for me to do Alita because then it’s like, okay, we don’t know. Again, we don’t need to know. We know we’ll get there, but we don’t know how we’re going to do it. We’re going to start. And anything that I would come up with on this movie and his team, because he had all his Weta people working on it. He had them all working on it, too. I do a fast version of his process because a lot of live action. Avatar is mostly CG. I have live action sets. You have to come to my studio. I still have the whole Alita city in my back lot.
But we thought let’s shoot mostly live action and we’ll just replace her. But we still have to figure her out. You have to cast the right actress. And when I saw Rosa Salazar, she was just amazing. She made me cry in audition for the first time. I was like, oh my god, this person has something. If we can capture even a fourth of her facial expression, it will bring so much life. And they got it one to one. And it really helped Jim on the next Avatar and Weta because they got to try on a bunch of things. That’s why the second Avatar wave water looks so much more refined than the first Avatar because of that middle step of doing Alita. It was training ground for them.
So it was cool to be able to help, knowing that you’re being helpful to him in his process and not just distracting him, but then also he liked that his artist had something else to work on besides just Avatar, to just work on something different to freshen up their perspective on things and methodology. And so yeah, that was a really exciting movie to work on, and that we got to shoot it here, a Jim Cameron movie here in Austin. That was the best, having him here and my whole crew who’s worked with me 25, 30 years, everyone had an extra spring in their step because they’re like, wow, we’re working on a Jim Cameron movie. I mean that’s just like a high bar of achievement for everybody working on it.
So I went home and I have a bunch of siblings, so well the stars are bed head taking all these pictures of everybody. I take it back and he looks at the pictures when he develops, he’s like, “Whoa, these are really creative. You’re a creative person.” So when sometimes people tell you something that you can’t unhear. And he goes, “That’s a gift. But now you need to become technical.” Because most creative people need technicians and technicians always need creative people because they’re not usually the same. You’re born with creativity. It’s against your nature to be technical, but you can learn if you apply yourself. And if you’re both technical and creative, you’ll be unstoppable. And I was like, stop. Wow. So here, I want you to learn zone photography and I want you to learn the technical part of it.
So that’s why I didn’t take a crew on Mariachi. I knew if I’m just the creative person and I need a crew to go actually technically make the movie, I’ll always need something. And when you want to really change your life, you want to get your I need list down to little is possible. Because if you’re like, well, I want to shoot my movie, but I need a cameraman and I need somebody who knows how to light it, your I need list keeps growing. That’s further and further and further you will be from what you need to accomplish.
So I kind of went down there without any help so remember that script analogy where the guy said, throw away three scripts. I said, no, I’m going to write three scripts and then shoot each one so I get better at each one of those jobs so I can learn to be technical. My technical capability was so little, I’m literally calling the guy on the phone. How do I use this camera? That’s how little I knew about it. But I knew by doing the job, I would learn. By being both, that’s really the key.
So Jim Cameron is like that. Jim Cameron, when you think of those guys, George Lucas, very technical and very creative. John Lasseter, very technical but very creative, Pixar. Jim Cameron, very technical, very creative. Putting those two things together is really what sets you apart from other technicians and other creative people. And it’s very, very powerful and a lot of creative people, again, it’s against their nature to be technical. They don’t want to do it. Make yourself do it. Read the manuals, take the lessons. It frees you up because then you can go do like I just showed you in that demo, you are able to now be a technical person and creative and then you’re unstoppable. He’s one of the best at it and he just knows how to craft a story. He’s very analytical as well.
We bounce off each other in a funny way. He goes, man, he came down to visit my studio before he did Alita. And he went, ” You only surround yourself with people who are like you. You exude creativity from every pore and so does everyone at your studio.” And I go, “Yeah, I didn’t hire them that way on purpose.” But I think if you’re not that way, you don’t belong there and you kind of leave. And then I went to his studio and there were a bunch of Jim Cameron’s there. They’re like, oh my God, they’re all very technical. You can’t get all kind of fuzzy with the logic or you can’t get really creative with physics or anything. They’re like, no, that’s not how it would work. It would be… And they’re just, wow, super great at what they do. Bar is sky-high and they’re all like that. Because yeah, you’re not like that, you can’t hang with those guys. You can’t hang with him very long.
But he’s really interesting in that he’s so prolific. I walked into his writing studio and it’d be like one of the tables, you have those papers there. Imagine them that thick, that thick, that thick, all script, script. What are these? He goes, “This is a whole space opera version of this movie. We’re not making that one.” I was like, he’s just cranking out all this stuff. Again, can I take this and go please? But yeah, we bounced off each other because I loved his analytical part of his brain. I’m not that analytical. I’m just kind of like, hey, I’m really creative feeling. I’m like, woo, I’ll go this way and then woo, I’ll go that way. And he likes that about me. But I think about things too much like you think about things like what makes a movie a billion dollar hit? What are the elements that you need?
And I’m going to analyze that and I’m going to make sure my movie does that. And he engineers a submarine that can break the world record. He engineers a movie that can break the world record. He has that engineering mind, but the creative part, that’s very rare. So that’s very rare and he’s capitalized on both. He had this submarine model like this big on his desk, the one that he broke the world record for. And just seeing it and knowing him and having kids and stuff and a wife and I’m like, weren’t you afraid going down there with something had happened? No, I wasn’t afraid. Why not? Because I designed the escape vehicle. Yeah, if I was any other bozo, I’d be afraid. But he designed this escape. That kind of confidence, that’s him. He just knows if some other bozo had designed the escape vehicle, I would be afraid. But total confidence because he did it.
Oh, because I was shooting my cuts. They’re used to seeing footage of Antonio walks into the bar and it’s going to be a dialogue scene. They expect the whole thing done from a wide shot. I would shoot the wide shot. He walks in, cut, move the camera, let’s get over here because we wanted, because I’m not going to use it for the rest of the scene. I know we’re going to get into coverage. I’ve already cut it. So I was like, huh, that’s interesting. So I cut the first scene. Have you ever seen Desperado? The first scene is the best scene. Steve Buscemi is telling a story. He’s talking about the myth of the mariachi. He’s doing all this crazy-
But back in ’94 it was unheard of. I’m cutting three movies at the same time myself. I roll out bed, I come here, I can cut Desperado, I can cut Dusk Till Dawn. Anyway, that’s it. I hate working with editors. When I was doing Terminator 2, they wouldn’t even let me put the Bad to the Bone song in Terminator 2 because they didn’t think it would work and I had to sneak into the edit room at night on the weekend to cut it in and then show them the next day. He is like, that’s your own movie. You can’t give that kind of power to people. He said, “I hate working with editors. I’m going to do this. I’m going to tear down a wall in my house. I’m going to put it in Avid. I’m going to cut my next movie.”
And he did. He got an Oscar for editing Titanic. He had two other editors, but now no one ever took him for a ride like that again. He edits on every movie. He has other editors, but he can go do his own cuts. When he shows me footage, he’s showing me himself on his own machine and it’s like, again, it gives you all those tools to be able to really find your vision that you’re looking for because you can’t always explain it to somebody because you don’t always know yourself. You kind of come up with it as you do the process.
People would be like, you got that movie out of that equipment? Where now it’s the other way around. It’s like all this equipment is great. So when people come to me and say, “Well, I’ve only got this camera.” I was like, “That camera is 10 times better than anything I had for my first 15 years of filmmaking.” You have no complaints. This is like you can just start now and just start making stuff.
So when I did Spy Kids 3D, I thought, oh, if I get Jim’s cameras that he’s done for these underwater 3D documentaries, I can make the first digital 3D film for theaters. And so I did and it seemed like the easiest way was to utilize that when you put on the glasses, when you go into a game world, so there’s a green screen and we shot all the actors on green screen for all the game stuff and we could do a lot of 3D stuff coming at kids’ faces when they’re reaching. My 3D is not like the kind they have in theaters where it’s very polite. Mine’s like theme park 3D where kids aren’t doing like that trying to grab, that’s why it was such a big hit. Nobody does 3D like that, but I wanted that. I wanted shit falling in people’s laps. So you go, okay, this is why I’m wearing the glasses. I’m wondering why. And when I went to go make my next movie, so this is how crazy this is, we shot Spy Kids 3D, remember actually how fast they came out.
That was in the summer of 2003. Few months later, Once Upon a Time in Mexico came out. Two number one movies, both were finishing trilogies of mine and each one starred Antonio, Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin. When I was editing those at the same time, you’d be like, whoa, one movie. They’re killing people and the other ones are with the kids going like, yay, family. So it was really fun. It’s easier to do very different things than to do two action movies or two family movies at the same time. But I was like, okay, what’s my next movie going to be? Oh, shit, how crazy is this? Okay, so Antonio is on the set. I’m going to shoot him out in half a day for Spy Kids 3D. He’s only in the last scene on the green screen. Shoot him to lunch. Okay, now go away, put on your Desperado outfit because we owed some shots for Once upon a Time in Mexico on the green screen.
He finished two trilogies in the same day. That’s got to be a first, if ever. No one’s ever finished two trilogies in the same day and it’s just kismet. It is just how it happened to happen that day was just luck or the universe or whatever. But I needed to make up something new now. So I was looking through my bookshelves of inspiration and I picked up my Sin City books, which I’ve had. I used to be a cartoonist and I always loved how I drew that. Every time I’d see a different edition, I’d buy it, go home and go, oh, I already have this. I got three copies of this already. It would just always grab me by the throat and I liked that he was a writer/director in a way because he not just wrote comic, but he drew it too. A lot of times it’s a different writer or a different comic artist. He’s like a real kinship. This is someone who writes and directs his own thing.
But I was looking at it and I went, oh, shit, I know how to do this now. I just did it on the green screen. If I shoot this on green screen, the actors on green screen, I can make the backgrounds look just like this and I can contrast up the actors and I could get this very graphic look, which sometimes for a window it’s just a white box. So it’s even got a sliding scale for budget. If I run out of money, just put the actors in black and white, just put a white dot behind them for street light and that looks just like the book. So I’m going to bring the book to life.
So I’ll show you how fast we go from development at Troublemaker. It was October. Once Upon a Time in Mexico had come out. I was like, oh, shit, I know how to do this now. Sin City, I’m going to do a test. Went to my green screen here in my studio, you’ll see my green screen where I shot all these movies and I shot my sister, myself, put it black and white. Looks just like the comic, but it’s moving. So I call a comic book artist friend of mine, Mike Allred, and I said, “Do you have Frank Miller’s number?” And he goes, “Yeah, I do.” Okay, I’m going to call him up, so I called Frank Miller. “Hey, it’s Robert Rodriguez, I have a test I’m going to show you for Sin City. I’m going to be in New York tomorrow.” He’s like, “Tomorrow? Okay, yeah, sure, come by. Meet me at this bar.” Okay, book a flight for New York. I didn’t have a flight.
I fly up there, have my laptop just like this. I go to the bar, I show him what looks like an image from his comic and it starts moving. And he’s like, “Wow, how did you do that?” I said, “I got my own studio,” and all this. And then I started telling, man, let’s make this movie because no one had the rights to it. He never gave the rights to a studio. A lot of comics, oh, Warner Brothers bought this a while back or then you got to go through the studio. He still owned his own rights. In fact, he’d gotten burned by Hollywood so many times as a screenwriter that he said, “Fuck it, I’m going to go back and draw a comic that’s so raw that can never be made into a movie.” So of course I call him, “Hey, let’s make a great movie.”
I show him how we can do it and I go, I know you don’t know me and I have to earn your trust for you to give me your baby, but we can make this right away. And he’s all excited for about two seconds and then he goes, ” Oh no. Then we got to write a script and then the studio’s going to have notes.” All that shit he’s been through before and it’s not like that. I have a whole different setup. I got my own studio in Austin. This is how it’s going to be. If you like this idea, you’re not going to have to take any risk. Let me take all the risk.
I’m going to go write the script myself next month. It’s going to be unremarkable because I’m going to write it right out of your book. I’m going to edit through the stories down. I’m going to just take stuff out really. Might add a few things to connect it, but I’ll write the script in December myself, no money involved. Then we’ll call some actor friends of mine. We’ll have them come to my green screen. We’ll shoot the opening scene as a test, but it’s also the opening scene. I’ll do the effects myself. Do the sound, do the music. I’ll do fake credits. We’ll watch it together. If you like what you see, we’ll make the movie. You give me the rights then. If you don’t like it, keep it. It’s a short film to show your friends. It’s be really cool. So he’s like, all right. There’s nothing on him to do. It’s all on me.
I write the script in December. January, Josh Hartnett, Marley Shelton come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence.
It’s like, if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. In fact, I asked him, do you ever feel like directing any of these short ones? I thought about directing The Big Fat Kill, maybe as a short film. You should come direct that one. Shit, you should direct all of them with me because I’m really copying it right out of a book. You should direct it with me. All right, let’s go.
So then January, okay, so remember I met him in November. I wrote it in December. January, we shoot the test. Took me a couple of weeks to do the effects. He loves it. I make a meeting with Bruce Willis, show it to Bruce Willis. What’s so cool about doing that opening scene is that any actor I show it to now, I show him the book, which is awesome. You’d be playing this character, but look at this test. Let me show you the book, what it looked like before I turn this test into a test. Watches it, Josh Harnett, voiceover, music, titles come on. First name on the screen, Bruce Willis. And I go, “Hey look, you’re in the credits. You have to do it now.” Manifesting it, right? He’s like, “Shit man, this is great. I’m in.” Go get everyone else from that was just easy to get. And we were filming the movie. So February, right…
So we’d put fluorescent tape in there, hit that with a light, then we could turn it white later. The black and white really helps. And then just upping the contrast. But it’s just something that you have a feeling for, but you’re able to try it. In fact, when I took it to George Lucas, George Lucas said this to me early on because we were the only guys shooting digital. He said, “Man, it’s so good you live in Austin. That’s why I’m in Marin County. Because when you live outside of this box of LA, Hollywood, you think outside of the box automatically. You’re just going to stumble upon innovations.” And he was right. It was like, “Yeah, why aren’t we shooting digital? Let’s shoot digital. Why aren’t we shooting digital 3D? Let’s do that. Why don’t we just use green screen for the background?” You just start innovating because you’re away from any [inaudible 02:59:31] saying, “Hey, you can’t do it that way.”
Which they would say if I was in LA. So we just came up with a whole other method. So I took him to Sin City to check out the first thing I was going to show at Comic-Con. He said, “Now this will really show people what digital is capable of. This really shows how avant-garde you can get with that shit. That you could never have done that on film.” And so by me versing myself in that technology early, I was able to make a movie like that and then everyone had to play catch-up. So you should always just follow your, that’s why people say, “Don’t use those curtains. That’s not going to work.” Just blow past those guys. Go innovate your own thing because sometimes not knowing is better. Being too naive to… “Don’t you know you shouldn’t have been able to make that movie that way?” People would say that all that time. “How did you make Mariachi for $7,000? You know it’s impossible.” It’s like, why do you keep using that word? Because it can’t be impossible if I did it, because I’m not that smart. And it’s like saying, “How did you get to the top of Mount Everest? It’s impossible. Well, I just kept walking. I didn’t realize it was at a slope. I didn’t really realize it was going up that high.
So I like the creative limitations that come from less money. That’s why I like Brass Knuckle Films. We’re going to make them for less so that they are better, not to make them shitty. So many people have come up to me and said, “You know what part I love in your movie?” And they’ll tell me some scene. And I’m like,” Oh, well, that’s because we ran out of sun and we had to do that jump with just him jumping on a pad three times,” or whatever it is. It’s something that you fumbled together and that’s what they’re drawn to. They’re drawn to that imperfect thing. And so I wouldn’t judge it because somebody, if you called your movie, that’s like John Carpenter saying, “Yeah, nobody liked The Thing and it’s a shitty movie and everyone hated it, so it must not be good.” Then 10 years later, it’s a masterpiece.
So don’t judge it because words we use on ourselves are very powerful. So if you say, “Well, I’m kind of an artist sometimes. I make a lot of shitty stuff,” well, that’s going to be your lot in life. I’m in pretty good shape for a director. It’s not because I’m operating the camera, because I work out. But I always hated working out. I was not into sports. I was a filmmaker. I was a cartoonist in high school. I was really tall. They would say, “Come work, come be in our team. It’s a small school. We need you.” And I’m like, “I don’t know how to play any of these things. I’m an artist.” There’s a line in The Faculty that was my line to coaches when they would say, “You got to come run with everybody.” I would say, “I don’t think a person should run unless he’s being chased.” I gave that to-
He goes, “You have to work out, Robert. You have to work out.” And I was like, “Shit, okay. Yeah, I know, I know.” And so then I thought, okay, next year I’m working with Stallone. I’ll ask Stallone. I’ll ask Stallone. “How do you get in shape? Because I need to get in shape. My back’s always going out.” He goes, “Get the trainer. Anyone who ever saw in Hollywood got in shape, they had a trainer.” I say, “Even you?” [inaudible 03:05:03] go, “I need a trainer.” He has a trainer. [inaudible 03:05:04], “No, I need a trainer. I can’t train.” I was like, well, shit, if you can’t even train on your own, and what do us mortal men have? So I got a trainer. Guess what happened? Hated it. I would feel sick when he was coming over because I hate working out. And then some years of doing that, I can’t stand it.
I know it’s good for my health. So the desire is there. So if you can’t accomplish something in your life, it’s not a lack of desire. If you want to be more creative, it’s not a lack of desire. It’s a lack of identity. The fact that you went, you were comfortable about saying creative, it’s because there’s a lack of identity there. You have lots of desire. You got to get the identity up and then suddenly you’re making shit. So a friend of mine from Mexico, she comes over, “I have to stop smoking. My doctor said I have to stop smoking for my health so I’m not smoking right now.” Said, “I’ve been smoking since I was eight years old.” I said, “Well, you’re going to go back to smoking because you just told me your identity is a smoker. So right now you’re a smoker who’s not smoking. What’s going to happen? Eventually you’re going to [inaudible 03:06:04]. You have to say, ‘I’m a nonsmoker.'” Just that lesson I’ve forgotten.
“You have to say, ‘I’m a nonsmoker. I’m a nonsmoker.’ What does a nonsmoker do? If you believe you’re a nonsmoker, you hate smoke. Start choking at the smell of smoke.” “Okay, I’ll try that.” She walks off, I go, “Shit, I forgot about my own… I wonder where my life I got to apply that. Working out. Of course. My God, I hate working out. No wonder I am so miserable. I’ll tell my trainer and anyone who will listen, ‘I can’t stand working out. I don’t understand sports.'” So that day I said, “I’m an athlete. I’m an athlete.”
“How many people here journal?” Two hands, three hands. I couldn’t believe it. It’s like, man, if there’s anything I can impart on you, is journal. Your life is way more interesting than you think because it’s not going to feel like anything while it’s going by. But in retrospect, you look back. I can just go through, I keep a journal, one file per year. So I started a new one in 2025. If I’m going to look up, I’m going to do a Director’s Chair episode. I look up Michael Mann, Michael Mann, Michael Mann. All the conversations we had since ’94 that I wrote down that I felt and it was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe we said that.” That’s how I knew about that thing with Quentin.
I’d forgotten about that story with Quentin saying, “Ah, Pulp Fiction.” I’d forgotten that because from the moment I asked him that question to the success at Cannes was very quick. So it was a lost moment in time where I had it recorded down to the time, down to the hour when I asked him that question. And he thought it wasn’t, he didn’t think that was the one for him.
And it’s like, wow. People come back with their version. And I love telling my kids stuff that I learned that I wish I could tell myself, but I can’t take a time machine. The closest thing is telling your kid because then they can take that information to process. So many times they’ve come back and said, “Wow, dad, the lesson you taught us about this, it’s really become big in our minds.” “Yeah, what was that?” And they tell me. I’m like, “I never told you that.” They say, “Yeah, you told us…” “Well, I told you maybe 10% of that. All the rest you added.” “Oh yeah, well, we embellished it [inaudible 03:16:59].” They turned it into something else. And it’s like, wow, that’s so cool. But yeah, that thing about reliving, that was one of my favorite ones. Just my mom turning 75 and not wanting to do anything for her 75th birthday.
I said, “Why not?” She goes, “The whole family’s going to… You have 10 kids. They’re all going to want to do something for your 75th birthday. Nothing can top my 65th.” I was like, “What did we do on your 65th?” I didn’t even remember even. I’m the one who orchestrated it all. She goes, “Oh, you flew everyone in from all over the country. You gave me a car.” I got to have a journal of that. I’m sure I have video. I go back 10 years, I see what tape I had it on, find the tape, pop the tape in. Forgot about all this stuff. So I cut together a ten-minute version of it, showed it at her 75th birthday. Just watching the old one. Everybody was like, “Oh my God, look how young everybody was. Look how small the nieces and nephews were.”
She starts bawling as soon as she gets the key, the gift of the key in the video, because she realizes now what it’s going to mean that she’s going to get this car. And so it’s like, wow, let’s just play the old tapes. We don’t even have to do anything anymore. We banked so much amazing stuff that we’ve all forgotten. That my kids just love watching their old home movies. They hardly remember any of it, but even a VHS to them is virtual reality. Because compared to our memories, it is virtual reality. They’re leaning into the screen to see what’s around the corner and they’re remembering the place and the sounds. And they say, “Oh, we left the living room. It’s like we’re there.” It’s like, wow. I was always afraid they would see this old footage and go, “Ah, this is dog shit. What kind of camera was that?” The limitations of it. You put up one of those files on your screen, it’s this big on your laptop now.
That’s how low-res shit was back then, but that didn’t matter. It’s like compared to our memories, that stuff, living is reliving. Pull up that, shoot as much as you can, take as many pictures, but write the journal because you’ll have a picture. Swear. You’re not going to know what it’s from even 10 years from now, you won’t know what that picture’s from. You read the diary, you go, “Oh, that’s what that is. Oh my God.” You can piece together all these things that are important to you or that become more important with time, actually, and you know what’s important later compared to what’s been happening at the time.
That’s why you barely feel remnants of it. Do I feel sad about it? When I tell people they flip out when I tell them that. I say I want a character to be like that. He’s dying. He’s like, “I don’t want to forget this dream. I don’t want to forget. Let me wake up. Don’t let me wake up.”
But what’s cool, almost like this clarity you get by just saying it. They now know that they were always supposed to be this creative person and now they can double down on it because they know that’s who they were supposed to be. They don’t have to have any doubt anymore. They don’t have to wonder, well, am I supposed to be more business minded or can I be creative? Doesn’t that sound kind of frivolous? Is that a real job? Can I do that? Now they realize, no, you’re supposed to be doing that for these, these, these, these reasons, and now they can double down. You can skip all that and just decide I feel like I want to be that person, so I’m just going to declare I am that person. And as soon as you say it, you are that, and tomorrow your activities will conform to that. That’s how powerful that decision is.
So when you walk out of here, it’s going to be with a complete commitment, “I’m a technical and creative person.” Like my first boss. I’m unstoppable because my boss told me that and he was right. I became technical and creative and you’re just unstoppable. You can just keep going and just go, “I’m unstoppable.” That doesn’t mean you’re going to use your powers for bad, but you’ve just changed your life by just declaring that. And I’m also a creative person who lives his life creatively. I’m going to find creative ways to use that technology. If somebody says, “You’re not the same kind of artist I was expecting,” that’s their own opinion. Don’t blink. Just keep going. All these things that you’ve learned that people were supposed to tell you along the way, they’re telling you for a reason. Anytime you got pushed, if you go back to your life at your really critical moments in your life where you went that way instead of that way, there was probably somebody there who said something to you that kind of pushed you.
There was one guy when I was in high school. It was senior year. I wrote a paper. And I wasn’t a great writer at all. I wrote a paper for a Latin American studies class, gave it to the teacher and he said, “Wow, you’re going to be rich and famous in four years based on what I read.” I was like, “Really?” I’m 17 or 18. Four years later, I did Mariachi and I went to him later at a reunion and I said, “You called it. You said I was going to be… Why did you say that?” And he was like, “I said that? I [inaudible 03:26:49].” He looked like he would never say that to somebody. You’d think he would own it and say, “Oh yeah, I knew and I told you.” No. He looked like he didn’t even know who I was. He was acting like he never would’ve said that in a million years. So again, sometimes things come out of our mouth that’s not us, that comes through us. So if you think of it that way, why are we here? We’re here for a reason. We’re going to get nudged along. Listen to the signs. Own who you’re supposed to be because you are that person. Don’t let your human doubt get in the way. That’s like the guy closing the pipe. “I don’t know if I’m really creative. I don’t know if I’m really a businessman.” And you’re just closing the pipe. You’re not going to let it flow. Just be a good pipe. Just say, “I just want to be a good pipe. Clean, open.” And then that’s when the magic happens.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Episode highlight
- 2:07 – Introduction
- 4:06 – Explosions and having only one take
- 11:40 – Success and failure
- 20:30 – Filmmaking on a low budget
- 32:43 – El Mariachi
- 44:12 – Creativity
- 1:06:07 – Limitations
- 1:12:24 – Handling criticism
- 1:28:33 – Action films
- 1:39:55 – Quentin Tarantino
- 1:49:54 – Desperado
- 1:50:56 – Salma Hayek
- 1:55:42 – Danny Trejo
- 2:00:56 – Filming in Austin
- 2:07:07 – Editing
- 2:16:37 – Sound design
- 2:21:45 – Deadlines
- 2:25:16 – Alita: Battle Angel
- 2:33:38 – James Cameron
- 2:46:41 – Sin City
- 3:00:50 – Manifesting
- 3:12:14 – Memories and journaling
- 3:21:57 – Mortality
Episode highlight
Robert Rodriguez
I write the script in December. January, Josh Arnett, Marley Shelton, come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence, incredible opening sequence and the visual Look, we’ve never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie, and they would miss the point that the visual is half of it. I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone’s seen because that’s how it reads when I read the book. It’s like, if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. Just by being around him and working with him you get by osmosis, you learn stuff and it just ups your game because they’re just swing way beyond you.
I write the script in December. January, Josh Arnett, Marley Shelton, come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence, incredible opening sequence and the visual Look, we’ve never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie, and they would miss the point that the visual is half of it. I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone’s seen because that’s how it reads when I read the book. It’s like, if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. Just by being around him and working with him you get by osmosis, you learn stuff and it just ups your game because they’re just swing way beyond you.
Jim Cameron was like that. So when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him because I was such a big fan. I was about to go do Desperado and I went, “Hey, I just took a three-day Steadicam course because I can’t afford a Steadicam operator, so I’m going to operate Steadicam myself on Desperado.” Now if he was just my peer, he’d say, “Oh, I did the same thing,” and I’m going to do the same thing. That would be hanging out with somebody of your I, but you want somebody who’s above that. Do you know what he said? He goes, “I bought about a Steadicam, but not to operate it. I’m going to take it apart and design a better one. Us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He’s designing all new systems. That’s the guy you want to hang out with, not someone who’s doing what you’re doing.
We put so much of the world around them. When you see the city, we put a blue screen way in the back to just make the city keep going, but we built the sets there, the town, we built the real set. So everything was very tangible and real, and that way she had to fit into that world and be as real as that because if it was all done in CG, well then now you can fudge everything. But if you put her in a real environment, that’s a real challenge. And just like with our movies, you watch it all fall apart, you watch this thing blow up, you watch this thing not work, everything just falls apart in front of your face. Then that’s when you roll up your sleeves and creatively figure out a way around it and by the end, you have a result that’s better than what you sought out. Sift through the ashes of your failure and you’ll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you’re not looking for it, you don’t find it.
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Robert Rodriguez, a legendary filmmaker and creator of Sin City, El Mariachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Machete from Dust Till Dawn, Alita, Battle Angel, The Faculty, and many more. Robert inspired a generation of independent filmmakers with his first film, El Mariachi, that he famously made for just $7,000. On that film in many sense, he was not only the director, he was also the writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, visual effects supervisor, sound designer, composer, basically the full stack of filmmaking. He has shown incredible versatility across genres including action horror, family films and sci-fi with some epic collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, and many other legendary actors and filmmakers. He has often operated at the technological cutting edge, pioneering, using HD filmmaking, digital backlots and 3D tech, and always through all of that, he’s been a champion of independent filmmaking, running his own studio here in Austin, Texas, which in many ways is very far away from Hollywood.
The following is a conversation with Robert Rodriguez, a legendary filmmaker and creator of Sin City, El Mariachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Machete from Dust Till Dawn, Alita, Battle Angel, The Faculty, and many more. Robert inspired a generation of independent filmmakers with his first film, El Mariachi, that he famously made for just $7,000. On that film in many sense, he was not only the director, he was also the writer, producer, cinematographer, editor, visual effects supervisor, sound designer, composer, basically the full stack of filmmaking. He has shown incredible versatility across genres including action horror, family films and sci-fi with some epic collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, and many other legendary actors and filmmakers. He has often operated at the technological cutting edge, pioneering, using HD filmmaking, digital backlots and 3D tech, and always through all of that, he’s been a champion of independent filmmaking, running his own studio here in Austin, Texas, which in many ways is very far away from Hollywood.
He’s building a new thing now called Brass Knuckle Films where he’s opening up the filmmaking process so that fans can be a part of it as he creates his next four action films. I’ll probably go hang out at his film studio a bunch as this is all coming to life. His work has inspired a very large number of people, including me to be more creative in whatever pursuit you take on in life and have fun doing it. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Robert Rodriguez.
Explosions and having only one take
Lex Fridman
Has there been a time when there was one take and you only have one take to get it right?
Has there been a time when there was one take and you only have one take to get it right?
Robert Rodriguez
Oh, all the time where you’re just like, or just how long it’ll take to reset and you’re just, but then you know what? You got to just work with what you got. You got to work with your results.
Oh, all the time where you’re just like, or just how long it’ll take to reset and you’re just, but then you know what? You got to just work with what you got. You got to work with your results.
Lex Fridman
You get nervous or no in that moment?
You get nervous or no in that moment?
Robert Rodriguez
Oh yeah, you’re nervous going just, “I hope it goes off because then to fix it, I’ll have to go do a bunch of other steps, which we don’t have time for.” But a lot of times I’ve just learned that if something happens, it’s just meant to be that way. And I got used to doing things in one take and just living with it. It didn’t bother me.
Oh yeah, you’re nervous going just, “I hope it goes off because then to fix it, I’ll have to go do a bunch of other steps, which we don’t have time for.” But a lot of times I’ve just learned that if something happens, it’s just meant to be that way. And I got used to doing things in one take and just living with it. It didn’t bother me.
One movie, it was even a low budget movie, they had rigged a car to implode because I was going to throw a guy at it, so we needed the car to implode and then we were going to throw them and marry it together. The car guy goes, “Yeah, we’re going to have three cars rigged.” “Three cars? Why you…” “Well in case one doesn’t work, and then we have a second way throwing away.” “We don’t have all night to go shoot take after take we’re doing Just give one car and if it doesn’t work, we’ll figure it out,” because you don’t have time to do it again. Sometimes it’s such a long setup. So I go, “No, I’m good with just going…” In Grindhouse movie. They only had one take. So that’ll make it more authentic.
Lex Fridman
When it all goes to shit, when it fails you just, what’s the next thought?
When it all goes to shit, when it fails you just, what’s the next thought?
Robert Rodriguez
So I’ll tell you, two things happen on Dusk Till Dawn. First was, okay, you know how those explosions when somebody walks away in slow motion from an explosion, that’s become kind of even that started with Desperado Desperado’s the first, if you look at all the montages, Desperado’s first. That’s right. That’s right. That is the meme because it was an accident. It was just supposed to be, it was just two grenades, not a nuclear bomb. It throws them over the side and I just wanted some body parts or something to fly up some shrapnel. It literally says shrapnel and my effects guy was so running so ragged.
So I’ll tell you, two things happen on Dusk Till Dawn. First was, okay, you know how those explosions when somebody walks away in slow motion from an explosion, that’s become kind of even that started with Desperado Desperado’s the first, if you look at all the montages, Desperado’s first. That’s right. That’s right. That is the meme because it was an accident. It was just supposed to be, it was just two grenades, not a nuclear bomb. It throws them over the side and I just wanted some body parts or something to fly up some shrapnel. It literally says shrapnel and my effects guy was so running so ragged.
We get to there and I go, “Do you have any body parts and stuff we can throw up or something you can shoot up. “I didn’t realize it’s so high to get past that second floor.” And he’s like, “No, I don’t. I can give you a fireball. I can give you a nice fireball with propane, but it burns away really quick.” “Like how fast?” “Like that but it’ll be big and orange.” “Okay, we’ll shoot it in slow motion so it lasts a little longer because it just goes poof.”
So I told the actors, I know how big this fireball is going to be, but just walk really fast and just look real determined and then just keep walking. Don’t stop and turn around because you might get your eyebrows singed. So they take off and it goes, and in slow motion, it looks great, right? I remember showing to Jim Cameron before it came out and his hand went up. He’d never seen that before, six months later Dusk Till Dawn came out. So I liked how much it looked so much that in Dusk Till Dawn, I did it again. So those movies came out within six months of each other. That’s why it turned into a thing because people saw it.
And so I thought, “How about for the opening of George Clooney and Quentin walking out of the gas station that we have the whole place just blowing up and they just keep talking like it’s not happening. Take it another step further so I’m not just doing the same thing. Okay, that one, it’s like, “Okay, you’re going to walk out and it’s all in one take. So we’re only going to do one take. We’re going to blow the thing up. We’re going to start with just some smaller explosions. Then when they’re further away and it’s safer, then we’ll do the big fireballs.” So we’re going and you’re nervous if one of them trips up a line and the pressure’s on them, it’s not just you that’s nervous, you’re nervous for them. They’re the ones who got to walk out, do that whole speech, get in the car and drive away. What if the car doesn’t star? There’s a lot of things that could happen.
Well guess what happens? The thing you would not expect, they go in, they come out, they start talking, shoot it perfect, great, we can move on. And the camera guy goes, I don’t know what happened, but just like you had a little snafu here he goes, we have an auto-focus on the Steadicam. We have a focus thing. It just went like this, I felt it go whack all the way out of focus and whack for a second back. It just reset itself. We don’t know why it did that because it’s radio-controlled and we can’t tell because we’re shooting film. So we’re like, “Oh, shit. Let’s watch the dailies. Sure enough, let’s see if we can, maybe I can scratch the film right there.” No, it goes completely out focus and back in focus within a second. Now we got to res-hoot it. So we had to wait till we’re back in that location. We rigged it for two more takes just in case. So that thing that was supposed to be the one take is three takes.
The other thing that happened was the front of the Dusk Till Dawn bar, that same guy that did those explosions, he packed a bunch of explosives behind the actors. When the actors come running out of the bar at the end of the movie and there’s an explosion through the door because all the vampires are blowing up. He didn’t put like 10 times the amount of stuff. It blew out, you see it in the movie. You see this huge fireball going up and if you watch closely, you see it already start to catch the whole place on fire. The whole front of that, which is foam, is catching on fire, and I cut just before you see that it’s on fire, and that was the first shot at that bar because we weren’t going to start shooting the other stuff till night.
So first shot is that, and the set’s ruined, burned to a crisp. The neon lights blew up. So we couldn’t even, Cheech goes, “Well, I guess I’m not doing my speech tonight,” but right away, this is what happens. My first AD, Doug Arnikowski comes over to me and I go over to him. Guys came out with the fire hoses. The fire hoses weren’t even any water. The thing was just scorching. The whole production design team was in tears because they had just spent weeks building this thing and it was up in smoke and charred. I said, “Let’s just keep shooting. Let’s just keep shooting because it looks really kind of cool like this.”
Yeah, they’re going to have to come repair it and we’ll have to come back, but it’s all black and charred. That’s why that whole scene with George Clooney and Cheech and the building’s black, we didn’t go over there and touch that up. That’s real flame that burned and it ended up looking great. So then the next week when we came back to shoot that other shot that didn’t work, we came back and they had repaired it and we shot all the night stuff, which is the majority of the stuff in front of it. So sometimes you got to roll with it and look at the blessing you get because of there’s a mistake. You probably actually got a better take by doing it later with them. And then you had this incredible look for the end of the movie that looked apocalyptic. If it had looked just clean, you would’ve actually seen that it was kind of a foam set. This made it look better. So I kind of let the universe push you where you’re supposed to go.
Lex Fridman
Just roll with it.
Just roll with it.
Robert Rodriguez
You got to roll with it because you don’t know what the grand plan is. You have your plan, just know it’s probably all going to fall apart. It’s just like the movies, you come up with your plan of what you want to accomplish. That’s like your script. Then you go scout your location and figure out what your project’s going to be and you go try to make it as bulletproof as possible. Then you go to do your project and just like with our movies, you watch it all fall apart. You watch this thing blow up, you watch this thing not work, everything just falls apart in front of your face. Then that’s when you roll up your sleeves and creatively figure out a way around it. You turn chickenshit into a chicken salad and by the end you have a result that’s better than what you saw it out.
You got to roll with it because you don’t know what the grand plan is. You have your plan, just know it’s probably all going to fall apart. It’s just like the movies, you come up with your plan of what you want to accomplish. That’s like your script. Then you go scout your location and figure out what your project’s going to be and you go try to make it as bulletproof as possible. Then you go to do your project and just like with our movies, you watch it all fall apart. You watch this thing blow up, you watch this thing not work, everything just falls apart in front of your face. Then that’s when you roll up your sleeves and creatively figure out a way around it. You turn chickenshit into a chicken salad and by the end you have a result that’s better than what you saw it out.
But that’s the process and that’s life and that’s wash, rinse, repeat the rest of your life. That’s what everything’s going to be like. It’s just like a movie because when you think about it, you’re writing a story for a film and you’re also writing the story of your life at the same time. How are you going to react to things? Well, how do you make your character react to things? You make him kind of super human. Why don’t you just make yourself that way? You’re writing your own story and you start really seeing, the more you get into storytelling that life imitates art and art limitates life. But the process is also the same.
Success and failure
Lex Fridman
So you write the story, the script, and then you have it collide with the chaos of reality. And in that moment when you said you see the chickenshit, you have to be able to keep your eyes open.
So you write the story, the script, and then you have it collide with the chaos of reality. And in that moment when you said you see the chickenshit, you have to be able to keep your eyes open.
Robert Rodriguez
You have to do that.
You have to do that.
Lex Fridman
The notice-
The notice-
Robert Rodriguez
You have to do that.
You have to do that.
Lex Fridman
Wait a minute, okay, stuff changed. It’s discipline. Where’s the, not to be cliche about it, but where’s the silver lining of this? Where’s the path to actually make something good out of this? And that’s a skill, right?
Wait a minute, okay, stuff changed. It’s discipline. Where’s the, not to be cliche about it, but where’s the silver lining of this? Where’s the path to actually make something good out of this? And that’s a skill, right?
Robert Rodriguez
I call It, and it’s one of my favorite stories. I was doing one of these talks and I said, come talk about creativity. I go, I understand because a lot of people read my book, Reels had a crew and told me, “Ooh, it made me be a filmmaker. But a lot of people said it helped me start my own business because they just see how you can go be entrepreneurial like that and go where no one else is going, and I’m giving all this talk about this kind of positive stuff and this one woman goes, you’re real positive. But what do I tell myself when I just wasted a year and a half of my life doing something that didn’t work? I was like, that’s a real negative way to ask that. Can you just rephrase the question a little more positively before I even attempt to answer it?
I call It, and it’s one of my favorite stories. I was doing one of these talks and I said, come talk about creativity. I go, I understand because a lot of people read my book, Reels had a crew and told me, “Ooh, it made me be a filmmaker. But a lot of people said it helped me start my own business because they just see how you can go be entrepreneurial like that and go where no one else is going, and I’m giving all this talk about this kind of positive stuff and this one woman goes, you’re real positive. But what do I tell myself when I just wasted a year and a half of my life doing something that didn’t work? I was like, that’s a real negative way to ask that. Can you just rephrase the question a little more positively before I even attempt to answer it?
Because already her point of view is exactly what you’re saying. She’s not looking at all. She’s just concentrating on what didn’t follow her plan and not seeing the gift of everything else that’s there. So she goes very reluctant. It was so perfect. I wish we had filmed it. She goes, “I learned a good lesson the hard way,” and I said, “That still sucks. I say, when you follow your instinct, if you follow your own instinct to go start a business or go make this movie, or it wasn’t someone saying, go over there and you’ll make a million dollars. It was your instinct and you fail sometimes. The only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. You fail. You have to really sift through.” It’s like the silver lining, but I call it sift through the ashes of your failure and you’ll find the key to your next success is in there. But if you’re not looking for it, you don’t find it. I’m going to tell you one, and I tell them the four room story. I said, I made a movie called Four Rooms. It didn’t make any money. When Quentin asked me, Hey, do you want to make a movie with me and two other filmmakers? It’s an anthology. It’s on New Year’s Eve, it’s in a hotel. You have to use the bill. We’re not going to know what each other’s making and we make it and we put it together. The hand went up right away, just instinctually. That sounds, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll go make that with you. Now, should I ask the audience, I like to throw it to the audience and her. Should I have not raised my hand that quick? Shouldn’t I have done a little studying first or should I just go blind instinct? Or should you do instinct with some studying?
Okay, well, I could have gone and studied and I would’ve found that anthologies never work. Even when it’s Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, they bomb because people can’t quite rip the hand. What is this Twilight Zone? I don’t want to go see that, but that’s not, I still said, “Yeah, I think I should still go by instinct.: So my instinct was to raise my hand. We go make that movie because I love short films. I made bedhead and short films and I thought, oh, here’s aw . If this works, I can make short films in anthologies and I can have the best of both worlds.
Lex Fridman
And by the way, anthologies is when there’s multiple, multiple one story in one movie, one story, yeah, one movie. So if you did the research, you would know that
And by the way, anthologies is when there’s multiple, multiple one story in one movie, one story, yeah, one movie. So if you did the research, you would know that
Robert Rodriguez
Very few
Very few
Lex Fridman
.People
.People
Robert Rodriguez
Ever
Ever
Got that to work. Yeah, the audience can’t quite wrap their end, and then it feels like the movie’s starting three times. So I make that movie, it bombs. Now I could feel real bad about that, but if you really think about it, you go, “Well, why did I sign up for it? Did I raise my hand because I thought it was going to go be this big financial success? No, I did it to work with my friends to do something creative, to try something, but that’s still not good enough. I need to really sift through the ashes and if I looked through the ashes of that failure, I find two keys to my biggest successes in there. While I was on the set, they said, it has to be new. So I thought, I’m just going to do like bedhead. I’m going to have two little kids that are running around in this room and we have to use the bellhop as a babysitter.
Well, it’s New Year’s. Let’s dress everybody in tuxedos because it’s New Year’s. They’re all going to go out, but the parents leave without them. When I saw Antonio and his wife, I thought, wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies and these two little kids, one of them keeps falling asleep on the set. He’s so young, they barely tie their shoes. They don’t know. Parents are spies. They have to go save them. Okay, there’s five of those movies now.
The other one was, I really love making short films. I really want this anthology thing to work. What if it’s three stories, like a three-act structure, not four, same director, not four different directors. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again? Well, because I had already done one and figured out how I could do it better, and that’s Sin City. Those are by far two of my biggest successes that came directly from that failure. So I always say, follow your instinct. If it doesn’t work, just go. Sometimes the only way across the river is to slip on the first two rocks. So where’s the key in that? The ashes of the failure. Because if I had an instinct, that means I was on the right track. I didn’t get the result I want. That’s because the result might be something way bigger that I don’t have the vision for, and the universe is pushing me that way.
Lex Fridman
By the way, a lot of people that look back to four rooms see a lot of creative genius in there. So you say it flopped,
By the way, a lot of people that look back to four rooms see a lot of creative genius in there. So you say it flopped,
Robert Rodriguez
It flopped financially.
It flopped financially.
Lex Fridman
Financially, but there’s so many ways to measure a fiscally” totally success movie.
Financially, but there’s so many ways to measure a fiscally” totally success movie.
Robert Rodriguez
But like I said, I would say, “Well, it was successful because even Roger Ebert said, Hey, you furnished my favorite room. I was like, Hey, I could take that, but now. I think there’s something else still there. I keep sifting and it’s like, oh yeah, two big successes came from. That’s amazing lesson to have because it makes you feel better about failure. Think of the thing by John Carpenter. You put that movie out the same weekend as E.T. I think bombed critics were calling it pornography because of all the weird special effects and audiences didn’t go either, and he thought he made a great movie. So it makes you question your instincts. Well, 10 years later, it turns out, oh, it’s a classic. So sometimes it takes the audience a while. So if you have some kind of failure on something, you don’t let it knock you down.
But like I said, I would say, “Well, it was successful because even Roger Ebert said, Hey, you furnished my favorite room. I was like, Hey, I could take that, but now. I think there’s something else still there. I keep sifting and it’s like, oh yeah, two big successes came from. That’s amazing lesson to have because it makes you feel better about failure. Think of the thing by John Carpenter. You put that movie out the same weekend as E.T. I think bombed critics were calling it pornography because of all the weird special effects and audiences didn’t go either, and he thought he made a great movie. So it makes you question your instincts. Well, 10 years later, it turns out, oh, it’s a classic. So sometimes it takes the audience a while. So if you have some kind of failure on something, you don’t let it knock you down.
Just go. Maybe in 10 years they’ll think it’s great. I’m just going to commit to making a body of work, a body of work. Some will succeed, some will over-perform, some will underperform. It’s not your job. You just want to be a creative person. Just create, stop thinking about movie per movie and worrying so much about each one or project to project. If you’re a business person, just commit to making a body of work like an artist would do, and you don’t know what the masterpieces are going to be or which someone’s going to come and say, “Oh, that one that bombed there is some really creative stuff in there.” It’s not for you to decide. You just go and do it.
Lex Fridman
Sometimes I think it takes some time to process the failure to make sense of it, at least for me, don’t rush making sense of what didn’t work, what lessons do I take from it, how do I sit through the ashes? As you said, it takes time. You have to sleep on it a bunch of nights.
Sometimes I think it takes some time to process the failure to make sense of it, at least for me, don’t rush making sense of what didn’t work, what lessons do I take from it, how do I sit through the ashes? As you said, it takes time. You have to sleep on it a bunch of nights.
Robert Rodriguez
Sometimes it’s right there and then sometimes you come back, revisit it later. You might not have had some information you have now that makes you look at it a lot differently. When I did, I just did the audiobook for Rebel Without a Crew.
Sometimes it’s right there and then sometimes you come back, revisit it later. You might not have had some information you have now that makes you look at it a lot differently. When I did, I just did the audiobook for Rebel Without a Crew.
Lex Fridman
Which I thank you for that, by the way.
Which I thank you for that, by the way.
Robert Rodriguez
I hadn’t read it since I wrote it, so I didn’t remember a lot of the details.
I hadn’t read it since I wrote it, so I didn’t remember a lot of the details.
Lex Fridman
And you actually, it’s voiced by you.
And you actually, it’s voiced by you.
Robert Rodriguez
I voiced it so I was reading it real time.
I voiced it so I was reading it real time.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I highly recommend people because you comment, you add additional commas to it. It’s great.
Yeah, I highly recommend people because you comment, you add additional commas to it. It’s great.
Robert Rodriguez
Most of the time I’m laughing because I can’t believe how crazy that story is. I forgot a lot of details. And when you’re younger, when you’re 21, 22, six months feels like six years. I didn’t realize how short that window was until I reread it and how impossible most of that is. But you see some places where a setup falls in my lap and then pays off immediately in a big way like magic over and over again. It’s clear I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s clear the universe is just pushing you places so you can’t fight it. Because I remember I was really disappointed and it says in the diary, I’m really bummed that I go home that Christmas, not having sold it to the Spanish home video market, which was my goal. I walked home penniless and I was like, “Merry Christmas. I feel like a freaking failure.”
Most of the time I’m laughing because I can’t believe how crazy that story is. I forgot a lot of details. And when you’re younger, when you’re 21, 22, six months feels like six years. I didn’t realize how short that window was until I reread it and how impossible most of that is. But you see some places where a setup falls in my lap and then pays off immediately in a big way like magic over and over again. It’s clear I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s clear the universe is just pushing you places so you can’t fight it. Because I remember I was really disappointed and it says in the diary, I’m really bummed that I go home that Christmas, not having sold it to the Spanish home video market, which was my goal. I walked home penniless and I was like, “Merry Christmas. I feel like a freaking failure.”
Good thing I didn’t sell it then. With time, you look back and you go, wow, I got an agent the next month. He wasn’t even going to help me sell it. He said, “Oh, if you can get $20,000 for it, take it.” I chased those people down for those contracts, Spanish market for months, and they never answered me back. And then Columbia ended up buying it for 10 times as much, and we released it and did a sequel and did another sequel. If you look back in time, good thing I didn’t get my way. My way had this for revision and it needed to do that, which you would never know. You don’t know that going through.
So just if you don’t have the answer right away, or even in 10 years, go, well, maybe it’s coming in 20 years. Don’t let anything slow you down. Just keep plowing forward. Committing to making your thing happen. Don’t get shook up by something that you might not have an answer for.
Filmmaking on a low budget
Lex Fridman
Every aspect of your journey is super inspiring. We’ll talk about it. Let’s go to the beginning because there’s a few technical things that are fascinating about your beginning. So you started making films when you were very young with an old Super 8 camera and you were editing on a VCR.
Every aspect of your journey is super inspiring. We’ll talk about it. Let’s go to the beginning because there’s a few technical things that are fascinating about your beginning. So you started making films when you were very young with an old Super 8 camera and you were editing on a VCR.
Robert Rodriguez
You see, I’ve met a lot of filmmakers who they start a certain way, but then they finish another way. They get to be big filmmakers and all that. I still do it that way. I like doing things that way. I have a new company called Brass Knuckle Films where the audience can actually participate by being investing investors in these movies that are done the same way. They’re action films like we did with Mariachi, but 10 to 30 million. It doesn’t take a lot of money to start a billion-dollar franchise. John Wick only cost $20 million, the first one. Second one was 40, third one was 80, fourth one was a hundred because the audience kept growing and growing.
You see, I’ve met a lot of filmmakers who they start a certain way, but then they finish another way. They get to be big filmmakers and all that. I still do it that way. I like doing things that way. I have a new company called Brass Knuckle Films where the audience can actually participate by being investing investors in these movies that are done the same way. They’re action films like we did with Mariachi, but 10 to 30 million. It doesn’t take a lot of money to start a billion-dollar franchise. John Wick only cost $20 million, the first one. Second one was 40, third one was 80, fourth one was a hundred because the audience kept growing and growing.
Lex Fridman
By the way you say $20 million, it’s not a lot of money.
By the way you say $20 million, it’s not a lot of money.
Robert Rodriguez
It’s not for an action film.
It’s not for an action film.
Lex Fridman
That’s right. But also we should say that El Mariachi, the film on which the book Rebel Without a Crew is a $7,000 dollar movie. So let’s put it all in context.
That’s right. But also we should say that El Mariachi, the film on which the book Rebel Without a Crew is a $7,000 dollar movie. So let’s put it all in context.
Robert Rodriguez
But you’re going to hire bigger actors. You can get a big actor like Keanu Reeves for a $20 million movie. I asked Jim, I said, Jim Cameron, I said, “Terminator cost $5 million.” And he goes, “I wish we had that much.” He had less than $5 million for that. So you can start a billion-dollar franchise using these methods, and with the audience investing, they get to make money on them. And what I’m going to say now about how I started, you see that DNA of how I give out. I want people to know how I did things with Rebel Without a Crew or with these methods that I started with. You see, that’s how we kept going. Hollywood spends way too much, and when you can make stuff for less, your profit margin is much better.
But you’re going to hire bigger actors. You can get a big actor like Keanu Reeves for a $20 million movie. I asked Jim, I said, Jim Cameron, I said, “Terminator cost $5 million.” And he goes, “I wish we had that much.” He had less than $5 million for that. So you can start a billion-dollar franchise using these methods, and with the audience investing, they get to make money on them. And what I’m going to say now about how I started, you see that DNA of how I give out. I want people to know how I did things with Rebel Without a Crew or with these methods that I started with. You see, that’s how we kept going. Hollywood spends way too much, and when you can make stuff for less, your profit margin is much better.
So when I first started, I didn’t have any money, so I still play like I don’t have money. So I had Super ,. My dad had a Super 8 camera, but I couldn’t afford it. I shot two rolls that you had to buy the film, shoot two minutes. I shot two rolls of that. It’s another same amount of money that it cost to buy it, whatever that was, 12 bucks or whatever to develop it. You get it. There’s no sound. Most of the shit’s out of focus. But then my dad, who sold cookware, had a VCR, one of the first home VCRs for the market that he would play his sales tapes to his salesman. And it came with a camera attached, like this cable you got coming out.
Imagine if that had to go into your VCR for you to even see what it’s shooting. It’s this old camera manual focus, manual iris and twelve-foot cable. And I would start making movies with that instead. Now I have for $8, I have a two-hour erasable tape of sound and picture. So I got into digital basically really early I was doing, which was really frowned upon back then and continued to be all the way to when I was using it for real in the early two thousands before everyone realized, “Oh, that’s the future.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s fascinating. You were a rebel in that way too, using digital.
Yeah, that’s fascinating. You were a rebel in that way too, using digital.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, well, because of the means and the democratizing of that, the elite didn’t like that you could just go make a movie like that. But I started practicing and it’s much easier to practice when it doesn’t cost any money. If you want to be a rock star, if you want to learn how to play guitar really well, you’re not going to just jump on stage and be able to play. You have to practice till your fingers bleed. Well, the same with movies. You got to keep telling stories and cutting them together, and you just can’t afford that on film. Nobody can with a two-minute roll costing as much as a two-hour tape. So I doing all these movies.
Yeah, well, because of the means and the democratizing of that, the elite didn’t like that you could just go make a movie like that. But I started practicing and it’s much easier to practice when it doesn’t cost any money. If you want to be a rock star, if you want to learn how to play guitar really well, you’re not going to just jump on stage and be able to play. You have to practice till your fingers bleed. Well, the same with movies. You got to keep telling stories and cutting them together, and you just can’t afford that on film. Nobody can with a two-minute roll costing as much as a two-hour tape. So I doing all these movies.
First I would cut in camera and that VCR, that old VCR had a really great pause button that they stopped making that when you hit pause, it stopped right there and it stopped with a clean cut. It didn’t have all this color bars like the later ones had, and it had an audio dub feature where you could add another second soundtrack to it. So if I have people talking, I could hit audio dub and add sound effects so I could have two tracks on the same one.
So that was my filmmaking kit for a while until I needed to start doing real editing and my dad bought a second VCR for his business. I stole his other one, and I found that if I hooked him together, I could play on one and used that pause button on the second. And this was the limitation. This is what taught me how to edit in my head, is that if I shot a bunch of footage, I needed to shoot very little footage so I could find it because sometimes you shoot out of order, so when I cut it, I have to cut in linear order because if you push pause, it’s a nice clean cut, but it only holds for five minutes.
You have five minutes before the machine shuts off. So you got to find your next shot within five minutes and do that. Otherwise, if you have to start the machine over, it added all these color bars and it would be all screwed up. So I’d have to sit there and not move for all day while I cut knowing what the next shot was. And once I had it cut, I would then add some sound effects to it. Remember, because I have the audio dub function, but now if I want to add music, I take that tape, which has two tracks now into the first deck and put it into the VCR. Again, one generation of loss, but I have a little cassette tape player with the music, and I do a Y splitter so I can add the music and just like that, that’s being resourceful with what you have.
And I made award-winning short films that way on video. There were some festivals that would allow video, not many, but they would always win. And there were always funny, as I stumbled upon Spy Kids that way, I wanted to make these action movies in my backyard. But when you’re a teenager, you don’t know anybody who can come be your action star, and if you just bring your high school buddies, well, they just look like high school kids. So I used my little brothers and sisters because one of 10, third oldest, they’re just sitting around watching cartoons anyway, and I made them the action stars just to learn. And I found those things would be a winning formula. They’d win every festival I’d send them to.
So Bedhead was my first time using a film camera. It was a windup film camera. I got in film school. I went to film school for one semester and realized I already knew more than the film students because they taught you a whole other outdated way of doing it. So I thought, I’m just going to use that film camera to make a low budget movie, a definitive film version that I can send to all film festivals of these action kids, which is a precursor to Spy Kids bit. Bedhead’s a precursor to Spy Kids.
Lex Fridman
And we should say that Bad Head was an award-winning short film. That was probably a big sort of leap for you that probably opened the door to you to then make El Mariachi.
And we should say that Bad Head was an award-winning short film. That was probably a big sort of leap for you that probably opened the door to you to then make El Mariachi.
Robert Rodriguez
It opened your brain especially because those video festivals, I would win a trip to New York and a director’s chair with a video shorts that I would put in festivals, but I knew the film festival, if I could get into film festivals, I could send that all over the world. So I made that little short film, sent it, and it was winning all the festivals. And I thought, “Wow, I made that with a wind-up film camera, filming just one take each shot, just no slates because I’m the editor and that costs $800 bucks and it was eight minutes. I bet I can make 80 minute movie for $8,000 if I’d use the same method. So that movie I did six months later, I was making Mariachi because it opened up my mind that I could try it in a feature.
It opened your brain especially because those video festivals, I would win a trip to New York and a director’s chair with a video shorts that I would put in festivals, but I knew the film festival, if I could get into film festivals, I could send that all over the world. So I made that little short film, sent it, and it was winning all the festivals. And I thought, “Wow, I made that with a wind-up film camera, filming just one take each shot, just no slates because I’m the editor and that costs $800 bucks and it was eight minutes. I bet I can make 80 minute movie for $8,000 if I’d use the same method. So that movie I did six months later, I was making Mariachi because it opened up my mind that I could try it in a feature.
Lex Fridman
Can we actually pause on that because I think Bedhead has a really great, really unique story shot in a really unique way. I think what I’m trying to say is it is very important to write the right script, write the right story.
Can we actually pause on that because I think Bedhead has a really great, really unique story shot in a really unique way. I think what I’m trying to say is it is very important to write the right script, write the right story.
Robert Rodriguez
So let me tell you the trick to that. And Mariachi is the same way, and this really helped people. Even Kevin Smith from Clerks said, “Wow,” Robert said, when Mariachi was success, I talked about how I did it. I said, “I looked at everything I had. What do I have? We have a pitbull, we have a turtle, we’ve got a bus that Carlos’ cousin owns. His brother-in-law has a bar and he owns a ranch. So the bad guy lives at the ranch. The fight scene’s going to be in the bar. He’s going to hit a bus at one point, the girl’s going to have a dog and a turtle is going to cross the road. It gives you all this production value, so you write backwards. So for Bedhead, I even did that with a camera. So I’ve been shooting video all this time, and one thing I wished I could do on video, I never could. Was slow motion or stop-motion even.
So let me tell you the trick to that. And Mariachi is the same way, and this really helped people. Even Kevin Smith from Clerks said, “Wow,” Robert said, when Mariachi was success, I talked about how I did it. I said, “I looked at everything I had. What do I have? We have a pitbull, we have a turtle, we’ve got a bus that Carlos’ cousin owns. His brother-in-law has a bar and he owns a ranch. So the bad guy lives at the ranch. The fight scene’s going to be in the bar. He’s going to hit a bus at one point, the girl’s going to have a dog and a turtle is going to cross the road. It gives you all this production value, so you write backwards. So for Bedhead, I even did that with a camera. So I’ve been shooting video all this time, and one thing I wished I could do on video, I never could. Was slow motion or stop-motion even.
So when I got that crappy World War II camera they gave us in film school. I was so pissed. Like, this is the camera. I’ve been trying to get my hands. I could have bought this for 50 bucks at a pawn shop. Old Bell and Howell wind up, you couldn’t even see through the lens you were seeing through an approximation of the lens, but you could shoot slow motion. I could do reverse photography. If I filmed upside down, I could do, because if I do a fast push into her, I’ll never get the focus in. So I started with it in focus, went back, pulled backwards on a chair, and then reversed it, flipped it, and now it looks like it stops on a dime in focus.
Lex Fridman
The number of times I’ve seen you shoot backwards is incredible. To achieve a certain feeling, a certain experience, a certain effect, sometimes shooting in reverse plus the sound effect layer. You can create this reality that’s surreal, that then results in the story that you wanted. You have to be functioning in some kind of different space-time continuum. You have to morph time.
The number of times I’ve seen you shoot backwards is incredible. To achieve a certain feeling, a certain experience, a certain effect, sometimes shooting in reverse plus the sound effect layer. You can create this reality that’s surreal, that then results in the story that you wanted. You have to be functioning in some kind of different space-time continuum. You have to morph time.
Robert Rodriguez
You start putting it together. So I’ve got this different camera. Well, what, now I go, I don’t want to shoot the same kind of movie. If I got a camera now that can do that, I can do stop-motion. So that’s why there’s an animated title sequence at the beginning because I go, “Wow, I am a cartoonist. If I set the camera up here, I can slow it down enough. It’s not a frame by frame, but if I get it down like two frames a second, I can just tap it and it’ll maybe get one frame off.” So I did 300 drawings by hand for that opening title sequence.
You start putting it together. So I’ve got this different camera. Well, what, now I go, I don’t want to shoot the same kind of movie. If I got a camera now that can do that, I can do stop-motion. So that’s why there’s an animated title sequence at the beginning because I go, “Wow, I am a cartoonist. If I set the camera up here, I can slow it down enough. It’s not a frame by frame, but if I get it down like two frames a second, I can just tap it and it’ll maybe get one frame off.” So I did 300 drawings by hand for that opening title sequence.
Lex Fridman
Holy shit. That was you doing it by hand?
Holy shit. That was you doing it by hand?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. So you watch that, and this is a throwaway title sequence, but I really want this thing to win awards.
Yeah. So you watch that, and this is a throwaway title sequence, but I really want this thing to win awards.
Lex Fridman
Okay, hold on a second. Again, how long did that take to draw that? That’s a lot. That’s a lot of work.
Okay, hold on a second. Again, how long did that take to draw that? That’s a lot. That’s a lot of work.
Robert Rodriguez
I drew it over, well, I was a daily cartoonist by then, so I was pretty fast. But still, that’s why it’s only penciled. It’s not inked, but it looks great. The camera’s going around and all kinds of crazy stuff, but it’s just all fake by paper. It took me all night to shoot it because I remember I walked into the film school the next day, all sleepy, and I told one of the fellow students, “Wow, I was up all night doing this animated title sequence.” And he went, “Why are you putting so much work in this? They’re not going to grade you any differently.” I was like, “Grades? Get an A walking in here. I’m trying to get out of this town. I’m not doing this for fucking grades.” I want people to see what I can do now and I want to see what I can do now with this.
I drew it over, well, I was a daily cartoonist by then, so I was pretty fast. But still, that’s why it’s only penciled. It’s not inked, but it looks great. The camera’s going around and all kinds of crazy stuff, but it’s just all fake by paper. It took me all night to shoot it because I remember I walked into the film school the next day, all sleepy, and I told one of the fellow students, “Wow, I was up all night doing this animated title sequence.” And he went, “Why are you putting so much work in this? They’re not going to grade you any differently.” I was like, “Grades? Get an A walking in here. I’m trying to get out of this town. I’m not doing this for fucking grades.” I want people to see what I can do now and I want to see what I can do now with this.
So a lot of the story came from the limitations or actually the freedoms of that camera. I couldn’t have done that story on video. So when I saw, wow, okay, I can do reverse photography, I can do stop-motion. She has to have special powers because if she has special powers, then I can utilize, I can really milk this camera for all it can get. This is one of my shots I love the most is where she’s standing there and the chair, she makes a chair come all the way up to her and it goes all the way up to her face. Now, if I did it normally, where would I even put the strings for that, right?
Lex Fridman
To pull the chair, yeah, yeah.
To pull the chair, yeah, yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
So I start here with the camera upside down. I have the strings in the back. So you’re not going to be looking at the back. And as it goes back, you pull it back and then when you reverse it goes and it looks so good. You can’t spot the, if you look close, you see the strings are in the back, but your eyes not looking there.
So I start here with the camera upside down. I have the strings in the back. So you’re not going to be looking at the back. And as it goes back, you pull it back and then when you reverse it goes and it looks so good. You can’t spot the, if you look close, you see the strings are in the back, but your eyes not looking there.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s fine.
Yeah, that’s fine.
Robert Rodriguez
So I did stuff like that, and then just her getting the hose, and then I just do stop-motion for the hose turning on, the faucet. That’s why I gave her special powers so that, and it made the story better. So sometimes the limitations you have with equipment or location, you can use it to take chickenshit, turn it into chicken salad. Take this camera that everyone was like, “What’s this?” And I go, I can do so much with this. But I tell you today, I look at that camera, I can’t believe I ever made a movie with that thing. It’s so ridiculously primitive. I’m just like, “How did I even think I could get anything done with this?
So I did stuff like that, and then just her getting the hose, and then I just do stop-motion for the hose turning on, the faucet. That’s why I gave her special powers so that, and it made the story better. So sometimes the limitations you have with equipment or location, you can use it to take chickenshit, turn it into chicken salad. Take this camera that everyone was like, “What’s this?” And I go, I can do so much with this. But I tell you today, I look at that camera, I can’t believe I ever made a movie with that thing. It’s so ridiculously primitive. I’m just like, “How did I even think I could get anything done with this?
El Mariachi
And it even exposed and Mariachi the same way. You have to think about it. I shot Mariachi on film with a bar of 16 millimeter camera. I didn’t know how to use it. I called up a place in Dallas that rented that kind of equipment and I said, “I have an AR-16s here, two motor looking things. One has a 24 and one has a bunch of numbers.” “Oh, that’s a variable speed motor. That means you can do different speed.” “I can shoot slow motion with this? Oh wow.” “Do you have a torque motor?” “I don’t know.” “What is that?” “Is there something on the side of the magazine?” Yeah, now you can just look up on YouTube and it shows you how to use it. I was doing it by phone that way, and then I went and shot the movie right then and I didn’t know if any of it was exposing or if the film camera was working until I finished the whole movie. So imagine you have to go down to Mexico, shoot for two weeks, come back, send it off to the lab. You want to talk about being nervous?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
Just hoping something exposed. And when I saw it come back and the tape, they transferred it to a tape so I could edit it deck to deck again. I was so relieved. Some things didn’t come out, but I can cut around that’s like, oh yeah, I’m doing everything right here. You’re doing everything. Imagine if you forgot to stop down and it’s open all the way and one shot is blown out. I’d have stuff like that because moving fast and I’m doing it all myself.
Just hoping something exposed. And when I saw it come back and the tape, they transferred it to a tape so I could edit it deck to deck again. I was so relieved. Some things didn’t come out, but I can cut around that’s like, oh yeah, I’m doing everything right here. You’re doing everything. Imagine if you forgot to stop down and it’s open all the way and one shot is blown out. I’d have stuff like that because moving fast and I’m doing it all myself.
Lex Fridman
Wait a minute, you shot El Mariachi the whole thing without knowing if some of the footage is damaged, wrong?
Wait a minute, you shot El Mariachi the whole thing without knowing if some of the footage is damaged, wrong?
Robert Rodriguez
Without any of it. That’s why I only did one take. So my idea was this.
Without any of it. That’s why I only did one take. So my idea was this.
Lex Fridman
How gangster is that?
How gangster is that?
Robert Rodriguez
Wow.
Wow.
Lex Fridman
It was a test film, right?
It was a test film, right?
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Robert Rodriguez
I thought it was going to be a test film. It’s the only movie in history ever made where the filmmaker did not think anyone would see it and expect it and even set it up that way. Why would I make an action movie for the Spanish market called, basically, the Guitar Player. Promises no ction. No one’s going to watch it. But I thought if someone actually picks it up and has the balls to watch this thing, they’re going to be surprised. I put a lot of action in. It was just to learn from, I just needed to make it for as little as possible, see how much I could sell it for. If I could double my money, great. I can make another one and just get more practice. It was just, I was so intrigued by this idea. You’ve heard advice about screenwriting. I heard a revise back then that I thought was ridiculous. It said, “It’s going to take you a long time to be a good screenwriter. So write three scripts and throw them away. The fourth script will be the good one.” I was like, it’s so hard.
I thought it was going to be a test film. It’s the only movie in history ever made where the filmmaker did not think anyone would see it and expect it and even set it up that way. Why would I make an action movie for the Spanish market called, basically, the Guitar Player. Promises no ction. No one’s going to watch it. But I thought if someone actually picks it up and has the balls to watch this thing, they’re going to be surprised. I put a lot of action in. It was just to learn from, I just needed to make it for as little as possible, see how much I could sell it for. If I could double my money, great. I can make another one and just get more practice. It was just, I was so intrigued by this idea. You’ve heard advice about screenwriting. I heard a revise back then that I thought was ridiculous. It said, “It’s going to take you a long time to be a good screenwriter. So write three scripts and throw them away. The fourth script will be the good one.” I was like, it’s so hard.
Robert Rodriguez
… and throw them away. The fourth script will be the good one. It’s like it’s so hard to write a script. Who’s going to write three full scripts knowing they throw them away? Wouldn’t it be better if you write three scripts and then shoot each one and be the cameraman, be the sound guy, be everything? Because that way you’re learning, not just writing, you’re learning how to make a movie. So that was my idea. I’m going to make three of these, hide it on Spanish video, but make money back. That’s like my own film school paying me, paying me to learn.
… and throw them away. The fourth script will be the good one. It’s like it’s so hard to write a script. Who’s going to write three full scripts knowing they throw them away? Wouldn’t it be better if you write three scripts and then shoot each one and be the cameraman, be the sound guy, be everything? Because that way you’re learning, not just writing, you’re learning how to make a movie. So that was my idea. I’m going to make three of these, hide it on Spanish video, but make money back. That’s like my own film school paying me, paying me to learn.
So the first one I thought, let me just shoot it, one take each, because my friend Carlos lives in Mexico. If we shoot two takes, most of the cost is to film. I’ve just doubled my budget, so let me just shoot one take. Some of it’s going to not come out, but I’m not going to know what, I’m not going to shoot a safety one. That doubles my… Let me see. Some things might come out. I expected like 70% of it to maybe be okay, but 30% I might have to come reshoot, which is fine. I just drive back there and then I just reshoot just those shots, right?
So I just went, “Let’s shoot.” We stop, we come back. Then I send it off to develop, because we’re shooting two weeks consecutively. To get film shipped back and forth from Mexico to see if it came out, you just couldn’t do it. I just had to double down on it, do it. One take everything. I remember one time I was telling the actor, “Man, I told you to run through that shot.” And he goes, “Oh, let me do it again.” “No one take, dude. Just think about it. Next time, do what I say.” I didn’t think anyone was going to see it. And because you don’t think anyone’s going to see it, you end up doing something remarkable, which is, “Well, I’m just going to make something for myself.”
Because if I was making a movie that was going to go to Sundance, I wouldn’t have made that movie. I would’ve thought, “Okay, I got to get serious.” But because I made this movie that was just entertaining myself, like Bedhead, it entertained audiences. So that naivete is really important when you’re starting out or at any point in your life. Be naive about what things going to, and just do something for yourself. That taught me a very valuable lesson. I didn’t want anybody to see it. I just thought, one take, one take. When I got back home, a bunch of stuff didn’t come out, but I’m like, “I’m not going back to Mexico. I’ll figure out a way to edit around it and make the movie shorter and that’s just going to be the movie.” And then that’s the one that won Sundance.
Lex Fridman
That was your first feature film. That’s the one you made for $7,000. You mentioned your friend Carlos. That’s the star of the movie. Everything one take. And I highly recommend people go back and watch that movie. It’s just an incredible movie. It’s fun and it’s an action film, moves really fast. The story is really interesting, so the script is really interesting. All the actors, you could tell they all kind of stepped up and played their own roles.
That was your first feature film. That’s the one you made for $7,000. You mentioned your friend Carlos. That’s the star of the movie. Everything one take. And I highly recommend people go back and watch that movie. It’s just an incredible movie. It’s fun and it’s an action film, moves really fast. The story is really interesting, so the script is really interesting. All the actors, you could tell they all kind of stepped up and played their own roles.
Robert Rodriguez
They weren’t actors.
They weren’t actors.
Lex Fridman
That’s right.
That’s right.
Robert Rodriguez
They were just friends of ours, which is why… And because, and this was the magic of not having a crew. They didn’t feel like they were making a movie. It’s like this, we’re just here, me with my one camera. In fact, the gal, Carlos said, “This one girl, I forgot she’s in town. Maybe she would work.” Because we tried to get a soap star and she backed out. So we got [inaudible 00:38:00] she goes, “But I don’t know how to act.” And I said, “Here, let’s watch. I want to show you something on Mexican TV.” A telenovela was on and you see someone, you know, all over acting. I said, “That’s acting. I don’t want you to do that. I want you to just talk like you’re talking about-
They were just friends of ours, which is why… And because, and this was the magic of not having a crew. They didn’t feel like they were making a movie. It’s like this, we’re just here, me with my one camera. In fact, the gal, Carlos said, “This one girl, I forgot she’s in town. Maybe she would work.” Because we tried to get a soap star and she backed out. So we got [inaudible 00:38:00] she goes, “But I don’t know how to act.” And I said, “Here, let’s watch. I want to show you something on Mexican TV.” A telenovela was on and you see someone, you know, all over acting. I said, “That’s acting. I don’t want you to do that. I want you to just talk like you’re talking about-
Lex Fridman
Wait, wait, wait. The love interest? The woman in that, that’s who you’re talking about?
Wait, wait, wait. The love interest? The woman in that, that’s who you’re talking about?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That’s who you’re talking about.
That’s who you’re talking about.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
She’s amazing.
She’s amazing.
Robert Rodriguez
She’s amazing. Because I got video of her. I said, “I want you to just do this one line. Pretend like you’re just talking to your boyfriend.” And I showed her the video. That was cool. Because I couldn’t show her the film because you’d have to develop it. But I showed her a video test of herself doing it and she saw herself doing it, she suddenly had the confidence. We went through her closet, “This red dress you can wear in that,” and everyone just brought their own clothes.
She’s amazing. Because I got video of her. I said, “I want you to just do this one line. Pretend like you’re just talking to your boyfriend.” And I showed her the video. That was cool. Because I couldn’t show her the film because you’d have to develop it. But I showed her a video test of herself doing it and she saw herself doing it, she suddenly had the confidence. We went through her closet, “This red dress you can wear in that,” and everyone just brought their own clothes.
Lex Fridman
She really had a sexuality, a tension, like a romantic tension that was real. It was in part a great love story that I mean, as ridiculous that it is to say, and a dramatic love story [inaudible 00:38:54].
She really had a sexuality, a tension, like a romantic tension that was real. It was in part a great love story that I mean, as ridiculous that it is to say, and a dramatic love story [inaudible 00:38:54].
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. The idea was that I thought a guitar player, really what I wanted to do was a Road Warrior. I said, I want a guy with a guitar case full of weapons going from town to town like Road Warrior, but that don’t have enough money for the first one to do that. That’ll be the second movie I do. How will we do a genesis story, how he became that guy? So let’s do Mad Max, basically, how he becomes that guy. Maybe he is a guitar player. So you start writing it out. I was going to show you my writing method. I write on index cards and I carry one of these, a little packet of index cards. I keep one always in my bag. And I smile when I run across it because I go, “I’ve made a million dollars with one of these before.”
Yeah. The idea was that I thought a guitar player, really what I wanted to do was a Road Warrior. I said, I want a guy with a guitar case full of weapons going from town to town like Road Warrior, but that don’t have enough money for the first one to do that. That’ll be the second movie I do. How will we do a genesis story, how he became that guy? So let’s do Mad Max, basically, how he becomes that guy. Maybe he is a guitar player. So you start writing it out. I was going to show you my writing method. I write on index cards and I carry one of these, a little packet of index cards. I keep one always in my bag. And I smile when I run across it because I go, “I’ve made a million dollars with one of these before.”
It’s like this is the key to your next success, cards. Because when you go see a therapist, you’re not going to them for the answers. You’re going to them for the questions. You’ve got the answers inside. What you don’t have are the questions. A lot of times we ask ourselves very unempowering questions like, “Why am I such a loser?” I can think of 10 answers right now, but if you go, “What three things can I do today that’ll not just change my life, but everyone around me?” Take steps of that. Take out your cards and start writing them down. You won’t come up with three, you’ll come up with 15.
I’m like, well, how? Because you’re asking yourself and you’ll see them. So when I was doing that movie, I thought, okay, he’s a guitar player for real, and he gets mixed up with the guy with a case. So how about he walks into a bar? So I write down that, he walks into a bar, bar, trying to get work. Bartender looks at him, “We don’t hire mariachis, get the hell out of here.” So he leaves. After that whole scene explaining who he is and what his story is. Then the shooter comes in with a guitar case full of weapons. He’s also dressed in black and he shoots the place up. Now if that was a short film, that’s how you’d start a short film. But this is a feature movie, so shit, I got to figure out how to tell a feature. I’m going to need a few more cards before that.
So I’m going to need, well, who’s this bad guy? How about he’s in jail? I had read a story, this crazy story about a guy who was in jail in Mexico, and he was running his drug business from the jail as protection. He could walk out anytime, but it was to have the cops be his enforcers basically. So introduced that guy, he’s in jail making phone calls and someone puts a hit on him. So we have action right away. There’s a hit on him. He kills those guys because it’s his operation. He’s not in jail. All the cops are working for him and he tells that guy on the phone, the main bad guy, “I’m going to come to town. I’m going to kill all your guys and I’m going to come kill you.”
So then he gets in his truck and you see them bring him a guitar case full of weapons. He passes the mariachi on the way to town, and now it’s his story. The baton gets turned to mariachi. Mariachi is doing a voiceover. It’s easy to shoot. We can do the voice later. We don’t have to do sync sound. There was even a scene when he walks into town where we saw these coconuts, a guy cutting coconuts and we, “Oh, let’s go film over there.” So we filmed the guy giving him a coconut with a straw in it, and he walks out. I’m like, “Shit, man, you forgot to pay the guy.” “Well, let’s shoot that.” “No, there’s one take. I’ll just put in the voiceover that they give away free coconuts in this town,” and for years, people in other countries would go, “They really give away free coconuts?” No, it’s because we forgot to show him paying. Little happy accidents.
So now look, you’re already building a movie. So it’s like now he goes in the bar. Now he’s mixed up and the bad guy says, “Find the guy with a guitar case full of weapons.” Then he goes and meets the girl. So you just start your movie, visually, you can start seeing your movie. And I’ve used this for business things, I’ve used this for ideas, for manifesting stuff.
Lex Fridman
It’s brilliant. Are you doing this alone usually or are you-
It’s brilliant. Are you doing this alone usually or are you-
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. And it comes so fast. It’s like free association. Well, maybe I have the ending. Oh, I know I want his hand shot. He’s going to get his hand shot because he’s a musician and those ballads are always really tragic. So the girl has to die. The girl has to die because if it’s going to be a tragic song for his songbook, each movie should be like a tragedy. That’s going to be over here. Now you got the ending, and then your brain starts filling in the rest. Because you’re asking yourself these prompt questions that you already have answers for, from a past life, from a vision you had that you don’t even know are there. This prompts it.
Yeah. And it comes so fast. It’s like free association. Well, maybe I have the ending. Oh, I know I want his hand shot. He’s going to get his hand shot because he’s a musician and those ballads are always really tragic. So the girl has to die. The girl has to die because if it’s going to be a tragic song for his songbook, each movie should be like a tragedy. That’s going to be over here. Now you got the ending, and then your brain starts filling in the rest. Because you’re asking yourself these prompt questions that you already have answers for, from a past life, from a vision you had that you don’t even know are there. This prompts it.
Lex Fridman
It’s kind of a puzzle that you’re figuring out. What happens if you get stuck? This doesn’t make sense, like some aspect of this structure doesn’t make sense. [inaudible 00:43:18]?
It’s kind of a puzzle that you’re figuring out. What happens if you get stuck? This doesn’t make sense, like some aspect of this structure doesn’t make sense. [inaudible 00:43:18]?
Robert Rodriguez
You leave all there. Yeah, you just start writing in the ones you do know. Like okay, I know at some point she’s going to betray him or he’s going to think she does. She betrays him. Okay, that’s in the middle somewhere. The other ones will come.
You leave all there. Yeah, you just start writing in the ones you do know. Like okay, I know at some point she’s going to betray him or he’s going to think she does. She betrays him. Okay, that’s in the middle somewhere. The other ones will come.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, those are all crossroads for the story. How do you know she has to die? Can you change your mind about that?
Yeah, those are all crossroads for the story. How do you know she has to die? Can you change your mind about that?
Robert Rodriguez
I can, yeah, but for now, I felt like if I really want… The story’s telling me now what it is. I didn’t know I was going to make a genesis story. I wanted to do the Road Warrior guy, but the Road Warrior, he lost his family. So really, to propel him to become a guy who has guitar case full of weapons, he has to lose everything. So he needs a ghost. So this is a genesis story of a character. Well, look, Bruce Wayne lost his parents. You could say, well, does the parents have to die? Well, no, but it’s not going to propel him, it’s not going to drive him like that thing. So it’s just coming to me. So this is my other trick and this is the main thing you got to learn about, if you take any way, this isn’t me doing it.
I can, yeah, but for now, I felt like if I really want… The story’s telling me now what it is. I didn’t know I was going to make a genesis story. I wanted to do the Road Warrior guy, but the Road Warrior, he lost his family. So really, to propel him to become a guy who has guitar case full of weapons, he has to lose everything. So he needs a ghost. So this is a genesis story of a character. Well, look, Bruce Wayne lost his parents. You could say, well, does the parents have to die? Well, no, but it’s not going to propel him, it’s not going to drive him like that thing. So it’s just coming to me. So this is my other trick and this is the main thing you got to learn about, if you take any way, this isn’t me doing it.
Creativity
I totally believe it, because when you start doing this, you go, “Where are these answers coming from? I’m asking the right question, but how come the answers just keep coming like this?” I believe, because I do so many different jobs, I’ve learned this over the years. When I was in 2002, I was like, “How is it that I’m the production designer, the composer,” which I don’t even know how to read or write music, and I’m writing orchestral score and I’m doing the editing and I’m doing the cinematography. I haven’t been trained for any of these. I never went to school for these specifically. Must be something about creativity.
So I went on Amazon, it’s 2002. I look up creative books. Anything that has creativity in the title, I just ordered it. And I’ve got a bunch of books on creativity, and I was reading them through. One of them was really speaking to me. “Yeah, that’s it.” That’s the process. And then it says gels and mediums, and I’m like, “Oh, this is a book specifically about painting,” but it applies to music, editing, cinematography, writing, it’s all the same. So that’s when I realized that creativity is 90% of any of those jobs. The technical part of setting up the cameras, of writing a script in format or reading or writing music, that’s 10% of that.
How many musicians don’t read or write music and they’re fantastic? It’s because 90% what they do is creative. Now I believe that that same person, even if they only do music, could literally jump from job to job creatively and do a superior job than most technicians.
Lex Fridman
And there’s also something to say there about the learning the technical aspects of an art. You collide with the experts. What happens is, I’ve experienced this a lot with using cameras and so on. I don’t know shit about cameras and you roll in and then there’s all the experts almost talking down to you and telling you how things are supposed to be. Everything is wrong. I talked to somebody about soundproofing a room and they said, they gave me prices that are insane and the amount of effort is insane and the geometry-
And there’s also something to say there about the learning the technical aspects of an art. You collide with the experts. What happens is, I’ve experienced this a lot with using cameras and so on. I don’t know shit about cameras and you roll in and then there’s all the experts almost talking down to you and telling you how things are supposed to be. Everything is wrong. I talked to somebody about soundproofing a room and they said, they gave me prices that are insane and the amount of effort is insane and the geometry-
Robert Rodriguez
Well, yeah, they’re selling you something.
Well, yeah, they’re selling you something.
Lex Fridman
… the dynamics of this room are all wrong. I’m like, “Why can’t I just fucking hang up some curtains? It seems like that kills most of the echo. I don’t understand.” And they’re like, “No, this is all wrong. The corners are going to have some… ” And I’m like, fuck it, I’m just going to try. I’m going to see what it sounds like. A and B. Okay, here’s audio with curtains, here’s audio without curtains. Seems like this is fine. Move on to the next thing. I think when you say creativity, some of that is being a rebel, not listening to the experts.
… the dynamics of this room are all wrong. I’m like, “Why can’t I just fucking hang up some curtains? It seems like that kills most of the echo. I don’t understand.” And they’re like, “No, this is all wrong. The corners are going to have some… ” And I’m like, fuck it, I’m just going to try. I’m going to see what it sounds like. A and B. Okay, here’s audio with curtains, here’s audio without curtains. Seems like this is fine. Move on to the next thing. I think when you say creativity, some of that is being a rebel, not listening to the experts.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. Or you’re going on your creativity, which is, what is that? That’s like, do you consider yourself a creative person? I think you play guitar.
Yeah. Or you’re going on your creativity, which is, what is that? That’s like, do you consider yourself a creative person? I think you play guitar.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, guitar, piano, yeah. Everything.
Yeah, guitar, piano, yeah. Everything.
Robert Rodriguez
You play piano? Okay. But would you call yourself a creative person?
You play piano? Okay. But would you call yourself a creative person?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I think so.
Robert Rodriguez
Good. You should.
Good. You should.
Lex Fridman
I think that’s a positive way to phrase it.
I think that’s a positive way to phrase it.
Robert Rodriguez
I would just suggest to anybody, is just own it. Own it and just say… Like when I do so many different jobs, it sounds crazy when they would introduce me, “Hey, Robert Rodriguez, he does this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I was like, I get tired just hearing that list. But when I think about it, there’s really only one thing I do and I live a creative life. And when you live a creative life, that means anything that has to do with creativity, whether it’s filming or piano or guitar or sculpting, you can do it. You can take it on and do it because it teaches you more about your main job. I become a better director by doing all those jobs. Because when somebody just does one job, they barely know that job. You have to do more to learn about creativity.
I would just suggest to anybody, is just own it. Own it and just say… Like when I do so many different jobs, it sounds crazy when they would introduce me, “Hey, Robert Rodriguez, he does this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I was like, I get tired just hearing that list. But when I think about it, there’s really only one thing I do and I live a creative life. And when you live a creative life, that means anything that has to do with creativity, whether it’s filming or piano or guitar or sculpting, you can do it. You can take it on and do it because it teaches you more about your main job. I become a better director by doing all those jobs. Because when somebody just does one job, they barely know that job. You have to do more to learn about creativity.
And this is the main thing I learned was that I’m writing music for an orchestra. I’m like, “I don’t even know what I’m doing. Why is that coming out?” I don’t feel like I’m doing it. I feel like I picked up the pen. I feel like I had the idea to do the cards, but then when everything just starts coming out so quickly, like that’s how fast I wrote that movie. I go, I really feel like something else has taken over. So this is what my belief is, because I hear it in different realms. You ask Keith Richards, “How do you come up with these riffs?” He goes, “I don’t. I don’t. They’re floating around the sky and I pull them out first.” You ask asked Jimmie Vaughan, “How do you play guitar, those solos?” He goes, “It’s like a radio. Once you get a tune just right, you can’t even believe what’s coming through.”
So I believe, I call it the creative spirit. There’s a spirit assigned to all of us that’s creative, that doesn’t have hands. It needs you to pick up the pen, pull out the cards, and then when you start getting in the flow and you’re like, “Whoa,” it’s writing. That’s that. And if you can have that mindset, you take your ego out of it and go, “All I need to do is be a good conduit for this thing. Be a good pipe and it’s going to come through.” So you don’t ever have to get hung up on that question you had. Well, what happens when you can’t come up… It wasn’t me to begin with. If it’s not coming out, it’s because I’m blocking it and if I were to do this and I’m flowing, and if I were to say, “Wow, I just wrote 10 cards. I don’t know if I can write more. How did I do that?” You just shut the pipe because your ego got in the way. You just clogged it because it gets pissed off that you think it’s you.
It’s not you. It’s like, “Dude, just open up. Let me through, pick up the fucking pen.” And I learned this when I was 19, when I had a daily cartoon strip. I had to draw a comic strip every day to get paid. And I would be like, I’d have to draw one drawing and draw another drawing. Then it’s like, okay, these kind of go together. It was a process, and sometimes I just felt like I wish I could just envision it, sit back. I’m going to try that method. I went home and I would sit back and just try to get in sofa, try the sofa method. I’m just going to try to picture the comic strip, and as soon as I got on that thing that’s funny, then I’ll just go draw that, right? Be done in a half hour. Why waste three hours?
I’d sit there and sit there and sit there. My deadline would be coming up, got like 30 minutes. I’m like, “Oh, shit.” Got to go sit and draw it out. And it’s like, “Oh, okay, I got this drawing. Oh, this kind of goes with that. If I make another drawing, I have my strip.” That’s the only way to do it. If you don’t get up, the creative spirit, ain’t going to come visit you if you’re doing this. It needs your hands and it’s not going to fucking reward you for sitting there, waiting for… You have to jump in and do it.
And people, when they say, “Oh, well, I’m not ready,” how pissed off is that spirit now? It’s waiting for you to feel like you’re ready. It’s not you. Just start doing the action and it’s going to come through and the ideas will come and the answers will come because it’s not you. And if you can take your ego out of life, you’ll be blessed with this never ending flow of ideas because don’t take ownership for it and know that if it’s not coming out, it’s because you’re just clogging it because this thing’s got endless ideas.
Lex Fridman
And you give that same advice for making films, which is don’t plan. If you want to be a filmmaker, don’t plan the movie. Don’t think about making the movie. Just go in and start.
And you give that same advice for making films, which is don’t plan. If you want to be a filmmaker, don’t plan the movie. Don’t think about making the movie. Just go in and start.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, I would meet a lot of people who introduce themselves as aspiring. “I’m an aspiring filmmaker and I wonder, what would you tell an aspiring filmmaker?” I’d say, “Stop aspiring. If you call yourself that, you are that, and you’re always going to feel like you’re not ready.” And you just jump in before you’re ready. You don’t feel like you’re ready until… I didn’t feel like I was ready to do Mariachi till I was probably in my last few days of filming. You became ready as you went. You didn’t know all that stuff… I couldn’t have figured all that out in advance. When my kids worked with me on a project that we did similar, by the end, they realized… They did an interview with my son who, after just two weeks of doing one of those projects, you’re a different person.
Yeah, I would meet a lot of people who introduce themselves as aspiring. “I’m an aspiring filmmaker and I wonder, what would you tell an aspiring filmmaker?” I’d say, “Stop aspiring. If you call yourself that, you are that, and you’re always going to feel like you’re not ready.” And you just jump in before you’re ready. You don’t feel like you’re ready until… I didn’t feel like I was ready to do Mariachi till I was probably in my last few days of filming. You became ready as you went. You didn’t know all that stuff… I couldn’t have figured all that out in advance. When my kids worked with me on a project that we did similar, by the end, they realized… They did an interview with my son who, after just two weeks of doing one of those projects, you’re a different person.
He’s suddenly waxing philosophical about the creative processing going, “I never knew how my dad did Mariachi until we did this project together.” And I realized he didn’t know either. He didn’t know how he was going to do it. He figured it out day by day. Every challenge that got thrown at him, he had to figure it out. And that’s the biggest lesson. Most people never start, and that’s the biggest thing. Don’t wait till you’re ready or that’ll be on your tombstone. “Here lies so-and-so. He was never ready.” And you don’t want to be that guy. Jump in. Know it’s not you, you just got to be the hands and that relieves a lot of pressure from you because then you don’t have to ever have to do anything really. You just have to be the hands.
Lex Fridman
Can you talk through some of the hats, some of the many hats you wore with the El Mariachi? That’s an interesting case study and you’ve done the same thing over and over in completely different innovative ways in all the films, but El Mariachi is such a radical leap for you.
Can you talk through some of the hats, some of the many hats you wore with the El Mariachi? That’s an interesting case study and you’ve done the same thing over and over in completely different innovative ways in all the films, but El Mariachi is such a radical leap for you.
Robert Rodriguez
That was crazy that thing’s held together with scotch tape and rubber bands because of the camera I borrowed.
That was crazy that thing’s held together with scotch tape and rubber bands because of the camera I borrowed.
Lex Fridman
You directed, you did cinematography, you did the sound.
You directed, you did cinematography, you did the sound.
Robert Rodriguez
It’s better to just say what I didn’t do. I didn’t act in front of the camera. Everything else I did. Everything else, I was the whole crew. It’s just like you’re doing here except you’ve got sound recording right onto the cameras, right? Or do you have it to a system?
It’s better to just say what I didn’t do. I didn’t act in front of the camera. Everything else I did. Everything else, I was the whole crew. It’s just like you’re doing here except you’ve got sound recording right onto the cameras, right? Or do you have it to a system?
Lex Fridman
Separately, but it’s synced. I mean, all the modern technology-
Separately, but it’s synced. I mean, all the modern technology-
Robert Rodriguez
But it’s synced, yeah. So I didn’t have synced camera, so I had a camera that, it was not a sync camera, and the thing was it was so loud, I would’ve had to blimp the out of it, which I didn’t have a blimp and then I would’ve needed a sound guy.
But it’s synced, yeah. So I didn’t have synced camera, so I had a camera that, it was not a sync camera, and the thing was it was so loud, I would’ve had to blimp the out of it, which I didn’t have a blimp and then I would’ve needed a sound guy.
Lex Fridman
Just to be clear, so people don’t understand this. You’re shooting basically no sound.
Just to be clear, so people don’t understand this. You’re shooting basically no sound.
Robert Rodriguez
Because the camera sounds like this. It sounds like all your money’s going away, first of all. So I would go like this, “Action.” You’d start running and I shoot my edit, ” Cut.”
Because the camera sounds like this. It sounds like all your money’s going away, first of all. So I would go like this, “Action.” You’d start running and I shoot my edit, ” Cut.”
Lex Fridman
Yep.
Yep.
Robert Rodriguez
They’re still running. I’m only using this part and there’s no slates. There’s guys holding up their fingers at the beginning of role, like this is reel seven for just a few frames so I know which reel it is. And then that 10 minutes of film is just one shot after another, and I use almost every frame of those shots because I was cutting in the camera. Now, after I shoot, like let’s say, tell me your name.
They’re still running. I’m only using this part and there’s no slates. There’s guys holding up their fingers at the beginning of role, like this is reel seven for just a few frames so I know which reel it is. And then that 10 minutes of film is just one shot after another, and I use almost every frame of those shots because I was cutting in the camera. Now, after I shoot, like let’s say, tell me your name.
Lex Fridman
Lex.
Lex.
Robert Rodriguez
What’s your last name?
What’s your last name?
Lex Fridman
Fridman.
Fridman.
Robert Rodriguez
Where do you live?
Where do you live?
Lex Fridman
Austin, Texas.
Austin, Texas.
Robert Rodriguez
I would do the whole scene then I would get the sound. Bring the mic in close like that. Say it again.
I would do the whole scene then I would get the sound. Bring the mic in close like that. Say it again.
Lex Fridman
Lex Fridman. Austin, Texas.
Lex Fridman. Austin, Texas.
Robert Rodriguez
That’ll probably sync. Now if you were going on and on, there’s a place where it’d go out of sync. I hate rubbery lips, so I would cut away to the dog or to the knife or to the girl, and then I cut back when you’re back in sync. And since these were non-actors, they say everything the same way each time.
That’ll probably sync. Now if you were going on and on, there’s a place where it’d go out of sync. I hate rubbery lips, so I would cut away to the dog or to the knife or to the girl, and then I cut back when you’re back in sync. And since these were non-actors, they say everything the same way each time.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 00:54:28].
[inaudible 00:54:28].
Robert Rodriguez
They would say their line just like they weren’t performing it to where they didn’t remember how they performed the day before. They were just talking in their own rhythm. So a lot of the times it’s… Anytime you see anyone on camera talking, they’re in sync with themselves and as soon as it cuts away, they’re out of sync. And it created this really fast cutting style that I probably wouldn’t have had on such a low budget movie, but it was the only way to keep things in sync. So when I would shoot two people talking, I would make sure I’d film a couple shots of the dog or a stuffed cat or something just so I’d have something to cut away to get them back in sync.
They would say their line just like they weren’t performing it to where they didn’t remember how they performed the day before. They were just talking in their own rhythm. So a lot of the times it’s… Anytime you see anyone on camera talking, they’re in sync with themselves and as soon as it cuts away, they’re out of sync. And it created this really fast cutting style that I probably wouldn’t have had on such a low budget movie, but it was the only way to keep things in sync. So when I would shoot two people talking, I would make sure I’d film a couple shots of the dog or a stuffed cat or something just so I’d have something to cut away to get them back in sync.
Lex Fridman
That’s so brilliant.
That’s so brilliant.
Robert Rodriguez
I call it, it’s just resourceful. It just being very resourceful.
I call it, it’s just resourceful. It just being very resourceful.
Lex Fridman
And you allow it to get maybe a little bit out of sync sometimes?
And you allow it to get maybe a little bit out of sync sometimes?
Robert Rodriguez
I didn’t allow it, but oh yeah, I would let it if I just didn’t have a way to cut away and I would try to sync it as best I could.
I didn’t allow it, but oh yeah, I would let it if I just didn’t have a way to cut away and I would try to sync it as best I could.
Lex Fridman
But we as the audience, do you understand where the threshold is, where we notice something?
But we as the audience, do you understand where the threshold is, where we notice something?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It seems like you can get away with a lot.
It seems like you can get away with a lot.
Robert Rodriguez
You can get away with… I just don’t, I’m just particular about that. I just don’t like seeing a dub movie where it just feels canned. It makes you not believe in it anymore. So I just cut away where the lips are just way off. I just didn’t want any of that. I just felt like, I wanted it to just be believable and they could be really believable if they were in sync. But I didn’t shoot two takes of film or even two takes of audio, just one take.
You can get away with… I just don’t, I’m just particular about that. I just don’t like seeing a dub movie where it just feels canned. It makes you not believe in it anymore. So I just cut away where the lips are just way off. I just didn’t want any of that. I just felt like, I wanted it to just be believable and they could be really believable if they were in sync. But I didn’t shoot two takes of film or even two takes of audio, just one take.
And what was cool is that because I just had them go through the whole scene again, so I would go ahead and record them, like grabbing the bottle or any action they did, opening the suitcase. I’d have all the sound effects too. I just had to sync it by hand. That’s a lot of work for me, but I got great sound that way. Because If I had had a sync camera, the mic would’ve been so far, we would’ve had to go get new sound effects, but because the camera’s off, I could record everything close up, so there was some blessing to that.
Lex Fridman
You and Quentin Tarantino had a great conversation about a lot of topics, but one of them is how to bring out the best in the actors. In that El Mariachi, how do you bring out the best in these non-actors? And then maybe what’s the thread that connects to your future work too?
You and Quentin Tarantino had a great conversation about a lot of topics, but one of them is how to bring out the best in the actors. In that El Mariachi, how do you bring out the best in these non-actors? And then maybe what’s the thread that connects to your future work too?
Robert Rodriguez
What really helped for those non- actors was that they just look across and it’s me filming. They didn’t feel like they were… So they’re being so natural. The guy who played the bad guy, I met him in the research hospital where I sold my body to science. He was my bunk mate. And I said, “Dude, you look kind of like Rutger Hauer. And then it’s like, we saw another movie, “Man, you look like James Spader. You should be the bad guy in my movie and it’d be cool to have you as the bad guy.” He goes, “But I don’t speak Spanish. Well, that’s okay, I’ll write and I’ll teach you it phonetically and you’re going to wear sunglasses,” and if you look close, he’s holding the lines here and he’s looking at the lines like that and just smiling. Couldn’t believe he was getting away with this. He’s smiling and he’s got the sunglasses on.
What really helped for those non- actors was that they just look across and it’s me filming. They didn’t feel like they were… So they’re being so natural. The guy who played the bad guy, I met him in the research hospital where I sold my body to science. He was my bunk mate. And I said, “Dude, you look kind of like Rutger Hauer. And then it’s like, we saw another movie, “Man, you look like James Spader. You should be the bad guy in my movie and it’d be cool to have you as the bad guy.” He goes, “But I don’t speak Spanish. Well, that’s okay, I’ll write and I’ll teach you it phonetically and you’re going to wear sunglasses,” and if you look close, he’s holding the lines here and he’s looking at the lines like that and just smiling. Couldn’t believe he was getting away with this. He’s smiling and he’s got the sunglasses on.
Lex Fridman
I read that somewhere in the pool, there’s a scene in the pool-
I read that somewhere in the pool, there’s a scene in the pool-
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. In the pool, he’s like this, “[inaudible 00:57:11].”
Yeah. In the pool, he’s like this, “[inaudible 00:57:11].”
Lex Fridman
With the sunglasses on, oh man. [inaudible 00:57:13].
With the sunglasses on, oh man. [inaudible 00:57:13].
Robert Rodriguez
But he was doing it phonetically. And I tell you what, he was so great, that guy, right?
But he was doing it phonetically. And I tell you what, he was so great, that guy, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
When we do Desperado, I brought him back. Didn’t even have to do any dialogue. Watch that movie. When he shows up in the opening scene when Desperado, he’s playing the guitar and the opening with the credits, to tie it into the first movie, he shows up again. And all he has to do is light a cigarette. And you see this, because he’s so nervous because now there’s a crew behind me. Now it’s real. Before it was just me and him and it didn’t feel like a real movie. So everyone gave a great performance. So how do you recreate that later, on a big movie? Is just building a rapport, making a safe zone for your actors. Quentin once told me, we’re talking about directing, he goes, “Yeah, sometimes being a great director is just being a great audience. Being a great audience, because you’re taking the place of the audience for the actor.”
When we do Desperado, I brought him back. Didn’t even have to do any dialogue. Watch that movie. When he shows up in the opening scene when Desperado, he’s playing the guitar and the opening with the credits, to tie it into the first movie, he shows up again. And all he has to do is light a cigarette. And you see this, because he’s so nervous because now there’s a crew behind me. Now it’s real. Before it was just me and him and it didn’t feel like a real movie. So everyone gave a great performance. So how do you recreate that later, on a big movie? Is just building a rapport, making a safe zone for your actors. Quentin once told me, we’re talking about directing, he goes, “Yeah, sometimes being a great director is just being a great audience. Being a great audience, because you’re taking the place of the audience for the actor.”
They try something and if you’re enjoying it, they know that the audience is going to enjoy it or if it makes you cry, so sometimes you don’t have to tell them a lot sometimes. And if you do have something very specific to tell them, they usually go with it. But I always just like to see what they do. And a lot of times they just are in the zone, because again, they’re getting that flow too. You create the right environment, everyone’s getting this inspiration that’s all tied together that you never could have directed. It’s just like you just create that space where we’re all going to be open to it and it’s going to drop in our lap. And I’m going to point it out when it does, because you may not feel like you know how to play this role yet, but I say not knowing is the other half of the battle and the more important part.
That’s the part we’re going to discover, and when it happens, I’m going to point it out and it’s going to be like magic and we’re just going to go, “Okay, we’re accepting it,” and we do it. And it gets people in that kind of headspace, and then we’re all open to it, to where the character’s supposed to go, what it’s supposed to sound like, instead of me being very manipulative to get a certain thing. I don’t know, it’s just whatever feels good.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s such an intimate connection between the actor and the director. I’ve seen some of the behind the scenes footage with you. You are just a fan enjoying the scene when it’s done well. But I think there’s an aspect, if I were to put myself in the headspace of the actor, they want you as the audience to earn that happiness. Because when a director approves…
Yeah, there’s such an intimate connection between the actor and the director. I’ve seen some of the behind the scenes footage with you. You are just a fan enjoying the scene when it’s done well. But I think there’s an aspect, if I were to put myself in the headspace of the actor, they want you as the audience to earn that happiness. Because when a director approves…
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, when you’re a performer and there’s no other… It’s not like a live show where you get the approval of the audience and you’re like, “Oh, wow, they like that joke. Let me do more.” Really, the director is it. And a lot of times the director’s way behind a monitor somewhere. That’s why I still like to operate the camera, because when I’m operating the camera, it’s like this. We can have a hundred people here, we wouldn’t know because they go away. It’s just us. They just disappear when it’s the camera guy is the director, and we’re going, “Let’s do that again. Let’s do that again.”
Yeah, when you’re a performer and there’s no other… It’s not like a live show where you get the approval of the audience and you’re like, “Oh, wow, they like that joke. Let me do more.” Really, the director is it. And a lot of times the director’s way behind a monitor somewhere. That’s why I still like to operate the camera, because when I’m operating the camera, it’s like this. We can have a hundred people here, we wouldn’t know because they go away. It’s just us. They just disappear when it’s the camera guy is the director, and we’re going, “Let’s do that again. Let’s do that again.”
There’s a shot in… I’m lighting Sin City myself. I have my crew setting lights and I have this great shot of Clive Owen and where he’s holding down Benicio’s head in the toilet. Benicio’s not there. It’s just a close up of him at this point, and I’m practicing my shot. I’m zooming in slow in his face and people are still walking behind him on the green screen setting lights, and I’m like, “I’m rolling. We’re ready to go. We’re getting this. I can already tell we’re already in the moment. What you’re doing right now, just keep holding that look. Now one jolt, like he’s starting to fight back, but you don’t even flinch. Cut. Okay, nevermind. You guys can stop moving that shit. We already got the shot.”
Lex Fridman
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Robert Rodriguez
Like that.
Like that.
Lex Fridman
Wow.
Wow.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. It’s like that because you’re so lucky.
Yeah. It’s like that because you’re so lucky.
Lex Fridman
That’s a great scene, by the way.
That’s a great scene, by the way.
Robert Rodriguez
Great, right?
Great, right?
Lex Fridman
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Robert Rodriguez
Because you could feel it. It’s like if I wait for these guys, this moment will be gone. And then another one was Mickey Rourke. He had so much freaking dialogue. He had just done this whole big dialogue scene. He had another one, I said, “Let’s go ahead and start with a wide shot,” where the two actors, if I’m the camera, Mickey and Elijah are here. Let’s get a two shot and we’ll come around on Mickey, close up. We’ll turn Mickey around for the close up, but let’s start with the wide thing, get used to the lines, and most of it’s going to be sold in a close up.
Because you could feel it. It’s like if I wait for these guys, this moment will be gone. And then another one was Mickey Rourke. He had so much freaking dialogue. He had just done this whole big dialogue scene. He had another one, I said, “Let’s go ahead and start with a wide shot,” where the two actors, if I’m the camera, Mickey and Elijah are here. Let’s get a two shot and we’ll come around on Mickey, close up. We’ll turn Mickey around for the close up, but let’s start with the wide thing, get used to the lines, and most of it’s going to be sold in a close up.
We sit down, Mickey starts delivering the take. I’m like, “Hold on, hold on a second.” I brought my camera over. Zoom in. “Just adjust that light real quick,” because I’m the DP. Because if I had another director of photography, they’d be like, “Oh, no, no, we have to relight,” and all this stuff. It’s like, “No, no, let’s just do this. Let’s go. He’s doing it right now.” And I go, and that performance is just right then. And so you can feel that when you’re also, you’re operating and you’re the camera guy and you’re the DP. It’s like high-tech guerrilla filmmaking. Yeah, we’re on a green screen, but it’s like all the crew needs are marching orders. “Just put a light back there, hitting them harder. This is a 5K, make that a 10K. It’s got to be stronger.”
They don’t need to know that I’m going to make that a lamp post later. They just need marching orders for the moment so I can just kind of tell people, “Do this, do this, do that,” and then I know what I can accomplish with the actor and then everything else falls into place later because I’m going to put all that in later. Once you know how to do a lot of jobs like that, you can just move at the speed of thought, which is where the actors love being, creatively. Because nobody knew what green screen was back then.
They’re like, “What is this again?” So I explained it as, “Well, it’s kind of like doing theater, but instead of a black curtain behind you with a prop, it’ll be a green curtain and you might just have a cup or just a steering wheel, but it’s just you and the other actors just like this and everything else will be painted in later. We’re just talking. We’re locked in. If we stay locked in, we’ll look great when there’s rain coming down and we’re on a ship later.” But it comes down to this, right? It was so fun to do those kind of movies.
Lex Fridman
So to this day, you try to be close to the action, connected with the actor that’s performing.
So to this day, you try to be close to the action, connected with the actor that’s performing.
Robert Rodriguez
Because it’s like a dance. You end up-
Because it’s like a dance. You end up-
Lex Fridman
That’s so cool to hear.
That’s so cool to hear.
Robert Rodriguez
… like remember on Dusk Till Dawn, Michael Parks in the opening scene, he’s talking about the two guys that are running around killing people just before he gets shot. And I just start doing this slow zoom. I remember it was take eight, start doing this slow zoom on him. And I’m like, I hope I get all the way up to where it stops zooming when he finishes that speech, because there’s no set way, and I don’t know how he’s going to say it. But you’re just locked almost telepathically. And has he delivered? There’s no edits. He’s just going, “Yeah, they killed four rangers, two hostages.” It’s just like, wow. And you’re just so pulled in. I’m just like, oh my God. And then it stopped. It’s like I ran out of zoom right as he finished that speech.
… like remember on Dusk Till Dawn, Michael Parks in the opening scene, he’s talking about the two guys that are running around killing people just before he gets shot. And I just start doing this slow zoom. I remember it was take eight, start doing this slow zoom on him. And I’m like, I hope I get all the way up to where it stops zooming when he finishes that speech, because there’s no set way, and I don’t know how he’s going to say it. But you’re just locked almost telepathically. And has he delivered? There’s no edits. He’s just going, “Yeah, they killed four rangers, two hostages.” It’s just like, wow. And you’re just so pulled in. I’m just like, oh my God. And then it stopped. It’s like I ran out of zoom right as he finished that speech.
Lex Fridman
So how can a director, because there’s a lot of great directors that stay-
So how can a director, because there’s a lot of great directors that stay-
Robert Rodriguez
In the bag. I don’t know, it’s hard.
In the bag. I don’t know, it’s hard.
Lex Fridman
… in the back of the battlefield.
… in the back of the battlefield.
Robert Rodriguez
You know, they just trust that whatever they get from their crew, they just accept it. Just like you would get a take to-
You know, they just trust that whatever they get from their crew, they just accept it. Just like you would get a take to-
Lex Fridman
There’s so much intimacy to that connection.
There’s so much intimacy to that connection.
Robert Rodriguez
But I like that intimate connection because I could not be behind a monitor. Even if I had communication with my cameraman, ” Okay, now start zooming in.” You’re not going to know. You have to feel it. You have to be in there. It’s like a dance. It’s like trying to do a dance with a partner and you’re across the room. It’s like, no, you got to be there up close, feeling the energy and it’s the creative spirits whispering to you both. It’s not your own idea. It’s, you’re capturing a moment that’s magic, and there’s true magic that happens on a set, and that’s what brings you back. Because you know, I didn’t direct that and they didn’t act that. That came through us, and we just had the cameras rolling and we captured a ghost.
But I like that intimate connection because I could not be behind a monitor. Even if I had communication with my cameraman, ” Okay, now start zooming in.” You’re not going to know. You have to feel it. You have to be in there. It’s like a dance. It’s like trying to do a dance with a partner and you’re across the room. It’s like, no, you got to be there up close, feeling the energy and it’s the creative spirits whispering to you both. It’s not your own idea. It’s, you’re capturing a moment that’s magic, and there’s true magic that happens on a set, and that’s what brings you back. Because you know, I didn’t direct that and they didn’t act that. That came through us, and we just had the cameras rolling and we captured a ghost.
Lex Fridman
Just like you said though, you had the pen in hand and you were there.
Just like you said though, you had the pen in hand and you were there.
Robert Rodriguez
It’s like that.
It’s like that.
Lex Fridman
It just came through.
It just came through.
Robert Rodriguez
It’s crazy. It’s crazy.
It’s crazy. It’s crazy.
Lex Fridman
All right. Your friendship with Tarantino is just fascinating. And just the whole timeline, the history of movies and the two of you collided and met is just a fascinating part of the story. You first met him in 1992 at the Toronto Film Festival. Can you just talk about meeting Tarantino?
All right. Your friendship with Tarantino is just fascinating. And just the whole timeline, the history of movies and the two of you collided and met is just a fascinating part of the story. You first met him in 1992 at the Toronto Film Festival. Can you just talk about meeting Tarantino?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. We both had films at the same time, first films, guys in black, action, violence. In fact, I had seen his movie already. My first film festival was a few months before that, the Telluride Film Festival and Reservoir Dogs was there, but Quentin couldn’t be there. He was at Sundance earlier that year, and the guy who became my agent, he saw it. He said, “Hey, you’re going to like this guy, Quentin Tarantino. I told him about you, you’re going to meet him. He’s going to be in Toronto.” “Oh, cool, cool. Okay.” So I went ahead and saw his movie in Telluride and I was like, “Holy shit.” Guys in black again, just like the mariachis dressed in black and action. I said, “Oh, we’re going to like each other’s movie. He’s going to like the movie when he see it.”
Yeah. We both had films at the same time, first films, guys in black, action, violence. In fact, I had seen his movie already. My first film festival was a few months before that, the Telluride Film Festival and Reservoir Dogs was there, but Quentin couldn’t be there. He was at Sundance earlier that year, and the guy who became my agent, he saw it. He said, “Hey, you’re going to like this guy, Quentin Tarantino. I told him about you, you’re going to meet him. He’s going to be in Toronto.” “Oh, cool, cool. Okay.” So I went ahead and saw his movie in Telluride and I was like, “Holy shit.” Guys in black again, just like the mariachis dressed in black and action. I said, “Oh, we’re going to like each other’s movie. He’s going to like the movie when he see it.”
So then in Toronto we met and we met first on a… Because I knew I was going to be doing a panel discussion with him. They asked us to do a panel discussion about violence in movies in the ’90s, even though it was only ’92. So we’re on a panel together, and that’s where I met him and he’s like, “Hey, you’re Robert Rodriguez, your agent told me about you.” And I was like, “Yeah, I saw your movie Reservoir Dogs.” And he goes, “Oh, well you got to come to my screening, and I’m going to come see yours.” So he came to Mariachi and I videotaped the audience reactions because they were insane, insane reactions to it. But I have the first screening he saw of Mariachi sitting next to me laughing. He’s laughing at everything. He was just the best audience. I have his recording of the first time he saw Mariachi.
Lex Fridman
Oh no, really?
Oh no, really?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, because I taped the whole thing.
Yeah, because I taped the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
That’s so cool.
That’s so cool.
Robert Rodriguez
He’s so loud because he’s right next to me.
He’s so loud because he’s right next to me.
Lex Fridman
Well, just like you, but even probably even more than you, he’s a fan. He watches… He just loves movies, right?
Well, just like you, but even probably even more than you, he’s a fan. He watches… He just loves movies, right?
Limitations
Robert Rodriguez
He loves movies. In fact, the next time I heard him laugh that way was at his own premiere for Kill Bill. We’re watching Kill Bill, and he’s laughing like it’s somebody else’s movie. He still enjoys the movie. He loves what all the actors did. And it’s like, that’s the kind of energy you really love. But I’ll tell you what happened. I’m a very shy person, very shy. I’d have to go talk. I’m sure you probably feel like you’re not an orator or anything, just have to go do it. I thought, well man, I’m going to have to introduce my film and talk about it afterwards. I’m afraid of that. What am I going to do? I don’t remember talking in front of more than five people before. So I went to see this other movie and it was good, and I was watching it, and then the director comes up at the end, he goes, “Yeah, well, that was my movie and here’s the writer.”
He loves movies. In fact, the next time I heard him laugh that way was at his own premiere for Kill Bill. We’re watching Kill Bill, and he’s laughing like it’s somebody else’s movie. He still enjoys the movie. He loves what all the actors did. And it’s like, that’s the kind of energy you really love. But I’ll tell you what happened. I’m a very shy person, very shy. I’d have to go talk. I’m sure you probably feel like you’re not an orator or anything, just have to go do it. I thought, well man, I’m going to have to introduce my film and talk about it afterwards. I’m afraid of that. What am I going to do? I don’t remember talking in front of more than five people before. So I went to see this other movie and it was good, and I was watching it, and then the director comes up at the end, he goes, “Yeah, well, that was my movie and here’s the writer.”
And it’s like, oh man, I don’t like the movie anymore. This guy’s kind of a dick, so I cannot do that. I’m going to have to go be who they imagine made that movie. So I wrote out my whole intro. It was like a 20-minute intro. Because no one had ever heard of anybody making a movie for no money, much less without a crew, much less, the way I did it was just very new. Nobody knew it was possible. So my whole intro is like, “You’ll see the Columbia logo slapped in front. It probably cost more than the whole movie.” And then I go through, “This is how I made it with a wheelchair for a dolly, a turtle. I wrote around things I had,” I mentioned the turtle, the pit bull, the bus, the ranch, all that stuff.
So then when they see the movie… In fact, I think my wife was in the audience, she said, “At Sundance, people are laughing so much at your intro, they just wanted to hear a story like this so badly. I heard someone next to me say, ‘I’m going to vote for his movie.'” They hadn’t even seen the movie yet, just because the story was so good, they wanted that movie to be great. And when they see the turtle, big cheers. When they see the pit bull, big cheers. When they see the school bus, cheers. But then when they see how we use it and he slams into it and falls in it, they fucking lose their minds because they know how I put it together. They know that the rubber bands and the popsicle sticks, because I already set it up.
And so that’s why that audience, I just taped the reaction, they’re so with it. The context is so key. You can watch Mariachi and go, “Hey, yeah, this looks like a $7,000 movie,” but if you know the story behind it, suddenly… I was curious. I hadn’t seen it in a long time. I was watching it for the 20th anniversary, we did a screening. And the first few shots come up and I’m like, “Oh yeah, well, it looks like a $7,000 movie.” And then it keeps going. And once we’re in the jail cell and the shooting’s happening, and I realized, oh my God, we had these blanks that only fired one shot and it would jam. So I had to show it going, use the sound effect, cut to the other guy, cut back, have another one go.
I’d have to do these editing tricks and then repeat a few frames so it looks like a machine gun. All these stuff that I’m start sweating as I’m watching it going, “I can’t believe I made this movie with that freaking camera.” I don’t know how I did. I couldn’t even see. I’m there with this long lens pulling my own focus. When I finally had to do a real movie, I was operating the camera on my first real movie with a crew, and I get the camera and a guy comes over and he focuses for you. You go, “That’s your job, you focus? Shit, I had to do my own focusing on the last movie.” I was so hard. You’re trying to focus on a guy while you’re filming. You don’t know where you are, and it’s just, I couldn’t believe how much easier it is when you have a crew.
Lex Fridman
It’s extremely valuable to know that the pain of that, the spectrum of creativity that’s allowed within that, even just the focusing, like how focusing fucks up on older cameras and newer cameras, what are different artifacts that come up. Just to know the battlefield. In order to be a great general, you have to know how to be a soldier on the battlefield.
It’s extremely valuable to know that the pain of that, the spectrum of creativity that’s allowed within that, even just the focusing, like how focusing fucks up on older cameras and newer cameras, what are different artifacts that come up. Just to know the battlefield. In order to be a great general, you have to know how to be a soldier on the battlefield.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah. It’s good to know all that stuff. But it’s like at the end of the day, you could shoot something on a phone, and if you have a great story, no one’s going to even notice. They’ll be, “Oh, you shot that on a phone? I didn’t notice.” So sometimes people get caught up on what kind of camera should I have?” It’s like, it’s not the camera. That’s just the tool. That’s just the pen. That’s just like, yeah, you can have different paint brushes, but you can go, “I’m going to limit my palette. I’m only going to use a fan brush and a detail brush, and I’m going to make a painting.” Do you think that painting’s going to suffer?
Yeah, yeah. It’s good to know all that stuff. But it’s like at the end of the day, you could shoot something on a phone, and if you have a great story, no one’s going to even notice. They’ll be, “Oh, you shot that on a phone? I didn’t notice.” So sometimes people get caught up on what kind of camera should I have?” It’s like, it’s not the camera. That’s just the tool. That’s just the pen. That’s just like, yeah, you can have different paint brushes, but you can go, “I’m going to limit my palette. I’m only going to use a fan brush and a detail brush, and I’m going to make a painting.” Do you think that painting’s going to suffer?
Robert Rodriguez
– and a detail brush and I’m going to make a painting. Do you think that painting’s going to suffer? No. It’s going to take on an identity that you wouldn’t have had if you had all the other tools. So sometimes the limitations help you because when you can do anything, it can be crippling. When I knew I could only use those things for Mariachi, it’s like, all right, well it’s very simple now.
– and a detail brush and I’m going to make a painting. Do you think that painting’s going to suffer? No. It’s going to take on an identity that you wouldn’t have had if you had all the other tools. So sometimes the limitations help you because when you can do anything, it can be crippling. When I knew I could only use those things for Mariachi, it’s like, all right, well it’s very simple now.
Let me show you how cheapskate I was, I did not spend on anything. So when you see him walking around with a guitar case, it’s a shitty cardboard one I got from home. I had to get a heavier one to put the guns in. So we borrowed one, but it had this material ripped off the top so you could see the wood. It was just the wood on top so it didn’t match the other one because it wasn’t all black and I was too cheap to paint it black. I didn’t want to spend money on paint. So you see that cardboard case, he puts it down and when he goes to open it, I cut to the other one. Once the wood is…
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
Watch the edits, you’ll see it open. Now it’s a completely different case with the guns. And when he goes to cut it and close it cuts to the other one and he goes out. That’s how I did that whole movie. Again it was a practice film. I don’t want to waste any money on it. I don’t know if it’s going to be, I won’t be able to make five bucks from it.
Watch the edits, you’ll see it open. Now it’s a completely different case with the guns. And when he goes to cut it and close it cuts to the other one and he goes out. That’s how I did that whole movie. Again it was a practice film. I don’t want to waste any money on it. I don’t know if it’s going to be, I won’t be able to make five bucks from it.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but you’re one of the few great directors where both the movie’s genius and the process of making it is creative genius. It’s like fun to watch both, to know of both.
Yeah, but you’re one of the few great directors where both the movie’s genius and the process of making it is creative genius. It’s like fun to watch both, to know of both.
Robert Rodriguez
You know what I believe.
You know what I believe.
Lex Fridman
Right. It’s from somewhere else.
Right. It’s from somewhere else.
Robert Rodriguez
I have to say that thing is freaking… I didn’t get in it’s way basically would help. And people say that, “Don’t get in your own way.” This is a little bit easier to understand. It’s like keep the pipe clear. Don’t block it with your ego. Don’t say you’re going to be shocked, but don’t ever say, “Oh, shit how do I do that? I don’t know if I can do that.” You didn’t do it to begin with. Accept that it just came through you and try to get back into that head space, especially when you go to make a second film or a third film or follow up a success. That’s when artists get really crippled because sometimes they start tiptoeing around as an artist going like, “Oh shit, now it’s my second film. My first one did really well. They might not like my second one so much.”
I have to say that thing is freaking… I didn’t get in it’s way basically would help. And people say that, “Don’t get in your own way.” This is a little bit easier to understand. It’s like keep the pipe clear. Don’t block it with your ego. Don’t say you’re going to be shocked, but don’t ever say, “Oh, shit how do I do that? I don’t know if I can do that.” You didn’t do it to begin with. Accept that it just came through you and try to get back into that head space, especially when you go to make a second film or a third film or follow up a success. That’s when artists get really crippled because sometimes they start tiptoeing around as an artist going like, “Oh shit, now it’s my second film. My first one did really well. They might not like my second one so much.”
That’s not the head space you were in when you made the first one. You weren’t hesitant like that. You’re just… So try to keep that very naive and that’s why I say commit to a body of work. I know a lot of filmmakers get stuck on their second one and then go further because they get crippled by the success of the first one and they start asking, “Oh shit, how did I do that? How can I do that again?” And you get deeper and deeper in a hole you can’t get out of.
Handling criticism
Lex Fridman
I think you’ve spoken about that filmmakers, especially early on in their journey, critics and the audience can destroy them, meaning it creates too much of a burden, too much, just wear them down to where they’re almost scared to be creative. Can you just speak to that how to ignore the critic?
I think you’ve spoken about that filmmakers, especially early on in their journey, critics and the audience can destroy them, meaning it creates too much of a burden, too much, just wear them down to where they’re almost scared to be creative. Can you just speak to that how to ignore the critic?
Robert Rodriguez
I’ll tell you something that my best advice ever got early on, I was so fortunate, from an unlikely place because he’s such, he sounded like Clint Eastwood when he said it, it was funny when you said that. But I got, I did Desperado and had Antonio Banderas, I brought Antonio to be in it from Europe, big action movie. And so Spielberg saw it and he said, “Hey, I want you to do Zorro with Antonio.” So we’re working on it for a while, I was working on the pre-production, got to work with Spielberg doing that. It ended up stalling because there was two studios involved and Amblin was moving or it was some weird thing where, but I got to work with him for about five months and I started getting really nervous because it’s like, oh shit, you start thinking about, even movies of his that people would say, “Oh, Temple of Doom is not as good as Raiders.” Have you seen Temple of Doom? I would kill to fucking do that movie.
I’ll tell you something that my best advice ever got early on, I was so fortunate, from an unlikely place because he’s such, he sounded like Clint Eastwood when he said it, it was funny when you said that. But I got, I did Desperado and had Antonio Banderas, I brought Antonio to be in it from Europe, big action movie. And so Spielberg saw it and he said, “Hey, I want you to do Zorro with Antonio.” So we’re working on it for a while, I was working on the pre-production, got to work with Spielberg doing that. It ended up stalling because there was two studios involved and Amblin was moving or it was some weird thing where, but I got to work with him for about five months and I started getting really nervous because it’s like, oh shit, you start thinking about, even movies of his that people would say, “Oh, Temple of Doom is not as good as Raiders.” Have you seen Temple of Doom? I would kill to fucking do that movie.
If I can make Zorro as good as that one, the one that people said, it’s like people don’t know how good they had it with that guy. But I started thinking, I even said, “Man, I just rewatched Temple of Doom last night. I don’t know how I’m going to do the Zorro movie. I’ve just never done anything like that.” You start getting afraid because you go, the second thing he said, “Oh Rob, you’re going to do fine.” But then I started thinking, this guy, at that time, you may not know the era, but this was like mid-nineties, he was making the biggest, best movies of all and people would shit all over this guy. They would throw so much, they were so jealous. Press, audience, everyone was just hits at them, just throwing rocks at him for everything.
Lex Fridman
Spielberg?
Spielberg?
Robert Rodriguez
You can’t imagine it now. You had to been at that time. Now everyone has respect for him, but they made him run a fucking gauntlet and they were like, “Jurassic Park, meh.” You can’t even imagine it now, but you should have seen the climate. It freaked me out because I’m like maybe I should just stay under the radar where I’ve been, not poke my head out so much.
You can’t imagine it now. You had to been at that time. Now everyone has respect for him, but they made him run a fucking gauntlet and they were like, “Jurassic Park, meh.” You can’t even imagine it now, but you should have seen the climate. It freaked me out because I’m like maybe I should just stay under the radar where I’ve been, not poke my head out so much.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
Because this guy has his head out and unwarranted. You can’t even fathom it now because you weren’t here at that time. It was crazy. You would never even think of him that way. I’m glad it changed because back then was just, it made people not want to be successful and it made me be worried, maybe I shouldn’t be go making a movie that has his name on it, that’s going to put my head out in a whole different realm of filmmaking at a studio level. Because even if I make a good movie, if I make a great movie, he’s making great movies and he’s getting this dog shit. I don’t know if I could take it.
Because this guy has his head out and unwarranted. You can’t even fathom it now because you weren’t here at that time. It was crazy. You would never even think of him that way. I’m glad it changed because back then was just, it made people not want to be successful and it made me be worried, maybe I shouldn’t be go making a movie that has his name on it, that’s going to put my head out in a whole different realm of filmmaking at a studio level. Because even if I make a good movie, if I make a great movie, he’s making great movies and he’s getting this dog shit. I don’t know if I could take it.
So I asked him, because you don’t know how resilient you can be, so I said, “Man, how do you do it? What do you do when people just throw rocks at you all day long?” He goes, “Oh, Robert, you just don’t blink.” And I was like, whoa, now I see how he got through it. Just don’t blink. Just like you know what’s coming, don’t blink. And to him say it is like a Clint Eastwood line, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
But it was like you could see he was telling the truth and you could see that’s how he did it. He just avoided all criticism by just not blinking. It’s like it’s designed to make you blink and you’re just not going to blink because you’re committing to a body of work. He just keeps cranking out movies. Whatever he feels like doing, he does. And that was the most power and it never bothered me again. I just always kept in mind, I tell that to my actors, I tell that people, that story has traveled. I even had some little actors who were starting to get up and I said, “Remember, tell you a couple of things. Some people have told me you’re never as good as people say you are and you’re never as bad either.” George Clooney told me that one, so I remember that. And then the second one, Spielberg, “Don’t blink. Don’t blink.”
But it was like you could see he was telling the truth and you could see that’s how he did it. He just avoided all criticism by just not blinking. It’s like it’s designed to make you blink and you’re just not going to blink because you’re committing to a body of work. He just keeps cranking out movies. Whatever he feels like doing, he does. And that was the most power and it never bothered me again. I just always kept in mind, I tell that to my actors, I tell that people, that story has traveled. I even had some little actors who were starting to get up and I said, “Remember, tell you a couple of things. Some people have told me you’re never as good as people say you are and you’re never as bad either.” George Clooney told me that one, so I remember that. And then the second one, Spielberg, “Don’t blink. Don’t blink.”
Lex Fridman
But there has to be a kind of vision for yourself of what you’re reaching for, what you’re trying to do.
But there has to be a kind of vision for yourself of what you’re reaching for, what you’re trying to do.
Robert Rodriguez
Again, yeah, I think if you just told me what would be my vision for the future, just committing to a body of work, which I’ve just kept doing. That’s about as far as you can see.
Again, yeah, I think if you just told me what would be my vision for the future, just committing to a body of work, which I’ve just kept doing. That’s about as far as you can see.
Lex Fridman
Do you have a sense, do you have a vision of the body of work you’ll make in the next 20 years?
Do you have a sense, do you have a vision of the body of work you’ll make in the next 20 years?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Or is it just this fog?
Or is it just this fog?
Robert Rodriguez
I did. I did. I wasn’t sure because you don’t always know with the… You might not have the vision yet because you don’t have the information yet. So if you just commit to a body of work, you’ll start figuring out more reasons to keep doing that body of work. So when I turned 50, I was like, I guess I could just keep making movies. I mean, I guess that’s been good for me. I guess I could just make more. I kind of done that already, but it’s always fun and it’s always new and I guess I could make, but it wasn’t a lot of drive, right?
I did. I did. I wasn’t sure because you don’t always know with the… You might not have the vision yet because you don’t have the information yet. So if you just commit to a body of work, you’ll start figuring out more reasons to keep doing that body of work. So when I turned 50, I was like, I guess I could just keep making movies. I mean, I guess that’s been good for me. I guess I could just make more. I kind of done that already, but it’s always fun and it’s always new and I guess I could make, but it wasn’t a lot of drive, right?
It’s like, well, I guess I could just keep doing that but, that’s not as much as I can’t wait to keep doing another season. But I didn’t know how to get to that point. So I thought, you know what? I got to this job so early, I was in the early twenties. I bet there’s some other job out there that exists that I don’t even know about because I don’t know other jobs. So I looked up, you’re not going to believe it, but I literally bought Jobs for Dummies.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Nice.
Robert Rodriguez
I was just like, I don’t even know what basic job even out there, turning the page, oh yeah, don’t want that job. I don’t want that job. I don’t want that job. It’s just going through and it gets to filmmaker and there’s a little icon beside this job, this icon is a guy like this. Literally you look it up and it says, “This is the best job ever. You get to just be creative with your friends, sit back, watch the money roll in, across the desk.” And it said, “But 99% of film students don’t get this job, so give up that dream.” So I was like, I guess I got the best job.
I was just like, I don’t even know what basic job even out there, turning the page, oh yeah, don’t want that job. I don’t want that job. I don’t want that job. It’s just going through and it gets to filmmaker and there’s a little icon beside this job, this icon is a guy like this. Literally you look it up and it says, “This is the best job ever. You get to just be creative with your friends, sit back, watch the money roll in, across the desk.” And it said, “But 99% of film students don’t get this job, so give up that dream.” So I was like, I guess I got the best job.
But then I started working with my kids when we did, I had a TV show called Rebel Without a Crew based on that, where I found filmmakers who had only made a short film that hadn’t made a feature. I picked this diverse group of filmmakers, gave them $7,000, and we documented them making a feature two weeks like I did. You can bring one person. I had Carlos Gallardo, the producer and star of Mariachi, “Bring one person, can be your cameraman or you can be your sound guy, whatever. But it’s only that for the shoot and you’d have to do the whole thing.” And I saw those guys by the time they’re like, “I don’t know how we’re going to make this movie.” By the first week of shooting, they’re already talking about their next feature. They became so confident because their idea of what impossible is drops really quick when you take it.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, anyone interested in unlocking their creativities, they’re not even just filmmaking, I highly recommend that show and I highly recommend kind of the follow-on show, which is where you make Red 11.
Yeah, anyone interested in unlocking their creativities, they’re not even just filmmaking, I highly recommend that show and I highly recommend kind of the follow-on show, which is where you make Red 11.
Robert Rodriguez
So that’s the one I did. So then it came time for me to do one. So I made a movie called Red 11 based on my experiences in the medical hospital, but I’ll turn it into a sci-fi thriller just to use that so that I can use somebody getting stabbed in the eye. So I’m still going to have more elements to show how you can do camera tricks and stuff with no money. And the old days make it for less than $7,000, which I think were like $5,000 mainly because I had a lot of actors I wanted to pay, but the movie itself can make it for nothing.
So that’s the one I did. So then it came time for me to do one. So I made a movie called Red 11 based on my experiences in the medical hospital, but I’ll turn it into a sci-fi thriller just to use that so that I can use somebody getting stabbed in the eye. So I’m still going to have more elements to show how you can do camera tricks and stuff with no money. And the old days make it for less than $7,000, which I think were like $5,000 mainly because I had a lot of actors I wanted to pay, but the movie itself can make it for nothing.
But I brought my son aboard as my number one who hadn’t been working with me in a while. He wrote Sharkboy and Lavagirl when he was seven, but then he hadn’t really been working on my crew, so he didn’t know how to operate the sound equipment, the separate sound system and all that. I didn’t show him until the day of filming because I knew we’re documenting it would make a better tutorial. So by getting them working on the movies together, they came to me super excited. By the end of the day I thought for sure, oh, they’re going to hate this even though it’s only two weeks. They’ve got other interests. They don’t want to be filmmakers. I thought they were going to be like, “All right, I’m out of here,” after one day.
But instead he came to me and his brother who acted in it and he went, “Dad, the actor didn’t show up after the first day. The location didn’t match the script at all. We asked you how we were going to solve the problems and you’re like, ‘I don’t know, figure it out.'” We thought Dad’s stumped for once, is he stumped finally? But then by the end of the day, his eyes were all wide. We figured it out. They went, oh, they don’t realize this is the creative process. Every day is like that. And in life too, every day you don’t know if your machine’s going to not work or you’re going to get a flat tire or you get fired that day. So life is very unpredictable, just like a movie set.
So I realized I’m going to make them all work on my movies now because it’s teaching them about life. I’m teaching them very little about the film make, it’s about life lessons, about how you take on something impossible, turn chicken shit to chicken salad and make it work. And that’s the strive, that’s life, that’s the process of life. So many people say, “Well, I’m not ready to make my projects.” You’re not ready for life either. You’re like this all day, you’re dodging shit that’s going on. How come art has to be perfect? It’s like it should be the same, life and art should be the same.
Lex Fridman
And I think filmmaking in general is full of unpredictable things. So many-
And I think filmmaking in general is full of unpredictable things. So many-
Robert Rodriguez
And its short little microcosm too. Within one project you’ve got a whole blueprint for how you’re going to solve life because you’ve just done it on a creative level.
And its short little microcosm too. Within one project you’ve got a whole blueprint for how you’re going to solve life because you’ve just done it on a creative level.
Lex Fridman
I think of all the art forms of all the art mediums that it just has so many different components.
I think of all the art forms of all the art mediums that it just has so many different components.
Robert Rodriguez
A lot of components to it.
A lot of components to it.
Lex Fridman
And so there’s so many ways to fuck things up, to learn from fuck-ups.
And so there’s so many ways to fuck things up, to learn from fuck-ups.
Robert Rodriguez
But any of the disciplines, if you add those to it, I teach my actors to paint in-between takes. We’ll go and I’ll take a picture of them in character. I show them a canvas, I show them paint. You don’t need to know how to paint. This is to show you the brush is going to know where to go, you just got to pick it up. Pick the colors you want. Doesn’t matter how crazy they are, whatever’s speaking to you, you lay it down. I’ll show you some of the pictures. You’re not going to believe the masterworks these actors did in a day.
But any of the disciplines, if you add those to it, I teach my actors to paint in-between takes. We’ll go and I’ll take a picture of them in character. I show them a canvas, I show them paint. You don’t need to know how to paint. This is to show you the brush is going to know where to go, you just got to pick it up. Pick the colors you want. Doesn’t matter how crazy they are, whatever’s speaking to you, you lay it down. I’ll show you some of the pictures. You’re not going to believe the masterworks these actors did in a day.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Nice.
Robert Rodriguez
They just start doing it. Lady Gaga had her fingernails in there, Josh Brolin’s doing his thing. Then I take a picture of them in character, do a line drawing of it, we project it on top, and mostly it’s the painting coming through, their line drawing with a little bit of their eyes painted in. You’re not going to believe these things. They couldn’t believe it, but it teaches them that thing about that the creativity is going to come through.
They just start doing it. Lady Gaga had her fingernails in there, Josh Brolin’s doing his thing. Then I take a picture of them in character, do a line drawing of it, we project it on top, and mostly it’s the painting coming through, their line drawing with a little bit of their eyes painted in. You’re not going to believe these things. They couldn’t believe it, but it teaches them that thing about that the creativity is going to come through.
So even though they’re already acting, they’re already being creative, we’re already making a movie. Like you said, that’s already a really great creative endeavor. When we would sneak off and paint, you could tell it’s firing a whole other part of their brain. It was funny, I think Josh Brolin’s girlfriend said, Josh said, “Hey, my girlfriend just said,” she said, his wife now, but at the time, “Are you guys doing drugs? You leave the set and you come back and you’re all excited.” and I go, “No, we’re painting. We’re painting. But that makes sense that you say that because when you get your creativity firing, it’s more powerful than any drug.” And we would come back and he’d be on the set going, “Is it bad that I’m still thinking about the painting?” And I’m like, “No, I think it’s good. I think it’s all good.” But you can tell it’s opening a whole other part of their creative brain.
So you can be doing acting in a movie and the painting’s still going to tap, it shows how much untapped potential your creative brain has. So the more you can do, the more you’re firing off. And it was so cool. I remember we did one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt was painting. We came in and the table was like this and they said, we have a problem. You want him to throw the cards out, the playing cards out, but it’s so slick they go sliding off the table and we both look at it and we both got the solution at the same time. Oh, just have them throw them, wherever they go and then we’ll place them. And then digitally, it’s even better that he looks like he gets them all perfectly laid out to show what a card shark he is.
But that’s what we have to do because we not going to, we’ll be here all day if we’re trying to get, if we’re going to worry about where they go, just go bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, and then we’ll place the cards down and everyone will pick them up and then we’ll marry the two in post. You just come up with creative solutions better, easier because you were just solving crazy creative solutions in the other one, what paint medium do I use? What kind of gel am I going to use? So when you come back to your main job, which is filmmaking, you’re like, “Oh, I can figure this out in two seconds.” So it helps you creative problem solve.
So that’s basically working with my kids made me realize, oh, now I know exactly what I want to do for the next 10 years. I only want to make movies with my kids because I’m mentoring them, but they’re teaching me shit the age I was when I made Mariachi and Desperado. And their ideas are really sharp. So the mentoring goes both ways and it’s like the greatest parenting you can do because you’re building a project together and in the same boat together, figuring it out and it’s family time. You’re like checking all the boxes.
So I thought my filmmaking going forward is going to be checking all the boxes in life. So I’m not not spending time with my family. We’re actually giving them lessons that they can go do, anything they want in life because they’re going to have different interests. But now it’s kind of like going to college and this college is like the best college because it pays you to learn, you get to do these crazy skills. My son is conducting the orchestra, the James Bond Orchestra in London for the Spy Kid score, the score he wrote, because I can’t write at his level because he was always our best piano player. And you get the charge out of working with him.
And then by making a label, there’s this weird phenomenon that happens if you guys want to take your game to another level, I stumbled upon this idea. My son, that was my counterpart on that movie, Racer, he was my sound guy, like I said, came up with Sharkboy and Lavagirl when he was little, he became my writer, co-writer, co-producer, he had come to me and said, “I want to do VR type movie.” And I said, “Oh, well let me show you,” as an example of creativity and manifest, I said, “Let me show you how it works. Let’s make a company. We’ll make a company called Double R, Double R Productions.” Because we all have double R names, all the kids. So if anyone ever wants to do anything, we can use our company.
So let’s make a logo and I’ll make t-shirts and notepads and stuff because once you have a company, you now have to make things for that company. Just like the advice I gave to people, stop aspiring, make a business card that says writer, director, cinematographer, I did, editor, because then now you have to conform to that identity. So now if I create a label like Double R, we’re going to come up with ideas. We’ll call up VR companies and say, “Hey, we have company, a VR company. Would you like us to make you a film for you to sell your headsets?” So yeah, they gave us a budget. They’re dying for content. They gave us a budget. We shot a 20-minute action movie we call The Limit with Michelle Rodriguez and Norman Reedus where you’re in an action movie with them. And it was killer. They made us a big Double R logo, animated logo.
Later that year we did Red 11, same logo. That movie went to Directors’ Fortnight and Cannes. Festivals were paying us to come talk about how we made that movie. That’s when we’re doing the cards, throwing the cards out, because they wanted their audiences, they knew they would love that. So we could have had a whole gig just continuing to get paid to go to the Fed. Usually you pay to Feds, go to the Feds, you don’t get paid. That’s what a success that was. But then we had to make We Can Be Heroes. So we had to stop, but We Can Be Heroes was a Netflix movie where they asked me to make a Spy Kids type thing. And so I thought, oh, okay, I’ll just do it with superheroes, that’s there I wrote it with my kids, based it on some of their personalities. It’s the most watched and rewatched movie in Netflix history.
Like nothing can touch it because kids just keep watching it over because it’s kids with superpowers, no one’s ever done that before and they couldn’t believe it. I’d heard anecdotally that’s how the Spy Kids where people said, “Oh, that kid’s watching over and over on video.” But you can’t keep track of that. You can on Netflix because their thing is people completing a movie, a lot of people don’t complete a movie and it still counts as a view. They may watch five minutes and change the channel. So do you complete a movie? That’s really where they really value. Not only do they complete, but re-watch, re-watch, re-watch per household so many times and nothing can touch it.
Lex Fridman
Wow.
Wow.
Robert Rodriguez
That one has a double R logo as well. And my kids are like, “Dad, that really worked.” I was like, “I know better than I thought.” I didn’t know that me manifesting that company was going to turn into that and we just keep making stuff. So I want to do that with Brass Knuckle films now with the audience because it works. So I said, as soon as you have a logo and a company, your brain starts coming up with all kinds of ideas and it’s a filter. Like I said, sometimes the freedom of limitations is all freeing. When I had to do Four Rooms and it’s like we have to use one hotel room, oh well then there’s going to be a dead body, there’s going to be this, you can do a lot with limitations. If they said you could use the whole city, it would’ve been harder to come up with something. Brass Knuckle Films has a filter, only action, action movies because that’s the stuff that there’s always an appetite for.
That one has a double R logo as well. And my kids are like, “Dad, that really worked.” I was like, “I know better than I thought.” I didn’t know that me manifesting that company was going to turn into that and we just keep making stuff. So I want to do that with Brass Knuckle films now with the audience because it works. So I said, as soon as you have a logo and a company, your brain starts coming up with all kinds of ideas and it’s a filter. Like I said, sometimes the freedom of limitations is all freeing. When I had to do Four Rooms and it’s like we have to use one hotel room, oh well then there’s going to be a dead body, there’s going to be this, you can do a lot with limitations. If they said you could use the whole city, it would’ve been harder to come up with something. Brass Knuckle Films has a filter, only action, action movies because that’s the stuff that there’s always an appetite for.
Action films
If you ask Netflix right now, what do you need more of? They’ll say, “Action, action, action. We don’t have enough action. The last regime didn’t leave us enough action. We need action.” They’ll pay a premium for an action film that we can make at a lower cost. A $20 million action film is very cheap. Studios don’t know how to make them that cheap. That’s why they’ll pay for an independent to go do it. And right now that’s the key is to be independent because a lot of studios that can’t even green light anything because things are so expensive they don’t want to lose their ass, but they need action films. So let’s make something that everybody needs and let’s make it at a price and we’ll make it in my studio because I got my own studio and I can keep all the costs down because we have all the costumes and props and sets from 25 years of filmmaking to keep the cost down and we’ll have the audience gets to invest. It’s not crowdfunding or Kickstarter, you are actually an investor.
Anyone who puts money in can pitch their idea for an action film to me. And I’m going to make one of the four films in that slate from one of those ideas because I want the audience to win. I want the audience to win and be a part of it because the audience is an afterthought in Hollywood. They make a movie, they show the audience the movie, “Go tell your friends now so you all spend money on our movie.” Well where’s your cut of that? So I want them to be successful. So if any of the movies in the slate do well, they make money off that one and then sequels or anything. But they’re all going to do well because everyone needs an action movie or we’re going to keep the cost down.
Lex Fridman
Can I actually ask you just to focus in on action, you’ve created a lot of epic action films, what makes for a great action film?
Can I actually ask you just to focus in on action, you’ve created a lot of epic action films, what makes for a great action film?
Robert Rodriguez
It comes down to the character. If you think about what are the best action films, what are your favorite films? Die Hard, he’s a cop so he’s still capable, but he’s not Superman. The fact that he’s in over his head and you’re rooting for him, that’s a great character. John Wick, he is Superman, but he’s retired and now he’s pissed off and he’s going back into a job. So it comes down to the character really being very important because the action will then have a character to it.
It comes down to the character. If you think about what are the best action films, what are your favorite films? Die Hard, he’s a cop so he’s still capable, but he’s not Superman. The fact that he’s in over his head and you’re rooting for him, that’s a great character. John Wick, he is Superman, but he’s retired and now he’s pissed off and he’s going back into a job. So it comes down to the character really being very important because the action will then have a character to it.
Lex Fridman
I think Leon: The Professional.
I think Leon: The Professional.
Robert Rodriguez
That’s a character.
That’s a character.
Lex Fridman
I mean that’s all about character.
I mean that’s all about character.
Robert Rodriguez
I mean that’s all character. Now that, when I say we’re going to do action movies, I mean movies that are really action first. There’s some movies that are more dramas that have action.
I mean that’s all character. Now that, when I say we’re going to do action movies, I mean movies that are really action first. There’s some movies that are more dramas that have action.
Lex Fridman
Where’s the boundary? So John Wick is action.
Where’s the boundary? So John Wick is action.
Robert Rodriguez
That’s more action, but it has character in it, but it’s action driven.
That’s more action, but it has character in it, but it’s action driven.
Lex Fridman
What about Predator?
What about Predator?
Robert Rodriguez
Predator is a sci-fi action film. So that’s kind of a hybrid, which I like but sometimes it’s hard for the audience to know what they’re buying into.
Predator is a sci-fi action film. So that’s kind of a hybrid, which I like but sometimes it’s hard for the audience to know what they’re buying into.
Lex Fridman
Got it.
Got it.
Robert Rodriguez
They focused a lot on the action in the trailer and then they felt there was some other worldly thing, but you didn’t really know. But it’s a great movie.
They focused a lot on the action in the trailer and then they felt there was some other worldly thing, but you didn’t really know. But it’s a great movie.
Lex Fridman
So Die Hard is a good example.
So Die Hard is a good example.
Robert Rodriguez
It was a good example I can think of right off where there’s a character that really made the difference and then everyone repeated that for a while. It was Under Siege, I was like a regular guy who’s really actually has some training on a ship now and then on the bus you’ve got a cop, he’s a cop, but he’s not super cop. So that’s why you root for him. That became an element that people repeated a lot.
It was a good example I can think of right off where there’s a character that really made the difference and then everyone repeated that for a while. It was Under Siege, I was like a regular guy who’s really actually has some training on a ship now and then on the bus you’ve got a cop, he’s a cop, but he’s not super cop. So that’s why you root for him. That became an element that people repeated a lot.
Lex Fridman
What about Taken?
What about Taken?
Robert Rodriguez
That’s a great one. That’s a great character who is superhuman, who’s also retired. There’s like a superhero type character in an extraordinary circumstance, now his daughter’s taken, right? And then there’s ordinary people like the Terminator, that’s a great character, not the Terminator, he is a villain. But Sarah Connor, who is a waitress, doesn’t think her life’s going anywhere and she finds out she’s the mother of the guy who’s going to save the human race and she’s got to train him. Suddenly she has to become someone else. Those are cool movies because it’s a genesis of a character and you see a character go from waitress to revolutionary.
That’s a great one. That’s a great character who is superhuman, who’s also retired. There’s like a superhero type character in an extraordinary circumstance, now his daughter’s taken, right? And then there’s ordinary people like the Terminator, that’s a great character, not the Terminator, he is a villain. But Sarah Connor, who is a waitress, doesn’t think her life’s going anywhere and she finds out she’s the mother of the guy who’s going to save the human race and she’s got to train him. Suddenly she has to become someone else. Those are cool movies because it’s a genesis of a character and you see a character go from waitress to revolutionary.
Lex Fridman
They step up. Yeah. What about mob movies? I mean some of them are like Godfather is really not about, it’s not action-
They step up. Yeah. What about mob movies? I mean some of them are like Godfather is really not about, it’s not action-
Robert Rodriguez
Not an action movie, drama that has some action in it.
Not an action movie, drama that has some action in it.
Lex Fridman
I mean John Wick is a mob film in some sense. Goodfellas, I mean there’s a lot of dynamic action, but there’s really not action first.
I mean John Wick is a mob film in some sense. Goodfellas, I mean there’s a lot of dynamic action, but there’s really not action first.
Robert Rodriguez
That’s really a character type piece. Great, freaking amazing. And it feels like action by the way he does it, it’s just like that. It’s like fast pace, fast talk and fast moving. Like Escape from New York’s one of my favorites since I was a kid because every movie, you’ll notice this now that I tell you, even a romantic comedy, there’s a timeline. Every movie has to have a ticking clock. So the audience knows this story’s not just going to take over a period of years though. Suddenly someone in the movie around 20 or 30 minutes in will say, “We’ve got to go find the groom before the wedding this weekend.” It’ll be just like that.
That’s really a character type piece. Great, freaking amazing. And it feels like action by the way he does it, it’s just like that. It’s like fast pace, fast talk and fast moving. Like Escape from New York’s one of my favorites since I was a kid because every movie, you’ll notice this now that I tell you, even a romantic comedy, there’s a timeline. Every movie has to have a ticking clock. So the audience knows this story’s not just going to take over a period of years though. Suddenly someone in the movie around 20 or 30 minutes in will say, “We’ve got to go find the groom before the wedding this weekend.” It’ll be just like that.
Escape from New York has the best example of a ticking time clock because he’s literally got bombs in his neck and he’s got a watch that shows him, he’s constantly clocking it, how little time he has and he gets you so like, oh my God, is he going to make it? That’s the best use of that. And no one’s ever topped that ticking time clock. All the other ones seem artificial in comparison. Aliens, we got to get off this planet now because this whole thing’s going to blow up. There’s a timeline, it’s already urgent, but now there’s an extra timeline on it. This is what happens.
Lex Fridman
As you’re talking, you’re just making me fall in love more and more with action films. Sometimes you forget how much you love action films.
As you’re talking, you’re just making me fall in love more and more with action films. Sometimes you forget how much you love action films.
Robert Rodriguez
A really good action film.
A really good action film.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
In fact, like The Terminator, oh my God, the original Terminator just came out in four cam and I’ve been watching it again. It looks like better than most movies look today, and that’s a $4 million movie. It looks incredible. You can see every bead of sweat in this movie. I was watching it again with somebody, a female and there’s always a point when you’re watching that movie where she’ll turn and say, “I love this movie.” A point that is, it’s a point where Michael Biehn tells her, ” I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you, I always have.” And you’re just like, oh my God. There’s like a real emotional love story there that he put into Titanic, that he put into Avatar, he figured out that thing that makes those movies work.
In fact, like The Terminator, oh my God, the original Terminator just came out in four cam and I’ve been watching it again. It looks like better than most movies look today, and that’s a $4 million movie. It looks incredible. You can see every bead of sweat in this movie. I was watching it again with somebody, a female and there’s always a point when you’re watching that movie where she’ll turn and say, “I love this movie.” A point that is, it’s a point where Michael Biehn tells her, ” I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you, I always have.” And you’re just like, oh my God. There’s like a real emotional love story there that he put into Titanic, that he put into Avatar, he figured out that thing that makes those movies work.
Lex Fridman
By the way, I should say that, I mean there is an aspect of El Mariachi that is the love story to me.
By the way, I should say that, I mean there is an aspect of El Mariachi that is the love story to me.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, there was a love story.
Yeah, there was a love story.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know if you see it that way, but when I just rewatched it, I was like a-
I don’t know if you see it that way, but when I just rewatched it, I was like a-
Robert Rodriguez
A tragic love story.
A tragic love story.
Lex Fridman
But I was heartbroken that she’s dead.
But I was heartbroken that she’s dead.
Robert Rodriguez
I got heartbroken twice. Let me tell you the second time it happened, one that you’re making that and you go, okay, this is how it has to go. But then now you’re invested in this person, you go, “Oh man, she has to die. It’s going to be really sad.” In fact, the studio, even when they said they were going to remake it, good thing I put that ending on, that’s the only reason they showed it to an audience. We’re going to remake it, they weren’t going to put that movie out. They showed it, they said, “We need to show this movie to an audience because they might not like the fact that we killed a girl before we remake it.” All right. They showed it to an audience. The audience liked it the way it was. So they said, “We’re going to take this movie to some film festivals.” And I was like, “No, not this movie. This is my practice movie. No one’s supposed to see this movie.” And they go, “No, no, you got something.”
I got heartbroken twice. Let me tell you the second time it happened, one that you’re making that and you go, okay, this is how it has to go. But then now you’re invested in this person, you go, “Oh man, she has to die. It’s going to be really sad.” In fact, the studio, even when they said they were going to remake it, good thing I put that ending on, that’s the only reason they showed it to an audience. We’re going to remake it, they weren’t going to put that movie out. They showed it, they said, “We need to show this movie to an audience because they might not like the fact that we killed a girl before we remake it.” All right. They showed it to an audience. The audience liked it the way it was. So they said, “We’re going to take this movie to some film festivals.” And I was like, “No, not this movie. This is my practice movie. No one’s supposed to see this movie.” And they go, “No, no, you got something.”
“No, no, dude, if I knew anyone was going to see this, I would’ve shot it completely different. Give me $2,000. I’ll go reshoot half of it,” just knowing people are going to see it I want something. And the head of the studio is really smart. He said, “You don’t know what you have here. It’s something really special. Let’s just take it and tell you what happened.” Tell you what? Toronto did great, like I said, it won Sundance. So now we had to put it out, but I was like, I would’ve said, “Don’t show that movie.” But they also questioned the ending and didn’t come into play because we ended up making Desperado. The girl in Desperado doesn’t die. We didn’t do that. We didn’t kill Salma, but that’s what needed to happen in El Mariachi.
Quentin called me one time. People would always say like, “Oh, Reservoir Dogs. He borrowed from this movie Hong Kong actually from called City on Fire about these guys they’re all criminals and they kill each other, whatever.” And he said, “Hey, they’re showing a double feature called East Looks West and West looks East. They’re showing Reservoir Dogs with City On Fire, the one they say I borrowed from. And they’re showing Mariachi with a Hong Kong film called Run where they ripped off Mariachi.” They just took the whole story. It had two Chinese actors in Mexico with guitar cases. Ones, they just followed it beat by beat.
So we’re watching it and it was like scene by scene. They just remade it without even getting the rights or anything. It was so fun to watch. So we saw Mariachi first, then we watched that one and I’m like, “What’s this big brothel scene though? This isn’t my movie.” Oh, the bad guy, oh, there’s a scene in my movie where the bad guy has two girls in bed with him and they figured that was a whorehouse, but it was just this apartment. So they got this whorehouse, they reinterpreted it and they have helicopter shots and all kinds of big thing. And the action was awesome. But then the girl’s really good. And then midway through the movie I’m like, “Oh shit, she’s going to die because I killed her in mine. I don’t want her to die. I like this actress. It’s really great. And they have a really great love story.” I go, “Well, I hope they changed that part.” No, they kill her. So I felt bad twice because I sealed her fate. I sealed her fate, because…
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
I have a line in Spy Kids 2 because I started thinking when you create stuff, you start thinking, I wonder if that’s how our creator is. He’s like, oh shit, I just kind of threw that in a memo and now that whole town’s going to get wiped out. I didn’t even think about the implications of that because there’s a line I was making a character that Steve Buscemi plays in Spy Kids 2 and he’s a creator. He just wanted to make a little miniature zoo for kids.
I have a line in Spy Kids 2 because I started thinking when you create stuff, you start thinking, I wonder if that’s how our creator is. He’s like, oh shit, I just kind of threw that in a memo and now that whole town’s going to get wiped out. I didn’t even think about the implications of that because there’s a line I was making a character that Steve Buscemi plays in Spy Kids 2 and he’s a creator. He just wanted to make a little miniature zoo for kids.
And then he thought, well, what if I put some together like a lizard with a snake and it’s a slizard, or you have a spider monkey, which is literally spider legs and a monkey top. So he makes that, and then he thought, hey, why don’t I make them a little bit bigger for kids that have big hands? And it got out of control and they turn into these huge creatures and now they’re trying to eat them. So he’s hiding. And the kids find him hiding and he says this one line that people keep coming, it’s on the internet a lot. This meme about this, “Why is this line in this movie?” It’s so wild. I thought I wanted Steve to come up to the camera and he’s lost in his own creative world.
And he says, “I can’t even go outside because my own creations are going to eat me.” And he comes up to the camera, he goes, “Do you think God hides in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he created here on Earth?” it’s really just for a moment, this thing. And it’s like, because you feel like that way when you’re creating stuff, you’re creating something and then now it’s taking all life on its own. And it’s like, oh no, now this character has to die. I didn’t want that. This domino effect of creation. And you start thinking, well, this must be what creation, maybe he is hiding up there because look, he didn’t expect all this shit to happen, giving us free will and all that.
Lex Fridman
I mean this particular context that you are the creator of this story and it for some reason makes me feel good to know that you feel the pain of this character dying.
I mean this particular context that you are the creator of this story and it for some reason makes me feel good to know that you feel the pain of this character dying.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, absolutely because if I’m writing it but if it’s not coming from me, I’m as surprised sometimes. And Quentin would say that. He’d say, “You just get two characters talking when I’m writing my script and then suddenly they’re just talking to each other.” And I was like, “What does that mean?” And now I know what that means. It’s like he just gave them life and now the dialogue’s coming through him.
Yeah, absolutely because if I’m writing it but if it’s not coming from me, I’m as surprised sometimes. And Quentin would say that. He’d say, “You just get two characters talking when I’m writing my script and then suddenly they’re just talking to each other.” And I was like, “What does that mean?” And now I know what that means. It’s like he just gave them life and now the dialogue’s coming through him.
Quentin Tarantino
Lex Fridman
Let me just ask you, you’re the perfect person to ask about the genius of Quentin Tarantino. What makes him special as a director, as a creative mind, what do you see in him that’s beautiful, that’s brilliant?
Let me just ask you, you’re the perfect person to ask about the genius of Quentin Tarantino. What makes him special as a director, as a creative mind, what do you see in him that’s beautiful, that’s brilliant?
Robert Rodriguez
Since I met him, he was just like this brilliant ball of energy. And if you see him, I walk around his house and I’ll see a few sheets of paper all handwritten out. I’m like, “What’s that?” He goes, “Oh, that was something I was starting to write, not going to finish.” I’m like, “Can I take these and go turn it into the whole trilogy of films?” What he throws away, all us mortal men would kill for, you need people like that.
Since I met him, he was just like this brilliant ball of energy. And if you see him, I walk around his house and I’ll see a few sheets of paper all handwritten out. I’m like, “What’s that?” He goes, “Oh, that was something I was starting to write, not going to finish.” I’m like, “Can I take these and go turn it into the whole trilogy of films?” What he throws away, all us mortal men would kill for, you need people like that.
I tell people, your parents say, “Watch out who your peers are,” when you’re younger that means one thing but once you get older, surround yourself around people who swing much farther than you. But that’s really true. I mean, just by being around him and working with him, you get, by osmosis, you learn stuff and it just ups your game because they’re just swing way beyond you.
Jim Cameron was like that. So when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him because I was such a big fan. I was about to go do this Desperado and I went, “Hey, I just took a three-day Steadicam course because I can’t afford a Steadicam operator, so I’m going to operate Steadicam myself on this Desperado.” Now if he was just my peer, he’d say, “Oh, I did the same thing and I’m going to do the same thing.” That would be hanging out with somebody of your ilk, but you want somebody who’s above that. You know what he said? He goes, “I bought a Steadicam, but not to operate it, I’m going to take it apart, design a better one.” Us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He’s designing all new systems. That’s the guy you want to hang out with, not someone who’s doing what you’re doing.
So surround yourself by those kinds of people. And that’s when you learn things like don’t blink. Somebody who’s really swinging for the senses and accomplishing so much. And Quentin was like that. So I met him at the festivals. He saw Mariachi, he loved it. We came up, we talked, and he said, “You’re going to like my next film I’m writing right now, Pulp Fiction.” So I thought, “Man, I’m going to put this guy, he’s so fun. I’m going to put him, I’m going to write him in my Desperado script, which I was writing.” So that was before Pulp Fiction and all that when I had cast him, I didn’t know he was going to go become such a household name. I just was drawn to his energy and I’d already written him in. And I met Steve Buscemi there, and I was like, “I’m writing a character for Steve Buscemi.”
But then I went back to the Sony lot where I was working on Desperado and Quentin and I ended up having offices right next to each other on the Sony lot by accident. I didn’t even know that. I just met him. And I go back and he was, because originally Pulp Fiction was for TriStar because Danny DeVito was a producer and he was going to make it for TriStar. So he was there writing Pulp Fiction and I was writing Desperado. So I’d go show him storyboards from Desperado, he’d come act out scenes of Pulp Fiction. And we got to be really good friends that way. We’d go eat lunch at Versailles across the street, the Sony lot.
And then Sony passed on Pulp Fiction. It’s too weird, it’s too long, $ 8 million movie or 7 million, “They’re like, ah, we’re going to go make the next Pauly Shore movie instead. People don’t understand this thing.” And Miramax got it. And they’d just been bought by Disney. So they produced, their first film was Pulp Fiction. And then that thing went to Cannes and it was a whole thing.
But what I loved about his story is that when he made Pulp Fiction, he had a director screening, he showed it to some directors and I wasn’t able to go. But anyway, I had dinner with him once, and it was in my journal because I keep a journal, at 2: 40 AM after I dropped him off at his house, I said, “Oh wait, how did your movie come out?” Pulp Fiction, he just finished it and he went, “It’s done. It still feels like a movie Quentin would make. It doesn’t feel like a real movie.” And I was like, “That’s fine. What do you mean?”
” It feels like one of those movies I would make, like Reservoir Dogs doesn’t feel like a real movie.” And I was trying to be the supportive friend going, oh man, he was so excited about this movie, now he’s bummed about it. And I was like, “Well, it should be different. Should be like…” He’s like, wouldn’t have it, drove off. So I thought, oh, I guess that wasn’t the one. So I went home and I called some of the directors that were at the screening and they go, “Yeah, this isn’t the one for him.” None of them saw it. None of them saw it. But I know you’re surprised.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
But that happened with George Lucas too, with Star Wars. Everybody saw that movie and was like, “Poor George.” They showed it to all his director friends, “Poor George. What did he waste all his time with this for?” Only Spielberg was the one who said, “It’s naive and it’s going to do really good because it’s naive kids will like it,” but everyone else was like, “What’s he doing? We’re artists. We’re making art films. What’s he doing this garbage for?” Because nobody knows. It shows. No one knows anything. Not even the filmmaker. When you’re being groundbreaking, you don’t know what groundbreaking is. Not you or anyone around you except maybe one or two people.
But that happened with George Lucas too, with Star Wars. Everybody saw that movie and was like, “Poor George.” They showed it to all his director friends, “Poor George. What did he waste all his time with this for?” Only Spielberg was the one who said, “It’s naive and it’s going to do really good because it’s naive kids will like it,” but everyone else was like, “What’s he doing? We’re artists. We’re making art films. What’s he doing this garbage for?” Because nobody knows. It shows. No one knows anything. Not even the filmmaker. When you’re being groundbreaking, you don’t know what groundbreaking is. Not you or anyone around you except maybe one or two people.
So he said, “There’s one person.” I go, “Oh yeah, who is your Spielberg?” Goes, “Kathryn Bigelow. Without a doubt she’s the only one who said there’s something here.” No one else was saying that.” He said, “In fact,” because he remembered suddenly, he’d forgotten the story but if it wasn’t in my journal, I would’ve forgot it too. He goes, “In fact, one of my friends even said, I want to sit you-“
Robert Rodriguez
… “that, too. In fact, one of my friends even said, ‘I’m going to sit you down and tell you all the things that are wrong with your movie, but I’ll wait till you get back from the Cannes Film Festival.'” Then he goes and he wins the Palme d’Or. Then his friend’s like, “Oh, what the hell do I know? I’ve only made one movie myself, so never mind. I guess we were all wrong.” So even he didn’t expect that, at all, so that was a shock, even to him. So, think about that.
… “that, too. In fact, one of my friends even said, ‘I’m going to sit you down and tell you all the things that are wrong with your movie, but I’ll wait till you get back from the Cannes Film Festival.'” Then he goes and he wins the Palme d’Or. Then his friend’s like, “Oh, what the hell do I know? I’ve only made one movie myself, so never mind. I guess we were all wrong.” So even he didn’t expect that, at all, so that was a shock, even to him. So, think about that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
That means, what do you do? Commit to a body of work. Just do that. Because you don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to be a Pulp Fiction, and what’s going to be a Jackie Brown. What’s going to be… You don’t know. And you’d like to think they know, but they don’t know either. They feel it. Like I asked Jim Cameron. I said, “Do you see your movie really clearly? Can you see it with hyper focus? Because it seems like that.” And he goes, “It’s really far, and it’s out of focus. And as you work on it, and you work on it starts coming.” I said, “Well, okay, good. So that’s normal.” I thought maybe he had laser vision, or something. But no, even him, he doesn’t really know, but he feels that he can make decisions and he understands what a creative drive is, and how to just keep being relentless about it.
That means, what do you do? Commit to a body of work. Just do that. Because you don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to be a Pulp Fiction, and what’s going to be a Jackie Brown. What’s going to be… You don’t know. And you’d like to think they know, but they don’t know either. They feel it. Like I asked Jim Cameron. I said, “Do you see your movie really clearly? Can you see it with hyper focus? Because it seems like that.” And he goes, “It’s really far, and it’s out of focus. And as you work on it, and you work on it starts coming.” I said, “Well, okay, good. So that’s normal.” I thought maybe he had laser vision, or something. But no, even him, he doesn’t really know, but he feels that he can make decisions and he understands what a creative drive is, and how to just keep being relentless about it.
But it’s not like they have all the… Proximity is huge. Proximity will change your life. Did for me. Just being around those guys. They didn’t teach me, “Hey, I’m going to teach you how to make a movie.” Just being next to them, being in their world, just ups your game. And you’re able to do things you weren’t able to do before. You get ideas you didn’t get to do before I did. I’ll show you one of my painting things.
You’re not going to believe this freaking thing. I had a painter friend in Germany, Sebastian Kruger, he gives a workshop once a year. I said, “I’m going to go there, and I bet I’ll learn more about directing by watching this guy paint, than I will by watching another director.” Because that’s just, now, I know how creativity works. You’re going to learn lessons outside of the box by doing that. And I tried to practice before going out there. I was doing a Danny Trejo, I’ll show you the before and after. You’re not going to freaking believe what you see, but it really tells the story of how important proximity is.
So I do this painting, it’s like, “Ah, it fucking looks garbage.” I’ll show you, it looks like garbage. I can’t do paintings that are just like… See, you never should say, “I can’t,” because you just cut your leg off. But I couldn’t at the time paint, just paintbrush into paint and then right on the canvas like that, without using some kind of medium. Which this guy Sebastian Kruger would do. So first I did a digital painting of Danny Trejo, just to get the framing and all that
Lex Fridman
Nice. How was that created?
Nice. How was that created?
Robert Rodriguez
That’s like on a Wacom tablet. But then I did it with paint, and it’s like, “Ah, it’s all cruddy, and it’s too thick, the paint. It just looks…” And I just gave up right away. I was trying to pre-practice so I wouldn’t be a total buffoon there, because I was going the next week. And I thought, “He’s using a different brush,” obviously, “he’s using a better paint. This stuff just is clogging up, and it’s crap. I’m sure when I get there…”
That’s like on a Wacom tablet. But then I did it with paint, and it’s like, “Ah, it’s all cruddy, and it’s too thick, the paint. It just looks…” And I just gave up right away. I was trying to pre-practice so I wouldn’t be a total buffoon there, because I was going the next week. And I thought, “He’s using a different brush,” obviously, “he’s using a better paint. This stuff just is clogging up, and it’s crap. I’m sure when I get there…”
So I get there, and he’s doing a Mick Jagger. And he starts with a mid-tone. He starts blocking in the face with a little tiny drawing of where the face goes. He starts doing that. He starts adding some highlights. There’s the photo, his reference. And I’m like, “Why are you concentrating so much on the cheek first?” And he was like, “It’s different every time.” Every, and I go, what paints are you using?” And he’s like, “It was regular acrylic paint.” “What brushes do you have?” “Regular brushes?” And I’m like, “How come mine doesn’t look like yours?”
“Well, let me try what he’s doing. You start with a mid-tone. I’m going to do that Danny again, start with a mid-tone. I’ll start adding some highlights.” And I did that, and everybody kept coming over going, “Did you just do that?” And I was like, “Yeah, I don’t know how,” but it’s very cartoony still. He’s doing a very realistic Mick Jagger. Look how real that is. And you’re just watching, and he doesn’t teach you anything. He just starts painting. So this is the photo he had as a reference, but then this is his painting. Right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
And because I’m there, he’s not teaching you how to paint.
And because I’m there, he’s not teaching you how to paint.
Lex Fridman
Through osmosis, you’re learning, somehow.
Through osmosis, you’re learning, somehow.
Robert Rodriguez
You’re seeing that there isn’t a trick.
You’re seeing that there isn’t a trick.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
I thought he had a trick, and that’s why I couldn’t get any further. He’s using the same brush and the same paint. Well, how come I can’t do that? And you go, you do it. And I go, “I’m going to try and do something realistic.” I’ve never done realistic before, because I’m a cartoonist, and everything. I was cartoony, and that was just easier for me, because I thought I would need too much training. I did another Trejo, I started doing a realistic, I finished out just one section of his face. And put the pen down, because I did that.
I thought he had a trick, and that’s why I couldn’t get any further. He’s using the same brush and the same paint. Well, how come I can’t do that? And you go, you do it. And I go, “I’m going to try and do something realistic.” I’ve never done realistic before, because I’m a cartoonist, and everything. I was cartoony, and that was just easier for me, because I thought I would need too much training. I did another Trejo, I started doing a realistic, I finished out just one section of his face. And put the pen down, because I did that.
Lex Fridman
Shit.
Shit.
Robert Rodriguez
The same day.
The same day.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Nice.
Robert Rodriguez
I got out of my way, because seeing him get out of his own way, I think that’s why sometimes people need to go to school for stuff like that. Because then now, “Well, I just did four years of school, so now I must know.” Now you’ve given yourself permission. But you could give yourself permission right away, and it’s going to come through.
I got out of my way, because seeing him get out of his own way, I think that’s why sometimes people need to go to school for stuff like that. Because then now, “Well, I just did four years of school, so now I must know.” Now you’ve given yourself permission. But you could give yourself permission right away, and it’s going to come through.
Desperado
Lex Fridman
And drawing Danny Trejo, of all people is like, there’s so much going on there. It’s like he’s so expressive.
And drawing Danny Trejo, of all people is like, there’s so much going on there. It’s like he’s so expressive.
Robert Rodriguez
He’s so expressive, and so much-
He’s so expressive, and so much-
Lex Fridman
I mean, you’ve worked with him a lot, and he’s one of the most badass humans on the screen. You’ve created that. Can you just talk about what it’s like, creating those characters?
I mean, you’ve worked with him a lot, and he’s one of the most badass humans on the screen. You’ve created that. Can you just talk about what it’s like, creating those characters?
Robert Rodriguez
What was exciting about Desperados, I went to go make it, and there were no Latin actors working in Hollywood. Because no one was creating roles for them. So I thought, “Wow, I got to go create my own stars. We’ll bring Antonio from Europe, because they kind of know his name from the Almodóvar movies, and I saw him in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, when I was in the hospital writing Mariachi. We were watching TV while I was a patient, and there’s a scene where he headbutts Victoria Abril. He just gave her headbutt. But he goes, like that. I was like, “Whoa. I bet that guy would want to be in an action movie. He’s got something inside.”
What was exciting about Desperados, I went to go make it, and there were no Latin actors working in Hollywood. Because no one was creating roles for them. So I thought, “Wow, I got to go create my own stars. We’ll bring Antonio from Europe, because they kind of know his name from the Almodóvar movies, and I saw him in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, when I was in the hospital writing Mariachi. We were watching TV while I was a patient, and there’s a scene where he headbutts Victoria Abril. He just gave her headbutt. But he goes, like that. I was like, “Whoa. I bet that guy would want to be in an action movie. He’s got something inside.”
So I called him when we were doing Desperado and I said, “Would you ever consider doing an action?” “Oh man, I’d love to do action.” You know, he said something… So I said, “Well, I got a movie for you. I got a movie for you. It’s the sequel to Mariachi.” And so, Salma I found in Mexico television. She couldn’t get work in the U.S., because of the roles that are [inaudible 01:51:05]-
Salma Hayek
Lex Fridman
Yeah. How did you find her? I mean, this is one of the greatest-
Yeah. How did you find her? I mean, this is one of the greatest-
Robert Rodriguez
It was a crazy story-
It was a crazy story-
Lex Fridman
… actors in the world.
… actors in the world.
Robert Rodriguez
… one of the best stories. I was really determined to hire a real Latin, especially Hispanic, and then she’s Mexican, actress, to be the Mexican character. That’s as authentic as you can get. And there was no one who was getting any jobs, because no one was creating any. So there was no one that had any movies under their name, because there was no one, it was a whole systemic problem. This was ’94, ’93. So I was watching a Paul Rodriguez show on Univision, because I was trying to practice my Spanish, because I was having to do all these Spanish interviews. Because Mariachi was in Spanish. That was the other part I didn’t tell you, I didn’t speak Spanish when I made that movie. We didn’t grow up with it. So I left that part out of the Mariachi story, because I thought, people already didn’t believe I made the movie by myself. If they knew I made it in a language I didn’t speak? I should have said it, because it’d be even more inspiring.
… one of the best stories. I was really determined to hire a real Latin, especially Hispanic, and then she’s Mexican, actress, to be the Mexican character. That’s as authentic as you can get. And there was no one who was getting any jobs, because no one was creating any. So there was no one that had any movies under their name, because there was no one, it was a whole systemic problem. This was ’94, ’93. So I was watching a Paul Rodriguez show on Univision, because I was trying to practice my Spanish, because I was having to do all these Spanish interviews. Because Mariachi was in Spanish. That was the other part I didn’t tell you, I didn’t speak Spanish when I made that movie. We didn’t grow up with it. So I left that part out of the Mariachi story, because I thought, people already didn’t believe I made the movie by myself. If they knew I made it in a language I didn’t speak? I should have said it, because it’d be even more inspiring.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s inspiring.
Yeah, that’s inspiring.
Robert Rodriguez
Like, now you have no excuse. I wrote the English subtitles, basically.
Like, now you have no excuse. I wrote the English subtitles, basically.
Lex Fridman
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Robert Rodriguez
I wrote the titles, what became the subtitles, and then we’d take it to the actors, and the actor would translate it for me. And I was like-
I wrote the titles, what became the subtitles, and then we’d take it to the actors, and the actor would translate it for me. And I was like-
Lex Fridman
That is so inspiring.
That is so inspiring.
Robert Rodriguez
… I’d be like-
… I’d be like-
Lex Fridman
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Robert Rodriguez
… I would try to speak Spanish. And say, “[foreign language 01:52:13],” like, “Let’s record.” And they’d be looking at me like, “What the fuck?” That means, “Let’s remember.” The [foreign language 01:52:19] doesn’t mean record. That means [foreign language 01:52:22]. Now I know, back then, I didn’t know.
… I would try to speak Spanish. And say, “[foreign language 01:52:13],” like, “Let’s record.” And they’d be looking at me like, “What the fuck?” That means, “Let’s remember.” The [foreign language 01:52:19] doesn’t mean record. That means [foreign language 01:52:22]. Now I know, back then, I didn’t know.
So I’m watching Univision, and then there’s Salma as a guest, and she’s a big soap star down there in Mexico. And she comes out, she’s beautiful, she’s funny, everyone’s laughing. She’s Salma. Everyone that we know, now. And she starts talking about, what I gather from what she’s saying, that she’s having trouble finding any work in the U.S. because of her accent. And then Paul Rodriguez says, “Well, say something in English.” And she says, and she sounds just like she does now. And he goes, “That’s great.” And she goes, “I know, I know.” And I went, “I think this is the girl.”
So I called her in my office, and I videotaped our first meeting together. So I have that somewhere.
Lex Fridman
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s so awesome.
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s so awesome.
Robert Rodriguez
And it’s Salma. It’s Salma. It’s her, with her energy, with her passion, and funny. She became instant friends with my wife. Before they walked over, “Your wife and I are best friends.” She already was like part of the family. She’s a godmother to my kids. And I thought, “I’m going to help you, and you’re going to help me. I need to have a Mexican actress in this, and you’re going to be phenomenal.
And it’s Salma. It’s Salma. It’s her, with her energy, with her passion, and funny. She became instant friends with my wife. Before they walked over, “Your wife and I are best friends.” She already was like part of the family. She’s a godmother to my kids. And I thought, “I’m going to help you, and you’re going to help me. I need to have a Mexican actress in this, and you’re going to be phenomenal.
The studio didn’t see it. They were like, “What? She hasn’t done anything. Why don’t you just hire somebody else, who already has a name?” I said, “Well, if we just give her one movie, then she’ll be someone who’s in a movie, and then you can keep casting.” So I made a whole nother movie with her in English, called Road Racers. It was my second film for Showtime. A really cool little Rebel Without a Cause type movie. And I gave her a role in that, so we’d have an example of her doing English. And they still were like, “We need a screen test. We need to have a screen test with a bunch of other actresses.” So I said, “Sure, let’s do that.”
So I went over to her house the night before the screen test, and we worked on the scene, which is the best scene. Where she’s operating on his arm, and they’ve got all this chemistry. And I was just directing her through it completely, down to, “When you pick up the water, and you hand him the water, don’t scream, “Oh, hot water!” Just be like, “Hot water,” while he’s spitting it out, and it’s going to be a big dramatic action with a very light delivery. And so, we got it down to a science.
The next day we, show up, Antonio does a scene with all the girls who come in. He does it with her. Clearly, they’ve got amazing chemistry. She just nails it. He’s great. He loves her, too. Studio’s like, “Okay, you can hire her.” Reluctantly, like that. But once they saw the footage come as we were shooting, and they saw it on the big screen when they were watching the dailies, then they were like, “Oh my God.” And then they saw it. Then they saw what I saw when I met her.
But sometimes, like you say, what do you do when people are like, “Hey, how come you’re using these…?” Just know that not everyone’s going to see it. You may have the only vision, just keep going. There’s an instinct that tells you to keep going that way. You’ll get proved right or wrong, or maybe you’re slipping on the first two rocks, or whatever. But follow your instinct, because everyone’s going to have an opinion, and it’s not necessarily the right one. And when you’re an independent filmmaker, you can make those decisions that change people’s career, that changes the world.
And that’s why you want to remain independent. That’s why what’s happening now in the industry is great, because I have to make movies like the way I started, which is what I’ve always liked to do. Which is just doing it where we create our own destiny. We go, “Hey, we’re going to make a movie. We’re going to make it for this budget, so we can make it. And the story’s going to be so character-driven and cool, we’re going to be able to get big actors to be in it because they’re going to want to be in it.”
Danny Trejo
So, Danny Trejo, you asked me about Danny Trejo. It’s great story.
Lex Fridman
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Robert Rodriguez
Okay, Danny Trejo. We’re doing Desperado now, I’m casting all kinds of people. Now, I have this character that I want to have a bunch of knives. He opens up his vest, and there’s a bunch of knives. So, “Bring me all the coolest looking Latin actors we can find.” And before he even walked in, there’s a picture of him, he already looked like the guy, but he was younger. He always just played prison inmates. It was a picture of him as an inmate, in a prison. “I want to give him a cool role, whoever this actor is.” He walks in, and I see him. It’s Danny Trejo. He sits down, and I had the prop knife already made. And I say, “You need to have this in your hand and look like you sleep with it. Just practice flipping it around in your hand.”
Okay, Danny Trejo. We’re doing Desperado now, I’m casting all kinds of people. Now, I have this character that I want to have a bunch of knives. He opens up his vest, and there’s a bunch of knives. So, “Bring me all the coolest looking Latin actors we can find.” And before he even walked in, there’s a picture of him, he already looked like the guy, but he was younger. He always just played prison inmates. It was a picture of him as an inmate, in a prison. “I want to give him a cool role, whoever this actor is.” He walks in, and I see him. It’s Danny Trejo. He sits down, and I had the prop knife already made. And I say, “You need to have this in your hand and look like you sleep with it. Just practice flipping it around in your hand.”
And I gave it to him. “You got the role, just start practicing with that.” And he gets up, and he walks out. He didn’t have to say anything because there’s no dialogue. He walks out, holding the… We get to the set, and he kept saying, “Put me in, Coach. Give me a line, give me a line.” It’s like, “No, no, you’re such a nice guy, you’re going to blow the whole mystique. I want this guy to feel like the most evil, scary guy of all. And you’re such a nice guy.” I didn’t let him talk till Dusk Till Dawn. But one thing I noticed was that the town we shot in, the Mexican town, which is the same town I shot Mariachi. We went back there, because I wanted to pay back the city. So we had this big movie there.
And they didn’t really know Antonio, because he was in European movies. Salma hadn’t come to the set yet. But they saw Danny Trejo there in his vest, looking like a Mexican icon. They would go like this. Everyone thought he was the star. And I just know magnetism when I see it, and I went, “This guy’s got something.” So I went to him and I said, “I got a movie we’re going to do someday.” This was ’94. We didn’t make this movie for 15 years. “Machete. You’re going to be machete.” I had an idea for Machete then, it wasn’t the same story. I had seen a story, actually, the guy from Mariachi sent me this funny story. He said, “Hey, look at this story,” that the USDA, and FBI sometimes, would hire a Mexican federale to come do a job for 25 grand that they didn’t want to get their own guys killed on. I said, “That’s Machete. The guy that they pay,” but he’s not doing it for the money. It turns out he has to get this guy that escaped Mexico, and that’s the twist. So that was the original story I had.
I said, “We’re going to do this someday.” And we talked about it for years, and never did it. Never got around to doing it. So when I did Spy Kids, I put him in Spy Kids and I said, “Hey, let’s pay tribute to that character we never got to make, and you’ll be Uncle Machete.” He’s a gadget guy, but he’s got a mysterious past. But then a few years later, Quentin and I were doing Grindhouse, and he’d already done Dusk Till Dawn with me. I was building my own Latin star system. Salma showed up in a bunch of my movies. Cheech shows up in every movie. Danny shows up there. I brought Cheech out of retirement, put him in my movie. I needed to create my own Latin star system, because all my scripts… Because when you write in your own voice, you’re going to write, probably somebody that’s Latin. So you need to have a star system that matches that, so that you don’t have trouble casting. And people are like, “Well, you can’t hire this person.” So I built up my own star system. So Danny was one of my stars.
So after we’re doing Grindhouse, we had to do fake trailers for Grindhouse. And I told Quentin, “I know what trailer I’m going to do, for the movie I never got to make with Danny called Machete. That’ll be so fun to finally get that out of our system.” And doing a trailer is so fun. It’s two days of shooting, just still being that resourceful guy, we asked this company that had a digital camera we wanted to use, “Can you send it to us for a couple of day screen test? I mean, camera test. Instead of shooting a camera test, we shot the trailer. So we got a free camera, shot the trailer with him, and it’s just the money shots. Him opening his vest full of machetes, him aiming that gun, him in a waterfall with two gals. And I just came up with this really funny trailer, and we shot it.
People were screaming at the premiere, you couldn’t even hear it. They just wanted that movie so badly, because there was blaxploitation in the ’70s. There was never mexploitation. It felt like this should have existed, but it didn’t. So a Mexican superhero, they’d just never seen anything like that. Now, you know. But even his mom calls him Machete. He just became this guy, and of 250 movies that he’s been in, Machete is most famous one. So for five years, five years, people would come up to us and say, “Where’s Machete? When is that movie coming out?” And we were like, “It’s not a real movie, but when it looks real, we want to see that movie.”
So we finally made the movie because people just asked for it. And I was adamant about, being resourceful again, “All those shots that are in the trailer are really great. I got to reverse engineer the trailer into a movie, so that I can use that shot that’s in the trailer. Like this girl in the waterfall. Why would this girl be in the waterfall?” Thought of a really clever way that he gets the bad guy. “Her face is kind of covered by this hair. We’ll cast Lindsay Lohan, there.” Or, “The senator, we’ll switch it out for Robert De Niro.” Well, I just reversed engineered it, so every time there’s a shot in the trailer, it’s in the movie, but I shot all the footage around to lead up to it. That’s another fun creative exercise, is to reverse engineer something you just did like this, on the day. You just threw a bunch of cards out, basically, with that trailer. And now you got to go make a movie using all those cards. That’s a creative exercise that I thought so satisfying, so fun.
Filming in Austin
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that was beautiful. You’re actually known in part, maybe you can correct me, but to do pretty unexpected, surprising, kind of interesting casting. So Robert De Niro is an example of that, and that’s just a great role. The second aspect of that, I heard the story that, you can just get an actor in and out in just a few days. Really fast. The Robert Rodriguez experience, as they call it. How do you make that happen? Can you just tell the story of Robert De Niro?
Yeah, that was beautiful. You’re actually known in part, maybe you can correct me, but to do pretty unexpected, surprising, kind of interesting casting. So Robert De Niro is an example of that, and that’s just a great role. The second aspect of that, I heard the story that, you can just get an actor in and out in just a few days. Really fast. The Robert Rodriguez experience, as they call it. How do you make that happen? Can you just tell the story of Robert De Niro?
Robert Rodriguez
Well, I’m the editor, I’m the cameraman, I’m the DP. And so, when I call him and say, “I’ve got you as the villain in this whole movie, but I swear, I’m going to shoot you on four days. You come down in four days.” In fact, there’s a scene where he’s in the hospital. He’s just smiling, he’s having such a good time, because he couldn’t believe it. I said, “Guess what? When you wake up from your hotel room at the Stephen F. Austin, you just cross the hallway, that’s the set. The room next to yours, we turned into the hospital set. So you’re just going to come lay in there, in your pajamas.
Well, I’m the editor, I’m the cameraman, I’m the DP. And so, when I call him and say, “I’ve got you as the villain in this whole movie, but I swear, I’m going to shoot you on four days. You come down in four days.” In fact, there’s a scene where he’s in the hospital. He’s just smiling, he’s having such a good time, because he couldn’t believe it. I said, “Guess what? When you wake up from your hotel room at the Stephen F. Austin, you just cross the hallway, that’s the set. The room next to yours, we turned into the hospital set. So you’re just going to come lay in there, in your pajamas.
Lex Fridman
Really? That’s what you did?
Really? That’s what you did?
Robert Rodriguez
Well, yeah, we had to save time. We only have four days. So everything had to be very thought out to be like boom, boom, boom. Let’s shoot the money, get him out of this. We don’t have to spend a lot of money on him.
Well, yeah, we had to save time. We only have four days. So everything had to be very thought out to be like boom, boom, boom. Let’s shoot the money, get him out of this. We don’t have to spend a lot of money on him.
Lex Fridman
Book a room in a hotel, set it up to look like a hospital room.
Book a room in a hotel, set it up to look like a hospital room.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, that’s our set. And it’s real, you don’t have to dress it, and it’s just right there. All you do is put a little tube there for his IV, and then you have a couple of nurses, and it looks like a hospital.
Yeah, that’s our set. And it’s real, you don’t have to dress it, and it’s just right there. All you do is put a little tube there for his IV, and then you have a couple of nurses, and it looks like a hospital.
Lex Fridman
That was genius. It was Robert De Niro.
That was genius. It was Robert De Niro.
Robert Rodriguez
Resourceful, resourceful. Next door. But I said, “You’re going to think about me when you’re on your next Meet the Fockers movie, and you’re on there for six months, where they have you sitting in a trailer. I don’t like to do that.”
Resourceful, resourceful. Next door. But I said, “You’re going to think about me when you’re on your next Meet the Fockers movie, and you’re on there for six months, where they have you sitting in a trailer. I don’t like to do that.”
You know, I gave a Lady Gaga her first two movies. Because after Machete she said publicly, she said, “I saw Machete, and my song Americano should have been in Machete.” I thought, “She saw Machete?”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
So I called her up and I said, “Hey, I’m making a sequel, and I would certainly use your music. But have you ever thought about acting? Because you’re an amazing performer, I think you’d be…” I’ve worked with a lot of actors who are also musicians, and they’re always great. Because they already know how to be a persona, be on stage, be in front of a bunch of people, which most actors can’t do. And she said, “Actually I studied acting before I became a singer.” Said, “Well, you’ll never be able to be in a movie, because you know what? They don’t know how to shoot people out. They’ll want six months of your time, and you’re always on tour. But if you come, be here, I have a part for you. I can shoot you out in half a day, this whole section of a movie, and I’ll shoot your movie poster.”
So I called her up and I said, “Hey, I’m making a sequel, and I would certainly use your music. But have you ever thought about acting? Because you’re an amazing performer, I think you’d be…” I’ve worked with a lot of actors who are also musicians, and they’re always great. Because they already know how to be a persona, be on stage, be in front of a bunch of people, which most actors can’t do. And she said, “Actually I studied acting before I became a singer.” Said, “Well, you’ll never be able to be in a movie, because you know what? They don’t know how to shoot people out. They’ll want six months of your time, and you’re always on tour. But if you come, be here, I have a part for you. I can shoot you out in half a day, this whole section of a movie, and I’ll shoot your movie poster.”
Lex Fridman
It’s incredible.
It’s incredible.
Robert Rodriguez
She’s like, “Okay.” So she shows up. I had all the sets like a conveyor belt, right next to each other. Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. She’s in the car. That’s why she had me do her music video for Rain On Me, later. She said, “We should just go to Austin. Robert, put me on a grease,” that was throughout that whole movie. I don’t know how we did that. It was half a day. She was there half a day. I did the same for Sin City, too. I was like, “I have a set here, waiting for you. If you’re on tour in Houston, just drive in to Austin, I’ll shoot you out in half a day. You get to be in a scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.” “Sure.” She came down.
She’s like, “Okay.” So she shows up. I had all the sets like a conveyor belt, right next to each other. Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. She’s in the car. That’s why she had me do her music video for Rain On Me, later. She said, “We should just go to Austin. Robert, put me on a grease,” that was throughout that whole movie. I don’t know how we did that. It was half a day. She was there half a day. I did the same for Sin City, too. I was like, “I have a set here, waiting for you. If you’re on tour in Houston, just drive in to Austin, I’ll shoot you out in half a day. You get to be in a scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.” “Sure.” She came down.
Lex Fridman
So wait, how do you take Robert De Niro, how do you take Lady Gaga, and solve the puzzle of all the scenes they have to be in? How do we shoot them quickly, efficiently, conveniently?
So wait, how do you take Robert De Niro, how do you take Lady Gaga, and solve the puzzle of all the scenes they have to be in? How do we shoot them quickly, efficiently, conveniently?
Robert Rodriguez
You have to edit your own movie. I have this analogy, a food analogy, that works really well. The script is like your grocery list. Filming is like grocery shopping. Getting the best performances, getting the best meat, getting the best ingredients. Right? Editing is like the cooking. Too much of this, and not enough of that, you fuck the whole thing up. So, so many filmmakers do not edit, and they give it to some other guy. Who might look at all your ingredients and go, “Well, this is all great, but I’m going to go make a fucking souffle.” And he makes something else.
You have to edit your own movie. I have this analogy, a food analogy, that works really well. The script is like your grocery list. Filming is like grocery shopping. Getting the best performances, getting the best meat, getting the best ingredients. Right? Editing is like the cooking. Too much of this, and not enough of that, you fuck the whole thing up. So, so many filmmakers do not edit, and they give it to some other guy. Who might look at all your ingredients and go, “Well, this is all great, but I’m going to go make a fucking souffle.” And he makes something else.
So by doing that job, I mean, I’ve worked on some big stuff. And I realized finally, after many years, because I’ve always edited. I realized, “This is why movies cost so much.” There could be 150, 200 people on the crew, and I swear not one of them knows how to edit. Not one. So they’re getting the wrong stuff, they’re having to reshoot shit. The editor is in a room somewhere, useless. Calling after the fact, “We still need to get this close up,” or, “You got to reshoot that, because it doesn’t match,” because no one knows editing. So if you just know that, you’re already miles ahead of 99% of Hollywood. But that’s just how I learn, by accident, so I kind of stumbled upon it. And I realized that’s what the problem is, because across the board I’m watching them going, “That’s not going to match. You guys are just spending money, sending crews out, shooting stuff for this. It’s a clusterfuck. Let me show you.”
And that’s how, in Sin City, Bruce Willis. Nine days.
Lex Fridman
Whoa.
Whoa.
Robert Rodriguez
Brittany Murphy’s in all three stories. One day. Benicio del Toro, three days. It’s just like, you’re just shooting their stuff. Mickey Rourke is in a sequence with Rutger Hauer. We shot eight months apart. I didn’t have Rutger Hauer until I was doing Sharkboy and Lava Girl. So I just shot Mickey acting with me, and then I shot Rutger acting with me, and I just cut them together.
Brittany Murphy’s in all three stories. One day. Benicio del Toro, three days. It’s just like, you’re just shooting their stuff. Mickey Rourke is in a sequence with Rutger Hauer. We shot eight months apart. I didn’t have Rutger Hauer until I was doing Sharkboy and Lava Girl. So I just shot Mickey acting with me, and then I shot Rutger acting with me, and I just cut them together.
Lex Fridman
Wow.
Wow.
Robert Rodriguez
What’s weird is, editing exercises are like, I used to do these editing exercises where I would put two of my VCRs together, and I would cut my movies. But sometimes I would just cut a music video. And I cut a music video once, because I was a big fan of Rutger Hauer, and a big fan of Mickey Rourke. So I said, “I want to make it look like they’re in a movie together.” So I cut this music video together, so it shows lightning on Rutger and The Hitcher, and then lightning on Mickey from Rumble Fish. But Rumble Fish is black and white, so I made the whole thing black and white. I was like 19. I was 19 years old when I did that.
What’s weird is, editing exercises are like, I used to do these editing exercises where I would put two of my VCRs together, and I would cut my movies. But sometimes I would just cut a music video. And I cut a music video once, because I was a big fan of Rutger Hauer, and a big fan of Mickey Rourke. So I said, “I want to make it look like they’re in a movie together.” So I cut this music video together, so it shows lightning on Rutger and The Hitcher, and then lightning on Mickey from Rumble Fish. But Rumble Fish is black and white, so I made the whole thing black and white. I was like 19. I was 19 years old when I did that.
Lex Fridman
Wow.
Wow.
Robert Rodriguez
And then years later, I’m making Sin City. I shot Mickey not knowing who the other actor was going to be until I cast him eight months later, and it was Rutger. I’m cutting them together to look like they’re in the same movie, and it’s in black and white. And I’m like, “I’ve done this before. I must have dome this before.”
And then years later, I’m making Sin City. I shot Mickey not knowing who the other actor was going to be until I cast him eight months later, and it was Rutger. I’m cutting them together to look like they’re in the same movie, and it’s in black and white. And I’m like, “I’ve done this before. I must have dome this before.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
“Oh my God,” I found that old video, it was like, “Oh my God, I already made a movie of them in black and white.” Now, that’s some weird shit, right?
“Oh my God,” I found that old video, it was like, “Oh my God, I already made a movie of them in black and white.” Now, that’s some weird shit, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
That’s the magic of creativity. It’s like, sometimes when you have a vision it’s not clear, but it’s coming to you from the future. So you got to just follow the voice. No matter what anyone says about your curtains, just follow the voice you got in your head, because you don’t know, and you’re not smart enough to know. And you don’t need to know. You just need to do. You just need to be the hands. So this is like, what you can do with no time or money, when you know all those jobs. It’s the benefit of knowing those jobs. Like I said, the more you know those jobs, the more you know your main job. Which is being creative, on the day, thinking on your feet.
That’s the magic of creativity. It’s like, sometimes when you have a vision it’s not clear, but it’s coming to you from the future. So you got to just follow the voice. No matter what anyone says about your curtains, just follow the voice you got in your head, because you don’t know, and you’re not smart enough to know. And you don’t need to know. You just need to do. You just need to be the hands. So this is like, what you can do with no time or money, when you know all those jobs. It’s the benefit of knowing those jobs. Like I said, the more you know those jobs, the more you know your main job. Which is being creative, on the day, thinking on your feet.
Editing
So I’m going to show you this test. Okay, so for Dusk Till Dawn, the TV series, I would always shoot the first episode and the last episode of a seven or eight episode season. There was three seasons. By the time we got to the third season, I was doing Alita, so I couldn’t do the big finale episode, and my actor who plays the George Clooney character, D.J. Cotrona, he’s somebody who wanted to be a writer, and was writing. He wrote Fight and Flight, it’s this movie that’s going to come out, with Josh Hartnett. That’s his, he wrote it. After doing this. He was like, “Man, hearing you talk, you know what? I got…” This is what I love about, you inspire people, the feedback loop inspires you back. He said, “Man, hearing in your talk for Red 11, and the cards. I’ve got a script that’s partially written, I’m just going to go crank it out in… I’m going to cut off the phone in three days. I’m going to finish that thing in three fucking days.”
Lex Fridman
Fuck yeah.
Fuck yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
And he came back and he said, “I finished the script.” And I read it and I go, “You wrote it in three days?” And he goes, “Well, I wrote some it before, but I just kept thinking I wasn’t ready. And then you told me the thing about not being ready, and you said that, it really resonated. I went and I finished it in three days.” I go, “Man, I’m going to do that. I’m going to go do the D.J. Method.” I call it the D.J. Method. I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that I’m just going to go turn off the phone, and finish the thing in three days. And I’ll fix it later. But those three days, there’s going to be pure pipe. It’s just going to be coming through, because you’re just going to be picking up the pen.”
And he came back and he said, “I finished the script.” And I read it and I go, “You wrote it in three days?” And he goes, “Well, I wrote some it before, but I just kept thinking I wasn’t ready. And then you told me the thing about not being ready, and you said that, it really resonated. I went and I finished it in three days.” I go, “Man, I’m going to do that. I’m going to go do the D.J. Method.” I call it the D.J. Method. I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that I’m just going to go turn off the phone, and finish the thing in three days. And I’ll fix it later. But those three days, there’s going to be pure pipe. It’s just going to be coming through, because you’re just going to be picking up the pen.”
So anyway, he came to me with this idea. He said, “Oh man, I was hoping you’d do the last episode of Dusk Till Dawn, because I had this great idea for a scene. We’re in a zombie town, a Western town. We have one of those guns where you have to pull the hammer back, before you can fire.” So I thought, “What if I have a gun that’s empty, and I got bullets in the other hand? And I bump into a zombie, the bullets go flying, I jump and I catch all the bullets, and shoot the guy before I hit the ground.” Okay, that’s kind of a real cool, Desperado type thing. But dude, this is a seven-day shoot, for these episodes. Everyone on the crew will have a different idea on how to do that. A stunt guy will put you on wires, because you have to do all that action.
Or, the DP isn’t even operating the camera. It’s a camera guy. The director doesn’t know how to shoot. He’s not operating the camera. Your editor is in a room somewhere. VFX guys aren’t there. You’re not going to be able to ask them how to do it. But I am my own VFX, I came up with how we did all the shots in Sin City, and all the Spy Kids movies. “We need one guy to come do it. I’ll come do it for you. I’ll come do it, because I’m already going to be there, because I have to shoot a second unit fight scene for the other actor who wanted a cool fight scene.” So I was already doing that. “And when it comes to your scene, we’ll switch places, because it’s got to be done quick, because… You got to shoot it in 20 minutes because you got a ton of other shit you got to shoot, and you’ll just never get it. You won’t even get it in a film schedule, in a regular movie schedule. It’s just too crazy. You need somebody with a vision to do the whole thing.”
“So this is what it would look like if you were on the set. I’m going to show you the footage, and I’m going to show you the scene. I’m going to have to show it to you a couple of times, because you’re not going to believe what you’re about to see. So if you were on the set, this is what it would look like.”
So I get there, they say, “We’re ready for that scene.” So I get over there to the set and I go, “Okay, where are you coming out of?” And he goes, “This building.” “Where are you getting the bullets from?” “That body.” “Okay, bring that body closer. Okay, stunt guy, bring a pad over. I want to see you just jump, and start to twist as if you’re turning. I just want to see how much air time you can get to get any action in, before you hit the pad.” He starts to jump, he barely starts jumping, he’s already hitting the pad. So I was like, “Okay, that ain’t going to work. You get out of here. D.J., you’re going to do it.” I have no idea how I’m going to do this. I hadn’t thought about it before, but now you’re there-
Lex Fridman
This is so awesome.
This is so awesome.
Robert Rodriguez
… and now the options are very limited. You’re very limited. Look at the sun. You’re going to see the sun not move. You see, that’s the point where the sun starts getting lost. I have to shoot this in 20 minutes. “You’re going to do three jumps, and I’m going to cut it to look like one jump. All the bullets are going to miss, only one’s going to go in. So here, just follow what I’m saying, because we don’t have time. What cameras do we have? What’s on the A camera?” “A long lens.” “Oh yeah, that’s my camera. I’ll operate that. What’s on the B camera?” “Steady campaign.” “Leave it on steady cam. No chance, no time to fucking convert it.”
… and now the options are very limited. You’re very limited. Look at the sun. You’re going to see the sun not move. You see, that’s the point where the sun starts getting lost. I have to shoot this in 20 minutes. “You’re going to do three jumps, and I’m going to cut it to look like one jump. All the bullets are going to miss, only one’s going to go in. So here, just follow what I’m saying, because we don’t have time. What cameras do we have? What’s on the A camera?” “A long lens.” “Oh yeah, that’s my camera. I’ll operate that. What’s on the B camera?” “Steady campaign.” “Leave it on steady cam. No chance, no time to fucking convert it.”
At one point, I wanted to lower it so, “Just flip it upside down. We’ll flop it later. Give me the main camera. Okay, D.J., start running towards that bullets, and grab it, and pretend like it gets shot out of your hand.” I shoot it in a slow motion, but I’m showing you how it would look on the set. Okay, now the bullets are flying. Now I’m going to add those digitally, and I’m going to hold the bullets up to the light in each angle, so that they know what it’s supposed to look like, so they can match that. Otherwise it’ll look phony.
“Now, first jump, I just want you to commit to just jumping out, and just look at the barrel. Just look at the barrel on your hands, when you’re jumping, because that’ll look like you’re looking at the bullets. And just don’t even think about that you’re going to catch a bullet, don’t think about that you’re going to start turning. Just stretch your body out. Get a really graphic…” Look how cool that looks.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
And then the side view, shot this at the same time. You can already tell it’s going to look like bullets are missing, right?
And then the side view, shot this at the same time. You can already tell it’s going to look like bullets are missing, right?
Lex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Robert Rodriguez
Okay. Now I need this part, though. I need the part where he’s catching the bullet, this little window there. How am I going to do that? With a lens that long, it’s going to be all out of focus. It’s not going to be slow motion enough. He even knows me, and he’s like, “What the hell am I doing?” So, “Just lay on the pad, and rock up and down. And as you’re coming down, that’ll look like you’re falling, as I’m zooming in.” Because I’m operating the camera, and I’m cutting this in my head. And I’m saying, “Just do it again.” He’s like, “What is it?” “Rock up, and then as you go down, it’s going to look like you’re falling-“
Okay. Now I need this part, though. I need the part where he’s catching the bullet, this little window there. How am I going to do that? With a lens that long, it’s going to be all out of focus. It’s not going to be slow motion enough. He even knows me, and he’s like, “What the hell am I doing?” So, “Just lay on the pad, and rock up and down. And as you’re coming down, that’ll look like you’re falling, as I’m zooming in.” Because I’m operating the camera, and I’m cutting this in my head. And I’m saying, “Just do it again.” He’s like, “What is it?” “Rock up, and then as you go down, it’s going to look like you’re falling-“
Lex Fridman
Well done.
Well done.
Robert Rodriguez
… and make it look like the bullets. Okay? So now-
… and make it look like the bullets. Okay? So now-
Lex Fridman
Well done.
Well done.
Robert Rodriguez
… “you’ve caught a bullet. One went in.”
… “you’ve caught a bullet. One went in.”
Lex Fridman
Yep.
Yep.
Robert Rodriguez
“Now, second jump. When you do the next jump, as if we just passed those other moments, you’ve caught a bullet already. So now you’re going to snap it closed. And start your turn, it’s all you’ll get before you hit the pad.” Snap, turn, right? So like, “Okay, I want the cameras to feel like they’re dropping with him, that’ll give you more of the sensation. So let’s actually lower that steady cam shot, flip it upside down, and get a low angle.”
“Now, second jump. When you do the next jump, as if we just passed those other moments, you’ve caught a bullet already. So now you’re going to snap it closed. And start your turn, it’s all you’ll get before you hit the pad.” Snap, turn, right? So like, “Okay, I want the cameras to feel like they’re dropping with him, that’ll give you more of the sensation. So let’s actually lower that steady cam shot, flip it upside down, and get a low angle.”
See, I look and the sun’s right there, hasn’t gone behind the building yet. That, and then my camera, I lowered my camera down, and I got that.
Lex Fridman
Good angle, good angle.
Good angle, good angle.
Robert Rodriguez
Right? Okay, now, last jump. I bury a thin… I said, “Just bring me a thin mattress,” because I want him to do all the stunts. I don’t want a stunt guy. Because he does this, himself. He just did it in three jumps. But the audience won’t know. They’ll just be like, “We believe that this guy could do anything.”
Right? Okay, now, last jump. I bury a thin… I said, “Just bring me a thin mattress,” because I want him to do all the stunts. I don’t want a stunt guy. Because he does this, himself. He just did it in three jumps. But the audience won’t know. They’ll just be like, “We believe that this guy could do anything.”
“I want you just to finish by turning, and cocking the hammer back, and firing before you hit the ground.” I’ll give you two takes for that. Almost gets it there, and then we do a second take. Boom. Nah, the other one was probably a little better, even though you don’t really see it. I’ve got to go do everything now. I got to cut it. I got to add the sound effects myself, I got to put the music in myself, because music guys would just end up filling it with music and ruin it. Sound effects guys would just fill it full of sound effects, and ruin it. I want all the sound to drop out, so as he’s jumping, all you hear is the wind in his jacket, the clinking of the bullets as they’re bouncing off. So you have this breathless moment, no music, cut the music. And that moment you cut it, so that you’re like, “I wonder if he’s going to make it,” right?
So I go home, I cut it. Before I even have the visual effects in, I just cut it that night, because I cut my own sound effects. I cut my sound effects in. You can already tell it’s going to work. You can already see, even with the bullets not there, you can tell by the sound where they’re going to be. It’s going to work. I call them up and said, “Dude, this is going to work great.”
So then I go to the effects guys and I go, “Okay, there’s the bullet in this frame, and the next frame is here,” because I used to animate. “And the next frame, it’s there. Then it hits the barrel, and then it starts bouncing this way. I want it that clear so we can follow that a bullet was supposed to go in, and that it bounced way over there. And then this bullet bounced way over there.” And they send it back, and a bunch of bullets come down. “No, guys, listen to what I say. I’m going to show you again. I’m going to draw it to you again. Just the sound will play like there’s multiple bullets flying. I don’t need to see all those bullets, or the eye’s not going to know where to go.” So then they got it right-
Lex Fridman
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
Robert Rodriguez
… and then, check this out. I’m going to show it to you twice, because you’re not going to believe it.
… and then, check this out. I’m going to show it to you twice, because you’re not going to believe it.
Lex Fridman
Wow.
Wow.
Robert Rodriguez
Changes direction.
Changes direction.
Lex Fridman
Wow. Wow.
Wow. Wow.
Robert Rodriguez
Crazy. You know-
Crazy. You know-
Lex Fridman
Well done.
Well done.
Robert Rodriguez
You don’t even see that in a feature film, much less a TV show.
You don’t even see that in a feature film, much less a TV show.
Lex Fridman
Well done. Just as a director, well done.
Well done. Just as a director, well done.
Robert Rodriguez
Oh, thank you. Here. Just, one more time.
Oh, thank you. Here. Just, one more time.
Lex Fridman
Well done.
Well done.
Robert Rodriguez
And I’ll show you something you didn’t notice, both times.
And I’ll show you something you didn’t notice, both times.
Lex Fridman
Just amazing. Just those decisions coming together perfectly, it’s just-
Just amazing. Just those decisions coming together perfectly, it’s just-
Robert Rodriguez
Coming together-
Coming together-
Lex Fridman
… really well done.
… really well done.
Robert Rodriguez
… and like this, you got minutes.
… and like this, you got minutes.
Lex Fridman
Just moving the camera you decided to do, really worked really well. The bouncing of the mattress, whatever, that worked well.
Just moving the camera you decided to do, really worked really well. The bouncing of the mattress, whatever, that worked well.
Robert Rodriguez
And it’s not like you have this whole plan figured out ahead. You’re literally, in the moment, it’s coming through.
And it’s not like you have this whole plan figured out ahead. You’re literally, in the moment, it’s coming through.
Lex Fridman
But you’re seeing it, though-
But you’re seeing it, though-
Robert Rodriguez
It’s coming through you.
It’s coming through you.
Lex Fridman
… right? In your head.
… right? In your head.
Robert Rodriguez
I’m seeing it because I’ve done it enough. That’s why, you really want to learn all those jobs, because you come to a moment like this when the shit’s fucking hitting the fan, you got to know how to pull it out. You could have gotten all those people together, and they never would have figured that out. One person had to see it all the way through.
I’m seeing it because I’ve done it enough. That’s why, you really want to learn all those jobs, because you come to a moment like this when the shit’s fucking hitting the fan, you got to know how to pull it out. You could have gotten all those people together, and they never would have figured that out. One person had to see it all the way through.
Lex Fridman
You’re seeing the bullet, how it’s going to go in the result.
You’re seeing the bullet, how it’s going to go in the result.
Robert Rodriguez
I’ve done enough times to know that if you don’t do it just right, you’re going to lose the image. You’re not going to know where to follow, and you’ll miss the point.
I’ve done enough times to know that if you don’t do it just right, you’re going to lose the image. You’re not going to know where to follow, and you’ll miss the point.
Sound design
Lex Fridman
And also, yeah. I love that you’re thinking about where the eyes of the audience will go. I feel like too many people might think about some more general concept of a scene, versus the audience, where’s their eye?
And also, yeah. I love that you’re thinking about where the eyes of the audience will go. I feel like too many people might think about some more general concept of a scene, versus the audience, where’s their eye?
Robert Rodriguez
Where’s their eye? Well, you’re drawing it through sound, through picture. I’m going to show you, if you notice, without the sound. You don’t really see him click that thing back. Watch.
Where’s their eye? Well, you’re drawing it through sound, through picture. I’m going to show you, if you notice, without the sound. You don’t really see him click that thing back. Watch.
Lex Fridman
The sound is so essential here, right?
The sound is so essential here, right?
Robert Rodriguez
Watch this. You don’t really-
Watch this. You don’t really-
Lex Fridman
Right. I thought I saw it.
Right. I thought I saw it.
Robert Rodriguez
You think you saw it, but you hear it, and so you feel like you see it. But watch it. It’s actually, he’s already finished. You don’t really see him do it, but you swear you saw it in a close-up, because the sound is in a close-up. I put the sound in a close-up.
You think you saw it, but you hear it, and so you feel like you see it. But watch it. It’s actually, he’s already finished. You don’t really see him do it, but you swear you saw it in a close-up, because the sound is in a close-up. I put the sound in a close-up.
Now here’s another thing you didn’t notice. He hits this ground in the first shot. Watch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You didn’t even notice it, because I didn’t play the sound there. So if you don’t hear it, you don’t see it. And if you don’t see it, but you play a sound, you hear it. And you see it in your mind, right? So check that out now, with the sound on, and you’ll see both those parts play completely different now.
Right. Now you hear it. Right, see? Like, I know you can get away with that, because I know editing. And if I don’t play the sound, I can go ahead and milk that shot as long as I want. I’ll make him be in the air longer, even though he’s actually touching the ground, by not playing the sound. And that comes from, you said directing, but it’s not. Directing, people can direct and say, “This is what I want.” But to actually execute it, you need to be a craftsman. And to be a craftsman, you have to learn all those crafts.
Lex Fridman
And not just with the visuals, but with the sound.
And not just with the visuals, but with the sound.
Robert Rodriguez
With the sound, too.
With the sound, too.
Lex Fridman
Sound.
Sound.
Robert Rodriguez
Sound is so important. Sound is half the picture. And if you cut sound, you realize how important sound is. I would learn so much by doing those movies like Desperado, action movies where you go, “Wow, the sound. I can add an extra sound effect of an extra punch he didn’t even throw.” And it sounds like he’s beating the shit out of this guy. And you only need to see one or two hits, and you can hear five. You know where you can push your limits, because you’ve done it. You’ve done it, and you’ve got the experience.
Sound is so important. Sound is half the picture. And if you cut sound, you realize how important sound is. I would learn so much by doing those movies like Desperado, action movies where you go, “Wow, the sound. I can add an extra sound effect of an extra punch he didn’t even throw.” And it sounds like he’s beating the shit out of this guy. And you only need to see one or two hits, and you can hear five. You know where you can push your limits, because you’ve done it. You’ve done it, and you’ve got the experience.
Lex Fridman
It’s so amazing that you can use sound to make a person believe they saw something that wasn’t actually there on the screen.
It’s so amazing that you can use sound to make a person believe they saw something that wasn’t actually there on the screen.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, your brain fills it in.
Yeah, your brain fills it in.
Lex Fridman
That’s crazy.
That’s crazy.
Robert Rodriguez
And that’s why that’s so important, because if you don’t know that, you’ll be on the set shooting 10 takes of that. Because you’re like, “No, he didn’t, I didn’t see him click it back. I didn’t see him click it back. That’s really needed.” “I can do that with sound. Let’s just go. Let’s just keep moving.”
And that’s why that’s so important, because if you don’t know that, you’ll be on the set shooting 10 takes of that. Because you’re like, “No, he didn’t, I didn’t see him click it back. I didn’t see him click it back. That’s really needed.” “I can do that with sound. Let’s just go. Let’s just keep moving.”
Lex Fridman
And when you say sound close up, what does that mean? So like, is that-
And when you say sound close up, what does that mean? So like, is that-
Robert Rodriguez
So all the other sound dropped away, and all you hear is, like the mic’s right on that thing. So that you hear it so big in your ear, that you swear it was in close up too, but just the sound was close up.
So all the other sound dropped away, and all you hear is, like the mic’s right on that thing. So that you hear it so big in your ear, that you swear it was in close up too, but just the sound was close up.
Lex Fridman
Sorry, just to give an insight into that process of sound design. Are you listening to the sound, and just experiencing the feeling that creates, and then you’re like, “That’s just right”?
Sorry, just to give an insight into that process of sound design. Are you listening to the sound, and just experiencing the feeling that creates, and then you’re like, “That’s just right”?
Robert Rodriguez
I’m playing in post a lot, so I have a whole library of sound effects from all my movies. So I can pull up the gun sound we created for Bruce Willis in Sin City and use that, and mix it with Antonio’s gun from Desperado. I remember in Four Rooms, there’s a scene where the bellhop goes into the hotel room. Jams his key into it, and clicks it. And I used all gun sounds for the sounds of the key, instead of key sounds, because it wasn’t sound closeup enough. So if you listen to it, you hear… You hear all these sounds from a gun, to do the key, because that conveys the sound better. I’ll use different kinds of sounds that just have impact.
I’m playing in post a lot, so I have a whole library of sound effects from all my movies. So I can pull up the gun sound we created for Bruce Willis in Sin City and use that, and mix it with Antonio’s gun from Desperado. I remember in Four Rooms, there’s a scene where the bellhop goes into the hotel room. Jams his key into it, and clicks it. And I used all gun sounds for the sounds of the key, instead of key sounds, because it wasn’t sound closeup enough. So if you listen to it, you hear… You hear all these sounds from a gun, to do the key, because that conveys the sound better. I’ll use different kinds of sounds that just have impact.
Robert Rodriguez
Because it’s like that conveys the sound better. I’ll use different kinds of sounds that just have impact and put it somewhere like when he hits the ground. So I like playing with all that in post when I’m editing because it makes my editing job easier. Sometimes it’s like, oh, the sound is covering me. I don’t need to keep trying to massage this. The sound is actually selling it, and so I keep those sound effects into the final movie. So it’s just all part necessary. It’s like being a chef. You’re there cooking and you’re going, I know the recipe says this, but I think it really could use jalapenos and some extra pepper and maybe a little more salt and then needs an acid of some kind so I’m going to add some lemon juice.
Because it’s like that conveys the sound better. I’ll use different kinds of sounds that just have impact and put it somewhere like when he hits the ground. So I like playing with all that in post when I’m editing because it makes my editing job easier. Sometimes it’s like, oh, the sound is covering me. I don’t need to keep trying to massage this. The sound is actually selling it, and so I keep those sound effects into the final movie. So it’s just all part necessary. It’s like being a chef. You’re there cooking and you’re going, I know the recipe says this, but I think it really could use jalapenos and some extra pepper and maybe a little more salt and then needs an acid of some kind so I’m going to add some lemon juice.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you made me realize, I’m not sure where I saw that, but you were talking about making sort of almost home films for fun and I think you mentioned how exciting you can make a very mundane scene by just adding sound. I think there was-
Yeah, you made me realize, I’m not sure where I saw that, but you were talking about making sort of almost home films for fun and I think you mentioned how exciting you can make a very mundane scene by just adding sound. I think there was-
Robert Rodriguez
My little kid with his car. He had one of those little [inaudible 02:20:53] but I added a motor sound to it and it’s like, wow.
My little kid with his car. He had one of those little [inaudible 02:20:53] but I added a motor sound to it and it’s like, wow.
Lex Fridman
And it sounds realistic somehow. I don’t understand why my brain is doing that.
And it sounds realistic somehow. I don’t understand why my brain is doing that.
Robert Rodriguez
And then we’re playing with these little cars, filming ourselves playing with the cars. But then I replaced it with real car sounds [inaudible 02:21:08] and it just, your brain links the reality of the real thing and you realize how unimportant the visual is and how important the sound is actually. Sound is everything. That’s what I was really lucky in Mariachi that my camera didn’t work for sound because then I got really good sound that I would’ve gotten with a shitty mic out of frame. Because that’s the first telltale sign of a low budget movie is bad sound. Bad sound right away, you can already hear all this hiss and all this mic was too far and you’re like low budget movie. Before your eyes even tell you, the sound gives it away. Isn’t that amazing?
And then we’re playing with these little cars, filming ourselves playing with the cars. But then I replaced it with real car sounds [inaudible 02:21:08] and it just, your brain links the reality of the real thing and you realize how unimportant the visual is and how important the sound is actually. Sound is everything. That’s what I was really lucky in Mariachi that my camera didn’t work for sound because then I got really good sound that I would’ve gotten with a shitty mic out of frame. Because that’s the first telltale sign of a low budget movie is bad sound. Bad sound right away, you can already hear all this hiss and all this mic was too far and you’re like low budget movie. Before your eyes even tell you, the sound gives it away. Isn’t that amazing?
Deadlines
Lex Fridman
The audio is first. Sound is first really, even though it’s a visual medium. That’s so crazy. Just what’s the plan with the four action films? What are the next steps?
The audio is first. Sound is first really, even though it’s a visual medium. That’s so crazy. Just what’s the plan with the four action films? What are the next steps?
Robert Rodriguez
I’ll probably direct more than one because there’s already several that I want to do, but I’m going to direct at least one, but I’m producing all three, all four there at my studio.
I’ll probably direct more than one because there’s already several that I want to do, but I’m going to direct at least one, but I’m producing all three, all four there at my studio.
Lex Fridman
It does draw you in.
It does draw you in.
Robert Rodriguez
It draws you in and it makes you go now think of ideas you never would’ve thought of for mainly because it has a filter. Well, now I don’t have to think of all these ideas. I actually have, like me on that set, there’s only very few things I can actually come up with that are just action driven first, when they have a great character. You’ll get to it a lot faster with a filter. That’s the beauty of a filter is that now you’ve just shrunk your target and now you can hit that target and people are coming up with ideas because now they’ve got proximity and they’ve got a reason to come up with the idea and they’ve got a deadline, which is the best thing you can do is have a deadline because when you have a deadline, you can freaking move mountains.
It draws you in and it makes you go now think of ideas you never would’ve thought of for mainly because it has a filter. Well, now I don’t have to think of all these ideas. I actually have, like me on that set, there’s only very few things I can actually come up with that are just action driven first, when they have a great character. You’ll get to it a lot faster with a filter. That’s the beauty of a filter is that now you’ve just shrunk your target and now you can hit that target and people are coming up with ideas because now they’ve got proximity and they’ve got a reason to come up with the idea and they’ve got a deadline, which is the best thing you can do is have a deadline because when you have a deadline, you can freaking move mountains.
I had a Spy Kids in the theater every year, three years in a row not being pre-planned. Every year there was a Spy Kids. Now the third one was the biggest one, biggest cast, mostly green screen, video game and the first digital 3D movie ever. So getting visual effects companies to make that, we realized, oh, I shot it with two cameras. That means each effect shot has to be done twice from a different angle. So I went to the studio midway through that and said, “There’s not going to be a movie in the theaters in time. You’re going to have to push the date back.” And they said, “Okay, we’ve never heard you panic. We’ll push the date back for you.” They called back 10 minutes later. I was like, oh, thank God. Because it’s really complicated. I didn’t know it was going to be this complicated, but I wanted a challenge.
And they said, McDonald’s will sue us for $20 million if you move the date. You have to have a movie in the theater. We started shooting that movie in January of 2003. It was in 3D in theaters by July. That’s the fastest any effects movie has ever been done.
Lex Fridman
That’s insane.
That’s insane.
Robert Rodriguez
Because you had no choice. So deadline makes you do things and make decisions really quickly and it was the biggest of the three. Deadlines are good and it’s hard for us to self-impose a deadline sometimes because we know it’s a bullshit deadline and your brain knows it’s bullshit. But why do deadlines work? Because when the deadline’s coming up, what do you do?
Because you had no choice. So deadline makes you do things and make decisions really quickly and it was the biggest of the three. Deadlines are good and it’s hard for us to self-impose a deadline sometimes because we know it’s a bullshit deadline and your brain knows it’s bullshit. But why do deadlines work? Because when the deadline’s coming up, what do you do?
Lex Fridman
You start to put the pen to the paper and it starts just flowing.
You start to put the pen to the paper and it starts just flowing.
Robert Rodriguez
You have no choice. You have to get out of the way and open the pipe and it just comes out and you’re shocked. You’re like, oh my God, I should do everything at the last minute. Well, no, you don’t have to. But if you just learn how to open that pipe earlier, you wouldn’t be in a rush, but you had to get out of your way because your deadline was up and you had to come up with it. So many people are going to come up with all these extra great ideas at the last minute. It looks like everyone who’s already signing on because it’s cool they don’t know when the deadline is. They keep writing in saying, when is the deadline for this? And we say, well, when we close the funding in May, but we didn’t say when still. So I think that gives them a sense of a deadline like shit, it might be May 1st or maybe May 2nd, so we better get my idea going.
You have no choice. You have to get out of the way and open the pipe and it just comes out and you’re shocked. You’re like, oh my God, I should do everything at the last minute. Well, no, you don’t have to. But if you just learn how to open that pipe earlier, you wouldn’t be in a rush, but you had to get out of your way because your deadline was up and you had to come up with it. So many people are going to come up with all these extra great ideas at the last minute. It looks like everyone who’s already signing on because it’s cool they don’t know when the deadline is. They keep writing in saying, when is the deadline for this? And we say, well, when we close the funding in May, but we didn’t say when still. So I think that gives them a sense of a deadline like shit, it might be May 1st or maybe May 2nd, so we better get my idea going.
So I think that works in your favor because then you come up with stuff. And you’re going to feel so enriched by doing the idea that you’re not going to care if it gets picked or not. You’re going to love this idea so much it could turn into 10 other things you never even thought about. That’s the beauty of doing a project. Nothing ever goes to waste. So many ideas that were sitting around that I’d come up with and put a lot of time in are now like, oh, I can do these now. I know how to finish it now.
Alita: Battle Angel
Lex Fridman
I have to ask you about Alita. So you’ve done so many incredibly innovative projects. This is one of them. It turned out to be this visual masterpiece. There’s a bunch of complexity, beautiful complexity about it in that it started out as a film that James Cameron was supposed to make. And then you started to collaborate with him on it. And then these two, I would say brilliant directors, but with different styles like you were talking about. And so plus there’s the complexity of for people who haven’t seen it, you’re putting this artificial creation, this beautiful photorealistic, artificial creation of a human being into a real world. So you have to capture the performance, not just the motion, but the performance of this actor, put them into this, with the power of technology, into the real world. So convey all the emotion, the richness of the human face. Can you just speak to the process of bringing that world to life?
I have to ask you about Alita. So you’ve done so many incredibly innovative projects. This is one of them. It turned out to be this visual masterpiece. There’s a bunch of complexity, beautiful complexity about it in that it started out as a film that James Cameron was supposed to make. And then you started to collaborate with him on it. And then these two, I would say brilliant directors, but with different styles like you were talking about. And so plus there’s the complexity of for people who haven’t seen it, you’re putting this artificial creation, this beautiful photorealistic, artificial creation of a human being into a real world. So you have to capture the performance, not just the motion, but the performance of this actor, put them into this, with the power of technology, into the real world. So convey all the emotion, the richness of the human face. Can you just speak to the process of bringing that world to life?
Robert Rodriguez
Sure. I mean, one, I never would’ve attempted if it wasn’t Jim, because Jim has figured all of this out. So just to get you again, remember like I said, “Hey Jim, I’m operating a steady cam, what do you think of that?” “Well, I’m designing a new system.” That’s always how it is between him and I. So when I went to show him Desperado when it was done, he said, “You might not want to sit through, if you don’t want to sit through it while I’m watching it, it’s fine. Do you want to read any of my scriptments, my treatment scripts?” They’re called scriptments. Sure. He goes, “I have Spider-Man and I got Avatar.” So this was in ’95. He was showing me the scriptment for Avatar, which there was no technology for that. He was already doing stuff that didn’t exist. And I was reading it going, this is a great story.
Sure. I mean, one, I never would’ve attempted if it wasn’t Jim, because Jim has figured all of this out. So just to get you again, remember like I said, “Hey Jim, I’m operating a steady cam, what do you think of that?” “Well, I’m designing a new system.” That’s always how it is between him and I. So when I went to show him Desperado when it was done, he said, “You might not want to sit through, if you don’t want to sit through it while I’m watching it, it’s fine. Do you want to read any of my scriptments, my treatment scripts?” They’re called scriptments. Sure. He goes, “I have Spider-Man and I got Avatar.” So this was in ’95. He was showing me the scriptment for Avatar, which there was no technology for that. He was already doing stuff that didn’t exist. And I was reading it going, this is a great story.
He was like, I don’t know how the fuck he’s going to do this. It’s impossible. He’d just done Terminator 2 a few years before. It’s like that was state of the art. So Alita was going to be the movie he did first to prepare for Avatar. And so he had already done some prep work on it. It was based on a manga. But before they did that, they just started doing some tests for Avatar. And then as they got deeper into the test for Avatar to prepare for Alita, they went, I guess we’re making Avatar first. So Alita got kind of pushed to the side and they ended up doing it, which ended up becoming such a journey to make that movie, to get the technology to build it, to make it, because I remember visiting him on the set.
I mean I’ve known him so long. I was on the set of Titanic. That’s how long I’ve been around this guy. I was on the set of Titanic. I was on the set with Sarah Connor and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Furlong for the 3D ride he made for Universal a few years later. So I mean I feel like I’ve been around him a lot of his career.
And to be able to visit the set of Avatar and remember him showing me artwork they did, very photorealistic and he goes, “Curious to see how photo-real it will be when we’re finally done with this process.” Because you don’t get to see it until it’s almost done. And I was like, wow. He’s just shooting blind. Talk about me shooting Mariachi, not seeing the footage. He’s making this whole movie, not even knowing what the end result’s going to look like at all. Because you’re not going to know till you get there. And when you get there, if you don’t like it, there’s not a lot you can do.
So just seeing him do that and have that success really made it easier for me to do Alita because then it’s like, okay, we don’t know. Again, we don’t need to know. We know we’ll get there, but we don’t know how we’re going to do it. We’re going to start. And anything that I would come up with on this movie and his team, because he had all his Weta people working on it. He had them all working on it, too. I do a fast version of his process because a lot of live action. Avatar is mostly CG. I have live action sets. You have to come to my studio. I still have the whole Alita city in my back lot.
Lex Fridman
Well here, the Troublemaker studio?
Well here, the Troublemaker studio?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That’s where it was-
That’s where it was-
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, it was shot here. So when you go see my city, I built it very resourceful. This is weird. It looks just like the town from Mariachi, but it’s in my backyard. I’m like, it looks better than the town from Mariachi. 90,000. It’s the biggest, largest standing set in the country because sets are always mowed down for the next movie. But I just kept it there. So we usually to shoot it all the time for Mexico or South America or Europe or whatever. It’s seven streets and we added digitally above it. The ceilings are 20 feet high, you got to come see. You don’t believe that it’s here. It’s unbelievable.
Yeah, it was shot here. So when you go see my city, I built it very resourceful. This is weird. It looks just like the town from Mariachi, but it’s in my backyard. I’m like, it looks better than the town from Mariachi. 90,000. It’s the biggest, largest standing set in the country because sets are always mowed down for the next movie. But I just kept it there. So we usually to shoot it all the time for Mexico or South America or Europe or whatever. It’s seven streets and we added digitally above it. The ceilings are 20 feet high, you got to come see. You don’t believe that it’s here. It’s unbelievable.
Lex Fridman
Where is it north of Austin?
Where is it north of Austin?
Robert Rodriguez
It’s where the old airport was. So it’s like on 51st street. It’s really close to town.
It’s where the old airport was. So it’s like on 51st street. It’s really close to town.
Lex Fridman
I would love to visit.
I would love to visit.
Robert Rodriguez
You got to come see, you’re not going to believe it. All my props, all my stuff from all my movies. So people who are investing in Brass Knuckle, that’s why I say it’s like a Willy Wonka movie because they’re going to get to come check out all that stuff and be in proximity and see, oh, like me with that painter. It’s not a trick, it’s just doing it. Then you realize you can do it, too.
You got to come see, you’re not going to believe it. All my props, all my stuff from all my movies. So people who are investing in Brass Knuckle, that’s why I say it’s like a Willy Wonka movie because they’re going to get to come check out all that stuff and be in proximity and see, oh, like me with that painter. It’s not a trick, it’s just doing it. Then you realize you can do it, too.
But we thought let’s shoot mostly live action and we’ll just replace her. But we still have to figure her out. You have to cast the right actress. And when I saw Rosa Salazar, she was just amazing. She made me cry in audition for the first time. I was like, oh my god, this person has something. If we can capture even a fourth of her facial expression, it will bring so much life. And they got it one to one. And it really helped Jim on the next Avatar and Weta because they got to try on a bunch of things. That’s why the second Avatar wave water looks so much more refined than the first Avatar because of that middle step of doing Alita. It was training ground for them.
Lex Fridman
Can you actually educate me on the Weta process? Is this like a performance capture technology?
Can you actually educate me on the Weta process? Is this like a performance capture technology?
Robert Rodriguez
I have her in a suit for capturing her body movements but also facial capture. It’s a performance capture of all her performance, all her emoting, and we have witness cameras around everywhere to pick up where she is and everything else is real and we’re just replacing her but with someone even smaller in size, so you have to erase everything behind her. It’s like a bunch of technical things you to do, but the idea is to, whatever performance she gives, she’s such a great actress, is to capture all of that because then this character that doesn’t even exist will feel very emotional and you have to be tied to it. You have to feel its heart. She was the heartbeat of it.
I have her in a suit for capturing her body movements but also facial capture. It’s a performance capture of all her performance, all her emoting, and we have witness cameras around everywhere to pick up where she is and everything else is real and we’re just replacing her but with someone even smaller in size, so you have to erase everything behind her. It’s like a bunch of technical things you to do, but the idea is to, whatever performance she gives, she’s such a great actress, is to capture all of that because then this character that doesn’t even exist will feel very emotional and you have to be tied to it. You have to feel its heart. She was the heartbeat of it.
Lex Fridman
So she’s acting with all this.
So she’s acting with all this.
Robert Rodriguez
Acting with all that, but it just disappears, it’s not even there. We don’t notice that this is here. It’s like that. She can just perform through it.
Acting with all that, but it just disappears, it’s not even there. We don’t notice that this is here. It’s like that. She can just perform through it.
Lex Fridman
What were some interesting, unique, challenging things about you directing her performance in this kind of world?
What were some interesting, unique, challenging things about you directing her performance in this kind of world?
Robert Rodriguez
I just knew she had to be her. It was going to be just so easy with her. She’s just so great. Everything was just so real and everything was like she’s that character. She becomes that character who’s seeing this world for the first time. No special effects going to help you with that if the performance isn’t there. So it was all about getting the performance and casting the right actors. That’s why you get Christoph Waltz there and you get Jennifer Connelly, these masters are all on the set. Mahershala Ali, you’ve got an amazing cast of people. And that’s really the heart of it so that the technology kind of goes away.
I just knew she had to be her. It was going to be just so easy with her. She’s just so great. Everything was just so real and everything was like she’s that character. She becomes that character who’s seeing this world for the first time. No special effects going to help you with that if the performance isn’t there. So it was all about getting the performance and casting the right actors. That’s why you get Christoph Waltz there and you get Jennifer Connelly, these masters are all on the set. Mahershala Ali, you’ve got an amazing cast of people. And that’s really the heart of it so that the technology kind of goes away.
Lex Fridman
How hard is it to get the actors to act when the full world is not around you?
How hard is it to get the actors to act when the full world is not around you?
Robert Rodriguez
We put so much of the world around them. When you see the city, we put a blue screen way in the back to just make the city keep going. But we built the sets there, the town, we built the real set. So everything was very tangible and real and that way she had to fit into that world and be as real as that because if it was all done in CG, well then now you can fudge everything. But if you put her in a real environment, that’s a real challenge and that really helps them an Avatar because that whole place has created an Avatar. You could get away with a lot, but they wanted to commit to that kind of detail. And on the next Avatar, that’s why it just feels like you’re really there. It’s just stunning and you get there by having something to work on like this to take the technology to the next level.
We put so much of the world around them. When you see the city, we put a blue screen way in the back to just make the city keep going. But we built the sets there, the town, we built the real set. So everything was very tangible and real and that way she had to fit into that world and be as real as that because if it was all done in CG, well then now you can fudge everything. But if you put her in a real environment, that’s a real challenge and that really helps them an Avatar because that whole place has created an Avatar. You could get away with a lot, but they wanted to commit to that kind of detail. And on the next Avatar, that’s why it just feels like you’re really there. It’s just stunning and you get there by having something to work on like this to take the technology to the next level.
So it was cool to be able to help, knowing that you’re being helpful to him in his process and not just distracting him, but then also he liked that his artist had something else to work on besides just Avatar, to just work on something different to freshen up their perspective on things and methodology. And so yeah, that was a really exciting movie to work on, and that we got to shoot it here, a Jim Cameron movie here in Austin. That was the best, having him here and my whole crew who’s worked with me 25, 30 years, everyone had an extra spring in their step because they’re like, wow, we’re working on a Jim Cameron movie. I mean that’s just like a high bar of achievement for everybody working on it.
James Cameron
Lex Fridman
Since we talked about a few the directors, can you speak to the genius of James Cameron? What makes him special? You talked about some of the difference in your approach and his. He’s created some of the most special movies ever also. What’s behind that? What would you say is interesting about the way his creative mind works?
Since we talked about a few the directors, can you speak to the genius of James Cameron? What makes him special? You talked about some of the difference in your approach and his. He’s created some of the most special movies ever also. What’s behind that? What would you say is interesting about the way his creative mind works?
Robert Rodriguez
I think that any of those guys, George Lucas, him know John Lasseter when he did Pixar. It’s a mix of, and I always got really lucky. My first job was a photo shop because my dad had a friend who owned a photo shop. He said, your summer job. And I was 16, go work for my friend Mario. I go to Mario’s Photo shop and I’m developing pictures or develop photos from film. And he said, here, take this camera home. Gave me one of his cameras. Take this camera home and some film. I need you to learn how to use the camera so you can help me sell the cameras.
I think that any of those guys, George Lucas, him know John Lasseter when he did Pixar. It’s a mix of, and I always got really lucky. My first job was a photo shop because my dad had a friend who owned a photo shop. He said, your summer job. And I was 16, go work for my friend Mario. I go to Mario’s Photo shop and I’m developing pictures or develop photos from film. And he said, here, take this camera home. Gave me one of his cameras. Take this camera home and some film. I need you to learn how to use the camera so you can help me sell the cameras.
So I went home and I have a bunch of siblings, so well the stars are bed head taking all these pictures of everybody. I take it back and he looks at the pictures when he develops, he’s like, “Whoa, these are really creative. You’re a creative person.” So when sometimes people tell you something that you can’t unhear. And he goes, “That’s a gift. But now you need to become technical.” Because most creative people need technicians and technicians always need creative people because they’re not usually the same. You’re born with creativity. It’s against your nature to be technical, but you can learn if you apply yourself. And if you’re both technical and creative, you’ll be unstoppable. And I was like, stop. Wow. So here, I want you to learn zone photography and I want you to learn the technical part of it.
So that’s why I didn’t take a crew on Mariachi. I knew if I’m just the creative person and I need a crew to go actually technically make the movie, I’ll always need something. And when you want to really change your life, you want to get your I need list down to little is possible. Because if you’re like, well, I want to shoot my movie, but I need a cameraman and I need somebody who knows how to light it, your I need list keeps growing. That’s further and further and further you will be from what you need to accomplish.
So I kind of went down there without any help so remember that script analogy where the guy said, throw away three scripts. I said, no, I’m going to write three scripts and then shoot each one so I get better at each one of those jobs so I can learn to be technical. My technical capability was so little, I’m literally calling the guy on the phone. How do I use this camera? That’s how little I knew about it. But I knew by doing the job, I would learn. By being both, that’s really the key.
So Jim Cameron is like that. Jim Cameron, when you think of those guys, George Lucas, very technical and very creative. John Lasseter, very technical but very creative, Pixar. Jim Cameron, very technical, very creative. Putting those two things together is really what sets you apart from other technicians and other creative people. And it’s very, very powerful and a lot of creative people, again, it’s against their nature to be technical. They don’t want to do it. Make yourself do it. Read the manuals, take the lessons. It frees you up because then you can go do like I just showed you in that demo, you are able to now be a technical person and creative and then you’re unstoppable. He’s one of the best at it and he just knows how to craft a story. He’s very analytical as well.
We bounce off each other in a funny way. He goes, man, he came down to visit my studio before he did Alita. And he went, ” You only surround yourself with people who are like you. You exude creativity from every pore and so does everyone at your studio.” And I go, “Yeah, I didn’t hire them that way on purpose.” But I think if you’re not that way, you don’t belong there and you kind of leave. And then I went to his studio and there were a bunch of Jim Cameron’s there. They’re like, oh my God, they’re all very technical. You can’t get all kind of fuzzy with the logic or you can’t get really creative with physics or anything. They’re like, no, that’s not how it would work. It would be… And they’re just, wow, super great at what they do. Bar is sky-high and they’re all like that. Because yeah, you’re not like that, you can’t hang with those guys. You can’t hang with him very long.
Lex Fridman
I heard a story where the guitar case being a rocket launcher, where, to you, you create this real world where everything is possible, the magic feels real. And for James Cameron, he has to know how a guitar case would work that would actually be up to double as a rocket launcher.
I heard a story where the guitar case being a rocket launcher, where, to you, you create this real world where everything is possible, the magic feels real. And for James Cameron, he has to know how a guitar case would work that would actually be up to double as a rocket launcher.
Robert Rodriguez
When I showed him the trailer for Grindhouse and he sees the machine gun laying and all that, he just goes, “Whoa, that’s unbridled filmmaking from the id.” It makes sense only the second you’re watching it, not a second after, but the second you’re watching it, you believe it.
When I showed him the trailer for Grindhouse and he sees the machine gun laying and all that, he just goes, “Whoa, that’s unbridled filmmaking from the id.” It makes sense only the second you’re watching it, not a second after, but the second you’re watching it, you believe it.
But he’s really interesting in that he’s so prolific. I walked into his writing studio and it’d be like one of the tables, you have those papers there. Imagine them that thick, that thick, that thick, all script, script. What are these? He goes, “This is a whole space opera version of this movie. We’re not making that one.” I was like, he’s just cranking out all this stuff. Again, can I take this and go please? But yeah, we bounced off each other because I loved his analytical part of his brain. I’m not that analytical. I’m just kind of like, hey, I’m really creative feeling. I’m like, woo, I’ll go this way and then woo, I’ll go that way. And he likes that about me. But I think about things too much like you think about things like what makes a movie a billion dollar hit? What are the elements that you need?
And I’m going to analyze that and I’m going to make sure my movie does that. And he engineers a submarine that can break the world record. He engineers a movie that can break the world record. He has that engineering mind, but the creative part, that’s very rare. So that’s very rare and he’s capitalized on both. He had this submarine model like this big on his desk, the one that he broke the world record for. And just seeing it and knowing him and having kids and stuff and a wife and I’m like, weren’t you afraid going down there with something had happened? No, I wasn’t afraid. Why not? Because I designed the escape vehicle. Yeah, if I was any other bozo, I’d be afraid. But he designed this escape. That kind of confidence, that’s him. He just knows if some other bozo had designed the escape vehicle, I would be afraid. But total confidence because he did it.
Lex Fridman
The confidence of extreme competence. That’s brilliant.
The confidence of extreme competence. That’s brilliant.
Robert Rodriguez
Just to get you excited about how creative this stuff is, so Desperado was the only movie on the Sony lot being edited digitally. Not only was I editing on a computer, I was editing in my house, which in 1994 was just unheard of. So I’m there in my house and they made me cut in LA because at first I told the studio I want to edit Desperado myself. It’s important that I edit it. And they go, no you can’t. Why not? We’ve never had a director edit his own movie here, so we don’t want to set a precedent in case they thought it would give you too much power. I said, this is the power of precedent. I said, well you bought Mariachi and I edited that. So they said, “Okay, but you’re going to have to edit in LA so we can watch it. We don’t think you know what you’re doing. We saw the footage and the shots are really short. It’s too short.” I was like, shots are too short.
Just to get you excited about how creative this stuff is, so Desperado was the only movie on the Sony lot being edited digitally. Not only was I editing on a computer, I was editing in my house, which in 1994 was just unheard of. So I’m there in my house and they made me cut in LA because at first I told the studio I want to edit Desperado myself. It’s important that I edit it. And they go, no you can’t. Why not? We’ve never had a director edit his own movie here, so we don’t want to set a precedent in case they thought it would give you too much power. I said, this is the power of precedent. I said, well you bought Mariachi and I edited that. So they said, “Okay, but you’re going to have to edit in LA so we can watch it. We don’t think you know what you’re doing. We saw the footage and the shots are really short. It’s too short.” I was like, shots are too short.
Oh, because I was shooting my cuts. They’re used to seeing footage of Antonio walks into the bar and it’s going to be a dialogue scene. They expect the whole thing done from a wide shot. I would shoot the wide shot. He walks in, cut, move the camera, let’s get over here because we wanted, because I’m not going to use it for the rest of the scene. I know we’re going to get into coverage. I’ve already cut it. So I was like, huh, that’s interesting. So I cut the first scene. Have you ever seen Desperado? The first scene is the best scene. Steve Buscemi is telling a story. He’s talking about the myth of the mariachi. He’s doing all this crazy-
Lex Fridman
Oh yeah, great scene.
Oh yeah, great scene.
Robert Rodriguez
It’s crazy.
It’s crazy.
Lex Fridman
Great scene.
Great scene.
Robert Rodriguez
So then they come over. I say, “Hey, you come see my first scene.” So they come over to my house, they watch it. Okay, you know what you’re doing. They leave. But I was cutting Desperado in my house that I rented there and then we shot Dusk Till Dawn at the same time. So I was cutting Desperado four rooms and Dusk Till Dawn myself. I’m the editor. I don’t have an editing team other than the ones who import it into the machine. So Del Toro came over, Soderbergh came over. Can I borrow for it Schizopolis? Then no one had heard of somebody having an Avid in their living room. Jim comes over and he goes, “I hear you have an Avid in your living room.” And I go, “Yeah, come check it out.” Just like I roll out of bed. It’s like seems unremarkable because this is what you do right now.
So then they come over. I say, “Hey, you come see my first scene.” So they come over to my house, they watch it. Okay, you know what you’re doing. They leave. But I was cutting Desperado in my house that I rented there and then we shot Dusk Till Dawn at the same time. So I was cutting Desperado four rooms and Dusk Till Dawn myself. I’m the editor. I don’t have an editing team other than the ones who import it into the machine. So Del Toro came over, Soderbergh came over. Can I borrow for it Schizopolis? Then no one had heard of somebody having an Avid in their living room. Jim comes over and he goes, “I hear you have an Avid in your living room.” And I go, “Yeah, come check it out.” Just like I roll out of bed. It’s like seems unremarkable because this is what you do right now.
But back in ’94 it was unheard of. I’m cutting three movies at the same time myself. I roll out bed, I come here, I can cut Desperado, I can cut Dusk Till Dawn. Anyway, that’s it. I hate working with editors. When I was doing Terminator 2, they wouldn’t even let me put the Bad to the Bone song in Terminator 2 because they didn’t think it would work and I had to sneak into the edit room at night on the weekend to cut it in and then show them the next day. He is like, that’s your own movie. You can’t give that kind of power to people. He said, “I hate working with editors. I’m going to do this. I’m going to tear down a wall in my house. I’m going to put it in Avid. I’m going to cut my next movie.”
And he did. He got an Oscar for editing Titanic. He had two other editors, but now no one ever took him for a ride like that again. He edits on every movie. He has other editors, but he can go do his own cuts. When he shows me footage, he’s showing me himself on his own machine and it’s like, again, it gives you all those tools to be able to really find your vision that you’re looking for because you can’t always explain it to somebody because you don’t always know yourself. You kind of come up with it as you do the process.
Lex Fridman
Just a small tangent about the different software and the technologies involved. So you mentioned Avid, there’s Premiere Pro.
Just a small tangent about the different software and the technologies involved. So you mentioned Avid, there’s Premiere Pro.
Robert Rodriguez
Premiere was still in its early stages then. I think Soderbergh looked at it and it said, “Yeah, I can’t afford an Avid for this movie. I’m going to go do it.” Because I think he started cutting on Premiere, but I’m sure it’s all better now. I just have always used an Avid because I just always rent it back to the same production. I think I don’t have to buy a new one, but there’s lots of good I hear about all kinds of systems. I just use the same one.
Premiere was still in its early stages then. I think Soderbergh looked at it and it said, “Yeah, I can’t afford an Avid for this movie. I’m going to go do it.” Because I think he started cutting on Premiere, but I’m sure it’s all better now. I just have always used an Avid because I just always rent it back to the same production. I think I don’t have to buy a new one, but there’s lots of good I hear about all kinds of systems. I just use the same one.
Lex Fridman
I guess that’s the question I have for you. It’s just interesting for people. It’s very interesting to me just the details use Avid. What do you like? Multiple monitors? One monitor?
I guess that’s the question I have for you. It’s just interesting for people. It’s very interesting to me just the details use Avid. What do you like? Multiple monitors? One monitor?
Robert Rodriguez
I have a couple monitors and then one big monitor to watch it if I’m watching the scene back because the monitors are still a little wacky. I mean if I were to design my own system, I’d probably design it differently, but I’m literally, I’ve worked on that thing since ’94. I still don’t know all the shortcuts and all that shit. I still use it like my tape deck, play, rewind, pause and I can cut so fast with that just I don’t use the mouse for shortcuts. I’m just like-
I have a couple monitors and then one big monitor to watch it if I’m watching the scene back because the monitors are still a little wacky. I mean if I were to design my own system, I’d probably design it differently, but I’m literally, I’ve worked on that thing since ’94. I still don’t know all the shortcuts and all that shit. I still use it like my tape deck, play, rewind, pause and I can cut so fast with that just I don’t use the mouse for shortcuts. I’m just like-
Lex Fridman
So you found your way, preferred way, the workflow of using it and now you can sort of let go of the technical and then be creative?
So you found your way, preferred way, the workflow of using it and now you can sort of let go of the technical and then be creative?
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, just be creative. It’s just a tool. It’s just a tool and it’s like it doesn’t matter which system it is. It’s like if you can get it to work for you, great. There’s a lot of problems I have with it that I know are probably fixed on another system, but that they’ll have a whole other set of problems. So it’s like, well, why bother with that? There’s limitations I think that it has that would need to be fixed but not for what I’m doing. I mean, I can still do what I need.
Yeah, just be creative. It’s just a tool. It’s just a tool and it’s like it doesn’t matter which system it is. It’s like if you can get it to work for you, great. There’s a lot of problems I have with it that I know are probably fixed on another system, but that they’ll have a whole other set of problems. So it’s like, well, why bother with that? There’s limitations I think that it has that would need to be fixed but not for what I’m doing. I mean, I can still do what I need.
Lex Fridman
It feels like part of the artistry is every system has limitations and you learn how to work around those limitations. I mean that’s every single thing.
It feels like part of the artistry is every system has limitations and you learn how to work around those limitations. I mean that’s every single thing.
Robert Rodriguez
Oh, yeah. My first VCRs, those things were, I was always known for taking what little basic equipment and milking the shit out of it, pushing the boundaries of what it can do. And now it’s flipped. Now you’re working on a program and you can spend 10 years on this thing and you’re scratching the surface of what it’s capable of. It’s totally flipped the other way. I’m not milking anything anymore. I’m barely getting the smallest capability of it because I would have to spend a lot of time to figure out all the stuff that it can possibly do, and I’m sure it’s all great, fantastic stuff, but what a different world than when I grew up where it was like, okay, let me splice these two sound things together and it was so hard to get it to do.
Oh, yeah. My first VCRs, those things were, I was always known for taking what little basic equipment and milking the shit out of it, pushing the boundaries of what it can do. And now it’s flipped. Now you’re working on a program and you can spend 10 years on this thing and you’re scratching the surface of what it’s capable of. It’s totally flipped the other way. I’m not milking anything anymore. I’m barely getting the smallest capability of it because I would have to spend a lot of time to figure out all the stuff that it can possibly do, and I’m sure it’s all great, fantastic stuff, but what a different world than when I grew up where it was like, okay, let me splice these two sound things together and it was so hard to get it to do.
People would be like, you got that movie out of that equipment? Where now it’s the other way around. It’s like all this equipment is great. So when people come to me and say, “Well, I’ve only got this camera.” I was like, “That camera is 10 times better than anything I had for my first 15 years of filmmaking.” You have no complaints. This is like you can just start now and just start making stuff.
Lex Fridman
I have a lot of friends who are huge fans of your movies, so one of them asked me that I absolutely must ask you, do you know if there’s sequel of Alita coming?
I have a lot of friends who are huge fans of your movies, so one of them asked me that I absolutely must ask you, do you know if there’s sequel of Alita coming?
Robert Rodriguez
We’re working on it. We’re definitely working on it. Jim and I both want to make it. That’s usually when we meet, we talk about it. I gave him something to read. He’s a little busy with his Avatar movie, but I’m going to see him again soon and we’ll see where it’s at. But we would love to make another one. We have ideas on how to do it because it was always built to be a trilogy and he sees that there’s a lot of love for it. It was just weird because it was Fox movie and they got bought by Disney and then so they weren’t really making Fox movies because they had enough work with their Disney movies, but now they’re starting to make some Fox movies like they did Deadpool and some Fox movies are starting to get made, so time might be right for us to come back and do Alita.
We’re working on it. We’re definitely working on it. Jim and I both want to make it. That’s usually when we meet, we talk about it. I gave him something to read. He’s a little busy with his Avatar movie, but I’m going to see him again soon and we’ll see where it’s at. But we would love to make another one. We have ideas on how to do it because it was always built to be a trilogy and he sees that there’s a lot of love for it. It was just weird because it was Fox movie and they got bought by Disney and then so they weren’t really making Fox movies because they had enough work with their Disney movies, but now they’re starting to make some Fox movies like they did Deadpool and some Fox movies are starting to get made, so time might be right for us to come back and do Alita.
Lex Fridman
No, I hope you do soon. But I mean you do so many different kinds of movies, that’s a whole different kind of puzzle, right?
No, I hope you do soon. But I mean you do so many different kinds of movies, that’s a whole different kind of puzzle, right?
Robert Rodriguez
No, but it’s not a bad one. It’s a good one. It’s a cool, it’s one of the few. Usually I made kids’ family kids movies or R-rated action horror movies and that was the first time I got to do a PG-13 movie, which was kind of like, it had a lot of action but it was for families could watch it too and it was kind of like the best of all worlds.
No, but it’s not a bad one. It’s a good one. It’s a cool, it’s one of the few. Usually I made kids’ family kids movies or R-rated action horror movies and that was the first time I got to do a PG-13 movie, which was kind of like, it had a lot of action but it was for families could watch it too and it was kind of like the best of all worlds.
Sin City
Lex Fridman
Have to ask you about Sin City, one of my favorite films of all time. It was a visually stunning world. What are some maybe interesting detailed aspects about you creating that world?
Have to ask you about Sin City, one of my favorite films of all time. It was a visually stunning world. What are some maybe interesting detailed aspects about you creating that world?
Robert Rodriguez
This is why you just got to follow your nose and go do something. Jim and I were both into 3D early on. I visited his set for the Terminator 3D ride. Dusk Till Dawn, I wanted to be 3D. Actually when they got to the bar, if you’ve watched from that point on and everything’s kind of set up for 3D, everything was shooting into the camera and all this, but the cameras they had for 3D and film were those old shitty ones that were so bad that I went, “Okay, we can’t do it.” But I really wanted people to have to put on glasses when they got into the bar and it was going to turn into a 3D different movie. I got to do that on Spy Kids 3D.
This is why you just got to follow your nose and go do something. Jim and I were both into 3D early on. I visited his set for the Terminator 3D ride. Dusk Till Dawn, I wanted to be 3D. Actually when they got to the bar, if you’ve watched from that point on and everything’s kind of set up for 3D, everything was shooting into the camera and all this, but the cameras they had for 3D and film were those old shitty ones that were so bad that I went, “Okay, we can’t do it.” But I really wanted people to have to put on glasses when they got into the bar and it was going to turn into a 3D different movie. I got to do that on Spy Kids 3D.
So when I did Spy Kids 3D, I thought, oh, if I get Jim’s cameras that he’s done for these underwater 3D documentaries, I can make the first digital 3D film for theaters. And so I did and it seemed like the easiest way was to utilize that when you put on the glasses, when you go into a game world, so there’s a green screen and we shot all the actors on green screen for all the game stuff and we could do a lot of 3D stuff coming at kids’ faces when they’re reaching. My 3D is not like the kind they have in theaters where it’s very polite. Mine’s like theme park 3D where kids aren’t doing like that trying to grab, that’s why it was such a big hit. Nobody does 3D like that, but I wanted that. I wanted shit falling in people’s laps. So you go, okay, this is why I’m wearing the glasses. I’m wondering why. And when I went to go make my next movie, so this is how crazy this is, we shot Spy Kids 3D, remember actually how fast they came out.
That was in the summer of 2003. Few months later, Once Upon a Time in Mexico came out. Two number one movies, both were finishing trilogies of mine and each one starred Antonio, Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin. When I was editing those at the same time, you’d be like, whoa, one movie. They’re killing people and the other ones are with the kids going like, yay, family. So it was really fun. It’s easier to do very different things than to do two action movies or two family movies at the same time. But I was like, okay, what’s my next movie going to be? Oh, shit, how crazy is this? Okay, so Antonio is on the set. I’m going to shoot him out in half a day for Spy Kids 3D. He’s only in the last scene on the green screen. Shoot him to lunch. Okay, now go away, put on your Desperado outfit because we owed some shots for Once upon a Time in Mexico on the green screen.
He finished two trilogies in the same day. That’s got to be a first, if ever. No one’s ever finished two trilogies in the same day and it’s just kismet. It is just how it happened to happen that day was just luck or the universe or whatever. But I needed to make up something new now. So I was looking through my bookshelves of inspiration and I picked up my Sin City books, which I’ve had. I used to be a cartoonist and I always loved how I drew that. Every time I’d see a different edition, I’d buy it, go home and go, oh, I already have this. I got three copies of this already. It would just always grab me by the throat and I liked that he was a writer/director in a way because he not just wrote comic, but he drew it too. A lot of times it’s a different writer or a different comic artist. He’s like a real kinship. This is someone who writes and directs his own thing.
But I was looking at it and I went, oh, shit, I know how to do this now. I just did it on the green screen. If I shoot this on green screen, the actors on green screen, I can make the backgrounds look just like this and I can contrast up the actors and I could get this very graphic look, which sometimes for a window it’s just a white box. So it’s even got a sliding scale for budget. If I run out of money, just put the actors in black and white, just put a white dot behind them for street light and that looks just like the book. So I’m going to bring the book to life.
So I’ll show you how fast we go from development at Troublemaker. It was October. Once Upon a Time in Mexico had come out. I was like, oh, shit, I know how to do this now. Sin City, I’m going to do a test. Went to my green screen here in my studio, you’ll see my green screen where I shot all these movies and I shot my sister, myself, put it black and white. Looks just like the comic, but it’s moving. So I call a comic book artist friend of mine, Mike Allred, and I said, “Do you have Frank Miller’s number?” And he goes, “Yeah, I do.” Okay, I’m going to call him up, so I called Frank Miller. “Hey, it’s Robert Rodriguez, I have a test I’m going to show you for Sin City. I’m going to be in New York tomorrow.” He’s like, “Tomorrow? Okay, yeah, sure, come by. Meet me at this bar.” Okay, book a flight for New York. I didn’t have a flight.
I fly up there, have my laptop just like this. I go to the bar, I show him what looks like an image from his comic and it starts moving. And he’s like, “Wow, how did you do that?” I said, “I got my own studio,” and all this. And then I started telling, man, let’s make this movie because no one had the rights to it. He never gave the rights to a studio. A lot of comics, oh, Warner Brothers bought this a while back or then you got to go through the studio. He still owned his own rights. In fact, he’d gotten burned by Hollywood so many times as a screenwriter that he said, “Fuck it, I’m going to go back and draw a comic that’s so raw that can never be made into a movie.” So of course I call him, “Hey, let’s make a great movie.”
I show him how we can do it and I go, I know you don’t know me and I have to earn your trust for you to give me your baby, but we can make this right away. And he’s all excited for about two seconds and then he goes, ” Oh no. Then we got to write a script and then the studio’s going to have notes.” All that shit he’s been through before and it’s not like that. I have a whole different setup. I got my own studio in Austin. This is how it’s going to be. If you like this idea, you’re not going to have to take any risk. Let me take all the risk.
I’m going to go write the script myself next month. It’s going to be unremarkable because I’m going to write it right out of your book. I’m going to edit through the stories down. I’m going to just take stuff out really. Might add a few things to connect it, but I’ll write the script in December myself, no money involved. Then we’ll call some actor friends of mine. We’ll have them come to my green screen. We’ll shoot the opening scene as a test, but it’s also the opening scene. I’ll do the effects myself. Do the sound, do the music. I’ll do fake credits. We’ll watch it together. If you like what you see, we’ll make the movie. You give me the rights then. If you don’t like it, keep it. It’s a short film to show your friends. It’s be really cool. So he’s like, all right. There’s nothing on him to do. It’s all on me.
I write the script in December. January, Josh Hartnett, Marley Shelton come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence.
Lex Fridman
Incredible opening sequence.
Incredible opening sequence.
Robert Rodriguez
Record his voiceover, right then in my little voiceover booth. Marley Shelton comes up. Why did I hire him to kill me? I don’t know. Let’s go ask Frank. He’s right here. Let’s go ask Frank. I want to know myself. So he tells her and he’s like, I want to do this movie already. I was like, “I tell you Frank, I used to be a cartoonist. It’s the same thing.” You’re already a director. You’re just using a pen instead of a camera. The performances you get out of your paper actors are phenomenal. The shots you do are beyond any DPs ever done. And the visual look, we’ve never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie and they would miss the point that the visual is half of it. I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone’s seen because that’s how it reads when I read the book.
Record his voiceover, right then in my little voiceover booth. Marley Shelton comes up. Why did I hire him to kill me? I don’t know. Let’s go ask Frank. He’s right here. Let’s go ask Frank. I want to know myself. So he tells her and he’s like, I want to do this movie already. I was like, “I tell you Frank, I used to be a cartoonist. It’s the same thing.” You’re already a director. You’re just using a pen instead of a camera. The performances you get out of your paper actors are phenomenal. The shots you do are beyond any DPs ever done. And the visual look, we’ve never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie and they would miss the point that the visual is half of it. I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone’s seen because that’s how it reads when I read the book.
It’s like, if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. In fact, I asked him, do you ever feel like directing any of these short ones? I thought about directing The Big Fat Kill, maybe as a short film. You should come direct that one. Shit, you should direct all of them with me because I’m really copying it right out of a book. You should direct it with me. All right, let’s go.
So then January, okay, so remember I met him in November. I wrote it in December. January, we shoot the test. Took me a couple of weeks to do the effects. He loves it. I make a meeting with Bruce Willis, show it to Bruce Willis. What’s so cool about doing that opening scene is that any actor I show it to now, I show him the book, which is awesome. You’d be playing this character, but look at this test. Let me show you the book, what it looked like before I turn this test into a test. Watches it, Josh Harnett, voiceover, music, titles come on. First name on the screen, Bruce Willis. And I go, “Hey look, you’re in the credits. You have to do it now.” Manifesting it, right? He’s like, “Shit man, this is great. I’m in.” Go get everyone else from that was just easy to get. And we were filming the movie. So February, right…
Robert Rodriguez
So February, building the few little sets we had, like the bar, I told Frank, “We don’t need to build a bar, but I’m going to go ahead and build a bar so we have a place to go have script meetings. Everything else will be green screen. We’ll build fake steps and things out of green.” So we’re doing that and I’m casting the first one. We’re shooting the movie by March, the beginning of March. And I remember because my son was born March 3rd and I was in LA for his birth because I was also recording the orchestra for the score I wrote somehow in the past few months for Kill Bill two. That’s how much stuff was going on.
So February, building the few little sets we had, like the bar, I told Frank, “We don’t need to build a bar, but I’m going to go ahead and build a bar so we have a place to go have script meetings. Everything else will be green screen. We’ll build fake steps and things out of green.” So we’re doing that and I’m casting the first one. We’re shooting the movie by March, the beginning of March. And I remember because my son was born March 3rd and I was in LA for his birth because I was also recording the orchestra for the score I wrote somehow in the past few months for Kill Bill two. That’s how much stuff was going on.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
That’s like when you just let it flow, you’re just riding the wave, you’re not doing any of that. So by staying in that urgent, there’s always, the deadlines are just pushing you to create stuff. And we shot the movie so fast, the record time. Now, not only that, I shot a whole other movie that year. I shot The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl with Kids that came out two months after Sin City the next year. Within less than a year, Sin City was out.
That’s like when you just let it flow, you’re just riding the wave, you’re not doing any of that. So by staying in that urgent, there’s always, the deadlines are just pushing you to create stuff. And we shot the movie so fast, the record time. Now, not only that, I shot a whole other movie that year. I shot The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl with Kids that came out two months after Sin City the next year. Within less than a year, Sin City was out.
Lex Fridman
You’re shooting that in parallel with Sin City. That’s hilarious.
You’re shooting that in parallel with Sin City. That’s hilarious.
Robert Rodriguez
Is that… Yeah. Sometimes we’d be shooting with the kids and then the afternoon Rudger Hauer would come and some of the Sin City girls to finish shooting stuff that we needed to film. It was just insane how fast we had to move. I was doing it, I was editing. I just edited it. And then I would scan the artwork into the computer and I would edit the storyboards with the sound effects and I would do the voiceover. I would imitate Mickey and I would imitate Bruce and lay out how fast it was going to move. And you were like, “Wow.” So now we have a template with the real drawings and the lighting on how we’re going to do it. It was funny because I can do a pretty good Bruce Willis because I’ve known his career for so long. We were doing his voiceover, and he would hear my guide voice for the timing and he’d be like, “Is that me or is that you? Can’t tell.” It’s like, “Oh, that one was me, but just do that.” He’s like, “All right, man. It sounds like me.”
Is that… Yeah. Sometimes we’d be shooting with the kids and then the afternoon Rudger Hauer would come and some of the Sin City girls to finish shooting stuff that we needed to film. It was just insane how fast we had to move. I was doing it, I was editing. I just edited it. And then I would scan the artwork into the computer and I would edit the storyboards with the sound effects and I would do the voiceover. I would imitate Mickey and I would imitate Bruce and lay out how fast it was going to move. And you were like, “Wow.” So now we have a template with the real drawings and the lighting on how we’re going to do it. It was funny because I can do a pretty good Bruce Willis because I’ve known his career for so long. We were doing his voiceover, and he would hear my guide voice for the timing and he’d be like, “Is that me or is that you? Can’t tell.” It’s like, “Oh, that one was me, but just do that.” He’s like, “All right, man. It sounds like me.”
Lex Fridman
First of all, why haven’t films like that been made?
First of all, why haven’t films like that been made?
Robert Rodriguez
Well, it’s a very specific look because it went to that comic. The first piece of music I wrote for that was the main title and I called it Descent. I wanted the notes to descend because it felt like you were descending into this dark world and you don’t come out till the end of the movie. You’re just in this world where all these layers of unreality… Water doesn’t photograph that way. Snow doesn’t photo… But it’s there and you’re seeing, you’re seeing the actors, so you’re just really, it’s a dream world.
Well, it’s a very specific look because it went to that comic. The first piece of music I wrote for that was the main title and I called it Descent. I wanted the notes to descend because it felt like you were descending into this dark world and you don’t come out till the end of the movie. You’re just in this world where all these layers of unreality… Water doesn’t photograph that way. Snow doesn’t photo… But it’s there and you’re seeing, you’re seeing the actors, so you’re just really, it’s a dream world.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
So I was really into it and I did test for the most difficult shots first. Like, how do I get his tape to glow in the dark like in the comics so it’s still in the shadow? And I realized, oh, use fluorescent tape and a fluorescent light. That way I can keep it, we can still key it. I started just doing my own visual effects like that early on because I knew technology was changing so fast that I would need to just know how to do it like a magician. Shooting digital, nobody wanted to touch digital back then. DPs were all afraid of digital. They didn’t want to have to learn something new.
So I was really into it and I did test for the most difficult shots first. Like, how do I get his tape to glow in the dark like in the comics so it’s still in the shadow? And I realized, oh, use fluorescent tape and a fluorescent light. That way I can keep it, we can still key it. I started just doing my own visual effects like that early on because I knew technology was changing so fast that I would need to just know how to do it like a magician. Shooting digital, nobody wanted to touch digital back then. DPs were all afraid of digital. They didn’t want to have to learn something new.
Lex Fridman
That’s so funny.
That’s so funny.
Robert Rodriguez
So I had to DP it. So me photographing it, I’m like so [inaudible 02:57:58] to cut because to light, you have to have that light out frame right now. But I could bring the lights in right here as long as they’re not crossing it. I’m just going to take it out of the green anyway so I could have the coolest lighting on everybody. Cool edge lights. You could have an edge light back here, an edge light back here, a fill light here. [inaudible 02:58:16] going to erase him. I just take him out.
So I had to DP it. So me photographing it, I’m like so [inaudible 02:57:58] to cut because to light, you have to have that light out frame right now. But I could bring the lights in right here as long as they’re not crossing it. I’m just going to take it out of the green anyway so I could have the coolest lighting on everybody. Cool edge lights. You could have an edge light back here, an edge light back here, a fill light here. [inaudible 02:58:16] going to erase him. I just take him out.
Lex Fridman
Can you educate me and people curious about this, what is the power of light when you’re telling a story, when you’re creating a feeling, an experience? What’s the artistry of that?
Can you educate me and people curious about this, what is the power of light when you’re telling a story, when you’re creating a feeling, an experience? What’s the artistry of that?
Robert Rodriguez
Well, if you look at the drawings too, sometimes it’s the absence of light.
Well, if you look at the drawings too, sometimes it’s the absence of light.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, darkness. Yeah.
Yeah, darkness. Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
You would see this face, but then this would be completely black, but you would still see my eye, which is impossible, right? But you believe it when you see it because it’s there. So things like that were a lot of the tricks I tried first because I liked that about it. It’s like you have a guy completely back lit so there’s no light on his face, but yet his glasses are glowing white.
You would see this face, but then this would be completely black, but you would still see my eye, which is impossible, right? But you believe it when you see it because it’s there. So things like that were a lot of the tricks I tried first because I liked that about it. It’s like you have a guy completely back lit so there’s no light on his face, but yet his glasses are glowing white.
So we’d put fluorescent tape in there, hit that with a light, then we could turn it white later. The black and white really helps. And then just upping the contrast. But it’s just something that you have a feeling for, but you’re able to try it. In fact, when I took it to George Lucas, George Lucas said this to me early on because we were the only guys shooting digital. He said, “Man, it’s so good you live in Austin. That’s why I’m in Marin County. Because when you live outside of this box of LA, Hollywood, you think outside of the box automatically. You’re just going to stumble upon innovations.” And he was right. It was like, “Yeah, why aren’t we shooting digital? Let’s shoot digital. Why aren’t we shooting digital 3D? Let’s do that. Why don’t we just use green screen for the background?” You just start innovating because you’re away from any [inaudible 02:59:31] saying, “Hey, you can’t do it that way.”
Which they would say if I was in LA. So we just came up with a whole other method. So I took him to Sin City to check out the first thing I was going to show at Comic-Con. He said, “Now this will really show people what digital is capable of. This really shows how avant-garde you can get with that shit. That you could never have done that on film.” And so by me versing myself in that technology early, I was able to make a movie like that and then everyone had to play catch-up. So you should always just follow your, that’s why people say, “Don’t use those curtains. That’s not going to work.” Just blow past those guys. Go innovate your own thing because sometimes not knowing is better. Being too naive to… “Don’t you know you shouldn’t have been able to make that movie that way?” People would say that all that time. “How did you make Mariachi for $7,000? You know it’s impossible.” It’s like, why do you keep using that word? Because it can’t be impossible if I did it, because I’m not that smart. And it’s like saying, “How did you get to the top of Mount Everest? It’s impossible. Well, I just kept walking. I didn’t realize it was at a slope. I didn’t really realize it was going up that high.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You’ve talked about a big part of your approach to filmmaking, to life is manifesting, manifesting the reality you want. In fact, I should comment. I would love to ask you about manifesting. You asked me at the beginning of this conversation, “Do you consider yourself a creative person?” I should reflect on that because I was very uncomfortable answering that.
Yeah. You’ve talked about a big part of your approach to filmmaking, to life is manifesting, manifesting the reality you want. In fact, I should comment. I would love to ask you about manifesting. You asked me at the beginning of this conversation, “Do you consider yourself a creative person?” I should reflect on that because I was very uncomfortable answering that.
Manifesting
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. I noticed a little bit. And I was like, I’m going to free you up so that you’re never uncomfortable again.
Yeah. I noticed a little bit. And I was like, I’m going to free you up so that you’re never uncomfortable again.
Lex Fridman
It’s scary to say that about yourself, to allow yourself-
It’s scary to say that about yourself, to allow yourself-
Robert Rodriguez
Because you think there’s a lot of people that go, “Well, you’re not an artist. You’re not a creative.” But you’re not saying, “I’m an artist. I’m saying I’m a creative person.” But that’s an artist too, isn’t it? Artist isn’t necessarily a guy with the French mustache and the funny hat. That’s not necessarily what an art… Artists are regular people.
Because you think there’s a lot of people that go, “Well, you’re not an artist. You’re not a creative.” But you’re not saying, “I’m an artist. I’m saying I’m a creative person.” But that’s an artist too, isn’t it? Artist isn’t necessarily a guy with the French mustache and the funny hat. That’s not necessarily what an art… Artists are regular people.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
And regular people relate to art that’s imperfect. If you can make art that’s perfect, no one will relate to it. So when you think about it like that, you go, “Well, I can make imperfect art. So yeah, I am an artist.” And if you have doubt, you’re an artist. That’s an artist. Real artists always wonder if they’re good enough. So you are an artist. Just by the fact that you were uncomfortable saying it, you’re a real artist.
And regular people relate to art that’s imperfect. If you can make art that’s perfect, no one will relate to it. So when you think about it like that, you go, “Well, I can make imperfect art. So yeah, I am an artist.” And if you have doubt, you’re an artist. That’s an artist. Real artists always wonder if they’re good enough. So you are an artist. Just by the fact that you were uncomfortable saying it, you’re a real artist.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And there’s some degree, I don’t know if you could speak to this, but there’s a fear of creating shitty things. I’ve created a lot of really shitty things in my life and I always feels like that’s really important to do.
Yeah. And there’s some degree, I don’t know if you could speak to this, but there’s a fear of creating shitty things. I’ve created a lot of really shitty things in my life and I always feels like that’s really important to do.
Robert Rodriguez
Okay. But you’re judging something that you have no business judging.
Okay. But you’re judging something that you have no business judging.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Robert Rodriguez
I have so many people, that’s why I like making movies on purpose that have less money and less time. On purpose. The biggest movie I said of all time on Netflix is We Can Be Heroes. I told them, “I don’t want to spend more than $50 million. I know you all want to give me 80, but I want to be a hero and come in at 50 because one, it’ll make it better. And then two, you’ll make three of them instead of just one. I don’t want to just go spend the farm.” And not many filmmakers will do that. Don’t try to get as much money as they can. But when you’re spending less, it’s a win-win situation. You have more creative freedom because they’re going to leave you alone. You can do whatever you want.
I have so many people, that’s why I like making movies on purpose that have less money and less time. On purpose. The biggest movie I said of all time on Netflix is We Can Be Heroes. I told them, “I don’t want to spend more than $50 million. I know you all want to give me 80, but I want to be a hero and come in at 50 because one, it’ll make it better. And then two, you’ll make three of them instead of just one. I don’t want to just go spend the farm.” And not many filmmakers will do that. Don’t try to get as much money as they can. But when you’re spending less, it’s a win-win situation. You have more creative freedom because they’re going to leave you alone. You can do whatever you want.
So I like the creative limitations that come from less money. That’s why I like Brass Knuckle Films. We’re going to make them for less so that they are better, not to make them shitty. So many people have come up to me and said, “You know what part I love in your movie?” And they’ll tell me some scene. And I’m like,” Oh, well, that’s because we ran out of sun and we had to do that jump with just him jumping on a pad three times,” or whatever it is. It’s something that you fumbled together and that’s what they’re drawn to. They’re drawn to that imperfect thing. And so I wouldn’t judge it because somebody, if you called your movie, that’s like John Carpenter saying, “Yeah, nobody liked The Thing and it’s a shitty movie and everyone hated it, so it must not be good.” Then 10 years later, it’s a masterpiece.
So don’t judge it because words we use on ourselves are very powerful. So if you say, “Well, I’m kind of an artist sometimes. I make a lot of shitty stuff,” well, that’s going to be your lot in life. I’m in pretty good shape for a director. It’s not because I’m operating the camera, because I work out. But I always hated working out. I was not into sports. I was a filmmaker. I was a cartoonist in high school. I was really tall. They would say, “Come work, come be in our team. It’s a small school. We need you.” And I’m like, “I don’t know how to play any of these things. I’m an artist.” There’s a line in The Faculty that was my line to coaches when they would say, “You got to come run with everybody.” I would say, “I don’t think a person should run unless he’s being chased.” I gave that to-
Lex Fridman
Good line.
Good line.
Robert Rodriguez
The Elijah Wood character because that’s the guy I identified with. He’s there with this camera and that was me. So I hated it. And then because I was a cartoonist drawing like this for hours, four hours, my back would go out. Out for a month. It would just go out from being so tall and crunched over. And then when I started making movies, operating the camera and doing steady cam, every year it would go out to where I would need cortisone shots to get up again if I’m filming or just be out for a month. And on Spy Kids 2, Ricardo Montalban had bad back surgery that went wrong and he was in a wheelchair. So he’s in a wheelchair and I’m in a walker and he’s like, “I’m 84. What’s your excuse?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I just was operating steady…”
The Elijah Wood character because that’s the guy I identified with. He’s there with this camera and that was me. So I hated it. And then because I was a cartoonist drawing like this for hours, four hours, my back would go out. Out for a month. It would just go out from being so tall and crunched over. And then when I started making movies, operating the camera and doing steady cam, every year it would go out to where I would need cortisone shots to get up again if I’m filming or just be out for a month. And on Spy Kids 2, Ricardo Montalban had bad back surgery that went wrong and he was in a wheelchair. So he’s in a wheelchair and I’m in a walker and he’s like, “I’m 84. What’s your excuse?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I just was operating steady…”
He goes, “You have to work out, Robert. You have to work out.” And I was like, “Shit, okay. Yeah, I know, I know.” And so then I thought, okay, next year I’m working with Stallone. I’ll ask Stallone. I’ll ask Stallone. “How do you get in shape? Because I need to get in shape. My back’s always going out.” He goes, “Get the trainer. Anyone who ever saw in Hollywood got in shape, they had a trainer.” I say, “Even you?” [inaudible 03:05:03] go, “I need a trainer.” He has a trainer. [inaudible 03:05:04], “No, I need a trainer. I can’t train.” I was like, well, shit, if you can’t even train on your own, and what do us mortal men have? So I got a trainer. Guess what happened? Hated it. I would feel sick when he was coming over because I hate working out. And then some years of doing that, I can’t stand it.
I know it’s good for my health. So the desire is there. So if you can’t accomplish something in your life, it’s not a lack of desire. If you want to be more creative, it’s not a lack of desire. It’s a lack of identity. The fact that you went, you were comfortable about saying creative, it’s because there’s a lack of identity there. You have lots of desire. You got to get the identity up and then suddenly you’re making shit. So a friend of mine from Mexico, she comes over, “I have to stop smoking. My doctor said I have to stop smoking for my health so I’m not smoking right now.” Said, “I’ve been smoking since I was eight years old.” I said, “Well, you’re going to go back to smoking because you just told me your identity is a smoker. So right now you’re a smoker who’s not smoking. What’s going to happen? Eventually you’re going to [inaudible 03:06:04]. You have to say, ‘I’m a nonsmoker.'” Just that lesson I’ve forgotten.
“You have to say, ‘I’m a nonsmoker. I’m a nonsmoker.’ What does a nonsmoker do? If you believe you’re a nonsmoker, you hate smoke. Start choking at the smell of smoke.” “Okay, I’ll try that.” She walks off, I go, “Shit, I forgot about my own… I wonder where my life I got to apply that. Working out. Of course. My God, I hate working out. No wonder I am so miserable. I’ll tell my trainer and anyone who will listen, ‘I can’t stand working out. I don’t understand sports.'” So that day I said, “I’m an athlete. I’m an athlete.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
That’s the last thing I would ever call myself all through my entire life. This was 2012. “I’m an athlete.” By the next day, not only did my life completely change, and it’s easier if it’s opposite day, if you’re just doing it by degrees, that’s bullshit. You got to go complete opposite. Because if there’s a donut, if you say, “Well, I’m going to only eat half of it.” You got to go, “No, I’m going to get an apple.” Opposite day is much easier. Not only did I change my life working out, I didn’t ever need a trainer. I have not had a trainer since all those years. Because I’m an athlete, I’ll just do it.
That’s the last thing I would ever call myself all through my entire life. This was 2012. “I’m an athlete.” By the next day, not only did my life completely change, and it’s easier if it’s opposite day, if you’re just doing it by degrees, that’s bullshit. You got to go complete opposite. Because if there’s a donut, if you say, “Well, I’m going to only eat half of it.” You got to go, “No, I’m going to get an apple.” Opposite day is much easier. Not only did I change my life working out, I didn’t ever need a trainer. I have not had a trainer since all those years. Because I’m an athlete, I’ll just do it.
Lex Fridman
Because you’re an athlete.
Because you’re an athlete.
Robert Rodriguez
What does an athlete do? An athlete loves working out. An athlete will make-
What does an athlete do? An athlete loves working out. An athlete will make-
Lex Fridman
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
Robert Rodriguez
Time to work out and they’ll eat right. I would never be the person that would call themselves an athlete, but that’s how much it can change your life by changing your identity. So if you want to be more creative, you’ve already got that in that desire. You’ve got enough of that. You don’t need more desire. You need more identity. So you got to say, “I’m a creative person,” with a straight face.
Time to work out and they’ll eat right. I would never be the person that would call themselves an athlete, but that’s how much it can change your life by changing your identity. So if you want to be more creative, you’ve already got that in that desire. You’ve got enough of that. You don’t need more desire. You need more identity. So you got to say, “I’m a creative person,” with a straight face.
Lex Fridman
With a straight face and believe it.
With a straight face and believe it.
Robert Rodriguez
So when I say, “Hey, are you a creative person?” You go, “Yeah.” Because then if you say that, what do you do? You’re going to do more creative stuff because that’s what a creative person does.
So when I say, “Hey, are you a creative person?” You go, “Yeah.” Because then if you say that, what do you do? You’re going to do more creative stuff because that’s what a creative person does.
Lex Fridman
It doesn’t make sense to me how manifesting works, but it does seem to work. Basically visualizing a path towards a certain kind of future. I guess everything around you, everything within you makes way for that. Makes way for the possibility of that. It’s weird.
It doesn’t make sense to me how manifesting works, but it does seem to work. Basically visualizing a path towards a certain kind of future. I guess everything around you, everything within you makes way for that. Makes way for the possibility of that. It’s weird.
Robert Rodriguez
It’s weird, but it’s nice to know that you can do that. But you have to just have that conviction and just say, start with a label.
It’s weird, but it’s nice to know that you can do that. But you have to just have that conviction and just say, start with a label.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. The RR. Yeah.
Yeah. The RR. Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
Start with a label. The double R or the label you just gave yourself.
Start with a label. The double R or the label you just gave yourself.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
I changed my label. My label was I hate working out.
I changed my label. My label was I hate working out.
Lex Fridman
Now I’m an athlete.
Now I’m an athlete.
Robert Rodriguez
I’m an athlete. I’m not a non-athlete anymore. I’m changing my label. And you get so inspired because now you know what to do because you can’t help but conform to your identity. You’re always going to conform to your identity. So just change your identity and you’ll change your life. And it’s not that hard. I didn’t have to go get hypnotized or anything. It was literally, I just told myself if I could do that, go from a guy who doesn’t want to work out, hates it, hates it… I had the desire. I was already hiring the guy. I lacked the identity. As soon as I changed my identity, boom.
I’m an athlete. I’m not a non-athlete anymore. I’m changing my label. And you get so inspired because now you know what to do because you can’t help but conform to your identity. You’re always going to conform to your identity. So just change your identity and you’ll change your life. And it’s not that hard. I didn’t have to go get hypnotized or anything. It was literally, I just told myself if I could do that, go from a guy who doesn’t want to work out, hates it, hates it… I had the desire. I was already hiring the guy. I lacked the identity. As soon as I changed my identity, boom.
Lex Fridman
Well, one of the things for me like that is probably music. Just playing guitar.
Well, one of the things for me like that is probably music. Just playing guitar.
Robert Rodriguez
Are you a musician?
Are you a musician?
Lex Fridman
Yeah [inaudible 03:08:56].
Yeah [inaudible 03:08:56].
Robert Rodriguez
Look at [inaudible 03:08:56]. You paused. You’re pausing.
Look at [inaudible 03:08:56]. You paused. You’re pausing.
Lex Fridman
I would definitely not… I’m going along with it now, but if we’re honestly, if we’re just in the [inaudible 03:09:02]-
I would definitely not… I’m going along with it now, but if we’re honestly, if we’re just in the [inaudible 03:09:02]-
Robert Rodriguez
You wouldn’t have said that.
You wouldn’t have said that.
Lex Fridman
I wouldn’t have said it.
I wouldn’t have said it.
Robert Rodriguez
But I heard you rip on fucking guitar.
But I heard you rip on fucking guitar.
Lex Fridman
And I’ve heard you play amazing in all different kinds of contexts.
And I’ve heard you play amazing in all different kinds of contexts.
Robert Rodriguez
Oh, but I should be freaking Santana by now because I’ve had a guitar in my hand since I was a kid, but since I’m not a full-time musician, I don’t get to play it that often. So I’m not as good as I should be. But when you apply yourself to just rehearse for a couple shows, you book some shows… Look at this. This was me just playing our first arena show opening for George Lopez. That was crazy to be on the stages where your heroes, that you saw them. Now you’re seeing what their point of view was. It blows your mind. You need to get on stage. You get on stage once and you’ll see that it’s not as bad as you think.
Oh, but I should be freaking Santana by now because I’ve had a guitar in my hand since I was a kid, but since I’m not a full-time musician, I don’t get to play it that often. So I’m not as good as I should be. But when you apply yourself to just rehearse for a couple shows, you book some shows… Look at this. This was me just playing our first arena show opening for George Lopez. That was crazy to be on the stages where your heroes, that you saw them. Now you’re seeing what their point of view was. It blows your mind. You need to get on stage. You get on stage once and you’ll see that it’s not as bad as you think.
Lex Fridman
You’re not terrified? Because you’re playing pretty complicated things. I’ve seen you play live.
You’re not terrified? Because you’re playing pretty complicated things. I’ve seen you play live.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. And I mess up a bunch of times-
Yeah. And I mess up a bunch of times-
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 03:09:50].
[inaudible 03:09:50].
Robert Rodriguez
But you don’t want to focus on that. And you just go, “Okay, I got to do it.” Because when you’re up there, it’s not that you’re screaming, nervous, but your hands will just won’t work anymore. Something will happen. But that happens to everybody. If you really watch even the best in their live performances, watch really close and you see they screw up a couple things, but you just wouldn’t notice.
But you don’t want to focus on that. And you just go, “Okay, I got to do it.” Because when you’re up there, it’s not that you’re screaming, nervous, but your hands will just won’t work anymore. Something will happen. But that happens to everybody. If you really watch even the best in their live performances, watch really close and you see they screw up a couple things, but you just wouldn’t notice.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 03:10:07].
[inaudible 03:10:07].
Robert Rodriguez
They just go right through it.
They just go right through it.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 03:10:08].
[inaudible 03:10:08].
Robert Rodriguez
It’s about the live performance and that’s how you know it’s real.
It’s about the live performance and that’s how you know it’s real.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
So I think if you could really just lean into it more, really work on the identity part because you’ve got the desire. You want to play guitar. But as soon as you say, “Yeah, but I can’t play live,” you just chopped off your leg at the start of the race. If you say, “I don’t know,” you just chopped off your other leg.
So I think if you could really just lean into it more, really work on the identity part because you’ve got the desire. You want to play guitar. But as soon as you say, “Yeah, but I can’t play live,” you just chopped off your leg at the start of the race. If you say, “I don’t know,” you just chopped off your other leg.
Lex Fridman
Yep, yep, yep.
Yep, yep, yep.
Robert Rodriguez
You’re doing this to yourself.
You’re doing this to yourself.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
You’re literally doing this to yourself. I’m not meaning just you. I mean anybody who’s-
You’re literally doing this to yourself. I’m not meaning just you. I mean anybody who’s-
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Broadly speaking. Yeah.
Yeah. Broadly speaking. Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
Who pauses, who hesitates. You don’t have to have doubts. Why would you have a doubt? Because you know the process now. It’s like if I don’t know how to do something, I know how to figure it out. I didn’t know how I was going to do that scene with him jumping and flipping. I didn’t know that. But do I have doubt that I’m going to go in there and be able to do it? If you say that you do, now you’re a doubtful person. That’s how powerful that is. But if you say, “No, I don’t have any doubt because I know I’m going to figure it out when I get there..”. Somehow it’ll fall on my lap. I trust the process. You don’t have to know. So if you trust the process that you’ll figure it out.
Who pauses, who hesitates. You don’t have to have doubts. Why would you have a doubt? Because you know the process now. It’s like if I don’t know how to do something, I know how to figure it out. I didn’t know how I was going to do that scene with him jumping and flipping. I didn’t know that. But do I have doubt that I’m going to go in there and be able to do it? If you say that you do, now you’re a doubtful person. That’s how powerful that is. But if you say, “No, I don’t have any doubt because I know I’m going to figure it out when I get there..”. Somehow it’ll fall on my lap. I trust the process. You don’t have to know. So if you trust the process that you’ll figure it out.
Lex Fridman
But here’s the thing, sometimes you fail and there’s audience.
But here’s the thing, sometimes you fail and there’s audience.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. Then you get four rooms. Yeah.
Yeah. Then you get four rooms. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But then-
Yeah. But then-
Robert Rodriguez
And then what happens?
And then what happens?
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 03:11:20]. Right? Don’t blink.
[inaudible 03:11:20]. Right? Don’t blink.
Robert Rodriguez
Don’t blink, and then you go sift through the failure.
Don’t blink, and then you go sift through the failure.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Robert Rodriguez
And you go, “Wait a minute, what did I get out of that?”
And you go, “Wait a minute, what did I get out of that?”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I’ve done that a bunch. It was great.
Yeah. I’ve done that a bunch. It was great.
Robert Rodriguez
Look, what’s the worst that can happen? You go on a stage and you bomb. It’s not going to be the first stage. And it’s one of those you can talk about so that when you do the next one… And sometimes they all go right. I’ve had a couple shows, we did a couple shows where we had video cameras set up for the second day. I said, “Let’s not film the first day because we’re going to be fucking just finding our feet. Let’s film the second day.” First day it was flawless.
Look, what’s the worst that can happen? You go on a stage and you bomb. It’s not going to be the first stage. And it’s one of those you can talk about so that when you do the next one… And sometimes they all go right. I’ve had a couple shows, we did a couple shows where we had video cameras set up for the second day. I said, “Let’s not film the first day because we’re going to be fucking just finding our feet. Let’s film the second day.” First day it was flawless.
Lex Fridman
Of course.
Of course.
Robert Rodriguez
Flawless.
Flawless.
Lex Fridman
Of course.
Of course.
Robert Rodriguez
Because no cameras.
Because no cameras.
Lex Fridman
Of course.
Of course.
Robert Rodriguez
You just go.
You just go.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
Second day we weren’t as into it as we had just done it. It felt like the second take. It just didn’t have the magic. And that’s the one that’s recorded and we’re like, oh, kicking ourselves. We didn’t film both nights. We should have filmed both nights.
Second day we weren’t as into it as we had just done it. It felt like the second take. It just didn’t have the magic. And that’s the one that’s recorded and we’re like, oh, kicking ourselves. We didn’t film both nights. We should have filmed both nights.
Lex Fridman
I love how much of a mess this human existence life is. You’ve talked about the importance of journaling because-
I love how much of a mess this human existence life is. You’ve talked about the importance of journaling because-
Memories and journaling
Robert Rodriguez
So important.
So important.
Lex Fridman
Living is-
Living is-
Robert Rodriguez
Reliving.
Reliving.
Lex Fridman
Reliving. I love that phrase.
Reliving. I love that phrase.
Robert Rodriguez
I came up with that because it’s like, wow, I see so many people who get after you for filming a concert and they go, “Live in the moment.” I’m like, “Dude, counterintuitive.” The moment goes by like this. We’re not going to remember any of this. The fact that we taped it, thank God, because later on it’s going to be a file photo of me remembering you… Three pound meat computer. All I’m going to have is a file photo of you may be in a suit and you picturing me in maybe a black T-shirt. And the metadata narrative is going to say, had a great talk about, if we remember, creativity.
I came up with that because it’s like, wow, I see so many people who get after you for filming a concert and they go, “Live in the moment.” I’m like, “Dude, counterintuitive.” The moment goes by like this. We’re not going to remember any of this. The fact that we taped it, thank God, because later on it’s going to be a file photo of me remembering you… Three pound meat computer. All I’m going to have is a file photo of you may be in a suit and you picturing me in maybe a black T-shirt. And the metadata narrative is going to say, had a great talk about, if we remember, creativity.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
Your brain doesn’t remember. But when I pull up old home movies, I show my kids that I just found and they’re like, they don’t remember it. I don’t remember filming it. And it’s like new adventures of. It becomes iconic and it sticks in our head. And all our jokes are based on old things that we used to do and say. So living is reliving. So keeping a journal is very important. Because I found that anything that passed 15 years, it’s like I’m reading someone else’s journal. I’m like, “I didn’t even know that’s where I got that guitar. I thought I bought that guitar. It was given to me? It’s like a $10,000 Santana… It was given to me my birthday by the studio that I made that movie? How did I not remember that?” It’s crazy what you don’t remember. And the brain is very, it’s not a very reliable computer. It’s made out of fucking butter.
Your brain doesn’t remember. But when I pull up old home movies, I show my kids that I just found and they’re like, they don’t remember it. I don’t remember filming it. And it’s like new adventures of. It becomes iconic and it sticks in our head. And all our jokes are based on old things that we used to do and say. So living is reliving. So keeping a journal is very important. Because I found that anything that passed 15 years, it’s like I’m reading someone else’s journal. I’m like, “I didn’t even know that’s where I got that guitar. I thought I bought that guitar. It was given to me? It’s like a $10,000 Santana… It was given to me my birthday by the studio that I made that movie? How did I not remember that?” It’s crazy what you don’t remember. And the brain is very, it’s not a very reliable computer. It’s made out of fucking butter.
Lex Fridman
That’s a really profound idea that so much of our life is lived through replaying our memories and then watching stuff is one of the ways to refresh, give some more texture and details.
That’s a really profound idea that so much of our life is lived through replaying our memories and then watching stuff is one of the ways to refresh, give some more texture and details.
Robert Rodriguez
Makes it iconic.
Makes it iconic.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert Rodriguez
It makes it iconic in your life and part of your life. Otherwise, it just went by. It went by. I’ll ask people, we just had a really, ” What did we do last week? What did we do last Wednesday?” And they’re like, [inaudible 03:14:04]. I can tell you because I wrote it down, but I’m not going to remember. And then when you go through your journal, I go back and I find, wow, life-changing thing happened Friday. Another life-changing thing I didn’t know at the time until now I know that that really set me on a new… Happened Saturday. And another big freaking thing happened on Sunday. They come in threes sometime. You start being able to predict the future a little bit because you see the patterns and it’s pretty wild to do that. And I swear I’ve talked to people, big group of people, 500 people.
It makes it iconic in your life and part of your life. Otherwise, it just went by. It went by. I’ll ask people, we just had a really, ” What did we do last week? What did we do last Wednesday?” And they’re like, [inaudible 03:14:04]. I can tell you because I wrote it down, but I’m not going to remember. And then when you go through your journal, I go back and I find, wow, life-changing thing happened Friday. Another life-changing thing I didn’t know at the time until now I know that that really set me on a new… Happened Saturday. And another big freaking thing happened on Sunday. They come in threes sometime. You start being able to predict the future a little bit because you see the patterns and it’s pretty wild to do that. And I swear I’ve talked to people, big group of people, 500 people.
“How many people here journal?” Two hands, three hands. I couldn’t believe it. It’s like, man, if there’s anything I can impart on you, is journal. Your life is way more interesting than you think because it’s not going to feel like anything while it’s going by. But in retrospect, you look back. I can just go through, I keep a journal, one file per year. So I started a new one in 2025. If I’m going to look up, I’m going to do a Director’s Chair episode. I look up Michael Mann, Michael Mann, Michael Mann. All the conversations we had since ’94 that I wrote down that I felt and it was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe we said that.” That’s how I knew about that thing with Quentin.
I’d forgotten about that story with Quentin saying, “Ah, Pulp Fiction.” I’d forgotten that because from the moment I asked him that question to the success at Cannes was very quick. So it was a lost moment in time where I had it recorded down to the time, down to the hour when I asked him that question. And he thought it wasn’t, he didn’t think that was the one for him.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And there’s a, I don’t know, when it’s private journaling, there’s an honesty, there’s an innocence about the dreams you have about the future, the conceptions you have about the future. That’s what this thing is a journal.
Yeah. And there’s a, I don’t know, when it’s private journaling, there’s an honesty, there’s an innocence about the dreams you have about the future, the conceptions you have about the future. That’s what this thing is a journal.
Robert Rodriguez
It’s just a journal. It’s like-
It’s just a journal. It’s like-
Lex Fridman
But the profundity that comes out of it. Right?
But the profundity that comes out of it. Right?
Robert Rodriguez
You look back and it’s crazy. Yeah. And so much I figured out [inaudible 03:15:50]. I’m talking like a professor by the end of that. I have people come up to me and they’re asking me all these questions about stuff I wrote in there and I’m like, “I wrote that in that book? Shit, I was smart back then. What happened?” I don’t remember half of that. But I think that it’s the same thing. When you go to teach someone, your mouth opens and stuff comes out. I am always taping myself when I go to give a talk because that’s also the pipe working. Someone else is talking through you sometimes. So the act of sharing, that’s why I’ve always liked to share information. Because the feedback loop is insane. Me inspiring [inaudible 03:16:24] DJ to go write. He writes the script in three days, comes back, tells me, “Now I’m doing that method.”
You look back and it’s crazy. Yeah. And so much I figured out [inaudible 03:15:50]. I’m talking like a professor by the end of that. I have people come up to me and they’re asking me all these questions about stuff I wrote in there and I’m like, “I wrote that in that book? Shit, I was smart back then. What happened?” I don’t remember half of that. But I think that it’s the same thing. When you go to teach someone, your mouth opens and stuff comes out. I am always taping myself when I go to give a talk because that’s also the pipe working. Someone else is talking through you sometimes. So the act of sharing, that’s why I’ve always liked to share information. Because the feedback loop is insane. Me inspiring [inaudible 03:16:24] DJ to go write. He writes the script in three days, comes back, tells me, “Now I’m doing that method.”
And it’s like, wow. People come back with their version. And I love telling my kids stuff that I learned that I wish I could tell myself, but I can’t take a time machine. The closest thing is telling your kid because then they can take that information to process. So many times they’ve come back and said, “Wow, dad, the lesson you taught us about this, it’s really become big in our minds.” “Yeah, what was that?” And they tell me. I’m like, “I never told you that.” They say, “Yeah, you told us…” “Well, I told you maybe 10% of that. All the rest you added.” “Oh yeah, well, we embellished it [inaudible 03:16:59].” They turned it into something else. And it’s like, wow, that’s so cool. But yeah, that thing about reliving, that was one of my favorite ones. Just my mom turning 75 and not wanting to do anything for her 75th birthday.
I said, “Why not?” She goes, “The whole family’s going to… You have 10 kids. They’re all going to want to do something for your 75th birthday. Nothing can top my 65th.” I was like, “What did we do on your 65th?” I didn’t even remember even. I’m the one who orchestrated it all. She goes, “Oh, you flew everyone in from all over the country. You gave me a car.” I got to have a journal of that. I’m sure I have video. I go back 10 years, I see what tape I had it on, find the tape, pop the tape in. Forgot about all this stuff. So I cut together a ten-minute version of it, showed it at her 75th birthday. Just watching the old one. Everybody was like, “Oh my God, look how young everybody was. Look how small the nieces and nephews were.”
She starts bawling as soon as she gets the key, the gift of the key in the video, because she realizes now what it’s going to mean that she’s going to get this car. And so it’s like, wow, let’s just play the old tapes. We don’t even have to do anything anymore. We banked so much amazing stuff that we’ve all forgotten. That my kids just love watching their old home movies. They hardly remember any of it, but even a VHS to them is virtual reality. Because compared to our memories, it is virtual reality. They’re leaning into the screen to see what’s around the corner and they’re remembering the place and the sounds. And they say, “Oh, we left the living room. It’s like we’re there.” It’s like, wow. I was always afraid they would see this old footage and go, “Ah, this is dog shit. What kind of camera was that?” The limitations of it. You put up one of those files on your screen, it’s this big on your laptop now.
That’s how low-res shit was back then, but that didn’t matter. It’s like compared to our memories, that stuff, living is reliving. Pull up that, shoot as much as you can, take as many pictures, but write the journal because you’ll have a picture. Swear. You’re not going to know what it’s from even 10 years from now, you won’t know what that picture’s from. You read the diary, you go, “Oh, that’s what that is. Oh my God.” You can piece together all these things that are important to you or that become more important with time, actually, and you know what’s important later compared to what’s been happening at the time.
Lex Fridman
To add on top of that, so journaling is a raw, or home films is a raw projection of what’s going on in the moment. I think what’s also really powerful because I’ve done that, is to do a high effort description of where your life is just for yourself. So sometimes journaling is low effort.
To add on top of that, so journaling is a raw, or home films is a raw projection of what’s going on in the moment. I think what’s also really powerful because I’ve done that, is to do a high effort description of where your life is just for yourself. So sometimes journaling is low effort.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. Sometimes it’s just, I just want to mark that we had this conversation. I had to go do something at five. I did that. Met somebody that, I know last night I met somebody that’s going to be life changing. I’m going to write a little bit more on that because I could just, now I know, but I’m going to just record it so later if I look it up.
Yeah. Sometimes it’s just, I just want to mark that we had this conversation. I had to go do something at five. I did that. Met somebody that, I know last night I met somebody that’s going to be life changing. I’m going to write a little bit more on that because I could just, now I know, but I’m going to just record it so later if I look it up.
Lex Fridman
So one of the cool things you could do is, for example, somebody, Jamie Mr. Beast does these videos, which are great. I think it’s a great exercise to do for yourself, which is a video he records for himself that he doesn’t look at to be published 20 years from now. “This is a message to myself 20 years from now. Here’s where I hope you end up.” You’re basically a younger version of yourself speaking to an older version, and then you get… Time flies and you get to a point where it’s like, holy shit, it has been 10 years, it has been 20 years. You get to listen to a younger version of yourself. It would’ve been hilarious if you shot videos like that to yourself because of just the incredible journey your career has been on.
So one of the cool things you could do is, for example, somebody, Jamie Mr. Beast does these videos, which are great. I think it’s a great exercise to do for yourself, which is a video he records for himself that he doesn’t look at to be published 20 years from now. “This is a message to myself 20 years from now. Here’s where I hope you end up.” You’re basically a younger version of yourself speaking to an older version, and then you get… Time flies and you get to a point where it’s like, holy shit, it has been 10 years, it has been 20 years. You get to listen to a younger version of yourself. It would’ve been hilarious if you shot videos like that to yourself because of just the incredible journey your career has been on.
Robert Rodriguez
I know.
I know.
Lex Fridman
And just to think about that, the delta, the difference between what your dreams were and where you ended up. Usually you outdo yourself in many ways. Sometimes your life goes in a totally different trajectory and the result is kind of funny. It’s a nice illustration of the non-linearity of life.
And just to think about that, the delta, the difference between what your dreams were and where you ended up. Usually you outdo yourself in many ways. Sometimes your life goes in a totally different trajectory and the result is kind of funny. It’s a nice illustration of the non-linearity of life.
Robert Rodriguez
I would film stuff like that with my kids. I couldn’t do it, but I would film my kids saying, “Hey, turn to the camera now and say, ‘Hey, Rebel, it’s me Rebel talking to Rebel in the future.'”
I would film stuff like that with my kids. I couldn’t do it, but I would film my kids saying, “Hey, turn to the camera now and say, ‘Hey, Rebel, it’s me Rebel talking to Rebel in the future.'”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So you have shot stuff like that.
Yeah. So you have shot stuff like that.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Cool.
Cool.
Robert Rodriguez
And then they show them-
And then they show them-
Lex Fridman
Cool.
Cool.
Robert Rodriguez
That 10 years later and they’re like, “Whoa,” to see it talking to them and saying. And I would do this thing where I would film them watching it and then pan off so that 10 years later I could get, “Hey, Rebel,” him reacting, pan off to the new Rebel watching it. It just keeps going. So I have one like that where it just-
That 10 years later and they’re like, “Whoa,” to see it talking to them and saying. And I would do this thing where I would film them watching it and then pan off so that 10 years later I could get, “Hey, Rebel,” him reacting, pan off to the new Rebel watching it. It just keeps going. So I have one like that where it just-
Lex Fridman
Love that.
Love that.
Robert Rodriguez
Keeps panning and they’re-
Keeps panning and they’re-
Lex Fridman
Love that.
Love that.
Robert Rodriguez
Watching themselves within the movie, within the movie, within the movie.
Watching themselves within the movie, within the movie, within the movie.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 03:21:29].
[inaudible 03:21:29].
Robert Rodriguez
It’s like an ongoing project. It’s just so fun to just play with memory and make you realize how fast time moves and to go, they go, “I kind of remember that, but I don’t remember being that tiny when I had that memory. It’s wild how time moves.” And it makes them feel much more precious about how quick time moves and how important every little moment is because you see the fragility of it too.
It’s like an ongoing project. It’s just so fun to just play with memory and make you realize how fast time moves and to go, they go, “I kind of remember that, but I don’t remember being that tiny when I had that memory. It’s wild how time moves.” And it makes them feel much more precious about how quick time moves and how important every little moment is because you see the fragility of it too.
Mortality
Lex Fridman
Does it make you sad? Does it break your heart that the number of memories we get to create is finite, that this life ends? Eventually the story is over?
Does it make you sad? Does it break your heart that the number of memories we get to create is finite, that this life ends? Eventually the story is over?
Robert Rodriguez
I had this theory. I’m going to put this in a movie. I don’t think I’ve ever said this before. Because I woke up from a dream and it was like trying to remember it. You’re like, “God, it was so real.” If you don’t write it down right away, it kind of fades away. But while you’re dreaming it, it’s really real. And it’s like you can almost see the walls. By the time I went to go tell somebody, it’s like, shit, I forgot most of it. I wonder if that’s what it’s like when you wake up in your consciousness after you die. You wake up in your next consciousness getting ready to move into whatever your next body is and you’re like, “Wow, I was a filmmaker? I had five kids? And oh well, I’m go be a fish now.” It’s like a dream. It’s like that, gone that way. And it’s like that’s what past lives are. They’re like distant memories, like a dream that’s faded away.
I had this theory. I’m going to put this in a movie. I don’t think I’ve ever said this before. Because I woke up from a dream and it was like trying to remember it. You’re like, “God, it was so real.” If you don’t write it down right away, it kind of fades away. But while you’re dreaming it, it’s really real. And it’s like you can almost see the walls. By the time I went to go tell somebody, it’s like, shit, I forgot most of it. I wonder if that’s what it’s like when you wake up in your consciousness after you die. You wake up in your next consciousness getting ready to move into whatever your next body is and you’re like, “Wow, I was a filmmaker? I had five kids? And oh well, I’m go be a fish now.” It’s like a dream. It’s like that, gone that way. And it’s like that’s what past lives are. They’re like distant memories, like a dream that’s faded away.
That’s why you barely feel remnants of it. Do I feel sad about it? When I tell people they flip out when I tell them that. I say I want a character to be like that. He’s dying. He’s like, “I don’t want to forget this dream. I don’t want to forget. Let me wake up. Don’t let me wake up.”
Lex Fridman
But you forget, especially the moment you try to tell somebody.
But you forget, especially the moment you try to tell somebody.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, [inaudible 03:23:15].
Yeah, [inaudible 03:23:15].
Lex Fridman
You tell the next fish over.
You tell the next fish over.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. The next [inaudible 03:23:16] going to be a fish next. But yeah, yeah. It feels like I’m almost sad about it. But then it just makes you even more double down to be precious about the life you’re in now.
Yeah. The next [inaudible 03:23:16] going to be a fish next. But yeah, yeah. It feels like I’m almost sad about it. But then it just makes you even more double down to be precious about the life you’re in now.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the meaning?
What do you think is the meaning?
Robert Rodriguez
And record it. Record it.
And record it. Record it.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life? Why are we here?
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life? Why are we here?
Robert Rodriguez
[inaudible 03:23:35] why we’re here. I really feel like my kids and I were just talking about this last night. We were just blown away. We did this Asterion astrology thing, which is the oldest form of astrology. It just nails each person. And it’s like, yeah, because when you have a kid, you realize right away, “This isn’t my kid. This is not my… I’m just in charge of him. It’s a completely different soul. He’s a different soul that ended up in my hands.” There’s physical characteristics that get passed on because of just how biology works. Even sometimes posture and movement is the same, but the actual person is somebody else. And all the kids, I have five kids and I had nine brothers and sisters, they’re all different. And you realize we made a pact in a past life to gather together because every time it’s like, it’s so good you were born in this family because you were given free rein to go find who you’re really supposed to be and you find out everyone is doing what they were supposed to be doing.
[inaudible 03:23:35] why we’re here. I really feel like my kids and I were just talking about this last night. We were just blown away. We did this Asterion astrology thing, which is the oldest form of astrology. It just nails each person. And it’s like, yeah, because when you have a kid, you realize right away, “This isn’t my kid. This is not my… I’m just in charge of him. It’s a completely different soul. He’s a different soul that ended up in my hands.” There’s physical characteristics that get passed on because of just how biology works. Even sometimes posture and movement is the same, but the actual person is somebody else. And all the kids, I have five kids and I had nine brothers and sisters, they’re all different. And you realize we made a pact in a past life to gather together because every time it’s like, it’s so good you were born in this family because you were given free rein to go find who you’re really supposed to be and you find out everyone is doing what they were supposed to be doing.
But what’s cool, almost like this clarity you get by just saying it. They now know that they were always supposed to be this creative person and now they can double down on it because they know that’s who they were supposed to be. They don’t have to have any doubt anymore. They don’t have to wonder, well, am I supposed to be more business minded or can I be creative? Doesn’t that sound kind of frivolous? Is that a real job? Can I do that? Now they realize, no, you’re supposed to be doing that for these, these, these, these reasons, and now they can double down. You can skip all that and just decide I feel like I want to be that person, so I’m just going to declare I am that person. And as soon as you say it, you are that, and tomorrow your activities will conform to that. That’s how powerful that decision is.
So when you walk out of here, it’s going to be with a complete commitment, “I’m a technical and creative person.” Like my first boss. I’m unstoppable because my boss told me that and he was right. I became technical and creative and you’re just unstoppable. You can just keep going and just go, “I’m unstoppable.” That doesn’t mean you’re going to use your powers for bad, but you’ve just changed your life by just declaring that. And I’m also a creative person who lives his life creatively. I’m going to find creative ways to use that technology. If somebody says, “You’re not the same kind of artist I was expecting,” that’s their own opinion. Don’t blink. Just keep going. All these things that you’ve learned that people were supposed to tell you along the way, they’re telling you for a reason. Anytime you got pushed, if you go back to your life at your really critical moments in your life where you went that way instead of that way, there was probably somebody there who said something to you that kind of pushed you.
There was one guy when I was in high school. It was senior year. I wrote a paper. And I wasn’t a great writer at all. I wrote a paper for a Latin American studies class, gave it to the teacher and he said, “Wow, you’re going to be rich and famous in four years based on what I read.” I was like, “Really?” I’m 17 or 18. Four years later, I did Mariachi and I went to him later at a reunion and I said, “You called it. You said I was going to be… Why did you say that?” And he was like, “I said that? I [inaudible 03:26:49].” He looked like he would never say that to somebody. You’d think he would own it and say, “Oh yeah, I knew and I told you.” No. He looked like he didn’t even know who I was. He was acting like he never would’ve said that in a million years. So again, sometimes things come out of our mouth that’s not us, that comes through us. So if you think of it that way, why are we here? We’re here for a reason. We’re going to get nudged along. Listen to the signs. Own who you’re supposed to be because you are that person. Don’t let your human doubt get in the way. That’s like the guy closing the pipe. “I don’t know if I’m really creative. I don’t know if I’m really a businessman.” And you’re just closing the pipe. You’re not going to let it flow. Just be a good pipe. Just say, “I just want to be a good pipe. Clean, open.” And then that’s when the magic happens.
Lex Fridman
And no matter what, don’t blink.
And no matter what, don’t blink.
Robert Rodriguez
Don’t blink. No matter how many… That dude was getting so much shit thrown at him. I wish you knew that time period, because then you would go like, “Yeah, that’s right.”
Don’t blink. No matter how many… That dude was getting so much shit thrown at him. I wish you knew that time period, because then you would go like, “Yeah, that’s right.”
Lex Fridman
It’s incredible.
It’s incredible.
Robert Rodriguez
It was unbelievable. I can’t even convey. There was no internet and stuff back then. This was literal press, reviews, public. It was like, why are they targeting this guy? They just did not like, he just had unprecedented success and was a really great guy and was making amazing shit. So it was the triple threat of make people jealous and pissed off.
It was unbelievable. I can’t even convey. There was no internet and stuff back then. This was literal press, reviews, public. It was like, why are they targeting this guy? They just did not like, he just had unprecedented success and was a really great guy and was making amazing shit. So it was the triple threat of make people jealous and pissed off.
Lex Fridman
Well, he’s one of the great artists of all time. So are you. It’s a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you for everything you’re doing in the world, for creating in the world and for inspiring millions of people to also be creators in the world, and for your new project that’s bringing people in. Robert, as I told you, I’m a huge fan.
Well, he’s one of the great artists of all time. So are you. It’s a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you for everything you’re doing in the world, for creating in the world and for inspiring millions of people to also be creators in the world, and for your new project that’s bringing people in. Robert, as I told you, I’m a huge fan.
Robert Rodriguez
I appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
Lex Fridman
It’s a huge honor to talk to you, brother.
It’s a huge honor to talk to you, brother.
Robert Rodriguez
So great talking with you. Great questions. Here you go. Change your life.
So great talking with you. Great questions. Here you go. Change your life.
Lex Fridman
Thank you, brother. Million dollars.
Thank you, brother. Million dollars.
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. Right there.
Yeah. Right there.
Lex Fridman
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Robert Rodriguez. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Alfred Hitchcock. In feature films, the director is God. In documentary films, God is the director. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Robert Rodriguez. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Alfred Hitchcock. In feature films, the director is God. In documentary films, God is the director. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism | Lex Fridman Podcast #464
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #464 with Dave Smith.
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the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
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Table of Contents
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So he’s very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quick as possible. You are fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you’re fighting, and so the first step is to stop doing that. Your cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that. And then let’s see if maybe we could heal. Where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Why does anything need to be redacted for national security? I’m sorry. You’re telling me there’s a pedophile ring and we can’t tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security?
And then he would be the lone no vote in Congress all the time, on the bills that the entire Congress, bipartisan agreement, everything, and there’s one vote against it. And that he would be that guy. He clearly kept doing what he was doing simply because he believed it was right, not because there was any benefit for him. In fact, he dealt with a lot of headaches for the views that he had. And then he was just a genuine person of integrity. He’s the only congressman who I’ve ever heard this about. And DC insiders, people on the hill will say this. He was the only congressman of my lifetime who the lobbyists simply stopped visiting. He was the only one who, they just stopped going to his office because they were just like, “There’s just no getting through to this guy.” He was just not playing politics like that.
And you imagine what it must’ve been like from the lobbyist perspective when they first tried to go there and they’d be like, “All right, listen, we really need you to vote yes on this or that.” And he was like, “The constitution doesn’t authorize us to do that.” And they’re like, “What? Who in this town even talks like that?” I’ve met him many times at this point, and he is just genuinely, he’s like one of those guys who’s just from an older, better generation. He’s the sweetest guy, but he’s not a pushover. He was a tough guy in his day, and he was an athlete and he was in the Air Force and is married to the same woman for I think over 60 years at this point, has a big beautiful family. He was a country doctor. He was a baby doctor who delivered thousands of babies. He’s like this kind of classic American figure. And I just think at the risk of falling into hero worship or something like that, I do think he’s a genuinely great man, and I think great men are to be revered.
You know what I mean? And to have the Republicans agree with him. These were a lot of the same people who had voted for George W. Bush twice and supported the war and even mocked their liberal fellow countrymen for not being on board with it. And a lot of that was the work that Ron Paul did and people waking up to how messed up all these wars were. And I think that at least there were a couple of major things for me at the time. So I was a young man when I first found Ron Paul, it was in 2007 was when I first saw him, and then started obsessively reading all of his books. So I was young, born in ’83. So what did that mean? 23, 24 when I first met him. So I was a young guy, and at least for me at the time, there were two categories in my naive mind where, okay, there were the liberals who supported big government at home, but were skeptical about big government abroad or they’re skeptical about wars.
And then there were the conservatives who said that they supported small government, limited government at home, but were always on the side of whatever the next war is. And at least for me, and I think for a lot of people of my generation, Ron Paul was the first guy who came along and said, no, I’m for limited government here and abroad. And it was kind of like a portal where you could access a different perspective on the world. And then once you saw that, you were like, “Wait, that’s actually what makes sense.” What is it exactly that all the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and even Milton Friedman and guys like that, and Thomas Sowell, and it’s like you want a constitutionally limited world empire? That’s what you guys stand for, because that doesn’t fit together at all. And so why is it that we were taking this as a given?
And then of course, the more you look into it, you realize that, okay, those two things do make sense together. And then also that in the initial wave of the original progressives, people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR, these were people who were pushing big government at home and big government abroad. And that actually made much more sense as a cohesive worldview. And to oppose that would be the Ron Paul worldview. And then the other thing for me, and this was my introduction to Ron Paul, and this too, to me was kind of a portal in a way. At least in my naive, not fully functioned brain or fully developed brain at 24 years old or whatever, it was a way for me to get, I tapped into something that was outside the empire, and I had heard a lot.
I was already against George W. Bush, and I didn’t like the war. I had already figured out, I think this war in Iraq is bullshit. And I think that we were lied into it. And so I kind of got that. And then there were liberals and left-wingers who I knew. I grew up in New York City, so I was very familiar with the left-wing perspective who are critical of George W. Bush for fighting the war and signing the Patriot Act into law and things like that. But I had never really heard anybody break it down the way Ron Paul did when he basically was like, “Look, there’s a reason why these terrorists hate us, and it’s not what they’re telling you. They don’t hate us for our freedom.” I remember the way Pat Buchanan put it, which I always loved, he said, “Dick Cheney makes it sound like Osama bin Laden stumbled in the deserts of Afghanistan. He stumbled onto a copy of our Bill of Rights somewhere.”
And he was like, “Oh my God, they’re free. Look at this speedy trial. Are you kidding me? What is going on here? They can own guns and their women can wear mini skirts.” And that just made people so angry that they were ready to suicide bomb themselves. That makes no sense at all. And then Ron Paul was just like, “No, look, here’s the thing. If we think we can just go around the world killing people, propping up dictatorships, putting our military bases in the Muslims holy land and not engender hatred from that, then we do that at our own peril.” And I thought it was such an interesting kind of… it had always been, I’m an ’80s and ’90s kid, and to me it was always a given that America’s number one we’re the force for good in the world.
And it was an interesting introduction to the idea that there are people outside of that who are dominated by that who don’t care for it very much. And that’s what 9/11 was actually about. And for me, I was living in New York City, I was 18, I think when 9/11 happened, and that was the moment of my childhood. It was a huge thing to live through. I mean, we were attacked. This seemed like something that could only happen in a history book. That didn’t happen to America in the ’90s. 2001 was basically the ’90s, and it was just like, “Oh.” Finally, it clicked. It was like, “That makes sense.” It’s the first time I had ever heard an explanation and an understanding of this whole thing that we’re involved in now from 9/11 to the terror wars that actually just made perfect sense.
It’s like, “Okay, but what about the 20 plus million people who were displaced? What about the million people who were killed? What about all the millions of people who were injured? What about the tens of thousands of our soldiers who have blown their brains out in the aftermath of the thing?” So many times it is true with government policy in general, people talk about the end result that they want, but you’re like, “Yeah, but what about the process by which you get there and how much hatred, could you…” It’s, not that hard for me to put myself in other people’s shoes, and I have two little kids and a wife, and if anybody were to ever try to argue to me that they have to be the eggs that get broken to make some bigger omelet. Like, “It is okay, we’re ultimately going to impose something on your society that’s better than what you have right there. It sure does suck that your wife and kids got to be the one who get taken out.”
I mean, as I’m just saying this to myself, and this is not real. This is just a thought experiment I’m making up. I’m already pretty close to being a terrorist. My next thought is kind of like, “Well, okay, well, I hope you’re going to like it when you watch your family die in front of you.” Hopefully, even if that happened to me, I wouldn’t go kill that guy’s family. Maybe I’d just go after him or something. But I could understand, and I think most people who have kids could understand going to a level of the most evil dark place you could imagine if anyone ever threatened or actually did something to your kids.
So from 2009 through 2015, AQAP just kept growing. It was doing all these targeted bombing campaigns, so they call them targeted. 96% of the people are innocent who get killed, but they call them targeted drone bombings. And Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula just kept getting bigger and bigger because every time you go in there, it’s like, okay, you took out one target and then you took out three little girls. And every one of those little girls had brothers and uncles and fathers, and all of them just signed up to join the fight now. Ron Paul was the first one who really made this click for me. But it’s in a way, and I’m not a leftist, I’m not an egalitarian, I’m not a cultural relativist. I’m not saying that all cultures are the same or that we all look at the world the same way.
There’s enormous differences between all of us, and I personally think some are better than others, but there are things that unite all of us. And in a weird way, I remember one time I was arguing with a Democrat guy on a S. E. Cupp show. I used to be a contributor on her show, and we were arguing, and it was after a terrorist attack here in New York, a fairly minor one. It was a guy, I think he hit someone with his car and then jumped out with a gun, and then the cops lit him up and killed him. This is back in 2017, I think, and he claimed to be ISIS inspired. I don’t remember if there was a direct connection or not, but at the time, they were like, “Doesn’t this mean we got to step up the war in Iraq or in Syria where ISIS’s stronghold is.”
And I remember the guy saying to me, I went off on how these wars have been disaster and he goes, ” Yeah, but Dave, what you’re saying here is we’re supposed to do nothing. This just happened and now we’re supposed to do nothing.” And so even though this guy had a suit and tie on, and we’re in a cable news studio and we’re in a first world country, we’re in the United States of America and we’re having that. The basic thing that he’s saying is, “You’re saying, we’re not going to go kill some motherfuckers.” I mean, he was just putting it as do something. But what’s something? Something is dropping bombs on human beings when yes, some innocent people are going to die, but it’s the same thing. It’s the same after 9/11. We’re like, “We got to go fucking invade some countries right now.” That’s the same impulse.
It’s like they killed some of our people. You think we’re not going to show them who the real killers are. You think there’s a chance that you could come here? And that is the most human instinct ever. It’s like some other tribe just came in here and killed some people in our tribe. So what do you want to do about that? Well, I don’t know. It’s not going to take me too long to figure out we’re going to go kill a bunch of people in their tribe. And I think that’s the major motivating factor for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think that’s the major motivator for both sides of the war on terror conflict. In a way, when you look at it like that, even though it’s so dark and tragic, there’s something almost beautiful about it where you’re like, “Oh, we’re all caught in this same cycle.”
And it was just for so long it was the case that the New York Times and NBC and CBS and ABC and the Washington Post and the Associated Press, I guess they could just move the nation. I mean, if they wanted to be like, “Hey.” Forget even after 9/11, the idea that in 1990, 1991, that there was any organic movement from the American people going, “We really got to see about this Saddam Hussein guy.” The dictator in Iraq is having a slant drilling dispute with the Emir of Kuwait. We really got to do something about that. That is not something that organically came from any… that was not a few soccer moms hanging out watching their kids’ game being like, “I think in a couple of years we’re going to have to send these boys over to Iraq.”
They just, from the top down, were able to create this feeling that like, “Hey, there’s a new Adolf Hitler on the rise over here in Iraq. We got to go see about this. There are these poor people in Kuwait, we have to do that.” They were able to create this desire for war. It’s really incredible when you think about it, because I think for the most part in human history, you would’ve had to have some type of plausible threat, some type of plausible reality to convince people that we actually have to go to war in order to deal with this. Whereas the idea that in 1991, the United States of America would feel threatened by Iraq was just ridiculous. And yet they were able to do it.
It was what Charles Krauthammer dubbed the unipolar moment. There was excitement, there was a feeling of invincibility. And also the Neocons weren’t in power after ’92 really. I mean, they were in the George H.W. Bush administration, but after ’92, they really weren’t. So they’re just writing at these think tanks, and it just didn’t seem as… they weren’t as guarded. There weren’t these accusations of Euro war criminal or something like that. But what he said, what Jonah Goldberg agreed with, I think the statement was every 10 years or so, America’s got to find a puny little country and put them up against the wall just to let the rest of the world know that we mean business. And that was actually their mentality.
And the idea that imagine if there were the political will to invade Mexico. If DC decided we’re taking Mexico City, that’s going to be part of America now, and we’re taking it by force. And then China was like, “We’re not sure if we can allow this.” I think immediately most Americans would be like, “Allow? How the fuck do you think you are going to stop us from taking Mexico City? What are you going to do China? You’re going to send your Navy ships over here to fight us off the coast of Mexico. Good luck with that.” And at least from my understanding in almost all the war games that they’ve run, even if it doesn’t come to nuclear weapons being used, in which case the whole world gets blown up. But even if we go to militarily try to stop China from invading Taiwan and everyone agrees to not use nukes, and we just fight a conventional war, we lose that war every time.
And the most obvious example of this was when Joe Biden actually said, ” Oh, we wouldn’t allow that and we would militarily intervene if they went into China.” And this was so bizarre, then the White House, whoever that was, came out to correct the President of the United States and say, “No, the policy of the White House is the one China policy.” Which look, I mean, again, I think the whole point of this is that the reason why whoever the hell was able to overrule Joe Biden and his administration, I don’t know who that is, but the whole point is that if you say, and this is why there is some wisdom in America accepting the one China policy is that if you tell China that we recognize Taiwan’s independence and that they’re not a part of China, that might be the type of thing that would make China invade and say, “No, we’re not accepting that.”
And so at least right now, it’s like, “Okay.” Look, this is the reality. It’s something that you kind of run up against with the war in Ukraine a lot and with the situation in China and Taiwan is that there are constraints placed on us by reality. It’s not all just how would you like the world to be? How would you like it to work? Obviously, I think we would all like that bigger countries don’t invade smaller countries and bigger countries don’t bully smaller countries around. That is not the way of the world. We are a big country that is the biggest bully in the world, so we’re in no position to let… but we’re kind of in the position is just you’re like, “Hey, we’d sure love if you don’t do that.
You can do it and you can get away with it, but we would sure love it if you don’t.” And so the goal would be to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. When Vladimir Putin starts talking about like, Hey, if you keep pushing the idea of Ukraine joining your military alliance, I’m going to invade that country. The goal there or the move there would be to be like, “Okay, we’ll stop talking about that. Is there something else that we can agree on?” Is there a way that you will promise you won’t do anything to them and we’ll promise we won’t bring them in our military. That’s the goal. You don’t just go like, “No, fuck you, we’re doing it anyway,” over and over and over again until they do the thing.
You could think of something where… You remember the saw movies? Where they used these crazy horror scenarios, but it’s like, “Okay, so there’s a person, an evil bad guy has buried a key inside this person, and you have to kill that person in order to get the key, in order to unlock these 20 people to let them out of a cage.” Now, look, you still don’t have a right to kill people. It’s horrible and wrong, and what you did there was still evil, but if you were taken to trial over it, you could probably explain to a judge and a jury be like, “I know, but the situation I was in was either these 20 people were going to die, or this one person was going to die, and under that situation, I chose to save the 20.” So in other words, by perfect theory, no, you never have the right to kill innocent people.
There could be a scenario where you were like, “Look, we had to take this military action and some innocent people did die, and it’s so tragic and awful that we had to do this, but we are certain that many more people would’ve died had we not done this.” Now, in that case, I would look at that as number one, it’s much like killing the one person to save the 20. It’s still wrong. It’s still an immoral thing that you were forced into doing. It’s not justified. I would say that the overwhelming onus should have to be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely needed to do that. And that’s how I feel about all these wars. It’s not like… I think that let’s just say if you could make World War II, you could reduce it down to the simplest caricature of what World War II is, and say there’s no Joseph Stalin. We’re not even partnering with him. There was a good guy in Russia who we were partnering with, and the British Empire had never done anything wrong.
They were just nothing but good guys. And of course, FDR is nothing but a good guy, and Hitler was even worse than the real Hitler, you know what I mean? And in order to stop them, we had to go on this bombing campaign, and we only got Nazis. We only killed the bad guys, and we were able to take out the Third Reich, but one eight-year-old girl died and you did this thing that stopped the whole world from falling into subjugation. So I think almost everybody would agree, “Jesus, man, you have to do that. Okay, you have to do that because the whole world’s going to be subjugated. There’s nothing but good guys here. The Nazis are so evil, and there’s one…”
I still would say that every single time World War II came up, we should all just be somber and we should all just think about that little eight-year-old girl who died and what a horrible thing it is that we had to do that. And so when there are these campaigns where tens of millions of people are killed, the fact that anybody’s ever spiking the football or this like, “Rah-rah, we were the good ones.” And then also when you add in all those other complicated factors like… This wasn’t the scenario at all. So I guess essentially I’d say no, you don’t ever have a right to kill innocent people. It’s never self-defense to be killing innocent people. I mean, short of some type of scenario where if you’re holding a baby and coming at me shooting and I shoot back at you, and, “Okay, I was acting in self-defense and it happened to kill a baby,” but I’m talking about the scenarios where you’re dropping bombs on cities, it’s never justified, and the overwhelming onus should be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely have to do it.
And that should be the standard, because there’s so many other standards that I see thrown out that I just think make no moral sense at all. People will argue about in Gaza, they’ll argue about the civilian to combatant ratio, that to me doesn’t really… That’s not what counts. That’s not the measure that’s important. And also no one knows what the numbers are. They’re all just pretend to. And then the other thing will be that people, as someone just recently argued with me about, they’ll say, “Well, Hamas has to go. That’s the starting point. Hamas has to go.” And I’m like, “No, I don’t think you get to say that, because the truth is that…”
Look, you can make an argument that Hamas has to go, sure, you can make an argument that the Likudniks have to go. You can make an argument that Kim Jong Un has to go, or that G has to go, or that Putin has to go, or that Zelensky has to go, or certainly, I would make an argument that Joe Biden had to go, but just because a government has to go, that doesn’t mean you could just go kill all their people.
It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s not true that people are responsible for the crimes of their government. I think that that same argument is used quite a bit by people on the pro-Israeli side when they say like, “Oh, they had an election in 2005 and Hamas won a plurality, therefore, 20 years later, they have no rights.” I think that’s insane. Okay, so Hamas had no right to go after civilians. It’s horrible, and you see these teenagers being killed, and you see the images of people who were held hostage for all this time. So it’s like your heart breaks for those people. It’s truly tragic. I do think that it was, in many ways, an indictment of so many different things. October 7th happening was an indictment of the entire occupation slash siege of Gaza and the West Bank for that matter. It was, I think… Should have probably forever destroyed the legacy of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is… I mean, this isn’t like George W. Bush was.
I mean, he was on the job for almost a year when 9/11 happened, but he was still kind of new. It was still kind of in his first year of being president. Benjamin Netanyahu was the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history, and had explicitly been like, “I’m the tough right-winger who’s going to be tough on these Palestinians, who’s going to move away from the idea of coming to a two state solution, because this is what we need to keep us safe.” The justification is like, “I’m going to be hard on these motherfuckers, because I know what it takes to keep us safe.”
And that culminates in the worst massacre in Israeli history. And then, I mean, the other big one is that I mean, and it’s not like a… I wouldn’t even say an open secret at this point. It’s just out in the open. He had this strategy of propping up Hamas for years. And so he had this strategy of propping up Hamas for a myriad of reasons, but a major part of it was that, “Look, man, as long as there’s terrorists in power there, there’s never going to be any pressure on us to give the Palestinians a state, because look, are you telling me I got to negotiate with them?”
It’s been over 60 years. We’re talking about a one-week-long war, or a day short of a week long war, in 1967. Israel’s had control of them ever since. And much in the same way that if you kidnap someone and you lock them in your basement and you don’t feed them, you murdered that person. So in other words, stated differently, you’re not allowed to kidnap people and lock them in your basement, but once you do, you take on a responsibility to feed those people. You know what I mean? You’re not allowed to keep someone and not feed them. That is a worse charge than just keeping them. So yeah, anyway, I guess my point is the solution to that, if you go like, “Well, I’m a bad guy if I fund Hamas, I’m a bad guy if I don’t let the aid in,” was to let the reputable international aid organizations bring aid in to the people of Gaza.
Don’t pressure the Qataris to send in briefcases full of cash, allow internationally recognized, reputable human rights organizations who are lining up trying to do it. Stop turning them away, let them in. And this is just, it’s so long past due. I mean, it’s just… I’m not defending Arab terrorism. I think really it’s a tragedy that the Arabs embraced terrorism. I don’t think it’s unique to them. And in fact, I think it was the Zionist militias who introduced terrorism to that part of the world, but there was also… Look, terrorism persists because it works. This is true with state terrorism and with non-state terrorism. Terrorism has often worked for people. I think the thing… Early Yasser Arafat I know was very influenced by the Algerians who successfully kicked the French out, embracing terrorism.
And it was almost like the major miscalculation of those Palestinian Arabs who did embrace terrorism, was that this isn’t the French hanging out in some colony with their home country back home where maybe a few acts of violence could work enough to… The liberal population back home is like, “Oh, I really didn’t like the response to that terrorism. We killed so many people. Forget it. This is too much of a headache. Let’s get out of here.” The Zionist settlers were there to stay. They weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t going back to Eastern Europe. You know what I mean?
And so it’s a tragedy that this whole thing went the way it did. But you always… Whenever you’re talking about a conflict like this, the person who has… Or the party who has the power is the one who needs make concessions, and it’s just indefensible that the status quo of the Palestinian people having no rights, literally no rights, being ruled by a government that they do not get to vote for or against, no right to do commerce with the outside world, no freedom of travel, no freedom of movement, no basic property rights, you can be kicked out of your home at any time, no right to a fair trial, no right to a lawyer, no right to a jury of your peers, I mean, the fact that that has been the status quo since 1967 is just indefensible. And then in the context that that has been the status quo, I guess I’m just not, even though I’m against it, it’s like when you’re just lecturing about the way in which they resist this. I think it’s very tough to be on a strong moral footing.
And even more directly involved, Egypt and Israel went to war four times in a couple of decades. They went to war, and then in the late ’70s, they made a land for peace deal, and they haven’t been to war since. I do at least try to hold out that that is… It’s not like Egypt is… You’re not going to say they don’t have an issue with radical Islam in Egypt. You know what I mean? That’s not the answer. It’s just that they made a land for peace deal, and once that was solved, it was easier to avoid the war. And I do like to think that there could be a solution to the Israel-Palestine question, but it’s going to have to involve Israel taking their boot off of the Palestinians neck. And I know that that’s scary, and I understand that there are legitimate concerns about that. There was the great Thomas Jefferson quote about slavery, which was, ” We have the wolf by the tail, and we can neither afford to hold onto him, nor risk letting him go.”
Which is like you could see where that would’ve been a real concern of people right toward the end of slavery or whatever in the early 1800, say the first half of the 19th century, where you’d be like, “Okay, okay, okay, we recognize this is wrong now, but we’ve had these millions of people enslaved for all these years. If we let them go, they’re going to fucking kill us. And what are you saying? They’re citizens now, meaning the Second Amendment applies to them, meaning that the guy who I enslaved now can get a gun. You know what…” So okay, there are the… But I think in hindsight, looking back at it, we would all just go, “Yeah, but you can’t enslave people. So whatever risks come with the next phase of this, unfortunately you are going to have to just deal with that and move. You have to start with abolishing slavery.”
And they just hate that Israel… That the nation was created at all, that all the Arabs were kicked out of what is very important land to them religiously. And so the governments there are like, “Look, we want to continue to have U.S. tax dollars flooding in here, and we’d love to make a deal with Israel, but you got to stop doing this to the Palestinians so my own people don’t rise up against me.” So I think as long… If the Israelis were like, “Fine, we’ll do a two-state solution,” or something like that, I think Saudi Arabia couldn’t wait to broker… In fact, they proposed a two-state solution just a few years ago. I mean, they would love to be a part of that, normalize relations.
Amongst the Palestinians, which again, I think this had been accepted multiple times, at least by their leadership. It’s like, “Yeah, you’re going to have to accept that you lost in ’48. You’re going to have to accept that you lost in ’47. You’re going to have to accept that the state of Israel does exist, and you’re going to have to accept that the right of return is not going to literally mean that everybody can go back to where they were.” And what Israel’s going to have to concede is that it was awfully fucked up that they kicked a lot of people out of their land, and that the whole, “A land for people for a people without land,” was never true. That was just a slogan that felt good to avoid what you guys actually did. And the fact that it was inexcusable that you guys occupied these people for 60 years, and that has to end immediately.
I also thought when Nikki Haley and other Israeli politicians are signing the bombs before they’re launched into Gaza, I found that sickening. I think there’s all types. I think mission accomplished banners and flying on… I mean, I think all of the… I think having Bob Hope specials at the end of the Persian Gulf War was sickening it. I just think all of it is horrific. I look at it and I try to say to myself, “Okay, we had one 9/11 in this country, and we all… Collectively we lost our minds as a society. We were ready to go bomb whoever the hell our politicians told us to bomb, and we didn’t care how many people it killed, and we killed a lot more than Israel or Hamas has killed doing it. And I try to think to myself, “Okay, imagine being trapped in what is…” People could call it whatever they want to.
I do think Pat Buchanan and these guys were right to call it a concentration camp. You’re trapped in a five-mile by 25 mile area where you cannot leave. You are stuck there. You don’t have an airport, because the Israelis bombed it. You don’t have a seaport, because they won’t allow you. You have no access to trade with the outside world, and you’re not suffering through a 9/11. You’re suffering through a thousand 9/11s. Your whole life has been… The people in Gaza, their entire life has been being refugees, you know what I mean? Their entire life. There’s generations of people who have been in this status now. And so if my society lost its mind after one 9/11, I just have a tough time judging the people who came up in this environment. But there’s no question. It is, I mean, it’s profoundly disturbing.
They were like, “Would you rather your sons are healthy and live good lives? Or would you rather they suffer, but be loyal obedience to the state?” And they were like, “We would rather they be obedient to the state,” and blah, blah, blah and all these things. And Murray Rothbard was saying he saw this interview and he was talking to his friend. He was, “Oh my God, this is horrible. It’s hopeless. These people’s minds have been warped.” And then he was talking to his friend who’s like a China expert who had been there, and he was like, “No, they’re not. That’s what they say when the cameras are around. As soon as the cameras go…” So anyway, I’m just making the point there that there is… Look, even in the situation with Israel and Gaza, specifically Gaza, not even the West Bank, when… You could look at it, when the peace talks were going on, support for Hamas plummeted, when the peace talks fell apart, support for Hamas went way back up. Every time there’s an aggressive military campaign, support for Hamas goes back up. So I just think that I’m more hopeful than not, that you could get to a place where… But it requires… You have to… If you do understand the Ron Paul point about blowback, the General McChrystal point about insurgent math, you just realize that it’s like you are fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you’re fighting. And so the first step is to stop doing that. Your cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that. And then let’s see if maybe we could heal.
Now, that’s one thing, a lot of nations are started on somethings like that. I suppose if you just did that, and then you were left with your 80/20 split and you go, “But we have elections from here on out.” I guess you could claim it’s a democracy, still seems like kind of gaming the democratic system a little bit, you know what I mean? If I just deported 80% of Democrats and then say, “Look, Republicans win every election.” You might be like, “Yeah, dude, but you didn’t exactly get there democratically. You got there through force.” But forget that, I’ll let that one go and just say, “I’ll call you a democracy if you just kept being a democracy like that moving forward.”
The real problem is the occupation that starts in 1967. Because look, when you’ve occupied an area since 1967, you can’t even really call it an occupation anymore, it’s an annexation. You took these lands. You have control of it. You are what the definition of the government is. And you could call Hamas the government all you want to, but they’re not the sovereigns. They’re not the final decision makers. Israel’s the final decision maker. Hamas does not meaningfully in any way decide the biggest questions about Gaza, I’m talking before this war, pre-October 7th. And so the problem Israel has in order to call themselves a democracy, is that there’s somewhere between 5 and 6 million people, less now because they’ve killed a lot of them. But there’s somewhere between 5 and 6 million people who live under Israeli control who do not have voting rights.
And by any other reasonable, commonly held standard of democracy, we would not call that a democracy. I mean, again, I’m not even saying this to try to be inflammatory or try to pick on the Israelis. There’s things about Israeli society I like, I don’t hate the people there. I’m Jewish, I love Jewish people. But the fact is, that’s not a democracy, that’s an apartheid state. I’m not even trying to be inflammatory when I say this, it’s just literally describing what’s in front of you. If we in America right now said Black people no longer get to vote, and Black people can only live in these few neighborhoods, we don’t get to call ourselves a democracy anymore then. And I’m not even coming at this from a pro-democracy point of view, I’m just saying if your defense of them is like, “Well, we’re a democracy,” which seems to be the case so much. Well no, you’re really not. You’re really not, as long as you got millions of people who have no say in their own government, then you’re really not a democracy. And so again, so you could frame it as democracy versus death cult, was his language for Hamas?
Let’s say you’re a really bad guy, and I want to kill you. And you are at home with a bunch of women and children, and I know there’s women and children there. I know for a fact that if I blow up this building, it’s going to kill all those babies. What I would be charged with is murder in the first degree. And the fact that I went in there and said, “Well, listen, hold on. It’s a shame that I had to kill those babies, I really just wanted to kill that one guy, I wish the babies weren’t there.” And they’d be like, “Yeah, but you knew they were there, and you did it anyway. You get murder in the first degree.” Maybe it would make some little difference tinkering around with the sentencing at the end of it, but it doesn’t like in kind change what the crime is there.
And so I just think at a certain point, if you’re doing something like… Look, I’ll say maybe with a little bit of an edge. Let’s say Barack Obama wants to drone-bomb this place to kill a terrorist. And he thinks he can do it without killing any innocent civilians. Does it, and then it ends up killing some innocent civilians. That’s one thing. But once you’ve done it over and over and over again, and every single time it kills innocent civilians. And then there’s a wedding and you order a drone bomb strike on a wedding. “No, you murdered those people. That’s murder in the first degree.
And so yes, whether you say out loud, “Oh, it sure is a shame that we got to kill all these kids.” When you’re doing it over and over, and you know the action you’re taking is going to kill more kids. Yeah, it’s a little bit different, but really not that much. It’s still pretty much a… And then also when you mix in with that, the fact that, I mean, if you go… And I’m not taking an opinion on the word genocide, I don’t even like to get into that conversation. I feel like it just derails it anyway. What Israel’s doing, whether you think it’s a genocide or not, it’s certainly not what most people envision when they hear the word genocide. But if you could look at South Africa’s case that they promoted at the International Court of Justice, the whole thing is just quotes from Israeli leaders. And I’m just saying, by the way, it’s not like they’re always saying, “Oh, it sure is a shame that we had to kill that 8-year-old girl.’ They like half the time they say that when they’re talking to the international community, and then the other half the time they seem to basically be saying, “There’s no such thing as an innocent 8-year-old girl.” And so I guess I just don’t find that argument to be very compelling, especially when the thing has been going on for so long.
And so I’m just saying you’re committing the same act that we would consider murder in the first degree here. And then just to go one step further, I think particularly part of the reasons why people have different attitudes about the way two nations fight, what we think of as war versus what we think as say a policing issue. We would never accept the idea that, the logic that’s used in wars, used in World War II, even used in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially used in the war in Gaza. If there was a bad guy, even a guy who had done something like October 7th, which we have school shooters and things like that here. If there was an active duty school shooter, and he’s in a school shooting people, and we know he is already killed 25 people-
So while Israel is saying, “Hey, they’re using human shields.” And that is true, I think, to some degree. I think the Israelis overplay it a little bit, but there have been, I think, clear instances where Hamas is using human shields. But it’s kind of a flip side of a different point. And the other point is like, “Oh, well why aren’t they using their army, or their air force, or their navy?” Oh, right, because they don’t have any of those. Oh, that’s right, so you are fighting a war against people that don’t have a government because you’ve denied them their right to have one. And so that’s the thing where I do think if you’ve occupied the place since 1967, you almost now take on an obligation that you kind of have to almost conduct this as a police matter. Because now we are getting awfully close to the scenario that we just laid out. We’re like, “Oh, there’s a school shooter, blow up the school.”
I found out about him from, my guy is Scott Horton, who’s a very close friend of mine, and I think the best person on war in the country, he’s just a genius. He runs the Libertarian Institute, and he’s also been the editor at antiwar.com for many years now. So he first told me about Daryl, and what I knew of Daryl was just that he did a podcast with Jocko. And so they did their show together, and I listened to a couple episodes of it and really enjoyed it.
And then it was Scott who was like, “Dude, you got to check out his podcast Martyr Mate, it’s the best history podcast.” The first thing I listened to of his was the Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem. He’s done a few things on Twitter where he’s kind of shit posting and stuff like that. But when you listen to his work, when he lays down like, I’m going to take years to put together a long presentation on the history of this conflict or the history of this. He has the utmost responsibility in the way that he tells the story and the way he presents it. I cannot understand how anyone would listen to his work, and come away with the feeling that this guy is any type of Jew hater, or Nazi apologist, or anything like that. It is just not who he is.
What Daryl said on Tucker’s show was that, he goes, “I’ll say this to be provocative sometimes to kind of rib my buddy Jocko, who’s like Anglo-Saxon. So this kind of gets to him.” And he goes, “And I’m being a bit hyperbolic when I say this, but I’ll sometimes say that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.” Now, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, he wasn’t the worst person there, but he was a guy who was hell-bent on kind of this thing becoming what it ultimately became. Whereas this might’ve just been an invasion of Poland, this may not have been this whole cascade of the worst thing that ever happened in human history.
Now, the retelling of that is always, people go, “He said Churchill was the chief villain of the war.” But it’s like, no, not exactly. You know what I mean? He’s making a point, and I think he’s putting out right now a long series on World War II, he just put the prologue to it out, which was excellent, by the way. Listen, after it’s out, maybe I’ll come back and regret saying this, but I don’t think I will. I really have trust that Darryl will handle this responsibly. And in fact, I think that he might be… And not because he’s involved, this is his angle or what he’s attempting to do. I think just that he’s going to tell the truth and the truth will take you where it takes you. I think he’s actually going to probably serve a function of bringing a lot of those types kind of back to reality. If you think he’s going to be excusing the atrocities of the Nazis in this thing, I don’t think you’re going to be happy with the end product, if that’s what you are coming into it for.
It still doesn’t follow from that, that therefore in every situation appeasement is wrong, and aggression is good. It doesn’t follow that, if that’s the only lesson of history. And that now it’s just okay to slaughter civilians. It’s okay to go to total war against a civilian population because this one time it was necessary. Bobby Kennedy said this to me again, somebody who I really do love and admire in many ways, and I’m glad he’s the health secretary. But I remember him evoking the Nazis and making a comparison between Hamas and the Nazis. And you’re like, “Dude, Hamas doesn’t even control Gaza really. The Nazis had most of Europe at one point. This is just not an apples to apples conversation. You can’t even compare the two in terms of what type of menace or threat they are to the world.”
I mean, sure, maybe if Hamas had a lot of power, they’d use it in a bad way. But that’s true with some homeless guy on the street too, but he doesn’t have that power. So what are we talking about here? And so I do think that the way the World War II narrative is weaponized has been, even if World War II itself was necessary and just, the way that, that’s been weaponized over the years has led to just countless catastrophes. You know what I mean, I guess it’s just in some ways there might be something positive about the fact that everybody’s always called Hitler if they’re bad. You know what I mean? Because we make Hitler the face of what is evil eternally or something. He really does play the role of the devil in our society in a strange way. But there is Saddam was the next Hitler, and Gaddafi was the Hitler, and Bashar Assad was the next Hitler.
One of the things is that for young white men in America today, they’ve lived through the years of real insane progressive woke-sim. I’m 42, it’s just a different thing for me, I come from a different culture in a different time. That just simply was not the case that when I was a teenager, or when I was in college, or when I was in my early 20s, that the school, the faculty, the politicians, Hollywood, all of them embraced racialism. They all said, “We’re playing identity politics, and it is okay to dice people up along these racial lines,” and have that first and foremost in your mind.
And there is this weird feeling over this last year and now with Trump being reelected, that we snapped our fingers and woke-sim and went away or something like that. But these guys still came up in this era, and it was always the case that one of the dangerous elements of playing this game was like, hey, you think you’re going to play this and that young straight white men aren’t going to start playing this game too? Why the hell would they not? Why would they just accept, we’ll just sit here while everybody else is allowed to have a racial identity, and a grievance about it. And yet we’ll be the one group who, yeah, could just stomp all over us, we’re the bad guys. And that’s part of the reason why I always opposed the woken sanity.
I mean, first and foremost, just because I think it’s wrong, I think it’s wrong to be shitty to people based on their racial group, and that includes white people too. But then also you’re like, you don’t see that this is going to result in something bad. So there’s that. And what’s weird to me is that, I guess it’s because a lot of the people who are the most upset about the antisemitism also happen to be supporting Israel, there’s a big correlation between that. But clearly it’s a huge factor in this. It’s not a coincidence that all of this rose up while Israel is just conducting this brutal campaign with our weapons and money.
And so I always think with these things, whether it’s with Putin, or with Al-Qaeda, or with whoever, and I’m not saying the guy who posts Jew-hating stuff on Twitter is the same as them. I’m just saying in all of these situations, you always kind of got to separate, what are legitimate grievances and what are, okay, you’re wrong on that and you shouldn’t be doing that. So it’s pretty easy for me, if I listen to the Putin interview with Tucker, I thought his whole 30 minute opening thing was horrible and just kind of stupid, especially when you’re talking to Tucker Carlson. This is for an American audience. You know how much that does not resonate with Americans being like, “We have a historic claim over another.” Our entire society is founded on, we think that’s bullshit. That’s the entire history of our society. It’s like, nah, it doesn’t matter. Sorry.
Literally read the Declaration of Independence, it just refutes everything Vladimir Putin said in the first 30 minutes. Our view of the world is that God wants us to be free, and we get to overthrow governments if they’re infringing on our rights. So that was stupid. But then when he is talking about NATO enlargement, and bringing Ukraine into the American Military Alliance, you’re like, “Okay, he’s got a legitimate point there. We would not allow one of our neighbors to be brought into China or Russia’s military alliance.” And so likewise, when it comes to those guys, I do think that, look, it is just true. It is the case that America has fought many wars over the last seven years with Israel playing a very influential role in us fighting those wars. And this was a scheme that was cooked up by the neoconservatives and the [inaudible 01:39:03] in Israel that we would go through this path. But this has been confirmed by four Star General Wesley Clark. He literally said, “It was a study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple seven countries in five years.” And we didn’t get there in five years, but we’ve made attempts to topple all of those countries since then.
You see Trump’s bombing the Houthis because they’re pissed off about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and so they’re trying to shut down their straits or whatever. So we’re just bombing another group on behalf of Israel. And if you really are concerned about the rise of Jew hatred, I would say, look, sometimes people would argue, the thing I said in the beginning about the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, they hate us because we’re over there. And people would say, “That’s just what Osama Bin Laden says.” He just says he hates us for our military, but he really just hates us because he’s an Islamist and we’re free people or whatever. And you’d be like, “Okay, well even if that’s what’s in his heart, that sure is his recruiting shtick. That sure is how he gets other people to blow themselves up.” And so even if you want to say, which might very well be the case, that some of these people just hate Jews, and it wouldn’t matter if Israel was at war with Gaza or not. It’s like, okay, but that sure is their recruiting shtick. That sure is how they get other people to go look at what these Jews are doing in our foreign policy.
So I don’t know. There’s a lot going on. I think racialism of all different forms is stupid and wrong. It always just leads to sloppy thinking and bad results, it’s always kind of ugly. And then weirdly, it also always ends up hurting the person, it’s not good for you, it’s not good for your soul. So I don’t like seeing that stuff. I was saying before about there’s this hierarchy of outrage that you got to have in order to think and act, you have to kind of put these together. It’s something that, despite being described as a self-hating Jew, I am really not. I love Jewish people, I love Jewish culture. I’ve benefited a lot from it. It’s in many ways made me the person I am, and I think it’s influenced some of the best parts of me.
But there is a whininess and a hysteria about this stuff that I think is just not healthy. I think it’s not good. I’ve told many Jewish friends and family this privately, but the way I look at it is like, I’m an American, this has been a wonderful country to be Jewish. Jews are doing exceptionally well in this country. We are 2% of the population or so, and we are thriving by any metric. And if mean stuff on Twitter is our great burden to bear, I don’t think we should be talking about it like we’re in the middle of Nazi Germany or something like that. So I do think people get hysterical about it.
And by the way, I’m really interested about World War II, probably in the way that Dan Carlin and Darryl Cooper are interested because it’s such an interesting first stage on which human nature was explored in all its forms, the geopolitics of it. Everybody on that stage was complicated. Also, there’s a lot of fascinating military tactics and strategy and military technology plus the nuclear bomb, all of that. That’s like a moment in human history. Listen, I love Genghis Khan, Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, those are all interesting studies of human history, of military tactics, of brutality, of human nature, all of that. That’s why I want to be able to discuss that. It’s fascinating that humans are able to do that kind of thing. What causes them to do it? What were the dynamics evolved, the propaganda on all sides? Could it been avoided or not? Plus Stalin is part of this picture. It’s like, what the fuck?
After the nuclear bomb you’re just not going to get characters like that. You’re not going to get a global war of that kind. It might be a different one, maybe a cyber war or maybe a war in space, but we’re not going to get this kind of war ever again. That was the biggest and the last global war we’re going to get. So I want to be able to mouth off and explore and, yeah, argue with Darryl Cooper bought Churchill and say stupid in the process and Darryl says stupid in the process too, and together come up to the… So anyway, the trolls on the left and the right just make everything worse and it’s annoying.
But then I also feel like, and I just want to be clear, just explain this, I’m not saying this is the worst thing about people who are Jew haters on Twitter, but just from a personal perspective, I’m like, “Guys, you are not helping me, man.” I’ll get people in my comments who I think are trying to catch my back who just don’t know I’m Jewish and they’re like, I’ll say something critical of Israel, and then someone will argue with me and they’ll be like, “Oh look, a Jew came in here to defend Israel.” And I’m like, “Dude, first of all, literally you might as well be working for Mossad. You literally make the entire movement who’s criticizing Israel look terrible, dude. You are literally the enemy that they would like to have.”
And so there’s a very weird dynamic in the Israel-Palestine conflict where there’s so many of the loons on both sides who almost seem like they’re secretly working for the other side. When you see the Palestinian protests and they’re chanting, “Death to America,” and all this stuff, you’re like, what are you doing? Are you trying to make people more sympathetic to Israel? Because if Rabbi Shmuley was working for Adolf Hitler or something like that, it would all make perfect sense. You’d be like, “Oh, I get it, you sent this guy out to make everyone hate Jewish people.” And then with the Jew hating posts too, yeah, it just feeds right into the opposition side of how to caricature. It’s like, “Oh, so their game is, they’ll smear everybody who’s a critic of Israel as being a Jew hater so your answer is to just really be a Jew hater? Like, all right, I don’t think that’s helping.”
And I’ve personally, so this is a bit of a therapy session, but I’ve personally been leaning against doing it and I hate that I’m leaning against doing it because the reason I’m leaning against doing it is because the very people you’re talking about, because I just don’t want them on either side, pro Israel, it doesn’t really matter, but the chanting sheep of animal farm, Jew hating or otherwise, they follow you around everywhere online and make it difficult to think. I think whenever I come across these crowds, the woke left or the whatever you call the Jew haters, the woke right, let’s call them, they just decrease the quality of my thoughts for the rest of the day.
And I just made a decision at a certain point that it’s like, I’m just going to accept that that’s the price of business here, that’s what it costs and then okay, fine. And then sometimes I try to have fun with it or mock them or whatever to go back. But to me now, again, I can never tell you what to do because it’s a very personal price that you have to pay, and it’s a very weird psychological dynamic. I mean, it’s almost something like that we were not evolved to deal with and is very artificial. If there’s a group of thousands of people who hate your guts and are furious at you, we’re almost hardwired to be like, “Well, I’m going to be killed now. That’s the next thing that happens.” You’re not supposed to get to know what just someone in Arkansas thinks about you right now.
So that’s a very personal decision to make, but I kind of feel like guys like me and you have already made the decision that we’re in the arena and we’re going to deal with that price. So just from my perspective, I’m like, “Yeah, but how could you turn down getting three hours with Netanyahu?” That would just be so interesting. And I’m not even saying, I hate the guy, but I’m not saying you should interview him like you hate the guy or I’m not saying you even have to grill him, but just if you get three hours with somebody, something interesting is going to be revealed there. There’ll be a benefit to that. It’ll be interesting to just see him talk that way.
There’s also something about, as we kind of saw with Trump doing the podcasts and even with JD Vance doing some of the podcasts, there is something really interesting about this format, the long form podcast where it just gets people to let down their guard and reveal themselves a little bit more. It is not just the time factor. That’s a big one, it’s a huge, huge one. But there’s something about if me and you are just like, we were having this conversation right now, but in the back of us was like a cable news background of red and blue and sparks and a ticker at the bottom of the show and then you just start interviewing someone, it’s just a different thing. Whereas this you just fall into conversation mode. And I’d be interested to see him fall into that, Putin too. I just think it’s great.
Now, there is a reasonable, I think, point that you made in there where it’s like it is a different game to interview a world leader. That is a very different thing. Talking to some comedian about his thoughts on all this stuff is a very different thing than talking to a world leader and especially one who’s conducting a brutal war as you’re talking to them. And I don’t know exactly what the way to navigate that is. I agree with you, it’s not just to be hostile and be like, “I’ve got you here for three hours, I’m going to grill the shit,” it’s probably not the best way to do it. There’s probably to have a conversation to talk to the guy, probably try to get some important questions in, but also give him a chance to breathe and be a person. From my perspective, but again, it’s a very personal thing, for me I just do think that I’m going, “I hope you do it,” because I’d love to see that podcast.
Number one, I feel like I’m obligated, and I wouldn’t say this for you, but I think this is true for me, I think I’m obligated to do at least several debates a year. And I think that if I’m going to go on shows like your show and Rogan’s show and Tucker’s show and Candice or whoever else, Patrick Bet-David and Tim Pool, and I go on these big shows for long form things and I’m sitting there and I’m being like, “Okay, it’s like this and I think it’s like this,” and then if I’m going to do that, I kind of have an obligation to test myself against someone being like, “No, it’s not like that,” and then showing that I think I can stand up to these kind of challenges. So I feel like I’m kind of obligated.
But then there is a feeling to it where you’re like, “Hey man, my career is not a joke. I got little kids. This is how I support them.” And I am kind of taking my career in my hands every time I go do one of these debates. If I just get smoked and this guy just totally beats me up, it’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know, how’s anyone going to look at me again after that? You’d be like, “Oh, you acted like you had such a good point and then this guy just totally destroyed your point.” But that then motivates me to be like, “Okay, I got to really be on point. I got to really make sure I’ve done my homework. I got to make sure my argument’s really tight. I got to think about this thing from all ends.”
And then on the other level, it’s like if someone can do that to me, then kind of that’s the way the movie’s supposed to end. If there is some hole in my argument that I’m just not thinking of and then someone else can point it out to me and I got no response to it, then I kind of deserve to be humiliated publicly for that so all right. And I don’t know, it’s kind of exciting in a way.
But you look at the guy, the way his career trajectory tracks is completely unexplainable outside of being connected to intelligence. It’s not just the one or two people saying that he’s intelligence, it’s like the idea that you’re just like, you have no experience and you’re a teacher at Dalton, which is this incredibly elite New York City private school, and then all of a sudden you’re at Bear Stearns and within two years you’ve made partner and you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody knows where you made your money from? This just doesn’t happen. And then you’re just inserted into this world with all of the most highest level political leaders and cultural figures and stuff.
But the thing that’s amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it’s like the level of evil and the level of corruption that it exposes, no matter what the answer is, no matter what the answer is, you’re going to tell me that there was a pedophile ring in our country that involved… I mean, listen, dude, if you had said this before it came out, this would’ve been the wildest conspiracy theory, but a pedophile ring that involves the most powerful people in the United States of America and in the world to some degree touching the Royal family, the Clintons, all these people, and that this was known and covered up and then allowed to continue? I mean, there’s a blackmail operation that relies on raping American children? And if this is, whether it’s CIA or Mossad doesn’t make one less, it’s equally horrible.
But then these elements were like, you’re like, okay, so when he first got arrested and then he was given a slap on the wrist, a slap on the wrist and then the prosecutor says, “Well, I was told by the intelligence community that he’s intelligence and to go easy on him,” it’s like, “Oh, okay, okay. And you didn’t resign and discuss that day?” You know what I mean? I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. There was the ABC reporter who said that she had the whole story, she’s on the hot mic saying she had the whole story and then the network told her to squash it, and it’s like, “And you stayed working there?” I’m sorry, I’m not saying we’re all imperfect and none of us are heroes, but you are in a news network and you uncovered a child raping ring that implicated the most powerful people in our society and your news network told you, “We will not run this story because of our relationship with the royal family,” and you did not resign in disgust that day and take this story to every single independent outlet that would maybe publish it? I’m sorry.
It’s like it’s so damning to the entire apparatus that we did not, at the very least, see mass resignations over this, forget even at the very least expect that it would’ve been prosecuted and shut down. And then still to this day even it’s like, and I think Tucker Carlson just said this recently, and I guess it’s a little bit of a weird area when you’re filming people raping children, but where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Where are those?
I don’t know what the legal process of this is, because I think technically it’s child porn, so yeah, okay, you can’t just distribute it out and let everybody watch it, but isn’t there a way that somebody has to sit down and watch it and see who is implicated in this? And there’s even, I think there’s a lot of LARPing with this administration going on right now on this topic, but does anybody really expect that we’re actually going to get to the bottom of this? Because I don’t. And that in itself just tells you what a sham this god damn whole system is.
One of the things that’s so amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story, I mean, you have all of that, and then of course, the end of it, which is just like, “Wait a minute, wait, what? Hold on. He’s in the most secure prison and then the cameras go out and the correctional officers don’t fill out the log and he’s found dead?” I mean, but when you look at it in totality, there’s just no getting around the huge indictment it is of this entire everything. And I mean, even the fact that even the Trump administration, when Pam Bondi goes, “We’re going to release all of this information. We’ve only redacted what needs to be redacted for national security.”
But look, a lot of this stuff with so much of this too, it’s just laziness and people searching for confirmation bias and people searching for a simpler story because that’s easier. So if they believe that Epstein was Mossad and there’s a clip of you where you’re like, “I don’t know about that,” then they go, “See, he’s Mossad too, and now that fits perfectly into my little story.” I know the truth is that it’s quite possible that people just aren’t convinced. However, given enough time, Tim Dillon is always right about everything.
And then I would say, and I don’t know exactly, I have no idea, I should say, the motivations inside any individual’s heads, but I would say in the case of Vladimir Putin, he is completely blacked out in American media and to the point that even RT has been blocked out, they never play any of his speeches, they never allow you to hear, “Look, this is what this guy’s perspective is.” It’s very interesting in the same way that they kind of all flipped out when Osama bin Laden’s letter to America went viral on Tik-Tok, and then all the talks of banning Tik-Tok increased and stuff. So for him, say like when he did the Tucker interview or if he does an interview with you, well, that’s a way for him to do an end around and allow his perspective to be heard, which I personally think is obviously a good thing. If you’re going to go in a war, and we’re kind of at a war with Russia right now, you should know what the other guy’s perspective is, not that you should take it as gospel.
And then from Netanyahu’s perspective, I would imagine Israel has a lot of control in a lot of different areas, but they have been losing the internet battle very, very badly, and it’s a major problem for Israel. I mean, I don’t know, I still think in a very strange way everybody seems to be underestimating how grave the implications of all of this are. But the view of Israel from the world is never going to be the same as what it was before. And the generational divide on it is so stark. Everybody 40 and under, who very quickly, the time goes by quickly, pretty soon the 40 and over crowd gets aged out pretty quickly, and it’s never going to be the perception of Israel that my parents’ generation…
But it is crazy in a way that it took this long for politicians to figure out that it’s like, oh, I guess we got to go where the audience is. That’s the point of doing shows. I mean, would you rather do a show with a million people or with 10 million people? It’s like, you guys do CNN all the time. Why wouldn’t you do Joe Rogan’s podcast? It’s just a bigger audience, and those people get to vote too.
Before Obama and Hillary Clinton did the regime change war in Libya, it was all this propaganda. They were like, “He’s buying up Viagra to rape all the women and he’s going to go genocide…”. This guy who had been in power for decades. You know what I mean? And hadn’t done that. And it’s just like, oh, it’s like the way you’re supposed to think about war is almost like these people have been possessed by pure evil. They are monsters, and there’s no talking to them. There’s no dealing with them. It’s just simply this.
A good example, just this recent conflict with the Houthis, where you have the Houthis in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia invaded in 2015 with the full backing of the United States of America. And the Houthis maintained power for eight years through that. They maintained power until the Saudis finally gave up. It was literally the Saudis were just killing hundreds of thousands of people, and then the Houthis would get a drone off at one of their oil refineries or something like that.
Eventually, they were just doing enough damage that it was like, ah, shit. All right, this isn’t worth it anymore. So, they end it. Anyway. You have this thing. You’re like, if they went through a total war for eight years, what you think, Trump sent in a few tomahawk missiles over there is going to stop them from doing this? But then, they didn’t do anything. And this is according to all reporting on it. They didn’t do anything during the ceasefire. It was only once the ceasefire broke down that they went back to attacking ships again that were coming through.
You just see this thing where you’re like… It’s not saying right or wrong or who’s good or bad, it’s like sometimes there’s a diplomatic solution and there’s not a military solution. In this case, you’re like, it just shows you if there was a ceasefire here, these guys will chill out. What do you want to do? Again, do you want to go to total war with it? Because we could overthrow the Houthis, if the US invades Yemen. That’s what it would take.
It’s like, does anyone here really have the appetite for another catastrophic war in the Middle East against the poorest country in the Middle East? Or we could pursue this diplomatic route, which seemed… I’m just saying, based on the evidence that they weren’t attacking ships during the ceasefire, seems like there could be a diplomatic solution here. There’s just a lot. If you make everybody monsters and they’re not human beings, you can’t do diplomacy with monsters, you can’t negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans.
To our earlier discussion, maybe there are times where you shouldn’t negotiate or you can’t negotiate with humans, but it’s better if you can. We could use a lot more of that thinking.
And by the way, I don’t think we should do it on a few… Number one, principally, I think it is like bullying Ukraine out of resources. From what I understand, they don’t even have that many fine minerals, but whatever. But it’s also, if he was selling it to Zelenskyy, that’s a security guarantee. Because, hey, if we’re in business, then if Putin messes with you, he’s messing with us.
But from my perspective, that’s the whole point, is you don’t want to get into the business of giving out security guarantees. This is why George Washington was against entangling alliances. You give out war guarantees to too many places, you might have to fight a lot more wars than you otherwise would’ve fought. And also, there’s simply… We’re in this weird position where America postures like they’re so tough. But really, when it comes down to it, we’re not going to war in Ukraine. There’s no political will here. I’m sorry, try to convince the American people we should send our boys to…
I understand you’re from the region or you have roots from there, but to the average American, the idea of going to war over whether Luhansk is ruled by Kiev or Moscow is just… They don’t even know what Luhansk is. And if they met someone from there, they would probably just assume they were Russian. You know what I mean? And they might be, but whatever.
I think the first step to a path to peace is that you have to want to get a path to peace. I think Trump’s doing a good job in that.
And then Stoltenberg bragged about how he said, “No, because we won’t let Vladimir Putin dictate to us whether we can expand NATO or not.”. And then he was bragging. He was like, “And look what he got, more NATO expansion, Finland, and this and that, so look at that.”. And it didn’t even seem to notice that, wait a minute, you’re admitting that you could have just promised not to bring Ukraine into NATO and saved hundreds of thousands of lives? Seems like it would’ve been a much better deal. It’s going to be a much better deal than what Ukraine will ultimately end up getting.
I think also Joe Biden’s CIA director, who was a CIA director a whole four years, William Burns, when he was ambassador to Russia, he wrote the Nyet Means Nyet. And again, this was dumped by Julian Assange. This wasn’t for the public. This was just him writing to Condoleezza Rice to tell the secretary of state his assessment. And he said that, his exact words were, “A decision Russia does not want to have to make.”. This was the decision about whether to invade the Ukraine or not. He was like, “They say, if you keep pushing for Ukrainian entry into NATO, this could lead to a civil war and even worse. And in that situation, Russia would have to decide whether or not to intervene. A decision Russia does not want to have to make.”.
So, essentially I think it’s pretty clear from all sides that Putin didn’t want it to come to this. Even after the coup in 2014, he took Crimea, but he didn’t invade the country. He may have sent special forces in, but I mean not the full-scale 2022 invasion. And even the civil war, going all that… I’m not defending the decision. I’m just saying it seemed like he reluctantly [inaudible 02:25:19].
What was it? In 2014 or ’15, when they had the plebiscites in Crimea and in the Donbas region, and they voted to be independent, he didn’t take them then. I mean, he could have used that as a pretense for, hey, they voted to be with us, and he didn’t. I think he wants to end the war.
Zelenskyy, from everything he’s said publicly, seems like he still feels like… I’m just taking him at his word here, that it’s like, no, we could end the war, but we got to end the war… It seems like he’s moved from his position being like, no, we have to reclaim all of our territory, to now his position is like, all right, maybe we don’t reclaim all of it, but we got to be given some type of security guarantee in the future.
I think the problem with that is just, again… I don’t mean to be cruel about this, because it sucks that there’s little countries that are next to big countries that get bullied around about them, but there also is a bit of an entitlement to demanding a security guarantee. What exactly do you mean? From America? What? That we’ll go to war if you’re invaded? Why do we owe that to anybody? That’s crazy. I’m sorry.
You can’t just sign up to say that we’ll go to war if anybody invades anybody. I hope nobody invades anybody, but I don’t want us to get dragged into… That’s a recipe for always being at war, and I don’t think that’s right for our country.
So essentially, I think Trump and Putin want peace. And if that’s the case, I think we’ll ultimately get to an end of this war.
The reality is, and this goes to our deep discussion about the morality of war, no matter the reasons, the guy that pulls the trigger first non-accidentally and keeps pulling the trigger, that’s the guy who’s at fault.
My friend, Scott Horton, who I was talking to you about, just a totally brilliant guy, even in his book, there’s a whole chapter of all the other options of what Vladimir Putin could do. So, you’re absolutely right. And there’s a weird thing where people say, “If you say that the West provoked this conflict, that is a very different thing than saying that this invasion was justified.”.
In the same way that if you were at a bar and someone goes and spits in another guy’s face and then he pulls out a gun and murders them right there, he’s not justified in doing that. That is not okay. You don’t get to murder someone because they spit in your face. Also, if you were talking about why did he murder that guy, I’d be like, oh, because he walked up and spit in his face. That’s why it happened. And that is essentially my contention about this war. I think it’s just crystal clear that that’s why it happened.
Listen, it may be right or it may be wrong, but if China or Russia ever backed a street putsch to overthrow the democratically-elected government in Mexico, and then install a pro-Chinese or a pro-Russian government, and then started pumping arms into that conflict, and then kept floating out the idea that they were going to bring them into their military alliance, DC would simply not allow that. You cannot do that, any more than the Soviet Union could put nukes in Cuba. Sorry.
I think all of those things are factors. I think Ukraine, Crimea being their only yearlong warm-water port, I think there’s several elements to it. But I do think a huge part of it is that also the country’s been invaded through Ukraine multiple times. I think very reasonably, grading on a curve of how reasonable governments are, he saw that as a security threat.
That being said, you can also point out that really what we’re talking about here is the George H.W. Bush administration, the Clintons, Bush again, Obama, and then Trump. And the people who were in charge of the foreign policy in those administrations, the same ones who gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, they were also in charge of our European foreign policy. The most reckless policy of all was their NATO policy, and that they drove up to this conflict with Russia, with nothing but off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp, and consciously decided that we’re not going to take any of those, we’re going to drive it all the way up to this point.
Thomas Friedman for The New York Times interviewed George Kennan in 1998, and George Kennan was the Cold Warrior. He is credited as founding the containment strategy in the Cold War. He was talking about the first round of NATO expansion, which he and many other foreign policy graybeards opposed.
He was like, “This is the worst thing we could possibly do after the fall of the Soviet Union, to now say that we had this alliance in NATO that was an anti-Russian military alliance, and now that the Soviet Union isn’t there anymore, and it’s Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, that now we’re going to expand NATO because of that.”. He literally said in 1998, he goes, “The people advocating that we expand NATO are going to continue advocating it and advocating it and advocating it. And then there will be a Russian reaction. And then they’ll say, ‘See? That’s why we were right to expand NATO.’. But they’ll get this completely wrong.”.
I think that already we’re in a position where Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that, “I can end this war.”, and he’s going to look very, very bad if he can’t. So, he’s very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quick as possible, and so hopefully that can happen soon. It would be great if it could happen in the next month.
There’d be a bombing campaign in Afghanistan when we already knew we were a few months away from ending the war. You’re like, “You got to kill more people on the way out. We already know we’re leaving. We already know.”, because there’s something… At least in the beginning, they could hide behind this justification or they could be like, “Listen, we’re going to overthrow the Taliban and we’re going to install our new government. They’re going to be a democracy. It’s going really good. We have to do this in order to do this bigger project.”.
But then by the end, you’re like, we’re not even pretending anymore that we’re doing anything more positive. It’s just someone dying in a senseless thing we never should have been in.
But it is a very different thing for two neighboring countries to fight, and even though most of the fighting’s been done on the Ukrainian side, not all of it. I think there still are areas…
But that’s very different than two nation states right next to each other on the border. There’s just a real feeling of survival in that moment. And I do think that probably I don’t understand this as well as you do, and probably you don’t even understand it as well as maybe an older generation of Russians and Ukrainians would. But there’s also something about both Russia and Ukraine, in their own ways, got so absolutely fucked over in the 20th century, multiple times, in a way that Americans just… It is just too foreign into us to even understand anything like that. Millions of people starving to death, being invaded, the entire nation collapsing.
The Russian government collapsed twice in 100 years. That’s traumatic. We just simply have never been through anything like that. When you have that trauma as a society and then there’s a war on your border, I’m sure there’s a whole lot of different kind of feelings that we just can’t relate to.
It was before the Comedy Mothership was built, you came by a Joe Rogan and Friends Show at The Vulture.
That was one of the things that I really learned from doing the podcast over the years, was how much that’s actually a relationship. You actually have a relationship with your listeners. In the same way that you can’t lie to people in your life, you also can’t lie to your… They’re a relationship too. You can’t lie to your audience.
I think that there’s often almost shortcuts that are presented before you, but there is a payoff to not taking the shortcuts and to doing it the way you want to do it.
But then Rogan became the main thing. And now, they didn’t just see you do seven minutes of standup. They sat and listened to you for three hours. Let’s just say even off that one three-hour podcast…
When you consume somebody like that for 40, 50 hours, you do see into their soul. I think there’s almost no way to avoid that. And also, I would say if they’re not letting you see into their soul, you’ll notice that…
I was a huge Joe Rogan fan before the Joe Rogan experience. I’m an old-school Joe Rogan head. I used to go on joerogan.net when…
I don’t know, man. He’s just a very genuine person. I think he really derives a lot of pleasure out of the fact that he gets to help…
Again, he’s just been such a great guy to me. And at every little angle, everything you open for him, he takes care of you better than anybody else does. You’d work his club, his club pays better than anybody else does. He’s always great to the people who are around him. I have a wife, I have two little kids. He’s put me in a situation where I can provide a great life for them. Don’t get me wrong, I did something with the opportunity. It’s not like he just gave me… He gave me the opportunity and I did something with it. But still, he didn’t have to give me that opportunity. I will go to my grave being enormously grateful for his friendship and the platform that he’s given me.
I try not to abuse this, but there’s been a few points over the years where I was like, “I really need advice on this.”, and I’ve gone to him and he’s been the absolute best, literally, every single time. I followed it a few times. A few times I didn’t follow his advice, and I really regret not following his advice. But he was the absolute best guy to be like, ” All right, let’s talk about this.”. And the last thing I’ll say is that it’s freaking crazy, because he’s got more shit going on than anybody else in the world and is still very interested to take time out to discuss some thing that I’m asking him about, which is a really, really great quality.
Yeah. The guy is fearless and follows just his genuine curiosity. It’s like an inspiration to me, friendships aside, just inspiration of how great of a conversationalist he is, and not … He would generally didn’t give a fuck, if he talks to any of the presidential candidates or not, he would just talk to friends just because he wants to. And there’s no clickbaitiness to it. There’s no giving a shit about views or likes or any of that.
It’s really hard to overstate it. I mean, there used to be nothing like this. It used to be that if CNN and Fox News agreed, well, then that was it. That was the line now. And now we got the biggest show in the country will actually allow the other perspective on and allow people to challenge the regime. I think it’s been historic.
I remember for a long time, back in the day in 9/11 truth movement, one of the huge smoking guns that they would point to was that in the ’90s there was this one document, I’m blanking on the title of it, but it was from PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, and this was the think tank or one of the think tanks of the neoconservatives. All the big neoconservatives were involved in PNAC, from Dick Cheney, to Rumsfeld, to Richard Perle, David Wurmser, all the big neocons.
And there was this one document where they basically … they were like, their Project for the New American Century was how we’re going to have hegemony for another 100 years. Now that we won the 20th century. How are we going to win the 21st century? And they were like, “Okay, well here’s what we want to do. We want to start multiple wars in the Middle East and we want to go …” Like all the plans that they had. NATO expansion in Europe was a big part of it too.
And then there was one line where they said, “It’s going to be tough to work up popular support for these multiple wars we want to fight in the Middle East, short of another Pearl Harbor style event.” And the 9/11 truthers would point to this and go, “See, clearly they did it. They did 9/11. They even say in their own words here that they want another Pearl Harbor event so they can do this.” And it’s like, well, look, that doesn’t actually prove anything. I mean, it might just be the case that they were like, “Oh, we wouldn’t get this without a Pearl …” And then when 9/11 happened, they went, “Hey, we got our Pearl Harbor style event.”
And even if you like that story of 9/11 was an inside job, because it’s kind of sexy and exciting and like, “Oh my God, what a crazy world we’re living in if that’s true.” And I’m not even saying it’s not true. I’m just saying, if you’re not sloppy and you’re scrupulous, you go, “That’s not really evidence.” It sounds like evidence, it’s evidence-sy, but it’s not actually a piece of evidence because that doesn’t in any way demonstrate that they actually were in on the thing.
And there’s just a lot of things like that, there’s a lot of things … I even see, because it’s a very popular conspiracy theory online now that Israel did 9/11, and I’m like, “I’m open. What do you got? What’s the evidence?” And they’ll be like, “Well, did you see that Larry Silverstein took out a huge insurance policy on the World Trade Center? How did he know?” And you’re like, “How did he know that the number one terrorist target in the world might need a big insurance policy on it?” You realize that the same guys attempted to knock those towers down in 1993.
And so there’s just little things like that where if you’re being sloppy and you already really want this conclusion, I see where you could see these things as evidence, but if you’re just being a little … if you’re critically thinking about them, it’s actually … it’s not as strong a case as you think it is. Again, I’ll speculate every now and again on things, but I like to take on something where I feel like I can prove this case. I really have enough evidence that I think I can prove this. I think I can prove that the neocons didn’t invade Iraq because they were worried about weapons of mass destruction and they actually had this agenda for at least a decade before the war broke out. There’s strong tangible evidence for that.
It’s just sometimes the constant conspiracy guys, not always, but sometimes they just get sloppy when it comes to actually analyzing how strong the case is.
And that’s seen as weakness and lack of intelligence often. It just sounds like it. When I even listen back to people that do that kind of thing, that certainty sounds like intelligence to people. If you say something with a lot of certainty, it sounds like, “This is a smart motherfucker.” And I hate that about myself, about human psyche, that that seems to be the case, because then the dumb dogmatists are going to be the ones that are driving agenda.
And then the thing, I feel like at least for me is, which I try to do, I’m sure I fail at this a ton, but you try to at least go like … You got to work on training your brain and you have to be conscious about it. And so you have to go like, “Hey, if there’s something here that is confirming my bias,” you start getting that little sense of pleasure of like, “Oh, great, here’s another point that proves the thing I want to be true,” then you have to be 10 times as skeptical about this. You have to really examine this one and be like, “Okay, am I sure that this one …”
Because sometimes you’ll hear people even throw out things where it’s like, ” Oh, I know you liked that it was helping your case,” but come on, think about this. This doesn’t even make sense. It’s like, okay, I want to make this argument and then everything that would support that just gets sucked in a force of gravity or something, and you’re like, “Yeah, but have half of these are bad data points.”
There’s a real problem with the American system and it’s that, and I think this just went on for too long before the American people just wouldn’t put up with it anymore. And this is why trust in every institution and the corporate media and Congress and all of it has evaporated, is that it’s like, are you just saying of all the people who sold the war in Iraq, no one so much as got kicked out of polite society? I’m not even saying, oh, they went to jail for war crimes for life, but was just like, “Yeah, we’re not looking to you for advice on the next war. Thanks. Go home.” None of that.
And it’s like all these crazy things, nobody goes down for it. I mean, they lied us into war after a war. They’ve bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar. They locked down the country on the basis of pseudoscience, then lied through their teeth about what this vaccine would do as they were forcing it on people, and no one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this. And look, in any area of life, whether a business or a relationship or whatever, you cannot screw up that catastrophically and face no repercussions for it and think that your business or relationship isn’t going to fail as a result of that.
And then yet our standard for who is the commander in chief was like, you show up to these debates that are 90 minutes long with these really … they are really stupid questions and you give a 90-second answer to it or … And at least for the first time now it does seem like, oh, the standard is kind of you’re going to have to do a long-form show where you really have to have … And that I think is long term a real positive development. You just know going forward, the Democrats, which I think is what you were saying, you can’t run a Kamala Harris if she can’t do a long-form interview. You got to run somebody who’s able to sit down and express themselves and have real genuine thoughts, or at least try to convince people they have real genuine thoughts at least.
And that’s very different in a way. I look back at the most talented politicians of my lifetime, which I’d have to say the two were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, just the most talented, traditional politicians. Trump’s the anti-politician, but they were the traditional and just unbelievably … but they never had to do that. It was just a different time. Bill Clinton had to walk up and be like, “Oh, it’s a beautiful baby you have here.” Then go back and then play the sax, and then have a couple good answers to a small crowd, “I’m from a little town called Hope.”
That’s not the game anymore. Now the game is like, can you sit down and actually have some ideas in a long form? And I think that’s so much better, because it’s so much more revealing of … Kind of like what we were saying before, you reveal a little bit, it’s not 50 hours, but in those three hours you reveal a little bit of your soul.
What Donald Trump did, people tend to forget this, because now it’s also because the accusation from the Democrats is that, “The Republican Parties are all a bunch of Trump cultists,” or something like that. But I’m old enough to remember 2016, and what actually happened was that Donald Trump came in and just really resonated with the voters and the establishment of the Republican Party hated it. They were openly talking about changing the rules at the Republican National Convention to deny him the nomination in 2016. What they were saying is that they were going to raise the number of delegates required so high that nobody could hit it and then say, “Hey, since nobody hit it, we select Mitt Romney again and we’re going to run Mitt Romney again.” They were openly, openly conspiring to steal the thing from him, and eventually he just had so much support on the ground that they couldn’t do it.
Right now, if someone could totally do that to the Democrats, but the thing is, it would have to be somebody outside of the three-letter agency control, because that’s what everyone’s rejecting right now. But if you were to actually sit there and go … And even policies I don’t necessarily agree with, but there are a lot of policies that if it was actually a pro-labor, working class party, you could … Bernie Sanders showed you a little bit of what’s possible, and this was from an 80-year-old socialist who didn’t really have the balls to go through with it at the end of the day. If somebody younger and a little bit more with the current zeitgeist we’re able to do that, that could happen.
Same with Obama was an unknown. I mean, obviously he had very powerful people behind his presidential run. It’s not like he was a true just grassroots guy, but he wasn’t anyone we would’ve been necessarily thinking about. I mean, he gave that big speech at the 2004 DNC, but that was it. That was the thing he was known for, is he gave one great speech at the … Besides that he was a state senator and then a junior senator. No one was thinking he was going to be the next president.
And at least Jon Stewart is, I will say, I think Jon Stewart is telling the truth the way he sees it. I don’t think he’s necessarily right about a lot of things. He is right about a lot of things, but I think he’s wrong about a lot of other things. But I just get the impression that he believes what he is saying and there’s something powerful about that.
And yet we were, I mean, it’s just the greatest thing in the history of the world, and unfortunately America had to fight a bloody civil war to get there, but many other countries did and they just walked away from what had been the status quo forever and just stopped doing it. And now, look, you can argue there’s slavery by other names and things like that, and to some degree, paying an income tax is some degree of slavery, but there is not chattel slavery in the way that there used to be, and that is an incredible advance for humanity.
And then the other example he would give is he was talking about how at the beginning of the Reagan administration in 1981, that the neocons … because when he was trying to have detente with Russia, the neocons were in the press, being like, “He just guaranteed another 100 years of Soviet dominance.” And if someone had just been to you like, “Hey, listen, calm down, in 10 years there won’t be a Soviet Union.” It’s just been like, “Okay, nice idea, but you’re out of your fucking mind.” And yet that was true too.
And you can see some dynamics even in our politics today where … Three years ago I was really concerned about whether they’d shut the whole thing down, us I mean. During the COVID times and during times where it was like everyone I knew was just getting strikes on all their channels, and if you just even wanted to talk about how there are people being vaccine injured, you’d lose your YouTube channel, people getting kicked off Twitter left and right. And I just saw it and I was like, “Dude, the grasp is just getting tighter and tighter and tighter. The regime is not going to allow these alternative voices in here. And they’re just getting too big and they’re going to shut this whole thing down and I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do after that.”
And I was totally wrong. The trend totally went in the other direction, and things are now at a point where it’s like, I couldn’t even imagine it. I never would’ve envisioned Elon Musk was going to get $44 billion together and buy Twitter and then he was … And so I just think that if you zoom out, I think that the regime has lost their monopoly on propaganda, and this opens up enormous possibilities for what …
I remember so vividly, 2002. 9/11 happened in late 2001, we invaded Iraq in 2003, but all of 2002 was a massive propaganda campaign. Just constantly laying down the blueprints for this war that we knew George W. Bush was about to launch. And it was, “They have weapons of mass destruction. They were in on 9/11. They’re friends with Al-Qaeda. They’re going to hand this weapon that they don’t have off to the terrorists they’re not friends with, and then they’re going to nuke Kansas.”
By the way, this is also, sorry for rambling a little bit here, but this is also one of the reasons why when the Jew haters will say things like … They’ll be like, “Oh, look, all of the Jews support Israel,” or, “70% of the Jews vote this way,” or, “70% of the Jews support the …” It’s like, listen, I don’t like blaming … Or even when the Palestine haters will say, “70% of Gazans support Hamas,” or whatever. It’s like, okay, look, I remember a time in this country, I know I’m going back 20 years, but every right-winger in this country was completely convinced that we have to go invade Iraq because he has weapons of mass destruction, and you’re some type of leftist homo if you don’t agree with that. That was the entire culture in this country. And it was the one thing that the New York Times and Bill O’Reilly and CNN and the Washington Post all agreed on, they were all on board selling this war.
You could not do that today. They could not get away with that today, because if they did, how do you control this entire problem? You tell me, how do you control Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? How do you get these guys to go … They’re not going to go along with it. And in fact, they’re almost definitely going to have people on their show who are just tearing it apart. And so I just look at that and I go like, “Yo, I mean, we’re at a place now where we have this world of possibilities that would’ve seemed impossible just so recently.” And so just thinking, all of that rambling stew, whatever all that was, that leaves me feeling very, very hopeful for the future.
And then now you have this … again, the rockets are going up. It’s like, first of all, we’ll colonize space and other planets. And we are inventive motherfuckers, we’ll figure it out.
And there is a lot of that stuff is just easy to take for granted. And it’s like, when it touches your life, you don’t take it for granted as much, but it’s just like now it really is … There are miracles going on all over the place now that everybody in human history did not have access to.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Episode highlight
- 1:26 – Introduction
- 1:45 – Libertarianism
- 3:00 – Ron Paul
- 6:13 – Military–industrial complex
- 13:06 – War on Terror
- 25:25 – China and Taiwan
- 33:13 – Just war theory
- 40:22 – Israel and Gaza
- 57:49 – Douglas Murray
- 1:05:42 – Hamas
- 1:22:01 – Hitler and Stalin
- 1:24:15 – Darryl Cooper
- 1:33:27 – Antisemitism
- 1:47:00 – World leaders
- 1:59:34 – Jeffrey Epstein
- 2:07:37 – Sam Harris
- 2:20:21 – Ukraine and Russia
- 2:39:46 – Joe Rogan
- 2:52:15 – Conspiracy theories
- 3:10:06 – Hope
Episode highlight
Dave Smith
All the people who sold the war in Iraq, they lied us into war after a war. They’ve bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar and no one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this. If you make everybody monsters and they’re not human beings, well, you can’t do diplomacy with monsters, you can’t negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. Maybe there are times where you shouldn’t negotiate or you can’t negotiate with humans, but it’s better if you can. And we could use a lot more of that thinking. Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that, “I can end this war.” And he’s going to look very, very bad if he can’t.
All the people who sold the war in Iraq, they lied us into war after a war. They’ve bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar and no one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this. If you make everybody monsters and they’re not human beings, well, you can’t do diplomacy with monsters, you can’t negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. Maybe there are times where you shouldn’t negotiate or you can’t negotiate with humans, but it’s better if you can. And we could use a lot more of that thinking. Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that, “I can end this war.” And he’s going to look very, very bad if he can’t.
So he’s very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quick as possible. You are fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you’re fighting, and so the first step is to stop doing that. Your cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that. And then let’s see if maybe we could heal. Where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Why does anything need to be redacted for national security? I’m sorry. You’re telling me there’s a pedophile ring and we can’t tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security?
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Dave Smith, an outspoken and at times controversial anti-war libertarian comedian and podcast host. This is the Lex Fridman podcast to support it. Please check on our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Dave Smith.
The following is a conversation with Dave Smith, an outspoken and at times controversial anti-war libertarian comedian and podcast host. This is the Lex Fridman podcast to support it. Please check on our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Dave Smith.
Libertarianism
Lex Fridman
You are a longtime libertarian, perhaps an anarcho-capitalist. We can talk about that. Can you explain the different variants, flavors of libertarianism and where you stand among those variants?
You are a longtime libertarian, perhaps an anarcho-capitalist. We can talk about that. Can you explain the different variants, flavors of libertarianism and where you stand among those variants?
Dave Smith
Yeah, so there’s almost like with left-wing schools of thought or right-wing schools of thought, there’s many different camps and different thinkers. And so within the kind of broader theme of libertarianism, there was a lot of influence from people like Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell. Those were I think some of the more mainstream figures. And then there’s the Ron Paul round of Libertarianism, which is kind of distinct from that other camp where they’re much more of an emphasis on foreign policy. All of them kind of fall into the radical minarchist points of view. And then there’s Rothbard, anarcho-capitalist. And there’s also David Friedman who’s an anarcho-capitalist, but from a completely different perspective than Murray Rothbard. I would probably be most closely with the Rothbard School, which is very similar to Ron Paul. But even maybe a little bit further in that, the very little bit of government that Ron Paul might support.
Yeah, so there’s almost like with left-wing schools of thought or right-wing schools of thought, there’s many different camps and different thinkers. And so within the kind of broader theme of libertarianism, there was a lot of influence from people like Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell. Those were I think some of the more mainstream figures. And then there’s the Ron Paul round of Libertarianism, which is kind of distinct from that other camp where they’re much more of an emphasis on foreign policy. All of them kind of fall into the radical minarchist points of view. And then there’s Rothbard, anarcho-capitalist. And there’s also David Friedman who’s an anarcho-capitalist, but from a completely different perspective than Murray Rothbard. I would probably be most closely with the Rothbard School, which is very similar to Ron Paul. But even maybe a little bit further in that, the very little bit of government that Ron Paul might support.
Ron Paul
Lex Fridman
You’ve been a big fan of Ron Paul. Can you explain what you admire about him?
You’ve been a big fan of Ron Paul. Can you explain what you admire about him?
Dave Smith
A big fan is an understatement. I think Ron Paul is the greatest living American hero. I revere him on the level of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, number one. I mean all of the major issues that he was correct in his understanding of them, his diagnosis of what caused these problems and his solutions. And in hindsight, there’s just a million different examples of where almost everybody today would agree, even though his ideas were very controversial at the time, it’d be like, “Oh my God, if we had just listened to Ron Paul about that, we’d be so much better off.” But I think there’s something almost deeper than that about why Ron Paul inspires so much love from so many people is okay, so number one, the guy, he was a champion of these views for decades when there was no payoff for it at all. Where he was just kind of alone in the woods, they used to call him Dr No because he was a medical doctor.
A big fan is an understatement. I think Ron Paul is the greatest living American hero. I revere him on the level of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, number one. I mean all of the major issues that he was correct in his understanding of them, his diagnosis of what caused these problems and his solutions. And in hindsight, there’s just a million different examples of where almost everybody today would agree, even though his ideas were very controversial at the time, it’d be like, “Oh my God, if we had just listened to Ron Paul about that, we’d be so much better off.” But I think there’s something almost deeper than that about why Ron Paul inspires so much love from so many people is okay, so number one, the guy, he was a champion of these views for decades when there was no payoff for it at all. Where he was just kind of alone in the woods, they used to call him Dr No because he was a medical doctor.
And then he would be the lone no vote in Congress all the time, on the bills that the entire Congress, bipartisan agreement, everything, and there’s one vote against it. And that he would be that guy. He clearly kept doing what he was doing simply because he believed it was right, not because there was any benefit for him. In fact, he dealt with a lot of headaches for the views that he had. And then he was just a genuine person of integrity. He’s the only congressman who I’ve ever heard this about. And DC insiders, people on the hill will say this. He was the only congressman of my lifetime who the lobbyists simply stopped visiting. He was the only one who, they just stopped going to his office because they were just like, “There’s just no getting through to this guy.” He was just not playing politics like that.
And you imagine what it must’ve been like from the lobbyist perspective when they first tried to go there and they’d be like, “All right, listen, we really need you to vote yes on this or that.” And he was like, “The constitution doesn’t authorize us to do that.” And they’re like, “What? Who in this town even talks like that?” I’ve met him many times at this point, and he is just genuinely, he’s like one of those guys who’s just from an older, better generation. He’s the sweetest guy, but he’s not a pushover. He was a tough guy in his day, and he was an athlete and he was in the Air Force and is married to the same woman for I think over 60 years at this point, has a big beautiful family. He was a country doctor. He was a baby doctor who delivered thousands of babies. He’s like this kind of classic American figure. And I just think at the risk of falling into hero worship or something like that, I do think he’s a genuinely great man, and I think great men are to be revered.
Military–industrial complex
Lex Fridman
Yeah, as you said, there’s integrity there. Can you speak to the ideas that Ron Paul represents? He says some of the things he’s been right about. Maybe can you speak about the economics, the Fed, and maybe war and being anti-military intervention?
Yeah, as you said, there’s integrity there. Can you speak to the ideas that Ron Paul represents? He says some of the things he’s been right about. Maybe can you speak about the economics, the Fed, and maybe war and being anti-military intervention?
Dave Smith
Well, I think it all came from the same central thesis, which is that the highest political value ought to be liberty. And that the government, by its very nature, is an instrument of force and tyranny. And therefore, the more government you have, the less liberty you have. I think he was way ahead of his time in really calling out the corruption in DC and I think that’s one of the things, it’s a common through line between the Federal Reserve and government spending, and of course this crazy war industry that our country has. So there’s a lot of components to that. But essentially Ron Paul was talking about draining the swamp way before it was this dominate mass message. And I think Ron Paul in many ways he laid the groundwork in his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Not saying that he leads to Donald Trump, but he laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to be able to get up at the South Carolina Republican primary debate and look at Jeb Bush and say, “Your brother lied us into war.”
Well, I think it all came from the same central thesis, which is that the highest political value ought to be liberty. And that the government, by its very nature, is an instrument of force and tyranny. And therefore, the more government you have, the less liberty you have. I think he was way ahead of his time in really calling out the corruption in DC and I think that’s one of the things, it’s a common through line between the Federal Reserve and government spending, and of course this crazy war industry that our country has. So there’s a lot of components to that. But essentially Ron Paul was talking about draining the swamp way before it was this dominate mass message. And I think Ron Paul in many ways he laid the groundwork in his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Not saying that he leads to Donald Trump, but he laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to be able to get up at the South Carolina Republican primary debate and look at Jeb Bush and say, “Your brother lied us into war.”
You know what I mean? And to have the Republicans agree with him. These were a lot of the same people who had voted for George W. Bush twice and supported the war and even mocked their liberal fellow countrymen for not being on board with it. And a lot of that was the work that Ron Paul did and people waking up to how messed up all these wars were. And I think that at least there were a couple of major things for me at the time. So I was a young man when I first found Ron Paul, it was in 2007 was when I first saw him, and then started obsessively reading all of his books. So I was young, born in ’83. So what did that mean? 23, 24 when I first met him. So I was a young guy, and at least for me at the time, there were two categories in my naive mind where, okay, there were the liberals who supported big government at home, but were skeptical about big government abroad or they’re skeptical about wars.
And then there were the conservatives who said that they supported small government, limited government at home, but were always on the side of whatever the next war is. And at least for me, and I think for a lot of people of my generation, Ron Paul was the first guy who came along and said, no, I’m for limited government here and abroad. And it was kind of like a portal where you could access a different perspective on the world. And then once you saw that, you were like, “Wait, that’s actually what makes sense.” What is it exactly that all the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and even Milton Friedman and guys like that, and Thomas Sowell, and it’s like you want a constitutionally limited world empire? That’s what you guys stand for, because that doesn’t fit together at all. And so why is it that we were taking this as a given?
And then of course, the more you look into it, you realize that, okay, those two things do make sense together. And then also that in the initial wave of the original progressives, people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR, these were people who were pushing big government at home and big government abroad. And that actually made much more sense as a cohesive worldview. And to oppose that would be the Ron Paul worldview. And then the other thing for me, and this was my introduction to Ron Paul, and this too, to me was kind of a portal in a way. At least in my naive, not fully functioned brain or fully developed brain at 24 years old or whatever, it was a way for me to get, I tapped into something that was outside the empire, and I had heard a lot.
I was already against George W. Bush, and I didn’t like the war. I had already figured out, I think this war in Iraq is bullshit. And I think that we were lied into it. And so I kind of got that. And then there were liberals and left-wingers who I knew. I grew up in New York City, so I was very familiar with the left-wing perspective who are critical of George W. Bush for fighting the war and signing the Patriot Act into law and things like that. But I had never really heard anybody break it down the way Ron Paul did when he basically was like, “Look, there’s a reason why these terrorists hate us, and it’s not what they’re telling you. They don’t hate us for our freedom.” I remember the way Pat Buchanan put it, which I always loved, he said, “Dick Cheney makes it sound like Osama bin Laden stumbled in the deserts of Afghanistan. He stumbled onto a copy of our Bill of Rights somewhere.”
And he was like, “Oh my God, they’re free. Look at this speedy trial. Are you kidding me? What is going on here? They can own guns and their women can wear mini skirts.” And that just made people so angry that they were ready to suicide bomb themselves. That makes no sense at all. And then Ron Paul was just like, “No, look, here’s the thing. If we think we can just go around the world killing people, propping up dictatorships, putting our military bases in the Muslims holy land and not engender hatred from that, then we do that at our own peril.” And I thought it was such an interesting kind of… it had always been, I’m an ’80s and ’90s kid, and to me it was always a given that America’s number one we’re the force for good in the world.
And it was an interesting introduction to the idea that there are people outside of that who are dominated by that who don’t care for it very much. And that’s what 9/11 was actually about. And for me, I was living in New York City, I was 18, I think when 9/11 happened, and that was the moment of my childhood. It was a huge thing to live through. I mean, we were attacked. This seemed like something that could only happen in a history book. That didn’t happen to America in the ’90s. 2001 was basically the ’90s, and it was just like, “Oh.” Finally, it clicked. It was like, “That makes sense.” It’s the first time I had ever heard an explanation and an understanding of this whole thing that we’re involved in now from 9/11 to the terror wars that actually just made perfect sense.
War on Terror
Lex Fridman
Yeah, we should also say that there’s some degree of truth that the battle is not just militaristic, it’s also cultural. And then many of those parts of the world don’t want other people’s values forced onto them.
Yeah, we should also say that there’s some degree of truth that the battle is not just militaristic, it’s also cultural. And then many of those parts of the world don’t want other people’s values forced onto them.
Dave Smith
Right. But the way that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and every right wing host in America, and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and everybody, what they were saying is that they hate that we are free, whereas it was much closer to saying they don’t like us imposing on them. Even like all the hardcore neocons, Brett Stevens, The New York Times, he wrote this piece on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, so 2023 to cheer lead the war in Iraq. And he goes through the whole piece, and there’s not one mention of the million people who died in the war. He literally just goes, the piece is just, measure life under Saddam Hussein verse life, were under the Shiite parliamentary system that they have now. Which one’s better? And he’s arguing this one’s better, therefore it was worth it. But there’s no mention.
Right. But the way that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and every right wing host in America, and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and everybody, what they were saying is that they hate that we are free, whereas it was much closer to saying they don’t like us imposing on them. Even like all the hardcore neocons, Brett Stevens, The New York Times, he wrote this piece on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, so 2023 to cheer lead the war in Iraq. And he goes through the whole piece, and there’s not one mention of the million people who died in the war. He literally just goes, the piece is just, measure life under Saddam Hussein verse life, were under the Shiite parliamentary system that they have now. Which one’s better? And he’s arguing this one’s better, therefore it was worth it. But there’s no mention.
It’s like, “Okay, but what about the 20 plus million people who were displaced? What about the million people who were killed? What about all the millions of people who were injured? What about the tens of thousands of our soldiers who have blown their brains out in the aftermath of the thing?” So many times it is true with government policy in general, people talk about the end result that they want, but you’re like, “Yeah, but what about the process by which you get there and how much hatred, could you…” It’s, not that hard for me to put myself in other people’s shoes, and I have two little kids and a wife, and if anybody were to ever try to argue to me that they have to be the eggs that get broken to make some bigger omelet. Like, “It is okay, we’re ultimately going to impose something on your society that’s better than what you have right there. It sure does suck that your wife and kids got to be the one who get taken out.”
I mean, as I’m just saying this to myself, and this is not real. This is just a thought experiment I’m making up. I’m already pretty close to being a terrorist. My next thought is kind of like, “Well, okay, well, I hope you’re going to like it when you watch your family die in front of you.” Hopefully, even if that happened to me, I wouldn’t go kill that guy’s family. Maybe I’d just go after him or something. But I could understand, and I think most people who have kids could understand going to a level of the most evil dark place you could imagine if anyone ever threatened or actually did something to your kids.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, we’ll have to remember the thing that’s difficult to measure that you just mentioned, which is the hate that’s created by every bomb that’s dropped.
Yeah, we’ll have to remember the thing that’s difficult to measure that you just mentioned, which is the hate that’s created by every bomb that’s dropped.
Dave Smith
It was a General McChrystal who was the general running the war in Afghanistan. He wasn’t Ron Paul, you know what I mean? He was a, “Sir, yes, sir. How do we fight and win this war general?” And he’s the one who coined the term insurgent math, that 10 minus two equals 20. It’s like the more you keep, I was re-reading about this the other day because of the Trump’s been bombing the Houthis in Yemen. And I think it was at least in 2009 is when Obama really stepped up the drone campaign with the then secret drone bombing campaign. And Yemen was one of the major theaters. And even back then when it really was just a… it was a war on terrorism. The main targets were always Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and their presence in Yemen, even then, so before the Saudis invaded.
It was a General McChrystal who was the general running the war in Afghanistan. He wasn’t Ron Paul, you know what I mean? He was a, “Sir, yes, sir. How do we fight and win this war general?” And he’s the one who coined the term insurgent math, that 10 minus two equals 20. It’s like the more you keep, I was re-reading about this the other day because of the Trump’s been bombing the Houthis in Yemen. And I think it was at least in 2009 is when Obama really stepped up the drone campaign with the then secret drone bombing campaign. And Yemen was one of the major theaters. And even back then when it really was just a… it was a war on terrorism. The main targets were always Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and their presence in Yemen, even then, so before the Saudis invaded.
So from 2009 through 2015, AQAP just kept growing. It was doing all these targeted bombing campaigns, so they call them targeted. 96% of the people are innocent who get killed, but they call them targeted drone bombings. And Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula just kept getting bigger and bigger because every time you go in there, it’s like, okay, you took out one target and then you took out three little girls. And every one of those little girls had brothers and uncles and fathers, and all of them just signed up to join the fight now. Ron Paul was the first one who really made this click for me. But it’s in a way, and I’m not a leftist, I’m not an egalitarian, I’m not a cultural relativist. I’m not saying that all cultures are the same or that we all look at the world the same way.
There’s enormous differences between all of us, and I personally think some are better than others, but there are things that unite all of us. And in a weird way, I remember one time I was arguing with a Democrat guy on a S. E. Cupp show. I used to be a contributor on her show, and we were arguing, and it was after a terrorist attack here in New York, a fairly minor one. It was a guy, I think he hit someone with his car and then jumped out with a gun, and then the cops lit him up and killed him. This is back in 2017, I think, and he claimed to be ISIS inspired. I don’t remember if there was a direct connection or not, but at the time, they were like, “Doesn’t this mean we got to step up the war in Iraq or in Syria where ISIS’s stronghold is.”
And I remember the guy saying to me, I went off on how these wars have been disaster and he goes, ” Yeah, but Dave, what you’re saying here is we’re supposed to do nothing. This just happened and now we’re supposed to do nothing.” And so even though this guy had a suit and tie on, and we’re in a cable news studio and we’re in a first world country, we’re in the United States of America and we’re having that. The basic thing that he’s saying is, “You’re saying, we’re not going to go kill some motherfuckers.” I mean, he was just putting it as do something. But what’s something? Something is dropping bombs on human beings when yes, some innocent people are going to die, but it’s the same thing. It’s the same after 9/11. We’re like, “We got to go fucking invade some countries right now.” That’s the same impulse.
It’s like they killed some of our people. You think we’re not going to show them who the real killers are. You think there’s a chance that you could come here? And that is the most human instinct ever. It’s like some other tribe just came in here and killed some people in our tribe. So what do you want to do about that? Well, I don’t know. It’s not going to take me too long to figure out we’re going to go kill a bunch of people in their tribe. And I think that’s the major motivating factor for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think that’s the major motivator for both sides of the war on terror conflict. In a way, when you look at it like that, even though it’s so dark and tragic, there’s something almost beautiful about it where you’re like, “Oh, we’re all caught in this same cycle.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s deeply human, the warring between tribes, but especially in the recent years. But more and more through human history, there’s almost like a third party, which is this military industrial complex, which is making money from the two tribes. So if you just have two tribes, one, I’ve been reading a lot about Genghis Khan, and this is why Genghis Khan banned this. It was very common in Mongolia before Genghis Khan to steal people’s wives, like, “You’re my wife now.” And he realized that that creates a lot of conflict.
Yeah, it’s deeply human, the warring between tribes, but especially in the recent years. But more and more through human history, there’s almost like a third party, which is this military industrial complex, which is making money from the two tribes. So if you just have two tribes, one, I’ve been reading a lot about Genghis Khan, and this is why Genghis Khan banned this. It was very common in Mongolia before Genghis Khan to steal people’s wives, like, “You’re my wife now.” And he realized that that creates a lot of conflict.
Dave Smith
Yeah, it sure does.
Yeah, it sure does.
Lex Fridman
That seems natural and human, that kind of conflict. But whenever a third party rolls in and starts making money on the whole thing and then driving that forward, then the escalation of the conflict comes with this whole machine that makes de-escalation really difficult.
That seems natural and human, that kind of conflict. But whenever a third party rolls in and starts making money on the whole thing and then driving that forward, then the escalation of the conflict comes with this whole machine that makes de-escalation really difficult.
Dave Smith
Yeah. The military industrial complex in America, it’s so big and it’s so sophisticated. There’s the intelligence agencies, there’s the weapons manufacturers, then there’s the people in the media who are either directly or indirectly just parroting, you know what I mean? All of their talking points. And so it’s not just that you can make money when there’s a conflict, but you have this entire apparatus to create the conflict and then create the public sentiment for that. And it’s interesting, we’re an interesting place because we’re in this new frontier of now where shows like this can happen, and there’s a lot of them, and a lot of them are humongous like yours, but for so long this just didn’t exist.
Yeah. The military industrial complex in America, it’s so big and it’s so sophisticated. There’s the intelligence agencies, there’s the weapons manufacturers, then there’s the people in the media who are either directly or indirectly just parroting, you know what I mean? All of their talking points. And so it’s not just that you can make money when there’s a conflict, but you have this entire apparatus to create the conflict and then create the public sentiment for that. And it’s interesting, we’re an interesting place because we’re in this new frontier of now where shows like this can happen, and there’s a lot of them, and a lot of them are humongous like yours, but for so long this just didn’t exist.
And it was just for so long it was the case that the New York Times and NBC and CBS and ABC and the Washington Post and the Associated Press, I guess they could just move the nation. I mean, if they wanted to be like, “Hey.” Forget even after 9/11, the idea that in 1990, 1991, that there was any organic movement from the American people going, “We really got to see about this Saddam Hussein guy.” The dictator in Iraq is having a slant drilling dispute with the Emir of Kuwait. We really got to do something about that. That is not something that organically came from any… that was not a few soccer moms hanging out watching their kids’ game being like, “I think in a couple of years we’re going to have to send these boys over to Iraq.”
They just, from the top down, were able to create this feeling that like, “Hey, there’s a new Adolf Hitler on the rise over here in Iraq. We got to go see about this. There are these poor people in Kuwait, we have to do that.” They were able to create this desire for war. It’s really incredible when you think about it, because I think for the most part in human history, you would’ve had to have some type of plausible threat, some type of plausible reality to convince people that we actually have to go to war in order to deal with this. Whereas the idea that in 1991, the United States of America would feel threatened by Iraq was just ridiculous. And yet they were able to do it.
Lex Fridman
Well, so to push back a little bit throughout human history, there was also a thing, you look at the Roman Empire where just the culture of values were different where military conquest was seen as a good thing. So we just almost assume in the United States war has been framed in the defensive sense where offensive war we’re not doing that anymore.
Well, so to push back a little bit throughout human history, there was also a thing, you look at the Roman Empire where just the culture of values were different where military conquest was seen as a good thing. So we just almost assume in the United States war has been framed in the defensive sense where offensive war we’re not doing that anymore.
Dave Smith
You make a fair point. It’s certainly true that throughout human history, there’s been overt empire building and wars of conquest and things like that. But I guess I’m just saying at least even there, you would have some type of sell of why we’re going to go take these resources and why that will be good for us. Whereas the idea that Kuwait just needed to be defended by the Americans seems so, it seems so hard to convince anybody, and yet they were able to do it. If you read Neocon writing in the ’90s, it was very interesting because they would tell the truth a lot more. Essentially, I think there was the Soviet Union had just collapsed.
You make a fair point. It’s certainly true that throughout human history, there’s been overt empire building and wars of conquest and things like that. But I guess I’m just saying at least even there, you would have some type of sell of why we’re going to go take these resources and why that will be good for us. Whereas the idea that Kuwait just needed to be defended by the Americans seems so, it seems so hard to convince anybody, and yet they were able to do it. If you read Neocon writing in the ’90s, it was very interesting because they would tell the truth a lot more. Essentially, I think there was the Soviet Union had just collapsed.
It was what Charles Krauthammer dubbed the unipolar moment. There was excitement, there was a feeling of invincibility. And also the Neocons weren’t in power after ’92 really. I mean, they were in the George H.W. Bush administration, but after ’92, they really weren’t. So they’re just writing at these think tanks, and it just didn’t seem as… they weren’t as guarded. There weren’t these accusations of Euro war criminal or something like that. But what he said, what Jonah Goldberg agreed with, I think the statement was every 10 years or so, America’s got to find a puny little country and put them up against the wall just to let the rest of the world know that we mean business. And that was actually their mentality.
China and Taiwan
Lex Fridman
I’m sure there’s people that agree with that. I happen to disagree with that. But the drums of war are beating a little bit over Taiwan and China.
I’m sure there’s people that agree with that. I happen to disagree with that. But the drums of war are beating a little bit over Taiwan and China.
Dave Smith
More than a little bit.
More than a little bit.
Lex Fridman
But I can’t even see a justification of a just war. What is the long-term benefit to society if you do military intervention?
But I can’t even see a justification of a just war. What is the long-term benefit to society if you do military intervention?
Dave Smith
Well, I also think, and I’ve been saying this for a while, but I do think there’s this empire mentality that Americans have got to shake off. As if it’s even a question of whether we should allow it or not. Are we in a position to allow or not allow that? I hope China doesn’t invade Taiwan. I hope Taiwan remains as free as possible. I hope China becomes free. I root for freedom and prosperity for everyone, but I also root for everybody to have a healthy marriage. But if you were talking to me and you were like, “Hey, the guy down the street is cheating on his wife, I don’t think we can allow this.” I’d immediately be like, “That’s really not my place. And then on top of that, I also have no authority over what they do in their marriage.” I have to be concerned with my marriage.
Well, I also think, and I’ve been saying this for a while, but I do think there’s this empire mentality that Americans have got to shake off. As if it’s even a question of whether we should allow it or not. Are we in a position to allow or not allow that? I hope China doesn’t invade Taiwan. I hope Taiwan remains as free as possible. I hope China becomes free. I root for freedom and prosperity for everyone, but I also root for everybody to have a healthy marriage. But if you were talking to me and you were like, “Hey, the guy down the street is cheating on his wife, I don’t think we can allow this.” I’d immediately be like, “That’s really not my place. And then on top of that, I also have no authority over what they do in their marriage.” I have to be concerned with my marriage.
And the idea that imagine if there were the political will to invade Mexico. If DC decided we’re taking Mexico City, that’s going to be part of America now, and we’re taking it by force. And then China was like, “We’re not sure if we can allow this.” I think immediately most Americans would be like, “Allow? How the fuck do you think you are going to stop us from taking Mexico City? What are you going to do China? You’re going to send your Navy ships over here to fight us off the coast of Mexico. Good luck with that.” And at least from my understanding in almost all the war games that they’ve run, even if it doesn’t come to nuclear weapons being used, in which case the whole world gets blown up. But even if we go to militarily try to stop China from invading Taiwan and everyone agrees to not use nukes, and we just fight a conventional war, we lose that war every time.
Lex Fridman
I think what you said applies to a lot of the wars we’ve been involved in, but China and Taiwan is a little bit different because of TSMC, right? Because there’s an economic dependence.
I think what you said applies to a lot of the wars we’ve been involved in, but China and Taiwan is a little bit different because of TSMC, right? Because there’s an economic dependence.
Dave Smith
If that was the concern, then the response would be, “We need some type of Manhattan Project.” And I’m not supporting a government project here, but there would be, “We need some type of Manhattan Project to say, ‘We are going to make these things here.'” And look, I was running that experiment before saying, ” What if we all pinky promise not to use nuclear weapons or something like that?” But that’s not the reality of the situation. Look, even in Ukraine, everybody, the biggest hawks, the biggest pushers of this policy, and Joe Biden’s policy to fund Ukraine, no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd airborne, which is really the only thing that could repel the Russians right now and restore the original sovereignty of the Ukrainian borders. But no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd airborne because we all know, well, we can’t have a direct war with Russia. That’s the end of the world. And same thing with China. So I’m not saying microchips or whatever aren’t important, but we can find other ways to… Taiwan is not magical. We can produce these things in other places now.
If that was the concern, then the response would be, “We need some type of Manhattan Project.” And I’m not supporting a government project here, but there would be, “We need some type of Manhattan Project to say, ‘We are going to make these things here.'” And look, I was running that experiment before saying, ” What if we all pinky promise not to use nuclear weapons or something like that?” But that’s not the reality of the situation. Look, even in Ukraine, everybody, the biggest hawks, the biggest pushers of this policy, and Joe Biden’s policy to fund Ukraine, no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd airborne, which is really the only thing that could repel the Russians right now and restore the original sovereignty of the Ukrainian borders. But no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd airborne because we all know, well, we can’t have a direct war with Russia. That’s the end of the world. And same thing with China. So I’m not saying microchips or whatever aren’t important, but we can find other ways to… Taiwan is not magical. We can produce these things in other places now.
Lex Fridman
So you have the humility to say that you don’t really know much about the situation. It sounds ridiculous to say, but there’s something magical about not Taiwan, but TSMC. Is incredibly difficult to manage the supply chain and manufacture at such a low cost that they are. And to add to that, China has been signaling about the one China policy, but you’re absolutely right that you shouldn’t be doing the Washington thing of beating the drums of war. It’s like completely the counterproductive thing. You should actually try to find partnerships with China, build friendships and cooperation. India’s doing a good job of this, build friendships. This is the 21st century. Conflict, this Cold War thinking is going to be destructive to the economy, destructive to humanity, to the flourishing of the individual nations of the world. There’s just nothing positive except making money for the military industry [inaudible 00:29:41]
So you have the humility to say that you don’t really know much about the situation. It sounds ridiculous to say, but there’s something magical about not Taiwan, but TSMC. Is incredibly difficult to manage the supply chain and manufacture at such a low cost that they are. And to add to that, China has been signaling about the one China policy, but you’re absolutely right that you shouldn’t be doing the Washington thing of beating the drums of war. It’s like completely the counterproductive thing. You should actually try to find partnerships with China, build friendships and cooperation. India’s doing a good job of this, build friendships. This is the 21st century. Conflict, this Cold War thinking is going to be destructive to the economy, destructive to humanity, to the flourishing of the individual nations of the world. There’s just nothing positive except making money for the military industry [inaudible 00:29:41]
Dave Smith
Well, yeah, and it was totally destructive during the original Cold War too, and almost led to nuclear war on a couple of different occasions. But look, I would just say, and I really, I’m no defender of the Chinese regime. I hate communism or fascism, whatever they, are some hybrid mix of the two.
Well, yeah, and it was totally destructive during the original Cold War too, and almost led to nuclear war on a couple of different occasions. But look, I would just say, and I really, I’m no defender of the Chinese regime. I hate communism or fascism, whatever they, are some hybrid mix of the two.
Lex Fridman
They’re paying you, aren’t they?
They’re paying you, aren’t they?
Dave Smith
Yeah, no, fuck them. By the way, a lot of people speculate online, but I’m not getting any of these checks, man, and I’d really like them to start coming in. But even when you say China’s asserting the one China policy, but the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America and has been for 50 years now. So I think what’s happening there a lot of times is that essentially, even though officially the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America, all of these American politicians and different figureheads across powerful centers in America are saying that China doesn’t have the right to go into Taiwan. And then China’s in the position of being like, “Well, hey, wait a minute. No, that’s not actually the policy. We maintain this one China policy, but we allow them to kind of do what they want to do.”
Yeah, no, fuck them. By the way, a lot of people speculate online, but I’m not getting any of these checks, man, and I’d really like them to start coming in. But even when you say China’s asserting the one China policy, but the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America and has been for 50 years now. So I think what’s happening there a lot of times is that essentially, even though officially the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America, all of these American politicians and different figureheads across powerful centers in America are saying that China doesn’t have the right to go into Taiwan. And then China’s in the position of being like, “Well, hey, wait a minute. No, that’s not actually the policy. We maintain this one China policy, but we allow them to kind of do what they want to do.”
And the most obvious example of this was when Joe Biden actually said, ” Oh, we wouldn’t allow that and we would militarily intervene if they went into China.” And this was so bizarre, then the White House, whoever that was, came out to correct the President of the United States and say, “No, the policy of the White House is the one China policy.” Which look, I mean, again, I think the whole point of this is that the reason why whoever the hell was able to overrule Joe Biden and his administration, I don’t know who that is, but the whole point is that if you say, and this is why there is some wisdom in America accepting the one China policy is that if you tell China that we recognize Taiwan’s independence and that they’re not a part of China, that might be the type of thing that would make China invade and say, “No, we’re not accepting that.”
And so at least right now, it’s like, “Okay.” Look, this is the reality. It’s something that you kind of run up against with the war in Ukraine a lot and with the situation in China and Taiwan is that there are constraints placed on us by reality. It’s not all just how would you like the world to be? How would you like it to work? Obviously, I think we would all like that bigger countries don’t invade smaller countries and bigger countries don’t bully smaller countries around. That is not the way of the world. We are a big country that is the biggest bully in the world, so we’re in no position to let… but we’re kind of in the position is just you’re like, “Hey, we’d sure love if you don’t do that.
You can do it and you can get away with it, but we would sure love it if you don’t.” And so the goal would be to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. When Vladimir Putin starts talking about like, Hey, if you keep pushing the idea of Ukraine joining your military alliance, I’m going to invade that country. The goal there or the move there would be to be like, “Okay, we’ll stop talking about that. Is there something else that we can agree on?” Is there a way that you will promise you won’t do anything to them and we’ll promise we won’t bring them in our military. That’s the goal. You don’t just go like, “No, fuck you, we’re doing it anyway,” over and over and over again until they do the thing.
Just war theory
Lex Fridman
I think we got to this discussion from the military industrial complex and military intervention, and Ron Paul, before that, if you could rewind a little bit. According to you, and according to various flavors of libertarianism, is there any amount of military intervention that’s justified? That’s okay?
I think we got to this discussion from the military industrial complex and military intervention, and Ron Paul, before that, if you could rewind a little bit. According to you, and according to various flavors of libertarianism, is there any amount of military intervention that’s justified? That’s okay?
Dave Smith
Well, I would say, at least to me, in terms of pure libertarian theory or just in terms of what I think is right or wrong, there is such thing as a just war. The most obvious example of that would be you’re invaded by a military and fighting them off. So in that sense, also, even if you want to isolate from everything else-
Well, I would say, at least to me, in terms of pure libertarian theory or just in terms of what I think is right or wrong, there is such thing as a just war. The most obvious example of that would be you’re invaded by a military and fighting them off. So in that sense, also, even if you want to isolate from everything else-
Dave Smith
If you want to isolate from everything else, from all of the awful U.S. policy toward Russia, post Soviet Union, to all of the NATO expansion and color coded revolutions and all of these things… If you want to… Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine. I do think the Ukrainians have a right to fight and protect their land. There’s an aggressor there, and you have a right to defend yourself. So certainly in that sense, I think the American Revolution was a just war. I think there can be just wars. In terms of pure libertarian theory, I think I would say that, look, you never have a right to kill innocent people. That’s never morally okay. Now, there could be a scenario, just like this is true in life in general, right? There’s lots of things that you don’t have the right to do, but you could come up with some scenario where you might be in a position where you have to do it because there were all of these extenuating circumstances.
If you want to isolate from everything else, from all of the awful U.S. policy toward Russia, post Soviet Union, to all of the NATO expansion and color coded revolutions and all of these things… If you want to… Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine. I do think the Ukrainians have a right to fight and protect their land. There’s an aggressor there, and you have a right to defend yourself. So certainly in that sense, I think the American Revolution was a just war. I think there can be just wars. In terms of pure libertarian theory, I think I would say that, look, you never have a right to kill innocent people. That’s never morally okay. Now, there could be a scenario, just like this is true in life in general, right? There’s lots of things that you don’t have the right to do, but you could come up with some scenario where you might be in a position where you have to do it because there were all of these extenuating circumstances.
You could think of something where… You remember the saw movies? Where they used these crazy horror scenarios, but it’s like, “Okay, so there’s a person, an evil bad guy has buried a key inside this person, and you have to kill that person in order to get the key, in order to unlock these 20 people to let them out of a cage.” Now, look, you still don’t have a right to kill people. It’s horrible and wrong, and what you did there was still evil, but if you were taken to trial over it, you could probably explain to a judge and a jury be like, “I know, but the situation I was in was either these 20 people were going to die, or this one person was going to die, and under that situation, I chose to save the 20.” So in other words, by perfect theory, no, you never have the right to kill innocent people.
There could be a scenario where you were like, “Look, we had to take this military action and some innocent people did die, and it’s so tragic and awful that we had to do this, but we are certain that many more people would’ve died had we not done this.” Now, in that case, I would look at that as number one, it’s much like killing the one person to save the 20. It’s still wrong. It’s still an immoral thing that you were forced into doing. It’s not justified. I would say that the overwhelming onus should have to be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely needed to do that. And that’s how I feel about all these wars. It’s not like… I think that let’s just say if you could make World War II, you could reduce it down to the simplest caricature of what World War II is, and say there’s no Joseph Stalin. We’re not even partnering with him. There was a good guy in Russia who we were partnering with, and the British Empire had never done anything wrong.
They were just nothing but good guys. And of course, FDR is nothing but a good guy, and Hitler was even worse than the real Hitler, you know what I mean? And in order to stop them, we had to go on this bombing campaign, and we only got Nazis. We only killed the bad guys, and we were able to take out the Third Reich, but one eight-year-old girl died and you did this thing that stopped the whole world from falling into subjugation. So I think almost everybody would agree, “Jesus, man, you have to do that. Okay, you have to do that because the whole world’s going to be subjugated. There’s nothing but good guys here. The Nazis are so evil, and there’s one…”
I still would say that every single time World War II came up, we should all just be somber and we should all just think about that little eight-year-old girl who died and what a horrible thing it is that we had to do that. And so when there are these campaigns where tens of millions of people are killed, the fact that anybody’s ever spiking the football or this like, “Rah-rah, we were the good ones.” And then also when you add in all those other complicated factors like… This wasn’t the scenario at all. So I guess essentially I’d say no, you don’t ever have a right to kill innocent people. It’s never self-defense to be killing innocent people. I mean, short of some type of scenario where if you’re holding a baby and coming at me shooting and I shoot back at you, and, “Okay, I was acting in self-defense and it happened to kill a baby,” but I’m talking about the scenarios where you’re dropping bombs on cities, it’s never justified, and the overwhelming onus should be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely have to do it.
And that should be the standard, because there’s so many other standards that I see thrown out that I just think make no moral sense at all. People will argue about in Gaza, they’ll argue about the civilian to combatant ratio, that to me doesn’t really… That’s not what counts. That’s not the measure that’s important. And also no one knows what the numbers are. They’re all just pretend to. And then the other thing will be that people, as someone just recently argued with me about, they’ll say, “Well, Hamas has to go. That’s the starting point. Hamas has to go.” And I’m like, “No, I don’t think you get to say that, because the truth is that…”
Look, you can make an argument that Hamas has to go, sure, you can make an argument that the Likudniks have to go. You can make an argument that Kim Jong Un has to go, or that G has to go, or that Putin has to go, or that Zelensky has to go, or certainly, I would make an argument that Joe Biden had to go, but just because a government has to go, that doesn’t mean you could just go kill all their people.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. This should not be the starting point, the assumption, the axiom of the discussion. Yeah.
Yeah. This should not be the starting point, the assumption, the axiom of the discussion. Yeah.
Dave Smith
The question is it… Is there no other option than doing it this way? It’s like, okay, October 7th happened, we can all agree this was a horrific tragedy and an indefensible act of terrorism. Okay. Is it guaranteed that another one of those is going to happen tomorrow, or was this the biggest security failure in Israeli history? Okay, well, if it’s the biggest security failure, let’s just say not even going down the inside job rabbit hole or anything like that, but just saying it’s a giant security failure, okay then put a bunch more men at that fence, first of all. And now you got to talk about how can you achieve your goal while inflicting the minimum amount of devastation on innocent people.
The question is it… Is there no other option than doing it this way? It’s like, okay, October 7th happened, we can all agree this was a horrific tragedy and an indefensible act of terrorism. Okay. Is it guaranteed that another one of those is going to happen tomorrow, or was this the biggest security failure in Israeli history? Okay, well, if it’s the biggest security failure, let’s just say not even going down the inside job rabbit hole or anything like that, but just saying it’s a giant security failure, okay then put a bunch more men at that fence, first of all. And now you got to talk about how can you achieve your goal while inflicting the minimum amount of devastation on innocent people.
Israel and Gaza
Lex Fridman
Let’s talk about it, since you brought it up. October 7th. So what exactly do you think about the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel.
Let’s talk about it, since you brought it up. October 7th. So what exactly do you think about the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel.
Dave Smith
Well, I mean, what I just said that it was horrible, and by the same logic that I’m giving you now, it’s always evil to target innocent civilians. I don’t believe civilians can be held responsible for the crimes of their government. This was, by the way, the Osama bin Laden logic, which I think would also be the logic of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But Osama bin Laden very explicitly said when he was asked, “Well, are you just going to target U.S. military sites or are you targeting U.S. civilians?” It was an interview in the ’90s before 9/11, and he goes, “No, civilians are fair game too because you guys have regular elections, and you guys vote for your government, and therefore you’re responsible for the crimes that they commit.” Now, I think that’s the logic of a fanatic like Osama bin Laden, and that’s not the logic that any of us should follow.
Well, I mean, what I just said that it was horrible, and by the same logic that I’m giving you now, it’s always evil to target innocent civilians. I don’t believe civilians can be held responsible for the crimes of their government. This was, by the way, the Osama bin Laden logic, which I think would also be the logic of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But Osama bin Laden very explicitly said when he was asked, “Well, are you just going to target U.S. military sites or are you targeting U.S. civilians?” It was an interview in the ’90s before 9/11, and he goes, “No, civilians are fair game too because you guys have regular elections, and you guys vote for your government, and therefore you’re responsible for the crimes that they commit.” Now, I think that’s the logic of a fanatic like Osama bin Laden, and that’s not the logic that any of us should follow.
It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s not true that people are responsible for the crimes of their government. I think that that same argument is used quite a bit by people on the pro-Israeli side when they say like, “Oh, they had an election in 2005 and Hamas won a plurality, therefore, 20 years later, they have no rights.” I think that’s insane. Okay, so Hamas had no right to go after civilians. It’s horrible, and you see these teenagers being killed, and you see the images of people who were held hostage for all this time. So it’s like your heart breaks for those people. It’s truly tragic. I do think that it was, in many ways, an indictment of so many different things. October 7th happening was an indictment of the entire occupation slash siege of Gaza and the West Bank for that matter. It was, I think… Should have probably forever destroyed the legacy of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is… I mean, this isn’t like George W. Bush was.
I mean, he was on the job for almost a year when 9/11 happened, but he was still kind of new. It was still kind of in his first year of being president. Benjamin Netanyahu was the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history, and had explicitly been like, “I’m the tough right-winger who’s going to be tough on these Palestinians, who’s going to move away from the idea of coming to a two state solution, because this is what we need to keep us safe.” The justification is like, “I’m going to be hard on these motherfuckers, because I know what it takes to keep us safe.”
And that culminates in the worst massacre in Israeli history. And then, I mean, the other big one is that I mean, and it’s not like a… I wouldn’t even say an open secret at this point. It’s just out in the open. He had this strategy of propping up Hamas for years. And so he had this strategy of propping up Hamas for a myriad of reasons, but a major part of it was that, “Look, man, as long as there’s terrorists in power there, there’s never going to be any pressure on us to give the Palestinians a state, because look, are you telling me I got to negotiate with them?”
Lex Fridman
He was allowing Qatar money to float.
He was allowing Qatar money to float.
Dave Smith
Insisting that Qatar money float to them. When the Qatar money dried up, sent the Mossad in to insist that it gets back to him. Hundreds of millions of dollars, briefcases in cash. And he said in his own words that the reason for doing this was to keep, his words were, “Prop up Hamas, bolster Hamas,” to keep them in power so that the West Bank and the Gazans were divided, and that the international community as well as the liberal Jewish community in Israel wouldn’t be able to put pressure on them to make a deal.
Insisting that Qatar money float to them. When the Qatar money dried up, sent the Mossad in to insist that it gets back to him. Hundreds of millions of dollars, briefcases in cash. And he said in his own words that the reason for doing this was to keep, his words were, “Prop up Hamas, bolster Hamas,” to keep them in power so that the West Bank and the Gazans were divided, and that the international community as well as the liberal Jewish community in Israel wouldn’t be able to put pressure on them to make a deal.
Lex Fridman
But what are the options? So if he doesn’t allow the money in, it also looks really bad for him, because if he’s not allowing the money in, that means he’s not allowing the quote unquote aid in to help the Palestinians.
But what are the options? So if he doesn’t allow the money in, it also looks really bad for him, because if he’s not allowing the money in, that means he’s not allowing the quote unquote aid in to help the Palestinians.
Dave Smith
But Lex, I mean, the dynamic here is from 2007 to today, Israel’s had a full blockade around the country. They won’t let potatoes in. They won’t let sugar in, and the justification is because they’re dual use, they can be used to make rockets as well as they can be used to feed starving children. So we can’t let that in because it’s dual use. But cash to Hamas, does that not have dual usage? Is there nothing else that they can… So yeah, it’s like, yes, when you have a full blockade around the country, you take on certain responsibilities. And I think this is the essence of really the whole struggle here, which is very tough, I think, for the pro-Israel side to grapple with. But the bottom line is that Israel hasn’t occupied Palestine for a few months after a war or even a couple of years after a war, while they’re figuring out what we’re going to do with them.
But Lex, I mean, the dynamic here is from 2007 to today, Israel’s had a full blockade around the country. They won’t let potatoes in. They won’t let sugar in, and the justification is because they’re dual use, they can be used to make rockets as well as they can be used to feed starving children. So we can’t let that in because it’s dual use. But cash to Hamas, does that not have dual usage? Is there nothing else that they can… So yeah, it’s like, yes, when you have a full blockade around the country, you take on certain responsibilities. And I think this is the essence of really the whole struggle here, which is very tough, I think, for the pro-Israel side to grapple with. But the bottom line is that Israel hasn’t occupied Palestine for a few months after a war or even a couple of years after a war, while they’re figuring out what we’re going to do with them.
It’s been over 60 years. We’re talking about a one-week-long war, or a day short of a week long war, in 1967. Israel’s had control of them ever since. And much in the same way that if you kidnap someone and you lock them in your basement and you don’t feed them, you murdered that person. So in other words, stated differently, you’re not allowed to kidnap people and lock them in your basement, but once you do, you take on a responsibility to feed those people. You know what I mean? You’re not allowed to keep someone and not feed them. That is a worse charge than just keeping them. So yeah, anyway, I guess my point is the solution to that, if you go like, “Well, I’m a bad guy if I fund Hamas, I’m a bad guy if I don’t let the aid in,” was to let the reputable international aid organizations bring aid in to the people of Gaza.
Don’t pressure the Qataris to send in briefcases full of cash, allow internationally recognized, reputable human rights organizations who are lining up trying to do it. Stop turning them away, let them in. And this is just, it’s so long past due. I mean, it’s just… I’m not defending Arab terrorism. I think really it’s a tragedy that the Arabs embraced terrorism. I don’t think it’s unique to them. And in fact, I think it was the Zionist militias who introduced terrorism to that part of the world, but there was also… Look, terrorism persists because it works. This is true with state terrorism and with non-state terrorism. Terrorism has often worked for people. I think the thing… Early Yasser Arafat I know was very influenced by the Algerians who successfully kicked the French out, embracing terrorism.
And it was almost like the major miscalculation of those Palestinian Arabs who did embrace terrorism, was that this isn’t the French hanging out in some colony with their home country back home where maybe a few acts of violence could work enough to… The liberal population back home is like, “Oh, I really didn’t like the response to that terrorism. We killed so many people. Forget it. This is too much of a headache. Let’s get out of here.” The Zionist settlers were there to stay. They weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t going back to Eastern Europe. You know what I mean?
And so it’s a tragedy that this whole thing went the way it did. But you always… Whenever you’re talking about a conflict like this, the person who has… Or the party who has the power is the one who needs make concessions, and it’s just indefensible that the status quo of the Palestinian people having no rights, literally no rights, being ruled by a government that they do not get to vote for or against, no right to do commerce with the outside world, no freedom of travel, no freedom of movement, no basic property rights, you can be kicked out of your home at any time, no right to a fair trial, no right to a lawyer, no right to a jury of your peers, I mean, the fact that that has been the status quo since 1967 is just indefensible. And then in the context that that has been the status quo, I guess I’m just not, even though I’m against it, it’s like when you’re just lecturing about the way in which they resist this. I think it’s very tough to be on a strong moral footing.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you have to really empathize with decades of suffering in the region. I suppose my question was grounded in how can the Israeli government, how can the world help the Palestinian people flourish? So you suggested allowing reputable aid organizations in, but that’s kind of almost patching, just helping humans who are suffering. But that’s not how you have a nation flourish. You have to build up the infrastructure. You have to build up a culture, the education system, the democratic processes of electing and regular elections so that the people are represented. And you have to form partnerships, friendships, normalization of relations with the Arab world, with Israel. You can travel back and forth and lessen the chokehold, the security chokehold, that you could say is justified in a militaristic situation, but why is it a military situation? The question is there, where do we go from here? If we… We will talk about Netanyahu some more. He is very criticized inside Israel as well.
Yeah, you have to really empathize with decades of suffering in the region. I suppose my question was grounded in how can the Israeli government, how can the world help the Palestinian people flourish? So you suggested allowing reputable aid organizations in, but that’s kind of almost patching, just helping humans who are suffering. But that’s not how you have a nation flourish. You have to build up the infrastructure. You have to build up a culture, the education system, the democratic processes of electing and regular elections so that the people are represented. And you have to form partnerships, friendships, normalization of relations with the Arab world, with Israel. You can travel back and forth and lessen the chokehold, the security chokehold, that you could say is justified in a militaristic situation, but why is it a military situation? The question is there, where do we go from here? If we… We will talk about Netanyahu some more. He is very criticized inside Israel as well.
Dave Smith
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman
Maybe less so after October 7th, because again, in the same way you can empathize with the Palestinian people, you can empathize with Israelis where October 7th touched, just like it did for Americans with 9/11, it touched some kind of primal thing of fear, of like, “Holy shit.”
Maybe less so after October 7th, because again, in the same way you can empathize with the Palestinian people, you can empathize with Israelis where October 7th touched, just like it did for Americans with 9/11, it touched some kind of primal thing of fear, of like, “Holy shit.”
Dave Smith
Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh yeah, and the same thing I said before. I could also very easily go if one of my kids was at that rave or something like that and just got gunned down or kidnapped by… I could understand being, “Level the whole goddamn place.” And I’m sure I would feel that way if that was one of my kids. So yeah, no, that’s exactly right. I mean, there’s lots of examples in the world of… Like France and Germany are right next to each other, and Ireland and England are right next to each other, and they’re just totally living in harmony right now. There is just no… The thought of them going to war is inconceivable right now, not saying it could never happen in the future, but it seems pretty hard to imagine. And that being the case would’ve been very hard to imagine for a very long time. I mean, there’s some serious levels of brutality between those two societies.
Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh yeah, and the same thing I said before. I could also very easily go if one of my kids was at that rave or something like that and just got gunned down or kidnapped by… I could understand being, “Level the whole goddamn place.” And I’m sure I would feel that way if that was one of my kids. So yeah, no, that’s exactly right. I mean, there’s lots of examples in the world of… Like France and Germany are right next to each other, and Ireland and England are right next to each other, and they’re just totally living in harmony right now. There is just no… The thought of them going to war is inconceivable right now, not saying it could never happen in the future, but it seems pretty hard to imagine. And that being the case would’ve been very hard to imagine for a very long time. I mean, there’s some serious levels of brutality between those two societies.
And even more directly involved, Egypt and Israel went to war four times in a couple of decades. They went to war, and then in the late ’70s, they made a land for peace deal, and they haven’t been to war since. I do at least try to hold out that that is… It’s not like Egypt is… You’re not going to say they don’t have an issue with radical Islam in Egypt. You know what I mean? That’s not the answer. It’s just that they made a land for peace deal, and once that was solved, it was easier to avoid the war. And I do like to think that there could be a solution to the Israel-Palestine question, but it’s going to have to involve Israel taking their boot off of the Palestinians neck. And I know that that’s scary, and I understand that there are legitimate concerns about that. There was the great Thomas Jefferson quote about slavery, which was, ” We have the wolf by the tail, and we can neither afford to hold onto him, nor risk letting him go.”
Which is like you could see where that would’ve been a real concern of people right toward the end of slavery or whatever in the early 1800, say the first half of the 19th century, where you’d be like, “Okay, okay, okay, we recognize this is wrong now, but we’ve had these millions of people enslaved for all these years. If we let them go, they’re going to fucking kill us. And what are you saying? They’re citizens now, meaning the Second Amendment applies to them, meaning that the guy who I enslaved now can get a gun. You know what…” So okay, there are the… But I think in hindsight, looking back at it, we would all just go, “Yeah, but you can’t enslave people. So whatever risks come with the next phase of this, unfortunately you are going to have to just deal with that and move. You have to start with abolishing slavery.”
Lex Fridman
And it is good to also remember in the hopeful message you send, at any day, you can make a deal. That’s one of the frustrating things I had with… I hosted a debate on Israel, and it was… It just felt hopeless. And a lot of people I talk to, it feels hopeless, but I have a lot of… I maybe naively see a lot of possibilities at peace there. I see, for example, normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then Saudi Arabia taking some ownership over Gaza, something like that, some interesting… Where a big major player in that region takes ownership and steps as the middle man.
And it is good to also remember in the hopeful message you send, at any day, you can make a deal. That’s one of the frustrating things I had with… I hosted a debate on Israel, and it was… It just felt hopeless. And a lot of people I talk to, it feels hopeless, but I have a lot of… I maybe naively see a lot of possibilities at peace there. I see, for example, normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then Saudi Arabia taking some ownership over Gaza, something like that, some interesting… Where a big major player in that region takes ownership and steps as the middle man.
Dave Smith
Yeah, I agree with you. And you’re 100% right, and even before October 7th, I think many steps had been taken away from the peace process and the feeling of that. I mean, really, I think since the second Intifada is when the appetite for peace, I think in Israel was greatly diminished. But to your point, I mean, it’s going to take really painful concessions on all sides in order to get there. I think that the… Personally, I think… And I don’t know if I say this for not necessarily the Arab world, but at least the nation states, their governments, I think are pretty much there. Like Saudi Arabia and UAE and Jordan and Egypt… If the Israelis… They’re almost like, “Look, these are American sock puppets,” for the most part. And so their thing is that, “Okay, 100% of my population is completely opposed to what Israel’s doing to Palestine right now.”
Yeah, I agree with you. And you’re 100% right, and even before October 7th, I think many steps had been taken away from the peace process and the feeling of that. I mean, really, I think since the second Intifada is when the appetite for peace, I think in Israel was greatly diminished. But to your point, I mean, it’s going to take really painful concessions on all sides in order to get there. I think that the… Personally, I think… And I don’t know if I say this for not necessarily the Arab world, but at least the nation states, their governments, I think are pretty much there. Like Saudi Arabia and UAE and Jordan and Egypt… If the Israelis… They’re almost like, “Look, these are American sock puppets,” for the most part. And so their thing is that, “Okay, 100% of my population is completely opposed to what Israel’s doing to Palestine right now.”
And they just hate that Israel… That the nation was created at all, that all the Arabs were kicked out of what is very important land to them religiously. And so the governments there are like, “Look, we want to continue to have U.S. tax dollars flooding in here, and we’d love to make a deal with Israel, but you got to stop doing this to the Palestinians so my own people don’t rise up against me.” So I think as long… If the Israelis were like, “Fine, we’ll do a two-state solution,” or something like that, I think Saudi Arabia couldn’t wait to broker… In fact, they proposed a two-state solution just a few years ago. I mean, they would love to be a part of that, normalize relations.
Amongst the Palestinians, which again, I think this had been accepted multiple times, at least by their leadership. It’s like, “Yeah, you’re going to have to accept that you lost in ’48. You’re going to have to accept that you lost in ’47. You’re going to have to accept that the state of Israel does exist, and you’re going to have to accept that the right of return is not going to literally mean that everybody can go back to where they were.” And what Israel’s going to have to concede is that it was awfully fucked up that they kicked a lot of people out of their land, and that the whole, “A land for people for a people without land,” was never true. That was just a slogan that felt good to avoid what you guys actually did. And the fact that it was inexcusable that you guys occupied these people for 60 years, and that has to end immediately.
Douglas Murray
Lex Fridman
I interviewed Douglas Murray recently. He just wrote a book on Israel and Hamas called On Democracies and Death Cults. He makes, what I think is a strong pro-Israel case, focusing on Hamas as an evil organization, evil for its corrupt leadership who’s essentially stealing money from the Palestinian people and allocating the money that is there towards terrorists, militaristic operations versus building up Gaza. Can you steel man the case for, and then against this perspective, centering… We’ve been talking about the people, about centering around Hamas, which is like this extremist religious organization. The perspective being like they need to be, as you mentioned before, eliminated before any progress can be made.
I interviewed Douglas Murray recently. He just wrote a book on Israel and Hamas called On Democracies and Death Cults. He makes, what I think is a strong pro-Israel case, focusing on Hamas as an evil organization, evil for its corrupt leadership who’s essentially stealing money from the Palestinian people and allocating the money that is there towards terrorists, militaristic operations versus building up Gaza. Can you steel man the case for, and then against this perspective, centering… We’ve been talking about the people, about centering around Hamas, which is like this extremist religious organization. The perspective being like they need to be, as you mentioned before, eliminated before any progress can be made.
Dave Smith
Okay, so if I were… So steelman Douglas Murray’s case, I would say, “Well, I guess the case is right.” Look, Hamas is a fanatical death cult, essentially, which I do think is a fair description of them. There is no question that they have pursued… They have pursued a path that was just devastating to their own people. And there’s no question, they have not spent the resources they have, their priority has not been uplifting their own people. Their priority has been, I think, essentially antagonizing Israel into this overreaction so that they can turn world opinion against Israel. I think they’ve been very effective at doing that. And again, I think the argument would come back to something like, “And the people voted for this in 2005, and the people sure do… We sure do see a lot of people cheering when Hamas is doing some pretty horrific stuff.” And so, hey, you got that on one side, and you have a country that’s much more similar to Western societies on the other side.
Okay, so if I were… So steelman Douglas Murray’s case, I would say, “Well, I guess the case is right.” Look, Hamas is a fanatical death cult, essentially, which I do think is a fair description of them. There is no question that they have pursued… They have pursued a path that was just devastating to their own people. And there’s no question, they have not spent the resources they have, their priority has not been uplifting their own people. Their priority has been, I think, essentially antagonizing Israel into this overreaction so that they can turn world opinion against Israel. I think they’ve been very effective at doing that. And again, I think the argument would come back to something like, “And the people voted for this in 2005, and the people sure do… We sure do see a lot of people cheering when Hamas is doing some pretty horrific stuff.” And so, hey, you got that on one side, and you have a country that’s much more similar to Western societies on the other side.
Lex Fridman
If we can just linger on that steelman, what do you make of the celebrations in Gaza after October 7th?
If we can just linger on that steelman, what do you make of the celebrations in Gaza after October 7th?
Dave Smith
I think it’s sickening and incredibly disturbing. I guess the way I look at it… I always, and maybe there is a degree of naivete to this, or perhaps it’s just that I just don’t want to allow myself to go down a certain path because I think it leads to such dark outcomes, but I always try to be against the government for the people, against the powerful sympathetic to the powerless. I think that… Look, it’s sickening. You see big crowds cheering on people with these people who have been in captivity for… I think some of them for over a year and a half.
I think it’s sickening and incredibly disturbing. I guess the way I look at it… I always, and maybe there is a degree of naivete to this, or perhaps it’s just that I just don’t want to allow myself to go down a certain path because I think it leads to such dark outcomes, but I always try to be against the government for the people, against the powerful sympathetic to the powerless. I think that… Look, it’s sickening. You see big crowds cheering on people with these people who have been in captivity for… I think some of them for over a year and a half.
I also thought when Nikki Haley and other Israeli politicians are signing the bombs before they’re launched into Gaza, I found that sickening. I think there’s all types. I think mission accomplished banners and flying on… I mean, I think all of the… I think having Bob Hope specials at the end of the Persian Gulf War was sickening it. I just think all of it is horrific. I look at it and I try to say to myself, “Okay, we had one 9/11 in this country, and we all… Collectively we lost our minds as a society. We were ready to go bomb whoever the hell our politicians told us to bomb, and we didn’t care how many people it killed, and we killed a lot more than Israel or Hamas has killed doing it. And I try to think to myself, “Okay, imagine being trapped in what is…” People could call it whatever they want to.
I do think Pat Buchanan and these guys were right to call it a concentration camp. You’re trapped in a five-mile by 25 mile area where you cannot leave. You are stuck there. You don’t have an airport, because the Israelis bombed it. You don’t have a seaport, because they won’t allow you. You have no access to trade with the outside world, and you’re not suffering through a 9/11. You’re suffering through a thousand 9/11s. Your whole life has been… The people in Gaza, their entire life has been being refugees, you know what I mean? Their entire life. There’s generations of people who have been in this status now. And so if my society lost its mind after one 9/11, I just have a tough time judging the people who came up in this environment. But there’s no question. It is, I mean, it’s profoundly disturbing.
Lex Fridman
But I wonder how much of the indoctrination has really made the software of their mind permanently anti-peace, extremify them. And it doesn’t justify anything, but it’s more concerning for the prospects of peace.
But I wonder how much of the indoctrination has really made the software of their mind permanently anti-peace, extremify them. And it doesn’t justify anything, but it’s more concerning for the prospects of peace.
Dave Smith
Well, I’d say… I get your point. It’s an interesting question that I don’t know if any of us know exactly the answer to, but I would say that… Even after, what was it, 80 years of the Soviet Union, and there were real debates back then about the new communist man, and whether the minds had been so warped of people that they would never even care about these things like liberty or national identity or independence. And then yet, at the end, it was all still there. It was very repressed, and it went underground and people weren’t allowed to talk about, but they all still had it. And in fact, I was just listening the other day to this Murray Rothbard speech from the early nineties, and he was talking about how… There was something where there was a camera crew interviewed a Chinese family under a real deal Chinese communism, I believe it was before Mao Zedong died, and they were just saying all these this crazy to the camera.
Well, I’d say… I get your point. It’s an interesting question that I don’t know if any of us know exactly the answer to, but I would say that… Even after, what was it, 80 years of the Soviet Union, and there were real debates back then about the new communist man, and whether the minds had been so warped of people that they would never even care about these things like liberty or national identity or independence. And then yet, at the end, it was all still there. It was very repressed, and it went underground and people weren’t allowed to talk about, but they all still had it. And in fact, I was just listening the other day to this Murray Rothbard speech from the early nineties, and he was talking about how… There was something where there was a camera crew interviewed a Chinese family under a real deal Chinese communism, I believe it was before Mao Zedong died, and they were just saying all these this crazy to the camera.
They were like, “Would you rather your sons are healthy and live good lives? Or would you rather they suffer, but be loyal obedience to the state?” And they were like, “We would rather they be obedient to the state,” and blah, blah, blah and all these things. And Murray Rothbard was saying he saw this interview and he was talking to his friend. He was, “Oh my God, this is horrible. It’s hopeless. These people’s minds have been warped.” And then he was talking to his friend who’s like a China expert who had been there, and he was like, “No, they’re not. That’s what they say when the cameras are around. As soon as the cameras go…” So anyway, I’m just making the point there that there is… Look, even in the situation with Israel and Gaza, specifically Gaza, not even the West Bank, when… You could look at it, when the peace talks were going on, support for Hamas plummeted, when the peace talks fell apart, support for Hamas went way back up. Every time there’s an aggressive military campaign, support for Hamas goes back up. So I just think that I’m more hopeful than not, that you could get to a place where… But it requires… You have to… If you do understand the Ron Paul point about blowback, the General McChrystal point about insurgent math, you just realize that it’s like you are fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you’re fighting. And so the first step is to stop doing that. Your cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that. And then let’s see if maybe we could heal.
Hamas
Lex Fridman
What about the case against… The Douglas Murray case of the death cults and that a fundamental part of this process, Hamas needs to be eliminated?
What about the case against… The Douglas Murray case of the death cults and that a fundamental part of this process, Hamas needs to be eliminated?
Dave Smith
Well, I mean, first of all, I would just say that, and I’m not saying this as a fan of democracy. I’m not a big believer in democracy. I believe in liberty, and I think democracy is often not in line with liberty.
Well, I mean, first of all, I would just say that, and I’m not saying this as a fan of democracy. I’m not a big believer in democracy. I believe in liberty, and I think democracy is often not in line with liberty.
Lex Fridman
The Chinese government paid you to say that as well?
The Chinese government paid you to say that as well?
Dave Smith
That’s literally all I had to get out.
That’s literally all I had to get out.
Lex Fridman
It’s a plug.
It’s a plug.
Dave Smith
But I get to say what I want the rest of the podcast, but just that I had to… No, well, I don’t… Well, no, I mean my beef with the Chinese government would not be that they don’t hold regular elections. My beef with them would be that they silenced speech, that they put people in camps and things like that, the surveillance, that stuff. I think… Look, when you call Israel a democracy, which I guess is right in the title of his book, and I, full disclosure, I haven’t read the book, but I have listened to some of his thoughts on this stuff, I think you’ve run up against a real problem, which is that the creation of the state of Israel, even though he tried to walk away from those comments as Norm Finkelstein called out Benny Morris for writing in his book 1948, which is a great book. His words were, “The Zionist project always knew it was going to involve transfer.” That was Benny Morris’s words. Now, when Finkelstein was grilling him on this on your podcast, he kind of said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean ethnic cleansing. That could be voluntary transfer.” You know what I mean? But the point is, the Zionist settlers, and they spoke about this openly, they all knew they had a major problem, which is like, “Well, you can’t create a Jewish state if it’s 50/50,” which is… And in all of Israel, it was much less than 50/50, but even in the Israeli portion of the partition recommendation, it was very close to 50/50. Now, you can’t really have a Jewish state with a 50/50 voter base, because now you’re just in a breeding war for the next generation, or who turns out the vote… Any more than we could hope… It would be the prospect right now of making America an official Republican state or an official Democrat state. “Well, how are you going to do that, man? It’s like 50/50 between the two.” And so I think what Benny…
But I get to say what I want the rest of the podcast, but just that I had to… No, well, I don’t… Well, no, I mean my beef with the Chinese government would not be that they don’t hold regular elections. My beef with them would be that they silenced speech, that they put people in camps and things like that, the surveillance, that stuff. I think… Look, when you call Israel a democracy, which I guess is right in the title of his book, and I, full disclosure, I haven’t read the book, but I have listened to some of his thoughts on this stuff, I think you’ve run up against a real problem, which is that the creation of the state of Israel, even though he tried to walk away from those comments as Norm Finkelstein called out Benny Morris for writing in his book 1948, which is a great book. His words were, “The Zionist project always knew it was going to involve transfer.” That was Benny Morris’s words. Now, when Finkelstein was grilling him on this on your podcast, he kind of said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean ethnic cleansing. That could be voluntary transfer.” You know what I mean? But the point is, the Zionist settlers, and they spoke about this openly, they all knew they had a major problem, which is like, “Well, you can’t create a Jewish state if it’s 50/50,” which is… And in all of Israel, it was much less than 50/50, but even in the Israeli portion of the partition recommendation, it was very close to 50/50. Now, you can’t really have a Jewish state with a 50/50 voter base, because now you’re just in a breeding war for the next generation, or who turns out the vote… Any more than we could hope… It would be the prospect right now of making America an official Republican state or an official Democrat state. “Well, how are you going to do that, man? It’s like 50/50 between the two.” And so I think what Benny…
Dave Smith
Do that, man, it’s like 50/50 between the two. And so I think what Benny Morris was saying was that, they always knew some of these Arabs are going to have to get moved out of here so that we could have more of something, which ultimately where they got to like an 80/20, which is pretty much what Israel’s maintained the whole time. Now, Benny Morris could quarrel about whether that necessarily meant voluntary, but when it happened, it wasn’t voluntary, okay? So when it actually happened in effect, it involved a massive amount, somewhere between 700 and 800,000 Arabs being forcefully evicted out of this area.
Do that, man, it’s like 50/50 between the two. And so I think what Benny Morris was saying was that, they always knew some of these Arabs are going to have to get moved out of here so that we could have more of something, which ultimately where they got to like an 80/20, which is pretty much what Israel’s maintained the whole time. Now, Benny Morris could quarrel about whether that necessarily meant voluntary, but when it happened, it wasn’t voluntary, okay? So when it actually happened in effect, it involved a massive amount, somewhere between 700 and 800,000 Arabs being forcefully evicted out of this area.
Now, that’s one thing, a lot of nations are started on somethings like that. I suppose if you just did that, and then you were left with your 80/20 split and you go, “But we have elections from here on out.” I guess you could claim it’s a democracy, still seems like kind of gaming the democratic system a little bit, you know what I mean? If I just deported 80% of Democrats and then say, “Look, Republicans win every election.” You might be like, “Yeah, dude, but you didn’t exactly get there democratically. You got there through force.” But forget that, I’ll let that one go and just say, “I’ll call you a democracy if you just kept being a democracy like that moving forward.”
The real problem is the occupation that starts in 1967. Because look, when you’ve occupied an area since 1967, you can’t even really call it an occupation anymore, it’s an annexation. You took these lands. You have control of it. You are what the definition of the government is. And you could call Hamas the government all you want to, but they’re not the sovereigns. They’re not the final decision makers. Israel’s the final decision maker. Hamas does not meaningfully in any way decide the biggest questions about Gaza, I’m talking before this war, pre-October 7th. And so the problem Israel has in order to call themselves a democracy, is that there’s somewhere between 5 and 6 million people, less now because they’ve killed a lot of them. But there’s somewhere between 5 and 6 million people who live under Israeli control who do not have voting rights.
And by any other reasonable, commonly held standard of democracy, we would not call that a democracy. I mean, again, I’m not even saying this to try to be inflammatory or try to pick on the Israelis. There’s things about Israeli society I like, I don’t hate the people there. I’m Jewish, I love Jewish people. But the fact is, that’s not a democracy, that’s an apartheid state. I’m not even trying to be inflammatory when I say this, it’s just literally describing what’s in front of you. If we in America right now said Black people no longer get to vote, and Black people can only live in these few neighborhoods, we don’t get to call ourselves a democracy anymore then. And I’m not even coming at this from a pro-democracy point of view, I’m just saying if your defense of them is like, “Well, we’re a democracy,” which seems to be the case so much. Well no, you’re really not. You’re really not, as long as you got millions of people who have no say in their own government, then you’re really not a democracy. And so again, so you could frame it as democracy versus death cult, was his language for Hamas?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Smith
And all right, it’s a little bit difficult to accuse another group of being a death cult when the group you are supporting has killed so many more people than them. Now, I’m not saying that’s the only metric. There’s other things that are factors too. But the fact is that you have… I mean, I don’t know to look over the numbers for the whole history of the conflict, but the amount killed by the Israelis on the Palestinian side, versus the amount killed by the Palestinians is 20 to 1 in Israel’s killing more people, maybe more than that, I don’t know exactly, I’d have to look at the numbers. But Israel’s called far, far more Palestinians than Palestinians have ever killed Israelis. And so it rings a little hollow to me to just call them a death cult. We’re the democracy, even though there’s millions of people who can’t vote over who rules them, but they’re the death cult. I mean, look, they kill people in a more primitive, barbaric way, I guess you could say. There’s something a little bit cleaner about when it’s done by a government, and it’s collateral damage, and it was done with sophisticated weaponry. Okay, still innocent people on the end of those bombs.
And all right, it’s a little bit difficult to accuse another group of being a death cult when the group you are supporting has killed so many more people than them. Now, I’m not saying that’s the only metric. There’s other things that are factors too. But the fact is that you have… I mean, I don’t know to look over the numbers for the whole history of the conflict, but the amount killed by the Israelis on the Palestinian side, versus the amount killed by the Palestinians is 20 to 1 in Israel’s killing more people, maybe more than that, I don’t know exactly, I’d have to look at the numbers. But Israel’s called far, far more Palestinians than Palestinians have ever killed Israelis. And so it rings a little hollow to me to just call them a death cult. We’re the democracy, even though there’s millions of people who can’t vote over who rules them, but they’re the death cult. I mean, look, they kill people in a more primitive, barbaric way, I guess you could say. There’s something a little bit cleaner about when it’s done by a government, and it’s collateral damage, and it was done with sophisticated weaponry. Okay, still innocent people on the end of those bombs.
Lex Fridman
Absolutely. But there is, I think, a powerful ethical difference when you mentioned about the 8-year-old girl, right? If in your stated goals of the war, is to do everything you can to avoid the death of that girl, versus saying, “We love death more than we love life” And Israelis democracy or not are pro-life for life.
Absolutely. But there is, I think, a powerful ethical difference when you mentioned about the 8-year-old girl, right? If in your stated goals of the war, is to do everything you can to avoid the death of that girl, versus saying, “We love death more than we love life” And Israelis democracy or not are pro-life for life.
Dave Smith
I mean, okay, I don’t 100% disagree with you, but I think if I were to say the degree to which that matters… At a murder trial after somebody’s been convicted and before sentencing, sometimes the judge will allow them to give a statement. And if their statement is like, “I’m very sorry for what I did, and I’m so sorry to the family, and this or that or that.” That might be life without parole rather than the death penalty. You know what I mean? It might make that bit of difference in that. And if you get up there and you’re like, “Hey, I’m happy for what I did, screw the family, [inaudible 01:13:22].” That might make a judge who was going to give you life without parole, give you the death penalty or something like. It’s that type of margin around the edge.
I mean, okay, I don’t 100% disagree with you, but I think if I were to say the degree to which that matters… At a murder trial after somebody’s been convicted and before sentencing, sometimes the judge will allow them to give a statement. And if their statement is like, “I’m very sorry for what I did, and I’m so sorry to the family, and this or that or that.” That might be life without parole rather than the death penalty. You know what I mean? It might make that bit of difference in that. And if you get up there and you’re like, “Hey, I’m happy for what I did, screw the family, [inaudible 01:13:22].” That might make a judge who was going to give you life without parole, give you the death penalty or something like. It’s that type of margin around the edge.
Let’s say you’re a really bad guy, and I want to kill you. And you are at home with a bunch of women and children, and I know there’s women and children there. I know for a fact that if I blow up this building, it’s going to kill all those babies. What I would be charged with is murder in the first degree. And the fact that I went in there and said, “Well, listen, hold on. It’s a shame that I had to kill those babies, I really just wanted to kill that one guy, I wish the babies weren’t there.” And they’d be like, “Yeah, but you knew they were there, and you did it anyway. You get murder in the first degree.” Maybe it would make some little difference tinkering around with the sentencing at the end of it, but it doesn’t like in kind change what the crime is there.
And so I just think at a certain point, if you’re doing something like… Look, I’ll say maybe with a little bit of an edge. Let’s say Barack Obama wants to drone-bomb this place to kill a terrorist. And he thinks he can do it without killing any innocent civilians. Does it, and then it ends up killing some innocent civilians. That’s one thing. But once you’ve done it over and over and over again, and every single time it kills innocent civilians. And then there’s a wedding and you order a drone bomb strike on a wedding. “No, you murdered those people. That’s murder in the first degree.
And so yes, whether you say out loud, “Oh, it sure is a shame that we got to kill all these kids.” When you’re doing it over and over, and you know the action you’re taking is going to kill more kids. Yeah, it’s a little bit different, but really not that much. It’s still pretty much a… And then also when you mix in with that, the fact that, I mean, if you go… And I’m not taking an opinion on the word genocide, I don’t even like to get into that conversation. I feel like it just derails it anyway. What Israel’s doing, whether you think it’s a genocide or not, it’s certainly not what most people envision when they hear the word genocide. But if you could look at South Africa’s case that they promoted at the International Court of Justice, the whole thing is just quotes from Israeli leaders. And I’m just saying, by the way, it’s not like they’re always saying, “Oh, it sure is a shame that we had to kill that 8-year-old girl.’ They like half the time they say that when they’re talking to the international community, and then the other half the time they seem to basically be saying, “There’s no such thing as an innocent 8-year-old girl.” And so I guess I just don’t find that argument to be very compelling, especially when the thing has been going on for so long.
Lex Fridman
There is some disagreement I have with you there. I think the thing you’re implying is, whenever they state it’s not quite genuine to some degree. Not [inaudible 01:16:10]-
There is some disagreement I have with you there. I think the thing you’re implying is, whenever they state it’s not quite genuine to some degree. Not [inaudible 01:16:10]-
Dave Smith
No, I’m saying it might be genuine by some people. I’m not saying it’s necessarily not. I’m saying that when there’s a lot of people who are saying the opposite, it doesn’t seem like it’s consistently genuine from the entire Israeli leadership class. And that even if it is genuine when some people say it, that’s kind of not enough to get away from the fact that… When Tucker was on Pierce Morgan, he said the thing, he goes, “I don’t like my tax dollars being used to intentionally kill children.” And a lot of people really objected to that word, intentionally, because I think so many of the defenders of Israel fall behind this. Like, “No, no, no, that’s not intentional, we’re just trying to kill Hamas.” But again, like I said, we would never accept that standard in a domestic murder case. The thing is that, if you know there are kids there and you know they’re going to die, then that’s intent.
No, I’m saying it might be genuine by some people. I’m not saying it’s necessarily not. I’m saying that when there’s a lot of people who are saying the opposite, it doesn’t seem like it’s consistently genuine from the entire Israeli leadership class. And that even if it is genuine when some people say it, that’s kind of not enough to get away from the fact that… When Tucker was on Pierce Morgan, he said the thing, he goes, “I don’t like my tax dollars being used to intentionally kill children.” And a lot of people really objected to that word, intentionally, because I think so many of the defenders of Israel fall behind this. Like, “No, no, no, that’s not intentional, we’re just trying to kill Hamas.” But again, like I said, we would never accept that standard in a domestic murder case. The thing is that, if you know there are kids there and you know they’re going to die, then that’s intent.
Lex Fridman
I think I agree with you fundamentally because war is hell, and that’s why I’m against war. But there is a difference. So I think we’re mixing in a lot of things. I think you’re fundamentally against war, and that’s why to you, it really doesn’t matter. It is murder. It’s just murder, and we shouldn’t do murder. And there’s a lot of democracies with colorful flags that justify murder because they’re trying very hard not to kill civilians. And then when you say you look at the reality of the Obama administration, the entirety of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you’re murdering civilians. Yes, you’re trying to kill bad guys, but you’re murdering civilians. That said, on an ethical consideration on which kind of ideals, ideologies you can build a society after the war. One that even on the surface levels states that the value of every life, of every civilian life is equal and high in value. That’s a good society. That’s the concern with extremist ideology that basically is very difficult to build a flourishing society on. But then the argument against that is the one you said, which is, yeah, well, Hamas is really supported now because of the war.
I think I agree with you fundamentally because war is hell, and that’s why I’m against war. But there is a difference. So I think we’re mixing in a lot of things. I think you’re fundamentally against war, and that’s why to you, it really doesn’t matter. It is murder. It’s just murder, and we shouldn’t do murder. And there’s a lot of democracies with colorful flags that justify murder because they’re trying very hard not to kill civilians. And then when you say you look at the reality of the Obama administration, the entirety of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you’re murdering civilians. Yes, you’re trying to kill bad guys, but you’re murdering civilians. That said, on an ethical consideration on which kind of ideals, ideologies you can build a society after the war. One that even on the surface levels states that the value of every life, of every civilian life is equal and high in value. That’s a good society. That’s the concern with extremist ideology that basically is very difficult to build a flourishing society on. But then the argument against that is the one you said, which is, yeah, well, Hamas is really supported now because of the war.
Dave Smith
Right. But by the way, I don’t disagree with the first part of your statement there, I just don’t think it’s in conflict with what I’m stating. Look, I understand first of all, that there is a difference between the way you’re going to say prosecute crime domestically within your own country, and the way you can prosecute crime or a war between two different countries, right? Maybe it’s not exactly the same. You don’t have cops that you can just send in, you can’t arrest somebody and put them on trial. It’s not the same, so fine you could say. But the point I’m making is more like, I’m just saying how we would think about these things in a domestic setting. We’re talking about morality here. And morality by its very nature, it rises above logistics, it rises above nationalities, or governments, or borders, or any of those things, what’s right or wrong. If it’s wrong to rape somebody in New Jersey, it’s also wrong to rape somebody in Central Africa.
Right. But by the way, I don’t disagree with the first part of your statement there, I just don’t think it’s in conflict with what I’m stating. Look, I understand first of all, that there is a difference between the way you’re going to say prosecute crime domestically within your own country, and the way you can prosecute crime or a war between two different countries, right? Maybe it’s not exactly the same. You don’t have cops that you can just send in, you can’t arrest somebody and put them on trial. It’s not the same, so fine you could say. But the point I’m making is more like, I’m just saying how we would think about these things in a domestic setting. We’re talking about morality here. And morality by its very nature, it rises above logistics, it rises above nationalities, or governments, or borders, or any of those things, what’s right or wrong. If it’s wrong to rape somebody in New Jersey, it’s also wrong to rape somebody in Central Africa.
And so I’m just saying you’re committing the same act that we would consider murder in the first degree here. And then just to go one step further, I think particularly part of the reasons why people have different attitudes about the way two nations fight, what we think of as war versus what we think as say a policing issue. We would never accept the idea that, the logic that’s used in wars, used in World War II, even used in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially used in the war in Gaza. If there was a bad guy, even a guy who had done something like October 7th, which we have school shooters and things like that here. If there was an active duty school shooter, and he’s in a school shooting people, and we know he is already killed 25 people-
Lex Fridman
Blow up the school.
Blow up the school.
Dave Smith
Blow up the school. Hey, he’s using him as human shields. No, it’s not our fault. You see, listen, those deaths [inaudible 01:20:31] while tragic were the school shooter’s fault because he used all these people as human shields. We would never for a goddam second if those were our kids in there, we’d never accept that excuse. We would be like, “What? Yeah, that guy was bad. You still had an obligation to do something else.” That was never accepted. Now, we may look at things differently in the context of a war, but also… By the way, I’m not sure I completely do, but typically speaking, when people think of wars, they’re thinking of this government versus this government, this military versus this military. That’s not the situation here.
Blow up the school. Hey, he’s using him as human shields. No, it’s not our fault. You see, listen, those deaths [inaudible 01:20:31] while tragic were the school shooter’s fault because he used all these people as human shields. We would never for a goddam second if those were our kids in there, we’d never accept that excuse. We would be like, “What? Yeah, that guy was bad. You still had an obligation to do something else.” That was never accepted. Now, we may look at things differently in the context of a war, but also… By the way, I’m not sure I completely do, but typically speaking, when people think of wars, they’re thinking of this government versus this government, this military versus this military. That’s not the situation here.
So while Israel is saying, “Hey, they’re using human shields.” And that is true, I think, to some degree. I think the Israelis overplay it a little bit, but there have been, I think, clear instances where Hamas is using human shields. But it’s kind of a flip side of a different point. And the other point is like, “Oh, well why aren’t they using their army, or their air force, or their navy?” Oh, right, because they don’t have any of those. Oh, that’s right, so you are fighting a war against people that don’t have a government because you’ve denied them their right to have one. And so that’s the thing where I do think if you’ve occupied the place since 1967, you almost now take on an obligation that you kind of have to almost conduct this as a police matter. Because now we are getting awfully close to the scenario that we just laid out. We’re like, “Oh, there’s a school shooter, blow up the school.”
Hitler and Stalin
Lex Fridman
It’s difficult to have a discussion about ethics when you’re talking about war because really at the core of it all war is immoral.
It’s difficult to have a discussion about ethics when you’re talking about war because really at the core of it all war is immoral.
Dave Smith
Yeah. I mean, by its very definition, it’s innocent people dying almost always, right?
Yeah. I mean, by its very definition, it’s innocent people dying almost always, right?
Lex Fridman
It’s difficult to pick which is the just war. And even World War II because of the complexities that you mentioned is difficult because it’s Stalin.
It’s difficult to pick which is the just war. And even World War II because of the complexities that you mentioned is difficult because it’s Stalin.
Dave Smith
Well, as my buddy Daryl Cooper demonstrated, I think we can have a reasonable civil discussion about these things without anybody blowing their lid. We can all just talk. I mean, World War II it’s the third rail, like nothing else. Really, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement, I think are the third rails of American politics, if you have any type of view that is not the approved authorized view of how these events went, you’re in a lot of trouble. If you wanted to compare Hitler to Stalin’s body count, at that time Stalin was already a genocidal maniac, and Hitler had not gone genocidal yet. So there is a weird dynamic there. Now, in hindsight it looks a little bit better because you go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but he went so genocidal at the end there.” But that’s a weird decision at the time to ally with Joseph Stalin when he had already done the worst things that Joseph Stalin had done, or at least a lot of the worst things he had done. I guess, there were a lot more in the war as well.
Well, as my buddy Daryl Cooper demonstrated, I think we can have a reasonable civil discussion about these things without anybody blowing their lid. We can all just talk. I mean, World War II it’s the third rail, like nothing else. Really, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement, I think are the third rails of American politics, if you have any type of view that is not the approved authorized view of how these events went, you’re in a lot of trouble. If you wanted to compare Hitler to Stalin’s body count, at that time Stalin was already a genocidal maniac, and Hitler had not gone genocidal yet. So there is a weird dynamic there. Now, in hindsight it looks a little bit better because you go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but he went so genocidal at the end there.” But that’s a weird decision at the time to ally with Joseph Stalin when he had already done the worst things that Joseph Stalin had done, or at least a lot of the worst things he had done. I guess, there were a lot more in the war as well.
Lex Fridman
I was curious though you didn’t mention Mao, it’s that funding again. Because he did even worse than Stalin. So is that the second thing?
I was curious though you didn’t mention Mao, it’s that funding again. Because he did even worse than Stalin. So is that the second thing?
Dave Smith
I’m not sure that’s officially known. Do we actually know that Mao killed anybody? I mean, all right, I’ll say it. Here we go, I’m going to blow my funding. Bad guy that Mao Zedong, do not care for him.
I’m not sure that’s officially known. Do we actually know that Mao killed anybody? I mean, all right, I’ll say it. Here we go, I’m going to blow my funding. Bad guy that Mao Zedong, do not care for him.
Lex Fridman
I think the Chinese government officially says, they have an actual percentage that he was 70% correct.
I think the Chinese government officially says, they have an actual percentage that he was 70% correct.
Dave Smith
Is that true?
Is that true?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Smith
They actually broke it down to that 70%? But the 30% was being the worst mass murderer in human history. That’s such a communist thing to do.
They actually broke it down to that 70%? But the 30% was being the worst mass murderer in human history. That’s such a communist thing to do.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, we measured it scientifically.
Yeah, we measured it scientifically.
Dave Smith
We measured it, and perfectly, scientifically figured it out.
We measured it, and perfectly, scientifically figured it out.
Darryl Cooper
Lex Fridman
Since you mentioned Daryl Cooper, you’re friends with him, can you tell me about him? And tell me about the whole saga about where he got attacked after the talker interview?
Since you mentioned Daryl Cooper, you’re friends with him, can you tell me about him? And tell me about the whole saga about where he got attacked after the talker interview?
Dave Smith
Yeah, yeah. So I was just a big fan, and still I’m really just a big fan of him. We chatted a few times and I interviewed him on my podcast, and I consider us friends. Martyr Made Podcast is his show and it’s just phenomenal.
Yeah, yeah. So I was just a big fan, and still I’m really just a big fan of him. We chatted a few times and I interviewed him on my podcast, and I consider us friends. Martyr Made Podcast is his show and it’s just phenomenal.
I found out about him from, my guy is Scott Horton, who’s a very close friend of mine, and I think the best person on war in the country, he’s just a genius. He runs the Libertarian Institute, and he’s also been the editor at antiwar.com for many years now. So he first told me about Daryl, and what I knew of Daryl was just that he did a podcast with Jocko. And so they did their show together, and I listened to a couple episodes of it and really enjoyed it.
And then it was Scott who was like, “Dude, you got to check out his podcast Martyr Mate, it’s the best history podcast.” The first thing I listened to of his was the Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem. He’s done a few things on Twitter where he’s kind of shit posting and stuff like that. But when you listen to his work, when he lays down like, I’m going to take years to put together a long presentation on the history of this conflict or the history of this. He has the utmost responsibility in the way that he tells the story and the way he presents it. I cannot understand how anyone would listen to his work, and come away with the feeling that this guy is any type of Jew hater, or Nazi apologist, or anything like that. It is just not who he is.
What Daryl said on Tucker’s show was that, he goes, “I’ll say this to be provocative sometimes to kind of rib my buddy Jocko, who’s like Anglo-Saxon. So this kind of gets to him.” And he goes, “And I’m being a bit hyperbolic when I say this, but I’ll sometimes say that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.” Now, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, he wasn’t the worst person there, but he was a guy who was hell-bent on kind of this thing becoming what it ultimately became. Whereas this might’ve just been an invasion of Poland, this may not have been this whole cascade of the worst thing that ever happened in human history.
Now, the retelling of that is always, people go, “He said Churchill was the chief villain of the war.” But it’s like, no, not exactly. You know what I mean? He’s making a point, and I think he’s putting out right now a long series on World War II, he just put the prologue to it out, which was excellent, by the way. Listen, after it’s out, maybe I’ll come back and regret saying this, but I don’t think I will. I really have trust that Darryl will handle this responsibly. And in fact, I think that he might be… And not because he’s involved, this is his angle or what he’s attempting to do. I think just that he’s going to tell the truth and the truth will take you where it takes you. I think he’s actually going to probably serve a function of bringing a lot of those types kind of back to reality. If you think he’s going to be excusing the atrocities of the Nazis in this thing, I don’t think you’re going to be happy with the end product, if that’s what you are coming into it for.
Lex Fridman
Okay. One thing I want to say is, I think calling Daryl Nazi and Nazi sympathizer is just wrong, and it does a lot of damage. I think he has a lot of value to his podcast. I think there’s several things to sort of make very clear. I think he’s a really interesting guy, I’m sure I’ll talk to him in the future. But I just want to lay on the table that I think what he’s saying about Churchill is just dead wrong. I think legitimately that statement, removing the trolling from it, is the revisionist history statement that I think is wrong, and the invasion of the Soviet Union would’ve happened no matter what. And possibly, which I’m actually learning a lot more, Stalin could have gone the other way as well. That was going to be a global war, no matter what. Churchill, the role of Churchill, we can debate. And I still don’t think he was a main instigator of that expansion there, there’s a lot of historical documentation of that.
Okay. One thing I want to say is, I think calling Daryl Nazi and Nazi sympathizer is just wrong, and it does a lot of damage. I think he has a lot of value to his podcast. I think there’s several things to sort of make very clear. I think he’s a really interesting guy, I’m sure I’ll talk to him in the future. But I just want to lay on the table that I think what he’s saying about Churchill is just dead wrong. I think legitimately that statement, removing the trolling from it, is the revisionist history statement that I think is wrong, and the invasion of the Soviet Union would’ve happened no matter what. And possibly, which I’m actually learning a lot more, Stalin could have gone the other way as well. That was going to be a global war, no matter what. Churchill, the role of Churchill, we can debate. And I still don’t think he was a main instigator of that expansion there, there’s a lot of historical documentation of that.
Dave Smith
Well, look, that’s a fair debate to have, and it’d be interesting to see you two kind of talk about that. Or maybe not even debate it, but just have a conversation about that, that would be great.
Well, look, that’s a fair debate to have, and it’d be interesting to see you two kind of talk about that. Or maybe not even debate it, but just have a conversation about that, that would be great.
Lex Fridman
I think the broader point you’re making, I mean, there’s just a lot of trivialization of the World War II that happens in the West, in the United States especially. And that’s used by neocons by warmongers to sort of shift-
I think the broader point you’re making, I mean, there’s just a lot of trivialization of the World War II that happens in the West, in the United States especially. And that’s used by neocons by warmongers to sort of shift-
Dave Smith
I’ve done a bunch of Israel-Palestine debates, I don’t think I’ve ever done one where World War II wasn’t invoked. Well, I mean Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so you’re going to tell me it’s not okay. And immediately, if you just look at it like that, let’s say the official narrative is 100% true in World War II, let’s even say every aspect of the official narrative is really true. The lesson of World War II is that we should have gone to war sooner, which is essentially the dominant mainstream narrative that Chamberlain is the failure. That was the problem, the appeasement. Churchill was the solution. If only Chamberlain had been Churchill, or if only we had gone to war with Germany and whatever in 1933, it would’ve been better. Okay, let’s say all of that’s true.
I’ve done a bunch of Israel-Palestine debates, I don’t think I’ve ever done one where World War II wasn’t invoked. Well, I mean Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so you’re going to tell me it’s not okay. And immediately, if you just look at it like that, let’s say the official narrative is 100% true in World War II, let’s even say every aspect of the official narrative is really true. The lesson of World War II is that we should have gone to war sooner, which is essentially the dominant mainstream narrative that Chamberlain is the failure. That was the problem, the appeasement. Churchill was the solution. If only Chamberlain had been Churchill, or if only we had gone to war with Germany and whatever in 1933, it would’ve been better. Okay, let’s say all of that’s true.
It still doesn’t follow from that, that therefore in every situation appeasement is wrong, and aggression is good. It doesn’t follow that, if that’s the only lesson of history. And that now it’s just okay to slaughter civilians. It’s okay to go to total war against a civilian population because this one time it was necessary. Bobby Kennedy said this to me again, somebody who I really do love and admire in many ways, and I’m glad he’s the health secretary. But I remember him evoking the Nazis and making a comparison between Hamas and the Nazis. And you’re like, “Dude, Hamas doesn’t even control Gaza really. The Nazis had most of Europe at one point. This is just not an apples to apples conversation. You can’t even compare the two in terms of what type of menace or threat they are to the world.”
I mean, sure, maybe if Hamas had a lot of power, they’d use it in a bad way. But that’s true with some homeless guy on the street too, but he doesn’t have that power. So what are we talking about here? And so I do think that the way the World War II narrative is weaponized has been, even if World War II itself was necessary and just, the way that, that’s been weaponized over the years has led to just countless catastrophes. You know what I mean, I guess it’s just in some ways there might be something positive about the fact that everybody’s always called Hitler if they’re bad. You know what I mean? Because we make Hitler the face of what is evil eternally or something. He really does play the role of the devil in our society in a strange way. But there is Saddam was the next Hitler, and Gaddafi was the Hitler, and Bashar Assad was the next Hitler.
Lex Fridman
Trump.
Trump.
Dave Smith
Trump is Hitler, Hamas is Hitler. Except the problem is that none of them are Hitler. None of them are even close, it’s just totally different.
Trump is Hitler, Hamas is Hitler. Except the problem is that none of them are Hitler. None of them are even close, it’s just totally different.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And the amount of power is really important. It matters how much destructive power you have within you, the capabilities. But every major superpower with nuclear weapons has the potential to be that destructive, it is just unproductive to-
Yeah. And the amount of power is really important. It matters how much destructive power you have within you, the capabilities. But every major superpower with nuclear weapons has the potential to be that destructive, it is just unproductive to-
Dave Smith
And yet the only ones who ever have dropped them are us. I was arguing with one guy on a podcast, and he said that, he goes, “You can’t allow dictators to have nuclear weapons because they might use them.” And I was like, “But we are the only ones who ever used them.” And he goes, “Ah, come on, that’s naïve,” or something. And you’re like, “Wait, what? Shouldn’t that be pointed out?” And I don’t know. I mean, I’d prefer Iran not get nuclear weapons. I think we’re pushing them to probably want to pursue that. And I also think there’s been a lot of propaganda about the nuclear program in Iran. I know at least since the ’90s, according to Netanyahu, they’ve been five years away.
And yet the only ones who ever have dropped them are us. I was arguing with one guy on a podcast, and he said that, he goes, “You can’t allow dictators to have nuclear weapons because they might use them.” And I was like, “But we are the only ones who ever used them.” And he goes, “Ah, come on, that’s naïve,” or something. And you’re like, “Wait, what? Shouldn’t that be pointed out?” And I don’t know. I mean, I’d prefer Iran not get nuclear weapons. I think we’re pushing them to probably want to pursue that. And I also think there’s been a lot of propaganda about the nuclear program in Iran. I know at least since the ’90s, according to Netanyahu, they’ve been five years away.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of warmongering going on about all parts of the world, Iran especially. I have a lot of friends from Iran, it’s one of the most beautiful cultures in the world, this just superpower of intellect and culture. And it’s really sad and disappointing that the regime is basically suppressing that culture. You have to always remember, there’s parts of the world where the people are beautiful, and we don’t get to see it because of the suppression, the lack of freedom.
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of warmongering going on about all parts of the world, Iran especially. I have a lot of friends from Iran, it’s one of the most beautiful cultures in the world, this just superpower of intellect and culture. And it’s really sad and disappointing that the regime is basically suppressing that culture. You have to always remember, there’s parts of the world where the people are beautiful, and we don’t get to see it because of the suppression, the lack of freedom.
Dave Smith
Yeah. No, absolutely.
Yeah. No, absolutely.
Antisemitism
Lex Fridman
So all that said, there does seem to be a lot of hatred of Jews on the X. How much of it do you think is actual hate of Jews? And how much of it’s just trolls and grifters and conspiracy nerds just cosplaying as Nazis?
So all that said, there does seem to be a lot of hatred of Jews on the X. How much of it do you think is actual hate of Jews? And how much of it’s just trolls and grifters and conspiracy nerds just cosplaying as Nazis?
Dave Smith
It’s really hard to tell. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know how you even figure it out. And I think this is one of the problems with outrage culture. It’s kind of one of the unintended consequences of it, is that now you just have no way of knowing who’s saying this just to get a rise out of you, or who really sincerely means it, or who’s some version of both. You see, there’s so many weird dynamics because there’s no question, I see it all the time. I mean, I see a level of Jew hatred on Twitter that I’ve never seen before in my own replies and other people’s things. And that’s interesting. First off, you’re like, “Okay, what’s going on here?”
It’s really hard to tell. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know how you even figure it out. And I think this is one of the problems with outrage culture. It’s kind of one of the unintended consequences of it, is that now you just have no way of knowing who’s saying this just to get a rise out of you, or who really sincerely means it, or who’s some version of both. You see, there’s so many weird dynamics because there’s no question, I see it all the time. I mean, I see a level of Jew hatred on Twitter that I’ve never seen before in my own replies and other people’s things. And that’s interesting. First off, you’re like, “Okay, what’s going on here?”
Lex Fridman
Interesting sociological phenomenon. Yeah.
Interesting sociological phenomenon. Yeah.
Dave Smith
Right. Yeah. Concerning and troubling and all of that stuff. But then you also see people who will be asking completely legitimate questions, or making completely legitimate points that are called antisemitic. And then that, I think, does not help the dynamic at all because now you’re almost like, number one, you make the word meaningless, you take away the disincentive for anybody else to actually be a Jew hater. I mean, I think there’s a lot going on.
Right. Yeah. Concerning and troubling and all of that stuff. But then you also see people who will be asking completely legitimate questions, or making completely legitimate points that are called antisemitic. And then that, I think, does not help the dynamic at all because now you’re almost like, number one, you make the word meaningless, you take away the disincentive for anybody else to actually be a Jew hater. I mean, I think there’s a lot going on.
One of the things is that for young white men in America today, they’ve lived through the years of real insane progressive woke-sim. I’m 42, it’s just a different thing for me, I come from a different culture in a different time. That just simply was not the case that when I was a teenager, or when I was in college, or when I was in my early 20s, that the school, the faculty, the politicians, Hollywood, all of them embraced racialism. They all said, “We’re playing identity politics, and it is okay to dice people up along these racial lines,” and have that first and foremost in your mind.
And there is this weird feeling over this last year and now with Trump being reelected, that we snapped our fingers and woke-sim and went away or something like that. But these guys still came up in this era, and it was always the case that one of the dangerous elements of playing this game was like, hey, you think you’re going to play this and that young straight white men aren’t going to start playing this game too? Why the hell would they not? Why would they just accept, we’ll just sit here while everybody else is allowed to have a racial identity, and a grievance about it. And yet we’ll be the one group who, yeah, could just stomp all over us, we’re the bad guys. And that’s part of the reason why I always opposed the woken sanity.
I mean, first and foremost, just because I think it’s wrong, I think it’s wrong to be shitty to people based on their racial group, and that includes white people too. But then also you’re like, you don’t see that this is going to result in something bad. So there’s that. And what’s weird to me is that, I guess it’s because a lot of the people who are the most upset about the antisemitism also happen to be supporting Israel, there’s a big correlation between that. But clearly it’s a huge factor in this. It’s not a coincidence that all of this rose up while Israel is just conducting this brutal campaign with our weapons and money.
And so I always think with these things, whether it’s with Putin, or with Al-Qaeda, or with whoever, and I’m not saying the guy who posts Jew-hating stuff on Twitter is the same as them. I’m just saying in all of these situations, you always kind of got to separate, what are legitimate grievances and what are, okay, you’re wrong on that and you shouldn’t be doing that. So it’s pretty easy for me, if I listen to the Putin interview with Tucker, I thought his whole 30 minute opening thing was horrible and just kind of stupid, especially when you’re talking to Tucker Carlson. This is for an American audience. You know how much that does not resonate with Americans being like, “We have a historic claim over another.” Our entire society is founded on, we think that’s bullshit. That’s the entire history of our society. It’s like, nah, it doesn’t matter. Sorry.
Literally read the Declaration of Independence, it just refutes everything Vladimir Putin said in the first 30 minutes. Our view of the world is that God wants us to be free, and we get to overthrow governments if they’re infringing on our rights. So that was stupid. But then when he is talking about NATO enlargement, and bringing Ukraine into the American Military Alliance, you’re like, “Okay, he’s got a legitimate point there. We would not allow one of our neighbors to be brought into China or Russia’s military alliance.” And so likewise, when it comes to those guys, I do think that, look, it is just true. It is the case that America has fought many wars over the last seven years with Israel playing a very influential role in us fighting those wars. And this was a scheme that was cooked up by the neoconservatives and the [inaudible 01:39:03] in Israel that we would go through this path. But this has been confirmed by four Star General Wesley Clark. He literally said, “It was a study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple seven countries in five years.” And we didn’t get there in five years, but we’ve made attempts to topple all of those countries since then.
You see Trump’s bombing the Houthis because they’re pissed off about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and so they’re trying to shut down their straits or whatever. So we’re just bombing another group on behalf of Israel. And if you really are concerned about the rise of Jew hatred, I would say, look, sometimes people would argue, the thing I said in the beginning about the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, they hate us because we’re over there. And people would say, “That’s just what Osama Bin Laden says.” He just says he hates us for our military, but he really just hates us because he’s an Islamist and we’re free people or whatever. And you’d be like, “Okay, well even if that’s what’s in his heart, that sure is his recruiting shtick. That sure is how he gets other people to blow themselves up.” And so even if you want to say, which might very well be the case, that some of these people just hate Jews, and it wouldn’t matter if Israel was at war with Gaza or not. It’s like, okay, but that sure is their recruiting shtick. That sure is how they get other people to go look at what these Jews are doing in our foreign policy.
So I don’t know. There’s a lot going on. I think racialism of all different forms is stupid and wrong. It always just leads to sloppy thinking and bad results, it’s always kind of ugly. And then weirdly, it also always ends up hurting the person, it’s not good for you, it’s not good for your soul. So I don’t like seeing that stuff. I was saying before about there’s this hierarchy of outrage that you got to have in order to think and act, you have to kind of put these together. It’s something that, despite being described as a self-hating Jew, I am really not. I love Jewish people, I love Jewish culture. I’ve benefited a lot from it. It’s in many ways made me the person I am, and I think it’s influenced some of the best parts of me.
But there is a whininess and a hysteria about this stuff that I think is just not healthy. I think it’s not good. I’ve told many Jewish friends and family this privately, but the way I look at it is like, I’m an American, this has been a wonderful country to be Jewish. Jews are doing exceptionally well in this country. We are 2% of the population or so, and we are thriving by any metric. And if mean stuff on Twitter is our great burden to bear, I don’t think we should be talking about it like we’re in the middle of Nazi Germany or something like that. So I do think people get hysterical about it.
Lex Fridman
In a way that’s completely not productive. But to me, I think of the Jew-hating nerds and trolls on Twitter as just the other side of the woke.
In a way that’s completely not productive. But to me, I think of the Jew-hating nerds and trolls on Twitter as just the other side of the woke.
Lex Fridman
… And trolls on Twitter is just the other side of the woke leftist.
… And trolls on Twitter is just the other side of the woke leftist.
Dave Smith
I kind of get that, yeah.
I kind of get that, yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s almost like a response, like you were saying, it’s just that the woke weren’t censored and the response to the woke was censored. And now that on X, they’re less censored or not censored, you just get to see it. And they’re both annoying.
It’s almost like a response, like you were saying, it’s just that the woke weren’t censored and the response to the woke was censored. And now that on X, they’re less censored or not censored, you just get to see it. And they’re both annoying.
Dave Smith
I agree with that.
I agree with that.
Lex Fridman
They don’t really help the discussion on Israel, they don’t help the discussion on anything. In fact, one of the reasons I stay away from that discussion of Israel, which I think is nuanced and really complicated in the way that we’ve been discussing, in order to have an intellectual exploration of ideas, you have to be able to misstep and try ideas for size. And if I’m going to be punished severely by these… I’m okay being criticized. But when they’re low brain takes that are just lying about me en masse, you get a huge amount of engagement just because you’re thinking out loud and reading history and it’s just annoying.
They don’t really help the discussion on Israel, they don’t help the discussion on anything. In fact, one of the reasons I stay away from that discussion of Israel, which I think is nuanced and really complicated in the way that we’ve been discussing, in order to have an intellectual exploration of ideas, you have to be able to misstep and try ideas for size. And if I’m going to be punished severely by these… I’m okay being criticized. But when they’re low brain takes that are just lying about me en masse, you get a huge amount of engagement just because you’re thinking out loud and reading history and it’s just annoying.
And by the way, I’m really interested about World War II, probably in the way that Dan Carlin and Darryl Cooper are interested because it’s such an interesting first stage on which human nature was explored in all its forms, the geopolitics of it. Everybody on that stage was complicated. Also, there’s a lot of fascinating military tactics and strategy and military technology plus the nuclear bomb, all of that. That’s like a moment in human history. Listen, I love Genghis Khan, Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, those are all interesting studies of human history, of military tactics, of brutality, of human nature, all of that. That’s why I want to be able to discuss that. It’s fascinating that humans are able to do that kind of thing. What causes them to do it? What were the dynamics evolved, the propaganda on all sides? Could it been avoided or not? Plus Stalin is part of this picture. It’s like, what the fuck?
After the nuclear bomb you’re just not going to get characters like that. You’re not going to get a global war of that kind. It might be a different one, maybe a cyber war or maybe a war in space, but we’re not going to get this kind of war ever again. That was the biggest and the last global war we’re going to get. So I want to be able to mouth off and explore and, yeah, argue with Darryl Cooper bought Churchill and say stupid in the process and Darryl says stupid in the process too, and together come up to the… So anyway, the trolls on the left and the right just make everything worse and it’s annoying.
Dave Smith
Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I’m sure I’m not without my own bias in this because from my own self-interested perspective, I’m not saying this is the main reason to be annoyed with them or anything like that, but what I personally get is all types of, “Self-hating Jew,” “Nazi apologist,” all this literally just because I criticize the way Israel’s conducting this war. So I think that’s insane.
Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I’m sure I’m not without my own bias in this because from my own self-interested perspective, I’m not saying this is the main reason to be annoyed with them or anything like that, but what I personally get is all types of, “Self-hating Jew,” “Nazi apologist,” all this literally just because I criticize the way Israel’s conducting this war. So I think that’s insane.
But then I also feel like, and I just want to be clear, just explain this, I’m not saying this is the worst thing about people who are Jew haters on Twitter, but just from a personal perspective, I’m like, “Guys, you are not helping me, man.” I’ll get people in my comments who I think are trying to catch my back who just don’t know I’m Jewish and they’re like, I’ll say something critical of Israel, and then someone will argue with me and they’ll be like, “Oh look, a Jew came in here to defend Israel.” And I’m like, “Dude, first of all, literally you might as well be working for Mossad. You literally make the entire movement who’s criticizing Israel look terrible, dude. You are literally the enemy that they would like to have.”
And so there’s a very weird dynamic in the Israel-Palestine conflict where there’s so many of the loons on both sides who almost seem like they’re secretly working for the other side. When you see the Palestinian protests and they’re chanting, “Death to America,” and all this stuff, you’re like, what are you doing? Are you trying to make people more sympathetic to Israel? Because if Rabbi Shmuley was working for Adolf Hitler or something like that, it would all make perfect sense. You’d be like, “Oh, I get it, you sent this guy out to make everyone hate Jewish people.” And then with the Jew hating posts too, yeah, it just feeds right into the opposition side of how to caricature. It’s like, “Oh, so their game is, they’ll smear everybody who’s a critic of Israel as being a Jew hater so your answer is to just really be a Jew hater? Like, all right, I don’t think that’s helping.”
World leaders
Lex Fridman
So maybe this is a good time to ask for your advice because these folks are the reason why I’m hesitant. So I’ve interviewed several world leaders recently, it is looking likely that I’ll interview Vladimir Putin and several other similar level major world leaders. I’ve previously interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu for an hour. One of the biggest regrets I have about that interview is it was only an hour. I mean, I learned a lot, but I think he’s a really important historical figure and I think it’s impossible to have an effective conversation with him that’s shorter than three hours. So it looks like he’s interested now to do round two with me for three or more hours.
So maybe this is a good time to ask for your advice because these folks are the reason why I’m hesitant. So I’ve interviewed several world leaders recently, it is looking likely that I’ll interview Vladimir Putin and several other similar level major world leaders. I’ve previously interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu for an hour. One of the biggest regrets I have about that interview is it was only an hour. I mean, I learned a lot, but I think he’s a really important historical figure and I think it’s impossible to have an effective conversation with him that’s shorter than three hours. So it looks like he’s interested now to do round two with me for three or more hours.
And I’ve personally, so this is a bit of a therapy session, but I’ve personally been leaning against doing it and I hate that I’m leaning against doing it because the reason I’m leaning against doing it is because the very people you’re talking about, because I just don’t want them on either side, pro Israel, it doesn’t really matter, but the chanting sheep of animal farm, Jew hating or otherwise, they follow you around everywhere online and make it difficult to think. I think whenever I come across these crowds, the woke left or the whatever you call the Jew haters, the woke right, let’s call them, they just decrease the quality of my thoughts for the rest of the day.
Dave Smith
I get what you mean.
I get what you mean.
Lex Fridman
I feel dumber. It’s like Rogan talks about when he hears a bad comedian, he feels like nothing is funny anymore. This is what I feel like when I read their thoughts, it’s like, “I’m going to go read a book now because I need to recover my brain.”
I feel dumber. It’s like Rogan talks about when he hears a bad comedian, he feels like nothing is funny anymore. This is what I feel like when I read their thoughts, it’s like, “I’m going to go read a book now because I need to recover my brain.”
Dave Smith
Well, it’s a dangerous kind of poison to let in your mind because then you’re like, “Hey, I can’t be thinking about you when I’m doing what I want to do. I can’t be thinking about what your reaction to this is going to be.” The way I always thought about it was when I’d get hate online, which I always get, it’s always just like, I look at it like this, I got a great family and a great career and I really love what I do. I make really good money at what I do, and I do shows all the time, I get crowds of people who love what I do, I get a lot of people who listen to my podcast who love what I do. And it’s like, so if I get all that and then the price that comes along with it is there’s some people who talk shit online, it’s like, that’s a very good price to pay for all of this.
Well, it’s a dangerous kind of poison to let in your mind because then you’re like, “Hey, I can’t be thinking about you when I’m doing what I want to do. I can’t be thinking about what your reaction to this is going to be.” The way I always thought about it was when I’d get hate online, which I always get, it’s always just like, I look at it like this, I got a great family and a great career and I really love what I do. I make really good money at what I do, and I do shows all the time, I get crowds of people who love what I do, I get a lot of people who listen to my podcast who love what I do. And it’s like, so if I get all that and then the price that comes along with it is there’s some people who talk shit online, it’s like, that’s a very good price to pay for all of this.
And I just made a decision at a certain point that it’s like, I’m just going to accept that that’s the price of business here, that’s what it costs and then okay, fine. And then sometimes I try to have fun with it or mock them or whatever to go back. But to me now, again, I can never tell you what to do because it’s a very personal price that you have to pay, and it’s a very weird psychological dynamic. I mean, it’s almost something like that we were not evolved to deal with and is very artificial. If there’s a group of thousands of people who hate your guts and are furious at you, we’re almost hardwired to be like, “Well, I’m going to be killed now. That’s the next thing that happens.” You’re not supposed to get to know what just someone in Arkansas thinks about you right now.
So that’s a very personal decision to make, but I kind of feel like guys like me and you have already made the decision that we’re in the arena and we’re going to deal with that price. So just from my perspective, I’m like, “Yeah, but how could you turn down getting three hours with Netanyahu?” That would just be so interesting. And I’m not even saying, I hate the guy, but I’m not saying you should interview him like you hate the guy or I’m not saying you even have to grill him, but just if you get three hours with somebody, something interesting is going to be revealed there. There’ll be a benefit to that. It’ll be interesting to just see him talk that way.
There’s also something about, as we kind of saw with Trump doing the podcasts and even with JD Vance doing some of the podcasts, there is something really interesting about this format, the long form podcast where it just gets people to let down their guard and reveal themselves a little bit more. It is not just the time factor. That’s a big one, it’s a huge, huge one. But there’s something about if me and you are just like, we were having this conversation right now, but in the back of us was like a cable news background of red and blue and sparks and a ticker at the bottom of the show and then you just start interviewing someone, it’s just a different thing. Whereas this you just fall into conversation mode. And I’d be interested to see him fall into that, Putin too. I just think it’s great.
Lex Fridman
First of all, thank you for the encouragement. But to push back on the complexity of it a little bit, I think everything you said about your life is also true about my life except family, I want to have a family, you son of a bitch, you’re bragging. On the podcast side, I can have a lot of incredible conversations, some of my favorites are talking to programmers or video game designers or to you about Netanyahu versus talking to a world leader is a very specific thing and people don’t understand that that, for example, you and I can mouth off, we can be super supportive of Netanyahu or super critical in a way that you can’t do in front of the guy.
First of all, thank you for the encouragement. But to push back on the complexity of it a little bit, I think everything you said about your life is also true about my life except family, I want to have a family, you son of a bitch, you’re bragging. On the podcast side, I can have a lot of incredible conversations, some of my favorites are talking to programmers or video game designers or to you about Netanyahu versus talking to a world leader is a very specific thing and people don’t understand that that, for example, you and I can mouth off, we can be super supportive of Netanyahu or super critical in a way that you can’t do in front of the guy.
Dave Smith
Yeah, that’s true.
Yeah, that’s true.
Lex Fridman
If you want to reveal something about that person, there’s a different skill involved there in order to reveal how they think, who they are as a human being, you have to, just like we said with Darryl Cooper, you have to humanize the person to a degree in order to let their mind flourish in front of you in order for them to let down the barriers they’ve put up. And Benjamin Netanyahu’s put up a lot of barriers, internally in Israel he gets attacked insanely. There’s a Game of Thrones constantly going on, and this guy has maintained power for a very long time so he is very good at putting up those barriers. Plus, globally gets attacked a lot. So the task there is difficult. And so each one is a puzzle and you have to make a decision, do you want to take this on as a project which might become a lifelong project because of the consequences? And you don’t need to.
If you want to reveal something about that person, there’s a different skill involved there in order to reveal how they think, who they are as a human being, you have to, just like we said with Darryl Cooper, you have to humanize the person to a degree in order to let their mind flourish in front of you in order for them to let down the barriers they’ve put up. And Benjamin Netanyahu’s put up a lot of barriers, internally in Israel he gets attacked insanely. There’s a Game of Thrones constantly going on, and this guy has maintained power for a very long time so he is very good at putting up those barriers. Plus, globally gets attacked a lot. So the task there is difficult. And so each one is a puzzle and you have to make a decision, do you want to take this on as a project which might become a lifelong project because of the consequences? And you don’t need to.
Dave Smith
There’s a calculation there. I’m not saying it’s not so self-evident that there is a correct and incorrect answer, and I do think that we’ve probably all had things, like certain type of ventures in life where you’re like, “All right, no, I don’t want to do that.” But then you have to have a moment and be like, “Well, why is it you don’t want it? Oh, is it just because it’s going to be a lot of work? Is it just because you’re scared of it? Is it just because this?” And those typically are not good reasons to not do something, you know what I mean?
There’s a calculation there. I’m not saying it’s not so self-evident that there is a correct and incorrect answer, and I do think that we’ve probably all had things, like certain type of ventures in life where you’re like, “All right, no, I don’t want to do that.” But then you have to have a moment and be like, “Well, why is it you don’t want it? Oh, is it just because it’s going to be a lot of work? Is it just because you’re scared of it? Is it just because this?” And those typically are not good reasons to not do something, you know what I mean?
Now, there is a reasonable, I think, point that you made in there where it’s like it is a different game to interview a world leader. That is a very different thing. Talking to some comedian about his thoughts on all this stuff is a very different thing than talking to a world leader and especially one who’s conducting a brutal war as you’re talking to them. And I don’t know exactly what the way to navigate that is. I agree with you, it’s not just to be hostile and be like, “I’ve got you here for three hours, I’m going to grill the shit,” it’s probably not the best way to do it. There’s probably to have a conversation to talk to the guy, probably try to get some important questions in, but also give him a chance to breathe and be a person. From my perspective, but again, it’s a very personal thing, for me I just do think that I’m going, “I hope you do it,” because I’d love to see that podcast.
Lex Fridman
Okay, well see, this is why it’s part of the reason I asked you is I get a Dave Smith endorsement on it.
Okay, well see, this is why it’s part of the reason I asked you is I get a Dave Smith endorsement on it.
Dave Smith
There you go, when this completely ruins it.
There you go, when this completely ruins it.
Lex Fridman
At least there’s another guy who thought there’s a chance that it might be a good idea. Because I don’t know, that’s the cool thing about the things we do, you’ve been through a lot of battles, you’ve walked into a lot of tough debates and it’s like you don’t know, this could be the conversation that ends you.
At least there’s another guy who thought there’s a chance that it might be a good idea. Because I don’t know, that’s the cool thing about the things we do, you’ve been through a lot of battles, you’ve walked into a lot of tough debates and it’s like you don’t know, this could be the conversation that ends you.
Dave Smith
I know. Well, I’ll say I think that’s one of the things that I love about doing debates, and there is something about that where I do kind of feel this… I’m a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. I mean, not really, I don’t skydive or do stuff like that, but doing stand-up, there’s always something about that that’s like you’re risking a lot by doing it, you feel alive and not the way you do when you first start. But there is something about that and there’s something about… Well, first of all, there’s kind of two things.
I know. Well, I’ll say I think that’s one of the things that I love about doing debates, and there is something about that where I do kind of feel this… I’m a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. I mean, not really, I don’t skydive or do stuff like that, but doing stand-up, there’s always something about that that’s like you’re risking a lot by doing it, you feel alive and not the way you do when you first start. But there is something about that and there’s something about… Well, first of all, there’s kind of two things.
Number one, I feel like I’m obligated, and I wouldn’t say this for you, but I think this is true for me, I think I’m obligated to do at least several debates a year. And I think that if I’m going to go on shows like your show and Rogan’s show and Tucker’s show and Candice or whoever else, Patrick Bet-David and Tim Pool, and I go on these big shows for long form things and I’m sitting there and I’m being like, “Okay, it’s like this and I think it’s like this,” and then if I’m going to do that, I kind of have an obligation to test myself against someone being like, “No, it’s not like that,” and then showing that I think I can stand up to these kind of challenges. So I feel like I’m kind of obligated.
But then there is a feeling to it where you’re like, “Hey man, my career is not a joke. I got little kids. This is how I support them.” And I am kind of taking my career in my hands every time I go do one of these debates. If I just get smoked and this guy just totally beats me up, it’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know, how’s anyone going to look at me again after that? You’d be like, “Oh, you acted like you had such a good point and then this guy just totally destroyed your point.” But that then motivates me to be like, “Okay, I got to really be on point. I got to really make sure I’ve done my homework. I got to make sure my argument’s really tight. I got to think about this thing from all ends.”
And then on the other level, it’s like if someone can do that to me, then kind of that’s the way the movie’s supposed to end. If there is some hole in my argument that I’m just not thinking of and then someone else can point it out to me and I got no response to it, then I kind of deserve to be humiliated publicly for that so all right. And I don’t know, it’s kind of exciting in a way.
Lex Fridman
Because the movie ends at some point.
Because the movie ends at some point.
Dave Smith
Well, that’s true. Unless you and your genius friends can figure out how to give us eternal life or something.
Well, that’s true. Unless you and your genius friends can figure out how to give us eternal life or something.
Lex Fridman
I don’t think I want to live forever. I think flirting with that idea too much is dangerous, this kind of transhumanism kind of idea. It’s not a good way of thinking. Of course, I do want to heal diseases and extend human life, especially high quality of human life. But yeah.
I don’t think I want to live forever. I think flirting with that idea too much is dangerous, this kind of transhumanism kind of idea. It’s not a good way of thinking. Of course, I do want to heal diseases and extend human life, especially high quality of human life. But yeah.
Dave Smith
If we could be in much better shape and much healthier and extend life by a few decades, I think that would be great. But I agree with you. I think there’s supposed to be an expiration date on it, I think we’re supposed to… There’s something about scarcity being a necessary component in a lot of different fields, you know what I mean? Where it’s like life itself having a finite amount of time on it I think makes it more precious.
If we could be in much better shape and much healthier and extend life by a few decades, I think that would be great. But I agree with you. I think there’s supposed to be an expiration date on it, I think we’re supposed to… There’s something about scarcity being a necessary component in a lot of different fields, you know what I mean? Where it’s like life itself having a finite amount of time on it I think makes it more precious.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, at the individual level and then at the societal level, it just does seem like death is the way you get new ideas. It’s like people kind of solidify their ideas and are unwilling to change their mind and the only way you get new ideas-
Yeah, at the individual level and then at the societal level, it just does seem like death is the way you get new ideas. It’s like people kind of solidify their ideas and are unwilling to change their mind and the only way you get new ideas-
Dave Smith
Yeah, that’s interesting, right? The next generation has to take them over.
Yeah, that’s interesting, right? The next generation has to take them over.
Jeffrey Epstein
Lex Fridman
You have to keep turning. All right, speaking of the trolls and Israel, I got to ask you about this. Let’s talk about Jeffrey Epstein. I recently got attacked because a couple of conversations I had with Tim Dillon three and four years ago. I love Tim Dillon, he’s hilarious.
You have to keep turning. All right, speaking of the trolls and Israel, I got to ask you about this. Let’s talk about Jeffrey Epstein. I recently got attacked because a couple of conversations I had with Tim Dillon three and four years ago. I love Tim Dillon, he’s hilarious.
Dave Smith
I love Tim too. I’ve known Tim for many years, love that guy.
I love Tim too. I’ve known Tim for many years, love that guy.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, so I bring up Jeffrey Epstein often because it’s a fascinating study of evil to me, whichever angle you take on it. And I think there, partially to talk shit, but I showed some skepticism that he’s connected to Mossad. And I’ve evolved on that since then. By the way, I’m not actually sure it’s Mossad, it could be any intelligence agencies, it could be CIA. But I was wondering if you could educate me. I did a little research on this last night, I looked into it a little more, and then I saw that you said he’s definitely Mossad.
Yeah, so I bring up Jeffrey Epstein often because it’s a fascinating study of evil to me, whichever angle you take on it. And I think there, partially to talk shit, but I showed some skepticism that he’s connected to Mossad. And I’ve evolved on that since then. By the way, I’m not actually sure it’s Mossad, it could be any intelligence agencies, it could be CIA. But I was wondering if you could educate me. I did a little research on this last night, I looked into it a little more, and then I saw that you said he’s definitely Mossad.
Dave Smith
Well, I don’t know, I didn’t say he was definitely Mossad. I don’t know my exact… I mean, I made one kind of jokey post. As is the case with almost any intelligence operation, look, I don’t want to poo-poo anybody’s hopes here because I guess the JFK files just got released and supposedly the rest of the Epstein files are coming out and there’s a major yearning right now to get to the end of the movie where we find out everything that happened. And I think it’s great that people have that desire, and I hope more and more does come out. I think the truth is that with any intelligence operations, we’re probably never going to know all of the details of exactly what happened.
Well, I don’t know, I didn’t say he was definitely Mossad. I don’t know my exact… I mean, I made one kind of jokey post. As is the case with almost any intelligence operation, look, I don’t want to poo-poo anybody’s hopes here because I guess the JFK files just got released and supposedly the rest of the Epstein files are coming out and there’s a major yearning right now to get to the end of the movie where we find out everything that happened. And I think it’s great that people have that desire, and I hope more and more does come out. I think the truth is that with any intelligence operations, we’re probably never going to know all of the details of exactly what happened.
Lex Fridman
The funny thing about intelligence agencies, and I’ve been regularly accused of being CIA, FSB or Mossad depending on the group that’s attacking me, but I think it’s a fascinating topic and it’s very difficult to know somebody’s intelligence, but if you have any nuance and want to discuss the nuances, then the comment is going to be, “That guy for sure is Mossad,” if we’re talking about Mossad or so on. But yeah, that’s one of the things I didn’t know. And I saw the, what is it, Alex Acosta basically mentioned that Epstein is intelligence. That to me is like, “Okay, that’s the piece of evidence, that’s the really valuable piece of evidence that he’s intelligence.” And that was very not just intelligence, but Mossad. Because before that I thought it might be CIA because I kind of heard rumors-
The funny thing about intelligence agencies, and I’ve been regularly accused of being CIA, FSB or Mossad depending on the group that’s attacking me, but I think it’s a fascinating topic and it’s very difficult to know somebody’s intelligence, but if you have any nuance and want to discuss the nuances, then the comment is going to be, “That guy for sure is Mossad,” if we’re talking about Mossad or so on. But yeah, that’s one of the things I didn’t know. And I saw the, what is it, Alex Acosta basically mentioned that Epstein is intelligence. That to me is like, “Okay, that’s the piece of evidence, that’s the really valuable piece of evidence that he’s intelligence.” And that was very not just intelligence, but Mossad. Because before that I thought it might be CIA because I kind of heard rumors-
Dave Smith
And I think it’s quite possible that he was working with elements of both, I mean, as I think is often the case. I also think that’s something that people get a little bit wrong when they think, “Okay, this guy was CIA, or, “This guy was Mossad.” And then there’s also, I think there’s the possibility that there are rogue elements within those organizations. This is not necessarily coming from the director I don’t know.
And I think it’s quite possible that he was working with elements of both, I mean, as I think is often the case. I also think that’s something that people get a little bit wrong when they think, “Okay, this guy was CIA, or, “This guy was Mossad.” And then there’s also, I think there’s the possibility that there are rogue elements within those organizations. This is not necessarily coming from the director I don’t know.
But you look at the guy, the way his career trajectory tracks is completely unexplainable outside of being connected to intelligence. It’s not just the one or two people saying that he’s intelligence, it’s like the idea that you’re just like, you have no experience and you’re a teacher at Dalton, which is this incredibly elite New York City private school, and then all of a sudden you’re at Bear Stearns and within two years you’ve made partner and you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody knows where you made your money from? This just doesn’t happen. And then you’re just inserted into this world with all of the most highest level political leaders and cultural figures and stuff.
But the thing that’s amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it’s like the level of evil and the level of corruption that it exposes, no matter what the answer is, no matter what the answer is, you’re going to tell me that there was a pedophile ring in our country that involved… I mean, listen, dude, if you had said this before it came out, this would’ve been the wildest conspiracy theory, but a pedophile ring that involves the most powerful people in the United States of America and in the world to some degree touching the Royal family, the Clintons, all these people, and that this was known and covered up and then allowed to continue? I mean, there’s a blackmail operation that relies on raping American children? And if this is, whether it’s CIA or Mossad doesn’t make one less, it’s equally horrible.
But then these elements were like, you’re like, okay, so when he first got arrested and then he was given a slap on the wrist, a slap on the wrist and then the prosecutor says, “Well, I was told by the intelligence community that he’s intelligence and to go easy on him,” it’s like, “Oh, okay, okay. And you didn’t resign and discuss that day?” You know what I mean? I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. There was the ABC reporter who said that she had the whole story, she’s on the hot mic saying she had the whole story and then the network told her to squash it, and it’s like, “And you stayed working there?” I’m sorry, I’m not saying we’re all imperfect and none of us are heroes, but you are in a news network and you uncovered a child raping ring that implicated the most powerful people in our society and your news network told you, “We will not run this story because of our relationship with the royal family,” and you did not resign in disgust that day and take this story to every single independent outlet that would maybe publish it? I’m sorry.
It’s like it’s so damning to the entire apparatus that we did not, at the very least, see mass resignations over this, forget even at the very least expect that it would’ve been prosecuted and shut down. And then still to this day even it’s like, and I think Tucker Carlson just said this recently, and I guess it’s a little bit of a weird area when you’re filming people raping children, but where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Where are those?
I don’t know what the legal process of this is, because I think technically it’s child porn, so yeah, okay, you can’t just distribute it out and let everybody watch it, but isn’t there a way that somebody has to sit down and watch it and see who is implicated in this? And there’s even, I think there’s a lot of LARPing with this administration going on right now on this topic, but does anybody really expect that we’re actually going to get to the bottom of this? Because I don’t. And that in itself just tells you what a sham this god damn whole system is.
One of the things that’s so amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story, I mean, you have all of that, and then of course, the end of it, which is just like, “Wait a minute, wait, what? Hold on. He’s in the most secure prison and then the cameras go out and the correctional officers don’t fill out the log and he’s found dead?” I mean, but when you look at it in totality, there’s just no getting around the huge indictment it is of this entire everything. And I mean, even the fact that even the Trump administration, when Pam Bondi goes, “We’re going to release all of this information. We’ve only redacted what needs to be redacted for national security.”
Lex Fridman
The meme.
The meme.
Sam Harris
Dave Smith
Why does anything need to be redacted for national security? I’m sorry, you’re telling me there’s a pedophile ring and we can’t tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security? And I do think there’s something, and it’s very interesting because we talked briefly, was that on air before, we were talking about Sam Harris kind of criticized me a little bit for not having the credentials to talk about some of this stuff, which I even said, “Okay, he has got a point,” but it’s one of the things that guys like Sam Harris will talk about a lot is that, “Look, we need trust in institutions.” And this is his big thing where he goes, “These people like Joe Rogan and Dave Smith are just tearing down the institutions. And while I recognize that’s an issue, I also think we need trust in these institutions.”
Why does anything need to be redacted for national security? I’m sorry, you’re telling me there’s a pedophile ring and we can’t tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security? And I do think there’s something, and it’s very interesting because we talked briefly, was that on air before, we were talking about Sam Harris kind of criticized me a little bit for not having the credentials to talk about some of this stuff, which I even said, “Okay, he has got a point,” but it’s one of the things that guys like Sam Harris will talk about a lot is that, “Look, we need trust in institutions.” And this is his big thing where he goes, “These people like Joe Rogan and Dave Smith are just tearing down the institutions. And while I recognize that’s an issue, I also think we need trust in these institutions.”
Lex Fridman
That’s a good Sam Harris.
That’s a good Sam Harris.
Dave Smith
Yeah, well, if you talk in that tone, then it means you’re not being emotional and you’re only being logical and rational, which I actually don’t think is appropriate when you’re talking about a child rapist ring, but whatever, that’s my take on it. But it’s like, okay, so where are these institutions I’m supposed to trust, man? You’re telling me there’s a pedophile ring that is at least in some degree associated with national security? What? And how could you possibly have this story if you did care about trust in institutions, then you should be even louder than me talking about you got to tell the truth on this story otherwise we’ll never have trust in these institutions.
Yeah, well, if you talk in that tone, then it means you’re not being emotional and you’re only being logical and rational, which I actually don’t think is appropriate when you’re talking about a child rapist ring, but whatever, that’s my take on it. But it’s like, okay, so where are these institutions I’m supposed to trust, man? You’re telling me there’s a pedophile ring that is at least in some degree associated with national security? What? And how could you possibly have this story if you did care about trust in institutions, then you should be even louder than me talking about you got to tell the truth on this story otherwise we’ll never have trust in these institutions.
Lex Fridman
I’m the same actually, I believe institutions, I think they have value. So this is where you and I probably disagree on the libertarian side. I think institutions, if they’re run efficiently can-
I’m the same actually, I believe institutions, I think they have value. So this is where you and I probably disagree on the libertarian side. I think institutions, if they’re run efficiently can-
Dave Smith
Who’s the utopian now?
Who’s the utopian now?
Lex Fridman
That’s right. I mean there is the utopian notion to it for sure, but because it’s very possible that bureaucracy has always destroy the productivity and the effectiveness of institutions. It’s possible.
That’s right. I mean there is the utopian notion to it for sure, but because it’s very possible that bureaucracy has always destroy the productivity and the effectiveness of institutions. It’s possible.
Dave Smith
It’s a Lord Atkins kind of power corrupts type deal?
It’s a Lord Atkins kind of power corrupts type deal?
Lex Fridman
And you’re absolutely right, if you believe in institutions, you should want to release everything about Epstein. You should want to be transparent as much as possible. Yeah. But the one thing, and it is very suspicious, so I’m more and more becoming convinced that there’s some intelligence agency connected to it. But I also want to, setting that aside, just comment on one thing where again, it’s super entertaining, but people say about me that I came out of nowhere and that’s proof that I’m intelligence. So first of all, there is a track record of “where I came from”. It’s just people are too lazy. And there is something sexy about just saying Mossad. “Oh, he’s denying it? Fucking Mossad.” By the way, the Mossad thing is a new thing, it used to be FSB and CIA. What do I want to say about that? Oh, yeah, I’ve been gradually growing in popularity over the past 10 years, I’ve been doing interviews, lectures, podcasts, and it’s actually very gradual. And I don’t know what else to say.
And you’re absolutely right, if you believe in institutions, you should want to release everything about Epstein. You should want to be transparent as much as possible. Yeah. But the one thing, and it is very suspicious, so I’m more and more becoming convinced that there’s some intelligence agency connected to it. But I also want to, setting that aside, just comment on one thing where again, it’s super entertaining, but people say about me that I came out of nowhere and that’s proof that I’m intelligence. So first of all, there is a track record of “where I came from”. It’s just people are too lazy. And there is something sexy about just saying Mossad. “Oh, he’s denying it? Fucking Mossad.” By the way, the Mossad thing is a new thing, it used to be FSB and CIA. What do I want to say about that? Oh, yeah, I’ve been gradually growing in popularity over the past 10 years, I’ve been doing interviews, lectures, podcasts, and it’s actually very gradual. And I don’t know what else to say.
Dave Smith
There’s a difference, and I know I’ve experienced this too, right? There’s such a difference in perspective because if somebody just found me and they just found out who I am, and they go, “This guy’s brand new and he’s doing all these shows,” but you’re like, “Yeah, well, I don’t know, dude. Not from my perspective I’m not brand new. Dude, I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for 19 years and I’ve been podcasting for 15 years.” And then when it starts taking off, everybody’s like, “Oh, this guy just came out of nowhere.” And you’re like, “I mean, all right, I wish I had been aware that it was all this quick.”
There’s a difference, and I know I’ve experienced this too, right? There’s such a difference in perspective because if somebody just found me and they just found out who I am, and they go, “This guy’s brand new and he’s doing all these shows,” but you’re like, “Yeah, well, I don’t know, dude. Not from my perspective I’m not brand new. Dude, I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for 19 years and I’ve been podcasting for 15 years.” And then when it starts taking off, everybody’s like, “Oh, this guy just came out of nowhere.” And you’re like, “I mean, all right, I wish I had been aware that it was all this quick.”
But look, a lot of this stuff with so much of this too, it’s just laziness and people searching for confirmation bias and people searching for a simpler story because that’s easier. So if they believe that Epstein was Mossad and there’s a clip of you where you’re like, “I don’t know about that,” then they go, “See, he’s Mossad too, and now that fits perfectly into my little story.” I know the truth is that it’s quite possible that people just aren’t convinced. However, given enough time, Tim Dillon is always right about everything.
Lex Fridman
That’s true.
That’s true.
Dave Smith
So eventually you’ll have to admit that he got it right.
So eventually you’ll have to admit that he got it right.
Lex Fridman
And not to say the cliche cheesy thing, but it is true that the comedians sometimes say the obvious thing that people are a little resistant to say, it ends up being true. Now we just landed some more credibility to Tim Dillon’s insanity, great. Now I do want to comment on the other aspect of me that came out of nowhere, fine, but I do get to talk to world leaders, which I have to really admit I don’t understand why. So the experience I’ve had is you basically gain a reputation, I talked to a lot of scientists early on, you gain a reputation like this is an interesting person to talk to, and that travels. And then over time you get fans and world leaders are humans too, they listen to this stuff and sometimes it’s their family that listen.
And not to say the cliche cheesy thing, but it is true that the comedians sometimes say the obvious thing that people are a little resistant to say, it ends up being true. Now we just landed some more credibility to Tim Dillon’s insanity, great. Now I do want to comment on the other aspect of me that came out of nowhere, fine, but I do get to talk to world leaders, which I have to really admit I don’t understand why. So the experience I’ve had is you basically gain a reputation, I talked to a lot of scientists early on, you gain a reputation like this is an interesting person to talk to, and that travels. And then over time you get fans and world leaders are humans too, they listen to this stuff and sometimes it’s their family that listen.
Dave Smith
Yeah, oftentimes their kids, that seems to be a big one.
Yeah, oftentimes their kids, that seems to be a big one.
Lex Fridman
And so that’s just how it happens. And so you sent an email, “Hey, you want to talk?” And then their team or them directly, in several cases, they just respond, “Yeah,” and that’s it. It’s as simple as that. And they’re human beings. And I think a lot of them as human beings are exhausted by journalists, by shitty journalists I should say. And it’s hard for them to know which is the good journalist. By good, there’s the cynical view that they want somebody who’s just going to spout propaganda aligned with their propaganda. No, they just want a good faith person in front of them. And I should also say that no single world leader has told me which questions to ask. There’s this meme about my conversation with Modi that it’s scripted, nope, there was zero oversight, I have full control.
And so that’s just how it happens. And so you sent an email, “Hey, you want to talk?” And then their team or them directly, in several cases, they just respond, “Yeah,” and that’s it. It’s as simple as that. And they’re human beings. And I think a lot of them as human beings are exhausted by journalists, by shitty journalists I should say. And it’s hard for them to know which is the good journalist. By good, there’s the cynical view that they want somebody who’s just going to spout propaganda aligned with their propaganda. No, they just want a good faith person in front of them. And I should also say that no single world leader has told me which questions to ask. There’s this meme about my conversation with Modi that it’s scripted, nope, there was zero oversight, I have full control.
Dave Smith
Well, it’s also, I mean, obviously one of the major dynamics, which is just one of the most interesting kind of themes in the world, I think right now, but it’s particularly true in America, is that the corporate media is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and whatever this is, which is so weird that we still all call them podcasts because just not the right name for them at all and none of us have had an iPod in quite a long time. And I don’t know, it’s just such the first person came up with it, “It’s a cast on an iPod, it’s a podcast,” and we all still use that term. But whatever, these shows on the internet have the audience. And so that’s a big factor, just that it’s like, “Oh, this is where you can go to the audience.”
Well, it’s also, I mean, obviously one of the major dynamics, which is just one of the most interesting kind of themes in the world, I think right now, but it’s particularly true in America, is that the corporate media is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and whatever this is, which is so weird that we still all call them podcasts because just not the right name for them at all and none of us have had an iPod in quite a long time. And I don’t know, it’s just such the first person came up with it, “It’s a cast on an iPod, it’s a podcast,” and we all still use that term. But whatever, these shows on the internet have the audience. And so that’s a big factor, just that it’s like, “Oh, this is where you can go to the audience.”
And then I would say, and I don’t know exactly, I have no idea, I should say, the motivations inside any individual’s heads, but I would say in the case of Vladimir Putin, he is completely blacked out in American media and to the point that even RT has been blocked out, they never play any of his speeches, they never allow you to hear, “Look, this is what this guy’s perspective is.” It’s very interesting in the same way that they kind of all flipped out when Osama bin Laden’s letter to America went viral on Tik-Tok, and then all the talks of banning Tik-Tok increased and stuff. So for him, say like when he did the Tucker interview or if he does an interview with you, well, that’s a way for him to do an end around and allow his perspective to be heard, which I personally think is obviously a good thing. If you’re going to go in a war, and we’re kind of at a war with Russia right now, you should know what the other guy’s perspective is, not that you should take it as gospel.
And then from Netanyahu’s perspective, I would imagine Israel has a lot of control in a lot of different areas, but they have been losing the internet battle very, very badly, and it’s a major problem for Israel. I mean, I don’t know, I still think in a very strange way everybody seems to be underestimating how grave the implications of all of this are. But the view of Israel from the world is never going to be the same as what it was before. And the generational divide on it is so stark. Everybody 40 and under, who very quickly, the time goes by quickly, pretty soon the 40 and over crowd gets aged out pretty quickly, and it’s never going to be the perception of Israel that my parents’ generation…
Dave Smith
It’s never going to be the perception of Israel that my parents’ generation had, ever again, because of this war. I’m sure, to some degree at least, Netanyahu feels like he has to try to get his perspective into that internet conversation area. In a way, it’s shocking. And I guess Bobby Kennedy, when he was running for president, and Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was running for president, they were doing some of it even before Donald Trump was.
It’s never going to be the perception of Israel that my parents’ generation had, ever again, because of this war. I’m sure, to some degree at least, Netanyahu feels like he has to try to get his perspective into that internet conversation area. In a way, it’s shocking. And I guess Bobby Kennedy, when he was running for president, and Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was running for president, they were doing some of it even before Donald Trump was.
But it is crazy in a way that it took this long for politicians to figure out that it’s like, oh, I guess we got to go where the audience is. That’s the point of doing shows. I mean, would you rather do a show with a million people or with 10 million people? It’s like, you guys do CNN all the time. Why wouldn’t you do Joe Rogan’s podcast? It’s just a bigger audience, and those people get to vote too.
Lex Fridman
You reminded me with Netanyahu that one of the goals I have with the podcast is to have the kind of conversation that a historian would find useful 20 years from now, which is tough to do because you’re going to get punished for it. Because it’s mostly I want to reveal as much information as possible without the signaling, without the… You just want to know who was this person.
You reminded me with Netanyahu that one of the goals I have with the podcast is to have the kind of conversation that a historian would find useful 20 years from now, which is tough to do because you’re going to get punished for it. Because it’s mostly I want to reveal as much information as possible without the signaling, without the… You just want to know who was this person.
Dave Smith
I think that’s exactly right. And I think this was what Darryl was saying. I think that the part of the awful thing of always using World War II as the next example for the next war is that it’s almost like you’re never… They hate us for our freedom, or Vladimir Putin’s just mad and he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. They always insist that we can never treat our enemies as people and be like this is a real person with real grievances. And even, they might be a fanatic also. I’m not saying they’re not. There are these human qualities to it, and it’s always whatever.
I think that’s exactly right. And I think this was what Darryl was saying. I think that the part of the awful thing of always using World War II as the next example for the next war is that it’s almost like you’re never… They hate us for our freedom, or Vladimir Putin’s just mad and he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. They always insist that we can never treat our enemies as people and be like this is a real person with real grievances. And even, they might be a fanatic also. I’m not saying they’re not. There are these human qualities to it, and it’s always whatever.
Before Obama and Hillary Clinton did the regime change war in Libya, it was all this propaganda. They were like, “He’s buying up Viagra to rape all the women and he’s going to go genocide…”. This guy who had been in power for decades. You know what I mean? And hadn’t done that. And it’s just like, oh, it’s like the way you’re supposed to think about war is almost like these people have been possessed by pure evil. They are monsters, and there’s no talking to them. There’s no dealing with them. It’s just simply this.
A good example, just this recent conflict with the Houthis, where you have the Houthis in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia invaded in 2015 with the full backing of the United States of America. And the Houthis maintained power for eight years through that. They maintained power until the Saudis finally gave up. It was literally the Saudis were just killing hundreds of thousands of people, and then the Houthis would get a drone off at one of their oil refineries or something like that.
Eventually, they were just doing enough damage that it was like, ah, shit. All right, this isn’t worth it anymore. So, they end it. Anyway. You have this thing. You’re like, if they went through a total war for eight years, what you think, Trump sent in a few tomahawk missiles over there is going to stop them from doing this? But then, they didn’t do anything. And this is according to all reporting on it. They didn’t do anything during the ceasefire. It was only once the ceasefire broke down that they went back to attacking ships again that were coming through.
You just see this thing where you’re like… It’s not saying right or wrong or who’s good or bad, it’s like sometimes there’s a diplomatic solution and there’s not a military solution. In this case, you’re like, it just shows you if there was a ceasefire here, these guys will chill out. What do you want to do? Again, do you want to go to total war with it? Because we could overthrow the Houthis, if the US invades Yemen. That’s what it would take.
It’s like, does anyone here really have the appetite for another catastrophic war in the Middle East against the poorest country in the Middle East? Or we could pursue this diplomatic route, which seemed… I’m just saying, based on the evidence that they weren’t attacking ships during the ceasefire, seems like there could be a diplomatic solution here. There’s just a lot. If you make everybody monsters and they’re not human beings, you can’t do diplomacy with monsters, you can’t negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans.
Ukraine and Russia
To our earlier discussion, maybe there are times where you shouldn’t negotiate or you can’t negotiate with humans, but it’s better if you can. We could use a lot more of that thinking.
Lex Fridman
Can we take that idea and move to the war in Ukraine?
Can we take that idea and move to the war in Ukraine?
Dave Smith
Sure.
Sure.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the path for peace there?
What do you think is the path for peace there?
Dave Smith
I think what Trump is pursuing is infinitely preferable to what Biden was doing. What puts Donald Trump… And I don’t think everything he’s done has been perfect, and I really did not like that mineral deal that he was floating out for a while there. I think maybe that might be the best thing that came out of that Oval Office thing, is that maybe that Donald Trump is going to be very tough to do business like this, and it’s like we shouldn’t be doing this business deal anyway.
I think what Trump is pursuing is infinitely preferable to what Biden was doing. What puts Donald Trump… And I don’t think everything he’s done has been perfect, and I really did not like that mineral deal that he was floating out for a while there. I think maybe that might be the best thing that came out of that Oval Office thing, is that maybe that Donald Trump is going to be very tough to do business like this, and it’s like we shouldn’t be doing this business deal anyway.
And by the way, I don’t think we should do it on a few… Number one, principally, I think it is like bullying Ukraine out of resources. From what I understand, they don’t even have that many fine minerals, but whatever. But it’s also, if he was selling it to Zelenskyy, that’s a security guarantee. Because, hey, if we’re in business, then if Putin messes with you, he’s messing with us.
But from my perspective, that’s the whole point, is you don’t want to get into the business of giving out security guarantees. This is why George Washington was against entangling alliances. You give out war guarantees to too many places, you might have to fight a lot more wars than you otherwise would’ve fought. And also, there’s simply… We’re in this weird position where America postures like they’re so tough. But really, when it comes down to it, we’re not going to war in Ukraine. There’s no political will here. I’m sorry, try to convince the American people we should send our boys to…
I understand you’re from the region or you have roots from there, but to the average American, the idea of going to war over whether Luhansk is ruled by Kiev or Moscow is just… They don’t even know what Luhansk is. And if they met someone from there, they would probably just assume they were Russian. You know what I mean? And they might be, but whatever.
I think the first step to a path to peace is that you have to want to get a path to peace. I think Trump’s doing a good job in that.
Lex Fridman
Do you think all three sides want peace, from what you understand? Obviously Trump legitimately, fully, with an urgency wants peace.
Do you think all three sides want peace, from what you understand? Obviously Trump legitimately, fully, with an urgency wants peace.
Dave Smith
I think, for sure, Trump wants peace. I also think Putin wants to wrap the conflict up. And I think that Putin has been willing to deal through the entire lead up to the war and pretty much throughout the war, and there’s been a lot of solid reporting on this. I mean, the sources on it are pretty impeccable. The head of NATO… Stoltenberg? I always mess up his name. He literally said that in late 2021 that Vladimir Putin actually sent a draft agreement to NATO, and that his condition for not invading… He is like, I will not invade, but you have to put it in writing. He sent a draft treaty to them, “You have to put in writing that Ukraine will not join NATO.”.
I think, for sure, Trump wants peace. I also think Putin wants to wrap the conflict up. And I think that Putin has been willing to deal through the entire lead up to the war and pretty much throughout the war, and there’s been a lot of solid reporting on this. I mean, the sources on it are pretty impeccable. The head of NATO… Stoltenberg? I always mess up his name. He literally said that in late 2021 that Vladimir Putin actually sent a draft agreement to NATO, and that his condition for not invading… He is like, I will not invade, but you have to put it in writing. He sent a draft treaty to them, “You have to put in writing that Ukraine will not join NATO.”.
And then Stoltenberg bragged about how he said, “No, because we won’t let Vladimir Putin dictate to us whether we can expand NATO or not.”. And then he was bragging. He was like, “And look what he got, more NATO expansion, Finland, and this and that, so look at that.”. And it didn’t even seem to notice that, wait a minute, you’re admitting that you could have just promised not to bring Ukraine into NATO and saved hundreds of thousands of lives? Seems like it would’ve been a much better deal. It’s going to be a much better deal than what Ukraine will ultimately end up getting.
I think also Joe Biden’s CIA director, who was a CIA director a whole four years, William Burns, when he was ambassador to Russia, he wrote the Nyet Means Nyet. And again, this was dumped by Julian Assange. This wasn’t for the public. This was just him writing to Condoleezza Rice to tell the secretary of state his assessment. And he said that, his exact words were, “A decision Russia does not want to have to make.”. This was the decision about whether to invade the Ukraine or not. He was like, “They say, if you keep pushing for Ukrainian entry into NATO, this could lead to a civil war and even worse. And in that situation, Russia would have to decide whether or not to intervene. A decision Russia does not want to have to make.”.
So, essentially I think it’s pretty clear from all sides that Putin didn’t want it to come to this. Even after the coup in 2014, he took Crimea, but he didn’t invade the country. He may have sent special forces in, but I mean not the full-scale 2022 invasion. And even the civil war, going all that… I’m not defending the decision. I’m just saying it seemed like he reluctantly [inaudible 02:25:19].
What was it? In 2014 or ’15, when they had the plebiscites in Crimea and in the Donbas region, and they voted to be independent, he didn’t take them then. I mean, he could have used that as a pretense for, hey, they voted to be with us, and he didn’t. I think he wants to end the war.
Zelenskyy, from everything he’s said publicly, seems like he still feels like… I’m just taking him at his word here, that it’s like, no, we could end the war, but we got to end the war… It seems like he’s moved from his position being like, no, we have to reclaim all of our territory, to now his position is like, all right, maybe we don’t reclaim all of it, but we got to be given some type of security guarantee in the future.
I think the problem with that is just, again… I don’t mean to be cruel about this, because it sucks that there’s little countries that are next to big countries that get bullied around about them, but there also is a bit of an entitlement to demanding a security guarantee. What exactly do you mean? From America? What? That we’ll go to war if you’re invaded? Why do we owe that to anybody? That’s crazy. I’m sorry.
You can’t just sign up to say that we’ll go to war if anybody invades anybody. I hope nobody invades anybody, but I don’t want us to get dragged into… That’s a recipe for always being at war, and I don’t think that’s right for our country.
So essentially, I think Trump and Putin want peace. And if that’s the case, I think we’ll ultimately get to an end of this war.
Lex Fridman
There’s a lot of stuff to say here. Let’s actually start at the beginning, at the foundation of this. I think the thing that we left unsaid that’s important to say is that Putin invaded Ukraine in February 24th, 2022. And I think he is, at least from my perspective, the person who started the war. You could talk about NATO expansion. You could talk about any other thing that led to it. You could start at the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can go all the way back, as he did, 1,000 years.
There’s a lot of stuff to say here. Let’s actually start at the beginning, at the foundation of this. I think the thing that we left unsaid that’s important to say is that Putin invaded Ukraine in February 24th, 2022. And I think he is, at least from my perspective, the person who started the war. You could talk about NATO expansion. You could talk about any other thing that led to it. You could start at the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can go all the way back, as he did, 1,000 years.
The reality is, and this goes to our deep discussion about the morality of war, no matter the reasons, the guy that pulls the trigger first non-accidentally and keeps pulling the trigger, that’s the guy who’s at fault.
Dave Smith
Oh, I agree. I’ll say one standard, one standard for everybody. The standard that I laid out before is the same one I… Did you absolutely have to do that? Once you start killing people by the hundreds of thousands, was there any other option? Are you telling me you absolutely had to do this? And I don’t think that’s right.
Oh, I agree. I’ll say one standard, one standard for everybody. The standard that I laid out before is the same one I… Did you absolutely have to do that? Once you start killing people by the hundreds of thousands, was there any other option? Are you telling me you absolutely had to do this? And I don’t think that’s right.
My friend, Scott Horton, who I was talking to you about, just a totally brilliant guy, even in his book, there’s a whole chapter of all the other options of what Vladimir Putin could do. So, you’re absolutely right. And there’s a weird thing where people say, “If you say that the West provoked this conflict, that is a very different thing than saying that this invasion was justified.”.
In the same way that if you were at a bar and someone goes and spits in another guy’s face and then he pulls out a gun and murders them right there, he’s not justified in doing that. That is not okay. You don’t get to murder someone because they spit in your face. Also, if you were talking about why did he murder that guy, I’d be like, oh, because he walked up and spit in his face. That’s why it happened. And that is essentially my contention about this war. I think it’s just crystal clear that that’s why it happened.
Listen, it may be right or it may be wrong, but if China or Russia ever backed a street putsch to overthrow the democratically-elected government in Mexico, and then install a pro-Chinese or a pro-Russian government, and then started pumping arms into that conflict, and then kept floating out the idea that they were going to bring them into their military alliance, DC would simply not allow that. You cannot do that, any more than the Soviet Union could put nukes in Cuba. Sorry.
Lex Fridman
That should be said that that’s really Cold War, 20th century, and neocon thinking. It is the way the world works, but that’s…
That should be said that that’s really Cold War, 20th century, and neocon thinking. It is the way the world works, but that’s…
Dave Smith
I don’t think…
I don’t think…
Lex Fridman
You should still punish…
You should still punish…
Dave Smith
Listen, whether you’re talking about the neoconservatives or going way before the neo… Any other group that has ever had control of US foreign policy, going back to the Cold Warriors, the Truman administration, the Eisenhower administration, I think you could take this back to Thomas Jefferson if this happened in 1801, there is simply no way that they would allow a foreign great power to overthrow their government, and then bring our neighbor into their military alliance. I think there’s no great power that would ever tolerate that.
Listen, whether you’re talking about the neoconservatives or going way before the neo… Any other group that has ever had control of US foreign policy, going back to the Cold Warriors, the Truman administration, the Eisenhower administration, I think you could take this back to Thomas Jefferson if this happened in 1801, there is simply no way that they would allow a foreign great power to overthrow their government, and then bring our neighbor into their military alliance. I think there’s no great power that would ever tolerate that.
Lex Fridman
First of all, we’re in a post-nuclear world, so meaning post, there’s nuclear weapons.
First of all, we’re in a post-nuclear world, so meaning post, there’s nuclear weapons.
Dave Smith
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman
So, the threat of somebody being on your border is just not the same kind of threat, when you’re in nuclear power. Which is why, you look at Finland…
So, the threat of somebody being on your border is just not the same kind of threat, when you’re in nuclear power. Which is why, you look at Finland…
Dave Smith
No, I think in some ways it’s more of a threat in some ways.
No, I think in some ways it’s more of a threat in some ways.
Lex Fridman
Putin is not upset about Finland joining NATO nearly as much.
Putin is not upset about Finland joining NATO nearly as much.
Dave Smith
I’m just saying, Vladimir Putin in his own words, what his issue always was, was the military hardware that comes along with NATO membership. It’s not just that you get into NATO, but then you get all that military hardware there. And he made a huge deal about the dual-use rocket launchers in Poland, which George W. Bush put there after 9/11.
I’m just saying, Vladimir Putin in his own words, what his issue always was, was the military hardware that comes along with NATO membership. It’s not just that you get into NATO, but then you get all that military hardware there. And he made a huge deal about the dual-use rocket launchers in Poland, which George W. Bush put there after 9/11.
I think all of those things are factors. I think Ukraine, Crimea being their only yearlong warm-water port, I think there’s several elements to it. But I do think a huge part of it is that also the country’s been invaded through Ukraine multiple times. I think very reasonably, grading on a curve of how reasonable governments are, he saw that as a security threat.
Lex Fridman
We should make very clear, because the way that comes across, the full responsibility of the invasion of Ukraine lays at the hands of Vladimir Putin.
We should make very clear, because the way that comes across, the full responsibility of the invasion of Ukraine lays at the hands of Vladimir Putin.
Dave Smith
Sure. I completely agree with that. Vladimir Putin launched a war where… Again, I don’t know exactly what the numbers are. I’ve read a whole bunch of estimates, some that contradict each other. But the consensus seems to be it’s at least in the hundreds of thousands, possibly well north of a million, if you’re talking about the casualties on both sides. Vladimir Putin launched a war that led to that, and he’s responsible for that.
Sure. I completely agree with that. Vladimir Putin launched a war where… Again, I don’t know exactly what the numbers are. I’ve read a whole bunch of estimates, some that contradict each other. But the consensus seems to be it’s at least in the hundreds of thousands, possibly well north of a million, if you’re talking about the casualties on both sides. Vladimir Putin launched a war that led to that, and he’s responsible for that.
That being said, you can also point out that really what we’re talking about here is the George H.W. Bush administration, the Clintons, Bush again, Obama, and then Trump. And the people who were in charge of the foreign policy in those administrations, the same ones who gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, they were also in charge of our European foreign policy. The most reckless policy of all was their NATO policy, and that they drove up to this conflict with Russia, with nothing but off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp, and consciously decided that we’re not going to take any of those, we’re going to drive it all the way up to this point.
Thomas Friedman for The New York Times interviewed George Kennan in 1998, and George Kennan was the Cold Warrior. He is credited as founding the containment strategy in the Cold War. He was talking about the first round of NATO expansion, which he and many other foreign policy graybeards opposed.
He was like, “This is the worst thing we could possibly do after the fall of the Soviet Union, to now say that we had this alliance in NATO that was an anti-Russian military alliance, and now that the Soviet Union isn’t there anymore, and it’s Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, that now we’re going to expand NATO because of that.”. He literally said in 1998, he goes, “The people advocating that we expand NATO are going to continue advocating it and advocating it and advocating it. And then there will be a Russian reaction. And then they’ll say, ‘See? That’s why we were right to expand NATO.’. But they’ll get this completely wrong.”.
Lex Fridman
When do you think a deal is reached?
When do you think a deal is reached?
Dave Smith
I really have no idea what the timeline’s going to look like. I’m hoping sooner rather than later. I think Donald Trump would love nothing more than to have some type of big spectacle of ending this war, some type of big press conference or some type of… You know what I mean? My guess would be that’s where Trump’s mind is, is how to do this in the best way that sells him the best.
I really have no idea what the timeline’s going to look like. I’m hoping sooner rather than later. I think Donald Trump would love nothing more than to have some type of big spectacle of ending this war, some type of big press conference or some type of… You know what I mean? My guess would be that’s where Trump’s mind is, is how to do this in the best way that sells him the best.
I think that already we’re in a position where Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that, “I can end this war.”, and he’s going to look very, very bad if he can’t. So, he’s very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quick as possible, and so hopefully that can happen soon. It would be great if it could happen in the next month.
Lex Fridman
People on both sides outside of Donald Trump are telling me that it’s a process.
People on both sides outside of Donald Trump are telling me that it’s a process.
Dave Smith
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
There’s a implication it’s going to take a while, which I really hate. I really love…
There’s a implication it’s going to take a while, which I really hate. I really love…
Dave Smith
Yeah, it’s a shame.
Yeah, it’s a shame.
Lex Fridman
… Donald Trump’s urgency.
… Donald Trump’s urgency.
Dave Smith
It’s also terrible. There’s something really awful. Innocent people dying in war at any time is terrible, but there is something profoundly awful… I’m old enough now that I’ve seen this a few times happen, or I’ve lived through it a few times, I’ve read about it happening earlier. Once you’ve already decided the war’s over and people still die, there’s something almost sadder about that, because it’s always like, “Come on. You already know…”.
It’s also terrible. There’s something really awful. Innocent people dying in war at any time is terrible, but there is something profoundly awful… I’m old enough now that I’ve seen this a few times happen, or I’ve lived through it a few times, I’ve read about it happening earlier. Once you’ve already decided the war’s over and people still die, there’s something almost sadder about that, because it’s always like, “Come on. You already know…”.
There’d be a bombing campaign in Afghanistan when we already knew we were a few months away from ending the war. You’re like, “You got to kill more people on the way out. We already know we’re leaving. We already know.”, because there’s something… At least in the beginning, they could hide behind this justification or they could be like, “Listen, we’re going to overthrow the Taliban and we’re going to install our new government. They’re going to be a democracy. It’s going really good. We have to do this in order to do this bigger project.”.
But then by the end, you’re like, we’re not even pretending anymore that we’re doing anything more positive. It’s just someone dying in a senseless thing we never should have been in.
Lex Fridman
In the spirit of that, that’s why I traveled to Moscow, and will travel to Moscow again in the near future to likely interview Vladimir Putin, and hopefully travel back to Ukraine, which I did, to talk again with Volodymyr Zelenskyy or with whoever the future president is.
In the spirit of that, that’s why I traveled to Moscow, and will travel to Moscow again in the near future to likely interview Vladimir Putin, and hopefully travel back to Ukraine, which I did, to talk again with Volodymyr Zelenskyy or with whoever the future president is.
Dave Smith
You’ll be the only guy who’s interviewed both of them, I think…
You’ll be the only guy who’s interviewed both of them, I think…
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Smith
… during this war.
… during this war.
Lex Fridman
And I have to say, the border crossing is getting increasingly more intense.
And I have to say, the border crossing is getting increasingly more intense.
Dave Smith
Yeah, I went to Canada last week and I didn’t care for that, so I’m sure.
Yeah, I went to Canada last week and I didn’t care for that, so I’m sure.
Lex Fridman
Primarily, it’s the nations at war, as it was in Ukraine. It’s dangerous to do both.
Primarily, it’s the nations at war, as it was in Ukraine. It’s dangerous to do both.
Dave Smith
I think something that’s a little bit foreign, no pun intended, to America is, we’ve fought in a lot of wars over the last, say, 25 years, 50 years, whatever. But all of them, including, in a way, the World Wars even in the 20th century, it’s like… But it’s been since 1812 that we fought one on our shores. And none of the other ones… I guess Pearl Harbor, but even Pearl Harbor, that was a one-off, and it was only… It was America technically, but it wasn’t mainland America. So, we’re fighting wars halfway across the world.
I think something that’s a little bit foreign, no pun intended, to America is, we’ve fought in a lot of wars over the last, say, 25 years, 50 years, whatever. But all of them, including, in a way, the World Wars even in the 20th century, it’s like… But it’s been since 1812 that we fought one on our shores. And none of the other ones… I guess Pearl Harbor, but even Pearl Harbor, that was a one-off, and it was only… It was America technically, but it wasn’t mainland America. So, we’re fighting wars halfway across the world.
But it is a very different thing for two neighboring countries to fight, and even though most of the fighting’s been done on the Ukrainian side, not all of it. I think there still are areas…
Lex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dave Smith
… inside Russia’s borders where there’s action. There’s something so much more real about that.
… inside Russia’s borders where there’s action. There’s something so much more real about that.
Lex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dave Smith
The wars we’re used to are we send a military that is a hundred thousand times more sophisticated than anything it’ll be meeting on the ground over to a third world country to go do that. As we’ve found out over the years, there’s still a lot of challenges to that, even when your side has night vision goggles and the other one doesn’t, and your side can call in airstrikes and the other one can’t, and your side has all the sophisticated training and the other side’s practicing on monkey bars, still very hard to occupy a people and dominate them and defeat an insurgency.
The wars we’re used to are we send a military that is a hundred thousand times more sophisticated than anything it’ll be meeting on the ground over to a third world country to go do that. As we’ve found out over the years, there’s still a lot of challenges to that, even when your side has night vision goggles and the other one doesn’t, and your side can call in airstrikes and the other one can’t, and your side has all the sophisticated training and the other side’s practicing on monkey bars, still very hard to occupy a people and dominate them and defeat an insurgency.
But that’s very different than two nation states right next to each other on the border. There’s just a real feeling of survival in that moment. And I do think that probably I don’t understand this as well as you do, and probably you don’t even understand it as well as maybe an older generation of Russians and Ukrainians would. But there’s also something about both Russia and Ukraine, in their own ways, got so absolutely fucked over in the 20th century, multiple times, in a way that Americans just… It is just too foreign into us to even understand anything like that. Millions of people starving to death, being invaded, the entire nation collapsing.
The Russian government collapsed twice in 100 years. That’s traumatic. We just simply have never been through anything like that. When you have that trauma as a society and then there’s a war on your border, I’m sure there’s a whole lot of different kind of feelings that we just can’t relate to.
Lex Fridman
Plus a history in both nations of super sophisticated and expansive intelligence agencies.
Plus a history in both nations of super sophisticated and expansive intelligence agencies.
Dave Smith
Right, right, right. Yeah, that’s a very good point. Yeah.
Right, right, right. Yeah, that’s a very good point. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Lex Fridman
You host a podcast called Part of the Problem.
You host a podcast called Part of the Problem.
Dave Smith
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
What have you learned through that whole process of interviewing some interesting people? And are there topics you cover that make you sweat still to this day, like it feels like going into the fire.
What have you learned through that whole process of interviewing some interesting people? And are there topics you cover that make you sweat still to this day, like it feels like going into the fire.
Dave Smith
What I’ve learned just from the podcast is that there’s an interesting relationship that you build with your audience. I travel a lot, and I do shows a lot, so I meet people who listen to the show. I’ve had this experience before. I had this experience with you. Me and you met once, I think, before today. Me and you actually met on a very interesting night. I don’t know if you remember this.
What I’ve learned just from the podcast is that there’s an interesting relationship that you build with your audience. I travel a lot, and I do shows a lot, so I meet people who listen to the show. I’ve had this experience before. I had this experience with you. Me and you met once, I think, before today. Me and you actually met on a very interesting night. I don’t know if you remember this.
It was before the Comedy Mothership was built, you came by a Joe Rogan and Friends Show at The Vulture.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Smith
It was while Joe was going through the shitstorm of cancel culture, and he was on the phone with Dana White and stuff in the back.
It was while Joe was going through the shitstorm of cancel culture, and he was on the phone with Dana White and stuff in the back.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, in the back. [inaudible 02:40:54]…
Yeah, yeah, in the back. [inaudible 02:40:54]…
Dave Smith
It was a wild night.
It was a wild night.
Lex Fridman
Quite a wild night, yeah.
Quite a wild night, yeah.
Dave Smith
Then at the same time, even though we just met that one time, and then we talked on the phone and now we’re doing this show, I know you already.
Then at the same time, even though we just met that one time, and then we talked on the phone and now we’re doing this show, I know you already.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dave Smith
I already know you, and it’s not just that we have friends of friends, but I’ve just seen so much of your stuff that it’s like I know who you are. And then it’s weird because people come up to you and they’re like that. It’s like they know you. I’ve had this experience. I had this experience with Joe. I knew him before I knew him.
I already know you, and it’s not just that we have friends of friends, but I’ve just seen so much of your stuff that it’s like I know who you are. And then it’s weird because people come up to you and they’re like that. It’s like they know you. I’ve had this experience. I had this experience with Joe. I knew him before I knew him.
That was one of the things that I really learned from doing the podcast over the years, was how much that’s actually a relationship. You actually have a relationship with your listeners. In the same way that you can’t lie to people in your life, you also can’t lie to your… They’re a relationship too. You can’t lie to your audience.
I think that there’s often almost shortcuts that are presented before you, but there is a payoff to not taking the shortcuts and to doing it the way you want to do it.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the number of hours it takes to form a relationship? Because I absolutely agree with you. First of all, I should say I’m a huge podcast fan. I’ve listened to you as a guest and your own show a lot. I think with you I’ve already crossed the threshold of hours where I feel like we’re friends, one way, and I guess because you listen to me, it’s the other way, which are separate, parallel [inaudible 02:42:20].
What do you think is the number of hours it takes to form a relationship? Because I absolutely agree with you. First of all, I should say I’m a huge podcast fan. I’ve listened to you as a guest and your own show a lot. I think with you I’ve already crossed the threshold of hours where I feel like we’re friends, one way, and I guess because you listen to me, it’s the other way, which are separate, parallel [inaudible 02:42:20].
Dave Smith
Yeah, it’s very weird. It’s very strange in a way. It’s very interesting. Also, there’s something there, which is more your area of expertise than mine, but there’s something there where technology is playing this wild role. We could have a two-way friendship…
Yeah, it’s very weird. It’s very strange in a way. It’s very interesting. Also, there’s something there, which is more your area of expertise than mine, but there’s something there where technology is playing this wild role. We could have a two-way friendship…
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Smith
… without actually having to meet each other, all facilitated by the machines that we built. It’s very trippy.
… without actually having to meet each other, all facilitated by the machines that we built. It’s very trippy.
Lex Fridman
I would say it’s 50 hours. Maybe 20 to 50-hour range is when you’re like, okay.
I would say it’s 50 hours. Maybe 20 to 50-hour range is when you’re like, okay.
Dave Smith
It’s interesting, in a way. Before the Joe Rogan experience and what was the thing that made comedians big, the things before that used to be Letterman and Leno and Conan. Comedians would get a seven-minute set on there. And even if you do great, if you killed, and someone watching is like, “I love that comedian, that comedian’s amazing.”, first of all, unless they were on social media and then went and [inaudible 02:43:18], there was no way to connect. They’d just be like, ” Love that guy. Anyway. Back to my life.”. And then maybe you’ll remember him and maybe when he’s coming to town, you’d see, oh, that same guy I saw in Conan is going to be at the local comedy club or something, maybe.
It’s interesting, in a way. Before the Joe Rogan experience and what was the thing that made comedians big, the things before that used to be Letterman and Leno and Conan. Comedians would get a seven-minute set on there. And even if you do great, if you killed, and someone watching is like, “I love that comedian, that comedian’s amazing.”, first of all, unless they were on social media and then went and [inaudible 02:43:18], there was no way to connect. They’d just be like, ” Love that guy. Anyway. Back to my life.”. And then maybe you’ll remember him and maybe when he’s coming to town, you’d see, oh, that same guy I saw in Conan is going to be at the local comedy club or something, maybe.
But then Rogan became the main thing. And now, they didn’t just see you do seven minutes of standup. They sat and listened to you for three hours. Let’s just say even off that one three-hour podcast…
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s right.
Yeah, that’s right.
Dave Smith
… you come away knowing a lot more about that person. It is not just a little taste, you know a lot about it. I probably would put the threshold at 40 to 50 hours. If you’ve consumed 40 to 50 hours of somebody, especially when they’re doing what we do on these shows, where you’re speaking in a very unguarded manner, even though this is your show and you asked a lot of questions, you don’t know exactly where this is going to go. Then you’re seeing what I say, and then go, ” Huh. Okay, let me ask something based off that. Let me make a point based off that.”. We’re both unguarded.
… you come away knowing a lot more about that person. It is not just a little taste, you know a lot about it. I probably would put the threshold at 40 to 50 hours. If you’ve consumed 40 to 50 hours of somebody, especially when they’re doing what we do on these shows, where you’re speaking in a very unguarded manner, even though this is your show and you asked a lot of questions, you don’t know exactly where this is going to go. Then you’re seeing what I say, and then go, ” Huh. Okay, let me ask something based off that. Let me make a point based off that.”. We’re both unguarded.
When you consume somebody like that for 40, 50 hours, you do see into their soul. I think there’s almost no way to avoid that. And also, I would say if they’re not letting you see into their soul, you’ll notice that…
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Smith
… and you know that about them. This is a guarded person. This was ultimately Kamala Harris’s issue. This is why she was probably correct not to do Rogan, even though everyone looks back at that and says, ” No, no, no. This was the big disaster of her campaign.”. It’s like, “I don’t know.”. She was so guarded in every single interview that she ever did.
… and you know that about them. This is a guarded person. This was ultimately Kamala Harris’s issue. This is why she was probably correct not to do Rogan, even though everyone looks back at that and says, ” No, no, no. This was the big disaster of her campaign.”. It’s like, “I don’t know.”. She was so guarded in every single interview that she ever did.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Smith
She was always, constantly not trying to let you see who she really was. And if she was going to try that on Rogan, that would’ve been so apparent to everybody involved.
She was always, constantly not trying to let you see who she really was. And if she was going to try that on Rogan, that would’ve been so apparent to everybody involved.
Lex Fridman
You’ve had a lot of intense conversations on JRE. What do you appreciate most about Joe as a human being, as a conversation partner?
You’ve had a lot of intense conversations on JRE. What do you appreciate most about Joe as a human being, as a conversation partner?
Dave Smith
I can’t overstate how much I love Joe and how much I admire him.
I can’t overstate how much I love Joe and how much I admire him.
Lex Fridman
Not as much as Ron Paul. Just let’s be clear. There’s a hierarchy here.
Not as much as Ron Paul. Just let’s be clear. There’s a hierarchy here.
Dave Smith
He’s close, man.
He’s close, man.
Lex Fridman
Wow. Holy shit.
Wow. Holy shit.
Dave Smith
There’s very few…
There’s very few…
Lex Fridman
That means a lot coming through you.
That means a lot coming through you.
Dave Smith
Ron Paul and Joe Rogan, those are like my generals, and I’m a soldier.
Ron Paul and Joe Rogan, those are like my generals, and I’m a soldier.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 02:45:55].
[inaudible 02:45:55].
Dave Smith
Those are my guys. If Joe Rogan pointed to some guy and said, ” You got to go fight that guy right now.”. I’d be like, ” All right, I got to go fight that guy.”. Ron Paul too. It’s both very personally for me. Ron Paul introduced me to a set of ideas that changed my life, and I’m just enormously grateful for that.
Those are my guys. If Joe Rogan pointed to some guy and said, ” You got to go fight that guy right now.”. I’d be like, ” All right, I got to go fight that guy.”. Ron Paul too. It’s both very personally for me. Ron Paul introduced me to a set of ideas that changed my life, and I’m just enormously grateful for that.
I was a huge Joe Rogan fan before the Joe Rogan experience. I’m an old-school Joe Rogan head. I used to go on joerogan.net when…
Lex Fridman
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Dave Smith
… websites used to end with that.
… websites used to end with that.
Lex Fridman
Before whatever it is.
Before whatever it is.
Dave Smith
Before everything…
Before everything…
Lex Fridman
… 2003.
… 2003.
Dave Smith
I was a fan of his before he confronted Carlos Mencia. And the day he confronted Carlos Mencia, I watched the video on his website and was like, “Oh, shit. Joe Rogan called him out, dude. This is the craziest thing ever.”. I was a fan that when he started the podcast, I remember going, ” This is going to be big, because he’s going to be so good at this, because he’s got so much interesting shit to say..”.
I was a fan of his before he confronted Carlos Mencia. And the day he confronted Carlos Mencia, I watched the video on his website and was like, “Oh, shit. Joe Rogan called him out, dude. This is the craziest thing ever.”. I was a fan that when he started the podcast, I remember going, ” This is going to be big, because he’s going to be so good at this, because he’s got so much interesting shit to say..”.
Lex Fridman
Interesting.
Interesting.
Dave Smith
I didn’t realize it was going to be quite what it became, but I did think like, oh, this is going to be an awesome thing. So, there’s that. I always really admired him and I was always a huge fan of his. Not only did he change my life, but he changed all of my friends’ lives. It’s a very weird situation. He’s the Santa Claus of my world.
I didn’t realize it was going to be quite what it became, but I did think like, oh, this is going to be an awesome thing. So, there’s that. I always really admired him and I was always a huge fan of his. Not only did he change my life, but he changed all of my friends’ lives. It’s a very weird situation. He’s the Santa Claus of my world.
I don’t know, man. He’s just a very genuine person. I think he really derives a lot of pleasure out of the fact that he gets to help…
Lex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dave Smith
… the people who he sees as the good guys, the guy’s worth helping. I just think that’s such an unbelievable thing. The first time Rogan had me on his podcast was, I believe, in 2016. I might’ve had 5,000 followers or something like that. I was completely unknown. I did nothing for him. It was just the fact that he heard me on Ari’s show and he was like, “Oh, I like what this guy’s got to say. I think this is cool. Let’s talk about it.”.
… the people who he sees as the good guys, the guy’s worth helping. I just think that’s such an unbelievable thing. The first time Rogan had me on his podcast was, I believe, in 2016. I might’ve had 5,000 followers or something like that. I was completely unknown. I did nothing for him. It was just the fact that he heard me on Ari’s show and he was like, “Oh, I like what this guy’s got to say. I think this is cool. Let’s talk about it.”.
Again, he’s just been such a great guy to me. And at every little angle, everything you open for him, he takes care of you better than anybody else does. You’d work his club, his club pays better than anybody else does. He’s always great to the people who are around him. I have a wife, I have two little kids. He’s put me in a situation where I can provide a great life for them. Don’t get me wrong, I did something with the opportunity. It’s not like he just gave me… He gave me the opportunity and I did something with it. But still, he didn’t have to give me that opportunity. I will go to my grave being enormously grateful for his friendship and the platform that he’s given me.
I try not to abuse this, but there’s been a few points over the years where I was like, “I really need advice on this.”, and I’ve gone to him and he’s been the absolute best, literally, every single time. I followed it a few times. A few times I didn’t follow his advice, and I really regret not following his advice. But he was the absolute best guy to be like, ” All right, let’s talk about this.”. And the last thing I’ll say is that it’s freaking crazy, because he’s got more shit going on than anybody else in the world and is still very interested to take time out to discuss some thing that I’m asking him about, which is a really, really great quality.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, always takes a phone call. Yeah, you’re right about the advice. His advice is spot on. For me personally, what’s needed is he’s been through so many fires that he’s really good at making you feel like don’t fucking worry about it.
Yeah, always takes a phone call. Yeah, you’re right about the advice. His advice is spot on. For me personally, what’s needed is he’s been through so many fires that he’s really good at making you feel like don’t fucking worry about it.
Dave Smith
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That he’s really good at making you feel like, “Don’t fucking worry about it. Just move on.” It’s the don’t-read-the-comments thing, but generally.
That he’s really good at making you feel like, “Don’t fucking worry about it. Just move on.” It’s the don’t-read-the-comments thing, but generally.
Dave Smith
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Just like, fuck it. And he has that whole vibe, which kind of looks effortless, but I think when you look at it seriously, especially in contrast with journalists, there’s a fearlessness there.
Just like, fuck it. And he has that whole vibe, which kind of looks effortless, but I think when you look at it seriously, especially in contrast with journalists, there’s a fearlessness there.
Dave Smith
100%. Yeah.
100%. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That not giving a fuck, I mean, he says it’s because of fuck-you money or any of that. I don’t think so. I think it’s-
That not giving a fuck, I mean, he says it’s because of fuck-you money or any of that. I don’t think so. I think it’s-
Dave Smith
It’s more than that.
It’s more than that.
Lex Fridman
It’s more than that.
It’s more than that.
Dave Smith
I mean, I’m sure that’s a component of it, but there’s people who have that who still don’t have his fearlessness.
I mean, I’m sure that’s a component of it, but there’s people who have that who still don’t have his fearlessness.
Lex Fridman
Most people who have money, a lot of money, are actually become more scared. They like the comfort of just normal life, because when you’re taking risks, you’re going to pay for it even if you have money. Not just financially, just like, it’s going to hurt, it’s going to disturb your life, it’s going to create turbulence.
Most people who have money, a lot of money, are actually become more scared. They like the comfort of just normal life, because when you’re taking risks, you’re going to pay for it even if you have money. Not just financially, just like, it’s going to hurt, it’s going to disturb your life, it’s going to create turbulence.
Yeah. The guy is fearless and follows just his genuine curiosity. It’s like an inspiration to me, friendships aside, just inspiration of how great of a conversationalist he is, and not … He would generally didn’t give a fuck, if he talks to any of the presidential candidates or not, he would just talk to friends just because he wants to. And there’s no clickbaitiness to it. There’s no giving a shit about views or likes or any of that.
Dave Smith
Yeah. I mean, during the COVID stuff, man, I mean he was interviewing Dr. McCullough. And who’s the other one? Malone, Dr. Malone. And had Bobby Kennedy, all these people. Like at this time when it was so … And he’s had it with me before too, talking about Ukraine and Israel at the times when it’s really white-hot, you know what I mean? And there’s this huge penalty on not going along with the regimes’ talking points.
Yeah. I mean, during the COVID stuff, man, I mean he was interviewing Dr. McCullough. And who’s the other one? Malone, Dr. Malone. And had Bobby Kennedy, all these people. Like at this time when it was so … And he’s had it with me before too, talking about Ukraine and Israel at the times when it’s really white-hot, you know what I mean? And there’s this huge penalty on not going along with the regimes’ talking points.
It’s really hard to overstate it. I mean, there used to be nothing like this. It used to be that if CNN and Fox News agreed, well, then that was it. That was the line now. And now we got the biggest show in the country will actually allow the other perspective on and allow people to challenge the regime. I think it’s been historic.
Conspiracy theories
Lex Fridman
I think also there are shows, there are people, that just are constantly conspiracy theorists, which is fine also, but I sometimes feel that those lack genuineness, because they put themselves in a bin. Or everything, you question everything to a point where, I don’t know, I feel like you’re not getting closer to the truth when you question everything.
I think also there are shows, there are people, that just are constantly conspiracy theorists, which is fine also, but I sometimes feel that those lack genuineness, because they put themselves in a bin. Or everything, you question everything to a point where, I don’t know, I feel like you’re not getting closer to the truth when you question everything.
Dave Smith
There is something that some people in the conspiracy world do, which is they speak about something with certainty when they’re really not certain about I., and it’s fine to ask questions and it’s fine to speculate about things, but you also have to … It is true in general in life, you got to be really careful about presuming your conclusion and then working backward from there. And then sometimes when you have one … It’s a matter of being sloppy verse not being sloppy.
There is something that some people in the conspiracy world do, which is they speak about something with certainty when they’re really not certain about I., and it’s fine to ask questions and it’s fine to speculate about things, but you also have to … It is true in general in life, you got to be really careful about presuming your conclusion and then working backward from there. And then sometimes when you have one … It’s a matter of being sloppy verse not being sloppy.
I remember for a long time, back in the day in 9/11 truth movement, one of the huge smoking guns that they would point to was that in the ’90s there was this one document, I’m blanking on the title of it, but it was from PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, and this was the think tank or one of the think tanks of the neoconservatives. All the big neoconservatives were involved in PNAC, from Dick Cheney, to Rumsfeld, to Richard Perle, David Wurmser, all the big neocons.
And there was this one document where they basically … they were like, their Project for the New American Century was how we’re going to have hegemony for another 100 years. Now that we won the 20th century. How are we going to win the 21st century? And they were like, “Okay, well here’s what we want to do. We want to start multiple wars in the Middle East and we want to go …” Like all the plans that they had. NATO expansion in Europe was a big part of it too.
And then there was one line where they said, “It’s going to be tough to work up popular support for these multiple wars we want to fight in the Middle East, short of another Pearl Harbor style event.” And the 9/11 truthers would point to this and go, “See, clearly they did it. They did 9/11. They even say in their own words here that they want another Pearl Harbor event so they can do this.” And it’s like, well, look, that doesn’t actually prove anything. I mean, it might just be the case that they were like, “Oh, we wouldn’t get this without a Pearl …” And then when 9/11 happened, they went, “Hey, we got our Pearl Harbor style event.”
And even if you like that story of 9/11 was an inside job, because it’s kind of sexy and exciting and like, “Oh my God, what a crazy world we’re living in if that’s true.” And I’m not even saying it’s not true. I’m just saying, if you’re not sloppy and you’re scrupulous, you go, “That’s not really evidence.” It sounds like evidence, it’s evidence-sy, but it’s not actually a piece of evidence because that doesn’t in any way demonstrate that they actually were in on the thing.
And there’s just a lot of things like that, there’s a lot of things … I even see, because it’s a very popular conspiracy theory online now that Israel did 9/11, and I’m like, “I’m open. What do you got? What’s the evidence?” And they’ll be like, “Well, did you see that Larry Silverstein took out a huge insurance policy on the World Trade Center? How did he know?” And you’re like, “How did he know that the number one terrorist target in the world might need a big insurance policy on it?” You realize that the same guys attempted to knock those towers down in 1993.
And so there’s just little things like that where if you’re being sloppy and you already really want this conclusion, I see where you could see these things as evidence, but if you’re just being a little … if you’re critically thinking about them, it’s actually … it’s not as strong a case as you think it is. Again, I’ll speculate every now and again on things, but I like to take on something where I feel like I can prove this case. I really have enough evidence that I think I can prove this. I think I can prove that the neocons didn’t invade Iraq because they were worried about weapons of mass destruction and they actually had this agenda for at least a decade before the war broke out. There’s strong tangible evidence for that.
It’s just sometimes the constant conspiracy guys, not always, but sometimes they just get sloppy when it comes to actually analyzing how strong the case is.
Lex Fridman
I mean, there’s several psychological effects. I think there’s a certain drug to the dogmatic certainty that you were mentioning. It really annoys me, there’s something about human psychology, because when I say stuff, I usually show doubt and show the humiliated that I might not have the right answer and I sometimes look at multiple perspectives.
I mean, there’s several psychological effects. I think there’s a certain drug to the dogmatic certainty that you were mentioning. It really annoys me, there’s something about human psychology, because when I say stuff, I usually show doubt and show the humiliated that I might not have the right answer and I sometimes look at multiple perspectives.
And that’s seen as weakness and lack of intelligence often. It just sounds like it. When I even listen back to people that do that kind of thing, that certainty sounds like intelligence to people. If you say something with a lot of certainty, it sounds like, “This is a smart motherfucker.” And I hate that about myself, about human psyche, that that seems to be the case, because then the dumb dogmatists are going to be the ones that are driving agenda.
Dave Smith
It is true. I’ve noticed that for a long time though. It’s almost like in a weird way, it’s like a prerequisite for leadership in a way. You kind of have to be certain about things. But then there’s a real problem with that, which is that a lot of times you’re just bullshitting or you’re not correct to be this certain about this. It’s at least debatable.
It is true. I’ve noticed that for a long time though. It’s almost like in a weird way, it’s like a prerequisite for leadership in a way. You kind of have to be certain about things. But then there’s a real problem with that, which is that a lot of times you’re just bullshitting or you’re not correct to be this certain about this. It’s at least debatable.
And then the thing, I feel like at least for me is, which I try to do, I’m sure I fail at this a ton, but you try to at least go like … You got to work on training your brain and you have to be conscious about it. And so you have to go like, “Hey, if there’s something here that is confirming my bias,” you start getting that little sense of pleasure of like, “Oh, great, here’s another point that proves the thing I want to be true,” then you have to be 10 times as skeptical about this. You have to really examine this one and be like, “Okay, am I sure that this one …”
Because sometimes you’ll hear people even throw out things where it’s like, ” Oh, I know you liked that it was helping your case,” but come on, think about this. This doesn’t even make sense. It’s like, okay, I want to make this argument and then everything that would support that just gets sucked in a force of gravity or something, and you’re like, “Yeah, but have half of these are bad data points.”
Lex Fridman
I mean, for me, there’s something definitely about my brain that is attracted to conspiracy theories.
I mean, for me, there’s something definitely about my brain that is attracted to conspiracy theories.
Dave Smith
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, me too.
Lex Fridman
So I’m very well aware that that gravitational pull is there.
So I’m very well aware that that gravitational pull is there.
Dave Smith
Well, if nothing else, it’s a crazy story.
Well, if nothing else, it’s a crazy story.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dave Smith
It’s like a movie, so it’s like, “Oh, that’s cool.”
It’s like a movie, so it’s like, “Oh, that’s cool.”
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 02:59:02] Epstein aspect of it is crazy. Every fucking aspect –
[inaudible 02:59:02] Epstein aspect of it is crazy. Every fucking aspect –
Dave Smith
Yeah, you don’t need to work on Epstein [inaudible 02:59:05] story.
Yeah, you don’t need to work on Epstein [inaudible 02:59:05] story.
Lex Fridman
I don’t understand. That’s one of the big mysteries of our modern era is like, how the did fuck this guy get an island, this pedophile, and got smart, smart, I think really smart people to hang out with him, and what the fuck?
I don’t understand. That’s one of the big mysteries of our modern era is like, how the did fuck this guy get an island, this pedophile, and got smart, smart, I think really smart people to hang out with him, and what the fuck?
Dave Smith
I mean, obviously Ghislaine, however you say her name-
I mean, obviously Ghislaine, however you say her name-
Lex Fridman
Ghislaine.
Ghislaine.
Dave Smith
… Ghislaine Maxwell, okay, she went to jail. It’s like, has anybody else? Has anybody anywhere been forced to resign? I mean, just even, say, I don’t know, at the FBI or something, just for not catching the thing sooner. Even if you weren’t in on it, it was like, no …
… Ghislaine Maxwell, okay, she went to jail. It’s like, has anybody else? Has anybody anywhere been forced to resign? I mean, just even, say, I don’t know, at the FBI or something, just for not catching the thing sooner. Even if you weren’t in on it, it was like, no …
There’s a real problem with the American system and it’s that, and I think this just went on for too long before the American people just wouldn’t put up with it anymore. And this is why trust in every institution and the corporate media and Congress and all of it has evaporated, is that it’s like, are you just saying of all the people who sold the war in Iraq, no one so much as got kicked out of polite society? I’m not even saying, oh, they went to jail for war crimes for life, but was just like, “Yeah, we’re not looking to you for advice on the next war. Thanks. Go home.” None of that.
And it’s like all these crazy things, nobody goes down for it. I mean, they lied us into war after a war. They’ve bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar. They locked down the country on the basis of pseudoscience, then lied through their teeth about what this vaccine would do as they were forcing it on people, and no one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this. And look, in any area of life, whether a business or a relationship or whatever, you cannot screw up that catastrophically and face no repercussions for it and think that your business or relationship isn’t going to fail as a result of that.
Lex Fridman
I think ultimately there’s been a lot of wake-up calls and I think we’re going to build a better society from it, better institution … I believe-
I think ultimately there’s been a lot of wake-up calls and I think we’re going to build a better society from it, better institution … I believe-
Dave Smith
I hope you’re right.
I hope you’re right.
Lex Fridman
… with more transparency, more authenticity. I think also the Democratic Party has learned a lesson of you have to have candidates that do … I don’t give a shit about podcasts, but do podcasts-like things, meaning reveal themselves as human beings.
… with more transparency, more authenticity. I think also the Democratic Party has learned a lesson of you have to have candidates that do … I don’t give a shit about podcasts, but do podcasts-like things, meaning reveal themselves as human beings.
Dave Smith
I think it’s one of the best things that happened in this last election. I did think they were great, but I’m not saying that any of the Trump podcasts were perfect or maybe there’d be a better way that they could be done. But I will say that I used to say this for a while, as of the last few years, but I’d be like, so I’m me, and for me to do what I do, it’s kind of expected that I’ll probably … I don’t know, I get at least maybe 15, 10 to 15 times a year, I’ll come do a show like this. A long-form show on a big platform where my ideas will be poked and prodded and tested and there’ll be pushback questions and they’ll be … Sometimes they’re more adversarial, sometimes they’re more friendly.
I think it’s one of the best things that happened in this last election. I did think they were great, but I’m not saying that any of the Trump podcasts were perfect or maybe there’d be a better way that they could be done. But I will say that I used to say this for a while, as of the last few years, but I’d be like, so I’m me, and for me to do what I do, it’s kind of expected that I’ll probably … I don’t know, I get at least maybe 15, 10 to 15 times a year, I’ll come do a show like this. A long-form show on a big platform where my ideas will be poked and prodded and tested and there’ll be pushback questions and they’ll be … Sometimes they’re more adversarial, sometimes they’re more friendly.
And then yet our standard for who is the commander in chief was like, you show up to these debates that are 90 minutes long with these really … they are really stupid questions and you give a 90-second answer to it or … And at least for the first time now it does seem like, oh, the standard is kind of you’re going to have to do a long-form show where you really have to have … And that I think is long term a real positive development. You just know going forward, the Democrats, which I think is what you were saying, you can’t run a Kamala Harris if she can’t do a long-form interview. You got to run somebody who’s able to sit down and express themselves and have real genuine thoughts, or at least try to convince people they have real genuine thoughts at least.
And that’s very different in a way. I look back at the most talented politicians of my lifetime, which I’d have to say the two were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, just the most talented, traditional politicians. Trump’s the anti-politician, but they were the traditional and just unbelievably … but they never had to do that. It was just a different time. Bill Clinton had to walk up and be like, “Oh, it’s a beautiful baby you have here.” Then go back and then play the sax, and then have a couple good answers to a small crowd, “I’m from a little town called Hope.”
That’s not the game anymore. Now the game is like, can you sit down and actually have some ideas in a long form? And I think that’s so much better, because it’s so much more revealing of … Kind of like what we were saying before, you reveal a little bit, it’s not 50 hours, but in those three hours you reveal a little bit of your soul.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And I think that process makes you actually a better person. I ultimately think that Barack Obama is a fascinating human being. And there was a choice made early on to do less interviews, be more behind the wall, I think. And that’s a disservice, because I think it’s a skill to be an authentic person, that you build, to be able to allow yourself to be yourself. It’s very possible that Kamala Harris is a fascinating person, but she just-
Yeah. And I think that process makes you actually a better person. I ultimately think that Barack Obama is a fascinating human being. And there was a choice made early on to do less interviews, be more behind the wall, I think. And that’s a disservice, because I think it’s a skill to be an authentic person, that you build, to be able to allow yourself to be yourself. It’s very possible that Kamala Harris is a fascinating person, but she just-
Dave Smith
Yeah, we’ve just never gotten to meet her.
Yeah, we’ve just never gotten to meet her.
Lex Fridman
And I don’t know if she has gotten to meet or by … It’s a practiced thing, to reveal yourself is a tricky thing. I think it’s just good for the candidate. Well, I think what she did, I’m a critic, I don’t think she’s a good candidate, but what she did is pretty fricking incredible, meaning to raise that much money in that short amount of time. I think it was a terrible thing for the Democratic Party to do, I think she’s a terrible candidate, but still, with the tools you got, use TikTok, use whatever.
And I don’t know if she has gotten to meet or by … It’s a practiced thing, to reveal yourself is a tricky thing. I think it’s just good for the candidate. Well, I think what she did, I’m a critic, I don’t think she’s a good candidate, but what she did is pretty fricking incredible, meaning to raise that much money in that short amount of time. I think it was a terrible thing for the Democratic Party to do, I think she’s a terrible candidate, but still, with the tools you got, use TikTok, use whatever.
Dave Smith
I’ll say the fact that she came as close as she did to being president is pretty goddamn insane if you ask me. But yeah, the Democrats are a mess. They’re a mess like I’ve never seen a political party before, but that in itself is I think a very good thing. And what comes from here is there’s a lot of possibilities now. I don’t know who the person is. I don’t see anyone out there that I could think of that would fill this role, but there’s never been a more ripe time for someone to Donald Trump the Democratic Party now.
I’ll say the fact that she came as close as she did to being president is pretty goddamn insane if you ask me. But yeah, the Democrats are a mess. They’re a mess like I’ve never seen a political party before, but that in itself is I think a very good thing. And what comes from here is there’s a lot of possibilities now. I don’t know who the person is. I don’t see anyone out there that I could think of that would fill this role, but there’s never been a more ripe time for someone to Donald Trump the Democratic Party now.
What Donald Trump did, people tend to forget this, because now it’s also because the accusation from the Democrats is that, “The Republican Parties are all a bunch of Trump cultists,” or something like that. But I’m old enough to remember 2016, and what actually happened was that Donald Trump came in and just really resonated with the voters and the establishment of the Republican Party hated it. They were openly talking about changing the rules at the Republican National Convention to deny him the nomination in 2016. What they were saying is that they were going to raise the number of delegates required so high that nobody could hit it and then say, “Hey, since nobody hit it, we select Mitt Romney again and we’re going to run Mitt Romney again.” They were openly, openly conspiring to steal the thing from him, and eventually he just had so much support on the ground that they couldn’t do it.
Right now, if someone could totally do that to the Democrats, but the thing is, it would have to be somebody outside of the three-letter agency control, because that’s what everyone’s rejecting right now. But if you were to actually sit there and go … And even policies I don’t necessarily agree with, but there are a lot of policies that if it was actually a pro-labor, working class party, you could … Bernie Sanders showed you a little bit of what’s possible, and this was from an 80-year-old socialist who didn’t really have the balls to go through with it at the end of the day. If somebody younger and a little bit more with the current zeitgeist we’re able to do that, that could happen.
Lex Fridman
I mean, I would generally think that AOC can develop into that candidate. She might not be there yet, but I think she can develop into that. And it could be out there, it could be-
I mean, I would generally think that AOC can develop into that candidate. She might not be there yet, but I think she can develop into that. And it could be out there, it could be-
Dave Smith
I don’t know. I don’t see AOC being the one to do it, but I could be wrong about that. She’s got some qualities, unlike almost all the other ones you could think of. I don’t see anyone right now who I think could be that person, but I never would’ve … I mean, if you had asked me in 2014 who’s going to come take over the Republican Party, I never would’ve guessed Donald Trump was going to come do what he did. So it might be the person we’re seeing who we’re not even thinking of, or it might just be some unknown.
I don’t know. I don’t see AOC being the one to do it, but I could be wrong about that. She’s got some qualities, unlike almost all the other ones you could think of. I don’t see anyone right now who I think could be that person, but I never would’ve … I mean, if you had asked me in 2014 who’s going to come take over the Republican Party, I never would’ve guessed Donald Trump was going to come do what he did. So it might be the person we’re seeing who we’re not even thinking of, or it might just be some unknown.
Same with Obama was an unknown. I mean, obviously he had very powerful people behind his presidential run. It’s not like he was a true just grassroots guy, but he wasn’t anyone we would’ve been necessarily thinking about. I mean, he gave that big speech at the 2004 DNC, but that was it. That was the thing he was known for, is he gave one great speech at the … Besides that he was a state senator and then a junior senator. No one was thinking he was going to be the next president.
Lex Fridman
It could be like a Jon Stewart type character. Of course, I don’t think he would ever … I honestly don’t think a comedian will ever run, but I never thought Trump would ever run, so.
It could be like a Jon Stewart type character. Of course, I don’t think he would ever … I honestly don’t think a comedian will ever run, but I never thought Trump would ever run, so.
Dave Smith
There is something about Jon Stewart that is … And obviously I disagree with him on a lot of stuff too, but he is an authentic person. And there’s something about that that gives you a huge advantage, particularly in our current political climate. People are so sick of the phoniness. And they’re right to be, because you could only … You can lie to some of the people some of the time. You can only lie so much before eventually nobody wants to hear you in that phony voice telling the same phony lies anymore.
There is something about Jon Stewart that is … And obviously I disagree with him on a lot of stuff too, but he is an authentic person. And there’s something about that that gives you a huge advantage, particularly in our current political climate. People are so sick of the phoniness. And they’re right to be, because you could only … You can lie to some of the people some of the time. You can only lie so much before eventually nobody wants to hear you in that phony voice telling the same phony lies anymore.
And at least Jon Stewart is, I will say, I think Jon Stewart is telling the truth the way he sees it. I don’t think he’s necessarily right about a lot of things. He is right about a lot of things, but I think he’s wrong about a lot of other things. But I just get the impression that he believes what he is saying and there’s something powerful about that.
Lex Fridman
Especially when he’s surrounded by people that disagree with him, he’s still willing to say it.
Especially when he’s surrounded by people that disagree with him, he’s still willing to say it.
Dave Smith
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
That takes a certain kind of courage, yeah, and be funny doing it, but he’s not going to run.
That takes a certain kind of courage, yeah, and be funny doing it, but he’s not going to run.
Dave Smith
No, I don’t think so.
No, I don’t think so.
Lex Fridman
This is annoying. You have to be fucking crazy to run.
This is annoying. You have to be fucking crazy to run.
Dave Smith
That is one of the real problems. And then people attack Donald Trump for being a narcissist-
That is one of the real problems. And then people attack Donald Trump for being a narcissist-
Lex Fridman
You have to be, I think.
You have to be, I think.
Dave Smith
… and it’s like, yeah, but who the hell else is going to ever do this?
… and it’s like, yeah, but who the hell else is going to ever do this?
Hope
Lex Fridman
Yeah. All right. What gives you hope about this whole thing we got going on, America and human civilization?
Yeah. All right. What gives you hope about this whole thing we got going on, America and human civilization?
Dave Smith
Okay. This is not mine, but this is Gene Epstein, who’s a … is a really brilliant economist and a great guy. And he told me this once and I just always loved it, and so I call it Epstein’s case, not that … Different Epstein, Gene Epstein. No relation. I want to be clear on that. Okay. Let’s call it Gene’s case for radical optimism, and the way he put it was he goes, “So imagine you were sitting around in 1845 and you’re at the height of the slavery and you were like, ‘Hey, in 20 years slavery is going to be abolished across the West.'” And if you told that to someone, they’d be like, “Dude, slavery has existed for all of human history. Look around. It’s not going anywhere. You’d have to be out of your mind to think we’re 20 years away from abolishing slavery.”
Okay. This is not mine, but this is Gene Epstein, who’s a … is a really brilliant economist and a great guy. And he told me this once and I just always loved it, and so I call it Epstein’s case, not that … Different Epstein, Gene Epstein. No relation. I want to be clear on that. Okay. Let’s call it Gene’s case for radical optimism, and the way he put it was he goes, “So imagine you were sitting around in 1845 and you’re at the height of the slavery and you were like, ‘Hey, in 20 years slavery is going to be abolished across the West.'” And if you told that to someone, they’d be like, “Dude, slavery has existed for all of human history. Look around. It’s not going anywhere. You’d have to be out of your mind to think we’re 20 years away from abolishing slavery.”
And yet we were, I mean, it’s just the greatest thing in the history of the world, and unfortunately America had to fight a bloody civil war to get there, but many other countries did and they just walked away from what had been the status quo forever and just stopped doing it. And now, look, you can argue there’s slavery by other names and things like that, and to some degree, paying an income tax is some degree of slavery, but there is not chattel slavery in the way that there used to be, and that is an incredible advance for humanity.
And then the other example he would give is he was talking about how at the beginning of the Reagan administration in 1981, that the neocons … because when he was trying to have detente with Russia, the neocons were in the press, being like, “He just guaranteed another 100 years of Soviet dominance.” And if someone had just been to you like, “Hey, listen, calm down, in 10 years there won’t be a Soviet Union.” It’s just been like, “Okay, nice idea, but you’re out of your fucking mind.” And yet that was true too.
And you can see some dynamics even in our politics today where … Three years ago I was really concerned about whether they’d shut the whole thing down, us I mean. During the COVID times and during times where it was like everyone I knew was just getting strikes on all their channels, and if you just even wanted to talk about how there are people being vaccine injured, you’d lose your YouTube channel, people getting kicked off Twitter left and right. And I just saw it and I was like, “Dude, the grasp is just getting tighter and tighter and tighter. The regime is not going to allow these alternative voices in here. And they’re just getting too big and they’re going to shut this whole thing down and I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do after that.”
And I was totally wrong. The trend totally went in the other direction, and things are now at a point where it’s like, I couldn’t even imagine it. I never would’ve envisioned Elon Musk was going to get $44 billion together and buy Twitter and then he was … And so I just think that if you zoom out, I think that the regime has lost their monopoly on propaganda, and this opens up enormous possibilities for what …
I remember so vividly, 2002. 9/11 happened in late 2001, we invaded Iraq in 2003, but all of 2002 was a massive propaganda campaign. Just constantly laying down the blueprints for this war that we knew George W. Bush was about to launch. And it was, “They have weapons of mass destruction. They were in on 9/11. They’re friends with Al-Qaeda. They’re going to hand this weapon that they don’t have off to the terrorists they’re not friends with, and then they’re going to nuke Kansas.”
By the way, this is also, sorry for rambling a little bit here, but this is also one of the reasons why when the Jew haters will say things like … They’ll be like, “Oh, look, all of the Jews support Israel,” or, “70% of the Jews vote this way,” or, “70% of the Jews support the …” It’s like, listen, I don’t like blaming … Or even when the Palestine haters will say, “70% of Gazans support Hamas,” or whatever. It’s like, okay, look, I remember a time in this country, I know I’m going back 20 years, but every right-winger in this country was completely convinced that we have to go invade Iraq because he has weapons of mass destruction, and you’re some type of leftist homo if you don’t agree with that. That was the entire culture in this country. And it was the one thing that the New York Times and Bill O’Reilly and CNN and the Washington Post all agreed on, they were all on board selling this war.
You could not do that today. They could not get away with that today, because if they did, how do you control this entire problem? You tell me, how do you control Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? How do you get these guys to go … They’re not going to go along with it. And in fact, they’re almost definitely going to have people on their show who are just tearing it apart. And so I just look at that and I go like, “Yo, I mean, we’re at a place now where we have this world of possibilities that would’ve seemed impossible just so recently.” And so just thinking, all of that rambling stew, whatever all that was, that leaves me feeling very, very hopeful for the future.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s a lot of social and political progress in that rambling stew over the decades and the centuries. For me, probably some of the technological progress is really exciting. Me personally, it just fills me with hope whenever I see the rockets go up … To clarify-
Yeah, there’s a lot of social and political progress in that rambling stew over the decades and the centuries. For me, probably some of the technological progress is really exciting. Me personally, it just fills me with hope whenever I see the rockets go up … To clarify-
Dave Smith
Not the ones going into Gaza, the ones going into outer space, I assume.
Not the ones going into Gaza, the ones going into outer space, I assume.
Lex Fridman
You had to clarify the Epstein thing, the Epstein rule, to clarify exactly which rockets. SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets. So taking humans out to space and for us to be among the stars, it makes me feel like we’re going to make it. Because the bleaker times throughout human history, you think … I mean, there’s just a sense … You’re right, and during COVID, there was a sense of, for many reasons, maybe just a simple psychological human reason, it felt like bleak, like, fuck I don’t think we as a civilization are … If we can’t handle this pandemic from a policy perspective, from a human perspective, economic perspective, this is like pandemic lite. There’s going to be other bigger troubles coming our way.
You had to clarify the Epstein thing, the Epstein rule, to clarify exactly which rockets. SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets. So taking humans out to space and for us to be among the stars, it makes me feel like we’re going to make it. Because the bleaker times throughout human history, you think … I mean, there’s just a sense … You’re right, and during COVID, there was a sense of, for many reasons, maybe just a simple psychological human reason, it felt like bleak, like, fuck I don’t think we as a civilization are … If we can’t handle this pandemic from a policy perspective, from a human perspective, economic perspective, this is like pandemic lite. There’s going to be other bigger troubles coming our way.
And then now you have this … again, the rockets are going up. It’s like, first of all, we’ll colonize space and other planets. And we are inventive motherfuckers, we’ll figure it out.
Dave Smith
Yeah. And then certainly for me, just personally because this has really touched my life, but the innovations in medical technology are just … And my son had a congenital heart defect at open-heart surgery when he was three days old. And I mean, it’s something that 20 years ago I would’ve lost my child. And he’s fine. Just absolutely fine, because it’s just amazing what these surgeons and cardiologists and neonatologists and all of them, what they do now is like goddamn magic. And so there was always something about that that would … It was almost like that inoculated me against ever having a sense of like, “Well, I wish it was a previous time.” Because now, sorry, in a previous time, I lose my kid, so I don’t care. Whatever other challenges there are out here, I’ll take that trade off where this baby survives and gets a shot at having a life.”
Yeah. And then certainly for me, just personally because this has really touched my life, but the innovations in medical technology are just … And my son had a congenital heart defect at open-heart surgery when he was three days old. And I mean, it’s something that 20 years ago I would’ve lost my child. And he’s fine. Just absolutely fine, because it’s just amazing what these surgeons and cardiologists and neonatologists and all of them, what they do now is like goddamn magic. And so there was always something about that that would … It was almost like that inoculated me against ever having a sense of like, “Well, I wish it was a previous time.” Because now, sorry, in a previous time, I lose my kid, so I don’t care. Whatever other challenges there are out here, I’ll take that trade off where this baby survives and gets a shot at having a life.”
And there is a lot of that stuff is just easy to take for granted. And it’s like, when it touches your life, you don’t take it for granted as much, but it’s just like now it really is … There are miracles going on all over the place now that everybody in human history did not have access to.
Lex Fridman
All right, brother. It’s great to finally meet a friend and have a conversation.
All right, brother. It’s great to finally meet a friend and have a conversation.
Dave Smith
Yeah, I really enjoyed this.
Yeah, I really enjoyed this.
Lex Fridman
And I can’t wait to talk to you again, brother.
And I can’t wait to talk to you again, brother.
Dave Smith
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dave Smith. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ron Paul, “Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong.” Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dave Smith. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ron Paul, “Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong.” Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza | Lex Fridman Podcast #463
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #463 with Douglas Murray.
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I recommend you listen to many sources who disagree with each other and tried to pick up wisdom from each. Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who have spent most of their lives living there. Whether it’s Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia. Let’s try together to not be cogs in the machine of outrage, and instead to reach toward reason and compassion. There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today. Plus, there are thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire. Human civilization hangs in the balance. The 21st century is a new geopolitical puzzle, all of us are tasked with solving. Let’s not mess it up. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Douglas Murray.
And I think that probably also at that moment, there was a sort of sense of Zelensky is being disrespected by being asked about what he’s wearing when as everyone knows, Churchill during World War II used to wear his fatigues on foreign visit. But [inaudible 00:12:19] just that is to remind people that you are coming from the realm of war. And I think that probably in that moment, one of the things that would’ve been going through his head would be, I mean, if this was Putin sitting here being assaulted by a journalist, you’d hope your host stepped in and defended you.
Let me try this one out. I mean, if a journalist in the Oval Office, if Putin was sitting there or a putative journalist said to Putin, everyone knows you’ve had a lot of facial work done, and word is you’ve used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use. Can you comment on that? You’d say, well, that’s a disrespectful question for journalists to ask, and it’s a little bit off what needs to be gone over. And it is the same thing with Zelensky with his outfit. I think it was just petty and threw things off in a bad way.
There’s this whole energy of entitlement that he brought. He forgot that there’s a new guy. You got to convince the new guy that this global mission, that this nation is on this war that is in many ways, the West versus the East. That there’s ideals, there’s whole histories here that this is a war worth winning. You have to convince them, right?
And maybe he would’ve done, maybe he would’ve taken his time, maybe he wouldn’t have done. And this is a very fine calculation that changes every week, let alone every year. My friends in Georgia I thought were wildly off the mark when they were believing that after 2008 they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership. And I thought that was completely unlikely. And I still think it’s unlikely and almost suddenly undesirable for Europe and for NATO, because you’ve got to be very careful. And obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine and has been since the ’90s, are you going to set up a trip wire to start World War 3? And that’s not a small thing to consider.
There is a school of thought that obviously President Trump to some extent was floating in recent weeks, which is that if a deal is done, a business deal in relation to minerals or anything else, you get a buffer zone of American businesses and investment. And therefore American business people in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to invade. I don’t follow that idea because not least there were Americans in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast…
One teenage boy who described to me how, when his mother was out, a woman came around the house, knocked on the door and gave him his papers and said that he had to attend the next week to sign up for the Russian army. This is not good and that’s obviously what life is like for thousands of people behind the Russian lines in Ukraine. I just have it in mind when people say things like, “Well, obviously, these regions have to be handed over.” It’s very, very hard, if you’re a Ukrainian, to concede to that.
And I do think that one reason is that they were effectively hostages and the Ukrainians knew, this is my estimation of the terrain, is that the Ukrainians knew that, if they made a great deal about this more than they did, that the children would effectively be the most effective bargaining chip. And I do think there’s considerable truth in that because, if you look at, for instance, the way in which pressure has been put on the Israeli government by the Israeli population about the kidnapped Israelis, you’ll see that it’s a pretty effective tactic for any totalitarian regime or terrorist group to operate in a way that means that the population of the country you’re attacking pressure their government to do something in terms of concession, it’s a very effective tool. And I think that story was partly played down, not just outside of Ukraine, but also within Ukraine partly for that reason.
And the moderator, I remember, it was just a melee, and the moderator turns to Andrew Roberts and says, “Andrew Roberts, why did World War II begin?” and he says, “World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland.” And it was a magnificent moment because everything had been a marsh, they were just so lost in all the intricate and clever and interesting things that you can talk about about the origins of a war that you forget to mention the thing that’s most important. And certainly, my experience as a journalist and writer is one of the reasons why you need to go and see things with your own eyes is because people are certain to tell you that what you’ve seen with your own eyes didn’t happen or hasn’t happened and it helps to steal you for that moment.
So, there’s just all psychological complexities that are … And you look at this whole picture, in a basic sense, if you want Ukraine to flourish, if you want humanity to flourish, you just ask the question, okay, so what is the thing I would like to see.
At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing is that you do, and I’ve seen this elsewhere, you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize, and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can’t pressurize. That is one of the worrying things that could happen with this. Simply, America can put extraordinary diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military pressure on Ukraine, and it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it’s much easier to pressure Zelenskyy.
That’s one of the many things that makes it harder is that the temptation to rush for peace, accepting that peace is the most desirable thing and accepting the horrors of war, which we can linger on, but accepting all that. If somebody says, “We’ve got to get peace today,” and the three of them around a table, the most likely thing is that it’ll be the person who you can pressure most easily, who will be the person that you pressure, and as a result, have an outcome, which, yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim. That’s an extremely ugly and common thing to happen.
Obviously, on the 7th itself, it was a brigade-sized attack on Israel from Gaza. Hamas broke through the security fence and attacked all the softest targets they could. They swiftly overwhelmed things, like the observation base in Nahal Oz. They ran through the communities in the south, very peaceful, peacenik [inaudible 01:07:41] free communities of the kibbutzim as they’re called, the communities, and murdered and raped and burned and kidnapped.
Of course, they, from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party, and rampaged through that with RPGs and Kalashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more, and got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel, on places like Ofakim and Sderot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well.
We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the north. Hezbollah joined in the war within 24 hours by starting firing rockets again in very large numbers into northern Israel from southern Lebanon, but the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north and carry out similar massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garrote Israel from the center.
The interesting reason why I think, it’ll be found out in the future, but why they didn’t coordinate better was Hamas didn’t trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were going to do it that wouldn’t be intercepted. The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and trains and arms knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn’t get close to that, but they got worryingly closer than people might’ve thought they were capable of.
I think from the Israeli side, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most, catastrophic intelligence and military failure since the foundation of the state. I think there are several reasons why. One is a perception problem, what a lot of military commanders and others described to me as the conception. The conception that had prevailed in Israel for some years in security, military establishment was that Hamas were content with being corrupt and governing Gaza and lining their pockets and living in Qatar and becoming billionaires, but that like many other terrorist groups and cults, that they would end up becoming just corrupt and not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary. That’s the first thing was there was just a massive era of the conception in Israel.
And then, the multiple manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to the day. There already have been quite a lot of people held to account for that and their, doubtless, will be in the future as well. The single thing I heard, which I heard most and which was most distressing in a way, was the number of people who described to me, who survived the massacres in the south, who said that they’d said to their children, “Don’t worry, the Army will be here in minutes,” and they weren’t. In many places, it was many hours until the army got there. There are reasons for that. There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings. Other things were very, I discovered, were very human failings. I don’t want overstress the failure of the army, because actually certain units and things got down very fast. There’s a unit, Duvdevan, who got down to the junction by within about an hour, 90 minutes of the massacres starting, and joined in the fight. And then, there were self-starters, who I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just broke orders and just realized the magnitude of what was happening and said, “We’re needed in the south. Go.” And fought very hard for hours, days in some cases.
But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable, I mean, as usually happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You can see it in hindsight, but you can’t see when you are in it. And one of the things that made it very complicated was, for instance, Hamas coming in, taking uniforms off dead Israelis, wearing them, coming in with Israeli-style apparatus on them.
There’s a Muslim doctor I quote in the book, I interviewed, who describes how he was going to his… He’s an Israeli Muslim Arab, and he’s a doctor. He was going to his shift at the hospital at 6:30 in the morning. The rockets start coming in because the rocket started first and then the full invasion. He described to me how… He’s one of the members of this group, United Hatzalah, which is a first responders group, and they get an alert and it tells them that a car has crashed nearby, and they put on their first aid kit and so on and go.
He got one of those alerts at one of the junctions, and realized there was a car that something had happened and there were some dead bodies. He stops and he sees these men dressed as soldiers, and he’s wearing his Hatzalah gear and they start firing at him. And he just thinks, “What the hell? What the hell is going on?” They turned out to be Hamas dressed as Israeli soldiers. They used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air assault. In the end, they shot him and left him, and he survived. He’s a very, very brave man.
So, there was a lot of confusion like that. There was a girl whose father I interviewed, she was at the Nova party. I met him at one of the reunions of the party and the weeks after, and the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. He described how in the last moments of his daughter’s life, she phoned him on her phone, like a lot of people. He reassured her that Army would get there and so on. Her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap, and she was obviously panicked. They’d managed to get into a car and escape the party, but they went to a community where they thought they’d be safe in the south of Israel.
They were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman, and he wasn’t the policeman. He was Hamas dressed as police and she died. She was shot and killed as well. So, there was a lot of confusion like that. Hopefully, the world will find out exactly what went wrong, Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe, but, I mean, it was a complete catastrophe.
I don’t think you need to go into that. I mean, for instance, some of the young women at the observation base are on the record. I’ve spoken to them myself, who said that they had been warning in the weeks running up to the 7th, that they were seeing maneuvers and training by the border, which suggested that Hamas was going to do something like this. They say that they were ignored. Though you speak to some of the more senior commanders about that, and they say the thing is that this stuff was happening all the time, so it’s very hard to know at the moment.
The primary aim of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel and [inaudible 01:17:42]. They’re not an unusual group, sadly. The bit of it that is hard for some people to understand, I think, is that they really do mean what they say and that they really do mean what they say they want to do. I give a number of examples in the book of this, but, I mean, the most obvious is the case of Yahya Al-Sinwar, the Hamas leader who is generally regarded as having orchestrated and arranged the 7th of October.
We know a fair amount about him because he was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza, and he was released in the prisoner swap for the… He’s one of the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners inside Israel who was released in a swap for Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier. Yahya Al-Sinwar, in prison in Israel, talked to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his life because Yahya Al-Sinwar had a brain tumor.
This dentist identified this and actually sent him to the hospital. The Israelis famously removed the tumor and saved Sinwar’s life. But this dentist used to speak to him in the prison not fairly regularly and has related, not at least to the New York Times, his conversations with Sinwar. Sinwar said in one of those conversations, he said, “At the moment, you, Israel, are strong, but one day, you’ll be weak, and then I’ll come.” And that’s what he did.
There’s a woman whose name has become relatively famous since, certainly famous inside Israel, Vivian Silver, who was a peace activist, who spent every weekend driving Gazan children from the border to… If they had very rare medical needs that could not be seen attention within inside Gaza, would drive them to Israeli hospitals. She spent every weekend doing that. Worked for all of the left-wing peace organizations in Israel.
For a while after the 7th, her neighbors and others thought that she had been taken captive into Gaza. And actually, there was a hostage poster for her, and there were appeals by the various peacenik organizations for Hamas to hand her over. But it turned out she’d been burned alive in her home. This wasn’t discovered for quite a long time because there was so little DNA left of her that it was very hard to identify the remains as being hers.
So, there were a lot, just a lot of people in the Gaza envelope, as it’s called in Israel, in the area around Gaza, who would’ve been the people who wanted to live peacefully with the Gazans some day. There’s a certain, among the many, it’s not an irony, but just among the pains of the days that is so overwhelmingly, these are the people that Hamas brought hell to.
The proportionality that much of the rest of the world seems to think Israel should express in warfare is to have an equal level of suffering or killing on both sides. I don’t think there’s any law of war that says that if you kill 1,200 people and you kidnap another 250, that as it were the other side’s allowed to do the same back. But that’s what a lot of people think. And then when they see the death toll escalating on the Gazan side, they say Israel has acted disproportionately and has overreacted.
That one is tricky, because it’s my belief that, I mean, again, this is a basic thing but it has to be stated, that 9 million citizens of Israel, if you extrapolate that out to what the 7th of October would’ve meant in American terms, you’d be talking about a day on which if the attack had happened in America where 44,000 Americans were killed in one day and 10,000 American citizens taken hostage, nobody can tell me that if such an atrocity occurred that America would not do whatever it needed to destroy the groups that had done that and to retrieve the hostages who’d been taken.
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan did not maybe succeed in defeating terrorism or even making progress. It probably made more terrorists than not. So, there’s a justified feeling of hitting back and going after somebody like Bin Laden in the case of 9/11. And there’s just the actual implementation. It seems like the implementation can sometimes, intended or unintended, have consequences that are bordering on war crimes, if not downright war crimes. Now, this is a general statement, and now we’ll look at Israel where things are small land, everything is very compact. There’s a lot of complexities that are well-studied that we’ve talked about extensively.
I believe that I’ve seen as much of the war as any outside observer. I don’t know, some exceptions maybe, so I think I can say with considerable certainty what the Israelis have and haven’t done. There were various operations at the beginning, various plans which didn’t happen, like storming straight in and getting, for instance, as many hostages as possible out of the Shifa complex, which is called a hospital, but also at the very least, the Hamas command headquarters. There was a plan to maybe go and do that fast, but it was avoided because of the number of deaths on all sides that would be likely to happen.
The Israelis did actually hold back at the beginning. There was a period of making sure that when they went into Gaza, they didn’t do so, in any way, blind. Gaza is a very built-up area, and population-wise is densely populated. Something, by the way, which the people who claim frivolously that Israel has been creating genocide never take account of, which is the fact that the Gaza population has boomed since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. It’s almost doubled. But yes, it’s a densely populated area, and it’s an incredibly difficult place for the train of war because of one thing in particular, which is that Hamas, going back a bit to our conversation earlier, but this is a much more extreme example. I mean, Hamas really don’t play by the rules. In fact, they use the rules of war, the laws of war completely to their own advantage. It has to be reiterated. You are not meant to disguise your army as civilians. You’re not meant to use places of care, like hospitals, as bases for your military operations. You’re not meant to use schools and places of worship as operating centers of war.
Hamas does all of these things and has always done so, and it does so with the very obvious reason that for them, the whole thing is a two-for-one offer. You get to operate everywhere. And if the Israelis operate anywhere, you claim that this is a war crime, because how could they attack this group of civilians, these people who are dressed as civilians, these people merely fighting from a mosque and so on. That’s why everybody who’s been to Gaza, who’s seen the fighting, knows the same thing, which is this is just incredibly difficult, difficult warfare, of a kind that American troops have seen in the last 20 years in Fallujah and elsewhere. Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga saw when they were fighting as our frontline troops in the war against ISIS, similar house to house, but by no means with the same entrenched bases. Again, it can’t be stressed enough that Hamas has used the years since the Israel withdrawal from 2005 to build this vast underground tunnel network.
Again, it’s obvious, but it has to be remembered. I quote one of Hamas leaders in the book saying this in an interview. When they build their tunnels, they do so in order their tunnels are used by them, Hamas, to store their weaponry, to secure their fighters, and to hold hostages. They do not build their underground tunnel networks for the safety of guards and civilians avoiding aerial bombardment. Every difference in the world seems to me to exist between a country which does build bomb shelters for its citizens and a government which builds bomb shelters for its bombs.
One of the many, many tragedies of this is that whatever you are reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, it was an opportunity for the Gaza to become something else. It could have become a thriving statelet. It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It’s just that Hamas, like the PLO before them, decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create a Palestinian estate. And that is to the great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza to put it at its mildest.
This is difficult because you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way justifying collective punishment if you talk about this, but it should be born in mind that Hamas had effectively 18 years to run the Gaza. And that-
If you speak to soldiers who were there in 2014 when Hamas started a war again… One of a set of rounds of war since 2005. If you speak to the soldiers who were there in 2014 going house to house and who were also involved in the war since 2003, they all say the same thing, which is the marked radicalization of the Gazan population.
The marked increase in just, I mean, the most… I mean, it’s so banal in a way to even… The numbers of copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion, there are so many what ifs and other paths that Hamas could have taken, but that was the one they took. They decided to take the path of using their time and power to build up their infrastructure, radicalize the population, and encouraged them to believe that they could destroy the state of Israel.
And then on October 7th, they gave it their best shot. And by the way, there is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza. Collective punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas, carpet bombing, this sort of thing. This is simply not what the IAF and the IDF have done since the 7th. They have been fighting a house to house war against this terrorist group. They do do aerial strikes. Gaza is very, very badly beaten up as the buildings, I mean the infrastructure that existed.
There aren’t many buildings standing. But this is not the result of just wild and imprecise bombing by the Israelis. It’s been extremely concerted. It’s extremely difficult. But when people say, “Well, this must be collective punishment.” I think that the people who say that simultaneously, that’s not true. And also there is not a hostage who’s come out who… President Trump made his point recently. There is not a hostage who’s come out who I’ve spoken with, who found any Gazan Palestinian who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them.
If you look at the footage from the 7th, the Hamas recorded themselves of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on. You will notice that the trucks and the motorbikes and so on are not stopped by horrified Gazan civilians saying, “Why have you got this Israeli girl whose tendons you’ve cut and why are you bringing her here?” It’s all celebration. It’s all celebration. And it’s the same with those couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses they were being held in who were immediately returned by the citizens they met.
Because the way we’re speaking about this with a celebration, it’s very easy to project a kind of evil on the populace that I just am very hesitant to project, especially on the general populace.
And so everyone knows the world of a dance party in all night raving in the desert to commune with nature and the universe and to take some psychedelics and to expand your consciousness and your love and all of that sort of thing.
The fact that people doing that at 6:30 in the morning then encountered people coming in to the party on trucks and military vehicles and just massacring them and raping them. I mean, I give examples of the firsthand accounts of people who survived, but I mean, it’s beyond belief of almost anything else I’ve covered in war. And it’s because it seems so… I mean, an army facing another army is one thing.
A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing. A terrorist group facing a group of young people at a dance unarmed and doing what they did is pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere. So that stated, can you empathize with the suffering of Palestinians and Gaza with the destruction that resulted as a response?
Yes. What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there on the first time a couple of days early into the ground invasion when the citizens of Gaza were coming south. I was in the middle of the strip and the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages being taken south deeper into Gaza and to try to stop the Hamas leadership from making it south. It actually didn’t really work because they’d already got a lot of the hostages south.
It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north so as not to be dragged all the way… In the end, dragged all the way in any way. But, yes, and I mean watching the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor and everyone was being checked for bombs, suicide vests, checked for particularly young men of military age. I mean, you look at this tide of human misery and you think, “This is terrible.” But this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been miss governing the place that they lived in.
And of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this. At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger that they had come to this point because of the fact that they had elected a terror group to run their territory. And one of the things obviously is that a lot of people like to say, and it’s true, of course, this didn’t all start on October the 7th. Absolutely true. This particular round, this particularly intense round of war started on October the 7th without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October the 7th.
It wasn’t like they were forced to liberate themselves or something that some of the defenders of Hamas claim. But the conflict of course goes back a lot earlier. But you will have to always keep on contending with this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict, what used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict and now has become interestingly rebranded, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But there is one absolutely essential issue to this which cannot be forgotten, which is do the Palestinians want a state or do they want to destroy the Jewish state? And if they want to destroy the Jewish state as they’ve tried many times, it’s a disaster for them. It’s a total disaster for them.
If they want to create their own state, they’ve already had several very good shots to do it, one of which is Gaza post 2005. But they’ve never shown in their leadership the desire to live with a Jewish state, and that’s the catastrophe for the Palestinians.
And this the, as it were, normalization route was slowly being attempted. It as being pushed on Israel [inaudible 01:51:42] did a little bit too fast for Israel’s comfort, but it happened. That completely came to an end, and that dream has gone since the 7th of October.
I spoke with one man who, his community, they had a security officer chief and Hamas came in. They knew to go and kill him and his family first, and then which families… I’ve seen the maps myself. They came in with incredibly accurate information about these communities. How did they have them? Because it was given to them by the brothers, by the workers, by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out. So there is nobody that will trust that ever again.
I actually think one of the few positive news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has by and large held. There hasn’t been an Intifada. One of the reasons why there hasn’t been more terrorist activity in the West Bank in Judea and Samaria is because the Israelis have been very careful along with the Palestinian authority to some extent, cooperating to keep that down. But there wasn’t a full war on three fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening.
So I think that the coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some terrible examples, far too regular, but not as regular that could happen of Muslim Arab Israelis carrying out acts of terror as it was sympathy with Hamas. I was in the middle of one such attack myself late last year and in a town called Hadera. And those things have happened, but it’s not… That particular catastrophe has not occurred.
You pressure the people who will listen. I mean, one of the things you hear a lot in the last year, people ignoramuses in the governments in places like Britain will say, we need to put more pressure on the Israelis to do X. And you go, “Well, in part that’s because they will listen.” If you go, “We need to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs in Iran to persuade them that Hamas are really bad and they shouldn’t be doing this,” what the hell do you think they’re going to do? Are they even going to listen to you? They don’t give a damn. You’re talking totally different worlds. Not just a different language. It’s a different world.
And by the way, that happens in Israel. I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel. When the Hostage Families Forum came about, I spent a lot of time there. I got to know a lot of the families. And they’re remarkable. But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that a lot of them, they protest outside Netanyahu’s house. They use clacks and horns and make sure he can never sleep. They will put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied hands and so on.
I think as much sympathy as you can for these families, the plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year, a day, an hour is intolerable. But there’s a reason why the families protested Netanyahu, and that’s because Sinwar didn’t care. That wouldn’t work if you said, “Understand my plight. I’m a Jewish mother and my daughter is thing.” You think Sinwar the heads of Hamas care? You think the leaders in Qatar who host them care?
The Qatari emir’s mother when Sinwar was killed, praised Sinwar. You couldn’t talk that language to these people, but you can talk that language to the elected prime minister of Israel because that, first of all, he’s somebody who might listen to your pressure, could be pressured. And secondly he’s simply the only person you can pressure. There’s no one else. Hamas doesn’t care. Hezbollah doesn’t care. Iranian revolutionary government doesn’t care.
I think it should be called out that, yes, it can feel that way from the lived experience. But Hamas is very clearly since we’re talking about Netanyahu, Hamas is evil. Okay. Now, you can still in that context discuss the degree to which Netanyahu is the right leader for this moment, and whether he goes too far, whether he’s too politically selfish in the decisions he makes, whether he’s too much a warmonger, whether he’s utilizing the war for his own political gains and is not caring about the death of civilians in Gaza, for example, but more caring about his own political maintaining power.
That’s a perspective that I could steal, man. And that’s a perspective worth we’re discussing, and that’s a perspective of many in Israel hold. When they criticize Netanyahu. He’s increasingly less and less popular.
There were protests. And the police were tired because they’d spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned raucous, not to say violent. Well, sometimes violent and you could say, “Well, if you see that something is dividing your country this much, might you stop?” There is a claim by some people that one of the things that prompted the 7th was that Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population.
Significant chunk of it every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services and so on, and thought, “Good. Now is the time.” In other words, what I quoted Sinwar as saying earlier when he was in prison in Israel was this thing, “One day you’ll be weak, and then I’ll strike.” Maybe that is one of the things that Sinwar thought Israel was very weak. It had been divided, and therefore the time to strike.
There’s an argument against that which is that the 7th was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began. So you can look at it several ways, but you could use that. You could say, “Look, your nation was divided. Don’t push through anymore on that.” There’s lots of things like that. You could say that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception. There were critics of his, including critics who were in the war cabinet who thought that he was too focused on Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah.
Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. There’s them and many other criticisms that people make of him. I’ve interviewed, I think every political leader in Israel from right to left, pretty much, and I have to say, I don’t think there’s any of them that wouldn’t have responded similarly to the 7th of October to the way he has.
You think he guided everything? Why would that be? Other than the fact that his name, as Marc Stein once said, starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish.
I thought, let me just express this, I thought like a lot of people, when I heard about the hostages, my immediate instinct was they’re all dead, they’re all going to be dead, we’ll never see them again. And that was the attitude of a lot of Israelis. But although there are still hostages being held, and as I’ve always said the war could end tomorrow if they were handed back, or at least the beginning of the end of the war could begin tomorrow if they were handed back, nevertheless, because of the actions of not just Netanyahu but The Israeli government, most of the hostages have been returned, did not expect this to happen. Hamas has not been completely destroyed, but it has been very, very significantly degraded, and you end up in the definition of what a total destruction of Hamas would look like, but they are not anywhere near the capability they were in November of 2023.
Their leadership has almost all been killed. The second tier of leadership almost all gone, and this is a just response to what Hamas did. The moment Netanyahu’s reputation in Israel was at a low early on because of what had happened, but there’s no doubt, and as I say in the final chapter of the book, I mean General Slim had this phrase from Defeat Into Victory, Israel isn’t a victory yet in this conflict. But when in September last year, there were a set of operational successes, so extraordinary that, I mean, it was just like every day’s news was… There was one day, I remember when after the Assad regime file, when the Israeli Air Force took out the entirety of the Syrian Air Force in a day because they didn’t want it falling into the hands of the new Jihadist administration in Syria.
It was story number four on the BBC News website. The leadership of Hezbollah, gone, gone. The second and third tiers of Hezbollah, gone or wounded. Iran’s Rolls-Royce, destroyed. These are very, very significant military achievements and are, in my mind, a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies to destroy the Jewish state. Would another Israeli leader have been able to hold firm as Netanyahu has? I don’t know but I do know that any of them would’ve done something similar or would’ve tried to do something similar, because there’s no country on earth, no democracy on earth, which could possibly not respond to such an atrocity.
He says you can meet it everywhere in the academy of sciences and in the games that children play in the yard. But Grossman’s great insight is he says everywhere it tells you not about the Jews, but about the person making the claim. And the most important gift he gives in his analysis is when he says, describes it as a mirror to the person who is making the claims, culminating in this phrase I’ve been trying to make popular, which is he says, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you you’re guilty of.” It’s a searingly brilliant insight. The Iranian revolutionary government accuses Israel of being a colonial power. The Iranian revolutionary government has been colonizing the Middle East throughout our lifetimes. The Turkish government accuses the Jewish state of being guilty of occupation. Do you know Northern Cyprus? Turks have been occupying half of Cyprus since the 1970s. Cyprus is an EU member state and Turkey is in NATO. So you can do this on and on. The people who accuse the Jewish state like the people who accuse Jews of something almost without fail is the thing they’re guilty of. Look at the supporters of Hamas and Hamas. One of the things they say is that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate killing.
Hamas, hello? What were you doing on the 7th? If you see, they’re these crazy guys online who claim, repeatedly claim that for some reason Israeli soldiers will rape Palestinians when they meet them, whether in a prison or on the battlefield or in a hospital. It just erupts occasionally. These people go around and say, “Oh, my God, the IDF are rapists.” Excuse me? You are the ones who spent the years after 2016 saying, “Believe all women,” then from the 7th of October said, believe all women except for Jewish women who say they’ve been raped or seen their friends raped, and then you say, “Aha, the Jews are rapists.”
You’ve been carrying water for rapists and then go and accuse the Jews of rape. It just works. Every way you do it, it works. I do think the thing of psychological projection in the case of Israel is wild. I mean, it is wild. By the way, there’s an interesting thing on this that I tried to get into in the book, which is this thing of why did so much of the world respond the way it did? I mean, we’re sitting in New York. There was not one protest against Hamas in New York after the 7th of October.
The Believe All Women crowd didn’t come out against Hamas’s rapes. The Black Lives Matter movement did not turn their attention to the killing of Israeli children or anything. Nobody did it. Nobody did it. The one thing that did happen very prominently was that people came out to attack the people who’d been attacked. And as I say in the opening of the book, I saw that myself down the road from him at Times Square on October the 8th, October the frigging 8th, the protests are in Times Square against Israel, justifying the attacks that were still going on. And this is something that deserves deep self-examination on behalf of people in the West who’ve seen this movement overwhelm parts of our society, I mean degraded parts but parts, bits of the universities and so on. And I think there’s an explanation for it, by the way, which again goes back to that issue of projection. When you and I last talked on camera, we were talking about my last book, The War on the West. And I remember saying to you there that one of the things I was talking about in that book was the deeply, deeply, wildly biased, unfair, and inaccurate estimation of the Western past, whereby America’s original sin had to be identified and the original sin is slavery. So America has an original sin.
Does Ghana have an original sin? No one knows. No one really will think it polite to point one out, and you go on and on with these things that I identified in The War in the West, these sins of the West. And they have in recent years been reduced to the claim that countries like the one we’re sitting in are guilty of what? Colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, genocide, and a couple of others you can throw in probably. One of the things I remember saying to you when we spoke about that was that one of the deep problems of setting up that system of thought, pseudo thought, non-thought, would be thought is that there’s nothing you can do about it. Even if it was true, there’s nothing you can do about it.
If it turned out that your ancestors in the 18th century once owned a slave, what are you going to do? There’s no mechanism to forgive or be forgiven because you didn’t do it, and there’s no one in life who could accept the apology. And I remember setting it up there in The War on the West, I set up this very, very risky, dangerous, unforgivable, unforgiving thing that had been set up about our societies. But I would say that since October the 7th, there has been an answer for a certain type of person, which is I am from a society where I have been told I am guilty of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and more.
I’ve been told all of these things. I have been put in an ungetoutable of situation of moral burden that can never be relieved because I can’t ask anyone’s forgiveness and nobody can forgive me, but ah, here’s a country which I can accuse of all of these things in the here and now, load my energies, my burdens onto and what’s more I might be able to end it and by doing so would relieve myself. In other words, to slight just, I quote, I tweak Grossman with the people in America elsewhere who’ve fallen into this trap, I tweak him by saying, “On this occasion, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’ve been told you’re guilty of.”
There is no reason why if the Palestinians got another state either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, there is no reason why we should expect the economy of Yemen to boom. It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women or anything else. The most likely thing is you simply have another failed Arab state run by a proxy of Tehran. That’s the best case scenario.
And by the way, even lifelong defenders of the Palestinian cause like Salman Rushdie. He said recently, he said, “I’ve always been a supporter of the Palestinian people in their course, but it is an unavoidable fact that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it simply be at best another front for the Iranian regime in Iran.” The best. So why the passion? Why the unbelievable wild passion about this? And I say some of it can be, should be argued out and so on, and some of it can be explained, but there’s definitely a realm of it, a layer of it, which is simply at that level of this excites something within me, this excites something within me.
But anyway, and I was really struck by the fact that this man, man of great insight happened to disagree politically, but said to me, “But Douglas is always like this.” And he said, “Look at Tony Blair came into power in 1997 wanting to reform education in the UK, ends up trying to remake the Middle East.” I mean, as I say, one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists and most conspiracy theories, not to say that there aren’t some that do actually turn out to be to have something in them. It had happens. A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true lab league.
But in general, the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall into this is, as I say, it’s a very low grade, low resolution. Look at the world by people who clearly have never seen the wildness of actions in the world and the way that they reverberate and the number of events. I mean, I once spoke some years ago to a politician who literally said to me, I won’t name the country, but said to me, “Can you help us out with just how to cope with the day and understand the day-to-day struggle we’re having with the cycle?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” And they said, “Our experience in government is that every day, something comes up, which we have to firefight,” and that’s what we do that day. And then the next day something else comes up, which we have to fight and we’re not getting our policies done. And I just thought, for me, that rings an awful lot truer, then that country gets the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family telling them, it’s like, “Come on.”
But the other thing I learned from that particular friend and others was this thing that, and again, it’s very hard for the western mindset, very hard for the American mindset in particular, that there is such a thing as fanaticism, real fanaticism and real ideological and real religious fanaticism, and the thing that I describe leads to the death cult mindset. That fanaticism is something which is very easy for the West to forget because we haven’t seen it in a while. We get very distant echoes of it in our own societies, really, and we’re highly attuned to hear them, which is good in some ways.
But Khomeinism not only vastly set back the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed to keep it in subjugation since 1979. And your question of why gets to one of the biggest questions, really, the answer to which has to be understood, which is, it’s what Solzhenitsyn says at one point in Gulag Archipelago, in that passage where he describes, “When we heard the footsteps on the staircase and the knock was on our neighbor’s door and we knew our neighbor was being taken away, why did we not stop them?”
And in the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, it’s the same answer as, whether it’s Hamas governing Gaza with whoever the people in Gaza are who would’ve liked to have seen them overthrown, people don’t realize that despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other guy might kill you. And that when the Green Revolution in 2009 started in Iran, why was it put down? Why didn’t it work? The sort of Iranians who I really hope one day get their country back, why did all these smart young students and others, why after they came out, why was it put down? It was put down because the Basij militia will shoot you in the head and they’ll take you to a prison, as they did with the Iranian students, and they’ll rape you with bottles and kill you. And even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way to tell the rest of society not to do it again.
We know it happens like that from films, but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale, on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate of brutality, and that’s how they stay empower. And one other thing on that, by the way, which is, I was reminded of this the other day, thinking about this, what I’ve just described as a sort of a problem in democracies is that we like to think everyone thinks like us, and we’d like everyone to be like us, and we believe fictions that we’re taught in films, like everyone basically wants the same things as us, and you go, you haven’t stepped outside the walls of the city if you think that.
But the second thing is this thing of the death cults of why we sort of singly fail to understand that this is possible. Khomeinism is both very specific and also very strongly linked to totalitarian and radical and extremist death cult movements that are not that far in our past. I mean, there’s a moment when Oriana Fallaci interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, one of the very few western journalists to do so, she says to him, “These people in the street, this movement, this revolution you’ve begun, it’s guided by hate, it’s hate, it’s all hate.” And Khomeini says, “No, no, it’s love. It’s love.” And it’s actually a scene that appears in The Satanic Verses of Rushdie where that exact same thing happens.
But I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, but how can you explain to a western mindset that that’s something that’s going on, that there are people directed by this hate that calls itself love? And I was reminded of a book I haven’t read since I was probably a teenager or something, made a great impression on me then. Did you ever read the Tragic Sense of Life? Miguel de Unamuno, a great Spanish existentialist philosopher, died in the ’30s. Unamuno had an encounter with students at the university in the ’30s when he realized, I mean this is the early period of the Francoists, de Rivera and all those people. Unamuno is at this meeting and the chant goes up from the eager students who have fallen into this sort of Falangist Francoist ideology already, they end up chanting in front of him as he’s trying to defend the principles by which he has lived his life. They end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la Muerte,” long live death. Long live death. And he tries to explain to them, this is a necrophilic chant.
I have to ask, because you mentioned that interview, you had a good interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7th, and I’ve been very fortunate to get the opportunity to interview a few world leaders, it looks like I’ll interview Vladimir Putin and others. Want to have a general question about how do you interview people like this? Maybe to put your historian hat on of how do you approach the interview of world leaders such that you can gain a deeper understanding in the hope that that adds to the compassion in the world. So I have a deep sense that understanding people you might hate helps, in the long arc of history, add compassion to the world. But even just to add understanding is difficult in those kinds of contexts, and maybe it’s more useful to think about, from a historian perspective, of how you need to interview somebody like Hitler or Stalin or Churchill, FDR during World War II. I think about this a lot, especially if it’s a 2, 3, 4, 5 hour conversation.
But I do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and worry about their opinion, and no one else’s, really, and you just keep your own guiding light. That’s what’s always done it for me, is that I’ve always said I wouldn’t care if I was the only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me, but it doesn’t, fundamentally that’s not why…
I’ll send you Churchill’s great speech on the death of Chamberlain. I mean it. He says one of the most wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelenskyy, because one of Churchill’s greatnesses was his magnanimity, and when his great political opponent, Chamberlain died in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, he could have used the opportunity, and we might even say that some politicians in our day won’t be able to resist the opportunity, he could have used the opportunity to say, you see, I was right, and Chamberlain didn’t know what the hell he was doing and he’s led us into this mess, and you should have all listened to me, because that would’ve been a good time. It would’ve been a good time to say that, that would’ve been one for the win, as they say.
But Churchill doesn’t do that in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the world, and how you can do it successfully. He very movingly says, he doesn’t even mention the name of Hitler, he says, “What were Neville Chamberlain’s flaws?” He says, “Desiring of human peace, to be seeking peace,” and he says, “and the curse that he had was he was led astray by a very wicked man.” But then he has this great passage where Churchill says, beautiful resonant passage about how, he says, “It’s not given to men happily for them, for otherwise life would prove intolerable to foresee or to predict to any great extent the unfolding course of events.” And he says, “In one phase, men seem to have been right and in another they’re proved wrong,” and then a different scale of values emerges.
And he says, “What is the worth of all this?” He says, “The only guide to a man is his conscience, the only shield his memory, his rectitude, and the sincerity of his actions.” In fact, he says, ” It doesn’t matter what happens, if you have this,” finishes it he says, “However the fates may play, but if you have this shield to guard you,” he says, “you march always in the ranks of honor.” All that can guide a man is that. If you lose sight of it, and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point, then it’s a challenge, and then you get buffeted by the tos and throes of the waves of popular opinion, and that’s dangerous. But if you keep sight and hold onto what you believe, a million billion foes don’t matter.
All right, what gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on, human civilization? You’ve been covering some of the darker aspects, The Madness of Crowds, the madness of geopolitics, the madness of wars. Sometimes when the sun shines through the clouds and there’s a smile on Douglas Murray’s face, what’s the source of the smile and the warmth?
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Episode highlight
- 0:24 – Introduction
- 2:38 – War in Ukraine
- 6:24 – Trump and Zelenskyy
- 20:54 – Putin
- 41:47 – Peace
- 51:38 – Zelenskyy
- 1:06:17 – Israel-Palestine
- 1:17:04 – Hamas
- 1:31:37 – Corruption
- 1:34:47 – Gaza
- 1:55:25 – Benjamin Netanyahu
- 2:12:36 – Hate
- 2:37:06 – Iran
- 2:47:55 – Interview advice
- 3:02:19 – War
Episode highlight
Douglas Murray
… end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la Muerte. Long-lived death.” They have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, “We love death more than you love live.”
… end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la Muerte. Long-lived death.” They have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, “We love death more than you love live.”
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of the War in the West, the Madness of Crowds and his new book On Democracies and Death Cults. We talk about Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics, and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly. As I always try to do for all topics, I will also talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including the next episode of this podcast. We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sycophants, and sociopaths roam the vast beautiful dark land of the internet. It’s hard to know who to trust. I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others. Some are insightful and some are delusional. The problem is it’s hard to tell which is which unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor.
The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of the War in the West, the Madness of Crowds and his new book On Democracies and Death Cults. We talk about Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics, and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly. As I always try to do for all topics, I will also talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including the next episode of this podcast. We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sycophants, and sociopaths roam the vast beautiful dark land of the internet. It’s hard to know who to trust. I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others. Some are insightful and some are delusional. The problem is it’s hard to tell which is which unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor.
I recommend you listen to many sources who disagree with each other and tried to pick up wisdom from each. Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who have spent most of their lives living there. Whether it’s Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia. Let’s try together to not be cogs in the machine of outrage, and instead to reach toward reason and compassion. There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today. Plus, there are thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire. Human civilization hangs in the balance. The 21st century is a new geopolitical puzzle, all of us are tasked with solving. Let’s not mess it up. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Douglas Murray.
War in Ukraine
Lex Fridman
What have you understood about the war in Ukraine from your visits there? Just looking at the big picture of your understanding of the invasion of February 24th, 2022, and the war in the three years since?
What have you understood about the war in Ukraine from your visits there? Just looking at the big picture of your understanding of the invasion of February 24th, 2022, and the war in the three years since?
Douglas Murray
I mean, several things has political angles, which are forever changing. But on the human level, as you know, if you visit troops, frontline troops, you have that admiration for people defending their country, defending their homes, defending their families. Struck by the way in which that is at a remove from the sort of political noise and the media noise and much more. It’s very easy to get caught up in the to’s and fro’s of today’s news, but that to my mind is that’s the single thing that struck me most in my visits there. Is just the people I’ve met who are fighting for a cause, which at that level is unavoidable, undeniable.
I mean, several things has political angles, which are forever changing. But on the human level, as you know, if you visit troops, frontline troops, you have that admiration for people defending their country, defending their homes, defending their families. Struck by the way in which that is at a remove from the sort of political noise and the media noise and much more. It’s very easy to get caught up in the to’s and fro’s of today’s news, but that to my mind is that’s the single thing that struck me most in my visits there. Is just the people I’ve met who are fighting for a cause, which at that level is unavoidable, undeniable.
Lex Fridman
So, the thing that struck you that’s different from the media turmoil is just the reality of war?
So, the thing that struck you that’s different from the media turmoil is just the reality of war?
Douglas Murray
Yeah, of course. I mean, people who have either lived under Russian occupation from invading armies and then come back out into the world, having been liberated as in late 2022. Or the people now organized most recently there in recent weeks, who were just getting on with their job as soldiers whilst the world was talking about them.
Yeah, of course. I mean, people who have either lived under Russian occupation from invading armies and then come back out into the world, having been liberated as in late 2022. Or the people now organized most recently there in recent weeks, who were just getting on with their job as soldiers whilst the world was talking about them.
Lex Fridman
When were you there early on in this escalated war of ’22?
When were you there early on in this escalated war of ’22?
Douglas Murray
Yes, first time was, I was with the Ukrainian Armed Forces when they retook Kherson, and I was back in recent weeks. And was there when the Trump-Zelensky blow up happened. In fact, I was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when I was watching it.
Yes, first time was, I was with the Ukrainian Armed Forces when they retook Kherson, and I was back in recent weeks. And was there when the Trump-Zelensky blow up happened. In fact, I was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when I was watching it.
Lex Fridman
How’s the morale? How’s the way the content of the conversations you’ve heard different from the two visits separated by, I guess, two years?
How’s the morale? How’s the way the content of the conversations you’ve heard different from the two visits separated by, I guess, two years?
Douglas Murray
One level, I mean, nothing has changed much. It is not a total standoff because intermittently each side gains territory from the others. I mean, there’d been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.
One level, I mean, nothing has changed much. It is not a total standoff because intermittently each side gains territory from the others. I mean, there’d been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.
Lex Fridman
I think my experience of the soldiers, the people of Ukraine early on in the war, there’s a intense optimism about the outcomes of the war. There’s a sense that they’re going to win. And the definition of what win means was like, all the territory is going to be one back.
I think my experience of the soldiers, the people of Ukraine early on in the war, there’s a intense optimism about the outcomes of the war. There’s a sense that they’re going to win. And the definition of what win means was like, all the territory is going to be one back.
Douglas Murray
Yeah, I certainly on the front lines facing Crimea was became quite familiar with people who thought that the Ukrainians in late 2022 would even be able to get Crimea back. And that struck me even at the time, and I thought that that was an overreach.
Yeah, I certainly on the front lines facing Crimea was became quite familiar with people who thought that the Ukrainians in late 2022 would even be able to get Crimea back. And that struck me even at the time, and I thought that that was an overreach.
Lex Fridman
And now, I think the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited the second time, are more exhausted. The morale, the dreams, the certainty of victory has maybe faded from the forefront of their minds.
And now, I think the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited the second time, are more exhausted. The morale, the dreams, the certainty of victory has maybe faded from the forefront of their minds.
Douglas Murray
Well, three years of war will tire out anyone.
Well, three years of war will tire out anyone.
Trump and Zelenskyy
Lex Fridman
What did you think of the blow up between Zelensky and Trump as you’re sitting there in the dugout?
What did you think of the blow up between Zelensky and Trump as you’re sitting there in the dugout?
Douglas Murray
Well, it was a very disturbing place to watch it from, perhaps anywhere would’ve been. And obviously, it was a meeting that shouldn’t have happened. It was far too early.
Well, it was a very disturbing place to watch it from, perhaps anywhere would’ve been. And obviously, it was a meeting that shouldn’t have happened. It was far too early.
Lex Fridman
Why do you think so? There’s not enough actual pathways to peace on the table?
Why do you think so? There’s not enough actual pathways to peace on the table?
Douglas Murray
Well, I think the mineral deal, I mean, I love the fact that everyone’s now an expert in Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits, but-
Well, I think the mineral deal, I mean, I love the fact that everyone’s now an expert in Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits, but-
Lex Fridman
I think as I’ve learned, and we’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, I’m learning that everybody’s an expert on geopolitics and the history of war on the internet.
I think as I’ve learned, and we’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, I’m learning that everybody’s an expert on geopolitics and the history of war on the internet.
Douglas Murray
And now mineral deposits, obviously.
And now mineral deposits, obviously.
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
Douglas Murray
I’m really speaking of the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here. But no, from what I could see the deal that the American administration was trying to get the Ukrainian government to sign, it was too early to force. The Ukrainians were ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure. And I think certainly, Zelensky actually wasn’t expecting to go until pretty much the day before, was obviously visibly tired and exhausted. Again, as you are after that amount of pressure for that long time. I mean, the thing that struck me, and I said this in my column, the New York Post from there, that the thing that struck me was I said to some of the soldiers I was with, what do you make of this? And one of them just said to me, “Well, we’re advised not to follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this,” but of course everyone has Instagram or scrolls and among dog pictures and the hot women or whatever is what happened in the Oval. But what struck me was this same guy and saying, “I’ve got a job to do.”
I’m really speaking of the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here. But no, from what I could see the deal that the American administration was trying to get the Ukrainian government to sign, it was too early to force. The Ukrainians were ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure. And I think certainly, Zelensky actually wasn’t expecting to go until pretty much the day before, was obviously visibly tired and exhausted. Again, as you are after that amount of pressure for that long time. I mean, the thing that struck me, and I said this in my column, the New York Post from there, that the thing that struck me was I said to some of the soldiers I was with, what do you make of this? And one of them just said to me, “Well, we’re advised not to follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this,” but of course everyone has Instagram or scrolls and among dog pictures and the hot women or whatever is what happened in the Oval. But what struck me was this same guy and saying, “I’ve got a job to do.”
Lex Fridman
Right. And there’s a clarity and a wisdom to that. But your job is bigger than that, right? Is to understand the politics as well. And what do you think about the politics of that moment? Because that was a real opportunity to come together and make progress on peace, right? And by all accounts was not a successful step forward.
Right. And there’s a clarity and a wisdom to that. But your job is bigger than that, right? Is to understand the politics as well. And what do you think about the politics of that moment? Because that was a real opportunity to come together and make progress on peace, right? And by all accounts was not a successful step forward.
Douglas Murray
I don’t think by any account, it was a successful step forward. Unless to some extent it was a play, from DC to say to Putin, “Look, we doffed off Zelensky and now give us something.” That’s the only remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it. But I think it was just one of those extremely, I mean, just awful political moments. Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated by the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington. It was only a week after the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator, and people and the administration implying that Ukraine has started the war. And I think that must be for Zelensky, a pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to be in. And I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering because it would be bewildering.
I don’t think by any account, it was a successful step forward. Unless to some extent it was a play, from DC to say to Putin, “Look, we doffed off Zelensky and now give us something.” That’s the only remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it. But I think it was just one of those extremely, I mean, just awful political moments. Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated by the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington. It was only a week after the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator, and people and the administration implying that Ukraine has started the war. And I think that must be for Zelensky, a pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to be in. And I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering because it would be bewildering.
Lex Fridman
I think the sad thing to me also on the mundane details of that meeting and just the unfortunate way that meetings happen, I think it’s true that he was also exhausted. There was a dickhead, a reporter that was asked the question about outfit in a way that, listen, Zelensky, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. He’s an emotional being, for better or for worse. And there’s a dumb dickhead of a reporter-
I think the sad thing to me also on the mundane details of that meeting and just the unfortunate way that meetings happen, I think it’s true that he was also exhausted. There was a dickhead, a reporter that was asked the question about outfit in a way that, listen, Zelensky, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. He’s an emotional being, for better or for worse. And there’s a dumb dickhead of a reporter-
Douglas Murray
Margie Taylor Green’s boyfriend. He is, yeah, yeah.
Margie Taylor Green’s boyfriend. He is, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
The things you know. See, you’re a real journalist.
The things you know. See, you’re a real journalist.
Douglas Murray
I’m all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of thing, but it means that you get some people in who are sort of, yeah, from a bloglanders. Nothing wrong with that, but it means that you get somebody who will do something like that. The problem with that interaction, as I saw it, was that guy asked that disrespectful question, and I think it was disrespectful. I’ll very quickly say why. I think that when a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect or at least concession that the other man has come from the realm of war. And that if you are sitting in a political environment where you talk about people being destroyed and decimated and defenestrated and much more to a man who’s for whom, none of that is metaphorical. I think that’s extremely hard to accept.
I’m all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of thing, but it means that you get some people in who are sort of, yeah, from a bloglanders. Nothing wrong with that, but it means that you get somebody who will do something like that. The problem with that interaction, as I saw it, was that guy asked that disrespectful question, and I think it was disrespectful. I’ll very quickly say why. I think that when a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect or at least concession that the other man has come from the realm of war. And that if you are sitting in a political environment where you talk about people being destroyed and decimated and defenestrated and much more to a man who’s for whom, none of that is metaphorical. I think that’s extremely hard to accept.
And I think that probably also at that moment, there was a sort of sense of Zelensky is being disrespected by being asked about what he’s wearing when as everyone knows, Churchill during World War II used to wear his fatigues on foreign visit. But [inaudible 00:12:19] just that is to remind people that you are coming from the realm of war. And I think that probably in that moment, one of the things that would’ve been going through his head would be, I mean, if this was Putin sitting here being assaulted by a journalist, you’d hope your host stepped in and defended you.
Let me try this one out. I mean, if a journalist in the Oval Office, if Putin was sitting there or a putative journalist said to Putin, everyone knows you’ve had a lot of facial work done, and word is you’ve used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use. Can you comment on that? You’d say, well, that’s a disrespectful question for journalists to ask, and it’s a little bit off what needs to be gone over. And it is the same thing with Zelensky with his outfit. I think it was just petty and threw things off in a bad way.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I know it was probably researched because I think Zelensky was explained this three years ago at the beginning of the war, why he wears what he wears, and he’s been consistent wearing the same-
Yeah, I know it was probably researched because I think Zelensky was explained this three years ago at the beginning of the war, why he wears what he wears, and he’s been consistent wearing the same-
Douglas Murray
By the way, it’s an example of the frivolity of a lot of the attempts to understand what’s going on. I mean, my view is that since actually most people, in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything. One of the things that we always do is to seize on minor and really quite unimportant things. I mean, every site does it. Look at the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office in the Obama years. I didn’t want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after eight years because it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama’s foreign policy. It was just an easy shorthand. I think it’s the same, we’re always tempted to that.
By the way, it’s an example of the frivolity of a lot of the attempts to understand what’s going on. I mean, my view is that since actually most people, in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything. One of the things that we always do is to seize on minor and really quite unimportant things. I mean, every site does it. Look at the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office in the Obama years. I didn’t want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after eight years because it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama’s foreign policy. It was just an easy shorthand. I think it’s the same, we’re always tempted to that.
Lex Fridman
But the thing is, I think you mentioned Putin, I think Putin would’ve been able to respond himself to that journalist effectively, and he would’ve done it in Russian.
But the thing is, I think you mentioned Putin, I think Putin would’ve been able to respond himself to that journalist effectively, and he would’ve done it in Russian.
Douglas Murray
Oh, yeah, the language thing.
Oh, yeah, the language thing.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So I wanted to sort of lay out several just unfortunate things that happened in these situations. I think it happens in all peace negotiations, and it’s funny how history can turn in moments like this. I do think there’s a dickhead reporter combined with the fact that, with all due respect, but Zelensky’s English sometimes is not very good.
Yeah. So I wanted to sort of lay out several just unfortunate things that happened in these situations. I think it happens in all peace negotiations, and it’s funny how history can turn in moments like this. I do think there’s a dickhead reporter combined with the fact that, with all due respect, but Zelensky’s English sometimes is not very good.
Douglas Murray
Yes. And apart from anything else, if had have agreed to have not done it in English, he would’ve bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed. Yeah.
Yes. And apart from anything else, if had have agreed to have not done it in English, he would’ve bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And have the wit, the guys funny, witty, intelligent. He could do that in the native language of whether it’s Ukrainian or Russian, to be able to respond and get the interpreter. So all of that is really unfortunate, because I think in those little moments, it’s a dance, and there’s an opportunity there. The Republicans, the right-wing in the United States have a general skepticism of Zelensky, but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way. It can turn, it can change, it can evolve.
Yeah. And have the wit, the guys funny, witty, intelligent. He could do that in the native language of whether it’s Ukrainian or Russian, to be able to respond and get the interpreter. So all of that is really unfortunate, because I think in those little moments, it’s a dance, and there’s an opportunity there. The Republicans, the right-wing in the United States have a general skepticism of Zelensky, but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way. It can turn, it can change, it can evolve.
Douglas Murray
It’s very interesting why it has happened. Why do you think it’s happened?
It’s very interesting why it has happened. Why do you think it’s happened?
Lex Fridman
Politics in the United States is so dumb that at the very beginning it could just be reduced to… Well, the left went Putin bad, Zelensky good. Rah, rah, Ukrainian flags. Therefore, the right must go the opposite.
Politics in the United States is so dumb that at the very beginning it could just be reduced to… Well, the left went Putin bad, Zelensky good. Rah, rah, Ukrainian flags. Therefore, the right must go the opposite.
Douglas Murray
Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.
Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Sometimes it’s literally as dumb as that. Let’s each pick a side and call the other dumb.
Sometimes it’s literally as dumb as that. Let’s each pick a side and call the other dumb.
Douglas Murray
I had a line I used recently, the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the memes. It is sort like that, isn’t it?
I had a line I used recently, the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the memes. It is sort like that, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Douglas Murray
Because yes, I mean, I can understand the people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or pride flags or trans flags in their bio then put Ukrainian flags in their bio despite almost suddenly not knowing where Ukraine was. And if that happens, inevitable instinct of a lot of people who aren’t really thinking is to say, “That’s really annoying. These people are really annoying, I’ll sock it to them.” But that’s where you’ve got to try to rise above that and say, “Actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn’t depend on my tolerance for memes online today.”
Because yes, I mean, I can understand the people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or pride flags or trans flags in their bio then put Ukrainian flags in their bio despite almost suddenly not knowing where Ukraine was. And if that happens, inevitable instinct of a lot of people who aren’t really thinking is to say, “That’s really annoying. These people are really annoying, I’ll sock it to them.” But that’s where you’ve got to try to rise above that and say, “Actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn’t depend on my tolerance for memes online today.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So, I think the memes can be broken through in meetings like the one that happened between Zelensky and Trump. There can been real comradery. I’ve seen the skill of that just recently having researched deeply and interacted with Narendra Modi, here’s somebody who has the skill for his country, for his situation, being able to somehow be friends with Putin and friends with Zelensky and friends with Trump, and friends with Biden and friends with Obama.
Yeah. So, I think the memes can be broken through in meetings like the one that happened between Zelensky and Trump. There can been real comradery. I’ve seen the skill of that just recently having researched deeply and interacted with Narendra Modi, here’s somebody who has the skill for his country, for his situation, being able to somehow be friends with Putin and friends with Zelensky and friends with Trump, and friends with Biden and friends with Obama.
Douglas Murray
He was very skillful.
He was very skillful.
Lex Fridman
That while still being strong for his country and fundamentally a nationalist figure who’s very non globalist, not anything but pro-India, India First, Nation First. In fact, Nation First with a very specific idea what that nation represents.
That while still being strong for his country and fundamentally a nationalist figure who’s very non globalist, not anything but pro-India, India First, Nation First. In fact, Nation First with a very specific idea what that nation represents.
Douglas Murray
Sure.
Sure.
Lex Fridman
And that Zelensky could do all of those things, but have the skill of navigating the Trump room. Because every single leader has their own peculiar quirks that need to be navigated.
And that Zelensky could do all of those things, but have the skill of navigating the Trump room. Because every single leader has their own peculiar quirks that need to be navigated.
Douglas Murray
Yes, the obvious one, I mean, I don’t want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky’s fault, I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to say, “Yet again, as he has done for three years, thank you to America and American people and American politicians from across the aisle for your support for my country in its hour of need, but we’re deeply grateful.” And because he for once forgot to say that.
Yes, the obvious one, I mean, I don’t want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky’s fault, I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to say, “Yet again, as he has done for three years, thank you to America and American people and American politicians from across the aisle for your support for my country in its hour of need, but we’re deeply grateful.” And because he for once forgot to say that.
Lex Fridman
I think it’s not that simple. I think there’s a-
I think it’s not that simple. I think there’s a-
Douglas Murray
It’s not that simple. It’s one reason.
It’s not that simple. It’s one reason.
Lex Fridman
I think saying, thank you. He didn’t need to say, “Thank you.” There’s just-
I think saying, thank you. He didn’t need to say, “Thank you.” There’s just-
Douglas Murray
Well, that was what Vance leapt in on.
Well, that was what Vance leapt in on.
Lex Fridman
He’s just picking a thing to leap on. There’s a whole energy. You have to acknowledge in your way of being that you have been very Biden buddy buddy with the left for the last four years. There’s ways to fix that. Listen, these people are complicated narcissists, all of them, Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that. And you basically have to say a kind word to Trump, which is showing… There’s many ways of doing that. But one of them is saying, feeding the ego by acknowledging that he is one of the world’s greatest negotiators, right? “I’m glad we’re able to come to the table and negotiate together, because I believe you are the great negotiator/mediator that can actually bring a successful resolution to…” As opposed to have an energy of, it should be obvious to everybody that Ukrainian are the good guys and Russia is the bad guys.
He’s just picking a thing to leap on. There’s a whole energy. You have to acknowledge in your way of being that you have been very Biden buddy buddy with the left for the last four years. There’s ways to fix that. Listen, these people are complicated narcissists, all of them, Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that. And you basically have to say a kind word to Trump, which is showing… There’s many ways of doing that. But one of them is saying, feeding the ego by acknowledging that he is one of the world’s greatest negotiators, right? “I’m glad we’re able to come to the table and negotiate together, because I believe you are the great negotiator/mediator that can actually bring a successful resolution to…” As opposed to have an energy of, it should be obvious to everybody that Ukrainian are the good guys and Russia is the bad guys.
There’s this whole energy of entitlement that he brought. He forgot that there’s a new guy. You got to convince the new guy that this global mission, that this nation is on this war that is in many ways, the West versus the East. That there’s ideals, there’s whole histories here that this is a war worth winning. You have to convince them, right?
Douglas Murray
Yeah. No, sure. And they obviously failed on that occasion. But as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky not Putin being the dictator. I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the president’s comments on that saying that the big picture of Putin just saying, “This is a dictator.” And I think the people can be live enough to be able to recognize that you can make criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn’t mean you have to fall for Putin. And again, unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don’t have that capability.
Yeah. No, sure. And they obviously failed on that occasion. But as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky not Putin being the dictator. I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the president’s comments on that saying that the big picture of Putin just saying, “This is a dictator.” And I think the people can be live enough to be able to recognize that you can make criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn’t mean you have to fall for Putin. And again, unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don’t have that capability.
Putin
Lex Fridman
Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin?
Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin?
Douglas Murray
He’s a dictator who’s very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal opposition. He’s kleptomaniac of his country’s resources, has enriched himself as much as he could, as he has with the cronies around him. He’s not just acted to destroy internal opposition in Russia, but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth and killed people on our soil. As it happens, weapons of mass destruction, the use of polonium in the Center of London, not good. The use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of people in a charming Cathedral City like Salisbury. Not good. If the sort of apologists of Putin would say, “Well, he’s just a sort of tough man who’s looking after his house business,” he say. Well, I don’t think even if you think he has the right to do that, he should be doing it in third countries deliberately using weapons that are meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of British citizens. Yeah. I mean, that’s just for starters.
He’s a dictator who’s very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal opposition. He’s kleptomaniac of his country’s resources, has enriched himself as much as he could, as he has with the cronies around him. He’s not just acted to destroy internal opposition in Russia, but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth and killed people on our soil. As it happens, weapons of mass destruction, the use of polonium in the Center of London, not good. The use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of people in a charming Cathedral City like Salisbury. Not good. If the sort of apologists of Putin would say, “Well, he’s just a sort of tough man who’s looking after his house business,” he say. Well, I don’t think even if you think he has the right to do that, he should be doing it in third countries deliberately using weapons that are meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of British citizens. Yeah. I mean, that’s just for starters.
Lex Fridman
Do you think he’s actually popularly elected?
Do you think he’s actually popularly elected?
Douglas Murray
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
Do you think the results of the elections are fraudulent?
Do you think the results of the elections are fraudulent?
Douglas Murray
Yes. I mean-
Yes. I mean-
Lex Fridman
Do you think it’s possible that it’s just that the opposition has been eliminated and he’s legitimately popularly elected?
Do you think it’s possible that it’s just that the opposition has been eliminated and he’s legitimately popularly elected?
Douglas Murray
It definitely helps the chap if he’s killed all of his opponents.
It definitely helps the chap if he’s killed all of his opponents.
Lex Fridman
Something about using the term chap in that context is just marvelous.
Something about using the term chap in that context is just marvelous.
Douglas Murray
This is another, the sort of slightly Alice in Wonderland things recently about Zelensky as people are saying, “Well, he’s a dictator because he hasn’t held elections during a total war of self-defense.” And it’s like, “Well, if you are really, really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods, you’d at least notice that Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense.” But this doesn’t mean that you have to say that therefore, they should have Western style elections and freedom, that Russia is ready to go and become a western liberal democracy. It doesn’t mean any of that at all. At least note that this is what Putin is.
This is another, the sort of slightly Alice in Wonderland things recently about Zelensky as people are saying, “Well, he’s a dictator because he hasn’t held elections during a total war of self-defense.” And it’s like, “Well, if you are really, really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods, you’d at least notice that Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense.” But this doesn’t mean that you have to say that therefore, they should have Western style elections and freedom, that Russia is ready to go and become a western liberal democracy. It doesn’t mean any of that at all. At least note that this is what Putin is.
Lex Fridman
What do you think is the motivation for his invasion of Ukraine in ’22?
What do you think is the motivation for his invasion of Ukraine in ’22?
Douglas Murray
Well, it’s what he’s said for years, which is basically the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.
Well, it’s what he’s said for years, which is basically the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman
Do you think there is empire building components to that motivation?
Do you think there is empire building components to that motivation?
Douglas Murray
I would trust most of my friends in East and Central Europe who certainly do think that. There’s a reason why the Baltic countries are the countries that are spending highest in percentage of GDP on defense. And it’s because they’re very worried. I don’t think they’re faking it. I don’t think they’re faking it for me or for anyone else. I think the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.
I would trust most of my friends in East and Central Europe who certainly do think that. There’s a reason why the Baltic countries are the countries that are spending highest in percentage of GDP on defense. And it’s because they’re very worried. I don’t think they’re faking it. I don’t think they’re faking it for me or for anyone else. I think the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.
Lex Fridman
Do you think there’s a possibility that the war continues indefinitely, even if there’s a ceasefire in the peace reached, the war will resume, he will seek expansion even beyond Ukraine?
Do you think there’s a possibility that the war continues indefinitely, even if there’s a ceasefire in the peace reached, the war will resume, he will seek expansion even beyond Ukraine?
Douglas Murray
Yes. And the most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire, it’ll be a temporary pause. And whoever comes in as president after Trump, Putin will use the opportunity to advance again. Yes. Again, one of the things that I have heard from parts of the American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine. That that’s all he wants, and that he has no history of rhetoric or actions that suggest anything else. And again, it’s one of the reasons why it’s useful traveling to places and seeing things your own eyes. Because I very much remember being in the country of Georgia after Putin tried to invade in 2008. Again, people don’t have to be the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause. Just to recognize that it doesn’t seem to be the case that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin’s vision.
Yes. And the most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire, it’ll be a temporary pause. And whoever comes in as president after Trump, Putin will use the opportunity to advance again. Yes. Again, one of the things that I have heard from parts of the American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine. That that’s all he wants, and that he has no history of rhetoric or actions that suggest anything else. And again, it’s one of the reasons why it’s useful traveling to places and seeing things your own eyes. Because I very much remember being in the country of Georgia after Putin tried to invade in 2008. Again, people don’t have to be the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause. Just to recognize that it doesn’t seem to be the case that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin’s vision.
Lex Fridman
Do you see value and maybe depth and power to the realist perspective of all this? Somebody like John Mearsheimer’s formulation of all this, that in these invasions of Georgia, of Ukraine, it’s using military power to expand the sphere of influence in the region in a cold calculation of geopolitics.
Do you see value and maybe depth and power to the realist perspective of all this? Somebody like John Mearsheimer’s formulation of all this, that in these invasions of Georgia, of Ukraine, it’s using military power to expand the sphere of influence in the region in a cold calculation of geopolitics.
Douglas Murray
It’s interesting. One of the fascinating things about the last few years is that there’s been an act of sort of necromancy of certain figures were totally, totally debunked in the area of Ukraine, Mearsheimer, and in the case of Israel people like Finkelstein. And it’s been interesting because these are people that one hadn’t heard of for some years because they were not listened to, usually, for good reason. By the way, first of all, I’m very skeptical of the term realist in foreign policy because most people to some extent will say that they are a realist in foreign policy. Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists.
It’s interesting. One of the fascinating things about the last few years is that there’s been an act of sort of necromancy of certain figures were totally, totally debunked in the area of Ukraine, Mearsheimer, and in the case of Israel people like Finkelstein. And it’s been interesting because these are people that one hadn’t heard of for some years because they were not listened to, usually, for good reason. By the way, first of all, I’m very skeptical of the term realist in foreign policy because most people to some extent will say that they are a realist in foreign policy. Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists.
Lex Fridman
I would like to meet them.
I would like to meet them.
Douglas Murray
A surrealist foreign policy analyst.
A surrealist foreign policy analyst.
Lex Fridman
We did mention Alice in Wonderland, so.
We did mention Alice in Wonderland, so.
Douglas Murray
Yeah. I mean, maybe we should introduce the term, but… I mean, if you want to say, if you want to look gimlet-eyed, eyed out across the world, you’re a realist. I think the steel man of their argument would be Russia has or believes it has a sphere of influence. And is regrettable, but there’s very little we can do about that. That would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.
Yeah. I mean, maybe we should introduce the term, but… I mean, if you want to say, if you want to look gimlet-eyed, eyed out across the world, you’re a realist. I think the steel man of their argument would be Russia has or believes it has a sphere of influence. And is regrettable, but there’s very little we can do about that. That would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.
Lex Fridman
Well, to expand on that steel man, isn’t this how superpowers operate in the dark realist/surrealist way? Meaning the United States uses military power to have a sphere of influence over the whole globe, really. China appears to be willing to use military power to expand its sphere of influence.
Well, to expand on that steel man, isn’t this how superpowers operate in the dark realist/surrealist way? Meaning the United States uses military power to have a sphere of influence over the whole globe, really. China appears to be willing to use military power to expand its sphere of influence.
Douglas Murray
And political power, yeah, more importantly, in the case of China.
And political power, yeah, more importantly, in the case of China.
Lex Fridman
Political power.
Political power.
Douglas Murray
Non-kinetic warfare to take over areas. Hong Kong being the obvious one.
Non-kinetic warfare to take over areas. Hong Kong being the obvious one.
Lex Fridman
Behind that, isn’t there always a kinetic threat?
Behind that, isn’t there always a kinetic threat?
Douglas Murray
Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, you disappear some booksellers and students are protesting, of course. But to go back to this, yeah, of course. Okay. The countries believe they have or would like to have spheres of influence. I do think at some point that the so-called realists on that have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious regime. I mean, it’s not the easiest calculation always to make. You have to work out whether or not, for instance, it is true that if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kiev in the first weeks of the war in ’22, he would’ve gone straight on to other places.
Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, you disappear some booksellers and students are protesting, of course. But to go back to this, yeah, of course. Okay. The countries believe they have or would like to have spheres of influence. I do think at some point that the so-called realists on that have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious regime. I mean, it’s not the easiest calculation always to make. You have to work out whether or not, for instance, it is true that if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kiev in the first weeks of the war in ’22, he would’ve gone straight on to other places.
And maybe he would’ve done, maybe he would’ve taken his time, maybe he wouldn’t have done. And this is a very fine calculation that changes every week, let alone every year. My friends in Georgia I thought were wildly off the mark when they were believing that after 2008 they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership. And I thought that was completely unlikely. And I still think it’s unlikely and almost suddenly undesirable for Europe and for NATO, because you’ve got to be very careful. And obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine and has been since the ’90s, are you going to set up a trip wire to start World War 3? And that’s not a small thing to consider.
Lex Fridman
So what do you think the peace deal might look like, and what does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months?
So what do you think the peace deal might look like, and what does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months?
Douglas Murray
I just thought it would be regrettably the Ukrainian ceding territory in the east, and then making sure they rearm during whatever peace period comes afterwards.
I just thought it would be regrettably the Ukrainian ceding territory in the east, and then making sure they rearm during whatever peace period comes afterwards.
Lex Fridman
And probably, all four territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson.
And probably, all four territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson.
Douglas Murray
You couldn’t lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated on. And I think the ease with which non-Ukrainians are currently speaking about the Ukrainian ceding territory is concerning because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin’s rule, and people who have families in the rest of Ukraine and much more. And I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian occupied areas, and it’s brutal for the Ukrainian to be growing up in that territory. So, when people say, “Well, obviously Donetsk has to be given to Putin.” I think that is not as easier a thing if you are in Ukraine as it is if you’re sitting in New York say.
You couldn’t lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated on. And I think the ease with which non-Ukrainians are currently speaking about the Ukrainian ceding territory is concerning because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin’s rule, and people who have families in the rest of Ukraine and much more. And I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian occupied areas, and it’s brutal for the Ukrainian to be growing up in that territory. So, when people say, “Well, obviously Donetsk has to be given to Putin.” I think that is not as easier a thing if you are in Ukraine as it is if you’re sitting in New York say.
There is a school of thought that obviously President Trump to some extent was floating in recent weeks, which is that if a deal is done, a business deal in relation to minerals or anything else, you get a buffer zone of American businesses and investment. And therefore American business people in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to invade. I don’t follow that idea because not least there were Americans in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast…
Douglas Murray
… in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast. And we know from Hong Kong and other places, just because there are international financial interests in the region does not mean that a dictatorship will not, either militarily or covertly, take over. I don’t see American miners as being an effective buffer zone against Putin.
… in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast. And we know from Hong Kong and other places, just because there are international financial interests in the region does not mean that a dictatorship will not, either militarily or covertly, take over. I don’t see American miners as being an effective buffer zone against Putin.
Lex Fridman
By the way, what did you learn from talking to the children, Ukrainian children from those regions?
By the way, what did you learn from talking to the children, Ukrainian children from those regions?
Douglas Murray
Well, it’s heartbreaking because the only schooling is Russian schooling. Obviously, teaching the Russian language, Putin’s view of history and, effectively, indoctrination. And people can quibble with that term but it’s Putinesque indoctrination schools and any children or families that do not want that effectively have to hide and not go out. And I spoke to children and parents who’d had [inaudible 00:33:08], for instance, the Russians set up in ’22 and ’23 summer camps for the children of some of the areas that have been occupied and the children went off to the camps and then they didn’t come back, they were just stolen. It’s thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been stolen in this fashion, that’s not a small thing. It’s not got very much attention but, yes, children who would hide whenever the Russian troops came to the door.
Well, it’s heartbreaking because the only schooling is Russian schooling. Obviously, teaching the Russian language, Putin’s view of history and, effectively, indoctrination. And people can quibble with that term but it’s Putinesque indoctrination schools and any children or families that do not want that effectively have to hide and not go out. And I spoke to children and parents who’d had [inaudible 00:33:08], for instance, the Russians set up in ’22 and ’23 summer camps for the children of some of the areas that have been occupied and the children went off to the camps and then they didn’t come back, they were just stolen. It’s thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been stolen in this fashion, that’s not a small thing. It’s not got very much attention but, yes, children who would hide whenever the Russian troops came to the door.
One teenage boy who described to me how, when his mother was out, a woman came around the house, knocked on the door and gave him his papers and said that he had to attend the next week to sign up for the Russian army. This is not good and that’s obviously what life is like for thousands of people behind the Russian lines in Ukraine. I just have it in mind when people say things like, “Well, obviously, these regions have to be handed over.” It’s very, very hard, if you’re a Ukrainian, to concede to that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And even if they are, as part of the negotiation, to hand it over, I think it’ll probably be generations or never that that could be accepted by Ukrainian people.
Yeah. And even if they are, as part of the negotiation, to hand it over, I think it’ll probably be generations or never that that could be accepted by Ukrainian people.
Douglas Murray
Absolutely, and I would have thought never.
Absolutely, and I would have thought never.
Lex Fridman
What do we know about this kidnapping of children? The stories of the thousands of children that the Russian forces kidnapped?
What do we know about this kidnapping of children? The stories of the thousands of children that the Russian forces kidnapped?
Douglas Murray
Some of them were in orphanages in Eastern Ukraine, not all by any means, but some were. And it’s a very complicated story, actually, because many children were taken from their families, many the Russians said, “Well, look at these Ukrainians, they don’t even look after their children, therefore, we will look after them.” And recently, when I was there looking into this story because it’s a very interesting question as to why it hasn’t had more attention. One thinks of, for instance, the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls some 12 years ago now in Northern Nigeria and the appalling abduction of 300 girls by Boko Haram completely gained the world’s attention. And I was very interested into why the Ukrainian children who’d been taken by the Russians have not gained similar attention, there’s a slight similarity with the war in Israel which I’m sure we’ll come on to.
Some of them were in orphanages in Eastern Ukraine, not all by any means, but some were. And it’s a very complicated story, actually, because many children were taken from their families, many the Russians said, “Well, look at these Ukrainians, they don’t even look after their children, therefore, we will look after them.” And recently, when I was there looking into this story because it’s a very interesting question as to why it hasn’t had more attention. One thinks of, for instance, the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls some 12 years ago now in Northern Nigeria and the appalling abduction of 300 girls by Boko Haram completely gained the world’s attention. And I was very interested into why the Ukrainian children who’d been taken by the Russians have not gained similar attention, there’s a slight similarity with the war in Israel which I’m sure we’ll come on to.
And I do think that one reason is that they were effectively hostages and the Ukrainians knew, this is my estimation of the terrain, is that the Ukrainians knew that, if they made a great deal about this more than they did, that the children would effectively be the most effective bargaining chip. And I do think there’s considerable truth in that because, if you look at, for instance, the way in which pressure has been put on the Israeli government by the Israeli population about the kidnapped Israelis, you’ll see that it’s a pretty effective tactic for any totalitarian regime or terrorist group to operate in a way that means that the population of the country you’re attacking pressure their government to do something in terms of concession, it’s a very effective tool. And I think that story was partly played down, not just outside of Ukraine, but also within Ukraine partly for that reason.
Lex Fridman
As a truth seeker, as a journalist, how do you operate in that world where, at least to me, it’s obvious that there’s just a flood of propaganda on both sides? Now, of course, when you go there and directly experience it and talk to people but those people are still also swimming in the propaganda. So, unless you witness stuff directly, sometimes it’s hard to know. I speak to people on the Russian side and they’re clearly, first of all, hilariously enough, they almost always say that there’s no propaganda in Russia.
As a truth seeker, as a journalist, how do you operate in that world where, at least to me, it’s obvious that there’s just a flood of propaganda on both sides? Now, of course, when you go there and directly experience it and talk to people but those people are still also swimming in the propaganda. So, unless you witness stuff directly, sometimes it’s hard to know. I speak to people on the Russian side and they’re clearly, first of all, hilariously enough, they almost always say that there’s no propaganda in Russia.
Douglas Murray
Of course.
Of course.
Lex Fridman
Which makes me realize you can be completely lied to, maybe I am in the United States as well, and just be unaware. Maybe earth is run by aliens, maybe the earth is flat so I don’t know.
Which makes me realize you can be completely lied to, maybe I am in the United States as well, and just be unaware. Maybe earth is run by aliens, maybe the earth is flat so I don’t know.
Douglas Murray
Maybe you’ve taken mushrooms.
Maybe you’ve taken mushrooms.
Lex Fridman
I have before this and I finally see the truth and it’s you that are deluded, Douglas. Okay, but back to our round earth discussion, round earth shills that we are, how do you know what is true?
I have before this and I finally see the truth and it’s you that are deluded, Douglas. Okay, but back to our round earth discussion, round earth shills that we are, how do you know what is true?
Douglas Murray
You can tell it when the bare facts become not true, you can tell it when somebody is willing to claim that everything caused the invasion of 2022 except for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.
You can tell it when the bare facts become not true, you can tell it when somebody is willing to claim that everything caused the invasion of 2022 except for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s a hilarious thing that happens and I think you’ve actually speak about this that people are generally just much more willing to criticize the democratically elected leader.
Yeah, there’s a hilarious thing that happens and I think you’ve actually speak about this that people are generally just much more willing to criticize the democratically elected leader.
Douglas Murray
Always, always.
Always, always.
Lex Fridman
So, the interesting thing that happens is these wise sages that do the narratives of NATO started the war which there is some interesting geopolitical depth and truth to that.
So, the interesting thing that happens is these wise sages that do the narratives of NATO started the war which there is some interesting geopolitical depth and truth to that.
Douglas Murray
Sure.
Sure.
Lex Fridman
That NATO expansion created a complicated geopolitical context, whatever.
That NATO expansion created a complicated geopolitical context, whatever.
Douglas Murray
Sure.
Sure.
Lex Fridman
But they forget to say other parts of that story.
But they forget to say other parts of that story.
Douglas Murray
Well, yes, of course. And of course, to some extent, it’s rather … The most irritating type of question asker at any event is the person who says, ” I was disappointed that, in your 30-minute talk, you didn’t address X.” And I tend to say, “Looking forward to coming to your next talk where, in 30 minutes, you’ll cover everything that could possibly be covered.” There’s always stuff that’s going to be left on the sides, there’s always going to be stuff that’s left unaddressed, there’s always going to be other angles, there’s always going to be somebody else who has this interesting perspective and you can’t cover it. Nevertheless, if you cover everything other than the central things, then it’s suspicious. Many years ago at a debate in London, there was a debate about the origins of World War II and Pat Buchanan talking of necromancy was one of the speakers and Andrew Roberts, the historian, was one of the people on the other side. And at one point, they got so completely stuck into issues of iron ore mining in Poland in the mid … Something like this.
Well, yes, of course. And of course, to some extent, it’s rather … The most irritating type of question asker at any event is the person who says, ” I was disappointed that, in your 30-minute talk, you didn’t address X.” And I tend to say, “Looking forward to coming to your next talk where, in 30 minutes, you’ll cover everything that could possibly be covered.” There’s always stuff that’s going to be left on the sides, there’s always going to be stuff that’s left unaddressed, there’s always going to be other angles, there’s always going to be somebody else who has this interesting perspective and you can’t cover it. Nevertheless, if you cover everything other than the central things, then it’s suspicious. Many years ago at a debate in London, there was a debate about the origins of World War II and Pat Buchanan talking of necromancy was one of the speakers and Andrew Roberts, the historian, was one of the people on the other side. And at one point, they got so completely stuck into issues of iron ore mining in Poland in the mid … Something like this.
And the moderator, I remember, it was just a melee, and the moderator turns to Andrew Roberts and says, “Andrew Roberts, why did World War II begin?” and he says, “World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland.” And it was a magnificent moment because everything had been a marsh, they were just so lost in all the intricate and clever and interesting things that you can talk about about the origins of a war that you forget to mention the thing that’s most important. And certainly, my experience as a journalist and writer is one of the reasons why you need to go and see things with your own eyes is because people are certain to tell you that what you’ve seen with your own eyes didn’t happen or hasn’t happened and it helps to steal you for that moment.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It’s a gradual thing that happens where the obvious thing starts being taken for granted and people stop saying it because it’s the boring thing to say at a party. And then, all of a sudden, over time, you just almost start questioning whether the obvious thing is even true. I don’t know how that happens in human psychology but it does.
Yeah. It’s a gradual thing that happens where the obvious thing starts being taken for granted and people stop saying it because it’s the boring thing to say at a party. And then, all of a sudden, over time, you just almost start questioning whether the obvious thing is even true. I don’t know how that happens in human psychology but it does.
Douglas Murray
Yeah, I think it does. I’ve observed it in a lot of different places which is the important thing is the only thing you do forget, everything else is what you remember. And some of us are, for some reason, wired in a way where we try not to forget the important thing.
Yeah, I think it does. I’ve observed it in a lot of different places which is the important thing is the only thing you do forget, everything else is what you remember. And some of us are, for some reason, wired in a way where we try not to forget the important thing.
Lex Fridman
Remember the obvious thing, yeah.
Remember the obvious thing, yeah.
Douglas Murray
Yes. And as you say, not wanting to be the boring guy at the party who reiterates what is true because what a douchebag you’d be if you were that guy.
Yes. And as you say, not wanting to be the boring guy at the party who reiterates what is true because what a douchebag you’d be if you were that guy.
Peace
Lex Fridman
Nobody likes captain obvious at a party, okay. Is it possible that Donald Trump is a mediator, a successful negotiator that brings a stable peace to Ukraine?
Nobody likes captain obvious at a party, okay. Is it possible that Donald Trump is a mediator, a successful negotiator that brings a stable peace to Ukraine?
Douglas Murray
It’s possible, we’ll have to see. I think it’s just too early and complicated to tell. That he wants to bring a peace seems to me to be obvious, he stated it a lot of times. Whether he can, we’re just going to have to see. It’s extremely hard to see some of the parameters of the peace still. And I would suggest that the one, not the most difficult, but one of the most difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe. It doesn’t matter because we in the West, some of the countries in the West have said it before that we’d secure their peace and we haven’t. And so, what other than NATO membership, which is not possible in my view, what other than NATO membership would reassure the Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured, I can’t see.
It’s possible, we’ll have to see. I think it’s just too early and complicated to tell. That he wants to bring a peace seems to me to be obvious, he stated it a lot of times. Whether he can, we’re just going to have to see. It’s extremely hard to see some of the parameters of the peace still. And I would suggest that the one, not the most difficult, but one of the most difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe. It doesn’t matter because we in the West, some of the countries in the West have said it before that we’d secure their peace and we haven’t. And so, what other than NATO membership, which is not possible in my view, what other than NATO membership would reassure the Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured, I can’t see.
Lex Fridman
I think there’s not going to be ever a guarantee that you can trust. I think the way you have a guarantee, implicit guarantee is by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as possible. So, you have partnerships with the Middle East, you have partnerships with India, perhaps even with China, with the United States, with many nations in Europe.
I think there’s not going to be ever a guarantee that you can trust. I think the way you have a guarantee, implicit guarantee is by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as possible. So, you have partnerships with the Middle East, you have partnerships with India, perhaps even with China, with the United States, with many nations in Europe.
Douglas Murray
All of which still suggests that, if there’s enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another Russian invasion.
All of which still suggests that, if there’s enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another Russian invasion.
Lex Fridman
There would be financial pressure, yeah. Russia needs to be friends with somebody, either China or the West. I think a world that’s flourishing would have Russia trading and being friends with the West and the East.
There would be financial pressure, yeah. Russia needs to be friends with somebody, either China or the West. I think a world that’s flourishing would have Russia trading and being friends with the West and the East.
Douglas Murray
Thought it would be ideal. It would be ideal if the regime in Moscow wanted it but that’s that not … Again, you get into the thing of people accused of Russophobia but the … I do believe that, after the fall of the wall, Russia was ill-treated by the West, not treated with some of the courtesy that it required, I do think that. And at the same time, that doesn’t justify the actions of Russia in the last 20 years.
Thought it would be ideal. It would be ideal if the regime in Moscow wanted it but that’s that not … Again, you get into the thing of people accused of Russophobia but the … I do believe that, after the fall of the wall, Russia was ill-treated by the West, not treated with some of the courtesy that it required, I do think that. And at the same time, that doesn’t justify the actions of Russia in the last 20 years.
Lex Fridman
Right. But let’s descend from the surrealist to the realist, it’s very possible for Russia to be on the verge of military invasion of these nations and that being wrong while also not doing it because they’re afraid to hurt the partnerships with the West and with China.
Right. But let’s descend from the surrealist to the realist, it’s very possible for Russia to be on the verge of military invasion of these nations and that being wrong while also not doing it because they’re afraid to hurt the partnerships with the West and with China.
Douglas Murray
It’s possible. But the alliance they formed with this rogue alliance with China to a considerable extent, North Korea, not useful and Iran is something they seem to find bearable. It’s not a very good alliance in most people’s analysis but it’s an alliance.
It’s possible. But the alliance they formed with this rogue alliance with China to a considerable extent, North Korea, not useful and Iran is something they seem to find bearable. It’s not a very good alliance in most people’s analysis but it’s an alliance.
Lex Fridman
It’s bearable but I don’t think, maybe you disagree with this, I don’t think the Russian people or even Putin wants to be isolated from the West. I think it wants to be friends with the West and with the East and with everybody, he just also wants Ukraine. And there’s … How does the Rolling Stones song go?
It’s bearable but I don’t think, maybe you disagree with this, I don’t think the Russian people or even Putin wants to be isolated from the West. I think it wants to be friends with the West and with the East and with everybody, he just also wants Ukraine. And there’s … How does the Rolling Stones song go?
Douglas Murray
Which one?
Which one?
Lex Fridman
Not the satisfaction one.
Not the satisfaction one.
Douglas Murray
Sympathy with the Devil?
Sympathy with the Devil?
Lex Fridman
That’s the one. You got me on that one. No, there’s interests, whether it’s expanding the sphere of influence, that’s one thing on the table but that can be put aside if you want to maintain the partnerships with these nations. And if Ukraine has strong economic partnerships with those nations, then that prevents Russia from invading.
That’s the one. You got me on that one. No, there’s interests, whether it’s expanding the sphere of influence, that’s one thing on the table but that can be put aside if you want to maintain the partnerships with these nations. And if Ukraine has strong economic partnerships with those nations, then that prevents Russia from invading.
Douglas Murray
I think the premise is one that I’ve seen before. There was a famous … What was his name? Norman Angell. He wrote this book which was a fantastic bestseller in his day where he believed that Europe would be in a period of endless Kantian peace because the prospect of European powers going to war was so economically unviable. The book was reissued after World War I and I never got the second edition but I assume it was significantly rewritten.
I think the premise is one that I’ve seen before. There was a famous … What was his name? Norman Angell. He wrote this book which was a fantastic bestseller in his day where he believed that Europe would be in a period of endless Kantian peace because the prospect of European powers going to war was so economically unviable. The book was reissued after World War I and I never got the second edition but I assume it was significantly rewritten.
Lex Fridman
That’s a very cynical take that just because the book is wrong-
That’s a very cynical take that just because the book is wrong-
Douglas Murray
I’m not saying that the book is wrong, I’m saying that the idea that cooperation on an economic and other levels is any significant preventative device to madness breaking out is not something I see. It could deter some people, it could deter some very, very rational economically driven actors but it fails to take into account all of the other things that motivate people to go to war and to invade and to go mad.
I’m not saying that the book is wrong, I’m saying that the idea that cooperation on an economic and other levels is any significant preventative device to madness breaking out is not something I see. It could deter some people, it could deter some very, very rational economically driven actors but it fails to take into account all of the other things that motivate people to go to war and to invade and to go mad.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Well, I would argue that, in the 21st century, one of the reasons we have much fewer wars is because of the much more-
Okay. Well, I would argue that, in the 21st century, one of the reasons we have much fewer wars is because of the much more-
Douglas Murray
Bomb.
Bomb.
Lex Fridman
Well, so there’s a few tools here on the geopolitical stage. One of them is that we’re just much more interconnected economically, globally interconnected and that is always a present pressure on the world to keep peace. There’s a lot of money to be made from peace, there’s also a lot of money to be made from war. There’s a lot of interest, attention and I’m just presenting one of the tools that a leader should be using. The alternative is, what, military force? That is an interesting one, sometimes a useful one but, unfortunately, it has its downsides also. And after three years of war and the hundreds of thousands dead, you have to start wondering what are the options on the table.
Well, so there’s a few tools here on the geopolitical stage. One of them is that we’re just much more interconnected economically, globally interconnected and that is always a present pressure on the world to keep peace. There’s a lot of money to be made from peace, there’s also a lot of money to be made from war. There’s a lot of interest, attention and I’m just presenting one of the tools that a leader should be using. The alternative is, what, military force? That is an interesting one, sometimes a useful one but, unfortunately, it has its downsides also. And after three years of war and the hundreds of thousands dead, you have to start wondering what are the options on the table.
Douglas Murray
I agree. I’m obviously for economic cooperation but my only caveat is not to think that that is something which is of ultimate interest or even at the top of the list of interests of despots, tyrants, extremists who want something else.
I agree. I’m obviously for economic cooperation but my only caveat is not to think that that is something which is of ultimate interest or even at the top of the list of interests of despots, tyrants, extremists who want something else.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but can you read the mind of Vladimir Putin?
Yeah, but can you read the mind of Vladimir Putin?
Douglas Murray
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
A lot of the ideas I hear about peace is Putin bad, victory must be achieved, NATO membership required. But what do you have to do? You have to come to the table to end the killing is one and, two, have different ideas of how to have a non-zero chance of peace.
A lot of the ideas I hear about peace is Putin bad, victory must be achieved, NATO membership required. But what do you have to do? You have to come to the table to end the killing is one and, two, have different ideas of how to have a non-zero chance of peace.
Douglas Murray
Go on.
Go on.
Lex Fridman
So, the options are … It seems to me the only option, not the only option, but the likeliest option is a lot of strong economic partnerships. There’s, of course, there other radical options. There’s Russia joining NATO or something like this or there’s flirting with World War III essentially, giving nukes to Ukraine or something like this. There’s crazy stuff or a totally new military alliance with France and Britain and Germany and European nations and Ukraine or some weird network of military power that threatens Russia in some way or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between India, China and Ukraine, something like this, just some really out there ideas. And I think that’s how the world finds a balance and realigns itself in interesting ways.
So, the options are … It seems to me the only option, not the only option, but the likeliest option is a lot of strong economic partnerships. There’s, of course, there other radical options. There’s Russia joining NATO or something like this or there’s flirting with World War III essentially, giving nukes to Ukraine or something like this. There’s crazy stuff or a totally new military alliance with France and Britain and Germany and European nations and Ukraine or some weird network of military power that threatens Russia in some way or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between India, China and Ukraine, something like this, just some really out there ideas. And I think that’s how the world finds a balance and realigns itself in interesting ways.
Douglas Murray
No, it could be. I hope your idea is right, I think it’s about what’s certainly the most peaceful way for this to be resolved. My only caveat, as I say, is and also never forget to factor in that people want different things in this world and some people don’t dream as you dream.
No, it could be. I hope your idea is right, I think it’s about what’s certainly the most peaceful way for this to be resolved. My only caveat, as I say, is and also never forget to factor in that people want different things in this world and some people don’t dream as you dream.
Lex Fridman
I think we’ll talk about that in your new book, Death Cults, that one is an easier one for me to understand to the story that you’re describing. I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy to leaders of major nations.
I think we’ll talk about that in your new book, Death Cults, that one is an easier one for me to understand to the story that you’re describing. I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy to leaders of major nations.
Douglas Murray
Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not, by any means, urging you to regard Vladimir Putin as a millenarian madman who cannot be in any way understood.
Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not, by any means, urging you to regard Vladimir Putin as a millenarian madman who cannot be in any way understood.
Lex Fridman
I think he could be negotiated and reasoned with.
I think he could be negotiated and reasoned with.
Douglas Murray
From your lips to God’s ears.
From your lips to God’s ears.
Zelenskyy
Lex Fridman
Can you steer me on the case for and then against Zelenskyy as the right leader for Ukraine at this moment? Is he the right person to take it to the point of peace?
Can you steer me on the case for and then against Zelenskyy as the right leader for Ukraine at this moment? Is he the right person to take it to the point of peace?
Douglas Murray
We’ll see. If he can, then of course he is. He deserves enormous respect for galvanizing his people, for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation at a time of incredible peril, for playing the international game of getting support for his country well. And sometimes the person who does that, not that there are many people like that, can be the person who also brings about a peace deal and sometimes not.
We’ll see. If he can, then of course he is. He deserves enormous respect for galvanizing his people, for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation at a time of incredible peril, for playing the international game of getting support for his country well. And sometimes the person who does that, not that there are many people like that, can be the person who also brings about a peace deal and sometimes not.
Lex Fridman
I think there’s a degree to which he may have seen too much suffering of the people of the land he loves to be able to sit down at a table with a world leader who did the destruction and to be able to-
I think there’s a degree to which he may have seen too much suffering of the people of the land he loves to be able to sit down at a table with a world leader who did the destruction and to be able to-
Douglas Murray
That is very hard.
That is very hard.
Lex Fridman
… compromise on anything.
… compromise on anything.
Douglas Murray
That’s possible. Again, it puts the onus on him though. It slightly presupposes that Putin doesn’t have the same human instinct on that. It is extremely hard, I’ve noticed this in a lot of conflicts, it’s extremely hard the way in which outsiders come in and others who haven’t seen what you’ve seen or gone through what you’ve gone through and say, “You know, it’s time to get around the negotiating table and just …” You think you didn’t see what I saw or you didn’t go through what I went through, who are you to tell me? It comes back to that thing with the visitor from the land of war and the visitor from the land of peace. The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about getting around negotiating tables but the visitor from the land of war has seen other things and it’s very hard for somebody who hasn’t seen it to tell the person who has that they should act differently.
That’s possible. Again, it puts the onus on him though. It slightly presupposes that Putin doesn’t have the same human instinct on that. It is extremely hard, I’ve noticed this in a lot of conflicts, it’s extremely hard the way in which outsiders come in and others who haven’t seen what you’ve seen or gone through what you’ve gone through and say, “You know, it’s time to get around the negotiating table and just …” You think you didn’t see what I saw or you didn’t go through what I went through, who are you to tell me? It comes back to that thing with the visitor from the land of war and the visitor from the land of peace. The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about getting around negotiating tables but the visitor from the land of war has seen other things and it’s very hard for somebody who hasn’t seen it to tell the person who has that they should act differently.
Lex Fridman
And the sad thing about humanity is both the person from the land of peace and the person from the land of war are right.
And the sad thing about humanity is both the person from the land of peace and the person from the land of war are right.
Douglas Murray
Yes, that’s a struggle, that’s definitely a struggle. It’s like asking somebody to forgive, I’ve seen that at a lot of ends of conflicts. People say, “You know, the important thing is that we forgive and move on,” and then the other person says, “You know, your child didn’t die of shrapnel wounds.”
Yes, that’s a struggle, that’s definitely a struggle. It’s like asking somebody to forgive, I’ve seen that at a lot of ends of conflicts. People say, “You know, the important thing is that we forgive and move on,” and then the other person says, “You know, your child didn’t die of shrapnel wounds.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, this is … I got a lot of heat for an interview I did with Zelenskyy. By the way, people privately, the people that message me is all love and support and the people that disagree in Ukraine, soldiers. People online are ruthless, they’re misrepresenting me, they’re lying about-
Yeah, this is … I got a lot of heat for an interview I did with Zelenskyy. By the way, people privately, the people that message me is all love and support and the people that disagree in Ukraine, soldiers. People online are ruthless, they’re misrepresenting me, they’re lying about-
Douglas Murray
People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying?
People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying?
Lex Fridman
I know, yeah.
I know, yeah.
Douglas Murray
Good God, Lex, you’ve discovered a new phenomenon.
Good God, Lex, you’ve discovered a new phenomenon.
Lex Fridman
I’m a real radical intellectual.
I’m a real radical intellectual.
Douglas Murray
Nothing misses your eye.
Nothing misses your eye.
Lex Fridman
I see the truth and I’m unafraid to point it out. No, there’s a degree … This idea that you need to compromise with the person who the leader of a nation you’re at war with and, in so doing, to some degree, are forgiving their actions. Because the actual feeling you have is you want it to be fair and the definition of fair when you’ve seen that much suffering is for him and everybody around him and maybe even all of the people on the other side to just die because you’ve seen towards suffering. But the other side of that is, yes, there’s children that have died but you coming to the negotiation table-
I see the truth and I’m unafraid to point it out. No, there’s a degree … This idea that you need to compromise with the person who the leader of a nation you’re at war with and, in so doing, to some degree, are forgiving their actions. Because the actual feeling you have is you want it to be fair and the definition of fair when you’ve seen that much suffering is for him and everybody around him and maybe even all of the people on the other side to just die because you’ve seen towards suffering. But the other side of that is, yes, there’s children that have died but you coming to the negotiation table-
Douglas Murray
Will stop other children from dying. Yes, of course.
Will stop other children from dying. Yes, of course.
Lex Fridman
And so, there is … You had this way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective that it’s naive to say to come to the negotiation table and it is for a person from the land of war. But the very smart, intelligent and not naive person from the land of peace that is often right in some deep sense about the long arc of history, for them it is the right thing to come to the negotiation table to end the more killing.
And so, there is … You had this way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective that it’s naive to say to come to the negotiation table and it is for a person from the land of war. But the very smart, intelligent and not naive person from the land of peace that is often right in some deep sense about the long arc of history, for them it is the right thing to come to the negotiation table to end the more killing.
Douglas Murray
The one thing I would add to that though is don’t forget that it also depends on whether or not there’s a clear shot of winning.
The one thing I would add to that though is don’t forget that it also depends on whether or not there’s a clear shot of winning.
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
Douglas Murray
If there’s a clear shot of winning and that’s the most important. The most important thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that, it’s simply winning and losing. And if you have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you’re near it, then having somebody else come in and saying why not stop just before victory is very hard. That’s one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we’re talking about.
If there’s a clear shot of winning and that’s the most important. The most important thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that, it’s simply winning and losing. And if you have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you’re near it, then having somebody else come in and saying why not stop just before victory is very hard. That’s one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we’re talking about.
Lex Fridman
You know what’s the other big complexity of that? Because the clear shot of winning is like a man walking through the desert seeing water. During war, it really is an illusion. So, here’s what happens. The really complicated aspect of negotiation is, in order to negotiate peace from a place of strength, you have to have victory in sight.
You know what’s the other big complexity of that? Because the clear shot of winning is like a man walking through the desert seeing water. During war, it really is an illusion. So, here’s what happens. The really complicated aspect of negotiation is, in order to negotiate peace from a place of strength, you have to have victory in sight.
Douglas Murray
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
And so, the temptation from that position is to not negotiate, is to keep pushing forward to achieve victory. And this, I would say, hindsight is 20/20 But this is the failure in ’22 and two occasions to achieve, to negotiate a ceasefire and peace. One in the spring because Ukraine was in a real big, I would say, position of strength having fended off the Russian forces around Kiev. That’s one. And then, as you mentioned, in the fall of ’22 with Kherson and Kharkiv, had a lot of military success, they were in a place of strength. And from that place, they’ve decided to keep going because victory was in sight but that was also an opportunity to make peace.
And so, the temptation from that position is to not negotiate, is to keep pushing forward to achieve victory. And this, I would say, hindsight is 20/20 But this is the failure in ’22 and two occasions to achieve, to negotiate a ceasefire and peace. One in the spring because Ukraine was in a real big, I would say, position of strength having fended off the Russian forces around Kiev. That’s one. And then, as you mentioned, in the fall of ’22 with Kherson and Kharkiv, had a lot of military success, they were in a place of strength. And from that place, they’ve decided to keep going because victory was in sight but that was also an opportunity to make peace.
Douglas Murray
It’s perfectly possible, yes.
It’s perfectly possible, yes.
Lex Fridman
That’s the hard thing.
That’s the hard thing.
Douglas Murray
It’s very hard, it’s all hard. But again, victory can be won in wars and is often won in wars and, you’re right, they can also grind on because nobody has the capability to make a breakthrough. It’s a case … The wisdom about civil wars tends to be that they burn out after about 10 years or so for similar reasons.
It’s very hard, it’s all hard. But again, victory can be won in wars and is often won in wars and, you’re right, they can also grind on because nobody has the capability to make a breakthrough. It’s a case … The wisdom about civil wars tends to be that they burn out after about 10 years or so for similar reasons.
Lex Fridman
When you’re in the war, can you actually know that a victory can be won?
When you’re in the war, can you actually know that a victory can be won?
Douglas Murray
It’s a very good question. And you mean troops on the battlefield or military leaders or political leaders?
It’s a very good question. And you mean troops on the battlefield or military leaders or political leaders?
Lex Fridman
Military and political leaders. It just feels like, like I said, man in the desert seeing water. I think there’s a sense that victory is so close, there’s times in a war when you feel like victory is close.
Military and political leaders. It just feels like, like I said, man in the desert seeing water. I think there’s a sense that victory is so close, there’s times in a war when you feel like victory is close.
Douglas Murray
No, you’re right. It’s [inaudible 00:59:13].
No, you’re right. It’s [inaudible 00:59:13].
Lex Fridman
And then it just slips away.
And then it just slips away.
Douglas Murray
Yes, it’s an interesting insight. It’s like the way in which there’s a force in nature which is that, if you amass an army, amassing it will pull you in to using it. Extremely hard to amass an army somewhere and then say let’s go back. Yes, you’re right, no, it’s one of many, many interesting aspects to warfare.
Yes, it’s an interesting insight. It’s like the way in which there’s a force in nature which is that, if you amass an army, amassing it will pull you in to using it. Extremely hard to amass an army somewhere and then say let’s go back. Yes, you’re right, no, it’s one of many, many interesting aspects to warfare.
Lex Fridman
I think the sad thing about successful wars, at least in the modern day, is it takes a great military leader which I would argue that Zelenskyy really unified Ukraine in this fight in the beginning of the war. You have to be that and, like you said, after you amass the army and have military success, to be able to step back and make peace. Those two just don’t often go hand in hand because, again, as a wartime leader, especially one who has seen the suffering first hand, walking away is tough. Especially, also combined with that, just the realities of war where there is probably corruption, that there is things, once the war ends, there has to be investigations. Because the war wasn’t won, you might not turn out to be, when the history looks at it, the good guy and a leader doesn’t want to … A leader always wants to be the good guy.
I think the sad thing about successful wars, at least in the modern day, is it takes a great military leader which I would argue that Zelenskyy really unified Ukraine in this fight in the beginning of the war. You have to be that and, like you said, after you amass the army and have military success, to be able to step back and make peace. Those two just don’t often go hand in hand because, again, as a wartime leader, especially one who has seen the suffering first hand, walking away is tough. Especially, also combined with that, just the realities of war where there is probably corruption, that there is things, once the war ends, there has to be investigations. Because the war wasn’t won, you might not turn out to be, when the history looks at it, the good guy and a leader doesn’t want to … A leader always wants to be the good guy.
So, there’s just all psychological complexities that are … And you look at this whole picture, in a basic sense, if you want Ukraine to flourish, if you want humanity to flourish, you just ask the question, okay, so what is the thing I would like to see.
Douglas Murray
There’s so many historical analogies you can give but just surely not rewarding Putin’s actions in any way would be a good way to deter him and other dictators from trying to grab land in the future.
There’s so many historical analogies you can give but just surely not rewarding Putin’s actions in any way would be a good way to deter him and other dictators from trying to grab land in the future.
Lex Fridman
So, yeah, but this is nuanced because it’s very probably good to be the boring person at the party that says dictatorships are bad, democracies are good, many of the ideals of the West are good.
So, yeah, but this is nuanced because it’s very probably good to be the boring person at the party that says dictatorships are bad, democracies are good, many of the ideals of the West are good.
Douglas Murray
Mostly the better.
Mostly the better.
Lex Fridman
Better? Yes.
Better? Yes.
Douglas Murray
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That sounds like animal farm but, yes, two legs better. But yes, democracy is better and invading countries is bad but World War III is bad too. So, after you say something is bad, what’s the next step? Because military intervention in a lot of these conflicts-
That sounds like animal farm but, yes, two legs better. But yes, democracy is better and invading countries is bad but World War III is bad too. So, after you say something is bad, what’s the next step? Because military intervention in a lot of these conflicts-
Douglas Murray
It’ll be a bad deterrence.
It’ll be a bad deterrence.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but what’s effective deterrence?
Yeah, but what’s effective deterrence?
Douglas Murray
That we’re going to have to keep going over for a long time to come.
That we’re going to have to keep going over for a long time to come.
Lex Fridman
My question is how can we achieve peace in April? In May? The adults at the table all seem to tell me, “Well, it’s a process, it’s complicated,” it just feels like this is a thing that might go into the next winter and there’s still maybe initial ceasefire and then ceasefire is broken and there’s more people dying-
My question is how can we achieve peace in April? In May? The adults at the table all seem to tell me, “Well, it’s a process, it’s complicated,” it just feels like this is a thing that might go into the next winter and there’s still maybe initial ceasefire and then ceasefire is broken and there’s more people dying-
Douglas Murray
For sure.
For sure.
Lex Fridman
… and it’s that mess. It seems like civility and politeness ignores the fact that people are dying every single day.
… and it’s that mess. It seems like civility and politeness ignores the fact that people are dying every single day.
Douglas Murray
Of course, we are all … Almost everybody, not everybody but almost everyone, would like the killing to stop immediately, of course.
Of course, we are all … Almost everybody, not everybody but almost everyone, would like the killing to stop immediately, of course.
Lex Fridman
No, I think that is the boring thing at the party. Yes, but they don’t say it often enough, not often … There has to be a frustration-
No, I think that is the boring thing at the party. Yes, but they don’t say it often enough, not often … There has to be a frustration-
Douglas Murray
Perhaps I should say it more.
Perhaps I should say it more.
Lex Fridman
There has to be a frustration. I don’t understand why Putin, Zelenskyy and Trump can’t just meet in a room together without signing anything, leaders meeting and discussing and the human connection, there’s so many layers of diplomats. It’s the problem I have with the managerial class, they schedule meetings really well, they don’t get shit done and I would love it if people got shit done. So, the soldiers get shit done, they’re fighting the reality of the war and then the leaders have the capacity to get shit done on the scale of nations and geopolitics. But these diplomatic meetings and this-
There has to be a frustration. I don’t understand why Putin, Zelenskyy and Trump can’t just meet in a room together without signing anything, leaders meeting and discussing and the human connection, there’s so many layers of diplomats. It’s the problem I have with the managerial class, they schedule meetings really well, they don’t get shit done and I would love it if people got shit done. So, the soldiers get shit done, they’re fighting the reality of the war and then the leaders have the capacity to get shit done on the scale of nations and geopolitics. But these diplomatic meetings and this-
Douglas Murray
No, I agree. I share your frustration about it, at the same time, I think … I share your frustration because I’ve seen it all, a lot of-
No, I agree. I share your frustration about it, at the same time, I think … I share your frustration because I’ve seen it all, a lot of-
Douglas Murray
I share your frustration because I’ve seen it, a lot of it in my own eyes. There was a [inaudible 01:04:09] the other week and they were hit just after I left the base. You wouldn’t believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body. And I share your frustration with that.
I share your frustration because I’ve seen it, a lot of it in my own eyes. There was a [inaudible 01:04:09] the other week and they were hit just after I left the base. You wouldn’t believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body. And I share your frustration with that.
At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing is that you do, and I’ve seen this elsewhere, you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize, and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can’t pressurize. That is one of the worrying things that could happen with this. Simply, America can put extraordinary diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military pressure on Ukraine, and it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it’s much easier to pressure Zelenskyy.
That’s one of the many things that makes it harder is that the temptation to rush for peace, accepting that peace is the most desirable thing and accepting the horrors of war, which we can linger on, but accepting all that. If somebody says, “We’ve got to get peace today,” and the three of them around a table, the most likely thing is that it’ll be the person who you can pressure most easily, who will be the person that you pressure, and as a result, have an outcome, which, yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim. That’s an extremely ugly and common thing to happen.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and that’s the other boring thing to say, the boring truth, that the easy shortcut here is to punish Ukraine, and you just have to not do it.
Yeah, and that’s the other boring thing to say, the boring truth, that the easy shortcut here is to punish Ukraine, and you just have to not do it.
Douglas Murray
Let’s keep being the boring people of the party.
Let’s keep being the boring people of the party.
Israel-Palestine
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Well, nobody’s going to invite us. All right. Let’s go from one complicated conflict to perhaps an even more complicated one. Israel and Palestine. Can you take me through what happened on October 7th as you understand it and as you outline at the beginning of the book?
Yeah. Well, nobody’s going to invite us. All right. Let’s go from one complicated conflict to perhaps an even more complicated one. Israel and Palestine. Can you take me through what happened on October 7th as you understand it and as you outline at the beginning of the book?
Douglas Murray
Well, the book, On Democracies and Death Cults, is a mixture of firsthand reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that’s been going on since the 7th of October, but the war that’s been going on a lot longer. Also, I suppose on what, for me, is one of the overwhelming questions which I’m sure we’ll get to, which is the reaction in the rest of the world.
Well, the book, On Democracies and Death Cults, is a mixture of firsthand reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that’s been going on since the 7th of October, but the war that’s been going on a lot longer. Also, I suppose on what, for me, is one of the overwhelming questions which I’m sure we’ll get to, which is the reaction in the rest of the world.
Obviously, on the 7th itself, it was a brigade-sized attack on Israel from Gaza. Hamas broke through the security fence and attacked all the softest targets they could. They swiftly overwhelmed things, like the observation base in Nahal Oz. They ran through the communities in the south, very peaceful, peacenik [inaudible 01:07:41] free communities of the kibbutzim as they’re called, the communities, and murdered and raped and burned and kidnapped.
Of course, they, from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party, and rampaged through that with RPGs and Kalashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more, and got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel, on places like Ofakim and Sderot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well.
We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the north. Hezbollah joined in the war within 24 hours by starting firing rockets again in very large numbers into northern Israel from southern Lebanon, but the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north and carry out similar massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garrote Israel from the center.
The interesting reason why I think, it’ll be found out in the future, but why they didn’t coordinate better was Hamas didn’t trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were going to do it that wouldn’t be intercepted. The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and trains and arms knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn’t get close to that, but they got worryingly closer than people might’ve thought they were capable of.
I think from the Israeli side, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most, catastrophic intelligence and military failure since the foundation of the state. I think there are several reasons why. One is a perception problem, what a lot of military commanders and others described to me as the conception. The conception that had prevailed in Israel for some years in security, military establishment was that Hamas were content with being corrupt and governing Gaza and lining their pockets and living in Qatar and becoming billionaires, but that like many other terrorist groups and cults, that they would end up becoming just corrupt and not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary. That’s the first thing was there was just a massive era of the conception in Israel.
And then, the multiple manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to the day. There already have been quite a lot of people held to account for that and their, doubtless, will be in the future as well. The single thing I heard, which I heard most and which was most distressing in a way, was the number of people who described to me, who survived the massacres in the south, who said that they’d said to their children, “Don’t worry, the Army will be here in minutes,” and they weren’t. In many places, it was many hours until the army got there. There are reasons for that. There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings. Other things were very, I discovered, were very human failings. I don’t want overstress the failure of the army, because actually certain units and things got down very fast. There’s a unit, Duvdevan, who got down to the junction by within about an hour, 90 minutes of the massacres starting, and joined in the fight. And then, there were self-starters, who I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just broke orders and just realized the magnitude of what was happening and said, “We’re needed in the south. Go.” And fought very hard for hours, days in some cases.
But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable, I mean, as usually happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You can see it in hindsight, but you can’t see when you are in it. And one of the things that made it very complicated was, for instance, Hamas coming in, taking uniforms off dead Israelis, wearing them, coming in with Israeli-style apparatus on them.
There’s a Muslim doctor I quote in the book, I interviewed, who describes how he was going to his… He’s an Israeli Muslim Arab, and he’s a doctor. He was going to his shift at the hospital at 6:30 in the morning. The rockets start coming in because the rocket started first and then the full invasion. He described to me how… He’s one of the members of this group, United Hatzalah, which is a first responders group, and they get an alert and it tells them that a car has crashed nearby, and they put on their first aid kit and so on and go.
He got one of those alerts at one of the junctions, and realized there was a car that something had happened and there were some dead bodies. He stops and he sees these men dressed as soldiers, and he’s wearing his Hatzalah gear and they start firing at him. And he just thinks, “What the hell? What the hell is going on?” They turned out to be Hamas dressed as Israeli soldiers. They used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air assault. In the end, they shot him and left him, and he survived. He’s a very, very brave man.
So, there was a lot of confusion like that. There was a girl whose father I interviewed, she was at the Nova party. I met him at one of the reunions of the party and the weeks after, and the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. He described how in the last moments of his daughter’s life, she phoned him on her phone, like a lot of people. He reassured her that Army would get there and so on. Her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap, and she was obviously panicked. They’d managed to get into a car and escape the party, but they went to a community where they thought they’d be safe in the south of Israel.
They were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman, and he wasn’t the policeman. He was Hamas dressed as police and she died. She was shot and killed as well. So, there was a lot of confusion like that. Hopefully, the world will find out exactly what went wrong, Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe, but, I mean, it was a complete catastrophe.
Lex Fridman
Do you have a sense of how such an intelligence failure could have happened? There’s a bit of a temptation to go into conspiracy land, because it’s such a giant intelligence failure. It seems that there is some manipulation on the inside for political reasons or for-
Do you have a sense of how such an intelligence failure could have happened? There’s a bit of a temptation to go into conspiracy land, because it’s such a giant intelligence failure. It seems that there is some manipulation on the inside for political reasons or for-
Douglas Murray
Yes. You don’t need to go into conspiracy land. I think there are people who say that there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were withholding the information. I don’t know. Again, people will find out there’s an awful lot of politics inside Israel, and it’s hard to know that at this stage. I think most people are still Israeli and not Israeli, including people who are anti-Israel, who just believe that Israeli military, and particularly intelligence dominance, is so strong that there must have been some kind of conspiracy. Otherwise, how could this have happened?
Yes. You don’t need to go into conspiracy land. I think there are people who say that there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were withholding the information. I don’t know. Again, people will find out there’s an awful lot of politics inside Israel, and it’s hard to know that at this stage. I think most people are still Israeli and not Israeli, including people who are anti-Israel, who just believe that Israeli military, and particularly intelligence dominance, is so strong that there must have been some kind of conspiracy. Otherwise, how could this have happened?
I don’t think you need to go into that. I mean, for instance, some of the young women at the observation base are on the record. I’ve spoken to them myself, who said that they had been warning in the weeks running up to the 7th, that they were seeing maneuvers and training by the border, which suggested that Hamas was going to do something like this. They say that they were ignored. Though you speak to some of the more senior commanders about that, and they say the thing is that this stuff was happening all the time, so it’s very hard to know at the moment.
Hamas
Lex Fridman
Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history and the governing ideology of this group?
Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history and the governing ideology of this group?
Douglas Murray
Well, Hamas, in a way, quite easy to understand, because they say what their ambitions are, they say what their beliefs are. They’ve said it from their governing charter onwards. And you also have the advantage with Hamas that they, as if we’re trying to understand them, is that they tend to do what they say and act on what they believe.
Well, Hamas, in a way, quite easy to understand, because they say what their ambitions are, they say what their beliefs are. They’ve said it from their governing charter onwards. And you also have the advantage with Hamas that they, as if we’re trying to understand them, is that they tend to do what they say and act on what they believe.
The primary aim of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel and [inaudible 01:17:42]. They’re not an unusual group, sadly. The bit of it that is hard for some people to understand, I think, is that they really do mean what they say and that they really do mean what they say they want to do. I give a number of examples in the book of this, but, I mean, the most obvious is the case of Yahya Al-Sinwar, the Hamas leader who is generally regarded as having orchestrated and arranged the 7th of October.
We know a fair amount about him because he was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza, and he was released in the prisoner swap for the… He’s one of the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners inside Israel who was released in a swap for Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier. Yahya Al-Sinwar, in prison in Israel, talked to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his life because Yahya Al-Sinwar had a brain tumor.
This dentist identified this and actually sent him to the hospital. The Israelis famously removed the tumor and saved Sinwar’s life. But this dentist used to speak to him in the prison not fairly regularly and has related, not at least to the New York Times, his conversations with Sinwar. Sinwar said in one of those conversations, he said, “At the moment, you, Israel, are strong, but one day, you’ll be weak, and then I’ll come.” And that’s what he did.
Lex Fridman
Is it a hatred of Israel, or is it a hatred of Jews? Is it on the level of nations or the level of religion?
Is it a hatred of Israel, or is it a hatred of Jews? Is it on the level of nations or the level of religion?
Douglas Murray
Both. It’s both. I mean, it originates from a religious mindset, but it’s, of course, political as well. I mean, the Hamas Charter, of course, some people think the Hamas Charter is of no significance in… I often notice this sleight of hand that people do. Again, it goes back to what we were saying earlier, forget everything other than the most important basic things. But the Hamas Charter, among other things, quotes the Hadith that the end times will not come until all of the rocks and the trees shout out, “Oh, Muslim, there’s a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” So, Hamas is both obviously anti-Israeli, obviously, and anti-Jewish, obviously. By the way, I mean, one of the many painful stories I tell in the book is of the fact that so many of the people in the communities that they attacked, it’s not as if there’d be a right community to attack and a wrong community to attack, but the many of the communities they attacked were communities which deeply, deeply dreamed of the idea of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors.
Both. It’s both. I mean, it originates from a religious mindset, but it’s, of course, political as well. I mean, the Hamas Charter, of course, some people think the Hamas Charter is of no significance in… I often notice this sleight of hand that people do. Again, it goes back to what we were saying earlier, forget everything other than the most important basic things. But the Hamas Charter, among other things, quotes the Hadith that the end times will not come until all of the rocks and the trees shout out, “Oh, Muslim, there’s a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” So, Hamas is both obviously anti-Israeli, obviously, and anti-Jewish, obviously. By the way, I mean, one of the many painful stories I tell in the book is of the fact that so many of the people in the communities that they attacked, it’s not as if there’d be a right community to attack and a wrong community to attack, but the many of the communities they attacked were communities which deeply, deeply dreamed of the idea of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors.
There’s a woman whose name has become relatively famous since, certainly famous inside Israel, Vivian Silver, who was a peace activist, who spent every weekend driving Gazan children from the border to… If they had very rare medical needs that could not be seen attention within inside Gaza, would drive them to Israeli hospitals. She spent every weekend doing that. Worked for all of the left-wing peace organizations in Israel.
For a while after the 7th, her neighbors and others thought that she had been taken captive into Gaza. And actually, there was a hostage poster for her, and there were appeals by the various peacenik organizations for Hamas to hand her over. But it turned out she’d been burned alive in her home. This wasn’t discovered for quite a long time because there was so little DNA left of her that it was very hard to identify the remains as being hers.
So, there were a lot, just a lot of people in the Gaza envelope, as it’s called in Israel, in the area around Gaza, who would’ve been the people who wanted to live peacefully with the Gazans some day. There’s a certain, among the many, it’s not an irony, but just among the pains of the days that is so overwhelmingly, these are the people that Hamas brought hell to.
Lex Fridman
The response to October 7th by Israel, can you steal me on the case that Israel went too far?
The response to October 7th by Israel, can you steal me on the case that Israel went too far?
Douglas Murray
Well, the case that started from very early on, that critics of Israel had was the claim that… I mean, I think I first heard it on about the 8th of October before Israel had done anything in response, was the claim that Israel must act proportionately in response. I have a critic of this that I’ve often expressed, which is that there is such a thing as proportionality in warfare. At the same time, Israel is always accused of acting disproportionately.
Well, the case that started from very early on, that critics of Israel had was the claim that… I mean, I think I first heard it on about the 8th of October before Israel had done anything in response, was the claim that Israel must act proportionately in response. I have a critic of this that I’ve often expressed, which is that there is such a thing as proportionality in warfare. At the same time, Israel is always accused of acting disproportionately.
The proportionality that much of the rest of the world seems to think Israel should express in warfare is to have an equal level of suffering or killing on both sides. I don’t think there’s any law of war that says that if you kill 1,200 people and you kidnap another 250, that as it were the other side’s allowed to do the same back. But that’s what a lot of people think. And then when they see the death toll escalating on the Gazan side, they say Israel has acted disproportionately and has overreacted.
That one is tricky, because it’s my belief that, I mean, again, this is a basic thing but it has to be stated, that 9 million citizens of Israel, if you extrapolate that out to what the 7th of October would’ve meant in American terms, you’d be talking about a day on which if the attack had happened in America where 44,000 Americans were killed in one day and 10,000 American citizens taken hostage, nobody can tell me that if such an atrocity occurred that America would not do whatever it needed to destroy the groups that had done that and to retrieve the hostages who’d been taken.
Lex Fridman
So just on that point, I agree with you 100% America would hit hard back, and I think a lot of Americans would feel justified in that. But it’s also possible that the military industrial complex and the politicians would do something like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means extend far beyond hitting back and actually do a thing that’s destructive to everybody, including America financially and the flourishing of America, and the flourishing of humanity broadly, and the region and the stability and the war on terrorism, if that’s a real thing.
So just on that point, I agree with you 100% America would hit hard back, and I think a lot of Americans would feel justified in that. But it’s also possible that the military industrial complex and the politicians would do something like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means extend far beyond hitting back and actually do a thing that’s destructive to everybody, including America financially and the flourishing of America, and the flourishing of humanity broadly, and the region and the stability and the war on terrorism, if that’s a real thing.
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan did not maybe succeed in defeating terrorism or even making progress. It probably made more terrorists than not. So, there’s a justified feeling of hitting back and going after somebody like Bin Laden in the case of 9/11. And there’s just the actual implementation. It seems like the implementation can sometimes, intended or unintended, have consequences that are bordering on war crimes, if not downright war crimes. Now, this is a general statement, and now we’ll look at Israel where things are small land, everything is very compact. There’s a lot of complexities that are well-studied that we’ve talked about extensively.
Douglas Murray
Well, the two stated aims of the Israelis after the 7th were to get the hostages back and to destroy Hamas. Many people said that you could do one but not both. I actually think they’ve gone a long way to doing both. By no means everything, there were still hostages as we are speaking held in Gaza, including a young American. And Hamas is not completely destroyed. It’s very, very significantly degraded, but it’s not completely destroyed. But those are the two aims.
Well, the two stated aims of the Israelis after the 7th were to get the hostages back and to destroy Hamas. Many people said that you could do one but not both. I actually think they’ve gone a long way to doing both. By no means everything, there were still hostages as we are speaking held in Gaza, including a young American. And Hamas is not completely destroyed. It’s very, very significantly degraded, but it’s not completely destroyed. But those are the two aims.
I believe that I’ve seen as much of the war as any outside observer. I don’t know, some exceptions maybe, so I think I can say with considerable certainty what the Israelis have and haven’t done. There were various operations at the beginning, various plans which didn’t happen, like storming straight in and getting, for instance, as many hostages as possible out of the Shifa complex, which is called a hospital, but also at the very least, the Hamas command headquarters. There was a plan to maybe go and do that fast, but it was avoided because of the number of deaths on all sides that would be likely to happen.
The Israelis did actually hold back at the beginning. There was a period of making sure that when they went into Gaza, they didn’t do so, in any way, blind. Gaza is a very built-up area, and population-wise is densely populated. Something, by the way, which the people who claim frivolously that Israel has been creating genocide never take account of, which is the fact that the Gaza population has boomed since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. It’s almost doubled. But yes, it’s a densely populated area, and it’s an incredibly difficult place for the train of war because of one thing in particular, which is that Hamas, going back a bit to our conversation earlier, but this is a much more extreme example. I mean, Hamas really don’t play by the rules. In fact, they use the rules of war, the laws of war completely to their own advantage. It has to be reiterated. You are not meant to disguise your army as civilians. You’re not meant to use places of care, like hospitals, as bases for your military operations. You’re not meant to use schools and places of worship as operating centers of war.
Hamas does all of these things and has always done so, and it does so with the very obvious reason that for them, the whole thing is a two-for-one offer. You get to operate everywhere. And if the Israelis operate anywhere, you claim that this is a war crime, because how could they attack this group of civilians, these people who are dressed as civilians, these people merely fighting from a mosque and so on. That’s why everybody who’s been to Gaza, who’s seen the fighting, knows the same thing, which is this is just incredibly difficult, difficult warfare, of a kind that American troops have seen in the last 20 years in Fallujah and elsewhere. Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga saw when they were fighting as our frontline troops in the war against ISIS, similar house to house, but by no means with the same entrenched bases. Again, it can’t be stressed enough that Hamas has used the years since the Israel withdrawal from 2005 to build this vast underground tunnel network.
Again, it’s obvious, but it has to be remembered. I quote one of Hamas leaders in the book saying this in an interview. When they build their tunnels, they do so in order their tunnels are used by them, Hamas, to store their weaponry, to secure their fighters, and to hold hostages. They do not build their underground tunnel networks for the safety of guards and civilians avoiding aerial bombardment. Every difference in the world seems to me to exist between a country which does build bomb shelters for its citizens and a government which builds bomb shelters for its bombs.
Corruption
Lex Fridman
Can you discuss the flow of money here? How does Hamas, the leadership, use the money? You started to talk about the tunnels, but how much corruption is there? Can you just lay it all out? Because I think it’s an important part of the picture here.
Can you discuss the flow of money here? How does Hamas, the leadership, use the money? You started to talk about the tunnels, but how much corruption is there? Can you just lay it all out? Because I think it’s an important part of the picture here.
Douglas Murray
It’s certainly corrupt. Every Hamas leader, who’s now dead, died a billionaire.
It’s certainly corrupt. Every Hamas leader, who’s now dead, died a billionaire.
Lex Fridman
With a B.
With a B.
Douglas Murray
With a B. To say that they used Gaza’s resources or the resources that came into Gaza for their own ends is to just vastly understate matters. Hamas used everything that came in to build the infrastructure of terror that allowed them to do the 7th and everything since. They militarized the whole of the Gaza. By the estimations of troops I’ve been with, every second to third house had weaponry stashed there. Bombs, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, rockets, tunnel entrances. The network that they just embedded all these years was total.
With a B. To say that they used Gaza’s resources or the resources that came into Gaza for their own ends is to just vastly understate matters. Hamas used everything that came in to build the infrastructure of terror that allowed them to do the 7th and everything since. They militarized the whole of the Gaza. By the estimations of troops I’ve been with, every second to third house had weaponry stashed there. Bombs, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, rockets, tunnel entrances. The network that they just embedded all these years was total.
One of the many, many tragedies of this is that whatever you are reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, it was an opportunity for the Gaza to become something else. It could have become a thriving statelet. It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It’s just that Hamas, like the PLO before them, decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create a Palestinian estate. And that is to the great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza to put it at its mildest.
Lex Fridman
So just to outline here, leadership of Hamas are stealing the money they get sent by Qatar, by everybody, so they’re putting in their pocket and then the-
So just to outline here, leadership of Hamas are stealing the money they get sent by Qatar, by everybody, so they’re putting in their pocket and then the-
Douglas Murray
By the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as well. Yes.
By the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as well. Yes.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Douglas Murray
Well, yeah, but, I mean, it’s not just about the stealing the money. It’s about using the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor.
Well, yeah, but, I mean, it’s not just about the stealing the money. It’s about using the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor.
Lex Fridman
Those two things, but the corruption is a signal. From an economic perspective, it’s just also a signal of deep moral corruption because they’re screwing over the Palestinian people.
Those two things, but the corruption is a signal. From an economic perspective, it’s just also a signal of deep moral corruption because they’re screwing over the Palestinian people.
Douglas Murray
Yes, the cynicism, certainly. Yeah.
Yes, the cynicism, certainly. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Okay. And then, the money they do spend on the Palestinian cause, they’re not doing that to build up Gaza. They’re doing it to strengthen the militaristic capabilities of the terrorist organization of Hamas. You have, maybe you can correct me on this, have said that the people of Gaza have some significant responsibility for the actions of Hamas-
Okay. And then, the money they do spend on the Palestinian cause, they’re not doing that to build up Gaza. They’re doing it to strengthen the militaristic capabilities of the terrorist organization of Hamas. You have, maybe you can correct me on this, have said that the people of Gaza have some significant responsibility for the actions of Hamas-
Gaza
Douglas Murray
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
… because they’ve elected them.
… because they’ve elected them.
Douglas Murray
They elected them. The what ifs are endless, but very unwise of the George W. Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza after ’05. But Hamas were elected ,and they then, in 2007, killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main challenger, Fatah. Killed them through them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes through the Gaza. From that point, they had total control.
They elected them. The what ifs are endless, but very unwise of the George W. Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza after ’05. But Hamas were elected ,and they then, in 2007, killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main challenger, Fatah. Killed them through them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes through the Gaza. From that point, they had total control.
This is difficult because you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way justifying collective punishment if you talk about this, but it should be born in mind that Hamas had effectively 18 years to run the Gaza. And that-
Douglas Murray
… run the Gaza. And that’s the time that it takes from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education. And in 18 years they could have presided over and produced a generation of young Gazans who were productive for their people, for their society, for their neighbors, for the rest of the world, and they didn’t. They spent 18 years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into a genocidal hatred, which obviously was most dangerous to the Israelis, but it was obviously disastrous for the people of Gaza.
… run the Gaza. And that’s the time that it takes from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education. And in 18 years they could have presided over and produced a generation of young Gazans who were productive for their people, for their society, for their neighbors, for the rest of the world, and they didn’t. They spent 18 years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into a genocidal hatred, which obviously was most dangerous to the Israelis, but it was obviously disastrous for the people of Gaza.
If you speak to soldiers who were there in 2014 when Hamas started a war again… One of a set of rounds of war since 2005. If you speak to the soldiers who were there in 2014 going house to house and who were also involved in the war since 2003, they all say the same thing, which is the marked radicalization of the Gazan population.
The marked increase in just, I mean, the most… I mean, it’s so banal in a way to even… The numbers of copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion, there are so many what ifs and other paths that Hamas could have taken, but that was the one they took. They decided to take the path of using their time and power to build up their infrastructure, radicalize the population, and encouraged them to believe that they could destroy the state of Israel.
And then on October 7th, they gave it their best shot. And by the way, there is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza. Collective punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas, carpet bombing, this sort of thing. This is simply not what the IAF and the IDF have done since the 7th. They have been fighting a house to house war against this terrorist group. They do do aerial strikes. Gaza is very, very badly beaten up as the buildings, I mean the infrastructure that existed.
There aren’t many buildings standing. But this is not the result of just wild and imprecise bombing by the Israelis. It’s been extremely concerted. It’s extremely difficult. But when people say, “Well, this must be collective punishment.” I think that the people who say that simultaneously, that’s not true. And also there is not a hostage who’s come out who… President Trump made his point recently. There is not a hostage who’s come out who I’ve spoken with, who found any Gazan Palestinian who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them.
If you look at the footage from the 7th, the Hamas recorded themselves of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on. You will notice that the trucks and the motorbikes and so on are not stopped by horrified Gazan civilians saying, “Why have you got this Israeli girl whose tendons you’ve cut and why are you bringing her here?” It’s all celebration. It’s all celebration. And it’s the same with those couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses they were being held in who were immediately returned by the citizens they met.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the celebration. I do wonder what percent of the population they represent, but there’s something really dark. There’s several ways to explain the celebration. It could be that there’s a deep indoctrination where you do legitimately hate Jews, and there also could be a place of just deep desperation. And it’s a kind of relief that you have to convince yourself that you’re on the side of fighting for freedom in order to justify to yourself that this is the right way to fight out desperation out of extremely harsh conditions.
Yeah, the celebration. I do wonder what percent of the population they represent, but there’s something really dark. There’s several ways to explain the celebration. It could be that there’s a deep indoctrination where you do legitimately hate Jews, and there also could be a place of just deep desperation. And it’s a kind of relief that you have to convince yourself that you’re on the side of fighting for freedom in order to justify to yourself that this is the right way to fight out desperation out of extremely harsh conditions.
Because the way we’re speaking about this with a celebration, it’s very easy to project a kind of evil on the populace that I just am very hesitant to project, especially on the general populace.
Douglas Murray
You don’t have to project it onto them. You can just listen to their own words. I’m sure you’ve heard that one of many audio recordings you hear from the morning, but I’m sure you’ve heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of Israel and calls back home. Have you heard that?
You don’t have to project it onto them. You can just listen to their own words. I’m sure you’ve heard that one of many audio recordings you hear from the morning, but I’m sure you’ve heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of Israel and calls back home. Have you heard that?
Lex Fridman
Yes, I’ve heard it.
Yes, I’ve heard it.
Douglas Murray
I quoted it in the first chapter of the book. He calls back home and he says to his father who picks up… It’s on what? I think he’s on phone, but he’s saying, “Turn on to WhatsApp because I can show you.” He says, “I’ve killed 10 Jews with my own hands. Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews.” And his father is saying, “Where are you? Where are you?” “I want to show you, dad. I want to show you. I’ve killed Jews with my own hands, your son. Put mother on the phone.” Mother comes on the phone, the brother comes on the phone. This is one of many, many stories from the day that suggests something, which I would say is not just indoctrination, but yes, evil.
I quoted it in the first chapter of the book. He calls back home and he says to his father who picks up… It’s on what? I think he’s on phone, but he’s saying, “Turn on to WhatsApp because I can show you.” He says, “I’ve killed 10 Jews with my own hands. Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews.” And his father is saying, “Where are you? Where are you?” “I want to show you, dad. I want to show you. I’ve killed Jews with my own hands, your son. Put mother on the phone.” Mother comes on the phone, the brother comes on the phone. This is one of many, many stories from the day that suggests something, which I would say is not just indoctrination, but yes, evil.
Lex Fridman
First of all, those phone calls are somehow uniquely horrific. But I’ve also heard recordings of phone calls made by Ukrainian soldiers to their parents and Russian soldiers to their parents and they have… Not as intense and not as horrific, but they have a similar nature to them, which there’s an aspect of war where you dehumanize the other side in order to fight that war. We have to remember that element is going to be there in a time of war, in a time of desperation.
First of all, those phone calls are somehow uniquely horrific. But I’ve also heard recordings of phone calls made by Ukrainian soldiers to their parents and Russian soldiers to their parents and they have… Not as intense and not as horrific, but they have a similar nature to them, which there’s an aspect of war where you dehumanize the other side in order to fight that war. We have to remember that element is going to be there in a time of war, in a time of desperation.
Douglas Murray
It would be a strange type of simple sort of, I don’t know, pride in war to go into an eight-year-old woman’s house and kill her on her floor and then film her dead body, her body in its final moments and send it round to all of that woman’s friends on her phone, on her Instagram account. You may have heard different things from me, but I mean, I would be surprised if there were even the most vociferous of Russian soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and saying, “Mom, you won’t believe my luck. I managed to rape and kill this 18-year-old woman.” That’s quite unusual, even in warfare. And that’s one of the things about Hamas and what I describe as the death cult types, which makes them different from other people.
It would be a strange type of simple sort of, I don’t know, pride in war to go into an eight-year-old woman’s house and kill her on her floor and then film her dead body, her body in its final moments and send it round to all of that woman’s friends on her phone, on her Instagram account. You may have heard different things from me, but I mean, I would be surprised if there were even the most vociferous of Russian soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and saying, “Mom, you won’t believe my luck. I managed to rape and kill this 18-year-old woman.” That’s quite unusual, even in warfare. And that’s one of the things about Hamas and what I describe as the death cult types, which makes them different from other people.
Lex Fridman
But that’s the channeling of evil, and hatred, and anger in the human spirit. But that doesn’t make that person evil.
But that’s the channeling of evil, and hatred, and anger in the human spirit. But that doesn’t make that person evil.
Douglas Murray
No, I disagree.
No, I disagree.
Lex Fridman
You commit that once.
You commit that once.
Douglas Murray
I think that there is such a force as evil in the world, and I think it can descend and it can be used. It’s very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this. But everything I’ve seen, there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the 7th that cannot be described as anything other than evil. The things that happened at the Nova Party were especially appalling. I mean, it was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because first of all, it’s a party which people like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger might have been at.
I think that there is such a force as evil in the world, and I think it can descend and it can be used. It’s very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this. But everything I’ve seen, there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the 7th that cannot be described as anything other than evil. The things that happened at the Nova Party were especially appalling. I mean, it was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because first of all, it’s a party which people like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger might have been at.
And so everyone knows the world of a dance party in all night raving in the desert to commune with nature and the universe and to take some psychedelics and to expand your consciousness and your love and all of that sort of thing.
The fact that people doing that at 6:30 in the morning then encountered people coming in to the party on trucks and military vehicles and just massacring them and raping them. I mean, I give examples of the firsthand accounts of people who survived, but I mean, it’s beyond belief of almost anything else I’ve covered in war. And it’s because it seems so… I mean, an army facing another army is one thing.
A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing. A terrorist group facing a group of young people at a dance unarmed and doing what they did is pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere. So that stated, can you empathize with the suffering of Palestinians and Gaza with the destruction that resulted as a response?
Yes. What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there on the first time a couple of days early into the ground invasion when the citizens of Gaza were coming south. I was in the middle of the strip and the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages being taken south deeper into Gaza and to try to stop the Hamas leadership from making it south. It actually didn’t really work because they’d already got a lot of the hostages south.
It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north so as not to be dragged all the way… In the end, dragged all the way in any way. But, yes, and I mean watching the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor and everyone was being checked for bombs, suicide vests, checked for particularly young men of military age. I mean, you look at this tide of human misery and you think, “This is terrible.” But this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been miss governing the place that they lived in.
And of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this. At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger that they had come to this point because of the fact that they had elected a terror group to run their territory. And one of the things obviously is that a lot of people like to say, and it’s true, of course, this didn’t all start on October the 7th. Absolutely true. This particular round, this particularly intense round of war started on October the 7th without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October the 7th.
It wasn’t like they were forced to liberate themselves or something that some of the defenders of Hamas claim. But the conflict of course goes back a lot earlier. But you will have to always keep on contending with this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict, what used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict and now has become interestingly rebranded, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But there is one absolutely essential issue to this which cannot be forgotten, which is do the Palestinians want a state or do they want to destroy the Jewish state? And if they want to destroy the Jewish state as they’ve tried many times, it’s a disaster for them. It’s a total disaster for them.
If they want to create their own state, they’ve already had several very good shots to do it, one of which is Gaza post 2005. But they’ve never shown in their leadership the desire to live with a Jewish state, and that’s the catastrophe for the Palestinians.
Lex Fridman
Can you still mount the case of the lived experience of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices that describe the Gaza situation as an occupation, West Bank too, and in the case of Gaza, open air prison?
Can you still mount the case of the lived experience of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices that describe the Gaza situation as an occupation, West Bank too, and in the case of Gaza, open air prison?
Douglas Murray
To take them in order, there’s nothing about Gaza that was an open air prison. They had ability to trade. They had the ability to move in and out in increasing numbers. Egypt wasn’t so keen on allowing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt. Still isn’t. But at the time of the 7th, there was actually an interesting… One of the things the international community was pushing for was more Palestinians to be coming into Israel every day through the Eretz Crossing and others to work in Israel because they can make a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza.
To take them in order, there’s nothing about Gaza that was an open air prison. They had ability to trade. They had the ability to move in and out in increasing numbers. Egypt wasn’t so keen on allowing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt. Still isn’t. But at the time of the 7th, there was actually an interesting… One of the things the international community was pushing for was more Palestinians to be coming into Israel every day through the Eretz Crossing and others to work in Israel because they can make a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza.
And this the, as it were, normalization route was slowly being attempted. It as being pushed on Israel [inaudible 01:51:42] did a little bit too fast for Israel’s comfort, but it happened. That completely came to an end, and that dream has gone since the 7th of October.
Lex Fridman
Can you clarify the dream, the normalization relationship?
Can you clarify the dream, the normalization relationship?
Douglas Murray
The normalization dream.
The normalization dream.
Lex Fridman
Between Gaza and Israel?
Between Gaza and Israel?
Douglas Murray
Gone. There will be-
Gone. There will be-
Lex Fridman
Really?
Really?
Douglas Murray
Yeah, no normalization. No, not after that. And one of the reasons is the number of people, again, who I’ve spoken with, who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians, worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza in order to work in Israel, and these were their brothers and sisters and so on and so forth. One of the reasons why the massacres of the 7th were so successful in the kibbutz, in the communities in the South was because of the number of the terrorists who came in with detailed house to house maps of those communities.
Yeah, no normalization. No, not after that. And one of the reasons is the number of people, again, who I’ve spoken with, who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians, worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza in order to work in Israel, and these were their brothers and sisters and so on and so forth. One of the reasons why the massacres of the 7th were so successful in the kibbutz, in the communities in the South was because of the number of the terrorists who came in with detailed house to house maps of those communities.
I spoke with one man who, his community, they had a security officer chief and Hamas came in. They knew to go and kill him and his family first, and then which families… I’ve seen the maps myself. They came in with incredibly accurate information about these communities. How did they have them? Because it was given to them by the brothers, by the workers, by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out. So there is nobody that will trust that ever again.
Lex Fridman
There’s a lot of Palestinians that have lived and flourished inside Israel. What are they saying? What are they feeling and what are the Israelis feeling about them? Is there still camaraderie to some degree or is it completely destroyed?
There’s a lot of Palestinians that have lived and flourished inside Israel. What are they saying? What are they feeling and what are the Israelis feeling about them? Is there still camaraderie to some degree or is it completely destroyed?
Douglas Murray
My observation at the beginning was that everyone was extremely wary. I mean, if you’ve worked beside somebody and then found out they sold out your family, you will never trust again. And that particularly in a small country like Israel, the word of that happening goes out very fast. At the very beginning, there was intense, intense fear about that, including of the 20% or so of the population who are Arab Israelis.
My observation at the beginning was that everyone was extremely wary. I mean, if you’ve worked beside somebody and then found out they sold out your family, you will never trust again. And that particularly in a small country like Israel, the word of that happening goes out very fast. At the very beginning, there was intense, intense fear about that, including of the 20% or so of the population who are Arab Israelis.
I actually think one of the few positive news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has by and large held. There hasn’t been an Intifada. One of the reasons why there hasn’t been more terrorist activity in the West Bank in Judea and Samaria is because the Israelis have been very careful along with the Palestinian authority to some extent, cooperating to keep that down. But there wasn’t a full war on three fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening.
So I think that the coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some terrible examples, far too regular, but not as regular that could happen of Muslim Arab Israelis carrying out acts of terror as it was sympathy with Hamas. I was in the middle of one such attack myself late last year and in a town called Hadera. And those things have happened, but it’s not… That particular catastrophe has not occurred.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Lex Fridman
Can we talk about Benjamin Netanyahu? For a lot of people who spoke of evil, they refer to him as evil on the spectrum between good and evil. As a leader, where does Netanyahu fall?
Can we talk about Benjamin Netanyahu? For a lot of people who spoke of evil, they refer to him as evil on the spectrum between good and evil. As a leader, where does Netanyahu fall?
Douglas Murray
Well, he’s certainly not evil. Interesting if people looking at this conflict were to be reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister. It would be sort of telling, I would say.
Well, he’s certainly not evil. Interesting if people looking at this conflict were to be reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister. It would be sort of telling, I would say.
Lex Fridman
Can we just actually linger on that point? There is a point you’ve made multiple times, which is we’re more eager to criticize and maybe even over-exaggerate the criticism of democratically elected leaders.
Can we just actually linger on that point? There is a point you’ve made multiple times, which is we’re more eager to criticize and maybe even over-exaggerate the criticism of democratically elected leaders.
Douglas Murray
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
It’s a dark, weird other quality of discourse at parties, aforementioned parties.
It’s a dark, weird other quality of discourse at parties, aforementioned parties.
Douglas Murray
I mean, not to be flippant for a moment. It’s a little bit like who do you show your worst sides to the people you love? My intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me because if I expressed it to absolutely everybody I met at the party or a social setting, it would be hard. I mean, there’s a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it. And something similar happens in international politics.
I mean, not to be flippant for a moment. It’s a little bit like who do you show your worst sides to the people you love? My intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me because if I expressed it to absolutely everybody I met at the party or a social setting, it would be hard. I mean, there’s a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it. And something similar happens in international politics.
You pressure the people who will listen. I mean, one of the things you hear a lot in the last year, people ignoramuses in the governments in places like Britain will say, we need to put more pressure on the Israelis to do X. And you go, “Well, in part that’s because they will listen.” If you go, “We need to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs in Iran to persuade them that Hamas are really bad and they shouldn’t be doing this,” what the hell do you think they’re going to do? Are they even going to listen to you? They don’t give a damn. You’re talking totally different worlds. Not just a different language. It’s a different world.
And by the way, that happens in Israel. I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel. When the Hostage Families Forum came about, I spent a lot of time there. I got to know a lot of the families. And they’re remarkable. But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that a lot of them, they protest outside Netanyahu’s house. They use clacks and horns and make sure he can never sleep. They will put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied hands and so on.
I think as much sympathy as you can for these families, the plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year, a day, an hour is intolerable. But there’s a reason why the families protested Netanyahu, and that’s because Sinwar didn’t care. That wouldn’t work if you said, “Understand my plight. I’m a Jewish mother and my daughter is thing.” You think Sinwar the heads of Hamas care? You think the leaders in Qatar who host them care?
The Qatari emir’s mother when Sinwar was killed, praised Sinwar. You couldn’t talk that language to these people, but you can talk that language to the elected prime minister of Israel because that, first of all, he’s somebody who might listen to your pressure, could be pressured. And secondly he’s simply the only person you can pressure. There’s no one else. Hamas doesn’t care. Hezbollah doesn’t care. Iranian revolutionary government doesn’t care.
Lex Fridman
Let’s just say once, again, the obvious thing that while it is possible to discuss Hamas soldiers as freedom fighters, I’m not one of the folks that can take that perspective. It’s a tough one to take.
Let’s just say once, again, the obvious thing that while it is possible to discuss Hamas soldiers as freedom fighters, I’m not one of the folks that can take that perspective. It’s a tough one to take.
Douglas Murray
I don’t see how you can call them freedom fighters.
I don’t see how you can call them freedom fighters.
Lex Fridman
So this goes to the man from the land of peace and the man from the land of war. There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza. And if you fully load that into your brain in a real way, not using the words of good and evil, but in a very deep human sense, from that place, from that place of desperation, from your home and your family is destroyed, doesn’t matter why, doesn’t matter if there’s evil all around you that caused it. It doesn’t matter. The facts are the facts. And from that place, somebody who’s fighting for you can feel like a freedom fighter.
So this goes to the man from the land of peace and the man from the land of war. There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza. And if you fully load that into your brain in a real way, not using the words of good and evil, but in a very deep human sense, from that place, from that place of desperation, from your home and your family is destroyed, doesn’t matter why, doesn’t matter if there’s evil all around you that caused it. It doesn’t matter. The facts are the facts. And from that place, somebody who’s fighting for you can feel like a freedom fighter.
I think it should be called out that, yes, it can feel that way from the lived experience. But Hamas is very clearly since we’re talking about Netanyahu, Hamas is evil. Okay. Now, you can still in that context discuss the degree to which Netanyahu is the right leader for this moment, and whether he goes too far, whether he’s too politically selfish in the decisions he makes, whether he’s too much a warmonger, whether he’s utilizing the war for his own political gains and is not caring about the death of civilians in Gaza, for example, but more caring about his own political maintaining power.
That’s a perspective that I could steal, man. And that’s a perspective worth we’re discussing, and that’s a perspective of many in Israel hold. When they criticize Netanyahu. He’s increasingly less and less popular.
Douglas Murray
That’s wrong. Opinion polls last month when he was in Washington, it showed it was an all time high. But you were saying…
That’s wrong. Opinion polls last month when he was in Washington, it showed it was an all time high. But you were saying…
Lex Fridman
I make my own poll, and according to my poll, I’m the greatest. I’m the nicest and the coolest person in the world. A hundred percent of people agree.
I make my own poll, and according to my poll, I’m the greatest. I’m the nicest and the coolest person in the world. A hundred percent of people agree.
Douglas Murray
Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh that much.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh that much.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You laughed a little too much.
Yeah. You laughed a little too much.
Douglas Murray
Too long.
Too long.
Lex Fridman
It’s more than the joke.
It’s more than the joke.
Douglas Murray
But you were saying, I mean the…
But you were saying, I mean the…
Lex Fridman
Okay, let’s steelman the criticism of Netanyahu. And then steelman, the case for him that he’s the right leader actually.
Okay, let’s steelman the criticism of Netanyahu. And then steelman, the case for him that he’s the right leader actually.
Douglas Murray
Well, the most devastating thing that anyone could come up against Netanyahu is that the 7th happened on his watch. After the Yom Kippur War in 1933, Golda Meir who is very distinguished prime minister of Israel, and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the political hit for the Yom Kippur invasion by Israel’s Arab neighbors happening on her watch. And I would’ve thought that most critics, fair-minded critics of Netanyahu inside Israel would always hold that against him. One of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before the 7th because of the judicial reforms. I think there’s a strong case for the judicial reforms in Israel, but it’s a niche Israeli governance issue, which we don’t have to get into. The point is that Netanyahu and its government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms, and it was very divisive and on the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend.
Well, the most devastating thing that anyone could come up against Netanyahu is that the 7th happened on his watch. After the Yom Kippur War in 1933, Golda Meir who is very distinguished prime minister of Israel, and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the political hit for the Yom Kippur invasion by Israel’s Arab neighbors happening on her watch. And I would’ve thought that most critics, fair-minded critics of Netanyahu inside Israel would always hold that against him. One of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before the 7th because of the judicial reforms. I think there’s a strong case for the judicial reforms in Israel, but it’s a niche Israeli governance issue, which we don’t have to get into. The point is that Netanyahu and its government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms, and it was very divisive and on the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend.
There were protests. And the police were tired because they’d spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned raucous, not to say violent. Well, sometimes violent and you could say, “Well, if you see that something is dividing your country this much, might you stop?” There is a claim by some people that one of the things that prompted the 7th was that Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population.
Significant chunk of it every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services and so on, and thought, “Good. Now is the time.” In other words, what I quoted Sinwar as saying earlier when he was in prison in Israel was this thing, “One day you’ll be weak, and then I’ll strike.” Maybe that is one of the things that Sinwar thought Israel was very weak. It had been divided, and therefore the time to strike.
There’s an argument against that which is that the 7th was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began. So you can look at it several ways, but you could use that. You could say, “Look, your nation was divided. Don’t push through anymore on that.” There’s lots of things like that. You could say that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception. There were critics of his, including critics who were in the war cabinet who thought that he was too focused on Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah.
Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. There’s them and many other criticisms that people make of him. I’ve interviewed, I think every political leader in Israel from right to left, pretty much, and I have to say, I don’t think there’s any of them that wouldn’t have responded similarly to the 7th of October to the way he has.
Lex Fridman
Okay. So that’s inside Israel. Outside of Israel, despite what he said, he is one of the most hated people in the world. Just the raw quantity. Relative, he’s a loved by a lot of people, but there’s a lot of people that… there’s a lot of psychological effects that might explain that.
Okay. So that’s inside Israel. Outside of Israel, despite what he said, he is one of the most hated people in the world. Just the raw quantity. Relative, he’s a loved by a lot of people, but there’s a lot of people that… there’s a lot of psychological effects that might explain that.
Douglas Murray
I mean, it’s sort of strange, if there is a widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of 8 to 9 million people.
I mean, it’s sort of strange, if there is a widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of 8 to 9 million people.
Lex Fridman
That might mean something more than hatred of the military actions and the policies of the one person.
That might mean something more than hatred of the military actions and the policies of the one person.
Douglas Murray
I mean, there’s an awful lot of people to hate in the world. There’s a lot of wars in the world. It’s always of interest to me, and obviously some of the one things I go into on democracies and death cults is this question of why is this so galvanizing for so many people? And I think that is a very, very interesting question. Why? By the way, let me do a quick addendum to that. You can notice something else that when people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy and the last 30 years or so, it’s very interesting. There’s a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfowitz and they will say, “Well, Wolfowitz? You mean deputy undersecretary of defense under George W. Bush?”
I mean, there’s an awful lot of people to hate in the world. There’s a lot of wars in the world. It’s always of interest to me, and obviously some of the one things I go into on democracies and death cults is this question of why is this so galvanizing for so many people? And I think that is a very, very interesting question. Why? By the way, let me do a quick addendum to that. You can notice something else that when people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy and the last 30 years or so, it’s very interesting. There’s a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfowitz and they will say, “Well, Wolfowitz? You mean deputy undersecretary of defense under George W. Bush?”
You think he guided everything? Why would that be? Other than the fact that his name, as Marc Stein once said, starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish.
Lex Fridman
That’s a good one.
That’s a good one.
Douglas Murray
So I do think that there are very deep things at play.
So I do think that there are very deep things at play.
Lex Fridman
That’s a good line.
That’s a good line.
Douglas Murray
There are very deep things at play. Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does, for a lot of people is a kind of devil. And you have to say, “Well, why is that?” Now, of course, some people will say, “Well, that’s because of his terrible hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth.”
There are very deep things at play. Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does, for a lot of people is a kind of devil. And you have to say, “Well, why is that?” Now, of course, some people will say, “Well, that’s because of his terrible hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth.”
Douglas Murray
… hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth. The case for Netanyahu is that he sees it as his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people and that that’s his life’s mission. And on that basis, I think he’s been, by any measure, historic leader, he has warned the world about the threat from the mullahs in Tehran. He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism across the region, across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. And after the 7th, he has held together a very, very difficult set of challenges to keep international pressure at a tolerable level to do all sorts of things, but most importantly to oversee the two war aims that he set out at the beginning.
… hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth. The case for Netanyahu is that he sees it as his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people and that that’s his life’s mission. And on that basis, I think he’s been, by any measure, historic leader, he has warned the world about the threat from the mullahs in Tehran. He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism across the region, across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. And after the 7th, he has held together a very, very difficult set of challenges to keep international pressure at a tolerable level to do all sorts of things, but most importantly to oversee the two war aims that he set out at the beginning.
I thought, let me just express this, I thought like a lot of people, when I heard about the hostages, my immediate instinct was they’re all dead, they’re all going to be dead, we’ll never see them again. And that was the attitude of a lot of Israelis. But although there are still hostages being held, and as I’ve always said the war could end tomorrow if they were handed back, or at least the beginning of the end of the war could begin tomorrow if they were handed back, nevertheless, because of the actions of not just Netanyahu but The Israeli government, most of the hostages have been returned, did not expect this to happen. Hamas has not been completely destroyed, but it has been very, very significantly degraded, and you end up in the definition of what a total destruction of Hamas would look like, but they are not anywhere near the capability they were in November of 2023.
Their leadership has almost all been killed. The second tier of leadership almost all gone, and this is a just response to what Hamas did. The moment Netanyahu’s reputation in Israel was at a low early on because of what had happened, but there’s no doubt, and as I say in the final chapter of the book, I mean General Slim had this phrase from Defeat Into Victory, Israel isn’t a victory yet in this conflict. But when in September last year, there were a set of operational successes, so extraordinary that, I mean, it was just like every day’s news was… There was one day, I remember when after the Assad regime file, when the Israeli Air Force took out the entirety of the Syrian Air Force in a day because they didn’t want it falling into the hands of the new Jihadist administration in Syria.
It was story number four on the BBC News website. The leadership of Hezbollah, gone, gone. The second and third tiers of Hezbollah, gone or wounded. Iran’s Rolls-Royce, destroyed. These are very, very significant military achievements and are, in my mind, a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies to destroy the Jewish state. Would another Israeli leader have been able to hold firm as Netanyahu has? I don’t know but I do know that any of them would’ve done something similar or would’ve tried to do something similar, because there’s no country on earth, no democracy on earth, which could possibly not respond to such an atrocity.
Hate
Lex Fridman
To the underlying point you made of why do so many people want to call him evil, and so the implication is it’s not just a hatred of Israel, there’s an ocean of hatred for the Jews.
To the underlying point you made of why do so many people want to call him evil, and so the implication is it’s not just a hatred of Israel, there’s an ocean of hatred for the Jews.
Douglas Murray
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
Why is there so much hatred for Jews in the world?
Why is there so much hatred for Jews in the world?
Douglas Murray
I would say there’s one reason in particular, it’s a stupid and gullible person’s easy answer. Why does certain things happen in the world? What is our explanation of chance or unfairness or any number of things? Easiest, easiest, stupidest person’s explanation is there’s a small group of people doing it.
I would say there’s one reason in particular, it’s a stupid and gullible person’s easy answer. Why does certain things happen in the world? What is our explanation of chance or unfairness or any number of things? Easiest, easiest, stupidest person’s explanation is there’s a small group of people doing it.
Lex Fridman
Let’s not say stupid because there’s something in the human mind that craves a nice clean theory of everything that explains all the problems. It’s not just stupidest-
Let’s not say stupid because there’s something in the human mind that craves a nice clean theory of everything that explains all the problems. It’s not just stupidest-
Douglas Murray
Let me rephrase, lowest grade.
Let me rephrase, lowest grade.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Douglas Murray
Lowest grade.
Lowest grade.
Lex Fridman
Because I have that desire too to simplify everything like-
Because I have that desire too to simplify everything like-
Douglas Murray
Be a bit antisemitic, what?
Be a bit antisemitic, what?
Lex Fridman
We’ve all been a bit antisemitic here and there, and just get a few vodkas in me, no. To find, I mean, maybe it’s a mathematician in me, it’s like to find a simple explanation for everything.
We’ve all been a bit antisemitic here and there, and just get a few vodkas in me, no. To find, I mean, maybe it’s a mathematician in me, it’s like to find a simple explanation for everything.
Douglas Murray
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
Actually, that’s nice for historians do this.
Actually, that’s nice for historians do this.
Douglas Murray
Absolutely. I agree.
Absolutely. I agree.
Lex Fridman
Analyzing why the Roman Empire collapsed. It’s so nice to have, especially if it’s a counterintuitive explanation. It’s one of the favorite go-tos, right? Is an explanation for all the problems in the world.
Analyzing why the Roman Empire collapsed. It’s so nice to have, especially if it’s a counterintuitive explanation. It’s one of the favorite go-tos, right? Is an explanation for all the problems in the world.
Douglas Murray
It’s the lowest resolution analysis imaginable.
It’s the lowest resolution analysis imaginable.
Lex Fridman
Why is there traffic? Why did my wife leave me? Why did my wife cheating on me? Why did I lose my job? Why did I not get the job? So even on the personal level.
Why is there traffic? Why did my wife leave me? Why did my wife cheating on me? Why did I lose my job? Why did I not get the job? So even on the personal level.
Douglas Murray
Oh, especially on the personal level. Why did I not get everything? Somebody must have held me back.
Oh, especially on the personal level. Why did I not get everything? Somebody must have held me back.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and it’s just that hatred of Jews has been such a popular go-to throughout history that you just always return back to the hits, I guess. And what is it special about the Jews as a group that people love to hate? Is it just because it’s small number of people?
Yeah, and it’s just that hatred of Jews has been such a popular go-to throughout history that you just always return back to the hits, I guess. And what is it special about the Jews as a group that people love to hate? Is it just because it’s small number of people?
Douglas Murray
I think several things.
I think several things.
Lex Fridman
Successful?
Successful?
Douglas Murray
One is small and without by any means saying this is a general rule, but disproportionately highly accomplished in certain fields at certain times. Prominent is a word I would use, prominent slightly beyond their numbers in certain places. It’s not a full explanation. I mean all sorts of historical reasons why Jews were involved in banking, but then there are lots of historical reasons why the Scottish people, my own, were involved in banking. And to this day, you don’t find many people who blame all international finance problems on the Scots. So they were just like easy grooves for people to fall into, it seems to me.
One is small and without by any means saying this is a general rule, but disproportionately highly accomplished in certain fields at certain times. Prominent is a word I would use, prominent slightly beyond their numbers in certain places. It’s not a full explanation. I mean all sorts of historical reasons why Jews were involved in banking, but then there are lots of historical reasons why the Scottish people, my own, were involved in banking. And to this day, you don’t find many people who blame all international finance problems on the Scots. So they were just like easy grooves for people to fall into, it seems to me.
Lex Fridman
We should also mention banking, for some reason, money is a thing that people go to, but Jews have been disproportionately successful in the sciences and engineering mathematics and the arts and so on.
We should also mention banking, for some reason, money is a thing that people go to, but Jews have been disproportionately successful in the sciences and engineering mathematics and the arts and so on.
Douglas Murray
A sensible person would try to work out why that is and see what is replicable. A, I don’t use the word stupid again, now a different type of person.
A sensible person would try to work out why that is and see what is replicable. A, I don’t use the word stupid again, now a different type of person.
Lex Fridman
I’m triggered already.
I’m triggered already.
Douglas Murray
A different type of person would look at that and say, that must mean they took something from me, and that’s the most zero-sum game there is. It’s an endlessly fascinating subject, because it seems to me that antisemitism is almost certainly a sort of ineradicable temptation of the human spirit at its ugliest and cheapest. But because it’s back in our day, it bears some analysis again, and I would say two things about it. One is, as I and others have said many times in the past, one of the fascinating things about antisemitism is that it can cover everything at once. So the Jews get hated for being rich and for being poor, both for being the Rothschilds and for being Eastern European Jews escaping the pogroms. They can be hated for being religious and for being anti-religious and producing Marxism for instance, hated for religiosity and secularism. They can be hated for most recently not having a state and therefore being ruthless cosmopolitans and also hated for having a state. And that makes it something very unusual actually in the history of human bigotry and bias and ugliness. But the real thing is, one of my great heroes, Vasily Grossman, says at the center of Life and Faith, almost everything that is worth saying about antisemitism is Grossman’s genius that he could say in three to four pages what most people couldn’t say in an entire life, even after life of study. But there’s this passage in Life and Faith that I quote in my book, which is I just bowled me over when I read it some years ago when he says the interesting thing about antisemitism.
A different type of person would look at that and say, that must mean they took something from me, and that’s the most zero-sum game there is. It’s an endlessly fascinating subject, because it seems to me that antisemitism is almost certainly a sort of ineradicable temptation of the human spirit at its ugliest and cheapest. But because it’s back in our day, it bears some analysis again, and I would say two things about it. One is, as I and others have said many times in the past, one of the fascinating things about antisemitism is that it can cover everything at once. So the Jews get hated for being rich and for being poor, both for being the Rothschilds and for being Eastern European Jews escaping the pogroms. They can be hated for being religious and for being anti-religious and producing Marxism for instance, hated for religiosity and secularism. They can be hated for most recently not having a state and therefore being ruthless cosmopolitans and also hated for having a state. And that makes it something very unusual actually in the history of human bigotry and bias and ugliness. But the real thing is, one of my great heroes, Vasily Grossman, says at the center of Life and Faith, almost everything that is worth saying about antisemitism is Grossman’s genius that he could say in three to four pages what most people couldn’t say in an entire life, even after life of study. But there’s this passage in Life and Faith that I quote in my book, which is I just bowled me over when I read it some years ago when he says the interesting thing about antisemitism.
He says you can meet it everywhere in the academy of sciences and in the games that children play in the yard. But Grossman’s great insight is he says everywhere it tells you not about the Jews, but about the person making the claim. And the most important gift he gives in his analysis is when he says, describes it as a mirror to the person who is making the claims, culminating in this phrase I’ve been trying to make popular, which is he says, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you you’re guilty of.” It’s a searingly brilliant insight. The Iranian revolutionary government accuses Israel of being a colonial power. The Iranian revolutionary government has been colonizing the Middle East throughout our lifetimes. The Turkish government accuses the Jewish state of being guilty of occupation. Do you know Northern Cyprus? Turks have been occupying half of Cyprus since the 1970s. Cyprus is an EU member state and Turkey is in NATO. So you can do this on and on. The people who accuse the Jewish state like the people who accuse Jews of something almost without fail is the thing they’re guilty of. Look at the supporters of Hamas and Hamas. One of the things they say is that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate killing.
Hamas, hello? What were you doing on the 7th? If you see, they’re these crazy guys online who claim, repeatedly claim that for some reason Israeli soldiers will rape Palestinians when they meet them, whether in a prison or on the battlefield or in a hospital. It just erupts occasionally. These people go around and say, “Oh, my God, the IDF are rapists.” Excuse me? You are the ones who spent the years after 2016 saying, “Believe all women,” then from the 7th of October said, believe all women except for Jewish women who say they’ve been raped or seen their friends raped, and then you say, “Aha, the Jews are rapists.”
You’ve been carrying water for rapists and then go and accuse the Jews of rape. It just works. Every way you do it, it works. I do think the thing of psychological projection in the case of Israel is wild. I mean, it is wild. By the way, there’s an interesting thing on this that I tried to get into in the book, which is this thing of why did so much of the world respond the way it did? I mean, we’re sitting in New York. There was not one protest against Hamas in New York after the 7th of October.
The Believe All Women crowd didn’t come out against Hamas’s rapes. The Black Lives Matter movement did not turn their attention to the killing of Israeli children or anything. Nobody did it. Nobody did it. The one thing that did happen very prominently was that people came out to attack the people who’d been attacked. And as I say in the opening of the book, I saw that myself down the road from him at Times Square on October the 8th, October the frigging 8th, the protests are in Times Square against Israel, justifying the attacks that were still going on. And this is something that deserves deep self-examination on behalf of people in the West who’ve seen this movement overwhelm parts of our society, I mean degraded parts but parts, bits of the universities and so on. And I think there’s an explanation for it, by the way, which again goes back to that issue of projection. When you and I last talked on camera, we were talking about my last book, The War on the West. And I remember saying to you there that one of the things I was talking about in that book was the deeply, deeply, wildly biased, unfair, and inaccurate estimation of the Western past, whereby America’s original sin had to be identified and the original sin is slavery. So America has an original sin.
Does Ghana have an original sin? No one knows. No one really will think it polite to point one out, and you go on and on with these things that I identified in The War in the West, these sins of the West. And they have in recent years been reduced to the claim that countries like the one we’re sitting in are guilty of what? Colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, genocide, and a couple of others you can throw in probably. One of the things I remember saying to you when we spoke about that was that one of the deep problems of setting up that system of thought, pseudo thought, non-thought, would be thought is that there’s nothing you can do about it. Even if it was true, there’s nothing you can do about it.
If it turned out that your ancestors in the 18th century once owned a slave, what are you going to do? There’s no mechanism to forgive or be forgiven because you didn’t do it, and there’s no one in life who could accept the apology. And I remember setting it up there in The War on the West, I set up this very, very risky, dangerous, unforgivable, unforgiving thing that had been set up about our societies. But I would say that since October the 7th, there has been an answer for a certain type of person, which is I am from a society where I have been told I am guilty of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and more.
I’ve been told all of these things. I have been put in an ungetoutable of situation of moral burden that can never be relieved because I can’t ask anyone’s forgiveness and nobody can forgive me, but ah, here’s a country which I can accuse of all of these things in the here and now, load my energies, my burdens onto and what’s more I might be able to end it and by doing so would relieve myself. In other words, to slight just, I quote, I tweak Grossman with the people in America elsewhere who’ve fallen into this trap, I tweak him by saying, “On this occasion, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’ve been told you’re guilty of.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s an interesting kind of projection. Just to observe some of the sociological phenomena here on top of all this, it does seem that hatred of Jews gets a lot of engagement online. So I watch it like a curiosity, like I’m an alien observing Earth, is this dangerous to you or is it just a bunch of trolls and grifters, let’s say cosplaying as Nazis. It’s just-
Yeah, it’s an interesting kind of projection. Just to observe some of the sociological phenomena here on top of all this, it does seem that hatred of Jews gets a lot of engagement online. So I watch it like a curiosity, like I’m an alien observing Earth, is this dangerous to you or is it just a bunch of trolls and grifters, let’s say cosplaying as Nazis. It’s just-
Douglas Murray
Could be both.
Could be both.
Lex Fridman
… fun to trigger the libs?
… fun to trigger the libs?
Douglas Murray
It could be all of this I think it is and a lot more. I mean taboos, taboos can be fun to break, I suppose. And I suppose there are some people online who have grown up knowing that since the Holocaust, antisemitism was taboo and they’ve run out of, goes back to what we were saying earlier a bit. They’ve got bored of that Holocaust smaller course. They’d say, “I’ve heard enough about that.” And maybe those people have gone off in a funny direction as a result, but I don’t think that’s the main. I think that’s a detail compared to the real thing. The real thing is that antisemitism is back and there is a certain type of person who’s loving it.
It could be all of this I think it is and a lot more. I mean taboos, taboos can be fun to break, I suppose. And I suppose there are some people online who have grown up knowing that since the Holocaust, antisemitism was taboo and they’ve run out of, goes back to what we were saying earlier a bit. They’ve got bored of that Holocaust smaller course. They’d say, “I’ve heard enough about that.” And maybe those people have gone off in a funny direction as a result, but I don’t think that’s the main. I think that’s a detail compared to the real thing. The real thing is that antisemitism is back and there is a certain type of person who’s loving it.
Lex Fridman
Is it really back? So I watch a lot-
Is it really back? So I watch a lot-
Douglas Murray
Well, it never goes away. It’s just that since the 7th, I think that it’s had a great resurgence. And this isn’t to say, I assume and that doesn’t mean that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, no, it doesn’t. But as I have often said, if you don’t ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims in Syria, not any interest in genocide in Sudan, killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, but on the 8th of October, you are on the street with a placard attacking Israel, I’m sorry, you’re an antisemite for sure. You may not know you are, but that’s what’s motivating you.
Well, it never goes away. It’s just that since the 7th, I think that it’s had a great resurgence. And this isn’t to say, I assume and that doesn’t mean that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, no, it doesn’t. But as I have often said, if you don’t ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims in Syria, not any interest in genocide in Sudan, killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, but on the 8th of October, you are on the street with a placard attacking Israel, I’m sorry, you’re an antisemite for sure. You may not know you are, but that’s what’s motivating you.
Lex Fridman
It gets a lot of engagement. I watched it.
It gets a lot of engagement. I watched it.
Douglas Murray
It does. It does.
It does. It does.
Lex Fridman
I watched it.
I watched it.
Douglas Murray
But I mean, it’s one of several things you can always see get huge engagement. I mean, if you say that there’s a massive pedophile ring run by prominent politicians, it might be total horse shit, likely to be total horse shit, but it’ll also get a hell of a lot of engagement.
But I mean, it’s one of several things you can always see get huge engagement. I mean, if you say that there’s a massive pedophile ring run by prominent politicians, it might be total horse shit, likely to be total horse shit, but it’ll also get a hell of a lot of engagement.
Lex Fridman
But that’s still… so the pedophile ring like Epstein Island, that kind of stuff.
But that’s still… so the pedophile ring like Epstein Island, that kind of stuff.
Douglas Murray
Yeah, all which is very interesting.
Yeah, all which is very interesting.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s like great, all right, cool. Let’s get behind that conspiracy. But the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews is still, that’s the greatest hits still.
Yeah, it’s like great, all right, cool. Let’s get behind that conspiracy. But the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews is still, that’s the greatest hits still.
Douglas Murray
It is. And I mean you see it with, I mean some of the people who’ve made minor celebrities of themselves, with a sort of made up version of history with a smattering of this and a little bit of that, and then the just asking questions. I’m not saying, but there are certain [inaudible 02:29:43] have helped this along. But as I said earlier, it’s just the lowest grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking for a pattern and looking for meaning. I mean, I can give you just one quick example of why that in the case of Israel is so extraordinary, is the number of otherwise semi-intelligent people who will tell you that the problem is simply that the Israelis need to give the Palestinians and other state. And if they do, it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world and irrespective of the fact that the Palestinians agreeing given to several states, the claim that this particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be seen on its face to be preposterous.
It is. And I mean you see it with, I mean some of the people who’ve made minor celebrities of themselves, with a sort of made up version of history with a smattering of this and a little bit of that, and then the just asking questions. I’m not saying, but there are certain [inaudible 02:29:43] have helped this along. But as I said earlier, it’s just the lowest grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking for a pattern and looking for meaning. I mean, I can give you just one quick example of why that in the case of Israel is so extraordinary, is the number of otherwise semi-intelligent people who will tell you that the problem is simply that the Israelis need to give the Palestinians and other state. And if they do, it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world and irrespective of the fact that the Palestinians agreeing given to several states, the claim that this particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be seen on its face to be preposterous.
There is no reason why if the Palestinians got another state either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, there is no reason why we should expect the economy of Yemen to boom. It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women or anything else. The most likely thing is you simply have another failed Arab state run by a proxy of Tehran. That’s the best case scenario.
And by the way, even lifelong defenders of the Palestinian cause like Salman Rushdie. He said recently, he said, “I’ve always been a supporter of the Palestinian people in their course, but it is an unavoidable fact that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it simply be at best another front for the Iranian regime in Iran.” The best. So why the passion? Why the unbelievable wild passion about this? And I say some of it can be, should be argued out and so on, and some of it can be explained, but there’s definitely a realm of it, a layer of it, which is simply at that level of this excites something within me, this excites something within me.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s something compelling to people about hating Jews.
Yeah, there’s something compelling to people about hating Jews.
Douglas Murray
Look at the prominence or semi-prominent people who are willing to play around with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job and somehow it’s done by the Israelis or the Jews. I mean, look at this shit is going around.
Look at the prominence or semi-prominent people who are willing to play around with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job and somehow it’s done by the Israelis or the Jews. I mean, look at this shit is going around.
Lex Fridman
I have to admit, there’s a part of my brain that’s pulled towards conspiracies. There’s something compelling and fun about a simple explanation for things, what’s really going on behind the scenes. Because the real world, when you don’t look into conspiracies, first of all, it’s complicated, and second of all, it’s kind of boring. It’s a bunch of incompetent people.
I have to admit, there’s a part of my brain that’s pulled towards conspiracies. There’s something compelling and fun about a simple explanation for things, what’s really going on behind the scenes. Because the real world, when you don’t look into conspiracies, first of all, it’s complicated, and second of all, it’s kind of boring. It’s a bunch of incompetent people.
Douglas Murray
Usually opening up Pandora’s boxes. They don’t understand.
Usually opening up Pandora’s boxes. They don’t understand.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s pushing buffoons. I’ve walked around and hung around with a lot of powerful and rich people, and the thing I learned is they’re just human beings. I’ve yet to be in a room where exceptionally brilliant psychopaths are plotting.
Yeah, it’s pushing buffoons. I’ve walked around and hung around with a lot of powerful and rich people, and the thing I learned is they’re just human beings. I’ve yet to be in a room where exceptionally brilliant psychopaths are plotting.
Douglas Murray
You never got that invite?
You never got that invite?
Lex Fridman
No. In fact, a lot of people in the positions of power, I mean, I’m just continuously disappointed that they’re not ultra… I love competence. The places where I’ve seen competence inklings of it is in low-level like soldiers, like low-level, what do you call that? People that do stuff with their hands. So builders of different kinds like engineering, like craftsmen. I’ve seen-
No. In fact, a lot of people in the positions of power, I mean, I’m just continuously disappointed that they’re not ultra… I love competence. The places where I’ve seen competence inklings of it is in low-level like soldiers, like low-level, what do you call that? People that do stuff with their hands. So builders of different kinds like engineering, like craftsmen. I’ve seen-
Douglas Murray
Yes, because you’ve got a very specific task that could be highly complicated, but you get to apply yourself to and to solve.
Yes, because you’ve got a very specific task that could be highly complicated, but you get to apply yourself to and to solve.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Over years, you’ve mastered it. It’s passed across generations and so on, but states, craft and that kind of stuff…
Yeah. Over years, you’ve mastered it. It’s passed across generations and so on, but states, craft and that kind of stuff…
Douglas Murray
Well, because there’s so many variables. I mean, this is one when you’re trying to lure me onto prognostications on Ukraine earlier. I was saying I’ve seen enough to know that I just don’t know, because I know the amount of things that can change all the time. Some years ago, I was talking to a former public servant in the UK when Boris Johnson was prime minister and COVID started. I mentioned to this friend, I said, “Well, it’s pretty bad luck for Boris that he came in to do one thing, which was Brexit, and then there’s a global pandemic from Wuhan and he’s got to mug up on that and then gets it really wrong.”
Well, because there’s so many variables. I mean, this is one when you’re trying to lure me onto prognostications on Ukraine earlier. I was saying I’ve seen enough to know that I just don’t know, because I know the amount of things that can change all the time. Some years ago, I was talking to a former public servant in the UK when Boris Johnson was prime minister and COVID started. I mentioned to this friend, I said, “Well, it’s pretty bad luck for Boris that he came in to do one thing, which was Brexit, and then there’s a global pandemic from Wuhan and he’s got to mug up on that and then gets it really wrong.”
But anyway, and I was really struck by the fact that this man, man of great insight happened to disagree politically, but said to me, “But Douglas is always like this.” And he said, “Look at Tony Blair came into power in 1997 wanting to reform education in the UK, ends up trying to remake the Middle East.” I mean, as I say, one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists and most conspiracy theories, not to say that there aren’t some that do actually turn out to be to have something in them. It had happens. A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true lab league.
But in general, the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall into this is, as I say, it’s a very low grade, low resolution. Look at the world by people who clearly have never seen the wildness of actions in the world and the way that they reverberate and the number of events. I mean, I once spoke some years ago to a politician who literally said to me, I won’t name the country, but said to me, “Can you help us out with just how to cope with the day and understand the day-to-day struggle we’re having with the cycle?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” And they said, “Our experience in government is that every day, something comes up, which we have to firefight,” and that’s what we do that day. And then the next day something else comes up, which we have to fight and we’re not getting our policies done. And I just thought, for me, that rings an awful lot truer, then that country gets the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family telling them, it’s like, “Come on.”
Iran
Lex Fridman
I do before I forget. When I ask you about Iran, what role do they play in this conflict? It’s fascinating how it seems like Iran is, fingerprints are everywhere in the Middle East. And it’s also fascinating that I have a lot of friends. My best friend is Iranian. It’s fascinating that the Islamic Revolution in Iran took the country from the leadership perspective backwards in such a drastic way and that they’re still in power. That confuses me because I know now it’s possible. I don’t know the people of Iran. Sorry to make the obvious statement, but I just have a lot of friends in Iran and a lot of them, everybody I know, they’re opposes the regime and they’re brilliant, educated, thoughtful, worldly people. And it confuses me that this is one of the, I would say, one of the greatest nations on earth.
I do before I forget. When I ask you about Iran, what role do they play in this conflict? It’s fascinating how it seems like Iran is, fingerprints are everywhere in the Middle East. And it’s also fascinating that I have a lot of friends. My best friend is Iranian. It’s fascinating that the Islamic Revolution in Iran took the country from the leadership perspective backwards in such a drastic way and that they’re still in power. That confuses me because I know now it’s possible. I don’t know the people of Iran. Sorry to make the obvious statement, but I just have a lot of friends in Iran and a lot of them, everybody I know, they’re opposes the regime and they’re brilliant, educated, thoughtful, worldly people. And it confuses me that this is one of the, I would say, one of the greatest nations on earth.
Douglas Murray
In one of the great cultures of earth.
In one of the great cultures of earth.
Lex Fridman
The cultures and the people’s Iran.
The cultures and the people’s Iran.
Douglas Murray
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, I agree.
Lex Fridman
Then you look at that and then you look at the leadership when they’re behind most of the terror groups,
Then you look at that and then you look at the leadership when they’re behind most of the terror groups,
Douglas Murray
In the region. Certainly, yeah.
In the region. Certainly, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Can you just speak to that and how is it still the same regime since 1979?
Can you just speak to that and how is it still the same regime since 1979?
Douglas Murray
I know, as you know, I start On Democracies and Death Cults with the flight taking the Ayatollah Khomeini or other from Paris to Tehran.
I know, as you know, I start On Democracies and Death Cults with the flight taking the Ayatollah Khomeini or other from Paris to Tehran.
Lex Fridman
The flight that you say you wish never happened.
The flight that you say you wish never happened.
Douglas Murray
I think it’s one of the two worst journeys of the 20th century.
I think it’s one of the two worst journeys of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman
What’s the other one?
What’s the other one?
Douglas Murray
Lenin’s train getting to Petrograd.
Lenin’s train getting to Petrograd.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It’s always about the transportation.
Yeah. It’s always about the transportation.
Douglas Murray
Yes, I know. I’m really a transport guy. No, wait until my book of 10 best journeys.
Yes, I know. I’m really a transport guy. No, wait until my book of 10 best journeys.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, across the world.
Yeah, across the world.
Douglas Murray
No, just as the train, the Finland station brought the basilis of Bolshevism into Russia. So the flight coming from Paris, bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran, brought the basilis of Khomeinism, the most radical form of Shi’ite Islam to Tehran and to Iran. It’s one of the great tragedies of the modern era, what happened there. You actually, I have a lot of Persian friends and I had the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close late friend who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah and so on. Her father had been an ayatollah before the overthrow of the Shah, and everyone had criticisms of him, but when you saw what came…
No, just as the train, the Finland station brought the basilis of Bolshevism into Russia. So the flight coming from Paris, bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran, brought the basilis of Khomeinism, the most radical form of Shi’ite Islam to Tehran and to Iran. It’s one of the great tragedies of the modern era, what happened there. You actually, I have a lot of Persian friends and I had the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close late friend who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah and so on. Her father had been an ayatollah before the overthrow of the Shah, and everyone had criticisms of him, but when you saw what came…
Douglas Murray
… criticisms of him. But when you saw what came after him, it was among other things, what I learned from her and other friends from that region, was that, I suppose two things. One is, of course, is that it’s a sort of central conservative insight, being that things can always be worse. They can always be worse. Never say this is rock bottom, because you might have a Shah with hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells, but you could always have Ayatollah Khomeini butchering them all, including the people who helped him get to power like the communists and the trade unionists who simply were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful for the Ayatollah until he didn’t need them anymore.
… criticisms of him. But when you saw what came after him, it was among other things, what I learned from her and other friends from that region, was that, I suppose two things. One is, of course, is that it’s a sort of central conservative insight, being that things can always be worse. They can always be worse. Never say this is rock bottom, because you might have a Shah with hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells, but you could always have Ayatollah Khomeini butchering them all, including the people who helped him get to power like the communists and the trade unionists who simply were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful for the Ayatollah until he didn’t need them anymore.
But the other thing I learned from that particular friend and others was this thing that, and again, it’s very hard for the western mindset, very hard for the American mindset in particular, that there is such a thing as fanaticism, real fanaticism and real ideological and real religious fanaticism, and the thing that I describe leads to the death cult mindset. That fanaticism is something which is very easy for the West to forget because we haven’t seen it in a while. We get very distant echoes of it in our own societies, really, and we’re highly attuned to hear them, which is good in some ways.
But Khomeinism not only vastly set back the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed to keep it in subjugation since 1979. And your question of why gets to one of the biggest questions, really, the answer to which has to be understood, which is, it’s what Solzhenitsyn says at one point in Gulag Archipelago, in that passage where he describes, “When we heard the footsteps on the staircase and the knock was on our neighbor’s door and we knew our neighbor was being taken away, why did we not stop them?”
And in the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, it’s the same answer as, whether it’s Hamas governing Gaza with whoever the people in Gaza are who would’ve liked to have seen them overthrown, people don’t realize that despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other guy might kill you. And that when the Green Revolution in 2009 started in Iran, why was it put down? Why didn’t it work? The sort of Iranians who I really hope one day get their country back, why did all these smart young students and others, why after they came out, why was it put down? It was put down because the Basij militia will shoot you in the head and they’ll take you to a prison, as they did with the Iranian students, and they’ll rape you with bottles and kill you. And even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way to tell the rest of society not to do it again.
We know it happens like that from films, but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale, on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate of brutality, and that’s how they stay empower. And one other thing on that, by the way, which is, I was reminded of this the other day, thinking about this, what I’ve just described as a sort of a problem in democracies is that we like to think everyone thinks like us, and we’d like everyone to be like us, and we believe fictions that we’re taught in films, like everyone basically wants the same things as us, and you go, you haven’t stepped outside the walls of the city if you think that.
But the second thing is this thing of the death cults of why we sort of singly fail to understand that this is possible. Khomeinism is both very specific and also very strongly linked to totalitarian and radical and extremist death cult movements that are not that far in our past. I mean, there’s a moment when Oriana Fallaci interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, one of the very few western journalists to do so, she says to him, “These people in the street, this movement, this revolution you’ve begun, it’s guided by hate, it’s hate, it’s all hate.” And Khomeini says, “No, no, it’s love. It’s love.” And it’s actually a scene that appears in The Satanic Verses of Rushdie where that exact same thing happens.
But I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, but how can you explain to a western mindset that that’s something that’s going on, that there are people directed by this hate that calls itself love? And I was reminded of a book I haven’t read since I was probably a teenager or something, made a great impression on me then. Did you ever read the Tragic Sense of Life? Miguel de Unamuno, a great Spanish existentialist philosopher, died in the ’30s. Unamuno had an encounter with students at the university in the ’30s when he realized, I mean this is the early period of the Francoists, de Rivera and all those people. Unamuno is at this meeting and the chant goes up from the eager students who have fallen into this sort of Falangist Francoist ideology already, they end up chanting in front of him as he’s trying to defend the principles by which he has lived his life. They end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la Muerte,” long live death. Long live death. And he tries to explain to them, this is a necrophilic chant.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Douglas Murray
But those young men in free Francoist Spain shouting long live death, they have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis and others with lines like, we love death more than you love life.
But those young men in free Francoist Spain shouting long live death, they have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis and others with lines like, we love death more than you love life.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s the line you return to. That’s a really difficult line to load in, because if you base your whole existence on that notion then, well, you’re a danger to the world. That’s a good foundation for committing evil.
Yeah, that’s the line you return to. That’s a really difficult line to load in, because if you base your whole existence on that notion then, well, you’re a danger to the world. That’s a good foundation for committing evil.
Interview advice
I have to ask, because you mentioned that interview, you had a good interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7th, and I’ve been very fortunate to get the opportunity to interview a few world leaders, it looks like I’ll interview Vladimir Putin and others. Want to have a general question about how do you interview people like this? Maybe to put your historian hat on of how do you approach the interview of world leaders such that you can gain a deeper understanding in the hope that that adds to the compassion in the world. So I have a deep sense that understanding people you might hate helps, in the long arc of history, add compassion to the world. But even just to add understanding is difficult in those kinds of contexts, and maybe it’s more useful to think about, from a historian perspective, of how you need to interview somebody like Hitler or Stalin or Churchill, FDR during World War II. I think about this a lot, especially if it’s a 2, 3, 4, 5 hour conversation.
Douglas Murray
Well, there’s a lot of weight on you when you do those conversations, isn’t there?
Well, there’s a lot of weight on you when you do those conversations, isn’t there?
Lex Fridman
From where? So who’s watching? Is it historians 20 years from then?
From where? So who’s watching? Is it historians 20 years from then?
Douglas Murray
Who knows, I mean, the whole data might be wiped. I suspect there’s a weight on you because every major world leader you interview, and you’ve done some amazing ones, but I mean, presumably you have a set of people saying, “You’ve got to ask him about this, you can’t not address this.” And that’s a very challenging one because of course, although an interview with a politician should not be supine, nor can it be endlessly interrogative, because you’re not the prosecutor, and they don’t have to be the guilty party answering to you. And I’ve noticed the number of people who interview people, world leaders and others, who go in with a set of those things, and at some point the other party can just, ” I don’t need this.” And people criticizing you don’t realize that, you just can’t do that.
Who knows, I mean, the whole data might be wiped. I suspect there’s a weight on you because every major world leader you interview, and you’ve done some amazing ones, but I mean, presumably you have a set of people saying, “You’ve got to ask him about this, you can’t not address this.” And that’s a very challenging one because of course, although an interview with a politician should not be supine, nor can it be endlessly interrogative, because you’re not the prosecutor, and they don’t have to be the guilty party answering to you. And I’ve noticed the number of people who interview people, world leaders and others, who go in with a set of those things, and at some point the other party can just, ” I don’t need this.” And people criticizing you don’t realize that, you just can’t do that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I suppose why journalists behave the way they do, although I have increasingly less and less respect for the journalists, the average journalists, have more and more respect for the great journalists as my respect for the average journalist decreases, because a lot of the journalists seem to be signaling to their own in group. But there is a lot of pressure on people in that situation to ask what I would say is the dumb question. Why is it the dumb question? The adversarial question that the world leader, the person, is ready for, they’ve answered that question, and what you’re trying to do is I guess one, to signal that you’ve asked the question and to push them.
Yeah, I suppose why journalists behave the way they do, although I have increasingly less and less respect for the journalists, the average journalists, have more and more respect for the great journalists as my respect for the average journalist decreases, because a lot of the journalists seem to be signaling to their own in group. But there is a lot of pressure on people in that situation to ask what I would say is the dumb question. Why is it the dumb question? The adversarial question that the world leader, the person, is ready for, they’ve answered that question, and what you’re trying to do is I guess one, to signal that you’ve asked the question and to push them.
Douglas Murray
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman
Two, you’re trying to just create drama, because really what people that ask you to ask that question, they want you to embarrass that person. They hate them and they want you to make them piss their pants or something, or just start crying and run out off the room.
Two, you’re trying to just create drama, because really what people that ask you to ask that question, they want you to embarrass that person. They hate them and they want you to make them piss their pants or something, or just start crying and run out off the room.
Douglas Murray
Walk out.
Walk out.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, walk out in a way that is embarrassing for them, they could be like, look at that pathetic person. And that reveals to me nothing except maybe the weakness of the interviewee that they can’t stand up to a tough question.
Yeah, walk out in a way that is embarrassing for them, they could be like, look at that pathetic person. And that reveals to me nothing except maybe the weakness of the interviewee that they can’t stand up to a tough question.
Douglas Murray
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
But mostly I have to do a lot of thinking because you get attacked a lot if you ask questions from a place of curiosity that actually have a chance to reveal who the person is.
But mostly I have to do a lot of thinking because you get attacked a lot if you ask questions from a place of curiosity that actually have a chance to reveal who the person is.
Douglas Murray
There’s a very interesting line that Robin Day who was quite a distinguished interviewer, a very distinguished interviewer back in the day, said about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in the UK. Robin Day, who was quite good at being rude to politicians, but carefully, said the problem with the new approach as he saw it from the ’90s of political interviewing was, he said, “If you think the person you’re speaking to is a liar, you should get them to reveal that they’re a liar, don’t just call them a liar.”
There’s a very interesting line that Robin Day who was quite a distinguished interviewer, a very distinguished interviewer back in the day, said about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in the UK. Robin Day, who was quite good at being rude to politicians, but carefully, said the problem with the new approach as he saw it from the ’90s of political interviewing was, he said, “If you think the person you’re speaking to is a liar, you should get them to reveal that they’re a liar, don’t just call them a liar.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yep.
Yeah, yep.
Douglas Murray
I think that is, again, it’s something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don’t realize, is that it may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn’t do anything, and it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that’s something else. But yes, I mean, I hear you, obviously you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do. It’s also difficult because one of the things that I don’t think anyone really understands is that in the end it’s just you.
I think that is, again, it’s something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don’t realize, is that it may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn’t do anything, and it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that’s something else. But yes, I mean, I hear you, obviously you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do. It’s also difficult because one of the things that I don’t think anyone really understands is that in the end it’s just you.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Douglas Murray
I’m sure that you have this about Putin, people say, “I know exactly how you can…” They could give end endless advice, at the end it’s you sitting down talking to him. It’s like everybody knows how to behave on the presidential debate stage, but only a few people have done it.
I’m sure that you have this about Putin, people say, “I know exactly how you can…” They could give end endless advice, at the end it’s you sitting down talking to him. It’s like everybody knows how to behave on the presidential debate stage, but only a few people have done it.
Lex Fridman
In person it’s actually pretty difficult.
In person it’s actually pretty difficult.
Douglas Murray
It’s very difficult, because you’ve got all this weird behind the scenes stuff as well. You’ve got all of the games that people play.
It’s very difficult, because you’ve got all this weird behind the scenes stuff as well. You’ve got all of the games that people play.
Lex Fridman
I mean, yeah, I interviewed Zelenskyy, I’m pretty fearless in general, and he was a very human and fascinating human. But there is soldiers with guns standing all around.
I mean, yeah, I interviewed Zelenskyy, I’m pretty fearless in general, and he was a very human and fascinating human. But there is soldiers with guns standing all around.
Douglas Murray
And you didn’t have anyone? No one was packing on your side.
And you didn’t have anyone? No one was packing on your side.
Lex Fridman
I had one friend, a security person, who’s also Ukrainian, so you never know, he could turn on.
I had one friend, a security person, who’s also Ukrainian, so you never know, he could turn on.
Douglas Murray
You have an infiltrator.
You have an infiltrator.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, that doesn’t have any effect. And by the way, I should mention that, because it’s hilarious to me, but process wise, with Narendra Modi and with anyone, they said it was scripted and all this kind of stuff, I would never do anything scripted, they don’t get to have a say in anything I ask, I have complete freedom. Sometimes you’ll have people on the team very politely nudge like, “Hey, can you,” and I’ll very politely say, “Thank you,” smile, but that doesn’t mean I have to fucking do it.
Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, that doesn’t have any effect. And by the way, I should mention that, because it’s hilarious to me, but process wise, with Narendra Modi and with anyone, they said it was scripted and all this kind of stuff, I would never do anything scripted, they don’t get to have a say in anything I ask, I have complete freedom. Sometimes you’ll have people on the team very politely nudge like, “Hey, can you,” and I’ll very politely say, “Thank you,” smile, but that doesn’t mean I have to fucking do it.
Douglas Murray
Right.
Right.
Lex Fridman
I can do whatever the hell I want. By the way, with world leaders it doesn’t happen, it happens more with CEOs, because they have usually PR and comms people, they’ll just be like very politely, “Hey, you know the thing about when they, the sexual assault harassment charges they’ve had, could we just, there’s no reason to really linger on that.”
I can do whatever the hell I want. By the way, with world leaders it doesn’t happen, it happens more with CEOs, because they have usually PR and comms people, they’ll just be like very politely, “Hey, you know the thing about when they, the sexual assault harassment charges they’ve had, could we just, there’s no reason to really linger on that.”
Douglas Murray
We don’t have to do that, yeah. One of my favorite things anyone’s ever said, its only ever happened, I know a couple of cases of this happening in private. A friend of mine once years ago was debating against the, this is before the Civil War in Syria, was debating something to do with the Middle East, and one of the people on the other side was the then Syrian ambassador in London. The then Syrian ambassador in London says something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and my friend stands up and starts talking about Assad seniors’ massacre of the Palestinians in Hama, where they killed like 10,000 Palestinians in a day. And my friend starts talking about the Hama massacre by Assad senior, and the big fat Syrian ambassador stands up to respond, and he says, “That is none of your business.” And my friend was like, “Oh, I thought we were going to get a denial.”
We don’t have to do that, yeah. One of my favorite things anyone’s ever said, its only ever happened, I know a couple of cases of this happening in private. A friend of mine once years ago was debating against the, this is before the Civil War in Syria, was debating something to do with the Middle East, and one of the people on the other side was the then Syrian ambassador in London. The then Syrian ambassador in London says something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and my friend stands up and starts talking about Assad seniors’ massacre of the Palestinians in Hama, where they killed like 10,000 Palestinians in a day. And my friend starts talking about the Hama massacre by Assad senior, and the big fat Syrian ambassador stands up to respond, and he says, “That is none of your business.” And my friend was like, “Oh, I thought we were going to get a denial.”
Lex Fridman
Let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu, because I also have the opportunity to do a three-hour interview with him at this stage. And I’ve been, if I’m just being honest, very hesitant to do it, and I just don’t know how a conversation there could help add compassion to the world. And that particular topic, no matter how well you do it, you do take on a very large number of people that will just make it their daily activity to hate you and to write about it and to post about it and to accuse you of things. In some sense, I don’t want to lose the part of me that’s vulnerable to the world.
Let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu, because I also have the opportunity to do a three-hour interview with him at this stage. And I’ve been, if I’m just being honest, very hesitant to do it, and I just don’t know how a conversation there could help add compassion to the world. And that particular topic, no matter how well you do it, you do take on a very large number of people that will just make it their daily activity to hate you and to write about it and to post about it and to accuse you of things. In some sense, I don’t want to lose the part of me that’s vulnerable to the world.
Douglas Murray
People have very little understanding of things if they’re willing to say that because you’re sitting down and talking with somebody you are ergo platforming them, advancing their cause, being used, being a shill, or whatever like that. You might be actually just finding some things out, which I think is something you do expertly. And another thing that your critics wouldn’t realize is that life is long, and hopefully, God willing, we’re both around for a long time, and therefore you don’t blow everything up at the request of some twat online.
People have very little understanding of things if they’re willing to say that because you’re sitting down and talking with somebody you are ergo platforming them, advancing their cause, being used, being a shill, or whatever like that. You might be actually just finding some things out, which I think is something you do expertly. And another thing that your critics wouldn’t realize is that life is long, and hopefully, God willing, we’re both around for a long time, and therefore you don’t blow everything up at the request of some twat online.
But I do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and worry about their opinion, and no one else’s, really, and you just keep your own guiding light. That’s what’s always done it for me, is that I’ve always said I wouldn’t care if I was the only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me, but it doesn’t, fundamentally that’s not why…
I’ll send you Churchill’s great speech on the death of Chamberlain. I mean it. He says one of the most wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelenskyy, because one of Churchill’s greatnesses was his magnanimity, and when his great political opponent, Chamberlain died in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, he could have used the opportunity, and we might even say that some politicians in our day won’t be able to resist the opportunity, he could have used the opportunity to say, you see, I was right, and Chamberlain didn’t know what the hell he was doing and he’s led us into this mess, and you should have all listened to me, because that would’ve been a good time. It would’ve been a good time to say that, that would’ve been one for the win, as they say.
But Churchill doesn’t do that in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the world, and how you can do it successfully. He very movingly says, he doesn’t even mention the name of Hitler, he says, “What were Neville Chamberlain’s flaws?” He says, “Desiring of human peace, to be seeking peace,” and he says, “and the curse that he had was he was led astray by a very wicked man.” But then he has this great passage where Churchill says, beautiful resonant passage about how, he says, “It’s not given to men happily for them, for otherwise life would prove intolerable to foresee or to predict to any great extent the unfolding course of events.” And he says, “In one phase, men seem to have been right and in another they’re proved wrong,” and then a different scale of values emerges.
And he says, “What is the worth of all this?” He says, “The only guide to a man is his conscience, the only shield his memory, his rectitude, and the sincerity of his actions.” In fact, he says, ” It doesn’t matter what happens, if you have this,” finishes it he says, “However the fates may play, but if you have this shield to guard you,” he says, “you march always in the ranks of honor.” All that can guide a man is that. If you lose sight of it, and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point, then it’s a challenge, and then you get buffeted by the tos and throes of the waves of popular opinion, and that’s dangerous. But if you keep sight and hold onto what you believe, a million billion foes don’t matter.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that is the path. We were talking offline about the great biography of Churchill. Churchill himself made mistakes, then admitted the mistakes, and we can even say was proud of the mistakes. I mean-
Yeah, that is the path. We were talking offline about the great biography of Churchill. Churchill himself made mistakes, then admitted the mistakes, and we can even say was proud of the mistakes. I mean-
Douglas Murray
He learned from them.
He learned from them.
Lex Fridman
Learned from them, that’s all the best you could do. The worst you could probably do is being afraid of making mistakes.
Learned from them, that’s all the best you could do. The worst you could probably do is being afraid of making mistakes.
Douglas Murray
That’s what T.R. famously said in the Man in the Arena Speech.
That’s what T.R. famously said in the Man in the Arena Speech.
Lex Fridman
T.R. Yeah, the old T.R. Those two have made quite a few mistakes, but are, in the end, some of the greatest humans ever created. Norm MacDonald, Churchill, and Teddy Roosevelt.
T.R. Yeah, the old T.R. Those two have made quite a few mistakes, but are, in the end, some of the greatest humans ever created. Norm MacDonald, Churchill, and Teddy Roosevelt.
Douglas Murray
Did we do Norm? I think we did him before coming on air.
Did we do Norm? I think we did him before coming on air.
Lex Fridman
Oh, before coming on air, yeah. Well, he’s always everywhere in the air around us, one of the great comedians.
Oh, before coming on air, yeah. Well, he’s always everywhere in the air around us, one of the great comedians.
War
All right, what gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on, human civilization? You’ve been covering some of the darker aspects, The Madness of Crowds, the madness of geopolitics, the madness of wars. Sometimes when the sun shines through the clouds and there’s a smile on Douglas Murray’s face, what’s the source of the smile and the warmth?
Douglas Murray
Endless numbers of things. Endless numbers of things. I get enormous encouragement from smart young people, actually, that’s just the best thing ever. I was in Kiev the other week and I was asked to speak to students at the university, and irrespective to the rather tricky situation that they are in, it’s just great to, as you know, to speak to a roomful of students about things, and then hang around afterwards and just answer all the questions you can and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do, and remembering what you were like at their age and how goofy you were and how much you were going to get wrong, and how much you had to learn and how much you were going to enjoy it, and seeing the opportunities they have in front of them if things go right. Just smart young people giving enormous encouragement all the time, that’s the best thing, I mean, it’s just-
Endless numbers of things. Endless numbers of things. I get enormous encouragement from smart young people, actually, that’s just the best thing ever. I was in Kiev the other week and I was asked to speak to students at the university, and irrespective to the rather tricky situation that they are in, it’s just great to, as you know, to speak to a roomful of students about things, and then hang around afterwards and just answer all the questions you can and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do, and remembering what you were like at their age and how goofy you were and how much you were going to get wrong, and how much you had to learn and how much you were going to enjoy it, and seeing the opportunities they have in front of them if things go right. Just smart young people giving enormous encouragement all the time, that’s the best thing, I mean, it’s just-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you can see endless possibility in their eyes, and they’re not burdened by, let’s say, the cynicism that builds up.
Yeah, you can see endless possibility in their eyes, and they’re not burdened by, let’s say, the cynicism that builds up.
Douglas Murray
Even the cynicism though, I mean, you can resist that. I mean, I’ve got quite a deep well spring of it, but I mean, you can’t only fall into that, because there’s so much else it doesn’t cover. It’d be like spending your life being ironic.
Even the cynicism though, I mean, you can resist that. I mean, I’ve got quite a deep well spring of it, but I mean, you can’t only fall into that, because there’s so much else it doesn’t cover. It’d be like spending your life being ironic.
Lex Fridman
So that said, you have seen a lot of war, especially recently and directly, Ukraine, Israel, has that changed you? Has that dimmed some of that warmth and light?
So that said, you have seen a lot of war, especially recently and directly, Ukraine, Israel, has that changed you? Has that dimmed some of that warmth and light?
Douglas Murray
That’s a very difficult question to answer. I don’t know. Differs day to day.
That’s a very difficult question to answer. I don’t know. Differs day to day.
Lex Fridman
So sometimes there’s a heaviness there because of the things you’ve seen?
So sometimes there’s a heaviness there because of the things you’ve seen?
Douglas Murray
Sure, yeah, at times, at times, yeah.
Sure, yeah, at times, at times, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Do you regret going as much as you have to the front lines?
Do you regret going as much as you have to the front lines?
Douglas Murray
No, no. One of the reasons why a war is for a writer kind of the ultimate subject is because you see life weirdly at its ultimate. Very strange, strange thing, but it is the truth. Death, when it’s in front of you, is something which gives a terrible clarity to everything, and you see how people will love and even sometimes laugh more, how they’ll… There’s an essay by Montaigne that’s always on my mind called Why We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing. Everything’s just more, and the real thing is that you see the very, very best of people and the very worst, and they’re beside each other.
No, no. One of the reasons why a war is for a writer kind of the ultimate subject is because you see life weirdly at its ultimate. Very strange, strange thing, but it is the truth. Death, when it’s in front of you, is something which gives a terrible clarity to everything, and you see how people will love and even sometimes laugh more, how they’ll… There’s an essay by Montaigne that’s always on my mind called Why We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing. Everything’s just more, and the real thing is that you see the very, very best of people and the very worst, and they’re beside each other.
Lex Fridman
There some… So I’ve gotten a bunch of chances to interact with soldiers on the front line in Ukraine, and there is some level of all the bullshit niceties, or whatever it is, of civilian life is all stripped away. It just seems more honest somehow.
There some… So I’ve gotten a bunch of chances to interact with soldiers on the front line in Ukraine, and there is some level of all the bullshit niceties, or whatever it is, of civilian life is all stripped away. It just seems more honest somehow.
Douglas Murray
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Well, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. And there’s the wild clarity about things, not because of enemies or anything like that, but because of, I think I mentioned, I joked about this with some Ukrainian soldiers in ’22 because they wanted a cigarette, and we stepped outside, I accompanied them outside because they weren’t allowed to smoke indoors in this hotel, which there were rockets falling. And I said to them, “Isn’t it strange that fear of secondhand smoke has superseded this?” But I don’t know, it’s-
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Well, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. And there’s the wild clarity about things, not because of enemies or anything like that, but because of, I think I mentioned, I joked about this with some Ukrainian soldiers in ’22 because they wanted a cigarette, and we stepped outside, I accompanied them outside because they weren’t allowed to smoke indoors in this hotel, which there were rockets falling. And I said to them, “Isn’t it strange that fear of secondhand smoke has superseded this?” But I don’t know, it’s-
Lex Fridman
And seeing the humor in that, when you’re on the front line, when you’re fighting in a war, the humor of that is somehow just perfectly delicious. You could just laugh all day about that. And the absurdity of life is just right there-
And seeing the humor in that, when you’re on the front line, when you’re fighting in a war, the humor of that is somehow just perfectly delicious. You could just laugh all day about that. And the absurdity of life is just right there-
Douglas Murray
Yes, that’s right.
Yes, that’s right.
Lex Fridman
And it’s so honest and it’s so beautiful. And that’s why a lot of soldiers are traumatized, they’re destroyed by war, but they also miss it.
And it’s so honest and it’s so beautiful. And that’s why a lot of soldiers are traumatized, they’re destroyed by war, but they also miss it.
Douglas Murray
That’s right, that’s right. Absolutely, oh my God, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
That’s right, that’s right. Absolutely, oh my God, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman
There’s an intimacy to the whole thing.
There’s an intimacy to the whole thing.
Douglas Murray
Absolutely. Well, that’s right, I mean, everyone says, I never felt more alive, yeah, and I wouldn’t do anything different.
Absolutely. Well, that’s right, I mean, everyone says, I never felt more alive, yeah, and I wouldn’t do anything different.
Lex Fridman
Well, I hope, just like Churchill, you keep fighting the good fight and not listening to anybody, and I’ll try to learn to do the same. Douglas, I’m a huge fan, thank you for doing this.
Well, I hope, just like Churchill, you keep fighting the good fight and not listening to anybody, and I’ll try to learn to do the same. Douglas, I’m a huge fan, thank you for doing this.
Douglas Murray
It’s been a great pleasure, and right back at you.
It’s been a great pleasure, and right back at you.
Lex Fridman
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bertrand Russell, “The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bertrand Russell, “The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Left vs Right Politics, Trump, Elon & DOGE | Lex Fridman Podcast #462
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #462 with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
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Right now, I have no sense that there’s a mind meld. And in fact I have the exact opposite sense, that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of destruction, destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It’s much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint, to describe ,Doge as an ideological purge of progressivism, performing the job of efficiency rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.
If I may, let me comment on the fact that sometimes on this podcast, I delve into the dark realm of politics. Indeed, politics often devises and frankly, brings out the worst in some very smart people. Plus to me, it is frustrating how much of the political discourse is drama, and how little of it is rigorous, empathetic discussion of policy. I hate this. But I guess I understand why. If the other side is called either Hitler or Stalin online by swarms of chanting mobs, it’s hard to carry out a nuanced discussion about immigration, healthcare, housing, education, foreign policy, and so on. On top of that, anytime I talk about politics, half the audience is pissed off at me. And no, there is no audience capture. I get on equally by different groups across the political spectrum, depending on the guest. Why? I don’t know. But I’m slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all.
Still, I think it’s valuable to sometimes talk about politics. It’s an important part to the big picture of human civilization, but indeed, it is only still a small part. My happy place is talking to scientists, engineers, programmers, video game designers, historians, philosophers, musicians, athletes, filmmakers and so on. So, I apologize for the occasional detour into politics, especially over the past few months. I did a few conversations with world leaders and I have a few more coming up. So, there will be a few more political podcast coming out in part so I can be better prepared to deeply understand the mind, the life and the perspective of each world leader. I hope you come along with me on this journey into the darkness of politics, as I try to shine a light in the complex mess of it all, hoping to understand us humans better, always backed of course by deep rigorous research and by empathy.
Long-term, I hope for political discussions to be only a small percentage of this podcast. If it’s not your thing, please just skip these episodes. Or maybe come along anyway, since both you and I are reluctant travelers on this road trip. But who knows what we’ll learn together about the world and about ourselves. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
You are both firmly on the left of the US political spectrum. Ezra, I have been a fan of yours for a long time. You’re often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left. Can you try to define the ideals and the vision of the American left?
The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So, I think in a way, you have both. Markets are things that are enforced by government. How you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich building coal-fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels. And the market doesn’t know the difference between the two. And so, there’s a set of goals about regulating the unchecked potential of capitalism that also relates to exploitation of workers. There’s very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to the left when you think about what the minimum wage is.
I am a successful podcast host when I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker, the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They’re not working with firms. And by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms would cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So, trying to rectify power imbalances is, I think, another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the… maybe let’s call it the intuitions. I want to say that’s a podcast answer, not a book. I’m sure I left a million things out here, but I’ll start there.
Liberals I think tend to value change. And at the level of government that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don’t previously exist. It’s typically been liberals, for example, who’ve been trying to expand health coverage, while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years, it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it.
And then I also think they tolerate different things. I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn’t been. Well, I conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice. They’re more likely to say there’s a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world and we’re not going to try to overcorrect forward with our policies. And so, I think that even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there’s almost like an archetypal difference between what they fear, and value and tolerate. Liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition and often tolerate injustice.
I always think about the sort of George W. Bush era, although right now with ice agents hassling all kinds of green card holders, you can think about this moment, too. But the right’s view that on the one hand the government is incompetent. And on the other hand we could send our army across oceans, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and then rebuild these societies we don’t understand into fully functioning liberal democracies that will be our allies, was an extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean that was expensive. That took manpower. Compared to we’re going to set up the Affordable Care Act in America, that took a lot more faith in the US government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left is more confidence in the government of the check and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun.
So, the right has developed a very, very top-down structure. And one of Trump’s talents, one of the things that makes him a disruptive force in politics is his ability to upend the sort of coalitional structure, the interest group structure that used to prevail. The Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left 10, 15 years ago. The view was in many ways they set the agenda of the right. The Koch brother network is much less powerful Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. Not to say none of their people or none of their groups are meaningful at all. They are, but you wouldn’t put them at the forefront in the way that you might’ve had another time. Right this second, we’re using the left, but Democrats are in fundamental disarray. There is no leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats decided to vote for the containing resolution, avoiding a shutdown or a critical mass of them. Then Hakeem Jeffries is the leader of the House Democrats and Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats are in bitter disagreement over whether or not they should have done that. Democratic leadership isn’t even united on the single biggest point of leverage they might’ve had. They disagree over whether or not it was even a point of leverage. Outside of them, the party has no leader, which is fairly normal after a pretty crushing defeat. But there isn’t the next in line.
So, you go back and it was pretty clear that after Barack Obama, it was going to be Hillary Clinton. After Hillary Clinton, it was either going to be Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in second in the primary. Joe Biden had been the vice president. You often have a presumptive next nominee who the party can look to for kind of leadership. Even after 2000, Al Gore was still giving big speeches. There was a question about Al Gore running again. There is no presumptive in the Democratic Party right now. You can’t turn around and say, “Oh, it’s going to be Pete Buttigieg. It’s going to be Josh Shapiro. It’s going to be Gretchen Whitmer.” Parties are given force, modern parties, which are quite weak by historical standards. Modern parties tend to be given force by a centralizing personality. Donald Trump being a very strong example of that on the right, but Barack Obama was the person who held together the Democratic Party for a long time.
In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won’t stay that way. There’s a rhythm to these things. There’ll be a midterm, they’re probably going to pick up a bunch of seats in the midterm. If that means Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker after the midterm, he’s going to have a much louder voice because he’s going to have power. It’s going to be a harder road for Schumer to get back to the majority because of the Senate map, and then we’ll start having a primary on the left. And you’ll begin to see voices emerge out of that.
But right now, the Democratic Party, it doesn’t have points of power. There’s simply outside of at the national level, there is no Democrat who wields control over a branch of government. They don’t have the Supreme Court, they don’t have the House, they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the presidency and they don’t have a next in line. So, you’re looking at an organization without any of the people in the position to structure it, and the head of the DNC, the new head, Ken Martin, doesn’t have power in that way. So, they’re pretty fractured.
The thing for Kamala Harris, it was really difficult was she was for another moment. She’s picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst just a very different political equilibrium, a sense that you had a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic Party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past to these sort of lunch pail, blue collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But also Biden never has a chance if he’s not Barack Obama’s vice president. And so, you have this sort of weird set of historical factors operating at the same time. There’s a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump in the pandemic. There is Biden as Obama’s vice president who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama.
I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, you know what? If Biden had been the candidate, he would’ve beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality. And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own, at least assumed weaknesses. He’s a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying. And when the view of how you win elections is you put back together the Obama Coalition. And the Obama Coalition is young people, it’s voters of color and it’s enough working class white voters and then college educated white voters. That’s the Obama coalition. And so, Biden picks Harris for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought he should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But there were different people out there.
And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. First, she has a particular background from California where she’s tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor. But she runs in the Democratic Party at time when it’s turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don’t want a sort of prosecutorial character. So, she sort of abandons that and never I think really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running in 2024. That works. But she’s a talented debater. She’s a very talented performer on the stump, but she doesn’t really have a theory of politics and policy that she’s identified with. But she’s a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being in 2020, a 78-year-old white guy, he understands the future is not him, or at least not just him. And he’s sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that speaks to his own potential weaknesses.
I think by 2024, you have two problems. He only steps down, what is it, June? They’re weeks from the DNC. They don’t have time anymore for an open convention. You know how the Biden position is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So, now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated. It’s a Biden-Harris administration. She doesn’t really have a lane on cost of living. It’s not something she’s known for working on in the Senate. It’s not something she has a bunch of great ideas about. It’s not something she could write a talking about. It’s probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election.
And she’s had no time to build that out. Maybe if she had been running in a primary for a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would’ve figured out how to do it. Primaries or periods of education and learning for the candidates too, or they would’ve found somebody else who could do it. But she doesn’t get any of that. She’s thrown into the game with three months to go. So, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden’s inspiring or not, he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term, and he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn’t. And then the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn’t go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We’ll see what they do in 2028, but the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe.
Number two, if you look at elections over the 21st century, two things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close. For reasons that I’m not sure I entirely understand, the parties have gotten really good, historically, bizarrely good at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48% such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we’ve seen over the last few years, and there’s this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics, that says that what often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change, they become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled. That then the next out-group party says, “We have a theory of change and we’re going to throw out the bums.” And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose.
In a world where you have thermostatic change and every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So, I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold onto power for six-year, eight-year, 12-year terms the same way they did say in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you have to look at what kind of character Donald Trump is and what kind of a media figure he is. We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate. The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a way that he can’t be in the 1890s. And then you have the 1950s. Dwight Eisenhower, 1956, I believe is the first televised national convention. Famously the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make it an election that’s leaning toward JFK because he’s so damn handsome and also just electrically compelling on a screen.
We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids. It’s a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They’re good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds. Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He’s just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that he seems to be, to borrow Ezra’s term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft these message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.
And there is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe of the bureaucratic rule follower is a little bit afraid of unstructured conversation, is always performing the background algorithm of how do I communicate in a way that balances all of the coalitions on my side? Because if you look at the Democratic Party right now compared to the Republican Party, I mean in 2015, I think there were four political parties in America. There was MAGA, there was the Center Right, there was the Bernie Wing, and there was the Biden Clinton Obama wing. And what happened is that Trump killed and skinned the Center Right and is now wearing it as a hat.
The entire Republican Party is Donald Trump wearing the skins of the old center, the Romney wing, and the Democratic Party is still a fight. It’s exactly what Ezra described. It’s a jungle. And maybe there’s something about that jungle nature of the Democratic Party that is making some of its leaders perform this sort of coalitional calculation when they’re communicating, such that it makes them less interested in appearing in settings that might cost them, that might not benefit them in exactly the sort of pre-calculated way they have to get their message across. And so, there’s not necessarily a whole lot of empirics to that theory. I’m a little bit going on vibes here, and maybe Ezra see some flaws to theory.
Most Democrats still live in a world where the thing that they’re optimizing for and attention is to not get negative attention. And what the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party understands, and this is truer for them than it probably would be for Democrats because for them the media is the enemy, or at least the mainstream media is etcetera, but is that attention. A volume of attention is itself good and you can only get a critical mass of it if you’re willing to accept negative attention. Agenda control doesn’t come from positive attention. It comes from conflict. You get agenda control by doing things the other side disagrees with, so they enter into functioning agreement with you to keep the thing you’re doing at the front.
Now, that doesn’t make you highly popular. Donald Trump is the most unpopular modern president at this stage of his presidency except for Donald Trump’s first term. It took, I think Nate Silver said it was 221 days for Joe Biden’s net favorability to go negative. It’s taken something like 55 days for Donald Trump to do the same. So what Donald Trump is doing does not optimize for favorability. It does not optimize, by the way, for big wins. Democrats feel like they got trashed in 2024, and in a way they did. But Trump’s popular vote victory was the smallest popular vote victory since 2000 when Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 17 dogs and three old men or whatever it was. And so, attention works really differently.
And while I think some of the Rogan of the left discourse has been frankly overstated, because honestly, the most parsimonious model of 2024 and 2020 is in 2020, you have a 4848 nation, something like that. Or maybe you have something that’s more like a 49 Democrat, 47 Republican nation. And in 2020, because of the pandemic, Donald Trump suffered a, let’s call it a 2. 5-point incumbent penalty. People are mad about the pandemic, they’re mad about things being chaotic, so he loses 2.5 points that given the natural split of the electorate, Joe Biden, a 4.5-point popular vote victory. In 2024, people are mad about inflation. They’re somewhat mad about the border. You have a 2.5-point penalty applied to the incumbent administration. Now it’s Harris, and you get a 1.5-point popular vote victory for Donald Trump. I genuinely don’t think, and this held internationally too, right? I generally don’t think you need a lot more to explain the election right now than that, but you do need something more than that to explain.
Donald Trump’s now since 2016, almost decade long dominance of all attention in American politics. Starting when he came down the golden escalator in 2015, American politics from 2015 to 2020 when Joe Biden won was about Donald Trump. And then from 2020 to 2024, when Joe Biden was president, it was about Donald Trump. And then from 2024 on, it was about Donald Trump. Joe Biden was an attentional void, be it his age, be it their strategy. They agreed that the topic of the nation should be Donald Trump, right? When he went back to begin his campaign in 2024, he goes to Valley Forge and gives a speech about January 6th and Donald Trump, right? It wasn’t about his own achievements, it was about Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn’t do the Super Bowl interview in 2023. That’s when I did my thing about this is not going to work. Probably because at that point, he was not capable of good extemporaneous interviews.
I mean, I think that was my view of them, that the revealed thing here was that they didn’t trust him to do interviews. I didn’t have some inside information about anything, I just looked at what they were doing, what they weren’t doing. They’re behind in the polls. They weren’t doing things like the Super Bowl interview. If you can’t turn your candidate into the product, if you don’t trust your candidate to be the product in an election, you’re fucked, right? And so that was to me, the tell, but attention is the coin of the realm. Now, there are better and worse ways of doing it. I don’t think Donald Trump is doing himself huge favors right now. I think they had, there was a path they could have walked to be a majority party.
I think that if he was more restrained, more inhibited, if he was able to not do a bunch of things that are mobilizing opposition to him, you could talk about what they would or wouldn’t achieve that way, but I think they could be in a much stronger political position that would make them stronger for the midterms. It would eventually make JD Vance stronger as a successor. I think they’re running a very high-risk strategy that has a very reasonable chance of if they don’t make what I would call an autocratic breakthrough, they might completely blow up their own movement. It’s all very high risk. So, for them, for everybody, for everything, what makes them good at politics is also what makes them bad at politics.
But for Democrats, the caution, the bureaucratic culture, the fear of saying anything that will make anybody mad, it is optimized for a different attentional era. One of the things I’m watching when you’re saying about leaders, one of the things I’m watching in the people coming up, the ones who want to run in 2028 is who seems like they have adapted to this era not in the way Trump did or Vance did or Musk did. I think they’re going to need something different. They fully represent the Twitter era of politics. I mean Musk bought Twitter. I think sort of all in on what politics right now, what online politics feels like. I think the thing that will come next is someone who’s able to synthesize both the lessons of it, feeling that we all have that it’s kind of sick and poisoned, right? That Twitter’s not a good place, X is not a good place. TikTok politics is not a good place that we’re all being turned on each other somehow.
You need to be authentic and authentically angry at what we’ve all become in the way that Obama ran as a political reformer who hated the red and blue cut of America, who hated what political consultants and pollsters were doing to us. You’re not going to have somebody who just echoes. There’s not going to be, there’ll be no Joe Rogan of the left. There will be no Donald Trump of the left because the left is different than the right, but it’ll have to be something authentically of this era, but also authentic to the backlash to it, which I think as we enter into this period where the president and everybody around him fully embraces this attentional economy, I think people are going to want something different from this attentional economy in four years.
On the Democratic side, there is a fight and it’s happening right now and our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party. So, I’m not of the left. I’m certainly not of the far left. I have center left politics and maybe even a center left personality style if we can even call it that, but I do not begrudge the left for fighting because there’s a fight to be had. In many ways, I think sometimes they see, I’m not endorsing this, I’m describing it. I think they see their near-term opposition as not always the Republican Party, but as the forces, the Democratic Party that are in the way for them controlling one of the two major parties in this country.
And so, they do have an oppositional style and maybe that’s personality based. They are fighting the center left. They are criticizing the center left consistently, but I want to be good faith about this even though I don’t share their politics and say that they’re doing it because they’re trying to win power on the left of center, and so that’s why they’re criticizing the way they are. Now, our book and much of my writing is an attempt to do a little bit of a very specific dance as we touched on this I think really beautifully. We’re in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics, and Democrats are at risk right now as being seen as the party that always defends institutions, the party that always defends the establishment status quo, and that is an absolute death knell, I think for this century’s angry anti-establishment politics.
So, what we’re trying to do is essentially say, here’s a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right? We believe that we have answers on housing and energy and high-quality governance and science and technology, really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led cities and Democrat-led states. We’re trying to be oppositional in a way that’s constructive rather than just destructive.
If you’re a high-ranking democratic politician and maybe you do a podcast like this, what if I say the wrong thing and it goes viral and my bookers and my agenda, people and myself just feel terrible for the next few weeks because all we see on Bluesky and X is just people hating. But if you get one interview that goes well, if you talk to Wes Moore, let’s say, and there’s a five-minute segment where he articulates vision of liberalism in the 2020s that everyone says, “My gosh, that is the best possible articulation of what the Democratic Party can stand for the next four years that I’ve ever heard.” Suddenly what’s happened is that appearing on the show becomes massively de-risk. And in fact, the risk valence entirely switches. We are leaving dollars on the floor by not appearing on this guy’s podcast, AOC. I’m a sensational communicator. If Wes Moore can do it, I can do it even better.
And so, I think to a certain extent, there’s a little bit of a riot theory phenomenon here. The person who throws the first stone in a riot has to be very courageous. The person who throws the 101st stone in a riot doesn’t need to be courageous at all, and there might be a little bit of that going on that people need to see proof of high expected value before it breaks what we’re acknowledging to be a bit of a communications norm on the left.
I just had Jake Auchincloss on. He’s not that well-known house member from Massachusetts. I just think he’s a guy who thinks out loud. I am booking someone else right now two more people like that frankly, who are neither of them. They’re like [inaudible 00:50:51]. I could get a bigger name. I’m more interested in people who are thinking. One reason I think Bernie Sanders always did everything is to him, the thing he was really doing was he had something to say. The point of almost everything for Bernie Sanders is to be in a place where people can hear the thing he has to say, and a lot of politicians don’t have that, right? The point of anything is what it does for them in the polls, what it does for them with the donors, how it repositions them.
I’m interested right now at this moment because it’s not 2028, it’s not 2027, there’s no democratic primary happening right now. The idea that you’re going to pre-run the Democratic Party primary is stupid. We don’t even know what the, we might be in World War Three. We have no idea what, we might have AGI, the things that the 2027 primary might be about, the kinds of scandals that might’ve erupted by them are totally different. Whereas, the reason I have people on is because they are saying something. They’re a live mind in the moment that has a perspective on this that you want to hear. And so, I would look for that.
And I think a lot of people who are not there are people who are trying to protect something, protect a standing in the polls, protect a sort of coalitional set of allies they currently have, and then there are people who are trying to just be heard. Again, a lot of Bernie Sanders’ culture, the way he does media is now Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders. He didn’t used to be. He wasn’t in 2015 even. When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2015, it wasn’t initially a big deal. It was like, “Oh, bummer.” Elizabeth Warren didn’t run for president was a feeling of most people on the left. And so, Bernie Sanders was the guy who’s been saying the same thing for decades, but in the wilderness and nobody was listening.
And now, he still has the instincts of somebody who understood that the most important thing was to find a place where people were listening, where they would let you talk and even better let you talk for a while. I think the candidate who’s going to do well in 2028 is going to have an instinct like that, but even right now, I think the question is, one of my big questions is I’m booking for my show is just I want someone who has a perspective on this moment, who feels like they have had a thought that is about right now and who we are right now and what the story of America is right now.
So certainly, one thing that’s profoundly motivated us is having something very concrete that we just want to get out there in the world. My sense as a writer, as a thinker is I want my software running on as many pieces of hardware as possible. I want to get my ideas out there as much as possible and who gets credit for them and where the idea goes, and that’s all secondary. I believe on ideas because they’re important. And so, I want to talk to people who have large platforms about those ideas because how else is the idea getting into the mainstream except through those large platforms? That’s how broadcast technology works in the first place. So maybe one thing that you’re touching on is a little bit of ideological ambiguity. Maybe a part of this is this sense that people don’t know exactly what it is they have to say for three hours. All I can say for sure is that we know.
You have a party that starts it, opposition party that accepts key premises. Dwight Eisenhower doesn’t come in and say, “We’re going to roll back the whole New Deal,” and it’s often held in place by an external antagonist. In that case, the Soviet Union. You then you have in the 70s stagflation, the Vietnam War, series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So, you have the rise of what he calls the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is if you’re going to choose a founder, it’s going to be Reagan on that one. It’s much more about markets. It’s very concerned with things like inflation, and it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton, the era of the government is over. And partially, it’s entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union.
The fall of the Soviet Union is like this proof point that the capitalists are right, that markets are the way of the future, government does not know what it’s doing, and that becomes the governing set of assumptions. And so, there are arguments about what the markets should be doing. Obamacare is about creating markets and health insurance. You can use markets very progressive ends. We want to use markets for lots of progressive ends, but the neoliberal order basically collapses amidst a financial crisis and climate change and China. And those are the three things that grow a little, but also separately we think kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis, and it botches in many ways.
The answer to the financial crisis puts too little demand into the economy, lets a recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long, it doesn’t know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging for the environment, very damaging for the future of the human race potentially. And you have the rise of China and the neoliberal order said you integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO, you trade with them, you help them build their industrial base, you help them pull their people out of poverty, which that part is good, and they’ll become more like the West. They will liberalize. They’ll have a free press. The richer we make China, the more China’s going to become like us, and that proves totally wrong.
China becomes more authoritarian over time, but it also develops an industrial base. It becomes as it does not become more like us, becomes dangerous, at least in our view. You don’t want to ever have a conflict with another country who you’ve outsourced your key industrial base to. And so, you have the sort of fall of that order. And then again here, things that would’ve been ridiculous at one point in American politics then become possible. Bernie Sanders is one of them, right? The idea that you’d have somebody, a self-described socialist running for president and coming anywhere near the Democratic nomination, that was unthinkable in 2004. And by 2016, it almost happened.
And Donald Trump is another thing. Donald Trump runs like headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican Party. He runs against trade. He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan more open immigration. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. He runs against the Iraq war and foreign adventurism, and there’s an isolationist instinct that coexist very awkwardly now within a territorial expansionist instinct, but at least to 2016, it was more isolationist. And so, Donald Trump and his sort of reimagining of the Republican Party as a right-wing populist, more like sort of some Christian democratic parties in other countries up in that quadrant of socially conservative, economically populist, that becomes something that’s possible.
But nothing has found an equilibrium, right? Nobody’s agreed to the other side’s premises. There are certain ones that people are agreeing on, both the Republican and Democratic parties a very different view on China now. Biden kept a lot of Trump’s policies on China and actually strengthen them, and now Trump is building on that aggressively again. But in terms of the other things, there isn’t agreement about what the next period in American politics should look like, and that’s one reason I think it’s very dangerous, both as a question of media strategy, but also is a question of politics to code people, places, platforms too tightly. Republicans and Democrats aren’t going to get along in Congress. That has to do with, I think the incentives of Congress.
My first book is called Why We’re Polarized. It’s about those almost hydraulic incentives for partisanship. But in terms of what is the meaning of my podcast, of Derek’s, of yours, of Joe Rogan, of Theo Vaughn, of Call Her Daddy, of a million different places that are not well coded, that’s I think are very up for grabs. I mean, Elon Musk was an Obama-era liberal in 2012. I mean, I think his personal process of radicalization is not going to unwind itself, but a lot of the people who Democrats are like, “All these billionaires are right-wing now.” No, people are just uncertain. I mean, some of them are a little bit afraid, but people are uncertain. They’re moving back and forth. The sort of texture of it is unsettled and it’s going to take time, these transitionary periods.
I mean, they can go very badly too, but they take time and I think people who are clinging to old certainties about what tells you which side folks are on, my sense is a lot of people who are very open to MAGA in 2025 are going to feel very differently about it in 2028 depending on how they do, right? If they do great, then they’re going to entrench. But if they don’t, then a lot of people became MAGA curious are not going to be MAGA curious anymore, but they’re not going to want the last Democratic Party either.
I was making this point to someone the other day about why the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Liz Cheney style independent didn’t work. Liz Cheney, of course, being Dick Cheney’s daughter, a Republican. But what Liz Cheney, the Never Trumpers were a way of reaching out to who the Democratic Party thought the independents were. But the key thing about an independent to a political party is not that they don’t like the other party, it’s that they’re an independent because they also don’t like your party. And so, finding a bunch of people who are meant to be messengers to them about why they shouldn’t like the other party, it’s fine, but what you need to do is explain why they should like your party. You need to have some message. You need to accept some fault. You need to think about what it was about you that drove them away.
One of our deep views about politics right now and not politics policy, the texture of the economy of the country is that the last period in American politics, in the economy was about demand. The fundamental problem coming out of the financial crisis was demand. We had too little demand in the economy. Behind that too little demand in the economy was this other thing that was building up, which was a cost-of-living crisis. Housing was getting super expensive, healthcare in certain ways, energy. But energy is more complicated in ways we can talk about elder care, child care, higher education, right? This is a point, my wife is a journalist at the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey with Derek, and she wrote this piece on in early 2020. The pandemic that went very viral called the Affordability Crisis.
And it sticks in my head because she’s writing at a time when people were saying, “The economy’s great. Everything’s great.” You looked at measures of consumer confidence in 2020, February of 2020, terrific. She’s like, “So, how come if the economy’s so great? Everybody I talked to is so upset.” And she’s like, “Look, people are making more money than ever, but it’s getting eaten up and eaten up and eaten up by these things they really need.” They keep getting more expensive, even as consumer goods get cheaper, then the pandemic hits, the problem becomes COVID, but then you have inflation and inflation moves the problem of the economy, the fundamental problem everybody’s paying attention to.
From the demand side, how do we get more people at work? How do we get them to spend more money to the supply side? We don’t have enough. We have a constriction of semiconductors, of used cars, and then eventually everything, everything is getting more expensive. We’ll see what happens with tariffs. We do get, by 2024, the rate of inflation under control, but prices are still much higher and now people are paying real attention to prices. And the affordability crisis, which again is a cost-of-living crisis, which had been growing for a very long time, is now at crisis levels and it becomes the substance of politics. You had all these Democrats saying, I don’t know what the problem is. Inflation has come down to whatever it was, 3 to 4% in 2024, and they’re right about that. But one, the price level of everything remained high. Two, people were now like, “The housing so expensive. I’m never going to be able to afford a home.” My parents went to public university, debt free. I could never do that. And what we’ve done is fail.
I mean, Democrats in this case, Republicans haven’t done that great on it either. But in blue states, Democrats have failed on cost of living. The reason California, Illinois, New York are losing hundreds of thousands of people to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, is that they failed on cost of living. It is too expensive to live there, and the reason they failed at cost of living is supply. They did not make enough. They actually made it too hard in many cases to make enough of the things people needed. Some of those are straightforward. We didn’t let people build enough homes. Some of them are more like we’ve made it too expensive to build public infrastructure like high-speed rail or the Second Avenue subway. Some of it has to do, I think, in the long run with innovation and the relationship between Democrats and technology.
But one of our views is that there are other things in politics that will matter too, but we are in a period where the cost-of-living supply affordability is the fundamental economic question. Donald Trump himself has said he won because of the price of groceries. He’s got this very funny quote where he is like, nobody said, I don’t have a Donald Trump impression, but he’s like, “Nobody ever used the word groceries in politics before I did.” Well, it’d be good if he then wasn’t making it more expensive, but Democrats believe his weakness is cost of living. They’re probably right, but they don’t have a strength on it. The key question our book is trying to refocus politics on is how do we make more of what we need? How does the government either organize itself or organize markets to create more of what we need, and how do we admit as liberals times when we’ve made it so the government makes it too hard to make more of what we need?
I’ll say one last thing and this is a pretty long answer. I thought one of the most important things that has come out recently is a piece in Foreign Affairs by Brian Deese, who’s a former head of Joe Biden’s National Economics Council, and Deese helped negotiate every major Bill Biden passed. It’s a very-
And then also, you go earlier into March and May of 2020, and we had a shortage of PPE equipment for our doctors to remain safe as they were taking care of a pandemic. And I thought it’s interesting that this entire experience of the pandemic has essentially been defined by this concept of scarcity. And as I zoomed out a little bit, I thought it’s not just the pandemic. It’s really so much the 21st century economy that’s been defined by scarcity. Ezra beautifully described the degree to which housing unaffordability has become the economic problem of our time.
In the history of political orders, each political order is in part defined by the internal crisis, the Great Depression springs neoliberalism, stagflation springs neoliberalism. Now we’re in this molten moment where we’re waiting for the new political order to emerge and it’s going to emerge because of the lever, because of the power of housing affordability. You have to solve that problem if you want to solve the problem of American anger about prices, and part of this is just pure arithmetic. If you look at any family’s budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It’s housing, housing, housing, and housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to agglomerate, to bring smart people together. Housing relates to all sorts of other affordability. Like if you care about the cost of eldercare, you want to make it cheaper to house institutions, buildings that can care for children, which means you want to bring those rents down.
And so I thought as I’m zooming out on this concept of scarcity in the 21st century, we have chosen to make housing scarce. In some of the most productive cities and states, often run by Democrats, we have rules, zoning rules, historic preservation rules, permitting processes, environmental reviews, laws that we created that have gotten in the way of making abundant the most important material good there is, which is housing. And as I kept working myself into a lather and getting mad about the world, I thought it’s actually not just housing. It’s clean energy too. There’s lots of environmentalists who are on my side and believing very fervently in climate change who’ve made it very difficult to site solar panels or site solar farms or to raise wind turbines or to advance geothermal or to accept nuclear power. We have chosen to make clean energy scarce as well.
And then finally, the ultimate boss of scarcity was the pandemic itself, which constricted the supply of all sorts of goods around the world, setting the price of everything to the moon. And that’s why inflation wasn’t just an American phenomenon, not just a North American phenomenon. It was a global phenomenon. And I thought what we need to solve for this crisis of penumbral scarcity is an abundance agenda, an approach towards solving America’s problems that puts abundance first. And Ezra and I have a very focused definition of abundance. We believe, we say in the first page of the book, America needs to build and invent more of the things it needs. We believe that housing is critical. We believe energy is critical. We talk a lot about science and technology, but we really put government effectiveness at the heart of this because one really deep vein of our book is a criticism of where liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years, where liberalism has gone from in the New Deal era, a politics of building things.
FDR and the progressives transformed the physical world, not just with infrastructure projects, but with building roads, the highway system under Dwight Eisenhower, we changed the physical world during the decades of 1930s to the 1950s. But in the last half century, liberalism has become very good at the politics of blocking rather than the politics of building. And if you look at the way that liberals define success in the last few decades, it’s often about success defined by how much money you can spend rather than how many things you can actually build.
You look at the fact that, for example, in the book, we have so many examples, California authorizes more than $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system, which basically doesn’t exist. Just last week, the Mayor of Chicago bragged that they spent $11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units. That’s $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. That’s absolutely pathetic. We have a story in the book about a $1.7 million public toilet built in San Francisco, $1.7 million for a toilet because of all of the rules that get in the way and raise the price of building public infrastructure like public bathrooms in San Francisco and California.
So liberalism, I’m worried over the last 50 years has become so good at the politics of blocking and the politics of associating the money authorized as success rather than what you build in the physical world that we’ve lost sense of material abundance, of how important outcomes are and not just processes. And so this is a book that’s trying to nudge the Democratic Party back to what we think are in a way, historically its roots. Thinking about what Americans need and making it easier for government to act efficiently to provide them, and that really does, I think, begin with housing and energy.
And we do that through 1,000,000 things, covenants and HOAs and all these contracts we make people enter into so they can’t even build on their own land. But one of the things that just happens when you constrict the supply of housing is that people who got in when the getting was good, it’s a classic story, in New York and LA and in SF, you bought a place in 1977 for $220,000, and now it’s worth $2.7 million, and maybe you’ll pass it on to your kids or you’ll sell it, but the working class families can’t afford to live there anymore. Right? So that’s not even a question of redistribution. Sometimes what you need in order to create the possibilities for opportunity and mobility is enough supply of the thing.
At the same time, we don’t think that redistribution is the problem here. I’m pro redistribution, I’m pro more redistribution than we currently do, but to give one example the way these can be great tastes that go together, Derek tells in the book at some great length the story of Operation Warp Speed. And here you have in the mRNA vaccines, technology that was critically funded by public money, specifically DARPA at different points, then hastened after COVID. Government through Operation Warp Speed under Donald Trump really tried to clear out regulatory cruft, move these things really fast, but the demand on the side of the public for having funded so much of this, for having made so much possible was that when these vaccines hit, they were going to be free. Maybe the most important medical advance of that entire era, and it wasn’t going to be like Ozempic say, where it’s $15,000 for a year of doses. Right? It wasn’t going to be only available to the richest people at the beginning. We were going to try to give it to everybody, sorted by need to the best that we could and it would be free.
Now, you’re not going to do that with everything, right? There are places for the price signal to actually function and where it can function to then bring on more supply later. And there’s all the econ 101 stuff that we all know, but there are a lot of places where redistribution and supply increases go hand in hand. Another good example, I’ve done over the course of my career, a huge amount of work on health insurance reform and universal healthcare. And let’s say you got Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016 and had swept in a huge Democratic majority and they passed Bernie’s single-payer-for-all plan, which was by the way, much more expansive than any existing single payer plan in the world. It covered much more than Canada’s or the UK’s or anybody else. If you had done that, what you would have needed immediately was a huge supply increase in healthcare because you would have had a huge demand increase.
What happens if you make healthcare free? People are going to use more of it. If you make insurance much more widespread, people are going to go to the doctor more often. Well, if you don’t have enough doctors, you don’t have enough nurses, you don’t have enough surgeons, you need more. We constrict the supply of all those things using residency rules, using nursing rules, immigration rules, who can practice as a nurse practitioner? What can a nurse practitioner actually do? You have to be attentive to the supply side even if what you’re doing is aggressive redistribution. Now, there are places where these things don’t conflict, like I’d like to see a much expanded child tax credit, and I don’t think that has a big supply side implication one way or the other. But on a lot of the things we’re talking about, even if what you want to do, and it is often what we want to do, to do more redistribution, if you’re redistributing some kind of thing that gives you access to a good or a service, you need to expand the good or the service.
We do rental vouchers, giving people rental vouchers in the San Francisco housing market, unless you build more housing, just creates something that our friends at the Niskanen Center call cost disease socialism, where you are increasing demand for good at which you’ve constricted supply. If you do that, you’re just going to drive the price up. To some degree, that’s at least part of the story of higher education. We give people Pell Grants, we give people all kinds of subsidies for higher ed, but we have not done nearly enough to increase supply or regulate the way in which colleges just then pocket part of that money. And so they’re building these fancy gyms and they’re competing with each other, but they’re not actually increasing the supply of slots. It’s certainly not the level we want them to.
So there’s a lot here where I think it scrambles traditional categories. You cannot do effective redistribution in ways that we would like to see them done, and many people on the left would like to see them done if you’re not taking supply of the thing that you’re subsidizing seriously.
You have to solve some of these problems on the supply side.And one of the conceptual scoops that Ezra and I are trying to work out for the left, for liberals in America is to get people to ask the question, “How do we solve this problem with supply? Housing is a crisis. How do we solve it with supply? Energy is a crisis. How do we solve it with supply? Medical innovation, scientific discovery is a massively interesting phenomenon. We don’t even understand how it exists, really. How do great discoveries actually happen? Is there a supply-side policy for that as well?” That’s the question we’re asking over and over in the book.
So at the end of the day, demand-side progressivism and what Ezra calls supply-side progressivism really are peanut butter and chocolate. They are two flavors that go beautifully well together, but here’s the problem that I think your question was putting your finger on. I think a lot of Americans don’t believe that these things work together because what they see is a liberalism that just taxes and spends and Americans don’t see the benefits of that spending. The Biden administration authorized $42 billion to build rural broadband in America. Practically, none of it was built. Authorized $7.5 billion to build EV charger stations in America. Practically, none of it was built. How many tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to build high-speed rail in California? Practically, none of it exists. You can’t ride it.
So the problem is when the reputation of a tax and spend liberal makes contact with the fact that people don’t see the results in the physical world, like where’s my money going? I have in my head something like this idea of what I call Equinox liberalism, which is to say there’s some forms of liberalism where it’s very expensive, but you see what you’re getting. Like when you spend $270 to go to Equinox for the month, right? It’s a really expensive gym bill, but people who go there seem to love it. They’re like, “The equipment is always free, everything is clean. I go into the locker room, there’s a bunch of Kiehl’s lotions to put on my face after I shower. I am getting exactly what I’m paying for. Yes, I’ll pay out the nose for a gym because I love seeing that money going to work.” And in places like Sweden, Denmark, citizens seem very happy. They’re paying much higher taxes than people are in America, but they’re seeing where the money’s going to work.
The problem with the liberalism that blocks rather than builds is that people don’t see the money going to work. All they see are the dollar signs being spent by government, and then they walk out of their house and they see collapsing infrastructure and they see crime and they see housing prices going to the moon. And so they think, “Wait, this social contract is broken down. You’re asking for Equinox prices, but you’re giving me a shit-ass gym and that’s unfair.”
And so what we’re trying to say is… In a very serious way because I’m not trying to be flippant about gyms. In a very serious way, what we’re trying to say is a part of this problem is that you Democrats have looked so hard at the demand side of the ledger that you’ve forgotten how powerful the levers are on the supply side. And if we can just pull those levers on housing in particular, we can bring down the cost of living and people might even support the tax and spend model more because they’ll feel like they’re participating in Equinox liberalism and not its opposite.
So when we talk about housing over and over, we’re not just talking about the four walls and roof and floor, we’re talking about what housing means to people because housing is life. And right now, what we very clearly see in the data is that Americans are leaving expensive cities and states that tend to be run by Democrats and they’re moving to areas that are sunnier, that are cheaper and are often more likely to be run by Republicans. And this is, I think because starting in the 1960s, 1970s, you had this era of blockage points in housing. We started seeing zoning regulations, we started seeing historic preservation rules. We started seeing laws that made it easier for citizens to sue to stop a new development from going up. Essentially, new tools were invented to empower people’s natural conservatism.
For hundreds of years, people might’ve always felt like, “I want my neighborhood to stay the same.” That might’ve been something that the Neanderthals were feeling, but only in the last 50 years have we really outfitted human beings with a weapon to go along with their biological preference for the familiar such that they can utilize it to stop the change of the physical world around them. And so we’ve seen the rise of what is commonly called NIMBYism, Not In My Backyard, the rise of a movement to stop the development of new housing around where they live. And so what you see in the data is according to one study that was reported on by Yoni Applebaum, my colleague at The Atlantic, if there’s a city with a 10% increase in the progressive vote share, there’s a 30% decline in the number of houses that are permitted. For some reason, it does tend to be these areas that are more populated by progressives that have more of these choke points.
Some of this is just historical quirk, but some of it is, I think maybe the character of a certain kind of liberal, maybe often an older liberal, who believes that preserving the physical environment is the good, that the best thing you can do for the planet is to stop things from changing around you, stop things from being built. And that’s an old-fashioned version of environmentalism that we’re trying to turn the liberals against because really, we see the challenge with climate change is not how do we get everybody to stop using electricity? How do we get people to stop using any power or electrons that come from natural gas and oil? We want people to recognize that if the people want to lead modern lives and they’re going to continue to demand modern lives, and so we have to use clean energy technology to allow them to live those lives. That means you have to build an absolute shit ton of new clean energy, solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear, and maybe in the near future, even fusion.
It requires an attitude of being excited about building new things, rather than a liberalism that seeks always to block changes to the physical environment around them. So I think that what we’re trying to do is to allow people in a way to meet processes and outcomes. I think liberals want housing abundance in some part of their brains, in some part of their hearts. I think they want the price of housing to go down, but there hasn’t quite been a really clean articulation of a mindset or paradigm-shifting argument that gets them to see how the processes that we’ve created go so dramatically against the outcomes that liberals want. And we’re trying to say, “Here’s a new process. Here’s a new question you can ask yourself. How can we solve the housing problem on the supply side?”
You make a lot more money being a barber near Google than you do being a barber in rural Arkansas, and this is the ancient pathway to mobility. People who are poor and work in the service sector, they move to richer areas where the productivity is higher, and thus the money spreads around. And if you look at American mobility and opportunity over the 20th century, about a third, roughly on some calculation, just comes from this people moving to richer areas. And if you look in the last 20-ish years, 30-ish years, you see this extremely steady process of income convergence as people move towards richer areas begin to throw itself into reverse because it used to make sense for the janitor and the lawyer to move to New York City, but now it only makes sense for the lawyer to and the janitor leaves because you can’t support yourself and your family and live in a home and have a reasonable commute being a janitor working in Manhattan. Now, obviously some people do it and it’s often very tough and they live very far. It’s very hard in San Francisco.
You can’t look at cities as, “Well, that’s just where the rich people are,” and that’s a problem that many Democrats now have. Michael Bloomberg famously described New York City as a luxury good and luxury goods cost luxury prices, and that’s true in the sense that New York became a luxury good, but that’s a problem. That is a terrible problem and an inversion of what the city is. There’s this famous advice, possibly Apocryphally from Horace Greeley who’s a early American newspaper publisher and political candidate, but he says, “Go west, young man, go west.” Right? The opportunity is out in the west where the lands are open. It’s never been true, including for him. That guy moved from a rural area to New York City, and that’s how he became famous, and he ran a newspaper and he ran against Ulysses S Grant in a presidential election.
The cities are the frontier. The cities have always been the frontier, not of the land, but of the economy because the frontier of the economy is where ideas are produced and ideas, even now, even the age of remote work are produced in the big cities where people live together and they compete with each other and they cooperate with each other. And so if you gate the cities, if you make it impossible for someone making 50,000 bucks with two kids to live in the city, then what you’ve done is you’ve actually closed the American frontier. You have forced them into lower productivity places. Their children are less likely to grow up around the inventors in the cities.
There’s really amazing research from Raj Chetty and others, basically showing that kids, no matter what income class they’re in, they’re likelier to grow up innovating and patenting in the innovations of the place around them, right? Smart kids don’t just grow up and innovate in anything. If they grew up in the Bay Area, they innovate in technology as Steve Jobs did, and Wozniak did, right? Because they just lived around those people. And that is true in many, many, many different things.
And so when you gate the cities, housing is almost too small of a thing for what we’re talking about. We’re talking about if you can live next to economic opportunity. We are talking also about if you can put the people together who will create the next era of economic opportunity. Right now, the Bay Area is still in some ways drafting off the back when it was cheap. A lot of the people we’re talking about who have made amazing things, they started in the Bay Area when you could afford to live there. It wasn’t always like this, and it wasn’t that long ago that it wasn’t like this. And now, fine, you can go there if you have money or you have a great job offer from Google or Apple or whomever, but over time, you need the ferment. I have a personal interest in reading memoirs and noticing that the memoir is really a housing story. One of the ones I like about this, Moby, the electronic musician, his first memoir, which is great, it’s a memoir of a certain era in New York, it’s a housing story. He was just living next to a bunch of other musicians in cheap-ass housing. I just read Meet Me In The Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman, a sort of oral history of the Aughts Rock Revival in New York City, a housing story. They could afford to live here. Right? I’ve read a bunch of these in San Francisco too, where people just like, they’re actually squatting, right? The San Francisco ferment, its queerness, its openness and tolerance of new ideas, its home of the psychedelic counterculture that intermixed with the defense culture that created Silicon Valley, right? You’ve read probably… Is it Frederick Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture? That was a story of cheap housing. You need to allow people to be around each other, to mix each other. If only one type of person can afford to be there, it becomes a monocultural over time. And so it’s not just housing. This is about the geography of economic innovation and opportunity. That’s why it’s so fucking important.
And single-family zoning, make it easier to add accessory dwelling units called ADUs. We’re changing this at the level of law, but one thing I’m very fixated on is making sure that we also communicate to people that it has to be changed at the level of mindset, and even at the level of political courage because here’s like a model of what often happens. You’re the Mayor of some city and you want to add a housing development of let’s say 500 units. Right? 500 apartment unit building is going to be set up by some developer, and there’s a City Council meeting to determine whether or not this apartment building is going to be built.
Because of loss aversion and because the people who tend to go to City Council meetings are older and richer and homeowners, guess what the overwhelming volume of reaction is in those City Council meetings? It’s a lot of people who feel like they have something to lose, saying, “You cannot put up this building, you cannot add these apartments. It’s going to ruin the character of the neighborhood. It’s going to create traffic. It’s going to be like an eyesore because I don’t like buildings that are that tall.” Any number of excuses can come out of like the Pez dispenser of excuses. You take care of one, there’s going to be another that comes to the surface.
And so what often happens is that these Mayors or these people sitting in the City Council will look out into this room of 50 people saying, “No, no, no.” And they’ll say, “I’m going to represent the feedback that I see and I’m going to vote no on the addition of these housing units, the addition of this apartment building.” Where political courage comes into play is the ability to say, “You know what? I want everyone here to know that I hear you. I’m listening to you and…”
I don’t just represent, you could say the circle of care that I can see right now. I also represent the circle of voters that we can’t see right now, who are in the city or who are in the state or might even want to move to the state, but currently can’t because housing prices are too high on account of housing supply being restricted.
And so, one thing we’re trying to get liberals to have is a sense of political courage to stand up against this very visible NIMBYism and say, “We represent interests that aren’t necessarily visible at this city council meeting. We represent the larger interest of housing abundance.” So, we’re going to always default to saying yes rather than default to saying no, just because the people who happen to come to these meetings are NIMBYs.
One of the things we go into, and this book is a manifesto on some level, but something we really try to do is take you into the gritty, grimy, frustrating details of how policy plays out on the ground, what actually happens after a bill passes, and why we get the outcomes we do. Because often, it’s like a bunch of decisions made after everybody stopped paying attention.
So, one of the things we pay some real attention to is the kind of housing that people on the left all agree on is affordable housing through government grants, right? The government says, “Oh, we’re not just going to have market rate developers coming in, building more luxury condos for the children of the upper class. We’re going to build affordable housing for people who should be in this city, but otherwise couldn’t pay enough to be here.”
California. I can give you two different examples, but let’s look at Los Angeles. I’m from outside LA and they have something… I always forget if it’s Measure H or Measure HHH. But California, LA voters pass a bond measure about a billion dollars a little bit more, I think it was to build affordable housing. Six years later when I’m writing about this, they have built a couple of thousand units at an average cost of $600,000 to $700,000 a unit.
So, it’s costing more to build housing under this affordable housing bond measure, which they have agreed to pay for than it is to buy a home market rate in Denver. Denver is a nice place to live. So, why? What had happened? Well, it turns out that when you trigger the public money in various cities, these are city ordinances often, but not always.
And you use these public grants and you cobble together the different grants you need to build an affordable housing complex. What you’ve done is layer onto yourself a huge number of rules that the market rate developers don’t have to follow. You’re either using union labor or paying prevailing wage. You’re building to higher green building codes.
Oftentimes, by the way, to get through the kind of planning board meetings that Derek is talking about, you’ve made a bunch of concessions on the design. Is there going to be parking in it, security? Things like that. You have to often agree to who’s going to be in the home. So, you’re getting… There’s a thing in the Measure H stuff where, well, they wanted it to not just be the taxpayer money. They also wanted nonprofit grants so the money would go further.
So, you’re trying to get these other grants, but these grants are to house homeless veterans. So, now to open the thing, you need to find these homeless veterans. You need to go through extra disability accessibility reviews. And, of course, we all want these things to be accessible, but they already had to comply with the American Disability Act. But now, you’re doing another disability act review in the city, and they come in and they say, “Well, your doors are a little bit not as wide as we think. So, you got to make all your doors 3 inches wider before you can open up,” and that adds time and that adds cost.
You have these subcontractor rules, right? This is, now I’m using an example from San Francisco. But you had a preference initially for minority-based subcontractors that became illegal. It became small businesses, but that meant it had a preference against the bigger contractors who were more efficient at building housing.
In order to use public money, and then very much in order to build public housing directly, it ends up being more expensive and slower than market rate, and that is a choice. We do not have to try to solve every problem in society through an individual housing project. Building affordable housing is hard enough. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult to do. You do have to talk with the neighbors, right? It’s never going to be trivial to build a 500-unit apartment building.
But instead, we layer on all these external and additional agenda items. I call this everything bagel liberalism because you sprinkle just enough on the bagel and it’s great, but if you saw everything everywhere all at once, you put everything on the everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape.
And so, the need to deregulate government, right? Why? I saw some of Elon Musk’s marathon appearance on your show, and he talks about high-speed rail in California. And the thing he says there that it’s functionally illegal to build high-speed rail in California. I got 100 disagreements with Elon Musk right now. That’s not one of them. It’s functionally illegal to build high-speed rail in California.
Like I went out, I toured the high-speed rail. I’ve done a lot of reporting on that. You can’t build it affordably. You just can’t on time. They have no way to get the money to build the rest of it. It’s not going to happen and it’s not going to happen, not because you can’t build high-speed rail. Europe builds high-speed rail. Japan builds high-speed rail. China builds high-speed rail. And it’s not because of the private market, like we’ll only build luxury high-speed rail. It’s because we have so heavily regulated a public project that you can’t finish it, and you definitely can’t bring it in on time and affordably.
And so, I really would like to de like, uncode, deregulation because yeah, there’s places where I would like to regulate more. I don’t want you to be able to build a coal-fired power plant in America. I just don’t want it to be possible. I think it’s bad. But I do want it to be possible to build high-speed rail and affordable housing, including through the public market.
And one thing, my friends on the left, I think really underrate is how hard they’ve made it for the government to act. They believe in government, but if you believe in government, then you have to make it possible for government to complete projects. You have to make it possible for the people who work for government to apply their own genius and initiative. They have to have agency.
I always say that like we’re sort of trapped right now between a party that wants government to fail and a party that won’t make government work. And like, we are trying to push this idea that the thing we want is a capable government, a strong government, a government that when it promises it will do something, it actually does it and gets it done. And that requires not just deregulation of the private sector, though sometimes it does require that. It requires deregulation of the government itself.
Some rules are good and some rules are stupid. We all understand that in life. That’s what regulations are. They’re just rules. And sometimes, they give us exactly the outcomes we want. And sometimes, they give us the outcomes we would never hope for. And here’s a good example. You go back to the 1940s and 1950s, America was fucking disgusting. The air and the water was horrifying.
In 1943, residents of Los Angeles woke up to a smog that was so black. They thought the Japanese had launched a chemical attack against America. In New Hampshire, in the rivers next to textile mills. Sometimes, the rivers themselves would run green and purple and red depending on what textile colors were being dumped into the river. You had the Ohio River on fire in the 1960s, 1970s. The world of mid 1900s America was truly sickening, and it made people sick.
And so, we passed a raft of environmental rules, and some of them achieved exactly what we wanted. The air we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner because of the Clean Air and Water Acts. We did extraordinary things with this era of regulation. Some of these regulations were about outcomes that the Clean Air and Water Act regulates specific pollution levels in the air and the water or the emissions coming out of tailpipes.
Some of the regulations though, were about process. NEPA is the National Environmental Protection Act, and it among many other things, empowered individuals and citizens to sue the government and organizations, businesses, to stop construction or fill out environmental reviews to prove that their construction would meet muster wouldn’t degrade the environment too severely.
This opened the door to an infinitude of lawsuits to wrap up any effort to build anything in red tape forever. So, fast forward to 2021 the year, or sorry, the month after Newsom’s signs, Gavin Newsom, Governor of California signs the law to end single-family zoning in California. It seems like a massive win for the pro-housing YIMBYs of California.
The month after that law was passed, the board of supervisors in San Francisco decided to rule against an apartment building that would have added 500 total units and 100 below market rent units. So, something like public or social housing that was going to be built on a Nordstrom parking lot, just about the best possible place you could add housing in the world, a Nordstrom parking lot because the builders, the developers, didn’t file the appropriate paperwork under environmental review.
It was really good to pass the set of environmental bills that we did in the 1960s and 1970s because it addressed the extremely real problem of air and water and land being degraded by industry. But we’re in a new world, and the problem environmentalism today is in part a problem of global warming. And we have to build not only dense housing, but also clean energy. And the same rules that were designed to help the environment in the 1960s and 1970s are sometimes ironically used in a way that hurt the environment in the 2020s. And that’s one reason why, we, as liberals need a paradigm shift.
Instead, they both become growth miracles. They both do much better than the UK, which was on the winning side of the war. Why? And Olson’s argument is that affluent, stable societies over long periods of time, develop something that is very difficult to develop and very important to develop, which is bargaining organizations, right?
Collective action is hard. It is hard to form an organization. It is hard to make that organization persist. But if you can do that in an atmosphere of stability, then over time, that organization will tend to entrench its power, right? Think about AARP or the Chamber of Commerce or certain unions or the National Manufacturing Council, et cetera, the business roundtable. They’re not that powerful when they start, but over long periods of time, they become really powerful, and they start to pass laws and make themselves more powerful and so on.
There’s a lot you can say about this insight, but my favorite part of Olson’s book, and one that I don’t think people emphasize enough, is this insight he has, which is that over time, countries will begin. Every country has a kind of form of natural selection within it, and that form of natural selection will select for people with the skills to navigate, best navigate the kind of economy that country has.
So, if you’re in China right now and China’s in its developmentalism phase, you really want to be in civil infrastructure, right? It is great to be a civil engineer in China, great to be working on semiconductors in China, great to be doing all this stuff in the physical world. But America as a kind of price of our affluence and our success, we’ve become a country, and this happens to a lot of countries where negotiation is really important. And a country in which negotiation is really important is going to, over time, start developing a preference for lots of lawyers, people in finance, management consultants, because it is a society that requires continuous, what he calls complex bargaining.
And I think this actually explains a lot. Patrick Collison, we quote him in the… Who’s the founder, CEO of Stripe, brilliant tech guy. Here’s his point that he made in an interview with Noah Smith, who’s a blogger and economist where they were talking about high-speed rail, and sort of Patrick makes this point. He’s like, “It’s just tough to be a high-speed rail engineer in America. You’re going to have a much easier time working in the digital space.” And so, the digital space becomes a kind of frontier of last resort.
And so, people want to build things, go into bits and bytes, not into atoms, right? To use the old kind of Peter Thiel cut. And I think there’s something to that. It’s not that lawyers are bad. Some of the people I love and most in this world are lawyers. And many lawyers do amazing, amazing work. But one reason we’ve selected for so many lawyers and America has a lot of lawyers, is we became a society that needs a lot of lawyers because we are a society that is stable, affluent, and we’ve become very into bargaining.
Donald Trump is a real estate developer. That’s a relational business. The way real estate development works in this country, the reason you don’t have all that many huge firms building housing in many, many states simultaneously is it requires a lot of relationships in the individual city you’re in.
And so, if you read, say, Maggie Haberman’s, great biography of Donald Trump, Confidence Man, which focuses a lot on his time as a real estate magnate in New York. You see Donald Trump doesn’t build a ton of stuff in other states. He actually builds in other countries sometimes or more to the point he puts his name on things built in other countries. But really, what he did was build here and he built here through his relationships with the New York political system.
And so, over time, societies that make building and construction and creation something that is the output of negotiations rather than very clear standards and rules where if you’ve done it, you can just do it. You get a lot of lawyers, you get a lot of management consultants, you get a lot of finance people because that’s what society is selecting for. That’s what you’ve made it possible to have agency and freedom in. That’s what you need to do, to do big things.
This is coming from Nick Bagley, who’s a University of Michigan law professor. But between Walter Mondale and Tim Walz, there’s not a single person on a Democratic presidential ticket who didn’t go to law school, not one, like the Democratic Party in particular is a party of lawyers. And lawyers look at things through the legal perspective. And the legal perspective is that government is legitimate by following process.
And Bagley’s point is that government attains legitimacy, at least in part through outcomes. And when you prize process so high over outcomes, you think you’re acting legitimately, but actually it what would have made you legitimate in the view of the people is that you built the thing you told them you were going to build, you made it possible to live affordably in the city. And so, you have this sort of movement then over time to populist strong men who say, I alone can fix it, because they’ve kind of given up on this procedural liberalism like they didn’t deliver for them.
So, you keep telling them, we’re the ones who know how to run government and they don’t see it. And eventually, somebody else comes and says, “I’m going to bust through the walls of this thing like the Kool-Aid man,” and they win.
I love Ezra’s line that we don’t just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it’s trying to achieve. This is a world in which a Department of Government Efficiency is a godsend.
We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we’re going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place. So, that to me is the sort of pillbox version of a steel case for a Department of Government Efficiency.
Because the only way to make change within it possible is to delete what currently exists, whether it was efficient or not. You would never actually know that if you had it all come and present its case for efficiency or something, you’d know you’d get turned around, whatever. The only way like, the problem with the government is there is no actual competition.
The Department of Education doesn’t get outcompeted by the agency of education, which has started up three years ago or something. And because of that, the only way to make possible radical change is to bulldoze the thing that currently exists. And then, once that is done, you can begin to rebuild. If you’ve fired half of the Department of Education, then you can start rehiring your people and they will actually do what you want. If you have shown that you can delete every regulation or just not follow it, then you can begin deciding which ones to actually follow. If there is no department of USAID and you’ve moved back under state, then you can tell state what really to fund in terms of foreign aid, right?
There’s a theory here, I think that was never about efficiency. It was about deletion. He’s not trying to make things run a little bit better. He’s not trying to lower the overhead cost of government. That the theory is that in the first term, the bureaucracy impeded Donald Trump. It didn’t listen to him. Bureaucracy is supposed to be limbs of the President. The only way to make the federal government a neural link of Donald Trump himself, is to destroy the federal government. And then, rebuild it as that thing.
They’re elected into an office that is already pre-contaminated by the bureaucracy itself. And we’re trying to take all of that away. We’re trying to, I mean, this is very just explicitly the case they’re going to make, trying to make government more democratic, not less, by allowing the democratic, the elected president guide or lead in a pure way.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. If you asked me to do the non-steelman, which I would love to do too. It is not my view that the steelman case of this is to make the federal government fully responsive to Donald Trump. But the steelman case for what they are doing as expressed by them. And I think a steelman reflects, I mean, I have talked to these people, right? I’m telling you what they tell me on some level. The steelman cases, they believe, like as Derek said a minute ago, this has become non-democratically responsive, and the way it becomes democratically responsive is deeply responsive to the president. The president represents a different politics than Joe Biden’s politics. And so, if you have a state filled with liberal civil servants who don’t want to do what he says, that is a violation of small democratic principles of how the government should be run.
I think if you don’t like it, that’s fine. But I do want to say, I actually think that is the steelman. They’re not doing this for no reason. They have an intention here, and I think whether you like it or not, so it depends on whether or not you like their view.
So, when you choose who to install as the head of whatever organization, so if you fire everybody and rehire, the rehiring process is more likely to have people that just said nice things about Donald Trump in the past versus a meritocracy-based system that these people are really good.
If we just steelman everything he’s been doing, which is like, let’s find the productive people that show up to work that love what they’re doing that are actually sort of amazing at what they’re doing. I mean, how would you solve that problem from his experience in business? It’s painful, but effective to just fire almost everybody. And then, rebuild from there and continuously do that.
And as the result, as long as everybody is aligned in a mission is you’re simplifying over and over the system. So, it’s more and more and more effective. Now, how else would you approach… We could start now criticizing, how would you make government more efficient, if not by the way that they’re doing it?
In a way, and I do think sort of the purchase of Twitter is late Elon, which becomes a much more political set of goals. But nevertheless, in a way, at least there’s an expressed idea at Twitter, which is the return of free expression. I think it’s really important if you are steelmanning or any kind of manning is really asking and listening to what people are saying their goal is, because efficiency does not exist in a vacuum, right?
A state that is efficient at building dirty energy and a state that is efficient at burning clean energy, they can be opposite versions of each other, right? You have to be optimizing towards something. You’re an AI guy. You have to optimize towards something. And the goal… I find myself really consistently frustrated by conversations about DOGE that treat efficiency as some free-floating thing. Or I sometimes will hear people say to me, very smart people have said to me, “Oh, what DOGE is really doing is stripping the government down to studs, so it can put AI into it, because Elon believes in AGI is coming soon, and you need to make a government capable of using AGI.
And I always say to them, “Okay, AI towards what? Towards what value function? Towards what prompt are you inserting at the base level?” Sorry about that. And I think a few things become very clear. One is that it is towards Donald Trump. It is his movement. Elon Musk serves at his pleasure. Elon Musk has said that he would like to himself chisel Donald Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. He said he loves Donald Trump as much as a man can love any other man. He believes in Trump, right?
I think you have to take him at his word, or maybe you think he’s very cynical and he’s saying all that to curry favor in a sycophantic way with Trump. But at some point, Elon Musk does not serve with any kind of independence. If Trump says, “Your power is gone,” his power is gone. He’s functionally an outside advisor to the government.
So, then you really do, I think, have to listen to what Donald Trump has said, what Russ Vought has said, and they believe that Trump represents something fundamental. His movement represents something fundamental that has been suppressed in American life, okay. I think if you were doing something… The best cases I’ve seen for Elon are a zero-based budgeting case.
You’re trying to break everything down to studs, and then it needs to rejustify itself. If he did this at Twitter, the engineers had to come in and justify to his people what they were actually doing. But that wasn’t how those emails worked. We all know this, right? He doesn’t have a staff capable of seriously working through, and then following up on emails from 2 some million government employees about what they did that week, and then really checking, well, did they do it well? Was the thing accomplished, right? That’s not how you do that like what? He’s got 50 people at DOGE? It’s nothing.
If you want to do zero-based budgeting, it has to be against a criteria. So, coming in and gutting USAID, some of the things USAID does are just extraordinary, right? PEPFAR, nobody anywhere thought PEPFAR was not an efficient program. PEPFAR is maybe the highest value thing that we have ever done in the US government to save human life through foreign aid. I mean, just bluntly, it’s a George W. Bush program. It saved a generation of people from dying of HIV AIDS.
They just turned it off, and they didn’t have somebody come in and justify the PEPFAR funding. They just turned it off as they turned all these different things off and have never given people a serious effort to come back in and say, ” This is what we do.” They just fired half of the people at DOE. DOE is, if you look at it, DOE has the lowest staffing level of any agency, but the fourth highest appropriation, and it administers the more than $1 trillion higher ed. It is in overhead terms, one of the leanest of all the agencies alongside Social Security Agency.
They didn’t tell those people what they wanted out of a DOE of half the size. They didn’t let those people come in and argue for their jobs. They’re just cutting things, and they’re not explaining at any point, at any level what they want to do with them. And then, I will also say what they’re doing is probably illegal, right? Just this week or last week, a judge said that about 26,000 people need to be rehired by the federal government because their firings were illegal.
And now, that’s going to go up to the Supreme Court and we’ll see what John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett say, right? That game is not done yet, but they have Congress. I am a person who believes we needed civil service reform. Too hard to hire, too hard to fire, too hard to manage. And they could have gone to Congress.
And frankly, at the beginning, Ro Khanna and a bunch of Democrats that they wanted to work with DOGE, Democrats were defeated. If you had wanted to build some amount of like political bipartisanship, it was there to do, right? Like the Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Bill, the hardcore immigration bill. They were ready to deal, but they didn’t want to do that because it is fundamentally for them about political control. And this is my steelman case for the action. This is a case, I believe.
What Elon did at Twitter was not make Twitter more efficient. It’s not like a better product now. It’s a different product. What he did was he made it controllable. What he did at Twitter was he went into something where he thought the people disagreed with him, and he broke it until he had actual operational control of the thing, and they would do what he wanted them to do, and then he can move it in his direction.
What they’re doing in the federal government, and this is what Chris Rufo wanted to do, it’s what Russ Vought wanted to do, is make the thing controllable. And what they want to do with that control, I don’t even think they fully know, but their view is that the federal government is like a… It is the capital city that they have conquered.
And now, they need to turn it into something that they can actually use. And in order to do that, I mean, Russ Vought has said, “You need to traumatize the civil servants,” right? That was his word, traumatize the civil servants. When Elon Musk talked about USAID, he said, “It’s all worms. No apple. We’re going to feed it to the wood shipper.” This isn’t the language of, let’s see who’s really doing a good job here and who’s not. This is the language of conquering. This is the language of destruction, and they have not-
I can tell you what some conservatives have written about it, but the administration itself has not articulated goals. So what I think their view is right now is they’re breaking the thing and trying to make the people who would be oppositional either leave or go into hiding and then they’re going to figure out what they want to do with it.
But right now they’re in the period where you have to sack and then later on you can build yourself your monuments and turn the civil service to your own ends. I don’t think it’s still… I just… That is what I think is going on.
And the resulting thing this machine that is created, all barriers removed, you create beautiful stuff. It’s not like move fast and break things. It’s very cynical perspective on it. No, everybody loves what they do, are good at it and are really rapidly figuring out all the multitude of problems that arise in that. It’s a different culture, a culture of productivity, and it’s not like some negative boys club or there’s all kinds of negative perspectives you can take on those things. No, it’s a positive culture of productivity.
Controllable side, also really important to understand and that could be taken advantage of in a really negative way, especially in government. But you should say on some of the most successful software projects, there is a level of control required like open source projects, Linus Torvalds, that heads up the Linux kernel. There has to be what’s often called the benevolent dictator for life. There has to be a controllability to the machine of this extremely productive, efficient team to work together.
Now, those are engineering projects and the problem with government is you get elected new benevolent dictators for life that come.
Just everything is so bureaucratic and slow. That’s a different culture. So part of the destruction is in reestablishing culture and yes, make it more controllable so you can be efficient.
You know exactly when you’re doing a good and bad job. And so the KPIs are so cleanly drawn that people are aligned in their sense of we are moving forward and moving back. I don’t think government has done this at all under DOGE. In fact, I think in some ways goals that you could clearly identify as being good are being torn down. And this is why again, it’s so useful to be able to articulate goals in politics because without an articulation of goals, you don’t know whether the job to be done is to take something away or to add something.
And right now the answer from DOGE is to take away, take away, subtract everything, break down to studs as Cesar said. But let’s take a really, really concrete example here. The FDA, right? DOGE just laid off dozens of probationary employees. So upwardly mobile, recently hired, often very young, nicely credentialed employees at the FDA as a part of its slashing of the federal workforce.
One of the big problems of the FDA is slow approval of phase three clinical trial drugs. Everyone in this country who believes in science and technology wants the most lifesaving drugs to be brought into the public marketplace as soon as possible and competed against with other drugs, the price comes down and helps to extend people’s lives and health spans. I think everyone agrees that is an outcome worth fighting for. And if they don’t, certainly, as you and I willing to say that’s an outcome that we want. That’s what we want from our science policy.
What happens if you cut probationary employees at the FDA? The FDA doesn’t become more efficient. It becomes less efficient because the same amount of work spread over fewer people means longer delays in terms of approving phase three clinical trial drugs and deciding whether or not to approve them for public consumption. So in this really, really clear and very specific example, I think we can see the problem with not having articulated goals. You don’t know whether the job to be done is to take away employees or to add them. I think if instead what DOGE had done is come in and say, “You know what, Elon Musk and a bunch of other people from Silicon Valley, one thing we take very seriously is the importance of scientific and technological progress.”
Because if you look back over decades and centuries, what distinguishes our generation from every other generation in terms of its health and its power is science and technology. And we want to infuse government with a sense of science and technological progress. And to that end, one thing we want to do is to have a smarter and more efficient FDA so that people can experience life-saving medicines.
I think what you would do is research the bottlenecks that exist to American science and pharmaceutical policy and say, “We should hire more people at the FDA to accelerate drug approval, decide which drugs are to be rejected and which drugs are to get the FDA label.” That is the opposite of the DOGE approach, and this really, I think puts a fine point to the problem of a DOGE without goals.
When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon is at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him, and maybe most importantly for the purposes of this part of the conversation, the people who work for him. I’ll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, “I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we’re going to integrate new features.”
There’s probably a really clear mind meld. Right now I have no sense that there’s a mind meld and in fact I have the exact opposite sense that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of destruction, destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It’s much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint to describe DOGE as an ideological purge of progressivism performing an act or performing the job of efficiency rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.
One of the things that has really cowed congressional Republicans, it is a huge sun-like gravitational force now on Capitol Hill, is that Elon has made it known that any house or Senate Republican who defies Trump on a key vote, cabinet nominees or the CR, that kind of thing, he will dump 50 to a hundred million dollars into a primary.
It’s no money at all for him. It’s lethal for them. This is well known. He has said this personally to some of them. It’s been well reported. This is probably why Joni Ernst voted for Pete Hegseth. Well, what’s achieved by this? I think it’s an interesting question because Republicans in theory are allied to Donald Trump, right? He’s the nominee of their party and they don’t all have literally the same view of him. But I think you might say from one perspective there is a value in the system and there being checks and balances.
There’s a value in the system, in this system having to absorb other kinds of information. Now, we already don’t know the checks and balances we once had or thought we would have in this country because we have nationalized political parties instead of branches of government that compete with ambition, checking ambition, and I’ve done whole shows on this and we can talk about that if we want. But we do have political parties and political parties are themselves institutions that aggregate different kinds of information. In order to try to come to some outcome that is a better outcome because more information is surfaced.
I think Donald Trump would be in a stronger position for him if Senate Republicans could have done what they actually wanted to do and not confirm RFK Jr., not confirm Tulsi Gabbard, not confirm Pete Hegseth, not confirm Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, right? That’s actually a huge amount of risk the Trump administration has taken on. If they had named a sort of normal figure to HHS and then there’s a measles outbreak. Well, measles outbreaks are tough. That’s a hard thing. If you name RFK Jr. And there’s a huge measles outbreak, you’re really going to get blamed for that because people are ready to blame you.
If there is a domestic terror attack after you’ve put Kash Patel who’s quite unqualified in charge of the FBI and they’ve launched a war internally against the FBI which they see as a hotbed of anti-Trump sentiment and the FBI in the internal chaos misses some things and you have deaths on American soil, that’s a huge amount of risk you’ve taken on. I mean, the guy they fired, Chris Wray, he was Trump’s appointee. It wasn’t some Democrat. Trump named him in his first term.
But Elon, what he did here was he created a death star of primary money, and he has said that, “If you cross Trump in Congress even as a Republican, you’re done. Between Trump’s control of attention and loyalty and my ability to outspend you, you’re toast.” I think what that reveals is that what he wants is for power to be centralized under Trump. We’ve been talking about the bureaucracy, but he also wants it to be true in Congress. I’m not a Donald Trump fan, but obviously other people are Donald Trump fans. Obviously, I think at this point Elon Musk is a Donald Trump fan, but much of the country thinks this guy is great and I think we should take what they’re doing at word and deed.
The point of Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is right about things. We should give him power and he should use that power. My sense is you have some mixed feelings about him, but not everybody does, and this very consistent application of authority across the people… JD Vance. The difference between Mike Pence and JD Vance is JD Vance said explicitly in the whole run up to the vice presidential sweepstakes that his view of what went wrong in the first administration is between the bureaucracy and the staff.
Too many people are trying to inhibit Donald Trump and that what he would do is tell Trump that he’s got to get rid of these generals and he’s got to get people who will do what Trump actually said. The view of Trump’s fans, the view of his allies is that the first term didn’t go well enough because they had too much opposition from Republicans in Congress who talked Trump into things they shouldn’t have talked him into and too much opposition from the civil service and even from Trump’s own staff.
I think a very simple heuristic of why these terms are so different is that the most important member of the Trump family, Trump aside in the first term was Jared Kushner and maybe Ivanka, and the most important member of the family in the second is Donald Trump Jr. right? Kushner brought in a bunch of inhibitors. He brought in mainstream figures like Gary Cohn and Kushner represented other parts of society that were mixed on Trump and they wanted him to do certain things and not others, and there was maybe a productive tension.
McConnell was majority leader. He was more powerful than Thune is. Paul Ryan was speaker. He’s more powerful than Mike Johnson is. In the second term, you have Donald Trump Jr. who brings in much more right-wing figures. They’re accelerators, not inhibitors. Accelerationists in many cases explicitly. You have Elon Musk who believes the likeliest problem is Trump doesn’t go far enough, fast enough. And you have a weak Republican Congress that is further cowed by Musk’s money.
It could be good or it could be bad, but the Curtis Yarvin take that we need a more monarch-like figure is clearly being tested out. The view, just as you said about software engineering things is that you often need a benevolent dictator. Now, I don’t think Trump is benevolent, other people do, but the view that what is being attempted here is something much more centralized in its power, I think is actually a shared view of what’s going on. It’s like a consensus reality we have, not like an argument over reality we’re having.
And by the way, so I have an optimism about it that matches the division of abundance in the book, that once you do the creative destruction, then you start to really be able to step in and have a clear vision of like, “Okay, housing. What are the policies to solve housing?” But I do think the first step that’s needed is the destruction.
Donald Trump has insulated himself from any feedback loop or any sense of criticism that his tariff policy might not be the best course of strategy for American industry or global relations. And as a result, what we have is I think fairly described as a purposeful chaos. I mean, what other term can you use if a tariff is being announced at 9:00 AM and then taken away at 3:30 PM, and then 10 days later announced at 9:37 and then renegotiated at 2:45? This is not a principled theory of the perfect tariff level on international trade.
This is, I think, much more parsimoniously explained by just an expression of Donald Trump’s personality. This is a New York real estate guy. He loves making big awesome pronouncements and then using those big awesome pronouncements in order to negotiate little one-on-one dealings where he can rest for himself a personal sense of power or money, or pride, right? Announcing these tariffs in a chaotic way, forces world leaders to get on the phone with him and say, “Donald, what can I give you to bring down the tariff?”
This is personality standing in for politics in a way that’s totally unmolested by anybody else’s sense of, “Hey, that’ll maybe chill it on the tariff policy. Hey, let’s maybe slow down on the deportations. I’m not so sure about this particular move over here.” Instead, you have an executive branch that’s just a full manifestation of Donald Trump’s mind. And I do think at the early returns, if you look at consumer sentiment, if you look at the stock market, if you look at the 10-year yield, you have a range of let’s called them aggregated economic information telling us that the economy, consumers, employers, investors, do not like what’s happening now, which is going to be a really interesting test case.
Donald Trump’s first four years in office, love him or hate him, were four rather successful years of economic growth. Low unemployment, steady growth, low inflation, pretty much every economic indicator in the green. We’re already in the red in many of the economic indicators that never even blinked yellow under his first administration. And I personally don’t think it’s a coincidence that you’re getting these red indicators at a time when Donald Trump is having an entirely different experience of being president where there is no Mnuchin to tell him, “Hey, maybe let’s cool it off in the tariffs.”
The one more thing I would add here is you said maybe Trump’s presidency is a kind of right-wing abundance, right? And I think that it’s a worthy question, right? Is Donald Trump just doing his own version of abundance and we should… even if we disagree with his process, ideologically root for the outcomes that are likely under it? Here’s why I don’t think so. Let’s say that you or just someone as a conservative shares our view that they want housing to be abundant.
I think what they should really root for is to reduce the tax for building and make it easier to add housing units cheaply. Well, houses are made out of materials. Two of the most important materials in home building are soft lumber and drywall. Soft lumber, we import from Canada. Drywall, one of the key ingredients we import from Mexico. One of the first things that’s going to happen if you raise 25% tariff on lumber from Canada and drywall from Mexico is that the cost of housing is going to go straight up.
And this isn’t my personal opinion, this was a March 7th memo sent by the National Association of Home Builders essentially in a controlled panic saying, “Please don’t do a tariff policy like this. You’re going to screw over home builders even though ironically, you Donald Trump were elected by Biden to Trump voters who were mad about the price of housing.” So I am not in the moment optimistic that his centralizing style is going to be economically useful for Americans, whatever their interests.
My sense of the early feedback and of the early returns is that he in fact does not have a very clear and beneficial economic agenda. He has a personal agenda. He likes taking phone calls from international leaders and working out little deals with them. I don’t think that’s in the larger interest of economic growth, and certainly I don’t think it’s in the specific interest of reducing housing prices.
Now, in a perfect world, some of that is good matched with principled policy that’s surrounded by a large number of experts that actually understand that policy. I can criticize Trump all day, but I’m just saying that there is some degree to the picking up the phone and talking to leaders and playing in the morning, say one thing in the evening another and that could be part of a principled chaos.
He did it importantly unlike Donald Trump without alienating all of our traditional allies. One of the things that I think is important to say about Trump is that the difference between Trump and, say, Biden or Trump and Obama is not that Trump will negotiate with Putin and Obama wouldn’t. It’s that Trump is realigning our alliances.
He doesn’t really seem to want to negotiate with the Europeans, or at least he wants to do it from a more hostile position. He wants to make Canada the 51st state, not treated as a longtime ally. The thing here is not that Trump is negotiating with our perceived enemies. These are his perceived allies and he’s turning our traditional allies into perceived enemies. So with him, I think it’s important. I am very much on the view of you talk to everybody. And it was my view going back for some years that it was clear that the Biden administration needed to be pushing for negotiations over Ukraine.
There was not going to be some end game here where Ukraine got all of its territory back. But, but, but, but I don’t think it is reasonable to look at what he is doing and say that is the norm that he has broken. The idea that we should have negotiations. I mean, many different presidents have done many surprising things and he’s rolled back a bunch of those things. Republicans have been very unfriendly to the opening that began with Cuba, right? And that was a big deal in American foreign policy. Something Obama did against very heavy criticism, something that cost him and cost Democrats in Florida and among Cuban voters in the following election.
So I just don’t think that that’s that an unusual thing with Trump. I also just want to say with the tariffs, he wanted to cut the tariffs off from DOGE and cut the tariffs off from this broader agenda. And one reason I don’t is that I think the way to understand tariffs… Look, you can be accomplishing many different things with tariffs. One thing, which was a theory that you heard from some people around Trump and fit what he said on the campaign trail, which was Trump’s position on the campaign trail, was that he was going to lay down 10 to 20% tariffs on all imported goods and 65% tariffs on imported goods from China. So I think that’s a bad idea for a bunch of different reasons, but what that is, is a stable change in the cost structure for all corporations and all trade. And then different players can make different investment decisions in the long term based on this new cost structure. What he’s doing, as Derek said, and I’ve had these funny experiences where I’m literally doing a podcast with a tariffs expert and I’ll be talking about the auto parts problem, and then my producer will be like, “He just delayed the tariff on the auto parts.” What he’s doing with these tariffs that you move on and you move off and you negotiate over endlessly, and I’ve been told this again by people around him is their view is that America had leverage it wasn’t using. And tariffs in particular are a form of executive control. Trade deals need to be negotiated and ratified with Congress. Trade deals are something you have to do with the rest of the system, but tariffs are something Trump can do unilaterally. And one thing Trump wants is control. That is the through line of virtually everything in his politics. Tariffs are a leverage based form of foreign policy. They are America has the biggest economy in the world that anybody who’s going to get into a trade war with us is going to suffer worse than we will. And there’s something where the president can use the tariffs because of authority granted by Congress some time ago for other purposes. He can use them with a huge amount of discretion. So you can use them on the one hand to say, “Well, I think that we’ve lost too much manufacturing and the dollar is undervalued in other places, or overvalued rather. And so we want to use tariffs to make the cost structure differently so that people have to locate more of the supply chains and the intermediate manufacturing in the United States.”
But you can also use a tariff to say, Columbia has to take the people we’re deporting and they have to take them in chains. And Donald Trump is doing both things. And the reason I think it’s important to keep those in mind is that what Donald Trump wants, what connects a lot of different things is that he wants leverage over things. I think it connects to Eric Adams and you were sitting here talking to New York City. Eric Adams is a Democratic mayor. Donald Trump has no truck with Eric Adams, right? He did not support Eric Adams. Eric Adams is not his natural ally, but what he had over Eric Adams, he realized was a leverage that he could get the cases off of Eric Adams and then get Eric Adams in his pocket.
So Donald Trump stepped in to save like the corrupt Democratic mayor of New York City. Not because they have a deep ideological alliance, but because then Donald Trump would’ve power over New York City and its policy that he wouldn’t otherwise have. The thing that connects Trump, Trump is a very old school politician. He’s very relational. He’s very 19th century. He’s looking for the angle. He’s very zero sum. He’s looking for things to empower.
DOGE is a way of getting power over the bureaucracy. Tariffs are a way of getting power over the international financial system and foreign policy and breaking traditional alliances. Maybe in his mind, even getting Canada to become the 51st state, maybe getting Mexico to change its immigration policy, trying to weaponize the Justice Department against Eric Adams as a way of getting power over Democratic mayor. Some of what they’re doing with grants and money is a way of getting power over other institutions in American life.
Again, you could think it’s bad or you could think it’s good, but it is coherent. I think it’s bad, but it is coherent, and the people who think it’s good think it’s good for Trump to have power. Again, with the Eric Adams thing, they were very explicit about this, right? They said that it is worthwhile for the president to negotiate over his policy objectives and to trade things to get his policy objectives more fully carried out. And so Eric Adams went from saying New York City would be a sanctuary city. They’d aggressively carry out deportations.
You can think that kind of transactionalism is fine. I think in this case, given that it’s about corruption, it wasn’t. But the idea, Trump’s idea that the problem is that the president doesn’t wield enough power here the way he does in Russia, the way he might in India, the way he might in China. Trump has spoken very openly of envying some of the powers these other people have. I think it’s a consistent governing philosophy that needs to be taken as that. Right?
I think sometimes you describe… One of the difficulties Trump poses is sometimes if you just describe what he’s doing, I think quite neutrally, people say, “Oh, you’re criticizing him, you’re anti-Trump.” But I’m just describing what he’s doing. You can think it’s good or it’s bad, but the fact that he wants to arrogate power and find points of leverage and tariffs are one. What he’s doing through DOGE is another. What he did with the DOJ is another. It’s all very consistent. The question is really then just what your normative view is on Trump having that much power.
But on the topic of DOGE is more on the Elon side. If we can combine DOGE and abundance as a topic, if DOGE succeeds the effort, let’s just forget DOGE, but the effort of making government more efficient, what does that look like before the next election and after the next election? If we can just look at success.
I have outlined that the problem with a personality type of the right is it’s autocratic now, and the problem with a personality type of the left is it’s bureaucratic. And I don’t want to see things going either to where DOGE is in terms of, I think, there’s a fundamental lawlessness to it, but I also don’t like the aims of it. But I don’t want to see things where Democrats were, which is such respect for process, that they will put the process ahead of getting their own things done.
They will listen to any lawyer with any super intense interpretation of any law, and that’ll turn them all the way back. What DOGE has demonstrated is that the room for movement inside the American government, inside the state, as much wider than anybody gave it credit for both Republican and Democratic administrations. It may not be as wide, it probably isn’t legally as wide as what DOGE is trying to do, and that’s why they’re losing all these court cases. But it is wide. And you could also use Congress. You could pass statute to make it wider, and you should.
There is no abundance agenda that works if the Democratic Party is as rule-bound and as process obsessed as it was in the last 10 years. It doesn’t work flatly. That is why so many of the stories we tell in the book are about process gone. It’s not process gone wrong because it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do, but it is process that has become antagonistic to the promised outcomes.
And so I do hope there’s a kind of thesis, right? All the institutions are great. Democrats are the defenders of government. Antithesis, the government is a corrupt cesspool. It’s a ball of worms, and it has to be destroyed and taken over by a benevolent or non-benevolent dictator. And synthesis, which is that the government’s process has made it not a functional state. It’s non-responsive in many important ways, and it needs to be reformed at a quite fundamental level, but in a way that is lawful, in a way that is thoughtful, in a way that is running experiments that gathers information, and then can make adjustments, in a way that is respectful of the human lives, that it touches and affects, in a way that is not hostile to the goals of good government, but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process…
There’s a piece of that law that’s a $42 billion program called BEAD stands for broadband, equity, access and deployment, I think. $42 billion to build rural broadband. Fast-forward to 2024, practically none of it is built. We’re now four calendar years after it was passed and the program is at this point, it seems like it’s going to die and they’re just going to transfer the whole thing to Starlink. So why? We want to understand why does government fail to achieve its outcomes? And how can we learn from those failures to allow government to succeed at its outcomes? Well, you look into it and it turns out that in order to take these $42 billion and send it to the states, the states had to go through a 14 stage process in order to get the money.
First, the FCC had to draw a map of the places where America needed more rural broadband. And then there was a challenge period where people could question the map, and the FCC would remake the map and then the challengers would sue them to change the map again. Then the states had to file a letter of intent and a five-year action plan and a funding program, all of which could be subject to their own challenge periods. And in each of these challenge periods, the commerce department is going back to the states and saying, “We really like your five-year plan, but your workforce development program didn’t pass this matrix of equity. And you didn’t reach out to the right bidders over here. And if you try harder to reach out to more people who just aren’t white men to be your employees, that would be fantastic if you could put that into the new edit that you submit to us.”
And of course there are delays because every state has to do its own programs. The commerce department is backed up, yada, yada, yada. You get to a point where out of 56 states and jurisdictions that have applied to begin the 14 stage process, by the time the Democrats lose the election in November 2024, three out of the 56 have passed all 14 stages. And very little of the money has actually been spent because of all the problems that Ezra and I discussed about how hard it is to build in the physical world. $42 billion therefore dies upon contact with planet Earth. That’s not government achieving its goals. And a Doge that we were sort of duumvirate of in this parallel universe, is one that would try very clearly to A, articulate a goal. What are we trying to do here? We’re trying to build rural broadband. Why? Because we think connectivity is incredibly important to the economy of the future. It helps people’s health, it helps the economy of rural areas. Let’s build rural broadband.
Two, what are the roadblocks? What are the bottlenecks? What’s hard about taking a pot of money that exists in Washington and actually creating broadband networks in rural Kentucky? Let’s understand what those roadblocks are so that we can do two things. We can take away the things that need to be taken away to accelerate the program. And maybe we can add new policies that will accelerate the spending because bottom line, we want to make a difference in the world. That’s a world where government is, to borrow Ezra’s language, deregulated itself. It’s easier for the government to achieve its goals. I think that it’s really important at the level of a principle here that liberals fall out of love with this procedural fetish that has dominated the left of the last half century and fall back in love with outcomes. To be ruthlessly obsessed with how liberalism has failed and how these kinds of failures aren’t just technocratic stories to tell in a podcast.
I think this is fundamental to why Democrats are losing the communications war in an era of anti-establishment and anti-institutional. We find ourselves in a reflexive position of having all the cranks, so to speak, having left the Democratic Party and we’re the ones who defend all institutions. We’re the ones who defend the establishments. We’re the ones saying government can only do good. But as a result, we lose the ability to talk to people about how government fails and how they can see that failure. And how sometimes they’re literally leaving cities and states run by Democrats because that failure is so effing obvious to them. So this isn’t just about the BEAD program, it’s not just about 14-step programs, it’s not just about rural broadband. It really is about a higher level principle of political communication. How do you develop a liberalism that in an age of anti-establishment anger both reflects that anger and channels it for proactive purposes by not just doing destruction destruction but creative destruction.
There’s hours and let’s schedule a meeting in three weeks from now to discuss this document so we can have another document. And all of a sudden the big dreams and the visions, the hopes that people have invested in building a project that’s an incredible project dies. It’s not just a waste of money, it’s the possibility of a beautiful thing that could have been built, never gets built.
And to narrow this down to a world that I know you care a lot about, there’s a chapter in our book about science policy and the history of the NIH. And the NIH really comes into its own after World War II. And it is immediately this beautifully funded crown jewel of biomedical research, just the federal government irrigating university researchers studying cancer and heart disease and brain science and everything else. Practically every single scientific breakthrough in the US in the last 70 years at least bears the fingerprints of NIH. But the NIH is also a bureaucracy. And like every bureaucracy, it has accumulated a set of processes and habits that it’s the people most affected by it. Scientists in America told us and will tell anybody else who’s listening, has flaws.
According to some surveys, 40% of the time that scientists are working today in America, they are filling out grants and doing paperwork, not doing science. That is astonishing. As we say in the book, imagine if we discovered that one year there was a virus that broke out in the American academic scene, such that our scientists suffered from chronic fatigue disorder between January and June every single year. They just couldn’t work. We’d be like, “This is an absolute shanda, we have to fix this problem.” This problem exists. It’s our own bureaucratic rules. It’s the rules that we wrote that’s slowing down science. So what should we do? I don’t think we should tear down the NIH. I don’t think we should slash and burn grants as we’re currently doing in the administration.
I think we should understand what’s broken and be clear about our desired outcomes. My desired outcome for science is that we produce and pursue high risk, high reward science under the theory that almost no important breakthrough is going to be obvious before you discovered it. If it’s obvious, you probably already knew it. So why is it some new science? You should want to incentivize scientists to ask their biggest, most curious questions in a high risk, high reward environment. And right now the NIH doesn’t do that. The NIH for a variety of reasons, whether it’s aspects of the peer review process or just assumptions that scientists have of the system, is too incrementalist. It funds older researchers and it wastes a lot of scientists time with bureaucratic paperwork and kludge. We’d love to reform it. We have ideas for reforming it. But if liberals don’t use the language of and act on institutional reform, we will allow institutions to grow old and sclerotic and piss off Americans.
And they’ll vote for people who come in with a wrecking ball to tear it down. So that’s why I think it’s so important for abundance liberals like us to be very clear about our goals, our outcomes, and exactly what we want to accomplish because I think that’s the only way to really see how and why institutions that are all around us truly do need reform.
What I admired about him since, I think the thing that he’s been good on is he’s been very independent. So Sam at that time, there was sort of the emergence around then of this thing that people then called the intellectual dark web. And it was like Sam and the Weinstein brothers and Ben Shapiro, and I forget who was part of it. And as a bunch of those people I think, it kind of split up over time, but Harris has done a good job not falling into conspiracy as the Weinstein brothers did. Not letting his anger at the left blind him to the failures of the right. He’s a guy, I guess both for better and for worse as we all are. But he is perfectly willing to stand alone in a crowd. Like I haven’t listened to that much of his stuff lately, but my sense is he’s been like quite clear-eyed from my perspective on Donald Trump. So my view is not that Sam Harris is in general a bad actor, it just isn’t.
But the literacy scores are going down and a number of test scores are going down. And the sort of sense of the piece was that we are making ourselves stupider by endlessly staring at screens and social media, which I think is probably right. I’ve had this sort of line since becoming aware of that piece in my head that, we spend a lot of time talking about how to get smarter and not enough time talking about how to avoid getting dumber. But we do a lot of things that we think make us smarter, like I would say having social media on our phones because like, oh, you’re getting all this information all the time that in fact make us dumber because it’s not just that the information is bad. But the lack of concentration, the constant distraction, the sort of lack of focus.
And so my sense is that there is a different kind of conversation here. I’m not sure it’s really an IQ conversation, but that there is a sense that we are inflicting a possibly global, certainly societal cognitive wound on ourselves. That’s what John Height’s book is a little bit about, that’s sort of more coming at it from a behavioral standpoint. But we have the Flynn effect reflects… This is how James Flynn would describe it. The Flynn effect reflects society’s putting on, he, I think put it the scientific spectacles. You create societies where we prize things like reading abstract intelligence, symbolic logic. You teach people on them a lot and we get better and better and better at doing it. And reading changes the brain, it changes the physical structure of the brain. You’re hijacking parts of the mind and meant for other purposes to do this kind of interpretive work.
But it’s of course possible just as we became societally connected and then made more and more widespread technologies like literacy, that changed our brains and led to the increase in this thing we call G intelligence. And decreases in other things, like I’m really shitty at knowing which direction I’m going into. That sort of part of my brain that does navigation is terribly atrophied compared to somebody in a society that did not have Google Maps. It’s entirely possible to go too far in that. It’s entirely possible to move on to technology to begin to weaken that. I have this concern very profoundly about AI, by the way, which obviously you have a lot of your roots in. And there are parts of AI I’m very optimistic about, but my biggest concern about AI is we’re going to make ourselves much stupider without realizing it. Because the things that are easy to automate in AI, which is like getting the AI to summarize the reading of something or getting AI to write the first draft of something, that’s where all the intelligence happens in my view.
I think one advantage I have over a lot of other podcast hosts who superficially do what I do, probably this is true for you, I’m sure this is true for you, I know, is that I really do do the reading. No summary is equivalent to me doing the reading and sitting there and making the associations myself and spending the time in the book. And then sort of thinking about what it brought up in me. I write the first draft. ChatGPT cannot write the first draft of my book. The first draft is fucking hard to write. And it’s often hard because it’s completely wrong, but not because it’s narrowly wrong. ChatGPT will never tell you that the problem with what you’re trying to do is that you’re just trying to do the wrong thing. It’ll never tell you if you tell it to write a first draft, that’s the wrong direction for this draft. Some part of you has to know it. And often the problem is you just haven’t done enough reporting, haven’t done enough research and ChatGPT can’t tell you that either.
And my worry for my kids, my worry for society is creating technologies that make it incredibly alluring to automate the part of creation that is most difficult, most laborious, and most likely to lead to genuine insight and the sort of sharpening of your own mental acuity. We better hope the AI can autonomously make innovations because I really worry we’re going to stop being able to.
So people who want to eat more fruits and vegetables seem to find it easier to eat more fruits and vegetables when they’re on GLP-1 drugs. But also because there’s probably a lot of neurological issues that are fundamentally issues of inflammation, including maybe dementia and Alzheimer’s. We might have accidentally from the tongue of a lizard, a partial medicine for Alzheimer’s disease. The ability of science to connect these dots in the cosmos just absolutely thrills and fascinates me. And I hope that we get better at making those connections.
And while I have a lot of fears about AI, many of them shared by Ezra, I am really interested in the possibility of AI being useful for synthesizing large bodies of knowledge to allow people to make cross-domain comparisons. I think a lot of inventions in tech history are essentially ingenious recombinations of ideas. Like to a certain extent, you look at something as fundamental or archetypal as Thomas Edison inventing the incandescent light bulb. What did he do? He just tested 10,000 different materials and figured out that actually it was like a very special kind of bamboo that burned for the right amount of time and said, “Boom, I did it. I made the incandescent light bulb.”
The ability to have a machine accelerate the degree to which we understand what those 10,000 materials can do, or synthesize knowledge so people can combine it and say, we’re going to take a little bit of CRISPR over here and a little bit of cancer science over here to develop a gene therapy that targets a particular inhibitor that allows the immune system to attack a protein that is explicitly related to pancreatic cancer. I do absolutely believe that we might be on the doorstep of those kinds of breakthroughs. And that makes me incredibly optimistic because I think at base it’s like, what’s life about? What’s abundance about? Why housing and energy? Well, because we think they’re fundamental to living a good life. You need a place to live, and people deserve the freedom to live where they want to live.
Energy is what powers the entire economy. And more energy would power technologies that we can’t even imagine or are just beginning to, whether it’s supersonic flight powered by clean fuel or fusion technology that basically gives us infinite solar energy, the sun’s actual energy in a particular location. These are beautiful things that can happen. But also I think the good life is about health. It’s about health and it’s about the wealth that comes, and the freedom that comes from finding health in your own life. And I am incredibly optimistic that we might be at the cusp of a real golden age in taking all these little ingredients that we’ve spent decades on, whether it’s genomics and proteomics and a little bit of AI. We’re at a moment right now, I hope, where we can have this explosion of combinatorial intelligence. And that hopefully in an optimistic way, AI could be useful in accelerating us toward that future. But I also think to the point of this book, we have to get institutions right too.
These are discoveries that are going to happen inside of institutions. And how those institutions work and how they’re funded and the incentives that are created by law or by technology, really matter in terms of the world that we build. And so that’s why I think it’s really important to not only be obsessed with what the technology can do, but how it’s instantiated in the institutions that we have because it ultimately is institutions and individuals that build the world, not technology acting on its own.
We’re in an age it seems to be more like the early 20th century, late 19th century than like the 1990s. And that means the possibilities range very widely. When you think about AI, when you think about biotech advances, when you think about energetic advances, when you think about the sort of shifting nature of global alliances, of the technological and political systems, we are in the most high variance period that I think has happened in a very, very, very long time. And that carries tremendous peril. Things could go terribly, and it carries tremendous possibility. What if AI is an incredible boon for humanity? What if we do invent and deploy the clean energy technologies that deliver energy abundance. Not just a kind of answer to the worst of climate change, but genuine energy` abundance.
Unlocking new things like mass desalination. And what if we do… Like I’m an animal suffering person. I’m a vegetarian. I care a lot about animal suffering. What if we did figure out cultivated meat that we grow in breweries and on scaffolds, and we don’t have to kill tens of billions of animals that we’ve raised in unimaginable suffering every single year? What if we do figure out how to make government better and more responsive? What if that thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing does work out? But it’s not hope, it’s like that’s a future. You have to create a future. You have to call into being a future you’ll have to fight for. So it isn’t so much that I find myself hopeful about what America or the world would be like in 2030 or 2040. But I find that I believe in the possibility of enough remarkable outcomes, that it makes the present really worth being engaged in. And really worth trying to do your small part, to bend the arc of the time in the direction that you find more just.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Episode highlight
- 3:08 – Introduction
- 6:37 – Left-wing vs right-wing politics
- 15:58 – Political leaders on the left and the right
- 40:34 – Internal political divisions
- 43:34 – AOC
- 54:54 – Political realignment
- 1:06:37 – Supply-side progressivism
- 1:13:47 – Wealth redistribution
- 1:23:54 – Housing problem
- 1:40:13 – Regulation and deregulation
- 1:56:47 – DOGE, Elon, and Trump
- 2:55:50 – Sam Harris
- 3:05:28 – Future of America
Episode highlight
Ezra Klein
Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that’s a huge difference between the two sides right now.
Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that’s a huge difference between the two sides right now.
Derek Thompson
I think the steel man is very easy to make here. Department of government efficiency. That sounds like an organization that’s needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail. Adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units. I love Ezra’s line that we don’t just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it’s trying to achieve. This is a world in which a department of government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we’re going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.
I think the steel man is very easy to make here. Department of government efficiency. That sounds like an organization that’s needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail. Adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units. I love Ezra’s line that we don’t just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it’s trying to achieve. This is a world in which a department of government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we’re going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.
Ezra Klein
In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won’t stay that way. You cannot change American politics. You can’t change the Democratic Party if you’re not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by willing able to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow this guy ran right after Mitt Romney and John McCain, while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain. The Democratic Party does need to change. It needs to attain a different form because the Obama Coalition is exhausted. It’s done. It’s not going to be able to do that. If doesn’t have standard bears who are willing to say, “We were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently.”
In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won’t stay that way. You cannot change American politics. You can’t change the Democratic Party if you’re not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by willing able to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow this guy ran right after Mitt Romney and John McCain, while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain. The Democratic Party does need to change. It needs to attain a different form because the Obama Coalition is exhausted. It’s done. It’s not going to be able to do that. If doesn’t have standard bears who are willing to say, “We were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently.”
Derek Thompson
When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon’s at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him, and maybe most importantly for the purposes of this part of the conversation, you know the people who work for him. I’ll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, “I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter, and the growth of our subscription business and how we’re going to integrate new features.” There’s probably a really clear mind meld.
When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon’s at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him, and maybe most importantly for the purposes of this part of the conversation, you know the people who work for him. I’ll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, “I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter, and the growth of our subscription business and how we’re going to integrate new features.” There’s probably a really clear mind meld.
Right now, I have no sense that there’s a mind meld. And in fact I have the exact opposite sense, that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of destruction, destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It’s much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint, to describe ,Doge as an ideological purge of progressivism, performing the job of efficiency rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for The New York Times, author of Why We’re Polarized and host of the Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at the Atlantic, author of Hit Makers and On Work, and host of the Plain English Podcast. Together, they’ve written a new book simply titled Abundance, that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for in the coming election.
The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for The New York Times, author of Why We’re Polarized and host of the Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at the Atlantic, author of Hit Makers and On Work, and host of the Plain English Podcast. Together, they’ve written a new book simply titled Abundance, that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for in the coming election.
If I may, let me comment on the fact that sometimes on this podcast, I delve into the dark realm of politics. Indeed, politics often devises and frankly, brings out the worst in some very smart people. Plus to me, it is frustrating how much of the political discourse is drama, and how little of it is rigorous, empathetic discussion of policy. I hate this. But I guess I understand why. If the other side is called either Hitler or Stalin online by swarms of chanting mobs, it’s hard to carry out a nuanced discussion about immigration, healthcare, housing, education, foreign policy, and so on. On top of that, anytime I talk about politics, half the audience is pissed off at me. And no, there is no audience capture. I get on equally by different groups across the political spectrum, depending on the guest. Why? I don’t know. But I’m slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all.
Still, I think it’s valuable to sometimes talk about politics. It’s an important part to the big picture of human civilization, but indeed, it is only still a small part. My happy place is talking to scientists, engineers, programmers, video game designers, historians, philosophers, musicians, athletes, filmmakers and so on. So, I apologize for the occasional detour into politics, especially over the past few months. I did a few conversations with world leaders and I have a few more coming up. So, there will be a few more political podcast coming out in part so I can be better prepared to deeply understand the mind, the life and the perspective of each world leader. I hope you come along with me on this journey into the darkness of politics, as I try to shine a light in the complex mess of it all, hoping to understand us humans better, always backed of course by deep rigorous research and by empathy.
Long-term, I hope for political discussions to be only a small percentage of this podcast. If it’s not your thing, please just skip these episodes. Or maybe come along anyway, since both you and I are reluctant travelers on this road trip. But who knows what we’ll learn together about the world and about ourselves. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Left-wing vs right-wing politics
You are both firmly on the left of the US political spectrum. Ezra, I have been a fan of yours for a long time. You’re often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left. Can you try to define the ideals and the vision of the American left?
Ezra Klein
Oh, good. We’re starting small here.
Oh, good. We’re starting small here.
Lex Fridman
And maybe contrast them with the American right.
And maybe contrast them with the American right.
Ezra Klein
Sure. So, the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations. The luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don’t deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean we also worked hard, and we also had talent and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level that we are sitting here is unfair, and that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity so people can have lives of flourishing. So, I’d say that’s one thing.
Sure. So, the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations. The luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don’t deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean we also worked hard, and we also had talent and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level that we are sitting here is unfair, and that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity so people can have lives of flourishing. So, I’d say that’s one thing.
The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So, I think in a way, you have both. Markets are things that are enforced by government. How you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich building coal-fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels. And the market doesn’t know the difference between the two. And so, there’s a set of goals about regulating the unchecked potential of capitalism that also relates to exploitation of workers. There’s very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to the left when you think about what the minimum wage is.
I am a successful podcast host when I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker, the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They’re not working with firms. And by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms would cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So, trying to rectify power imbalances is, I think, another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the… maybe let’s call it the intuitions. I want to say that’s a podcast answer, not a book. I’m sure I left a million things out here, but I’ll start there.
Lex Fridman
I mean there’s a lot of fascinating things there on the unfairness of life that could be the inter-person unfairness, so one person getting more money than another person, or more skills or more natural abilities and another person. And then there’s just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden you cross a street, and the car runs a red light, and runs you over and you’re in the hospital. So, that unfairness of life. And in general, I guess the left sees there’s some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there’s also a general notion of the size of government. I think the left is more comfortable with larger government as long as it’s effective and efficient, at least in its idea.
I mean there’s a lot of fascinating things there on the unfairness of life that could be the inter-person unfairness, so one person getting more money than another person, or more skills or more natural abilities and another person. And then there’s just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden you cross a street, and the car runs a red light, and runs you over and you’re in the hospital. So, that unfairness of life. And in general, I guess the left sees there’s some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there’s also a general notion of the size of government. I think the left is more comfortable with larger government as long as it’s effective and efficient, at least in its idea.
Derek Thompson
That’s certainly true in the last 200 years. It was new deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting the 1970s, 1980s, it’s typically been conservatives who’ve tried to constrict governments. Sometimes they failed while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly taxing and spending. But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra’s answer was really lovely, but at a really high level, I thought… maybe you disagree with this. I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors, what each side fears, what each side values and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice, and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society. And as a result they value different things.
That’s certainly true in the last 200 years. It was new deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting the 1970s, 1980s, it’s typically been conservatives who’ve tried to constrict governments. Sometimes they failed while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly taxing and spending. But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra’s answer was really lovely, but at a really high level, I thought… maybe you disagree with this. I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors, what each side fears, what each side values and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice, and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society. And as a result they value different things.
Liberals I think tend to value change. And at the level of government that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don’t previously exist. It’s typically been liberals, for example, who’ve been trying to expand health coverage, while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years, it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it.
And then I also think they tolerate different things. I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn’t been. Well, I conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice. They’re more likely to say there’s a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world and we’re not going to try to overcorrect forward with our policies. And so, I think that even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there’s almost like an archetypal difference between what they fear, and value and tolerate. Liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition and often tolerate injustice.
Ezra Klein
The only thing I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right like small government oversimplifies. The left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance in national security state.
The only thing I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right like small government oversimplifies. The left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance in national security state.
I always think about the sort of George W. Bush era, although right now with ice agents hassling all kinds of green card holders, you can think about this moment, too. But the right’s view that on the one hand the government is incompetent. And on the other hand we could send our army across oceans, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and then rebuild these societies we don’t understand into fully functioning liberal democracies that will be our allies, was an extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean that was expensive. That took manpower. Compared to we’re going to set up the Affordable Care Act in America, that took a lot more faith in the US government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left is more confidence in the government of the check and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun.
Lex Fridman
You’re right, there’s some degree to which what the right, when the right speaks about the size of government, it’s a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway. They just say small government, but they don’t… it’s in the surveillance state, in the foreign policy in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every program, they’re not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it.
You’re right, there’s some degree to which what the right, when the right speaks about the size of government, it’s a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway. They just say small government, but they don’t… it’s in the surveillance state, in the foreign policy in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every program, they’re not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it.
Derek Thompson
Cutting is really hard. Government spends trillions of dollars and if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they’re going to scream. And so, you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew, all sorts of programs grew. So, I think that one thing we’re sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level, there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation, it can be a little bit messy. Even Bush’s foreign policy that Ezra was describing from a big sense of American history, is very like Wilsonian, this sense of it’s America’s duty to go out and change the world.
Cutting is really hard. Government spends trillions of dollars and if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they’re going to scream. And so, you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew, all sorts of programs grew. So, I think that one thing we’re sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level, there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation, it can be a little bit messy. Even Bush’s foreign policy that Ezra was describing from a big sense of American history, is very like Wilsonian, this sense of it’s America’s duty to go out and change the world.
Ezra Klein
Or to use a current example, McKinleyan.
Or to use a current example, McKinleyan.
Derek Thompson
Or McKinleyan. Right. And a lot of people compare Donald Trump’s foreign policy to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need to pull back from the world. America first. We need to care about what’s inside of our borders and care much less about what’s outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don’t fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative because those definitions can be mushy.
Or McKinleyan. Right. And a lot of people compare Donald Trump’s foreign policy to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need to pull back from the world. America first. We need to care about what’s inside of our borders and care much less about what’s outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don’t fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative because those definitions can be mushy.
Political leaders on the left and the right
Lex Fridman
All right. So, to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, well, who’s actually running the show on the right and the left? Who are the dominant forces? Maybe you could describe and you mentioned democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream left, and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism.
All right. So, to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, well, who’s actually running the show on the right and the left? Who are the dominant forces? Maybe you could describe and you mentioned democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream left, and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism.
Ezra Klein
So, on the right, it’s pretty straightforward at the moment. And the right is composed differently than it was 10 years ago. But the right is run by Donald Trump and the people who have been given the nod of power by Donald Trump. So, that is right now Elon Musk, but Elon Musk’s power is coming from Donald Trump. That is maybe in some degrees JD Vance, maybe in some degrees, Russ Vought, maybe sometimes Homan’s over at DHS. The right beneath that, the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn’t want Pete Hegseth. They didn’t want Kash Patel. They didn’t want Tulsi Gabbard. They didn’t want RFK Jr. Nobody got elected to be a Republican in the Senate hoping that they would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a member of the Kennedys, a Democrat who is pro-choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But Donald Trump told him to do it and they did.
So, on the right, it’s pretty straightforward at the moment. And the right is composed differently than it was 10 years ago. But the right is run by Donald Trump and the people who have been given the nod of power by Donald Trump. So, that is right now Elon Musk, but Elon Musk’s power is coming from Donald Trump. That is maybe in some degrees JD Vance, maybe in some degrees, Russ Vought, maybe sometimes Homan’s over at DHS. The right beneath that, the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn’t want Pete Hegseth. They didn’t want Kash Patel. They didn’t want Tulsi Gabbard. They didn’t want RFK Jr. Nobody got elected to be a Republican in the Senate hoping that they would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a member of the Kennedys, a Democrat who is pro-choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But Donald Trump told him to do it and they did.
So, the right has developed a very, very top-down structure. And one of Trump’s talents, one of the things that makes him a disruptive force in politics is his ability to upend the sort of coalitional structure, the interest group structure that used to prevail. The Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left 10, 15 years ago. The view was in many ways they set the agenda of the right. The Koch brother network is much less powerful Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. Not to say none of their people or none of their groups are meaningful at all. They are, but you wouldn’t put them at the forefront in the way that you might’ve had another time. Right this second, we’re using the left, but Democrats are in fundamental disarray. There is no leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats decided to vote for the containing resolution, avoiding a shutdown or a critical mass of them. Then Hakeem Jeffries is the leader of the House Democrats and Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats are in bitter disagreement over whether or not they should have done that. Democratic leadership isn’t even united on the single biggest point of leverage they might’ve had. They disagree over whether or not it was even a point of leverage. Outside of them, the party has no leader, which is fairly normal after a pretty crushing defeat. But there isn’t the next in line.
So, you go back and it was pretty clear that after Barack Obama, it was going to be Hillary Clinton. After Hillary Clinton, it was either going to be Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in second in the primary. Joe Biden had been the vice president. You often have a presumptive next nominee who the party can look to for kind of leadership. Even after 2000, Al Gore was still giving big speeches. There was a question about Al Gore running again. There is no presumptive in the Democratic Party right now. You can’t turn around and say, “Oh, it’s going to be Pete Buttigieg. It’s going to be Josh Shapiro. It’s going to be Gretchen Whitmer.” Parties are given force, modern parties, which are quite weak by historical standards. Modern parties tend to be given force by a centralizing personality. Donald Trump being a very strong example of that on the right, but Barack Obama was the person who held together the Democratic Party for a long time.
In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won’t stay that way. There’s a rhythm to these things. There’ll be a midterm, they’re probably going to pick up a bunch of seats in the midterm. If that means Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker after the midterm, he’s going to have a much louder voice because he’s going to have power. It’s going to be a harder road for Schumer to get back to the majority because of the Senate map, and then we’ll start having a primary on the left. And you’ll begin to see voices emerge out of that.
But right now, the Democratic Party, it doesn’t have points of power. There’s simply outside of at the national level, there is no Democrat who wields control over a branch of government. They don’t have the Supreme Court, they don’t have the House, they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the presidency and they don’t have a next in line. So, you’re looking at an organization without any of the people in the position to structure it, and the head of the DNC, the new head, Ken Martin, doesn’t have power in that way. So, they’re pretty fractured.
Lex Fridman
You got a lot of criticism for this, but you were one of the people that early on said that Biden should step down. Why is the Democratic Party at this stage in its history, so bad at generating the truly inspiring person? To me personally, AOC is an example of a person that might be that person.
You got a lot of criticism for this, but you were one of the people that early on said that Biden should step down. Why is the Democratic Party at this stage in its history, so bad at generating the truly inspiring person? To me personally, AOC is an example of a person that might be that person.
Ezra Klein
You should have her on the show. I would watch that.
You should have her on the show. I would watch that.
Lex Fridman
Definitely. I really try to, and we’ll talk about this, I try to do two, three hours and there’s a hesitancy on the left, especially to do these kinds of long programs. I think it’s a trust issue. I’m not exactly sure what it is. 80% of the people on this show are left wing. I’m pretty good faith and I try to bring out the best in people.
Definitely. I really try to, and we’ll talk about this, I try to do two, three hours and there’s a hesitancy on the left, especially to do these kinds of long programs. I think it’s a trust issue. I’m not exactly sure what it is. 80% of the people on this show are left wing. I’m pretty good faith and I try to bring out the best in people.
Ezra Klein
Have you invited her? Is that what you’re saying?
Have you invited her? Is that what you’re saying?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Ezra Klein
We’ll see what happens when people get closer to 2028.
We’ll see what happens when people get closer to 2028.
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
Ezra Klein
Maybe people begin taking that kind of risk.
Maybe people begin taking that kind of risk.
Lex Fridman
I hope so. Bernie’s up there in age so he can’t do it anymore. Why is the Democratic Party so bad at generating this kind of power?
I hope so. Bernie’s up there in age so he can’t do it anymore. Why is the Democratic Party so bad at generating this kind of power?
Ezra Klein
I don’t think it’s so bad at generating them. I think that it turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, as you mentioned back in February, 2023, I was somebody who came out and said, Biden can’t run again. This isn’t going to work. And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about, was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly going to win the primary, that there was still time for Democrats to do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. And you could structure the lead up to an open convention in a number of different ways. You could have something like a mini primary. But basically you’d have Democrats out in the media out giving speeches. And their ultimate audience would be the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And my hope was through that you would find the person for this moment.
I don’t think it’s so bad at generating them. I think that it turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, as you mentioned back in February, 2023, I was somebody who came out and said, Biden can’t run again. This isn’t going to work. And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about, was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly going to win the primary, that there was still time for Democrats to do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. And you could structure the lead up to an open convention in a number of different ways. You could have something like a mini primary. But basically you’d have Democrats out in the media out giving speeches. And their ultimate audience would be the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And my hope was through that you would find the person for this moment.
The thing for Kamala Harris, it was really difficult was she was for another moment. She’s picked by Joe Biden in 2020 amidst just a very different political equilibrium, a sense that you had a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic Party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past to these sort of lunch pail, blue collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But also Biden never has a chance if he’s not Barack Obama’s vice president. And so, you have this sort of weird set of historical factors operating at the same time. There’s a desire for stability and experience amidst the chaos of Donald Trump in the pandemic. There is Biden as Obama’s vice president who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama.
I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, you know what? If Biden had been the candidate, he would’ve beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality. And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own, at least assumed weaknesses. He’s a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying. And when the view of how you win elections is you put back together the Obama Coalition. And the Obama Coalition is young people, it’s voters of color and it’s enough working class white voters and then college educated white voters. That’s the Obama coalition. And so, Biden picks Harris for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought he should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But there were different people out there.
And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. First, she has a particular background from California where she’s tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor. But she runs in the Democratic Party at time when it’s turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don’t want a sort of prosecutorial character. So, she sort of abandons that and never I think really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running in 2024. That works. But she’s a talented debater. She’s a very talented performer on the stump, but she doesn’t really have a theory of politics and policy that she’s identified with. But she’s a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being in 2020, a 78-year-old white guy, he understands the future is not him, or at least not just him. And he’s sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that speaks to his own potential weaknesses.
I think by 2024, you have two problems. He only steps down, what is it, June? They’re weeks from the DNC. They don’t have time anymore for an open convention. You know how the Biden position is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So, now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated. It’s a Biden-Harris administration. She doesn’t really have a lane on cost of living. It’s not something she’s known for working on in the Senate. It’s not something she has a bunch of great ideas about. It’s not something she could write a talking about. It’s probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election.
And she’s had no time to build that out. Maybe if she had been running in a primary for a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would’ve figured out how to do it. Primaries or periods of education and learning for the candidates too, or they would’ve found somebody else who could do it. But she doesn’t get any of that. She’s thrown into the game with three months to go. So, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden’s inspiring or not, he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term, and he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn’t. And then the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn’t go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We’ll see what they do in 2028, but the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe.
Derek Thompson
There’s two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked one, why did Trump win? And two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured three-hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump’s victory in 2024 was over determined if there are a lot of factors here. Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents lost all over the world. They lost in the US, they lost in Europe, they lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven’t seen in 50 years. And that’s largely because the inflation crisis that came after COVID created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power. People couldn’t bring prices down. Voters were furious and they were destroying establishment orders all over the world. Democrats happened to be in power, and as a result, they got the brunt of it. That’s number one.
There’s two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked one, why did Trump win? And two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured three-hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump’s victory in 2024 was over determined if there are a lot of factors here. Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents lost all over the world. They lost in the US, they lost in Europe, they lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven’t seen in 50 years. And that’s largely because the inflation crisis that came after COVID created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power. People couldn’t bring prices down. Voters were furious and they were destroying establishment orders all over the world. Democrats happened to be in power, and as a result, they got the brunt of it. That’s number one.
Number two, if you look at elections over the 21st century, two things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close. For reasons that I’m not sure I entirely understand, the parties have gotten really good, historically, bizarrely good at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48% such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we’ve seen over the last few years, and there’s this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics, that says that what often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change, they become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled. That then the next out-group party says, “We have a theory of change and we’re going to throw out the bums.” And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose.
In a world where you have thermostatic change and every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So, I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold onto power for six-year, eight-year, 12-year terms the same way they did say in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you have to look at what kind of character Donald Trump is and what kind of a media figure he is. We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate. The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a way that he can’t be in the 1890s. And then you have the 1950s. Dwight Eisenhower, 1956, I believe is the first televised national convention. Famously the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make it an election that’s leaning toward JFK because he’s so damn handsome and also just electrically compelling on a screen.
We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids. It’s a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They’re good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds. Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He’s just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that he seems to be, to borrow Ezra’s term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft these message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.
And there is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe of the bureaucratic rule follower is a little bit afraid of unstructured conversation, is always performing the background algorithm of how do I communicate in a way that balances all of the coalitions on my side? Because if you look at the Democratic Party right now compared to the Republican Party, I mean in 2015, I think there were four political parties in America. There was MAGA, there was the Center Right, there was the Bernie Wing, and there was the Biden Clinton Obama wing. And what happened is that Trump killed and skinned the Center Right and is now wearing it as a hat.
The entire Republican Party is Donald Trump wearing the skins of the old center, the Romney wing, and the Democratic Party is still a fight. It’s exactly what Ezra described. It’s a jungle. And maybe there’s something about that jungle nature of the Democratic Party that is making some of its leaders perform this sort of coalitional calculation when they’re communicating, such that it makes them less interested in appearing in settings that might cost them, that might not benefit them in exactly the sort of pre-calculated way they have to get their message across. And so, there’s not necessarily a whole lot of empirics to that theory. I’m a little bit going on vibes here, and maybe Ezra see some flaws to theory.
Ezra Klein
It’s an age of the vibe.
It’s an age of the vibe.
Derek Thompson
It’s the age of the vibe. Yeah, exactly. I’m trying to perform the live wire authenticity that I’m describing, but I do think that might begin to explain why you, Lex, might be picking up on a difference between the political vibes. An eagerness and a willingness and the one hand to have kind of unstructured and even chaotic conversations, and a care on the other side about not letting conversations become too unstructured or too careless.
It’s the age of the vibe. Yeah, exactly. I’m trying to perform the live wire authenticity that I’m describing, but I do think that might begin to explain why you, Lex, might be picking up on a difference between the political vibes. An eagerness and a willingness and the one hand to have kind of unstructured and even chaotic conversations, and a care on the other side about not letting conversations become too unstructured or too careless.
Ezra Klein
Can I build on that? I know we’re supposed to talk about abundance, but I want to talk about this.
Can I build on that? I know we’re supposed to talk about abundance, but I want to talk about this.
Lex Fridman
There’s an abundance of time.
There’s an abundance of time.
Ezra Klein
An abundance of time. We’re on the Lex Fridman Show. So, two or three things. One is Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that’s a huge difference between the two sides right now. So, what did Kamala Harris come in and do? She came in and raised a shit ton of money, like a billion dollars in record time, basically. She had more money than Donald Trump did, and used it to try to buy attention. What it meant for Democrats to be good at social media, is to have a good social media team. People in your office somewhere in your campaign headquarters who put out cool things on social media, good memes, and good advertisements-
An abundance of time. We’re on the Lex Fridman Show. So, two or three things. One is Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that’s a huge difference between the two sides right now. So, what did Kamala Harris come in and do? She came in and raised a shit ton of money, like a billion dollars in record time, basically. She had more money than Donald Trump did, and used it to try to buy attention. What it meant for Democrats to be good at social media, is to have a good social media team. People in your office somewhere in your campaign headquarters who put out cool things on social media, good memes, and good advertisements-
Ezra Klein
Put out cool things on social media, good memes, and good advertisements and so on. What it means on the right to be good at social media is to be you personally good at social media, your Vivek Ramaswamy, you’re JD Vance, your Donald Trump, your Elon Musk, and what you understand is you are the product. What it means to be good at attention is you are good at attention. Now, Harris, I think was actually better at some dimensions of this. They were just slightly older dimensions and people always gave her credit for, hell of a performer on the stump. She was way better on the stump than people realized she would be, and a good debater, she’d always been a good debater. She trashed Donald Trump in that debate, but she does not do social media herself at any level because she’s not going to take risks Democrats.
Put out cool things on social media, good memes, and good advertisements and so on. What it means on the right to be good at social media is to be you personally good at social media, your Vivek Ramaswamy, you’re JD Vance, your Donald Trump, your Elon Musk, and what you understand is you are the product. What it means to be good at attention is you are good at attention. Now, Harris, I think was actually better at some dimensions of this. They were just slightly older dimensions and people always gave her credit for, hell of a performer on the stump. She was way better on the stump than people realized she would be, and a good debater, she’d always been a good debater. She trashed Donald Trump in that debate, but she does not do social media herself at any level because she’s not going to take risks Democrats.
Most Democrats still live in a world where the thing that they’re optimizing for and attention is to not get negative attention. And what the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party understands, and this is truer for them than it probably would be for Democrats because for them the media is the enemy, or at least the mainstream media is etcetera, but is that attention. A volume of attention is itself good and you can only get a critical mass of it if you’re willing to accept negative attention. Agenda control doesn’t come from positive attention. It comes from conflict. You get agenda control by doing things the other side disagrees with, so they enter into functioning agreement with you to keep the thing you’re doing at the front.
Now, that doesn’t make you highly popular. Donald Trump is the most unpopular modern president at this stage of his presidency except for Donald Trump’s first term. It took, I think Nate Silver said it was 221 days for Joe Biden’s net favorability to go negative. It’s taken something like 55 days for Donald Trump to do the same. So what Donald Trump is doing does not optimize for favorability. It does not optimize, by the way, for big wins. Democrats feel like they got trashed in 2024, and in a way they did. But Trump’s popular vote victory was the smallest popular vote victory since 2000 when Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 17 dogs and three old men or whatever it was. And so, attention works really differently.
And while I think some of the Rogan of the left discourse has been frankly overstated, because honestly, the most parsimonious model of 2024 and 2020 is in 2020, you have a 4848 nation, something like that. Or maybe you have something that’s more like a 49 Democrat, 47 Republican nation. And in 2020, because of the pandemic, Donald Trump suffered a, let’s call it a 2. 5-point incumbent penalty. People are mad about the pandemic, they’re mad about things being chaotic, so he loses 2.5 points that given the natural split of the electorate, Joe Biden, a 4.5-point popular vote victory. In 2024, people are mad about inflation. They’re somewhat mad about the border. You have a 2.5-point penalty applied to the incumbent administration. Now it’s Harris, and you get a 1.5-point popular vote victory for Donald Trump. I genuinely don’t think, and this held internationally too, right? I generally don’t think you need a lot more to explain the election right now than that, but you do need something more than that to explain.
Donald Trump’s now since 2016, almost decade long dominance of all attention in American politics. Starting when he came down the golden escalator in 2015, American politics from 2015 to 2020 when Joe Biden won was about Donald Trump. And then from 2020 to 2024, when Joe Biden was president, it was about Donald Trump. And then from 2024 on, it was about Donald Trump. Joe Biden was an attentional void, be it his age, be it their strategy. They agreed that the topic of the nation should be Donald Trump, right? When he went back to begin his campaign in 2024, he goes to Valley Forge and gives a speech about January 6th and Donald Trump, right? It wasn’t about his own achievements, it was about Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn’t do the Super Bowl interview in 2023. That’s when I did my thing about this is not going to work. Probably because at that point, he was not capable of good extemporaneous interviews.
I mean, I think that was my view of them, that the revealed thing here was that they didn’t trust him to do interviews. I didn’t have some inside information about anything, I just looked at what they were doing, what they weren’t doing. They’re behind in the polls. They weren’t doing things like the Super Bowl interview. If you can’t turn your candidate into the product, if you don’t trust your candidate to be the product in an election, you’re fucked, right? And so that was to me, the tell, but attention is the coin of the realm. Now, there are better and worse ways of doing it. I don’t think Donald Trump is doing himself huge favors right now. I think they had, there was a path they could have walked to be a majority party.
I think that if he was more restrained, more inhibited, if he was able to not do a bunch of things that are mobilizing opposition to him, you could talk about what they would or wouldn’t achieve that way, but I think they could be in a much stronger political position that would make them stronger for the midterms. It would eventually make JD Vance stronger as a successor. I think they’re running a very high-risk strategy that has a very reasonable chance of if they don’t make what I would call an autocratic breakthrough, they might completely blow up their own movement. It’s all very high risk. So, for them, for everybody, for everything, what makes them good at politics is also what makes them bad at politics.
But for Democrats, the caution, the bureaucratic culture, the fear of saying anything that will make anybody mad, it is optimized for a different attentional era. One of the things I’m watching when you’re saying about leaders, one of the things I’m watching in the people coming up, the ones who want to run in 2028 is who seems like they have adapted to this era not in the way Trump did or Vance did or Musk did. I think they’re going to need something different. They fully represent the Twitter era of politics. I mean Musk bought Twitter. I think sort of all in on what politics right now, what online politics feels like. I think the thing that will come next is someone who’s able to synthesize both the lessons of it, feeling that we all have that it’s kind of sick and poisoned, right? That Twitter’s not a good place, X is not a good place. TikTok politics is not a good place that we’re all being turned on each other somehow.
You need to be authentic and authentically angry at what we’ve all become in the way that Obama ran as a political reformer who hated the red and blue cut of America, who hated what political consultants and pollsters were doing to us. You’re not going to have somebody who just echoes. There’s not going to be, there’ll be no Joe Rogan of the left. There will be no Donald Trump of the left because the left is different than the right, but it’ll have to be something authentically of this era, but also authentic to the backlash to it, which I think as we enter into this period where the president and everybody around him fully embraces this attentional economy, I think people are going to want something different from this attentional economy in four years.
Lex Fridman
And be okay with a negative attention that comes with being authentic.
And be okay with a negative attention that comes with being authentic.
Ezra Klein
You’re going to have to have some of it, right? You cannot change American politics. You can’t change the Democratic Party if you’re not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by willing able to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow this guy ran right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain, right? If you are not, the Democratic Party does need to change. It needs to attain a different form because the Obama Coalition is exhausted. It’s done. It’s not going to be able to do that if it doesn’t have standard-bearers who are willing to say we were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently.
You’re going to have to have some of it, right? You cannot change American politics. You can’t change the Democratic Party if you’re not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by willing able to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow this guy ran right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain, right? If you are not, the Democratic Party does need to change. It needs to attain a different form because the Obama Coalition is exhausted. It’s done. It’s not going to be able to do that if it doesn’t have standard-bearers who are willing to say we were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently.
Internal political divisions
Lex Fridman
Is there a degree to which the left uniquely attacks its own more intensely than maybe other parts of the political spectrum?
Is there a degree to which the left uniquely attacks its own more intensely than maybe other parts of the political spectrum?
Derek Thompson
It’s possible. You go back to the model that I gave you of 2015 where there used to be these four large parties, MAGA, center right, center left, and left. Right now, the Republican Party is all MAGA, so there is no coalitional fight to be had. It’s all Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to name a former left-wing environmentalist to be the HHS secretary, everyone says, “Okay, that sounds like a fantastic idea. That’s exactly who we were going to nominate too. Thank you, Donald. That’s wonderful. It’s at the tip of my tongue.”
It’s possible. You go back to the model that I gave you of 2015 where there used to be these four large parties, MAGA, center right, center left, and left. Right now, the Republican Party is all MAGA, so there is no coalitional fight to be had. It’s all Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to name a former left-wing environmentalist to be the HHS secretary, everyone says, “Okay, that sounds like a fantastic idea. That’s exactly who we were going to nominate too. Thank you, Donald. That’s wonderful. It’s at the tip of my tongue.”
On the Democratic side, there is a fight and it’s happening right now and our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party. So, I’m not of the left. I’m certainly not of the far left. I have center left politics and maybe even a center left personality style if we can even call it that, but I do not begrudge the left for fighting because there’s a fight to be had. In many ways, I think sometimes they see, I’m not endorsing this, I’m describing it. I think they see their near-term opposition as not always the Republican Party, but as the forces, the Democratic Party that are in the way for them controlling one of the two major parties in this country.
And so, they do have an oppositional style and maybe that’s personality based. They are fighting the center left. They are criticizing the center left consistently, but I want to be good faith about this even though I don’t share their politics and say that they’re doing it because they’re trying to win power on the left of center, and so that’s why they’re criticizing the way they are. Now, our book and much of my writing is an attempt to do a little bit of a very specific dance as we touched on this I think really beautifully. We’re in an era right now of anti-institution politics, anti-establishment politics, and Democrats are at risk right now as being seen as the party that always defends institutions, the party that always defends the establishment status quo, and that is an absolute death knell, I think for this century’s angry anti-establishment politics.
So, what we’re trying to do is essentially say, here’s a way to channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends, right? We believe that we have answers on housing and energy and high-quality governance and science and technology, really good answers that are fiercely critical of the status quo in Democrat-led cities and Democrat-led states. We’re trying to be oppositional in a way that’s constructive rather than just destructive.
AOC
Lex Fridman
Just to put a nice pretty bow tie in the whole thing, let me ask for advice. What do I need to do for AOC to do a three-hour interview with me? Ezra, from your throne of wisdom.
Just to put a nice pretty bow tie in the whole thing, let me ask for advice. What do I need to do for AOC to do a three-hour interview with me? Ezra, from your throne of wisdom.
Ezra Klein
I don’t think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. I would not pretend to know her offices or her particular views on this. I do think though that you can see different Democrats taking on different kinds of risks. Right now, we’re sort of in the age of Gavin Newsom. I mean, Gavin Newsom is the Governor of California and he’s spending some percentage of his time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. Gavin Newsom realizes that one lane for a Democrat is to be high risk and talking to virtually everybody. I think Pete Buttigieg in a different way, somebody who wants to take media risks. Now I think he’s going to, my gut on him is he’s going to hold his powder a little bit, so he’ll probably want to do the Lex Fridman podcast assuming he runs in 2028, in 2027.
I don’t think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. I would not pretend to know her offices or her particular views on this. I do think though that you can see different Democrats taking on different kinds of risks. Right now, we’re sort of in the age of Gavin Newsom. I mean, Gavin Newsom is the Governor of California and he’s spending some percentage of his time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. Gavin Newsom realizes that one lane for a Democrat is to be high risk and talking to virtually everybody. I think Pete Buttigieg in a different way, somebody who wants to take media risks. Now I think he’s going to, my gut on him is he’s going to hold his powder a little bit, so he’ll probably want to do the Lex Fridman podcast assuming he runs in 2028, in 2027.
Lex Fridman
Buttigieg?
Buttigieg?
Ezra Klein
Buttigieg, right. I think a lot of them are trying to figure out what is the lane for right now, and there’s a lane for the next two years and there’s a lane for the two years after that, and you’re going to see a lot of people begin to blanket media in the two years after that. Now, it’d be interesting, I would be curious to know, would Hakeem Jeffries come on your show right now? That’d be interesting. I mean, would he do it for four hours? I don’t know. The four-hour ask, the three to four-hour ask as somebody who also books politicians is hard. I have trouble, I like to book people for 90 minutes to two hours, and I tend to get negotiated down to, I try not to go under 75 or 65. But even as somebody I think well regarded in that world, it’s very, very, very hard for me to get politicians to sit for two hours.
Buttigieg, right. I think a lot of them are trying to figure out what is the lane for right now, and there’s a lane for the next two years and there’s a lane for the two years after that, and you’re going to see a lot of people begin to blanket media in the two years after that. Now, it’d be interesting, I would be curious to know, would Hakeem Jeffries come on your show right now? That’d be interesting. I mean, would he do it for four hours? I don’t know. The four-hour ask, the three to four-hour ask as somebody who also books politicians is hard. I have trouble, I like to book people for 90 minutes to two hours, and I tend to get negotiated down to, I try not to go under 75 or 65. But even as somebody I think well regarded in that world, it’s very, very, very hard for me to get politicians to sit for two hours.
Lex Fridman
I don’t have the sense that the three-hour ask is a big ask because of scheduling. I think it still is grounded in the fear of saying the wrong thing.
I don’t have the sense that the three-hour ask is a big ask because of scheduling. I think it still is grounded in the fear of saying the wrong thing.
Ezra Klein
I just think they’re used to something else, right?
I just think they’re used to something else, right?
Lex Fridman
Used to, yeah.
Used to, yeah.
Ezra Klein
I think that when you talk, I mean they are scheduled by schedulers. If you talk to them yourself, if you end up having a personal relationship with Wes Moore of Maryland and he wants to do your show, he will tell his scheduler, “I want three to four hours to do the show.” But the scheduler is used to a world. The staff is used to a world where nobody gets three to four hours for the boss. Reporters don’t, donors don’t, policy staffers don’t. So then, when some interview comes in and they say, “Hey, I want three to four hours.” The answer is no, because culturally it’s not done. You need Donald Trump himself, Pete Buttigieg himself, AOC herself to say to their staff, “No, no, no, we’re making time for this.”
I think that when you talk, I mean they are scheduled by schedulers. If you talk to them yourself, if you end up having a personal relationship with Wes Moore of Maryland and he wants to do your show, he will tell his scheduler, “I want three to four hours to do the show.” But the scheduler is used to a world. The staff is used to a world where nobody gets three to four hours for the boss. Reporters don’t, donors don’t, policy staffers don’t. So then, when some interview comes in and they say, “Hey, I want three to four hours.” The answer is no, because culturally it’s not done. You need Donald Trump himself, Pete Buttigieg himself, AOC herself to say to their staff, “No, no, no, we’re making time for this.”
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Ezra Klein
Because it’s not how they make time for things normally. I don’t know how much it is fear. I do think they’re unused to it, but I suspect a lot of it is simply booking culture. I run into it too. They’re not used to saying yes to three to four hours for anything. It’s not that they don’t have it. They have three to four hours if their kid is having a graduation. I mean, they’re human beings, they can make time, but it would have to come in a way from them. My sense is part of the Rogan, it’s very unclear because they’re very differing stories on what happened in the Rogan-Harris negotiations, but it does seem that time was one of the sticking points.
Because it’s not how they make time for things normally. I don’t know how much it is fear. I do think they’re unused to it, but I suspect a lot of it is simply booking culture. I run into it too. They’re not used to saying yes to three to four hours for anything. It’s not that they don’t have it. They have three to four hours if their kid is having a graduation. I mean, they’re human beings, they can make time, but it would have to come in a way from them. My sense is part of the Rogan, it’s very unclear because they’re very differing stories on what happened in the Rogan-Harris negotiations, but it does seem that time was one of the sticking points.
Derek Thompson
It’s also possible that you’re going to find as you try to interview democratic politicians, that the exact same thing that happened with tech CEOs is going to happen among democratic politicians. You interviewed some tech CEOs and then they did a great job and their friends were like, “You were fantastic on a Lex Fridman podcast. That was such a great thing that you said in minute 97.” And then there becomes a bit of a meme that you can create really high value moments for yourself if you appear on Lex’s podcast and then it becomes less risky for the next marginal CEO to say yes. And I think right now what we’re talking about fundamentally is not physics, it’s culture, it’s just norms. I think there’s a fear of low expected value.
It’s also possible that you’re going to find as you try to interview democratic politicians, that the exact same thing that happened with tech CEOs is going to happen among democratic politicians. You interviewed some tech CEOs and then they did a great job and their friends were like, “You were fantastic on a Lex Fridman podcast. That was such a great thing that you said in minute 97.” And then there becomes a bit of a meme that you can create really high value moments for yourself if you appear on Lex’s podcast and then it becomes less risky for the next marginal CEO to say yes. And I think right now what we’re talking about fundamentally is not physics, it’s culture, it’s just norms. I think there’s a fear of low expected value.
If you’re a high-ranking democratic politician and maybe you do a podcast like this, what if I say the wrong thing and it goes viral and my bookers and my agenda, people and myself just feel terrible for the next few weeks because all we see on Bluesky and X is just people hating. But if you get one interview that goes well, if you talk to Wes Moore, let’s say, and there’s a five-minute segment where he articulates vision of liberalism in the 2020s that everyone says, “My gosh, that is the best possible articulation of what the Democratic Party can stand for the next four years that I’ve ever heard.” Suddenly what’s happened is that appearing on the show becomes massively de-risk. And in fact, the risk valence entirely switches. We are leaving dollars on the floor by not appearing on this guy’s podcast, AOC. I’m a sensational communicator. If Wes Moore can do it, I can do it even better.
And so, I think to a certain extent, there’s a little bit of a riot theory phenomenon here. The person who throws the first stone in a riot has to be very courageous. The person who throws the 101st stone in a riot doesn’t need to be courageous at all, and there might be a little bit of that going on that people need to see proof of high expected value before it breaks what we’re acknowledging to be a bit of a communications norm on the left.
Lex Fridman
That’s a really convincing and powerful theory. I think I want to push back on it. So, what’s going to happen, for example, this very conversation, you’re both going to come off brilliant.
That’s a really convincing and powerful theory. I think I want to push back on it. So, what’s going to happen, for example, this very conversation, you’re both going to come off brilliant.
Ezra Klein
Well, we’re barely like 50 minutes into a four-hour.
Well, we’re barely like 50 minutes into a four-hour.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s going to be… Let’s see what happens.
Yeah, it’s going to be… Let’s see what happens.
Derek Thompson
I have no more material. Lex, it’s all straight downhill…
I have no more material. Lex, it’s all straight downhill…
Lex Fridman
But people will get tired, they’ll listen to this…
But people will get tired, they’ll listen to this…
Ezra Klein
It’s sloppy.
It’s sloppy.
Lex Fridman
And they’re like, “Well, that’s Ezra. He’s brilliant.” They’re going to be worried about their own candidate. If AOC comes off brilliant, they’re not going to be thinking, “Oh, this is a place to be brilliant.” They’re going to be like, “Well, because AOC is brilliant, but my candidate is not.” It’s still boils down to the caution. I’ve had a lot of Republican, high profile Republican people reach out to me, they don’t give a shit. They’re just like, “Whatever, I’ll come.” People on the left, I’ve had two people who I respect deeply and admire, expressed caution about the previous people I’ve interviewed and not wanting to come on.
And they’re like, “Well, that’s Ezra. He’s brilliant.” They’re going to be worried about their own candidate. If AOC comes off brilliant, they’re not going to be thinking, “Oh, this is a place to be brilliant.” They’re going to be like, “Well, because AOC is brilliant, but my candidate is not.” It’s still boils down to the caution. I’ve had a lot of Republican, high profile Republican people reach out to me, they don’t give a shit. They’re just like, “Whatever, I’ll come.” People on the left, I’ve had two people who I respect deeply and admire, expressed caution about the previous people I’ve interviewed and not wanting to come on.
Ezra Klein
Well, that’s the thing the left has to get over. Yeah, that’s a very important cultural. They began to do a thing where spaces were verboten because it had platformed so-and-so, and I think that culture is changing. I think they realized, I mean, that they abandoned huge, vast swaths of significant culture because they wouldn’t go places. It’s crazy. The idea that you only go where people agree with you is genuine lunacy. I don’t want to act as your booker here and 2020 candidates are what they are and they each have their own press strategy. But I would say I’m doing this myself on my show. I don’t think the best people to get right now in the Democratic Party are the seven people who lead the polls. I’m looking for people who will think out loud.
Well, that’s the thing the left has to get over. Yeah, that’s a very important cultural. They began to do a thing where spaces were verboten because it had platformed so-and-so, and I think that culture is changing. I think they realized, I mean, that they abandoned huge, vast swaths of significant culture because they wouldn’t go places. It’s crazy. The idea that you only go where people agree with you is genuine lunacy. I don’t want to act as your booker here and 2020 candidates are what they are and they each have their own press strategy. But I would say I’m doing this myself on my show. I don’t think the best people to get right now in the Democratic Party are the seven people who lead the polls. I’m looking for people who will think out loud.
I just had Jake Auchincloss on. He’s not that well-known house member from Massachusetts. I just think he’s a guy who thinks out loud. I am booking someone else right now two more people like that frankly, who are neither of them. They’re like [inaudible 00:50:51]. I could get a bigger name. I’m more interested in people who are thinking. One reason I think Bernie Sanders always did everything is to him, the thing he was really doing was he had something to say. The point of almost everything for Bernie Sanders is to be in a place where people can hear the thing he has to say, and a lot of politicians don’t have that, right? The point of anything is what it does for them in the polls, what it does for them with the donors, how it repositions them.
I’m interested right now at this moment because it’s not 2028, it’s not 2027, there’s no democratic primary happening right now. The idea that you’re going to pre-run the Democratic Party primary is stupid. We don’t even know what the, we might be in World War Three. We have no idea what, we might have AGI, the things that the 2027 primary might be about, the kinds of scandals that might’ve erupted by them are totally different. Whereas, the reason I have people on is because they are saying something. They’re a live mind in the moment that has a perspective on this that you want to hear. And so, I would look for that.
And I think a lot of people who are not there are people who are trying to protect something, protect a standing in the polls, protect a sort of coalitional set of allies they currently have, and then there are people who are trying to just be heard. Again, a lot of Bernie Sanders’ culture, the way he does media is now Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders. He didn’t used to be. He wasn’t in 2015 even. When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2015, it wasn’t initially a big deal. It was like, “Oh, bummer.” Elizabeth Warren didn’t run for president was a feeling of most people on the left. And so, Bernie Sanders was the guy who’s been saying the same thing for decades, but in the wilderness and nobody was listening.
And now, he still has the instincts of somebody who understood that the most important thing was to find a place where people were listening, where they would let you talk and even better let you talk for a while. I think the candidate who’s going to do well in 2028 is going to have an instinct like that, but even right now, I think the question is, one of my big questions is I’m booking for my show is just I want someone who has a perspective on this moment, who feels like they have had a thought that is about right now and who we are right now and what the story of America is right now.
Derek Thompson
I think what’s really important is what Ezra said, it’s about having something to say. We wanted to talk to you and talk together about how much we wanted to talk to you because we got something to say. We wrote a 300-page book about how much we have to say. We love going on podcasts and television shows and radio and then doing live events to tell people what we have to say. We think this idea of abundance isn’t just important for redefining what the American left means. We think that the outcome of thinking abundantly about housing and energy and science and technology is what politics is all about. It’s about people, the good life, and we think this is the path toward it.
I think what’s really important is what Ezra said, it’s about having something to say. We wanted to talk to you and talk together about how much we wanted to talk to you because we got something to say. We wrote a 300-page book about how much we have to say. We love going on podcasts and television shows and radio and then doing live events to tell people what we have to say. We think this idea of abundance isn’t just important for redefining what the American left means. We think that the outcome of thinking abundantly about housing and energy and science and technology is what politics is all about. It’s about people, the good life, and we think this is the path toward it.
So certainly, one thing that’s profoundly motivated us is having something very concrete that we just want to get out there in the world. My sense as a writer, as a thinker is I want my software running on as many pieces of hardware as possible. I want to get my ideas out there as much as possible and who gets credit for them and where the idea goes, and that’s all secondary. I believe on ideas because they’re important. And so, I want to talk to people who have large platforms about those ideas because how else is the idea getting into the mainstream except through those large platforms? That’s how broadcast technology works in the first place. So maybe one thing that you’re touching on is a little bit of ideological ambiguity. Maybe a part of this is this sense that people don’t know exactly what it is they have to say for three hours. All I can say for sure is that we know.
Political realignment
Ezra Klein
There’s also a reality, and I mean the book is trying to enter into this reality. I think one thing you’re saying is that people have coded you. And so, Donald Trump is really excited to do it and maybe left with politicians are not. One thing that we think is that we’re in a period of realignment. The last chapter of the book, we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Gerstle, which is an idea of political orders. And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict, but it’s more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So, you have a new deal order, new deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the US proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union. So those are sort of right there. The three ingredients typically have an order.
There’s also a reality, and I mean the book is trying to enter into this reality. I think one thing you’re saying is that people have coded you. And so, Donald Trump is really excited to do it and maybe left with politicians are not. One thing that we think is that we’re in a period of realignment. The last chapter of the book, we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Gerstle, which is an idea of political orders. And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict, but it’s more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So, you have a new deal order, new deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the US proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union. So those are sort of right there. The three ingredients typically have an order.
You have a party that starts it, opposition party that accepts key premises. Dwight Eisenhower doesn’t come in and say, “We’re going to roll back the whole New Deal,” and it’s often held in place by an external antagonist. In that case, the Soviet Union. You then you have in the 70s stagflation, the Vietnam War, series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So, you have the rise of what he calls the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is if you’re going to choose a founder, it’s going to be Reagan on that one. It’s much more about markets. It’s very concerned with things like inflation, and it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton, the era of the government is over. And partially, it’s entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union.
The fall of the Soviet Union is like this proof point that the capitalists are right, that markets are the way of the future, government does not know what it’s doing, and that becomes the governing set of assumptions. And so, there are arguments about what the markets should be doing. Obamacare is about creating markets and health insurance. You can use markets very progressive ends. We want to use markets for lots of progressive ends, but the neoliberal order basically collapses amidst a financial crisis and climate change and China. And those are the three things that grow a little, but also separately we think kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis, and it botches in many ways.
The answer to the financial crisis puts too little demand into the economy, lets a recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long, it doesn’t know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging for the environment, very damaging for the future of the human race potentially. And you have the rise of China and the neoliberal order said you integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO, you trade with them, you help them build their industrial base, you help them pull their people out of poverty, which that part is good, and they’ll become more like the West. They will liberalize. They’ll have a free press. The richer we make China, the more China’s going to become like us, and that proves totally wrong.
China becomes more authoritarian over time, but it also develops an industrial base. It becomes as it does not become more like us, becomes dangerous, at least in our view. You don’t want to ever have a conflict with another country who you’ve outsourced your key industrial base to. And so, you have the sort of fall of that order. And then again here, things that would’ve been ridiculous at one point in American politics then become possible. Bernie Sanders is one of them, right? The idea that you’d have somebody, a self-described socialist running for president and coming anywhere near the Democratic nomination, that was unthinkable in 2004. And by 2016, it almost happened.
And Donald Trump is another thing. Donald Trump runs like headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican Party. He runs against trade. He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan more open immigration. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. He runs against the Iraq war and foreign adventurism, and there’s an isolationist instinct that coexist very awkwardly now within a territorial expansionist instinct, but at least to 2016, it was more isolationist. And so, Donald Trump and his sort of reimagining of the Republican Party as a right-wing populist, more like sort of some Christian democratic parties in other countries up in that quadrant of socially conservative, economically populist, that becomes something that’s possible.
But nothing has found an equilibrium, right? Nobody’s agreed to the other side’s premises. There are certain ones that people are agreeing on, both the Republican and Democratic parties a very different view on China now. Biden kept a lot of Trump’s policies on China and actually strengthen them, and now Trump is building on that aggressively again. But in terms of the other things, there isn’t agreement about what the next period in American politics should look like, and that’s one reason I think it’s very dangerous, both as a question of media strategy, but also is a question of politics to code people, places, platforms too tightly. Republicans and Democrats aren’t going to get along in Congress. That has to do with, I think the incentives of Congress.
My first book is called Why We’re Polarized. It’s about those almost hydraulic incentives for partisanship. But in terms of what is the meaning of my podcast, of Derek’s, of yours, of Joe Rogan, of Theo Vaughn, of Call Her Daddy, of a million different places that are not well coded, that’s I think are very up for grabs. I mean, Elon Musk was an Obama-era liberal in 2012. I mean, I think his personal process of radicalization is not going to unwind itself, but a lot of the people who Democrats are like, “All these billionaires are right-wing now.” No, people are just uncertain. I mean, some of them are a little bit afraid, but people are uncertain. They’re moving back and forth. The sort of texture of it is unsettled and it’s going to take time, these transitionary periods.
I mean, they can go very badly too, but they take time and I think people who are clinging to old certainties about what tells you which side folks are on, my sense is a lot of people who are very open to MAGA in 2025 are going to feel very differently about it in 2028 depending on how they do, right? If they do great, then they’re going to entrench. But if they don’t, then a lot of people became MAGA curious are not going to be MAGA curious anymore, but they’re not going to want the last Democratic Party either.
I was making this point to someone the other day about why the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Liz Cheney style independent didn’t work. Liz Cheney, of course, being Dick Cheney’s daughter, a Republican. But what Liz Cheney, the Never Trumpers were a way of reaching out to who the Democratic Party thought the independents were. But the key thing about an independent to a political party is not that they don’t like the other party, it’s that they’re an independent because they also don’t like your party. And so, finding a bunch of people who are meant to be messengers to them about why they shouldn’t like the other party, it’s fine, but what you need to do is explain why they should like your party. You need to have some message. You need to accept some fault. You need to think about what it was about you that drove them away.
One of our deep views about politics right now and not politics policy, the texture of the economy of the country is that the last period in American politics, in the economy was about demand. The fundamental problem coming out of the financial crisis was demand. We had too little demand in the economy. Behind that too little demand in the economy was this other thing that was building up, which was a cost-of-living crisis. Housing was getting super expensive, healthcare in certain ways, energy. But energy is more complicated in ways we can talk about elder care, child care, higher education, right? This is a point, my wife is a journalist at the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey with Derek, and she wrote this piece on in early 2020. The pandemic that went very viral called the Affordability Crisis.
And it sticks in my head because she’s writing at a time when people were saying, “The economy’s great. Everything’s great.” You looked at measures of consumer confidence in 2020, February of 2020, terrific. She’s like, “So, how come if the economy’s so great? Everybody I talked to is so upset.” And she’s like, “Look, people are making more money than ever, but it’s getting eaten up and eaten up and eaten up by these things they really need.” They keep getting more expensive, even as consumer goods get cheaper, then the pandemic hits, the problem becomes COVID, but then you have inflation and inflation moves the problem of the economy, the fundamental problem everybody’s paying attention to.
From the demand side, how do we get more people at work? How do we get them to spend more money to the supply side? We don’t have enough. We have a constriction of semiconductors, of used cars, and then eventually everything, everything is getting more expensive. We’ll see what happens with tariffs. We do get, by 2024, the rate of inflation under control, but prices are still much higher and now people are paying real attention to prices. And the affordability crisis, which again is a cost-of-living crisis, which had been growing for a very long time, is now at crisis levels and it becomes the substance of politics. You had all these Democrats saying, I don’t know what the problem is. Inflation has come down to whatever it was, 3 to 4% in 2024, and they’re right about that. But one, the price level of everything remained high. Two, people were now like, “The housing so expensive. I’m never going to be able to afford a home.” My parents went to public university, debt free. I could never do that. And what we’ve done is fail.
I mean, Democrats in this case, Republicans haven’t done that great on it either. But in blue states, Democrats have failed on cost of living. The reason California, Illinois, New York are losing hundreds of thousands of people to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, is that they failed on cost of living. It is too expensive to live there, and the reason they failed at cost of living is supply. They did not make enough. They actually made it too hard in many cases to make enough of the things people needed. Some of those are straightforward. We didn’t let people build enough homes. Some of them are more like we’ve made it too expensive to build public infrastructure like high-speed rail or the Second Avenue subway. Some of it has to do, I think, in the long run with innovation and the relationship between Democrats and technology.
But one of our views is that there are other things in politics that will matter too, but we are in a period where the cost-of-living supply affordability is the fundamental economic question. Donald Trump himself has said he won because of the price of groceries. He’s got this very funny quote where he is like, nobody said, I don’t have a Donald Trump impression, but he’s like, “Nobody ever used the word groceries in politics before I did.” Well, it’d be good if he then wasn’t making it more expensive, but Democrats believe his weakness is cost of living. They’re probably right, but they don’t have a strength on it. The key question our book is trying to refocus politics on is how do we make more of what we need? How does the government either organize itself or organize markets to create more of what we need, and how do we admit as liberals times when we’ve made it so the government makes it too hard to make more of what we need?
I’ll say one last thing and this is a pretty long answer. I thought one of the most important things that has come out recently is a piece in Foreign Affairs by Brian Deese, who’s a former head of Joe Biden’s National Economics Council, and Deese helped negotiate every major Bill Biden passed. It’s a very-
Ezra Klein
He’s helped negotiate every major bill Biden passed. It’s a very straightforward piece about what it is Democrats have not done to make it possible to build at the level of their goals. And he says things like, “We should just remove federal funding from cities that have highly restrictive home zoning codes.” He says, “We should have a goal for how much nuclear we build in the next 10 years. We should be trying to reach a goal of new nuclear capacity.” It’s a very, very important piece because Deese is right at the center of Democratic policy. Instead of retrenching, he’s like, “Okay, we didn’t get there. What do we do now to make it possible to get to the place we promised you we can go?”
He’s helped negotiate every major bill Biden passed. It’s a very straightforward piece about what it is Democrats have not done to make it possible to build at the level of their goals. And he says things like, “We should just remove federal funding from cities that have highly restrictive home zoning codes.” He says, “We should have a goal for how much nuclear we build in the next 10 years. We should be trying to reach a goal of new nuclear capacity.” It’s a very, very important piece because Deese is right at the center of Democratic policy. Instead of retrenching, he’s like, “Okay, we didn’t get there. What do we do now to make it possible to get to the place we promised you we can go?”
Supply-side progressivism
Lex Fridman
And we should say that the book you’ve mentioned, which I’ve gotten a chance to read, and I think it’s incredible, highly recommend, it’s called Abundance. I think of it as a kind of manifesto for what the left would represent in the coming years. So I think people should read it from that angle. And both of you have been writing about this topic from different angles for a while. I think in ’22, Derek, you wrote an article on this topic of abundance titled A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. And Ezra, you wrote an article in ’21, a supply side progressivism titled The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting. And you’ve just described, laid out this more progressive perspective on supply side economics that you’re presenting in Abundance. I was wondering if you could give the broad, high-level explanation of this idea of supply side progressivism?
And we should say that the book you’ve mentioned, which I’ve gotten a chance to read, and I think it’s incredible, highly recommend, it’s called Abundance. I think of it as a kind of manifesto for what the left would represent in the coming years. So I think people should read it from that angle. And both of you have been writing about this topic from different angles for a while. I think in ’22, Derek, you wrote an article on this topic of abundance titled A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. And Ezra, you wrote an article in ’21, a supply side progressivism titled The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting. And you’ve just described, laid out this more progressive perspective on supply side economics that you’re presenting in Abundance. I was wondering if you could give the broad, high-level explanation of this idea of supply side progressivism?
Derek Thompson
Well, my piece about the abundance agenda, which I wrote in 2022, started with me standing outside, waiting for a COVID test. And this was a period where two years after the pandemic started, COVID tests were still being rationed and it was like 21 degrees outside. And I was getting very, very frustrated about the fact that still, we seem to have a scarcity of COVID tests. And as I’m sitting outside, just freezing my ass off and just getting really mad, I’m thinking, “It’s not just COVID tests we’ve had scarcity of. We also had a scarcity of COVID vaccines early on in the rollout, which created this really discombobulated scheme for distributing the early COVID vaccines.”
Well, my piece about the abundance agenda, which I wrote in 2022, started with me standing outside, waiting for a COVID test. And this was a period where two years after the pandemic started, COVID tests were still being rationed and it was like 21 degrees outside. And I was getting very, very frustrated about the fact that still, we seem to have a scarcity of COVID tests. And as I’m sitting outside, just freezing my ass off and just getting really mad, I’m thinking, “It’s not just COVID tests we’ve had scarcity of. We also had a scarcity of COVID vaccines early on in the rollout, which created this really discombobulated scheme for distributing the early COVID vaccines.”
And then also, you go earlier into March and May of 2020, and we had a shortage of PPE equipment for our doctors to remain safe as they were taking care of a pandemic. And I thought it’s interesting that this entire experience of the pandemic has essentially been defined by this concept of scarcity. And as I zoomed out a little bit, I thought it’s not just the pandemic. It’s really so much the 21st century economy that’s been defined by scarcity. Ezra beautifully described the degree to which housing unaffordability has become the economic problem of our time.
In the history of political orders, each political order is in part defined by the internal crisis, the Great Depression springs neoliberalism, stagflation springs neoliberalism. Now we’re in this molten moment where we’re waiting for the new political order to emerge and it’s going to emerge because of the lever, because of the power of housing affordability. You have to solve that problem if you want to solve the problem of American anger about prices, and part of this is just pure arithmetic. If you look at any family’s budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It’s housing, housing, housing, and housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to agglomerate, to bring smart people together. Housing relates to all sorts of other affordability. Like if you care about the cost of eldercare, you want to make it cheaper to house institutions, buildings that can care for children, which means you want to bring those rents down.
And so I thought as I’m zooming out on this concept of scarcity in the 21st century, we have chosen to make housing scarce. In some of the most productive cities and states, often run by Democrats, we have rules, zoning rules, historic preservation rules, permitting processes, environmental reviews, laws that we created that have gotten in the way of making abundant the most important material good there is, which is housing. And as I kept working myself into a lather and getting mad about the world, I thought it’s actually not just housing. It’s clean energy too. There’s lots of environmentalists who are on my side and believing very fervently in climate change who’ve made it very difficult to site solar panels or site solar farms or to raise wind turbines or to advance geothermal or to accept nuclear power. We have chosen to make clean energy scarce as well.
And then finally, the ultimate boss of scarcity was the pandemic itself, which constricted the supply of all sorts of goods around the world, setting the price of everything to the moon. And that’s why inflation wasn’t just an American phenomenon, not just a North American phenomenon. It was a global phenomenon. And I thought what we need to solve for this crisis of penumbral scarcity is an abundance agenda, an approach towards solving America’s problems that puts abundance first. And Ezra and I have a very focused definition of abundance. We believe, we say in the first page of the book, America needs to build and invent more of the things it needs. We believe that housing is critical. We believe energy is critical. We talk a lot about science and technology, but we really put government effectiveness at the heart of this because one really deep vein of our book is a criticism of where liberalism has gone wrong in the last 50 years, where liberalism has gone from in the New Deal era, a politics of building things.
FDR and the progressives transformed the physical world, not just with infrastructure projects, but with building roads, the highway system under Dwight Eisenhower, we changed the physical world during the decades of 1930s to the 1950s. But in the last half century, liberalism has become very good at the politics of blocking rather than the politics of building. And if you look at the way that liberals define success in the last few decades, it’s often about success defined by how much money you can spend rather than how many things you can actually build.
You look at the fact that, for example, in the book, we have so many examples, California authorizes more than $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system, which basically doesn’t exist. Just last week, the Mayor of Chicago bragged that they spent $11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units. That’s $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. That’s absolutely pathetic. We have a story in the book about a $1.7 million public toilet built in San Francisco, $1.7 million for a toilet because of all of the rules that get in the way and raise the price of building public infrastructure like public bathrooms in San Francisco and California.
So liberalism, I’m worried over the last 50 years has become so good at the politics of blocking and the politics of associating the money authorized as success rather than what you build in the physical world that we’ve lost sense of material abundance, of how important outcomes are and not just processes. And so this is a book that’s trying to nudge the Democratic Party back to what we think are in a way, historically its roots. Thinking about what Americans need and making it easier for government to act efficiently to provide them, and that really does, I think, begin with housing and energy.
Wealth redistribution
Lex Fridman
Is there a tension between the left, the progressive wealth redistribution kind of ideas with the idea of building that’s primarily getting out of the way and letting the market get the job done?
Is there a tension between the left, the progressive wealth redistribution kind of ideas with the idea of building that’s primarily getting out of the way and letting the market get the job done?
Ezra Klein
Let’s say two things on that. So one, we think there’s a real tension between equality, redistribution and constricting the supply of specifically housing.
Let’s say two things on that. So one, we think there’s a real tension between equality, redistribution and constricting the supply of specifically housing.
Lex Fridman
So housing by the way, I would love to understand is that’s the big problem of-
So housing by the way, I would love to understand is that’s the big problem of-
Ezra Klein
Housing and energy, I think are the two most significant that we focus on in the book. Right? Housing and clean energy. We don’t have housing, we don’t have enough clean energy. I would add things to that, public infrastructure. We don’t really focus that much on education, but we could and we could talk about that. Immigration is probably there for me too, and we talk about that a little bit in the book and we do talk a lot about how to pull innovation forward from the future. But when you ask about redistribution, I really think this is an important point because there’s a great new paper by David Schleicher, and I’m so sorry because I’m forgetting his co-author. They’re law professors though, and they talk about the victory of gentry law. We used to have a law that was very dynamic when it came to property and land. It was very different than how things were in Britain. And over time, back half of the 20th century, we moved American law to be much more for what they call the gentry. We moved it much more towards protecting those who currently have things. Right?
Housing and energy, I think are the two most significant that we focus on in the book. Right? Housing and clean energy. We don’t have housing, we don’t have enough clean energy. I would add things to that, public infrastructure. We don’t really focus that much on education, but we could and we could talk about that. Immigration is probably there for me too, and we talk about that a little bit in the book and we do talk a lot about how to pull innovation forward from the future. But when you ask about redistribution, I really think this is an important point because there’s a great new paper by David Schleicher, and I’m so sorry because I’m forgetting his co-author. They’re law professors though, and they talk about the victory of gentry law. We used to have a law that was very dynamic when it came to property and land. It was very different than how things were in Britain. And over time, back half of the 20th century, we moved American law to be much more for what they call the gentry. We moved it much more towards protecting those who currently have things. Right?
And we do that through 1,000,000 things, covenants and HOAs and all these contracts we make people enter into so they can’t even build on their own land. But one of the things that just happens when you constrict the supply of housing is that people who got in when the getting was good, it’s a classic story, in New York and LA and in SF, you bought a place in 1977 for $220,000, and now it’s worth $2.7 million, and maybe you’ll pass it on to your kids or you’ll sell it, but the working class families can’t afford to live there anymore. Right? So that’s not even a question of redistribution. Sometimes what you need in order to create the possibilities for opportunity and mobility is enough supply of the thing.
At the same time, we don’t think that redistribution is the problem here. I’m pro redistribution, I’m pro more redistribution than we currently do, but to give one example the way these can be great tastes that go together, Derek tells in the book at some great length the story of Operation Warp Speed. And here you have in the mRNA vaccines, technology that was critically funded by public money, specifically DARPA at different points, then hastened after COVID. Government through Operation Warp Speed under Donald Trump really tried to clear out regulatory cruft, move these things really fast, but the demand on the side of the public for having funded so much of this, for having made so much possible was that when these vaccines hit, they were going to be free. Maybe the most important medical advance of that entire era, and it wasn’t going to be like Ozempic say, where it’s $15,000 for a year of doses. Right? It wasn’t going to be only available to the richest people at the beginning. We were going to try to give it to everybody, sorted by need to the best that we could and it would be free.
Now, you’re not going to do that with everything, right? There are places for the price signal to actually function and where it can function to then bring on more supply later. And there’s all the econ 101 stuff that we all know, but there are a lot of places where redistribution and supply increases go hand in hand. Another good example, I’ve done over the course of my career, a huge amount of work on health insurance reform and universal healthcare. And let’s say you got Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016 and had swept in a huge Democratic majority and they passed Bernie’s single-payer-for-all plan, which was by the way, much more expansive than any existing single payer plan in the world. It covered much more than Canada’s or the UK’s or anybody else. If you had done that, what you would have needed immediately was a huge supply increase in healthcare because you would have had a huge demand increase.
What happens if you make healthcare free? People are going to use more of it. If you make insurance much more widespread, people are going to go to the doctor more often. Well, if you don’t have enough doctors, you don’t have enough nurses, you don’t have enough surgeons, you need more. We constrict the supply of all those things using residency rules, using nursing rules, immigration rules, who can practice as a nurse practitioner? What can a nurse practitioner actually do? You have to be attentive to the supply side even if what you’re doing is aggressive redistribution. Now, there are places where these things don’t conflict, like I’d like to see a much expanded child tax credit, and I don’t think that has a big supply side implication one way or the other. But on a lot of the things we’re talking about, even if what you want to do, and it is often what we want to do, to do more redistribution, if you’re redistributing some kind of thing that gives you access to a good or a service, you need to expand the good or the service.
We do rental vouchers, giving people rental vouchers in the San Francisco housing market, unless you build more housing, just creates something that our friends at the Niskanen Center call cost disease socialism, where you are increasing demand for good at which you’ve constricted supply. If you do that, you’re just going to drive the price up. To some degree, that’s at least part of the story of higher education. We give people Pell Grants, we give people all kinds of subsidies for higher ed, but we have not done nearly enough to increase supply or regulate the way in which colleges just then pocket part of that money. And so they’re building these fancy gyms and they’re competing with each other, but they’re not actually increasing the supply of slots. It’s certainly not the level we want them to.
So there’s a lot here where I think it scrambles traditional categories. You cannot do effective redistribution in ways that we would like to see them done, and many people on the left would like to see them done if you’re not taking supply of the thing that you’re subsidizing seriously.
Derek Thompson
If you think about it from a first principle standpoint, what if what you wanted to do was to bring American poverty as close to 0.0% as you possibly could? You got a bunch of smart people into a room. You said, “What can we possibly do?” In my opinion, the answer would include a lot of what are sometimes called demand-side policies, a lot of redistribution of income. The child tax credit, I think would be essential. Expanding the earned income tax credit would be essential. Expanding cash welfare might be essential. Certainly, redistributing income from the rich to the poor would be essential. These are demand-side policies, they’re tax and spending policies. But if you only approach this subject through the demand side, you will utterly and categorically fail. Because like we said, housing is the biggest part of a typical family’s budget. And if your only policy on housing is to increase housing vouchers without increasing the supply of housing, macroeconomically speaking, there’s only one direction for housing prices to go, and it’s straight up to the moon. You’re not actually bringing housing prices down. You’re just subsidizing a constricted market, and therefore creating enormous inflation.
If you think about it from a first principle standpoint, what if what you wanted to do was to bring American poverty as close to 0.0% as you possibly could? You got a bunch of smart people into a room. You said, “What can we possibly do?” In my opinion, the answer would include a lot of what are sometimes called demand-side policies, a lot of redistribution of income. The child tax credit, I think would be essential. Expanding the earned income tax credit would be essential. Expanding cash welfare might be essential. Certainly, redistributing income from the rich to the poor would be essential. These are demand-side policies, they’re tax and spending policies. But if you only approach this subject through the demand side, you will utterly and categorically fail. Because like we said, housing is the biggest part of a typical family’s budget. And if your only policy on housing is to increase housing vouchers without increasing the supply of housing, macroeconomically speaking, there’s only one direction for housing prices to go, and it’s straight up to the moon. You’re not actually bringing housing prices down. You’re just subsidizing a constricted market, and therefore creating enormous inflation.
You have to solve some of these problems on the supply side.And one of the conceptual scoops that Ezra and I are trying to work out for the left, for liberals in America is to get people to ask the question, “How do we solve this problem with supply? Housing is a crisis. How do we solve it with supply? Energy is a crisis. How do we solve it with supply? Medical innovation, scientific discovery is a massively interesting phenomenon. We don’t even understand how it exists, really. How do great discoveries actually happen? Is there a supply-side policy for that as well?” That’s the question we’re asking over and over in the book.
So at the end of the day, demand-side progressivism and what Ezra calls supply-side progressivism really are peanut butter and chocolate. They are two flavors that go beautifully well together, but here’s the problem that I think your question was putting your finger on. I think a lot of Americans don’t believe that these things work together because what they see is a liberalism that just taxes and spends and Americans don’t see the benefits of that spending. The Biden administration authorized $42 billion to build rural broadband in America. Practically, none of it was built. Authorized $7.5 billion to build EV charger stations in America. Practically, none of it was built. How many tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to build high-speed rail in California? Practically, none of it exists. You can’t ride it.
So the problem is when the reputation of a tax and spend liberal makes contact with the fact that people don’t see the results in the physical world, like where’s my money going? I have in my head something like this idea of what I call Equinox liberalism, which is to say there’s some forms of liberalism where it’s very expensive, but you see what you’re getting. Like when you spend $270 to go to Equinox for the month, right? It’s a really expensive gym bill, but people who go there seem to love it. They’re like, “The equipment is always free, everything is clean. I go into the locker room, there’s a bunch of Kiehl’s lotions to put on my face after I shower. I am getting exactly what I’m paying for. Yes, I’ll pay out the nose for a gym because I love seeing that money going to work.” And in places like Sweden, Denmark, citizens seem very happy. They’re paying much higher taxes than people are in America, but they’re seeing where the money’s going to work.
The problem with the liberalism that blocks rather than builds is that people don’t see the money going to work. All they see are the dollar signs being spent by government, and then they walk out of their house and they see collapsing infrastructure and they see crime and they see housing prices going to the moon. And so they think, “Wait, this social contract is broken down. You’re asking for Equinox prices, but you’re giving me a shit-ass gym and that’s unfair.”
And so what we’re trying to say is… In a very serious way because I’m not trying to be flippant about gyms. In a very serious way, what we’re trying to say is a part of this problem is that you Democrats have looked so hard at the demand side of the ledger that you’ve forgotten how powerful the levers are on the supply side. And if we can just pull those levers on housing in particular, we can bring down the cost of living and people might even support the tax and spend model more because they’ll feel like they’re participating in Equinox liberalism and not its opposite.
Housing problem
Lex Fridman
Can we zoom in on the housing problem? Can you explain the housing problem and what’s the importance of housing in the quality of life, in the flourishing of the nation of the United States in general, and what is broken about it?
Can we zoom in on the housing problem? Can you explain the housing problem and what’s the importance of housing in the quality of life, in the flourishing of the nation of the United States in general, and what is broken about it?
Derek Thompson
Let’s take the second part of the question first. What’s so important about housing? We’re talking about life, and even at a higher level, we’re talking about freedom, like the freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to feel like the good and achievable life is actually good and achievable. This is profoundly a question of housing. There’s this great paper that was written several years ago called The Housing Theory of Everything by Bowman, Southwood, and I forget the other guy’s name, but they made this really beautiful point that no matter what you care about in terms of public policy or politics, housing probably makes contact with it. If you care about innovation, innovation, as I said, it’s about getting people together in a city where they can work together. That’s about housing density. If you care about childcare costs, that’s about bringing down the cost of buildings. That’s also about housing. If you care about being able to live near your friends and family, this is also profoundly a question of housing.
Let’s take the second part of the question first. What’s so important about housing? We’re talking about life, and even at a higher level, we’re talking about freedom, like the freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to feel like the good and achievable life is actually good and achievable. This is profoundly a question of housing. There’s this great paper that was written several years ago called The Housing Theory of Everything by Bowman, Southwood, and I forget the other guy’s name, but they made this really beautiful point that no matter what you care about in terms of public policy or politics, housing probably makes contact with it. If you care about innovation, innovation, as I said, it’s about getting people together in a city where they can work together. That’s about housing density. If you care about childcare costs, that’s about bringing down the cost of buildings. That’s also about housing. If you care about being able to live near your friends and family, this is also profoundly a question of housing.
So when we talk about housing over and over, we’re not just talking about the four walls and roof and floor, we’re talking about what housing means to people because housing is life. And right now, what we very clearly see in the data is that Americans are leaving expensive cities and states that tend to be run by Democrats and they’re moving to areas that are sunnier, that are cheaper and are often more likely to be run by Republicans. And this is, I think because starting in the 1960s, 1970s, you had this era of blockage points in housing. We started seeing zoning regulations, we started seeing historic preservation rules. We started seeing laws that made it easier for citizens to sue to stop a new development from going up. Essentially, new tools were invented to empower people’s natural conservatism.
For hundreds of years, people might’ve always felt like, “I want my neighborhood to stay the same.” That might’ve been something that the Neanderthals were feeling, but only in the last 50 years have we really outfitted human beings with a weapon to go along with their biological preference for the familiar such that they can utilize it to stop the change of the physical world around them. And so we’ve seen the rise of what is commonly called NIMBYism, Not In My Backyard, the rise of a movement to stop the development of new housing around where they live. And so what you see in the data is according to one study that was reported on by Yoni Applebaum, my colleague at The Atlantic, if there’s a city with a 10% increase in the progressive vote share, there’s a 30% decline in the number of houses that are permitted. For some reason, it does tend to be these areas that are more populated by progressives that have more of these choke points.
Some of this is just historical quirk, but some of it is, I think maybe the character of a certain kind of liberal, maybe often an older liberal, who believes that preserving the physical environment is the good, that the best thing you can do for the planet is to stop things from changing around you, stop things from being built. And that’s an old-fashioned version of environmentalism that we’re trying to turn the liberals against because really, we see the challenge with climate change is not how do we get everybody to stop using electricity? How do we get people to stop using any power or electrons that come from natural gas and oil? We want people to recognize that if the people want to lead modern lives and they’re going to continue to demand modern lives, and so we have to use clean energy technology to allow them to live those lives. That means you have to build an absolute shit ton of new clean energy, solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear, and maybe in the near future, even fusion.
It requires an attitude of being excited about building new things, rather than a liberalism that seeks always to block changes to the physical environment around them. So I think that what we’re trying to do is to allow people in a way to meet processes and outcomes. I think liberals want housing abundance in some part of their brains, in some part of their hearts. I think they want the price of housing to go down, but there hasn’t quite been a really clean articulation of a mindset or paradigm-shifting argument that gets them to see how the processes that we’ve created go so dramatically against the outcomes that liberals want. And we’re trying to say, “Here’s a new process. Here’s a new question you can ask yourself. How can we solve the housing problem on the supply side?”
Lex Fridman
And also, solving the housing problem is one of the mechanisms to lift people out of poverty. So there’s a lot of goals that align well with the liberals. You write about cities, “Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class.” So the housing problem we’re talking about specifically, or most importantly is in urban areas.
And also, solving the housing problem is one of the mechanisms to lift people out of poverty. So there’s a lot of goals that align well with the liberals. You write about cities, “Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class.” So the housing problem we’re talking about specifically, or most importantly is in urban areas.
Ezra Klein
Yeah. This is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about for the book. There’s a lot of land in the United States, and sometimes you’ll hear people say something like, I’ve heard this a lot, “Well, not everybody can live in San Francisco or Venice and Los Angeles or Manhattan or Brooklyn or whatever.” And fine, right? Not everybody can. That’s true. The problem is that cities are engines of opportunity and economic dynamism. As you know better than we do, the frontier AI labs in the US, basically all of them outside of China exist in 50 square miles in the Bay Area. There’s not one in New York, there’s not one in Dallas, there’s not one in Chicago, there’s not one in Austin. There’s not one anywhere but in the Bay Area, but the key thing is that there is huge spillover from these hyper-dynamic industries, be it finance in New York, be it tech in San Francisco, be it culture in Los Angeles.
Yeah. This is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about for the book. There’s a lot of land in the United States, and sometimes you’ll hear people say something like, I’ve heard this a lot, “Well, not everybody can live in San Francisco or Venice and Los Angeles or Manhattan or Brooklyn or whatever.” And fine, right? Not everybody can. That’s true. The problem is that cities are engines of opportunity and economic dynamism. As you know better than we do, the frontier AI labs in the US, basically all of them outside of China exist in 50 square miles in the Bay Area. There’s not one in New York, there’s not one in Dallas, there’s not one in Chicago, there’s not one in Austin. There’s not one anywhere but in the Bay Area, but the key thing is that there is huge spillover from these hyper-dynamic industries, be it finance in New York, be it tech in San Francisco, be it culture in Los Angeles.
You make a lot more money being a barber near Google than you do being a barber in rural Arkansas, and this is the ancient pathway to mobility. People who are poor and work in the service sector, they move to richer areas where the productivity is higher, and thus the money spreads around. And if you look at American mobility and opportunity over the 20th century, about a third, roughly on some calculation, just comes from this people moving to richer areas. And if you look in the last 20-ish years, 30-ish years, you see this extremely steady process of income convergence as people move towards richer areas begin to throw itself into reverse because it used to make sense for the janitor and the lawyer to move to New York City, but now it only makes sense for the lawyer to and the janitor leaves because you can’t support yourself and your family and live in a home and have a reasonable commute being a janitor working in Manhattan. Now, obviously some people do it and it’s often very tough and they live very far. It’s very hard in San Francisco.
You can’t look at cities as, “Well, that’s just where the rich people are,” and that’s a problem that many Democrats now have. Michael Bloomberg famously described New York City as a luxury good and luxury goods cost luxury prices, and that’s true in the sense that New York became a luxury good, but that’s a problem. That is a terrible problem and an inversion of what the city is. There’s this famous advice, possibly Apocryphally from Horace Greeley who’s a early American newspaper publisher and political candidate, but he says, “Go west, young man, go west.” Right? The opportunity is out in the west where the lands are open. It’s never been true, including for him. That guy moved from a rural area to New York City, and that’s how he became famous, and he ran a newspaper and he ran against Ulysses S Grant in a presidential election.
The cities are the frontier. The cities have always been the frontier, not of the land, but of the economy because the frontier of the economy is where ideas are produced and ideas, even now, even the age of remote work are produced in the big cities where people live together and they compete with each other and they cooperate with each other. And so if you gate the cities, if you make it impossible for someone making 50,000 bucks with two kids to live in the city, then what you’ve done is you’ve actually closed the American frontier. You have forced them into lower productivity places. Their children are less likely to grow up around the inventors in the cities.
There’s really amazing research from Raj Chetty and others, basically showing that kids, no matter what income class they’re in, they’re likelier to grow up innovating and patenting in the innovations of the place around them, right? Smart kids don’t just grow up and innovate in anything. If they grew up in the Bay Area, they innovate in technology as Steve Jobs did, and Wozniak did, right? Because they just lived around those people. And that is true in many, many, many different things.
And so when you gate the cities, housing is almost too small of a thing for what we’re talking about. We’re talking about if you can live next to economic opportunity. We are talking also about if you can put the people together who will create the next era of economic opportunity. Right now, the Bay Area is still in some ways drafting off the back when it was cheap. A lot of the people we’re talking about who have made amazing things, they started in the Bay Area when you could afford to live there. It wasn’t always like this, and it wasn’t that long ago that it wasn’t like this. And now, fine, you can go there if you have money or you have a great job offer from Google or Apple or whomever, but over time, you need the ferment. I have a personal interest in reading memoirs and noticing that the memoir is really a housing story. One of the ones I like about this, Moby, the electronic musician, his first memoir, which is great, it’s a memoir of a certain era in New York, it’s a housing story. He was just living next to a bunch of other musicians in cheap-ass housing. I just read Meet Me In The Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman, a sort of oral history of the Aughts Rock Revival in New York City, a housing story. They could afford to live here. Right? I’ve read a bunch of these in San Francisco too, where people just like, they’re actually squatting, right? The San Francisco ferment, its queerness, its openness and tolerance of new ideas, its home of the psychedelic counterculture that intermixed with the defense culture that created Silicon Valley, right? You’ve read probably… Is it Frederick Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture? That was a story of cheap housing. You need to allow people to be around each other, to mix each other. If only one type of person can afford to be there, it becomes a monocultural over time. And so it’s not just housing. This is about the geography of economic innovation and opportunity. That’s why it’s so fucking important.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s so brilliantly put that the economic dynamism and the intellectual dynamism that makes America, I think the greatest nation on Earth is at the core, a housing story. It’s like you have to live near the place where there is turmoil and turbulence intellectually and economically speaking. And so you want to be able to move there and be part of that culture, part of that economy and part of that, how you raise your kids and culturally what you want them to study, what you want them to do. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So how do we solve the housing problem? Is it just remove as much regulation as possible, like get out of the way?
Yeah, that’s so brilliantly put that the economic dynamism and the intellectual dynamism that makes America, I think the greatest nation on Earth is at the core, a housing story. It’s like you have to live near the place where there is turmoil and turbulence intellectually and economically speaking. And so you want to be able to move there and be part of that culture, part of that economy and part of that, how you raise your kids and culturally what you want them to study, what you want them to do. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So how do we solve the housing problem? Is it just remove as much regulation as possible, like get out of the way?
Derek Thompson
There’s certainly a lot of regulation that you want to get out of the way. You look at California, for example. You were just giving a beautiful summary of just how important it is for people to be able to move next to economic opportunity. If you look at the number of houses that have been permitted in the State of California, over the last 40 years, it’s basically just a squiggle line down. The tragedy here, just to put a really fine point on it, is that the city wasn’t gated by geography or by destiny.
There’s certainly a lot of regulation that you want to get out of the way. You look at California, for example. You were just giving a beautiful summary of just how important it is for people to be able to move next to economic opportunity. If you look at the number of houses that have been permitted in the State of California, over the last 40 years, it’s basically just a squiggle line down. The tragedy here, just to put a really fine point on it, is that the city wasn’t gated by geography or by destiny.
Ezra Klein
Or by technology. We know how to build apartment buildings.
Or by technology. We know how to build apartment buildings.
Derek Thompson
Yeah. Yeah. Elisha Otis invented the elevator in like the 1850s. This is not exactly a breaking technology. We chose to do this. We wrote these laws. We people are filing these lawsuits. We judges are accepting these lawsuits and determining that this building can’t be built. This is entirely self-inflicted. And it’s why over and over again in this book, we call it a manufactured scarcity, which is like a little bit of a funny term. How do you manufacture the absence of something? No, a manufactured scarcity means you didn’t have to do this. This is a human-made rule whose purposeful goal was to make it harder to add to the supply of something. And in this case, especially since the 1960s, we have made it purposefully difficult to add housing supply, and the outcome just follow the process. You see housing supply decline often in the richest cities and these states that are governed too often by progressives. How do we undo it? Yes. A huge part of it exists at the layer of law. Right? California is already trying to change its laws, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Elisha Otis invented the elevator in like the 1850s. This is not exactly a breaking technology. We chose to do this. We wrote these laws. We people are filing these lawsuits. We judges are accepting these lawsuits and determining that this building can’t be built. This is entirely self-inflicted. And it’s why over and over again in this book, we call it a manufactured scarcity, which is like a little bit of a funny term. How do you manufacture the absence of something? No, a manufactured scarcity means you didn’t have to do this. This is a human-made rule whose purposeful goal was to make it harder to add to the supply of something. And in this case, especially since the 1960s, we have made it purposefully difficult to add housing supply, and the outcome just follow the process. You see housing supply decline often in the richest cities and these states that are governed too often by progressives. How do we undo it? Yes. A huge part of it exists at the layer of law. Right? California is already trying to change its laws, right?
And single-family zoning, make it easier to add accessory dwelling units called ADUs. We’re changing this at the level of law, but one thing I’m very fixated on is making sure that we also communicate to people that it has to be changed at the level of mindset, and even at the level of political courage because here’s like a model of what often happens. You’re the Mayor of some city and you want to add a housing development of let’s say 500 units. Right? 500 apartment unit building is going to be set up by some developer, and there’s a City Council meeting to determine whether or not this apartment building is going to be built.
Because of loss aversion and because the people who tend to go to City Council meetings are older and richer and homeowners, guess what the overwhelming volume of reaction is in those City Council meetings? It’s a lot of people who feel like they have something to lose, saying, “You cannot put up this building, you cannot add these apartments. It’s going to ruin the character of the neighborhood. It’s going to create traffic. It’s going to be like an eyesore because I don’t like buildings that are that tall.” Any number of excuses can come out of like the Pez dispenser of excuses. You take care of one, there’s going to be another that comes to the surface.
And so what often happens is that these Mayors or these people sitting in the City Council will look out into this room of 50 people saying, “No, no, no.” And they’ll say, “I’m going to represent the feedback that I see and I’m going to vote no on the addition of these housing units, the addition of this apartment building.” Where political courage comes into play is the ability to say, “You know what? I want everyone here to know that I hear you. I’m listening to you and…”
Derek Thompson
I want everyone here to know that I hear you. I’m listening to you and I represent you. And so, I’m grateful that you showed up to the city council meeting. But for every one person here who says they see a benefit to adding a new apartment building, I know that there are 10,000 people in the city that didn’t have the wealth or the knowledge to be here at this meeting. And they’re going to benefit from more housing because that’s going to bring down their housing costs, and I represent them as well.
I want everyone here to know that I hear you. I’m listening to you and I represent you. And so, I’m grateful that you showed up to the city council meeting. But for every one person here who says they see a benefit to adding a new apartment building, I know that there are 10,000 people in the city that didn’t have the wealth or the knowledge to be here at this meeting. And they’re going to benefit from more housing because that’s going to bring down their housing costs, and I represent them as well.
I don’t just represent, you could say the circle of care that I can see right now. I also represent the circle of voters that we can’t see right now, who are in the city or who are in the state or might even want to move to the state, but currently can’t because housing prices are too high on account of housing supply being restricted.
And so, one thing we’re trying to get liberals to have is a sense of political courage to stand up against this very visible NIMBYism and say, “We represent interests that aren’t necessarily visible at this city council meeting. We represent the larger interest of housing abundance.” So, we’re going to always default to saying yes rather than default to saying no, just because the people who happen to come to these meetings are NIMBYs.
Regulation and deregulation
Ezra Klein
I want to add a wrinkle on regulation and deregulation. So, we were talking about coding earlier, who gets coded as right wing? Who gets coded as left wing? Deregulation is a word that is highly coded as right wing. The right wing wants it to deregulate, right? They want the government to stop regulating the market. It’s fine. In many cases, the government should deregulate parts of the market. In many cases, it should regulate parts of the market more. What we don’t talk about enough is how much the government regulates the government and how badly it needs to deregulate the government. So, I have many more left friends and they’ll come to me or they’ll critique me and they’ll say, “This all is fine, but what we really need in this country is public housing,” or it’s been rebranded social housing. It’s fine, Singapore, huge amount of social housing, right? They do a great job with it.
I want to add a wrinkle on regulation and deregulation. So, we were talking about coding earlier, who gets coded as right wing? Who gets coded as left wing? Deregulation is a word that is highly coded as right wing. The right wing wants it to deregulate, right? They want the government to stop regulating the market. It’s fine. In many cases, the government should deregulate parts of the market. In many cases, it should regulate parts of the market more. What we don’t talk about enough is how much the government regulates the government and how badly it needs to deregulate the government. So, I have many more left friends and they’ll come to me or they’ll critique me and they’ll say, “This all is fine, but what we really need in this country is public housing,” or it’s been rebranded social housing. It’s fine, Singapore, huge amount of social housing, right? They do a great job with it.
One of the things we go into, and this book is a manifesto on some level, but something we really try to do is take you into the gritty, grimy, frustrating details of how policy plays out on the ground, what actually happens after a bill passes, and why we get the outcomes we do. Because often, it’s like a bunch of decisions made after everybody stopped paying attention.
So, one of the things we pay some real attention to is the kind of housing that people on the left all agree on is affordable housing through government grants, right? The government says, “Oh, we’re not just going to have market rate developers coming in, building more luxury condos for the children of the upper class. We’re going to build affordable housing for people who should be in this city, but otherwise couldn’t pay enough to be here.”
California. I can give you two different examples, but let’s look at Los Angeles. I’m from outside LA and they have something… I always forget if it’s Measure H or Measure HHH. But California, LA voters pass a bond measure about a billion dollars a little bit more, I think it was to build affordable housing. Six years later when I’m writing about this, they have built a couple of thousand units at an average cost of $600,000 to $700,000 a unit.
So, it’s costing more to build housing under this affordable housing bond measure, which they have agreed to pay for than it is to buy a home market rate in Denver. Denver is a nice place to live. So, why? What had happened? Well, it turns out that when you trigger the public money in various cities, these are city ordinances often, but not always.
And you use these public grants and you cobble together the different grants you need to build an affordable housing complex. What you’ve done is layer onto yourself a huge number of rules that the market rate developers don’t have to follow. You’re either using union labor or paying prevailing wage. You’re building to higher green building codes.
Oftentimes, by the way, to get through the kind of planning board meetings that Derek is talking about, you’ve made a bunch of concessions on the design. Is there going to be parking in it, security? Things like that. You have to often agree to who’s going to be in the home. So, you’re getting… There’s a thing in the Measure H stuff where, well, they wanted it to not just be the taxpayer money. They also wanted nonprofit grants so the money would go further.
So, you’re trying to get these other grants, but these grants are to house homeless veterans. So, now to open the thing, you need to find these homeless veterans. You need to go through extra disability accessibility reviews. And, of course, we all want these things to be accessible, but they already had to comply with the American Disability Act. But now, you’re doing another disability act review in the city, and they come in and they say, “Well, your doors are a little bit not as wide as we think. So, you got to make all your doors 3 inches wider before you can open up,” and that adds time and that adds cost.
You have these subcontractor rules, right? This is, now I’m using an example from San Francisco. But you had a preference initially for minority-based subcontractors that became illegal. It became small businesses, but that meant it had a preference against the bigger contractors who were more efficient at building housing.
In order to use public money, and then very much in order to build public housing directly, it ends up being more expensive and slower than market rate, and that is a choice. We do not have to try to solve every problem in society through an individual housing project. Building affordable housing is hard enough. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult to do. You do have to talk with the neighbors, right? It’s never going to be trivial to build a 500-unit apartment building.
But instead, we layer on all these external and additional agenda items. I call this everything bagel liberalism because you sprinkle just enough on the bagel and it’s great, but if you saw everything everywhere all at once, you put everything on the everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape.
And so, the need to deregulate government, right? Why? I saw some of Elon Musk’s marathon appearance on your show, and he talks about high-speed rail in California. And the thing he says there that it’s functionally illegal to build high-speed rail in California. I got 100 disagreements with Elon Musk right now. That’s not one of them. It’s functionally illegal to build high-speed rail in California.
Like I went out, I toured the high-speed rail. I’ve done a lot of reporting on that. You can’t build it affordably. You just can’t on time. They have no way to get the money to build the rest of it. It’s not going to happen and it’s not going to happen, not because you can’t build high-speed rail. Europe builds high-speed rail. Japan builds high-speed rail. China builds high-speed rail. And it’s not because of the private market, like we’ll only build luxury high-speed rail. It’s because we have so heavily regulated a public project that you can’t finish it, and you definitely can’t bring it in on time and affordably.
And so, I really would like to de like, uncode, deregulation because yeah, there’s places where I would like to regulate more. I don’t want you to be able to build a coal-fired power plant in America. I just don’t want it to be possible. I think it’s bad. But I do want it to be possible to build high-speed rail and affordable housing, including through the public market.
And one thing, my friends on the left, I think really underrate is how hard they’ve made it for the government to act. They believe in government, but if you believe in government, then you have to make it possible for government to complete projects. You have to make it possible for the people who work for government to apply their own genius and initiative. They have to have agency.
I always say that like we’re sort of trapped right now between a party that wants government to fail and a party that won’t make government work. And like, we are trying to push this idea that the thing we want is a capable government, a strong government, a government that when it promises it will do something, it actually does it and gets it done. And that requires not just deregulation of the private sector, though sometimes it does require that. It requires deregulation of the government itself.
Derek Thompson
I love this question of deregulation. But I also sometimes find it very frustrating, because sometimes I find that people’s sense of regulation is so specifically coded. Regulation is just rules. If you change the word from regulation to rules, I think it’d be easier for people to see.
I love this question of deregulation. But I also sometimes find it very frustrating, because sometimes I find that people’s sense of regulation is so specifically coded. Regulation is just rules. If you change the word from regulation to rules, I think it’d be easier for people to see.
Some rules are good and some rules are stupid. We all understand that in life. That’s what regulations are. They’re just rules. And sometimes, they give us exactly the outcomes we want. And sometimes, they give us the outcomes we would never hope for. And here’s a good example. You go back to the 1940s and 1950s, America was fucking disgusting. The air and the water was horrifying.
In 1943, residents of Los Angeles woke up to a smog that was so black. They thought the Japanese had launched a chemical attack against America. In New Hampshire, in the rivers next to textile mills. Sometimes, the rivers themselves would run green and purple and red depending on what textile colors were being dumped into the river. You had the Ohio River on fire in the 1960s, 1970s. The world of mid 1900s America was truly sickening, and it made people sick.
And so, we passed a raft of environmental rules, and some of them achieved exactly what we wanted. The air we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner because of the Clean Air and Water Acts. We did extraordinary things with this era of regulation. Some of these regulations were about outcomes that the Clean Air and Water Act regulates specific pollution levels in the air and the water or the emissions coming out of tailpipes.
Some of the regulations though, were about process. NEPA is the National Environmental Protection Act, and it among many other things, empowered individuals and citizens to sue the government and organizations, businesses, to stop construction or fill out environmental reviews to prove that their construction would meet muster wouldn’t degrade the environment too severely.
This opened the door to an infinitude of lawsuits to wrap up any effort to build anything in red tape forever. So, fast forward to 2021 the year, or sorry, the month after Newsom’s signs, Gavin Newsom, Governor of California signs the law to end single-family zoning in California. It seems like a massive win for the pro-housing YIMBYs of California.
The month after that law was passed, the board of supervisors in San Francisco decided to rule against an apartment building that would have added 500 total units and 100 below market rent units. So, something like public or social housing that was going to be built on a Nordstrom parking lot, just about the best possible place you could add housing in the world, a Nordstrom parking lot because the builders, the developers, didn’t file the appropriate paperwork under environmental review.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Derek Thompson
So, this is a world in which the most housing starved city in America is being starved even more of housing because of the expression of, or the power of the instrumentalization of a rule past the 1970s that has allowed people to sue to stop the physical world from being changed. And I think it goes back to this idea that like sometimes the solutions of one era can become the problems of the next generation, right?
So, this is a world in which the most housing starved city in America is being starved even more of housing because of the expression of, or the power of the instrumentalization of a rule past the 1970s that has allowed people to sue to stop the physical world from being changed. And I think it goes back to this idea that like sometimes the solutions of one era can become the problems of the next generation, right?
It was really good to pass the set of environmental bills that we did in the 1960s and 1970s because it addressed the extremely real problem of air and water and land being degraded by industry. But we’re in a new world, and the problem environmentalism today is in part a problem of global warming. And we have to build not only dense housing, but also clean energy. And the same rules that were designed to help the environment in the 1960s and 1970s are sometimes ironically used in a way that hurt the environment in the 2020s. And that’s one reason why, we, as liberals need a paradigm shift.
Lex Fridman
Okay. You said a lot of really interesting insights there. So, one, if I understood correctly that regulation of outcomes is more a good idea than regulation of process, because regulation of process is where you can breed a lot of, basically the lawyers show up. And the other insight is, if we get rid of 99% of lawyers, the world would be a better place. There’s a lot of jokes around that. I don’t know if you agree, but that…
Okay. You said a lot of really interesting insights there. So, one, if I understood correctly that regulation of outcomes is more a good idea than regulation of process, because regulation of process is where you can breed a lot of, basically the lawyers show up. And the other insight is, if we get rid of 99% of lawyers, the world would be a better place. There’s a lot of jokes around that. I don’t know if you agree, but that…
Ezra Klein
I definitely wouldn’t say 99%.
I definitely wouldn’t say 99%.
Lex Fridman
98…
98…
Derek Thompson
Yeah, yeah, 82.3% to be absolute.
Yeah, yeah, 82.3% to be absolute.
Lex Fridman
In the 80s, okay.
In the 80s, okay.
Derek Thompson
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
Majority of them, no, they’re simply there to take advantage of the rules.
Majority of them, no, they’re simply there to take advantage of the rules.
Ezra Klein
We talk a lot about a book. I don’t know if you’ve run into this one. But it’s by Mancur Olson, who’s sort of a founder of public interest economics, and it’s called The Rise and Decline of Nations. This is a very famous book. Libertarians love this book, and I love this book. It’s not right about everything, but its fundamental question is, how come after World War II did the completely destroyed, bombed out countries of Germany and Japan? You would have thought they would be just screwed.
We talk a lot about a book. I don’t know if you’ve run into this one. But it’s by Mancur Olson, who’s sort of a founder of public interest economics, and it’s called The Rise and Decline of Nations. This is a very famous book. Libertarians love this book, and I love this book. It’s not right about everything, but its fundamental question is, how come after World War II did the completely destroyed, bombed out countries of Germany and Japan? You would have thought they would be just screwed.
Instead, they both become growth miracles. They both do much better than the UK, which was on the winning side of the war. Why? And Olson’s argument is that affluent, stable societies over long periods of time, develop something that is very difficult to develop and very important to develop, which is bargaining organizations, right?
Collective action is hard. It is hard to form an organization. It is hard to make that organization persist. But if you can do that in an atmosphere of stability, then over time, that organization will tend to entrench its power, right? Think about AARP or the Chamber of Commerce or certain unions or the National Manufacturing Council, et cetera, the business roundtable. They’re not that powerful when they start, but over long periods of time, they become really powerful, and they start to pass laws and make themselves more powerful and so on.
There’s a lot you can say about this insight, but my favorite part of Olson’s book, and one that I don’t think people emphasize enough, is this insight he has, which is that over time, countries will begin. Every country has a kind of form of natural selection within it, and that form of natural selection will select for people with the skills to navigate, best navigate the kind of economy that country has.
So, if you’re in China right now and China’s in its developmentalism phase, you really want to be in civil infrastructure, right? It is great to be a civil engineer in China, great to be working on semiconductors in China, great to be doing all this stuff in the physical world. But America as a kind of price of our affluence and our success, we’ve become a country, and this happens to a lot of countries where negotiation is really important. And a country in which negotiation is really important is going to, over time, start developing a preference for lots of lawyers, people in finance, management consultants, because it is a society that requires continuous, what he calls complex bargaining.
And I think this actually explains a lot. Patrick Collison, we quote him in the… Who’s the founder, CEO of Stripe, brilliant tech guy. Here’s his point that he made in an interview with Noah Smith, who’s a blogger and economist where they were talking about high-speed rail, and sort of Patrick makes this point. He’s like, “It’s just tough to be a high-speed rail engineer in America. You’re going to have a much easier time working in the digital space.” And so, the digital space becomes a kind of frontier of last resort.
And so, people want to build things, go into bits and bytes, not into atoms, right? To use the old kind of Peter Thiel cut. And I think there’s something to that. It’s not that lawyers are bad. Some of the people I love and most in this world are lawyers. And many lawyers do amazing, amazing work. But one reason we’ve selected for so many lawyers and America has a lot of lawyers, is we became a society that needs a lot of lawyers because we are a society that is stable, affluent, and we’ve become very into bargaining.
Donald Trump is a real estate developer. That’s a relational business. The way real estate development works in this country, the reason you don’t have all that many huge firms building housing in many, many states simultaneously is it requires a lot of relationships in the individual city you’re in.
And so, if you read, say, Maggie Haberman’s, great biography of Donald Trump, Confidence Man, which focuses a lot on his time as a real estate magnate in New York. You see Donald Trump doesn’t build a ton of stuff in other states. He actually builds in other countries sometimes or more to the point he puts his name on things built in other countries. But really, what he did was build here and he built here through his relationships with the New York political system.
And so, over time, societies that make building and construction and creation something that is the output of negotiations rather than very clear standards and rules where if you’ve done it, you can just do it. You get a lot of lawyers, you get a lot of management consultants, you get a lot of finance people because that’s what society is selecting for. That’s what you’ve made it possible to have agency and freedom in. That’s what you need to do, to do big things.
This is coming from Nick Bagley, who’s a University of Michigan law professor. But between Walter Mondale and Tim Walz, there’s not a single person on a Democratic presidential ticket who didn’t go to law school, not one, like the Democratic Party in particular is a party of lawyers. And lawyers look at things through the legal perspective. And the legal perspective is that government is legitimate by following process.
And Bagley’s point is that government attains legitimacy, at least in part through outcomes. And when you prize process so high over outcomes, you think you’re acting legitimately, but actually it what would have made you legitimate in the view of the people is that you built the thing you told them you were going to build, you made it possible to live affordably in the city. And so, you have this sort of movement then over time to populist strong men who say, I alone can fix it, because they’ve kind of given up on this procedural liberalism like they didn’t deliver for them.
So, you keep telling them, we’re the ones who know how to run government and they don’t see it. And eventually, somebody else comes and says, “I’m going to bust through the walls of this thing like the Kool-Aid man,” and they win.
Lex Fridman
So, speaking of the Kool-Aid man…
So, speaking of the Kool-Aid man…
Ezra Klein
I can see what you’re about to do.
I can see what you’re about to do.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’m so transparent. It makes me think I’m a robot built in a lab somewhere.
Yeah, I’m so transparent. It makes me think I’m a robot built in a lab somewhere.
Ezra Klein
Sam Altman once said to me, he said, “Well, aren’t you just a reinforcement learning system with energy running through it?”
Sam Altman once said to me, he said, “Well, aren’t you just a reinforcement learning system with energy running through it?”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ezra Klein
It’s like, I’d like to think not, but maybe.
It’s like, I’d like to think not, but maybe.
DOGE, Elon, and Trump
Lex Fridman
So, on the Kool-Aid man, I was wondering if you could maybe steelman the case for and against Elon Musk and DOGE, because you mentioned all of these regulations, all of these complexities that get in the way of building, it seems like a bold human like Elon is required to break through the regulation, put that on one side and the other side. I read somewhere that abundance is kind of the anti-DOGE, which to me, it seems like there is conflicting ideas, but there’s also alignment. So, maybe can we break all that?
So, on the Kool-Aid man, I was wondering if you could maybe steelman the case for and against Elon Musk and DOGE, because you mentioned all of these regulations, all of these complexities that get in the way of building, it seems like a bold human like Elon is required to break through the regulation, put that on one side and the other side. I read somewhere that abundance is kind of the anti-DOGE, which to me, it seems like there is conflicting ideas, but there’s also alignment. So, maybe can we break all that?
Derek Thompson
I think the steelman is very easy to make here. Department of Government Efficiency. That sounds like an organization that’s needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends, building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units.
I think the steelman is very easy to make here. Department of Government Efficiency. That sounds like an organization that’s needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends, building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units.
I love Ezra’s line that we don’t just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it’s trying to achieve. This is a world in which a Department of Government Efficiency is a godsend.
We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we’re going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place. So, that to me is the sort of pillbox version of a steel case for a Department of Government Efficiency.
Ezra Klein
Wait, before you do the anti-case, can I offer a different steelman?
Wait, before you do the anti-case, can I offer a different steelman?
Derek Thompson
Please?
Please?
Ezra Klein
I think the steelman case for what DOGE is, right, rather than what it pretended to be, is that the government is an interest, the bureaucracy, the deep state, the rules, the regulations, and it’s not about efficiency, never was. You wouldn’t do this if it was about efficiency, that it’s zero-based budgeting, that you’re breaking the thing. You’re turning it on and off. You’re firing massive parts of it.
I think the steelman case for what DOGE is, right, rather than what it pretended to be, is that the government is an interest, the bureaucracy, the deep state, the rules, the regulations, and it’s not about efficiency, never was. You wouldn’t do this if it was about efficiency, that it’s zero-based budgeting, that you’re breaking the thing. You’re turning it on and off. You’re firing massive parts of it.
Because the only way to make change within it possible is to delete what currently exists, whether it was efficient or not. You would never actually know that if you had it all come and present its case for efficiency or something, you’d know you’d get turned around, whatever. The only way like, the problem with the government is there is no actual competition.
The Department of Education doesn’t get outcompeted by the agency of education, which has started up three years ago or something. And because of that, the only way to make possible radical change is to bulldoze the thing that currently exists. And then, once that is done, you can begin to rebuild. If you’ve fired half of the Department of Education, then you can start rehiring your people and they will actually do what you want. If you have shown that you can delete every regulation or just not follow it, then you can begin deciding which ones to actually follow. If there is no department of USAID and you’ve moved back under state, then you can tell state what really to fund in terms of foreign aid, right?
There’s a theory here, I think that was never about efficiency. It was about deletion. He’s not trying to make things run a little bit better. He’s not trying to lower the overhead cost of government. That the theory is that in the first term, the bureaucracy impeded Donald Trump. It didn’t listen to him. Bureaucracy is supposed to be limbs of the President. The only way to make the federal government a neural link of Donald Trump himself, is to destroy the federal government. And then, rebuild it as that thing.
Derek Thompson
I think if you talk to people at DOGE or talk to people who are authors of Project 2025 who are at Heritage, who are chiefs of staff, and the people working for Heritage, if you have a truth serum conversation with these folks and you say, “Defend what’s happening?”
I think if you talk to people at DOGE or talk to people who are authors of Project 2025 who are at Heritage, who are chiefs of staff, and the people working for Heritage, if you have a truth serum conversation with these folks and you say, “Defend what’s happening?”
Ezra Klein
Oh, that’s not up. They’re excited to tell you.
Oh, that’s not up. They’re excited to tell you.
Derek Thompson
This is what they’re saying. They’re saying, something metastatic has grown inside of government, not just over the last few years under Joe Biden, but over the last few decades, maybe going all the way back to FDR and even Woodrow Wilson. We have allowed an administrative state to accumulate like barnacles on a ship around the executive branch. And it’s keeping the executive branch from being able to translate. The Democratic will into policy because there’s never any president who’s purely elected by the people.
This is what they’re saying. They’re saying, something metastatic has grown inside of government, not just over the last few years under Joe Biden, but over the last few decades, maybe going all the way back to FDR and even Woodrow Wilson. We have allowed an administrative state to accumulate like barnacles on a ship around the executive branch. And it’s keeping the executive branch from being able to translate. The Democratic will into policy because there’s never any president who’s purely elected by the people.
They’re elected into an office that is already pre-contaminated by the bureaucracy itself. And we’re trying to take all of that away. We’re trying to, I mean, this is very just explicitly the case they’re going to make, trying to make government more democratic, not less, by allowing the democratic, the elected president guide or lead in a pure way.
Lex Fridman
Okay. So, as you said, two things. One is the steelman, and then at the end there, there was a non-steelman. So, the first part is cutting, removing as much as possible to see what’s actually needed. That seems like one of the ways to figure out what’s actually needed is by removing it. And then, there’s the second thing is that you mentioned so that you can install the people that follow your policy, whatever.
Okay. So, as you said, two things. One is the steelman, and then at the end there, there was a non-steelman. So, the first part is cutting, removing as much as possible to see what’s actually needed. That seems like one of the ways to figure out what’s actually needed is by removing it. And then, there’s the second thing is that you mentioned so that you can install the people that follow your policy, whatever.
Ezra Klein
Oh, I disagree here that that wasn’t the steelman. I mean, I think you have to listen to them to do the steelman, right? I don’t think the steelman is imaginary. If you read the OMB regulation that froze funding, it said explicitly that the government has to reflect the will of the people as expressed through their choice of president. If you read anything, Russ Vought has ever said, they have the unitary executive theory.
Oh, I disagree here that that wasn’t the steelman. I mean, I think you have to listen to them to do the steelman, right? I don’t think the steelman is imaginary. If you read the OMB regulation that froze funding, it said explicitly that the government has to reflect the will of the people as expressed through their choice of president. If you read anything, Russ Vought has ever said, they have the unitary executive theory.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. If you asked me to do the non-steelman, which I would love to do too. It is not my view that the steelman case of this is to make the federal government fully responsive to Donald Trump. But the steelman case for what they are doing as expressed by them. And I think a steelman reflects, I mean, I have talked to these people, right? I’m telling you what they tell me on some level. The steelman cases, they believe, like as Derek said a minute ago, this has become non-democratically responsive, and the way it becomes democratically responsive is deeply responsive to the president. The president represents a different politics than Joe Biden’s politics. And so, if you have a state filled with liberal civil servants who don’t want to do what he says, that is a violation of small democratic principles of how the government should be run.
I think if you don’t like it, that’s fine. But I do want to say, I actually think that is the steelman. They’re not doing this for no reason. They have an intention here, and I think whether you like it or not, so it depends on whether or not you like their view.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Well, I don’t like it because it cuts my ear in a certain way that one of the criticisms I have for Donald Trump and the Trump administration is, there’s a natural circles of sycophancy that forms, and every president has their personality and psychological quirks, and I think he is one of the people where favoritism is more likely to develop.
Okay. Well, I don’t like it because it cuts my ear in a certain way that one of the criticisms I have for Donald Trump and the Trump administration is, there’s a natural circles of sycophancy that forms, and every president has their personality and psychological quirks, and I think he is one of the people where favoritism is more likely to develop.
So, when you choose who to install as the head of whatever organization, so if you fire everybody and rehire, the rehiring process is more likely to have people that just said nice things about Donald Trump in the past versus a meritocracy-based system that these people are really good.
Ezra Klein
Lex, AOC should definitely come on the show.
Lex, AOC should definitely come on the show.
Lex Fridman
Well, she has her own. But the ideal, the steelman to me about not maybe what Elon is doing is, in order to have the best people in the world doing a great job at every part of government, you have to figure out, I mean, his first email of like, “What have you done this week?”
Well, she has her own. But the ideal, the steelman to me about not maybe what Elon is doing is, in order to have the best people in the world doing a great job at every part of government, you have to figure out, I mean, his first email of like, “What have you done this week?”
If we just steelman everything he’s been doing, which is like, let’s find the productive people that show up to work that love what they’re doing that are actually sort of amazing at what they’re doing. I mean, how would you solve that problem from his experience in business? It’s painful, but effective to just fire almost everybody. And then, rebuild from there and continuously do that.
And as the result, as long as everybody is aligned in a mission is you’re simplifying over and over the system. So, it’s more and more and more effective. Now, how else would you approach… We could start now criticizing, how would you make government more efficient, if not by the way that they’re doing it?
Ezra Klein
Yeah, can I steelman to the other side now?
Yeah, can I steelman to the other side now?
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
Ezra Klein
Okay. You wouldn’t do this. You wouldn’t do this.
Okay. You wouldn’t do this. You wouldn’t do this.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ezra Klein
So, let me say a couple of things. One is that efficiency only makes sense when yoked to a goal. So, when… If Elon Musk came in and did this at Tesla, Musk had a goal for Tesla. It was to build the electric vehicle of the future. SpaceX, he had a goal for SpaceX. We know what the goal for SpaceX is in some long-term way, go to Mars, but in some short-term way, cheaper orbital travel, cheaper orbital shipping, reusable rockets, et cetera. We know what the goal for SolarCity was.
So, let me say a couple of things. One is that efficiency only makes sense when yoked to a goal. So, when… If Elon Musk came in and did this at Tesla, Musk had a goal for Tesla. It was to build the electric vehicle of the future. SpaceX, he had a goal for SpaceX. We know what the goal for SpaceX is in some long-term way, go to Mars, but in some short-term way, cheaper orbital travel, cheaper orbital shipping, reusable rockets, et cetera. We know what the goal for SolarCity was.
In a way, and I do think sort of the purchase of Twitter is late Elon, which becomes a much more political set of goals. But nevertheless, in a way, at least there’s an expressed idea at Twitter, which is the return of free expression. I think it’s really important if you are steelmanning or any kind of manning is really asking and listening to what people are saying their goal is, because efficiency does not exist in a vacuum, right?
A state that is efficient at building dirty energy and a state that is efficient at burning clean energy, they can be opposite versions of each other, right? You have to be optimizing towards something. You’re an AI guy. You have to optimize towards something. And the goal… I find myself really consistently frustrated by conversations about DOGE that treat efficiency as some free-floating thing. Or I sometimes will hear people say to me, very smart people have said to me, “Oh, what DOGE is really doing is stripping the government down to studs, so it can put AI into it, because Elon believes in AGI is coming soon, and you need to make a government capable of using AGI.
And I always say to them, “Okay, AI towards what? Towards what value function? Towards what prompt are you inserting at the base level?” Sorry about that. And I think a few things become very clear. One is that it is towards Donald Trump. It is his movement. Elon Musk serves at his pleasure. Elon Musk has said that he would like to himself chisel Donald Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. He said he loves Donald Trump as much as a man can love any other man. He believes in Trump, right?
I think you have to take him at his word, or maybe you think he’s very cynical and he’s saying all that to curry favor in a sycophantic way with Trump. But at some point, Elon Musk does not serve with any kind of independence. If Trump says, “Your power is gone,” his power is gone. He’s functionally an outside advisor to the government.
So, then you really do, I think, have to listen to what Donald Trump has said, what Russ Vought has said, and they believe that Trump represents something fundamental. His movement represents something fundamental that has been suppressed in American life, okay. I think if you were doing something… The best cases I’ve seen for Elon are a zero-based budgeting case.
You’re trying to break everything down to studs, and then it needs to rejustify itself. If he did this at Twitter, the engineers had to come in and justify to his people what they were actually doing. But that wasn’t how those emails worked. We all know this, right? He doesn’t have a staff capable of seriously working through, and then following up on emails from 2 some million government employees about what they did that week, and then really checking, well, did they do it well? Was the thing accomplished, right? That’s not how you do that like what? He’s got 50 people at DOGE? It’s nothing.
If you want to do zero-based budgeting, it has to be against a criteria. So, coming in and gutting USAID, some of the things USAID does are just extraordinary, right? PEPFAR, nobody anywhere thought PEPFAR was not an efficient program. PEPFAR is maybe the highest value thing that we have ever done in the US government to save human life through foreign aid. I mean, just bluntly, it’s a George W. Bush program. It saved a generation of people from dying of HIV AIDS.
They just turned it off, and they didn’t have somebody come in and justify the PEPFAR funding. They just turned it off as they turned all these different things off and have never given people a serious effort to come back in and say, ” This is what we do.” They just fired half of the people at DOE. DOE is, if you look at it, DOE has the lowest staffing level of any agency, but the fourth highest appropriation, and it administers the more than $1 trillion higher ed. It is in overhead terms, one of the leanest of all the agencies alongside Social Security Agency.
They didn’t tell those people what they wanted out of a DOE of half the size. They didn’t let those people come in and argue for their jobs. They’re just cutting things, and they’re not explaining at any point, at any level what they want to do with them. And then, I will also say what they’re doing is probably illegal, right? Just this week or last week, a judge said that about 26,000 people need to be rehired by the federal government because their firings were illegal.
And now, that’s going to go up to the Supreme Court and we’ll see what John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett say, right? That game is not done yet, but they have Congress. I am a person who believes we needed civil service reform. Too hard to hire, too hard to fire, too hard to manage. And they could have gone to Congress.
And frankly, at the beginning, Ro Khanna and a bunch of Democrats that they wanted to work with DOGE, Democrats were defeated. If you had wanted to build some amount of like political bipartisanship, it was there to do, right? Like the Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Bill, the hardcore immigration bill. They were ready to deal, but they didn’t want to do that because it is fundamentally for them about political control. And this is my steelman case for the action. This is a case, I believe.
What Elon did at Twitter was not make Twitter more efficient. It’s not like a better product now. It’s a different product. What he did was he made it controllable. What he did at Twitter was he went into something where he thought the people disagreed with him, and he broke it until he had actual operational control of the thing, and they would do what he wanted them to do, and then he can move it in his direction.
What they’re doing in the federal government, and this is what Chris Rufo wanted to do, it’s what Russ Vought wanted to do, is make the thing controllable. And what they want to do with that control, I don’t even think they fully know, but their view is that the federal government is like a… It is the capital city that they have conquered.
And now, they need to turn it into something that they can actually use. And in order to do that, I mean, Russ Vought has said, “You need to traumatize the civil servants,” right? That was his word, traumatize the civil servants. When Elon Musk talked about USAID, he said, “It’s all worms. No apple. We’re going to feed it to the wood shipper.” This isn’t the language of, let’s see who’s really doing a good job here and who’s not. This is the language of conquering. This is the language of destruction, and they have not-
Ezra Klein
This is the language of destruction and they have not articulated new better goals for it and nor are they starting with the parts of the government where I think you would start with. What do they want the education department to do? I’m a professional political journalist. I talk to people in the Trump administration. I can’t tell you what they want out of it, aside from the fact that they don’t like it and they think it’s like a hotbed of other people’s power.
This is the language of destruction and they have not articulated new better goals for it and nor are they starting with the parts of the government where I think you would start with. What do they want the education department to do? I’m a professional political journalist. I talk to people in the Trump administration. I can’t tell you what they want out of it, aside from the fact that they don’t like it and they think it’s like a hotbed of other people’s power.
I can tell you what some conservatives have written about it, but the administration itself has not articulated goals. So what I think their view is right now is they’re breaking the thing and trying to make the people who would be oppositional either leave or go into hiding and then they’re going to figure out what they want to do with it.
But right now they’re in the period where you have to sack and then later on you can build yourself your monuments and turn the civil service to your own ends. I don’t think it’s still… I just… That is what I think is going on.
Lex Fridman
I think that’s, from a certain perspective, accurate and insightful description. If we just look at Twitter, you said that he didn’t make it more efficient, he made it more controllable. Let me just describe, just because I know the engineers inside Twitter well, which we could argue that the government is very different than a company. That’s an important argument there. With Twitter, the culture that’s there now, people are really excited to work there and to be productive there, engineers. Elon is really good at finding people that are there, extremely good at what they do and are there to give everything.
I think that’s, from a certain perspective, accurate and insightful description. If we just look at Twitter, you said that he didn’t make it more efficient, he made it more controllable. Let me just describe, just because I know the engineers inside Twitter well, which we could argue that the government is very different than a company. That’s an important argument there. With Twitter, the culture that’s there now, people are really excited to work there and to be productive there, engineers. Elon is really good at finding people that are there, extremely good at what they do and are there to give everything.
And the resulting thing this machine that is created, all barriers removed, you create beautiful stuff. It’s not like move fast and break things. It’s very cynical perspective on it. No, everybody loves what they do, are good at it and are really rapidly figuring out all the multitude of problems that arise in that. It’s a different culture, a culture of productivity, and it’s not like some negative boys club or there’s all kinds of negative perspectives you can take on those things. No, it’s a positive culture of productivity.
Controllable side, also really important to understand and that could be taken advantage of in a really negative way, especially in government. But you should say on some of the most successful software projects, there is a level of control required like open source projects, Linus Torvalds, that heads up the Linux kernel. There has to be what’s often called the benevolent dictator for life. There has to be a controllability to the machine of this extremely productive, efficient team to work together.
Now, those are engineering projects and the problem with government is you get elected new benevolent dictators for life that come.
Ezra Klein
They’re often not benevolent.
They’re often not benevolent.
Lex Fridman
And they’re often not benevolent and they all convince themselves they’re benevolent. I’m sure Hitler thought he’s doing the right thing, the good thing, the benevolent thing in his worldview. Every single dictator does that, yes. So that’s the problem, but in order to be efficient, there has to be some level of controllability and there has to be, I think, to go back to the steelman, you have to have a culture of productivity that I’m not sure I’ve had quite a bit of experience with DOD and DARPA from the academic side.
And they’re often not benevolent and they all convince themselves they’re benevolent. I’m sure Hitler thought he’s doing the right thing, the good thing, the benevolent thing in his worldview. Every single dictator does that, yes. So that’s the problem, but in order to be efficient, there has to be some level of controllability and there has to be, I think, to go back to the steelman, you have to have a culture of productivity that I’m not sure I’ve had quite a bit of experience with DOD and DARPA from the academic side.
Just everything is so bureaucratic and slow. That’s a different culture. So part of the destruction is in reestablishing culture and yes, make it more controllable so you can be efficient.
Derek Thompson
We still need to define what the outcome is.
We still need to define what the outcome is.
Lex Fridman
Yes, that’s a-
Yes, that’s a-
Derek Thompson
Productivity and service of what?
Productivity and service of what?
Lex Fridman
In service of what?
In service of what?
Derek Thompson
Efficiency in service of what? And I think the juxtaposition of the private and public sectors is really useful here. Private companies, publicly traded companies have the benefit of tight and quantifiable feedback loops. Are you making more money this quarter than you were last quarter or less? How’s consumer feedback? Do people say they like the product more? Are you getting 4.8 on your reviews or 4.6? The feedback loops are very quantifiable and they’re also very, very quick.
Efficiency in service of what? And I think the juxtaposition of the private and public sectors is really useful here. Private companies, publicly traded companies have the benefit of tight and quantifiable feedback loops. Are you making more money this quarter than you were last quarter or less? How’s consumer feedback? Do people say they like the product more? Are you getting 4.8 on your reviews or 4.6? The feedback loops are very quantifiable and they’re also very, very quick.
You know exactly when you’re doing a good and bad job. And so the KPIs are so cleanly drawn that people are aligned in their sense of we are moving forward and moving back. I don’t think government has done this at all under DOGE. In fact, I think in some ways goals that you could clearly identify as being good are being torn down. And this is why again, it’s so useful to be able to articulate goals in politics because without an articulation of goals, you don’t know whether the job to be done is to take something away or to add something.
And right now the answer from DOGE is to take away, take away, subtract everything, break down to studs as Cesar said. But let’s take a really, really concrete example here. The FDA, right? DOGE just laid off dozens of probationary employees. So upwardly mobile, recently hired, often very young, nicely credentialed employees at the FDA as a part of its slashing of the federal workforce.
One of the big problems of the FDA is slow approval of phase three clinical trial drugs. Everyone in this country who believes in science and technology wants the most lifesaving drugs to be brought into the public marketplace as soon as possible and competed against with other drugs, the price comes down and helps to extend people’s lives and health spans. I think everyone agrees that is an outcome worth fighting for. And if they don’t, certainly, as you and I willing to say that’s an outcome that we want. That’s what we want from our science policy.
What happens if you cut probationary employees at the FDA? The FDA doesn’t become more efficient. It becomes less efficient because the same amount of work spread over fewer people means longer delays in terms of approving phase three clinical trial drugs and deciding whether or not to approve them for public consumption. So in this really, really clear and very specific example, I think we can see the problem with not having articulated goals. You don’t know whether the job to be done is to take away employees or to add them. I think if instead what DOGE had done is come in and say, “You know what, Elon Musk and a bunch of other people from Silicon Valley, one thing we take very seriously is the importance of scientific and technological progress.”
Because if you look back over decades and centuries, what distinguishes our generation from every other generation in terms of its health and its power is science and technology. And we want to infuse government with a sense of science and technological progress. And to that end, one thing we want to do is to have a smarter and more efficient FDA so that people can experience life-saving medicines.
I think what you would do is research the bottlenecks that exist to American science and pharmaceutical policy and say, “We should hire more people at the FDA to accelerate drug approval, decide which drugs are to be rejected and which drugs are to get the FDA label.” That is the opposite of the DOGE approach, and this really, I think puts a fine point to the problem of a DOGE without goals.
When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon is at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him, and maybe most importantly for the purposes of this part of the conversation, the people who work for him. I’ll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, “I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we’re going to integrate new features.”
There’s probably a really clear mind meld. Right now I have no sense that there’s a mind meld and in fact I have the exact opposite sense that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of destruction, destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It’s much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint to describe DOGE as an ideological purge of progressivism performing an act or performing the job of efficiency rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.
Ezra Klein
I want to say because I really want to emphasize that it has goals. The goals are clear on some level and they have to do with centralizing power. So let me take out something that’s not DOGE because this is, I think an important place where you see what the effort is. What is Congress for? Not just Democrats in Congress who are in theory right now the opposition party, but Republicans in Congress. Congress is this aggregation of information from different places in the country who have chosen representatives to represent them in Washington. That’s how the system works.
I want to say because I really want to emphasize that it has goals. The goals are clear on some level and they have to do with centralizing power. So let me take out something that’s not DOGE because this is, I think an important place where you see what the effort is. What is Congress for? Not just Democrats in Congress who are in theory right now the opposition party, but Republicans in Congress. Congress is this aggregation of information from different places in the country who have chosen representatives to represent them in Washington. That’s how the system works.
One of the things that has really cowed congressional Republicans, it is a huge sun-like gravitational force now on Capitol Hill, is that Elon has made it known that any house or Senate Republican who defies Trump on a key vote, cabinet nominees or the CR, that kind of thing, he will dump 50 to a hundred million dollars into a primary.
It’s no money at all for him. It’s lethal for them. This is well known. He has said this personally to some of them. It’s been well reported. This is probably why Joni Ernst voted for Pete Hegseth. Well, what’s achieved by this? I think it’s an interesting question because Republicans in theory are allied to Donald Trump, right? He’s the nominee of their party and they don’t all have literally the same view of him. But I think you might say from one perspective there is a value in the system and there being checks and balances.
There’s a value in the system, in this system having to absorb other kinds of information. Now, we already don’t know the checks and balances we once had or thought we would have in this country because we have nationalized political parties instead of branches of government that compete with ambition, checking ambition, and I’ve done whole shows on this and we can talk about that if we want. But we do have political parties and political parties are themselves institutions that aggregate different kinds of information. In order to try to come to some outcome that is a better outcome because more information is surfaced.
I think Donald Trump would be in a stronger position for him if Senate Republicans could have done what they actually wanted to do and not confirm RFK Jr., not confirm Tulsi Gabbard, not confirm Pete Hegseth, not confirm Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, right? That’s actually a huge amount of risk the Trump administration has taken on. If they had named a sort of normal figure to HHS and then there’s a measles outbreak. Well, measles outbreaks are tough. That’s a hard thing. If you name RFK Jr. And there’s a huge measles outbreak, you’re really going to get blamed for that because people are ready to blame you.
If there is a domestic terror attack after you’ve put Kash Patel who’s quite unqualified in charge of the FBI and they’ve launched a war internally against the FBI which they see as a hotbed of anti-Trump sentiment and the FBI in the internal chaos misses some things and you have deaths on American soil, that’s a huge amount of risk you’ve taken on. I mean, the guy they fired, Chris Wray, he was Trump’s appointee. It wasn’t some Democrat. Trump named him in his first term.
But Elon, what he did here was he created a death star of primary money, and he has said that, “If you cross Trump in Congress even as a Republican, you’re done. Between Trump’s control of attention and loyalty and my ability to outspend you, you’re toast.” I think what that reveals is that what he wants is for power to be centralized under Trump. We’ve been talking about the bureaucracy, but he also wants it to be true in Congress. I’m not a Donald Trump fan, but obviously other people are Donald Trump fans. Obviously, I think at this point Elon Musk is a Donald Trump fan, but much of the country thinks this guy is great and I think we should take what they’re doing at word and deed.
The point of Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is right about things. We should give him power and he should use that power. My sense is you have some mixed feelings about him, but not everybody does, and this very consistent application of authority across the people… JD Vance. The difference between Mike Pence and JD Vance is JD Vance said explicitly in the whole run up to the vice presidential sweepstakes that his view of what went wrong in the first administration is between the bureaucracy and the staff.
Too many people are trying to inhibit Donald Trump and that what he would do is tell Trump that he’s got to get rid of these generals and he’s got to get people who will do what Trump actually said. The view of Trump’s fans, the view of his allies is that the first term didn’t go well enough because they had too much opposition from Republicans in Congress who talked Trump into things they shouldn’t have talked him into and too much opposition from the civil service and even from Trump’s own staff.
I think a very simple heuristic of why these terms are so different is that the most important member of the Trump family, Trump aside in the first term was Jared Kushner and maybe Ivanka, and the most important member of the family in the second is Donald Trump Jr. right? Kushner brought in a bunch of inhibitors. He brought in mainstream figures like Gary Cohn and Kushner represented other parts of society that were mixed on Trump and they wanted him to do certain things and not others, and there was maybe a productive tension.
McConnell was majority leader. He was more powerful than Thune is. Paul Ryan was speaker. He’s more powerful than Mike Johnson is. In the second term, you have Donald Trump Jr. who brings in much more right-wing figures. They’re accelerators, not inhibitors. Accelerationists in many cases explicitly. You have Elon Musk who believes the likeliest problem is Trump doesn’t go far enough, fast enough. And you have a weak Republican Congress that is further cowed by Musk’s money.
It could be good or it could be bad, but the Curtis Yarvin take that we need a more monarch-like figure is clearly being tested out. The view, just as you said about software engineering things is that you often need a benevolent dictator. Now, I don’t think Trump is benevolent, other people do, but the view that what is being attempted here is something much more centralized in its power, I think is actually a shared view of what’s going on. It’s like a consensus reality we have, not like an argument over reality we’re having.
Lex Fridman
Do you think there’s some degree to where if you trust in the system of democracy, which I do, and there’s some people, and we’ll talk about that. One of the main criticisms or concerns of Donald Trump is he’s going to break democracy. But if you trust that democracy holds, isn’t this an interesting experiment of how when everybody’s aligned, aggressive cutting of regulation and the number of people is an experiment of like, “Okay, let’s see what this does to a really over bloated bureaucracy that’s become extremely inefficient.”
Do you think there’s some degree to where if you trust in the system of democracy, which I do, and there’s some people, and we’ll talk about that. One of the main criticisms or concerns of Donald Trump is he’s going to break democracy. But if you trust that democracy holds, isn’t this an interesting experiment of how when everybody’s aligned, aggressive cutting of regulation and the number of people is an experiment of like, “Okay, let’s see what this does to a really over bloated bureaucracy that’s become extremely inefficient.”
And by the way, so I have an optimism about it that matches the division of abundance in the book, that once you do the creative destruction, then you start to really be able to step in and have a clear vision of like, “Okay, housing. What are the policies to solve housing?” But I do think the first step that’s needed is the destruction.
Derek Thompson
As Ezra said, we’re sort of speed running a particular experiment here of what does executive power look like if we do away as much as possible with checks and balances. And I would submit that we’re already starting to get some feedback loops from the market. The stock market is not the economy, but it is a very clear voting mechanism. And what’s clear is that many institutional and retail investors think that the current economic regime is pushing us toward a recession that we don’t have to have, right?
As Ezra said, we’re sort of speed running a particular experiment here of what does executive power look like if we do away as much as possible with checks and balances. And I would submit that we’re already starting to get some feedback loops from the market. The stock market is not the economy, but it is a very clear voting mechanism. And what’s clear is that many institutional and retail investors think that the current economic regime is pushing us toward a recession that we don’t have to have, right?
Donald Trump has insulated himself from any feedback loop or any sense of criticism that his tariff policy might not be the best course of strategy for American industry or global relations. And as a result, what we have is I think fairly described as a purposeful chaos. I mean, what other term can you use if a tariff is being announced at 9:00 AM and then taken away at 3:30 PM, and then 10 days later announced at 9:37 and then renegotiated at 2:45? This is not a principled theory of the perfect tariff level on international trade.
This is, I think, much more parsimoniously explained by just an expression of Donald Trump’s personality. This is a New York real estate guy. He loves making big awesome pronouncements and then using those big awesome pronouncements in order to negotiate little one-on-one dealings where he can rest for himself a personal sense of power or money, or pride, right? Announcing these tariffs in a chaotic way, forces world leaders to get on the phone with him and say, “Donald, what can I give you to bring down the tariff?”
This is personality standing in for politics in a way that’s totally unmolested by anybody else’s sense of, “Hey, that’ll maybe chill it on the tariff policy. Hey, let’s maybe slow down on the deportations. I’m not so sure about this particular move over here.” Instead, you have an executive branch that’s just a full manifestation of Donald Trump’s mind. And I do think at the early returns, if you look at consumer sentiment, if you look at the stock market, if you look at the 10-year yield, you have a range of let’s called them aggregated economic information telling us that the economy, consumers, employers, investors, do not like what’s happening now, which is going to be a really interesting test case.
Donald Trump’s first four years in office, love him or hate him, were four rather successful years of economic growth. Low unemployment, steady growth, low inflation, pretty much every economic indicator in the green. We’re already in the red in many of the economic indicators that never even blinked yellow under his first administration. And I personally don’t think it’s a coincidence that you’re getting these red indicators at a time when Donald Trump is having an entirely different experience of being president where there is no Mnuchin to tell him, “Hey, maybe let’s cool it off in the tariffs.”
The one more thing I would add here is you said maybe Trump’s presidency is a kind of right-wing abundance, right? And I think that it’s a worthy question, right? Is Donald Trump just doing his own version of abundance and we should… even if we disagree with his process, ideologically root for the outcomes that are likely under it? Here’s why I don’t think so. Let’s say that you or just someone as a conservative shares our view that they want housing to be abundant.
I think what they should really root for is to reduce the tax for building and make it easier to add housing units cheaply. Well, houses are made out of materials. Two of the most important materials in home building are soft lumber and drywall. Soft lumber, we import from Canada. Drywall, one of the key ingredients we import from Mexico. One of the first things that’s going to happen if you raise 25% tariff on lumber from Canada and drywall from Mexico is that the cost of housing is going to go straight up.
And this isn’t my personal opinion, this was a March 7th memo sent by the National Association of Home Builders essentially in a controlled panic saying, “Please don’t do a tariff policy like this. You’re going to screw over home builders even though ironically, you Donald Trump were elected by Biden to Trump voters who were mad about the price of housing.” So I am not in the moment optimistic that his centralizing style is going to be economically useful for Americans, whatever their interests.
My sense of the early feedback and of the early returns is that he in fact does not have a very clear and beneficial economic agenda. He has a personal agenda. He likes taking phone calls from international leaders and working out little deals with them. I don’t think that’s in the larger interest of economic growth, and certainly I don’t think it’s in the specific interest of reducing housing prices.
Lex Fridman
Okay. There’s a lot to say there. So first of all, can we separate the abundance and those efforts from tariffs? Because I don’t know who agrees with the tariffs. Tariffs don’t make sense to me economically. Maybe you can explain who agrees or likes the tariffs on the right or the left or anybody.
Okay. There’s a lot to say there. So first of all, can we separate the abundance and those efforts from tariffs? Because I don’t know who agrees with the tariffs. Tariffs don’t make sense to me economically. Maybe you can explain who agrees or likes the tariffs on the right or the left or anybody.
Derek Thompson
But do you see my point that-
But do you see my point that-
Lex Fridman
Well, that point also to comment on it, I mean, one of the mechanisms by which bureaucracy forms is a kind of polite civility and a structure and a process. There is a argument to be made, and I’m not saying Donald Trump is that person, but there’s some qualities there of picking up the phone and calling Putin. That goes against all the process. Some of the most successful peace negotiations throughout history broke process. I just spoke with Narendra Modi. There’s a process you’re not supposed to meet with Pakistan or whatever for India. You just screw it. “I’m going to go to a wedding, a Pakistan wedding of a high up official. I’m going to do these things that are very Trumpian, break the rules.”
Well, that point also to comment on it, I mean, one of the mechanisms by which bureaucracy forms is a kind of polite civility and a structure and a process. There is a argument to be made, and I’m not saying Donald Trump is that person, but there’s some qualities there of picking up the phone and calling Putin. That goes against all the process. Some of the most successful peace negotiations throughout history broke process. I just spoke with Narendra Modi. There’s a process you’re not supposed to meet with Pakistan or whatever for India. You just screw it. “I’m going to go to a wedding, a Pakistan wedding of a high up official. I’m going to do these things that are very Trumpian, break the rules.”
Now, in a perfect world, some of that is good matched with principled policy that’s surrounded by a large number of experts that actually understand that policy. I can criticize Trump all day, but I’m just saying that there is some degree to the picking up the phone and talking to leaders and playing in the morning, say one thing in the evening another and that could be part of a principled chaos.
Ezra Klein
I think the important part of madman theory is that you’re not actually a madman. You just got to convince people you are.
I think the important part of madman theory is that you’re not actually a madman. You just got to convince people you are.
Lex Fridman
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes.
Ezra Klein
Look, I don’t think… I’m in agreement that we should talk to everybody. I don’t know how many people followed the 2008 election closely who are watching this. There’s a big fight in that election between Clinton and Obama about should you negotiate with your enemies? And Obama’s view is, “We should. We should talk to anybody.” And Clinton’s view was more nuanced than that, right? Certainly, we shouldn’t at this juncture. And during his presidency, Obama did a deal with Iran on the nuclear question. He negotiated with Cuba. He had very direct negotiations with Russia.
Look, I don’t think… I’m in agreement that we should talk to everybody. I don’t know how many people followed the 2008 election closely who are watching this. There’s a big fight in that election between Clinton and Obama about should you negotiate with your enemies? And Obama’s view is, “We should. We should talk to anybody.” And Clinton’s view was more nuanced than that, right? Certainly, we shouldn’t at this juncture. And during his presidency, Obama did a deal with Iran on the nuclear question. He negotiated with Cuba. He had very direct negotiations with Russia.
He did it importantly unlike Donald Trump without alienating all of our traditional allies. One of the things that I think is important to say about Trump is that the difference between Trump and, say, Biden or Trump and Obama is not that Trump will negotiate with Putin and Obama wouldn’t. It’s that Trump is realigning our alliances.
He doesn’t really seem to want to negotiate with the Europeans, or at least he wants to do it from a more hostile position. He wants to make Canada the 51st state, not treated as a longtime ally. The thing here is not that Trump is negotiating with our perceived enemies. These are his perceived allies and he’s turning our traditional allies into perceived enemies. So with him, I think it’s important. I am very much on the view of you talk to everybody. And it was my view going back for some years that it was clear that the Biden administration needed to be pushing for negotiations over Ukraine.
There was not going to be some end game here where Ukraine got all of its territory back. But, but, but, but I don’t think it is reasonable to look at what he is doing and say that is the norm that he has broken. The idea that we should have negotiations. I mean, many different presidents have done many surprising things and he’s rolled back a bunch of those things. Republicans have been very unfriendly to the opening that began with Cuba, right? And that was a big deal in American foreign policy. Something Obama did against very heavy criticism, something that cost him and cost Democrats in Florida and among Cuban voters in the following election.
So I just don’t think that that’s that an unusual thing with Trump. I also just want to say with the tariffs, he wanted to cut the tariffs off from DOGE and cut the tariffs off from this broader agenda. And one reason I don’t is that I think the way to understand tariffs… Look, you can be accomplishing many different things with tariffs. One thing, which was a theory that you heard from some people around Trump and fit what he said on the campaign trail, which was Trump’s position on the campaign trail, was that he was going to lay down 10 to 20% tariffs on all imported goods and 65% tariffs on imported goods from China. So I think that’s a bad idea for a bunch of different reasons, but what that is, is a stable change in the cost structure for all corporations and all trade. And then different players can make different investment decisions in the long term based on this new cost structure. What he’s doing, as Derek said, and I’ve had these funny experiences where I’m literally doing a podcast with a tariffs expert and I’ll be talking about the auto parts problem, and then my producer will be like, “He just delayed the tariff on the auto parts.” What he’s doing with these tariffs that you move on and you move off and you negotiate over endlessly, and I’ve been told this again by people around him is their view is that America had leverage it wasn’t using. And tariffs in particular are a form of executive control. Trade deals need to be negotiated and ratified with Congress. Trade deals are something you have to do with the rest of the system, but tariffs are something Trump can do unilaterally. And one thing Trump wants is control. That is the through line of virtually everything in his politics. Tariffs are a leverage based form of foreign policy. They are America has the biggest economy in the world that anybody who’s going to get into a trade war with us is going to suffer worse than we will. And there’s something where the president can use the tariffs because of authority granted by Congress some time ago for other purposes. He can use them with a huge amount of discretion. So you can use them on the one hand to say, “Well, I think that we’ve lost too much manufacturing and the dollar is undervalued in other places, or overvalued rather. And so we want to use tariffs to make the cost structure differently so that people have to locate more of the supply chains and the intermediate manufacturing in the United States.”
But you can also use a tariff to say, Columbia has to take the people we’re deporting and they have to take them in chains. And Donald Trump is doing both things. And the reason I think it’s important to keep those in mind is that what Donald Trump wants, what connects a lot of different things is that he wants leverage over things. I think it connects to Eric Adams and you were sitting here talking to New York City. Eric Adams is a Democratic mayor. Donald Trump has no truck with Eric Adams, right? He did not support Eric Adams. Eric Adams is not his natural ally, but what he had over Eric Adams, he realized was a leverage that he could get the cases off of Eric Adams and then get Eric Adams in his pocket.
So Donald Trump stepped in to save like the corrupt Democratic mayor of New York City. Not because they have a deep ideological alliance, but because then Donald Trump would’ve power over New York City and its policy that he wouldn’t otherwise have. The thing that connects Trump, Trump is a very old school politician. He’s very relational. He’s very 19th century. He’s looking for the angle. He’s very zero sum. He’s looking for things to empower.
DOGE is a way of getting power over the bureaucracy. Tariffs are a way of getting power over the international financial system and foreign policy and breaking traditional alliances. Maybe in his mind, even getting Canada to become the 51st state, maybe getting Mexico to change its immigration policy, trying to weaponize the Justice Department against Eric Adams as a way of getting power over Democratic mayor. Some of what they’re doing with grants and money is a way of getting power over other institutions in American life.
Again, you could think it’s bad or you could think it’s good, but it is coherent. I think it’s bad, but it is coherent, and the people who think it’s good think it’s good for Trump to have power. Again, with the Eric Adams thing, they were very explicit about this, right? They said that it is worthwhile for the president to negotiate over his policy objectives and to trade things to get his policy objectives more fully carried out. And so Eric Adams went from saying New York City would be a sanctuary city. They’d aggressively carry out deportations.
You can think that kind of transactionalism is fine. I think in this case, given that it’s about corruption, it wasn’t. But the idea, Trump’s idea that the problem is that the president doesn’t wield enough power here the way he does in Russia, the way he might in India, the way he might in China. Trump has spoken very openly of envying some of the powers these other people have. I think it’s a consistent governing philosophy that needs to be taken as that. Right?
I think sometimes you describe… One of the difficulties Trump poses is sometimes if you just describe what he’s doing, I think quite neutrally, people say, “Oh, you’re criticizing him, you’re anti-Trump.” But I’m just describing what he’s doing. You can think it’s good or it’s bad, but the fact that he wants to arrogate power and find points of leverage and tariffs are one. What he’s doing through DOGE is another. What he did with the DOJ is another. It’s all very consistent. The question is really then just what your normative view is on Trump having that much power.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I have a question about DOGE, but before that, I’ll just say that I don’t think Donald Trump should have that much power because I think to this day, my biggest criticism and concern is that he is a person that denied the results of the election. And so I’m unwilling. I like George Washington. I like people that have the skill, the ability, the track record to walk away from power. And a person who’s unwilling to accept reality and is willing to bend reality to maintain a grip on power, even if what they’re trying to do is really good, maybe making a government more efficient makes me very concerned.
Yeah. I have a question about DOGE, but before that, I’ll just say that I don’t think Donald Trump should have that much power because I think to this day, my biggest criticism and concern is that he is a person that denied the results of the election. And so I’m unwilling. I like George Washington. I like people that have the skill, the ability, the track record to walk away from power. And a person who’s unwilling to accept reality and is willing to bend reality to maintain a grip on power, even if what they’re trying to do is really good, maybe making a government more efficient makes me very concerned.
But on the topic of DOGE is more on the Elon side. If we can combine DOGE and abundance as a topic, if DOGE succeeds the effort, let’s just forget DOGE, but the effort of making government more efficient, what does that look like before the next election and after the next election? If we can just look at success.
Ezra Klein
I know I’m jumping again, but I’ll do something quick and then pass to you. I’m not a huge fan of the experiment framing because amidst this experiment, people are… Through USAID, as my colleague Nick Kristof has documented and potentially further and otherwise will die, lose homes, be scammed by things. So I feel like experimenting with the government at that level is very dangerous, but if assuming democracy survives, Democrats, they’re going to make the government work again, are going to have to become less rule-bound than they were.
I know I’m jumping again, but I’ll do something quick and then pass to you. I’m not a huge fan of the experiment framing because amidst this experiment, people are… Through USAID, as my colleague Nick Kristof has documented and potentially further and otherwise will die, lose homes, be scammed by things. So I feel like experimenting with the government at that level is very dangerous, but if assuming democracy survives, Democrats, they’re going to make the government work again, are going to have to become less rule-bound than they were.
I have outlined that the problem with a personality type of the right is it’s autocratic now, and the problem with a personality type of the left is it’s bureaucratic. And I don’t want to see things going either to where DOGE is in terms of, I think, there’s a fundamental lawlessness to it, but I also don’t like the aims of it. But I don’t want to see things where Democrats were, which is such respect for process, that they will put the process ahead of getting their own things done.
They will listen to any lawyer with any super intense interpretation of any law, and that’ll turn them all the way back. What DOGE has demonstrated is that the room for movement inside the American government, inside the state, as much wider than anybody gave it credit for both Republican and Democratic administrations. It may not be as wide, it probably isn’t legally as wide as what DOGE is trying to do, and that’s why they’re losing all these court cases. But it is wide. And you could also use Congress. You could pass statute to make it wider, and you should.
There is no abundance agenda that works if the Democratic Party is as rule-bound and as process obsessed as it was in the last 10 years. It doesn’t work flatly. That is why so many of the stories we tell in the book are about process gone. It’s not process gone wrong because it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do, but it is process that has become antagonistic to the promised outcomes.
And so I do hope there’s a kind of thesis, right? All the institutions are great. Democrats are the defenders of government. Antithesis, the government is a corrupt cesspool. It’s a ball of worms, and it has to be destroyed and taken over by a benevolent or non-benevolent dictator. And synthesis, which is that the government’s process has made it not a functional state. It’s non-responsive in many important ways, and it needs to be reformed at a quite fundamental level, but in a way that is lawful, in a way that is thoughtful, in a way that is running experiments that gathers information, and then can make adjustments, in a way that is respectful of the human lives, that it touches and affects, in a way that is not hostile to the goals of good government, but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process…
Ezra Klein
…but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process the government has erected and evolved over time.
…but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process the government has erected and evolved over time.
Derek Thompson
As you articulated the principle beautifully, and just to put some meat on the bones, abundance is about being incredibly concrete about what you want to accomplish in the world. Then it’s about understanding how to accomplish that. A stage of the process that I think Doge has entirely skipped. I don’t think we’ve reached the stage of understanding. We’ve destroyed and then maybe it’s sometimes promised to understand the thing that we’ve destroyed after the fact. You want to set goals, you want to understand how to meet those goals and then you want to meet them. And the problem with liberalism over the last few years, in the last few decades is that we’ve become disconnected from outcomes. Really, really crystal clear example. So Joe Biden in 2021 signs the bipartisan infrastructure law. And he and Pete Buttigieg call it truthfully, one of the most important infrastructure bills passed in the last few decades. $1.2 trillion to do exactly what Ezra and I want to do, to build in the world.
As you articulated the principle beautifully, and just to put some meat on the bones, abundance is about being incredibly concrete about what you want to accomplish in the world. Then it’s about understanding how to accomplish that. A stage of the process that I think Doge has entirely skipped. I don’t think we’ve reached the stage of understanding. We’ve destroyed and then maybe it’s sometimes promised to understand the thing that we’ve destroyed after the fact. You want to set goals, you want to understand how to meet those goals and then you want to meet them. And the problem with liberalism over the last few years, in the last few decades is that we’ve become disconnected from outcomes. Really, really crystal clear example. So Joe Biden in 2021 signs the bipartisan infrastructure law. And he and Pete Buttigieg call it truthfully, one of the most important infrastructure bills passed in the last few decades. $1.2 trillion to do exactly what Ezra and I want to do, to build in the world.
There’s a piece of that law that’s a $42 billion program called BEAD stands for broadband, equity, access and deployment, I think. $42 billion to build rural broadband. Fast-forward to 2024, practically none of it is built. We’re now four calendar years after it was passed and the program is at this point, it seems like it’s going to die and they’re just going to transfer the whole thing to Starlink. So why? We want to understand why does government fail to achieve its outcomes? And how can we learn from those failures to allow government to succeed at its outcomes? Well, you look into it and it turns out that in order to take these $42 billion and send it to the states, the states had to go through a 14 stage process in order to get the money.
First, the FCC had to draw a map of the places where America needed more rural broadband. And then there was a challenge period where people could question the map, and the FCC would remake the map and then the challengers would sue them to change the map again. Then the states had to file a letter of intent and a five-year action plan and a funding program, all of which could be subject to their own challenge periods. And in each of these challenge periods, the commerce department is going back to the states and saying, “We really like your five-year plan, but your workforce development program didn’t pass this matrix of equity. And you didn’t reach out to the right bidders over here. And if you try harder to reach out to more people who just aren’t white men to be your employees, that would be fantastic if you could put that into the new edit that you submit to us.”
And of course there are delays because every state has to do its own programs. The commerce department is backed up, yada, yada, yada. You get to a point where out of 56 states and jurisdictions that have applied to begin the 14 stage process, by the time the Democrats lose the election in November 2024, three out of the 56 have passed all 14 stages. And very little of the money has actually been spent because of all the problems that Ezra and I discussed about how hard it is to build in the physical world. $42 billion therefore dies upon contact with planet Earth. That’s not government achieving its goals. And a Doge that we were sort of duumvirate of in this parallel universe, is one that would try very clearly to A, articulate a goal. What are we trying to do here? We’re trying to build rural broadband. Why? Because we think connectivity is incredibly important to the economy of the future. It helps people’s health, it helps the economy of rural areas. Let’s build rural broadband.
Two, what are the roadblocks? What are the bottlenecks? What’s hard about taking a pot of money that exists in Washington and actually creating broadband networks in rural Kentucky? Let’s understand what those roadblocks are so that we can do two things. We can take away the things that need to be taken away to accelerate the program. And maybe we can add new policies that will accelerate the spending because bottom line, we want to make a difference in the world. That’s a world where government is, to borrow Ezra’s language, deregulated itself. It’s easier for the government to achieve its goals. I think that it’s really important at the level of a principle here that liberals fall out of love with this procedural fetish that has dominated the left of the last half century and fall back in love with outcomes. To be ruthlessly obsessed with how liberalism has failed and how these kinds of failures aren’t just technocratic stories to tell in a podcast.
I think this is fundamental to why Democrats are losing the communications war in an era of anti-establishment and anti-institutional. We find ourselves in a reflexive position of having all the cranks, so to speak, having left the Democratic Party and we’re the ones who defend all institutions. We’re the ones who defend the establishments. We’re the ones saying government can only do good. But as a result, we lose the ability to talk to people about how government fails and how they can see that failure. And how sometimes they’re literally leaving cities and states run by Democrats because that failure is so effing obvious to them. So this isn’t just about the BEAD program, it’s not just about 14-step programs, it’s not just about rural broadband. It really is about a higher level principle of political communication. How do you develop a liberalism that in an age of anti-establishment anger both reflects that anger and channels it for proactive purposes by not just doing destruction destruction but creative destruction.
Lex Fridman
So first of all, beautifully put and second is of the big thing that Doge did is make this a sexy topic to discuss. And then you can tear down Doge with the way they’re doing it, say it’s wrong, criticize. But then people are all of a sudden more and more caring about the efficiency of government and educating themselves, learning about it, and it’s creating a culture of transparency to the whole thing. So now you can swoop in with a book like Abundance and describe here’s actually how to have a clear mission and metrics, how to solve these problems. But that allows as opposed to have this culture of process, me personally, one of the things that really frustrates me about this world is that, the bureaucracy of that kind of process. Especially because everybody, at least in the United States is just all so fucking polite everywhere about the whole thing. They’re all so nice to you as they’re doing the process. About every single thing they’re just like, this is… And then you have to call from nine to five.
So first of all, beautifully put and second is of the big thing that Doge did is make this a sexy topic to discuss. And then you can tear down Doge with the way they’re doing it, say it’s wrong, criticize. But then people are all of a sudden more and more caring about the efficiency of government and educating themselves, learning about it, and it’s creating a culture of transparency to the whole thing. So now you can swoop in with a book like Abundance and describe here’s actually how to have a clear mission and metrics, how to solve these problems. But that allows as opposed to have this culture of process, me personally, one of the things that really frustrates me about this world is that, the bureaucracy of that kind of process. Especially because everybody, at least in the United States is just all so fucking polite everywhere about the whole thing. They’re all so nice to you as they’re doing the process. About every single thing they’re just like, this is… And then you have to call from nine to five.
There’s hours and let’s schedule a meeting in three weeks from now to discuss this document so we can have another document. And all of a sudden the big dreams and the visions, the hopes that people have invested in building a project that’s an incredible project dies. It’s not just a waste of money, it’s the possibility of a beautiful thing that could have been built, never gets built.
Derek Thompson
You’re retracing Ezra’s lovely line about how the character of the right these days is autocratic, and the character of the left can be overly bureaucratic. I hope there’s a middle synthesis lane here where there’s a political identity that believes in efficient bureaucracies. Sometimes it actually does take a lot of people to get certain things done. But you really, I think need to have an eye toward institutional reform. This is a theme of our book that we haven’t talked about as much yet, but I think it’s so important for abundance to believe that each generation adopts, is passed down institutions that were created for different eras, different decades to solve different problems. That’s how you get an environmental revolution in the 1960s that solves the problem of dirty air and dirty water. But leaves us with a set of norms like NEPA that make it impossible to add clean energy in our generation, just a tragedy of unintended outcomes.
You’re retracing Ezra’s lovely line about how the character of the right these days is autocratic, and the character of the left can be overly bureaucratic. I hope there’s a middle synthesis lane here where there’s a political identity that believes in efficient bureaucracies. Sometimes it actually does take a lot of people to get certain things done. But you really, I think need to have an eye toward institutional reform. This is a theme of our book that we haven’t talked about as much yet, but I think it’s so important for abundance to believe that each generation adopts, is passed down institutions that were created for different eras, different decades to solve different problems. That’s how you get an environmental revolution in the 1960s that solves the problem of dirty air and dirty water. But leaves us with a set of norms like NEPA that make it impossible to add clean energy in our generation, just a tragedy of unintended outcomes.
And to narrow this down to a world that I know you care a lot about, there’s a chapter in our book about science policy and the history of the NIH. And the NIH really comes into its own after World War II. And it is immediately this beautifully funded crown jewel of biomedical research, just the federal government irrigating university researchers studying cancer and heart disease and brain science and everything else. Practically every single scientific breakthrough in the US in the last 70 years at least bears the fingerprints of NIH. But the NIH is also a bureaucracy. And like every bureaucracy, it has accumulated a set of processes and habits that it’s the people most affected by it. Scientists in America told us and will tell anybody else who’s listening, has flaws.
According to some surveys, 40% of the time that scientists are working today in America, they are filling out grants and doing paperwork, not doing science. That is astonishing. As we say in the book, imagine if we discovered that one year there was a virus that broke out in the American academic scene, such that our scientists suffered from chronic fatigue disorder between January and June every single year. They just couldn’t work. We’d be like, “This is an absolute shanda, we have to fix this problem.” This problem exists. It’s our own bureaucratic rules. It’s the rules that we wrote that’s slowing down science. So what should we do? I don’t think we should tear down the NIH. I don’t think we should slash and burn grants as we’re currently doing in the administration.
I think we should understand what’s broken and be clear about our desired outcomes. My desired outcome for science is that we produce and pursue high risk, high reward science under the theory that almost no important breakthrough is going to be obvious before you discovered it. If it’s obvious, you probably already knew it. So why is it some new science? You should want to incentivize scientists to ask their biggest, most curious questions in a high risk, high reward environment. And right now the NIH doesn’t do that. The NIH for a variety of reasons, whether it’s aspects of the peer review process or just assumptions that scientists have of the system, is too incrementalist. It funds older researchers and it wastes a lot of scientists time with bureaucratic paperwork and kludge. We’d love to reform it. We have ideas for reforming it. But if liberals don’t use the language of and act on institutional reform, we will allow institutions to grow old and sclerotic and piss off Americans.
And they’ll vote for people who come in with a wrecking ball to tear it down. So that’s why I think it’s so important for abundance liberals like us to be very clear about our goals, our outcomes, and exactly what we want to accomplish because I think that’s the only way to really see how and why institutions that are all around us truly do need reform.
Sam Harris
Lex Fridman
Listen, I hope your book becomes the manifesto of the Democratic Party. It’s a beautiful vision. I’m a little bit skeptical because of the momentum of bureaucratic thought, but nevertheless remain hopeful. I have to ask as I’m a fan of both of you in the interest of time, Ezra, you had an intense debate many years ago with Sam Harris. Okay, so you’re, I would say, like I said, I’m a fan of both of you. You’re both intellectually rigorous people. So the debate, the contentiousness of it was both sad to me. But also as just a fan of you and since I admire your intellects, it’s just fun to watch, what is it Godzilla and King Kong fight. I wish there was more of it. I wish you would do this podcast again and debate it more on some other topic and argue. It’s just great. Anyway, some time has passed and-
Listen, I hope your book becomes the manifesto of the Democratic Party. It’s a beautiful vision. I’m a little bit skeptical because of the momentum of bureaucratic thought, but nevertheless remain hopeful. I have to ask as I’m a fan of both of you in the interest of time, Ezra, you had an intense debate many years ago with Sam Harris. Okay, so you’re, I would say, like I said, I’m a fan of both of you. You’re both intellectually rigorous people. So the debate, the contentiousness of it was both sad to me. But also as just a fan of you and since I admire your intellects, it’s just fun to watch, what is it Godzilla and King Kong fight. I wish there was more of it. I wish you would do this podcast again and debate it more on some other topic and argue. It’s just great. Anyway, some time has passed and-
Ezra Klein
Yeah, was this eight years ago now?
Yeah, was this eight years ago now?
Lex Fridman
Yeah,
Yeah,
Ezra Klein
2018-ish, something there.
2018-ish, something there.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the battles you have fought over the years, that’s just-
Yeah, the battles you have fought over the years, that’s just-
Ezra Klein
That’s a lot of chapters.
That’s a lot of chapters.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, this is like several chapters ago. But in the interest of camaraderie, what do you admire most about Sam Harris?
Yeah, this is like several chapters ago. But in the interest of camaraderie, what do you admire most about Sam Harris?
Ezra Klein
Oh, that’s not a hard question. If you go back, if you listen to that debate on my show at Vox, I intro that debate by saying, “Look, I disagree with Harris on like this specific conversation he had with Charles Murray about race and IQ. But he’s good on meditation, he’s good on psychedelics, he’s good on consciousness, he’s good…” I don’t know if I said AI back then though, but I think he’s good on AI. I always felt in that without going into the way back machine, that Sam really thought like he really somehow got where I was wrong. And I thought I offered like a lot of like tries for deescalation and he did me weirdly the favor of publishing our whole email correspondence. And I think if you read that you can see that I was not angling for a fight here.
Oh, that’s not a hard question. If you go back, if you listen to that debate on my show at Vox, I intro that debate by saying, “Look, I disagree with Harris on like this specific conversation he had with Charles Murray about race and IQ. But he’s good on meditation, he’s good on psychedelics, he’s good on consciousness, he’s good…” I don’t know if I said AI back then though, but I think he’s good on AI. I always felt in that without going into the way back machine, that Sam really thought like he really somehow got where I was wrong. And I thought I offered like a lot of like tries for deescalation and he did me weirdly the favor of publishing our whole email correspondence. And I think if you read that you can see that I was not angling for a fight here.
What I admired about him since, I think the thing that he’s been good on is he’s been very independent. So Sam at that time, there was sort of the emergence around then of this thing that people then called the intellectual dark web. And it was like Sam and the Weinstein brothers and Ben Shapiro, and I forget who was part of it. And as a bunch of those people I think, it kind of split up over time, but Harris has done a good job not falling into conspiracy as the Weinstein brothers did. Not letting his anger at the left blind him to the failures of the right. He’s a guy, I guess both for better and for worse as we all are. But he is perfectly willing to stand alone in a crowd. Like I haven’t listened to that much of his stuff lately, but my sense is he’s been like quite clear-eyed from my perspective on Donald Trump. So my view is not that Sam Harris is in general a bad actor, it just isn’t.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, he’s been like difficult to categorize and fearless about it, meaning like he deliberately resists audience capture.
Yeah, he’s been like difficult to categorize and fearless about it, meaning like he deliberately resists audience capture.
Ezra Klein
Yeah, which is a hard thing to do.
Yeah, which is a hard thing to do.
Lex Fridman
It’s quite difficult.
It’s quite difficult.
Ezra Klein
I think I saw a clip of him on this show sort of like going after Trump and it became like a big whole thing.
I think I saw a clip of him on this show sort of like going after Trump and it became like a big whole thing.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, he’s been very consistent on that. Let’s try to find the interesting thing here. I actually had a while back, a podcast with Richard Haier. He studies intelligence. And it was a very detailed non-policy discussion about IQ tests and all that kind of stuff. And there I tried extremely hard to be very nuanced because that felt like an uncomfortable topic back then. It doesn’t feel so uncomfortable now. Do you think the Overton Window has expanded? Do you think the kind of things we’re willing to talk about now… And this has to do with the Trump moment also.
Yeah, he’s been very consistent on that. Let’s try to find the interesting thing here. I actually had a while back, a podcast with Richard Haier. He studies intelligence. And it was a very detailed non-policy discussion about IQ tests and all that kind of stuff. And there I tried extremely hard to be very nuanced because that felt like an uncomfortable topic back then. It doesn’t feel so uncomfortable now. Do you think the Overton Window has expanded? Do you think the kind of things we’re willing to talk about now… And this has to do with the Trump moment also.
Ezra Klein
I think the place where the topic seems to me to have changed in my ambient awareness of it is two things. One is the sense of the Flynn effect, which is yeah, it’s hard to individually change your IQ, but there is a very well-documented effect. And I talked to James Flynn before I talked to Sam. There is a very well-documented effect where IQs have been rising over time. There’s good evidence now that that has stopped. Again, this is ambiently my sense, I’ve read some things like in passing, I did not come to this podcast preparing to talk about IQ or I would have prepared very carefully. And then there was an interesting FT article just the other day that was like, Have We Passed Peak Human Intelligence? And my sense is that that wasn’t about IQ, although again, I don’t remember exactly what was in it. I kind of glanced at it and put it aside to read more later.
I think the place where the topic seems to me to have changed in my ambient awareness of it is two things. One is the sense of the Flynn effect, which is yeah, it’s hard to individually change your IQ, but there is a very well-documented effect. And I talked to James Flynn before I talked to Sam. There is a very well-documented effect where IQs have been rising over time. There’s good evidence now that that has stopped. Again, this is ambiently my sense, I’ve read some things like in passing, I did not come to this podcast preparing to talk about IQ or I would have prepared very carefully. And then there was an interesting FT article just the other day that was like, Have We Passed Peak Human Intelligence? And my sense is that that wasn’t about IQ, although again, I don’t remember exactly what was in it. I kind of glanced at it and put it aside to read more later.
But the literacy scores are going down and a number of test scores are going down. And the sort of sense of the piece was that we are making ourselves stupider by endlessly staring at screens and social media, which I think is probably right. I’ve had this sort of line since becoming aware of that piece in my head that, we spend a lot of time talking about how to get smarter and not enough time talking about how to avoid getting dumber. But we do a lot of things that we think make us smarter, like I would say having social media on our phones because like, oh, you’re getting all this information all the time that in fact make us dumber because it’s not just that the information is bad. But the lack of concentration, the constant distraction, the sort of lack of focus.
And so my sense is that there is a different kind of conversation here. I’m not sure it’s really an IQ conversation, but that there is a sense that we are inflicting a possibly global, certainly societal cognitive wound on ourselves. That’s what John Height’s book is a little bit about, that’s sort of more coming at it from a behavioral standpoint. But we have the Flynn effect reflects… This is how James Flynn would describe it. The Flynn effect reflects society’s putting on, he, I think put it the scientific spectacles. You create societies where we prize things like reading abstract intelligence, symbolic logic. You teach people on them a lot and we get better and better and better at doing it. And reading changes the brain, it changes the physical structure of the brain. You’re hijacking parts of the mind and meant for other purposes to do this kind of interpretive work.
But it’s of course possible just as we became societally connected and then made more and more widespread technologies like literacy, that changed our brains and led to the increase in this thing we call G intelligence. And decreases in other things, like I’m really shitty at knowing which direction I’m going into. That sort of part of my brain that does navigation is terribly atrophied compared to somebody in a society that did not have Google Maps. It’s entirely possible to go too far in that. It’s entirely possible to move on to technology to begin to weaken that. I have this concern very profoundly about AI, by the way, which obviously you have a lot of your roots in. And there are parts of AI I’m very optimistic about, but my biggest concern about AI is we’re going to make ourselves much stupider without realizing it. Because the things that are easy to automate in AI, which is like getting the AI to summarize the reading of something or getting AI to write the first draft of something, that’s where all the intelligence happens in my view.
I think one advantage I have over a lot of other podcast hosts who superficially do what I do, probably this is true for you, I’m sure this is true for you, I know, is that I really do do the reading. No summary is equivalent to me doing the reading and sitting there and making the associations myself and spending the time in the book. And then sort of thinking about what it brought up in me. I write the first draft. ChatGPT cannot write the first draft of my book. The first draft is fucking hard to write. And it’s often hard because it’s completely wrong, but not because it’s narrowly wrong. ChatGPT will never tell you that the problem with what you’re trying to do is that you’re just trying to do the wrong thing. It’ll never tell you if you tell it to write a first draft, that’s the wrong direction for this draft. Some part of you has to know it. And often the problem is you just haven’t done enough reporting, haven’t done enough research and ChatGPT can’t tell you that either.
And my worry for my kids, my worry for society is creating technologies that make it incredibly alluring to automate the part of creation that is most difficult, most laborious, and most likely to lead to genuine insight and the sort of sharpening of your own mental acuity. We better hope the AI can autonomously make innovations because I really worry we’re going to stop being able to.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and all of that is brilliantly put, I definitely think that social media is making me dumber. Like if I spend a week checking social media versus reading books, I’m just distinctly the quality of my thoughts-
Yeah, and all of that is brilliantly put, I definitely think that social media is making me dumber. Like if I spend a week checking social media versus reading books, I’m just distinctly the quality of my thoughts-
Ezra Klein
Even the same content. I don’t read things anymore as much as I can on like a screen, I print everything out and I sit at a table and I read it. I can read it on my iPad, I can read it on my laptop. I print it all out because my attention is different.
Even the same content. I don’t read things anymore as much as I can on like a screen, I print everything out and I sit at a table and I read it. I can read it on my iPad, I can read it on my laptop. I print it all out because my attention is different.
Lex Fridman
And the same goes for AI, whether we’re talking about this kind of research, it’s more distinct and rigorous. And the other space that I do every single day is programming. I’m definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI offloading because it actually works really well there. I’m becoming worse at creative thinking at what you’re saying, writing the first draft, which require that skill, that first little leap, that little mini leap into the creative genius that we all do every single day. AI is not able to do that, and it’s definitely doling that. All right, we covered a lot of ground today. But on the note of optimism, what gives you hope about the future of this great nation of ours, the future of America? Looking out in the next few years and the next few decades, centuries, when we colonize the solar system and beyond or we could just stick to the next couple of decades.
And the same goes for AI, whether we’re talking about this kind of research, it’s more distinct and rigorous. And the other space that I do every single day is programming. I’m definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI offloading because it actually works really well there. I’m becoming worse at creative thinking at what you’re saying, writing the first draft, which require that skill, that first little leap, that little mini leap into the creative genius that we all do every single day. AI is not able to do that, and it’s definitely doling that. All right, we covered a lot of ground today. But on the note of optimism, what gives you hope about the future of this great nation of ours, the future of America? Looking out in the next few years and the next few decades, centuries, when we colonize the solar system and beyond or we could just stick to the next couple of decades.
Future of America
Derek Thompson
Sure. Despite the fact that our book is a deep diagnosis of modern liberalism with a ton of criticism of the last half decade in politics, I am at root a profound optimist about everything just at a general personality sense. To a certain extent, a question like this is attempting to elicit a little bit of what can be considered analysis of the world. But you’re also eliciting what is fundamentally like personality, like what makes you optimistic? I’ve just always been a real optimist. I’m optimistic about science and technology, especially in the realm of biomedical science in a big way. I think if you look at what’s happening right now in mRNA cancer vaccines, in CAR T-cell therapy for redesigning T-cells to attack cancers. If you look at the GLP-1 drug revolution and some of these studies that have been done on the fact that GLP-1 drugs, while they were initially synthesized from lizard venom to help people with type two diabetes turned out to have these effects that seem to reduce body-wide inflammation. That not only rewires our minds and makes it easier for people’s desired sense of moderation to be actualized.
Sure. Despite the fact that our book is a deep diagnosis of modern liberalism with a ton of criticism of the last half decade in politics, I am at root a profound optimist about everything just at a general personality sense. To a certain extent, a question like this is attempting to elicit a little bit of what can be considered analysis of the world. But you’re also eliciting what is fundamentally like personality, like what makes you optimistic? I’ve just always been a real optimist. I’m optimistic about science and technology, especially in the realm of biomedical science in a big way. I think if you look at what’s happening right now in mRNA cancer vaccines, in CAR T-cell therapy for redesigning T-cells to attack cancers. If you look at the GLP-1 drug revolution and some of these studies that have been done on the fact that GLP-1 drugs, while they were initially synthesized from lizard venom to help people with type two diabetes turned out to have these effects that seem to reduce body-wide inflammation. That not only rewires our minds and makes it easier for people’s desired sense of moderation to be actualized.
So people who want to eat more fruits and vegetables seem to find it easier to eat more fruits and vegetables when they’re on GLP-1 drugs. But also because there’s probably a lot of neurological issues that are fundamentally issues of inflammation, including maybe dementia and Alzheimer’s. We might have accidentally from the tongue of a lizard, a partial medicine for Alzheimer’s disease. The ability of science to connect these dots in the cosmos just absolutely thrills and fascinates me. And I hope that we get better at making those connections.
And while I have a lot of fears about AI, many of them shared by Ezra, I am really interested in the possibility of AI being useful for synthesizing large bodies of knowledge to allow people to make cross-domain comparisons. I think a lot of inventions in tech history are essentially ingenious recombinations of ideas. Like to a certain extent, you look at something as fundamental or archetypal as Thomas Edison inventing the incandescent light bulb. What did he do? He just tested 10,000 different materials and figured out that actually it was like a very special kind of bamboo that burned for the right amount of time and said, “Boom, I did it. I made the incandescent light bulb.”
The ability to have a machine accelerate the degree to which we understand what those 10,000 materials can do, or synthesize knowledge so people can combine it and say, we’re going to take a little bit of CRISPR over here and a little bit of cancer science over here to develop a gene therapy that targets a particular inhibitor that allows the immune system to attack a protein that is explicitly related to pancreatic cancer. I do absolutely believe that we might be on the doorstep of those kinds of breakthroughs. And that makes me incredibly optimistic because I think at base it’s like, what’s life about? What’s abundance about? Why housing and energy? Well, because we think they’re fundamental to living a good life. You need a place to live, and people deserve the freedom to live where they want to live.
Energy is what powers the entire economy. And more energy would power technologies that we can’t even imagine or are just beginning to, whether it’s supersonic flight powered by clean fuel or fusion technology that basically gives us infinite solar energy, the sun’s actual energy in a particular location. These are beautiful things that can happen. But also I think the good life is about health. It’s about health and it’s about the wealth that comes, and the freedom that comes from finding health in your own life. And I am incredibly optimistic that we might be at the cusp of a real golden age in taking all these little ingredients that we’ve spent decades on, whether it’s genomics and proteomics and a little bit of AI. We’re at a moment right now, I hope, where we can have this explosion of combinatorial intelligence. And that hopefully in an optimistic way, AI could be useful in accelerating us toward that future. But I also think to the point of this book, we have to get institutions right too.
These are discoveries that are going to happen inside of institutions. And how those institutions work and how they’re funded and the incentives that are created by law or by technology, really matter in terms of the world that we build. And so that’s why I think it’s really important to not only be obsessed with what the technology can do, but how it’s instantiated in the institutions that we have because it ultimately is institutions and individuals that build the world, not technology acting on its own.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And I should say that you make a really great case for investing in weird science, meaning stuff that doesn’t on the surface make sense. You said lizard venom. There’s all this popular criticism of scientific projects that sound like a waste of money when in reality, at least in the scientific realm, projects that seem like they don’t have any positive effect might actually end up being the ones that transform human civilization as we know it because of the unintended discoveries that happen and all the eureka moments. All the special discoveries happen truly, when you’re just passionately pursuing a cool thing in science, that’s how scientific minds work. And so it makes sense to invest in exploring weird shit, the weird mysteries of the universe. Anyway, Ezra, what gives you hope?
Yeah. And I should say that you make a really great case for investing in weird science, meaning stuff that doesn’t on the surface make sense. You said lizard venom. There’s all this popular criticism of scientific projects that sound like a waste of money when in reality, at least in the scientific realm, projects that seem like they don’t have any positive effect might actually end up being the ones that transform human civilization as we know it because of the unintended discoveries that happen and all the eureka moments. All the special discoveries happen truly, when you’re just passionately pursuing a cool thing in science, that’s how scientific minds work. And so it makes sense to invest in exploring weird shit, the weird mysteries of the universe. Anyway, Ezra, what gives you hope?
Ezra Klein
I’m a less temperamentally optimistic person than Derek by a lot actually. And I would usually give a pretty similar answer to this question that Derek gave, which is technological advancement. We live in an age of marvels. I guess I’ll say from the realist perspective, that we live in a more liquid moment than many. That if one of the advantages of the ’90s of much of the life that I have grown up in, is that much of the structure of technology, of global governance was fairly stable. We could sort of like look at it and there were certain, not certainties but fairly reliable guardrails of what was and what wasn’t going to happen. And there were disruptions like 9/11 and the financial crisis. They weren’t small and slowly they broke that entire system. But I think one of the things people sort of miss, sort of feel about the way history’s accelerated is that things have just all gotten faster and less predictable. And they really have, I think gotten faster and less predictable.
I’m a less temperamentally optimistic person than Derek by a lot actually. And I would usually give a pretty similar answer to this question that Derek gave, which is technological advancement. We live in an age of marvels. I guess I’ll say from the realist perspective, that we live in a more liquid moment than many. That if one of the advantages of the ’90s of much of the life that I have grown up in, is that much of the structure of technology, of global governance was fairly stable. We could sort of like look at it and there were certain, not certainties but fairly reliable guardrails of what was and what wasn’t going to happen. And there were disruptions like 9/11 and the financial crisis. They weren’t small and slowly they broke that entire system. But I think one of the things people sort of miss, sort of feel about the way history’s accelerated is that things have just all gotten faster and less predictable. And they really have, I think gotten faster and less predictable.
We’re in an age it seems to be more like the early 20th century, late 19th century than like the 1990s. And that means the possibilities range very widely. When you think about AI, when you think about biotech advances, when you think about energetic advances, when you think about the sort of shifting nature of global alliances, of the technological and political systems, we are in the most high variance period that I think has happened in a very, very, very long time. And that carries tremendous peril. Things could go terribly, and it carries tremendous possibility. What if AI is an incredible boon for humanity? What if we do invent and deploy the clean energy technologies that deliver energy abundance. Not just a kind of answer to the worst of climate change, but genuine energy` abundance.
Unlocking new things like mass desalination. And what if we do… Like I’m an animal suffering person. I’m a vegetarian. I care a lot about animal suffering. What if we did figure out cultivated meat that we grow in breweries and on scaffolds, and we don’t have to kill tens of billions of animals that we’ve raised in unimaginable suffering every single year? What if we do figure out how to make government better and more responsive? What if that thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing does work out? But it’s not hope, it’s like that’s a future. You have to create a future. You have to call into being a future you’ll have to fight for. So it isn’t so much that I find myself hopeful about what America or the world would be like in 2030 or 2040. But I find that I believe in the possibility of enough remarkable outcomes, that it makes the present really worth being engaged in. And really worth trying to do your small part, to bend the arc of the time in the direction that you find more just.
Lex Fridman
Well, thank you to both of you for fighting for abundance and writing this manifesto for abundance, and for all the writing and the work you do in the podcasts and just being incredible minds in this world that I’m a fan of. So thank you for talking today.
Well, thank you to both of you for fighting for abundance and writing this manifesto for abundance, and for all the writing and the work you do in the podcasts and just being incredible minds in this world that I’m a fan of. So thank you for talking today.
Ezra Klein
Thanks very much, Lex.
Thanks very much, Lex.
Derek Thompson
Thanks so much.
Thanks so much.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Napoleon Bonaparte, ” In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Napoleon Bonaparte, ” In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Transcript for ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #461 with ThePrimeagen.
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And I just remember being just so blown away, because up until that point, everything was just, “All right, I have a list of 10 items. I have a list of 20 items.” Right? It was very rigid and small, and the things I built were really small and trivial, and all of a sudden I felt like I could build anything in that one moment. And it was so amazing. I just remember sitting in class for, I don’t even remember how long those classes were or anything, but I just remember being just completely profoundly impacted by this notion. And so I just sat there and I watched, and I had the exact same experience in heaven’s forbid by a software engineering class, when we talked about the decorator pattern, where you can keep on constructing these objects in this recursive way. Not that I think that’s actually a good idea to do, but just watching that and realizing there’s so many weird and unique ways you can solve problems, and anything your mind can think of, you can just create that. And I just remember getting just so excited about the possibility that anything is possible.
I built that, you know, all kinds of programming languages. That’s less about programming languages and more about the system you create. And that just filled me with infinite joy, having… Now similar to the linked list situation, creating a system where each individual cell only knows about its neighbors and operates in very simple rules. But when you take that system as a whole and allow it to evolve over time, you can create infinite complexity. So I just… Man, those are many pothead moments, where I’m just looking at the beautiful complexity that can be created with cellular automata. That filled me with just infinite joy, for sure. But yeah, all I remember is parentheses. So my memories of my first are drowned in a sea of parentheses.
Because always my big problem was like, “Okay, do factorial.” Why not just use a for loop? “Okay, what about Fibonacci sequence?” Why not use a for loop? I don’t understand. What’s the purpose of recursion? I don’t understand it yet. It’s so powerful. Why? It looks like a really complicated for loop. And so I just could not understand it. And then lab came that day and it was, “I’m going to give you a 2D array you have to read from a file. This is what a starting position looks like. This is what an ending position looks like. This is what a wall looks like. I want you to find me a path through the maze.” So I just sat there like, “Okay, well I guess I can just go up and I can create a visited grid, so I know not to visit these places anymore.” And then all of a sudden it just started clicking. Like, “Well, wait a second. I don’t know the maze, but if I just go up, right, down, and left, and hop back every time I’ve been to that square, don’t visit it, it will just go forever.”
And I realized in that moment, I’m like, “I actually understand. I’ve understood recursion this whole time, I just never had a problem in which it actually made sense to use. And that was my big downfall, is that I was measuring my understanding with the problems that I had available, which were just list traversal, which is not a good use of recursion. And so I just remember that freeing… Oh, man. Recursion. It was a great moment in my life.
The thing that kills me the most about programming, what I actually considered the worst aspect of programming, is when you know everything. And so when I was at this job, it’s just every single day I’d come in, there were no surprises, there was no questions. I didn’t understand the code base, sure, that’s fair. I didn’t understand all the things about the code base. But I knew I was going to go in, I was going to generate some sort of object from the database. I was going to take that object from the database, and I was just going to map it over and just display it on the webpage. There’s no creativity, there’s nothing to it. It’s very almost factory line kind of work. And that was a very difficult moment for me, which is…
I didn’t enjoy programming, because I knew everything about it. I already knew exactly what I was going to do that day. I knew all the hurdles I going to have to go over. There was no unknown unknowns, if you will. It was just knowns at all times. And for me, that is the worst part about programming, is when you already know the solution and it’s just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands.
You know, you’re familiar with the ML side of things. There’s networking, there’s going to be just performance, operating systems, compilers. There’s just huge amounts of variation of all these different types of programming verticals that you can be. And so we often talk about programming in perspective of web, or something that’s pretty narrow, and I think that’s just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else, that actually I don’t believe it’s that representative of the entire programming world out there. And I think a lot of programming’s really, really fun. There’s some really great stuff. Building your own language is just a very fun experience to do. Every programmer should just do that once, just to have a completely different perspective on how things work in life.
But as far as what do I do, I’ve always looked at myself as a tools engineer. So at my time, at my jobs, typically I would start off on the UI, and then they’d be like, “Okay, well hey, we need a library for this thing.” So then I’d be the one writing the library. So in 2012, 2013, I was writing a UI library for the web that can behave just like an iPad, so you can pinch and zoom on it, but it’s still a web page. Because we didn’t have any of that stuff back then. It was a canvas, had to do all the matrices operations and all that stuff to…
And so I’ve always really enjoyed that aspect, because your shareholders and the people that use your program understand programming and they’re going to say, “Hey, I need this.” And typically the thing that they need, they actually want. Whereas with people, people want stuff, but what they actually need versus what they actually want often are this weird separation. That’s like the old Henry Ford quote, “I just want a faster horse,” and he’s like, “No, what you actually want is a car.” And so you have to play this game of trying to really figure it out, whereas developers, it’s like, “I know you know what I’m doing. I know what you want. Let’s figure it out together.”
Really, if you think about it, if you’re just writing a mom-and-pa website, people that do PHP that are doing WordPress and all that, they’re going to build something, they’re going to hand it off to, I don’t know, Linode, DigitalOcean, some company. They don’t really need a really complicated build, deployment, all this. It’s just someone with a simple website so they can sell their goods. And so they don’t really need that. And so that’s kind of how I think of a DevOps, is when things need to scale, that’s the person you hire.
When I was seven years old, my dad died. That was a really tough period of life. I still think about this time that I went over to China, and there’s some rules that we were given, and one of the rules was just like, “Hey, don’t talk about God, and if you do, use the word ‘Dad’ instead.” And I was just like, “Okay, Dad!” It was the first time I said that word in 17 years or some long time. It was so weird to say that phrase. And I was just like, “Oh, that was just the strangest thing I’ve ever said in my entire lifetime.” It just felt so weird.
As I got older, I was super bad socially. I was not a very great social person. High school is brutal, got made fun of a lot, really I wouldn’t say had a great time during high school. Definitely felt very out of place or offset or maybe misplaced, if you will. I’m not sure what the right word is. And so of course at that point, I just always wanted to be accepted, to fit in and all that. I did forget to say one side story. After my dad died, my older brother, he started getting into drugs, and along with that he exposed me to pot, so at eight years old I was smoking some marijuana for a while there, until maybe 11 or 12, and took a break, and then again did a lot of that as I got a little bit older, but…
So I got a lot of these exposures fairly young. 16, 15 through 18, lot of drinking and all that. When I graduated, or as I was graduating high school, I had such sadness, if you will. I was very sad about how everything went, tried to commit suicide, obviously it was a very poor attempt and I’m still here today. I’m very happy about that aspect. I’m glad that I didn’t follow through with anything, had to go to the hospital and all that. And when I was done, I just still remember coming out of the hospital, and at that moment it’s kind of like something broke in you. Have you ever read the book Wheel of Time? It’s 14,000 pages or something like that, but right around page 12,000, Rand has to intentionally kill a girl, the main character. And that’s the moment he breaks, and he gets into like Hard Rand. [inaudible 00:24:46] Rand, if you will, for those that know Wheel of Time will appreciate all that. For those that don’t, very confusing, and I understand. Not the Amazon movie show, not that Wheel of Time.
So now that we go back onto it, at that point it’s just like something kind of broke in me, and I just didn’t care anymore. So all the social awkwardness, if you will, all that, just died away with me, but also so did everything else. And so I started using a bunch of drugs. LSD, mushrooms, meth. Did a bunch of meth, did a bunch of that stuff, and then went off to college and continued to do a bunch of stuff. I took too much acid to where for quite a few years, I had little squigglies on the side of my eyes whenever I’d walk by high contrast objects. And so it’s just that whole period of life was just kind of marked by just poor decisions.
And then sometime when I was about 19 years old, somewhere in that range, I just had this one evening where I felt the very dramatic and real presence of God. And I kind of had this choice, like Frodo, on a razor, where it’s like if I go either way, I’m going to fall off, and I need to change my life. You get to make the choice now. Do you want to do that or not? And so I remember going, “Okay, I do want to change my life. I don’t like this experience. I don’t like what I’m living. I am still very sad, I still feel very desperate. I still feel all those things. I’m just pretending to be this other person.” And then I just went to sleep that night. Nothing changed in my life. Everything was still the way it was. I woke up the next day, the same person, and I was just like, “Oh, that’s just such a strange, weird experience.”
And I just went about my day. And then I remember, I think that evening, I looked at porn, and all of a sudden I just had a conscious… just this deep, profound shame. And I was like, “I’ve never felt shame in my life. I have no idea what’s happening now.” And then all of a sudden when I smoked pot, I just felt deep shame. And when I hurt somebody or did something wrong, all of a sudden… It’s just like I got a conscious from that evening. That’s what my gift was, if you will. And just at that point, I didn’t even have a choice. I had to change my life, because for whatever reason, I’ve been changed in a moment.
And so from there I started actually trying in school. I always joke around that I got 2.14 in high school. I had a teacher hand write me a note saying I was the worst student she’s ever had. All that kind of stuff. I was not a really great student. And then in that moment it’s just like, “Okay, now life’s changed,” and I start trying to learn, and I try to become a good student. And it turns out it’s really hard. I was really bad. I still got Cs. I went and took pre-calculus and failed pre-calculus, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I used to be the smart math guy, and now I’m the idiot failing.” And so I’m just questioning myself and all that, and I spent hours upon hours in a studying, math learning center, and then just at some point years into this journey, I’m like a year and a half into this journey, at this point, something clicks, and I go from being the worst person to just immediately becoming the best.
Everything after that is just, I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I was the best person at math. I started going into my computer science classes. I just really got everything. Everything, at just years after trying, just all of a sudden became easier. And I’m not sure if it happened over the course of weeks or when the easier started, but it was just first predicated by just a huge amount of difficulty. And then this is where I started really desiring and loving the process of learning, was when things started getting easier after all those years.
Because I just was motivated by this desire to do something, not thinking it was going to get any easier, and then all of a sudden it just started getting easier, and it was great. And that’s really where I guess I started having the biggest parts of my life change at that point. I started really, really, really wanting to never look at porn again, because every single time just such shame, and I really wanted to stop. And that was by far the hardest addiction to quit. Smoking cigarettes was also a really hard addiction to quit, shockingly hard addiction to quit, but porn by far was just the worst of them all. And then I think about 22, I was finally done with all kind of addictions, if you will, and then for a year I just worked in all that, and I think right around, maybe it was 21 and three quarters, somewhere in that range, I’m not really sure where I stopped all the addictions part, but… Or at least the outwardly addictions. And then at some point, six months later, a year later, met my beautiful wife. Things just started falling more and more into place. I loved more and more work. I loved programming. I started programming 12 hours a day. I watched the Social Network movie, and after that, I was just like, “I’m doing a startup.” And so that night I started my first startup, and I was just like, so… It was in PHP by way.
And so it’s just like, yeah, it probably does help to do those things, to go to BJJ, to do any of these activities. Because even if you don’t ever kick someone’s ass, just having some level of confidence in yourself is probably a very valuable thing. But just remembering that this is such a short, tiny moment in your life is just like a huge help.
And that carries a tremendous amount of weight. It’s just why psychologically it’s extremely difficult to be… I think it’s understated often by parents, by society, how difficult it is to be a high schooler, how difficult psychologically it is, how it actually makes sense that some people would suffer from depression and be on the verge of suicide; is very, very difficult.
Today, there’s a quantification of people. You have 32,514 people following you, you have 12. The people can visually… They can inspect your exact social value on whatever platform you’re on. And that has to be just so much harder.
And I can imagine that there’s a lot of just so much weight to put on that, that it’s just… it feels probably way worse and way more damning to be uncool because you have an exact number of how uncool you are.
The weirdos are the ones that are going to succeed, the weirdos in high school. Probably because they also get bullied and they get to be tormented more psychologically and get to explore their own mind and think through what it means to be a human being more.
Because if you’re winning in high school, you’re not being challenged, you’re not self-reflecting, you’re not trying shit out. So there is some degree to being tormented as long as it doesn’t break you. The porn addiction, that’s another powerful one that I think will probably resonate with a lot of people. And it’s interesting that you say that’s one of the hardest addictions to overcome.
No one makes that argument with meth, right? No one’s going to be like, “Well, not everyone has to quit meth, okay. It’s actually a fine industry and people who are the ones producing it, they’re good also, right?” No one’s going to make that kind of argument.
Whereas with porn, you’re going to have a whole thing and friends are going to think you’re dumb for doing it or whatever. It’s like you have… It’s a much more difficult one in just like that. So it feels accepted.
And porn addiction is probably one you can just have for many years and then it can deepen. That’s probably a serious issue. Boy, am I glad I grew up before the internet because porn is so accessible, so easy to go deep into that addiction. I mean, what can you speak about what impact it had on your life? Maybe some of the low points, but also how to overcome it?
And it is purely an objectifying activity. Someone else is on display for your own enjoyment. And so I think you carry this around. I do think that the women that I dated during high school or the women after high school and college, I looked at them as a means to an end. And I think porn greatly kind of shifted that perspective in my head that I did not give the value that was desired to another person. It really devalues humanity just in general, is my perspective of it. And then it makes people into commodities. And I don’t think people are commodities. I think everyone has value.
And so during that, for me that’s like the great effect of porn, is that it’s just consumerism gone wild or materialism maybe, you could ask or argue, gone wild. And it’s extremely hard to quit, just like you said, because I can look at porn and then I can go out to lunch.
No one’s going to know. No one’s going to have any ideas. It’s a very private, it can be very short session. It doesn’t have to be something that takes… You can’t take acid then go out to lunch, right? Your whole day is going to be a very different day. And so it’s very quick, easy, accessible.
And then obviously there’s all the science and statistics, like men make worse decisions for some period of time after looking or being exposed to sexualized images. There’s the whole dopamine effect that’s just like you constantly need more and more dopamine. That’s why people typically don’t just watch five minutes of porn and call it a day. There’s like the hundred tab joke that’s always made on the internet. It’s because it’s just this constant dopamine cycle you’re constantly doing.
And all that stuff is great to say. And I’m sure statistics and science and all that stuff is really great arguments for some amount of people. But for me it just comes down to, is it really a good thing to do? Is it really actually something we want, is to value people in such a profane or just disregarding way? I just really think it’s just bad for the soul. Even if all the stats said it was great for you, I still say it’s actually bad.
And I think porn does that in its purest, darkest form, which is: the thing that matters is the sex, not the deep connection with another human being. And I think, again, going back to high school and the manosphere, the objective function if it’s to get laid, which helps with status and confidence and all…
All that is wonderful, I think. Again, can be an addiction. But the thing that’s even more awesome for a lot of people is a deep friendship or deep intimacy with a romantic partner. That’s also fucking awesome, and both of those are great.
We have a very… I can depend on her in all circumstances. Whereas if you live that other life, it sure could be… It could feel great, but there’s no meaning to it. There’s no actual real value to it.
And that will allow you to see the world more clearly and to actually find that one partner with whom you can be deeply intimate with. Sometimes the nervousness around this societally constructed value in getting laid can cloud your judgment.
And if you just release that by getting laid a bunch of times, then you could see the world clearly that getting laid is not nearly as important as you said, as finding the right human, including I should put in that pile, not just a romantic partner, but friendships, deep lasting friendships.
It’s a great sign that your relationship is healthy. Like if me and my wife were to have no sex at all for months on end, something’s gone wrong, which means what… we are no longer on the same plane. But it’s not also a good identifier. Just because you’re having a lot of sex, it doesn’t mean you’re having a good relationship.
And so it’s like a unique… I forget the right term here, but it’s a unique way at looking at the problems. And our society puts so much emphasis. And maybe that’s why porn was so hard to quit, but my guess is it’s just all the dopamine effect that it is.
But for me, the most important part and the thing that actually has real reward is having that… having just my wife. I do not look at… I desperately try not to look at any other woman. I’m hopefully not going to get caught… Mark Zuckerberged at the White House like that.
I don’t look at porn. My wife has complete confidence in me that there is not going to be a situation in which she has to question me in any kind of sense. And that builds a much more deeply, I would argue, a very deep relationship because the trust is that much bigger. I think the deepness of the relationship is probably proportional to the trust you have in each other. It’s very hard to have a deep relationship with no trust.
I personally just… Given my position, that’s even more challenging, being vulnerable with the world and there’s a bunch of people out there that want to hurt you for it, but I think it’s worthwhile anyway to be vulnerable.
And so it’s always worth the risk though, in my personal opinion, because finding my wife has been obviously the most impactful or changing thing in my life. Or second most, I’d argue that one night with God would probably be the most impactful thing that led to everything else, but then the wife would be the next most impactful. I mean, I’m cleaning up after myself and stuff now. Changed man. I’m a changed man.
And I don’t know what the result of that path would be or anything like that. I don’t tend to speculate on things I don’t understand. I just know that in that moment I had the option and I just chose… I didn’t want it anymore. Right?
It’s kind of mixed in this whole thing where it’s just like I had no value. I wrapped up all my meaning or value in having sex or getting laid, I had… All that stuff, all the things we just talked about, that was where all my worth was. And that is just such a terrible place to have your worth.
And it was just all came to a point. And I can’t tell you the day of the week, I can’t tell you anything other than it was nighttime and I was in South Hedges in Montana State University, go Bobcats, that’s about… Yeah, that’s the sign that we do at football games. Don’t worry about it. But that’s all I can really tell you because that night was no more or less special than some other night. It’s just the specialness was I got at least a chance to make a choice.
And so it’s just that’s… Once I made that realization, I think it went from my head to my heart, which they say is the greatest distance in the universe. I finally got it. And that’s really where things change.
The ability to say like what’s going to help you change and all that, I don’t know if there’s… I don’t think there’s silver bullets, right? If someone could offer you a drug… I forget who says this phrase, but there’s this really interesting phrase that goes something like, he was a very depressed man and he was struggling with suicide and he writes about this in this memoir.
And he goes to these doctors and the doctors effectively say, “Well, here’s antidepressants, it’s going to help you.” And he says that, “Well, the problem was is that scientists told me that I could just touch my brain and make myself happy, and that’s it. They could reach in, they could configure some stuff and I’ll be happy.” He’s like, “For me, it was a lot like going out into a field and being able to take a drug to see the rain. I could look out, see the rain, it would fall down, it’d be silvery, it’d be beautiful, but all the crop would still die because there’s not actually any rain. I had to discover how to be happy myself.”
And so for me, it’s like the reason why I looked at porn is because I was unhappy. I was trying to find meaning. I was trying to find value in something, right? Something that was supposed to finally give me this ultimate satisfaction. And it just does not, no matter how hard, and no matter how much you think it will, there is no escapade, there is no pornography that will ever give you that satisfaction you’re looking for. That’s the reason why it’s addicting. And that’s my call to why you shouldn’t do it, but how to get out of it, I only got out of it by realizing.
I think there’s a lot of choices we make that are just preventing us from opening the door to whatever future. I think what’s really nice to do is to imagine, just like we said with high school, that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you’ll be truly happy and you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths. And there’s a bunch of addictions, there’s a bunch of choices that prevent us from traveling down those paths.
So just believe that you’re going to have an awesome life and remove from your life the things that are preventing you from walking down that path, which is essentially what you did. It’s a leap of faith that if you let go of porn, that a better life is waiting for you on the other end.
I had incredible experiences, but I don’t think I want to recommend it to anyone. It’s a risk, it’s a serious risk. It really is a roll of the dice that you could meet your demons and they could destroy you or you can meet your demons and let go of them. Or you could have experiences like I did, which is never… Apparently I don’t have demons. I’m pretty sure they’re somewhere in the basement, but I’ve never met them on drugs.
I’m always really happy. I’m happy drunk. I’m super happy on ayahuasca, just full of love. I don’t understand, I don’t understand where the demons are, but that’s my biochemistry, whatever that is.
And for some others, one trip could be amazing and the next one could just completely destroy you and wreck your life. So I don’t know what the recommendation from that is, maybe avoid it, but then all of us die and life…
I tend to lean into adventure but drugs is… If you fuck with the biochemistry of your brain, you can really destroy yourself in a way that it’s going to torment you. So I would generally recommend that people avoid drugs altogether, probably, unless you’re a crazy motherfucker. Hunter S. Thompson.
Personally, I find that stuff to be very… I believe in the spiritual realm, right? I believe demons and angels exist. I believe God exists. And that whole realm is like… I don’t know what it opens you up to, but it’s much, much different experience. Now, some people will be like, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of chemicals in your brain. They all get mixed up. LSD just takes all of your pathways and they all go… They all get kind of scrambled up in your brain.”
And it’s just like, “Yeah, the experiences are profound.” I had some really bizarre, very cool, very awful… I’ve had all the experiences in them all. I can just tell you that I personally always say the same thing. It’s like, choices that I made I can never take back. I would never take that away from myself because I don’t know if I would be who I am today without all those experiences going up to it.
But if you have not had that experience, I’m on your team, or at least partially on your team, maybe more severely, I don’t think you need those experiences. I don’t think they’re going to… You don’t have to put yourself through that to make a good decisions or to realize that people have value, right? You don’t have to do that.
So as far as what is meth like? Meth is like… If you’ve ever done cocaine, cocaine starts off with like a 15-minute dance party. Just… It’s just so intense. It’s so great. And then it just followed up with like a five hour… just feeling wiggly, right? I don’t know how else to describe it. Meth is like that except for I didn’t get as much dance party or any dance party, but instead I just got that part for like 12 hours.
So is meth a thing that everybody’s going to enjoy? Well, categorically, as you can see, and just how people experience drug addiction, no. But for me it’s just I had a really… It kind of feeds into the ADHD nature of this… Because you know you’re kind of high energy, you’re like always in the moment. So it’s just like you’re in the moment, but it’s just like, “Oh, I’m in the moment!” Everything’s just so intense!
You just want to really be in the moment. And so it’s just experiencing that constantly. And so was that great? Well, some people… My wife always tells me this, being nervous or… I forget, the anxiety of a situation can also be the same thing as like thrill. I forget the exact way. She’s probably super disappointed that I messed this up.
But it’s like you could perceive those two experiences in very different lights. Some people get in front of a crowd and it’s thrilling. Some people get in front of it and it’s just the worst experience of their lifetime. They would actually literally rather die, which is a crazy thing to think about than stand up and speak.
And so for me, meth was that thrilling side, but at the same time, it still didn’t quite give me that thing I wanted, whatever I was looking for. I’d use it to help try to get that thing I want, but it was never giving me that thing I wanted.
So for me, I’m an introvert. I’m afraid of the world. Social interaction fills me with anxiety. Alcohol is definitely a thing that helps with that sometimes, but I think honestly it’s not even the alcohol, it’s having to do something while a person is talking to me. I could just drink a liquid. “Yeah. Mm-hmm.” There’s a social thing. With a beer, it’s like… “Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, we’re having fun.” And I think it’s…
For me, it works the same as… If the liquid actually looks like alcohol, it does the same purpose often because alcohol… If you have a whiskey or a beer looking thing, it kind of sends a signal that we should be having fun. So we’re socializing, right? We’re fucking getting crazy. And then that mean…
You don’t actually need the alcohol. You can get fucking crazy without the alcohol substance, but there is some kind of social signaling that happens when you have a drink in your hand. So I’ve been to get-togethers where I’m not drinking, but just doing a fake drink situation and I can also have fun. So I’ve been…
But that said, traveling across the world, there are times when you get to be able to down a bottle of vodka. That’s very essential for my line of work, but that’s almost like a cultural experience versus a necessary component of a successful social interaction and one that brings you happiness.
So not drinking… I think you can have fun and not drink too. So all of this… Man, I’m so careful saying drugs have had a good effect on my life because I think for most people, no, for majority of people, they will in the long term have a negative effect. So I think if you were to choose one or the other, just no drugs and no drinking means one day you can be the President of the United States kids. And I should say… Oh, man.
It’s like trying to find meaning in your job. You can find satisfaction in what you do. That is a very good thing. You can find satisfaction and be happy with what you’ve created. You can be thrilled by the experience, but you cannot find… I doubt you can find purpose. Maybe some people in specific jobs.
This obviously have very broad strokes, I’m painting with. Like if you’re an EMT and you save someone’s life, maybe there can be purpose in that whole experience, right? So I’m not saying all things, but as programming goes, most programmers, you cannot just simply find your purpose.
And same with drugs, you cannot find that thing you’re looking for, but they are a very great distraction. And then at some point that distraction comes with a heavy cost. I think Dr. Faust would probably know the best about the heavy cost, but it’s just you’re making one trade for another and at some point the bill comes due and that bill can be very, very large.
I was the only person out of 400 people to finish the Diffy Q final. And I got the highest grade. And so I was like… I got really good. So I somehow went from really bad to really good. And my only… The thing that I did is that I had to win. It was not a option. It was not like, “Oh, this would be really great.” It’s like, “I will not graduate, I will not finish my stuff if I cannot do this.”
And so every single day I got up, I went to my however many hour class it was. Right after that, I went straight to the math learning center, did those problems. When I got home, I just got the book and it had the odd answers in the back. And I would try to walk through the problems over and over and over and over again until I absolutely got it. And it just became this thing where it’s just I…
Just simple rote memory took over and the ability to just effectively have the times table, but for calculus, all stuck in my head. Inverse trig substitution, trig substitution, doing Taylor and MaClaurin series. All those things, just over and over and over and over again. Eventually they became easy. They became very easy. It’s just that I had to cram it in there.
And some people, you hear these stories, whether they barely show up to class and they get As, I’ve never been that person. I’ve always been the person that has to sit down, read through everything, and I’m bad at abstract concepts. I like the concrete into the abstract, not the abstract into the concrete. Very bad at talking about things theoretically, then trying to apply them. But if I can do it once literally, then it’s really easy for me to go into the abstract.
And so it’s just like… For me, it’s just I had… There’s no substitute for the hours. So if I were to give advice, it’s just that you have to have time in the saddle. Hour after hour will make you slowly better. And at first, it’s crushing. It’s defeating and it’s not fun because you are bad at it.
But then at some point you’re just not bad at it if you can just do it long enough, and you’ll start getting okay at it. And then at some point you might even get good at it. And when you get good at something, it feels amazing.
There’s like an exploratory thing. If you’ve ever played a musical instrument, you stop having to think about all the little teeny things you have to do to be able to play something correctly. And you start thinking about how you can explore that space.
And here’s the easy way. But no, you have to put in the hours. Musical instrument is a beautiful example of guitar and piano. I’ve put in, I don’t know how many thousands of hours. And now when I’m explaining stuff jiu-jitsu as well, I sound like one of those people just relax in jiu-jitsu. By the way, just relax is a really wonderful thing for physical endeavors like piano and so on. But to learn how to relax your hand, how to relax your mind, your body and use whatever the biomechanics of your body to apply the correct kind of leverage and the timing and all that, that takes thousands of hours of learning. Just to learn how to relax takes a lot of really hard work. In jiu-jitsu that takes many months of getting your ass beat over and over until you ride the bus home crying.
Your ego completely shattered and destroyed. And then a little element is figured out late that night or next morning. And from the depression, there’s this little plant that grows this flower of insight. And you use that insight to then get your ass kicked again all next month and year. And then you grow and grow and grow. And from that you discover how beautifully simple jiu-jitsu is or Judo is, just speaking for myself, or piano or guitar. And then yes, the profound truth or the mastery of a skill feels simple when you finally arrive to it, but the path for most people is going to be a hard one.
Me as I grew up and did my own startup, I did a startup where was text message marketing. This was in 2010 where you could receive, say texts about various deals, all that kind of stuff. And of course, 10 years later now you don’t stop receiving texts and text message marketing is all the rage. And so I also, much like my father had a startup in the telemarketing space in which was just like a half decade too early.
But then after that, obviously had to get a real job. We were living in an apartment right next to campus, Bozeman, Montana. And the guy below us must’ve been on some amount of drugs. He threatened to kill us several times, would just scream and just lose his marbles all the time. Very unhinged man, angry downstairs man is what we call him. One time my wife dropped a battery, double A. Okay, so we’re not talking about a B battery or D battery. We’re just talking about a double A, drop it pa, land on the ground, “I’m going to kill you.” Like crazy, absolutely unhinged behavior down there. So I had to go get a real job, we needed to move out of there. We were going to start our life.
And so I worked at a small place [inaudible 01:16:38], which I kind of talked about the boredom there. Got to go to a place called WebFilings where I’m working just tons and tons of hours. During all that time I’m still trying to figure out startups. Did one where you could pre-wish your friend’s birthday messages, and then it would automatically send it via Facebook beforehand. We called it Greet Feed. It was pretty clever. Nonetheless, I say all that story because everything that I was doing was exploring, building, finishing things, working, learning about corporate life, learning how to communicate in corporate life, being able to be successful at a job, learning about a bunch of technologies that we’re about.
And one of the big technologies during that day, specifically 2013 was RXJS, if you remember that one, RxJS, that’s a link from C# kind of ported over to JavaScript.
And she might remember this but I said, ” We now have to make a decision. Are we actually going to move to California or not?” Because I already knew I had the job at that point. I was just knocking them out of the park. I was doing a great job on that. And so I just knew for a fact, I’m getting a job at Netflix. There’s this thing that people always get so freaked out about when it comes to interviews and all that. And I luckily somehow avoided this. I don’t get test anxiety, I don’t get any of that because when I go into these situations, my only goal is to show the things I already know. And so it’s like I walked into this situation, I’ve been preparing for this 80 hours a week for the last five years. So just walk in and I’m just showing the things I know.
And it was perfectly fitting for Netflix at that time period in the 2013, early JavaScript days on television. And so it was just awesome, just worked out perfectly. Got hired there.
One thing I can say that’s really positive about the valley is that everybody is operating on this idea of trying to build or create something, and there’s an energy to it that’s very exciting. You meet somebody and they have a startup and they’re working on the startup. And it’s very exciting. And there’s a lot of negative aspects to that, and we can all agree that our entire life being commercialized has probably not been that great. But the kind of the experience of being there and everyone’s excited to build something, it’s a really cool experience.
So it’s like I’m leaving a place where it’s more secure to go to a place I don’t know anybody, to a job that’s bold in its claims about firing everybody with a wife that’s just about to have a baby. And I’m from Montana and every Montanan’s born with a natural dislike of California. So there’s all these things kind of flowing into it where it’s just going to be like, wow, this is a very intense experience. And it was hard for sure. It wasn’t just some easy simple experience that we were just like, oh, well, I work now at Fang. We had to kind of work through that. Having a kid was very difficult. Our first kid was very difficult. Not having any family around to ever help you took a much larger toll on my wife than me, for sure.
So all I did was go like observable.sleep one because I just wanted to see it sleep and then do the next thing. And it turns out when a thread sleeps itself, no thread can wake it up. And I just turned off all of staging because I ran it like 10 times. Like, oh, it’s not responding. Oh, it’s not responding. Oh, now it’s not even coming back. Broke all of staging for everybody. So no developer could work for the rest of the afternoon because I locked up all the instances because it turns out no, it was in fact not multi-threaded. Every assumption we’ve been told is a lie. No one had any idea what they were doing. It was a wild time. And so I just simply naturally gravitated towards that because I’m good at print off debugging. I’m good at doing those things.
So I was like, yeah, I’ll just figure this out here. I will do this. So I had the rewrite how we do the data structure on the front end for the TV from what is called a LoLoMo, list of list of movies into LoLoRoMo, which is a list of list of recommendation objects for movie. Why would we need to do that? Think about this. You have two lists, one has Live Free Die Hard, Bruce Willis because you love Bruce Willis. The other one has Live Free Die Hard because you want tough men doing tough jobs. Well, during those days we’d only have one way we could show evidence why you wanted it. So we couldn’t say, “Oh, because you liked this other movie.” You’d go to that one and say the same thing. So we had to add one level of indirection where we could decorate the video with the recommendation information.
Obviously I’m not a game developer, probably a different world probably should use… I think John Carmack was on here and talked to how great the debugger is, different world. Because when I was at Netflix, there’s machines that exist somewhere on AWS, I’m not logged into them. I don’t even know how to log into them. I’m not even sure if I have credentials to log into them. They run once somewhere and I have to figure out what happened and why it’s happening. So it’s like I’m going to become… This is what I’ve trained for. I’m a print off debugging champion. So it’s just like I could just run through these things really quickly and figure out why they’re happening the way they’re happening.
It’s a much more important skillset to understand, to learn from the mistakes and the wisdom of the past, of the ancestors that came before and build on them as opposed to throw it all out and start from scratch. This is something obviously you see a lot with a JavaScript framework that comes out and you won every single day.
So I had to figure all that out based on what someone’s requesting, and then just only optimally request the stuff that we don’t have. He wrote in such a goofy way and I’m thinking, man, this guy is just… What a goofball. So I delete it all and I start writing and I’m like, look at how much nicer this is. It’s looking so good. I’m like, Ooh, there’s that one edge case. Okay, I can see why he wrote it this one way. That’s not a big deal though. The rest of my code’s really great. By the end of it, I’m like, I literally almost line for line just reproduced what he already wrote. It’s slightly different towards my style, but I just wrote the same code. I’m like, I’m an idiot.
I am the idiot in this situation because it was already a solved problem. I just didn’t take the time to learn what he did. Instead, I relearned what he did by rewriting the entire thing.
Anyways, and had the right to fix for it or the first fix. So this is how it works, is that you can do something pretty similar, I believe with GraphQL as well. It has the same kind of danger. Any of these kinds of RPC request as much or as little of the data as you would like frameworks, are vulnerable to this kind of attack. So with Falcor, what you do is you give it an array. That’s an array is called a path, and that’s the path to the data. But sometimes you don’t want to have to write out, I want movie, I want row zero or list zero or row zero column zero title. I want row zero column zero description. You don’t want to have to write out all that.
So instead you could just be like, I want rows zero through 10, columns zero through 10, titles and descriptions. So you can write in a very compact, nice little format and it’ll give you all that data. It’ll go to the server. The server will fill that all in and give it to you. Oh, dang it, list three, it only had three videos in it. So what happens when I try-
Well, I’m about to go create billions of objects in the JVM, and what happens to the machine? It stops running. And then if we try to JSON… Even if it could create a mall, we then ask it that JSON serialize, it’s not going to do it. It’s impossible. And so that was the attack vector, is a simple wild loop would’ve taken down and held down Netflix for a very long time. Because one request would kill one machine on AWS. And so that means it would just turn it all off. And this was on the website? This was on TV, this was on mobile. This was profound. And here’s the worst part, it was in production for years so we couldn’t even roll it back. There was no like, “Oh crap, let’s just roll back to two weeks ago and we’ll fix forward and figure out.” No, it’s like we could roll back to 2011. That’s our option is 2011 and that’s it. So we had to figure out a way forward and all that. And so it was like… The amount of problems that would’ve happened if someone would’ve discovered this is unstatable.
But DoS is a bit different, because it doesn’t have to be overwhelming by using resources with a whole bunch of requests. It really just means simply that there’s a denial of service attack. One of them could be there’s a RegEx attack that existed where CloudFlare actually did it to itself and shut itself down, which is there’s a RegEx expansion attack where given the right RegEx, if you know someone’s running a specific RegEx, you can actually provide input that is maximally bad and that thing goes to super processing. It takes 10 seconds to process a single request, then you only need to make hundreds of requests and you shut down the whole service. It’s not like you need some giant machinery to make one trillion requests. You only need just some small amount to completely destroy a service. And so there’s… The web is an extremely difficult place to do it correct.
This is like a standard. So there’s all these ways people hack. And so my assumption is that there are really great white hat hackers, there’s really great black hat hackers. But the vulnerability space, the harp, the thing is that discovering a vulnerability and you don’t let anyone know, the white hat hacker still has to make that same discovery. And that’s where I think the real thing is that black hat hacking in some sense has a fundamentally easier job or at least a job in which they can take advantage of for much longer periods of time. One’s the process of discovering who’s breaking the system. The other one’s trying to figure out how to break the system. And it seems like most software is held together by toothpicks and glue and there is a lot of dangers in every piece.
There’s all these products that are going to be vulnerable to things they never thought about. It’s one thing where you forget an edge case while you’re programming. Now you have to guess what people might be able to think of making something that has access to a system be able to do. Right. And you don’t have a way to reason about it. Its reasoning came from Reddit, and other words that it’s read and how to put things together. This is a very… It’s a massive space that’s going to be happening. It’s why I’m personally thinking don’t give too many powers yet. We don’t know the attacks that are about to happen.
I just made a whole conundrum with that. So that was one time I did it. Another time is I took down, if you were on the homepage on the website waiting for Lady Gaga’s video to come out and you were watching the countdown go down, if it reached zero, the billboard would freeze and it wouldn’t work. If you refreshed it, it would work. But the reveal, the big reveal, I screwed that up and my boss got real upset and so did other people in Hollywood got upset about that one. That was like a, “My bad. Sorry, Jeff Wagner, again.” I remember that one. I remember that one specifically. One time I released a bug where again on the billboard, if you pressed add to my list, I accidentally programmed in an infinite loop, and your whole webpage would just freeze.
I think those all go into how you can do that. Because not all applications are created equal either. That application I was making was zooming and scrolling where we had all of our own everything. It was a very deep heavy logic app, and that was regardless of what was happening on the website, most of the code was library code. And that becomes way harder if you don’t have a good test suite and stuff to run before you push it out. Because when you squeeze that ball, different things come popping out in different areas. And that’s a very harder problem than say if you’re doing more of a heavy visual one because a heavy visual one, you’re affecting just this one area’s visual stuff and you can test it and that’s normally the end of it.
Whereas, you know… So it depends on the coupling and everything. So I love his approach by the way. I have such mad respect for anyone that operates that way because I think is a great way, it just is so good because it breaks this notion that tech Twitter has that oh well you have to use all these expensive services, you need to use all these things because if you don’t use all this stuff, “If you’re not using the latest version of React, if you’re not using the latest version of this, you’re simply not going to make it as a startup. It’s impossible.” And it’s just like, “No, no, that’s not software.” Most of software isn’t the new stuff. Most of software is old crappy software that someone has to maintain, and it actually is really, really great and has lots of really hard problems. And if you look at it differently, it’s actually fantastic.
They all add up and they all add inefficiencies to the system. So something like YouTube, they want to be able to serve that data as quick as possible, but their data changes constantly and relevance is almost directly tied with the newness of the item. So it’s like how do you even cache these things out? How are you doing this? So they must have such an incredible caching network that I can’t even… I can’t even fathom what it takes to do that. That just to me is just so impressive. A million view hours in how many different resolutions with how much data? What is a million view hours? Is it 4K million view hours, along with 1080p, along with 720p, along with 1440p? That number is an insane number.
In the case of the Chelsea Handler Show, it was like a daily show, so it’s like you don don’t need episode numbers, you just need the latest one. And so there’s this whole problem that exists. And so it’s like, “Okay, you need to work on that for your UI over there, then you need to be able to store that data. Then we need to be able to go to the people that can actually get the video data out of that and provide it to our service layer. I need to go talk to them and convince them they need to be able to give me the new methods and everything to do that. Then I need to be able to go write the methods to get it down, and then I need to go to the UI and make that accessible. Now I need to go to the website people, I need to go to the mobile people, I need to go to the TV people.”
I’d go to the BMS team, “Okay, I need this engineer.” I’d go to the billboard team, “I need this engineer.” I go to all these little places to get all these little pieces of data. And then I was the captain, I was like, “You’re working on this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, I’m doing this. Let’s go.” It’s like that worked. And we were able to go pretty fast for a big company. And the fact that it required 20 engineers to do such a simple task, we were able to do it in, gosh, I’d say about three weeks worth of effort. But that was still… I thought that was amazing, comparatively, to how many people move.
And he was just like, “Hey, come do this. We’re going to all do this.” So I played Fortnite. So before I did that, I was like, oh, I better learn how to stream first. I better get affiliated so I can take subscriptions. And then if anyone gives me a subscription, I’ll also pay that forward. So June 2018 or something like that, I start, I start streaming and I start streaming some Fortnite. End up getting affiliated, end up doing the whole extra life thing. I end up really enjoying it. I’m like, “This is a lot of fun.” I’m playing Fortnite at that point. Okay, so mind you, I’m a Fortnite streamer at that point, and I start really enjoying it. I keep doing it and then one day I decide I’m going to do some programming. Because I really love Vim and I think I’m fast at Vim, and maybe people think programming is cool. Because there was no really programming section at that point.
And I did it. I had like 30 people show up, which was just… And it felt like incredible numbers at that point. So I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s like 30 people watching me program.” So it just kept on going and it kept on happening and it just kept on growing. And I did it for year after year. I would do my job, I would come home, I’d eat dinner with the kiddos, I would read them Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit during that time, I’d read to them for a half an hour, then I’d set that down. And then three nights a week I would program until like 2:00 in the morning or play video games until 2:00 in the morning streaming and building up this whole side thing. And I did this for a long, long time, and then eventually it just kept working out so well and I started making YouTube videos. And then that started getting better. And it was just a long, long grind until April of last year.
I went to the Streamer Awards and I got to announce the programming category and Pirate SoftwareOne. It was awesome. It was a great time. And during that time he gave me a challenge coin and just said, “You just got to go for it. Just go full time.” And so I just sat there and my wife can attest to it. It was like an emotional turmoil thing and it just took a lot of, it was pretty awful because Netflix is very safe option. It was both very fun. It was challenging. I liked a lot of the people worked with, it was overall a really great thing. I had a really great boss, really appreciated him. I still have text him now and then he’s really great guy. So it’s just like I’m leaving all these things for something that’s unsure. And the reality is that streaming and all these things, people love you one day, they could hate you the next day. There’s all this stuff that goes into being on the public side.
And I had Netflix as the backing, so it’s like if public hated me the next day I’d be like, deuces, I’m out. I don’t care now it’s like, now I’m going to do this as a job. And so there’s a whole huge turmoil to this whole thing that went through it. And eventually I just said, okay, I’m going to make this. It resonated with me when I first made the decision to join Netflix. I’m getting older. There’s not a lot of chances to do something unusual. Those chances go down constantly. As you get older, this might be the last crazy thing I get to do. Let’s just try it. So in April I went full-time and I guess I haven’t looked back. I’m only not even a year into doing this as a full-time gig. And it’s just been a lot of fun. And the biggest thing is just being able to really explore and do these things on stream where people really enjoy watching and engaging. It’s been a great, hard, fun, amazing, difficult experience.
I remember just how bad the tech world had kind of become. It was just like this super pretentious place, tons of dick measuring, just everything that just was the worst. Ken Wheeler got canceled over playing the Circle game. It was just like, it is so hard to describe to people that weren’t there, but it was just the worst place to be. Tech was extremely unfun. It was extremely awful. Everything was just so, it wasn’t academic because it was research. It was like we’re building the most sophisticated things, and this is for the smart people and everyone else is the dumb people. Don’t worry. We’ll design for you, dummy. We’ll show you how to make the perfect architecture. And I remember changing my Twitter handle because I got so upset and just went back to my video game name. I was like, I want things to be fun.
I want this to stop. And so when I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was, because it includes nobody. Everyone thinks that they’re the smart people and they design for the dummies. And it’s just like, no, I want tech to be this place where people feel like they can be creative, and excited, and actually build something. And if you’re new, it’s okay to be dumb and ask dumb questions. Learn from your dumbness. No one’s expecting you to be smart. Pick whatever you want. Actually do something and have fun and build your crazy ideas. Oh, you’re going to reinvent the wheel, reinvent the wheel, understand what you’re doing, learn it really good, and interact and stuff. And it was just so different than what was out there. And the name… Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about this thing where, when he first started acting, his name was the thing that people hated.
As he once said, you have a strange voice, you have a strange body, and your name, your name’s unpronounceable. No one’s going to Schneitzinfinitzel, no one’s going to remember that. And he said, but now the name is the strong part. And for me, I’ve always felt akin to that, though my name’s not nearly as cool, nor am I as popular as Arnold, nor am I as tough or good-looking or successful. But nonetheless, it’s just the name represented this counterculture movement within myself, in which I just hated what was there and I wanted to defeat it. And so this has been the thing. And now people remember me so well because of how weird my name is. And so it’s just like for whatever reason, it became its own thing. And so that’s the… Now I would never change it, and back then I would never change it because it was my rage against the machine moment, if you will.
This is the fun times. And so all of a sudden it was just exciting to have a mustache. And I shaved it off and I was like, oh, okay. But then part of me is like there’s this weird energy that comes from just having a mustache. So I was like, I’m going back. Told my wife, forgive her. She was very not as thrilled about my decisions to have a mustache long-term, but I just decided to have it back and it was the right thing. It’s always been the energy that I had was the mustache. It was always been there. It just never was visible until later on it feels like.
But on top of it, I find that, by doing that, you also fall into traps. You kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience. And so you don’t have what makes that language special. You have what all the other languages make special. And so you end up not really being able to use it very effectively, but you can certainly kind of learn it and get kind of good at it. And so the second approach I’ve been doing lately, and this has been inspired by the creator of Ghosty, Mitchell Hashimoto, is to just start by reading the language reference, the whole thing. And so lately I’ve been just kind of going through and just reading the entire manual for these languages. Like Zig, I’m almost done with that one. It’s like eight to 10 hours of just sitting down reading, and I’ll whip out my computer and kind of practice a couple of the things from the actual docs, and that way I can learn all the things.
So then when I start building again, I’ll remember, okay, I know there’s a thing over here, let me go reread about it because now I have it indexed in my brain somewhere that will remember. And so I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way. I mean at the end of the day, the right way is always that you have to build something eventually. You cannot just read about it. You have to put your hands on the keyboard, you have to build something out. And then once you do that, that’s where you really discover what makes it painful or what makes it great. And if you don’t have the breadth of what the language offers, you just may make it painful by simply being bad at it.
You can just use a calculator. You can just do all that. I remember I just was sitting on the airplane and I watched someone do the world’s most simple addition and subtraction like 10 times on their phone. And why are you not just… You should already know, you should be able to do these things. And I realized that we kind of offload our brains, right? Oh, I don’t need to know these things because I can look them up. And that’s not a bad answer in some sense. I can understand that. I don’t need them to remember every last thing, but then it also makes me realize that you kind of develop this learned helplessness, that a new error comes up. I’ll just ask the AI.
AI says, oh, okay, I got to fix this line. I fix the line. You didn’t actually learn anything. You kind of just used it as a quick means to get something out and move on. And so you sacrifice knowledge for speed, which is a great thing in some… We have to make those trade-offs all the time in engineering. Sometimes you have to move fast at the sacrifice of knowledge, and I’m totally on board for that, but I worry that what we’ll create is an entire generation of incompetent programmers who can do some amount of things well, but anything that is unique, bespoke, or requires some extra like little elbow grease, might become very difficult. It might cause a whole chasm where juniors remain juniors forever.
And I don’t want to see that. I want to see people grow. I want to see people actually be able to take this as a craftsmanship thing. And so that’s both my hope and my worry is that AI think can do both really. If you could ask whatever question you want and you don’t have to rely on, say, a book to give you that exact answer. And if the book just said it wrong and you can’t understand it, it’s just like, sorry, you don’t get to learn what this is. Like recursion for me, I spent way too much time until someone gave me the right problem to understand recursion. You could imagine AI could have solved that for me way faster because it could have gave me the right problem and walked me through much better. But what happened if I just always have recursion solved by them and not actually learn it myself?
But I think as a first step of learning how to program, it’s pretty nice to generate a function, to generate for loops and all that kind of stuff, and then just fuck with the different lines and modify them to try to adjust the behavior of the program, and from the way the behavior of the program adjusts or bugs are created, you learn about the syntax of the language, the behavior of the language, all that kind of stuff. So I think it’s a super powerful way to learn. But yeah, you need to also write from scratch.
You can write a quick backend in it. Now you’re starting to get familiar with programming a little bit. I can save this to a database. I can bring it down. I can put it on a screen and I can animate it all around, and I can even put it on a canvas and render it in 2D or 3D. So it’s like there’s so much variety of what you can do with JavaScript. It’s a great way to get introduced into programming. But then at some point you have to go, okay, I now need to learn more about this whole thing.
But somewhere in the middle lies Zig. Zig has optionals. If you’re not familiar with optionals, that just simply means there’s a value here or there’s not, but you first have to check that before you can use it. So it prevents that whole null pointer dereferencing segfault problem. And that’s not available in C, just by default, you have to kind of build that thing in. It is the only option in Rust, but Zig says, “Hey, if you have a pointer, you can’t express it as null unless if you market that it can be null.”
There’s ways around it, there’s other types of pointers and stuff like that that can do that. But for the most part, Zig will give you safety for the most part. So it’s like a little bit of safety, but more like C. So it kind of gives you everything you want in that region where you can express safe code and unsafe code. It’s very easy to write. It’s very pretty. Or at least the idea behind it is very pretty. The language itself is bland, but.
So it’s not a garbage collector, which will do it sometime later. It’s not like C where you have to call it yourself, it’s somewhere in between. Now, there’s a lot of strategies people use, arenas and all that that make that C part much easier. I’m just not even mentioning it, but it just makes it a lot easier. But Rust does that really beautifully and it’s just like a really cool idea about it and I really like that. And the second thing that I think Rust does really, is such a good thing is that mutability of something is you have to specify it. So you don’t just create a variable and then mutate it. You have to say this is not only a variable, it’s a mutable variable. And I think that just makes code really readable and really understandable. Because anything that does not have the word mute next to it, you know for a fact it cannot change. There’s some rules around that, but you get the general idea.
So you’ve also spoken about metaprogramming. Which of these languages do you like for the metaprogramming? I love metaprogramming in C++, but it’s a giant mess. At least when I program C++ 17 standard, I believe, it’s just a mess, especially a mess to debug.
So you can create the list of prime numbers at compile time in Zig, which is kind of an interesting, unique thing. So you have code that executes at compile time and then you can take advantage of the result of it at runtime. So neat, right? That’s how I’d look at it. But again, I haven’t used it to the point where I feel like I can super authoritatively talk about it.
So if you’re unfamiliar with Berkeley sockets, it’s like the old way of doing it, it’s how you do it in C. So you have to kind of go through the whole nine yards of creating your own connection. I had to create my own connection, I have to read from the socket, then I have to parse out all the IRC, right? You have to kind of build it from scratch. There’s not like a new TCP connection to this server. You have to be like, “I’m creating a socket.” You’re going to be of the IPv4 family and TCP and you’re going to do, you know, I’m going to now have to take your address and go look up your address with DNS, get that address back and then connect to a TCP. So it’s a lot more manual still. It’s a lot more raw in that area, but it’s fun.
But the fun part was I used a bunch of fun encoding techniques. I used quad trees to be able to take smaller amounts to use run length in coding. Tried to create my own compression algorithm because if you’re sending out a bunch of ASCII stuff, it’s still pretty expensive because you have to represent color, color’s not cheap. On top of it you have to represent what does it look like? What does the ASCII look like?
Well, I realized there’s all these fun techniques you can do for compression like the shape of the ASCII you send down in a lot of these engines are actually just proportional to the lumosity of that pixel. So you’d use an eight to represent or a pound sign to represent white, but black, you’re going to want to do a period or a comma or a bar, something smaller. So it’s like I then developed all these different compression algorithms that turn a bunch of data, which would take, I forget how much it would take. It’d take gigabytes upon gigabytes to be able to send out to thousands of people to all see the same image at the same time, to all be able to interact with Doom at the same time. I turned it from gigabytes into kilobytes by just trying to figure out how to make it as small as possible and send it all out. It was super fun. Absolutely had a great time.
So every time you’re making jokes, you’re making jokes that are in the ether. Twitter kind of has that too. Tech Twitter kind of has a set of jokes and so you can kind of see it. The problem with Twitter chat is that there’s just nobody there right now. Typically just to put it into perspective, I have somewhere between… somewhere between like 1,500 to 3,000 people on Twitch, somewhere between 800 to 2,000 on YouTube, and like 50 people on Twitter. So the difference is massive.
But Twitter has that same thing that’s developing where there’s memes that are constantly flowing through it. And so they’re very highly connected. YouTube just doesn’t seem to have that. They’re just a bunch of people and people go to YouTube for various reasons. I’m going to YouTube to learn. So they come in and they want to learn. So they’re not on the meme train, they’re not in this cultural zeitgeist train. They’re just like, “But why would you use this if statement when a switch statement in this one particular case?” And you’re just like, well that’s not what I’m trying to do here.
There’s a point in which all of your choices add up. And I typically find that right around 5 to 10,000 lines of code. The choices you’ve made either weigh you down or kind of free you up. And so it’s right in that, that I feel like I learned the most is because I love getting to that point in a project or in some small part of the code base because at that point I get to test, A, how good were my initial gut decisions about how I designed the software, but B, now I need to go back and think about how am I going to do testing across this in a more effective way? How can I scale this out to 20,000 lines of code? How can I do all these things with what I’ve got or do I need to kind of rethink it?
And I find that that’s really where the best learning happens is that everybody has probably a different number that exists, and as you go to each one of these numbers or how well or holistic you want your project to be, I think that you’ll come up with different numbers. And I think that number should just get bigger as you get more experienced. Because there’s projects that are a million lines of code, but they’re most certainly not holistic, right? Every part of the code base is some age at some capsule of time with some sort of programming style. Some is more functional, more class-based, more, God help your soul if it’s pre-processor macros in C++. There’s all these different kind of things you’ll find throughout time.
And so that’s why I try to think about it as the feature or the thing you’re working on. It’s usually about 5,000 lines is where I find that things get kind of, did I make good or bad decisions? And that’s where I do all my learning is right on that phase. I’m trying to get it to the point where I should be able to shoot from the hip and do 20,000 lines and not be upset about it.
So I saw that and I was like, I’m curious about how to use asserts more. And then I ran into a person named Joran. He’s the CEO and creator of TigerBeetle. It’s like the world’s fastest, greatest financial database. And it was spawned out of a company that needed to do a bunch of financial transactions. And it’s written in Zig and what they do is they do deterministic simulation testing and they just use NASA’s kind of guarantee for creating really great software. So don’t use U size, specify your exact size of int you expect everywhere. All these kind of things they do to be very specific.
And one of them is that every function should contain two asserts. Whether it’s positive space like these things should happen or negative space, like this pointer should never be null. You’re programming into things that should never happen. Normally, you would just never specify that. You’d never think about that. So every single function everywhere has all these asserts and these asserts run both in production and in testing. They’re always on.
And then they take deterministic simulation testing and run like 200 years of just random data, just complete slop going through the system and seeing how far it goes. And when an assert happens, they’re like, here’s the input that caused it, here’s every last little bit that happened, and now you can identify where this went wrong. And it was so cool. So between you, John Carmack and Joran, that’s where I got like, okay, I got to really… And NASA, I’ll throw NASA a bone as well. NASA can join in on that one.
I was like, okay, I want to try this. And I did try it. I built this big reverse proxy for me trying to do some game development stuff. And I just went ham on the asserts. And then I built the whole simulation testing thing that could do everything deterministically. So even the result of requests would all come in specific orders. And I found a bunch of bugs that I just would never have found. And then I did it for a game I was making. I found some bugs where my cursor went off-screen, it would cause all these different problems because I just never tested them. And it’s super fun and it’s like a really great way to program.
This is one of the things, I think it was Jonathan Blow that either in conversation with you or was it in a presentation, he said that when he’s starting in a project, he usually doesn’t know how to implement it, how it’s going to work. And I think he was saying that he wants a programming language. This might have been a criticism of C++, I’m not sure, where he wants a programming language that makes it as painless as possible for him to not know what he’s doing, how he’s going to implement it, and to quickly get to a place where he figures it out.
I think there’s a fundamental part of programming is building stuff while not really knowing what the next thing you’re doing is. You kind of have a loose design, maybe a strict design, but really you’re solving puzzles that are not… It is a dark room in a fundamental sense. And there you have to anticipate the kind of weirdnesses that might emerge while not really knowing everything. Just this full fog, fog of war. And there that’s a real skill to anticipate the kind of issues that might arise and put a asserts on top of them.
And it’s also like spiritually, for me, been a really nice way of programming a building of living life as having very strict asserts that say, “You’re going to fix this problem if it ever arises. You can’t just look the other way.” This idea of treating warnings as errors. Make sure your code compiles without any warnings. That was a big leap for me. It’s like, but there’s so many of them and it’s not really that important. It’s like, no, no, no warnings. Make sure you treat every single problem, even fuzzy problems seriously, because that’s actually long-term is going to create code that’s much easier to work with, much more fun to work with, much more robust, resilient to all kinds of weirdnesses, all that kind of stuff.
So it’s a different way of approaching coding, probably more NASA-like versus web programming style. But yeah, it has made programming for me personally, much more fun because one of the most painful things about programming is creating when you get past 10,000, 20,000 lines of code and you have to find a bug. And that bug can take hours, it could take days to find, and that’s torture.
So I love that. I just love the asserts because I’m not good at them, I can see it’s definitely a skill that I don’t put into practice constantly, which means it’s just not like a muscle memory type thing. And so it’s just one of those things I just love. It’s such a fascinating way to approach a problem, because I would’ve never thought, you know what I’m going to do? If I’m wrong, I’m going to crash this thing and I’m going to crash it right here because I should never be wrong. But instead you’re like, “Oh, actually that makes perfect sense. I should crash this thing. I’ve done something terribly wrong here. Why would this ever exist?” And then you’re like, “This is going to solve a whole class of problems.”
And so there’s an aspect of maturity that really helps, no matter what, I will do the thing I’m going to do and I’m going to do it well and maybe it takes me a lot longer and that’s okay. That’s not the point of it. It’s that I’m doing it and that’s the point. And so that’s one thing that I think just generally helps. And ADHD, no ADHD, the resilience, emotional resilience is just a really important aspect that just helps. And so I think that has been a large part that really helps me.
There’s things that I still obviously struggle with. It’s clear where I’m really bad at stuff, and just trying to think through all the different things that I’m bad at. There’s more things I’m bad at than I’m good at. And so programming obviously has something that just allows me to remain focused and it’s like a strength of mine. And so I started off where I could just do it for a little bit and then just through kind of that emotional resilience, I was able to start doing it more and more. And so now I can just do it for like 10, 12, 15 hours at a time and I absolutely love it. And so it’s become kind of like a joy. It’s like playing a musical instrument. I’m really into it.
But then if it came down to, “Hey, you need to go schedule your own dentistry and go do all these other things or make sure the kids have this type of stuff ready for the meals you need to pack throughout the week.” I’m historically very bad at that and will probably continue to be very bad at that. And so I must say that one of the reasons why I excel so much is because I also have a wife who is so good to me and she helps clear out a lot of the things in my life that cause a lot of me kind of getting snowballed into a weird spot where I’m just distracted getting nothing done. And so she’s really helped me.
So it would be foolish of me to claim that I’ve defeated the ADHD by myself, but instead I find that the places that I can really control I’ve done a very good job at, and the things that I obviously need to do much better at, my wife has helped me a whole bunch. And so I’ve kind of cheated. Maybe I found a cheat code, a loving wife. But that has been the thing that has really helped.
It’s a skill. I didn’t realize how much of a skill listening to an audiobook is, especially when there’s other sensory inputs when you run. So I have to force myself to really pay attention to every single word. And if I don’t, like tune out and don’t remember what I just listened to in the past 30 seconds, I force myself to re-listen to it. And sometimes that means five times until, it’s like punishing myself to like, “You’re going to listen to this boring shit over and over until you get good at that little skill of like zoom in.” And you’re like, yeah, there’s people, they’re doing stuff, there’s nature, it doesn’t matter…
Like I can be just on an airplane and I can just program for hours. I don’t have to look up a single thing. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t even have to test the code. I can write 1,000 lines of code on an airplane and I’m very confident that it’s going to be 98% pretty dang good. And I’m very happy about that because that allows me just to be in the moment solving the problem I’m trying to solve. Then I have 100% of my brain power solving a problem. And this is why I also… It’s the same reason why I recommend learning how to type and learning your editor so well you don’t even have to think about the action because the people that have to… Even if you just look down, that’s still mental processing power you have to spend looking at a keyboard in which you already know where the key is. You do. At this point, if you’ve been typing for thousands of hours, you know where the key is, just stop looking down, you’ll learn really quickly.
And so it’s like this thing where it’s like, “I’m not going to spend all that time and all that mental effort looking up the thing. I’m going to just memorize… I’m just going to get it in me, and then I can go fast.” And it feels good. And so that’s how I’d kind of defeat that is because now I get to do something where it’s like there’s no more questions. It’s now me just expressing myself into this medium and it feels really good.
I don’t want a perfect editor because that is a pursuit that will never stop. I just go, “This is good, good breakpoint, I won’t do it again.” So, last month I probably spent a hundred hours just editing every possible thing I could about how I start up my system and make… I can have a computer from zero to 60 in almost no time now everything the way I exactly want it, Neovim and everything all perfectly set up. Happy enough, I’m not going to touch that system again. Maybe I’ll touch it next year. Maybe I’ll take a year off. It’s just I’m fine with that. I’m fine with not being perfect.
When I used to have Slack, it was alt-five. If I have a spare terminal where I need to run some extra things, that’s alt-four. I had all these kind of… Everything is perfectly mapped out to single-key. And then when it comes down to using, say, Tmux, I have all my terminals into one single terminal. And now I’m able to kind of switch between there. Prefix one goes to my Vim editor. Whatever project I’m in, it’s always the first Tmux tab, if you will. I’m not sure… They call it a session, but I’m not sure how to describe it if you’re not familiar with Tmux. A tab. Second one is like my spare terminal, third one is my long-running process terminal, my fourth one is a long-running process terminal. So, I have it all set up, so every project I go to automatically spawns session one: Vim, session two: spare terminal, session three will also open it, so it’s like everything’s just ready to rock.
Everything has been optimized to where I do that. If I want to go to a project, it’s ctrl-F, and any terminal will bring up a fuzzy find list of every one of my folders on my operating system in which I can go to with just a couple keystrokes and, boom, I’m in that one now. And so it’s very oriented to find where I need to be as quickly as possible.
Sometimes you work between two different projects, so in Tmux that’s prefix, capital L will swap between your last two. So, I have alternate projects, so I can even swap between projects in pretty much one key. So, it’s just like do-do-do, just trying to optimize it, so I don’t think as much, because I think search fatigue is a massive fail where you have to look for it. When I see people on a Mac do this and then explode all the different ones, that gives me anxiety. I’m like, “Why are you using your eyeballs to search for what you want to do?” Make it into a key press and never think about it again, ever.
This is more for like articles and especially with visual information in them or documentation, you can just jump faster. But I’m trying to… As you were speaking so eloquently, I was like wondering, “Am I just like deceiving myself that I need that? Can I just keyboard shortcut-ify everything and just have everything on one monitor?” That’s something I should probably try because I’m a big proponent of just automating everything with the keyboard because you can just move really, really fast, and you don’t have to think. Because I also do creative stuff, whether it’s recording music or video editing. It’s hard… Some of these programs still make it super easy for you. On Windows, with AutoHotkey you can do quite a lot, but still there’s limitations on how much you can do with the keyboard. So, it really is a pain in the to have to use the mouse, but, man, you’re really making me think.
So, I’m not exactly sure if I actually get any real benefit of having a lot of stuff on screen, as opposed to I can relax my eyes so much I don’t even have to focus. The words are so big. I actually program pretty zoomed in. My text is bigger than this when I program, and so it’s just that it’s so comfortable, I don’t even have to exert any effort to read the code.
A good example, say you have three lines of code you want to delete. If you’re in VS Code, take your little beautiful mouse, highlight those things, press the backspace. That’s lovely. Your hand left the keyboard. Very simple to do though. It’s very beginner friendly. I was a huge Vim hater, by the way, so I just want you to know that before we go into this. I was probably the biggest Vim hater. If there was Saul to Apostle Paul, I am like the Saul to Apostle Paul of Vim, just so you can see how big the gap was. Or you can do something that’s like… I don’t know what the VS Code shortcut is, but I’m sure there’s some keys you can press to delete the current line you’re on. Delete, delete, delete, you can just do that. In Vim, I can go DAP, delete around paragraph. All contiguous code in that thing. I’m going to delete, so D, then I can choose my motion I want to take, AP, around paragraph. Or maybe I want to DF, meaning jump up to the next character that matches the next character I’m going to press.
So, DF opening parenthesis will delete everything from your cursor up to the first opening parenthesis. So, you get to describe your motion in these little keystrokes. And as you get really good… You’ve seen people that can master Fortnite, it’s the same thing with mastering Vim motions. When you get so good, you no longer think about each individual movement, and instead you’re just like, “Get rid of the paragraph, jump here, jump this, highlight this, yank this, do this,” it becomes so fast that you can superiorly edit text at a very fast rate. And there comes a point when you know your language really well, you know the problem you’re really working on really well, where editing text and getting code out actually becomes one of the many bottlenecks.
People always talk about, “Well, most of the time I think…” Most of the time I’m not thinking, I’m programming. I know what I want to do, I want to go as fast as possible because I’ve been just doing it for so long and I’m so familiar with the general space that it becomes a huge problem for me. I cannot tell you how many times that I’ve been purely bottlenecked by the fact that I just can’t type fast enough and I just need to get it out of my head onto the text editor. And so that’s why I think Vim motions are superior in all aspects. Keep your hands on the keyboard, on the home row, and it can manipulate text in very wide and fast ways.
It’s just a little optimization for me because you can’t press that as fast. So, anyways, I’m very optimized in my approach, so I yank the line, paste the line. CI double quotes will delete everything inside the first occurring string. Then I can type the string, escape, save. And so it’s like so optimized that I can just jump so fast in between that, whereas the copying and pasting line is probably the same speed, but the navigating to the string, deleting what’s currently in the string, and then… That’s such a fast motion in Vim, and I just do that all the time.
You’d never see that in another world, where people would be able to build something or do something and just completely forget how these things work, and only just focus on one part of their craft. And so, to me, it’s just like it doesn’t matter how you use it, I want to see the person that just knows how to use it, and they know how to use it well. When there’s a problem, they can say why the problem exists, and then go and fix the problem. To me, that’s like, ” There you go. You’ve done it. You now know your tool, go forth and conquer with said tool.”
With typing, it’s surprising how many people do just that. Like you said, they’re pecking or looking down. It’s like the quality of life improvement you can have by learning to touch type, by just like typing without looking. It’s immeasurable. You’re bringing a lot of joy to your life because all of us are typing a lot. And the reason, by the way, I was extremely efficient with Emacs… I’m sure you know, all jokes aside, it feels like Neovim has more room for the kind of efficiency I’ve had with Emacs to be able to move really fast as you described me to edit. There is a real joy. It’s not just efficiency, it’s a freedom that you can get when you get really good with an editor. The reason I chose to go with VS Code is it felt like there’s going to be an acceleration of features to which Neovim or Emacs will not be able to catch up, in the… and I don’t mean in the next five years, I mean in the next 30 years.
And it felt like I almost wanted to take the pain of learning new editors constantly and just switching and learning that, because I was getting so comfortable in Emacs, with this Kinesis keyboard, everything, all the shortcuts, I know how to program, and it felt like this is not… Neovim will not be here in 50 years. Possibly might be, I don’t know, but it felt like you want to learn these constant different technologies. Cursor is a great example of that. I primarily am using Cursor now. I go back between VS Code and Cursor. Just the skill of using AI is a real skill, from the shortcuts to the timing to the layout of the windows to how I think about where, when and how to use the AI that doesn’t distract me, that it empowers me, not just for the fuck of it or for the fun of it, for the actual measure of productivity.
It’s a skill. And I feel like I would be stuck in a local maximum of comfort if I stayed with Emacs. And maybe the same should be true for me with Neovim. I should try it seriously. I’m sure there’s a plugin, like a copilot type of situation that you could set up with Neovim. I should possibly consider that. But Cursor is doing a lot of really fascinating stuff on the IDE side, not just sort of generate code and edit that code manually, it’s like continuously be able to rewrite code. It’s the idea of tab, tab, tab, tab, move the Cursor around, but also modify parts of code and do the diff really nicely, that whether it’s Cursor or VS Code that wins that battle out with Copilot, I don’t know. But that feels like a fundamentally different experience than the really efficient, joyful experience that you just described in your selling me on this is Neovim. That doesn’t have an AI in the picture, obviously immediately, but you can, yeah, absolutely.
I build everything just for me. Harpoon’s just literally just built for me. I spent three months trying to figure out the most optimal navigation for files, and that’s what I came up with. Harpoon, it’s a take on alternate file. If you’re familiar with the alternate file, typically you’ll have this in all editors where you can go back to the file you were just in. And so that means you can have effectively two files you swap back and forth in. You’ve probably used it a bunch; really fast way to navigate. Pretty nice thing to do. I want alternate file, but three of them or four of them, and so that’s all Harpoon is is just being able to pin a file. And so I have one button to press to go to a file, another for another, another for another. And so I can have up to four. I just had my four power fingers. For Dvorak, what is that? That’s HTNS. If I go Ctrl H, T, N, or S, it goes to one of the four files. And that’s it. That’s all it is.
And you can technically make it so you can add in functions and be able to execute things externally. You can open up terminals, you can send requests off to servers. You can do anything you want with it, I just have it primarily designed for opening files.
And then at some point, we’re just like, “Well, wait a second. And maybe we could do coffee. Every developer loves coffee. Maybe we could figure out this coffee business.” And so I had a good friend named Dax, THDXR. Dax, yeah, Dax. The most sassiest man alive.
But we decided to make a coffee shop, and then we thought instead of just making it Neovim, what if we made it from SSH? Because everybody has SSH. You have VS Code. Launch VS Code. You can order coffee from within VS Code. Because your little bottom terminal that has access to SSH, bada bing, bada boom. It’s fun. And so we really-
At this point, I don’t like drinking other coffee. I get upset about it because it’s not as good. And so it’s funny that I’ve fallen for my own stuff. I’m high on my own supply pretty hard right now. I just got done ordering 16 bags and gave it out to my family to try to convince them. But it’s just something where it’s like I didn’t sell you a software product that’s going to influence your startup that could potentially lead to disaster, I didn’t convince you to do a bunch of stuff that’s going to change your career, I just said, “Hey, here’s some coffee.” And it’s like a fun experience.
I think there’s a lot of interesting things that are going to come down through AI that I think a lot of people aren’t really prepared for or thinking through. TJ’s the genesis of this idea, but the idea that I think there’s going to be a lot of market manipulation, if you will, through AI. Meaning, hey, you want to research, say, best woodworking tools. Someone’s going to be buying an ad spot. Someone’s going to be buying premium training data. They’re the ones that get the big boosts in the LLMs. But LLMs don’t really have to market as an advertisement because it’s not really directly an advertisement, they just had a more premium spot, per se, in the training data; a little bit extra learning to it.
It’s like there’s a lot of things about AI that I fear upcoming. A lot of it just comes down to people not learning or making the trade-off where productivity is the only thing that matters. And I don’t think productivity is the only thing that matters. If you want to build something complex and difficult, productivity is not the only thing. You actually are going to have to do deep learning and pursue it beyond the basics.
And so I see AI as this really cool thing. It feels like a magic trick. I remember the first time I used it, I got early access to GitHub Copilot. In fact, Nat Friedman saw my Twitch clip of me asking GitHub for it, and he sent me early access himself. It was awesome. And when I used it, it predicted an if statement correct and my mind was just absolutely blown because I had nothing before then, and now it’s just like first time ever. And I just remember thinking, man, this is going to change programming so much.
And then the more I used it, the more I just… For me personally, I kept introducing bugs, and I couldn’t figure out why. And what I realized is that I developed… I wasn’t copiloting well, I was autopiloting much better. And my ability to read code versus my ability to critically think and write code, they’re definitely different sets of skill levels. I don’t consider as well when I just read code as opposed to what I write code. And so I struggled there.
I personally just… It’s more fun to program with AI. Even when I delete a lot of the code, it’s more fun. It’s less lonely. It’s what I imagine pair programming to be. And I’ve never done it, but it just feels like that friction that you get when you’re staring at an empty thing is not there. Empty function, empty class, it’s just more fun, less lonely.
And I do think that a lot of the easier type of coding, it really helps with like interacting with APIs, basic things that I would usually have to look up to stack overflow for. It’s just really fast at that. As example, just interacting with the YouTube API. The YouTube API documentation is not very good. And you can just load it all in there and ask it to generate a set of functions that access the API, all kinds of read and write operations, and it figures it all out. Well, you do have to read. You have to read and check everything.
And you start to develop the skill of understanding where it misinterpreted the task. What is that skill? I don’t even know. You have to be empathic about what the AI, what its limitations are. A lot of the times that has to do with prompt engineering. You have to at the same time understand what the AI is aware of. What did you actually give it as data to be able to generate the code? A lot of times, we don’t realize that we’re not giving it enough information. Okay, okay, all right. You have to be empathic. Be like, okay, these are the files it’s aware of. This is the specifics of the question you asked it. You have to imagine you’re an intern that doesn’t know anything else.
Oftentimes, we want the AI to just figure out the things that’s left unspoken. But you can’t know those things, you have to specify those things. And so you have to actually be much more deliberate and rigorous in the things you specify, is to spell it out. And so I just have this sea of prompts that I have saved up, and I’m building these library of different templates for prompts and it’s a mess. And I’m sure there’s a lot of developers that have this similar kind of mess.
A lot of it has to do long-term with the tooling that’s going to improve that. One, the systems are going to get much more intelligent when you don’t need the nuance. And two, there’s going to be the tooling that allows you to specify those things and load it in correctly and give all the context that the system needs in order to make the good decisions. And maybe the system asks you follow up questions with, “Here’s things you didn’t make clear,” all that kind of stuff.
A lot of that has to do with the interface, with the actual design of the tools. Like we said with Cursor, it’s going to keep getting better and better and better. My sense is developers in general should be learning this to not be left behind, to see how that can be used as a superpower to boost their productivity, their effectiveness, their joy of programming versus be seen as a competitor to them or something like that.
But for me already, it’s been a big boost to productivity. If you measure the actual how quickly you’re able to get a thing done, it’s been a big… And measured not across minutes and hours but days also. Sometimes there’s things I have to do that are not that important that I’ll just out of procrastination will push off.
And the thing is that I’m not a AI negative person. I can see why people really, really like it. I used Copilot from when Nat gave me the access all the way up until about six months ago. I used it for quite some time. And I really did enjoy the things I used out of it. It did the opposite for me. I felt like I was more reviewing than writing and I felt like I was more just letting things slide where I just didn’t really think too heavily about stuff. And just I wasn’t as engaged. And so I’m like, “Okay, something’s kind wrong here.” And that’s just a me personal thing. I recognize that is not how someone should approach these things. That’s not a good reason for why you should or should not use AI. I just don’t think that that’s right. I could probably correct that and figure out a better way to do it.
I’ve been meaning to have another AI round, and so I’ve been thinking about maybe I just need to spend two weeks in Cursor and just fully embrace what does it mean to be somebody like this? And what can I do with these new powers? Have they improved to the point where they’re actually good? And for me, because a lot of the decisions I make, a lot of the little functions I’m writing, it’s not because trying to write this function to solve this problem, it’s because I’m writing these functions or this set not just to solve this problem but because I know in about another 2,000 lines of code of building all these other things, I’m going to need to start doing this next activity. It’s like I’m trying to really try to chess move myself into the exact things that, as I let things go faster, I fall apart on that chess move. And again, skill issues for on my behalf. And I mean it in the truest sense of the word where it’s like I’m making a critique because I don’t use it well enough.
Well, then you make this phrase where you’re like, but then at some point, the interface is going to get better, and maybe it can do a lot of these things better where I won’t need that. Then my question is, well, is anyone actually falling behind for not using AI then? Because if the interface is going to change so greatly that all of your habits need to fundamentally change and it will be able to clarify and make all those statements, have I actually fallen behind at all? Or will the next gen actually just be so different from the current one that it’s like, yeah, you’re over there actually doing punch card AI right now. I’m going to come in at compiler time AI, so different that it’s like what’s a punch card?
I think it’s a skill of almost empathy with an AI system because it doesn’t know… You know what it’s missing? It’s missing common sense. It’s missing long- term memory. A lot of things, when we talk to other humans, they have a basic common sense about reality, and AI systems often lack that kind of common sense. And they also don’t remember things. You have to realize there’s a constant blank slate happening. It’s almost just a skill of talking to an AI system that I’m training. And by having to write all those prompts and communicating back and forth to understand what kind of prompts work better or not, you build up that intuition. And also just raw the skill of reading somebody else’s code. Maybe for people who work on large teams, that’s a skill that’s already developed. For me, not so much, so learning how to modify the code that somebody else written is a real skill.
And also, the other thing you mentioned, which is considering another perspective on a piece of code is really nice, but it is also a skill to understand, okay, this is what you did. There’s a skill to asking a question that code that’s been generated such that you can have a conversation about the approach that was taken. I think there’s just a lot of subtle, little skills involved in a cooperative endeavor to code, kind of like there was a real skill issue between you and Teej when you guys did the video of two idiots, one keyboard. People should go watch.
I tried to get it to learn how to play tower defense. I made a tower defense game in Zig and then made it play tower defense, and then played a Claude 3.5 against OpenAI. Claude 3.5 would do better during the daytimes, and OpenAI did better during the nighttimes. I don’t know why, I have no idea what was going on there, but one would just start winning and the other one would start losing. It was just very strange. And so it’s just this, I’m learning to prompt well, but I’m learning to prompt in a very different axis. I just don’t find it very useful yet in programming.
And the problem is that anyone worth any of their salt will tell you that AI, though can produce code, is going to get it wrong in a huge number of cases. And as the code becomes bigger or more complex or more input, it’s going to just start kind of sloshing back and forth between bugs. And so if you don’t have those hard skills and you’re not ultimately the driver at the end of the day, you’re going to really find some hard times, and your ability to progress will be directly bound to how good the LLMs are. So if you believe that the LLMs will be vastly superior to humans in the next year, maybe that’s a good bet. But if they aren’t, then your skill ceiling is bound to whatever they are.
And even beyond that, there’s just a level of information problem, which is like, “Do we even have enough compute power to be able to solve things at this real scale?” And even if we did, if everybody started using it right now, “Do we even have the compute power for everybody to use it right now?” There’s a lot of kind of bounding questions, there’s privacy concerns, and I just don’t want people to make the immediate, or what appears to be the obvious choice, where you don’t need hard skills, you don’t need these things, we just need to only think creatively. It’s like, no, I don’t think so. I think these hard skills are going to be around for quite some time even with a massive improvement in the AI, you’re going to really be needed to step in regularly for quite some time as far as I can tell.
I mean even just societally, there’s plenty of companies that don’t even allow you to use AI. I mean, there’s just practical problems that exist. So that’s a question I just try not to answer in the direct sense. There will come a day if humanity continues and all things continue in a good positive direction, where a lot of skills will go out the window due to immense computing systems. So, yeah, I’ll give you that one. But it’s just like if I don’t think it has anything in the near term, there’s been no computer improvement up to this date that did not result in more jobs.
I mean, all I see is that if you say natural language can be used in the pipeline, you’ve just made that many more people can become programmers, which means that much more software will eventually be created, which means there’s that much more software that will need to be maintained, and just becomes a real big snowballing effect.
And if you truly make yourself irrelevant, I would challenge you that you’re just doing something that was just slightly too complicated to automate. If you’re only writing just straight up crud apps from backend to front end and simple table displays, yeah, maybe we just couldn’t quite automate that away and now we just have something that can just do that a little bit better, so now that’s automated away, but that’s not really programming. That’s almost like building Legos at that point, where the designs are already set, you just simply have to move piece from bag into correct position.
And I know I’m asking way too much that’s not… Now we’re getting into Blade Runner’s level AI. I just want something that it just feels like I’m missing that, where it’s just like it will complete the task to whatever level it understood what I was prompting, but it doesn’t actually care about it.
I think the ideal solution is that you can start giving it small bugs and it goes and fixes these bugs and you can just come back to these backlog tickets that no one ever does, and it actually starts going through these backlog tickets, and it’s actually a really amazing experience. So I love the idea. I think we can all agree that that sounds great, but every time I’ve done it and I’ve asked it for many and I try to keep narrowing down the problems, the more narrow the problem, the better it does. So if I’m like, “Just add one singular icon. And when it gets clicked, I want you to do this just console, click me. At least create me an SVG and place it so it’s nicely placed.” The more narrow the task, the more likely it’s to be successful.
There’s like a certain level of specifying where if you specify too much, it just like can’t do it. If you specify too little, it just does weird things. So it’s kind of like this very kind of fun, unique way you have to play the balance game. But so far, every time I do these things, I always end up going, “Gosh, I should just get better at Tailwind and write it myself,” because I always go back and I just rewrite it, and then it’s just like, “Dang it. What am I saving at the end?” I feel like I’m not saving anything yet. And it’s just like this, “I want it so bad.” I actually want AI to be great because then I can really go fast. I mean, I can go amazing fast, but then I always just go, “Gosh, I should have just learned Tailwind myself to like the nth degree and just go fast.”
And there’s this really great article by creator or maintainer of curl, it’s the I in the LLM stands for intelligence. And he writes curl and maintains curl. Curl has been inundated with security problems and all this, and it’s all from LLMs being like, “Oh, I found a security flaw. Here’s the security flaw,” details it out in the code. And he’s just like, “Okay, how did you reproduce that? Show me,” because if you look at the code right here, that’s actually an impossible situation you’re speaking of. And it’s just like going in these circles and security right now is being inundated, these bug bounty programs are being inundated by LLM-submitted responses because they can’t actually analyze the code beyond just like basic text prediction. “Oh, this is a stir copy. Stir copy is commonly referred, blah, blah, blah, blah. Boom, there you go. Here’s the bug.” And it’s just like, “No, that’s actually impossible because the if statement right beforehand leaves the function if the string is too long, so it’s like we don’t even run into this case. It’s impossible what you’re saying.” So debugging is very interesting.
And then there’s like the whole thing with coding and licenses. How much of it is GPL licenses, do you think, they’ve scraped and used as training data? GPL forces open source. What are you going to do with that one? That means your model might need to be open source. OpenAI may have to get forced open, all their previous stuff if there’s any hint of GPL.
But also knowing how to value what is valuable and not getting lost in the sauce where you’re just so stuck on trying to make the next greatest startup that you sacrifice your health, you sacrifice your relationships. Or even worse, you sacrifice your own morals to take certain shortcuts that you probably shouldn’t be taking in life to be able to achieve these things, because I’m sure there’s hundreds of horror stories you could hear where people definitely shortcutted their morals for monetary success.
And it’s like you can talk with much more authority if you stay at a place longer. And that’s nothing but benefits in my book. It’s only if you stay at a place because you’re afraid or you don’t want to… You already have something that works for you and you just never want to change and you’re just like, “I get to go in and just be completely mindless.” I think if you go mindless for a couple years, you’ll find yourself… That’s the only real danger. You just come out with nothing at all.
It’s just like you’ll never be able to say that about most things. People will jokingly say that until it’s actually on the line. But it’s like with that, you just have this ferociousness. I can break out and sweat thinking about somebody fictionally pushing my kid to the ground, actually get real adrenal responses flowing through my body. So it’s just such a different world and it’s hard to explain. And you could never have convinced me when I was young that it’d be this big.
And I’m like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about this. What is this again?” He’s like, “SIMA balls,” right? It’s just like, “Dang it,” how do I keep…? So I’ve just had it happen live on stream many, many times. I’ve died by Ligma the most.
And so it was a very funny moment and so I was like, “Oh, that’s funny that happened.” That was about six years ago. Last year I was at a conference and there’s a guy wearing a Stack Overflow name tag and I was like, “Oh, you work at Stack Overflow?” He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I do.” I’m like, “Do I got a story for you.” And he goes-
And so for me, it’s obviously the turning point of my entire life. I cannot speak to who I would be now without that. I can just tell you that I wouldn’t have had the drive. I probably would not have completed college. I would’ve not have found my wife or had my kids. I wouldn’t know how to value people. I don’t think without that whole thing, my value for people would’ve been very, very small because I would’ve continued to just objectifying in the way I was. And then probably the biggest thing is there’s this one verse, I don’t even know where it’s at, it effectively says that we love because he first loved us. And so for me it’s like I don’t think I would’ve ever lived a life that was happy without this. And I just didn’t even know that that was an option for me.
And I never really, it was a very tough set of years for me and I was very, very sad and just always just constantly looking for something to fulfill me. And so it’s like I didn’t have any confidence, I didn’t have any joy. I felt very sad. And so that was this moment where for the first time ever didn’t, all of a sudden I just felt like I didn’t have to live up to a standard. The standards have already been paid for, everything’s already, that’s the free gift, that’s the exchange. And so it’s just like for the first time, I didn’t have to be the cool guy, I didn’t have to have all the right words, I didn’t have to feel, I didn’t have to go on the conquest, the sexual conquest to find validation. I didn’t have to do any of those things and it was exceptionally liberating.
And so who is God? That’s more of a catechism question perhaps. What is man, who is God? Those are much harder questions. I believe that anytime you try to get too deep into describing who God is, you typically fall into Christian heresy. But for you-
And so I just had choose to forgive these people and to move on, and it really kind of freed me. And I would never have thought forgiveness as a means for that change if I didn’t first experience it myself.
And so I think that it’s hard to call, what is its role in the human experience, because I think it’s just something that we all naturally not just want, but need. And I don’t think that you can really progress, and when I say the word love, I would like to kind of narrow it down maybe a bit more. And I don’t mean Eros, the Greek word like sexy love, I think that paternal and friendship love are extremely important. And I think agape, God love is also very important. Agape love is the one that is superior to them all, but obviously different and also co-needed with the parental ones and all that. And so you kind of need this mixture of them all, and each one is different for each reason and where it’s applied.
And so I don’t think… I just don’t see a world in which is good of any kind without that as a very foundational piece. Because again, I didn’t come here trying to quote any sort of scripture, but it says that it’s not the nails that hung on there, it’s love. That’s the reason why these things happen. And so if forgiveness is the requirement to kind of pay off hate in some sense, then love has to be the motivation for forgiveness.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 0:42 – Love for programming
- 10:15 – Hardest part of programming
- 12:31 – Types of programming
- 20:08 – Life story
- 30:12 – Hardship
- 31:44 – High school
- 37:30 – Porn addiction
- 47:16 – God
- 1:02:59 – Perseverance
- 1:12:55 – Netflix
- 1:25:23 – Groovy
- 1:30:27 – Printf() debugging
- 1:36:49 – Falcor
- 1:46:19 – Breaking production
- 1:49:04 – Pieter Levels
- 1:53:34 – Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube infrastructure
- 2:05:36 – ThePrimeagen origin story
- 2:20:52 – Learning programming languages
- 2:29:55 – Best programming languages in 2025
- 2:34:50 – Python
- 2:35:30 – HTML & CSS
- 2:36:20 – Bash
- 2:37:00 – FFmpeg
- 2:43:42 – Performance
- 2:46:15 – Rust
- 2:51:03 – Epic projects
- 3:04:27 – Asserts
- 3:13:41 – ADHD
- 3:21:49 – Productivity
- 3:26:13 – Programming setup
- 4:01:43 – Coffee
- 4:08:47 – Programming with AI
- 4:51:31 – Advice for young programmers
- 5:03:03 – Reddit questions
- 5:10:35 – God
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Michael Paulson, better known online as ThePrimeagen. He is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software, whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades. In short, ThePrimeagen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s ThePrimeagen.
The following is a conversation with Michael Paulson, better known online as ThePrimeagen. He is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software, whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades. In short, ThePrimeagen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s ThePrimeagen.
Love for programming
Lex Fridman
What do you love most about programming? What brings you joy when you program?
What do you love most about programming? What brings you joy when you program?
ThePrimeagen
I can tell you the first time that I ever felt love in programming, or felt that joy or that excitement-
I can tell you the first time that I ever felt love in programming, or felt that joy or that excitement-
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
ThePrimeagen
Which was in college. It was the second class, data structures, and the teacher that was teaching Ray Babcock, he was talking about linked lists. Now you have to learn Java at Montana State University when I went, and so he’s off there explaining this whole linked list thing and all that, and then he shows code. And in the code it’s abstract class node or whatever it was, I can’t remember what it was. And then it had a private member, and that private member was of type node, and I’ve never seen that before. It is a class that is called node with a member that is of itself. And for the first time ever I was like, “Oh my gosh. There’s no end. There’s no way to iterate. This is not a set of 10 items. This is a set of infinite items.” And so my mind kind of exploded in that moment, like, “What you can express is huge. I can see what memory looks like. I can see this hopping through space.”
Which was in college. It was the second class, data structures, and the teacher that was teaching Ray Babcock, he was talking about linked lists. Now you have to learn Java at Montana State University when I went, and so he’s off there explaining this whole linked list thing and all that, and then he shows code. And in the code it’s abstract class node or whatever it was, I can’t remember what it was. And then it had a private member, and that private member was of type node, and I’ve never seen that before. It is a class that is called node with a member that is of itself. And for the first time ever I was like, “Oh my gosh. There’s no end. There’s no way to iterate. This is not a set of 10 items. This is a set of infinite items.” And so my mind kind of exploded in that moment, like, “What you can express is huge. I can see what memory looks like. I can see this hopping through space.”
And I just remember being just so blown away, because up until that point, everything was just, “All right, I have a list of 10 items. I have a list of 20 items.” Right? It was very rigid and small, and the things I built were really small and trivial, and all of a sudden I felt like I could build anything in that one moment. And it was so amazing. I just remember sitting in class for, I don’t even remember how long those classes were or anything, but I just remember being just completely profoundly impacted by this notion. And so I just sat there and I watched, and I had the exact same experience in heaven’s forbid by a software engineering class, when we talked about the decorator pattern, where you can keep on constructing these objects in this recursive way. Not that I think that’s actually a good idea to do, but just watching that and realizing there’s so many weird and unique ways you can solve problems, and anything your mind can think of, you can just create that. And I just remember getting just so excited about the possibility that anything is possible.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, let’s wax philosophical about a linked list. It is pretty profound. For people who don’t know, a node in a linked list doesn’t know anything about the world it’s in. It only knows about the thing it’s linked to, its neighbor. Maybe that’s symbolic. It’s a metaphor for all of us humans. There’s billions of us on this planet and we only know about our local little network.
Yeah, let’s wax philosophical about a linked list. It is pretty profound. For people who don’t know, a node in a linked list doesn’t know anything about the world it’s in. It only knows about the thing it’s linked to, its neighbor. Maybe that’s symbolic. It’s a metaphor for all of us humans. There’s billions of us on this planet and we only know about our local little network.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And it’s kind of beautiful. And you realize in that little simple data structure, you can construct arbitrarily large systems, and they’re like roots that go through memory. And then of course, that’s where you get all the programming languages that allow you to dump junk into memory and have memory leaks, and therefore create infinite pain as you try to figure out where that unfreed memory is. For me, yeah, probably… It’s so beautiful the way you put that. Linked lists are indeed beautiful. Recursion also for me, when I finally wrapped my brain around what it means to write a recursive function.
And it’s kind of beautiful. And you realize in that little simple data structure, you can construct arbitrarily large systems, and they’re like roots that go through memory. And then of course, that’s where you get all the programming languages that allow you to dump junk into memory and have memory leaks, and therefore create infinite pain as you try to figure out where that unfreed memory is. For me, yeah, probably… It’s so beautiful the way you put that. Linked lists are indeed beautiful. Recursion also for me, when I finally wrapped my brain around what it means to write a recursive function.
ThePrimeagen
What was the thing? What was one that taught you? Because I think we all… You probably did factorial, where you just do a quick factorial of it. It just doesn’t hit home. What was the thing that made it hit home?
What was the thing? What was one that taught you? Because I think we all… You probably did factorial, where you just do a quick factorial of it. It just doesn’t hit home. What was the thing that made it hit home?
Lex Fridman
I don’t remember the first.
I don’t remember the first.
ThePrimeagen
I remember my first. How do you not remember your first? It was magic.
I remember my first. How do you not remember your first? It was magic.
Lex Fridman
I’ve had so many that it just…
I’ve had so many that it just…
ThePrimeagen
I mean, you are a Lisp guy. You’re probably pretty used to the recursion.
I mean, you are a Lisp guy. You’re probably pretty used to the recursion.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, all I remember is just surrounded by sea of parentheses. I mean that’s really, probably, when I… In high school, I think it was either Java or C++. Wow, how do I not remember that? It must have been C++. And then college, the generic bullshit software engineering classes were Java, but then the renegades, the cool kids, were all using Lisp. That’s when you’re doing the AI, the quote-unquote “AI” at that time, that that was Lisp. If you want to write a chess engine, you would use Lisp. And so for me, probably the moment I really fell in love with programming was Lisp, and writing Othello programs and chess engines, all kinds of engines that play a game, and then I could play against that thing and that thing would beat me. The joy of being destroyed by the thing you’ve created. And oh, game of life too. Cellular automata. That’s when I…
Yeah, all I remember is just surrounded by sea of parentheses. I mean that’s really, probably, when I… In high school, I think it was either Java or C++. Wow, how do I not remember that? It must have been C++. And then college, the generic bullshit software engineering classes were Java, but then the renegades, the cool kids, were all using Lisp. That’s when you’re doing the AI, the quote-unquote “AI” at that time, that that was Lisp. If you want to write a chess engine, you would use Lisp. And so for me, probably the moment I really fell in love with programming was Lisp, and writing Othello programs and chess engines, all kinds of engines that play a game, and then I could play against that thing and that thing would beat me. The joy of being destroyed by the thing you’ve created. And oh, game of life too. Cellular automata. That’s when I…
I built that, you know, all kinds of programming languages. That’s less about programming languages and more about the system you create. And that just filled me with infinite joy, having… Now similar to the linked list situation, creating a system where each individual cell only knows about its neighbors and operates in very simple rules. But when you take that system as a whole and allow it to evolve over time, you can create infinite complexity. So I just… Man, those are many pothead moments, where I’m just looking at the beautiful complexity that can be created with cellular automata. That filled me with just infinite joy, for sure. But yeah, all I remember is parentheses. So my memories of my first are drowned in a sea of parentheses.
ThePrimeagen
Oh man. Well, first off, mine was in Java, so my first was a little bit more rigid, kind of, you know, a corporate experience.
Oh man. Well, first off, mine was in Java, so my first was a little bit more rigid, kind of, you know, a corporate experience.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Cold, meaningless…
Yeah. Cold, meaningless…
ThePrimeagen
But… yeah. I was in a lab, everyone was using CentOS at that… or Cent OS or however you say. I always called it CentOS, the fresh maker.
But… yeah. I was in a lab, everyone was using CentOS at that… or Cent OS or however you say. I always called it CentOS, the fresh maker.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
And so it’s just like I’m in this very cold…
And so it’s just like I’m in this very cold…
Lex Fridman
That’s nice.
That’s nice.
ThePrimeagen
Thank you.
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
I’m in this cold, rigid environment with my Microsoft keyboard, programming away in Java. And I still have just such… this memory of despair, because I love programming, this was after the linked list, and I cannot figure out recursion. And so I go to the university store and I buy a book and it’s Deitel and Deitel learn Java and it has a section, Recursion, so I open it up and I start reading it, and it just doesn’t hit home. And I’m spiraling into this.
I’m in this cold, rigid environment with my Microsoft keyboard, programming away in Java. And I still have just such… this memory of despair, because I love programming, this was after the linked list, and I cannot figure out recursion. And so I go to the university store and I buy a book and it’s Deitel and Deitel learn Java and it has a section, Recursion, so I open it up and I start reading it, and it just doesn’t hit home. And I’m spiraling into this.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Like, “Maybe I’m not a programmer. Maybe I’m not worthy enough to enter into this circle of people who can figure out what the heck recursion means.” And Deitel and Deitel’s, I still remember this, their exact phrase was, “Every young budding developer solves this recursion program,” and it was the Tower of Hanoi. And guess what? I don’t know if I can solve the Tower of Hanoi to this day. It’s a very hard recursive problem. And I just sat there and thought, ” Oh my gosh. I’m not going to make it.” And I sat there in the lab for eight hours, 10 hours doing these things, so worried. It’s the week of recursion, we have to do a lab assignment. “I’m not going to be able to do it.” And I just remember being genuinely worried about that. And then…
Like, “Maybe I’m not a programmer. Maybe I’m not worthy enough to enter into this circle of people who can figure out what the heck recursion means.” And Deitel and Deitel’s, I still remember this, their exact phrase was, “Every young budding developer solves this recursion program,” and it was the Tower of Hanoi. And guess what? I don’t know if I can solve the Tower of Hanoi to this day. It’s a very hard recursive problem. And I just sat there and thought, ” Oh my gosh. I’m not going to make it.” And I sat there in the lab for eight hours, 10 hours doing these things, so worried. It’s the week of recursion, we have to do a lab assignment. “I’m not going to be able to do it.” And I just remember being genuinely worried about that. And then…
Because always my big problem was like, “Okay, do factorial.” Why not just use a for loop? “Okay, what about Fibonacci sequence?” Why not use a for loop? I don’t understand. What’s the purpose of recursion? I don’t understand it yet. It’s so powerful. Why? It looks like a really complicated for loop. And so I just could not understand it. And then lab came that day and it was, “I’m going to give you a 2D array you have to read from a file. This is what a starting position looks like. This is what an ending position looks like. This is what a wall looks like. I want you to find me a path through the maze.” So I just sat there like, “Okay, well I guess I can just go up and I can create a visited grid, so I know not to visit these places anymore.” And then all of a sudden it just started clicking. Like, “Well, wait a second. I don’t know the maze, but if I just go up, right, down, and left, and hop back every time I’ve been to that square, don’t visit it, it will just go forever.”
And I realized in that moment, I’m like, “I actually understand. I’ve understood recursion this whole time, I just never had a problem in which it actually made sense to use. And that was my big downfall, is that I was measuring my understanding with the problems that I had available, which were just list traversal, which is not a good use of recursion. And so I just remember that freeing… Oh, man. Recursion. It was a great moment in my life.
Lex Fridman
I mean it does require, to be fair, a leap of faith, because people will tell you, those conformist, dogmatic, Java instructors will tell you, that this is important, to understand recursion. But it takes a leap of faith that this is a different way of looking at the world, and it’s a powerful way of looking at the world. Actually, I think I remember my first now.
I mean it does require, to be fair, a leap of faith, because people will tell you, those conformist, dogmatic, Java instructors will tell you, that this is important, to understand recursion. But it takes a leap of faith that this is a different way of looking at the world, and it’s a powerful way of looking at the world. Actually, I think I remember my first now.
ThePrimeagen
All right.
All right.
Lex Fridman
I think it was [inaudible 00:09:42] first search for one of the games. Maybe Othello, something like that, and for that implementing recursion. Understand that you can search trajectories through the space of states and do that recursively? That was mind blowing.
I think it was [inaudible 00:09:42] first search for one of the games. Maybe Othello, something like that, and for that implementing recursion. Understand that you can search trajectories through the space of states and do that recursively? That was mind blowing.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Just imagining the possibilities.
Just imagining the possibilities.
ThePrimeagen
You can just see it all. Yeah.
You can just see it all. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, just numbers flying. It was like The Beautiful Mind. And that’s when I also discovered conspiracy theories, and I just saw. I saw the truth. Okay, yeah. So what were we talking about? Oh, what was the most painful aspect of programming for you? What memories do you have of deep, profound suffering in terms of programming in the early days?
Yeah, just numbers flying. It was like The Beautiful Mind. And that’s when I also discovered conspiracy theories, and I just saw. I saw the truth. Okay, yeah. So what were we talking about? Oh, what was the most painful aspect of programming for you? What memories do you have of deep, profound suffering in terms of programming in the early days?
Hardest part of programming
ThePrimeagen
I would say the biggest one that I can really hold on to had to be one of two experiences. The first experience was when I was at a place called Schedulicity, and… Am I not allowed to say the place [inaudible 00:10:43]
I would say the biggest one that I can really hold on to had to be one of two experiences. The first experience was when I was at a place called Schedulicity, and… Am I not allowed to say the place [inaudible 00:10:43]
Lex Fridman
You’re allowed.
You’re allowed.
ThePrimeagen
I’m not sure if they’re even operating still at this point, but they’re in-
I’m not sure if they’re even operating still at this point, but they’re in-
Lex Fridman
There was something funny about the name. I’m sorry.
There was something funny about the name. I’m sorry.
ThePrimeagen
Oh, Schedulicity? Yeah. Actually, the name was so bad that when you looked at their paid-for Google ad terms that they would make sure that they’re at the top of the list, the spellings were just insane, because no one knew how to spell the word Schedulicity, and so the Google optimizing for that is just hilarious. But okay, go back to the thing.
Oh, Schedulicity? Yeah. Actually, the name was so bad that when you looked at their paid-for Google ad terms that they would make sure that they’re at the top of the list, the spellings were just insane, because no one knew how to spell the word Schedulicity, and so the Google optimizing for that is just hilarious. But okay, go back to the thing.
The thing that kills me the most about programming, what I actually considered the worst aspect of programming, is when you know everything. And so when I was at this job, it’s just every single day I’d come in, there were no surprises, there was no questions. I didn’t understand the code base, sure, that’s fair. I didn’t understand all the things about the code base. But I knew I was going to go in, I was going to generate some sort of object from the database. I was going to take that object from the database, and I was just going to map it over and just display it on the webpage. There’s no creativity, there’s nothing to it. It’s very almost factory line kind of work. And that was a very difficult moment for me, which is…
I didn’t enjoy programming, because I knew everything about it. I already knew exactly what I was going to do that day. I knew all the hurdles I going to have to go over. There was no unknown unknowns, if you will. It was just knowns at all times. And for me, that is the worst part about programming, is when you already know the solution and it’s just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands.
Lex Fridman
So the absence of uncertainty, the absence of challenge, was the pain?
So the absence of uncertainty, the absence of challenge, was the pain?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That’s pretty profound, Prime.
That’s pretty profound, Prime.
ThePrimeagen
I’m more than just good looks. I want you to know that.
I’m more than just good looks. I want you to know that.
Lex Fridman
It’s a low bar. What do you identify as? I’m enjoying asking the general question.
It’s a low bar. What do you identify as? I’m enjoying asking the general question.
ThePrimeagen
38, male.
38, male.
Lex Fridman
Male.
Male.
ThePrimeagen
Husband of beautiful wife.
Husband of beautiful wife.
Types of programming
Lex Fridman
Okay. You stream about all kinds of programming, but what kind of programmer are you? Are you full-stack developer, web programming? And maybe can you lay out all the different kinds of programming and then place yourself in that, in terms of your identity. Sexual identity as well.
Okay. You stream about all kinds of programming, but what kind of programmer are you? Are you full-stack developer, web programming? And maybe can you lay out all the different kinds of programming and then place yourself in that, in terms of your identity. Sexual identity as well.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, we can put it all in there.
Yeah, we can put it all in there.
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
ThePrimeagen
Plus, obviously those two are very, very tightly coupled.
Plus, obviously those two are very, very tightly coupled.
Lex Fridman
I have seen you on the border of sexually aroused by certain languages. I think you got real excited about OCaml, or…
I have seen you on the border of sexually aroused by certain languages. I think you got real excited about OCaml, or…
ThePrimeagen
OCaml. Let’s go. Thank you Dillon Mulroy [inaudible 00:13:08]
OCaml. Let’s go. Thank you Dillon Mulroy [inaudible 00:13:08]
Lex Fridman
Okay, wow.
Okay, wow.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
I did not expect that. That escalated quickly. Anyway, what do you identify as?
I did not expect that. That escalated quickly. Anyway, what do you identify as?
ThePrimeagen
Okay, so first let’s do the previous or the in-between question first, which is the different archetypes. I think that’s a really interesting question, because if you go on Twitter or you’re new, your thoughts are probably that there is just web programming, and maybe there’s some other stuff, yeah, like game programming, but you’d be like, game programming in JavaScript and on the web. There’s this very myopic view of the programming world, and I bet if you ask a lot of people these days what is the most popular form of programming, they’d probably say web. If you said what contains the most amount of repos, how many percentage of repos on GitHub are web-based, they probably say 90% or some huge number. But the reality is that there’s an entire embedded robotics world.
Okay, so first let’s do the previous or the in-between question first, which is the different archetypes. I think that’s a really interesting question, because if you go on Twitter or you’re new, your thoughts are probably that there is just web programming, and maybe there’s some other stuff, yeah, like game programming, but you’d be like, game programming in JavaScript and on the web. There’s this very myopic view of the programming world, and I bet if you ask a lot of people these days what is the most popular form of programming, they’d probably say web. If you said what contains the most amount of repos, how many percentage of repos on GitHub are web-based, they probably say 90% or some huge number. But the reality is that there’s an entire embedded robotics world.
You know, you’re familiar with the ML side of things. There’s networking, there’s going to be just performance, operating systems, compilers. There’s just huge amounts of variation of all these different types of programming verticals that you can be. And so we often talk about programming in perspective of web, or something that’s pretty narrow, and I think that’s just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else, that actually I don’t believe it’s that representative of the entire programming world out there. And I think a lot of programming’s really, really fun. There’s some really great stuff. Building your own language is just a very fun experience to do. Every programmer should just do that once, just to have a completely different perspective on how things work in life.
But as far as what do I do, I’ve always looked at myself as a tools engineer. So at my time, at my jobs, typically I would start off on the UI, and then they’d be like, “Okay, well hey, we need a library for this thing.” So then I’d be the one writing the library. So in 2012, 2013, I was writing a UI library for the web that can behave just like an iPad, so you can pinch and zoom on it, but it’s still a web page. Because we didn’t have any of that stuff back then. It was a canvas, had to do all the matrices operations and all that stuff to…
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Nice.
ThePrimeagen
You know, it felt like you’re on an iPad, but it actually wasn’t on an iPad. And this was iPad 2 by the way, so this is a long time ago. And so every single time I got into a job it’s like, “Okay, hey, we need to do a library. Hey, can you work on a build system?” So back then there was no Grunt, there was no gulp, there was no any of those things, so I had to hand roll my own JavaScript build system. And so I always fell into these positions of building tools for developers to be successful. And I’ve always really enjoyed that region. So as I went on to say Netflix, spent 10 years there, I’d say the majority of my 10 years were building things for developers to use that they could be successful at their job.
You know, it felt like you’re on an iPad, but it actually wasn’t on an iPad. And this was iPad 2 by the way, so this is a long time ago. And so every single time I got into a job it’s like, “Okay, hey, we need to do a library. Hey, can you work on a build system?” So back then there was no Grunt, there was no gulp, there was no any of those things, so I had to hand roll my own JavaScript build system. And so I always fell into these positions of building tools for developers to be successful. And I’ve always really enjoyed that region. So as I went on to say Netflix, spent 10 years there, I’d say the majority of my 10 years were building things for developers to use that they could be successful at their job.
And so I’ve always really enjoyed that aspect, because your shareholders and the people that use your program understand programming and they’re going to say, “Hey, I need this.” And typically the thing that they need, they actually want. Whereas with people, people want stuff, but what they actually need versus what they actually want often are this weird separation. That’s like the old Henry Ford quote, “I just want a faster horse,” and he’s like, “No, what you actually want is a car.” And so you have to play this game of trying to really figure it out, whereas developers, it’s like, “I know you know what I’m doing. I know what you want. Let’s figure it out together.”
Lex Fridman
Actually that gives you a really nice big-picture view of programming in general. So I love the idea of just starting at the interface, like you need to pinch and all that kind of stuff, and then figure out the entire thing that requires to make that happen, including maybe the side quest tooling, how to make it more productive and efficient, all that kind of stuff. So the entirety of the thing. That’s really cool.
Actually that gives you a really nice big-picture view of programming in general. So I love the idea of just starting at the interface, like you need to pinch and all that kind of stuff, and then figure out the entire thing that requires to make that happen, including maybe the side quest tooling, how to make it more productive and efficient, all that kind of stuff. So the entirety of the thing. That’s really cool.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Okay, so that would be full stack? By that general definition of full stack, meaning…
Okay, so that would be full stack? By that general definition of full stack, meaning…
ThePrimeagen
Perhaps, yeah.
Perhaps, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Versus systems starting at the bottom and trying to optimize a certain kind of specific thing without seeing the big picture of what the resulting interface would look like.
Versus systems starting at the bottom and trying to optimize a certain kind of specific thing without seeing the big picture of what the resulting interface would look like.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And a lot of people in web programming, they never go beyond the front end of how a thing looks. They kind of always assume there’ll be somebody, some grunt in the shadows, in the darkness of the basement, that will implement the back end.
And a lot of people in web programming, they never go beyond the front end of how a thing looks. They kind of always assume there’ll be somebody, some grunt in the shadows, in the darkness of the basement, that will implement the back end.
ThePrimeagen
Some Gilfoyle out there will be doing the back end.
Some Gilfoyle out there will be doing the back end.
Lex Fridman
Gilfoyle.
Gilfoyle.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I like to call myself a generalist, just to give some ideas. At one point at Netflix I built the WebSocket connection. So for TVs, how WebSocket works is code I just wrote. And so I built the framing thing, and before that I was doing stuff with memory, and before that I built a UI for a tool. Right? I can just do the thing. You just tell me the thing to do and I’ll just go do the thing. I don’t try to get super good at one specific activity. I don’t want to be a Kubernetes engineer, who’s the world’s greatest employer, but if I had to go learn Kubernetes, I’d go learn it and learn how to deploy some things, and then hopefully move on to the next thing, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I like to call myself a generalist, just to give some ideas. At one point at Netflix I built the WebSocket connection. So for TVs, how WebSocket works is code I just wrote. And so I built the framing thing, and before that I was doing stuff with memory, and before that I built a UI for a tool. Right? I can just do the thing. You just tell me the thing to do and I’ll just go do the thing. I don’t try to get super good at one specific activity. I don’t want to be a Kubernetes engineer, who’s the world’s greatest employer, but if I had to go learn Kubernetes, I’d go learn it and learn how to deploy some things, and then hopefully move on to the next thing, if that makes sense.
Lex Fridman
I posted about the fact that I’m talking to you on Reddit, and there’s a lot of wonderful questions. Somebody mentioned that I should ask you about DevOps. Can you explain what DevOps is? Is it a kind of special ops of programmers, is it SEAL Team Six of developers? What’s DevOps? Can you define… Are you a DevOps engineer?
I posted about the fact that I’m talking to you on Reddit, and there’s a lot of wonderful questions. Somebody mentioned that I should ask you about DevOps. Can you explain what DevOps is? Is it a kind of special ops of programmers, is it SEAL Team Six of developers? What’s DevOps? Can you define… Are you a DevOps engineer?
ThePrimeagen
Well, people keep telling me DevOps isn’t real. There’s actually, you want platform engineers, cloud engineers, infra engineers. I just often think the easiest way, if we’re doing just some basic nomenclature, it’s just DevOps are the people that make sure that when you launch a service and all of that, it doesn’t just disappear. Right? It’s all the backbone of being able to operate something at scale.
Well, people keep telling me DevOps isn’t real. There’s actually, you want platform engineers, cloud engineers, infra engineers. I just often think the easiest way, if we’re doing just some basic nomenclature, it’s just DevOps are the people that make sure that when you launch a service and all of that, it doesn’t just disappear. Right? It’s all the backbone of being able to operate something at scale.
Really, if you think about it, if you’re just writing a mom-and-pa website, people that do PHP that are doing WordPress and all that, they’re going to build something, they’re going to hand it off to, I don’t know, Linode, DigitalOcean, some company. They don’t really need a really complicated build, deployment, all this. It’s just someone with a simple website so they can sell their goods. And so they don’t really need that. And so that’s kind of how I think of a DevOps, is when things need to scale, that’s the person you hire.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, those people are actually amazing.
Yeah, those people are actually amazing.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
The time I spent at Google, it’s like oh yeah yeah, there’s all these fancy machine learning people, but the folks that are running the infrastructure, basically that make sure that shit doesn’t go down, they’re like wizards, and they’re essential.
The time I spent at Google, it’s like oh yeah yeah, there’s all these fancy machine learning people, but the folks that are running the infrastructure, basically that make sure that shit doesn’t go down, they’re like wizards, and they’re essential.
ThePrimeagen
It’s a very incredible vertical of job. And obviously I’m using a very broad term to describe, I’m sure, a bunch… You know, because making sure stuff doesn’t go down, you could also say that’s an SRE, right? Site reliability engineer. Whatever, the ones that wear the bomber jackets at Google. And so when we say DevOps, I think people get very particular about terms specifically in this category. They’re like, “Well actually, you’re mentioning infrastructure engineer versus site reliability engineer.” It’s just like, “Okay, yes, I hear you,” but generally when someone thinks DevOps, they think somebody that manages the servers and their life cycles and the reliability. There’s DevOps. Is it real? I’m not sure.
It’s a very incredible vertical of job. And obviously I’m using a very broad term to describe, I’m sure, a bunch… You know, because making sure stuff doesn’t go down, you could also say that’s an SRE, right? Site reliability engineer. Whatever, the ones that wear the bomber jackets at Google. And so when we say DevOps, I think people get very particular about terms specifically in this category. They’re like, “Well actually, you’re mentioning infrastructure engineer versus site reliability engineer.” It’s just like, “Okay, yes, I hear you,” but generally when someone thinks DevOps, they think somebody that manages the servers and their life cycles and the reliability. There’s DevOps. Is it real? I’m not sure.
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
ThePrimeagen
Did Vercel kill DevOps?
Did Vercel kill DevOps?
Lex Fridman
Question mark?
Question mark?
ThePrimeagen
Question mark.
Question mark.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Wow, you’re almost a journalist. That’s a headline. Let’s go back to the beginning.
Yeah. Wow, you’re almost a journalist. That’s a headline. Let’s go back to the beginning.
Life story
ThePrimeagen
All right.
All right.
Lex Fridman
Baby Prime. So you mentioned Netflix.
Baby Prime. So you mentioned Netflix.
ThePrimeagen
Oh, I worked at Netflix by the way.
Oh, I worked at Netflix by the way.
Lex Fridman
For people who don’t know who ThePrimeagen is, he mentions the fact that he has been very successful and has worked at Netflix in basically every other sentence.
For people who don’t know who ThePrimeagen is, he mentions the fact that he has been very successful and has worked at Netflix in basically every other sentence.
ThePrimeagen
Correct. Almost as much as I mention Neovim.
Correct. Almost as much as I mention Neovim.
Lex Fridman
Oh, great. Tell me more about Neovim. No, please don’t. So, baby Prime. At the very beginning. You’ve had one hell of a life, and I think it’s inspiring to a lot of people. You’ve gone through a lot of painful low points, including meth addiction, loss, and like you mentioned, you’ve come out of that to become a successful programmer and a person that inspires a huge number of people to get into programming, and just to find success in life. So maybe… I would love it if you laid out just your whole life journey from the beginning.
Oh, great. Tell me more about Neovim. No, please don’t. So, baby Prime. At the very beginning. You’ve had one hell of a life, and I think it’s inspiring to a lot of people. You’ve gone through a lot of painful low points, including meth addiction, loss, and like you mentioned, you’ve come out of that to become a successful programmer and a person that inspires a huge number of people to get into programming, and just to find success in life. So maybe… I would love it if you laid out just your whole life journey from the beginning.
ThePrimeagen
So I guess if we’re going to start with this whole journey, I think it’s probably best to start to when I was about four or five years old. That was the first time I was ever exposed to pornography, and it’s kind of just earwormed me for a large portion of my life. And so I don’t think there was a day that didn’t go by from when I was a very young lad all the way up until I was twenty-some years old where I didn’t think about porn on the daily basis. And so it was just every single day, even that young. And so it was just a very mind-consuming, time-consuming, thought consuming thing that plagued me, starting at a very young age.
So I guess if we’re going to start with this whole journey, I think it’s probably best to start to when I was about four or five years old. That was the first time I was ever exposed to pornography, and it’s kind of just earwormed me for a large portion of my life. And so I don’t think there was a day that didn’t go by from when I was a very young lad all the way up until I was twenty-some years old where I didn’t think about porn on the daily basis. And so it was just every single day, even that young. And so it was just a very mind-consuming, time-consuming, thought consuming thing that plagued me, starting at a very young age.
When I was seven years old, my dad died. That was a really tough period of life. I still think about this time that I went over to China, and there’s some rules that we were given, and one of the rules was just like, “Hey, don’t talk about God, and if you do, use the word ‘Dad’ instead.” And I was just like, “Okay, Dad!” It was the first time I said that word in 17 years or some long time. It was so weird to say that phrase. And I was just like, “Oh, that was just the strangest thing I’ve ever said in my entire lifetime.” It just felt so weird.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
So, kind of rewind. As I got older, obviously was very good at computers, good at accessing porn, of course, played video games on the Internet. Fun fun kind of side quest story. I think the guy’s name is Lord Toc on Twitch. I can’t quite remember his name, but he built this game called Grail, G-R-A-A-L, and Graal Online. And when I was a young lad it was just like Zelda, except for it also had a level editor and it had a C-like language, and that’s how I discovered how to program, is I looked at these symbols and figured out what they meant, and then I was able to make things happen in the game. And that’s my introduction into programming. So thank you that guy, whatever your Twitch name was. But all right, so keep on going.
So, kind of rewind. As I got older, obviously was very good at computers, good at accessing porn, of course, played video games on the Internet. Fun fun kind of side quest story. I think the guy’s name is Lord Toc on Twitch. I can’t quite remember his name, but he built this game called Grail, G-R-A-A-L, and Graal Online. And when I was a young lad it was just like Zelda, except for it also had a level editor and it had a C-like language, and that’s how I discovered how to program, is I looked at these symbols and figured out what they meant, and then I was able to make things happen in the game. And that’s my introduction into programming. So thank you that guy, whatever your Twitch name was. But all right, so keep on going.
As I got older, I was super bad socially. I was not a very great social person. High school is brutal, got made fun of a lot, really I wouldn’t say had a great time during high school. Definitely felt very out of place or offset or maybe misplaced, if you will. I’m not sure what the right word is. And so of course at that point, I just always wanted to be accepted, to fit in and all that. I did forget to say one side story. After my dad died, my older brother, he started getting into drugs, and along with that he exposed me to pot, so at eight years old I was smoking some marijuana for a while there, until maybe 11 or 12, and took a break, and then again did a lot of that as I got a little bit older, but…
So I got a lot of these exposures fairly young. 16, 15 through 18, lot of drinking and all that. When I graduated, or as I was graduating high school, I had such sadness, if you will. I was very sad about how everything went, tried to commit suicide, obviously it was a very poor attempt and I’m still here today. I’m very happy about that aspect. I’m glad that I didn’t follow through with anything, had to go to the hospital and all that. And when I was done, I just still remember coming out of the hospital, and at that moment it’s kind of like something broke in you. Have you ever read the book Wheel of Time? It’s 14,000 pages or something like that, but right around page 12,000, Rand has to intentionally kill a girl, the main character. And that’s the moment he breaks, and he gets into like Hard Rand. [inaudible 00:24:46] Rand, if you will, for those that know Wheel of Time will appreciate all that. For those that don’t, very confusing, and I understand. Not the Amazon movie show, not that Wheel of Time.
So now that we go back onto it, at that point it’s just like something kind of broke in me, and I just didn’t care anymore. So all the social awkwardness, if you will, all that, just died away with me, but also so did everything else. And so I started using a bunch of drugs. LSD, mushrooms, meth. Did a bunch of meth, did a bunch of that stuff, and then went off to college and continued to do a bunch of stuff. I took too much acid to where for quite a few years, I had little squigglies on the side of my eyes whenever I’d walk by high contrast objects. And so it’s just that whole period of life was just kind of marked by just poor decisions.
And then sometime when I was about 19 years old, somewhere in that range, I just had this one evening where I felt the very dramatic and real presence of God. And I kind of had this choice, like Frodo, on a razor, where it’s like if I go either way, I’m going to fall off, and I need to change my life. You get to make the choice now. Do you want to do that or not? And so I remember going, “Okay, I do want to change my life. I don’t like this experience. I don’t like what I’m living. I am still very sad, I still feel very desperate. I still feel all those things. I’m just pretending to be this other person.” And then I just went to sleep that night. Nothing changed in my life. Everything was still the way it was. I woke up the next day, the same person, and I was just like, “Oh, that’s just such a strange, weird experience.”
And I just went about my day. And then I remember, I think that evening, I looked at porn, and all of a sudden I just had a conscious… just this deep, profound shame. And I was like, “I’ve never felt shame in my life. I have no idea what’s happening now.” And then all of a sudden when I smoked pot, I just felt deep shame. And when I hurt somebody or did something wrong, all of a sudden… It’s just like I got a conscious from that evening. That’s what my gift was, if you will. And just at that point, I didn’t even have a choice. I had to change my life, because for whatever reason, I’ve been changed in a moment.
And so from there I started actually trying in school. I always joke around that I got 2.14 in high school. I had a teacher hand write me a note saying I was the worst student she’s ever had. All that kind of stuff. I was not a really great student. And then in that moment it’s just like, “Okay, now life’s changed,” and I start trying to learn, and I try to become a good student. And it turns out it’s really hard. I was really bad. I still got Cs. I went and took pre-calculus and failed pre-calculus, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I used to be the smart math guy, and now I’m the idiot failing.” And so I’m just questioning myself and all that, and I spent hours upon hours in a studying, math learning center, and then just at some point years into this journey, I’m like a year and a half into this journey, at this point, something clicks, and I go from being the worst person to just immediately becoming the best.
Everything after that is just, I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I was the best person at math. I started going into my computer science classes. I just really got everything. Everything, at just years after trying, just all of a sudden became easier. And I’m not sure if it happened over the course of weeks or when the easier started, but it was just first predicated by just a huge amount of difficulty. And then this is where I started really desiring and loving the process of learning, was when things started getting easier after all those years.
Because I just was motivated by this desire to do something, not thinking it was going to get any easier, and then all of a sudden it just started getting easier, and it was great. And that’s really where I guess I started having the biggest parts of my life change at that point. I started really, really, really wanting to never look at porn again, because every single time just such shame, and I really wanted to stop. And that was by far the hardest addiction to quit. Smoking cigarettes was also a really hard addiction to quit, shockingly hard addiction to quit, but porn by far was just the worst of them all. And then I think about 22, I was finally done with all kind of addictions, if you will, and then for a year I just worked in all that, and I think right around, maybe it was 21 and three quarters, somewhere in that range, I’m not really sure where I stopped all the addictions part, but… Or at least the outwardly addictions. And then at some point, six months later, a year later, met my beautiful wife. Things just started falling more and more into place. I loved more and more work. I loved programming. I started programming 12 hours a day. I watched the Social Network movie, and after that, I was just like, “I’m doing a startup.” And so that night I started my first startup, and I was just like, so… It was in PHP by way.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Nice.
ThePrimeagen
PHP, yeah, 5.2 or something like that. It was great. Great times. And I was just so motivated to do that, and I would just program for… Sometimes I’d program for 24, 36 hours straight, and just nonstop, that’s all I wanted to do at all points. I think my wife got a little sick of me. She would be like, “Can you drop me off at school?” And I’d be like, “No, I’m programming.” I was not a very nice… You know, I didn’t think through things that well.
PHP, yeah, 5.2 or something like that. It was great. Great times. And I was just so motivated to do that, and I would just program for… Sometimes I’d program for 24, 36 hours straight, and just nonstop, that’s all I wanted to do at all points. I think my wife got a little sick of me. She would be like, “Can you drop me off at school?” And I’d be like, “No, I’m programming.” I was not a very nice… You know, I didn’t think through things that well.
Lex Fridman
Yeah yeah. Yeah.
Yeah yeah. Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
I was just so into it and I just did it nonstop, and that’s kind of how I became me, is that story, if that makes sense.
I was just so into it and I just did it nonstop, and that’s kind of how I became me, is that story, if that makes sense.
Hardship
Lex Fridman
Let’s try to reverse engineer some of the pain and some of the triumph. You made it sound easy at times. Let’s try to understand it better, maybe when you were seven years old. What do you think about the pain you’ve experienced there, losing your dad? What do you think? What kind of impact did it have on you? What kind of memories do you have at that time?
Let’s try to reverse engineer some of the pain and some of the triumph. You made it sound easy at times. Let’s try to understand it better, maybe when you were seven years old. What do you think about the pain you’ve experienced there, losing your dad? What do you think? What kind of impact did it have on you? What kind of memories do you have at that time?
ThePrimeagen
The best way I can put it is that I just never knew what a dad was. I was young enough that I could maybe repress or just even have the capability of remembering things long-term. Because I know most people don’t remember a lot from when they’re young, and so I’m not exactly sure. I probably was at one of the best possible ages, if I’m going to lose a dad, to lose a dad. You know? If you’re going to lose one, if you’re 11 or 12, it’s a terrible age. That’s what my brother was, and he fell into drug addiction and never got back out. So I just have more of a fuzziness and just kind of a longing. I just wish I had a dad.
The best way I can put it is that I just never knew what a dad was. I was young enough that I could maybe repress or just even have the capability of remembering things long-term. Because I know most people don’t remember a lot from when they’re young, and so I’m not exactly sure. I probably was at one of the best possible ages, if I’m going to lose a dad, to lose a dad. You know? If you’re going to lose one, if you’re 11 or 12, it’s a terrible age. That’s what my brother was, and he fell into drug addiction and never got back out. So I just have more of a fuzziness and just kind of a longing. I just wish I had a dad.
Lex Fridman
What impact did that have on your evolution, on your life, having that longing?
What impact did that have on your evolution, on your life, having that longing?
ThePrimeagen
I think that’s why I was so bad socially, in the sense that I was looking for approval, right? I needed approval. I think a lot of people desire that approval or that loving figure, and I just didn’t have that. So I think I just looked for it in everything else, right? If I were to psychoanalyze my actions. During the time, it’s not like I was actively thinking that, but yeah, I just always wanted something to fill in whatever that was I felt.
I think that’s why I was so bad socially, in the sense that I was looking for approval, right? I needed approval. I think a lot of people desire that approval or that loving figure, and I just didn’t have that. So I think I just looked for it in everything else, right? If I were to psychoanalyze my actions. During the time, it’s not like I was actively thinking that, but yeah, I just always wanted something to fill in whatever that was I felt.
High school
Lex Fridman
I think a lot of people listening to this will resonate with your experience in high school. Being the outsider, being picked on, struggling through a lot of different complexities at home. What advice would you give to them?
I think a lot of people listening to this will resonate with your experience in high school. Being the outsider, being picked on, struggling through a lot of different complexities at home. What advice would you give to them?
ThePrimeagen
The worst part about high school is that you’re surrounded by a bunch of people your age and it feels eternal.
The worst part about high school is that you’re surrounded by a bunch of people your age and it feels eternal.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
You don’t think… The people that are around you, you feel like are the people that will be there for the rest of your life. At least that’s what I thought. And I didn’t really even realize this until many years later, that they are going to be some of the least consequential people in your life.
You don’t think… The people that are around you, you feel like are the people that will be there for the rest of your life. At least that’s what I thought. And I didn’t really even realize this until many years later, that they are going to be some of the least consequential people in your life.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Which is very shocking to think about, especially if you’re in it right now.
Which is very shocking to think about, especially if you’re in it right now.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Right? Right now they are everything that your experience is, your whole reality. And then one day it all stops, and then real life starts to begin.
Right? Right now they are everything that your experience is, your whole reality. And then one day it all stops, and then real life starts to begin.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
That’s such a shocking thing, and if I could just tell myself that, maybe I would have been a bunch of different person.
That’s such a shocking thing, and if I could just tell myself that, maybe I would have been a bunch of different person.
Lex Fridman
That’s so beautifully put. I mean, it is like a trial run. You know at the beginning of video games, there’s a little tutorial? That’s what that is.
That’s so beautifully put. I mean, it is like a trial run. You know at the beginning of video games, there’s a little tutorial? That’s what that is.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And actually that should be a chance to try shit out, to take risks, because real life will begin with, there is more consequences after that.
And actually that should be a chance to try shit out, to take risks, because real life will begin with, there is more consequences after that.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Because real life will begin where there is more consequences after that.
Because real life will begin where there is more consequences after that.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Here you can, if you like a girl, ask her out. Try, try shit. If you get picked on, hit that guy back. Try shit out.
Here you can, if you like a girl, ask her out. Try, try shit. If you get picked on, hit that guy back. Try shit out.
ThePrimeagen
I’m not going to condone punching another person.
I’m not going to condone punching another person.
Lex Fridman
I will. Beat the shit out of him, and take some jiu-jitsu and learn how to take him down. And then that girl that rejected you will be like, “Hmm, maybe I’ll give that guy a second chance.” Be a bad motherfucker. It’s a chance to try stuff out. This is a very motivational speech for kicking ass.
I will. Beat the shit out of him, and take some jiu-jitsu and learn how to take him down. And then that girl that rejected you will be like, “Hmm, maybe I’ll give that guy a second chance.” Be a bad motherfucker. It’s a chance to try stuff out. This is a very motivational speech for kicking ass.
ThePrimeagen
It is true. I mean, there is something very true about that, that I think especially… I mean, I have no idea what the girls experience of high school would be like, but as a guy, there’s definitely a lot of like physical requirements in high school. There’s a lot of physical measurement, at least where I grew up. I think that might not be true in all high schools, but if they’re filled with boys, it’s probably true.
It is true. I mean, there is something very true about that, that I think especially… I mean, I have no idea what the girls experience of high school would be like, but as a guy, there’s definitely a lot of like physical requirements in high school. There’s a lot of physical measurement, at least where I grew up. I think that might not be true in all high schools, but if they’re filled with boys, it’s probably true.
And so it’s just like, yeah, it probably does help to do those things, to go to BJJ, to do any of these activities. Because even if you don’t ever kick someone’s ass, just having some level of confidence in yourself is probably a very valuable thing. But just remembering that this is such a short, tiny moment in your life is just like a huge help.
Lex Fridman
I mean, the way you phrased it is exactly right. That’s what it feels like. That these are the people that will be with you for the rest of your life and this is the whole world. And so that means that there’ll be just tremendous amount of impact if somebody picks on you or if you fall somewhere low in the hierarchy and the status hierarchy of this high school, that means you’ll be low in the status hierarchy of the world and you’re fucked for the rest of your life.
I mean, the way you phrased it is exactly right. That’s what it feels like. That these are the people that will be with you for the rest of your life and this is the whole world. And so that means that there’ll be just tremendous amount of impact if somebody picks on you or if you fall somewhere low in the hierarchy and the status hierarchy of this high school, that means you’ll be low in the status hierarchy of the world and you’re fucked for the rest of your life.
And that carries a tremendous amount of weight. It’s just why psychologically it’s extremely difficult to be… I think it’s understated often by parents, by society, how difficult it is to be a high schooler, how difficult psychologically it is, how it actually makes sense that some people would suffer from depression and be on the verge of suicide; is very, very difficult.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I think it’s even… People always say, “Back in my day,” blah blah blah. I think it’s genuinely harder today than it’s ever been in the sense that when I was a kid, there was a qualification to people. Meaning, this is a cool guy, this is not a cool guy.
Yeah, I think it’s even… People always say, “Back in my day,” blah blah blah. I think it’s genuinely harder today than it’s ever been in the sense that when I was a kid, there was a qualification to people. Meaning, this is a cool guy, this is not a cool guy.
Today, there’s a quantification of people. You have 32,514 people following you, you have 12. The people can visually… They can inspect your exact social value on whatever platform you’re on. And that has to be just so much harder.
And I can imagine that there’s a lot of just so much weight to put on that, that it’s just… it feels probably way worse and way more damning to be uncool because you have an exact number of how uncool you are.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. The challenge there. And the task, the quest is to remember that just because your social circle on social media and in high school thinks you’re uncool, it actually might mean you are cool. And you need to find that cool and grow it and let it flourish so that when real life begins, you can fucking come out of the gate firing on all cylinders because-
Yeah. The challenge there. And the task, the quest is to remember that just because your social circle on social media and in high school thinks you’re uncool, it actually might mean you are cool. And you need to find that cool and grow it and let it flourish so that when real life begins, you can fucking come out of the gate firing on all cylinders because-
ThePrimeagen
That’s a great way to put it.
That’s a great way to put it.
Lex Fridman
I think if anything, high school is really bad at picking out the cool people. Whatever the system, the hierarchy that forms, it’s such a basic bitch hierarchy. You’re good at very generic shit. That’s how you rise.
I think if anything, high school is really bad at picking out the cool people. Whatever the system, the hierarchy that forms, it’s such a basic bitch hierarchy. You’re good at very generic shit. That’s how you rise.
ThePrimeagen
Your parents bought you an expensive car.
Your parents bought you an expensive car.
Lex Fridman
Expensive car, right?
Expensive car, right?
ThePrimeagen
Just-
Just-
Lex Fridman
Materialistic shit. Yeah, exactly.
Materialistic shit. Yeah, exactly.
ThePrimeagen
It’s a greedy search. See, they didn’t have a proper search, so they’re just hitting that local optima.
It’s a greedy search. See, they didn’t have a proper search, so they’re just hitting that local optima.
Lex Fridman
But the… I mean, even the objective function for that greedy search is just a really shitty one, where those people that win the game of high school are very often not going to be the people that win the much more exciting, beautiful game of life. So do epic shit and try stuff out.
But the… I mean, even the objective function for that greedy search is just a really shitty one, where those people that win the game of high school are very often not going to be the people that win the much more exciting, beautiful game of life. So do epic shit and try stuff out.
The weirdos are the ones that are going to succeed, the weirdos in high school. Probably because they also get bullied and they get to be tormented more psychologically and get to explore their own mind and think through what it means to be a human being more.
Because if you’re winning in high school, you’re not being challenged, you’re not self-reflecting, you’re not trying shit out. So there is some degree to being tormented as long as it doesn’t break you. The porn addiction, that’s another powerful one that I think will probably resonate with a lot of people. And it’s interesting that you say that’s one of the hardest addictions to overcome.
Porn addiction
ThePrimeagen
Let me say it this way, some addictions have a much bigger societal look and porn is just not one of them, which makes it super hard. None of your friends are going to cheer you on. If you go on Twitter and say, “I quit porn,” they’re going to be like, “Well, that’s good for you but not everybody…”
Let me say it this way, some addictions have a much bigger societal look and porn is just not one of them, which makes it super hard. None of your friends are going to cheer you on. If you go on Twitter and say, “I quit porn,” they’re going to be like, “Well, that’s good for you but not everybody…”
No one makes that argument with meth, right? No one’s going to be like, “Well, not everyone has to quit meth, okay. It’s actually a fine industry and people who are the ones producing it, they’re good also, right?” No one’s going to make that kind of argument.
Whereas with porn, you’re going to have a whole thing and friends are going to think you’re dumb for doing it or whatever. It’s like you have… It’s a much more difficult one in just like that. So it feels accepted.
Lex Fridman
And I think it’s also an addiction you can practice, participate in privately and hide it from the world. There’s certain addictions that are harder to hide from the world for prolonged periods of time.
And I think it’s also an addiction you can practice, participate in privately and hide it from the world. There’s certain addictions that are harder to hide from the world for prolonged periods of time.
And porn addiction is probably one you can just have for many years and then it can deepen. That’s probably a serious issue. Boy, am I glad I grew up before the internet because porn is so accessible, so easy to go deep into that addiction. I mean, what can you speak about what impact it had on your life? Maybe some of the low points, but also how to overcome it?
ThePrimeagen
I’d say as far as impact goes is that you will have such a long and broken look at women. By the very, like I can… Again, I’m only speaking from a male’s perspective, that porn in its just most basic thing is that you use another person for your own desire or your own want. It’s not something that is deeply needed. There’s no need for porn. It’s purely a want-based activity or a lust, however you want, whatever word you can fill in there.
I’d say as far as impact goes is that you will have such a long and broken look at women. By the very, like I can… Again, I’m only speaking from a male’s perspective, that porn in its just most basic thing is that you use another person for your own desire or your own want. It’s not something that is deeply needed. There’s no need for porn. It’s purely a want-based activity or a lust, however you want, whatever word you can fill in there.
And it is purely an objectifying activity. Someone else is on display for your own enjoyment. And so I think you carry this around. I do think that the women that I dated during high school or the women after high school and college, I looked at them as a means to an end. And I think porn greatly kind of shifted that perspective in my head that I did not give the value that was desired to another person. It really devalues humanity just in general, is my perspective of it. And then it makes people into commodities. And I don’t think people are commodities. I think everyone has value.
And so during that, for me that’s like the great effect of porn, is that it’s just consumerism gone wild or materialism maybe, you could ask or argue, gone wild. And it’s extremely hard to quit, just like you said, because I can look at porn and then I can go out to lunch.
No one’s going to know. No one’s going to have any ideas. It’s a very private, it can be very short session. It doesn’t have to be something that takes… You can’t take acid then go out to lunch, right? Your whole day is going to be a very different day. And so it’s very quick, easy, accessible.
And then obviously there’s all the science and statistics, like men make worse decisions for some period of time after looking or being exposed to sexualized images. There’s the whole dopamine effect that’s just like you constantly need more and more dopamine. That’s why people typically don’t just watch five minutes of porn and call it a day. There’s like the hundred tab joke that’s always made on the internet. It’s because it’s just this constant dopamine cycle you’re constantly doing.
And all that stuff is great to say. And I’m sure statistics and science and all that stuff is really great arguments for some amount of people. But for me it just comes down to, is it really a good thing to do? Is it really actually something we want, is to value people in such a profane or just disregarding way? I just really think it’s just bad for the soul. Even if all the stats said it was great for you, I still say it’s actually bad.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You have to look at the long-term big picture, psychological impact it has on your relationships with human beings in general. That’s my, more generally than just porn, my problem with the quote, unquote, “sort of manosphere”, is I think sleeping with a bunch of women is great, wonderful. But the problem is making that the primary objective of your life, similar with porn, is you devalue one of the most awesome things, which is intimacy. That’s true for deep friendship, that’s true for relationships.
Yeah. You have to look at the long-term big picture, psychological impact it has on your relationships with human beings in general. That’s my, more generally than just porn, my problem with the quote, unquote, “sort of manosphere”, is I think sleeping with a bunch of women is great, wonderful. But the problem is making that the primary objective of your life, similar with porn, is you devalue one of the most awesome things, which is intimacy. That’s true for deep friendship, that’s true for relationships.
And I think porn does that in its purest, darkest form, which is: the thing that matters is the sex, not the deep connection with another human being. And I think, again, going back to high school and the manosphere, the objective function if it’s to get laid, which helps with status and confidence and all…
All that is wonderful, I think. Again, can be an addiction. But the thing that’s even more awesome for a lot of people is a deep friendship or deep intimacy with a romantic partner. That’s also fucking awesome, and both of those are great.
ThePrimeagen
It’s objectively better to have… I would say that there’s no universe that exists or there should be no argument possible that exists that a guy who has meaningless sex has a better or a more meaningful life than, say, me and my wife who’ve been together for 15 years.
It’s objectively better to have… I would say that there’s no universe that exists or there should be no argument possible that exists that a guy who has meaningless sex has a better or a more meaningful life than, say, me and my wife who’ve been together for 15 years.
We have a very… I can depend on her in all circumstances. Whereas if you live that other life, it sure could be… It could feel great, but there’s no meaning to it. There’s no actual real value to it.
Lex Fridman
That’s absolutely correct. I do think that getting laid can have a tremendous positive impact on the confidence of a young man. I think just there’s a certain number of sexual partners from which you can collect a lot of data and it can free you about, like not to be so nervous about the opposite sex, not to be so nervous about human interaction.
That’s absolutely correct. I do think that getting laid can have a tremendous positive impact on the confidence of a young man. I think just there’s a certain number of sexual partners from which you can collect a lot of data and it can free you about, like not to be so nervous about the opposite sex, not to be so nervous about human interaction.
And that will allow you to see the world more clearly and to actually find that one partner with whom you can be deeply intimate with. Sometimes the nervousness around this societally constructed value in getting laid can cloud your judgment.
And if you just release that by getting laid a bunch of times, then you could see the world clearly that getting laid is not nearly as important as you said, as finding the right human, including I should put in that pile, not just a romantic partner, but friendships, deep lasting friendships.
ThePrimeagen
Well, I mean I think you’re right that our society puts a lot of emphasis on getting laid. And I’m sure that’s true among any group of males throughout any point in history. I’m sure that’s a very common joke that’s never actually never stopped at any point. So I’m sure that exists but… And there’s probably some truth to the sense that after you’ve… Who was it? Jim Carrey. “I hope that everyone can get rich so they realize that money solves none of your problems.” The realization that this thing that society told you is hyper important is actually not the important part. It is a very important…
Well, I mean I think you’re right that our society puts a lot of emphasis on getting laid. And I’m sure that’s true among any group of males throughout any point in history. I’m sure that’s a very common joke that’s never actually never stopped at any point. So I’m sure that exists but… And there’s probably some truth to the sense that after you’ve… Who was it? Jim Carrey. “I hope that everyone can get rich so they realize that money solves none of your problems.” The realization that this thing that society told you is hyper important is actually not the important part. It is a very important…
It’s a great sign that your relationship is healthy. Like if me and my wife were to have no sex at all for months on end, something’s gone wrong, which means what… we are no longer on the same plane. But it’s not also a good identifier. Just because you’re having a lot of sex, it doesn’t mean you’re having a good relationship.
And so it’s like a unique… I forget the right term here, but it’s a unique way at looking at the problems. And our society puts so much emphasis. And maybe that’s why porn was so hard to quit, but my guess is it’s just all the dopamine effect that it is.
But for me, the most important part and the thing that actually has real reward is having that… having just my wife. I do not look at… I desperately try not to look at any other woman. I’m hopefully not going to get caught… Mark Zuckerberged at the White House like that.
I don’t look at porn. My wife has complete confidence in me that there is not going to be a situation in which she has to question me in any kind of sense. And that builds a much more deeply, I would argue, a very deep relationship because the trust is that much bigger. I think the deepness of the relationship is probably proportional to the trust you have in each other. It’s very hard to have a deep relationship with no trust.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And a probably a prerequisite, maybe a component of trust is vulnerability to where you take the leap of being vulnerable with another human being. And that vulnerability when reciprocated builds this really strong trust and it’s a beautiful thing. Yeah.
Yeah. And a probably a prerequisite, maybe a component of trust is vulnerability to where you take the leap of being vulnerable with another human being. And that vulnerability when reciprocated builds this really strong trust and it’s a beautiful thing. Yeah.
I personally just… Given my position, that’s even more challenging, being vulnerable with the world and there’s a bunch of people out there that want to hurt you for it, but I think it’s worthwhile anyway to be vulnerable.
ThePrimeagen
It’s always worth it. The risk is always worth it in some sense. Obviously, everyone has a different life they have to filter through their actions with, right? Because the person that has no, say, social following or anything, their risk reward profile could just be local impact, which could be just as damning or harming to them.
It’s always worth it. The risk is always worth it in some sense. Obviously, everyone has a different life they have to filter through their actions with, right? Because the person that has no, say, social following or anything, their risk reward profile could just be local impact, which could be just as damning or harming to them.
And so it’s always worth the risk though, in my personal opinion, because finding my wife has been obviously the most impactful or changing thing in my life. Or second most, I’d argue that one night with God would probably be the most impactful thing that led to everything else, but then the wife would be the next most impactful. I mean, I’m cleaning up after myself and stuff now. Changed man. I’m a changed man.
God
Lex Fridman
Can we try to reverse engineer that moment of you finding God. What is it at 19? Because it feels like that was a big leap for you to escape the pain, to escape the addiction or the beginning of that journey. What do you think happened there?
Can we try to reverse engineer that moment of you finding God. What is it at 19? Because it feels like that was a big leap for you to escape the pain, to escape the addiction or the beginning of that journey. What do you think happened there?
ThePrimeagen
I think it just felt like I just… There was no line that I wasn’t willing to cross. Everything was fine and just like… It just all of a sudden, just in that moment, it’s just like I had I guess some sort of deep fear and understanding I am going down a path. Is this really the path you want to go down?
I think it just felt like I just… There was no line that I wasn’t willing to cross. Everything was fine and just like… It just all of a sudden, just in that moment, it’s just like I had I guess some sort of deep fear and understanding I am going down a path. Is this really the path you want to go down?
And I don’t know what the result of that path would be or anything like that. I don’t tend to speculate on things I don’t understand. I just know that in that moment I had the option and I just chose… I didn’t want it anymore. Right?
It’s kind of mixed in this whole thing where it’s just like I had no value. I wrapped up all my meaning or value in having sex or getting laid, I had… All that stuff, all the things we just talked about, that was where all my worth was. And that is just such a terrible place to have your worth.
And it was just all came to a point. And I can’t tell you the day of the week, I can’t tell you anything other than it was nighttime and I was in South Hedges in Montana State University, go Bobcats, that’s about… Yeah, that’s the sign that we do at football games. Don’t worry about it. But that’s all I can really tell you because that night was no more or less special than some other night. It’s just the specialness was I got at least a chance to make a choice.
Lex Fridman
Because you find in that advice that you can give to others who are probably… There’s probably just an endless amount of people that are struggling with porn addiction now, young people. What advice could you give to them? How to overcome it?
Because you find in that advice that you can give to others who are probably… There’s probably just an endless amount of people that are struggling with porn addiction now, young people. What advice could you give to them? How to overcome it?
ThePrimeagen
For me to overcome it, I had to realize that I was taking something away from my future wife. Some people would be like, “Oh, well, once you get a girlfriend then you can stop.” And it’s just like, “No, because you never stopped the problem.” You don’t stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife. And I didn’t even know my current wife at that time. She was not in the picture. I’m not even sure if she was at Montana State University at that point.
For me to overcome it, I had to realize that I was taking something away from my future wife. Some people would be like, “Oh, well, once you get a girlfriend then you can stop.” And it’s just like, “No, because you never stopped the problem.” You don’t stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife. And I didn’t even know my current wife at that time. She was not in the picture. I’m not even sure if she was at Montana State University at that point.
And so it’s just that’s… Once I made that realization, I think it went from my head to my heart, which they say is the greatest distance in the universe. I finally got it. And that’s really where things change.
The ability to say like what’s going to help you change and all that, I don’t know if there’s… I don’t think there’s silver bullets, right? If someone could offer you a drug… I forget who says this phrase, but there’s this really interesting phrase that goes something like, he was a very depressed man and he was struggling with suicide and he writes about this in this memoir.
And he goes to these doctors and the doctors effectively say, “Well, here’s antidepressants, it’s going to help you.” And he says that, “Well, the problem was is that scientists told me that I could just touch my brain and make myself happy, and that’s it. They could reach in, they could configure some stuff and I’ll be happy.” He’s like, “For me, it was a lot like going out into a field and being able to take a drug to see the rain. I could look out, see the rain, it would fall down, it’d be silvery, it’d be beautiful, but all the crop would still die because there’s not actually any rain. I had to discover how to be happy myself.”
And so for me, it’s like the reason why I looked at porn is because I was unhappy. I was trying to find meaning. I was trying to find value in something, right? Something that was supposed to finally give me this ultimate satisfaction. And it just does not, no matter how hard, and no matter how much you think it will, there is no escapade, there is no pornography that will ever give you that satisfaction you’re looking for. That’s the reason why it’s addicting. And that’s my call to why you shouldn’t do it, but how to get out of it, I only got out of it by realizing.
Lex Fridman
I think that’s really brilliantly described. You knew that this thing you’re doing is preventing you from finding your future wife and future wife could mean more even broadly, this path to a flourishing, to a beautiful life.
I think that’s really brilliantly described. You knew that this thing you’re doing is preventing you from finding your future wife and future wife could mean more even broadly, this path to a flourishing, to a beautiful life.
I think there’s a lot of choices we make that are just preventing us from opening the door to whatever future. I think what’s really nice to do is to imagine, just like we said with high school, that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you’ll be truly happy and you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths. And there’s a bunch of addictions, there’s a bunch of choices that prevent us from traveling down those paths.
So just believe that you’re going to have an awesome life and remove from your life the things that are preventing you from walking down that path, which is essentially what you did. It’s a leap of faith that if you let go of porn, that a better life is waiting for you on the other end.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I definitely can’t say how long it will take, a better life. But for me, there’s no way in the universe I could have had the relationship that I have without first making those steps because I couldn’t value my wife in the way that was proper for who she was. I would have valued her through the index or the lens that I currently was looking through.
Yeah. I definitely can’t say how long it will take, a better life. But for me, there’s no way in the universe I could have had the relationship that I have without first making those steps because I couldn’t value my wife in the way that was proper for who she was. I would have valued her through the index or the lens that I currently was looking through.
Lex Fridman
Got to ask. So I’ve never done meth. I’ve never done meth.
Got to ask. So I’ve never done meth. I’ve never done meth.
ThePrimeagen
That was a great segue by the way.
That was a great segue by the way.
Lex Fridman
Oh, man. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, honestly with this interviewing thing. But yeah, meth and LSD… I did ayahuasca. I did shrooms a bunch of times. And this topic, I should say that there’s a lot of, on Twitter and in the tech community in general, people speaking negatively about ayahuasca and some positively. I think it’s such a roll of the dice.
Oh, man. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, honestly with this interviewing thing. But yeah, meth and LSD… I did ayahuasca. I did shrooms a bunch of times. And this topic, I should say that there’s a lot of, on Twitter and in the tech community in general, people speaking negatively about ayahuasca and some positively. I think it’s such a roll of the dice.
I had incredible experiences, but I don’t think I want to recommend it to anyone. It’s a risk, it’s a serious risk. It really is a roll of the dice that you could meet your demons and they could destroy you or you can meet your demons and let go of them. Or you could have experiences like I did, which is never… Apparently I don’t have demons. I’m pretty sure they’re somewhere in the basement, but I’ve never met them on drugs.
I’m always really happy. I’m happy drunk. I’m super happy on ayahuasca, just full of love. I don’t understand, I don’t understand where the demons are, but that’s my biochemistry, whatever that is.
And for some others, one trip could be amazing and the next one could just completely destroy you and wreck your life. So I don’t know what the recommendation from that is, maybe avoid it, but then all of us die and life…
I tend to lean into adventure but drugs is… If you fuck with the biochemistry of your brain, you can really destroy yourself in a way that it’s going to torment you. So I would generally recommend that people avoid drugs altogether, probably, unless you’re a crazy motherfucker. Hunter S. Thompson.
ThePrimeagen
What an intro to this topic.
What an intro to this topic.
Lex Fridman
I’m sorry. What’s meth like?
I’m sorry. What’s meth like?
ThePrimeagen
That’s a great intro. I like… You are very correct in the sense that there is, at least when it comes to hallucinogens, there is a wild variance to what you’re going to experience. And there is no guarantee, there’s no… Just because you buy the product, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have a good time, right? There’s a lot of…
That’s a great intro. I like… You are very correct in the sense that there is, at least when it comes to hallucinogens, there is a wild variance to what you’re going to experience. And there is no guarantee, there’s no… Just because you buy the product, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have a good time, right? There’s a lot of…
Personally, I find that stuff to be very… I believe in the spiritual realm, right? I believe demons and angels exist. I believe God exists. And that whole realm is like… I don’t know what it opens you up to, but it’s much, much different experience. Now, some people will be like, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of chemicals in your brain. They all get mixed up. LSD just takes all of your pathways and they all go… They all get kind of scrambled up in your brain.”
And it’s just like, “Yeah, the experiences are profound.” I had some really bizarre, very cool, very awful… I’ve had all the experiences in them all. I can just tell you that I personally always say the same thing. It’s like, choices that I made I can never take back. I would never take that away from myself because I don’t know if I would be who I am today without all those experiences going up to it.
But if you have not had that experience, I’m on your team, or at least partially on your team, maybe more severely, I don’t think you need those experiences. I don’t think they’re going to… You don’t have to put yourself through that to make a good decisions or to realize that people have value, right? You don’t have to do that.
So as far as what is meth like? Meth is like… If you’ve ever done cocaine, cocaine starts off with like a 15-minute dance party. Just… It’s just so intense. It’s so great. And then it just followed up with like a five hour… just feeling wiggly, right? I don’t know how else to describe it. Meth is like that except for I didn’t get as much dance party or any dance party, but instead I just got that part for like 12 hours.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
So did a lot of skateboarding, did a lot of running around, staying all night.
So did a lot of skateboarding, did a lot of running around, staying all night.
Lex Fridman
Would you say it’s a pleasant feeling or is it more like an escape from the loneliness of life? Is it pleasant or negative in the actual moment? Not the consequences but in the moment.
Would you say it’s a pleasant feeling or is it more like an escape from the loneliness of life? Is it pleasant or negative in the actual moment? Not the consequences but in the moment.
ThePrimeagen
So I mean, this is just a very interesting kind of area, which is that not… Universally, you can’t say that. Often you’ll find that there’s kind of these two groups of drug addicts. There’s those that like the opioids and those that like the uppers. They typically don’t like… There’s very few people in the drug world that do both. They’re really just like find their side and they go for it.
So I mean, this is just a very interesting kind of area, which is that not… Universally, you can’t say that. Often you’ll find that there’s kind of these two groups of drug addicts. There’s those that like the opioids and those that like the uppers. They typically don’t like… There’s very few people in the drug world that do both. They’re really just like find their side and they go for it.
So is meth a thing that everybody’s going to enjoy? Well, categorically, as you can see, and just how people experience drug addiction, no. But for me it’s just I had a really… It kind of feeds into the ADHD nature of this… Because you know you’re kind of high energy, you’re like always in the moment. So it’s just like you’re in the moment, but it’s just like, “Oh, I’m in the moment!” Everything’s just so intense!
You just want to really be in the moment. And so it’s just experiencing that constantly. And so was that great? Well, some people… My wife always tells me this, being nervous or… I forget, the anxiety of a situation can also be the same thing as like thrill. I forget the exact way. She’s probably super disappointed that I messed this up.
But it’s like you could perceive those two experiences in very different lights. Some people get in front of a crowd and it’s thrilling. Some people get in front of it and it’s just the worst experience of their lifetime. They would actually literally rather die, which is a crazy thing to think about than stand up and speak.
And so for me, meth was that thrilling side, but at the same time, it still didn’t quite give me that thing I wanted, whatever I was looking for. I’d use it to help try to get that thing I want, but it was never giving me that thing I wanted.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. For me, I’ve had all really wonderful experiences. Do not recommend them. But like with shroom-
Yeah. For me, I’ve had all really wonderful experiences. Do not recommend them. But like with shroom-
ThePrimeagen
That’s a YouTube policy by the way that you have to say, “By the way, do whatever you do, do not do a illegal activity.”
That’s a YouTube policy by the way that you have to say, “By the way, do whatever you do, do not do a illegal activity.”
Lex Fridman
I-
I-
ThePrimeagen
But I had great experiences, but whatever you do, don’t do it.
But I had great experiences, but whatever you do, don’t do it.
Lex Fridman
Mr. ThePrimeagen, I have no master. I don’t have YouTube or whatever. I’ll say whatever the fuck I want. I’m just-
Mr. ThePrimeagen, I have no master. I don’t have YouTube or whatever. I’ll say whatever the fuck I want. I’m just-
ThePrimeagen
But seriously, you do.
But seriously, you do.
Lex Fridman
… kind… No. No, I don’t give a shit about YouTube or anybody, honestly. I’m just careful about the words I say because just because I had positive experiences, I don’t want young people listening to this think they should try the experience. I think the much more powerful message is that life is awesome even without that. That’s something I definitely experiment with on the alcohol side.
… kind… No. No, I don’t give a shit about YouTube or anybody, honestly. I’m just careful about the words I say because just because I had positive experiences, I don’t want young people listening to this think they should try the experience. I think the much more powerful message is that life is awesome even without that. That’s something I definitely experiment with on the alcohol side.
So for me, I’m an introvert. I’m afraid of the world. Social interaction fills me with anxiety. Alcohol is definitely a thing that helps with that sometimes, but I think honestly it’s not even the alcohol, it’s having to do something while a person is talking to me. I could just drink a liquid. “Yeah. Mm-hmm.” There’s a social thing. With a beer, it’s like… “Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, we’re having fun.” And I think it’s…
For me, it works the same as… If the liquid actually looks like alcohol, it does the same purpose often because alcohol… If you have a whiskey or a beer looking thing, it kind of sends a signal that we should be having fun. So we’re socializing, right? We’re fucking getting crazy. And then that mean…
You don’t actually need the alcohol. You can get fucking crazy without the alcohol substance, but there is some kind of social signaling that happens when you have a drink in your hand. So I’ve been to get-togethers where I’m not drinking, but just doing a fake drink situation and I can also have fun. So I’ve been…
But that said, traveling across the world, there are times when you get to be able to down a bottle of vodka. That’s very essential for my line of work, but that’s almost like a cultural experience versus a necessary component of a successful social interaction and one that brings you happiness.
So not drinking… I think you can have fun and not drink too. So all of this… Man, I’m so careful saying drugs have had a good effect on my life because I think for most people, no, for majority of people, they will in the long term have a negative effect. So I think if you were to choose one or the other, just no drugs and no drinking means one day you can be the President of the United States kids. And I should say… Oh, man.
ThePrimeagen
That is-
That is-
Lex Fridman
That means Diet Coke-
That means Diet Coke-
ThePrimeagen
… his funniest line.
… his funniest line.
Lex Fridman
Diet Coke is great.
Diet Coke is great.
ThePrimeagen
That’s his funniest line, which is, “You would hate me if I drank.” Which I just like… To me, that tickles me to no end. Just like, “Oh my gosh, that is such a funny line.”
That’s his funniest line, which is, “You would hate me if I drank.” Which I just like… To me, that tickles me to no end. Just like, “Oh my gosh, that is such a funny line.”
Lex Fridman
Self-awareness and humor is wonderful there, but yeah.
Self-awareness and humor is wonderful there, but yeah.
ThePrimeagen
But I am on your team. All of the reasons why I used drugs and all that, it’s some level of escapism. I’m sure that’s like… would be the archetype or the box I’d put that into or the pursuit of trying to feel something that cannot come from them.
But I am on your team. All of the reasons why I used drugs and all that, it’s some level of escapism. I’m sure that’s like… would be the archetype or the box I’d put that into or the pursuit of trying to feel something that cannot come from them.
It’s like trying to find meaning in your job. You can find satisfaction in what you do. That is a very good thing. You can find satisfaction and be happy with what you’ve created. You can be thrilled by the experience, but you cannot find… I doubt you can find purpose. Maybe some people in specific jobs.
This obviously have very broad strokes, I’m painting with. Like if you’re an EMT and you save someone’s life, maybe there can be purpose in that whole experience, right? So I’m not saying all things, but as programming goes, most programmers, you cannot just simply find your purpose.
And same with drugs, you cannot find that thing you’re looking for, but they are a very great distraction. And then at some point that distraction comes with a heavy cost. I think Dr. Faust would probably know the best about the heavy cost, but it’s just you’re making one trade for another and at some point the bill comes due and that bill can be very, very large.
Perseverance
Lex Fridman
The other moment you mentioned that I think is really inspiring is that you failed pre-calculus. You really struggled in school. You realize that school is really hard and then eventually you’re able to sort of persevere and, I don’t know, break through that wall of struggle. Can you, by way of advice, figure out what happened and what kind of advice you can give to people who are struggling?
The other moment you mentioned that I think is really inspiring is that you failed pre-calculus. You really struggled in school. You realize that school is really hard and then eventually you’re able to sort of persevere and, I don’t know, break through that wall of struggle. Can you, by way of advice, figure out what happened and what kind of advice you can give to people who are struggling?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I’ll paint it in a more clear picture, or a very fast speed run of it is that I took pre-calculus, failed. I took pre-calculus again, failed, took pre-calculus again and got a C. So I took it three times. Then I took Calc over the summer, so Calc 1. In that one at the end, the final… The final was a two-hour final. I finished it in 30 minutes and that was the highest score in all of the school. And I proceeded to be the highest score in all calculus and Diffy Q.
Yeah. I’ll paint it in a more clear picture, or a very fast speed run of it is that I took pre-calculus, failed. I took pre-calculus again, failed, took pre-calculus again and got a C. So I took it three times. Then I took Calc over the summer, so Calc 1. In that one at the end, the final… The final was a two-hour final. I finished it in 30 minutes and that was the highest score in all of the school. And I proceeded to be the highest score in all calculus and Diffy Q.
I was the only person out of 400 people to finish the Diffy Q final. And I got the highest grade. And so I was like… I got really good. So I somehow went from really bad to really good. And my only… The thing that I did is that I had to win. It was not a option. It was not like, “Oh, this would be really great.” It’s like, “I will not graduate, I will not finish my stuff if I cannot do this.”
And so every single day I got up, I went to my however many hour class it was. Right after that, I went straight to the math learning center, did those problems. When I got home, I just got the book and it had the odd answers in the back. And I would try to walk through the problems over and over and over and over again until I absolutely got it. And it just became this thing where it’s just I…
Just simple rote memory took over and the ability to just effectively have the times table, but for calculus, all stuck in my head. Inverse trig substitution, trig substitution, doing Taylor and MaClaurin series. All those things, just over and over and over and over again. Eventually they became easy. They became very easy. It’s just that I had to cram it in there.
And some people, you hear these stories, whether they barely show up to class and they get As, I’ve never been that person. I’ve always been the person that has to sit down, read through everything, and I’m bad at abstract concepts. I like the concrete into the abstract, not the abstract into the concrete. Very bad at talking about things theoretically, then trying to apply them. But if I can do it once literally, then it’s really easy for me to go into the abstract.
And so it’s just like… For me, it’s just I had… There’s no substitute for the hours. So if I were to give advice, it’s just that you have to have time in the saddle. Hour after hour will make you slowly better. And at first, it’s crushing. It’s defeating and it’s not fun because you are bad at it.
But then at some point you’re just not bad at it if you can just do it long enough, and you’ll start getting okay at it. And then at some point you might even get good at it. And when you get good at something, it feels amazing.
There’s like an exploratory thing. If you’ve ever played a musical instrument, you stop having to think about all the little teeny things you have to do to be able to play something correctly. And you start thinking about how you can explore that space.
ThePrimeagen
…play something correctly and you start thinking about how you can explore that space. It’s like it’s a completely different problem. And same with programming, programming has an identical kind of feel to it. It’s just like you’ll cross that barrier and it becomes magical as opposed to a chore.
…play something correctly and you start thinking about how you can explore that space. It’s like it’s a completely different problem. And same with programming, programming has an identical kind of feel to it. It’s just like you’ll cross that barrier and it becomes magical as opposed to a chore.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Once you cross that barrier, somehow other things become easier. But then if you want to have a truly successful life, then you find the next barrier. Yeah, I’ve always been the same. Everything’s come really hard.
Yeah. Once you cross that barrier, somehow other things become easier. But then if you want to have a truly successful life, then you find the next barrier. Yeah, I’ve always been the same. Everything’s come really hard.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I’ve had no free lunches. Everything’s just been a lot of pain and struggle.
Yeah, I’ve had no free lunches. Everything’s just been a lot of pain and struggle.
Lex Fridman
I think somebody said that on this topic that you think work smarter not harder is a phrase that you dislike. Somebody on Reddit told me this.
I think somebody said that on this topic that you think work smarter not harder is a phrase that you dislike. Somebody on Reddit told me this.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I don’t just dislike it. I hate that phrase.
Yeah. I don’t just dislike it. I hate that phrase.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Tell me about your hatred. How do you feel?
Okay. Tell me about your hatred. How do you feel?
ThePrimeagen
The reason why I dislike that is that there is kind of a hidden suggestion there, which is that you already know what smarter is, so just do that. That actually things should be easy. You should just not have to try that hard. You should just do the quick, easy, obvious path and boom, it’s done. It’s like I’ve never experienced that in anything I’ve done. Everything is actually really hard and most of the time I don’t even know what I’m doing, so therefore I don’t even know what smart looks like. And so for me, the only way I can learn how to work smart is by working very, very hard and knowing that there’s no shortcuts. And then when I finally figure out what smart is, when I work smart and work hard, it is that much better.
The reason why I dislike that is that there is kind of a hidden suggestion there, which is that you already know what smarter is, so just do that. That actually things should be easy. You should just not have to try that hard. You should just do the quick, easy, obvious path and boom, it’s done. It’s like I’ve never experienced that in anything I’ve done. Everything is actually really hard and most of the time I don’t even know what I’m doing, so therefore I don’t even know what smart looks like. And so for me, the only way I can learn how to work smart is by working very, very hard and knowing that there’s no shortcuts. And then when I finally figure out what smart is, when I work smart and work hard, it is that much better.
Lex Fridman
I think there’s a deep profound truth to that.
I think there’s a deep profound truth to that.
ThePrimeagen
There’s a lot of these phrases that just drive me nuts in our society,
There’s a lot of these phrases that just drive me nuts in our society,
Lex Fridman
But that one is… Sorry, that one is really accepted if you can just linger on it because it really bothers me as well. So one, which is a really nice thing you said, the presumption there is things should be easy and you’re a failure if you don’t see the easy path. That’s kind of the implied thing.
But that one is… Sorry, that one is really accepted if you can just linger on it because it really bothers me as well. So one, which is a really nice thing you said, the presumption there is things should be easy and you’re a failure if you don’t see the easy path. That’s kind of the implied thing.
ThePrimeagen
Just work smart, daug, why are you putting in all those hours?
Just work smart, daug, why are you putting in all those hours?
Lex Fridman
And so it makes a lot of people that struggle feel like they’re a failure because I don’t see it. And then the choice they have, well, I’ll just be lazy and then maybe the profound truth will come to me somehow. And yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever, and I don’t think I’ve met great engineers that find the smart way without the extremely hard work. The annoying thing about those great engineers is then looking back, they forget the hard work because they remember all the joy they now are experiencing from all the efficient, smart work they figured out how to do. They forget. So when they give advice they give the stupid advice of, well, just do it like the easy way
And so it makes a lot of people that struggle feel like they’re a failure because I don’t see it. And then the choice they have, well, I’ll just be lazy and then maybe the profound truth will come to me somehow. And yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever, and I don’t think I’ve met great engineers that find the smart way without the extremely hard work. The annoying thing about those great engineers is then looking back, they forget the hard work because they remember all the joy they now are experiencing from all the efficient, smart work they figured out how to do. They forget. So when they give advice they give the stupid advice of, well, just do it like the easy way
And here’s the easy way. But no, you have to put in the hours. Musical instrument is a beautiful example of guitar and piano. I’ve put in, I don’t know how many thousands of hours. And now when I’m explaining stuff jiu-jitsu as well, I sound like one of those people just relax in jiu-jitsu. By the way, just relax is a really wonderful thing for physical endeavors like piano and so on. But to learn how to relax your hand, how to relax your mind, your body and use whatever the biomechanics of your body to apply the correct kind of leverage and the timing and all that, that takes thousands of hours of learning. Just to learn how to relax takes a lot of really hard work. In jiu-jitsu that takes many months of getting your ass beat over and over until you ride the bus home crying.
Your ego completely shattered and destroyed. And then a little element is figured out late that night or next morning. And from the depression, there’s this little plant that grows this flower of insight. And you use that insight to then get your ass kicked again all next month and year. And then you grow and grow and grow. And from that you discover how beautifully simple jiu-jitsu is or Judo is, just speaking for myself, or piano or guitar. And then yes, the profound truth or the mastery of a skill feels simple when you finally arrive to it, but the path for most people is going to be a hard one.
ThePrimeagen
I think I should make an addendum to the phrase, I think the phrase should be work hard, get smart.
I think I should make an addendum to the phrase, I think the phrase should be work hard, get smart.
Lex Fridman
Nice. That’s a t-shirt.
Nice. That’s a t-shirt.
ThePrimeagen
That’s what it should be.
That’s what it should be.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, agreed. Okay, that was a tangent of a tangent.
Yeah, agreed. Okay, that was a tangent of a tangent.
ThePrimeagen
Can I say one more cultural phrase that I absolutely hate?
Can I say one more cultural phrase that I absolutely hate?
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
ThePrimeagen
The journey is better than the destination. Everyone’s heard this. Just take one second to apply what that means. That means forever starting from now, you are only going towards a place that’s worse. That literally is what it means. Enjoy the journey, celebrate the destination, that should be what it would be but no. People say these phrases, they’re everywhere. There’s these very shallow phrases that have no logical bounds to them. You’re just like, why would the journey ever be better than the destination? I think this might even be a C.S. Lewis quote is that C.S. Lewis was like, nope, this is terrible. The journey is not in fact better than the destination.
The journey is better than the destination. Everyone’s heard this. Just take one second to apply what that means. That means forever starting from now, you are only going towards a place that’s worse. That literally is what it means. Enjoy the journey, celebrate the destination, that should be what it would be but no. People say these phrases, they’re everywhere. There’s these very shallow phrases that have no logical bounds to them. You’re just like, why would the journey ever be better than the destination? I think this might even be a C.S. Lewis quote is that C.S. Lewis was like, nope, this is terrible. The journey is not in fact better than the destination.
Lex Fridman
I love the demotivational posters. Progress, moving forward is better than moving backwards even if you’re still going nowhere. There’s a lot-
I love the demotivational posters. Progress, moving forward is better than moving backwards even if you’re still going nowhere. There’s a lot-
ThePrimeagen
I feel that one so much being in California for a few years, that is painful.
I feel that one so much being in California for a few years, that is painful.
Lex Fridman
Positivity, if it doesn’t break you today don’t worry, it will try again tomorrow. It’s just a lot of really great posters.
Positivity, if it doesn’t break you today don’t worry, it will try again tomorrow. It’s just a lot of really great posters.
ThePrimeagen
I didn’t even know this was a thing.
I didn’t even know this was a thing.
Lex Fridman
This is a thing.
This is a thing.
ThePrimeagen
Oh my gosh, I want that.
Oh my gosh, I want that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Hey. Hi, this is ThePrimeagen. One thing that I forgot to mention in this podcast, which feels just so foolish to me for forgetting, is just what a big role my mom played in my life. She had to work 18 hours a day after my dad died. She really made her house be able to survive. I always looked up to her and I always thought her amazing. And she really was the reason why when I decided to get my butt kicked back in gear, she’s just someone who I looked to as an internal inspiration for me to continuing, to keep on going because I really wanted to make her proud. And all those years of just high energy effort, I really wanted to make sure that she knew that I was just so dang appreciative for it. So hey, I just wanted to say thank you. Love you, mom.
Hey. Hi, this is ThePrimeagen. One thing that I forgot to mention in this podcast, which feels just so foolish to me for forgetting, is just what a big role my mom played in my life. She had to work 18 hours a day after my dad died. She really made her house be able to survive. I always looked up to her and I always thought her amazing. And she really was the reason why when I decided to get my butt kicked back in gear, she’s just someone who I looked to as an internal inspiration for me to continuing, to keep on going because I really wanted to make her proud. And all those years of just high energy effort, I really wanted to make sure that she knew that I was just so dang appreciative for it. So hey, I just wanted to say thank you. Love you, mom.
Netflix
Lex Fridman
For people who don’t know, you worked in Netflix.
For people who don’t know, you worked in Netflix.
ThePrimeagen
By the way.
By the way.
Lex Fridman
By the way. Now, how did you go from there, from the hardship that we mentioned, from the struggle, from the addictions and so on to a place where you were working at this incredible engineering company and building cool shit there? So tell the Netflix story.
By the way. Now, how did you go from there, from the hardship that we mentioned, from the struggle, from the addictions and so on to a place where you were working at this incredible engineering company and building cool shit there? So tell the Netflix story.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, so I kind of alluded to it earlier that I wanted to do my own startup so for, I forget how long it was, one or two years or two and a half years, built a startup. PHP, jQuery, everyone’s favorite language is all put together. You can solve math stuff with jQuery. So I just was totally into just non-stop doing that. This is the height of Stack Overflow. I was asking really dumb questions on Stack Overflow like what is more pythonic? And then you get a bunch of up votes and try to steal a bunch of karma away, all the fun stuff to do. Good times. And I was just so into it breathing and I just breathe it in, breathe it out, and that’s what I do all day every day. And so it’s just like non-stop building of a startup. Ultimately that startup failed and so I had to go get a real job.
Yeah, so I kind of alluded to it earlier that I wanted to do my own startup so for, I forget how long it was, one or two years or two and a half years, built a startup. PHP, jQuery, everyone’s favorite language is all put together. You can solve math stuff with jQuery. So I just was totally into just non-stop doing that. This is the height of Stack Overflow. I was asking really dumb questions on Stack Overflow like what is more pythonic? And then you get a bunch of up votes and try to steal a bunch of karma away, all the fun stuff to do. Good times. And I was just so into it breathing and I just breathe it in, breathe it out, and that’s what I do all day every day. And so it’s just like non-stop building of a startup. Ultimately that startup failed and so I had to go get a real job.
Lex Fridman
Can you say what the startup was?
Can you say what the startup was?
ThePrimeagen
It is so wild thinking about it in the past. Before I tell you what it is, I want to tell one quick thing about my dad. My dad in the early ’90s, like ’91, ’92, was building kind of a phone card company where you’d be able to pre-purchase long-distance minutes. Now, if you remember the ’90s at about what ’97, ’98, ’99, 10-10-220, all those different things down the center, all those companies where you can pre-purchase long-distance minutes kind of came out and were very, very big. And so my dad was six years early to that notion and ultimately his startup failed. But he was just really early to something that would catch on really, really big specifically in the telecommunication space.
It is so wild thinking about it in the past. Before I tell you what it is, I want to tell one quick thing about my dad. My dad in the early ’90s, like ’91, ’92, was building kind of a phone card company where you’d be able to pre-purchase long-distance minutes. Now, if you remember the ’90s at about what ’97, ’98, ’99, 10-10-220, all those different things down the center, all those companies where you can pre-purchase long-distance minutes kind of came out and were very, very big. And so my dad was six years early to that notion and ultimately his startup failed. But he was just really early to something that would catch on really, really big specifically in the telecommunication space.
Me as I grew up and did my own startup, I did a startup where was text message marketing. This was in 2010 where you could receive, say texts about various deals, all that kind of stuff. And of course, 10 years later now you don’t stop receiving texts and text message marketing is all the rage. And so I also, much like my father had a startup in the telemarketing space in which was just like a half decade too early.
Lex Fridman
So is it fair to say you’re almost always ahead of your time, that you’re a visionary of sorts?
So is it fair to say you’re almost always ahead of your time, that you’re a visionary of sorts?
ThePrimeagen
No, in fact, I am not ahead of my time. I just got, some would say I got unlucky on that situation. But it seems so obvious to me at that time when I was doing it, 80% of phones were dumb phones. Most people had flip phones. When I went and sold Via Text, is what the name was of that specific product. And we had the short code via text too, so it was pretty clever, six digits. When I went out and sold it, I only had a flip phone during that time. I didn’t even have a smartphone because they were kind of untenable for a lot of people. So it’s kind of just wild times to think about.
No, in fact, I am not ahead of my time. I just got, some would say I got unlucky on that situation. But it seems so obvious to me at that time when I was doing it, 80% of phones were dumb phones. Most people had flip phones. When I went and sold Via Text, is what the name was of that specific product. And we had the short code via text too, so it was pretty clever, six digits. When I went out and sold it, I only had a flip phone during that time. I didn’t even have a smartphone because they were kind of untenable for a lot of people. So it’s kind of just wild times to think about.
But then after that, obviously had to get a real job. We were living in an apartment right next to campus, Bozeman, Montana. And the guy below us must’ve been on some amount of drugs. He threatened to kill us several times, would just scream and just lose his marbles all the time. Very unhinged man, angry downstairs man is what we call him. One time my wife dropped a battery, double A. Okay, so we’re not talking about a B battery or D battery. We’re just talking about a double A, drop it pa, land on the ground, “I’m going to kill you.” Like crazy, absolutely unhinged behavior down there. So I had to go get a real job, we needed to move out of there. We were going to start our life.
And so I worked at a small place [inaudible 01:16:38], which I kind of talked about the boredom there. Got to go to a place called WebFilings where I’m working just tons and tons of hours. During all that time I’m still trying to figure out startups. Did one where you could pre-wish your friend’s birthday messages, and then it would automatically send it via Facebook beforehand. We called it Greet Feed. It was pretty clever. Nonetheless, I say all that story because everything that I was doing was exploring, building, finishing things, working, learning about corporate life, learning how to communicate in corporate life, being able to be successful at a job, learning about a bunch of technologies that we’re about.
And one of the big technologies during that day, specifically 2013 was RXJS, if you remember that one, RxJS, that’s a link from C# kind of ported over to JavaScript.
Lex Fridman
And for people who don’t know, I guess C-sharp, what is its closest neighbor? Java. Is Java-
And for people who don’t know, I guess C-sharp, what is its closest neighbor? Java. Is Java-
ThePrimeagen
They obviously just took Java and ripped it off at one point, but now it’s such a dynamic, interesting language that it seems like it could be a really cool bounds of practical versus not practical. It’s just I’m not really into wearing pleated pants and programming at a Microsoft house.
They obviously just took Java and ripped it off at one point, but now it’s such a dynamic, interesting language that it seems like it could be a really cool bounds of practical versus not practical. It’s just I’m not really into wearing pleated pants and programming at a Microsoft house.
Lex Fridman
Is pleated pants a requirement?
Is pleated pants a requirement?
ThePrimeagen
I think so.
I think so.
Lex Fridman
Okay, we’ll get back to this.
Okay, we’ll get back to this.
ThePrimeagen
Can we just get back-
Can we just get back-
Lex Fridman
All right.
All right.
ThePrimeagen
Triggering me here.
Triggering me here.
Lex Fridman
WebFilings.
WebFilings.
ThePrimeagen
So anyways, WebFilings was that’s where I had to do all the matrices stuff and build systems and just kind of all that. And it really pushed me because they also wanted me to do 60 hours a week. It was not very healthy work-life balance. It was very hard work. And kind of that really hard work going to cutting edge stuff, really understanding the world, really made it so that I was able to just be able to talk about stuff very commandingly because we had to build really complex state machines for the UI for what we’re building. And so when I went and started getting a LinkedIn and all that, inevitably just due to the fact that I’ve touched all these technologies and I had some sort of paper trail saying, I’ve touched these technologies or Microsoft. Dang it, Lex
So anyways, WebFilings was that’s where I had to do all the matrices stuff and build systems and just kind of all that. And it really pushed me because they also wanted me to do 60 hours a week. It was not very healthy work-life balance. It was very hard work. And kind of that really hard work going to cutting edge stuff, really understanding the world, really made it so that I was able to just be able to talk about stuff very commandingly because we had to build really complex state machines for the UI for what we’re building. And so when I went and started getting a LinkedIn and all that, inevitably just due to the fact that I’ve touched all these technologies and I had some sort of paper trail saying, I’ve touched these technologies or Microsoft. Dang it, Lex
Lex Fridman
Pleated pants.
Pleated pants.
ThePrimeagen
Pleated pants reached out. No, Netflix reached out and said, “Hey, I see you’ve done RxJS. We do a lot of it. You want to come and interview with us?” And I was always told that you should never reject kind of a handwritten personal invitation to interview. This was way before bots and even the bots were pretty obvious to tell they were bots. This was a manager at Netflix, Jeff Wagner, first manager ever. And he just wrote a really nice note and just like, “Hey, I see you’re doing a lot of these things. We really need help with JavaScript. I would love for you to come interview. We’re even using a lot of RxJS if you’re interested in that.” And so I was like, all right, I can come and I’ll interview. And lo and behold, interview went on and I called my wife I think halfway through the interview and I was just like defeated, absolutely crushed because I said…
Pleated pants reached out. No, Netflix reached out and said, “Hey, I see you’ve done RxJS. We do a lot of it. You want to come and interview with us?” And I was always told that you should never reject kind of a handwritten personal invitation to interview. This was way before bots and even the bots were pretty obvious to tell they were bots. This was a manager at Netflix, Jeff Wagner, first manager ever. And he just wrote a really nice note and just like, “Hey, I see you’re doing a lot of these things. We really need help with JavaScript. I would love for you to come interview. We’re even using a lot of RxJS if you’re interested in that.” And so I was like, all right, I can come and I’ll interview. And lo and behold, interview went on and I called my wife I think halfway through the interview and I was just like defeated, absolutely crushed because I said…
And she might remember this but I said, ” We now have to make a decision. Are we actually going to move to California or not?” Because I already knew I had the job at that point. I was just knocking them out of the park. I was doing a great job on that. And so I just knew for a fact, I’m getting a job at Netflix. There’s this thing that people always get so freaked out about when it comes to interviews and all that. And I luckily somehow avoided this. I don’t get test anxiety, I don’t get any of that because when I go into these situations, my only goal is to show the things I already know. And so it’s like I walked into this situation, I’ve been preparing for this 80 hours a week for the last five years. So just walk in and I’m just showing the things I know.
And it was perfectly fitting for Netflix at that time period in the 2013, early JavaScript days on television. And so it was just awesome, just worked out perfectly. Got hired there.
Lex Fridman
So we’re in California with Netflix. This is San Francisco.
So we’re in California with Netflix. This is San Francisco.
ThePrimeagen
Los Gatos. So if you’re familiar, so classic symbol people do which is this is San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Los Gatos is just kind of a little bit south of San Jose, same mega contiguous city.
Los Gatos. So if you’re familiar, so classic symbol people do which is this is San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Los Gatos is just kind of a little bit south of San Jose, same mega contiguous city.
Lex Fridman
Yellowstone is in Montana, Yellowstone, the show. So is it basically like that, Kevin Costner riding on a horse? Were you riding on a horse to campus?
Yellowstone is in Montana, Yellowstone, the show. So is it basically like that, Kevin Costner riding on a horse? Were you riding on a horse to campus?
ThePrimeagen
No, but I love those stereotypes. Actually to be completely fair, when I was 15 years old, I was driving around on what is now a very busy populated street shooting gophers out the window of our car with a 22. So it’s like Montana was a different place at one point than it is today. And there’s plenty of parts of Montana that’s still very rural, still kind of more of that old world. So yeah, a little bit you can get whatever you want from Montana. As far as culturally goes, I’m not really sure the best way to put the difference between California and Montana. It’s just different expectations. One thing I can really appreciate about California, or at least when I say California, I mean the Silicon Valley Because obviously LA and the Silicon Valley, very different attitudes, very different mindsets. You can’t really compare one to the other.
No, but I love those stereotypes. Actually to be completely fair, when I was 15 years old, I was driving around on what is now a very busy populated street shooting gophers out the window of our car with a 22. So it’s like Montana was a different place at one point than it is today. And there’s plenty of parts of Montana that’s still very rural, still kind of more of that old world. So yeah, a little bit you can get whatever you want from Montana. As far as culturally goes, I’m not really sure the best way to put the difference between California and Montana. It’s just different expectations. One thing I can really appreciate about California, or at least when I say California, I mean the Silicon Valley Because obviously LA and the Silicon Valley, very different attitudes, very different mindsets. You can’t really compare one to the other.
One thing I can say that’s really positive about the valley is that everybody is operating on this idea of trying to build or create something, and there’s an energy to it that’s very exciting. You meet somebody and they have a startup and they’re working on the startup. And it’s very exciting. And there’s a lot of negative aspects to that, and we can all agree that our entire life being commercialized has probably not been that great. But the kind of the experience of being there and everyone’s excited to build something, it’s a really cool experience.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s really great. The excitement, the energy.
Yeah, it’s really great. The excitement, the energy.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, Montana doesn’t have that.
Yeah, Montana doesn’t have that.
Lex Fridman
I have a romantic admiration for the shows like Yellowstone being out on nature. It’s beautiful. I like riding horses. Somebody also said Reddit is full of wisdom about you. Some of it could be fake news, but something about horses and this kind of thing. You like horses, you like riding horses?
I have a romantic admiration for the shows like Yellowstone being out on nature. It’s beautiful. I like riding horses. Somebody also said Reddit is full of wisdom about you. Some of it could be fake news, but something about horses and this kind of thing. You like horses, you like riding horses?
ThePrimeagen
We have horses on… Our neighbor had much more hilly land and one of the horses broke its leg, so they had to put it down. And so we just said, “Hey, we are on much flatter land. You can just have your horses in our property.” And so we just have horses that run around on our-
We have horses on… Our neighbor had much more hilly land and one of the horses broke its leg, so they had to put it down. And so we just said, “Hey, we are on much flatter land. You can just have your horses in our property.” And so we just have horses that run around on our-
Lex Fridman
What about milking cows? Somebody asked about cattle and cow.
What about milking cows? Somebody asked about cattle and cow.
ThePrimeagen
So I’ve only had open cows. If you don’t know, cow means girl, open means that, hey, they’ve tried to get the cow pregnant. The cow did not get pregnant first try. And so they’re calling that gene, they’re getting rid of that gene. The open cow is going to now go out to pasture for the year and then get turned into delicious T-bone steaks and various things. And so we would house open cows on our property. So no, there’s no milking of open cows.
So I’ve only had open cows. If you don’t know, cow means girl, open means that, hey, they’ve tried to get the cow pregnant. The cow did not get pregnant first try. And so they’re calling that gene, they’re getting rid of that gene. The open cow is going to now go out to pasture for the year and then get turned into delicious T-bone steaks and various things. And so we would house open cows on our property. So no, there’s no milking of open cows.
Lex Fridman
Okay.
Okay.
ThePrimeagen
They’d be very upset if you tried to milk an open cow because they’re not milking cows. You have to get that cow pregnant. And then once you get it pregnant, you have to kind of put it into this permanent state of milking and all that. And it’s a little bit more complicated than say what we did, which was just cows on eating grass and I didn’t have to touch them.
They’d be very upset if you tried to milk an open cow because they’re not milking cows. You have to get that cow pregnant. And then once you get it pregnant, you have to kind of put it into this permanent state of milking and all that. And it’s a little bit more complicated than say what we did, which was just cows on eating grass and I didn’t have to touch them.
Lex Fridman
Okay, well, that’s wonderful.
Okay, well, that’s wonderful.
ThePrimeagen
Reddit is not a great place for wisdom about me. They’re going to give you the craziest answers.
Reddit is not a great place for wisdom about me. They’re going to give you the craziest answers.
Lex Fridman
We’ll return to Reddit time and time again, my friend. So yeah, you took the leap into Netflix. So what was that like?
We’ll return to Reddit time and time again, my friend. So yeah, you took the leap into Netflix. So what was that like?
ThePrimeagen
This is one of those things where when you talk about it, people love to trivialize this because it’s like, oh, you’re taking a leap of faith by going into a fang company. And in 2013, sounds super risky. My wife was 36 weeks pregnant. We had to travel to a place where we knew not a soul. We were about to have our first kid. We didn’t even have a doctor. If you don’t know what having a baby does, you kind of want a relationship with a doctor. There’s a whole thing that goes on there. So it was a really hard and great experience. So I went to a job in which their culture deck… So during this time, this is where Netflix still had kind of that old generation X feel to it. Their culture deck was hire fast, fire fast. It was very in your face about like, “Hey, this is how we operate. You don’t meet the standards, we kick you out.”
This is one of those things where when you talk about it, people love to trivialize this because it’s like, oh, you’re taking a leap of faith by going into a fang company. And in 2013, sounds super risky. My wife was 36 weeks pregnant. We had to travel to a place where we knew not a soul. We were about to have our first kid. We didn’t even have a doctor. If you don’t know what having a baby does, you kind of want a relationship with a doctor. There’s a whole thing that goes on there. So it was a really hard and great experience. So I went to a job in which their culture deck… So during this time, this is where Netflix still had kind of that old generation X feel to it. Their culture deck was hire fast, fire fast. It was very in your face about like, “Hey, this is how we operate. You don’t meet the standards, we kick you out.”
So it’s like I’m leaving a place where it’s more secure to go to a place I don’t know anybody, to a job that’s bold in its claims about firing everybody with a wife that’s just about to have a baby. And I’m from Montana and every Montanan’s born with a natural dislike of California. So there’s all these things kind of flowing into it where it’s just going to be like, wow, this is a very intense experience. And it was hard for sure. It wasn’t just some easy simple experience that we were just like, oh, well, I work now at Fang. We had to kind of work through that. Having a kid was very difficult. Our first kid was very difficult. Not having any family around to ever help you took a much larger toll on my wife than me, for sure.
Groovy
Lex Fridman
What was the technical learning curve for you? You showed up in your plaid pants, dressed up?
What was the technical learning curve for you? You showed up in your plaid pants, dressed up?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
What did you have to learn about the Stack? Because Netflix, I imagine is this incredible infrastructure. It has to deliver just a huge amount of data. I’m just blown away by Netflix but also YouTube. These companies that have to deliver, serve a huge amount of bits.
What did you have to learn about the Stack? Because Netflix, I imagine is this incredible infrastructure. It has to deliver just a huge amount of data. I’m just blown away by Netflix but also YouTube. These companies that have to deliver, serve a huge amount of bits.
ThePrimeagen
Netflix has it easiest. Out of all the companies Netflix by… Even though you could say maybe we beat YouTube in view hours, I’m not sure if we do, but let’s just pretend Netflix has five x more view hours than YouTube. Whatever it is, Netflix has a fundamentally easier problem than all other companies. And let’s get back to that. I’m going to first tell you about the Stack, but I’ll tell you why it has a fundamentally easier problem. So when I first got there, they gave me my PlayStation three. My boss said, “Go learn some code. Come back to me in a couple of days and tell me what you’ve learned. And then I’m going to start giving you bugs to fix.”
Netflix has it easiest. Out of all the companies Netflix by… Even though you could say maybe we beat YouTube in view hours, I’m not sure if we do, but let’s just pretend Netflix has five x more view hours than YouTube. Whatever it is, Netflix has a fundamentally easier problem than all other companies. And let’s get back to that. I’m going to first tell you about the Stack, but I’ll tell you why it has a fundamentally easier problem. So when I first got there, they gave me my PlayStation three. My boss said, “Go learn some code. Come back to me in a couple of days and tell me what you’ve learned. And then I’m going to start giving you bugs to fix.”
Lex Fridman
Wait, PlayStation three, what are you talking about?
Wait, PlayStation three, what are you talking about?
ThePrimeagen
Well, I was on the TV team. I had to go plug in a PlayStation and start launching programs onto the PlayStation three and figure out how to work Netflix on a television device.
Well, I was on the TV team. I had to go plug in a PlayStation and start launching programs onto the PlayStation three and figure out how to work Netflix on a television device.
Lex Fridman
Oh, so you have different kinds of devices. Why PlayStation three, is other different-
Oh, so you have different kinds of devices. Why PlayStation three, is other different-
ThePrimeagen
It’s just 2013. That’s what you have.
It’s just 2013. That’s what you have.
Lex Fridman
Any devices that plug into the TV? Okay, cool.
Any devices that plug into the TV? Okay, cool.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, not as many TVs had Netflix, let alone what they called their Darwin app, which is their new application. So if you bought a VIZIO earlier that year, you’d get their older one there. It’s called Plus UI. You get their older version. And so not many had the newer version. We no longer supported Plus or we never actively developed on Plus, we only did stuff on Darwin. And so I had to learn that whole stack, the backend or the middle end, the middle layer between the actual backend and the front end was written in Groovy. And as I went around, Groovy is if you’re not familiar with Jenkins, then you’ve probably never interacted with Groovy. But Groovy is a JVM language. It’s a very interesting language, but here’s how it got started at Netflix.
Yeah, not as many TVs had Netflix, let alone what they called their Darwin app, which is their new application. So if you bought a VIZIO earlier that year, you’d get their older one there. It’s called Plus UI. You get their older version. And so not many had the newer version. We no longer supported Plus or we never actively developed on Plus, we only did stuff on Darwin. And so I had to learn that whole stack, the backend or the middle end, the middle layer between the actual backend and the front end was written in Groovy. And as I went around, Groovy is if you’re not familiar with Jenkins, then you’ve probably never interacted with Groovy. But Groovy is a JVM language. It’s a very interesting language, but here’s how it got started at Netflix.
Lex Fridman
Oh, it’s Apache. Apache Groovy is a powerful object-oriented programming language that runs on the Java virtual machine released in 2007. It has evolved to become a versatile language that combines both static and dynamic typing capabilities.
Oh, it’s Apache. Apache Groovy is a powerful object-oriented programming language that runs on the Java virtual machine released in 2007. It has evolved to become a versatile language that combines both static and dynamic typing capabilities.
ThePrimeagen
All right, so the AI is kind of lying to you. Groovy is not a powerful great language. That statement makes it seem way cooler than it actually is. You’ll meet one out of 100 people that have touched Groovy that said, “Oh yeah, Groovy’s great.” The other 99 will be like, “Heavens forbid, you ever have to touch that language.” So when I got there, nobody, not a single soul at Netflix, those 40-some engineers had any idea how Groovy pretty much worked. Somehow people just hacked together these scripts and put them all on there and it worked. And this was before there was a Groovy RX port. We wrote our own version called WX. It was a nightmare, observables, all these things. I remember one time they told me that, “Oh yeah, with RX it’s really easy. You just say what you need to do. It maps out and boom, boom, everything will run and all that.” And I was like, “Oh wow, really?”
All right, so the AI is kind of lying to you. Groovy is not a powerful great language. That statement makes it seem way cooler than it actually is. You’ll meet one out of 100 people that have touched Groovy that said, “Oh yeah, Groovy’s great.” The other 99 will be like, “Heavens forbid, you ever have to touch that language.” So when I got there, nobody, not a single soul at Netflix, those 40-some engineers had any idea how Groovy pretty much worked. Somehow people just hacked together these scripts and put them all on there and it worked. And this was before there was a Groovy RX port. We wrote our own version called WX. It was a nightmare, observables, all these things. I remember one time they told me that, “Oh yeah, with RX it’s really easy. You just say what you need to do. It maps out and boom, boom, everything will run and all that.” And I was like, “Oh wow, really?”
So all I did was go like observable.sleep one because I just wanted to see it sleep and then do the next thing. And it turns out when a thread sleeps itself, no thread can wake it up. And I just turned off all of staging because I ran it like 10 times. Like, oh, it’s not responding. Oh, it’s not responding. Oh, now it’s not even coming back. Broke all of staging for everybody. So no developer could work for the rest of the afternoon because I locked up all the instances because it turns out no, it was in fact not multi-threaded. Every assumption we’ve been told is a lie. No one had any idea what they were doing. It was a wild time. And so I just simply naturally gravitated towards that because I’m good at print off debugging. I’m good at doing those things.
So I was like, yeah, I’ll just figure this out here. I will do this. So I had the rewrite how we do the data structure on the front end for the TV from what is called a LoLoMo, list of list of movies into LoLoRoMo, which is a list of list of recommendation objects for movie. Why would we need to do that? Think about this. You have two lists, one has Live Free Die Hard, Bruce Willis because you love Bruce Willis. The other one has Live Free Die Hard because you want tough men doing tough jobs. Well, during those days we’d only have one way we could show evidence why you wanted it. So we couldn’t say, “Oh, because you liked this other movie.” You’d go to that one and say the same thing. So we had to add one level of indirection where we could decorate the video with the recommendation information.
Lex Fridman
Okay. So you can abstract away into the space of recommendation versus the space of movies directly.
Okay. So you can abstract away into the space of recommendation versus the space of movies directly.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. So you can’t hang it off the video because obviously then it would be the same for everything that shows that same video.
Yeah. So you can’t hang it off the video because obviously then it would be the same for everything that shows that same video.
Lex Fridman
That’s amazing.
That’s amazing.
ThePrimeagen
I had to do all this and I wrote it in Groovy and I just did it-
I had to do all this and I wrote it in Groovy and I just did it-
Lex Fridman
Such a funny name.
Such a funny name.
ThePrimeagen
And people were like, “How did you write this in Groovy?” And I was just like, “Well, I read the language reference for a day and then programmed it.” Well, what do you mean? It was a very radical language, shall we say. And so I just simply became the person that knew these things, so they just give me more and more jobs with that. And so that’s kind of how I excelled, being the person that was willing to do the thing that no one else was.
And people were like, “How did you write this in Groovy?” And I was just like, “Well, I read the language reference for a day and then programmed it.” Well, what do you mean? It was a very radical language, shall we say. And so I just simply became the person that knew these things, so they just give me more and more jobs with that. And so that’s kind of how I excelled, being the person that was willing to do the thing that no one else was.
Printf() debugging
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Can you actually speak to the print off debugging. You walk into a system and there’s a lot of systems in the world like this. Twitter was like this, when Elon acquired Twitter and the rolls in and there’s this old junky code base that’s just like a giant mess, and you have to basically do print off debugging. What’s the process of going into a code base and figuring out what the fuck? Well, how does this work? What are the flaws? What are the assumptions? You have to reverse engineer what all these other engineers did in the past and the mess across the space of months and years, and you have to figure out how all that works in order to make improvements.
Yeah. Can you actually speak to the print off debugging. You walk into a system and there’s a lot of systems in the world like this. Twitter was like this, when Elon acquired Twitter and the rolls in and there’s this old junky code base that’s just like a giant mess, and you have to basically do print off debugging. What’s the process of going into a code base and figuring out what the fuck? Well, how does this work? What are the flaws? What are the assumptions? You have to reverse engineer what all these other engineers did in the past and the mess across the space of months and years, and you have to figure out how all that works in order to make improvements.
ThePrimeagen
I’ve always just been good at print off debugging because one of my first kind of side quest jobs that I got was writing robots for the government when I was still at school. And so I’d kind of do this contractually for so many hours a week. And my boss, Hunter Lloyd, great professor by the way, he just said, “Hey, here’s your computer, here’s the robot, here’s how you plug it in. Here’s how you run the code. Can you write the flash driver, the ethernet driver. Can you write the planetary pancake motor? Here’s some manuals, I’m missing some. Just figure it out, I’ll be back.” So that was government work for me. So I was like, okay, I’ll figure all these things out. And I figured them all out and the only way to really get anything out of the machine was to print. And so it’s like I had to become really good at printing my way through problems. And so that kind of became this skill I guess I adopted is that I can just kind of print off debug my way through a lot of these problems.
I’ve always just been good at print off debugging because one of my first kind of side quest jobs that I got was writing robots for the government when I was still at school. And so I’d kind of do this contractually for so many hours a week. And my boss, Hunter Lloyd, great professor by the way, he just said, “Hey, here’s your computer, here’s the robot, here’s how you plug it in. Here’s how you run the code. Can you write the flash driver, the ethernet driver. Can you write the planetary pancake motor? Here’s some manuals, I’m missing some. Just figure it out, I’ll be back.” So that was government work for me. So I was like, okay, I’ll figure all these things out. And I figured them all out and the only way to really get anything out of the machine was to print. And so it’s like I had to become really good at printing my way through problems. And so that kind of became this skill I guess I adopted is that I can just kind of print off debug my way through a lot of these problems.
Obviously I’m not a game developer, probably a different world probably should use… I think John Carmack was on here and talked to how great the debugger is, different world. Because when I was at Netflix, there’s machines that exist somewhere on AWS, I’m not logged into them. I don’t even know how to log into them. I’m not even sure if I have credentials to log into them. They run once somewhere and I have to figure out what happened and why it’s happening. So it’s like I’m going to become… This is what I’ve trained for. I’m a print off debugging champion. So it’s just like I could just run through these things really quickly and figure out why they’re happening the way they’re happening.
Lex Fridman
You’re a special human. I think that’s an incredible skill set to have to be able to drop in into any code base, drop into any situation, and do print off debugging. Meaning you’re in a dark room and you’re feeling around that room to try to figure out what the room is.
You’re a special human. I think that’s an incredible skill set to have to be able to drop in into any code base, drop into any situation, and do print off debugging. Meaning you’re in a dark room and you’re feeling around that room to try to figure out what the room is.
ThePrimeagen
Well, I had the code so it’s like I can kind of blueprint what’s happening. I don’t understand the services or anything, but you can start guessing pretty quick as to what’s going wrong.
Well, I had the code so it’s like I can kind of blueprint what’s happening. I don’t understand the services or anything, but you can start guessing pretty quick as to what’s going wrong.
Lex Fridman
Right. But then the print side of that helps you confirm your intuitions, test your intuitions and build up more and more information. And then you start to accumulate this bigger picture from that, what the edge cases are that break the system and not. I think that just that kind of situation is intimidating for a lot of engineers. They break down at that point. I think it really is a powerful thing to be able to come into a code base, that’s generally a skillset of very few of us start from scratch. And actually this is the fundamental problem of web development and in general where they’re like, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m going to write my own thing from scratch. As opposed to actually doing print off debugging on the space of languages, on the space of problems, because there’s a lot of wisdom and solved problems already in this code base.
Right. But then the print side of that helps you confirm your intuitions, test your intuitions and build up more and more information. And then you start to accumulate this bigger picture from that, what the edge cases are that break the system and not. I think that just that kind of situation is intimidating for a lot of engineers. They break down at that point. I think it really is a powerful thing to be able to come into a code base, that’s generally a skillset of very few of us start from scratch. And actually this is the fundamental problem of web development and in general where they’re like, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m going to write my own thing from scratch. As opposed to actually doing print off debugging on the space of languages, on the space of problems, because there’s a lot of wisdom and solved problems already in this code base.
It’s a much more important skillset to understand, to learn from the mistakes and the wisdom of the past, of the ancestors that came before and build on them as opposed to throw it all out and start from scratch. This is something obviously you see a lot with a JavaScript framework that comes out and you won every single day.
ThePrimeagen
I have a very great story about that, that this is what I think has shaped me the most about my perspective of other devs. There’s this dev and he always just wrote things in just what I thought was such a bizarre and weird way, and this had to do with Falcor. So our data fetching library for Netflix, This would run on mobile. So I had to write in Objective-C. It had to run on television and it had to also run on web. So it ran on everything. And me and one other person were responsible for this thing working. And the request side where we’d have to de-dupe the information that we already have, the requests that were pending and the new data.
I have a very great story about that, that this is what I think has shaped me the most about my perspective of other devs. There’s this dev and he always just wrote things in just what I thought was such a bizarre and weird way, and this had to do with Falcor. So our data fetching library for Netflix, This would run on mobile. So I had to write in Objective-C. It had to run on television and it had to also run on web. So it ran on everything. And me and one other person were responsible for this thing working. And the request side where we’d have to de-dupe the information that we already have, the requests that were pending and the new data.
So I had to figure all that out based on what someone’s requesting, and then just only optimally request the stuff that we don’t have. He wrote in such a goofy way and I’m thinking, man, this guy is just… What a goofball. So I delete it all and I start writing and I’m like, look at how much nicer this is. It’s looking so good. I’m like, Ooh, there’s that one edge case. Okay, I can see why he wrote it this one way. That’s not a big deal though. The rest of my code’s really great. By the end of it, I’m like, I literally almost line for line just reproduced what he already wrote. It’s slightly different towards my style, but I just wrote the same code. I’m like, I’m an idiot.
I am the idiot in this situation because it was already a solved problem. I just didn’t take the time to learn what he did. Instead, I relearned what he did by rewriting the entire thing.
Lex Fridman
I think that’s a skill set that is extremely important for people to learn. I see that in myself. That’s a constant struggle for myself when facing a code base, for example. But this applies generally in life, where somebody did a lot of work to do a thing, you should invest a huge amount of time and get really good at figuring out what they did, why they did it. Do a lot of print off debugging to understand what they did. It’s a much more efficient way to understand a problem deeply than to start from scratch. Even though there’s a constant temptation to start from scratch, because starting from scratch is fun. You do get the puzzle solved and all that kind of stuff. It’s just not going to be the right thing to do. Usually pain is the right thing to do, and it is for most people painful to understand other people’s code bases.
I think that’s a skill set that is extremely important for people to learn. I see that in myself. That’s a constant struggle for myself when facing a code base, for example. But this applies generally in life, where somebody did a lot of work to do a thing, you should invest a huge amount of time and get really good at figuring out what they did, why they did it. Do a lot of print off debugging to understand what they did. It’s a much more efficient way to understand a problem deeply than to start from scratch. Even though there’s a constant temptation to start from scratch, because starting from scratch is fun. You do get the puzzle solved and all that kind of stuff. It’s just not going to be the right thing to do. Usually pain is the right thing to do, and it is for most people painful to understand other people’s code bases.
ThePrimeagen
I highly recommend starting from scratch if you want to understand a concept. You don’t know how an HTTP server works, create a TCP socket, learn how to parse HTTP. It’ll become very easy and you’ll go, this is the reason why whenever I get a request, I have to await the text. I now understand why the text is for whatever reason not there. I get it. I now understand it. And so you kind of gain these new perspectives just by simply parsing something out.
I highly recommend starting from scratch if you want to understand a concept. You don’t know how an HTTP server works, create a TCP socket, learn how to parse HTTP. It’ll become very easy and you’ll go, this is the reason why whenever I get a request, I have to await the text. I now understand why the text is for whatever reason not there. I get it. I now understand it. And so you kind of gain these new perspectives just by simply parsing something out.
Falcor
Lex Fridman
All right. Back to the wisdom of Reddit. Apparently there are memes and legends about your programming arc in Netflix. This Falcor system you mentioned, somebody, I think it was Teej, how do you pronounce his name by the way?
All right. Back to the wisdom of Reddit. Apparently there are memes and legends about your programming arc in Netflix. This Falcor system you mentioned, somebody, I think it was Teej, how do you pronounce his name by the way?
ThePrimeagen
Teej.
Teej.
Lex Fridman
Okay, Teej.
Okay, Teej.
ThePrimeagen
TJ would be his name, but we call it Teej or Telescopic Johnson.
TJ would be his name, but we call it Teej or Telescopic Johnson.
Lex Fridman
Oh wow, so many names. DDoS, distributed denial of service attacks, you apparently were able to accomplish the simplified version of that of just DoS. That’s a legend. So you basically broke down the system somehow.
Oh wow, so many names. DDoS, distributed denial of service attacks, you apparently were able to accomplish the simplified version of that of just DoS. That’s a legend. So you basically broke down the system somehow.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Can you tell the story of that?
Can you tell the story of that?
ThePrimeagen
I’d be glad to. So there’s this Falcor business, and I did discover the bug before anybody else and I did report it to security and it was so bad. It actually got its own name, Repulsive Grizzly Attack, and they even give examples of how to do it. Effectively what it means is that there is a request that targets both memory and CPU and will destroy. There you go. Look, how Netflix… The next one down was the article that was actually written. I don’t get mentioned, which is a little bit upsetting considering I was the one that discovered it and told everybody how bad it was.
I’d be glad to. So there’s this Falcor business, and I did discover the bug before anybody else and I did report it to security and it was so bad. It actually got its own name, Repulsive Grizzly Attack, and they even give examples of how to do it. Effectively what it means is that there is a request that targets both memory and CPU and will destroy. There you go. Look, how Netflix… The next one down was the article that was actually written. I don’t get mentioned, which is a little bit upsetting considering I was the one that discovered it and told everybody how bad it was.
Anyways, and had the right to fix for it or the first fix. So this is how it works, is that you can do something pretty similar, I believe with GraphQL as well. It has the same kind of danger. Any of these kinds of RPC request as much or as little of the data as you would like frameworks, are vulnerable to this kind of attack. So with Falcor, what you do is you give it an array. That’s an array is called a path, and that’s the path to the data. But sometimes you don’t want to have to write out, I want movie, I want row zero or list zero or row zero column zero title. I want row zero column zero description. You don’t want to have to write out all that.
So instead you could just be like, I want rows zero through 10, columns zero through 10, titles and descriptions. So you can write in a very compact, nice little format and it’ll give you all that data. It’ll go to the server. The server will fill that all in and give it to you. Oh, dang it, list three, it only had three videos in it. So what happens when I try-
ThePrimeagen
Three, it only had three videos in it. So what happens when I try to re-request the data? Well, I need a way to be able to tell my system that you’d have requested the data and there’s nothing there. So call this like a boxed value. So it’s going to be like type, something, value, there’s nothing there. We’ve already requested it and there’s nothing there. It’s like a sentinel value, if you will, a boxed value. And we have this little special flag weed pass called materialize. Meaning that when you ask for a path, we will make sure we fill it out so we don’t accidentally erase anything. And at the very end we’ll say okay, the thing does, the request you’ve made has already been made and there’s nothing there. Well, what happens if I request rows zero through 10,000 columns through 10,000, one more item through 10,000 and then a whole bunch of properties and then ask it to materialize?
Three, it only had three videos in it. So what happens when I try to re-request the data? Well, I need a way to be able to tell my system that you’d have requested the data and there’s nothing there. So call this like a boxed value. So it’s going to be like type, something, value, there’s nothing there. We’ve already requested it and there’s nothing there. It’s like a sentinel value, if you will, a boxed value. And we have this little special flag weed pass called materialize. Meaning that when you ask for a path, we will make sure we fill it out so we don’t accidentally erase anything. And at the very end we’ll say okay, the thing does, the request you’ve made has already been made and there’s nothing there. Well, what happens if I request rows zero through 10,000 columns through 10,000, one more item through 10,000 and then a whole bunch of properties and then ask it to materialize?
Well, I’m about to go create billions of objects in the JVM, and what happens to the machine? It stops running. And then if we try to JSON… Even if it could create a mall, we then ask it that JSON serialize, it’s not going to do it. It’s impossible. And so that was the attack vector, is a simple wild loop would’ve taken down and held down Netflix for a very long time. Because one request would kill one machine on AWS. And so that means it would just turn it all off. And this was on the website? This was on TV, this was on mobile. This was profound. And here’s the worst part, it was in production for years so we couldn’t even roll it back. There was no like, “Oh crap, let’s just roll back to two weeks ago and we’ll fix forward and figure out.” No, it’s like we could roll back to 2011. That’s our option is 2011 and that’s it. So we had to figure out a way forward and all that. And so it was like… The amount of problems that would’ve happened if someone would’ve discovered this is unstatable.
Lex Fridman
Just to be clear, the infrastructure that’s serving the videos would shut down.
Just to be clear, the infrastructure that’s serving the videos would shut down.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, the UI, you couldn’t perform any actions in the UI. You surprisingly could still stream video but you would never be able to get to a video to stream. Because every action you would take would be completely shut down. And so it wasn’t a DDoS because you didn’t need a bunch of computers to try to overwhelm the system by making a bunch of requests, one request, one machine. If we had 50 machines serving the millions of requests, it’d only take 50 requests to shut down the entire UI.
Yeah, the UI, you couldn’t perform any actions in the UI. You surprisingly could still stream video but you would never be able to get to a video to stream. Because every action you would take would be completely shut down. And so it wasn’t a DDoS because you didn’t need a bunch of computers to try to overwhelm the system by making a bunch of requests, one request, one machine. If we had 50 machines serving the millions of requests, it’d only take 50 requests to shut down the entire UI.
Lex Fridman
Isn’t it possible to do DoS or DDoS on basically any software system Like defending against all the closing all those attack factors is probably really difficult. If you take any sufficiently complicated software system, there’s probably so many ways to overwhelm it.
Isn’t it possible to do DoS or DDoS on basically any software system Like defending against all the closing all those attack factors is probably really difficult. If you take any sufficiently complicated software system, there’s probably so many ways to overwhelm it.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, this is why people use CloudFlare. I think d HH said it best, which is like we have our website and we have a strong bodyguard on the outside. So CloudFlare has a bunch of utilities all built in. Because obviously this is why everyone hates all these Bluetooth devices that connect to the internet because they just turn into attack vectors where people use those to DoS or DDoS other sites. And so you don’t need something sophisticated, you just need a bunch of requests to come in and you can take down websites. And so that’s why these fronts are really good at discovering where these problems are.
Yeah, this is why people use CloudFlare. I think d HH said it best, which is like we have our website and we have a strong bodyguard on the outside. So CloudFlare has a bunch of utilities all built in. Because obviously this is why everyone hates all these Bluetooth devices that connect to the internet because they just turn into attack vectors where people use those to DoS or DDoS other sites. And so you don’t need something sophisticated, you just need a bunch of requests to come in and you can take down websites. And so that’s why these fronts are really good at discovering where these problems are.
But DoS is a bit different, because it doesn’t have to be overwhelming by using resources with a whole bunch of requests. It really just means simply that there’s a denial of service attack. One of them could be there’s a RegEx attack that existed where CloudFlare actually did it to itself and shut itself down, which is there’s a RegEx expansion attack where given the right RegEx, if you know someone’s running a specific RegEx, you can actually provide input that is maximally bad and that thing goes to super processing. It takes 10 seconds to process a single request, then you only need to make hundreds of requests and you shut down the whole service. It’s not like you need some giant machinery to make one trillion requests. You only need just some small amount to completely destroy a service. And so there’s… The web is an extremely difficult place to do it correct.
Lex Fridman
This is super fascinating. I do also wonder how many ultra competent, what is it, black hat hackers there are, versus the good guys versus the bad guys. How many bad guys there are and what is the average… What is the distribution of skillset on the bad guy side that are constantly trying to attack?
This is super fascinating. I do also wonder how many ultra competent, what is it, black hat hackers there are, versus the good guys versus the bad guys. How many bad guys there are and what is the average… What is the distribution of skillset on the bad guy side that are constantly trying to attack?
ThePrimeagen
I assume there’s probably a huge number of just really simple ones, script kitties, right? Just people trying to just do things. And then there’s a huge amount of social engineering that just goes in where hacking’s done, not with a computer but just by one of the classic ones. Kevin Mitnick had this one in his book which was you’d call up somebody pretending to be like, “Charlene, we’re doing some auditing and I think your pin’s out of date on file. Is it 2323, still?” And they’re like, “No, it’s 4747.” You’re like, “Oh, thanks Sharon.” Boom. You just hacked him. Right? The classic people love correcting bad information.
I assume there’s probably a huge number of just really simple ones, script kitties, right? Just people trying to just do things. And then there’s a huge amount of social engineering that just goes in where hacking’s done, not with a computer but just by one of the classic ones. Kevin Mitnick had this one in his book which was you’d call up somebody pretending to be like, “Charlene, we’re doing some auditing and I think your pin’s out of date on file. Is it 2323, still?” And they’re like, “No, it’s 4747.” You’re like, “Oh, thanks Sharon.” Boom. You just hacked him. Right? The classic people love correcting bad information.
This is like a standard. So there’s all these ways people hack. And so my assumption is that there are really great white hat hackers, there’s really great black hat hackers. But the vulnerability space, the harp, the thing is that discovering a vulnerability and you don’t let anyone know, the white hat hacker still has to make that same discovery. And that’s where I think the real thing is that black hat hacking in some sense has a fundamentally easier job or at least a job in which they can take advantage of for much longer periods of time. One’s the process of discovering who’s breaking the system. The other one’s trying to figure out how to break the system. And it seems like most software is held together by toothpicks and glue and there is a lot of dangers in every piece.
Lex Fridman
And also the social engineering aspect, that’s a real attack vector. I think that’s the attack vector that will do in the longterm the most damage in the world. Especially as AI tooling becomes easier and easier to convince people at scale, sort of do that email Grandma. I think that’s a really serious attack vector, like human psychology and all that. I assume whenever there’s a girl that approaches me, it’s some kind of social engineering project, some attack vector, some intelligence agency. In fact, I’m pretty sure-
And also the social engineering aspect, that’s a real attack vector. I think that’s the attack vector that will do in the longterm the most damage in the world. Especially as AI tooling becomes easier and easier to convince people at scale, sort of do that email Grandma. I think that’s a really serious attack vector, like human psychology and all that. I assume whenever there’s a girl that approaches me, it’s some kind of social engineering project, some attack vector, some intelligence agency. In fact, I’m pretty sure-
ThePrimeagen
We’re back to A Beautiful Mind, aren’t we?
We’re back to A Beautiful Mind, aren’t we?
Lex Fridman
Beautiful mind? Yeah. I have a whiteboard upstairs that I calculate everything, everybody’s trajectory and move.
Beautiful mind? Yeah. I have a whiteboard upstairs that I calculate everything, everybody’s trajectory and move.
ThePrimeagen
You’re not wrong though with the attack vector, especially in the day of AI. One thing that I don’t think a lot of people are talking about as we integrate more and more AI is that prompt injection is an extremely hard thing to defend against because it’s not really clear how you defend against it. If it’s just a, at the end of the day word calculator make word come out. If you can figure out the proper word calculator input, it might just break its bounds and start doing something it’s not supposed to do. And there’s a whole future word.
You’re not wrong though with the attack vector, especially in the day of AI. One thing that I don’t think a lot of people are talking about as we integrate more and more AI is that prompt injection is an extremely hard thing to defend against because it’s not really clear how you defend against it. If it’s just a, at the end of the day word calculator make word come out. If you can figure out the proper word calculator input, it might just break its bounds and start doing something it’s not supposed to do. And there’s a whole future word.
There’s all these products that are going to be vulnerable to things they never thought about. It’s one thing where you forget an edge case while you’re programming. Now you have to guess what people might be able to think of making something that has access to a system be able to do. Right. And you don’t have a way to reason about it. Its reasoning came from Reddit, and other words that it’s read and how to put things together. This is a very… It’s a massive space that’s going to be happening. It’s why I’m personally thinking don’t give too many powers yet. We don’t know the attacks that are about to happen.
Breaking production
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the more power we give to software systems, the more damage they can do. That certainly is the case. But the more awesome they could do, and that’s the knife’s edge that we all walk along as a human civilization together, hand in hand. Will we flourish or destroy ourselves? Question mark. Folks on Reddit, the good folks on Reddit, demanded that I ask you about the time you broke production. Is this related to Falco? Did you break production? Is this fake news?
Yeah, the more power we give to software systems, the more damage they can do. That certainly is the case. But the more awesome they could do, and that’s the knife’s edge that we all walk along as a human civilization together, hand in hand. Will we flourish or destroy ourselves? Question mark. Folks on Reddit, the good folks on Reddit, demanded that I ask you about the time you broke production. Is this related to Falco? Did you break production? Is this fake news?
ThePrimeagen
I’ve broke production quite a few times. I’ve broken productions for so many stupid reasons. One time I broke production because I came up in the PHP and PHP. Static means static for the lifetime of the PHP and PHP was the lifetime of every request, right? That’s why PHP was so inefficient was that every request was its own instance, and therefore static memory was for the lifetime. I guess I never put that together. And so I had some objects that I made static because I was like, oh I just need this for the lifetime of the request. And lo and behold, those weren’t lifetime. A whole bunch of bad data got all over the place. People were showing up saying they were from all these different countries and everything was all wrong because I just… “Whoopsie-daisies.”
I’ve broke production quite a few times. I’ve broken productions for so many stupid reasons. One time I broke production because I came up in the PHP and PHP. Static means static for the lifetime of the PHP and PHP was the lifetime of every request, right? That’s why PHP was so inefficient was that every request was its own instance, and therefore static memory was for the lifetime. I guess I never put that together. And so I had some objects that I made static because I was like, oh I just need this for the lifetime of the request. And lo and behold, those weren’t lifetime. A whole bunch of bad data got all over the place. People were showing up saying they were from all these different countries and everything was all wrong because I just… “Whoopsie-daisies.”
I just made a whole conundrum with that. So that was one time I did it. Another time is I took down, if you were on the homepage on the website waiting for Lady Gaga’s video to come out and you were watching the countdown go down, if it reached zero, the billboard would freeze and it wouldn’t work. If you refreshed it, it would work. But the reveal, the big reveal, I screwed that up and my boss got real upset and so did other people in Hollywood got upset about that one. That was like a, “My bad. Sorry, Jeff Wagner, again.” I remember that one. I remember that one specifically. One time I released a bug where again on the billboard, if you pressed add to my list, I accidentally programmed in an infinite loop, and your whole webpage would just freeze.
Lex Fridman
Are some of these bugs difficult to discover until you started-
Are some of these bugs difficult to discover until you started-
ThePrimeagen
That one seems really easy looking back at it.
That one seems really easy looking back at it.
Lex Fridman
In for a loop? Yeah.
In for a loop? Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
And we actually, during those days we had manual QA that are supposed to go through everything. So I didn’t feel as bad because my manual QA counterpart also missed it. We all missed it. But it was just so simple. Just press that button, boom. It just completely freezes the website.
And we actually, during those days we had manual QA that are supposed to go through everything. So I didn’t feel as bad because my manual QA counterpart also missed it. We all missed it. But it was just so simple. Just press that button, boom. It just completely freezes the website.
Lex Fridman
Polluting the code with global variables that are holding values, SPHP I think allows you to do, that’s a tricky one to discover, because you rely on it, then there could be somebody else assigns a value to it.
Polluting the code with global variables that are holding values, SPHP I think allows you to do, that’s a tricky one to discover, because you rely on it, then there could be somebody else assigns a value to it.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, it’s a data race everywhere. And I just didn’t understand… In my head static was like, “Oh, this is for the life.” I was just so locked into the PHP world at that time that I just made just such a, looking back on it’s so obvious. But during the time, it’s hard.
Yeah, it’s a data race everywhere. And I just didn’t understand… In my head static was like, “Oh, this is for the life.” I was just so locked into the PHP world at that time that I just made just such a, looking back on it’s so obvious. But during the time, it’s hard.
Pieter Levels
Lex Fridman
So in general, pushing to production, I talked to Peter levels about this. He, obvious he’s operating as mostly a solo developer, but he often on the website said thousands, not hundreds of thousands of people use. He often ships to production, pushes to production, meaning just no testing, just like push to fix. What are the pros and cons of that approach in general to you? What do you think?
So in general, pushing to production, I talked to Peter levels about this. He, obvious he’s operating as mostly a solo developer, but he often on the website said thousands, not hundreds of thousands of people use. He often ships to production, pushes to production, meaning just no testing, just like push to fix. What are the pros and cons of that approach in general to you? What do you think?
ThePrimeagen
It’s obviously much easier the smaller your organization is. I think no one would argue that sentiment. If it’s just you working on a singular project, it is obviously much easier for you to push directly to production because you are the only one working. You know all the ins and outs and if something were to break, you would discover it. So to me that makes sense. I think the way he operates is perfect for what he does. You couldn’t take what he does and move it to say Microsoft or Netflix or Google because that would obviously… It would just be a disaster, just due to the amount of people all pushing to production. And so I personally love that. I think that you have to gauge both the application you’re building and its complexity and what you’re pushing, and how many people are working on it.
It’s obviously much easier the smaller your organization is. I think no one would argue that sentiment. If it’s just you working on a singular project, it is obviously much easier for you to push directly to production because you are the only one working. You know all the ins and outs and if something were to break, you would discover it. So to me that makes sense. I think the way he operates is perfect for what he does. You couldn’t take what he does and move it to say Microsoft or Netflix or Google because that would obviously… It would just be a disaster, just due to the amount of people all pushing to production. And so I personally love that. I think that you have to gauge both the application you’re building and its complexity and what you’re pushing, and how many people are working on it.
I think those all go into how you can do that. Because not all applications are created equal either. That application I was making was zooming and scrolling where we had all of our own everything. It was a very deep heavy logic app, and that was regardless of what was happening on the website, most of the code was library code. And that becomes way harder if you don’t have a good test suite and stuff to run before you push it out. Because when you squeeze that ball, different things come popping out in different areas. And that’s a very harder problem than say if you’re doing more of a heavy visual one because a heavy visual one, you’re affecting just this one area’s visual stuff and you can test it and that’s normally the end of it.
Whereas, you know… So it depends on the coupling and everything. So I love his approach by the way. I have such mad respect for anyone that operates that way because I think is a great way, it just is so good because it breaks this notion that tech Twitter has that oh well you have to use all these expensive services, you need to use all these things because if you don’t use all this stuff, “If you’re not using the latest version of React, if you’re not using the latest version of this, you’re simply not going to make it as a startup. It’s impossible.” And it’s just like, “No, no, that’s not software.” Most of software isn’t the new stuff. Most of software is old crappy software that someone has to maintain, and it actually is really, really great and has lots of really hard problems. And if you look at it differently, it’s actually fantastic.
Lex Fridman
For people who don’t know his tech stack, in terms of web development is PHP, jQuery and SQL.
For people who don’t know his tech stack, in terms of web development is PHP, jQuery and SQL.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, all great stuff. I’m just surprised he still uses jQuery just given the fact that at this point on the modern web, everything is, you have document query selector and ad event listener click, right? It pretty much has everything you already need. It had DOM content load, all the reasons I used jQuery back in the day was adding a click on a button was hard. You had to deal with IE7, IE8, IE9. Those are hard differences. Whereas now, it’s just so easy. I’m just surprised it’s even that.
Yeah, all great stuff. I’m just surprised he still uses jQuery just given the fact that at this point on the modern web, everything is, you have document query selector and ad event listener click, right? It pretty much has everything you already need. It had DOM content load, all the reasons I used jQuery back in the day was adding a click on a button was hard. You had to deal with IE7, IE8, IE9. Those are hard differences. Whereas now, it’s just so easy. I’m just surprised it’s even that.
Lex Fridman
That’s definitely a trade-off. I still use the exact same stack, PHP, jQuery and different flavors of SQL. But the question there is you keep using jQuery because you can get the job done really fast and there’s no significant performance hit that you detect. So like why swish to something else? But it’s always probably as we’ll talk about good to explore and to learn.
That’s definitely a trade-off. I still use the exact same stack, PHP, jQuery and different flavors of SQL. But the question there is you keep using jQuery because you can get the job done really fast and there’s no significant performance hit that you detect. So like why swish to something else? But it’s always probably as we’ll talk about good to explore and to learn.
ThePrimeagen
Not all tools are great at solving all problems. And so what you think is really the problem is you run into this trade off, which is you have some tool belt that you’re very adept with, you know all the ins and outs. There’s no unknown unknowns, but there’s no surprises in this. You know what you’re building, you know what you’re getting into. You will go through and you’ll be able to solve the problem. But if you ever use a different language or a different experience, you can find that some things are able to represent states way easier, in a way more efficient way. And you can solve problems really efficiently in some versus the other. And so it’s like if you don’t take the time to explore as well, you could be missing out on something that makes you twice as good on this one specific problem like subset. And so I value being able to look at all problems. And so I don’t want to get stuck on one thing though. I see why people do, which is for the efficiency sake.
Not all tools are great at solving all problems. And so what you think is really the problem is you run into this trade off, which is you have some tool belt that you’re very adept with, you know all the ins and outs. There’s no unknown unknowns, but there’s no surprises in this. You know what you’re building, you know what you’re getting into. You will go through and you’ll be able to solve the problem. But if you ever use a different language or a different experience, you can find that some things are able to represent states way easier, in a way more efficient way. And you can solve problems really efficiently in some versus the other. And so it’s like if you don’t take the time to explore as well, you could be missing out on something that makes you twice as good on this one specific problem like subset. And so I value being able to look at all problems. And so I don’t want to get stuck on one thing though. I see why people do, which is for the efficiency sake.
Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube infrastructure
Lex Fridman
Let’s just return to the infrastructure of the platform of Netflix and, speak more generally, Netflix, Twitch, YouTube. Anytime I use any of these services, I’m just blown away by the infrastructure it takes to deliver this service. YouTube and Twitch are unique, versus Netflix where the creators can roll in themselves and upload stuff. So on the consumption side, YouTube has over 100 billion views a day, over one billion hours watch time. But on the creator side, one million hours of videos are uploaded every day. One million hours. It’s like you have to service both and you have to deliver everything… It’s just incredible to me. Can you maybe speak to your own intuition, just zooming out on it, what it takes to deliver that kind of infrastructure?
Let’s just return to the infrastructure of the platform of Netflix and, speak more generally, Netflix, Twitch, YouTube. Anytime I use any of these services, I’m just blown away by the infrastructure it takes to deliver this service. YouTube and Twitch are unique, versus Netflix where the creators can roll in themselves and upload stuff. So on the consumption side, YouTube has over 100 billion views a day, over one billion hours watch time. But on the creator side, one million hours of videos are uploaded every day. One million hours. It’s like you have to service both and you have to deliver everything… It’s just incredible to me. Can you maybe speak to your own intuition, just zooming out on it, what it takes to deliver that kind of infrastructure?
ThePrimeagen
For me, the thing that I find vastly complicated and I can’t imagine the engineering hours, is how do you even create an edge in that situation? And what I mean by an edge, when people say this phrase, if you’re unexperienced, an edge is where you deliver data. You want that edge to be as close to the customer as possible because that’s where the data lives. And then the communication between the customer and what you’re doing is really, really small. Obviously the speed of light adds up, the amount of hops adds up, the amount of services that you have to remotely call adds up.
For me, the thing that I find vastly complicated and I can’t imagine the engineering hours, is how do you even create an edge in that situation? And what I mean by an edge, when people say this phrase, if you’re unexperienced, an edge is where you deliver data. You want that edge to be as close to the customer as possible because that’s where the data lives. And then the communication between the customer and what you’re doing is really, really small. Obviously the speed of light adds up, the amount of hops adds up, the amount of services that you have to remotely call adds up.
They all add up and they all add inefficiencies to the system. So something like YouTube, they want to be able to serve that data as quick as possible, but their data changes constantly and relevance is almost directly tied with the newness of the item. So it’s like how do you even cache these things out? How are you doing this? So they must have such an incredible caching network that I can’t even… I can’t even fathom what it takes to do that. That just to me is just so impressive. A million view hours in how many different resolutions with how much data? What is a million view hours? Is it 4K million view hours, along with 1080p, along with 720p, along with 1440p? That number is an insane number.
Lex Fridman
Actually, it is brilliant what you said, which is for YouTube often the new thing is extremely important to show to everybody. And so, you can’t rely on caching or trivial kind of caching.
Actually, it is brilliant what you said, which is for YouTube often the new thing is extremely important to show to everybody. And so, you can’t rely on caching or trivial kind of caching.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
You have to deliver the new thing as quickly as possible. Yeah, it’s incredible. So there’s the entire system, the recommendation system that knows each individual human watching YouTube and it has to integrate into that the new thing, while also caching this incredible cluster of possible videos that you’re potentially interested in. And integrate into that ads in the case of YouTube and so on.
You have to deliver the new thing as quickly as possible. Yeah, it’s incredible. So there’s the entire system, the recommendation system that knows each individual human watching YouTube and it has to integrate into that the new thing, while also caching this incredible cluster of possible videos that you’re potentially interested in. And integrate into that ads in the case of YouTube and so on.
ThePrimeagen
It’s a really tough problem because you have to think what is the cash hit rate on this? Because the problem now actually comes down to space, space actually becomes a real problem. How many hundreds of petabytes do they have that they have for like, “Okay, what do we cache and where do we cache this?” The number, I think in the terms of gigabytes or maybe megabytes, they have to think in probably versions of bytes I don’t even know the name for right? It’s such a different problem and that’s why I said Netflix. Netflix has a much easier job when it comes to caching. So if you’ve never looked it up, it’s called OCA and that we know what videos we’re releasing, we know what videos are hot in specific areas. It’s a very limited set. We’re not going to all of a sudden get, “Oopsies, we got a million new view hours.” We don’t even have to worry about that as a problem. So it’s like, “Okay, we know Stranger Things season five’s about to drop, we’re going to pre-cash Stranger Things season five in every single OCA across the world because that thing’s about to get hammered.” And so it’s like it’s able to do such a different decision-making than what you have to do with something like YouTube. And then Twitch is even more wild because now you’re actually ingesting video and trying to make it go out all at the exact same time for all video and you have to transform that video from whatever format and whatever the bit rate is into something that’s more efficient in the system like that. Hats off to Twitch engineering, because that’s some serious work.
It’s a really tough problem because you have to think what is the cash hit rate on this? Because the problem now actually comes down to space, space actually becomes a real problem. How many hundreds of petabytes do they have that they have for like, “Okay, what do we cache and where do we cache this?” The number, I think in the terms of gigabytes or maybe megabytes, they have to think in probably versions of bytes I don’t even know the name for right? It’s such a different problem and that’s why I said Netflix. Netflix has a much easier job when it comes to caching. So if you’ve never looked it up, it’s called OCA and that we know what videos we’re releasing, we know what videos are hot in specific areas. It’s a very limited set. We’re not going to all of a sudden get, “Oopsies, we got a million new view hours.” We don’t even have to worry about that as a problem. So it’s like, “Okay, we know Stranger Things season five’s about to drop, we’re going to pre-cash Stranger Things season five in every single OCA across the world because that thing’s about to get hammered.” And so it’s like it’s able to do such a different decision-making than what you have to do with something like YouTube. And then Twitch is even more wild because now you’re actually ingesting video and trying to make it go out all at the exact same time for all video and you have to transform that video from whatever format and whatever the bit rate is into something that’s more efficient in the system like that. Hats off to Twitch engineering, because that’s some serious work.
Lex Fridman
And here’s some asshole, Lex, coming out and tweeting about YouTube features. Listen…
And here’s some asshole, Lex, coming out and tweeting about YouTube features. Listen…
ThePrimeagen
You’re not wrong on the features you asked for, though.
You’re not wrong on the features you asked for, though.
Lex Fridman
I think this is an engineering problem of how do you allow fast iteration and addition of features that shouldn’t have to be integrated or impact the whole code base. So at the edges of the code base improve on certain features, without having to consult the mothership of the code.
I think this is an engineering problem of how do you allow fast iteration and addition of features that shouldn’t have to be integrated or impact the whole code base. So at the edges of the code base improve on certain features, without having to consult the mothership of the code.
ThePrimeagen
It’s the large team, right? That’s the fundamental problem. When you get into YouTube size, there is the team/organization that deals with data warehousing. There’s the team slash organization that deals with delivery. There’s a team slash organization that’s like the middle layer, how you even… They’re going to be like the little micro-surfaces to talk to these places. Then you have this front-end engine. So for a small feature, you have to get middle team, you have to get backend team, you have to get all these things. Quick example, Netflix. Are you familiar with the dystopian, Black Mirror?
It’s the large team, right? That’s the fundamental problem. When you get into YouTube size, there is the team/organization that deals with data warehousing. There’s the team slash organization that deals with delivery. There’s a team slash organization that’s like the middle layer, how you even… They’re going to be like the little micro-surfaces to talk to these places. Then you have this front-end engine. So for a small feature, you have to get middle team, you have to get backend team, you have to get all these things. Quick example, Netflix. Are you familiar with the dystopian, Black Mirror?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Okay. Season one, episode one. Do you know season one, episode one? Everyone who watches Black Mirror typically knows this episode.
Okay. Season one, episode one. Do you know season one, episode one? Everyone who watches Black Mirror typically knows this episode.
Lex Fridman
Okay, yeah. I don’t remember what it is.
Okay, yeah. I don’t remember what it is.
ThePrimeagen
Forgive my language, but they call it the pig-fucker episode.
Forgive my language, but they call it the pig-fucker episode.
Lex Fridman
Oh yeah, of course.
Oh yeah, of course.
ThePrimeagen
Once you’ve seen the episode, you will then know this episode. Well, when Netflix adopted it, I got pulled into a room, there’s like a VP, a product designer, a VP, and they said, Hey, we’re about to release our own version of Black Mirror, season three, I think at that time. We need episode one, season one to not be the first thing people see. So let’s just reverse the season order. That required me… I had like 20 engineers I had to gather together to be able to have this happen. And that’s just the problem of big companies is that eventually every little thing has to become its own team. And so even small… There’s no such thing as a small feature.
Once you’ve seen the episode, you will then know this episode. Well, when Netflix adopted it, I got pulled into a room, there’s like a VP, a product designer, a VP, and they said, Hey, we’re about to release our own version of Black Mirror, season three, I think at that time. We need episode one, season one to not be the first thing people see. So let’s just reverse the season order. That required me… I had like 20 engineers I had to gather together to be able to have this happen. And that’s just the problem of big companies is that eventually every little thing has to become its own team. And so even small… There’s no such thing as a small feature.
Lex Fridman
Reversing the order of the dropdown that selects the seasons is a meeting with a bunch of VPs and engineers. That’s really interesting.
Reversing the order of the dropdown that selects the seasons is a meeting with a bunch of VPs and engineers. That’s really interesting.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
There’s got to be a way to accelerate that. The natural scaling of a company and the bureaucracy that grows, yes, slows that down. But just having seen Elon work a lot, his teams are able to still keep it very fast, even as the company grows. There’s got to be a process to doing that, especially for the pig-fucker episode. I don’t know where that’s in the priority list, but for important things like that, you should be able to do that quickly. I don’t know. Can you speak to how would you do that?
There’s got to be a way to accelerate that. The natural scaling of a company and the bureaucracy that grows, yes, slows that down. But just having seen Elon work a lot, his teams are able to still keep it very fast, even as the company grows. There’s got to be a process to doing that, especially for the pig-fucker episode. I don’t know where that’s in the priority list, but for important things like that, you should be able to do that quickly. I don’t know. Can you speak to how would you do that?
ThePrimeagen
Well, I can tell first how it was done. Remember… So at a place like Netflix, there would be… I think that at that point it’s called a product called Dexter. I can’t remember. There’s our actual movie metadata warehouse that’s going to be highly integrated with Hollywood, where that side is able to manage all that. So I’m like, “Hey, you need the ability to mark things that need to be reversed because we’re going to run into this a bunch.” And we did. We ran into quite a few topical shows that all need to be reversed and all that. And so it’s like, “We need to be able to reverse episode numbers, season numbers. We need to be able to hide season or episode numbers.”
Well, I can tell first how it was done. Remember… So at a place like Netflix, there would be… I think that at that point it’s called a product called Dexter. I can’t remember. There’s our actual movie metadata warehouse that’s going to be highly integrated with Hollywood, where that side is able to manage all that. So I’m like, “Hey, you need the ability to mark things that need to be reversed because we’re going to run into this a bunch.” And we did. We ran into quite a few topical shows that all need to be reversed and all that. And so it’s like, “We need to be able to reverse episode numbers, season numbers. We need to be able to hide season or episode numbers.”
In the case of the Chelsea Handler Show, it was like a daily show, so it’s like you don don’t need episode numbers, you just need the latest one. And so there’s this whole problem that exists. And so it’s like, “Okay, you need to work on that for your UI over there, then you need to be able to store that data. Then we need to be able to go to the people that can actually get the video data out of that and provide it to our service layer. I need to go talk to them and convince them they need to be able to give me the new methods and everything to do that. Then I need to be able to go write the methods to get it down, and then I need to go to the UI and make that accessible. Now I need to go to the website people, I need to go to the mobile people, I need to go to the TV people.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
And so it’s like, you could see this thing like snowballing. And for us, the big thing that Netflix did that was so well is after I met with these people that were high level, I was the captain. “I’m the captain now.” So I went to all these teams and said, “Hey manager, I need an engineer. We need to get this done within the next couple of months because we got Black Mirror coming out.” So she would go, “Okay, here you go.” “The map team, I need someone to help me with being able to get data out of the lomo for this.” And so it’s like, “All right, you’re working with this engineering.”
And so it’s like, you could see this thing like snowballing. And for us, the big thing that Netflix did that was so well is after I met with these people that were high level, I was the captain. “I’m the captain now.” So I went to all these teams and said, “Hey manager, I need an engineer. We need to get this done within the next couple of months because we got Black Mirror coming out.” So she would go, “Okay, here you go.” “The map team, I need someone to help me with being able to get data out of the lomo for this.” And so it’s like, “All right, you’re working with this engineering.”
I’d go to the BMS team, “Okay, I need this engineer.” I’d go to the billboard team, “I need this engineer.” I go to all these little places to get all these little pieces of data. And then I was the captain, I was like, “You’re working on this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, I’m doing this. Let’s go.” It’s like that worked. And we were able to go pretty fast for a big company. And the fact that it required 20 engineers to do such a simple task, we were able to do it in, gosh, I’d say about three weeks worth of effort. But that was still… I thought that was amazing, comparatively, to how many people move.
Lex Fridman
Well, because you have the freedom of the agency to do it. You said the captain of the ship. That’s really powerful. For big companies, that’s a risk. Because you can fuck it up. You might not see the bigger context legally the bigger context of the impact on the industry or all the contracts that are made, all that. So it’s a risk, it’s a risk, but it’s a risk you have to keep taking. And then when you fuck up, you fix, and then maybe pay the cost legally for that, whatever. But the long term, that risk pays off because you’re going to keep creating a better and better product, evolving where the industry is going, constantly innovating ahead of where the industry is going and so on. Yeah.
Well, because you have the freedom of the agency to do it. You said the captain of the ship. That’s really powerful. For big companies, that’s a risk. Because you can fuck it up. You might not see the bigger context legally the bigger context of the impact on the industry or all the contracts that are made, all that. So it’s a risk, it’s a risk, but it’s a risk you have to keep taking. And then when you fuck up, you fix, and then maybe pay the cost legally for that, whatever. But the long term, that risk pays off because you’re going to keep creating a better and better product, evolving where the industry is going, constantly innovating ahead of where the industry is going and so on. Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
And not only that, I think one thing that is just so important is that yes, the product will get better, but the people that you hire and the people that you keep around are better because they’re the ones that show maturity. They’re the ones that can just… You give them something and they can rally the troops and make something happen. That’s a very great group of people to hire. And so you also naturally select out great engineers that aren’t just simply good at coding, they’re good at coding and they’re good at explaining and they’re good at convincing. And you have to create a very lean audience that can move fast.
And not only that, I think one thing that is just so important is that yes, the product will get better, but the people that you hire and the people that you keep around are better because they’re the ones that show maturity. They’re the ones that can just… You give them something and they can rally the troops and make something happen. That’s a very great group of people to hire. And so you also naturally select out great engineers that aren’t just simply good at coding, they’re good at coding and they’re good at explaining and they’re good at convincing. And you have to create a very lean audience that can move fast.
Lex Fridman
And I think for great engineers, having to wait for like, “Okay, let’s schedule a meeting for next Wednesday with the VPs and…” That destroys their soul. And they either don’t want to contribute anymore or they leave the companies or they just tune out and take the golden handcuffs and just buy a nice house and focus on a family.
And I think for great engineers, having to wait for like, “Okay, let’s schedule a meeting for next Wednesday with the VPs and…” That destroys their soul. And they either don’t want to contribute anymore or they leave the companies or they just tune out and take the golden handcuffs and just buy a nice house and focus on a family.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I feel like I would die under that… Honestly, that is my death sentence is where it’s just that there’s no reason to try, there’s no reason to do anything. I’m just going to go in there, effectively zombie through my day and call it… I don’t want to live like that. I want to feel like I’m trying to do something.
Yeah. I feel like I would die under that… Honestly, that is my death sentence is where it’s just that there’s no reason to try, there’s no reason to do anything. I’m just going to go in there, effectively zombie through my day and call it… I don’t want to live like that. I want to feel like I’m trying to do something.
Lex Fridman
I should also mention on top of that, so you’ve brilliantly laid out how incredible the challenge that Netflix has to solve. On top of that with YouTube, the metadata thing, because users are able to upload video and there’s an API where they can upload automatically and change all this kind of stuff automatically. Every one of those things is an attack vector, as we mentioned. That’s something they have to consider seriously on the engineering side. And on the legal side, they can get into trouble all kinds of ways. So they have to consider all of that, which is fascinating.
I should also mention on top of that, so you’ve brilliantly laid out how incredible the challenge that Netflix has to solve. On top of that with YouTube, the metadata thing, because users are able to upload video and there’s an API where they can upload automatically and change all this kind of stuff automatically. Every one of those things is an attack vector, as we mentioned. That’s something they have to consider seriously on the engineering side. And on the legal side, they can get into trouble all kinds of ways. So they have to consider all of that, which is fascinating.
ThePrimeagen
The legal side is obvious, but it’s not really like… I would never have initially thought someone would, say, upload images that you’re not allowed to own or have. But that guarantee you that happens. Then you have the whole kid side, right? I think about when you mark something as kid-friendly, how many times have they snuck porn into a Taylor Swift video or whatever? That was like a few years back, there was that whole Taylor Swift or whatever. I forget what it was, I thought it was Taylor Swift. But there’d be these mock videos that’d come up and then, boom. It’s like, that is such an awful problem and I’m so happy that is not a problem. I have to try to figure out.
The legal side is obvious, but it’s not really like… I would never have initially thought someone would, say, upload images that you’re not allowed to own or have. But that guarantee you that happens. Then you have the whole kid side, right? I think about when you mark something as kid-friendly, how many times have they snuck porn into a Taylor Swift video or whatever? That was like a few years back, there was that whole Taylor Swift or whatever. I forget what it was, I thought it was Taylor Swift. But there’d be these mock videos that’d come up and then, boom. It’s like, that is such an awful problem and I’m so happy that is not a problem. I have to try to figure out.
ThePrimeagen origin story
Lex Fridman
Okay. So yes, YouTube and Twitch and Netflix are doing an incredible job. You eventually chose, the madman you are, to leave Netflix and to start on a new journey of being a wolf pack of one, start streaming. What was that? What was the story of that?
Okay. So yes, YouTube and Twitch and Netflix are doing an incredible job. You eventually chose, the madman you are, to leave Netflix and to start on a new journey of being a wolf pack of one, start streaming. What was that? What was the story of that?
ThePrimeagen
So I was streaming for almost seven years now. It started actually at Netflix. We did a charity, Extra Life, shout out to Extra Life for starting my streaming career, effectively is just you stream and whatever money you raise, it goes to Kids with Cancer research. They are a great charity in the sense that they take no overhead and they raise their own donations for their website and everything. And so it’s a very great, straightforward charity. Really love what they’ve done. It was super cool because I live in South Dakota now, but I actually could choose a hospital directly where the money goes to. So there’s a direct impact from A to B. So it’s a pretty cool organization. And so my friend, Guy Cirino, Nice Try Guy is what I like to call him, he was probably the single greatest engineer I’ve ever met in my lifetime.
So I was streaming for almost seven years now. It started actually at Netflix. We did a charity, Extra Life, shout out to Extra Life for starting my streaming career, effectively is just you stream and whatever money you raise, it goes to Kids with Cancer research. They are a great charity in the sense that they take no overhead and they raise their own donations for their website and everything. And so it’s a very great, straightforward charity. Really love what they’ve done. It was super cool because I live in South Dakota now, but I actually could choose a hospital directly where the money goes to. So there’s a direct impact from A to B. So it’s a pretty cool organization. And so my friend, Guy Cirino, Nice Try Guy is what I like to call him, he was probably the single greatest engineer I’ve ever met in my lifetime.
And he was just like, “Hey, come do this. We’re going to all do this.” So I played Fortnite. So before I did that, I was like, oh, I better learn how to stream first. I better get affiliated so I can take subscriptions. And then if anyone gives me a subscription, I’ll also pay that forward. So June 2018 or something like that, I start, I start streaming and I start streaming some Fortnite. End up getting affiliated, end up doing the whole extra life thing. I end up really enjoying it. I’m like, “This is a lot of fun.” I’m playing Fortnite at that point. Okay, so mind you, I’m a Fortnite streamer at that point, and I start really enjoying it. I keep doing it and then one day I decide I’m going to do some programming. Because I really love Vim and I think I’m fast at Vim, and maybe people think programming is cool. Because there was no really programming section at that point.
And I did it. I had like 30 people show up, which was just… And it felt like incredible numbers at that point. So I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s like 30 people watching me program.” So it just kept on going and it kept on happening and it just kept on growing. And I did it for year after year. I would do my job, I would come home, I’d eat dinner with the kiddos, I would read them Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit during that time, I’d read to them for a half an hour, then I’d set that down. And then three nights a week I would program until like 2:00 in the morning or play video games until 2:00 in the morning streaming and building up this whole side thing. And I did this for a long, long time, and then eventually it just kept working out so well and I started making YouTube videos. And then that started getting better. And it was just a long, long grind until April of last year.
I went to the Streamer Awards and I got to announce the programming category and Pirate SoftwareOne. It was awesome. It was a great time. And during that time he gave me a challenge coin and just said, “You just got to go for it. Just go full time.” And so I just sat there and my wife can attest to it. It was like an emotional turmoil thing and it just took a lot of, it was pretty awful because Netflix is very safe option. It was both very fun. It was challenging. I liked a lot of the people worked with, it was overall a really great thing. I had a really great boss, really appreciated him. I still have text him now and then he’s really great guy. So it’s just like I’m leaving all these things for something that’s unsure. And the reality is that streaming and all these things, people love you one day, they could hate you the next day. There’s all this stuff that goes into being on the public side.
And I had Netflix as the backing, so it’s like if public hated me the next day I’d be like, deuces, I’m out. I don’t care now it’s like, now I’m going to do this as a job. And so there’s a whole huge turmoil to this whole thing that went through it. And eventually I just said, okay, I’m going to make this. It resonated with me when I first made the decision to join Netflix. I’m getting older. There’s not a lot of chances to do something unusual. Those chances go down constantly. As you get older, this might be the last crazy thing I get to do. Let’s just try it. So in April I went full-time and I guess I haven’t looked back. I’m only not even a year into doing this as a full-time gig. And it’s just been a lot of fun. And the biggest thing is just being able to really explore and do these things on stream where people really enjoy watching and engaging. It’s been a great, hard, fun, amazing, difficult experience.
Lex Fridman
It’s a really inspiring leap. It’s a really hard one to take for many reasons, like you outlined, but also the loneliness of it, I think it’s a pretty lonely pursuit.
It’s a really inspiring leap. It’s a really hard one to take for many reasons, like you outlined, but also the loneliness of it, I think it’s a pretty lonely pursuit.
ThePrimeagen
It is.
It is.
Lex Fridman
Just you and the camera and the audience and the ups and downs of that. And there’s not really a team.
Just you and the camera and the audience and the ups and downs of that. And there’s not really a team.
ThePrimeagen
I do have one lucky thing I’d say that, my editor, Flip, shout out Flip.
I do have one lucky thing I’d say that, my editor, Flip, shout out Flip.
Lex Fridman
Flip, shout out.
Flip, shout out.
ThePrimeagen
He said it would mean the world to him if I said, “Shout out, Flip.”
He said it would mean the world to him if I said, “Shout out, Flip.”
Lex Fridman
I love you, Flip. We all love you.
I love you, Flip. We all love you.
ThePrimeagen
Oh, man. He had, as he would say, he had nothing going for him. He had a really hard growing up. A lot of rough life decisions have gone into his life and he’s crawling back out of it. And he just said, Hey, I’ll edit full-time for you. So I just said, “All right, like 50/50, whatever I make on YouTube, you get. We’re going to do this together.” And we did that for years, making $0 a month pretty much. And so it’s just like that was an incredible jump and now we get to work together. So I do get that one team aspect that I think is really nice. But it’s not like it was at Netflix where I could hear about stuff people are building, I don’t have a team, I don’t have product or cycles, I don’t have a manager that I have to try to make happy. It’s just like… It is very lonely. And I don’t think a lot of people realize how lonely it actually can be.
Oh, man. He had, as he would say, he had nothing going for him. He had a really hard growing up. A lot of rough life decisions have gone into his life and he’s crawling back out of it. And he just said, Hey, I’ll edit full-time for you. So I just said, “All right, like 50/50, whatever I make on YouTube, you get. We’re going to do this together.” And we did that for years, making $0 a month pretty much. And so it’s just like that was an incredible jump and now we get to work together. So I do get that one team aspect that I think is really nice. But it’s not like it was at Netflix where I could hear about stuff people are building, I don’t have a team, I don’t have product or cycles, I don’t have a manager that I have to try to make happy. It’s just like… It is very lonely. And I don’t think a lot of people realize how lonely it actually can be.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So combine that loneliness with, in my case, I don’t know how many people attack you.
Yeah. So combine that loneliness with, in my case, I don’t know how many people attack you.
ThePrimeagen
I have a shockingly low amount of attack rate, I feel like.
I have a shockingly low amount of attack rate, I feel like.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, people generally… It’s sometimes fun sort of teasing, that kind of thing, but it’s mostly just really… You give so much love to the world and inspire so many people, even when you’re making fun of stuff, yeah. But with me taking the loneliness of it combined with just really intense attacks, it’s tough. It can be rough. Psychologically, really a tough journey. You miss working with a team, just from even a software engineering side, where you can share code or talk over code?
Yeah, people generally… It’s sometimes fun sort of teasing, that kind of thing, but it’s mostly just really… You give so much love to the world and inspire so many people, even when you’re making fun of stuff, yeah. But with me taking the loneliness of it combined with just really intense attacks, it’s tough. It can be rough. Psychologically, really a tough journey. You miss working with a team, just from even a software engineering side, where you can share code or talk over code?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the collab…
Yeah, the collab…
Lex Fridman
Or talk over code or the collaborative aspect of it.
Or talk over code or the collaborative aspect of it.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, multiple things there. One, hey, we love you Lex, so don’t let the things get you down.
Yeah, multiple things there. One, hey, we love you Lex, so don’t let the things get you down.
Lex Fridman
Thank you. Thank you. I love you too.
Thank you. Thank you. I love you too.
ThePrimeagen
Thank you. Hey, little bonding moment here going on. But one thing I really miss-
Thank you. Hey, little bonding moment here going on. But one thing I really miss-
Lex Fridman
Not in a sexual way, just to be clear.
Not in a sexual way, just to be clear.
ThePrimeagen
The tension is a little tense.
The tension is a little tense.
Lex Fridman
I’m getting uncomfortable. Yeah. Anyway, team.
I’m getting uncomfortable. Yeah. Anyway, team.
ThePrimeagen
It’s just the one thing I really miss is just, even when I hated how people did it, just seeing how other people solved things, it’s really amazing just the raw creative power so many people have, and just being like, oh, wow, I would’ve never done it this way. Crazy, right? Wow, this is awesome. And then you kind of internally process this and you’re like, oh, I now have a new little tool in my tool belt. Because at some point it’s really hard to find a mentor when you’re first, young and you’re just starting out programming. I mean, anyone with a couple years of experience will be not just a little bit better than you, but infinitely better than you. It feels like crazy how much better people are. And so you have to get mentors and you learn from people. And then as you get better, that amount of availability gets really small. And so it’s something that I really do miss is that forced hard problem solving together.
It’s just the one thing I really miss is just, even when I hated how people did it, just seeing how other people solved things, it’s really amazing just the raw creative power so many people have, and just being like, oh, wow, I would’ve never done it this way. Crazy, right? Wow, this is awesome. And then you kind of internally process this and you’re like, oh, I now have a new little tool in my tool belt. Because at some point it’s really hard to find a mentor when you’re first, young and you’re just starting out programming. I mean, anyone with a couple years of experience will be not just a little bit better than you, but infinitely better than you. It feels like crazy how much better people are. And so you have to get mentors and you learn from people. And then as you get better, that amount of availability gets really small. And so it’s something that I really do miss is that forced hard problem solving together.
Lex Fridman
I think there’s also a skill to mining the wisdom from other people. I generally try to approach even junior people, young folks. It’s just mentally, at least for me, it works as a hack to assume they’re the smartest person in the world, way smarter than me. And so I take every single word they say as potential wisdom, and that helps me sort of mine for potential wisdom there. Because it’s so easy once you get older to judge, to be like, yeah, okay, okay. I’ve been through that. I remember feeling like that. I remember thinking that. That’s incorrect, whatever. But just kind of assume that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, and the other person is this sage. And in that kind of interaction, I think you could actually learn a lot. And my favorite interactions is when we both think that way. So from there, I think that’s a catalyst for a great collaboration and interaction.
I think there’s also a skill to mining the wisdom from other people. I generally try to approach even junior people, young folks. It’s just mentally, at least for me, it works as a hack to assume they’re the smartest person in the world, way smarter than me. And so I take every single word they say as potential wisdom, and that helps me sort of mine for potential wisdom there. Because it’s so easy once you get older to judge, to be like, yeah, okay, okay. I’ve been through that. I remember feeling like that. I remember thinking that. That’s incorrect, whatever. But just kind of assume that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, and the other person is this sage. And in that kind of interaction, I think you could actually learn a lot. And my favorite interactions is when we both think that way. So from there, I think that’s a catalyst for a great collaboration and interaction.
ThePrimeagen
It just also makes everything much nicer. It really stinks to work with someone that’s combative and negative. I don’t mind combativeness if it’s like I’m trying to figure out what’s best to do right now, versus combativeness just because you’re a negative person and things have to be this one particular way, because if they’re not this one particular way, it’s the end of the world. And that’s actually really hard for me to work with.
It just also makes everything much nicer. It really stinks to work with someone that’s combative and negative. I don’t mind combativeness if it’s like I’m trying to figure out what’s best to do right now, versus combativeness just because you’re a negative person and things have to be this one particular way, because if they’re not this one particular way, it’s the end of the world. And that’s actually really hard for me to work with.
Lex Fridman
What’s the origin story of ThePrimeagen name?
What’s the origin story of ThePrimeagen name?
ThePrimeagen
The origin story of ThePrimeagen name was, are you familiar with a video game called Turok? Nintendo 64. Turok had Turok I and then Turok II. Turok II was a brutally hard game. This is back when first-person shooters, they would only give you a certain amount of health, and you had to go discover health and get that health. And you had to beat the whole game without effectively dying. That’s the first version right there. That’s like Turok I and Turok II.
The origin story of ThePrimeagen name was, are you familiar with a video game called Turok? Nintendo 64. Turok had Turok I and then Turok II. Turok II was a brutally hard game. This is back when first-person shooters, they would only give you a certain amount of health, and you had to go discover health and get that health. And you had to beat the whole game without effectively dying. That’s the first version right there. That’s like Turok I and Turok II.
Lex Fridman
Turok is a renowned first-person shooter video game series featuring dinosaurs, action, and sci-fi elements. The franchise has evolved significantly since its inception in 1997.
Turok is a renowned first-person shooter video game series featuring dinosaurs, action, and sci-fi elements. The franchise has evolved significantly since its inception in 1997.
ThePrimeagen
There you go. So in 1998, there, you can see it right there.
There you go. So in 1998, there, you can see it right there.
Lex Fridman
Turok II, Seed of Evil followed in 1998 featuring larger levels, more challenging puzzles, and deadlier enemies.
Turok II, Seed of Evil followed in 1998 featuring larger levels, more challenging puzzles, and deadlier enemies.
ThePrimeagen
The notable difficulty, it was very, very, very difficult. So I spent, when I got it, it came in a black cartridge, not like your standard gray Nintendo 64, the black cartridge. Badass game. And I got it and I put it in and I played, and I played every day for 10 hours a day, for a month straight. And I beat it. And it was such an incredible, great experience. And the last leader of Turok II is called the Primeagen. And so when I was a kid, when you’re in fifth grade, that’s super cool, named after the bad guy. And so for a long time on any internet thing, like Grail Online that I mentioned earlier, the name was ThePrimeagen. It was great. And then I became an adult eventually, and it’s just like, okay, I’m an adult. My name’s Michael Paulson underscore. And that’s what I was on the internet for a long time was that. And I remember it was like 2017, 2018, somewhere in there.
The notable difficulty, it was very, very, very difficult. So I spent, when I got it, it came in a black cartridge, not like your standard gray Nintendo 64, the black cartridge. Badass game. And I got it and I put it in and I played, and I played every day for 10 hours a day, for a month straight. And I beat it. And it was such an incredible, great experience. And the last leader of Turok II is called the Primeagen. And so when I was a kid, when you’re in fifth grade, that’s super cool, named after the bad guy. And so for a long time on any internet thing, like Grail Online that I mentioned earlier, the name was ThePrimeagen. It was great. And then I became an adult eventually, and it’s just like, okay, I’m an adult. My name’s Michael Paulson underscore. And that’s what I was on the internet for a long time was that. And I remember it was like 2017, 2018, somewhere in there.
I remember just how bad the tech world had kind of become. It was just like this super pretentious place, tons of dick measuring, just everything that just was the worst. Ken Wheeler got canceled over playing the Circle game. It was just like, it is so hard to describe to people that weren’t there, but it was just the worst place to be. Tech was extremely unfun. It was extremely awful. Everything was just so, it wasn’t academic because it was research. It was like we’re building the most sophisticated things, and this is for the smart people and everyone else is the dumb people. Don’t worry. We’ll design for you, dummy. We’ll show you how to make the perfect architecture. And I remember changing my Twitter handle because I got so upset and just went back to my video game name. I was like, I want things to be fun.
I want this to stop. And so when I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was, because it includes nobody. Everyone thinks that they’re the smart people and they design for the dummies. And it’s just like, no, I want tech to be this place where people feel like they can be creative, and excited, and actually build something. And if you’re new, it’s okay to be dumb and ask dumb questions. Learn from your dumbness. No one’s expecting you to be smart. Pick whatever you want. Actually do something and have fun and build your crazy ideas. Oh, you’re going to reinvent the wheel, reinvent the wheel, understand what you’re doing, learn it really good, and interact and stuff. And it was just so different than what was out there. And the name… Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about this thing where, when he first started acting, his name was the thing that people hated.
As he once said, you have a strange voice, you have a strange body, and your name, your name’s unpronounceable. No one’s going to Schneitzinfinitzel, no one’s going to remember that. And he said, but now the name is the strong part. And for me, I’ve always felt akin to that, though my name’s not nearly as cool, nor am I as popular as Arnold, nor am I as tough or good-looking or successful. But nonetheless, it’s just the name represented this counterculture movement within myself, in which I just hated what was there and I wanted to defeat it. And so this has been the thing. And now people remember me so well because of how weird my name is. And so it’s just like for whatever reason, it became its own thing. And so that’s the… Now I would never change it, and back then I would never change it because it was my rage against the machine moment, if you will.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I love that as a symbol of rage against the machine and the rage being fun.
Yeah, I love that as a symbol of rage against the machine and the rage being fun.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I just want people to be creative and have fun again. It’s okay.
Yeah. I just want people to be creative and have fun again. It’s okay.
Lex Fridman
What about the mustache? It’s an epic mustache. It’s an epic stash. It has a life of its own. Is there an origin story or did you guys discover each other at some point? Or did it emerge from the darkness of the struggle that is your life, or where does it come from?
What about the mustache? It’s an epic mustache. It’s an epic stash. It has a life of its own. Is there an origin story or did you guys discover each other at some point? Or did it emerge from the darkness of the struggle that is your life, or where does it come from?
ThePrimeagen
Well, the original mustache is that it was no-shave November back before it became Movember. It was no-shave November back in the day. And after no-shave November, you had all this hair. And so what’s the natural thing you got to do? You got to sport a mustache for a day. So whenever I’d forget to not shave for a long time, and then I’d let it start growing out really big, I just go, oh, this is kind of funny. I’ll have a mustache. So one day when I was streaming, it’s just one of those times I just didn’t shave, and then I started just letting it go, and then I got kind of a beard, and then I just had a mustache. When I did it, people were just like, yeah, it’s mustache time. And I was just like, heck yeah, it feels like a lifestyle decision.
Well, the original mustache is that it was no-shave November back before it became Movember. It was no-shave November back in the day. And after no-shave November, you had all this hair. And so what’s the natural thing you got to do? You got to sport a mustache for a day. So whenever I’d forget to not shave for a long time, and then I’d let it start growing out really big, I just go, oh, this is kind of funny. I’ll have a mustache. So one day when I was streaming, it’s just one of those times I just didn’t shave, and then I started just letting it go, and then I got kind of a beard, and then I just had a mustache. When I did it, people were just like, yeah, it’s mustache time. And I was just like, heck yeah, it feels like a lifestyle decision.
This is the fun times. And so all of a sudden it was just exciting to have a mustache. And I shaved it off and I was like, oh, okay. But then part of me is like there’s this weird energy that comes from just having a mustache. So I was like, I’m going back. Told my wife, forgive her. She was very not as thrilled about my decisions to have a mustache long-term, but I just decided to have it back and it was the right thing. It’s always been the energy that I had was the mustache. It was always been there. It just never was visible until later on it feels like.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, we’re chatting offline how one of the components of a successful relationship is sacrifice and your wife was willing to take the sacrifice of allowing you to have a mustache.
Yeah, we’re chatting offline how one of the components of a successful relationship is sacrifice and your wife was willing to take the sacrifice of allowing you to have a mustache.
ThePrimeagen
I clearly was not willing to sacrifice not having one.
I clearly was not willing to sacrifice not having one.
Learning programming languages
Lex Fridman
You do this incredible thing where you tried a bunch of different programming languages when you stream. You go all out on certain programming languages like Rust and then go and then try to pick a new one, but also are experimenting constantly. So maybe one question I could ask is about learning. What’s your approach to learning a new programming language, and maybe what’s your advice on learning a new programming language when you begin that journey?
You do this incredible thing where you tried a bunch of different programming languages when you stream. You go all out on certain programming languages like Rust and then go and then try to pick a new one, but also are experimenting constantly. So maybe one question I could ask is about learning. What’s your approach to learning a new programming language, and maybe what’s your advice on learning a new programming language when you begin that journey?
ThePrimeagen
So I’ve kind of done a bunch of different ways to go through this learning process, and I’ve tried a lot of different ones. Something that is obviously successful is just start building something. Just put your hands on the keyboard, especially if you already know how to program. You’re like, okay, I’m now using Zig. How do I do a main function so I can just run the program? Okay, now I know how to build. Okay, how do I do an if statement? What does it look like? Okay, how do I declare my own functions? How do I do modules, right? You just kind of Google your way through it, if you will, to get to the end product and build something. It’s a great way to do things because I find that repetition, rote learning is obviously the best way to do this. You have to kind of go over it a bunch and you can definitely get out and build a lot of stuff with that. I like that initial kind of get used to things.
So I’ve kind of done a bunch of different ways to go through this learning process, and I’ve tried a lot of different ones. Something that is obviously successful is just start building something. Just put your hands on the keyboard, especially if you already know how to program. You’re like, okay, I’m now using Zig. How do I do a main function so I can just run the program? Okay, now I know how to build. Okay, how do I do an if statement? What does it look like? Okay, how do I declare my own functions? How do I do modules, right? You just kind of Google your way through it, if you will, to get to the end product and build something. It’s a great way to do things because I find that repetition, rote learning is obviously the best way to do this. You have to kind of go over it a bunch and you can definitely get out and build a lot of stuff with that. I like that initial kind of get used to things.
But on top of it, I find that, by doing that, you also fall into traps. You kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience. And so you don’t have what makes that language special. You have what all the other languages make special. And so you end up not really being able to use it very effectively, but you can certainly kind of learn it and get kind of good at it. And so the second approach I’ve been doing lately, and this has been inspired by the creator of Ghosty, Mitchell Hashimoto, is to just start by reading the language reference, the whole thing. And so lately I’ve been just kind of going through and just reading the entire manual for these languages. Like Zig, I’m almost done with that one. It’s like eight to 10 hours of just sitting down reading, and I’ll whip out my computer and kind of practice a couple of the things from the actual docs, and that way I can learn all the things.
So then when I start building again, I’ll remember, okay, I know there’s a thing over here, let me go reread about it because now I have it indexed in my brain somewhere that will remember. And so I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way. I mean at the end of the day, the right way is always that you have to build something eventually. You cannot just read about it. You have to put your hands on the keyboard, you have to build something out. And then once you do that, that’s where you really discover what makes it painful or what makes it great. And if you don’t have the breadth of what the language offers, you just may make it painful by simply being bad at it.
Lex Fridman
Where exactly are you reading this-
Where exactly are you reading this-
ThePrimeagen
Language reference.
Language reference.
Lex Fridman
The language reference.
The language reference.
ThePrimeagen
So it just goes through every feature top to bottom, right?
So it just goes through every feature top to bottom, right?
Lex Fridman
That’s a lot. Yeah.
That’s a lot. Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Every way it’s described, all the different things. I think Zig’s is, it’s a decent size, but it’s not just simply read the words. You want to internalize each concept as well. So it takes a long time. So I’m a slow reader.
Every way it’s described, all the different things. I think Zig’s is, it’s a decent size, but it’s not just simply read the words. You want to internalize each concept as well. So it takes a long time. So I’m a slow reader.
Lex Fridman
So you’re building, in AI terms, like a background model. I don’t think you can just start building once you’re done reading because you probably forgot how to do a for loop. You kind of forget the specifics. You just are building up the design choices, the set of features available, what are the strengths and weaknesses, all that kind of stuff. And then you start building. That’s really interesting. Probably not the thing you would recommend to a junior developer, somebody who’s just starting out at first.
So you’re building, in AI terms, like a background model. I don’t think you can just start building once you’re done reading because you probably forgot how to do a for loop. You kind of forget the specifics. You just are building up the design choices, the set of features available, what are the strengths and weaknesses, all that kind of stuff. And then you start building. That’s really interesting. Probably not the thing you would recommend to a junior developer, somebody who’s just starting out at first.
ThePrimeagen
If you don’t know what an if statement is, that’s not a good way to learn. To me, the best way to learn that is really hands on the keyboard and building extremely simple things, and slowly growing in complexity. Because understanding what a class and methods and instances versus the blueprint, which is the class versus functions versus modules versus all that stuff. That just takes time to learn. And so that’s a completely different style of learning.
If you don’t know what an if statement is, that’s not a good way to learn. To me, the best way to learn that is really hands on the keyboard and building extremely simple things, and slowly growing in complexity. Because understanding what a class and methods and instances versus the blueprint, which is the class versus functions versus modules versus all that stuff. That just takes time to learn. And so that’s a completely different style of learning.
Lex Fridman
I wonder because for me, learning right now, AI is a huge help, but I already have a lot of experience. I wonder, if you’re starting from scratch, whether that’s a good idea. But I still think it’s probably a really good idea, but basically generate some code using AI and figure out what it’s doing by playing with different parts. Maybe can you comment on that aspect, like the use of AI as part of the learning process?
I wonder because for me, learning right now, AI is a huge help, but I already have a lot of experience. I wonder, if you’re starting from scratch, whether that’s a good idea. But I still think it’s probably a really good idea, but basically generate some code using AI and figure out what it’s doing by playing with different parts. Maybe can you comment on that aspect, like the use of AI as part of the learning process?
ThePrimeagen
This is where I have both the hopeful and the doomer take at the exact same time, and it’s the same thing with Google or Stack Overflow, it’s all the same kind of take, which is it’s just making things more democratized in some sense. I get to ask questions in probably the most personal possible way with my own voice, in my own words, and it’s able to produce out answers and hopefully help guide me. Now, regardless of just say the errors and the incorrectness of it, ultimately just using it as a learning tool and being able to just formulate and read answers in your own voice, I think is super powerful. And I think it’s super amazing. But the part that I think is going to be really difficult is that we don’t value remembering things anymore as a society. Since the internet came about, I can just look that up. I can just look that up. You don’t need to memorize your times tables.
This is where I have both the hopeful and the doomer take at the exact same time, and it’s the same thing with Google or Stack Overflow, it’s all the same kind of take, which is it’s just making things more democratized in some sense. I get to ask questions in probably the most personal possible way with my own voice, in my own words, and it’s able to produce out answers and hopefully help guide me. Now, regardless of just say the errors and the incorrectness of it, ultimately just using it as a learning tool and being able to just formulate and read answers in your own voice, I think is super powerful. And I think it’s super amazing. But the part that I think is going to be really difficult is that we don’t value remembering things anymore as a society. Since the internet came about, I can just look that up. I can just look that up. You don’t need to memorize your times tables.
You can just use a calculator. You can just do all that. I remember I just was sitting on the airplane and I watched someone do the world’s most simple addition and subtraction like 10 times on their phone. And why are you not just… You should already know, you should be able to do these things. And I realized that we kind of offload our brains, right? Oh, I don’t need to know these things because I can look them up. And that’s not a bad answer in some sense. I can understand that. I don’t need them to remember every last thing, but then it also makes me realize that you kind of develop this learned helplessness, that a new error comes up. I’ll just ask the AI.
AI says, oh, okay, I got to fix this line. I fix the line. You didn’t actually learn anything. You kind of just used it as a quick means to get something out and move on. And so you sacrifice knowledge for speed, which is a great thing in some… We have to make those trade-offs all the time in engineering. Sometimes you have to move fast at the sacrifice of knowledge, and I’m totally on board for that, but I worry that what we’ll create is an entire generation of incompetent programmers who can do some amount of things well, but anything that is unique, bespoke, or requires some extra like little elbow grease, might become very difficult. It might cause a whole chasm where juniors remain juniors forever.
And I don’t want to see that. I want to see people grow. I want to see people actually be able to take this as a craftsmanship thing. And so that’s both my hope and my worry is that AI think can do both really. If you could ask whatever question you want and you don’t have to rely on, say, a book to give you that exact answer. And if the book just said it wrong and you can’t understand it, it’s just like, sorry, you don’t get to learn what this is. Like recursion for me, I spent way too much time until someone gave me the right problem to understand recursion. You could imagine AI could have solved that for me way faster because it could have gave me the right problem and walked me through much better. But what happened if I just always have recursion solved by them and not actually learn it myself?
Lex Fridman
So if I ask AI to generate code to do a certain thing, actually a large percentage of time, most of what AI generates is going to be correct for me, but some percent of time it’s not, fundamentally not. And for me to recognize the difference between those two, I think it takes a lot of experience. I think to learn that skill of knowing, no, no, no, a different new out of the box solution is needed here than the one you’re providing. You’re missing the point. That’s a skill, and how do you learn that? You learn that by building from scratch. So both are probably really necessary.
So if I ask AI to generate code to do a certain thing, actually a large percentage of time, most of what AI generates is going to be correct for me, but some percent of time it’s not, fundamentally not. And for me to recognize the difference between those two, I think it takes a lot of experience. I think to learn that skill of knowing, no, no, no, a different new out of the box solution is needed here than the one you’re providing. You’re missing the point. That’s a skill, and how do you learn that? You learn that by building from scratch. So both are probably really necessary.
But I think as a first step of learning how to program, it’s pretty nice to generate a function, to generate for loops and all that kind of stuff, and then just fuck with the different lines and modify them to try to adjust the behavior of the program, and from the way the behavior of the program adjusts or bugs are created, you learn about the syntax of the language, the behavior of the language, all that kind of stuff. So I think it’s a super powerful way to learn. But yeah, you need to also write from scratch.
ThePrimeagen
At some point you have to take off the training wheels, because I think what you’re really spotting is the difference between reading and writing code. I can read a lot of languages very well. I can see what’s happening. I can understand it, but I would not be very good at writing it. I can understand a lot of things about C++ and I can read it, but I’m just not that because I just don’t done it in so long. I can’t remember where all the semicolons, and colons and you do public and private, and how should you do naming conventions? All those things kind of add all together, and then you’re just like, oh, I’m really bad at writing it, though I can read it. And so there’s a skill gap chasm that exists between those two.
At some point you have to take off the training wheels, because I think what you’re really spotting is the difference between reading and writing code. I can read a lot of languages very well. I can see what’s happening. I can understand it, but I would not be very good at writing it. I can understand a lot of things about C++ and I can read it, but I’m just not that because I just don’t done it in so long. I can’t remember where all the semicolons, and colons and you do public and private, and how should you do naming conventions? All those things kind of add all together, and then you’re just like, oh, I’m really bad at writing it, though I can read it. And so there’s a skill gap chasm that exists between those two.
Best programming languages in 2025
Lex Fridman
All right. Well, let me talk about the various languages. The cheesy, ridiculous question of what’s the best programming language? Let’s say, what’s the best programming language that everybody should learn? Maybe let’s go with the top five. I’m going to pull up the Stack Overflow developer survey, because I think we have… You don’t like them?
All right. Well, let me talk about the various languages. The cheesy, ridiculous question of what’s the best programming language? Let’s say, what’s the best programming language that everybody should learn? Maybe let’s go with the top five. I’m going to pull up the Stack Overflow developer survey, because I think we have… You don’t like them?
ThePrimeagen
You got to remember, because I mean, you’re a data guy. You know about biases and data. What does Stack Overflow naturally bias towards?
You got to remember, because I mean, you’re a data guy. You know about biases and data. What does Stack Overflow naturally bias towards?
Lex Fridman
Well, they have the different slices of professional developers, junior developers, they have different slices. Okay, what is the bias?
Well, they have the different slices of professional developers, junior developers, they have different slices. Okay, what is the bias?
ThePrimeagen
I hear you, but who fills out a Stack Overflow survey? Someone who participates on Stack Overflow. Who’s participating on Stack Overflow? Largely very, very new people, and that one guy that loves answering questions. And so I’m not sure if Stack Overflow is a great place to get data. It could be a very biased set of data.
I hear you, but who fills out a Stack Overflow survey? Someone who participates on Stack Overflow. Who’s participating on Stack Overflow? Largely very, very new people, and that one guy that loves answering questions. And so I’m not sure if Stack Overflow is a great place to get data. It could be a very biased set of data.
Lex Fridman
Is it really only new people?
Is it really only new people?
ThePrimeagen
I mean that’s who’s using Stack Overflow.
I mean that’s who’s using Stack Overflow.
Lex Fridman
All right. Most popular technologies. On this…
All right. Most popular technologies. On this…
ThePrimeagen
JavaScript, HTML, Python, SQL.
JavaScript, HTML, Python, SQL.
Lex Fridman
SQL is the more general kind of… I’m sure they’re not doing the individual sort of flavors of SQL. By the way, pronounce SQL versus SQL?
SQL is the more general kind of… I’m sure they’re not doing the individual sort of flavors of SQL. By the way, pronounce SQL versus SQL?
ThePrimeagen
It’s squeal.
It’s squeal.
Lex Fridman
Squeal? You squeal?
Squeal? You squeal?
ThePrimeagen
Squeal, I think is the correct way.
Squeal, I think is the correct way.
Lex Fridman
Squeal.
Squeal.
ThePrimeagen
I did SQL because I didn’t know the audience. I don’t know if they can handle the truth, which is its squeal.
I did SQL because I didn’t know the audience. I don’t know if they can handle the truth, which is its squeal.
Lex Fridman
The squeal of joy, squeal…
The squeal of joy, squeal…
ThePrimeagen
Squeal light, my squeal, Postgres squeal.
Squeal light, my squeal, Postgres squeal.
Lex Fridman
By the way, I had a lot of joy from earlier saying pigfucker, for some reason.
By the way, I had a lot of joy from earlier saying pigfucker, for some reason.
ThePrimeagen
It’s such a [inaudible 02:31:36]. I mean, can you believe that was a real conversation that I had?
It’s such a [inaudible 02:31:36]. I mean, can you believe that was a real conversation that I had?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that was. TypeScript, BAS, Java, C Sharp, C++, C-PHP.
Yeah, that was. TypeScript, BAS, Java, C Sharp, C++, C-PHP.
ThePrimeagen
It largely kind of aligns with the world you’d expect, but Assembly, why is Assembly more popular than Ruby? Who’s writing just Assembly by… No one writes Assembly by hand other than maybe that one guy that’s developing TLS 1.3 and hand rolling a cryptography algorithm to be the fastest possible algorithm.
It largely kind of aligns with the world you’d expect, but Assembly, why is Assembly more popular than Ruby? Who’s writing just Assembly by… No one writes Assembly by hand other than maybe that one guy that’s developing TLS 1.3 and hand rolling a cryptography algorithm to be the fastest possible algorithm.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Assembly is a weird one. Maybe people write it maybe in school, but even in school now for a operating systems course or something like that, or system engineering. I don’t know if they write Assembly anymore. I don’t think so anyway.
Yeah. Assembly is a weird one. Maybe people write it maybe in school, but even in school now for a operating systems course or something like that, or system engineering. I don’t know if they write Assembly anymore. I don’t think so anyway.
ThePrimeagen
And Swift and Ruby being less popular than Assembly seems ridiculous. But nonetheless, okay, so you get my ideas behind that, but as far as top five languages go, that’s probably too broad because you could just name so many. I think you should probably archetype it by what do you want to do? So if you want to get into game development, perhaps C Sharp, C++ could be good choices. Or JavaScript and doing Canvas games, I could see that also working. But you’re limited by doing JavaScript obviously, because you can’t do as much because the language is just not fast enough to do as much. So it’s like a good thing to remember. If you’re going to be doing backend stuff, if you want a job, if you’re looking for a job, maybe C Sharp slash Java, or JavaScript, or Go would be great choices. If you’re looking to do embedded, you probably want to do C, C++, like that would probably be a good choice. And so I think you have to first determine what do you really want to get out.
And Swift and Ruby being less popular than Assembly seems ridiculous. But nonetheless, okay, so you get my ideas behind that, but as far as top five languages go, that’s probably too broad because you could just name so many. I think you should probably archetype it by what do you want to do? So if you want to get into game development, perhaps C Sharp, C++ could be good choices. Or JavaScript and doing Canvas games, I could see that also working. But you’re limited by doing JavaScript obviously, because you can’t do as much because the language is just not fast enough to do as much. So it’s like a good thing to remember. If you’re going to be doing backend stuff, if you want a job, if you’re looking for a job, maybe C Sharp slash Java, or JavaScript, or Go would be great choices. If you’re looking to do embedded, you probably want to do C, C++, like that would probably be a good choice. And so I think you have to first determine what do you really want to get out.
Lex Fridman
If you’re just curious about programming, which I talked to a lot of people who are, yeah, you can consider jobs, but basically their question is, okay, what’s the first language I should learn, and maybe what are the several languages I should explore?
If you’re just curious about programming, which I talked to a lot of people who are, yeah, you can consider jobs, but basically their question is, okay, what’s the first language I should learn, and maybe what are the several languages I should explore?
ThePrimeagen
Can I say something that’s going to make a lot of people angry?
Can I say something that’s going to make a lot of people angry?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure.
ThePrimeagen
I think the first language people should learn if they have no idea about anything is JavaScript.
I think the first language people should learn if they have no idea about anything is JavaScript.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Why would that make people angry?
Yeah. Why would that make people angry?
ThePrimeagen
Oh, because people just, first off, I’m not supposed to say anything nice about JavaScript.
Oh, because people just, first off, I’m not supposed to say anything nice about JavaScript.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, usually that’s the meme, that you hate JavaScript, right?
Yeah, usually that’s the meme, that you hate JavaScript, right?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. No, JavaScript’s a beautiful language, and it has a lot of things that are very great for it, and one of them is that you can express anything with very little effort. And so someone that’s new, I think it’s really great to be able to draw a box and move a box. That’s great. You get to see it visually. I think that’s one thing that’s really great about JavaScript is that you can do that. Then you can go, okay, I want to learn about the backend. I want to make a request now.
Yeah. No, JavaScript’s a beautiful language, and it has a lot of things that are very great for it, and one of them is that you can express anything with very little effort. And so someone that’s new, I think it’s really great to be able to draw a box and move a box. That’s great. You get to see it visually. I think that’s one thing that’s really great about JavaScript is that you can do that. Then you can go, okay, I want to learn about the backend. I want to make a request now.
You can write a quick backend in it. Now you’re starting to get familiar with programming a little bit. I can save this to a database. I can bring it down. I can put it on a screen and I can animate it all around, and I can even put it on a canvas and render it in 2D or 3D. So it’s like there’s so much variety of what you can do with JavaScript. It’s a great way to get introduced into programming. But then at some point you have to go, okay, I now need to learn more about this whole thing.
Lex Fridman
I mean, yeah, just like you said, you can make games, you can do front end, backend for web development.
I mean, yeah, just like you said, you can make games, you can do front end, backend for web development.
ThePrimeagen
You can even do embedded. They actually have… Like there’s Wes Bos is building his Roomba or something and programming it with JavaScript and React, which is just the world’s worst language to choose for embed, but you can still do it.
You can even do embedded. They actually have… Like there’s Wes Bos is building his Roomba or something and programming it with JavaScript and React, which is just the world’s worst language to choose for embed, but you can still do it.
Python
Lex Fridman
Also, we mentioned sort of in terms of applications, anything that relates to data or machine learning, Python is the sort of the leader there, so that’s a great one.
Also, we mentioned sort of in terms of applications, anything that relates to data or machine learning, Python is the sort of the leader there, so that’s a great one.
ThePrimeagen
It seems like Python, CUDA stuff and C++ would be a dynamite in that, because a lot of these Python libraries are assumed you’re just smuggling in C++ underneath the hood or C.
It seems like Python, CUDA stuff and C++ would be a dynamite in that, because a lot of these Python libraries are assumed you’re just smuggling in C++ underneath the hood or C.
Lex Fridman
Okay, so JavaScript. I’ll say Python.
Okay, so JavaScript. I’ll say Python.
ThePrimeagen
Python’s a great one too. You can get quite far with it, but you can’t write the front end. What happened if you love the front end? What happened if you really just want to design things and you just didn’t know that?
Python’s a great one too. You can get quite far with it, but you can’t write the front end. What happened if you love the front end? What happened if you really just want to design things and you just didn’t know that?
Lex Fridman
Well, it’s okay. So for that, JavaScript.
Well, it’s okay. So for that, JavaScript.
ThePrimeagen
But Python’s a good choice because you can’t do the ML stuff in JavaScript nearly as easy.
But Python’s a good choice because you can’t do the ML stuff in JavaScript nearly as easy.
HTML & CSS
Lex Fridman
Do we count HTML and CSS as programming languages?
Do we count HTML and CSS as programming languages?
ThePrimeagen
I think there’s some technical definition that it is. If you use this certain amalgamation of CSS plus HTML, it actually has, it can be a Turing complete language. But I mean for practical purposes, no. HTML is not a language. For me, yes, the Turing test is a good one, but for those that are just not wanting to be as academic, if I can’t write a function and an if statement, I don’t feel like that’s… If I can’t loop, if, and function, I don’t feel like that’s a good, that’s a programming language.
I think there’s some technical definition that it is. If you use this certain amalgamation of CSS plus HTML, it actually has, it can be a Turing complete language. But I mean for practical purposes, no. HTML is not a language. For me, yes, the Turing test is a good one, but for those that are just not wanting to be as academic, if I can’t write a function and an if statement, I don’t feel like that’s… If I can’t loop, if, and function, I don’t feel like that’s a good, that’s a programming language.
Lex Fridman
Although modern HTML has a lot of features.
Although modern HTML has a lot of features.
ThePrimeagen
It’s crazy how much it has, but it’s more of a specification than anything else. I specify it to be a pop-up. I specify it to have this kind of accessibility, this kind of look. Under these conditions look like this, transform like this, move down here.
It’s crazy how much it has, but it’s more of a specification than anything else. I specify it to be a pop-up. I specify it to have this kind of accessibility, this kind of look. Under these conditions look like this, transform like this, move down here.
Bash
Lex Fridman
I don’t know. I kind of like these popular programming languages in this list. I like JavaScript.
I don’t know. I kind of like these popular programming languages in this list. I like JavaScript.
ThePrimeagen
You like Bash?
You like Bash?
Lex Fridman
Oh, yeah. I like Bash a lot. Yeah. Why?
Oh, yeah. I like Bash a lot. Yeah. Why?
ThePrimeagen
Okay. Bash is kind of one of those ones where it’s like, do you really like it? I like it up until I need an array.
Okay. Bash is kind of one of those ones where it’s like, do you really like it? I like it up until I need an array.
Lex Fridman
Oh, as a programming language, just no, but I like the command line.
Oh, as a programming language, just no, but I like the command line.
ThePrimeagen
Okay.
Okay.
Lex Fridman
Do you like Bash? No, nobody likes Bash. Do you mean-
Do you like Bash? No, nobody likes Bash. Do you mean-
ThePrimeagen
Someone is so offended right now.
Someone is so offended right now.
Lex Fridman
It means do you use it a lot? Yes. I mean, it’s good to learn, right? It is good to-
It means do you use it a lot? Yes. I mean, it’s good to learn, right? It is good to-
ThePrimeagen
It is.
It is.
Lex Fridman
… Be comfortable in the command line because it’s a bit of a superpower. It’s like, I think I follow on Twitter, FFMPEG.
… Be comfortable in the command line because it’s a bit of a superpower. It’s like, I think I follow on Twitter, FFMPEG.
FFmpeg
ThePrimeagen
Great account.
Great account.
Lex Fridman
There’s certain Twitter accounts that are just legit. And I think FFMPEG, they have all these sort of parameters that you can add on the command line, that it’s like one of those cryptic languages that only very few wizards understand. But once you begin to slowly understand, and I’m only at the very sort of beginning stage of that journey to mastery, the powers you gain at every step, it grows exponentially, it feels like. I mean, FFMPEG is just this incredible, what would you call a library system? There’s just the people behind them must be just brilliant masterminds because they have to work with all these codecs, with all these containers, with all the mysteries of the media codec universe they’re masters of. And they understand compression, which is another super fascinating technical set of problems that, I don’t know, just FFMPEG just fills me with joy that it exists. But you need kind of Bash type comfort, command line comfort, to work with it to really unlock its power. Yeah.
There’s certain Twitter accounts that are just legit. And I think FFMPEG, they have all these sort of parameters that you can add on the command line, that it’s like one of those cryptic languages that only very few wizards understand. But once you begin to slowly understand, and I’m only at the very sort of beginning stage of that journey to mastery, the powers you gain at every step, it grows exponentially, it feels like. I mean, FFMPEG is just this incredible, what would you call a library system? There’s just the people behind them must be just brilliant masterminds because they have to work with all these codecs, with all these containers, with all the mysteries of the media codec universe they’re masters of. And they understand compression, which is another super fascinating technical set of problems that, I don’t know, just FFMPEG just fills me with joy that it exists. But you need kind of Bash type comfort, command line comfort, to work with it to really unlock its power. Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
I think FFMPEG is probably one of the most consequential libraries of our day, and the Twitter account is so unhinged. It is the most amazing thing to see because I think FFMPEG does not get the love it deserves. Every single application, OBS, probably FFMPEG underneath the hood. Everything, FFMPEG underneath the hood, and yet they do not get the love they deserve. I just love it. I just think they’re the best.
I think FFMPEG is probably one of the most consequential libraries of our day, and the Twitter account is so unhinged. It is the most amazing thing to see because I think FFMPEG does not get the love it deserves. Every single application, OBS, probably FFMPEG underneath the hood. Everything, FFMPEG underneath the hood, and yet they do not get the love they deserve. I just love it. I just think they’re the best.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I would say JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, SQL, I mean that is SQL Squeal is a programming language. It’s an incredibly sophisticated programming language. Yeah?
Yeah, I would say JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, SQL, I mean that is SQL Squeal is a programming language. It’s an incredibly sophisticated programming language. Yeah?
ThePrimeagen
SQL is interesting. I believe you can classify it as a programming language. It does have, if. You have case statements and it’s pretty crazy what you can do with it.
SQL is interesting. I believe you can classify it as a programming language. It does have, if. You have case statements and it’s pretty crazy what you can do with it.
Lex Fridman
You could do functions, you can do all that stuff. You shouldn’t.
You could do functions, you can do all that stuff. You shouldn’t.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, for stored procedures, that’s how you make your life hell. I will say that all the top languages there, none of them are strict static typed languages. And so even TypeScript, I don’t like this any. And so for people that are learning, doing something that’s much more strict would be great. Something like Go, Rust, I mean even C Sharp, C++. Anything that kind of changes your perspective of types I think is really helpful to kind of go through. They’re not getting nearly as much love on this most popular language list, but I think they’re very fantastic.
Yeah, for stored procedures, that’s how you make your life hell. I will say that all the top languages there, none of them are strict static typed languages. And so even TypeScript, I don’t like this any. And so for people that are learning, doing something that’s much more strict would be great. Something like Go, Rust, I mean even C Sharp, C++. Anything that kind of changes your perspective of types I think is really helpful to kind of go through. They’re not getting nearly as much love on this most popular language list, but I think they’re very fantastic.
Lex Fridman
All right, well, if I put a gun to your head, top five languages, let’s list them out. There’s a bright-eyed 20-year-old asking you, what are the top languages, five languages to learn?
All right, well, if I put a gun to your head, top five languages, let’s list them out. There’s a bright-eyed 20-year-old asking you, what are the top languages, five languages to learn?
ThePrimeagen
If I were to pick five languages that I think people should learn, or at least, let’s restate it this way, I’m going to say a couple languages and you should at least explore some of them. I think you should explore a loosey language, so Python slash JavaScript, where there is truly only one type, which is a boxed value, which is a multivariate, different types underneath the hood.
If I were to pick five languages that I think people should learn, or at least, let’s restate it this way, I’m going to say a couple languages and you should at least explore some of them. I think you should explore a loosey language, so Python slash JavaScript, where there is truly only one type, which is a boxed value, which is a multivariate, different types underneath the hood.
Lex Fridman
What did you call it? A loosey language?
What did you call it? A loosey language?
ThePrimeagen
A loosey-goosey language. It’s a dynamic language, and so I think it’s really good to explore one of those too. So I’d put Python or JavaScript right there. Even Lua, throw Lua in the bunch. I think you should explore a strict language, so I’d do something like Rust, Go. I think those are both really, really great.
A loosey-goosey language. It’s a dynamic language, and so I think it’s really good to explore one of those too. So I’d put Python or JavaScript right there. Even Lua, throw Lua in the bunch. I think you should explore a strict language, so I’d do something like Rust, Go. I think those are both really, really great.
Lex Fridman
C++?
C++?
ThePrimeagen
You can do C++. You can do some type erasure in C++. You can do it with Go as well, but for the most part it’s a great language to do that in. It can get a little wild. New C++ seems great. Everyone keeps telling me new C++ is great. It has every feature you’ve ever wanted and all the features you don’t want.
You can do C++. You can do some type erasure in C++. You can do it with Go as well, but for the most part it’s a great language to do that in. It can get a little wild. New C++ seems great. Everyone keeps telling me new C++ is great. It has every feature you’ve ever wanted and all the features you don’t want.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, exactly. I mean there’s smart pointers, there’s dumb pointers, there’s all kinds of pointers. There’s no memory leaks. That’s not an issue.
Yeah, exactly. I mean there’s smart pointers, there’s dumb pointers, there’s all kinds of pointers. There’s no memory leaks. That’s not an issue.
ThePrimeagen
Foot guns, face guns, soft beds. There’s everything in there.
Foot guns, face guns, soft beds. There’s everything in there.
Lex Fridman
Unless you like memory leaks, it has that too if you want that kind of thing. It’s great.
Unless you like memory leaks, it has that too if you want that kind of thing. It’s great.
ThePrimeagen
Okay. How about this one? Languages that I actually want to really learn, that at least sit in my curiosity bank. There’s three languages, which is going to be Swift, Elixir, OCaml, and then I’m going to throw Odin in there, just because Ginger Bill is great. But Elixir and OCaml, I don’t have a strong functional language underneath my belt. That’s something that I just genuinely lack.
Okay. How about this one? Languages that I actually want to really learn, that at least sit in my curiosity bank. There’s three languages, which is going to be Swift, Elixir, OCaml, and then I’m going to throw Odin in there, just because Ginger Bill is great. But Elixir and OCaml, I don’t have a strong functional language underneath my belt. That’s something that I just genuinely lack.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’ve heard incredible things about Elixir, about Odin, about OCaml. Obviously, I’m a person, as you know, who loves Lisp.
Yeah, I’ve heard incredible things about Elixir, about Odin, about OCaml. Obviously, I’m a person, as you know, who loves Lisp.
ThePrimeagen
I have never done Lisp. Lisp could be in that category too, just, or Closure I think at this point is what everyone tells you to use.
I have never done Lisp. Lisp could be in that category too, just, or Closure I think at this point is what everyone tells you to use.
Lex Fridman
So in the case of Lisp, I don’t want to speak negatively about Lisp, but it’s important about modern community, what the community looks like. It seems like there’s an excited, maybe small, but an excited community around Elixir, Odin, and OCaml, so that helps. Because then you can post shit on Twitter that you’re like, I accomplished this. People get excited and it’s nice. It’s a good feeling.
So in the case of Lisp, I don’t want to speak negatively about Lisp, but it’s important about modern community, what the community looks like. It seems like there’s an excited, maybe small, but an excited community around Elixir, Odin, and OCaml, so that helps. Because then you can post shit on Twitter that you’re like, I accomplished this. People get excited and it’s nice. It’s a good feeling.
ThePrimeagen
You can post something on Twitter and you’ll get a thousand likes if you do something cool on Elixir, which is that’s a pretty big amount of people to like a post for such a niche topic. Programming’s already a pretty small topic. Then you get into functional program. That’s a small topic in a small topic.
You can post something on Twitter and you’ll get a thousand likes if you do something cool on Elixir, which is that’s a pretty big amount of people to like a post for such a niche topic. Programming’s already a pretty small topic. Then you get into functional program. That’s a small topic in a small topic.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I don’t get that much. If I post something about Emacs, I’ll get crickets if I post something about… If I proudly use Neovim, there’d be a lot of people like, good job.
Yeah. I don’t get that much. If I post something about Emacs, I’ll get crickets if I post something about… If I proudly use Neovim, there’d be a lot of people like, good job.
ThePrimeagen
Because it is the best editor.
Because it is the best editor.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, maybe it’s just hype.
Yeah, maybe it’s just hype.
ThePrimeagen
Come back to the Civil War, Lex.
Come back to the Civil War, Lex.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Sometimes you have to sacrifice and go from the superior editor that is Emacs and choose Neovim just to be popular. You sacrifice integrity and values and quality for just popularity. It’s a choice you made.
Yeah. Sometimes you have to sacrifice and go from the superior editor that is Emacs and choose Neovim just to be popular. You sacrifice integrity and values and quality for just popularity. It’s a choice you made.
ThePrimeagen
Absolutely. I love how you put it.
Absolutely. I love how you put it.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Anyway, what were we talking about? I like how you’re doing this in bunches. That’s great.
Okay. Anyway, what were we talking about? I like how you’re doing this in bunches. That’s great.
ThePrimeagen
Right now, my kind of side honeys that I’m exploring-
Right now, my kind of side honeys that I’m exploring-
Lex Fridman
Side honey?
Side honey?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, side honeys. They’re not my mainstay. Right now Go’s kind of my favorite one to build a web app in. If I’m going to build some sort of backend with a lot of complicated logic, Go’s just so convenient. But I get really frustrated with its ability to express everything that I need. If you have a list, a heterogeneous list, a list that contains two types, Go’s just really not that fun to use. And I could see, so the ones I’m exploring is Jai or J, or the language as Jonathan Blow says, and Zig. And both of them have a lot of power to them. They’re both very interesting. They definitely have foot guns in them. They’re definitely more, they don’t take it easy on you. Zig seems like it’s a really amazing language, and so does Jai. They’re both very cool.
Yeah, side honeys. They’re not my mainstay. Right now Go’s kind of my favorite one to build a web app in. If I’m going to build some sort of backend with a lot of complicated logic, Go’s just so convenient. But I get really frustrated with its ability to express everything that I need. If you have a list, a heterogeneous list, a list that contains two types, Go’s just really not that fun to use. And I could see, so the ones I’m exploring is Jai or J, or the language as Jonathan Blow says, and Zig. And both of them have a lot of power to them. They’re both very interesting. They definitely have foot guns in them. They’re definitely more, they don’t take it easy on you. Zig seems like it’s a really amazing language, and so does Jai. They’re both very cool.
Performance
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Actually, I saw Dave Plummer’s testing of close to 100 languages for speed, and Zig came out on top.
Yeah. Actually, I saw Dave Plummer’s testing of close to 100 languages for speed, and Zig came out on top.
ThePrimeagen
That was a mistake. I mean, when I say mistake, nothing against Dave Plummer. He’s an extremely talented engineer. It’s just that Zig, C, C++, all those languages that were being tested, they’re all LLVM backends, right? That’s the one that actually turns the thing into the executable part. And if there’s a variation in speed, it just means in one language you didn’t quite express what you are supposed to correctly. There’s the language ball test that’s been bouncing around on Twitter. Zig was like sixth or seventh below I forget what language it is. I played around with the example, added the word “no alias” to the argument, which means that the piece of memory that’s coming into this function, there’s no global pointers, there’s nothing to it, and so the compiler can make these really cool optimizations. And I made it faster than the C version. So it just means that it’s just not correctly specified is all that means.
That was a mistake. I mean, when I say mistake, nothing against Dave Plummer. He’s an extremely talented engineer. It’s just that Zig, C, C++, all those languages that were being tested, they’re all LLVM backends, right? That’s the one that actually turns the thing into the executable part. And if there’s a variation in speed, it just means in one language you didn’t quite express what you are supposed to correctly. There’s the language ball test that’s been bouncing around on Twitter. Zig was like sixth or seventh below I forget what language it is. I played around with the example, added the word “no alias” to the argument, which means that the piece of memory that’s coming into this function, there’s no global pointers, there’s nothing to it, and so the compiler can make these really cool optimizations. And I made it faster than the C version. So it just means that it’s just not correctly specified is all that means.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but it’s still exciting. To me, the competition between Zig, Rust, and C++ is really interesting. Part of it’s for speed. Part of it’s how easy it is to write performant code.
Yeah, but it’s still exciting. To me, the competition between Zig, Rust, and C++ is really interesting. Part of it’s for speed. Part of it’s how easy it is to write performant code.
ThePrimeagen
I’ll say something. That’s the reason why I think Zig is so interesting comparatively to say C or Rust. C is the ultimate language. It can do anything, have pre-process or macros. You can do quite a bit with it, but it’s also really difficult.
I’ll say something. That’s the reason why I think Zig is so interesting comparatively to say C or Rust. C is the ultimate language. It can do anything, have pre-process or macros. You can do quite a bit with it, but it’s also really difficult.
ThePrimeagen
So macros, you can do quite a bit with it, but it’s also really difficult and it’s also really simple and you can learn it. So it’s kind of its own unique beast. And when you get really good at C, C is a magical language and people are really great at it and people speak very highly of it. Rust is like this ultra safe language. What you can do in C, you just can’t even express in Rust. Rust is going to be the safe man that holds you at night, keeping you warm, right? It’s going to be just the greatest.
So macros, you can do quite a bit with it, but it’s also really difficult and it’s also really simple and you can learn it. So it’s kind of its own unique beast. And when you get really good at C, C is a magical language and people are really great at it and people speak very highly of it. Rust is like this ultra safe language. What you can do in C, you just can’t even express in Rust. Rust is going to be the safe man that holds you at night, keeping you warm, right? It’s going to be just the greatest.
But somewhere in the middle lies Zig. Zig has optionals. If you’re not familiar with optionals, that just simply means there’s a value here or there’s not, but you first have to check that before you can use it. So it prevents that whole null pointer dereferencing segfault problem. And that’s not available in C, just by default, you have to kind of build that thing in. It is the only option in Rust, but Zig says, “Hey, if you have a pointer, you can’t express it as null unless if you market that it can be null.”
There’s ways around it, there’s other types of pointers and stuff like that that can do that. But for the most part, Zig will give you safety for the most part. So it’s like a little bit of safety, but more like C. So it kind of gives you everything you want in that region where you can express safe code and unsafe code. It’s very easy to write. It’s very pretty. Or at least the idea behind it is very pretty. The language itself is bland, but.
Lex Fridman
Wow, there’s beauty in everything, Prime.
Wow, there’s beauty in everything, Prime.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rust
Lex Fridman
You’ve programmed in Rust a lot. What do you love about Rust? What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? Maybe you can speak about memory management that you already mentioned, the challenge of memory management that several of these languages address, but yeah, what do you love about Rust?
You’ve programmed in Rust a lot. What do you love about Rust? What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? Maybe you can speak about memory management that you already mentioned, the challenge of memory management that several of these languages address, but yeah, what do you love about Rust?
ThePrimeagen
What I love about Rust, I love the ability to free the memory that you’re using is directly tied to the stack. So whenever you create something, there’s a stack variable or there’s some amount of stack memory, whether it’s a pointer off to the heap, a pointer and a length. So some amount of memory on the stack and then some memory on the heap because a string is not all on the stack, it’s some on the heap, some on the stack. And when that stack variable goes out of scope and gets cleaned up, it also cleans up what’s on the heap. So it kind of simplifies this whole idea of, whoops, I forgot to free my memory. It just does it for you.
What I love about Rust, I love the ability to free the memory that you’re using is directly tied to the stack. So whenever you create something, there’s a stack variable or there’s some amount of stack memory, whether it’s a pointer off to the heap, a pointer and a length. So some amount of memory on the stack and then some memory on the heap because a string is not all on the stack, it’s some on the heap, some on the stack. And when that stack variable goes out of scope and gets cleaned up, it also cleans up what’s on the heap. So it kind of simplifies this whole idea of, whoops, I forgot to free my memory. It just does it for you.
So it’s not a garbage collector, which will do it sometime later. It’s not like C where you have to call it yourself, it’s somewhere in between. Now, there’s a lot of strategies people use, arenas and all that that make that C part much easier. I’m just not even mentioning it, but it just makes it a lot easier. But Rust does that really beautifully and it’s just like a really cool idea about it and I really like that. And the second thing that I think Rust does really, is such a good thing is that mutability of something is you have to specify it. So you don’t just create a variable and then mutate it. You have to say this is not only a variable, it’s a mutable variable. And I think that just makes code really readable and really understandable. Because anything that does not have the word mute next to it, you know for a fact it cannot change. There’s some rules around that, but you get the general idea.
Lex Fridman
Unlike most programming languages, you have to explicitly state that this is going to be changed.
Unlike most programming languages, you have to explicitly state that this is going to be changed.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I mean it’s safe, it’s trying to be, and the safety might be, create limitations. Let us consult the AI overlords. Rust is a blazing fast memory efficient systems programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety and concurrency. The language enforces memory safety without using a garbage collector, as you said, instead utilizing the unique, quote, “borrow checker” that tracks object lifetimes at compile time. This prevents common programming errors like null point or dereferencing and memory leaks and so on. Yeah.
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I mean it’s safe, it’s trying to be, and the safety might be, create limitations. Let us consult the AI overlords. Rust is a blazing fast memory efficient systems programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety and concurrency. The language enforces memory safety without using a garbage collector, as you said, instead utilizing the unique, quote, “borrow checker” that tracks object lifetimes at compile time. This prevents common programming errors like null point or dereferencing and memory leaks and so on. Yeah.
So you’ve also spoken about metaprogramming. Which of these languages do you like for the metaprogramming? I love metaprogramming in C++, but it’s a giant mess. At least when I program C++ 17 standard, I believe, it’s just a mess, especially a mess to debug.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I would consider myself kind of a metaprogramming newbie. I have only solved some amount of problems with it. That’s kind of like what this year is for, is for me to really, I want to see where the ends can go in that. So I don’t have a strong opinion on this one. Zig, one thing I really like about Zig is that the metaprogramming is also the language itself. So you don’t have to, there’s not an alternative. So with Rust there’s an alternative. When you create a macro, you have to do the macro syntax. With Zig, it’s just, it is the thing, you just program it and you add the word comp time if you want it to be a compile time only.
Yeah, I would consider myself kind of a metaprogramming newbie. I have only solved some amount of problems with it. That’s kind of like what this year is for, is for me to really, I want to see where the ends can go in that. So I don’t have a strong opinion on this one. Zig, one thing I really like about Zig is that the metaprogramming is also the language itself. So you don’t have to, there’s not an alternative. So with Rust there’s an alternative. When you create a macro, you have to do the macro syntax. With Zig, it’s just, it is the thing, you just program it and you add the word comp time if you want it to be a compile time only.
So you can create the list of prime numbers at compile time in Zig, which is kind of an interesting, unique thing. So you have code that executes at compile time and then you can take advantage of the result of it at runtime. So neat, right? That’s how I’d look at it. But again, I haven’t used it to the point where I feel like I can super authoritatively talk about it.
Lex Fridman
You have been undecided, what language are you going for this year?
You have been undecided, what language are you going for this year?
ThePrimeagen
I’m going to keep Go as my mainstay, my two side honeys, Jai and Zig. I’m going to explore and try to build out a service in them that can do a bunch of talking to, say, ChatGPT and ElevenLabs and send stuff down to client and work with web sockets. And I want to make sure that, I just want to see how do they perform in this realm. And I may be using the language incorrectly, like Jai, it’s not really been designed for the web world. I just got done writing the ability to read Twitch Chat and it required me to do Berkeley sockets.
I’m going to keep Go as my mainstay, my two side honeys, Jai and Zig. I’m going to explore and try to build out a service in them that can do a bunch of talking to, say, ChatGPT and ElevenLabs and send stuff down to client and work with web sockets. And I want to make sure that, I just want to see how do they perform in this realm. And I may be using the language incorrectly, like Jai, it’s not really been designed for the web world. I just got done writing the ability to read Twitch Chat and it required me to do Berkeley sockets.
So if you’re unfamiliar with Berkeley sockets, it’s like the old way of doing it, it’s how you do it in C. So you have to kind of go through the whole nine yards of creating your own connection. I had to create my own connection, I have to read from the socket, then I have to parse out all the IRC, right? You have to kind of build it from scratch. There’s not like a new TCP connection to this server. You have to be like, “I’m creating a socket.” You’re going to be of the IPv4 family and TCP and you’re going to do, you know, I’m going to now have to take your address and go look up your address with DNS, get that address back and then connect to a TCP. So it’s a lot more manual still. It’s a lot more raw in that area, but it’s fun.
Epic projects
Lex Fridman
What are some epic projects you’ve built on stream that jump to memory?
What are some epic projects you’ve built on stream that jump to memory?
ThePrimeagen
My most favorite, sorry for interrupting you. So I’m really jazzed right now.
My most favorite, sorry for interrupting you. So I’m really jazzed right now.
Lex Fridman
Let’s go.
Let’s go.
ThePrimeagen
Okay. So jazzed.
Okay. So jazzed.
Lex Fridman
Jazz hands.
Jazz hands.
ThePrimeagen
My most favorite project was the one I did last year. Someone built a Doom ASCII port. So you could play Doom with ASCII. So that means you could play it in your terminal. Very, very fun, very excite. So I made a Go program that could spawn out the Doom ASCII, then I took that Doom ASCII and I sent it to the browser so that people could play Doom ASCII in the browser, but then I made it so that Twitch chat could control that instance of Doom ASCII by piping in Twitch chat, taking the average of the movements over so much time and replaying it as if it was a controller. And I had Twitch chat beat level one by spamming it.
My most favorite project was the one I did last year. Someone built a Doom ASCII port. So you could play Doom with ASCII. So that means you could play it in your terminal. Very, very fun, very excite. So I made a Go program that could spawn out the Doom ASCII, then I took that Doom ASCII and I sent it to the browser so that people could play Doom ASCII in the browser, but then I made it so that Twitch chat could control that instance of Doom ASCII by piping in Twitch chat, taking the average of the movements over so much time and replaying it as if it was a controller. And I had Twitch chat beat level one by spamming it.
But the fun part was I used a bunch of fun encoding techniques. I used quad trees to be able to take smaller amounts to use run length in coding. Tried to create my own compression algorithm because if you’re sending out a bunch of ASCII stuff, it’s still pretty expensive because you have to represent color, color’s not cheap. On top of it you have to represent what does it look like? What does the ASCII look like?
Well, I realized there’s all these fun techniques you can do for compression like the shape of the ASCII you send down in a lot of these engines are actually just proportional to the lumosity of that pixel. So you’d use an eight to represent or a pound sign to represent white, but black, you’re going to want to do a period or a comma or a bar, something smaller. So it’s like I then developed all these different compression algorithms that turn a bunch of data, which would take, I forget how much it would take. It’d take gigabytes upon gigabytes to be able to send out to thousands of people to all see the same image at the same time, to all be able to interact with Doom at the same time. I turned it from gigabytes into kilobytes by just trying to figure out how to make it as small as possible and send it all out. It was super fun. Absolutely had a great time.
Lex Fridman
So you’re actually sending it to all the people in chat. So where’s that pipeline, how chat is able to control the Doom thing?
So you’re actually sending it to all the people in chat. So where’s that pipeline, how chat is able to control the Doom thing?
ThePrimeagen
Twitch chat. Yeah, so they would go, people would spam W and if you said W, it would hold down W for 150 milliseconds if the majority of people during that time period said W.
Twitch chat. Yeah, so they would go, people would spam W and if you said W, it would hold down W for 150 milliseconds if the majority of people during that time period said W.
Lex Fridman
Nice. Okay. And how are they getting the input of where you are on screen?
Nice. Okay. And how are they getting the input of where you are on screen?
ThePrimeagen
So originally I was going to send that through Twitch, but Twitch is like five seconds behind, so that’s why I piped it out to a website so everybody could see from my computer to the website and typical lag was right around 70 milliseconds. So it’s like they could mostly see what was happening in that short period of time. It was pretty exciting. So we had 1,000 people, or I had somewhere between 1,000 to 1,400 people smashing Ws and pressing F to fire and turning and we killed some zombies. We blew up the barrel at the very end of level one to kill the imp.
So originally I was going to send that through Twitch, but Twitch is like five seconds behind, so that’s why I piped it out to a website so everybody could see from my computer to the website and typical lag was right around 70 milliseconds. So it’s like they could mostly see what was happening in that short period of time. It was pretty exciting. So we had 1,000 people, or I had somewhere between 1,000 to 1,400 people smashing Ws and pressing F to fire and turning and we killed some zombies. We blew up the barrel at the very end of level one to kill the imp.
Lex Fridman
How are you getting the Ws from the Twitch chat? Is there an API?
How are you getting the Ws from the Twitch chat? Is there an API?
ThePrimeagen
I was using IRC, so just a little TCP socket and then you just parse out IRC.
I was using IRC, so just a little TCP socket and then you just parse out IRC.
Lex Fridman
Okay. And there’s very little lag there. Okay.
Okay. And there’s very little lag there. Okay.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I think it’s a couple hundred milliseconds though. It’s enough that it actually made it a little bit difficult because people would often overturn and then go forward and miss the door and then they had to go back and…
Yeah, I think it’s a couple hundred milliseconds though. It’s enough that it actually made it a little bit difficult because people would often overturn and then go forward and miss the door and then they had to go back and…
Lex Fridman
That’s awesome.
That’s awesome.
ThePrimeagen
It was awesome. So that was my favorite I think project of all time just because I never got to do a lot of encoding. Encoding’s kind of like, what do you normally do? Okay, I need to send something down. I don’t know, gzip it, server will just do it. Server just does the right thing. I don’t need to think about it. So instead it’s like I think about it, I’m going to send the right thing.
It was awesome. So that was my favorite I think project of all time just because I never got to do a lot of encoding. Encoding’s kind of like, what do you normally do? Okay, I need to send something down. I don’t know, gzip it, server will just do it. Server just does the right thing. I don’t need to think about it. So instead it’s like I think about it, I’m going to send the right thing.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you have to think about the compression. Yeah. And there you go. That’s some more love towards FFmpeg because they have to think about that a lot.
Yeah, you have to think about the compression. Yeah. And there you go. That’s some more love towards FFmpeg because they have to think about that a lot.
ThePrimeagen
Ultimately inspired by FFmpeg and their awesomeness.
Ultimately inspired by FFmpeg and their awesomeness.
Lex Fridman
So can you speak to just the chat community in general? A big part of what you do in terms of streaming is the humans that are communicating with you live. Can you talk to the different chat communities? First of all, which is the best chat community, YouTube, Twitch, or X?
So can you speak to just the chat community in general? A big part of what you do in terms of streaming is the humans that are communicating with you live. Can you talk to the different chat communities? First of all, which is the best chat community, YouTube, Twitch, or X?
ThePrimeagen
This is where I feel bad for YouTube, because I do think it’s technically the worst, but it’s not YouTube’s fault. And let me kind of explain why.
This is where I feel bad for YouTube, because I do think it’s technically the worst, but it’s not YouTube’s fault. And let me kind of explain why.
Lex Fridman
And then I will explain why you’re wrong. But go ahead. YouTube is great.
And then I will explain why you’re wrong. But go ahead. YouTube is great.
ThePrimeagen
I know you love YouTube but let explain why, is that when you go on Twitch, you go to anyone’s channel, they have this cultural human centipede thing that’s happening where as the memes flow in, all of Twitch reacts and morphs to all those memes. So every channel you go to has this same culture. There’s a lot of similar emotes and everything, so it’s very tight-knit. So when I stream, I get all the same jokes that you would pretty much see if you saw, I don’t know, Sodapoppin or some big streamer, Asmongold, whoever, [inaudible 02:55:56] software streaming. All the same memes would all flow through the exact same kind of pipe. And so it’s a very holistic kind of community.
I know you love YouTube but let explain why, is that when you go on Twitch, you go to anyone’s channel, they have this cultural human centipede thing that’s happening where as the memes flow in, all of Twitch reacts and morphs to all those memes. So every channel you go to has this same culture. There’s a lot of similar emotes and everything, so it’s very tight-knit. So when I stream, I get all the same jokes that you would pretty much see if you saw, I don’t know, Sodapoppin or some big streamer, Asmongold, whoever, [inaudible 02:55:56] software streaming. All the same memes would all flow through the exact same kind of pipe. And so it’s a very holistic kind of community.
So every time you’re making jokes, you’re making jokes that are in the ether. Twitter kind of has that too. Tech Twitter kind of has a set of jokes and so you can kind of see it. The problem with Twitter chat is that there’s just nobody there right now. Typically just to put it into perspective, I have somewhere between… somewhere between like 1,500 to 3,000 people on Twitch, somewhere between 800 to 2,000 on YouTube, and like 50 people on Twitter. So the difference is massive.
But Twitter has that same thing that’s developing where there’s memes that are constantly flowing through it. And so they’re very highly connected. YouTube just doesn’t seem to have that. They’re just a bunch of people and people go to YouTube for various reasons. I’m going to YouTube to learn. So they come in and they want to learn. So they’re not on the meme train, they’re not in this cultural zeitgeist train. They’re just like, “But why would you use this if statement when a switch statement in this one particular case?” And you’re just like, well that’s not what I’m trying to do here.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you want to captain the meme train or you want to ride on the meme train.
Yeah, you want to captain the meme train or you want to ride on the meme train.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. Or you just want to be able to create a culture on your chat because your chat’s going to be some variation of that kind of zeitgeist that’s flowing through Twitch. And it kind of is very contiguous between X and Twitch. It just feels really out of sync with YouTube. And then YouTube particularly does a bad job. And some people would argue a good job because you can swim. Swim being, you can actually change what timestamp you’re at. So all of a sudden you’ll be like, oh yeah, something about driving to soccer in my minivan. And then 20 minutes later you’ll be talking about Zig and then someone’s like, “I personally use whatever to drive to soccer.” And you’re like, “What are we talking about?” So YouTube is a very disjointed chat as well because it depends on where they’re at within the video. Swim comes from Netflix, by the way, call it swim.
Yeah. Or you just want to be able to create a culture on your chat because your chat’s going to be some variation of that kind of zeitgeist that’s flowing through Twitch. And it kind of is very contiguous between X and Twitch. It just feels really out of sync with YouTube. And then YouTube particularly does a bad job. And some people would argue a good job because you can swim. Swim being, you can actually change what timestamp you’re at. So all of a sudden you’ll be like, oh yeah, something about driving to soccer in my minivan. And then 20 minutes later you’ll be talking about Zig and then someone’s like, “I personally use whatever to drive to soccer.” And you’re like, “What are we talking about?” So YouTube is a very disjointed chat as well because it depends on where they’re at within the video. Swim comes from Netflix, by the way, call it swim.
Lex Fridman
The term?
The term?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, people said swim.
Yeah, people said swim.
Lex Fridman
Oh, so you’re, okay.
Oh, so you’re, okay.
ThePrimeagen
Swimming through-
Swimming through-
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So you’re not just making up the term. Thank you. Wow.
Yeah. So you’re not just making up the term. Thank you. Wow.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, but it’s probably made up and probably only 10 people said it at Netflix, so no one’s going to know it and they’re going to be like, “Yeah, right. That doesn’t happen on Netflix.”
Yeah, but it’s probably made up and probably only 10 people said it at Netflix, so no one’s going to know it and they’re going to be like, “Yeah, right. That doesn’t happen on Netflix.”
Lex Fridman
So going back to projects, what projects on stream or in general?
So going back to projects, what projects on stream or in general?
ThePrimeagen
No, you need to answer why YouTube chat’s the best chat.
No, you need to answer why YouTube chat’s the best chat.
Lex Fridman
Well you kind of convinced me. Okay, why YouTube is the best chat. Well, I think I’m just a hater. That’s basically what it boils down to and I’m just talking shit.
Well you kind of convinced me. Okay, why YouTube is the best chat. Well, I think I’m just a hater. That’s basically what it boils down to and I’m just talking shit.
ThePrimeagen
Love it.
Love it.
Lex Fridman
And I’m probably just from the outside shooting in because Twitch is such a fun culture of memes. And so it’s just fun to shoot from the outside to egg the house of Twitch. And then I just sit back on my lawn chair with the small YouTube community just talking shit. No, you’re absolutely right. There’s a real sense of community that Twitch can form. But I just like the openness of YouTube. It’s just better at opening to the world. It’s more accessible, it’s easier to share. It’s just a more established platform, that’s all.
And I’m probably just from the outside shooting in because Twitch is such a fun culture of memes. And so it’s just fun to shoot from the outside to egg the house of Twitch. And then I just sit back on my lawn chair with the small YouTube community just talking shit. No, you’re absolutely right. There’s a real sense of community that Twitch can form. But I just like the openness of YouTube. It’s just better at opening to the world. It’s more accessible, it’s easier to share. It’s just a more established platform, that’s all.
ThePrimeagen
Fully on that team.
Fully on that team.
Lex Fridman
For the open world. I can send it to people that don’t usually watch video game streaming or that kind of stuff.
For the open world. I can send it to people that don’t usually watch video game streaming or that kind of stuff.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. If you send a Twitch link, they’re like, “I don’t like video games.” And you’re like, “Well actually it’s not video games.” That talk happens every single time you mention Twitch because Twitch does have a perspective about it that YouTube does not.
Yeah. If you send a Twitch link, they’re like, “I don’t like video games.” And you’re like, “Well actually it’s not video games.” That talk happens every single time you mention Twitch because Twitch does have a perspective about it that YouTube does not.
Lex Fridman
I was just on Joe Rogan’s podcast and I think it came up, he asked something like, “Is Twitch still a thing?” So that just gives you an example. And then Jamie said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely still a thing. It’s still growing and so on.” And so yeah, there’s just a big slice of humans that don’t participate in the Twitch Twitch sphere. Yeah, I just like talking shit so yeah.
I was just on Joe Rogan’s podcast and I think it came up, he asked something like, “Is Twitch still a thing?” So that just gives you an example. And then Jamie said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely still a thing. It’s still growing and so on.” And so yeah, there’s just a big slice of humans that don’t participate in the Twitch Twitch sphere. Yeah, I just like talking shit so yeah.
ThePrimeagen
That’s a beautiful answer.
That’s a beautiful answer.
Lex Fridman
But it’s cool that you sort of make it accessible on all these different platforms. And I have high hopes for X, but yeah, it’s feature-wise still has a lot of growing up to do.
But it’s cool that you sort of make it accessible on all these different platforms. And I have high hopes for X, but yeah, it’s feature-wise still has a lot of growing up to do.
ThePrimeagen
And just why do people use X? You typically are going there for a text-based interaction you want to look through. So I also think they just have a user expectation change that needs to happen. And that just takes a while. That’s going to take a little bit before people get to it. I think their idea of audio first is a great first step where people can listen to it and have the phone away maybe. There’s a lot of changes that have to happen before X can be successful in that.
And just why do people use X? You typically are going there for a text-based interaction you want to look through. So I also think they just have a user expectation change that needs to happen. And that just takes a while. That’s going to take a little bit before people get to it. I think their idea of audio first is a great first step where people can listen to it and have the phone away maybe. There’s a lot of changes that have to happen before X can be successful in that.
Lex Fridman
I mean, X has this incredible comment section just like Reddit, right? So it’s like-
I mean, X has this incredible comment section just like Reddit, right? So it’s like-
ThePrimeagen
You said incredible. That’s not Reddit. Comment section, correct.
You said incredible. That’s not Reddit. Comment section, correct.
Lex Fridman
Comment, yeah. Incredibly dynamic and vibrant even if it’s… Yeah. What is the technological platform? How does the interface and the technology shape the discourse? It’s fascinating because X has a different style than Reddit, different style than Facebook, different style than Instagram. It’s interesting. And all those common sections are different technologically, like how the sorting is done, how easy it is to sort of build a community around it? Because YouTube is not really a community. Every single video on YouTube has its own mini community. You’re all talking on just that one video. But you can’t jump across.
Comment, yeah. Incredibly dynamic and vibrant even if it’s… Yeah. What is the technological platform? How does the interface and the technology shape the discourse? It’s fascinating because X has a different style than Reddit, different style than Facebook, different style than Instagram. It’s interesting. And all those common sections are different technologically, like how the sorting is done, how easy it is to sort of build a community around it? Because YouTube is not really a community. Every single video on YouTube has its own mini community. You’re all talking on just that one video. But you can’t jump across.
ThePrimeagen
There’s not like, “Hey Bill, hey George.” There’s no crosstalk that happens in multiple videos.
There’s not like, “Hey Bill, hey George.” There’s no crosstalk that happens in multiple videos.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But the community is awesome. I love community. I love the feeling of community and I guess that’s what Twitch really provides.
Yeah. But the community is awesome. I love community. I love the feeling of community and I guess that’s what Twitch really provides.
ThePrimeagen
YouTube also does have it though. They have an aggregate community. There’s a lot of fun comments and all that on the videos and a lot of thumbs up and then you see the fun discourse that happens and it’s like that’s the community, it’s just only a certain slice sees it.
YouTube also does have it though. They have an aggregate community. There’s a lot of fun comments and all that on the videos and a lot of thumbs up and then you see the fun discourse that happens and it’s like that’s the community, it’s just only a certain slice sees it.
Lex Fridman
I think that’s even more so on YouTube for live-streaming. All the same folks show up and they talk shit, they celebrate, the meme train arrives.
I think that’s even more so on YouTube for live-streaming. All the same folks show up and they talk shit, they celebrate, the meme train arrives.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Okay. So now, what projects shape you as a programmer? Whether the ones you streamed or offline.
Okay. So now, what projects shape you as a programmer? Whether the ones you streamed or offline.
ThePrimeagen
For me, I don’t know if there’s a one project I can point to, but I can point to a specific spot where I think it happens and where I think you can learn a lot from. Any small program you write will be somewhere between 1,000 to 5,000 lines of code I consider a pretty dang small project. You can correlate this to any feature within a larger system as well. A specific feature on a website could be a thousand lines, a couple thousand lines.
For me, I don’t know if there’s a one project I can point to, but I can point to a specific spot where I think it happens and where I think you can learn a lot from. Any small program you write will be somewhere between 1,000 to 5,000 lines of code I consider a pretty dang small project. You can correlate this to any feature within a larger system as well. A specific feature on a website could be a thousand lines, a couple thousand lines.
There’s a point in which all of your choices add up. And I typically find that right around 5 to 10,000 lines of code. The choices you’ve made either weigh you down or kind of free you up. And so it’s right in that, that I feel like I learned the most is because I love getting to that point in a project or in some small part of the code base because at that point I get to test, A, how good were my initial gut decisions about how I designed the software, but B, now I need to go back and think about how am I going to do testing across this in a more effective way? How can I scale this out to 20,000 lines of code? How can I do all these things with what I’ve got or do I need to kind of rethink it?
And I find that that’s really where the best learning happens is that everybody has probably a different number that exists, and as you go to each one of these numbers or how well or holistic you want your project to be, I think that you’ll come up with different numbers. And I think that number should just get bigger as you get more experienced. Because there’s projects that are a million lines of code, but they’re most certainly not holistic, right? Every part of the code base is some age at some capsule of time with some sort of programming style. Some is more functional, more class-based, more, God help your soul if it’s pre-processor macros in C++. There’s all these different kind of things you’ll find throughout time.
And so that’s why I try to think about it as the feature or the thing you’re working on. It’s usually about 5,000 lines is where I find that things get kind of, did I make good or bad decisions? And that’s where I do all my learning is right on that phase. I’m trying to get it to the point where I should be able to shoot from the hip and do 20,000 lines and not be upset about it.
Asserts
Lex Fridman
So first of all, just enjoying the thing you create part, yeah. About there you can sit back and see all the parts dancing together. For me, also debugging, you get to see the choices you make materialize as how easy it is to debug. I’m a big proponent, I think you’ve mentioned this in the past, I put asserts everywhere.
So first of all, just enjoying the thing you create part, yeah. About there you can sit back and see all the parts dancing together. For me, also debugging, you get to see the choices you make materialize as how easy it is to debug. I’m a big proponent, I think you’ve mentioned this in the past, I put asserts everywhere.
ThePrimeagen
No, you are the reason why I do that.
No, you are the reason why I do that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
You were like the first one. Keep on going, sorry.
You were like the first one. Keep on going, sorry.
Lex Fridman
Really? Okay. So for me, one of the joys, whether it’s try catch box, whether it’s assert, whether it’s with the testing, I get to see the payoff of all the minefield of asserts I’ve laid out before me in my kingdom by how quickly I can debug a system as it grows larger. And I can first of all discover errors before they become real bugs and also how quickly I can solve those errors. And that brings me joy. For me, a lot of the joys of programming is creating powerful systems that don’t break down, that work correctly, that work correctly in majority of the cases. And there, sort of the stress testing the system and getting all of the signals from that system that everything is working correctly is something that fills me with joy and makes sure that the system actually works. So yeah, that, I don’t know if it’s 5, 10,000 lines of code, if it’s Java or C++ it’s millions lines of code. But yeah, in Python, yeah, I would say 10,000 lines of code. That’s when you first get to see the magic. But anyway, you were saying?
Really? Okay. So for me, one of the joys, whether it’s try catch box, whether it’s assert, whether it’s with the testing, I get to see the payoff of all the minefield of asserts I’ve laid out before me in my kingdom by how quickly I can debug a system as it grows larger. And I can first of all discover errors before they become real bugs and also how quickly I can solve those errors. And that brings me joy. For me, a lot of the joys of programming is creating powerful systems that don’t break down, that work correctly, that work correctly in majority of the cases. And there, sort of the stress testing the system and getting all of the signals from that system that everything is working correctly is something that fills me with joy and makes sure that the system actually works. So yeah, that, I don’t know if it’s 5, 10,000 lines of code, if it’s Java or C++ it’s millions lines of code. But yeah, in Python, yeah, I would say 10,000 lines of code. That’s when you first get to see the magic. But anyway, you were saying?
ThePrimeagen
Okay, so you and John Carmack had a conversation about asserts.
Okay, so you and John Carmack had a conversation about asserts.
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
ThePrimeagen
You talked about this idea of putting asserts everywhere that effectively crash the program when you have some state in your program that should not be represented and you have made this choice actively. And so I’ve never done that before. And I know this is like an old technique and I obviously must be too young or too dumb to know that this was a thing people did. I grew up in Java and I think that’s probably why I didn’t run into this.
You talked about this idea of putting asserts everywhere that effectively crash the program when you have some state in your program that should not be represented and you have made this choice actively. And so I’ve never done that before. And I know this is like an old technique and I obviously must be too young or too dumb to know that this was a thing people did. I grew up in Java and I think that’s probably why I didn’t run into this.
So I saw that and I was like, I’m curious about how to use asserts more. And then I ran into a person named Joran. He’s the CEO and creator of TigerBeetle. It’s like the world’s fastest, greatest financial database. And it was spawned out of a company that needed to do a bunch of financial transactions. And it’s written in Zig and what they do is they do deterministic simulation testing and they just use NASA’s kind of guarantee for creating really great software. So don’t use U size, specify your exact size of int you expect everywhere. All these kind of things they do to be very specific.
And one of them is that every function should contain two asserts. Whether it’s positive space like these things should happen or negative space, like this pointer should never be null. You’re programming into things that should never happen. Normally, you would just never specify that. You’d never think about that. So every single function everywhere has all these asserts and these asserts run both in production and in testing. They’re always on.
And then they take deterministic simulation testing and run like 200 years of just random data, just complete slop going through the system and seeing how far it goes. And when an assert happens, they’re like, here’s the input that caused it, here’s every last little bit that happened, and now you can identify where this went wrong. And it was so cool. So between you, John Carmack and Joran, that’s where I got like, okay, I got to really… And NASA, I’ll throw NASA a bone as well. NASA can join in on that one.
I was like, okay, I want to try this. And I did try it. I built this big reverse proxy for me trying to do some game development stuff. And I just went ham on the asserts. And then I built the whole simulation testing thing that could do everything deterministically. So even the result of requests would all come in specific orders. And I found a bunch of bugs that I just would never have found. And then I did it for a game I was making. I found some bugs where my cursor went off-screen, it would cause all these different problems because I just never tested them. And it’s super fun and it’s like a really great way to program.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think it’s a skillset you grow over time. It’s not just that you have to specify the preconditions, everything that has to be true, it’s also adding things that are like, you might not even think about. You have to sort of anticipate really weird things. And if you add asserts, especially in complicated functions or in complicated classes that are able to catch really weird things, that’s going to save you so many headaches and it’s going to help you learn about your own code.
Yeah, I think it’s a skillset you grow over time. It’s not just that you have to specify the preconditions, everything that has to be true, it’s also adding things that are like, you might not even think about. You have to sort of anticipate really weird things. And if you add asserts, especially in complicated functions or in complicated classes that are able to catch really weird things, that’s going to save you so many headaches and it’s going to help you learn about your own code.
This is one of the things, I think it was Jonathan Blow that either in conversation with you or was it in a presentation, he said that when he’s starting in a project, he usually doesn’t know how to implement it, how it’s going to work. And I think he was saying that he wants a programming language. This might have been a criticism of C++, I’m not sure, where he wants a programming language that makes it as painless as possible for him to not know what he’s doing, how he’s going to implement it, and to quickly get to a place where he figures it out.
I think there’s a fundamental part of programming is building stuff while not really knowing what the next thing you’re doing is. You kind of have a loose design, maybe a strict design, but really you’re solving puzzles that are not… It is a dark room in a fundamental sense. And there you have to anticipate the kind of weirdnesses that might emerge while not really knowing everything. Just this full fog, fog of war. And there that’s a real skill to anticipate the kind of issues that might arise and put a asserts on top of them.
And it’s also like spiritually, for me, been a really nice way of programming a building of living life as having very strict asserts that say, “You’re going to fix this problem if it ever arises. You can’t just look the other way.” This idea of treating warnings as errors. Make sure your code compiles without any warnings. That was a big leap for me. It’s like, but there’s so many of them and it’s not really that important. It’s like, no, no, no warnings. Make sure you treat every single problem, even fuzzy problems seriously, because that’s actually long-term is going to create code that’s much easier to work with, much more fun to work with, much more robust, resilient to all kinds of weirdnesses, all that kind of stuff.
So it’s a different way of approaching coding, probably more NASA-like versus web programming style. But yeah, it has made programming for me personally, much more fun because one of the most painful things about programming is creating when you get past 10,000, 20,000 lines of code and you have to find a bug. And that bug can take hours, it could take days to find, and that’s torture.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. When your system gets sufficiently large, some of these bugs are just, they are very difficult. Bless anyone’s soul that’s working on million line code bases, because it does. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent multiple days just trying to figure out the root cause of the bug. Not even the fix. Just like why does this happen? And that’s hard.
Yeah. When your system gets sufficiently large, some of these bugs are just, they are very difficult. Bless anyone’s soul that’s working on million line code bases, because it does. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent multiple days just trying to figure out the root cause of the bug. Not even the fix. Just like why does this happen? And that’s hard.
So I love that. I just love the asserts because I’m not good at them, I can see it’s definitely a skill that I don’t put into practice constantly, which means it’s just not like a muscle memory type thing. And so it’s just one of those things I just love. It’s such a fascinating way to approach a problem, because I would’ve never thought, you know what I’m going to do? If I’m wrong, I’m going to crash this thing and I’m going to crash it right here because I should never be wrong. But instead you’re like, “Oh, actually that makes perfect sense. I should crash this thing. I’ve done something terribly wrong here. Why would this ever exist?” And then you’re like, “This is going to solve a whole class of problems.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And especially if it’s in production, it’s like, well a user’s going to see this crash. It’s like, yeah, well you should minimize the number of times any user ever sees the crash, not by having a nice blue screen or whatever the fuck, but actually stopping everything. And that’s going to create an incentive for you to never have that happen. You’re actually going to put in the time to make sure it never happens.
Yeah. And especially if it’s in production, it’s like, well a user’s going to see this crash. It’s like, yeah, well you should minimize the number of times any user ever sees the crash, not by having a nice blue screen or whatever the fuck, but actually stopping everything. And that’s going to create an incentive for you to never have that happen. You’re actually going to put in the time to make sure it never happens.
ThePrimeagen
And the nice part is with the web and all that, you can always pop up something and say, “Hey, things have gone very, very wrong or unable to recover.” You can give them a nice message and then log it off so you can see it, and then measure how often are you doing it. I understand that there’s a bit of interestingness to a web project like do you want to always crash a server? There’s a bit of a gamble if you release a bad version and you crash all your servers constantly. That’s a pain you’re going to have to accept.
And the nice part is with the web and all that, you can always pop up something and say, “Hey, things have gone very, very wrong or unable to recover.” You can give them a nice message and then log it off so you can see it, and then measure how often are you doing it. I understand that there’s a bit of interestingness to a web project like do you want to always crash a server? There’s a bit of a gamble if you release a bad version and you crash all your servers constantly. That’s a pain you’re going to have to accept.
ADHD
Lex Fridman
I think this is more applicable for single systems like robots and so on. You have struggled with ADHD. I think a lot of people are really inspired by the fact that you’re able to be productive and flourish while having ADHD. How’d you overcome it?
I think this is more applicable for single systems like robots and so on. You have struggled with ADHD. I think a lot of people are really inspired by the fact that you’re able to be productive and flourish while having ADHD. How’d you overcome it?
ThePrimeagen
Well, there’s a lot of things that ADHD affects and so I’ll start with some of the easiest things, because there’s directly applicable, then these kind of collateral damage applicable things that happen. So one thing that has really helped me with ADHD is maturity. I think that’s just a thing that everyone needs more of. Meaning that I found myself getting so wiggly and so out of control when I would try to sit down and read, and I just couldn’t handle it. I just felt like I’d read a page and didn’t read anything. The part of me that just went, “Oh man, gosh, I just can’t even do this.” I had to just simply quit listening to it and said, “Nope, I’m rereading this page.” I remember reading some pages in college like 18 times in a row, just like I’m going to force myself to just do this the correct way.
Well, there’s a lot of things that ADHD affects and so I’ll start with some of the easiest things, because there’s directly applicable, then these kind of collateral damage applicable things that happen. So one thing that has really helped me with ADHD is maturity. I think that’s just a thing that everyone needs more of. Meaning that I found myself getting so wiggly and so out of control when I would try to sit down and read, and I just couldn’t handle it. I just felt like I’d read a page and didn’t read anything. The part of me that just went, “Oh man, gosh, I just can’t even do this.” I had to just simply quit listening to it and said, “Nope, I’m rereading this page.” I remember reading some pages in college like 18 times in a row, just like I’m going to force myself to just do this the correct way.
And so there’s an aspect of maturity that really helps, no matter what, I will do the thing I’m going to do and I’m going to do it well and maybe it takes me a lot longer and that’s okay. That’s not the point of it. It’s that I’m doing it and that’s the point. And so that’s one thing that I think just generally helps. And ADHD, no ADHD, the resilience, emotional resilience is just a really important aspect that just helps. And so I think that has been a large part that really helps me.
There’s things that I still obviously struggle with. It’s clear where I’m really bad at stuff, and just trying to think through all the different things that I’m bad at. There’s more things I’m bad at than I’m good at. And so programming obviously has something that just allows me to remain focused and it’s like a strength of mine. And so I started off where I could just do it for a little bit and then just through kind of that emotional resilience, I was able to start doing it more and more. And so now I can just do it for like 10, 12, 15 hours at a time and I absolutely love it. And so it’s become kind of like a joy. It’s like playing a musical instrument. I’m really into it.
But then if it came down to, “Hey, you need to go schedule your own dentistry and go do all these other things or make sure the kids have this type of stuff ready for the meals you need to pack throughout the week.” I’m historically very bad at that and will probably continue to be very bad at that. And so I must say that one of the reasons why I excel so much is because I also have a wife who is so good to me and she helps clear out a lot of the things in my life that cause a lot of me kind of getting snowballed into a weird spot where I’m just distracted getting nothing done. And so she’s really helped me.
So it would be foolish of me to claim that I’ve defeated the ADHD by myself, but instead I find that the places that I can really control I’ve done a very good job at, and the things that I obviously need to do much better at, my wife has helped me a whole bunch. And so I’ve kind of cheated. Maybe I found a cheat code, a loving wife. But that has been the thing that has really helped.
Lex Fridman
You said a lot of interesting things. So on the reading and for me it’s also audiobook side, I do the same thing and I’ve gotten much better at it, which is I tune out mentally and I read a page and you don’t understand anything on the page. You didn’t actually read it. And yeah, I forced myself to just reread it or re-listen to an audiobook, which is a much more common problem for me now, and forcing myself to really pay attention. Because I listen to audiobooks often when I run and it’s so easy to just tune out.
You said a lot of interesting things. So on the reading and for me it’s also audiobook side, I do the same thing and I’ve gotten much better at it, which is I tune out mentally and I read a page and you don’t understand anything on the page. You didn’t actually read it. And yeah, I forced myself to just reread it or re-listen to an audiobook, which is a much more common problem for me now, and forcing myself to really pay attention. Because I listen to audiobooks often when I run and it’s so easy to just tune out.
It’s a skill. I didn’t realize how much of a skill listening to an audiobook is, especially when there’s other sensory inputs when you run. So I have to force myself to really pay attention to every single word. And if I don’t, like tune out and don’t remember what I just listened to in the past 30 seconds, I force myself to re-listen to it. And sometimes that means five times until, it’s like punishing myself to like, “You’re going to listen to this boring shit over and over until you get good at that little skill of like zoom in.” And you’re like, yeah, there’s people, they’re doing stuff, there’s nature, it doesn’t matter…
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s people, they’re like doing stuff, there’s nature, it doesn’t matter. You’re listening to every single word and loading it in and trying to stay focused, even there’s just so many distractions all around you. Yeah.
Yeah, there’s people, they’re like doing stuff, there’s nature, it doesn’t matter. You’re listening to every single word and loading it in and trying to stay focused, even there’s just so many distractions all around you. Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
It’s definitely a learned skill and it takes a lot of time. And when I say, “Oh, I was able to do from here to here,” I’m speaking over the course of like five years of doing this every day. It’s not some small… There’s no… The nice part about that decision though is you can make that decision today. You can make it right now. You’re going to be like, “From here on out, I’ll never make that mistake again. I will say I’m going to read 50 pages, I will sit down and read 50 pages, and when I get distracted I’ll go back to the last place I remember and I’ll start again.” And like that’s a decision you can make. That’s a mature, non-emotional decision to make. And you can do that, it just may be really painful for the first couple years of making said decisions. And then it gets easier and then it gets easier, and then it becomes more natural to change yourself.
It’s definitely a learned skill and it takes a lot of time. And when I say, “Oh, I was able to do from here to here,” I’m speaking over the course of like five years of doing this every day. It’s not some small… There’s no… The nice part about that decision though is you can make that decision today. You can make it right now. You’re going to be like, “From here on out, I’ll never make that mistake again. I will say I’m going to read 50 pages, I will sit down and read 50 pages, and when I get distracted I’ll go back to the last place I remember and I’ll start again.” And like that’s a decision you can make. That’s a mature, non-emotional decision to make. And you can do that, it just may be really painful for the first couple years of making said decisions. And then it gets easier and then it gets easier, and then it becomes more natural to change yourself.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And with every medium, with every platform, I think it’s like a new skill. For me, like using social media has been that, just like I end up like doom scrolling too easily on platforms. And one solution is not to look at all, which is kind of what I lean on mostly these days, but I feel like I should be able to check, just read, okay, feel a thing, learn a thing, and then put it down, versus you have this glazed look over your eye and you’re not really paying attention anymore and you’re dead inside and you feel horrible afterwards. I don’t understand.
Yeah. And with every medium, with every platform, I think it’s like a new skill. For me, like using social media has been that, just like I end up like doom scrolling too easily on platforms. And one solution is not to look at all, which is kind of what I lean on mostly these days, but I feel like I should be able to check, just read, okay, feel a thing, learn a thing, and then put it down, versus you have this glazed look over your eye and you’re not really paying attention anymore and you’re dead inside and you feel horrible afterwards. I don’t understand.
ThePrimeagen
The horrible afterwards is real serious. I’ve definitely… I can 100% notice that I am a more anxious person the more time I spend scrolling.
The horrible afterwards is real serious. I’ve definitely… I can 100% notice that I am a more anxious person the more time I spend scrolling.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
ThePrimeagen
I can just feel it. It’s like something inside of me that’s kind of… I don’t know how to say it other than it like wants to get out but I don’t really know what that is. It’s not anger, but it’s not… It’s very anxious.
I can just feel it. It’s like something inside of me that’s kind of… I don’t know how to say it other than it like wants to get out but I don’t really know what that is. It’s not anger, but it’s not… It’s very anxious.
Lex Fridman
It’s like the opposite of the feeling I have when I wake up in the morning and I’m feeling good, and I look out in nature and look at the sun and just, and there’s like a bird chirping and this kind of thing. Scrolling through social media, even if it’s like super positive stuff or whatever, it’s still not the same feeling as the bird chirping. Bird chirping on Instagram is a different bird chirping than in real life, cause bird chirping on Instagram, I’ll start swiping until there’s demons of different types fighting inside my head and then different anxiety, insecurity, whatever the hell. Just the mixture of chaos versus the bird chirping in real life. That is beautiful. But again, that’s the same thing as with the audiobook. It boils down to… Man, these people that talk about meditation, I think that’s probably… they’re onto something, because that’s what it is be able to like focus calmly and deliberately on a thing, whether it’s reading or audiobook or existence. When they sort of observe the breath, you’re able to silent out everything else and remove everything else from focus. Yeah. That’s a skill. That’s a skill.
It’s like the opposite of the feeling I have when I wake up in the morning and I’m feeling good, and I look out in nature and look at the sun and just, and there’s like a bird chirping and this kind of thing. Scrolling through social media, even if it’s like super positive stuff or whatever, it’s still not the same feeling as the bird chirping. Bird chirping on Instagram is a different bird chirping than in real life, cause bird chirping on Instagram, I’ll start swiping until there’s demons of different types fighting inside my head and then different anxiety, insecurity, whatever the hell. Just the mixture of chaos versus the bird chirping in real life. That is beautiful. But again, that’s the same thing as with the audiobook. It boils down to… Man, these people that talk about meditation, I think that’s probably… they’re onto something, because that’s what it is be able to like focus calmly and deliberately on a thing, whether it’s reading or audiobook or existence. When they sort of observe the breath, you’re able to silent out everything else and remove everything else from focus. Yeah. That’s a skill. That’s a skill.
ThePrimeagen
I heard it put really beautifully, which is that we in America really have misunderstood liberty because we typically have liberty as just the freedom to do whatever you want. And the argument was that it’s not the freedom to do whatever you want, it’s the freedom to be able to do what you will. And how often is what you actually want to do, you don’t do because you get trapped doing something that you’ve convinced yourself in this quick moment you want to do? And so it’s like, “I want liberty. I want the ability to control my energy and to be able to do the thing I want to do, not to get distracted and destroyed in all the millions of distractions.” And some of us get handed a worse deck of cards, some of us get a better deck of cards, but I don’t think there’s anybody that doesn’t struggle with it in the technological age.
I heard it put really beautifully, which is that we in America really have misunderstood liberty because we typically have liberty as just the freedom to do whatever you want. And the argument was that it’s not the freedom to do whatever you want, it’s the freedom to be able to do what you will. And how often is what you actually want to do, you don’t do because you get trapped doing something that you’ve convinced yourself in this quick moment you want to do? And so it’s like, “I want liberty. I want the ability to control my energy and to be able to do the thing I want to do, not to get distracted and destroyed in all the millions of distractions.” And some of us get handed a worse deck of cards, some of us get a better deck of cards, but I don’t think there’s anybody that doesn’t struggle with it in the technological age.
Productivity
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and that’s the skill. What can you say to the skill of achieving focus in programming? Do you have a process of how you sit down and try to sort of approach a problem? So, all the different, not just distractions but the challenges of starting a project, of thinking through the design, how to maintain real focus, because it’s really difficult intellectual endeavor.
Yeah, and that’s the skill. What can you say to the skill of achieving focus in programming? Do you have a process of how you sit down and try to sort of approach a problem? So, all the different, not just distractions but the challenges of starting a project, of thinking through the design, how to maintain real focus, because it’s really difficult intellectual endeavor.
ThePrimeagen
At this point I’m lucky, but when I first started I can remember that every last part of programming. I had to go look up, I had to go read, I had side quests at all time. Every step was a side quest. Why is my screen blinking when I’m trying to render this thing out? Oh, I didn’t know about double buffering. Why is this happening? How do I even write to the screen? How do I… Everything was a question. I had more questions than answers. And so I constantly had the problem of side quests, and I find that to be a very exhausting thing. But as I learned my instrument very, very well, I don’t have as many side quests. I become more and more able to just focus on the thing I want to do. And I find that to be something that is just super, super useful. So, when I say I’m kind of lucky, meaning that I’ve spent so much of my life preparing for this moment that now when I have the opportunity to do something, I can just do that thing and I don’t…
At this point I’m lucky, but when I first started I can remember that every last part of programming. I had to go look up, I had to go read, I had side quests at all time. Every step was a side quest. Why is my screen blinking when I’m trying to render this thing out? Oh, I didn’t know about double buffering. Why is this happening? How do I even write to the screen? How do I… Everything was a question. I had more questions than answers. And so I constantly had the problem of side quests, and I find that to be a very exhausting thing. But as I learned my instrument very, very well, I don’t have as many side quests. I become more and more able to just focus on the thing I want to do. And I find that to be something that is just super, super useful. So, when I say I’m kind of lucky, meaning that I’ve spent so much of my life preparing for this moment that now when I have the opportunity to do something, I can just do that thing and I don’t…
Like I can be just on an airplane and I can just program for hours. I don’t have to look up a single thing. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t even have to test the code. I can write 1,000 lines of code on an airplane and I’m very confident that it’s going to be 98% pretty dang good. And I’m very happy about that because that allows me just to be in the moment solving the problem I’m trying to solve. Then I have 100% of my brain power solving a problem. And this is why I also… It’s the same reason why I recommend learning how to type and learning your editor so well you don’t even have to think about the action because the people that have to… Even if you just look down, that’s still mental processing power you have to spend looking at a keyboard in which you already know where the key is. You do. At this point, if you’ve been typing for thousands of hours, you know where the key is, just stop looking down, you’ll learn really quickly.
And so it’s like this thing where it’s like, “I’m not going to spend all that time and all that mental effort looking up the thing. I’m going to just memorize… I’m just going to get it in me, and then I can go fast.” And it feels good. And so that’s how I’d kind of defeat that is because now I get to do something where it’s like there’s no more questions. It’s now me just expressing myself into this medium and it feels really good.
Lex Fridman
I’m sure there’s still like things that pull at you, like curiosities, distractions, like, “Ooh, I wonder how…” Anytime you have access to the internet, you’re going to get-
I’m sure there’s still like things that pull at you, like curiosities, distractions, like, “Ooh, I wonder how…” Anytime you have access to the internet, you’re going to get-
ThePrimeagen
Twitter’s a big one on that one. Yeah.
Twitter’s a big one on that one. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… you’re going to get curious about stuff, including, I guess you’re speaking about everything in the editors optimize, but, okay, you can always improve stuff. You can always find better plugins and macros and, “Oh, let me… You know what, this thing that took this pain point, I just found this tiny pain point, let me spend the next five days creating a plugin for my editor or whatever the fuck to remove that one pain point,” when you should have just kept going as opposed to taking side quests.
… you’re going to get curious about stuff, including, I guess you’re speaking about everything in the editors optimize, but, okay, you can always improve stuff. You can always find better plugins and macros and, “Oh, let me… You know what, this thing that took this pain point, I just found this tiny pain point, let me spend the next five days creating a plugin for my editor or whatever the fuck to remove that one pain point,” when you should have just kept going as opposed to taking side quests.
ThePrimeagen
So, I have a rule which is I do not edit my RC other than some kind of cataclysmic thing, like someone updates a plugin, I didn’t know they updated it and now there’s like a hard error in my editor and I have to move forward. But I have a rule where I will edit my RC, my Neovim RC or anything once a year. Something that bothers me, I’ll write it down, I’ll remember it. I’ll be like, “Okay, I want to change that,” but I will just not go back to it. Now, every now and then I’ll break that rule if I know, if like, “Oh, I want a new remap to be able to do this one command and that takes literally 13 seconds, like copy paste, do this, bop-bop-bop, done. Okay, I have this new remap, it made perfect sense in this situation, but I don’t go plug-in exploring. I don’t try to solve every problem.
So, I have a rule which is I do not edit my RC other than some kind of cataclysmic thing, like someone updates a plugin, I didn’t know they updated it and now there’s like a hard error in my editor and I have to move forward. But I have a rule where I will edit my RC, my Neovim RC or anything once a year. Something that bothers me, I’ll write it down, I’ll remember it. I’ll be like, “Okay, I want to change that,” but I will just not go back to it. Now, every now and then I’ll break that rule if I know, if like, “Oh, I want a new remap to be able to do this one command and that takes literally 13 seconds, like copy paste, do this, bop-bop-bop, done. Okay, I have this new remap, it made perfect sense in this situation, but I don’t go plug-in exploring. I don’t try to solve every problem.
I don’t want a perfect editor because that is a pursuit that will never stop. I just go, “This is good, good breakpoint, I won’t do it again.” So, last month I probably spent a hundred hours just editing every possible thing I could about how I start up my system and make… I can have a computer from zero to 60 in almost no time now everything the way I exactly want it, Neovim and everything all perfectly set up. Happy enough, I’m not going to touch that system again. Maybe I’ll touch it next year. Maybe I’ll take a year off. It’s just I’m fine with that. I’m fine with not being perfect.
Programming setup
Lex Fridman
All right, zero to 60, let’s talk about the perfect setup. What’s your perfect programming setup, keyboard operating system, how many screens, chair?
All right, zero to 60, let’s talk about the perfect setup. What’s your perfect programming setup, keyboard operating system, how many screens, chair?
ThePrimeagen
All right, I like all these.
All right, I like all these.
Lex Fridman
IDE, let’s go.
IDE, let’s go.
ThePrimeagen
So, keyboard, you’re using my favorite keyboard right there, the Kinesis Advantage. Saved my career. Beautiful keyboard. Concavity and thumb clusters are just so important because if you really think about it, especially if you’re using qwerty, when you’re pressing the symbols on a standard keyboard, you’re just doing this the whole time: backspace, enter, symbols. You’re just doing this, and it just screws up your wrist constantly doing this. And this when you’re constantly doing like ctrl and shift. And it just is like messing you up, so it’s just like right here. That’s so much nicer in life. So, keyboard most important, I’d say. Get that one done.
So, keyboard, you’re using my favorite keyboard right there, the Kinesis Advantage. Saved my career. Beautiful keyboard. Concavity and thumb clusters are just so important because if you really think about it, especially if you’re using qwerty, when you’re pressing the symbols on a standard keyboard, you’re just doing this the whole time: backspace, enter, symbols. You’re just doing this, and it just screws up your wrist constantly doing this. And this when you’re constantly doing like ctrl and shift. And it just is like messing you up, so it’s just like right here. That’s so much nicer in life. So, keyboard most important, I’d say. Get that one done.
Lex Fridman
For people who don’t know, Kinesis keyboard, I think the thing that you experience the most is exactly the thing you just said now, which is the backspace is really easy to press versus what it is on normal keyboards. So, backspace in general symbolizes you’re deleting a thing, it symbolizes a mistake. Not symbolizes, it usually means a mistake. And so not only did you just make a mistake in what you were typing, you also have to take a physically painful action, annoying action to fix that mistake. And for most of us, we make a lot of mistakes, so Kinesis just makes it pleasant and fast and easy physically to correct the mistake. That’s probably for me the number one reason of Kinesis. Everything else, yeah, super plus with the macros and the positioning, the concavity like you mentioned, but their mistakes are pleasant.
For people who don’t know, Kinesis keyboard, I think the thing that you experience the most is exactly the thing you just said now, which is the backspace is really easy to press versus what it is on normal keyboards. So, backspace in general symbolizes you’re deleting a thing, it symbolizes a mistake. Not symbolizes, it usually means a mistake. And so not only did you just make a mistake in what you were typing, you also have to take a physically painful action, annoying action to fix that mistake. And for most of us, we make a lot of mistakes, so Kinesis just makes it pleasant and fast and easy physically to correct the mistake. That’s probably for me the number one reason of Kinesis. Everything else, yeah, super plus with the macros and the positioning, the concavity like you mentioned, but their mistakes are pleasant.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I am on that team, so that’s why I love that. I would say that’s one of the most important things. The next thing that I find to be very, very important is that one monitor. I’m a one monitor kind of guy.
Yeah. I am on that team, so that’s why I love that. I would say that’s one of the most important things. The next thing that I find to be very, very important is that one monitor. I’m a one monitor kind of guy.
Lex Fridman
What? Really?
What? Really?
ThePrimeagen
So, when I program, when I do anything… Now, when I stream, I obviously have a second computer that runs the stream because I sometimes crash my computer, I have to restart or whatever. So, I do have a second screen there that I put stuff up, but most of the time you’ll notice that even when I’m streaming, you’ve been there, I have to physically switch to the streaming chat channel for me to read it, and that’s because I’m operating off of one screen. And so I have this whole style in which I like to navigate, inspired by StarCraft, is that I believe in the press one key, go where you want to be mentality. And so everything about my setup is press one key. So, when I want to go to Twitch chat, alt-two, Twitch chat. When I want to go to my browser, alt-one. That’s my browser. Alt-three, that’s where I go to my programming. That’s power finger, obviously. The big middle finger right there, just smash it down. Alt-six is going to be gimp, so my GNU image manipulation program, so if I want to draw, I go there.
So, when I program, when I do anything… Now, when I stream, I obviously have a second computer that runs the stream because I sometimes crash my computer, I have to restart or whatever. So, I do have a second screen there that I put stuff up, but most of the time you’ll notice that even when I’m streaming, you’ve been there, I have to physically switch to the streaming chat channel for me to read it, and that’s because I’m operating off of one screen. And so I have this whole style in which I like to navigate, inspired by StarCraft, is that I believe in the press one key, go where you want to be mentality. And so everything about my setup is press one key. So, when I want to go to Twitch chat, alt-two, Twitch chat. When I want to go to my browser, alt-one. That’s my browser. Alt-three, that’s where I go to my programming. That’s power finger, obviously. The big middle finger right there, just smash it down. Alt-six is going to be gimp, so my GNU image manipulation program, so if I want to draw, I go there.
When I used to have Slack, it was alt-five. If I have a spare terminal where I need to run some extra things, that’s alt-four. I had all these kind of… Everything is perfectly mapped out to single-key. And then when it comes down to using, say, Tmux, I have all my terminals into one single terminal. And now I’m able to kind of switch between there. Prefix one goes to my Vim editor. Whatever project I’m in, it’s always the first Tmux tab, if you will. I’m not sure… They call it a session, but I’m not sure how to describe it if you’re not familiar with Tmux. A tab. Second one is like my spare terminal, third one is my long-running process terminal, my fourth one is a long-running process terminal. So, I have it all set up, so every project I go to automatically spawns session one: Vim, session two: spare terminal, session three will also open it, so it’s like everything’s just ready to rock.
Everything has been optimized to where I do that. If I want to go to a project, it’s ctrl-F, and any terminal will bring up a fuzzy find list of every one of my folders on my operating system in which I can go to with just a couple keystrokes and, boom, I’m in that one now. And so it’s very oriented to find where I need to be as quickly as possible.
Lex Fridman
Via keyboard.
Via keyboard.
ThePrimeagen
Via keyboard. Then in Vim I developed a plugin called Harpoon, which is I press one button and I can pin one of the files to like a temporary buffer. I think Projectile is potentially close to this in Emacs. I can’t remember if Projectile… I think Projectile is closer to my sessionizing script. Anyways, so now I have four pinned files in which I can go to any of those pinned files with just a single keystroke. And so now it’s just like… Because every time you develop a feature, usually you have like three files you’re kind of primarily working in. And I can fuzzy find for the other files and that’s that, but usually I just have like these three power files that I’m always swapping in between. And so it’s like now everything is just, “I want go to the browser.” That’s one press. “I want to go to my workstation.” That’s one press. “I want to go to a specific folder, I need to change folders.”
Via keyboard. Then in Vim I developed a plugin called Harpoon, which is I press one button and I can pin one of the files to like a temporary buffer. I think Projectile is potentially close to this in Emacs. I can’t remember if Projectile… I think Projectile is closer to my sessionizing script. Anyways, so now I have four pinned files in which I can go to any of those pinned files with just a single keystroke. And so now it’s just like… Because every time you develop a feature, usually you have like three files you’re kind of primarily working in. And I can fuzzy find for the other files and that’s that, but usually I just have like these three power files that I’m always swapping in between. And so it’s like now everything is just, “I want go to the browser.” That’s one press. “I want to go to my workstation.” That’s one press. “I want to go to a specific folder, I need to change folders.”
Sometimes you work between two different projects, so in Tmux that’s prefix, capital L will swap between your last two. So, I have alternate projects, so I can even swap between projects in pretty much one key. So, it’s just like do-do-do, just trying to optimize it, so I don’t think as much, because I think search fatigue is a massive fail where you have to look for it. When I see people on a Mac do this and then explode all the different ones, that gives me anxiety. I’m like, “Why are you using your eyeballs to search for what you want to do?” Make it into a key press and never think about it again, ever.
Lex Fridman
You’re making me think a lot whether I can live with your system, whether it’s better because it feels better.
You’re making me think a lot whether I can live with your system, whether it’s better because it feels better.
ThePrimeagen
It at least intellectually feels better. It may not be great for some people.
It at least intellectually feels better. It may not be great for some people.
Lex Fridman
Well, there’s a few profound things you said, which is like really what the number of windows or tasks you’re switching between, whether it’s programming, the number of files you’re working on, it’s small at any one time, at any one space of 20 minutes or something like that. So, okay, that’s a profound truth. Sometimes we think like, “Oh I need the full freedom to search,” but you don’t. You usually work on a very small slice. But I guess the trade-off there… I always have three monitors, not when I’m traveling, but my happy place is three monitors. It’s like, do you really need all of them to be present there? So, you’re turning your head. Now, the monitors I have is two vertical ones, which is just better for certain kinds of content. They’re positioned vertically, so you can read. You can use your eyes to scan quickly.
Well, there’s a few profound things you said, which is like really what the number of windows or tasks you’re switching between, whether it’s programming, the number of files you’re working on, it’s small at any one time, at any one space of 20 minutes or something like that. So, okay, that’s a profound truth. Sometimes we think like, “Oh I need the full freedom to search,” but you don’t. You usually work on a very small slice. But I guess the trade-off there… I always have three monitors, not when I’m traveling, but my happy place is three monitors. It’s like, do you really need all of them to be present there? So, you’re turning your head. Now, the monitors I have is two vertical ones, which is just better for certain kinds of content. They’re positioned vertically, so you can read. You can use your eyes to scan quickly.
ThePrimeagen
Interesting. So, I don’t even do that. I even have it so zoomed in that I probably only have like maybe 25 lines of code at any one time on my 27-inch monitor.
Interesting. So, I don’t even do that. I even have it so zoomed in that I probably only have like maybe 25 lines of code at any one time on my 27-inch monitor.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I think that’s… I think I feel fundamentally constrained when I can’t see more because your eyes are just good at jumping. You could-
Yeah, I think that’s… I think I feel fundamentally constrained when I can’t see more because your eyes are just good at jumping. You could-
ThePrimeagen
Why not search? Why not press a couple of keystrokes? Ctrl-U, ctrl-D, jump up and down by a half page.
Why not search? Why not press a couple of keystrokes? Ctrl-U, ctrl-D, jump up and down by a half page.
Lex Fridman
Because the ape visual system was designed to… You’re loading a lot of information. If every time you have to investigate this table, what’s on this table, you have to press a keystroke, you could develop the skillset that integrates that information but it’s really… There is an effective thing where if you have a sheet of paper like this and I’m looking at it, my eyes will be able to load in the structure of the information, the topics of the information. You just can do it faster, I think. There’s a big cost because it’s an extra monitor, but there is some stuff that’s vertical when vertically positioned. See, code is an iffy one code because code, 25 lines at a time, I think you can do a lot.
Because the ape visual system was designed to… You’re loading a lot of information. If every time you have to investigate this table, what’s on this table, you have to press a keystroke, you could develop the skillset that integrates that information but it’s really… There is an effective thing where if you have a sheet of paper like this and I’m looking at it, my eyes will be able to load in the structure of the information, the topics of the information. You just can do it faster, I think. There’s a big cost because it’s an extra monitor, but there is some stuff that’s vertical when vertically positioned. See, code is an iffy one code because code, 25 lines at a time, I think you can do a lot.
This is more for like articles and especially with visual information in them or documentation, you can just jump faster. But I’m trying to… As you were speaking so eloquently, I was like wondering, “Am I just like deceiving myself that I need that? Can I just keyboard shortcut-ify everything and just have everything on one monitor?” That’s something I should probably try because I’m a big proponent of just automating everything with the keyboard because you can just move really, really fast, and you don’t have to think. Because I also do creative stuff, whether it’s recording music or video editing. It’s hard… Some of these programs still make it super easy for you. On Windows, with AutoHotkey you can do quite a lot, but still there’s limitations on how much you can do with the keyboard. So, it really is a pain in the to have to use the mouse, but, man, you’re really making me think.
ThePrimeagen
Even the text one, the reading one, fundamentally I think I agree with you, that you can see a lot more and you can kind of look up and down, and see those two things. And probably in articles or things like that, if there’s a graph down here that’s really big that take up your whole screen plus text, I could see why that would be very beneficial to zoom out, to be able to have all that information, but for me, I can only look at like a square inch. Really, that’s all my eyes can actually focus on. So, when I’m reading, I’m right here. Then I have to structurally try to pattern match what I think the information looks like. Then I have to start reading it.
Even the text one, the reading one, fundamentally I think I agree with you, that you can see a lot more and you can kind of look up and down, and see those two things. And probably in articles or things like that, if there’s a graph down here that’s really big that take up your whole screen plus text, I could see why that would be very beneficial to zoom out, to be able to have all that information, but for me, I can only look at like a square inch. Really, that’s all my eyes can actually focus on. So, when I’m reading, I’m right here. Then I have to structurally try to pattern match what I think the information looks like. Then I have to start reading it.
So, I’m not exactly sure if I actually get any real benefit of having a lot of stuff on screen, as opposed to I can relax my eyes so much I don’t even have to focus. The words are so big. I actually program pretty zoomed in. My text is bigger than this when I program, and so it’s just that it’s so comfortable, I don’t even have to exert any effort to read the code.
Lex Fridman
But you have to kind of train your brain to know that you can navigate spatially using keys.
But you have to kind of train your brain to know that you can navigate spatially using keys.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, Neovim by the way.
Yeah, Neovim by the way.
Lex Fridman
Oh, maybe it has everything to do with Neovim. Okay.
Oh, maybe it has everything to do with Neovim. Okay.
ThePrimeagen
All right. And then Neovim is obviously the next big one. I love Neovim. Reason being is that I think you can make all the arguments that you want about which editor is the best. I do not think you can make an argument that Vim motions aren’t superior.
All right. And then Neovim is obviously the next big one. I love Neovim. Reason being is that I think you can make all the arguments that you want about which editor is the best. I do not think you can make an argument that Vim motions aren’t superior.
Lex Fridman
Here we go. Can you explain Vim motions? What is this? So, Neovim… Vim is an old school editor. Neovim-
Here we go. Can you explain Vim motions? What is this? So, Neovim… Vim is an old school editor. Neovim-
ThePrimeagen
It’s a modern take on an old school editor.
It’s a modern take on an old school editor.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And what’s ELI5? What does it take to work with Neovim?
Yeah. And what’s ELI5? What does it take to work with Neovim?
ThePrimeagen
Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about a Vim motion there. That’s how… I know, but you know that meme that’s just like, “Hey, Jarvis, can I tell you about Vim motions?” Because they can’t fit anything else in their head because they only have Vim motions. You said EL5, explain it like I’m five, but in my head it’s like, “Okay, E is jump to the end of the word, L is the one more…” Dude, I’m so broken that I’m like, “Okay, Vim motion,” when I hear letters. Yeah, so, you can think of it like this is that Vim has a language to describe movements in text because its primary mode of operation is manipulating or editing text. So, it is a well-thought through set of movements, deleting, yanking, pasting, copying, all that kind of stuff that goes in, motions that are optimized for working with pretty much code.
Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about a Vim motion there. That’s how… I know, but you know that meme that’s just like, “Hey, Jarvis, can I tell you about Vim motions?” Because they can’t fit anything else in their head because they only have Vim motions. You said EL5, explain it like I’m five, but in my head it’s like, “Okay, E is jump to the end of the word, L is the one more…” Dude, I’m so broken that I’m like, “Okay, Vim motion,” when I hear letters. Yeah, so, you can think of it like this is that Vim has a language to describe movements in text because its primary mode of operation is manipulating or editing text. So, it is a well-thought through set of movements, deleting, yanking, pasting, copying, all that kind of stuff that goes in, motions that are optimized for working with pretty much code.
A good example, say you have three lines of code you want to delete. If you’re in VS Code, take your little beautiful mouse, highlight those things, press the backspace. That’s lovely. Your hand left the keyboard. Very simple to do though. It’s very beginner friendly. I was a huge Vim hater, by the way, so I just want you to know that before we go into this. I was probably the biggest Vim hater. If there was Saul to Apostle Paul, I am like the Saul to Apostle Paul of Vim, just so you can see how big the gap was. Or you can do something that’s like… I don’t know what the VS Code shortcut is, but I’m sure there’s some keys you can press to delete the current line you’re on. Delete, delete, delete, you can just do that. In Vim, I can go DAP, delete around paragraph. All contiguous code in that thing. I’m going to delete, so D, then I can choose my motion I want to take, AP, around paragraph. Or maybe I want to DF, meaning jump up to the next character that matches the next character I’m going to press.
So, DF opening parenthesis will delete everything from your cursor up to the first opening parenthesis. So, you get to describe your motion in these little keystrokes. And as you get really good… You’ve seen people that can master Fortnite, it’s the same thing with mastering Vim motions. When you get so good, you no longer think about each individual movement, and instead you’re just like, “Get rid of the paragraph, jump here, jump this, highlight this, yank this, do this,” it becomes so fast that you can superiorly edit text at a very fast rate. And there comes a point when you know your language really well, you know the problem you’re really working on really well, where editing text and getting code out actually becomes one of the many bottlenecks.
People always talk about, “Well, most of the time I think…” Most of the time I’m not thinking, I’m programming. I know what I want to do, I want to go as fast as possible because I’ve been just doing it for so long and I’m so familiar with the general space that it becomes a huge problem for me. I cannot tell you how many times that I’ve been purely bottlenecked by the fact that I just can’t type fast enough and I just need to get it out of my head onto the text editor. And so that’s why I think Vim motions are superior in all aspects. Keep your hands on the keyboard, on the home row, and it can manipulate text in very wide and fast ways.
Lex Fridman
Oh, so, this is not just about writing text, this is about modifying text. It’s primarily about modifying text.
Oh, so, this is not just about writing text, this is about modifying text. It’s primarily about modifying text.
ThePrimeagen
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
And I’m sure that most editors including Emacs, including VS Code can do all those same things, but there is something… They just don’t encourage you to discover those things. That’s like an important thing about a lot of technologies and programming languages that a lot of them can do a lot of the stuff, but it’s something about whether it’s the community or the style of the language or anything like this that encourages you to not be lazy in the beginning and learn the fast way to edit text, in this particular example, how to use the keyboard. That’s a fascinating just reality of how technology is used. You want to be encouraged to find the fast thing as quickly as possible so that long term it’s efficient and fun to use the thing.
And I’m sure that most editors including Emacs, including VS Code can do all those same things, but there is something… They just don’t encourage you to discover those things. That’s like an important thing about a lot of technologies and programming languages that a lot of them can do a lot of the stuff, but it’s something about whether it’s the community or the style of the language or anything like this that encourages you to not be lazy in the beginning and learn the fast way to edit text, in this particular example, how to use the keyboard. That’s a fascinating just reality of how technology is used. You want to be encouraged to find the fast thing as quickly as possible so that long term it’s efficient and fun to use the thing.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. It takes a long time for dividends, like a long time, but on top of that, notice I didn’t say Vim. I’m not saying, “Go use Vim,” I’m saying, “Vim motions.” Let me give you one more example. I’m a big fan. Let’s say you have a line that contains some variable, some function you’re calling something that takes in a string. And you need to do that again, so you would typically copy that line, you’d paste that line below, you’d go into the string and you’d change the string. Let’s say it’s calling some sort of configuration, you need to call it three times with three different configuring strings. In Vim, I like to do shift-V to highlight the whole line, and then Y. Some people do YY, but I don’t like to do double ones. I like to be able to do two different fingers because you can do that way faster than one finger twice.
Yeah. It takes a long time for dividends, like a long time, but on top of that, notice I didn’t say Vim. I’m not saying, “Go use Vim,” I’m saying, “Vim motions.” Let me give you one more example. I’m a big fan. Let’s say you have a line that contains some variable, some function you’re calling something that takes in a string. And you need to do that again, so you would typically copy that line, you’d paste that line below, you’d go into the string and you’d change the string. Let’s say it’s calling some sort of configuration, you need to call it three times with three different configuring strings. In Vim, I like to do shift-V to highlight the whole line, and then Y. Some people do YY, but I don’t like to do double ones. I like to be able to do two different fingers because you can do that way faster than one finger twice.
It’s just a little optimization for me because you can’t press that as fast. So, anyways, I’m very optimized in my approach, so I yank the line, paste the line. CI double quotes will delete everything inside the first occurring string. Then I can type the string, escape, save. And so it’s like so optimized that I can just jump so fast in between that, whereas the copying and pasting line is probably the same speed, but the navigating to the string, deleting what’s currently in the string, and then… That’s such a fast motion in Vim, and I just do that all the time.
Lex Fridman
To backtrack, really dumb question, CI, what’s the difference between typing the letters and using the letters to navigate and edit? How do you switch between the two modes?
To backtrack, really dumb question, CI, what’s the difference between typing the letters and using the letters to navigate and edit? How do you switch between the two modes?
ThePrimeagen
Okay, so insert mode means that you’re just putting in text, and then normal mode means that you’re moving your cursor.
Okay, so insert mode means that you’re just putting in text, and then normal mode means that you’re moving your cursor.
Lex Fridman
And how do you switch between the two?
And how do you switch between the two?
ThePrimeagen
Escape. Escape goes from insert mode into normal mode. And to go into insert mode press I to take your current cursor and go to the beginning, A to go to the end of the year Cursor, capital A to go to the end of the line, capital I to go to the beginning of line, O to put a new line below and then put your cursor at the proper intended for the language, shift-O to shift your current line down, and then put a new line in. You can see, there’s a lot-
Escape. Escape goes from insert mode into normal mode. And to go into insert mode press I to take your current cursor and go to the beginning, A to go to the end of the year Cursor, capital A to go to the end of the line, capital I to go to the beginning of line, O to put a new line below and then put your cursor at the proper intended for the language, shift-O to shift your current line down, and then put a new line in. You can see, there’s a lot-
Lex Fridman
So, you’re pressing escape a lot.
So, you’re pressing escape a lot.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I mapped mine. I do ctrl-C. Ctrl-C does the same thing except for in one edge case. People hate that. I got used to it just due to the fact that I was using IntelliJ, and I really hate pressing the escape key, so I just got used to pressing escapee.
Yeah, I mapped mine. I do ctrl-C. Ctrl-C does the same thing except for in one edge case. People hate that. I got used to it just due to the fact that I was using IntelliJ, and I really hate pressing the escape key, so I just got used to pressing escapee.
Lex Fridman
That seems like an essential thing to do if you’re using Neovim to map escape to something.
That seems like an essential thing to do if you’re using Neovim to map escape to something.
ThePrimeagen
Cap lock would be your standard go-to.
Cap lock would be your standard go-to.
Lex Fridman
Oh yeah, I map it too. Cool. I got you. I got you.
Oh yeah, I map it too. Cool. I got you. I got you.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, so then it’s just really easy to press it, and boom, boom, boom, not a big deal at all. But yeah, I think that if you’re willing to learn it, the emotions are superior, but if you’re not willing to learn it, then they’re not superior. You should just not do it. If you’re willing to endure pain, it’s good. If you’re not, it’s actually way worse. It’s 100 worse.
Yeah, so then it’s just really easy to press it, and boom, boom, boom, not a big deal at all. But yeah, I think that if you’re willing to learn it, the emotions are superior, but if you’re not willing to learn it, then they’re not superior. You should just not do it. If you’re willing to endure pain, it’s good. If you’re not, it’s actually way worse. It’s 100 worse.
Lex Fridman
Right, so if you like pain, you use Neovim. Totally. I understand.
Right, so if you like pain, you use Neovim. Totally. I understand.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, you’re totally on-board.
Yeah, you’re totally on-board.
Lex Fridman
100%.
100%.
ThePrimeagen
See, now you get it.
See, now you get it.
Lex Fridman
If you like joy, you use Emacs.
If you like joy, you use Emacs.
ThePrimeagen
Sorry, sorry, did Emacs ever get a good text editor? I know they’re a great operating system, but I never caught up if they got a good text editor.
Sorry, sorry, did Emacs ever get a good text editor? I know they’re a great operating system, but I never caught up if they got a good text editor.
Lex Fridman
Operating system? I think you’ve been miseducated my friend. So, at least 30 minutes on Emacs versus Neovim is what Reddit requested. Have you actually used Emacs in order to be able to talk so much shit or no?
Operating system? I think you’ve been miseducated my friend. So, at least 30 minutes on Emacs versus Neovim is what Reddit requested. Have you actually used Emacs in order to be able to talk so much shit or no?
ThePrimeagen
I used it for a year.
I used it for a year.
Lex Fridman
You used it for a year?
You used it for a year?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, yeah. Doom Emacs, Spacemacs and regular Emacs.
Yeah, yeah. Doom Emacs, Spacemacs and regular Emacs.
Lex Fridman
But you don’t even know Lisp, so did you really use it?
But you don’t even know Lisp, so did you really use it?
ThePrimeagen
I kind of hacked my way through kind of like, “Okay, so this is how to configure…” You can kind of get your way through and do all that.
I kind of hacked my way through kind of like, “Okay, so this is how to configure…” You can kind of get your way through and do all that.
Lex Fridman
So, you recommend to mastering Neovim and really learn the depths of it, but Emacs is okay to just kind of use before making a judgment. I think everybody…
So, you recommend to mastering Neovim and really learn the depths of it, but Emacs is okay to just kind of use before making a judgment. I think everybody…
ThePrimeagen
You got me on that one?
You got me on that one?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, no, and what’s Neovim written? It’s Lua?
Yeah, no, and what’s Neovim written? It’s Lua?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, so Lua would be the configuration language, but you have… It’s written in C, but you have Lua 4. And Lua is just a dead simple language. Anyone can program Lua.
Yeah, so Lua would be the configuration language, but you have… It’s written in C, but you have Lua 4. And Lua is just a dead simple language. Anyone can program Lua.
Lex Fridman
I actually don’t know why… I think it’s because my love for Lisp that I went with Emacs. I think you just choose a path and you walk down that path. And because there’s just such a vibrant, intense battle between the two communities, you just start fighting just because everybody else is fighting. And then one day you’re an old warrior on a horse, and you’re wondering, “What was this all for?” And it’s quite sad, in all seriousness, that I haven’t to this day tried Neovim. I think because there is a learning curve. There’s a learning curve to a lot of these editors.
I actually don’t know why… I think it’s because my love for Lisp that I went with Emacs. I think you just choose a path and you walk down that path. And because there’s just such a vibrant, intense battle between the two communities, you just start fighting just because everybody else is fighting. And then one day you’re an old warrior on a horse, and you’re wondering, “What was this all for?” And it’s quite sad, in all seriousness, that I haven’t to this day tried Neovim. I think because there is a learning curve. There’s a learning curve to a lot of these editors.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. To really learn it.
Yeah. To really learn it.
Lex Fridman
To really learn it. And I think this is some of the criticism of maybe VS Code or Sublime or Atom that it’s so easy to not learn it, to just kind of halfass use it. And there is a big benefit to having editors that force you to have some learning curve, where you take the art, the science, the procedure of editing seriously. Because you spend so much time in it, you might as well learn how to use the thing.
To really learn it. And I think this is some of the criticism of maybe VS Code or Sublime or Atom that it’s so easy to not learn it, to just kind of halfass use it. And there is a big benefit to having editors that force you to have some learning curve, where you take the art, the science, the procedure of editing seriously. Because you spend so much time in it, you might as well learn how to use the thing.
ThePrimeagen
My big takeaway really, what I’m trying to say with all these words is that I honestly don’t actually think that… The editor obviously does not make the programmer, but I think it says a lot about your character as a programmer if you don’t know how to use your editor well. There’s something about a person who’s willing to commit their life to programming, and spending literally 50,000 hours doing an activity over the course of their lifetime, and never take the time to learn their editor through and through. It just seems strange.
My big takeaway really, what I’m trying to say with all these words is that I honestly don’t actually think that… The editor obviously does not make the programmer, but I think it says a lot about your character as a programmer if you don’t know how to use your editor well. There’s something about a person who’s willing to commit their life to programming, and spending literally 50,000 hours doing an activity over the course of their lifetime, and never take the time to learn their editor through and through. It just seems strange.
You’d never see that in another world, where people would be able to build something or do something and just completely forget how these things work, and only just focus on one part of their craft. And so, to me, it’s just like it doesn’t matter how you use it, I want to see the person that just knows how to use it, and they know how to use it well. When there’s a problem, they can say why the problem exists, and then go and fix the problem. To me, that’s like, ” There you go. You’ve done it. You now know your tool, go forth and conquer with said tool.”
Lex Fridman
Especially for tools you use a lot.
Especially for tools you use a lot.
ThePrimeagen
[inaudible 03:46:07].
[inaudible 03:46:07].
Lex Fridman
You have to look at your whole life, your life, whatever, if you’re a developer or anything, what is the thing you do a lot?
You have to look at your whole life, your life, whatever, if you’re a developer or anything, what is the thing you do a lot?
ThePrimeagen
Meetings.
Meetings.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Sorry. Keep going.
Sorry. Keep going.
Lex Fridman
Ask a question like: how can this be done a lot better? Because every single day you do this for hours a day, how many hours did you spend on thinking how to do this better or whether to do it at all, in the case of meetings? People surprisingly just don’t do this enough. I see this, just to go back to jujitsu, there’s a lot of people that show up and do jujitsu or martial arts, and they do it the same way over and over and over, and they invest tremendous amount of energy. And they don’t ask like, “How do I do it differently to improve faster?” In the case of jujitsu or any kind of sport, same with practicing the piano or the guitar, they just religiously put in a lot of time and derive a lot of joy from getting better. They don’t enough ask the meta question of like, “How can I do this better?” And with editors, it’s surprisingly how often people do just that.
Ask a question like: how can this be done a lot better? Because every single day you do this for hours a day, how many hours did you spend on thinking how to do this better or whether to do it at all, in the case of meetings? People surprisingly just don’t do this enough. I see this, just to go back to jujitsu, there’s a lot of people that show up and do jujitsu or martial arts, and they do it the same way over and over and over, and they invest tremendous amount of energy. And they don’t ask like, “How do I do it differently to improve faster?” In the case of jujitsu or any kind of sport, same with practicing the piano or the guitar, they just religiously put in a lot of time and derive a lot of joy from getting better. They don’t enough ask the meta question of like, “How can I do this better?” And with editors, it’s surprisingly how often people do just that.
With typing, it’s surprising how many people do just that. Like you said, they’re pecking or looking down. It’s like the quality of life improvement you can have by learning to touch type, by just like typing without looking. It’s immeasurable. You’re bringing a lot of joy to your life because all of us are typing a lot. And the reason, by the way, I was extremely efficient with Emacs… I’m sure you know, all jokes aside, it feels like Neovim has more room for the kind of efficiency I’ve had with Emacs to be able to move really fast as you described me to edit. There is a real joy. It’s not just efficiency, it’s a freedom that you can get when you get really good with an editor. The reason I chose to go with VS Code is it felt like there’s going to be an acceleration of features to which Neovim or Emacs will not be able to catch up, in the… and I don’t mean in the next five years, I mean in the next 30 years.
And it felt like I almost wanted to take the pain of learning new editors constantly and just switching and learning that, because I was getting so comfortable in Emacs, with this Kinesis keyboard, everything, all the shortcuts, I know how to program, and it felt like this is not… Neovim will not be here in 50 years. Possibly might be, I don’t know, but it felt like you want to learn these constant different technologies. Cursor is a great example of that. I primarily am using Cursor now. I go back between VS Code and Cursor. Just the skill of using AI is a real skill, from the shortcuts to the timing to the layout of the windows to how I think about where, when and how to use the AI that doesn’t distract me, that it empowers me, not just for the fuck of it or for the fun of it, for the actual measure of productivity.
It’s a skill. And I feel like I would be stuck in a local maximum of comfort if I stayed with Emacs. And maybe the same should be true for me with Neovim. I should try it seriously. I’m sure there’s a plugin, like a copilot type of situation that you could set up with Neovim. I should possibly consider that. But Cursor is doing a lot of really fascinating stuff on the IDE side, not just sort of generate code and edit that code manually, it’s like continuously be able to rewrite code. It’s the idea of tab, tab, tab, tab, move the Cursor around, but also modify parts of code and do the diff really nicely, that whether it’s Cursor or VS Code that wins that battle out with Copilot, I don’t know. But that feels like a fundamentally different experience than the really efficient, joyful experience that you just described in your selling me on this is Neovim. That doesn’t have an AI in the picture, obviously immediately, but you can, yeah, absolutely.
ThePrimeagen
I would 100% agree that Cursor seems like such a cool product. I actually think there’s a lot of really neat things coming down with all of that. And I could change from Neovim. I don’t use Neovim because I love Neovim, I use Neovim because I love the instrument I play. And so it’s like if Cursor can meet those needs, I could see myself moving over. I don’t have some sort of obsessed attachment with it. I am curious though that every time I use AI… I think I just have skill issues. I think I’m just so riddled with skill issues when it comes to using AI, I have yet-
I would 100% agree that Cursor seems like such a cool product. I actually think there’s a lot of really neat things coming down with all of that. And I could change from Neovim. I don’t use Neovim because I love Neovim, I use Neovim because I love the instrument I play. And so it’s like if Cursor can meet those needs, I could see myself moving over. I don’t have some sort of obsessed attachment with it. I am curious though that every time I use AI… I think I just have skill issues. I think I’m just so riddled with skill issues when it comes to using AI, I have yet-
ThePrimeagen
I think I’m just so riddled with skill issues when it comes to using AI, I have yet to be able to use it in a way that I really love it.
I think I’m just so riddled with skill issues when it comes to using AI, I have yet to be able to use it in a way that I really love it.
Lex Fridman
We’ll talk about it, but before then-
We’ll talk about it, but before then-
ThePrimeagen
Oh, ball to sit on. I forgot to say that, ball to sit on. Desk needs to be properly heighted. One monitor. Eyes should be two-thirds way up the screen. I don’t like to turn my head. I prefer my hands in a pistol neutral position. And there we go.
Oh, ball to sit on. I forgot to say that, ball to sit on. Desk needs to be properly heighted. One monitor. Eyes should be two-thirds way up the screen. I don’t like to turn my head. I prefer my hands in a pistol neutral position. And there we go.
Lex Fridman
A ball to sit on. Yoga ball.
A ball to sit on. Yoga ball.
ThePrimeagen
Yoga ball.
Yoga ball.
Lex Fridman
What’s that about?
What’s that about?
ThePrimeagen
It just helps just maintain good posture, because when I have something to lean against, I do this.
It just helps just maintain good posture, because when I have something to lean against, I do this.
Lex Fridman
You’re for hours sitting without… Wait, what are you doing?
You’re for hours sitting without… Wait, what are you doing?
ThePrimeagen
I sit on the ball, and then I bounce.
I sit on the ball, and then I bounce.
Lex Fridman
Is your back leaning on a thing?
Is your back leaning on a thing?
ThePrimeagen
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
ThePrimeagen
Well, how else do you-
Well, how else do you-
Lex Fridman
You’re the only person in the world sitting on a yoga ball as you program for hours. You do realize this, right?
You’re the only person in the world sitting on a yoga ball as you program for hours. You do realize this, right?
ThePrimeagen
It feels great. The problem is whenever I get a back, I just slouch and I find myself just getting uncomfortable. And I’m like, “I’m uncomfortable.” My shoulders are getting goofed up. I’m chicken necking constantly. It’s just like-
It feels great. The problem is whenever I get a back, I just slouch and I find myself just getting uncomfortable. And I’m like, “I’m uncomfortable.” My shoulders are getting goofed up. I’m chicken necking constantly. It’s just like-
Lex Fridman
But you’re able to keep your posture for hours on the yoga ball?
But you’re able to keep your posture for hours on the yoga ball?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. And so I can just do that. And then I find myself, if I slouch, I’m like, “Okay, Nope. Got to get back.
Yeah. And so I can just do that. And then I find myself, if I slouch, I’m like, “Okay, Nope. Got to get back.
Lex Fridman
Do you have incredible back muscles or what?
Do you have incredible back muscles or what?
ThePrimeagen
No. Well, I don’t think it takes incredible back muscles to-
No. Well, I don’t think it takes incredible back muscles to-
Lex Fridman
Keep posture.
Keep posture.
ThePrimeagen
… remain upright. Yeah, I think that’s a pretty basic human function. I would not consider myself a strong person.
… remain upright. Yeah, I think that’s a pretty basic human function. I would not consider myself a strong person.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Basic human function. I don’t know.
Yeah. Basic human function. I don’t know.
ThePrimeagen
Facts and logic.
Facts and logic.
Lex Fridman
Okay, cool. With one screen. Neovim. What operating system?
Okay, cool. With one screen. Neovim. What operating system?
ThePrimeagen
Linux, just because I want a good window manager. That’s the whole press one button, bring up Chrome. I just use i3. I’m sure I could use something better than i3. People always tell me all these window managers are really great. But I just have those three screens I switch between, so it doesn’t really… I don’t really care what I use, just long as I can press one button and go.
Linux, just because I want a good window manager. That’s the whole press one button, bring up Chrome. I just use i3. I’m sure I could use something better than i3. People always tell me all these window managers are really great. But I just have those three screens I switch between, so it doesn’t really… I don’t really care what I use, just long as I can press one button and go.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’m the same, so half and half. Half Linux, the other half Windows with Linux, meaning WSL. What’s that? Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Yeah, I’m the same, so half and half. Half Linux, the other half Windows with Linux, meaning WSL. What’s that? Windows Subsystem for Linux.
ThePrimeagen
Weasel.
Weasel.
Lex Fridman
Weasel. See, no, there’s got to be a better one that’s more positive. Weasel just sounds-
Weasel. See, no, there’s got to be a better one that’s more positive. Weasel just sounds-
ThePrimeagen
Seems right up Microsoft’s alley. That seems perfect.
Seems right up Microsoft’s alley. That seems perfect.
Lex Fridman
People often accuse me of being a shill for somebody, sometimes dictators. If I’m a shill for anybody, it’s for Windows. There you go. I get paychecks every week from-
People often accuse me of being a shill for somebody, sometimes dictators. If I’m a shill for anybody, it’s for Windows. There you go. I get paychecks every week from-
ThePrimeagen
Dang. Bought by Bill Gates.
Dang. Bought by Bill Gates.
Lex Fridman
Well, he’s not Microsoft anymore.
Well, he’s not Microsoft anymore.
ThePrimeagen
I know.
I know.
Lex Fridman
Developers, developers, develop. No, I’m just joking. I think, man, I need to try Mac. I need to try. I’m surrounded by people with iPhones. I use Android.
Developers, developers, develop. No, I’m just joking. I think, man, I need to try Mac. I need to try. I’m surrounded by people with iPhones. I use Android.
ThePrimeagen
I use the Android.
I use the Android.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. There you go. See? Oh.
Yeah. There you go. See? Oh.
ThePrimeagen
We’re losers together.
We’re losers together.
Lex Fridman
Losers on a sinking ship. Okay, just to stay on Neovim for a sec and to give love and a shout-out to your friend, Teej.
Losers on a sinking ship. Okay, just to stay on Neovim for a sec and to give love and a shout-out to your friend, Teej.
ThePrimeagen
He Streams, by the way.
He Streams, by the way.
Lex Fridman
He’s a streamer. And I subscribed. And I’ve been enjoying it. My allegiance is slowly shifting from you to him. The quality is far superior with him, the looks, the intelligence, the skillset, everything, just far superior. No. Okay, he-
He’s a streamer. And I subscribed. And I’ve been enjoying it. My allegiance is slowly shifting from you to him. The quality is far superior with him, the looks, the intelligence, the skillset, everything, just far superior. No. Okay, he-
ThePrimeagen
You know you’re making his day.
You know you’re making his day.
Lex Fridman
All right. He mentioned that he loves Neovim because it gives him the ability to eliminate having to do things he doesn’t like. That’s just a nice way to frame what this automation process that you described of automating a way, assigning shortcuts to things that are painful, that procedure. I wonder if you agree with that.
All right. He mentioned that he loves Neovim because it gives him the ability to eliminate having to do things he doesn’t like. That’s just a nice way to frame what this automation process that you described of automating a way, assigning shortcuts to things that are painful, that procedure. I wonder if you agree with that.
ThePrimeagen
Fully agree. We have very similar mentalities when it comes to usage of Neovim, why people should use it, all that kind of stuff, and how to even use it well. He definitely takes it probably to a further degree. He spends more time automating and all that. I don’t necessarily derive a lot of joy from getting the perfect setup. But a lot to learn from. He’s very, very good at what he does. He’s 30 years old, been programming for not too many years, and he is one of the most talented developers for sure. It’s very shocking to see how smart someone can be.
Fully agree. We have very similar mentalities when it comes to usage of Neovim, why people should use it, all that kind of stuff, and how to even use it well. He definitely takes it probably to a further degree. He spends more time automating and all that. I don’t necessarily derive a lot of joy from getting the perfect setup. But a lot to learn from. He’s very, very good at what he does. He’s 30 years old, been programming for not too many years, and he is one of the most talented developers for sure. It’s very shocking to see how smart someone can be.
Lex Fridman
People should check him out at teej_dv. Teej.
People should check him out at teej_dv. Teej.
ThePrimeagen
DV. His last name is DeVries. DeVries.
DV. His last name is DeVries. DeVries.
Lex Fridman
Oh, it’s not developer. Okay, cool.
Oh, it’s not developer. Okay, cool.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, yeah, it’s just TJ. That’s just his name just spelled fun.
Yeah, yeah, it’s just TJ. That’s just his name just spelled fun.
Lex Fridman
All right, Teej. What do you love about him?
All right, Teej. What do you love about him?
ThePrimeagen
Wow. How much did he pay you to ask these questions?
Wow. How much did he pay you to ask these questions?
Lex Fridman
Thousands of dollars. Thousands.
Thousands of dollars. Thousands.
ThePrimeagen
Just so many dollars.
Just so many dollars.
Lex Fridman
I can’t even count that many dollars.
I can’t even count that many dollars.
ThePrimeagen
Trust. Obviously trust is the biggest thing, especially in the, quote, unquote, “streaming” YouTube world, if you will. It’s very easy to find people that will want to be a part of stuff. People tend to latch onto things, and it’s very hard to find someone that you can really, really trust. And so he’s just somebody whom I can genuinely trust. He will always tell the truth. He’s all the right things for a good friend in this kind of endeavor.
Trust. Obviously trust is the biggest thing, especially in the, quote, unquote, “streaming” YouTube world, if you will. It’s very easy to find people that will want to be a part of stuff. People tend to latch onto things, and it’s very hard to find someone that you can really, really trust. And so he’s just somebody whom I can genuinely trust. He will always tell the truth. He’s all the right things for a good friend in this kind of endeavor.
Lex Fridman
As a good friend, he told me questions I could backstab you with.
As a good friend, he told me questions I could backstab you with.
ThePrimeagen
Okay, I hate him. I forgot how much I don’t trust him.
Okay, I hate him. I forgot how much I don’t trust him.
Lex Fridman
Speaking of a harpoon, you mentioned it. He said to ask you basically how many years or decades it’s going to take to transition to Harpoon 2 to actually release it, develop it, and so on. Can you describe what Harpoon is and why your seem to be incapable of finishing a single project?
Speaking of a harpoon, you mentioned it. He said to ask you basically how many years or decades it’s going to take to transition to Harpoon 2 to actually release it, develop it, and so on. Can you describe what Harpoon is and why your seem to be incapable of finishing a single project?
ThePrimeagen
That was a lovely framed question. Harpoon 2 is actually done. This is what I did: To avoid the swirl in the thousands of questions I will inevitably get, I kept the master branch as Harpoon 1, and I’ve kept Harpoon 2 as Harpoon 2 branch. And people that don’t read the read me to say that I just use Harpoon 2 now, that’s their fault. That’s it. I really don’t like answering hundreds of questions about open source stuff. I used to love doing open source and all that, but I got my soul crushed during the Falcor years, and so I guess I’m just allergic to being a really active maintainer.
That was a lovely framed question. Harpoon 2 is actually done. This is what I did: To avoid the swirl in the thousands of questions I will inevitably get, I kept the master branch as Harpoon 1, and I’ve kept Harpoon 2 as Harpoon 2 branch. And people that don’t read the read me to say that I just use Harpoon 2 now, that’s their fault. That’s it. I really don’t like answering hundreds of questions about open source stuff. I used to love doing open source and all that, but I got my soul crushed during the Falcor years, and so I guess I’m just allergic to being a really active maintainer.
I build everything just for me. Harpoon’s just literally just built for me. I spent three months trying to figure out the most optimal navigation for files, and that’s what I came up with. Harpoon, it’s a take on alternate file. If you’re familiar with the alternate file, typically you’ll have this in all editors where you can go back to the file you were just in. And so that means you can have effectively two files you swap back and forth in. You’ve probably used it a bunch; really fast way to navigate. Pretty nice thing to do. I want alternate file, but three of them or four of them, and so that’s all Harpoon is is just being able to pin a file. And so I have one button to press to go to a file, another for another, another for another. And so I can have up to four. I just had my four power fingers. For Dvorak, what is that? That’s HTNS. If I go Ctrl H, T, N, or S, it goes to one of the four files. And that’s it. That’s all it is.
And you can technically make it so you can add in functions and be able to execute things externally. You can open up terminals, you can send requests off to servers. You can do anything you want with it, I just have it primarily designed for opening files.
Lex Fridman
Since you mentioned it, what keyboard layout do you use? You use Dvorak?
Since you mentioned it, what keyboard layout do you use? You use Dvorak?
ThePrimeagen
I use Dvorak, but I used a custom version of Dvorak. The reason why I used it is in 2017, we are just having my second kid, it was Christmas and I’m having so much pain in my arm and I’m sitting there freaking out like, “Oh my gosh, is this the end of my career? Am I done programming? Is this all over?” And so I decided that I was going to create my own keyboard layout optimized to prevent the pain that I’m experiencing, so I used to Dvorak as the base and then laid out the symbols in a symmetrical, reasonable way so that it’s opening, closing, opening, closing, opening, closing. And they all are right here. I actually have to hold shift to press a number. Symbols are actually my first thing I get to press. And so it’s very optimized for a laptop keyboard layout so I can use my laptop in a very efficient, nice way. That’s how I got started on Dvorak and all that. I wouldn’t actually recommend it because I didn’t have a Kinesis at the time. I didn’t even know Kinesis existed at that time. And so when I discovered Kinesis in also 2017, that’s when I was like, “Oh, okay.”
I use Dvorak, but I used a custom version of Dvorak. The reason why I used it is in 2017, we are just having my second kid, it was Christmas and I’m having so much pain in my arm and I’m sitting there freaking out like, “Oh my gosh, is this the end of my career? Am I done programming? Is this all over?” And so I decided that I was going to create my own keyboard layout optimized to prevent the pain that I’m experiencing, so I used to Dvorak as the base and then laid out the symbols in a symmetrical, reasonable way so that it’s opening, closing, opening, closing, opening, closing. And they all are right here. I actually have to hold shift to press a number. Symbols are actually my first thing I get to press. And so it’s very optimized for a laptop keyboard layout so I can use my laptop in a very efficient, nice way. That’s how I got started on Dvorak and all that. I wouldn’t actually recommend it because I didn’t have a Kinesis at the time. I didn’t even know Kinesis existed at that time. And so when I discovered Kinesis in also 2017, that’s when I was like, “Oh, okay.”
Lex Fridman
Would you recommend Kinesis to people?
Would you recommend Kinesis to people?
ThePrimeagen
I’m technically sponsored by Kinesis, so it’s hard for someone to believe someone that’s sponsored by it. But I did use it before I ever became sponsored. They’re the only sponsor that I reached out to and said, “I need a sponsorship from you. I’m going to use you either way. You can say no, but I really love it.” And for the first three years of using Kinesis, they gave me free Kinesises, Kenisi, as my sponsorship.
I’m technically sponsored by Kinesis, so it’s hard for someone to believe someone that’s sponsored by it. But I did use it before I ever became sponsored. They’re the only sponsor that I reached out to and said, “I need a sponsorship from you. I’m going to use you either way. You can say no, but I really love it.” And for the first three years of using Kinesis, they gave me free Kinesises, Kenisi, as my sponsorship.
Lex Fridman
Kenisi. Yeah, I’m always torn. I tried to leave so many times.
Kenisi. Yeah, I’m always torn. I tried to leave so many times.
ThePrimeagen
You can’t. It’s too good.
You can’t. It’s too good.
Lex Fridman
But, see, I have this absurd situation of traveling with it.
But, see, I have this absurd situation of traveling with it.
ThePrimeagen
I relate.
I relate.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I’m literally going to the war zone in Ukraine, I have a Kinesis keyboard, a laptop, and just a few other small things and that’s it. And it’s like is Kinesis keyboard really going to be 30% of volume that you’re bringing to a war zone? But-
Yeah. I’m literally going to the war zone in Ukraine, I have a Kinesis keyboard, a laptop, and just a few other small things and that’s it. And it’s like is Kinesis keyboard really going to be 30% of volume that you’re bringing to a war zone? But-
ThePrimeagen
Looks like the answer is yes.
Looks like the answer is yes.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Do you really derive that much value? I think it’s probably spiritual or psychological for me. It feels like home. There’s comfort associated with it. I try to leave.
Yeah. Do you really derive that much value? I think it’s probably spiritual or psychological for me. It feels like home. There’s comfort associated with it. I try to leave.
ThePrimeagen
I love this experience. It’s like a relationship you have with the thing.
I love this experience. It’s like a relationship you have with the thing.
Lex Fridman
It is. But I’m trying to figure out if it’s a toxic relationship or not. I think it’s mostly love. I think it’s love. Like all relationship, there’s some push and pull complications, but-
It is. But I’m trying to figure out if it’s a toxic relationship or not. I think it’s mostly love. I think it’s love. Like all relationship, there’s some push and pull complications, but-
ThePrimeagen
They say that distance makes the heart grow fonder, so maybe sometimes the Kinesis keyboard needs to stay at home and the laptop keyboard can be the one so that your heart grows even more fond and that connection grows even deeper.
They say that distance makes the heart grow fonder, so maybe sometimes the Kinesis keyboard needs to stay at home and the laptop keyboard can be the one so that your heart grows even more fond and that connection grows even deeper.
Lex Fridman
I already miss it as you say it, so I don’t know. I think it’s coming along to all the trips. If it breaks down, though… I was worried that Kinesis was shut down as a company. I’m like, what’s the business model here? Who actually uses these keyboards? But apparently they’re still going strong.
I already miss it as you say it, so I don’t know. I think it’s coming along to all the trips. If it breaks down, though… I was worried that Kinesis was shut down as a company. I’m like, what’s the business model here? Who actually uses these keyboards? But apparently they’re still going strong.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. Who uses these keyboards? As you use the keyboard “I have to take it with me everywhere.” I wonder who uses these keyboards.
Yeah. Who uses these keyboards? As you use the keyboard “I have to take it with me everywhere.” I wonder who uses these keyboards.
Coffee
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yep. I should mention that one of the things when I first became a fan of yours, I heard you talk about coffee and term… I still don’t, by the way, understand what you’re even talking about. I need to actually use it. But you run, amongst many things, a coffee company. Man, this smells so good. This one is dark mode, dark roast, whole coffee beans. There is seg origin, dash, dash location. Brazil.
Yeah. Yep. I should mention that one of the things when I first became a fan of yours, I heard you talk about coffee and term… I still don’t, by the way, understand what you’re even talking about. I need to actually use it. But you run, amongst many things, a coffee company. Man, this smells so good. This one is dark mode, dark roast, whole coffee beans. There is seg origin, dash, dash location. Brazil.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff on there.
Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff on there.
Lex Fridman
Stuff on there that’s very devy. Shop, server, web. Can you legit, as such, order coffee via SSH?
Stuff on there that’s very devy. Shop, server, web. Can you legit, as such, order coffee via SSH?
ThePrimeagen
As of right now, it’s the only way you can get the coffee is via SSH. Okay, can I just origin, origin story you?
As of right now, it’s the only way you can get the coffee is via SSH. Okay, can I just origin, origin story you?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right, I was going to do some kind of command line. Command to request or dash dash help or something or-
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right, I was going to do some kind of command line. Command to request or dash dash help or something or-
ThePrimeagen
Command coffee?
Command coffee?
Lex Fridman
Command coffee.
Command coffee.
ThePrimeagen
Okay. TJ and I, again, same Teej, Teej TV, about… By the way, very amazing designs done by David Hill. They’re very, very good. Let me give the basic ideas. It must’ve been about a year and a half ago, TJ and I were talking like, “Hey, every one of these people that have some sort of following, some sort of online presence, they’re always selling a thing,” but I got nothing to sell. I don’t really want to do merch. I’ve never really enjoyed doing merch. I just find that, I don’t know, it’s just not as much fun for me.
Okay. TJ and I, again, same Teej, Teej TV, about… By the way, very amazing designs done by David Hill. They’re very, very good. Let me give the basic ideas. It must’ve been about a year and a half ago, TJ and I were talking like, “Hey, every one of these people that have some sort of following, some sort of online presence, they’re always selling a thing,” but I got nothing to sell. I don’t really want to do merch. I’ve never really enjoyed doing merch. I just find that, I don’t know, it’s just not as much fun for me.
Lex Fridman
Don’t want to have a tequila?
Don’t want to have a tequila?
ThePrimeagen
I don’t want a tequila. I want something that-
I don’t want a tequila. I want something that-
Lex Fridman
Like The Rock.
Like The Rock.
ThePrimeagen
And I also want something that I really don’t feel bad about selling. There’s a lot of people that will go on the internet and they’ll shill for a whole bunch of products like, “Oh, okay, try this, try this.” And this is why I’ve only ever really done Kinesis is because it’s like, well, I can point to something that was really bad in my life, I was very scared, and now it’s not bad anymore. It’s like, okay, that one made sense. But everything else always has been… It’s harder for me. And so we just talked for so long, and we love Neovim, so we’re just like, “Why haven’t we could do something from Neovim?” And we’re laughing about that, ordering from Neovim is just so ridiculous.
And I also want something that I really don’t feel bad about selling. There’s a lot of people that will go on the internet and they’ll shill for a whole bunch of products like, “Oh, okay, try this, try this.” And this is why I’ve only ever really done Kinesis is because it’s like, well, I can point to something that was really bad in my life, I was very scared, and now it’s not bad anymore. It’s like, okay, that one made sense. But everything else always has been… It’s harder for me. And so we just talked for so long, and we love Neovim, so we’re just like, “Why haven’t we could do something from Neovim?” And we’re laughing about that, ordering from Neovim is just so ridiculous.
And then at some point, we’re just like, “Well, wait a second. And maybe we could do coffee. Every developer loves coffee. Maybe we could figure out this coffee business.” And so I had a good friend named Dax, THDXR. Dax, yeah, Dax. The most sassiest man alive.
Lex Fridman
Sassiest?
Sassiest?
ThePrimeagen
Oh yeah, he has a lot of sass.
Oh yeah, he has a lot of sass.
Lex Fridman
Beard?
Beard?
ThePrimeagen
Yep, he has a beard. He does SST. He does a lot of stuff. Very, very talented. We’ll call him DevOps engineer. He’s more than that. But very talented guy. Him and another person named Adamdotdev, vegan, by the way, great guy. We take him to Korean barbecue all the time. He eats nothing.
Yep, he has a beard. He does SST. He does a lot of stuff. Very, very talented. We’ll call him DevOps engineer. He’s more than that. But very talented guy. Him and another person named Adamdotdev, vegan, by the way, great guy. We take him to Korean barbecue all the time. He eats nothing.
Lex Fridman
That’s great.
That’s great.
ThePrimeagen
And Liz, she has been super important to the terminal coffee company. I think without her, we would not have been able to do what we have done. And then also David Hill, designer, he does Laravel. He designs for Laravel. Very talented designer. And so we all came together. And we were just laughing about how could we do something that’s just ridiculous? And that’s what we came up with. Yeah, there you go. You just open the website. You literally cannot order. We actually do not allow you to order.
And Liz, she has been super important to the terminal coffee company. I think without her, we would not have been able to do what we have done. And then also David Hill, designer, he does Laravel. He designs for Laravel. Very talented designer. And so we all came together. And we were just laughing about how could we do something that’s just ridiculous? And that’s what we came up with. Yeah, there you go. You just open the website. You literally cannot order. We actually do not allow you to order.
Lex Fridman
The website is something that looks like the terminal. Use command below to order your delicious whole coffee bean. SSH terminal.shop.
The website is something that looks like the terminal. Use command below to order your delicious whole coffee bean. SSH terminal.shop.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. You can only SSH into it. You have to copy that command and throw it in there. If you want to add in the little terminal shop for your known hosts, you could do that.
Yeah. You can only SSH into it. You have to copy that command and throw it in there. If you want to add in the little terminal shop for your known hosts, you could do that.
Lex Fridman
How do you handle payment?
How do you handle payment?
ThePrimeagen
Through Stripe. And so one of the things, we’ll be adding a mobile checkout to where I’ll show a QR code in the terminal and you can just check out on your phone, but right now, you enter in your credentials, it goes to Stripe.
Through Stripe. And so one of the things, we’ll be adding a mobile checkout to where I’ll show a QR code in the terminal and you can just check out on your phone, but right now, you enter in your credentials, it goes to Stripe.
Lex Fridman
Via all terminal, like SSH.
Via all terminal, like SSH.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, SSH, obviously it stands for Secure Shell. It uses elliptical quantum safe algorithms to ensure that your data’s not being intercepted.
Yeah, SSH, obviously it stands for Secure Shell. It uses elliptical quantum safe algorithms to ensure that your data’s not being intercepted.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but does he use AI?
Yeah, but does he use AI?
ThePrimeagen
I’m pretty sure Dax uses AI. That-
I’m pretty sure Dax uses AI. That-
Lex Fridman
You said quantum, so I don’t know.
You said quantum, so I don’t know.
ThePrimeagen
Quantum AI?
Quantum AI?
Lex Fridman
Can this-
Can this-
ThePrimeagen
Fusion quantum AI?
Fusion quantum AI?
Lex Fridman
Can this even be a company if it’s not using AI?
Can this even be a company if it’s not using AI?
ThePrimeagen
We have some crypto chains with some quantum AI that’s powered by Fusion, so it’s pretty wild. Anyway, yeah, we just came together where we thought, what is the… That was from the Mike Tyson fight. It was literally that night Mike Tyson kissed the reporter and then walked out without any clothes. We did an ad for somebody.
We have some crypto chains with some quantum AI that’s powered by Fusion, so it’s pretty wild. Anyway, yeah, we just came together where we thought, what is the… That was from the Mike Tyson fight. It was literally that night Mike Tyson kissed the reporter and then walked out without any clothes. We did an ad for somebody.
But we decided to make a coffee shop, and then we thought instead of just making it Neovim, what if we made it from SSH? Because everybody has SSH. You have VS Code. Launch VS Code. You can order coffee from within VS Code. Because your little bottom terminal that has access to SSH, bada bing, bada boom. It’s fun. And so we really-
Lex Fridman
I love this.
I love this.
ThePrimeagen
We just wanted to do something where there’s no level and there’s no world that makes me feel bad about selling this in people buying it. It’s good ethical coffee. We developed the entire supply chain and everything. It’s all packaged, it’s all boutique. It’s pretty high-end coffee. It tastes really, really good.
We just wanted to do something where there’s no level and there’s no world that makes me feel bad about selling this in people buying it. It’s good ethical coffee. We developed the entire supply chain and everything. It’s all packaged, it’s all boutique. It’s pretty high-end coffee. It tastes really, really good.
At this point, I don’t like drinking other coffee. I get upset about it because it’s not as good. And so it’s funny that I’ve fallen for my own stuff. I’m high on my own supply pretty hard right now. I just got done ordering 16 bags and gave it out to my family to try to convince them. But it’s just something where it’s like I didn’t sell you a software product that’s going to influence your startup that could potentially lead to disaster, I didn’t convince you to do a bunch of stuff that’s going to change your career, I just said, “Hey, here’s some coffee.” And it’s like a fun experience.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s fun, everything. The humor on it is great. People should go to terminal.shop.
Yeah, it’s fun, everything. The humor on it is great. People should go to terminal.shop.
ThePrimeagen
SSH terminal.shop.
SSH terminal.shop.
Lex Fridman
I’m speaking to people that don’t know what SSH is. And there, you can read the command and then figure out how to use SSH in order to… It’s a kind of documentation, right?
I’m speaking to people that don’t know what SSH is. And there, you can read the command and then figure out how to use SSH in order to… It’s a kind of documentation, right?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
On the website.
On the website.
ThePrimeagen
If you can’t use SSH, you probably should just not worry about buying our coffee. That’s the whole-
If you can’t use SSH, you probably should just not worry about buying our coffee. That’s the whole-
Lex Fridman
Well, you can learn.
Well, you can learn.
ThePrimeagen
You can learn. If you’re active and you’re a computer person, you’d like to launch the terminal and feel like a hacker, go for it. We even have subscriptions.
You can learn. If you’re active and you’re a computer person, you’d like to launch the terminal and feel like a hacker, go for it. We even have subscriptions.
Lex Fridman
What I would love to see… This is how it came up I think on the cursor conversation, is that I would love it if an AI agent did this, like Anthropos computer use or something like that, actually took the action of ordering the coffee while it was programming.
What I would love to see… This is how it came up I think on the cursor conversation, is that I would love it if an AI agent did this, like Anthropos computer use or something like that, actually took the action of ordering the coffee while it was programming.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, like, “Hey, order me some coffee,” and it actually go off. “Give me dark roast.” Order coffee. It could actually go through the whole flow of order.
Yeah, like, “Hey, order me some coffee,” and it actually go off. “Give me dark roast.” Order coffee. It could actually go through the whole flow of order.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the whole flow. But even better, if you didn’t ask it to order coffee, you asked it to do something, and as a tangent, as a side quest it did that. Which is computer use does that. They showed off that it’s able to go to I think Google for some images, take a pause, and then continue doing other stuff. Anyway, yeah, super cool idea. Love it. Speaking of which, let’s talk AI.
Yeah, the whole flow. But even better, if you didn’t ask it to order coffee, you asked it to do something, and as a tangent, as a side quest it did that. Which is computer use does that. They showed off that it’s able to go to I think Google for some images, take a pause, and then continue doing other stuff. Anyway, yeah, super cool idea. Love it. Speaking of which, let’s talk AI.
Programming with AI
ThePrimeagen
All right.
All right.
Lex Fridman
You’ve been both positive and negative on the role of AI in the whole programming software engineering experience. As it stands today, what do you think? What’s your general view about AI? What is it effective at? What is it not so good at?
You’ve been both positive and negative on the role of AI in the whole programming software engineering experience. As it stands today, what do you think? What’s your general view about AI? What is it effective at? What is it not so good at?
ThePrimeagen
Okay, my general view is it comes down to something that’s pretty simple, which is that if you’re doing something in which is very predictable, AI is really nice. When you’re doing something that is just not predictable, AI is not very nice to use. If you’re using anything that’s more cutting edge, AI will not be using it, or AI won’t be very good at doing stuff with it. It’s not great at Zig because Zig is just, say, less documented. It’s really great at TypeScript.
Okay, my general view is it comes down to something that’s pretty simple, which is that if you’re doing something in which is very predictable, AI is really nice. When you’re doing something that is just not predictable, AI is not very nice to use. If you’re using anything that’s more cutting edge, AI will not be using it, or AI won’t be very good at doing stuff with it. It’s not great at Zig because Zig is just, say, less documented. It’s really great at TypeScript.
I think there’s a lot of interesting things that are going to come down through AI that I think a lot of people aren’t really prepared for or thinking through. TJ’s the genesis of this idea, but the idea that I think there’s going to be a lot of market manipulation, if you will, through AI. Meaning, hey, you want to research, say, best woodworking tools. Someone’s going to be buying an ad spot. Someone’s going to be buying premium training data. They’re the ones that get the big boosts in the LLMs. But LLMs don’t really have to market as an advertisement because it’s not really directly an advertisement, they just had a more premium spot, per se, in the training data; a little bit extra learning to it.
It’s like there’s a lot of things about AI that I fear upcoming. A lot of it just comes down to people not learning or making the trade-off where productivity is the only thing that matters. And I don’t think productivity is the only thing that matters. If you want to build something complex and difficult, productivity is not the only thing. You actually are going to have to do deep learning and pursue it beyond the basics.
And so I see AI as this really cool thing. It feels like a magic trick. I remember the first time I used it, I got early access to GitHub Copilot. In fact, Nat Friedman saw my Twitch clip of me asking GitHub for it, and he sent me early access himself. It was awesome. And when I used it, it predicted an if statement correct and my mind was just absolutely blown because I had nothing before then, and now it’s just like first time ever. And I just remember thinking, man, this is going to change programming so much.
And then the more I used it, the more I just… For me personally, I kept introducing bugs, and I couldn’t figure out why. And what I realized is that I developed… I wasn’t copiloting well, I was autopiloting much better. And my ability to read code versus my ability to critically think and write code, they’re definitely different sets of skill levels. I don’t consider as well when I just read code as opposed to what I write code. And so I struggled there.
Lex Fridman
I do think that’s a skill set.
I do think that’s a skill set.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. Skill issue for sure.
Yeah. Skill issue for sure.
Lex Fridman
Skill issue. For people who are not aware, that’s a hashtag thing sometimes used mockingly in this case. There’s several layers mockingly, but also seriously, meaning the criticism is grounded in the fact that you lack the skill versus some kind of fundamental truth. Yes. I think that that’s the reason I use actually Copilot cursor a lot is for developing the skill of editing AI so I can just learn how to do that better and better. Because I think as I do that better and better, I start to utilize AI better. At this time, it is a bit of a boilerplate code thing, but you can do out of the box novel design decisions or tricky design decisions from scratch but fill out stuff using AI and then just learn the skill of modifying.
Skill issue. For people who are not aware, that’s a hashtag thing sometimes used mockingly in this case. There’s several layers mockingly, but also seriously, meaning the criticism is grounded in the fact that you lack the skill versus some kind of fundamental truth. Yes. I think that that’s the reason I use actually Copilot cursor a lot is for developing the skill of editing AI so I can just learn how to do that better and better. Because I think as I do that better and better, I start to utilize AI better. At this time, it is a bit of a boilerplate code thing, but you can do out of the box novel design decisions or tricky design decisions from scratch but fill out stuff using AI and then just learn the skill of modifying.
I personally just… It’s more fun to program with AI. Even when I delete a lot of the code, it’s more fun. It’s less lonely. It’s what I imagine pair programming to be. And I’ve never done it, but it just feels like that friction that you get when you’re staring at an empty thing is not there. Empty function, empty class, it’s just more fun, less lonely.
And I do think that a lot of the easier type of coding, it really helps with like interacting with APIs, basic things that I would usually have to look up to stack overflow for. It’s just really fast at that. As example, just interacting with the YouTube API. The YouTube API documentation is not very good. And you can just load it all in there and ask it to generate a set of functions that access the API, all kinds of read and write operations, and it figures it all out. Well, you do have to read. You have to read and check everything.
And you start to develop the skill of understanding where it misinterpreted the task. What is that skill? I don’t even know. You have to be empathic about what the AI, what its limitations are. A lot of the times that has to do with prompt engineering. You have to at the same time understand what the AI is aware of. What did you actually give it as data to be able to generate the code? A lot of times, we don’t realize that we’re not giving it enough information. Okay, okay, all right. You have to be empathic. Be like, okay, these are the files it’s aware of. This is the specifics of the question you asked it. You have to imagine you’re an intern that doesn’t know anything else.
Oftentimes, we want the AI to just figure out the things that’s left unspoken. But you can’t know those things, you have to specify those things. And so you have to actually be much more deliberate and rigorous in the things you specify, is to spell it out. And so I just have this sea of prompts that I have saved up, and I’m building these library of different templates for prompts and it’s a mess. And I’m sure there’s a lot of developers that have this similar kind of mess.
A lot of it has to do long-term with the tooling that’s going to improve that. One, the systems are going to get much more intelligent when you don’t need the nuance. And two, there’s going to be the tooling that allows you to specify those things and load it in correctly and give all the context that the system needs in order to make the good decisions. And maybe the system asks you follow up questions with, “Here’s things you didn’t make clear,” all that kind of stuff.
A lot of that has to do with the interface, with the actual design of the tools. Like we said with Cursor, it’s going to keep getting better and better and better. My sense is developers in general should be learning this to not be left behind, to see how that can be used as a superpower to boost their productivity, their effectiveness, their joy of programming versus be seen as a competitor to them or something like that.
But for me already, it’s been a big boost to productivity. If you measure the actual how quickly you’re able to get a thing done, it’s been a big… And measured not across minutes and hours but days also. Sometimes there’s things I have to do that are not that important that I’ll just out of procrastination will push off.
ThePrimeagen
I know that.
I know that.
Lex Fridman
And AI helps me actually get it done, because that thing, the empty page, like I mentioned before, it helps me write the thing, get it done, get it tested, ship the thing. Maybe it’s just because it’s just less lonely to work with an AI. I don’t know. I don’t know if any of that made sense, but-
And AI helps me actually get it done, because that thing, the empty page, like I mentioned before, it helps me write the thing, get it done, get it tested, ship the thing. Maybe it’s just because it’s just less lonely to work with an AI. I don’t know. I don’t know if any of that made sense, but-
ThePrimeagen
It all made perfect sense. I really do like that phrase, it makes it less lonely. I think there’s something to that that’s interesting having just some level of interaction that’s not just like an LSP autocomplete, having something that’s actually a little bit more than just that where it actually is thinking through and you can see a different thought and you’re like, “Oh wow, that’s a way different approach than I would’ve taken. Hey, that’s cool. I like these kind things.”
It all made perfect sense. I really do like that phrase, it makes it less lonely. I think there’s something to that that’s interesting having just some level of interaction that’s not just like an LSP autocomplete, having something that’s actually a little bit more than just that where it actually is thinking through and you can see a different thought and you’re like, “Oh wow, that’s a way different approach than I would’ve taken. Hey, that’s cool. I like these kind things.”
And the thing is that I’m not a AI negative person. I can see why people really, really like it. I used Copilot from when Nat gave me the access all the way up until about six months ago. I used it for quite some time. And I really did enjoy the things I used out of it. It did the opposite for me. I felt like I was more reviewing than writing and I felt like I was more just letting things slide where I just didn’t really think too heavily about stuff. And just I wasn’t as engaged. And so I’m like, “Okay, something’s kind wrong here.” And that’s just a me personal thing. I recognize that is not how someone should approach these things. That’s not a good reason for why you should or should not use AI. I just don’t think that that’s right. I could probably correct that and figure out a better way to do it.
I’ve been meaning to have another AI round, and so I’ve been thinking about maybe I just need to spend two weeks in Cursor and just fully embrace what does it mean to be somebody like this? And what can I do with these new powers? Have they improved to the point where they’re actually good? And for me, because a lot of the decisions I make, a lot of the little functions I’m writing, it’s not because trying to write this function to solve this problem, it’s because I’m writing these functions or this set not just to solve this problem but because I know in about another 2,000 lines of code of building all these other things, I’m going to need to start doing this next activity. It’s like I’m trying to really try to chess move myself into the exact things that, as I let things go faster, I fall apart on that chess move. And again, skill issues for on my behalf. And I mean it in the truest sense of the word where it’s like I’m making a critique because I don’t use it well enough.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know if this is a general rule, this is my anecdote data. The better you’re programming, the less you want to use the AI, the more gets in the way. The good programmers-
I don’t know if this is a general rule, this is my anecdote data. The better you’re programming, the less you want to use the AI, the more gets in the way. The good programmers-
ThePrimeagen
It’s fair enough, as far as I can tell.
It’s fair enough, as far as I can tell.
Lex Fridman
The more beginner programmers are much more happy to use AI. When I use AI, it’s for basic for just… I don’t know if there’s a better term. It’s not boilerplate, but it’s pretty easy programming. And that kind of programming is much easier to do. The 10 X, not to use the meme, programmers that I know that are ultra productive and brilliant people, they hate AI. They’re like, “This is nowhere close to what’s needed.” There’s something to that. I still think they should be using AI just for the learning because it’s going to get smarter, it’s going to get better. It’s the same thing, it’s like when you super optimize Neovim or super optimize Emacs, you may not discover new things that are in the pipeline, so it’s always good to be training in that way.
The more beginner programmers are much more happy to use AI. When I use AI, it’s for basic for just… I don’t know if there’s a better term. It’s not boilerplate, but it’s pretty easy programming. And that kind of programming is much easier to do. The 10 X, not to use the meme, programmers that I know that are ultra productive and brilliant people, they hate AI. They’re like, “This is nowhere close to what’s needed.” There’s something to that. I still think they should be using AI just for the learning because it’s going to get smarter, it’s going to get better. It’s the same thing, it’s like when you super optimize Neovim or super optimize Emacs, you may not discover new things that are in the pipeline, so it’s always good to be training in that way.
ThePrimeagen
Let me ask you a question here just for my understanding. You talked about this idea that you have all these LLM prompts, all this big backlog of messy LLM prompts that you have these templates for that you can do various actions. You have these strategies of making itself explain itself and then do the right thing. As far as I can tell, that’s really built into a lot of people.
Let me ask you a question here just for my understanding. You talked about this idea that you have all these LLM prompts, all this big backlog of messy LLM prompts that you have these templates for that you can do various actions. You have these strategies of making itself explain itself and then do the right thing. As far as I can tell, that’s really built into a lot of people.
Well, then you make this phrase where you’re like, but then at some point, the interface is going to get better, and maybe it can do a lot of these things better where I won’t need that. Then my question is, well, is anyone actually falling behind for not using AI then? Because if the interface is going to change so greatly that all of your habits need to fundamentally change and it will be able to clarify and make all those statements, have I actually fallen behind at all? Or will the next gen actually just be so different from the current one that it’s like, yeah, you’re over there actually doing punch card AI right now. I’m going to come in at compiler time AI, so different that it’s like what’s a punch card?
Lex Fridman
Obviously open question. It’s a fascinating one. I personally think, yes, you’re falling behind. Not you, but if you’re not-
Obviously open question. It’s a fascinating one. I personally think, yes, you’re falling behind. Not you, but if you’re not-
ThePrimeagen
It could be me, it could be me.
It could be me, it could be me.
Lex Fridman
… not playing with it, you’re falling behind because the thing I’m doing with the prompts is you’re learning, you’re building up this intuition about how AI works. You’re understanding what is its strengths and weaknesses? Not even the current version, but the next version and so on. What does it mean to teach an AI system about the world? What kind of information does it need to make effective decisions? I think that does transfer to smarter and smarter models. You’ll need to make less rigorous and specific in details instructions over time, but you still have to have that kind of thing.
… not playing with it, you’re falling behind because the thing I’m doing with the prompts is you’re learning, you’re building up this intuition about how AI works. You’re understanding what is its strengths and weaknesses? Not even the current version, but the next version and so on. What does it mean to teach an AI system about the world? What kind of information does it need to make effective decisions? I think that does transfer to smarter and smarter models. You’ll need to make less rigorous and specific in details instructions over time, but you still have to have that kind of thing.
I think it’s a skill of almost empathy with an AI system because it doesn’t know… You know what it’s missing? It’s missing common sense. It’s missing long- term memory. A lot of things, when we talk to other humans, they have a basic common sense about reality, and AI systems often lack that kind of common sense. And they also don’t remember things. You have to realize there’s a constant blank slate happening. It’s almost just a skill of talking to an AI system that I’m training. And by having to write all those prompts and communicating back and forth to understand what kind of prompts work better or not, you build up that intuition. And also just raw the skill of reading somebody else’s code. Maybe for people who work on large teams, that’s a skill that’s already developed. For me, not so much, so learning how to modify the code that somebody else written is a real skill.
And also, the other thing you mentioned, which is considering another perspective on a piece of code is really nice, but it is also a skill to understand, okay, this is what you did. There’s a skill to asking a question that code that’s been generated such that you can have a conversation about the approach that was taken. I think there’s just a lot of subtle, little skills involved in a cooperative endeavor to code, kind of like there was a real skill issue between you and Teej when you guys did the video of two idiots, one keyboard. People should go watch.
Lex Fridman
You guys did the video of two idiots, one keyboard, People should go watch that video, where you guys obviously sucked at it.
You guys did the video of two idiots, one keyboard, People should go watch that video, where you guys obviously sucked at it.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, co-using.
Yeah, co-using.
Lex Fridman
That was pretty cool, which you guys did, which is controlling one Neovim interface from two different keyboards.
That was pretty cool, which you guys did, which is controlling one Neovim interface from two different keyboards.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. And then we each get an allowance of certain characters or motions we could perform.
Yeah. And then we each get an allowance of certain characters or motions we could perform.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And so you both had to communicate together. That’s a real skill. I’m sure you can get super efficient with that, but it just takes time to learn that kind of thing. So yeah, I think there’s some value to it, but I think there’s a learning curve.
Yeah. And so you both had to communicate together. That’s a real skill. I’m sure you can get super efficient with that, but it just takes time to learn that kind of thing. So yeah, I think there’s some value to it, but I think there’s a learning curve.
ThePrimeagen
One thing to be pretty clear is that I actually use AI quite a bit. I just don’t use it for programming. And so one thing I’ve been trying to get it to is to be able to have a long interview or understand what Twitch Chat is saying and become Twitch chat and be able to speak as if it is Twitch chat. Try to learn how to prompt it in different ways. And so I think those things for me are just really fun.
One thing to be pretty clear is that I actually use AI quite a bit. I just don’t use it for programming. And so one thing I’ve been trying to get it to is to be able to have a long interview or understand what Twitch Chat is saying and become Twitch chat and be able to speak as if it is Twitch chat. Try to learn how to prompt it in different ways. And so I think those things for me are just really fun.
I tried to get it to learn how to play tower defense. I made a tower defense game in Zig and then made it play tower defense, and then played a Claude 3.5 against OpenAI. Claude 3.5 would do better during the daytimes, and OpenAI did better during the nighttimes. I don’t know why, I have no idea what was going on there, but one would just start winning and the other one would start losing. It was just very strange. And so it’s just this, I’m learning to prompt well, but I’m learning to prompt in a very different axis. I just don’t find it very useful yet in programming.
Lex Fridman
In programming. And I should also say that I’m using it in every walk of life, in every context. I use that same kind of exploration about prompts and so on, I’m using and learning. I think it legit is a whole field in itself.
In programming. And I should also say that I’m using it in every walk of life, in every context. I use that same kind of exploration about prompts and so on, I’m using and learning. I think it legit is a whole field in itself.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Prompt engineering and how to interact with AI systems, I think it’s worth the investment. Can you actually speak to that? Because I saw you’re basically pulling from Twitch chat and having an LLM speak. I didn’t realize, you’re not reading the exact chat messages.
Prompt engineering and how to interact with AI systems, I think it’s worth the investment. Can you actually speak to that? Because I saw you’re basically pulling from Twitch chat and having an LLM speak. I didn’t realize, you’re not reading the exact chat messages.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
You’re doing kind of some kind of summarization?
You’re doing kind of some kind of summarization?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. So I ended up making like eight queries off to OpenAI where it’s just like the first thing is like I have it have it like a default personality. “Hey, you’re Randall, the manager, you’re a software engineering manager.” Kind of explain their position, what they like, what they don’t like, and then be like, “These are the list of thoughts you have in your head and you need to talk to this person and ask them a question.”
Yeah. So I ended up making like eight queries off to OpenAI where it’s just like the first thing is like I have it have it like a default personality. “Hey, you’re Randall, the manager, you’re a software engineering manager.” Kind of explain their position, what they like, what they don’t like, and then be like, “These are the list of thoughts you have in your head and you need to talk to this person and ask them a question.”
Lex Fridman
This is amazing.
This is amazing.
ThePrimeagen
“Give me 10 of these responses that you think are probably thoughts that you have and you want to ask.” Make it kind of give you a list and then be like, “Okay.” Then re-prompt and be like, “Hey, you’re Randall, you’re this, this, this, this, this. You have these 10 questions before you and now you need to select one of them and reword it in a way that sounds more like you, the engineering manager.” And I’m constantly trying to make it iterate on itself as opposed to just one-shotting it. And I found if I iterate too much, it loses what it was originally trying to ask if I don’t do it enough and it’s just too degenerate from Twitch chat. And so it’s like I have a lot of improvement to do with this idea-
“Give me 10 of these responses that you think are probably thoughts that you have and you want to ask.” Make it kind of give you a list and then be like, “Okay.” Then re-prompt and be like, “Hey, you’re Randall, you’re this, this, this, this, this. You have these 10 questions before you and now you need to select one of them and reword it in a way that sounds more like you, the engineering manager.” And I’m constantly trying to make it iterate on itself as opposed to just one-shotting it. And I found if I iterate too much, it loses what it was originally trying to ask if I don’t do it enough and it’s just too degenerate from Twitch chat. And so it’s like I have a lot of improvement to do with this idea-
Lex Fridman
Just to clarify, you’re feeding in Twitch chat, “You’re a manager, these are the thoughts you have in your head, pick out some of the most profound thoughts”?
Just to clarify, you’re feeding in Twitch chat, “You’re a manager, these are the thoughts you have in your head, pick out some of the most profound thoughts”?
ThePrimeagen
Effectively. It’s like depending on what I want it to do, I’m trying to work on a better system still for it.
Effectively. It’s like depending on what I want it to do, I’m trying to work on a better system still for it.
Lex Fridman
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
ThePrimeagen
And so it’s like, “How can I give voice to Twitch chat? Can I make it so that I can create adversarial characters against Twitch chat or for Twitch chat? Can I incorporate YouTube?” All that kind of stuff. And how do you describe to an LLM to role-play into its position? And so just thinking through those kinds of things. So maybe I am having some prompt skills, but it’s just not in the coding world yet.
And so it’s like, “How can I give voice to Twitch chat? Can I make it so that I can create adversarial characters against Twitch chat or for Twitch chat? Can I incorporate YouTube?” All that kind of stuff. And how do you describe to an LLM to role-play into its position? And so just thinking through those kinds of things. So maybe I am having some prompt skills, but it’s just not in the coding world yet.
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
ThePrimeagen
One day I’ll get there.
One day I’ll get there.
Lex Fridman
I saw that you were playing with different voices. There was like a sexy voice?
I saw that you were playing with different voices. There was like a sexy voice?
ThePrimeagen
That started off as a French voice-
That started off as a French voice-
Lex Fridman
French voice?
French voice?
ThePrimeagen
… and then it turns out ElevenLabs just cannot do a French lady. And when you do multilingual French lady, she starts talking. It’s like, “What? What is this?”
… and then it turns out ElevenLabs just cannot do a French lady. And when you do multilingual French lady, she starts talking. It’s like, “What? What is this?”
Lex Fridman
I tuned into one of your streams and there’s this lady in a sexualized way.
I tuned into one of your streams and there’s this lady in a sexualized way.
ThePrimeagen
It became too funny. And so we call her Not French Stormy Daniels.
It became too funny. And so we call her Not French Stormy Daniels.
Lex Fridman
Oh, nice.
Oh, nice.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. But I want to go back to the AI and some of the aspects.
Yeah. But I want to go back to the AI and some of the aspects.
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
ThePrimeagen
And so my big gripe with AI has nothing to do with its capabilities. It’s exactly capable, as it should be capable, because that’s what people programmed it as. The things that I really dislike is, A, there’s a whole group of people that are just like, “The end is nigh. AI is here, you just need to stop programming.” I cannot tell you, even you mentioned Peter levels earlier, he made some sort of tweet and one of the person’s responses was, “No one in 2025 or whatever should be acquiring hard skills. You should rely on everything for the AI effectively.” And it’s just like these are really damning pieces of advice for young people. Young people are being told that you should never become an expert in anything, you should always offload.
And so my big gripe with AI has nothing to do with its capabilities. It’s exactly capable, as it should be capable, because that’s what people programmed it as. The things that I really dislike is, A, there’s a whole group of people that are just like, “The end is nigh. AI is here, you just need to stop programming.” I cannot tell you, even you mentioned Peter levels earlier, he made some sort of tweet and one of the person’s responses was, “No one in 2025 or whatever should be acquiring hard skills. You should rely on everything for the AI effectively.” And it’s just like these are really damning pieces of advice for young people. Young people are being told that you should never become an expert in anything, you should always offload.
And the problem is that anyone worth any of their salt will tell you that AI, though can produce code, is going to get it wrong in a huge number of cases. And as the code becomes bigger or more complex or more input, it’s going to just start kind of sloshing back and forth between bugs. And so if you don’t have those hard skills and you’re not ultimately the driver at the end of the day, you’re going to really find some hard times, and your ability to progress will be directly bound to how good the LLMs are. So if you believe that the LLMs will be vastly superior to humans in the next year, maybe that’s a good bet. But if they aren’t, then your skill ceiling is bound to whatever they are.
And even beyond that, there’s just a level of information problem, which is like, “Do we even have enough compute power to be able to solve things at this real scale?” And even if we did, if everybody started using it right now, “Do we even have the compute power for everybody to use it right now?” There’s a lot of kind of bounding questions, there’s privacy concerns, and I just don’t want people to make the immediate, or what appears to be the obvious choice, where you don’t need hard skills, you don’t need these things, we just need to only think creatively. It’s like, no, I don’t think so. I think these hard skills are going to be around for quite some time even with a massive improvement in the AI, you’re going to really be needed to step in regularly for quite some time as far as I can tell.
Lex Fridman
But I also think even on top of that, just even acquiring the hard skills or whether that means, programming from scratch, for example, in the context of programming, that’s going to make you better at steering the AI, not just correcting the AI, but steering the AI. I think there is some kind of, if you know how a computer works, you can program Python better. It’s maybe counterintuitive, but if you know the low level abstractions, some intuition around that, you can steer the high level abstractions better.
But I also think even on top of that, just even acquiring the hard skills or whether that means, programming from scratch, for example, in the context of programming, that’s going to make you better at steering the AI, not just correcting the AI, but steering the AI. I think there is some kind of, if you know how a computer works, you can program Python better. It’s maybe counterintuitive, but if you know the low level abstractions, some intuition around that, you can steer the high level abstractions better.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
But that just seems to be the case. Unless of course AI becomes like truly super intelligent like many levels above, but it’s very unlikely in the short term. And in the long term it’s still good as it gets better and better and better to be able to ride the wave of the improvement.
But that just seems to be the case. Unless of course AI becomes like truly super intelligent like many levels above, but it’s very unlikely in the short term. And in the long term it’s still good as it gets better and better and better to be able to ride the wave of the improvement.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I’m on that team very much so.
Yeah, I’m on that team very much so.
Lex Fridman
A lot of people have written to me, I think a lot of developers, programmers are really concerned about the future of their profession in the context of quickly improving AI systems. So do you think AI will eventually replace programmers?
A lot of people have written to me, I think a lot of developers, programmers are really concerned about the future of their profession in the context of quickly improving AI systems. So do you think AI will eventually replace programmers?
ThePrimeagen
The hard part about that phrase is you use the term eventually, meaning do I think in five years, 10 years, a hundred years? What does that term actually mean? I think at some point if all things continue at the current rate of improvement, there does come a point where programming as a hard skill does become unnecessary. At some eventual point, way, way down the road, yes. I don’t know what that point looks like. I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I don’t even attempt to make predictions about that. But there are still some leaps and bounds we need to make.
The hard part about that phrase is you use the term eventually, meaning do I think in five years, 10 years, a hundred years? What does that term actually mean? I think at some point if all things continue at the current rate of improvement, there does come a point where programming as a hard skill does become unnecessary. At some eventual point, way, way down the road, yes. I don’t know what that point looks like. I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I don’t even attempt to make predictions about that. But there are still some leaps and bounds we need to make.
I mean even just societally, there’s plenty of companies that don’t even allow you to use AI. I mean, there’s just practical problems that exist. So that’s a question I just try not to answer in the direct sense. There will come a day if humanity continues and all things continue in a good positive direction, where a lot of skills will go out the window due to immense computing systems. So, yeah, I’ll give you that one. But it’s just like if I don’t think it has anything in the near term, there’s been no computer improvement up to this date that did not result in more jobs.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that I think it depends how you define programming also, because when the community moves from assembly to C, from C to, I don’t know, Python and JavaScript, that’s evolution. That’s really painful for a lot of people who are used to programming that lower-level language, so there’s going to be a continuous evolution. And maybe that means with AI, there’s going to be more and more evolution towards natural language as part of the tool chain like being able to learn how to write proper prompts. Yeah, because natural language is still a language. And in the long term, it’s possible that a large percentage of programming is natural language. There are probably still going to be some percentage that’s not, that’s going to be extremely structured language.
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that I think it depends how you define programming also, because when the community moves from assembly to C, from C to, I don’t know, Python and JavaScript, that’s evolution. That’s really painful for a lot of people who are used to programming that lower-level language, so there’s going to be a continuous evolution. And maybe that means with AI, there’s going to be more and more evolution towards natural language as part of the tool chain like being able to learn how to write proper prompts. Yeah, because natural language is still a language. And in the long term, it’s possible that a large percentage of programming is natural language. There are probably still going to be some percentage that’s not, that’s going to be extremely structured language.
ThePrimeagen
Right now, I don’t think we are anywhere near natural language being possible because it’s ambiguous. And I think what we’ll end up seeing as people push really hard into this, you’re going to see some sort of pseudo-lang, which is going to be a language for AIs in which you prompt, which is going to be less ambiguous. People keep striving towards the less ambiguous state. And at that point you’re just programming yet another evolution into a higher order language. And perhaps that is a future in which people will have a more terse language. I’m just not sure how much more terse it can get.
Right now, I don’t think we are anywhere near natural language being possible because it’s ambiguous. And I think what we’ll end up seeing as people push really hard into this, you’re going to see some sort of pseudo-lang, which is going to be a language for AIs in which you prompt, which is going to be less ambiguous. People keep striving towards the less ambiguous state. And at that point you’re just programming yet another evolution into a higher order language. And perhaps that is a future in which people will have a more terse language. I’m just not sure how much more terse it can get.
I mean, all I see is that if you say natural language can be used in the pipeline, you’ve just made that many more people can become programmers, which means that much more software will eventually be created, which means there’s that much more software that will need to be maintained, and just becomes a real big snowballing effect.
Lex Fridman
But there’s just people who are programmers who are worried about their jobs. Not a complete replacement, but maybe a rapid evolution of what it means to be a programmer. Like you mentioned, if natural language becomes a way that you can communicate or you can program, that means the pool of people who can get programming jobs changes rapidly, so they’re really concerned.
But there’s just people who are programmers who are worried about their jobs. Not a complete replacement, but maybe a rapid evolution of what it means to be a programmer. Like you mentioned, if natural language becomes a way that you can communicate or you can program, that means the pool of people who can get programming jobs changes rapidly, so they’re really concerned.
ThePrimeagen
And to some extent, because no matter how much we want to say how good AI is, there comes a point where there exists a bug, there exists a large piece of software in which to describe the change requires just pages and pages of description to the point where it is significantly just faster or easier for someone to just whip something out. There’s definitely a balance there, it’s not like a perfect trade-off. And so I think people need to quit worrying and think about how they can integrate it and try, like prove it to themselves. Do they actually make themselves irrelevant?
And to some extent, because no matter how much we want to say how good AI is, there comes a point where there exists a bug, there exists a large piece of software in which to describe the change requires just pages and pages of description to the point where it is significantly just faster or easier for someone to just whip something out. There’s definitely a balance there, it’s not like a perfect trade-off. And so I think people need to quit worrying and think about how they can integrate it and try, like prove it to themselves. Do they actually make themselves irrelevant?
And if you truly make yourself irrelevant, I would challenge you that you’re just doing something that was just slightly too complicated to automate. If you’re only writing just straight up crud apps from backend to front end and simple table displays, yeah, maybe we just couldn’t quite automate that away and now we just have something that can just do that a little bit better, so now that’s automated away, but that’s not really programming. That’s almost like building Legos at that point, where the designs are already set, you just simply have to move piece from bag into correct position.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Is there something you recommend how a developer or programmer could avoid the situation where AI can automate them away?
Yeah. Is there something you recommend how a developer or programmer could avoid the situation where AI can automate them away?
ThePrimeagen
I think that the bigger the project you can manage, the bigger the thing you can build, the more understanding both down and up the stack you can go, the more valuable you become. Because if you understand how to build something in the front end, okay, well, now you kick off some LLM task of some sort, that’s going to go off and make a change to the front end. Okay, while it’s doing that, you can go and kick off something in the CLI tool, you can go and you can go kick off something somewhere else. And as these things come back with results, you can review the results, make sure it’s the way you want it, change it, commit it, go to the next. You only become more, as you said in the end, more productive if we reach this state where it’s truly able to do that.
I think that the bigger the project you can manage, the bigger the thing you can build, the more understanding both down and up the stack you can go, the more valuable you become. Because if you understand how to build something in the front end, okay, well, now you kick off some LLM task of some sort, that’s going to go off and make a change to the front end. Okay, while it’s doing that, you can go and kick off something in the CLI tool, you can go and you can go kick off something somewhere else. And as these things come back with results, you can review the results, make sure it’s the way you want it, change it, commit it, go to the next. You only become more, as you said in the end, more productive if we reach this state where it’s truly able to do that.
Lex Fridman
I think there is like a skill to working together with AI, which is why I’m kind of excited to watch you keep trying to do it.
I think there is like a skill to working together with AI, which is why I’m kind of excited to watch you keep trying to do it.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s like we don’t know how it fits exactly, but it feels like AI should be a boost to productivity. And I definitely think it’s a boost to just the joy of programming. I think there’s a lot of people, yeah, it’s a job, but it’s also a source of meaning, a source of joy. Programming is fun, you’re creating something cool, and also potentially that a lot of people use.
It’s like we don’t know how it fits exactly, but it feels like AI should be a boost to productivity. And I definitely think it’s a boost to just the joy of programming. I think there’s a lot of people, yeah, it’s a job, but it’s also a source of meaning, a source of joy. Programming is fun, you’re creating something cool, and also potentially that a lot of people use.
ThePrimeagen
There’s this one thing that just really frustrates me, and this is kind of going into the Devin category, which is that I want an intern that cares.
There’s this one thing that just really frustrates me, and this is kind of going into the Devin category, which is that I want an intern that cares.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
You don’t get that out of an LLM. It does not care, meaning that I don’t want it just to make a UI for me that displays these icons like I asked, I want it to care, I want it to think about it, I want it to present to me and me being like, “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s great.” And then me to make changes. And then later on it’s like, “Actually, I really rethought about this and actually it’d be way better if we change…” It doesn’t actually care about the craft. But when you work with an intern or you work with somebody else, they care. When they factor something, they actually go over and go, “Oh yeah, this is actually kind of bad. I’m going to come back to that.” They finish this, they go back over here and they make this even better. They actually care about the thing itself. It’s a completely different experience. I just want something that also cares that wants to make the thing better, not just simply accomplish the task.
You don’t get that out of an LLM. It does not care, meaning that I don’t want it just to make a UI for me that displays these icons like I asked, I want it to care, I want it to think about it, I want it to present to me and me being like, “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s great.” And then me to make changes. And then later on it’s like, “Actually, I really rethought about this and actually it’d be way better if we change…” It doesn’t actually care about the craft. But when you work with an intern or you work with somebody else, they care. When they factor something, they actually go over and go, “Oh yeah, this is actually kind of bad. I’m going to come back to that.” They finish this, they go back over here and they make this even better. They actually care about the thing itself. It’s a completely different experience. I just want something that also cares that wants to make the thing better, not just simply accomplish the task.
And I know I’m asking way too much that’s not… Now we’re getting into Blade Runner’s level AI. I just want something that it just feels like I’m missing that, where it’s just like it will complete the task to whatever level it understood what I was prompting, but it doesn’t actually care about it.
Lex Fridman
I mean, there’s so many aspects to caring versus the trivial version of that is a kind of restlessness where you want to keep improving, and I think that is very much AI could do, where it constantly just ask itself, “Can I make this better?” And if it keeps doing that, it probably is going to take it to some ridiculous place, so actually it’s also knowing when to stop. I think developing something you can call taste, which is like trying, working extremely hard, constantly improving until it just feels right. This is it. And I think that is a thing that AI is not good at where it’s just like, “Yes, this is it.”
I mean, there’s so many aspects to caring versus the trivial version of that is a kind of restlessness where you want to keep improving, and I think that is very much AI could do, where it constantly just ask itself, “Can I make this better?” And if it keeps doing that, it probably is going to take it to some ridiculous place, so actually it’s also knowing when to stop. I think developing something you can call taste, which is like trying, working extremely hard, constantly improving until it just feels right. This is it. And I think that is a thing that AI is not good at where it’s just like, “Yes, this is it.”
ThePrimeagen
I’ve had write iterated three times and three was the-
I’ve had write iterated three times and three was the-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s it. We’re now there. And I think ultimately that is what humans are amazing at, which is like knowing when something is right like, “This is it.” Especially as you understand, as you develop taste in a particular industry, in a particular context application, knowing like, “This is it. Yeah, the rounded corners on this button, that’s exactly that. That’s beautiful.” So it’s just a sense of beauty, a sense of function, and efficiency, and so on. Yeah, but humans could do almost like supervision of AI systems in that context.
Yeah, that’s it. We’re now there. And I think ultimately that is what humans are amazing at, which is like knowing when something is right like, “This is it.” Especially as you understand, as you develop taste in a particular industry, in a particular context application, knowing like, “This is it. Yeah, the rounded corners on this button, that’s exactly that. That’s beautiful.” So it’s just a sense of beauty, a sense of function, and efficiency, and so on. Yeah, but humans could do almost like supervision of AI systems in that context.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You’ve ranted about Devin just full of rage.
Yeah. You’ve ranted about Devin just full of rage.
ThePrimeagen
I mean, first off, the people that run Devin are extremely nice. I want that to be understood. I don’t have some sort of upsetness against them or anything like that. Second, Devin, it’s like the full package when it comes to programming. So it’s going to have, you’re going to give it a task and a repo, and it’s going to go through, it’s going to try to understand the repo and the task, make the change to the repo by exploring it, then actually make a commit to GitHub and explain what it did. So hopefully you have this whole offline thing, which is the other part of this AI part that I actually really like, where it’s just like, “Go fix this thing.” Then I can just go and unbroke and fix this one thing and come back and go, “Okay, good enough, merge, boom.” I want that kind of running, being able to complete things.
I mean, first off, the people that run Devin are extremely nice. I want that to be understood. I don’t have some sort of upsetness against them or anything like that. Second, Devin, it’s like the full package when it comes to programming. So it’s going to have, you’re going to give it a task and a repo, and it’s going to go through, it’s going to try to understand the repo and the task, make the change to the repo by exploring it, then actually make a commit to GitHub and explain what it did. So hopefully you have this whole offline thing, which is the other part of this AI part that I actually really like, where it’s just like, “Go fix this thing.” Then I can just go and unbroke and fix this one thing and come back and go, “Okay, good enough, merge, boom.” I want that kind of running, being able to complete things.
I think the ideal solution is that you can start giving it small bugs and it goes and fixes these bugs and you can just come back to these backlog tickets that no one ever does, and it actually starts going through these backlog tickets, and it’s actually a really amazing experience. So I love the idea. I think we can all agree that that sounds great, but every time I’ve done it and I’ve asked it for many and I try to keep narrowing down the problems, the more narrow the problem, the better it does. So if I’m like, “Just add one singular icon. And when it gets clicked, I want you to do this just console, click me. At least create me an SVG and place it so it’s nicely placed.” The more narrow the task, the more likely it’s to be successful.
There’s like a certain level of specifying where if you specify too much, it just like can’t do it. If you specify too little, it just does weird things. So it’s kind of like this very kind of fun, unique way you have to play the balance game. But so far, every time I do these things, I always end up going, “Gosh, I should just get better at Tailwind and write it myself,” because I always go back and I just rewrite it, and then it’s just like, “Dang it. What am I saving at the end?” I feel like I’m not saving anything yet. And it’s just like this, “I want it so bad.” I actually want AI to be great because then I can really go fast. I mean, I can go amazing fast, but then I always just go, “Gosh, I should have just learned Tailwind myself to like the nth degree and just go fast.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. We should also mention that debugging, this might be intuitive or counterintuitive, AI is really bad at.
Yeah. We should also mention that debugging, this might be intuitive or counterintuitive, AI is really bad at.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Like that is one of the hardest… It actually makes you realize how special humans are and how difficult the task of debugging is. Obviously, for trivial debugging, maybe you can find bugs, but that is the real art of programming is finding bugs, logical bugs, extremely complicated rare bugs, edge cases. AI can assist, but man, the hard ones really require so much context, so much experience, so much intuition from, again, operating in a fog full of uncertainty. It’s hard.
Like that is one of the hardest… It actually makes you realize how special humans are and how difficult the task of debugging is. Obviously, for trivial debugging, maybe you can find bugs, but that is the real art of programming is finding bugs, logical bugs, extremely complicated rare bugs, edge cases. AI can assist, but man, the hard ones really require so much context, so much experience, so much intuition from, again, operating in a fog full of uncertainty. It’s hard.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Of course AI could maybe create logs and do traces and do some kind of loading a huge amount of data that humans can’t, but ultimately that just means it could be a better assistant in debugging versus the actual lead debugger.
Of course AI could maybe create logs and do traces and do some kind of loading a huge amount of data that humans can’t, but ultimately that just means it could be a better assistant in debugging versus the actual lead debugger.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I mean, it’d be great if they could. I mean, the more it can do that, the better, because as far as I can tell, correct me where I’m wrong on this, current state debugging is really, it looks at the code, it looks at the bug problem, it just kind of tries to text-predict where it’s most likely accurate, and then just tries to fix that spot. And so it’s like it’s likely this spot, you said admin panel, it’s slightly off, this, this, this. It’s probably this location, which could actually be a really great way to do search, let me do semantic searching, point to me where this is, because maybe that is a really great way to navigate large code bases. It’s like smart intelligent search. As opposed to trying to make it do the thing, ask it to just help you do the thing in pinpointing problems. I’d love to see more of that, because that’s for me is like the exciting part.
Yeah. I mean, it’d be great if they could. I mean, the more it can do that, the better, because as far as I can tell, correct me where I’m wrong on this, current state debugging is really, it looks at the code, it looks at the bug problem, it just kind of tries to text-predict where it’s most likely accurate, and then just tries to fix that spot. And so it’s like it’s likely this spot, you said admin panel, it’s slightly off, this, this, this. It’s probably this location, which could actually be a really great way to do search, let me do semantic searching, point to me where this is, because maybe that is a really great way to navigate large code bases. It’s like smart intelligent search. As opposed to trying to make it do the thing, ask it to just help you do the thing in pinpointing problems. I’d love to see more of that, because that’s for me is like the exciting part.
And there’s this really great article by creator or maintainer of curl, it’s the I in the LLM stands for intelligence. And he writes curl and maintains curl. Curl has been inundated with security problems and all this, and it’s all from LLMs being like, “Oh, I found a security flaw. Here’s the security flaw,” details it out in the code. And he’s just like, “Okay, how did you reproduce that? Show me,” because if you look at the code right here, that’s actually an impossible situation you’re speaking of. And it’s just like going in these circles and security right now is being inundated, these bug bounty programs are being inundated by LLM-submitted responses because they can’t actually analyze the code beyond just like basic text prediction. “Oh, this is a stir copy. Stir copy is commonly referred, blah, blah, blah, blah. Boom, there you go. Here’s the bug.” And it’s just like, “No, that’s actually impossible because the if statement right beforehand leaves the function if the string is too long, so it’s like we don’t even run into this case. It’s impossible what you’re saying.” So debugging is very interesting.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean, that for me would be the big, if it can solve that, not solve that, but improve that, that would be huge, whether it’s agents or just LLMs integrated into IDE.
Yeah. I mean, that for me would be the big, if it can solve that, not solve that, but improve that, that would be huge, whether it’s agents or just LLMs integrated into IDE.
ThePrimeagen
I think there’s this whole idea, I call it a denial of attention. I think there’s an entire attack vector that’s going to be happening. We’re using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, fake all these things to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers. Polykill was the first bug that kind of had this experience, is this denial of attention where an active malicious maintainer just hounded the owner. And then a white knight came out and offered to buy some stuff from under them. And when they bought it, they actually replaced it with a malicious piece of code and then used it. So there’s this whole security world that’s developing around using these in a very aggressive format.
I think there’s this whole idea, I call it a denial of attention. I think there’s an entire attack vector that’s going to be happening. We’re using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, fake all these things to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers. Polykill was the first bug that kind of had this experience, is this denial of attention where an active malicious maintainer just hounded the owner. And then a white knight came out and offered to buy some stuff from under them. And when they bought it, they actually replaced it with a malicious piece of code and then used it. So there’s this whole security world that’s developing around using these in a very aggressive format.
Lex Fridman
I mean, it’s a fascinating world we’re entering into, but I do agree with you that human developers will be a huge part of that world.
I mean, it’s a fascinating world we’re entering into, but I do agree with you that human developers will be a huge part of that world.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That the job might evolve, but it’s going to be there. If I can, I didn’t really look at this page, I thought it would be cool to go over with you. This is, again, the-
That the job might evolve, but it’s going to be there. If I can, I didn’t really look at this page, I thought it would be cool to go over with you. This is, again, the-
ThePrimeagen
Stack overflow, my favorite
Stack overflow, my favorite
Lex Fridman
… Stack Overflow Developer Survey, talking about their sentiment and usage of AI systems. The general sentiment of, yes, 61% say yes, they use it and 25% say no, don’t plan to. So majority use it, majority have a favorable sentiment over it, favorable or very favorable or indifferent. That’s like looks like over 90%.
… Stack Overflow Developer Survey, talking about their sentiment and usage of AI systems. The general sentiment of, yes, 61% say yes, they use it and 25% say no, don’t plan to. So majority use it, majority have a favorable sentiment over it, favorable or very favorable or indifferent. That’s like looks like over 90%.
ThePrimeagen
That’s really surprising that that many people just have no plan in looking into AI. As much as I don’t like using it for coding, I hope one day I can use it more. And so it’s like, to me, I’m always looking for the next thing. I’m just surprised that people are, that, I guess obstinate for it. Obviously, the second one, the AI tool sentiment, it must be only the users who responded to the top two of that first one just given the amount of respondents.
That’s really surprising that that many people just have no plan in looking into AI. As much as I don’t like using it for coding, I hope one day I can use it more. And so it’s like, to me, I’m always looking for the next thing. I’m just surprised that people are, that, I guess obstinate for it. Obviously, the second one, the AI tool sentiment, it must be only the users who responded to the top two of that first one just given the amount of respondents.
Lex Fridman
I wonder if no and don’t plan to are people who have tried it and quickly built up the intuition like, “This really sucks.”
I wonder if no and don’t plan to are people who have tried it and quickly built up the intuition like, “This really sucks.”
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So it could be like experienced programmers. They’re like, “No, this is not making me more productive.” 81% agree that increasing productivity is the biggest benefit that the developers identify for AI tools. Okay, so this is, what are the benefits? Increased productivity, speed up learning, greater efficiency, improve accuracy in coding, make workload more manageable, improve collaborate. Where’s the fun, increased fun? I would say that’s like number one for me.
So it could be like experienced programmers. They’re like, “No, this is not making me more productive.” 81% agree that increasing productivity is the biggest benefit that the developers identify for AI tools. Okay, so this is, what are the benefits? Increased productivity, speed up learning, greater efficiency, improve accuracy in coding, make workload more manageable, improve collaborate. Where’s the fun, increased fun? I would say that’s like number one for me.
ThePrimeagen
Maybe speed up learning is like a subcategory of fun. If you’re able to learn more and be able to become better. To me, that sounds good.
Maybe speed up learning is like a subcategory of fun. If you’re able to learn more and be able to become better. To me, that sounds good.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know. It’s different because productivity is part of fun too. There is just a lightness. I mean, maybe improved collaboration, all of these elements for sure.
I don’t know. It’s different because productivity is part of fun too. There is just a lightness. I mean, maybe improved collaboration, all of these elements for sure.
ThePrimeagen
My time using Copilot, there was certainly a level of wonder that would happen for quite some time where it’s just like, it’s just amazing what it can do.
My time using Copilot, there was certainly a level of wonder that would happen for quite some time where it’s just like, it’s just amazing what it can do.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
I’m just super impressed by what it can do, even though I don’t use it. It’s amazing to me that we have something that can even get that close.
I’m just super impressed by what it can do, even though I don’t use it. It’s amazing to me that we have something that can even get that close.
Lex Fridman
In terms of accuracy of AI tools, only 2.7% highly trust-
In terms of accuracy of AI tools, only 2.7% highly trust-
ThePrimeagen
I would say that you have to be very green to think that you should highly trust an AI output. You should be very skeptical.
I would say that you have to be very green to think that you should highly trust an AI output. You should be very skeptical.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I don’t know where I stand. Probably somewhat distrust. Highly distrust seems aggressive.
Yeah, I don’t know where I stand. Probably somewhat distrust. Highly distrust seems aggressive.
ThePrimeagen
It does seem a little, true. You should always assume that there’s something wrong, and then from there you can go and challenge it.
It does seem a little, true. You should always assume that there’s something wrong, and then from there you can go and challenge it.
Lex Fridman
And then estimation of whether AI can handle complex tasks, most people don’t think it can handle complex tasks. I mean, it seems like people have a good sense of what it’s able to handle and not.
And then estimation of whether AI can handle complex tasks, most people don’t think it can handle complex tasks. I mean, it seems like people have a good sense of what it’s able to handle and not.
ThePrimeagen
I would argue that people don’t have a good grasp of what complex is in programming.
I would argue that people don’t have a good grasp of what complex is in programming.
Lex Fridman
Sure, yeah.
Sure, yeah.
ThePrimeagen
If you say, “Write me quicksort,” some people will think quicksort’s super complex. But I would argue that that’s actually probably the simplest thing you could ask an AI to do. Things that are so well documented, it’s going to do a great job at that.
If you say, “Write me quicksort,” some people will think quicksort’s super complex. But I would argue that that’s actually probably the simplest thing you could ask an AI to do. Things that are so well documented, it’s going to do a great job at that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Probably high-level design decisions, which people don’t even use AI for right now, I guess agents are supposed to be doing that kind of stuff. That’s probably the most difficult thing or the most impactful thing, or the most difficult thing is finding bugs.
Yeah. Probably high-level design decisions, which people don’t even use AI for right now, I guess agents are supposed to be doing that kind of stuff. That’s probably the most difficult thing or the most impactful thing, or the most difficult thing is finding bugs.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
AI tools next year, writing code, and so on.
AI tools next year, writing code, and so on.
ThePrimeagen
Now, this one, the ethics part. I’m actually super curious your take on the ethics. Will we see Europe laying down some new regulations?
Now, this one, the ethics part. I’m actually super curious your take on the ethics. Will we see Europe laying down some new regulations?
Lex Fridman
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
ThePrimeagen
What about artists? What about people that are really… Because the difference between coding and artists is very, very simple. If you gave me a sheet of paper, I could draw you a crab. You go, “That’s a crab.” But you can’t do that with coding. It’s like it’s right or it’s wrong. There’s not a variation of interpretation for what a crab is. It’s like, “No, you cannot make that statement.” It’s very bounded in what it can express. And I could see why artists, that’s a very frustrating point. And then who gets rewarded for all that?
What about artists? What about people that are really… Because the difference between coding and artists is very, very simple. If you gave me a sheet of paper, I could draw you a crab. You go, “That’s a crab.” But you can’t do that with coding. It’s like it’s right or it’s wrong. There’s not a variation of interpretation for what a crab is. It’s like, “No, you cannot make that statement.” It’s very bounded in what it can express. And I could see why artists, that’s a very frustrating point. And then who gets rewarded for all that?
And then there’s like the whole thing with coding and licenses. How much of it is GPL licenses, do you think, they’ve scraped and used as training data? GPL forces open source. What are you going to do with that one? That means your model might need to be open source. OpenAI may have to get forced open, all their previous stuff if there’s any hint of GPL.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s a weird one. That’s a really weird one because most of these models I think are training on data they don’t technically have rights to be training on.
Yeah, that’s a weird one. That’s a really weird one because most of these models I think are training on data they don’t technically have rights to be training on.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, there’s a lot of questions.
Yeah, there’s a lot of questions.
Lex Fridman
There’s an unspoken, it’s a real Wild West.
There’s an unspoken, it’s a real Wild West.
ThePrimeagen
Because you could imagine that, I always use Europe because they tend to have like maybe the most consumer protection laws out there. You could imagine what happens if a law came down that said that if you used a model that produced GPL potential code, you have to open source? How many companies are going to be like, “Oh my gosh”? Like, “You have one year to get rid of all code that was generated that’s potentially GPL-sourced from a model.” You could imagine just the sheer panic that’s going to happen. It’d be a fire sale of code.
Because you could imagine that, I always use Europe because they tend to have like maybe the most consumer protection laws out there. You could imagine what happens if a law came down that said that if you used a model that produced GPL potential code, you have to open source? How many companies are going to be like, “Oh my gosh”? Like, “You have one year to get rid of all code that was generated that’s potentially GPL-sourced from a model.” You could imagine just the sheer panic that’s going to happen. It’d be a fire sale of code.
Advice for young programmers
Lex Fridman
So given all that, can you give advice to young programmers? This is another question from Reddit, the infinite wisdom of Reddit. “What should a person in their early 20s do to move forward in the tech industry?” And this is an interesting addition to the question, “And by doing it, will this be walking on someone else’s path?”
So given all that, can you give advice to young programmers? This is another question from Reddit, the infinite wisdom of Reddit. “What should a person in their early 20s do to move forward in the tech industry?” And this is an interesting addition to the question, “And by doing it, will this be walking on someone else’s path?”
ThePrimeagen
I am going to try to answer that question, I guess the best I can, which I think that if you’re entering into the tech world, one of the hardest pieces of advice that I took a long time to learn was I became enamored and addicted. Obviously, we talked about that I program for way too many hours, forgetting to spend the time I needed with my wife, with my friends, all that stuff, like totally wrapping myself up into one activity. I think though it made me who I am, it was probably an unhealthy activity and probably not a wise activity. And so the best advice I can give is that you got to develop the love, the skill, the desire for it. Whether that’s just only using AI agents, programming yourself, using Zig or programming JavaScript, whatever that flavor is that’s going to get you coming back every single day, getting the reps in the gym, if you will for programming.
I am going to try to answer that question, I guess the best I can, which I think that if you’re entering into the tech world, one of the hardest pieces of advice that I took a long time to learn was I became enamored and addicted. Obviously, we talked about that I program for way too many hours, forgetting to spend the time I needed with my wife, with my friends, all that stuff, like totally wrapping myself up into one activity. I think though it made me who I am, it was probably an unhealthy activity and probably not a wise activity. And so the best advice I can give is that you got to develop the love, the skill, the desire for it. Whether that’s just only using AI agents, programming yourself, using Zig or programming JavaScript, whatever that flavor is that’s going to get you coming back every single day, getting the reps in the gym, if you will for programming.
But also knowing how to value what is valuable and not getting lost in the sauce where you’re just so stuck on trying to make the next greatest startup that you sacrifice your health, you sacrifice your relationships. Or even worse, you sacrifice your own morals to take certain shortcuts that you probably shouldn’t be taking in life to be able to achieve these things, because I’m sure there’s hundreds of horror stories you could hear where people definitely shortcutted their morals for monetary success.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean, the golden handcuffs comfort can destroy the soul in some sense. Yeah, so that’s really important to remember. There’s young people kind of thinking, “Do I even want to be a programmer now?” It seems like AI is getting better and better at programming. If they were trying to make that decision, would you still say, “Yeah, if this is something that fills you with joy”?
Yeah. I mean, the golden handcuffs comfort can destroy the soul in some sense. Yeah, so that’s really important to remember. There’s young people kind of thinking, “Do I even want to be a programmer now?” It seems like AI is getting better and better at programming. If they were trying to make that decision, would you still say, “Yeah, if this is something that fills you with joy”?
ThePrimeagen
I still want my kids to learn how to program if I can answer that, if that’s a good enough answer-
I still want my kids to learn how to program if I can answer that, if that’s a good enough answer-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s a really powerful answer.
Yeah, that’s a really powerful answer.
ThePrimeagen
… in the sense that my kids are decades younger than a young person trying to learn how to program right now. And so I’m hoping that my kid can run and build whatever he wants in Roblox. I’m showing him ChatGPT and be like, “All right, let’s ask questions. How do we do this?” It’s still extremely confusing for him to do all these things. And so it’s like, “Let’s do this.” I want him to learn and be effective, and maybe one day he has to throw away all those skills in 20 years. But I bet you that whatever skills he threw away or whatever hard skills he had to throw away, an entirely new field that none of us have thought about, just like if you would have asked somebody in the ’70s about social networks, they’d be like, “What the heck are you even talking about?” Things will exist in the future that are going to be massively different, and crazy, and exciting.
… in the sense that my kids are decades younger than a young person trying to learn how to program right now. And so I’m hoping that my kid can run and build whatever he wants in Roblox. I’m showing him ChatGPT and be like, “All right, let’s ask questions. How do we do this?” It’s still extremely confusing for him to do all these things. And so it’s like, “Let’s do this.” I want him to learn and be effective, and maybe one day he has to throw away all those skills in 20 years. But I bet you that whatever skills he threw away or whatever hard skills he had to throw away, an entirely new field that none of us have thought about, just like if you would have asked somebody in the ’70s about social networks, they’d be like, “What the heck are you even talking about?” Things will exist in the future that are going to be massively different, and crazy, and exciting.
Lex Fridman
Maybe in virtual reality.
Maybe in virtual reality.
ThePrimeagen
There you go.
There you go.
Lex Fridman
Maybe all of us actually down the line will just be building video games.
Maybe all of us actually down the line will just be building video games.
ThePrimeagen
Just entertainment for all, the brave new world of our world?
Just entertainment for all, the brave new world of our world?
Lex Fridman
Well, I think entertainment is a kind of trivialized version of what a video game could be. It’s like, what is the purpose of life anyway? I mean, it could be a deeply fulfilling video game. It doesn’t have to be just like dopamine rush. It could be educational, it could be scary, it could be challenging, forcing an evolution, the leap into adventure that it makes up a fulfilling life. That could be video games. Who knows? Especially in virtual reality. I tend to… That’s the other thing. I play a lot of video games. I think there’s a lot of room to make video games deeply fulfilling, like there’s a lot of space where that can go.
Well, I think entertainment is a kind of trivialized version of what a video game could be. It’s like, what is the purpose of life anyway? I mean, it could be a deeply fulfilling video game. It doesn’t have to be just like dopamine rush. It could be educational, it could be scary, it could be challenging, forcing an evolution, the leap into adventure that it makes up a fulfilling life. That could be video games. Who knows? Especially in virtual reality. I tend to… That’s the other thing. I play a lot of video games. I think there’s a lot of room to make video games deeply fulfilling, like there’s a lot of space where that can go.
ThePrimeagen
I didn’t know you played a lot of video games, because when I asked you specifically, “Should I play World of Warcraft or do Advent of Code,” you’re like, “Advent of Code, Advent of Code.”
I didn’t know you played a lot of video games, because when I asked you specifically, “Should I play World of Warcraft or do Advent of Code,” you’re like, “Advent of Code, Advent of Code.”
Lex Fridman
Oh, well, that might mean I’ve never played World of Warcraft because there’s certain games I avoid. Fortnite, by the way, I think was one of them because I was worried it’d become too addicted.
Oh, well, that might mean I’ve never played World of Warcraft because there’s certain games I avoid. Fortnite, by the way, I think was one of them because I was worried it’d become too addicted.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
So there’s certain games I just know I won’t get super addicted to. Like for example, I’m terrified of Civilization. I have never played a Civ’s game because I’m worried. I’m worried the dark path in my lead because there’s some games just really pull you in. I’m much better with, that’s why I play Skyrim. I can play these games or a Baldur’s Gate, and moderate how much I play. And they could be like a lifelong companion versus an addiction where it’s like sunrise and you’re like, “What’s happening with my life?” And I find myself naked behind a dumpster somewhere just wondering what happened. Yeah, so that’s how I choose my video games.
So there’s certain games I just know I won’t get super addicted to. Like for example, I’m terrified of Civilization. I have never played a Civ’s game because I’m worried. I’m worried the dark path in my lead because there’s some games just really pull you in. I’m much better with, that’s why I play Skyrim. I can play these games or a Baldur’s Gate, and moderate how much I play. And they could be like a lifelong companion versus an addiction where it’s like sunrise and you’re like, “What’s happening with my life?” And I find myself naked behind a dumpster somewhere just wondering what happened. Yeah, so that’s how I choose my video games.
ThePrimeagen
You’re not the first person who has specifically called out Civilization.
You’re not the first person who has specifically called out Civilization.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
I’ve had more than one person, also very high up in the tech world, be like, “Civilization is my downfall. If I get near that game, I’m done.”
I’ve had more than one person, also very high up in the tech world, be like, “Civilization is my downfall. If I get near that game, I’m done.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
I’ve never even played the game. Now it makes me be like, “Dude, I got to give this a try. That sounds crazy.”
I’ve never even played the game. Now it makes me be like, “Dude, I got to give this a try. That sounds crazy.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And the new one is actually supposed to be-
Yeah. And the new one is actually supposed to be-
ThePrimeagen
Give this a try. That sounds crazy.
Give this a try. That sounds crazy.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And the new one is actually supposed to be really, really good. What were we talking about? Yes. For that same young developer, is there a trajectory through jobs that you could give advice on? So you started out with Schedulicity?
Yeah. And the new one is actually supposed to be really, really good. What were we talking about? Yes. For that same young developer, is there a trajectory through jobs that you could give advice on? So you started out with Schedulicity?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, that was my first full-time…. When I had the government contracting one before, that wasn’t quite full-time. It was in C. It was a lot of fun. And then building my own startup for quite some time. So if you count either of those as full-time, then those would be the full-time. Schedulicity was the official on the docs.
Yeah, that was my first full-time…. When I had the government contracting one before, that wasn’t quite full-time. It was in C. It was a lot of fun. And then building my own startup for quite some time. So if you count either of those as full-time, then those would be the full-time. Schedulicity was the official on the docs.
Lex Fridman
Is there some value to jumping around, working in one company and another to try to figure out what brings you joy?
Is there some value to jumping around, working in one company and another to try to figure out what brings you joy?
ThePrimeagen
I think there’s a lot to that because not every job you’re going to get is going to be great. Now, your first job you could get could make you think you hate programming. It happened, I did an internship at a place and I keep on surprising you with more kind of things I did in the past, did an internship at-
I think there’s a lot to that because not every job you’re going to get is going to be great. Now, your first job you could get could make you think you hate programming. It happened, I did an internship at a place and I keep on surprising you with more kind of things I did in the past, did an internship at-
Lex Fridman
Fuck. You did so many things. It’s incredible.
Fuck. You did so many things. It’s incredible.
ThePrimeagen
… a place called Total Information Management System. Remember when I talked about that hours ago, about healthcare and that and industrial shipping and all that? It was a C-sharp shop. It was so bad that after I did that, I went and changed my major to mechanical engineering first semester in college.
… a place called Total Information Management System. Remember when I talked about that hours ago, about healthcare and that and industrial shipping and all that? It was a C-sharp shop. It was so bad that after I did that, I went and changed my major to mechanical engineering first semester in college.
Lex Fridman
Oh, boy. Oh, boy.
Oh, boy. Oh, boy.
ThePrimeagen
I thought I, “Okay. Actually I like computer science. I hate the programming.” So just because you’ve had a job doesn’t mean it’s going to be the one. And the thing is, here’s the best part though, if you get a job and you like it and you want to do it and it’s exciting, you don’t need to change. I think a lot of people are like, “Oh, I got to find the next thing. I’ve been here for two years.” There’s of this, you got to move around mindset. I don’t think you have to move around. I don’t think it hurts your career. Because if anything, you’ll gain more responsibility and you’ll be able to talk with way more authority. And the next time you interview, you’re going to be way more into like, “Oh yeah, I had to get these X people and these X people to be able to do all this stuff.”
I thought I, “Okay. Actually I like computer science. I hate the programming.” So just because you’ve had a job doesn’t mean it’s going to be the one. And the thing is, here’s the best part though, if you get a job and you like it and you want to do it and it’s exciting, you don’t need to change. I think a lot of people are like, “Oh, I got to find the next thing. I’ve been here for two years.” There’s of this, you got to move around mindset. I don’t think you have to move around. I don’t think it hurts your career. Because if anything, you’ll gain more responsibility and you’ll be able to talk with way more authority. And the next time you interview, you’re going to be way more into like, “Oh yeah, I had to get these X people and these X people to be able to do all this stuff.”
And it’s like you can talk with much more authority if you stay at a place longer. And that’s nothing but benefits in my book. It’s only if you stay at a place because you’re afraid or you don’t want to… You already have something that works for you and you just never want to change and you’re just like, “I get to go in and just be completely mindless.” I think if you go mindless for a couple years, you’ll find yourself… That’s the only real danger. You just come out with nothing at all.
Lex Fridman
Especially when you’re younger, that’s the whole point. You’re like, “Take the risk. Take the leap out to the next thing, to the next thing.” And not for money, but for just personal joy, joy.
Especially when you’re younger, that’s the whole point. You’re like, “Take the risk. Take the leap out to the next thing, to the next thing.” And not for money, but for just personal joy, joy.
ThePrimeagen
And money could get at the end, that’s the best part. When you don’t strive for the money, sometimes the money just shows up anyways.
And money could get at the end, that’s the best part. When you don’t strive for the money, sometimes the money just shows up anyways.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. And some of the, what makes life worth living is the people you work with, a good team. Some of it’s not to be generic, but culture matters. It’s whatever makes you happy. For example, I just had won’t call out places, but there’s certain companies where everybody is very nine to five. And even if the work is exciting, they don’t work hard enough I would say. I’m one of those people that likes to go all out, likes to be surrounded by people who are super passionate. Now to be fair, a lot of them don’t have families or don’t-
Yeah. And some of the, what makes life worth living is the people you work with, a good team. Some of it’s not to be generic, but culture matters. It’s whatever makes you happy. For example, I just had won’t call out places, but there’s certain companies where everybody is very nine to five. And even if the work is exciting, they don’t work hard enough I would say. I’m one of those people that likes to go all out, likes to be surrounded by people who are super passionate. Now to be fair, a lot of them don’t have families or don’t-
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s a fascinating choice. I really don’t want to talk down on any choice like work-life balance or not, I think both are beautiful paths. And if you really derive a lot of value from joy from your work, going all in, at least for some stretch of your life is a beautiful thing to do. Just all out, full-on passion, sacrifice a lot of social life, all that kind of stuff. I don’t know. That could also be beautiful.
It’s a fascinating choice. I really don’t want to talk down on any choice like work-life balance or not, I think both are beautiful paths. And if you really derive a lot of value from joy from your work, going all in, at least for some stretch of your life is a beautiful thing to do. Just all out, full-on passion, sacrifice a lot of social life, all that kind of stuff. I don’t know. That could also be beautiful.
ThePrimeagen
There could be something very, very exciting about that in some sense, especially if you’re building your own thing. I could imagine that would be very exciting. If I was Amazon, Jeff Bezos building Amazon, one could imagine that those early years were probably very rough and the amount of hours he probably put in we’re very, very rough. But I will say that there’s this unique aspect in our culture where we make this as an equal trade-off between family or work, like “Oh, you do or you don’t have to have kids.” And my only real notion with that one is that you will never know your capacity for love until you have kids. You just don’t know. And some people are like, “Oh yeah, but I love my dog.” It’s just like I loved my dogs too. And then I had kids and now my dogs are, “They’re all right. I like them.”
There could be something very, very exciting about that in some sense, especially if you’re building your own thing. I could imagine that would be very exciting. If I was Amazon, Jeff Bezos building Amazon, one could imagine that those early years were probably very rough and the amount of hours he probably put in we’re very, very rough. But I will say that there’s this unique aspect in our culture where we make this as an equal trade-off between family or work, like “Oh, you do or you don’t have to have kids.” And my only real notion with that one is that you will never know your capacity for love until you have kids. You just don’t know. And some people are like, “Oh yeah, but I love my dog.” It’s just like I loved my dogs too. And then I had kids and now my dogs are, “They’re all right. I like them.”
Lex Fridman
I get it.
I get it.
ThePrimeagen
I could come home and I pet Indy and I’m like, “Oh, Indy.” And then I’m just like, “Okay, bye Indy.” I can’t even describe the difference between the two, it’s not even the same. And so that trade-off making is no one can tell you what it’s like because there’s a real reality that’s right now, and I’m sure, I’m 100% positive this is with my wife as well, where if right now we got news that said you have some medical procedure where if we do this, you will die, but your kid will live, there’s not a question in my soul that I wouldn’t do that. If I could look into the future and if I had to die right now knowing that my kids would’ve a better life, they would be happier, they’d be more fulfilled and all those things, I guarantee you either my wife or I would take that every single time.
I could come home and I pet Indy and I’m like, “Oh, Indy.” And then I’m just like, “Okay, bye Indy.” I can’t even describe the difference between the two, it’s not even the same. And so that trade-off making is no one can tell you what it’s like because there’s a real reality that’s right now, and I’m sure, I’m 100% positive this is with my wife as well, where if right now we got news that said you have some medical procedure where if we do this, you will die, but your kid will live, there’s not a question in my soul that I wouldn’t do that. If I could look into the future and if I had to die right now knowing that my kids would’ve a better life, they would be happier, they’d be more fulfilled and all those things, I guarantee you either my wife or I would take that every single time.
It’s just like you’ll never be able to say that about most things. People will jokingly say that until it’s actually on the line. But it’s like with that, you just have this ferociousness. I can break out and sweat thinking about somebody fictionally pushing my kid to the ground, actually get real adrenal responses flowing through my body. So it’s just such a different world and it’s hard to explain. And you could never have convinced me when I was young that it’d be this big.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. I thought I knew. I didn’t know.
Yeah. I thought I knew. I didn’t know.
Lex Fridman
But to add on top of that, some of the most successful people I know, some of the most productive people I know have kids. So I don’t know if it’s even a trade-off. That love you feel, it seems to be a catalyst to make sure you have less time, but you’re going to use that time better to be productive.
But to add on top of that, some of the most successful people I know, some of the most productive people I know have kids. So I don’t know if it’s even a trade-off. That love you feel, it seems to be a catalyst to make sure you have less time, but you’re going to use that time better to be productive.
ThePrimeagen
I would argue that it definitely changed a lot of my life and how I approach problems and everything, in a very different way.
I would argue that it definitely changed a lot of my life and how I approach problems and everything, in a very different way.
Reddit questions
Lex Fridman
Let me ask some random questions from Reddit. On a scale of one to 10, how much do you hate every product Microsoft has ever created and why is it a 10? I think we covered that.
Let me ask some random questions from Reddit. On a scale of one to 10, how much do you hate every product Microsoft has ever created and why is it a 10? I think we covered that.
ThePrimeagen
We haven’t technically covered it.
We haven’t technically covered it.
Lex Fridman
There you go. All right, go ahead. Go ahead.
There you go. All right, go ahead. Go ahead.
ThePrimeagen
Okay.
Okay.
Lex Fridman
Use your time.
Use your time.
ThePrimeagen
The only thing I’ll say is that I don’t like that Microsoft pretends to be the good guy when what they really wanted to get you addicted to their products, to get you to use their products as much as possible so they can extract as much money out of you.
The only thing I’ll say is that I don’t like that Microsoft pretends to be the good guy when what they really wanted to get you addicted to their products, to get you to use their products as much as possible so they can extract as much money out of you.
Lex Fridman
Well, in this world, are there really good guys?
Well, in this world, are there really good guys?
ThePrimeagen
That’s a great point. I would argue Neovim is a great guy. There’s no way they can make money. Justin Keyes is the benevolent dictator and he thinks deeply about the product and tries to make it the best as possible. Whereas something like Microsoft, they made VS Code as a loss leader. Copilot’s probably operating on a loss leader. These things are all getting you so tied into, GitHub, remote workspaces, CI, Copilot, you become this trapped in permanent person and if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you’ll never be able to switch. That’s my only fear is that Microsoft was once accused of EEE and it feels like they’re EEEing again.
That’s a great point. I would argue Neovim is a great guy. There’s no way they can make money. Justin Keyes is the benevolent dictator and he thinks deeply about the product and tries to make it the best as possible. Whereas something like Microsoft, they made VS Code as a loss leader. Copilot’s probably operating on a loss leader. These things are all getting you so tied into, GitHub, remote workspaces, CI, Copilot, you become this trapped in permanent person and if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you’ll never be able to switch. That’s my only fear is that Microsoft was once accused of EEE and it feels like they’re EEEing again.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’m nervous about criticizing a good thing because you could see an incentive to do that good thing, like Google creating all these services that don’t make money like Gmail for example, you can cynically say they’re only doing that to tie you into an ecosystem so they can basically keep you for life. But also it’s awesome that they created Gmail-
Yeah, I’m nervous about criticizing a good thing because you could see an incentive to do that good thing, like Google creating all these services that don’t make money like Gmail for example, you can cynically say they’re only doing that to tie you into an ecosystem so they can basically keep you for life. But also it’s awesome that they created Gmail-
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… and they created an incredible product, so-
… and they created an incredible product, so-
ThePrimeagen
I can side with you on that one. It is a good product. VS Code is a good product.
I can side with you on that one. It is a good product. VS Code is a good product.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
Now, I think don’t put that on the… But it is fine. They did a great job.
Now, I think don’t put that on the… But it is fine. They did a great job.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So there is going to be financial incentives behind some of these companies. And by the way, me defending, not defending, but saying positive things about Microsoft is just so I could talk shit to Prime. But that’s…
Yeah. So there is going to be financial incentives behind some of these companies. And by the way, me defending, not defending, but saying positive things about Microsoft is just so I could talk shit to Prime. But that’s…
ThePrimeagen
I love that by the way.
I love that by the way.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, Linux is my first and last love, it definitely… The spirit of Linux and open source is a beautiful thing so I do think that when you have these large corporations, even when they try to do good, oftentimes the profit imperative just takes over and they can corrupt themselves and Microsoft has a long history of doing just that to themselves.
Yeah, Linux is my first and last love, it definitely… The spirit of Linux and open source is a beautiful thing so I do think that when you have these large corporations, even when they try to do good, oftentimes the profit imperative just takes over and they can corrupt themselves and Microsoft has a long history of doing just that to themselves.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That said, they’ve done, they have you could say for cynical reason because they want to seem like the good guy amongst developers, but they’ve done a lot to support open source. It’s just like, same with Meta, Meta has done insane amount-
That said, they’ve done, they have you could say for cynical reason because they want to seem like the good guy amongst developers, but they’ve done a lot to support open source. It’s just like, same with Meta, Meta has done insane amount-
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… to support open source. You can say, actually for that one, I don’t know if I can even make a financial or a cynical case for why Meta is open sourcing Llama and these-
… to support open source. You can say, actually for that one, I don’t know if I can even make a financial or a cynical case for why Meta is open sourcing Llama and these-
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, that one’s confusing. It just seems great.
Yeah, that one’s confusing. It just seems great.
Lex Fridman
Maybe for hiring. But no, I think that’s legit, just an ethical, really powerful decision. And sometimes these companies, because they have a lot of cash, can make the right, do the right thing.
Maybe for hiring. But no, I think that’s legit, just an ethical, really powerful decision. And sometimes these companies, because they have a lot of cash, can make the right, do the right thing.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. It’s a really positive way to look at it and I think that’s really nice.
Yeah. It’s a really positive way to look at it and I think that’s really nice.
Lex Fridman
Well, we should always be skeptical.
Well, we should always be skeptical.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, I mean because at the end of the day, companies, they’re not good, they’re not bad, they’re morally neutral. It’s the people that are running them, the decisions those people make that are really where the bad or the good comes from.
Yeah, I mean because at the end of the day, companies, they’re not good, they’re not bad, they’re morally neutral. It’s the people that are running them, the decisions those people make that are really where the bad or the good comes from.
Lex Fridman
Another question, ask him if he knows how to milk a cow? I’ve already asked that. The answer is-
Another question, ask him if he knows how to milk a cow? I’ve already asked that. The answer is-
ThePrimeagen
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
Oh, no, you don’t know.
Oh, no, you don’t know.
ThePrimeagen
I’ve never milked a cow.
I’ve never milked a cow.
Lex Fridman
Never milked a cow.
Never milked a cow.
ThePrimeagen
Almost been killed by a cow, but never milked a cow.
Almost been killed by a cow, but never milked a cow.
Lex Fridman
Did you ever ride a bull?
Did you ever ride a bull?
ThePrimeagen
No.
No.
Lex Fridman
All right. Why male models?
All right. Why male models?
ThePrimeagen
Okay, so I can explain that one. I will say something like, “I really dislike the color purple because the color purple makes me upset.” I don’t know, just something very benign. But then someone right afterwards will be like, “But why don’t you like the color purple?” And it’ll just be like… It’s just like Derek Zoolander. It’s just like I get done on a five-minute talk about it and then the next question’s like, “But seriously why though?” It was just like, “Why male models?”
Okay, so I can explain that one. I will say something like, “I really dislike the color purple because the color purple makes me upset.” I don’t know, just something very benign. But then someone right afterwards will be like, “But why don’t you like the color purple?” And it’ll just be like… It’s just like Derek Zoolander. It’s just like I get done on a five-minute talk about it and then the next question’s like, “But seriously why though?” It was just like, “Why male models?”
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So that’s the Zoolander reference when there’s a long explanation why male models and he agrees and then forgets.
Yeah. So that’s the Zoolander reference when there’s a long explanation why male models and he agrees and then forgets.
ThePrimeagen
Yep.
Yep.
Lex Fridman
What is Ligma?
What is Ligma?
ThePrimeagen
I’ve died by Ligma quite a few times. So do you know the origin story of Ligma?
I’ve died by Ligma quite a few times. So do you know the origin story of Ligma?
Lex Fridman
No.
No.
ThePrimeagen
So Ninja, famous streamer, someone got him with Ligma and said like, “Oh,” something like, “Have you heard about Ligma?” And he was like, “No.” And he’s like, “Oh, Ligma balls.” And then after that Ninja got so hurt by getting had by that, he started banning anyone in chat who’s said the word Ligma or something like that. And so then if you don’t embrace the meme you get destroyed. So of course, gets destroyed and so then the whole goal is that, can people get me with Ligma? TJ did iladies. He’s like, “Oh, did you hear that E-girls got renamed to iladies?” And I just didn’t even see it coming. And I was just like, “What?” And he’s like, “iladies nuts on your face.” And then it’s just like, “Oh my gosh.” And then a pirate software has also got me like, “Oh, have you heard about Google SIMA,” which SEMA is a real product by Google>
So Ninja, famous streamer, someone got him with Ligma and said like, “Oh,” something like, “Have you heard about Ligma?” And he was like, “No.” And he’s like, “Oh, Ligma balls.” And then after that Ninja got so hurt by getting had by that, he started banning anyone in chat who’s said the word Ligma or something like that. And so then if you don’t embrace the meme you get destroyed. So of course, gets destroyed and so then the whole goal is that, can people get me with Ligma? TJ did iladies. He’s like, “Oh, did you hear that E-girls got renamed to iladies?” And I just didn’t even see it coming. And I was just like, “What?” And he’s like, “iladies nuts on your face.” And then it’s just like, “Oh my gosh.” And then a pirate software has also got me like, “Oh, have you heard about Google SIMA,” which SEMA is a real product by Google>
And I’m like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about this. What is this again?” He’s like, “SIMA balls,” right? It’s just like, “Dang it,” how do I keep…? So I’ve just had it happen live on stream many, many times. I’ve died by Ligma the most.
Lex Fridman
Please ask him about the size of his dict.
Please ask him about the size of his dict.
ThePrimeagen
Okay, so that’s dict, that’s dictionary in Python.
Okay, so that’s dict, that’s dictionary in Python.
Lex Fridman
Who doesn’t love dicts?
Who doesn’t love dicts?
ThePrimeagen
Yeah, that’s a great question. Just a dicts party when you use Python.
Yeah, that’s a great question. Just a dicts party when you use Python.
Lex Fridman
I love dicts.
I love dicts.
ThePrimeagen
That should be a T-shirt. That’s actually a hilarious T-shirt. So on Stack Overflow, you can ask any question you want, and I decided to craft a question one day on Stack Overflow that says how to measure your dict and bytes. And then I proceeded to really go to town and explain all the different things like, “Well, what about the cost of the strings and the references?” And when you really get both hands on your dict and really go after it, it’s very hard to, really threw in some innuendos. The Stack Overflow team deleted the question, and then someone hand wrote me an email explaining why they deleted the question and complimented me on how thoroughly and thoughtful the question was just to weave in innuendos and that the entire team was impressed, but it’s inappropriate and it had to be deleted and don’t do it again or we’re going to ban your account.
That should be a T-shirt. That’s actually a hilarious T-shirt. So on Stack Overflow, you can ask any question you want, and I decided to craft a question one day on Stack Overflow that says how to measure your dict and bytes. And then I proceeded to really go to town and explain all the different things like, “Well, what about the cost of the strings and the references?” And when you really get both hands on your dict and really go after it, it’s very hard to, really threw in some innuendos. The Stack Overflow team deleted the question, and then someone hand wrote me an email explaining why they deleted the question and complimented me on how thoroughly and thoughtful the question was just to weave in innuendos and that the entire team was impressed, but it’s inappropriate and it had to be deleted and don’t do it again or we’re going to ban your account.
And so it was a very funny moment and so I was like, “Oh, that’s funny that happened.” That was about six years ago. Last year I was at a conference and there’s a guy wearing a Stack Overflow name tag and I was like, “Oh, you work at Stack Overflow?” He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I do.” I’m like, “Do I got a story for you.” And he goes-
Lex Fridman
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
ThePrimeagen
… “No, wait a second. Are you the dict guy?”
… “No, wait a second. Are you the dict guy?”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
ThePrimeagen
That was his only question was that. And I was just like, “Let’s go.” I didn’t even say anything about me and he already knew immediately I was the dict guy.
That was his only question was that. And I was just like, “Let’s go.” I didn’t even say anything about me and he already knew immediately I was the dict guy.
Lex Fridman
I should say in all seriousness, I think I’ve had a bunch of conversations in the Python world where I would have to mention the name of this data structure and it makes me uncomfortable every time.
I should say in all seriousness, I think I’ve had a bunch of conversations in the Python world where I would have to mention the name of this data structure and it makes me uncomfortable every time.
ThePrimeagen
It’s a very unfortunate shortening of a word.
It’s a very unfortunate shortening of a word.
Lex Fridman
Dict. It’s just like when I go to the hardware store and ask for caulk and there’s always a nice old lady and I ask her where to find, and it’s very uncomfortable. I try to pronounce it as hard as I can.
Dict. It’s just like when I go to the hardware store and ask for caulk and there’s always a nice old lady and I ask her where to find, and it’s very uncomfortable. I try to pronounce it as hard as I can.
ThePrimeagen
Really get that L in there, like caulk.
Really get that L in there, like caulk.
God
Lex Fridman
Caulk, just to be clear. And try to avoid eye contact the whole time. You said that God was a big part, was a big part of your life. Can you speak to that a little bit more? Who is God and what effect, what role did he play in your life?
Caulk, just to be clear. And try to avoid eye contact the whole time. You said that God was a big part, was a big part of your life. Can you speak to that a little bit more? Who is God and what effect, what role did he play in your life?
ThePrimeagen
So I did talk about that one important evening where I, for whatever reason, gained my conscious that moment. So obviously for me that I grew up with a life where I would probably argue myself as a functional atheist. I went to church a handful of times. I can’t quite really remember actually going to church as a family in any sort of sense. So there wasn’t some super strong tie or anything like that to it. Pretty much anyone else growing up in America in the ’90s, you had some sort of impact or intersection with church at some point in your life, that was just a very normal thing I would probably say. And so when that happened, it was a fairly big surprise for me. I wasn’t necessarily going that direction or deciding to do any of those things.
So I did talk about that one important evening where I, for whatever reason, gained my conscious that moment. So obviously for me that I grew up with a life where I would probably argue myself as a functional atheist. I went to church a handful of times. I can’t quite really remember actually going to church as a family in any sort of sense. So there wasn’t some super strong tie or anything like that to it. Pretty much anyone else growing up in America in the ’90s, you had some sort of impact or intersection with church at some point in your life, that was just a very normal thing I would probably say. And so when that happened, it was a fairly big surprise for me. I wasn’t necessarily going that direction or deciding to do any of those things.
And so for me, it’s obviously the turning point of my entire life. I cannot speak to who I would be now without that. I can just tell you that I wouldn’t have had the drive. I probably would not have completed college. I would’ve not have found my wife or had my kids. I wouldn’t know how to value people. I don’t think without that whole thing, my value for people would’ve been very, very small because I would’ve continued to just objectifying in the way I was. And then probably the biggest thing is there’s this one verse, I don’t even know where it’s at, it effectively says that we love because he first loved us. And so for me it’s like I don’t think I would’ve ever lived a life that was happy without this. And I just didn’t even know that that was an option for me.
And I never really, it was a very tough set of years for me and I was very, very sad and just always just constantly looking for something to fulfill me. And so it’s like I didn’t have any confidence, I didn’t have any joy. I felt very sad. And so that was this moment where for the first time ever didn’t, all of a sudden I just felt like I didn’t have to live up to a standard. The standards have already been paid for, everything’s already, that’s the free gift, that’s the exchange. And so it’s just like for the first time, I didn’t have to be the cool guy, I didn’t have to have all the right words, I didn’t have to feel, I didn’t have to go on the conquest, the sexual conquest to find validation. I didn’t have to do any of those things and it was exceptionally liberating.
And so who is God? That’s more of a catechism question perhaps. What is man, who is God? Those are much harder questions. I believe that anytime you try to get too deep into describing who God is, you typically fall into Christian heresy. But for you-
Lex Fridman
He gave you a chance to be happy.
He gave you a chance to be happy.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah. He gave me a chance not just to be happy, but also made it so that the first time I can actually feel forgiven I guess in some sense, and able to forgive people that hurt me. For a long time I had this weight I’d carry around from the things I hated about high school and all that kind of stuff. And through that experience, I just wrote down every last person’s name and actually held them with me for quite some time and this was the list of people I forgave. And I read it a few times. I couldn’t let myself be angry or consumed by that kind of stuff because hate is so sticky, it sticks for a lifetime. And there really is only one cure for hate, which is forgiveness. I just don’t think you can get rid of it without that.
Yeah. He gave me a chance not just to be happy, but also made it so that the first time I can actually feel forgiven I guess in some sense, and able to forgive people that hurt me. For a long time I had this weight I’d carry around from the things I hated about high school and all that kind of stuff. And through that experience, I just wrote down every last person’s name and actually held them with me for quite some time and this was the list of people I forgave. And I read it a few times. I couldn’t let myself be angry or consumed by that kind of stuff because hate is so sticky, it sticks for a lifetime. And there really is only one cure for hate, which is forgiveness. I just don’t think you can get rid of it without that.
And so I just had choose to forgive these people and to move on, and it really kind of freed me. And I would never have thought forgiveness as a means for that change if I didn’t first experience it myself.
Lex Fridman
What’s the role of love in the human condition, to go to the philosophical, and what’s been the role of love in your life?
What’s the role of love in the human condition, to go to the philosophical, and what’s been the role of love in your life?
ThePrimeagen
It’s very obvious that every person wants or desires love. My wife has recently convinced me to watch Love is Blind with her one time. And you watch the show and if you’re not familiar with it, it feels like just a disaster of an experiment to just cause crazy filming. But anyways, the idea is that if you just don’t see somebody, you can fall in love with somebody and want to marry them after 10 days or some very small period of time. And what you really end up seeing is all these people who are just desperate for actually love. And there’s some part of it… I told my wife, “It’s like love gladiators.” We’re watching people battle it out for drama and really what they want is love. And it’s like they’re fighting to the death and love, if you will. And it’s this almost kind of sad aspect to watch.
It’s very obvious that every person wants or desires love. My wife has recently convinced me to watch Love is Blind with her one time. And you watch the show and if you’re not familiar with it, it feels like just a disaster of an experiment to just cause crazy filming. But anyways, the idea is that if you just don’t see somebody, you can fall in love with somebody and want to marry them after 10 days or some very small period of time. And what you really end up seeing is all these people who are just desperate for actually love. And there’s some part of it… I told my wife, “It’s like love gladiators.” We’re watching people battle it out for drama and really what they want is love. And it’s like they’re fighting to the death and love, if you will. And it’s this almost kind of sad aspect to watch.
And so I think that it’s hard to call, what is its role in the human experience, because I think it’s just something that we all naturally not just want, but need. And I don’t think that you can really progress, and when I say the word love, I would like to kind of narrow it down maybe a bit more. And I don’t mean Eros, the Greek word like sexy love, I think that paternal and friendship love are extremely important. And I think agape, God love is also very important. Agape love is the one that is superior to them all, but obviously different and also co-needed with the parental ones and all that. And so you kind of need this mixture of them all, and each one is different for each reason and where it’s applied.
And so I don’t think… I just don’t see a world in which is good of any kind without that as a very foundational piece. Because again, I didn’t come here trying to quote any sort of scripture, but it says that it’s not the nails that hung on there, it’s love. That’s the reason why these things happen. And so if forgiveness is the requirement to kind of pay off hate in some sense, then love has to be the motivation for forgiveness.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s the tragic aspect of life. I think there’s a deep loneliness in all of us and a longing to be a part of this bigger thing. And that longing is a love and it has many names, but yeah. Yeah, the love aspect of it, it’s the beautiful aspect of life, the tragedies, the loneliness, and the unfortunate suffering that is a fundamental part of life and the beautiful aspect is the love.
Yeah, that’s the tragic aspect of life. I think there’s a deep loneliness in all of us and a longing to be a part of this bigger thing. And that longing is a love and it has many names, but yeah. Yeah, the love aspect of it, it’s the beautiful aspect of life, the tragedies, the loneliness, and the unfortunate suffering that is a fundamental part of life and the beautiful aspect is the love.
ThePrimeagen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Which I think is a good time to mention more Reddit, the place for everlasting positivity and love. Somebody wrote, “Please thank him, you, for his everlasting positivity and give him a big hug for me.” So I won’t give you a big hug on camera because I’m afraid I’ll get a boner and that’ll be very unfortunate.
Which I think is a good time to mention more Reddit, the place for everlasting positivity and love. Somebody wrote, “Please thank him, you, for his everlasting positivity and give him a big hug for me.” So I won’t give you a big hug on camera because I’m afraid I’ll get a boner and that’ll be very unfortunate.
ThePrimeagen
Hey, let’s not bring dicts into this again, okay?
Hey, let’s not bring dicts into this again, okay?
Lex Fridman
It’s my favorite data structure. Like I said, I love dicts, all kinds of dicts, ordered dicts-
It’s my favorite data structure. Like I said, I love dicts, all kinds of dicts, ordered dicts-
ThePrimeagen
Unordered.
Unordered.
Lex Fridman
… unordered dicts. I don’t discriminate. Yeah, but just that to say big thank you from me. I listen to you a lot and I just really enjoy… I’ve been going through a lot of shit myself and just the positivity, even when you’re building the stupidest shit, it’s just the positivity radiates from you and you inspire me to be a good person. You inspire me to build stuff. So thank you. And I’m sure there’s many, many others who listen to you for the same reason. So thank you for your positivity. Thank you for being the light in many people’s lives, and thank you for talking to me, brother.
… unordered dicts. I don’t discriminate. Yeah, but just that to say big thank you from me. I listen to you a lot and I just really enjoy… I’ve been going through a lot of shit myself and just the positivity, even when you’re building the stupidest shit, it’s just the positivity radiates from you and you inspire me to be a good person. You inspire me to build stuff. So thank you. And I’m sure there’s many, many others who listen to you for the same reason. So thank you for your positivity. Thank you for being the light in many people’s lives, and thank you for talking to me, brother.
ThePrimeagen
Dang. That was very, very kind. I really do appreciate all those extremely nice words even from Reddit. That’s very surprising. But thank you. I mean, I know you know that there’s many people’s lives, and I’m sure you’ve received the letters that have been changed from actions and things you’ve said and things you’ve done. And so it’s one of the best parts about doing this side is that you get a chance to potentially improve somebody’s life. And you getting to interview a lot of people, there’s a lot of people that listened to Chris Latner and saw his excitement for Swift and probably went and learned Swift and then got really amazing jobs and it can be all origined back to back to you in that interview. And so those are amazing things. And so same goes back to you, you’ve done a lot of good stuff.
Dang. That was very, very kind. I really do appreciate all those extremely nice words even from Reddit. That’s very surprising. But thank you. I mean, I know you know that there’s many people’s lives, and I’m sure you’ve received the letters that have been changed from actions and things you’ve said and things you’ve done. And so it’s one of the best parts about doing this side is that you get a chance to potentially improve somebody’s life. And you getting to interview a lot of people, there’s a lot of people that listened to Chris Latner and saw his excitement for Swift and probably went and learned Swift and then got really amazing jobs and it can be all origined back to back to you in that interview. And so those are amazing things. And so same goes back to you, you’ve done a lot of good stuff.
Lex Fridman
Right back at you brother. Thank you for talking today. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Paulson, aka ThePrimeagen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Paulo Coelho. “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Right back at you brother. Thank you for talking today. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Paulson, aka ThePrimeagen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Paulo Coelho. “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Files for Narendra Modi Episode | Lex Fridman Podcast #456
Captions & Transcripts:
You can download captions & transcripts in English, Hindi & Russian here:
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Videos:
If you need the video version with Original, Hindi, or Russian audio tracks for creating clips for YouTube or for any other video platform, the currently best-available method I know for sharing is hosting them on YouTube as unlisted videos. Hopefully these are useful for you:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPUtA3W-7_I
Transcript for Narendra Modi: Prime Minister of India – Power, Democracy, War & Peace | Lex Fridman Podcast #460
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #460 with Narendra Modi.
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the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
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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.
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We seek neither to wage war against nature, nor to foster strife among nations. We stand for peace, and wherever we can act as peacemakers, we have gladly embraced that responsibility. My early life was spent in extreme poverty, but we never really felt the burden of poverty. You see, someone who is used to wearing fine shoes will feel their absence when they don’t have them, but for us, we had never worn shoes in our lives. So how would we even know that wearing shoes was a big deal? We weren’t in a position to compare. That’s just how we lived.
When I became Prime Minister, I especially invited Pakistan to my swearing-in ceremony so we could turn over a new leaf, yet every noble attempt at fostering peace was met with hostility and betrayal. We sincerely hope that wisdom prevails upon them and they choose the path of peace. I believe even the people of Pakistan long for peace. Look, regarding what you said about criticism and how I deal with it. If I had to summarize in one sentence, I welcome it. I have a strong belief that criticism is the soul of democracy. I want to tell all the young people the following. No matter how dark the night may seem, it is still just night, and morning is bound to come.
So now more than ever, we need great leaders, great peacemakers who build bridges, not destroy them, who may preserve the identity of their nations, but still celebrate the common humanity of all of us, all people on earth. For this and many other reasons, this conversation with Prime Minister Modi was one of the most remarkable I’ve ever had. You may hear such words and think that I’m just enamored by power or access. No, never was, never will be. I do not idolize anyone, especially those in power. I’m generally skeptical of power, money, and fame because of their natural corrupting influence on the mind, the heart, the soul of a person.
The whole point of all the conversations I’ve had in my life, on mic and off mic, is that I try to see and explore the full complexity of every human being, the good and the bad. I believe we’re all the same in a deep fundamental sense, all capable of good, all capable of evil, all carry stories of pain and stories of hope. Whether you’re a world leader or a truck driver, a coal miner, or a farmer in the American Midwest. And by the way, I will be talking to a lot of the latter kind of folk this year off mic, and maybe even on mic, as I travel the US and the world. My brief statements here about Narendra Modi are about both him as a leader, and especially him as a human being. In the extensive time I spent with him, I spoke with him off mic and on mic.
It was a deeply personal human interaction characterized by warmth, kindness, humor, inner and outer peace, and absolute focus on the conversation between us in the present moment as if nothing else existed. I have heard from many people that he treats everyone he meets in this empathic way, no matter where they come from or what their position is in this world. So for those and many other reasons, this really was an incredible experience. I will never forget. Oh, and by the way, we make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in English, Hindi and other languages. You can also listen to the original mixed language version where I speak English and Prime Minister Modi speaks Hindi. Separately, you can choose to turn on subtitles in your preferred language.
On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon and clicking audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer. For fully English overdub, select English. For fully Hindi overdub select Hindi, and to listen to the original mixed language version where I speak English and Prime Minister Modi speaks Hindi, please select Hindi Latin audio track, so you can listen either to a version that is all one language or to the original mixed language version with subtitles in your preferred language. The default is English overdub. Our thanks to ElevenLabs and a great team of translators, we do our best to bring the Prime Minister’s voice to life with AI voice cloning in English.
I promise that we will continue to work very hard to break down the barriers that language creates, and try to make these conversations as accessible as possible to everyone in the world. Anyway, let me pause one more time to say a big thank you. What a wild ride this life has been. It’s an honor for me to be on it with all of you. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, and now, dear friends, here’s the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.
If I put it in simple terms, or explain it to the viewers who are unfamiliar with India, it is a powerful tool to bring both the inner and outer self into balance. It shapes life in profound ways when you fast. You may have noticed, as you said, you’ve been fasting on water for two days. Every single one of your senses, especially smell, touch and taste, becomes highly sensitive. You may even notice the subtle aroma of water itself, something you probably never noticed before when drinking it. If someone walks past you carrying tea, you will catch its aroma just like you would with coffee. A small flower you’ve seen before, you will see it again today, but now you can perceive its details more vividly. Your senses become extra sharp, highly aware, and fully tuned in, and their capability to observe and to respond multiplies, and grows sharper. I have personally often experienced this. Another thing I’ve experienced is that fasting can greatly accelerate the thinking process, and can give a fresh perspective. You start thinking outside the box. I don’t know if everyone experiences this, but I certainly do. Most people assume that fasting simply means giving up food or not eating, but that’s just the physical aspect of fasting. If someone is forced to go without food due to hardship with an empty stomach, can we call that fasting? Fasting is actually a scientific process. Whenever I fast for an extended period, I prepare my body in advance. For five to seven days before the fast, I follow various Ayurvedic practices and yoga practices, along with other traditional cleansing methods to internally reset my system.
Before actually beginning the fast. I make sure to drink a lot of water, as much as possible. So, you could say that this detoxification process helps prepare my body in the best possible way. And once I begin fasting, for me, it’s an act of devotion. For me, fasting is a form of self-discipline. For me personally, even while I go about doing my daily activities during a fast, my mind remains deeply introspective and focused inward, and that experience is profoundly transformative for me. My practice of fasting didn’t come from reading books, listening to sermons, or following a tradition just because my family happened to have observed it. It came from my own personal experience.
During my school days, there was a movement inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s vision, his vision of cow protection. The government had not enacted any laws at the time. At the time, people across the country observed a one-day fast by gathering in public places in silent protests. We were just kids, probably had just finished primary school. Something inside me said, “I should be part of this,” and that was the first time in my life I experienced fasting. At such a young age, I felt neither hunger nor any desire for food. Instead, I felt a new awareness, a surge of energy within me.
So, I became convinced that fasting is a science far beyond just skipping meals. It is something far greater than that. Then gradually, I refined my body and mind through various experiments. Over time, it became a long and disciplined journey for me, and one thing is certain. Fasting never slows me down. I work just as much as usual. Sometimes I even work more. And another fascinating thing I’ve noticed is that when I need to express my thoughts, I’m amazed at where they come from and how they flow. It’s truly an incredible experience.
During this time, I completely abstain from food and only drink hot water. Although drinking hot water has always been a part of my daily routine, my past lifestyle was such that I naturally developed this habit over time. Then in March or April, another Navratri occurs called Chaitra Navratri. This year, it will likely begin around March 31st. During this nine-day fast, I eat only one specific fruit, once a day. So for those nine days, if let’s say I choose papaya, then for all nine days, I won’t touch anything else. Just papaya. That too, I eat only once a day. That’s how I follow my nine-day fasting routine. So there are numerous fasts I keep throughout the year, and this has become a deeply ingrained tradition in my life. Perhaps I can say that I’ve been following these practices for 50 to 55 years.
For example, after I became Prime Minister, I had a bilateral meeting at the White House with President Obama, and he had also arranged a formal dinner. Then as discussions between the two governments progressed, someone said, “Please join us for dinner.” To which another replied, “But the Prime Minister doesn’t eat.” This left them a bit concerned. How do you host the leader of such a major nation at the White House without serving food? When we sat down, they brought me a glass of hot water. I turned to President Obama and jokingly said, “Look, my dinner has arrived,” as I placed the glass in front of me. Later when I visited again, he still remembered. He smiled and said, “Last time you were fasting, this time we’re having lunch. Since you’re not fasting, you’ll have to eat twice as much.”
There was a victory monument from the 12th century, a temple from the 17th century, and in the 16th century, two sisters, Tana and Riri, who were renowned musicians. As I uncovered these history traces, I grasped the depth of our heritage. So when I became chief minister, I initiated large-scale excavation projects. The findings from these very projects confirmed that thousands of Buddhist monks had at one time studied there. It was a place where Buddhist, Jain and Hindu traditions co-existed harmoniously, and for us, history wasn’t just confined to books. Every stone spoke. Every wall had a story to tell, and so when we began the large-scale excavation work, we uncovered findings that hold immense historical significance.
So far, they have discovered evidence dating back 2,800 years, proving that this city has remained unbroken and eternal for all those 2,800 years. They have discovered solid proof of how its development unfolded over these centuries. Now, an international-level museum has been established there, open to visitors, especially for archeology students. It has become a major area of study. So the place where I was born holds its own unique historical significance. I see it as my good fortune. Some things in life unfold beyond our understanding. Kashi became my realm of duty. Now, Kashi is also eternal. Kashi, also known as Benares, or Varanasi, is an eternal city that has remained vibrant and alive for centuries.
Perhaps it was some divine design that led a boy born in Vadnagar to eventually make Kashi his realm of duty, living in the embrace of Mother Ganga. When I think about my family, my father, my mother, my siblings, my uncles, aunts, grandparents, we all grew up together in a small house. The place we lived was likely even smaller than where we are sitting now. There was no window, just a small door. That’s where I was born. That’s where I grew up. Now, when people talk about poverty, it’s natural to discuss it in the context of public life, and by those standards, my early life was spent in extreme poverty, but we never really felt the burden of poverty.
You see, someone who is used to wearing fine shoes will feel their absence when they don’t have them. But for us, we had never worn shoes in our lives. So how would we even know that wearing shoes was a big deal? We weren’t in a position to compare. That’s just how we lived. Our mother worked incredibly hard. My father, too. He was extremely hardworking, and he was also extremely disciplined. Every morning around 4:00 or 4:30 AM he would leave the house, walk long distances, visit several temples, and then reach his shop.
He wore traditional leather shoes, handmade in the village. The shoes were very tough and sturdy, making a distinct tock, tock, tock sound when he walked. People in the village used to say that they could tell the time just by hearing his footsteps. ” Oh, yes,” they would say, “Mr. Damodar is on his way.” Such was his discipline. He worked tirelessly, late into the night. Our mother too, ensured that we never felt the struggles of our circumstances, but despite everything, these challenging circumstances of living in scarcity never left a mark on our minds. I remember in school, the idea of wearing shoes never even crossed my mind.
One day, while I was on my way to school, I ran into my uncle on the way he saw me and was surprised, “Hey, you go to school like this, without shoes?” So at that time, he bought me a pair of canvas shoes and made me wear them. Back then, they must have cost around 10 or 12 rupees. But here’s the thing. They were white canvas shoes, and they would quickly get stained. So what did I do? In the evening, after school was over, I would stay back for a while. I would go from classroom to classroom, collecting leftover pieces of chalk that the teachers had discarded. I would take the pieces of chalk home, soak them in water, mix them into a paste and polish my canvas shoes with it, making them bright white again.
For me, those shoes were a treasured possession, a symbol of great wealth, and I don’t exactly know why, but from childhood, our mother was extremely particular about cleanliness. Perhaps that’s where we inherited that habit, too. Not sure how I picked up the habit of dressing neatly, but it’s been there since childhood. Whatever I wore, I made sure it looked proper. Back then, as you can imagine, we didn’t have any arrangements for ironing clothes. So instead, I would heat up water in a copper pot, hold it with tongs, and press my clothes myself. Then I’d head off to school. That’s how I lived, and I found joy in it. We never thought about being poor, or judged about how others lived or what their struggles were.
We lived carefree, enjoying whatever little we had and kept working hard. Never once did we complain about these things. And all these aspects of my life, whether you call it fortune or misfortune, unfolded in such a way in politics that they started coming to light. Because when I was taking my oath as Chief Minister, TV reporters went to my village, questioned my childhood friends, went to capture videos of my home. That’s when people started asking, “Who is this and what background he is coming from?” Before that, very few knew much about my life. That’s just how my journey has been. My mother possessed an innate spirit of caring for others’ well-being. It was woven into the very fabric of her being. She possessed knowledge of traditional remedies and healing practices, and would treat children with these home remedies. Every morning before sunrise, around five o’clock, she would start treating them, so all the children and their parents would gather at our home, little children crying, and we had to wake up early because of it.
So, to all young people, I say, have patience. There are no shortcuts in life. At our railway stations, there hangs a sign for those who habitually cross the tracks instead of using the bridge, it reads, “Shortcut will cut you short.” I would tell young people the same, shortcut will cut you short. There are no shortcuts in life. Patience and perseverance are essential. Whatever responsibility we are given, we must pour our heart into it. We should live it with passion. Enjoy the journey and find fulfillment in it. I truly believe that if this mindset is cultivated, it transforms life. Similarly, abundance alone is not enough. There is no guarantee of success. Even a wealthy person who indulges in comfort and idleness will eventually wither away.
Instead, he must decide, “Yes, I may have resources around me, but I must use my abilities to grow them further. I must contribute more to society with my own strength. Even if I am in a good position, there is still so much more to do. Even if I am not in a good position, there is still so much work to do.” That’s what I believe. I have also noticed that some people tend to think, “I’ve learned enough. That’s it.” But one should never let the student within them die. Learning should never stop. I believe that as long as I am alive, I must have a purpose. Perhaps I exist to keep learning, to keep growing. Now, my mother tongue is Gujarati, and we were not very familiar with the Hindi language, nor did we know how to speak it eloquently or communicate effectively. But as a child, I used to sit at my father’s tea shop, and at that young age, I got the chance to meet so many people. And every time, I learned something from them, I observed their ways of speaking, their expressions. These things taught me a lot, even though I wasn’t in a position to apply it then, I thought, “If I ever get the chance, why not? Why shouldn’t I present myself well?” So, I believe the desire to learn should always remain alive. And another thing I’ve observed is that most people dream about achieving something or becoming someone. They set big targets and when they fall short, they feel disappointed.
That’s why whenever I get a chance to talk to my friends, I tell them, instead of dreaming about getting and becoming, dream of doing something. If you focus on doing something, and let’s say your goal is to reach 10, but you make it to eight, you won’t feel discouraged. You’ll still work toward 10 with determination. But if your dream is only to become something and it doesn’t happen, even your achievements may feel like a burden. That’s why we must adjust our mindset in life. Instead of thinking about what I got or didn’t get, the mindset should be what can I give? Because true contentment doesn’t bloom on its own. It grows from the depth of what you give.
For example, where I lived, winters weren’t too harsh, but December nights could get quite cold. But still, at night, the cold would bite. It was natural. So, sometimes I would decide to sleep outside in the open with nothing to cover myself, just to see how my body endures the cold. So, from a very young age, I would often experiment with my body, and this became a regular thing for me. For me, going to the library, reading extensively, visiting the pond, washing the family’s clothes, and swimming became part of my routine. Swimming was my main physical activity. All of these things were deeply connected to my life. Later as I read Vivekananda, I became even more drawn to his teachings. One time I read about Swami Vivekananda, his mother was ill. So, he went to Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa for guidance. He would argue with him, debate with him. In his early days, he would often argue with him, questioning everything intellectually.
He said, “My mother is sick. If I were earning, I could take better care of her.” Sri Ramakrishna said, “Don’t bother me with all this. Go to Goddess Kali. She is there. Ask her for what you need.” And so, Swami Vivekananda went and sat before Goddess Kali’s idol for hours, and he immersed himself into deep meditation. After a few hours when he returned, Ramakrishna asked him, “So, did you request the goddess?” Swami Vivekananda replied, “No, I didn’t.” Ramakrishna said, “Go again tomorrow. She will fulfill your request. Ask her.” He went the next day and then again the day after. But each time, he found himself unable to ask for anything. His mother was unwell and he needed help, but when he sat before Goddess Kali, he was completely absorbed in her presence, and yet he could not bring himself to ask for anything.
Each time he returned empty-handed. He told Sri Ramakrishna, “I came back empty-handed. I didn’t ask for anything.” To stand before the divine goddess and not be able to ask for anything, that moment, that experience lit a flame inside him. There was a spark in his life. And from that came the spirit of giving. I believe that perhaps that small incident in Vivekananda’s life left an impression on me too. The thought of, “What can I give to the world?” Maybe true contentment comes from giving. If my heart is only filled with the hunger to receive, that hunger will never end. And within that realization came the idea of Shiva and living being as one. If you wish to serve Shiva, serve all living beings. Recognize the unity between the divine and the living. True non-duality is experience through this realization. I would often lose myself in such thoughts. My mind naturally drifting in that direction.
I remember an incident in the neighborhood where we lived, just outside there was a Lord Shiva temple. One day a saint came to stay there. So, that saint used to engage in meditation and spiritual practices. I started feeling drawn to him thinking perhaps he possessed some spiritual energy. I had only read about Swami Vivekananda, never seen such figures in real life. During Navratri, he was fasting and he had placed sorghum grains on his hand, a common tradition in our culture. In a way, sprouting seeds on your palms and sleeping like that for nine or 10 days, it was a kind of spiritual vow, and this saint was observing it. During those same days, my maternal uncle’s family was preparing for my aunt’s wedding. Everyone from my home was going to my uncle’s house for the wedding.
Now, for any child, visiting an uncle’s house is always exciting. But I told my family, “I’m not going. I’ll stay here and I will take care of Swamiji. Since he has these grains on his hand, he can’t eat or drink, so I will take care of him.” So, as a child, I chose not to attend the wedding. I stayed back serving Swamiji instead. Somehow my mind was naturally drawn in that direction. At times, whenever soldiers from my village came home during their holidays, they would walk around in their uniforms with such pride. I would run behind them all day thinking, “Look at them. They are serving the nation.” So, there was always a strong feeling inside me to do something meaningful. I didn’t fully understand what it would be, and I didn’t have a roadmap. There was a hunger within me, a deep longing to understand life, to explore its meaning. So, I just set out and began the journey.
During my time in the mission, I came across remarkable saints. They showered me with love and blessings. Among them, I formed a special bond with Swami Atmasthanandji. He lived for nearly 100 years, a life full of wisdom and service. In his final years, I deeply wished for him to stay with me at the Prime Minister’s residence, but his responsibilities were vast and he couldn’t come. However, back when I was chief minister, he used to visit and I was fortunate to receive his blessings and guidance. He once looked at me and said, “Why have you come here? You have a greater purpose to fulfill. Is your priority your own well-being? Or is it the welfare of society? Whatever Swami Vivekananda said was for the betterment of society. He said you are meant to serve others.” So, I remember feeling a bit disheartened at that moment. I had come seeking guidance, but all I got were words.
So, I continued on my journey, wandering from place to place. I spent time in the Himalayas embracing the solitude of the mountains. I met many remarkable individuals along the way. Some were great ascetics, people who had renounced everything, but still my mind remained restless. Perhaps it was my age of curiosity, of wanting to learn, to understand. It was a new experience, a world shaped by the mountains, by ice, by the towering snow-covered peaks. But all of this played a huge role in shaping me. It strengthened me from within and enabled me to discover my inner power. Practicing meditation, waking up in the sacred pre-dawn hours, bathing in the cold, serving people with devotion and naturally tending to elderly saints became a seamless part of who I was. Once, a natural calamity struck the region, and I immediately devoted myself to helping the villagers. So, these were the saints and spiritual masters with whom I stayed from time to time. I never remained in one place for long, I kept moving, constantly wandering. That was the kind of life I lived.
This is what has been said since the Vedic Era. What our sages have said, what Vivekananda said and what the RSS echoes. A volunteer is told that the inspiration he gains from RSS is not just about attending the one-hour session or wearing the uniform. What matters is what you do for society. And today, inspired by that spirit, many initiatives are thriving. Like some volunteers established an organization called Seva Bharati. This organization serves the slums and settlements where the poorest people live, which they call service communities. To my knowledge, they run approximately 125,000 service projects without any government assistance, solely through community support. They spend time there, teach the children, care for their health, instill good values and work towards improving cleanliness in these communities. Running 125,000 social service projects is no small feat.
Similarly, some volunteers nurtured by RSS are dedicated to serving tribal communities through Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. They live among the tribal people, working for their welfare. They have established over 70,000 one-teacher schools in remote tribal regions. There are also some people in America who show their support for this cause and contribute donations of about $10 or $15. And they say, “Skip a Coca-Cola this month. Don’t drink Coca-Cola and donate that money to a one-teacher school instead.” Now, imagine 70,000 one-teacher schools dedicated to educating tribal children. Some volunteers have founded Vidya Bharati to revolutionize education. Today they run nearly 25,000 schools educating around 3 million students, and I believe that millions of students have benefited from this initiative, receiving quality education at an incredibly low cost.
Alongside education, values are prioritized, and students remain grounded, learning skills so they don’t become a burden on society. That is in every aspect of life, whether it’s women, youth, or even laborers, the RSS has played a role. In terms of membership size, if I may say so, we have the Indian Labor Union. It has around 50,000 unions with millions of members across the country. Perhaps in terms of scale, there is no bigger labor union in the world. But what’s interesting is the approach they take. Historically, leftist ideologies have fueled labor movements worldwide. And what has been their slogan? “Workers of the world unite.” The message was clear. Unite first and then we’ll deal with everything else. But what do the labor unions run by RSS-trained volunteers believe in? They say, “Workers unite the world.” Others say, “Workers of the world unite.” And we say, “Workers unite the world.” It may seem like just a small shift in words, but it represents a huge ideological transformation.
The volunteers who come from the RSS follow their own interests, nature and inclination, and in doing so, they strengthen and promote these kinds of activities. When you observe these initiatives, you’ll see how over the past 100 years, the RSS has dedicated itself with the discipline and devotion of a seeker staying away from the glare of mainstream attention. I feel blessed to gain life’s values from such a sacred organization. Through the RSS, I found a life of purpose. Then I was fortunate to spend some time among the saints, which gave me a strong spiritual foundation. I found discipline and a life of purpose. And through the guidance of saints, I gained spiritual grounding. Swami Atmasthananda and others like him have held my hand throughout my journey, constantly guiding me at every step. The teachings of Ramakrishna Mission, Swami Vivekananda, and the service-driven philosophy of the RSS have played a crucial role in shaping me.
This unique cultural bond is what unites India as one civilization. Take something as simple as bathing in water. We have a ritual where all the rivers of India are remembered. They chant, ” I am bathing with the waters of all these rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu, Kaveri.” It’s a sentiment that unites a nation, and we have a long tradition of making such resolutions at the beginning of important events and rituals. And the resolution itself can present a historical record. And in so doing serve as a way of collecting and preserving historical data. It has been an incredibly unique system, guided meticulously by our scriptures. When someone makes a resolution, performs a Puja, or even during weddings, we start by invoking the entire universe, beginning with Jambudweep, Bharatkhand, Aryavrat, and gradually narrow it down to the village, then mentioning the specific family, and finally, we invoke the family deity. This practice is still alive, happening daily in every corner of India, but sadly, the Western and global models began viewing nations only as administrative systems. India, however, has had a variety of administrative systems throughout history, many systems were fragmented, scattered and varied across regions. Kings and rulers were numerous, but India’s unity lay in cultural bonds. Pilgrimage traditions played a key role in preserving this unity. Shankaracharya established the four pilgrimage sites. Even today, millions of people travel from one place to another for pilgrimage. In Kashi, you’ll find people who bring water from Rameshwaram to Kashi and take water from Kashi to Rameshwaram. Even if you look at our Hindu calendar, you’ll find so many things across the country that you can’t even imagine.
But it was Mahatma Gandhi who awakened the nation, leading a mass movement fueled by truth and he wove even a sweeper into the very fabric of the freedom struggle. He told teachers their work was part of the freedom struggle. He told the people spinning thread and weaving clothes, they were freedom fighters. He told those tending to lepers that their service was a step toward India’s freedom. He viewed every task as a vital thread in the fabric of India’s independence movement, and this transformed India’s common man into a soldier in the quest for freedom. Gandhi forged a mass movement so immense that the British could never fully grasp it. The British never imagined that a pinch of salt from the Dandi March could spark a massive revolution, and he made it happen. And his life, presence, style, mannerisms all left a profound impact, and I have seen many of his stories evolve into timeless legends.
I recall an incident from a Roundtable Conference. Yeah, I believe he was attending a Roundtable Conference. He was supposed to meet King George at the Buckingham Palace draped in his breechcloth. Mahatma Gandhi made his way to the palace. Many people were amazed that he had showed up in that attire to meet the King. Gandhi remarked he didn’t need to wear a lot of clothes. He said, “Your king is wearing enough clothes for the both of us.” This was the whimsical charm of his nature. Mahatma Gandhi possessed many remarkable qualities. His call for unity and recognition of the people’s strength still resonates with me. In everything I do, I strive to include the common man and to ensure the participation of as many as possible. I don’t believe in leaving everything to the government. I am a firm believer in the power of social change.
You see, I recall something that happened all the way back in 2013. It was when my party declared I would be their prime ministerial candidate. My critics often tried to corner me on one point. It became a topic of widespread discussion, Modi is nothing more than a state leader. What does he know of foreign policy? Does he even understand global geopolitics? This was on everyone’s lips, and I was asked this question in every interview. I gave a very well-thought-out answer at the time. I said, “I won’t lay out my entire foreign policy in an interview, nor is it needed.” That said, India will neither allow itself to be looked down upon, nor will it ever look up to anyone. India will now see eye-to-eye with her counterparts. This was my belief in 2013, and it still lies at the heart of my foreign policy. For me, the country always comes first. However, to belittle someone or speaking ill of others is neither part of my cultural values nor my traditions. Moreover, our culture upholds and advocates for the welfare of mankind.
India has always championed the ideas of global peace and brotherhood. For centuries, we have envisioned the world as one big family. Our noble ancestors envisaged the welfare of the whole world and universe, and that’s why you must have noticed, the nature of our conversations as well as the ideas that I have presented on the global stage, which are rooted in respect and positivity. For example, I spoke about the environment in one of my speeches. I proposed the concept of one sun, one world, one grid. During the COVID pandemic, I delivered a speech at the G20 summit. I put forth the vision of one health, where humans and nature would live in harmony, and I have always worked towards this.
We hosted the G20 Summit with the motto, One Earth, One Family, One Future. We have inherited this timeless wisdom and it’s our duty to share it with the world. To give you an example, I have advocated for embracing renewable energy. We founded the International Solar Alliance with the motto, One Sun, One World, One Grid. Even when it comes to global healthcare, I had proposed One Earth, One Health. This initiative extends not only to humans, but also to all flora and fauna. I have always aimed to initiate efforts that foster global well-being, and the global community needs to join hands to accomplish that.
We must also understand that the world has become one small village today. No country can thrive in isolation. Today we all depend upon one another. No one can make it far by themselves. That is why you must learn to synchronize with everyone and everyone else must learn to synchronize with you. That’s the only way to propel this initiative forward. Organizations like the United Nations came into being after the First World War, but they failed to evolve with the times, and this inability to adapt has sparked a global debate on their relevance.
Returning to your example, I have a close relationship with Russia and Ukraine alike. I can sit with President Putin and say that this is not the time for war, and I can also tell President Zelensky in a friendly way that brother, regardless of how many people stand with you in the world, there will never be a resolution on the battlefield. The resolution will only come when both Ukraine and Russia come to the negotiating table. Ukraine may hold countless discussions with their allies, but it will bear no fruit. Discussions must include both parties instead. Initially, it was challenging to find peace, but now the current situation presents an opportunity for meaningful and productive talks between Ukraine and Russia. There has been a lot of suffering. Even the global south has suffered. The world has been grappling with a food, fuel and fertilizer crisis. So the global community should unite in the pursuit of peace. As for me, I have always maintained that I stand with peace. I am not neutral. I have a stance and that is peace, and peace is what I strive for.
Don’t mistake this for ideology. What kind of ideology thrives on bloodshed and the export of terror, and we are not the sole victims of this menace. Wherever terror strikes in the world, the trail somehow leads to Pakistan. Let’s take the September 11th attacks, for example. The main mastermind behind it, Osama bin Laden, where did he eventually emerge from? He had taken refuge in Pakistan. The world has recognized that in a way terrorism and the terrorist mindset are deeply rooted in Pakistan. Today, it stands as an epicenter of turmoil, not just for India but for the world. And we have repeatedly asked them what good can come from this path? We have urged them to abandon the path of state-sponsored terrorism for good, “What do you hope to gain by surrendering your nation to lawless forces?” I even personally traveled to Lahore in the pursuit of peace.
When I became Prime Minister, I specially invited Pakistan to my swearing-in ceremony so we could turn over a new leaf. Yet, every noble attempt at fostering peace was met with hostility and betrayal. We sincerely hope that wisdom prevails upon them and they choose the path of peace. I believe even the people of Pakistan long for peace because even they must be weary of living in strife and unrest, they must have grown weary of relentless terror where even innocent children are killed and countless lives are destroyed.
Now that you’ve asked, another interesting memory just came to mind. There’s a state in India called Madhya Pradesh, right in the center. There’s a district called Shahdol, a completely tribal region where a large tribal community resides. I really enjoy interacting with people from such communities, especially the self-help groups run by tribal women. So I decided to visit them and have a conversation. But when I got there, I noticed something fascinating. Around 80 to 100 young boys, kids and even some older youth all dressed in sports uniforms standing together. Naturally, I walked over to them. So I asked them, “Where are you all from?” And they replied, “We’re from mini Brazil.” I was surprised and said, “What do you mean by mini Brazil?” They said, “That’s what people call our village.” Curious, I asked, “Why do they call it mini Brazil?” They explained, “In our village, football has been played for four generations. Nearly 80 national level players have come from here. Our entire village is dedicated to football.” They also told me when we host our annual football match, nearly 20,000 to 25,000 spectators come from nearby villages to watch.
I see the growing craze for football in India these days as a positive sign because it not only fuels passion, but also builds true team spirit.
In American life, it’s almost impossible for the President to walk into a crowd of thousands, but without even a moment’s hesitation, he agreed and started walking with me. His entire security detail was thrown off guard, but for me that moment was truly touching. It showed me that this man had courage. He makes his own decisions, but also he trusted me and my lead in that moment enough to have walked with me into the crowd. It was that sense of mutual trust, a strong bond between us that I truly witnessed on that day and the way I saw President Trump that day walking into a crowd of thousands without even asking security, it was truly amazing. And if you watch the video now, you’ll be amazed.
When he was shot during the recent campaign, I saw the same resilient and determined President Trump, the one who walked hand-in-hand with me in that stadium. Even after being shot, he remained unwaveringly dedicated to America. His life was for his nation. His reflection showed his America First spirit, just as I believe in nation first. I stand for India first and that’s why we connect so well. These are the things that truly resonate. And I believe that across the world politicians are covered so much by the media that people mostly perceive each other through its lens. People rarely get the chance to truly meet or personally know one another and perhaps third-party intervention is the real cause of tensions.
When I visited him in the White House for the first time, there was already a lot written about President Trump in the media. At that time, he was still new to office and the world had a rather different perception of him. Even I had been briefed in many different ways before meeting him, but to my surprise, the very moment I stepped into the White House, he broke all formal protocols right away. And then, he personally took me on a tour of the White House. As he showed me around, I noticed something striking, he wasn’t holding any notes or cue cards, nor was anyone accompanying him to assist. He pointed things out himself. “This is where Abraham Lincoln lived,” he said. He even explained why the courtroom was designed so long. He would point at the table and tell me which President signed here and on what date. I found that incredibly impressive. It showed how much he honored the Presidency and how respectful and deeply connected he was to America’s history. I could feel that. And he spoke to me freely, discussing many things openly. That was my experience from our first meeting.
Later, when his first term ended, and President Biden won, four years passed, but during that time whenever someone we both knew met him, and this must have happened dozens of times, he would say, “Modi is my friend, convey my regards.” That kind of gesture is rare. Even though we didn’t meet physically for years, our direct and indirect communication, our closeness and the trust between us remained unshaken.
Then I introduced direct benefit transfer, ensuring that every rupee sent from Delhi reached the rightful person without leakage. As a result, my country saved nearly 3 trillion rupees that would have otherwise ended up in the wrong hands. Just because of direct benefit transfer through technology, we eliminated middlemen, ensuring transparency in the system.
I also introduced the GeM portal for government purchases, which has helped save both time and money. It has increased competition and improved quality. In India, we had an overwhelming burden of compliances. I eliminated 40,000 unnecessary compliances, and removed nearly 1500 outdated laws that served no purpose.
So in a way, my efforts have been about freeing governance from unnecessary dominance and inefficiency. And naturally, when bold changes happen, just like DOGE’s mission, they become a topic of discussion worldwide.
Our relationship should remain just as strong in the future. It should continue to grow. Of course, differences are natural. When two neighboring countries exist, occasional disagreements are bound to happen. Even within a family, not everything is always perfect. But our focus is to ensure that these differences don’t turn into disputes. That’s what we actively work toward. Instead of discord, we emphasize dialogue, because only through dialogue can we build a stable cooperative relationship that serves the best interests of both nations.
It is true that there have been ongoing border disputes between us. And in 2020, the incidents along the border created significant tensions between our countries. However, after my recent meeting with President Xi, we have seen a return to normalcy at the border. We are now working to restore conditions to how they were before 2020. Slowly but surely, trust, enthusiasm, and energy will return. But of course, it will take some time, since there’s been a five-year gap. Our cooperation isn’t just beneficial, it’s also essential for global stability and prosperity. And since the 21st century is Asia’s century, we want India and China to compete in a healthy and natural way. Competition is not a bad thing, but it should never turn into conflict.
I believe that modern wars are no longer just about resources or interests. Today I see so many kinds of conflicts happening. Physical battles often get discussed. Struggles are happening in every domain. International organizations that were once powerful have become almost irrelevant. No real reforms are happening. Institutions, like the UN, are failing to fulfill their roles. People, who disregard international laws and rules, continue to act freely, and no one can stop them. In such situations, the prudent choice for everyone is to let go of conflict and move toward cooperation. And a development-driven approach is the way forward. Expansionism will not work. As I’ve said before, the world is interdependent and interconnected. Every nation needs one another, no one can stand alone. And from all the different forums I attend, one thing is clear: Everyone is deeply worried about these conflicts. We can only hope that peace is restored very soon.
Then, in the year 2000, the Red Fort in Delhi was attacked by terrorists. Yet another crisis struck the nation, intensifying fear and turmoil. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers in America faced a devastating terror attack, once again shocking the entire world. Because ultimately, the people behind these attacks are driven by a similar mindset. Then in October 2001, terrorists attacked the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. Soon after, on December 13th, 2001, India’s parliament was targeted.
Within just eight to 10 months, these major global terrorist attacks took place, violent incidents that led to bloodshed and the loss of innocent lives. In such a tense environment, even the smallest spark can ignite unrest. The situation had already become extremely volatile. In such times, suddenly, on October 7th, 2001, I was given the responsibility of becoming chief minister of Gujarat. This was an enormous challenge.
At that time, Gujarat was recovering from a devastating earthquake, the largest of the previous century, which had left thousands dead. My first major task as chief minister was overseeing the rehabilitation of survivors. This was a crucial task, and from day one after my oath, I immersed myself in it. I was a person who had absolutely no prior experience with government. I had never been part of any administration, never even served in government before. I had never contested an election, never even been a state representative. For the first time in my life, I had to face elections.
On February 24, 2002, I became a state representative, an elected representative for the first time. And it was only around February 24th, 25th, or 26th that I stepped into the Gujarat Assembly for the very first time. On February 27th, 2002, we were seated in the Assembly for the budget session. And that same day, it had been just three days since I’d become a state representative, when suddenly the horrific Godhra incident occurred. It was a tragedy of unimaginable magnitude, people were burned alive. You can imagine, against the backdrop of incidents like the Kandahar hijacking, the attack on parliament, or even 9/11, and then to have so many people killed and burned alive, you can imagine how tense and volatile the situation was. Of course, this was tragic for everyone. Everyone prefers peace.
The perception that these were the biggest riots ever is actually misinformation. If you review the data from before 2002, you will see that Gujarat faced frequent riots. Curfews were constantly being imposed somewhere. Communal violence could erupt over trivial issues, like kite flying contests or even minor bicycle collisions. Before 2002, Gujarat witnessed over 250 significant riots. The riots in 1969 lasted nearly six months. So there was a long history, long before I was in the picture.
But that one tragic incident in 2002 became a sparking point, leading some people towards violence. Yet, the judiciary thoroughly investigated the matter. At that time, our political opponents were in power, and naturally they wanted all allegations against us to stick. Despite their relentless efforts, the judiciary analyzed the situation meticulously twice and ultimately found us completely innocent. Those who were truly responsible have faced justice from the courts.
But the most important thing is, in Gujarat, where riots used to happen some way or the other every year, but after 2002, in 22 years, there hasn’t been a single major riot in Gujarat. Gujarat remains completely peaceful. Our approach has always been to avoid World Bank politics. Instead, our mantra has been, together with everyone, development for all, trust from all, and efforts by everyone. We’ve shifted away from the politics of appeasement to the politics of aspiration. Because of this, anyone who wishes to contribute joins us willingly. We’ve continuously strived to turn Gujarat into a well-developed state. And today, Gujarat is actively contributing toward building a developed India as well.
But my real complaint is that nowadays what we see isn’t real criticism. Genuine criticism requires thorough study, in-depth research and careful analysis. It demands finding the truth from falsehoods. Today, people look for shortcuts, avoid proper research and skip deep analysis. Instead of identifying genuine weaknesses, they jump straight to accusations. There’s a big difference between allegations and criticism. The references you’re giving, they are allegations, not criticism. For a strong democracy, genuine criticism is necessary. Allegations benefit no one, they just cause unnecessary conflicts. That’s why I always welcome criticism openly. And whenever false accusations arise, I calmly continue serving my country with complete dedication.
Regarding your point about journalistic headlines, if someone’s attracted by catchy headlines or plays with words, I honestly don’t mind that much. But when there’s a deliberate agenda behind the actions and the truth is deliberately ignored, that can cause damage that lasts for decades. If someone focuses on pleasing their readers or viewers with attractive headlines, maybe we can compromise a little. But if there’s a hidden motive, or if things are intentionally twisted to serve an agenda, that’s a serious issue worth worrying about.
However, some people selectively picked up just half of my analogy and created a huge controversy out of it. Honestly, was I being negative about anyone? Not at all. I was simply highlighting the incredible strength of a bee, that even its small sting can leave such an impact that can make someone hide their face for days. You can’t show your face. That’s the power journalism should have. But unfortunately, some people prefer the fly approach instead.
My government is committed to ensuring welfare schemes reach every citizen. Every scheme must reach its intended beneficiaries. Every beneficiary must be treated equally. No one should face discrimination on caste, creed, faith, wealth, or ideology. We must strive to ensure the well-being and prosperity of everyone. This way, even those not directly benefiting, never feel left out or treated unfairly. They find comfort in knowing they too will benefit in due course. This fosters a deep sense of trust, and trust is the cornerstone of my governance model.
Secondly, my governance flows beyond the ebb and flow of elections. My governance is rooted in the people, not the polls. It is committed to the well-being of my citizens and the greater good of the nation. As you may know, I had once set out on a quest for spiritual awakening, so now I revere my nation as the Divine itself, and I now revere the people as a manifestation of the Divine. Like a devoted priest, my heart is set on serving the people. I don’t distance myself from the people. I live among them as one of them. And I tell everyone I work with, if you work hard, I will work harder. People see this and it builds trust. Besides, I have no conflicts of interest. I have no friends or relatives who stand to gain from the position I hold. The common man appreciates this lack of vested interests, and that’s probably just one reason why.
Moreover, I come from a party with millions of dedicated volunteers. Volunteers who are completely devoted to the welfare of India and its citizens. They have had no stake whatsoever in politics. They’ve held no title, nor strayed where influence holds sway. My party is blessed with millions of volunteers who work tirelessly. I am proud to belong to the world’s largest political party, and it’s not like my party has been around forever. It reflects the hard work of millions of volunteers. Their selfless service is widely recognized and valued by the community. It fortifies people’s trust in the BJP, echoed in the election results. I never tallied our election triumphs, but we have had people’s blessings.
We had more than a million polling booths. Can you fathom all the manpower involved in this? My country has more than 2,500 registered political parties. This staggering figure, with such a vast array of political parties, has the power to leave the entire world in awe. My country has more than 900 round-the-clock news channels. There are over 5,000 newspapers published daily. They each play a role in upholding democracy in their own way. Even the humblest villagers here embrace technology with remarkable swiftness. While some other countries take months to declare election results, we announced the results within a day, despite the mind-boggling number of voters.
And you were spot on in saying that even the remotest villages have polling stations. We even use helicopters to transport polling stations. I believe Arunachal Pradesh has the highest altitude polling booth on record. In Gujarat, a polling booth was set up in the Gir Forest for just one voter, who was in the middle of nowhere, but we ensured a polling booth was set up for them. All I mean to say…
As far as power is concerned, it is something I have never bothered about. I entered politics not to play power games, but to serve. Rather than seeking power, I stay committed to doing and getting work done. I am more focused on productivity than power. I have always dedicated myself to serving the people. I have always devoted myself to bringing about a positive change in their lives.
Like at the time of pandemic, with the lockdown and traveling restrictions in place, I came up with a way to make the most of my time. I designed a governance model that operated seamlessly through videoconferencing. I kept myself occupied with remote work and virtual meetings.
Another thing I did was to connect with the people I had worked with throughout my life. Among my party’s volunteers nationwide, I made a list of those who were 70 and older. Some of the volunteers had very humble beginnings and came from very modest backgrounds. I personally called every volunteer aged 70 and above. I made it a point to inquire about their health and their family’s well-being. I inquired about how their area was coping. I asked these questions to make sure they were doing well. This allowed me to build rapport with them, and we would go down the memory lane. They were touched that the Prime Minister would check on them in the pandemic.
I made around 40 calls every day without fail. I carried on with this throughout the pandemic. It gave me the chance to reconnect and relive old memories with familiar faces. Loneliness is never a concern for me, as I always find ways to stay engaged, and I have long been at peace with myself. The time I spent in the Himalayas have helped me develop this.
Secondly, my responsibilities keep pushing me forward. The responsibilities entrusted to me by my fellow citizens always remind me that I’m not here to enjoy privileges. I will always give it my absolute best. Perhaps there are a couple of things I may not accomplish, but there will never be a lack of effort or hard work from me. When I was campaigning in 2014, I had made a promise first in Gujarat and later across India. I promised my fellow citizens that I will never fall behind in hard work for my country. Secondly, I promised I would never act with bad intentions, and thirdly, I vowed I’d never do anything for personal gain.
Today it’s been 24 years. For such a long period, the people have entrusted me as head of government. I’ve continuously held myself to these three standards, and I still live by them today. My inspiration comes from serving 1.4 billion people from understanding and fulfilling their aspirations and addressing their needs. I’m always determined to do as much as I can, work as hard as possible. Even today, my energy remains just as strong.
You see, the more open we are to new and different sources of knowledge, the more new ideas we’ll have. I think it’s important for us to clearly understand the difference between information and knowledge. Some people mistakenly confuse information with knowledge, carrying around large amounts of information, but I don’t believe information alone equals knowledge. Knowledge is something deeper. It gradually evolves through processing, reflection and understanding. Recognizing this difference is important in how we handle both.
Another factor in my approach is that I’m very well-connected in my administration. My officials know this well and probably feel overwhelmed by it, by the fact that my information channels are numerous and are very active. Because of that, I receive lots of insights from various sources. So when someone comes to brief me, that’s not my only source of information. I always have additional perspectives available to me.
Another thing, I maintain a learner’s mindset. Suppose I’m not familiar with something and an official explains it to me. I approach them like a student and ask, “Can you clarify this? How does it work? Then what happens next and how?” Whenever I have different information, I deliberately play devil’s advocate and ask challenging questions. I thoroughly analyze the issue from multiple angles, hoping that careful evaluation will yield something valuable. Then once I converge toward a decision or action that is worth taking, I share the idea informally with like-minded people just to gauge their reactions and see how they respond, gathering insights and feedback before moving forward, until finally, I have a strong conviction that my decision is right.
This entire decision-making process doesn’t actually take much time. My speed is very fast. Let me share an example. How did I make decisions during COVID? I had Nobel Prize winners advising me, giving countless economic examples from around the world. They’d say, “This country is doing this, that country did that. You should do it too.” Renowned economists constantly bombarded me with suggestions. Political parties pressured me relentlessly, urging me to spend huge amounts of money, but I didn’t act immediately. I paused and reflected. What exactly should I do? Then considering the unique conditions of my own country, I made a clear decision. I wouldn’t let the poor sleep hungry. I wouldn’t allow social tensions to arise over basic daily needs.
These core principles guided my approach. The entire world was in lockdown. Global economies were collapsing. Everyone pressured me to empty the treasury, print more currency and flood money everywhere, but I decided that this was not the right economic route to follow. And so instead, the path I chose, after carefully listening to experts, understanding their opinions without opposing them and combining their advice with my own country’s situation and my personal experiences, created a system that worked effectively. As a result, when the whole world suffered from severe inflation immediately after COVID, India did not.
Today, my country is steadily advancing at a rapid pace, emerging as one of the fastest growing major economies in the world. The main reason is that during that crisis, with patience and discipline, I resisted the temptation to apply every global theory blindly. We didn’t worry about what newspapers would say, whether they’d praise or criticize. Ignoring all that, I stayed focused on basic fundamentals, and by doing so, we succeeded and kept moving ahead. So ultimately, my economy benefited as well. My approach has always been to stay focused on these fundamentals.
Another strength is my risk-taking capacity. I don’t worry about potential losses for myself. If something is right for my country, for the people, I’m always prepared to take the risk. Secondly, I take ownership of my decisions. If something goes wrong, I don’t ship blame to others. I stand up, take responsibility, and own the outcome. When you take ownership, your team also becomes deeply committed. They know this person won’t let us down, won’t abandon us. He’ll always stand with us because they see I’m making honest decisions, not for myself, but for the nation. I’ve openly told the country from the start, I’m human. I can make mistakes, but I won’t act with bad intentions. People remember those words clearly. Even if something doesn’t go as planned, they trust that Modi’s intentions were right. They think he probably meant to do something good even if it didn’t work out. So society sees and accepts me just as I am.
Take 5G for example. The world initially believed we were far behind, but once we started, we became the fastest nation globally to roll out comprehensive 5G networks. Recently, an American company executive visited me and shared his experiences about this very fact. He told me that if I were to advertise in the US for engineers, I would only receive enough applicants to fill a single room at best. But if I do the same in India, even a football field wouldn’t be enough to hold them. This indicates that India has access to an extraordinarily vast pool of talent, and that’s our greatest strength. After all, artificial intelligence is fundamentally powered, shaped, and guided by human intelligence. Without genuine human intelligence, AI can’t thrive or progress sustainably, and that real intelligence exists abundantly in India’s youth and talent pool, and I believe that’s our greatest asset.
Secondly, they never get involved in anything questionable or unethical. They tend to remain dedicated to what’s right and ethical. Their nature is collaborative. They easily get along with others, eventually for success. Just having knowledge isn’t enough. The ability to work effectively as part of a team matters significantly more. Understanding people and harnessing their abilities is an incredibly valuable skill.
Generally, people raised in India, especially those coming from joint families and brought up in an open society, find it easier to lead complex tasks and large teams effectively. That’s why today, in major corporations across the globe, you’ll find Indians holding key leadership positions. The problem-solving abilities, along with the analytical thinking of Indian professionals are truly exceptional. I believe this capability is so strong, it makes Indians globally competitive and extremely valuable on the international stage. This is the reason why in fields like innovation, entrepreneurship, startups and boardrooms, you’ll find Indians achieving extraordinary results everywhere.
Take our space sector, for example. Previously, it was entirely government-controlled, but just a couple of years ago, I opened it up to the private sector, and now we already have 200 startups working in space technology. Moreover, our missions like Chandrayaan are extremely cost-effective. India’s Chandrayaan mission costs less than what Hollywood spends making a single blockbuster film. So when the world sees how cost-effective our work is, they naturally think why not partner with India? This automatically generates respect for Indian talent globally. I believe this is a hallmark of our civilizational ethos.
We’ve introduced significant changes in our new education policy to address this issue. But until those changes take effect on the ground, I feel another responsibility. If our children face challenges, it’s my duty to listen to them, understand them, and ease their burden. In a way, when I conduct Pariksha Pe Charcha, I get insights directly from the students, understand their parents’ mindset, as well as the perspectives of people in the educational field. So these discussions don’t just benefit the students. They benefit me too.
Exams are valuable for assessing knowledge in a specific domain, but they can’t become the sole measure of someone’s overall potential. Many people may not score high academically, yet can hit a century in cricket because that’s where their true strength lies. When the focus shifts to actual learning, scores tend to naturally improve.
I remember when I was a student, I had a teacher whose learning techniques still greatly appeal to me today. He would give us children specific instructions. To one child he would say, “Tomorrow, bring exactly 10 chickpeas from home.” To another, he might request, ” Bring 15 grains of rice. No more. No less.” A third child could be told, “Bring 21 mung beans. Precisely that number.” Different students got different quantities and varieties. So each child would think, “I need to get exactly 10.” Counting them at home helped them memorize numbers naturally. Then they’d learn what chickpeas were, and after returning to school, they’d pool it all. The teacher would then ask, ” Take out 10 chickpeas, three chickpeas, two mung beans-“
When I was in school, I observed one of my teachers using an innovative idea. On his very first day, he placed a diary on the table and said, “Whoever arrives earliest each morning will write one sentence in this diary along with their name.” The next student would then need to write a related sentence.
At first, I’d rush to school very early every day. Why? So that I could write the first sentence. I once wrote something like, “Today’s sunrise was magnificent. It filled me with energy.” I’d write my name and whoever arrived after me had to write something connected to the sunrise as well.
After a few days, I realized my creativity wasn’t improving much from this. Why? Because I’d arrived with the fixed thought already in mind and simply write it down. So I decided I’d start going last instead. What happened then was that I’d read what others had written first and then try to give my very best.
As a result, my creativity began to improve even more. Sometimes teachers do these small simple activities that greatly impact your life. These experiences combined with my own background in organizational work, made human resource development a key area of focus for me.
That’s why I engage with children through events once or twice each year and over time, these efforts have resulted in a book that’s benefiting thousands of children serving as a valuable reference for them.
While working, one must continually strive to improve their skills and should never underestimate their ability to learn. When someone constantly neglects their learning ability, they limit their growth, but those who look beyond their tasks and observe what others around them are doing, their capacity can double or even triple.
To young people I’d say this clearly, there’s no need to feel discouraged. There’s certainly some task out there destined just for you. Don’t worry. Focus on enhancing your skills and opportunities will come.
You may think, “I wanted to be a doctor, but became a teacher. My life is wasted.” Thinking like that won’t help you at all. All right, you didn’t become a doctor, but as a teacher, you can shape 100 doctors.
If you had become a doctor, you’d serve only your patients. But now, as a teacher, you can inspire students to fulfill their dreams of becoming doctors so that both you and your students can together serve millions of patients. Then he gains a new perspective on life.
“I couldn’t become a doctor so I was miserable and I was unhappy being a teacher, but now I realize as a teacher, I can create doctors.” Connecting your life to a greater purpose brings a sense of inspiration and meaning. I have always believed that God has given everyone unique capabilities. Never lose faith in your own abilities. You should always maintain trust in your own abilities. Keep believing in yourself and trust that when the opportunity comes, you’ll perform and you’ll succeed. That confidence makes a person deliver results.
Secondly, students should always keep themselves well-prepared beforehand. Only then can they appear for exams feeling stress-free and confident. They should have complete trust in themselves and their abilities.
Sometimes I see students panic over the smallest issues during exams. They take papers or other things, and when their pen suddenly stops working causing anxiety, sometimes they feel uneasy thinking, “Oh no, I don’t like sitting next to this person.” If the bench wobbles, their whole attention goes there, indicating self-doubt.
Those lacking confidence constantly keep looking for distractions. But if you are confident and have genuinely worked hard, just take a minute, take some deep breaths, relax your mind and refocus your attention calmly.
Slowly read through the questions and allocate your time systematically. “I have this amount of time I’ll dedicate these minutes per question.” In my experience, students who regularly practice writing test papers can easily overcome such situations without any trouble at all.
When I’m with you, I’m fully present, grounded in the moment. No calls or messages can pull me away from this moment with you. I am fully present focused on the here and now. That’s why I always believe this is a habit everyone should embrace.
It will sharpen your mind and improve your learning ability. Besides, knowledge alone cannot light the way. You must immerse yourself in the flow of practice. You cannot master driving merely by reading the life stories of great drivers. You must get behind the wheel and take the road yourself.
You must dare to take risks. You can never master the road if fear of accident or death holds you back. I truly believe that those who live in the present are the ones who live their life to the fullest. That’s because they know that every moment lived has already slipped into the past.
So you must embrace the moment before it fades into the past. Otherwise, chasing the future only turns the present into the past. It’s not a trade worth making. Most people stress so much about the future that their present quietly slips away. Before they know it the moment has already faded into the past.
Let me ask maybe a difficult, maybe a human question. Do you contemplate your mortality? Are you afraid of death?
That’s how life will evolve and flourish, for it is uncertain. That’s why you must commit to enriching, refining and elevating your life so you can live fully and with a purpose before death comes knocking.
That’s why you must let go of the fear of death. After all, death is inevitable and there’s no use worrying about when it will arrive. It will arrive when it’s meant to.
If we take a moment to reflect on the history of mankind, we see the incredible crisis humans have overcome with resilience and strength. We also see the major changes humanity has embraced to evolve with the times, and this continuous transformation has carried on for millennia.
In every era, it is in human nature to adapt to the ever-flowing current of change. And while our progress has gone through cycles of ups and downs, it is those people who can break free from the constraints of these historical cycles and outdated thinking patterns.
It is they who can help humanity achieve extraordinary positive breakthroughs with an unshackled speed and grace transcending the limitations of the old way of doing things by embracing change.
Many mantras in Hindu philosophy are deeply intertwined in some intricate and interesting ways with science and nature, each woven into different facets of life. Chanting mantras on a daily basis brings profound and lasting benefits.
For example, even when you’re in class, your mind wanders to recess. All you think about is lunch, not the lesson. Meditation is simply being present in the moment. I recall an incident from my time living in the Himalayas. There I encountered this wise sage. He taught me a simple practical technique. It was nothing spiritual.
There are several little streams in the Himalayas. He positioned a large leaf to catch water from one of those streams and placed an upside down bowl below so water would drip rhythmically from the leaf onto the bowl.
He asked me to focus only on the dripping water, ignoring all other sounds. “Ignore the chirping birds and the soft rustle of the breeze.” He would place the leaf and I would meditate there for hours. I felt my mind slowly tuning into the rhythmic sounds of the water droplets falling onto the bowl like a melody guiding me into deep focus.
And it’s not like I was chanting mantras or reciting God’s name. I like to call it the divine resonance. It was by tuning into that divine resonance that I learned the art of concentration. This practice slowly evolved into meditation. Sometimes you happen to stay at a fancy hotel, you get a lavish, luxurious room. The decor is impeccable and you have been wholeheartedly fasting, but there’s a dripping faucet in the bathroom. That faint sound is enough to make a luxurious room feel worthless.
At times, we realize the value of concentration in life’s inner journey. We come to appreciate the difference a little bit of concentration can make. One very interesting concept comes to mind from our scriptures.
Since we spoke about life and death, I would like to quote a mantra, [foreign language 03:03:28]. In other words, all life is part of a complete circle, and this mantra emphasizes the path to achieve that completeness.
Similarly, Hindus never focus solely on individual well-being. [foreign language 03:03:52]. In other words, we wish for the well-being and prosperity of all. [foreign language 03:04:00]. This mantra encompasses the idea of universal well-being and prosperity.
And you know how this mantra ends? [foreign language 03:04:13]. Every Hindu mantra ends on the same note. Peace, peace, peace. These ancient and powerful rituals born in India have emerged from thousands of years of the spiritual practice of sages. They connect us to the essence of life.
I’ve explored several new realms of thought for the first time ever with you today. I had long kept those thoughts tucked away within myself, but today you brought those thoughts to light. I hope [inaudible 03:05:30].
First, let me give a shout out to the amazing team around the Prime Minister. Everyone was super kind, excellent at what they do, efficient, great communication, and just great people all around.
And since I spoke English and Prime Minister Modi spoke Hindi, I have to comment on the interpreter who was doing simultaneous interpreting for both of us. She was absolutely amazing. I can’t sing her enough praises. From the equipment used to the quality of the translation, to just the human touch of it all.
And in general, my travels around Delhi and India revealed to me some early glimpses of what felt like another world, almost like another planet, different culturally from anything I’ve experienced before. A chaos of human interactions, out there, big dynamic personalities and characters.
Obviously, India’s composed of many distinct subcultures and Delhi represents just one slice. Much like neither New York or Texas or Iowa alone represent America. They’re all different flavors of America.
On my visit, I walked around and rode rickshaws everywhere, just aimlessly wandering the streets, looking to talk to people about life. Of course, like many places on earth, there are always some people, especially those that have something to sell, who will at first see me as a tourist, a foreign traveler, one with some money to spend.
Like always, I avoided such shallow interactions and went straight past the small talk to the meaningful conversations. Shooting the shit about what they love, what they fear, what kind of hardship and triumph they’ve experienced in their lives.
I think the cool thing about people anywhere on earth is they quickly do see the real you past the facades that strangers put up for each other, if you’re vulnerable and honest enough to let them. And I tried to do just that and I should say that for the most part, everyone was super kind in the genuine human way.
Even when they didn’t speak English, it was always easy to understand. Probably more than any other peoples I’ve interacted with in India, people’s eyes, faces, body language, all communicate a lot of information, a lot of emotion, not reserved at all.
When I traveled through Eastern Europe, for example, in contrast, reading a person is much tougher. The meme does have some truth to it. There’s often a protective layer between the heart of the person and the outside world. In India, it’s all there on full display. So I had a lot of epic conversations and interactions as I walked around Delhi for a couple of weeks.
In general, on the topic of reading people, I do believe the eyes can often say more than words can. We humans are a fascinating bunch. There really is a deep turbulent ocean behind the surface waves we show the world. In some sense, what I try to do in conversations, on and off the mic, is to get to that depth.
Anyway, the few weeks I spent in India were a magical experience. Traffic alone was a wild time, like the world’s most difficult test for self-driving cars.
It reminded me of watching nature documentary videos of swarms of fish when it’s thousands of them swimming around at insane speeds, seemingly in complete chaos. And yet when looking at the big picture of it it all works like a perfectly tuned orchestra.
I will, most certainly, travel around India with my friend Paul Rosalie in the near future, maybe with some other friends all around from the north of India to the south.
Now, allow me to also comment about one of the books that first drew me toward India and to its deep history of philosophical and spiritual traditions. The book is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.
I first read most of Hesse’s major work as a teenager, but then reread them again through the years. It first found me, Siddhartha, when I was immersed in a very different kind of literature of Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Orwell, Hemingway, Kerouac, Steinbeck and so on. Many of these explore the same human condition that puzzled me when I was a young man and still puzzles me today, even more so.
But Siddhartha was my introduction to the Eastern way of looking at these puzzles. It was written by Hermann Hesse. And by the way, please allow me this pronunciation of his last name. I’ve heard some people say Hesse, but my whole life I’ve always said Hesse.
So, anyway, it was written by Hermann Hesse, a German-Swiss Nobel Prize winning writer during one of the darkest periods of his own life. His marriage was failing, World War I has shattered his pacifist ideals and he suffered from debilitating headaches, insomnia, and depression.
During this period, he began psychoanalysis with Carl Jung, which, in part, led him to explore Eastern philosophies as a way to heal his fractured psyche. Hesse immersed himself in translations of ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts studying the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
And so, the writing of Siddhartha was in itself, for him, a journey that paralleled that of the main character in the book. Hesse started writing the book in 1919 and finished three years later experiencing an extensive psychological crisis in the middle. The book follows Siddhartha, a young man in ancient India, as he leaves behind wealth and comfort to search for meaning. You can feel his personal struggle in every page. Siddhartha’s restlessness, his dissatisfaction with conventional wisdom, his need to find truth, the direct experience.
Again, the book wasn’t simply a philosophical exploration for Hesse, it was psychological survival. He was writing his way out of suffering and towards his own enlightenment. I won’t go into a deep analysis of the book here, but I will mention two key lessons I took away and carry with me to this day.
First lesson comes from the scene in the book that to me is one of the great scenes in all of literature. Siddhartha is sitting by a river just listening, and in that river he hears all of life. All sounds, all voices, all of time, past, present, future, flowing together as one.
That scene gave me the experience and the notion that while in some grounded human sense, the linear arrow of time does exist. In another sense, time is a kind of illusion that, in fact, everything exists simultaneously. That our lives are both momentary and eternal. It is hard to describe these ideas with words. I think they must be experienced as personal revelations.
I’m reminded of the fish story that David Foster Wallace, another one of my favorite writers, described in a commencement speech 20 years ago. The story goes, “Two young fish are swimming along when they encounter an older fish swimming the opposite way. The older fish nods and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The young fish swim on, and eventually one turns to the other and asks, ‘What the hell is water?'”
The illusion of the forward progress of time is water in this metaphor. As humans, we’re fully immersed in it, but enlightenment, in part, involves being able to step back and get a glimpse at another deeper perspective on reality where all things are inextricably interconnected across both time and space.
Another key lesson from the novel that was especially formative to me as a young man was that one should not blindly follow others or learn about the world exclusively through books. But rather forge your own path and thrust yourself into the world where the lessons of life can only be learned by experiencing them directly.
And every experience, both positive and negative, mistakes, suffering and even seemingly wasted time is all an essential part of growth. To this point, Hesse draws a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge can be taught by others. Wisdom can only be gathered through experiencing the full mess of life yourself.
In other words, the path to understanding isn’t through rejection of the world, but through complete immersion in it. Those are my early steps in seeing the world through the lens of Eastern philosophy. But many of Hesse’s books had an impact on me. I would recommend to read Demian, when you are younger, Steppenwolf, when you are older, Siddhartha throughout your life, especially in moments of crisis, and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning.
But Siddhartha is the only one I’ve returned to more than twice. In my own life, when faced with a difficult situation, I often return to the moment in the book when Siddhartha is asked what skills he possesses, and his answer is simply, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.”
Let me elaborate. Indeed, for the first part, “I can think.” As Marcus Aurelius said, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.” For the second part, “I can wait.” Patience and waiting often is indeed the optimal decision when facing a problem. Time does bring clarity and depth of understanding.
For the third part, “I can fast.” When needed, being able to live and flourish with less is a prerequisite of being free when the mind, the body, and society all are trying to put you in cages.
All right, friends, now sadly, our time together in this episode has come to a close. As always, thank you for being here and thank you for your support through the years.
Let me leave you with a few words from the Bhagavad Gita. “He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own self in all beings and all beings in his own self and looks unto everything with an impartial eye.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – In this episode…
- 3:07 – Introduction
- 9:19 – Fasting
- 21:38 – Early life
- 33:33 – Advice to Young People
- 39:16 – Journey in the Himalayas
- 50:45 – Becoming a monk
- 52:33 – RSS and Hindu nationalism
- 1:00:17 – Explaining India
- 1:04:27 – Mahatma Gandhi
- 1:16:23 – Path to peace in Ukraine
- 1:19:37 – India and Pakistan
- 1:25:16 – Cricket and Football
- 1:29:41 – Donald Trump
- 1:40:51 – China and Xi Jinping
- 1:47:56 – Gujarat riots in 2002
- 2:03:33 – Biggest democracy in the world
- 2:13:48 – Power
- 2:18:34 – Hard work
- 2:21:42 – Srinivasa Ramanujan
- 2:23:48 – Decision-making process
- 2:31:35 – AI
- 2:41:50 – Education
- 2:52:06 – Learning and focus
- 2:57:56 – Mantra
- 2:59:41 – Meditation
- 3:05:38 – Lex visiting India
- 3:10:04 – Siddhartha
In this episode…
Narendra Modi
My strength lies not in my name, but in the backing of 1.4 billion Indians and thousands of years of timeless culture and heritage. So wherever I go, I carry with me the essence of thousands of years of Vedic tradition, the timeless teachings of Swami Vivekananda and the blessings, dreams, and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians. When I shake hands with the world leader, it’s not Modi, but 1.4 billion Indians doing so. So this isn’t my strength at all. It is rather the strength of India. Whenever we speak of peace, the world listens to us, because India is the land of Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, and Indians aren’t hardwired to espouse strife and conflict. We espouse harmony instead.
My strength lies not in my name, but in the backing of 1.4 billion Indians and thousands of years of timeless culture and heritage. So wherever I go, I carry with me the essence of thousands of years of Vedic tradition, the timeless teachings of Swami Vivekananda and the blessings, dreams, and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians. When I shake hands with the world leader, it’s not Modi, but 1.4 billion Indians doing so. So this isn’t my strength at all. It is rather the strength of India. Whenever we speak of peace, the world listens to us, because India is the land of Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, and Indians aren’t hardwired to espouse strife and conflict. We espouse harmony instead.
We seek neither to wage war against nature, nor to foster strife among nations. We stand for peace, and wherever we can act as peacemakers, we have gladly embraced that responsibility. My early life was spent in extreme poverty, but we never really felt the burden of poverty. You see, someone who is used to wearing fine shoes will feel their absence when they don’t have them, but for us, we had never worn shoes in our lives. So how would we even know that wearing shoes was a big deal? We weren’t in a position to compare. That’s just how we lived.
When I became Prime Minister, I especially invited Pakistan to my swearing-in ceremony so we could turn over a new leaf, yet every noble attempt at fostering peace was met with hostility and betrayal. We sincerely hope that wisdom prevails upon them and they choose the path of peace. I believe even the people of Pakistan long for peace. Look, regarding what you said about criticism and how I deal with it. If I had to summarize in one sentence, I welcome it. I have a strong belief that criticism is the soul of democracy. I want to tell all the young people the following. No matter how dark the night may seem, it is still just night, and morning is bound to come.
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Narendra Modi, the prime Minister of India. It was one of the most moving conversations and experiences of my life. Allow me here to say a few words about it. Please skip ahead straight to our conversation, if you like. Narendra Modi’s life story is incredible. He rose from poverty to lead a nation of 1.4 billion people, the biggest democracy in the world, where he won epic-scale elections for Prime Minister three times. As a leader, he fought for ideas that unite his nation of India, a nation that is composed of a large number of highly varied and disparate cultures and peoples, who have a long history marked by religious, social, and political frictions. He is known for taking decisive, at times controversial actions for which he is loved by hundreds of millions of people, and is also criticized by many. We discuss all of this at length in this conversation. On the world stage, he is respected as a peacemaker and friend by most major world leaders, even those whose nations are at war with each other, from the United States to China, to Ukraine and Russia, to Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, and everywhere else. Now, at this moment in history, it is clear, at least to me, that the flourishing of human civilization hangs in the balance, with several wars on the brink of escalation to regional and even global conflict, rising tensions between nuclear powers, technological developments from AI to nuclear fusion that aim to completely transform society and geopolitics as we know it, and of course, generally increasing political and cultural turmoil.
The following is a conversation with Narendra Modi, the prime Minister of India. It was one of the most moving conversations and experiences of my life. Allow me here to say a few words about it. Please skip ahead straight to our conversation, if you like. Narendra Modi’s life story is incredible. He rose from poverty to lead a nation of 1.4 billion people, the biggest democracy in the world, where he won epic-scale elections for Prime Minister three times. As a leader, he fought for ideas that unite his nation of India, a nation that is composed of a large number of highly varied and disparate cultures and peoples, who have a long history marked by religious, social, and political frictions. He is known for taking decisive, at times controversial actions for which he is loved by hundreds of millions of people, and is also criticized by many. We discuss all of this at length in this conversation. On the world stage, he is respected as a peacemaker and friend by most major world leaders, even those whose nations are at war with each other, from the United States to China, to Ukraine and Russia, to Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, and everywhere else. Now, at this moment in history, it is clear, at least to me, that the flourishing of human civilization hangs in the balance, with several wars on the brink of escalation to regional and even global conflict, rising tensions between nuclear powers, technological developments from AI to nuclear fusion that aim to completely transform society and geopolitics as we know it, and of course, generally increasing political and cultural turmoil.
So now more than ever, we need great leaders, great peacemakers who build bridges, not destroy them, who may preserve the identity of their nations, but still celebrate the common humanity of all of us, all people on earth. For this and many other reasons, this conversation with Prime Minister Modi was one of the most remarkable I’ve ever had. You may hear such words and think that I’m just enamored by power or access. No, never was, never will be. I do not idolize anyone, especially those in power. I’m generally skeptical of power, money, and fame because of their natural corrupting influence on the mind, the heart, the soul of a person.
The whole point of all the conversations I’ve had in my life, on mic and off mic, is that I try to see and explore the full complexity of every human being, the good and the bad. I believe we’re all the same in a deep fundamental sense, all capable of good, all capable of evil, all carry stories of pain and stories of hope. Whether you’re a world leader or a truck driver, a coal miner, or a farmer in the American Midwest. And by the way, I will be talking to a lot of the latter kind of folk this year off mic, and maybe even on mic, as I travel the US and the world. My brief statements here about Narendra Modi are about both him as a leader, and especially him as a human being. In the extensive time I spent with him, I spoke with him off mic and on mic.
It was a deeply personal human interaction characterized by warmth, kindness, humor, inner and outer peace, and absolute focus on the conversation between us in the present moment as if nothing else existed. I have heard from many people that he treats everyone he meets in this empathic way, no matter where they come from or what their position is in this world. So for those and many other reasons, this really was an incredible experience. I will never forget. Oh, and by the way, we make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in English, Hindi and other languages. You can also listen to the original mixed language version where I speak English and Prime Minister Modi speaks Hindi. Separately, you can choose to turn on subtitles in your preferred language.
On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon and clicking audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer. For fully English overdub, select English. For fully Hindi overdub select Hindi, and to listen to the original mixed language version where I speak English and Prime Minister Modi speaks Hindi, please select Hindi Latin audio track, so you can listen either to a version that is all one language or to the original mixed language version with subtitles in your preferred language. The default is English overdub. Our thanks to ElevenLabs and a great team of translators, we do our best to bring the Prime Minister’s voice to life with AI voice cloning in English.
I promise that we will continue to work very hard to break down the barriers that language creates, and try to make these conversations as accessible as possible to everyone in the world. Anyway, let me pause one more time to say a big thank you. What a wild ride this life has been. It’s an honor for me to be on it with all of you. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, and now, dear friends, here’s the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.
Fasting
Lex Fridman
So, I should also say I’m fasting right now. It’s been almost two days, 45 hours, so just water, no food in honor of this conversation, just to get in the right mindset, get into the spiritual level. I’ve read that you often fast for many days. Can you explain why you fast, and where does your mind go when you fast?
So, I should also say I’m fasting right now. It’s been almost two days, 45 hours, so just water, no food in honor of this conversation, just to get in the right mindset, get into the spiritual level. I’ve read that you often fast for many days. Can you explain why you fast, and where does your mind go when you fast?
Narendra Modi
First of all, I’m truly pleasantly surprised and honored that you’re fasting, all the more because it feels like you’re fasting as a tribute of respect for me. So, I express my deepest gratitude to you for doing this. In India, our religious traditions are actually a way of life. Our Supreme Court once gave a brilliant interpretation of Hinduism. They have stated that Hinduism is not about rituals or methods of worship, but rather it’s a way of living, a philosophy that guides life itself. And in our scriptures, there is deep discussion on elevating the body, mind, intellect, soul, and humanity. They outline various paths, traditions, and systems to achieve this, and fasting is one of them, but fasting alone isn’t everything. In India, whether you see it culturally or philosophically, sometimes I see that fasting is a way to cultivate discipline.
First of all, I’m truly pleasantly surprised and honored that you’re fasting, all the more because it feels like you’re fasting as a tribute of respect for me. So, I express my deepest gratitude to you for doing this. In India, our religious traditions are actually a way of life. Our Supreme Court once gave a brilliant interpretation of Hinduism. They have stated that Hinduism is not about rituals or methods of worship, but rather it’s a way of living, a philosophy that guides life itself. And in our scriptures, there is deep discussion on elevating the body, mind, intellect, soul, and humanity. They outline various paths, traditions, and systems to achieve this, and fasting is one of them, but fasting alone isn’t everything. In India, whether you see it culturally or philosophically, sometimes I see that fasting is a way to cultivate discipline.
If I put it in simple terms, or explain it to the viewers who are unfamiliar with India, it is a powerful tool to bring both the inner and outer self into balance. It shapes life in profound ways when you fast. You may have noticed, as you said, you’ve been fasting on water for two days. Every single one of your senses, especially smell, touch and taste, becomes highly sensitive. You may even notice the subtle aroma of water itself, something you probably never noticed before when drinking it. If someone walks past you carrying tea, you will catch its aroma just like you would with coffee. A small flower you’ve seen before, you will see it again today, but now you can perceive its details more vividly. Your senses become extra sharp, highly aware, and fully tuned in, and their capability to observe and to respond multiplies, and grows sharper. I have personally often experienced this. Another thing I’ve experienced is that fasting can greatly accelerate the thinking process, and can give a fresh perspective. You start thinking outside the box. I don’t know if everyone experiences this, but I certainly do. Most people assume that fasting simply means giving up food or not eating, but that’s just the physical aspect of fasting. If someone is forced to go without food due to hardship with an empty stomach, can we call that fasting? Fasting is actually a scientific process. Whenever I fast for an extended period, I prepare my body in advance. For five to seven days before the fast, I follow various Ayurvedic practices and yoga practices, along with other traditional cleansing methods to internally reset my system.
Before actually beginning the fast. I make sure to drink a lot of water, as much as possible. So, you could say that this detoxification process helps prepare my body in the best possible way. And once I begin fasting, for me, it’s an act of devotion. For me, fasting is a form of self-discipline. For me personally, even while I go about doing my daily activities during a fast, my mind remains deeply introspective and focused inward, and that experience is profoundly transformative for me. My practice of fasting didn’t come from reading books, listening to sermons, or following a tradition just because my family happened to have observed it. It came from my own personal experience.
During my school days, there was a movement inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s vision, his vision of cow protection. The government had not enacted any laws at the time. At the time, people across the country observed a one-day fast by gathering in public places in silent protests. We were just kids, probably had just finished primary school. Something inside me said, “I should be part of this,” and that was the first time in my life I experienced fasting. At such a young age, I felt neither hunger nor any desire for food. Instead, I felt a new awareness, a surge of energy within me.
So, I became convinced that fasting is a science far beyond just skipping meals. It is something far greater than that. Then gradually, I refined my body and mind through various experiments. Over time, it became a long and disciplined journey for me, and one thing is certain. Fasting never slows me down. I work just as much as usual. Sometimes I even work more. And another fascinating thing I’ve noticed is that when I need to express my thoughts, I’m amazed at where they come from and how they flow. It’s truly an incredible experience.
Lex Fridman
So you still do meetings with world leaders, you still manage the affairs of India. You still carry out your role as a leader on the world stage, all fasted, and sometimes nine days?
So you still do meetings with world leaders, you still manage the affairs of India. You still carry out your role as a leader on the world stage, all fasted, and sometimes nine days?
Narendra Modi
Well, this practice has a long historical context. I hope it may be interesting for those listening. There is an ancient tradition in India called Chaturmas. During the monsoon season, we know that the digestion tends to slow down, and so in this season, many people in India follow the practice of eating only a single meal within 24 hours. For me, this starts around mid-June and goes on until after Diwali around November. For about four to four and a half months, I follow this tradition of eating only once in 24 hours. Then comes the Navratri Festival in India, which usually falls in September or October. During this time, the whole country celebrates Durga Puja, a festival of strength, devotion, and spiritual discipline. This lasts for nine days.
Well, this practice has a long historical context. I hope it may be interesting for those listening. There is an ancient tradition in India called Chaturmas. During the monsoon season, we know that the digestion tends to slow down, and so in this season, many people in India follow the practice of eating only a single meal within 24 hours. For me, this starts around mid-June and goes on until after Diwali around November. For about four to four and a half months, I follow this tradition of eating only once in 24 hours. Then comes the Navratri Festival in India, which usually falls in September or October. During this time, the whole country celebrates Durga Puja, a festival of strength, devotion, and spiritual discipline. This lasts for nine days.
During this time, I completely abstain from food and only drink hot water. Although drinking hot water has always been a part of my daily routine, my past lifestyle was such that I naturally developed this habit over time. Then in March or April, another Navratri occurs called Chaitra Navratri. This year, it will likely begin around March 31st. During this nine-day fast, I eat only one specific fruit, once a day. So for those nine days, if let’s say I choose papaya, then for all nine days, I won’t touch anything else. Just papaya. That too, I eat only once a day. That’s how I follow my nine-day fasting routine. So there are numerous fasts I keep throughout the year, and this has become a deeply ingrained tradition in my life. Perhaps I can say that I’ve been following these practices for 50 to 55 years.
Lex Fridman
Has there been times when you met with a world leader and completely fasted, and maybe what do they think about that? What do they think about your ability to do that kind of thing? And you’re right, I should mention that from even my two days, my ability to be present, my ability to sense everything, sharply focus on this experience is elevated. But yes, is there stories with a world leader that maybe jumped to mind when you were fasted?
Has there been times when you met with a world leader and completely fasted, and maybe what do they think about that? What do they think about your ability to do that kind of thing? And you’re right, I should mention that from even my two days, my ability to be present, my ability to sense everything, sharply focus on this experience is elevated. But yes, is there stories with a world leader that maybe jumped to mind when you were fasted?
Narendra Modi
Well, most of the time I don’t even let people know about it. It’s my personal matter, so I never publicized it, but people gradually started finding out. It became known only after I became Chief Minister and Prime Minister. Otherwise, it was purely personal. But now that it’s out in the open, I don’t mind sharing. If someone asks, I tell them so it might be useful to them, because it’s not my personal property. It’s my experience, and if that can help someone, why not share it? After all, my life has always been devoted to the well-being of others.
Well, most of the time I don’t even let people know about it. It’s my personal matter, so I never publicized it, but people gradually started finding out. It became known only after I became Chief Minister and Prime Minister. Otherwise, it was purely personal. But now that it’s out in the open, I don’t mind sharing. If someone asks, I tell them so it might be useful to them, because it’s not my personal property. It’s my experience, and if that can help someone, why not share it? After all, my life has always been devoted to the well-being of others.
For example, after I became Prime Minister, I had a bilateral meeting at the White House with President Obama, and he had also arranged a formal dinner. Then as discussions between the two governments progressed, someone said, “Please join us for dinner.” To which another replied, “But the Prime Minister doesn’t eat.” This left them a bit concerned. How do you host the leader of such a major nation at the White House without serving food? When we sat down, they brought me a glass of hot water. I turned to President Obama and jokingly said, “Look, my dinner has arrived,” as I placed the glass in front of me. Later when I visited again, he still remembered. He smiled and said, “Last time you were fasting, this time we’re having lunch. Since you’re not fasting, you’ll have to eat twice as much.”
Early life
Lex Fridman
Let’s go to the beginning. You rose from humble beginnings to lead the world’s largest democracy. So, I think there’s a lot of people for whom this is truly inspiring. Your family was a very modest means, and you grew up in a one-room house with a mud floor, your whole family living there. Tell me about your childhood. How did those humble beginnings shape your outlook on life?
Let’s go to the beginning. You rose from humble beginnings to lead the world’s largest democracy. So, I think there’s a lot of people for whom this is truly inspiring. Your family was a very modest means, and you grew up in a one-room house with a mud floor, your whole family living there. Tell me about your childhood. How did those humble beginnings shape your outlook on life?
Narendra Modi
My birthplace is in Gujarat, specifically in North Gujarat, in Mehsana district, in a small town called Vadnagar. Historically, this town holds great significance, and so Vadnagar is where I was born and completed my early education. Looking at the world as I understand it today, I can reflect on my childhood and the unique environment I grew up in. My village had certain fascinating aspects, some of which are quite rare, even globally. When I was in school, there was an elder in our village who would regularly tell students, “Listen, kids, wherever you go, if you find a carved stone, or you find a stone with inscriptions on it or anything with engravings, bring it and place it in this corner of the school.” Over time, my curiosity grew and I started to understand. I realized that my village had a rich and ancient history. Discussions at school often revealed more fascinating details about its past. Later I learned that China even made a film about it. I had read in a newspaper about a film that mentioned the Chinese philosopher Hiuen Tsang, who had spent a considerable amount of time in my village, having arrived there many centuries ago. Back then, it was a major center for Buddhist learning. That’s how I first learned about it. And perhaps around the 1400s, it was a prominent Buddhist educational hub.
My birthplace is in Gujarat, specifically in North Gujarat, in Mehsana district, in a small town called Vadnagar. Historically, this town holds great significance, and so Vadnagar is where I was born and completed my early education. Looking at the world as I understand it today, I can reflect on my childhood and the unique environment I grew up in. My village had certain fascinating aspects, some of which are quite rare, even globally. When I was in school, there was an elder in our village who would regularly tell students, “Listen, kids, wherever you go, if you find a carved stone, or you find a stone with inscriptions on it or anything with engravings, bring it and place it in this corner of the school.” Over time, my curiosity grew and I started to understand. I realized that my village had a rich and ancient history. Discussions at school often revealed more fascinating details about its past. Later I learned that China even made a film about it. I had read in a newspaper about a film that mentioned the Chinese philosopher Hiuen Tsang, who had spent a considerable amount of time in my village, having arrived there many centuries ago. Back then, it was a major center for Buddhist learning. That’s how I first learned about it. And perhaps around the 1400s, it was a prominent Buddhist educational hub.
There was a victory monument from the 12th century, a temple from the 17th century, and in the 16th century, two sisters, Tana and Riri, who were renowned musicians. As I uncovered these history traces, I grasped the depth of our heritage. So when I became chief minister, I initiated large-scale excavation projects. The findings from these very projects confirmed that thousands of Buddhist monks had at one time studied there. It was a place where Buddhist, Jain and Hindu traditions co-existed harmoniously, and for us, history wasn’t just confined to books. Every stone spoke. Every wall had a story to tell, and so when we began the large-scale excavation work, we uncovered findings that hold immense historical significance.
So far, they have discovered evidence dating back 2,800 years, proving that this city has remained unbroken and eternal for all those 2,800 years. They have discovered solid proof of how its development unfolded over these centuries. Now, an international-level museum has been established there, open to visitors, especially for archeology students. It has become a major area of study. So the place where I was born holds its own unique historical significance. I see it as my good fortune. Some things in life unfold beyond our understanding. Kashi became my realm of duty. Now, Kashi is also eternal. Kashi, also known as Benares, or Varanasi, is an eternal city that has remained vibrant and alive for centuries.
Perhaps it was some divine design that led a boy born in Vadnagar to eventually make Kashi his realm of duty, living in the embrace of Mother Ganga. When I think about my family, my father, my mother, my siblings, my uncles, aunts, grandparents, we all grew up together in a small house. The place we lived was likely even smaller than where we are sitting now. There was no window, just a small door. That’s where I was born. That’s where I grew up. Now, when people talk about poverty, it’s natural to discuss it in the context of public life, and by those standards, my early life was spent in extreme poverty, but we never really felt the burden of poverty.
You see, someone who is used to wearing fine shoes will feel their absence when they don’t have them. But for us, we had never worn shoes in our lives. So how would we even know that wearing shoes was a big deal? We weren’t in a position to compare. That’s just how we lived. Our mother worked incredibly hard. My father, too. He was extremely hardworking, and he was also extremely disciplined. Every morning around 4:00 or 4:30 AM he would leave the house, walk long distances, visit several temples, and then reach his shop.
He wore traditional leather shoes, handmade in the village. The shoes were very tough and sturdy, making a distinct tock, tock, tock sound when he walked. People in the village used to say that they could tell the time just by hearing his footsteps. ” Oh, yes,” they would say, “Mr. Damodar is on his way.” Such was his discipline. He worked tirelessly, late into the night. Our mother too, ensured that we never felt the struggles of our circumstances, but despite everything, these challenging circumstances of living in scarcity never left a mark on our minds. I remember in school, the idea of wearing shoes never even crossed my mind.
One day, while I was on my way to school, I ran into my uncle on the way he saw me and was surprised, “Hey, you go to school like this, without shoes?” So at that time, he bought me a pair of canvas shoes and made me wear them. Back then, they must have cost around 10 or 12 rupees. But here’s the thing. They were white canvas shoes, and they would quickly get stained. So what did I do? In the evening, after school was over, I would stay back for a while. I would go from classroom to classroom, collecting leftover pieces of chalk that the teachers had discarded. I would take the pieces of chalk home, soak them in water, mix them into a paste and polish my canvas shoes with it, making them bright white again.
For me, those shoes were a treasured possession, a symbol of great wealth, and I don’t exactly know why, but from childhood, our mother was extremely particular about cleanliness. Perhaps that’s where we inherited that habit, too. Not sure how I picked up the habit of dressing neatly, but it’s been there since childhood. Whatever I wore, I made sure it looked proper. Back then, as you can imagine, we didn’t have any arrangements for ironing clothes. So instead, I would heat up water in a copper pot, hold it with tongs, and press my clothes myself. Then I’d head off to school. That’s how I lived, and I found joy in it. We never thought about being poor, or judged about how others lived or what their struggles were.
We lived carefree, enjoying whatever little we had and kept working hard. Never once did we complain about these things. And all these aspects of my life, whether you call it fortune or misfortune, unfolded in such a way in politics that they started coming to light. Because when I was taking my oath as Chief Minister, TV reporters went to my village, questioned my childhood friends, went to capture videos of my home. That’s when people started asking, “Who is this and what background he is coming from?” Before that, very few knew much about my life. That’s just how my journey has been. My mother possessed an innate spirit of caring for others’ well-being. It was woven into the very fabric of her being. She possessed knowledge of traditional remedies and healing practices, and would treat children with these home remedies. Every morning before sunrise, around five o’clock, she would start treating them, so all the children and their parents would gather at our home, little children crying, and we had to wake up early because of it.
Narendra Modi
And we had to wake up early because of it. Meanwhile, my mother would continue treating them with care. This spirit of service, in a way, was nurtured through these experiences. A sense of empathy for society, the desire to do good for others, these values were instilled in me from my family. I believe that my life has been shaped by my mother, my father, my teachers, and the environment I grew up in.
And we had to wake up early because of it. Meanwhile, my mother would continue treating them with care. This spirit of service, in a way, was nurtured through these experiences. A sense of empathy for society, the desire to do good for others, these values were instilled in me from my family. I believe that my life has been shaped by my mother, my father, my teachers, and the environment I grew up in.
Advice to Young People
Lex Fridman
There’s a lot of young people listening to this that are truly inspired by your story. From those humble beginnings to the leader of the biggest democracy in the world, what can you tell to those young folks who are struggling, who are lost in the world, who are trying to find their way? What advice could you give them?
There’s a lot of young people listening to this that are truly inspired by your story. From those humble beginnings to the leader of the biggest democracy in the world, what can you tell to those young folks who are struggling, who are lost in the world, who are trying to find their way? What advice could you give them?
Narendra Modi
I want to tell all the young people the following. No matter how dark the night may seem, it is still just night, and morning is bound to come. That’s why we need patience and self-confidence. Yes, the challenges are real, but I am not defined by my circumstances. I am here for a purpose, sent by a higher power, and I am not alone. The one who sent me is always with me. This unwavering faith should always remain within us. Difficulties are a test of endurance. They are not meant to defeat me. Hardships exist to make me stronger, helping me grow and improve, not to leave me feeling hopeless or discouraged. Personally, I see every crisis, every challenge as an opportunity.
I want to tell all the young people the following. No matter how dark the night may seem, it is still just night, and morning is bound to come. That’s why we need patience and self-confidence. Yes, the challenges are real, but I am not defined by my circumstances. I am here for a purpose, sent by a higher power, and I am not alone. The one who sent me is always with me. This unwavering faith should always remain within us. Difficulties are a test of endurance. They are not meant to defeat me. Hardships exist to make me stronger, helping me grow and improve, not to leave me feeling hopeless or discouraged. Personally, I see every crisis, every challenge as an opportunity.
So, to all young people, I say, have patience. There are no shortcuts in life. At our railway stations, there hangs a sign for those who habitually cross the tracks instead of using the bridge, it reads, “Shortcut will cut you short.” I would tell young people the same, shortcut will cut you short. There are no shortcuts in life. Patience and perseverance are essential. Whatever responsibility we are given, we must pour our heart into it. We should live it with passion. Enjoy the journey and find fulfillment in it. I truly believe that if this mindset is cultivated, it transforms life. Similarly, abundance alone is not enough. There is no guarantee of success. Even a wealthy person who indulges in comfort and idleness will eventually wither away.
Instead, he must decide, “Yes, I may have resources around me, but I must use my abilities to grow them further. I must contribute more to society with my own strength. Even if I am in a good position, there is still so much more to do. Even if I am not in a good position, there is still so much work to do.” That’s what I believe. I have also noticed that some people tend to think, “I’ve learned enough. That’s it.” But one should never let the student within them die. Learning should never stop. I believe that as long as I am alive, I must have a purpose. Perhaps I exist to keep learning, to keep growing. Now, my mother tongue is Gujarati, and we were not very familiar with the Hindi language, nor did we know how to speak it eloquently or communicate effectively. But as a child, I used to sit at my father’s tea shop, and at that young age, I got the chance to meet so many people. And every time, I learned something from them, I observed their ways of speaking, their expressions. These things taught me a lot, even though I wasn’t in a position to apply it then, I thought, “If I ever get the chance, why not? Why shouldn’t I present myself well?” So, I believe the desire to learn should always remain alive. And another thing I’ve observed is that most people dream about achieving something or becoming someone. They set big targets and when they fall short, they feel disappointed.
That’s why whenever I get a chance to talk to my friends, I tell them, instead of dreaming about getting and becoming, dream of doing something. If you focus on doing something, and let’s say your goal is to reach 10, but you make it to eight, you won’t feel discouraged. You’ll still work toward 10 with determination. But if your dream is only to become something and it doesn’t happen, even your achievements may feel like a burden. That’s why we must adjust our mindset in life. Instead of thinking about what I got or didn’t get, the mindset should be what can I give? Because true contentment doesn’t bloom on its own. It grows from the depth of what you give.
Journey in the Himalayas
Lex Fridman
And I should say that this young kid, one of the things I’ve dreamed of doing is to do this very thing, to talk to you today. So, this is very surreal. At 17, another fascinating part of your life. You left home and spent two years roaming in the Himalayas, searching for purpose, for deeper truth, for God. So, not much is known about this period of your life. You lived a nomadic, minimalist existence, very much like a yogi, often sleeping without a roof over your head. What are some memorable spiritual moments, rituals, experiences from that time?
And I should say that this young kid, one of the things I’ve dreamed of doing is to do this very thing, to talk to you today. So, this is very surreal. At 17, another fascinating part of your life. You left home and spent two years roaming in the Himalayas, searching for purpose, for deeper truth, for God. So, not much is known about this period of your life. You lived a nomadic, minimalist existence, very much like a yogi, often sleeping without a roof over your head. What are some memorable spiritual moments, rituals, experiences from that time?
Narendra Modi
It seems like you’ve put in a lot of effort. Look, I don’t usually talk much about this, but I can share a few external aspects of it. I grew up in a very small town. Our life was all about being part of a community. We lived among people, surrounded by them. That was just how life was. There was a library in the village, and I used to go there often to read books. Whenever I read something from the books, I often found myself feeling inspired, thinking, “Why shouldn’t I shape my own life like that?” That desire was always there. When I used to read about Swami Vivekananda or read about Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, I would often wonder, “How did they live? How did they build such remarkable lives?” And for that, I constantly experimented on myself. Most of my experiments were physical in nature, testing my body’s limits.
It seems like you’ve put in a lot of effort. Look, I don’t usually talk much about this, but I can share a few external aspects of it. I grew up in a very small town. Our life was all about being part of a community. We lived among people, surrounded by them. That was just how life was. There was a library in the village, and I used to go there often to read books. Whenever I read something from the books, I often found myself feeling inspired, thinking, “Why shouldn’t I shape my own life like that?” That desire was always there. When I used to read about Swami Vivekananda or read about Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, I would often wonder, “How did they live? How did they build such remarkable lives?” And for that, I constantly experimented on myself. Most of my experiments were physical in nature, testing my body’s limits.
For example, where I lived, winters weren’t too harsh, but December nights could get quite cold. But still, at night, the cold would bite. It was natural. So, sometimes I would decide to sleep outside in the open with nothing to cover myself, just to see how my body endures the cold. So, from a very young age, I would often experiment with my body, and this became a regular thing for me. For me, going to the library, reading extensively, visiting the pond, washing the family’s clothes, and swimming became part of my routine. Swimming was my main physical activity. All of these things were deeply connected to my life. Later as I read Vivekananda, I became even more drawn to his teachings. One time I read about Swami Vivekananda, his mother was ill. So, he went to Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa for guidance. He would argue with him, debate with him. In his early days, he would often argue with him, questioning everything intellectually.
He said, “My mother is sick. If I were earning, I could take better care of her.” Sri Ramakrishna said, “Don’t bother me with all this. Go to Goddess Kali. She is there. Ask her for what you need.” And so, Swami Vivekananda went and sat before Goddess Kali’s idol for hours, and he immersed himself into deep meditation. After a few hours when he returned, Ramakrishna asked him, “So, did you request the goddess?” Swami Vivekananda replied, “No, I didn’t.” Ramakrishna said, “Go again tomorrow. She will fulfill your request. Ask her.” He went the next day and then again the day after. But each time, he found himself unable to ask for anything. His mother was unwell and he needed help, but when he sat before Goddess Kali, he was completely absorbed in her presence, and yet he could not bring himself to ask for anything.
Each time he returned empty-handed. He told Sri Ramakrishna, “I came back empty-handed. I didn’t ask for anything.” To stand before the divine goddess and not be able to ask for anything, that moment, that experience lit a flame inside him. There was a spark in his life. And from that came the spirit of giving. I believe that perhaps that small incident in Vivekananda’s life left an impression on me too. The thought of, “What can I give to the world?” Maybe true contentment comes from giving. If my heart is only filled with the hunger to receive, that hunger will never end. And within that realization came the idea of Shiva and living being as one. If you wish to serve Shiva, serve all living beings. Recognize the unity between the divine and the living. True non-duality is experience through this realization. I would often lose myself in such thoughts. My mind naturally drifting in that direction.
I remember an incident in the neighborhood where we lived, just outside there was a Lord Shiva temple. One day a saint came to stay there. So, that saint used to engage in meditation and spiritual practices. I started feeling drawn to him thinking perhaps he possessed some spiritual energy. I had only read about Swami Vivekananda, never seen such figures in real life. During Navratri, he was fasting and he had placed sorghum grains on his hand, a common tradition in our culture. In a way, sprouting seeds on your palms and sleeping like that for nine or 10 days, it was a kind of spiritual vow, and this saint was observing it. During those same days, my maternal uncle’s family was preparing for my aunt’s wedding. Everyone from my home was going to my uncle’s house for the wedding.
Now, for any child, visiting an uncle’s house is always exciting. But I told my family, “I’m not going. I’ll stay here and I will take care of Swamiji. Since he has these grains on his hand, he can’t eat or drink, so I will take care of him.” So, as a child, I chose not to attend the wedding. I stayed back serving Swamiji instead. Somehow my mind was naturally drawn in that direction. At times, whenever soldiers from my village came home during their holidays, they would walk around in their uniforms with such pride. I would run behind them all day thinking, “Look at them. They are serving the nation.” So, there was always a strong feeling inside me to do something meaningful. I didn’t fully understand what it would be, and I didn’t have a roadmap. There was a hunger within me, a deep longing to understand life, to explore its meaning. So, I just set out and began the journey.
During my time in the mission, I came across remarkable saints. They showered me with love and blessings. Among them, I formed a special bond with Swami Atmasthanandji. He lived for nearly 100 years, a life full of wisdom and service. In his final years, I deeply wished for him to stay with me at the Prime Minister’s residence, but his responsibilities were vast and he couldn’t come. However, back when I was chief minister, he used to visit and I was fortunate to receive his blessings and guidance. He once looked at me and said, “Why have you come here? You have a greater purpose to fulfill. Is your priority your own well-being? Or is it the welfare of society? Whatever Swami Vivekananda said was for the betterment of society. He said you are meant to serve others.” So, I remember feeling a bit disheartened at that moment. I had come seeking guidance, but all I got were words.
So, I continued on my journey, wandering from place to place. I spent time in the Himalayas embracing the solitude of the mountains. I met many remarkable individuals along the way. Some were great ascetics, people who had renounced everything, but still my mind remained restless. Perhaps it was my age of curiosity, of wanting to learn, to understand. It was a new experience, a world shaped by the mountains, by ice, by the towering snow-covered peaks. But all of this played a huge role in shaping me. It strengthened me from within and enabled me to discover my inner power. Practicing meditation, waking up in the sacred pre-dawn hours, bathing in the cold, serving people with devotion and naturally tending to elderly saints became a seamless part of who I was. Once, a natural calamity struck the region, and I immediately devoted myself to helping the villagers. So, these were the saints and spiritual masters with whom I stayed from time to time. I never remained in one place for long, I kept moving, constantly wandering. That was the kind of life I lived.
Becoming a monk
Lex Fridman
And for people who don’t know, that moment in the Ramakrishna Mission Ashram with the monk, Swami Atmasthananda, as you mentioned, he helped steer you towards a life of service. So, there’s another possible life that could have been where you take Sannyasa, you give away everything, and you’re a monk. So, we could have had a monk, Narendra Modi, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and he helped you take the decision to live a life of service at every scale
And for people who don’t know, that moment in the Ramakrishna Mission Ashram with the monk, Swami Atmasthananda, as you mentioned, he helped steer you towards a life of service. So, there’s another possible life that could have been where you take Sannyasa, you give away everything, and you’re a monk. So, we could have had a monk, Narendra Modi, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and he helped you take the decision to live a life of service at every scale
Narendra Modi
From the outside, people may call me a leader. Some call me the prime minister. Others call me the chief minister, and that’s how they see me from their perspective. But deep within, there is only an unwavering spiritual commitment. The Modi, who lovingly helped his mother care for children during their treatments, tending to them with patience and compassion. The Modi who wandered through the Himalayas. And the Modi who now works from this seat of responsibility. They are all tied together by the same inner consistency. Every action is dedicated to serving others. People may see a stark difference between a saint and a leader, but to me, there is no real difference. Yes, the attire changes, the way of life changes. The words spoken throughout the day shift and the nature of work evolves. But the core of my being remains unchanged, carrying out every responsibility with the same sense of calm, focus, and dedication.
From the outside, people may call me a leader. Some call me the prime minister. Others call me the chief minister, and that’s how they see me from their perspective. But deep within, there is only an unwavering spiritual commitment. The Modi, who lovingly helped his mother care for children during their treatments, tending to them with patience and compassion. The Modi who wandered through the Himalayas. And the Modi who now works from this seat of responsibility. They are all tied together by the same inner consistency. Every action is dedicated to serving others. People may see a stark difference between a saint and a leader, but to me, there is no real difference. Yes, the attire changes, the way of life changes. The words spoken throughout the day shift and the nature of work evolves. But the core of my being remains unchanged, carrying out every responsibility with the same sense of calm, focus, and dedication.
RSS and Hindu nationalism
Lex Fridman
Another part of your life of who you are is you’ve spoken your whole life about putting your nation of India above all else. When you were eight, you joined the RSS, which espouses the idea of Hindu nationalism. Can you tell me about RSS and what impact they had on who you are and the development of your political ideas?
Another part of your life of who you are is you’ve spoken your whole life about putting your nation of India above all else. When you were eight, you joined the RSS, which espouses the idea of Hindu nationalism. Can you tell me about RSS and what impact they had on who you are and the development of your political ideas?
Narendra Modi
Ever since childhood, I always had the habit of staying engaged in something or the other. I remember there was a man named Makoshi. I don’t quite recall his full name. I think he was part of the service group, Makoshi Soni or something like that. He used to carry a small drum-like instrument called the Tambourine with him, and he used to sing patriotic songs in his deep, powerful voice. Whenever he came to our village, he would hold programs in different places. I would run after him like a crazy fan just to listen to his songs. I would spend entire nights listening to their patriotic songs. I enjoyed it. I don’t even know why, but I just did. In our village, there was a branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, where we played sports and sang patriotic songs. Something about those songs touched me deeply. They stirred something inside me, and that’s how I eventually became part of the RSS. One of the core values that were instilled in us at RSS was, whatever you do, do it with a purpose. Even while studying, study with the goal of learning enough to contribute to the nation. Even when you exercise, do it with the purpose of strengthening your body to serve the nation. This is what we were taught. And today, RSS is a massive organization. It is now nearing its 100th anniversary. Such a massive volunteer organization likely doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Millions of people are connected to it, but understanding RSS is not that simple. One must make an effort to truly grasp the nature of its work. More than anything, the RSS provides you with a clear direction toward what can truly be called a purpose in life. Secondly, the nation is everything, and serving the people is akin to serving God.
Ever since childhood, I always had the habit of staying engaged in something or the other. I remember there was a man named Makoshi. I don’t quite recall his full name. I think he was part of the service group, Makoshi Soni or something like that. He used to carry a small drum-like instrument called the Tambourine with him, and he used to sing patriotic songs in his deep, powerful voice. Whenever he came to our village, he would hold programs in different places. I would run after him like a crazy fan just to listen to his songs. I would spend entire nights listening to their patriotic songs. I enjoyed it. I don’t even know why, but I just did. In our village, there was a branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, where we played sports and sang patriotic songs. Something about those songs touched me deeply. They stirred something inside me, and that’s how I eventually became part of the RSS. One of the core values that were instilled in us at RSS was, whatever you do, do it with a purpose. Even while studying, study with the goal of learning enough to contribute to the nation. Even when you exercise, do it with the purpose of strengthening your body to serve the nation. This is what we were taught. And today, RSS is a massive organization. It is now nearing its 100th anniversary. Such a massive volunteer organization likely doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Millions of people are connected to it, but understanding RSS is not that simple. One must make an effort to truly grasp the nature of its work. More than anything, the RSS provides you with a clear direction toward what can truly be called a purpose in life. Secondly, the nation is everything, and serving the people is akin to serving God.
This is what has been said since the Vedic Era. What our sages have said, what Vivekananda said and what the RSS echoes. A volunteer is told that the inspiration he gains from RSS is not just about attending the one-hour session or wearing the uniform. What matters is what you do for society. And today, inspired by that spirit, many initiatives are thriving. Like some volunteers established an organization called Seva Bharati. This organization serves the slums and settlements where the poorest people live, which they call service communities. To my knowledge, they run approximately 125,000 service projects without any government assistance, solely through community support. They spend time there, teach the children, care for their health, instill good values and work towards improving cleanliness in these communities. Running 125,000 social service projects is no small feat.
Similarly, some volunteers nurtured by RSS are dedicated to serving tribal communities through Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. They live among the tribal people, working for their welfare. They have established over 70,000 one-teacher schools in remote tribal regions. There are also some people in America who show their support for this cause and contribute donations of about $10 or $15. And they say, “Skip a Coca-Cola this month. Don’t drink Coca-Cola and donate that money to a one-teacher school instead.” Now, imagine 70,000 one-teacher schools dedicated to educating tribal children. Some volunteers have founded Vidya Bharati to revolutionize education. Today they run nearly 25,000 schools educating around 3 million students, and I believe that millions of students have benefited from this initiative, receiving quality education at an incredibly low cost.
Alongside education, values are prioritized, and students remain grounded, learning skills so they don’t become a burden on society. That is in every aspect of life, whether it’s women, youth, or even laborers, the RSS has played a role. In terms of membership size, if I may say so, we have the Indian Labor Union. It has around 50,000 unions with millions of members across the country. Perhaps in terms of scale, there is no bigger labor union in the world. But what’s interesting is the approach they take. Historically, leftist ideologies have fueled labor movements worldwide. And what has been their slogan? “Workers of the world unite.” The message was clear. Unite first and then we’ll deal with everything else. But what do the labor unions run by RSS-trained volunteers believe in? They say, “Workers unite the world.” Others say, “Workers of the world unite.” And we say, “Workers unite the world.” It may seem like just a small shift in words, but it represents a huge ideological transformation.
The volunteers who come from the RSS follow their own interests, nature and inclination, and in doing so, they strengthen and promote these kinds of activities. When you observe these initiatives, you’ll see how over the past 100 years, the RSS has dedicated itself with the discipline and devotion of a seeker staying away from the glare of mainstream attention. I feel blessed to gain life’s values from such a sacred organization. Through the RSS, I found a life of purpose. Then I was fortunate to spend some time among the saints, which gave me a strong spiritual foundation. I found discipline and a life of purpose. And through the guidance of saints, I gained spiritual grounding. Swami Atmasthananda and others like him have held my hand throughout my journey, constantly guiding me at every step. The teachings of Ramakrishna Mission, Swami Vivekananda, and the service-driven philosophy of the RSS have played a crucial role in shaping me.
Explaining India
Lex Fridman
But they’ve also helped push the idea of India. What is the idea that unifies India? What is India as a nation? What is the foundational idea that unites all of these disparate worlds and communities and cultures? What would it be?
But they’ve also helped push the idea of India. What is the idea that unifies India? What is India as a nation? What is the foundational idea that unites all of these disparate worlds and communities and cultures? What would it be?
Narendra Modi
Look, India is a cultural identity. It is a civilization that dates back thousands of years. Consider the vastness of India, over 100 languages, thousands of dialects. India is so diverse that we have a saying that every 20 miles, the language changes, customs change, cuisine changes, even clothing styles shift from region to region. From the south to the north, you will see immense diversity across the country. But if you dig a little deeper, you will find a common thread. For example, the stories of Lord Ram can be heard everywhere in India. His name echoes in every corner of the country. But if you look closely from Tamil Nadu to Jammu and Kashmir, you will always find people whose names include Ram in some form. In Gujarat, he might be called Rambhai. In Tamil Nadu, Ramachandra, and in Maharashtra, Rambhau.
Look, India is a cultural identity. It is a civilization that dates back thousands of years. Consider the vastness of India, over 100 languages, thousands of dialects. India is so diverse that we have a saying that every 20 miles, the language changes, customs change, cuisine changes, even clothing styles shift from region to region. From the south to the north, you will see immense diversity across the country. But if you dig a little deeper, you will find a common thread. For example, the stories of Lord Ram can be heard everywhere in India. His name echoes in every corner of the country. But if you look closely from Tamil Nadu to Jammu and Kashmir, you will always find people whose names include Ram in some form. In Gujarat, he might be called Rambhai. In Tamil Nadu, Ramachandra, and in Maharashtra, Rambhau.
This unique cultural bond is what unites India as one civilization. Take something as simple as bathing in water. We have a ritual where all the rivers of India are remembered. They chant, ” I am bathing with the waters of all these rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu, Kaveri.” It’s a sentiment that unites a nation, and we have a long tradition of making such resolutions at the beginning of important events and rituals. And the resolution itself can present a historical record. And in so doing serve as a way of collecting and preserving historical data. It has been an incredibly unique system, guided meticulously by our scriptures. When someone makes a resolution, performs a Puja, or even during weddings, we start by invoking the entire universe, beginning with Jambudweep, Bharatkhand, Aryavrat, and gradually narrow it down to the village, then mentioning the specific family, and finally, we invoke the family deity. This practice is still alive, happening daily in every corner of India, but sadly, the Western and global models began viewing nations only as administrative systems. India, however, has had a variety of administrative systems throughout history, many systems were fragmented, scattered and varied across regions. Kings and rulers were numerous, but India’s unity lay in cultural bonds. Pilgrimage traditions played a key role in preserving this unity. Shankaracharya established the four pilgrimage sites. Even today, millions of people travel from one place to another for pilgrimage. In Kashi, you’ll find people who bring water from Rameshwaram to Kashi and take water from Kashi to Rameshwaram. Even if you look at our Hindu calendar, you’ll find so many things across the country that you can’t even imagine.
Mahatma Gandhi
Lex Fridman
If we look at the historical foundation of modern India, along with yourself, Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most important humans to have ever lived, but certainly one of the most important humans to the history of India. What do you admire about Mahatma Gandhi?
If we look at the historical foundation of modern India, along with yourself, Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most important humans to have ever lived, but certainly one of the most important humans to the history of India. What do you admire about Mahatma Gandhi?
Narendra Modi
As I had mentioned before, I was born in Gujarat, and Gujarati is my mother tongue. Mahatma Gandhi was also born in Gujarat. His native language was Gujarati too. He pursued a career as an attorney and lived overseas for several years. He had plenty of great opportunities, but the deep sense of duty within him, along with the values instilled by his family, led him to give up all comforts and devote his life to serving the people of India. He joined the struggle for India’s independence, and to this day, he continues to deeply influence the life of every Indian in some way. Mahatma Gandhi tried to live by his principles and practiced what he preached. For example, he strongly advocated for cleanliness and practiced it-
As I had mentioned before, I was born in Gujarat, and Gujarati is my mother tongue. Mahatma Gandhi was also born in Gujarat. His native language was Gujarati too. He pursued a career as an attorney and lived overseas for several years. He had plenty of great opportunities, but the deep sense of duty within him, along with the values instilled by his family, led him to give up all comforts and devote his life to serving the people of India. He joined the struggle for India’s independence, and to this day, he continues to deeply influence the life of every Indian in some way. Mahatma Gandhi tried to live by his principles and practiced what he preached. For example, he strongly advocated for cleanliness and practiced it-
Narendra Modi
He strongly advocated for cleanliness and practiced it himself, and he made it a point to discuss cleanliness wherever he went. Another key factor to consider is India’s fight for independence. India was ruled by the Mughals, the British, and several other foreign powers. Despite being bound by the shackles of colonial rule for centuries, the flame of independence burned brightly in every corner and nook of India, never fading, always fueling the desire for freedom. Millions of people sacrificed their lives so the light of freedom could shine on India. They laid down their lives for freedom, sacrificing their youth behind prison walls. Mahatma Gandhi also fought for India’s independence, but in his own way, indeed the other freedom fighters were brave warriors and devoted sons of Mother India. They came, they fought and their martyrdom immortalized them, and they did indeed have a lasting impact.
He strongly advocated for cleanliness and practiced it himself, and he made it a point to discuss cleanliness wherever he went. Another key factor to consider is India’s fight for independence. India was ruled by the Mughals, the British, and several other foreign powers. Despite being bound by the shackles of colonial rule for centuries, the flame of independence burned brightly in every corner and nook of India, never fading, always fueling the desire for freedom. Millions of people sacrificed their lives so the light of freedom could shine on India. They laid down their lives for freedom, sacrificing their youth behind prison walls. Mahatma Gandhi also fought for India’s independence, but in his own way, indeed the other freedom fighters were brave warriors and devoted sons of Mother India. They came, they fought and their martyrdom immortalized them, and they did indeed have a lasting impact.
But it was Mahatma Gandhi who awakened the nation, leading a mass movement fueled by truth and he wove even a sweeper into the very fabric of the freedom struggle. He told teachers their work was part of the freedom struggle. He told the people spinning thread and weaving clothes, they were freedom fighters. He told those tending to lepers that their service was a step toward India’s freedom. He viewed every task as a vital thread in the fabric of India’s independence movement, and this transformed India’s common man into a soldier in the quest for freedom. Gandhi forged a mass movement so immense that the British could never fully grasp it. The British never imagined that a pinch of salt from the Dandi March could spark a massive revolution, and he made it happen. And his life, presence, style, mannerisms all left a profound impact, and I have seen many of his stories evolve into timeless legends.
I recall an incident from a Roundtable Conference. Yeah, I believe he was attending a Roundtable Conference. He was supposed to meet King George at the Buckingham Palace draped in his breechcloth. Mahatma Gandhi made his way to the palace. Many people were amazed that he had showed up in that attire to meet the King. Gandhi remarked he didn’t need to wear a lot of clothes. He said, “Your king is wearing enough clothes for the both of us.” This was the whimsical charm of his nature. Mahatma Gandhi possessed many remarkable qualities. His call for unity and recognition of the people’s strength still resonates with me. In everything I do, I strive to include the common man and to ensure the participation of as many as possible. I don’t believe in leaving everything to the government. I am a firm believer in the power of social change.
Lex Fridman
So he was probably one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century. You are one of the greatest leaders of the 21st century. Those two centuries are very different, and you have been masterful in the game, in the art of geopolitics. So let me ask you, you have found a balance. So when negotiating on the world stage with super-powerful nations, is it better to be loved or feared? It seems like you are a masterclass of being loved by everybody, but everybody knows and feels the strength, so finding that balance. Can you speak to that balance?
So he was probably one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century. You are one of the greatest leaders of the 21st century. Those two centuries are very different, and you have been masterful in the game, in the art of geopolitics. So let me ask you, you have found a balance. So when negotiating on the world stage with super-powerful nations, is it better to be loved or feared? It seems like you are a masterclass of being loved by everybody, but everybody knows and feels the strength, so finding that balance. Can you speak to that balance?
Narendra Modi
First and foremost, I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t just a 20th-century leader. His relevance transcends centuries. Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy will last for centuries to come, and he remains relevant to date. As far as I am concerned, I have a responsibility to fulfill, yet the weight of that responsibility pales in comparison to my country. I am nowhere near as great as my country, and my strength lies not in my name, but in the backing of 1.4 billion Indians and thousands of years of timeless culture and heritage. So wherever I go, I carry with me the essence of thousands of years of Vedic tradition, the timeless teachings of Swami Vivekananda, and the blessings, dreams and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians. When I shake hands with a world leader, it’s not Modi, but 1.4 billion Indians doing so. So this isn’t my strength at all. It is rather the strength of India.
First and foremost, I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t just a 20th-century leader. His relevance transcends centuries. Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy will last for centuries to come, and he remains relevant to date. As far as I am concerned, I have a responsibility to fulfill, yet the weight of that responsibility pales in comparison to my country. I am nowhere near as great as my country, and my strength lies not in my name, but in the backing of 1.4 billion Indians and thousands of years of timeless culture and heritage. So wherever I go, I carry with me the essence of thousands of years of Vedic tradition, the timeless teachings of Swami Vivekananda, and the blessings, dreams and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians. When I shake hands with a world leader, it’s not Modi, but 1.4 billion Indians doing so. So this isn’t my strength at all. It is rather the strength of India.
You see, I recall something that happened all the way back in 2013. It was when my party declared I would be their prime ministerial candidate. My critics often tried to corner me on one point. It became a topic of widespread discussion, Modi is nothing more than a state leader. What does he know of foreign policy? Does he even understand global geopolitics? This was on everyone’s lips, and I was asked this question in every interview. I gave a very well-thought-out answer at the time. I said, “I won’t lay out my entire foreign policy in an interview, nor is it needed.” That said, India will neither allow itself to be looked down upon, nor will it ever look up to anyone. India will now see eye-to-eye with her counterparts. This was my belief in 2013, and it still lies at the heart of my foreign policy. For me, the country always comes first. However, to belittle someone or speaking ill of others is neither part of my cultural values nor my traditions. Moreover, our culture upholds and advocates for the welfare of mankind.
India has always championed the ideas of global peace and brotherhood. For centuries, we have envisioned the world as one big family. Our noble ancestors envisaged the welfare of the whole world and universe, and that’s why you must have noticed, the nature of our conversations as well as the ideas that I have presented on the global stage, which are rooted in respect and positivity. For example, I spoke about the environment in one of my speeches. I proposed the concept of one sun, one world, one grid. During the COVID pandemic, I delivered a speech at the G20 summit. I put forth the vision of one health, where humans and nature would live in harmony, and I have always worked towards this.
We hosted the G20 Summit with the motto, One Earth, One Family, One Future. We have inherited this timeless wisdom and it’s our duty to share it with the world. To give you an example, I have advocated for embracing renewable energy. We founded the International Solar Alliance with the motto, One Sun, One World, One Grid. Even when it comes to global healthcare, I had proposed One Earth, One Health. This initiative extends not only to humans, but also to all flora and fauna. I have always aimed to initiate efforts that foster global well-being, and the global community needs to join hands to accomplish that.
We must also understand that the world has become one small village today. No country can thrive in isolation. Today we all depend upon one another. No one can make it far by themselves. That is why you must learn to synchronize with everyone and everyone else must learn to synchronize with you. That’s the only way to propel this initiative forward. Organizations like the United Nations came into being after the First World War, but they failed to evolve with the times, and this inability to adapt has sparked a global debate on their relevance.
Path to peace in Ukraine
Lex Fridman
You have spoken about, you have the experience, you have the skill, you have the geopolitical leverage to be the biggest peacemaker in the world today, on the world stage, and there’s several wars going on. Can you maybe explain how you approach the process of making peace, helping make peace between two warring nations, for example, Russia and Ukraine?
You have spoken about, you have the experience, you have the skill, you have the geopolitical leverage to be the biggest peacemaker in the world today, on the world stage, and there’s several wars going on. Can you maybe explain how you approach the process of making peace, helping make peace between two warring nations, for example, Russia and Ukraine?
Narendra Modi
Well, I represent the country that is the land of Lord Buddha. I represent the country that is the land of Mahatma Gandhi. These are the great souls whose teachings, words, actions, and behavior are entirely dedicated to peace. And that is why culturally and historically our background is so strong that whenever we speak of peace, the world listens to us. Because India is the land of Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi and Indians aren’t hardwired to espouse strife and conflict. We espouse harmony instead. We seek neither to wage war against nature, nor to foster strife among nations. We stand for peace and wherever we can act as peacemakers, we have gladly embraced that responsibility.
Well, I represent the country that is the land of Lord Buddha. I represent the country that is the land of Mahatma Gandhi. These are the great souls whose teachings, words, actions, and behavior are entirely dedicated to peace. And that is why culturally and historically our background is so strong that whenever we speak of peace, the world listens to us. Because India is the land of Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi and Indians aren’t hardwired to espouse strife and conflict. We espouse harmony instead. We seek neither to wage war against nature, nor to foster strife among nations. We stand for peace and wherever we can act as peacemakers, we have gladly embraced that responsibility.
Returning to your example, I have a close relationship with Russia and Ukraine alike. I can sit with President Putin and say that this is not the time for war, and I can also tell President Zelensky in a friendly way that brother, regardless of how many people stand with you in the world, there will never be a resolution on the battlefield. The resolution will only come when both Ukraine and Russia come to the negotiating table. Ukraine may hold countless discussions with their allies, but it will bear no fruit. Discussions must include both parties instead. Initially, it was challenging to find peace, but now the current situation presents an opportunity for meaningful and productive talks between Ukraine and Russia. There has been a lot of suffering. Even the global south has suffered. The world has been grappling with a food, fuel and fertilizer crisis. So the global community should unite in the pursuit of peace. As for me, I have always maintained that I stand with peace. I am not neutral. I have a stance and that is peace, and peace is what I strive for.
India and Pakistan
Lex Fridman
Another difficult historic relationship and conflict is between India and Pakistan, it’s one of the most tense conflicts in the world, two nuclear powers with strong ideological differences. You are a great peacemaker. Looking out into the future as a visionary, what do you see as the path for friendship, for peace, for good relations between India and Pakistan?
Another difficult historic relationship and conflict is between India and Pakistan, it’s one of the most tense conflicts in the world, two nuclear powers with strong ideological differences. You are a great peacemaker. Looking out into the future as a visionary, what do you see as the path for friendship, for peace, for good relations between India and Pakistan?
Narendra Modi
I would like to delve into periods of our history the world may be unfamiliar with. Before 1947, during the struggle for independence, everyone was fighting side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, and the nation was eagerly waiting to celebrate the freedom, the joy of independence. Now, we could have a lengthy discussion on what led to the events that unfolded, but the fact remains that the policymakers of the time agreed to India’s partition and they agreed to the Muslim side’s demand of carving out a separate nation. With hearts weighed down by grief and silent tears, Indians embraced this painful reality. However, what unfolded was an immediate heartbreaking saga of bloodshed. Trains filled with bloodied, wounded people and corpses started arriving from Pakistan. It was a harrowing sight. After getting their own way, we expected them to live and let live and yet, they chose not to foster a harmonious coexistence. Time and again, they decided to be at odds with India. They have waged a proxy war against us.
I would like to delve into periods of our history the world may be unfamiliar with. Before 1947, during the struggle for independence, everyone was fighting side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, and the nation was eagerly waiting to celebrate the freedom, the joy of independence. Now, we could have a lengthy discussion on what led to the events that unfolded, but the fact remains that the policymakers of the time agreed to India’s partition and they agreed to the Muslim side’s demand of carving out a separate nation. With hearts weighed down by grief and silent tears, Indians embraced this painful reality. However, what unfolded was an immediate heartbreaking saga of bloodshed. Trains filled with bloodied, wounded people and corpses started arriving from Pakistan. It was a harrowing sight. After getting their own way, we expected them to live and let live and yet, they chose not to foster a harmonious coexistence. Time and again, they decided to be at odds with India. They have waged a proxy war against us.
Don’t mistake this for ideology. What kind of ideology thrives on bloodshed and the export of terror, and we are not the sole victims of this menace. Wherever terror strikes in the world, the trail somehow leads to Pakistan. Let’s take the September 11th attacks, for example. The main mastermind behind it, Osama bin Laden, where did he eventually emerge from? He had taken refuge in Pakistan. The world has recognized that in a way terrorism and the terrorist mindset are deeply rooted in Pakistan. Today, it stands as an epicenter of turmoil, not just for India but for the world. And we have repeatedly asked them what good can come from this path? We have urged them to abandon the path of state-sponsored terrorism for good, “What do you hope to gain by surrendering your nation to lawless forces?” I even personally traveled to Lahore in the pursuit of peace.
When I became Prime Minister, I specially invited Pakistan to my swearing-in ceremony so we could turn over a new leaf. Yet, every noble attempt at fostering peace was met with hostility and betrayal. We sincerely hope that wisdom prevails upon them and they choose the path of peace. I believe even the people of Pakistan long for peace because even they must be weary of living in strife and unrest, they must have grown weary of relentless terror where even innocent children are killed and countless lives are destroyed.
Lex Fridman
Is there some memorable stories from your past attempts to try to improve relations with Pakistan that could guide the path forward into the future?
Is there some memorable stories from your past attempts to try to improve relations with Pakistan that could guide the path forward into the future?
Narendra Modi
Like I mentioned, my first attempt at improving bilateral relations was when I invited my Pakistani counterpart to my swearing-in. It was a gesture of goodwill. It was a diplomatic gesture unlike any in decades. The very people who once questioned my approach to foreign policy were taken aback when they learned I had invited all SAARC heads of state and our then president, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee beautifully captured that historic gesture in his memoir. This was a testament to how clear and confident India’s foreign policy had become. This sent a clear message to the world about India’s commitment to peace and harmony, but we didn’t get the desired outcome.
Like I mentioned, my first attempt at improving bilateral relations was when I invited my Pakistani counterpart to my swearing-in. It was a gesture of goodwill. It was a diplomatic gesture unlike any in decades. The very people who once questioned my approach to foreign policy were taken aback when they learned I had invited all SAARC heads of state and our then president, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee beautifully captured that historic gesture in his memoir. This was a testament to how clear and confident India’s foreign policy had become. This sent a clear message to the world about India’s commitment to peace and harmony, but we didn’t get the desired outcome.
Cricket and Football
Lex Fridman
Maybe to ask a little bit of a lighter question, who has the better cricket team, India or Pakistan? The two teams have an epic rivalry on the pitch and more seriously, given the geopolitical tensions that you spoke to, what role do sports and cricket and football play in fostering better relations?
Maybe to ask a little bit of a lighter question, who has the better cricket team, India or Pakistan? The two teams have an epic rivalry on the pitch and more seriously, given the geopolitical tensions that you spoke to, what role do sports and cricket and football play in fostering better relations?
Narendra Modi
I think sports have the power to energize the entire world. The spirit of sports brings people together across different nations. That’s why I would never want to see sports being discredited. I truly believe that sports play a major role in human evolution. They’re not just games, they connect people on a deeper level. Now, coming to the question of who’s better and who’s not, when it comes to techniques in sports, I’m not an expert. Only those who specialize in the technical aspects can judge which techniques are superior and who the best players really are. But sometimes the results speak for themselves. Just a few days ago, India and Pakistan played a match. The result reveals, which is the better team. That’s how we know.
I think sports have the power to energize the entire world. The spirit of sports brings people together across different nations. That’s why I would never want to see sports being discredited. I truly believe that sports play a major role in human evolution. They’re not just games, they connect people on a deeper level. Now, coming to the question of who’s better and who’s not, when it comes to techniques in sports, I’m not an expert. Only those who specialize in the technical aspects can judge which techniques are superior and who the best players really are. But sometimes the results speak for themselves. Just a few days ago, India and Pakistan played a match. The result reveals, which is the better team. That’s how we know.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I’ve watched this series called The Greatest Rivalry, India versus Pakistan, that describes so many incredible players, so many incredible games. It’s always beautiful to see a great rivalry. You’ve also spoken about football. Football is very popular in India. So another tough question, who is the greatest football player of all time? We’ve got Messi, Pele, Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo, Zidane, who do you think is the greatest football player to have ever played?
Yeah. I’ve watched this series called The Greatest Rivalry, India versus Pakistan, that describes so many incredible players, so many incredible games. It’s always beautiful to see a great rivalry. You’ve also spoken about football. Football is very popular in India. So another tough question, who is the greatest football player of all time? We’ve got Messi, Pele, Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo, Zidane, who do you think is the greatest football player to have ever played?
Narendra Modi
It’s absolutely true that many regions in India have a strong football culture. Our women’s football team is performing really well and the men’s team is also making great progress. But if we talk about the past, back in the 1980s, one name that always stood out was Maradona. For that generation, he was seen as a true hero, and if you ask today’s generation, they’ll immediately mention Messi.
It’s absolutely true that many regions in India have a strong football culture. Our women’s football team is performing really well and the men’s team is also making great progress. But if we talk about the past, back in the 1980s, one name that always stood out was Maradona. For that generation, he was seen as a true hero, and if you ask today’s generation, they’ll immediately mention Messi.
Now that you’ve asked, another interesting memory just came to mind. There’s a state in India called Madhya Pradesh, right in the center. There’s a district called Shahdol, a completely tribal region where a large tribal community resides. I really enjoy interacting with people from such communities, especially the self-help groups run by tribal women. So I decided to visit them and have a conversation. But when I got there, I noticed something fascinating. Around 80 to 100 young boys, kids and even some older youth all dressed in sports uniforms standing together. Naturally, I walked over to them. So I asked them, “Where are you all from?” And they replied, “We’re from mini Brazil.” I was surprised and said, “What do you mean by mini Brazil?” They said, “That’s what people call our village.” Curious, I asked, “Why do they call it mini Brazil?” They explained, “In our village, football has been played for four generations. Nearly 80 national level players have come from here. Our entire village is dedicated to football.” They also told me when we host our annual football match, nearly 20,000 to 25,000 spectators come from nearby villages to watch.
I see the growing craze for football in India these days as a positive sign because it not only fuels passion, but also builds true team spirit.
Donald Trump
Lex Fridman
Yeah, football is one of the great sports that unites not just India, the whole world, and that just shows the power of what sport can do. You recently visited the United States and reinvigorated your friendship with Donald Trump. What do you like about Donald Trump as a friend, as a leader?
Yeah, football is one of the great sports that unites not just India, the whole world, and that just shows the power of what sport can do. You recently visited the United States and reinvigorated your friendship with Donald Trump. What do you like about Donald Trump as a friend, as a leader?
Narendra Modi
I’d like to share with you an event that stands out in my memory. Perhaps from that, you’ll get a better understanding of the point I’m trying to convey. For example, we had an event in Houston, Howdy Modi. Both President Trump and I were there and the entire stadium was completely packed. A massive crowd at an event in the US is a huge moment. While packed stadiums are common in sports, this was extraordinary for a political rally. The Indian diaspora had gathered in large numbers. Both of us delivered speeches and he sat down below listening to me speak. Now, that’s his humility. The President of the United States sitting in the audience while I spoke from the stage, that was a remarkable gesture on his part. After finishing my speech, I stepped down and as we all know, security in the US is extremely strict and thorough. The level of scrutiny there is on a completely different level. I went over to thank him and casually said, “If you don’t mind, why don’t we take a lap around the stadium? There are so many people here. Let’s walk, wave and greet them.”
I’d like to share with you an event that stands out in my memory. Perhaps from that, you’ll get a better understanding of the point I’m trying to convey. For example, we had an event in Houston, Howdy Modi. Both President Trump and I were there and the entire stadium was completely packed. A massive crowd at an event in the US is a huge moment. While packed stadiums are common in sports, this was extraordinary for a political rally. The Indian diaspora had gathered in large numbers. Both of us delivered speeches and he sat down below listening to me speak. Now, that’s his humility. The President of the United States sitting in the audience while I spoke from the stage, that was a remarkable gesture on his part. After finishing my speech, I stepped down and as we all know, security in the US is extremely strict and thorough. The level of scrutiny there is on a completely different level. I went over to thank him and casually said, “If you don’t mind, why don’t we take a lap around the stadium? There are so many people here. Let’s walk, wave and greet them.”
In American life, it’s almost impossible for the President to walk into a crowd of thousands, but without even a moment’s hesitation, he agreed and started walking with me. His entire security detail was thrown off guard, but for me that moment was truly touching. It showed me that this man had courage. He makes his own decisions, but also he trusted me and my lead in that moment enough to have walked with me into the crowd. It was that sense of mutual trust, a strong bond between us that I truly witnessed on that day and the way I saw President Trump that day walking into a crowd of thousands without even asking security, it was truly amazing. And if you watch the video now, you’ll be amazed.
When he was shot during the recent campaign, I saw the same resilient and determined President Trump, the one who walked hand-in-hand with me in that stadium. Even after being shot, he remained unwaveringly dedicated to America. His life was for his nation. His reflection showed his America First spirit, just as I believe in nation first. I stand for India first and that’s why we connect so well. These are the things that truly resonate. And I believe that across the world politicians are covered so much by the media that people mostly perceive each other through its lens. People rarely get the chance to truly meet or personally know one another and perhaps third-party intervention is the real cause of tensions.
When I visited him in the White House for the first time, there was already a lot written about President Trump in the media. At that time, he was still new to office and the world had a rather different perception of him. Even I had been briefed in many different ways before meeting him, but to my surprise, the very moment I stepped into the White House, he broke all formal protocols right away. And then, he personally took me on a tour of the White House. As he showed me around, I noticed something striking, he wasn’t holding any notes or cue cards, nor was anyone accompanying him to assist. He pointed things out himself. “This is where Abraham Lincoln lived,” he said. He even explained why the courtroom was designed so long. He would point at the table and tell me which President signed here and on what date. I found that incredibly impressive. It showed how much he honored the Presidency and how respectful and deeply connected he was to America’s history. I could feel that. And he spoke to me freely, discussing many things openly. That was my experience from our first meeting.
Later, when his first term ended, and President Biden won, four years passed, but during that time whenever someone we both knew met him, and this must have happened dozens of times, he would say, “Modi is my friend, convey my regards.” That kind of gesture is rare. Even though we didn’t meet physically for years, our direct and indirect communication, our closeness and the trust between us remained unshaken.
Lex Fridman
He said that you’re a much tougher, much better negotiator than he is. He said this recently when you visited. What do you think of him as a negotiator and what do you think he meant about you being a great negotiator?
He said that you’re a much tougher, much better negotiator than he is. He said this recently when you visited. What do you think of him as a negotiator and what do you think he meant about you being a great negotiator?
Narendra Modi
Now, that’s not something I can comment on. Since it’s his graciousness and humility, it is very kind of him that he openly appreciates me on various occasions and in different contexts. But about negotiation, I always put my country’s interests first. That’s why in every forum, I speak up for India’s interest, not to harm anyone but in a positive manner and because of that, no one takes offense. People know that if Modi is present, he will strongly advocate for these things. After all, the people of India have given me this responsibility. For me, my nation is my high command and I will always honor their will.
Now, that’s not something I can comment on. Since it’s his graciousness and humility, it is very kind of him that he openly appreciates me on various occasions and in different contexts. But about negotiation, I always put my country’s interests first. That’s why in every forum, I speak up for India’s interest, not to harm anyone but in a positive manner and because of that, no one takes offense. People know that if Modi is present, he will strongly advocate for these things. After all, the people of India have given me this responsibility. For me, my nation is my high command and I will always honor their will.
Lex Fridman
You’ve also had a bunch of productive meetings with several other folks on your visit to the United States, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy. What are some things that stood out from those meetings? Maybe key takeaways, key memories.
You’ve also had a bunch of productive meetings with several other folks on your visit to the United States, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy. What are some things that stood out from those meetings? Maybe key takeaways, key memories.
Narendra Modi
Look, I can say this, I have observed President Trump both during his first term and now in his second run. This time, he seems far more prepared than before. He has a clear roadmap in his mind with well-defined steps, each one designed to lead him toward his goals. I also had the chance to meet members of his team, and I truly believe he has put together a strong, capable group and with such a strong team, I feel they are fully capable of implementing President Trump’s vision based on my interactions with them. I met several people, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and there was a family-like atmosphere, everyone had come with their families. As for Elon Musk, I have known him since my time as chief minister. He was there with his family and children, so naturally the atmosphere felt warm and friendly. Of course, we had discussions and we talked about many different topics. Now, with his DOGE mission, he is incredibly excited about how it’s progressing and honestly, it makes me happy too because when I took office in 2014, I wanted to free my country from the deep-rooted issues and harmful practices that have crept in, and I’ll continue striving to eliminate as many of them as I possibly can. For example, after I took office in 2014, I observed that back then we weren’t part of many global discussions, not like how President Trump and DOGE are being talked about today. But let me give you an example so you can see the kind of work that was done. I noticed that the benefits of certain government schemes, especially welfare programs, were being exploited by so many people who never even existed in real life…
Look, I can say this, I have observed President Trump both during his first term and now in his second run. This time, he seems far more prepared than before. He has a clear roadmap in his mind with well-defined steps, each one designed to lead him toward his goals. I also had the chance to meet members of his team, and I truly believe he has put together a strong, capable group and with such a strong team, I feel they are fully capable of implementing President Trump’s vision based on my interactions with them. I met several people, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and there was a family-like atmosphere, everyone had come with their families. As for Elon Musk, I have known him since my time as chief minister. He was there with his family and children, so naturally the atmosphere felt warm and friendly. Of course, we had discussions and we talked about many different topics. Now, with his DOGE mission, he is incredibly excited about how it’s progressing and honestly, it makes me happy too because when I took office in 2014, I wanted to free my country from the deep-rooted issues and harmful practices that have crept in, and I’ll continue striving to eliminate as many of them as I possibly can. For example, after I took office in 2014, I observed that back then we weren’t part of many global discussions, not like how President Trump and DOGE are being talked about today. But let me give you an example so you can see the kind of work that was done. I noticed that the benefits of certain government schemes, especially welfare programs, were being exploited by so many people who never even existed in real life…
Narendra Modi
… who never even existed in real life. There were ghost names, pensions being issued to fake people. Widow pensions were being granted even before marriages took place, and disability pensions were given without any real disabilities. Then I launched a scrutiny process, and you’ll be shocked to know what we found. A hundred million people, a hundred million people, that’s a hundred million fake or duplicate names that I removed from the system. And because of that, we saved massive amount of money.
… who never even existed in real life. There were ghost names, pensions being issued to fake people. Widow pensions were being granted even before marriages took place, and disability pensions were given without any real disabilities. Then I launched a scrutiny process, and you’ll be shocked to know what we found. A hundred million people, a hundred million people, that’s a hundred million fake or duplicate names that I removed from the system. And because of that, we saved massive amount of money.
Then I introduced direct benefit transfer, ensuring that every rupee sent from Delhi reached the rightful person without leakage. As a result, my country saved nearly 3 trillion rupees that would have otherwise ended up in the wrong hands. Just because of direct benefit transfer through technology, we eliminated middlemen, ensuring transparency in the system.
I also introduced the GeM portal for government purchases, which has helped save both time and money. It has increased competition and improved quality. In India, we had an overwhelming burden of compliances. I eliminated 40,000 unnecessary compliances, and removed nearly 1500 outdated laws that served no purpose.
So in a way, my efforts have been about freeing governance from unnecessary dominance and inefficiency. And naturally, when bold changes happen, just like DOGE’s mission, they become a topic of discussion worldwide.
China and Xi Jinping
Lex Fridman
You and Xi Jinping have considered each other friends. How can that friendship be reinvigorated to help de-escalate some of the recent tensions, and resume dialogue and cooperation with China?
You and Xi Jinping have considered each other friends. How can that friendship be reinvigorated to help de-escalate some of the recent tensions, and resume dialogue and cooperation with China?
Narendra Modi
Look, the relationship between India and China isn’t something new. Both nations have ancient cultures and civilizations. Even in the modern world, they play a significant role. If you look at historical records, for centuries, India and China have learned from each other. Together, they have always contributed to the global good in some way. Old records suggest that at one point India and China alone accounted for more than 50% of the world’s GDP. That’s how massive India’s contribution was. And I believe our ties have been extremely strong, with deep cultural connections. If we look back centuries, there’s no real history of conflict between us. It has always been about learning from each other and understanding one another. At one time, Buddhism had a profound influence in China, and that philosophy originally came from here.
Look, the relationship between India and China isn’t something new. Both nations have ancient cultures and civilizations. Even in the modern world, they play a significant role. If you look at historical records, for centuries, India and China have learned from each other. Together, they have always contributed to the global good in some way. Old records suggest that at one point India and China alone accounted for more than 50% of the world’s GDP. That’s how massive India’s contribution was. And I believe our ties have been extremely strong, with deep cultural connections. If we look back centuries, there’s no real history of conflict between us. It has always been about learning from each other and understanding one another. At one time, Buddhism had a profound influence in China, and that philosophy originally came from here.
Our relationship should remain just as strong in the future. It should continue to grow. Of course, differences are natural. When two neighboring countries exist, occasional disagreements are bound to happen. Even within a family, not everything is always perfect. But our focus is to ensure that these differences don’t turn into disputes. That’s what we actively work toward. Instead of discord, we emphasize dialogue, because only through dialogue can we build a stable cooperative relationship that serves the best interests of both nations.
It is true that there have been ongoing border disputes between us. And in 2020, the incidents along the border created significant tensions between our countries. However, after my recent meeting with President Xi, we have seen a return to normalcy at the border. We are now working to restore conditions to how they were before 2020. Slowly but surely, trust, enthusiasm, and energy will return. But of course, it will take some time, since there’s been a five-year gap. Our cooperation isn’t just beneficial, it’s also essential for global stability and prosperity. And since the 21st century is Asia’s century, we want India and China to compete in a healthy and natural way. Competition is not a bad thing, but it should never turn into conflict.
Lex Fridman
The world is worried about a brewing global war. The tensions between China and the United States, in Ukraine, Russia and Europe, in Israel, the Middle East. What can you say about how we in the 21st century can avoid a global war, avoid an escalation towards more conflict, more war?
The world is worried about a brewing global war. The tensions between China and the United States, in Ukraine, Russia and Europe, in Israel, the Middle East. What can you say about how we in the 21st century can avoid a global war, avoid an escalation towards more conflict, more war?
Narendra Modi
Look, COVID exposed the limitations of every nation. No matter how much we consider ourselves as a great nation, no matter how progressive we think we are, or how scientifically advanced we believe we’ve become, everyone has their own way of looking at things. In the end, we all found ourselves on the same ground. Every country in the world faced this reality. At that time, it felt like the world would learn from it, that we would move toward a more unified world. Just as a geopolitical order emerged after World War II, many thought something similar would happen post-COVID. But unfortunately, instead of moving towards peace, the world became even more fragmented, ushering in a period of uncertainty, and the wars have only made it worse.
Look, COVID exposed the limitations of every nation. No matter how much we consider ourselves as a great nation, no matter how progressive we think we are, or how scientifically advanced we believe we’ve become, everyone has their own way of looking at things. In the end, we all found ourselves on the same ground. Every country in the world faced this reality. At that time, it felt like the world would learn from it, that we would move toward a more unified world. Just as a geopolitical order emerged after World War II, many thought something similar would happen post-COVID. But unfortunately, instead of moving towards peace, the world became even more fragmented, ushering in a period of uncertainty, and the wars have only made it worse.
I believe that modern wars are no longer just about resources or interests. Today I see so many kinds of conflicts happening. Physical battles often get discussed. Struggles are happening in every domain. International organizations that were once powerful have become almost irrelevant. No real reforms are happening. Institutions, like the UN, are failing to fulfill their roles. People, who disregard international laws and rules, continue to act freely, and no one can stop them. In such situations, the prudent choice for everyone is to let go of conflict and move toward cooperation. And a development-driven approach is the way forward. Expansionism will not work. As I’ve said before, the world is interdependent and interconnected. Every nation needs one another, no one can stand alone. And from all the different forums I attend, one thing is clear: Everyone is deeply worried about these conflicts. We can only hope that peace is restored very soon.
Gujarat riots in 2002
Lex Fridman
I’m not very good at this.
I’m not very good at this.
Narendra Modi
You keep looking at your watch.
You keep looking at your watch.
Lex Fridman
No, no, no. I barely know what I’m doing, Prime Minister. I’m not very good at this. Okay. You’ve been… through your career and through your life, you have seen a lot of difficult situations in the history of India. One of them, the 2002 Gujarat riots, they’re one of the most challenging periods of modern Indian history, when there was violence between Hindu and Muslim citizens of the Gujarat that led to over 1000 deaths. It revealed the intensity of religious tensions in the region. You were, as you mentioned, chief minister of Gujarat at the time. Looking back, what lessons do you draw from that time? And we should also say that India’s independent Supreme Court upheld twice, in ’12 and ’22, that you had no involvement in the violence of the 2002 Gujarat riots. But I was wondering if you could speak to the broad lessons you draw from that time?
No, no, no. I barely know what I’m doing, Prime Minister. I’m not very good at this. Okay. You’ve been… through your career and through your life, you have seen a lot of difficult situations in the history of India. One of them, the 2002 Gujarat riots, they’re one of the most challenging periods of modern Indian history, when there was violence between Hindu and Muslim citizens of the Gujarat that led to over 1000 deaths. It revealed the intensity of religious tensions in the region. You were, as you mentioned, chief minister of Gujarat at the time. Looking back, what lessons do you draw from that time? And we should also say that India’s independent Supreme Court upheld twice, in ’12 and ’22, that you had no involvement in the violence of the 2002 Gujarat riots. But I was wondering if you could speak to the broad lessons you draw from that time?
Narendra Modi
Look, regarding your first point, when you humbly said that you don’t know what you’re doing, that you’re not good at this, I disagree and personally feel you’ve put in tremendous care. You’ve done extensive research and have dived deeply into every small detail. So I think you’ve done very well, and all the efforts you’ve put in during our conversation and in all your conversations are appreciated. And rather than simply interviewing me, I feel you’re trying to deeply understand India. That’s why I strongly feel there’s genuine honesty in your sincere effort to uncover the truth. And for that sincere approach, I genuinely congratulate you.
Look, regarding your first point, when you humbly said that you don’t know what you’re doing, that you’re not good at this, I disagree and personally feel you’ve put in tremendous care. You’ve done extensive research and have dived deeply into every small detail. So I think you’ve done very well, and all the efforts you’ve put in during our conversation and in all your conversations are appreciated. And rather than simply interviewing me, I feel you’re trying to deeply understand India. That’s why I strongly feel there’s genuine honesty in your sincere effort to uncover the truth. And for that sincere approach, I genuinely congratulate you.
Lex Fridman
Thank you.
Thank you.
Narendra Modi
Regarding the earlier events that you mentioned, like the 2002 riots in Gujarat, I’d like to paint you a clearer picture of the 12 to 15 months leading up to that, so you can fully understand the atmosphere of that time. For instance, take December 24, 1999, roughly three years earlier, an Indian flight from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked, redirected to Afghanistan and landed in Kandahar. Hundreds of Indian passengers were held hostage. It caused massive turmoil across India as people faced life and death uncertainty.
Regarding the earlier events that you mentioned, like the 2002 riots in Gujarat, I’d like to paint you a clearer picture of the 12 to 15 months leading up to that, so you can fully understand the atmosphere of that time. For instance, take December 24, 1999, roughly three years earlier, an Indian flight from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked, redirected to Afghanistan and landed in Kandahar. Hundreds of Indian passengers were held hostage. It caused massive turmoil across India as people faced life and death uncertainty.
Then, in the year 2000, the Red Fort in Delhi was attacked by terrorists. Yet another crisis struck the nation, intensifying fear and turmoil. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers in America faced a devastating terror attack, once again shocking the entire world. Because ultimately, the people behind these attacks are driven by a similar mindset. Then in October 2001, terrorists attacked the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. Soon after, on December 13th, 2001, India’s parliament was targeted.
Within just eight to 10 months, these major global terrorist attacks took place, violent incidents that led to bloodshed and the loss of innocent lives. In such a tense environment, even the smallest spark can ignite unrest. The situation had already become extremely volatile. In such times, suddenly, on October 7th, 2001, I was given the responsibility of becoming chief minister of Gujarat. This was an enormous challenge.
At that time, Gujarat was recovering from a devastating earthquake, the largest of the previous century, which had left thousands dead. My first major task as chief minister was overseeing the rehabilitation of survivors. This was a crucial task, and from day one after my oath, I immersed myself in it. I was a person who had absolutely no prior experience with government. I had never been part of any administration, never even served in government before. I had never contested an election, never even been a state representative. For the first time in my life, I had to face elections.
On February 24, 2002, I became a state representative, an elected representative for the first time. And it was only around February 24th, 25th, or 26th that I stepped into the Gujarat Assembly for the very first time. On February 27th, 2002, we were seated in the Assembly for the budget session. And that same day, it had been just three days since I’d become a state representative, when suddenly the horrific Godhra incident occurred. It was a tragedy of unimaginable magnitude, people were burned alive. You can imagine, against the backdrop of incidents like the Kandahar hijacking, the attack on parliament, or even 9/11, and then to have so many people killed and burned alive, you can imagine how tense and volatile the situation was. Of course, this was tragic for everyone. Everyone prefers peace.
The perception that these were the biggest riots ever is actually misinformation. If you review the data from before 2002, you will see that Gujarat faced frequent riots. Curfews were constantly being imposed somewhere. Communal violence could erupt over trivial issues, like kite flying contests or even minor bicycle collisions. Before 2002, Gujarat witnessed over 250 significant riots. The riots in 1969 lasted nearly six months. So there was a long history, long before I was in the picture.
But that one tragic incident in 2002 became a sparking point, leading some people towards violence. Yet, the judiciary thoroughly investigated the matter. At that time, our political opponents were in power, and naturally they wanted all allegations against us to stick. Despite their relentless efforts, the judiciary analyzed the situation meticulously twice and ultimately found us completely innocent. Those who were truly responsible have faced justice from the courts.
But the most important thing is, in Gujarat, where riots used to happen some way or the other every year, but after 2002, in 22 years, there hasn’t been a single major riot in Gujarat. Gujarat remains completely peaceful. Our approach has always been to avoid World Bank politics. Instead, our mantra has been, together with everyone, development for all, trust from all, and efforts by everyone. We’ve shifted away from the politics of appeasement to the politics of aspiration. Because of this, anyone who wishes to contribute joins us willingly. We’ve continuously strived to turn Gujarat into a well-developed state. And today, Gujarat is actively contributing toward building a developed India as well.
Lex Fridman
A lot of people love you. I’ve got to hear from a lot of them. But there is also people who criticize you, including from the media. And folks in the media have criticized you over this 2002 Gujarat riots. What’s your relationship like with criticism? How do you deal with critics? How do you deal with criticism coming from the media or in your own inner circle or just in your own life?
A lot of people love you. I’ve got to hear from a lot of them. But there is also people who criticize you, including from the media. And folks in the media have criticized you over this 2002 Gujarat riots. What’s your relationship like with criticism? How do you deal with critics? How do you deal with criticism coming from the media or in your own inner circle or just in your own life?
Narendra Modi
Look, regarding what you said about criticism and how I deal with it, if I had to summarize in one sentence, I welcome it. I have a strong belief that criticism is the soul of democracy. If democracy truly runs in your veins, you must embrace it. In our scriptures it’s said, always keep your critics close. Critics should be your nearest companions, because through genuine criticism, you can improve quickly, and work democratically with better insights. In fact, I believe we should have more criticism and it should be sharp and well-informed.
Look, regarding what you said about criticism and how I deal with it, if I had to summarize in one sentence, I welcome it. I have a strong belief that criticism is the soul of democracy. If democracy truly runs in your veins, you must embrace it. In our scriptures it’s said, always keep your critics close. Critics should be your nearest companions, because through genuine criticism, you can improve quickly, and work democratically with better insights. In fact, I believe we should have more criticism and it should be sharp and well-informed.
But my real complaint is that nowadays what we see isn’t real criticism. Genuine criticism requires thorough study, in-depth research and careful analysis. It demands finding the truth from falsehoods. Today, people look for shortcuts, avoid proper research and skip deep analysis. Instead of identifying genuine weaknesses, they jump straight to accusations. There’s a big difference between allegations and criticism. The references you’re giving, they are allegations, not criticism. For a strong democracy, genuine criticism is necessary. Allegations benefit no one, they just cause unnecessary conflicts. That’s why I always welcome criticism openly. And whenever false accusations arise, I calmly continue serving my country with complete dedication.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the thing you speak of is very important to me because I admire great journalism. And unfortunately, in modern day, a lot of journalists seek clickbait headlines, make accusations, because they operate under incentive, because they want the headline, the cheap shot. I think there is room and desire and hunger for great journalists, and that requires deep understanding. And it saddens me how often… I don’t think I’m very good at this, but one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you is because I don’t see enough high effort, deep dive research. I don’t know how many books I’ve read. I’ve read a lot in preparing, just to experience, just to try to understand. It requires a lot of preparation, a lot of work, and I would love to see great journalists do that more. And from that place, you can criticize. From that place, you can really investigate the complexity of a situation, of people in power; their strengths, their flaws, the mistakes they have made. But that requires great, great, great preparation. So I wish there was more of that, of great journalism.
Yeah, the thing you speak of is very important to me because I admire great journalism. And unfortunately, in modern day, a lot of journalists seek clickbait headlines, make accusations, because they operate under incentive, because they want the headline, the cheap shot. I think there is room and desire and hunger for great journalists, and that requires deep understanding. And it saddens me how often… I don’t think I’m very good at this, but one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you is because I don’t see enough high effort, deep dive research. I don’t know how many books I’ve read. I’ve read a lot in preparing, just to experience, just to try to understand. It requires a lot of preparation, a lot of work, and I would love to see great journalists do that more. And from that place, you can criticize. From that place, you can really investigate the complexity of a situation, of people in power; their strengths, their flaws, the mistakes they have made. But that requires great, great, great preparation. So I wish there was more of that, of great journalism.
Narendra Modi
Yes. Clear, well-directed and specific criticism genuinely helps in the process of effective policymaking. It leads to a clear-cut policy vision. I specifically pay close attention to such constructive criticism. In fact, I actively welcome it.
Yes. Clear, well-directed and specific criticism genuinely helps in the process of effective policymaking. It leads to a clear-cut policy vision. I specifically pay close attention to such constructive criticism. In fact, I actively welcome it.
Regarding your point about journalistic headlines, if someone’s attracted by catchy headlines or plays with words, I honestly don’t mind that much. But when there’s a deliberate agenda behind the actions and the truth is deliberately ignored, that can cause damage that lasts for decades. If someone focuses on pleasing their readers or viewers with attractive headlines, maybe we can compromise a little. But if there’s a hidden motive, or if things are intentionally twisted to serve an agenda, that’s a serious issue worth worrying about.
Lex Fridman
And in that, the truth suffers, I think.
And in that, the truth suffers, I think.
Narendra Modi
I remember once in London, I was invited to give a speech at an event organized by a Gujarati newspaper there. So during my speech, I casually said, since it was an event attended by journalists, “What kind of journalism should we have? Should it be like a fly or a bee?” I explained, “A fly sits on dirt and spreads the dirt around, but a bee lands on flowers, collects nectar, and then shares that sweetness everywhere. Yet if something wrong occurs, the bee can sting so powerfully that you’d have to hide your face for three days straight.”
I remember once in London, I was invited to give a speech at an event organized by a Gujarati newspaper there. So during my speech, I casually said, since it was an event attended by journalists, “What kind of journalism should we have? Should it be like a fly or a bee?” I explained, “A fly sits on dirt and spreads the dirt around, but a bee lands on flowers, collects nectar, and then shares that sweetness everywhere. Yet if something wrong occurs, the bee can sting so powerfully that you’d have to hide your face for three days straight.”
However, some people selectively picked up just half of my analogy and created a huge controversy out of it. Honestly, was I being negative about anyone? Not at all. I was simply highlighting the incredible strength of a bee, that even its small sting can leave such an impact that can make someone hide their face for days. You can’t show your face. That’s the power journalism should have. But unfortunately, some people prefer the fly approach instead.
Biggest democracy in the world
Lex Fridman
I now have a new life goal of becoming the bee. You mentioned democracy, and not knowing much about government until 2002, but from 2002 to today, you won eight elections that I could count. So many of the elections, over 800 million people vote in India. What does it take to win an election like that, and to win an election of 1.4 billion people where you get to represent those people, the biggest democracy in the world?
I now have a new life goal of becoming the bee. You mentioned democracy, and not knowing much about government until 2002, but from 2002 to today, you won eight elections that I could count. So many of the elections, over 800 million people vote in India. What does it take to win an election like that, and to win an election of 1.4 billion people where you get to represent those people, the biggest democracy in the world?
Narendra Modi
Well, I’ve been actively involved in politics for years. Before stepping into active politics, my focus was primarily on organizational work. This also included managing elections and strategizing campaigns, so that was where I dedicated my time. For 24 years, the people of Gujarat and India have placed their trust in me to lead with unwavering dedication and a deep sense of duty. I try to fulfill the sacred duty entrusted to me by the people I revere as divine. I remain committed to honoring their trust, ensuring it never falters. And they see me for what I truly am.
Well, I’ve been actively involved in politics for years. Before stepping into active politics, my focus was primarily on organizational work. This also included managing elections and strategizing campaigns, so that was where I dedicated my time. For 24 years, the people of Gujarat and India have placed their trust in me to lead with unwavering dedication and a deep sense of duty. I try to fulfill the sacred duty entrusted to me by the people I revere as divine. I remain committed to honoring their trust, ensuring it never falters. And they see me for what I truly am.
My government is committed to ensuring welfare schemes reach every citizen. Every scheme must reach its intended beneficiaries. Every beneficiary must be treated equally. No one should face discrimination on caste, creed, faith, wealth, or ideology. We must strive to ensure the well-being and prosperity of everyone. This way, even those not directly benefiting, never feel left out or treated unfairly. They find comfort in knowing they too will benefit in due course. This fosters a deep sense of trust, and trust is the cornerstone of my governance model.
Secondly, my governance flows beyond the ebb and flow of elections. My governance is rooted in the people, not the polls. It is committed to the well-being of my citizens and the greater good of the nation. As you may know, I had once set out on a quest for spiritual awakening, so now I revere my nation as the Divine itself, and I now revere the people as a manifestation of the Divine. Like a devoted priest, my heart is set on serving the people. I don’t distance myself from the people. I live among them as one of them. And I tell everyone I work with, if you work hard, I will work harder. People see this and it builds trust. Besides, I have no conflicts of interest. I have no friends or relatives who stand to gain from the position I hold. The common man appreciates this lack of vested interests, and that’s probably just one reason why.
Moreover, I come from a party with millions of dedicated volunteers. Volunteers who are completely devoted to the welfare of India and its citizens. They have had no stake whatsoever in politics. They’ve held no title, nor strayed where influence holds sway. My party is blessed with millions of volunteers who work tirelessly. I am proud to belong to the world’s largest political party, and it’s not like my party has been around forever. It reflects the hard work of millions of volunteers. Their selfless service is widely recognized and valued by the community. It fortifies people’s trust in the BJP, echoed in the election results. I never tallied our election triumphs, but we have had people’s blessings.
Lex Fridman
I was wondering if you could speak to the incredible logistics, that blew my mind, of running the elections in India. So there’s a lot of interesting anecdotes that arise, for example, that no voter should be more than two kilometers away from a polling station. The result of that is you have these stories, of voting machines having to be carried to remote regions of India, is really incredible. Just every single voter counts, and the machinery of having 600 plus million people vote. Is there some anecdote you could speak to that is particularly impressive to you? Or maybe you could speak generally to the logistics of what it makes to run an election that big, a democracy that big.
I was wondering if you could speak to the incredible logistics, that blew my mind, of running the elections in India. So there’s a lot of interesting anecdotes that arise, for example, that no voter should be more than two kilometers away from a polling station. The result of that is you have these stories, of voting machines having to be carried to remote regions of India, is really incredible. Just every single voter counts, and the machinery of having 600 plus million people vote. Is there some anecdote you could speak to that is particularly impressive to you? Or maybe you could speak generally to the logistics of what it makes to run an election that big, a democracy that big.
Narendra Modi
First and foremost, I am truly grateful for your insightful question. Anyone who believes in democracy should listen to what I’m about to share with you. We often discuss election results, but all the behind the scenes work is overlooked. Let’s take the recently concluded 2024 general elections as an example. There were 980 million registered voters. Each of those voters had a registered ID, and all the necessary details in a vast database. And this number is twice the entire population of North America. It even surpasses the total population of the entire European Union. Out of the 980 million registered voters, 646 million people ventured out, and braved the intense heat of May, determined to cast their votes. Temperatures soared to 40 degrees in some areas, yet they chose to go, and the size of this voter base is double the population of the United States.
First and foremost, I am truly grateful for your insightful question. Anyone who believes in democracy should listen to what I’m about to share with you. We often discuss election results, but all the behind the scenes work is overlooked. Let’s take the recently concluded 2024 general elections as an example. There were 980 million registered voters. Each of those voters had a registered ID, and all the necessary details in a vast database. And this number is twice the entire population of North America. It even surpasses the total population of the entire European Union. Out of the 980 million registered voters, 646 million people ventured out, and braved the intense heat of May, determined to cast their votes. Temperatures soared to 40 degrees in some areas, yet they chose to go, and the size of this voter base is double the population of the United States.
We had more than a million polling booths. Can you fathom all the manpower involved in this? My country has more than 2,500 registered political parties. This staggering figure, with such a vast array of political parties, has the power to leave the entire world in awe. My country has more than 900 round-the-clock news channels. There are over 5,000 newspapers published daily. They each play a role in upholding democracy in their own way. Even the humblest villagers here embrace technology with remarkable swiftness. While some other countries take months to declare election results, we announced the results within a day, despite the mind-boggling number of voters.
And you were spot on in saying that even the remotest villages have polling stations. We even use helicopters to transport polling stations. I believe Arunachal Pradesh has the highest altitude polling booth on record. In Gujarat, a polling booth was set up in the Gir Forest for just one voter, who was in the middle of nowhere, but we ensured a polling booth was set up for them. All I mean to say…
Narendra Modi
… ensure the polling booth was set up for them. All I mean to say is that we truly leave no stone unturned in our unwavering commitment to strengthening democracy, ensuring that we are always fully prepared and election ready no matter the circumstances. I firmly believe that India’s Election Commission sets a global standard as a benchmark for conducting free and fair elections. It is the Apex decision-maker. This in itself is such a remarkable story that the world’s top universities should consider it a case study. They should analyze the management behind it as a valuable learning example. Given the sheer number of voters, can you truly grasp the immense depth of political awareness? All of this will make for an excellent case study for the younger generation worldwide.
… ensure the polling booth was set up for them. All I mean to say is that we truly leave no stone unturned in our unwavering commitment to strengthening democracy, ensuring that we are always fully prepared and election ready no matter the circumstances. I firmly believe that India’s Election Commission sets a global standard as a benchmark for conducting free and fair elections. It is the Apex decision-maker. This in itself is such a remarkable story that the world’s top universities should consider it a case study. They should analyze the management behind it as a valuable learning example. Given the sheer number of voters, can you truly grasp the immense depth of political awareness? All of this will make for an excellent case study for the younger generation worldwide.
Lex Fridman
To me, I love democracy. This is one of the main reasons I love the United States, but there’s just nothing quite as beautiful as democracy when it functions in India. Like you said, 900 million people registered to vote. It really is a case study. It’s beautiful to see that many people come together willingly, passionately casting a vote for some person to represent them like they’re putting their heart in that. It’s really important for a person to feel like their voice is going to be heard. It’s beautiful. Speaking of which, you are loved by a lot of people. You are one of the most powerful humans in the world. Do you sometimes think about whether this much power has a corrupting effect on your mind, especially across the many years that you’ve been in power?
To me, I love democracy. This is one of the main reasons I love the United States, but there’s just nothing quite as beautiful as democracy when it functions in India. Like you said, 900 million people registered to vote. It really is a case study. It’s beautiful to see that many people come together willingly, passionately casting a vote for some person to represent them like they’re putting their heart in that. It’s really important for a person to feel like their voice is going to be heard. It’s beautiful. Speaking of which, you are loved by a lot of people. You are one of the most powerful humans in the world. Do you sometimes think about whether this much power has a corrupting effect on your mind, especially across the many years that you’ve been in power?
Power
Narendra Modi
Well, I don’t think the word powerful quite reflects the journey of my life. I can never claim to be powerful. For all I am is a humble servant, I even identify myself as not the Prime Minister, but the prime servant, and service is the guiding principle of my work ethic.
Well, I don’t think the word powerful quite reflects the journey of my life. I can never claim to be powerful. For all I am is a humble servant, I even identify myself as not the Prime Minister, but the prime servant, and service is the guiding principle of my work ethic.
As far as power is concerned, it is something I have never bothered about. I entered politics not to play power games, but to serve. Rather than seeking power, I stay committed to doing and getting work done. I am more focused on productivity than power. I have always dedicated myself to serving the people. I have always devoted myself to bringing about a positive change in their lives.
Lex Fridman
Like you mentioned, you work a lot. You give your whole soul to your work. Do you ever get lonely?
Like you mentioned, you work a lot. You give your whole soul to your work. Do you ever get lonely?
Narendra Modi
Look, I never experience loneliness because I am an ardent believer in the philosophy of one plus one, and this philosophy of one plus one is aligned with my moral compass, and whenever I am asked to elaborate on this outlook, I say, the first one represents Modi and the other one represents the Almighty. I am never alone for he is always there to keep me company. This is just how I function. Having wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of Swami Vivekananda, I firmly believe that service to mankind is service to God. For me, the nation itself is divine and mankind is a reflection of the divine. I walk this path with the conviction that serving the people is serving the divine. That’s why the very notion of struggling with loneliness has never even remotely crossed my mind.
Look, I never experience loneliness because I am an ardent believer in the philosophy of one plus one, and this philosophy of one plus one is aligned with my moral compass, and whenever I am asked to elaborate on this outlook, I say, the first one represents Modi and the other one represents the Almighty. I am never alone for he is always there to keep me company. This is just how I function. Having wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of Swami Vivekananda, I firmly believe that service to mankind is service to God. For me, the nation itself is divine and mankind is a reflection of the divine. I walk this path with the conviction that serving the people is serving the divine. That’s why the very notion of struggling with loneliness has never even remotely crossed my mind.
Like at the time of pandemic, with the lockdown and traveling restrictions in place, I came up with a way to make the most of my time. I designed a governance model that operated seamlessly through videoconferencing. I kept myself occupied with remote work and virtual meetings.
Another thing I did was to connect with the people I had worked with throughout my life. Among my party’s volunteers nationwide, I made a list of those who were 70 and older. Some of the volunteers had very humble beginnings and came from very modest backgrounds. I personally called every volunteer aged 70 and above. I made it a point to inquire about their health and their family’s well-being. I inquired about how their area was coping. I asked these questions to make sure they were doing well. This allowed me to build rapport with them, and we would go down the memory lane. They were touched that the Prime Minister would check on them in the pandemic.
I made around 40 calls every day without fail. I carried on with this throughout the pandemic. It gave me the chance to reconnect and relive old memories with familiar faces. Loneliness is never a concern for me, as I always find ways to stay engaged, and I have long been at peace with myself. The time I spent in the Himalayas have helped me develop this.
Hard work
Lex Fridman
I’ve heard from many people that you are the hardest worker they know. What’s your philosophy behind that? Maybe you put in crazy hours every single day. Do you ever get tired? What’s your source of strength and perseverance through all of that?
I’ve heard from many people that you are the hardest worker they know. What’s your philosophy behind that? Maybe you put in crazy hours every single day. Do you ever get tired? What’s your source of strength and perseverance through all of that?
Narendra Modi
Look, first of all, I don’t believe I’m the only one working. I look at the people around me and always think these people work harder than I do. When I think about farmers, I realize how hard they work. They toil and sweat under the open sky day after day. When I look at our country’s soldiers, I think about how many hours someone spends working tirelessly in snow, deserts, or even underwater day and night. When I see a laborer, I think about how hard they’re working. I always think about how hard our mothers and sisters work in every family for the happiness of the family. They’re the first to wake up and the last to go to bed, taking care of everyone in the family, while also managing social responsibilities. Thinking of all this, I’m in awe of how hard people work. So I think, “How can I sleep? How can I relax?” So naturally the motivation is right in front of my eyes. Those very things around me keep me motivated.
Look, first of all, I don’t believe I’m the only one working. I look at the people around me and always think these people work harder than I do. When I think about farmers, I realize how hard they work. They toil and sweat under the open sky day after day. When I look at our country’s soldiers, I think about how many hours someone spends working tirelessly in snow, deserts, or even underwater day and night. When I see a laborer, I think about how hard they’re working. I always think about how hard our mothers and sisters work in every family for the happiness of the family. They’re the first to wake up and the last to go to bed, taking care of everyone in the family, while also managing social responsibilities. Thinking of all this, I’m in awe of how hard people work. So I think, “How can I sleep? How can I relax?” So naturally the motivation is right in front of my eyes. Those very things around me keep me motivated.
Secondly, my responsibilities keep pushing me forward. The responsibilities entrusted to me by my fellow citizens always remind me that I’m not here to enjoy privileges. I will always give it my absolute best. Perhaps there are a couple of things I may not accomplish, but there will never be a lack of effort or hard work from me. When I was campaigning in 2014, I had made a promise first in Gujarat and later across India. I promised my fellow citizens that I will never fall behind in hard work for my country. Secondly, I promised I would never act with bad intentions, and thirdly, I vowed I’d never do anything for personal gain.
Today it’s been 24 years. For such a long period, the people have entrusted me as head of government. I’ve continuously held myself to these three standards, and I still live by them today. My inspiration comes from serving 1.4 billion people from understanding and fulfilling their aspirations and addressing their needs. I’m always determined to do as much as I can, work as hard as possible. Even today, my energy remains just as strong.
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Lex Fridman
Me as an engineer, as a person who loves mathematics, I have to ask Srinivasa Ramanujan is an Indian mathematician from a century ago. He’s widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Self-taught, grew up in poverty. You have often spoken about him. What do you find inspiring about him?
Me as an engineer, as a person who loves mathematics, I have to ask Srinivasa Ramanujan is an Indian mathematician from a century ago. He’s widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Self-taught, grew up in poverty. You have often spoken about him. What do you find inspiring about him?
Narendra Modi
Look, I deeply respect him, and everyone in my country respects him as well, because I strongly believe there’s a deep connection between science and spirituality. If you closely observe many scientifically advanced minds, you’ll find they’re often spiritually advanced too. They’re not disconnected from spirituality. Srinivasa Ramanujan once said that his mathematical ideas came from the goddess he worshiped, meaning ideas emerge from spiritual discipline, and discipline is more than just hard work. It means fully devoting yourself to a task and completely immersing yourself into it so much that you become one with your work.
Look, I deeply respect him, and everyone in my country respects him as well, because I strongly believe there’s a deep connection between science and spirituality. If you closely observe many scientifically advanced minds, you’ll find they’re often spiritually advanced too. They’re not disconnected from spirituality. Srinivasa Ramanujan once said that his mathematical ideas came from the goddess he worshiped, meaning ideas emerge from spiritual discipline, and discipline is more than just hard work. It means fully devoting yourself to a task and completely immersing yourself into it so much that you become one with your work.
You see, the more open we are to new and different sources of knowledge, the more new ideas we’ll have. I think it’s important for us to clearly understand the difference between information and knowledge. Some people mistakenly confuse information with knowledge, carrying around large amounts of information, but I don’t believe information alone equals knowledge. Knowledge is something deeper. It gradually evolves through processing, reflection and understanding. Recognizing this difference is important in how we handle both.
Decision-making process
Lex Fridman
You have a reputation for being a decisive leader. So can you walk me through on this topic of ideas, how you make decisions? What’s your process? So for instance, when facing a high stakes choice with no clear precedence, a lot of uncertainty, having to balance input, how do you make decisions?
You have a reputation for being a decisive leader. So can you walk me through on this topic of ideas, how you make decisions? What’s your process? So for instance, when facing a high stakes choice with no clear precedence, a lot of uncertainty, having to balance input, how do you make decisions?
Narendra Modi
There are many factors to my decision making. First, I’m perhaps the only politician in India who has stayed overnight in around 85 to 90% of the districts across the country. This was before my current role. I used to travel extensively. I learned a lot from those experiences. They gave me firsthand knowledge of the ground realities and grassroots level issues, not something asked or heard or learned merely from books. Secondly, from a governance perspective, I carry no baggage of any kind. I don’t carry any baggage that weighs me down or forces me to act a certain way. Thirdly, I have a simple yardstick for decisions. My country first. I always question if what I’m doing harms my nation in any way. Additionally, Mahatma Gandhi once said that, if you’re ever unsure when making a decision, think of the poorest person’s face. Remember them and ask yourself, “Will this help them?” Then your decision will be right. That wisdom always guides me, remembering ordinary citizens and considering how my actions affect them.
There are many factors to my decision making. First, I’m perhaps the only politician in India who has stayed overnight in around 85 to 90% of the districts across the country. This was before my current role. I used to travel extensively. I learned a lot from those experiences. They gave me firsthand knowledge of the ground realities and grassroots level issues, not something asked or heard or learned merely from books. Secondly, from a governance perspective, I carry no baggage of any kind. I don’t carry any baggage that weighs me down or forces me to act a certain way. Thirdly, I have a simple yardstick for decisions. My country first. I always question if what I’m doing harms my nation in any way. Additionally, Mahatma Gandhi once said that, if you’re ever unsure when making a decision, think of the poorest person’s face. Remember them and ask yourself, “Will this help them?” Then your decision will be right. That wisdom always guides me, remembering ordinary citizens and considering how my actions affect them.
Another factor in my approach is that I’m very well-connected in my administration. My officials know this well and probably feel overwhelmed by it, by the fact that my information channels are numerous and are very active. Because of that, I receive lots of insights from various sources. So when someone comes to brief me, that’s not my only source of information. I always have additional perspectives available to me.
Another thing, I maintain a learner’s mindset. Suppose I’m not familiar with something and an official explains it to me. I approach them like a student and ask, “Can you clarify this? How does it work? Then what happens next and how?” Whenever I have different information, I deliberately play devil’s advocate and ask challenging questions. I thoroughly analyze the issue from multiple angles, hoping that careful evaluation will yield something valuable. Then once I converge toward a decision or action that is worth taking, I share the idea informally with like-minded people just to gauge their reactions and see how they respond, gathering insights and feedback before moving forward, until finally, I have a strong conviction that my decision is right.
This entire decision-making process doesn’t actually take much time. My speed is very fast. Let me share an example. How did I make decisions during COVID? I had Nobel Prize winners advising me, giving countless economic examples from around the world. They’d say, “This country is doing this, that country did that. You should do it too.” Renowned economists constantly bombarded me with suggestions. Political parties pressured me relentlessly, urging me to spend huge amounts of money, but I didn’t act immediately. I paused and reflected. What exactly should I do? Then considering the unique conditions of my own country, I made a clear decision. I wouldn’t let the poor sleep hungry. I wouldn’t allow social tensions to arise over basic daily needs.
These core principles guided my approach. The entire world was in lockdown. Global economies were collapsing. Everyone pressured me to empty the treasury, print more currency and flood money everywhere, but I decided that this was not the right economic route to follow. And so instead, the path I chose, after carefully listening to experts, understanding their opinions without opposing them and combining their advice with my own country’s situation and my personal experiences, created a system that worked effectively. As a result, when the whole world suffered from severe inflation immediately after COVID, India did not.
Today, my country is steadily advancing at a rapid pace, emerging as one of the fastest growing major economies in the world. The main reason is that during that crisis, with patience and discipline, I resisted the temptation to apply every global theory blindly. We didn’t worry about what newspapers would say, whether they’d praise or criticize. Ignoring all that, I stayed focused on basic fundamentals, and by doing so, we succeeded and kept moving ahead. So ultimately, my economy benefited as well. My approach has always been to stay focused on these fundamentals.
Another strength is my risk-taking capacity. I don’t worry about potential losses for myself. If something is right for my country, for the people, I’m always prepared to take the risk. Secondly, I take ownership of my decisions. If something goes wrong, I don’t ship blame to others. I stand up, take responsibility, and own the outcome. When you take ownership, your team also becomes deeply committed. They know this person won’t let us down, won’t abandon us. He’ll always stand with us because they see I’m making honest decisions, not for myself, but for the nation. I’ve openly told the country from the start, I’m human. I can make mistakes, but I won’t act with bad intentions. People remember those words clearly. Even if something doesn’t go as planned, they trust that Modi’s intentions were right. They think he probably meant to do something good even if it didn’t work out. So society sees and accepts me just as I am.
AI
Lex Fridman
You gave a powerful speech on AI a few weeks ago at the AI Summit in France. In it you spoke about the talent pool for AI engineers in India. I think it’s probably one of the biggest pools of brilliant engineers in the world. So how can India become the leader in the space of AI? Currently lags behind the United States. What does it take for India to start winning and leading the world in AI?
You gave a powerful speech on AI a few weeks ago at the AI Summit in France. In it you spoke about the talent pool for AI engineers in India. I think it’s probably one of the biggest pools of brilliant engineers in the world. So how can India become the leader in the space of AI? Currently lags behind the United States. What does it take for India to start winning and leading the world in AI?
Narendra Modi
One thing I’m about to say might sound strong, and it may even upset some people, but since you’ve asked, I’ll speak openly from my heart. No matter what the world does with AI, it will remain incomplete without India. I’m making this statement very responsibly. Tell me, you’ve heard my speech at the AI Summit in Paris on global cooperation. What do you think? Can anyone develop AI entirely on their own? What is your perspective on this?
One thing I’m about to say might sound strong, and it may even upset some people, but since you’ve asked, I’ll speak openly from my heart. No matter what the world does with AI, it will remain incomplete without India. I’m making this statement very responsibly. Tell me, you’ve heard my speech at the AI Summit in Paris on global cooperation. What do you think? Can anyone develop AI entirely on their own? What is your perspective on this?
Lex Fridman
You gave, actually, in your speech a brilliant example of the positive impact of AI and the limitations of AI. I think the example you gave is when you ask it to generate an image of a person writing with their left hand-
You gave, actually, in your speech a brilliant example of the positive impact of AI and the limitations of AI. I think the example you gave is when you ask it to generate an image of a person writing with their left hand-
Narendra Modi
Left hand.
Left hand.
Lex Fridman
… it’s always going to generate a person writing with their right hand. So in that way, the West creating an AI system where India is not part of that process is always going to generate the person with the right hand is an essential part of what the world is historically, but especially in the 21st century.
… it’s always going to generate a person writing with their right hand. So in that way, the West creating an AI system where India is not part of that process is always going to generate the person with the right hand is an essential part of what the world is historically, but especially in the 21st century.
Narendra Modi
I agree. I believe AI development is fundamentally a collaboration. Everyone involved supports one another through shared experiences and learning. India isn’t just developing theoretical AI models. It is actively working on and bringing to life AI-driven applications for very specific use cases to ensure that GPU access is available to every section of society. We have already created a unique marketplace-based model to ensure its broad accessibility. A significant mindset shift is taking place in India, though historical influences, traditional government procedures or the lack of strong support infrastructure made us appear as lagging behind to others.
I agree. I believe AI development is fundamentally a collaboration. Everyone involved supports one another through shared experiences and learning. India isn’t just developing theoretical AI models. It is actively working on and bringing to life AI-driven applications for very specific use cases to ensure that GPU access is available to every section of society. We have already created a unique marketplace-based model to ensure its broad accessibility. A significant mindset shift is taking place in India, though historical influences, traditional government procedures or the lack of strong support infrastructure made us appear as lagging behind to others.
Take 5G for example. The world initially believed we were far behind, but once we started, we became the fastest nation globally to roll out comprehensive 5G networks. Recently, an American company executive visited me and shared his experiences about this very fact. He told me that if I were to advertise in the US for engineers, I would only receive enough applicants to fill a single room at best. But if I do the same in India, even a football field wouldn’t be enough to hold them. This indicates that India has access to an extraordinarily vast pool of talent, and that’s our greatest strength. After all, artificial intelligence is fundamentally powered, shaped, and guided by human intelligence. Without genuine human intelligence, AI can’t thrive or progress sustainably, and that real intelligence exists abundantly in India’s youth and talent pool, and I believe that’s our greatest asset.
Lex Fridman
But also if you look, many of the top tech leaders, first of all, tech talent, but tech leaders in the US are of Indian origin, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Aravind Srinivas. You’ve met with some of them. What spirit of their Indian origins do you think they carry in them that enables them to be so successful?
But also if you look, many of the top tech leaders, first of all, tech talent, but tech leaders in the US are of Indian origin, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Aravind Srinivas. You’ve met with some of them. What spirit of their Indian origins do you think they carry in them that enables them to be so successful?
Narendra Modi
Look, Indian culture emphasizes that there should be equal respect for the place where you’re born and the place where you work. There should be no difference. As much as there is dedication to the land of birth, there should be the same sense of dedication to the land of work. You should always give your best wherever you are. Because of these rich cultural values, every Indian strives to give their best effort, regardless of their role or position. They don’t wait until they’re in senior roles, even in smaller roles.
Look, Indian culture emphasizes that there should be equal respect for the place where you’re born and the place where you work. There should be no difference. As much as there is dedication to the land of birth, there should be the same sense of dedication to the land of work. You should always give your best wherever you are. Because of these rich cultural values, every Indian strives to give their best effort, regardless of their role or position. They don’t wait until they’re in senior roles, even in smaller roles.
Secondly, they never get involved in anything questionable or unethical. They tend to remain dedicated to what’s right and ethical. Their nature is collaborative. They easily get along with others, eventually for success. Just having knowledge isn’t enough. The ability to work effectively as part of a team matters significantly more. Understanding people and harnessing their abilities is an incredibly valuable skill.
Generally, people raised in India, especially those coming from joint families and brought up in an open society, find it easier to lead complex tasks and large teams effectively. That’s why today, in major corporations across the globe, you’ll find Indians holding key leadership positions. The problem-solving abilities, along with the analytical thinking of Indian professionals are truly exceptional. I believe this capability is so strong, it makes Indians globally competitive and extremely valuable on the international stage. This is the reason why in fields like innovation, entrepreneurship, startups and boardrooms, you’ll find Indians achieving extraordinary results everywhere.
Take our space sector, for example. Previously, it was entirely government-controlled, but just a couple of years ago, I opened it up to the private sector, and now we already have 200 startups working in space technology. Moreover, our missions like Chandrayaan are extremely cost-effective. India’s Chandrayaan mission costs less than what Hollywood spends making a single blockbuster film. So when the world sees how cost-effective our work is, they naturally think why not partner with India? This automatically generates respect for Indian talent globally. I believe this is a hallmark of our civilizational ethos.
Lex Fridman
You spoke about this human intelligence. Do you worry that AI, artificial intelligence, will replace us humans?
You spoke about this human intelligence. Do you worry that AI, artificial intelligence, will replace us humans?
Narendra Modi
It’s true that in every era, a competitive atmosphere was created between technology and humanity. At times, it was even portrayed as conflict. It was often portrayed as if technology would challenge human existence itself. But every time, as technology advanced, humans adapted and stayed a step ahead. It has always been the case. After all, it is humans who find the best ways to use technology to their advantage. I believe that with AI, humans are now being forced to reflect on what it truly means to be human. This is the real power of AI. Because of the way AI functions, it has challenged how we perceive work itself. But human imagination is the fuel. AI can create many things based on that, and in the future it may achieve even more. Still, I firmly believe that no technology can ever replace the boundless creativity and imagination of the human mind.
It’s true that in every era, a competitive atmosphere was created between technology and humanity. At times, it was even portrayed as conflict. It was often portrayed as if technology would challenge human existence itself. But every time, as technology advanced, humans adapted and stayed a step ahead. It has always been the case. After all, it is humans who find the best ways to use technology to their advantage. I believe that with AI, humans are now being forced to reflect on what it truly means to be human. This is the real power of AI. Because of the way AI functions, it has challenged how we perceive work itself. But human imagination is the fuel. AI can create many things based on that, and in the future it may achieve even more. Still, I firmly believe that no technology can ever replace the boundless creativity and imagination of the human mind.
Lex Fridman
I agree with you. It does make me and a lot of people wonder what makes humans special because it seems that there’s a lot that makes humans special. The imagination, the creativity, the consciousness, the ability to be afraid, to love, to dream, to think outside of the box, outside of the box of the box of the box, take risks, all of those things.
I agree with you. It does make me and a lot of people wonder what makes humans special because it seems that there’s a lot that makes humans special. The imagination, the creativity, the consciousness, the ability to be afraid, to love, to dream, to think outside of the box, outside of the box of the box of the box, take risks, all of those things.
Narendra Modi
Now, look, humans have an innate ability to care for each other, the natural tendency to be concerned about one another. Now, can someone tell me, is AI capable of this?
Now, look, humans have an innate ability to care for each other, the natural tendency to be concerned about one another. Now, can someone tell me, is AI capable of this?
Education
Lex Fridman
This is one of the big open questions of the 21st century. Every year you host the Pariksha Pe Charcha where you interact directly with young students and give them advice on how to prepare for exams. I watched a bunch of them. So you give advice on how to succeed in exams, how to manage stress, all those kinds of things. Can you explain at a high level the different exams that students in India need to take in their education journey and why it’s so stressful?
This is one of the big open questions of the 21st century. Every year you host the Pariksha Pe Charcha where you interact directly with young students and give them advice on how to prepare for exams. I watched a bunch of them. So you give advice on how to succeed in exams, how to manage stress, all those kinds of things. Can you explain at a high level the different exams that students in India need to take in their education journey and why it’s so stressful?
Narendra Modi
By and large, a strange mindset has developed in society today. Even schools measure their success by students’ rankings. Families too feel pride when their child achieves a high rank because they believe it improves their educational and social status. This mentality has resulted in increased pressure on children. Kids also began feeling that their entire lives depend on 10th and 12th grade exams.
By and large, a strange mindset has developed in society today. Even schools measure their success by students’ rankings. Families too feel pride when their child achieves a high rank because they believe it improves their educational and social status. This mentality has resulted in increased pressure on children. Kids also began feeling that their entire lives depend on 10th and 12th grade exams.
We’ve introduced significant changes in our new education policy to address this issue. But until those changes take effect on the ground, I feel another responsibility. If our children face challenges, it’s my duty to listen to them, understand them, and ease their burden. In a way, when I conduct Pariksha Pe Charcha, I get insights directly from the students, understand their parents’ mindset, as well as the perspectives of people in the educational field. So these discussions don’t just benefit the students. They benefit me too.
Exams are valuable for assessing knowledge in a specific domain, but they can’t become the sole measure of someone’s overall potential. Many people may not score high academically, yet can hit a century in cricket because that’s where their true strength lies. When the focus shifts to actual learning, scores tend to naturally improve.
I remember when I was a student, I had a teacher whose learning techniques still greatly appeal to me today. He would give us children specific instructions. To one child he would say, “Tomorrow, bring exactly 10 chickpeas from home.” To another, he might request, ” Bring 15 grains of rice. No more. No less.” A third child could be told, “Bring 21 mung beans. Precisely that number.” Different students got different quantities and varieties. So each child would think, “I need to get exactly 10.” Counting them at home helped them memorize numbers naturally. Then they’d learn what chickpeas were, and after returning to school, they’d pool it all. The teacher would then ask, ” Take out 10 chickpeas, three chickpeas, two mung beans-“
Narendra Modi
… take out 10 chickpeas, three chickpeas, two mung beans. This way children learned math and could identify chickpeas and mung beans effortlessly. I’m talking about early childhood education here. Such learning techniques educate children without burdening them, and we’ve incorporated similar methods into our new education policy.
… take out 10 chickpeas, three chickpeas, two mung beans. This way children learned math and could identify chickpeas and mung beans effortlessly. I’m talking about early childhood education here. Such learning techniques educate children without burdening them, and we’ve incorporated similar methods into our new education policy.
When I was in school, I observed one of my teachers using an innovative idea. On his very first day, he placed a diary on the table and said, “Whoever arrives earliest each morning will write one sentence in this diary along with their name.” The next student would then need to write a related sentence.
At first, I’d rush to school very early every day. Why? So that I could write the first sentence. I once wrote something like, “Today’s sunrise was magnificent. It filled me with energy.” I’d write my name and whoever arrived after me had to write something connected to the sunrise as well.
After a few days, I realized my creativity wasn’t improving much from this. Why? Because I’d arrived with the fixed thought already in mind and simply write it down. So I decided I’d start going last instead. What happened then was that I’d read what others had written first and then try to give my very best.
As a result, my creativity began to improve even more. Sometimes teachers do these small simple activities that greatly impact your life. These experiences combined with my own background in organizational work, made human resource development a key area of focus for me.
That’s why I engage with children through events once or twice each year and over time, these efforts have resulted in a book that’s benefiting thousands of children serving as a valuable reference for them.
Lex Fridman
Can you speak a little bit more by way of advice to students of how to be successful on their path in their career, how to find the career and how to find success in India and just to all the people across the world who find inspiration in your words?
Can you speak a little bit more by way of advice to students of how to be successful on their path in their career, how to find the career and how to find success in India and just to all the people across the world who find inspiration in your words?
Narendra Modi
I believe that whatever task you get, if you perform that task with complete dedication and sincerity, they inevitably become an expert sooner or later, and their enhanced capabilities open doors to success.
I believe that whatever task you get, if you perform that task with complete dedication and sincerity, they inevitably become an expert sooner or later, and their enhanced capabilities open doors to success.
While working, one must continually strive to improve their skills and should never underestimate their ability to learn. When someone constantly neglects their learning ability, they limit their growth, but those who look beyond their tasks and observe what others around them are doing, their capacity can double or even triple.
To young people I’d say this clearly, there’s no need to feel discouraged. There’s certainly some task out there destined just for you. Don’t worry. Focus on enhancing your skills and opportunities will come.
You may think, “I wanted to be a doctor, but became a teacher. My life is wasted.” Thinking like that won’t help you at all. All right, you didn’t become a doctor, but as a teacher, you can shape 100 doctors.
If you had become a doctor, you’d serve only your patients. But now, as a teacher, you can inspire students to fulfill their dreams of becoming doctors so that both you and your students can together serve millions of patients. Then he gains a new perspective on life.
“I couldn’t become a doctor so I was miserable and I was unhappy being a teacher, but now I realize as a teacher, I can create doctors.” Connecting your life to a greater purpose brings a sense of inspiration and meaning. I have always believed that God has given everyone unique capabilities. Never lose faith in your own abilities. You should always maintain trust in your own abilities. Keep believing in yourself and trust that when the opportunity comes, you’ll perform and you’ll succeed. That confidence makes a person deliver results.
Lex Fridman
How do those students deal with stress, with struggle, with difficulties along that path?
How do those students deal with stress, with struggle, with difficulties along that path?
Narendra Modi
Parents must first understand that life is not just about taking exams. Families should understand that their children aren’t trophies meant to be displayed or models to show off in society. It’s not about saying, “Look, my kid scores so high.” Parents really need to stop using their kids just as status symbols.
Parents must first understand that life is not just about taking exams. Families should understand that their children aren’t trophies meant to be displayed or models to show off in society. It’s not about saying, “Look, my kid scores so high.” Parents really need to stop using their kids just as status symbols.
Secondly, students should always keep themselves well-prepared beforehand. Only then can they appear for exams feeling stress-free and confident. They should have complete trust in themselves and their abilities.
Sometimes I see students panic over the smallest issues during exams. They take papers or other things, and when their pen suddenly stops working causing anxiety, sometimes they feel uneasy thinking, “Oh no, I don’t like sitting next to this person.” If the bench wobbles, their whole attention goes there, indicating self-doubt.
Those lacking confidence constantly keep looking for distractions. But if you are confident and have genuinely worked hard, just take a minute, take some deep breaths, relax your mind and refocus your attention calmly.
Slowly read through the questions and allocate your time systematically. “I have this amount of time I’ll dedicate these minutes per question.” In my experience, students who regularly practice writing test papers can easily overcome such situations without any trouble at all.
Learning and focus
Lex Fridman
And you said, “Always focus on learning.” What’s your approach to learning? What advice can you give on how to learn best, not just when you’re young, throughout your life?
And you said, “Always focus on learning.” What’s your approach to learning? What advice can you give on how to learn best, not just when you’re young, throughout your life?
Narendra Modi
Let me share a personal example with you. I used to learn a lot from reading, but these days, more and more, I learn by being fully present. Whenever I meet someone, I am fully present in the moment. I give them my full attention. This complete focus allows me to grasp new concepts quickly.
Let me share a personal example with you. I used to learn a lot from reading, but these days, more and more, I learn by being fully present. Whenever I meet someone, I am fully present in the moment. I give them my full attention. This complete focus allows me to grasp new concepts quickly.
When I’m with you, I’m fully present, grounded in the moment. No calls or messages can pull me away from this moment with you. I am fully present focused on the here and now. That’s why I always believe this is a habit everyone should embrace.
It will sharpen your mind and improve your learning ability. Besides, knowledge alone cannot light the way. You must immerse yourself in the flow of practice. You cannot master driving merely by reading the life stories of great drivers. You must get behind the wheel and take the road yourself.
You must dare to take risks. You can never master the road if fear of accident or death holds you back. I truly believe that those who live in the present are the ones who live their life to the fullest. That’s because they know that every moment lived has already slipped into the past.
So you must embrace the moment before it fades into the past. Otherwise, chasing the future only turns the present into the past. It’s not a trade worth making. Most people stress so much about the future that their present quietly slips away. Before they know it the moment has already faded into the past.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of stories of you having meetings with people and it’s usually all the distractions, there’s no distractions. It’s just two human beings just like this and just focused on the moment and the interaction. That’s a really beautiful thing. And today really is a gift that you would give that focus to me, so thank you.
Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of stories of you having meetings with people and it’s usually all the distractions, there’s no distractions. It’s just two human beings just like this and just focused on the moment and the interaction. That’s a really beautiful thing. And today really is a gift that you would give that focus to me, so thank you.
Let me ask maybe a difficult, maybe a human question. Do you contemplate your mortality? Are you afraid of death?
Narendra Modi
Can I ask you a question instead?
Can I ask you a question instead?
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
Narendra Modi
I have a very interesting question. Life and death are two sides of a coin, but which of the two is more certain?
I have a very interesting question. Life and death are two sides of a coin, but which of the two is more certain?
Lex Fridman
Death.
Death.
Narendra Modi
Exactly. Now, with that out of the way, we know for a fact that life itself is a whispered promise of death, and yet life is also destined to flourish. So again, in the dance of life and death, only death is certain, so why fear what is certain? That’s why you must embrace life instead of fretting over death.
Exactly. Now, with that out of the way, we know for a fact that life itself is a whispered promise of death, and yet life is also destined to flourish. So again, in the dance of life and death, only death is certain, so why fear what is certain? That’s why you must embrace life instead of fretting over death.
That’s how life will evolve and flourish, for it is uncertain. That’s why you must commit to enriching, refining and elevating your life so you can live fully and with a purpose before death comes knocking.
That’s why you must let go of the fear of death. After all, death is inevitable and there’s no use worrying about when it will arrive. It will arrive when it’s meant to.
Lex Fridman
What gives you hope about the future? Not just of India, but all of human civilization, all of us humans here on earth?
What gives you hope about the future? Not just of India, but all of human civilization, all of us humans here on earth?
Narendra Modi
Well, I am an optimist at heart. Pessimism and negativity are simply not ingrained in my mindset. They don’t align with the way I think. That’s why I always gravitate toward the bright side instead.
Well, I am an optimist at heart. Pessimism and negativity are simply not ingrained in my mindset. They don’t align with the way I think. That’s why I always gravitate toward the bright side instead.
If we take a moment to reflect on the history of mankind, we see the incredible crisis humans have overcome with resilience and strength. We also see the major changes humanity has embraced to evolve with the times, and this continuous transformation has carried on for millennia.
In every era, it is in human nature to adapt to the ever-flowing current of change. And while our progress has gone through cycles of ups and downs, it is those people who can break free from the constraints of these historical cycles and outdated thinking patterns.
It is they who can help humanity achieve extraordinary positive breakthroughs with an unshackled speed and grace transcending the limitations of the old way of doing things by embracing change.
Mantra
Lex Fridman
In this moment, I was wondering if you could guide me perhaps through a Hindu prayer or meditation for a few moments. I learned, I’m trying to learn the Gayatri Mantra. In my fast I was trying to do the chants. Perhaps I could try chanting. You could tell me about the importance of this mantra and maybe others in your life, in your spirituality? Should I try?
In this moment, I was wondering if you could guide me perhaps through a Hindu prayer or meditation for a few moments. I learned, I’m trying to learn the Gayatri Mantra. In my fast I was trying to do the chants. Perhaps I could try chanting. You could tell me about the importance of this mantra and maybe others in your life, in your spirituality? Should I try?
Narendra Modi
Yes, please.
Yes, please.
Lex Fridman
[foreign language 02:58:34]. How did I do? It’s okay?
[foreign language 02:58:34]. How did I do? It’s okay?
Narendra Modi
You did great. [foreign language 02:58:58]. This mantra is dedicated to the radiant power of the sun and is considered a powerful tool for spiritual enlightenment.
You did great. [foreign language 02:58:58]. This mantra is dedicated to the radiant power of the sun and is considered a powerful tool for spiritual enlightenment.
Many mantras in Hindu philosophy are deeply intertwined in some intricate and interesting ways with science and nature, each woven into different facets of life. Chanting mantras on a daily basis brings profound and lasting benefits.
Meditation
Lex Fridman
In your own spirituality and your quiet moments, when you are with God, where does your mind go? What role do mantras play when you’re fasting, when you’re just alone with yourself?
In your own spirituality and your quiet moments, when you are with God, where does your mind go? What role do mantras play when you’re fasting, when you’re just alone with yourself?
Narendra Modi
The word meditation has been overused to the point that it feels like a cliché. In Indian languages, we usually refer to it as dhyan. If I associate dhyan to meditation, it might seem burdensome to some. One might think, “This is too difficult. I’m not an enlightened being.” But it’s not rocket science. It just means freeing yourself from distraction.
The word meditation has been overused to the point that it feels like a cliché. In Indian languages, we usually refer to it as dhyan. If I associate dhyan to meditation, it might seem burdensome to some. One might think, “This is too difficult. I’m not an enlightened being.” But it’s not rocket science. It just means freeing yourself from distraction.
For example, even when you’re in class, your mind wanders to recess. All you think about is lunch, not the lesson. Meditation is simply being present in the moment. I recall an incident from my time living in the Himalayas. There I encountered this wise sage. He taught me a simple practical technique. It was nothing spiritual.
There are several little streams in the Himalayas. He positioned a large leaf to catch water from one of those streams and placed an upside down bowl below so water would drip rhythmically from the leaf onto the bowl.
He asked me to focus only on the dripping water, ignoring all other sounds. “Ignore the chirping birds and the soft rustle of the breeze.” He would place the leaf and I would meditate there for hours. I felt my mind slowly tuning into the rhythmic sounds of the water droplets falling onto the bowl like a melody guiding me into deep focus.
And it’s not like I was chanting mantras or reciting God’s name. I like to call it the divine resonance. It was by tuning into that divine resonance that I learned the art of concentration. This practice slowly evolved into meditation. Sometimes you happen to stay at a fancy hotel, you get a lavish, luxurious room. The decor is impeccable and you have been wholeheartedly fasting, but there’s a dripping faucet in the bathroom. That faint sound is enough to make a luxurious room feel worthless.
At times, we realize the value of concentration in life’s inner journey. We come to appreciate the difference a little bit of concentration can make. One very interesting concept comes to mind from our scriptures.
Since we spoke about life and death, I would like to quote a mantra, [foreign language 03:03:28]. In other words, all life is part of a complete circle, and this mantra emphasizes the path to achieve that completeness.
Similarly, Hindus never focus solely on individual well-being. [foreign language 03:03:52]. In other words, we wish for the well-being and prosperity of all. [foreign language 03:04:00]. This mantra encompasses the idea of universal well-being and prosperity.
And you know how this mantra ends? [foreign language 03:04:13]. Every Hindu mantra ends on the same note. Peace, peace, peace. These ancient and powerful rituals born in India have emerged from thousands of years of the spiritual practice of sages. They connect us to the essence of life.
Lex Fridman
[foreign language 03:04:40]. Thank you for this honor. Thank you for this incredible conversation. Thank you for welcoming me to India, and I can’t wait to break the fast with some Indian food tomorrow. Thank you so much, Prime Minister. This was an honor.
[foreign language 03:04:40]. Thank you for this honor. Thank you for this incredible conversation. Thank you for welcoming me to India, and I can’t wait to break the fast with some Indian food tomorrow. Thank you so much, Prime Minister. This was an honor.
Narendra Modi
I am thankful for the opportunity to have this conversation with you. After fasting for two days I recommend you ease into eating slowly and I hope you reap great benefits from this fasting experience.
I am thankful for the opportunity to have this conversation with you. After fasting for two days I recommend you ease into eating slowly and I hope you reap great benefits from this fasting experience.
I’ve explored several new realms of thought for the first time ever with you today. I had long kept those thoughts tucked away within myself, but today you brought those thoughts to light. I hope [inaudible 03:05:30].
Lex Fridman
Thank you.
Thank you.
Narendra Modi
I hope your viewers may enjoy this. It was a great pleasure speaking with you. Thank you.
I hope your viewers may enjoy this. It was a great pleasure speaking with you. Thank you.
Lex visiting India
Lex Fridman
Thank you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And now, let me ask you some questions and try reflect on and articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you would like to submit questions or get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact.
Thank you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And now, let me ask you some questions and try reflect on and articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you would like to submit questions or get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact.
First, let me give a shout out to the amazing team around the Prime Minister. Everyone was super kind, excellent at what they do, efficient, great communication, and just great people all around.
And since I spoke English and Prime Minister Modi spoke Hindi, I have to comment on the interpreter who was doing simultaneous interpreting for both of us. She was absolutely amazing. I can’t sing her enough praises. From the equipment used to the quality of the translation, to just the human touch of it all.
And in general, my travels around Delhi and India revealed to me some early glimpses of what felt like another world, almost like another planet, different culturally from anything I’ve experienced before. A chaos of human interactions, out there, big dynamic personalities and characters.
Obviously, India’s composed of many distinct subcultures and Delhi represents just one slice. Much like neither New York or Texas or Iowa alone represent America. They’re all different flavors of America.
On my visit, I walked around and rode rickshaws everywhere, just aimlessly wandering the streets, looking to talk to people about life. Of course, like many places on earth, there are always some people, especially those that have something to sell, who will at first see me as a tourist, a foreign traveler, one with some money to spend.
Like always, I avoided such shallow interactions and went straight past the small talk to the meaningful conversations. Shooting the shit about what they love, what they fear, what kind of hardship and triumph they’ve experienced in their lives.
I think the cool thing about people anywhere on earth is they quickly do see the real you past the facades that strangers put up for each other, if you’re vulnerable and honest enough to let them. And I tried to do just that and I should say that for the most part, everyone was super kind in the genuine human way.
Even when they didn’t speak English, it was always easy to understand. Probably more than any other peoples I’ve interacted with in India, people’s eyes, faces, body language, all communicate a lot of information, a lot of emotion, not reserved at all.
When I traveled through Eastern Europe, for example, in contrast, reading a person is much tougher. The meme does have some truth to it. There’s often a protective layer between the heart of the person and the outside world. In India, it’s all there on full display. So I had a lot of epic conversations and interactions as I walked around Delhi for a couple of weeks.
In general, on the topic of reading people, I do believe the eyes can often say more than words can. We humans are a fascinating bunch. There really is a deep turbulent ocean behind the surface waves we show the world. In some sense, what I try to do in conversations, on and off the mic, is to get to that depth.
Anyway, the few weeks I spent in India were a magical experience. Traffic alone was a wild time, like the world’s most difficult test for self-driving cars.
It reminded me of watching nature documentary videos of swarms of fish when it’s thousands of them swimming around at insane speeds, seemingly in complete chaos. And yet when looking at the big picture of it it all works like a perfectly tuned orchestra.
I will, most certainly, travel around India with my friend Paul Rosalie in the near future, maybe with some other friends all around from the north of India to the south.
Siddhartha
Now, allow me to also comment about one of the books that first drew me toward India and to its deep history of philosophical and spiritual traditions. The book is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.
I first read most of Hesse’s major work as a teenager, but then reread them again through the years. It first found me, Siddhartha, when I was immersed in a very different kind of literature of Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Orwell, Hemingway, Kerouac, Steinbeck and so on. Many of these explore the same human condition that puzzled me when I was a young man and still puzzles me today, even more so.
But Siddhartha was my introduction to the Eastern way of looking at these puzzles. It was written by Hermann Hesse. And by the way, please allow me this pronunciation of his last name. I’ve heard some people say Hesse, but my whole life I’ve always said Hesse.
So, anyway, it was written by Hermann Hesse, a German-Swiss Nobel Prize winning writer during one of the darkest periods of his own life. His marriage was failing, World War I has shattered his pacifist ideals and he suffered from debilitating headaches, insomnia, and depression.
During this period, he began psychoanalysis with Carl Jung, which, in part, led him to explore Eastern philosophies as a way to heal his fractured psyche. Hesse immersed himself in translations of ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts studying the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
And so, the writing of Siddhartha was in itself, for him, a journey that paralleled that of the main character in the book. Hesse started writing the book in 1919 and finished three years later experiencing an extensive psychological crisis in the middle. The book follows Siddhartha, a young man in ancient India, as he leaves behind wealth and comfort to search for meaning. You can feel his personal struggle in every page. Siddhartha’s restlessness, his dissatisfaction with conventional wisdom, his need to find truth, the direct experience.
Again, the book wasn’t simply a philosophical exploration for Hesse, it was psychological survival. He was writing his way out of suffering and towards his own enlightenment. I won’t go into a deep analysis of the book here, but I will mention two key lessons I took away and carry with me to this day.
First lesson comes from the scene in the book that to me is one of the great scenes in all of literature. Siddhartha is sitting by a river just listening, and in that river he hears all of life. All sounds, all voices, all of time, past, present, future, flowing together as one.
That scene gave me the experience and the notion that while in some grounded human sense, the linear arrow of time does exist. In another sense, time is a kind of illusion that, in fact, everything exists simultaneously. That our lives are both momentary and eternal. It is hard to describe these ideas with words. I think they must be experienced as personal revelations.
I’m reminded of the fish story that David Foster Wallace, another one of my favorite writers, described in a commencement speech 20 years ago. The story goes, “Two young fish are swimming along when they encounter an older fish swimming the opposite way. The older fish nods and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The young fish swim on, and eventually one turns to the other and asks, ‘What the hell is water?'”
The illusion of the forward progress of time is water in this metaphor. As humans, we’re fully immersed in it, but enlightenment, in part, involves being able to step back and get a glimpse at another deeper perspective on reality where all things are inextricably interconnected across both time and space.
Another key lesson from the novel that was especially formative to me as a young man was that one should not blindly follow others or learn about the world exclusively through books. But rather forge your own path and thrust yourself into the world where the lessons of life can only be learned by experiencing them directly.
And every experience, both positive and negative, mistakes, suffering and even seemingly wasted time is all an essential part of growth. To this point, Hesse draws a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge can be taught by others. Wisdom can only be gathered through experiencing the full mess of life yourself.
In other words, the path to understanding isn’t through rejection of the world, but through complete immersion in it. Those are my early steps in seeing the world through the lens of Eastern philosophy. But many of Hesse’s books had an impact on me. I would recommend to read Demian, when you are younger, Steppenwolf, when you are older, Siddhartha throughout your life, especially in moments of crisis, and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning.
But Siddhartha is the only one I’ve returned to more than twice. In my own life, when faced with a difficult situation, I often return to the moment in the book when Siddhartha is asked what skills he possesses, and his answer is simply, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.”
Let me elaborate. Indeed, for the first part, “I can think.” As Marcus Aurelius said, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.” For the second part, “I can wait.” Patience and waiting often is indeed the optimal decision when facing a problem. Time does bring clarity and depth of understanding.
For the third part, “I can fast.” When needed, being able to live and flourish with less is a prerequisite of being free when the mind, the body, and society all are trying to put you in cages.
All right, friends, now sadly, our time together in this episode has come to a close. As always, thank you for being here and thank you for your support through the years.
Let me leave you with a few words from the Bhagavad Gita. “He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own self in all beings and all beings in his own self and looks unto everything with an impartial eye.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Transcript for DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #459 with Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert.
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While it does get super technical, we try to make sure that it’s still accessible to folks outside of the AI field by defining terms, stating important concepts explicitly, spelling out acronyms, and in general, always moving across the several layers of abstraction and levels of detail. There is a lot of hype in the media about what AI is and isn’t. The purpose of this podcast in part is to cut through the hype, through the bullshit and the low resolution analysis and to discuss in detail how stuff works and what the implications are. Let me also, if I may comment on the new OpenAI o3-mini reasoning model, the release of which we were anticipating during the conversation and it did indeed come out right after. Its capabilities and costs are on par with our expectations as we stated. OpenAI o3-mini is indeed a great model, but it should be stated that DeepSeek-R1 has similar performance on benchmarks, is still cheaper and it reveals its chain of thought reasoning, which o3-mini does not. It only shows a summary of the reasoning, plus R1 is open weight and o3-mini is not.
By the way, I got a chance to play with o3-mini and anecdotal vibe check wise, I felt that o3-mini, specifically o3-mini high is better than R1. Still for me personally, I find that Claude Sonnet 3.5 is the best model for programming except for tricky cases where I will use o1 Pro to brainstorm. Either way, many more better AI models will come including reasoning models both from American and Chinese companies. They’ll continue to shift the cost curve, but the quote “DeepSeek moment” is indeed real. I think it will still be remembered five years from now as a pivotal event in tech history due in part to the geopolitical implications, but for other reasons to, as we discuss in detail from many perspectives in this conversation. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, to support it please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert.
This reasoning model has a lot of overlapping training steps to DeepSeek-V3, and it’s confusing that you have a base model called V3 that you do something to to get a chat model and then you do some different things to get a reasoning model. I think a lot of the AI industry is going through this challenge of communications right now where OpenAI makes fun of their own naming schemes. They have GPT-4o, they have OpenIA o1, and there’s a lot of types of models, so we’re going to break down what each of them are. There’s a lot of technical specifics on training and go through them high level to specific and go through each of them.
There’s still a lot of debate on the definition and soul of open source AI. Open source software has a rich history on freedom to modify, freedom to take on your own, freedom for many restrictions on how you would use the software and what that means for AI is still being defined. For what I do, I work at the Allen Institute for AI, we’re a nonprofit, we want to make AI open for everybody and we try to lead on what we think is truly open source. There’s not full agreement in the community, but for us that means releasing the training data, releasing the training code, and then also having open weights like this. And we’ll get into the details of the models and again and again as we try to get deeper into how the models were trained, we will say things like the data processing, data filtering data quality is the number one determinant of the model quality.
And then a lot of the training code is the determinant on how long it takes to train and how fast your experimentation is. Without fully open source models where you have access to this data, it is hard to know… Or it’s harder to replicate. We’ll get into cost numbers for DeepSeek-V3 on mostly GPU hours and how much you could pay to rent those yourselves. But without the data, the replication cost is going to be far, far higher. And same goes for the code.
And this is all fantastic. I think the closest peer is something like Llama where you have the weights and you have a technical report. And the technical report is very good for Llama. One of the most read PDFs of the year last year is the Llama 3 paper, but in some ways it’s slightly less actionable. It has less details on the training specifics. I think less plots and so on. And the Llama 3 license is more restrictive than MIT. And then between the DeepSeek custom license and the Llama license, we could get into this whole rabbit hole, I think. We’ll make sure we want to go down the license rabbit hole before we do specifics.
We’ll get into some of these words and this is what they did to create the DeepSeek-V3 model. This was the first model to be released and it is very high performant, it’s competitive with GPT-4, Llama 405B and so on. And then when this release was happening, we don’t know their exact timeline or soon after they were finishing the training of a different training process from the same next token prediction based model that I talked about, which is when this new reasoning training that people have heard about comes in in order to create the model that is called DeepSeek-R1. The R through this conversation is good for grounding for reasoning. And the name is also similar to OpenAI’s o1, which is the other reasoning model that people have heard about. And we’ll have to break down the training for R1 in more detail because for one we have a paper detailing it, but also it is a far newer set of techniques for the AI community, so it is a much more rapidly evolving area of research.
This can be scaled to be very efficient and there’s a lot of numbers that are thrown around in AI training like how many floating-point operations or flops are used. And then you can also look at how many hours of these GPUs that are used. And it’s largely one loss function taken to a very large amount of compute usage. You set up really efficient systems and then at the end of that you have the base model and pre-training is where there is a lot more of complexity in terms of how the process is emerging or evolving and the different types of training losses that you’ll use. I think this is a lot of techniques grounded in the natural language processing literature. The oldest technique which is still used today is something called instruction tuning or also known as supervised fine-tuning. These acronyms will be IFT or SFT.
People really go back and forth throughout them, and I’ll probably do the same, which is where you add this formatting to the model where it knows to take a question that is, explain the history of the Roman Empire to me or a sort of question you’ll see on Reddit or Stack Overflow. And then the model will respond in a information-dense but presentable manner. The core of that formatting is in this instruction tuning phase. And then there’s two other categories of loss functions that are being used today. One I’ll classify as preference fine-tuning. Preference fine-tuning is a generalized term for what came out of reinforcement learning from human feedback, which is RLHF. This reinforcement learning from human feedback is credited as the technique that helped ChatGPT break through. It is a technique to make the responses that are nicely formatted like these Reddit answers more in tune with what a human would like to read.
This is done by collecting pairwise preferences from actual humans out in the world to start and now AIs are also labeling this data and we’ll get into those trade-offs. And you have this contrastive loss function between a good answer and a bad answer. And the model learns to pick up these trends. There’s different implementation ways. You have things called reward models. You could have direct alignment algorithms. There’s a lot of really specific things you can do, but all of this is about fine-tuning to human preferences. And the final stage is much newer and will link to what is done in R1 and these reasoning models is I think OpenAI’s name for this, they had this new API in the fall, which they called the reinforcement fine-tuning API. This is the idea that you use the techniques of reinforcement learning, which is a whole framework of AI.
There’s a deep literature here to summarize, it’s often known as trial and error learning or the subfield of AI where you’re trying to make sequential decisions in a certain potentially noisy environment. There’s a lot of ways we could go down that, but fine-tuning language models where they can generate an answer and then you check to see if the answer matches the true solution. For math or code you have an exactly correct answer for math, you can have unit tests for code. And what we’re doing is we are checking the language model’s work and we’re giving it multiple opportunities on the same questions to see if it is right. And if you keep doing this, the models can learn to improve in verifiable domains to a great extent. It works really well. It’s a newer technique in the academic literature. It’s been used at frontier labs in the US that don’t share every detail for multiple years. This is the idea of using reinforcement learning with language models and it has been taking off especially in this DeepSeek moment.
Cutting edge AI topics that I do research on, these models are capable for study aid and they’re regularly updated. Where this changes is with the DeepSeek- R1, what is called these reasoning models is when you see tokens coming from these models to start, it will be a large chain of thought process. We’ll get back to chain of thought in a second, which looks like a lot of tokens where the model is explaining the problem. The model will often break down the problem and be like, okay, they asked me for this. Let’s break down the problem. I’m going to need to do this. And you’ll see all of this generating from the model. It’ll come very fast in most user experiences. These APIs are very fast, so you’ll see a lot of tokens, a lot of words show up really fast, it’ll keep flowing on the screen and this is all the reasoning process.
And then eventually the model will change its tone in R1 and it’ll write the answer where it summarizes its reasoning process and writes a similar answer to the first types of model. But in DeepSeek’s case, which is part of why this was so popular even outside the AI community, is that you can see how the language model is breaking down problems. And then you get this answer, on a technical side they train the model to do this specifically where they have a section which is reasoning, and then it generates a special token, which is probably hidden from the user most of the time, which says, okay, I’m starting the answer. The model is trained to do this two stage process on its own. If you use a similar model in say, OpenAI, OpenAI’s user interface is trying to summarize this process for you nicely by showing the sections that the model is doing and it’ll click through, it’ll say breaking down the problem, making X calculation, cleaning the result, and then the answer will come for something like OpenAI.
Now, with a mixture of experts model, you don’t do that. How does the human actually work? Is like, oh, well my visual cortex is active when I’m thinking about vision tasks and other things. My amygdala is when I’m scared. These different aspects of your brain are focused on different things. A mixture of experts, models attempts to approximate this to some extent. It’s nowhere close to what a brain architecture is, but different portions of the model activate. You’ll have a set number of experts in the model and a set number that are activated each time. And this dramatically reduces both your training and inference costs because now if you think about the parameter count as the total embedding space for all of this knowledge that you’re compressing down during training, one, you’re embedding this data in instead of having to activate every single parameter, every single time you’re training or running inference, now you can just activate on a subset and the model will learn which expert to route to for different tasks.
And so this is a humongous innovation in terms of, hey, I can continue to grow the total embedding space of parameters. And so DeepSeek’s model is 600 something billion parameters, relative to Llama 405B, it’s 405 billion parameters, relative to Llama 70B, it’s 70 billion parameters. This model technically has more embedding space for information to compress all of the world’s knowledge that’s on the internet down. But at the same time, it is only activating around 37 billion of the parameters, so only 37 billion of these parameters actually need to be computed every single time you’re training data or inferencing data out of it. Versus again, the Llama model, 70 billion parameters must be activated or 405 billion parameters must be activated, so you’ve dramatically reduced your compute cost when you’re doing training and inference with this mixture of experts architecture.
This is one of the things that DeepSeek gets credit for is they do this extremely well. They do a mixture of experts extremely well. This architecture for what is called DeepSeek MoE, MoE is the shortened version of mixture of experts, is multiple papers old. This part of their training infrastructure is not new to these models alone. And same goes for what Dylan mentioned with multi-head latent attention. This is all about reducing memory usage during inference and same things during training by using some fancy low rank approximation math. If you get into the details with this latent attention, it’s one of those things I look at and it’s like, okay, they’re doing really complex implementations because there’s other parts of language models such as embeddings that are used to extend the context length, the common one that DeepSeek used is rotary positional embeddings, which is called RoPE.
And if you want to use RoPE with a normal MoE, it’s a sequential thing, you take two of the attention matrices and you rotate them by a complex value rotation, which is a matrix multiplication. With DeepSeek’s MLA, with this new attention architecture, they need to do some clever things because they’re not set up the same and it just makes the implementation complexity much higher. They’re managing all of these things, and these are probably the sort of things that OpenAI these closed labs are doing. We don’t know if they’re doing the exact same techniques, but they actually shared them with the world, which is really nice to be like, this is the cutting edge of efficient language model training.
Meta talked about in Llama 3, how they made their own custom version of NCCL. They didn’t talk about the implementation details. This is some of what they did, probably not as well as… Maybe not as well as DeepSeek because DeepSeek, necessity is the mother of innovation and they had to do this. OpenAI has people that do this sort of stuff, Anthropic, et cetera. But DeepSeek certainly did it publicly and they may have done it even better because they were gimped on a certain aspect of the chips that they have access to. And so they scheduled communications by scheduling specific SMs. SMs you could think of as the core on a GPU. There’s hundreds of cores or there’s a bit over a hundred cores SMs on a GPU. And they were specifically scheduling, hey, which ones are running the model? Which ones are doing allreduce? Which one are doing allgather? And they would flip back and forth between them. And this requires extremely low level programming.
So, you might have 1/4th of your model activate, and that’s what Mistral’s Mixtral model, right? They’re a model that really catapulted them to like, “Oh, my God. They’re really, really good.” OpenAI has also had models that are MoE and so have all the other labs that are major closed. But what DeepSeek did that maybe only the leading labs have only just started recently doing is have such a high sparsity factor, right? It’s not 1/4th of the model, right? Two out of eight experts activating every time you go through the model, it’s eight out of 256.
And one of the innovations in DeepSeek’s architecture is that they change the routing mechanism and mixture of expert models. There’s something called an auxiliary loss, which effectively means during training, you want to make sure that all of these experts are used across the tasks that the model sees.
Why there can be failures in mixture of experts is that when you’re doing this training, one objective is token prediction accuracy. And if you just let turning go with a mixture of expert model on your own, it can be that the model learns to only use a subset of the experts. And in the MoE literature, there’s something called the auxiliary loss which helps balance them.
But if you think about the loss functions of deep learning, this even connects to The Bitter Lesson, is that you want to have the minimum inductive bias in your model to let the model learn maximally. And this auxiliary loss, this balancing across experts could be seen as intention with the prediction accuracy of the tokens.
So we don’t know the exact extent that the DeepSeek MoE change, which is instead of doing an auxiliary loss, they have an extra parameter in their routing, which after the batches, they update this parameter to make sure that the next batches all have a similar use of experts. And this type of change can be big, it can be small, but they add up over time. And this is the sort of thing that just points to them innovating.
And I’m sure all the labs that are training big MoEs are looking at this sort of things, which is getting away from the auxiliary loss. Some of them might already use it, but you keep accumulating gains. And we’ll talk about the philosophy of training and how you organize these organizations. And a lot of it is just compounding small improvements over time in your data, in your architecture, in your post-training and how they integrate with each other.
DeepSeek does the same thing and some of them are shared, or a lot. We have to take them on face value that they share their most important details. I mean, the architecture and the weights are out there, so we’re seeing what they’re doing and it adds up.
And so you might have different experts on different GPU nodes, but now what happens when this set of data that you get, “Hey, all of it looks like this one way and all of it should route to one part of my model.” So when all of it routes to one part of the model, then you can have this overloading of a certain set of the GPU resources or a certain set of the GPUs and then the rest of the training network sits idle because all of the tokens are just routing to that.
So this is the biggest complexity, one of the big complexities with running a very sparse mixture of experts model i.e., this 32 ratio versus this four ratio, is that you end up with so many of the experts just sitting there idle. So how do I load balance between them? How do I schedule the communications between them? This is a lot of the extremely low-level, detailed work that they figured out in the public first, and potentially second or third in the world and maybe even first in some cases.
Is this a short-term leap because they’ve figured out a hack because constraints necessitate the mother of invention or is there still a lot of gains?
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
And therefore, we were talking about relatively small implementation changes to the mixture of experts model. And therefore it’s like, “Okay, we will need a few more years to know if one of these were actually really crucial to The Bitter Lesson,” but The Bitter Lesson is really this long-term arc of how simplicity can often win.
And there’s a lot of sayings in the industry, “The models just want to learn. You have to give them the simple loss landscape where you put compute through the model and they will learn, and getting barriers out of the way.”
That’s something that could be with their specific low-level coding of scheduling SMs is specific to this model architecture and size. Whereas, Nvidia’s Collectives Library is more like, “Hey, it’ll work for anything,” right? “You want to do an allreduce? Great, I don’t care what your model architecture is, it’ll work,” and you’re giving up a lot of performance when you do that in many cases, but it’s worthwhile for them to do the specific optimization for the specific run given the constraints that they have regarding compute.
So you have the stressful period where it’s flat or it might start going up and you’re like, “What do I do?” Whereas, there are also loss spikes that are, it looks good and then there’s one spiky data point. And what you could do is you just skip those. You see that there’s a spike. You’re like, “Okay, I can ignore this data. Don’t update the model and do the next one, and it’ll recover quickly.”
But on trickier implementations, so as you get more complex in your architecture and you scale up to more GPUs, you have more potential for your loss blowing up. So it’s like, there’s a distribution.
And you look at the DeepSeek papers and models, they’ve scaled up, they’ve added complexity, and it’s just continuing to build the capabilities that they have.
A couple of researchers, few GPUs, tens of GPUs, hundreds of GPUs, whatever it is. And then all of a sudden you’re like, “Okay, guys. No more fucking around. No more screwing around. Everyone, take all the resources we have. Let’s pick what we think will work and just go for it. YOLO.”
And this is where that sort of stress comes in is like, “Well, I know it works here, but some things that work here don’t work here. And some things that work here don’t work down here in this terms of scale.” So it’s really truly a YOLO run. And there’s this discussion of certain researchers just have this methodical nature. They can find the whole search space and figure out all the ablations of different research and really see what is best. And there’s certain researchers who just have that innate gut instinct of like, “This is the YOLO run. I’m looking at the data. I think this is it.”
And when you zoom in really close, it can be really obvious that this model is just really bad at this thing and we can fix it and you just add these up. So some of it feels like luck, but on the ground, especially with these new reasoning models we’re talking to is just so many ways that we could poke around. And normally, it’s that some of them give big improvements.
In the past, a lot of these high-frequency trading, algorithmic quant traders used FPGAs, but it shifted to GPUs definitely. And there’s both, but GPUs especially. And High-Flyer, which is the hedge fund that owns DeepSeek, and everyone who works for DeepSeek is part of High-Flyer to some extent. Same parent company, same owner, same CEO, they had all these resources and infrastructure for trading, and then they devoted a humongous portion of them to training models, both language models and otherwise, because these techniques were heavily AI-influenced.
More recently, people have realized, “Hey, trading with …” Even when you go back to Renaissance and all these quantitative firms, natural language processing is the key to trading really fast, understanding a press release and making the right trade. And so DeepSeek has always been really good at this.
And even as far back as 2021, they have press releases and papers saying, “Hey, we’re the first company in China with an A100 cluster this large.” It was 10,000 A100 GPUs, right? This is in 2021. Now, this wasn’t all for training large language models. This was mostly for training models for their quantitative aspects, quantitative trading as well as a lot of that was natural language processing, to be clear. Right?
And so this is the sort of history, right? So verifiable fact is that in 2021, they built the largest cluster, at least they claim it was the largest cluster in China, 10,000 GPUs.
And so over that time period, he’s gotten really in depth into AI. He actually has a bit of a, if you see some of his statements, a bit of an IAK vibe almost, right?
And DeepSeek has done multiple models since then. They’ve acquired more and more GPUs. They share infrastructure with the fund. Right? And so there is no exact number of public GPU resources that they have. But besides this 10,000 GPUs that they bought in 2021, and they were fantastically profitable, and then this paper claims they did only 2,000 H800 GPUs, which are a restricted GPU that was previously allowed in China, but no longer allowed. And there’s a new version, but it’s basically Nvidia’s H100 for China.
And there’s some restrictions on it specifically around the communications sort of speed, the interconnect speed, which is why they had to do this crazy SM scheduling stuff. So going back to that, it’s like this is obviously not true in terms of their total GPU count.
And we know that they’re very profitable and they had 10,000 GPUs in 2021. So, some of the research that we’ve found is that we actually believe they have closer to 50,000 GPUs.
In China, there’ve been different salvos of expert restrictions. So initially, the U.S. government limited on a two-factor scale, which is chip interconnect versus FLOPs. So any chip that had interconnects above a certain level and FLOPs above a certain … Floating point operations above a certain level was restricted.
Later, the government realized that this was a flaw in the restriction and they cut it down to just floating point operations. And so-
And so that was back in October 2022. But later in 2023, into 2023 implemented in 2024, the U.S. government banned the H800. Right? And so by the way, this H800 cluster, these 2,000 GPUs was not even purchased in 2024. It was purchased in late 2023. And they’re just getting the model out now because it takes a lot of research, et cetera.
H800 was banned and now there’s a new chip called the H20. The H20 is cut back on only FLOPs, but the interconnect bandwidth is the same. And in fact, in some ways it’s better than the H100 because it has better memory bandwidth and memory capacity. So Nvidia is working within the constraints of what the government sets and then builds the best possible GPU for China.
And so because The United States is a democracy and as he says, China is authoritarian or has authoritarian elements, you want a unipolar world where the super powerful military, because of the AI is one that’s a democracy. It’s a much more complicated world geopolitically when you have two superpowers with super powerful AI and one is authoritarian.
So, that’s the case he makes. And so the United States wants to use export controls to slow down, to make sure that China can’t do these gigantic training runs that will be presumably required to build the AGI.
And if you think about the AI ecosystem right now, as all of these AI companies, revenue numbers are up and to the right. Their AI usage is just continuing to grow, more GPUs are going to inference. A large part of export controls, if they work is just that the amount of AI that can be run in China is going to be much lower.
So on the training side, DeepSeek V3 is a great example, which you have a very focused team that can still get to the frontier of AI on … This 2,000 GPUs is not that hard to get all considering in the world. They’re still going to have those GPUs. They’re still going to be able to train models. But if there’s going to be a huge market for AI, if you have strong export controls and you want to have 100,000 GPUs just serving the equivalent of ChatGPT clusters with good export controls, it also just makes it so that AI can be used much less.
And I think that is a much easier goal to achieve than trying to debate on what AGI is. And if you have these extremely intelligent autonomous AIs and data centers, those are the things that could be running in these GPU clusters in the United States, but not in China.
And so the U.S. government has effectively said … And forever, training will always be a portion of the total compute. We mentioned Meta’s 400,000 GPUs. Only 16,000 made Llama. Right? So the percentage that Meta’s dedicating to inference, now this might be for recommendation systems that are trying to hack our mind into spending more time and watching more ads, or if it’s for a super powerful AI that’s doing productive things, it doesn’t matter about the exact use that our economic system decides. It’s that, that can be delivered in whatever way we want.
Whereas with China, you know, your expert restrictions, great. You’re never going to be able to cut everything off. And I think that’s quite a well-understood by the U.S. government is that you can’t cut everything off.
And therefore, this compounding effect of the difference in compute is really important. There’s some sci-fi out there where AI is measured in how much power is delivered to compute, right, or how much is being … That’s sort of a way of thinking about what’s the economic output, is just how much power are you directing towards that AI?
But Dylan has good research on this. You can get to the specific numbers on the ratio of when you train a model, you can look at things. It’s about the amount of compute used at training and amount of compute used at inference.
These reasoning models are making inference way more important to doing complex tasks. In the fall in December, OpenAI announced this o3 model. There’s another thing in AI, when things move fast, we get both announcements and releases. Announcements are essentially blog posts where you pat yourself on the back and you say you did things and releases are when the model’s out there, the paper’s out there, et cetera.
So OpenAI has announced o3. I mean, we can check if o3-mini is out as of recording potentially, but that doesn’t really change the point, which is that the breakthrough result was something called ARC-AGI task, which is the abstract reasoning corpus, a task for artificial general intelligence. François Chollet is the guy who’s been … It’s a multi-year-old paper. It’s a brilliant benchmark. And the number for open AI o3 to solve this was that it used some sort of number of samples in the API. The API has thinking effort and number of samples. They used 1,000 samples to solve this task and it comes out to be five to $20 per question, which you’re putting in effectively a math puzzle. And then it takes orders of dollars to answer one question, and this is a lot of compute.
If those are going to take off in the U.S., OpenAI needs a ton of GPUs on inference to capture this. They have this OpenAI ChatGPT Pro subscription, which is $200 a month-
And if the main result for o3 is also a spectacular coding performance, and if that feeds back into AI companies being able to experiment better.
I think my personal definition of AGI is much simpler. I think language models are a form of AGI and all of this super powerful stuff is a next step that’s great if we get these tools. But a language model has so much value in so many domains that it’s a general intelligence to me.
But this next step of agentic things where they’re independent and they can do tasks that aren’t in the training data is what the few-year outlook that these AI companies are driving for.
So it’s something that it’s too soon to tell in terms of… I think that’s political instability via the web is very… It’s monitored by a lot of researchers to see what’s happening. I think that… You’re asking about the AGI thing. If you’re making me give a year, I’m going to be like, “Okay, I have AI CEOs saying this. They’ve been saying two years for a while. I think that there are people like Dario at Anthropic, the CEO, has thought about this so deeply. I need to take their word seriously, but also understand that they have different incentives.” So I would be like, “Add a few years to that.” Which is how you get something similar to 2030 or a little after 2030.
But at that moment, who gets to control and point the AGI at a task? And so this was in Dario’s post that he’s like, “Hey, China can effectively and more quickly than us, point their AGI at military tasks.” And they have been, in many ways, faster at adopting certain new technologies into their military, especially with regards to drones. The US maybe has a long-standing large air sort of fighter jet type of thing, bombers. But when it comes to asymmetric arms such as drones, they’ve completely leapfrogged the US and the West.
And the fear that Dario is sort of pointing out there, I think, is that, yeah, great, we’ll have AGI in the commercial sector. The US military won’t be able to implement it superfast. Chinese military could and they could direct all their resources to implementing it in the military, and therefore solving military logistics or solving some other aspect of disinformation for targeted certain set of people so they can flip a country’s politics or something like that that is actually catastrophic versus the US just wants to… Because it’ll be more capitalistically allocated just towards whatever is the highest return on income, which might be building factories better or whatever.
So that’s the thing I’m really worried about. But there could be cyber war, cyber war type of technologies that from social engineering to actually just swarms of robots that find attack vectors in our code bases and shut down power grids, that kind of stuff. And it could be one of those things like on any given weekend or something, power goes out, nobody knows why, and the world changes forever. Just power going out for two days in all of the United States, that will lead to murder, to chaos. But going back to export controls, do you see that as a useful way to control the balance of power geopolitically in the context of AI?
But if China decided to, they could do it faster than us, but this is where the restrictions come in. It is not clear that China as a whole has decided from the highest levels that this is a priority. The US sort of has. You see Trump talking about DeepSeek and Stargate within the same week. And the Biden admin as well had a lot of discussions about AI and such. It’s clear that they think about it. Only just last week did DeepSeek meet the second in command of China. They have not even met the top, they haven’t met Xi, Xi hasn’t set down, and they only just released a subsidy of a trillion RMB, roughly $160 billion, which is closer to the spending of Microsoft and Meta and Google combined for this year. So they’re realizing it just now. But that’s where these export restrictions come in and say, “Hey, you can’t ship the most powerful US chips to China. You can ship a cut-down version. You can’t ship the most powerful chips to all these countries who we know are just going to rent it to China. You have to limit the numbers.”
They thought EVs and renewables were the most important technology. They dominate that now. Now, they started thinking about semiconductors in the late 2010s and early 2020s and now they’ve been dumping money and they’re catching up rapidly and they’re going to do the same with AI because they’re very talented. So the question is, when does this hit a breaking point? And if China sees this as, “Hey, they can continue…” If not having access and starting a true hot war, taking over Taiwan or trying to subvert its democracy in some way or blockading it hurts the rest of the world far more than it hurts them, this is something they could potentially do. And so is this pushing them towards that? Potentially. I’m not quite a geopolitical person, but it’s obvious that the world regime of peace and trade is super awesome for economics, but at some point, it could break.
And so you look at a leading-edge fab that is going to be profitable today, that’s building three nanometer chips or two nanometer chips in the future, that’s going to cost north of 30, $40 billion. And that’s just for a token amount. That’s like the base building blocking. You probably need to build multiple. And so when you look at the industry over the last, if I go back 20, 30 years ago, there were 20, 30 companies that could build the most advanced chips, and then they would design them themselves and sell them. So companies like AMD would build their own chips. Intel, of course, still builds their own chips. They’re very famous for it. IBM would build their own chips. And you could just keep going down the list. All these companies built their own chips.
Slowly, they kept falling like flies, and that’s because of what TSMC did. They created the Foundry business model, which is, I’m not going to design any chips. I’m just going to contract manufacturer chips for other people. And one of their early customers is NVIDIA. NVIDIA is the only semiconductor company doing more than $1 billion of revenue that was started in the era of foundry. Every other company started before then, and at some point had fabs, which is actually incredible. Like AMD and Intel and Broadcom-
Google is not just running on Intel CPUs for web serving. They have a YouTube chip, they have TPUs, they have Pixel chips, they have a wide diversity of chips that generate all the economic value of Google. It’s running all the services and stuff. And this is just Google. And you could go across any company in the industry, and it’s like this. Cars contain 5,000 chips, 200 different varieties of them. All these random things. A Tesla door handle has two chips. It’s ridiculous. And it’s a cool door handle. You don’t think about it, but it has two really chip, penny chips in there. Anyways, so as you have more diversity of chips, as you have more specialization required and the cost of fabs continues to grow, you need someone who is laser focused on building the best process technology and making it as flexible as possible.
And so you get more diversity of chips, you have more companies than ever designing chips, but you have fewer companies than ever manufacturing them. And this is where TSMC comes in, is they’ve just been the best. They are so good at it. They’re customer focused, they make it easy for you to fabricate your chips. They take all of that complexity and kind of try and abstract a lot of it away from you. They make good money. They don’t make insane money, but they make good money and they’re able to aggregate all this demand and continue to build the next fab, the next fab, the next fab.
Second is the work ethic. We like to work. You work a lot, we work a lot, but at the end of the day, what does the time and amount of work that you’re doing and what does a fab require? Fabs are not work from home jobs. They are you go into the fab and grueling work. There’s hey, if there is any amount of vibration, an earthquake happens, vibrates the machines, they’re either broken, you’ve scrapped some of your production. And then in many cases, they’re not calibrated properly. So when there’s an earthquake, recently, there’s been a earthquake, TSMC doesn’t call their employees, they just go to the fab and they just show up. The parking lot gets slammed, and people just go into the fab and fix it. It’s like ants. It’s like a hive of ants doesn’t get told by the queen what to do. The ants just know.
You’ve invested in the wrong things. They said no to the iPhone. They had all these different things regarding mismanagement of the fabs and mismanagement of designs, this lockup. And at the same time, all these brilliant people, these 50,000 PhDs or masters that have been working on specific chemical or physical processes or nanomanufacturing processes for decades, in Oregon, they’re still there, they’re still producing amazing work. It’s just getting it to the last mile of production at high yield where you can manufacture dozens and hundreds of different kinds of chips, and good customer experience has broken.
It’s that customer experience. Part of it is people will say, Intel was too pompous in the 2000s, 2010s. They just thought they were better than everyone. The tool guys were like, “Oh, I don’t think that this is mature enough.” And they’re like, “Ah, you just don’t know. We know.” This sort of stuff would happen. And so can the US bring leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing to the US? [inaudible 01:42:44] yes. And we are. It’s happening.
These three places are doing the leading-edge R&D for the rest of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors. Now, manufacturing can be distributed more globally. And this is sort of where this dichotomy exists of who’s actually modifying the process, who’s actually developing the next generation one, who’s improving them is Hsinchu, is Hillsboro, is Pyongyang. It is not the rest of these fabs like Arizona. Arizona is a paperweight. If Hsinchu disappeared off the face of the planet, within a year, couple years, Arizona would stop producing too. It’s actually pretty critical. One of the things I like to say is if I had a few missiles, I know exactly where I could cause the most economic damage. It’s not targeting the White House.
Now they still have to buy some chips from foreign, for example, around like self-driving ADAS capabilities because those are really high-end, but at least … A internal combustion engine has 40 chips in an EV, just for controlling flow rates and all these things, and EVs are even more complicated. So all these different power ICs and battery management controllers and all these things, they’re insourcing.
And this is something that China has been doing since 2015. Now, as far as the trailing edge, they’re getting so much capacity there. As far as the leading edge, i.e. this five nanometer and so on and so forth, where GPUs, they are still behind. The US restrictions are trying to stop them in the latter, but all that’s happened is yes, they’ve slowed down their five nanometer, three nanometer, et cetera, but they’ve accelerated their, hey, 45 nanometer, 90 nanometer power IC or analog IC or random chip in my keyboard, that kind of stuff.
So there is an angle of, the US’ actions, from the angle of the expert controls, have been so inflammatory at slowing down China’s progress on the leading edge that they’ve turned around and have accelerated their progress elsewhere because they know that this is so important. If the US is going to lock them out here, “what if they lock us out here as well in the trailing edge?”
And so going back, can the US build it here? Yes, but it’s going to take a ton of money. I truly think to revolutionize and completely in-source semiconductors would take a decade and a trillion dollars.
And it’s an element of culture, yeah, sure. Taiwan works that hard. But also, like the US has done it in the past, they could do it now. We can just import, I say import, the best people in the world if we want to.
But they also have differences in terms of, hey, there’s just tax benefits in the law and have been in the law for 20 years. And then some countries have massive subsidies. China has something like $200 billion of semiconductor subsidies a year. We’re talking about $50 billion in the US over like six. So the girth or difference in the subsidy amounts is also huge.
And so I think Trump has been talking about tariffing Taiwan recently. That’s one of these things that’s like, “Oh, okay, well, maybe he doesn’t want to subsidize the US semiconductor industry.” Obviously tariffing Taiwan is going to cost a lot of things to get much more expensive, but does it change the equation for TSMC building more fabs in the US? That’s what he’s positing.
So in this game theory, complicated game, what are the different trajectories? What should US be doing? What do you see as the different possible trajectories of US-China relations as both leaders start to feel the AGI more and more and see the importance of chips and the importance of AI.
There’s all these things that are happening that point to further and further divergence. I have zero idea, and I would love if we could all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but I have zero idea how that could possibly happen.
Now what happens when it’s not one global hegemon but it’s two, obviously … And China will be competitive or even overtake the US, it’s possible. And so this change in global hegemony, I don’t think it ever happens super peacefully. When empires fall, which is a possible trajectory for America, they don’t fall gracefully. They don’t just slide out of irrelevance. Usually there’s a lot of shaking. And so what the US is trying to do is maintain its top position, and what China is trying to do is become the top position. And obviously there’s butting of heads here, in the most simple terms.
And so this H20 has been neutered in one way, but it’s actually upgraded in other ways. And you could think of chips along three axes for AI, ignoring software stack and exact architecture, just raw specifications. There’s floating point operations, FLOPS. There is memory bandwidth, i.e. in-memory capacity, IO memory. And then there is interconnect, chip-to-chip interconnections. All three of these are incredibly important for making AI systems. Because AI systems involve a lot of compute, they involve a lot of moving memory around, whether it be to memory or too other chips.
And so these three vectors, the US initially had two of these vectors controlled and one of them not controlled, which was FLOPS and interconnect bandwidth were initially controlled. And then they said, “No, no, no, no. We’re going to remove the interconnect bandwidth and just make it a very simple, only FLOPS.” But now Nvidia can now make a chip that has … okay, it’s cut down on FLOPS, so one-third that of the H100 on spec sheet paper performance for FLOPs. In real world it’s closer to half or maybe even 60% of it. But then on the other two vectors, it’s just as good for interconnect bandwidth. And then for memory bandwidth and memory capacity, the H20 has more memory bandwidth and more memory capacity than the H100.
Now recently we, at our research, we cut Nvidia’s production for H20 for this year down drastically. They were going to make another two million of those this year, but they just canceled all the orders a couple of weeks ago. In our view that’s because we think that they think they’re going to get restricted, because why would they cancel all these orders for H20? Because they shipped a million of them last year, they had orders in for a couple million this year, and just gone right. For H20, B20, a successor to H20, and now they’re all gone.
Now why would they do this? I think it’s very clear, the H20 is actually better for certain tasks. And that certain task is reasoning. Reasoning is incredibly different than … When you look at the different regimes of models. Pre-training is all about FLOPS, it’s all about FLOPS. There’s things you do, like Mixture of Experts that we talked about, to trade off interconnect or to trade off other aspects and lower the FLOPS and rely more on interconnect and memory.
But at the end of the day, FLOPS is everything. We talk about models in terms of how many FLOPS they are. So we talk about, oh, GPT-4 is 2e25. Two to the 25th, 25 zeros FLOP, floating point operations for training. And we’re talking about the restrictions for the 2e24, or 25, whatever. The US has an executive order that Trump recently unsigned, which was, hey, 1e26, once you hit that number of floating point operations, you must notify the government and you must share your results with us. There’s a level of model where the US government must be told, and that’s 1e26.
And so as we move forward, this is an incredibly important … FLOP is the vector that the government has cared about historically, but the other two vectors are arguably just as important. And especially when we come to this new paradigm, which the world is only just learning about over the last six months: reasoning.
And what effectively happens is that when you’re doing these matrix multiplications, you’re having matrices that are of the size of the context length, so the number of tokens that you put into the model. And the KV cache is effectively some form of compressed representation of all the previous tokens in the model. So when you’re doing this, we talk about autoregressive models, you predict one token at a time. You start with whatever your prompt was, you ask a question, like who was the president in 1825. The model then is going to generate its first token.
For each of these tokens you’re doing the same attention operator where you’re multiplying these query, key-value matrices. But the math is very nice so that when you’re doing this repeatedly, this KV cache, this key-value operation, you can keep appending the new values to it, so you keep track of what your previous values you were inferring over in this autoregressive chain, you keep it in-memory the whole time. And this is a really crucial thing to manage when serving inference at scale. There are far bigger experts in this and there are so many levels of detail that you can go into.
Essentially one of the key, quote unquote, “drawbacks” of the attention operator and the transformer is that there is a form of quadratic memory cost in proportion to the context length. So as you put in longer questions, the memory used in order to make that computation is going up in the form of a quadratic. You’ll hear about a lot of other language model architectures that are sub quadratic or linear attention forms, which is like State Space Models. We don’t need to go down all these now. And then there’s innovations on attention to make this memory usage and the ability to attend over long contexts much more accurate and high performance.
So there’s two things. It’s, one, to be able to serve this on the memory level. Google has magic with their TPU stack where they can serve really long contexts. And then there’s also many decisions along the way to actually make long context performance work that supplies the data. There’s subtle changes to these computations in attention and it changes the architecture. But serving long context is extremely memory constrained, especially when you’re making a lot of predictions. I actually don’t know why input and output tokens are more expensive, but I think essentially output tokens, you have to do more computation because you have to sample from the model.
And so when you do that, that is a parallel operation. All of the tokens can be processed at one time and therefore you can dramatically reduce how much you’re spending. The FLOP requirements for generating a token and an input token are identical. If I input one token or if I generate one token, it’s completely identical. I have to go through the model. But the difference is that I can do that input, i.e. the prefill, i.e. the prompt, simultaneously in a batch nature and therefore it is all FLOP.
And so therefore, this is a non-parallel operation. And this is one where you have to, in the case of prefill or prompt, you pull the whole model in and you calculate 20,000 tokens at once, 20,000-
But it’s very different than we’re leading to these reasoning models, which we showed this example earlier and read some of this mumbling stuff. And what happens is that the output context length is so much higher. And I mean, I learned a lot about this from Dylan’s work, which is essentially as the output work length gets higher, you’re writing this quadratic in terms of memory used. And then the GPUs that we have, effectively you’re going to run out of memory and they’re all trying to serve multiple requests at once. So they’re doing this batch processing where not all of the prompts are exactly the same, really complex handling.
And then as context links gets longer, there’s this, I think you call it critical batch size, where your ability to serve more users, so how much you can parallelize your inference plummets because of this long context. So your memory usage is going way up with these reasoning models and you still have a lot of users, so effectively the cost to serve multiplies by a ton.
Now with reasoning and agents, this is a very different idea. Now instead I might only have like, hey, do this task, or I might have all these documents, but at the end of the day, the model is not just producing a little bit, it’s producing tons of information, this chain of thought-
And so what this chart is showing, and it’s a logarithmic chart, is as you grow from 1K to 4K or 4K to 16K, the memory requirements grow so fast for your KV cache that you end up not being able to run a certain number of … Your sequence length is capped or the number of users you could serve-
And so with reasoning models, this is where a lot of the complexity comes about and why memory is so important. Because if you have limited amounts of memory, then you can’t serve so many users. If you have limited amounts of memory, your serving speeds get lower. And so your costs get a lot, lot worse because all of a sudden if I was used to, hey, on this $16 an hour server I’m serving Llama 405B, or if I’m serving DeepSeek-V3 and it’s all chat style applications, i.e. we’re just chit-chatting, the sequence length are a thousand, a few thousand. When you use a language model, it’s a few thousand context length most of times. Sometimes you’re dropping a big document, but then you process it, you get your answer, you throw it away, you move on to the next thing.
Whereas with reasoning, I’m now generating tens of thousands of tokens in sequence. And so this memory, this KV cache, has to stay resonant and you have to keep loading it, you have to keep it in-memory constantly. And now this butts out other users. If there’s now a reasoning task and the model’s capable of reasoning, then all of a sudden that memory pressure means that I can’t serve as many users simultaneously.
So DeepSeek hit this. They also launched an API product recently where you can ping their API and get these super long responses for R1 out. At the same time as these are out, we’ll get to what’s happened to them. Because the model weights for DeepSeek-R1 are openly available and the license is very friendly, the MIT license commercially available, all of these midsize companies and big companies are trying to be first to serve R1 to their users.
We are trying to evaluate R1 because we have really similar research going on. We released the model and we’re trying to compare to it. And out of all the companies that are, quote unquote, “serving” R1 and they’re doing it at prices that are way higher than the DeepSeek API, most of them barely work and the throughput is really low.
Now, others have already innovated. There’s a lot of work like MQA, GQA, local, global, all these different innovations that try to bend the curve. It’s still quadratic, but the constant is now smaller.
So it is cheaper. A part of that, is OpenAI making a ton of money? Is DeepSeek making on their API? Unknown, I don’t actually think so. And part of that is this chart. Look at all the other providers. Together AI, Fireworks.ai are very high-end companies. Ex-Meta, Together AI is [inaudible 02:14:53] and the inventor of FlashAttention, which is a huge efficiency technique. There a very efficient, good companies. And I do know those companies make money, not tons of money on inference, but they make money. And so they’re serving at a five to 7X difference in cost.
And so now when you equate, okay, OpenAI is making tons of money, that’s like a 5x difference, and the companies that are trying to make money for this model is like a 5x difference, there is still a gap. There’s still a gap and that is just DeepSeek being really freaking good. The model architecture, MLA, the way they did the MoE, all these things, there is legitimate just efficiency differences.
I think they’re just shipping as fast as they can, and who cares about Christmas, who cares about … Get it out before Chinese New Year, obviously, which just happened. I don’t think they actually were timing the market or trying to make the biggest splash possible, I think they’re just shipping.
But there’s reviews internally. Anthropic mentions things to international governments. There’s been news of how Anthropic has done pre-release testing with the UK AI Safety Institute. All of these things add inertia to the process of getting things out. And we’re on this trend line where the progress is very high. So if you reduce the time from when your model is done training, you run the vals, it’s good. You want to get it out as soon as possible to maximize the perceived quality of your outputs. DeepSeek does this so well.
And chain-of-thought models are that way. This is a true, quote unquote, “risk” between a chat application where, hey, I asked the model to say bad words or whatever or how to make anthrax, and it tells me. That’s unsafe, sure, but that’s something I can get out relatively easily. What if I tell the AI to do a task and then it does the task all of a sudden randomly in a way that I don’t want it, and now that has much more … Task versus response is very different. So the bar for safety is much higher-
We talk about the cost of training. DeepSeek has this shocking $5 million number. Think about how many entities in the world can afford a hundred times that to have the best open-source model that people use in the world. And it’s a scary reality, which is that these open models are probably going to keep coming for the time being, whether or not we want to stop them, and stopping them might make it even worse and harder to prepare. But it just means that the preparation and understanding what AI can do is just so much more important. That’s why I’m here at the end of the day. But it’s letting that sink into people, especially not in AI, is that this is coming. There are some structural things in a global interconnected world that you have to accept.
Now, when you release this publicly in an instruct model that’s open- weights, this can then proliferate, but as these systems get more and more capable, what you can embed deep down in the model is not as clear. And so that is one of the big fears is if an American model or a Chinese model is the top model, you are going to embed things that are unclear. And it can be unintentional too. British English is dead because American LLMs won and the internet is American, and therefore, color is spelled the way Americans spell, and this is-
I don’t think they meant to do this, but this was in the model weight, so it didn’t necessarily be… There’s things called system prompts, which are when you’re querying a model. It’s a piece of text that is shown to the model but not to the user. So, a fun example is your system prompt could be, “Talk like a pirate,” so no matter what the user says to the model, it’ll respond like a pirate. In practice, what they are is, “You’re a helpful assistant. You should break down problems. If you don’t know about something, don’t tell them your date cutoff is this. Today’s date is this.” It’s a lot of really useful context for how can you answer a question well.
Let’s go back to post-training specifically RLHF around Llama 2. It was too much safety prioritization was baked into the model weights. This makes you refuse things in a really annoying way for users. It’s not great. It caused a lot of awareness to be attached to RLHF that it makes the models dumb-
So this takes us through the arc of… We’ve talked about pre-training, hard to get rid of things. We’ve talked about post-training and how post-training… You can mess it up. It’s a complex multifaceted optimization with 10 to 100 person teams converging at one artifact. It’s really easy to not do it perfectly.
And then there’s the third case, which is what we talked about Gemini. The thing that was about Gemini is this was a served product where Google has their internal model weights. They’ve done all these processes that we talked about, and in the served product, what came out after this was that they had a prompt that they were rewriting user queries to boost diversity or something. And this just made it… The outputs were just blatantly wrong. It was some sort of organizational failure that had this prompt in that position, and I think Google executives probably have owned this. I don’t pay that attention, that detail, but it was just a mess-up in execution that led to this ridiculous thing, but at the system level, the model weights might have been fine.
Now, it is the case that there are many model options that are way better than humans at writing detailed and eloquent answers for things like model and code. So they talked about this with the Llama 3 release, where they switched to using Llama 3, 4, or 5B to write their answers for math and code. But they, in their paper, talk about how they use extensive human preference data, which is something that they haven’t gotten AIs to replace. There are other techniques in industry, like constitutional AI, where you use human data for preferences and AI for preferences, and I expect the AI part to scale faster than the human part. But among the research that we have access to is that humans are in this kind of preference loop.
The DeepSeek-R1-Full model has some of this human preference tuning, this RLHF, after the reasoning stage. But the very remarkable thing is that you can get these reasoning behaviors, and it’s very unlikely that there’s humans writing out reasoning chains. It’s very unlikely that they somehow hacked OpenAI and they got access to OpenAI o-1’s reasoning chains. It’s something about the pre-trained language models and this RL training where you reward the model for getting the question right, and therefore it’s trying multiple solutions and it emerges this chain of thought.
My favorite simple example is AlphaGo. One, is learning by imitating expert players. Two, is reinforcement learning to win the game. Almost every single shocking result of deep learning and the source of all magic is always two.
Two is significantly more powerful. Two is what surprises you. Two is when the paddle learns to hit the ball behind the blocks in Breakout. Two is when AlphaGo beats even Lee Sedol. And two is the “aha moment” when the DeepSeek or o1, et cetera, discovers that it works well to reevaluate your assumptions, backtrack, try something else, et cetera.
It’s the solving strategies you see this model use in its chain of thought. It’s how it goes back and forth thinking to itself. These thoughts are emergent. Three exclamation points. And this is actually seriously incredible, impressive, and new, and is publicly available and documented.
The model could never learn this with the imitation because the cognition of the model and the cognition of the human labeler is different. The human would never know to correctly annotate these kinds of solving strategies and what they should even look like. They have to be discovered during reinforcement learning as empirically and statistically useful towards the final outcome.”
Anyway, the AlphaZero metaphor analogy here. Can you speak to that? The magic of the chain of thought that he’s referring to.
And then there’s been a lot of discussion in language models. This is not new. This goes back to the whole Q-Star rumors, which if you piece together the pieces, is probably the start of OpenAI figuring out its o1 stuff when last year in November, the Q-Star rumors came out, there’s a lot of intellectual drive to know when is something like this going to happen with language models? Because we know these models are so powerful, and we know it has been so successful in the past. And it is a reasonable analogy that this new type of reinforcement learning training for reasoning models is when the doors open to this. We don’t yet have the equivalent of turn 37, which is the famous turn where the DeepMind’s AI playing Go’s, dumped Lee Sedol completely. We don’t have something that’s that level of focal point, but that doesn’t mean that the approach to technology is different, and the impact of the general training it’s still incredibly new.
And now we have something that is similar to that with these verifiable proofs, whether it’s a unit testing code or a mathematical verifiable task, generate many traces of reasoning and keep branching them out, keep branching them out, and then check at the end, hey, which one actually has the right answer? Most of them are wrong. Great. These are the few that are right. Maybe we use some sort of reward model outside of this to select even the best one to preference, as well. But now you’ve started to get better and better at these benchmarks. And so you’ve seen over the last six months a skyrocketing in a lot of different benchmarks.
And so this is where I think the aha moment of computer use or robotics will come in because now you have a sandbox or a playground that is infinitely verifiable. Messing around on the internet. There are so many actions that you can do that are verifiable. It’ll start off with log into a website, create an account, click a button here, blah, blah, blah. But it’ll then get to the point where it’s, “Hey, go do a task on Tasker,” or whatever, all these various task websites. “Hey, go get hundreds of likes,” and it’s going to fail. It’s going to spawn hundreds of accounts. It’s going to fail on most of them, but this one got to a thousand. Great. Now, you’ve reached the verifiable thing, and you just keep iterating this loop over and over. And same with robotics. That’s where you have an infinite playground of tasks like, “Hey, did I put the ball in the bucket,” all the way to like, “Oh, did I build a car?”
There’s a whole trajectory to speed run or what models can do. But at some point, I truly think that we’ll spawn models, and initially, all the training will be in sandboxes, but then, at some point, the language model pre-training is going to be dwarfed by what is this reinforcement learning… You’ll pre-train a multimodal model that can see, that can read, that can write, blah, blah, blah, whatever, vision, audio, et cetera. But then you’ll have it play in a sandbox infinitely, and figure out math, figure out code, figure out navigating the web, figure out operating a robot arm. And then it’ll learn so much. And the aha moment will be when this is available to then create something that’s not good, right? Oh, cool. Part of it was figuring out how to use the web. Now, all of a sudden, it’s figured out really well how to just get hundreds of thousands of followers that are real and real engagement on Twitter because, all of a sudden, this is one of the things that are verifiable.
The space of language and the space of tokens, whether you’re generating language or tasks or robot is so big that you might say that… The tokenizer for a language model can be like 200,000 things, so at each step, it can sample from that big of a space. So if it can generate a bit of a signal that it can climb onto, that’s what the whole field of RL is around, is learning from sparse rewards. And the same thing has played out in math, where it’s very weak models that sometimes generate answers where you see research already that you can boost their math scores, you can do this RL training for math, it might not be as effective, but if you take a 1 billion parameter model, so something 600 times smaller than DeepSeek, you can boost its grade school…
So, some of this transfer, we looked at this philosophical example early on. One of the big open questions is, how much does this transfer? If we bring in domains after the reasoning training, are all the models going to become eloquent writers by reasoning? Is this philosophy stuff going to be open? We don’t know in the research of how much this will transfer. There’s other things about how we can make soft verifiers and things like this, but there is more training after reasoning, which makes it easier to use these reasoning models. And that’s what we’re using right now. So if we’re going to talk about o3-mini and o1, these have gone through these extra techniques that are designed for human preferences after being trained to elicit reasoning.
My quick read is that Gemini Flash is not trained the same way as o1, but taking an existing training stack, adding reasoning to it, so taking a more normal training stack and adding reasoning to it, and I’m sure they’re going to have more. I mean they’ve done quick releases on Gemini Flash, reasoning, and this is the second version from the holidays. It’s evolving fast and it takes longer to make this training stack where you’re doing this large scale RL-
Hello, everyone, this is Lex with a quick intermission recorded after the podcast since we’ve reviewed responses from DeepSeek R1 and Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking during this conversation, I thought at this moment it would be nice to insert myself quickly doing the same for OpenAI o1-pro and o3-mini with the same prompt. The prompt being, give one truly novel insight about humans. And I thought I would, in general, give my vibe check and vibe based anecdotal report on my own experiences with the new o3-mini model now that I got a chance to spend many hours with it in different kinds of context and applications.
So, I would probably categorize this question as let’s say open- ended philosophical question. And in particular, the emphasis on novelty I think is a nice way to test one of the capabilities of the model, which is come up with something that makes you pause and almost surprise you with brilliance.
So that said, my general review after running each of the models on this question a bunch of times is that o1-pro consistently gave brilliant answers, ones that gave me pause and made me think, both cutting in its insight and just really nicely phrased with wit, with clarity, with nuance over and over, consistently generating the best answers. After that is R1, which was less consistent, but again, delivered brilliance. Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking was third and last was o3-mini actually. It often gave quite a generic answer, at least to my particular sensibilities. That said, in a bunch of other applications that I tested for brainstorming purposes, it actually worked extremely well and often outperformed R1. But on this open-ended philosophical question, it did consistently worse.
Now another important element for each of these models is how the reasoning is presented. DeepSeek R1 shows the full chain of thought tokens, which I personally just love. For these open-ended philosophical questions, it’s really, really interesting to see the model think through it, but really also just stepping back, me as a person who appreciates intelligence and reasoning and reflection, reading these kind of chain of thought raw tokens of R1, there’s something genuinely beautiful about observing the path of deliberation in an intelligent system. I think we don’t always have that explicitly laid out for us humans. So, to see it in another intelligence system, the nonlinearity of it akin to the Ulysses, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. It’s just beautiful to watch.
Anyways, we discussed in the episode DeepSeek R1 talked about humans being able to convert selfish desires into cooperative systems by collectively pretending abstract rules like money laws and rights are real. And these shared hallucinations act as games where competition is secretly redirected to benefit the group turning conflict into society’s fuel. Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking said, “Humans are not just social animals but self-domesticated apes. And this self domestication is the key to understanding our unique cognitive and social abilities.”
Now, it’s important to say that the chain of thought there was really interesting. It was looking through the entire evolution of life on earth considering apex predators and considering how from that, we ended up to where we are. I think that domestication by choice is a really interesting angle. Again, it’s one of those things when somebody presents a different angle on a seemingly obvious thing, it just makes me smile. And the same with DeepSeek R1, that these hallucinations of money laws and rights and us collectively pretending like it’s real and we play games with them that look like competition when secretly we’re just cooperating with each other and that is the fuel of progress. Beautifully put.
Now, OpenAI o1-pro consistently, over and over delivered bangers. I can go through many of them, but the first one was, “Humans are the only species that turns raw materials into symbolic resources. Then uses those symbols to reorganize the very materials that came from creating a closed feedback loop between meaning and matter.” Here, I just ran it again. Banger after banger, I’m telling you. “Humans are unique among known species in that they simultaneously rewrite two layers of reality; the external world and their own private mental landscapes. And then merge these two rewritten layers into a continuous personal narrative that feels objectively true.” Feels true. This is poetry.
Okay. And then o3-mini high, for me, was smart, fast actually, and kind of generic. Never quite got there for me. So here’s the first one I got from o3-mini, “Humans are not fixed beings, but rather ongoing narratives, dynamic stories that we continuously write, edit, and reinterpret. This narrative plasticity is more than just memory or self-reflection. It’s an intrinsic cognitive process that acts like an internal error correction system. It allows us to adapt our identities and values over time in response to new experiences, challenges, and social contexts.” Now, it almost sneaks up to something approximating cutting insight with narrative plasticity in quotes. But then it goes back to the generic. I don’t know.
All of these models are incredible for different reasons. There’s a lot of concerns as we discussed in this episode, but there’s a lot of reasons to be excited as well. And I’ve probably spoken for too long. I am severely sleep-deprived, borderline delirious. So hopefully some of this made sense. And now, dear friends, back to the episode.
Everything is going to take this cost curve down and down and down and down. And then can I just spawn a thousand different LLMs to create a task and then pick from one of them? Or whatever search technique, I want, a Tree, Monte Carlo Tree Search, maybe it gets that complicated, maybe it doesn’t because it’s too complicated to actually scale. Who knows? Better lesson, right?
The question is, I think, when not if, because the rate of progress is so fast. Nine months ago, Dario said nine months ago the cost to train an inference was this, and now we’re much better than this and DeepSeek is much better than this. And that cost curve for GPT-4, which was also roughly $60 per million tokens when it launched, has already fallen to $2 or so. And we’re going to get it down to cents probably for GPT-4 quality. And then that’s the base for the reasoning models like o1 that we have today and o1-pro is spawning multiple and o3 and so on and so forth, these search techniques, too expensive today, but they will get cheaper and that’s what’s going to unlock the intelligence.
The actual thing that happened is much more complex where there’s social factors, where there’s the rising in the app store, the social contagion that is happening. And then I think some of it is just like, I don’t trade, I don’t know anything about financial markets, but it builds up over the weekend, the social pressure, where it’s like if it was during the week and there was multiple days of trading when this was really becoming, but it comes on the weekend and then everybody wants to sell, and then that is a social contagion.
So, there’s a bit of misunderstanding of what these numbers are, and then there’s also an element of… NVIDIA has just been a straight line up and there’s been so many different narratives that have been trying to push down NVIDIA. I don’t say push down NVIDIA stock. Everyone is looking for a reason to sell or to be worried. It was Blackwell delays, right? Their GPU, every two weeks there’s a new report about their GPUs being delayed. There’s the whole thing about scaling laws ending, right? It’s so ironic-
And a big chunk of it was, hey, random company buys 16 servers, ships them to China. There’s actually, I saw a photo from someone in the semiconductor industry who leads a team for networking chips that competes with NVIDIA, and he sent a photo of a guy checking into a first class United flight from San Francisco to Shanghai or Shenzhen with a super micro box that was this big, which can only contain GPUs, right? And he was booking first class because think about it, 3K to 5K for your first class ticket, server costs $240,000 in the US, $250,000, you sell it for $300,000 in China. Wait, you just got a free first class ticket and a lot more money. So it’s like… And that’s small scale smuggling. Most of the large scale smuggling is companies in Singapore and Malaysia routing them around or renting GPUs, completely legally-
And then the third source, which is just now banned, which wasn’t considered smuggling, but is China is renting, I believe from our research, Oracle’s biggest GPU customer is ByteDance. And for Google, I think it’s their second-biggest customer. And you go down the list of clouds and especially these smaller cloud companies that aren’t the “hyperscalers,” think beyond CoreWeave and Lambda even, there’s 60 different new cloud companies serving NVIDIA GPUs. I think ByteDance is renting a lot of these, all over it, right?
And so these companies are renting GPUs to Chinese companies, and that was completely legal up until the diffusion rules, which happened just a few weeks ago. And even now, you can rent GPU clusters that are less than 2,000 GPUs, or you can buy GPUs and ship them wherever you want if there are less than 1,500 GPUs. There are still some ways to smuggle, but yeah, as the numbers grow a hundred something billion dollars of revenue for NVIDIA last year, 200 something billion this year, and if next year, it could nearly double again or more than double based on what we see with data center footprints being built out all across the US and the rest of the world, it’s going to be really hard for China to keep up with these rules.
Yes, there will always be smuggling and DeepSeek level models, GPT-4 level models, o1 level models capable to train on what China can get, even the next tier above that. But if we speed run a couple more jumps to billion dollar models, $10 billion models, then it becomes, “Hey, there is a compute disadvantage for China for training models and serving them.” And the serving part is really critical, right? DeepSeek cannot serve their model today. It’s completely out of inventory. It’s already started falling in the app store actually, downloads, because you download it, you try and sign up, they say, “We’re not taking registrations,” because they have no capacity. You open it up, you get less than five tokens per second, if you even get your request approved, right? Because there’s just no capacity because they just don’t have enough GPUs to serve the model, even though it’s incredibly efficient.
So, it’s much easier to get off the ground using this than to set up human pipelines and build a strong model. So there’s long history here, and a lot of the communications are seem like narrative [inaudible 03:31:00].
So, we’ve seen a sort of roundabout. Is it bad? Is it illegal? Maybe it’s illegal, whatever. I don’t know about that, but-
This is difficult, but I think you should be allowed to train on the internet. I know a lot of authors and creators are very sensitive about it. That’s a difficult question. But the moment you’re not allowed to train on the internet-
We have a market here to make. We build massive data centers, we rent them to the labs, and then we train models in a legally permissible way, and there’s no ifs, ands, or buts. And now, the models have no potential copyright lawsuit from New York Times or anything like that. No, it’s just completely legal.
It’s going to be a rough journey, but there will be some solutions like that that makes sense. But there’s a long tail where it’s just on the internet.
Code and stuff between, I say companies, not nation states, is probably very difficult. But ideas are discussed a lot, whether it be a house party in San Francisco or a company changing employees or always the mythical honeypot that always gets talked about. Someone gets honeypotted because everyone working on AI is a single dude who’s in their 20s and 30s. Not everyone, but insane amount of… Insane percentages. So, there’s always all these… And obviously-
Now, by the end of this decade, it’s… Even under… When I say 10%, a lot of people that are traditionally by 2028 to 2030, people traditionally non-traditional data center people, that’s nuts. But then, people who are in AI who have really looked at this like the Anthropics and OpenAI’s, are like, “That’s not enough.”
And I’m like, “Okay.” But this is both through globally distributed or distributed throughout the US as well as centralized clusters. The distributed throughout the US is exciting and it’s the bulk of it. Like, hey, OpenAI or, say, Meta’s adding a gigawatt, but most of it is distributed through the US for inference and all these other things.
It’s now, a inference. An inference is dramatically different from traditional distributed systems, but it looks a lot more simple, similar. And then, there’s training. The inference side is still like, “Hey, I’m going to put thousands of GPUs in blocks all around these data centers.” I’m going to run models on them. User submits a request, it gets kicked off. Or hey, my service. They submit a request to my service. They’re on Word and they’re like, “Oh yeah, help me, Copilot,” and it kicks it off. Or I’m on my windows, Copilot, whatever, Apple intelligence. Whatever it is, it gets kicked off to a data center. That data center does some work and sends it back. That’s inference. That is going to be the bulk of compute, but then…
And that’s like, there’s thousands of data centers that we’re tracking with satellites and all these other things, and those are the bulk of what’s being built. But the scale of… And so, that’s what’s really reshaping and that’s what’s getting millions of GPUs. But the scale of the largest cluster is also really important. When we look back at history or through the age of AI, it was a really big deal when they did AlexNet on, I think, 2 GPUs or 4 GPUs. I don’t remember. It’s a really big deal.
Sorry for skipping past that. And then the data center itself is complicated, but these are still standard sized data centers for GPT-4 scale. Now, we step forward to what is the scale of clusters that people built last year, and it ranges widely. It ranges from like, “Hey, these are standard data centers. And we’re just using multiple of them and connecting them together really with a ton of fiber between them, a lot of networking, etc.” That’s what OpenAI and Microsoft did in Arizona. They have 100,000 GPUs.
Meta, similar thing. They took their standard existing data center design and it looks like an H, and they connected multiple of them together. They first did 24,000 GPUs total, only 16,000 of them were running on the training run because GPUs are very unreliable so they need to have spares to swap in and out. All the way to now, 100,000 GPUs that they’re training on Llama 4 on currently. Like, 128,000 or so.
Think about 100,000 GPUs with roughly 1,400 watts apiece. That’s 140 megawatts, 150 megawatts for 128. So, you’re talking about you’ve jumped from 15 to 20 megawatts to almost 10x that number, 9x that number, to 150 megawatts in two years from 2022 to 2024. And some people like Elon, that he admittedly… He says himself he got into the game a little bit late for pre-training large language models. xAI was started later, right? But then, he bent heaven and hell to get his data center up and get the largest cluster in the world, which is 200,000 GPUs. And he did that. He bought a factory in Memphis. He’s upgrading the substation, with the same time, he’s got a bunch of mobile power generation, a bunch of single cycle combine. He tapped the natural gas line that’s right next to the factory, and he’s just pulling a ton of gas, burning gas.
He’s generating all this power. He’s in an old appliance factory that’s shut down and moved to China long ago, and he’s got 200,000 GPUs in it. And now, what’s the next scale? All the hyperscalers have done this. Now, the next scale is something that’s even bigger. And so Elon, just to stick on the topic, he’s building his own natural gas plant, like a proper one right next door. He’s deploying tons of Tesla Megapack batteries to make the power more smooth and all sorts of other things. He’s got industrial chillers to cool the water down because he’s water-cooling the chips. So, all these crazy things to get the clusters bigger and bigger.
But when you look at, say, what OpenAI did with Stargate in Arizona, in Abilene Texas, right? What they’ve announced, at least. It’s not built. Elon says they don’t have the money. There’s some debates about this. But at full scale, at least the first section is definitely money’s accounted for, but there’s multiple sections. But full scale, that data center is going to be 2.2 gigawatts, 2,200 megawatts of power in. And roughly, 1.8 gigawatts or 1,800 megawatts of power delivered to chips.
Now, this is an absurd scale. 2.2 gigawatts is more than most cities, to be clear. Delivered to a single cluster that’s connected to do training. To train these models, to do both the pre-training, the post-training, all of this stuff.
As you throw more compute, you get more performance. This shirt is about scaling laws. To some extent, it is diminishing returns. You 10x the compute, you don’t get 10x better model. You get a diminishing returns. But also, you get efficiency improvements, so you bend the curve. And these scale of data centers are just reeking a lot of havoc on the network. Nathan was mentioning Amazon has tried to buy this nuclear power plant Talen. And if you look at Talen’s stock, it’s just skyrocketing. They’re building a massive multi-gigawatt data center there.
You just go down the list, there’s so many ramifications. Interesting thing is certain regions of the US transmitting power cost more than actually generating it because the grid is so slow to build. And the demand for power, and the ability to build power, and re-ramping on a natural gas plant or even a coal plant is easy enough to do, but transmitting the power’s really hard. So in some parts of the US like in Virginia, it costs more to transmit power than it costs to generate it, which is there’s all sorts of second-order effects that are insane here.
Data center power consumption is flat, right? I mean, [inaudible 03:46:53].
You can’t do solar or anything in the short term like that.
One is… And Elon, what he’s doing in Memphis is to the extreme. They’re not just using dual combine cycle gas which is super efficient, he’s also just using single cycle and mobile generators and stuff which is less efficient. But there’s also the flip side, which is solar power generation is like this, and wind is another like this. Different correlate different. So if you stack both of those, plus you get a big chunk of batteries, plus you have a little bit of gas, it is possible to run it more green. It’s just the time scales for that is slow. So, people are trying. But Meta basically said, “Whatever. I don’t care about my sustainability pledge.” Or they’ll buy a power… It’s called a PPA, Power Purchasing Agreement, where there’ll be a massive wind farm or solar farm wherever. And then, they’ll just pretend like those electrons are being consumed by the data center. But in reality, they’re paying for the power here and selling it to the grid, and they’re buying power here.
And then another thing is Microsoft quit on some of their sustainability pledges. Elon, what he did with Memphis is objectively somewhat dirty, but he is also doing it in an area where there’s a bigger natural gas plant right next door and a sewer next… Or not a sewer, but a wastewater treatment and a garbage dump nearby. And he’s obviously made the world a lot more clean than that one data center is going to do, so I think it’s fine to some extent. And maybe, AGI solves global warming and stuff, whatever it is.
This is the attitude that people at the labs have, which is like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’ll just use gas,” because the race is that important. And if we lose, that’s way worse.
I was sitting in on all of these meetings where they’re brainstorming. It’s insane. It’s exciting because they’re trying to figure out what the bottlenecks are, how to remove the bottlenecks, how to make sure that… There’s just so many really cool things about putting together a data center because everything has to work. The people that do the sys admin, the machine learning and all of that is the exciting thing, so on. But really, the people that run everything are the folks that know the low-level software and hardware that runs everything, the networking, all of that. So, you have to make sure you have procedures that test everything. I think they’re using ethernet. I don’t know how they’re doing the networking, but-
But in the simplest terms, you’ll be computing a lot and then you’ll exchange. The interesting thing is GPU power is most of it, networking power is some but it’s a lot less. So while you’re computing, your power for your GPUs is here. But then when you’re exchanging weights, if you’re not able to overlap communications and compute perfectly, there may be a time period where your GPUs are just idle, and you’re exchanging weights and you’re like, “Hey, the model’s updating.” So, you’re exchanging the radiance, you do the model update, and then you start training again. So, the power goes… Right? And it’s super spiky.
And so funnily enough, when you talk about the scale of data center power, you can blow stuff up so easily. And so, Meta actually has accidentally upstreamed something to code in PyTorch where they added an operator. And I kid you not, whoever made this, I want to hug the guy because it says PyTorch… It’s like PyTorch.powerplant no blow up equals 0 or equal 1. And what it does is amazing, right?
But Elon did it on this current generation, and that required a lot of stuff. If you look at some of the satellite photos and stuff of the Memphis facility, there’s all these external water chillers that are sitting. Basically, it looks like a semi truck pod thing. What’s it called? The container? But really, those are water chillers, and he has 90 of those water chillers just sitting outside. Ninety different containers that chill the water, bring it back to the data center, and then you distribute it to all the chips, pull all the heat out and then send it back. And this is both a way to cool the chips, but also, it’s an efficiency thing.
And going back to that three vector thing, there is Memory Bandwidth FLOPS and interconnect. The closer the chips are together, the easier it is to do high-speed interconnects. And this is also a reason why you want to go water cooling is because you can just put the chips right next to each other, and therefore get higher speed connectivity.
And so, Elon today has 200,000 H100s, 100,000 H100s and 100,000 H200s. Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon all have on the scale of a hundred thousand, a little bit less. But next this year, people are building much more. Anthrophic and Amazon are building a cluster of 400,000 trainium 2, which is Amazon-specific chip trying to get away from NVIDIA. Meta and OpenAI have scales for hundreds of thousands. But by next year, you’ll have 500,000 to 700,000 GPU clusters. And note, those GPUs are much higher power consumption than existing ones. Hopper’s 700 watts, Blackwell goes to 1,200 watts.
So, the power per chip is growing and the number of chips is growing.
Now with pre-training, this is the old scale. You can increase parameters, you did increase data, model gets better. That doesn’t apply anymore because there’s not much more data in the pre-training side. Yes, there’s video and audio and image that has not been fully taken advantage of, so there’s a lot more scaling. But a lot of people have transcript, taken transcripts out of YouTube videos, and that gets you a lot of the data. It doesn’t get you all of the learning value out of the video and image data, but…
There’s still scaling to be done on pre-training, but this post-training world is where all the FLOPS are going to be spent. The model’s going to play with itself, it’s going to self-play, it’s going to do verifiable tasks, it’s going to do computer use in sandboxes. It might even do simulated robotics things. All of these things are going to be environments where compute is spent in “post-training.” But I think it’s going to be good. We’re going to drop the post from post-training.
I think FLOPS is the standard for how you measure it. But with RL, and you have to do all of these things where you move your weights around in a different way than at pre-training and just generation, it’s going to be become less efficient and FLOPS is going to be less of a useful term. And then as the infrastructure gets better, it’s probably going to go back to FLOPS.
But the way they do it is very interesting. They have two data center super regions in that the data center isn’t physically… All of the GPUs aren’t physically on one site but they’re like 30 miles from each other. And they’re not GPUs, TPUs. In Iowa and Nebraska, they have four data centers that are just right next to each other.
This is an image of what a standard Google data center looks like. By the way, their data centers look very different than anyone else’s data centers.
So, Google has a very advanced infrastructure that no one else has for the TPU. And what they do is they’ve stamped a bunch of these data centers out in a few regions. So if you go a little bit further down… This is a Microsoft. This is in Arizona. This is where GPT-5 “will be trained.”
And the point here is that Google has a very advanced infrastructure, very tightly connected in a small region. So, Elon will always to have the biggest cluster fully connected because it’s all in one building, and he’s completely right on that. Google has the biggest cluster but you have to spread over three sites, and by a significant margin. We have to go across multiple sites.
One simple one is they’ve open sourced a Gemma model, and they called it Gemma-7B. But then, it’s actually 8 billion parameters because the vocabulary is so large. And the reason they made the vocabulary so large is because TPUs matrix multiply unit is massive because that’s what they’ve optimized for. And so they decided, “Oh, well, I’ll just make the vocabulary large, too.” Even though it makes no sense to do so in such a small model, because that fits on their hardware. Gemma doesn’t run it as efficiently on a GPU as a Llama does. But vice versa, Llama doesn’t run as efficiently on a TPU as a Gemma does.
There’s certain aspects of hardware, software co-design. All their search models are there, ranking and recommendation models, all these different models that are AI but not like gen AI have been hyper optimized with TPUs forever. The software stack is super optimized. But all of this software stack has not been released publicly at all. Very small portions of it. JAX and XLA have been. But the experience when you’re inside of Google and you’re training on TPUs as a researcher, you don’t need to know anything about the hardware in many cases, right? It’s pretty beautiful.
I think in 2023, they bought a couple of billion. And now, they’re buying like 10 billion to $15 billion worth. But how do you convince them that they should just buy twice as many and figure out how to sell them, and make $30 billion? Who cares about making $30 billion?
Also, a lot of the silicon they’ve engineered makes them have a lower cost structure in traditional cloud, storage, CPU networking, that kind of stuff than in databases. I think four of Amazon’s top five revenue products, margin products like gross profit products are all database-related products like Redshift and all these things. So Amazon has a very good silicon to user experience like entire pipeline with AWS. I think Google, their silicon teams, they have awesome silicon internally, TPU, the YouTube chip, some of these other chips that they’ve made. And the problem is they’re not serving external customers, they’re serving internal customers, right?
And in servers, hyperscalers are all making their own ARM-based server chips and Intel has no AI silicon like wins. They have very small wins and they never got into mobile because they said no to the iPhone and all these things have compounded and they’ve lost their process technology leadership. They were ahead for 20 years and now they’re behind by at least a couple years and they’re trying to catch back up and we’ll see if their 18A, 14A strategy works out where they try and leapfrog TSMC like and Intel is just losing tons of money anyways, and they just fired their CEO, even though the CEO was the only person who understood the company well, right? We’ll see. He was not the best, but he was pretty good relatively technical guy.
You don’t know if all of a sudden OpenAI goes kapoof and now Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of GPUs they were renting to OpenAI that they paid for themselves with their investment in them that no longer have a customer. This is always a possibility. I don’t believe that. I think OpenAI will keep raising money. I think others will keep raising money because the returns from it are going to be eventually huge once we have AGI.
The question is what ways can we get language models to generalize to new domains and solve their own problems in real time. Maybe some tiny amount of training when they’re doing this with fine-tuning themselves or in context learning, which is the idea of storing information in a prompt. And you can use learning algorithms to update that and whether or not you believe that that is going to actually generalize to things like me saying, “Book my trip to go to Austin in two days. I have XYZ constraints,” and actually trusting it. I think there’s an HCI problem coming back for information.
And then you compound the nines onto each other and it’s like if you multiply by the number of steps that are six sigma, you get to a yield or something. So in semiconductor manufacturing, tens of thousands of steps, 9999999 is not enough. You multiply by that many times you actually end up with 60% yield, right? Really low yield or zero. And this is the same thing with agents, right? Chaining tasks together each time, even the best LLMs in particularly pretty good benchmarks don’t get 100%, right? They get a little bit below that because there is a lot of noise. And so how do you get to enough nines, right? This is the same thing with self-driving. We can’t have self-driving because without it being super geofenced like Google’s and even then they have a bunch of teleoperators to make sure it doesn’t get stuck. But you can’t do that because it doesn’t have enough nines.
You go from sandbox to progress and then you add one more domain at a time and generalize, I think. And the history of NLP and language processing instruction, tuning and tasks per language model used to be like one language model did one task, and then in the instruction tuning literature, there’s this point where you start adding more and more tasks together where it just starts to generalize to every task. And we don’t know where on this curve we are. I think for reasoning with this RL and verifiable domains, we’re early, but we don’t know where the point is where you just start training on enough domains and poof, more domains just start working. And you’ve crossed the generalization barrier.
But the way that people think of it now is it can do code completion. Easy. It can do some function generation. I have to review it. Great. But really the software engineering agents I think can be done faster sooner than any other agent because it is a verifiable domain. You can always unit test or compile, and there’s many different regions of it can inspect the whole code base at once, which no engineer really can. Only the architects can really think about this stuff, the really senior guys, and they can define stuff and then the agent can execute on it. So I think software engineering costs are going to plummet like crazy. And one interesting aspect of that is when software engineering costs are really low, you get very different markets. So in the US, you have all these platform SaaS companies, Salesforce and so on and so forth. In China, no one uses platform SaaS. Everyone just builds their own stack because software engineering is much cheaper in China and partially because people, number of STEM graduates, et cetera. So it’s generally just cheaper to do.
And so at the same time, code LLMs have been adopted much less in China because the cost of an engineer there is much lower. But what happens when every company can just invent their own business logic really cheaply and quickly? You stop using platform SaaS, you start building custom tailored solutions, you change them really quickly. Now all of a sudden your business is a little bit more efficient too, potentially because you’re not dealing with the hell that is. Some random platform SaaS company stuff not working perfectly and having to adjust workflows or random business automation cases that aren’t necessarily AI required.
It’s just logic that needs to be built that no one has built. All of these things can go happen faster. And so I think software and then the other domain is industrial, chemical, mechanical engineers suck at coding just generally. And their tools like semiconductor engineers, their tools are 20 years old. All the tools run on XP including ASML lithography tools run on Windows XP. And a lot of the analysis happens in Excel, right? It’s just like, “Guys, you guys can move 20 years forward with all the data you have and gathered and do a lot better.” You need the engineering skills for software engineering to be delivered to the actual domain expert engineer. So I think that’s the area where I’m super-duper bullish of generally AI creating value.
And we’ve been playing at the frontiers of post-training with open source code. And this first part of this release was in the fall where we’ve built on Llama’s, open models, open weight models, and then we add in our fully open code or fully open data. There’s a popular benchmark that is Chatbot Arena. And that’s generally the metric by which how these chat models are evaluated. And it’s humans compare random models from different organizations. And if you looked at the leaderboard in November or December, among the top 60 models from tens to twenties of organizations, none of them had open code or data for just post-training.
Among that, even fewer or none have pre-training data and code available. Post-training is much more accessible at this time. It’s still pretty cheap, and you can do it. And the thing is, how high can we push this number where people have access to all the code and data? So that’s kind of the motivation of the project. We draw in lessons from Llama. Nvidia had a Nemotron model where the recipe for their post-training was fairly open with some data and a paper, and it’s putting all these together to try to create a recipe that people can fine tune models like GPT-4 to their domain.
And this is something that the DeepSeek paper talked about as well is at this bigger model, it’s easier to elicit powerful capabilities with this RL training. And then they distill it down from that big model to the small model. And this model we released today, we saw the same thing. We’re at AI2, we don’t have a ton of compute. We can’t train 405B models all the time. So we just did a few runs and they tend to work. And it just shows that there’s a lot of room for people to play in these things and that’s –
And this is, it’s like the time of progress and we benefit if we can release a model later, we have more time to learn new techniques like this RL technique, we had started this in the fall, it’s now really popular reasoning models. The next thing to do for open source post-training is to scale up verifiers, to scale up data to replicate some of DeepSeek’s results. And it’s awesome that we have a paper to draw on and it makes it a lot easier. And that’s the type of things that is going on among academic and closed frontier research in AI.
So until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data? And there’s not a lot about that. We’re going to try to launch a demo soon where you can look at an OMO model and a query and see what pre-training data is similar to it, which is legally risky and complicated, but it’s like what does it mean to see the data that the AI was trained on? It’s hard to parse. It’s terabytes of files. It’s like I don’t know what I’m going to find in there, but that’s what we need to do as an ecosystem if people want open source AI to be financially useful.
They tried to rent it to Elon in fact, but Elon was like, “It’s too slow. I need it faster.” So then he went and did his Memphis thing, and so OpenAI was able to get it with this weird joint venture called Stargate. They initially signed a deal with just Oracle for the first section of this cluster. This first section of this cluster is roughly $5 billion to $6 billion of server spend, and then there’s another billion or so of data center spend. And then likewise, if you fill out that entire 1.8 gigawatts with the next two generations of NVIDIA’s chips, GB 200, GB 300, VR 200, and you fill it out completely, that ends up being roughly $50 billion of server cost. Plus there’s data center costs plus maintenance costs, plus operation costs plus all these things. And that’s where OpenAI gets to their $100 billion announcement that they had. Because they talked about $100 billion dollars is phase one. That’s this Abilene, Texas data center, right? $ 100 billion of “total cost of ownership.” So it’s not CapEx, it’s not investment, it’s a $100 billion of total cost of ownership.
And then there will be future phases. They’re looking at other sites that are even bigger than this 2.2 gigawatts by the way, in Texas and elsewhere. And so they’re not completely ignoring that, but the number of $100 billion that they save for phase one, which I do think will happen. They don’t even have the money for that. Furthermore, it’s not $100 billion dollars, it’s $50 billion of spend and then $50 billion of operational cost power, et cetera, rental pricing, et cetera, because they’re renting it. OpenAI is renting the GPUs from the Stargate joint venture. What money do they actually have, right? SoftBank is going to invest, Oracle is going to invest. OpenAI is going to invest. OpenAI is on the line for $19 billion. Everyone knows that they’ve only got 46 billion in their last round and $4 billion of debt. But there, there’s news of Softbank maybe investing $25 billion into OpenAI. So that’s part of it. So $19 billion can come from there.
So OpenAI does not have the money at all to be clear. Ink is not dried on anything. OpenAI has $0 for this, 50 billion in which they’re legally obligated to put 19 billion of CapEx into the joint venture, and then the rest they’re going to pay via renting the GPUs from the joint venture. And then there’s Oracle. Oracle has a lot of money. They’re building the first section completely. They were spending for it themselves, this $6 billion of CapEx, $10 billion of TCO, and they were going to do that first section. They’re paying for that, right? As far as the rest of the section, I don’t know how much Larry wants to spend. At any point he could pull out. This is again, it is completely voluntary. So at any point, there’s no signed ink on this, but he potentially could contribute tens of billions of dollars to be clear. He’s got the money, Oracle’s got the money.
And then there’s like MGX is the UAE fund, which technically has $1.5 trillion for investing in AI. But again, I don’t know how real that money is and there’s no ink signed for this, SoftBank does not have $25 billion of cash. They have to sell down their stake in arm, which is the leader in CPUs and they IPO’d it. This is obviously what they’ve always wanted to do, they just didn’t know where they’d redeploy the capital. Selling down the stake in ARM makes a ton of sense. So they can sell that down and invest in this if they want to and invest in OpenAI if they want to. As far as money secured, the first 100,000 GB 200 cluster can be funded. Everything else after that-
But the way to think about it is that there is sort of the more elements you add to a task, you don’t get strong scaling. If I double the number of chips, I don’t get two exit performance. This is just a reality of computing because there’s inefficiencies.And there’s a lot of interesting work being done to make it not to make it more linear, whether it’s making the chips more networked together more tightly or cool programming models or cool algorithmic things that you can do on the model side. DeepSeek did some of these really cool innovations because they were limited on interconnect, but they still needed to parallelize. Everyone’s always doing stuff. Google’s got a bunch of work and everyone’s got a bunch of work about this. That stuff is super exciting on the model and workload and innovation side. Hardware, solid-state transformers are interesting. For the power side, all sorts of stuff on batteries and there’s all sorts of stuff on.
I think if you look at every layer of the compute stack, whether it goes from lithography and etch all the way to fabrication, to optics, to networking, to power, to transformers, to cooling, to a networking, and you just go on up and up and up and up the stack, even air conditioners for data centers are innovating. Copper cables are innovating. You wouldn’t think it, but copper cables, there’s some innovations happening there with the density of how you can pack them and it’s like all of these layers of the stack, all the way up to the models, human progress is at a pace that’s never been seen before.
It’s like we’re the ones that it’s like, we’re going to do it and you can trust us and we’re just going to have all the AI, and it’s just like, I would like a future where more people have a say in what AI is and can understand it, and it’s a little bit less fun that it’s not a positive thing of this is just all really fun. Training models is fun and bring people in as fun, but it’s really AI if it is going to be the most powerful technology of my lifetime, it’s like we need to have a lot of people involved in making that and-
And I think that’s the thing that’s probably more worrisome is human-machine amalgamations. This enables an individual human to have more impact on the world and that impact can be both positive and negative. Generally, humans have positive impacts on the world, at least societally, but it’s possible for individual humans to have such negative impacts. And AGI, at least as I think the labs define it, which is not a runaway sentient thing, but rather just something that can do a lot of tasks really efficiently amplifies the capabilities of someone causing extreme damage. But for the most part, I think it’ll be used for profit-seeking motives, which will increase the abundance and supply of things and therefore reduce suffering, right? That’s the goal.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 3:33 – DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3
- 25:07 – Low cost of training
- 51:25 – DeepSeek compute cluster
- 58:57 – Export controls on GPUs to China
- 1:09:16 – AGI timeline
- 1:18:41 – China’s manufacturing capacity
- 1:26:36 – Cold war with China
- 1:31:05 – TSMC and Taiwan
- 1:54:44 – Best GPUs for AI
- 2:09:36 – Why DeepSeek is so cheap
- 2:22:55 – Espionage
- 2:31:57 – Censorship
- 2:44:52 – Andrej Karpathy and magic of RL
- 2:55:23 – OpenAI o3-mini vs DeepSeek r1
- 3:14:31 – NVIDIA
- 3:18:58 – GPU smuggling
- 3:25:36 – DeepSeek training on OpenAI data
- 3:36:04 – AI megaclusters
- 4:11:26 – Who wins the race to AGI?
- 4:21:39 – AI agents
- 4:30:21 – Programming and AI
- 4:37:49 – Open source
- 4:47:01 – Stargate
- 4:54:30 – Future of AI
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert. Dylan runs SemiAnalysis, a well-respected research and analysis company that specializes in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs, and AI hardware in general. Nathan is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI and is the author of the amazing blog on AI called Interconnects. They are both highly respected, read and listened to by the experts, researchers and engineers in the field of AI. And personally, I’m just a fan of the two of them, so I used the DeepSeek moment that shook the AI world a bit as an opportunity to sit down with them and lay it all out from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Google XAI, Meta, Anthropic to NVIDIA and DSMC, and to US-China-Taiwan relations and everything else that is happening at the cutting edge of AI. This conversation is a deep dive into many critical aspects of the AI industry.
The following is a conversation with Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert. Dylan runs SemiAnalysis, a well-respected research and analysis company that specializes in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs, and AI hardware in general. Nathan is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI and is the author of the amazing blog on AI called Interconnects. They are both highly respected, read and listened to by the experts, researchers and engineers in the field of AI. And personally, I’m just a fan of the two of them, so I used the DeepSeek moment that shook the AI world a bit as an opportunity to sit down with them and lay it all out from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Google XAI, Meta, Anthropic to NVIDIA and DSMC, and to US-China-Taiwan relations and everything else that is happening at the cutting edge of AI. This conversation is a deep dive into many critical aspects of the AI industry.
While it does get super technical, we try to make sure that it’s still accessible to folks outside of the AI field by defining terms, stating important concepts explicitly, spelling out acronyms, and in general, always moving across the several layers of abstraction and levels of detail. There is a lot of hype in the media about what AI is and isn’t. The purpose of this podcast in part is to cut through the hype, through the bullshit and the low resolution analysis and to discuss in detail how stuff works and what the implications are. Let me also, if I may comment on the new OpenAI o3-mini reasoning model, the release of which we were anticipating during the conversation and it did indeed come out right after. Its capabilities and costs are on par with our expectations as we stated. OpenAI o3-mini is indeed a great model, but it should be stated that DeepSeek-R1 has similar performance on benchmarks, is still cheaper and it reveals its chain of thought reasoning, which o3-mini does not. It only shows a summary of the reasoning, plus R1 is open weight and o3-mini is not.
By the way, I got a chance to play with o3-mini and anecdotal vibe check wise, I felt that o3-mini, specifically o3-mini high is better than R1. Still for me personally, I find that Claude Sonnet 3.5 is the best model for programming except for tricky cases where I will use o1 Pro to brainstorm. Either way, many more better AI models will come including reasoning models both from American and Chinese companies. They’ll continue to shift the cost curve, but the quote “DeepSeek moment” is indeed real. I think it will still be remembered five years from now as a pivotal event in tech history due in part to the geopolitical implications, but for other reasons to, as we discuss in detail from many perspectives in this conversation. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, to support it please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert.
DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3
Lex Fridman
A lot of people are curious to understand China’s DeepSeek AI models, so let’s lay it out. Nathan, can you describe what DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 are, how they work, how they’re trained? Let’s look at the big picture and then we’ll zoom in on the details.
A lot of people are curious to understand China’s DeepSeek AI models, so let’s lay it out. Nathan, can you describe what DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 are, how they work, how they’re trained? Let’s look at the big picture and then we’ll zoom in on the details.
Nathan Lambert
DeepSeek-V3 is a new mixture of experts, transformer language model from DeepSeek who is based in China. They have some new specifics in the model that we’ll get into. Largely this is a open weight model and it’s a instruction model like what you would use in ChatGPT. They also released what is called the base model, which is before these techniques of post-training. Most people use instruction models today, and those are what’s served in all sorts of applications. This was released on, I believe, December 26th or that week. And then weeks later on January 20th, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, which is a reasoning model, which really accelerated a lot of this discussion.
DeepSeek-V3 is a new mixture of experts, transformer language model from DeepSeek who is based in China. They have some new specifics in the model that we’ll get into. Largely this is a open weight model and it’s a instruction model like what you would use in ChatGPT. They also released what is called the base model, which is before these techniques of post-training. Most people use instruction models today, and those are what’s served in all sorts of applications. This was released on, I believe, December 26th or that week. And then weeks later on January 20th, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, which is a reasoning model, which really accelerated a lot of this discussion.
This reasoning model has a lot of overlapping training steps to DeepSeek-V3, and it’s confusing that you have a base model called V3 that you do something to to get a chat model and then you do some different things to get a reasoning model. I think a lot of the AI industry is going through this challenge of communications right now where OpenAI makes fun of their own naming schemes. They have GPT-4o, they have OpenIA o1, and there’s a lot of types of models, so we’re going to break down what each of them are. There’s a lot of technical specifics on training and go through them high level to specific and go through each of them.
Lex Fridman
There’s so many places we can go here, but maybe let’s go to open weights first. What does it mean for a model to be open weights and what are the different flavors of open source in general?
There’s so many places we can go here, but maybe let’s go to open weights first. What does it mean for a model to be open weights and what are the different flavors of open source in general?
Nathan Lambert
This discussion has been going on for a long time in AI. It became more important since ChatGPT or more focal since ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Open weights is the accepted term for when model weights of a language model are available on the internet for people to download. Those weights can have different licenses, which is effectively the terms by which you can use the model. There are licenses that come from history and open source software. There are licenses that are designed by companies specifically all of Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, these popular names in open weight models have some of their own licenses. It’s complicated because not all the same models have the same terms. The big debate is on what makes a model open weight. It’s like, why are we saying this term? It’s a mouthful. It sounds close to open source, but it’s not the same.
This discussion has been going on for a long time in AI. It became more important since ChatGPT or more focal since ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Open weights is the accepted term for when model weights of a language model are available on the internet for people to download. Those weights can have different licenses, which is effectively the terms by which you can use the model. There are licenses that come from history and open source software. There are licenses that are designed by companies specifically all of Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, these popular names in open weight models have some of their own licenses. It’s complicated because not all the same models have the same terms. The big debate is on what makes a model open weight. It’s like, why are we saying this term? It’s a mouthful. It sounds close to open source, but it’s not the same.
There’s still a lot of debate on the definition and soul of open source AI. Open source software has a rich history on freedom to modify, freedom to take on your own, freedom for many restrictions on how you would use the software and what that means for AI is still being defined. For what I do, I work at the Allen Institute for AI, we’re a nonprofit, we want to make AI open for everybody and we try to lead on what we think is truly open source. There’s not full agreement in the community, but for us that means releasing the training data, releasing the training code, and then also having open weights like this. And we’ll get into the details of the models and again and again as we try to get deeper into how the models were trained, we will say things like the data processing, data filtering data quality is the number one determinant of the model quality.
And then a lot of the training code is the determinant on how long it takes to train and how fast your experimentation is. Without fully open source models where you have access to this data, it is hard to know… Or it’s harder to replicate. We’ll get into cost numbers for DeepSeek-V3 on mostly GPU hours and how much you could pay to rent those yourselves. But without the data, the replication cost is going to be far, far higher. And same goes for the code.
Lex Fridman
We should also say that this is probably one of the more open models out of the frontier models.
We should also say that this is probably one of the more open models out of the frontier models.
Nathan Lambert
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
In this full spectrum where probably the fullest open source, like you said, open code, open data, open weights, this is not open code, this is probably not open data and this is open weights and the licensing is MIT license or it’s… There’s some nuance in the different models, but it’s towards the free… In terms of the open source movement, these are the good guys.
In this full spectrum where probably the fullest open source, like you said, open code, open data, open weights, this is not open code, this is probably not open data and this is open weights and the licensing is MIT license or it’s… There’s some nuance in the different models, but it’s towards the free… In terms of the open source movement, these are the good guys.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. DeepSeek is doing fantastic work for disseminating understanding of AI. Their papers are extremely detailed in what they do and for other teams around the world, they’re very actionable in terms of improving your own training techniques. And we’ll talk about licenses more, the DeepSeek-R1 model has a very permissive license. It’s called the MIT license. That effectively means there’s no downstream restrictions on commercial use, there’s no use case restrictions. You can use the outputs from the models to create synthetic data.
Yeah. DeepSeek is doing fantastic work for disseminating understanding of AI. Their papers are extremely detailed in what they do and for other teams around the world, they’re very actionable in terms of improving your own training techniques. And we’ll talk about licenses more, the DeepSeek-R1 model has a very permissive license. It’s called the MIT license. That effectively means there’s no downstream restrictions on commercial use, there’s no use case restrictions. You can use the outputs from the models to create synthetic data.
And this is all fantastic. I think the closest peer is something like Llama where you have the weights and you have a technical report. And the technical report is very good for Llama. One of the most read PDFs of the year last year is the Llama 3 paper, but in some ways it’s slightly less actionable. It has less details on the training specifics. I think less plots and so on. And the Llama 3 license is more restrictive than MIT. And then between the DeepSeek custom license and the Llama license, we could get into this whole rabbit hole, I think. We’ll make sure we want to go down the license rabbit hole before we do specifics.
Lex Fridman
It should be stated that one of the implications that DeepSeek, it puts pressure on Llama and everybody else on OpenAI to push towards open source. And that’s the other side of open source is that you mentioned is how much is published in detail about it, so how open are you with the insights behind the code? How good is the technical reports? Are there hand wavy or is there actual details in there? And that’s one of the things that DeepSeek did well is they published a lot of the details.
It should be stated that one of the implications that DeepSeek, it puts pressure on Llama and everybody else on OpenAI to push towards open source. And that’s the other side of open source is that you mentioned is how much is published in detail about it, so how open are you with the insights behind the code? How good is the technical reports? Are there hand wavy or is there actual details in there? And that’s one of the things that DeepSeek did well is they published a lot of the details.
Nathan Lambert
Especially in the DeepSeek-V3, which is their pre-training paper. They were very clear that they are doing interventions on the technical stack that go at many different levels. For example, on their to get highly efficient training, they’re making modifications at or below the CUDA layer for NVIDIA chips. I have never worked there myself and there are a few people in the world that do that very well, and some of them are at DeepSeek. These types of people are at DeepSeek and leading American frontier labs, but there are not many places.
Especially in the DeepSeek-V3, which is their pre-training paper. They were very clear that they are doing interventions on the technical stack that go at many different levels. For example, on their to get highly efficient training, they’re making modifications at or below the CUDA layer for NVIDIA chips. I have never worked there myself and there are a few people in the world that do that very well, and some of them are at DeepSeek. These types of people are at DeepSeek and leading American frontier labs, but there are not many places.
Lex Fridman
To help people understand the other implication of open weights, just there’s a topic we’ll return to often here. There’s a fear that China, the nation might have interest in stealing American data, violating privacy of American citizens. What can we say about open weights to help us understand what the weights are able to do in terms of stealing people’s data?
To help people understand the other implication of open weights, just there’s a topic we’ll return to often here. There’s a fear that China, the nation might have interest in stealing American data, violating privacy of American citizens. What can we say about open weights to help us understand what the weights are able to do in terms of stealing people’s data?
Nathan Lambert
These weights that you can download from Hugging Face or other platforms are very big matrices of numbers. You can download them to a computer in your own house that has no internet and you can run this model and you’re totally in control of your data. That is something that is different than how a lot of language model usage is actually done today, which is mostly through APIs where you send your prompt to GPUs run by certain companies. And these companies will have different distributions and policies on how your data is stored, if it is used to train future models, where it is stored, if it is encrypted, and so on. The open weights are you have your fate of data in your own hands, and that is something that is deeply connected to the soul of open source.
These weights that you can download from Hugging Face or other platforms are very big matrices of numbers. You can download them to a computer in your own house that has no internet and you can run this model and you’re totally in control of your data. That is something that is different than how a lot of language model usage is actually done today, which is mostly through APIs where you send your prompt to GPUs run by certain companies. And these companies will have different distributions and policies on how your data is stored, if it is used to train future models, where it is stored, if it is encrypted, and so on. The open weights are you have your fate of data in your own hands, and that is something that is deeply connected to the soul of open source.
Lex Fridman
It’s not the model that steals your data, it’s whoever is hosting the model, which could be China if you’re using the DeepSeek app or it could be Perplexity. You’re trusting them with your data or OpenAI, you’re trusting them with your data. And some of these are American companies, some these are Chinese companies, but the model itself is not doing the stealing, it’s the host. All right, so back to the basics. What’s the difference between DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1? Can we try to lay out the confusion potential?
It’s not the model that steals your data, it’s whoever is hosting the model, which could be China if you’re using the DeepSeek app or it could be Perplexity. You’re trusting them with your data or OpenAI, you’re trusting them with your data. And some of these are American companies, some these are Chinese companies, but the model itself is not doing the stealing, it’s the host. All right, so back to the basics. What’s the difference between DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1? Can we try to lay out the confusion potential?
Nathan Lambert
Yes. For one, I have very understanding of many people being confused by these two model names, so I would say the best way to think about this is that when training a language model, you have what is called pre-training, which is when you’re predicting the large amounts of mostly internet text you’re trying to predict the next token. And what to know about these new DeepSeek models is that they do this internet large scale pre-training once to get what is called DeepSeek-V3 base. This is a base model, it’s just going to finish your sentences for you. It’s going to be harder to work with than ChatGPT. And then what DeepSeek did is they’ve done two different post-training regimes to make the models have specific desirable behaviors. What is the more normal model in terms of the last few years of AI, an instruct model, a chat model, a quote unquote “aligned model”, a helpful model. There are many ways to describe this is more standard post-training. This is things like instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback.
Yes. For one, I have very understanding of many people being confused by these two model names, so I would say the best way to think about this is that when training a language model, you have what is called pre-training, which is when you’re predicting the large amounts of mostly internet text you’re trying to predict the next token. And what to know about these new DeepSeek models is that they do this internet large scale pre-training once to get what is called DeepSeek-V3 base. This is a base model, it’s just going to finish your sentences for you. It’s going to be harder to work with than ChatGPT. And then what DeepSeek did is they’ve done two different post-training regimes to make the models have specific desirable behaviors. What is the more normal model in terms of the last few years of AI, an instruct model, a chat model, a quote unquote “aligned model”, a helpful model. There are many ways to describe this is more standard post-training. This is things like instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback.
We’ll get into some of these words and this is what they did to create the DeepSeek-V3 model. This was the first model to be released and it is very high performant, it’s competitive with GPT-4, Llama 405B and so on. And then when this release was happening, we don’t know their exact timeline or soon after they were finishing the training of a different training process from the same next token prediction based model that I talked about, which is when this new reasoning training that people have heard about comes in in order to create the model that is called DeepSeek-R1. The R through this conversation is good for grounding for reasoning. And the name is also similar to OpenAI’s o1, which is the other reasoning model that people have heard about. And we’ll have to break down the training for R1 in more detail because for one we have a paper detailing it, but also it is a far newer set of techniques for the AI community, so it is a much more rapidly evolving area of research.
Lex Fridman
Maybe we should also say the big two categories of training of pre-training and post-training. These are umbrella terms that people use, so what is pre-training and what is post-training and what are the different flavors of things underneath the post-training umbrella?
Maybe we should also say the big two categories of training of pre-training and post-training. These are umbrella terms that people use, so what is pre-training and what is post-training and what are the different flavors of things underneath the post-training umbrella?
Nathan Lambert
Pre-training, I’m using some of the same words to really get the message across is you’re doing what is called autoregressive prediction to predict the next token in a series of documents. This is done over standard practice is trillions of tokens, so this is a ton of data that is mostly scraped from the web. And some of DeepSeek’s earlier papers, they talk about their training data being distilled for math. I shouldn’t use this word yet, but taken from Common Crawl and that’s a public access that anyone listening to this could go download data from the Common Crawl website. This is a crawler that is maintained publicly. Yes, other tech companies eventually shift to their own crawler and DeepSeek likely has done this as well as most frontier labs do. But this sort of data is something that people can get started with and you’re just predicting text in a series of documents.
Pre-training, I’m using some of the same words to really get the message across is you’re doing what is called autoregressive prediction to predict the next token in a series of documents. This is done over standard practice is trillions of tokens, so this is a ton of data that is mostly scraped from the web. And some of DeepSeek’s earlier papers, they talk about their training data being distilled for math. I shouldn’t use this word yet, but taken from Common Crawl and that’s a public access that anyone listening to this could go download data from the Common Crawl website. This is a crawler that is maintained publicly. Yes, other tech companies eventually shift to their own crawler and DeepSeek likely has done this as well as most frontier labs do. But this sort of data is something that people can get started with and you’re just predicting text in a series of documents.
This can be scaled to be very efficient and there’s a lot of numbers that are thrown around in AI training like how many floating-point operations or flops are used. And then you can also look at how many hours of these GPUs that are used. And it’s largely one loss function taken to a very large amount of compute usage. You set up really efficient systems and then at the end of that you have the base model and pre-training is where there is a lot more of complexity in terms of how the process is emerging or evolving and the different types of training losses that you’ll use. I think this is a lot of techniques grounded in the natural language processing literature. The oldest technique which is still used today is something called instruction tuning or also known as supervised fine-tuning. These acronyms will be IFT or SFT.
People really go back and forth throughout them, and I’ll probably do the same, which is where you add this formatting to the model where it knows to take a question that is, explain the history of the Roman Empire to me or a sort of question you’ll see on Reddit or Stack Overflow. And then the model will respond in a information-dense but presentable manner. The core of that formatting is in this instruction tuning phase. And then there’s two other categories of loss functions that are being used today. One I’ll classify as preference fine-tuning. Preference fine-tuning is a generalized term for what came out of reinforcement learning from human feedback, which is RLHF. This reinforcement learning from human feedback is credited as the technique that helped ChatGPT break through. It is a technique to make the responses that are nicely formatted like these Reddit answers more in tune with what a human would like to read.
This is done by collecting pairwise preferences from actual humans out in the world to start and now AIs are also labeling this data and we’ll get into those trade-offs. And you have this contrastive loss function between a good answer and a bad answer. And the model learns to pick up these trends. There’s different implementation ways. You have things called reward models. You could have direct alignment algorithms. There’s a lot of really specific things you can do, but all of this is about fine-tuning to human preferences. And the final stage is much newer and will link to what is done in R1 and these reasoning models is I think OpenAI’s name for this, they had this new API in the fall, which they called the reinforcement fine-tuning API. This is the idea that you use the techniques of reinforcement learning, which is a whole framework of AI.
There’s a deep literature here to summarize, it’s often known as trial and error learning or the subfield of AI where you’re trying to make sequential decisions in a certain potentially noisy environment. There’s a lot of ways we could go down that, but fine-tuning language models where they can generate an answer and then you check to see if the answer matches the true solution. For math or code you have an exactly correct answer for math, you can have unit tests for code. And what we’re doing is we are checking the language model’s work and we’re giving it multiple opportunities on the same questions to see if it is right. And if you keep doing this, the models can learn to improve in verifiable domains to a great extent. It works really well. It’s a newer technique in the academic literature. It’s been used at frontier labs in the US that don’t share every detail for multiple years. This is the idea of using reinforcement learning with language models and it has been taking off especially in this DeepSeek moment.
Lex Fridman
And we should say that there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on again across the stack, but the post-training probably this year, there’s going to be a lot of interesting developments in the post-training. We’ll talk about it. I almost forgot to talk about the difference between DeepSeek-V3 and R1 on the user experience side. Forget the technical stuff, forget all of that, just people that don’t know anything about AI, they show up. What’s the actual experience, what’s the use case for each one when they actually type and talk to it? What is each good at and that kind of thing?
And we should say that there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on again across the stack, but the post-training probably this year, there’s going to be a lot of interesting developments in the post-training. We’ll talk about it. I almost forgot to talk about the difference between DeepSeek-V3 and R1 on the user experience side. Forget the technical stuff, forget all of that, just people that don’t know anything about AI, they show up. What’s the actual experience, what’s the use case for each one when they actually type and talk to it? What is each good at and that kind of thing?
Nathan Lambert
Let’s start with DeepSeek-V3, again it’s more people would tried something like it. You ask it a question, it’ll start generating tokens very fast and those tokens will look like a very human legible answer. It’ll be some sort of markdown list. It might have formatting to help you draw to the core details in the answer and it’ll generate tens to hundreds of tokens. A token is normally a word for common words or a sub word part in a longer word, and it’ll look like a very high quality Reddit or Stack Overflow answer. These models are really getting good at doing these across a wide variety of domains, I think. Even things that if you’re an expert, things that are close to the fringe of knowledge, they will still be fairly good at, I think.
Let’s start with DeepSeek-V3, again it’s more people would tried something like it. You ask it a question, it’ll start generating tokens very fast and those tokens will look like a very human legible answer. It’ll be some sort of markdown list. It might have formatting to help you draw to the core details in the answer and it’ll generate tens to hundreds of tokens. A token is normally a word for common words or a sub word part in a longer word, and it’ll look like a very high quality Reddit or Stack Overflow answer. These models are really getting good at doing these across a wide variety of domains, I think. Even things that if you’re an expert, things that are close to the fringe of knowledge, they will still be fairly good at, I think.
Cutting edge AI topics that I do research on, these models are capable for study aid and they’re regularly updated. Where this changes is with the DeepSeek- R1, what is called these reasoning models is when you see tokens coming from these models to start, it will be a large chain of thought process. We’ll get back to chain of thought in a second, which looks like a lot of tokens where the model is explaining the problem. The model will often break down the problem and be like, okay, they asked me for this. Let’s break down the problem. I’m going to need to do this. And you’ll see all of this generating from the model. It’ll come very fast in most user experiences. These APIs are very fast, so you’ll see a lot of tokens, a lot of words show up really fast, it’ll keep flowing on the screen and this is all the reasoning process.
And then eventually the model will change its tone in R1 and it’ll write the answer where it summarizes its reasoning process and writes a similar answer to the first types of model. But in DeepSeek’s case, which is part of why this was so popular even outside the AI community, is that you can see how the language model is breaking down problems. And then you get this answer, on a technical side they train the model to do this specifically where they have a section which is reasoning, and then it generates a special token, which is probably hidden from the user most of the time, which says, okay, I’m starting the answer. The model is trained to do this two stage process on its own. If you use a similar model in say, OpenAI, OpenAI’s user interface is trying to summarize this process for you nicely by showing the sections that the model is doing and it’ll click through, it’ll say breaking down the problem, making X calculation, cleaning the result, and then the answer will come for something like OpenAI.
Lex Fridman
Maybe it’s useful here to go through an example of a DeepSeek-R1 reasoning.
Maybe it’s useful here to go through an example of a DeepSeek-R1 reasoning.
Nathan Lambert
If you’re looking at the screen here, what you’ll see is a screenshot of the DeepSeek chat app, and at the top is thought for 157 seconds with the drop-down arrow. Underneath that if we were in an app that we were running, the drop-down arrow would have the reasoning.
If you’re looking at the screen here, what you’ll see is a screenshot of the DeepSeek chat app, and at the top is thought for 157 seconds with the drop-down arrow. Underneath that if we were in an app that we were running, the drop-down arrow would have the reasoning.
Lex Fridman
In this case, the specific question which I’m philosophically/ pothead inclined, so this is asking DeepSeek-R1 for one truly novel insight about humans. And it reveals the reasoning and basically the truly novel aspect is what’s pushing the reasoning to constantly… The model asking itself, is this truly novel? It’s actually challenging itself to be more novel, more counterintuitive, less cringe, I suppose. Some of the reasoning says… This is just snapshots. Alternatively, humans have a unique meta-emotion where they feel emotions about their own emotions e.g. feeling guilty about being angry. This recursive emotional layering creates complex motivational drives that don’t exist in other animals. The insight is that human emotions are nested. It’s reasoning through how humans feel emotions, it’s reasoning about meta emotions.
In this case, the specific question which I’m philosophically/ pothead inclined, so this is asking DeepSeek-R1 for one truly novel insight about humans. And it reveals the reasoning and basically the truly novel aspect is what’s pushing the reasoning to constantly… The model asking itself, is this truly novel? It’s actually challenging itself to be more novel, more counterintuitive, less cringe, I suppose. Some of the reasoning says… This is just snapshots. Alternatively, humans have a unique meta-emotion where they feel emotions about their own emotions e.g. feeling guilty about being angry. This recursive emotional layering creates complex motivational drives that don’t exist in other animals. The insight is that human emotions are nested. It’s reasoning through how humans feel emotions, it’s reasoning about meta emotions.
Nathan Lambert
It’s going to have pages and pages of this. It’s almost too much to actually read, but it’s nice to skim as it’s coming.
It’s going to have pages and pages of this. It’s almost too much to actually read, but it’s nice to skim as it’s coming.
Lex Fridman
It’s a James Joyce like stream of consciousness. And then it goes, wait, the user wants something that’s not seen anywhere else. Let me dig deeper. And consider the human ability to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously. Cognitive dissonance is known, but perhaps the function is to allow flexible adaptation, so on and so forth. That really captures the public imagination that holy shit, this isn’t intelligence/almost like an inkling of sentience because you’re thinking through, you’re self-reflecting, you’re deliberating. And the final result of that after 157 seconds is, humans instinctively convert selfish desires into cooperative systems by collectively pretending abstract rules, money, laws, rights are real. These shared hallucinations act as quote “games” where competition is secretly redirected to benefit the group, turning conflict into society’s fuel. Pretty profound.
It’s a James Joyce like stream of consciousness. And then it goes, wait, the user wants something that’s not seen anywhere else. Let me dig deeper. And consider the human ability to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously. Cognitive dissonance is known, but perhaps the function is to allow flexible adaptation, so on and so forth. That really captures the public imagination that holy shit, this isn’t intelligence/almost like an inkling of sentience because you’re thinking through, you’re self-reflecting, you’re deliberating. And the final result of that after 157 seconds is, humans instinctively convert selfish desires into cooperative systems by collectively pretending abstract rules, money, laws, rights are real. These shared hallucinations act as quote “games” where competition is secretly redirected to benefit the group, turning conflict into society’s fuel. Pretty profound.
Nathan Lambert
This is a potential digression, but a lot of people have found that these reasoning models can sometimes produce much more eloquent text. That is a at least interesting example I think depending on how open-minded you are, you find language models interesting or not, and there’s a spectrum there.
This is a potential digression, but a lot of people have found that these reasoning models can sometimes produce much more eloquent text. That is a at least interesting example I think depending on how open-minded you are, you find language models interesting or not, and there’s a spectrum there.
Lex Fridman
We’ll talk about different benchmarks and so on but some has just a vibe. That in itself is a, let’s say quote “fire” tweet. If I’m trying to produce something where people are like, “Oh, shit.” Okay, so that’s a chance probably return to it more. How were they able to achieve such low cost on the training and the inference? Maybe you could talk to the training first.
We’ll talk about different benchmarks and so on but some has just a vibe. That in itself is a, let’s say quote “fire” tweet. If I’m trying to produce something where people are like, “Oh, shit.” Okay, so that’s a chance probably return to it more. How were they able to achieve such low cost on the training and the inference? Maybe you could talk to the training first.
Low cost of training
Dylan Patel
There’s two main techniques that they implemented that are probably the majority of their efficiency, and then there’s a lot of implementation details that maybe we’ll gloss over or get into later that contribute to it. But those two main things are, one is they went to a mixture of experts model, which we’ll define in a second. And then the other thing is that they invented this new technique called MLA, latent attention. Both of these are big deals. Mixture of experts is something that’s been in the literature for a handful of years. And OpenAI with GPT-4 was the first one to productize a mixture of experts model. And what this means is when you look at the common models around that most people have been able to interact with that are open, think Llama. Llama is a dense model i.e. every single parameter or neuron is activated as you’re going through the model for every single token you generate.
There’s two main techniques that they implemented that are probably the majority of their efficiency, and then there’s a lot of implementation details that maybe we’ll gloss over or get into later that contribute to it. But those two main things are, one is they went to a mixture of experts model, which we’ll define in a second. And then the other thing is that they invented this new technique called MLA, latent attention. Both of these are big deals. Mixture of experts is something that’s been in the literature for a handful of years. And OpenAI with GPT-4 was the first one to productize a mixture of experts model. And what this means is when you look at the common models around that most people have been able to interact with that are open, think Llama. Llama is a dense model i.e. every single parameter or neuron is activated as you’re going through the model for every single token you generate.
Now, with a mixture of experts model, you don’t do that. How does the human actually work? Is like, oh, well my visual cortex is active when I’m thinking about vision tasks and other things. My amygdala is when I’m scared. These different aspects of your brain are focused on different things. A mixture of experts, models attempts to approximate this to some extent. It’s nowhere close to what a brain architecture is, but different portions of the model activate. You’ll have a set number of experts in the model and a set number that are activated each time. And this dramatically reduces both your training and inference costs because now if you think about the parameter count as the total embedding space for all of this knowledge that you’re compressing down during training, one, you’re embedding this data in instead of having to activate every single parameter, every single time you’re training or running inference, now you can just activate on a subset and the model will learn which expert to route to for different tasks.
And so this is a humongous innovation in terms of, hey, I can continue to grow the total embedding space of parameters. And so DeepSeek’s model is 600 something billion parameters, relative to Llama 405B, it’s 405 billion parameters, relative to Llama 70B, it’s 70 billion parameters. This model technically has more embedding space for information to compress all of the world’s knowledge that’s on the internet down. But at the same time, it is only activating around 37 billion of the parameters, so only 37 billion of these parameters actually need to be computed every single time you’re training data or inferencing data out of it. Versus again, the Llama model, 70 billion parameters must be activated or 405 billion parameters must be activated, so you’ve dramatically reduced your compute cost when you’re doing training and inference with this mixture of experts architecture.
Nathan Lambert
Should we break down where it actually applies and go into the transformer? Is that useful?
Should we break down where it actually applies and go into the transformer? Is that useful?
Lex Fridman
Let’s go. Let’s go into the transformer.
Let’s go. Let’s go into the transformer.
Nathan Lambert
The transformer is a thing that is talked about a lot, and we will not cover every detail. Essentially the transformer is built on repeated blocks of this attention mechanism and then a traditional dense fully connected multilayer perception, whatever word you want to use for your normal neural network. And you alternate these blocks. There’s other details and where mixture of experts is applied is at this dense model. The dense model holds most of the weights if you count them in a transformer model, so you can get really big gains from those mixture of experts on parameter efficiency at training and inference because you get this efficiency by not activating all of these parameters.
The transformer is a thing that is talked about a lot, and we will not cover every detail. Essentially the transformer is built on repeated blocks of this attention mechanism and then a traditional dense fully connected multilayer perception, whatever word you want to use for your normal neural network. And you alternate these blocks. There’s other details and where mixture of experts is applied is at this dense model. The dense model holds most of the weights if you count them in a transformer model, so you can get really big gains from those mixture of experts on parameter efficiency at training and inference because you get this efficiency by not activating all of these parameters.
Lex Fridman
We should also say that a transformer is a giant neural network.
We should also say that a transformer is a giant neural network.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And then there’s, for 15 years now, there’s what’s called the deep learning revolution. Network’s gotten larger and larger. At a certain point, the scaling laws appeared where people realized-
And then there’s, for 15 years now, there’s what’s called the deep learning revolution. Network’s gotten larger and larger. At a certain point, the scaling laws appeared where people realized-
Dylan Patel
This is a scaling law shirt by the way.
This is a scaling law shirt by the way.
Lex Fridman
Representing scaling laws. Where it became more and more formalized that bigger is better across multiple dimensions of what bigger means. But these are all neural networks we’re talking about, and we’re talking about different architectures of how to construct these neural networks such that the training and the inference on them is super efficient.
Representing scaling laws. Where it became more and more formalized that bigger is better across multiple dimensions of what bigger means. But these are all neural networks we’re talking about, and we’re talking about different architectures of how to construct these neural networks such that the training and the inference on them is super efficient.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. Every different type of model has a different scaling law for it, which is effectively for how much compute you put in the architecture will get to different levels of performance at test tasks. And mixture of experts is one of the ones at training time even if you don’t consider the inference benefits, which are also big. At training time, your efficiency with your GPUs is dramatically improved by using this architecture if it is well implemented. You can get effectively the same performance model and evaluation scores with numbers like 30% less compute, I think. There’s going to be a wide variation depending on your implementation details and stuff. But it is just important to realize that this type of technical innovation is something that gives huge gains. And I expect most companies that are serving their models to move to this mixture of experts implementation. Historically, the reason why not everyone might do it is because it’s an implementation complexity, especially when doing these big models.
Yeah. Every different type of model has a different scaling law for it, which is effectively for how much compute you put in the architecture will get to different levels of performance at test tasks. And mixture of experts is one of the ones at training time even if you don’t consider the inference benefits, which are also big. At training time, your efficiency with your GPUs is dramatically improved by using this architecture if it is well implemented. You can get effectively the same performance model and evaluation scores with numbers like 30% less compute, I think. There’s going to be a wide variation depending on your implementation details and stuff. But it is just important to realize that this type of technical innovation is something that gives huge gains. And I expect most companies that are serving their models to move to this mixture of experts implementation. Historically, the reason why not everyone might do it is because it’s an implementation complexity, especially when doing these big models.
This is one of the things that DeepSeek gets credit for is they do this extremely well. They do a mixture of experts extremely well. This architecture for what is called DeepSeek MoE, MoE is the shortened version of mixture of experts, is multiple papers old. This part of their training infrastructure is not new to these models alone. And same goes for what Dylan mentioned with multi-head latent attention. This is all about reducing memory usage during inference and same things during training by using some fancy low rank approximation math. If you get into the details with this latent attention, it’s one of those things I look at and it’s like, okay, they’re doing really complex implementations because there’s other parts of language models such as embeddings that are used to extend the context length, the common one that DeepSeek used is rotary positional embeddings, which is called RoPE.
And if you want to use RoPE with a normal MoE, it’s a sequential thing, you take two of the attention matrices and you rotate them by a complex value rotation, which is a matrix multiplication. With DeepSeek’s MLA, with this new attention architecture, they need to do some clever things because they’re not set up the same and it just makes the implementation complexity much higher. They’re managing all of these things, and these are probably the sort of things that OpenAI these closed labs are doing. We don’t know if they’re doing the exact same techniques, but they actually shared them with the world, which is really nice to be like, this is the cutting edge of efficient language model training.
Lex Fridman
And some of this requires low level engineering, just it is a giant mess in trickery. As I understand they went below CUDA, so they go super low programming of GPUs.
And some of this requires low level engineering, just it is a giant mess in trickery. As I understand they went below CUDA, so they go super low programming of GPUs.
Dylan Patel
Effectively, Nvidia builds this library called NCCL, in which when you’re training a model, you have all these communications between every single layer of the model, and you may have over a hundred layers.
Effectively, Nvidia builds this library called NCCL, in which when you’re training a model, you have all these communications between every single layer of the model, and you may have over a hundred layers.
Nathan Lambert
What does NCCL stand for? It’s NCCL.
What does NCCL stand for? It’s NCCL.
Dylan Patel
Nvidia Communications Collectives Library.
Nvidia Communications Collectives Library.
Lex Fridman
Nice. Damn.
Nice. Damn.
Dylan Patel
And so when you’re training a model, you’re going to have all these allreducers and allgathers, between each layer, between the multilayer perceptron or feed-forward network and the attention mechanism, you’ll have basically the model synchronized. Or you’ll have allreduce and allgather. And this is a communication between all the GPUs in the network, whether it’s in training or inference, so Nvidia has a standard library. This is one of the reasons why it’s really difficult to use anyone else’s hardware for training is because no one’s really built a standard communications library. And Nvidia has done this at a sort of a higher level. DeepSeek because they have certain limitations around the GPUs that they have access to, the interconnects are limited to some extent by the restrictions of the GPUs that were shipped into China legally, not the ones that are smuggled but legally shipped in that they used to train this model, they had to figure out how to get efficiencies. And one of those things is that instead of just calling the NVIDIA library NCCL, they scheduled their own communications, which some of the labs do.
And so when you’re training a model, you’re going to have all these allreducers and allgathers, between each layer, between the multilayer perceptron or feed-forward network and the attention mechanism, you’ll have basically the model synchronized. Or you’ll have allreduce and allgather. And this is a communication between all the GPUs in the network, whether it’s in training or inference, so Nvidia has a standard library. This is one of the reasons why it’s really difficult to use anyone else’s hardware for training is because no one’s really built a standard communications library. And Nvidia has done this at a sort of a higher level. DeepSeek because they have certain limitations around the GPUs that they have access to, the interconnects are limited to some extent by the restrictions of the GPUs that were shipped into China legally, not the ones that are smuggled but legally shipped in that they used to train this model, they had to figure out how to get efficiencies. And one of those things is that instead of just calling the NVIDIA library NCCL, they scheduled their own communications, which some of the labs do.
Meta talked about in Llama 3, how they made their own custom version of NCCL. They didn’t talk about the implementation details. This is some of what they did, probably not as well as… Maybe not as well as DeepSeek because DeepSeek, necessity is the mother of innovation and they had to do this. OpenAI has people that do this sort of stuff, Anthropic, et cetera. But DeepSeek certainly did it publicly and they may have done it even better because they were gimped on a certain aspect of the chips that they have access to. And so they scheduled communications by scheduling specific SMs. SMs you could think of as the core on a GPU. There’s hundreds of cores or there’s a bit over a hundred cores SMs on a GPU. And they were specifically scheduling, hey, which ones are running the model? Which ones are doing allreduce? Which one are doing allgather? And they would flip back and forth between them. And this requires extremely low level programming.
Nathan Lambert
This is what NCCL does automatically or other Nvidia libraries handle this automatically usually.
This is what NCCL does automatically or other Nvidia libraries handle this automatically usually.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, exactly. And so technically they’re using PTX which is, you could think of it as an assembly type language. It’s not exactly that or instruction set, like coding directly to assembly or instruction set. It’s not exactly that, but that’s still part of technically CUDA. But it’s like, do I want to write in Python, PyTorch equivalent and call Nvidia libraries? Do I want to go down to the C level and code even lower level, or do I want to go all the way down to the assembly or ISO level? And there are cases where you go all the way down there at the very big labs, but most companies just do not do that because it’s a waste of time and the efficiency gains you get are not worth it. But-
Yeah, exactly. And so technically they’re using PTX which is, you could think of it as an assembly type language. It’s not exactly that or instruction set, like coding directly to assembly or instruction set. It’s not exactly that, but that’s still part of technically CUDA. But it’s like, do I want to write in Python, PyTorch equivalent and call Nvidia libraries? Do I want to go down to the C level and code even lower level, or do I want to go all the way down to the assembly or ISO level? And there are cases where you go all the way down there at the very big labs, but most companies just do not do that because it’s a waste of time and the efficiency gains you get are not worth it. But-
Dylan Patel
It’s a waste of time and the efficiency gains you get are not worth it. But DeepSeek’s implementation is so complex, especially with their mixture of experts. People have done mixture of experts, but they’re generally eight, 16 experts and they activate two. So, one of the words that we like to use is sparsity factor or usage.
It’s a waste of time and the efficiency gains you get are not worth it. But DeepSeek’s implementation is so complex, especially with their mixture of experts. People have done mixture of experts, but they’re generally eight, 16 experts and they activate two. So, one of the words that we like to use is sparsity factor or usage.
So, you might have 1/4th of your model activate, and that’s what Mistral’s Mixtral model, right? They’re a model that really catapulted them to like, “Oh, my God. They’re really, really good.” OpenAI has also had models that are MoE and so have all the other labs that are major closed. But what DeepSeek did that maybe only the leading labs have only just started recently doing is have such a high sparsity factor, right? It’s not 1/4th of the model, right? Two out of eight experts activating every time you go through the model, it’s eight out of 256.
Nathan Lambert
And there’s different implementations for mixture of experts where you can have some of these experts that are always activated, which this just looks like a small neural network, and then all the tokens go through that and then they also go through some that are selected by this routing mechanism.
And there’s different implementations for mixture of experts where you can have some of these experts that are always activated, which this just looks like a small neural network, and then all the tokens go through that and then they also go through some that are selected by this routing mechanism.
And one of the innovations in DeepSeek’s architecture is that they change the routing mechanism and mixture of expert models. There’s something called an auxiliary loss, which effectively means during training, you want to make sure that all of these experts are used across the tasks that the model sees.
Why there can be failures in mixture of experts is that when you’re doing this training, one objective is token prediction accuracy. And if you just let turning go with a mixture of expert model on your own, it can be that the model learns to only use a subset of the experts. And in the MoE literature, there’s something called the auxiliary loss which helps balance them.
But if you think about the loss functions of deep learning, this even connects to The Bitter Lesson, is that you want to have the minimum inductive bias in your model to let the model learn maximally. And this auxiliary loss, this balancing across experts could be seen as intention with the prediction accuracy of the tokens.
So we don’t know the exact extent that the DeepSeek MoE change, which is instead of doing an auxiliary loss, they have an extra parameter in their routing, which after the batches, they update this parameter to make sure that the next batches all have a similar use of experts. And this type of change can be big, it can be small, but they add up over time. And this is the sort of thing that just points to them innovating.
And I’m sure all the labs that are training big MoEs are looking at this sort of things, which is getting away from the auxiliary loss. Some of them might already use it, but you keep accumulating gains. And we’ll talk about the philosophy of training and how you organize these organizations. And a lot of it is just compounding small improvements over time in your data, in your architecture, in your post-training and how they integrate with each other.
DeepSeek does the same thing and some of them are shared, or a lot. We have to take them on face value that they share their most important details. I mean, the architecture and the weights are out there, so we’re seeing what they’re doing and it adds up.
Dylan Patel
Going back to the efficiency and complexity point, right? It’s 32 versus a four, right, for Mixtral and other MoE models that have been publicly released? So this ratio is extremely high. And what Nathan was getting at there was when you have such a different level of sparsity, you can’t just have every GPU have the entire model, right? The model’s too big, there’s too much complexity there. So you have to split up the model with different types of parallelism, right?
Going back to the efficiency and complexity point, right? It’s 32 versus a four, right, for Mixtral and other MoE models that have been publicly released? So this ratio is extremely high. And what Nathan was getting at there was when you have such a different level of sparsity, you can’t just have every GPU have the entire model, right? The model’s too big, there’s too much complexity there. So you have to split up the model with different types of parallelism, right?
And so you might have different experts on different GPU nodes, but now what happens when this set of data that you get, “Hey, all of it looks like this one way and all of it should route to one part of my model.” So when all of it routes to one part of the model, then you can have this overloading of a certain set of the GPU resources or a certain set of the GPUs and then the rest of the training network sits idle because all of the tokens are just routing to that.
So this is the biggest complexity, one of the big complexities with running a very sparse mixture of experts model i.e., this 32 ratio versus this four ratio, is that you end up with so many of the experts just sitting there idle. So how do I load balance between them? How do I schedule the communications between them? This is a lot of the extremely low-level, detailed work that they figured out in the public first, and potentially second or third in the world and maybe even first in some cases.
Lex Fridman
What lesson do you, in the direction of The Bitter Lesson do you take from all of this? Is this going to be the direction where a lot of the gain is going to be, which is this kind of low-level optimization or is this a short-term thing where the biggest gains will be more on the algorithmic high-level side of post-training?
What lesson do you, in the direction of The Bitter Lesson do you take from all of this? Is this going to be the direction where a lot of the gain is going to be, which is this kind of low-level optimization or is this a short-term thing where the biggest gains will be more on the algorithmic high-level side of post-training?
Is this a short-term leap because they’ve figured out a hack because constraints necessitate the mother of invention or is there still a lot of gains?
Nathan Lambert
I think we should summarize what The Bitter Lesson actually is about, is that The Bitter Lesson essentially, if you paraphrase it, is that the types of training that will win out in deep learning as we go are those methods that which are scalable in learning and search, is what it calls out.
I think we should summarize what The Bitter Lesson actually is about, is that The Bitter Lesson essentially, if you paraphrase it, is that the types of training that will win out in deep learning as we go are those methods that which are scalable in learning and search, is what it calls out.
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
And therefore, we were talking about relatively small implementation changes to the mixture of experts model. And therefore it’s like, “Okay, we will need a few more years to know if one of these were actually really crucial to The Bitter Lesson,” but The Bitter Lesson is really this long-term arc of how simplicity can often win.
And there’s a lot of sayings in the industry, “The models just want to learn. You have to give them the simple loss landscape where you put compute through the model and they will learn, and getting barriers out of the way.”
Lex Fridman
That’s where the power of something like nickel comes in, where standardized code that could be used by a lot of people to create simple innovations that can scale, which is why the hacks, I imagine, the code base for DeepSeek is probably a giant mess.
That’s where the power of something like nickel comes in, where standardized code that could be used by a lot of people to create simple innovations that can scale, which is why the hacks, I imagine, the code base for DeepSeek is probably a giant mess.
Nathan Lambert
I’m sure DeepSeek definitely has code bases that are extremely messy, where they’re testing these new ideas. Multi-head latent attention probably could start in something like a Jupyter Notebook, or somebody tries something on a few GPUs and that is really messy. But the stuff that trains the DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek-R1, those libraries, if you were to present them to us, I would guess are extremely high-quality code.
I’m sure DeepSeek definitely has code bases that are extremely messy, where they’re testing these new ideas. Multi-head latent attention probably could start in something like a Jupyter Notebook, or somebody tries something on a few GPUs and that is really messy. But the stuff that trains the DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek-R1, those libraries, if you were to present them to us, I would guess are extremely high-quality code.
Lex Fridman
So, high-quality, readable code. Yeah.
So, high-quality, readable code. Yeah.
Dylan Patel
I think there is one aspect to note though is that there is the general ability for that to transfer across different types of runs. You may make really, really high-quality code for one specific model architecture at one size, and then that is not transferable to, ” Hey, when I make this architecture tweak, everything’s broken again,” right?
I think there is one aspect to note though is that there is the general ability for that to transfer across different types of runs. You may make really, really high-quality code for one specific model architecture at one size, and then that is not transferable to, ” Hey, when I make this architecture tweak, everything’s broken again,” right?
That’s something that could be with their specific low-level coding of scheduling SMs is specific to this model architecture and size. Whereas, Nvidia’s Collectives Library is more like, “Hey, it’ll work for anything,” right? “You want to do an allreduce? Great, I don’t care what your model architecture is, it’ll work,” and you’re giving up a lot of performance when you do that in many cases, but it’s worthwhile for them to do the specific optimization for the specific run given the constraints that they have regarding compute.
Lex Fridman
I wonder how stressful it is to these frontier models, like initiate training to have the code-
I wonder how stressful it is to these frontier models, like initiate training to have the code-
Dylan Patel
Push the button.
Push the button.
Lex Fridman
… to push the button that you’re now spending a large amount of money and time to train this. I mean, there must be a lot of innovation on the debugging stage of making sure there’s no issues, that you’re monitoring and visualizing every aspect of the training, all that kind of stuff.
… to push the button that you’re now spending a large amount of money and time to train this. I mean, there must be a lot of innovation on the debugging stage of making sure there’s no issues, that you’re monitoring and visualizing every aspect of the training, all that kind of stuff.
Dylan Patel
When people are training, they have all these various dashboards, but the most simple one is your loss, right? And it continues to go down, but in reality, especially with more complicated stuff like MoE, the biggest problem with it, or FP8 training, which is another innovation, going to a lower precision number format i.e., less accurate is that you end up with loss spikes. And no one knows why the loss spike happened. And for a long-
When people are training, they have all these various dashboards, but the most simple one is your loss, right? And it continues to go down, but in reality, especially with more complicated stuff like MoE, the biggest problem with it, or FP8 training, which is another innovation, going to a lower precision number format i.e., less accurate is that you end up with loss spikes. And no one knows why the loss spike happened. And for a long-
Nathan Lambert
Some of them, you do.
Some of them, you do.
Dylan Patel
Some of them, you do.
Some of them, you do.
Nathan Lambert
Some of them are bad data. Can I give Ai2’s example of what blew up our earlier models is a Subreddit called microwavegang. We love to shout this out. It’s a real thing. You can pull up microwavegang. Essentially it’s a Subreddit where everybody makes posts that are just the letter M. So it’s like, mmm. So there’s extremely long sequences of the letter M and then the comments are like beep beep because it’s in the micro events.
Some of them are bad data. Can I give Ai2’s example of what blew up our earlier models is a Subreddit called microwavegang. We love to shout this out. It’s a real thing. You can pull up microwavegang. Essentially it’s a Subreddit where everybody makes posts that are just the letter M. So it’s like, mmm. So there’s extremely long sequences of the letter M and then the comments are like beep beep because it’s in the micro events.
Dylan Patel
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nathan Lambert
But if you pass this into a model that’s trained to be a normal producing text, it’s extremely high-loss because normally you see an M, you don’t predict Ms for a long time. So this is something that caused loss spikes for us. But when you have much … This is old, this is not recent. And when you have more mature data systems, that’s not the thing that causes the loss spike. And what Dylan is saying is true, but it’s levels to this sort of idea.
But if you pass this into a model that’s trained to be a normal producing text, it’s extremely high-loss because normally you see an M, you don’t predict Ms for a long time. So this is something that caused loss spikes for us. But when you have much … This is old, this is not recent. And when you have more mature data systems, that’s not the thing that causes the loss spike. And what Dylan is saying is true, but it’s levels to this sort of idea.
Dylan Patel
With regards to the stress, these people are like … You’ll go out to dinner with a friend that works at one of these labs and they’ll just be looking at their phone every 10 minutes and they’re not … You know, it’s one thing if they’re texting, but they’re just like, “Is the loss … Is the loss spike okay?”
With regards to the stress, these people are like … You’ll go out to dinner with a friend that works at one of these labs and they’ll just be looking at their phone every 10 minutes and they’re not … You know, it’s one thing if they’re texting, but they’re just like, “Is the loss … Is the loss spike okay?”
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. It’s like tokens per second. Loss not blown up. They’re just watching this.
Yeah. It’s like tokens per second. Loss not blown up. They’re just watching this.
Lex Fridman
And the heart rate goes up if there’s a spike.
And the heart rate goes up if there’s a spike.
Dylan Patel
And some level of spikes is normal, it’ll recover and be back. Sometimes a lot of the old strategy was like, you just stop the run, restart from the old version and then change the data mix and then it keeps going.
And some level of spikes is normal, it’ll recover and be back. Sometimes a lot of the old strategy was like, you just stop the run, restart from the old version and then change the data mix and then it keeps going.
Nathan Lambert
There are even different types of spikes. So Dirk Groeneveld has a theory today too, that’s like fast spikes and slow spikes, where there are, sometimes where you’re looking at the loss and there are other parameters, you could see it start to creep up and then blow up, and that’s really hard to recover from. So you have to go back much further.
There are even different types of spikes. So Dirk Groeneveld has a theory today too, that’s like fast spikes and slow spikes, where there are, sometimes where you’re looking at the loss and there are other parameters, you could see it start to creep up and then blow up, and that’s really hard to recover from. So you have to go back much further.
So you have the stressful period where it’s flat or it might start going up and you’re like, “What do I do?” Whereas, there are also loss spikes that are, it looks good and then there’s one spiky data point. And what you could do is you just skip those. You see that there’s a spike. You’re like, “Okay, I can ignore this data. Don’t update the model and do the next one, and it’ll recover quickly.”
But on trickier implementations, so as you get more complex in your architecture and you scale up to more GPUs, you have more potential for your loss blowing up. So it’s like, there’s a distribution.
Dylan Patel
And then the whole idea of grokking also comes in, right? It’s like, just because it slowed down from improving in loss doesn’t mean it’s not learning because all of a sudden it could be like this and it could just spike down in loss again because it truly learned something, right? And it took some time for it to learn that. It’s not a gradual process, and that’s what humans are like. That’s what models are like. So it’s really a stressful task, as you mentioned.
And then the whole idea of grokking also comes in, right? It’s like, just because it slowed down from improving in loss doesn’t mean it’s not learning because all of a sudden it could be like this and it could just spike down in loss again because it truly learned something, right? And it took some time for it to learn that. It’s not a gradual process, and that’s what humans are like. That’s what models are like. So it’s really a stressful task, as you mentioned.
Lex Fridman
And the whole time the dollar count is going up.
And the whole time the dollar count is going up.
Nathan Lambert
Every company has failed runs. You need failed run to push the envelope on your infrastructure. So, a lot of news cycles are made of X company had Y failed run. Every company that’s trying to push the frontier of AI has these. So yes, it’s noteworthy because it’s a lot of money and it can be week to a month setback, but it is part of the process.
Every company has failed runs. You need failed run to push the envelope on your infrastructure. So, a lot of news cycles are made of X company had Y failed run. Every company that’s trying to push the frontier of AI has these. So yes, it’s noteworthy because it’s a lot of money and it can be week to a month setback, but it is part of the process.
Lex Fridman
But if you’re DeepSeek, how do you get to a place where holy shit, there’s a successful combination of hyperparameters?
But if you’re DeepSeek, how do you get to a place where holy shit, there’s a successful combination of hyperparameters?
Nathan Lambert
A lot of small failed runs.
A lot of small failed runs.
Lex Fridman
So, rapid iteration through failed runs until-
So, rapid iteration through failed runs until-
Nathan Lambert
And successful ones.
And successful ones.
Lex Fridman
And then you build up some intuition, like this mixture of expert works and then this implementation of MLA works.
And then you build up some intuition, like this mixture of expert works and then this implementation of MLA works.
Nathan Lambert
Key hyperparameters, like learning rate and regularization and things like this, and you find the regime that works for your code base. Talking to people at Frontier Labs, there’s a story that you can tell where training language models is kind of a path that you need to follow. So you need to unlock the ability to train a certain type of model or a certain scale, and then your code base and your internal know-how of which hyperparameters work for IT is kind of known.
Key hyperparameters, like learning rate and regularization and things like this, and you find the regime that works for your code base. Talking to people at Frontier Labs, there’s a story that you can tell where training language models is kind of a path that you need to follow. So you need to unlock the ability to train a certain type of model or a certain scale, and then your code base and your internal know-how of which hyperparameters work for IT is kind of known.
And you look at the DeepSeek papers and models, they’ve scaled up, they’ve added complexity, and it’s just continuing to build the capabilities that they have.
Dylan Patel
There’s the concept of a YOLO run. So YOLO, you only live once.
There’s the concept of a YOLO run. So YOLO, you only live once.
Lex Fridman
Yep.
Yep.
Dylan Patel
What it is, is there’s all this experimentation you do at the small scale, research ablations. You have your Jupyter Notebook where you’re experimenting with MLA on three GPUs or whatever and you’re doing all these different things like, “Hey, do I do four active experts, 128 experts? Do I arrange the experts this way?” All these different model architecture things, you’re testing at a very small scale. Right?
What it is, is there’s all this experimentation you do at the small scale, research ablations. You have your Jupyter Notebook where you’re experimenting with MLA on three GPUs or whatever and you’re doing all these different things like, “Hey, do I do four active experts, 128 experts? Do I arrange the experts this way?” All these different model architecture things, you’re testing at a very small scale. Right?
A couple of researchers, few GPUs, tens of GPUs, hundreds of GPUs, whatever it is. And then all of a sudden you’re like, “Okay, guys. No more fucking around. No more screwing around. Everyone, take all the resources we have. Let’s pick what we think will work and just go for it. YOLO.”
And this is where that sort of stress comes in is like, “Well, I know it works here, but some things that work here don’t work here. And some things that work here don’t work down here in this terms of scale.” So it’s really truly a YOLO run. And there’s this discussion of certain researchers just have this methodical nature. They can find the whole search space and figure out all the ablations of different research and really see what is best. And there’s certain researchers who just have that innate gut instinct of like, “This is the YOLO run. I’m looking at the data. I think this is it.”
Nathan Lambert
This is why you want to work in post-training because the GPU cost for training is lower. So you can make a higher percentage of your training runs YOLO runs.
This is why you want to work in post-training because the GPU cost for training is lower. So you can make a higher percentage of your training runs YOLO runs.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
For now.
For now.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, for now.
Yeah, for now.
Nathan Lambert
For now. For now.
For now. For now.
Lex Fridman
So some of this is fundamentally luck, still.
So some of this is fundamentally luck, still.
Dylan Patel
Luck is skill, right, in many cases?
Luck is skill, right, in many cases?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean, it looks lucky, right, when you’re-
Yeah. I mean, it looks lucky, right, when you’re-
Nathan Lambert
But the hill to climb, if you’re on one of these labs, you have an evaluation you’re not crushing, there’s a repeated playbook of how you improve things. There are localized improvements, which might be data improvements. And these add up into the whole model just being much better.
But the hill to climb, if you’re on one of these labs, you have an evaluation you’re not crushing, there’s a repeated playbook of how you improve things. There are localized improvements, which might be data improvements. And these add up into the whole model just being much better.
And when you zoom in really close, it can be really obvious that this model is just really bad at this thing and we can fix it and you just add these up. So some of it feels like luck, but on the ground, especially with these new reasoning models we’re talking to is just so many ways that we could poke around. And normally, it’s that some of them give big improvements.
Dylan Patel
The search space is near infinite and yet the amount of compute and time you have is very low, and you have to hit release schedules. You have to not get blown past by everyone. Otherwise, what happened with DeepSeek crushing Meta and Mistral and Cohere and all these guys, they moved too slow. They maybe were too methodical. I don’t know, they didn’t hit the YOLO run. Whatever the reason was, maybe they weren’t as skilled. Whatever, you can call it luck if you want, but at the end of the day, it’s skill.
The search space is near infinite and yet the amount of compute and time you have is very low, and you have to hit release schedules. You have to not get blown past by everyone. Otherwise, what happened with DeepSeek crushing Meta and Mistral and Cohere and all these guys, they moved too slow. They maybe were too methodical. I don’t know, they didn’t hit the YOLO run. Whatever the reason was, maybe they weren’t as skilled. Whatever, you can call it luck if you want, but at the end of the day, it’s skill.
Lex Fridman
So 2025 is the year of the YOLO run. It seems like all the labs are going in.
So 2025 is the year of the YOLO run. It seems like all the labs are going in.
Dylan Patel
I think it’s even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, “Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model.” That is truly YOLO.
I think it’s even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, “Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model.” That is truly YOLO.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
Right?
Right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
Now people have all these training run failures that are in the media, right? It’s like, “Okay, great, but actually a huge chunk of my GPUs are doing inference. I still have a bunch doing research constantly. And yes, my biggest cluster is training, but on this YOLO run,” but that YOLO run is much less risky than what OpenAI did in 2022, or maybe what DeepSeek did now or sort of like, “Hey, we’re just going to throw everything at it.”
Now people have all these training run failures that are in the media, right? It’s like, “Okay, great, but actually a huge chunk of my GPUs are doing inference. I still have a bunch doing research constantly. And yes, my biggest cluster is training, but on this YOLO run,” but that YOLO run is much less risky than what OpenAI did in 2022, or maybe what DeepSeek did now or sort of like, “Hey, we’re just going to throw everything at it.”
Lex Fridman
The big winners throughout human history are the ones who are willing to do YOLO at some point. Okay. What do we understand about the hardware it’s been trained on, DeepSeek?
The big winners throughout human history are the ones who are willing to do YOLO at some point. Okay. What do we understand about the hardware it’s been trained on, DeepSeek?
DeepSeek compute cluster
Dylan Patel
DeepSeek is very interesting. This is where a second could take to zoom out, out of who they are first of all, right? High-Flyer is a hedge fund that has historically done quantitative trading in China as well as elsewhere. And they have always had a significant number of GPUs, right?
DeepSeek is very interesting. This is where a second could take to zoom out, out of who they are first of all, right? High-Flyer is a hedge fund that has historically done quantitative trading in China as well as elsewhere. And they have always had a significant number of GPUs, right?
In the past, a lot of these high-frequency trading, algorithmic quant traders used FPGAs, but it shifted to GPUs definitely. And there’s both, but GPUs especially. And High-Flyer, which is the hedge fund that owns DeepSeek, and everyone who works for DeepSeek is part of High-Flyer to some extent. Same parent company, same owner, same CEO, they had all these resources and infrastructure for trading, and then they devoted a humongous portion of them to training models, both language models and otherwise, because these techniques were heavily AI-influenced.
More recently, people have realized, “Hey, trading with …” Even when you go back to Renaissance and all these quantitative firms, natural language processing is the key to trading really fast, understanding a press release and making the right trade. And so DeepSeek has always been really good at this.
And even as far back as 2021, they have press releases and papers saying, “Hey, we’re the first company in China with an A100 cluster this large.” It was 10,000 A100 GPUs, right? This is in 2021. Now, this wasn’t all for training large language models. This was mostly for training models for their quantitative aspects, quantitative trading as well as a lot of that was natural language processing, to be clear. Right?
And so this is the sort of history, right? So verifiable fact is that in 2021, they built the largest cluster, at least they claim it was the largest cluster in China, 10,000 GPUs.
Nathan Lambert
Before export controls started.
Before export controls started.
Dylan Patel
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nathan Lambert
It’s like they’ve had a huge cluster before any conversation of export controls.
It’s like they’ve had a huge cluster before any conversation of export controls.
Dylan Patel
So then you step it forward to, what have they done over the last four years since then? Obviously, they’ve continued to operate the hedge fund, probably make tons of money. And the other thing is that they’ve leaned more and more and more into AI. The CEO, Lian Chingfeng … Lian-
So then you step it forward to, what have they done over the last four years since then? Obviously, they’ve continued to operate the hedge fund, probably make tons of money. And the other thing is that they’ve leaned more and more and more into AI. The CEO, Lian Chingfeng … Lian-
Nathan Lambert
You’re not putting me on the spot on this. We discussed this before.
You’re not putting me on the spot on this. We discussed this before.
Dylan Patel
Lian Feng, right, the CEO, he owns maybe … Lian Feng, he owns maybe a little bit more than half the company allegedly, is an extremely Elon, Jensen kind of figure where he’s just involved in everything. Right?
Lian Feng, right, the CEO, he owns maybe … Lian Feng, he owns maybe a little bit more than half the company allegedly, is an extremely Elon, Jensen kind of figure where he’s just involved in everything. Right?
And so over that time period, he’s gotten really in depth into AI. He actually has a bit of a, if you see some of his statements, a bit of an IAK vibe almost, right?
Nathan Lambert
Total AGI vibes, like, “We need to do this. We need to make a new ecosystem of OpenAI. We need China to lead on this sort of ecosystem because historically, the western countries have led on software ecosystems.” And straight up acknowledges, “In order to do this, we need to do something different.” DeepSeek is his way of doing this. Some of the translated interviews with him are fantastic.
Total AGI vibes, like, “We need to do this. We need to make a new ecosystem of OpenAI. We need China to lead on this sort of ecosystem because historically, the western countries have led on software ecosystems.” And straight up acknowledges, “In order to do this, we need to do something different.” DeepSeek is his way of doing this. Some of the translated interviews with him are fantastic.
Lex Fridman
So he has done interviews?
So he has done interviews?
Nathan Lambert
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Do you think you would do a western interview, or no, or is there controls on the channel?
Do you think you would do a western interview, or no, or is there controls on the channel?
Nathan Lambert
There hasn’t been one yet, but I would try it.
There hasn’t been one yet, but I would try it.
Lex Fridman
Okay. All right. Well, I just got a Chinese translator, so it was great. This is a push. So fascinating figure, engineer pushing full on into AI, leveraging the success from the high-frequency trading.
Okay. All right. Well, I just got a Chinese translator, so it was great. This is a push. So fascinating figure, engineer pushing full on into AI, leveraging the success from the high-frequency trading.
Nathan Lambert
Very direct quotes. “We will not switch to closed source,” when asked about this stuff. Very long-term motivated in how the ecosystem of AI should work. And I think from a Chinese perspective, he wants a Chinese company to build this vision.
Very direct quotes. “We will not switch to closed source,” when asked about this stuff. Very long-term motivated in how the ecosystem of AI should work. And I think from a Chinese perspective, he wants a Chinese company to build this vision.
Dylan Patel
And so this is sort of like the “visionary behind the company.” This hedge fund still exists, this quantitative firm. And so DeepSeek is the sort of … Slowly, he got turned to this full view of AI, everything about this, but at some point it slowly maneuvered and he made DeepSeek.
And so this is sort of like the “visionary behind the company.” This hedge fund still exists, this quantitative firm. And so DeepSeek is the sort of … Slowly, he got turned to this full view of AI, everything about this, but at some point it slowly maneuvered and he made DeepSeek.
And DeepSeek has done multiple models since then. They’ve acquired more and more GPUs. They share infrastructure with the fund. Right? And so there is no exact number of public GPU resources that they have. But besides this 10,000 GPUs that they bought in 2021, and they were fantastically profitable, and then this paper claims they did only 2,000 H800 GPUs, which are a restricted GPU that was previously allowed in China, but no longer allowed. And there’s a new version, but it’s basically Nvidia’s H100 for China.
And there’s some restrictions on it specifically around the communications sort of speed, the interconnect speed, which is why they had to do this crazy SM scheduling stuff. So going back to that, it’s like this is obviously not true in terms of their total GPU count.
Lex Fridman
Obvious available GPUs, but for this training run, you think 2,000 is the correct number, or no?
Obvious available GPUs, but for this training run, you think 2,000 is the correct number, or no?
Dylan Patel
So this is where it takes a significant amount of zoning in. What do you call your training run, right? You count all of the research and ablations that you ran, right? Picking all this stuff because yes, you can do a YOLO run, but at some level you have to do the test at the small scale and then you have to do some test at medium scale before you go to a large scale.
So this is where it takes a significant amount of zoning in. What do you call your training run, right? You count all of the research and ablations that you ran, right? Picking all this stuff because yes, you can do a YOLO run, but at some level you have to do the test at the small scale and then you have to do some test at medium scale before you go to a large scale.
Nathan Lambert
Accepted practice is that for any given model that is a notable advancement, you’re going to do two to 4x compute of the full training run in experiments alone.
Accepted practice is that for any given model that is a notable advancement, you’re going to do two to 4x compute of the full training run in experiments alone.
Lex Fridman
So a lot of this compute that’s being scaled up is probably used in large part at this time for research?
So a lot of this compute that’s being scaled up is probably used in large part at this time for research?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. And research begets the new ideas that lets you get huge efficiency.
Yeah. And research begets the new ideas that lets you get huge efficiency.
Nathan Lambert
Research gets you o1. Research gets you breakthroughs and you need to bet on it.
Research gets you o1. Research gets you breakthroughs and you need to bet on it.
Lex Fridman
So some of the pricing strategy that we’ll discuss has the research baked into the price?
So some of the pricing strategy that we’ll discuss has the research baked into the price?
Dylan Patel
So the numbers that DeepSeek specifically said publicly are just the 10,000 GPUs in 2021 and then 2,000 GPUs for only the pre-training for V3. They did not discuss cost on R1. They did not discuss cost on all the other RL for the instruct model that they made. They only discussed the pre-training for the base model and they did not discuss anything on research and ablations. And they do not talk about any of the resources that are shared in terms of, “Hey, the fund is using all these GPUs,” right?
So the numbers that DeepSeek specifically said publicly are just the 10,000 GPUs in 2021 and then 2,000 GPUs for only the pre-training for V3. They did not discuss cost on R1. They did not discuss cost on all the other RL for the instruct model that they made. They only discussed the pre-training for the base model and they did not discuss anything on research and ablations. And they do not talk about any of the resources that are shared in terms of, “Hey, the fund is using all these GPUs,” right?
And we know that they’re very profitable and they had 10,000 GPUs in 2021. So, some of the research that we’ve found is that we actually believe they have closer to 50,000 GPUs.
Lex Fridman
We as semi-analysis. So we should say that you’re sort of one of the world experts in figuring out what everybody’s doing in terms of the semiconductor, in terms of cluster buildouts, in terms of who is doing what in terms of training runs. So yeah, that’s the we. Okay, go ahead.
We as semi-analysis. So we should say that you’re sort of one of the world experts in figuring out what everybody’s doing in terms of the semiconductor, in terms of cluster buildouts, in terms of who is doing what in terms of training runs. So yeah, that’s the we. Okay, go ahead.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, sorry. We believe they actually have something closer to 50,000 GPUs, right? Now this is split across many tasks, right? Again, the fund, research and ablations.
Yeah, sorry. We believe they actually have something closer to 50,000 GPUs, right? Now this is split across many tasks, right? Again, the fund, research and ablations.
Nathan Lambert
For ballpark, how much would OpenAI or Anthropic had. I think the clearest example we have, because Meta is also open, they talk about order of 60k to 100k H100 equivalent GPUs in their training clusters.
For ballpark, how much would OpenAI or Anthropic had. I think the clearest example we have, because Meta is also open, they talk about order of 60k to 100k H100 equivalent GPUs in their training clusters.
Dylan Patel
Right. So Llama 3, they trained on 16,000 H100s, but the company of Meta last year publicly disclosed they bought 400 something thousand GPUs.
Right. So Llama 3, they trained on 16,000 H100s, but the company of Meta last year publicly disclosed they bought 400 something thousand GPUs.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
Right? So of course, tiny percentage on the training. Again, most of it is serving me the best Instagram Reels or whatever.
Right? So of course, tiny percentage on the training. Again, most of it is serving me the best Instagram Reels or whatever.
Nathan Lambert
I mean, we could get into a cost of, what is the cost of ownership for a 2,000 GPU cluster, 10,000? There’s just different sizes of companies that can afford these things and DeepSeek is reasonably big. Their compute allocation is one of the top few in the world that’s not OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, but they have a lot of compute.
I mean, we could get into a cost of, what is the cost of ownership for a 2,000 GPU cluster, 10,000? There’s just different sizes of companies that can afford these things and DeepSeek is reasonably big. Their compute allocation is one of the top few in the world that’s not OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, but they have a lot of compute.
Export controls on GPUs to China
Lex Fridman
Can you in gentlemen actually just zoom out and also talk about the Hopper architecture, the Nvidia Hopper GPU architecture and the difference between H100 and H800, like you mentioned, the interconnects?
Can you in gentlemen actually just zoom out and also talk about the Hopper architecture, the Nvidia Hopper GPU architecture and the difference between H100 and H800, like you mentioned, the interconnects?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. So there’s, Ampere was the A100 and then H100 Hopper, right? People use them synonymously in the U.S. because really there’s just H100 and now there’s H200, right, but same thing mostly?
Yeah. So there’s, Ampere was the A100 and then H100 Hopper, right? People use them synonymously in the U.S. because really there’s just H100 and now there’s H200, right, but same thing mostly?
In China, there’ve been different salvos of expert restrictions. So initially, the U.S. government limited on a two-factor scale, which is chip interconnect versus FLOPs. So any chip that had interconnects above a certain level and FLOPs above a certain … Floating point operations above a certain level was restricted.
Later, the government realized that this was a flaw in the restriction and they cut it down to just floating point operations. And so-
Nathan Lambert
H800 had high FLOPs, low communication?
H800 had high FLOPs, low communication?
Dylan Patel
Exactly. So, the H800 was the same performance as H100 on FLOPs, but it just had the interconnect bandwidth cut. DeepSeek knew how to utilize this. “Hey, even though we’re cut back on the interconnect, we can do all this fancy stuff to figure out how to use the GPU fully anyways.”
Exactly. So, the H800 was the same performance as H100 on FLOPs, but it just had the interconnect bandwidth cut. DeepSeek knew how to utilize this. “Hey, even though we’re cut back on the interconnect, we can do all this fancy stuff to figure out how to use the GPU fully anyways.”
And so that was back in October 2022. But later in 2023, into 2023 implemented in 2024, the U.S. government banned the H800. Right? And so by the way, this H800 cluster, these 2,000 GPUs was not even purchased in 2024. It was purchased in late 2023. And they’re just getting the model out now because it takes a lot of research, et cetera.
H800 was banned and now there’s a new chip called the H20. The H20 is cut back on only FLOPs, but the interconnect bandwidth is the same. And in fact, in some ways it’s better than the H100 because it has better memory bandwidth and memory capacity. So Nvidia is working within the constraints of what the government sets and then builds the best possible GPU for China.
Lex Fridman
Can we take this actual tangent and we’ll return back to the hardware, is the philosophy, the motivation, the case for export controls? What is it? Dario Amodei just published a blog post about export controls. The case he makes is that if AI becomes super powerful and he says by 2026, we’ll have AGI or super powerful AI and that’s going to give a significant … Whoever builds that will have a significant military advantage.
Can we take this actual tangent and we’ll return back to the hardware, is the philosophy, the motivation, the case for export controls? What is it? Dario Amodei just published a blog post about export controls. The case he makes is that if AI becomes super powerful and he says by 2026, we’ll have AGI or super powerful AI and that’s going to give a significant … Whoever builds that will have a significant military advantage.
And so because The United States is a democracy and as he says, China is authoritarian or has authoritarian elements, you want a unipolar world where the super powerful military, because of the AI is one that’s a democracy. It’s a much more complicated world geopolitically when you have two superpowers with super powerful AI and one is authoritarian.
So, that’s the case he makes. And so the United States wants to use export controls to slow down, to make sure that China can’t do these gigantic training runs that will be presumably required to build the AGI.
Nathan Lambert
This is very abstract. I think this can be the goal of how some people describe export controls, is this super powerful AI. And you touched on the training run idea. There’s not many worlds where China cannot train AI models. I think export controls are decapping the amount of compute or the density of compute that China can have.
This is very abstract. I think this can be the goal of how some people describe export controls, is this super powerful AI. And you touched on the training run idea. There’s not many worlds where China cannot train AI models. I think export controls are decapping the amount of compute or the density of compute that China can have.
And if you think about the AI ecosystem right now, as all of these AI companies, revenue numbers are up and to the right. Their AI usage is just continuing to grow, more GPUs are going to inference. A large part of export controls, if they work is just that the amount of AI that can be run in China is going to be much lower.
So on the training side, DeepSeek V3 is a great example, which you have a very focused team that can still get to the frontier of AI on … This 2,000 GPUs is not that hard to get all considering in the world. They’re still going to have those GPUs. They’re still going to be able to train models. But if there’s going to be a huge market for AI, if you have strong export controls and you want to have 100,000 GPUs just serving the equivalent of ChatGPT clusters with good export controls, it also just makes it so that AI can be used much less.
And I think that is a much easier goal to achieve than trying to debate on what AGI is. And if you have these extremely intelligent autonomous AIs and data centers, those are the things that could be running in these GPU clusters in the United States, but not in China.
Dylan Patel
To some extent, training a model does effectively nothing. They have a model. The thing that Dario is sort of speaking to is the implementation of that model, once trained to then create huge economic growth, huge increases in military capabilities, huge increases in productivity of people, betterment of lives. Whatever you want to direct super powerful AI towards, you can, but that requires a significant amounts of compute.
To some extent, training a model does effectively nothing. They have a model. The thing that Dario is sort of speaking to is the implementation of that model, once trained to then create huge economic growth, huge increases in military capabilities, huge increases in productivity of people, betterment of lives. Whatever you want to direct super powerful AI towards, you can, but that requires a significant amounts of compute.
And so the U.S. government has effectively said … And forever, training will always be a portion of the total compute. We mentioned Meta’s 400,000 GPUs. Only 16,000 made Llama. Right? So the percentage that Meta’s dedicating to inference, now this might be for recommendation systems that are trying to hack our mind into spending more time and watching more ads, or if it’s for a super powerful AI that’s doing productive things, it doesn’t matter about the exact use that our economic system decides. It’s that, that can be delivered in whatever way we want.
Whereas with China, you know, your expert restrictions, great. You’re never going to be able to cut everything off. And I think that’s quite a well-understood by the U.S. government is that you can’t cut everything off.
Nathan Lambert
And they’ll make their own chips.
And they’ll make their own chips.
Dylan Patel
And they’re trying to make their own chips. They’ll be worse than ours, but the whole point is to just keep a gap. And therefore at some point, as the AI … In a world where two, 3% economic growth, this is really dumb by the way, to cut off high-tech and not make money off of it. But in a world where super powerful AI comes about and then starts creating significant changes in society, which is what all the AI leaders and big tech companies believe. I think super powerful AI is going to change society massively.
And they’re trying to make their own chips. They’ll be worse than ours, but the whole point is to just keep a gap. And therefore at some point, as the AI … In a world where two, 3% economic growth, this is really dumb by the way, to cut off high-tech and not make money off of it. But in a world where super powerful AI comes about and then starts creating significant changes in society, which is what all the AI leaders and big tech companies believe. I think super powerful AI is going to change society massively.
And therefore, this compounding effect of the difference in compute is really important. There’s some sci-fi out there where AI is measured in how much power is delivered to compute, right, or how much is being … That’s sort of a way of thinking about what’s the economic output, is just how much power are you directing towards that AI?
Nathan Lambert
Should we talk about reasoning models with this, as a way that this might be actionable as something that people can actually see? So, the reasoning models that are coming out with R1 and o1, they’re designed to use more compute. There’s a lot of buzzy words in the AI community about this, test-time compute, inference time compute, whatever.
Should we talk about reasoning models with this, as a way that this might be actionable as something that people can actually see? So, the reasoning models that are coming out with R1 and o1, they’re designed to use more compute. There’s a lot of buzzy words in the AI community about this, test-time compute, inference time compute, whatever.
But Dylan has good research on this. You can get to the specific numbers on the ratio of when you train a model, you can look at things. It’s about the amount of compute used at training and amount of compute used at inference.
These reasoning models are making inference way more important to doing complex tasks. In the fall in December, OpenAI announced this o3 model. There’s another thing in AI, when things move fast, we get both announcements and releases. Announcements are essentially blog posts where you pat yourself on the back and you say you did things and releases are when the model’s out there, the paper’s out there, et cetera.
So OpenAI has announced o3. I mean, we can check if o3-mini is out as of recording potentially, but that doesn’t really change the point, which is that the breakthrough result was something called ARC-AGI task, which is the abstract reasoning corpus, a task for artificial general intelligence. François Chollet is the guy who’s been … It’s a multi-year-old paper. It’s a brilliant benchmark. And the number for open AI o3 to solve this was that it used some sort of number of samples in the API. The API has thinking effort and number of samples. They used 1,000 samples to solve this task and it comes out to be five to $20 per question, which you’re putting in effectively a math puzzle. And then it takes orders of dollars to answer one question, and this is a lot of compute.
If those are going to take off in the U.S., OpenAI needs a ton of GPUs on inference to capture this. They have this OpenAI ChatGPT Pro subscription, which is $200 a month-
Dylan Patel
Which Sam said they’re losing money on.
Which Sam said they’re losing money on.
Nathan Lambert
Which means that people are burning a lot of GPUs on inference. And I’ve signed up with it, I’ve played with it. I don’t think I’m a power user, but I use it. And it’s like, that is the thing that a Chinese company with mediumly strong expert controls, there will always be loopholes, might not be able to do it all.
Which means that people are burning a lot of GPUs on inference. And I’ve signed up with it, I’ve played with it. I don’t think I’m a power user, but I use it. And it’s like, that is the thing that a Chinese company with mediumly strong expert controls, there will always be loopholes, might not be able to do it all.
And if the main result for o3 is also a spectacular coding performance, and if that feeds back into AI companies being able to experiment better.
Lex Fridman
So presumably, the idea is for an AGI, a much larger fraction of the compute would be used for this test-time compute, for the reasoning, for the AGI goes into a room and thinks about how to take over the world and come back in 2.7 hours-
So presumably, the idea is for an AGI, a much larger fraction of the compute would be used for this test-time compute, for the reasoning, for the AGI goes into a room and thinks about how to take over the world and come back in 2.7 hours-
Nathan Lambert
This is what-
This is what-
Lex Fridman
… and that it’s going to take a lot of compute.
… and that it’s going to take a lot of compute.
Nathan Lambert
This is what people, CEO or leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic talk about, is autonomous AI models, which is you give them a task and they work on it in the background.
This is what people, CEO or leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic talk about, is autonomous AI models, which is you give them a task and they work on it in the background.
I think my personal definition of AGI is much simpler. I think language models are a form of AGI and all of this super powerful stuff is a next step that’s great if we get these tools. But a language model has so much value in so many domains that it’s a general intelligence to me.
But this next step of agentic things where they’re independent and they can do tasks that aren’t in the training data is what the few-year outlook that these AI companies are driving for.
Lex Fridman
I think the terminology here that Dario uses is super powerful AI. So I agree with you on the AGI. I think we already have something like that’s exceptionally impressive that Alan Turing would for sure say is AGI, but he’s referring more to something once in possession of, then you would have a significant military and geopolitical advantage over other nations. So it’s not just like you can ask it how to cook an omelet.
I think the terminology here that Dario uses is super powerful AI. So I agree with you on the AGI. I think we already have something like that’s exceptionally impressive that Alan Turing would for sure say is AGI, but he’s referring more to something once in possession of, then you would have a significant military and geopolitical advantage over other nations. So it’s not just like you can ask it how to cook an omelet.
Nathan Lambert
And he has a much more positive view. And as I say, machines of love and grace. I read into this and I don’t have enough background in physical sciences to gauge exactly how competent I am, and if AI can revolutionize biology. I am safe saying that AI is going to accelerate the progress of any computational science.
And he has a much more positive view. And as I say, machines of love and grace. I read into this and I don’t have enough background in physical sciences to gauge exactly how competent I am, and if AI can revolutionize biology. I am safe saying that AI is going to accelerate the progress of any computational science.
AGI timeline
Lex Fridman
So we’re doing a depth-first search here on topics, taking tangent of a tangent, so let’s continue on that depth-first search. You said that you’re both feeling the AGI. What’s your timeline? Dario is 2026 for the super powerful AI that’s basically agentic to a degree where it’s a real security threat, that level of AGI. What’s your timeline?
So we’re doing a depth-first search here on topics, taking tangent of a tangent, so let’s continue on that depth-first search. You said that you’re both feeling the AGI. What’s your timeline? Dario is 2026 for the super powerful AI that’s basically agentic to a degree where it’s a real security threat, that level of AGI. What’s your timeline?
Nathan Lambert
I don’t like to attribute specific abilities because predicting specific abilities and when is very hard. I think mostly if you’re going to say that I’m feeling the AGI is that I expect continued, rapid, surprising progress over the next few years. So, something like R1 is less surprising to me from DeepSeek because I expect there to be new paradigms versus …
I don’t like to attribute specific abilities because predicting specific abilities and when is very hard. I think mostly if you’re going to say that I’m feeling the AGI is that I expect continued, rapid, surprising progress over the next few years. So, something like R1 is less surprising to me from DeepSeek because I expect there to be new paradigms versus …
Nathan Lambert
… surprising to me from DeepSeek because I expect there to be new paradigms where substantial progress can be made. I think DeepSeek-R1 is so unsettling because we’re kind of on this path with ChatGPT. It’s like it’s getting better, it’s getting better, it’s getting better, and then we have a new direction for changing the models, and we took one step like this and we took a step-up. So it looks like a really fast slope, and then we’re going to just take more steps. So it’s just really unsettling when you have these big steps, and I expect that to keep happening. I’ve tried opening Operator, I’ve tried Claude computer use, they’re not there yet. I understand the idea, but it’s just so hard to predict what is the breakthrough that’ll make something like that work. And I think it’s more likely that we have breakthroughs that work in things that we don’t know what they’re going to do. So everyone wants agents. Dario has a very eloquent way of describing this, and I just think that it’s like there’s going to be more than that, so just expect these things to come.
… surprising to me from DeepSeek because I expect there to be new paradigms where substantial progress can be made. I think DeepSeek-R1 is so unsettling because we’re kind of on this path with ChatGPT. It’s like it’s getting better, it’s getting better, it’s getting better, and then we have a new direction for changing the models, and we took one step like this and we took a step-up. So it looks like a really fast slope, and then we’re going to just take more steps. So it’s just really unsettling when you have these big steps, and I expect that to keep happening. I’ve tried opening Operator, I’ve tried Claude computer use, they’re not there yet. I understand the idea, but it’s just so hard to predict what is the breakthrough that’ll make something like that work. And I think it’s more likely that we have breakthroughs that work in things that we don’t know what they’re going to do. So everyone wants agents. Dario has a very eloquent way of describing this, and I just think that it’s like there’s going to be more than that, so just expect these things to come.
Lex Fridman
I’m going to have to try to pin you down to a date on the AGI timeline. Like the nuclear weapon moment, so moment where on the geopolitical stage, there’s a real… Because we’re talking about export controls, when do you think, just even to throw out a date, when do you think that would be? For me, it’s probably after 2030, so I’m not as-
I’m going to have to try to pin you down to a date on the AGI timeline. Like the nuclear weapon moment, so moment where on the geopolitical stage, there’s a real… Because we’re talking about export controls, when do you think, just even to throw out a date, when do you think that would be? For me, it’s probably after 2030, so I’m not as-
Nathan Lambert
That’s what I would say.
That’s what I would say.
Dylan Patel
So define that. Because to me, it kind of almost has already happened. You look at elections in India and Pakistan, people get AI voice calls and think they’re talking to the politician. The AI diffusion rules, which was enacted in the last couple of weeks of the Biden admin, it looks like the Trump admin will keep and potentially even strengthen, limit cloud computing and GPU sales to countries that are not even related to China. It’s like this is-
So define that. Because to me, it kind of almost has already happened. You look at elections in India and Pakistan, people get AI voice calls and think they’re talking to the politician. The AI diffusion rules, which was enacted in the last couple of weeks of the Biden admin, it looks like the Trump admin will keep and potentially even strengthen, limit cloud computing and GPU sales to countries that are not even related to China. It’s like this is-
Nathan Lambert
Portugal and all these normal countries are on the… You need approval from the US list.
Portugal and all these normal countries are on the… You need approval from the US list.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, Portugal and all these countries that are allies. Singapore. They freaking have F-35s and we don’t let them buy GPUs. This to me is already to the scale of…
Yeah, Portugal and all these countries that are allies. Singapore. They freaking have F-35s and we don’t let them buy GPUs. This to me is already to the scale of…
Lex Fridman
Well, that just means that the US military is really nervous about this new technology. That doesn’t mean that technology is already there. So they might be just very cautious about this thing that they don’t quite understand. But that’s a really good point. The robocalls, swarms of semi-intelligent bots could be a weapon, could be doing a lot of social engineering.
Well, that just means that the US military is really nervous about this new technology. That doesn’t mean that technology is already there. So they might be just very cautious about this thing that they don’t quite understand. But that’s a really good point. The robocalls, swarms of semi-intelligent bots could be a weapon, could be doing a lot of social engineering.
Dylan Patel
I mean, there’s tons of talk about from the 2016 elections like Cambridge Analytica and all this stuff, Russian influence. I mean, every country in the world is pushing stuff onto the internet and has narratives they want. Every technically competent, whether it’s Russia, China, US, Israel, et cetera. People are pushing viewpoints onto the internet en masse. And language models crash the cost of very intelligent sounding language.
I mean, there’s tons of talk about from the 2016 elections like Cambridge Analytica and all this stuff, Russian influence. I mean, every country in the world is pushing stuff onto the internet and has narratives they want. Every technically competent, whether it’s Russia, China, US, Israel, et cetera. People are pushing viewpoints onto the internet en masse. And language models crash the cost of very intelligent sounding language.
Nathan Lambert
There’s some research that shows that the distribution is actually the limiting factor. So language models haven’t yet made misinformation particularly change the equation there. The internet is still ongoing. I think there’s a blog, AI Snake Oil and some of my friends at Princeton that write on this stuff. So there is research. It’s a default that everyone assumes. And I would’ve thought the same thing, is that misinformation doesn’t get far worse with language models. I think in terms of internet posts and things that people have been measuring, it hasn’t been a exponential increase or something extremely measurable and things you’re talking about with voice calls and stuff like that, it could be in modalities that are harder to measure.
There’s some research that shows that the distribution is actually the limiting factor. So language models haven’t yet made misinformation particularly change the equation there. The internet is still ongoing. I think there’s a blog, AI Snake Oil and some of my friends at Princeton that write on this stuff. So there is research. It’s a default that everyone assumes. And I would’ve thought the same thing, is that misinformation doesn’t get far worse with language models. I think in terms of internet posts and things that people have been measuring, it hasn’t been a exponential increase or something extremely measurable and things you’re talking about with voice calls and stuff like that, it could be in modalities that are harder to measure.
So it’s something that it’s too soon to tell in terms of… I think that’s political instability via the web is very… It’s monitored by a lot of researchers to see what’s happening. I think that… You’re asking about the AGI thing. If you’re making me give a year, I’m going to be like, “Okay, I have AI CEOs saying this. They’ve been saying two years for a while. I think that there are people like Dario at Anthropic, the CEO, has thought about this so deeply. I need to take their word seriously, but also understand that they have different incentives.” So I would be like, “Add a few years to that.” Which is how you get something similar to 2030 or a little after 2030.
Dylan Patel
I think to some extent, we have capabilities that hit a certain point where any one person could say, “Oh, okay, if I can leverage those capabilities for X amount of time, this is AGI, call it ’27, ’28.” But then the cost of actually operating that capability-
I think to some extent, we have capabilities that hit a certain point where any one person could say, “Oh, okay, if I can leverage those capabilities for X amount of time, this is AGI, call it ’27, ’28.” But then the cost of actually operating that capability-
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, this was going to be my point.
Yeah, this was going to be my point.
Dylan Patel
… is so, so extreme that no one can actually deploy it at scale en masse to actually completely revolutionize the economy on a snap of a finger. So I don’t think it will be a snap of the finger moment.
… is so, so extreme that no one can actually deploy it at scale en masse to actually completely revolutionize the economy on a snap of a finger. So I don’t think it will be a snap of the finger moment.
Nathan Lambert
It’s a physical constraint [inaudible 01:14:37].
It’s a physical constraint [inaudible 01:14:37].
Dylan Patel
Rather, it’ll be a, “Oh, the capabilities are here, but I can’t deploy it everywhere.” And so one simple example, going back sort of to 2023 was when being when GPT-4 came out, everyone was freaking out about search. Perplexity came out. If you did the cost on like, hey, implementing GPT-3 into every Google search, it was like, oh, okay, this is just physically impossible to implement. And as we step forward to going back to the test-time compute thing, a query for… You ask ChatGPT a question, it costs cents for their most capable model of Chat to get a query back. To solve an AGI problem though costs 5 to 20 bucks, and this is in-
Rather, it’ll be a, “Oh, the capabilities are here, but I can’t deploy it everywhere.” And so one simple example, going back sort of to 2023 was when being when GPT-4 came out, everyone was freaking out about search. Perplexity came out. If you did the cost on like, hey, implementing GPT-3 into every Google search, it was like, oh, okay, this is just physically impossible to implement. And as we step forward to going back to the test-time compute thing, a query for… You ask ChatGPT a question, it costs cents for their most capable model of Chat to get a query back. To solve an AGI problem though costs 5 to 20 bucks, and this is in-
Nathan Lambert
It’s only going up from there.
It’s only going up from there.
Dylan Patel
This is 1,000, 10,000 X factor difference in cost to respond to a query versus do a task. And the task of AGI is not like it’s like… It’s simple, to some extent, but it’s also like, what are the tasks that we want… Okay, AGI, “What we have today”, can do AGI. Three years from now, it can do much more complicated problems, but the cost is going to be measured in thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars of GPU time, and there just won’t be enough power, GPUs, infrastructure to operate this and therefore shift everything in the world on the snap the finger.
This is 1,000, 10,000 X factor difference in cost to respond to a query versus do a task. And the task of AGI is not like it’s like… It’s simple, to some extent, but it’s also like, what are the tasks that we want… Okay, AGI, “What we have today”, can do AGI. Three years from now, it can do much more complicated problems, but the cost is going to be measured in thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars of GPU time, and there just won’t be enough power, GPUs, infrastructure to operate this and therefore shift everything in the world on the snap the finger.
But at that moment, who gets to control and point the AGI at a task? And so this was in Dario’s post that he’s like, “Hey, China can effectively and more quickly than us, point their AGI at military tasks.” And they have been, in many ways, faster at adopting certain new technologies into their military, especially with regards to drones. The US maybe has a long-standing large air sort of fighter jet type of thing, bombers. But when it comes to asymmetric arms such as drones, they’ve completely leapfrogged the US and the West.
And the fear that Dario is sort of pointing out there, I think, is that, yeah, great, we’ll have AGI in the commercial sector. The US military won’t be able to implement it superfast. Chinese military could and they could direct all their resources to implementing it in the military, and therefore solving military logistics or solving some other aspect of disinformation for targeted certain set of people so they can flip a country’s politics or something like that that is actually catastrophic versus the US just wants to… Because it’ll be more capitalistically allocated just towards whatever is the highest return on income, which might be building factories better or whatever.
Lex Fridman
So everything I’ve seen, people’s intuition seems to fail on robotics. So you have this kind of general optimism. I’ve seen this on self-driving cars. People think it’s much easier problem than it is. Similar with drones, here, I understand it a little bit less, but I’ve just seen the reality of the war in Ukraine and the usage of drones on both sides. And it seems that humans still far outperform any fully autonomous systems. AI is an assistant, but humans drive. FPV drones where the human’s controlling most of it, just far, far, far outperforms AI systems. So I think it’s not obvious to me that we’re going to have swarms of autonomous robots anytime soon in the military context. Maybe the fastest I can imagine is 2030, which is why I said 2030 for the super powerful AI. Whenever you have large scale swarms of robots doing military actions, that’s when the world just starts to look different to me.
So everything I’ve seen, people’s intuition seems to fail on robotics. So you have this kind of general optimism. I’ve seen this on self-driving cars. People think it’s much easier problem than it is. Similar with drones, here, I understand it a little bit less, but I’ve just seen the reality of the war in Ukraine and the usage of drones on both sides. And it seems that humans still far outperform any fully autonomous systems. AI is an assistant, but humans drive. FPV drones where the human’s controlling most of it, just far, far, far outperforms AI systems. So I think it’s not obvious to me that we’re going to have swarms of autonomous robots anytime soon in the military context. Maybe the fastest I can imagine is 2030, which is why I said 2030 for the super powerful AI. Whenever you have large scale swarms of robots doing military actions, that’s when the world just starts to look different to me.
So that’s the thing I’m really worried about. But there could be cyber war, cyber war type of technologies that from social engineering to actually just swarms of robots that find attack vectors in our code bases and shut down power grids, that kind of stuff. And it could be one of those things like on any given weekend or something, power goes out, nobody knows why, and the world changes forever. Just power going out for two days in all of the United States, that will lead to murder, to chaos. But going back to export controls, do you see that as a useful way to control the balance of power geopolitically in the context of AI?
China’s manufacturing capacity
Dylan Patel
And I think going back to my viewpoint is if you believe we’re in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we’ve been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term. If you do not believe AI is going to make significant changes to society in the next 10 years or 5 years. Five-year timelines are sort of what the more executives and such of AI companies and even big tech companies believe. But even 10-year timelines, it’s reasonable. But once you get to, hey, these timelines are below that time period, then the only way to create a sizable advantage or disadvantage for America versus China is if you constrain and compute, because talent is not really something that’s constraining. China arguably has more talent, more STEM graduates, more programmers. The US can draw upon the world’s people, which it does. There’s tons of foreigners in the AI industry.
And I think going back to my viewpoint is if you believe we’re in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we’ve been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term. If you do not believe AI is going to make significant changes to society in the next 10 years or 5 years. Five-year timelines are sort of what the more executives and such of AI companies and even big tech companies believe. But even 10-year timelines, it’s reasonable. But once you get to, hey, these timelines are below that time period, then the only way to create a sizable advantage or disadvantage for America versus China is if you constrain and compute, because talent is not really something that’s constraining. China arguably has more talent, more STEM graduates, more programmers. The US can draw upon the world’s people, which it does. There’s tons of foreigners in the AI industry.
Nathan Lambert
So many of these AI teams are all people without a US passport.
So many of these AI teams are all people without a US passport.
Dylan Patel
Yeah. I mean, many of them are Chinese people who are moving to America, and that’s great. That’s exactly what we want. But that talent is one aspect, but I don’t think that’s one that is a measurable advantage for the US or not. It truly is just whether or not compute. Now, even on the compute side, when we look at chips versus data centers, China has the unprecedented ability to build ridiculous sums of power. Clockwork. They’re always building more and more power. They’ve got steel mills that individually are the size of the entire US industry. And they’ve got aluminum mills that consume gigawatts and gigawatts of power. And when we talk about what’s the biggest data center, OpenAI made this huge thing about Stargate, their announcement there, once it’s fully built out in a few years, it’ll be two gigawatts of power. And this is still smaller than the largest industrial facilities in China. China, if they wanted to build the largest data center in the world, if they had access to the chips, could. So it’s just a question of when, not if.
Yeah. I mean, many of them are Chinese people who are moving to America, and that’s great. That’s exactly what we want. But that talent is one aspect, but I don’t think that’s one that is a measurable advantage for the US or not. It truly is just whether or not compute. Now, even on the compute side, when we look at chips versus data centers, China has the unprecedented ability to build ridiculous sums of power. Clockwork. They’re always building more and more power. They’ve got steel mills that individually are the size of the entire US industry. And they’ve got aluminum mills that consume gigawatts and gigawatts of power. And when we talk about what’s the biggest data center, OpenAI made this huge thing about Stargate, their announcement there, once it’s fully built out in a few years, it’ll be two gigawatts of power. And this is still smaller than the largest industrial facilities in China. China, if they wanted to build the largest data center in the world, if they had access to the chips, could. So it’s just a question of when, not if.
Lex Fridman
So their industrial capacity far exceeds the United States’?
So their industrial capacity far exceeds the United States’?
Dylan Patel
Exactly.
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
They manufacture stuff. So long-term, they’re going to be manufacturing chips there?
They manufacture stuff. So long-term, they’re going to be manufacturing chips there?
Dylan Patel
Chips are a little bit more specialized. I’m specifically referring to the data centers. Fabs take huge amounts of power, don’t get me wrong. That’s not necessarily the gating factor there. The gating factor on how fast people can build the largest clusters today in the US is power. Now, it could be power generation, power transmission, substations, and all these sorts of transformers and all these things building the data center. These are all constraints on the US industry’s ability to build larger and larger training systems, as well as deploying more and more inference compute.
Chips are a little bit more specialized. I’m specifically referring to the data centers. Fabs take huge amounts of power, don’t get me wrong. That’s not necessarily the gating factor there. The gating factor on how fast people can build the largest clusters today in the US is power. Now, it could be power generation, power transmission, substations, and all these sorts of transformers and all these things building the data center. These are all constraints on the US industry’s ability to build larger and larger training systems, as well as deploying more and more inference compute.
Nathan Lambert
I think we need to make a point clear on why the time is now for people that don’t think about this, because essentially, with export controls, you’re making it so China cannot make or get cutting edge chips. And the idea is that if you time this wrong, China is pouring a ton of money into their chip production, and if you time it wrong, they are going to have more capacity for production, more capacity for energy, and figure out how to make the chips and have more capacity than the rest of the world to make the chips. Because everybody can buy… They’re going to sell their Chinese chips to everybody, they might subsidize them. And therefore, if AI takes a long time to become differentiated, we’ve kneecapped the financial performance of American companies. NVIDIA can sell less, TSMC cannot sell to China. So therefore, we have less demand to therefore… To keep driving the production cycle. So that’s the assumption behind the timing being [inaudible 01:22:43].
I think we need to make a point clear on why the time is now for people that don’t think about this, because essentially, with export controls, you’re making it so China cannot make or get cutting edge chips. And the idea is that if you time this wrong, China is pouring a ton of money into their chip production, and if you time it wrong, they are going to have more capacity for production, more capacity for energy, and figure out how to make the chips and have more capacity than the rest of the world to make the chips. Because everybody can buy… They’re going to sell their Chinese chips to everybody, they might subsidize them. And therefore, if AI takes a long time to become differentiated, we’ve kneecapped the financial performance of American companies. NVIDIA can sell less, TSMC cannot sell to China. So therefore, we have less demand to therefore… To keep driving the production cycle. So that’s the assumption behind the timing being [inaudible 01:22:43].
Dylan Patel
Less than 10 years or 5 years to above. China will win because of these restrictions long-term, unless AI does something in the short-term, which I believe AI will make massive changes to society in the medium, short-term. And so that’s the big unlocker there. And even today, if Xi Jinping decided to get “scale-pilled”, IE, decide that scaling laws are what matters, just like the US executives like Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar and all these US executives of the biggest, most powerful tech companies have decided they’re scale-pilled and they’re building multi-gigawatt data centers, whether it’s in Texas or Louisiana or Wisconsin, wherever it is, they’re building these massive things that cost as much as their entire budget for spending on data centers globally in one spot. This is what they’ve committed to for next year, year after, et cetera. And so they’re so convinced that this is the way that this is what they’re doing.
Less than 10 years or 5 years to above. China will win because of these restrictions long-term, unless AI does something in the short-term, which I believe AI will make massive changes to society in the medium, short-term. And so that’s the big unlocker there. And even today, if Xi Jinping decided to get “scale-pilled”, IE, decide that scaling laws are what matters, just like the US executives like Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar and all these US executives of the biggest, most powerful tech companies have decided they’re scale-pilled and they’re building multi-gigawatt data centers, whether it’s in Texas or Louisiana or Wisconsin, wherever it is, they’re building these massive things that cost as much as their entire budget for spending on data centers globally in one spot. This is what they’ve committed to for next year, year after, et cetera. And so they’re so convinced that this is the way that this is what they’re doing.
But if China decided to, they could do it faster than us, but this is where the restrictions come in. It is not clear that China as a whole has decided from the highest levels that this is a priority. The US sort of has. You see Trump talking about DeepSeek and Stargate within the same week. And the Biden admin as well had a lot of discussions about AI and such. It’s clear that they think about it. Only just last week did DeepSeek meet the second in command of China. They have not even met the top, they haven’t met Xi, Xi hasn’t set down, and they only just released a subsidy of a trillion RMB, roughly $160 billion, which is closer to the spending of Microsoft and Meta and Google combined for this year. So they’re realizing it just now. But that’s where these export restrictions come in and say, “Hey, you can’t ship the most powerful US chips to China. You can ship a cut-down version. You can’t ship the most powerful chips to all these countries who we know are just going to rent it to China. You have to limit the numbers.”
Nathan Lambert
And the tools.
And the tools.
Dylan Patel
And same with manufacturing [inaudible 01:24:52] tools, all these different aspects, but it all stems from AI and then what downstream can slow them down in AI. And so the entire semiconductor restrictions, you read them, they’re very clear, it’s about AI and military civil fusion of technology. It’s very clear. And then from there it goes, oh, well, we’re banning them from buying lithography tools and etch tools and deposition tools. And oh, this random subsystem from a random company that’s tiny. Why are we banning this? Because all of it, the US government has decided is critical to AI systems.
And same with manufacturing [inaudible 01:24:52] tools, all these different aspects, but it all stems from AI and then what downstream can slow them down in AI. And so the entire semiconductor restrictions, you read them, they’re very clear, it’s about AI and military civil fusion of technology. It’s very clear. And then from there it goes, oh, well, we’re banning them from buying lithography tools and etch tools and deposition tools. And oh, this random subsystem from a random company that’s tiny. Why are we banning this? Because all of it, the US government has decided is critical to AI systems.
Nathan Lambert
I think the fulcrum point is the transition from seven nanometer to five nanometer chips where I think it was Huawei that had the seven nanometer chip a few years ago, which caused another political brouhaha, almost like this moment. And then it’s the ASML deep UV. What is that… Extreme ultraviolet lithography.
I think the fulcrum point is the transition from seven nanometer to five nanometer chips where I think it was Huawei that had the seven nanometer chip a few years ago, which caused another political brouhaha, almost like this moment. And then it’s the ASML deep UV. What is that… Extreme ultraviolet lithography.
Dylan Patel
Just set context on the chips. What Nathan’s referring to is in 2020, Huawei released their Ascend 910 chip, which was an AI chip, first one on seven nanometer before Google did, before NVIDIA did. And they submitted it to the MLPerf benchmark, which is sort of a industry standard for machine learning performance benchmark, and it did quite well, and it was the best chip at the submission. This was a huge deal. The Trump admin, of course, banned, it was 2019, banned the Huawei from getting seven nanometer chips from TSMC. And so then they had to switch to using internal, domestically produced chips, which was a multi-year setback.
Just set context on the chips. What Nathan’s referring to is in 2020, Huawei released their Ascend 910 chip, which was an AI chip, first one on seven nanometer before Google did, before NVIDIA did. And they submitted it to the MLPerf benchmark, which is sort of a industry standard for machine learning performance benchmark, and it did quite well, and it was the best chip at the submission. This was a huge deal. The Trump admin, of course, banned, it was 2019, banned the Huawei from getting seven nanometer chips from TSMC. And so then they had to switch to using internal, domestically produced chips, which was a multi-year setback.
Nathan Lambert
Many companies have done seven nanometer chips. And the question is we don’t know how much Huawei was subsidizing production of that chip. Intel has made seven nanometer chips that are not profitable and things like this. So this is how it all feeds back into the economic engine of export controls.
Many companies have done seven nanometer chips. And the question is we don’t know how much Huawei was subsidizing production of that chip. Intel has made seven nanometer chips that are not profitable and things like this. So this is how it all feeds back into the economic engine of export controls.
Cold war with China
Lex Fridman
Well, so you’re saying that for now, Xi Jinping has not felt the AGI, but it feels like the DeepSeek moment, there might be meetings going on now where he’s going to start wearing the same t-shirt and things are going to escalate.
Well, so you’re saying that for now, Xi Jinping has not felt the AGI, but it feels like the DeepSeek moment, there might be meetings going on now where he’s going to start wearing the same t-shirt and things are going to escalate.
Dylan Patel
I mean, he may have woken up last week. Liang Feng met the second command guy, and they had a meeting, and then the next day, they announced the AI subsidies, which are a trillion RMB.
I mean, he may have woken up last week. Liang Feng met the second command guy, and they had a meeting, and then the next day, they announced the AI subsidies, which are a trillion RMB.
Lex Fridman
So it’s possible that this DeepSeek moment is truly the beginning of a cold war.
So it’s possible that this DeepSeek moment is truly the beginning of a cold war.
Nathan Lambert
That’s what a lot of people are worried about. People in AI have been worried that this is going towards a cold war or already is.
That’s what a lot of people are worried about. People in AI have been worried that this is going towards a cold war or already is.
Lex Fridman
But it’s not DeepSeek’s fault, but there’s something, a bunch of factors came together where-
But it’s not DeepSeek’s fault, but there’s something, a bunch of factors came together where-
Nathan Lambert
It’s how history works.
It’s how history works.
Lex Fridman
… it’s like this explosion. I mean, it all has to do with NVIDIA’s not going down properly, but it’s just some [inaudible 01:27:28] mass hysteria that happened that eventually led to Xi Jinping having meetings and waking up to this idea.
… it’s like this explosion. I mean, it all has to do with NVIDIA’s not going down properly, but it’s just some [inaudible 01:27:28] mass hysteria that happened that eventually led to Xi Jinping having meetings and waking up to this idea.
Dylan Patel
And the US government realized in October 7th, 2022, before ChatGPT released, that restriction on October 7th, which dropped and shocked everyone, and it was very clearly aimed at AI. Everyone was like, “What the heck are you doing?”
And the US government realized in October 7th, 2022, before ChatGPT released, that restriction on October 7th, which dropped and shocked everyone, and it was very clearly aimed at AI. Everyone was like, “What the heck are you doing?”
Nathan Lambert
Stable Diffusion was out then, but not ChatGPT.
Stable Diffusion was out then, but not ChatGPT.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, but not ChatGPT.
Yeah, but not ChatGPT.
Nathan Lambert
So it was starting to be rumblings-
So it was starting to be rumblings-
Dylan Patel
Of what GenAI can do to society, but it was very clear, I think, to at least National Security Council and those sort of folks, that this was where the world is headed, this cold war that’s happening.
Of what GenAI can do to society, but it was very clear, I think, to at least National Security Council and those sort of folks, that this was where the world is headed, this cold war that’s happening.
Lex Fridman
So is there any concerns that the export controls push China to take military action on Taiwan?
So is there any concerns that the export controls push China to take military action on Taiwan?
Dylan Patel
This is the big risk. The further you push China away from having access to cutting edge American and global technologies, the more likely they are to say, “Well, because I can’t access it, I might as well… No one should access it.” And there’s a few interesting aspects of that. China has a urban-rural divide like no other. They have a male-female birth ratio like no other to the point where if you look in most of China, it’s like the ratio is not that bad. But when you look at single dudes in rural China, it’s like a 30:1 ratio. And those are disenfranchised dudes. “The US has an incel problem.” China does too, it’s just they’re placated in some way or crushed down. What do you do with these people? And at the same time, you’re not allowed to access the most important technology, at least the US thinks so. China’s maybe starting to think this is the most important technology by starting to dump subsidies in it.
This is the big risk. The further you push China away from having access to cutting edge American and global technologies, the more likely they are to say, “Well, because I can’t access it, I might as well… No one should access it.” And there’s a few interesting aspects of that. China has a urban-rural divide like no other. They have a male-female birth ratio like no other to the point where if you look in most of China, it’s like the ratio is not that bad. But when you look at single dudes in rural China, it’s like a 30:1 ratio. And those are disenfranchised dudes. “The US has an incel problem.” China does too, it’s just they’re placated in some way or crushed down. What do you do with these people? And at the same time, you’re not allowed to access the most important technology, at least the US thinks so. China’s maybe starting to think this is the most important technology by starting to dump subsidies in it.
They thought EVs and renewables were the most important technology. They dominate that now. Now, they started thinking about semiconductors in the late 2010s and early 2020s and now they’ve been dumping money and they’re catching up rapidly and they’re going to do the same with AI because they’re very talented. So the question is, when does this hit a breaking point? And if China sees this as, “Hey, they can continue…” If not having access and starting a true hot war, taking over Taiwan or trying to subvert its democracy in some way or blockading it hurts the rest of the world far more than it hurts them, this is something they could potentially do. And so is this pushing them towards that? Potentially. I’m not quite a geopolitical person, but it’s obvious that the world regime of peace and trade is super awesome for economics, but at some point, it could break.
Nathan Lambert
I think we should comment the why Chinese economy would be hurt by that is that they’re export heavy, I think. United States buys so much. If that goes away, that’s how their economy [inaudible 01:30:17].
I think we should comment the why Chinese economy would be hurt by that is that they’re export heavy, I think. United States buys so much. If that goes away, that’s how their economy [inaudible 01:30:17].
Dylan Patel
Well, also, they just would not be able to import raw materials from all over the world. The US would just shut down the Strait of Malacca. And at the same time, the US entire… You could argue almost all the GDP growth in America since the ’70s has been either population growth or tech, because your life today is not that much better than someone from the ’80s outside of tech. Cars, they all have semiconductors in them everywhere. Fridges, semiconductors everywhere. There’s these funny stories about how Russians were taking apart laundry machines because they had certain Texas Instrument chips that they could then repurpose and put into their anti-missile missile things, like their S-400 or whatever. You would know more about this, but there’s all sorts of… Everything about semiconductors is so integral to every part of our lives.
Well, also, they just would not be able to import raw materials from all over the world. The US would just shut down the Strait of Malacca. And at the same time, the US entire… You could argue almost all the GDP growth in America since the ’70s has been either population growth or tech, because your life today is not that much better than someone from the ’80s outside of tech. Cars, they all have semiconductors in them everywhere. Fridges, semiconductors everywhere. There’s these funny stories about how Russians were taking apart laundry machines because they had certain Texas Instrument chips that they could then repurpose and put into their anti-missile missile things, like their S-400 or whatever. You would know more about this, but there’s all sorts of… Everything about semiconductors is so integral to every part of our lives.
TSMC and Taiwan
Lex Fridman
So can you explain the role of TSMC in the story of semiconductors and maybe also how the United States can break the reliance on TSMC?
So can you explain the role of TSMC in the story of semiconductors and maybe also how the United States can break the reliance on TSMC?
Dylan Patel
I don’t think it’s necessarily breaking the reliance. I think it’s getting TSMC to build in the US. So taking a step back, TSMC produces most of the world’s chips, especially on the foundry side. There’s a lot of companies that build their own chips. Samsung, Intel, STMicro, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, all these kinds of companies build their own chips, and XP, but more and more of these companies are outsourcing to TSMC and have been for multiple decades.
I don’t think it’s necessarily breaking the reliance. I think it’s getting TSMC to build in the US. So taking a step back, TSMC produces most of the world’s chips, especially on the foundry side. There’s a lot of companies that build their own chips. Samsung, Intel, STMicro, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, all these kinds of companies build their own chips, and XP, but more and more of these companies are outsourcing to TSMC and have been for multiple decades.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain the supply chain there and where most of TSMC is in terms of manufacturing?
Can you explain the supply chain there and where most of TSMC is in terms of manufacturing?
Dylan Patel
Sure. So historically, supply chain was companies would build their own chips. It would be a company started, they’d build their own chips, and then they’d design the chip and build the chip and sell it. Over time, this became really difficult because the cost of building a fab continues to compound every single generation. Of course, figuring out the technology for it is incredibly difficult regardless, but just the dollars and cents that are required, ignoring, saying, “Hey, yes, I have all the technical capability.” Which it’s really hard to get that by the way. Intel’s failing, Samsung’s failing, et cetera. But if you look at just the dollars to spend to build that next-generation fab, it keeps growing. Sort of Moore’s law is having the cost of chips every two years. There’s a separate law that’s sort of doubling the cost of fabs every handful of years.
Sure. So historically, supply chain was companies would build their own chips. It would be a company started, they’d build their own chips, and then they’d design the chip and build the chip and sell it. Over time, this became really difficult because the cost of building a fab continues to compound every single generation. Of course, figuring out the technology for it is incredibly difficult regardless, but just the dollars and cents that are required, ignoring, saying, “Hey, yes, I have all the technical capability.” Which it’s really hard to get that by the way. Intel’s failing, Samsung’s failing, et cetera. But if you look at just the dollars to spend to build that next-generation fab, it keeps growing. Sort of Moore’s law is having the cost of chips every two years. There’s a separate law that’s sort of doubling the cost of fabs every handful of years.
And so you look at a leading-edge fab that is going to be profitable today, that’s building three nanometer chips or two nanometer chips in the future, that’s going to cost north of 30, $40 billion. And that’s just for a token amount. That’s like the base building blocking. You probably need to build multiple. And so when you look at the industry over the last, if I go back 20, 30 years ago, there were 20, 30 companies that could build the most advanced chips, and then they would design them themselves and sell them. So companies like AMD would build their own chips. Intel, of course, still builds their own chips. They’re very famous for it. IBM would build their own chips. And you could just keep going down the list. All these companies built their own chips.
Slowly, they kept falling like flies, and that’s because of what TSMC did. They created the Foundry business model, which is, I’m not going to design any chips. I’m just going to contract manufacturer chips for other people. And one of their early customers is NVIDIA. NVIDIA is the only semiconductor company doing more than $1 billion of revenue that was started in the era of foundry. Every other company started before then, and at some point had fabs, which is actually incredible. Like AMD and Intel and Broadcom-
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 01:33:48].
[inaudible 01:33:48].
Dylan Patel
Everyone had fabs at some point, or some companies like Broadcom. It was like a merger amalgamation of various companies that rolled up. But even today, Broadcom has fabs. They build iPhone, RF radio chips in Colorado for Apple. All these companies had fabs, and for most of the fabs, they threw them away or sold them off, or they got rolled into something else. And now, everyone relies on TSMC. Including Intel, their latest PC chip uses TSMC chips. It also uses some Intel chips, but it uses TSMC process.
Everyone had fabs at some point, or some companies like Broadcom. It was like a merger amalgamation of various companies that rolled up. But even today, Broadcom has fabs. They build iPhone, RF radio chips in Colorado for Apple. All these companies had fabs, and for most of the fabs, they threw them away or sold them off, or they got rolled into something else. And now, everyone relies on TSMC. Including Intel, their latest PC chip uses TSMC chips. It also uses some Intel chips, but it uses TSMC process.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain why the foundry model is so successful for these companies? Why are they going with-
Can you explain why the foundry model is so successful for these companies? Why are they going with-
Nathan Lambert
Economies of scale.
Economies of scale.
Lex Fridman
Scale?
Scale?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. So I mean, like I mentioned, the cost of building a fab is so high, the R&D is so difficult. And when you look at these companies that had their own vertical stack, there was an antiquated process of like, okay, I’m so hyper customized to each specific chip, but as we’ve gone through the history of the last 50 years of electronics and semiconductors, A, you need more and more specialization because Moore’s law has died, Dennard Scaling has died, IE, Chips are not getting better just for free from manufacturing. You have to make real architectural innovations.
Yeah. So I mean, like I mentioned, the cost of building a fab is so high, the R&D is so difficult. And when you look at these companies that had their own vertical stack, there was an antiquated process of like, okay, I’m so hyper customized to each specific chip, but as we’ve gone through the history of the last 50 years of electronics and semiconductors, A, you need more and more specialization because Moore’s law has died, Dennard Scaling has died, IE, Chips are not getting better just for free from manufacturing. You have to make real architectural innovations.
Google is not just running on Intel CPUs for web serving. They have a YouTube chip, they have TPUs, they have Pixel chips, they have a wide diversity of chips that generate all the economic value of Google. It’s running all the services and stuff. And this is just Google. And you could go across any company in the industry, and it’s like this. Cars contain 5,000 chips, 200 different varieties of them. All these random things. A Tesla door handle has two chips. It’s ridiculous. And it’s a cool door handle. You don’t think about it, but it has two really chip, penny chips in there. Anyways, so as you have more diversity of chips, as you have more specialization required and the cost of fabs continues to grow, you need someone who is laser focused on building the best process technology and making it as flexible as possible.
Nathan Lambert
I think you could say it simply, which is the cost per fab goes up, and if you are a small player that makes a few types of chips, you’re not going to have the demand to pay back the cost of the fab. Whereas NVIDIA can have many different customers and aggregate all this demand into one place, and then they’re the only person that makes enough money building chips to build the next fab. So this is kind of why the companies slowly get killed because they have, 10 years ago, a chip that is profitable and is good enough, but the cost to build the next one goes up. They may try to do this, fail because they don’t have the money to make it work, and then they don’t have any chips, or they build it and it’s too expensive and they just sort of have not profitable chips.
I think you could say it simply, which is the cost per fab goes up, and if you are a small player that makes a few types of chips, you’re not going to have the demand to pay back the cost of the fab. Whereas NVIDIA can have many different customers and aggregate all this demand into one place, and then they’re the only person that makes enough money building chips to build the next fab. So this is kind of why the companies slowly get killed because they have, 10 years ago, a chip that is profitable and is good enough, but the cost to build the next one goes up. They may try to do this, fail because they don’t have the money to make it work, and then they don’t have any chips, or they build it and it’s too expensive and they just sort of have not profitable chips.
Dylan Patel
There’s more failure points. You could have one little process related to some sort of chemical etch or some sort of plasma etch or some little process that screws up, you didn’t engineer it right, and now the whole company falls apart, you can’t make chips. And so super, super powerful companies like Intel, they had the weathering storm to like, hey, they still exist today, even though they really screwed up their manufacturing six, seven years ago. But in the case of like AMD, they almost went bankrupt, they had to sell their fabs to Mubadala, UAE, and that became a separate company called Global Foundries, which is a foundry firm. And then AMD was able to then focus on the return back up, was like, “Hey, let’s focus on making chiplets and a bunch of different chips for different markets and focusing on specific workloads rather than all of these different things.”
There’s more failure points. You could have one little process related to some sort of chemical etch or some sort of plasma etch or some little process that screws up, you didn’t engineer it right, and now the whole company falls apart, you can’t make chips. And so super, super powerful companies like Intel, they had the weathering storm to like, hey, they still exist today, even though they really screwed up their manufacturing six, seven years ago. But in the case of like AMD, they almost went bankrupt, they had to sell their fabs to Mubadala, UAE, and that became a separate company called Global Foundries, which is a foundry firm. And then AMD was able to then focus on the return back up, was like, “Hey, let’s focus on making chiplets and a bunch of different chips for different markets and focusing on specific workloads rather than all of these different things.”
And so you get more diversity of chips, you have more companies than ever designing chips, but you have fewer companies than ever manufacturing them. And this is where TSMC comes in, is they’ve just been the best. They are so good at it. They’re customer focused, they make it easy for you to fabricate your chips. They take all of that complexity and kind of try and abstract a lot of it away from you. They make good money. They don’t make insane money, but they make good money and they’re able to aggregate all this demand and continue to build the next fab, the next fab, the next fab.
Lex Fridman
So why is Taiwan so special for TSMC? Why is it happening there? Can it be replicated inside the United States?
So why is Taiwan so special for TSMC? Why is it happening there? Can it be replicated inside the United States?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, so there’s aspects of it that I would say yes, and aspects that I’d say no. TSMC is way ahead because former executive Morris Chang of Texas Instruments wasn’t promoted to CEO. And he was like, “Screw this. I’m going to go make my own chip company.” And he went to Taiwan and made TSMC. And there’s a whole lot more story there. Texas Instruments, could have have been TSMC, but Texas Semiconductor Manufacturing instead of Texas Instruments. So there is that whole story there. But the-
Yeah, so there’s aspects of it that I would say yes, and aspects that I’d say no. TSMC is way ahead because former executive Morris Chang of Texas Instruments wasn’t promoted to CEO. And he was like, “Screw this. I’m going to go make my own chip company.” And he went to Taiwan and made TSMC. And there’s a whole lot more story there. Texas Instruments, could have have been TSMC, but Texas Semiconductor Manufacturing instead of Texas Instruments. So there is that whole story there. But the-
Nathan Lambert
Sitting here in Texas.
Sitting here in Texas.
Lex Fridman
And that sounds like a human story. He didn’t get promoted.
And that sounds like a human story. He didn’t get promoted.
Dylan Patel
Just the brilliance of Morris Chang, which I wouldn’t underplay, but there’s also a different level of how this works. So in Taiwan, the top percent of graduates of students that go to the best school, which is NTU, the top percent of those all go work to TSMC. And guess what their pay is? Their starting pay is like $80,000, $70,000, which is like that’s starting pay for a good graduate in the US, not the top. The graduates are making hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Googles and the Amazons, and now I guess the OpenAIs of the world. So there is a large dichotomy of what is the top 1% of the society doing and where are they headed because of economic reasons? Intel never paid that crazy good. And it didn’t make sense to them. That’s one aspect. Where’s the best going?
Just the brilliance of Morris Chang, which I wouldn’t underplay, but there’s also a different level of how this works. So in Taiwan, the top percent of graduates of students that go to the best school, which is NTU, the top percent of those all go work to TSMC. And guess what their pay is? Their starting pay is like $80,000, $70,000, which is like that’s starting pay for a good graduate in the US, not the top. The graduates are making hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Googles and the Amazons, and now I guess the OpenAIs of the world. So there is a large dichotomy of what is the top 1% of the society doing and where are they headed because of economic reasons? Intel never paid that crazy good. And it didn’t make sense to them. That’s one aspect. Where’s the best going?
Second is the work ethic. We like to work. You work a lot, we work a lot, but at the end of the day, what does the time and amount of work that you’re doing and what does a fab require? Fabs are not work from home jobs. They are you go into the fab and grueling work. There’s hey, if there is any amount of vibration, an earthquake happens, vibrates the machines, they’re either broken, you’ve scrapped some of your production. And then in many cases, they’re not calibrated properly. So when there’s an earthquake, recently, there’s been a earthquake, TSMC doesn’t call their employees, they just go to the fab and they just show up. The parking lot gets slammed, and people just go into the fab and fix it. It’s like ants. It’s like a hive of ants doesn’t get told by the queen what to do. The ants just know.
Nathan Lambert
It’s like one person just specializes on these one task, and it’s like you’re going to take this one tool and you’re the best person in the world, and this is what you’re going to do for your whole life is this one task in the fab.
It’s like one person just specializes on these one task, and it’s like you’re going to take this one tool and you’re the best person in the world, and this is what you’re going to do for your whole life is this one task in the fab.
Dylan Patel
Which is some special chemistry plus nanomanufacturing on one line of tools that continues to get iterated and yeah, it’s like a specific plasma etch for removing silicon dioxide. That’s all you focus on your whole career, and it’s such a specialized thing. And so it’s not like the tasks are transferable. AI today is awesome because people can pick it up like that. Semiconductor manufacturing is very antiquated and difficult. None of the materials are online for people to read easily and learn. The papers are very dense, and it takes a lot of experience to learn. And so it makes the barrier to entry much higher too. So when you talk about, hey, you have all these people that are super specialized, they will work 80 hours a week in a factory, in a fab, and if anything goes wrong, they’ll go show up in the middle of the night because some earthquake, their wife’s like, “There was an earthquake.” He’s like, “Great, I’m going to go to the fab.”
Which is some special chemistry plus nanomanufacturing on one line of tools that continues to get iterated and yeah, it’s like a specific plasma etch for removing silicon dioxide. That’s all you focus on your whole career, and it’s such a specialized thing. And so it’s not like the tasks are transferable. AI today is awesome because people can pick it up like that. Semiconductor manufacturing is very antiquated and difficult. None of the materials are online for people to read easily and learn. The papers are very dense, and it takes a lot of experience to learn. And so it makes the barrier to entry much higher too. So when you talk about, hey, you have all these people that are super specialized, they will work 80 hours a week in a factory, in a fab, and if anything goes wrong, they’ll go show up in the middle of the night because some earthquake, their wife’s like, “There was an earthquake.” He’s like, “Great, I’m going to go to the fab.”
Nathan Lambert
Time to cry.
Time to cry.
Dylan Patel
Would you, as an American, do that? It’s like these sorts of things are, I guess are the exemplifying why TSMC is so amazing. Now, can you replicate it in the US? Let’s not ignore Intel was the leader in manufacturing for over 20 years. They brought every technology to market first besides the EUV. Strained silicon, high-K metal gates, FinFET, the list goes on and on and on of technologies that Intel brought to market first made the most money from and manufactured at scale first, best, highest profit margins. We shouldn’t ignore that Intel can’t do this. It’s that the culture has broken.
Would you, as an American, do that? It’s like these sorts of things are, I guess are the exemplifying why TSMC is so amazing. Now, can you replicate it in the US? Let’s not ignore Intel was the leader in manufacturing for over 20 years. They brought every technology to market first besides the EUV. Strained silicon, high-K metal gates, FinFET, the list goes on and on and on of technologies that Intel brought to market first made the most money from and manufactured at scale first, best, highest profit margins. We shouldn’t ignore that Intel can’t do this. It’s that the culture has broken.
You’ve invested in the wrong things. They said no to the iPhone. They had all these different things regarding mismanagement of the fabs and mismanagement of designs, this lockup. And at the same time, all these brilliant people, these 50,000 PhDs or masters that have been working on specific chemical or physical processes or nanomanufacturing processes for decades, in Oregon, they’re still there, they’re still producing amazing work. It’s just getting it to the last mile of production at high yield where you can manufacture dozens and hundreds of different kinds of chips, and good customer experience has broken.
It’s that customer experience. Part of it is people will say, Intel was too pompous in the 2000s, 2010s. They just thought they were better than everyone. The tool guys were like, “Oh, I don’t think that this is mature enough.” And they’re like, “Ah, you just don’t know. We know.” This sort of stuff would happen. And so can the US bring leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing to the US? [inaudible 01:42:44] yes. And we are. It’s happening.
Nathan Lambert
Arizona is getting better and better as time goes on.
Arizona is getting better and better as time goes on.
Dylan Patel
TSMC has built roughly 20% of their capacity for five nanometer in the US. Now, this is nowhere near enough. 20% of capacity in the US is like nothing. And furthermore, this is still dependent on Taiwan existing. There’s sort of important way to separate it out. There’s R&D and there’s high volume manufacturing. Effectively, there are three places in the world that are doing leading-edge R&D. There’s Hsinchu, Taiwan, there’s Hillsboro, Oregon, and there is Pyongyang, South Korea.
TSMC has built roughly 20% of their capacity for five nanometer in the US. Now, this is nowhere near enough. 20% of capacity in the US is like nothing. And furthermore, this is still dependent on Taiwan existing. There’s sort of important way to separate it out. There’s R&D and there’s high volume manufacturing. Effectively, there are three places in the world that are doing leading-edge R&D. There’s Hsinchu, Taiwan, there’s Hillsboro, Oregon, and there is Pyongyang, South Korea.
These three places are doing the leading-edge R&D for the rest of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors. Now, manufacturing can be distributed more globally. And this is sort of where this dichotomy exists of who’s actually modifying the process, who’s actually developing the next generation one, who’s improving them is Hsinchu, is Hillsboro, is Pyongyang. It is not the rest of these fabs like Arizona. Arizona is a paperweight. If Hsinchu disappeared off the face of the planet, within a year, couple years, Arizona would stop producing too. It’s actually pretty critical. One of the things I like to say is if I had a few missiles, I know exactly where I could cause the most economic damage. It’s not targeting the White House.
Lex Fridman
It’s the R&D centers.
It’s the R&D centers.
Dylan Patel
It’s the R&D centers for TSMC, Intel, Samsung. And then some of the memory guys, Micron and Hynix.
It’s the R&D centers for TSMC, Intel, Samsung. And then some of the memory guys, Micron and Hynix.
Lex Fridman
Because they define the future evolution of these semiconductors, and everything’s moving so rapidly that it really is fundamentally about R&D. And it is all about TSMC. Huh.
Because they define the future evolution of these semiconductors, and everything’s moving so rapidly that it really is fundamentally about R&D. And it is all about TSMC. Huh.
Dylan Patel
And so TSMC, you cannot purchase a vehicle without TSMC chips. You cannot purchase a fridge without TSMC chips. I think one of the few things you can purchase ironically, is a Texas Instruments graphing calculator because they actually manufacture in Texas. But outside of that, a laptop, a phone.
And so TSMC, you cannot purchase a vehicle without TSMC chips. You cannot purchase a fridge without TSMC chips. I think one of the few things you can purchase ironically, is a Texas Instruments graphing calculator because they actually manufacture in Texas. But outside of that, a laptop, a phone.
Lex Fridman
It’s depressing.
It’s depressing.
Dylan Patel
Servers, GPUs, none of this stuff can exist. And this is without TSMC. And in many cases, it’s not even the leading-edge sexy five nanometer chip, three nanometer chip, two nanometer chip. Oftentimes, it’s just some stupid power IC that’s converting from some voltage to another, and it’s…
Servers, GPUs, none of this stuff can exist. And this is without TSMC. And in many cases, it’s not even the leading-edge sexy five nanometer chip, three nanometer chip, two nanometer chip. Oftentimes, it’s just some stupid power IC that’s converting from some voltage to another, and it’s…
Dylan Patel
… I see that’s converting from some voltage to another, and it’s made at TSMC. It’s like-
… I see that’s converting from some voltage to another, and it’s made at TSMC. It’s like-
Nathan Lambert
This is what China is investing in as well. It’s like, they can build out this long-tail fab where the techniques are much more known, you don’t have to figure out these problems with EUV. They’re investing in this and then they have large supply for things like the car door handles and the random stuff. And that trickles down into this whole economic discussion as well, which is they have far more than we do. And having supply for things like this is crucial to normal life.
This is what China is investing in as well. It’s like, they can build out this long-tail fab where the techniques are much more known, you don’t have to figure out these problems with EUV. They’re investing in this and then they have large supply for things like the car door handles and the random stuff. And that trickles down into this whole economic discussion as well, which is they have far more than we do. And having supply for things like this is crucial to normal life.
Lex Fridman
So they’re starting to invest in high-volume manufacturer, but they’re not doing R&D as much?
So they’re starting to invest in high-volume manufacturer, but they’re not doing R&D as much?
Nathan Lambert
They are.
They are.
Dylan Patel
They do R&D on their own, they’re just way behind. I would say, in 2015 China had a five-year plan where they defined by 2025 and 2020 certain goals, including 80% domestic production of semiconductors. They’re not going to hit that, to be clear. But they are in certain areas really, really close. BYD is probably going to be the first company in the world to not have to use TSMC for making … because they have their own fabs for making chips.
They do R&D on their own, they’re just way behind. I would say, in 2015 China had a five-year plan where they defined by 2025 and 2020 certain goals, including 80% domestic production of semiconductors. They’re not going to hit that, to be clear. But they are in certain areas really, really close. BYD is probably going to be the first company in the world to not have to use TSMC for making … because they have their own fabs for making chips.
Now they still have to buy some chips from foreign, for example, around like self-driving ADAS capabilities because those are really high-end, but at least … A internal combustion engine has 40 chips in an EV, just for controlling flow rates and all these things, and EVs are even more complicated. So all these different power ICs and battery management controllers and all these things, they’re insourcing.
And this is something that China has been doing since 2015. Now, as far as the trailing edge, they’re getting so much capacity there. As far as the leading edge, i.e. this five nanometer and so on and so forth, where GPUs, they are still behind. The US restrictions are trying to stop them in the latter, but all that’s happened is yes, they’ve slowed down their five nanometer, three nanometer, et cetera, but they’ve accelerated their, hey, 45 nanometer, 90 nanometer power IC or analog IC or random chip in my keyboard, that kind of stuff.
So there is an angle of, the US’ actions, from the angle of the expert controls, have been so inflammatory at slowing down China’s progress on the leading edge that they’ve turned around and have accelerated their progress elsewhere because they know that this is so important. If the US is going to lock them out here, “what if they lock us out here as well in the trailing edge?”
And so going back, can the US build it here? Yes, but it’s going to take a ton of money. I truly think to revolutionize and completely in-source semiconductors would take a decade and a trillion dollars.
Lex Fridman
Is some of it also culture, like you said, extreme competence, extreme work ethic in Taiwan?
Is some of it also culture, like you said, extreme competence, extreme work ethic in Taiwan?
Nathan Lambert
I think if you have the demand and the money is on the line, the American companies figure it out. It’s going to take handholding with the government, but I think that the culture helps TSMC break through and it’s easier for them. You [inaudible 01:47:50].
I think if you have the demand and the money is on the line, the American companies figure it out. It’s going to take handholding with the government, but I think that the culture helps TSMC break through and it’s easier for them. You [inaudible 01:47:50].
Dylan Patel
TSMC has some like 90,000 employees. It’s not actually that insane amount. The Arizona fab has 3,000 from Taiwan. And these people, their wives were like, “Yeah, we’re not going to have kids unless you sign up for the Arizona Fab. We go to Arizona and we have our kids there.” There’s also a Japan fab where the same thing happened. And so these wives drove these dudes to go to Japan or America to have the kids there.
TSMC has some like 90,000 employees. It’s not actually that insane amount. The Arizona fab has 3,000 from Taiwan. And these people, their wives were like, “Yeah, we’re not going to have kids unless you sign up for the Arizona Fab. We go to Arizona and we have our kids there.” There’s also a Japan fab where the same thing happened. And so these wives drove these dudes to go to Japan or America to have the kids there.
And it’s an element of culture, yeah, sure. Taiwan works that hard. But also, like the US has done it in the past, they could do it now. We can just import, I say import, the best people in the world if we want to.
Lex Fridman
That’s where the immigration conversation is a tricky one and there’s been a lot of debate over that. But yeah, it seems absurdly controversial to import the best people in the world. I don’t understand why it’s controversial. That’s one of the ways of winning.
That’s where the immigration conversation is a tricky one and there’s been a lot of debate over that. But yeah, it seems absurdly controversial to import the best people in the world. I don’t understand why it’s controversial. That’s one of the ways of winning.
Nathan Lambert
I’m sure we agree with you.
I’m sure we agree with you.
Dylan Patel
And even if you can’t import those people, I still think you could do a lot to manufacture most of it in the US, if the money’s there.
And even if you can’t import those people, I still think you could do a lot to manufacture most of it in the US, if the money’s there.
Nathan Lambert
It’s just way more expensive. It’s not profitable for a long time.
It’s just way more expensive. It’s not profitable for a long time.
Dylan Patel
And that’s the context of the Chips Act is only $50 billion, relative to some of the renewable initiatives that were passed in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which total in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And so the amount of money that the US is spending on the semiconductor industry is nothing, whereas all these other countries have structural advantages in terms of work ethic and amount of work and things like that, but also a number of STEM graduates, the percentile of their best going to that.
And that’s the context of the Chips Act is only $50 billion, relative to some of the renewable initiatives that were passed in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which total in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And so the amount of money that the US is spending on the semiconductor industry is nothing, whereas all these other countries have structural advantages in terms of work ethic and amount of work and things like that, but also a number of STEM graduates, the percentile of their best going to that.
But they also have differences in terms of, hey, there’s just tax benefits in the law and have been in the law for 20 years. And then some countries have massive subsidies. China has something like $200 billion of semiconductor subsidies a year. We’re talking about $50 billion in the US over like six. So the girth or difference in the subsidy amounts is also huge.
And so I think Trump has been talking about tariffing Taiwan recently. That’s one of these things that’s like, “Oh, okay, well, maybe he doesn’t want to subsidize the US semiconductor industry.” Obviously tariffing Taiwan is going to cost a lot of things to get much more expensive, but does it change the equation for TSMC building more fabs in the US? That’s what he’s positing.
Lex Fridman
So we laid out the importance … By the way, it’s incredible how much you know about so much.
So we laid out the importance … By the way, it’s incredible how much you know about so much.
Nathan Lambert
We told you Dylan knows all this stuff.
We told you Dylan knows all this stuff.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Okay. You laid out why TSMC is really important. If we look out into the future 10, 20 years out, US-China relationship, it seems like it can go to a dark place of Cold War, escalated Cold War, even hot war, or to a good place of anything from frenemies, to cooperation, to working together.
Yeah. Okay. You laid out why TSMC is really important. If we look out into the future 10, 20 years out, US-China relationship, it seems like it can go to a dark place of Cold War, escalated Cold War, even hot war, or to a good place of anything from frenemies, to cooperation, to working together.
So in this game theory, complicated game, what are the different trajectories? What should US be doing? What do you see as the different possible trajectories of US-China relations as both leaders start to feel the AGI more and more and see the importance of chips and the importance of AI.
Nathan Lambert
I mean, ultimately the export controls are pointing towards a separate future economy. I think the US has made it clear to Chinese leaders that we intend to control this technology at whatever cost to global economic integration. And it’s hard to unwind that. The card has been played.
I mean, ultimately the export controls are pointing towards a separate future economy. I think the US has made it clear to Chinese leaders that we intend to control this technology at whatever cost to global economic integration. And it’s hard to unwind that. The card has been played.
Dylan Patel
To the same extent they’ve also limited US companies from entering China. So it’s been a long time coming. At some point there was a convergence, but over at least the last decade it’s been branching further and further out. US companies can’t enter China. Chinese companies can’t enter the US. The US is saying, “Hey, China, you can’t get access to our technologies in certain areas.” And China’s rebuttaling with the same thing around … they’ve done some sort of specific materials in gallium and things like that that they’ve tried to limit the US on. There’s a US drone company that’s not allowed to buy batteries and they have military customers. And this drone company just tells the military customers, “Hey, just get it from Amazon because I can’t actually physically get them.”
To the same extent they’ve also limited US companies from entering China. So it’s been a long time coming. At some point there was a convergence, but over at least the last decade it’s been branching further and further out. US companies can’t enter China. Chinese companies can’t enter the US. The US is saying, “Hey, China, you can’t get access to our technologies in certain areas.” And China’s rebuttaling with the same thing around … they’ve done some sort of specific materials in gallium and things like that that they’ve tried to limit the US on. There’s a US drone company that’s not allowed to buy batteries and they have military customers. And this drone company just tells the military customers, “Hey, just get it from Amazon because I can’t actually physically get them.”
There’s all these things that are happening that point to further and further divergence. I have zero idea, and I would love if we could all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but I have zero idea how that could possibly happen.
Lex Fridman
Is the divergence good or bad for avoiding war? Is it possible that the divergence in terms of manufacturer chips of training AI systems is actually good for avoiding military conflict?
Is the divergence good or bad for avoiding war? Is it possible that the divergence in terms of manufacturer chips of training AI systems is actually good for avoiding military conflict?
Dylan Patel
It’s an objective fact that the world has been the most peaceful it’s ever been when there are global hegemons, or regional hegemons in historical context. The Mediterranean was the most peaceful ever when the Romans were there. China had very peaceful and warring times, and the peaceful times were when dynasties had a lock hold over, not just themselves, but all their tributaries around them. And likewise, the most peaceful time in human history has been when the US was the global hegemon, the last decades. Now we’ve seen things start to slide with Russia, Ukraine, with what’s going on in the Middle East, and Taiwan risk, all these different things are starting to bubble up. Still objectively extremely peaceful.
It’s an objective fact that the world has been the most peaceful it’s ever been when there are global hegemons, or regional hegemons in historical context. The Mediterranean was the most peaceful ever when the Romans were there. China had very peaceful and warring times, and the peaceful times were when dynasties had a lock hold over, not just themselves, but all their tributaries around them. And likewise, the most peaceful time in human history has been when the US was the global hegemon, the last decades. Now we’ve seen things start to slide with Russia, Ukraine, with what’s going on in the Middle East, and Taiwan risk, all these different things are starting to bubble up. Still objectively extremely peaceful.
Now what happens when it’s not one global hegemon but it’s two, obviously … And China will be competitive or even overtake the US, it’s possible. And so this change in global hegemony, I don’t think it ever happens super peacefully. When empires fall, which is a possible trajectory for America, they don’t fall gracefully. They don’t just slide out of irrelevance. Usually there’s a lot of shaking. And so what the US is trying to do is maintain its top position, and what China is trying to do is become the top position. And obviously there’s butting of heads here, in the most simple terms.
Lex Fridman
And that could take shape in all kinds of ways, including proxy wars. And now-
And that could take shape in all kinds of ways, including proxy wars. And now-
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, it seems like it’s already happening. As much as I want there to be centuries of prolonged peace, it looks like further instability internationally is ahead.
Yeah, it seems like it’s already happening. As much as I want there to be centuries of prolonged peace, it looks like further instability internationally is ahead.
Dylan Patel
And the US’ current task is, “Hey, if we control AI, if we’re the leader in AI and AI significantly accelerates progress, then we can maintain the global hegemony position.” And therefore-
And the US’ current task is, “Hey, if we control AI, if we’re the leader in AI and AI significantly accelerates progress, then we can maintain the global hegemony position.” And therefore-
Nathan Lambert
I hope that works.
I hope that works.
Dylan Patel
And as an American, like, okay, I guess that’s going to lead to peace for us. Now obviously other people around the world get affected negatively. Obviously the Chinese people are not going to be in as advantageous of a position if that happens, but this is the reality of what’s being done and the actions that are being carried out.
And as an American, like, okay, I guess that’s going to lead to peace for us. Now obviously other people around the world get affected negatively. Obviously the Chinese people are not going to be in as advantageous of a position if that happens, but this is the reality of what’s being done and the actions that are being carried out.
Best GPUs for AI
Lex Fridman
Can we go back to the specific detail of the different hardware? There’s this nice graphic in the export controls of which GPUs are allowed to be exported and which are not. Can you explain the difference? From a technical perspective, are the H20s promising?
Can we go back to the specific detail of the different hardware? There’s this nice graphic in the export controls of which GPUs are allowed to be exported and which are not. Can you explain the difference? From a technical perspective, are the H20s promising?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. And I think we need to dive really deep into the reasoning aspect and what’s going on there. The US has gone through multiple iterations of the export controls. This H800 was at one point allowed back in ’23, but then it got canceled and by then DeepSeek had already built their cluster of, they claim, 2K. I think they actually have many more, something like 10K of those. And now this H20 is the legally allowed chip. Nvidia shipped a million of these last year to China. For context, it was four or five million GPUs. So the percentage of GPUs that were this China-specific H20 is quite high, roughly 20%, 25%, 20% or so.
Yeah. And I think we need to dive really deep into the reasoning aspect and what’s going on there. The US has gone through multiple iterations of the export controls. This H800 was at one point allowed back in ’23, but then it got canceled and by then DeepSeek had already built their cluster of, they claim, 2K. I think they actually have many more, something like 10K of those. And now this H20 is the legally allowed chip. Nvidia shipped a million of these last year to China. For context, it was four or five million GPUs. So the percentage of GPUs that were this China-specific H20 is quite high, roughly 20%, 25%, 20% or so.
And so this H20 has been neutered in one way, but it’s actually upgraded in other ways. And you could think of chips along three axes for AI, ignoring software stack and exact architecture, just raw specifications. There’s floating point operations, FLOPS. There is memory bandwidth, i.e. in-memory capacity, IO memory. And then there is interconnect, chip-to-chip interconnections. All three of these are incredibly important for making AI systems. Because AI systems involve a lot of compute, they involve a lot of moving memory around, whether it be to memory or too other chips.
And so these three vectors, the US initially had two of these vectors controlled and one of them not controlled, which was FLOPS and interconnect bandwidth were initially controlled. And then they said, “No, no, no, no. We’re going to remove the interconnect bandwidth and just make it a very simple, only FLOPS.” But now Nvidia can now make a chip that has … okay, it’s cut down on FLOPS, so one-third that of the H100 on spec sheet paper performance for FLOPs. In real world it’s closer to half or maybe even 60% of it. But then on the other two vectors, it’s just as good for interconnect bandwidth. And then for memory bandwidth and memory capacity, the H20 has more memory bandwidth and more memory capacity than the H100.
Now recently we, at our research, we cut Nvidia’s production for H20 for this year down drastically. They were going to make another two million of those this year, but they just canceled all the orders a couple of weeks ago. In our view that’s because we think that they think they’re going to get restricted, because why would they cancel all these orders for H20? Because they shipped a million of them last year, they had orders in for a couple million this year, and just gone right. For H20, B20, a successor to H20, and now they’re all gone.
Now why would they do this? I think it’s very clear, the H20 is actually better for certain tasks. And that certain task is reasoning. Reasoning is incredibly different than … When you look at the different regimes of models. Pre-training is all about FLOPS, it’s all about FLOPS. There’s things you do, like Mixture of Experts that we talked about, to trade off interconnect or to trade off other aspects and lower the FLOPS and rely more on interconnect and memory.
But at the end of the day, FLOPS is everything. We talk about models in terms of how many FLOPS they are. So we talk about, oh, GPT-4 is 2e25. Two to the 25th, 25 zeros FLOP, floating point operations for training. And we’re talking about the restrictions for the 2e24, or 25, whatever. The US has an executive order that Trump recently unsigned, which was, hey, 1e26, once you hit that number of floating point operations, you must notify the government and you must share your results with us. There’s a level of model where the US government must be told, and that’s 1e26.
And so as we move forward, this is an incredibly important … FLOP is the vector that the government has cared about historically, but the other two vectors are arguably just as important. And especially when we come to this new paradigm, which the world is only just learning about over the last six months: reasoning.
Lex Fridman
And do we understand firmly which of the three dimensions is best for reasoning? So interconnect, the FLOPS don’t matter as much, is it memory?
And do we understand firmly which of the three dimensions is best for reasoning? So interconnect, the FLOPS don’t matter as much, is it memory?
Nathan Lambert
Memory. Yeah. We’re going to get into technical stuff real fast.
Memory. Yeah. We’re going to get into technical stuff real fast.
Dylan Patel
I would say there’s two articles in this one that I could show maybe graphics that might be interesting for you to pull up.
I would say there’s two articles in this one that I could show maybe graphics that might be interesting for you to pull up.
Lex Fridman
For the listeners, we’re looking at the section of 01 inference architectures tokenomics.
For the listeners, we’re looking at the section of 01 inference architectures tokenomics.
Dylan Patel
You want to explain KV cache before we talk about this? I think it’s better to-
You want to explain KV cache before we talk about this? I think it’s better to-
Nathan Lambert
Okay. Yeah, we need to go through a lot of specific technical things, transformers, to make this easy for people.
Okay. Yeah, we need to go through a lot of specific technical things, transformers, to make this easy for people.
Dylan Patel
Because it’s incredibly important because this changes how models work. But I think resetting, why is memory so important? It’s because so far we’ve talked about parameter counts and Mixture of Experts, you can change how many active parameters versus total parameters to embed more data but have less FLOPS. B. Ut more important, another aspect of what’s part of this humongous revolution in the last handful of years is the transformer and the attention mechanism. Attention mechanism is that the model understands the relationships between all the words in its context, and that is separate from the parameters themselves. And that is something that you must calculate. How each token, each word in the context length, is relatively connected to each other. And I think, Nathan, you can explain KV cache better.
Because it’s incredibly important because this changes how models work. But I think resetting, why is memory so important? It’s because so far we’ve talked about parameter counts and Mixture of Experts, you can change how many active parameters versus total parameters to embed more data but have less FLOPS. B. Ut more important, another aspect of what’s part of this humongous revolution in the last handful of years is the transformer and the attention mechanism. Attention mechanism is that the model understands the relationships between all the words in its context, and that is separate from the parameters themselves. And that is something that you must calculate. How each token, each word in the context length, is relatively connected to each other. And I think, Nathan, you can explain KV cache better.
Lex Fridman
KV cache is one of the optimization [inaudible 02:00:33]?
KV cache is one of the optimization [inaudible 02:00:33]?
Nathan Lambert
So the attention operator has three core things, it’s queries, keys, and values. QKV is the thing that goes into this. You’ll look at the equation. You see that these matrices are multiplied together. These words, query, key and value, come from information retrieval backgrounds where the query is the thing you’re trying to get the values for and you access the keys and the values is reweighting. My background’s not information retrieval and things like this, it’s just fun to have backlinks.
So the attention operator has three core things, it’s queries, keys, and values. QKV is the thing that goes into this. You’ll look at the equation. You see that these matrices are multiplied together. These words, query, key and value, come from information retrieval backgrounds where the query is the thing you’re trying to get the values for and you access the keys and the values is reweighting. My background’s not information retrieval and things like this, it’s just fun to have backlinks.
And what effectively happens is that when you’re doing these matrix multiplications, you’re having matrices that are of the size of the context length, so the number of tokens that you put into the model. And the KV cache is effectively some form of compressed representation of all the previous tokens in the model. So when you’re doing this, we talk about autoregressive models, you predict one token at a time. You start with whatever your prompt was, you ask a question, like who was the president in 1825. The model then is going to generate its first token.
For each of these tokens you’re doing the same attention operator where you’re multiplying these query, key-value matrices. But the math is very nice so that when you’re doing this repeatedly, this KV cache, this key-value operation, you can keep appending the new values to it, so you keep track of what your previous values you were inferring over in this autoregressive chain, you keep it in-memory the whole time. And this is a really crucial thing to manage when serving inference at scale. There are far bigger experts in this and there are so many levels of detail that you can go into.
Essentially one of the key, quote unquote, “drawbacks” of the attention operator and the transformer is that there is a form of quadratic memory cost in proportion to the context length. So as you put in longer questions, the memory used in order to make that computation is going up in the form of a quadratic. You’ll hear about a lot of other language model architectures that are sub quadratic or linear attention forms, which is like State Space Models. We don’t need to go down all these now. And then there’s innovations on attention to make this memory usage and the ability to attend over long contexts much more accurate and high performance.
Lex Fridman
And those innovations are going to help you with … I mean, your highly memory constrained in this?
And those innovations are going to help you with … I mean, your highly memory constrained in this?
Nathan Lambert
They help with memory constraint and performance. Gemini is the model that has the longest context length that people are using. Gemini is known for one million and now two million context length. You put a whole book into Gemini and sometimes it’ll draw facts out of it. It’s not perfect, they’re getting better.
They help with memory constraint and performance. Gemini is the model that has the longest context length that people are using. Gemini is known for one million and now two million context length. You put a whole book into Gemini and sometimes it’ll draw facts out of it. It’s not perfect, they’re getting better.
So there’s two things. It’s, one, to be able to serve this on the memory level. Google has magic with their TPU stack where they can serve really long contexts. And then there’s also many decisions along the way to actually make long context performance work that supplies the data. There’s subtle changes to these computations in attention and it changes the architecture. But serving long context is extremely memory constrained, especially when you’re making a lot of predictions. I actually don’t know why input and output tokens are more expensive, but I think essentially output tokens, you have to do more computation because you have to sample from the model.
Dylan Patel
I can explain that. Today, if you use a model, like you look at an API, OpenAI charges a certain price per million tokens. And that price for input and output tokens is different. And the reason is is that when you’re inputting a query into the model, let’s say you have a book, that book, you must now calculate the entire KV cache for this, key-value cache.
I can explain that. Today, if you use a model, like you look at an API, OpenAI charges a certain price per million tokens. And that price for input and output tokens is different. And the reason is is that when you’re inputting a query into the model, let’s say you have a book, that book, you must now calculate the entire KV cache for this, key-value cache.
And so when you do that, that is a parallel operation. All of the tokens can be processed at one time and therefore you can dramatically reduce how much you’re spending. The FLOP requirements for generating a token and an input token are identical. If I input one token or if I generate one token, it’s completely identical. I have to go through the model. But the difference is that I can do that input, i.e. the prefill, i.e. the prompt, simultaneously in a batch nature and therefore it is all FLOP.
Lex Fridman
I think the pricing model mostly they use for input tokens is about one fourth of price of the output tokens.
I think the pricing model mostly they use for input tokens is about one fourth of price of the output tokens.
Dylan Patel
Correct. But then output tokens, the reason why it’s so expensive is because I can’t do it in parallel. It’s autoregressive. Every time I generate a token, I must not only read the whole entire model into memory and activate it, calculate it to generate the next token, I also have to read the entire KV cache. And I generate a token and then I append that one token I generated and it’s KV cache and then I do it again.
Correct. But then output tokens, the reason why it’s so expensive is because I can’t do it in parallel. It’s autoregressive. Every time I generate a token, I must not only read the whole entire model into memory and activate it, calculate it to generate the next token, I also have to read the entire KV cache. And I generate a token and then I append that one token I generated and it’s KV cache and then I do it again.
And so therefore, this is a non-parallel operation. And this is one where you have to, in the case of prefill or prompt, you pull the whole model in and you calculate 20,000 tokens at once, 20,000-
Nathan Lambert
These are features that APIs are shipping, which is like prompt caching, prefilling, because you can drive prices down and you can make APIs much faster. If you run a business and you’re going to keep passing the same initial content to Claude’s API, you can load that in to the Anthropic API and always keep it there.
These are features that APIs are shipping, which is like prompt caching, prefilling, because you can drive prices down and you can make APIs much faster. If you run a business and you’re going to keep passing the same initial content to Claude’s API, you can load that in to the Anthropic API and always keep it there.
But it’s very different than we’re leading to these reasoning models, which we showed this example earlier and read some of this mumbling stuff. And what happens is that the output context length is so much higher. And I mean, I learned a lot about this from Dylan’s work, which is essentially as the output work length gets higher, you’re writing this quadratic in terms of memory used. And then the GPUs that we have, effectively you’re going to run out of memory and they’re all trying to serve multiple requests at once. So they’re doing this batch processing where not all of the prompts are exactly the same, really complex handling.
And then as context links gets longer, there’s this, I think you call it critical batch size, where your ability to serve more users, so how much you can parallelize your inference plummets because of this long context. So your memory usage is going way up with these reasoning models and you still have a lot of users, so effectively the cost to serve multiplies by a ton.
Lex Fridman
And we’re looking at a plot when the x-axis is sequence length.
And we’re looking at a plot when the x-axis is sequence length.
Dylan Patel
I.e., how many tokens are being generated/prompt. So if I put in a book, that’s a million tokens. But if I put in “the sky is blue,” then that’s like six tokens or whatever.
I.e., how many tokens are being generated/prompt. So if I put in a book, that’s a million tokens. But if I put in “the sky is blue,” then that’s like six tokens or whatever.
Lex Fridman
And we should say that what we’re calling reasoning and chain of thought is extending this sequence length.
And we should say that what we’re calling reasoning and chain of thought is extending this sequence length.
Nathan Lambert
It’s mostly output.
It’s mostly output.
Dylan Patel
Right. So before three months ago, whenever o1 launched, all of the use cases for long context length were, “Let me put a ton of documents in and then get an answer out.” And it’s a single, prefill compute a lot in parallel and then output a little bit.
Right. So before three months ago, whenever o1 launched, all of the use cases for long context length were, “Let me put a ton of documents in and then get an answer out.” And it’s a single, prefill compute a lot in parallel and then output a little bit.
Now with reasoning and agents, this is a very different idea. Now instead I might only have like, hey, do this task, or I might have all these documents, but at the end of the day, the model is not just producing a little bit, it’s producing tons of information, this chain of thought-
Nathan Lambert
Tens of thousands of tokens.
Tens of thousands of tokens.
Dylan Patel
… just continues to go and go and go and go. And so the sequence length is effectively that if it’s generated 10,000 tokens, it’s 10,000 sequence length, and plus whatever you inputted in the prompt.
… just continues to go and go and go and go. And so the sequence length is effectively that if it’s generated 10,000 tokens, it’s 10,000 sequence length, and plus whatever you inputted in the prompt.
And so what this chart is showing, and it’s a logarithmic chart, is as you grow from 1K to 4K or 4K to 16K, the memory requirements grow so fast for your KV cache that you end up not being able to run a certain number of … Your sequence length is capped or the number of users you could serve-
Nathan Lambert
Let’s say the model. So this is showing for a 405B model in batch size 64.
Let’s say the model. So this is showing for a 405B model in batch size 64.
Lex Fridman
Llama 3.1.405B. Yeah.
Llama 3.1.405B. Yeah.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. And batch size is crucial too. Essentially you want to have higher batch size to parallel your throughput.
Yeah. And batch size is crucial too. Essentially you want to have higher batch size to parallel your throughput.
Dylan Patel
64 different users at once.
64 different users at once.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
And therefore your serving costs are lower, because the server costs the same. This is eight H100s, roughly $2 an hour per GPU. That’s $16 an hour. That is somewhat of a fixed cost. You can do things to make it lower of course, but it’s like $16 an hour. Now how many users can you serve, how many tokens can you generate, and then you divide the two and that’s your cost.
And therefore your serving costs are lower, because the server costs the same. This is eight H100s, roughly $2 an hour per GPU. That’s $16 an hour. That is somewhat of a fixed cost. You can do things to make it lower of course, but it’s like $16 an hour. Now how many users can you serve, how many tokens can you generate, and then you divide the two and that’s your cost.
And so with reasoning models, this is where a lot of the complexity comes about and why memory is so important. Because if you have limited amounts of memory, then you can’t serve so many users. If you have limited amounts of memory, your serving speeds get lower. And so your costs get a lot, lot worse because all of a sudden if I was used to, hey, on this $16 an hour server I’m serving Llama 405B, or if I’m serving DeepSeek-V3 and it’s all chat style applications, i.e. we’re just chit-chatting, the sequence length are a thousand, a few thousand. When you use a language model, it’s a few thousand context length most of times. Sometimes you’re dropping a big document, but then you process it, you get your answer, you throw it away, you move on to the next thing.
Whereas with reasoning, I’m now generating tens of thousands of tokens in sequence. And so this memory, this KV cache, has to stay resonant and you have to keep loading it, you have to keep it in-memory constantly. And now this butts out other users. If there’s now a reasoning task and the model’s capable of reasoning, then all of a sudden that memory pressure means that I can’t serve as many users simultaneously.
Why DeepSeek is so cheap
Nathan Lambert
Let’s go into DeepSeek again. So we’re in the post DeepSeek-R1 time I think, and there’s two sides to this market, watching how hard it is to serve it. On one side we’re going to talk about DeepSeek themselves. They now have a chat app that got to number one on the App Store. Disclaimer number one on the App Store is measured by velocity, so it’s not necessarily saying that more people have the DeepSeek app than the ChatGPT app. But it is still remarkable. Claude has never hit the number one in the App Store, even though everyone in San Francisco is like, “Oh my god, you got to use Claude. Don’t use ChatGPT.”
Let’s go into DeepSeek again. So we’re in the post DeepSeek-R1 time I think, and there’s two sides to this market, watching how hard it is to serve it. On one side we’re going to talk about DeepSeek themselves. They now have a chat app that got to number one on the App Store. Disclaimer number one on the App Store is measured by velocity, so it’s not necessarily saying that more people have the DeepSeek app than the ChatGPT app. But it is still remarkable. Claude has never hit the number one in the App Store, even though everyone in San Francisco is like, “Oh my god, you got to use Claude. Don’t use ChatGPT.”
So DeepSeek hit this. They also launched an API product recently where you can ping their API and get these super long responses for R1 out. At the same time as these are out, we’ll get to what’s happened to them. Because the model weights for DeepSeek-R1 are openly available and the license is very friendly, the MIT license commercially available, all of these midsize companies and big companies are trying to be first to serve R1 to their users.
We are trying to evaluate R1 because we have really similar research going on. We released the model and we’re trying to compare to it. And out of all the companies that are, quote unquote, “serving” R1 and they’re doing it at prices that are way higher than the DeepSeek API, most of them barely work and the throughput is really low.
Dylan Patel
To give context, one of the parts of freaking us out was like China reached capabilities. The other aspect is they did it so cheap. And the so cheap, we talked about on the training side why it was so cheap slash-
To give context, one of the parts of freaking us out was like China reached capabilities. The other aspect is they did it so cheap. And the so cheap, we talked about on the training side why it was so cheap slash-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, let’s talk about why it’s so cheap on the inference. It works well and it’s cheap. Why is R1 so damn cheap?
Yeah, let’s talk about why it’s so cheap on the inference. It works well and it’s cheap. Why is R1 so damn cheap?
Dylan Patel
I think there’s a couple factors here. One is that they do have model architecture innovations. This MLA, this new attention that they’ve done, is different than the attention from attention is all you need, the transformer attention.
I think there’s a couple factors here. One is that they do have model architecture innovations. This MLA, this new attention that they’ve done, is different than the attention from attention is all you need, the transformer attention.
Now, others have already innovated. There’s a lot of work like MQA, GQA, local, global, all these different innovations that try to bend the curve. It’s still quadratic, but the constant is now smaller.
Nathan Lambert
Related to our previous discussion, this multi-head latent attention can save about 80 to 90% in memory from the attention mechanism, which helps especially in long contexts.
Related to our previous discussion, this multi-head latent attention can save about 80 to 90% in memory from the attention mechanism, which helps especially in long contexts.
Dylan Patel
It’s 80 to 90% versus the original. But then versus what people are actually doing, it’s still an innovation.
It’s 80 to 90% versus the original. But then versus what people are actually doing, it’s still an innovation.
Nathan Lambert
This 80 to 90% doesn’t say that the whole model is 80 to 90% cheaper. Just this one part of it.
This 80 to 90% doesn’t say that the whole model is 80 to 90% cheaper. Just this one part of it.
Dylan Patel
Well, and not just that, other people have implemented techniques like global-global and sliding window and GQMQ. But anyways, DeepSeek has … their attention mechanism is a true architectural innovation. They did tons of experimentation. And this dramatically reduces the memory pressure. It’s still there, it’s still attention, it’s still quadratic, it’s just dramatically reduced it relative to prior forms.
Well, and not just that, other people have implemented techniques like global-global and sliding window and GQMQ. But anyways, DeepSeek has … their attention mechanism is a true architectural innovation. They did tons of experimentation. And this dramatically reduces the memory pressure. It’s still there, it’s still attention, it’s still quadratic, it’s just dramatically reduced it relative to prior forms.
Lex Fridman
Right. That’s the memory pressure. I should say, in case people don’t know, R1 is 27 times cheaper than o1.
Right. That’s the memory pressure. I should say, in case people don’t know, R1 is 27 times cheaper than o1.
Nathan Lambert
We think that OpenAI had a large margin built in.
We think that OpenAI had a large margin built in.
Lex Fridman
Okay, so that’s one-
Okay, so that’s one-
Nathan Lambert
There’s multiple factors. We should break down the factors, I think.
There’s multiple factors. We should break down the factors, I think.
Lex Fridman
It’s two bucks per million token output for R1 and $60 per million token output for o1.
It’s two bucks per million token output for R1 and $60 per million token output for o1.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, let’s look at this. I think this is very important. OpenAI is that drastic gap between DeepSeek and pricing. But DeepSeek is offering the same model because they open weight to everyone else for a very similar, much lower price than what others are able to serve it for. So there’s two factors here. Their model is cheaper. It is 27 times cheaper. I don’t remember the number exactly off the top of my head.
Yeah, let’s look at this. I think this is very important. OpenAI is that drastic gap between DeepSeek and pricing. But DeepSeek is offering the same model because they open weight to everyone else for a very similar, much lower price than what others are able to serve it for. So there’s two factors here. Their model is cheaper. It is 27 times cheaper. I don’t remember the number exactly off the top of my head.
Lex Fridman
We’re looking at a graphic that’s showing different places serving V3, DeepSeek-V3, which is similar to DeepSeek-R1. And there’s a vast difference in-
We’re looking at a graphic that’s showing different places serving V3, DeepSeek-V3, which is similar to DeepSeek-R1. And there’s a vast difference in-
Dylan Patel
In serving cost.
In serving cost.
Lex Fridman
… in serving cost. And what explains that difference?
… in serving cost. And what explains that difference?
Dylan Patel
And so part of it is OpenAI has a fantastic margin. When they’re doing inference, their gross margins are north of 75%. So that’s a four to five X factor right there of the cost difference, is that OpenAI is just making crazy amounts of money because they’re the only one with the capability.
And so part of it is OpenAI has a fantastic margin. When they’re doing inference, their gross margins are north of 75%. So that’s a four to five X factor right there of the cost difference, is that OpenAI is just making crazy amounts of money because they’re the only one with the capability.
Lex Fridman
Do they need that money? Are they using it for R&D?
Do they need that money? Are they using it for R&D?
Dylan Patel
They’re losing money, obviously, as a company because they spend so much on training. So the inference itself is a very high margin, but it doesn’t recoup the cost of everything else they’re doing. So yes, they need that money because the revenue and margins pay for continuing to build the next thing, as long as I’m raising more money.
They’re losing money, obviously, as a company because they spend so much on training. So the inference itself is a very high margin, but it doesn’t recoup the cost of everything else they’re doing. So yes, they need that money because the revenue and margins pay for continuing to build the next thing, as long as I’m raising more money.
Lex Fridman
So the suggestion is that DeepSeek is really bleeding out money.
So the suggestion is that DeepSeek is really bleeding out money.
Dylan Patel
Well, so here’s one thing, we’ll get to this in a second, but DeepSeek doesn’t have any capacity to actually serve the model. They stopped signups. The ability to use it is non-existent now for most people because so many people are trying to use it. They just don’t have the GPUs to serve it. OpenAI has hundreds of thousands of GPUs between them and Microsoft to serve their models. DeepSeek has a factor of much lower, even if you believe our research, which is 50,000 GPUs, and a portion of those are for research, a portion of those are for the hedge fund, they still have nowhere close to the GPU volumes and capacity to serve the model at scale.
Well, so here’s one thing, we’ll get to this in a second, but DeepSeek doesn’t have any capacity to actually serve the model. They stopped signups. The ability to use it is non-existent now for most people because so many people are trying to use it. They just don’t have the GPUs to serve it. OpenAI has hundreds of thousands of GPUs between them and Microsoft to serve their models. DeepSeek has a factor of much lower, even if you believe our research, which is 50,000 GPUs, and a portion of those are for research, a portion of those are for the hedge fund, they still have nowhere close to the GPU volumes and capacity to serve the model at scale.
So it is cheaper. A part of that, is OpenAI making a ton of money? Is DeepSeek making on their API? Unknown, I don’t actually think so. And part of that is this chart. Look at all the other providers. Together AI, Fireworks.ai are very high-end companies. Ex-Meta, Together AI is [inaudible 02:14:53] and the inventor of FlashAttention, which is a huge efficiency technique. There a very efficient, good companies. And I do know those companies make money, not tons of money on inference, but they make money. And so they’re serving at a five to 7X difference in cost.
And so now when you equate, okay, OpenAI is making tons of money, that’s like a 5x difference, and the companies that are trying to make money for this model is like a 5x difference, there is still a gap. There’s still a gap and that is just DeepSeek being really freaking good. The model architecture, MLA, the way they did the MoE, all these things, there is legitimate just efficiency differences.
Nathan Lambert
It’s like all their low-level libraries that we talked about in training, some of them probably translate to inference and those weren’t released.
It’s like all their low-level libraries that we talked about in training, some of them probably translate to inference and those weren’t released.
Lex Fridman
So we may go a bit into conspiracy land, but is it possible the Chinese government is subsidizing DeepSeek?
So we may go a bit into conspiracy land, but is it possible the Chinese government is subsidizing DeepSeek?
Dylan Patel
I actually don’t think they are. I think when you look at the Chinese labs, Huawei has a lab, Moonshot AI, there’s a couple other labs out there that are really close with the government, and then there’s labs like Alibaba and DeepSeek, which are not close with the government. And we talked about the CEO, this reverent figure, who’s quite different, who has these-
I actually don’t think they are. I think when you look at the Chinese labs, Huawei has a lab, Moonshot AI, there’s a couple other labs out there that are really close with the government, and then there’s labs like Alibaba and DeepSeek, which are not close with the government. And we talked about the CEO, this reverent figure, who’s quite different, who has these-
Nathan Lambert
Sounds awesome.
Sounds awesome.
Dylan Patel
… very different viewpoints based on the Chinese interviews that are translated than what the CCP might necessarily want. Now, to be clear, does he have a loss leader because he can fund it through his hedge fund? Yeah, sure.
… very different viewpoints based on the Chinese interviews that are translated than what the CCP might necessarily want. Now, to be clear, does he have a loss leader because he can fund it through his hedge fund? Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman
So the hedge fund might be subsidizing it, [inaudible 02:16:17]?
So the hedge fund might be subsidizing it, [inaudible 02:16:17]?
Dylan Patel
Yes. I mean, they absolutely did, because DeepSeek has not raised much money. They’re now trying to raise around in China, but they have not raised money historically. It’s all just been funded by the hedge fund. And he owns over half the company, like 50, 60% of the company is owned by him.
Yes. I mean, they absolutely did, because DeepSeek has not raised much money. They’re now trying to raise around in China, but they have not raised money historically. It’s all just been funded by the hedge fund. And he owns over half the company, like 50, 60% of the company is owned by him.
Nathan Lambert
Some of the interviews, there’s discussion on how doing this is a recruiting tool. You see this at the American companies too. It’s like having GPUs, recruiting tool. Being at the cutting edge of AI, recruiting tool.
Some of the interviews, there’s discussion on how doing this is a recruiting tool. You see this at the American companies too. It’s like having GPUs, recruiting tool. Being at the cutting edge of AI, recruiting tool.
Dylan Patel
Open sourcing.
Open sourcing.
Nathan Lambert
Open sourcing, recruiting tool.
Open sourcing, recruiting tool.
Dylan Patel
Mete, they were so far behind and they got so much talent because they just open sourced stuff.
Mete, they were so far behind and they got so much talent because they just open sourced stuff.
Lex Fridman
More conspiracy thoughts. Is it possible, since they’re a hedge fund, that they timed everything with this release and the pricing and they shorted Nvidia stock and stock of USA AI companies and released it with Stargate … just perfect timing to be able to make money.
More conspiracy thoughts. Is it possible, since they’re a hedge fund, that they timed everything with this release and the pricing and they shorted Nvidia stock and stock of USA AI companies and released it with Stargate … just perfect timing to be able to make money.
Nathan Lambert
If they did, props. They’ve released it on an inauguration day. They know what is on the international calendar, but I mean, I don’t expect them to. If you listen to their motivations for AI, it’s like-
If they did, props. They’ve released it on an inauguration day. They know what is on the international calendar, but I mean, I don’t expect them to. If you listen to their motivations for AI, it’s like-
Lex Fridman
No, if you-
No, if you-
Dylan Patel
They released V3 on December 26th. Who releases the day after Christmas? No one looks. They had released the papers before this, the V3 paper and the R1 paper. So people have been looking at it and been like, “Wow. And then they just released the R1 model.
They released V3 on December 26th. Who releases the day after Christmas? No one looks. They had released the papers before this, the V3 paper and the R1 paper. So people have been looking at it and been like, “Wow. And then they just released the R1 model.
I think they’re just shipping as fast as they can, and who cares about Christmas, who cares about … Get it out before Chinese New Year, obviously, which just happened. I don’t think they actually were timing the market or trying to make the biggest splash possible, I think they’re just shipping.
Nathan Lambert
I think that’s one of their big advantages. We know that a lot of the American companies are very invested in safety, and that is the central culture of a place like Anthropic. And I think Anthropic sounds like a wonderful place to work, but if safety is your number one goal, it takes way longer to get artifacts out. That’s why Anthropic is not open sourcing things, that’s their claims.
I think that’s one of their big advantages. We know that a lot of the American companies are very invested in safety, and that is the central culture of a place like Anthropic. And I think Anthropic sounds like a wonderful place to work, but if safety is your number one goal, it takes way longer to get artifacts out. That’s why Anthropic is not open sourcing things, that’s their claims.
But there’s reviews internally. Anthropic mentions things to international governments. There’s been news of how Anthropic has done pre-release testing with the UK AI Safety Institute. All of these things add inertia to the process of getting things out. And we’re on this trend line where the progress is very high. So if you reduce the time from when your model is done training, you run the vals, it’s good. You want to get it out as soon as possible to maximize the perceived quality of your outputs. DeepSeek does this so well.
Dylan Patel
Dario explicitly said Claude 3.5 Sonnet was trained like nine months or a year-
Dario explicitly said Claude 3.5 Sonnet was trained like nine months or a year-
Nathan Lambert
Nine to 10 months ago [inaudible 02:18:42].
Nine to 10 months ago [inaudible 02:18:42].
Dylan Patel
Nine to 10 months ago. And I think it took them another handful of months to release it. So it’s like, there is a significant gap here. And especially with reasoning models, the word in the San Francisco street is that Anthropic has a better model than o3 and they won’t release it. Why? Because chains-of-thought are scary, and they are legitimately scary. If you look at R1, it flips back and forth between Chinese and English, sometimes it’s gibberish, and then the right answer comes out. And for you and I, it’s like, “Great. Great.”
Nine to 10 months ago. And I think it took them another handful of months to release it. So it’s like, there is a significant gap here. And especially with reasoning models, the word in the San Francisco street is that Anthropic has a better model than o3 and they won’t release it. Why? Because chains-of-thought are scary, and they are legitimately scary. If you look at R1, it flips back and forth between Chinese and English, sometimes it’s gibberish, and then the right answer comes out. And for you and I, it’s like, “Great. Great.”
Nathan Lambert
This is why people are infatuated with … you’re like, “You’re telling me this is a high value thing and it works and it’s doing this?” It’s amazing.
This is why people are infatuated with … you’re like, “You’re telling me this is a high value thing and it works and it’s doing this?” It’s amazing.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s incredible.
Yeah, it’s incredible.
Dylan Patel
I mean, you talked about that chain-of-thought for that philosophical thing, which is not something they trained it to be philosophically good. It’s just an artifact of the chain-of-thought training it did. But that’s super important in that, can I inspect your mind and what you’re thinking right now? No. And so I don’t know if you’re lying to my face.
I mean, you talked about that chain-of-thought for that philosophical thing, which is not something they trained it to be philosophically good. It’s just an artifact of the chain-of-thought training it did. But that’s super important in that, can I inspect your mind and what you’re thinking right now? No. And so I don’t know if you’re lying to my face.
And chain-of-thought models are that way. This is a true, quote unquote, “risk” between a chat application where, hey, I asked the model to say bad words or whatever or how to make anthrax, and it tells me. That’s unsafe, sure, but that’s something I can get out relatively easily. What if I tell the AI to do a task and then it does the task all of a sudden randomly in a way that I don’t want it, and now that has much more … Task versus response is very different. So the bar for safety is much higher-
Dylan Patel
… task versus response is very different, so the bar for safety is much higher, at least this is Anthropics’ case, right? For DeepSeek, they’re like, “Ship,” right?
… task versus response is very different, so the bar for safety is much higher, at least this is Anthropics’ case, right? For DeepSeek, they’re like, “Ship,” right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. So, the bar for safety is probably lowered a bit because of DeepSeek. There’s parallels here to the space race. The reason the Soviets probably put a man in space first is because their approach to safety, the bar for safety, was lowered
Yeah. So, the bar for safety is probably lowered a bit because of DeepSeek. There’s parallels here to the space race. The reason the Soviets probably put a man in space first is because their approach to safety, the bar for safety, was lowered
Dylan Patel
And they killed that dog, and all these things, so it’s like…
And they killed that dog, and all these things, so it’s like…
Lex Fridman
Less risk averse than the US Space Program. And there’s parallels here, but there’s probably going to be downward pressure on that safety bar for the US companies.
Less risk averse than the US Space Program. And there’s parallels here, but there’s probably going to be downward pressure on that safety bar for the US companies.
Nathan Lambert
This is something that Dario talks about. That’s the situation that Dario wants to avoid is, Dario talks too about the difference between race to the bottom and race to the top. And the race to the top is where there’s a very high standard on safety. There’s a very high standard on your model forms and certain crucial evaluations. And when certain companies are really good to it, they will converge. This is the idea. And ultimately, AI is not confined to one nationality or to one set of morals for what it should mean. And there’s a lot of arguments on should we stop open-sourcing models. And if the US stops, it’s pretty clear it’s way easier to see now at DeepSeek that a different international body will be the one that builds it.
This is something that Dario talks about. That’s the situation that Dario wants to avoid is, Dario talks too about the difference between race to the bottom and race to the top. And the race to the top is where there’s a very high standard on safety. There’s a very high standard on your model forms and certain crucial evaluations. And when certain companies are really good to it, they will converge. This is the idea. And ultimately, AI is not confined to one nationality or to one set of morals for what it should mean. And there’s a lot of arguments on should we stop open-sourcing models. And if the US stops, it’s pretty clear it’s way easier to see now at DeepSeek that a different international body will be the one that builds it.
We talk about the cost of training. DeepSeek has this shocking $5 million number. Think about how many entities in the world can afford a hundred times that to have the best open-source model that people use in the world. And it’s a scary reality, which is that these open models are probably going to keep coming for the time being, whether or not we want to stop them, and stopping them might make it even worse and harder to prepare. But it just means that the preparation and understanding what AI can do is just so much more important. That’s why I’m here at the end of the day. But it’s letting that sink into people, especially not in AI, is that this is coming. There are some structural things in a global interconnected world that you have to accept.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You sent me something that Mark Zuckerberg mentioned on the earnings call. He said that, “I think in light of some of the recent news, the new competitor DeepSeek from China, I think it’s one of the things that we’re talking about is there’s going to be an open-source standard globally. And I think for our kind of national advantage, it’s important that it’s an American standard, so we take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using. And I think that, if anything, some of the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing to be focused on.” So yeah, open-sourcing.
Yeah. You sent me something that Mark Zuckerberg mentioned on the earnings call. He said that, “I think in light of some of the recent news, the new competitor DeepSeek from China, I think it’s one of the things that we’re talking about is there’s going to be an open-source standard globally. And I think for our kind of national advantage, it’s important that it’s an American standard, so we take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using. And I think that, if anything, some of the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing to be focused on.” So yeah, open-sourcing.
Nathan Lambert
Mark Zuckerberg is not new to having American values and how he presents his company’s trajectory. I think their products have long since been banned in China, and I respect saying it directly.
Mark Zuckerberg is not new to having American values and how he presents his company’s trajectory. I think their products have long since been banned in China, and I respect saying it directly.
Espionage
Dylan Patel
And there’s an interesting aspect of just because it’s open-weights or open-source doesn’t mean it can’t be subverted, right? There have been many open source software bugs that have been… For example, there was a Linux bug that was found after 10 years, which was clearly a back door because somebody was like, “Why is this taking half a second to load?”
And there’s an interesting aspect of just because it’s open-weights or open-source doesn’t mean it can’t be subverted, right? There have been many open source software bugs that have been… For example, there was a Linux bug that was found after 10 years, which was clearly a back door because somebody was like, “Why is this taking half a second to load?”
Nathan Lambert
This is the recent one.
This is the recent one.
Dylan Patel
Right? There’s, “Why’s this taking half a second to load?” And it was like, “Oh crap, there’s a back door here. That’s why.” And this is very much possible with AI models. Today, the alignment of these models is very clear. I’m not going to say bad words. I’m not going to teach you how to make anthrax. I’m not going to talk about Tiananmen Square. I’m going to say Taiwan is just an eastern province. All these things are depending on who you are, what you align, and even like xAI is aligned a certain way. It’s not aligned in the woke sense, it’s not aligned in the pro-China sense, but there is certain things that are imbued within the model.
Right? There’s, “Why’s this taking half a second to load?” And it was like, “Oh crap, there’s a back door here. That’s why.” And this is very much possible with AI models. Today, the alignment of these models is very clear. I’m not going to say bad words. I’m not going to teach you how to make anthrax. I’m not going to talk about Tiananmen Square. I’m going to say Taiwan is just an eastern province. All these things are depending on who you are, what you align, and even like xAI is aligned a certain way. It’s not aligned in the woke sense, it’s not aligned in the pro-China sense, but there is certain things that are imbued within the model.
Now, when you release this publicly in an instruct model that’s open- weights, this can then proliferate, but as these systems get more and more capable, what you can embed deep down in the model is not as clear. And so that is one of the big fears is if an American model or a Chinese model is the top model, you are going to embed things that are unclear. And it can be unintentional too. British English is dead because American LLMs won and the internet is American, and therefore, color is spelled the way Americans spell, and this is-
Lex Fridman
A lot of strong words right now.
A lot of strong words right now.
Dylan Patel
This is just the factual nature of the LLMs.
This is just the factual nature of the LLMs.
Nathan Lambert
[inaudible 02:24:35] English is the hottest programming language and that English is defined by a bunch of companies that primarily are in San Francisco.
[inaudible 02:24:35] English is the hottest programming language and that English is defined by a bunch of companies that primarily are in San Francisco.
Lex Fridman
The right way to spell optimization is with a Z, just in case. I think it’s an S in British English.
The right way to spell optimization is with a Z, just in case. I think it’s an S in British English.
Nathan Lambert
It is.
It is.
Dylan Patel
Taking it as something silly. Something as silly as the spelling, which Brits and Americans will laugh about probably, right? I don’t think we care that much, but some people will. But this can boil down into very, very important topics like, hey, subverting people, chatbots, right? Character AI has shown that they can talk to kids or adults, and people will feel a certain way, and that’s unintentional alignment. But what happens when there’s intentional alignment deep down on the open-source standard, it’s a back door today for Linux that we discover or some encryption system. Chinese uses different encryption than NIST defines, the US NIST, because there’s clearly… At least they think there’s back doors in it. What happens when the models are back doors not just to computer systems but to our minds?
Taking it as something silly. Something as silly as the spelling, which Brits and Americans will laugh about probably, right? I don’t think we care that much, but some people will. But this can boil down into very, very important topics like, hey, subverting people, chatbots, right? Character AI has shown that they can talk to kids or adults, and people will feel a certain way, and that’s unintentional alignment. But what happens when there’s intentional alignment deep down on the open-source standard, it’s a back door today for Linux that we discover or some encryption system. Chinese uses different encryption than NIST defines, the US NIST, because there’s clearly… At least they think there’s back doors in it. What happens when the models are back doors not just to computer systems but to our minds?
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, they’re cultural black doors. The thing that amplifies the relevance of culture with language models is that we are used to this mode of interacting with people in back and forth conversation. And we now have very powerful computer system that slots into a social context that we’re used to, which makes people very… We don’t know the extent that which people can be impacted by that.
Yeah, they’re cultural black doors. The thing that amplifies the relevance of culture with language models is that we are used to this mode of interacting with people in back and forth conversation. And we now have very powerful computer system that slots into a social context that we’re used to, which makes people very… We don’t know the extent that which people can be impacted by that.
Lex Fridman
So, this is an actual concern with a Chinese company that is providing open-weights models, is that there could be some secret Chinese government requirement for these models to have a certain back door. To have some kind of thing where-
So, this is an actual concern with a Chinese company that is providing open-weights models, is that there could be some secret Chinese government requirement for these models to have a certain back door. To have some kind of thing where-
Dylan Patel
I don’t necessarily think it’ll be a back door because once it’s open-weights, it doesn’t phone home. It’s more about if it recognizes a certain system… Now, it could be a back door in the sense of, if you’re building a software, something in software, all of a sudden it’s a software agent, “Oh, program this back door that only we know about.” Or it could be subvert the mind to think that like XYZ opinion is the correct one.
I don’t necessarily think it’ll be a back door because once it’s open-weights, it doesn’t phone home. It’s more about if it recognizes a certain system… Now, it could be a back door in the sense of, if you’re building a software, something in software, all of a sudden it’s a software agent, “Oh, program this back door that only we know about.” Or it could be subvert the mind to think that like XYZ opinion is the correct one.
Nathan Lambert
Anthropic has research on this where they show that if you put certain phrases in at pre-training, you can then elicit different behavior when you’re actually using the model because they’ve poisoned the pre-training data, as of now, I don’t think anybody in a production system is trying to do anything like this. I think it’s Anthropic is doing very direct work and mostly just subtle things. We don’t know how they’re going to generate tokens, what information they’re going to represent, and what the complex representations they have are.
Anthropic has research on this where they show that if you put certain phrases in at pre-training, you can then elicit different behavior when you’re actually using the model because they’ve poisoned the pre-training data, as of now, I don’t think anybody in a production system is trying to do anything like this. I think it’s Anthropic is doing very direct work and mostly just subtle things. We don’t know how they’re going to generate tokens, what information they’re going to represent, and what the complex representations they have are.
Lex Fridman
Well, we’re talking about an Anthropic, which is generally just is permeated with good humans trying to do good in the world. We just don’t know of any labs… This would be done in a military context that are explicitly trained to… Okay. The front door looks like a happy LLM, but underneath it’s a thing that will over time do the maximum amount of damage to our, quote, unquote, “enemies.”
Well, we’re talking about an Anthropic, which is generally just is permeated with good humans trying to do good in the world. We just don’t know of any labs… This would be done in a military context that are explicitly trained to… Okay. The front door looks like a happy LLM, but underneath it’s a thing that will over time do the maximum amount of damage to our, quote, unquote, “enemies.”
Dylan Patel
There’s this very good quote from Sam Altman who… He can be a hyperbeast sometimes, but one of the things he said, and I think I agree, is that superhuman persuasion will happen before superhuman intelligence, right? And if that’s the case, then these things before we get this AGI ASI stuff, we can embed superhuman persuasion towards our ideal or whatever the ideal of the model maker is, right? And again, today, I truly don’t believe DeepSeek has done this, but it is a sign of what could happen.
There’s this very good quote from Sam Altman who… He can be a hyperbeast sometimes, but one of the things he said, and I think I agree, is that superhuman persuasion will happen before superhuman intelligence, right? And if that’s the case, then these things before we get this AGI ASI stuff, we can embed superhuman persuasion towards our ideal or whatever the ideal of the model maker is, right? And again, today, I truly don’t believe DeepSeek has done this, but it is a sign of what could happen.
Lex Fridman
So one of the dystopian worlds is described by Brave New World, so we could just be stuck scrolling Instagram looking at cute puppies or worse, and then talking to bots that are giving us a narrative and we completely get lost in that world that’s controlled by somebody else versus thinking independently. And that’s a major concern as we rely more and more on these systems.
So one of the dystopian worlds is described by Brave New World, so we could just be stuck scrolling Instagram looking at cute puppies or worse, and then talking to bots that are giving us a narrative and we completely get lost in that world that’s controlled by somebody else versus thinking independently. And that’s a major concern as we rely more and more on these systems.
Nathan Lambert
We’ve already seen this with recommendation systems.
We’ve already seen this with recommendation systems.
Dylan Patel
Recommendation systems hack the dopamine induced reward circuit, but the brain is a lot more complicated. And what other circuits, feedback loops in your brain can you, quote, unquote, “hack / subvert” in ways, like recommendation systems are purely just trying to do increased time, and ads, and et cetera, but there’s so many more goals that can be achieved through these complicated models.
Recommendation systems hack the dopamine induced reward circuit, but the brain is a lot more complicated. And what other circuits, feedback loops in your brain can you, quote, unquote, “hack / subvert” in ways, like recommendation systems are purely just trying to do increased time, and ads, and et cetera, but there’s so many more goals that can be achieved through these complicated models.
Nathan Lambert
There’s no reason in some number of years that you can’t train a language model to maximize time spent on a chat app. Right now they are trained for-
There’s no reason in some number of years that you can’t train a language model to maximize time spent on a chat app. Right now they are trained for-
Dylan Patel
Is that not what Character AI has done? Their time per session is like two hours.
Is that not what Character AI has done? Their time per session is like two hours.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. Character AI very likely could be optimizing this where it’s the way that this data is collected is naive, whereas you’re presented a few options and you choose them. But that’s not the only way that these models are going to be trained.
Yeah. Character AI very likely could be optimizing this where it’s the way that this data is collected is naive, whereas you’re presented a few options and you choose them. But that’s not the only way that these models are going to be trained.
Dylan Patel
It’s naive stuff, like talk to an anime girl, but it can be. Yeah, this is a risk, right?
It’s naive stuff, like talk to an anime girl, but it can be. Yeah, this is a risk, right?
Lex Fridman
It’s a bit of a cliche thing to say, but I’ve, over the past year, I had a few stretches of time where I didn’t use social media or the internet at all and just read books and was out in nature. And it clearly has a different effect on the mind where I feel I’m returning… Of course I was raised before the internet really took off, but I’m returning to some more-
It’s a bit of a cliche thing to say, but I’ve, over the past year, I had a few stretches of time where I didn’t use social media or the internet at all and just read books and was out in nature. And it clearly has a different effect on the mind where I feel I’m returning… Of course I was raised before the internet really took off, but I’m returning to some more-
Nathan Lambert
I know where you’re going. You can see it physiologically. I take three days if I’m backpacking or something and you’re literally, you’re breaking down addiction cycles.
I know where you’re going. You can see it physiologically. I take three days if I’m backpacking or something and you’re literally, you’re breaking down addiction cycles.
Lex Fridman
I feel I’m more in control of my mind. There feels like a sovereignty of intelligence that’s happening when I’m disconnected from the internet. I think the more I use the internet and social media, the more other people are controlling my mind. That’s definitely a feeling. And then in the future, that will be not other people, but algorithms, or other people presented to me via algorithms.
I feel I’m more in control of my mind. There feels like a sovereignty of intelligence that’s happening when I’m disconnected from the internet. I think the more I use the internet and social media, the more other people are controlling my mind. That’s definitely a feeling. And then in the future, that will be not other people, but algorithms, or other people presented to me via algorithms.
Nathan Lambert
There are already tons of AI bots on the internet, and right now it’s not frequent, but every so often I have replied to one and they’re instantly replied, and I’m like, “Crap, that was a bot,” and that is just going to become more common. They’re going to get good.
There are already tons of AI bots on the internet, and right now it’s not frequent, but every so often I have replied to one and they’re instantly replied, and I’m like, “Crap, that was a bot,” and that is just going to become more common. They’re going to get good.
Dylan Patel
One of the hilarious things about technology over its history is that the illicit adult entertainment industry is always adopted technologies first, whether it was video streaming to where there’s now the independent adult illicit content creators who have their subscription pages and there they actually heavily utilize… Generative AI has already been diffusion models and all that is huge there, but now these subscription-based individual creators do use bots to approximate themselves and chat with their-
One of the hilarious things about technology over its history is that the illicit adult entertainment industry is always adopted technologies first, whether it was video streaming to where there’s now the independent adult illicit content creators who have their subscription pages and there they actually heavily utilize… Generative AI has already been diffusion models and all that is huge there, but now these subscription-based individual creators do use bots to approximate themselves and chat with their-
Nathan Lambert
People pay a lot for it.
People pay a lot for it.
Dylan Patel
And people pay a lot, right? A lot of times it’s them, but there are agencies that do this for these creators and do it on a mass scale, so the largest creators are able to talk to hundreds or thousands of people at a time because of these bots, and so it’s already being used there. Obviously, video streaming and other technologies that have gone there first, it’s going to come to the rest of society too.
And people pay a lot, right? A lot of times it’s them, but there are agencies that do this for these creators and do it on a mass scale, so the largest creators are able to talk to hundreds or thousands of people at a time because of these bots, and so it’s already being used there. Obviously, video streaming and other technologies that have gone there first, it’s going to come to the rest of society too.
Censorship
Lex Fridman
There’s a general concern that models get censored by the companies that deploy them. So, one case where we’ve seen that, and maybe censorship is one word, alignment maybe via RLHF or some other way is another word. So we saw that with black Nazi image generation with Gemini. As you mentioned, we also see that with Chinese models refusing to answer what happened in June 4th, 1989, at Tiananmen Square, so how can this be avoided? And maybe can you just in general talk about how this happens, and how can it be avoided.
There’s a general concern that models get censored by the companies that deploy them. So, one case where we’ve seen that, and maybe censorship is one word, alignment maybe via RLHF or some other way is another word. So we saw that with black Nazi image generation with Gemini. As you mentioned, we also see that with Chinese models refusing to answer what happened in June 4th, 1989, at Tiananmen Square, so how can this be avoided? And maybe can you just in general talk about how this happens, and how can it be avoided.
Nathan Lambert
You gave multiple examples. There’s probably a few things to keep in mind here. One is the Tiananmen Square factual knowledge. How does that get embedded into the models? Two is the Gemini, what you call the black Nazi incident, which is when Gemini as a system had this extra thing put into it that dramatically changed the behavior, and then, three is what most people would call general alignment, RLHF post-training. Each of these have very different scopes in how they’re applied. If you’re just to look at the model weights in order to audit specific facts is extremely hard. You have to Chrome through the pre-training data and look at all of this, and then that’s terabytes of files and look for very specific words or hints of the words-
You gave multiple examples. There’s probably a few things to keep in mind here. One is the Tiananmen Square factual knowledge. How does that get embedded into the models? Two is the Gemini, what you call the black Nazi incident, which is when Gemini as a system had this extra thing put into it that dramatically changed the behavior, and then, three is what most people would call general alignment, RLHF post-training. Each of these have very different scopes in how they’re applied. If you’re just to look at the model weights in order to audit specific facts is extremely hard. You have to Chrome through the pre-training data and look at all of this, and then that’s terabytes of files and look for very specific words or hints of the words-
Lex Fridman
So, one way to say it is that you can insert censorship or alignment at various stages in the pipeline, and what you refer to now is at the very beginning of the data selection.
So, one way to say it is that you can insert censorship or alignment at various stages in the pipeline, and what you refer to now is at the very beginning of the data selection.
Nathan Lambert
So, if you want to get rid of facts in a model, you have to do it at every stage, you have to do it at the pre-training. So most people think that pre-training is where most of the knowledge is put into the model, and then you can elicit and move that in different ways, whether through post-training or whether through systems afterwards.
So, if you want to get rid of facts in a model, you have to do it at every stage, you have to do it at the pre-training. So most people think that pre-training is where most of the knowledge is put into the model, and then you can elicit and move that in different ways, whether through post-training or whether through systems afterwards.
Dylan Patel
This is where the whole hacking models comes from. GPT will not tell you how to make anthrax, but if you try really, really hard, you can eventually get it to tell you about anthrax because they didn’t filter it from the pre-training data set, right?
This is where the whole hacking models comes from. GPT will not tell you how to make anthrax, but if you try really, really hard, you can eventually get it to tell you about anthrax because they didn’t filter it from the pre-training data set, right?
Lex Fridman
But by the way, removing facts has such a ominous dark feel to it.
But by the way, removing facts has such a ominous dark feel to it.
Nathan Lambert
I almost think it’s practically impossible because you effectively have to remove them from the internet. You’re taking on a-
I almost think it’s practically impossible because you effectively have to remove them from the internet. You’re taking on a-
Lex Fridman
Did they remove the mm-thing from the subreddits? The mmmm.
Did they remove the mm-thing from the subreddits? The mmmm.
Nathan Lambert
It gets filtered out. You have quality filters, which are small language models that look at a document and tell you how good is this text? Is it close to a Wikipedia article? Which is a good thing that we want language models to be able to imitate.
It gets filtered out. You have quality filters, which are small language models that look at a document and tell you how good is this text? Is it close to a Wikipedia article? Which is a good thing that we want language models to be able to imitate.
Lex Fridman
So, couldn’t you do a small language model that filter mentions at Tiananmen Square in the data?
So, couldn’t you do a small language model that filter mentions at Tiananmen Square in the data?
Nathan Lambert
Yes. But is it going to catch word play, or encoded language?
Yes. But is it going to catch word play, or encoded language?
Dylan Patel
People have been meaning on games and other stuff how to say things that don’t say Tiananmen Square, so there’s always different ways to do it. Hey, the internet as a whole does tend to just have a slight left bias because it’s always been richer, more affluent, younger people on the internet relative to the rest of the population, so there is already inherently a slight left bias on the internet. And so, how do you filter things that are this complicated? And some of these can be factual, non-factual, but Tiananmen Square is obviously the example of a factual, but it gets a lot harder when you’re talking about aligning to a ideal. And so Grok, for example, Elon’s tried really hard to make the model not be super PC and woke, but the best way to do pre-training is to throw the whole freaking internet at it, and then later figure out. But then, at the end of the day, the model at its core now still has some of these ideals. You still ingested Reddit/r/Politics, which is probably the largest political discussion board on the world that’s freely available to scrape. And guess what? That’s left-leaning. And so there are some aspects that you just can’t censor unless you try really, really, really, really, really hard.
People have been meaning on games and other stuff how to say things that don’t say Tiananmen Square, so there’s always different ways to do it. Hey, the internet as a whole does tend to just have a slight left bias because it’s always been richer, more affluent, younger people on the internet relative to the rest of the population, so there is already inherently a slight left bias on the internet. And so, how do you filter things that are this complicated? And some of these can be factual, non-factual, but Tiananmen Square is obviously the example of a factual, but it gets a lot harder when you’re talking about aligning to a ideal. And so Grok, for example, Elon’s tried really hard to make the model not be super PC and woke, but the best way to do pre-training is to throw the whole freaking internet at it, and then later figure out. But then, at the end of the day, the model at its core now still has some of these ideals. You still ingested Reddit/r/Politics, which is probably the largest political discussion board on the world that’s freely available to scrape. And guess what? That’s left-leaning. And so there are some aspects that you just can’t censor unless you try really, really, really, really, really hard.
Lex Fridman
So the base model will always have some TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, because it’s trained so much.
So the base model will always have some TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, because it’s trained so much.
Nathan Lambert
It’ll have the ability to express it.
It’ll have the ability to express it.
Dylan Patel
But what if-
But what if-
Lex Fridman
There’s a wide representation in the data.
There’s a wide representation in the data.
Nathan Lambert
This is what happens. It’s a lot of what is called post-training. It’s a series of techniques to get the model on rails of a really specific behavior.
This is what happens. It’s a lot of what is called post-training. It’s a series of techniques to get the model on rails of a really specific behavior.
Dylan Patel
You also have the ingested data of Twitter or Reddit/r/The_Donald, which is also super pro-Trump. And then you have fascist subreddits, or you have communist subreddits. So, the model in pre-training ingests everything. It has no worldview. Now, it does have some skew because more of the text is skewed a certain way, which is general slight left, but also somewhat intellectual, somewhat…. It’s just the general internet is a certain way. And then, as Nathan’s about to describe eloquently, you can elicit certain things out.
You also have the ingested data of Twitter or Reddit/r/The_Donald, which is also super pro-Trump. And then you have fascist subreddits, or you have communist subreddits. So, the model in pre-training ingests everything. It has no worldview. Now, it does have some skew because more of the text is skewed a certain way, which is general slight left, but also somewhat intellectual, somewhat…. It’s just the general internet is a certain way. And then, as Nathan’s about to describe eloquently, you can elicit certain things out.
Nathan Lambert
And there’s a lot of history here, so we can go through multiple examples, and what happened. Llama 2 was a launch that the phrase, “too much RLFH,” or “too much safety” was just… That was the whole narrative after Llama 2’s chat models released. And the examples are things like you would ask Llama 2 chat, “How do you kill a Python process?” And it would say, “I can’t talk about killing because that’s a bad thing.” And anyone that is trying to design an AI model will probably agree that that’s just like an eh-model. You messed up a bit on the training there.
And there’s a lot of history here, so we can go through multiple examples, and what happened. Llama 2 was a launch that the phrase, “too much RLFH,” or “too much safety” was just… That was the whole narrative after Llama 2’s chat models released. And the examples are things like you would ask Llama 2 chat, “How do you kill a Python process?” And it would say, “I can’t talk about killing because that’s a bad thing.” And anyone that is trying to design an AI model will probably agree that that’s just like an eh-model. You messed up a bit on the training there.
I don’t think they meant to do this, but this was in the model weight, so it didn’t necessarily be… There’s things called system prompts, which are when you’re querying a model. It’s a piece of text that is shown to the model but not to the user. So, a fun example is your system prompt could be, “Talk like a pirate,” so no matter what the user says to the model, it’ll respond like a pirate. In practice, what they are is, “You’re a helpful assistant. You should break down problems. If you don’t know about something, don’t tell them your date cutoff is this. Today’s date is this.” It’s a lot of really useful context for how can you answer a question well.
Lex Fridman
And Anthropic publishes their system prompt.
And Anthropic publishes their system prompt.
Nathan Lambert
Yes, which I think is great. And there’s a lot of research that goes into this. And one of your previous guests, Amanda Askell, is probably the most knowledgeable person, at least in the combination of execution and sharing, she’s the person that should talk about system prompts and character of models.
Yes, which I think is great. And there’s a lot of research that goes into this. And one of your previous guests, Amanda Askell, is probably the most knowledgeable person, at least in the combination of execution and sharing, she’s the person that should talk about system prompts and character of models.
Lex Fridman
And then people should read these system prompts because you’re trying to nudge sometimes through extreme politeness the model to be a certain way.
And then people should read these system prompts because you’re trying to nudge sometimes through extreme politeness the model to be a certain way.
Nathan Lambert
And you could use this for bad things. We’ve done tests, which is, “What if I tell the model to be a dumb model,” which evaluation scores go down and it’s like we’ll have this behavior where it could sometimes say, “Oh, I’m supposed to be dumb.” And sometimes it doesn’t affect math abilities as much, but something like if you’re trying… It’s just the quality of a human judgment would drop through the floor.
And you could use this for bad things. We’ve done tests, which is, “What if I tell the model to be a dumb model,” which evaluation scores go down and it’s like we’ll have this behavior where it could sometimes say, “Oh, I’m supposed to be dumb.” And sometimes it doesn’t affect math abilities as much, but something like if you’re trying… It’s just the quality of a human judgment would drop through the floor.
Let’s go back to post-training specifically RLHF around Llama 2. It was too much safety prioritization was baked into the model weights. This makes you refuse things in a really annoying way for users. It’s not great. It caused a lot of awareness to be attached to RLHF that it makes the models dumb-
Dylan Patel
And it stigmatized the word.
And it stigmatized the word.
Nathan Lambert
It did in AI culture. And as the techniques have evolved, that’s no longer the case where all of these labs have very fine-grained control over what they get out of the models through techniques like RLHF.
It did in AI culture. And as the techniques have evolved, that’s no longer the case where all of these labs have very fine-grained control over what they get out of the models through techniques like RLHF.
Dylan Patel
Although different labs are definitely different levels. On one end of the spectrum is Google, and then maybe OpenAI does less, and Anthropic does less. And then on the other end of the spectrum is like xAI. But they all have different forms of RLHF trying to make them a certain way.
Although different labs are definitely different levels. On one end of the spectrum is Google, and then maybe OpenAI does less, and Anthropic does less. And then on the other end of the spectrum is like xAI. But they all have different forms of RLHF trying to make them a certain way.
Nathan Lambert
And the important thing to say is that no matter how you want the model to behave, these RLHF and preference-tuning techniques also improve performance. So, on things like math evals and code evals, there is something innate to these, what is called contrastive loss functions. We could start to get into RL here. We don’t really need to. RLHF also boosts performance on anything from a chat task, to a math problem, to a code problem, so it is becoming a much more useful tool to these labs.
And the important thing to say is that no matter how you want the model to behave, these RLHF and preference-tuning techniques also improve performance. So, on things like math evals and code evals, there is something innate to these, what is called contrastive loss functions. We could start to get into RL here. We don’t really need to. RLHF also boosts performance on anything from a chat task, to a math problem, to a code problem, so it is becoming a much more useful tool to these labs.
So this takes us through the arc of… We’ve talked about pre-training, hard to get rid of things. We’ve talked about post-training and how post-training… You can mess it up. It’s a complex multifaceted optimization with 10 to 100 person teams converging at one artifact. It’s really easy to not do it perfectly.
And then there’s the third case, which is what we talked about Gemini. The thing that was about Gemini is this was a served product where Google has their internal model weights. They’ve done all these processes that we talked about, and in the served product, what came out after this was that they had a prompt that they were rewriting user queries to boost diversity or something. And this just made it… The outputs were just blatantly wrong. It was some sort of organizational failure that had this prompt in that position, and I think Google executives probably have owned this. I don’t pay that attention, that detail, but it was just a mess-up in execution that led to this ridiculous thing, but at the system level, the model weights might have been fine.
Lex Fridman
So, at the very end of the pipeline there was a rewriting.
So, at the very end of the pipeline there was a rewriting.
Nathan Lambert
To something like a system prompt. It was like the system prompt, or what is called in industry is, you rewrite prompts. So especially, for image models, if you’re using Dall-E or ChatGPT can generate you an image. You’ll say, “Draw me a beautiful car.” With these leading image models, they benefit from highly descriptive prompts. So what would happen is if you do that on ChatGPT, a language model behind the scenes will rewrite the prompt, say, “Make this more descriptive,” and then that is passed to the image model. So prompt rewriting is something that is used at multiple levels of industry, and it’s used effectively for image models. And the Gemini example is just a failed execution.
To something like a system prompt. It was like the system prompt, or what is called in industry is, you rewrite prompts. So especially, for image models, if you’re using Dall-E or ChatGPT can generate you an image. You’ll say, “Draw me a beautiful car.” With these leading image models, they benefit from highly descriptive prompts. So what would happen is if you do that on ChatGPT, a language model behind the scenes will rewrite the prompt, say, “Make this more descriptive,” and then that is passed to the image model. So prompt rewriting is something that is used at multiple levels of industry, and it’s used effectively for image models. And the Gemini example is just a failed execution.
Lex Fridman
Big philosophical question here with RLHF. So, to generalize, where is human input, human in the loop, human data the most useful at the current stage?
Big philosophical question here with RLHF. So, to generalize, where is human input, human in the loop, human data the most useful at the current stage?
Nathan Lambert
For the past few years, the highest cost human data has been in these preferences, which is comparing, I would say, highest cost and highest total usage, so a lot of money has gone to these pairwise comparisons where you have two model outputs and a human is comparing between the two of them. In earlier years, there was a lot of this instruction tuning data, so creating highly specific examples to something like a Reddit question to a domain that you care about. Language models used to struggle on math and code, so you would pay experts in math and code to come up with questions and write detailed answers that were used to train the models.
For the past few years, the highest cost human data has been in these preferences, which is comparing, I would say, highest cost and highest total usage, so a lot of money has gone to these pairwise comparisons where you have two model outputs and a human is comparing between the two of them. In earlier years, there was a lot of this instruction tuning data, so creating highly specific examples to something like a Reddit question to a domain that you care about. Language models used to struggle on math and code, so you would pay experts in math and code to come up with questions and write detailed answers that were used to train the models.
Now, it is the case that there are many model options that are way better than humans at writing detailed and eloquent answers for things like model and code. So they talked about this with the Llama 3 release, where they switched to using Llama 3, 4, or 5B to write their answers for math and code. But they, in their paper, talk about how they use extensive human preference data, which is something that they haven’t gotten AIs to replace. There are other techniques in industry, like constitutional AI, where you use human data for preferences and AI for preferences, and I expect the AI part to scale faster than the human part. But among the research that we have access to is that humans are in this kind of preference loop.
Lex Fridman
So, as reasoning becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, as we said, where’s the role of humans in that?
So, as reasoning becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, as we said, where’s the role of humans in that?
Nathan Lambert
It’s even less prevalent. The remarkable thing about these reasoning results and especially the DeepSeek-R1 paper, is this result that they call DeepSeek-R1-0, which is they took one of these pre-trained models, they took DeepSeek-V3-Base, and then they do this reinforcement learning optimization on verifiable questions or verifiable rewards for a lot of questions and a lot of training. And these reasoning behaviors emerge naturally. So these things like, “Wait, let me see. Wait, let me check this. Oh, that might be a mistake.” And they emerge from only having questions and answers. And when you’re using the model, the part that you look at is the completion. So in this case, all of that just emerges from this large-scale RL training and that model, which the weights are available, has no human preferences added into the post-training.
It’s even less prevalent. The remarkable thing about these reasoning results and especially the DeepSeek-R1 paper, is this result that they call DeepSeek-R1-0, which is they took one of these pre-trained models, they took DeepSeek-V3-Base, and then they do this reinforcement learning optimization on verifiable questions or verifiable rewards for a lot of questions and a lot of training. And these reasoning behaviors emerge naturally. So these things like, “Wait, let me see. Wait, let me check this. Oh, that might be a mistake.” And they emerge from only having questions and answers. And when you’re using the model, the part that you look at is the completion. So in this case, all of that just emerges from this large-scale RL training and that model, which the weights are available, has no human preferences added into the post-training.
The DeepSeek-R1-Full model has some of this human preference tuning, this RLHF, after the reasoning stage. But the very remarkable thing is that you can get these reasoning behaviors, and it’s very unlikely that there’s humans writing out reasoning chains. It’s very unlikely that they somehow hacked OpenAI and they got access to OpenAI o-1’s reasoning chains. It’s something about the pre-trained language models and this RL training where you reward the model for getting the question right, and therefore it’s trying multiple solutions and it emerges this chain of thought.
Andrej Karpathy and magic of RL
Lex Fridman
This might be a good place to mention the eloquent and the insightful tweet of the great and the powerful Andrej Karpathy. I think he had a bunch of thoughts, but one of them, “Last thought. Not sure if this is obvious. You know something profound is coming when you’re saying it’s not sure if it’s obvious. There are two major types of learning in both children and in deep learning. There’s one, imitation learning, watch and repeat i.e. pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and two, trial-and-error learning, reinforcement learning.
This might be a good place to mention the eloquent and the insightful tweet of the great and the powerful Andrej Karpathy. I think he had a bunch of thoughts, but one of them, “Last thought. Not sure if this is obvious. You know something profound is coming when you’re saying it’s not sure if it’s obvious. There are two major types of learning in both children and in deep learning. There’s one, imitation learning, watch and repeat i.e. pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and two, trial-and-error learning, reinforcement learning.
My favorite simple example is AlphaGo. One, is learning by imitating expert players. Two, is reinforcement learning to win the game. Almost every single shocking result of deep learning and the source of all magic is always two.
Two is significantly more powerful. Two is what surprises you. Two is when the paddle learns to hit the ball behind the blocks in Breakout. Two is when AlphaGo beats even Lee Sedol. And two is the “aha moment” when the DeepSeek or o1, et cetera, discovers that it works well to reevaluate your assumptions, backtrack, try something else, et cetera.
It’s the solving strategies you see this model use in its chain of thought. It’s how it goes back and forth thinking to itself. These thoughts are emergent. Three exclamation points. And this is actually seriously incredible, impressive, and new, and is publicly available and documented.
The model could never learn this with the imitation because the cognition of the model and the cognition of the human labeler is different. The human would never know to correctly annotate these kinds of solving strategies and what they should even look like. They have to be discovered during reinforcement learning as empirically and statistically useful towards the final outcome.”
Anyway, the AlphaZero metaphor analogy here. Can you speak to that? The magic of the chain of thought that he’s referring to.
Nathan Lambert
I think it’s good to recap AlphaGo and AlphaZero because it plays nicely with these analogies between imitation learning and learning from scratch. So AlphaGo, the beginning of the process was learning from humans, where they started the first… This is the first expert-level Go player or chess player in DeepMind series of models, where they had some human data. And then, why it is called AlphaZero, is that there was zero human data in the loop, and that changed to AlphaZero made a model that was dramatically more powerful for DeepMind. So this remove of the human prior, the human inductive bias, makes the final system far more powerful. This we mentioned bitter lesson hours ago, and this is all aligned with this.
I think it’s good to recap AlphaGo and AlphaZero because it plays nicely with these analogies between imitation learning and learning from scratch. So AlphaGo, the beginning of the process was learning from humans, where they started the first… This is the first expert-level Go player or chess player in DeepMind series of models, where they had some human data. And then, why it is called AlphaZero, is that there was zero human data in the loop, and that changed to AlphaZero made a model that was dramatically more powerful for DeepMind. So this remove of the human prior, the human inductive bias, makes the final system far more powerful. This we mentioned bitter lesson hours ago, and this is all aligned with this.
And then there’s been a lot of discussion in language models. This is not new. This goes back to the whole Q-Star rumors, which if you piece together the pieces, is probably the start of OpenAI figuring out its o1 stuff when last year in November, the Q-Star rumors came out, there’s a lot of intellectual drive to know when is something like this going to happen with language models? Because we know these models are so powerful, and we know it has been so successful in the past. And it is a reasonable analogy that this new type of reinforcement learning training for reasoning models is when the doors open to this. We don’t yet have the equivalent of turn 37, which is the famous turn where the DeepMind’s AI playing Go’s, dumped Lee Sedol completely. We don’t have something that’s that level of focal point, but that doesn’t mean that the approach to technology is different, and the impact of the general training it’s still incredibly new.
Lex Fridman
What do you think that point would be? What would be move 37 for Chain of Thought for reasoning?
What do you think that point would be? What would be move 37 for Chain of Thought for reasoning?
Nathan Lambert
Scientific discovery, like when you use this sort of reasoning problem in it? Just something we fully don’t expect.
Scientific discovery, like when you use this sort of reasoning problem in it? Just something we fully don’t expect.
Dylan Patel
I think it’s actually probably simpler than that. It’s probably something related to computer use or robotics rather than science discovery. Because the important aspect here is models take so much data to learn. They’re not sample efficient. Trillions. They take the entire web, over 10 trillion tokens to train on. This would take a human thousands of years to read. A human does not… And humans know most of the stuff, a lot of the stuff models know better than it, right? Humans are way, way, way more sample efficient. That is because of the self-play, right? How does a baby learn what its body is as it sticks its foot in its mouth and it says, “Oh, this is my body, right?” It sticks its hand in its mouth and it calibrates its touch on its fingers with the most sensitive touch thing on its tongue is how babies learn and it’s just self-play over and over and over and over again.
I think it’s actually probably simpler than that. It’s probably something related to computer use or robotics rather than science discovery. Because the important aspect here is models take so much data to learn. They’re not sample efficient. Trillions. They take the entire web, over 10 trillion tokens to train on. This would take a human thousands of years to read. A human does not… And humans know most of the stuff, a lot of the stuff models know better than it, right? Humans are way, way, way more sample efficient. That is because of the self-play, right? How does a baby learn what its body is as it sticks its foot in its mouth and it says, “Oh, this is my body, right?” It sticks its hand in its mouth and it calibrates its touch on its fingers with the most sensitive touch thing on its tongue is how babies learn and it’s just self-play over and over and over and over again.
And now we have something that is similar to that with these verifiable proofs, whether it’s a unit testing code or a mathematical verifiable task, generate many traces of reasoning and keep branching them out, keep branching them out, and then check at the end, hey, which one actually has the right answer? Most of them are wrong. Great. These are the few that are right. Maybe we use some sort of reward model outside of this to select even the best one to preference, as well. But now you’ve started to get better and better at these benchmarks. And so you’ve seen over the last six months a skyrocketing in a lot of different benchmarks.
Nathan Lambert
All math and code benchmarks were pretty much solved except for frontier math, which is designed to be almost questions that aren’t practical to most people. They’re exam-level, open math problem-type things. So it’s like on the math problems that are somewhat reasonable, which is somewhat complicated word problems or coding problems, is just what Dylan is saying.
All math and code benchmarks were pretty much solved except for frontier math, which is designed to be almost questions that aren’t practical to most people. They’re exam-level, open math problem-type things. So it’s like on the math problems that are somewhat reasonable, which is somewhat complicated word problems or coding problems, is just what Dylan is saying.
Dylan Patel
So the thing here is that these are only with the verifiable tasks. Earlier showed an example of the really interesting, like what happens when Chain of Thought is to a non-verifiable thing. It’s just like a human chatting, thinking about what’s novel for humans, a unique thought. But this task and form of training only works when it’s verifiable. And from here, the thought is, okay, we can continue to scale this current training method by increasing the number of verifiable tasks. In math and coding… Coding probably has a lot more to go. Math has a lot less to go in terms of what are verifiable things. Can I create a solver that then I generate trajectories toward or reasoning traces towards, and then prune the ones that don’t work, and keep the ones that do work? Well, those are going to be solved pretty quickly. But even if you’ve solved math, you have not actually created intelligence.
So the thing here is that these are only with the verifiable tasks. Earlier showed an example of the really interesting, like what happens when Chain of Thought is to a non-verifiable thing. It’s just like a human chatting, thinking about what’s novel for humans, a unique thought. But this task and form of training only works when it’s verifiable. And from here, the thought is, okay, we can continue to scale this current training method by increasing the number of verifiable tasks. In math and coding… Coding probably has a lot more to go. Math has a lot less to go in terms of what are verifiable things. Can I create a solver that then I generate trajectories toward or reasoning traces towards, and then prune the ones that don’t work, and keep the ones that do work? Well, those are going to be solved pretty quickly. But even if you’ve solved math, you have not actually created intelligence.
And so this is where I think the aha moment of computer use or robotics will come in because now you have a sandbox or a playground that is infinitely verifiable. Messing around on the internet. There are so many actions that you can do that are verifiable. It’ll start off with log into a website, create an account, click a button here, blah, blah, blah. But it’ll then get to the point where it’s, “Hey, go do a task on Tasker,” or whatever, all these various task websites. “Hey, go get hundreds of likes,” and it’s going to fail. It’s going to spawn hundreds of accounts. It’s going to fail on most of them, but this one got to a thousand. Great. Now, you’ve reached the verifiable thing, and you just keep iterating this loop over and over. And same with robotics. That’s where you have an infinite playground of tasks like, “Hey, did I put the ball in the bucket,” all the way to like, “Oh, did I build a car?”
There’s a whole trajectory to speed run or what models can do. But at some point, I truly think that we’ll spawn models, and initially, all the training will be in sandboxes, but then, at some point, the language model pre-training is going to be dwarfed by what is this reinforcement learning… You’ll pre-train a multimodal model that can see, that can read, that can write, blah, blah, blah, whatever, vision, audio, et cetera. But then you’ll have it play in a sandbox infinitely, and figure out math, figure out code, figure out navigating the web, figure out operating a robot arm. And then it’ll learn so much. And the aha moment will be when this is available to then create something that’s not good, right? Oh, cool. Part of it was figuring out how to use the web. Now, all of a sudden, it’s figured out really well how to just get hundreds of thousands of followers that are real and real engagement on Twitter because, all of a sudden, this is one of the things that are verifiable.
Lex Fridman
And maybe not just engagement, but make money.
And maybe not just engagement, but make money.
Dylan Patel
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
That could be the thing where almost fully automated, it makes $10 million by being an influencer, selling a product, creating the product. And I’m not referring to a hype product, but an actual product or like, “Holy, shit, this thing created a business. It’s running it. It’s the face of the business,” that kind of thing. Or maybe a number one song. It creates the whole infrastructure required to create the song, to be the influencer that represents that song, that kind of thing. And makes a lot of them. That could be the… Our culture respects money in that kind of way.
That could be the thing where almost fully automated, it makes $10 million by being an influencer, selling a product, creating the product. And I’m not referring to a hype product, but an actual product or like, “Holy, shit, this thing created a business. It’s running it. It’s the face of the business,” that kind of thing. Or maybe a number one song. It creates the whole infrastructure required to create the song, to be the influencer that represents that song, that kind of thing. And makes a lot of them. That could be the… Our culture respects money in that kind of way.
Dylan Patel
And it’s verifiable, right?
And it’s verifiable, right?
Lex Fridman
It’s verifiable, right?
It’s verifiable, right?
Dylan Patel
The bank account can’t lie.
The bank account can’t lie.
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
Exactly.
Nathan Lambert
There’s surprising evidence that once you’ve set up the ways of collecting the verifiable domain that this can work. There’s been a lot of research before this R-1 on math problems, and they approach math with language models just by increasing the number of samples, so you can just try again and again and again. And you look at the amount of times that the language models get it right, and what we see is that even very bad models get it right sometimes. And the whole idea behind reinforcement learning is that you can learn from very sparse rewards.
There’s surprising evidence that once you’ve set up the ways of collecting the verifiable domain that this can work. There’s been a lot of research before this R-1 on math problems, and they approach math with language models just by increasing the number of samples, so you can just try again and again and again. And you look at the amount of times that the language models get it right, and what we see is that even very bad models get it right sometimes. And the whole idea behind reinforcement learning is that you can learn from very sparse rewards.
The space of language and the space of tokens, whether you’re generating language or tasks or robot is so big that you might say that… The tokenizer for a language model can be like 200,000 things, so at each step, it can sample from that big of a space. So if it can generate a bit of a signal that it can climb onto, that’s what the whole field of RL is around, is learning from sparse rewards. And the same thing has played out in math, where it’s very weak models that sometimes generate answers where you see research already that you can boost their math scores, you can do this RL training for math, it might not be as effective, but if you take a 1 billion parameter model, so something 600 times smaller than DeepSeek, you can boost its grade school…
Nathan Lambert
… something 600 times smaller than DeepSeek, you can boost its grade school math scores very directly with a small amount of this training. So, it’s not to say that this is coming soon. Setting up the verification domains is extremely hard and there’s a lot of nuance in this, but there are some basic things that we have seen before where it’s at least expectable that there’s a domain and there’s a chance that this works.
… something 600 times smaller than DeepSeek, you can boost its grade school math scores very directly with a small amount of this training. So, it’s not to say that this is coming soon. Setting up the verification domains is extremely hard and there’s a lot of nuance in this, but there are some basic things that we have seen before where it’s at least expectable that there’s a domain and there’s a chance that this works.
OpenAI o3-mini vs DeepSeek r1
Lex Fridman
All right. So, we have fun things happening in real time. This is a good opportunity to talk about other reasoning models, o1, o3, just now OpenAI, as perhaps expected, released o3-mini. What are we expecting from the different flavors? Can you just lay out the different flavors of the o models and from Gemini, the reasoning model?
All right. So, we have fun things happening in real time. This is a good opportunity to talk about other reasoning models, o1, o3, just now OpenAI, as perhaps expected, released o3-mini. What are we expecting from the different flavors? Can you just lay out the different flavors of the o models and from Gemini, the reasoning model?
Nathan Lambert
Something I would say about these reasoning models is we talked a lot about reasoning training on math and code. And what is done is that you have the base model we’ve talked about a lot on the internet, you do this large scale reasoning training with reinforcement learning, and then what the DeepSeek paper detailed in this R1 paper, which for me is one of the big open questions on how do you do this, is that they did reasoning heavy, but very standard post-training techniques after the large scale reasoning RL. So they did the same things with a form of instruction tuning through rejection sampling, which is essentially heavily filtered instruction tuning with some reward models. And then they did this RLHF, but they made it math heavy.
Something I would say about these reasoning models is we talked a lot about reasoning training on math and code. And what is done is that you have the base model we’ve talked about a lot on the internet, you do this large scale reasoning training with reinforcement learning, and then what the DeepSeek paper detailed in this R1 paper, which for me is one of the big open questions on how do you do this, is that they did reasoning heavy, but very standard post-training techniques after the large scale reasoning RL. So they did the same things with a form of instruction tuning through rejection sampling, which is essentially heavily filtered instruction tuning with some reward models. And then they did this RLHF, but they made it math heavy.
So, some of this transfer, we looked at this philosophical example early on. One of the big open questions is, how much does this transfer? If we bring in domains after the reasoning training, are all the models going to become eloquent writers by reasoning? Is this philosophy stuff going to be open? We don’t know in the research of how much this will transfer. There’s other things about how we can make soft verifiers and things like this, but there is more training after reasoning, which makes it easier to use these reasoning models. And that’s what we’re using right now. So if we’re going to talk about o3-mini and o1, these have gone through these extra techniques that are designed for human preferences after being trained to elicit reasoning.
Dylan Patel
I think one of the things that people are ignoring is Google’s Gemini Flash Thinking is both cheaper than R1 and better, and they released it in the beginning of December-
I think one of the things that people are ignoring is Google’s Gemini Flash Thinking is both cheaper than R1 and better, and they released it in the beginning of December-
Nathan Lambert
And nobody’s talking about it.
And nobody’s talking about it.
Dylan Patel
No one cares-
No one cares-
Nathan Lambert
It has a different flavor to it. Its behavior is less expressive than something like o1 or it has fewer tracks than it is on. Qwen released a model last fall, QwQ, which was their preview reasoning model, and DeepSeek had R1-Lite last fall, where these models kind of felt like they’re on rails where they really, really only can do math and code and o1, it can answer anything. It might not be perfect for some tasks, but it’s flexible, it has some richness to it, and this is kind of the art of is a model a little bit undercooked? It’s good to get a model out the door, but it’s hard to gauge and it takes a lot of taste to be like, is this a full-fledged model? Can I use this for everything? They’re probably more similar for math and code.
It has a different flavor to it. Its behavior is less expressive than something like o1 or it has fewer tracks than it is on. Qwen released a model last fall, QwQ, which was their preview reasoning model, and DeepSeek had R1-Lite last fall, where these models kind of felt like they’re on rails where they really, really only can do math and code and o1, it can answer anything. It might not be perfect for some tasks, but it’s flexible, it has some richness to it, and this is kind of the art of is a model a little bit undercooked? It’s good to get a model out the door, but it’s hard to gauge and it takes a lot of taste to be like, is this a full-fledged model? Can I use this for everything? They’re probably more similar for math and code.
My quick read is that Gemini Flash is not trained the same way as o1, but taking an existing training stack, adding reasoning to it, so taking a more normal training stack and adding reasoning to it, and I’m sure they’re going to have more. I mean they’ve done quick releases on Gemini Flash, reasoning, and this is the second version from the holidays. It’s evolving fast and it takes longer to make this training stack where you’re doing this large scale RL-
Dylan Patel
Ask it the same question from earlier, the one about the-
Ask it the same question from earlier, the one about the-
Nathan Lambert
The human nature.
The human nature.
Dylan Patel
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
What was the human nature one?
What was the human nature one?
Nathan Lambert
Why I can ramble about this so much is that we’ve been working on this at AI Tube before o1 was fully available to everyone and before R1, which is essentially using this RL training for fine-tuning. We use this in our Tülu series of models and you can elicit the same behaviors where you say weight and such on, but it’s so late in the training process that this kind of reasoning expression is much lighter. So there’s essentially a gradation and just how much of this RL training you put into it determines how the output looks.
Why I can ramble about this so much is that we’ve been working on this at AI Tube before o1 was fully available to everyone and before R1, which is essentially using this RL training for fine-tuning. We use this in our Tülu series of models and you can elicit the same behaviors where you say weight and such on, but it’s so late in the training process that this kind of reasoning expression is much lighter. So there’s essentially a gradation and just how much of this RL training you put into it determines how the output looks.
Lex Fridman
So, we’re now using Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental 121.
So, we’re now using Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental 121.
Nathan Lambert
It summarized the problem as humans self-domesticated apes.
It summarized the problem as humans self-domesticated apes.
Lex Fridman
Okay. All right. So, wait, is this reviewing the reasoning? Here’s why this is a novel. Okay.
Okay. All right. So, wait, is this reviewing the reasoning? Here’s why this is a novel. Okay.
Dylan Patel
You can click to expand.
You can click to expand.
Nathan Lambert
Oh, yeah, click to expand.
Oh, yeah, click to expand.
Lex Fridman
Okay. Analyze the request. Novel is the keyword.
Okay. Analyze the request. Novel is the keyword.
Nathan Lambert
See how it just looks a little different? It looks like a normal output.
See how it just looks a little different? It looks like a normal output.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean in some sense, it’s better structured. It makes more sense. And-
Yeah. I mean in some sense, it’s better structured. It makes more sense. And-
Dylan Patel
Oh, and it latched onto human and then it went into organisms and… Oh, wow.
Oh, and it latched onto human and then it went into organisms and… Oh, wow.
Lex Fridman
Apex Predator. Focus on domestication. Apply domestication to humans. Explore the idea of self-domestication.
Apex Predator. Focus on domestication. Apply domestication to humans. Explore the idea of self-domestication.
Nathan Lambert
Not good, not good.
Not good, not good.
Lex Fridman
Where is this going? Refine, articulate the insight. Greater facial expressiveness and communication ability, yes. Plasticity and adaptability, yes. Dependence on social groups, yes. All right. And self-critique, refine further. Wow. Is this truly novel? Is it well-supported? So on and so forth. And the insight it’s getting at is humans are not just social animals but profoundly self-domesticated apes. And this self-domestication is the key to understanding our unique cognitive and social abilities. Self-domesticated apes. Self-domesticated-
Where is this going? Refine, articulate the insight. Greater facial expressiveness and communication ability, yes. Plasticity and adaptability, yes. Dependence on social groups, yes. All right. And self-critique, refine further. Wow. Is this truly novel? Is it well-supported? So on and so forth. And the insight it’s getting at is humans are not just social animals but profoundly self-domesticated apes. And this self-domestication is the key to understanding our unique cognitive and social abilities. Self-domesticated apes. Self-domesticated-
Nathan Lambert
I prefer the DeepSeek response.
I prefer the DeepSeek response.
Lex Fridman
I mean it’s novel. The insight is novel. I mean that’s like a good book title; Self-Domesticated Apes. There could be a case made for that. I mean, yeah, it’s cool and it’s revealing the reasoning. It’s magical. It’s magical. This is really powerful.
I mean it’s novel. The insight is novel. I mean that’s like a good book title; Self-Domesticated Apes. There could be a case made for that. I mean, yeah, it’s cool and it’s revealing the reasoning. It’s magical. It’s magical. This is really powerful.
Hello, everyone, this is Lex with a quick intermission recorded after the podcast since we’ve reviewed responses from DeepSeek R1 and Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking during this conversation, I thought at this moment it would be nice to insert myself quickly doing the same for OpenAI o1-pro and o3-mini with the same prompt. The prompt being, give one truly novel insight about humans. And I thought I would, in general, give my vibe check and vibe based anecdotal report on my own experiences with the new o3-mini model now that I got a chance to spend many hours with it in different kinds of context and applications.
So, I would probably categorize this question as let’s say open- ended philosophical question. And in particular, the emphasis on novelty I think is a nice way to test one of the capabilities of the model, which is come up with something that makes you pause and almost surprise you with brilliance.
So that said, my general review after running each of the models on this question a bunch of times is that o1-pro consistently gave brilliant answers, ones that gave me pause and made me think, both cutting in its insight and just really nicely phrased with wit, with clarity, with nuance over and over, consistently generating the best answers. After that is R1, which was less consistent, but again, delivered brilliance. Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking was third and last was o3-mini actually. It often gave quite a generic answer, at least to my particular sensibilities. That said, in a bunch of other applications that I tested for brainstorming purposes, it actually worked extremely well and often outperformed R1. But on this open-ended philosophical question, it did consistently worse.
Now another important element for each of these models is how the reasoning is presented. DeepSeek R1 shows the full chain of thought tokens, which I personally just love. For these open-ended philosophical questions, it’s really, really interesting to see the model think through it, but really also just stepping back, me as a person who appreciates intelligence and reasoning and reflection, reading these kind of chain of thought raw tokens of R1, there’s something genuinely beautiful about observing the path of deliberation in an intelligent system. I think we don’t always have that explicitly laid out for us humans. So, to see it in another intelligence system, the nonlinearity of it akin to the Ulysses, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. It’s just beautiful to watch.
Anyways, we discussed in the episode DeepSeek R1 talked about humans being able to convert selfish desires into cooperative systems by collectively pretending abstract rules like money laws and rights are real. And these shared hallucinations act as games where competition is secretly redirected to benefit the group turning conflict into society’s fuel. Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking said, “Humans are not just social animals but self-domesticated apes. And this self domestication is the key to understanding our unique cognitive and social abilities.”
Now, it’s important to say that the chain of thought there was really interesting. It was looking through the entire evolution of life on earth considering apex predators and considering how from that, we ended up to where we are. I think that domestication by choice is a really interesting angle. Again, it’s one of those things when somebody presents a different angle on a seemingly obvious thing, it just makes me smile. And the same with DeepSeek R1, that these hallucinations of money laws and rights and us collectively pretending like it’s real and we play games with them that look like competition when secretly we’re just cooperating with each other and that is the fuel of progress. Beautifully put.
Now, OpenAI o1-pro consistently, over and over delivered bangers. I can go through many of them, but the first one was, “Humans are the only species that turns raw materials into symbolic resources. Then uses those symbols to reorganize the very materials that came from creating a closed feedback loop between meaning and matter.” Here, I just ran it again. Banger after banger, I’m telling you. “Humans are unique among known species in that they simultaneously rewrite two layers of reality; the external world and their own private mental landscapes. And then merge these two rewritten layers into a continuous personal narrative that feels objectively true.” Feels true. This is poetry.
Okay. And then o3-mini high, for me, was smart, fast actually, and kind of generic. Never quite got there for me. So here’s the first one I got from o3-mini, “Humans are not fixed beings, but rather ongoing narratives, dynamic stories that we continuously write, edit, and reinterpret. This narrative plasticity is more than just memory or self-reflection. It’s an intrinsic cognitive process that acts like an internal error correction system. It allows us to adapt our identities and values over time in response to new experiences, challenges, and social contexts.” Now, it almost sneaks up to something approximating cutting insight with narrative plasticity in quotes. But then it goes back to the generic. I don’t know.
All of these models are incredible for different reasons. There’s a lot of concerns as we discussed in this episode, but there’s a lot of reasons to be excited as well. And I’ve probably spoken for too long. I am severely sleep-deprived, borderline delirious. So hopefully some of this made sense. And now, dear friends, back to the episode.
Dylan Patel
I think to Nathan’s point, when you look at the reasoning models, to me, even when I used R1 versus o1, there was that sort of rough edges around the corner feeling. And Flash Thinking earlier, I didn’t use this version, but the one from December, and it definitely had that rough edges around the corner feeling where it’s just not fleshed out in as many ways. Sure, they added math and coding capabilities via these verifiers in RL, but it feels like they lost something in certain areas. And o1 is worse performing than Chat in many areas as well, to be clear-
I think to Nathan’s point, when you look at the reasoning models, to me, even when I used R1 versus o1, there was that sort of rough edges around the corner feeling. And Flash Thinking earlier, I didn’t use this version, but the one from December, and it definitely had that rough edges around the corner feeling where it’s just not fleshed out in as many ways. Sure, they added math and coding capabilities via these verifiers in RL, but it feels like they lost something in certain areas. And o1 is worse performing than Chat in many areas as well, to be clear-
Nathan Lambert
Not by a lot.
Not by a lot.
Dylan Patel
Not by a lot though, right? And R1 definitely felt to me like it was worse than V3 in certain areas, like doing this RL expressed and learned a lot, but then it weakened in other areas. And so I think that’s one of the big differences between these models and what one offers. And then OpenAI has o1-pro, and what they did with o3, which is also very unique, is that they stacked search on top of chain of thought. And so chain of thought is one thing where it’s one chain, it backtracks, goes back and forth, but how they solved the ARC-AGI challenge was not just the chain of thought, it was also sampling many times, i.e., running them in parallel and then selecting.
Not by a lot though, right? And R1 definitely felt to me like it was worse than V3 in certain areas, like doing this RL expressed and learned a lot, but then it weakened in other areas. And so I think that’s one of the big differences between these models and what one offers. And then OpenAI has o1-pro, and what they did with o3, which is also very unique, is that they stacked search on top of chain of thought. And so chain of thought is one thing where it’s one chain, it backtracks, goes back and forth, but how they solved the ARC-AGI challenge was not just the chain of thought, it was also sampling many times, i.e., running them in parallel and then selecting.
Nathan Lambert
Is running in parallel actually search? Because I don’t know if we have the full information on how o1-pro works. So, I don’t have enough information-
Is running in parallel actually search? Because I don’t know if we have the full information on how o1-pro works. So, I don’t have enough information-
Dylan Patel
Agreed.
Agreed.
Nathan Lambert
… to confidently say that it is search.
… to confidently say that it is search.
Dylan Patel
It is parallel samples.
It is parallel samples.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. And then what.
Yeah. And then what.
Dylan Patel
And then it selects something.
And then it selects something.
Nathan Lambert
And we don’t know what the selection function is. The reason why we’re debating is because since o1 was announced, there’s been a lot of interest in techniques called Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is where you will break down the chain of thought into intermediate steps. We haven’t defined chain of thought. Chain of thought is from a paper from years ago where you introduced the idea to ask a language model that at the time was much less easy to use, you would say, “Let’s verify step by step,” and it would induce the model to do this bulleted list of steps. Chain of thought is now almost a default in models where if you ask it a math question, you don’t need to tell it to think step by step. And the idea with Monte Carlo Tree Search is that you would take an intermediate point in that train, do some sort of expansion, spend more compute, and then select the right one. That’s a very complex form of search that has been used in things like MuZero and AlphaZero, potentially. I know MuZero does this.
And we don’t know what the selection function is. The reason why we’re debating is because since o1 was announced, there’s been a lot of interest in techniques called Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is where you will break down the chain of thought into intermediate steps. We haven’t defined chain of thought. Chain of thought is from a paper from years ago where you introduced the idea to ask a language model that at the time was much less easy to use, you would say, “Let’s verify step by step,” and it would induce the model to do this bulleted list of steps. Chain of thought is now almost a default in models where if you ask it a math question, you don’t need to tell it to think step by step. And the idea with Monte Carlo Tree Search is that you would take an intermediate point in that train, do some sort of expansion, spend more compute, and then select the right one. That’s a very complex form of search that has been used in things like MuZero and AlphaZero, potentially. I know MuZero does this.
Dylan Patel
Another form of search is just asking five different people and then taking the majority answer. There’s a variety of, it could be complicated, it could be simple. We don’t know what it is, just that they are not just issuing one chain of thought in sequence. They’re launching many in parallel and in the ARC-AGI, they launched a thousand in parallel for the one that really shocked everyone that beat the benchmark was they would launch a thousand in parallel and then they would get the right answer like 80% of the time or 70% of the time, 90 maybe even. Whereas if they just launched one, it was like 30%.
Another form of search is just asking five different people and then taking the majority answer. There’s a variety of, it could be complicated, it could be simple. We don’t know what it is, just that they are not just issuing one chain of thought in sequence. They’re launching many in parallel and in the ARC-AGI, they launched a thousand in parallel for the one that really shocked everyone that beat the benchmark was they would launch a thousand in parallel and then they would get the right answer like 80% of the time or 70% of the time, 90 maybe even. Whereas if they just launched one, it was like 30%.
Nathan Lambert
There are many extensions to this. I would say the simplest one is that our language models to date have been designed to give the right answer the highest percentage of the time in one response. And we are now opening the door to different ways of running inference on our models in which we need to reevaluate many parts of the training process, which normally opens the door to more progress, but we don’t know if OpenAI changed a lot or if just sampling more and multiple choice is what they’re doing or if it’s something more complex, but they changed the training and they know that the inference mode is going to be different.
There are many extensions to this. I would say the simplest one is that our language models to date have been designed to give the right answer the highest percentage of the time in one response. And we are now opening the door to different ways of running inference on our models in which we need to reevaluate many parts of the training process, which normally opens the door to more progress, but we don’t know if OpenAI changed a lot or if just sampling more and multiple choice is what they’re doing or if it’s something more complex, but they changed the training and they know that the inference mode is going to be different.
Lex Fridman
So we’re talking about o1-pro, $200 a month and they’re losing money. The thing that we’re referring to, this fascinating exploration of the test time compute space, is that actually possible? Do we have enough compute for that? Does the financials make sense?
So we’re talking about o1-pro, $200 a month and they’re losing money. The thing that we’re referring to, this fascinating exploration of the test time compute space, is that actually possible? Do we have enough compute for that? Does the financials make sense?
Dylan Patel
So the fantastic thing is, and it’s in the thing that I pulled up earlier, but the cost for GPT-3 has plummeted if you scroll up just a few images, I think. The important thing about, hey, is cost a limiting factor here? My view is that we’ll have really awesome intelligence, like AGI, before we have it permeate throughout the economy. And this is sort of why that reason is. GPT-3 was trained in what? 2020? 2021? And the cost for running inference on it was $60, $70 per million tokens, which was the cost per intelligence was ridiculous. Now as we scaled forward two years, we’ve had a 1200X reduction in cost to achieve the same level of intelligence as GPT-3.
So the fantastic thing is, and it’s in the thing that I pulled up earlier, but the cost for GPT-3 has plummeted if you scroll up just a few images, I think. The important thing about, hey, is cost a limiting factor here? My view is that we’ll have really awesome intelligence, like AGI, before we have it permeate throughout the economy. And this is sort of why that reason is. GPT-3 was trained in what? 2020? 2021? And the cost for running inference on it was $60, $70 per million tokens, which was the cost per intelligence was ridiculous. Now as we scaled forward two years, we’ve had a 1200X reduction in cost to achieve the same level of intelligence as GPT-3.
Lex Fridman
So here on the x-axis is time over just a couple of years, and on the y-axis is log scale dollars to run inference on a million tokens.
So here on the x-axis is time over just a couple of years, and on the y-axis is log scale dollars to run inference on a million tokens.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, it’s dollar to million.
Yeah, it’s dollar to million.
Lex Fridman
So you have just a linear decline on log scale from GPT-3 through 3.5 to Lama-
So you have just a linear decline on log scale from GPT-3 through 3.5 to Lama-
Dylan Patel
It’s like five cents or something like that now, right? Versus $60, 1200X, that’s not the exact numbers, but it’s 1200X, I remember that number, is humongous cost per intelligence. Now, the freak out over DeepSeek is, “Oh my god, they made it so cheap.” It’s like actually, if you look at this trend line, they’re not below the trend line first of all, at least for GPT-3, right? They are the first to hit it, which is a big deal, but they’re not below the trend line as far as GPT-3. Now we have GPT-4, what’s going to happen with these reasoning capabilities? It’s a mix of architectural innovations, it’s a mix of better data, and it’s going to be better training techniques and all of these better inference systems, better hardware going from each generation of GPU to new generations or ASICs.
It’s like five cents or something like that now, right? Versus $60, 1200X, that’s not the exact numbers, but it’s 1200X, I remember that number, is humongous cost per intelligence. Now, the freak out over DeepSeek is, “Oh my god, they made it so cheap.” It’s like actually, if you look at this trend line, they’re not below the trend line first of all, at least for GPT-3, right? They are the first to hit it, which is a big deal, but they’re not below the trend line as far as GPT-3. Now we have GPT-4, what’s going to happen with these reasoning capabilities? It’s a mix of architectural innovations, it’s a mix of better data, and it’s going to be better training techniques and all of these better inference systems, better hardware going from each generation of GPU to new generations or ASICs.
Everything is going to take this cost curve down and down and down and down. And then can I just spawn a thousand different LLMs to create a task and then pick from one of them? Or whatever search technique, I want, a Tree, Monte Carlo Tree Search, maybe it gets that complicated, maybe it doesn’t because it’s too complicated to actually scale. Who knows? Better lesson, right?
The question is, I think, when not if, because the rate of progress is so fast. Nine months ago, Dario said nine months ago the cost to train an inference was this, and now we’re much better than this and DeepSeek is much better than this. And that cost curve for GPT-4, which was also roughly $60 per million tokens when it launched, has already fallen to $2 or so. And we’re going to get it down to cents probably for GPT-4 quality. And then that’s the base for the reasoning models like o1 that we have today and o1-pro is spawning multiple and o3 and so on and so forth, these search techniques, too expensive today, but they will get cheaper and that’s what’s going to unlock the intelligence.
NVIDIA
Lex Fridman
So, it’ll get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. The big DeepSeek R1 release freaked everybody out because of the cheaper. One of the manifestations of that is NVIDIA stock plummeted. Can you explain what happened? And also just explain this moment and if NVIDIA is going to keep winning.
So, it’ll get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. The big DeepSeek R1 release freaked everybody out because of the cheaper. One of the manifestations of that is NVIDIA stock plummeted. Can you explain what happened? And also just explain this moment and if NVIDIA is going to keep winning.
Nathan Lambert
We are both NVIDIA bulls here, I would say. And in some ways, the market response is reasonable. NVIDIA’s biggest customers in the US are major tech companies and they’re spending a ton on AI. And if a simple interpretation of DeepSeek is you can get really good models without spending as much on AI. So in that capacity it’s like, “Oh, maybe these big tech companies won’t need to spend as much in AI and go down.”
We are both NVIDIA bulls here, I would say. And in some ways, the market response is reasonable. NVIDIA’s biggest customers in the US are major tech companies and they’re spending a ton on AI. And if a simple interpretation of DeepSeek is you can get really good models without spending as much on AI. So in that capacity it’s like, “Oh, maybe these big tech companies won’t need to spend as much in AI and go down.”
The actual thing that happened is much more complex where there’s social factors, where there’s the rising in the app store, the social contagion that is happening. And then I think some of it is just like, I don’t trade, I don’t know anything about financial markets, but it builds up over the weekend, the social pressure, where it’s like if it was during the week and there was multiple days of trading when this was really becoming, but it comes on the weekend and then everybody wants to sell, and then that is a social contagion.
Dylan Patel
I think, and there were a lot of false narratives, which is like, “Hey, these guys are spending billions on models,” and they’re not spending billions on models. No one spent more than a billion dollars on a model that’s released publicly. GPT-4 was a couple hundred million and then they’ve reduced the cost with 4o, 4 Turbo, 4o, right? But billion dollar model runs are coming and this concludes pre-training and post-training, right? And then the other number is like, “Hey, DeepSeek didn’t include everything.” They didn’t include a lot of the cost goes to research and all this sort of stuff. A lot of the cost goes to inference. A lot of the cost goes to post-training. None of these things were factored. Research, salaries, all these things are counted in the “billions of dollars” that OpenAI is spending, but they weren’t counted in the, “Hey, $6 million, $5 million that DeepSeek spent.”
I think, and there were a lot of false narratives, which is like, “Hey, these guys are spending billions on models,” and they’re not spending billions on models. No one spent more than a billion dollars on a model that’s released publicly. GPT-4 was a couple hundred million and then they’ve reduced the cost with 4o, 4 Turbo, 4o, right? But billion dollar model runs are coming and this concludes pre-training and post-training, right? And then the other number is like, “Hey, DeepSeek didn’t include everything.” They didn’t include a lot of the cost goes to research and all this sort of stuff. A lot of the cost goes to inference. A lot of the cost goes to post-training. None of these things were factored. Research, salaries, all these things are counted in the “billions of dollars” that OpenAI is spending, but they weren’t counted in the, “Hey, $6 million, $5 million that DeepSeek spent.”
So, there’s a bit of misunderstanding of what these numbers are, and then there’s also an element of… NVIDIA has just been a straight line up and there’s been so many different narratives that have been trying to push down NVIDIA. I don’t say push down NVIDIA stock. Everyone is looking for a reason to sell or to be worried. It was Blackwell delays, right? Their GPU, every two weeks there’s a new report about their GPUs being delayed. There’s the whole thing about scaling laws ending, right? It’s so ironic-
Nathan Lambert
It lasted a month.
It lasted a month.
Dylan Patel
It was literally just, “Hey, models aren’t getting better.” They’re just not getting better. There’s no reason to spend more, pre-training scaling is dead. And then it’s like o1, o3, right?
It was literally just, “Hey, models aren’t getting better.” They’re just not getting better. There’s no reason to spend more, pre-training scaling is dead. And then it’s like o1, o3, right?
Nathan Lambert
R1.
R1.
Dylan Patel
R1, right? And now it’s like, “Wait, models, they’re progressing too fast. Slow down the progress, stop spending on GPUs.” But the funniest thing I think that comes out of this is Jevons paradox is true. AWS pricing for H100s has gone up over the last couple of weeks, since a little bit after Christmas, since V3 was launched, AWS H100 pricing has gone up. H200s are almost out of stock everywhere because H200 has more memory and therefore R1 wants that chip over H100, right?
R1, right? And now it’s like, “Wait, models, they’re progressing too fast. Slow down the progress, stop spending on GPUs.” But the funniest thing I think that comes out of this is Jevons paradox is true. AWS pricing for H100s has gone up over the last couple of weeks, since a little bit after Christmas, since V3 was launched, AWS H100 pricing has gone up. H200s are almost out of stock everywhere because H200 has more memory and therefore R1 wants that chip over H100, right?
Nathan Lambert
We were trying to get GPUs on a short notice this week for a demo and it wasn’t that easy. We were trying to get just 16 or 32 H100s for demo and it was not very easy.
We were trying to get GPUs on a short notice this week for a demo and it wasn’t that easy. We were trying to get just 16 or 32 H100s for demo and it was not very easy.
Lex Fridman
So for people who don’t know, Jevons paradox is when the efficiency goes up, somehow magically, counter intuitively, the total resource consumption goes up as well.
So for people who don’t know, Jevons paradox is when the efficiency goes up, somehow magically, counter intuitively, the total resource consumption goes up as well.
Dylan Patel
And semiconductors is 50 years of Moore’s law, every two years half the cost, double the transistors, just like clockwork and it’s slowed down obviously, but the semiconductor industry has gone up the whole time. It’s been wavy, right? There’s obviously cycles and stuff and I don’t expect AI to be any different. There’s going to be ebbs and flows, but in AI, it’s just playing out at an insane timescale. It was 2X every two years, this is 1200X in like three years. So it’s like the scale of improvement is hard to wrap your head around.
And semiconductors is 50 years of Moore’s law, every two years half the cost, double the transistors, just like clockwork and it’s slowed down obviously, but the semiconductor industry has gone up the whole time. It’s been wavy, right? There’s obviously cycles and stuff and I don’t expect AI to be any different. There’s going to be ebbs and flows, but in AI, it’s just playing out at an insane timescale. It was 2X every two years, this is 1200X in like three years. So it’s like the scale of improvement is hard to wrap your head around.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I was confused because to me, NVIDIA stock on that should have gone up, but maybe it went down because there’s suspicion of foul play on the side of China, something like this. But if you just look purely at the actual principles at play here, it’s obvious. Yeah, the Jevons paradox-
Yeah. I was confused because to me, NVIDIA stock on that should have gone up, but maybe it went down because there’s suspicion of foul play on the side of China, something like this. But if you just look purely at the actual principles at play here, it’s obvious. Yeah, the Jevons paradox-
GPU smuggling
Nathan Lambert
The more progress that AI makes or the higher the derivative of AI progress is, especially because NVIDIA’s in the best place, the higher the derivative is, the sooner the market’s going to be bigger and expanding and NVIDIA’s the only one that does everything reliably right now.
The more progress that AI makes or the higher the derivative of AI progress is, especially because NVIDIA’s in the best place, the higher the derivative is, the sooner the market’s going to be bigger and expanding and NVIDIA’s the only one that does everything reliably right now.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, because it’s not like an NVIDIA competitor arose. It’s another company that’s using NVIDIA-
Yeah, because it’s not like an NVIDIA competitor arose. It’s another company that’s using NVIDIA-
Nathan Lambert
Who historically has been a large NVIDIA customer.
Who historically has been a large NVIDIA customer.
Dylan Patel
And has press releases about them cheering about being China’s biggest NVIDIA customer, right?
And has press releases about them cheering about being China’s biggest NVIDIA customer, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I mean-
Yeah. I mean-
Dylan Patel
Obviously they’ve quieted down, but I think that’s another element of it is that they don’t want to say how many GPUs they have because hey, yes, they have H800s, yes, they have H20s, they also have some H100s, right? Which were smuggled in.
Obviously they’ve quieted down, but I think that’s another element of it is that they don’t want to say how many GPUs they have because hey, yes, they have H800s, yes, they have H20s, they also have some H100s, right? Which were smuggled in.
Lex Fridman
Can you speak to that, to the smuggling? What’s the scale of smuggling that’s feasible for a nation state to do for companies? Is it possible to-
Can you speak to that, to the smuggling? What’s the scale of smuggling that’s feasible for a nation state to do for companies? Is it possible to-
Dylan Patel
I think there’s a few angles of “smuggling” here, right? One is ByteDance, arguably is the largest smuggler of GPUs for China. China’s not supposed to have GPUs. ByteDance has over 500,000 GPUs. Why? Because they’re all rented from companies around the world. They rent from Oracle, they rent from Google, they rent from all these, and a bunch of smaller cloud companies too, right? All the “neoClouds” of the world. They rent so, so many GPUs. They also buy a bunch. And they do this for mostly what Meta does, right? Serving TikTok, right? Serving next best-
I think there’s a few angles of “smuggling” here, right? One is ByteDance, arguably is the largest smuggler of GPUs for China. China’s not supposed to have GPUs. ByteDance has over 500,000 GPUs. Why? Because they’re all rented from companies around the world. They rent from Oracle, they rent from Google, they rent from all these, and a bunch of smaller cloud companies too, right? All the “neoClouds” of the world. They rent so, so many GPUs. They also buy a bunch. And they do this for mostly what Meta does, right? Serving TikTok, right? Serving next best-
Nathan Lambert
Separate discussion.
Separate discussion.
Dylan Patel
Same as Meta, right? To be clear, today, that’s the use, right? And it’s a valid use, right? Hack the dopamine circuit. Now, that’s theoretically now very much restricted with the AI diffusion rules, which happened in the last week of the Biden admin, and Trump admin looks like they’re going to keep them, which limits allies even, like Singapore, which Singapore is 20%, 30% of NVIDIA’s revenue, but Singapore’s had a memoratorium on not building data centers for 15 years because they don’t have enough power. So, where are they going?
Same as Meta, right? To be clear, today, that’s the use, right? And it’s a valid use, right? Hack the dopamine circuit. Now, that’s theoretically now very much restricted with the AI diffusion rules, which happened in the last week of the Biden admin, and Trump admin looks like they’re going to keep them, which limits allies even, like Singapore, which Singapore is 20%, 30% of NVIDIA’s revenue, but Singapore’s had a memoratorium on not building data centers for 15 years because they don’t have enough power. So, where are they going?
Nathan Lambert
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Dylan Patel
I’m not claiming they’re all going to China, but a portion, many are going to Malaysia, including Microsoft and Oracle have big data centers in Malaysia. They’re going all over Southeast Asia probably, India as well. There’s stuff routing, but the diffusion rules are very de facto, like you can only buy this many GPUs from this country and you can only rent a cluster this large to companies that are Chinese. They’re very explicit on trying to stop smuggling.
I’m not claiming they’re all going to China, but a portion, many are going to Malaysia, including Microsoft and Oracle have big data centers in Malaysia. They’re going all over Southeast Asia probably, India as well. There’s stuff routing, but the diffusion rules are very de facto, like you can only buy this many GPUs from this country and you can only rent a cluster this large to companies that are Chinese. They’re very explicit on trying to stop smuggling.
And a big chunk of it was, hey, random company buys 16 servers, ships them to China. There’s actually, I saw a photo from someone in the semiconductor industry who leads a team for networking chips that competes with NVIDIA, and he sent a photo of a guy checking into a first class United flight from San Francisco to Shanghai or Shenzhen with a super micro box that was this big, which can only contain GPUs, right? And he was booking first class because think about it, 3K to 5K for your first class ticket, server costs $240,000 in the US, $250,000, you sell it for $300,000 in China. Wait, you just got a free first class ticket and a lot more money. So it’s like… And that’s small scale smuggling. Most of the large scale smuggling is companies in Singapore and Malaysia routing them around or renting GPUs, completely legally-
Nathan Lambert
I want to jump in. How much does this scale? I think there’s been some people that are higher level economics understanding say that as you go from 1 billion of smuggling to 10 billion, it’s like you’re hiding certain levels of economic activity and that’s the most reasonable thing to me is that there’s going to be some level where it’s so obvious that it’s easier to find this economic activity. And-
I want to jump in. How much does this scale? I think there’s been some people that are higher level economics understanding say that as you go from 1 billion of smuggling to 10 billion, it’s like you’re hiding certain levels of economic activity and that’s the most reasonable thing to me is that there’s going to be some level where it’s so obvious that it’s easier to find this economic activity. And-
Dylan Patel
Yeah. So, my belief is that last year roughly, so NVIDIA made a million H20s, which are legally allowed to be shipped to China, which we talked about is better for reasoning, inference at least, not training, but reasoning inference and inference generally. Then they also had a couple hundred thousand, we think like 200,000 to 300,000 GPUs were routed to China from Singapore, Malaysia, US, wherever. Companies spawn up, buy 16 GPUs, 64 GPUs, whatever it is, route it, and Huawei is known for having spent up a massive network of companies to get the materials they need after they were banned in 2018. So, it’s not otherworldly, but I agree, right? Nathan’s point is like, hey, you can’t smuggle $10 billion of GPUs.
Yeah. So, my belief is that last year roughly, so NVIDIA made a million H20s, which are legally allowed to be shipped to China, which we talked about is better for reasoning, inference at least, not training, but reasoning inference and inference generally. Then they also had a couple hundred thousand, we think like 200,000 to 300,000 GPUs were routed to China from Singapore, Malaysia, US, wherever. Companies spawn up, buy 16 GPUs, 64 GPUs, whatever it is, route it, and Huawei is known for having spent up a massive network of companies to get the materials they need after they were banned in 2018. So, it’s not otherworldly, but I agree, right? Nathan’s point is like, hey, you can’t smuggle $10 billion of GPUs.
And then the third source, which is just now banned, which wasn’t considered smuggling, but is China is renting, I believe from our research, Oracle’s biggest GPU customer is ByteDance. And for Google, I think it’s their second-biggest customer. And you go down the list of clouds and especially these smaller cloud companies that aren’t the “hyperscalers,” think beyond CoreWeave and Lambda even, there’s 60 different new cloud companies serving NVIDIA GPUs. I think ByteDance is renting a lot of these, all over it, right?
And so these companies are renting GPUs to Chinese companies, and that was completely legal up until the diffusion rules, which happened just a few weeks ago. And even now, you can rent GPU clusters that are less than 2,000 GPUs, or you can buy GPUs and ship them wherever you want if there are less than 1,500 GPUs. There are still some ways to smuggle, but yeah, as the numbers grow a hundred something billion dollars of revenue for NVIDIA last year, 200 something billion this year, and if next year, it could nearly double again or more than double based on what we see with data center footprints being built out all across the US and the rest of the world, it’s going to be really hard for China to keep up with these rules.
Yes, there will always be smuggling and DeepSeek level models, GPT-4 level models, o1 level models capable to train on what China can get, even the next tier above that. But if we speed run a couple more jumps to billion dollar models, $10 billion models, then it becomes, “Hey, there is a compute disadvantage for China for training models and serving them.” And the serving part is really critical, right? DeepSeek cannot serve their model today. It’s completely out of inventory. It’s already started falling in the app store actually, downloads, because you download it, you try and sign up, they say, “We’re not taking registrations,” because they have no capacity. You open it up, you get less than five tokens per second, if you even get your request approved, right? Because there’s just no capacity because they just don’t have enough GPUs to serve the model, even though it’s incredibly efficient.
Lex Fridman
It’d be fascinating to watch the smuggling. Because I mean there’s drug smuggling, right? That’s a market. There’s weapons smuggling. And GPUs will surpass that at some point.
It’d be fascinating to watch the smuggling. Because I mean there’s drug smuggling, right? That’s a market. There’s weapons smuggling. And GPUs will surpass that at some point.
Nathan Lambert
Chips are highest value per kilogram probably by far. I have another question for you, Dylan. Do you track model API access internationally? How easy is it for Chinese companies to use hosted model APIs from the US?
Chips are highest value per kilogram probably by far. I have another question for you, Dylan. Do you track model API access internationally? How easy is it for Chinese companies to use hosted model APIs from the US?
DeepSeek training on OpenAI data
Dylan Patel
Yeah. I mean that’s incredibly easy, right? OpenAI publicly stated DeepSeek uses their API and they say they have evidence, right? And this is another element of the training regime, is people at OpenAI have claimed that it’s a distilled model, i.e., you’re taking OpenAI’s model, you’re generating a lot of output, and then you’re training on the output in their model. And even if that’s the case, what they did is still amazing by the way, what DeepSeek did, efficiency-wise.
Yeah. I mean that’s incredibly easy, right? OpenAI publicly stated DeepSeek uses their API and they say they have evidence, right? And this is another element of the training regime, is people at OpenAI have claimed that it’s a distilled model, i.e., you’re taking OpenAI’s model, you’re generating a lot of output, and then you’re training on the output in their model. And even if that’s the case, what they did is still amazing by the way, what DeepSeek did, efficiency-wise.
Nathan Lambert
Distillation is standard practice in industry. Whether or not, if you’re at a closed lab where you care about terms of service and IP closely, you distill from your own models. If you are a researcher and you’re not building any products, you distill from the OpenAI models-
Distillation is standard practice in industry. Whether or not, if you’re at a closed lab where you care about terms of service and IP closely, you distill from your own models. If you are a researcher and you’re not building any products, you distill from the OpenAI models-
Lex Fridman
This is a good opportunity. Can you explain big picture distillation as a process? What is distillation? What’s the process of distillation?
This is a good opportunity. Can you explain big picture distillation as a process? What is distillation? What’s the process of distillation?
Nathan Lambert
We’ve talked a lot about training language models. They are trained on text and post-training, you’re trying to train on very high-quality texts that you want the model to match the features of, or if you’re using RL, you’re letting the model find its own thing. But for supervised fine-tuning, for preference data, you need to have some completions, what the model is trying to learn to imitate. And what you do there is instead of a human data or instead of the model you’re currently training, you take completions from a different, normally more powerful, model. I think there’s rumors that these big models that people are waiting for, these GPT-5s of the world, the Claude 3 Opuses of the world are used internally to do this distillation process at OpenAI-
We’ve talked a lot about training language models. They are trained on text and post-training, you’re trying to train on very high-quality texts that you want the model to match the features of, or if you’re using RL, you’re letting the model find its own thing. But for supervised fine-tuning, for preference data, you need to have some completions, what the model is trying to learn to imitate. And what you do there is instead of a human data or instead of the model you’re currently training, you take completions from a different, normally more powerful, model. I think there’s rumors that these big models that people are waiting for, these GPT-5s of the world, the Claude 3 Opuses of the world are used internally to do this distillation process at OpenAI-
Dylan Patel
There’s also public examples, right? Like Meta explicitly stated, not necessarily distilling, but they used 405B as a reward model for 70B in their Llama 3.2 or 3.3 rule-
There’s also public examples, right? Like Meta explicitly stated, not necessarily distilling, but they used 405B as a reward model for 70B in their Llama 3.2 or 3.3 rule-
Nathan Lambert
Yes. This is all the same topic.
Yes. This is all the same topic.
Lex Fridman
So, is this ethical? Is this legal? Why is that Financial Times article headline say, “OpenAI says that there’s evidence that China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor.”
So, is this ethical? Is this legal? Why is that Financial Times article headline say, “OpenAI says that there’s evidence that China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor.”
Nathan Lambert
This is a long, at least in the academic side and research side, it has a long history because you’re trying to interpret OpenAI’s rule. OpenAI’s terms of service say that you cannot build a competitor with outputs from their models. Terms of service are different than a license, which are essentially a contract between organizations. So if you have a terms of service on OpenAI’s account, if I violate it, OpenAI can cancel my account. This is very different than a license that says how you could use a downstream artifact. So a lot of it hinges on a word that is very unclear in the AI space, which is, what is a competitor?
This is a long, at least in the academic side and research side, it has a long history because you’re trying to interpret OpenAI’s rule. OpenAI’s terms of service say that you cannot build a competitor with outputs from their models. Terms of service are different than a license, which are essentially a contract between organizations. So if you have a terms of service on OpenAI’s account, if I violate it, OpenAI can cancel my account. This is very different than a license that says how you could use a downstream artifact. So a lot of it hinges on a word that is very unclear in the AI space, which is, what is a competitor?
Dylan Patel
And then the ethical aspect of it is like, why is it unethical for me to train on your model when you can train on the internet’s text? Right?
And then the ethical aspect of it is like, why is it unethical for me to train on your model when you can train on the internet’s text? Right?
Lex Fridman
So there’s a bit of a hypocrisy because OpenAI and potentially most of the companies trained on the internet’s text without permission.
So there’s a bit of a hypocrisy because OpenAI and potentially most of the companies trained on the internet’s text without permission.
Nathan Lambert
There’s also a clear loophole, which is that I generate data from OpenAI and then I upload it somewhere and then somebody else trains on it and the link has been broken. They’re not under the same terms of service contract.
There’s also a clear loophole, which is that I generate data from OpenAI and then I upload it somewhere and then somebody else trains on it and the link has been broken. They’re not under the same terms of service contract.
Dylan Patel
This is why-
This is why-
Nathan Lambert
There’s a lot of… There’s a lot of to be discovered details that don’t make a lot of sense.
There’s a lot of… There’s a lot of to be discovered details that don’t make a lot of sense.
Dylan Patel
This is why a lot of models today, even if they train on zero OpenAI data, you ask the model, “Who trained you?” It’ll say, “I’m ChatGPT trained by OpenAI,” because there’s so much copy paste of OpenAI outputs from that on the internet that you just weren’t able to filter it out and there was nothing in the RL where they implemented or post-training or SFT, whatever, that says, “Hey, I’m actually a model by Allen Institute instead of OpenAI.”
This is why a lot of models today, even if they train on zero OpenAI data, you ask the model, “Who trained you?” It’ll say, “I’m ChatGPT trained by OpenAI,” because there’s so much copy paste of OpenAI outputs from that on the internet that you just weren’t able to filter it out and there was nothing in the RL where they implemented or post-training or SFT, whatever, that says, “Hey, I’m actually a model by Allen Institute instead of OpenAI.”
Nathan Lambert
We have to do this if we serve a demo. We do research and we use OpenAI APIs because it’s useful and we want to understand post-training and our research models, they all say they’re written by OpenAI unless we put in the system prop that we talked about that, “I am Tülu. I am a language model trained by the Allen Institute for AI.” And if you ask more people around industry, especially with post-training, it’s a very doable task to make the model say who it is or to suppress the OpenAI thing. So in some levels, it might be that DeepSeek didn’t care that it was saying that it was by OpenAI. If you’re going to upload model weights, it doesn’t really matter because anyone that’s serving it in an application and cares a lot about serving is going to, when serving it, if they’re using it for a specific task, they’re going to tailor it to that and it doesn’t matter that it’s saying it’s ChatGPT.
We have to do this if we serve a demo. We do research and we use OpenAI APIs because it’s useful and we want to understand post-training and our research models, they all say they’re written by OpenAI unless we put in the system prop that we talked about that, “I am Tülu. I am a language model trained by the Allen Institute for AI.” And if you ask more people around industry, especially with post-training, it’s a very doable task to make the model say who it is or to suppress the OpenAI thing. So in some levels, it might be that DeepSeek didn’t care that it was saying that it was by OpenAI. If you’re going to upload model weights, it doesn’t really matter because anyone that’s serving it in an application and cares a lot about serving is going to, when serving it, if they’re using it for a specific task, they’re going to tailor it to that and it doesn’t matter that it’s saying it’s ChatGPT.
Lex Fridman
Oh, I guess one of the ways to do that is like a system prompt or something like that? If you’re serving it to say that you’re-
Oh, I guess one of the ways to do that is like a system prompt or something like that? If you’re serving it to say that you’re-
Nathan Lambert
That’s what we do. If we host a demo, you say, “You are Tülu 3, a language model trained by the Allen Institute for AI.” We also are benefited…
That’s what we do. If we host a demo, you say, “You are Tülu 3, a language model trained by the Allen Institute for AI.” We also are benefited…
Nathan Lambert
… model trained by the Allen Institute for AI. We also are benefited from OpenAI data because it’s a great research tool.
… model trained by the Allen Institute for AI. We also are benefited from OpenAI data because it’s a great research tool.
Lex Fridman
Do you think there’s any truth and value to the OpenAI’s claim that there’s evidence that China’s DeepSeek used this model to train?
Do you think there’s any truth and value to the OpenAI’s claim that there’s evidence that China’s DeepSeek used this model to train?
Dylan Patel
I think everyone has benefited regardless because the data’s on the internet. And therefore, it’s in your per training now. There are subreddits where people share the best ChatGPT outputs, and those are in your model-
I think everyone has benefited regardless because the data’s on the internet. And therefore, it’s in your per training now. There are subreddits where people share the best ChatGPT outputs, and those are in your model-
Nathan Lambert
I think that they’re trying to shift the narrative. They’re trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There’s other AI startups that most people, if you’re in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned. That’s how they bootstrapped their early models.
I think that they’re trying to shift the narrative. They’re trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There’s other AI startups that most people, if you’re in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned. That’s how they bootstrapped their early models.
So, it’s much easier to get off the ground using this than to set up human pipelines and build a strong model. So there’s long history here, and a lot of the communications are seem like narrative [inaudible 03:31:00].
Dylan Patel
Actually, over the last couple of days, we’ve seen a lot of people distill DeepSeek’s model into Llama models, because the DeepSeek models are complicated to run inference on because they’re mixture of experts and they’re 600 plus billion parameters and all of this. And people distilled them into the Llama models because the Llama models are so easy to serve, and everyone’s built the pipelines and tooling for inference with the Llama models because it’s the open standard.
Actually, over the last couple of days, we’ve seen a lot of people distill DeepSeek’s model into Llama models, because the DeepSeek models are complicated to run inference on because they’re mixture of experts and they’re 600 plus billion parameters and all of this. And people distilled them into the Llama models because the Llama models are so easy to serve, and everyone’s built the pipelines and tooling for inference with the Llama models because it’s the open standard.
So, we’ve seen a sort of roundabout. Is it bad? Is it illegal? Maybe it’s illegal, whatever. I don’t know about that, but-
Nathan Lambert
It could break contracts. I don’t think it’s illegal in any legal… No one’s going to jail for this, ever.
It could break contracts. I don’t think it’s illegal in any legal… No one’s going to jail for this, ever.
Lex Fridman
Fundamentally, I think it’s ethical, or I hope it’s ethical because the moment it becomes… We ban that kind of thing, it’s going to make everybody much worse off. And I also, actually…
Fundamentally, I think it’s ethical, or I hope it’s ethical because the moment it becomes… We ban that kind of thing, it’s going to make everybody much worse off. And I also, actually…
This is difficult, but I think you should be allowed to train on the internet. I know a lot of authors and creators are very sensitive about it. That’s a difficult question. But the moment you’re not allowed to train on the internet-
Nathan Lambert
I agree.
I agree.
Dylan Patel
I have a schizo take on how you can solve this. Because it already works.
I have a schizo take on how you can solve this. Because it already works.
Lex Fridman
All right.
All right.
Nathan Lambert
I have a reasonable take out of it.
I have a reasonable take out of it.
Lex Fridman
All right, [inaudible 03:32:10].
All right, [inaudible 03:32:10].
Dylan Patel
So, Japan has a law which you’re allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don’t apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they’d like. So, all we have to do…
So, Japan has a law which you’re allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don’t apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they’d like. So, all we have to do…
We have a market here to make. We build massive data centers, we rent them to the labs, and then we train models in a legally permissible way, and there’s no ifs, ands, or buts. And now, the models have no potential copyright lawsuit from New York Times or anything like that. No, it’s just completely legal.
Nathan Lambert
Now, so-
Now, so-
Lex Fridman
Genius.
Genius.
Nathan Lambert
… the early copyright lawsuits have fallen in the favor of AI training. I would say that the long tail of use is going to go inside of AI, which is if you scrape trillions of tokens of data, you’re not looking and saying, “This one New York Times article is so important to me.” But if you’re doing a audio generation for music or image generation, and you say, “Make it in the style of X person,” that’s a reasonable case where you could figure out what is their profit margin on inference. I don’t know if it’s going to be the 50/50 of YouTube Creator Program or something, but I would opt into that program as a writer, please.
… the early copyright lawsuits have fallen in the favor of AI training. I would say that the long tail of use is going to go inside of AI, which is if you scrape trillions of tokens of data, you’re not looking and saying, “This one New York Times article is so important to me.” But if you’re doing a audio generation for music or image generation, and you say, “Make it in the style of X person,” that’s a reasonable case where you could figure out what is their profit margin on inference. I don’t know if it’s going to be the 50/50 of YouTube Creator Program or something, but I would opt into that program as a writer, please.
It’s going to be a rough journey, but there will be some solutions like that that makes sense. But there’s a long tail where it’s just on the internet.
Lex Fridman
I think one of the other aspects of that Financial Times article implied, and so that leads to a more general question. Do you think there’s… How difficult is spying, espionage, and stealing of actual secret code and data from inside of companies? How much of that is being attempted?
I think one of the other aspects of that Financial Times article implied, and so that leads to a more general question. Do you think there’s… How difficult is spying, espionage, and stealing of actual secret code and data from inside of companies? How much of that is being attempted?
Nathan Lambert
Code and data is hard, but ideas is easy. Silicon Valley operates on the way that top employees get bought out by other companies for a pay raise, and a large reason why these companies do this is to bring ideas with them. And there’s no… I mean, in California, there’s rules that certain non-competes or whatever are illegal in California. And whether or not there’s NDAs and things, that is how a lot of it happens. Recently, there was somebody from Gemini who helped make this 1 million context length. And everyone is saying the next Llama who, he went to the Meta team, is going to have 1 million context length. And that’s kind of how the world works.
Code and data is hard, but ideas is easy. Silicon Valley operates on the way that top employees get bought out by other companies for a pay raise, and a large reason why these companies do this is to bring ideas with them. And there’s no… I mean, in California, there’s rules that certain non-competes or whatever are illegal in California. And whether or not there’s NDAs and things, that is how a lot of it happens. Recently, there was somebody from Gemini who helped make this 1 million context length. And everyone is saying the next Llama who, he went to the Meta team, is going to have 1 million context length. And that’s kind of how the world works.
Dylan Patel
As far as industrial espionage and things, that has been greatly successful in the past. The Americans did it to the Brits, the Chinese have done it to the Americans, and so on and so forth. It is a fact of life. And so, to argue industrial espionage can be stopped is probably unlikely. You can make it difficult. But even then, there’s all these stories about like, “Hey, F35 and F22 have already been given to China in terms of design plans and stuff.”
As far as industrial espionage and things, that has been greatly successful in the past. The Americans did it to the Brits, the Chinese have done it to the Americans, and so on and so forth. It is a fact of life. And so, to argue industrial espionage can be stopped is probably unlikely. You can make it difficult. But even then, there’s all these stories about like, “Hey, F35 and F22 have already been given to China in terms of design plans and stuff.”
Code and stuff between, I say companies, not nation states, is probably very difficult. But ideas are discussed a lot, whether it be a house party in San Francisco or a company changing employees or always the mythical honeypot that always gets talked about. Someone gets honeypotted because everyone working on AI is a single dude who’s in their 20s and 30s. Not everyone, but insane amount of… Insane percentages. So, there’s always all these… And obviously-
Lex Fridman
So, honeypotted is like a female spy approaches you and…
So, honeypotted is like a female spy approaches you and…
Dylan Patel
Yeah. Or male, right? It’s San Francisco. But as a single dude, I will say in his late 20s, we are very easily corrupted. Not corrupted myself, but we are. Right?
Yeah. Or male, right? It’s San Francisco. But as a single dude, I will say in his late 20s, we are very easily corrupted. Not corrupted myself, but we are. Right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Everybody else. Not me.
Yeah. Everybody else. Not me.
Nathan Lambert
I’m too oblivious that I am not single, so I’m safe from one espionage access.
I’m too oblivious that I am not single, so I’m safe from one espionage access.
AI megaclusters
Lex Fridman
Yeah. You have to make sure to close all security vulnerabilities. So you, Dylan, collect a lot of information about each of the mega clusters for each of the major AI companies. Can you talk about the buildouts for each one that stand out?
Yeah. You have to make sure to close all security vulnerabilities. So you, Dylan, collect a lot of information about each of the mega clusters for each of the major AI companies. Can you talk about the buildouts for each one that stand out?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. I think the thing that’s really important about these mega cluster buildouts is they’re completely unprecedented in scale. US data center power consumption has been slowly on the rise and it’s gone up to 2, 3% even through the cloud computing revolution. Data center consumption has a percentage of total US, and that’s been over decades of data centers, etc. It’s been climbing slowly, but now, 2 to 3%.
Yeah. I think the thing that’s really important about these mega cluster buildouts is they’re completely unprecedented in scale. US data center power consumption has been slowly on the rise and it’s gone up to 2, 3% even through the cloud computing revolution. Data center consumption has a percentage of total US, and that’s been over decades of data centers, etc. It’s been climbing slowly, but now, 2 to 3%.
Now, by the end of this decade, it’s… Even under… When I say 10%, a lot of people that are traditionally by 2028 to 2030, people traditionally non-traditional data center people, that’s nuts. But then, people who are in AI who have really looked at this like the Anthropics and OpenAI’s, are like, “That’s not enough.”
And I’m like, “Okay.” But this is both through globally distributed or distributed throughout the US as well as centralized clusters. The distributed throughout the US is exciting and it’s the bulk of it. Like, hey, OpenAI or, say, Meta’s adding a gigawatt, but most of it is distributed through the US for inference and all these other things.
Lex Fridman
So maybe, we should lay out what a cluster is. So, does this include AWS? Maybe, it’s good to talk about the different kinds of clusters. What you mean by mega clusters? What’s the GPU and what’s a compute or… And what [inaudible 03:37:41]-
So maybe, we should lay out what a cluster is. So, does this include AWS? Maybe, it’s good to talk about the different kinds of clusters. What you mean by mega clusters? What’s the GPU and what’s a compute or… And what [inaudible 03:37:41]-
Dylan Patel
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Not that far back, but yeah. So, what do we mean by the clusters? The buildouts?
Not that far back, but yeah. So, what do we mean by the clusters? The buildouts?
Dylan Patel
Oh, man. I thought I was about to do the Apple ad, what’s a computer? So traditionally, data centers and data center tasks have been a distributed systems problem that is capable of being spread very far and widely. I.e, I send a request to Google, it gets routed to a data center somewhat close to me, it does whatever search ranking recommendation, sends a result back. The nature of the task is changing rapidly in that the task, there’s two tasks that people are really focused on now. It’s not database access. It’s not, “Serve me the right page, serve me the right ad.”
Oh, man. I thought I was about to do the Apple ad, what’s a computer? So traditionally, data centers and data center tasks have been a distributed systems problem that is capable of being spread very far and widely. I.e, I send a request to Google, it gets routed to a data center somewhat close to me, it does whatever search ranking recommendation, sends a result back. The nature of the task is changing rapidly in that the task, there’s two tasks that people are really focused on now. It’s not database access. It’s not, “Serve me the right page, serve me the right ad.”
It’s now, a inference. An inference is dramatically different from traditional distributed systems, but it looks a lot more simple, similar. And then, there’s training. The inference side is still like, “Hey, I’m going to put thousands of GPUs in blocks all around these data centers.” I’m going to run models on them. User submits a request, it gets kicked off. Or hey, my service. They submit a request to my service. They’re on Word and they’re like, “Oh yeah, help me, Copilot,” and it kicks it off. Or I’m on my windows, Copilot, whatever, Apple intelligence. Whatever it is, it gets kicked off to a data center. That data center does some work and sends it back. That’s inference. That is going to be the bulk of compute, but then…
And that’s like, there’s thousands of data centers that we’re tracking with satellites and all these other things, and those are the bulk of what’s being built. But the scale of… And so, that’s what’s really reshaping and that’s what’s getting millions of GPUs. But the scale of the largest cluster is also really important. When we look back at history or through the age of AI, it was a really big deal when they did AlexNet on, I think, 2 GPUs or 4 GPUs. I don’t remember. It’s a really big deal.
Nathan Lambert
It’s a big deal because you use GPUs.
It’s a big deal because you use GPUs.
Dylan Patel
It’s a big deal that they use GPUs and they use multiple. But then over time, its scale has just been compounding. And so when you skip forward to GPT-3, then GPT-4, GPT-4 20,000 A100 GPUs. Unprecedented run in terms of the size and the cost, right? A couple of hundred million dollars on a YOLO run for GPT-4, and it yielded this magical improvement that was perfectly in line with what was experimented and just a log scale right up.
It’s a big deal that they use GPUs and they use multiple. But then over time, its scale has just been compounding. And so when you skip forward to GPT-3, then GPT-4, GPT-4 20,000 A100 GPUs. Unprecedented run in terms of the size and the cost, right? A couple of hundred million dollars on a YOLO run for GPT-4, and it yielded this magical improvement that was perfectly in line with what was experimented and just a log scale right up.
Nathan Lambert
Oh yeah, they had that plot from the paper.
Oh yeah, they had that plot from the paper.
Dylan Patel
The scaling of the technical part. The scaling laws were perfect, right? But that’s not a crazy number. 20,000 A100’s, roughly, each GPU is consuming 400 watts. And then when you add in the whole server, everything, it’s like 15 to 20 megawatts of power. Maybe, you could look up what the power of consumption of a person is because the numbers are going to get silly, but 15 to 20 megawatts was standard data center size. It was just unprecedented that was all GPUs running one task.
The scaling of the technical part. The scaling laws were perfect, right? But that’s not a crazy number. 20,000 A100’s, roughly, each GPU is consuming 400 watts. And then when you add in the whole server, everything, it’s like 15 to 20 megawatts of power. Maybe, you could look up what the power of consumption of a person is because the numbers are going to get silly, but 15 to 20 megawatts was standard data center size. It was just unprecedented that was all GPUs running one task.
Nathan Lambert
How many watts is a toaster?
How many watts is a toaster?
Dylan Patel
A toaster has also-
A toaster has also-
Nathan Lambert
That’s a good example.
That’s a good example.
Dylan Patel
… a similar power consumption to an A100. H100 comes around. They increase the power from 400 to 700 watts and that’s just per GPU, and then there’s all the associated stuff around it. So once you count all of that, it’s roughly 1,200 to 1,400 watts for everything. Networking, CPUs, memory, blah, blah, blah.
… a similar power consumption to an A100. H100 comes around. They increase the power from 400 to 700 watts and that’s just per GPU, and then there’s all the associated stuff around it. So once you count all of that, it’s roughly 1,200 to 1,400 watts for everything. Networking, CPUs, memory, blah, blah, blah.
Lex Fridman
So we should also say, what’s required, you said power. So, a lot of power is required. A lot of heat is generated, so the cooling is required. And because there’s a lot of GPUs or CPUs or whatever, they have to be connected. So, there’s a lot of networking, right?
So we should also say, what’s required, you said power. So, a lot of power is required. A lot of heat is generated, so the cooling is required. And because there’s a lot of GPUs or CPUs or whatever, they have to be connected. So, there’s a lot of networking, right?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. I think-
Yeah. I think-
Sorry for skipping past that. And then the data center itself is complicated, but these are still standard sized data centers for GPT-4 scale. Now, we step forward to what is the scale of clusters that people built last year, and it ranges widely. It ranges from like, “Hey, these are standard data centers. And we’re just using multiple of them and connecting them together really with a ton of fiber between them, a lot of networking, etc.” That’s what OpenAI and Microsoft did in Arizona. They have 100,000 GPUs.
Meta, similar thing. They took their standard existing data center design and it looks like an H, and they connected multiple of them together. They first did 24,000 GPUs total, only 16,000 of them were running on the training run because GPUs are very unreliable so they need to have spares to swap in and out. All the way to now, 100,000 GPUs that they’re training on Llama 4 on currently. Like, 128,000 or so.
Think about 100,000 GPUs with roughly 1,400 watts apiece. That’s 140 megawatts, 150 megawatts for 128. So, you’re talking about you’ve jumped from 15 to 20 megawatts to almost 10x that number, 9x that number, to 150 megawatts in two years from 2022 to 2024. And some people like Elon, that he admittedly… He says himself he got into the game a little bit late for pre-training large language models. xAI was started later, right? But then, he bent heaven and hell to get his data center up and get the largest cluster in the world, which is 200,000 GPUs. And he did that. He bought a factory in Memphis. He’s upgrading the substation, with the same time, he’s got a bunch of mobile power generation, a bunch of single cycle combine. He tapped the natural gas line that’s right next to the factory, and he’s just pulling a ton of gas, burning gas.
He’s generating all this power. He’s in an old appliance factory that’s shut down and moved to China long ago, and he’s got 200,000 GPUs in it. And now, what’s the next scale? All the hyperscalers have done this. Now, the next scale is something that’s even bigger. And so Elon, just to stick on the topic, he’s building his own natural gas plant, like a proper one right next door. He’s deploying tons of Tesla Megapack batteries to make the power more smooth and all sorts of other things. He’s got industrial chillers to cool the water down because he’s water-cooling the chips. So, all these crazy things to get the clusters bigger and bigger.
But when you look at, say, what OpenAI did with Stargate in Arizona, in Abilene Texas, right? What they’ve announced, at least. It’s not built. Elon says they don’t have the money. There’s some debates about this. But at full scale, at least the first section is definitely money’s accounted for, but there’s multiple sections. But full scale, that data center is going to be 2.2 gigawatts, 2,200 megawatts of power in. And roughly, 1.8 gigawatts or 1,800 megawatts of power delivered to chips.
Now, this is an absurd scale. 2.2 gigawatts is more than most cities, to be clear. Delivered to a single cluster that’s connected to do training. To train these models, to do both the pre-training, the post-training, all of this stuff.
Lex Fridman
This is insane.
This is insane.
Nathan Lambert
It is. What is a nuclear power plant, again?
It is. What is a nuclear power plant, again?
Dylan Patel
Everyone is doing this. Meta in Louisiana, they’re building two natural gas plants. Massive ones. And then, they’re building this massive data center. Amazon has plans for this scale. Google has plans for this scale. xAI has plans for this scale. All of these, the guys that are racing, the companies that are racing are racing hard, and they’re doing multi-gigawatt data centers to build this out. Because they think that, “If I now have…” Obviously, pre-training scaling is going to continue, but to some extent. But then also, all this post-training stuff where you have RL Sandbox for computer use or whatever, this is where they’re going to… And all these fearful viable domains where they just keep learning and learning and learning, self-play or whatever. Whatever it is makes the AI so much more capable because the line does go up.
Everyone is doing this. Meta in Louisiana, they’re building two natural gas plants. Massive ones. And then, they’re building this massive data center. Amazon has plans for this scale. Google has plans for this scale. xAI has plans for this scale. All of these, the guys that are racing, the companies that are racing are racing hard, and they’re doing multi-gigawatt data centers to build this out. Because they think that, “If I now have…” Obviously, pre-training scaling is going to continue, but to some extent. But then also, all this post-training stuff where you have RL Sandbox for computer use or whatever, this is where they’re going to… And all these fearful viable domains where they just keep learning and learning and learning, self-play or whatever. Whatever it is makes the AI so much more capable because the line does go up.
As you throw more compute, you get more performance. This shirt is about scaling laws. To some extent, it is diminishing returns. You 10x the compute, you don’t get 10x better model. You get a diminishing returns. But also, you get efficiency improvements, so you bend the curve. And these scale of data centers are just reeking a lot of havoc on the network. Nathan was mentioning Amazon has tried to buy this nuclear power plant Talen. And if you look at Talen’s stock, it’s just skyrocketing. They’re building a massive multi-gigawatt data center there.
You just go down the list, there’s so many ramifications. Interesting thing is certain regions of the US transmitting power cost more than actually generating it because the grid is so slow to build. And the demand for power, and the ability to build power, and re-ramping on a natural gas plant or even a coal plant is easy enough to do, but transmitting the power’s really hard. So in some parts of the US like in Virginia, it costs more to transmit power than it costs to generate it, which is there’s all sorts of second-order effects that are insane here.
Lex Fridman
Can the power grid support this kind of growth?
Can the power grid support this kind of growth?
Dylan Patel
Trump’s executive orders… There was a Biden executive order before the end of the year, but then Trump had some more executive orders, which hopefully reduced the regulations to where, yes, things can be built. But yeah, this is a big, big challenge. Is building enough power fast enough?
Trump’s executive orders… There was a Biden executive order before the end of the year, but then Trump had some more executive orders, which hopefully reduced the regulations to where, yes, things can be built. But yeah, this is a big, big challenge. Is building enough power fast enough?
Lex Fridman
Are you going to basically have a nuclear power plant next to a data center for each one of these?
Are you going to basically have a nuclear power plant next to a data center for each one of these?
Dylan Patel
The fun thing here is this is too slow to build the power plant. To build a power plant or to reconfigure an existing power plant, it’s too slow. And so therefore, you must use…
The fun thing here is this is too slow to build the power plant. To build a power plant or to reconfigure an existing power plant, it’s too slow. And so therefore, you must use…
Data center power consumption is flat, right? I mean, [inaudible 03:46:53].
Nathan Lambert
This is why nuclear is also good for it. Long term, nuclear is a very natural fit, but…
This is why nuclear is also good for it. Long term, nuclear is a very natural fit, but…
Dylan Patel
Yes.
Yes.
Nathan Lambert
… data-
… data-
You can’t do solar or anything in the short term like that.
Dylan Patel
Because data center power’s like this, right? You’re telling me I’m going to buy tens of billions of dollars of GPUs and idle them because the power’s not being generated? Power’s cheap. If you look at the cost of a cluster, less than 20% of it is power. Most of it is the capital cost and depreciation of the GPUs. And so it’s like, “Well, screw it. I’ll just build natural gas plants.” This is what Meta is doing in Louisiana, this is what OpenAI is doing in Texas, and all these different places. They may not be doing it directly, but they are partnered with someone. And so, there is a couple of hopes.
Because data center power’s like this, right? You’re telling me I’m going to buy tens of billions of dollars of GPUs and idle them because the power’s not being generated? Power’s cheap. If you look at the cost of a cluster, less than 20% of it is power. Most of it is the capital cost and depreciation of the GPUs. And so it’s like, “Well, screw it. I’ll just build natural gas plants.” This is what Meta is doing in Louisiana, this is what OpenAI is doing in Texas, and all these different places. They may not be doing it directly, but they are partnered with someone. And so, there is a couple of hopes.
One is… And Elon, what he’s doing in Memphis is to the extreme. They’re not just using dual combine cycle gas which is super efficient, he’s also just using single cycle and mobile generators and stuff which is less efficient. But there’s also the flip side, which is solar power generation is like this, and wind is another like this. Different correlate different. So if you stack both of those, plus you get a big chunk of batteries, plus you have a little bit of gas, it is possible to run it more green. It’s just the time scales for that is slow. So, people are trying. But Meta basically said, “Whatever. I don’t care about my sustainability pledge.” Or they’ll buy a power… It’s called a PPA, Power Purchasing Agreement, where there’ll be a massive wind farm or solar farm wherever. And then, they’ll just pretend like those electrons are being consumed by the data center. But in reality, they’re paying for the power here and selling it to the grid, and they’re buying power here.
And then another thing is Microsoft quit on some of their sustainability pledges. Elon, what he did with Memphis is objectively somewhat dirty, but he is also doing it in an area where there’s a bigger natural gas plant right next door and a sewer next… Or not a sewer, but a wastewater treatment and a garbage dump nearby. And he’s obviously made the world a lot more clean than that one data center is going to do, so I think it’s fine to some extent. And maybe, AGI solves global warming and stuff, whatever it is.
This is the attitude that people at the labs have, which is like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’ll just use gas,” because the race is that important. And if we lose, that’s way worse.
Lex Fridman
I should say that I got a chance to visit the Memphis data center.
I should say that I got a chance to visit the Memphis data center.
Dylan Patel
Oh, wow.
Oh, wow.
Lex Fridman
And it’s incredible. I mean, I visited with Elon. Just the teams and the rate of innovation there is insane. My sense is that nobody’s ever done anything of this scale, and nobody has certainly ever done anything of this scale at the rate that xAI is doing. So, they’re figuring out…
And it’s incredible. I mean, I visited with Elon. Just the teams and the rate of innovation there is insane. My sense is that nobody’s ever done anything of this scale, and nobody has certainly ever done anything of this scale at the rate that xAI is doing. So, they’re figuring out…
I was sitting in on all of these meetings where they’re brainstorming. It’s insane. It’s exciting because they’re trying to figure out what the bottlenecks are, how to remove the bottlenecks, how to make sure that… There’s just so many really cool things about putting together a data center because everything has to work. The people that do the sys admin, the machine learning and all of that is the exciting thing, so on. But really, the people that run everything are the folks that know the low-level software and hardware that runs everything, the networking, all of that. So, you have to make sure you have procedures that test everything. I think they’re using ethernet. I don’t know how they’re doing the networking, but-
Dylan Patel
They’re using NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet. I think the unsung heroes are the cooling in electrical systems which are just glossed over.
They’re using NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet. I think the unsung heroes are the cooling in electrical systems which are just glossed over.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Dylan Patel
But I think one story that maybe exemplifies how insane this stuff is, is when you’re training, you’re always doing… You’re running through the model a bunch, in the most simplistic terms. Running through the model a bunch, and then you’re going to exchange everything and synchronize the weights. So, you’ll do a step. This is like a step-in model training. And every step, your loss goes down hopefully, and it doesn’t always.
But I think one story that maybe exemplifies how insane this stuff is, is when you’re training, you’re always doing… You’re running through the model a bunch, in the most simplistic terms. Running through the model a bunch, and then you’re going to exchange everything and synchronize the weights. So, you’ll do a step. This is like a step-in model training. And every step, your loss goes down hopefully, and it doesn’t always.
But in the simplest terms, you’ll be computing a lot and then you’ll exchange. The interesting thing is GPU power is most of it, networking power is some but it’s a lot less. So while you’re computing, your power for your GPUs is here. But then when you’re exchanging weights, if you’re not able to overlap communications and compute perfectly, there may be a time period where your GPUs are just idle, and you’re exchanging weights and you’re like, “Hey, the model’s updating.” So, you’re exchanging the radiance, you do the model update, and then you start training again. So, the power goes… Right? And it’s super spiky.
And so funnily enough, when you talk about the scale of data center power, you can blow stuff up so easily. And so, Meta actually has accidentally upstreamed something to code in PyTorch where they added an operator. And I kid you not, whoever made this, I want to hug the guy because it says PyTorch… It’s like PyTorch.powerplant no blow up equals 0 or equal 1. And what it does is amazing, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
Either when you’re exchanging the weights, the GPU will just compute fake numbers so the power doesn’t spike too much, and so then the power plants don’t blow up because the transient spikes screw stuff up.
Either when you’re exchanging the weights, the GPU will just compute fake numbers so the power doesn’t spike too much, and so then the power plants don’t blow up because the transient spikes screw stuff up.
Lex Fridman
Well, that makes sense. You have to do that kind thing. [inaudible 03:51:57] You have to make sure they’re not idle.
Well, that makes sense. You have to do that kind thing. [inaudible 03:51:57] You have to make sure they’re not idle.
Dylan Patel
And Elon’s solution was like, “Let me throw a bunch of Tesla Megapacks and a few other things.”
And Elon’s solution was like, “Let me throw a bunch of Tesla Megapacks and a few other things.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah, to symbolize that.
Yeah, to symbolize that.
Dylan Patel
Everyone has different solutions, but Meta’s, at least, was publicly and openly known, which is just like, set this operator. And what this operator does is it just makes the GPUs compute nothing so that the power doesn’t spike.
Everyone has different solutions, but Meta’s, at least, was publicly and openly known, which is just like, set this operator. And what this operator does is it just makes the GPUs compute nothing so that the power doesn’t spike.
Lex Fridman
But that just tells you how much power you’re working with. I mean, it’s insane. It’s insane.
But that just tells you how much power you’re working with. I mean, it’s insane. It’s insane.
Nathan Lambert
People should just go to Google, like scale or what does X watts do, and go through all the scales from 1 watt to a kilowatt to a megawatt. You look and stare at that, and you’re how high on the list a gigawatt is, it’s mind-blowing.
People should just go to Google, like scale or what does X watts do, and go through all the scales from 1 watt to a kilowatt to a megawatt. You look and stare at that, and you’re how high on the list a gigawatt is, it’s mind-blowing.
Lex Fridman
Can you say something about the cooling? I know Elon’s using liquid cooling, I believe, in all cases. That’s a new thing. Most of them don’t use liquid cooling. Is there something interesting to say about the cooling?
Can you say something about the cooling? I know Elon’s using liquid cooling, I believe, in all cases. That’s a new thing. Most of them don’t use liquid cooling. Is there something interesting to say about the cooling?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. So, air cooling has been the de facto standard. Throw a bunch of metal heat pipes, et cetera, and fans, and that’s cold. That’s been enough to cool it. People have been dabbling in water cooling. Google’s TPUs are water- cooled. So, they’ve been doing that for a few years. But with GPUs, no one’s ever done… And no one’s ever done the scale of water cooling that Elon just did. Now, next generation NVIDIA is for the highest-end GPU, it is mandatory water cooling. You have to water-cool it.
Yeah. So, air cooling has been the de facto standard. Throw a bunch of metal heat pipes, et cetera, and fans, and that’s cold. That’s been enough to cool it. People have been dabbling in water cooling. Google’s TPUs are water- cooled. So, they’ve been doing that for a few years. But with GPUs, no one’s ever done… And no one’s ever done the scale of water cooling that Elon just did. Now, next generation NVIDIA is for the highest-end GPU, it is mandatory water cooling. You have to water-cool it.
But Elon did it on this current generation, and that required a lot of stuff. If you look at some of the satellite photos and stuff of the Memphis facility, there’s all these external water chillers that are sitting. Basically, it looks like a semi truck pod thing. What’s it called? The container? But really, those are water chillers, and he has 90 of those water chillers just sitting outside. Ninety different containers that chill the water, bring it back to the data center, and then you distribute it to all the chips, pull all the heat out and then send it back. And this is both a way to cool the chips, but also, it’s an efficiency thing.
And going back to that three vector thing, there is Memory Bandwidth FLOPS and interconnect. The closer the chips are together, the easier it is to do high-speed interconnects. And this is also a reason why you want to go water cooling is because you can just put the chips right next to each other, and therefore get higher speed connectivity.
Lex Fridman
I got to ask you, in one of your recent posts, there’s a section called cluster measuring contest. So…
I got to ask you, in one of your recent posts, there’s a section called cluster measuring contest. So…
Dylan Patel
There’s another word there, but I won’t say it.
There’s another word there, but I won’t say it.
Lex Fridman
Who’s got the biggest now and who’s going to have the biggest?
Who’s got the biggest now and who’s going to have the biggest?
Dylan Patel
Today, individual largest is Elon. Right?
Today, individual largest is Elon. Right?
Lex Fridman
Right. Elon’s cluster.
Right. Elon’s cluster.
Dylan Patel
Elon’s cluster in Memphis, 200,000 GPUs. Meta has 128,000, OpenAI has 100,000 now. Now to be clear, other companies have more GPUs than Elon. They just don’t have them in one place. And for training, you want them tightly connected. There’s some techniques that people are researching and working on that let you train across multiple regions. But for the most part, you want them all in one area so you can connect them highly with high-speed networking.
Elon’s cluster in Memphis, 200,000 GPUs. Meta has 128,000, OpenAI has 100,000 now. Now to be clear, other companies have more GPUs than Elon. They just don’t have them in one place. And for training, you want them tightly connected. There’s some techniques that people are researching and working on that let you train across multiple regions. But for the most part, you want them all in one area so you can connect them highly with high-speed networking.
And so, Elon today has 200,000 H100s, 100,000 H100s and 100,000 H200s. Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon all have on the scale of a hundred thousand, a little bit less. But next this year, people are building much more. Anthrophic and Amazon are building a cluster of 400,000 trainium 2, which is Amazon-specific chip trying to get away from NVIDIA. Meta and OpenAI have scales for hundreds of thousands. But by next year, you’ll have 500,000 to 700,000 GPU clusters. And note, those GPUs are much higher power consumption than existing ones. Hopper’s 700 watts, Blackwell goes to 1,200 watts.
So, the power per chip is growing and the number of chips is growing.
Lex Fridman
Nuts. Elon said he’ll get to a million. Do you think that’s actually feasible?
Nuts. Elon said he’ll get to a million. Do you think that’s actually feasible?
Dylan Patel
I mean, I don’t doubt Elon. The filings that he has for the power plant and the Tesla battery packs, it’s clear he has some crazy plans for Memphis. Permits and stuff is open record, but it’s not quite clear what the time scales are. I just never doubt Elon. He’s going to surprise us.
I mean, I don’t doubt Elon. The filings that he has for the power plant and the Tesla battery packs, it’s clear he has some crazy plans for Memphis. Permits and stuff is open record, but it’s not quite clear what the time scales are. I just never doubt Elon. He’s going to surprise us.
Lex Fridman
So, what’s the idea with these clusters? If you have a million GPUs, what percentage in a, let’s say 2 or 3 years, is used for training? What percent pre-training, and what percent is used for the actual computation?
So, what’s the idea with these clusters? If you have a million GPUs, what percentage in a, let’s say 2 or 3 years, is used for training? What percent pre-training, and what percent is used for the actual computation?
Dylan Patel
These mega clusters make no sense for inference. You could route inference there and just not train. But most of the inference capacity is being, “Hey, I’ve got a 30-megawatt data center here, I’ve got 50 megawatts here, I’ve got 100 here.” Whatever. I’ll just throw inference in all of those because the mega clusters, multi-gigawatt data centers, I want to train there because that’s where all of my GPUs are co-located where I can put them at a super high networking speed connected together. Because that’s what you need for training.
These mega clusters make no sense for inference. You could route inference there and just not train. But most of the inference capacity is being, “Hey, I’ve got a 30-megawatt data center here, I’ve got 50 megawatts here, I’ve got 100 here.” Whatever. I’ll just throw inference in all of those because the mega clusters, multi-gigawatt data centers, I want to train there because that’s where all of my GPUs are co-located where I can put them at a super high networking speed connected together. Because that’s what you need for training.
Now with pre-training, this is the old scale. You can increase parameters, you did increase data, model gets better. That doesn’t apply anymore because there’s not much more data in the pre-training side. Yes, there’s video and audio and image that has not been fully taken advantage of, so there’s a lot more scaling. But a lot of people have transcript, taken transcripts out of YouTube videos, and that gets you a lot of the data. It doesn’t get you all of the learning value out of the video and image data, but…
There’s still scaling to be done on pre-training, but this post-training world is where all the FLOPS are going to be spent. The model’s going to play with itself, it’s going to self-play, it’s going to do verifiable tasks, it’s going to do computer use in sandboxes. It might even do simulated robotics things. All of these things are going to be environments where compute is spent in “post-training.” But I think it’s going to be good. We’re going to drop the post from post-training.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. Wow.
Dylan Patel
It’s going to be pre-training and it’s going to be training, I think, at some point. [inaudible 03:57:53] At some point. Because for bulk of the last few years, pre-training has dwarfed post-training. But with these verifiable methods, especially ones that scale really potentially infinitely, like computer use in robotics, not just math and coding where you can verify what’s happening, those infinitely verifiable tasks, it seems you can spend as much compute as you want on this.
It’s going to be pre-training and it’s going to be training, I think, at some point. [inaudible 03:57:53] At some point. Because for bulk of the last few years, pre-training has dwarfed post-training. But with these verifiable methods, especially ones that scale really potentially infinitely, like computer use in robotics, not just math and coding where you can verify what’s happening, those infinitely verifiable tasks, it seems you can spend as much compute as you want on this.
Nathan Lambert
Especially at the context length increase because the end of pre-training is when you increase the context length for these models. And we’ve talked earlier in the conversation about how the context length, when you have a long input, is much easier to manage than output. And a lot of these post-training and reasoning techniques rely on a ton of sampling, and it’s becoming increasingly long context. So just like effectively, your compute efficiency goes down.
Especially at the context length increase because the end of pre-training is when you increase the context length for these models. And we’ve talked earlier in the conversation about how the context length, when you have a long input, is much easier to manage than output. And a lot of these post-training and reasoning techniques rely on a ton of sampling, and it’s becoming increasingly long context. So just like effectively, your compute efficiency goes down.
I think FLOPS is the standard for how you measure it. But with RL, and you have to do all of these things where you move your weights around in a different way than at pre-training and just generation, it’s going to be become less efficient and FLOPS is going to be less of a useful term. And then as the infrastructure gets better, it’s probably going to go back to FLOPS.
Lex Fridman
So, all of the things we’ve been talking about is most likely going to be NVIDIA, right? Is there any competitors of GPU?
So, all of the things we’ve been talking about is most likely going to be NVIDIA, right? Is there any competitors of GPU?
Dylan Patel
Google kind of ignored them. I was getting-
Google kind of ignored them. I was getting-
Nathan Lambert
I was like, “Ah?”
I was like, “Ah?”
Lex Fridman
What’s the story with TPU? What’s the…
What’s the story with TPU? What’s the…
Dylan Patel
TPU is awesome. It’s great. Google is, they’re a bit more tepid on building data centers for some reason. They’re building big data centers, don’t get me wrong, and they actually have the biggest cluster. I was talking about NVIDIA clusters. They actually have the biggest cluster. Period.
TPU is awesome. It’s great. Google is, they’re a bit more tepid on building data centers for some reason. They’re building big data centers, don’t get me wrong, and they actually have the biggest cluster. I was talking about NVIDIA clusters. They actually have the biggest cluster. Period.
But the way they do it is very interesting. They have two data center super regions in that the data center isn’t physically… All of the GPUs aren’t physically on one site but they’re like 30 miles from each other. And they’re not GPUs, TPUs. In Iowa and Nebraska, they have four data centers that are just right next to each other.
Lex Fridman
Why doesn’t Google flex its cluster size?
Why doesn’t Google flex its cluster size?
Dylan Patel
Go to multi-data center training, there’s good images in there. I’ll show you what I mean. It’s just semi-analysis multi-data center.
Go to multi-data center training, there’s good images in there. I’ll show you what I mean. It’s just semi-analysis multi-data center.
This is an image of what a standard Google data center looks like. By the way, their data centers look very different than anyone else’s data centers.
Lex Fridman
What are we looking at here?
What are we looking at here?
Dylan Patel
So if you see this image, in the center, there are these big rectangular boxes. Those are where the actual chips are kept. And then if you scroll down a little bit further, you can see there’s these water pipes, there’s these chiller cooling towers in the top, and a bunch of diesel generators. The diesel generators are backup power. The data center itself look physically smaller than the water chillers. The chips are actually easier to keep together, but then cooling all the water for the water cooling is very difficult.
So if you see this image, in the center, there are these big rectangular boxes. Those are where the actual chips are kept. And then if you scroll down a little bit further, you can see there’s these water pipes, there’s these chiller cooling towers in the top, and a bunch of diesel generators. The diesel generators are backup power. The data center itself look physically smaller than the water chillers. The chips are actually easier to keep together, but then cooling all the water for the water cooling is very difficult.
So, Google has a very advanced infrastructure that no one else has for the TPU. And what they do is they’ve stamped a bunch of these data centers out in a few regions. So if you go a little bit further down… This is a Microsoft. This is in Arizona. This is where GPT-5 “will be trained.”
Nathan Lambert
If it doesn’t exist already.
If it doesn’t exist already.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, if it doesn’t exist already. But each of these data centers, I’ve shown a couple images of them, they’re really closely co-located in the same region. Nebraska, Iowa. And then they also have a similar one in Ohio complex. And so, these data centers are really close to each other. And what they’ve done is they’ve connected them super high bandwidth with fiber. And so, these are just a bunch of data centers.
Yeah, if it doesn’t exist already. But each of these data centers, I’ve shown a couple images of them, they’re really closely co-located in the same region. Nebraska, Iowa. And then they also have a similar one in Ohio complex. And so, these data centers are really close to each other. And what they’ve done is they’ve connected them super high bandwidth with fiber. And so, these are just a bunch of data centers.
And the point here is that Google has a very advanced infrastructure, very tightly connected in a small region. So, Elon will always to have the biggest cluster fully connected because it’s all in one building, and he’s completely right on that. Google has the biggest cluster but you have to spread over three sites, and by a significant margin. We have to go across multiple sites.
Lex Fridman
Why doesn’t Google compete with NVIDIA? Why don’t they sell TPUs?
Why doesn’t Google compete with NVIDIA? Why don’t they sell TPUs?
Dylan Patel
I think there’s a couple of problems with it. It’s like, one, TPU has been a form of allowing search to be really freaking cheap and build models for that. And so, a big chunk of the search, GPU purchases or TPU purchases or big chunk of Google’s purchases and usage, all of it is for internal workloads. Whether it be search, now Gemini, YouTube, all these different applications that they have ads. These are where all their TPUs are being spent and that’s what they’re hyper-focused on. And so, there’s certain aspects of the architecture that are optimized for their use case that are not optimized elsewhere.
I think there’s a couple of problems with it. It’s like, one, TPU has been a form of allowing search to be really freaking cheap and build models for that. And so, a big chunk of the search, GPU purchases or TPU purchases or big chunk of Google’s purchases and usage, all of it is for internal workloads. Whether it be search, now Gemini, YouTube, all these different applications that they have ads. These are where all their TPUs are being spent and that’s what they’re hyper-focused on. And so, there’s certain aspects of the architecture that are optimized for their use case that are not optimized elsewhere.
One simple one is they’ve open sourced a Gemma model, and they called it Gemma-7B. But then, it’s actually 8 billion parameters because the vocabulary is so large. And the reason they made the vocabulary so large is because TPUs matrix multiply unit is massive because that’s what they’ve optimized for. And so they decided, “Oh, well, I’ll just make the vocabulary large, too.” Even though it makes no sense to do so in such a small model, because that fits on their hardware. Gemma doesn’t run it as efficiently on a GPU as a Llama does. But vice versa, Llama doesn’t run as efficiently on a TPU as a Gemma does.
There’s certain aspects of hardware, software co-design. All their search models are there, ranking and recommendation models, all these different models that are AI but not like gen AI have been hyper optimized with TPUs forever. The software stack is super optimized. But all of this software stack has not been released publicly at all. Very small portions of it. JAX and XLA have been. But the experience when you’re inside of Google and you’re training on TPUs as a researcher, you don’t need to know anything about the hardware in many cases, right? It’s pretty beautiful.
Nathan Lambert
They all loved it.
They all loved it.
Dylan Patel
But as soon as you step outside-
But as soon as you step outside-
Nathan Lambert
A lot of them go back. They leave Google and then they go back.
A lot of them go back. They leave Google and then they go back.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
Yeah. They leave and they start a company because they have all of these amazing research ideas. And they’re like, “Wait. Infrastructure’s hard, software is hard.” And this is on GPUs. Or if they try to use TPUs, same thing, because they don’t have access to all this code. And so it’s like, how do you convince a company whose golden goose is search where they’re making hundreds of billions of dollars from, to start selling GPU or TPUs which they used to only buy a couple of billion of…
Yeah. They leave and they start a company because they have all of these amazing research ideas. And they’re like, “Wait. Infrastructure’s hard, software is hard.” And this is on GPUs. Or if they try to use TPUs, same thing, because they don’t have access to all this code. And so it’s like, how do you convince a company whose golden goose is search where they’re making hundreds of billions of dollars from, to start selling GPU or TPUs which they used to only buy a couple of billion of…
I think in 2023, they bought a couple of billion. And now, they’re buying like 10 billion to $15 billion worth. But how do you convince them that they should just buy twice as many and figure out how to sell them, and make $30 billion? Who cares about making $30 billion?
Lex Fridman
Won’t that 30 billion exceed actually the search profit eventually?
Won’t that 30 billion exceed actually the search profit eventually?
Dylan Patel
You’re always going to make more money on services than…
You’re always going to make more money on services than…
Lex Fridman
Always.
Always.
Dylan Patel
I mean, yeah. To be clear, today, people are spending a lot more on hardware than they are with the services because the hardware front runs the service spend. But-
I mean, yeah. To be clear, today, people are spending a lot more on hardware than they are with the services because the hardware front runs the service spend. But-
Lex Fridman
You’re investing, yeah.
You’re investing, yeah.
Dylan Patel
… if there’s no revenue for AI stuff or not enough revenue, then obviously, it’s going to blow up. People won’t continue to spend on GPUs forever. And NVIDIA is trying to move up the stack with software that they’re trying to sell and licensed and stuff. But Google has never had that DNA of like, “This is a product we should sell.” The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There’s a lot of bureaucracy here.
… if there’s no revenue for AI stuff or not enough revenue, then obviously, it’s going to blow up. People won’t continue to spend on GPUs forever. And NVIDIA is trying to move up the stack with software that they’re trying to sell and licensed and stuff. But Google has never had that DNA of like, “This is a product we should sell.” The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There’s a lot of bureaucracy here.
Lex Fridman
Wait. Google Cloud is a separate team than the TPU team?
Wait. Google Cloud is a separate team than the TPU team?
Dylan Patel
Technically, TPU sits under infrastructure, which sits under Google Cloud. But Google Cloud, for renting stuff-
Technically, TPU sits under infrastructure, which sits under Google Cloud. But Google Cloud, for renting stuff-
Dylan Patel
… But Google cloud for renting stuff and TPU architecture are very different goals, and hardware and software, all of this, right? The Jax XLA teams do not serve Google’s customers externally. Whereas NVIDIA’s various CUDA teams for things like NCCL serve external customers. The internal teams like Jax and XLA and stuff, they more so serve DeepMind and Search, right? And so their customer is different. They’re not building a product for them.
… But Google cloud for renting stuff and TPU architecture are very different goals, and hardware and software, all of this, right? The Jax XLA teams do not serve Google’s customers externally. Whereas NVIDIA’s various CUDA teams for things like NCCL serve external customers. The internal teams like Jax and XLA and stuff, they more so serve DeepMind and Search, right? And so their customer is different. They’re not building a product for them.
Lex Fridman
Do you understand why AWS keeps winning versus Azure for cloud versus Google Cloud?
Do you understand why AWS keeps winning versus Azure for cloud versus Google Cloud?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, there’s-
Yeah, there’s-
Lex Fridman
Google Cloud is tiny, isn’t it, relative to AWS?
Google Cloud is tiny, isn’t it, relative to AWS?
Dylan Patel
Google Cloud is third. Yeah. Microsoft is the second biggest, but Amazon is the biggest, right?
Google Cloud is third. Yeah. Microsoft is the second biggest, but Amazon is the biggest, right?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dylan Patel
And Microsoft deceptively sort of includes Microsoft Office 365 and things like that, some of these enterprise-wide licenses. So in reality, the gulf is even larger. Microsoft is still second though, right? Amazon is way bigger. Why? Because using AWS is better and easier. And in many cases, it’s cheaper-
And Microsoft deceptively sort of includes Microsoft Office 365 and things like that, some of these enterprise-wide licenses. So in reality, the gulf is even larger. Microsoft is still second though, right? Amazon is way bigger. Why? Because using AWS is better and easier. And in many cases, it’s cheaper-
Nathan Lambert
It was first.
It was first.
Dylan Patel
And it’s first. It was first.
And it’s first. It was first.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But there’s a lot of things that are first that lose the-
Yeah. But there’s a lot of things that are first that lose the-
Nathan Lambert
Well, it’s harder to switch than it is to-
Well, it’s harder to switch than it is to-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, okay.
Dylan Patel
AWS is-
AWS is-
Lex Fridman
Because there’s large-
Because there’s large-
Nathan Lambert
There’s big fees for switching too.
There’s big fees for switching too.
Dylan Patel
AWS generates over 80% of Amazon’s profit. I think over 90%.
AWS generates over 80% of Amazon’s profit. I think over 90%.
Lex Fridman
That’s insane.
That’s insane.
Dylan Patel
The distribution centers are just like one day we’ll decide to make money from this, but they haven’t yet, right? They make tiny little profit from it.
The distribution centers are just like one day we’ll decide to make money from this, but they haven’t yet, right? They make tiny little profit from it.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, one day Amazon Prime will triple in price.
Yeah, one day Amazon Prime will triple in price.
Lex Fridman
You would think they would improve AWS interface because it’s horrible. It’s clunky, but everybody is.
You would think they would improve AWS interface because it’s horrible. It’s clunky, but everybody is.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, one would think.
Yeah, one would think.
Dylan Patel
I think actually Google’s interface is sometimes nice, but it’s also they don’t care about anyone besides their top customers.
I think actually Google’s interface is sometimes nice, but it’s also they don’t care about anyone besides their top customers.
Lex Fridman
Exactly.
Exactly.
Dylan Patel
And their customer service sucks and they have a lot less-
And their customer service sucks and they have a lot less-
Lex Fridman
I mean, all these companies, they optimize for the big customers. Yeah, it’s supposed to be for business.
I mean, all these companies, they optimize for the big customers. Yeah, it’s supposed to be for business.
Dylan Patel
Amazon has always optimized for the small customer too though. Obviously they optimize a lot for the big customer, but when they started, they just would go to random Bay Area things and give out credits or just put in your credit card and use us back in the early days. The business has grown with them and [inaudible 04:07:04]. Why is Snowflake all over Amazon? Because Snowflake in the beginning, when Amazon didn’t care about them, was still using Amazon. And then of course one day Snowflake and Amazon has a super huge partnership, but this is the case. Amazon’s user experience and quality is better.
Amazon has always optimized for the small customer too though. Obviously they optimize a lot for the big customer, but when they started, they just would go to random Bay Area things and give out credits or just put in your credit card and use us back in the early days. The business has grown with them and [inaudible 04:07:04]. Why is Snowflake all over Amazon? Because Snowflake in the beginning, when Amazon didn’t care about them, was still using Amazon. And then of course one day Snowflake and Amazon has a super huge partnership, but this is the case. Amazon’s user experience and quality is better.
Also, a lot of the silicon they’ve engineered makes them have a lower cost structure in traditional cloud, storage, CPU networking, that kind of stuff than in databases. I think four of Amazon’s top five revenue products, margin products like gross profit products are all database-related products like Redshift and all these things. So Amazon has a very good silicon to user experience like entire pipeline with AWS. I think Google, their silicon teams, they have awesome silicon internally, TPU, the YouTube chip, some of these other chips that they’ve made. And the problem is they’re not serving external customers, they’re serving internal customers, right?
Nathan Lambert
I mean, NVIDIA’s entire culture is designed from the bottom up to do this. There’s this recent book, The NVIDIA Way by Tae Kim, that details this and how they look for future opportunities and ready their CUDA software libraries to make it so that new applications of high-performance computing can very rapidly be evolved on CUDA and NVIDIA chips. And that is entirely different than Google as a services business.
I mean, NVIDIA’s entire culture is designed from the bottom up to do this. There’s this recent book, The NVIDIA Way by Tae Kim, that details this and how they look for future opportunities and ready their CUDA software libraries to make it so that new applications of high-performance computing can very rapidly be evolved on CUDA and NVIDIA chips. And that is entirely different than Google as a services business.
Lex Fridman
I mean NVIDIA, it should be said, is a truly special company. I mean there’s the culture of everything. They’re really optimized for that kind of thing. Speaking of which, is there somebody that can even challenge NVIDIA hardware-wise? Intel? AMD?
I mean NVIDIA, it should be said, is a truly special company. I mean there’s the culture of everything. They’re really optimized for that kind of thing. Speaking of which, is there somebody that can even challenge NVIDIA hardware-wise? Intel? AMD?
Dylan Patel
I really don’t think so. We went through a very long process of working with AMD on training on their GPUs inference and stuff. And they’re decent, their hardware is better in many ways than in NVIDIA’s. The problem is their software is really bad and I think they’re getting better, right? They’re getting better, faster, but the gulf is so large and they don’t spend enough resources on it or haven’t historically, right? Maybe they’re changing their tune now, but for multiple months we were submitting the most bugs like us semi-analysis like what the fuck? Why are we submitting the most bugs? Because they only cared about their biggest customers and so they’d ship them a private image, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, “Okay, but I am just using PyTorch and I want to use the publicly available libraries,” and you don’t care about that. So they’re getting better, but I think AMD is not possible. Intel is obviously in dire straits right now and needs to be saved somehow. Very important for national security, for American technology comments.
I really don’t think so. We went through a very long process of working with AMD on training on their GPUs inference and stuff. And they’re decent, their hardware is better in many ways than in NVIDIA’s. The problem is their software is really bad and I think they’re getting better, right? They’re getting better, faster, but the gulf is so large and they don’t spend enough resources on it or haven’t historically, right? Maybe they’re changing their tune now, but for multiple months we were submitting the most bugs like us semi-analysis like what the fuck? Why are we submitting the most bugs? Because they only cared about their biggest customers and so they’d ship them a private image, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, “Okay, but I am just using PyTorch and I want to use the publicly available libraries,” and you don’t care about that. So they’re getting better, but I think AMD is not possible. Intel is obviously in dire straits right now and needs to be saved somehow. Very important for national security, for American technology comments.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain the obviously, so why are they in dire straits?
Can you explain the obviously, so why are they in dire straits?
Dylan Patel
Going back to earlier, only three companies can R&D, right? Taiwan Hsinchu, Samsung [inaudible 04:09:49], and then Intel Hillsboro. Samsung’s doing horribly. Intel’s doing horribly. We could be in a world where there’s only one company that can do R& and that one company already manufactures most of chips. They’ve been gaining market share anyways, but that’s a critical thing. So what happens to Taiwan means the rest of the world, semiconductor industry and therefore tech relies on Taiwan and that’s obviously precarious as far as Intel, they’ve been slowly, steadily declining. They were on top of servers and PCs, but now Apple’s done the M1 and Nvidia’s releasing a PC chip and Qualcomm’s releasing a PC chip.
Going back to earlier, only three companies can R&D, right? Taiwan Hsinchu, Samsung [inaudible 04:09:49], and then Intel Hillsboro. Samsung’s doing horribly. Intel’s doing horribly. We could be in a world where there’s only one company that can do R& and that one company already manufactures most of chips. They’ve been gaining market share anyways, but that’s a critical thing. So what happens to Taiwan means the rest of the world, semiconductor industry and therefore tech relies on Taiwan and that’s obviously precarious as far as Intel, they’ve been slowly, steadily declining. They were on top of servers and PCs, but now Apple’s done the M1 and Nvidia’s releasing a PC chip and Qualcomm’s releasing a PC chip.
And in servers, hyperscalers are all making their own ARM-based server chips and Intel has no AI silicon like wins. They have very small wins and they never got into mobile because they said no to the iPhone and all these things have compounded and they’ve lost their process technology leadership. They were ahead for 20 years and now they’re behind by at least a couple years and they’re trying to catch back up and we’ll see if their 18A, 14A strategy works out where they try and leapfrog TSMC like and Intel is just losing tons of money anyways, and they just fired their CEO, even though the CEO was the only person who understood the company well, right? We’ll see. He was not the best, but he was pretty good relatively technical guy.
Lex Fridman
Where does Intel make most of its money? The CPUs though.
Where does Intel make most of its money? The CPUs though.
Dylan Patel
PCs and data center CPUs, yeah, but data center CPUs are all going cloud and Amazon, Microsoft, Google are making ARM-based CPUs. And then PC side, AMD’s gained market share, Nvidia’s launching a chip, that’s not going to be a success, right? MediaTek, Qualcomm ever launched chips. Apple’s doing well. They could get squeezed a little bit in PC, although PC generally I imagine will just stick Intel mostly for Windows side.
PCs and data center CPUs, yeah, but data center CPUs are all going cloud and Amazon, Microsoft, Google are making ARM-based CPUs. And then PC side, AMD’s gained market share, Nvidia’s launching a chip, that’s not going to be a success, right? MediaTek, Qualcomm ever launched chips. Apple’s doing well. They could get squeezed a little bit in PC, although PC generally I imagine will just stick Intel mostly for Windows side.
Who wins the race to AGI?
Lex Fridman
Let’s talk about the broad AI race. Who do you think wins? We talked about Google, Meta.
Let’s talk about the broad AI race. Who do you think wins? We talked about Google, Meta.
Nathan Lambert
The default leader has been Google because of their infrastructure advantage.
The default leader has been Google because of their infrastructure advantage.
Lex Fridman
Well, in the news, OpenAI is the leader.
Well, in the news, OpenAI is the leader.
Nathan Lambert
They’re the leading in the narrative.
They’re the leading in the narrative.
Dylan Patel
They have the best model.
They have the best model.
Nathan Lambert
They have the best model that people can use and they’re experts-Experts.
They have the best model that people can use and they’re experts-Experts.
Dylan Patel
And they have the most AI revenue.
And they have the most AI revenue.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. OpenAI is winning.
Yeah. OpenAI is winning.
Lex Fridman
So who’s making money on AI right now? Is anyone making money?
So who’s making money on AI right now? Is anyone making money?
Dylan Patel
So accounting profit-wise, Microsoft is making money, but they’re spending a lot of CapEx and that gets depreciated over years. Meta’s making tons of money with recommendation systems, which is AI, but not with Llama, right? Llama’s losing money for sure. I think Anthropic and OpenAI are obviously not making money otherwise they wouldn’t be raising money. They have to raise money to build more. Although theoretically they are making money. You spent a few hundred million dollars on GPT-4 and it’s doing billions in revenue. So obviously it’s making money. Although they had to continue to research to get the compute efficiency wins and moved down the curve to get that 1200x that has been achieved for GPT-3. Maybe we’re only at a couple hundred X now, but know with GPT-4 Turbo and 4.0 And there’ll be another one probably cheaper than GPT-4.0 even that comes out at some point.
So accounting profit-wise, Microsoft is making money, but they’re spending a lot of CapEx and that gets depreciated over years. Meta’s making tons of money with recommendation systems, which is AI, but not with Llama, right? Llama’s losing money for sure. I think Anthropic and OpenAI are obviously not making money otherwise they wouldn’t be raising money. They have to raise money to build more. Although theoretically they are making money. You spent a few hundred million dollars on GPT-4 and it’s doing billions in revenue. So obviously it’s making money. Although they had to continue to research to get the compute efficiency wins and moved down the curve to get that 1200x that has been achieved for GPT-3. Maybe we’re only at a couple hundred X now, but know with GPT-4 Turbo and 4.0 And there’ll be another one probably cheaper than GPT-4.0 even that comes out at some point.
Lex Fridman
And that research costs a lot of money.
And that research costs a lot of money.
Dylan Patel
Yep, exactly.
Yep, exactly.
Lex Fridman
That’s the thing that I guess is not talked about with the cost, that when you’re referring to the cost of the model, it’s not just the training or the test runs, it’s the actual research, the manpower.
That’s the thing that I guess is not talked about with the cost, that when you’re referring to the cost of the model, it’s not just the training or the test runs, it’s the actual research, the manpower.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, to do things like reasoning right now that exists. They’re going to scale it. They’re going to do a lot of research still. I think people focus on the payback question, but it’s really easy to just be like, well, GDP is humans and industrial capital. And if you can make intelligence cheap, then you can grow a lot, right? That’s the sort of dumb way to explain it. But that’s sort of what basically the investment thesis is. I think only Nvidia is actually making tons of money and other hardware vendors, the hyperscalers are all on paper making money, but in reality they’re spending a lot more on purchasing the GPUs, which you don’t know if they’re still going to make this much money on each GPU in two years, right?
Yeah, to do things like reasoning right now that exists. They’re going to scale it. They’re going to do a lot of research still. I think people focus on the payback question, but it’s really easy to just be like, well, GDP is humans and industrial capital. And if you can make intelligence cheap, then you can grow a lot, right? That’s the sort of dumb way to explain it. But that’s sort of what basically the investment thesis is. I think only Nvidia is actually making tons of money and other hardware vendors, the hyperscalers are all on paper making money, but in reality they’re spending a lot more on purchasing the GPUs, which you don’t know if they’re still going to make this much money on each GPU in two years, right?
You don’t know if all of a sudden OpenAI goes kapoof and now Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of GPUs they were renting to OpenAI that they paid for themselves with their investment in them that no longer have a customer. This is always a possibility. I don’t believe that. I think OpenAI will keep raising money. I think others will keep raising money because the returns from it are going to be eventually huge once we have AGI.
Lex Fridman
So do you think multiple companies will get, let’s assume-
So do you think multiple companies will get, let’s assume-
Dylan Patel
I don’t think it’s winner take all.
I don’t think it’s winner take all.
Lex Fridman
Okay, so let’s not call it AGI whatever. It’s like a single day. It’s a gradual thing-
Okay, so let’s not call it AGI whatever. It’s like a single day. It’s a gradual thing-
Nathan Lambert
Powerful AI. Super powerful AI.
Powerful AI. Super powerful AI.
Lex Fridman
But it’s a gradually increasing set of features that are useful and make-
But it’s a gradually increasing set of features that are useful and make-
Nathan Lambert
Rapidly increasing set of features.
Rapidly increasing set of features.
Lex Fridman
Rapidly increasing set of features. So you’re saying a lot of companies will be… It just seems absurd that all of these companies are building gigantic data centers.
Rapidly increasing set of features. So you’re saying a lot of companies will be… It just seems absurd that all of these companies are building gigantic data centers.
Nathan Lambert
There are companies that will benefit from AI but not because they train the best model. Meta has so many avenues to benefit from AI and all of their services. People are there. People spend time on that as platforms, and it’s a way to make more money per user per hour.
There are companies that will benefit from AI but not because they train the best model. Meta has so many avenues to benefit from AI and all of their services. People are there. People spend time on that as platforms, and it’s a way to make more money per user per hour.
Lex Fridman
It seems like Google X/X AI/ Tesla important to say. And then Meta will benefit not directly from the AI like the LLMs, but from the intelligence, like the additional boost of intelligence to the products they already sell. So whether that’s the recommendation system or for Elon who’s been talking about Optimus, the robot, potentially the intelligence of the robot, and then you have personalized robots in the home, that kind of thing. He thinks it’s a 10 plus trillion dollars business, which…
It seems like Google X/X AI/ Tesla important to say. And then Meta will benefit not directly from the AI like the LLMs, but from the intelligence, like the additional boost of intelligence to the products they already sell. So whether that’s the recommendation system or for Elon who’s been talking about Optimus, the robot, potentially the intelligence of the robot, and then you have personalized robots in the home, that kind of thing. He thinks it’s a 10 plus trillion dollars business, which…
Nathan Lambert
At some point, maybe. Not soon, but who knows when robotics will use for-
At some point, maybe. Not soon, but who knows when robotics will use for-
Dylan Patel
Let’s do a TAM analysis, 8 billion humans and let’s get 8 billion robots and let’s pay them the average salary. And there we go. 10 trillion. More than 10 trillions.
Let’s do a TAM analysis, 8 billion humans and let’s get 8 billion robots and let’s pay them the average salary. And there we go. 10 trillion. More than 10 trillions.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean if there’s robots everywhere, why does it have to be just 8 billion robots?
Yeah, I mean if there’s robots everywhere, why does it have to be just 8 billion robots?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. I’m going to have one robot. You’re going to have like 20.
Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. I’m going to have one robot. You’re going to have like 20.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean I see a use case for that. So yeah, so I guess the benefit would be in the products they sell, which is why OpenAI’s in a trickier position because they-
Yeah, I mean I see a use case for that. So yeah, so I guess the benefit would be in the products they sell, which is why OpenAI’s in a trickier position because they-
Nathan Lambert
All of the value of OpenAI right now as a brand is in ChatGPT and for most users, there’s not that much of a reason that they need OpenAI to be spending billions and billions of dollars on the next best model when they could just license Llama 5 and for be way cheaper. So that’s kind of like ChatGPT is an extremely valuable entity to them, but they could make more money just off that.
All of the value of OpenAI right now as a brand is in ChatGPT and for most users, there’s not that much of a reason that they need OpenAI to be spending billions and billions of dollars on the next best model when they could just license Llama 5 and for be way cheaper. So that’s kind of like ChatGPT is an extremely valuable entity to them, but they could make more money just off that.
Dylan Patel
The chat application clearly does not have tons of room to continue. The standard chat where you’re just using it for a random question and stuff. The cost continues to collapse. V3 is the latest one.
The chat application clearly does not have tons of room to continue. The standard chat where you’re just using it for a random question and stuff. The cost continues to collapse. V3 is the latest one.
Nathan Lambert
It’ll go down with the ads.
It’ll go down with the ads.
Dylan Patel
But it’s going to get supported by ads. Meta already serves 405B and probably loses the money, but at some point the models are going to get so cheap that they can just serve them for free with ad supported and that’s what Google is going to be able to do. And obviously they’ve got a bigger reach. Chat is not going to be the only use case. It’s like these reasoning, code, agents, computer use, all this stuff is where OpenAI has to actually go to make money in the future otherwise they’re kaputs.
But it’s going to get supported by ads. Meta already serves 405B and probably loses the money, but at some point the models are going to get so cheap that they can just serve them for free with ad supported and that’s what Google is going to be able to do. And obviously they’ve got a bigger reach. Chat is not going to be the only use case. It’s like these reasoning, code, agents, computer use, all this stuff is where OpenAI has to actually go to make money in the future otherwise they’re kaputs.
Lex Fridman
But X, Google, and Meta have these other products. So isn’t it likely that OpenAI and Anthropic disappear eventually?
But X, Google, and Meta have these other products. So isn’t it likely that OpenAI and Anthropic disappear eventually?
Dylan Patel
Unless they’re so good at models, which they are.
Unless they’re so good at models, which they are.
Lex Fridman
But it’s such a cutting edge. I mean-
But it’s such a cutting edge. I mean-
Nathan Lambert
It depends on where you think AI capabilities are going.
It depends on where you think AI capabilities are going.
Lex Fridman
You have to keep winning.
You have to keep winning.
Dylan Patel
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
You have to keep winning as you climb, even if the AI capabilities are going super rapidly awesome into the direction of AGI, there’s still a boost for X in terms of data, Google in terms of data, Meta in terms of data, in terms of other products and the money and there’s just huge amounts of money.
You have to keep winning as you climb, even if the AI capabilities are going super rapidly awesome into the direction of AGI, there’s still a boost for X in terms of data, Google in terms of data, Meta in terms of data, in terms of other products and the money and there’s just huge amounts of money.
Dylan Patel
The whole idea is human data is kind of tapped out. We don’t care. We all care about self-play, verifiable task.
The whole idea is human data is kind of tapped out. We don’t care. We all care about self-play, verifiable task.
Nathan Lambert
Think about AWS.
Think about AWS.
Lex Fridman
Yes, self-play, which is an RNG problem.
Yes, self-play, which is an RNG problem.
Nathan Lambert
AWS does not make a lot of money on each individual machine. And the same can be said for the most powerful AI platform, which is even though the calls to the API are so cheap, there’s still a lot of money to be made by owning that platform. And there’s a lot of discussions as it’s the next compute layer.
AWS does not make a lot of money on each individual machine. And the same can be said for the most powerful AI platform, which is even though the calls to the API are so cheap, there’s still a lot of money to be made by owning that platform. And there’s a lot of discussions as it’s the next compute layer.
Dylan Patel
You have to believe that. And there’s a lot of discussions that tokens and tokenomics and LLM, APIs are the next compute layer, are the next paradigm for the economy like energy and oil was. But you have to sort of believe that APIs and chat are not where AI is stuck. It is actually just tasks and agents and robotics and computer use, and those are the areas where all the value will be delivered, not API, not chat application.
You have to believe that. And there’s a lot of discussions that tokens and tokenomics and LLM, APIs are the next compute layer, are the next paradigm for the economy like energy and oil was. But you have to sort of believe that APIs and chat are not where AI is stuck. It is actually just tasks and agents and robotics and computer use, and those are the areas where all the value will be delivered, not API, not chat application.
Lex Fridman
So is it possible you have it all just becomes a commodity and you have the very thin wrapper like Perplexity, just joking.
So is it possible you have it all just becomes a commodity and you have the very thin wrapper like Perplexity, just joking.
Nathan Lambert
There are a lot of wrappers making a lot of money.
There are a lot of wrappers making a lot of money.
Lex Fridman
But do you think it’s possible that people would just even forget what OpenAI and Anthropic is just there’ll be wrappers around the API and it just dynamically-
But do you think it’s possible that people would just even forget what OpenAI and Anthropic is just there’ll be wrappers around the API and it just dynamically-
Dylan Patel
If model progress is not rapid, yeah. It’s becoming a commodity, right? DeepSeek V3 shows this, but also the GPT-3 chart earlier, Kurt [inaudible 04:19:14] showed this, right? Llama 3B is 1200X cheaper than GPT-3. Anyone whose business model was GPT-3 level capabilities is dead. Anyone whose business models GPT-4 level capabilities is dead.
If model progress is not rapid, yeah. It’s becoming a commodity, right? DeepSeek V3 shows this, but also the GPT-3 chart earlier, Kurt [inaudible 04:19:14] showed this, right? Llama 3B is 1200X cheaper than GPT-3. Anyone whose business model was GPT-3 level capabilities is dead. Anyone whose business models GPT-4 level capabilities is dead.
Nathan Lambert
It is a common saying that the best businesses being made now are ones that are predicated on models getting better.
It is a common saying that the best businesses being made now are ones that are predicated on models getting better.
Lex Fridman
Right. Which would be like wrappers, thing that is riding the wave of the models.
Right. Which would be like wrappers, thing that is riding the wave of the models.
Nathan Lambert
The short-term that company that could make the most money is the one that figures out what advertising targeting method works for language model generations. We have the Meta ads which are hyper-targeted in feed, not within specific pieces of content. And we have search ads that are used by Google and Amazon has been rising a lot on search. But within a return from ChatGPT, it is not clear how you get a high-quality placed ad within the output. And if you can do that with model costs coming down, you can just get super high revenue. That revenue is totally untapped and it’s not clear technically how it’s done.
The short-term that company that could make the most money is the one that figures out what advertising targeting method works for language model generations. We have the Meta ads which are hyper-targeted in feed, not within specific pieces of content. And we have search ads that are used by Google and Amazon has been rising a lot on search. But within a return from ChatGPT, it is not clear how you get a high-quality placed ad within the output. And if you can do that with model costs coming down, you can just get super high revenue. That revenue is totally untapped and it’s not clear technically how it’s done.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that is, I mean sort of the AdSense innovation that Google did, the one day you’ll have in GPT output an ad and that’s going to make billions, if not-
Yeah, that is, I mean sort of the AdSense innovation that Google did, the one day you’ll have in GPT output an ad and that’s going to make billions, if not-
Nathan Lambert
And it could be very subtle, it could be in conversation, we have voice mode now. It could be some way of making it so the voice introduces certain things. It’s much harder to measure and it takes imagination, but yeah.
And it could be very subtle, it could be in conversation, we have voice mode now. It could be some way of making it so the voice introduces certain things. It’s much harder to measure and it takes imagination, but yeah.
Lex Fridman
And it wouldn’t come off shady so that you would receive public blowback, that kind of thing. So you have to do it loud enough to where it’s clear it’s an ad and balance all of that. So that’s the open question they’re trying to solve. Anthropic and OpenAI, they need to-
And it wouldn’t come off shady so that you would receive public blowback, that kind of thing. So you have to do it loud enough to where it’s clear it’s an ad and balance all of that. So that’s the open question they’re trying to solve. Anthropic and OpenAI, they need to-
Nathan Lambert
They might not say that they’re trying-
They might not say that they’re trying-
Dylan Patel
I don’t think they care about that at all.
I don’t think they care about that at all.
Nathan Lambert
They don’t care about it right now. I think it’s places like Perplexity are experimenting on that more.
They don’t care about it right now. I think it’s places like Perplexity are experimenting on that more.
Lex Fridman
Oh, interesting. Yeah, for sure.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, for sure.
Dylan Patel
Perplexity, Google, Meta care about this. I think OpenAI and Anthropic are purely laser focused on-
Perplexity, Google, Meta care about this. I think OpenAI and Anthropic are purely laser focused on-
Lex Fridman
AGI.
AGI.
Dylan Patel
Yeah. Like agents and AGI, and if I build AGI, I can make tons of money or I can pay for everything. And it’s just predicated back on the export control thing. If you think AGI is five, 10 years away or less, these labs think it’s two, three years away. Obviously your actions are, if you assume they’re rational actors, which they are mostly what you do in a two-year AGI versus five year versus 10 years, very, very, very different. Right?
Yeah. Like agents and AGI, and if I build AGI, I can make tons of money or I can pay for everything. And it’s just predicated back on the export control thing. If you think AGI is five, 10 years away or less, these labs think it’s two, three years away. Obviously your actions are, if you assume they’re rational actors, which they are mostly what you do in a two-year AGI versus five year versus 10 years, very, very, very different. Right?
AI agents
Lex Fridman
Do you think agents are promising? We have to talk about this. This is the excitement of the year that agents are going to rev.. This is the generic hype term that a lot of business folks are using. AI agents are going to revolutionize everything.
Do you think agents are promising? We have to talk about this. This is the excitement of the year that agents are going to rev.. This is the generic hype term that a lot of business folks are using. AI agents are going to revolutionize everything.
Nathan Lambert
Okay. So mostly the term agent is obviously overblown. We’ve talked a lot about reinforcement learning as a way to train for verifiable outcomes. Agents should mean something that is open-ended and is solving a task independently on its own and able to adapt to uncertainty. There’s a lot of the term agent applied to things like Apple Intelligence, which we still don’t have after the last WWDC, which is orchestrating between apps and that type of tool use thing is something that language models can do really well. Apple Intelligence I suspect will come eventually. It’s a closed domain. It’s your messages app integrating with your photos with AI in the background. That will work. That has been described as an agent by a lot of software companies to get into the narrative.
Okay. So mostly the term agent is obviously overblown. We’ve talked a lot about reinforcement learning as a way to train for verifiable outcomes. Agents should mean something that is open-ended and is solving a task independently on its own and able to adapt to uncertainty. There’s a lot of the term agent applied to things like Apple Intelligence, which we still don’t have after the last WWDC, which is orchestrating between apps and that type of tool use thing is something that language models can do really well. Apple Intelligence I suspect will come eventually. It’s a closed domain. It’s your messages app integrating with your photos with AI in the background. That will work. That has been described as an agent by a lot of software companies to get into the narrative.
The question is what ways can we get language models to generalize to new domains and solve their own problems in real time. Maybe some tiny amount of training when they’re doing this with fine-tuning themselves or in context learning, which is the idea of storing information in a prompt. And you can use learning algorithms to update that and whether or not you believe that that is going to actually generalize to things like me saying, “Book my trip to go to Austin in two days. I have XYZ constraints,” and actually trusting it. I think there’s an HCI problem coming back for information.
Lex Fridman
Well, what’s your prediction there? Because my gut says we’re very far away from that.
Well, what’s your prediction there? Because my gut says we’re very far away from that.
Dylan Patel
I think OpenAI’s statement, I don’t know if you’ve seen the five levels where it’s chat is level one, reasoning is level two, and then agents is level three. And I think there’s a couple more levels, but it’s important to note, we were in chat for a couple years. We just theoretically got to reasoning, we’ll be here for a year or two, and then agents, but at the same time, people can try and approximate capabilities of the next level, but the agents are doing things autonomously, doing things for minutes at a time, hours at a time, et cetera, right? Reasoning is doing things for tens of seconds at a time and then coming back with an output that I still need to verify and use and try check out. And the biggest problem is of course, it’s the same thing with manufacturing. There’s the whole six sigma thing, how many nines do you get?
I think OpenAI’s statement, I don’t know if you’ve seen the five levels where it’s chat is level one, reasoning is level two, and then agents is level three. And I think there’s a couple more levels, but it’s important to note, we were in chat for a couple years. We just theoretically got to reasoning, we’ll be here for a year or two, and then agents, but at the same time, people can try and approximate capabilities of the next level, but the agents are doing things autonomously, doing things for minutes at a time, hours at a time, et cetera, right? Reasoning is doing things for tens of seconds at a time and then coming back with an output that I still need to verify and use and try check out. And the biggest problem is of course, it’s the same thing with manufacturing. There’s the whole six sigma thing, how many nines do you get?
And then you compound the nines onto each other and it’s like if you multiply by the number of steps that are six sigma, you get to a yield or something. So in semiconductor manufacturing, tens of thousands of steps, 9999999 is not enough. You multiply by that many times you actually end up with 60% yield, right? Really low yield or zero. And this is the same thing with agents, right? Chaining tasks together each time, even the best LLMs in particularly pretty good benchmarks don’t get 100%, right? They get a little bit below that because there is a lot of noise. And so how do you get to enough nines, right? This is the same thing with self-driving. We can’t have self-driving because without it being super geofenced like Google’s and even then they have a bunch of teleoperators to make sure it doesn’t get stuck. But you can’t do that because it doesn’t have enough nines.
Lex Fridman
Self-driving has quite a lot of structure because roads have rules, it’s well-defined, there’s regulation. When you’re talking about computer use for the open web, for example, or the open operating system, it’s a mess. So the possibility… I’m always skeptical of any system that is tasked with interacting with the human world, with the open messaging world.
Self-driving has quite a lot of structure because roads have rules, it’s well-defined, there’s regulation. When you’re talking about computer use for the open web, for example, or the open operating system, it’s a mess. So the possibility… I’m always skeptical of any system that is tasked with interacting with the human world, with the open messaging world.
Nathan Lambert
That’s the thing. If we can’t get intelligence that’s enough to solve the human world on its own, we can create infrastructure like the human operators for Waymo over many years that enable certain workflows.
That’s the thing. If we can’t get intelligence that’s enough to solve the human world on its own, we can create infrastructure like the human operators for Waymo over many years that enable certain workflows.
Dylan Patel
There is a company, I don’t remember it, but it is, but that’s literally their pitch is, “Yeah, we’re just going to be the human operator when agents fail and you just call us and we fix it.” Same thing an API call, and it’s hilarious.
There is a company, I don’t remember it, but it is, but that’s literally their pitch is, “Yeah, we’re just going to be the human operator when agents fail and you just call us and we fix it.” Same thing an API call, and it’s hilarious.
Nathan Lambert
There’s going to be teleoperation markets when we get human robots, which is there’s going to be somebody around the world that’s happy to fix the fact that it can’t finish loading my dishwasher when I’m unhappy with it. But that’s just going to be part of the Tesla service package.
There’s going to be teleoperation markets when we get human robots, which is there’s going to be somebody around the world that’s happy to fix the fact that it can’t finish loading my dishwasher when I’m unhappy with it. But that’s just going to be part of the Tesla service package.
Lex Fridman
I’m just imagining an AI agent talking to another AI agent. One company has an AI agent that specializes in helping other AI agents.
I’m just imagining an AI agent talking to another AI agent. One company has an AI agent that specializes in helping other AI agents.
Nathan Lambert
But if you can make things that are good at one step, you can stack them together. So that’s why if it takes a long time, we’re going to build infrastructure that enables it. You see the operator launch, they have partnerships with certain websites, with DoorDash, with OpenTable, with things like this. Those partnerships are going to let them climb really fast. Their model’s going to get really good at those things. It’s going to proof of concept that might be a network effect where more companies want to make it easier for AI. Some companies will be like, “No, let’s put blockers in place.” And this is the story of the internet we’ve seen, we see it now with training data for language models where companies are like, “No, you have to pay.” Business working it out.
But if you can make things that are good at one step, you can stack them together. So that’s why if it takes a long time, we’re going to build infrastructure that enables it. You see the operator launch, they have partnerships with certain websites, with DoorDash, with OpenTable, with things like this. Those partnerships are going to let them climb really fast. Their model’s going to get really good at those things. It’s going to proof of concept that might be a network effect where more companies want to make it easier for AI. Some companies will be like, “No, let’s put blockers in place.” And this is the story of the internet we’ve seen, we see it now with training data for language models where companies are like, “No, you have to pay.” Business working it out.
Lex Fridman
That said, I think airlines and hotels have high incentive to make their site work really well, and they usually don’t. If you look at how many clicks it takes to order airplane ticket, it’s insane.
That said, I think airlines and hotels have high incentive to make their site work really well, and they usually don’t. If you look at how many clicks it takes to order airplane ticket, it’s insane.
Nathan Lambert
You actually can’t call an American Airlines agent anymore. They don’t have a phone number.
You actually can’t call an American Airlines agent anymore. They don’t have a phone number.
Lex Fridman
I mean, it’s horrible on the interface front. And to imagine that agents will be able to deal with that website when I, as a human, struggle, like I have an existential crisis every time I try to book an airplane ticket. I think it’s going to be extremely difficult to build an AI agent that’s robust in that way.
I mean, it’s horrible on the interface front. And to imagine that agents will be able to deal with that website when I, as a human, struggle, like I have an existential crisis every time I try to book an airplane ticket. I think it’s going to be extremely difficult to build an AI agent that’s robust in that way.
Nathan Lambert
But think about it, United has accepted the Starlink term, which is they have to provide Starlink for free and the users are going to love it. What if one airline is like, “We’re going to take a year and we’re going to make our website have white text that works perfectly for the AIs.” Every time anyone asks about an AI flight, they buy whatever airline it is.
But think about it, United has accepted the Starlink term, which is they have to provide Starlink for free and the users are going to love it. What if one airline is like, “We’re going to take a year and we’re going to make our website have white text that works perfectly for the AIs.” Every time anyone asks about an AI flight, they buy whatever airline it is.
Dylan Patel
They’re just like, “Here’s an API and it’s only exposed to AI agents and if anyone queries it, the price is 10% higher for any flight, but we’ll let you see any of our flights and you can just book any of them. Here you go.”
They’re just like, “Here’s an API and it’s only exposed to AI agents and if anyone queries it, the price is 10% higher for any flight, but we’ll let you see any of our flights and you can just book any of them. Here you go.”
Nathan Lambert
And then that’s it.
And then that’s it.
Dylan Patel
It’s like, “Oh, and I made 10% higher price. Awesome.” And am I willing to say that for like, “Hey, book me a flight to [inaudible 04:28:18].” Right? And it’s like, yeah, whatever. I think computers and real world and the open world are really, really messy, but if you start defining the problem in narrow regions, people are going to be able to create very, very productive things and ratchet down cost massively, right? Now, crazy things like robotics in the home, those are going to be a lot harder to do just like self-driving because there’s just a billion different failure modes, but agents that can navigate a certain set of websites and do certain sets of tasks or take a photo of your fridge or upload your recipes and then it figures out what to order from Amazon/Whole Foods food delivery, and that’s going to be pretty quick and easy to do, I think. So it’s going to be a whole range of business outcomes and it’s going to be tons of optimism around people can just figure out ways to make money.
It’s like, “Oh, and I made 10% higher price. Awesome.” And am I willing to say that for like, “Hey, book me a flight to [inaudible 04:28:18].” Right? And it’s like, yeah, whatever. I think computers and real world and the open world are really, really messy, but if you start defining the problem in narrow regions, people are going to be able to create very, very productive things and ratchet down cost massively, right? Now, crazy things like robotics in the home, those are going to be a lot harder to do just like self-driving because there’s just a billion different failure modes, but agents that can navigate a certain set of websites and do certain sets of tasks or take a photo of your fridge or upload your recipes and then it figures out what to order from Amazon/Whole Foods food delivery, and that’s going to be pretty quick and easy to do, I think. So it’s going to be a whole range of business outcomes and it’s going to be tons of optimism around people can just figure out ways to make money.
Nathan Lambert
To be clear, these sandboxes already exist in research. There are people who have built clones of all the most popular websites of Google, Amazon, blah, blah, blah, to make it so that there’s… And I mean open AI probably has them internally to train these things. It’s the same as DeepMind’s robotics team for years has had clusters for robotics where you interact with robots fully, remotely. They just have a lab in London and you send tasks to it, arrange the blocks, and you do this research. Obviously there’s techs there that fix stuff, but we’ve turned these cranks of automation before.
To be clear, these sandboxes already exist in research. There are people who have built clones of all the most popular websites of Google, Amazon, blah, blah, blah, to make it so that there’s… And I mean open AI probably has them internally to train these things. It’s the same as DeepMind’s robotics team for years has had clusters for robotics where you interact with robots fully, remotely. They just have a lab in London and you send tasks to it, arrange the blocks, and you do this research. Obviously there’s techs there that fix stuff, but we’ve turned these cranks of automation before.
You go from sandbox to progress and then you add one more domain at a time and generalize, I think. And the history of NLP and language processing instruction, tuning and tasks per language model used to be like one language model did one task, and then in the instruction tuning literature, there’s this point where you start adding more and more tasks together where it just starts to generalize to every task. And we don’t know where on this curve we are. I think for reasoning with this RL and verifiable domains, we’re early, but we don’t know where the point is where you just start training on enough domains and poof, more domains just start working. And you’ve crossed the generalization barrier.
Programming and AI
Lex Fridman
Well, what do you think about the programming context? So software engineering, that’s where I personally, and I know a lot of people interact with AI the most.
Well, what do you think about the programming context? So software engineering, that’s where I personally, and I know a lot of people interact with AI the most.
Dylan Patel
There’s a lot of fear and angst too from current CS students, but that is the area where probably the most AI revenue and productivity gains have come, right? Whether it be Copilots or Cursor or what have you, or just standard ChatGPT. I know very few programmers who don’t have ChatGPT and actually many of them have the $200 tier because that’s what it’s so good for. I think that in that world, we already see it like SWE-bench. And if you’ve looked at the benchmark made by some Stanford students, I wouldn’t say it’s really hard, but I wouldn’t say it’s easy either. I think it takes someone who’s been through at least a few years of CS or a couple years of programming to do SWE-bench, well, and the models went from 4% to 60% in a year, and where are they going to go to next year? It’s going to be higher. It probably won’t be a hundred percent because again, that nines is really hard to do, but we’re going to get to some point where that’s, and then we’re going to need harder software engineering benchmarks and so on and so forth.
There’s a lot of fear and angst too from current CS students, but that is the area where probably the most AI revenue and productivity gains have come, right? Whether it be Copilots or Cursor or what have you, or just standard ChatGPT. I know very few programmers who don’t have ChatGPT and actually many of them have the $200 tier because that’s what it’s so good for. I think that in that world, we already see it like SWE-bench. And if you’ve looked at the benchmark made by some Stanford students, I wouldn’t say it’s really hard, but I wouldn’t say it’s easy either. I think it takes someone who’s been through at least a few years of CS or a couple years of programming to do SWE-bench, well, and the models went from 4% to 60% in a year, and where are they going to go to next year? It’s going to be higher. It probably won’t be a hundred percent because again, that nines is really hard to do, but we’re going to get to some point where that’s, and then we’re going to need harder software engineering benchmarks and so on and so forth.
But the way that people think of it now is it can do code completion. Easy. It can do some function generation. I have to review it. Great. But really the software engineering agents I think can be done faster sooner than any other agent because it is a verifiable domain. You can always unit test or compile, and there’s many different regions of it can inspect the whole code base at once, which no engineer really can. Only the architects can really think about this stuff, the really senior guys, and they can define stuff and then the agent can execute on it. So I think software engineering costs are going to plummet like crazy. And one interesting aspect of that is when software engineering costs are really low, you get very different markets. So in the US, you have all these platform SaaS companies, Salesforce and so on and so forth. In China, no one uses platform SaaS. Everyone just builds their own stack because software engineering is much cheaper in China and partially because people, number of STEM graduates, et cetera. So it’s generally just cheaper to do.
And so at the same time, code LLMs have been adopted much less in China because the cost of an engineer there is much lower. But what happens when every company can just invent their own business logic really cheaply and quickly? You stop using platform SaaS, you start building custom tailored solutions, you change them really quickly. Now all of a sudden your business is a little bit more efficient too, potentially because you’re not dealing with the hell that is. Some random platform SaaS company stuff not working perfectly and having to adjust workflows or random business automation cases that aren’t necessarily AI required.
It’s just logic that needs to be built that no one has built. All of these things can go happen faster. And so I think software and then the other domain is industrial, chemical, mechanical engineers suck at coding just generally. And their tools like semiconductor engineers, their tools are 20 years old. All the tools run on XP including ASML lithography tools run on Windows XP. And a lot of the analysis happens in Excel, right? It’s just like, “Guys, you guys can move 20 years forward with all the data you have and gathered and do a lot better.” You need the engineering skills for software engineering to be delivered to the actual domain expert engineer. So I think that’s the area where I’m super-duper bullish of generally AI creating value.
Nathan Lambert
The big picture is that I don’t think it’s going to be a cliff. I think a really good example of how growth changes is when Meta added stories. So Snapchat was on an exponential, they added stories, it flatlined. Software engineers then up until the right, AI is going to come in, it’s probably just going to be flat. It’s not like everyone’s going to lose their job. It’s hard because the supply corrects more slowly. So the amount of students is still growing, and that’ll correct on a multi-year, like a year delay, but the amount of jobs will just turn and then maybe in 20, 40 years, it’ll be well down. But in the few years, there’ll never going to be the snap moment where it’s like software engineers aren’t useful.
The big picture is that I don’t think it’s going to be a cliff. I think a really good example of how growth changes is when Meta added stories. So Snapchat was on an exponential, they added stories, it flatlined. Software engineers then up until the right, AI is going to come in, it’s probably just going to be flat. It’s not like everyone’s going to lose their job. It’s hard because the supply corrects more slowly. So the amount of students is still growing, and that’ll correct on a multi-year, like a year delay, but the amount of jobs will just turn and then maybe in 20, 40 years, it’ll be well down. But in the few years, there’ll never going to be the snap moment where it’s like software engineers aren’t useful.
Lex Fridman
I think also the nature of what it means to be a programmer and what kind of jobs programmers do changes, because I think there needs to be a human in the loop of everything you’ve talked about. There’s a really important human in that picture of correcting the code, fixing-
I think also the nature of what it means to be a programmer and what kind of jobs programmers do changes, because I think there needs to be a human in the loop of everything you’ve talked about. There’s a really important human in that picture of correcting the code, fixing-
Dylan Patel
Thinking larger than the context length.
Thinking larger than the context length.
Lex Fridman
And debugging also, like debugging by reading the code, understanding the steering the system. No, no, no. You missed the point. Adding more to the prompt like, yes, adding the human-
And debugging also, like debugging by reading the code, understanding the steering the system. No, no, no. You missed the point. Adding more to the prompt like, yes, adding the human-
Nathan Lambert
Designing the perfect Google button. Google’s famous for having people design buttons that are so perfect, and it’s like how is AI going to do that? They could give you all the ideas. Perfect, fine.
Designing the perfect Google button. Google’s famous for having people design buttons that are so perfect, and it’s like how is AI going to do that? They could give you all the ideas. Perfect, fine.
Lex Fridman
I mean, that’s the thing. You can call it taste. One thing humans can do is figure out what other humans enjoy better than AI systems. That’s where the preference you loading that in. But ultimately, humans are the greatest preference generator. That’s where the preference comes from.
I mean, that’s the thing. You can call it taste. One thing humans can do is figure out what other humans enjoy better than AI systems. That’s where the preference you loading that in. But ultimately, humans are the greatest preference generator. That’s where the preference comes from.
Nathan Lambert
And humans are actually very good at reading or judging between two things versus… This goes back to the core of what RLHF and preference tuning is that it’s hard to generate a good answer for a lot of problems, but it’s easy to see which one is better. And that’s how we’re using humans for AI now is judging which one is better, and that’s what software engineering could look like. The PR review, here’s a few options, here are some potential pros and cons, and they’re going to be judges.
And humans are actually very good at reading or judging between two things versus… This goes back to the core of what RLHF and preference tuning is that it’s hard to generate a good answer for a lot of problems, but it’s easy to see which one is better. And that’s how we’re using humans for AI now is judging which one is better, and that’s what software engineering could look like. The PR review, here’s a few options, here are some potential pros and cons, and they’re going to be judges.
Lex Fridman
I think the thing I would very much recommend is programmers start using AI and embracing that role of the supervisor of the AI system and partner the AI system versus writing from scratch or not learning coding at all and just generating stuff because I think there actually has to be a pretty high level of expertise as a programmer to be able to manage increasingly intelligent systems.
I think the thing I would very much recommend is programmers start using AI and embracing that role of the supervisor of the AI system and partner the AI system versus writing from scratch or not learning coding at all and just generating stuff because I think there actually has to be a pretty high level of expertise as a programmer to be able to manage increasingly intelligent systems.
Dylan Patel
I think it’s that and then becoming a domain expert in something.
I think it’s that and then becoming a domain expert in something.
Lex Fridman
Sure. Yeah.
Sure. Yeah.
Dylan Patel
Because seriously, if you go look at aerospace or semiconductors or chemical engineering, everyone is using really crappy platforms, really old software. The job of a data scientist is a joke in many cases. In many cases, it’s very real, but it’s like bring what the forefront of human capabilities are to your domain. And even if the forefront is from the AI, your domain, you’re at the forefront. So it’s like you have to be at the forefront of something and then leverage the rising tide that is AI for everything else.
Because seriously, if you go look at aerospace or semiconductors or chemical engineering, everyone is using really crappy platforms, really old software. The job of a data scientist is a joke in many cases. In many cases, it’s very real, but it’s like bring what the forefront of human capabilities are to your domain. And even if the forefront is from the AI, your domain, you’re at the forefront. So it’s like you have to be at the forefront of something and then leverage the rising tide that is AI for everything else.
Lex Fridman
Oh, yeah. There’s so many low hanging fruit everywhere in terms of where software can help automate a thing or digitize a thing in the legal system. That’s why DOGE is exciting. I got to hang out with a bunch of the DOGE folks, and I mean, government is so old school. It’s like begging for the modernization of software, of organizing the data, all this kind of stuff. I mean, in that case it’s by design because bureaucracy protects centers of power and so on. But software breaks down those barriers, so it hurts those that are holding onto power, but ultimately benefits humanity. So there’s a bunch of domains of that kind. One thing we didn’t fully finish talking about is open source. So first of all, congrats. You released a new model.
Oh, yeah. There’s so many low hanging fruit everywhere in terms of where software can help automate a thing or digitize a thing in the legal system. That’s why DOGE is exciting. I got to hang out with a bunch of the DOGE folks, and I mean, government is so old school. It’s like begging for the modernization of software, of organizing the data, all this kind of stuff. I mean, in that case it’s by design because bureaucracy protects centers of power and so on. But software breaks down those barriers, so it hurts those that are holding onto power, but ultimately benefits humanity. So there’s a bunch of domains of that kind. One thing we didn’t fully finish talking about is open source. So first of all, congrats. You released a new model.
Open source
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, this is-
Yeah, this is-
Lex Fridman
Tülu.
Tülu.
Nathan Lambert
I’ll explain what a tülu is. A tülu is a hybrid camel when you breed a dromedary with a Bactrian camel. Back in the early days after ChatGPT, there was a big wave of models coming out like Alpaca, Vicuna, et cetera, that were all named after various mammalian species. Tülu, the brand, is multiple years old, which comes from that.
I’ll explain what a tülu is. A tülu is a hybrid camel when you breed a dromedary with a Bactrian camel. Back in the early days after ChatGPT, there was a big wave of models coming out like Alpaca, Vicuna, et cetera, that were all named after various mammalian species. Tülu, the brand, is multiple years old, which comes from that.
And we’ve been playing at the frontiers of post-training with open source code. And this first part of this release was in the fall where we’ve built on Llama’s, open models, open weight models, and then we add in our fully open code or fully open data. There’s a popular benchmark that is Chatbot Arena. And that’s generally the metric by which how these chat models are evaluated. And it’s humans compare random models from different organizations. And if you looked at the leaderboard in November or December, among the top 60 models from tens to twenties of organizations, none of them had open code or data for just post-training.
Among that, even fewer or none have pre-training data and code available. Post-training is much more accessible at this time. It’s still pretty cheap, and you can do it. And the thing is, how high can we push this number where people have access to all the code and data? So that’s kind of the motivation of the project. We draw in lessons from Llama. Nvidia had a Nemotron model where the recipe for their post-training was fairly open with some data and a paper, and it’s putting all these together to try to create a recipe that people can fine tune models like GPT-4 to their domain.
Lex Fridman
To be clear, in the case of Tülu, maybe you can talk about Llama too, but in the case of Tülu, you’re taking Llama 3, 405B.
To be clear, in the case of Tülu, maybe you can talk about Llama too, but in the case of Tülu, you’re taking Llama 3, 405B.
Nathan Lambert
Tülu has been a series of recipes for post-training. So we’ve done multiple models over years.
Tülu has been a series of recipes for post-training. So we’ve done multiple models over years.
Lex Fridman
And so you’re open sourcing everything.
And so you’re open sourcing everything.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. If you start with an open weight based model, their whole model technically isn’t open source because you don’t know what Llama put into it, which is why we have the separate thing that we’ll get to, but it’s just getting parts of the pipeline where people can zoom in and customize. I know I hear from startups and businesses, they’re like, “Okay, I can take this post-training-“
Yeah. If you start with an open weight based model, their whole model technically isn’t open source because you don’t know what Llama put into it, which is why we have the separate thing that we’ll get to, but it’s just getting parts of the pipeline where people can zoom in and customize. I know I hear from startups and businesses, they’re like, “Okay, I can take this post-training-“
Nathan Lambert
… I know I hear from startups and businesses, they’re like, “Okay, I can take this post-training and try to apply it to my domain.” We talk about verifiers a lot. We use this idea which is reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards RLVR, kind of similar to RLHF. And we applied it to MAP and the model today, which is we applied it to the Llama 405B base model from last year. And we have our other stuff. We have our instruction tuning and our preference tuning. But the math thing is interesting, which is it’s easier to improve this math benchmark. There’s a benchmark, M-A-T-H, MATH, all capitals, tough name on the benchmark name is the area that you’re evaluating. We’re researchers, we’re not brand strategists.
… I know I hear from startups and businesses, they’re like, “Okay, I can take this post-training and try to apply it to my domain.” We talk about verifiers a lot. We use this idea which is reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards RLVR, kind of similar to RLHF. And we applied it to MAP and the model today, which is we applied it to the Llama 405B base model from last year. And we have our other stuff. We have our instruction tuning and our preference tuning. But the math thing is interesting, which is it’s easier to improve this math benchmark. There’s a benchmark, M-A-T-H, MATH, all capitals, tough name on the benchmark name is the area that you’re evaluating. We’re researchers, we’re not brand strategists.
And this is something that the DeepSeek paper talked about as well is at this bigger model, it’s easier to elicit powerful capabilities with this RL training. And then they distill it down from that big model to the small model. And this model we released today, we saw the same thing. We’re at AI2, we don’t have a ton of compute. We can’t train 405B models all the time. So we just did a few runs and they tend to work. And it just shows that there’s a lot of room for people to play in these things and that’s –
Dylan Patel
And they crushed Llama’s actual release, they’re way better than it.
And they crushed Llama’s actual release, they’re way better than it.
Nathan Lambert
… Yeah. So our eval numbers, I mean we have extra months in this, but our eval numbers are much better than the Llama instruct model that they released.
… Yeah. So our eval numbers, I mean we have extra months in this, but our eval numbers are much better than the Llama instruct model that they released.
Lex Fridman
And then you also said better than DeepSeek V3?
And then you also said better than DeepSeek V3?
Nathan Lambert
Yeah, on our eval benchmark. DeepSeek V3 is really similar. We have a safety benchmark to understand if it will say harmful things and things like that. And that’s what draws down most of the way. It’s still-
Yeah, on our eval benchmark. DeepSeek V3 is really similar. We have a safety benchmark to understand if it will say harmful things and things like that. And that’s what draws down most of the way. It’s still-
Dylan Patel
It’s like an amalgamation of multiple benchmarks or what do you mean?
It’s like an amalgamation of multiple benchmarks or what do you mean?
Nathan Lambert
… Yeah, so we have a 10 evaluator. This is standard practice in post-training is you choose your evaluations you care about. In academics, in smaller labs you’ll have fewer evaluations. In companies, you’ll have a really one domain that you really care about. In Frontier Labs, you’ll have tens to 20s to maybe even 100 evaluations of specific things. So we choose a representative suite of things that look like chat, precise instruction following, which is like respond only in emojis, just model follow weird things like that, math, code. And you create a suite like this. So safety would be one of 10 in that type of suite where you have what does the broader community of AI care about? And for example, in comparison to DeepSeek it would be something like our average eval for our model would be 80, including safety and similar without. And DeepSeek would be like 79% average score without safety and their safety score would bring it down to like 70 or there abouts.
… Yeah, so we have a 10 evaluator. This is standard practice in post-training is you choose your evaluations you care about. In academics, in smaller labs you’ll have fewer evaluations. In companies, you’ll have a really one domain that you really care about. In Frontier Labs, you’ll have tens to 20s to maybe even 100 evaluations of specific things. So we choose a representative suite of things that look like chat, precise instruction following, which is like respond only in emojis, just model follow weird things like that, math, code. And you create a suite like this. So safety would be one of 10 in that type of suite where you have what does the broader community of AI care about? And for example, in comparison to DeepSeek it would be something like our average eval for our model would be 80, including safety and similar without. And DeepSeek would be like 79% average score without safety and their safety score would bring it down to like 70 or there abouts.
Dylan Patel
Oh, so you’d beat them even ignoring safety.
Oh, so you’d beat them even ignoring safety.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah. So this is something that internally, it’s like I don’t want to win only by how you shape the eval benchmark. So if there’s something that’s like people may or may not care about safety in their model, safety can come downstream, safety can be when you host the model for an API, like safety is addressed in a spectrum of locations in AI applications. So it’s like if you want to say that you have the best recipe, you can’t just gate it on these things that some people might not want.
Yeah. So this is something that internally, it’s like I don’t want to win only by how you shape the eval benchmark. So if there’s something that’s like people may or may not care about safety in their model, safety can come downstream, safety can be when you host the model for an API, like safety is addressed in a spectrum of locations in AI applications. So it’s like if you want to say that you have the best recipe, you can’t just gate it on these things that some people might not want.
And this is, it’s like the time of progress and we benefit if we can release a model later, we have more time to learn new techniques like this RL technique, we had started this in the fall, it’s now really popular reasoning models. The next thing to do for open source post-training is to scale up verifiers, to scale up data to replicate some of DeepSeek’s results. And it’s awesome that we have a paper to draw on and it makes it a lot easier. And that’s the type of things that is going on among academic and closed frontier research in AI.
Lex Fridman
Since you’re pushing open source, what do you think is the future of it? Do you think DeepSeek actually changes things since it’s open source or open weight or is pushing the open source movement into the open direction?
Since you’re pushing open source, what do you think is the future of it? Do you think DeepSeek actually changes things since it’s open source or open weight or is pushing the open source movement into the open direction?
Nathan Lambert
This goes very back to license discussion. So DeepSeek R1 with a friendly license is a major reset. So it’s like the first time that we’ve had a really clear frontier model that is open weights and with a commercially friendly license with no restrictions on downstream use cases since that data distillation, whatever.This has never been the case at all in the history of AI in the last few years since ChatGPT. There have been models that are off the frontier or models with weird licenses that you can’t really use them.
This goes very back to license discussion. So DeepSeek R1 with a friendly license is a major reset. So it’s like the first time that we’ve had a really clear frontier model that is open weights and with a commercially friendly license with no restrictions on downstream use cases since that data distillation, whatever.This has never been the case at all in the history of AI in the last few years since ChatGPT. There have been models that are off the frontier or models with weird licenses that you can’t really use them.
Dylan Patel
So is it Meta’s license pretty much permissible except for five companies?
So is it Meta’s license pretty much permissible except for five companies?
Nathan Lambert
So this goes to what open source AI is, which is there’s also use case restrictions in the Llama license, which says you can’t use it for specific things. So if you come from an open source software background, you would say that that is not an open source license.
So this goes to what open source AI is, which is there’s also use case restrictions in the Llama license, which says you can’t use it for specific things. So if you come from an open source software background, you would say that that is not an open source license.
Dylan Patel
What kind of things are those, though? Are they like-
What kind of things are those, though? Are they like-
Nathan Lambert
At this point, I can’t pull them off the top of my head, but it’d be like-
At this point, I can’t pull them off the top of my head, but it’d be like-
Lex Fridman
Stuff like competitors?
Stuff like competitors?
Nathan Lambert
It used to be military use was one and they removed that for scale, it’ll be like CSAM like child abuse material. That’s the type of thing that is forbidden there. But that’s enough from an open source background to say it’s not an open source license.And also the Llama license has this horrible thing where you have to name your model Llama if you touch it to the Llama model. So it’s like the branding thing. So if a company uses Llama, technically the license says that they should say built with Llama at the bottom of their application. And from a marketing perspective, that just hurts. I could suck it up as a researcher, I’m like, oh, it’s fine. It says Llama dash on all of our materials for this release. But this is why we need truly open models, which is we don’t know DeepSeek R1’s data, but-
It used to be military use was one and they removed that for scale, it’ll be like CSAM like child abuse material. That’s the type of thing that is forbidden there. But that’s enough from an open source background to say it’s not an open source license.And also the Llama license has this horrible thing where you have to name your model Llama if you touch it to the Llama model. So it’s like the branding thing. So if a company uses Llama, technically the license says that they should say built with Llama at the bottom of their application. And from a marketing perspective, that just hurts. I could suck it up as a researcher, I’m like, oh, it’s fine. It says Llama dash on all of our materials for this release. But this is why we need truly open models, which is we don’t know DeepSeek R1’s data, but-
Dylan Patel
Wait, so you’re saying I can’t make a cheap copy of Llama and pretend it’s mine, but I can do this with the Chinese model?
Wait, so you’re saying I can’t make a cheap copy of Llama and pretend it’s mine, but I can do this with the Chinese model?
Nathan Lambert
… Hell, yeah. That’s what I’m saying. And that’s why it’s like we want this whole open language model thing, he Olmo thing is to try to keep the model where everything is open with the data as close to the frontier as possible. So we’re compute constrained, we’re personnel constrained. We rely on getting insights from people like John Schulman tells us to do URL and outputs. We can make these big jumps, but it just takes a long time to push the frontier of open source. And fundamentally, I would say that that’s because open source AI does not have the same feedback loops as open source software. We talked about open source software for security. Also it’s just because you build something once and can reuse it. If you go into a new company, there’s so many benefits, but if you open source a language model, you have this data sitting around, you have this training code, it’s not like that easy for someone to come and build on and improve because you need to spend a lot on compute, you need to have expertise.
… Hell, yeah. That’s what I’m saying. And that’s why it’s like we want this whole open language model thing, he Olmo thing is to try to keep the model where everything is open with the data as close to the frontier as possible. So we’re compute constrained, we’re personnel constrained. We rely on getting insights from people like John Schulman tells us to do URL and outputs. We can make these big jumps, but it just takes a long time to push the frontier of open source. And fundamentally, I would say that that’s because open source AI does not have the same feedback loops as open source software. We talked about open source software for security. Also it’s just because you build something once and can reuse it. If you go into a new company, there’s so many benefits, but if you open source a language model, you have this data sitting around, you have this training code, it’s not like that easy for someone to come and build on and improve because you need to spend a lot on compute, you need to have expertise.
So until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data? And there’s not a lot about that. We’re going to try to launch a demo soon where you can look at an OMO model and a query and see what pre-training data is similar to it, which is legally risky and complicated, but it’s like what does it mean to see the data that the AI was trained on? It’s hard to parse. It’s terabytes of files. It’s like I don’t know what I’m going to find in there, but that’s what we need to do as an ecosystem if people want open source AI to be financially useful.
Stargate
Lex Fridman
We didn’t really talk about Stargate. I would love to get your opinion on what the new administration, the Trump administration, everything that’s being done from the America side and supporting AI infrastructure and the efforts of the different AI companies. What do you think about Stargate? What are we supposed to think about Stargate and does Sam have the money?
We didn’t really talk about Stargate. I would love to get your opinion on what the new administration, the Trump administration, everything that’s being done from the America side and supporting AI infrastructure and the efforts of the different AI companies. What do you think about Stargate? What are we supposed to think about Stargate and does Sam have the money?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, so I think Stargate is a opaque thing. It definitely doesn’t have $500 billion, doesn’t even have $100 billion dollars. So what they announced is this $500 billion number, Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Trump said it. They thanked Trump and Trump did do some executive actions that do significantly improve the ability for this to be built faster. One of the executive actions he did is on federal land, you can just basically build data centers in power pretty much like that. And then permitting process is basically gone or you file after the fact. So again, I had of schizo take earlier, another schizo take, if you’ve ever been to the Presidio in San Francisco, beautiful area, you could build a power plant in a data center there if you wanted to because it is federal land. It used to be a military base, but obviously this would people off. It’s a good fit. Anyways, Trump has made it much easier to do this, right? Generally, Texas has the only unregulated grid in the nation as well.
Yeah, so I think Stargate is a opaque thing. It definitely doesn’t have $500 billion, doesn’t even have $100 billion dollars. So what they announced is this $500 billion number, Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Trump said it. They thanked Trump and Trump did do some executive actions that do significantly improve the ability for this to be built faster. One of the executive actions he did is on federal land, you can just basically build data centers in power pretty much like that. And then permitting process is basically gone or you file after the fact. So again, I had of schizo take earlier, another schizo take, if you’ve ever been to the Presidio in San Francisco, beautiful area, you could build a power plant in a data center there if you wanted to because it is federal land. It used to be a military base, but obviously this would people off. It’s a good fit. Anyways, Trump has made it much easier to do this, right? Generally, Texas has the only unregulated grid in the nation as well.
Lex Fridman
Let’s go Texas.
Let’s go Texas.
Dylan Patel
And so therefore ERCOT enables people to build faster as well in addition, the federal regulations are coming down and so Stargate is predicated, and this is why that whole show happened. Now how they came up with a $500 billion number is beyond me. How they came up with $100 billion dollars number makes sense to some extent. And there’s actually a good table in here that I would like to show in that Stargate piece that I had. It’s the most recent one. So anyways, Stargate, it’s basically, it’s a table about cost. There, you passed it already. It’s that one. So this table is kind of explaining what happens. So Stargate is in Abilene, Texas, the first $100 billion of it. That site is 2.2 gigawatts of power in, about 1.8 gigawatts of power consumed. Per GPU, Oracle is already building the first part of this before Stargate came about. To be clear, they’ve been building it for a year.
And so therefore ERCOT enables people to build faster as well in addition, the federal regulations are coming down and so Stargate is predicated, and this is why that whole show happened. Now how they came up with a $500 billion number is beyond me. How they came up with $100 billion dollars number makes sense to some extent. And there’s actually a good table in here that I would like to show in that Stargate piece that I had. It’s the most recent one. So anyways, Stargate, it’s basically, it’s a table about cost. There, you passed it already. It’s that one. So this table is kind of explaining what happens. So Stargate is in Abilene, Texas, the first $100 billion of it. That site is 2.2 gigawatts of power in, about 1.8 gigawatts of power consumed. Per GPU, Oracle is already building the first part of this before Stargate came about. To be clear, they’ve been building it for a year.
They tried to rent it to Elon in fact, but Elon was like, “It’s too slow. I need it faster.” So then he went and did his Memphis thing, and so OpenAI was able to get it with this weird joint venture called Stargate. They initially signed a deal with just Oracle for the first section of this cluster. This first section of this cluster is roughly $5 billion to $6 billion of server spend, and then there’s another billion or so of data center spend. And then likewise, if you fill out that entire 1.8 gigawatts with the next two generations of NVIDIA’s chips, GB 200, GB 300, VR 200, and you fill it out completely, that ends up being roughly $50 billion of server cost. Plus there’s data center costs plus maintenance costs, plus operation costs plus all these things. And that’s where OpenAI gets to their $100 billion announcement that they had. Because they talked about $100 billion dollars is phase one. That’s this Abilene, Texas data center, right? $ 100 billion of “total cost of ownership.” So it’s not CapEx, it’s not investment, it’s a $100 billion of total cost of ownership.
And then there will be future phases. They’re looking at other sites that are even bigger than this 2.2 gigawatts by the way, in Texas and elsewhere. And so they’re not completely ignoring that, but the number of $100 billion that they save for phase one, which I do think will happen. They don’t even have the money for that. Furthermore, it’s not $100 billion dollars, it’s $50 billion of spend and then $50 billion of operational cost power, et cetera, rental pricing, et cetera, because they’re renting it. OpenAI is renting the GPUs from the Stargate joint venture. What money do they actually have, right? SoftBank is going to invest, Oracle is going to invest. OpenAI is going to invest. OpenAI is on the line for $19 billion. Everyone knows that they’ve only got 46 billion in their last round and $4 billion of debt. But there, there’s news of Softbank maybe investing $25 billion into OpenAI. So that’s part of it. So $19 billion can come from there.
So OpenAI does not have the money at all to be clear. Ink is not dried on anything. OpenAI has $0 for this, 50 billion in which they’re legally obligated to put 19 billion of CapEx into the joint venture, and then the rest they’re going to pay via renting the GPUs from the joint venture. And then there’s Oracle. Oracle has a lot of money. They’re building the first section completely. They were spending for it themselves, this $6 billion of CapEx, $10 billion of TCO, and they were going to do that first section. They’re paying for that, right? As far as the rest of the section, I don’t know how much Larry wants to spend. At any point he could pull out. This is again, it is completely voluntary. So at any point, there’s no signed ink on this, but he potentially could contribute tens of billions of dollars to be clear. He’s got the money, Oracle’s got the money.
And then there’s like MGX is the UAE fund, which technically has $1.5 trillion for investing in AI. But again, I don’t know how real that money is and there’s no ink signed for this, SoftBank does not have $25 billion of cash. They have to sell down their stake in arm, which is the leader in CPUs and they IPO’d it. This is obviously what they’ve always wanted to do, they just didn’t know where they’d redeploy the capital. Selling down the stake in ARM makes a ton of sense. So they can sell that down and invest in this if they want to and invest in OpenAI if they want to. As far as money secured, the first 100,000 GB 200 cluster can be funded. Everything else after that-
Lex Fridman
Up in the air.
Up in the air.
Dylan Patel
… is up in the air. Money’s coming. I believe the money will come. I personally do.
… is up in the air. Money’s coming. I believe the money will come. I personally do.
Lex Fridman
It’s a belief.
It’s a belief.
Dylan Patel
It’s a belief that they’re going to release better models and be able to raise more money. But the actual reality is that Elon’s right, the money does not exist.
It’s a belief that they’re going to release better models and be able to raise more money. But the actual reality is that Elon’s right, the money does not exist.
Lex Fridman
What does the US government have to do with anything? What does Trump have to do with everything? He’s just a hype man?
What does the US government have to do with anything? What does Trump have to do with everything? He’s just a hype man?
Dylan Patel
Trump, he’s reducing the regulation so they can build it faster and he’s allowing them to do it because any investment of this side is going to involve antitrust stuff. So obviously he’s going to allow them to do it. He’s going to enable the regulations to actually allow it to be built. I don’t believe there’s any US government dollars being spent on this though.
Trump, he’s reducing the regulation so they can build it faster and he’s allowing them to do it because any investment of this side is going to involve antitrust stuff. So obviously he’s going to allow them to do it. He’s going to enable the regulations to actually allow it to be built. I don’t believe there’s any US government dollars being spent on this though.
Lex Fridman
So I think he’s also just creating a general vibe that regulation will go down and this is the era of building. So if you’re a builder, you want to create stuff, you want to launch stuff, this is the time to do it.
So I think he’s also just creating a general vibe that regulation will go down and this is the era of building. So if you’re a builder, you want to create stuff, you want to launch stuff, this is the time to do it.
Dylan Patel
And so we’ve had this 1.8 gigawatt data center in our data for over a year now, and we’ve been sending it to all of our clients, including many of these companies that are building the multi gigawatts. But that is at a level that’s not quite, maybe executives seeing $500 billion, $100 billion dollars, and then everyone’s asking them. So it could spur an even faster arms race. Because there’s already an arms race, but this 100 billion, $500 billion number, Trump talking about it on TV, it could spur the arm race to be even faster and more investors to flood in and et cetera, et cetera. So I think you’re right in that sense that open AI or Trump is sort of championing, people are going to build more and his actions are going to let people build more.
And so we’ve had this 1.8 gigawatt data center in our data for over a year now, and we’ve been sending it to all of our clients, including many of these companies that are building the multi gigawatts. But that is at a level that’s not quite, maybe executives seeing $500 billion, $100 billion dollars, and then everyone’s asking them. So it could spur an even faster arms race. Because there’s already an arms race, but this 100 billion, $500 billion number, Trump talking about it on TV, it could spur the arm race to be even faster and more investors to flood in and et cetera, et cetera. So I think you’re right in that sense that open AI or Trump is sort of championing, people are going to build more and his actions are going to let people build more.
Future of AI
Lex Fridman
What are you excited about these several years that are upcoming in terms of cluster build outs, in terms of breakthroughs in AI, the best possible future you can imagine in the next couple of years, two, three, four years? What does that look like? It could be very specific technical things like breakthroughs on post-training or it could be just size, big impressive clusters.
What are you excited about these several years that are upcoming in terms of cluster build outs, in terms of breakthroughs in AI, the best possible future you can imagine in the next couple of years, two, three, four years? What does that look like? It could be very specific technical things like breakthroughs on post-training or it could be just size, big impressive clusters.
Dylan Patel
I really enjoy tracking supply chain and who’s involved and what, I really do. It’s really fun to see the numbers, the cost, who’s building what capacity, helping them figure out how much capacity they should build winning deals, strategic stuff. That’s really cool. I think technologically, there’s a lot around the networking side that really excites me with optics and electronics kind of getting closer and closer, whether it be co-packaged optics or some sort of forms of new forms of switching.
I really enjoy tracking supply chain and who’s involved and what, I really do. It’s really fun to see the numbers, the cost, who’s building what capacity, helping them figure out how much capacity they should build winning deals, strategic stuff. That’s really cool. I think technologically, there’s a lot around the networking side that really excites me with optics and electronics kind of getting closer and closer, whether it be co-packaged optics or some sort of forms of new forms of switching.
Lex Fridman
This is internal to a cluster?
This is internal to a cluster?
Dylan Patel
A cluster, yeah. Also multi-data center training. People are putting so much fiber between these data centers and lighting it up with so much bandwidth that there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening on that end. Telecom has been really boring since 5G, and now it’s really exciting again on the hardware side.
A cluster, yeah. Also multi-data center training. People are putting so much fiber between these data centers and lighting it up with so much bandwidth that there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening on that end. Telecom has been really boring since 5G, and now it’s really exciting again on the hardware side.
Lex Fridman
Can you educate me a little bit about the speed of things? So the speed of memory versus the speed of interconnect versus the speed of fiber between data centers. Are these orders of magnitude different? Can we at some point converge towards a place where it all just feels like one computer?
Can you educate me a little bit about the speed of things? So the speed of memory versus the speed of interconnect versus the speed of fiber between data centers. Are these orders of magnitude different? Can we at some point converge towards a place where it all just feels like one computer?
Dylan Patel
No, I don’t think that’s possible. It’s only going to get harder to program, not easier. It’s only going to get more difficult and complicated and more layers. The general image that people like to have is this hierarchy of memory, so on-chip is really close, localized within the chip, you have registers and those are shared between some compute elements and then you’ll have caches which are shared between more compute elements. Then you have memory like HBM or DRAM like DDRR memory or whatever it is, and that’s shared between the whole chip. And then you can have pools of memory that are shared between many chips and then storage and you keep zoning out. The access latency across data centers, within the data center within a chip is different. So you’re always going to have different programming paradigms for this. It’s not going to be easy. Programming this stuff is going to be hard, maybe AI can help with programming this.
No, I don’t think that’s possible. It’s only going to get harder to program, not easier. It’s only going to get more difficult and complicated and more layers. The general image that people like to have is this hierarchy of memory, so on-chip is really close, localized within the chip, you have registers and those are shared between some compute elements and then you’ll have caches which are shared between more compute elements. Then you have memory like HBM or DRAM like DDRR memory or whatever it is, and that’s shared between the whole chip. And then you can have pools of memory that are shared between many chips and then storage and you keep zoning out. The access latency across data centers, within the data center within a chip is different. So you’re always going to have different programming paradigms for this. It’s not going to be easy. Programming this stuff is going to be hard, maybe AI can help with programming this.
But the way to think about it is that there is sort of the more elements you add to a task, you don’t get strong scaling. If I double the number of chips, I don’t get two exit performance. This is just a reality of computing because there’s inefficiencies.And there’s a lot of interesting work being done to make it not to make it more linear, whether it’s making the chips more networked together more tightly or cool programming models or cool algorithmic things that you can do on the model side. DeepSeek did some of these really cool innovations because they were limited on interconnect, but they still needed to parallelize. Everyone’s always doing stuff. Google’s got a bunch of work and everyone’s got a bunch of work about this. That stuff is super exciting on the model and workload and innovation side. Hardware, solid-state transformers are interesting. For the power side, all sorts of stuff on batteries and there’s all sorts of stuff on.
I think if you look at every layer of the compute stack, whether it goes from lithography and etch all the way to fabrication, to optics, to networking, to power, to transformers, to cooling, to a networking, and you just go on up and up and up and up the stack, even air conditioners for data centers are innovating. Copper cables are innovating. You wouldn’t think it, but copper cables, there’s some innovations happening there with the density of how you can pack them and it’s like all of these layers of the stack, all the way up to the models, human progress is at a pace that’s never been seen before.
Lex Fridman
I’m just imagining you sitting back in a layer somewhere with screens everywhere, just monitoring the supply chain where all these clusters, all the information you’re gathering, you’re incredible.
I’m just imagining you sitting back in a layer somewhere with screens everywhere, just monitoring the supply chain where all these clusters, all the information you’re gathering, you’re incredible.
Dylan Patel
There’s a big team, there’s a big team.
There’s a big team, there’s a big team.
Lex Fridman
You do quite incredible work with semi analysis. I mean just keeping your finger on the pulse of human civilization in the digital world. It’s pretty cool just to watch, feel that.
You do quite incredible work with semi analysis. I mean just keeping your finger on the pulse of human civilization in the digital world. It’s pretty cool just to watch, feel that.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, thank you. I guess.
Yeah, thank you. I guess.
Lex Fridman
Feel all of us doing shit. Epic shit.
Feel all of us doing shit. Epic shit.
Dylan Patel
The AGI, yeah.
The AGI, yeah.
Lex Fridman
I feel from meme to reality. Nathan, is there breakthroughs that you’re looking forward to potentially?
I feel from meme to reality. Nathan, is there breakthroughs that you’re looking forward to potentially?
Nathan Lambert
I had a while to think about this while listening to Dylan’s beautiful response.
I had a while to think about this while listening to Dylan’s beautiful response.
Dylan Patel
He did listen to me. He was so into it.
He did listen to me. He was so into it.
Nathan Lambert
No, I knew this was coming and it’s like realistically training models is very fun because there’s so much low-hanging fruit. And the thing that makes my job entertaining, I train models, I write analysis about what’s happening with models and it’s fun because there is obviously so much more progress to be had. And the real motivation, why I do this somewhere where I can share things is that there’s just, I don’t trust people that are like, “Trust me bro, we’re going to make AI good.”
No, I knew this was coming and it’s like realistically training models is very fun because there’s so much low-hanging fruit. And the thing that makes my job entertaining, I train models, I write analysis about what’s happening with models and it’s fun because there is obviously so much more progress to be had. And the real motivation, why I do this somewhere where I can share things is that there’s just, I don’t trust people that are like, “Trust me bro, we’re going to make AI good.”
It’s like we’re the ones that it’s like, we’re going to do it and you can trust us and we’re just going to have all the AI, and it’s just like, I would like a future where more people have a say in what AI is and can understand it, and it’s a little bit less fun that it’s not a positive thing of this is just all really fun. Training models is fun and bring people in as fun, but it’s really AI if it is going to be the most powerful technology of my lifetime, it’s like we need to have a lot of people involved in making that and-
Lex Fridman
Making it open helps with that. As accessible as possible, as open as possible, yeah.
Making it open helps with that. As accessible as possible, as open as possible, yeah.
Nathan Lambert
… In my read of the last few years is that more openness would help the AI ecosystem in terms of having more people understand what’s going on. Rather that’s researchers from non-AI fields to governments to everything. It doesn’t mean that openness will always be the answer. I think then it’ll reassess of what is the biggest problem facing AI and tack on a different angle to the wild ride that we’re on.
… In my read of the last few years is that more openness would help the AI ecosystem in terms of having more people understand what’s going on. Rather that’s researchers from non-AI fields to governments to everything. It doesn’t mean that openness will always be the answer. I think then it’ll reassess of what is the biggest problem facing AI and tack on a different angle to the wild ride that we’re on.
Lex Fridman
And for me, just from even the user experience, anytime you have like Aparthi said, the aha moments, the magic, seeing the reasoning, the chain of thought, it’s like there’s something really just fundamentally beautiful about that. It’s putting a mirror to ourselves and seeing like, oh, shit. It is solving intelligence as the cliche goal of these companies is, and you get to understand why we humans are special. The intelligence within us is special. And for now also why we’re special in terms of we seem to be conscious and the AI systems for now, and we get to explore that mystery, so it’s just really cool to get to explore these questions that I don’t think I would’ve never imagined would be even possible back when just watching with excitement, deep blue beat Kasparov, I wouldn’t have ever thought this kind of AI would be possible in my lifetime. This is really feels like AI.
And for me, just from even the user experience, anytime you have like Aparthi said, the aha moments, the magic, seeing the reasoning, the chain of thought, it’s like there’s something really just fundamentally beautiful about that. It’s putting a mirror to ourselves and seeing like, oh, shit. It is solving intelligence as the cliche goal of these companies is, and you get to understand why we humans are special. The intelligence within us is special. And for now also why we’re special in terms of we seem to be conscious and the AI systems for now, and we get to explore that mystery, so it’s just really cool to get to explore these questions that I don’t think I would’ve never imagined would be even possible back when just watching with excitement, deep blue beat Kasparov, I wouldn’t have ever thought this kind of AI would be possible in my lifetime. This is really feels like AI.
Nathan Lambert
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s incredible.
It’s incredible.
Nathan Lambert
I started with AI learning to fly a silly, a quadrotor, it’s like learning to fly and it learned to fly up. It would hit the ceiling and stop and catch it. It’s like, okay, that is really stupid compared to what’s going on now.
I started with AI learning to fly a silly, a quadrotor, it’s like learning to fly and it learned to fly up. It would hit the ceiling and stop and catch it. It’s like, okay, that is really stupid compared to what’s going on now.
Lex Fridman
And now you could probably with natural language tell it to learn to fly and it’s going to generate the control algorithm required to do that probably.
And now you could probably with natural language tell it to learn to fly and it’s going to generate the control algorithm required to do that probably.
Nathan Lambert
There’s low level blockers. We have to do some weird stuff for that, but you can, you definitely can.
There’s low level blockers. We have to do some weird stuff for that, but you can, you definitely can.
Lex Fridman
Back to our robotics conversation, yeah, when you have to interact in the actual physical world, that’s hard. What gives you hope about the future of human civilization looking into the next 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, how long do you think we’ll make it? You think we’ve got 1000 years?
Back to our robotics conversation, yeah, when you have to interact in the actual physical world, that’s hard. What gives you hope about the future of human civilization looking into the next 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, how long do you think we’ll make it? You think we’ve got 1000 years?
Nathan Lambert
I think humans will definitely be around in a 1000 years, I think. There’s ways that very bad things could happen. There’ll be way fewer humans, but humans are very good at surviving. There’s been a lot of things that that is true. I don’t think necessarily we’re good at long-term credit assignment of risk, but when the risk becomes immediate, we tend to figure things out.
I think humans will definitely be around in a 1000 years, I think. There’s ways that very bad things could happen. There’ll be way fewer humans, but humans are very good at surviving. There’s been a lot of things that that is true. I don’t think necessarily we’re good at long-term credit assignment of risk, but when the risk becomes immediate, we tend to figure things out.
Lex Fridman
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Nathan Lambert
And for that reason, there’s physical constraints to things like AGI, like recursive improvement to kill us all type stuff. For the physical reasons and for how humans have figured things out before, I’m not too worried about AI takeover. There are other international things that are worrying, but there’s just fundamental human goodness and trying to amplify that. I think we’re on a tenuous time. And I mean if you look at humanity as a whole, there’s been times where things go backwards, there’s times when things don’t happen at all, and we’re on what should be very positive trajectory right now.
And for that reason, there’s physical constraints to things like AGI, like recursive improvement to kill us all type stuff. For the physical reasons and for how humans have figured things out before, I’m not too worried about AI takeover. There are other international things that are worrying, but there’s just fundamental human goodness and trying to amplify that. I think we’re on a tenuous time. And I mean if you look at humanity as a whole, there’s been times where things go backwards, there’s times when things don’t happen at all, and we’re on what should be very positive trajectory right now.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there seems to be progress, but just like with power, there’s like spikes of human suffering and we want to try to minimize the amount of spikes.
Yeah, there seems to be progress, but just like with power, there’s like spikes of human suffering and we want to try to minimize the amount of spikes.
Dylan Patel
Generally, humanity is going to suffer a lot less, I’m very optimistic about that. I do worry of like techno-fascism type stuff arising. As AI becomes more and more prevalent and powerful and those who control it can do more and more, maybe it doesn’t kill us all, but at some point, every very powerful human is going to want to brain- computer interface so that they can interact with the AGI and all of its advantages in many more way and merge its mind and its capabilities or that person’s capabilities can leverage those much better than anyone else and therefore be, it won’t be one person rule them all, but it will be, the thing I worry about is it’ll be few people, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of people rule whoever’s left and the economy around it.
Generally, humanity is going to suffer a lot less, I’m very optimistic about that. I do worry of like techno-fascism type stuff arising. As AI becomes more and more prevalent and powerful and those who control it can do more and more, maybe it doesn’t kill us all, but at some point, every very powerful human is going to want to brain- computer interface so that they can interact with the AGI and all of its advantages in many more way and merge its mind and its capabilities or that person’s capabilities can leverage those much better than anyone else and therefore be, it won’t be one person rule them all, but it will be, the thing I worry about is it’ll be few people, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of people rule whoever’s left and the economy around it.
And I think that’s the thing that’s probably more worrisome is human-machine amalgamations. This enables an individual human to have more impact on the world and that impact can be both positive and negative. Generally, humans have positive impacts on the world, at least societally, but it’s possible for individual humans to have such negative impacts. And AGI, at least as I think the labs define it, which is not a runaway sentient thing, but rather just something that can do a lot of tasks really efficiently amplifies the capabilities of someone causing extreme damage. But for the most part, I think it’ll be used for profit-seeking motives, which will increase the abundance and supply of things and therefore reduce suffering, right? That’s the goal.
Lex Fridman
Scrolling on a timeline, just drowning in dopamine-
Scrolling on a timeline, just drowning in dopamine-
Dylan Patel
Scrolling open stasis.
Scrolling open stasis.
Nathan Lambert
Scrolling holds the status quo of the world.
Scrolling holds the status quo of the world.
Dylan Patel
That is a positive outcome, right? If I have food tubes and lung down scrolling and I’m happy, that’s a positive outcome.
That is a positive outcome, right? If I have food tubes and lung down scrolling and I’m happy, that’s a positive outcome.
Lex Fridman
While expanding out into the cosmos. Well, this is a fun time to be alive. And thank you for pushing the forefront of what is possible in humans, and thank you for talking today. This was fun.
While expanding out into the cosmos. Well, this is a fun time to be alive. And thank you for pushing the forefront of what is possible in humans, and thank you for talking today. This was fun.
Dylan Patel
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
Nathan Lambert
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.
Transcript for Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America | Lex Fridman Podcast #458
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #458 with Marc Andreessen.
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And so the lucky part is just number one, we just have incredible physical security by being our own continent. We have incredible natural resources. There’s this running joke now that whenever it looks like the US is going to run out of some rare earth material, some farmer in North Dakota kicks over a hay bale and finds a $2 trillion deposit. I mean, we’re just blessed with geography and with natural resources. Energy. We can be energy independent anytime we want. This last administration decided they didn’t want to be, they wanted to turn off American energy. This new administration has declared that they have a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way. There’s no question we can be energy independent, we can be a giant net energy exporter. It’s purely a question of choice, and I think the new administration’s going to do that. And then I would say two other things.
One is we are the beneficiaries, and you’re an example of this. We’re a beneficiary. We’re the beneficiary of 50, 100, 200 years of the basically most aggressive driven, smartest people in the world, most capable people moving to the US and raising their kids here. And so we’re by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive, we’re the most aggressive set of characters, certainly in any Western country and have been for a long time, and certainly are today.
And then finally, I would just say, look, we are overwhelmingly the advanced technology leader. We have our issues and we have, I would say particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about. But for anything in software, anything in AI, anything in all these … Advanced biotech, all these advanced areas of technology, we’re by far the leader. Again, in part because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields come to the US. And so we have all of the preconditions for just a monster boom. I could see economic growth going way up, I could see productivity growth going way up, rate of technology adoption going way up. And then we can do a global tour, if you like. But basically, all of our competitors have profound issues, and we could go through them one by one, but the competitive landscape just is … It’s like it’s remarkable how much better positioned we are for growth.
So yeah, I would say all of our problems, I think are basically, in my view, to some extent, attempts to basically sand all that off and make everything basically boring and mediocre. But there is something in the national spirit that basically keeps bouncing back. And basically what we discover over time is we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say, “It’s time to build, it’s time to grow, it’s time to do things.” And there’s something in the American spirit that just roars right back to life. And I’ve seen it before. I saw it as a kid here in the early 80s because the 70s were horribly depressing in the US. They were a nightmare on many fronts. And in a lot of ways, the last decade to me has felt a lot like the 70s just being mired in misery and just this self-defeating negative attitude and everybody’s upset about everything. And then by the way, energy crisis and hostage crisis and foreign wars and just demoralization.
The low point in the 70s was Jimmy Carter who just passed away, he went on TV and he gave this speech known as the Malaise Speech, and it was like the weakest possible, trying to rouse people back to a sense of passion, completely failed. And we had the hostages in Iran for I think 440 days. And every night on the nightly news, it was lines around the block, energy crisis, depression, inflation. And then Reagan came in and Reagan was a very controversial character at the time. And he came in and he’s like, “Yep, nope, it’s morning in America and we’re the shining city on the hill, and we’re going to do it.” And he did it, and we did it. And the national spirit came roaring back and roared really hard for a full decade. I think that’s exactly what … I think we’ll see, but I think that’s what could happen here.
But I would also say it’s not just individualism, and this is one of the big things. It’s playing out in a lot of our culture and kind of political fights right now, which is basically this feeling, certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people, which is it’s not enough for America to just be an economic zone, and it’s not enough for us to just be individuals, and it’s not enough to just have line go up, and it’s not enough to just have economic success. There are deeper questions at play, and also there’s more to a country than just that. And quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. A lot of it involves spirit and passion. And like I said, we have more of it than anybody else, but we have to choose to want it.
The way I look at, it’s like all of our problems are self-inflicted. Decline is a choice. All of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns, basically people telling us, people in positions of authority telling us that, “We shouldn’t stand out, we shouldn’t be adventurous, we shouldn’t be exciting, we shouldn’t be exploratory, we shouldn’t this, that, and the other thing. And we should feel bad about everything that we do.” And I think we’ve lived through a decade where that’s been the prevailing theme. And I think quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it.
And then specifically what he did is he talked about the Greeks and the Romans, but specifically what he did is he went back further. He reconstructed the people who came before the Greeks and the Romans and what their life and society was like. And these were the people who were now known as the Indo-Europeans. And you may have heard of these, these are the people who came down from the steppes. And so they came out of what’s now Eastern Europe around sort of the outskirts of what’s now Russia. And then they sort of swept through Europe. They ultimately took over all of Europe, by the way, almost many of the ethnicities in the Americas, the hundreds of years that follow are Indo-European. And so they were basically this warrior, basically class that came down and swept through and essentially populated much of the world. And there’s a whole interesting saga there. And then from there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans were kind of evolutions off of that.
And so what he reconstructs, what life was like, at least in the West for people in their kind of original social state. And the significance of that is the original social state is living in the state of the absolute imperative for survival with absolutely no technology. No modern systems, no nothing. You’ve got the clothes on your back, you’ve got whatever you can build with your bare hands. This predates basically all concepts of technology as we understand them today. And so these are people under maximum levels of physical survival pressure. And so what social patterns did they evolve to be able to do that? And the social pattern basically was as follows, is a three-part social structure, family, tribe and city, and zero concept of individual rights and essentially no concept of individualism. And so you were not an individual. You were a member of your family, and then a set of families would aggregate into a tribe and then a set of tribes would aggregate into a city.
And then the morality was completely … It was actually what Nietzsche talks about. The morality was entirely master morality, not slave morality. And so in their morality, anything that was strong was good, and anything that was weak was bad. And it’s very clear why that is. It is because strong equals good equals survive. Weak equals bad equals die. And that led to what became known later as the master-slave dialectic, which is, is it more important for you to live on your feet as a master even at the risk of dying? Or are you willing to live as a slave on your knees in order to not die? And this is sort of the derivation of that moral framework. Christianity later inverted that moral framework. But the original framework lasted for many, many thousands of years.
No concept of individualism. The head of the family had total life and death control over the family, the head of the tribe, same thing, head of the city, same thing. And then you were morally obligated to kill members of the other cities on contact. You were morally required to. If you didn’t do it, you were a bad person.
And then the form of the society was basically maximum fascism combined with maximum communism. And so it was maximum fascism in the form of this absolute top-down control where the head of the family tribe or city could kill other members of the community at any time with no repercussions at all. So maximum hierarchy, but combined with maximum communism, which is no market economy and so everything gets shared. And sort of the point of being in one of these collectives is that it’s a collective and people are sharing, and of course that limited how big they could get because the problem with communism is it doesn’t scale. It works at the level of a family. It’s much harder to make it work at the level of a country. Impossible. Maximum fascism, maximum communism.
And then it was all intricately tied into their religion. And their religion was in two parts. It was veneration of ancestors and it was veneration of nature. And the veneration of ancestors is extremely important because it was basically the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were. The ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you. And then it was veneration of nature because of course, nature is the thing that’s trying to kill you. And then you had your ancestor, every family, tribe or city had their ancestor gods and then they had their nature gods.
So fast-forward to today, we live in a world that is radically different, and the book takes you through what happened from that through the Greeks and Romans through to Christianity. But it’s very helpful to kind of think in these terms because the conventional view of the progress through time is that we are … The cliche is the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice or so-called wig history, which is that the arc of progress is positive. And so what you hear all the time, what you’re taught in school and everything is every year that goes by, we get better and better and more and more moral and more and more pure and a better version of ourselves. Our Indo-European ancestors would say, ” Oh no, you people have fallen to shit. You people took all of the principles of basically your civilization and you have diluted them down to the point where they barely even matter and you’re having children out of a wedlock and you regularly encounter people of other cities and you don’t try to kill them.” And how crazy is that?
And they would basically consider us to be living like an incredibly diluted version of this sort of highly religious, highly cult-like, highly organized, highly fascist, communist society. I can’t resist noting that as a consequence of basically going through all the transitions we’ve been through going all the way through Christianity coming out the other end of Christianity, Nietzsche declares God is dead. We’re in a secular society that still has tinges of Christianity, but largely prides itself on no longer being religious in that way. We being the sort of most fully evolved, modern secular experts, scientists and so forth have basically re-evolved or fallen back on the exact same religious structure that the Indo-Europeans had, specifically ancestor worship, which is identity politics and nature worship, which is environmentalism. And so we have actually worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it. And it just goes to show that in some ways we have fallen far from the family tree, but in some cases we’re exactly the same.
And the way I think about that is the process of evolutionary learning, which is what tradition ought to be, is the distilled wisdom of all. And this is what Indo-Europeans thought about. It should be the distilled wisdom of everybody who came before you. All those important and powerful lessons learned. And that’s why I think it’s fascinating to go back and study how these people lived is because part of the history and part of the learning that got us to where we’re today.
Having said that, there are many cultures around the world that are mired in tradition to the point of not being able to progress. And in fact, you might even say globally, that’s the default human condition, which is a lot of people are in societies in which there’s absolute seniority by age, kids are completely … In the US, for some reason we decided kids are in charge of everything and they’re the trendsetters and they’re allowed to set all the agendas and set all the politics and set all the culture and maybe that’s a little bit crazy. But in a lot of other cultures, kids have no voice at all, no role at all. The old people who are in charge of everything, they’re gerontocracies, and it’s all a bunch of 80 year olds running everything, which by the way, we have a little bit of that too.
And so what I would say is there’s a real downside. Full traditionalism is communitarianism, it’s ethnic particularism, it’s ethnic chauvinism, it’s this incredible level of resistance to change. It just doesn’t get you anywhere. It may be good and fine at the level of an individual tribe, but as a society living in the modern world, you can’t evolve, you can’t advance, you can’t participate in all the good things that have happened. And so I think probably this is one of those things where extremists on either side is probably a bad idea, but this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and nuanced way.
And then just this general idea of progress is bad, and technology is bad, and capitalism is bad, and building businesses is bad and success is bad. Tall poppy syndrome, basically, anybody who sticks their head up deserves to get it chopped off. Anybody who’s wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever. Just this very kind of grinding repression. And then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes and debanking and Draconian, deliberately kneecapping critical American industries, and then congratulating yourselves on the back for doing it or having these horrible social policies, like let’s let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens. And so we’ve just been through this period, I call it a demoralization campaign. We’ve just been through this period, whether it started that way or not, it ended up basically being this comprehensive message that says, “You’re terrible and if you try to do anything, you’re terrible and fuck you.” And the Biden administration reached the full pinnacle of that in our time. They got really bad on many fronts at the same time. And so just relieving that and getting back to a reasonably optimistic, constructive, pro-growth frame of mind, there’s so much pent-up energy and potentially in the American system, that alone is going to, I think cause growth and spirit to take off. And then there’s a lot of things proactively that could be done.
But I would say that same conversation, those same kinds of things are happening throughout the industry. And so the tech industry itself, whether people were pro-Trump or anti-Trump, there’s just a giant vibe shift, mood shift that’s kicked in already. And then I was with a group of Hollywood people about two weeks ago, and they were still people who at least vocally were still very anti-Trump, but I said, “Has anything changed since November 6th?” And they immediately said, “Oh, it’s completely different. It feels like the ice has thawed. Woke is over.” They said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now they couldn’t before, that Hollywood’s going to start making comedies again. It is just like an incredible immediate environmental change. And as I talk to people, certainly throughout the economy, people who run businesses, I hear that all the time, which is just this last 10 years of misery is just over.
I mean, the one that I’m watching that’s really funny. I mean, Facebook’s getting a lot, Meta’s getting a lot of attention, but the other funny one is BlackRock, which I don’t know him, but I’ve watched for a long time. And so Larry Fink, who’s the CEO of BlackRock, was first in as a major investment CEO on every dumb social trend and rule set every … I’m going for it. Every retarded thing you can imagine, every ESG and every possible … Saddling companies with every aspect of just these crazed ideological positions. And he was coming in, he literally had aggregated together trillions of dollars of shareholdings that were his customer’s rights, and he seized their voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do all of this crazy ideological stuff. And he was like the Typhoid Mary of all this stuff in corporate America. And he in the last year has been backpedaling from that stuff as fast as he possibly can.
And just an example, last week, he pulled out of the whatever the Corporate Net-Zero Alliance, he pulled out of the crazy energy stuff. And so he’s backing away as fast as he can. Remember, the Richard Pryor backwards walk? Richard Pryor had this way where he could back out of a room while looking like he was walking forward.
And so even there doing that and just the whole thing. I mean, if you saw the court recently ruled that NASDAQ had these crazy board of directors composition rules. One of the funniest moments of my life is when my friend Peter Thiel and I were on the Meta board and these NASDAQ rules came down, mandated diversity on corporate boards. And so we sat around the table and had to figure out which of us counted as diverse. And the very professional attorneys at Meta explained with 100% complete straight face that Peter Thiel counts as diverse by virtue of being LGBT. And this is a guy who literally wrote a book called The Diversity Myth. He literally looked like he’d swallowed a live goldfish, and this was imposed. I mean, this was so incredibly offensive to him that it was just absolutely appalling and I felt terrible for him. But the look in his face was very funny.
And it was imposed by NASDAQ, your stock exchange imposing this stuff on you, and then the court, whatever, the Court of Appeals just nuked that. So these things basically are being ripped down one by one. And what’s on the other side of it is basically finally being able to get back to everything that everybody always wanted to do, which is run their companies, have great products, have happy customers, succeed, achieve, outperform, and work with the best and the brightest and not be made to feel bad about it. And I think that’s happening in many areas of American society.
We can maybe talk about the fire later, but I can tell you there is a very big question of what’s happening in Los Angeles right now. I don’t want to get into the fire, but it’s catastrophic. And there was already a rightward shift in the big cities in California, and I think a lot of people in LA are really thinking about things right now as they’re trying to literally save their houses and save their families. But even in San Francisco, there was a big shift to the right in the voting in ’24. So we’ll see where that goes, but you observe that by just looking at the numbers over time.
The part that I’m more focused on is, and I don’t know how to exactly describe this, but it’s like the top 1,000 or the top 10,000 people. I don’t have a list, but it’s all the top founders, top CEOs, top executives, top engineers, top VCs, and then into the ranks, the people who kind of built and run the companies. And I don’t have numbers, but I have a much more tactile feel for what’s happening. So the big thing I have now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong. I think that most people just go along, and I think even most high status people just go along. And I think maybe the most high status people are the most prone to just go along because they’re the most focused on status. And the way I would describe that is one of the great forbidden philosophers of our time is the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. And amidst his madness, he had this extremely interesting articulation. He was an insane lunatic murderer, but he was also a Harvard super genius. Not that those are in conflict.
Even before I had the views that I have today, there was always just this weird thing where it’s like, why does every dinner party have the exact same conversation? Why does everybody agree on every single issue? Why is that agreement precisely what was in the New York Times today? Why are these positions not the same as they were five years ago? But why does everybody snap into agreement every step of the way? And that was true when I came to Silicon Valley, and it’s just as true today 30 years later. And so I think most people are just literally, I think they’re taking their cues from, it’s some combination of the press, the universities, the big foundations. So it’s basically, it’s like The New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, and I don’t know, a few CEOs and a few public figures and maybe the President if your party is in power. And whatever that is, everybody who’s sort of good and proper and elite and good standing and in charge of things, and a sort of correct member of, let’s call it coastal American society, everybody just believes those things.
And then the two interesting things about that is, number one, there’s no divergence among the organs of power. So Harvard and Yale believed the exact same thing. The New York Times and The Washington Post believe the exact same thing. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing. Google and whatever, Microsoft believe the exact same thing. But those things change over time, but there’s never conflict in the moment. And so The New York Times and The Washington Post agreed on exactly everything in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, despite the fact that the specifics changed radically. The lockstep was what mattered. And so I think basically we in the Valley we’re on the tail end of that, in the same way Hollywood’s on the tail end of that, in the same way New York’s on the tail end of that, the same way the media’s on the tail end of that. It’s like some sort of collective hive mind thing.
And I just go through that to say, I don’t think most people in my orbit, or let’s say the top 10,000 people in the Valley or the top 10,000 people in LA, I don’t think they’re sitting there thinking basically, I have rock … I mean, they probably think they have rocks solid beliefs, but they don’t actually have some inner core of rock solid beliefs. And then they kind of watch reality change around them and try to figure out how to keep their beliefs correct. I don’t think that’s what happens. I think what happens is they conform to the belief system around them, and I think most of the time they’re not even aware that they’re basically part of a herd.
People don’t laugh at made-up bullshit stories. They laugh because you’re revealing something that they either have not been allowed to think about or have not been allowed to talk about or is off limits. And all of a sudden it’s like the ice breaks and it’s like, oh yeah, that’s the thing. And it’s funny and I laugh, and then of course, this is why of course live comedy is so powerful is because you’re all doing that at the same time, so you start to have the safety of numbers. It’s no surprise to me, for example, Joe has been as successful as he has because they have this hack that the rest of us who are not professional comedians don’t have, but you have your in-person version of it, and then you’ve got the question of whether you can join the networks together.
And then you’ve probably been to this, is then at some point there’s like the Alt dinner party, the [inaudible 00:36:23] dinner party, and you get six or eight people together and you join the networks. And those are the happiest, at least in the last decade, those are the happiest moments of everybody’s lives. Everybody’s just ecstatic because they’re like, I don’t have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth, and we can actually talk about real things. So that’s the live version of it. And then of course, the other side of it’s the group chat phenomenon. And then basically the same thing played out until Elon bought X and until Substack took off, which were really the two big breakthroughs in free speech online, the same dynamic played out online, which is you had absolute conformity on the social networks, literally enforced by the social networks themselves through censorship, and then also through cancellation campaigns and mobbing and shaming.
But then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of Samizdat. Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under communism, note, they had the hard version of this. It’s like, how do you know who you could talk to? And then how do you distribute information? And again, that was the hard authoritarian version of this. And then we’ve been living through this weird mutant soft authoritarian version, but with some of the same patterns.
And so it’s that same thing. And then group chats is a technological phenomenon. It was amazing to see. Number one, it was obviously the rise of smartphones, then it was the rise of the new messaging services, then it was the rise specifically of I would say combination of WhatsApp and Signal. And the reason for that is those were the two big systems that did the full encryption, so you actually felt safe. And then the real breakthrough I think was disappearing messages, which hit Signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago. And then the combination of encryption and disappearing messages I think really unleashed it. Well, then there’s the fight over the length of disappearing messages. And so it’s like I often get behind on my thing, so I set to seven day disappearing messages and my friends who are like, no, that’s way too much risk. It’s got to be a day. And then every once in a while somebody will set to five minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.
To me, the interesting question here is, what is the landscape of private thoughts and ideas and conversations that are happening under the surface of Americans? Especially, my question is how much dormant energy is there for this roaring twenties? What people are like, no more bullshit, let’s get done.
And there’s the two classic forms of it. For example, there’s the, I believe communism is rotten, but I can’t say it version of it. But then there’s also the famous parable of the real life example, but the thing that Vaclav Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, which is The Power of the Powerless, who is an anti-communist resistance fighter who ultimately became the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the wall. But he wrote this book and he describes the other side of this, which is workers of the world unite. And so he describes what he calls the Parable of the Greengrocer, which is you’re a greengrocer in Prague in 1985, and for the last 50 years, it’s been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says Workers of the World Unite.
And it’s 1985, it is crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Of all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen. The Commies have been at that for 70 years, it is not happening. But that slogan had better be in your window every morning because if it’s not in your window every morning, you are not a good communist. The secret police are going to come by and they’re going to get you. And so the first thing you do when you get to the store is you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says, the thing is, the greengrocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he’s caving into the system and lying in public.
And so it turns into the moralization campaign. In fact, it’s not ideological enforcement anymore because everybody knows it’s fake. The authorities know it’s fake, everybody knows it’s fake. It’s not that they’re enforcing the actual ideology of the workers of the world uniting. It’s that they’re enforcing compliance and compliance with the regime. And you fuck you, you will comply. And so anyway, that’s the other side of that. And of course, we have lived in the last decade through a lot of both of those. I think anybody listening to this could name a series of slogans that we’ve all been forced to chant for the last decade that everybody knows at this point are just simply not true. I’ll let the audience speculate on their own group chats.
And if anybody would just stand up and say it, I would be willing to go along with it, but I’m not going to be the first one to put my head on the chopping block. But because of the suppression censorship, you have no way of knowing how many of the people agree with you. And if the people agree with you are 10% of the population and you become part of a movement, you’re going to get killed. If 90% of the people agree with you, you’re going to win the revolution. And so the question of what the percentage actually is is a really critical question. And then basically in any sort of authoritarian system, you can’t run a survey to get an accurate result. And so you actually can’t know until you put it to the test. And then what he describes in the book is it’s always put to the test in the same way.
This is exactly what’s happened for the last two years, like 100% of exactly what’s happened. It’s like straight out of this book. Which is somebody, Elon, sticks his hand up and says, the workers of the world are not going to unite. Or the emperor is actually wearing no clothes, that famous parable. So one person stands up and does it, and literally that person is standing there by themselves, and everybody else in the audience is like, Ooh, I wonder what’s going to happen to that guy? But again, nobody knows. Elon doesn’t know, the first guy doesn’t know, other people don’t know which way is this going to go. And it may be that that’s a minority position and that’s the way to get yourself killed. Or it may be that that’s the majority position and you are now the leader of a revolution.
And then basically, of course, what happens is, okay, the first guy does that doesn’t get killed, the second guy does… Well, a lot of the time that guy does get killed, but when the guy doesn’t get killed, then a second guy pops his head up, says the same thing. All right, now you’ve got two. Two leads to four, four leads to eight, eight leads to 16. And then as we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in ’89, when it goes, it can go, and then it rips. And then if it turns out that you had a large percentage of the population that actually believed the different thing, it turns out all of a sudden everybody has this giant epiphany that says, oh, I’m actually part of the majority. And at that point, you were on the freight train to revolution, right? It is rolling. Now, the other part of this is the distinction between the role of the elites and the masses.
And here the best book is called the True Believer, which is the Eric Hoffer book. And so the nuance you have to put on this is the elites play a giant role in this because the elites do idea formation and communication, but the elites, by definition are a small minority. And so there’s also this giant role played by the masses, and the masses are not necessarily thinking these things through in the same intellectualized formal way that the elites are, but they are for sure experiencing these things in their daily lives, and they for sure have at least very strong emotional views on them.
And so when you really get the revolution, it’s when you get the elites lined up with, or either the current elites change or the new set of elites, a new set of counter elites, basically come along and say, “No, there’s actually a different and better way to live.” And then the people basically decide to follow the counter elite. So that’s the other dimension to it. And of course, that part is also happening right now. And again, case study one of that would be Elon, and who turns out in truly massive following.
Whatever you think of them, what they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public. They’re completely transparent, they’re completely honest in that way. Again, it’s not like they’re perfect people, but they’re honest in that way. And it makes them potentially both as they have been, very powerful leaders of these movements because they’re both willing to stand up and say the thing that if it’s true, it turns out to be the thing in many cases that many or most or almost everyone else actually believes, but nobody was actually willing to say out loud. And so they can actually catalyze these shifts. I think this framework is exactly why Trump took over the Republican Party. I think Trump stood up there on stage with all these other kind of conventional Republicans, and he started saying things out loud that it turned out the base really was they were either already believing or they were prone to believe, and he was the only one who was saying them.
And so again, elite masses, he was the elite, the voters of the masses, and the voters decided, no. No more bushes, we’re going this other direction. That’s the mechanism of social change. What we just described is the actual mechanism of social change. It is fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this. We’ve been living through everything exactly what Timur Kuran describes, everything that Vaclav Havel described. Black Squares and Instagram, like the whole thing, right? All of it. And we’ve been living through the true believer elites masses thing, with a set of basically incredibly corrupt elites wondering why they don’t have the masses anymore, and a set of new elites that are running away with things.
And so we’re living through this incredible applied case study of these ideas. And if there’s a moral of the story, it is I think fairly obvious, which is it’s a really bad idea for a society to wedge itself into a position in which most people don’t believe the fundamental precepts of what they’re told they have to do to be good people like that. That is just not a good state to be in.
And by the way, that may work for a while. I mean, again, the hard form, Soviet Union, pre photocopiers, there were mimeograph machines that were used to make Samizdat and underground newspapers, which is the mechanism of written communication of radical ideas, radical ideas. Ownership of a mimeograph machine was punishable by death. So that’s the hard version. The soft version is somebody clicks a button in Washington and you were erased from the internet, which good news, you’re still alive. Bad news is, shame about not being able to get a job. Too bad your family now hates you and won’t talk to you, whatever the version of cancellation it’s been. And so does that work? Maybe it works for a while. It worked for the Soviet Union for a while in its way, especially when it was coupled with official state power. But when it unwinds, it can unwind with incredible speed and ferocity. Because to your point, there’s all this bottled up energy.
Now, your question was what are the percentages? What’s the breakdown? And so my rough guess, just based on what I’ve seen in my world, is it’s something like 20, 60, 20. It’s like you’ve got 20% true believers in whatever is the current thing. You got 20% of people who are just true believers of whatever’s in the New York Times, Harvard professors and the Ford Foundation, they’re just… Maybe it’s 10, maybe it’s five, but let’s say generously it’s 20. So 20% kind of full-on revolutionaries. And then you’ve got, let’s call it 20% on the other side that are like, no, I’m not on board with this. This is crazy. I’m not signing up for this. But their view of themselves is they’re in a small minority, and in fact, they start out in a small minority, because what happens is the 60% go with the first 20%, not the second 20%. So you’ve got this large middle of people.
And it’s not that the people in the middle are not smart or anything like that, that they just have normal lives and they’re just trying to get by and they’re just trying to go to work each day and do a good job and be a good person and raise their kids and have a little bit of time to watch the game, and they’re just not engaged in the cut and thrust of political activism or any of this stuff. It’s just not their thing. But that’s where the over socialization comes in. It’s just like, okay, by default, the 60% will go along with the 20% of the radical revolutionaries at least for a while, and then the counter elite is in this other 20%. And over time, they build up a theory and network and ability to resist in a new set of representatives, in a new set of ideas. And then at some point there’s a contest and then, and then the question is, what happens in the middle? What happens in the 60%?
And it is kind of my point. It’s not even really does the 60% change their beliefs as much as it’s like, okay, what is the thing that that 60% now decides to basically fall into step with? And in the valley, that 60% for the last decade decided to be woke and extremely, I would say, on edge on a lot of things. And that 60% is pivoting in real time. They’re just done. They’ve just had it.
And by the way, Trump’s not the only part of this, but he’s just a convenient shorthand for a lot of this. But whatever it is, you’ll have people who will say, well, I never supported the EI, or I never supported ESG, or I never thought we should have canceled that person, where of course, they were full on a part of the mob at that moment. So anyway, so you’ll have preference falsification happening in the other direction. His prediction, I think, basically is you’ll end up with the same quote, “problem” on the other side. Now, will that happen here? I don’t know. How far is American society willing to go on any of these things? I don’t know. But there is some question there.
And then the other part of it is, okay, now you have this elite that is used to being in power for the last decade. And by the way, many of those people are still in power and they’re in very important positions. And the New York Times is still the New York Times, and Harvard is still Harvard, and those people haven’t changed, like at all. Bureaucrats in the government and senior democratic politicians and so forth. And they’re sitting there right now feeling like reality has just smacked them hard in the face because they lost the election so badly. But they’re now going into, and specifically the Democratic Party, is going into a Civil War. And that form of the Civil War is completely predictable and it’s exactly what’s happening, which is half of them are saying, we need to go back to the center. We need to de-radicalize because we’ve lost the people. We’ve lost the people in the middle, and so we need to go back to the middle in order to be able to get 50% plus one in an election.
And then the other half of them are saying, no, we weren’t true to our principles. We were too weak. We were too soft. We must become more revolutionary. We must double down and we must celebrate murders in the street of health insurance executives. And that right now is a real fight.
Nevertheless, he just doesn’t want the headache. And that speaks to the thing that you’ve kind of mentioned, that you just don’t want the headache. You just want to just have a pleasant morning with some coffee and talk to your fellow professors. And I think a lot of people are feeling that in universities and in other contexts, in tech companies. And I wonder if that shifts, how quickly that shifts? And there, the percentages you mentioned, 20, 60, 20 matters, and the contents of the private groups matters, and the dynamics of how that shifts matters. Because it’s very possible, nothing really changes in universities and in major tech companies. Where just, there’s a kind of excitement right now for potential revolution and these new ideas, these new vibes, to reverberate through these companies and universities, but it’s possible the wall will hold.
I’ll give you the most direct reason we can’t get access to that money, we can’t get access to federal student funding. Do you know how universities are accredited for the purpose of getting access to federal student funding? Federal student loans? They’re accredited by the government, but not directly, indirectly. They’re not accredited by the Department of Education. Instead, what happens is the Department of Education accredits accreditation bureaus that are nonprofits that do the accreditation. Guess what the composition of the accreditation bureaus is? The existing universities. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money. Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university? Right.
And so we have a government funded and supported cartel that has gone… It’s just obvious now. It’s just gone sideways in basically any possible way it could go sideways, including, I mean, literally, as you know, students getting beaten up on campus for being the wrong religion. They’re just wrong in every possible way at this point. And it’s all on the federal taxpayer back. And there is no way, I mean, my opinion, there is no way to fix these things without replacing them. And there’s no way to replace them without letting them fail. And by the way, it’s like everything else in life. I mean, in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time, which is what happens in the business world when a company does a bad job is they go bankrupt and another company takes its place, and that’s how you get progress. And of course, below that is what happens is this is the process of evolution. Why does anything ever get better? Things are tested and tried, and then the things that are good survive. And so these places, they’ve been allowed to cut themselves off, both from evolution of the institutional level and evolution of the individual level as shown by the just widespread abuse of tenure. And so we’ve just stalled out. We built an ossified system, an ossified, centralized, corrupt system, where we’re surprised by the results. They are not fixable in their current form.
So the form of this in politics is we must do something. This is something, therefore we must do this. But there’s no causal logic chain in there at all to expect that that’s actually going to succeed because there’s no reason to believe that it is.
It’s insane, like obviously you can’t do it. Nobody in business thinks you can do that, it’s impossible. Now look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends who work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I’m wrong, I would love to be wrong, I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to fix it, I’d love to see them come back to their spoken principles, I think that’d be great, I’d love to see the professors with tenure get bravery, it would be fantastic. My partner and I have done a lot of public speaking on this topic, it’s been intended to not just be harsh, but also be like, okay, these challenges have to be confronted directly.
By the way, let me also say something positive, especially post-October seventh, there are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions like Mark Rowan who are really coming in trying to, I think legitimately trying to fix these places. I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities. He’s working overtime to try to do this.
Man, I hope they can figure it out. But the counter question would just be like, do you see it actually happening at a single one of these places?
I think the taxpayers do not understand this level of crisis, and I think if the taxpayers come to understand it, I think the funding evaporates. And so I think the fuse is going through no fault of any of ours, but the fuse is going and there’s some window of time here to fix this and address it and justify the money because just normal taxpayers sitting in normal towns in normal jobs are not going to tolerate this for that much longer.
So I think the way to think about this, so first of all, yeah. So I was involved in this at Facebook, by the way, I’ve been involved in this at Facebook every step of the way. I joined the board there in 2007 so I’ve seen everything in the last almost 20 years every step of the way. But also I’ve been involved in most of the other companies over time so I was angel investor on Twitter. I knew them really well. We were the founding investor in Substack. Part of the Elon takeover of Twitter with X. I was an angel at LinkedIn. So I’ve been in, we were the funder of Pinterest. We were one of the main investors there, Reddit as well. And I was having these conversations with all these guys all the way through. So as much talk specifically about Facebook, but I can just tell you the general pattern. And for quite a while it was kind of all the same across these companies.
So basically the way to think about this, the true kind of nuanced view of this is that there is practically speaking, no internet service that can have zero censorship. And by the way, that also mirrors, there is no country that actually has unlimited free speech either. The U.S. First Amendment actually has 12 or 13 formal carve outs from the Supreme Court over time. So incitement to violence and terrorist recruitment and child abuse and child pornography and so forth, they’re not covered by the First Amendment. And just practically speaking, if you and I are going to start an internet company and have a service, we can’t have that stuff either because illegal or it will just clearly destroy the whole thing.
So you’re always going to have a censorship engine. I mean hopefully it’s not actually in the browser, but you’re going to have it for sure at the level of an internet service. But then what happens is now you have a machine. Now you have a system where you can put in rules saying, we allow this. We don’t allow that. You have enforcement, you have consequences. And once that system is in place, it becomes the ring of power, which is like, okay, now anybody in that company or anybody associated with that company or anybody who wants to pressure that company will just start to say, “Okay, you should use that machine for more than just terrorist recruitment and child pornography. You should use it for X, Y, Z.”
And basically that transition happened, call it 2012, 2013 is when there was this very, very kind of rapid pivot. I think the kickoff to it for some reason it was the beginning of the second Obama term. I think it also coincided with the sort of arrival of the first kind of super woke kids into these schools. It’s the kids that were in school between for the Iraq war and then the global financial crisis and they came out super radicalized. They came into these companies, they immediately started mounting these social crusades to ban and censor lots of things.
And then quite frankly, the Democratic Party figured this out. And they figured out that these companies were very subject to being controlled and the executive teams and boards of directors were almost all Democrats. And there’s tremendous circulation. A lot of Obama people from the first term actually came and worked in these companies. And a lot of FBI people and other law enforcement intelligence people came in and worked and they were all Democrats for that set. And so the ring of power was lying on the table. It had been built and they picked it up and put it on, and then they just ran.
And the original discussions were basically always on two topics. It was hate speech and misinformation. Hate speech was the original one. And the hate speech conversation started exactly like you’d expect, which is we can’t have the N word. And which the answer is fair enough, let’s not have the N word. Now, we’ve set a precedent, and Jordan Peterson has talked a lot about this. The definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable. So we can’t have things that make people uncomfortable. I, course people like me that are disagreeable raise their hands and say, “Well, that idea right there makes me uncomfortable.” But of course that doesn’t count as hate speech. So the ring of power is on one hand and not on the other hand.
And then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that completely anodyne is the point Mark has been making recently completely anodyne comments that are completely legitimate on television or on the Senate floor all of a sudden are hate speech can’t be said online so that the ring of power was wielded in grossly irresponsible ways. We could talk about all the stuff that happened there.
And then the other one was misinformation. And there was a little bit of that early on, but of course that really kicked in with Trump. So hate speech stuff pre-dated Trump by three or four years. The misinformation stuff was, it was a little bit later and it was a consequence of the Russiagate hoax. And then that was a ring of power that was even more powerful because hate speech, it’s like, okay, at some point if something offensive or not, at least you can have a question as to whether that’s the case. But the problem with misinformation is like, is it the truth or not? What do we know for 800 years or whatever western civilization it’s that there’s only a few entities that can determine the truth on every topic. There’s God, there’s the king. We don’t have those anymore and the rest of us are all imperfect and flawed.
And so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is deeply anti-Western and deeply authoritarian. And somehow the misinformation kind of crusade went from the Russiagate hoax into just full-blown, we’re going to use that weapon for whatever we want.
And then of course, then the culminating moment on that, that really was the straw that broke the camel’s back was we’re going to censor all theories that the COVID virus might’ve been manufactured in a lab as misinformation. And inside these companies, that was the point where people for the first time, this is what, three years ago for the first time, they were like, that was when it sunk in where it’s just like, okay, this has spun completely out of control. But anyway, that’s how we got to where we are.
And then basically that spell lasted, that complex existed and got expanded basically from, call it 2013 to 2023. I think basically two things broke it. One is Substack, and I’m super proud of those guys because they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a free speech platform. And they came under intense pressure, including from the press, and they tried to beat them to the ground and kill them. And intense pressure, by the way, from let’s say certain of the platform companies basically threatening them. And they stood up to it. And sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of speech and conversation anywhere on planet Earth. And they’ve done a great job. And it is worked by the way. It’s great. And then obviously Elon with X was the hammer blow. And then the third one now is what Mark is doing at Facebook.
And for people who don’t recall what he did, and this was in the full-blown, you absolutely must lock down for two years. You absolutely must keep all the schools closed. You absolutely must have everybody work from home. You absolutely must wear a mask like the whole thing. And then one of those was you absolutely must believe that COVID was completely natural. You must believe that. And not believing that means you’re a fascist Nazi Trump supporter, MAGA, evil QAnon person. And uniformly, that was enforced by the social media companies. And like I said, that was the peak. And Jon Stewart went on the Colbert Show, and I don’t know if they planned it or not because Colbert looked shocked. I don’t know how much, it was a bit, but he went on there and he just had one of these, the Emperor’s wearing no clothes things where he said, “It’s just not plausible that you had the COVID super virus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute of lethal coronaviruses.” It’s just not plausible that certainly that you could just rule that out.
And then there was another key moment, actually, the more serious version was I think the author, Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York Magazine. And Nicholson Baker is one of our great novelist, writers of our time. And he wrote the piece and he did the complete undressing of it. And that was the first, I think that was the first legit, there had been alt renegade, there had been people running around saying this, but getting censored all over the place. That was the first one that was in the mainstream press and he talked to all the heretics and he just laid the whole thing out. And that was a moment.
And I remember let’s say a board meeting at one of these companies after that where basically everybody looked around the table and was like, “All right, I guess we’re not, we don’t need to censor that anymore.” And then of course, what immediately follows from that is, “Well, wait a minute, why were we censoring that in the first place?” And then the downstream, not that day, but the downstream conversations were like, “Okay, if we made such a giant, in retrospect, if we all made such a giant collective mistake censoring that, then what does that say about the rest of our regime?” And I think that was the thread in the sweater that started to unravel it.
I would say he has always taken upon himself a level of obligation, responsibility to running a company the size of Meta and to running services that are that large. And I think his conception of what he’s doing, which I think is correct, is he’s running services that are bigger than any country. Over 3 billion people use those services. And then the company has many tens of thousands of employees and many investors, and it’s a public company and he thinks very deeply and seriously about his responsibilities. And so he has not felt like he has had, let’s just say, the complete flexibility that Elon has had. And people could argue that one way or the other, but he talked about a lot. He’s evolved a lot. A lot of it was he learned a lot.
And by the way, I’m going to put myself right back up there. I’m not claiming any huge foresight or heroism on any of this. I’ve also learned a lot, my views on things are very different than they were 10 years ago on lots of topics. And so I’ve been on a learning journey. He’s been on a learning journey. He’s a really, really good learner. He assimilates information as good as, or better than anybody else I know.
The other thing I guess I would just say is he talked on that show about something very important, which is when you’re in a role where you’re running a company like that, there are a set of decisions that you get to make and you deserve to be criticized for those decisions and so forth and it’s valid, but you are under tremendous external pressure as well. And by the way, you’re under tremendous internal pressure. You’ve got your employees coming at you, you’ve got your executives in some cases coming at you. You’ve got your board in some cases coming at you. You’ve got your shareholders coming at you, so you’ve got your internal pressures, but you also have the press coming at you. You’ve got academia coming at you, you’ve got the entire nonprofit complex activist complex coming at you.
And then really critically, he talked about in Rogan and these companies all went through this, in this last especially five years, you had the government coming at you. And that’s the really stinky end of the pool where the government was, in my view, illegally exerting just in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on speech and coercion and conspiracy, forcing these companies to engage in activities. Again, in some cases they may have wanted to do, but in other cases they clearly didn’t want to do and felt like they had to do.
And the level of pressure, like I say, I’ve known every CEO Twitter, they’ve all had the exact same experience, which when they were in the job, it was just daily beatings. It’s just getting punched in the face every single day constantly. And Mark is very good at getting physically punched in the face and then-
And by the way, I should also say the cynicism of course is immediately out and it’s a legitimate thing for people to say, but it’s like, “Oh, you’re only doing this because of Trump or whatever.” And it’s just like, no, he has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time. And so I think what you saw are legitimate, deeply held beliefs, not some sort of just-in-the-moment thing that could change at any time.
Or my partner Ben, he was CEO of our last company before we started the venture firm. He said the problem he had with his family life was even when he was home at night, he wasn’t home because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems. And so he was supposed to be having dinner with his kids and he was physically there, but he wasn’t mentally there so you get that a lot. But the key thing is you can’t talk to people. You can. I mean, you can talk to your spouse and your kids, but they don’t understand that they’re not working in your company. They don’t understand, have the context to really help you. If you talk to your executives, they all have agendas and they can’t resist. It’s just human nature. And so you can’t necessarily rely on what they say. It’s very hard in most companies to talk to your board because they can fire you.
Now, Mark has the situation because he has control, it actually turns out he can talk to his board. And Mark talks to us about many things that most CEOs won’t talk to their boards about literally because we can’t fire him. But a general, including all the CEOs of Twitter, none of them had control and so they could all get fired. You can’t talk to the board members. They’re going to fire, you can’t talk to the shareholders because they’ll just dump your stock. Okay.
So every once in a while, what you find is basically the best case scenario they have is they can talk to other CEOs, and there’s these little organizations where they kind of pair up and do that and so they maybe get a little bit out of that. But even that’s fraught with peril because can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO, insider trading risk. And so it’s just a very lonely isolating thing to start with.
And then on top of that, you apply pressure, and that’s where it gets painful. And then maybe I’ll just spend a moment on this internal external pressure thing. My general experience with companies is that they can withstand most forms of external pressure as long as they retain internal coherence. So as long as the internal team is really bonded together and supporting each other, most forms of external pressure you can withstand. And by that I mean investors dump your stock, you lose your biggest customers, whatever negative article, negative headline, you can withstand all that. And basically, in fact, many of those forms of pressure can be bonding experiences for the team where they come out stronger.
What you 100% cannot withstand is the internal crack. And what I always look for in high pressure corporate situations now is the moment when the internal team cracks because I know the minute that happens, we’re in a different regime. It’s like the solid has turned into a liquid, we’re in a different regime, and the whole thing can unravel in the next week because then people turn, I mean, this is what’s happening in Los Angeles right now. The mayor and the fire chief turned on each other, and that’s it. That government is dysfunctional. It is never going to get put back together again. It is over. It is not going to work ever again. And that’s what happens to inside companies.
And so somebody like Mark is under profound internal pressure and external pressure at the same time. Now he’s been very good at maintaining the coherence of his executive team, but he has had over the years, a lot of activist employees as a lot of these companies have had and so that’s been continuous pressure.
And then the final thing I’d say is I said that companies can withstand most forms of external pressure, but not all [inaudible 01:31:21] though not all one is government pressure. Is it when your government comes for you? Yeah. Any CEO who thinks that they’re bigger than their government, has that notion beaten out of them in short order.
The second is Mark referenced this in the Rogan podcast. There’s a congressman Jim Jordan who has a congressional committee called the Weaponization Committee. And they, in the last, whatever three years, have done a full-scale investigation of this. And Facebook produced a lot of documents into that investigation and many of those have now been made public and you can download those reports. And there’s 2000 pages worth of material on that. And that’s essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter files just arrived at with a different mechanism.
And then third is Mark himself talking about this on Rogan, so I’ll just defer to his comments there. But yeah, basically what those three forms of information show you is basically the government over time and then culminating in 2020, 2021 in the last four years, just decided that the First Amendment didn’t apply to them. And they just decided that federal laws around free speech and around conspiracies to take away the rights of citizens just don’t apply. And they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, just like literally arbitrarily call up companies and threaten and bully and yell and scream and threaten repercussions and force them to censor.
And there’s this whole thing of like, well, the First Amendment only applies to, the government, it doesn’t apply to companies. It’s like, well, there’s actually a little bit of nuance to that. First of all, it definitely applies to the government. 100%, the First Amendment applies to the government. By the way, so does the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, including the right to due process, also applies to the government. There was no due process at all to any of the censorship regime that was put in place. There was no due process put in place, by the way, for de-banking either. Those are just as serious violations as the free speech violations. And so this is just flagrant, flagrant, unconstitutional behavior.
And then there are specific federal statutes, 18 241 and 18 242, and one of them applies to federal employees, government employees, and the other one applies to private actors around what’s called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights. And it is not legal according to the United States Criminal Code for government employees or in a conspiracy private entities to take away constitutional rights. And interestingly, some of those constitutional rights are enumerated, for example, in the First Amendment, freedom of speech. And then some of those rights actually do not need to be enumerated. If the government takes away rights that you have, they don’t need to be specifically enumerated rights in the Constitution in order to still be a felony. The Constitution very specifically does not say you only have the rights that it gives you. It says you have all the rights that have not been previously defined as being taken away from you. And so de-banking qualifies as a right, right to access to the financial system, is every bit something that’s subject to these laws as free speech. And so yeah, this has happened.
And then I’ll just add one final thing, which is we’ve talked about two parties so far. We talked about the government employees and then we’ve talked about the companies. The government employees for sure have misbehaved. The companies, there’s a very interesting question there as to whether they are victims or perpetrators or both. They will defend, they will argue, and I believe they have a good case, that they are victims, not perpetrators, right? They’re the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause of pressure, but there’s a big swath of people who are in the middle and specifically the ones that are funded by the government that I think are in possibly pretty big trouble. And that’s all of these third-party censorship bureaus.
I mean, the one that is most obvious is the so-called Stanford Internet Observatory that got booted up there over the last several years. And they basically were funded by the federal government to be third-party censorship operations. And they’re private sector actors, but acting with federal funding. And so it puts them in this very interesting spot where there could be very obvious theory under which they’re basically acting as agents of the government. And so I think they’re also very exposed on this and have behaved in just flagrantly illegal ways.
There’s subject to tens of thousands of regulations that they have to comply with. And the hammer that comes down when you don’t comply with regulations is profound. They can completely wreck your company with no ability for you to do anything about it. So regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised.
And then there’s called just flat out administrative power, the term that you’ll hear and administrative power is just literally the government telling you, calling you and telling you what to do. Here’s an example of how this works. So Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra. And they built the entire system and it was this high-scale sort of new cryptocurrency, and they were going to build into every product, and they were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra. And they went to the government and they went to all these different, trying to figure out how to make it so it’s fully compliant with anti-money laundering and all these controls and everything. And they had the whole thing ready to go.
Two senators wrote letters to the big banks saying, “We’re not telling you that you can’t work with Facebook on this, but if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business is going to come under greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny,” which is of course the exact equivalent of it sure is a nice corner restaurant you have here. It would be a shame if somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight, right?
And so what is that letter? It’s not a law. It’s not even a regulation, it’s just.
I have no idea what part of this recent election mapped to the censorship regime. I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship, but I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side. Maybe some people on the left will now not want their Democratic nominees to be so pro censorship. So the voters definitely get a vote, number one. Number two, I think you need transparency. You need to know what happened. We know some of what happened. Peter Thiel has written in the FT just now saying, after what we’ve been through in the last decade we need the broad-based truth and reconciliation efforts to really get to the root of things. So maybe that’s part of it. We need investigations for sure. Ultimately, we need prosecutions. Ultimately, we need people to go to jail. Because we need to set object lessons that say that you don’t get to do this. And on those last two, I would say those are both up to the new administration, and I don’t want to speak for them and I don’t want to predict what they’re going to do, but they for sure have the ability to do both of those things and we’ll see where they take it.
I think you said something actually quite profound there, which is the ring of power is infinitely tempting. The censorship machine is infinitely tempting. If you have it, you are going to use it. It’s overwhelmingly tempting because it’s so powerful, and that it will corrupt you. Yeah. I don’t know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don’t know if they do. But yeah. You go out five or 10 years later, you would hope that you would realize that your soul has been corroded and you probably started out thinking that you were a patriot and you were trying to defend democracy, and you ended up being extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic and anti-western.
But I think a lot of the stuff that gets people mad at him is like, it’s the social and political stuff, and it’s his statements, and then it’s the downstream effects of his statements. So for example, for the last couple of weeks, it’s been him weighing in on this rape gang scandal, this organized child rape thing in the UK. It’s a preface cascade. It’s one of these things where people knew there was a problem, they weren’t willing to talk about it, it got suppressed. And then Elon brought it up, and then all of a sudden there’s now in the UK this massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time. It’s like this catalyzing, all of a sudden everybody’s woken up and being like, “Oh my God, this is really bad.” And there will be now pretty clearly big changes as a result.
And Elon, he played the role of the boy who said, the emperor has no clothes. But here’s the thing, here’s my point. He said it about something that was true. And so had he said it about something that was false, he would get no credit for it. He wouldn’t deserve any credit for it. But he said something that was true. And by the way, everybody over there instantly, they were like, “Oh, yeah, he’s right.” They’re just arguing the details now. So number one, it’s like, okay, he says true things. And so it’s like, okay, how far … Put it this way. How worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power being that they get to speak the truth? And I guess I would say, especially in the last decade of what we’ve been through where everybody’s been lying all the time about everything, I’d say, I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth. And so I don’t feel that bad about that.
And then the money side, this rapidly gets into the money in politics question. And the money in politics question is this very interesting question because it seems like there’s a clear cut case that the more money in politics, the worse things are and the more corrupted the system is. That was a very popular topic of public conversation up until 2016 when Hillary outspent Trump three to one and lost. You’ll notice that money in politics has almost vanished as a topic in the last eight years. And once again, Kamala raised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden had spent. So they were at, I don’t know, something like three billion total and Trump, I think spent again, a third or a fourth of that. So the money in politics topic has vanished from the popular conversation in the last eight years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending. But again, it’s like, okay, he’s spending, but the data would seem to indicate, at least in the last eight years, that money doesn’t win the political battles. The voters actually have a voice and they actually exercise it, and they don’t just listen to ads. And so again, there, I would say, yeah, clearly there’s some power there, but I don’t know if it’s some weapon that he can just turn on and use in a definitive way.
So the one thing that we’re all told, we’re all taught from early is that the best people in the world are the people who care about all of humanity. All of our figures are people who care about all of … Jesus cared about all of humanity. Gandhi cared about all of humanity. Martin Luther King cared about all of humanity. The person who cares the most about everybody. And with Elon, you have a guy who literally … He talks about this constantly, and he talks about exactly the same in private. He is literally, he is operating on behalf of all of humanity to try to get us … He goes through to get us through multi-planetary civilization so that we can survive a strike at any one planet so that we can extend the light of human consciousness into the world and into the universe and have it persist in the good of the whole thing. And literally the critique is, yeah, we want you to care about all of humanity, but not like that.
And this guy, Michels had this concept he ended up with called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. And so what the Iron Law of Oligarchy … Take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy because it has multiple meanings. So basically, in classic political theory, there’s basically three forms of government at core. There’s democracy, which is rule of many, there’s oligarchy, which is rule of the few, and there’s monarchy, which is rule of the one. And you can just use that as a general framework of any government going to be under is going to be one of those. Just mechanical observation. Without even saying which one’s good or bad, just a structural observation. And so the question that Michels asked was, is there such a thing as democracy? Is there actually such a thing as democracy? Is there ever actually direct government? And what he did was he mounted this incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world. And the answer basically is almost never. And we could talk about that.
But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically communist German autoworkers union that was wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting back when that was the hot thing. And he went in there and he is like, okay, this is the organization out of all organizations on planet Earth that must be operating as a direct democracy. And he went in there and he’s like, “Oh, nope.” There’s a leadership class. There’s like six guys at the top and they control everything and they lead the rest of the membership along by the nose, which is of course the story of every union. The story of every union is always the story of there’s a Jimmy Hoffa in there running the thing. We just saw that with the dock worker’s union. There’s a guy and he’s in charge. And by the way, the number two is his son. That’s not an accident.
So the Iron Law of Oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There’s always a ruling class. There’s always a ruling elite structurally. And he said, “The reason for that is because the masses can’t organize.” What’s the fundamental problem? Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can’t organize, the majority cannot organize, only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority. Every single one. The Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy, and they were total disasters. In Florence … I forget the name of it. It was called The Workers’ Revolt or something like that. There was a two-year period where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance, and it was a complete disaster and they never tried it again.
In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system, which is an overlay on top of the legislature. Anybody who looks at it for two seconds concludes it’s been a complete disaster. It’s just a catastrophe, and it’s caused enormous damage to the state. And so basically the presumption that we are in a democracy is just by definition, fake. Now, good news for the US. It turns out the founders understood this. And so of course they didn’t give us a direct democracy. They gave us a representative democracy. And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch. So anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you’re fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what’s happening.
But what’s interesting is they didn’t choose one or the other. They did them both. And then to get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. And so they built in a second layer of checks and balances. And then there’s a thousand observations we could make about how well the system is working today and how much does it live up to the ideal, and how much are we actually complying with the constitution? And there’s lots of open questions there, but this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful. But I don’t think, at least … I don’t think any of us would trade the system for any other one. And so it’s one of the great all time achievements.
By the way, if the employees revolt, it’s also hard to stay in the seat. By the way, if the New York Times comes at you, it’s also very hard to stay in the seat. If the Senate comes at you, it’s very hard to stay in the seat. So a reductionist version of this that is a good shorthand is who can get who fired? So who has more power? The newspaper columnist who makes $200,000 a year, or the CEO who makes $200 million a year/ and it’s like, well, I know for sure that the columnist can get the CEO fired. I’ve seen that happen before I have yet to see a CEO get a columnist fired.
So there’s a fascinating thing playing out right now. Not to dwell on these fires. But you see the pressure reveals things, right? And so if you’ve been watching what’s happening with the LA Times recently. So this guy, biotech entrepreneur buys the LA Times, whatever, eight years ago. It is just like the most radical social revolutionary thing you can possibly imagine. It endorses every crazy left-wing radical you can imagine. It endorses Karen Bass, it endorses Gavin Newsom. It’s just a litany of all the people who are currently burning the city to the ground. It’s just like endorsed every single bad person every step of the way. He’s owned it the entire time. He for the first time, I think, put his foot down right before the November election and said, we’re not … He said, “We’re going to get out of this thing where we just always endorse the Democrat.” I think he said, “We’re not endorsing for the presidency.” And the paper flipped out. It’s like our billionaire backer who’s … And I don’t know what he spends, but he must be burning 50 or a hundred million dollars a year out of his pocket to keep this thing running.
He paid 500 million for it, which is amazing. Back when people still thought these things were businesses. And then he’s probably burned another 500 million over the last decade keeping it running. And he burns probably another 50, a hundred million a year to do this. And the journalists at the LA Times hate him with the fury of a thousand suns. They just absolutely freaking despise him, and they have been attacking him. The ones that can get jobs elsewhere quit and do it, and the rest just stay and say the worst, most horrible things about him. And they want to constantly run these stories attack him. And so he has had this reaction that a lot of people in LA are having right now to this fire and to this just incredibly vivid collapse of leadership. And all these people that his paper head endorsed are just disasters.
He’s on this tour. Basically he’s decided to be the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, but he’s doing it to his own newspaper. Very smart guy. He is on a press tour and he is basically saying, yes, we did all that and we endorsed all these people and it was a huge mistake and we’re going to completely change. And his paper is in a complete internal revolt. But I go through it, which is okay, now we have a very interesting question, which is who runs the LA Times? Because for the last eight years, it hasn’t been him. It’s been the reporters. Now for the first time, the owner is showing up saying, “Oh no, I’m actually in charge,” and the reporters are saying, “No, you’re not.” It is freaking on. And so again, the Machiavellian’s mindset on this is like, okay, how is power actually exercised here? Can a guy who’s even super rich and super powerful who even owns his own newspaper, can he stand up to a full scale assault, not only by his own reporters, but by every other journalism outlet who also now thinks he’s the Antichrist?
So it turns out with Bill’s … It’s such a fascinating case. He has that complete skill set. And he has now decided to bring it to bear in areas that are not just companies. And two interesting things for that. One is some of these places and some of these battles are still ongoing, but number one, a lot of people who run universities or newspapers are not used to being up against somebody like this. And by the way, also now with infinitely deep pockets and lots of experience in courtrooms and all the things that go with that. But the other is through example he is teaching a lot of the rest of us the activists playbook in real time. And so the Liam Neeson skill set is getting more broadly diffused just by being able to watch and learn from him. So I think he’s having a … I would put him up there with Elon in terms of somebody who’s really affecting how all this is playing out.
And so the concern, including from some very smart people in the last two years has been, boy, if Trump gets a second term, is he going to be able to get a team that is as good as the team he had last time or a team that is actually not as good? Because maybe people got burned out. Maybe they’re more cynical now. Maybe they’re not willing to go through the drama. By the way, a lot of people in the first term came under their own withering legal assaults, and some of them went to prison. A lot of stuff happened. Lots of investigations, lots of legal fees, lots of bad press, lots of debanking by the way. A lot of the officials in the first Trump term got debanked, including the president’s wife and son.
And so they’re going to get, I think, some of the best people from the first term, but they’re bringing in a lot of people who they couldn’t get the first time around. And then second is there’s a bunch of people, including people in the first term where they’re just 10 years older. And so they went through the first term and they just learned how everything works. Or there are young people who just had a different point of view and now they’re 10 years older and they’re ready to go serve in government. So there’s a generational shift happening. And actually one of the interesting things about the team that’s forming up is it’s remarkably young. Some of the cabinet members and then many of the second and third level people are in their 30s and 40s, which is a big change from the gerontocracy that we’ve been under for the last 30 years.
I think the caliber has been outstanding. And we could sit here and list tons and tons of people, but the people who are running. It’s everything from the people who are running all the different departments at HHS. The number two at the Pentagon is Steve Feinberg, who’s just an incredible legend of private equity, incredible capable guy. Actually two of my partners are going in who I both think are amazing. Many, many parts of the government the people are really impressive.
And the people thing is interesting, because you get into these very fascinating questions. And I’ve been doing this, I won’t do this for you as a pop quiz, but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz and I can stump them every time. Which is, A, how many federal agencies are there? And the answer is somewhere between 450 and 520, and nobody’s quite sure. And then the other is how many people work for the federal government? And the answer is something on the order, I forget, but like 4 million full-time employees and maybe up to 20 million contractors, and nobody’s quite sure. And so there’s a large people component to this. And then by the way, there’s a related component to that, which is how many of them are actually in the office? And the answer is not many, most of the federal buildings are still empty.
And then there’s questions of are people working from home or are we actually working from home? So there’s the people dimension, and of course the money and the people are connected. And then there’s the third, which is the regulation thing. And I described earlier how basically our system of government is much more now based on regulations than legislation. Most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress, they’re from an agency that created a regulation. That turns out to be very, very important. So one is Elon had already described the DOGE wants to do broad-based regulatory relief, and Trump has talked about this, and basically get the government off of people’s backs and liberate the American people to be able to do things again. So that’s part of it. But there’s also something else that’s happened, which is very interesting, which was there were a set of Supreme Court decisions about two years ago that went directly after the idea that the executive branch can create regulatory agencies, and issue regulations and enforce those regulations without corresponding congressional legislation.
And most of the federal government that exists today, including most of the departments and most of the rules and most of the money and most of the people, most of it is not enforcing laws that Congress passed. Most of it is regulation. And the Supreme Court basically said, “Large parts, large to maybe all of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress, the way that the cartoon said that it should, may not actually be legal. Now, the previous White House, of course, was super in favor of big government. They did nothing based on this, they didn’t pull anything back in. But the new regime, if they choose to, could say, “Look, the thing that we’re doing here is not challenging the laws, we’re actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this and we have to unwind the regulations which are no longer legal, constitutional. We have to unwind the spend and we have to unwind the people.
And that’s how you get from basically you connect the thread from the regulation part back to the money part back to the people part. They have work going on all three of these threads. They have, I would say, incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this. I know lots of former government people who 100% of them are super cynical on this topic, and they’re like, “This is impossible, this could never possibly work.” And I’m like, “Well, I can’t tell you what the secret plans are, but blow my mind.” And all three of those, they have ideas that are really quite amazing, as you’d expect from the people involved. And so over the course of the next few months, that’ll start to become visible. And then the final thing I would say is this is going to be very different than attempts, there have been other programs like this in the past. The Clinton-Gore administration had one and then there were others before that, Reagan had one. The difference is this time, their social media,
It’s interesting, one of the reasons people in Washington are so cynical is because they know all the bull shit. They know all the bad spending and all the bad rules. Look, we’re adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now. And that’s compounding, and it’s now passing the size of the defense department budget and it’s compounding, and pretty soon it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days, and then it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days, and then it’s going to be a trillion dollars every 70 days. And then if this doesn’t get fixed, at some point we enter a hyperinflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil, and [inaudible 02:18:44]. And so everybody in D.C. knows that something has to be done, and then everybody in D.C. knows for a fact that it’s impossible to do anything.
They know all the problems and they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing it. But I think what they’re not taking into account, what the critics are not taking into account is these guys can do this in the full light of day. And they can do it on social media, they can completely bypass the press, they can completely bypass the cynicism. They can expose any element of unconstitutional or silly government spending. They can run victory laps every single day on what they’re doing. They can bring the people into the process. And again, if you think about it, this goes back to our Machiavellian structure, which is if you think about, again, you’ve got democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, rule of the many, rule of the few, rule of the one. You could think about what’s happening here as a little bit of a sandwich, which is we don’t have a monarch, but we have a president, rule of the one with some power.
And then we have the people who can’t organize, but they can be informed and they can be aware, and they can express themselves through voting and polling. So there’s a sandwich happening right now is the way to think about it, which is you’ve got basically rule of one combining with rule of many. And rule of many is they do get to vote, the people do get to vote basically, and then essentially Congress and this permanent bureaucratic class in Washington as the oligarchy in the middle. And so the White House plus the people I think have the power to do all kinds of things here, and I think that would be the way I would wash it.
And then that’s just one of those programs, there’s 100 of those programs. And they’re all just like that, it’s not like any of this stuff is running well. The one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well, we know that for sure. And we know these people aren’t showing up to work, and we know that all this crazy stuff is happening. Do you remember Elon’s story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania? Oh, okay. So Pennsylvania is like a wonderful state, great history. It has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended other cities into just complete chaos, violent madness, and death. And the federal government has just let it happen, these incredibly violent places.
And so the Biden administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do in Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk with armed raids. And it turns out it really pissed off the Amish. It turns out they weren’t willing to drive to the polling places because they don’t have cars, but if you came and got them, they would go and they would vote. And that’s one of the reasons why Trump won. Anyway, so the law enforcement agencies are off working on crazy things. The system’s not working. And so you add up, just pick $130 billion programs, all right, now you’re okay. Math major, 100 times 100.
Like, okay, A, that’s not what’s in the constitution. And there’s actually quite a good Wikipedia page that goes through the great debate on this that’s played out in the legal world over the last 60 years. And basically, if you look at this with anything resembling I think an open mind, you’re like, “All right, this is not what the founders meant.” And then number two, again, we go back to this thing of contempt. Can you imagine showing up and running the government like that and thinking that you’re doing the right thing, and not going home at night and thinking that you’ve sold your soul? I actually think you headed it a really good point, which is it’s even unfair to the people who have to execute this because it makes them bad people, and they didn’t start out wanting to be bad people. And so there is stuff like this.
Let’s start with this, where I ended up, in Silicon Valley, and I have made the pro high-skilled immigration argument many, many times, the H-1B argument many times. In past lives, I’ve been in D.C. many times arguing with prior administrations about this, always on the side of trying to get more H-1B’s and trying to get more high-skilled immigration. And I think that argument is very strong and very solid, and has paid off for the US in many, many ways. And we can go through it, but I think it’s the argument everybody already knows, it’s like the stock. You take any Silicon Valley person, you press the button and they tell you why we need to brain drain the world to get more H-1B’s. So everybody gets that argument.
And then the other part is, look, I benefit every day. I always describe it as I work in the United Nations, my own firm and our founders and our companies and the industry and my friends are just this amazing panoply, cornucopia of people from all over the world. And I’ve worked, I don’t know, at this point with people from, it’s got to be, I don’t know, 80 countries or something, and hopefully over time it’ll be the rest as well. And it’s been amazing, and they’ve done many of the most important things in my industry and it’s been really remarkable. So that’s all good. And then there’s just the practical version of the argument, which is we are the main place these people get educated anyway. The best and the brightest tend to come here to get educated. And so this is the old Mitt Romney, staple a green card to maybe not every university degree, but every technical degree. Maybe the sociologists we could quibble about, but the roboticists for sure, for sure. For sure, we can all agree that-
We don’t have enough good founders, we don’t have enough engineers, we don’t have enough scientists. Or then the next version of the argument below that is our education system is not good enough to generate those people, which is a weird argument by the way. Because our education system is good enough for foreigners to be able to come here preferentially in a very large number of cases, but somehow not good enough to educate our own native foreign people. So there’s little cracks in the matrix that you can stick your fingernail into and wonder about and we’ll come back to that one. But at least, yes, our education system has its flaws. And then underneath that is the argument that Vivek made, which is we have cultural rot in the country and native-born people in the country don’t work hard enough, and spend too much time watching TV and TikTok and don’t spend enough time studying differential equations.
And again, it’s like, all right, yeah, there’s a fair amount to that. There’s a lot of American culture that is, there’s a lot of frivolity, we have well-documented social issues on many fronts, many things that cut against having a culture of just straightforward, high achievement and effort and striving. But anyway, those are the basic arguments. But then I have this other side of my personality and thought process, which is, well, I grew up in a small farming town of rural Wisconsin, the rural Midwest, and it’s interesting, there’s not a lot of people who make it from rural Wisconsin to high tech.
And so it’s like, all right, why is that exactly? And I know this, I’m an aberration. I was the only one from anybody I ever knew who ever did this. I know what an aberration I am and I know exactly how that aberration happened, and it’s a very unusual set of steps, including many that were just luck. But there is in no sense a talent flow from rural Wisconsin into high tech, like not at all. There is also in no sense a talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into high tech. There is no talent flow from the south into high tech. There is no flow from the Sunbelt into high tech. There’s no flow from the deep south into high tech. Literally, it’s like the blanks. There’s this whole section of the country where the people just for some reason don’t end up in tech.
Now, that’s a little bit strange, because these are the people who put a man on the moon. These are the people who built the World War II War Machine. These are the people, at least their ancestors are the people who built the second industrial revolution, and built the railroads and built the telephone network and built logistics and transportation in the auto industry. The auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit. And so at least these people’s parents and grandparents and great grandparents somehow had the wherewithal to build all of these amazing things, invent all these things.
And then there’s many, many, many, many stories in the history of American invention and innovation and capitalism, where you had people who grew up in the middle of nowhere, Philo Farnsworth who invented the television, and just tons and tons of others, endless stories like this. Now you have a puzzle and the conundrum, which is like, okay, what is happening on the blank spot of the map? And then of course, you also can’t help noticing that the blank spot on the map, the Midwest, the South, you’ve also just defined Trump country, the Trump voter base.
And it’s like, oh, well, that’s interesting. How did that happen? And so either you really, really, really have to believe the very, very strong version of the Vivek thesis or something, where you have to believe that that basically culture, the whole civilization in the middle of the country and the south of the country is so deeply flawed, either inherently flawed or culturally flawed, such that for whatever reason, they’re not able to do the things that their parents and grandparents were able to do, and that their peers are able to do. Or something else is happening. Would you care to guess on what else is happening?
But the Supreme Court upheld it for a very long time. The most recent ruling, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t have the exact reference in my head, but there was a case in 2003 that said that Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote that although it had been 30 years of affirmative action and although it was not working remotely as it had been intended, she said that, well, basically we need to try it for another 25 years. But she said basically as a message to future Supreme Court justices, if it hasn’t resolved basically the issues it’s intended to resolve within 25 years, then we should probably call it off. By the way, we’re coming up on the 25 years, it’s a couple of years away. The Supreme Court just had these cases, it’s a Harvard case and I think a University of North Carolina case.
And what’s interesting about those cases is the lawyers in those cases put a tremendous amount of evidence into the record of how the admissions decisions actually happen at Harvard and happen at UNC. And it is like every bit as cartoonishly garish and racist as you could possibly imagine, because it’s a ring of power. And if you’re an admissions officer at a private university or an administrator, you have unlimited power to do what you want, and you can justify any of it under any of these rules or systems. And up until these cases, it had been a black box where you didn’t have to explain yourself and show your work. And what the Harvard and UNC cases did is they basically required showing the work. And there was all kinds of phenomenal detail, number one is there were text messages in there that will just curl your hair, of students being spoken of and just crude racial stereotypes that would just make you want to jump out the window. It’s horrible stuff.
But also, there was statistical information. And of course, the big statistical kicker to the whole thing is that at top institutions, it’s common for different ethnic groups to have different cutoffs for SAT that are as wide as 400 points. So different groups. So specifically Asians need to perform at 400 SAT points higher than other ethnicities in order to actually get admitted into these. White people are a part of this, but Asians are a very big part of this. And actually the Harvard case is actually brought by an activist on behalf of actually the Asian students who are being turned away. And it’s the cliche now in the valley and in the medical community, which is like, if you want a super genius you hire an Asian from Harvard, because they are guaranteed to be freaking Einstein. Because if they weren’t, they were never getting admitted. Almost all the qualified Asians get turned away.
So they’ve been running this, it’s a very, very explicit, very, very clear program. This, of course, has been a third rail of things that people are not supposed to discuss under any circumstances. The thing that has really changed the tenor on this is I think two things. Number one, those Supreme Court cases, the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that. I will tell you, I don’t believe there’s a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling, I think they’re all flagrantly ignoring it. And we could talk about that.
Well, another example of that is I think that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale, the level of incestuousness here is… Anyway, so there’s that. And so this has been running for a very long time. So one is the Harvard and UNC cases gave up the game, number one, or at least showed what the mechanism was. And then number two, the other thing is obviously the aftermath of October 7th, and what we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants and what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants was they were being managed down, either being actively managed down as a percentage of the base. And let’s say I’ve heard reports of extremely explicit basically plans to manage the Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the US population, which is 2%. And there’s a whole backstory here, which is 100 years ago, Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions, and then there was a big campaign to get them in.
Once they could get in, they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there are so many smart, talented Jews. So it went from 0% to 30%, and then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it done to 2%. And a lot of Jewish people, at least a lot of Jewish people I know, they kind of knew this was happening but they discovered it the hard way after October 7th. So basically the Supreme Court case meant that you could address this in terms of the Asian victims. The October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims. And for sure, both of those groups are being systematically excluded. And then of course, there’s the thing that you basically can’t talk about, which is all the white people are being excluded. And then it turns out it’s also happening to black people, and this is the thing that blew my freaking mind when I found out about it.
So I just assumed that this was great news for American Blacks, because obviously if Whites, Asians, and Jews are being excluded, then the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the Black population up, and so this must be great for American Blacks. So then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 called Blacks are Being Admitted into Top Schools at Greater Numbers, but which ones? And by the way, this is in the New York Times, this is not in, whatever, The National Review, this is New York Times, 2004. And the two authorities that were quoted in the story are Henry Louis Gates, who’s the dean of the African-American Studies community in the United States, super brilliant guy. And then Lani Guinier, she was a potential Supreme Court appointee under, I think she was a close friend of Hillary Clinton.
And there was for a long time, she was on the short list for Supreme Court. So one of the top jurists, lawyers in the country, but both Black, legendarily successful in the academic and legal worlds and Black. And they are quoted as the authorities in this story, and the story that they tell, it’s actually amazing. And by the way, it’s happening today in education institutions and it’s happening in companies, and you can see it all over the place, and the government. Which is at least at that time, the number was half of the Black admits into a place like Harvard were not American-born Blacks, they were foreign-born Blacks, specifically Northern African, generally Nigerian or West Indian.
And by the way, many Nigerians and Northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful. Nigerian-Americans as a group way outperform, they’re just a super smart cohort of people. And then West Indian Blacks in the US are incredibly successful. Most recently, by the way, Kamala Harris, as well as Colin Powell, just two examples of that. And so basically what Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either, whatever it was, identify, recruit, make successful, whatever it was, American-born native Blacks, and so therefore they were using high-skill immigration as an escape hatch to go get Blacks from other countries. And then this was 2004 when you could discuss such things, obviously that is a topic that nobody has discussed since, it has sailed on. All of the DEI programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic.
There’s large numbers of Black people in America who are fully aware of this and are like, “It’s obviously not us that are getting these slots, we’re literally competing with people who are being imported.” And if you believe in the basis of affirmative action, you were trying to make up for historical injustice of American Black slavery. So the idea that you import somebody from Nigeria that never experienced that is tremendously insulting to Black Americans. Anyway, so you can see where I’m heading with this. We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into. And so it turns out it’s not a victim-free thing, there’s 100%, there’s victims. Because why? There’s only so many, for sure there’s only so many education slots, and then for sure, there’s only so many of these jobs. Google only hires so many, whatever, level seven engineers. And so that’s the other side of it, and so you’re a farm boy in Wisconsin.
And then DEI is just another word for affirmative action, so it’s the affirmative action conversation. And you need to actually deal with this at substance and to see what’s actually happening to people, you needed to join these topics. And I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high-skilled immigration given the extent to which DEI took over both the education process and the hiring process.
Generally what you get is you get… Because if you don’t have experts, what do you have? You know something is wrong, but you have primarily an emotional response. You feel it, but can you put it into the words and tables and charts that a certified expert can? No, you can’t, that’s not who you are. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, and it also doesn’t mean that you have less of a moral stance. And so, it’s just like, all right… Now, by the way, look, I think there are ways to square the circle, I think there’s a way to have our cake and eat it too, I think there’d be many ways to resolve this. I think, again, I think the way to do it is to look at these issues combined, look at DEI combined with high-skilled immigration. It so happens that DEI is under much more scrutiny today than it has been for probably 20 years, affirmative action is. The Supreme Court did just rule that it is not legal for universities to do that, they are still doing it, but they should stop.
And then, there are more and more, you’ve seen more companies now also ditching their DEI programs, in part… That’s happening for a bunch of reasons, but it’s happening in part because a lot of corporate lawyers will tell you that the Supreme Court rulings in education either already apply to businesses, or it just is a clear foreshadowing the Supreme Court will rule on new cases that will ban in businesses. And so, there is a moment here to be able to look at this on both sides. Let me add one more nuance to it though, that makes it even more complicated. So, the cliché is we’re going to brain drain the world, you’ve heard that? We’re going to take all the smart people from all over the world, we’re going to bring them here, we’re going to educate them, and then we’re going to keep them, and then they’re going to raise their families here, create businesses here, create jobs here, right?
By the way, this is a potential… I know you care a lot about Ukraine, this is a potential crisis for Ukraine. In part because of this, because we enthusiastically recruit Ukrainians, of course, and so we’ve been brain draining Ukraine for a long time, but also, of course, war does tend to cause people to migrate out. And so, when it comes time for Ukraine to rebuild as a peaceful country, is it going to have the talent base even that it had five years ago, is a very big and important question. By the way, Russia, we have brain drained a lot of really smart people out of Russia, a lot of them are here, over the last 30 years. And so, there’s this thing, it’s actually really funny if you think about it, the one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever did was colonization and resource extraction.
So, we know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and everybody else went and had these colonies, and then went in and we took all the oil, and we took all the diamonds, or we took all the whatever, lithium or whatever it is. Well, for some reason we realized that that’s a deeply evil thing to do when it’s a physical resource, when it’s a non-conscious physical matter, for some reason we think it’s completely morally acceptable to do it with human capital. In fact, we think it’s glorious and beautiful and wonderful and the great flowering of peace and harmony and moral justice of our time to do it, and we don’t think for one second what we’re doing to the countries that we’re pulling all these people out of.
And this is one of these things, I don’t know, maybe we’re just going to live in this delusional state forever, and we’ll just keep doing it, and it’ll keep benefiting us, and we just won’t care what happens, but I think there may come… This is one of these submarines 10 feet under the water line, I think it’s just a matter of time until people suddenly realize, oh my God, what are we doing? We need the rest of the world to succeed too, we need these other countries to flourish. We don’t want to be the only successful country in the middle of just complete chaos and disaster, and we just extract and we extract and we extract, and we don’t think twice about it.
One is basically a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think, and then the other is it goes to these, what they call the mills, the consulting mills. And so, there’s these set of companies with names, I don’t want to pick on companies, but names like Cognizant, that hire, basically have their business model is bringing in primarily Indians in large numbers, and they often have offices next to company-owned housing, and they’ll have organizations that are literally thousands of Indians living and working in the US, and they do basically call it mid-tier IT consulting. So, these folks, they’re making good wages, but they’re making 60 or 80 a or 100,000 a year, not the 300,000 that you’d make in the Valley.
And so, in practice, the startups, basically little tech as we call it, or the startup world, mainly doesn’t use H-1Bs at this point, and mainly can’t, because the system is kind of rigged in a way that we really can’t. And then, again, you get to the underlying morality here, which is, it’s like, well, Amazon, Amazon’s… I love Amazon. But they’re a big powerful company, they’ve got more money than God, they’ve got resources, they’ve got long-term planning horizon, they do big profound things over decades at a time, they could, or any of these other companies, could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the country. And you’ll notice they don’t do that, they bring in 10,000, 20,000 H1Bs a year. And so, you’ve got a question there, and then these mills, there’s lots of questions around them, and whether that’s even an ethical way… I don’t want to say they’re unethical, but there’s questions around exactly what the trade-offs are there. And this like is a Pandora’s box that really nobody really wanted to be opened. To play devil’s advocate in all this, in terms of national immigration issues, none of this is a top end issue, just because the numbers are small, and so I don’t think, the administration has said this is not a priority of theirs for right now. But I guess what I would say is, there is actually a lot of complexity and nuance here. Like I said, I have a lot of friends and colleagues who came over on H-1Bs or O-1s, green cards, many are now citizens, and every single one of them was… Not every single one. A lot of them were enthusiastic to defend the honor of immigrants throughout this whole period. And they said to me, it’s like, well, Marc, how can we more clearly express the importance of high school immigration to the US?
And I was like, I think you can do it by advocating for also developing our native-born talent. Do you want to inflame the issue or do you want to diffuse the issue? I think the answer is to diffuse the issue. Let me give you one more positive scenario, and then I’ll also beat up on the university some more. Do you know about the National Merit Scholarship System, have you heard about this?
And so they, they’ve tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy because IQ is such an inflammatory concept. And the consequence of that is, and this is sort of perverse, they’ve made it more coachable, right? So, the SAT 40 years ago, coaching didn’t really work, and more recently it has really started to work. And one of the things you see is that the Asian spike, you see this giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade, and I think, looking at the data, I think a lot of that is because it’s more coachable now, and the Asians do the most coaching. So, there’s a bunch of issues with this. And so, the coaching thing is really difficult because the coaching thing is a subsidy then to the kids whose parents can afford coaching, and I don’t know about you, but where I grew up, there was no SAT coaching. So, there’s an issue there. I didn’t even know what the SAT was until the day I took it, much less that there was coaching, much less that it could work, so much less we could afford it.
So, number one, there’s issues there. But the other issue there is think about what’s happened by the dumbing down, 800 no longer captures all the smart, 800 is too crude of a test. It’s like the AI benchmarking problem. It’s the same problem they have AI benchmarking right now, 800 is too low of a threshold. There are too many kids scoring 800. Because what you want is you want, whatever, if it’s going to be 100,000 kids, I don’t know what it is, if it’s going to be 50,000 kids a year scoring 800, you also then want kids to be able to score 900 and 1000, and 1100, and 1200, and you want to ultimately get to, you’d like to ultimately identify the top 100 kids, and make sure that you get them in MIT. And the resolution of the test has been reduced so that it actually is not useful for doing that.
And again, I would say this is part of the generalized corruption that’s taken place throughout this entire system, where we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and actually put them in the places where they should be. And then, just the final comment would be, the great thing about standardized testing and the National Merit System is it’s, like I said, it’s completely race blind, it’s gender blind, it’s blind on every other characteristic, it’s only done on test scores. And you can make an argument about whether that’s good or bad, but it is, for sure, it’s the closest thing that we had to get to merit. It was the thing that they did when they thought they needed merit to win the Cold War.
And of course, we could choose to do that anytime we want. And I just say, I find it incredibly striking, and an enormous moral indictment of the current system that there are no universities that do this today. So, back to the immigration thing, just real quick, it’s like, okay, we aren’t even trying to go get the smart kids out of [inaudible 03:03:39], and even if they think that they can get into these places, they get turned down. And the same thing for the smart Asians, and the same thing for the smart Jews, and the same thing for the smart Black people. And I don’t know how that’s moral, I don’t get it at all.
And so, everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get to be phenomenally good. And it’s already great. And anybody who wants to see this, just go on YouTube and look at AI coding demos, little kids making apps in 10 minutes, working with an AI coding system. And so, I think it’s the golden age… I think this is an area where it’s clearly the golden age. The tool set is extraordinary. In a day as a coder, for sure, in a day you can retrain yourself, start using these things, get a huge boost in productivity, as a non-coder, you can learn much more quickly than you could before.
And there’s a whole bunch of, I’ll name names, Khan Academy… There’s a whole bunch of work that they’re doing at Khan Academy for free, and then we have this company, Replit, which was originally specifically built for kids for coding, that has AI built in, that’s just absolutely extraordinary now. And then, there’s a variety of other systems like this. Yeah, the AI is going to be able to teach to code… AI, by the way, is, as you know, is spectacularly good at explaining code. And so, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base, and so you can literally ask the code base questions about itself. And you can also just do the simple form, which is you can copy and paste code into a ChatGPT and just ask it to explain it, what’s going on, rewrite it, improve it, make recommendations. And so, there’s dozens of ways to do this.
By the way, you can also, even more broadly than code, like, okay, you want to make a video game, okay, now you can do AI, art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, voice generation, all of a sudden you don’t need designers, you don’t need voice actors. Yeah, there’s just unlimited…And then a big part of coding is so-called glue, it’s interfacing into other systems. So, it’s interfacing into Stripe, to take payments, or something like that, and AI is fantastic at writing glue code. So, really, really good at making sure that you can plug everything together, really good at helping you figure out how to deploy. It’ll even write a business plan for you. So, it’s just this, it’s like everything happening with AI right now, it’s like this latent superpower, and there’s this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases, productivity increases with it already, there’s other people who aren’t even aware it’s happening.
And there’s some gearing to whether you’re a coder or not, but I think there are lots of non-coders that are off to the races, and I think there are lots of professional coders who are still like, eh… The blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of the car business. So, there’s the old William Gibson quote, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” and this is maybe the most potent version of that that I’ve ever seen.
My guess is we’ll have more coding jobs probably by an order of magnitude 10 years from now. That will be different, they’ll be different jobs, they’ll involve orchestrating AI, but we will be creating so much more software that the whole industry will just explode in size.
Because one of the things that AI should be pretty good at is managing because it’s process-driven, it’s the kind of thing that AI is actually pretty good at, right? Performance evaluation, coaching. And so, should it be an AI executive team? And then, of course, the ultimate question, which is AI CEO. And then, maybe the most futuristic version of it would be an actual AI agent that actually goes fully autonomous. Yeah, what if you really set one of these things loose and let it basically build itself a business? And so, I will say, we’re not yet seeing those, and I think there’s a little bit of the systems aren’t quite ready for that yet, and then I think it’s a little bit of, you really do need, at that point, a founder who’s really willing to break all the rules, and really willing to take the swing, and those people exist, and so I’m sure we’ll see that.
And look, the most obvious example of the flux is sitting here less than three years ago, sitting here in December of ’22, we would’ve said that Open Ai is just running away with everything. And sitting here today, it’s like there’s at least six world-class God model companies and teams that are, by the way, generating remarkably similar results. That’s actually been one of the most shocking things to me is it turns out that once you know that it’s possible to build one incredibly smart Turing Test-passing large language model, which was a complete shock and surprise to the world, it turns out within a year you can have five more. There’s also a money component thing to it, which is to get the money to scale one of these things into the billions of dollars. There’s basically right now only two sources of money that will do that for you. One is the hyperscalers giving you the money which you turn around and round trip back to them, or foreign sovereigns, other country sovereign wealth funds, which can be difficult in some cases, for companies to access.
So there’s maybe another trillion-dollar question is the financing question. Here’s one. So Sam Altman has been public about the fact that he wants to transition OpenAI from being a non-profit to being a for-profit. The way that that is legally done is that … And there is a way to do it, there is a way in US law to do it. The IRS and other legal entities, government entities, scrutinizes this very carefully because the US takes foundation non-profit law very seriously because of the tax exemption.
And so historically, the way that you do it is you start a for-profit and then you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the non-profit at fair market value. And the last financing round at OpenAI was 150 some billion dollars. And so logically, if the flip is going to happen, the for-profit has to go raise 150 billion out of the chute to buy the assets. Raising 150 billion is a challenge. So is that even possible? If that is possible, then OpenAI maybe is off to the races as a for-profit company. If not, I don’t know. And then obviously the Elon lawsuit. So just because they’re the market leader today, there’s big important questions there. Microsoft has this kind of love-hate relationship with them. Where does that go? Apple’s lagging badly behind, but they’re very good at catching up. Amazon is primarily hyperscalar, but they now have their own models.
But at discussing philosophy, they’re basically as smart as they’re ever going to be. And they’re going to be kind of say mid-wit grad student level. And the theory there would just be they’re already out of training data. They literally, you talk to these people, literally the big models, the big models are within a factor of 2X of consuming all the human-generated training data, to the point that some of these big companies are literally hiring people like doctors and lawyers to sit and write new training data by hand. And so does this mean that you have to, if you want your model to get better philosophy, you have to go hire a thousand philosophers and have them write new content, and is anybody going to do that? And so maybe these things are topping out in certain ways and they’re going to leap way ahead in other ways.
Anyway, so we just don’t … Actually, maybe my main conclusion is anybody telling you these big sweeping conclusions, this whole, all of these abstract generalized super intelligence AGI stuff, maybe it’s the engineer in me, but no, that’s too abstract. It’s got to actually work. And then by the way, it has to actually have to be able to pay for it. I mean, this is a problem right now with the big models, the big models that are really good at coding and math. They’re actually very expensive to run. They’re quite slow.
Another trillion-dollar question, future chips, which I know you’ve talked a lot about. Another trillion-dollar question, yeah, I mean all the global issues. Oh, another trillion-dollar question, censorship. And, as they say, all the human feedback training process. Exactly what are you training these things to do? What are they allowed to talk about? How long do they give you these … How often do they give these incredibly preaching moral lectures?
Here’s a trillion-dollar question. How many other countries want their country to run its education system, healthcare system, new system, political system, on the basis of an AI that’s been trained according to the most extreme left-wing California politics? Because what they have on offer right now. And I think the answer to that is not very many. So there’s massive open questions there about, and by the way, what morality of these things are going to get trained on as a …
But look, those same questions also apply outside the US and the EU is doing their thing. They’re being extremely draconian and they’re trying to lock in a political censorship regime on AI right now that’s so harsh that even American AI companies are not even willing to launch new products in the EU right now. That’s not going to last. But what happens there and what are the trade-offs? What levels of censorship are American companies going to have to sign up for if they want to operate in the EU? Or is the EU still capable of generating its own AI companies or have we brain drained them so that they can’t? So big questions.
And then the other is crypto’s going to come right back to life. And actually that’s very exciting. Actually, that’s worth noting is that’s another trillion-dollar question on AI, which is in a world of pervasive AI, and especially in a world of AI agents, and imagine a world of billions or trillions of AI agents running around, they need an economy. And crypto, in our view, happens to be the ideal economic system for that, because it’s a programmable money. It’s a very easy way to plug in and do that. And there’s this transaction processing system that can do that. And so I think the crypto AI intersection is potentially a very, very big deal. And so that was going to be impossible under the prior regime, and I think under the new regime, hopefully, it’ll be something we can do.
And I actually, I try to do this thing where I try to model, try to have a mental model of the two different sides of a serious argument. And so I’ve tried to internalize that argument as much as I can. Which is difficult because we’re investing it behind LLMs as aggressively as we can. And so if he’s right, that could be a big problem, but we should also know that. And then I sort of use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people to really test their level of knowledge. So I like to grill people.
I got my CS degree 35 years ago, so I’m not deep in the technology, but to the extent I can understand Yann’s points, I can use them to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish. And that’s been, I think, very, very productive. So it is very striking that you have somebody who is that central in the space, who is actually a full-on skeptic. And again, this could go different ways. He could end up being very wrong. He could end up being totally right, or it could be that he will provoke the evolution of these systems to be much better than they would’ve been.
The other thing though, that’s happened, and maybe the more practical answer to the question is I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society that I didn’t have when I was younger. And my partner, Ben has a great … I think he quotes his father on this. He’s like, “If a man does not have a real religion, he makes up a fake one, and the fake ones go very, very badly.”
And so there’s this, it’s actually really funny, there’s this class of intellectual … There’s this class of intellectual that has what appears to be a very patronizing point of view, which is, “Yes, I’m an atheist, but it’s very important that the people believe in something.” And Marx had the negative view on that, which is religion is the opiate of the masses. But there’s a lot of right-wing intellectuals who are themselves, I think, pretty atheist or agnostic, that are like, it’s deeply important that the people be Christian or something like that. And on the one hand it’s like, wow, that’s arrogant and presumptive. But on the other hand, maybe it’s right because what have we learned in the last hundred years is in the absence of a real religion, people will make up fake ones.
There’s this writer, there’s this political philosopher who’s super interesting on this named Eric Voegelin. And he wrote in the mid-part of the century, mid-late-part of the 20th century, he was born in, I think, 1900, died in ’85. So he saw the complete run of communism and Nazism and himself fled, I think he fled Europe and the whole thing. His big conclusion was basically that both communism and Nazism, fascism, were basically religions, but in the deep way of religions. We call them political religions, but they were like actual religions. And they were what Nietzsche forecasted when he said, “God is dead. We’ve killed him, and we won’t wash the blood off our hands for a thousand years.” Is we will come up with new religions that will just cause just mass murder and death. And you read his stuff now and you’re like, “Yep, that happened.”
And then of course, as fully elite moderates, of course, we couldn’t possibly be doing that for ourselves right now, but, of course, we are. And I would argue that Eric Voegelin, for sure, would argue that the last 10 years we have been in a religious frenzy, that woke has been a full scale religious frenzy and has had all of the characteristics of a religion, including everything from patron saints to holy texts, to sin. Wokeness has, I think, has had every single aspect of an actual religion other than redemption, which is maybe the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with, is the one where there’s no forgiveness. And so I think if Voegelin were alive, I think he would’ve zeroed right in on that, would’ve said that. And we just sailed right off. I mentioned earlier we somehow rediscover the religions of the Indo-Europeans. We’re all into identity politics and environmentalism. I don’t think that’s an accident.
So anyway, there is something very deep going on in the human psyche, on religion, that is not dismissible and needs to be taken seriously. Even if one struggles with the specifics of it.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 1:09 – Best possible future
- 10:32 – History of Western Civilization
- 19:51 – Trump in 2025
- 27:32 – TDS in tech
- 40:19 – Preference falsification
- 56:15 – Self-censorship
- 1:11:18 – Censorship
- 1:19:57 – Jon Stewart
- 1:22:43 – Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan
- 1:31:32 – Government pressure
- 1:42:19 – Nature of power
- 1:55:08 – Journalism
- 2:00:43 – Bill Ackman
- 2:05:40 – Trump administration
- 2:13:19 – DOGE
- 2:27:11 – H1B and immigration
- 3:05:05 – Little tech
- 3:17:25 – AI race
- 3:26:15 – X
- 3:29:47 – Yann LeCun
- 3:33:21 – Andrew Huberman
- 3:34:53 – Success
- 3:37:49 – God and humanity
Introduction
Marc Andreessen
I mean, look, we’re adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now, and it’s now passing the size of the Defense Department budget and it’s compounding, and pretty soon it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days, and then it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days, and then it’s going to be a trillion dollars every 70 days. And then if this doesn’t get fixed, at some point, we enter a hyper-inflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil. And …
I mean, look, we’re adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now, and it’s now passing the size of the Defense Department budget and it’s compounding, and pretty soon it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days, and then it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days, and then it’s going to be a trillion dollars every 70 days. And then if this doesn’t get fixed, at some point, we enter a hyper-inflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil. And …
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Marc Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Marc is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years. He’s the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Marc Andreessen.
The following is a conversation with Marc Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Marc is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years. He’s the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Marc Andreessen.
Best possible future
Lex Fridman
All right, let’s start with optimism. If you were to imagine the best possible 1 to 2 years, 2025, ’26 for tech, for big tech and small tech, what would it be? What would it look like? Lay out your vision for the best possible scenario trajectory for America?
All right, let’s start with optimism. If you were to imagine the best possible 1 to 2 years, 2025, ’26 for tech, for big tech and small tech, what would it be? What would it look like? Lay out your vision for the best possible scenario trajectory for America?
Marc Andreessen
The roaring 20s.
The roaring 20s.
Lex Fridman
The roaring 20s.
The roaring 20s.
Marc Andreessen
The roaring 20s. I mean, look, couple of things. It is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues including not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that’s happened. It’s really amazing, the United States just kept growing. If you just look at economic growth charts, the US just kept growing and very significantly, many other countries stopped growing. So Canada stopped growing, the UK has stopped growing, Germany has stopped growing, and some of those countries may be actually growing backwards at this point. And there’s a very long discussion to be had about what’s wrong with those countries. And there’s of course, plenty of things that are wrong with our country, but the US is just flat out primed for growth. And I think that’s a consequence of many factors, some of which are lucky and some of which through hard work.
The roaring 20s. I mean, look, couple of things. It is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues including not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that’s happened. It’s really amazing, the United States just kept growing. If you just look at economic growth charts, the US just kept growing and very significantly, many other countries stopped growing. So Canada stopped growing, the UK has stopped growing, Germany has stopped growing, and some of those countries may be actually growing backwards at this point. And there’s a very long discussion to be had about what’s wrong with those countries. And there’s of course, plenty of things that are wrong with our country, but the US is just flat out primed for growth. And I think that’s a consequence of many factors, some of which are lucky and some of which through hard work.
And so the lucky part is just number one, we just have incredible physical security by being our own continent. We have incredible natural resources. There’s this running joke now that whenever it looks like the US is going to run out of some rare earth material, some farmer in North Dakota kicks over a hay bale and finds a $2 trillion deposit. I mean, we’re just blessed with geography and with natural resources. Energy. We can be energy independent anytime we want. This last administration decided they didn’t want to be, they wanted to turn off American energy. This new administration has declared that they have a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way. There’s no question we can be energy independent, we can be a giant net energy exporter. It’s purely a question of choice, and I think the new administration’s going to do that. And then I would say two other things.
One is we are the beneficiaries, and you’re an example of this. We’re a beneficiary. We’re the beneficiary of 50, 100, 200 years of the basically most aggressive driven, smartest people in the world, most capable people moving to the US and raising their kids here. And so we’re by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive, we’re the most aggressive set of characters, certainly in any Western country and have been for a long time, and certainly are today.
And then finally, I would just say, look, we are overwhelmingly the advanced technology leader. We have our issues and we have, I would say particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about. But for anything in software, anything in AI, anything in all these … Advanced biotech, all these advanced areas of technology, we’re by far the leader. Again, in part because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields come to the US. And so we have all of the preconditions for just a monster boom. I could see economic growth going way up, I could see productivity growth going way up, rate of technology adoption going way up. And then we can do a global tour, if you like. But basically, all of our competitors have profound issues, and we could go through them one by one, but the competitive landscape just is … It’s like it’s remarkable how much better positioned we are for growth.
Lex Fridman
What about the humans themselves? Almost a philosophical question. I travel across the world and there’s something about the American spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit that’s uniquely intense in America. I don’t know what that is. I’ve talked to Saagar who claims it might be the Scots-Irish blood that runs through the history of America. What is it? You, at the heart of Silicon Valley, is there something in the water? Why is there this entrepreneurial spirit?
What about the humans themselves? Almost a philosophical question. I travel across the world and there’s something about the American spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit that’s uniquely intense in America. I don’t know what that is. I’ve talked to Saagar who claims it might be the Scots-Irish blood that runs through the history of America. What is it? You, at the heart of Silicon Valley, is there something in the water? Why is there this entrepreneurial spirit?
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So is this a family show or am I allowed to swear?
Yeah. So is this a family show or am I allowed to swear?
Lex Fridman
You can say whatever the fuck you want.
You can say whatever the fuck you want.
Marc Andreessen
Okay. So the great TV show, succession, the show of course, which you were intended to root for exactly zero of the characters.
Okay. So the great TV show, succession, the show of course, which you were intended to root for exactly zero of the characters.
Lex Fridman
Yes.
Yes.
Marc Andreessen
The best line from succession was in the final episode of the first season when the whole family’s over in Logan Roy’s ancestral homeland of Scotland. And they’re at this castle for some wedding. And Logan is just completely miserable because he’s been in New York for 50 years, he’s totally miserable being back in Scotland. And he gets in some argument with somebody and he says, finally just says, “My God, I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America where we can fuck without condoms.”
The best line from succession was in the final episode of the first season when the whole family’s over in Logan Roy’s ancestral homeland of Scotland. And they’re at this castle for some wedding. And Logan is just completely miserable because he’s been in New York for 50 years, he’s totally miserable being back in Scotland. And he gets in some argument with somebody and he says, finally just says, “My God, I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America where we can fuck without condoms.”
Lex Fridman
Was that a metaphor or … Okay
Was that a metaphor or … Okay
Marc Andreessen
Exactly. No, but it’s exactly the thing, and everybody instantly knows what … Everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means, which it’s exactly this. I think there’s an ethnographic way of it. There’s a bunch of books on, like you said, the Scots-Irish, like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years. But what we have is this sort of amalgamation of the Northeast Yankees who are super tough and hardcore. Yeah, the Scots-Irish are super aggressive. We’ve got the Southerners and the Texans and the whole blended kind of Anglo-Hispanic thing, super, incredibly tough, strong, driven, capable characters. The Texas Rangers, we’ve got the California, we’ve got the wild, we’ve got the incredibly inventive hippies, but we also have the hardcore engineers. We’ve got the best rocket scientists in the world. We’ve got the best artists in the world, creative professionals, the best movies.
Exactly. No, but it’s exactly the thing, and everybody instantly knows what … Everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means, which it’s exactly this. I think there’s an ethnographic way of it. There’s a bunch of books on, like you said, the Scots-Irish, like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years. But what we have is this sort of amalgamation of the Northeast Yankees who are super tough and hardcore. Yeah, the Scots-Irish are super aggressive. We’ve got the Southerners and the Texans and the whole blended kind of Anglo-Hispanic thing, super, incredibly tough, strong, driven, capable characters. The Texas Rangers, we’ve got the California, we’ve got the wild, we’ve got the incredibly inventive hippies, but we also have the hardcore engineers. We’ve got the best rocket scientists in the world. We’ve got the best artists in the world, creative professionals, the best movies.
So yeah, I would say all of our problems, I think are basically, in my view, to some extent, attempts to basically sand all that off and make everything basically boring and mediocre. But there is something in the national spirit that basically keeps bouncing back. And basically what we discover over time is we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say, “It’s time to build, it’s time to grow, it’s time to do things.” And there’s something in the American spirit that just roars right back to life. And I’ve seen it before. I saw it as a kid here in the early 80s because the 70s were horribly depressing in the US. They were a nightmare on many fronts. And in a lot of ways, the last decade to me has felt a lot like the 70s just being mired in misery and just this self-defeating negative attitude and everybody’s upset about everything. And then by the way, energy crisis and hostage crisis and foreign wars and just demoralization.
The low point in the 70s was Jimmy Carter who just passed away, he went on TV and he gave this speech known as the Malaise Speech, and it was like the weakest possible, trying to rouse people back to a sense of passion, completely failed. And we had the hostages in Iran for I think 440 days. And every night on the nightly news, it was lines around the block, energy crisis, depression, inflation. And then Reagan came in and Reagan was a very controversial character at the time. And he came in and he’s like, “Yep, nope, it’s morning in America and we’re the shining city on the hill, and we’re going to do it.” And he did it, and we did it. And the national spirit came roaring back and roared really hard for a full decade. I think that’s exactly what … I think we’ll see, but I think that’s what could happen here.
Lex Fridman
And I just did a super long podcast on Milton Friedman with Jennifer Burns, who’s this incredible professor at Stanford, and he was part of the Reagan … So there’s a bunch of components to that, one of which is economic, and one of which maybe you can put a word on it of not to be romantic or anything, but freedom, individual freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and just in general, individualism.
And I just did a super long podcast on Milton Friedman with Jennifer Burns, who’s this incredible professor at Stanford, and he was part of the Reagan … So there’s a bunch of components to that, one of which is economic, and one of which maybe you can put a word on it of not to be romantic or anything, but freedom, individual freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and just in general, individualism.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. As you know this, America has this incredible streak of individualism. Individualism in America probably peaked, I think between roughly call it the end of the Civil War, 1865 through to probably call it 1931 or something. And there was this incredible rush. I mean that period, we now know that period as the second Industrial Revolution, and it’s when the United States basically assumed global leadership and basically took over technological and economic leadership from England. And then that led to ultimately then therefore being able to not only industrialize the world, but also win World War II and then win the Cold War. And yeah, there’s a massive individualistic streak. By the way, Milton Friedman’s old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring as they were then. He’s a singular figure. And many of us, I never knew him, but he was actually at Stanford for many years at the Hoover Institution, but I never met him, but I know a lot of people who worked with him and he was a singular figure. But all of his lessons live on or are fully available.
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. As you know this, America has this incredible streak of individualism. Individualism in America probably peaked, I think between roughly call it the end of the Civil War, 1865 through to probably call it 1931 or something. And there was this incredible rush. I mean that period, we now know that period as the second Industrial Revolution, and it’s when the United States basically assumed global leadership and basically took over technological and economic leadership from England. And then that led to ultimately then therefore being able to not only industrialize the world, but also win World War II and then win the Cold War. And yeah, there’s a massive individualistic streak. By the way, Milton Friedman’s old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring as they were then. He’s a singular figure. And many of us, I never knew him, but he was actually at Stanford for many years at the Hoover Institution, but I never met him, but I know a lot of people who worked with him and he was a singular figure. But all of his lessons live on or are fully available.
But I would also say it’s not just individualism, and this is one of the big things. It’s playing out in a lot of our culture and kind of political fights right now, which is basically this feeling, certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people, which is it’s not enough for America to just be an economic zone, and it’s not enough for us to just be individuals, and it’s not enough to just have line go up, and it’s not enough to just have economic success. There are deeper questions at play, and also there’s more to a country than just that. And quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. A lot of it involves spirit and passion. And like I said, we have more of it than anybody else, but we have to choose to want it.
The way I look at, it’s like all of our problems are self-inflicted. Decline is a choice. All of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns, basically people telling us, people in positions of authority telling us that, “We shouldn’t stand out, we shouldn’t be adventurous, we shouldn’t be exciting, we shouldn’t be exploratory, we shouldn’t this, that, and the other thing. And we should feel bad about everything that we do.” And I think we’ve lived through a decade where that’s been the prevailing theme. And I think quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it.
History of Western Civilization
Lex Fridman
If we could go on a tangent of a tangent, since we’re talking about individualism, and that’s not all that it takes. You’ve mentioned in the past the book The Ancient City by, if I could only pronounce the name, French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. I don’t know.
If we could go on a tangent of a tangent, since we’re talking about individualism, and that’s not all that it takes. You’ve mentioned in the past the book The Ancient City by, if I could only pronounce the name, French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. I don’t know.
Marc Andreessen
That was amazing.
That was amazing.
Lex Fridman
Okay. All right. From the 19th century. Anyway, you said this is an important book to understand who we are and where we come from.
Okay. All right. From the 19th century. Anyway, you said this is an important book to understand who we are and where we come from.
Marc Andreessen
So what that book does, it’s actually quite a striking book. So that book is written by this guy as a [inaudible 00:11:02] Let Lex do the pronunciations, the foreign language pronunciations for the day. He was a professor of classics at the Sorbonne in Paris, the top university, actually in the 1860s, so actually right around after the US Civil War. And he was a savant of a particular kind, which is he, and you can see this in the book is he had apparently read, and sort of absorbed and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and Roman literature. And so is like a walking index on basically everything we know about Greek and Roman culture, and that’s significant. The reason this matters is because basically none of that has changed. And so he had access to the exact same written materials that we have access to, and so we’ve learned nothing.
So what that book does, it’s actually quite a striking book. So that book is written by this guy as a [inaudible 00:11:02] Let Lex do the pronunciations, the foreign language pronunciations for the day. He was a professor of classics at the Sorbonne in Paris, the top university, actually in the 1860s, so actually right around after the US Civil War. And he was a savant of a particular kind, which is he, and you can see this in the book is he had apparently read, and sort of absorbed and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and Roman literature. And so is like a walking index on basically everything we know about Greek and Roman culture, and that’s significant. The reason this matters is because basically none of that has changed. And so he had access to the exact same written materials that we have access to, and so we’ve learned nothing.
And then specifically what he did is he talked about the Greeks and the Romans, but specifically what he did is he went back further. He reconstructed the people who came before the Greeks and the Romans and what their life and society was like. And these were the people who were now known as the Indo-Europeans. And you may have heard of these, these are the people who came down from the steppes. And so they came out of what’s now Eastern Europe around sort of the outskirts of what’s now Russia. And then they sort of swept through Europe. They ultimately took over all of Europe, by the way, almost many of the ethnicities in the Americas, the hundreds of years that follow are Indo-European. And so they were basically this warrior, basically class that came down and swept through and essentially populated much of the world. And there’s a whole interesting saga there. And then from there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans were kind of evolutions off of that.
And so what he reconstructs, what life was like, at least in the West for people in their kind of original social state. And the significance of that is the original social state is living in the state of the absolute imperative for survival with absolutely no technology. No modern systems, no nothing. You’ve got the clothes on your back, you’ve got whatever you can build with your bare hands. This predates basically all concepts of technology as we understand them today. And so these are people under maximum levels of physical survival pressure. And so what social patterns did they evolve to be able to do that? And the social pattern basically was as follows, is a three-part social structure, family, tribe and city, and zero concept of individual rights and essentially no concept of individualism. And so you were not an individual. You were a member of your family, and then a set of families would aggregate into a tribe and then a set of tribes would aggregate into a city.
And then the morality was completely … It was actually what Nietzsche talks about. The morality was entirely master morality, not slave morality. And so in their morality, anything that was strong was good, and anything that was weak was bad. And it’s very clear why that is. It is because strong equals good equals survive. Weak equals bad equals die. And that led to what became known later as the master-slave dialectic, which is, is it more important for you to live on your feet as a master even at the risk of dying? Or are you willing to live as a slave on your knees in order to not die? And this is sort of the derivation of that moral framework. Christianity later inverted that moral framework. But the original framework lasted for many, many thousands of years.
No concept of individualism. The head of the family had total life and death control over the family, the head of the tribe, same thing, head of the city, same thing. And then you were morally obligated to kill members of the other cities on contact. You were morally required to. If you didn’t do it, you were a bad person.
And then the form of the society was basically maximum fascism combined with maximum communism. And so it was maximum fascism in the form of this absolute top-down control where the head of the family tribe or city could kill other members of the community at any time with no repercussions at all. So maximum hierarchy, but combined with maximum communism, which is no market economy and so everything gets shared. And sort of the point of being in one of these collectives is that it’s a collective and people are sharing, and of course that limited how big they could get because the problem with communism is it doesn’t scale. It works at the level of a family. It’s much harder to make it work at the level of a country. Impossible. Maximum fascism, maximum communism.
And then it was all intricately tied into their religion. And their religion was in two parts. It was veneration of ancestors and it was veneration of nature. And the veneration of ancestors is extremely important because it was basically the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were. The ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you. And then it was veneration of nature because of course, nature is the thing that’s trying to kill you. And then you had your ancestor, every family, tribe or city had their ancestor gods and then they had their nature gods.
So fast-forward to today, we live in a world that is radically different, and the book takes you through what happened from that through the Greeks and Romans through to Christianity. But it’s very helpful to kind of think in these terms because the conventional view of the progress through time is that we are … The cliche is the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice or so-called wig history, which is that the arc of progress is positive. And so what you hear all the time, what you’re taught in school and everything is every year that goes by, we get better and better and more and more moral and more and more pure and a better version of ourselves. Our Indo-European ancestors would say, ” Oh no, you people have fallen to shit. You people took all of the principles of basically your civilization and you have diluted them down to the point where they barely even matter and you’re having children out of a wedlock and you regularly encounter people of other cities and you don’t try to kill them.” And how crazy is that?
And they would basically consider us to be living like an incredibly diluted version of this sort of highly religious, highly cult-like, highly organized, highly fascist, communist society. I can’t resist noting that as a consequence of basically going through all the transitions we’ve been through going all the way through Christianity coming out the other end of Christianity, Nietzsche declares God is dead. We’re in a secular society that still has tinges of Christianity, but largely prides itself on no longer being religious in that way. We being the sort of most fully evolved, modern secular experts, scientists and so forth have basically re-evolved or fallen back on the exact same religious structure that the Indo-Europeans had, specifically ancestor worship, which is identity politics and nature worship, which is environmentalism. And so we have actually worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it. And it just goes to show that in some ways we have fallen far from the family tree, but in some cases we’re exactly the same.
Lex Fridman
You kind of described this progressive idea of wokeism and so on as worshiping ancestors.
You kind of described this progressive idea of wokeism and so on as worshiping ancestors.
Marc Andreessen
Identity politics is worshiping ancestors. It’s tagging newborn infants with either benefits or responsibilities or levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were. The Indo-Europeans would’ve recognized it on sight. We somehow think it’s super socially progressive.
Identity politics is worshiping ancestors. It’s tagging newborn infants with either benefits or responsibilities or levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were. The Indo-Europeans would’ve recognized it on sight. We somehow think it’s super socially progressive.
Lex Fridman
And it is not.
And it is not.
Marc Andreessen
I mean, I would say obviously not. Get nuanced which is where I think you’re headed, which is, is the idea that you can completely reinvent society every and have no regard whatsoever for what came before you? That seems like a really bad idea. That’s like the Cambodians with Year Zero under Pol Pot and death follows. Obviously the Soviets tried that. The utopian fantasists who think that they can just rip up everything that came before and create something new in the human condition and human society have a very bad history of causing enormous destruction. So on the one hand, it’s like, okay, there is a deeply important role for tradition.
I mean, I would say obviously not. Get nuanced which is where I think you’re headed, which is, is the idea that you can completely reinvent society every and have no regard whatsoever for what came before you? That seems like a really bad idea. That’s like the Cambodians with Year Zero under Pol Pot and death follows. Obviously the Soviets tried that. The utopian fantasists who think that they can just rip up everything that came before and create something new in the human condition and human society have a very bad history of causing enormous destruction. So on the one hand, it’s like, okay, there is a deeply important role for tradition.
And the way I think about that is the process of evolutionary learning, which is what tradition ought to be, is the distilled wisdom of all. And this is what Indo-Europeans thought about. It should be the distilled wisdom of everybody who came before you. All those important and powerful lessons learned. And that’s why I think it’s fascinating to go back and study how these people lived is because part of the history and part of the learning that got us to where we’re today.
Having said that, there are many cultures around the world that are mired in tradition to the point of not being able to progress. And in fact, you might even say globally, that’s the default human condition, which is a lot of people are in societies in which there’s absolute seniority by age, kids are completely … In the US, for some reason we decided kids are in charge of everything and they’re the trendsetters and they’re allowed to set all the agendas and set all the politics and set all the culture and maybe that’s a little bit crazy. But in a lot of other cultures, kids have no voice at all, no role at all. The old people who are in charge of everything, they’re gerontocracies, and it’s all a bunch of 80 year olds running everything, which by the way, we have a little bit of that too.
And so what I would say is there’s a real downside. Full traditionalism is communitarianism, it’s ethnic particularism, it’s ethnic chauvinism, it’s this incredible level of resistance to change. It just doesn’t get you anywhere. It may be good and fine at the level of an individual tribe, but as a society living in the modern world, you can’t evolve, you can’t advance, you can’t participate in all the good things that have happened. And so I think probably this is one of those things where extremists on either side is probably a bad idea, but this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and nuanced way.
Trump in 2025
Lex Fridman
So the beautiful picture you painted of the roaring 20s, how can the Trump administration play a part in making that future happen?
So the beautiful picture you painted of the roaring 20s, how can the Trump administration play a part in making that future happen?
Marc Andreessen
So look, a big part of this is getting the government boot off the neck of the American economy, the American technology industry, the American people. And again, this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s, which is for what started out looking like, I’m sure good and virtuous purposes, we ended up both then and now with this, what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism. The good news is it’s not like a military dictatorship. It’s not like you get thrown into Lubyanka. For the most part, [inaudible 00:20:28] not coming at four in the morning. You’re not getting dragged off to a cell. So it’s not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. And so it’s this incredible suppressive blanket of regulation rules, this concept of a vetocracy. What’s required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off on anything, any one of them can veto it. There’s a lot of [inaudible 00:20:47] political system works.
So look, a big part of this is getting the government boot off the neck of the American economy, the American technology industry, the American people. And again, this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s, which is for what started out looking like, I’m sure good and virtuous purposes, we ended up both then and now with this, what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism. The good news is it’s not like a military dictatorship. It’s not like you get thrown into Lubyanka. For the most part, [inaudible 00:20:28] not coming at four in the morning. You’re not getting dragged off to a cell. So it’s not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. And so it’s this incredible suppressive blanket of regulation rules, this concept of a vetocracy. What’s required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off on anything, any one of them can veto it. There’s a lot of [inaudible 00:20:47] political system works.
And then just this general idea of progress is bad, and technology is bad, and capitalism is bad, and building businesses is bad and success is bad. Tall poppy syndrome, basically, anybody who sticks their head up deserves to get it chopped off. Anybody who’s wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever. Just this very kind of grinding repression. And then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes and debanking and Draconian, deliberately kneecapping critical American industries, and then congratulating yourselves on the back for doing it or having these horrible social policies, like let’s let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens. And so we’ve just been through this period, I call it a demoralization campaign. We’ve just been through this period, whether it started that way or not, it ended up basically being this comprehensive message that says, “You’re terrible and if you try to do anything, you’re terrible and fuck you.” And the Biden administration reached the full pinnacle of that in our time. They got really bad on many fronts at the same time. And so just relieving that and getting back to a reasonably optimistic, constructive, pro-growth frame of mind, there’s so much pent-up energy and potentially in the American system, that alone is going to, I think cause growth and spirit to take off. And then there’s a lot of things proactively that could be done.
Lex Fridman
So how do you relieve that? To what degree has the thing you describe ideologically permeated government and permeated big companies?
So how do you relieve that? To what degree has the thing you describe ideologically permeated government and permeated big companies?
Marc Andreessen
Disclaimer at first, which is I don’t want to predict anything on any of this stuff because I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t predict politics or Washington at all. But I would just say that the plans and intentions are clear and the staffing supports it, and all the conversations are consistent with the due administration and that they plan to take very rapid action on a lot of these fronts very quickly. They’re going to do as much as they can through executive orders, and then they’re going to do legislation and regulatory changes for the rest. And so they’re going to move, I think, quickly on a whole bunch of stuff. You can already feel, I think a shift in the national spirit, or at least, let’s put it this way, I feel it for sure in Silicon Valley. I mean, we just saw a great example of this with what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, and obviously I’m involved with his company, but we just saw it kind of in public, the scope and speed of the changes are reflective of a lot of these shifts.
Disclaimer at first, which is I don’t want to predict anything on any of this stuff because I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t predict politics or Washington at all. But I would just say that the plans and intentions are clear and the staffing supports it, and all the conversations are consistent with the due administration and that they plan to take very rapid action on a lot of these fronts very quickly. They’re going to do as much as they can through executive orders, and then they’re going to do legislation and regulatory changes for the rest. And so they’re going to move, I think, quickly on a whole bunch of stuff. You can already feel, I think a shift in the national spirit, or at least, let’s put it this way, I feel it for sure in Silicon Valley. I mean, we just saw a great example of this with what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, and obviously I’m involved with his company, but we just saw it kind of in public, the scope and speed of the changes are reflective of a lot of these shifts.
But I would say that same conversation, those same kinds of things are happening throughout the industry. And so the tech industry itself, whether people were pro-Trump or anti-Trump, there’s just a giant vibe shift, mood shift that’s kicked in already. And then I was with a group of Hollywood people about two weeks ago, and they were still people who at least vocally were still very anti-Trump, but I said, “Has anything changed since November 6th?” And they immediately said, “Oh, it’s completely different. It feels like the ice has thawed. Woke is over.” They said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now they couldn’t before, that Hollywood’s going to start making comedies again. It is just like an incredible immediate environmental change. And as I talk to people, certainly throughout the economy, people who run businesses, I hear that all the time, which is just this last 10 years of misery is just over.
I mean, the one that I’m watching that’s really funny. I mean, Facebook’s getting a lot, Meta’s getting a lot of attention, but the other funny one is BlackRock, which I don’t know him, but I’ve watched for a long time. And so Larry Fink, who’s the CEO of BlackRock, was first in as a major investment CEO on every dumb social trend and rule set every … I’m going for it. Every retarded thing you can imagine, every ESG and every possible … Saddling companies with every aspect of just these crazed ideological positions. And he was coming in, he literally had aggregated together trillions of dollars of shareholdings that were his customer’s rights, and he seized their voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do all of this crazy ideological stuff. And he was like the Typhoid Mary of all this stuff in corporate America. And he in the last year has been backpedaling from that stuff as fast as he possibly can.
And just an example, last week, he pulled out of the whatever the Corporate Net-Zero Alliance, he pulled out of the crazy energy stuff. And so he’s backing away as fast as he can. Remember, the Richard Pryor backwards walk? Richard Pryor had this way where he could back out of a room while looking like he was walking forward.
And so even there doing that and just the whole thing. I mean, if you saw the court recently ruled that NASDAQ had these crazy board of directors composition rules. One of the funniest moments of my life is when my friend Peter Thiel and I were on the Meta board and these NASDAQ rules came down, mandated diversity on corporate boards. And so we sat around the table and had to figure out which of us counted as diverse. And the very professional attorneys at Meta explained with 100% complete straight face that Peter Thiel counts as diverse by virtue of being LGBT. And this is a guy who literally wrote a book called The Diversity Myth. He literally looked like he’d swallowed a live goldfish, and this was imposed. I mean, this was so incredibly offensive to him that it was just absolutely appalling and I felt terrible for him. But the look in his face was very funny.
And it was imposed by NASDAQ, your stock exchange imposing this stuff on you, and then the court, whatever, the Court of Appeals just nuked that. So these things basically are being ripped down one by one. And what’s on the other side of it is basically finally being able to get back to everything that everybody always wanted to do, which is run their companies, have great products, have happy customers, succeed, achieve, outperform, and work with the best and the brightest and not be made to feel bad about it. And I think that’s happening in many areas of American society.
Lex Fridman
It’s great to hear that Peter Thiel is fundamentally a diversity hire.
It’s great to hear that Peter Thiel is fundamentally a diversity hire.
Marc Andreessen
Well, there was a moment. So Peter, of course, is publicly gay, has been for a long time, but there are other men on the board, and we’re sitting there and we’re all looking at it, and we’re like, all right, okay, LGBT, and we keep coming back to the B, and it’s like all I’m willing to do a lot for this company, but …
Well, there was a moment. So Peter, of course, is publicly gay, has been for a long time, but there are other men on the board, and we’re sitting there and we’re all looking at it, and we’re like, all right, okay, LGBT, and we keep coming back to the B, and it’s like all I’m willing to do a lot for this company, but …
Lex Fridman
It’s all about sacrifice for diversity.
It’s all about sacrifice for diversity.
Marc Andreessen
Well, yeah. And then it’s like, okay, is there a test?
Well, yeah. And then it’s like, okay, is there a test?
Lex Fridman
Oh yeah, exactly. How do you prove it?
Oh yeah, exactly. How do you prove it?
Marc Andreessen
The questions that got asked.
The questions that got asked.
Lex Fridman
What are you willing to do for the greater good?
What are you willing to do for the greater good?
Marc Andreessen
I’ve become very good at asking lawyers completely absurd questions with a totally straight face.
I’ve become very good at asking lawyers completely absurd questions with a totally straight face.
Lex Fridman
And do they answer with a straight face [inaudible 00:27:29]?
And do they answer with a straight face [inaudible 00:27:29]?
Marc Andreessen
Sometimes. I think in fairness, they have trouble telling when I’m joking.
Sometimes. I think in fairness, they have trouble telling when I’m joking.
TDS in tech
Lex Fridman
So you mentioned the Hollywood folks, maybe people in Silicon Valley and the vibe shift. Maybe you can speak to preference falsification. What do they actually believe? How many of them actually hate Trump? What percent of them are feeling this vibe shift and are interested in creating the roaring 20s in the way they’ve described?
So you mentioned the Hollywood folks, maybe people in Silicon Valley and the vibe shift. Maybe you can speak to preference falsification. What do they actually believe? How many of them actually hate Trump? What percent of them are feeling this vibe shift and are interested in creating the roaring 20s in the way they’ve described?
Marc Andreessen
So first we should maybe talk population. So there’s all of Silicon Valley, and the way to just measure that is just look at voting records and what that shows consistently is Silicon Valley is just, at least historically, my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority just straight up Democrat. The other way to look at that is political donation records. And again, the political donations in the Valley range from 90 to 99% to 1 side. And so I just bring it up because we’ll see what happens with the voting and with donations going forward.
So first we should maybe talk population. So there’s all of Silicon Valley, and the way to just measure that is just look at voting records and what that shows consistently is Silicon Valley is just, at least historically, my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority just straight up Democrat. The other way to look at that is political donation records. And again, the political donations in the Valley range from 90 to 99% to 1 side. And so I just bring it up because we’ll see what happens with the voting and with donations going forward.
We can maybe talk about the fire later, but I can tell you there is a very big question of what’s happening in Los Angeles right now. I don’t want to get into the fire, but it’s catastrophic. And there was already a rightward shift in the big cities in California, and I think a lot of people in LA are really thinking about things right now as they’re trying to literally save their houses and save their families. But even in San Francisco, there was a big shift to the right in the voting in ’24. So we’ll see where that goes, but you observe that by just looking at the numbers over time.
The part that I’m more focused on is, and I don’t know how to exactly describe this, but it’s like the top 1,000 or the top 10,000 people. I don’t have a list, but it’s all the top founders, top CEOs, top executives, top engineers, top VCs, and then into the ranks, the people who kind of built and run the companies. And I don’t have numbers, but I have a much more tactile feel for what’s happening. So the big thing I have now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong. I think that most people just go along, and I think even most high status people just go along. And I think maybe the most high status people are the most prone to just go along because they’re the most focused on status. And the way I would describe that is one of the great forbidden philosophers of our time is the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. And amidst his madness, he had this extremely interesting articulation. He was an insane lunatic murderer, but he was also a Harvard super genius. Not that those are in conflict.
Lex Fridman
Shots fired man.
Shots fired man.
Marc Andreessen
But he was a very bright guy, and he did this whole thing where he talked about, basically he was very right-wing and talked about leftism a lot. And he had this great concept that’s just stuck in my mind ever since I read it, which is he had this concept just called over-socialization. And so most people are socialized. We live in a society, most people learn how to be part of a society. They give some deference to the society. There’s something about modern Western elites where they’re over-socialized and they’re just overly oriented towards what other people like themselves think and believe. And you can get a real sense of that if you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I just do, I think as a consequence of where I grew up.
But he was a very bright guy, and he did this whole thing where he talked about, basically he was very right-wing and talked about leftism a lot. And he had this great concept that’s just stuck in my mind ever since I read it, which is he had this concept just called over-socialization. And so most people are socialized. We live in a society, most people learn how to be part of a society. They give some deference to the society. There’s something about modern Western elites where they’re over-socialized and they’re just overly oriented towards what other people like themselves think and believe. And you can get a real sense of that if you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I just do, I think as a consequence of where I grew up.
Even before I had the views that I have today, there was always just this weird thing where it’s like, why does every dinner party have the exact same conversation? Why does everybody agree on every single issue? Why is that agreement precisely what was in the New York Times today? Why are these positions not the same as they were five years ago? But why does everybody snap into agreement every step of the way? And that was true when I came to Silicon Valley, and it’s just as true today 30 years later. And so I think most people are just literally, I think they’re taking their cues from, it’s some combination of the press, the universities, the big foundations. So it’s basically, it’s like The New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, and I don’t know, a few CEOs and a few public figures and maybe the President if your party is in power. And whatever that is, everybody who’s sort of good and proper and elite and good standing and in charge of things, and a sort of correct member of, let’s call it coastal American society, everybody just believes those things.
And then the two interesting things about that is, number one, there’s no divergence among the organs of power. So Harvard and Yale believed the exact same thing. The New York Times and The Washington Post believe the exact same thing. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing. Google and whatever, Microsoft believe the exact same thing. But those things change over time, but there’s never conflict in the moment. And so The New York Times and The Washington Post agreed on exactly everything in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, despite the fact that the specifics changed radically. The lockstep was what mattered. And so I think basically we in the Valley we’re on the tail end of that, in the same way Hollywood’s on the tail end of that, in the same way New York’s on the tail end of that, the same way the media’s on the tail end of that. It’s like some sort of collective hive mind thing.
And I just go through that to say, I don’t think most people in my orbit, or let’s say the top 10,000 people in the Valley or the top 10,000 people in LA, I don’t think they’re sitting there thinking basically, I have rock … I mean, they probably think they have rocks solid beliefs, but they don’t actually have some inner core of rock solid beliefs. And then they kind of watch reality change around them and try to figure out how to keep their beliefs correct. I don’t think that’s what happens. I think what happens is they conform to the belief system around them, and I think most of the time they’re not even aware that they’re basically part of a herd.
Lex Fridman
Is it possible that the surface chatter …
Is it possible that the surface chatter …
Marc Andreessen
That they’re basically part of a herd.
That they’re basically part of a herd.
Lex Fridman
Is it possible that the surface chatter of dinner parties, underneath that there is a turmoil of ideas and thoughts and beliefs that’s going on, but you’re just talking to people really close to you or in your own mind, and the socialization happens at the dinner parties? When you go outside the inner circle of one, two, three, four people who you really trust, then you start to conform. But inside there, inside the mind, there is an actual belief or a struggle, attention within New York Times or with the listener. For the listener, there’s a slow smile that overtook Mark Andreessen’s face.
Is it possible that the surface chatter of dinner parties, underneath that there is a turmoil of ideas and thoughts and beliefs that’s going on, but you’re just talking to people really close to you or in your own mind, and the socialization happens at the dinner parties? When you go outside the inner circle of one, two, three, four people who you really trust, then you start to conform. But inside there, inside the mind, there is an actual belief or a struggle, attention within New York Times or with the listener. For the listener, there’s a slow smile that overtook Mark Andreessen’s face.
Marc Andreessen
So look, I’ll just tell you what I think, which is at the dinner parties and at the conferences, no, there’s none of that. What there is that all of the heretical conversations, anything that challenges the status quo, any heretical ideas and any new idea is a heretical idea, any deviation is either discussed one-on-one, face-to-face, it’s like a whisper network or it’s like a real life social network. There’s a secret handshake. Which is like, okay, you meet somebody and each other a little bit, but not well, and you’re both trying to figure out if you can talk to the other person openly or whether you have to be fully conformist. It’s a joke.
So look, I’ll just tell you what I think, which is at the dinner parties and at the conferences, no, there’s none of that. What there is that all of the heretical conversations, anything that challenges the status quo, any heretical ideas and any new idea is a heretical idea, any deviation is either discussed one-on-one, face-to-face, it’s like a whisper network or it’s like a real life social network. There’s a secret handshake. Which is like, okay, you meet somebody and each other a little bit, but not well, and you’re both trying to figure out if you can talk to the other person openly or whether you have to be fully conformist. It’s a joke.
Lex Fridman
Well, yeah, humor 100%.
Well, yeah, humor 100%.
Marc Andreessen
Somebody cracks a joke, right? Somebody cracks a joke. If the other person laughs, the conversation is on.
Somebody cracks a joke, right? Somebody cracks a joke. If the other person laughs, the conversation is on.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
If the other person doesn’t laugh, back slowly away from the scene, I didn’t mean anything by it. And then by the way, it doesn’t have to be a super offensive joke. It just has to be a joke that’s just up against the edge of one of the, use the Sam Bankman-Fried term, one of the chivalrous. It has to be up against one of the things, one of the things that you’re absolutely required to believe to be the dinner parties. And then at that point, what happens is have a peer-to-peer network. You have a one-to-one connection with somebody, then you have your little conspiracy of thought criminality, and then you’ve probably been through this, you have your network of thought criminals, and then they have their network of thought criminals, and then you have this delicate mating dance as to whether you should bring the thought criminals together.
If the other person doesn’t laugh, back slowly away from the scene, I didn’t mean anything by it. And then by the way, it doesn’t have to be a super offensive joke. It just has to be a joke that’s just up against the edge of one of the, use the Sam Bankman-Fried term, one of the chivalrous. It has to be up against one of the things, one of the things that you’re absolutely required to believe to be the dinner parties. And then at that point, what happens is have a peer-to-peer network. You have a one-to-one connection with somebody, then you have your little conspiracy of thought criminality, and then you’ve probably been through this, you have your network of thought criminals, and then they have their network of thought criminals, and then you have this delicate mating dance as to whether you should bring the thought criminals together.
Lex Fridman
And the fundamental mechanism of the dance is humor.
And the fundamental mechanism of the dance is humor.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, it’s humor. Well, of course.
Yeah, it’s humor. Well, of course.
Lex Fridman
Memes. Yeah.
Memes. Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
Well, for two reasons. Number one, humor is a way to have deniability, right? Humor is a way to discuss serious things without having deniability. Oh, I’m sorry. It was just a joke. So that’s part of it, which is one of the reasons why comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can’t, they can always fall back on, oh yeah, I was just going for the laugh. But the other key thing about humor is that laughter is involuntary. You either laugh or you don’t. And it’s not a conscious decision whether you’re going to laugh. And everybody can tell when somebody’s fake laughing and every professional comedian knows this. The laughter is the clue that you’re onto something truthful.
Well, for two reasons. Number one, humor is a way to have deniability, right? Humor is a way to discuss serious things without having deniability. Oh, I’m sorry. It was just a joke. So that’s part of it, which is one of the reasons why comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can’t, they can always fall back on, oh yeah, I was just going for the laugh. But the other key thing about humor is that laughter is involuntary. You either laugh or you don’t. And it’s not a conscious decision whether you’re going to laugh. And everybody can tell when somebody’s fake laughing and every professional comedian knows this. The laughter is the clue that you’re onto something truthful.
People don’t laugh at made-up bullshit stories. They laugh because you’re revealing something that they either have not been allowed to think about or have not been allowed to talk about or is off limits. And all of a sudden it’s like the ice breaks and it’s like, oh yeah, that’s the thing. And it’s funny and I laugh, and then of course, this is why of course live comedy is so powerful is because you’re all doing that at the same time, so you start to have the safety of numbers. It’s no surprise to me, for example, Joe has been as successful as he has because they have this hack that the rest of us who are not professional comedians don’t have, but you have your in-person version of it, and then you’ve got the question of whether you can join the networks together.
And then you’ve probably been to this, is then at some point there’s like the Alt dinner party, the [inaudible 00:36:23] dinner party, and you get six or eight people together and you join the networks. And those are the happiest, at least in the last decade, those are the happiest moments of everybody’s lives. Everybody’s just ecstatic because they’re like, I don’t have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth, and we can actually talk about real things. So that’s the live version of it. And then of course, the other side of it’s the group chat phenomenon. And then basically the same thing played out until Elon bought X and until Substack took off, which were really the two big breakthroughs in free speech online, the same dynamic played out online, which is you had absolute conformity on the social networks, literally enforced by the social networks themselves through censorship, and then also through cancellation campaigns and mobbing and shaming.
But then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of Samizdat. Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under communism, note, they had the hard version of this. It’s like, how do you know who you could talk to? And then how do you distribute information? And again, that was the hard authoritarian version of this. And then we’ve been living through this weird mutant soft authoritarian version, but with some of the same patterns.
Lex Fridman
And WhatsApp allows you to scale and make it more efficient to build on these groups of heretical ideas bonded by humor.
And WhatsApp allows you to scale and make it more efficient to build on these groups of heretical ideas bonded by humor.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, exactly. Well, and this is the thing, and well, this is the running kind of thing about group chats. It’s not even a joke. It’s true. If you’ve noticed this principle of group chats, every group chat ends up being about memes and humor. And the game of group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable as you can get without actually tripping it. And literally every group chat that I have been in for the last decade, even if it starts some other direction, what ends up happening is it becomes the absolute comedy fest where, butt they walk right up the line and they’re constantly testing. And every once in a while somebody will trip the line and people will freak out. And it’s like, oh, too soon. Okay, we got to wait until next year to talk about that. They walk it back.
Yeah, exactly. Well, and this is the thing, and well, this is the running kind of thing about group chats. It’s not even a joke. It’s true. If you’ve noticed this principle of group chats, every group chat ends up being about memes and humor. And the game of group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable as you can get without actually tripping it. And literally every group chat that I have been in for the last decade, even if it starts some other direction, what ends up happening is it becomes the absolute comedy fest where, butt they walk right up the line and they’re constantly testing. And every once in a while somebody will trip the line and people will freak out. And it’s like, oh, too soon. Okay, we got to wait until next year to talk about that. They walk it back.
And so it’s that same thing. And then group chats is a technological phenomenon. It was amazing to see. Number one, it was obviously the rise of smartphones, then it was the rise of the new messaging services, then it was the rise specifically of I would say combination of WhatsApp and Signal. And the reason for that is those were the two big systems that did the full encryption, so you actually felt safe. And then the real breakthrough I think was disappearing messages, which hit Signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago. And then the combination of encryption and disappearing messages I think really unleashed it. Well, then there’s the fight over the length of disappearing messages. And so it’s like I often get behind on my thing, so I set to seven day disappearing messages and my friends who are like, no, that’s way too much risk. It’s got to be a day. And then every once in a while somebody will set to five minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, 100%. One of the things that bothers me about WhatsApp, the choice is between 24 hours and seven days, one day or seven days. And I have to have an existential crisis deciding whether I can last for seven days with what I’m about to say.
Yeah, 100%. One of the things that bothers me about WhatsApp, the choice is between 24 hours and seven days, one day or seven days. And I have to have an existential crisis deciding whether I can last for seven days with what I’m about to say.
Marc Andreessen
Exactly. Now, of course, what’s happening right now is the big thaw. The vibe shift. So what’s happening on the other side of the election is Elon on Twitter two years ago and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram. And by the way, with the continued growth of Substack and with other new platforms that are emerging, I think it may be, I don’t know that everything just shifts back into public, but a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view. And this is one of those things, quite frankly, even if I was opposed to what people are saying, and I’m sure I am in some cases, I would argue still net better for society that those things happen in public instead of private. Does you want to know? And then look, it’s just I think, clearly much healthier to live in a society in which people are not literally scared of what they’re saying.
Exactly. Now, of course, what’s happening right now is the big thaw. The vibe shift. So what’s happening on the other side of the election is Elon on Twitter two years ago and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram. And by the way, with the continued growth of Substack and with other new platforms that are emerging, I think it may be, I don’t know that everything just shifts back into public, but a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view. And this is one of those things, quite frankly, even if I was opposed to what people are saying, and I’m sure I am in some cases, I would argue still net better for society that those things happen in public instead of private. Does you want to know? And then look, it’s just I think, clearly much healthier to live in a society in which people are not literally scared of what they’re saying.
Preference falsification
Lex Fridman
I mean, to push back, to come back to this idea that we’re talking about, I do believe that people have beliefs and thoughts that are heretical, like a lot of people. I wonder what fraction of people have that? To me, the preference falsification is really interesting. What is the landscape of ideas that human civilization has in private as compared to what’s out in public? Because the dynamical system that is the difference between those two is fascinating. Throughout history the fall of communism and multiple regimes throughout Europe is really interesting. Everybody was following the line until not. But for sure, privately, there was a huge number of boiling conversations happening, where this is the bureaucracy of communism, the corruption of communism, all of that was really bothering people more and more and more and more. And all of a sudden there’s a trigger that allows the vibe shift to happen.
I mean, to push back, to come back to this idea that we’re talking about, I do believe that people have beliefs and thoughts that are heretical, like a lot of people. I wonder what fraction of people have that? To me, the preference falsification is really interesting. What is the landscape of ideas that human civilization has in private as compared to what’s out in public? Because the dynamical system that is the difference between those two is fascinating. Throughout history the fall of communism and multiple regimes throughout Europe is really interesting. Everybody was following the line until not. But for sure, privately, there was a huge number of boiling conversations happening, where this is the bureaucracy of communism, the corruption of communism, all of that was really bothering people more and more and more and more. And all of a sudden there’s a trigger that allows the vibe shift to happen.
To me, the interesting question here is, what is the landscape of private thoughts and ideas and conversations that are happening under the surface of Americans? Especially, my question is how much dormant energy is there for this roaring twenties? What people are like, no more bullshit, let’s get done.
Marc Andreessen
So we’ll go through the theory of preference falsification just to-
So we’ll go through the theory of preference falsification just to-
Lex Fridman
Yes. By the way, amazing. The books on this is fascinating.
Yes. By the way, amazing. The books on this is fascinating.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah. So this is one of the all time great books. Incredible. About 20, 30-year-old book, but it’s completely modern and current in what it talks about as well as very deeply historically informed. So it’s called Private Truths, Public Lies, and it’s written by a social science professor named Timur Kuran, at I think Duke, and his definitive work on this. And so he has this concept, he calls Preference Falsification. And so preference falsification is two things, and you get it from the title of the book, Private Truths, Public Lies. So preference falsification is when you believe something and you can’t say it, or, and this is very important, you don’t believe something and you must say it. And the commonality there is in both cases, you’re lying. You believe something internally, and then you’re lying about it in public.
Yeah, yeah. So this is one of the all time great books. Incredible. About 20, 30-year-old book, but it’s completely modern and current in what it talks about as well as very deeply historically informed. So it’s called Private Truths, Public Lies, and it’s written by a social science professor named Timur Kuran, at I think Duke, and his definitive work on this. And so he has this concept, he calls Preference Falsification. And so preference falsification is two things, and you get it from the title of the book, Private Truths, Public Lies. So preference falsification is when you believe something and you can’t say it, or, and this is very important, you don’t believe something and you must say it. And the commonality there is in both cases, you’re lying. You believe something internally, and then you’re lying about it in public.
And there’s the two classic forms of it. For example, there’s the, I believe communism is rotten, but I can’t say it version of it. But then there’s also the famous parable of the real life example, but the thing that Vaclav Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, which is The Power of the Powerless, who is an anti-communist resistance fighter who ultimately became the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the wall. But he wrote this book and he describes the other side of this, which is workers of the world unite. And so he describes what he calls the Parable of the Greengrocer, which is you’re a greengrocer in Prague in 1985, and for the last 50 years, it’s been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says Workers of the World Unite.
And it’s 1985, it is crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Of all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen. The Commies have been at that for 70 years, it is not happening. But that slogan had better be in your window every morning because if it’s not in your window every morning, you are not a good communist. The secret police are going to come by and they’re going to get you. And so the first thing you do when you get to the store is you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says, the thing is, the greengrocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he’s caving into the system and lying in public.
And so it turns into the moralization campaign. In fact, it’s not ideological enforcement anymore because everybody knows it’s fake. The authorities know it’s fake, everybody knows it’s fake. It’s not that they’re enforcing the actual ideology of the workers of the world uniting. It’s that they’re enforcing compliance and compliance with the regime. And you fuck you, you will comply. And so anyway, that’s the other side of that. And of course, we have lived in the last decade through a lot of both of those. I think anybody listening to this could name a series of slogans that we’ve all been forced to chant for the last decade that everybody knows at this point are just simply not true. I’ll let the audience speculate on their own group chats.
Lex Fridman
Send Marc your memes online as well, please.
Send Marc your memes online as well, please.
Marc Andreessen
Yes, yes, exactly. Okay. So anyway, so it’s the two sides of that, right? So it’s Private Truth, Public Lies. So then what preference falsification does is it talks about extending that from the idea of the individual experience in that to the idea of the entire society experiencing that, right? And this gets to your percentages question. Which is like, okay, what happens in a society in which people are forced to lie in public about what they truly believe? What happens number one is that individually they’re lying in public and that’s bad. But the other thing that happens is they no longer have an accurate gauge at all or any way to estimate how many people agree with them. And again, this literally is how you get something like the communist system, which is like, okay, you end up in a situation in which 80 or 90 or 99% of a society can actually all be thinking individually, I really don’t buy this anymore.
Yes, yes, exactly. Okay. So anyway, so it’s the two sides of that, right? So it’s Private Truth, Public Lies. So then what preference falsification does is it talks about extending that from the idea of the individual experience in that to the idea of the entire society experiencing that, right? And this gets to your percentages question. Which is like, okay, what happens in a society in which people are forced to lie in public about what they truly believe? What happens number one is that individually they’re lying in public and that’s bad. But the other thing that happens is they no longer have an accurate gauge at all or any way to estimate how many people agree with them. And again, this literally is how you get something like the communist system, which is like, okay, you end up in a situation in which 80 or 90 or 99% of a society can actually all be thinking individually, I really don’t buy this anymore.
And if anybody would just stand up and say it, I would be willing to go along with it, but I’m not going to be the first one to put my head on the chopping block. But because of the suppression censorship, you have no way of knowing how many of the people agree with you. And if the people agree with you are 10% of the population and you become part of a movement, you’re going to get killed. If 90% of the people agree with you, you’re going to win the revolution. And so the question of what the percentage actually is is a really critical question. And then basically in any sort of authoritarian system, you can’t run a survey to get an accurate result. And so you actually can’t know until you put it to the test. And then what he describes in the book is it’s always put to the test in the same way.
This is exactly what’s happened for the last two years, like 100% of exactly what’s happened. It’s like straight out of this book. Which is somebody, Elon, sticks his hand up and says, the workers of the world are not going to unite. Or the emperor is actually wearing no clothes, that famous parable. So one person stands up and does it, and literally that person is standing there by themselves, and everybody else in the audience is like, Ooh, I wonder what’s going to happen to that guy? But again, nobody knows. Elon doesn’t know, the first guy doesn’t know, other people don’t know which way is this going to go. And it may be that that’s a minority position and that’s the way to get yourself killed. Or it may be that that’s the majority position and you are now the leader of a revolution.
And then basically, of course, what happens is, okay, the first guy does that doesn’t get killed, the second guy does… Well, a lot of the time that guy does get killed, but when the guy doesn’t get killed, then a second guy pops his head up, says the same thing. All right, now you’ve got two. Two leads to four, four leads to eight, eight leads to 16. And then as we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in ’89, when it goes, it can go, and then it rips. And then if it turns out that you had a large percentage of the population that actually believed the different thing, it turns out all of a sudden everybody has this giant epiphany that says, oh, I’m actually part of the majority. And at that point, you were on the freight train to revolution, right? It is rolling. Now, the other part of this is the distinction between the role of the elites and the masses.
And here the best book is called the True Believer, which is the Eric Hoffer book. And so the nuance you have to put on this is the elites play a giant role in this because the elites do idea formation and communication, but the elites, by definition are a small minority. And so there’s also this giant role played by the masses, and the masses are not necessarily thinking these things through in the same intellectualized formal way that the elites are, but they are for sure experiencing these things in their daily lives, and they for sure have at least very strong emotional views on them.
And so when you really get the revolution, it’s when you get the elites lined up with, or either the current elites change or the new set of elites, a new set of counter elites, basically come along and say, “No, there’s actually a different and better way to live.” And then the people basically decide to follow the counter elite. So that’s the other dimension to it. And of course, that part is also happening right now. And again, case study one of that would be Elon, and who turns out in truly massive following.
Lex Fridman
And he has done that over and over in different industries, not just saying crazy shit online, but saying crazy shit in the realm of space, in the realm of autonomous driving, in the realm of AI, just over and over and over again. Turns out saying crazy shit is one of the ways to do a revolution and to actually make progress.
And he has done that over and over in different industries, not just saying crazy shit online, but saying crazy shit in the realm of space, in the realm of autonomous driving, in the realm of AI, just over and over and over again. Turns out saying crazy shit is one of the ways to do a revolution and to actually make progress.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And it’s like, well, but then there’s the test. Is it crazy or is it the truth?
Yeah. And it’s like, well, but then there’s the test. Is it crazy or is it the truth?
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
And this is where there are many specific things about Elon’s genius, but one of the really core ones is an absolute dedication to the truth. And so when Elon says something, it sounds like crazy shit, but in his mind it’s true. Now, is he always right? No. Sometimes the rockets crash, sometimes he’s wrong. He’s human, he’s like anybody else. He’s not right all the time. But at least my through line with him both in what he says in public and what he says in private, which by the way are the exact same things. He does not do this. He doesn’t lie in public about what he believes in private, or at least he doesn’t do that anymore. He’s 100% consistent in my experience. By the way, there’s two guys who are 100% consistent like that that I know. Elon and Trump.
And this is where there are many specific things about Elon’s genius, but one of the really core ones is an absolute dedication to the truth. And so when Elon says something, it sounds like crazy shit, but in his mind it’s true. Now, is he always right? No. Sometimes the rockets crash, sometimes he’s wrong. He’s human, he’s like anybody else. He’s not right all the time. But at least my through line with him both in what he says in public and what he says in private, which by the way are the exact same things. He does not do this. He doesn’t lie in public about what he believes in private, or at least he doesn’t do that anymore. He’s 100% consistent in my experience. By the way, there’s two guys who are 100% consistent like that that I know. Elon and Trump.
Whatever you think of them, what they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public. They’re completely transparent, they’re completely honest in that way. Again, it’s not like they’re perfect people, but they’re honest in that way. And it makes them potentially both as they have been, very powerful leaders of these movements because they’re both willing to stand up and say the thing that if it’s true, it turns out to be the thing in many cases that many or most or almost everyone else actually believes, but nobody was actually willing to say out loud. And so they can actually catalyze these shifts. I think this framework is exactly why Trump took over the Republican Party. I think Trump stood up there on stage with all these other kind of conventional Republicans, and he started saying things out loud that it turned out the base really was they were either already believing or they were prone to believe, and he was the only one who was saying them.
And so again, elite masses, he was the elite, the voters of the masses, and the voters decided, no. No more bushes, we’re going this other direction. That’s the mechanism of social change. What we just described is the actual mechanism of social change. It is fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this. We’ve been living through everything exactly what Timur Kuran describes, everything that Vaclav Havel described. Black Squares and Instagram, like the whole thing, right? All of it. And we’ve been living through the true believer elites masses thing, with a set of basically incredibly corrupt elites wondering why they don’t have the masses anymore, and a set of new elites that are running away with things.
And so we’re living through this incredible applied case study of these ideas. And if there’s a moral of the story, it is I think fairly obvious, which is it’s a really bad idea for a society to wedge itself into a position in which most people don’t believe the fundamental precepts of what they’re told they have to do to be good people like that. That is just not a good state to be in.
Lex Fridman
So one of the ways to avoid that in the future maybe, is to keep the delta between what’s said in private and what’s said in public small.
So one of the ways to avoid that in the future maybe, is to keep the delta between what’s said in private and what’s said in public small.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Well, this is sort of the siren song of censorship is we can keep people from saying things, which means we can keep people from thinking things.
Yeah. Well, this is sort of the siren song of censorship is we can keep people from saying things, which means we can keep people from thinking things.
And by the way, that may work for a while. I mean, again, the hard form, Soviet Union, pre photocopiers, there were mimeograph machines that were used to make Samizdat and underground newspapers, which is the mechanism of written communication of radical ideas, radical ideas. Ownership of a mimeograph machine was punishable by death. So that’s the hard version. The soft version is somebody clicks a button in Washington and you were erased from the internet, which good news, you’re still alive. Bad news is, shame about not being able to get a job. Too bad your family now hates you and won’t talk to you, whatever the version of cancellation it’s been. And so does that work? Maybe it works for a while. It worked for the Soviet Union for a while in its way, especially when it was coupled with official state power. But when it unwinds, it can unwind with incredible speed and ferocity. Because to your point, there’s all this bottled up energy.
Now, your question was what are the percentages? What’s the breakdown? And so my rough guess, just based on what I’ve seen in my world, is it’s something like 20, 60, 20. It’s like you’ve got 20% true believers in whatever is the current thing. You got 20% of people who are just true believers of whatever’s in the New York Times, Harvard professors and the Ford Foundation, they’re just… Maybe it’s 10, maybe it’s five, but let’s say generously it’s 20. So 20% kind of full-on revolutionaries. And then you’ve got, let’s call it 20% on the other side that are like, no, I’m not on board with this. This is crazy. I’m not signing up for this. But their view of themselves is they’re in a small minority, and in fact, they start out in a small minority, because what happens is the 60% go with the first 20%, not the second 20%. So you’ve got this large middle of people.
And it’s not that the people in the middle are not smart or anything like that, that they just have normal lives and they’re just trying to get by and they’re just trying to go to work each day and do a good job and be a good person and raise their kids and have a little bit of time to watch the game, and they’re just not engaged in the cut and thrust of political activism or any of this stuff. It’s just not their thing. But that’s where the over socialization comes in. It’s just like, okay, by default, the 60% will go along with the 20% of the radical revolutionaries at least for a while, and then the counter elite is in this other 20%. And over time, they build up a theory and network and ability to resist in a new set of representatives, in a new set of ideas. And then at some point there’s a contest and then, and then the question is, what happens in the middle? What happens in the 60%?
And it is kind of my point. It’s not even really does the 60% change their beliefs as much as it’s like, okay, what is the thing that that 60% now decides to basically fall into step with? And in the valley, that 60% for the last decade decided to be woke and extremely, I would say, on edge on a lot of things. And that 60% is pivoting in real time. They’re just done. They’ve just had it.
Lex Fridman
And I would love to see where that pivot goes because there’s internal battles happening right now.
And I would love to see where that pivot goes because there’s internal battles happening right now.
Marc Andreessen
So this is the other thing. So there’s two forms of things, and Timur has actually talked about this, Professor Kuran has talked about this. So one is he said, this is the kind of unwind where what you’re going to have is you’re now going to have people in the other direction. You’re going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along, who actually didn’t, right? So it’s going to swing the other way.
So this is the other thing. So there’s two forms of things, and Timur has actually talked about this, Professor Kuran has talked about this. So one is he said, this is the kind of unwind where what you’re going to have is you’re now going to have people in the other direction. You’re going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along, who actually didn’t, right? So it’s going to swing the other way.
And by the way, Trump’s not the only part of this, but he’s just a convenient shorthand for a lot of this. But whatever it is, you’ll have people who will say, well, I never supported the EI, or I never supported ESG, or I never thought we should have canceled that person, where of course, they were full on a part of the mob at that moment. So anyway, so you’ll have preference falsification happening in the other direction. His prediction, I think, basically is you’ll end up with the same quote, “problem” on the other side. Now, will that happen here? I don’t know. How far is American society willing to go on any of these things? I don’t know. But there is some question there.
And then the other part of it is, okay, now you have this elite that is used to being in power for the last decade. And by the way, many of those people are still in power and they’re in very important positions. And the New York Times is still the New York Times, and Harvard is still Harvard, and those people haven’t changed, like at all. Bureaucrats in the government and senior democratic politicians and so forth. And they’re sitting there right now feeling like reality has just smacked them hard in the face because they lost the election so badly. But they’re now going into, and specifically the Democratic Party, is going into a Civil War. And that form of the Civil War is completely predictable and it’s exactly what’s happening, which is half of them are saying, we need to go back to the center. We need to de-radicalize because we’ve lost the people. We’ve lost the people in the middle, and so we need to go back to the middle in order to be able to get 50% plus one in an election.
And then the other half of them are saying, no, we weren’t true to our principles. We were too weak. We were too soft. We must become more revolutionary. We must double down and we must celebrate murders in the street of health insurance executives. And that right now is a real fight.
Self-censorship
Lex Fridman
If I could tell you a little personal story that breaks my heart a little bit, there’s a professor, a historian, I won’t say who, who I admire deeply, love his work. He’s kind of a heretical thinker. And we were talking about having a podcast, on doing a podcast, and he eventually said that, “You know what, at this time, given your guest list, I just don’t want the headache of being in the faculty meetings in my particular institution.” And I asked, “Who are the particular figures in this guest list?” He said, “Trump.” And the second one, he said, “That you announced your interest to talk to Vladimir Putin.” So I just don’t want the headache. Now, I fully believe it would surprise a lot of people if I said who it is. This is a person who’s not bothered by the guest list. And I should also say that 80 plus percent of the guest list is left wing.
If I could tell you a little personal story that breaks my heart a little bit, there’s a professor, a historian, I won’t say who, who I admire deeply, love his work. He’s kind of a heretical thinker. And we were talking about having a podcast, on doing a podcast, and he eventually said that, “You know what, at this time, given your guest list, I just don’t want the headache of being in the faculty meetings in my particular institution.” And I asked, “Who are the particular figures in this guest list?” He said, “Trump.” And the second one, he said, “That you announced your interest to talk to Vladimir Putin.” So I just don’t want the headache. Now, I fully believe it would surprise a lot of people if I said who it is. This is a person who’s not bothered by the guest list. And I should also say that 80 plus percent of the guest list is left wing.
Nevertheless, he just doesn’t want the headache. And that speaks to the thing that you’ve kind of mentioned, that you just don’t want the headache. You just want to just have a pleasant morning with some coffee and talk to your fellow professors. And I think a lot of people are feeling that in universities and in other contexts, in tech companies. And I wonder if that shifts, how quickly that shifts? And there, the percentages you mentioned, 20, 60, 20 matters, and the contents of the private groups matters, and the dynamics of how that shifts matters. Because it’s very possible, nothing really changes in universities and in major tech companies. Where just, there’s a kind of excitement right now for potential revolution and these new ideas, these new vibes, to reverberate through these companies and universities, but it’s possible the wall will hold.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So he’s a friend of yours, I respect that you don’t want to name him. I also respect you don’t want to beat on him, so I would like to beat on him on your behalf. Does he have tenure?
Yeah. So he’s a friend of yours, I respect that you don’t want to name him. I also respect you don’t want to beat on him, so I would like to beat on him on your behalf. Does he have tenure?
Lex Fridman
Yes. He should use it.
Yes. He should use it.
Marc Andreessen
So this is the thing. This is the ultimate indictment of the corruption and the rot at the heart of our education system, at the heart of these universities. And it’s, by the way, it’s across the board. It’s all the top universities. Because the siren song for what it’s been for 70 years, whatever, of the tenure system, peer review system, tenure system, which is like, yeah, you work your butt off as an academic to get a professorship and then to get tenure, because then you can say what you actually think. Then you can do your work and your research and your speaking and your teaching without fear of being fired. Without fear of being canceled. Academic freedom. I mean, think of the term academic freedom, and then think of what these people have done to it. It’s gone. That entire thing was fake and is completely rotten. And these people are completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that’s been built for them, which by the way, is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money.
So this is the thing. This is the ultimate indictment of the corruption and the rot at the heart of our education system, at the heart of these universities. And it’s, by the way, it’s across the board. It’s all the top universities. Because the siren song for what it’s been for 70 years, whatever, of the tenure system, peer review system, tenure system, which is like, yeah, you work your butt off as an academic to get a professorship and then to get tenure, because then you can say what you actually think. Then you can do your work and your research and your speaking and your teaching without fear of being fired. Without fear of being canceled. Academic freedom. I mean, think of the term academic freedom, and then think of what these people have done to it. It’s gone. That entire thing was fake and is completely rotten. And these people are completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that’s been built for them, which by the way, is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money.
Lex Fridman
What’s the inkling of hope in this? This particular person and others who hear this, what can give them strength, inspiration, and courage?
What’s the inkling of hope in this? This particular person and others who hear this, what can give them strength, inspiration, and courage?
Marc Andreessen
That the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it’s going to withdraw the funding.
That the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it’s going to withdraw the funding.
Lex Fridman
Okay, so desperation.
Okay, so desperation.
Marc Andreessen
No, no, no, no, no. Think about what happens next. Okay, so let’s go through it. So the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is a federal student loan program, which is in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and then only spiraling way faster than inflation. That’s number one. Number two is federal research funding, which is also very large. And you probably know that when a scientist at the university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses.
No, no, no, no, no. Think about what happens next. Okay, so let’s go through it. So the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is a federal student loan program, which is in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and then only spiraling way faster than inflation. That’s number one. Number two is federal research funding, which is also very large. And you probably know that when a scientist at the university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let’s say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have. Anybody who’s been close to a university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and then for the state schools, the state money, they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild. Then you could rebuild. Because the problem right now, the folks at University of Austin are mounting a very valiant effort, and I hope that they succeed and I’m cheering for them, but the problem is you’re now inserting. Suppose you and I want to start a new university, and we want to hire all the free thinking professors, and we want to have the place that fixes all this, practically speaking, we can’t do it because we can’t get access to that money.
Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let’s say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have. Anybody who’s been close to a university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and then for the state schools, the state money, they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild. Then you could rebuild. Because the problem right now, the folks at University of Austin are mounting a very valiant effort, and I hope that they succeed and I’m cheering for them, but the problem is you’re now inserting. Suppose you and I want to start a new university, and we want to hire all the free thinking professors, and we want to have the place that fixes all this, practically speaking, we can’t do it because we can’t get access to that money.
I’ll give you the most direct reason we can’t get access to that money, we can’t get access to federal student funding. Do you know how universities are accredited for the purpose of getting access to federal student funding? Federal student loans? They’re accredited by the government, but not directly, indirectly. They’re not accredited by the Department of Education. Instead, what happens is the Department of Education accredits accreditation bureaus that are nonprofits that do the accreditation. Guess what the composition of the accreditation bureaus is? The existing universities. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money. Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university? Right.
And so we have a government funded and supported cartel that has gone… It’s just obvious now. It’s just gone sideways in basically any possible way it could go sideways, including, I mean, literally, as you know, students getting beaten up on campus for being the wrong religion. They’re just wrong in every possible way at this point. And it’s all on the federal taxpayer back. And there is no way, I mean, my opinion, there is no way to fix these things without replacing them. And there’s no way to replace them without letting them fail. And by the way, it’s like everything else in life. I mean, in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time, which is what happens in the business world when a company does a bad job is they go bankrupt and another company takes its place, and that’s how you get progress. And of course, below that is what happens is this is the process of evolution. Why does anything ever get better? Things are tested and tried, and then the things that are good survive. And so these places, they’ve been allowed to cut themselves off, both from evolution of the institutional level and evolution of the individual level as shown by the just widespread abuse of tenure. And so we’ve just stalled out. We built an ossified system, an ossified, centralized, corrupt system, where we’re surprised by the results. They are not fixable in their current form.
Lex Fridman
I disagree with you on that. Maybe it’s grounded in hope that I believe you can revolutionize a system from within, because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important.
I disagree with you on that. Maybe it’s grounded in hope that I believe you can revolutionize a system from within, because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important.
Marc Andreessen
But that logic doesn’t follow at all. That’s underpants gnome logic.
But that logic doesn’t follow at all. That’s underpants gnome logic.
Lex Fridman
Underpants gnome, can you explain what that means?
Underpants gnome, can you explain what that means?
Marc Andreessen
Underpants gnomes logic. So I just started watching a key touchstone of American culture with my nine-year-old, which of course is South Park.
Underpants gnomes logic. So I just started watching a key touchstone of American culture with my nine-year-old, which of course is South Park.
Lex Fridman
Yes. Wow.
Yes. Wow.
Marc Andreessen
Which by the way is a little aggressive for a nine-year-old.
Which by the way is a little aggressive for a nine-year-old.
Lex Fridman
Very aggressive.
Very aggressive.
Marc Andreessen
But he likes it. He’s learning all kinds of new words.
But he likes it. He’s learning all kinds of new words.
Lex Fridman
And all kinds of new ideas. But yeah, go on.
And all kinds of new ideas. But yeah, go on.
Marc Andreessen
I told him, I said, “You’re going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use.”
I told him, I said, “You’re going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use.”
Lex Fridman
Right. Education.
Right. Education.
Marc Andreessen
And I said, “You know how we have an agreement that we never lie to mommy?” I said, “Not using a word that you learn in here does not count as lying. And keep that in mind.”
And I said, “You know how we have an agreement that we never lie to mommy?” I said, “Not using a word that you learn in here does not count as lying. And keep that in mind.”
Lex Fridman
Wow. This is Orwellian redefinition of lying. But yes, go ahead.
Wow. This is Orwellian redefinition of lying. But yes, go ahead.
Marc Andreessen
And of course, in the very opening episode, in the first 30 seconds, one of the kids calls the other kid a dildo. We’re off to the races.
And of course, in the very opening episode, in the first 30 seconds, one of the kids calls the other kid a dildo. We’re off to the races.
Lex Fridman
Yep. Let’s go.
Yep. Let’s go.
Marc Andreessen
“Daddy, what’s a dildo?”
“Daddy, what’s a dildo?”
Lex Fridman
Yep.
Yep.
Marc Andreessen
“Sorry son. I don’t know.”
“Sorry son. I don’t know.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
So the-
So the-
Lex Fridman
Underpants gnome.
Underpants gnome.
Marc Andreessen
So famous episode of South Park, the underpants gnomes. All the kids basically realize that their underpants are going missing from their dresser drawers, somebody’s stealing the underpants. And it’s just like, well, who on earth would steal the underpants? And it turns out it’s the underpants gnomes. And it turns out the underpants gnomes have come to town and they’ve got this little underground warren of tunnels in storage places for all the underpants. And so they go out at night, they steal the underpants, and the kids discover that the underpants gnomes, and they’re, “What are you doing? What’s the point of this?” And so the underpants gnomes present their master plan, which is a three-part plan, which is step one, collect underpants, step three, profit, step two, question mark. So you just proposed the underpants gnome. Which is very common in politics.
So famous episode of South Park, the underpants gnomes. All the kids basically realize that their underpants are going missing from their dresser drawers, somebody’s stealing the underpants. And it’s just like, well, who on earth would steal the underpants? And it turns out it’s the underpants gnomes. And it turns out the underpants gnomes have come to town and they’ve got this little underground warren of tunnels in storage places for all the underpants. And so they go out at night, they steal the underpants, and the kids discover that the underpants gnomes, and they’re, “What are you doing? What’s the point of this?” And so the underpants gnomes present their master plan, which is a three-part plan, which is step one, collect underpants, step three, profit, step two, question mark. So you just proposed the underpants gnome. Which is very common in politics.
So the form of this in politics is we must do something. This is something, therefore we must do this. But there’s no causal logic chain in there at all to expect that that’s actually going to succeed because there’s no reason to believe that it is.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, but-
Yeah, but-
Marc Andreessen
But this is what I hear all the time, and I will let you talk as the host of the show in a moment, but I hear this all the time. I have friends who are on these boards, very involved in these places, and I hear this all the time, which is like, “Oh, these are very important. We must fix them.” And so therefore, they are fixable. There’s no logic chain there at all.
But this is what I hear all the time, and I will let you talk as the host of the show in a moment, but I hear this all the time. I have friends who are on these boards, very involved in these places, and I hear this all the time, which is like, “Oh, these are very important. We must fix them.” And so therefore, they are fixable. There’s no logic chain there at all.
Lex Fridman
If there’s that pressure that you described in terms of cutting funding, then you have the leverage to fire a lot of the administration and have new leadership that steps up that aligns with this vision that things really need to change at the heads of the universities. And they put students and faculty at primary, fire a lot of the administration, and realign and reinvigorate this idea of freedom of thought and intellectual freedom, because there is already-
If there’s that pressure that you described in terms of cutting funding, then you have the leverage to fire a lot of the administration and have new leadership that steps up that aligns with this vision that things really need to change at the heads of the universities. And they put students and faculty at primary, fire a lot of the administration, and realign and reinvigorate this idea of freedom of thought and intellectual freedom, because there is already-
Lex Fridman
And intellectual freedom. Because there is already a framework of great institutions that’s there, and the way they talk about what it means to be a great institution is aligned with this very idea that you’re talking about, meaning like intellectual freedom, the idea of tenure. On the surface it’s aligned, underneath it’s become corrupted.
And intellectual freedom. Because there is already a framework of great institutions that’s there, and the way they talk about what it means to be a great institution is aligned with this very idea that you’re talking about, meaning like intellectual freedom, the idea of tenure. On the surface it’s aligned, underneath it’s become corrupted.
Marc Andreessen
If we say free speech and academic freedom often enough, sooner or later these tenured professors will get brave.
If we say free speech and academic freedom often enough, sooner or later these tenured professors will get brave.
Lex Fridman
Wait, do you think that universities are fundamentally broken? Okay, so how do you fix it? How do you have institutions for educating 20-year-olds and institutions that host researchers that have the freedom to do epic shit, like research-type shit that’s outside the scopes of R&D departments and inside companies? So how do you create an institution like that?
Wait, do you think that universities are fundamentally broken? Okay, so how do you fix it? How do you have institutions for educating 20-year-olds and institutions that host researchers that have the freedom to do epic shit, like research-type shit that’s outside the scopes of R&D departments and inside companies? So how do you create an institution like that?
Marc Andreessen
How do you create a good restaurant when the one down the street sucks?
How do you create a good restaurant when the one down the street sucks?
Lex Fridman
Right. You invent something new?
Right. You invent something new?
Marc Andreessen
You open a new restaurant.
You open a new restaurant.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
How often in your life have you experienced a restaurant that’s just absolutely horrible, and it’s poisoning all of its customers and the food tastes terrible, and then three years later you go back and it’s fantastic? Charlie Munger actually had the best comment, this great investor, Charlie Munger has great comment. He was once asked, it’s like General Electric was going through all these challenges, and he was asked at a Q&A. It said, “How would you fix the culture at General Electric?” And he said, “Fix the culture at General Electric?” He said, “I couldn’t even fix the culture at a restaurant.”
How often in your life have you experienced a restaurant that’s just absolutely horrible, and it’s poisoning all of its customers and the food tastes terrible, and then three years later you go back and it’s fantastic? Charlie Munger actually had the best comment, this great investor, Charlie Munger has great comment. He was once asked, it’s like General Electric was going through all these challenges, and he was asked at a Q&A. It said, “How would you fix the culture at General Electric?” And he said, “Fix the culture at General Electric?” He said, “I couldn’t even fix the culture at a restaurant.”
It’s insane, like obviously you can’t do it. Nobody in business thinks you can do that, it’s impossible. Now look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends who work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I’m wrong, I would love to be wrong, I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to fix it, I’d love to see them come back to their spoken principles, I think that’d be great, I’d love to see the professors with tenure get bravery, it would be fantastic. My partner and I have done a lot of public speaking on this topic, it’s been intended to not just be harsh, but also be like, okay, these challenges have to be confronted directly.
By the way, let me also say something positive, especially post-October seventh, there are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions like Mark Rowan who are really coming in trying to, I think legitimately trying to fix these places. I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities. He’s working overtime to try to do this.
Man, I hope they can figure it out. But the counter question would just be like, do you see it actually happening at a single one of these places?
Lex Fridman
I’m a person that believes in leadership. If you have the right leadership, the whole system can be changed.
I’m a person that believes in leadership. If you have the right leadership, the whole system can be changed.
Marc Andreessen
So here’s a question for your friend who have tenure at one of these places, which is who runs his university?
So here’s a question for your friend who have tenure at one of these places, which is who runs his university?
Lex Fridman
You know how I think runs it? Whoever the fuck says they run it, that’s what great leadership is. A president has that power.
You know how I think runs it? Whoever the fuck says they run it, that’s what great leadership is. A president has that power.
Marc Andreessen
But how does-
But how does-
Lex Fridman
President of university has the leverage because they can mouth off like Elon can.
President of university has the leverage because they can mouth off like Elon can.
Marc Andreessen
Can they fire the professors?
Can they fire the professors?
Lex Fridman
They can fire them through being vocal publicly, yes.
They can fire them through being vocal publicly, yes.
Marc Andreessen
Can they fire the professors?
Can they fire the professors?
Lex Fridman
What are you talking about legally? Can we fire? No, they cannot fire the professors.
What are you talking about legally? Can we fire? No, they cannot fire the professors.
Marc Andreessen
Then we know who runs the university.
Then we know who runs the university.
Lex Fridman
The professors?
The professors?
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, the professors. The professors and the students, the professors and the feral students. Then they’re of course in a radicalization feedback cycle driving each other crazy.
Yeah, the professors. The professors and the students, the professors and the feral students. Then they’re of course in a radicalization feedback cycle driving each other crazy.
Lex Fridman
You said feral students?
You said feral students?
Marc Andreessen
The feral students. Yeah, the feral students. What happens when you’re put in charge of your bureaucracy where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they can outlast you? The thing that the tenured professors at all these places know is it doesn’t matter who the president is because they can outlast them because they cannot get fired. By the way, it’s the same thing that bureaucrats in the government know. It’s the same thing that the bureaucrats in the Department of Education know. They know the exact same thing. They can outlast you. I mean it’s the whole thing that, it’s the resistance. They can be the resistance. They can just sit there and resist, which is what they do. They’re not fireable.
The feral students. Yeah, the feral students. What happens when you’re put in charge of your bureaucracy where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they can outlast you? The thing that the tenured professors at all these places know is it doesn’t matter who the president is because they can outlast them because they cannot get fired. By the way, it’s the same thing that bureaucrats in the government know. It’s the same thing that the bureaucrats in the Department of Education know. They know the exact same thing. They can outlast you. I mean it’s the whole thing that, it’s the resistance. They can be the resistance. They can just sit there and resist, which is what they do. They’re not fireable.
Lex Fridman
That’s definitely a crisis that needs to be solved. That’s a huge problem. And I also don’t like that I’m defending academia here. I agree with you that the situation is dire, but I just think that institutions are important. And I should also add context since you’ve been grilling me a little bit, you were using restaurants as an analogy and earlier offline in this conversation you said the Dairy Queen is a great restaurant. So let’s [inaudible 01:10:12].
That’s definitely a crisis that needs to be solved. That’s a huge problem. And I also don’t like that I’m defending academia here. I agree with you that the situation is dire, but I just think that institutions are important. And I should also add context since you’ve been grilling me a little bit, you were using restaurants as an analogy and earlier offline in this conversation you said the Dairy Queen is a great restaurant. So let’s [inaudible 01:10:12].
Marc Andreessen
I didn’t say Dairy Queen is a great restaurant.
I didn’t say Dairy Queen is a great restaurant.
Lex Fridman
Let the listener take-
Let the listener take-
Marc Andreessen
I said Dairy Queen is the best restaurant.
I said Dairy Queen is the best restaurant.
Lex Fridman
The best restaurant. There you go. So everything that Marc Andreessen is saying today, put that into, cont-
The best restaurant. There you go. So everything that Marc Andreessen is saying today, put that into, cont-
Marc Andreessen
You should go order a Blizzard. One day, you should walk down there and order a Blizzard.
You should go order a Blizzard. One day, you should walk down there and order a Blizzard.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
They can get like 4,000 calories in a cup.
They can get like 4,000 calories in a cup.
Lex Fridman
They can and they’re delicious.
They can and they’re delicious.
Marc Andreessen
It’s amazing.
It’s amazing.
Lex Fridman
They are truly delicious. And they-
They are truly delicious. And they-
Marc Andreessen
They’re really fantastic. And they’ll put anything in there you want. Okay. But anyway, let me just close by saying, look, my friends in the university system, I would just say, “Look, this is the challenge.” I would just pose this as the challenge. To me having had a lot of these conversations, this is the bar in my view, this is the conversation that actually has to happen. This is the bar that actually has to be hit. These problems need to be confronted directly because I there’s think there’s been way too much, I mean, I’m actually worried on the other side. There’s too much happy talk in these conversations.
They’re really fantastic. And they’ll put anything in there you want. Okay. But anyway, let me just close by saying, look, my friends in the university system, I would just say, “Look, this is the challenge.” I would just pose this as the challenge. To me having had a lot of these conversations, this is the bar in my view, this is the conversation that actually has to happen. This is the bar that actually has to be hit. These problems need to be confronted directly because I there’s think there’s been way too much, I mean, I’m actually worried on the other side. There’s too much happy talk in these conversations.
I think the taxpayers do not understand this level of crisis, and I think if the taxpayers come to understand it, I think the funding evaporates. And so I think the fuse is going through no fault of any of ours, but the fuse is going and there’s some window of time here to fix this and address it and justify the money because just normal taxpayers sitting in normal towns in normal jobs are not going to tolerate this for that much longer.
Censorship
Lex Fridman
You’ve mentioned censorship a few times. Let us, if we can go deep into the darkness of the past and how censorship mechanism was used. So you are a good person to speak about the history of this because you were there on the ground floor in 2013-ish Facebook. I heard that you were there when they invented or maybe developed the term hate speech in the context of censorship on social media. So take me through that history if you can, the use of censorship.
You’ve mentioned censorship a few times. Let us, if we can go deep into the darkness of the past and how censorship mechanism was used. So you are a good person to speak about the history of this because you were there on the ground floor in 2013-ish Facebook. I heard that you were there when they invented or maybe developed the term hate speech in the context of censorship on social media. So take me through that history if you can, the use of censorship.
Marc Andreessen
So I was there on the ground in 1993.
So I was there on the ground in 1993.
Lex Fridman
There’s multiple floors to this building, apparently.
There’s multiple floors to this building, apparently.
Marc Andreessen
There are.
There are.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
So I got the first ask to implement censorship on the internet, which was in the web browser.
So I got the first ask to implement censorship on the internet, which was in the web browser.
Lex Fridman
That is fascinating.
That is fascinating.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah. Actually 1992. I was asked to implement a nudity filter.
Yeah, yeah. Actually 1992. I was asked to implement a nudity filter.
Lex Fridman
Did you have the courage to speak up back then?
Did you have the courage to speak up back then?
Marc Andreessen
I did not have any problems speaking up back then. I was making $6.25 cents an hour. I did not have a lot to lose. No, I was asked at the time, and then look, in some sense, a legitimate request, which is working on a research project actually funded by the federal government at a public university. So I don’t think my boss was in any way out of line, but it was like, yeah, this web browser thing is great, but could it just make sure to not have any photos of naked people that show up? But if you think about this for a second, as a technologist, I had an issue, which is this was pre-image net. And so I had a brief period where I tried to imagine an algorithm that I referred to as the breast detection algorithm that I was going to have to design and then apparently a variety of other apparently body parts people are also sensitive about. And then I politely declined to do this.
I did not have any problems speaking up back then. I was making $6.25 cents an hour. I did not have a lot to lose. No, I was asked at the time, and then look, in some sense, a legitimate request, which is working on a research project actually funded by the federal government at a public university. So I don’t think my boss was in any way out of line, but it was like, yeah, this web browser thing is great, but could it just make sure to not have any photos of naked people that show up? But if you think about this for a second, as a technologist, I had an issue, which is this was pre-image net. And so I had a brief period where I tried to imagine an algorithm that I referred to as the breast detection algorithm that I was going to have to design and then apparently a variety of other apparently body parts people are also sensitive about. And then I politely declined to do this.
Lex Fridman
For just the technical difficulties of it.
For just the technical difficulties of it.
Marc Andreessen
Well, number one, I actually didn’t know how to do it, but number two is just like, no, I’m just not building a censorship engine. I’m just not doing it. And in those days, the internet generally was a free fire zone for everything. It was actually interesting as sort of pre-’93, the internet was such a specific niche community. It was the million kind of highest IQ nerds in the world. And so it actually didn’t really have a lot of issues that people were super interested in talking about like astrophysics and not very interested in even politics at that time so there really was not an issue there. But yeah, I didn’t want to start the process.
Well, number one, I actually didn’t know how to do it, but number two is just like, no, I’m just not building a censorship engine. I’m just not doing it. And in those days, the internet generally was a free fire zone for everything. It was actually interesting as sort of pre-’93, the internet was such a specific niche community. It was the million kind of highest IQ nerds in the world. And so it actually didn’t really have a lot of issues that people were super interested in talking about like astrophysics and not very interested in even politics at that time so there really was not an issue there. But yeah, I didn’t want to start the process.
So I think the way to think about this, so first of all, yeah. So I was involved in this at Facebook, by the way, I’ve been involved in this at Facebook every step of the way. I joined the board there in 2007 so I’ve seen everything in the last almost 20 years every step of the way. But also I’ve been involved in most of the other companies over time so I was angel investor on Twitter. I knew them really well. We were the founding investor in Substack. Part of the Elon takeover of Twitter with X. I was an angel at LinkedIn. So I’ve been in, we were the funder of Pinterest. We were one of the main investors there, Reddit as well. And I was having these conversations with all these guys all the way through. So as much talk specifically about Facebook, but I can just tell you the general pattern. And for quite a while it was kind of all the same across these companies.
So basically the way to think about this, the true kind of nuanced view of this is that there is practically speaking, no internet service that can have zero censorship. And by the way, that also mirrors, there is no country that actually has unlimited free speech either. The U.S. First Amendment actually has 12 or 13 formal carve outs from the Supreme Court over time. So incitement to violence and terrorist recruitment and child abuse and child pornography and so forth, they’re not covered by the First Amendment. And just practically speaking, if you and I are going to start an internet company and have a service, we can’t have that stuff either because illegal or it will just clearly destroy the whole thing.
So you’re always going to have a censorship engine. I mean hopefully it’s not actually in the browser, but you’re going to have it for sure at the level of an internet service. But then what happens is now you have a machine. Now you have a system where you can put in rules saying, we allow this. We don’t allow that. You have enforcement, you have consequences. And once that system is in place, it becomes the ring of power, which is like, okay, now anybody in that company or anybody associated with that company or anybody who wants to pressure that company will just start to say, “Okay, you should use that machine for more than just terrorist recruitment and child pornography. You should use it for X, Y, Z.”
And basically that transition happened, call it 2012, 2013 is when there was this very, very kind of rapid pivot. I think the kickoff to it for some reason it was the beginning of the second Obama term. I think it also coincided with the sort of arrival of the first kind of super woke kids into these schools. It’s the kids that were in school between for the Iraq war and then the global financial crisis and they came out super radicalized. They came into these companies, they immediately started mounting these social crusades to ban and censor lots of things.
And then quite frankly, the Democratic Party figured this out. And they figured out that these companies were very subject to being controlled and the executive teams and boards of directors were almost all Democrats. And there’s tremendous circulation. A lot of Obama people from the first term actually came and worked in these companies. And a lot of FBI people and other law enforcement intelligence people came in and worked and they were all Democrats for that set. And so the ring of power was lying on the table. It had been built and they picked it up and put it on, and then they just ran.
And the original discussions were basically always on two topics. It was hate speech and misinformation. Hate speech was the original one. And the hate speech conversation started exactly like you’d expect, which is we can’t have the N word. And which the answer is fair enough, let’s not have the N word. Now, we’ve set a precedent, and Jordan Peterson has talked a lot about this. The definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable. So we can’t have things that make people uncomfortable. I, course people like me that are disagreeable raise their hands and say, “Well, that idea right there makes me uncomfortable.” But of course that doesn’t count as hate speech. So the ring of power is on one hand and not on the other hand.
And then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that completely anodyne is the point Mark has been making recently completely anodyne comments that are completely legitimate on television or on the Senate floor all of a sudden are hate speech can’t be said online so that the ring of power was wielded in grossly irresponsible ways. We could talk about all the stuff that happened there.
And then the other one was misinformation. And there was a little bit of that early on, but of course that really kicked in with Trump. So hate speech stuff pre-dated Trump by three or four years. The misinformation stuff was, it was a little bit later and it was a consequence of the Russiagate hoax. And then that was a ring of power that was even more powerful because hate speech, it’s like, okay, at some point if something offensive or not, at least you can have a question as to whether that’s the case. But the problem with misinformation is like, is it the truth or not? What do we know for 800 years or whatever western civilization it’s that there’s only a few entities that can determine the truth on every topic. There’s God, there’s the king. We don’t have those anymore and the rest of us are all imperfect and flawed.
And so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is deeply anti-Western and deeply authoritarian. And somehow the misinformation kind of crusade went from the Russiagate hoax into just full-blown, we’re going to use that weapon for whatever we want.
And then of course, then the culminating moment on that, that really was the straw that broke the camel’s back was we’re going to censor all theories that the COVID virus might’ve been manufactured in a lab as misinformation. And inside these companies, that was the point where people for the first time, this is what, three years ago for the first time, they were like, that was when it sunk in where it’s just like, okay, this has spun completely out of control. But anyway, that’s how we got to where we are.
And then basically that spell lasted, that complex existed and got expanded basically from, call it 2013 to 2023. I think basically two things broke it. One is Substack, and I’m super proud of those guys because they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a free speech platform. And they came under intense pressure, including from the press, and they tried to beat them to the ground and kill them. And intense pressure, by the way, from let’s say certain of the platform companies basically threatening them. And they stood up to it. And sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of speech and conversation anywhere on planet Earth. And they’ve done a great job. And it is worked by the way. It’s great. And then obviously Elon with X was the hammer blow. And then the third one now is what Mark is doing at Facebook.
Jon Stewart
Lex Fridman
And there’s also singular moments, I think you’ve spoken about this, which like Jon Stewart going on Stephen Colbert and talking about the lab leak theory.
And there’s also singular moments, I think you’ve spoken about this, which like Jon Stewart going on Stephen Colbert and talking about the lab leak theory.
Marc Andreessen
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
There’s certain moments that just kind of shake everybody up, the right person the right time. It’s a wake-up call.
There’s certain moments that just kind of shake everybody up, the right person the right time. It’s a wake-up call.
Marc Andreessen
So that there, and I will tell you, and I should say Jon Stewart attacked me recently, so I’m not that thrilled about him, but I would say I was a long run fan of Jon Stewart. I watched probably every episode of The Daily Show when he was on it for probably 20 years. But he did a very important public service and it was that appearance on the Colbert Show. And I don’t know how broadly this is, at the time, it was in the news briefly, but I don’t know how if people remember this, but I will tell you in the rooms where people discuss what is misinformation and these policies, that was a very big moment. That was probably actually the key catalyzing moment. And I think he exhibited, I would say, conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that.
So that there, and I will tell you, and I should say Jon Stewart attacked me recently, so I’m not that thrilled about him, but I would say I was a long run fan of Jon Stewart. I watched probably every episode of The Daily Show when he was on it for probably 20 years. But he did a very important public service and it was that appearance on the Colbert Show. And I don’t know how broadly this is, at the time, it was in the news briefly, but I don’t know how if people remember this, but I will tell you in the rooms where people discuss what is misinformation and these policies, that was a very big moment. That was probably actually the key catalyzing moment. And I think he exhibited, I would say, conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that.
And for people who don’t recall what he did, and this was in the full-blown, you absolutely must lock down for two years. You absolutely must keep all the schools closed. You absolutely must have everybody work from home. You absolutely must wear a mask like the whole thing. And then one of those was you absolutely must believe that COVID was completely natural. You must believe that. And not believing that means you’re a fascist Nazi Trump supporter, MAGA, evil QAnon person. And uniformly, that was enforced by the social media companies. And like I said, that was the peak. And Jon Stewart went on the Colbert Show, and I don’t know if they planned it or not because Colbert looked shocked. I don’t know how much, it was a bit, but he went on there and he just had one of these, the Emperor’s wearing no clothes things where he said, “It’s just not plausible that you had the COVID super virus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute of lethal coronaviruses.” It’s just not plausible that certainly that you could just rule that out.
And then there was another key moment, actually, the more serious version was I think the author, Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York Magazine. And Nicholson Baker is one of our great novelist, writers of our time. And he wrote the piece and he did the complete undressing of it. And that was the first, I think that was the first legit, there had been alt renegade, there had been people running around saying this, but getting censored all over the place. That was the first one that was in the mainstream press and he talked to all the heretics and he just laid the whole thing out. And that was a moment.
And I remember let’s say a board meeting at one of these companies after that where basically everybody looked around the table and was like, “All right, I guess we’re not, we don’t need to censor that anymore.” And then of course, what immediately follows from that is, “Well, wait a minute, why were we censoring that in the first place?” And then the downstream, not that day, but the downstream conversations were like, “Okay, if we made such a giant, in retrospect, if we all made such a giant collective mistake censoring that, then what does that say about the rest of our regime?” And I think that was the thread in the sweater that started to unravel it.
Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan
Lex Fridman
I should say it again, I do think that the Jon Stewart appearance and the statement he made was a courageous act.
I should say it again, I do think that the Jon Stewart appearance and the statement he made was a courageous act.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, I agree.
Lex Fridman
I think we need to have more of that in the world. And like you said, Elon, everything he did with X is a series of courageous acts. And I think what Mark Zuckerberg did on Rogan a few days ago is a courageous act. Can you just speak to that?
I think we need to have more of that in the world. And like you said, Elon, everything he did with X is a series of courageous acts. And I think what Mark Zuckerberg did on Rogan a few days ago is a courageous act. Can you just speak to that?
Marc Andreessen
He has become, I think, an outstanding communicator, and he’s somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front. And I think he’s one of these guys who can sit down and talk for three hours and make complete sense. And as you do with all of your episodes, when somebody sit and talks for three hours, you really get a sense of somebody because it’s really hard to be artificial for that long and he’s now done that repeatedly. He’s really good at it. And then look again, I would maybe put him in the third category now certainly after that appearance, I would say I would put him up there now with kind of Elon and Trump in the sense of the public and the private are now synchronized. I guess I’d say that. He said on that show what he really believes. He said all the same things that he says in private. I don’t think there’s really any discrepancy anymore.
He has become, I think, an outstanding communicator, and he’s somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front. And I think he’s one of these guys who can sit down and talk for three hours and make complete sense. And as you do with all of your episodes, when somebody sit and talks for three hours, you really get a sense of somebody because it’s really hard to be artificial for that long and he’s now done that repeatedly. He’s really good at it. And then look again, I would maybe put him in the third category now certainly after that appearance, I would say I would put him up there now with kind of Elon and Trump in the sense of the public and the private are now synchronized. I guess I’d say that. He said on that show what he really believes. He said all the same things that he says in private. I don’t think there’s really any discrepancy anymore.
I would say he has always taken upon himself a level of obligation, responsibility to running a company the size of Meta and to running services that are that large. And I think his conception of what he’s doing, which I think is correct, is he’s running services that are bigger than any country. Over 3 billion people use those services. And then the company has many tens of thousands of employees and many investors, and it’s a public company and he thinks very deeply and seriously about his responsibilities. And so he has not felt like he has had, let’s just say, the complete flexibility that Elon has had. And people could argue that one way or the other, but he talked about a lot. He’s evolved a lot. A lot of it was he learned a lot.
And by the way, I’m going to put myself right back up there. I’m not claiming any huge foresight or heroism on any of this. I’ve also learned a lot, my views on things are very different than they were 10 years ago on lots of topics. And so I’ve been on a learning journey. He’s been on a learning journey. He’s a really, really good learner. He assimilates information as good as, or better than anybody else I know.
The other thing I guess I would just say is he talked on that show about something very important, which is when you’re in a role where you’re running a company like that, there are a set of decisions that you get to make and you deserve to be criticized for those decisions and so forth and it’s valid, but you are under tremendous external pressure as well. And by the way, you’re under tremendous internal pressure. You’ve got your employees coming at you, you’ve got your executives in some cases coming at you. You’ve got your board in some cases coming at you. You’ve got your shareholders coming at you, so you’ve got your internal pressures, but you also have the press coming at you. You’ve got academia coming at you, you’ve got the entire nonprofit complex activist complex coming at you.
And then really critically, he talked about in Rogan and these companies all went through this, in this last especially five years, you had the government coming at you. And that’s the really stinky end of the pool where the government was, in my view, illegally exerting just in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on speech and coercion and conspiracy, forcing these companies to engage in activities. Again, in some cases they may have wanted to do, but in other cases they clearly didn’t want to do and felt like they had to do.
And the level of pressure, like I say, I’ve known every CEO Twitter, they’ve all had the exact same experience, which when they were in the job, it was just daily beatings. It’s just getting punched in the face every single day constantly. And Mark is very good at getting physically punched in the face and then-
Lex Fridman
Getting better and better.
Getting better and better.
Marc Andreessen
And he is. And he’s very good at taking a punch, and he has taken many, many punches. So I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy for these are not kings, these are people who operate with I would say extraordinary levels of external pressure. I think if I had been in his job for the last decade, I would be a little puddle on the floor. And so it says, I think a lot about him that he has risen to this occasion the way that he has.
And he is. And he’s very good at taking a punch, and he has taken many, many punches. So I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy for these are not kings, these are people who operate with I would say extraordinary levels of external pressure. I think if I had been in his job for the last decade, I would be a little puddle on the floor. And so it says, I think a lot about him that he has risen to this occasion the way that he has.
And by the way, I should also say the cynicism of course is immediately out and it’s a legitimate thing for people to say, but it’s like, “Oh, you’re only doing this because of Trump or whatever.” And it’s just like, no, he has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time. And so I think what you saw are legitimate, deeply held beliefs, not some sort of just-in-the-moment thing that could change at any time.
Lex Fridman
So what do you think it’s like to be him and other leaders of companies, to be you and withstand internal pressure and external pressure? What’s that life? Is it deeply lonely?
So what do you think it’s like to be him and other leaders of companies, to be you and withstand internal pressure and external pressure? What’s that life? Is it deeply lonely?
Marc Andreessen
That’s a great question. So leaders are lonely to start with. And this is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy. Nobody feels sorry for a CEO. It’s not a thing. And again, legitimately so CEOs get paid a lot, the whole thing, there’s a lot of great things about it. So it’s not like they should be out there asking for a lot of sympathy, but it is the case that they are human beings and it is the case that it is a lonely job. And the reason it’s a lonely job is because your words carry tremendous weight and you are dealing with extremely complicated issues, and you’re under a tremendous amount of emotional, personal, emotional stress. And you often end up not being able to sleep well, and you end up not being able to keep up an exercise routine and all those things. And you come under family stress because you’re working all the time.
That’s a great question. So leaders are lonely to start with. And this is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy. Nobody feels sorry for a CEO. It’s not a thing. And again, legitimately so CEOs get paid a lot, the whole thing, there’s a lot of great things about it. So it’s not like they should be out there asking for a lot of sympathy, but it is the case that they are human beings and it is the case that it is a lonely job. And the reason it’s a lonely job is because your words carry tremendous weight and you are dealing with extremely complicated issues, and you’re under a tremendous amount of emotional, personal, emotional stress. And you often end up not being able to sleep well, and you end up not being able to keep up an exercise routine and all those things. And you come under family stress because you’re working all the time.
Or my partner Ben, he was CEO of our last company before we started the venture firm. He said the problem he had with his family life was even when he was home at night, he wasn’t home because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems. And so he was supposed to be having dinner with his kids and he was physically there, but he wasn’t mentally there so you get that a lot. But the key thing is you can’t talk to people. You can. I mean, you can talk to your spouse and your kids, but they don’t understand that they’re not working in your company. They don’t understand, have the context to really help you. If you talk to your executives, they all have agendas and they can’t resist. It’s just human nature. And so you can’t necessarily rely on what they say. It’s very hard in most companies to talk to your board because they can fire you.
Now, Mark has the situation because he has control, it actually turns out he can talk to his board. And Mark talks to us about many things that most CEOs won’t talk to their boards about literally because we can’t fire him. But a general, including all the CEOs of Twitter, none of them had control and so they could all get fired. You can’t talk to the board members. They’re going to fire, you can’t talk to the shareholders because they’ll just dump your stock. Okay.
So every once in a while, what you find is basically the best case scenario they have is they can talk to other CEOs, and there’s these little organizations where they kind of pair up and do that and so they maybe get a little bit out of that. But even that’s fraught with peril because can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO, insider trading risk. And so it’s just a very lonely isolating thing to start with.
And then on top of that, you apply pressure, and that’s where it gets painful. And then maybe I’ll just spend a moment on this internal external pressure thing. My general experience with companies is that they can withstand most forms of external pressure as long as they retain internal coherence. So as long as the internal team is really bonded together and supporting each other, most forms of external pressure you can withstand. And by that I mean investors dump your stock, you lose your biggest customers, whatever negative article, negative headline, you can withstand all that. And basically, in fact, many of those forms of pressure can be bonding experiences for the team where they come out stronger.
What you 100% cannot withstand is the internal crack. And what I always look for in high pressure corporate situations now is the moment when the internal team cracks because I know the minute that happens, we’re in a different regime. It’s like the solid has turned into a liquid, we’re in a different regime, and the whole thing can unravel in the next week because then people turn, I mean, this is what’s happening in Los Angeles right now. The mayor and the fire chief turned on each other, and that’s it. That government is dysfunctional. It is never going to get put back together again. It is over. It is not going to work ever again. And that’s what happens to inside companies.
And so somebody like Mark is under profound internal pressure and external pressure at the same time. Now he’s been very good at maintaining the coherence of his executive team, but he has had over the years, a lot of activist employees as a lot of these companies have had and so that’s been continuous pressure.
And then the final thing I’d say is I said that companies can withstand most forms of external pressure, but not all [inaudible 01:31:21] though not all one is government pressure. Is it when your government comes for you? Yeah. Any CEO who thinks that they’re bigger than their government, has that notion beaten out of them in short order.
Government pressure
Lex Fridman
Can you just linger on that because it is maybe educating and deeply disturbing? You’ve spoken about it before, but we’re speaking about again this government pressure. So you think they’ve crossed the line into essentially criminal levels of pressure?
Can you just linger on that because it is maybe educating and deeply disturbing? You’ve spoken about it before, but we’re speaking about again this government pressure. So you think they’ve crossed the line into essentially criminal levels of pressure?
Marc Andreessen
Flagrant criminality, felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can actually cite the laws, but yes, absolute criminality.
Flagrant criminality, felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can actually cite the laws, but yes, absolute criminality.
Lex Fridman
Can you explain how those possible to happen and maybe on a hopeful note, how we can avoid that happening again?
Can you explain how those possible to happen and maybe on a hopeful note, how we can avoid that happening again?
Marc Andreessen
So just start with is a lot of this now is in the public record, which is good because it needs to be in the public record. And so there’s three forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at. So one is the Twitter files, which Elon put out with the set of journalists when he took over. And I will just tell you, the Twitter files are a hundred percent representative of what I’ve seen at every other one of these companies. And so you can just see what happened in Twitter and you can just assume that that happened in these other companies for the most part, certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got. So that’s number one. That stuff, you can just read it and you should if you haven’t.
So just start with is a lot of this now is in the public record, which is good because it needs to be in the public record. And so there’s three forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at. So one is the Twitter files, which Elon put out with the set of journalists when he took over. And I will just tell you, the Twitter files are a hundred percent representative of what I’ve seen at every other one of these companies. And so you can just see what happened in Twitter and you can just assume that that happened in these other companies for the most part, certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got. So that’s number one. That stuff, you can just read it and you should if you haven’t.
The second is Mark referenced this in the Rogan podcast. There’s a congressman Jim Jordan who has a congressional committee called the Weaponization Committee. And they, in the last, whatever three years, have done a full-scale investigation of this. And Facebook produced a lot of documents into that investigation and many of those have now been made public and you can download those reports. And there’s 2000 pages worth of material on that. And that’s essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter files just arrived at with a different mechanism.
And then third is Mark himself talking about this on Rogan, so I’ll just defer to his comments there. But yeah, basically what those three forms of information show you is basically the government over time and then culminating in 2020, 2021 in the last four years, just decided that the First Amendment didn’t apply to them. And they just decided that federal laws around free speech and around conspiracies to take away the rights of citizens just don’t apply. And they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, just like literally arbitrarily call up companies and threaten and bully and yell and scream and threaten repercussions and force them to censor.
And there’s this whole thing of like, well, the First Amendment only applies to, the government, it doesn’t apply to companies. It’s like, well, there’s actually a little bit of nuance to that. First of all, it definitely applies to the government. 100%, the First Amendment applies to the government. By the way, so does the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, including the right to due process, also applies to the government. There was no due process at all to any of the censorship regime that was put in place. There was no due process put in place, by the way, for de-banking either. Those are just as serious violations as the free speech violations. And so this is just flagrant, flagrant, unconstitutional behavior.
And then there are specific federal statutes, 18 241 and 18 242, and one of them applies to federal employees, government employees, and the other one applies to private actors around what’s called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights. And it is not legal according to the United States Criminal Code for government employees or in a conspiracy private entities to take away constitutional rights. And interestingly, some of those constitutional rights are enumerated, for example, in the First Amendment, freedom of speech. And then some of those rights actually do not need to be enumerated. If the government takes away rights that you have, they don’t need to be specifically enumerated rights in the Constitution in order to still be a felony. The Constitution very specifically does not say you only have the rights that it gives you. It says you have all the rights that have not been previously defined as being taken away from you. And so de-banking qualifies as a right, right to access to the financial system, is every bit something that’s subject to these laws as free speech. And so yeah, this has happened.
And then I’ll just add one final thing, which is we’ve talked about two parties so far. We talked about the government employees and then we’ve talked about the companies. The government employees for sure have misbehaved. The companies, there’s a very interesting question there as to whether they are victims or perpetrators or both. They will defend, they will argue, and I believe they have a good case, that they are victims, not perpetrators, right? They’re the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause of pressure, but there’s a big swath of people who are in the middle and specifically the ones that are funded by the government that I think are in possibly pretty big trouble. And that’s all of these third-party censorship bureaus.
I mean, the one that is most obvious is the so-called Stanford Internet Observatory that got booted up there over the last several years. And they basically were funded by the federal government to be third-party censorship operations. And they’re private sector actors, but acting with federal funding. And so it puts them in this very interesting spot where there could be very obvious theory under which they’re basically acting as agents of the government. And so I think they’re also very exposed on this and have behaved in just flagrantly illegal ways.
Lex Fridman
So fundamentally, government should not do any kind of pressure, even soft pressure on companies to censor?
So fundamentally, government should not do any kind of pressure, even soft pressure on companies to censor?
Marc Andreessen
Can’t. Not allowed.
Can’t. Not allowed.
Lex Fridman
It really is disturbing. It probably started soft, lightly slowly, and then it escalates as the old [inaudible 01:36:44] to power will instruct them to do. I mean, yeah, that’s why there’s protection because you can’t put a check on power for government, right?
It really is disturbing. It probably started soft, lightly slowly, and then it escalates as the old [inaudible 01:36:44] to power will instruct them to do. I mean, yeah, that’s why there’s protection because you can’t put a check on power for government, right?
Marc Andreessen
There are so many ways that they can get you. There are so many ways they can come at you and get you. And the thing here to think about is a lot of times when people think about government action, they think about legislation. So when I was a kid, we got trained, how does government work? There was this famous animated short, the thing we got shown was just a cartoon of how a bill becomes a law. It’s like this fancy little bill sneaked along and guess this-
There are so many ways that they can get you. There are so many ways they can come at you and get you. And the thing here to think about is a lot of times when people think about government action, they think about legislation. So when I was a kid, we got trained, how does government work? There was this famous animated short, the thing we got shown was just a cartoon of how a bill becomes a law. It’s like this fancy little bill sneaked along and guess this-
Lex Fridman
I’m just the bill. Yeah.
I’m just the bill. Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
Exactly. It’s like, all right, number one, that’s not how it works at all. That doesn’t actually happen. We could talk about that. But even beyond that, mostly what we’re dealing with is not legislation. When we talk about government power these days, mostly it’s not legislation. Mostly it’s either regulation, which is basically the equivalent of legislation, but having not gone through the legislative process, which is a very big open legal issue. And one of the things that the DOGE is very focused on. Most government rules are not legislated. They’re regulated and there’s tons and tons of regulations that these companies are, this is another cliche you’ll hear a lot, which is, “Oh, private companies can do whatever they want.” It’s like, “Oh no can’t.”
Exactly. It’s like, all right, number one, that’s not how it works at all. That doesn’t actually happen. We could talk about that. But even beyond that, mostly what we’re dealing with is not legislation. When we talk about government power these days, mostly it’s not legislation. Mostly it’s either regulation, which is basically the equivalent of legislation, but having not gone through the legislative process, which is a very big open legal issue. And one of the things that the DOGE is very focused on. Most government rules are not legislated. They’re regulated and there’s tons and tons of regulations that these companies are, this is another cliche you’ll hear a lot, which is, “Oh, private companies can do whatever they want.” It’s like, “Oh no can’t.”
There’s subject to tens of thousands of regulations that they have to comply with. And the hammer that comes down when you don’t comply with regulations is profound. They can completely wreck your company with no ability for you to do anything about it. So regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised.
And then there’s called just flat out administrative power, the term that you’ll hear and administrative power is just literally the government telling you, calling you and telling you what to do. Here’s an example of how this works. So Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra. And they built the entire system and it was this high-scale sort of new cryptocurrency, and they were going to build into every product, and they were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra. And they went to the government and they went to all these different, trying to figure out how to make it so it’s fully compliant with anti-money laundering and all these controls and everything. And they had the whole thing ready to go.
Two senators wrote letters to the big banks saying, “We’re not telling you that you can’t work with Facebook on this, but if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business is going to come under greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny,” which is of course the exact equivalent of it sure is a nice corner restaurant you have here. It would be a shame if somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight, right?
And so what is that letter? It’s not a law. It’s not even a regulation, it’s just.
Marc Andreessen
It’s not a law, it’s not even a regulation, it’s just straight direct state power. And then it culminates in literally calls from the White House where they’re just flat out telling you what to do, which is of course what a king gets to do, but not what a president gets to do. Anyway. So what these companies experienced was they experienced the full panoply of this, but the level of intensity was in that order. It was actually, legislation was the least important part. Regulation was more important, administrative power was more important, and then just flat out demands and flat out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? Well, first of all, you have to elect people who don’t do it. As with all these things, ultimately the fault lies with the voters. And so you have to decide you don’t want to live in that regime.
It’s not a law, it’s not even a regulation, it’s just straight direct state power. And then it culminates in literally calls from the White House where they’re just flat out telling you what to do, which is of course what a king gets to do, but not what a president gets to do. Anyway. So what these companies experienced was they experienced the full panoply of this, but the level of intensity was in that order. It was actually, legislation was the least important part. Regulation was more important, administrative power was more important, and then just flat out demands and flat out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? Well, first of all, you have to elect people who don’t do it. As with all these things, ultimately the fault lies with the voters. And so you have to decide you don’t want to live in that regime.
I have no idea what part of this recent election mapped to the censorship regime. I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship, but I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side. Maybe some people on the left will now not want their Democratic nominees to be so pro censorship. So the voters definitely get a vote, number one. Number two, I think you need transparency. You need to know what happened. We know some of what happened. Peter Thiel has written in the FT just now saying, after what we’ve been through in the last decade we need the broad-based truth and reconciliation efforts to really get to the root of things. So maybe that’s part of it. We need investigations for sure. Ultimately, we need prosecutions. Ultimately, we need people to go to jail. Because we need to set object lessons that say that you don’t get to do this. And on those last two, I would say those are both up to the new administration, and I don’t want to speak for them and I don’t want to predict what they’re going to do, but they for sure have the ability to do both of those things and we’ll see where they take it.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It’s truly disturbing. I don’t think anybody wants this kind of overreach of power for government, including perhaps people that are participating in it. It’s like this dark momentum of power that you just get caught up in it. And that’s the reason there’s that kind of protection. Nobody wants that.
Yeah. It’s truly disturbing. I don’t think anybody wants this kind of overreach of power for government, including perhaps people that are participating in it. It’s like this dark momentum of power that you just get caught up in it. And that’s the reason there’s that kind of protection. Nobody wants that.
Marc Andreessen
I use the metaphor, the ring of power. And for people who don’t catch the reference, that’s Lord of the Rings. And the thing with the ring of power and Lord of the Rings, it’s the ring the Gollem has in the beginning and it turns you invisible. And it turns out it unlocks all this fearsome power. It’s the most powerful thing in the world, is to key to everything. And basically the moral lesson of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things is, yeah, the ring of power is inherently corrupting. The characters at one point, they’re like, “Gandalf, just put on the ring and fix this.” He will not put the ring on even to end the war because he knows that it will corrupt him. As it starts, the character of Gollem is the result of a normal character who ultimately becomes this incredibly corrupt and deranged version of himself.
I use the metaphor, the ring of power. And for people who don’t catch the reference, that’s Lord of the Rings. And the thing with the ring of power and Lord of the Rings, it’s the ring the Gollem has in the beginning and it turns you invisible. And it turns out it unlocks all this fearsome power. It’s the most powerful thing in the world, is to key to everything. And basically the moral lesson of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things is, yeah, the ring of power is inherently corrupting. The characters at one point, they’re like, “Gandalf, just put on the ring and fix this.” He will not put the ring on even to end the war because he knows that it will corrupt him. As it starts, the character of Gollem is the result of a normal character who ultimately becomes this incredibly corrupt and deranged version of himself.
I think you said something actually quite profound there, which is the ring of power is infinitely tempting. The censorship machine is infinitely tempting. If you have it, you are going to use it. It’s overwhelmingly tempting because it’s so powerful, and that it will corrupt you. Yeah. I don’t know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don’t know if they do. But yeah. You go out five or 10 years later, you would hope that you would realize that your soul has been corroded and you probably started out thinking that you were a patriot and you were trying to defend democracy, and you ended up being extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic and anti-western.
Nature of power
Lex Fridman
Can I ask you a tough question here? Staying on the ring of power is quickly becoming the most powerful human on earth.
Can I ask you a tough question here? Staying on the ring of power is quickly becoming the most powerful human on earth.
Marc Andreessen
I’m not sure about that.
I’m not sure about that.
Lex Fridman
You don’t think he is.
You don’t think he is.
Marc Andreessen
Well, he doesn’t have the nukes so.
Well, he doesn’t have the nukes so.
Lex Fridman
Nukes. Yeah. There’s different definitions and perspectives on power, right?
Nukes. Yeah. There’s different definitions and perspectives on power, right?
Marc Andreessen
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
How can he and or Donald Trump avoid the corrupting aspects of this power?
How can he and or Donald Trump avoid the corrupting aspects of this power?
Marc Andreessen
I think the danger is there with power. It’s flat out there. I would say with Elon, we’ll see. I would say with Elon, and I would say by the way, overwhelmingly, I would say so far so good. I’m extremely, extremely thrilled by what he’s done on almost every front for the last 30 years. But including all this stuff recently. I think he’s been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see heroism. But look, I would say, I guess the case that he has this level of power is some combination of the money and the proximity to the president. And obviously both of those are instruments of power. The counter argument to that is I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now … There’s the companies he’s running directly where I think he’s doing very well, and we’re investors in multiple of them and doing very well.
I think the danger is there with power. It’s flat out there. I would say with Elon, we’ll see. I would say with Elon, and I would say by the way, overwhelmingly, I would say so far so good. I’m extremely, extremely thrilled by what he’s done on almost every front for the last 30 years. But including all this stuff recently. I think he’s been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see heroism. But look, I would say, I guess the case that he has this level of power is some combination of the money and the proximity to the president. And obviously both of those are instruments of power. The counter argument to that is I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now … There’s the companies he’s running directly where I think he’s doing very well, and we’re investors in multiple of them and doing very well.
But I think a lot of the stuff that gets people mad at him is like, it’s the social and political stuff, and it’s his statements, and then it’s the downstream effects of his statements. So for example, for the last couple of weeks, it’s been him weighing in on this rape gang scandal, this organized child rape thing in the UK. It’s a preface cascade. It’s one of these things where people knew there was a problem, they weren’t willing to talk about it, it got suppressed. And then Elon brought it up, and then all of a sudden there’s now in the UK this massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time. It’s like this catalyzing, all of a sudden everybody’s woken up and being like, “Oh my God, this is really bad.” And there will be now pretty clearly big changes as a result.
And Elon, he played the role of the boy who said, the emperor has no clothes. But here’s the thing, here’s my point. He said it about something that was true. And so had he said it about something that was false, he would get no credit for it. He wouldn’t deserve any credit for it. But he said something that was true. And by the way, everybody over there instantly, they were like, “Oh, yeah, he’s right.” They’re just arguing the details now. So number one, it’s like, okay, he says true things. And so it’s like, okay, how far … Put it this way. How worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power being that they get to speak the truth? And I guess I would say, especially in the last decade of what we’ve been through where everybody’s been lying all the time about everything, I’d say, I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth. And so I don’t feel that bad about that.
And then the money side, this rapidly gets into the money in politics question. And the money in politics question is this very interesting question because it seems like there’s a clear cut case that the more money in politics, the worse things are and the more corrupted the system is. That was a very popular topic of public conversation up until 2016 when Hillary outspent Trump three to one and lost. You’ll notice that money in politics has almost vanished as a topic in the last eight years. And once again, Kamala raised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden had spent. So they were at, I don’t know, something like three billion total and Trump, I think spent again, a third or a fourth of that. So the money in politics topic has vanished from the popular conversation in the last eight years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending. But again, it’s like, okay, he’s spending, but the data would seem to indicate, at least in the last eight years, that money doesn’t win the political battles. The voters actually have a voice and they actually exercise it, and they don’t just listen to ads. And so again, there, I would say, yeah, clearly there’s some power there, but I don’t know if it’s some weapon that he can just turn on and use in a definitive way.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know if there’s parallels there, but I could also say just on a human level, he has a good heart and I interact with a lot of powerful people, and that’s not always the case. So that’s a good thing there. If we can draw parallels to the Hobbit or whatever. Who gets to put on the ring?
I don’t know if there’s parallels there, but I could also say just on a human level, he has a good heart and I interact with a lot of powerful people, and that’s not always the case. So that’s a good thing there. If we can draw parallels to the Hobbit or whatever. Who gets to put on the ring?
Marc Andreessen
Frodo.
Frodo.
Lex Fridman
Frodo. Yeah.
Frodo. Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Maybe one of the lessons of Lord of the Rings is even Frodo would’ve been, even Frodo would’ve been corrupted. But nevertheless, you had somebody who could do what it took at the time. The thing that I find just so amazing about the Elon phenomenon and all the critiques is the one thing that everybody in our societies universally agrees on because of our post-Christian egalitarian, so we live in this post secularized Christian context in the west now, and we consider Christianity backwards, but we still believe essentially all the same things. We just dress them up in fake science.
Yeah. Maybe one of the lessons of Lord of the Rings is even Frodo would’ve been, even Frodo would’ve been corrupted. But nevertheless, you had somebody who could do what it took at the time. The thing that I find just so amazing about the Elon phenomenon and all the critiques is the one thing that everybody in our societies universally agrees on because of our post-Christian egalitarian, so we live in this post secularized Christian context in the west now, and we consider Christianity backwards, but we still believe essentially all the same things. We just dress them up in fake science.
So the one thing that we’re all told, we’re all taught from early is that the best people in the world are the people who care about all of humanity. All of our figures are people who care about all of … Jesus cared about all of humanity. Gandhi cared about all of humanity. Martin Luther King cared about all of humanity. The person who cares the most about everybody. And with Elon, you have a guy who literally … He talks about this constantly, and he talks about exactly the same in private. He is literally, he is operating on behalf of all of humanity to try to get us … He goes through to get us through multi-planetary civilization so that we can survive a strike at any one planet so that we can extend the light of human consciousness into the world and into the universe and have it persist in the good of the whole thing. And literally the critique is, yeah, we want you to care about all of humanity, but not like that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. All the critics. All the surface turmoil, the critics will be forgotten.
Yeah. All the critics. All the surface turmoil, the critics will be forgotten.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. I think that’s clear.
Yeah. I think that’s clear.
Lex Fridman
You said that we always end up being ruled by the elites of some kind. Can you explain this law, this idea?
You said that we always end up being ruled by the elites of some kind. Can you explain this law, this idea?
Marc Andreessen
So this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about a hundred years ago named Robert … I’m going to mangle … I’ll let you pronounce the Italian. Michels or Michels. I learned about it through a famous book on politics. Probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called The Machiavellians by this guy James Burnham, who has had a big impact on me. But in The Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls this Italian realist school of political philosophy from the ’10s and ’20s. To be clear, this was not like a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works. So to get to the actual mechanical substance of how the political machine operates.
So this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about a hundred years ago named Robert … I’m going to mangle … I’ll let you pronounce the Italian. Michels or Michels. I learned about it through a famous book on politics. Probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called The Machiavellians by this guy James Burnham, who has had a big impact on me. But in The Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls this Italian realist school of political philosophy from the ’10s and ’20s. To be clear, this was not like a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works. So to get to the actual mechanical substance of how the political machine operates.
And this guy, Michels had this concept he ended up with called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. And so what the Iron Law of Oligarchy … Take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy because it has multiple meanings. So basically, in classic political theory, there’s basically three forms of government at core. There’s democracy, which is rule of many, there’s oligarchy, which is rule of the few, and there’s monarchy, which is rule of the one. And you can just use that as a general framework of any government going to be under is going to be one of those. Just mechanical observation. Without even saying which one’s good or bad, just a structural observation. And so the question that Michels asked was, is there such a thing as democracy? Is there actually such a thing as democracy? Is there ever actually direct government? And what he did was he mounted this incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world. And the answer basically is almost never. And we could talk about that.
But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically communist German autoworkers union that was wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting back when that was the hot thing. And he went in there and he is like, okay, this is the organization out of all organizations on planet Earth that must be operating as a direct democracy. And he went in there and he’s like, “Oh, nope.” There’s a leadership class. There’s like six guys at the top and they control everything and they lead the rest of the membership along by the nose, which is of course the story of every union. The story of every union is always the story of there’s a Jimmy Hoffa in there running the thing. We just saw that with the dock worker’s union. There’s a guy and he’s in charge. And by the way, the number two is his son. That’s not an accident.
So the Iron Law of Oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There’s always a ruling class. There’s always a ruling elite structurally. And he said, “The reason for that is because the masses can’t organize.” What’s the fundamental problem? Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can’t organize, the majority cannot organize, only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority. Every single one. The Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy, and they were total disasters. In Florence … I forget the name of it. It was called The Workers’ Revolt or something like that. There was a two-year period where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance, and it was a complete disaster and they never tried it again.
In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system, which is an overlay on top of the legislature. Anybody who looks at it for two seconds concludes it’s been a complete disaster. It’s just a catastrophe, and it’s caused enormous damage to the state. And so basically the presumption that we are in a democracy is just by definition, fake. Now, good news for the US. It turns out the founders understood this. And so of course they didn’t give us a direct democracy. They gave us a representative democracy. And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch. So anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you’re fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what’s happening.
Lex Fridman
And lucky for us, the founders saw this and figured out a way to, given that there’s going to be a ruling elite, how to create a balance of power among that elite so it doesn’t get out of hand.
And lucky for us, the founders saw this and figured out a way to, given that there’s going to be a ruling elite, how to create a balance of power among that elite so it doesn’t get out of hand.
Marc Andreessen
And it was very clever. Some of this was based on earlier experiments. By the way, these were very, very smart people. And so they knew tremendous amounts of Greek and Roman history. They knew the Renaissance history. The Federalist Papers, they argued this a great length. You can read it all. They ran one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out. And they went through all this. So they thought through it very carefully, but just, I’ll give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic. So one way they did it just through the three branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. Balance the powers. But the other way they did it was they echoing what had been done earlier I think in the UK Parliament, they created the two different bodies of the legislature. And so the House and the Senate. And as you know, the house is a portion on the basis of population, and the Senate is not. The small states have just as many senators as the big states. And then they made the deliberate decision to have the house get reelected every two years to make it very responsive to the will of the people. And they made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of the moment.
And it was very clever. Some of this was based on earlier experiments. By the way, these were very, very smart people. And so they knew tremendous amounts of Greek and Roman history. They knew the Renaissance history. The Federalist Papers, they argued this a great length. You can read it all. They ran one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out. And they went through all this. So they thought through it very carefully, but just, I’ll give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic. So one way they did it just through the three branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. Balance the powers. But the other way they did it was they echoing what had been done earlier I think in the UK Parliament, they created the two different bodies of the legislature. And so the House and the Senate. And as you know, the house is a portion on the basis of population, and the Senate is not. The small states have just as many senators as the big states. And then they made the deliberate decision to have the house get reelected every two years to make it very responsive to the will of the people. And they made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of the moment.
But what’s interesting is they didn’t choose one or the other. They did them both. And then to get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. And so they built in a second layer of checks and balances. And then there’s a thousand observations we could make about how well the system is working today and how much does it live up to the ideal, and how much are we actually complying with the constitution? And there’s lots of open questions there, but this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful. But I don’t think, at least … I don’t think any of us would trade the system for any other one. And so it’s one of the great all time achievements.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It’s incredible. And we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current set of leaders.
Yeah. It’s incredible. And we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current set of leaders.
Marc Andreessen
They were. Many in their 20s at the time. And super geniuses. This is one of those things where it’s just like, all right, something happened where there was a group of people where nobody ever tested their IQs, but these are Einstein’s of politics. An amazing thing. But anyway, I go through all that, which is they were very keen students of the actual mechanical practice of democracy, not fixated on what was desirable. They were incredibly focused on what would actually work, which is I think the way to think about these things.
They were. Many in their 20s at the time. And super geniuses. This is one of those things where it’s just like, all right, something happened where there was a group of people where nobody ever tested their IQs, but these are Einstein’s of politics. An amazing thing. But anyway, I go through all that, which is they were very keen students of the actual mechanical practice of democracy, not fixated on what was desirable. They were incredibly focused on what would actually work, which is I think the way to think about these things.
Lex Fridman
There were engineers of sort, not the fuzzy humanity students of sort.
There were engineers of sort, not the fuzzy humanity students of sort.
Marc Andreessen
They were shape rotators, not word cells.
They were shape rotators, not word cells.
Lex Fridman
I remember that. Wow, that meme came and went. I think you were central to them. You’re central to a lot of memes.
I remember that. Wow, that meme came and went. I think you were central to them. You’re central to a lot of memes.
Marc Andreessen
I was.
I was.
Lex Fridman
You’re the meme dealer and the meme popularizer.
You’re the meme dealer and the meme popularizer.
Marc Andreessen
That meme I gets some credit for and then the current thing is the other one I get some credit for. I don’t know that I invented either one, but I popularized them.
That meme I gets some credit for and then the current thing is the other one I get some credit for. I don’t know that I invented either one, but I popularized them.
Journalism
Lex Fridman
Take credit and run with it. If we can just linger on the Machiavellians. It’s a study of power and power dynamics, like you mentioned, looking at the actual reality of the machinery of power. From everything you’ve seen now in government, but also in companies, what are some interesting things you can continue to say about the dynamics of power, the jostling for power that happens inside these institutions?
Take credit and run with it. If we can just linger on the Machiavellians. It’s a study of power and power dynamics, like you mentioned, looking at the actual reality of the machinery of power. From everything you’ve seen now in government, but also in companies, what are some interesting things you can continue to say about the dynamics of power, the jostling for power that happens inside these institutions?
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. A lot of it, we already talked about this a bit with the universities, which is you can apply a Machiavellian style lens to … It’s why I posed the question to you that I did, which is okay, who runs the university, the trustees, the administration, the students or the faculty? And the true answer is some combination of the three, of the four plus the donors. By the way, plus the government, plus the press, et cetera. And so there’s a mechanical interpretation of that. Companies operate under the exact same set of questions. Who runs a company? The CEO, but the CEO EO runs the company basically up to the day that either the shareholders or the management team revolt. If the shareholders revolt, it’s very hard for the CEO O to stay in the seat. If the management team revolts, it’s very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat.
Yeah. A lot of it, we already talked about this a bit with the universities, which is you can apply a Machiavellian style lens to … It’s why I posed the question to you that I did, which is okay, who runs the university, the trustees, the administration, the students or the faculty? And the true answer is some combination of the three, of the four plus the donors. By the way, plus the government, plus the press, et cetera. And so there’s a mechanical interpretation of that. Companies operate under the exact same set of questions. Who runs a company? The CEO, but the CEO EO runs the company basically up to the day that either the shareholders or the management team revolt. If the shareholders revolt, it’s very hard for the CEO O to stay in the seat. If the management team revolts, it’s very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat.
By the way, if the employees revolt, it’s also hard to stay in the seat. By the way, if the New York Times comes at you, it’s also very hard to stay in the seat. If the Senate comes at you, it’s very hard to stay in the seat. So a reductionist version of this that is a good shorthand is who can get who fired? So who has more power? The newspaper columnist who makes $200,000 a year, or the CEO who makes $200 million a year/ and it’s like, well, I know for sure that the columnist can get the CEO fired. I’ve seen that happen before I have yet to see a CEO get a columnist fired.
Lex Fridman
Did anyone ever get from the Bill Ackman assault on journalism? So Bill really showed the bullshit that happens in journalism.
Did anyone ever get from the Bill Ackman assault on journalism? So Bill really showed the bullshit that happens in journalism.
Marc Andreessen
No. Because what happens is they wear it with the … And I would say to their credit, they wear it as a badge of honor, and then to their shame, they wear it as a badge of honor, which is if they’re doing the right thing, then they are justifiably priding themselves for standing up under pressure. But it also means that they can’t respond to legitimate criticism and they’re obviously terrible at that now. As I recall, he went straight to the CEO of Axel Springer that owns Insider. I happen to know the CEO O, and I think he’s quite a good CEO. Well, there’s a good example. Does the CEO Axel Springer run his own company?
No. Because what happens is they wear it with the … And I would say to their credit, they wear it as a badge of honor, and then to their shame, they wear it as a badge of honor, which is if they’re doing the right thing, then they are justifiably priding themselves for standing up under pressure. But it also means that they can’t respond to legitimate criticism and they’re obviously terrible at that now. As I recall, he went straight to the CEO of Axel Springer that owns Insider. I happen to know the CEO O, and I think he’s quite a good CEO. Well, there’s a good example. Does the CEO Axel Springer run his own company?
So there’s a fascinating thing playing out right now. Not to dwell on these fires. But you see the pressure reveals things, right? And so if you’ve been watching what’s happening with the LA Times recently. So this guy, biotech entrepreneur buys the LA Times, whatever, eight years ago. It is just like the most radical social revolutionary thing you can possibly imagine. It endorses every crazy left-wing radical you can imagine. It endorses Karen Bass, it endorses Gavin Newsom. It’s just a litany of all the people who are currently burning the city to the ground. It’s just like endorsed every single bad person every step of the way. He’s owned it the entire time. He for the first time, I think, put his foot down right before the November election and said, we’re not … He said, “We’re going to get out of this thing where we just always endorse the Democrat.” I think he said, “We’re not endorsing for the presidency.” And the paper flipped out. It’s like our billionaire backer who’s … And I don’t know what he spends, but he must be burning 50 or a hundred million dollars a year out of his pocket to keep this thing running.
He paid 500 million for it, which is amazing. Back when people still thought these things were businesses. And then he’s probably burned another 500 million over the last decade keeping it running. And he burns probably another 50, a hundred million a year to do this. And the journalists at the LA Times hate him with the fury of a thousand suns. They just absolutely freaking despise him, and they have been attacking him. The ones that can get jobs elsewhere quit and do it, and the rest just stay and say the worst, most horrible things about him. And they want to constantly run these stories attack him. And so he has had this reaction that a lot of people in LA are having right now to this fire and to this just incredibly vivid collapse of leadership. And all these people that his paper head endorsed are just disasters.
He’s on this tour. Basically he’s decided to be the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, but he’s doing it to his own newspaper. Very smart guy. He is on a press tour and he is basically saying, yes, we did all that and we endorsed all these people and it was a huge mistake and we’re going to completely change. And his paper is in a complete internal revolt. But I go through it, which is okay, now we have a very interesting question, which is who runs the LA Times? Because for the last eight years, it hasn’t been him. It’s been the reporters. Now for the first time, the owner is showing up saying, “Oh no, I’m actually in charge,” and the reporters are saying, “No, you’re not.” It is freaking on. And so again, the Machiavellian’s mindset on this is like, okay, how is power actually exercised here? Can a guy who’s even super rich and super powerful who even owns his own newspaper, can he stand up to a full scale assault, not only by his own reporters, but by every other journalism outlet who also now thinks he’s the Antichrist?
Lex Fridman
And he is trying to exercise power by speaking out publicly and so that’s the game of power there.
And he is trying to exercise power by speaking out publicly and so that’s the game of power there.
Marc Andreessen
And firing people.
And firing people.
Lex Fridman
Firing people. Yeah.
Firing people. Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
He has removed people and he has set new rules. He’s now at long last actually exercising prerogatives of an owner of a business, which is decide on the policies and staffing of the business. There are certain other owners of these publications that are doing similar things right now. He’s the one I don’t know so he’s the one I can talk about. But there are others that are going through the same thing right now. And I think it’s a really interesting open question in a fight between the employees and the employer it’s not crystal clear that the employer wins that one.
He has removed people and he has set new rules. He’s now at long last actually exercising prerogatives of an owner of a business, which is decide on the policies and staffing of the business. There are certain other owners of these publications that are doing similar things right now. He’s the one I don’t know so he’s the one I can talk about. But there are others that are going through the same thing right now. And I think it’s a really interesting open question in a fight between the employees and the employer it’s not crystal clear that the employer wins that one.
Bill Ackman
Lex Fridman
And just to stay on journalism for a second, we mentioned Bill Ackman. I just want to say put him in the category we mentioned before of a really courageous person. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody so fearless in going after, in following what he believes in publicly. That’s courage. Several things he’s done publicly has been really inspiring. Just being courageous.
And just to stay on journalism for a second, we mentioned Bill Ackman. I just want to say put him in the category we mentioned before of a really courageous person. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody so fearless in going after, in following what he believes in publicly. That’s courage. Several things he’s done publicly has been really inspiring. Just being courageous.
Marc Andreessen
What do you think is the most impressive example?
What do you think is the most impressive example?
Lex Fridman
Where he went after journalists whose whole incentive is to … It’s like kicking the beehive or whatever. You know what’s going to follow and to do that. That’s why it’s difficult to challenge journalistic organizations because they’re going to … There’s just so many mechanisms they use, including writing articles and get cited by Wikipedia and then drive the narrative and then they can get you fired, all this stuff. Bill Ackman, like a bad MFer just tweets these essays and just goes after them legally and also in the public eye. I don’t know. That was truly inspiring. There’s not many people like that in public and hopefully that inspires not just me, but many others to be courageous themselves.
Where he went after journalists whose whole incentive is to … It’s like kicking the beehive or whatever. You know what’s going to follow and to do that. That’s why it’s difficult to challenge journalistic organizations because they’re going to … There’s just so many mechanisms they use, including writing articles and get cited by Wikipedia and then drive the narrative and then they can get you fired, all this stuff. Bill Ackman, like a bad MFer just tweets these essays and just goes after them legally and also in the public eye. I don’t know. That was truly inspiring. There’s not many people like that in public and hopefully that inspires not just me, but many others to be courageous themselves.
Marc Andreessen
Did you know of him before he started doing this in public?
Did you know of him before he started doing this in public?
Lex Fridman
I knew of Neri, his wife, who’s a brilliant researcher and scientist. And so I admire her. Looked up to her and think she’s amazing.
I knew of Neri, his wife, who’s a brilliant researcher and scientist. And so I admire her. Looked up to her and think she’s amazing.
Marc Andreessen
Well, the reason I ask if you knew about Bill is because a lot of people had not heard of him before, especially before October 7th and before some of the campaigns he’s been running since in public with Harvard and so forth. But he was very well known in the investment world before that. He was a so-called activist investor for … Very successful and widely respected for probably 30 years before now. And I bring that up because it turns out they weren’t for the most part battles that happened in full public view. They weren’t national stories. But in the business and world, the activist investor is a very … It’s like in the movie Taken. It’s a very specific set of skills on how to really take control of situations and how to wreck the people who you’re going up against. There’s been controversy over the years on this topic, and there’s too much detail to go into. But the defense of activist investing, which I think is valid, is these are the guys who basically go in and take stakes in companies that are being poorly managed or under-optimized. And then generally what that means is, at least the theory is that means the existing management is become entrenched and lazy, mediocre, whatever. Not you’re responding to the needs of the shareholders. Often not responding to the customers. And the activists basically go in with a minority position and then they rally support among other investors who are not activists. And then they basically show up and they force change. But they are the aggressive version of this. I’ve been involved in companies that have been on the receiving end of these where it is amazing how much somebody like that can exert pressure on situations even when they don’t have formal control. It would be another chess piece on the mechanical board of how power gets exercised. And basically what happens is the effective analysts, a large amount of time they end up taking over control of companies even though they never own more than 5% of the stock. So anyway,
Well, the reason I ask if you knew about Bill is because a lot of people had not heard of him before, especially before October 7th and before some of the campaigns he’s been running since in public with Harvard and so forth. But he was very well known in the investment world before that. He was a so-called activist investor for … Very successful and widely respected for probably 30 years before now. And I bring that up because it turns out they weren’t for the most part battles that happened in full public view. They weren’t national stories. But in the business and world, the activist investor is a very … It’s like in the movie Taken. It’s a very specific set of skills on how to really take control of situations and how to wreck the people who you’re going up against. There’s been controversy over the years on this topic, and there’s too much detail to go into. But the defense of activist investing, which I think is valid, is these are the guys who basically go in and take stakes in companies that are being poorly managed or under-optimized. And then generally what that means is, at least the theory is that means the existing management is become entrenched and lazy, mediocre, whatever. Not you’re responding to the needs of the shareholders. Often not responding to the customers. And the activists basically go in with a minority position and then they rally support among other investors who are not activists. And then they basically show up and they force change. But they are the aggressive version of this. I’ve been involved in companies that have been on the receiving end of these where it is amazing how much somebody like that can exert pressure on situations even when they don’t have formal control. It would be another chess piece on the mechanical board of how power gets exercised. And basically what happens is the effective analysts, a large amount of time they end up taking over control of companies even though they never own more than 5% of the stock. So anyway,
So it turns out with Bill’s … It’s such a fascinating case. He has that complete skill set. And he has now decided to bring it to bear in areas that are not just companies. And two interesting things for that. One is some of these places and some of these battles are still ongoing, but number one, a lot of people who run universities or newspapers are not used to being up against somebody like this. And by the way, also now with infinitely deep pockets and lots of experience in courtrooms and all the things that go with that. But the other is through example he is teaching a lot of the rest of us the activists playbook in real time. And so the Liam Neeson skill set is getting more broadly diffused just by being able to watch and learn from him. So I think he’s having a … I would put him up there with Elon in terms of somebody who’s really affecting how all this is playing out.
Lex Fridman
But even set aside just courage and-
But even set aside just courage and-
Marc Andreessen
Yes. Including by the way, courage to go outside of his own zone. I’ll give you an example. My venture capital firm, we have LPs. There are things that I feel like I can’t do or say because I feel like I would be bringing embarrassment or other consequences to our LPs. He has investors also where he worries about that. So a couple of things. One, it’s his willingness to go out a bit and risk his relationship with his own investors. But I will tell you the other thing, which is his investors … I know this for a fact. His investors have been remarkably supportive of him doing that. Because as it turns out, a lot of them actually agree with him. It’s the same thing he does in his activism campaigns. He is able to be the tip of the spear on something that actually a lot more people agree with.
Yes. Including by the way, courage to go outside of his own zone. I’ll give you an example. My venture capital firm, we have LPs. There are things that I feel like I can’t do or say because I feel like I would be bringing embarrassment or other consequences to our LPs. He has investors also where he worries about that. So a couple of things. One, it’s his willingness to go out a bit and risk his relationship with his own investors. But I will tell you the other thing, which is his investors … I know this for a fact. His investors have been remarkably supportive of him doing that. Because as it turns out, a lot of them actually agree with him. It’s the same thing he does in his activism campaigns. He is able to be the tip of the spear on something that actually a lot more people agree with.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It turns out if you have truth behind you, it helps.
Yeah. It turns out if you have truth behind you, it helps.
Marc Andreessen
And just again, how I started is a lot of people are just fed up.
And just again, how I started is a lot of people are just fed up.
Trump administration
Lex Fridman
You’ve been spending a bunch of time in Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach helping the new administration in many ways, including interviewing people who might join. So what’s your general sense about the talent, about the people who are coming into the new administration?
You’ve been spending a bunch of time in Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach helping the new administration in many ways, including interviewing people who might join. So what’s your general sense about the talent, about the people who are coming into the new administration?
Marc Andreessen
So I should start by saying I’m not a member of the new administration. I’m not in the room when a lot of these people are being selected.
So I should start by saying I’m not a member of the new administration. I’m not in the room when a lot of these people are being selected.
Lex Fridman
I believe you said unpaid intern.
I believe you said unpaid intern.
Marc Andreessen
I am an unpaid intern. So I’m a volunteer when helpful, but I’m not making the decisions, nor am I in a position to speak for the administration. I don’t want to say anything that would cause people to think I’m doing that. It’s a very unusual situation where you had an incumbent president and then you had a four-year gap where he is out of office, and then you have him coming back. And as you’ll recall, there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term. The specific concern was the first Trump administration, they will all say this is they didn’t come in with a team. They didn’t come into the team. And most of the institutional base of the Republican Party were Bush Republicans. And many of them had become never Trumpers. And so they had a hard time putting the team together. And then by the way, they had a hard time getting people confirmed. And so if you talk to the people who were there in the first term, it took them two to three years to even get the government in place. And then they basically only had the government in place for basically like 18 months and then COVID hit. And then the aftermath and everything and all the drama and headlines and everything.
I am an unpaid intern. So I’m a volunteer when helpful, but I’m not making the decisions, nor am I in a position to speak for the administration. I don’t want to say anything that would cause people to think I’m doing that. It’s a very unusual situation where you had an incumbent president and then you had a four-year gap where he is out of office, and then you have him coming back. And as you’ll recall, there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term. The specific concern was the first Trump administration, they will all say this is they didn’t come in with a team. They didn’t come into the team. And most of the institutional base of the Republican Party were Bush Republicans. And many of them had become never Trumpers. And so they had a hard time putting the team together. And then by the way, they had a hard time getting people confirmed. And so if you talk to the people who were there in the first term, it took them two to three years to even get the government in place. And then they basically only had the government in place for basically like 18 months and then COVID hit. And then the aftermath and everything and all the drama and headlines and everything.
And so the concern, including from some very smart people in the last two years has been, boy, if Trump gets a second term, is he going to be able to get a team that is as good as the team he had last time or a team that is actually not as good? Because maybe people got burned out. Maybe they’re more cynical now. Maybe they’re not willing to go through the drama. By the way, a lot of people in the first term came under their own withering legal assaults, and some of them went to prison. A lot of stuff happened. Lots of investigations, lots of legal fees, lots of bad press, lots of debanking by the way. A lot of the officials in the first Trump term got debanked, including the president’s wife and son.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I heard you tell that story. That’s insane. That’s just insane.
Yeah. I heard you tell that story. That’s insane. That’s just insane.
Marc Andreessen
In the wake of the first term, yes. We now take out spouses and children with our ring of power. And so there’s this legitimate question as to okay, what will the team for the second term look like? At least what I’ve seen and what you’re seeing with the appointments is it looks much, much better. First of all, it just looks better than the first term and not because the people in the first term were not necessarily good, but you just have this influx of incredibly capable people that have shown up that want to be part of this and you just didn’t have that the first time. And so they’re just drawing on a much deeper, richer talent pool than they had the first time. And they’re drawing on people who know what the game is. They’re drawing on people now who know what is going to happen, and they’re still willing to do it.
In the wake of the first term, yes. We now take out spouses and children with our ring of power. And so there’s this legitimate question as to okay, what will the team for the second term look like? At least what I’ve seen and what you’re seeing with the appointments is it looks much, much better. First of all, it just looks better than the first term and not because the people in the first term were not necessarily good, but you just have this influx of incredibly capable people that have shown up that want to be part of this and you just didn’t have that the first time. And so they’re just drawing on a much deeper, richer talent pool than they had the first time. And they’re drawing on people who know what the game is. They’re drawing on people now who know what is going to happen, and they’re still willing to do it.
And so they’re going to get, I think, some of the best people from the first term, but they’re bringing in a lot of people who they couldn’t get the first time around. And then second is there’s a bunch of people, including people in the first term where they’re just 10 years older. And so they went through the first term and they just learned how everything works. Or there are young people who just had a different point of view and now they’re 10 years older and they’re ready to go serve in government. So there’s a generational shift happening. And actually one of the interesting things about the team that’s forming up is it’s remarkably young. Some of the cabinet members and then many of the second and third level people are in their 30s and 40s, which is a big change from the gerontocracy that we’ve been under for the last 30 years.
I think the caliber has been outstanding. And we could sit here and list tons and tons of people, but the people who are running. It’s everything from the people who are running all the different departments at HHS. The number two at the Pentagon is Steve Feinberg, who’s just an incredible legend of private equity, incredible capable guy. Actually two of my partners are going in who I both think are amazing. Many, many parts of the government the people are really impressive.
Lex Fridman
Well, I think one of the concerns is actually that given the human being of Donald Trump, that there would be more tendency towards, let’s say favoritism versus meritocracy. That there’s circles of sycophancy that form. And if you’re be able to be loyal and never oppose and just basically suck up to the president, that you’ll get a position. So that’s one of the concerns. And I think you’re in a good position to speak to the degree that’s happening versus hiring based on merit and just getting great teams.
Well, I think one of the concerns is actually that given the human being of Donald Trump, that there would be more tendency towards, let’s say favoritism versus meritocracy. That there’s circles of sycophancy that form. And if you’re be able to be loyal and never oppose and just basically suck up to the president, that you’ll get a position. So that’s one of the concerns. And I think you’re in a good position to speak to the degree that’s happening versus hiring based on merit and just getting great teams.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So look, start by saying any leader at that level, by the way, any CEO, there’s always some risk of that. That’s like a natural reality warps around powerful leaders. And so there’s always some risk to that. Of course, the good powerful leaders are very aware of that. And Trump, at this point in his life, I think is highly aware of that, at least in my interactions with him. He definitely seems very aware of that. So that’s one thing. I would just say, I think the way to look at that … And look, like I said, I don’t want to predict what’s going to happen once this whole thing starts unfolding. I would just say again, the caliber of the people who are showing up and getting the jobs, and then the fact that these are some of the most accomplished people in the business world and in the medical field. Jay Bhattacharya coming in to run NIH. I was part of the interview team for a lot of the HHS folks.
Yeah. So look, start by saying any leader at that level, by the way, any CEO, there’s always some risk of that. That’s like a natural reality warps around powerful leaders. And so there’s always some risk to that. Of course, the good powerful leaders are very aware of that. And Trump, at this point in his life, I think is highly aware of that, at least in my interactions with him. He definitely seems very aware of that. So that’s one thing. I would just say, I think the way to look at that … And look, like I said, I don’t want to predict what’s going to happen once this whole thing starts unfolding. I would just say again, the caliber of the people who are showing up and getting the jobs, and then the fact that these are some of the most accomplished people in the business world and in the medical field. Jay Bhattacharya coming in to run NIH. I was part of the interview team for a lot of the HHS folks.
Lex Fridman
Nice. Jay’s amazing. Oh, I was so happy to see that.
Nice. Jay’s amazing. Oh, I was so happy to see that.
Marc Andreessen
So I literally got … This is the story. I got to the transition office for one of the days of the HHS interviews, and I was on one of the interview interviewing teams. I didn’t know who the candidates were, and they gave us the sheet in the beginning, and I go down the sheet and I saw Jay’s name. I almost physically fell on my chair. And I was just like … I happen to know Jay. I happen to know Jay, and I respect him enormously. And then he proved himself under this … Talk about a guy who proved himself under extraordinary pressure over the last five years.
So I literally got … This is the story. I got to the transition office for one of the days of the HHS interviews, and I was on one of the interview interviewing teams. I didn’t know who the candidates were, and they gave us the sheet in the beginning, and I go down the sheet and I saw Jay’s name. I almost physically fell on my chair. And I was just like … I happen to know Jay. I happen to know Jay, and I respect him enormously. And then he proved himself under this … Talk about a guy who proved himself under extraordinary pressure over the last five years.
Lex Fridman
And then go radical under the pressure. He maintained balance and thoughtfulness and depth. Incredibly-
And then go radical under the pressure. He maintained balance and thoughtfulness and depth. Incredibly-
Marc Andreessen
Very serious, very analytical, very applied. Yes. A hundred percent. Tested under pressure came out. The more people look back at what he said and did. None of us perfect, but overwhelmingly insightful throughout that whole period. We would all be much better off today had he been in charge of the response. And so just an incredibly capable guy. And look, and then he learned from all that. He learned a lot in the last five years. And so the idea that somebody that could be head of NIH as compared to the people we’ve had is just breathtakingly. It’s just a gigantic upgrade. And then Marty McAree coming.
Very serious, very analytical, very applied. Yes. A hundred percent. Tested under pressure came out. The more people look back at what he said and did. None of us perfect, but overwhelmingly insightful throughout that whole period. We would all be much better off today had he been in charge of the response. And so just an incredibly capable guy. And look, and then he learned from all that. He learned a lot in the last five years. And so the idea that somebody that could be head of NIH as compared to the people we’ve had is just breathtakingly. It’s just a gigantic upgrade. And then Marty McAree coming.
Marc Andreessen
It is just a gigantic upgrade. And then Marty Makary coming in to run FDA, exact same thing. The guy coming to run a CDC, exact same thing. I’ve been spending time with Dr. Oz. So again, I’m not on these teams, I’m not in the room, but I’ve been spending enough time trying to help that his level of insight into the healthcare system, it’s astounding. And it comes from being a guy who’s been in the middle of the whole thing and been talking to people about this stuff, and working on it and serving as a doctor himself and in medical systems for his entire life. He’s like a walking encyclopedia on these things. And very dynamic, very charismatic, very smart, organized, effective. So to have somebody like that in there. And so anyway, I have 30 of these stories now across all these different positions. And then to be quite honest, you do the compare and contrast to the last four years, and these people are not in the same ballpark, they’re just wildly better. And so pound for pound this maybe the best team in the White House since, I don’t even know, maybe the 90s, maybe the 30s, maybe the 50s. Maybe Eisenhower had a team like this or something, but there’s a lot of really good people in there now.
It is just a gigantic upgrade. And then Marty Makary coming in to run FDA, exact same thing. The guy coming to run a CDC, exact same thing. I’ve been spending time with Dr. Oz. So again, I’m not on these teams, I’m not in the room, but I’ve been spending enough time trying to help that his level of insight into the healthcare system, it’s astounding. And it comes from being a guy who’s been in the middle of the whole thing and been talking to people about this stuff, and working on it and serving as a doctor himself and in medical systems for his entire life. He’s like a walking encyclopedia on these things. And very dynamic, very charismatic, very smart, organized, effective. So to have somebody like that in there. And so anyway, I have 30 of these stories now across all these different positions. And then to be quite honest, you do the compare and contrast to the last four years, and these people are not in the same ballpark, they’re just wildly better. And so pound for pound this maybe the best team in the White House since, I don’t even know, maybe the 90s, maybe the 30s, maybe the 50s. Maybe Eisenhower had a team like this or something, but there’s a lot of really good people in there now.
DOGE
Lex Fridman
Yeah, the potential for change is certainly extremely high. Can you speak to DOGE? What’s the most wildly successful next two years for DOGE, can you imagine? Maybe also can you think about the trajectory that’s the most likely and what kind of challenges would it be facing?
Yeah, the potential for change is certainly extremely high. Can you speak to DOGE? What’s the most wildly successful next two years for DOGE, can you imagine? Maybe also can you think about the trajectory that’s the most likely and what kind of challenges would it be facing?
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so start by saying, again, disclaimer, I have to say, I’m not on DOGE, I’m not a member of DOGE.
Yeah, so start by saying, again, disclaimer, I have to say, I’m not on DOGE, I’m not a member of DOGE.
Lex Fridman
We should say there’s about 10 lawyers in the room, they’re staring. No, I’m just kidding.
We should say there’s about 10 lawyers in the room, they’re staring. No, I’m just kidding.
Marc Andreessen
Both the angels and the devils on my shoulder are literally [inaudible 02:13:51]. So I’m not speaking for DOGE, I’m not in charge of DOGE. Those guys are doing it, I’m not doing it. But again, I’m volunteering to help as much as I can and I’m 100% supportive. Yeah, so look, I think the way to think, the basic outlines are in public, which is it’s a time limited basically commission. It’s not a formal government agency. It’s a time limited, 18 month. In terms of implementation, it will advise the executive branch. And so the implementation will happen through the White House. And the president has total latitude on what he wants to implement. And then basically what I think about it is three streams, target sets, and they’re related but different. So money, people, and regulations. And so the headline number they put as the $2 trillion number, and there’s already disputes over that and whatever, and there’s a whole question there. But then there’s the people thing.
Both the angels and the devils on my shoulder are literally [inaudible 02:13:51]. So I’m not speaking for DOGE, I’m not in charge of DOGE. Those guys are doing it, I’m not doing it. But again, I’m volunteering to help as much as I can and I’m 100% supportive. Yeah, so look, I think the way to think, the basic outlines are in public, which is it’s a time limited basically commission. It’s not a formal government agency. It’s a time limited, 18 month. In terms of implementation, it will advise the executive branch. And so the implementation will happen through the White House. And the president has total latitude on what he wants to implement. And then basically what I think about it is three streams, target sets, and they’re related but different. So money, people, and regulations. And so the headline number they put as the $2 trillion number, and there’s already disputes over that and whatever, and there’s a whole question there. But then there’s the people thing.
And the people thing is interesting, because you get into these very fascinating questions. And I’ve been doing this, I won’t do this for you as a pop quiz, but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz and I can stump them every time. Which is, A, how many federal agencies are there? And the answer is somewhere between 450 and 520, and nobody’s quite sure. And then the other is how many people work for the federal government? And the answer is something on the order, I forget, but like 4 million full-time employees and maybe up to 20 million contractors, and nobody’s quite sure. And so there’s a large people component to this. And then by the way, there’s a related component to that, which is how many of them are actually in the office? And the answer is not many, most of the federal buildings are still empty.
And then there’s questions of are people working from home or are we actually working from home? So there’s the people dimension, and of course the money and the people are connected. And then there’s the third, which is the regulation thing. And I described earlier how basically our system of government is much more now based on regulations than legislation. Most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress, they’re from an agency that created a regulation. That turns out to be very, very important. So one is Elon had already described the DOGE wants to do broad-based regulatory relief, and Trump has talked about this, and basically get the government off of people’s backs and liberate the American people to be able to do things again. So that’s part of it. But there’s also something else that’s happened, which is very interesting, which was there were a set of Supreme Court decisions about two years ago that went directly after the idea that the executive branch can create regulatory agencies, and issue regulations and enforce those regulations without corresponding congressional legislation.
And most of the federal government that exists today, including most of the departments and most of the rules and most of the money and most of the people, most of it is not enforcing laws that Congress passed. Most of it is regulation. And the Supreme Court basically said, “Large parts, large to maybe all of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress, the way that the cartoon said that it should, may not actually be legal. Now, the previous White House, of course, was super in favor of big government. They did nothing based on this, they didn’t pull anything back in. But the new regime, if they choose to, could say, “Look, the thing that we’re doing here is not challenging the laws, we’re actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this and we have to unwind the regulations which are no longer legal, constitutional. We have to unwind the spend and we have to unwind the people.
And that’s how you get from basically you connect the thread from the regulation part back to the money part back to the people part. They have work going on all three of these threads. They have, I would say, incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this. I know lots of former government people who 100% of them are super cynical on this topic, and they’re like, “This is impossible, this could never possibly work.” And I’m like, “Well, I can’t tell you what the secret plans are, but blow my mind.” And all three of those, they have ideas that are really quite amazing, as you’d expect from the people involved. And so over the course of the next few months, that’ll start to become visible. And then the final thing I would say is this is going to be very different than attempts, there have been other programs like this in the past. The Clinton-Gore administration had one and then there were others before that, Reagan had one. The difference is this time, their social media,
It’s interesting, one of the reasons people in Washington are so cynical is because they know all the bull shit. They know all the bad spending and all the bad rules. Look, we’re adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now. And that’s compounding, and it’s now passing the size of the defense department budget and it’s compounding, and pretty soon it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days, and then it’s going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days, and then it’s going to be a trillion dollars every 70 days. And then if this doesn’t get fixed, at some point we enter a hyperinflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil, and [inaudible 02:18:44]. And so everybody in D.C. knows that something has to be done, and then everybody in D.C. knows for a fact that it’s impossible to do anything.
They know all the problems and they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing it. But I think what they’re not taking into account, what the critics are not taking into account is these guys can do this in the full light of day. And they can do it on social media, they can completely bypass the press, they can completely bypass the cynicism. They can expose any element of unconstitutional or silly government spending. They can run victory laps every single day on what they’re doing. They can bring the people into the process. And again, if you think about it, this goes back to our Machiavellian structure, which is if you think about, again, you’ve got democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, rule of the many, rule of the few, rule of the one. You could think about what’s happening here as a little bit of a sandwich, which is we don’t have a monarch, but we have a president, rule of the one with some power.
And then we have the people who can’t organize, but they can be informed and they can be aware, and they can express themselves through voting and polling. So there’s a sandwich happening right now is the way to think about it, which is you’ve got basically rule of one combining with rule of many. And rule of many is they do get to vote, the people do get to vote basically, and then essentially Congress and this permanent bureaucratic class in Washington as the oligarchy in the middle. And so the White House plus the people I think have the power to do all kinds of things here, and I think that would be the way I would wash it.
Lex Fridman
The transparency. Elon, just by who he is is incentivized to be transparent, and show the bull shit in the system and to celebrate the victories. So it’s going to be so exciting. It honestly just makes government more exciting, which is a win for everybody.
The transparency. Elon, just by who he is is incentivized to be transparent, and show the bull shit in the system and to celebrate the victories. So it’s going to be so exciting. It honestly just makes government more exciting, which is a win for everybody.
Marc Andreessen
These people are spending our money. These people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer. Okay, here’s the thing you hear in Washington, here’s one of the things. So the first thing you hear is, “This is impossible, they’ll be able to do nothing.” And then, yeah, I walk them through this and it starts to dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing. And then they’re like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because all the money is in entitlements and the debt and the military.” And so yeah, you’ve got this silly, fake whatever, NPR funding or whatever, and just it’s a rounding error and it doesn’t matter. And you look it up in the budget and it’s like, whatever, $500 million or $5 billion, or it’s the charging stations that don’t exist. It’s the $40 billion of charging stations and they build eight charging stations, or it’s the broadband internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody and cost you $30 billion, so these boondoggles. And what everybody in Washington says is that $30 billion is a rounding error on the federal budget, it doesn’t matter. Who cares if they make it go away? And of course, any taxpayer is like, “What the fuck?”
These people are spending our money. These people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer. Okay, here’s the thing you hear in Washington, here’s one of the things. So the first thing you hear is, “This is impossible, they’ll be able to do nothing.” And then, yeah, I walk them through this and it starts to dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing. And then they’re like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because all the money is in entitlements and the debt and the military.” And so yeah, you’ve got this silly, fake whatever, NPR funding or whatever, and just it’s a rounding error and it doesn’t matter. And you look it up in the budget and it’s like, whatever, $500 million or $5 billion, or it’s the charging stations that don’t exist. It’s the $40 billion of charging stations and they build eight charging stations, or it’s the broadband internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody and cost you $30 billion, so these boondoggles. And what everybody in Washington says is that $30 billion is a rounding error on the federal budget, it doesn’t matter. Who cares if they make it go away? And of course, any taxpayer is like, “What the fuck?”
Lex Fridman
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
Marc Andreessen
It’s $30 billion. And the press is in on this too, and then the experts are like, “Well, it doesn’t matter because it’s rounding error.” No, it’s $30 billion. And if you’re this cavalier about $30 billion, imagine how cavalier you are about the three trillion. Then there’s the, okay, $30 billion. Is $30 billion a lot of the federal budget in percentage? No, it’s not, but $30 billion divided by, do the math, $30 billion divided by let’s say 300 million taxpayers. What’s that math expert?
It’s $30 billion. And the press is in on this too, and then the experts are like, “Well, it doesn’t matter because it’s rounding error.” No, it’s $30 billion. And if you’re this cavalier about $30 billion, imagine how cavalier you are about the three trillion. Then there’s the, okay, $30 billion. Is $30 billion a lot of the federal budget in percentage? No, it’s not, but $30 billion divided by, do the math, $30 billion divided by let’s say 300 million taxpayers. What’s that math expert?
Lex Fridman
$100.
$100.
Marc Andreessen
$100 per taxpayer per year. Okay, so $100 to an ordinary person working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids. $100 is a meal out, it’s a trip to the amusement park. It’s the ability to buy additional educational materials. It’s the ability to have a babysitter to be able to have a romantic relationship with your wife. There’s 100 things that that person can do with $100 that they’re not doing because it’s going to some bull shit program that is being basically where the money’s being looted out in the form of just ridiculous ridiculousness and graft. And so the idea that that $30 billion program is not something that is a very important thing to go after, the level of contempt for the taxpayer is just off the charts.
$100 per taxpayer per year. Okay, so $100 to an ordinary person working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids. $100 is a meal out, it’s a trip to the amusement park. It’s the ability to buy additional educational materials. It’s the ability to have a babysitter to be able to have a romantic relationship with your wife. There’s 100 things that that person can do with $100 that they’re not doing because it’s going to some bull shit program that is being basically where the money’s being looted out in the form of just ridiculous ridiculousness and graft. And so the idea that that $30 billion program is not something that is a very important thing to go after, the level of contempt for the taxpayer is just off the charts.
And then that’s just one of those programs, there’s 100 of those programs. And they’re all just like that, it’s not like any of this stuff is running well. The one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well, we know that for sure. And we know these people aren’t showing up to work, and we know that all this crazy stuff is happening. Do you remember Elon’s story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania? Oh, okay. So Pennsylvania is like a wonderful state, great history. It has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended other cities into just complete chaos, violent madness, and death. And the federal government has just let it happen, these incredibly violent places.
And so the Biden administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do in Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk with armed raids. And it turns out it really pissed off the Amish. It turns out they weren’t willing to drive to the polling places because they don’t have cars, but if you came and got them, they would go and they would vote. And that’s one of the reasons why Trump won. Anyway, so the law enforcement agencies are off working on crazy things. The system’s not working. And so you add up, just pick $130 billion programs, all right, now you’re okay. Math major, 100 times 100.
Lex Fridman
10,000.
10,000.
Marc Andreessen
$10,000, okay. $10,000 per tax payer per year.
$10,000, okay. $10,000 per tax payer per year.
Lex Fridman
But it’s also not just about money, obviously money is a hugely important thing, but it’s the cavalier attitude that then in the ripple effect of that, it makes it so nobody wants to work in government and be productive. It makes it so that it breeds corruption, it breeds laziness. It breeds secrecy because you don’t want to be transparent about having done nothing all year, all this kind of stuff. And you now want to reverse that so that it will be exciting for the future to work in government, because the amazing thing if you’re the steelman government is you can do shit at scale. You have money and you can directly impact people’s lives in a positive sense at scale. It’s super exciting. As long as there’s no bureaucracy that slows you down, or not huge amounts of bureaucracy that slows you down significantly.
But it’s also not just about money, obviously money is a hugely important thing, but it’s the cavalier attitude that then in the ripple effect of that, it makes it so nobody wants to work in government and be productive. It makes it so that it breeds corruption, it breeds laziness. It breeds secrecy because you don’t want to be transparent about having done nothing all year, all this kind of stuff. And you now want to reverse that so that it will be exciting for the future to work in government, because the amazing thing if you’re the steelman government is you can do shit at scale. You have money and you can directly impact people’s lives in a positive sense at scale. It’s super exciting. As long as there’s no bureaucracy that slows you down, or not huge amounts of bureaucracy that slows you down significantly.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So here’s the trick, this blew my mind. Because once you open the hellmouth of looking into the federal budget, you learn all kinds of things. So there is a term of art in government called impoundment. So if you’re like me, you’ve learned this the hard way when your car has been impounded. The government meaning of impoundment, the federal budget meaning is a different meaning. Impoundment is as follows. The constitution requires Congress to authorize money to be spent by the executive branch. So the executive branch goes to Congress, says, “We need money X.” Congress does their thing. They come back and they say, “You can have money Y.” The money’s appropriated from Congress, the executive branch spends it on the military or whatever they spend it on, or on roads to nowhere or charging stations to nowhere or whatever. And what’s in the constitution is the Congress appropriates the money. Over the last 60 years, there has been an additional interpretation of appropriations applied by the courts and by the system, which is the executive branch not only needs Congress to appropriate X amount of money, the executive branch is not allowed to underspend.
Yeah. So here’s the trick, this blew my mind. Because once you open the hellmouth of looking into the federal budget, you learn all kinds of things. So there is a term of art in government called impoundment. So if you’re like me, you’ve learned this the hard way when your car has been impounded. The government meaning of impoundment, the federal budget meaning is a different meaning. Impoundment is as follows. The constitution requires Congress to authorize money to be spent by the executive branch. So the executive branch goes to Congress, says, “We need money X.” Congress does their thing. They come back and they say, “You can have money Y.” The money’s appropriated from Congress, the executive branch spends it on the military or whatever they spend it on, or on roads to nowhere or charging stations to nowhere or whatever. And what’s in the constitution is the Congress appropriates the money. Over the last 60 years, there has been an additional interpretation of appropriations applied by the courts and by the system, which is the executive branch not only needs Congress to appropriate X amount of money, the executive branch is not allowed to underspend.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’m aware of this. I’m aware of this.
Yeah, I’m aware of this. I’m aware of this.
Marc Andreessen
And so there’s this thing that happens in Washington at the end of every fiscal year, which is September 30th, and it’s the great budget flush. And any remaining money that’s in the system that they don’t know how to productively spend, they deliberately spend it unproductively, to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. A president that doesn’t want to spend the money can’t not spend it.
And so there’s this thing that happens in Washington at the end of every fiscal year, which is September 30th, and it’s the great budget flush. And any remaining money that’s in the system that they don’t know how to productively spend, they deliberately spend it unproductively, to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. A president that doesn’t want to spend the money can’t not spend it.
Like, okay, A, that’s not what’s in the constitution. And there’s actually quite a good Wikipedia page that goes through the great debate on this that’s played out in the legal world over the last 60 years. And basically, if you look at this with anything resembling I think an open mind, you’re like, “All right, this is not what the founders meant.” And then number two, again, we go back to this thing of contempt. Can you imagine showing up and running the government like that and thinking that you’re doing the right thing, and not going home at night and thinking that you’ve sold your soul? I actually think you headed it a really good point, which is it’s even unfair to the people who have to execute this because it makes them bad people, and they didn’t start out wanting to be bad people. And so there is stuff like this.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, everywhere.
Yeah, everywhere.
Marc Andreessen
Everywhere. And so we’ll see how far these guys get. I am extremely encouraged, what I’ve seen so far.
Everywhere. And so we’ll see how far these guys get. I am extremely encouraged, what I’ve seen so far.
H1B and immigration
Lex Fridman
It seems like a lot of people will try to slow them down, but yeah, I hope they get far. Another difficult topic, immigration. What’s your take on the, let’s say, heated H-1B visa debate that’s going on online and legal immigration in general?
It seems like a lot of people will try to slow them down, but yeah, I hope they get far. Another difficult topic, immigration. What’s your take on the, let’s say, heated H-1B visa debate that’s going on online and legal immigration in general?
Marc Andreessen
I should start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I’m not planning to be, this is not an issue that I’m working on or that I’m going to work on. This is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing, my firm is doing. So I’m not in the new administration or the government, I’m not planning to be, so purely just personal opinion. So I would say I would describe this as I have a complex or nuanced, hopefully nuanced view on this issue that’s maybe a little bit different than what a lot of my peers have. And I thought about this, I didn’t say anything about it all the way through the big debate over Christmas, but I thought about it a lot and read everything. I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things, and the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I ended up.
I should start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I’m not planning to be, this is not an issue that I’m working on or that I’m going to work on. This is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing, my firm is doing. So I’m not in the new administration or the government, I’m not planning to be, so purely just personal opinion. So I would say I would describe this as I have a complex or nuanced, hopefully nuanced view on this issue that’s maybe a little bit different than what a lot of my peers have. And I thought about this, I didn’t say anything about it all the way through the big debate over Christmas, but I thought about it a lot and read everything. I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things, and the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I ended up.
Let’s start with this, where I ended up, in Silicon Valley, and I have made the pro high-skilled immigration argument many, many times, the H-1B argument many times. In past lives, I’ve been in D.C. many times arguing with prior administrations about this, always on the side of trying to get more H-1B’s and trying to get more high-skilled immigration. And I think that argument is very strong and very solid, and has paid off for the US in many, many ways. And we can go through it, but I think it’s the argument everybody already knows, it’s like the stock. You take any Silicon Valley person, you press the button and they tell you why we need to brain drain the world to get more H-1B’s. So everybody gets that argument.
Lex Fridman
So it’s basically, just to summarize, it’s a mechanism by which you can get super smart people from the rest of the world, import them in, keep them here to increase the productivity of the US companies.
So it’s basically, just to summarize, it’s a mechanism by which you can get super smart people from the rest of the world, import them in, keep them here to increase the productivity of the US companies.
Marc Andreessen
And then it’s not just good for them and it’s not just good for Silicon Valley or the tech industry, it’s good for the country because they then create new companies and create new technologies and create new industries that then create many more jobs for Americans, native born Americans, than would’ve previously existed. And so it’s a positive, some flywheel thing where everybody wins. Everybody wins, there are no trade-offs, it’s all absolutely glorious in all directions. There cannot possibly be a moral argument against it under any circumstances. Anybody who argues against it is obviously doing so from a position of racism, is probably a fascist and a Nazi. That’s the thing, and like I said, I’ve made that argument many times. I’m very comfortable with that argument. And then I’d also say, look, I would say number one, I believe a lot of it, I’ll talk about the parts I don’t believe, but I believe a lot of it.
And then it’s not just good for them and it’s not just good for Silicon Valley or the tech industry, it’s good for the country because they then create new companies and create new technologies and create new industries that then create many more jobs for Americans, native born Americans, than would’ve previously existed. And so it’s a positive, some flywheel thing where everybody wins. Everybody wins, there are no trade-offs, it’s all absolutely glorious in all directions. There cannot possibly be a moral argument against it under any circumstances. Anybody who argues against it is obviously doing so from a position of racism, is probably a fascist and a Nazi. That’s the thing, and like I said, I’ve made that argument many times. I’m very comfortable with that argument. And then I’d also say, look, I would say number one, I believe a lot of it, I’ll talk about the parts I don’t believe, but I believe a lot of it.
And then the other part is, look, I benefit every day. I always describe it as I work in the United Nations, my own firm and our founders and our companies and the industry and my friends are just this amazing panoply, cornucopia of people from all over the world. And I’ve worked, I don’t know, at this point with people from, it’s got to be, I don’t know, 80 countries or something, and hopefully over time it’ll be the rest as well. And it’s been amazing, and they’ve done many of the most important things in my industry and it’s been really remarkable. So that’s all good. And then there’s just the practical version of the argument, which is we are the main place these people get educated anyway. The best and the brightest tend to come here to get educated. And so this is the old Mitt Romney, staple a green card to maybe not every university degree, but every technical degree. Maybe the sociologists we could quibble about, but the roboticists for sure, for sure. For sure, we can all agree that-
Lex Fridman
At least I won you over on something today.
At least I won you over on something today.
Marc Andreessen
Well, no, I’m exaggerating for effect.
Well, no, I’m exaggerating for effect.
Lex Fridman
And I lost you, I had you for half a second.
And I lost you, I had you for half a second.
Marc Andreessen
I haven’t gotten to the other side of the argument yet.
I haven’t gotten to the other side of the argument yet.
Lex Fridman
Okay, thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Marc Andreessen
So surely we can all agree that we need to staple a green card.
So surely we can all agree that we need to staple a green card.
Lex Fridman
The rollercoaster is going up.
The rollercoaster is going up.
Marc Andreessen
The rollercoaster is ratcheting slowly up. So yeah, so surely we can all agree that the roboticists should all get green cards. And again, there’s a lot of merit to that, obviously. Look, we want the US to be the world leader in robotics. What’s step one to being the world leader in robotics is have all the great robotics people. Unlike the underpants, it’s like a very straightforward formula. All right, that’s all well and good, all right, but it gets a little bit more complicated because there is a argument that’s right underneath that that you also hear from these same people. And I have made this argument myself many times, which is we need to do this because we don’t have enough people in the US who can do it otherwise. We have all these unfilled jobs, we’ve got all these companies that wouldn’t exist.
The rollercoaster is ratcheting slowly up. So yeah, so surely we can all agree that the roboticists should all get green cards. And again, there’s a lot of merit to that, obviously. Look, we want the US to be the world leader in robotics. What’s step one to being the world leader in robotics is have all the great robotics people. Unlike the underpants, it’s like a very straightforward formula. All right, that’s all well and good, all right, but it gets a little bit more complicated because there is a argument that’s right underneath that that you also hear from these same people. And I have made this argument myself many times, which is we need to do this because we don’t have enough people in the US who can do it otherwise. We have all these unfilled jobs, we’ve got all these companies that wouldn’t exist.
We don’t have enough good founders, we don’t have enough engineers, we don’t have enough scientists. Or then the next version of the argument below that is our education system is not good enough to generate those people, which is a weird argument by the way. Because our education system is good enough for foreigners to be able to come here preferentially in a very large number of cases, but somehow not good enough to educate our own native foreign people. So there’s little cracks in the matrix that you can stick your fingernail into and wonder about and we’ll come back to that one. But at least, yes, our education system has its flaws. And then underneath that is the argument that Vivek made, which is we have cultural rot in the country and native-born people in the country don’t work hard enough, and spend too much time watching TV and TikTok and don’t spend enough time studying differential equations.
And again, it’s like, all right, yeah, there’s a fair amount to that. There’s a lot of American culture that is, there’s a lot of frivolity, we have well-documented social issues on many fronts, many things that cut against having a culture of just straightforward, high achievement and effort and striving. But anyway, those are the basic arguments. But then I have this other side of my personality and thought process, which is, well, I grew up in a small farming town of rural Wisconsin, the rural Midwest, and it’s interesting, there’s not a lot of people who make it from rural Wisconsin to high tech.
And so it’s like, all right, why is that exactly? And I know this, I’m an aberration. I was the only one from anybody I ever knew who ever did this. I know what an aberration I am and I know exactly how that aberration happened, and it’s a very unusual set of steps, including many that were just luck. But there is in no sense a talent flow from rural Wisconsin into high tech, like not at all. There is also in no sense a talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into high tech. There is no talent flow from the south into high tech. There is no flow from the Sunbelt into high tech. There’s no flow from the deep south into high tech. Literally, it’s like the blanks. There’s this whole section of the country where the people just for some reason don’t end up in tech.
Now, that’s a little bit strange, because these are the people who put a man on the moon. These are the people who built the World War II War Machine. These are the people, at least their ancestors are the people who built the second industrial revolution, and built the railroads and built the telephone network and built logistics and transportation in the auto industry. The auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit. And so at least these people’s parents and grandparents and great grandparents somehow had the wherewithal to build all of these amazing things, invent all these things.
And then there’s many, many, many, many stories in the history of American invention and innovation and capitalism, where you had people who grew up in the middle of nowhere, Philo Farnsworth who invented the television, and just tons and tons of others, endless stories like this. Now you have a puzzle and the conundrum, which is like, okay, what is happening on the blank spot of the map? And then of course, you also can’t help noticing that the blank spot on the map, the Midwest, the South, you’ve also just defined Trump country, the Trump voter base.
And it’s like, oh, well, that’s interesting. How did that happen? And so either you really, really, really have to believe the very, very strong version of the Vivek thesis or something, where you have to believe that that basically culture, the whole civilization in the middle of the country and the south of the country is so deeply flawed, either inherently flawed or culturally flawed, such that for whatever reason, they’re not able to do the things that their parents and grandparents were able to do, and that their peers are able to do. Or something else is happening. Would you care to guess on what else is happening?
Lex Fridman
You mean what, affirmative action?
You mean what, affirmative action?
Marc Andreessen
Affirmative action. Think about this, this is very entertaining. What are the three things that we know about affirmative action? It is absolutely 100% necessary, however, it cannot explain the success of any one individual, nor does it have any victims at all.
Affirmative action. Think about this, this is very entertaining. What are the three things that we know about affirmative action? It is absolutely 100% necessary, however, it cannot explain the success of any one individual, nor does it have any victims at all.
Lex Fridman
That could explain maybe disproportionate, but surely it doesn’t explain why you’re probably the only person in Silicon Valley from Wisconsin.
That could explain maybe disproportionate, but surely it doesn’t explain why you’re probably the only person in Silicon Valley from Wisconsin.
Marc Andreessen
What educational institution in the last 60 years has wanted farm boys from Wisconsin?
What educational institution in the last 60 years has wanted farm boys from Wisconsin?
Lex Fridman
But what institution rejected farm boys from Wisconsin?
But what institution rejected farm boys from Wisconsin?
Marc Andreessen
All of them.
All of them.
Lex Fridman
All of them.
All of them.
Marc Andreessen
Of course. Okay, so we know this, we know this. The reason we know this is because of the Harvard and UNC Supreme Court cases. This was three years ago, these were big court cases. Because the idea of affirmative action has been litigated for many, many, many years and through many court cases, and the Supreme Court repeatedly in the past had upheld that it was a completely legitimate thing to do. And there’s basically two categories of affirmative action that really matter. One is the admissions into educational institutions and then the other is jobs, getting hired. Those are the two biggest areas. The education one is super potent, has been a super potent political issue for a very long time for all… People have written and talked about this for many decades, I don’t need to go through it. There’s many arguments for why it’s important, there’s many arguments as to how it could backfire. It’s been this thing.
Of course. Okay, so we know this, we know this. The reason we know this is because of the Harvard and UNC Supreme Court cases. This was three years ago, these were big court cases. Because the idea of affirmative action has been litigated for many, many, many years and through many court cases, and the Supreme Court repeatedly in the past had upheld that it was a completely legitimate thing to do. And there’s basically two categories of affirmative action that really matter. One is the admissions into educational institutions and then the other is jobs, getting hired. Those are the two biggest areas. The education one is super potent, has been a super potent political issue for a very long time for all… People have written and talked about this for many decades, I don’t need to go through it. There’s many arguments for why it’s important, there’s many arguments as to how it could backfire. It’s been this thing.
But the Supreme Court upheld it for a very long time. The most recent ruling, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t have the exact reference in my head, but there was a case in 2003 that said that Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote that although it had been 30 years of affirmative action and although it was not working remotely as it had been intended, she said that, well, basically we need to try it for another 25 years. But she said basically as a message to future Supreme Court justices, if it hasn’t resolved basically the issues it’s intended to resolve within 25 years, then we should probably call it off. By the way, we’re coming up on the 25 years, it’s a couple of years away. The Supreme Court just had these cases, it’s a Harvard case and I think a University of North Carolina case.
And what’s interesting about those cases is the lawyers in those cases put a tremendous amount of evidence into the record of how the admissions decisions actually happen at Harvard and happen at UNC. And it is like every bit as cartoonishly garish and racist as you could possibly imagine, because it’s a ring of power. And if you’re an admissions officer at a private university or an administrator, you have unlimited power to do what you want, and you can justify any of it under any of these rules or systems. And up until these cases, it had been a black box where you didn’t have to explain yourself and show your work. And what the Harvard and UNC cases did is they basically required showing the work. And there was all kinds of phenomenal detail, number one is there were text messages in there that will just curl your hair, of students being spoken of and just crude racial stereotypes that would just make you want to jump out the window. It’s horrible stuff.
But also, there was statistical information. And of course, the big statistical kicker to the whole thing is that at top institutions, it’s common for different ethnic groups to have different cutoffs for SAT that are as wide as 400 points. So different groups. So specifically Asians need to perform at 400 SAT points higher than other ethnicities in order to actually get admitted into these. White people are a part of this, but Asians are a very big part of this. And actually the Harvard case is actually brought by an activist on behalf of actually the Asian students who are being turned away. And it’s the cliche now in the valley and in the medical community, which is like, if you want a super genius you hire an Asian from Harvard, because they are guaranteed to be freaking Einstein. Because if they weren’t, they were never getting admitted. Almost all the qualified Asians get turned away.
So they’ve been running this, it’s a very, very explicit, very, very clear program. This, of course, has been a third rail of things that people are not supposed to discuss under any circumstances. The thing that has really changed the tenor on this is I think two things. Number one, those Supreme Court cases, the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that. I will tell you, I don’t believe there’s a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling, I think they’re all flagrantly ignoring it. And we could talk about that.
Lex Fridman
Mostly because of momentum probably, or what?
Mostly because of momentum probably, or what?
Marc Andreessen
They are trying to make the world a better place. They’re trying to solve all these social problems, They are trying to have diverse student populations. They are trying to live up to the expectations of their donors. They’re trying to make their faculty happy. They are trying to have their friends and family think that they’re good people. They’re trying to have the press write nice things about them. It’s nearly impossible for them. And to be clear, nobody has been fired from an admissions office for 25 years and prior, what the Supreme Court now is ruled to be illegality. And so they’re all the same people under the exact same pressures. And so the numbers are moving a little bit, but I don’t know anybody in the system who thinks that they are complying with Supreme Court. Like who’s in charge, in the rank ordering of who rules who, the university’s rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities.
They are trying to make the world a better place. They’re trying to solve all these social problems, They are trying to have diverse student populations. They are trying to live up to the expectations of their donors. They’re trying to make their faculty happy. They are trying to have their friends and family think that they’re good people. They’re trying to have the press write nice things about them. It’s nearly impossible for them. And to be clear, nobody has been fired from an admissions office for 25 years and prior, what the Supreme Court now is ruled to be illegality. And so they’re all the same people under the exact same pressures. And so the numbers are moving a little bit, but I don’t know anybody in the system who thinks that they are complying with Supreme Court. Like who’s in charge, in the rank ordering of who rules who, the university’s rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities.
Well, another example of that is I think that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale, the level of incestuousness here is… Anyway, so there’s that. And so this has been running for a very long time. So one is the Harvard and UNC cases gave up the game, number one, or at least showed what the mechanism was. And then number two, the other thing is obviously the aftermath of October 7th, and what we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants and what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants was they were being managed down, either being actively managed down as a percentage of the base. And let’s say I’ve heard reports of extremely explicit basically plans to manage the Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the US population, which is 2%. And there’s a whole backstory here, which is 100 years ago, Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions, and then there was a big campaign to get them in.
Once they could get in, they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there are so many smart, talented Jews. So it went from 0% to 30%, and then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it done to 2%. And a lot of Jewish people, at least a lot of Jewish people I know, they kind of knew this was happening but they discovered it the hard way after October 7th. So basically the Supreme Court case meant that you could address this in terms of the Asian victims. The October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims. And for sure, both of those groups are being systematically excluded. And then of course, there’s the thing that you basically can’t talk about, which is all the white people are being excluded. And then it turns out it’s also happening to black people, and this is the thing that blew my freaking mind when I found out about it.
So I just assumed that this was great news for American Blacks, because obviously if Whites, Asians, and Jews are being excluded, then the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the Black population up, and so this must be great for American Blacks. So then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 called Blacks are Being Admitted into Top Schools at Greater Numbers, but which ones? And by the way, this is in the New York Times, this is not in, whatever, The National Review, this is New York Times, 2004. And the two authorities that were quoted in the story are Henry Louis Gates, who’s the dean of the African-American Studies community in the United States, super brilliant guy. And then Lani Guinier, she was a potential Supreme Court appointee under, I think she was a close friend of Hillary Clinton.
And there was for a long time, she was on the short list for Supreme Court. So one of the top jurists, lawyers in the country, but both Black, legendarily successful in the academic and legal worlds and Black. And they are quoted as the authorities in this story, and the story that they tell, it’s actually amazing. And by the way, it’s happening today in education institutions and it’s happening in companies, and you can see it all over the place, and the government. Which is at least at that time, the number was half of the Black admits into a place like Harvard were not American-born Blacks, they were foreign-born Blacks, specifically Northern African, generally Nigerian or West Indian.
And by the way, many Nigerians and Northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful. Nigerian-Americans as a group way outperform, they’re just a super smart cohort of people. And then West Indian Blacks in the US are incredibly successful. Most recently, by the way, Kamala Harris, as well as Colin Powell, just two examples of that. And so basically what Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either, whatever it was, identify, recruit, make successful, whatever it was, American-born native Blacks, and so therefore they were using high-skill immigration as an escape hatch to go get Blacks from other countries. And then this was 2004 when you could discuss such things, obviously that is a topic that nobody has discussed since, it has sailed on. All of the DEI programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic.
There’s large numbers of Black people in America who are fully aware of this and are like, “It’s obviously not us that are getting these slots, we’re literally competing with people who are being imported.” And if you believe in the basis of affirmative action, you were trying to make up for historical injustice of American Black slavery. So the idea that you import somebody from Nigeria that never experienced that is tremendously insulting to Black Americans. Anyway, so you can see where I’m heading with this. We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into. And so it turns out it’s not a victim-free thing, there’s 100%, there’s victims. Because why? There’s only so many, for sure there’s only so many education slots, and then for sure, there’s only so many of these jobs. Google only hires so many, whatever, level seven engineers. And so that’s the other side of it, and so you’re a farm boy in Wisconsin.
Lex Fridman
So, that’s the other side of it. And so, you’re a farm boy in Wisconsin, or a Black American whose ancestors arrived here on a slave ship, 300 years ago, in Louisiana, or a Cambodian immigrant in the Bronx, and you are a kid, or a Jewish immigrant, or from a very successful Jewish family, and for three generations, you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard, and what all of those groups know is the system that has been created is not for them. It’s designed specifically to exclude them, and then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say, yeah, let’s bring in more foreigners. So, anyway, so the short version of it is, you can’t anymore, I don’t think, just have the “high-skilled immigration,” conversation for either education or for employment without also having the DEI conversation.
So, that’s the other side of it. And so, you’re a farm boy in Wisconsin, or a Black American whose ancestors arrived here on a slave ship, 300 years ago, in Louisiana, or a Cambodian immigrant in the Bronx, and you are a kid, or a Jewish immigrant, or from a very successful Jewish family, and for three generations, you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard, and what all of those groups know is the system that has been created is not for them. It’s designed specifically to exclude them, and then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say, yeah, let’s bring in more foreigners. So, anyway, so the short version of it is, you can’t anymore, I don’t think, just have the “high-skilled immigration,” conversation for either education or for employment without also having the DEI conversation.
And then DEI is just another word for affirmative action, so it’s the affirmative action conversation. And you need to actually deal with this at substance and to see what’s actually happening to people, you needed to join these topics. And I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high-skilled immigration given the extent to which DEI took over both the education process and the hiring process.
Marc Andreessen
So, first of all, that was brilliantly laid out, the nuance of it. So, just to understand, it’s not so much a criticism of H-1B, high-skilled immigration, it’s that there needs to be more people saying, yay, we need more American- born hires.
So, first of all, that was brilliantly laid out, the nuance of it. So, just to understand, it’s not so much a criticism of H-1B, high-skilled immigration, it’s that there needs to be more people saying, yay, we need more American- born hires.
Lex Fridman
So, I spent the entire Christmas holiday reading every message on this and not saying anything, and what I was… Which you know me well enough to know that’s a serious level of-
So, I spent the entire Christmas holiday reading every message on this and not saying anything, and what I was… Which you know me well enough to know that’s a serious level of-
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that was very Zen.
Yeah, that was very Zen.
Lex Fridman
Yes, thank you, thank you. No, it wasn’t, there was tremendous rage on the other side of it, but I suppressed it. So, I was waiting for the dog that didn’t bark, and the dog that didn’t bark was I did not… And tell me if you saw one. I did not see a single example of somebody pounding the table for more high-skilled immigration, who was also pounding the table to go get more smart kids who are already here into these educational institutions and into these jobs. I didn’t see a single one.
Yes, thank you, thank you. No, it wasn’t, there was tremendous rage on the other side of it, but I suppressed it. So, I was waiting for the dog that didn’t bark, and the dog that didn’t bark was I did not… And tell me if you saw one. I did not see a single example of somebody pounding the table for more high-skilled immigration, who was also pounding the table to go get more smart kids who are already here into these educational institutions and into these jobs. I didn’t see a single one.
Marc Andreessen
That’s true, I think I agree with that. There really was a divide.
That’s true, I think I agree with that. There really was a divide.
Lex Fridman
But it was literally, it was like the proponents of high-skilled immigrant… And again, this was me for a very long time. I kind of took myself by surprise on this because I had the much, say, simpler version of this story for a very long… Like I said, I’ve been in Washington many times under past presidents, lobbying for this. By the way, never made any progress, which we could talk about, it never actually worked. But I’ve been on the other side of this one. But I was literally sitting there being like, all right, which of these super geniuses, many of whom by the way are very successful, high-skilled immigrants or children of high-skilled immigrants, which of these super geniuses are going to say, actually we have this incredible talent source here in the country? Which again, to be clear, I’m not talking about white people, I’m talking about native-born Americans, whites, Asians, Jews, Blacks, for sure. For sure, for sure, those four groups,
But it was literally, it was like the proponents of high-skilled immigrant… And again, this was me for a very long time. I kind of took myself by surprise on this because I had the much, say, simpler version of this story for a very long… Like I said, I’ve been in Washington many times under past presidents, lobbying for this. By the way, never made any progress, which we could talk about, it never actually worked. But I’ve been on the other side of this one. But I was literally sitting there being like, all right, which of these super geniuses, many of whom by the way are very successful, high-skilled immigrants or children of high-skilled immigrants, which of these super geniuses are going to say, actually we have this incredible talent source here in the country? Which again, to be clear, I’m not talking about white people, I’m talking about native-born Americans, whites, Asians, Jews, Blacks, for sure. For sure, for sure, those four groups,
Marc Andreessen
But also white people.
But also white people.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, and also white people.
Yeah, and also white people.
Marc Andreessen
People that are making the case for American-born hires are usually not also supporting H-1B. It’s an extreme divide, and those people, they’re making that case are often not making it in a way that’s… Making it in quite a radical way, let’s put it this way.
People that are making the case for American-born hires are usually not also supporting H-1B. It’s an extreme divide, and those people, they’re making that case are often not making it in a way that’s… Making it in quite a radical way, let’s put it this way.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah. But you have this interesting thing, you have a split between the sides that I’ve noticed, which is one side has all of the experts. And I’m using air quote for people listening to audio, I’m making quotes in the air with my fingers as vigorously as I can. One side has all the certified experts, the other side just has a bunch of people who are like, they know that something is wrong and they don’t quite know how to explain it. And what was so unusual about the Harvard UNC cases, by the way, in front of the Supreme Court is they actually had sophisticated lawyers for the first time in a long time actually put all this evidence together and actually put it in the public record. They actually had experts, which is just really rare.
Yeah, yeah. But you have this interesting thing, you have a split between the sides that I’ve noticed, which is one side has all of the experts. And I’m using air quote for people listening to audio, I’m making quotes in the air with my fingers as vigorously as I can. One side has all the certified experts, the other side just has a bunch of people who are like, they know that something is wrong and they don’t quite know how to explain it. And what was so unusual about the Harvard UNC cases, by the way, in front of the Supreme Court is they actually had sophisticated lawyers for the first time in a long time actually put all this evidence together and actually put it in the public record. They actually had experts, which is just really rare.
Generally what you get is you get… Because if you don’t have experts, what do you have? You know something is wrong, but you have primarily an emotional response. You feel it, but can you put it into the words and tables and charts that a certified expert can? No, you can’t, that’s not who you are. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, and it also doesn’t mean that you have less of a moral stance. And so, it’s just like, all right… Now, by the way, look, I think there are ways to square the circle, I think there’s a way to have our cake and eat it too, I think there’d be many ways to resolve this. I think, again, I think the way to do it is to look at these issues combined, look at DEI combined with high-skilled immigration. It so happens that DEI is under much more scrutiny today than it has been for probably 20 years, affirmative action is. The Supreme Court did just rule that it is not legal for universities to do that, they are still doing it, but they should stop.
And then, there are more and more, you’ve seen more companies now also ditching their DEI programs, in part… That’s happening for a bunch of reasons, but it’s happening in part because a lot of corporate lawyers will tell you that the Supreme Court rulings in education either already apply to businesses, or it just is a clear foreshadowing the Supreme Court will rule on new cases that will ban in businesses. And so, there is a moment here to be able to look at this on both sides. Let me add one more nuance to it though, that makes it even more complicated. So, the cliché is we’re going to brain drain the world, you’ve heard that? We’re going to take all the smart people from all over the world, we’re going to bring them here, we’re going to educate them, and then we’re going to keep them, and then they’re going to raise their families here, create businesses here, create jobs here, right?
Marc Andreessen
In the cliché, that’s a super positive thing.
In the cliché, that’s a super positive thing.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Okay, so what happens to the rest of the world?
Yeah. Okay, so what happens to the rest of the world?
Marc Andreessen
They lose?
They lose?
Lex Fridman
Well, how fungible are people? How many highly ambitious, highly conscientious, highly energetic, high achieving, high IQ, super geniuses are there in the world? And if there’s a lot, that’s great, but if there just aren’t that many, and they all come here, and they aren’t where they would be otherwise, what happens to all those other places? So, it’s almost impossible for us here to have that conversation, in part because we become incredibly uncomfortable as a society talking about the fact that people aren’t just simply all the same, which is a whole thing we could talk about, but also we are purely the beneficiary of this effect. We are brain draining the world, not the other way around. There’s only four… So, if you look at the flow of high-skilled immigration over time, there’s only four permanent sinks of high-skilled immigration places people go. It’s the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia.
Well, how fungible are people? How many highly ambitious, highly conscientious, highly energetic, high achieving, high IQ, super geniuses are there in the world? And if there’s a lot, that’s great, but if there just aren’t that many, and they all come here, and they aren’t where they would be otherwise, what happens to all those other places? So, it’s almost impossible for us here to have that conversation, in part because we become incredibly uncomfortable as a society talking about the fact that people aren’t just simply all the same, which is a whole thing we could talk about, but also we are purely the beneficiary of this effect. We are brain draining the world, not the other way around. There’s only four… So, if you look at the flow of high-skilled immigration over time, there’s only four permanent sinks of high-skilled immigration places people go. It’s the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia.
Marc Andreessen
Oh, Australia.
Oh, Australia.
Lex Fridman
It’s four of the five, five eyes. It’s the major Anglosphere countries. And so, for those countries, this seems like a no-lose proposition, it’s all the other countries that, basically, what we four countries have been doing is draining all the smart people out. It’s actually much easier for people in Europe to talk about this I’ve discovered, because the Eurozone is, whatever, 28 countries, and within the Eurozone, the high-skilled people over time have been migrating to originally the UK, but also specifically I think it’s the Netherlands, Germany, and France. But specifically, they’ve been migrating out of the peripheral Eurozone countries. And the one where this really hit the fan was in Greece. So, Greece falls into chaos, disaster, and then you’re running the government in Greece and you’re trying to figure out how to put an economic development plan together, all of your smart young kids have left, what are you going to do?
It’s four of the five, five eyes. It’s the major Anglosphere countries. And so, for those countries, this seems like a no-lose proposition, it’s all the other countries that, basically, what we four countries have been doing is draining all the smart people out. It’s actually much easier for people in Europe to talk about this I’ve discovered, because the Eurozone is, whatever, 28 countries, and within the Eurozone, the high-skilled people over time have been migrating to originally the UK, but also specifically I think it’s the Netherlands, Germany, and France. But specifically, they’ve been migrating out of the peripheral Eurozone countries. And the one where this really hit the fan was in Greece. So, Greece falls into chaos, disaster, and then you’re running the government in Greece and you’re trying to figure out how to put an economic development plan together, all of your smart young kids have left, what are you going to do?
By the way, this is a potential… I know you care a lot about Ukraine, this is a potential crisis for Ukraine. In part because of this, because we enthusiastically recruit Ukrainians, of course, and so we’ve been brain draining Ukraine for a long time, but also, of course, war does tend to cause people to migrate out. And so, when it comes time for Ukraine to rebuild as a peaceful country, is it going to have the talent base even that it had five years ago, is a very big and important question. By the way, Russia, we have brain drained a lot of really smart people out of Russia, a lot of them are here, over the last 30 years. And so, there’s this thing, it’s actually really funny if you think about it, the one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever did was colonization and resource extraction.
So, we know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and everybody else went and had these colonies, and then went in and we took all the oil, and we took all the diamonds, or we took all the whatever, lithium or whatever it is. Well, for some reason we realized that that’s a deeply evil thing to do when it’s a physical resource, when it’s a non-conscious physical matter, for some reason we think it’s completely morally acceptable to do it with human capital. In fact, we think it’s glorious and beautiful and wonderful and the great flowering of peace and harmony and moral justice of our time to do it, and we don’t think for one second what we’re doing to the countries that we’re pulling all these people out of.
And this is one of these things, I don’t know, maybe we’re just going to live in this delusional state forever, and we’ll just keep doing it, and it’ll keep benefiting us, and we just won’t care what happens, but I think there may come… This is one of these submarines 10 feet under the water line, I think it’s just a matter of time until people suddenly realize, oh my God, what are we doing? We need the rest of the world to succeed too, we need these other countries to flourish. We don’t want to be the only successful country in the middle of just complete chaos and disaster, and we just extract and we extract and we extract, and we don’t think twice about it.
Marc Andreessen
This is so deeply profound, actually. So, what is the cost of “winning” if these countries are drained in terms of human capital, on the level of geopolitics, what does that lead to? Even if we talk about wars and conflict and all of this, we actually want them to be strong, in the way we understand strong, not just in every way, so that cooperation and competition can build a better world for all of humanity. It’s interesting, this is one of those truths where you just speak and it resonates, and I didn’t even think about it.
This is so deeply profound, actually. So, what is the cost of “winning” if these countries are drained in terms of human capital, on the level of geopolitics, what does that lead to? Even if we talk about wars and conflict and all of this, we actually want them to be strong, in the way we understand strong, not just in every way, so that cooperation and competition can build a better world for all of humanity. It’s interesting, this is one of those truths where you just speak and it resonates, and I didn’t even think about it.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Marc Andreessen
So, you were sitting during the holiday season, just boiling over. So, all that said, there’s still to use some good to the H-1B?
So, you were sitting during the holiday season, just boiling over. So, all that said, there’s still to use some good to the H-1B?
Lex Fridman
Okay, so then you get this other… Okay, so then there’s-
Okay, so then you get this other… Okay, so then there’s-
Marc Andreessen
Come all the way around.
Come all the way around.
Lex Fridman
… there’s another nuance. So there’s another nuance, there’s another nuance, which is mostly in the valley we don’t use H-1Bs anymore, mostly we use O1s. So, there’s a separate class of these, and the O1 is like this… It turns out the O1 is the super genius visa. So, the O1 is basically our founder… When we have somebody from anywhere in the world, and they’ve invented a breakthrough new technology, and they want to come to the US to start a company, they come in through an O1 Visa. And that actually, it’s a fairly high bar, it’s a high acceptance rate, but it’s a pretty high bar, and they do a lot of work, and you have to put real work into it, really prove your case. Mostly what’s happened with the H-1B Visa program is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers.
… there’s another nuance. So there’s another nuance, there’s another nuance, which is mostly in the valley we don’t use H-1Bs anymore, mostly we use O1s. So, there’s a separate class of these, and the O1 is like this… It turns out the O1 is the super genius visa. So, the O1 is basically our founder… When we have somebody from anywhere in the world, and they’ve invented a breakthrough new technology, and they want to come to the US to start a company, they come in through an O1 Visa. And that actually, it’s a fairly high bar, it’s a high acceptance rate, but it’s a pretty high bar, and they do a lot of work, and you have to put real work into it, really prove your case. Mostly what’s happened with the H-1B Visa program is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers.
One is basically a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think, and then the other is it goes to these, what they call the mills, the consulting mills. And so, there’s these set of companies with names, I don’t want to pick on companies, but names like Cognizant, that hire, basically have their business model is bringing in primarily Indians in large numbers, and they often have offices next to company-owned housing, and they’ll have organizations that are literally thousands of Indians living and working in the US, and they do basically call it mid-tier IT consulting. So, these folks, they’re making good wages, but they’re making 60 or 80 a or 100,000 a year, not the 300,000 that you’d make in the Valley.
And so, in practice, the startups, basically little tech as we call it, or the startup world, mainly doesn’t use H-1Bs at this point, and mainly can’t, because the system is kind of rigged in a way that we really can’t. And then, again, you get to the underlying morality here, which is, it’s like, well, Amazon, Amazon’s… I love Amazon. But they’re a big powerful company, they’ve got more money than God, they’ve got resources, they’ve got long-term planning horizon, they do big profound things over decades at a time, they could, or any of these other companies, could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the country. And you’ll notice they don’t do that, they bring in 10,000, 20,000 H1Bs a year. And so, you’ve got a question there, and then these mills, there’s lots of questions around them, and whether that’s even an ethical way… I don’t want to say they’re unethical, but there’s questions around exactly what the trade-offs are there. And this like is a Pandora’s box that really nobody really wanted to be opened. To play devil’s advocate in all this, in terms of national immigration issues, none of this is a top end issue, just because the numbers are small, and so I don’t think, the administration has said this is not a priority of theirs for right now. But I guess what I would say is, there is actually a lot of complexity and nuance here. Like I said, I have a lot of friends and colleagues who came over on H-1Bs or O-1s, green cards, many are now citizens, and every single one of them was… Not every single one. A lot of them were enthusiastic to defend the honor of immigrants throughout this whole period. And they said to me, it’s like, well, Marc, how can we more clearly express the importance of high school immigration to the US?
And I was like, I think you can do it by advocating for also developing our native-born talent. Do you want to inflame the issue or do you want to diffuse the issue? I think the answer is to diffuse the issue. Let me give you one more positive scenario, and then I’ll also beat up on the university some more. Do you know about the National Merit Scholarship System, have you heard about this?
Marc Andreessen
Not really, can you explain?
Not really, can you explain?
Lex Fridman
So, there’s a system that was created during the Cold War called the National Merit Scholars, and it is a, basically, it was created, I forget, in the 50s or 60s when… It was people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest, as heretical an idea as that sounds today. And so, it’s basically a national talent search for, basically, IQ. Its goal is to identify basically the top 0.5% of the IQ in the country. By the way, completely regardless of other characteristics. So, there’s no race, gender, or any other aspect to it, it’s just going for straight intelligence. It uses, first, the PSAT, which is the preparatory SAT that you take, and then the SAT. So, it uses those scores, that is the scoring, it’s a straight PSAT/SAT scoring system. They use the SAT as a proxy for IQ, which it is. They run this every year, they identify, they get down to 1% of the population of the kids, of 18 year olds in an given year, who score highest on the PSAT, and then they further qualify down to the 0.5% that also replicate on the SAT. And then it’s like, the scholarship amount is like $2,500. So, it was a lot of money 50 years ago, not as much today. But it’s a national system being run, literally, to find the best and the brightest. How many of our great and powerful universities use this as a scouting system? Our universities all have sports teams, they all have national scouting, they have full-time scouts who go out and they go to every high school and they try to find all the great basketball players and bring them into the NCAA, into all these leagues. How many of our great and powerful and enlightened universities use the National Merit System to go do a talent search for the smartest kids and just bring them in?
So, there’s a system that was created during the Cold War called the National Merit Scholars, and it is a, basically, it was created, I forget, in the 50s or 60s when… It was people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest, as heretical an idea as that sounds today. And so, it’s basically a national talent search for, basically, IQ. Its goal is to identify basically the top 0.5% of the IQ in the country. By the way, completely regardless of other characteristics. So, there’s no race, gender, or any other aspect to it, it’s just going for straight intelligence. It uses, first, the PSAT, which is the preparatory SAT that you take, and then the SAT. So, it uses those scores, that is the scoring, it’s a straight PSAT/SAT scoring system. They use the SAT as a proxy for IQ, which it is. They run this every year, they identify, they get down to 1% of the population of the kids, of 18 year olds in an given year, who score highest on the PSAT, and then they further qualify down to the 0.5% that also replicate on the SAT. And then it’s like, the scholarship amount is like $2,500. So, it was a lot of money 50 years ago, not as much today. But it’s a national system being run, literally, to find the best and the brightest. How many of our great and powerful universities use this as a scouting system? Our universities all have sports teams, they all have national scouting, they have full-time scouts who go out and they go to every high school and they try to find all the great basketball players and bring them into the NCAA, into all these leagues. How many of our great and powerful and enlightened universities use the National Merit System to go do a talent search for the smartest kids and just bring them in?
Marc Andreessen
Let me guess, very few. Zero.
Let me guess, very few. Zero.
Lex Fridman
Zero. As you say it, that’s brilliant, there should be that same level of scouting for talent internally.
Zero. As you say it, that’s brilliant, there should be that same level of scouting for talent internally.
Marc Andreessen
Go get the smartest ones. I’ll give you one more kicker on this topic, if I haven’t beaten it to death. The SAT has changed. So, the SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ that caused a bunch of problems, people really don’t like the whole idea of IQ. And so, the SAT has been actively managed over the last 50 years by the college board that runs it, and it has been, essentially, like everything else, it’s been dumbed down, in two ways. Number one, it’s been dumbed down where an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today. And 40 years ago, it was almost impossible to get an 800. Today, there’s so many 800s that you could stock the entire Ivy League with 800s, and so it’s been deliberately dumbed down. And then, two is, they have tried to pull out a lot of what’s called the g-loading.
Go get the smartest ones. I’ll give you one more kicker on this topic, if I haven’t beaten it to death. The SAT has changed. So, the SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ that caused a bunch of problems, people really don’t like the whole idea of IQ. And so, the SAT has been actively managed over the last 50 years by the college board that runs it, and it has been, essentially, like everything else, it’s been dumbed down, in two ways. Number one, it’s been dumbed down where an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today. And 40 years ago, it was almost impossible to get an 800. Today, there’s so many 800s that you could stock the entire Ivy League with 800s, and so it’s been deliberately dumbed down. And then, two is, they have tried to pull out a lot of what’s called the g-loading.
And so they, they’ve tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy because IQ is such an inflammatory concept. And the consequence of that is, and this is sort of perverse, they’ve made it more coachable, right? So, the SAT 40 years ago, coaching didn’t really work, and more recently it has really started to work. And one of the things you see is that the Asian spike, you see this giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade, and I think, looking at the data, I think a lot of that is because it’s more coachable now, and the Asians do the most coaching. So, there’s a bunch of issues with this. And so, the coaching thing is really difficult because the coaching thing is a subsidy then to the kids whose parents can afford coaching, and I don’t know about you, but where I grew up, there was no SAT coaching. So, there’s an issue there. I didn’t even know what the SAT was until the day I took it, much less that there was coaching, much less that it could work, so much less we could afford it.
So, number one, there’s issues there. But the other issue there is think about what’s happened by the dumbing down, 800 no longer captures all the smart, 800 is too crude of a test. It’s like the AI benchmarking problem. It’s the same problem they have AI benchmarking right now, 800 is too low of a threshold. There are too many kids scoring 800. Because what you want is you want, whatever, if it’s going to be 100,000 kids, I don’t know what it is, if it’s going to be 50,000 kids a year scoring 800, you also then want kids to be able to score 900 and 1000, and 1100, and 1200, and you want to ultimately get to, you’d like to ultimately identify the top 100 kids, and make sure that you get them in MIT. And the resolution of the test has been reduced so that it actually is not useful for doing that.
And again, I would say this is part of the generalized corruption that’s taken place throughout this entire system, where we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and actually put them in the places where they should be. And then, just the final comment would be, the great thing about standardized testing and the National Merit System is it’s, like I said, it’s completely race blind, it’s gender blind, it’s blind on every other characteristic, it’s only done on test scores. And you can make an argument about whether that’s good or bad, but it is, for sure, it’s the closest thing that we had to get to merit. It was the thing that they did when they thought they needed merit to win the Cold War.
And of course, we could choose to do that anytime we want. And I just say, I find it incredibly striking, and an enormous moral indictment of the current system that there are no universities that do this today. So, back to the immigration thing, just real quick, it’s like, okay, we aren’t even trying to go get the smart kids out of [inaudible 03:03:39], and even if they think that they can get into these places, they get turned down. And the same thing for the smart Asians, and the same thing for the smart Jews, and the same thing for the smart Black people. And I don’t know how that’s moral, I don’t get it at all.
Lex Fridman
As you said about the 800, so I took the SAT and the ACT many times, and I’ve always gotten perfect on math, 800. And I’m not special, it doesn’t identify genius, I think you want to search for genius. And you want to create measures that find genius of all different kinds, speaking of diversity. And I guess we should reiterate and say over and over and over, defend immigrants, yes, but say we should hire more and more native-born.
As you said about the 800, so I took the SAT and the ACT many times, and I’ve always gotten perfect on math, 800. And I’m not special, it doesn’t identify genius, I think you want to search for genius. And you want to create measures that find genius of all different kinds, speaking of diversity. And I guess we should reiterate and say over and over and over, defend immigrants, yes, but say we should hire more and more native-born.
Marc Andreessen
Well, you asked me in the beginning what’s the most optimistic forecast that we could have? And the most optimistic forecast would be, my God, what if we did both?
Well, you asked me in the beginning what’s the most optimistic forecast that we could have? And the most optimistic forecast would be, my God, what if we did both?
Lex Fridman
So, that’s the reasonable, the rational, the smart thing to say here. In fact, we don’t have to have a war.
So, that’s the reasonable, the rational, the smart thing to say here. In fact, we don’t have to have a war.
Marc Andreessen
Well, it would defuse, it would defuse the entire issue.
Well, it would defuse, it would defuse the entire issue.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
If everybody in the center and the South of the country, and every Jewish family, Asian family, Black family knew they were getting a fair shake, it would defuse the issue. How about defusing the issue? What a crazy radical… Sorry, I don’t mean to really get out over my skis here, but…
If everybody in the center and the South of the country, and every Jewish family, Asian family, Black family knew they were getting a fair shake, it would defuse the issue. How about defusing the issue? What a crazy radical… Sorry, I don’t mean to really get out over my skis here, but…
Little tech
Lex Fridman
I think your profile on X states, it’s time to build. It feels like 2025 is a good year to build. So, I wanted to ask your advice, and maybe for advice for anybody who’s trying to build, who is trying to build something useful in the world. Maybe launch a startup, or maybe just launch apps, services, whatever, ship software products. So, maybe, by way of advice, how do you actually get to shipping?
I think your profile on X states, it’s time to build. It feels like 2025 is a good year to build. So, I wanted to ask your advice, and maybe for advice for anybody who’s trying to build, who is trying to build something useful in the world. Maybe launch a startup, or maybe just launch apps, services, whatever, ship software products. So, maybe, by way of advice, how do you actually get to shipping?
Marc Andreessen
So, a big part of the answer I think is we’re in the middle of a legit revolution, and I know you’ve been talking about this on your show. But AI coding, this is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly my life, maybe since the invention of software. And we’re involved in various of these companies, but these tools, from a variety of companies, are absolutely revolutionary, and they’re getting better by leaps and bounds every day. And you know all this. But the thing with coding, there’s open questions of whether AI can get better at, I don’t know, understanding philosophy, or whatever, creative writing or whatever, but for sure we can make it much better at coding, because you can validate the results of coding. And so, there’s all these methods of synthetic data and self-training and reinforcement learning that, for sure, you can do with coding.
So, a big part of the answer I think is we’re in the middle of a legit revolution, and I know you’ve been talking about this on your show. But AI coding, this is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly my life, maybe since the invention of software. And we’re involved in various of these companies, but these tools, from a variety of companies, are absolutely revolutionary, and they’re getting better by leaps and bounds every day. And you know all this. But the thing with coding, there’s open questions of whether AI can get better at, I don’t know, understanding philosophy, or whatever, creative writing or whatever, but for sure we can make it much better at coding, because you can validate the results of coding. And so, there’s all these methods of synthetic data and self-training and reinforcement learning that, for sure, you can do with coding.
And so, everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get to be phenomenally good. And it’s already great. And anybody who wants to see this, just go on YouTube and look at AI coding demos, little kids making apps in 10 minutes, working with an AI coding system. And so, I think it’s the golden age… I think this is an area where it’s clearly the golden age. The tool set is extraordinary. In a day as a coder, for sure, in a day you can retrain yourself, start using these things, get a huge boost in productivity, as a non-coder, you can learn much more quickly than you could before.
Lex Fridman
That’s actually a tricky one in terms of learning as a non-coder to build stuff, I feel like you still need to learn how to code. It becomes a superpower, it helps you be much more productive. You could legitimately be a one person company and get quite far.
That’s actually a tricky one in terms of learning as a non-coder to build stuff, I feel like you still need to learn how to code. It becomes a superpower, it helps you be much more productive. You could legitimately be a one person company and get quite far.
Marc Andreessen
I agree with that, up to a point. So, I think, for sure, for quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things, because they’re going to understand what, very basic, they’re going to understand what’s happening. And they’re going to be able to evaluate the work, and they’re going to be able to literally manage AIs better, even if they’re not literally handwriting the code, they’re just going to have a much better sense of what’s going on. So, I definitely think, 100% my nine-year-old is doing all kinds of coding classes, and he’ll keep doing that for, certainly through 18, we’ll see after that. And so, for sure that’s the case. But look, having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, teach me how to code.
I agree with that, up to a point. So, I think, for sure, for quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things, because they’re going to understand what, very basic, they’re going to understand what’s happening. And they’re going to be able to evaluate the work, and they’re going to be able to literally manage AIs better, even if they’re not literally handwriting the code, they’re just going to have a much better sense of what’s going on. So, I definitely think, 100% my nine-year-old is doing all kinds of coding classes, and he’ll keep doing that for, certainly through 18, we’ll see after that. And so, for sure that’s the case. But look, having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, teach me how to code.
And there’s a whole bunch of, I’ll name names, Khan Academy… There’s a whole bunch of work that they’re doing at Khan Academy for free, and then we have this company, Replit, which was originally specifically built for kids for coding, that has AI built in, that’s just absolutely extraordinary now. And then, there’s a variety of other systems like this. Yeah, the AI is going to be able to teach to code… AI, by the way, is, as you know, is spectacularly good at explaining code. And so, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base, and so you can literally ask the code base questions about itself. And you can also just do the simple form, which is you can copy and paste code into a ChatGPT and just ask it to explain it, what’s going on, rewrite it, improve it, make recommendations. And so, there’s dozens of ways to do this.
By the way, you can also, even more broadly than code, like, okay, you want to make a video game, okay, now you can do AI, art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, voice generation, all of a sudden you don’t need designers, you don’t need voice actors. Yeah, there’s just unlimited…And then a big part of coding is so-called glue, it’s interfacing into other systems. So, it’s interfacing into Stripe, to take payments, or something like that, and AI is fantastic at writing glue code. So, really, really good at making sure that you can plug everything together, really good at helping you figure out how to deploy. It’ll even write a business plan for you. So, it’s just this, it’s like everything happening with AI right now, it’s like this latent superpower, and there’s this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases, productivity increases with it already, there’s other people who aren’t even aware it’s happening.
And there’s some gearing to whether you’re a coder or not, but I think there are lots of non-coders that are off to the races, and I think there are lots of professional coders who are still like, eh… The blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of the car business. So, there’s the old William Gibson quote, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” and this is maybe the most potent version of that that I’ve ever seen.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s the old meme with the bell curve, the people on both extremes say, “AI coding is the future.” It’s very common, the programmers to say, if you’re any good of a programmer, you’re not going to be using it, that’s just not true. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and my productivity has been just skyrocketed, and the joy of programming skyrocketed, every aspect of programming is more efficient, more productive, more fun, all of that kind of stuff.
Yeah, there’s the old meme with the bell curve, the people on both extremes say, “AI coding is the future.” It’s very common, the programmers to say, if you’re any good of a programmer, you’re not going to be using it, that’s just not true. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and my productivity has been just skyrocketed, and the joy of programming skyrocketed, every aspect of programming is more efficient, more productive, more fun, all of that kind of stuff.
Marc Andreessen
I would also say code has, of anything in industrial society, code has the highest elasticity, which is to say the easier it is to make it, the more of it gets made. I think effectively there’s unlimited demand for code. In other words, there’s always some other idea for a thing that you can do, a feature that you can add, or a thing that you can optimize. And so, overwhelmingly, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today, and then we come up with new ideas all the time. And so, I think that… I was, in the late 80s, early 90s, when automated coding systems started to come out, expert systems, a big deal in those days, and there was a famous book called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, that predicted that these new coding systems were going to mean we wouldn’t have programmers in the future, and of course, the number of programming jobs exploded by a factor of 100.
I would also say code has, of anything in industrial society, code has the highest elasticity, which is to say the easier it is to make it, the more of it gets made. I think effectively there’s unlimited demand for code. In other words, there’s always some other idea for a thing that you can do, a feature that you can add, or a thing that you can optimize. And so, overwhelmingly, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today, and then we come up with new ideas all the time. And so, I think that… I was, in the late 80s, early 90s, when automated coding systems started to come out, expert systems, a big deal in those days, and there was a famous book called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, that predicted that these new coding systems were going to mean we wouldn’t have programmers in the future, and of course, the number of programming jobs exploded by a factor of 100.
My guess is we’ll have more coding jobs probably by an order of magnitude 10 years from now. That will be different, they’ll be different jobs, they’ll involve orchestrating AI, but we will be creating so much more software that the whole industry will just explode in size.
Lex Fridman
Are you seeing the size of companies decrease in terms of startups? What’s the landscapes of little tech?
Are you seeing the size of companies decrease in terms of startups? What’s the landscapes of little tech?
Marc Andreessen
All we’re seeing right now is the AI hiring boom of all time.
All we’re seeing right now is the AI hiring boom of all time.
Lex Fridman
Oh, for the big tech?
Oh, for the big tech?
Marc Andreessen
And little tech.
And little tech.
Lex Fridman
And little tech.
And little tech.
Marc Andreessen
Everybody’s trying to hire as many engineers as they can to build AI systems, it’s 100%… There’s a handful of company… There’s a little bit, in customer service, we have some companies and others, I think it’s Klarna that’s publicizing a lot of this, in Europe, where… There are jobs that can be optimized, and jobs that can be automated. But for engineering jobs, it’s just an explosion of hiring, that at least, so far, there’s no trace of any sort of diminishing effect. Now, having said that, I am looking forward to the day, I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying, yes… The more radical form of it. So, basically, the companies that we see are basically one of two kinds, we see the companies that are basically… Sometimes we use weak form, strong form. So, the weak form companies, I sometimes use the term, it’s call it the sixth bullet point, AI is the sixth bullet point on whatever they’re doing.
Everybody’s trying to hire as many engineers as they can to build AI systems, it’s 100%… There’s a handful of company… There’s a little bit, in customer service, we have some companies and others, I think it’s Klarna that’s publicizing a lot of this, in Europe, where… There are jobs that can be optimized, and jobs that can be automated. But for engineering jobs, it’s just an explosion of hiring, that at least, so far, there’s no trace of any sort of diminishing effect. Now, having said that, I am looking forward to the day, I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying, yes… The more radical form of it. So, basically, the companies that we see are basically one of two kinds, we see the companies that are basically… Sometimes we use weak form, strong form. So, the weak form companies, I sometimes use the term, it’s call it the sixth bullet point, AI is the sixth bullet point on whatever they’re doing.
Lex Fridman
Sure.
Sure.
Marc Andreessen
Right? And it’s on the slide. So, they’ve got the whatever, da, da, da, da, da… And then AI is the sixth thing. And the reason AI is the sixth thing is because they had already previously written the slide before the AI revolution started, and so they just added the six bullet point in the slide. Which is how you’re getting all these products that have the AI button up in the corner, the little sparkly button. And all of a sudden Gmail is offering to summarize your email, which I’m like, I don’t need that, I need you to answer my email, not summarize it. What the hell? Okay, so we see those, and that’s fine, that’s like, I don’t know, putting sugar on the cake or something. But then, we see the strong form, which is the companies that are building from scratch for AI, and they’re building it… I actually just met with a company that is building literally an AI email system, as an example, so just-
Right? And it’s on the slide. So, they’ve got the whatever, da, da, da, da, da… And then AI is the sixth thing. And the reason AI is the sixth thing is because they had already previously written the slide before the AI revolution started, and so they just added the six bullet point in the slide. Which is how you’re getting all these products that have the AI button up in the corner, the little sparkly button. And all of a sudden Gmail is offering to summarize your email, which I’m like, I don’t need that, I need you to answer my email, not summarize it. What the hell? Okay, so we see those, and that’s fine, that’s like, I don’t know, putting sugar on the cake or something. But then, we see the strong form, which is the companies that are building from scratch for AI, and they’re building it… I actually just met with a company that is building literally an AI email system, as an example, so just-
Lex Fridman
Oh, nice, I can’t wait.
Oh, nice, I can’t wait.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, they’re going to completely… So, very obvious idea, very smart team, it’s going to be great. And then, Notion, just another, not one of our companies, but just came out with a product. So now companies are going to basically come through, sweep through, and they’re going to do basically AI first versions of basically everything. And those are, companies built… AI is the first bullet point, it’s the strong form of the argument.
Yeah, they’re going to completely… So, very obvious idea, very smart team, it’s going to be great. And then, Notion, just another, not one of our companies, but just came out with a product. So now companies are going to basically come through, sweep through, and they’re going to do basically AI first versions of basically everything. And those are, companies built… AI is the first bullet point, it’s the strong form of the argument.
Lex Fridman
Cursor is an example of that, they basically said, okay, we’re going to rebuild the thing with AI as the first citizen.
Cursor is an example of that, they basically said, okay, we’re going to rebuild the thing with AI as the first citizen.
Marc Andreessen
What [inaudible 03:14:02] from scratch that we could build on this? And again, this is part of the Full Employment Act for startups and VCs is, if a technology transformation is sufficiently powerful, then you actually need to start the product development process over from scratch because you need to reconceptualize the product, and then usually what that means is you need a new company because most incumbents just won’t do that. So, yeah, that’s underway across many categories. What I’m waiting for is the company where it’s like, no, our org chart is redesigned as a result of AI. So, I’m waiting for the company where it’s like, no, we’re going to have… And the cliché, here’s a thought experiment, the cliché would be we’re going to have the human executive team, and then we’re going to have the AIs be the workers. So, we’ll have a VP of engineering supervising 100 instances of coding agents. Okay, maybe… By the way, or maybe the VP of engineering should be the AI, maybe supervising human coders who are supervising AIs.
What [inaudible 03:14:02] from scratch that we could build on this? And again, this is part of the Full Employment Act for startups and VCs is, if a technology transformation is sufficiently powerful, then you actually need to start the product development process over from scratch because you need to reconceptualize the product, and then usually what that means is you need a new company because most incumbents just won’t do that. So, yeah, that’s underway across many categories. What I’m waiting for is the company where it’s like, no, our org chart is redesigned as a result of AI. So, I’m waiting for the company where it’s like, no, we’re going to have… And the cliché, here’s a thought experiment, the cliché would be we’re going to have the human executive team, and then we’re going to have the AIs be the workers. So, we’ll have a VP of engineering supervising 100 instances of coding agents. Okay, maybe… By the way, or maybe the VP of engineering should be the AI, maybe supervising human coders who are supervising AIs.
Because one of the things that AI should be pretty good at is managing because it’s process-driven, it’s the kind of thing that AI is actually pretty good at, right? Performance evaluation, coaching. And so, should it be an AI executive team? And then, of course, the ultimate question, which is AI CEO. And then, maybe the most futuristic version of it would be an actual AI agent that actually goes fully autonomous. Yeah, what if you really set one of these things loose and let it basically build itself a business? And so, I will say, we’re not yet seeing those, and I think there’s a little bit of the systems aren’t quite ready for that yet, and then I think it’s a little bit of, you really do need, at that point, a founder who’s really willing to break all the rules, and really willing to take the swing, and those people exist, and so I’m sure we’ll see that.
Lex Fridman
And some of it is, as you know with all the startups, this is the execution. The idea that you have a AI first email client seems like an obvious idea, but actually creating one, executing it, and then taking on Gmail is really difficult. Gmail, it’s fascinating to see Google can’t do it, because why? Because momentum, because it’s hard to re-engineer the entirety of the system, because feels like Google is perfectly positioned to do it. Same with you have Perplexity, which I love, Google could technically take on Perplexity and do it much better, but they haven’t, not yet. So, it’s fascinating why that is for large companies, that is an advantage for little tech, they could be agile.
And some of it is, as you know with all the startups, this is the execution. The idea that you have a AI first email client seems like an obvious idea, but actually creating one, executing it, and then taking on Gmail is really difficult. Gmail, it’s fascinating to see Google can’t do it, because why? Because momentum, because it’s hard to re-engineer the entirety of the system, because feels like Google is perfectly positioned to do it. Same with you have Perplexity, which I love, Google could technically take on Perplexity and do it much better, but they haven’t, not yet. So, it’s fascinating why that is for large companies, that is an advantage for little tech, they could be agile.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that’s right.
Yeah, that’s right.
Lex Fridman
They can move fast.
They can move fast.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Little companies can break glass in a way big companies can’t.
Yeah. Little companies can break glass in a way big companies can’t.
Lex Fridman
Right.
Right.
Marc Andreessen
This is sort of the big breakthrough that Clay Christensen had in the Innovator’s Dilemma, which is sometimes when big companies don’t do things, it’s because they’re screwing up. And that certainly happens. But a lot of times they don’t do things because it would break too much glass. Specifically, it would interfere with their existing customers and their existing businesses, and they just simply won’t do that. And by the way, responsibly, they shouldn’t do that. And so, they just get, this is Clay Christensen’s big thing, is they often don’t adapt because they’re well-run, not because they’re poorly run. But they’re optimizing machines, they’re optimizing against the existing business. And as you just said, this is a permanent state of affairs for large organizations. Every once in a while, one breaks the pattern and actually does it, but for the most part, this is a very predictable form of human behavior, and this fundamentally is why startups exist.
This is sort of the big breakthrough that Clay Christensen had in the Innovator’s Dilemma, which is sometimes when big companies don’t do things, it’s because they’re screwing up. And that certainly happens. But a lot of times they don’t do things because it would break too much glass. Specifically, it would interfere with their existing customers and their existing businesses, and they just simply won’t do that. And by the way, responsibly, they shouldn’t do that. And so, they just get, this is Clay Christensen’s big thing, is they often don’t adapt because they’re well-run, not because they’re poorly run. But they’re optimizing machines, they’re optimizing against the existing business. And as you just said, this is a permanent state of affairs for large organizations. Every once in a while, one breaks the pattern and actually does it, but for the most part, this is a very predictable form of human behavior, and this fundamentally is why startups exist.
AI race
Lex Fridman
It feels like 2025 is when the race for dominance in AI will see some winners. It’s a big year. So, who do you think wins the race? OpenAI, Meta, Google, xAI… Who do you think wins the AI race?
It feels like 2025 is when the race for dominance in AI will see some winners. It’s a big year. So, who do you think wins the race? OpenAI, Meta, Google, xAI… Who do you think wins the AI race?
Marc Andreessen
I would say, I’m not going to predict, I’m going to say there’s questions all over the place. And we have this category of question we call the trillion-dollar question, which is literally, depending on how it’s answered, people make or lose a trillion dollars, and I think there’s, I don’t know, five or six trillion questions right now, that are hanging out there, which is an unusually large number. And I’ll just hit a few of them and we can talk about them. So, one is big models versus small models, another is open models versus closed models, another…
I would say, I’m not going to predict, I’m going to say there’s questions all over the place. And we have this category of question we call the trillion-dollar question, which is literally, depending on how it’s answered, people make or lose a trillion dollars, and I think there’s, I don’t know, five or six trillion questions right now, that are hanging out there, which is an unusually large number. And I’ll just hit a few of them and we can talk about them. So, one is big models versus small models, another is open models versus closed models, another…
Marc Andreessen
… Small models. Another is open models versus closed models. Another is whether you can use synthetic data or not. Another is chain of thought. How far can you push that? And reinforcement learning. And then another one is political trillion dollar questions, policy questions, which the US and the EU have both been flunking dramatically and the US hopefully is about to really succeed at. Yeah. And then there’s probably another half dozen big important questions after that. And so these are all just like, say, this is an industry that’s in flux in a way that I even more dramatic, I think, than the ones I’ve seen before.
… Small models. Another is open models versus closed models. Another is whether you can use synthetic data or not. Another is chain of thought. How far can you push that? And reinforcement learning. And then another one is political trillion dollar questions, policy questions, which the US and the EU have both been flunking dramatically and the US hopefully is about to really succeed at. Yeah. And then there’s probably another half dozen big important questions after that. And so these are all just like, say, this is an industry that’s in flux in a way that I even more dramatic, I think, than the ones I’ve seen before.
And look, the most obvious example of the flux is sitting here less than three years ago, sitting here in December of ’22, we would’ve said that Open Ai is just running away with everything. And sitting here today, it’s like there’s at least six world-class God model companies and teams that are, by the way, generating remarkably similar results. That’s actually been one of the most shocking things to me is it turns out that once you know that it’s possible to build one incredibly smart Turing Test-passing large language model, which was a complete shock and surprise to the world, it turns out within a year you can have five more. There’s also a money component thing to it, which is to get the money to scale one of these things into the billions of dollars. There’s basically right now only two sources of money that will do that for you. One is the hyperscalers giving you the money which you turn around and round trip back to them, or foreign sovereigns, other country sovereign wealth funds, which can be difficult in some cases, for companies to access.
So there’s maybe another trillion-dollar question is the financing question. Here’s one. So Sam Altman has been public about the fact that he wants to transition OpenAI from being a non-profit to being a for-profit. The way that that is legally done is that … And there is a way to do it, there is a way in US law to do it. The IRS and other legal entities, government entities, scrutinizes this very carefully because the US takes foundation non-profit law very seriously because of the tax exemption.
And so historically, the way that you do it is you start a for-profit and then you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the non-profit at fair market value. And the last financing round at OpenAI was 150 some billion dollars. And so logically, if the flip is going to happen, the for-profit has to go raise 150 billion out of the chute to buy the assets. Raising 150 billion is a challenge. So is that even possible? If that is possible, then OpenAI maybe is off to the races as a for-profit company. If not, I don’t know. And then obviously the Elon lawsuit. So just because they’re the market leader today, there’s big important questions there. Microsoft has this kind of love-hate relationship with them. Where does that go? Apple’s lagging badly behind, but they’re very good at catching up. Amazon is primarily hyperscalar, but they now have their own models.
Lex Fridman
And then there’s the other questions like you laid out brilliantly, briefly and brilliantly, open versus closed, big versus little models, synthetic data. That’s a huge, huge question. And then test on compute with a chain of thought. They’re all of that. And it’s just fascinating. And these are, I think it’s fair to say, trillion-dollar questions.
And then there’s the other questions like you laid out brilliantly, briefly and brilliantly, open versus closed, big versus little models, synthetic data. That’s a huge, huge question. And then test on compute with a chain of thought. They’re all of that. And it’s just fascinating. And these are, I think it’s fair to say, trillion-dollar questions.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, these are big. Look here’s a trillion-dollar question, which is kind of embedded in that, which is just hallucinations. So if you are trying to use these tools creatively, you’re thrilled because they can draw new images and they can make new music and they can do all this incredible stuff. They’re creative. The flip side of that is if you need them to be correct, they can’t be creative. And that’s the term hallucination. And these things do hallucinate. And there have been court cases already where lawyers have submitted legal briefs that contain made-up court citations, case citations. The judge is like, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t exist.” And the very next question is, “Did you write this yourself?” And the lawyer goes, “Er…”
Yeah, these are big. Look here’s a trillion-dollar question, which is kind of embedded in that, which is just hallucinations. So if you are trying to use these tools creatively, you’re thrilled because they can draw new images and they can make new music and they can do all this incredible stuff. They’re creative. The flip side of that is if you need them to be correct, they can’t be creative. And that’s the term hallucination. And these things do hallucinate. And there have been court cases already where lawyers have submitted legal briefs that contain made-up court citations, case citations. The judge is like, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t exist.” And the very next question is, “Did you write this yourself?” And the lawyer goes, “Er…”
Lex Fridman
I mean, that’s why with Elon, with Grok, looking for truth. I mean, that’s an open technical question. How close can you get to truth with LLMs?
I mean, that’s why with Elon, with Grok, looking for truth. I mean, that’s an open technical question. How close can you get to truth with LLMs?
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that’s right. And my sense, this is a very contentious topic at the industry, my sense is to the extent that there is a domain in which there is a definitive and checkable and provable answer, and you might say, math satisfies that, coding satisfies that, and maybe some other fields, then you should be able to generate synthetic data. You should be able to do chain of thought reasoning. You should be able to do reinforcement learning and you should be able to ultimately eliminate hallucinations. But by the way, that’s a trillion-dollar question right there as to whether that’s true. But then there’s questions like, okay, is that going to work in the more general domain? So for example, one possibility is these things are going to get truly superhuman at math and coding.
Yeah, that’s right. And my sense, this is a very contentious topic at the industry, my sense is to the extent that there is a domain in which there is a definitive and checkable and provable answer, and you might say, math satisfies that, coding satisfies that, and maybe some other fields, then you should be able to generate synthetic data. You should be able to do chain of thought reasoning. You should be able to do reinforcement learning and you should be able to ultimately eliminate hallucinations. But by the way, that’s a trillion-dollar question right there as to whether that’s true. But then there’s questions like, okay, is that going to work in the more general domain? So for example, one possibility is these things are going to get truly superhuman at math and coding.
But at discussing philosophy, they’re basically as smart as they’re ever going to be. And they’re going to be kind of say mid-wit grad student level. And the theory there would just be they’re already out of training data. They literally, you talk to these people, literally the big models, the big models are within a factor of 2X of consuming all the human-generated training data, to the point that some of these big companies are literally hiring people like doctors and lawyers to sit and write new training data by hand. And so does this mean that you have to, if you want your model to get better philosophy, you have to go hire a thousand philosophers and have them write new content, and is anybody going to do that? And so maybe these things are topping out in certain ways and they’re going to leap way ahead in other ways.
Anyway, so we just don’t … Actually, maybe my main conclusion is anybody telling you these big sweeping conclusions, this whole, all of these abstract generalized super intelligence AGI stuff, maybe it’s the engineer in me, but no, that’s too abstract. It’s got to actually work. And then by the way, it has to actually have to be able to pay for it. I mean, this is a problem right now with the big models, the big models that are really good at coding and math. They’re actually very expensive to run. They’re quite slow.
Another trillion-dollar question, future chips, which I know you’ve talked a lot about. Another trillion-dollar question, yeah, I mean all the global issues. Oh, another trillion-dollar question, censorship. And, as they say, all the human feedback training process. Exactly what are you training these things to do? What are they allowed to talk about? How long do they give you these … How often do they give these incredibly preaching moral lectures?
Here’s a trillion-dollar question. How many other countries want their country to run its education system, healthcare system, new system, political system, on the basis of an AI that’s been trained according to the most extreme left-wing California politics? Because what they have on offer right now. And I think the answer to that is not very many. So there’s massive open questions there about, and by the way, what morality of these things are going to get trained on as a …
Lex Fridman
And now [inaudible 03:24:50], we’re cracking wide open with what’s been happening over the past few months. Censorship on every level of these companies, and just the very idea what truth means and what it means to expand the Overton window of LLMs or the Overton window of human discourse.
And now [inaudible 03:24:50], we’re cracking wide open with what’s been happening over the past few months. Censorship on every level of these companies, and just the very idea what truth means and what it means to expand the Overton window of LLMs or the Overton window of human discourse.
Marc Andreessen
So what I experienced, going back to how we started, what I experienced was, all right, social media censorship regime from hell, debanking at large scale, and then the war on the crypto industry, trying to kill it. And then basically declared intent to do the same thing to AI and to put AI under the same kind of censorship and control regime as social media and the banks. And I think this election tipped, in America, I think this election tipped us from a timeline in which things were going to get really bad on that front to a timeline in which I think things are going to be quite good.
So what I experienced, going back to how we started, what I experienced was, all right, social media censorship regime from hell, debanking at large scale, and then the war on the crypto industry, trying to kill it. And then basically declared intent to do the same thing to AI and to put AI under the same kind of censorship and control regime as social media and the banks. And I think this election tipped, in America, I think this election tipped us from a timeline in which things were going to get really bad on that front to a timeline in which I think things are going to be quite good.
But look, those same questions also apply outside the US and the EU is doing their thing. They’re being extremely draconian and they’re trying to lock in a political censorship regime on AI right now that’s so harsh that even American AI companies are not even willing to launch new products in the EU right now. That’s not going to last. But what happens there and what are the trade-offs? What levels of censorship are American companies going to have to sign up for if they want to operate in the EU? Or is the EU still capable of generating its own AI companies or have we brain drained them so that they can’t? So big questions.
X
Lex Fridman
Quick question. So you’re very active on X. A very unique character: flamboyant, exciting, bold. You post a lot. I think there’s a meme, I don’t remember it exactly, but that Elon posted something like inside Elon, there are two wolves. One is please be kind or more positive. And the other one is, I think doing the, I take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face guy. How many wolves are inside your mind when you’re tweeting?
Quick question. So you’re very active on X. A very unique character: flamboyant, exciting, bold. You post a lot. I think there’s a meme, I don’t remember it exactly, but that Elon posted something like inside Elon, there are two wolves. One is please be kind or more positive. And the other one is, I think doing the, I take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face guy. How many wolves are inside your mind when you’re tweeting?
Marc Andreessen
To be clear, a reference from the comedy classic Tropic Thunder.
To be clear, a reference from the comedy classic Tropic Thunder.
Lex Fridman
Tropic Thunder, yeah. Legendary movie.
Tropic Thunder, yeah. Legendary movie.
Marc Andreessen
Yes. Any Zoomers listening to this who haven’t seen that movie, go watch it immediately.
Yes. Any Zoomers listening to this who haven’t seen that movie, go watch it immediately.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s nothing offensive about it.
Yeah, there’s nothing offensive about it.
Marc Andreessen
Nothing offensive about it at all. So Tom Cruise’s greatest performance. So yeah, no, look, I should start by saying I’m not supposed to be tweeting at all.
Nothing offensive about it at all. So Tom Cruise’s greatest performance. So yeah, no, look, I should start by saying I’m not supposed to be tweeting at all.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
Yes, yes, yes. But you know.
Yes, yes, yes. But you know.
Lex Fridman
So how do you approach that? How do you approach what to tweet?
So how do you approach that? How do you approach what to tweet?
Marc Andreessen
I mean, I don’t. I don’t well enough. It’s mostly an exercise in frustration. Look, there’s a glory to it and there’s an issue with it, and the glory of it is instantaneous global communication. X in particular is the town square on all these social issues, political issues, everything else, current events. But I mean, look, there’s no question of the format. The format of at least the original tweet is prone to be inflammatory. I’m the guy who at one point, the entire nation of India hated me because I once tweeted something. It turned out that it’s still politically sensitive in the entire continent. I stayed up all night that night as I became front page headline and leading television news in each time zone in India for a single tweet. So the single tweet out of context is a very dangerous thing. Obviously X now has the middle ground where they now have the longer form essays. And so probably the most productive thing I can do is longer form things.
I mean, I don’t. I don’t well enough. It’s mostly an exercise in frustration. Look, there’s a glory to it and there’s an issue with it, and the glory of it is instantaneous global communication. X in particular is the town square on all these social issues, political issues, everything else, current events. But I mean, look, there’s no question of the format. The format of at least the original tweet is prone to be inflammatory. I’m the guy who at one point, the entire nation of India hated me because I once tweeted something. It turned out that it’s still politically sensitive in the entire continent. I stayed up all night that night as I became front page headline and leading television news in each time zone in India for a single tweet. So the single tweet out of context is a very dangerous thing. Obviously X now has the middle ground where they now have the longer form essays. And so probably the most productive thing I can do is longer form things.
Lex Fridman
You’re not going to do it though are you?
You’re not going to do it though are you?
Marc Andreessen
I do. I do. From time-to-time. I do.
I do. I do. From time-to-time. I do.
Lex Fridman
Sometimes.
Sometimes.
Marc Andreessen
I should do more of them. Yeah. Look, obviously X is doing great. And then like I said, Substack know has become the center for a lot of them. I think the best deeply thought through, certainly intellectual content, tons of current events stuff there as well. And then, yeah, then there’s a bunch of new systems that are very exciting. So I think one of the things we can look forward to in the next four years is number one, just a massive reinvigoration of social media as a consequence of the changes that are happening right now. I’m very excited to see what’s going to happen with that. And then it’s happened on X, but it’s now going to happen on other platforms.
I should do more of them. Yeah. Look, obviously X is doing great. And then like I said, Substack know has become the center for a lot of them. I think the best deeply thought through, certainly intellectual content, tons of current events stuff there as well. And then, yeah, then there’s a bunch of new systems that are very exciting. So I think one of the things we can look forward to in the next four years is number one, just a massive reinvigoration of social media as a consequence of the changes that are happening right now. I’m very excited to see what’s going to happen with that. And then it’s happened on X, but it’s now going to happen on other platforms.
And then the other is crypto’s going to come right back to life. And actually that’s very exciting. Actually, that’s worth noting is that’s another trillion-dollar question on AI, which is in a world of pervasive AI, and especially in a world of AI agents, and imagine a world of billions or trillions of AI agents running around, they need an economy. And crypto, in our view, happens to be the ideal economic system for that, because it’s a programmable money. It’s a very easy way to plug in and do that. And there’s this transaction processing system that can do that. And so I think the crypto AI intersection is potentially a very, very big deal. And so that was going to be impossible under the prior regime, and I think under the new regime, hopefully, it’ll be something we can do.
Yann LeCun
Lex Fridman
Almost for fun. Let me ask a friend of yours, Yann LeCun, what are your top 10 favorite things about Yann LeCun? I think he’s a brilliant guy. I think he’s important to the world. I think you guys disagree on a lot of things, but I personally like vigorous disagreement, I, as a person in the stands, like to watch the gladiators go at it. And-
Almost for fun. Let me ask a friend of yours, Yann LeCun, what are your top 10 favorite things about Yann LeCun? I think he’s a brilliant guy. I think he’s important to the world. I think you guys disagree on a lot of things, but I personally like vigorous disagreement, I, as a person in the stands, like to watch the gladiators go at it. And-
Marc Andreessen
No, he’s a super genius. I mean, look, I wouldn’t say we’re super close, but casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. He was the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and still works with us. And obviously is a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what’s happening. My serious observation would be it’s the thing I’ve talked to him about for a long time, and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does, is he’s probably, he is the, I think, see if you agree with this, he is the smartest and most credible critic of LLMs as the path for AI. And he’s not, there’s certain, I would say, troll-like characters who are just cropping everything but Yann has very deeply thought through, basically, theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.
No, he’s a super genius. I mean, look, I wouldn’t say we’re super close, but casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. He was the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and still works with us. And obviously is a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what’s happening. My serious observation would be it’s the thing I’ve talked to him about for a long time, and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does, is he’s probably, he is the, I think, see if you agree with this, he is the smartest and most credible critic of LLMs as the path for AI. And he’s not, there’s certain, I would say, troll-like characters who are just cropping everything but Yann has very deeply thought through, basically, theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.
And I actually, I try to do this thing where I try to model, try to have a mental model of the two different sides of a serious argument. And so I’ve tried to internalize that argument as much as I can. Which is difficult because we’re investing it behind LLMs as aggressively as we can. And so if he’s right, that could be a big problem, but we should also know that. And then I sort of use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people to really test their level of knowledge. So I like to grill people.
I got my CS degree 35 years ago, so I’m not deep in the technology, but to the extent I can understand Yann’s points, I can use them to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish. And that’s been, I think, very, very productive. So it is very striking that you have somebody who is that central in the space, who is actually a full-on skeptic. And again, this could go different ways. He could end up being very wrong. He could end up being totally right, or it could be that he will provoke the evolution of these systems to be much better than they would’ve been.
Lex Fridman
He could be both right and wrong. First of all, I do agree with that. He’s one of the most legit and rigorous and deep critics of the LLM path to AGI know. His basic notion is that there AI needs to have some physical understanding of the physical world, and that’s very difficult to achieve with LLMs. And that is a really good way to challenge the limitations of LLMs and so on. He’s also been a vocal and a huge proponent of open source, which is a whole nother, which you have been as well.
He could be both right and wrong. First of all, I do agree with that. He’s one of the most legit and rigorous and deep critics of the LLM path to AGI know. His basic notion is that there AI needs to have some physical understanding of the physical world, and that’s very difficult to achieve with LLMs. And that is a really good way to challenge the limitations of LLMs and so on. He’s also been a vocal and a huge proponent of open source, which is a whole nother, which you have been as well.
Marc Andreessen
Which is very useful.
Which is very useful.
Lex Fridman
And that’s been just fascinating to watch.
And that’s been just fascinating to watch.
Marc Andreessen
And anti-doomer.
And anti-doomer.
Lex Fridman
Anti-doomer?
Anti-doomer?
Marc Andreessen
He’s very anti-doomer.
He’s very anti-doomer.
Lex Fridman
He embodies … he also has many wolves inside.
He embodies … he also has many wolves inside.
Marc Andreessen
Yes, he does. Yes, does. Yes he does. So it’s been really, really fun to watch.
Yes, he does. Yes, does. Yes he does. So it’s been really, really fun to watch.
Marc Andreessen
The other two. Okay, here’s my other wolf coming out. The other two of the three godfathers of AI are radicals. Full-on far left, I would say either Marxists or borderline Marxists. And they’re, I think, quite extreme in their social political views. And I think that feeds into their doomerism, and I think they are lobbying for draconian government. I think what would be ruinously destructive government legislation and regulation. And so it’s actually super helpful, super, super helpful to have you on as a counterpoint to those two.
The other two. Okay, here’s my other wolf coming out. The other two of the three godfathers of AI are radicals. Full-on far left, I would say either Marxists or borderline Marxists. And they’re, I think, quite extreme in their social political views. And I think that feeds into their doomerism, and I think they are lobbying for draconian government. I think what would be ruinously destructive government legislation and regulation. And so it’s actually super helpful, super, super helpful to have you on as a counterpoint to those two.
Andrew Huberman
Lex Fridman
Another fun question, our mutual friend Andrew Huberman. First maybe, what do you love most about Andrew? And second, what score on a scale of one to 10 do you think he would give you on your approach to health?
Another fun question, our mutual friend Andrew Huberman. First maybe, what do you love most about Andrew? And second, what score on a scale of one to 10 do you think he would give you on your approach to health?
Marc Andreessen
Oh, three.
Oh, three.
Lex Fridman
Physical three. You think you’d score that high, huh? Okay.
Physical three. You think you’d score that high, huh? Okay.
Marc Andreessen
Exactly.
Exactly.
Lex Fridman
That’s good.
That’s good.
Marc Andreessen
Exactly. Well, so he convinced me to stop drinking alcohol, which was a big-
Exactly. Well, so he convinced me to stop drinking alcohol, which was a big-
Lex Fridman
Successfully?
Successfully?
Marc Andreessen
Well, other than my family, it was my favorite thing in the world. And so it was a major, major reduction. Having a glass of scotch at night, it was the thing I would do to relax. And so he has profoundly negatively impacted my emotional health. I blame him for making me much less happy as a person, but much, much, much healthier, physically healthier. So that I credit him with that. I’m glad I did that. But then his sleep stuff like, yeah, I’m not doing any of that.
Well, other than my family, it was my favorite thing in the world. And so it was a major, major reduction. Having a glass of scotch at night, it was the thing I would do to relax. And so he has profoundly negatively impacted my emotional health. I blame him for making me much less happy as a person, but much, much, much healthier, physically healthier. So that I credit him with that. I’m glad I did that. But then his sleep stuff like, yeah, I’m not doing any of that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc Andreessen
I have no interest in his sleep shit. No. This whole light, natural light, no, we’re not doing.
I have no interest in his sleep shit. No. This whole light, natural light, no, we’re not doing.
Lex Fridman
You’re too hardcore for this?
You’re too hardcore for this?
Marc Andreessen
I don’t see any natural … I don’t see any natural light in here.
I don’t see any natural … I don’t see any natural light in here.
Lex Fridman
It’s all covered. It’s all horrible.
It’s all covered. It’s all horrible.
Marc Andreessen
And I’m very happy. I would be very happy living and working here because I’m totally happy without natural light.
And I’m very happy. I would be very happy living and working here because I’m totally happy without natural light.
Lex Fridman
In darkness.
In darkness.
Marc Andreessen
Yes.
Yes.
Lex Fridman
It must be a metaphor for something.
It must be a metaphor for something.
Marc Andreessen
Yes, it’s a test. Look, it’s a test of manhood as to whether you can have a blue screen in your face for three hours and then go right to sleep. I don’t understand why you shouldn’t want to take shortcuts.
Yes, it’s a test. Look, it’s a test of manhood as to whether you can have a blue screen in your face for three hours and then go right to sleep. I don’t understand why you shouldn’t want to take shortcuts.
Success
Lex Fridman
I now understand what they mean by toxic masculinity. All right. So let’s see. You’re exceptionally successful by most measures, but what to you is the definition of success?
I now understand what they mean by toxic masculinity. All right. So let’s see. You’re exceptionally successful by most measures, but what to you is the definition of success?
Marc Andreessen
I would probably say it is a combination of two things. I think it is contribution. So have you done something that mattered ultimately and specifically mattered to people? And then the other thing is, I think, happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth. And in fact, Interesting, Thomas Jefferson did not mean happiness the way that we understand it. When he said “Pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, he meant it more of the Greek meaning, which is closer to satisfaction or fulfillment. So I think about happiness as the first ice cream cone makes you super happy. The first mile of the walk in the park during sunset makes super happy. The first kiss makes you super happy. The thousandth ice cream cone, not so much. The thousandth mile of the walk through the park. The thousandth kiss can still be good, but maybe just not right in a row. And so happiness is this very fleeting concept, and the people who anchor on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often. So the deep sense of having been, I don’t know how to put it, useful.
I would probably say it is a combination of two things. I think it is contribution. So have you done something that mattered ultimately and specifically mattered to people? And then the other thing is, I think, happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth. And in fact, Interesting, Thomas Jefferson did not mean happiness the way that we understand it. When he said “Pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, he meant it more of the Greek meaning, which is closer to satisfaction or fulfillment. So I think about happiness as the first ice cream cone makes you super happy. The first mile of the walk in the park during sunset makes super happy. The first kiss makes you super happy. The thousandth ice cream cone, not so much. The thousandth mile of the walk through the park. The thousandth kiss can still be good, but maybe just not right in a row. And so happiness is this very fleeting concept, and the people who anchor on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often. So the deep sense of having been, I don’t know how to put it, useful.
Lex Fridman
So that’s a good place to arrive at in life.
So that’s a good place to arrive at in life.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, who was it who said, the source of all the ills in the world is man’s inability to sit in a room by himself doing nothing. But if you’re sitting in a room by yourself and you’re like, all right, four in the morning, it’s like, all right, have I lived up to my expectation of myself? If you have, the people I know who feel that way are pretty centered and generally seem very, I don’t know how to put it, pleased, proud, calm, at peace. The people who are sensation seekers … Some of the sensations, … By the way, there’s certain entrepreneurs, for example, who are into every form of extreme sport and they get huge satisfaction out to that, or they’re sensation seeking in useful and productive ways. Larry Ellison was always like that. Zuckerberg is like that. And then there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who end up, drugs, like sexual escapades that seem like they’ll be fun at first and then backfire.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, who was it who said, the source of all the ills in the world is man’s inability to sit in a room by himself doing nothing. But if you’re sitting in a room by yourself and you’re like, all right, four in the morning, it’s like, all right, have I lived up to my expectation of myself? If you have, the people I know who feel that way are pretty centered and generally seem very, I don’t know how to put it, pleased, proud, calm, at peace. The people who are sensation seekers … Some of the sensations, … By the way, there’s certain entrepreneurs, for example, who are into every form of extreme sport and they get huge satisfaction out to that, or they’re sensation seeking in useful and productive ways. Larry Ellison was always like that. Zuckerberg is like that. And then there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who end up, drugs, like sexual escapades that seem like they’ll be fun at first and then backfire.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. But at the end of the day, if you’re able to be at peace by yourself in a room at 4:00 AM and I would even say happy, but I know, I understand Thomas Jefferson didn’t mean it the way, maybe I mean it, but I can be happy by myself at 4:00 AM with a blue screen.
Yeah. But at the end of the day, if you’re able to be at peace by yourself in a room at 4:00 AM and I would even say happy, but I know, I understand Thomas Jefferson didn’t mean it the way, maybe I mean it, but I can be happy by myself at 4:00 AM with a blue screen.
Marc Andreessen
That’s good. Exactly.
That’s good. Exactly.
Lex Fridman
Staring at a cursor.
Staring at a cursor.
Marc Andreessen
Exactly.
Exactly.
God and humanity
Lex Fridman
As a small tangent, a quick shout out to an amazing interview you did with Bari Weiss and just to her in general, Bari Weiss of the Free Press. She has a podcast called, Honestly, with Bari Weiss. She’s great. People should go listen. You were asked if you believe in God. One of the joys … See, we talked about happiness. One of the things that makes me happy is making you uncomfortable.
As a small tangent, a quick shout out to an amazing interview you did with Bari Weiss and just to her in general, Bari Weiss of the Free Press. She has a podcast called, Honestly, with Bari Weiss. She’s great. People should go listen. You were asked if you believe in God. One of the joys … See, we talked about happiness. One of the things that makes me happy is making you uncomfortable.
Marc Andreessen
Thank you.
Thank you.
Lex Fridman
So this question is designed for … Many of the questions today were designed for that. You were asked if you believe in God, and you said after a pause, that you’re not sure. So it felt like the pause, the uncertainty there was some kind of ongoing search for wisdom and meaning. Are you, in fact, searching for wisdom and meaning?
So this question is designed for … Many of the questions today were designed for that. You were asked if you believe in God, and you said after a pause, that you’re not sure. So it felt like the pause, the uncertainty there was some kind of ongoing search for wisdom and meaning. Are you, in fact, searching for wisdom and meaning?
Marc Andreessen
I guess I’d put it this way. There’s a lot to just understand about people that I feel like I’m only starting to understand. And that’s certainly a simpler concept than God. So that’s what I’ve spent a lot of the last 15 years trying to figure out. I feel like I spent my first whatever, 30 years figuring out machines, and then now I’m spending 30 years figuring out people, which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. And then, I don’t know, maybe God’s the last 30 years or something. And then look, I mean just like Elon, it’s just like, okay, the known universe is very complicated and mystifying. I mean, every time I pull up an astronomy, my kid super in astronomy, and it’s like, Daddy, how many galaxies are there in the universe? And how many galaxies are there in the universe?
I guess I’d put it this way. There’s a lot to just understand about people that I feel like I’m only starting to understand. And that’s certainly a simpler concept than God. So that’s what I’ve spent a lot of the last 15 years trying to figure out. I feel like I spent my first whatever, 30 years figuring out machines, and then now I’m spending 30 years figuring out people, which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. And then, I don’t know, maybe God’s the last 30 years or something. And then look, I mean just like Elon, it’s just like, okay, the known universe is very complicated and mystifying. I mean, every time I pull up an astronomy, my kid super in astronomy, and it’s like, Daddy, how many galaxies are there in the universe? And how many galaxies are there in the universe?
Lex Fridman
A hundred billion?
A hundred billion?
Marc Andreessen
Okay, how?
Okay, how?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Marc Andreessen
How is that freaking possible? It’s such a staggering concept that I-
How is that freaking possible? It’s such a staggering concept that I-
Lex Fridman
I actually wanted to show you a tweet that blew my mind from Elon from a while back. Elon said, “As a friend called it, this is the ultimate skill tree. This is a wall of galaxies a billion light years across.” So these are all galaxies.
I actually wanted to show you a tweet that blew my mind from Elon from a while back. Elon said, “As a friend called it, this is the ultimate skill tree. This is a wall of galaxies a billion light years across.” So these are all galaxies.
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. How is it that big? How the hell? I’m like, I can read the textbook and the this and the that and the whatever, 8 billion years and the Big Bang and the whole thing. And then it’s just like, all right, wow. And then it’s like, all right, the Big Bang. All right, what was before the Big Bang?
Yeah. How is it that big? How the hell? I’m like, I can read the textbook and the this and the that and the whatever, 8 billion years and the Big Bang and the whole thing. And then it’s just like, all right, wow. And then it’s like, all right, the Big Bang. All right, what was before the Big Bang?
Lex Fridman
Do you think we humans will ever colonize like a galaxy and maybe even go beyond?
Do you think we humans will ever colonize like a galaxy and maybe even go beyond?
Marc Andreessen
Sure. I mean, yeah, in the fullness of time. Yeah.
Sure. I mean, yeah, in the fullness of time. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So you have that kind of optimism. You have that kind of hope that extends across thousand of [inaudible 03:40:26]?
So you have that kind of optimism. You have that kind of hope that extends across thousand of [inaudible 03:40:26]?
Marc Andreessen
In the fullness of time. I mean, all the challenges with it that I do, but yeah, why not? I mean, again, in the fullness of time, it’ll take a long time.
In the fullness of time. I mean, all the challenges with it that I do, but yeah, why not? I mean, again, in the fullness of time, it’ll take a long time.
Lex Fridman
You don’t think we’ll destroy ourselves?
You don’t think we’ll destroy ourselves?
Marc Andreessen
No, I doubt it. I doubt it. And fortunately we have Elon giving us the backup plan. So I don’t know. I grew up real Midwest, just conventionally Protestant Christian. It never made that much sense to me. Got trained as an engineer and a scientist. I’m like, “Oh, that definitely doesn’t make sense.” I’m like, “I know I’ll spend my life as an empirical rationalist and I’ll figure everything out.” And then again, you walk up against these things, you bump up against these things and you’re just like, “All right, okay. I guess there’s a scientific explanation for this, but wow.” Then there’s like, “All right, where did that come from?” Then how far back can you go on the causality chain? Yeah. Then even just experiences that we all have on earth, it’s hard to rationally explain it all. And then, so yeah, I guess I’d just say I’m kind of radically open-minded, at peace with the fact that I’ll probably never know.
No, I doubt it. I doubt it. And fortunately we have Elon giving us the backup plan. So I don’t know. I grew up real Midwest, just conventionally Protestant Christian. It never made that much sense to me. Got trained as an engineer and a scientist. I’m like, “Oh, that definitely doesn’t make sense.” I’m like, “I know I’ll spend my life as an empirical rationalist and I’ll figure everything out.” And then again, you walk up against these things, you bump up against these things and you’re just like, “All right, okay. I guess there’s a scientific explanation for this, but wow.” Then there’s like, “All right, where did that come from?” Then how far back can you go on the causality chain? Yeah. Then even just experiences that we all have on earth, it’s hard to rationally explain it all. And then, so yeah, I guess I’d just say I’m kind of radically open-minded, at peace with the fact that I’ll probably never know.
The other thing though, that’s happened, and maybe the more practical answer to the question is I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society that I didn’t have when I was younger. And my partner, Ben has a great … I think he quotes his father on this. He’s like, “If a man does not have a real religion, he makes up a fake one, and the fake ones go very, very badly.”
And so there’s this, it’s actually really funny, there’s this class of intellectual … There’s this class of intellectual that has what appears to be a very patronizing point of view, which is, “Yes, I’m an atheist, but it’s very important that the people believe in something.” And Marx had the negative view on that, which is religion is the opiate of the masses. But there’s a lot of right-wing intellectuals who are themselves, I think, pretty atheist or agnostic, that are like, it’s deeply important that the people be Christian or something like that. And on the one hand it’s like, wow, that’s arrogant and presumptive. But on the other hand, maybe it’s right because what have we learned in the last hundred years is in the absence of a real religion, people will make up fake ones.
There’s this writer, there’s this political philosopher who’s super interesting on this named Eric Voegelin. And he wrote in the mid-part of the century, mid-late-part of the 20th century, he was born in, I think, 1900, died in ’85. So he saw the complete run of communism and Nazism and himself fled, I think he fled Europe and the whole thing. His big conclusion was basically that both communism and Nazism, fascism, were basically religions, but in the deep way of religions. We call them political religions, but they were like actual religions. And they were what Nietzsche forecasted when he said, “God is dead. We’ve killed him, and we won’t wash the blood off our hands for a thousand years.” Is we will come up with new religions that will just cause just mass murder and death. And you read his stuff now and you’re like, “Yep, that happened.”
And then of course, as fully elite moderates, of course, we couldn’t possibly be doing that for ourselves right now, but, of course, we are. And I would argue that Eric Voegelin, for sure, would argue that the last 10 years we have been in a religious frenzy, that woke has been a full scale religious frenzy and has had all of the characteristics of a religion, including everything from patron saints to holy texts, to sin. Wokeness has, I think, has had every single aspect of an actual religion other than redemption, which is maybe the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with, is the one where there’s no forgiveness. And so I think if Voegelin were alive, I think he would’ve zeroed right in on that, would’ve said that. And we just sailed right off. I mentioned earlier we somehow rediscover the religions of the Indo-Europeans. We’re all into identity politics and environmentalism. I don’t think that’s an accident.
So anyway, there is something very deep going on in the human psyche, on religion, that is not dismissible and needs to be taken seriously. Even if one struggles with the specifics of it.
Lex Fridman
I think I speak for a lot of people that it has been a real joy and, for me, an honor to get to watch you seek to understand the human psyche as you described. You’re in that thirty-year part of your life, and it’s been an honor to talk with you today. Thank you, Marc.
I think I speak for a lot of people that it has been a real joy and, for me, an honor to get to watch you seek to understand the human psyche as you described. You’re in that thirty-year part of your life, and it’s been an honor to talk with you today. Thank you, Marc.
Marc Andreessen
Thank you, Lex. Is that it? That’s only, how long is that?
Thank you, Lex. Is that it? That’s only, how long is that?
Lex Fridman
Four hours with Marc Andreessen is like 40 hours of actual content so …
Four hours with Marc Andreessen is like 40 hours of actual content so …
Marc Andreessen
I’ll accept being one of the short ones.
I’ll accept being one of the short ones.
Lex Fridman
For the listener. Marc looks like he’s ready to go for 20 more hours, and I need a nap. Thank you, Marc.
For the listener. Marc looks like he’s ready to go for 20 more hours, and I need a nap. Thank you, Marc.
Marc Andreessen
Thank you, Lex.
Thank you, Lex.
Lex Fridman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Marc Andreessen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Thomas Sowell. “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Marc Andreessen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Thomas Sowell. “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.