Category Archives: transcripts

Files for Volodymyr Zelenskyy Episode | Lex Fridman Podcast #456

Captions & Transcripts:

You can download captions & transcripts in English, Ukrainian & Russian here: Dropbox Link

Videos:

If you need the video version with Original, Ukrainian, 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:

Translation Fix:

I fixed the translation of “Ми били по руках всіх” to “We cracked down hard on everyone” in captions. English audio track has been fixed and is being swapped in by YouTube, this might take awhile. In the meantime, you can get the fixed translation version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y8Ddc3S9-g

See Telegram post explaining some details: https://t.me/lexfridman/329

Transcript for Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Ukraine, War, Peace, Putin, Trump, NATO, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #456

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #456 with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
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.
Here are some useful links:

Table of Contents

Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction

Lex Fridman
(00:00:00)
I hope the Kyiv Airport will open soon then it will be easier to fly in.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:00:05)
Yes. I think that the war will end and President Trump may be the first leader to travel here by airplane. I think it would be symbolic by airplane.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:16)
Again, January 25th around that date, right. Flying in, meeting the Air Force One.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:00:21)
That would be cool.
Lex Fridman
(00:00:23)
There is a perception of corruption. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk really care about fighting corruption. What can you say to them to gain their trust that the money is going towards this fight for freedom, towards the war effort?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:00:41)
In most of cases, we did not receive money, we received weapons. And where we saw risks that something could be happening with weapons, we cracked down hard on everyone. And believe me, this is not only about Ukraine. Everywhere along the supply chain, there are some or other people and companies who want to make money, they try to make money on the war. We did not profit from the war. If we caught someone, believe me, we cracked down hard on them, and we did that, and we will continue to do so because to this day when someone says that, “Ukraine was selling weapons,” and by the way, Russia was the one pushing this narrative, we always responded, “Our soldiers would kill such people with their own hands without any trial.”

(00:01:34)
Do you honestly think anyone could steal weapons by the truckload when we ourselves don’t have enough on the front lines and yet we have to provide proof to defend ourselves? Because when there’s an abundance of such misinformation, distrust starts to grow. And you’re right, people listen to various media outlets, see this and lose faith in you. In the end, you lose trust and with it you lose support. Therefore, believe me, we are fighting more against disinformation than against particular cases, although I still emphasize once again at the everyday level, such things are still important. We catch these people and we fight them.

(00:02:22)
… as if Putin wants to sit down and talk, but Ukraine does not. This is not true.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:31)
I think that yes, he is in fact ready to talk.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:02:35)
Did you talk to him?
Lex Fridman
(00:02:36)
On the phone or what?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:02:37)
How do you normally talk to him?
Lex Fridman
(00:02:39)
I don’t know. Normally by the sea, the same as with you. He invites you to the sea with me, just the three of us.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:02:45)
No, no. One of us may drown.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:48)
Who? Are you good at swimming?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:02:49)
Yes, I’m a good swimmer.
Lex Fridman
(00:02:50)
You’re a good swimmer. Well, if you think that the President of a country is completely crazy, it is really hard to come to an agreement with him. You have to look at him as a serious person who loves his country and loves the people in his country, and he conducts, yes, destructive military actions-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:03:10)
Who are you talking about now? Who loves his country?
Lex Fridman
(00:03:12)
Putin. Do you think he doesn’t love his country?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:03:16)
No. What is his country? He happened to consider Ukraine, his country. What is his country?
Lex Fridman
(00:03:22)
When do you think there will be presidential elections in Ukraine?

Introductory words from Lex

Lex Fridman
(00:03:29)
The following is a conversation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine. It was an intense, raw and heartfelt conversation, my goal for which, was to understand and to do all I can to push for peace. Please allow me to say a few words first about language, then about the President, and finally about history. Please skip ahead straight to our conversation if you like. We spoke in a mix of languages, continuously switching from Ukrainian to Russian to English, so the interpreter was barely hanging on. It was indeed in many ways a wild ride of a conversation. As the President said, “The first of many. Language, like many other things in a time of war is a big deal.” We had a choice, speaking Russian, Ukrainian or English. The President does speak some English, but he’s far from fluent in it and I sadly don’t speak Ukrainian yet, so Russian is the only common language we’re both fluent.

(00:04:39)
In case you don’t know, the Russian language is one that the President speaks fluently and was his primary language for most of his life. It’s the language I also speak fluently to the degree I speak any language fluently, as does a large fraction of the Ukrainian population. So the most dynamic and powerful conversation between us would be in Russian without an interpreter, who in this case added about two to three second delay and frankly translated partially and poorly for me at least, taking away my ability to feel the humor, the wit, the brilliance, the pain, the anger, the humanity of the person sitting before me, that I could clearly feel when he was speaking fluently in the language I understand, Russian. But all that said, war changes everything. The Ukrainian language has become a symbol of the Ukrainian people’s fight for freedom and independence, so we had a difficult choice of three languages and faced with that choice, we said yes to all three.

(00:05:49)
To the consternation and dismay of the translators. We make captions and voice over audio tracks available in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, 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. On YouTube you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking audio track and then selecting the language you prefer English, Ukrainian, Russian. To listen to the original mixed-language version, please select the English (UK) audio track, big thank you to ElevenLabs for their help with overdubbing using a mix of AI and humans. We will continue to explore how to break down the barriers that language creates with AI and otherwise. This is a difficult but important endeavor. Language, after all, is much more than a cold sequence of facts and logic statements.

(00:06:58)
There are words when spoken in the right sequence and at the right time they can shake the world and turn the tides of history. They can start and end wars. Great leaders can find those words and great translators can help these words reverberate to the outskirts of a divided civilization. On another note, let me say that President Zelenskyy is a truly remarkable person and a historic figure. I say this as somebody who deeply understands the geopolitical complexity and history of the region. I am from this region. My parents were both born in Ukraine, Kyiv and Kharkiv, both my grandfathers too. I was born in Tajikistan and lived for a time there, then in Kyiv, then Moscow, then United States, and while I am now for almost 30 years and to the day I die, I’m a proud American. My family roots grow deep in the soil of nations that comprised the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Tajikistan.

(00:08:13)
I’ve gotten to know and have spoken for hours with members of the President’s team and people close to him. I spoke to hundreds of Ukrainians since 2022, including soldiers, civilians, politicians, artists, religious leaders, journalists, economists, historians and technologists. I listened to hundreds of hours of programs that both support and criticize the President in Ukraine, in Russia, and the United States. I’ve read countless books about this war and the long arc of history that led up to it. It forced to recommend two at this moment, I would say The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy and The Showman by Simon Shuster, which is a good personal behind-the-scenes biography of the President focused on 2022, but there are many, many more. This is why I can comfortably say that he is a truly singular and remarkable human being. It was an honor and pleasure to talk with him on and off the mic.

(00:09:18)
Now, it is true that I plan to travel to Moscow and to speak with President Vladimir Putin and I hope to be back in Kyiv as well as President Zelenskyy said, this was our first of many more meetings. In all of these cases, I seek to do my small part in pushing for peace. And in doing all this, I’m deeply grateful for the trust people have given me on all sides. For the people attacking me, sometimes lying about me, for the critics in the stands chanting the latest slogans of the mass hysteria machine like the sheep in Animal Farm, I love you too. And I assure you that drawing lines between good and evil on a world map is much easier than seeing that line between good and evil in every human being, including you and me. This is what I try to do. I’m simply a human being who seeks to find and surface the humanity in others, and as I’ve said, no amount of money, fame, power, access can buy my opinion or my integrity. Now, finally, please allow me to briefly overview some history to give background for several topics that President Zelenskyy references in this conversation. I recommend my conversation with Serhii Plokhy and many others about the history of the region. But here, let me start with 1991. When Ukraine declared its independence and the Soviet Union collapsed. From this point on Russia-Ukraine relations were defined in large part by whether Ukraine aligned more with Russia or with the West, meaning Europe, United States, NATO, and so on. In 2004, with the Orange Revolution, a pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko became President. In 2010, it went the other way. A pro-Russia candidate, Viktor Yanukovych became President. The internal tensions grew and in 2013 Euromaidan protests broke out over Yanukovych’s decision to suspend talks with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. This set forward a chain of important events in 2014. On the politics front, Yanukovych was ousted and fled to Russia leading to the election of a pro-Western President.

(00:11:45)
Also, in 2014, on the war front, Russia annexed Crimea and war broke out in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, which eventually killed over 14,000 people and continued all the way to 2022. When on February 24th 2022, Russian forces initiated a full scale invasion of Ukraine. This is when the world started to really pay attention. Now some history of peace talks. Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the presidency in 2019 and he discusses in this conversation the ceasefire agreements he made with Vladimir Putin in 2019, which was one of many attempts at peace from the two Minsk agreements in 2014 and ’15 to a series of ceasefire agreements in 2018, ’19, and ’20, all of which failed in part or in whole. All this shows just how difficult ceasefire and peace negotiations are, but they are not impossible. It is always worth trying over and over again to find the path to peace.

(00:12:55)
I believe that Presidents Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump should meet soon after January 20th this year and give everything they got to negotiate a ceasefire and security guarantees that pave the way for long-lasting peace. We discussed several ideas for this in this conversation. As I said, this was one of my main goals here, to push for peace. This trip to Kyiv and this conversation was a truly special moment for me in my life. It is one I will never forget, so to reflect I say a few more words and answer some questions at the very end if you like to listen, but here let me say thank you to everyone for your support over the years. It means the world. This is a Lex Fridman Podcast and now dear friends, here’s the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Language

Lex Fridman
(00:13:55)
If we can explain why the Ukrainian language is very important, our conversation will be most effective and impactful if we speak in Russian.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:14:01)
I speak Russian perfectly of course, and I understand everything you are talking about. However, I can’t respond in Russian the entire interview. It’s because this is how it is today. I’m not making anything up. You can see it all for yourself. You can feel and hear it. Today, there were 73 missile attacks against us and people were killed. There were over 100 drones today, and this is a daily occurrence. The people who attack us, they speak Russian. They attack people who were only recently told that this was actually in defense of Russian-speaking people, and this is why I respect neither the leader or director of today’s Russia, nor the people. That’s it. And I don’t think that you can just pretend that nothing’s happening and give Putin a pass once again for saying that, “We are one people, that we speak one language,” et cetera. They speak the language of weapons. That is a fact, and we are peaceful people. Peaceful people who want to protect themselves and defend their freedom and their human choice. At the beginning of the war, I addressed Russians in Russian, zero effect. They’re mute.

(00:15:33)
They do not listen. They did not listen. Some are afraid, some have other issues. They have different reasons. It’s like when a person is drowning and people walk by because they can’t hear them. And someone walks on by crying, afraid to save them. It doesn’t change anything for the one drowning. They need someone to help them. This is why I honestly despise these people as they are deaf. They began the occupation in the supposed defense of the Russian language and that’s why with all due respect, I would like to give an interview in Ukrainian. This is very important to me. If there are some points that you want me to explain in Russian, I can certainly do that. I can certainly occasionally speak Russian, but in general, no. I’m not sure that you will understand me completely, despite your Ukrainian roots, you are a citizen of the United States, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:16:39)
Yes.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:16:40)
That’s why I’m surprised that you don’t understand. Well, it was a long time ago. I understand that it was a long time ago. Moreover, a lot has changed. A lot has changed.
Lex Fridman
(00:16:58)
If I may, please allow me to say this in Russian. Yes, many things have changed, but I have hope. I hope that today many Russians will hear this, that Vladimir Putin will hear this, that the American President, Donald Trump, and the American people will hear this, that everyone will hear this. And yes, Ukrainian language is important symbolically, but what is also important is that we understand each other well.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:17:24)
For Donald Trump? Is it important for Donald Trump whether I speak Russian or not?
Lex Fridman
(00:17:28)
Yes, yes, yes. Because unfortunately, and it hurts to admit, but I cannot speak or understand Ukrainian yet, so your wit, dynamism and your humanity will not come through as well and as quickly. Remember, I need to wait for two to three seconds to hear it. You have a great sense of humor, great stories. With an interpreter translating, I simply won’t see this, but I understand that it’s painful. Another reason is that I hoped we could show that even though it is sometimes said that Russian is banned in Ukraine-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:18:03)
This is not true. I’m speaking Russian now, right. We have people who speak Russian. This is not true. Really, it’s not. It’s really not true. We disrespect Russian now because of Russians. That’s all. When they were saving Russian speakers, they killed Russian speakers. Many people who actually… Many of whom are in the East, right. They lived in the East. They destroyed their houses, destroyed their lives. It’s not a rhetorical thing. It’s not all talk and blah, blah, blah. I don’t have time for blah, blah, blah.

(00:18:38)
Yes, so it’s a very, very, very important and sensitive moment. The message is that we are not one nation. We are not the same country. We’re different countries. Yes, different countries, and I think what is most important is what we’re talking about, not how we’re speaking about it. This is what I think. You are a smart guy, so you have a lot of experience in dialogue of this kind. That’s why I think you will understand me. Yeah. Anyway, I think it is far better for Donald Trump to hear my English, not my Russian.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:21)
Your English is much better than my Ukrainian. You’re getting better and better every day.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:25)
That’s true. I’m a very honest guy. That’s why I will be very honest with you.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:30)
Okay.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:31)
Your Ukrainian is not very good, but we will work on it.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:36)
Yes. I have many flaws, that’s one of them.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:38)
Sometimes I can speak English. Sometimes as I understand, we can be very flexible, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:19:44)
Very flexible. Spanish, Swahili.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:47)
Yeah. You see?
Lex Fridman
(00:19:48)
Yeah.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:49)
You’re very flexible-
Lex Fridman
(00:19:50)
Javier Milei needs to understand this, so…
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:51)
By the way, Javier understood me without any words.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:55)
The language of love, maybe.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:57)
Of respect.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:58)
Respect.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:19:58)
I respect him. I had a very good conversation with him. Really brilliant.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:03)
May I sometimes speak Russian and sometimes English?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:20:05)
Yeah, yes. You can use any language you like, and I think that’s a very good rule for this first meeting between us. As you said, maybe we will meet in the future for the second time.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:15)
Second and third and fourth?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:20:17)
Yeah, this is good. You can ask questions in the language you’d like and I will answer in the language I can.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:23)
Well, you said you wanted to meet by the sea at some point, so for our next meeting, let’s meet by the sea.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:20:30)
With pleasure next time. It would be much better to meet by our Ukrainian Black or our Azov Sea.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:39)
I have traveled to many cities in Ukraine, but I have never been to Odessa and everyone tells me that, and I don’t know why.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:20:46)
You have to.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:47)
Can you explain to me why everyone loves Odessa so much? What’s there?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:20:54)
What’s in Odessa? That’s how they say it. What’s there? In Odessa, we’ve got it all.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:59)
Okay.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:21:00)
Odessa. I love Odessa because of its particular temperament. People have their own accent, and there are many nationalities. There are a lot of stories, authentic, Odessa cuisine. By the way, the cuisine is very different from others. The dishes are not like any other dishes and everything is very tasty. Also, there are beautiful people, and today, you understand people very well, especially after the attacks on Odessa. You understand what the people are like, just how Odessites are, very Ukrainian, and that’s very cool. I love Odessa. I go there several times a year. I go there several times a year now because… Well, now because of strengthening of air defense systems, because of this grain corridor, et cetera. I go there more often. They have the sun there. They have the sea. It’s Ukraine, and it’s very cool there.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:10)
Well, when you come and visit me in Texas as a guest for the third time-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:22:16)
With pleasure.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:16)
Let’s do this. How about you, my friend Joe Rogan and I, we’ll go get some Texas barbecue together.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:22:25)
Who will pay?
Lex Fridman
(00:22:27)
That’s a good question.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:22:27)
Putin. Putin for everything. He has to pay.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:31)
Well, yes. We’ll invite him too.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:22:33)
No, no, no, no.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:34)
Okay.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:22:34)
Without him.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:35)
Okay, I get it. Understood.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:22:37)
But if the Rome Statute will be accepted by your government before this moment.
Lex Fridman
(00:22:46)
Okay. By the way, I don’t know if you know this, but Joe has a great comedy club in Austin.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:22:52)
Joe Rogan?
Lex Fridman
(00:22:53)
Joe Rogan, yes. And I think that as a person who respects comedy and stand-up comedy, it would be interesting for you to have a look at it.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:23:00)
No, no. He is, I know him and I saw a lot of different videos. He’s a very talented person, so it would be a pleasure if you invite me and I’m able to do it. I am a little bit busy, but if I’ll be in the United States, I hope that I will have a conversation and a meeting with President Trump, and of course during my visit, if I’ll have the time, it would be a pleasure if you’ll invite me. With pleasure.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:30)
You know what? I will pay.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:23:33)
Good.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:33)
Yeah. I had to think about it, but you are the President.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:23:37)
Yes, with you, with pleasure.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:39)
When the war is over, please come.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:23:42)
Thanks so much.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:43)
And when you’re less busy.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:23:43)
Thanks so much.

World War II

Lex Fridman
(00:23:44)
If we can go back many years, World War II, tell me the story of your grandfather who fought in World War II.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:23:52)
My grandfather, he graduated from the military academy, and from the very beginning of the war, he went to fight. He was in the infantry and he fought through the entire war. He had many wounds, as they used to say back then, “His chest is covered in medals,” and it’s true. He had more than 30? Yes, more than 30. He was the kind of man… He was such a serious man. I loved him very much, and we had a very close relationship. He didn’t like to tell details about the war. He never boasted, although I asked him as a boy would, “How many fascists did you kill?” He never talked about it. He believed that the war was a great tragedy. A tragedy for everyone. And Ukraine was occupied, and it was a tragedy for Ukraine, a tragedy for Europe, and a tragedy for the Jewish people.

(00:25:10)
His own brothers, his entire family were executed. They were tortured by fascists who had occupied Ukraine and their village. His father was the head of the village and he was killed. They were shot. It was a mass… A mass grave, right? Yes. It was a communal burial. Some of them were killed outright and others, they were buried alive. His four brothers, they all went to war. As soon as the war began, they were all there. He was the only one who had a military education, and they all died in the war. He was the only one who came back. He had nobody. He came back and he found my grandmother, his future wife, and she managed… What was it called then? I don’t know. They don’t have them anymore. It was a child care facility, an orphanage, so to speak, a place where orphans lived, children who don’t have parents, children of war.

(00:26:34)
And she managed this child care facility with difficult children, as they used to call them, difficult children who went through the war, who saw their parents killed, and this is how they met, because these difficult children, they, well, sometimes behave differently. They could steal something, do something bad. There were many, many children in the orphanage. Yes, that’s how she met my grandfather, and I loved him very much, and I think that my grandfather, frankly would never have believed that this war is possible. He would never have believed it because he worked in the police after the war. He was a colonel. He worked in a criminal investigation all his life, so he fought with bandits all his life, after the Second World War, but also I believe he fought for justice all his life. And we all lived in one apartment, and even after his death, I lived with both of my grandmothers and my parents, two grandmothers who both lost their husbands. Both of them died.

(00:28:05)
Well, it was an ordinary family, an ordinary family that lived like everyone lived back then in the Soviet Union and even after the Soviet in the nineties, we lived in one apartment all together. What else is there to say? But I think the most important thing was values, respect. They gave me an education. My parents gave me an education, no one left me money or apartments, so I didn’t inherit anything material. But I believe that our real inheritance is here, in our minds and in our hearts. I believe that. Understood.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:47)
There’s just a one-second delay, so if… I’m sorry, if you-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:28:59)
It’s fine.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:59)
… tell a joke, I will laugh about one, two or three seconds later. There’s a delay. So ordinary family, but not an ordinary time. World War II. Speaking of mass graves, I was at Babyn Yar yesterday. A large part of my family died there. In moments like this, such a place serves as a stark reminder of the profound historical gravity of the Second World War. I remember this song from my youth, “On June 22nd at four o’clock, Kyiv was bombed and the war began.” I always wondered how it would feel to live in a moment when everything changed. The path of humanity completely shifts in a single moment just like that. What do you think about that moment in 1941 now, after the 2022 invasion, how do you perceive the Second World War after you have witnessed all of it?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:30:05)
Well, firstly, the war actually started earlier. It started here in Ukraine. Kyiv was bombed as you quoted, but the war had already begun before that. And I think I perceived it as a start of the full-scale invasion. Well, I think it’s hard to understand why nobody wants to listen, look at and analyze history. War, the rise of fascism and Nazism, the emergence of Hitler, Goebbels, and their entire team at the time, this wasn’t just about one party or even one country. It was essentially a wave. A wave of hatred, a wave of one race, one race above the rest.

(00:31:17)
They were in fact constructing and ultimately implemented a theory around this idea later seizing Europe. They created a theory of one nation, one race, one world, their world. Of course, this idea is absolutely senseless, but it has become radicalized over the years and even gained support. A vision of one world and in principle, the so-called Russian World, the ideology Putin promotes and imposes, it wasn’t originally like that. He was a different person back then, or maybe he was always like this, but his rhetoric was different. At the beginning, remember, he talked about the EU, and-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:32:00)
At the beginning, remember he talked about the EU and even about Russia’s future being tied to NATO. There were even talks of joining the European Union, NATO. He spoke about shared values with the West. That’s how it all sounded back then. We must also look at Hitler, who was seriously… Before the radical idea of taking over the whole world, he actually made certain steps and everyone believed he was helping the economy. And to be fair, he did take some steps in that direction but he was a terrifying person. None of those actions justify him, nor do they excuse his actions and that’s why we cannot look at the Second World War as if it started in 1939. It didn’t begin in 1941 either. We need to draw conclusions. When did it start? With the weaknesses of the world? The division of European states, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. All of this happened before 1941. People who were more informed, those who dug deeper, whether they were politicians or not, whether they were from different walks of life including business, which was different back then, we’re speaking about all of this.

(00:33:26)
Hitler won’t stop. There’ll be a world war. Hitler will destroy nations, nations, and that’s what happened. Someone looked the other way. What I told you about. Europe was sinking then, I gave you an example of it but the whole world looked the other way and didn’t pay attention and said, no, we can negotiate with him. I’m telling you he’s okay. We can negotiate with him. He’s just more right leaning, or it does not matter what they said. He’s just very pro nationalist. This is all nonsense and this is not the first time and Hitler isn’t the first such case in history. We’re dealing with a person who is allowed to stick to this desire to destroy. He was consumed by it and enjoying it. And what happened to Hitler?

(00:34:31)
Now, what about Putin? This invasion was also at around four in the morning. There were missile strikes on Ukraine. This is the same. I believe that intentions are also the same but more on that later. By the way, you tell me if this is too long, you can stop me.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:53)
Never long enough. It’s beautiful.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:34:55)
Okay, so it happened here around four in the morning. Before this, I must honestly say everyone said something, predicted something, et cetera but I asked only for one thing primarily from the United States, if you are sure, if you have the evidence, if you talk to him and he tells you that there’ll be an invasion, if all this scares you, I only asked for two things. Send us weapons or better yet, strengthen us with preventive measures so there would be no war. It wasn’t the weapons that I was asking for. I asked for sanctions. Intimidate him. Please don’t say that if he comes, if he crosses borders, if he kills, we are imposing sanctions. Well, this is complete bullshit. Sorry but really.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:53)
Oh, I understand this.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:35:54)
Oh, wonderful. Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:35:55)
I understood one word.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:35:57)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:00)
So, they did not help.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:36:02)
I believe that no and this is a fact. We didn’t receive help. If we assume that words are help, well then yes, we received a lot of it because there were plenty of words. Even more than plenty, yes. At four in the morning there were strikes. Morally, is it possible to prepare for war? No. It doesn’t happen like you read in books, see in movies and so on. What happens to you? I was just looking at my wife and children. My children were asleep but my wife was awake. There were strikes, missile strikes. We heard them. To you as a living person, how can this be? You just can’t fully believe this. You just don’t understand. Why now, given everything that happened in World War II when millions of people died? None of it mattered still at four in the morning around 4:00, 3:40, 3:45. Remember, around this time? Yes, there were missile strikes and later.

(00:37:27)
By the way, a few days after the first days of the war, I spoke with Lukashenko on the phone and he apologized and he said that it was not me. Missiles were launched from my territory and Putin was the one launching them. These are his words. “I have witnesses and I apologize,” he said. But believe me, that’s what he told me. “Volodymyr, this is not me. I’m not in charge,” he told me, “I’m not in charge. These are just missiles. This is Putin.” I told him, “Don’t do that.” This was done without me. That’s it. On the phone, I remember this conversation. I told him, “You are a murderer too, I’m just saying.” He told me, “You must understand, you can’t fight the Russians.” I told him that we never fought them. I said, “It’s war. The missiles came from your land, from Belarus. How did you allow this?” Then he replied, “All right, retaliate then.” I still remember him telling me, “Hit the refinery. You know how much I care about it.” Mozyr Oil Refinery, is that it? Can’t recall. Mozyr Oil Refinery. I told him, “What are you on about? What retaliation?”
Lex Fridman
(00:39:00)
Forgive me, Volodymyr.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:39:02)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:03)
This was at five in the morning?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:39:06)
No, no, no. This was during the first or maybe the second day. Second or third day of the war.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:11)
Ah, I see.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:39:12)
After that I went back home. I was home with my children, with my wife. I just went to my wife very quickly that night at four o’clock and just told her, “Get the children, get ready. You’ll probably need to go to my office very soon.” And I left. That’s it. At this moment, you are no longer a father. What happened to me, unfortunately, because I believe that this is, and not only do I believe I understand, especially now, that all of this is the most important thing because your country is your family. The strength is in your family and this is the most important thing. I’m the president and therefore, I had to stop being a father in my own family. And my wife had to do everything… She had to do everything regarding children, regarding safety and I had to deal with the state because I’m the president and this is my duty. And I, by the way, am taking this very seriously. I went to the office and here we are now. You’re very welcome.

Invasion on Feb 24, 2022

Lex Fridman
(00:40:31)
Well, at that moment on February 24th, 2022, everything changed again. Just like in June 1941, everything changed and history took a turn. The history of humanity took a turn and for you too, you were the president. You were talking about fighting corruption, about the country’s freedom, about interesting and innovative reforms but that morning of February 22nd, everything changed. Could you tell me about that morning, the details of your actions when you had to quickly make difficult decisions? What was the process for you? How did you make these decisions? Did you discuss them with people you trust to understand how to respond to this invasion in every technical, political and military aspect? What was the process for you? How did you make the decision?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:41:34)
According to our legislation, in principle, I am the supreme commander of the Armed forces of Ukraine, so I had to give corresponding orders. Yes, I have a military office and then later there was a military headquarters where all key people gathered. This is not only about the military, it’s about energy, et cetera, all key things. But at that moment, I made the decisions quickly and without a doubt and I cannot say that I am just that kind of person. I’m just a living person who believed that if help is needed right now to help, to help evacuate people, help with children. Several cities were blocked. I was only thinking about how to deliver food there within a day. We did a lot of things, although we understood that they in fact occupy part of our state.

(00:42:43)
We distributed weapons to people, that’s how it was. Trucks came and simply distributed weapons to people so that they could defend the capital, to ordinary people just on the street, to ordinary people who understood that if the Russians entered a city, then we would have the same thing that’s happening in other cities per the information we received. Thanks to digitalization, by the way, we had very good digitalization before this. We preserved a lot and even when they were surrounding certain cities, a lot of things still worked. The banking system, the internet, we had television, and thanks to this, I made several decisions to ensure that people are united and have all the information. Russia is very good at spreading large scale disinformation. Fortunately, I have two decades of experience managing a production studio, TV channels and large media resources. I understood that we needed to build an information network very quickly.

(00:44:08)
Thanks to this, I began to address the people constantly. This happened several times, three to five times a day. In fact, I became an information source for people who were in cities that were cut off from other information and it was very important for me to keep all things digital, to keep the internet, to stay in touch with everyone with all the people. Initially, that’s the contact we had and then we also built a media platform where we had all the news agencies of Ukraine and this network was called Marathon. It was also very important for the people to trust us and people had to receive information. Why? There were waves of Russian on the first day who said he ran away. I had to go out into the street, I left the office and went outside. I had to do this because I was showing that this was no green screen to show that it was the street, not some digital manipulation.

(00:45:25)
I did these things. Then I touched various objects. Now, people might think that these are small things, but I was actually showing that I was in a real place. All of this had an impact. I was absolutely sure of my actions. And these contacts, several contacts and then I spoke to the Russians, I addressed Russians, I really did, and then only after that I gathered… It was the first day when I invited all of the journalists here, wasn’t it? That was on the first day, I think. Well, not here, to the press center in this building. I talked to journalists. I asked them not to leave because we needed weapons. At that moment, they were handing out rifles to people and for me, journalists and media platforms were essential voices.

(00:46:22)
There were various journalists from different countries here and they were essentially stuck and I asked them for contacts, those who had access to Russians, Belarusians, Kazakhs who understood everything, the same information, and I spoke to them and I spoke to them and spoke in Russian. I told them, “You must stop Putin. This is terrible. This is horror. This is war. You must stop him. And if you stand up now, if you speak out and if you go out into the streets…” This was very important. I spoke to them in Russian to show them that there was no problem and that all of these pretexts were made up. This is why it’s so painful to talk about the Russian language too because look, if a person does not want to listen, they will not listen no matter what language we speak.

Negotiating Peace

Lex Fridman
(00:47:19)
I disagree with you here. I think and hope that many people in Russia will hear us today.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:47:27)
They blocked YouTube recently. Are you aware of this? In their country.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:32)
I know. I simply guarantee that this conversation will travel fast on the internet. Everyone will hear you. They will hear you, including the president of Russia will hear you. This is why I have hope.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:47:46)
He is actually deaf. Even if he speaks to you, he is deaf by his very nature. Do you understand the difference? For instance, when you talk to Musk, you are talking to an innovator, a scientist about rockets. You talk about how to save on costs and how they land. On the other hand, Putin doesn’t launch rockets to save money but to kill people. Do you think you can talk to Putin about technology? Your guys were interviewing him and he told them about tribal history. Do you understand? Imagine a Russian man in his country listening to him. You know what Musk is about, technology, Mars, artificial intelligence. And this guy Putin is standing there bare-assed pontificating about tribes. You’ve got to understand, you think that when you do interviews like Mr. Tucker who did an interview there that you’re about to make them friends. What does this have to do with friends? He is different. He’s simply different.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:09)
But it’s still necessary.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:49:10)
A mammoth stands before you.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:13)
By the way, I must say that when you said bare-assed, it was not translated. Could the interpreter please translate?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:49:19)
This is so that you can understand.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:21)
Now he explained everything to me, I understand.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:49:23)
Yeah, that’s great.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:24)
Now I fully understand.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:49:25)
That’s great.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:25)
Anyway, but we still need to talk.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:49:28)
One should always speak with someone who listens and you must speak when you know that this will benefit you bring peace and calm to the world, not the other way around. I love President Trump’s message. When he speaks, I think that we share a position on peace through strength. That is very important. It means that if you are strong, you can speak. And we need to be strong and Ukraine has to be strong enough, otherwise what for? Like Voldemort who must not be named. Yes, he’s like Voldemort. He thrives subsists and lives on being subjectivized instead of isolation. He has offered to step out into the light. He is darkness personified and you offer him, as it were, to be subjectivized.

(00:50:40)
Why? There’s only one reason, fear. And you say we need to talk. Listen, we need to be in a strong position and not talk but end the war. Yes, it is possible through dialogue. We’re not opposed to it. You just need to be in a strong position to make the other person want it. Do you think he wants to end the war? That’s what you suggested. I think this is naive. I’m sorry. With all due respect, it’s naive to think he wants to finish the war.
Lex Fridman
(00:51:20)
Tell you what-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:51:22)
The circumstances… Sorry for interrupting. There’s something we need. I think that President Trump not only has will, he has all these possibilities and it’s not just talk. I really count on him and I think that our people really count on him. He has enough power to pressure Putin not into wanting to stop it. No, he will not want to. To pressure him to actually stop it, that is the difference. Don’t rely on Putin’s will to stop. You won’t see it. That’s what I think. Sorry.
Lex Fridman
(00:52:04)
No, sorry. I interrupted you first. I do have what some might call a naive dream of you sitting down with Putin and Trump and negotiating a deal about a ceasefire and together, finding a path to long-term peace. I think this requires strength, requires negotiations. There are a lot of carrots and sticks here that can be used to make a real deal. Trump is very keen on making a deal and ready to negotiate.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:52:41)
Can I ask you a question?
Lex Fridman
(00:52:42)
Yeah.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:52:44)
I just really want you and I to be on the same page. It’s very important to be in the same information space. Extremely important. Let’s talk a bit about the ceasefire. Let me describe the situation to you. In December 2019 in Normandy, in Paris at the Elysee Palace, Macron, Merkel, Putin and I agreed on the ceasefire. The U.S. wasn’t there and this, by the way, was a weak point of the meeting. If you’d like, we can later discuss why they weren’t there. It’s a security guarantee thing in general. It’s Germany’s position, et cetera. We agreed on an exchange of hostages, an all for all exchange. We made a deal to exchange everyone for everyone, I think you know that. There was also a meeting that lasted many hours, a meeting where we made a deal with him. Everyone was tired. It was just the two of us in the end and I proposed a ceasefire. By the way, no one in Ukraine believed. Few believed in the ceasefire and he wanted troop withdrawal.

(00:54:05)
I calculated that if there were a withdrawal of troops from the line of contact the way Russians proposed, it would take 20 years. I proved it to him just in terms of time, square kilometers, namely the length of the line of contact or delimitation line, and we agreed on what I told him that it will not work out but I had many points because I was deeply involved in the issue. I was involved very deeply. It’s my thing in general. If I start doing something, I can’t stand there like that guy I spoke about with my ass out. I must be dressed. I must be prepared. I must be prepared better, better than anyone in front of me. You do sports, right?
Lex Fridman
(00:54:59)
Mm-hmm.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(00:55:00)
I practiced for many years and we know what fights are like what boxing is, what Thai boxing is. This is what I did and I loved it very much. When you step into the ring, you understand everything pretty much, and so I stepped into it and I was definitely well-prepared but he wasn’t, no. He was not deeply involved in the process. What border? Where is it? How long will it take to disengage troops? Why wasn’t he involved you want to know? Because he wasn’t going to do any of this. This is what confused me. If you are not deeply involved in the issue, it’s as if you don’t really need the result. That’s what I think. So, what happened? We agreed that there will be gas continuation, gas transit in 2019. We agreed with him. This was the security for Europe. Merkel asked me for it and this was extremely important for Germany. We agreed with him. For him it was just money.

(00:56:21)
Secondly, we agreed on an exchange. For me, this was the most important thing. For them, gas was. For me, was the people and this is a fact because I wanted to have a humanitarian advantage so that there would be further meetings that would lead to sustained peace. And third, ceasefire. Ceasefire, you spoke about. What happened? The gas contract was signed because he needed it. And by the way, he knew everything about it. As for exchange, we took the first step and exchanged the people. Regarding the ceasefire, well, they started killing us in about a month, so I called him and I told him, “We agreed on a ceasefire, didn’t we?” Well, it wasn’t a piece of toilet paper, was it? This is serious business or so it seemed. It really was serious. “Merkel, Macron, you and I, we all agreed on this together. A ceasefire is important, isn’t it?”

(00:57:43)
Not for New Year’s because everyone was celebrating New Year’s. And now, they’re offering us a Christmas ceasefire. It’s all the same. A ceasefire for two, three days just to get some praise but this isn’t a performance. This isn’t some kind of theater. No, this is about people’s lives and that’s what happened. After that, I called him a few more times. I think I only had two, three calls with him in total. I asked him for a ceasefire. He told me it couldn’t be. We will figure it out now. People from the occupied territory, Russians and separatists, they were all there together. They continued to shoot and kill our people. Yes, the front lines were quiet but they killed people. They were killing people and I kept calling him.

(00:58:35)
I called again and again, but there was nothing until after a few months the Russians stopped answering the phone. We did not have any contact since. I wanted another meeting like we had in Normandy. I wanted the next meeting. I wanted to find a solution but the Russians refused. We tried to make it happen through various European countries and not only European, but the Russians refused. They passed along some kind of bullshit, made excuses. They didn’t want it. Meanwhile, they were sending their snipers. We had evidence, living proof, even video evidence because some of them were captured back then. Those were the snipers in training. They were training them. They were training them. And later, those snipers operated in Syria and Africa. These snipers were training in our country in the east. Ukrainians were living targets.

(00:59:35)
They were shooting from the other side, killing people, women, people, children. They were shooting. It was a hunt. By the way, it was in the Russian-speaking region in the east where according to him, everyone is speaking Russian. That’s where they were shooting. Where the situation currently is the most tense. They killed people. We sent this information, sent pictures, we sent them to the UN, sent them everywhere. We worked very hard, very persistently. I met with everyone but who thought of Ukraine back then. They didn’t notice it much. They didn’t pay much attention to Crimea being illegally occupied either. To be honest, the United States of America too, everyone was somewhat silent about this issue. That’s how it was. It was like that before a full-scale war.

(01:00:30)
I want to ask you a question about the ceasefire. For example, in Mariupol today, there are American and Ukrainian journalists, and everyone will tell you who has contact now with Mariupol, who fled from there in the last minutes, just before the occupation or who was able to leave to escape after the occupation? Chernov, who won an Oscar was among them, and the journalists that left Mariupol, they are here by the way. We had a conversation. They will tell you that 20,000, 30,000 civilians were tortured and buried there. We do not know the number of victims. People who didn’t want to work with them, who refused to cooperate with them, people who went on strikes to protest, people who did not want to work with the Russians who occupied Mariupol. And this is one example just with this city. And I have a question for you. What about the millions of children?

(01:01:40)
I will ask you in Russian so that you hear this without delay, what about the millions of children over there? What if we just arranged a ceasefire without understanding what would happen next without understanding what will happen to Ukraine’s security guarantees? What about the millions of children in the occupied territories? What should I tell them? What am I to tell them? What is it I should tell them? What? Whatever? Hey, all of you over there, see ya. And those tens of thousands of people buried there, they were… Is that what we want? Are we ready to forgive them for this? We must at least take the first step. If this is a ceasefire, we must know that there is a security guarantee for the part of Ukraine under our control. We need it so that he will not come back. This is very important.

(01:02:38)
What do we say to the people who live in those territories? These are millions of people. Did you know that since 2014 in Donetsk, in the Crimea, this is happening in Melitopol as well as in Berdiansk now, they are making all these kids of drafting age go and fight? And if they don’t go, they will be killed. So, you understand what’s happening? That is why a ceasefire, everything I said, what I wish for, and I believe in President Trump’s power to use all of this information to come up with a way to make Ukraine strong. Why am I saying that? I will give you an example. President Trump will be in the same situation as I was in 2019. Precisely the same situation. I want to end the war. We want a lasting piece for Ukraine. We must do this, the ceasefire, exchange people, and then diplomatically return all territories. And we will do this through diplomacy. What will happen next with-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:04:00)
… to diplomacy. What will happen next with President Trump? If the ceasefire happens without security guarantees, at least for the territory we control, what does he get? If he manages to make a ceasefire deal, and three months later, Putin launches a new wave of attacks, what will Trump look like? What will Ukraine look like? What will everyone look like? Putin will just do it, and why would Putin do it? Because today he’s afraid of Trump. But once Trump manages, for example, to do a ceasefire deal without serious security guarantees for Ukraine, he will give a pass to Putin. Not that he wants to, no, he does not want that. I believe in what he says. But he will give Putin an opportunity, because in Putin’s head, he wants me to fight with Trump.

(01:05:04)
Putin’s plan is to end the occupation of our territory. This is in his sick head and I’m absolutely sure of this. That is why I told you don’t wait for Putin to want to stop the war. Pressure him so that he is forced to stop the war, that’s important.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:30)
It’s important to say that what you said about the children is a tragedy. War is hell, but let me say again, we must find a path to peace.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:05:38)
There is one.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:40)
What is it?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:05:41)
There is one. Before ceasefire, strong Ukraine. Strong Ukraine’s position, yes, we can speak about it with Trump. For me, we can speak about security guarantees, but a quick step is NATO. A partial membership, NATO, yes, I understand. I understand Trump’s feelings about NATO. I heard him, he’s thinking through all of it, of course.

(01:06:10)
But anyway, yes, NATO is a strong security guarantee for all the people, for us, part of security guarantee. The second part is the arms aid package, which we will not use. If a ceasefire works, nobody will use the weapons. For what? But it has to stay. But with all due respect to the United States and to the administration, not like before, I don’t want the same situation like we had with Biden.

(01:06:39)
I ask for sanctions now, please, and weapons now and then we will see. If they start it again, of course, we’ll be happy if you’ll give us more and you will stand with us shoulder to shoulder. Of course, that is right, but, but it’s different when you have weapons. Putin wouldn’t have been able to occupy so much territory.

(01:07:03)
It was very difficult for us to push him out, but we didn’t have weapons before and that is the same situation. It can be the same situation. I’m just sharing this with you, like I said at the very beginning, I want to be very honest with you and with your audience. Yes, it’s true. If we do not have security guarantees, Putin will come again.

NATO and security guarantees

Lex Fridman
(01:07:24)
To make it clear, let’s describe the idea that you are speaking about. I would like to offer you other ideas too.

(01:07:32)
But right now, your idea is that NATO accepts Ukraine, minus the five regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:07:43)
Just so you understand the situation, the invitation to NATO is legislatively issued to Ukraine. So to us, all those territories are still Ukraine, but NATO so far can only act in the part that is under Ukrainian control. This can be negotiated, I’m sure about that. Yes, this would not be a great success for us, but if we see a diplomatic way to end the war, this is one of the ways.

(01:08:16)
So it is, sorry, that is a start. Secondly, weapons, arms aid package, I’m not ready to discuss this publicly right now. It’s all written down and President Trump might have seen it or not, but we’ve got no secrets from him, yes. But mostly it depends on the willingness of the United States, because some of it will come from the EU, some from the United States, of course, together.

(01:08:43)
So not just from the United States, no, no, no, we need unity with this package, so the package and sanctions. Yes, sanctions, but I think it’s in the interest of all the smart people to not have Russian energy on the market in general, so he has to stop it. That’s all, it’s fine. American oil, American gas is okay. Why not? And it’s cheaper, so it will be cheaper for the whole world.

(01:09:11)
The money will go to the United States and I think he will be happy, and the president and your people will be happy, but it’s your decision. I’m just sharing. Yes, and cheaper oil. So Putin won’t have so much money for the war, and that’s it.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:27)
But this is difficult because it’s a lot. You’re saying to continue the sanctions on Russia, to accept Ukraine into NATO, I need to ask you some difficult questions about this.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:09:37)
Yes, go on.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:38)
I trust and respect your words today. Many people respect and love you in America. Trump respects you.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:09:46)
Loves me.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:47)
Oh, come on now. Remember, last time you corrected me when I said that you love Javier Millet, you said, “No, no, no, I respect him.”

(01:09:54)
So let’s not talk about love today, but could we talk seriously about guaranteeing Russia’s security?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:10:04)
Okay. Can I interview you a little? Question is what land is the war happening on and where did it start? On our soil, on our territory, international law was violated. The sovereignty of our country was violated, civilians were killed. Tens of thousands of our people were taken hostage, and everyone will tell you this happened.

(01:10:28)
This is what happened when I speak with the Global South, which is trying to balance the two sides because of the history, because of their roots and because of their shared economic interests with Russia in the past. And now, of course, when you talk to them, they are speaking a little bit like you. They’re balancing a little bit. Yeah, a little bit in between, but we will work on it.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:56)
Yeah.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:10:57)
It’s our first meeting. During the second one, you will be more on our side, but it’s just-
Lex Fridman
(01:11:03)
You’re very convincing, very charismatic.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:11:05)
Yeah, thank you. But when I speak with them, when I speak, it’s very important. Even with their balancing attitude towards the war, they all recognize that this is a war. This is not just internal conflict, this is a full-scale war that began, that Putin began. And all of them, all of them, if you talk to them, they say…

(01:11:41)
But then they all recognize that, that it’s his own big mistake, Putin’s mistake, and that he’s not right. That’s why I said, “No, no. He’s not right, and you have to begin from this.” If you begin at the middle, between Ukraine and Russia, of course, we can speak like this. You are in the middle and say, “Okay, what’s going on? There is a fight. Where is the fight?”

(01:12:10)
It’s not the fight like in Europe when Napoleon is fighting against somebody in the middle of Europe. No, this is not in the middle of somewhere of the planet. Not the planet, it’s concretely on our land. So one country with one army, one person came to another. That’s it, it’s very clear.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:38)
Again, I would like us to find a path to peace, so let us nevertheless try to start in the middle. What other ideas do you think might? You are a very intelligent person and-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:12:50)
Your Russian isn’t that good either, and I told you that this is only our first meeting.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:56)
My English is not very good either.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:12:58)
Your English is very good.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:00)
Thank you. To be honest, I’m terrible at speaking in every language. Well, there are other ideas. For instance, sorry to say this, it sounds crazy.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:13:08)
Please.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:08)
But what if both Ukraine and Russia are accepted into NATO?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:13:12)
Putin himself spoke about Russia, maybe about NATO. What you just said is very correct. What are the guarantees for Russia? It’s not like I’m even interested what happens to them. To be honest, I don’t care what will happen to them in the future after the war ends, but these are our borders and we must understand what is going on there. Well, the NATO guarantees for Ukraine.

(01:13:43)
Actually, this is also a security guarantee for the Russians. Frankly, I talked about this many times before. Sorry, I’m speaking figuratively, but as an example, if you were a father who lost his children, a grown man. A grown man, a man, an adult, and the war has ended and he never got justice for real. For example, somebody decides to freeze support. We won’t give you anything.

(01:14:16)
You can’t fight. You can’t continue, so we stop when we stop without any guarantees, without any support, without financing, without okay. And nobody is held accountable, but the man lost his children. He will not get anything. None of the killers will be in prison. All the sanctions will be removed, and he lost his children, and we have thousands of such people.

(01:14:47)
Why do you think they will not go to Russia? We’ll find a way and will not kill the Russian soldiers there or somebody there. Why wouldn’t they? It’s human nature. It’s not about us, it’s everyone. Read American writers. Always after any war, if there is no justice for people, there must be punishment for the crime, it is only justice. How come my child was taken away? The war took him.

(01:15:21)
This is very scary. And even whether it was my son, who was fulfilling his constitutional duty, or simply a missile that struck a civilian child, and if there is no justice and the killers are not punished, why wouldn’t these people come back with hate? They will definitely come back. So when we talk about NATO, NATO is not only stopping Russia.

(01:15:51)
Do not forget, NATO is stopping us too, because there will not be justice for everyone. We know that NATO does not have the right to solve certain issues with war. NATO is a security alliance, it is protection, not brainwashing. What Putin claims that this is offensive is not true. NATO is a defensive alliance, a security alliance, and it is security for Russia.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:22)
But unfortunately, there are many options for peace that don’t involve NATO inviting Ukraine as a member. Can you imagine security guarantees without NATO membership?

(01:16:35)
For example, if America simply leaves NATO, I believe there is a high likelihood that Donald Trump would do such a thing.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:16:45)
I think it’s very bad for NATO. That’s the end, that is, that’s the death of NATO. It is a pity, because I think that it’s a very good alliance. Maybe not everything’s good there from the bureaucracy or money, et cetera, but totally countries who are in NATO, they don’t fight.

(01:17:07)
There is no war on the land of any of these NATO countries. I think that is the answer. It works or not. It works politically or militarily, I don’t know, but it works. So without Trump, without the United States of America, there will not be NATO. That is the first, so and you say, “Can we imagine that?” That what?
Lex Fridman
(01:17:32)
That there could be security guarantee without.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:17:34)
No, we don’t need guarantees without the United States. That’s it, because the United States is a very strong, powerful country. The United States puts the point. Of course, Putin said that it’s just the Soviet Union where, by the way, Ukraine was the second strong republic militarily, yes, by the way. But he, of course, always forgets about it.

(01:18:01)
But during the World War II, without help of the United States, support of your troops, support of your industry. Industrially, militarily, without your money, without your people, Hitler could win, so the United States helped a lot. Of course, Europe, USSR, and of course, everybody fought. Everybody did a lot.

(01:18:29)
But without the United States, it couldn’t be such. I don’t use the word success, because I think that there is no war which ends successfully because this is a war. Seven figure losses, heavy losses in World War II, millions of people, and that’s why without the United States, security guarantees are not possible.

(01:18:53)
I mean these security guarantees, which can prevent Russian aggression. Of course, we have security guarantees bilaterally with some countries financing support of our internal military and defending, and humanitarian issues and demining, which is very important, in helping our children in the school networks. By the way, this is a very sensitive point.

(01:19:18)
How many bomb shelters? How many bomb shelters we built with the partners for the children? And it’s a pity that they are underground, but can you imagine their eyes when they came after COVID? You understand what does it mean COVID, but they had COVID and the war, and together they didn’t see each other for so many years.

(01:19:39)
And when they saw each other even underground, they were very happy and smiling. So we have such security guarantees, but it’s not enough to prevent. Yes, preventive measures also work to prevent the aggression of Putin.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:00)
Your English is better than my Russian. This is wonderful.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:20:05)
I’m not sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:06)
I’m just giving you a compliment.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:20:07)
Thank you. No, no.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:08)
You’re supposed to do that kind of thing to a president.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:20:10)
Thank you so much.

Sitting down with Putin and Trump

Lex Fridman
(01:20:11)
Okay. Once again, without NATO guarantees, I have a dream that, let’s say, on January 25 or sometime at the end of January this year, you will sit down with Donald Trump, with Vladimir Putin.

(01:20:28)
And together negotiate a ceasefire with strict security guarantees and an agreement will be signed. What will this look like without NATO?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:20:41)
I will make it clear. So first of all, I think January 25th or some other day, well, you just call it January 25th and I don’t mind, it’s my birthday. And we sit down, first of all, with Trump. We agree with him on how we can stop the war, stop Putin. It is important for us to sit down with him.

(01:21:16)
Secondly, it is very important for us that Europe, which is very important for us because we are part of Europe. And not only geographically, geopolitically, but also in the European Union where we will be. For us, it is very important that Europe also has a voice. It’s the second thing. It won’t be long because Europe will be looking at us and we’ll be looking at Trump.

(01:21:44)
And by the way, I now see that when I talk about something with Donald Trump, whether we meet in person or we just have a call, all the European leaders always ask, “How was it?” This shows the influence of Donald Trump, and this has never happened before with an American president. I tell you from my experience, this also gives you confidence that he can stop this war.

(01:22:15)
That is why we and Trump come first and Europe will support Ukraine’s position, because they understand that Ukraine has every right to have its voice heard in this because we are at war. Trump and I will come to an agreement. And then if, and I am sure that he can offer strong security guarantees together with Europe, and then we can talk to the Russians. That’s right.

(01:22:46)
Not just three of us sitting down at once, and you still talk to me like that? Do you know how? As if Putin wants to sit down and talk, but Ukraine does not. This is not true.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:02)
I think that yes, he is, in fact, ready to talk.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:23:06)
Did you talk to him?
Lex Fridman
(01:23:07)
On the phone or what?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:23:09)
How do you normally talk to him?
Lex Fridman
(01:23:10)
I don’t know. Normally, by the sea, the same as with you. He invites you to the sea with me, just the three of us.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:23:17)
No, no. One of us may drown.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:19)
Who? Are you good at swimming?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:23:20)
Yes, I’m a good swimmer.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:21)
You’re a good swimmer. Well…
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:23:25)
And I would like to add that if you have any contact with him, I just want to hear what happens then.
Lex Fridman
(01:23:32)
I have never talked to Vladimir Putin, but I have a feeling that he is ready, because Donald Trump is ready. I hope you’re ready, and this is not just a feeling, but a dream.

(01:23:46)
I have a dream here that the three of you will get together in a room and make peace, and I want to understand what it looks like. What security guarantees look like that will satisfy Ukraine, that will satisfy Russia.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:24:04)
Ukraine needs security guarantees. First and foremost, we are in danger, that is why they are called so. This is no joke to me. Let’s take a few steps back. Interesting, why are security guarantees a strong position of Ukraine, strong weapons and so on, so important? I will give you a little history lesson, although I think you have prepared yourself and know everything perfectly well.

(01:24:38)
You can correct me on that. Yes, Ukraine had security guarantees. The Budapest Memorandum, nuclear weapons are the security guarantees that Ukraine had. Ukraine had nuclear weapons. I do not want to characterize it as good or bad. Today, the fact that we do not have them is bad. Why? Because this is war.

(01:25:01)
Today we are at war because you have unleashed the hands of a nuclear power. A nuclear power is fighting against us, against Ukraine, and doing what it wants. By the way, even you are now talking about ceasefire, just a ceasefire. Maybe give flowers to Putin, maybe to say, “Thank you so much for these years. That was a great part of my life.” No, we are not just ready for this.

(01:25:33)
Why? The Budapest Memorandum, nuclear weapons, this is what we had. Ukraine used them for protection. This does not mean that someone attacked us. That doesn’t mean that we would have used it. We had that opportunity. These were our security guarantees. Why am I talking about this in detail? Because if you take the Budapest Memorandum, by the way, I discussed this with President Trump.

(01:25:58)
We have not finished this conversation yet. We will continue it. Regarding the Budapest Memorandum, the Budapest Memorandum included security guarantees for Ukraine at first, three, three. The most important security guarantors for Ukraine, three strategic friends and partners of Ukraine. This was in agreement. United States of America, Russia, Britain, France, and China joined.

(01:26:28)
There were five states that these are not even security guarantees. We now understand that this is not a guarantee of security, because on the one hand, these are security guarantees, but there was an English word, as far as I understand, assurance. It is translated as assurance, assurance, right? And in Russian, it’ll be and what assurance?

(01:26:59)
That is give up nuclear weapons because you were under pressure of the US and Russia for Ukraine to give them up. These two powers were exerting pressure. These two states negotiated to ensure that Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons. Ukraine agreed. These are the largest states. This is the nuclear five that does not even provide security guarantees.

(01:27:27)
Now we just need to find these people, and we just need to put in jail all of those who frankly invented all this. So confidence, assurance, assurance that Ukraine will be territorially integral with its sovereignty. It was a piece of paper. If you are curious, by the way, that after occupying part of our Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine sent diplomats three times.

(01:28:04)
I don’t think I remember, three times within a few years, we sent letters to all security guarantors, to all members of the Budapest Memorandum. What did they send? That what was written on the piece of paper, consultations, Ukraine holds consultations. If it’s territorial, integrity is violated and everyone should be in consultation. Everyone must come.

(01:28:32)
Everyone must meet urgently, USA, Britain, Russia, France, China. Did anyone come, you ask? No. Did anyone reply to these letters, official letters? They are all recorded by diplomats. Did anyone conduct consultations? No, and why not? They didn’t give a fuck. This is understandable in Russian, that as Russia didn’t give a damn, neither did all the other security guarantors of the Budapest Memorandum.

(01:29:08)
None of them gave a damn about this country, these people, these security guarantees, et cetera. We take a break, this will be a Budapest Memorandum. The last time with me, imagine how many years it was with me in February 2022? In February 2022, the war began, a full-scale war. Letters for consultations have been sent. No one answers. Next, we are taking a break from the Budapest Memorandum.

(01:29:46)
The question is simple about Budapest. Can we trust this? No. Whichever country out of these five sat at the negotiating table, just a piece of paper. Believe me, we will save you. No. Another, this is a train. This is a train with wastepaper, with security guarantees, which Ukraine has been riding for many years. The second car on this train is the Minsk agreements.

(01:30:21)
The Normandy Format and the Minsk agreements where it was written, where the signatories were, the United States of America was no longer there. I understand that Obama was here at the time, and as far as I know, I think they were simply not interested in what happened to Ukraine, and where it was in general, where it was located. Well, somewhere there, part of something.

(01:30:43)
People, well, people and let it be, let it be with these people. The United States simply did not participate. In the Minsk agreements, there are no claims to the US because they were not guarantors. Where is the claim? A step back. 2008, Bucharest, everyone has already learned from the Budapest Memorandum. Bucharest, 2008.

(01:31:14)
Bucharest, Mr. Bush, President of the United States, Republican says that Ukraine should be in NATO. This is the voice of Republicans. Check it out, Ukraine should be in NATO. Everybody’s looking at the US always, all in favor. Who is against? Merkel, so she opposes and she forced everyone not to give Ukraine an invitation to join NATO because that would be a step.

(01:31:46)
Seriously, Republicans were in favor, the US was in favor, because Republicans and Bush were not afraid of anyone. They were not afraid of anyone, and they knew that Ukraine rightly wanted to join NATO. She chooses so. And what is the question? Well, people made their choice. Well, and the Russians will not look that way. That was not the case then. Why? Because the Russians were different.

(01:32:16)
Next, Minsk, we didn’t succeed. After the Minsk agreements, as I told you, hundreds of meetings were held. I have had hundreds of meetings since 2019. We could not think about a ceasefire. A ceasefire is our offer, this is not somebody’s suggestion. This is mine, I would like. I wanted to. In Ukraine, society was divided. Not everyone wanted to, half did not want to.

(01:32:52)
Half were against, half were in favor. Some of them shouted, “Do not believe it.” Some of them shouted, “Believe it.” I am the president of Ukraine. I was given a mandate of trust by 70% of the population to take appropriate steps and I made them. This is not a joke, we’ll just sit the three of us. I am simply telling you what is. This is how can I tell you?

(01:33:19)
These meetings must be serious and prepared, and prepared with those who want peace. Ukraine wants peace, US wants peace. We have to sit down with Trump, and that is 100%, first and foremost, number one. Moreover, he told me on the phone that he is waiting for us to meet, and there will be an official visit. And my visit would be the first or one of the first to him.

(01:33:48)
And for him, this topic is very important. I know that he has his own matters, American issues, I understand. I heard his election program, but regarding international affairs, I think our issue is one of the most pressing issues for President Trump. Therefore, I believe very much I trust his words, and I hope we will meet again. We need to prepare.

(01:34:11)
We have many plans to build on, and they exist and they are supported by many countries, but we need his vision. He needs to look at all these details, but his vision, please, because he can stop Putin because Putin is afraid of him. That’s a fact, but Trump is a president of a democratic country, and he does not come for life. He is not Putin. He will not come for 25 years.

(01:34:43)
He will come for his term. Please, tell me. Well, for example, he came for four years and for the fifth year, Putin came with a war. Will it make Trump feel better that there was no war during his time, and that Ukraine was destroyed after him? Why destroyed? Putin is whoever, a killer, whoever, but not a fool. He will be prepared. He knows our mistakes.

(01:35:17)
He understands how we defeated his army after the invasion began. He realized that this was not a Soviet war, and that this would not happen with us. He will prepare. He will let everything into arms production. He will have lots of weapons, and there will be a very large army. And you think that after such humiliation, four years without a war, he did not finish us.

(01:35:42)
He will return and fight only against Ukraine. He will destroy everything around. And if you say there is a risk that President Trump will withdraw from NATO, for example, this is a decision of the United States. I’m simply saying that if it does, Putin will destroy Europe. Calculate the size of army in Europe.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:36:01)
Calculate the size of army in Europe. It’s just that I say it for a reason. Do the calculation. Why did Hitler conquer all of Europe then? Almost. Just count, remember his armies of millions. Calculate what Europe has. What are the largest armies? We have the largest army. The Ukrainian army is the largest in Europe. The second place after us is four times smaller than us.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:33)
France?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:36:33)
Yes. 200,000. I think the French have about 200,000. We have 980.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:41)
So this powerful coalition of European nations.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:36:44)
That will not be enough.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:45)
Yes, it’s not going to be enough. But you’re a smart man. There’s a lot of ideas. Partnerships with global South India, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, [foreign language 01:36:57] partnerships, political partnerships. It all protects you.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:37:01)
First of all, look at one example. North Korea. Just look at this example. 12,000 has arrived. Today, 3,800 killed or wounded. They can bring more. 30-40,000 or maybe 500. They can bring many people. Why? Because they have order, autocracy and everything. Can Europe bring people together? No. Will Europe be able to build an army consisting of two to 3 million people? No, Europe will not want to do this. And for what? We definitely don’t want a world war with you. There is no such purpose. There is no such purpose as gathering everyone.

(01:38:07)
We do not want any war. We want to stop the Russians and they invite North Korean soldiers. Invited. Their faces are burned. They themselves burn their faces. Those who cannot escape, injured or killed. There’s a video. Everything I’m telling you, there is evidence of this so that they are not recognizable. Right? What does it mean? It’s out of values which share Europe. Europe counts. It means that those guys, they don’t count. [foreign language 01:38:54] It’s count. Yes. They don’t count the number of people. That is the answer.

(01:38:58)
Can they move more? Yes. Can they move dozens of thousands? Yes, because we see what they have. Last year, for example, Europe gave us 1 million artillery rounds. We produced a lot ourselves, but they gave us initiative. It was initiative. 1 million artillery rounds and of 155 and et cetera. We produce more but North Korea gave Putin 3.7. Just gave him. So he also has a deficit for today. It means he needs what? He needs time.

Compromise and leverage

Lex Fridman
(01:39:46)
But the number of soldiers…
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:39:48)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:49)
And the number of artillery rounds is not everything. As you have said. Let’s say Donald Trump guarantees security for four years. You can form partnerships with India, with Saudi Arabia that enforce punishment to stick on oil prices, for example, if any aggressive action is taken. You can actually even build the… I’ve met a lot of incredible Ukrainian tech people, IT people. You could build great companies that form partnerships with the United States, that form partnerships with China, and that is a big leverage against aggression of however many million artillery rounds. And that, a sheet of paper, you don’t need a sheet of paper of protection.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:40:41)
Ah, that’s you. Well, when you speak in English. You don’t even need answers because when you now are talking, you already answered on all the questions. The first one is that during this time you need just cooperation. A lot of money for this military industry. In Ukraine or in Europe, with India, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, you need a lot of money. So the question is where you will get it. My answer was to Trump. I said this is one of the security guarantees. Take 300 billions of frozen Russian assets. We will take it. Take money, what we need for our interior production, and we will buy all the weapons from the United States.

(01:41:35)
We don’t need gifts from the United States. It will be very good for your industry, for the United States. We will put money there. Russian money, not Ukrainian, not European. Russian money, Russian assets. They have to pay for this. We will put it and we will make it. This is one of security guarantees. Yes, of course. Because this is a military guarantee. Yes. But then the second you said that energy price and a lot of sanctions on products and the Russian shadow fleet and etc. That is the second answer we spoke about before. Yes put more sanctions on them. More sanctions. It’s okay, but not to take off sanctions.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:20)
It’s okay with you, but it’s not going to be okay with the president of Russia.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:42:24)
Yes, but I’m not thinking how it’ll be very good for him. He’s still a killer.
Lex Fridman
(01:42:29)
I understand, but unfortunately the reality is that a compromise is needed in order to reach an agreement.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:42:35)
So in your understanding, the fact that he is not in jail after all the murders, he’s not in jail assuming all the murders and no one in the world is able to put him in his place, send him to prison. Do you think this is a small compromise?
Lex Fridman
(01:42:50)
This is not a small compromise. And to forgive him will not be a small compromise.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:42:55)
To forgive. No one will forgive. It is absolutely impossible to forgive him. We cannot get into the head and soul of a person who lost their family. Nobody never will accept this. Absolutely impossible. I don’t know. Do you have children?
Lex Fridman
(01:43:09)
No, not yet. But I would like to.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:43:11)
Yes. God bless. And this is the most important thing in life, and they simply took away the most precious thing from you. Will you ask who ruined your life before going to rip their head off? I’m just curious. They took your child away. Are you going to ask who did this? And they will answer that that dude did this. You will say, “Oh, well then there are no questions.” No, no, no. You will go fucking hell and bite their head off and it will be fair. Can murderers be forgiven? That’s why you make security guarantees. What I told you, for those who are here and what we control and what will not happen.

(01:43:52)
And that those who lost, we will never forget in a matter of time. But when you gave us NATO, I just said this means that after a while, everything I said about NATO. After a while, Ukraine will not go against Russia and Russia will not go against Ukraine because you are in NATO. I am just saying is not that a compromise? NATO is a compromise. This is not just a security guarantee, in my opinion. Look, when rockets were attacking Israel and Israel is not in NATO. NATO countries, aircrafts were deployed. The air defense worked, operated by different Middle Eastern countries.

(01:44:44)
These are also security guarantees. And by the way, Israel has nuclear weapons. So why do they need NATO when in fact they have more than NATO has? The American, British and French aviation stepped in. There was ADA. I don’t remember from Jordan. Listen, thousands of missiles were shot down that way. What is this? So it’s a guarantee of safety. It’s just that it’s not called NATO. Is some Uncle Vova irritated by the word NATO? There’s a problem with the word and I think he’s simply irritated by people who are alive and living here.

Putin and Russia

Lex Fridman
(01:45:33)
If you believe this, it will be very difficult to negotiate. If you think that the president of a country is completely crazy, it is really hard to come to an agreement with him. You have to look at him as a serious person who loves his country and loves the people in his country. And he conducts, yes, destructive military actions.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:45:55)
Who are you talking about now? Who loves his country?
Lex Fridman
(01:45:56)
Putin. Do you think he doesn’t love his country?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:46:00)
No. What is his country? He happened to consider Ukraine, his country. What is his country? Explain it. Tomorrow he will say that it’s America. No pity for the Chechens. Do they look like Russians? Do they speak Russian? Of course, they learn in schools like anywhere there’s been Russification. Who are the Chechens? A different people, another faith, other people, another language. A million eliminated. And eliminated how? How did he kill them? With love? I know fuck by hugging. In Ukrainian, as we say, “Strangling by hugging. I love you so, so much. I love you so much that I want to kill you.” That’s his love.

(01:46:55)
And that’s not love. You are mistaken. He does not love his people. He loves his inner circle. It’s only a small part of the people. He doesn’t love them. Why? I’ll explain. You cannot send your people to another land knowing that they will die. Children, my daughter, she is 20 years old. For me, This is a child. She’s already an adult of course, but she’s a child. The boys he sends are 18 years old. They are children. He sends them. It’s not that fascists came to his land and he needs to defend it. He came to ours and he sent them Chechnya. He sent them Syria, he sent them Africa. He sent them Georgia.

(01:48:06)
He sent them Moldova. Transnistria, that was before him. Fine, we can leave that aside. He has enough sins of his own. And then there’s Ukraine, the largest part. 788,000 killed or wounded Russians. He calls them all Russians. Even those who don’t know how to speak Russian on his territory of Russia, everything they’ve enslaved. Yes. Proud [foreign language 01:48:48]. So I wonder, is that love? What love is this? And for what? Does he love his people? No. Does he love his land? His country is bigger than America. How much land do you need? America is huge. America is simply an outstanding country. Outstanding country.

(01:49:09)
Russia is bigger. Well, just bigger. So ask yourself, does he love them? What is he doing and what does he love? Do you think he’s been everywhere in his Russia? It’s impossible to get around it. He hasn’t been everywhere. He just hasn’t.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:32)
Well, I believe that Donald Trump loves America and I don’t think he has been to every single American city.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:49:39)
No, no, no. I saw his rallies. So many rallies. No, no. Let’s be honest. Let’s be honest. He had it and I saw it and it’s very difficult. I mean he’s not 18. Yes, but he’s strong and this is his will. Everywhere where the war is, I’m sure, I pray to God it never will be on your land. Yes. And I’m sure that it will not be, but I’m sure that if you have in some region the problems, how to say, earthquake, hurricane you have it all. Well, I’m sure that President Trump would be there after one day, two or three days. I don’t know the security of all these things, but he will be. Otherwise, how will people look at him?

(01:50:29)
Yes, of course he will. Of course the same about me. I’m not comparing myself with him. I’m just where it is difficult for people, I have to come. The next question is very simple. Region, Kursk region. The operation there. Was Putin in Kursk during four months? No.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:00)
Listen, I have tremendous respect for you, admiration for many reasons. One of which is you stayed in Kiev and another one is that you visit the front and you talk to the soldiers in the front and you talk to people all across Ukraine. Absolutely tremendous respect for that. And not enough people say that. I had a conversation with Tucker Carlson for example, and I said that, “You’re hero for staying in Kiev.” And he said, “Well, he just did a thing that every leader should do.” But I think not enough leaders do the thing that every leader should do. So tremendous respect. I agree with you totally.

(01:51:44)
Yes a leader should go to the front of a war. That said, America has waged wars all across the world. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq costs $9 trillion and killed over a million people. War is hell. And just because war is waged in terrible ways that it is does not mean the leader does not love their country. But I take your point. I once again have a dream that even if there’s hate, that you sit down with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and you find a way to peace. Let me ask you a question. What do you think?

(01:52:33)
Will there ever be a day when the Ukrainian people forgive the Russian people and both peoples will travel back and forth again and marry each other, rekindle and form friendships? Will there be such a time in the future?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:52:47)
I think history has long answered this question. I don’t know how be for us. It’ll be in the future without a doubt. History has shown this time. And again after every devastating war, one generation, one country recognizes that it was an aggressor. And it comes to realize this is impossible to forgive. This is precisely the kind of education they’ve had in Germany for many years. Even though these children had nothing to do with it. It was their grandfathers who participated and not all of them were participants of Nazi Germany’s war essentially against the world. Yes. And against life. And therefore they’re still apologizing.

(01:53:54)
Apologizing is not easy. They know that they were the aggressors, they were guilty. They do not look for compromise in history. Compromise in itself buys time. And they understand this. There are convicted murderers condemned both historically and by their own people. Reparations have been paid and security guarantees have been established by the way. And all this is done. And when all this is done and recognized, in any case, people develop relations with each other. That’s clear. But it can only happen the way it always has, always has in history. Russia will have to apologize. It will.

(01:54:45)
This will happen because they are guilty. They’re guilty. And as I told you, the guilty are different. Both those who participated and those who remain silent because silence is also about participating, in my opinion.

Donald Trump

Lex Fridman
(01:55:07)
Can I ask about Donald Trump? We’ve already mentioned him a lot, but let’s focus there. What do you admire? What do you respect about Donald Trump? And also maybe why do you think he won overwhelmingly the election in 2024, that American people chose him?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:55:28)
He was stronger. He was much more stronger than Kamala Harris. Biden first and then Kamala Harris. Yes. He showed that he can intellectually and physically. It wasn’t important point to show that if you want to have a strong country, you have to be strong. And he was strong. And this number of rallies, what I said is not a simple thing. He showed that he can. He’s strong. So he doesn’t have any questions with his, I mean this age and et cetera. Nothing. He is young. He is young here and his brain works. So I think it’s important, very important. And of course a lot of interior questions.

(01:56:15)
I understand the prices and et cetera. Economic questions and you have the questions with other things.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:24)
Immigration.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:56:26)
A lot of things. I understand. So maybe he answered on those questions, which people had.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:34)
One of the questions-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:56:35)
That he will finish the war.
Lex Fridman
(01:56:37)
That he will finish the war.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:56:38)
For me, this is the main question, but I said that for him, he’s the President of the United States. For him, his priority is his questions in the United States. And I understand and I respect it, but the second he was speaking about the world, yes, he said that he will finish the war. And I hope very much because I think that our people really support his idea. And that’s why I said it is for me. It’s very, very important to have enough people around him who will have connections with him, with the right things.

(01:57:21)
For me, the truth is very right things. What’s going on really in the battlefield, what’s going on really with Putin and Russia, what he really wants and that is just to have it. Before any decision, you have to be at the same level of information. Really we need him to know everything from us, from you, from people in Ukraine, from people around who are really afraid. Afraid that Putin doesn’t want to stop the war, afraid that he will come back with his aggression.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:07)
So first of all, I should mention that our conversation today will be translated and dubbed into Ukrainian, English, Russian, other languages, Spanish. So you’re in your voice. So there are great guys originally from Poland. It’s a company called ElevenLabs. They’ve trained an AI. Artificial intelligence sounds truly remarkable in your voice. You have the freedom to speak in any language you choose, but no matter what, you will always find yourself returning to speaking in Ukrainian. That is, when you talk about Donald Trump, you can do it in Ukrainian or Russian.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:58:49)
Everybody understands.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:50)
Everybody understands. But you said that there’s some things about the war that maybe Americans don’t understand. So we talked about Putin, we talked about the security guarantees, the reality of war, what’s happening on the ground? What do you think that people should understand?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(01:59:13)
First of all, they have to understand the idea of Putin’s war. It is very important for him. I consider this process. I think it is very important for him not to give Ukraine independence. To prevent Ukraine from developing as an independent country for him, influence. Influence on Ukraine cannot be lost. And four, for him, it is like… I think for him, this is such a goal in this last mile and certainly for him, the last mile and of his political life. And I think that this is the goal for him. The second story, I do not want to talk about these banalities that he wants to return all the territories of the Soviet Union influence over them. He does this little by little.

(02:00:22)
I just don’t want to… People need to know details. For example, Georgia, which was headed towards the EU and NATO completely turns towards Russia regardless of the fact that they have frozen conflicts. They have in Abkhazia what we have with Donbas, which is controlled by militant rebels. Abkhazia is not developing. It’s just a very beautiful part of Georgia that has died. And if you have the opportunity, then go there someday. You will understand. It simply died because Putin wanted to. He wanted not to allow them to develop because a frozen conflict means that you will not be accepted in the EU and certainly will not be accepted into NATO.

(02:01:02)
Because right now, yes, they do not take you because of a frozen conflict. And this is what Putin did. It’s very important for him not to lose this influence. That is he turned back Georgia, young people, students, everyone leaves. And this is a fact. Georgia is quite small and they will leave. They want to live in Europe. They want to develop. Somebody in the United States, somebody in Europe, somebody in the EU, somebody in Britain. He will now fight for the Moldovan parliament. This is his second step. You will see in April what happens. You will see he will start turning Moldova away from Europe.

(02:01:42)
Although they want to go there, he does not care. They will be a pro-Russian party and they will do something with the current president because she has won the elections. She is pro-European but he will turn this back. The next steps are completely clear. He will do everything wherever he has lost influence, where there was influence of the Soviet Union. He’ll turn it back as much as possible. And we understand at what price. You have seen Syria, you saw these tortures. What we saw in [inaudible 02:02:19], what we saw everywhere we came and where our territories were occupied.

(02:02:24)
In Syria, the same happened. There were a thousand people there. And you have seen it. Scientists were found. Doctors were found. It’s clear that any people are capable of generating their own opinion. So their skills developed society, everyone who can express an opinion, everyone who can shape the independence and maturity of society. Such people are not needed. And he wants this in Ukraine. And therefore everyone should understand that Ukraine is like a large wall. From that Europe, and if God willing, President Trump does not withdraw from NATO. Because again, I believe that this is the biggest risk.

(02:03:15)
I think two steps. Two steps that Putin would like to see is a weak NATO and this without Trump. And a weak Ukraine, which cannot survive on the battlefield, simply cannot survive and prevent me from building a strong relationship with Trump. I think these two steps, leaving NATO and Ukraine’s weakness will lead to a large-scale war, which Putin will wage on all the territories of that post-Soviet Europe. I mean Soviet Europe, not post-Soviet, but post-World War II period. That is Soviet era Europe, in order to completely control everything there. This is what he will do. And besides this, this will happen in any case.

(02:04:19)
Even if the US is thinking about leaving NATO, this war will affect the United States because North Korea is the first sign. North Korean skills, North Korean knowledge, which they are now gaining from this war. These include mastering new technologies, large-scale drones, missiles, how it works, the kind of technological war we have today, cyber war, etc. All these skills, Korea will bring home and scale up in that region. And this will be a risk for the Pacific region. Security, first and foremost. For Japan and for South Korea, they will face these risks a hundred percent and it will be clear that Taiwan will also have to face them.

(02:05:18)
Without this, it is impossible. This is already happening. This is already happening. Therefore, I think that President Trump has all power to stop Putin and give Ukraine strong security guarantees.

Martial Law and Elections

Lex Fridman
(02:05:40)
We’ve been talking for two hours. Have to pause. You want to take the break?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:05:45)
We will make a pause. We can have coffee, right? Coffee.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:50)
Let’s do it. And give the interpreter, he’s struggling.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:05:57)
Some water.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:00)
We keep switching languages
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:06:01)
Like a dragon. Three heads, three translators.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:05)
So one of the difficult decisions you had to make when the war began is to enact martial law. So when you won the presidency, you were the warrior for freedom. In fact, this war is for freedom. For freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom. But a lot of freedoms had to be curtailed, sacrificed in this fight because there’s so much focus on the war. Do you see the tension? Do you feel the tension of that, the sacrifice that had to be made in democracy, in freedom, in fighting this war?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:06:52)
In any case, this war is for our freedom. Generally speaking. To be honest, when you understand, over time when the war passes, you understand that your main values are at home. This is your home, your children, your love, God willing, parents are alive and if not alive, then their memory, visiting their grave, choosing how to work, how much, preferably choosing where to work. All this is freedom. Freedoms are not just a desire, they are an opportunity. In any case, you are right because war is a limitation of opportunities. In any case, you fight for these opportunities. Your parents and God gave you life, right?

(02:07:57)
You fight for your life. Your life. But we need to understand that first there is a war. And then-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:08:00)
But we need to understand that first there is a war and then martial law is introduced. Martial law is not introduced because someone wanted to. You say, this is not Pinochet, this is not Pinochet, and so on. This is a completely different story. An aggressor came and according to your legislation, if the border is violated, if there is armed aggression, you have all this written down long ago, written out in legislation, you introduce martial law and the introduction of martial law everywhere at all times means, in any case, a restriction of opportunities. If opportunities are limited, rights and freedoms are restricted. Therefore, the war itself restricts rights and freedoms. Yes, and you can’t do anything about it. We try, honestly, to balance as much as possible. I believe that the business sector works despite the difficulties of the war, and we do everything somewhere, there somewhere to reduce some load. Unfortunately, we cannot reduce taxes.

(02:09:12)
On the contrary, military tax is used for war. You need to take money somewhere. This, by the way, is about the fact that the US gave us a lot and Europe too, but compared to how much we needed for the war, this is not all. As for military salaries, you know that we could not pay the salaries of a million strong army. We could not pay it using the money from our partners. These are all expenses. This is all the money that the country and people have accumulated. You can’t do anything. I really want to reduce taxes. I will tell you frankly, I really want to.

(02:09:55)
Well, I think that the whole new tax system, new deregulation, new steps, new reforms, all this will be after the war. Although there is something to brag about, this is proof. And this is a document because if you want to get a candidacy for European Union, you must implement the appropriate number of reforms. We do everything. During the war, we voted for many reforms, including anti-corruption, banking reforms, land reforms, major reforms. We started a large privatization and the war did not stop us. Yes, it slowed down, but we went through a lot.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:42)
When do you think you’ll hold elections? Because for people who don’t know, part of the martial law elections were suspended and they were delayed and delayed and delayed and I think the next sort of plan is in February of 2025, but when do you think there will be presidential elections in Ukraine?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:11:02)
Elections were postponed once. They were not delayed, to be clear. Elections did not take place in 2024 that year. First of all, we need to understand the constitution. They were scheduled to be held in the spring of 2024. Due to martial law under the constitution, you cannot do this. These are the presidential elections. The parliamentary elections did not take place in the fall of 2024 according to the constitution. Yes, there are security things, there is the constitution, but there are security things. That is, everyone in Ukraine understands that this cannot be done until the war is over or legislation needs to be changed.

(02:11:52)
I believe that elections will take place immediately after the end of martial law. This is according to the law or members of the parliament need to get together and change legislation, which will be very difficult to do because society is against it. Why society against it? It is understandable why. Because we want elections that we want to trust. 8.5 million people went abroad. The infrastructure needs to be created for these millions of people to vote. Millions of people in the occupied territories. I’m not even talking about the occupation of 2014. I’m talking about the occupation right now. What to do with these people? This is a difficult question. And one of the most unfair ones is how to vote without having a million soldiers. It is impossible.

(02:12:57)
We need to think about how to change the system if the elections are held in times of war, change the legislation, which should include changes to the voting system, to think about online voting. Everyone is afraid because of certain attacks like cyber attacks and so on, but we need to think about it. I really think that it’s possible that we can end the war in 2025.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:27)
In January?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:13:29)
We’ve already agreed on it. I would very much like to. I would very much like to-
Lex Fridman
(02:13:34)
After the war?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:13:35)
And immediately. Yes, immediately. In the year of the end of the war. It’s a fact. Why? Because when martial law ends, you can immediately vote in parliament to hold elections and then everyone will vote because there are no restrictive measures. And after they vote, I think elections can be held in 90 days, something like that. Yes. And this means that immediately after the end of the war, elections may take place in 90 days.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:11)
Are you running for reelection?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:14:14)
Even I don’t know, really. I don’t know. I don’t know. It is a very difficult question. It depends on how this war will finish. It depends on what people will want. Mostly, it depends on people, first of all, and of course my family. We had no time to speak about it with my family and of course didn’t have a chance because we don’t think about it now. I mean, it’s something… There are a lot of, some, not a lot of, but enough voices in Ukraine from politicians, opposition and et cetera, about this, I guess. But we don’t think really seriously, didn’t think seriously with my family about it. So this is war. I mean, how to think about what will be after. It’s very difficult, really very difficult.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:18)
If we look at the field of candidates, maybe you can give your opinion about the set of ideas you see out there, including your own about the future of Ukraine. As I understand the candidates include Poroshenko, Zaluzhnyi, Arestovych, Budanov, Klitschko, there are many others. This is the internet speaking to me. What do you think are the space of ideas that these candidates represent?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:15:44)
I think there can be even a bigger number of candidates. Yeah, I don’t really know what will be. They have rights to participate if they want to. Yes, if they really want to, and can, they can go and do what they want, honestly. Most important is what are they doing now? I think that all these people are famous Ukrainian people and it’s important for them to do everything they can today, not begin any election campaign. I think this what can divide our people to have the elections during the war. I mean this make steps, speak about elections a lot, make a big mess about it. I think this is not right. That’s why I’m not agreeing with some of these people. But they can and I think that they can and maybe some of them will. And it’s okay. It’s normal. It’s very normal. Our system differs from the system in the United States. You have two parties and the parties decide who will be the leader. And in Ukraine, everybody can participate. Let them.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:57)
You think you’re going to win the debate? You versus Zaluzhnyi, Poroshenko or Arestovych and you decide to run, do you think you’re going to win the debate or you’re again focused on the war and everybody should be focused-
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:17:11)
Oh, I’m really focusing on the war and-
Lex Fridman
(02:17:13)
I understand.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:17:14)
… I think the most difficult debate is what will be brought to the table and we spoke about it. It’ll be during the war, how to finish the war. I think that is my goal because it will be one of my most complicated debates and for any president who is in a war, of course, but I think this is my goal to win those debates and the other things are not for today.

Corruption

Lex Fridman
(02:17:44)
As I said, the dream I have is it’s a historic opportunity to make peace, to make lasting peace soon. So I’m glad you’re focused on that. Let me ask a question that a lot of people in the United States think about, and I care a lot about the future of Ukraine is corruption. This is something you have cared a lot about for a long time. You won the presidency in 2019, in big part your message of fighting corruption. But there’s a lot of accusations that during war, I mentioned $9 trillion in the United States, war breeds corruption. So can you speak to that, how you have been fighting corruption and can you respond to the accusations there has been corruption in Ukraine?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:18:42)
It’s very simple. First of all, we really have a very sophisticated anti-corruption system. Sophisticated not in the sense that it’s difficult to understand, but in that it really consists of many elements. It’s the most sophisticated in all of Europe. This is another requirement of the European Union. It was a requirement for Ukraine and for many years, Ukraine was not trusted. I want to tell you that under me, we all voted for bills, all the anti-corruption reforms, well, almost all reforms and all anti-corruption bodies today are independent. They work as requested. I still believe that they are not perfect yet. There are many issues. There is a judicial system, but also a judicial reform that our partners, the United States plus the EU, demanded from us. This is all written out. This is written out in specific laws, in specific decrees, in specific decisions. We did this, we’ve done 99% of this.

(02:19:50)
If something has not been done, it means that it is on the way. But in principle, all this exists and there is no such system as we have in Europe. To say that we do not have corruption would be lying. We just talk about it openly. We are genuinely fighting against it. Look, we have sitting in our prison, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is the most influential Ukrainian oligarch since independence and no one could do anything about him. The United States of America wanted to have Kolomoyskyi and they went to great lengths because of money laundering, etc. There are criminal cases in the United States, I think in Delaware, something like that. Neither Europe could do anything about it. That is, we did a lot with oligarchs. Russian oligarchs, sanctions were imposed, they were thrown out. Some of them fled the state, but they are all under sanctions. We exchanged some of them for our soldiers such as Medvedchuk to whose daughter Putin is godfather.

(02:20:57)
That is, we fought against the strongest influential oligarchs, which are, and were in Ukraine and we eliminated a lot of corruption. Of course corruption exists in everyday life. It exists. But institutionally, I am sure that Ukraine will overcome all this. This takes a little time. I would say honestly, that listen, what we call corruption and in some state of the world it’s called lobbyism, but this does not mean that there is no corruption there.

(02:21:36)
Let’s take the aid you mentioned during the war. First of all, we have no money. We have no money except for the war. We received weapons from the United States of America, from Europe. If we take for example money from the United States of America during all this time of the war, around 177 billion have been voted for or decided upon, 177 billion. Let’s be honest, we have not received half of this money.

(02:22:20)
The second point, which is very important, just as an example, is it corruption? The first question, whose corruption? This is the second. Here is just one small example for you. When the United States began to transfer US weapons, it was American money, but American weapons, money for these weapons. As a president, I had cargo jets, not in Ukraine. Because of the war, we moved them very quickly to Europe. We had cargo. We have good cargo fleet, very good because of Antonov. So I asked American side to grant me the opportunity because our jets are at another airfield and I asked America to give me the opportunity to use our jets for transfer, not to pay a lot. To whom? To your companies, to American companies. No, I didn’t get this opportunity. My jets stayed put and the United States jets, cargo jets moved these weapons. But everywhere you have to spend money so we could get more weapons, but we have to pay for this very expensive fleet. My question, is this corruption or not? Or lobbyism? What is it?
Lex Fridman
(02:24:05)
You mean corruption on the part of the US companies?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:24:08)
Yes. Making such decisions.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:10)
Yes, I got it.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:24:11)
The lobbying for such decisions involves some companies that make these decisions, but I can’t be open about it and I couldn’t speak loudly about it. I didn’t want, nor did I intend to cause any scandals to arise because otherwise you can freeze the support and that’s it. And that’s why when we talk about corruption, we must ask who is involved? If we had 177, and if we get the half, where’s the half? If you will find the second half, you will find corruption.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:45)
There is a perception of corruption. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk really care about fighting corruption. What can you say to them to gain their trust that the money is going towards this fight for freedom, towards the war effort?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:25:03)
In most of cases, we did not receive money, we received weapons. And where we saw risks that something could be happening with weapons, we cracked down hard on everyone. And believe me, this is not only about Ukraine. Everywhere along the supply chain, there are some or other people and companies who want to make money, they try to make money on the war. We did not profit from the war. If we caught someone, believe me, we cracked down hard on them, and we did that, and we will continue to do so because to this day when someone says that, “Ukraine was selling weapons,” and by the way, Russia was the one pushing this narrative, we always responded, “Our soldiers would kill such people with their own hands without any trial.”

(02:25:56)
Do you honestly think anyone could steal weapons by the truckload when we ourselves don’t have enough on the front lines? And yet we have to provide proof to defend ourselves because when there’s an abundance of such misinformation, distrust starts to grow. And you’re right, people listen to various media outlets, see this and lose faith in you. In the end, you lose trust and with it you lose support. Therefore, believe me, we are fighting more against disinformation than against particular cases. Although I still emphasize once again at the everyday level, such things are still important. We catch these people and we fight them.

Elon Musk

Lex Fridman
(02:26:45)
I mentioned Elon Musk. I would be interested to hear what you think of him, why you respect him as a person, as an engineer, as an innovator, as a businessman. I would just like to hear from you, what do you think about Elon Musk?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:27:00)
First of all, I had a conversation with him at the beginning of the war. I talked with him. I respect him, first and foremost. I respect the self-made man, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:27:14)
Yes.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:27:14)
In English, I love such people. No one and nothing fell into their lap. But the man did something, did it all himself. I worked myself, created a big production company and I know what it means to make money, to select talented people, to impart knowledge to them, to invest money and to create something, something important for certain people. And I’m not comparing myself to Musk, he just, well, the man is a great leader of innovations in the world. And I believe that such people move the world forward. Therefore, I respect the result of his work. And we see this result. And for me, it has always been important that your result can be used. That these are not words but facts.

(02:28:16)
Let’s take the war. We are very grateful for Starlink. It has helped. We used it after Russian missile attacks on the energy infrastructure. There were problems with the internet, et cetera, with connection. We used Starlink both at the front and in kindergartens. It was used in schools, it helped children. We used it in various infrastructure and it helped us very much. And I would very much like Elon to be on our side as much as possible to support us. And yes, I’m grateful to him for Starlink. Truly, I am. First of all, so that our guys have a connection, and children too. And I am really grateful to him for that. I think I would like him to come to Ukraine, to talk to people here and to look around and so on.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:21)
Has Elon visited Kyiv or Ukraine yet?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:29:23)
No.
Lex Fridman
(02:29:25)
I hope the Kyiv airport will open soon, then it will be easier to fly in.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:29:30)
Yes, I am looking forward to it. Maybe we will open it, but only, and you must understand if the war is over, there must be sustainable peace and air defense systems to be honest. And we must ensure that they are long-lasting and effective. Let’s take the airport for example, and let’s focus on the airport in Dresden, which very well as it is handling important cargo for Ukraine in Poland. And there are patriot systems there because everyone understands what the risk is. Well, Russia is a risk and therefore we need air defense systems. And today, today, take for example, the air defense system of one city or another that is being shelled and move it, move it to the airport. Well, that would be dishonest. People are more important than planes. But there will be a moment, and Trump, by the way, I think that the war will end and President Trump may be the first leader to travel here by airplane. I think it would be symbolic by airplane.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:36)
Again, January 25th around that date. Right? Flying in, meeting the Air Force One.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:30:41)
That would be cool.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:42)
Elon Musk. I will meet you there for the second time too on the plane.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:30:46)
With pleasure.

Trump Inauguration on Jan 20

Lex Fridman
(02:30:47)
And you, by the way, before I forget, let me ask, are you coming on January 20th for President Trump’s inauguration?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:30:58)
I would like to, of course. I will be considering what is happening then in the war because there are moments of difficulties, escalation, many missiles, etc. But honestly, well, I can’t. I can’t come especially during the war, unless President Trump invites me personally. I’m not sure it’s proper to come because I know that in general, leaders are for some reason not usually invited to the inauguration of presidents of the United States of America. Well, and I know that there are leaders who can simply come, want to come and will come. Yeah, I know. And I know the temperament of some of these people. They can come at their discretion. This is very, very difficult for me. I am the kind of person that cannot come without an invitation. This is Putin. We did not invite him. He came to us, so to say. And me, I can’t do that.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:09)
No, but he publicly say that it would be great if you came to the inauguration or you mean did he invite it officially?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:32:15)
No, wait. Look, look, look. Listen, I am against any bureaucracy. I get rid of it as much as I can. But well, there are some complexities involving security. I decide and I fly, and the United States of America officially provides security. Not that I need this, mind you. I do not ask for helicopters to fly around and protect me, but they will simply do it themselves. The security service itself. They had to do it. I don’t want it, and sometimes I don’t need it. And I’m asking them.

(02:32:51)
It was for example, before the war, I think, yes, it was before the war, I had a meeting, yes, with President Trump. It was in 2019. I just wanted to go for a run early in the morning because I really wanted to exercise. And they, those tall bodyguards, a lot of them, they decided to join me, but I couldn’t really do it because they were in suits and I was in sportswear. I said, no, I can’t. It’s always funny. I don’t want to disturb anybody and cause anyone problems with me. And that’s why if he will invite me, I will come.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:34)
I thought he invited you.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:33:36)
Yeah?
Lex Fridman
(02:33:37)
Yeah. I thought he publicly invited you. But okay, I hope to see you there.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:33:40)
I think they had to to do some of their steps. I don’t know, but…
Lex Fridman
(02:33:46)
Step, yeah. The stamp was missing.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:33:49)
But with pleasure with my wife of course. And I think it’s important. It’s important.

Power dynamics in Ukraine

Lex Fridman
(02:33:55)
All right, let’s get back to a serious question. Sometimes they say it in America, this question of who is really in power? So let me ask, is someone controlling you? For example, oligarchs, American politicians, Yermak? I wanted to bring this up because I have been here in Ukraine twice since the invasion of 2022. And one of the things I’ve learned well is that actually nobody controls you. And this is one of your strengths as a president, as a person that oligarchs and other rich and powerful people like that cannot control you. Can you explain why that is? How you see it?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:34:44)
I think, and it is indeed true that I’m generally difficult to deal with. I am an ambitious person. I can’t submit to anyone. I can live by rules, by laws. I believe that this is the only thing that can control any person today. These are the rules and laws of the society or state where you live. And I believe that this is the most important thing. There’s no person who could control me as I once told President Trump when we had a meeting. By the way, journalists asked if Trump influenced me during the phone call. I told the journalist the truth then, who can influence me? Only my boy, my son. This is a fact. When he calls asking for something, well, then I lift up my arms, yes, and I cannot do anything about it because children are children. I have so little time with them. And therefore when there are these moments, they are precious and important to me. I am ready to do anything.

(02:35:58)
Also, probably my parents, they are an authority for me. Beyond that, I view it more as a system. No one can control the president. Therefore, we have oligarchs who either fled or are in prison because oligarchs usually control cash flows and people and influence politics. And we have concrete examples with sentences. They are not just under house arrest. Not just that there are some judgments under which their assets were frozen or sanctions were imposed. There are specific people who are behind bars. I think this is the answer regarding the influence. Would they like to influence me in the same way as any president of Ukraine because finance and cash flows always influence politics? Well, at least they want to do this. This is regarding the influence and other people on the vertical, they perform tasks as my managers. Andrii, you mentioned is one of those managers. Well, I am glad that I have such people. Well, probably there is nothing else to add here.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:19)
I will just say that your team that I spoke with is an excellent team. Excellent people.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:37:25)
Thank you.

Future of Ukraine

Lex Fridman
(02:37:26)
Okay, one last question. The future of Ukraine. If you look 5, 10, 20 years into the future, what can help Ukraine flourish economically, culturally, politically in the future?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:37:37)
Digital, it’s very important. Digitalization of all the process. We began this work. We have special ministry of digital transformation.
Lex Fridman
(02:37:38)
Yeah?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:37:47)
Yeah. So this is very good. And we also have our Diia. This is the name for all of these services. So I think that is the most important. This is, again, this is not only convenient, that will cancel any possibilities for future corruption because you don’t have any personal connections with people in the government or elsewhere. So you are just on your phone or any other device. That’s it. And I think we are doing very well. We are the best in Europe. All of Europe recognizes it. Some countries of the African Union asked us to provide this, the same service and we will do it after the war immediately. And I think that we can bring money to Ukraine from this. And I think what we also need, we need a tax reform. I think it will be very important for the businesses to return.

(02:38:43)
A lot of support will come, I think from USA business investment, not as direct aid to us, just to the private sector and resources. And I mentioned this to President Trump and to some European leaders who are our key strategic partners that will be happy, especially with the Americans, will be happy to sign these contracts and engage in joint investments in many areas. And I think we can develop oil, gas, green energy, including solar power. And we already have the resources. We can invest money into this. We have oil reserves in the Black Sea that we can exploit and we need your expertise and the investment of your companies. We have gold and uranium reserves, the largest in Europe by the way, which is also very important. For example, Russia has pushed France out of Africa. They urgently need uranium, which we have. So we are ready to open up for investments and this will give us of course, opportunities, jobs for people, revenue. I don’t want cheap labor, honestly. What I truly want, especially after the war, to open up for those people…
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:40:00)
I truly want, especially after the war, to open up for those people who can really contribute and earn.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:08)
Yes, and give a reason to the eight million people to come back.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:40:11)
Yes, it’s so important. And they will come and we will recover and rebuild Ukraine. We will be very open to companies, and of course we will welcome our people back. It’s so important culturally.

(02:40:28)
I think the most important thing is to remain open and not change our direction because culturally aligning with Russia, it’s one idea, while aligning with Europe is another. Our people have chosen Europe. It’s their choice, it’s our choice, the choice of our nation, and I think it’s very important.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:45)
But first, you have to end the war.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:40:47)
Yes, you’re right. And we will. We want peace. Just to make it clear, we want peace. Just what I always say, you have to come to Ukraine and see for yourself. And people will tell you, “No, we can’t forgive those murderers who took our lives, but we still want to make peace.”

(02:41:12)
And honestly, I think that the highest approval rating of the president of the United States, of Trump now is in Ukraine. People really believe that he can truly help bring peace. Now they have faith, faith that he can make it happen, that he can support Ukraine and he can stop Putin and that he will make sure Putin doesn’t get everything he wants. This is very important, and it’s why we believe that we must not lose this opportunity.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:54)
I hope you find the path to peace. Thank you.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:41:57)
Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:58)
Thank you for talking today.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:41:59)
Thank you for coming.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:01)
[foreign language 02:42:01].
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
(02:42:02)
[foreign language 02:42:02] Yeah. You started. Thank you very much.

Choice of language

Lex Fridman
(02:42:09)
Thank you for listening to this conversation with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And now let me answer some questions and try to reflect on and articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama. Or to contact me for whatever other reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact.

(02:42:36)
First, I got a bunch of questions about this, so let me chat about the topic of language and let’s say the mechanics of multilingual conversation. Perhaps the details are interesting to some people. It also allows me to reflect back on the puzzle of it in this episode and what I can do better next time. I already explained in the intro the symbolic, historic, and geopolitical complexity of the choice of language in the conversation with President Zelenskyy. As I said, the Russian language is one that the president speaks fluently and was his primary language for most of his life. I speak Russian fluently as well. It’s the only common language we are both fluent in, so any other combination of languages required an interpreter, including when I spoke English. He did need an interpreter when I spoke English, and just like I was, was visibly encumbered and annoyed by the process of interpretation. This is why I tried to speak in Russian to the president instead of English, so that he can directly understand me without an interpreter.

(02:43:47)
I’m willing to take the hit for that, as I am for everything else. I’m not trying to protect myself, I’m trying to do whatever is best for the conversation for understanding, though it has been getting harder and harder to stay open, vulnerable and raw in public while the swarms of chanting internet mobs stop by with their torches and their color-coded hats, flags, frogs, pronouns, and hashtags.

(02:44:17)
Anyway, there is a lot of nuanced aspects of the conversational language that I would like to explain here. I’ll try to be brief. I can recommend a lot of books on this topic of language and communication that reveal just how amazing this technology of language is. For example, for a good overview, I recommend John McWhorter’s books and especially his lecture series for the Great Courses on language. There are several. In the Story of Human Language series, he gives a great discussion on spoken language versus written language, and that spoken language often relaxes the rules of communication. It uses shorter packets of words, loads in a bunch of subtle cues and meanings, all of which, like I’m trying to describe, are lost when there’s an interpreter in the loop.

(02:45:09)
Let me also describe some relevant characteristics of my peculiar language “abilities” in quotes. I was never good at speaking. I listen to think and understand better than I speak. For me, this is true for both English and Russian, but it is especially true for Russian. The Russian language allows for much more room for wit, nonstandard terms of phrase, metaphors, humor, rhyme, musicality, and let’s say deforming of words that create a lot of room for creativity and how meaning and emotion are conveyed. You could do the same in English, but it’s harder. I actually find that Brits are sometimes very good at this. One of my favorite humans to talk to is Douglas Murray. Setting the content of the conversation aside, the sheer linguistic brilliance and wit of dialogue with Douglas is a journey in itself. I think Christopher Hitchens had the same, and many others, like I said, especially Brits. Anyway, I’m able to detect and understand a lot of dynamism and humor in the Russian language, but I’m slow to generate it in part because I just don’t practice. I have very few Russian-speaking friends. Funny enough, most of them are Ukrainian, but they speak with me and each other in Russian. But of course, as I mentioned, this is slowly changing due to the war. But I tried to speak to the president in Russian so he would avoid needing an interpreter as much as possible.

(02:46:47)
One of the things I want to improve for next time is to make sure I get very good equipment for interpretation and arrange for an interpreter I trust to be exceptionally good for the dynamism and the endurance of a three-hour conversation in the style that I tried to do. Just to give you some behind-the-scenes details of the experience, equipment-wise, funny enough, it’s not actually so trivial to set up wireless connections from us, the two people talking, to the interpreter, and then back to us in a way that’s super robust and has clean audio. The audio I had in my ear from the interpreter had a loud background noise, so the whole time I’m hearing a shh sound with the voice of the interpreter coming in very quietly. What a wonderful experience this whole life is, frankly. Plus, his translation was often incomplete, at least for me, so I had to put together those puzzle pieces continuously. But again, it worked out. And hopefully our constant switching of languages and having a meta-discussion about language provided good insights as to the complexity of this fight for a nation’s identity and sovereignty that Ukraine has gone through.

(02:48:07)
Behind the scenes, off-mic on a personal level, President Zelenskyy was funny, thoughtful, and just a kind-hearted person. And really, the whole team were just great people. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

(02:48:24)
After the conversation was recorded, the next challenge was to translate all of this and overdub it and do it super quickly. These words I’m speaking now have to be translated and dubbed into Ukrainian and Russian. ElevenLabs were really helpful here, especially in bringing the president’s voice to life in different languages. But even more than that, they’re just an amazing team who inspired me and everyone involved. Please go support ElevenLabs. They are a great company and great people. The translation is separate from the text to speech and was done in part by AI and a lot by human. This is where the fact that we had constant switching between three languages was a real challenge. There are six transition mappings that have to be done: English to Ukrainian and Russian, Ukrainian to English and Russian, and then Russian to English and Ukrainian continuously, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. And each combination of language to language translation is best done by a person who specializes in that kind of mapping. It was all a beautiful mess, all of it.

(02:49:41)
And on top of all that, great translation is super hard. For example, I’ve read and listened to a lot of Dostoevsky both English and Russian and studied the process of how these books are translated by various translators. You can spend a week discussing how to translate a single important sentence well. Obviously, in this situation, we don’t have weeks, we have hours for the whole thing.

(02:50:06)
One of the things I regret is not putting enough time into the hiring and selecting great translators, from Russian and Ukrainian to English especially. I think translation is an art, so getting a good translator that works well with us is a process that needs more time and effort. I’ll be doing that more this month.

(02:50:27)
By the way, we have a small but amazing team. If you want to join us, go to lexfridman.com/hiring. If you’re passionate, work hard, and everyone on the team loves working with you, then we’ll do some epic stuff together. Would love to work with you. Like I said about ElevenLabs. There are a few things is awesome in life as being able to work hard with an amazing team towards a mission all of us are passionate about.

(02:50:54)
Anyway, I’ll probably be doing a few more interviews in the Russian language. I do have a lingering goal of interviewing the Mathematician Grigori Perelman, but there’s also others. I will also work on improving my whole pipeline both equipment-wise and interpreter-wise in doing these conversations in other languages because there are many that I would like to do in languages I don’t speak at all like Chinese, Mandarin or Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, French, German. I see language as both a barrier for communication and a portal into understanding the spirit of a people connected by that language. It’s all a weird and beautiful puzzle, and I’m just excited to get the chance to explore it.

Podcast prep and research process


(02:51:39)
All right, I got a question on how I prepare for podcasts. This has evolved and expanded more and more over time. There are some podcasts that I prepare hundreds of hours for. In AI terms, let’s say, first, I’m training a solid background model by consuming as much variety on the topic as possible. A lot of this comes down to picking high-signal sources, whether it’s blogs, books, podcasts, YouTube videos, X accounts, and so on.

(02:52:09)
For this conversation with President Zelenskyy, for example, since February 2022 I’ve spoken with hundreds of people on the ground, I’ve read Kindle or audiobook, about 10 books fully, and then I skimmed about 20 more. And I don’t mean books about Zelenskyy, although he does appear in some of them, I mean books where this conversation was fully in the back of my mind as I’m reading the book. For example, I read Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. It’s about Holodomor. Does it directly relate to Zelenskyy? Not on the surface, no. But it continues to weave the fabric of my understanding of a people, of a history of the region.

(02:52:56)
But it’s really important for me to read books from various perspectives. And I’m always trying to calculate the bias under which the author operates and adjusting for that in my brain as I integrate the information. For example, Anne Applebaum’s book, Gulag, is very different from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The former is a rigorous, comprehensive, historical account, the latter is a literary, psychological, and personal portrait of Soviet society. Both I think are extremely valuable. On the bias front, for example, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer is a good example. It is full of bias, but he was there, and to me, he has written probably one of the greatest if not the greatest book on the Third Reich ever. But like I said, it has a lot of inaccuracies and biases. You can read about them online if you like. But my job in this case and in all cases is to adjust based on my understanding of the authors’ biases and take the wisdom from the text where it could be found and putting the inaccuracies aside into the proverbial dustbins of history.

(02:54:12)
As I’m reading, I’m writing down my thoughts as they come up, always digging for some deeper insight about human nature. If I’m at my computer, I’ll write it down in Google Doc, sometimes use Notion or Obsidian. If I’m not on my computer, I’ll use Google Keep. For example, if I’m listening to an audiobook and I’m running along the river, if a good idea comes to mind, I’ll stop, think for a few seconds, and then do a speech to text note in Google Keep. By the way, listening to audiobook at 1X speed. Old school. And eventually I get a gigantic pile of thoughts and notes that I look over to refresh my memory. But for the most part, I just throw them out. It’s a background model building process. By the way, LLMs are increasingly becoming useful here for organization purposes, but have not yet been useful, at least for me, and I do try a lot for insight extraction or insight generation purposes.

(02:55:14)
I should mention that my memory for specific facts, names, days, quotes is terrible. What I remember well is high-level ideas. That’s just how my brain works, for better or for worse. I realize that sometimes forgetting all of the details and the words needed to express them makes me sound simplistic and even unprepared. I’m not, but that’s life. We have to accept our flaws and roll with them.

(02:55:44)
Aside from books, I also listen to a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos where people are talking about the topic. For the President Zelenskyy episode, I listened probably to hundreds of hours of content from his supporters and from his critics; from all sides. Again, I choose who to listen to based not on their perspective, but based on SNR, signal-to-noise ratio. If I’m regularly getting insights from a person, I will continue listening to them whether I agree or disagree.

(02:56:14)
In the end, this turns out to be a lot of hours of prep, but to say that it’s X hours per episode is not accurate because a lot of this preparation transfers from one guest to another even when there’s an insane level of variety in the guests. We’re all humans, after all. There is a thread that connects all of it together somehow if you look closely enough.

(02:56:35)
For more technical guests in STEM fields, I’ll read papers, a lot of papers, and also technical blog posts and technical tweet threads. This is a very different process. For AI or CS-related topics, I will run other people’s code, I will write my own, implement stuff from scratch. If it’s a software company, I’ll use their tools and software relevant. But in the actual conversation, I constantly am searching for simple but profound insights at various levels of abstraction. Sometimes this means asking a trivial question in hopes of uncovering the non-trivial, counterintuitive but fundamental idea that opens the door to a whole new way of looking at the field.

(02:57:18)
And actually, every guest is their own puzzle. Like preparing for Rick Rubin was me listening to hundreds of songs he produced and even learning some on guitar like Hurt by Johnny Cash. Preparing for the Cursor Team episode meant obviously I had to use Cursor fully for several weeks; all of its features. I switched completely from VS Code to Cursor. For Paul Rosolie, round two especially, I literally went deep into the jungle with Paul and almost died fully taking the leap toward adventure with him.

(02:57:56)
When it gets close to the conversation, I’ll start working on the actual interview questions and notes. And there I’m asking myself what am I personally curious about? I love podcasts. I’m a big fan of many, many podcasts, and so I ask myself, “What would I want this person to explain on a podcast? And maybe what aspect of their thought process or their humanity would I want to be surfaced or have the chance to be surfaced?”

(02:58:26)
In the actual conversation, I always try to put my ego aside completely and do whatever it takes to have a good conversation and serve the listener. This means asking questions, simply trying to define terms and give context if needed, being open-minded, vulnerable, curious, and challenging the guests when needed. Despite the claims on the internet, I do ask a lot of challenging questions, including follow-ups, but always with empathy. I don’t need to be right. I don’t need to signal my moral or intellectual superiority to anyone. I try to do the opposite actually, because I want the guest to open up. And I trust the intelligence of the listener to see for themselves if the guest is full of shit or not, to detect the flaws and the strengths of how the guest thinks or who they are deep down. A lot of times when interviewers grill the guest, it doesn’t reveal much except give a dopamine hit to the echo chambers who hate the guest.

(02:59:29)
As I said in the intro, I believe the line between good and evil does run through the heart of every man. The resulting conversations are sometimes a failure, sometimes because they are too short, sometimes because the chemistry was just not working, sometimes because I fucked it up. I try to take risks, give it everything I got and enjoy the rollercoaster of it all no matter what. And as I said, I trust the listener to put it all together and I trust the critic to tear it apart. And I love you all for it.

Travel and setup


(03:00:04)
All right, I got a bit of a fun question. It’s a long one. Delian, cool name, wrote in saying he spotted me out in the wild and had a question about it. He wrote, “I saw Lex working at the Detroit Airport between flights. I hesitated and ultimately decided not to interrupt since he was in focus mode.” True. “Lex had his headphones, earbuds on,” listening to brown noise, “Microsoft’s surface propped up at eye level, Kinesis Advantage keyboard on the table. The use of Microsoft Windows is surprising, but it has been discussed in the past.” True. “The ergonomics of the setup surface at eye level means that Lex cares about his health. But the anomalously large Kinesis advantage keyboard seems like such a burden to lug around airports. I cannot help but ask why is it that Lex is going through the hassle to bring this absolutely large keyboard with him as carry-on? It barely fits in a backpack. Carrying it around must be necessary for Lex for some reason.” I love the puzzle of this, that you’re trying to think through this. “The pain of lugging this tool around must be much smaller than the problem it solves for it? What problem does this keyboard solve? What makes it necessary at the airport? Productivity? Health? RSI?”

(03:01:24)
Good questions. Thank you, Delia. Great question. It made me smile, so I thought I’d answer. I remember that day. There was something else about that day, aside from the keyboard that I miss, so I am filled with a melancholy feeling that is appropriate for the holiday season. Let me try to set the melancholy feeling aside, answer a question about my computer setup when I’m traveling. Whether I’m going to SF, Boston, Austin, London, or the front in Ukraine, I am always bringing the Kinesis keyboard. I don’t have RSI or any other health issues of that kind that I’m aware of, even though I’ve been programming, playing guitar, doing all kinds of combat sports my whole life, all of which put my hands and fingers in a lot of precarious positions and situations. For that reason, and in general, ergonomics have never been a big concern for me. I can work on a crappy chair and a table, sleep on the floor. It’s all great. I’m happy with all of it.

(03:02:36)
Why Kinesis? Which, by the way, is right here. I had to think about it. Your question actually made me reflect. And I was hoping as I’m answering it the truth will come off on many levels. It is true that I’m more productive with it. I can type and correct mistakes very fast compared to a regular keyboard, both in natural language typing and in programming. Fast enough, I think, where it feels like I can think freely without the physical bottlenecks and constraints of fingers moving. The bit rate in Neuralink parlance is high enough for me to not feel like there is cognitive friction of any kind.

(03:03:26)
But the real answer may be the deeper, more honest answer or something else. I’ve used the Kinesis keyboard for over 20 years, so maybe it’s like one of those love stories where a guy and a girl love each other and you try to quit because it doesn’t quite work, but every time you leave, you ask yourself, “Why?” And then you realize that when you’re together, your life is just full of simple joys, so what’s the point of leaving? What’s the point of life if not to keep close to you the things that bring you joy, Delia? Like this keyboard, it brings me joy. It’s a bad metaphor, over anthropomorphized perhaps, but I never promised a good one. I’m like a cheap motel on a road trip; low quality is part of the charm. I do have some good motel stories for another time. This does not feel like the appropriate time. All that said, to disagree with myself, I did use Emacs also for over 20 years, and in a single week recently switched to VS Code and then Cursor and never looked back. Take my romantic nature with a grain of salt.

(03:04:38)
Yes, eventually I’ll have to leave, but for now, you’ll keep finding me on occasion in a random airport somewhere listening to brown noise, writing away the hours on this Kinesis keyboard. Now, if you see me without it, maybe it’ll give you the same change of melancholy feeling I feel now in looking back to that airport in Detroit.

(03:05:03)
Anyway, more about my travel setup, if anyone’s curious. I usually do travel with a Windows laptop, but I am mostly using Linux on it through WSL, Windows Subsystem for Linux. And in some cases, I’m dual booting Linux and Windows. I also need to be able to video edit, so on a longer trips, I usually have a bigger laptop with a bigger screen, lots of memory, good CPU, good GPU. All of that helps with video editing on Adobe Premiere. In general, I’m extremely minimalist except for the few, let’s call them the sentimental things, like all my podcast recording equipment fits into a small suitcase. I try to keep it as simple as possible. Thank you for the question, and see you at the next airport.

Conclusion


(03:05:51)
All right, I think it’s time to bring things to close. I’d like to give a big thanks to you for giving me your time and your support over the years. It means the world. If you want to get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/contact. There you can give feedback, ask questions, request guests for the podcast, or submit the Coffee with Lex form if you just want to chat with me over a cup of coffee. I’ll be traveling across the world a bunch this year, from Europe to South America and more, so it would be cool to do some small meetups and meet some interesting people. This has been a journey of a lifetime. Thank you for everything. Onto the next adventure. I love you all.

Transcript for Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #455 with Adam Frank.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
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Table of Contents

Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:

Introduction

Adam Frank
(00:00:00)
If we don’t ask how long they last, but instead ask what’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all, now matter how long they lasted. I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the university. That, we’re able to constrain. What we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. What that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. The only way that we’re the only time that this whole process from abiogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if everyone one of those experiments failed.

(00:00:51)
Therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the Pessimism Line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus-22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone. If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first. It’s happened somewhere else. To me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Lex Fridman
(00:01:36)
The following is a conversation with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist interested in the evolution of star systems and the search for alien civilizations in our universe. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Adam Frank.

Planet formation

Lex Fridman
(00:01:58)
You wrote a book about aliens. The big question, how many alien civilizations are out there?
Adam Frank
(00:02:04)
Yeah, that’s the question. The amazing thing is that, after two-and-a-half millennia of people yelling at each other, or setting each other on fire occasionally over the answer, we now actually have the capacity to answer that question. In the next 10, 20, 30 years, we’re going to have data relevant to the answer to that question. We’re going to have hard data finally that will, one way or the other … Even if we don’t find anything immediately, we will have gone through a number of planets. We’ll be able to start putting limits on how common life is.

(00:02:38)
The one answer I can tell you, which was an important part of the problem, is how many planets are there? Just like people have been arguing about the existence of life elsewhere for 2500 years, people have been arguing about planets for the exact same amount of time. You can see Aristotle yelling at Democritus about this. You can see they had very wildly different opinions about how common planets were going to be, and how unique Earth was. And that question got answered. Which is pretty remarkable, that in a lifetime, you can have a 2500-year-old question. The answer is they’re everywhere. There are planets everywhere.

(00:03:14)
It was possible that planets were really rare. We didn’t really understand how planets formed. If you go back to, say the turn of the 20th Century, there was a theory that said planets formed when two stars passed by each other closely, and then material was gravitationally squeezed out. In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.
Lex Fridman
(00:03:42)
One of the things you’ve done is simulated the formation of stars. How difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planet? Like simulate a solar system through the entire of the evolution of the solar system. This is a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there.
Adam Frank
(00:04:01)
That, actually, we’re able to do now. You can run simulations of the formation of planetary system. If you run the simulation, really where you want to start is a cloud of gas, these giant interstellar clouds of gas that may have a million times the mass of the Sun in them. You run a simulation of that, it’s turbulent. Gas is roiling and tumbling. Every now and then, you get a place where the gas is dense enough that gravity gets hold of it and it can pull it downward, so you’ll start to form a proto-star.

(00:04:32)
A proto-star is basically the young star, this ball of gas where nuclear reactions are getting started. But it’s also a disc. As material falls inward because everything’s rotating, as it falls inward, it’ll spin up and then it’ll form a disc. The material will collect in what’s called an accretion disc or a proto-planetary disc. You can simulate all of that.

(00:04:56)
Once you get into the disc itself and you want to do planets, things get a little bit more complicated because the physics gets more complicated. Now you got to start worrying about dust, because actually dust … Dust is the wrong word. It’s smoke, really. These are the tiniest bits of solids. They will coagulate in the disc to form pebbles, and then the pebbles will collide to form rocks. And then the rocks will form boulders, et cetera, et cetera. That process is super complicated. But we’ve been able to simulate enough of it to begin to get a handle on how planets form. How you accrete enough material to get the first proto-planets, or planetary embryos as we call them.

(00:05:37)
The next step is those things start slamming into each other to form planetary-sized bodies. Then the planetary bodies slam into each other. Earth, the Moon came about because there was a Mars-sized body that slammed into the Earth and basically blew off all the material. Then eventually formed the Moon.
Lex Fridman
(00:05:54)
And all of them have different chemical compositions, different temperatures?
Adam Frank
(00:06:00)
Yeah. The temperature of the material in the disc depends on how far away you are from the star.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:07)
Got it.
Adam Frank
(00:06:07)
It decreases.

(00:06:08)
There’s a really interesting point. Close to the star, temperatures are really high. The only thing that can condense, that can freeze out, is going to be stuff like metals. That’s why you find Mercury is this giant ball of iron, basically. Then as you go further out, stuff, the gas gets cooler. And now you can start getting things like water to freeze. There’s something we call the Snow Line, which is somewhere in our solar system, out around between Mars and Jupiter. That’s the reason why the giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all have huge amounts of ice in them, or water and ice.

(00:06:47)
Actually, Jupiter and Saturn don’t have so much, but the moons do. The moons have so much water in them that there’s oceans. We’ve got a number of those moons have got more water on them than there’s water on Earth.
Lex Fridman
(00:06:58)
Do you think it’s possible to do that kind of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of how likely an Earth-like planet is? Can we get the physics simulation done well enough to where we can start estimating what are the possible Earth-like things that could be generated?

Plate tectonics

Adam Frank
(00:07:17)
Yeah, I think we can. I think we’re learning how to do that now. One part is trying to just figure out how planets form themselves in doing the simulations. That cascade from dust grains up to planetary embryos, that’s hard to simulate because you got to do both the gas, and you got to do the dust and the dust colliding, and all that physics.

(00:07:40)
Once you get up to a planet-sized body, then you have to switch over to almost a different kind of simulation. Often what you’re doing is you’re assuming the planet this this spherical ball, and then you’re doing a 1D, a radial calculation. You’re just asking, “All right, what is the structure of it going to be? Am I going to have a solid iron core, or am I going to get a solid iron core with a liquid iron core out around it?” Like we have on Earth. Then you get a silicate, rocky mantle, and then a crust. All those details, those are beyond being able to do full 3D simulations from Ab Initio, from scratch. We’re not there yet.
Lex Fridman
(00:08:20)
How important are those details, like the crust and the atmosphere, do you think?
Adam Frank
(00:08:24)
Hugely important. I’m part of a collaboration at the University of Rochester, where we’re using the giant laser. Literally, this is called the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. We got a huge grant from the NSF to use that laser to slam tiny pieces of silica to understand what conditions are like at the center of the Earth. Or even more importantly, the center of Super-Earths.

(00:08:47)
This is what’s wild. The most common kind of planet in the universe, we don’t have in our solar system. Which is amazing, right? We’ve been able to study or observe enough planets now to get a census. We have an idea of whose average, whose weird. Our solar system’s weird, because the average planet has a mass somewhere between a few times the mass of the Earth, to maybe 10 times the mass of the Earth. That’s exactly where there are no planets in our solar system.

(00:09:20)
The smaller ones of those we call Super-Earths, the larger ones we call Sub-Neptunes. They’re anybody’s guess. We don’t really know what happens to material when you’re squeezed to those pressures, which is millions, tens of millions of times the pressure on the surface of the Earth. Those details really will matter of what’s on in there, because that will determine whether or not you have, say for example, plate tectonics.

(00:09:44)
We think plate tectonics may have been really important for life on Earth, for the evolution of complex life on Earth. It turns out, and this is the next generation where we’re going with the understanding the evolution of planets and life. It turns out that you actually have to think hard about the planetary context for life. You can just be like, “Oh, there’s a warm pond,” and then some interesting chemistry happens in the warm pond. You actually have to think about the planet as a whole and what it’s gone through in order to really understand whether a planet is a good place for life or not.
Lex Fridman
(00:10:16)
Why do you think plate tectonics might be useful for the formation of complex life?
Adam Frank
(00:10:21)
There’s a bunch of different things. One is that the Earth went through a couple of phases of being a snowball planet. We went into a period of glaciation where pretty much the entire planet was under ice. The oceans were frozen.

(00:10:36)
Early on in Earth’s history, there was barely any land. We were actually a water world, with just a couple of Australia-sized cratons they called them, proto-continents.

(00:10:48)
We went through these snowball Earth phases. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had an active plate tectonics, which had a lot of vulcanism on it, we could have been locked in that forever. Once you get into a snowball state, a planet can be trapped there forever. Which is maybe you already had life formed, but then because it’s so cold, you may never get anything more than just microbes.

(00:11:10)
What plate tectonics does, because it fosters more vulcanism, is that you’re going to get carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, which warms the planet up and gets you out of the snowball Earth phase. But even more, there’s even more really important things.

(00:11:26)
I just finished a paper where we were looking at something called the Hard Steps Model, which is this model that’s been out there for a long time that purports to say intelligent life in the universe will be really rare. It made all these assumptions about the Earth’s history, particularly about the history of life and the history of the planet have nothing to do with each other. It turns out, and as I was doing the reading for this, that Earth probably, early on, had a more mild form of plate tectonics, and then somewhere about a billion years ago, it ramped up.

(00:11:54)
That ramping up changed everything on the planet, because here’s a funny thing. The Earth used to be flat. All the Flat Earthers out there can get excited for one second.
Lex Fridman
(00:12:04)
Clip it. It still is.
Adam Frank
(00:12:08)
What I mean by that is that there really weren’t many mountain ranges. The beginning of, I think the term is orogenesis, mountain building, the true Himalayan-style giant mountains, didn’t happen until this more robust form of plate tectonics, where the plates are really being driven around the planet. That is when you get the crusts hitting each other, and they start pushing into these Himalayan- style mountains.

(00:12:30)
The weathering of that, the erosion of that puts huge amounts of nutrients, things that microbes want to use, into the oceans. And then what we call the net primary productivity, the bottom of the food chain, how much sugars they are producing, how much photosynthesis they are doing shot up by a factor of almost 1000. The fact that you had plate tectonics supercharged evolution in some sense. We’re not exactly sure how it happened, but it’s clear that the amount of life, the amount of living activity that was happening really got a boost from the fact that something there was this new vigorous form of plate tectonics.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:10)
It’s nice to have turmoil. In terms of temperature, in terms of surface geometries, in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.
Adam Frank
(00:13:20)
Yeah, that’s actually really true. Because what happens is, if you look at the history of life … That’s an excellent point that you’re bringing up. If you look at the history of life on Earth, we get abiogenesis somewhere around at least 3.8 billion years ago. That’s the first microbes. They take over enough that they really do, you get a biosphere. You get a biosphere that is actively changing the planet.

(00:13:40)
But then you go through this period they called the Boring Billion, where it’s a billion years and it’s just microbes. Nothing’s happening, it’s just microbes. The microbes are doing amazing things. They’re inventing fermentation. Thank you very much, we appreciate that. But it’s not until you get probably these continents slamming into each other, you really get the beginning of continents forming and driving changes that evolution has to respond to. That on a planetary scale, this turmoil, this chaos is creating new niches, as well as closing other ones. Biology, evolution has to respond to that.

(00:14:15)
Somewhere around there is when you get the Cambrian Explosion. It’s when suddenly every body plan … Evolution goes on an orgy, essentially. Yeah. It does look like that chaos or that turmoil was actually very helpful to evolution.

Extinction events

Lex Fridman
(00:14:31)
I wonder if there is some extremely elevated levels of chaos, almost like catastrophes behind every leap of evolution. You’re not going to have leaps. In human societies, we have an Einstein that comes up with a good idea. But it feels like on an evolutionary timescale, you need some real big drama going on for the evolutionary system to have to come up with a solution to that drama. An extra complex solution to that drama.
Adam Frank
(00:15:01)
Well, I’m not sure if that’s true. I don’t know if it needs to be an almost extinction event.
Lex Fridman
(00:15:05)
Right.
Adam Frank
(00:15:05)
Because it’s certainly true that we have gone through almost extinction events. We’ve had five mass extinctions. But you don’t necessarily see that there was this giant evolutionary leap happening after those.

(00:15:18)
With the comet impact, the K-T Boundary, certainly lots of niches opened up. That’s why we’re here, because our ancestors were little basically rodents, rats living under the footsteps of the dinosaurs. It was that comet impact that opened the route for us. That still took another 65 million years. It was like this thing immediately happened.

(00:15:42)
But what we found with this Hard Steps Paper, because the whole idea of the Hard Steps Paper was it was one of these anthropic reasoning kinds of things. Where Brandon Carter said, “Oh, look. The intelligence doesn’t show up on Earth until about almost close to when the end of the Sun’s lifetime.” He’s like, “Well, there should be no reason why the Sun’s lifetime and the time for evolution to produce intelligence should be the same.” He goes through all this reasoning, anthropic reasoning. He ends up with the idea that, “Oh, it must be that the odds of getting intelligence are super-low, and so that’s the hard step.”

(00:16:21)
There was a series of steps in evolution that were very, very hard. Because of that, you can calculate some probability distributions. Everybody loves a good probability distribution, and they went a long way with this. But it turns out that the whole thing is flawed because, when you look at it, of course the timescale for the Sun’s evolution and the timescale for the evolution on life are coupled, because the timescale for evolution of the Earth is coupled, is about the same timescale as the evolution of the Sun. It’s billions of years. The Earth evolves over billions of years.

(00:16:53)
Life and the Earth co-evolve. That’s what Brandon Carter didn’t see is that actually, the fate of the Earth the fate of life are inextricably combined. This is really important for astrobiology, too. Life doesn’t happen on a planet, it happens to a planet. This is something that David Grinspoon and Sara Walker both say, and I agree with this. It’s a really nice way of putting it.

(00:17:19)
Plate tectonics, the evolution of oxygen, of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life. These things, these are things that are happening where life and the planet are sloshing back-and-forth. Rather than, to your point about do you need giant catastrophes, maybe not giant catastrophes. But what happens is, as the Earth and life are evolving together, windows are opening up, evolutionary windows.

(00:17:46)
For example, life put oxygen into the atmosphere. When life invented this new form of photosynthesis about 2.5 billion years ago, that broke water apart to work to do its chemical shenanigans. It broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere. That’s why there’s oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s only because of life.

(00:18:07)
That opened up huge possibilities, new spaces for evolution to happen. But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever. The introduction of oxygen photosynthesis changed the planet forever, and it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Like for example, you and I, we need that amount of oxygen. Big-brained creatures need an oxygen-rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent for metabolism. You couldn’t get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed.

Biosphere

Lex Fridman
(00:18:41)
So really, on a scale of a planet when there’s billions and trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact.
Adam Frank
(00:18:53)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:18:53)
The chemical shenanigans of an individual organism when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet.
Adam Frank
(00:18:59)
Yeah. We know this for a fact now.

(00:19:00)
There was this thing, Gaia Theory, which James Lovelock introduced in the ’70s. And then, Lynn Margulis, the Biologist Lynn Margulis together. This Gaia Theory was the idea that life takes over a planet, life hijacks a planet in a way that the sum total of life creates these feedbacks between the planet and the life, such that it keeps the planet habitable. It’s kind of a homeostasis.

(00:19:29)
I can go out … Right now outside, it’s 100-degrees. And I go outside, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. I can go back to Rochester, New York in the winter, and it’s going to be zero-degrees, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. That’s homeostasis.

(00:19:42)
The idea of Gaia Theory was that life, the biosphere exerts this pressure on the planet or these feedbacks on the planet, that even as other things are changing, the planet will always stay in the right kinds of conditions for life. Now when this theory came out, it was very controversial. People were like, “Oh my God, what are you, smoking weed?” There were all these Gaian Festivals with Gaian dances. It became very popular in the New Age community.

(00:20:09)
But Lovelock actually, they were able to show that no, this has nothing to do with the planet being conscious or anything. It was about these feedbacks, that the biology, the biosphere can exert these feedbacks. We’re still unclear whether there are true Gaian feedbacks, in the sense that the planet can really exert complete control. But it is absolutely true that the biosphere is a major player in Earth’s history.
Lex Fridman
(00:20:35)
The biosphere fights for homeostasis on Earth.
Adam Frank
(00:20:39)
Okay. What I would say right now is I don’t know if I can say that scientifically. I can certainly say that the biosphere does a huge amount of the regulation of the planetary state. And over billions of years, has strongly modified the evolution of the planet. A true Gaian feedback would be exactly what you said.

(00:20:57)
The biosphere is somewhere … Sara Walker, and David Grinspoon, and I actually did a paper on this about the idea of planetary intelligence, or cognition across a planetary scale. I think that actually is possible. It’s not conscious, but there is a cognitive activity going on. The biosphere, in some sense, knows what is happening because of these feedbacks. It’s still unclear whether we have these full Gaian feedbacks, but we certainly have semi-Gaian feedbacks.

(00:21:24)
If there’s a perturbation on the planetary scale, temperature, insulation, how much sunlight’s coming in, the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that perturbation. Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something, temperature comes down.

Technosphere

Lex Fridman
(00:21:39)
Now I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback or elements of a Gaian feedback? Such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis. Open question, I guess.
Adam Frank
(00:21:51)
Well, I’m glad you asked that question. Because that paper that David, and Sara, and I wrote, what we were arguing was is that over the history of a planet … When life first forms, 3.8 billion years ago, it’s thin on the ground. You’ve got the first species, these are all microbes. There are not enough of them to exert any kind of these Gaian feedbacks. We call that an immature biosphere. But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust and it begins to exert these feedbacks keeping the planet in the place where it needs to be for life, we call that a mature biosphere. I’m sure later on, we’re going to talk about definitions of life and such. There’s this great term called autopoiesis that Francisco Varela, the Neurobiologist Francisco Varela came up with. He said, “One of the defining things about life is this property of autopoiesis,” which means self-creating and self-maintaining. Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself. It’s always trying to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. The biosphere, from this Gaian perspective, has been autopoietic for billions of years.

(00:23:02)
Now we just invented this technosphere in the last couple of hundred years. What we were arguing in that paper is that it’s an immature technosphere. Because right now, with climate change and all the other things we’re doing, the technosphere right now is destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. The real job for us if we’re going to last over geological timescales, if we want a technosphere that’s going to last tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then we’ve got to become mature. Which means to not undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive. As of right now, I’d say we’re not autopoietic.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:44)
Wow. I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that the technosphere should create perturbations as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations. Which sounds like a ridiculous statement. But basically, go out and play in the yard and hurt yourself, to strengthen. Or drink water from the pond.
Adam Frank
(00:24:13)
From the pond. Yeah, right. Get sick a few times.
Lex Fridman
(00:24:16)
To strengthen the immune system.
Adam Frank
(00:24:18)
Yeah. Well, you know it’s interesting with the technosphere, we can talk about this more. We’re just emerging as a technosphere, in terms of as an interplanetary technosphere. That’s really the next step for us. David Grinspoon talks about it. I love this idea of anti-accretion. This amazing thing that, for the first time over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet. It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down. But now we’re starting to push stuff out. The idea of planetary defense or such, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We’re going to start engineering, if we make it. I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system. We’ll be literally engineering the solar system.

(00:25:06)
But what you can think of right now with what’s happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that is the technosphere, is the creation of it, that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere. The technosphere sits on top of the biosphere, and if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you’re in trouble. The biosphere is not going away. There’s nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it’s the conditions for us. Humanity emerged out of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years interglacial period. We can’t tolerate very different kinds of Earths. That’s what I mean about a perturbation.

Emergence of intelligence

Lex Fridman
(00:25:53)
Before we forget, I got to ask you about this paper.
Adam Frank
(00:25:55)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:56)
It’s pretty interesting. There’s an interesting table here about hard steps. Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation to propionic acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons. Eye precursor, so formation of the eye.
Adam Frank
(00:26:13)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:13)
Complex multicellularity.
Adam Frank
(00:26:17)
That’s definitely one of the big ones.
Lex Fridman
(00:26:18)
Yeah. Interesting. What can you say about this chart? There are all kinds of papers talking about, what, the difficulty of these steps?
Adam Frank
(00:26:26)
Right. This was the idea. What Carter said was, “We’re using anthropic reasoning.” He said, “There must be a few very hard steps for evolution to get through to make it to intelligence.” Some steps are going to be easy, so every generation, you roll the dice. Yeah, it won’t take long for you to get that step. But there must be a few of them, and he said you could even calculate how many there were, five, six, in order to get to intelligence.

(00:26:54)
This paper here, this plot is all these different people who’ve written all these papers. This is the point, actually. You can see all these papers that were written on the hard steps. Each one proposing a different set of what those steps should be. There’s this other idea from biology of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps.

(00:27:13)
But what we actually found was that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. What’s amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field. Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this. But the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved.

(00:27:43)
If you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a bio-geophysicist, they’d look at you when you explained this to them and they’d be like, “What? What are you guys doing?” It turns out, none of the details, or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with what the people who actually study the planet and its evolution.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:06)
Is it mostly about the fact that there’s not really discrete, big steps? Is this a gradual, continual kind of process?
Adam Frank
(00:28:12)
Well, there’s two things. The first most important one was that the planet and the biosphere have evolved together.
Lex Fridman
(00:28:16)
Together.
Adam Frank
(00:28:17)
That’s something that most bio-geophysicists completely accept. It was the first thing that Carter rejected. He said, “No, that’s probably not possible.” And yet, if he’d only had more discussions with this other community, he would have seen, no, there are actually windows that open up.

(00:28:34)
Then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not. Because for hard, what we mean by a hard step is, like I said, every time there’s a generation, every time there’s a next generation born, you’re rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. The idea of something being a hard step, there’s two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be. Or actually not be a hard step at all.

(00:28:56)
One is that you see something that has occurred in evolution that has only happened once. Let’s take the opposite, we see something that’s happened multiple times. Like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. Making wings is not a hard step.

(00:29:12)
There’s certain other things that people say, “No, that’s a hard step.” Oxygen, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they tend to be so long ago that we’ve lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that made this innovation, but they’re just gone now so you can’t tell, so there’s information loss.

(00:29:32)
The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder. That somebody, some species makes the innovation, but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again. Yeah, it only happened once but it happened once because basically, the creature was so successful it took over, and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it.

(00:29:49)
Yeah. The interesting thing about this was seeing how much, once you look at the details of life’s history on Earth, how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model. It shows you that those details, as we were talking about with do you have to know about the planet, do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you’re going to have to.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:07)
To be fair to Carter on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co-evolving. Because it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions.
Adam Frank
(00:30:23)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:24)
And then we can, from an outside perspective, analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create. Then there’s a binary yes or no at will it create life. But if they co-evolve, it’s a really complex dynamical system, the way everything is … Because it’s much more difficult from the perspective of settee. Of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones are actually producing life.
Adam Frank
(00:30:50)
But I think we’re at the point now, now there may be other kinds of principles that actually … Co-evolution actually has its own. Not deterministic, you’re done with determinism.
Lex Fridman
(00:30:59)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(00:31:00)
But complex systems have patterns.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:03)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(00:31:03)
Complex systems have constraints. That’s actually what we’re going to be looking for, are constraints on them.

(00:31:10)
Again, nothing against Carter. It was a brilliant idea. But it just goes to show you … I’m a theoretical physicist. Give me a simplified model, with dynamical equations and some initial conditions, I’m very happy. But there’s this great XTC comic, where somebody’s working something out on the board, and this physicist is looking over and saying, ” Oh, oh, I just wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. Do you guys even have a journal for this?” The subtitle is Why Everybody Hates Physicists.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:37)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(00:31:38)
Sometimes that approach totally works.
Lex Fridman
(00:31:40)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(00:31:40)
Sometimes physicists, we can be very good at zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside so you can get to the heart of an issue. That’s very useful sometimes. Other times, it obfuscates. Other times, it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity.

Drake equation

Lex Fridman
(00:32:02)
Speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation, let’s return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and talk about the Drake Equation.
Adam Frank
(00:32:12)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:12)
Can you explain the Drake Equation?
Adam Frank
(00:32:15)
People have various feelings about the Drake Equation. It can be abused. The story actually is really interesting.

(00:32:23)
Frank Drake in 1960 does the first ever astrobiological experiment. He gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars, and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody had done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. He does it, and he’s waiting for everybody to make fun of him. Instead, he gets a phone call from the government and says, “Hey, we want you to do a meeting on interstellar communications.” He’s like, “Okay.”

(00:32:51)
They organized a meeting with just eight people. A young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well. The night before, Drake has to come up with an agenda. How do you come up with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one’s ever talked about before? What he does, what’s so brilliant about the Drake Equation, is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are there out there into a bunch of sub-problems. He breaks it into seven sub-problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that, when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with.

(00:33:28)
The first term is the rate at which stars form. The second term is the fraction of those stars that have plants, F-sub-P. The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence. After that, it’s the fraction of planets where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization. Then finally, the last term, which is the one that we really care about, is the lifetime, have a civilization and how long does it last.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:08)
When you say we, we humans?
Adam Frank
(00:34:09)
We humans, because we’re staring at multiple guns pointing at us.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:13)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(00:34:14)
Nuclear war, climate change, AI. How long in general does civilizations last?

(00:34:20)
Now each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was, what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance. By breaking the problem up into these seven sub-problems, he gave astronomers something to do. This is always with a new research field, you need a research program or else you just have a bunch of vague questions. You don’t even know really what you’re trying to do.

(00:34:41)
The star people could figure out how many stars were forming per year. The people who were interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:50)
These are their own fields. Essentially by creating this equation, he’s launching new fields.
Adam Frank
(00:34:56)
Yeah. That’s exactly … He gave astrobiology, which wasn’t even a term then, a roadmap. “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that.”
Adam Frank
(00:35:03)
And then, a roadmap like, “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that, you go do that.” And it had such far-reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful marching orders for all these different groups. For example, it’s because of the Drake equation in some sense that people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978, two meetings, 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part by the people who were involved in SETI getting NASA together to say, “Look, okay, look, what’s the roadmap for us to develop technologies to find planets?”

(00:35:45)
So, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it’s not a law of nature. It’s not equal to MC squared. And so, you can see it being abused in some sense. Yeah, it’s generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good, I’ve written some of those. And some of those papers are bad, I’m not sure where my paper fits in on those. I’m saying one should be careful about what you’re using it for. But in terms of understanding the problem that astrobiology faces, this really broke it up in a useful way.

Exoplanets

Lex Fridman
(00:36:20)
We could talk about each one of these, but let’s just look at exoplanets.
Adam Frank
(00:36:24)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:25)
So, that’s a really interesting one. I think when you look back hundreds of years from now, was it in the 90s when they first detected the first-
Adam Frank
(00:36:32)
Yeah. ’92 and ’95. ’95 to me was really, that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sun-like star. To me, that was the water, the dam being broken.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:40)
I think that’s one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
Adam Frank
(00:36:45)
I agree. I agree.
Lex Fridman
(00:36:46)
Right now, I guess nobody’s celebrating it too much because you don’t know what it really means. But I think once we almost certainly will find life out there, it will obviously allow us to generalize across the entire galaxy of the entire universe. So, if you can find life on a planet, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing across the entire universe.
Adam Frank
(00:37:12)
You can, all you need is one. Right now, our understanding of life, we have one example. We have N equals one example of life. So, that means we could be an accident. It could be that we’re the only place in the entire universe where this weird thing called life has occurred. Get one more example and now you’re done, because if you have one more example, now you don’t have to find all the other examples. You just know that it’s happened more than once, and now you are from a Bayesian perspective, you can start thinking like, “Yeah. Life is not something that’s hard to make.”
Lex Fridman
(00:37:43)
Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You’ve also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer?
Adam Frank
(00:37:51)
So, there was this paper we wrote, Woody Sullivan and I in 2016, where we said, “Look, we have all this exoplanet data now.” So, the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it’s one. Every fricking star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. I mean, it’s mind-boggling because those are all places, right? They’re either gas giants, probably with moons, so the moons are places you can stand and look out. Or they’re like terrestrial worlds where even if there’s not life, there’s still snow falling and there’s oceans washing up on shorelines.

(00:38:33)
It’s incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So, the first term was F sub P, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone on average, and it turns out to be one over five, so around 0.2. So, that means you just count five of them go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five. One of them has an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, like, whoa.
Lex Fridman
(00:39:00)
So, what defines a habitable zone?

Habitable zones

Adam Frank
(00:39:02)
Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in the 1958 by the Chinese American astronomer, Xu Sheng, and it was a brilliant idea. It said, “Look, I can do the simple calculation. If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what’s the temperature of the planet? What’s the temperature of the surface?” So now, give it a standard Earth-like atmosphere and ask, “Could there be liquid water on the surface?” We believe that liquid water is really important for life. There could be other things that’s happening fine, but if you were to start off trying to make life, you’d probably choose water as your solvent for it.

(00:39:41)
So basically, the habitable zone is the band of orbits around a star where you can have liquid water on the surface. You could take a glass of water, pour it on the surface, and it would just pull up. It wouldn’t freeze immediately, which would happen if your planet is too far out and it wouldn’t just boil away if your planet’s too close in. So, that’s the formal definition of the habitable zone. So, it’s a nice strict definition, there’s probably way more going on than that, but this is a place to start.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:07)
Well, we should say it’s a place to start, I do think it’s too strict of a constraint.
Adam Frank
(00:40:11)
I would agree.
Lex Fridman
(00:40:12)
We’re talking about temperature where water can be on the surface. There’s so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil where the temperature varies, whether it’s volcanic, so interaction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of planets that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff.
Adam Frank
(00:40:33)
Yeah. Well, for example, we know in our own solar system we have, say Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which has got a hundred-mile-deep ocean under 10 miles of ice. That’s not in the habitable zone, that is outside the habitable zone, and that may be the best place. It’s got more water than Earth does, all of its oceans. It’s twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth. So, that may be a really great for life to form, and it’s outside the habitable zone. So, the habitable zone is a good place to start and it helps us. And there’s reasons why you do want to focus on the habitable zone, because like Europa, I won’t be able to see from across telescopic distances across light years.

(00:41:12)
I wouldn’t be able to see life on Europa because it’s under 10 miles of ice. So, with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we’re thinking they have atmospheres. Atmospheres are the things we can characterize across 10, 50 light years and we can see biosignatures as we’re going to talk about. So, there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of extra solar life.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:37)
But for me, when I look up at the stars, it’s very likely that there’s a habitable planet or moon in each of the stars, habitable defined broadly.
Adam Frank
(00:41:47)
Yeah, I think that’s not unreasonable to say, especially since the formal definition, you get one in five, right? One in five is a lot, there’s a lot of stars in the sky. So yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there’s a pretty good chance that there’s something habitable orbiting it. It is not a unreasonable scientific claim.

Fermi Paradox

Lex Fridman
(00:42:06)
To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi paradox? Why haven’t we seen them?
Adam Frank
(00:42:17)
Okay, the Fermi paradox. I love talking about the Fermi paradox because there is no Fermi paradox. Dun dun, dun dun. Yeah, so the Fermi paradox, let’s talk a about the Fermi paradox and the history of it. So, Enrico Fermi, it’s 1950, he’s walking with his friends at Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab to the Cantina, and there had been this cartoon in the New Yorker, they all read the New Yorker. And the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of garbage cans being disappearing in New York. And this cartoon said, “Oh, it’s UFOs.” Because it’s 1950, the first big UFO craze happened in ’47.

(00:42:55)
So, they were laughing about this as they’re walking, and they started being physicists, started talking about interstellar travel, interstellar propulsion. Conversation goes on for a while, conversation turns to something else, they’ve gone to other things. About 40 minutes later, over lunch, Fermi blurts out, “Well, where is everybody?” Typical Fermi sort of thing. He’d done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that, look, if intelligence is common, that even traveling at sub lights speeds a civilization could cross, hop from one star system to the other and spread it out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.

(00:43:34)
And he realized this, and so he was like, “Why aren’t they here now?” And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart where he actually went through this calculation and showed and said, “Well, there’s nobody here now, therefore, there’s nobody anywhere.” Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox, why aren’t they here now? But something happened after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence. People got this idea in their head that like, “Oh, we’ve been looking for decades now for signals of extra-terrestrial intelligence that we haven’t found any. Therefore, there’s nothing out there.

(00:44:12)
So, we’ll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There’s never been any money to look. SETI was always done by researchers who were scabbing some time, some extra time from their other projects to look a little bit at the sky where the telescope, telescopes are expensive. So, Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for SETI, and imagine that’s an ocean. All the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how when you look, how often you look.

(00:44:49)
Then they summed up all the SETI searches that had ever been done, they went through the literature. And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you’re looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That’s how much of the ocean that we’ve looked up. We’ve dragged a hot tub’s worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it, and so now are we going to say, “Well, there’s no fish in the ocean.” So, there is absolutely positively no indirect Fermi paradox, we just haven’t looked, but we’re starting to look. So finally, we’re starting to look, that’s what’s exciting.

(00:45:25)
The direct Fermi paradox, there are so many ways out of that. There’s a book called 77 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox that you can pick your favorite one. It just doesn’t carry a lot of weight because there’s so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Jonathan Carroll, one of my collaborators, we actually simulated the galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sub light speed from one star to the other, gathering resources heading to the next one. And so, we could actually track the expansion wave across the galaxy, have one IA biogenesis event, and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled. And it is absolutely true that wave crosses, Hart was right, Fermi was right, that wave crosses very quickly. But civilizations don’t last forever, so one question is when did they visit? When did they come to Earth? So, if you give civilizations a finite lifetime, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years, what you find is you now have a steady state. Civilizations are dying, they’re coming back, they’re traveling between the stars. What you find then is you can have big holes opened up. You can have regions of space where there is nobody for millions of years. And so, if we’re living in one of those bubbles right now, then maybe we revisited but we revisited 100 million years ago.

(00:46:39)
And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was dinosaurs or aliens that was here a 100 million years ago, there’s no way to tell, there’s no record left over, the fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that you’d be able to find iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is there’s no way.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:09)
So, if there was an alien camp here, an alien village, a small civilization, maybe even large civilizations?
Adam Frank
(00:47:17)
Even a large civilization, even if it was-
Lex Fridman
(00:47:19)
100 million years ago?
Adam Frank
(00:47:20)
And it lasted 10,000 years, fossil record’s not going to have it. Yeah, the fossil record is too sparse, most things don’t fossilize.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:28)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(00:47:28)
And 10,000 years is a blink in the eye of geological time. So, Gavin called this the Silurian Hypothesis after the Doctor who episode with the lizard creatures, the Silurians. And so, that paper got a lot of press, but it was an important idea, and this was really Gavin’s, I was just helping with the astrobiology. That to recognize that like, “Yeah, we could have been visited a long time ago there just would be no record.” Yeah, it’s mind-blowing.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:56)
It’s really mind-blowing.
Adam Frank
(00:47:57)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:47:57)
And it’s also a good reminder that intelligent species have been here for a very short amount of time.
Adam Frank
(00:48:05)
Very short amount of time. Yeah. This is not to say that there was, so I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper, and I had to always emphasize, we’re not saying there was a Silurian, but we’re just saying that if there was, that’s why I love Gavin’s question. Gavin’s question was just like, “How could you tell”? It was a very beautifully scientific question. That’s what we were really showing is that unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody’s done so far, there’s not an obvious way to tell that there could have been civilizations here earlier on.
Lex Fridman
(00:48:40)
I’ve actually been reading a lot about ancient civilizations, and it just makes me sad how much of the wisdom of that time is lost and how much guessing is going on, whether it’s in South America, what happened in the jungle.
Adam Frank
(00:48:57)
Like the Amazon, that was the conquistadors came and wiped everybody out, and especially just even the plague may have decimated. So yeah, how much of that civilization.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:09)
And there’s a lot of theories, and because of archaeology only looks at cities, they don’t really know the origins of humans.
Adam Frank
(00:49:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:49:19)
And there’s a lot of really interesting theories, and there are of course controversial and there’s a lot of controversial people in every discipline, but archaeology is a fascinating one because we know so little. They’re basically storytellers, you’re assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces, and it’s fascinating. It’s humbling and it’s sad that there could be entire civilizations, ancient civilizations that are either almost entirely or entirely lost.
Adam Frank
(00:49:48)
Yeah. Well, the indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been millions and millions. We get this idea that like, oh, the Europeans came and it was empty. But it may have only been empty because the plague gets swept up from what happened in Mesoamerica, and they didn’t really build cities. They didn’t build wooden or stone cities, they built wooden cities.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:13)
Everybody seems to be building pyramids and they’re really damn good at it. I don’t know-
Adam Frank
(00:50:17)
What it is up with a pyramid. Why does that apply? What archetype in our brain is that?
Lex Fridman
(00:50:22)
And it is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes, is that independent civilizations formed and they had a lot of similar dynamics like human nature when it builds up hierarchies in a certain way, it builds up myths and religions in a certain way, it builds pyramids in a certain way. It goes to war, all this kind of stuff independently, which is fascinating.
Adam Frank
(00:50:48)
Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on these as complex systems, the origin of hierarchies and such. Very cool.
Lex Fridman
(00:50:55)
Yeah, Santa Fe folks, complexity in general is really cool.
Adam Frank
(00:50:59)
Really cool.

Alien civilizations

Lex Fridman
(00:51:00)
What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact? Going back to this paper, a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe. This paper that expands on the Drake equation, what are some interesting things in this paper?
Adam Frank
(00:51:16)
Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, “Look, we have all of this exoplanet data.” It’s got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So, F sub P, that’s the second term, fraction of stars that have planets, and then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So, what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so, we said, “Okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation?”

(00:51:46)
And so, we realized is, “Well, okay, we got to get rid of time.” The lifetime thing, we can’t say anything about that, but if we don’t ask how long do they last but instead ask, “What’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all?” No matter how long they lasted, I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe and that we were able to constrain. And so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run.

(00:52:35)
And the only way that we’re this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed. So therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the pessimism line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, “Look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, 1 in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone.” If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first, it’s happened somewhere else. And to me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile.

(00:53:17)
It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:29)
10 billion trillion experiments.
Adam Frank
(00:53:33)
Yeah, that’s a lot of experiments.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:35)
That’s a lot.
Adam Frank
(00:53:35)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:35)
1,000 is a lot.
Adam Frank
(00:53:36)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:36)
100 is a lot.
Adam Frank
(00:53:39)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:53:40)
If we, normal humans saw 100 experiments, and we knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built we would say for sure, in 100 you’ll get another one.
Adam Frank
(00:53:55)
Yeah. So, that’s why these kinds of arguments you have to be careful of what they can do. But I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that’s why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there’s been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they’ve been yelling at each other, that’s all they had to go with. And with Giordano Bruno in 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We thought this was like the plank length, this was the plank length of astrobiology.

(00:54:27)
Gave you an actual number that if you could somehow calculate what the probability of forming a technological civilization was, this thing shows you where the limit is. As long as you’re above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually absolutely, it has occurred in the history. Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.
Lex Fridman
(00:54:47)
So, to me, at least, the big question is FE, which is basically a biogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate in a planet? Because all the other ones seem very likely, everything seems very likely. The only open question to me is how hard is it for life to originate?
Adam Frank
(00:55:03)
There’s lots of ways to, again, we don’t know unless we look, and you had Sarah Walker around not too long ago, she’s very interested in origins of life. So, lots of people are working on this. But I think it’s hard looking at the history of the Earth, and again, you can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, forming life I don’t think is hard. Getting basic biology started, I don’t think is hard. It’s still wild, it’s an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn’t. That’s one of the things I like about Sarah’s work, we’re pursuing on a different level about life as the only system that uses information. But still, regardless of all those kinds of details, life is probably easy to make. That’s my gut feeling.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:55)
Day by day, this changes for me, but I just see that once you create bacteria, it is off to the races. You’re going to get complex life as long as you have enough time. That boring billion, but I just can’t imagine a habitable planet not having a couple of billion to spare.
Adam Frank
(00:56:15)
Yeah, a couple billion years to spare. There is a mystery there about why did it take so long with the Cambrian explosion, but that may be again, about these windows. That it couldn’t happen until the window, the planet and the life had evolved together enough that they together opened the window for the next step. Intelligent life and how long intelligent, technological civilizations, I think there’s a big question about how long those last. And I’m hopeful, but in terms of just, I think life is absolutely going to be common, pretty common in the universe.
Lex Fridman
(00:56:52)
Yeah. I think, again, if I were to bet everything, even in advanced civilizations are common. So, to me then the only explanation is the L. Our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.
Adam Frank
(00:57:09)
Yeah. You think about it, we’ve only been around, truly when we think about in Drake’s definition, you had to have radio telescopes, that’s been 100 years. And if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, for us, it’d be pretty amazing. But that still, that wouldn’t be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So, you really need it to be hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question, which I am very interested in, which is how do we even talk about, I call it the billion-year civilization. How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way, what happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?
Lex Fridman
(00:57:52)
Yeah. How do you even simulate the trajectories as civilizations can take across that kind of timescale?
Adam Frank
(00:57:58)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:57:58)
When all the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so, 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations.
Adam Frank
(00:58:06)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:08)
And I don’t know what you put it at, but maybe 100 years that we’ve been technological?
Adam Frank
(00:58:12)
And we’re ready to blow ourselves to bits or drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it’s really interesting. But there’s got to be a way that I think that’s really a frontier. So, you had David Kipping on not too long ago, and David and I did a paper and Caleb Scharf, David really drove this. Where it was a Bayesian calculation to ask the question, “If you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older?” And you could see, this is not hard to do, but it was great. The formalism, the formalism was hard. It’s intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they’re older, probably much older.

(00:58:49)
So, that means you really do need to think about like, “Okay, how do billion-year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave?” And yeah, what’s so cool about it, it’s so much fun because you have to imagine the unimaginable. Obviously biological evolution can happen on those kinds of timescales, so you wouldn’t even really be the same thing you started out as. But social forms, what kind of social forms can you imagine that would be continuous over that? Or maybe they wouldn’t be continuous, should get they drop out, they destroy themselves, and then they come back. So, maybe it’s a punctuated evolution, but this is the fun part we have to work this out.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:31)
Well, one way to approach that question is what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis is you get greater and greater technological innovation. So, if you expand out into the universe and you have up to Kardashev scale, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself? Just achieve stability while still growing. That’s an interesting question, I think it’s probably simulatable?
Adam Frank
(01:00:00)
Could be, agent-based modeling you could do it with. So, our group has used agent-based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox that was agent-based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this, other groups have done this to do use agent-based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies, the formation of stable hierarchies. So, I think it’s actually very doable, but understanding the assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those, that is what is the frontier.

Colonizing Mars

Lex Fridman
(01:00:32)
Do you think if humans colonize Mars, the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now? That’s a thing to load into the agent-based simulation we’re talking about.
Adam Frank
(01:00:50)
Yeah. If we settle it, Mars will very quickly want to become its own nation.
Lex Fridman
(01:00:53)
Well, no, there’s already going to be nations on Mars that’s guaranteed-
Adam Frank
(01:00:58)
Yeah. And they’re there on-
Lex Fridman
(01:00:59)
2 million people. The moment you have 1 million people, there’s going to be two tribes.
Adam Frank
(01:01:03)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:04)
And then they’re going to start fighting.
Adam Frank
(01:01:06)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:01:06)
And the question is, interplanetary fighting. How quickly does that happen and does it have a different nature to it because of the distances?
Adam Frank
(01:01:14)
Are you a fan of The Expanse? Have you watched The Expanse? Great show, I highly recommend to everybody. It’s based on a series of books that are excellent. It’s on Prime, six seasons, and it’s basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now, and the entire solar system is settled, and it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, the journal, what was it? Foreign Affairs said the best show on TV about politics it takes place is interplanetary. So yeah, I think human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict.

(01:01:49)
And I don’t think it’ll be necessarily all that different because really I think within a few hundred years we will have lots of people in the solar system, and it doesn’t even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I always wanted to know about whether an idea in The Expanse was really possible. In The Expanse, the asteroid belt, what they’ve done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, “Wow, what a cool idea.”

(01:02:17)
And when I ran the blog for NPR, actually talked to the guys and said, “Did you guys calculate this to see whether it’s possible?” Sadly, it’s not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings. The rock would just fall apart, it would break. But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer wide asteroid would expand out to, you could get a Manhattan’s worth of material inside.

(01:02:54)
So, forget about even colonizing Mars space stations or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions of people living in the solar system.
Lex Fridman
(01:03:11)
You think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars on the planetary surface?
Adam Frank
(01:03:16)
It’s a lot easier on some level. It depends on how with nanofabrication and such, but getting down to gravity well is hard. So, there’s a certain way in which it’s a lot easier to build real estate out of the asteroids, but we’ll probably do both. I think what’ll happen is the next, should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other, and AI? The next 1,000 years of human history is the solar system. And so, I think we’ll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can, and what I love about, what’s hopeful about it is this idea you’re going to have all of these pockets, and I’m sure there’s going to be a Mormon space habitat.

(01:03:57)
Whatever you want, a libertarian space habitat, everybody’s going to be able to create, there’ll be lots of experiments in human flourishing. And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:15)
Do you think that’s a good backup solution to go out into space, so to avoid the possibility of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?
Adam Frank
(01:04:24)
Well, I think I want to be always careful with that, because like I said, it’s centuries that we’re talking about. So, the problem with climate change, and same thing with nuclear war, it’s breathing down our necks now. So, trying to establish a base on Mars it’s going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it’s not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that. There’s still enough nuclear weapons to really do horrific things to the planet for human beings.

(01:04:59)
So, I don’t think it’s a backup plan in that way, but I do think, like I said, it’s the prize. If we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to play around and experiment with and do really cool things with.
Lex Fridman
(01:05:11)
Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there’s a urgency, a real urgency, like a catastrophe. Maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it’s like, holy shit, this is for sure a bigger one is looming. Maybe if geopolitically the war between China and the United States escalates where there’s this tension that builds and builds and builds and it becomes more obvious that we need to really, really [inaudible 01:05:39].
Adam Frank
(01:05:39)
Yeah. I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a self-sufficient base is so far away. That say you start doing that and then there is a full-scale nuclear exchange that base is, it’s not going to last because the self-sufficiency requires a kind of economy. Literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars that we are centuries from. Like I said, three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries. Look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff. And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is centuries long.

(01:06:17)
So, that’s why I think we’d be better off trying to solve these problems than I just think the odds that we’re going to be able to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So, we’d have to deal with the threat.
Lex Fridman
(01:06:35)
That’s an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars or out in space as a space habitat where Earth entirely could be destroyed, you could still survive.
Adam Frank
(01:06:47)
Yeah. Because it’s really what about, thinking about complex systems? A space habitat would have to be as robust as an ecosystem. As the kind of thing, you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. That’s why I always think that if this process of going out into space will help us with climate change and with thinking about making a long-term sustainable version of human civilization. Because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this.

(01:07:23)
And so, A, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn’t mess with the biosphere, mess with the biosphere’s capacity to support our technosphere? So, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you’re thinking about building a small-scale version of this. So, I think the two problems are going to feedback on each other.
Lex Fridman
(01:07:44)
Well, there’s also the other possibility of the movie Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, where we can create this life gun that just shoots as opposed to engineering everything. Basically, seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing it seems like. So, as opposed to with a space habitat, you basically have to build the entire biosphere and technosphere, the whole thing-
Adam Frank
(01:08:13)
The whole thing.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:13)
… by yourself. If you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you’d be surprised what happens.
Adam Frank
(01:08:25)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:25)
Honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria, a giant number of organisms from Earth into on Mars, on some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system, I feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive.
Adam Frank
(01:08:45)
The moon is hard, the moon may be really hard. But I wonder if somebody must’ve done these experiments. Because we know they’re extremophiles, we know that you can go down 10 miles below the Earth’s surface. And there are things where there’s no sunlight, the conditions are so extreme and there’s lots of microbes having a great time living off the radioactivity in the rocks. But they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions, so I’m not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria, so somebody must’ve done these experiments. How fast could microbial evolution occur in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody who figures out, ” Okay, I can deal with this.”

(01:09:30)
I think the Moon’s too much because it’s so sterile. But Mars, I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know, but it’s an interesting idea.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:37)
I wonder if somebody has done those experiments.
Adam Frank
(01:09:39)
Yeah, you think somebody would, let’s take a bunch of microbes-
Lex Fridman
(01:09:43)
The harshest possible condition of all different kinds, temperature, all this kind of stuff.
Adam Frank
(01:09:46)
Right, pressure, salinity, and then just dump a bunch of things that are not used to it, and then just see, does everybody just die? That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(01:09:55)
The thing about life, it flourishes in a non-sterile environment where there’s a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh-
Lex Fridman
(01:10:03)
… Options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh. In the lab, I don’t know if you can reconstruct harsh conditions plus options for survival. You know what I mean? You have to have the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow, even when it’s a super harsh condition. So that’s actually not a trivial experiment and if somebody did that experiment in the lab, I’d be a little bit skeptical because I could see bacteria doesn’t survive in this kind of temperature. But then I’d be like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Adam Frank
(01:10:38)
Right. Are there other options? Is the condition rich enough?
Lex Fridman
(01:10:41)
Rich enough, yeah.
Adam Frank
(01:10:42)
There’s an alternative view though, which is, there’s this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. So there’s been 1,000,000 sentry ship stories where Earth sends out a generation ship or sentry ship, and it goes to another planet and they land and they colonize. And on this one, they get all the way there and they think the planet’s going to be habitable. And it turns out that it’s not habitable for earth life. There’s bacteria or prions actually, that just kill people in the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy. I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I’m not saying necessarily supporting it, but that actually, life reflects the planetary conditions… Not the planetary, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just be like, “Oh, just drop it over here and it’ll…”

(01:11:35)
Because the bacteria, even though they’re individual examples of life, and I believe this the true unit of life, it’s not DNA, it’s not a cell, it’s the biosphere. It’s the whole community.
Lex Fridman
(01:11:46)
Yeah. That’s actually an interesting field of study is how when you arrive from one planet to another… So we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, what is the way to integrate without killing yourself or-
Adam Frank
(01:12:06)
Or the other one?
Lex Fridman
(01:12:06)
Or the other one? Let’s stick to biology. That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that.
Adam Frank
(01:12:18)
Because everything on life has the same lineage. We all come from LUCA, the last universal common ancestor. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, “Oh, well, it’s okay,” because that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don’t even know each other.
Lex Fridman
(01:12:35)
Right.
Adam Frank
(01:12:37)
And then the other version is you get there, you land, and instantly, the nose bleeds and you’re dead. So it’s-
Lex Fridman
(01:12:43)
Unfortunately, I think it’s the latter.
Adam Frank
(01:12:44)
Yeah, it feels like the alien kind of thing.

Search for aliens

Lex Fridman
(01:12:48)
So as we look out there, according to the Drake equations we just discussed, it seems impossible to me that there’s not civilizations everywhere. So how do we look at them, this process of SETI?
Adam Frank
(01:12:59)
I have to put on my scientist hat and just say, my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common. I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse, but until… We got to go look, it’s all armchair astronomy.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:15)
That’s from a rigorous scientific perspective. From my bro science perspective, it seems, again, smoking the aforementioned weed-
Adam Frank
(01:13:24)
Smoking the weed, yeah. After the bong hit, it seems so.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:28)
Honestly, it really just seems impossible to me that there’s not potentially dead, but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.
Adam Frank
(01:13:37)
Yeah, yeah. The potentially dead part, I think, right. It could be that making civilizations is easy, they just don’t last long. So when we went out there, we’d find a lot of extinct civilizations.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:45)
Extinct civilizations. Yeah. Apex predators don’t survive. They get better, better, better.
Adam Frank
(01:13:51)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:51)
And they die, kill themselves all somehow. Anyway. So just how do we find them?
Adam Frank
(01:13:56)
Yeah. So SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Technology is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. Some people in my field are. So I’m sorry folks, but what I really like is the idea of technosignatures because I think to me, SETI is the… First of all, intelligence. We’re not really looking for intelligence. We’re looking for technology, and SETI, the classic idea of SETI is the radio telescopes and contact, Jodie Foster with the headphones. That whole thing is still part, it’s still active, there’s still great things going on with it, but suddenly, this whole new window opened up. When we discovered exoplanets, we now found a new way to look for intelligence civilizations or life in general in a way that doesn’t have any of the assumptions that had to go into the classic radio SETI. And specifically, what I mean is we’re not looking for somebody sending us a beacon. You really needed that with a classic model, for a bunch of different reasons. You have to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon.

(01:14:56)
Now, because we know exactly where to look and we know exactly how to look, we can just go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization, going about its civilizationing business, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a technosignature. It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere, and that’s really important. That is why the whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological, that biospheres and technospheres are so potent, they change the entire planet, and you can see that from 20 light years.

(01:15:36)
So let’s give an example of a biosignature to start off with, which would be a signature of a biosphere, oxygen. Right? On earth at least, we know that oxygen is only in the atmosphere because life put it there. If life went away, the oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair, they would disappear very quickly. They’d react away. They’d all be gone. So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that’s a good bet that there’s a biosphere there. Okay, what about technospheres? Technospheres, so I’m the principal investigator on the first grant NASA has ever given to do these exoplanet technosignatures. For reasons we can talk about, NASA had gotten pretty gun-shy about funding anything about intelligent life, but okay. What’s an example of a technosignature? Well, one could be atmospheric, “Pollution.” I’m going to put, “Pollution,” in quotes here because it doesn’t have to be pollution, but gases like chlorofluorocarbons.

(01:16:33)
So we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake. It was affecting the ozone, but we put so much in there that actually, this is one of the things we did, we did a paper where we showed, you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet, pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere. And that would for sure tell you that there was a technological civilization there, because there’s no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:11)
So in the case of the biosphere, you’re looking for anomalies in the spectrograph?
Adam Frank
(01:17:17)
I wouldn’t necessarily call these anomalies. For biosignature, I’m looking for things that a geosphere, right? That just rock and air wouldn’t produce on its own.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:28)
What kind of chemicals would life produce?
Adam Frank
(01:17:29)
Right. And that’s the interesting thing. So we can use earth as an example. We can say, look, oxygen. We know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn’t for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phylloplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it, that’s sometimes mentioned. And there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, “Well, we’re not saying we see it, but there’s a bunch of noise in the spectra right there.” So there’s a whole list of things that earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures, but now we’re reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with earth’s history, but we think that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life. What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint?

(01:18:20)
So one of these things could be the structure of the network of chemical reactions that biology always produces very different chemical networks, who’s reacting with who, than just rock and water. So there’s been some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere, and maybe that information shows you like, “Oh, there’s too much information here. There must’ve been biology happening. It’s not just rock.” Same thing for techno. That’s what we’re working on right now, for technosignatures as well.
Lex Fridman
(01:18:58)
So how do you detect technosignatures?
Adam Frank
(01:19:01)
Okay. So with technosignatures, I gave the example of chlorofluorocarbons. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non-agnostic one, because we sort of like, “Oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons. Maybe they will.” And there’s solar panels. The glint off of solar panels will produce the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, no matter what it’s made out of actually. There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb did in… I think it was 2017. We’ve just followed up on it. That actually could act as a technosignature. You’d be able to see in the reflected light this big jump that would occur because of… City lights, artificial illumination. If there’s really large scale cities like Coruscant and Star Wars or Trantor in the foundation, those city lights would be detectable, the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years.

(01:19:55)
So our job in this grant is to develop the first ever library of technosignatures. Nobody’s really ever thought about this before. So we’re trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across interstellar distances. And are these good ones or are these ones going to be hard to detect or such?
Lex Fridman
(01:20:17)
City lights. So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.
Adam Frank
(01:20:25)
Yeah. If you looked at earth at night from a distance, looked at spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you’d be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of. They bounce off the ground, the light bounces off the ground. So you’d convolve the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground. And yeah, you’d be able to see that there’s city lights. Now, increase that by a factor of 1,000 if you had a trantor, and you’d be able to detect that across interstellar distances. Thomas Beatty did this work, who’s now working with us.
Lex Fridman
(01:20:56)
What do you think is the most detectable thing about earth?
Adam Frank
(01:21:01)
Wow, this is fun. We just have Sophia Sheikh, who’s part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did earth from earth. If you were looking at earth with earth technology for a bunch of different technosignatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be… You’d have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud, but actually, it is our radio signatures still, that is still most detectable.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:23)
By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close and then you said the Oort cloud, that’s not very close. But you mean from an interstellar perspective.
Adam Frank
(01:21:29)
Interstellar distance, because we really want to know is I’m sitting here on earth, I’m looking at these exoplanets, the nearest star is four light years away. So that’s the minimum distance. So if I’m looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?
Lex Fridman
(01:21:44)
What is detectable about earth with our current technology from our nearest solar system?
Adam Frank
(01:21:49)
Oh my God, there’s all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see earth’s pollution, and I think city lights, you had to be within the solar system.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:01)
If they do direct imaging of earth-
Adam Frank
(01:22:04)
They’re going to need much more powerful, but let me tell you, let’s talk about direct imaging for a moment because I just have to go on, this is such a cool idea. So what we really want, and the next generation of space telescopes and such is we’re trying to do direct imaging. We’re trying to get an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.
Lex Fridman
(01:22:24)
By the way, just to clarify, direct imaging means literally a picture?
Adam Frank
(01:22:29)
A picture, but the problem is that even with the thing that’s going to come after JWST, it’s going to be a pixel. You’re not going to get any kind of resolution. You’ll be able to get the light from it, which you’ll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you’re not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the solar gravity lens telescope, I think that’s what it is. And the idea is insane. So their general relativity says, “Look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve space-time.” So the sun is a massive body, and so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens. So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out into the Oort cloud, and then look back towards the sun towards an exoplanet that is behind… Not directly behind the sun, but is in the direction of the sun.

(01:23:16)
And then let the sun act like a lens and collect, focus the light onto the telescope and you would be able to get, and they’ve done… It’s amazing. This idea is insane. They’d be able to get, if everything works out, 24 kilometer resolution. You’d be able to see Manhattan on an exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, NASA, the team has already gotten through three levels of NASA… There’s the NASA program for, “Give us your wackiest idea.” And then the ones that survive that are like, “Okay, tell us whether that wacky idea is even feasible?” And they’re marching along. And the idea is that they even have plans for how you’d be able to get these probes out into the Oort cloud on relatively fast time scales. You need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as earth is, but right now, the idea seems to hold together.

(01:24:10)
So probably when I’ll be dead, but when you’re an old man, it’s possible that something like this… Could you imagine having that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to kilometers? So I’m very excited about that [inaudible 01:24:26].
Lex Fridman
(01:24:25)
I can only imagine having a picture like that, and then there’s some mysterious artifacts that you’re seeing.
Adam Frank
(01:24:33)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:24:34)
It’s both inspiring and almost heartbreaking that we can see. I think we would be able to see a civilization where there’s a lot of scientists agree that this is very likely something and then we can’t-
Adam Frank
(01:24:49)
We can’t get there. But again, this is the thing about being long-lived. We’ve got to get to the point where we’re long-lived enough that… Let’s imagine that we find, say 10 light years away, we find a planet that looks like it’s got technosignatures. Righ? It doesn’t end there. That would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity, and it wouldn’t be like, “Well, okay, we’re done.” The first thing we do is we build bigger telescopes to try and do those imaging. And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there. We would figure out, with Breakthrough Starshot, there was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, light sails, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. So if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse. There would be the effort to actually try and send something to get there.

(01:25:42)
Now, we probably couldn’t land, so maybe we take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you’re dead, but your kids are… You know what I mean? So it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals? Those were multi-generational projects, and I think we’re on the cusp of that kind of project.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:07)
I think that would probably unite humans.
Adam Frank
(01:26:09)
I think it would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. Human beings are a mess, let’s face it. That’s why I always say to people, discovery of life, of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn’t matter, that to know that we’re not an accident, to know that there is probably… If we found one example of life, we’d know that we’re not an accident and there’s probably lots of life and that we’re a community. We’re part of a cosmic kind of community of life, and who knows what life has done? All bets are off with life.
Lex Fridman
(01:26:36)
Since we’re talking about the future of telescopes, let’s talk about our current super sexy, awesome telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, that I still can’t believe actually worked.
Adam Frank
(01:26:46)
I can’t believe it worked either. I was really skeptical. I was like, “Okay, guys. All right, sure.”
Lex Fridman
(01:26:51)
We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold. So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I’ve been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There’s been some direct imaging-
Adam Frank
(01:27:06)
Yes, like a single pixel.
Lex Fridman
(01:27:07)
The kinds of exoplanets were able to direct image I guess would have to be hot.
Adam Frank
(01:27:13)
Hot, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What’s more important I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there’s not sexy pictures. It’s like, “Hey, look at this wiggly line,” but be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That’s where we are right now. In order to look for life, we need to find planets with atmospheres. And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what’s in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that’s the most exciting thing.

(01:27:54)
For example, there was this planet K2-18b, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra, and the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a hycean world, hycean meaning hydrogen ocean world. And that is a kind of planet that it would be in the super earth, sub-Neptune domain we were talking about, maybe eight times the mass of the earth. But it’s got a layer of hydrogen, of an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water, you can get a giant ocean of liquid water, and that’s an entirely different kind of planet. That could be habitable planet. It could be a 60 degree warm ocean.

(01:28:41)
So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, “Oh yeah, you know what? From what we understand with the models, this looks like it could be a hycean world.”
Lex Fridman
(01:28:54)
And it’s 120 light years away from earth.
Adam Frank
(01:28:57)
And so isn’t that amazing? It’s 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see to the atmosphere so well that we can be like, “Oh, look, methane.” Methane was a five sigma detection. You knew that the data were so good that it was the gold standard of science.

Alien megastructures

Lex Fridman
(01:29:13)
What about detecting maybe through direct imaging or in other ways, megastructures, that the civilizations build?
Adam Frank
(01:29:24)
You know what’s great about megastructures is first of all, it’s fun to say, who doesn’t want to say megastructure? Alien, megastructure, right? Every morning, I’m looking for an opportunity to say that. So the err example of this is the Dyson sphere, which is amazing because it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.
Lex Fridman
(01:29:39)
Can you explain the Dyson sphere?
Adam Frank
(01:29:40)
Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists ever, who was very broad-minded and thought about a lot of different things. He recognized that as civilizations progress, what they’re going to need is ever more energy to do ever more amazing things. And what’s the best energy source in a solar system? It’s the star. Right? So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines… Anyway, the limit of this would actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside. You could capture every photon the star produced, which is this insane amount of light. You would have enough power now to do anything to re-engineer your solar system. So that was a Dyson sphere.

(01:30:25)
It turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn’t really work, it’s unstable, but a Dyson swarm, and that’s really what he meant, this large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:37)
So he didn’t actually mean a rigid sphere structure.
Adam Frank
(01:30:42)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:42)
He basically meant a swarm. So like you said, then the limit basically starts to look-
Adam Frank
(01:30:48)
People started to say, “Yeah, it was like a sphere.” And we actually almost thought we might’ve found one of these back with a Bajoyan star. The way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there’s a dip in the starlight. It’s a little eclipse basically, and we know exactly what they should look like. And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where it was like this little dragon’s tooth, and then there’d be another one and another one and another one, and then nothing, and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they went through the list of, it could be comets, it could be chunks of a broken up planet, and it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course, the news picked up on this and everybody’s newsfeed the next day, “Alien megastructures discovered.”

(01:31:31)
Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably gas or dust clouds, but it raised the possibility like, “Oh, these are observable.” And people have worked out the details of what they would look like. You don’t really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They’re big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they’re going to produce a little blip of light because that’s what they’re supposed to. They’re absorbing starlight. So people have worked out like, “Well, a square one or a triangular one.”
Lex Fridman
(01:31:55)
But that wouldn’t be a distance sphere. That would be like one object.
Adam Frank
(01:31:58)
One object, right. If it’s a swarm, you’d expect the light to be blinking in and out as these things pass in front of… If you’ve got thousands of these, much of the time, they’ll be blotting out the star. Sometimes they won’t be. Right? And so you’re going to get an irregular transit signal.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:15)
One you wouldn’t expect from a star that doesn’t have anything.
Adam Frank
(01:32:18)
Exactly. Or just a planet or a couple of planets. There’d be so many of these that it would be like, “Beep, beep, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.”
Lex Fridman
(01:32:24)
And that usually doesn’t happen in a star system because there’s only just a handful of planets.
Adam Frank
(01:32:31)
That’s exactly what it is. Everything’s coagulant. In a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, five, 10, that’s it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little micro transits telling you there’s something else that’s big enough to create a transit, but too many of them, and also, within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these could be megastructures.
Lex Fridman
(01:32:54)
How many people are looking for megastructures now?
Adam Frank
(01:32:58)
Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are again, Jason Wright at Penn State, and collaborators. The way they’re looking for it though is for infrared light because the second law of thermodynamics says, “Look, if you capture all of this starlight, your thing’s going to warm up and emit an infrared.” It’s going to be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:22)
That feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it.
Adam Frank
(01:33:25)
Right. And that’s actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn’t really proposing it because he was saying, “This is what civilizations are going to do.” He proposed it because he was like, “Oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations. Here’s something that would have a detectable signature.” So Jason and company have done pretty good searches, and recently, they made news because they were able to eliminate a lot of places. “No, these are not Dyson Spheres,” but they did have a couple that were anomalous enough that they’re like, “Well, this is what it would look like.” It’s not a detection. They were saying they would never say it’s a detection, but they were not non-detections.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:00)
And they’re potential candidates.
Adam Frank
(01:34:01)
Potential candidates, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:02)
Love it. We have megastructure candidates. That’s inspiring. What other megastructures do you think that could be? So Dyson Sphere is about capturing the energy of a star.
Adam Frank
(01:34:12)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:13)
There could be other-
Adam Frank
(01:34:14)
Well, there’s something called the Clark Belt. So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit. Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that’s really useful if you want to beam things straight down, or if you want to put a space elevator up. Right? So there’s this idea that if a civilization becomes advanced enough that it’s really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. There’s been a couple papers written about the possibility of these Clark Belts, densely occupied Clark Belts being a megastructure. It’s not as mega as a Dyson swarm, but it’s planetary scale.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:57)
You think it’s detectable, Clark Belt?
Adam Frank
(01:34:58)
It could be. In our list of technosignatures, it would be down there, but it would be… Again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, you’d have a Clark Belt. And the question is whether or not it’s detectable?
Lex Fridman
(01:35:11)
Yeah, probably Dyson sphere is the… That’s the more exciting thing too.
Adam Frank
(01:35:14)
That’s the go-to one. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:16)
Speaking of the Dyson Sphere, let’s talk through the Kardashev scales.

Kardashev scale

Adam Frank
(01:35:19)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:19)
What is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it?
Adam Frank
(01:35:24)
Right. So the Kardashev scale was at the same time. This is this golden age of SETI, like ’59 to ’65 when it just starts. Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, “Oh my God, this is even possible.” And so people are just throwing out these ideas and as I said in the book, science is conservative. And what I mean by that is it holds onto its best ideas. So Kardashev comes up with this idea that, “Look, if we’re…” Again, it’s always about detectability. “If we’re looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the, “Natural,” stages,” natural in quotes, “That a civilization goes through?” And he was thinking in terms of energy use, like a good physicist. So he said, “Look, the first hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that a civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet.” He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way you’re doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet, you’re using for your own ends.

(01:36:24)
The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star. Right? So that’s the Dyson sphere. So Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Kardashev was picking up. So that’s a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. So where are we now? Remarkably, on a log scale. We’re at 0.7 of a type one.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:49)
So we’re not even type one?
Adam Frank
(01:36:50)
No, no, no. We’re not even type one, but according to… There was a paper written by a group that said, “Can we continue on our path? We’ll be at a type one at around 2300.”
Lex Fridman
(01:37:02)
2300. So this is on a log scale?
Adam Frank
(01:37:08)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:08)
So 0.7. So type one is about 10 to the 16th watts. Type two is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that, 10 to the 26th watts, and I think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude.
Adam Frank
(01:37:20)
Yeah, because there’s a 100,000,000,000 star of order, 100,000,000 stars.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:24)
So that’s a lot.
Adam Frank
(01:37:25)
That’s a lot energy.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:27)
Do you think humans ever get to type one?
Adam Frank
(01:37:30)
I think that there’s a problem with type one, which is that we already know about climate change. The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state, and that’s something that Kardashev couldn’t have recognized. There’s the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there’s the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn’t thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don’t get to use it all. Right? Second law tells you that if I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank, and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, “Uh-oh, sorry, it’s going to change on you.”

(01:38:25)
So there’s a way in which we probably can’t get to a type one without devastating the earth’s climate. The most important thing actually here is probably, this is why space becomes… So the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we’ve been working on for a while called service worlds, that at some point you probably move a lot of your industry off world. We’ve got Mercury, for example. There’s nothing on Mercury, there’s no life on Mercury. Why don’t you put your energy harvesting there? Because you can’t mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are. And so there’s limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.
Lex Fridman
(01:39:10)
It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.
Adam Frank
(01:39:25)
This is the frontier where you are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It’s like you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we’re going through now of the Anthropocene on a planetary astrobiological framework. And that paper we were talking about with a 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know how often do you go through an… Does every technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate Anthropocene crisis? And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you’re doing technologically so that all boats rise? You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient.

(01:40:15)
So yeah, right. It’s the kind of technology. I think there’s probably absolutely limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you’re going to not going to do it on world.

Detecting aliens

Lex Fridman
(01:40:33)
So how do we detect alien type one, two, and three civilizations? So we’ve been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection.
Adam Frank
(01:40:43)
Yeah. Right,
Lex Fridman
(01:40:44)
Maybe with the Dyson sphere, you start to get a little bit more type two, but it feels like if you have a type two civilization, it won’t be just the Dyson sphere.
Adam Frank
(01:40:54)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:55)
It feels like that. Just for the same reason you mentioned climate change, but now at the star system level, they’re probably expanding, right? So how would you detect a type two?
Adam Frank
(01:41:08)
How about propulsion plumes? Right? If you’re expanding… No, no.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:12)
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great.
Adam Frank
(01:41:12)
I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beatty, who’s joined us, he’s at the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for plumes. Right? If you have a solar system-wide civilization and you got space truckers going back and forth from Mars to… They’re doing the insettlest run, they’re accelerating and decelerating the whole way there. If you want to get to Mars in a couple of weeks, you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there. You flip and burn and have it on. So you also always have gravity. You have thrust gravity. So would those plumes be detectable? Because now you’ve got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that the plume is going to cross your field of view could become pretty high. So yeah, I think that’s one idea of looking for large-scale interplanetary, which is like when you’re getting to a type two.

(01:42:11)
Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining. This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian, that to be able to look for… If you’re really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, there’d be dust particles left around and would they look different from just say the dust from just regular collisions?
Lex Fridman
(01:42:30)
So pollution of all different kinds.
Adam Frank
(01:42:32)
Pollution of all different kinds
Lex Fridman
(01:42:33)
And trash also?
Adam Frank
(01:42:34)
Okay, so trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system. There’s a whole other field of technosignatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by 1,000,000 years ago and left some stuff? So the earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years. A species like us, at our level, looking at earth, would’ve been able to know that earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking say at the Moon for artifacts that have been there for a long time is something that a number of people are doing. We’re just working on a paper where we just calculated, this was super fun. We calculated how long would the lunar lander exist on the Moon before micrometeorites just chewed it down? How long would you be able to land on the Moon and go, “Oh, look, somebody was here and left some debris.”

(01:43:34)
So there’s this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite, constant rain of micrometeorites, and that’s where you get the lunar regolith. That fine powder on the Moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years-
Lex Fridman
(01:43:50)
Oh, nice.
Adam Frank
(01:43:50)
That the lunar lander will be visible.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:54)
Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.
Adam Frank
(01:43:58)
If there are artifacts on there, and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. The Moon has been mapped down to a couple of meters with various probes and all that data is sitting there. So why not use machine learning to look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface? And they did a test program where they gave the computer, I don’t know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11 or maybe it was Apollo 17 site, and it instantly was able to pull out the lander.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:27)
The whole task of looking for anomaly, something that looks not like the lunar surface. You make it sound obvious, but it’s not exactly obvious. Detect something that doesn’t look right about this room?
Adam Frank
(01:44:42)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:43)
It’s actually really difficult.
Adam Frank
(01:44:44)
Really difficult. It’s really difficult. And what’s cool, it’s a really information theoretic kind of proposal. You really have to use information theory to say, “What’s the background?” How do I define something that I can say, “That looks weird?”
Lex Fridman
(01:44:58)
Yeah, maybe when you’re looking at a spectrograph or something, it’s still like…
Lex Fridman
(01:45:00)
[inaudible 01:45:00] or something, it’s going to look really weird potentially. We’re hypothesizing all the things that humans would build and how do we detect that.
Adam Frank
(01:45:12)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:45:13)
But that could be really weird stuff.
Adam Frank
(01:45:15)
That’s why there’s this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures. So, actually disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, it’s alive, because as soon as it dies, it goes back to equilibrium. And so, you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don’t know whether these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not, the chemicals have not all just gone down to, they’ve all reacted away to an equilibrium state. You can actually tell that in very general ways using what’s called the Gibbs free energy, and that’s a signature.

(01:45:56)
If you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium that indicates that there’s something happening on that planet biosphere or technosphere that is pumping gases into the atmosphere, that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.
Lex Fridman
(01:46:13)
So, is it possible we can detect anomalies in spacetime?
Adam Frank
(01:46:17)
Well, you could detect, and there’s been some work on this with the Alcubierre drive, these proposals for warp drives, and we can talk about that later, I’m skeptical of those. Because it may really be possible, you just can’t go faster than the speed of light. But people have done work on what would be the signature of an Alcubierre drive? What would be the signature? Could you detect if you’re using a drive like that, then you certainly are distorting spacetime, which means any light that’s passing by, its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted spacetime.

(01:46:51)
So yeah, there are possibilities along with that. One of the funny things, I don’t know if they’ve gotten past this, but somebody calculated the problem with the Alcubierre drive or this warp drive was that if you dropped out of warp, there would be this spray of gamma rays that would sterilize any planet in front of you. So, it’s like, “Well yeah, you probably don’t want to do that,” but that would be a great bios or techno signature, another planet obliterated.

Warp drives

Lex Fridman
(01:47:15)
So, you think it’s not possible to travel fast than the speed of light?
Adam Frank
(01:47:17)
I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that, but what I think, if you look at the physics, we understand, every possibility for faster than light travel really relies on something that doesn’t exist. So, the cool thing is Einstein’s field equations, you can actually play with them, the equations are right there. You can add things to the right or left-hand side that allow you to get something like the Alcubierre drive. That was a metric that showed you like, “Oh, it’s a warped bubble.” It’s a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime faster than the speed of light.

(01:47:52)
Because nothing can move across space faster than the speed of light, but spacetime itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here’s the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter and it doesn’t exist. It’s really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do. So, it’s a nice fiction but really right now, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where the technology we used now is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from 100 years ago.

(01:48:38)
But I remember playing Assassin’s Creed where everybody’s like, “What is it, it’s 1200?” And everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s a great game.” And then I got Assassin’s Creed II and it was 300 years later and everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn’t changed and that was actually true for most of human history. You used your great-grandfather’s tools because there was no need to have any other new tools and you probably did his job. So, we could be fooled into thinking like, “Oh, technology’s going to go on forever, we’re always going to find new advances.”

(01:49:14)
As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So, you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:23)
Yeah. But also, it is a great acceleration and we also are not good at predicting what that entails if it does keep accelerating. So, for example, somebody like Eric Weinstein often talks about we underinvest in theoretical physics research. Basically, we’re trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus trying to hack physics, warp drives and so on.
Adam Frank
(01:49:53)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:54)
Because it’s really hard to do space travel, and it seems like in the long arc of human history, if we survive the way to really travel across long distances is going to be some new totally new thing.
Adam Frank
(01:50:07)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:07)
So, it’s not going to be an engineering problem, it’s going to be a physics problem-
Adam Frank
(01:50:12)
A fundamental physics problem.
Lex Fridman
(01:50:14)
Fundamental physics problem.
Adam Frank
(01:50:15)
Yeah. I agree with that in principle, but I think there’s a lot of ideas out there. String theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years, it’s not like there hasn’t been a lot of effort. And again, I’m not going to predict, I think it’s entirely possible that there’s incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through, in which case then all bets are off. Once you get fast interstellar travel, whoa, who knows what can happen? But I tend to be drawn to science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously. What kind of civilization can you build where it takes 50 years to get to where you’re going and a 50 years back?

(01:50:59)
So, I don’t know. Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to say that we won’t get warp drives. But as of right now, it’s all fictional. It’s barely even a coherent concept.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:08)
Well, it’s also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations.
Adam Frank
(01:51:27)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:51:27)
So, you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years and you’re not sad that you’ll never see the destination because you have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life.
Adam Frank
(01:51:45)
Yeah. It’s a wild ethical question, isn’t it? That book I told you about Aurora, I love the book because it was such a inversion of the usual. Because I love science fiction, I’ve read so many generation ship stories. And they get to that planet, the planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It’s inhabited, but it’s uninhabitable for Earth because again, he has this idea of life is particular to their planets. So, they turn around and they come back, and then when they land, the main character goes, there’s still people who are arguing for more generation ships, and she goes, and she punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube with this.

(01:52:20)
I thought that was a really interesting inversion. The interesting thing about, we were talking about these space habitats.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:26)
Yes.
Adam Frank
(01:52:26)
But if you really had a space habitat, not some super cramped, crappy, usual version of a century ship. But if you had these space habitats that were really like the O’Neill cylinders, they’re actually pretty nice places to live, put a thruster on those. Why keep them in the solar system? Maybe space is full of these traveling space habitats that are in some sense, they’re worlds in and of themselves.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:49)
There’s the show Silo, which raises the question of basically, if you are putting on a generational ship, what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them.
Adam Frank
(01:53:00)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:01)
You might want to tell them a story that they believe.
Adam Frank
(01:53:04)
Right.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:04)
Because there is a society, there’s human nature. It’s like how do you maintain a homeostasis of that little society? That’s a fascinating technical question, the social question, the psychology question

Cryogenics

Adam Frank
(01:53:17)
The generation ship too, which I talked about in the book, the idea of also you talked about the extending human lifetimes or the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction that you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible. But what’s so interesting, and this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, all these ideas we’re going to talk about because they’ve been staples of science fiction for 50 years.
Lex Fridman
(01:53:44)
The whole field of cryogenics.
Adam Frank
(01:53:45)
Yeah. Where are we at with that?
Lex Fridman
(01:53:47)
Yeah. I wonder what the state of the art is for complex organism. Can you freeze? How long can you freeze? And then unfreeze maybe with bacteria you could do freeze.
Adam Frank
(01:53:56)
Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that’s been blasted? If there’s a comet impact across interstellar distances, that does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kinds of calculations, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. But a complex organism or multi-systems, with organs and such.
Lex Fridman
(01:54:20)
Also, what makes an organism? Which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe for humans, it seems like what makes a personality? It feels like you want to preserve a set of memories. If I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person.
Adam Frank
(01:54:43)
Altered Carbon, that’s a great series. I think it’s on Netflix, that’s a really great series where that’s exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody’s able to, you can re-sleeve in another body, and it raises exactly this question. It’s not the greatest cyberpunk, but it’s pretty good, it’s got some great action sequences too.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:01)
As we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine-tuned on you, it raises a question because to me, they’ve already passed the Turing test as we traditionally have defined it. So, if there’s going to be an LLM that’s able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it’s going to raise ethical and I don’t know, philosophical questions about what makes you, you. If there’s a thing that can talk exactly like you, what is the thing that makes you? It’s going to speak about your memories very effectively.
Adam Frank
(01:55:41)
This leads us to, if we’re going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps that the brain is not the minimal structure for consciousness, it’s the whole body. It’s embodied and may actually, in some sense, it’s communities actually. So yeah, I could be wrong, but this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science. Which is interesting, because it leads to this question about, “Oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers.” That’s another story that one tells. I’m super skeptical about those, but that’s one of the narratives about interstellar travel.

(01:56:20)
And that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway, whether it’s downloaded bodies or it’s just going to be artificial intelligence. There’s the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last? Maybe it’s a very short period before everybody goes to, or the machines take over and kill you, or it’s some hybrid.

What aliens look like

Lex Fridman
(01:56:39)
What do you think aliens look like? So, we talked about all the different kinds of bio signatures that might leave or techno signatures, but what would they look like when we show up? Are they going to have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they going to be carbon-based?
Adam Frank
(01:56:57)
Yeah. So, great question, and this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, about what life is. And this is the physical part of that, there’s also the informational part of it. But let’s just talk about the physical part of it, which is anything that we’re going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution. That’s the nice thing about Darwinian evolution, just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are this logic, this basic logic that anything we’d reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles.

(01:57:32)
And so, evolution’s about solving problems to survive that the environment presents. And the environment’s always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms, so that you’d expect a balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence and evolutionary contingency. So, if you’ve got to move along a surface, a hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed stick legs makes sense that you’re probably going to trigger that. If you look at Earth’s history multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of stick-like apparatus.
Lex Fridman
(01:58:18)
So, that’s about movement?
Adam Frank
(01:58:19)
Yeah. So, that’s one problem that has to be solved. The one problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:58:22)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(01:58:22)
Another problem is they got to get away from predators. You’ve seen wings, we’ve seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved wings, insects evolved wings, mammals evolved wings. If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it’s going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go, evolutionary trip on that. So, I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with stay alive, reproduce. But one of the weird things about with the UFO things is that you always see like, “Oh, they all look like humans, they’re just basically humans with triangular heads.” And that’s where we get to contingency.

(01:59:06)
So, what we’ve been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve. But contingency is accidents that you’ve got something that’s evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing. And then the climate changes and they all die out, end of story or an asteroid, total accident, asteroid hits. And so, contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution. And one of the things that lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth’s history over again, would you get the same creatures? Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way, you wouldn’t find anything on Earth that resembled any species today.

(01:59:52)
They’ve done experiments actually on this with E. coli. You take a bunch of E. coli, you let them evolve for a while, you take a bunch of them out, freeze them, let one, let that population continue to evolve, the other one’s frozen. Now, started over again with the frozen. And it seems to be that contingency tends to win. At least from what we can tell, that’s not a hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they’re going to be? Anybody’s guess.

(02:00:27)
Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That’s probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:39)
I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system? Where is most of the cognition competition going on?
Adam Frank
(02:00:46)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:00:47)
You could see that in organisms. Actually, I don’t know how the brain evolved. Why does it have to be in one place?
Adam Frank
(02:00:56)
It doesn’t have to be. So, my favorite word, word of the day is liquid brains. This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea, and we’ve come to understand how much distributed cognition there is. Obviously, you social animals like termites, and ants, that’s an example of distributed cognition, the organism is the whole colony. This is one thing that’s been really interesting in the state of the study for aliens, is that when we’ve come to recognize that human intelligence, the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have. Jason Wright described it as a deck of cards. The cards are all there, we got the hand that actually led to the technological progress that we see. But the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye, all the things that we define as intelligence. You can find many places in many other places across many other lineages across the earth. So, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe the hive mind idea or bacterial colonies that actually managed to come to their own version of high cognition.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:10)
Well, I wonder if we stretch out time across 10s, 20 billion years, whether there’s an Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms, and it switches to ideas for example. It’s much more rapidly you’re operating maybe, I guess it’s a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever, as [inaudible 02:02:36]-
Adam Frank
(02:02:35)
Technology seems to operate, but certainly markets can operate in ways that look very Darwinian.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:43)
So, basically a planet is working hard to get to the first kind of organism that’s able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete.
Adam Frank
(02:02:53)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:02:53)
And then it stops evolving there, and then these ideas that take off.
Adam Frank
(02:02:57)
Right. Because yeah, cultural Lex it’s true. It’s amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I’d be careful to say that a planet is working hard to do this. Because really looking at us, what we think of as ideas and culture, and it’s quite possible we’re going to make it another 200 years, and this is gone because it actually wasn’t a very good idea long-term, we just don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(02:03:22)
So, maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys.
Adam Frank
(02:03:26)
Not the biosphere, because again, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long- term, it may be very potent for a short period of time but that it’s not sustainable. It doesn’t become, like we were talking about before, mature. It’s very hard to make it into integrated into a mature bio/technosphere. And of course, evolution that is not working for anything. Well, here’s the actually interesting thing, so people are very much evolutionary biologists will get their hair will stand on end if you start talking about evolution, having a purpose or anything.

(02:03:53)
But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to a idea generating species or collective organism, yeah, then all bets are off and there is goals, there is teleology. Now suddenly, absolutely, there’s a direction implied. So that’s a cool interesting thing that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless and directionless and suddenly, yeah, we’re the ones who supply or any kind of creature like us has an absolute direction that way they decide on.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:26)
Although you could argue that from a perspective of the entire human civilization, we’re also directionless. We have a sense that there’s a direction in this cluster of humans.
Adam Frank
(02:04:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:37)
And then there’s another cluster has a different sense of direction, there’s all kinds of religions that are competing. There’s different ideologies that are competing.
Adam Frank
(02:04:45)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:04:45)
And when you just zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pinball.
Adam Frank
(02:04:55)
It’s an unholy mess. But at some point, the expansion into the solar system say, that would be both direction. Depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti-accrete, to start spreading out into the solar system. So, that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy nonlinear way, but it still a goal was set and it was achieved.

Alien contact

Lex Fridman
(02:05:25)
If there’s advanced civilizations out there, what do you think is the proper protocol for interacting with them? Do you think they would be peaceful? Do you think they would be warlike? What do we do next? We detect the civilizations through all the technosignatures we’ve been talking about, maybe direct imaging, maybe there’s really strong signal. We come up with a strategy of how to actually get there.
Adam Frank
(02:05:49)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:50)
But then the general says, they always do, the military industrial complex-
Adam Frank
(02:05:56)
We’ve watched that movie.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:58)
What kind of rockets and do we bring rockets?
Adam Frank
(02:06:02)
Right. Well, this general question also leads to many messaging, extraterrestrial intelligence, and I’m definitely of the opinion of you should be very careful. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. The people who advocate like, “Oh yeah, we should be sending powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space.” I’m like, “Why would you?” Because we just don’t know, I’m not going to say they are warlike. I’m not going to say they’re not warlike, I have no idea. But we sure as hell, well, first of all, who gets to decide that? The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, Who Speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book somebody wrote.

(02:06:44)
So, definitely we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. And the idea, you used to have this idea of, well, if they’re advanced, they’ve managed to survive. So of course, they’re going to be wearing togas and be singing kumbaya, but I just wouldn’t assume that. It’s also possible though that their cognitive structure is so different that we’re not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings. One of my favorite movies is Arrival, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one.

(02:07:18)
I really love that one because they literally, they have a different language. They have a different cognitive structure in terms of their language, and they’re literally living in a different physics.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:25)
Different physics, different language, different everything. But in the case of Arrival, it can at least recognize that they’re there.
Adam Frank
(02:07:34)
And they managed to cross the language barrier. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:38)
But that’s, both sides have an interest in communicating, which you suppose that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity. Because how do you become advanced without curiosity about the mysteries about the other.
Adam Frank
(02:07:54)
But also, if they’re long-lived, they may just be like, “We’re not even interested. Say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this, in communicating with you youngins, but now we’re not at all.” And that’s just one of the beauties of this again, is how to think about this systematically because you’re so far past the hairy edge of our experience of what we know that you want to think about it. You don’t want to be like, “Don’t know, can’t say anything,” because that’s not fun. But you also have to systematically go after your own biases. So, one of the things I loved about Arrival too was Carl Sagan always had this idea, “We’ll teach them math, we’ll teach them our math, then they’ll teach us their math, and then we’ll be telling each other, knock-knock jokes and swapping cures for cancer.”

(02:08:42)
And in the movie, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist, and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately. And it’s the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head, it’s actually the whole experience and she’s the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that how utterly different the cognitive structures of a different species should be. So somehow, we have to figure out how to think about it, but be so careful of our biases or figure out a systematic way to break through our biases and not just make science fiction movies. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
(02:09:17)
Yeah. Speaking of biases, do you think aliens have visited Earth? You’ve mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and we wouldn’t even know about it if it was 100 million years ago. How can we even begin to answer this question, whether-
Adam Frank
(02:09:32)
Got to look, got to figure out ways to look. So, it’s not high on my list of things that I think are probable, but it certainly, it needs to be explored. And unless you look, you never know. So, looking on the moon, where would we find if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last 3 billion years, where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth? Probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon’s a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable. So, you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it’ll last for a billion years.

(02:10:10)
So, those are the kind of questions. Like I said, it’s not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. Unless you look, you don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:20)
Speaking of biases, what about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room? Meaning the potential of aliens, say seeding life on earth?
Adam Frank
(02:10:30)
You mean in that directed panspermia, [inaudible 02:10:33]-
Lex Fridman
(02:10:32)
Directed panspermia.
Adam Frank
(02:10:33)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:34)
Or seeding some aspect of the evolution.
Adam Frank
(02:10:39)
Like 2001.
Lex Fridman
(02:10:40)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(02:10:41)
Yeah. It’s a great story, but always with Occam’s razor or whatever with science. If I can answer that question without that extra very detailed hypothesis, then I should. And the idea that evolution is a natural process, that’s what I would go for first. That just seems it’s so much easier to do it that way than adding, because it’s kind of a duo sex machina thing of like, “Oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you’re trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.”
Lex Fridman
(02:11:13)
So, to you, the origin of life is a pretty simple thing that doesn’t require an alien?
Adam Frank
(02:11:19)
I wouldn’t say that, it’s not a simple thing. Because all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road. The aliens formed, right? So, you’re just saying like, ” All right, I’m just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. What was their abiogenesis event?
Lex Fridman
(02:11:35)
Well, so from a different perspective, I’m just saying, it seems to me that there’s obviously advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy and through the universe from the Drake equation perspective. And then if I was an alien, what would I do? I’ve gotten a chance to learn about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. I recently went to the Amazon, and you get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon, they’re in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the uncontacted tribes. First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent towards the outside world, but everybody else tried to stay away from them. They try to protect them, don’t talk about them, don’t talk about their location and all this kind of stuff.

(02:12:19)
And I’ve begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you’re doing that. And if I was an alien civilization, I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing. And of course, there’s always the teenager or the troll who’s going to start messing with this stuff or the scientists.
Adam Frank
(02:12:34)
Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:35)
And so, from our perspective, yes. And if you’re in the Truman Show like Occam’s razor, but also the Occam’s razor from the perspective of the alien civilization, we have to have the humility to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect, that it would not be obvious.
Adam Frank
(02:12:57)
Right. I understand the logic of what you’re saying, but the problem for me with that is that first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I’m not sure about it, that most of them may be dead or they’re not. While I think that life is common, and again, this is just my biases. So now, the problem is how do we sort out the biases we’re bringing or the assumptions we’re bringing in from the causal chain that comes out of that? I would first want to try and do this without, if we’re looking at the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth. I’d want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions which also have their own breaking of causal chains.

(02:13:44)
Because the idea that when you ask, what would you do if you were an alien? But again, alien minds could be so unbelievably different that they wouldn’t even recognize the question you just posed.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:56)
Right.
Adam Frank
(02:13:56)
Because it’s just like we have a very particular cognitive structure or cognitive, and we’re very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about. If I could suddenly magically appear 100,000 years ago and talked to a hunter-gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, I might find something that, or no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, “Oh, that’s what naturally humans do.”
Lex Fridman
(02:14:20)
Well, let me ask you this question. Let’s together do the thought experience.
Adam Frank
(02:14:23)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:23)
If we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them.
Adam Frank
(02:14:28)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:28)
Or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization on a nearby star system, what would we do?
Adam Frank
(02:14:37)
Yeah. I think that’s a great question. It’s interesting how that even brings up the ethical questions. Let’s say that we’d have to first sort out what are the consequences for them and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them?
Lex Fridman
(02:14:51)
And also, sorry, from a capitalist perspective, what are we to gain from this interaction?
Adam Frank
(02:14:56)
Right. You look at the way the missionaries, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were was the most important, that’s what the gain was. So, from our perspective, we’d have to sort that out. I think given if we’re doing this thought experiment, we are curious, and I think eventually we’d want to reach out to them.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:19)
I think when you say we, let’s start with the people in this room, right?
Adam Frank
(02:15:23)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:15:25)
I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world, because I think there’s a lot of people, the military they’ll probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America. That’s one perspective. Then there’s the capitalist school will see how the benefits and the costs here, and how can I make money off of this? There’s opportunity here, there’s gold in them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientist is just not going to, unlike the movies-
Adam Frank
(02:16:00)
We’re not going to get much say.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:00)
They’re going to put them-
Adam Frank
(02:16:01)
“Hey guys, wait a minute.”
Lex Fridman
(02:16:03)
They would engage probably. Just as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.
Adam Frank
(02:16:12)
In our engagement.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:13)
In our engagement.
Adam Frank
(02:16:14)
Yeah, probably.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:15)
So, using that trivial bias logic, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way. Just brings up that old direct for me paradox for me. What do you make of all the UFO sightings?

UFO sightings

Adam Frank
(02:16:32)
I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there’s any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence. So, let’s just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence, because I made a big deal about this both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this. So, what people have to understand about science is we are really, our scientists, we are really mean to each other, we are brutal to each other.

(02:17:10)
Because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence, and it’s the idea of you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim. And under what conditions can you say, “Oh, look, I’ve got evidence of this claim X, Y, and Z.” And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are, and that is why cell phones work. If you didn’t have super rigorous standards about what you think that’s, “Oh, this little antenna, I’ve invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show you that it works.”

(02:17:50)
If you didn’t have these standards, every cell phone would be a brick. And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs, the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that we are being visited by non-human, advanced civilization just doesn’t even come close to the same standards. I’m going to have to obey or whatever live under. If my team, the group I work with is one of them says, “Look, we’ve discovered and he wants to announce that, oh, we’ve discovered a technosignature on an alien planet.” We’re going to get shredded as we expect to be, we expect to be beaten up. And the UAP, UFO community should expect the same thing. You don’t get a pass because it’s a really cool topic.

(02:18:32)
So, that’s where I am right now. I just don’t think any of the evidence is even close to anything that could support that claim.
Lex Fridman
(02:18:39)
Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots. Not scientific value, but just like it’s always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first step. Because I was like, “I wonder if there’s something there.” But unfortunately, with this topic, there’s so much excitement around that there’s a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it. There’s hoaxes all this kind of stuff. So, even if there’s some signal, there’s just so much noise it’s very difficult to operate with. So, how do we get better signal? So, you’ve talked about if we wanted to really search for UFOs on Earth and maybe detect things like weird physics, what kind of instruments would we be using?
Adam Frank
(02:19:23)
Yeah, so in the book, I talked about the idea that this is really stupid, but you want to look up, you want to look down and you want to look all around.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:31)
I think that’s brilliant. It’s simple, not stupid. It’s like literally.
Adam Frank
(02:19:35)
Yeah, right. So, you want to do ground-based detectors, upward-looking, ground-based detectors of the kind we’re already building for meteors, for tracking meteors. You want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites, this is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about. And then probably on, we have lots of people in the sky there should be detectors on the planes, or at least some kind of alert system that if a pilot says, “Oh, look, I’m seeing something I don’t understand.” Boop presses the red button, and that triggers the ground.
Adam Frank
(02:20:03)
I’m seeing something I don’t understand. Boop. Presses the red button and that triggers the ground-based and space-based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don’t understand and it’s so important. In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from down to the nth degree. You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to have characterized that. You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera. Was it refurbished recently? In every spectral wavelength in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and have them all characterized because especially if you want to claim like, “Oh my God, I saw something, take a right-hand turn at Mach-500.” Right?

(02:20:51)
You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim. So we have to have characterized detectors looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves, we need a rational search strategy. So let’s say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors. Where do you put them? Right? There’s only so much money in the world, so do you want to put them near places where you’ve seen a lot of things beforehand or do you want to have them try and do sparse coverage of the entire country?

(02:21:17)
And then you need the data analysts analysis, right? You’re going to have so much data, so many false positives or false triggering that you need a way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you’re going to throw out and what you’re going to keep, and all of these things we’re used to doing in other scientific enterprises. And without that, if we don’t do that, we’re going to be having the same damn argument about these things for the next 100 years.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:40)
But if I asked you, I give you $1 trillion and asked you to allocate to one place looking out, SETI or looking at Earth, should you allocate it?
Adam Frank
(02:21:52)
Oh God, looking out. Looking out. Because that’s the, as I always like to say, here’s my codification of this. If you said, “Hey, Adam, I’d like to find some Nebraskans.” And I said, “Oh, good, let’s go to the Himalayas.” You’d be like, “Why am I going there?” I’m like, “Well, maybe there’s some Himalayas, some Nebraskans in Himalayas.” You’d say, “No, no. Let’s go to Nebraska.” If we’re looking for aliens, why don’t we look on alien planets where they live? We have that technology now as opposed to the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say like, “Oh, they’re here right now. They just happen to be here right now.” And also the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to answer these weird, irrational things that are happening.

(02:22:36)
Like, okay, there’s an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don’t want to be detected. They’ve got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it because we keep seeing them, we keep seeing them, but then they disappear. I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. So there’s that whole sort of argument. You’ve got to explain why if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it? So that’s why I take that level of difficulty and then I put it on top of where should I look? I should look at where they’re from. That makes me want to look at do the telescopic stuff.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:17)
Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is either the sensors are not working correctly or it’s secret military technology being tested.
Adam Frank
(02:23:27)
Absolutely. I mean, listen, that’s why again, I think UAP, absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically, but if I had to make a bet and it’s just a bet, I would say this is pure state adversary stuff. When I did, I did a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021, which blew up, and so I had a lot of people talking to me. While I was doing that. I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the SIGINT and EINT, electronic intelligence communities, and what they were saying about the New York Times articles and the various videos, and really none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about pure state. That’s why I learned the word pure state adversaries, how even simple drone technologies and you purposely want to do this. You want to fake signals into the electronics of their adversary, so they crank it up so then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced radars can do.
Lex Fridman
(02:24:25)
That said, I’m not saying that’s what this is. If I was the head of an alien civilization and I chose not to minimize the amount of contact I’m doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see? That’s why the big heads in the humanoid form, I mean, that’s kind of how I would approach communication. If I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough. It’s like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with an ant colony, I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication. And maybe I would do a trivial thing, do a fake ant in there.
Adam Frank
(02:25:07)
Right. A robot ant.
Lex Fridman
(02:25:08)
A robot ant, but then it’s not enough to just do a robot ant. You have to do a robot ant that moves in the way they do, and maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants. But no, I just wanted to make the case for that,
Adam Frank
(02:25:21)
This is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Baer, and the idea was these sort of, this is actually where my first, I became sort of more than agnostic, anti-medy, because the idea is that yes, our aliens come, they sort of make their arrival and really their point is to get rid of us. It’s the dark forest hypothesis. And what they do is they literally, the way they present themselves is in this sort of classic UFO thing, and they do it and they arrive at, this was during the Soviet Union. They arrive at the USSR, they arrive in China, and they’re kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against… So it was really, they did exactly what you’re talking about, but for nefarious purposes.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:03)
Okay, let me ask the pothead question. Yet another pothead-
Adam Frank
(02:26:07)
Another pothead. The whole conversation-
Lex Fridman
(02:26:09)
I’m sorry.
Adam Frank
(02:26:09)
Boggs before breakfast.
Lex Fridman
(02:26:11)
It’s signs and pothead questions back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that’s unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing physical objects? What if they take the form of say ideas? What if real pothead, if it’s consciousness itself, like the subjective experience as an alien being, maybe ideas and is an easier one to visualize? Because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from human to human.
Adam Frank
(02:26:44)
I made the claim that the most important, that finding life any kind of life would be the most important discovery in human history. And one of the reasons is, again, as I said, that life, if we’re not an accident and there’s other life, then there’s probably lots of other life. And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right? If I give you a star and tell you the mass and the composition, you can basically pretty much use the laws of physics, tell exactly what’s going to happen to that star over its entire lifetime. Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall it’s going to be a white dwarf, if it’s going to be a black hole end of story. If I gave you a single cell and said, “What’s going to happen in a few billion years?” You’d never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:27:24)
Yeah.
Adam Frank
(02:27:25)
A kangaroo.

(02:27:26)
So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative. So what it means is, and that’s kind of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive. It goes past itself. So give life enough time and what are the end result? That’s why I love science fiction so much. At some point, does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself. It becomes the laws of physics or these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what we mean by reality, what we mean by experience. But I’m not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically, but they’re open-ended question about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.

Physics of life

Lex Fridman
(02:28:14)
Since you said it’s the biggest question, which is an interesting thought experiment, what is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer? Some people might say about what happened before the Big Bang, some big physics questions about the universe. I could see the argument for how many alien civilizations or if there’s other life out there? You want to speak to that a little bit? Why is it the biggest question in… Why is it number one in your top five?
Adam Frank
(02:28:43)
I’ve evolved in this, right? I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics, magnetohydrodynamics of star formation, but I always was a philosophy minor. I always had these sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind. And what I’ve come to now is the most important question for physics is, what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell, fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, this is where I’m going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency. What does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? I’m not a reductionist. I’m not somebody who’s just like, well, you just put together enough chemicals and bing, bang, boom, and it suddenly appears there’s something that really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is.

(02:29:30)
And so yeah, black holes are super cool. Cosmology is super cool. But really this question of what is life? Especially, from by viewing it from the inside, because it’s really about the verb to be. Really what is the most impressing philosophical question beyond science? Is the verb to be, what is being? This is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about, “What puts the fire in the equations? The fire.” The fire is this presence and this is where it touches things like whatever you want to say it, the sacred, spirituality, whatever you want to talk about. My first book was about science and human spirituality. So this question of life, what makes life as a physical system so different is to me much more because that is where being appears. Being doesn’t appear out there. The only place that ever appears to any of us is us. I can do this kind of projection into this third person thing, but nobody ever has that, that God’s eye view. That’s a story we tell. This is where, this between us is where the verb to be, appears.
Lex Fridman
(02:30:36)
So this is something that you write about in The Blind Spot, why science cannot ignore human experience, sort of trying to pull the fire into the process of science. And it’s a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book?
Adam Frank
(02:30:56)
Yeah. So the idea of The Blind Spot is that there is this thing that is central to science. So we’re using the blind spot as a metaphor. So the eye has an optic nerve, and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can’t have vision without the optic nerve, but actually you’re blind to the optic nerve. There’s a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is. And what we’re saying is that science has something like this. There’s something that without which science would not be possible, but that science, the way it’s been configured, and actually, when we mean the blind spot, I’ll get into exactly what I mean what it is, but it’s not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It’s a metaphysics that got glued on science. And so what is that thing? What is the blind spot? It’s experience. It is presence. And if I experience, people have to be very careful. I’m not talking about being an observer. There’s lots of words for it. There’s direct experience. There is presence. Being. The life world. Within the philosophy called phenomenology. There’s the life world.

(02:32:00)
It’s this sort of raw presence that you can’t get away from until you die. And then who the hell knows that as long as you’re around, it’s there. And what we’re saying is that, that is the way to say this, that is the precondition for the possibility of science and the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved is that it purposely pushed that out. It pushed that out. So it could make progress, and that’s fine for a certain class of problems. But when we try to answer, when we try and go deeper, there’s a whole other class of problems. The nature of consciousness, the nature of time, quantum mechanics, that comes back to bite us. And that if we don’t learn how to take, understand that, that is always the background, that experience is always the background. Then we just end up with these paradoxes and that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.
Lex Fridman
(02:32:54)
I think you give a bunch of examples of that. Looking at temperature as a number is a very objective, scientific way of looking at that. And then there’s the experience of the temperature.
Adam Frank
(02:33:02)
And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term it’s a constellation. It’s not just materialism. It’s a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They’re not what science says, but because of the evolution of the history of science and culture got like pin the tail on the donkey, they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says.

(02:33:25)
So what is it? One is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but all the way down to quarks. That’s it. So that’s reductionism.

(02:33:36)
The objective frame that science gives us this god’s eye view, this third-person view of the world to view the world from the outside. That’s what science bequeaths to us, that view.

(02:33:46)
Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There’s nothing else to talk about that, that’s all there is. And everything can be reduced to that.

(02:33:55)
And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this.

(02:34:01)
And there’s a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness. I think it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience because it is a verb kind of in a way. It is verb-like and by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we’re at right now.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:33)
So you actually say that, that from a perspective of detrimental society, that there’s a crisis of meaning, and then we respond to that in a way that’s counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right. I think the postmodernist on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right, and then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?
Adam Frank
(02:35:08)
Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we’re insignificant. We’re not important. We’re just biological machines. And so we’re basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant. In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside. At cosmology, we’re always the observers. We’re at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in, it comes the measurement problem just puts us front and center. And we’ve spent 100… Some people spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we’re insignificant, and on the other hand, we’re central. So which one is it? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability, we can’t do science without already being present in the world.

(02:36:03)
We can’t reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal… A lot of it is about we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we’re substituting. That’s one of the things that, there’s two philosophers we really like for our heroes. One is Husserl, who is a mathematician, who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And Husserl came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of The Blind Spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience that that’s more important.

(02:36:39)
And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let’s just do the parable of temperature because I think people can… It’ll help them understand what we mean. So think about degree Celsius. We have in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degree Celsius. They’re out there. The universe, the molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we’ve forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience. We started off with science by, we had the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold. Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michel Bitbol philosopher calls, “The structural invariance.” The things that we could both kind of agree on. So we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that’s got mercury in it and that hot things will be higher in on that gradiated cylinder, cold things will be lower, and we can both kind of figure out what we’re going to agree on are our standards for that. And then we have thermometry, yay. We have a way of having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold.

(02:37:53)
And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, etc. And then we end up at the bottom of that with this idea of everyday I wake up and I check my phone and I’m like, oh, it’s going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. It required that bodily experience that also, not just me, I have to tell you, it’s part of my communication with you, cold today, isn’t it? That from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world with everything that it involves, I developed degree Celsius, but then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that’s called the amnesia of experience.

(02:38:41)
So that’s what we mean by how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress, but then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this? What are the responses to trying to get this back in and where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that the only thing that’s true for us are scientific truths. Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn’t even exist. And anything else that’s not part of it that can be formalized in that way is an epiphenomenon. It’s not real.

(02:39:25)
So scientific triumphalism is this response to the weirdness of, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by just ignoring it completely. So there’s no other truth. Art, music, human spirituality, it’s all actually reducible it neural correlates. So that’s one way that it’s been dealt with.

(02:39:47)
The other way is this sort of, right, you’ve got on the postmodern, the left academic left, you get this thing, science is just a game. It’s just a game from the powerful come up with, which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that’s another way to push science away or respond to it. The denial, science denial that happens. That’s also another way of not understanding the balance that science is trying, that we need to establish with experience.

(02:40:18)
And then there’s just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say, oh, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way or that doesn’t have the rigor of science.

(02:40:33)
So all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning, and we don’t really have a good way of doing it yet. And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is, and what its effects are in the various sciences.
Lex Fridman
(02:40:55)
And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses, they kind of feed each other just to observe the scientific community, those who gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, is an arrogance that builds in the human soul. I mean, it has to do with PhDs, it has to do with sitting on an academic throne, all those things. And the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds. And of course, that nobody likes arrogance. And so those that reject science, the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science.
Adam Frank
(02:41:33)
I absolutely agree.
Lex Fridman
(02:41:34)
It just goes back and is this divide that builds.
Adam Frank
(02:41:37)
Yeah, no, and that was a problem when you saw, so like I said, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion. Religion is about politics, but about for the entire history of the species, we’ve had this experience of, for lack of a better word, the sacredness. I’m not connecting this God or anything. I’m just saying this experience of the more, and then with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that, “Anybody who feels that is an idiot.” They just can’t handle the hardcore science. When in fact their views of the world are so denuded of, they can’t even see the role that experience plays in how they came up with their formal systems. And experience fundamentally is weird, mysterious, it’s, it kind of goes down forever in some sense. There is always more. So yeah, that arrogance then just if you’re telling everybody who’s not hardcore enough to do the standard model of cosmology, that they’re idiots, that’s not going to bode well for the advance of your project.
Lex Fridman
(02:42:37)
So you’re proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is fundamental, experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is at the core of reality?
Adam Frank
(02:42:56)
But I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t because there is panpsychism, right? Which wants to say-
Lex Fridman
(02:43:02)
Right. So that’s all the way there. So panpsychism is, that’s literally one of the laws of physics is consciousness.
Adam Frank
(02:43:04)
Right. But see what all those do is just the idea of say, physicalism versus idealism, which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with. Physicalism says, “All that exists as physical.” Idealism says, “All that exists is mind.” We’re actually saying, “Look, both of these to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third-person view. And that third-person view we want to really emphasize is a fiction.” It’s a useful fiction when you’re doing science. If I want to do the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don’t want to have to think about experience at all, right? But if I’m asking deeper questions, I can’t ignore the fact that there really is no person view and that any story I tell about the world is coming from, it’s not just first person, but it’s literally because I’m going to argue that experience always involves all of us. Experience always originates out of a community.

(02:43:58)
That you are always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being in experience. So whatever account we want to give of the world is going to have to take that as experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately, we don’t have an answer. That’s when people are like, “Well, what are you suggesting is the alternative?” It’s like, look, that’s the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this, but what we would argue with is, and we’re thinking about the next book, is this is really going to require a new conception of nature. That doesn’t sort of jump to that third-person… That fictional third-person view and somehow figures out how to do science. Recognizing that it always starts from experience. It always starts from this field of experience. Or in phenomenology, the word is the life world that you’re embedded in. You can’t un-embed yourself from it.

(02:44:52)
So how do you do… So one of the things that Whitehead said was, “We have to avoid the bifurcation of nature.” And what he meant by that is the bifurcation into scientific concepts, wavelength. Think about seeing a sunset. You can say like, “Oh look, it’s just wavelengths and scattering particles.” And your experience of the redness, the actual experience of the redness and all the other things. It’s not just red. There’s no qualia, there’s no pure redness. Everything that’s happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomena. It’s just brain states, whatever. He said, “You can’t do that. They’re both real. They’re both accounts. They both need to be integrated.” And so that required, I think, really a different of what we mean by nature.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:34)
Is it something like incorporating in the physics, in the study of nature, the observer, the experiencing observer, or is that still also looking from a third-person?
Adam Frank
(02:45:45)
I think that that’s what we have to figure out. And so actually a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, because one of the things we’re arguing is look.. In the chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who’s a wonderful philosopher, and Marcelo Gleiser, who’s a theoretical physicist. When I was writing the chapter on the origin of The Blind Spot, sort of how this emerged out of history, the subheader was like, “Well, it made sense at the time.” Because it did. It really, there was a reason why people adopted this third person, God’s eye deterministic view. This view of sort of like, yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe. Yeah, totally made sense. But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you, “Eh-eh.” And no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right?

(02:46:29)
Quantum mechanics slams you with the idea of the measurement problem. And most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger equation, which you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions and now you’ve got a differential equation and you crank out the differential equation and it makes predictions for the future, right? Exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the Lagrange or Hamiltonians. But then this other thing happens where it’s like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole nother set of rules for you. That’s what we call the born rule. And it was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right? So when you’re asking, how will we do this? Quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it.

(02:47:17)
So there’s been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn’t there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter. And then you get something like QBism, which is I’m going to advocate for, is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which puts the Born rule at the center. Instead of focusing on the Schrodinger equation and the weird things that come out of it, like Schrodinger’s cat and all that other stuff. It says, “No, no, actually the real mystery is the Born rule. Let’s think about the Born rule.” And like you said, that puts the agent, the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:01)
So that’s not a thing you’re trying to get rid of? That’s the thing you’re trying to integrate at the center of the thing in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of thing should be incorporated in every layer of study of nature.
Adam Frank
(02:48:19)
Absolutely. That’s exactly it. So one of the things that’s really interesting to me, so we have a project, I’m part of a big project that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pienaar on QBism. So I’ve been part of that. And what I’ve been amazed by is the language they use. So what’s cool about QBism is it comes from quantum information theory. It’s a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics. And it’s always about do you have an agent who makes an action on the world? And then the information they get from that action through the experiment, that’s the action on the world. Updates, their priors updates, their Bayesian, that’s why it’s called QBism. Quantum Bayesianism updates how the information they’ve gotten from the world. Now, this turns out to be, it’s kind of the same language that we’re using in a project that’s about the physics of life, where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells.

(02:49:16)
So we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning, right? Focuses on in a very simple way, just how much of the information that the agent, the critter is getting from the world actually helps it survive. That’s the most basic idea of meaning. We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not? And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food? Kind of has the feel the same sort of architecture as what’s going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it, how do we bring this sort of recognition? That there’s always us, the agent or life the agent interacting with the world and drawing both giving information and passing information back as a way of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:50:27)
So you think there could be something like QBism, Quantum Bayesianism that creates a theory, like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center.
Adam Frank
(02:50:42)
Yes. That’s what we’re looking for. I think that is really, that’s the exciting part. And it’s a move, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you understand why people love this? I have these equations. And these equations represent, there’s this platonic ideal that they are, they exist eternally on their own. It’s kind of quasi-religious, right? It’s sort of somehow, look, these equations are the, you’re reading the mind of God, but this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you’re saying is there’s us and the world, they’re inseparable. It’s always us and the world. And what we’re now finding about is this co-creation, this interaction between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account. In no way am I saying these laws aren’t important. These laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, that turns the experience, turns the agent into just an epiphenomena, that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent’s not the most important part of the story.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:45)
So if you pull on this thread and say, there’s a whole discipline born of this, putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory, in a physics theory, is it possible it just breaks the whole thing open? So there’s this whole effort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of coming up with a theory of everything. What if these are the tip of the iceberg? What if the agent thing is really important?
Adam Frank
(02:52:18)
So listen, that would be kind of my dream. I’m not going to be the one to do it because I’m not smart enough to do it. Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while. With string theory, I’ve spent my whole life listening to talks about, “String theory, real soon.” And it’s gotten ever more disconnected from data, observations. There were people talking for a while that it is post-empirical. I always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like, physicists have been smoking their own stash. There’s this way we’ve gotten used to, you have to out-weird the other person, my theory has 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it’s got psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there’s a problem. I don’t need to tell you there’s a crisis in physics or there’s a crisis in cosmology. Other people have used that. That’s been the headline on scientific American stories.

(02:53:18)
So clearly another direction has to be found, and maybe it has nothing to do with this, but I suspect that because so many times the agent or having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency. When it comes to time thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time. Clocks don’t tell time. We use clocks to tell time. So maybe that even the fundamental nature of time can’t be viewed from the outside, that there’s a new physics theory that is going to come from, that comes from this agential, informational, computational view. I don’t know. But that’s kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.

Nature of time

Lex Fridman
(02:54:05)
Yeah, time is really interesting one. Time is really important to us humans. What is time?
Adam Frank
(02:54:12)
Yeah, right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we’ve taken, this is what, when Husserl talks about the surreptitious substitution, we’ve taken Einstein’s beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time, and we substituted that for the actual experience of time. So the block universe, where next Tuesday is already written down in the block universe, the four dimensional universe, all events are already there. Which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the scientific framework. But it is not lived time. And this was pointed out to Einstein, and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Bergson, who was the most famous philosopher of the early 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity-
Adam Frank
(02:55:03)
The 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and Berkson, whose whole thing was about time and it was about duration. He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of time from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration like we humans where duration for us is full. It’s stretched out. It’s got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present. Music is the best example, right? You’re hearing music, you’re both already anticipating what’s going to happen and you are remembering what’s going on.

(02:55:34)
There’s a kind of phenomenal structure there, which is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. And the way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot is it says, “Oh, no, no, the formal system is time,” but really the only place time appears is with us, where we’re so having a theory that actually could start with us and then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third-person view back on us. Could, that’s a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem.
Lex Fridman
(02:56:13)
I just wonder who is the observer? I mean, define what the agent is in any kind of frame is difficult.
Adam Frank
(02:56:20)
Is difficult, but that’s the good work of the science ahead of us. So what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So we start with experience, which is irreducible. There’s no atoms of experience. It’s a whole, and we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way. There’s a philosopher, Robert Crease, who talks about the workshop that started in the 1700s, 1600s, we developed this communal space to work in, sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated. And we want to the next step.

(02:56:54)
So this idea of pulling out from experience, these thinner, abstract, structural invariance, the things that we could actually do science with, and it’s kind of like, we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction. So the problem with the way we do things now is we take those abstractions, which came from experience, and then with something like a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in. You literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions neglecting experience because that’s the only way to do science. And then you think somehow, oh, I’m going to jam experience back in and have an explanation for experience.
Lex Fridman
(02:57:36)
So do you think it’s possible to show that something like free will is quote, unquote real if you integrate experience back into into the physics model of the world?
Adam Frank
(02:57:46)
What I would say is that free will is a given. And that’s the thing about experience. So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote. It says, “It’s not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It’s the job to account for the abstract.” The concrete, what’s happening between us right now, is just given. It’s presented to us every day. It’s presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn’t add anything to it. So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent. To be an agent agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, they’re equivalent. And so in some sense, to be an agent is to be autonomous. And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy that captures aspects of it’s arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise.

(02:58:41)
But the idea why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they’re more real than experience. And the equations are a paler… They don’t corral experience. They are a thinner representation. As we like to say, “Don’t confuse the map for the terrain.” What’s happening between us right now and all the weirdness of it. That’s the terrain. The map is what I can write down on equations. And then in the workshop, do experiments on. Super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:17)
What if the experience is an illusion? How do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion?
Adam Frank
(02:59:26)
An illusion looking from where? Because that already requires to take that stance is you’ve already pushed yourself into that third person view. And so what we’re saying is that third person view, which now you’re going to say like, “Oh, I’ve got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities,” meaning things that I think exist in God’s living room in spite that are independent of me and the community of living things I’m part of.
Lex Fridman
(02:59:51)
So you’re pushing it elsewhere just like there’s a stack of turtles is probably, if this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there’s an observer for whom it’s not an illusion. So you always have to find an observer somewhere.
Adam Frank
(03:00:06)
And that’s why fundamentally the blind spot, especially the scientific triumphalist part is following a religious impulse. It’s wanting the god’s eye view. And what’s really interesting, and when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, there’s a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in and it is actually a pretty, it’s only one version of philosophy. So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition. But there’s even in Europe or in the Western tradition for Western, what we’ll call western philosophy, there’s phenomenology. And Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which took an entirely different track. They were really interested in the structure of experience. They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle. That is experience, right experience. You’re not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it.

(03:01:00)
It’s given. So you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then, so that has not been part of this discussion about you’ll never, good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it’s a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization. So there’s the western core out of which comes the Greeks and the Judeo- Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia and they developed their own. They were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions. And they, for reasons they had contemplative practice. They were very focused on direct, trying to directly probe attention and experience. They asked questions in ways that the West never really did.

(03:01:52)
Phenomenology kind of started it, but there’s philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu. They’re like the Plato and the Aristotle of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience in the West. I think maybe because we had the Judeo-Christian tradition where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame in the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of India and Asia. They started always with this. They wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their argumentation was based on, I’ve got this experience, I can’t get out of this experience. How do I reason from it? So I think there’s a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from. Not slavishly, we don’t all have to become Buddhists to do it, but there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn’t.
Lex Fridman
(03:02:47)
But there’s also the practical fact that it’s difficult to build a logical system on top of experience. It’s difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience. And so as science advances, we might get better and better. The same is it’s very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fe questions.
Adam Frank
(03:03:16)
But I think we can do it. I think there’s aspects of it. I mean, as long as you’re never trying to, “This is what experience is,” I think that’s kind of where you’re never going to have a causal account of experience just given. But you can do lots about, and that’s what the good work is to how do I approach this? How do I approach this in a way that’s rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in this is what we’re counting with our semantic information too. Causal closure. Love this idea. The idea that… So we talked about autopoiesis a while back, the idea that living systems, they are self creating and self maintaining. And so the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right? The cell membrane, you can’t have a cell without a cell membrane.

(03:04:02)
The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out. But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it’s a product of the processes that the cell membrane needs, right? In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself. So there’s this strange, it’s always with life, there’s always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is the science that’s ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure accounting for how the, we talk about downward causation. So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms. That’s it. If you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you are done. Of course, in principle, you need God’s computer, but fine. In principle, it could be done. Causal closure, and I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this.

(03:04:57)
There’s ways in which using Epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory, that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates. Now, the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws, whether that paper is true or not. It’s an example of heading down that road. There’s also Robert Rosen’s work. He was a theoretical biologist who he talked about closure to efficient cause that living systems are organizationally closed, are causally closed so that they don’t depend anymore on the microstate. And he had a proof, which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it’s some argue it’s true, some argue it’s not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church-turing complete, they cannot be represented as formal systems. So in that way, they’re not axioms, they’re not living systems will not be axioms.

(03:05:55)
They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof is valid or not. But I’m saying them giving you examples of when you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations. The book we thought was going to be really heretical. Obviously most public facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphant. So we were just waiting for the fight. Then the review from science came out and it was totally pro… It was very positive. We’re like, “Oh my God.” Then a review came out in Nature Physics and it was totally positive.

(03:06:38)
Then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal, kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized all industrial economies for that they had been touched by the blind spots, socialism, communism. It doesn’t matter. These extractive sort of had that sort of view that the is just reducible to resources. The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So it feels like there’s actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to jump past these hurdles that we’ve been arguing about forever and we’re sort of stuck in a vortex.
Lex Fridman
(03:07:18)
Well, it is. I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there’s an elephant in the room, that we’re just removing the agent. Everyone is doing it and it’s like, yeah, yeah, there’s the experience and then there’s the third-person perspective on the world. And so, man, science from, applying scientific rigor from a first-person perspective is very difficult. I mean, it’s fascinating.
Adam Frank
(03:07:44)
I think we can do it. Also, the thing, what’s really interesting is I think it’s not just first-person, first and second, because one idea is that, the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third-person view. That’s one way of talking about objectivity. There’s a whole other way is that I do the experiment. You do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity, and it acknowledges that when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible.

(03:08:18)
So there’s a great paper, speaking of Santa Fe by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information, theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it’s actually pretty fluid. My liver cell is an individual, but really it’s part of the liver. And my liver is a separate system, but really it’s part of me. So I’m an individual, yay. But actually I’m part of a society and I couldn’t be me without the entire community of say, language users. I wouldn’t even be able to frame any questions. And my community of language users is part of ecosystems that are alive, that I am a part of, a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker stuff, and then those ecosystems are part of the biosphere. We’re never separable as opposed to this very atomizing, the triumphal, this science view is wants like Boltzmann brains, you’re just a brain floating in the space.
Lex Fridman
(03:09:07)
There is a fascinating degree to which agency is fluid. You are an individual, but you and I talking is the kind of individual, and then the person listening to this right now is also an individual. I mean, that’s a weird thing too.
Adam Frank
(03:09:24)
That’s a weird thing, right?
Lex Fridman
(03:09:26)
Because there’s a broadcast nature too.
Adam Frank
(03:09:29)
This is why information theoretic. So the idea that we’re pursuing now, which I get really excited about, is this idea of information architecture or organization. Organizational organization. Because physicalism is like everything’s atoms, but Kant recognized, Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism. He recognized that life has a weird organization that would see specifically different from machines. And so this idea that how do we engage with the idea that organization, which is often I can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even. It’s not really quite physical. It’s embodied in physical, in the physical. It has to instantiate in the physical, but it also has this other realm of design, not design like intelligent design, but there’s a… The organization itself is a relationship of constraints and information flow. And I think again, that’s an entirely new interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that.

Cognition

Lex Fridman
(03:10:29)
So going back to Kant and organism versus machine. So I showed you a couple of legged robots.
Adam Frank
(03:10:40)
Very cool.
Lex Fridman
(03:10:41)
Is it possible for machines to have agency?
Adam Frank
(03:10:44)
I would not discount that possibility. I think there’s no reason I would say that it’s impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests that strange loop that we’re talking about that autopoiesis I don’t think there’s a reason to say it can’t happen in silicon. I think whatever, it would be very different from us, the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us. But now it’s instantiated and I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don’t think what we have now, the LLMs are really there, but yeah, I’m not going to say that it’s not possible.
Lex Fridman
(03:11:26)
I wonder how far you can get with imitation, which is essentially what LLMs are doing. So imitating humans, and I wouldn’t discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve what you would call consciousness or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most of us humans to think, oh, that’s just fake. That’s copying. But there’s some degree to which us, we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines coming from babies. We were born in this world and we’re just learning to imitate each other. And through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations. We gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.
Adam Frank
(03:12:08)
Yeah, it’s possible, right? It’s possible. But I think probably the view I’m advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there’s something called, E-four. The E-four theory of cognition, embodiment, enaction, embedding, and there’s another one, extension. But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension with other living systems as well is essential.

(03:12:46)
So that’s why I think the LLMs are not going to, it’s not imitation. It’s going to require, this goes to the brain in the VAT thing. I did an article about the brain in the vat, which was really Evans, I was reporting on Evans. Where they did the brain in the VAT argument. But they said, “Look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the VAT is actually to have a brain in a body.” And it could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don’t think LLMs will get there because they can’t. You really need to be embedded in a world, at least that’s the E-four idea.
Lex Fridman
(03:13:13)
The E-four, the 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. And by way of extra cranial processes and structures, they’re very much in vogue. 4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations. This is a paper, but reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the four E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses. It’s fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far, and it could go real far.
Adam Frank
(03:13:49)
Right. There’s a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who was very much a reductionist, the great biologist, and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist, and Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, “Where’s your mind?” And Salk went, “Up here,” and Bateson said, “No, no, no, out here.” And what he really meant was this extended idea. It’s not just within your cranium to have experience. Experience in some sense is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do. Almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies is, from this perspective, is really important. And it’s very attractive to me. And again, if we’re really going to do science with them, we’re going to have to have these ideas crash up against data, crash up against, we can’t just armchair it or couch quarterbacking it, but I think there’s a lot of possibility here. It’s a very radically different way of looking at what we mean by nature.

Mortality

Lex Fridman
(03:14:53)
What do you make of the fact that this individual observer, you as an individual observer only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world? Does it make you sad?
Adam Frank
(03:15:04)
No, actually it doesn’t make me sad. Okay, so full reveal, I have been doing contemplative practice in the zen tradition for 30 years. I’ve been staring at a wall for 30 years, and it’s taught me a lot. I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience. And one of the things it’s taught me is I don’t really matter that very much. This thing I call Adam Frank is really, it’s kind of a construct. There’s this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally, and that’s super cool, but it’s going to go. I don’t know where it came from. It’s going to go, I don’t really need it to, and then who the hell knows? I’m not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that what I love, zen, has this idea of beyond birth and death, and they don’t mean reincarnation. What they mean is, “Dude, you don’t even really understand what life is.” You know what I mean? I’m like this core level of your own experience. So your ideas about what death is are equally ill-formed.

(03:16:07)
The contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself. Spend five days at a zen session doing contemplative practice from 7:00 AM. until 9:00 PM, obviously with breaks. And you’ll really get a much deeper understanding of what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention because attention is kind of like this thing. It’s usually just like, “Oh, over there. Oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I got to do my taxes. Oh, what’s that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes?” And with a contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it.

(03:16:39)
And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So what I think I’ve learned from that is kind of whatever, I’m not really kind of real to begin with. The Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing, and the part of me that is real is everything’s coming and going. It’s all coming and going. Well, how could I ever not come and go? And the entire world is just, Buddhism has this idea of co-dependent arising. Nothing exists, nothing has self-nature. Nothing exists by itself. It’s an endless, infinitely connected web.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:15)
But still, there’s a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it and it ends and it’s good while it last, and it sucks that it ends. You can just be like, “Ah, well, everything comes and goes,” but I was eating ice cream yesterday. I found this awesome low-carb ice cream called, Delights here in Austin, and it ends. And I was staring at the empty container, and it was-
Adam Frank
(03:17:42)
That’s beautiful, man. I love that.
Lex Fridman
(03:17:44)
You could say, “Yeah, well, that’s how it all is, but…”
Adam Frank
(03:17:47)
Can I say that what I’ve learned from, because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it. But what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that you’re not just saying, this is I do koan practice. So this is a tradition in zen that it was established, it was a teaching method that was established a thousand years ago. They’re these book of koans. And every koan, if you’ve ever read Godel, he’s got a whole chapter on koans. They’re kind of non-logical problems that you have to work on. One of my favorite one was, “Stop the sound of the distant temple bell.”

(03:18:23)
You’re like, “What?” Every time my teacher gives it to him, I’m like, “What are you talking about?” This is the whole zen thing of up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So your job with these koans is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you realize what the thing is trying to teach you what aspect of experience it’s trying to teach you. So there’s no answer. No. And in fact, actually, you don’t give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate. The first time when I did a call on and the guy was like, “Don’t tell me the answer, show me the answer.” I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, I’ve kind of learned the language of them. So I could never tell you. If I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You’d be like, “What?”

(03:19:05)
It’s not the words, it’s the So your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty. With a contemplative practice as it deepens over years, it really does take years. Just like anything in math, it took me years to understand the Lagrangians. You kind of come to a deeper understanding with yeah, the words of, it’s not just like, oh, everything changes. You actually feel that movement. You feel it with breath to breath, and it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy and it’s not connected to anything. That’s what I’ve kind of gotten from practice. It’s just like, yeah, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment that is truly the way things are. And it’s okay. It’s not okay because I have a feeling about it. Okay. I want it to be okay. It just is okay. And so really, it’s a pretty awesome thing.
Lex Fridman
(03:19:51)
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Maybe it’s the genetics, maybe it’s the biochemistry in my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience, amorphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it’s my Eastern European roots, but there’s always a melancholy that’s also sitting next to the joy, and I think it always feels like they’re intricately linked. So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience, and the joy is just about the beauty of experience, and they’re just kind of sitting there.
Adam Frank
(03:20:22)
Which is cool actually, because I’m also, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well, going back, and I get it right, but that’s also the cool thing. I think one of the things is, well, that is what it is. That is what it is. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to manipulate it or move it around or yeah, this is the experience.
Lex Fridman
(03:20:41)
Can you speak to just the practical nature of sitting there from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM?
Adam Frank
(03:20:45)
I’m like, what the hell are you doing, bro?
Lex Fridman
(03:20:46)
What’s powerful? What’s fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall?
Adam Frank
(03:20:51)
Yeah. Yeah. So not really. I mean, you’re staring. You’re facing a wall, and what you’re doing is you’re just sitting with, there’s different meditative practices, there’s counting breaths. So that’s usually what I do. I sit down and I start counting breaths, and for the first half hour it’s just like, blah, blah, blah. Like I said, I’m thinking about my taxes. I’m thinking about what I got to do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full session, a two-day session, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen’s, Born To Run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses. This was back in when there were LPs with the fricking pauses.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:22)
Nice.
Adam Frank
(03:21:24)
My mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order.
Lex Fridman
(03:21:28)
That’s pretty cool, actually.
Adam Frank
(03:21:29)
Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see because you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while, I used to hate sitting. I do it, but after a while the mind gets exhausted. That part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter is just like, there’s nothing else to do. And then you get bored. And now I realize that’s when something interesting is going to happen. You drop down and now it’s a very physical practice. People think you’re just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually, it becomes a very physical process where you’re really just following the breath, you’re kind of riding the breath and it gets very quiet. And within that quietness, there’s a path. Because obviously there’s been, Buddhism is always not about thinking, but there’s a huge literature.

(03:22:18)
So these guys are always about, don’t think. I’ve written all this stuff, but they’re guideposts. They’re like the finger pointing at the moon. And there’s the idea of first, your mind is usually scattered. Right now, when I walk out, I’m going to go get the Uber and everything. My mind’s going to be all over the place, but with sitting, first, you concentrate the mind so that there’s no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening, but you’re just not there happening up there. You’re not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind, which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away and there’s just this presence.

(03:22:49)
It’s kind of like a raw presence, and that’s often where the joy up wells from, but you sit with whatever, maybe you’re going to sit and maybe you’re going to go through an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something. You’re just going to sit with whatever comes up you’re going to make. That’s why the sitting part, you’re making the commitment. I’m going to sit here with whatever comes up, I will not be moved. And then what You come away with it actually over time, it actually changes kind of who you are. I’m still the asshole I was from New Jersey growing up, but I just have more space now for things.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:24)
Once Jersey, always Jersey.
Adam Frank
(03:23:26)
Always Jersey.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:26)
But I love the Bruce Springsteen is just blasting in your head.
Adam Frank
(03:23:29)
Yeah, that was amazing.
Lex Fridman
(03:23:30)
Why are we here? What do you think is the purpose, the meaning of human existence?
Adam Frank
(03:23:35)
It’s good that we just had the last conversation because I’m going to give this answer, which is so corny. It’s love, and I’m not messing around. Because really actually, what happens, so within Buddhism, there’s the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You’re here to help. You’re just here to help, right? Compassion. That’s a really essential part of this path, of the Dharma path. And when I first started, I was like, “I don’t care about compassion. I’m here for knowledge.” I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing I was suffering. The reason everybody comes to things like this, life was hard. I was going through stuff, but I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion or whatever. But then I found out that you can’t get that. You can’t get those. You can’t go to this level without compassion.

(03:24:18)
Somehow in this process, you realize that it really is about helping all sentient beings. That’s the way they frame, just being here to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is the main thing is to get over. Your job is to get over. But that’s really what I found. It is actually kind… And so that joy, the joy, some of that joy is just, it’s like this. One of the things I have when I have really, there’s a kind of experience I’ll have in contemplative practice, which will carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world gives you everything, and there’s a certain way, just the blue sky and the breath, the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered. It holds nothing back. And yeah, that’s kind of the experience. And then you kind of like, “Oh, I need to be helpful, because who’s not having this experience.”
Lex Fridman
(03:25:09)
So just love for the world as it is?
Adam Frank
(03:25:10)
Love for the, and all the beings who are suffering. Everybody’s suffering, everybody’s suffering. Your worst political opponent, they’re suffering. And our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:26)
And hopefully there’s many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey, out of suffering, towards love.
Adam Frank
(03:25:33)
That may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:36)
I hope so.
Adam Frank
(03:25:37)
I hope so too. Either that or they’re coming to eat us.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:39)
Especially if they’re a type three civilization.
Adam Frank
(03:25:41)
That’s right. And they got really big guns.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:45)
Well, this was truly mind-blowing. Fascinating. Just awesome conversation. Adam, thank you for everything you do, and thank you for talking today.
Adam Frank
(03:25:52)
Oh, thank you. This was a lot of fun.
Lex Fridman
(03:25:54)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frank. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. “The cosmos is all that is or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest, contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Transcript for Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #454

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #454 with Saagar Enjeti.
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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Saagar Enjeti
(00:00:00)
People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right? We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House, and he is a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats, he’s passing legislation, but more importantly, he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional, he tries even more.

(00:00:36)
So what does America take away from that? Every single time, if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was, really, part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure.

(00:01:04)
I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR, I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had a really, really good judgment and I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world.

(00:01:24)
Actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that.

(00:01:37)
And I encourage people out there, this is a brutal text, we were forced to read it in graduate school, The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison, I’m so thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works.

(00:01:52)
People really need to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care about you, they don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great, shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal.

(00:02:13)
Every once in a while, you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done.

(00:02:22)
So the question around The Essence of Decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different schools of thought, but one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then, kind of the great man theory as well.

(00:02:42)
You and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT-109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back and he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine, he was a war hero.

(00:02:59)
And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which, to this day, is considered a text, which, at the moment, was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have a original copy, it’s one of my most prized possessions.

(00:03:21)
And from 1939… Because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he’s a brilliant man.

(00:03:27)
And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody, so in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, and all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind of amazing.

(00:03:52)
I’m going to give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius, shout out to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too because it really made me understand media. “People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed.”
Lex Fridman
(00:04:09)
The following is a conversation with Saagar Enjeti, his second time in the podcast. Saagar is a political commentator, journalist, co-host of Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and of The Realignment podcast with Marshall Kosloff. Saagar is one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met. His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world.

(00:04:38)
In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mention a large number of amazing books. We’ll put a link to them in the description for those interested to learn more about each topic.

(00:04:56)
This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Saagar Enjeti.

Why Trump won

Lex Fridman
(00:05:07)
So let’s start with the obvious big question, why do you think Trump won? Let’s break it down. Before the election, you said that if Trump wins, it’s going to be because of immigration. So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:05:25)
Yes, we absolutely need to return to immigration, but without that, multifaceted explanation, let’s start with the easiest one. There has been a wave of anti-incumbent energy around the world. Financial Times chart recently went viral showing, so the first time, I think since World War II, possibly since 1905, I need to look at the data set, that all anti-incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats. So that’s a very, very high level analysis, and we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 because there were similar global precursors.

(00:05:56)
The individual level in the United States, there’s a very simple explanation as well, which is that Joe Biden was very old, he was very unpopular, inflation was high. Inflation is one of the highest determiners of people switching their votes and of putting their primacy on that ahead of any other issue at the ballot box. So that’s that.

(00:06:12)
But I think it’s actually much deeper, at a psychological level, for who America is and what it is. And fundamentally, I think what we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about today is the evolution of the modern left and its collapse in the Kamala Harris candidacy, and eventually, the loss to Donald Trump in the popular vote where, really, is like an apotheosis of several social forces. So we’re going to talk about The Great Awakening or so-called Awokening, which is very important to understanding all of this.

(00:06:42)
There’s also really Donald Trump himself who is really one of the most unique individual American politicians that we’ve seen in decades. At this point, Donald Trump’s victory makes him the most important and transformative figure in American politics since FDR. And a thought process for the audience is in 2028, there will be an 18-year-old who’s eligible to vote who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the central American figure.

(00:07:08)
And there’s stories in World War II where troops were on the front line, some were 18, 19 years old, FDR died, and they literally said, “Well, who’s the president?” And they said, “Harry Truman, you dumb ass.” And they go, “Who?” They couldn’t conceive of a universe where FDR was not the president of the United States. And Donald Trump, even during the Biden administration, he was the figure. Joe Biden defined his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man, and obviously, he’s failed. We should talk a lot about Joe Biden as well for his own failed theories of the presidency.

(00:07:39)
So I think at a macro level, it’s easy to understand. At a basic level, inflation, it’s easy to understand. But what I really hope that a lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique Donald Trump is as a political figure and what he was able to do to realign American politics really forever. In the white working class realignment originally of 2016, the activation, really, of a multiracial kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along a single individual question of did you attend a four-year college degree institution or not?

(00:08:13)
And this is a crazy thing to say, Donald Trump is one of the most racially depolarizing electoral figures in American history. We lived in 2016 at a time when racial groups really voted in blocks, Latinos, Blacks, whites. There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white college educated, white collar workers. But by and large, you could pretty fairly say that Asians, Indians, everyone, 80, 90% were going to vote for the Democratic Party, Latinos as well. I’m born here in the state of Texas. George W. Bush shocked people when he won some 40% of the Latino vote. Donald Trump just beat Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men.

(00:08:59)
So really, fundamentally, we have witnessed a full realignment in American politics, and that’s a really fundamental problem for the modern left. It’s erased a lot of the conversation around gerrymandering, around the Electoral College, the so-called Electoral College bias towards Republicans. Really, being able to win the popular vote for the first time since 2004 is shocking and landmark achievement by a Republican.

(00:09:24)
In 2008, I have a book on my shelf and I always look at it to remind myself of how much things can change, James Carville, and it says 40 More Years, How Democrats Will Never Lose An Election Again. 2008, they wrote that book after the Obama coalition and the landslide. And something I love so much about this country, people change their minds all the time.

(00:09:46)
I was born in 1992, I watched red states go blue. I’ve seen blue states go red. I’ve seen swing states go red or blue. I’ve seen millions of people pick up and move, the greatest internal migration in the United States since World War II. And it’s really inspiring because it’s a really dynamic, interesting place. And I love covering it and I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people. It’s awesome.

Book recommendations

Lex Fridman
(00:10:08)
One of the reasons I’m a big fan of yours is you’re a student of history, and so, you’ve recommended a bunch of books to me. And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time, some don’t. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people, some are mass movements. And it’s just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve, and then, fit themselves, maybe, into the constraints of a two-party system. And I’d love to talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:10:51)
Well, I won’t go that far because to say it’s a class struggle really implies that things fundamentally align on economic lines, and I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. Although, if that’s your lens, you could get there. So there’s a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her vote share and won households over $100,000 or more, and Donald Trump won households under 100,000. You could view that in an economic lens.

(00:11:18)
The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college degree and for education. And so, one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray. And that book, really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in when they attend a four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life, not only on where they move to, who they marry, what type of grocery store they go to, their cultural, what television shows that they watch.

(00:11:47)
One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray’s is called a Bubble Quiz. I encourage people to go take it by the way. It asks you a question. It’s like what does the word Branson mean to you? And it has a couple of answers. One of them is Branson is Sir Richard Branson. Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination. Three is, it means nothing. So you are less in a bubble if you say country music. And you’re very much in the bubble if you say Richard Branson. And I remember taking that test for the first time, I go, “Obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic. Like what?” And then, I was like, “Wait.” I’m like, “I’m in the bubble.”

(00:12:20)
And there are other things in there like can you name various different military ranks? I can because I’m a history nerd, but the vast majority of college educated people don’t know anybody who served in the United States military, they don’t have family members who do… The most popular shows in America are like The Big Bang Theory and NCIS, whereas people in our, probably, cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus, The Last of Us, this is prestige television with a very small audience, but high income, high education.

(00:12:46)
So the point is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live. And rural, urban is one way to describe it, but honestly, with the work from home revolution and more rich people and highly educated people moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally weren’t able to commute in, that’s changing. And so, really, the internet is everything.

(00:13:08)
The stuff that you consume on the internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing, type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly, whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, all the things that you value in your life, that is the real cultural divide in America. And I actually think that’s what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling that these people don’t understand me and my struggles in this life.

History of wokeism

Lex Fridman
(00:13:44)
And so, the trivial formulation is the woke-ism and the anti woke-ism a movement?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:13:49)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:13:49)
So it’s not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against woke-ism, it was the broader anti-elitism?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:13:57)
It’s difficult to say because I wouldn’t dismiss anti woke-ism or woke-ism as an explanation. But we need to understand the electoral impacts of woke. So there’s varying degrees of how you’re going to encounter, quote-unquote, “woke-ism,” and this is a very difficult thing to define. So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you’re going to interact with on a cultural basis.

(00:14:21)
And what I mean by that is going to watch a TV show, and just for some reason, there’s like two trans characters. And it’s never particularly explained why, they just are there. Or watching a commercial, and it’s the same thing. Watching, I don’t know, I remember I was watching, I think it was Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It was a terrible movie, by the way. Don’t recommend it. But one of the characters, I think her name was like America and she wore a gay pride flag. Look, many left-wingers would make fun of me for saying these things, but that is obviously a social agenda to the point as in they believe it is deeply acceptable that it’s used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress in sexual orientation and others and really believe it’s important to, quote-unquote, “showcase it for representation.” So that’s one way that we may encounter, quote-unquote, woke-ism.

(00:15:09)
But the more important ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action, which really has its roots in American society all the way going back to the 1960s, and how those have manifested in our economy and in our understanding of, quote-unquote, “discrimination.” So two books I can recommend, one is called The Origins of Woke, that’s by Richard Hanania. There’s another one, The Age of Entitlement, by Christopher Caldwell. And they make a very strong case, Caldwell in particular, he calls it like a new founding of America, was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it created an entire new legal regime and understanding of race in the American character and how the government was going to enforce that.

(00:15:50)
And that really ties in with another one of the books that I recommended to you about the origins of Trump by Jim Webb. And Senator Jim Webb, incredible, incredible man. He’s so under appreciated. Intellectual. He was anti-war. And people may remember him from the 2016 primary and they had asked him a question, I don’t exactly remember, about one of his enemies, and he’s like, “Well, one of them was a guy I shot in Vietnam.” And he was running against Hillary.

(00:16:18)
And that guy, he wrote the book, Born Fighting, I think it’s history of the Scots-Irish people, something like that. And that book really opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action and racial preferences that were playing out through the HR, managerial elite really turned a lot of people within the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally discriminated against by the professional, managerial class.

(00:16:46)
So there’s a lot of roots to this, The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham. And in terms of the origin of how we got here, but the crystallization of DEI and/or affirmative action, I prefer to use the term affirmative action, in the highest echelons of business. And there became this idea that representation itself was the only thing that mattered. And I think that right around 2014, that really went on steroids, and that’s why it’s not an accident that Donald J. Trump elected in 2016.
Lex Fridman
(00:17:14)
At this point, do you think this election is the kind of statement that woke-ism as a movement is dead?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:17:20)
I don’t know. It’s very difficult to say because woke-ism itself is not a movement with a party leader, it’s a amorphous belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years. It’s effectively a religion. And part of the reason why it’s difficult to define is it means different things to different people. So for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define, quote-unquote, “woke.” Do I think that the Democrats will be speaking in so-called academic language? Yes, I do think they will.

(00:17:50)
I think that the next Democratic nominee will not do that. However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away from, quote-unquote, “woke,” but she basically was punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019, but a general cultural feeling that her and the people around her do not understand me and not only do not understand me, but have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding that would lead to a, quote-unquote, “equity mindset,” equal outcomes for everybody as opposed to equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy. So I can’t say, I think it’s way too early.

(00:18:26)
And again, you can not use the word Latinx, but do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime in terms of how you would run your Department of Justice, in terms of how you view the world, in terms of what you think the real dividing lines in America are? Because I would say that’s still actually kind of a woke mindset, and that’s part of the reason why the term itself doesn’t really mean a whole lot. And we have to get, actually, really specific about what it looks like in operations.

(00:18:55)
In operation, it means affirmative action, it means the NASDAQ passing some law that if you want to go public or something, that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board. This is a blatant and extraordinary, look, racialism that they’ve enshrined in their bylaws. So you can get rid of ESG, that’s great, you can get rid of DEI, I think that’s great, but it’s really about a mindset and a view of the world, and I don’t think that’s going anywhere.
Lex Fridman
(00:19:20)
And you think the reason it doesn’t work well in practice is because there’s a big degree to which it’s anti-meritocracy.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:19:29)
It’s anti-American, really. DEI and woke and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries. And there are a lot of countries out there that are multi-ethnic and they’re heterogeneous and they are run by, basically, quasi-dictators. And the way it works is that you pay off the Christians and they pay off the Muslims and they get this guy and they get that guy and everybody kind of shakes… It’s very explicit where they’re like, we have 10 spots and they go to the Christians, we have 10 spots, and they go to the Hindus. India’s a country that I know pretty well, and this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect.

(00:20:02)
But in America, fundamentally, we really believe that, no matter where you are from, that you come here, and basically, within a generation, especially if you migrate here legally and you integrate, that you leave a lot of that stuff behind. And the story, the American dream that is ingrained in so many of us is, one, that really does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference regime or anything that’s not meritocratic.

(00:20:29)
And I will give the left-wingers some credit in the idea that meritocracy itself could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds, I think that’s true. And so, the way I would like to see it is to increase everybody’s equality of opportunity to make sure that they all have a chance at, quote-unquote, “willing out the American dream.” But that doesn’t erase meritocracy, hard work, and many of the other things that we associate with the American character, with the American frontier.

(00:20:58)
So these are two ideologies which are really at odds. In a lot of ways, woke-ism, racialism and all this is a third world ideology. It’s one that’s very prevalent in Europe and all across Asia, but it doesn’t mix well here, and it shouldn’t. And I’m really glad that America feels the same way.

History of Scots-Irish

Lex Fridman
(00:21:14)
Yeah, I got to go back to Jim Webb in that book. What a badass, fascinating book.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:21:14)
Oh my God, it’s amazing.
Lex Fridman
(00:21:19)
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree, first of all how badass the Scots-Irish are. And that to the degree, many of the things that kind of identify as American and part of the American spirit were defined by this relatively small group of people as he describes the motto could be summarized as fight, sing, drink and pray.

(00:21:43)
So there’s the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government, the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance, over 2,000 years of a military tradition. They made up 40% of the Revolutionary War Army and produced numerous military leaders including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a bunch of presidents, some of the more gangster presidents, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Just the whole cultural legacy of country music.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:22:18)
We owe them so much and they really don’t get their due, unfortunately, a lot for the reasons that I just described around racialism is because post-mass immigration from Europe, the term white kind of became blanket applied to new Irish, to Italians, to Slovenians. And as you and I both know, if you travel those countries, people are pretty different. And it’s not the different here in the United States. Scots-Irish were some of the original settlers here in America, and particularly in Appalachia. And their contribution to the fighting spirit and their own culture and who we are as individualists and some of the first people to ever settle the frontier. And that frontier mindset really does come from them. We owe them just as much as we do the Puritans, but they don’t ever really get their due.

(00:23:02)
And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand then how exactly could this group of white working class voters go from 2012 voting for a man named Barack Hussein Obama to Donald J. Trump? It makes perfect sense if you combine it with a lot of the stuff I’m talking about here, about affirmative action, about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions are not seeing through to you and specifically also not valuing your contribution to American history, and in some cases actively looking down.

(00:23:35)
I’m glad you pointed out not only their role in the Revolutionary War, but in the Civil War as well, and just how much of a contribution culturally really that we owe them for the groundwork that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt some of their own ideas and their culture as our own. It’s one of the things that makes America great.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:53)
Mark Twain.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:23:54)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:23:56)
So much of the culture, so much of the American spirit, the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy. So would you trace that fierce individualism that we think of back to them?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:24:12)
Definitely. It’s a huge part of them, about who they were, about the screw you attitude. That book actually kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when Hillbilly Elegy came out. I’m sure you remember this, which it’s kind of weird to think that it’s now the Vice President-elect of the United States. It’s kind of wild, honestly, to think about. But JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, I think was really important for a lot of American elites who were like, “How do these poor people support Trump? Where does this shit come from?” Really, if you really think back to that time, it was shocking to the elite character that any person in the world could ever vote for Donald Trump. And not just vote, he won the election. How does that happen? And that’s Hillbilly Elegy guided people in an understanding of what that’s like on a lived day-to-day basis.

(00:24:56)
And JD, to his credit, talks about Scots-Irish heritage, about Appalachia and the legacy of what that culture looks like today and how a lot of these people voted for Donald Trump. But we got to give credit to Jim Webb who wrote the history of these people and taught me and you about their original fight against the oppressors in Scotland and Ireland and their militant spirit and how they were able to bring that over here. And they got their due in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populist presidents who set us up on the road to Donald Trump to where we are today.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:27)
Dude, it got me pumped and excited to be an American.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:25:29)
Me too. I love that book.
Lex Fridman
(00:25:31)
It’s crazy that JD, the same guy, because that’s Hillbilly Elegy’s, what I kind of thought of him as.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:25:38)
Yeah, I’ll tell you, for me, it’s actually pretty surreal. I met JD Vance in 2017 in a bar. I didn’t ever think he would be the Vice President-elect of the United States. Just kind of wild.

(00:25:50)
One of my friends went back and dug up the email that we originally sent him, just like, “Hey, do you want to meet up?” And he was like, “Sure.” I was watching on television. The first time that it really hit me, I was like, whoa. It was like, name in a history book is whenever he became the vice presidential nominee. I was watching him on TV and the confetti was falling and he was waving with his wife, and I was like, “Wow, that’s it.” You’re in the history books now forever, especially now as the literal Vice President-elect of the US.

(00:26:17)
But his own evolution is actually a fascinating story for us too because I think a lot of the time I’ve spent right now is a lot of what I’m giving right now are 2016 kind of takes about why Trump won that time. But we just spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election and what happened, some of the failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the Great Awokening. But also, if you look at the evolution of JD Vance, this is a person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. And not a lot of people pay attention to this, but if you read Hillbilly Elegy, JD was much more of a traditional conservative at that time.

(00:26:54)
He was citing a report, I think the famous passage is about payday loans and why they’re good or something like that. I don’t know his position today, but I would assume that he’s probably changed that. But the point is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class than eventually become a champion and a disciple of Donald Trump, and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing and bettering the United States, but specifically for working class Americans really of all stripes. And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project, as an ideology. It’s also one of the Republican Party which coalesced now with Donald Trump as a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that eventually was normalized to the point that majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024.

Biden

Lex Fridman
(00:27:51)
So let’s talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What’s your take on Biden?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:27:59)
Biden is, I try to remove myself from it, and I try not to give big history takes while you’re in the moment. But it’s really hard not to say that he’s one of the worst presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I’m going to go with it is because I want to judge him by the things that he set out to do.

(00:28:18)
So Joe Biden has been the same person for his entire political career. He is a basically C student who thinks he’s an A student. The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election to the United States Senate through his entire career as a United States Senator, where he always wanted to be the star and the center of attention and to his 1988 presidential campaign. And one of the most fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is watching him become even more of what he already was.

(00:28:48)
And so, a book recommendation, it’s called What It Takes, and it was written in 1988, and there’s actually a long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal. One of the things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be the center of attention.

(00:29:04)
Now, the reason I’m laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden, the individual and his character is fundamentally the reason that his presidency went awry. This is a person who was elected in 2020, really because of a feeling of chaos of Donald Trump, of we need normalcy, decides to come into the office, portrays himself as a, quote-unquote, “transitional president,” slowly begins to lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds himself with sycophants, the same ones who have been around him for so long that he had no single input into his life to tell him that he needed to stop and he needed to drop out of the race until it became truly undeniable to the vast majority of the American people.

(00:29:45)
And that’s why I’m trying to keep it as him as an individual, as a president, because we could separate him from some of his accomplishments and the things that happened on… Some of them I support, some I don’t, but generally, a lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the CHIPS Act. A lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the Build Back Better bill or whatever his Lina Khan antitrust policy. They’re going to look back on him and they’re going to remember high inflation. They’re going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the job in the sense that, again, book recommendation Freedom From Fear by David Kennedy is about the Roosevelt years.

(00:30:20)
And one of the most important things people don’t understand is the New Deal didn’t really work in the way that a lot of people wanted it to. There was still high unemployment, there was still a lot of suffering, but you know what changed? They felt that they had a vigorous commander in chief who was doing everything in his power to attack the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn’t even materially change, the vigor, that’s a term that was often associated with John F. Kennedy, he had vigor, in the Massachusetts accent. We had this young vibrant president in 1960, and he was running around and he wanted to convince us that he was working every single day tirelessly. And when you have an 80-year-old man who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach while people’s grocery prices and all these things go up-
Saagar Enjeti
(00:31:00)
… cream and going to the beach while people’s grocery prices and all this thing go up by 25%. And we don’t see the same vigor, we don’t see the same action, the biased action, which is so important in the modern presidency.

(00:31:12)
That is fundamentally part of the reason why the Democrats lost the election and also why I think that he missed his moment in such a dramatic way. And he had the opportunity, he could have done it if he wanted to, but maybe 20 years ago. But the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental rise to the presidency ended up in his downfall.

(00:31:36)
And it’s amazing because again, if we look back to his original campaign speech 2019, why I’m running for president, it was Charlottesville, and he said, “I want to defeat Donald Trump forever and I want to make sure that he never gets back in the White House again.” By his own metric he did fail. It was the only thing he wanted to do, and he failed from.

FDR

Lex Fridman
(00:31:54)
You said a lot of interesting stuff. One, FDR that’s really interesting. It’s not about the specific policy, it’s about fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and just uniting the entire country for a… This is the same with Bernie. Maybe there’s a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that’s still supporting him because we just want somebody-
Saagar Enjeti
(00:32:16)
Feels authentic.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:16)
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:32:17)
That’s it.
Lex Fridman
(00:32:17)
We just want somebody to fight authentically for us.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:32:20)
Yes, yes. FDR people really… FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus Christ in the US. And some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate. He gets all this stuff through.

(00:32:39)
But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place. We’ve had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House, and he was a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats. He’s passing legislation, but more importantly, so he tries various different programs.

(00:33:05)
Then they get ruled unconstitutional. He tries even more. What does America take away from that? Every single time if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was a really part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He’s such an inspirational figure. He really is.

(00:33:36)
And people think of him for World War II, of course, we can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the early years are not studied enough. 33 to 37 is one of the most remarkable periods in American history. We were not ruled by a president. We were ruled by a king, by a monarch. And people liked it. He was a dictator and he was a good one.

George W Bush

Lex Fridman
(00:33:56)
Yeah. To push back against the implied thing that you said.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:34:02)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:02)
When saying Biden is the worst president-
Saagar Enjeti
(00:34:04)
No second worst in modern history, that’s what I said.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:06)
Second in modern history. Who’s the worst?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:34:08)
W, no question.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:09)
I see. Because of the horrible wars probably.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:34:12)
I mean, Iraq is just so bad.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:13)
It’s just a mess. Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:34:14)
One of my favorite authors is a guy, Jean Edward Smith. He’s written a bunch of presidential biographies. And in the opening of his W Biography, he’s like, “There’s just no question. This is a single worst foreign policy mistake in all of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever.” He had terrible judgment and it got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster, and it set us up for failure. By the way, we talked a lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald Trump than George W. Bush, but I could go off on Bush for a long time.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:44)
Oh, we will. We’ll return there. As part of the pushback I’d like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance and narcissism against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:34:55)
You’re absolutely right.
Lex Fridman
(00:34:56)
Of arrogance. And I think you’ve also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:35:05)
Absolutely. But sometimes for a benefit. You have to be a pretty crazy person to want to be president. I had put out a tweet that got some controversy, and I think it was Joe Rogan, who I love, but he was like, “I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being.” And I was like, “I’m actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all.” I was like, “I’ve read too much about them to know, I know who you are.” If you spend your life and because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time around would-be politicians, I know what it takes to actually become the president. It’s crazy. You have to give up everything, everything.

(00:35:39)
Every night, you’re not spending it with your wife. You’re spending it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect you. Even after you get elected, that’s even moreso now you got to raise money and now you’re onto the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through. You’re going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this.

(00:35:56)
Your entire life revolves around your career. It’s honestly, you need an insane level of narcissism to do it because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else, which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self and everything around you.

LBJ


(00:36:20)
There’s a famous story of Lady Bird Johnson after Johnson becomes the president and he’s talking to the White House Butler. She was like, “Everything in this house revolves around my husband. Whatever’s left goes to the girls,” her two children, “And I’ll take the scraps.” Everything revolved around Johnson’s political career and his daughters, when they’re honest, because they like to paper over some of the things that happened under him, but they didn’t spend any time with him.

(00:36:44)
Saturday morning was for breakfast with Richard Russell, I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Caro books. Sunday was for Rayburn. There was no time for his kids. That’s what it was. And by the way, he’s one of the greatest politicians to ever live. But he also died from a massive heart attack and he was a deeply sad and depressed individual.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:03)
I saw that tweet, to go back to that. And also I listened to your incredible debate about it with Marshall on the Realignment podcast. And I have to side with Marshall. I think you’re just wrong on this.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:37:15)
All right.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:15)
Because I think revealing the character of a person is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and full of-
Saagar Enjeti
(00:37:23)
Yeah, this gets to the judgment question.
Lex Fridman
(00:37:25)
The judgment.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:37:25)
And that’s, I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had really, really good judgment. And I’m not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking about the world. JFK is actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in a room as a brand new president in the Cuban Missile crisis.

(00:37:55)
And he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly was his character, and we can go again though into his laundry list of that. But most of it was around being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes that he would make. And he was also had a deeply inquisitive mind and he experienced World War II at the personal level after PT 109.

(00:38:22)
Look, I get it. I actually could steal, man. The response to what I’m saying is judgment is not divisible from personal character, but just because I know a lot of politicians and I’ve read enough with the really great ones, the people who I revere the most, there’s really bad personal stuff basically every single time.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:41)
But you’re saying the judgment was good?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:38:43)
His judgment was great. His judgment-
Lex Fridman
(00:38:44)
On the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:38:46)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(00:38:46)
Some of the best judgment and decision-making in the history of America.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:38:51)
Yes, and we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there, this is a brutal text. We were forced to read it in graduate school, the Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I’m so thankful we did. It’s one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works. This is also a useful transition, by the way, if we want to talk about Trump and some of his cabinet and how that is shaping up because people really need to understand Washington.

(00:39:17)
Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don’t care about you. They don’t even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms which have been done a certain way. And it usually takes a great shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt who’s actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done.

(00:39:44)
The question around the essence of decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different schools of thought. But one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of The Great Man Theory as well. you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT 109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II as this, I think it was a First Lieutenant or something like that. And how he literally swam miles with a wounded man’s life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back, and he saved him and he ended up on the cover of Life Magazine and he was a war hero. And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which to this day is considered a text, which at the moment was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement.

(00:40:43)
I actually have a original copy is one of my most prized possessions. And from 1939, because this is a 23-year-old kid, who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he’s a brilliant man. And another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody. In the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, who will succeed him. 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, some shit head journalists on the side, and all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that’s the story of America right there. It’s kind of amazing. I loved people to say that because you never know about who will end up rising to power.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:25)
Are you announcing that you’re running for president?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:41:28)
No, absolutely not.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:28)
Good.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:41:29)
I don’t have what it takes. I don’t think so. I’m self-aware.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:32)
Well, maybe humility is necessary for greatness. Okay. Actually, can we just linger on that book?

Cuban Missile Crisis

Saagar Enjeti
(00:41:37)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(00:41:38)
The book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison, it presents three different models of how government works, the Rational Act model, so seeing government as one entity. Trying to maximize the national interest. Also seeing government as through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures. So this giant organization that’s just doing things how it’s always been done. And the government politics model of there’s just these individual internal power struggles within government. And all of that is a different way to view, and they’re probably all true to a degree, of how decisions are made within this giant machinery of government.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:42:26)
That’s why it’s so important is because you cannot read that book and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is more true than the other, but all of them are deeply true. And this is one, or this is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because… And I guess for the people out there who think I’ve been up too obsequious, you’ll be my criticism, Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast, probably the most important thing that he ever said. Which is he said, “I like to have people like John Bolton in my administration, well, because scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational individual in the room.”

(00:42:58)
At a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that, and then they can rationalize, while there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House, people like Mike Waltz and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a “anti-neocon anti-Liz Cheney agenda”. Now, Trump’s theory of this is that he likes to have “psychopaths” like John Bolton in the room with him while he’s sitting across from Kim Jong Un because it gets scared.

(00:43:26)
What I think Trump never understood when he was president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out, which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump I don’t think quite gets is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reached the president’s desk. One of the most important Obama quotes ever is, “By the time it gets to my desk, nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don’t have an answer. That’s why I have to make the call.”

(00:43:57)
The theory that Trump has that you can have people in there who are, let’s say warmongers, neocons or whatever, who don’t necessarily agree with you, is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I’ll still be able to rein those people in as an influence. Here’s the issue. Let’s say for Mike Waltz, who’s going to be the National Security Advisor, a lot of people don’t really understand there’s this theory of national security advisor where you call me into your office and you’re the president and you’re like, “Hey, what do we think about Iran?” I’m like, “I think you should do X, Y, and Z.”

(00:44:25)
No, that’s not how it works. The national security advisor’s job is to coordinate the inter-agency process. His job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room, CIA, state Department, SECDEF, others before the POTUS even walks in, we have options. We’re like, “Hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. Weed a package of options. Those packages of options are concede of three things. We’re going to have one group, we’re going to call it the dovish option. Two, we’re going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package.”

(00:44:53)
Trump walks in, this is how it’s supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, “Okay, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do we do?” “Mr. President, we’ve prepared three options for you. We got one, two, and three.” Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks one, two, or three? Or is the man who decides what’s even in option one, two, and three? That is the part where Trump needs to really understand how these things happen.

(00:45:12)
And I watched this happen to him in his first administration. He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn, but him and Trump were at least like this on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I would call an FBI coup, whatever. 33 days, he’s out as a national security advisor, H.R McMaster, he’s got a nice shiny uniform, four star, all of this. McMaster doesn’t agree with Donald Trump at all. And so Trump says, “I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan, I want to get out of Afghanistan.” They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get out of Afghanistan, but before we get out, we got to go back in.” As in we need more troops in there. And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like all this and proves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017 where he ends up escalating and increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. And it’s only until February, 2020 that he gets to sign a deal, the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017.

(00:46:06)
But the reason why that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory where H.R McMaster is able to guide the inter-agency process, bring the uniform recommendations of the joint chiefs of staff and others to give Donald Trump no option but to say, “We must put troops.” Another example of this is a book called Obama’s War by Bob Woodward. I highly encourage people to read this book because this book talks about how Obama comes into the White House in 2009 and he says, “I want to get out of Iraq and I don’t want to increase… I want to fight the Good War in Afghanistan.” Obama’s a thoughtful guy, too thoughtful actually. And so he sits there and he’s working out his opinions. And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his options began to narrow because strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we should do in Afghanistan.

(00:46:56)
And pretty soon David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire national security apparatus has Obama pegged where he basically politically at the time decides to take the advantage position of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both ways by saying, “But in two years, we’re going to withdraw.” That book really demonstrates how the deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with ones which you don’t even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down the extreme directions.

(00:47:33)
That’s why when Trump says things like, “I want to get out of Syria,” that doesn’t compute up here for the Pentagon. Because first of all, if I even asked you how many troops we have in Syria, and you could go on the DOD website, it’ll tell you a number. The number’s bullshit because the way that they do it is if you’re only there for 179 days, you don’t count as active, military contracts. The real numbers, let’s say five times.

(00:47:51)
And so Trump would be like, “Hey, I want to get out of Syria.” They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll do it. Six months, we need six months.” And after six months ago, he goes, “So, are we out of Syria yet?” And they’re like, “No. Well, we got to wrap this up. We got this base, we got that, and we have this important mission.” And next thing you know, you’re out of office and it’s over. That there’s all these things which I don’t think he quite understands. I know that some of the people around him who disagree with these picks do is the reason why these picks really matter, it’s not only are the voices in the situation room for the really, really high profile stuff, it’s where all little things to never get to that president’s desk of which can shape extraordinary policy.

(00:48:23)
And I’ll give you the best example. There was never a decision by FDR as President of the United States to oil embargo Japan. One, which he thought about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision made within the State Department. It was a decision that was made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it. It was a conscious choice, but it was not one which ever was understood the implications that by doing that, we invite a potential response like Pearl Harbor. So think about what the organizational bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary blowback that we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the entire national security chain in the White House.

Immigration


(00:49:03)
Also, I just realized I did not talk about immigration, which is so insane. One of the reasons Donald Trump won in 2024, of course, was because of the massive change to the immigration status quo. The truth is is that it may actually be second to inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win the presidency was because Joe Biden fundamentally changed the immigration status quo in this country. That was another thing about the Scots-Irish people and others that we need to understand is that when government machinery and elitism and liberalism appears to be more concerned about people who are coming here in a disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their ability to “pursue the American dream,” while the American dream is dying for the native-born population, that is a huge reason why people are turning against mass immigration. Historically as well, my friend, Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Melting Pot or Civil War? And one of the most important parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States.

(00:50:02)
If we think about the transition from Scots-Irish America to the opening of America to the Irish and to mass European immigration, what a lot of people don’t realize is it caused a ton of problems. There were mass movements at the time, the no nothings and others in the 1860s who rose up against mass European migration. They were particularly concerned about Catholicism as the religion of a lot of the new immigrants.

(00:50:28)
But really what it was is about the changing of the American character by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the native-born population. And their understanding of what they’re owed and their role in American society is very different from the way that people previously had. One of the most tumultuous periods of US politics was actually during the resolution of the immigration question where we had massive waves of foreign-born population come to the United States. We had them integrated, luckily actually at the time with the Industrial Revolution. So we actually did have jobs for them.

(00:51:06)
One of the problems is that today in the United States, we have one of the highest levels of foreign-born population than ever before, actually since that time in the early 1900s. But we have all of the same attendant problems. But even worse is we don’t live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly service-based economy that has long moved past manufacturing.

(00:51:27)
Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t bring some of that back, but the truth is that manufacturing today is not what it was to work in a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable and we can agree on that. And part of the problems with extremely high levels of foreign-born population, particularly unskilled, and the vast majority of the people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so under fraudulent purposes. They’re doing so because they are economic migrants and they’re abusing asylum law to basically gain entrance to the United States without going through a process of application or of merit. And this has all of its traces back to 1965 where the Immigration Naturalization Act of 1965 really reversed and changed the status quo of immigration from the 1920s to 1960, which really shut down levels of immigration to the United States. In my opinion, it was one of the most important things that ever happened. And one of the reasons why is it forced and caused integration. It also forced by slowing down the increase in the number of foreign-born population, it redeveloped an American character and an understanding that was more homogenous and was the ability for you and me to understand despite the difference in our background.

(00:52:39)
If you accelerate and you continue this trend of the very high foreign-born unskilled population, you unfortunately are basically creating a mass… It’s basically it’s a non-citizen population of illegal immigrants, people who are not as skilled. I think I read 27% of the people who’ve come under Joe Biden illegally don’t even have a college degree. That means that we are lucky if they’re even literate in Spanish, let alone English. So there are major problems about integrating that type of person. Even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial economy, now imagine today the amount of strain that would put on social services if mass citizenship happened to that population would be extraordinary.

(00:53:24)
I don’t think it’s a good idea, but even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair it with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don’t think a lot of people understand that immigration system. The immigration system in the United States, effectively they call it family-based migration. I call it chain migration. Chain migration is the term which implies that let’s say you come over here and you get your green card. You can use sponsorship and others by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with that is who is your cousin? Is he a plumber? Is he a coder? That doesn’t actually matter because he’s your cousin si he actually has preference.

(00:54:03)
The way that it should work is it should be nobody cares if he’s your cousin. What does he do? What does she do? What is she going to bring to this country? All immigration in the United States, in my opinion, should be net positive without doing fake statistics about, “Oh, they actually increased the GDP or whatever.” It’s like we need a merit-based immigration system. We are the largest country in the world and one of the only Western countries in the world that does not have a merit-based points-based immigration system like Australia and, or Canada.

(00:54:32)
And I mean, I get it because a lot of people did come to this country under non-merit-based purposes, so they’re really reluctant to let that go. But I do think that Biden, by changing the immigration status quo and by basically just allowing tens of millions, potentially tens of millions, at the very least 12 million new entrants to come to the US under these pretenses of complete disorder and of no conduct, really broke a lot of people’s understanding and even mercy in that regard. And so that was obviously a massive part of Trump’s victory.
Lex Fridman
(00:55:05)
Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the border czar, Tom Homan?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:55:11)
Tom Homan is a very legit dude, got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0. He is an original true believer on enforcing immigration law as it is. Now notice how I just said that. That’s a politically correct way of saying mass deportation. And I will point out for my left wing critics in that, yeah, he really believes in the ability, in the necessity of mass deportation, and he has the background to be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings, and this will apply to Doge too. czar has no statutory or constitutional authority. czar has as much authority as the President of the United States gives him. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, even as critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times. And he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel.

(00:56:07)
Czar in and of itself is frankly a very flawed position in the White House, and it’s one that I really wish we would move away from. I understand why we do it. It’s basically to do a national security advisor inter-agency convener to accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a person, Stephen Miller, who will be in the White House, the Deputy White House chief of staff who has well-founded beliefs, experience in government and rock solid ideology on this, which I think would also give him the ability to work with Homan to pull that off.

(00:56:38)
That said, a corollary to this, and frankly this is the one I’m the most mystified yet, is Kristi Noem as the Department of Homeland Security Secretary. Let me just lay this out for people because people don’t know what this is. The Department of Homeland Security, 90% of the time the way you’re going to interact with them is TSA. You don’t think about it. But people don’t know. The Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest law enforcement if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It’s gigantic. You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations. You have border patrol, ICE, TSA, CBP, all these other agencies that report up to you. But most importantly for this, you will be the public face of mass deportation.

(00:57:22)
I was there in the White House briefing room last time around when Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the DHS secretary under Donald Trump, and specifically the one who enforced child separation for a limited period of time. She was a smart woman. She has long experience in government. And honestly, she melted under the criticism. Kirsti Noem is the governor of South Dakota. I mean, that’s great. You have a little bit of executive experience, but to be honest, I mean you have no law enforcement background. You have no, frankly, with understanding of what it is going to be like to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history.

(00:58:01)
You have to go on television and defend that every single day, a literal job requirement under Donald Trump. And you will have to have extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high intellect. You have to have the ability to really break through. And I mean, we all watch how she handled that situation with her dog and her interviews. And that does not give me confidence that she will be able to do all that well in the position.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:24)
What do you think is behind that?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:58:25)
I have no idea.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:26)
Krystal Ball’s theory on Breaking Points is that there’s some kind of interpersonal…
Saagar Enjeti
(00:58:34)
I can explain it.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:36)
I should know this, but I didn’t know any of… There was some cheating or whatever.
Saagar Enjeti
(00:58:41)
There’s a rumor nobody knows if it’s true that Corey Lewandowski and Kirsti Noem had a previous relationship ongoing. Corey Lewandowski is a Trump official and that he maybe put her in front. I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
(00:58:51)
Is this like the Real Housewives of DC?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:58:53)
Yeah, but kind of, although I mean it was the most open secret in the world, allegedly. I don’t know if it’s true. Okay. All right. I don’t like to traffic too much in personal theories. But I mean in this respect, it might actually be correct in terms of how it all came down. I have no idea what he’s thinking to be… I truly don’t. I mean, maybe it’s like he was, last time he said, “I want a woman who’s softer and emotionally and the ability to be the face of my immigration program.” I mean, again, like I said, I don’t see it. In terms of her experience and her media, it’s frankly not very good.
Lex Fridman
(00:59:26)
You think she needs to be, not just be the softer face of this radical policy, but also be able to articulate what’s happening with the reasoning behind all that?
Saagar Enjeti
(00:59:37)
Yes. You need to give justification for everything. Here’s the thing. Under mass deportation, the media will drag up every sob story known to planet Earth about this person and that person who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really what the quasi thing is. That’s why the program itself is bad and we should legalize everybody who’s here illegally. Okay.

(00:59:56)
The thing is that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need a great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way that the media is being handled is that you throw every question back in their face and you say, “Well, you either talk about crime or you talk about the enforceability of the law, the necessity.” I mean, I just I think articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who immigrated to this country.

(01:00:26)
But one of the favorite phrases I heard from this, from a guy named Mark Corcoran, who’s a center for immigration studies, is, “We don’t make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandparents. We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren.” And that is an extraordinary and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it’s a triumph of the American system that somebody whose family benefited from the immigration regime and was able to come here. My parents had PhDs, came here legally, applied, spent thousands of dollars through the process. Can arrive at the conclusion that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American citizens. I’m not talking about other Indians or whatever. I’m talking about all of us. I care about everybody who is here in this country. But fundamentally, that will mean that we are going to have to exclude some people from the US.

(01:01:13)
And another thing that the open borders people don’t ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, it makes no sense. for example, a common left-wing talking point is that it’s America’s fault that El Salvador and Honduras and Central America is fucked up. And so because of that, we have a responsibility to take all those people in because our fault. Or Haiti, right? But if you think about it, America is responsible, and I’m just being honest, for destroying and ruining a lot of countries. They just don’t benefit from the geographic ability to walk to the United States.

(01:01:50)
I mean, if we’re doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a claim to be able to come here than anybody from El Salvador who’s talking about something that happened in 1982. Within its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the-
Saagar Enjeti
(01:02:00)
Within its own logic, it doesn’t make any sense. Even under the asylum process, people don’t even know this, you’re literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence. Okay? I mean, imagine that. Frankly, that is a local law enforcement and problem of people who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold-hearted this sounds, but maybe, honestly, it could be because I’m Indian.

(01:02:25)
One of the things that whenever you visit India and you see a country with over a billion people, you’re like, “Holy shit. This is crazy,” and you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved, and also, there is nothing in the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody. It’s a very complex and dynamic problem, and it’s really nice to be bleeding heart and to say, “Oh, well, we have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that,” but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with the nation state. It doesn’t work with the sovereign nation. We’re the luckiest people in the history of the world to live here in this country, and you need to protect it and protecting it requires really thinking about the fundamentals of immigration itself and not telling us stories.

(01:03:06)
There’s a famous moment from the Trump White House where Jim Acosta, CNN white House correspondent, got into it with Stephen Miller, who will be the current deputy chief, and he was like, “What do you say,” something along the lines, “to people who say you’re violating that quote on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me you’re tired, you’re poor, you’re hungry,’?” all of that,” the Emma Lazarus quote. And Stephen very logically was like, “What level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote? Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million?”

(01:03:39)
And that’s such a great way of putting it because there is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus quote. There is, when you start talking, honestly, you’re like, “Okay. We live in X, Y, and Z society with X, Y, and Z GDP. People who are coming here should be able to benefit for themselves and us not rely on welfare, not be people who we have to take care of after because we have our own problems here right now and who are the population and the types of people that we can study and look at who will be able to benefit, and based on that, yeah, immigration is great,” but there are a lot of economic, legal and societal reasons for why you definitely don’t want the current level.

(01:04:19)
But another thing is even if we turn the switch and we still let in 1,000,005 people a year under the chain family-based migration, I think it would be a colossal mistake because it’s not rooted in the idea that people who are coming to America are explicitly doing so at the benefit of America. It’s doing so based on the familial connections of people who already gamed the immigration system to be able to come here.

(01:04:45)
I have a lot of family in India and I love them, and some of them are actually very talented and qualified. If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able to apply on their own merit and that should have nothing to do with their familial status of the fact that I’m a US citizen.
Lex Fridman
(01:04:59)
You mentioned in the book Melting Pot or Civil War by Reihan Salam. He makes an argument against the open borders. The thesis there is a simulation should be a big part. I guess there’s some kind of optimal rate of immigration which allows for a simulation.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:05:14)
Yeah, and there are ebbs and flows, and that’s what I was talking about historically where, I mean, the truth is you could walk the streets of New York City in the early 1900s and the late 1890s and you’re not going to hear any English, and I think that’s bad. I mean, really what you had was ethnic enclaves of people who were basically practicing their way of life just like they did previously, bringing over a lot of their ethnic problems that they had and even some of their cultural unique capabilities or whatever, bringing it to America, and then New York City police and others are figuring out like, “What the hell do we do with all of this?” And it literally took shutting down immigration for an entire generation to do away with that and there’s actually still some.

(01:05:52)
The point about assimilation is twofold. One is that you should have the capacity to inherit the understanding of the American character that has nothing to do with race, and that’s so unique that I can sit here as a child of people from India and has such a deep appreciation for the Scots Irish. I consider myself American first, and one of the things that I really love about that is that I have no historical relationship to anybody who fought in the Civil War, but I feel such kinship with a lot of the people who did and reading the memoirs and the ideas of those that did because that same mindset of the victors and the values that they were able to instill in the country for 150 years later gives me the ability to connect to them. And that’s such an incredible victory on their part and that’s such a unique thing.

(01:06:45)
In almost every other country in the world, in China and India or wherever, you’re kind of like what you are. You’re a Hindu, you’re a Jew, you’re a Han Chinese, you’re a Uyghur or you’re Tibetan, something like that. You’re born into it. But really here, it was one of the only places in the world where you can really connect to that story and that spirit and the compounding effect of all of these different people who have come to America, and that is a celebration of immigration as an idea.

(01:07:11)
But immigration is also a discrete policy, and that policy was really screwed up by the Biden administration. And so we can celebrate the idea and also pursue a policy for all of the people in the US, our citizens to actually be able to benefit. And look, it’s going to be messy, and honestly, I still don’t know yet if Trump will be able to pursue actual mass deportation just because I think that I’m not sure the public is ready for it. I do support mass deportation. I don’t know if the public is ready for it. I think, I don’t know. I’ll have to see because there’s a lot of different ways that you can do it.

(01:07:46)
There’s mandatory E-Verify, which requires businesses to basically verify you’re a US citizen or you’re here legally whenever they employ you, which is not the law of the land currently, which is crazy, by the way. You can cut off or tax remittance payments, which are payments that are sent back to other countries like Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. Again, illustrating my economic migrant point. There are a lot of various different ways where you can just make it more difficult to be illegally here in the US so people will self-deport, but if he does pursue real mass deportation, that will be a flashpoint in America.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:19)
Aren’t you talking about things like what Tom Homan said, the work site raids, sort of increasing the rate of that?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:08:27)
We used to do that.
Lex Fridman
(01:08:29)
But there’s a rate at which you can do that where it would lead to, I mean, radical social upheaval.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:08:38)
Yeah, it will. I mean, and I think some people need to be honest here, and this actually flies in the face of … I mean, one of the most common liberal critiques is this is going to raise prices, and yeah, I think it’s true. I think it’s worth it, but that’s easy for me to say. I’m making a good living. If you care about inflation, you voted for Donald Trump and your price of groceries or whatever goes up because of this immigration policy, I think that needs to be extremely well-articulated by the president and of course, he needs to think about it.

(01:09:07)
The truth is is America right now is built on cheap labor. It’s not fair to the consumer, it’s not fair to the immigrants, the illegal immigrants themselves, and it’s not fair to the natural born citizen. The natural born citizen has his wages suppressed for competition by tens of millions of people who are willing to work at lower wages. They have to compete for housing, for social services. I mean, just even basic stuff at a societal level, it’s not fair to them. It’s definitely not fair to the other person because, I mean, whenever people say who’s going to build your houses or whatever, you’re endorsing this quasi-legal system where uninsured laborers from Mexico, they have no guarantee of wages, they’re getting paid cash under the table, they are living 10 to a room, they’re sending Mexican remittance payments back just so that their children can eat. That’s not really fair to that person either.

(01:10:02)
So that’s the point. The point is is that it will lead to a lot of social upheaval, but this gets to my Kristi Noem point as well is you need to be able to articulate a lot of what I just said here because if you don’t, it’s going to go south real quick.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:15)
The way that Vivek articulates this is that our immigration system is deeply dishonest. We don’t acknowledge some of the things he just said.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:10:24)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman
(01:10:25)
And he wants to make it honest. So if we don’t do mass deportation, at least you have to be really honest about the living conditions of illegal immigrants, about basically mistreatment of them.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:10:37)
Yes, it’s true. I mean, if you support mass illegal migration, you’re basically supporting tens of millions who are living lives as second class citizens. That’s not fair to them. I also think it’s deeply paternalistic. So there’s this idea that America has so ruined these Central American countries that they have no agency whatsoever and they can never turn things around. What does that say about our confidence in them?

(01:11:04)
One of the things they always say there, “Oh, they’re law-abiding, they’re great people,” and all that. I agree. Okay? By and large, I’m not saying these are bad people, but I am saying if they’re not bad and they’re law-abiding and they’re citizens and thoughtful and all that, they can fix their own countries and they did in El Salvador. That’s the perfect example.

(01:11:21)
Look at the dramatic drop in their crime rate. Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in all of South America. That is proof positive that you can change things around despite perhaps the legacy of US intervention. So to just say this idea that because it’s America’s fault that they’re screwed up, it takes agency away from them.

(01:11:42)
Another really key part of this dishonesty, this really gets to Springfield and the whole Haitian thing because everybody, beyond the eating cats and dogs, everybody does not even acknowledge because when they’re like, “The Haitians are here legally,” they need to actually think about the program. The program is called TPS. So let me explain that. TPS is called Temporary Protected Status. Note, what’s the first word on that? Temporary. What does that mean? TPS was developed under a regime in which let’s say that there was a catastrophic … I think this is a real example. I think there was a volcano or an earthquake or something where people were granted TPS to come to the United States, and the idea was they were going to go back after it was safe. They just never went back.

(01:12:21)
There are children born in the United States today who are adults, who are the descendants of people who are still living in the US under TPS. That’s a perfect example of what Vivek says is dishonest. You can’t mass de facto legalize people by saying that they’re here temporarily because of a program or because of something that happened in their home country when the reality is that for all intents and purposes, we are acknowledging them as full legal migrants. So even the term migrant to these Haitians in Springfield makes no sense because they’re supposed to be here under TPS. Migrant implies permanency.

(01:13:02)
So the language is all dishonest and people don’t want to tell you about the things I just said about chain migration. The vast majority of Americans don’t even know how the immigration system works. They don’t understand what I just said about TPS. They don’t really understand the insanity of asylum law, where you can just literally throw up your hands and say, “I fear for my life,” and you get to live here for four or five years before your court date even happens, and by that time, you get a work permit or whatever, you can get housing, like you just said, in substandard conditions, and you can kind of just play the game and wait before a deportation order comes, and even if it does, you never have to leave because there’s no ice agent or whatever who’s going to enforce it. So the whole system is nuts right now, and we need complete systematic reform that burns it all to the ground.
Lex Fridman
(01:13:44)
That said, the image and the reality of a child being separated from their parents seems deeply un-American, right?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:13:54)
Well, I mean, look, it gets … Okay. So I’m not going to defend it, but I’ll just put it this way.
Lex Fridman
(01:14:01)
Do you hate children?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:14:03)
See, this is what I mean. Do you think twice whenever you see a drug addict who’s put in prison and their child is put in protective services? Nobody in America thinks twice about that, right?
Lex Fridman
(01:14:13)
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:14:14)
So I mean, well, that’s kind of screwed up. Well, what we should think about, why did we come to that conclusion? The conclusion was is that these adults willingly broke the law and pursued a path of life, which put them on a trajectory where the state had to come in and determine that you are not allowed to be a parent basically to this child while you serve your debt to society. Now, child separation was very different. Child separation was also a product of extremely strange circumstances in US immigration law, where basically at the time, the reason why it was happening was because there was no way to prosecute people for illegal entry without child separation because previous doctrine, I believe it’s called the Flores Doctrine under some asylum law. People will have to go check my work on this. But basically, the whole reason this evolved as a legal regime was because people figured out that if you bring a kid with you because of the so-called Flores Doctrine or whatever, that you couldn’t be prosecuted for illegal entry, so it was a de facto way of breaking the law.

(01:15:16)
And in fact, a lot of people were bringing children here who weren’t even theirs, who they weren’t even related to or couldn’t even prove it, were bringing them to get around the prosecution for illegal entry. So I’m not defending child separation. I think it was horrible or whatever, but if I gave you the context, it does seem like a very tricky problem in terms of do we enforce the law or not, how are we able to do that, and the solution, honestly, is what Donald Trump did was remain in Mexico and then pursue a complete rewrite of the way that we have US asylum law applied and of asylum adjudication and really just about enforcing our actual laws.

(01:15:58)
So what I try to explain to people is the immigration system right now is a patchwork of this deeply dishonest, such a great word, deeply dishonest system in which you use the system and set it up in such ways that illegal immigration is actually one of the easiest things to do to accomplish immigration to the United States. That is wrong. My parents had to apply. It wasn’t easy.

(01:16:24)
Do you know in India there’s a temple called the Visa Temple where you walk 108 times around it, which is like a lucky number, and you do it when you’re applying for a visa to the United States. It costs a lot of money and it’s hard. People get rejected all the time. There’s billions of people across the world who would love to be able to come here, and many of them want to do so legally and they should have to go through a process. The current way it works is it’s easier to get here illegally than it is legally. I think that’s fundamentally right. It’s also unfair to people like us whose parents did come here legally.
Lex Fridman
(01:16:53)
Can you still man the case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:16:57)
The strongest argument would be that these people contribute to society, that these people, many of whom millions of here, have been here for many years who have children, natural born citizens because of birthright citizenship, it would require something that’s fundamentally inhumane and un-American as you said, the idea of separating families across different borders simply because of what is “small decision of coming here illegally”, and the best case beyond any of this moral stuff for no mass deportation is it’s good for business. Illegal immigration is great for big business. It is great for big agriculture. So if you want the lowest prices of all time, then yeah, mass deportation is a terrible idea.
Lex Fridman
(01:17:42)
First of all, very convincing, and second of all, I mean, you can’t just do mass deportation without also fixing the immigration system, right?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:17:51)
Yes, exactly. And I mean, there are several pieces of legislation. H.R.2, that’s something that the Republicans have really coalesced around. It’s a border bill. I encourage people to go read it and see some of the different fixes to the US immigration system. I’m curious whether it’ll actually pass or not. Remember, there’s a very slim majority of the House of Representatives for Republicans this time around, and people vote for a lot of things when they’re not in power, but when it’s actually about to become the law, we’ll see. There’s a lot of swing state people out there who may think twice before casting that vote. So I’m definitely curious to see how that one plays out.

(01:18:23)
The other thing is is that, like I just said, the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration is big business. So if you think they’re going to take this one lying down, absolutely not. They will fight for everything that they have to keep their pool of cheap labor because it’s great for them. I think JD said a story. I think he was on Rogan about how he talked to a hotelier chain guy and he was like, “Yeah, it’s just terrible. They would take away our whole workforce.” And he was like, “Do you hear yourself in terms of what you’re talking, you’re bragging about?” but that’s real. That’s a real thing.

(01:18:57)
And that, Tyson Foods and all these other people, that’s another really sad part is … What I mean by second class citizenship is this presumption, first of all, that Americans think it’s too disgusting to process meat or to work in a field. I think anybody will do anything for the right wage, first of all, but second is the conditions in a lot of those facilities are horrible and they’re covered up for a reason, not only in terms of the way that businesses, they actually conduct themselves, but also to cover up their illegal immigrant workforce. So honestly, I think it could make things better for everything.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:31)
You have studied how government works. What are the chances mass deportation happens?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:19:34)
Well, it depends how you define it. So I mean, mass deportation could mean one million. I mean, nobody even knows how many people are here illegally. It could be 20 million, it could be 30 million. I’ve seen estimates of up to 30 million, which is crazy. That’s almost 1/11 of the entire US population.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:46)
What number do you think will feel like mass deportation? One million people?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:19:51)
A million people is a lot.
Lex Fridman
(01:19:52)
That’s a lot of people.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:19:54)
It’s a lot, but the crazy part is that’s only 1/12 of what Joe Biden led in the country. So it’s one of those. That just to give people the scale of what it will all look like. Do I think mass deportation will happen? It depends on the definition. Will one million over four years? Yeah, I feel relatively confident in that. Anything over that, it’s going to be tough to say. Like I said, probably the most efficient way to do it is to have mandatory E-Verify and to have processes in place where it becomes very difficult to live in the United States illegally, and then you’ll have mass self-deportation and they will take the victory lap on that, but actual rounding millions of people up and putting them in deportation facilities and then arranging flights to God knows all across the globe, that’s a logistical nightmare. It would also cost a lot of money.

(01:20:48)
And don’t forget, Congress has to pay for all of this. So we can have DOGE or we can have mass deportation. So those two things are kind of irreconcilable, actually. There’s a lot of competing influences at play that people are not being real about at all.

DOGE

Lex Fridman
(01:21:06)
That was one of the tensions I had talking to Vivek is he’s big on mass deportation and big on making government more efficient, and it really feels like there’s a tension between those two in the short-term.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:21:19)
Well, yes, absolutely. Also, I mean, this is a good segue. I’ve been wanting to talk about this. I’m sympathetic to DOGE, to the whole Department of Government Efficiency.
Lex Fridman
(01:21:27)
How unreal is it that it’s called DOGE?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:21:30)
Actually, with Elon, it’s quite real. I guess I’ve accepted Elon as a major political figure in the US, but the DOGE committee, the Department of Government Efficiency is a non-statutory agency that has zero funding that Donald Trump says will advise OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.

(01:21:49)
Now, two things. Number one is, as I predicted, DOGE would become a “Blue Ribbon Commission”. So this is a non-statutory Blue Ribbon Commission that has been given authority to Vivek Ramaswamy and to Elon Musk. Secondary, their recommendations to government should be complete by July of 2026 according to the press release released by Trump. First of all, what that will mean is they’re probably going to need private funding to even set all this up. That’s great, not a problem for Elon, but you’re basically going to be able to have to commission GAO reports, Government Accountability Office and other reports and fact-finding missions across the government, which is fantastic. Trump can even empower you to go through to every agency and to collect figures.

(01:22:32)
None of it matters one iota if Republican appropriators in the House of Representatives care what you have to say. Historically, they don’t give a shit what the executive office has to say. So every year, the president releases his own budget. It used to mean something, but in the last decade or so, it’s become completely meaningless. The House Ways and Means Committee and the People’s House are the ones who originate all appropriations and set up spending. So that’s one is that DOGE in and of itself has no power. It has no ability to compel or force people to do anything. Its entire case for being, really, if you think about it mechanically, is to try and convince and provide a report to Republican legislators to be able to cut spending. So that’s that. Now, we all know how Congress takes to government reports and whether they get acted on or not. So that’s number one.

(01:23:24)
Number two is the figures that Elon is throwing out there. Again, I want to give them some advice because people do not understand federal government spending. The absolute vast majority of government spending is entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are untouchable under Donald Trump and their most politically popular programs in the world, and military spending, discretionary non-military spending. I don’t have the exact figure in front of me. It’s a very, very small part of the federal budget.

(01:23:53)
Now, within that small slice, about 90% of that eight is bipartisan and is supported by everybody. NOAA, you know the hurricane guys? Like people like that, people who are flying into the eye of the hurricane, people who are government inspectors of X, Y and Z. The parts that are controversial that you’re actually able to touch, things like welfare programs like food stamps is an extraordinary small slice.

(01:24:19)
So what’s the number we put out there? Five trillion? Something like that? There is only one way to do that, and realistically under the current thing, you have to radically change the entire way that the Pentagon buys everything. And I support that, but I just want to be very, very clear, but I haven’t seen enough energy around that. There’s this real belief in the US that we spend billions on all of these programs that are doing complete bullshit, but the absolute vast majority of it is military spending and entitlements. Trump has made clear entitlements are off the table. It’s not going to happen.

(01:24:53)
So the way that you’re going to be able to cut realistically military spending over a decade long period is to really change the way that the United States procures military equipment, hands out government contracts. Elon actually does have the background to be able to accomplish this because he has had to wrangle with SpaceX and the bullshit that Boeing has been pulling for over a decade, but I really want everybody’s expectations to be very set around this. Just remember, non-statutory, Blue Ribbon.

(01:25:24)
So if he’s serious about it, I just laid out all of these hurdles that he’s going to have to overcome, and I’m not saying him and Vivek aren’t serious dudes, but you got to really know the system to be able to accomplish this.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:36)
So you just laid out the reality of how Washington works. To give the counterpoint that I think you’re probably also rooting for is that one is a statement like Peter Thiel said, “Don’t bet against Elon.”
Saagar Enjeti
(01:25:49)
Sure.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:50)
One of the things that you don’t usually have with Blue Ribbon is the kind of megaphone that Elon has.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:25:56)
True.
Lex Fridman
(01:25:57)
And I would even set the financial aspects aside, just the influence he has with the megaphone but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can have real power when backed by a populist movement.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:26:15)
I don’t disagree with you, but let me give you a case where this just failed. So Elon endorsed who for Senate Majority Leader? Rick Scott, right? Who got the least amount of votes in the US Senate for GOP leader? Rick Scott. John Thune is the person who got it. Now, the reason I’m bringing that up, one of my favorite books, Master of the Senate by Robert Caro, part of the LBJ series, the Senate has an institution, it reveres independence. It reveres. I mean, the entire theory of the Senate is to cool down the mob that is in the House of Representatives and to deliberate. That’s its entire body. They are set up to be immune from public pressure.

(01:26:55)
Now, I’m not saying they can’t be pressured, but that example I just gave on Rick Scott is a very important one of he literally endorsed somebody for leader, so did Tucker Carlson, so did a lot of people online, and only 13 senators voted for Rick Scott. The truth is is that they don’t care. They’re set up where they’re marginally popular in their own home states, they’ll be able to win their primaries, and that’s all they really need to do to get elected, and they have six-year terms. They’re not even up for four years.

(01:27:19)
So will Elon still be interested in politics six years from now? That’s a legitimate question for a Republican senator. So maybe he could get the House of Representatives to sign off maybe on some of his things, but there’s no guarantee that the Senate is going to agree with any of that.

(01:27:34)
There’s a story that Caro tells in Master of the Senate book, which I love, where Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the writing of the Constitution, and he asked Washington, he said, “Why did you put in a Senate, a bicameral legislature?” And Washington said, “Why did you pour your tea into a saucer?” and Jefferson goes, “To cool it,” and Washington says, “Just so,” to explain it. He was a man of very few words. He was a brilliant man.
Lex Fridman
(01:28:03)
Okay. So you actually outlined the most likely thing that’s going to happen with DOGE as it hits the wall of Washington. What is the most successful thing that can be pulled off?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:28:17)
The most successful thing they could do is right now, I think they’re really obsessed with designing cuts and identifying cuts. I would redesign systems, systems of procurement. I would redesign the way that we have processes in place to dispense taxpayer dollars because the truth is is that appropriations itself, again, are set by the United States Congress, but the way that those appropriations are spent by the government, the executive has some discretionary authority.

(01:28:49)
So your ability as the executive to be a good steward of the taxpayer money and to redesign a system which I actually think Elon could be good at this and Vivek too in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit is the entire Pentagon procurement thing, it needs to be burned to the ground. Number one, it’s bad for the Pentagon. It gives them substandard equipment. It rewards very old weapons systems and programs and thinking that can be easily defeated by people who are studying that for vulnerabilities. The perfect example is all of this drone warfare in Ukraine and in Russia. I mean, drone warfare costs almost nothing, and yet drone swarms and hypersonic missiles pose huge dangers to US systems, which cost more than hundreds of billions of dollars.

(01:29:33)
So my point is that giving nimble procurement and systemic change in the way that we think about executing the mission that Congress does give you actually could save the most amount of money in the long run. That’s where I would really focus in on.

(01:29:48)
The other one is, counter to everything I just said, is maybe they would listen. Maybe the Republicans are like, “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.” The problem again though is swing state people who need to get reelected, they need to do one thing. They need to deliver for their district. They need to run on stuff, and nobody has ever run on cutting money for your state. They have run on bringing money to your state. And that’s why earmarks and a lot of these other things are extraordinarily popular in Congress is because it’s such an easy way to show constituents how you’re working for them whenever it does come reelection time. So it’s a very difficult system.

(01:30:28)
And I also want to tell people who are frustrated by this, I share your frustration, but the system is designed to work this way. And for two centuries, the Senate has stood as a bulwark against literally every popular change, and because of that, it’s designed to make sure that it’s so popular for long enough that it has to become inevitable before the status quo can change. That’s really, really frustrating, but you should take comfort in that it’s always been that way, so it’s been okay.
Lex Fridman
(01:30:54)
Well, as I’ve learned from one of the recommendations of The Age of Acrimony, I feel embarrassed that I didn’t know that senators used to not be elected.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:31:04)
What a crazy system, huh?
Lex Fridman
(01:31:05)
Yeah. I mean, many of the things we take for granted now as defining our democracy was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War in the 50 years after the Civil War.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:31:19)
Absolutely correct. Age of Acrimony, oh, my God, I love that book. I cannot recommend it enough. It is so important. And one of the biggest mistakes that Americans make is that we study periods where greatness happened, but we don’t often study periods where nothing happened or where really bad shit happened. We don’t spend nearly enough. Americans know about FDR. They don’t really know anything about the depression or how we got there.

(01:31:43)
What was it like to be alive in the United States in 1840? Right? Nobody thinks about that really because it’s kind of an in-between time in history. There are people who lived their entire lives, who were born, who had to live through those times, who were just as conscientious and intelligent as you and I are and were just trying to figure shit out and things felt really big. So the Age of Acrimony is a time where it’s almost completely ignored outside of the Gilded age aspect.

(01:32:06)
But like you just said, it was a time where progressive reform of government and of the tension between civil rights, extraordinary wealth and democracy and really the reigning in of big business, so many of our foundations happened exactly in that time. And I take a lot of comfort from that book because one of the things I learned from the book is that voter participation is highest when people are pissed off, not when they’re happy, and that’s such a counterintuitive thing, but voter participation goes down when the system is working.

(01:32:39)
So 2020, right? I think we can all agree it was very tense election. That’s also why it had the highest voter participation ever. 2024, very high rates of participation. Same thing. People are pissed off, and that’s actually what drives them to the vote, but something that I take comfort in that is that people being pissed off and people going out to vote, it actually does have major impact on the system because otherwise, the status quo is basically allowed to continue and so-
Saagar Enjeti
(01:33:00)
… [inaudible 01:33:00] the status quo is basically allowed to continue. And so, yeah, like you just said, I mean, direct election of senators… I mean, there are probably people alive today who were born when there was no direct election of senators, which is an insane thing to think about. I mean, there’d be almost 100 or so. But the point is that that time, it was so deeply corrupt, and it was one where the quasi aristocracy from the early days leading into the Gilded Age, were able to enforce their will upon the people. But you can take comfort in that that was one of those areas where Americans were so fed up with it, they changed the constitution and actually force the aristocrats in power to give their own power. It’s like our version of when they flipped power and took away the legislative power of the House of Lords in the UK. I just think that’s amazing and it’s such a cool thing about our country and the UK too.
Lex Fridman
(01:33:51)
It’s the continued battle between the people and the elite. Right? And we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but the election of candidates for a party.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:34:05)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:05)
That was also invented. It used to be that the, quote-unquote, party bosses, I say that with half a chuckle, chose the candidate.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:34:15)
Yeah. The whole system is nuts. The way that we currently experience politics is such a modern invention.
Lex Fridman
(01:34:20)
With a little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but-
Saagar Enjeti
(01:34:22)
Right. Yeah, good point. Well, that was actually more of a mean reversion, right? We’re living in an extraordinarily new era where we actually have more input than ever on who our candidates are. It used to be… This is crazy. So the conventions have always taken place two months before, right? Imagine a world where you did not know who the nominee was going to be before that convention, and the nominee literally was decided at that convention by those party bosses. Even crazier, there used to be a standard in American politics where presidents did not directly campaign. They, in fact, did not even comment about the news or mention their opponent’s names. They would give speeches from their doorstep, but it was unseemly for them to engage in direct politics.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:05)
Yeah. You would not get a Bernie Sanders.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:35:07)
No.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:07)
You would not get a Donald Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:35:09)
Obama, Bill Clinton… I mean, basically every president from John F. Kennedy onwards has been a product of the new system. Every president prior to that has been much more of the older system. There was an in-between period post-FDR where things were really changing, but the primary system itself had its first true big win under John F. Kennedy.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:28)
I think that the lesson from that is there’s a collective wisdom to the people. Right?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:35:32)
I think so.
Lex Fridman
(01:35:32)
I think it works.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:35:33)
Yeah. I mean, well, okay, I’ll steel man it. We had some great presidents in the party boss era. FDR was a great president. FDR was the master of coalitional politics of his ability. In fact, what really made him a genius was his ability to get this overthrow, the support of a lot of the corruption and the elite Democrats to take control in there at the convention, and then combine his personal popularity to fuse all systems of power where he had the elites basically under his boot because he was the king, and he used his popular power and his support from the people to be able to enforce things up and down.

(01:36:13)
I mean, even in the party boss era, a lot of the people we revere really came out of that. People like Abraham Lincoln. I mean, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln would have won a party primary in 1860. There’s no chance. He won, luck, thank God, from an insane process in the 1860 Republican Convention. People should go read about that because that was wild. I think we were this close to not having Lincoln as president. And, yeah, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, there’s so many that I could point to who made great impacts on history. So the system does find a way to still produce good stuff.
Lex Fridman
(01:36:49)
That was a beautiful diversion from the Doge discussion. If you’re going to return briefly to Doge, so you talked about cost-cutting, but there’s also increasing the efficiency of government, which you also talked about with procurement, and maybe we can throw into the pile, the 400-plus federal agencies. So let’s take another perspective on what success might look like. So radically successful Doge, would it basically cut a lot of federal agencies?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:37:22)
Probably combine.
Lex Fridman
(01:37:23)
Combine?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:37:24)
Okay, so I can give great examples of this because I have great insight. For each agency will often use different payroll systems. They’ll have different internal processes. Right? That makes no sense, and it’s all because it’s antiquated. Now, everybody always talks about changing it, but there are a lot of party interests about why certain people get certain things. The real problem with the government, the people like us who are private, and for example, when you want to do something, you can just do it. So I was listening to a really interesting analysis about law enforcement and the military. So I think the story was that National Guard guys were assigned to help with the border, and they were trying to provide… I think it was translation services to people at border patrol. But somebody had to come down and be like, “Hey, this has got to stop. According to US Code X, Y, and Z, the United States military cannot help with law enforcement abilities here.”

(01:38:24)
And so even though that makes absolutely no sense, because they’re all work, there are literal legal statutes in place that prevent you from doing the most efficient thing possible. So for some reason, we have to have a ton of Spanish speakers in SouthCom, in the US Command that is responsible for South America, who literally cannot help with a crisis at the border. Now, maybe you can find some legal chicanery to make that work, but, man, you got to have an attorney general who knows what he’s doing. You need a White House counsel. You need to make sure that shit stands up in a court of law. I mean, it’s not so simple. Whereas let’s say you have a software right here and you want to get a new software, you can just do it. You can hire whoever you want. When you’re the government, there’s a whole process you got to go through about bidding, and it just takes forever and it is so inefficient.

(01:39:12)
But unfortunately, the inefficiency is really derivative of a lot of legal statutes, and that is something that, again, actually radically successful Doge, quote-unquote, would be study the law, and then change it. Instead of cost- cutting, cut this program or whatever, like I just said about why do different systems use payroll, just say that you can change the statute under which new software can be updated, let’s say, after 90 days. I’ve heard stories of people who work for the government who still have IBM mainframe in 2024 that they’re still working, because those systems have never been updated. There’s also a big problem with a lot of this clearance stuff. That’s where a lot of inefficiency happens because a lot of contractors can only work based upon previous clearance that they already got. Achieving a clearance is very expensive. It’s very lengthy process. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, talking about security clearance, but it does naturally create a very small pool that you can draw some contracts fund.

(01:40:14)
And I even mean stuff like the janitor at the Pentagon needs a security service, right? So clearance. So there’s only five people who can even apply for that contract. Well, naturally, in an interim monopoly like that, he’s going to jack his price up because he literally has a moat around his product. Whereas if you were hiring a… Whatever, anybody for anything, that type of credentialism and legal regime, it doesn’t matter at all. So there are a million problems like this that people in government run into, and that is what I would see is the most successful.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:47)
Paperwork slows everything down, and it feels impossible to break through that in a incremental way.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:40:55)
It’s so hard.
Lex Fridman
(01:40:56)
It feels like the only way to do it is to literally shut down agencies in some radical way, and then build up from scratch. Of course, as you highlight, that’s going to be opposed by a lot of people within government.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:41:13)
Yeah. Well, historically, there’s only one way to do it, and it’s a really bad answer. War.
Lex Fridman
(01:41:17)
War. Yes. I was going to say, basically you have the consensus where, “Okay, all this stupid bureaucratic bullshit we’ve been doing, we need to put that aside. Get the fuck out of here. We need to win a war. So all the paperwork, all the lawyers go leave, please,”
Saagar Enjeti
(01:41:37)
Yeah. No, but I want people to really understand that. Up until 1865 or 1860, I forget the exact year, we didn’t even have national currency. And then we were like, “Well, we need a greenback.” And prior to that, people would freak out if we were talking about having national currency, greenback backed by the US government and all of that. Not even a question, passed in two weeks in the US Congress. An income tax eventually went away, but not even in the realm of possibility, and they decided to pass it. Same thing after World War I. And you think about how World War II… I mean, World War II just fundamentally changed the entire way the United States government works. Even the DHS, which I mentioned earlier, the Department of Homeland Security, it didn’t even exist prior to 9/11. It was done as response to 9/11 to coalesce all of those agencies under one branch to make sure that nothing like that could ever happen again. And so historically, unfortunately, absolute shitshow disaster war is the only thing that moves and throws the paperwork off the table. And I wish I wasn’t such a downer, but I’ve read too much and I’ve had enough experience now in Washington to just see how these dreams get crushed instantly. And I wish it wasn’t that way. I mean, it’s a cool idea and I want people who are inspired, who are getting into politics to think that they can do something, but I want them to be realistic too, and I want them to know what they’re signing up for whenever they do something like that, and the Titanic amount of work it’s going to take for you to be able to accomplish something.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:08)
Yeah. But I’ve also heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter. Here’s this guy, Elon Musk-
Saagar Enjeti
(01:43:17)
You are absolutely correct.
Lex Fridman
(01:43:18)
… knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course, you need all these servers. Of course, you need all these employees. And nevertheless, the service keeps running.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:43:27)
He figured it out, and you have to give him eternal credit for that. I guess the difference is there was no law that he could fire them. At the end of the day, he owned the company. He had total discretion of his ability to move. So I’m not even saying his ideas are bad. I’m saying that what makes him such an incredible visionary entrepreneur, it’s movement, it’s deference at times to the right people, but also the knowledge of every individual piece of the machine and his ability to come in and execute his full vision at any time and override any of the managers.

(01:44:04)
So I talked previously about the professional managerial class and the managerial revolution. Elon is one of the few people who’s ever built a multi-billion-dollar company who has not actually fallen victim to the managerial revolution and against entrepreneurship and innovation that happens there. There are very few people who can do it. Elon, Steve Jobs. But what do we learn is that, unfortunately, after Steve died, Apple basically did succumb to the managerial revolution and has become the product… They make all their money by printing services and making it impossible to leave this ecosystem as opposed to building the most cool product ever. As much as I love my Vision Pro, don’t get me wrong.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:41)
I think you just admitted that you’re part of a cult.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:44:44)
I know. I literally am. I am. I fully admit it.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:47)
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:44:47)
Yeah. I miss Steve.
Lex Fridman
(01:44:48)
The grass is greener on the other side. Come join us. Okay. Whether it’s Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim? What gives you hope that that will be possible?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:45:07)
Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t think slimness in and of itself is a good thing. What I care about is the relationship to people and its government. So the biggest problem that we have is that we have a complete loss of faith in all of our institutions. And I really encourage people… I don’t think people can quite understand what the relationship between America and its government was like after World War II and after FDR. 90% of the people trusted the government. That’s crazy. When the president said something, they were like, “Okay, he’s not lying.”

(01:45:41)
Think about our cynical attitude towards politicians today. That is largely the fault of Lyndon Johnson and of Richard Nixon and that entire fallout period of Vietnam. Vietnam, in particular, really broke the American character and its ability and its relationship with government, and we’ve never recovered faith in institutions ever since that. And it’s really unfortunate. So what makes me hopeful, at least this time, is anytime a president wins a popular vote and an election is they have the ability to reset and to actually try and build something that is new. And so what I would hope is that this is different from the first Trump administration in which the mandate for Donald Trump is actually carried out competently. Yes, he can do his antics, which got him elected. At this point, we can’t deny it. The McDonald’s thing is hilarious. It’s funny. It is. People love it. People like the podcasting. People like-
Lex Fridman
(01:46:35)
Garbage truck.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:46:36)
The garbage truck. Yeah, exactly. They like the stunts, and he will always excel and he will continue to do that. There are policy and other things that he can and should do, like the pursuit of no war, like solving the immigration question, and also really figuring out our economy the way that it currently runs and changing it so that the actual American dream is more achievable. And housing is one of the chief problems that we have right now. The real thing is Donald Trump was elected on the backs of the working man. I mean, it’s just true.

(01:47:07)
Households under $100,000 voted for Donald Trump. Maybe they didn’t do so for economic reasons. I think a lot of them did for economic, a lot of them did for immigration, for cultural. But you still owe them something. And I would hope that they could carry something out in that respect that is not a similar continuation and chaotic vibe of the first time where everything felt like it’d explode at any time with staffing, with even his policy or what he cared about or his ability to pursue. And a lot of that does come back to personnel. So I’m concerned in some respects, I’m not thrilled in some respects, I’m happy in some respects, but it remains to be seen how he’s going to do it.

MAGA ideology

Lex Fridman
(01:47:46)
To the degree it’s possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology, what do you think are the central pillars of it?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:47:54)
MAGA is a rejection of cultural elitism. That’s what I would say. Cultural elitism though has many different categories. Immigration is one, right? Is that cultural elitism and cultural liberalism has a fundamental belief that immigration in and of itself is a natural good at any and all levels, that all immigrants are replacement level, that there is no difference between them. Cultural elitism in a foreign policy context comes back to a lot of that human rights democracy stuff that I was talking about earlier, which divorces American values from American interests and says that actually American values are American interests. Cultural elitism and liberalism leads to the worship of the post-civil rights era of bureaucracy that I talked about from those two books of DEI or, quote-unquote, woke, and of progressive social ideology. So I would put all those together as ultimately what MAGA is. It is a, “Screw you.”

(01:48:53)
I once drove past… It was in rural Nevada, and I was driving and I drove past the biggest sign I’ve ever seen, political sign, to this day. And it was in 2020. It just said, “Trump, fuck your feelings.” And I still believe that is the most coherent MAGA thing I’ve ever seen. Because everyone’s always like, “How can a neocon, and Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK and all these other people, how can they all exist under the same umbrella?” And I’m like, “It’s very simple. All of them have rejected the cultural elite, in their own way, certainly, but they’ve arrived at the same place. It’s an umbrella. And it’s an umbrella fundamentally, which has nothing to do with the status quo and with the currently established cultural elite. That doesn’t mean they’re not elite and they’re not rich in their own regards, that doesn’t mean they don’t disagree, but that’s the one thing that unites the entire party.” And so that’s the way I would put it.
Lex Fridman
(01:49:46)
Anti-cultural elite, is that synonymous with anti-establishment? So basic distrust of all institutions? Is elitism connected to institutions?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:49:56)
Yes, absolutely, because elites are the ones who runs our institutions. That’s said, anti-establishment is really not the right word because there are a lot of left-wingers who are anti-establishment, right? They are against that, but they’re not anti-cultural leftism. And that’s the key distinction between MAGA and left populism. Left populism basically does agree. They agree with basic conceits, like racism is one of the biggest problem facing America. They’re like, “One of the ways that we would fix that is through class-oriented economic programs in order to address that. But we believe in… I don’t know, reparations as a concept. It’s just more about how we arrive there.” Whereas in MAGA, we would say, “No, we actually don’t think that at all. We think we’ve evolved past that and we think that the best way to fix it is actually similar policy prescription, but the mindset matters a lot.” So the real distinction, MAGA and left populism really is on culture.

Bernie Sanders


(01:50:52)
Trans, in particular, orientation about… Actually, immigration may be the biggest one. Because if you look at the history of Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders was a person who railed against open borders and against mass migration for years. There are famous interviews of him on YouTube with Lou Dobbs, who’s one of the hardcore immigration guys, and they agree with each other. And Lou is like, “Bernie’s one of the only guys out there.” Bernie, at the end of the day, he had to succumb to the cultural left, and it’s changing attitudes on mass immigration. There’s some famous clips from 2015 in a Vox interview that he gave where he started… I think he started talking about how open borders is a Koch brothers libertarian concept, right? Because Bernie is basically of a European welfare state tradition. European welfare states are very simply understood. We have high taxes, high services, low rates of immigration. Because we have high taxes and high services, we have a limited pool of people who can experience and take those services.

(01:51:51)
He used to understand that. He changed a lot of his attitude. Bernie also… I will say, look, he’s a courageous man and a courageous politician. As late as 2017, he actually endorsed a pro-life candidate because he said that that pro-life candidate was pro-worker. And he’s like, “At the end of the day, I care about pro-worker policy.” He took a ton of shit for it, and I don’t think he’s done it since. So the sad part that’s really happened is that a lot of left populist agenda and other has become subsumed in the hysteria around cultural leftism, wokeism, whatever the hell you want to call it. And ultimately, that cultural leftism was the thing that really united the two wings of that party. And that’s really why MAGA is very opposed to that. They’re really not the same, but the left populist can still be anti-establishment. That’s the key.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:40)
It’s interesting to think of the left cultural elite subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. So you think that’s what happened?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:52:50)
That’s what I would say.
Lex Fridman
(01:52:51)
What do you think happened in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible future where he would’ve won? You and Krystal wrote a book on populism in 2020. So from that perspective, just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time… By the way, that would be pretty gangster during 2016. Would he have… Because I think Hillary went towards the left more, right? Am I remembering that correctly?
Saagar Enjeti
(01:53:18)
It was a very weird time. So yes and no. It wasn’t full-on BLM-mania like it was in 2020, but the signs were all there. So the Great Awokening was in 2014. I know it’s a ridiculous term. I’m-
Lex Fridman
(01:53:33)
I love it. Please keep saying it because it has a ring to it.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:53:36)
But just to give the origin, the Great Awakening is about the great religious revival in the United States. So because wokeism is a religion, that’s a common refrain, they were like, “The Great Awokening is a really good term,” so-
Lex Fridman
(01:53:47)
Thank you for explaining the joke. Yep.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:53:48)
Yeah. So the Great Awokening is basically when racial attitudes amongst college-educated whites basically flipped on its head. There are a variety of reasons why this happened. I really believe that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations in the Atlantic is one of those. It radicalized an entire generation of basically white college-educated women to think completely differently on race. It was during Ferguson, and then it also happened immediately after the Trayvon Martin case. Those two things really set the stage for the eventual BLM takeover of 2020. But fundamentally, what they did is they changed racial attitudes amongst college-educated elites to really think in a race-first construct. And worse is that they were rejected in 2016 at the ballot box by the election of Donald Trump. And in response, they ramped it up because they believed that that was the framework to view the world, that people voted for Trump because he was racist and not for a variety of other reasons that they eventually did.

(01:54:45)
And so the point around this on question of whether Bernie could have won in 2016, I don’t know. Krystal seems to think so. I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical for a variety of reasons. I think the culture is honestly one of them. One of Trump’s core issues in 2016 was immigration. And Bernie and him did not agree on immigration. And if immigration, even if people did support Bernie Sanders and his vision for working class people, the debates and the understanding about what it would look like, like a healthcare system, which literally would pay for illegal immigrants, I think he would’ve gotten killed on that. But I could be wrong. I will never know what that looked like.
Lex Fridman
(01:55:26)
Let me reference you from earlier in the conversation with FDR. It’s not the policy. I think if he went more anti-establishment and more populist as opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the DNC-
Saagar Enjeti
(01:55:42)
Yeah. I mean, that’s a good counterfactual. Nobody will really know. Look, I have a lot of love for the Bernie 2016 campaign. He has a great ad from 2016 called America. You should watch it. It’s a great ad. That’s another very interesting thing. It’s unapologetically patriotic, and that is not something that you see in a lot of left-wing circles these days. So he understood politics at a base level that a lot of people did not. But Bernie himself, and then a lot of the Bernie movement was basically crushed by the elite Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. They hated them. They attacked Joe Rogan for even having him on and for giving him a platform. That was ridiculous.

(01:56:23)
Obviously, it backfired in their face, which is really funny. But there were a million examples like that when they attacked Bernie for endorsing a pro-life politician. He never did it again. They attacked Bernie for having Bernie Bros. People online, the bros who were [inaudible 01:56:40] Bernie, and it was his fault. His supporters would say nasty things about Elizabeth Warren, and he would defend straight himself and be like, “Yes, I’m sorry. Please, my bros,” he was like, “Stop that.”
Lex Fridman
(01:56:51)
I think that his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. He kept saying sorry.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:56:58)
Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Actually, in 2020, I did a ton of analysis on this at the time. He would always do stuff like, “Joe Biden, my friend,” and it’s like, “No, he’s not your friend. He stands for everything that you disagree with. Everything.” He’d be like, “Yeah, he’s a nice guy, but he’s not my friend,” but he would always be like, “Joe and I are great friends, but we have a small disagreement on this.” But like you just said, in terms of going full Trump, they wanted to see Trump up there humiliating all of the GOP politicians that they didn’t trust anymore. That’s what people really wanted. But the other side of this is that the Democratic base in 2020 was very different than 2016. Because by 2020, they full-on had TDS, and they were basically like, “We need to defeat Trump at all costs. We don’t give a shit what your name is, Bernie, Biden, whatever. Whichever of you is going to be at best defeat Trump, you get the knob.”

(01:57:52)
2016 is different because they didn’t full-on have that love and necessity of winning. By the way, this is a strategic advantage that the Democrats have. Democrats just care about winning. The current base of the party, all they want to do is win. Republican base? They don’t give a shit about winning. They just love Trump. So it’s nice to win. But one of those where they will express their id for what they really want. Now, it’s worked out for them because it turns out, that’s a very palpable political force. But one of the reasons why you won’t see me up here doing James Carville 40 more years is there is a law of something called thermostatic public opinion, where the thermostat, it changes a lot whenever you actually… So when you have a left-wing president in power, the country goes right. When you have a right-wing president in power, the country goes left.

(01:58:41)
Amazing. Right? You can actually look at a graph of economic attitudes from the two months where Joe Biden became president after Donald Trump. So Republicans, Trump was president in the last year in office, the economy’s great. Two months later, the economy is horrible. That is a perfect example of thermostatic opinion. And I’m not counting these Democrats out. 2004, George W. Bush wins the popular vote. He has a historic mandate to continue in Iraq. By ’06, he’s toasted. We have a massive midterm election. And by ’08, we’re writing books about 40 more years, and how there’s never going to be a Republican in the office ever again. So things can change a lot in a very short period of time.

Obama vs Trump

Lex Fridman
(01:59:19)
I think also for me, personally, maybe I’m deluded, the great man view of history, I think some of it is in programming circles, the term skills issue. I think some of it just has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are, how good you are as a politician. I maybe disagree with this. I’d love to see what you think. If you were allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep winning. He would win 2016, he would win 2020, he would win this year, 2024.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:59:49)
It’s possible. But I would flip it on you, and I would say Obama would never be elected if there were no term limits, because Bill Clinton would’ve still been president.
Lex Fridman
(01:59:55)
Right.
Saagar Enjeti
(01:59:56)
Yeah. So-
Lex Fridman
(01:59:56)
Well, those two, right? That’s two examples of… Exactly. Extremely skilled politicians and somehow can appear like populists.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:00:07)
Man, Bill Clinton was a force in his time, and it’s honestly sad what’s happened to him. I was actually just talking with a friend the other day. I’m like, “I don’t think that presidents should become president when they’re young because they live to see themselves become irrelevant,” and that must be really painful because I know what it takes to get there. Imagine being Clinton, I mean, your entire legacy was destroyed with Hillary Clinton in 2016. And then imagine being Obama, who, in 2016, you could argue it’s a one-off and say that Trump is just… Oh, Hillary was a bad candidate, but Michelle and Barack Obama went so hard for Kamala Harris, and they just got blown out in the popular vote. I mean, the Obama era officially ended with Donald Trump’s reelection to the presidency in 2024, and that was a 20-year period where Obama was one of the most popular central figures in American politics. But I want to return to what you’re saying because it is important, and by the way, I do not support term limits on American presidents.
Lex Fridman
(02:01:04)
Are you a fascist or-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:01:05)
Well, that would imply that I don’t believe in democracy. I actually do believe in democracy because I think the people, if they love their president, should be able to reelect him. I think FDR was amazing. I think that the term limit change was basically what happened is that Republicans and a lot of elite Democrats always wanted to speak against FDR, but he was a god, so they couldn’t. So they waited until he died. And then after he died, they were like, “Yeah, this whole third, fourth term, that can never happen again.” And America didn’t really think that hard about it. They were like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.” But, I mean, it had immense consequences for American history. Clinton is the perfect example. I mean, Bill Clinton left office, even despite the Lewinsky bullshit, he had a 60% approval rating. Okay? No way George W. Bush gets elected. Impossible. Clinton would’ve blown his ass out.

(02:01:58)
And imagine the consequences of that. We would have no Iraq… I mean, I’m not saying he was a great man. We probably still would’ve had the financial crisis, and there’s still a lot of bad stuff that would’ve happened. But he was a popular dude, and I wouldn’t say he had the best judgment at times presidentially… Definitely not personally, but presidentially. But I’m pretty confident we would’ve not gone into the Iraq war. And so that’s where it really cost us. If you’re left wing and you’re talking about Obama, yeah, I think Obama probably would’ve won in 2016. Although it’s a counterfactual, because Obama was never challenged in the same way that MAGA was able to, to the liberal consensus. Romney really ran this awful campaign, honestly, about cutting spending. It was very traditional Republican. It was deeply unpopular. The autopsy of that election was we actually need to be more pro-immigration. That literally was the autopsy. But Trump understood the assignment.

(02:02:56)
There are two people who I so deeply respect for their political bets. Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. So one of the books that I recommended called The Unwinding by George Packer, he actually talks about Peter Thiel there. This is in 2013. And Thiel talks about, he was like, “Whoever runs for office next, they don’t need to run on an optimistic message. They need to run on a message that everything is fucked up and that we need to… And if you think about, that’s why Thiel’s endorsement of Trump with the American carnage message is… I mean, it was shocking at the time, but he had that fundamental insight that that’s what the American people wanted. Trump too comes out of an election in 2012 where the literal GOP autopsy, the report produced by the party, says, “We need to be pro-mass immigration.” What happens? Immediately after 2012, they start to go for mass immigrant… Basically, they go for these amnesty plans, the so-called Gang of Eight plan, Marco Rubio, and all of this in 2013, it falls apart, but Republicans get punished by their base in [inaudible 02:04:04]-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:04:00)
Republicans get punished by their base in 2014. So Eric Cantor, who was the House Majority Leader, the number two Republican, spent more on stake in his campaign than his primary opponent who successfully defeated him, a guy named Dave Brat. Dave Brat kicked his ass on the issue of immigration and said that Eric Cantor is pro-amnesty. All of the forces were there.

(02:04:21)
Then in 2015, Trump comes down the escalator, and he gives the message on immigration that the GOP base has been roaring and wanting to hear now but that nobody wanted to listen to them. That was his fundamental insight. That bet was a colossal and a Titanic political bet at a time when all political ideology and thought process would’ve said that you should come out on the other side, which is where Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and all these other guys were effectively there in varying different ways, like they were hawkish or whatever. But Trump just had such a monopoly on that as an idea.

(02:04:56)
That’s why he wins the 2016 primary. Then paired with immigration, a hard line position on immigration, is this American carnage idea that actually everything is wrong. The American dream has gone. “We will stop this American carnage.” I think American Carnage is one of the most important inaugural speeches ever given in American history. Put it up against every single other speech, there’s nothing else like it. But that was what the country wanted at the time.

(02:05:26)
That’s what great politicians are able to do, is they’re able to suss something out. That’s also why Peter Thiel is who he is because he saw that in 2000. Imagine what it takes to come out of the 2012 election and to be honestly totally contrarian to the entire national mood and this entire theory of Obama-esque star politics and say, “No, you need somebody who runs on the opposite of that to win.”
Lex Fridman
(02:05:49)
Well, we’ll never know. I love this kind of Mike Tyson versus Muhammad Ali. I still think I would’ve loved to see Obama versus Trump.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:05:56)
Me too. I agree.
Lex Fridman
(02:05:58)
First of all, Obama versus Trump in 2008, Obama wins hands down.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:06:03)
Well, yes, definitely.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:05)
I love how this is a boxing talk.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:06:07)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:06:07)
Now, 2016, Obama has Iraq and Afghanistan.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:06:14)
He’s vulnerable though. I’ll tell you why: DACA. That’s what nobody ever talks about in the Obama-Trump thing. Don’t forget, Obama takes his 2012 victory, basically says, “Oh, the GOP even now agrees with me on immigration,” and then he does DACA and he legalizes X million number of illegal immigrants who are here who were brought here as children. That also fundamentally changed the immigration consensus on the Republican side because they’re like, “Wait, holy shit. You can just do that? Because we don’t agree with that at all.” That really ignited the base as well. So I’m not sure.

(02:06:47)
A moment I think about a lot with Trump and just being able to unleash the rage of the Republican base is in the 2012 debate, Candy Crowley was the moderator with Mitt Romney, and she fact-checked him famously. This was when fact checking was shocking in a presidential debate. She said something about Benghazi, and she was like, “No, he did say that.” She corrected Romney on behalf of Obama. To this day, it’s questionable whether she was even right. Romney was just like, “Oh, he did? Okay.” Trump would’ve been like, “Excuse me. Excuse me. Look at this woman.” He would’ve gone off.

(02:07:22)
I think about that moment because that’s what the Republican base wanted to hear. But also, it turns out, America had a lot of festering feelings about the mainstream media that it needed unleashed, and Trump was just this incredible vector to just blow up this system, which, if you asked me about optimism, that’s the thing I’m most optimistic about.
Lex Fridman
(02:07:42)
But don’t you think Obama had a good sense in how to turn it on, how to be anti-establishment correctly?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:07:47)
I will not deny that he’s one of the most talented politicians literally to ever play the game. He is a just unbelievable rhetorical talent. Look, as a counterfactual, would he have been more talented than Hillary? Yeah, no question in terms of anybody would’ve been for that one. But at the same time, all the signs were there. All the signs for the Trump victory and for the backlash against Obama-ism kind of as a political project, it all existed. Like I just laid the tea leaves out there, from 2012 to 2015, in retrospect, it’s the most predictable thing in the world that Donald Trump would get elected, but it was crazy in the moment. I got to live through that, which was really fun, like professionally.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:27)
I think it’s unfortunate that he kind of let Kamala Harris borrow his reputation.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:08:34)
It’s like, “You know better, dude. You know. You defeated these people, the Clinton machine. You destroyed them.” And it was awesome in ’08.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:44)
What is that? He’s so much bigger and better than the machine.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:08:51)
I don’t get it.
Lex Fridman
(02:08:51)
It’s interesting, right?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:08:52)
Yeah. It’s so weird though. I just think-
Lex Fridman
(02:08:54)
I think this was a wake-up call. 2024 was a wake-up call. The DNC machine doesn’t work.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:08:59)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(02:09:00)
There needs to be new blood, new Obama-like candidates.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:09:03)
Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that’s important, too, in terms of the process and the way that things currently stand. The DNC actually rigged its entire primary system under Biden not to the benefit of Obama. For example, you know how they moved away from the Iowa caucuses and they actually moved some other primaries and moved the calendar to reward traditional states that vote much more in line with the democratic establishment. The story of Barack Obama is one that not many… actually, probably a lot of young people today don’t even remember how it happened.

(02:09:34)
In 2008, Obama was the underdog. Actually, here’s the critical thing. Obama was losing with Black people. Why? Black Democrats simply did not believe that white people were vote for a Black guy. So Barack Obama goes to this white state, Iowa, all in on the Iowa caucuses, and shocks the world by winning the Iowa caucuses. Overnight, there is a shift in public amongst the Black population in South Carolina that says, “Oh, shit, he actually could win,” and he comes out, and he wins South Carolina. That’s basically was the death knell for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The problem is by moving South Carolina up and by making it first along with other more pro-establishment friendly places, what do we do? We make it so that Barack Obama can never happen again. We make it so that an older base of Democratic Party voters who listens to the elites can never have their assumptions challenged. That’s one of the worst things Joe Biden did. I talked about his arrogance. He was so arrogant, he changed the freaking primary system. He was so arrogant, he refused to do a debate. I mean, imagine history. How lucky are we honestly that Joe Biden agreed to do that debate with Donald Trump early? Again, that was his arrogance. I think we’re so lucky for it because if we hadn’t gotten… We got to understand as a country how cooked he was and how fake everything was behind the scenes in front of all of our eyes. They tried for three straight years to make sure that that would never happen. It’s still such a crime, honestly, against the American people.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:08)
I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to for three hours. That’s why I bring up Obama because he’s probably the number one person on the left I would like to hear analyze what happened in this election and what’s happened to the United States of America over the past 20 plus years. I can’t imagine anybody else.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:11:31)
Look, if anybody could do it, it’d be you. But there are layers upon layers with that man. I would love to actually sit and talk with him, for real.
Lex Fridman
(02:11:37)
I think it’s fair to say that we talked about the great man view of history. I think you have a psychopath view of history where all great leaders are for sure psychopaths.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:11:50)
Not for sure. There are many who are good people. Harry Truman was-
Lex Fridman
(02:11:52)
You’re like, some of them [inaudible 02:11:52].
Saagar Enjeti
(02:11:52)
Yeah, some-
Lex Fridman
(02:11:51)
Yeah, Harry Truman, Harry Truman.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:11:54)
Some, I assume, are good people. To be fair though, most of the good ones are accidents, like Harry Truman. He never would’ve gotten himself elected. He was a great dude.
Lex Fridman
(02:12:05)
How do you know he was a great dude?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:12:07)
David McCullough book, I highly recommended it. Everybody should read it. Truman loved his wife. I think that’s really awesome. I love when politicians love their wife. It’s so rare. He adored his wife, he adored his daughter, spent time with them. He made family life a priority. He had really good small-town judgment that he would apply to foreign affairs. He was just a very well-considered, very stand-up man. I so appreciate that about him.

(02:12:34)
Another one is John Adams. I love and revere John Adams. He’s my favorite Founding Father. Him and John Quincy, they don’t get nearly enough of their due. They were some of the most intelligent, well-considered. They were family men. The love and the relationship between John and Abigail Adams is literally legendary. I think it’s amazing, especially in the context of the 1700s, the way that he would take her counsel into conversations and her own ability. She would sit there and go toe-to-toe as much with Thomas Jefferson. There are some who are great, who are really, really good presidents, who have good judgment and who are really good people and really think deeply about the world and have really cool personal lives. But also the vast majority of them… I would say especially in the modern era and where the price of the presidency extracts everything that you have, you have to be willing to give everything. That’s not a price that most people want to pay.
Lex Fridman
(02:13:33)
Is it possible that some of the people who you think are sociopaths in politics are in fact really good people, and some of the people you think are good, like Truman and Adams, are actually sociopaths?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:13:46)
Definitely. I could just be reading the wrong books, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:13:49)
Yeah, that’s right. It sounds like you just read some really compelling biographies.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:13:54)
Well, to be fair, I don’t base this on one book. I read a lot of them, and I’ll get… For example, I’ve read books about LBJ, you wouldn’t know any of his foibles. But then you find out that they’re written by his friend or it was written by… I think you read [inaudible 02:14:08].
Lex Fridman
(02:14:08)
I think you read the truth. I really worry about this general, especially now, the anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath. The reason I worry about that is it feels true.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:14:24)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:14:25)
So you can fall into this bubble of beliefs where every politician is a sociopath, and because of that-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:14:36)
It can be a self-reinforcing [inaudible 02:14:38].
Lex Fridman
(02:14:38)
… it can be a self-reinforcing mechanism.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:14:38)
Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I agree, by the way. We do need to dramatically change it. But the problem is that people vote with their eyeballs and with their interests, and people love to dissect people’s personal lives. One of the reasons why you were probably more likely in the pre-modern era to get, quote/unquote, good people is they were not subject to the level of scrutiny and to the insanity of the process that you are currently. Like I just said about… Theoretically, you could run for president and you would just get your nomination at the convention. It’s only two months to Election Day. That’s not so bad. But you run for president today, you got your ass on the road for two years and then two years before that. Then you have to run the damn government. So the price is so extraordinarily high.

(02:15:23)
I also think that, oh, God, just Washington as a system, it will burn you. It will extract absolutely everything that you can give it. At the end of the day, everyone always talks about this, it’s hilarious, how Trump is the only president not to age in office. I actually think it’s crazy when you look at the photos of how he actually looks better today than he did whenever he went into the office. That’s amazing, and it actually says a lot about how his mind works. I think Trump is pure id. Having observed him a little bit, both at the White House and having interviewed him, it’s calculating, but it’s also pure id, which is very interesting. The ones who are the thinkers, guys like Obama and others who are really in their heads, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. Apparently, Obama would only sleep four hours a night.
Lex Fridman
(02:16:14)
Yeah, add some empathy on top of that, it’s just going to destroy you.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:16:18)
It will kill you, man.

Nancy Pelosi

Lex Fridman
(02:16:19)
All right, speaking about the dirty game of politics, several people, different people told me that of everyone they have ever met in politics, Nancy Pelosi is the best at attaining and wielding political power. Is there any truth to that?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:16:34)
In the modern era, yeah, I think that’s fair in the last 25 years, definitely. Let’s think about it. Number one is longevity. She’s had the ability to control the caucus for a long period of time, so that’s impressive. Because as I just laid out with Clinton, Obama, these figures come and they go, but over a 25-almost-year period, you’ve been at the very top and the center of American politics.

(02:16:55)
The other case would be is that in this modern era has been defined by access to money. She’s one of the greatest fundraisers in Democratic Party history. Again, consistently, Obama, Kamala, all those people come and go. But she’s always had a very central understanding of the ability to fundraise, to cultivate good relationships with Democratic Party elites all across the country, use that money and dole it out to her caucus.

(02:17:19)
She also was really good at making sure that legislation that came to the floor actually had the votes to do so. She ran an extremely well-ordered process in the House of Representatives, one in which you were able to reconcile problems within her office. It didn’t usually go public. Then it would make it to the floor, and it would pass so that there would be no general media frenzy and Democrats in disarray or any of that. Put that on display with the Republicans, and we’ve had multiple Speakers all resign or get fired in a 16-year period. That’s pretty remarkable. Basically, ever since John Boehner decided to leave in, what was it, 2012? I forget the exact year. My point is that if you compare her record to the longevity on the Republican side, it is astounding.

(02:18:03)
The other interesting thing is that she also has pulled off one of the real tests of political power is, can you rule even when you don’t have the title anymore? She gave up the leader position to Hakeem Jeffries, but everybody knows she pulled Joe Biden out of the race. That’s pretty interesting. She’s technically just a back-bencher, a nobody member of Congress, but we all know that’s bullshit. So that’s actually a very important case of political power is, can you rule without the title? If you can, then you truly are powerful. So I would make a good case for her, yeah. She’s done a lot of remarkable stuff for her party.

(02:18:39)
I will say they played Trump like a fiddle, man. Last time around, they were able to. They really got him. One of the craziest elements that I covered was Trump basically threatened to shut down the government and actually did shut down the government for a period of time over a dispute over border wall funding. Pelosi and Schumer, despite genuine mass hysteria in the Democratic Party with even some people who were willing to try and to strike a deal, never wavered and actually basically won and forced Trump to back down. Not a lot of MAGA people want to admit it, but that was honestly really embarrassing for the Trump administration at that time. The amount of discipline that it took for her, and Chuck to a lesser extent, but for the two of them to pull that off, it was honestly impressive that they were able to do that, even when the president has so much political power. It literally shut down the government over it.

Kamala Harris

Lex Fridman
(02:19:34)
Speaking of fundraising, Kamala raised $1 billion-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:19:39)
Insane.
Lex Fridman
(02:19:40)
… but I guess the conclusion is she spent it poorly. How would you spend it?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:19:47)
I don’t think money matters that much. I think Donald Trump has proven to us twice that you can win an underdog campaign through earned media. And I don’t think that paid advertisement moves the needle that much. Now, notice, I didn’t say it doesn’t matter. But am I buying $425,000-a-day spots on the Vegas Sphere? No. We’re not doing that. As people who do this for a living, how do you even spend $100,000 to build a set for one interview?
Lex Fridman
(02:20:15)
Is this the Call Her Daddy?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:20:15)
The Call Her Daddy thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:17)
Okay.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:20:17)
How’s that possible? Think about the dollar-per-hour cost. That’s like running a jet airplane in terms of what they did, [inaudible 02:20:24] Kamala Harris thing.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:24)
You know what I want to note behind the scenes, and I’m not good with this, I get really frustrated and I shouldn’t, but dealing with PR and comms people can sometimes break my soul.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:20:35)
It’s maddening. “Can we not talk about this? We need to pull them at 2:12 p.m.” You’re like, “But that’s only 30 minutes.” It’s like, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:43)
That, but there’s stuff like where to put the camera. It’s not that I don’t-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:20:47)
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:49)
Hypothetically, I don’t even disagree with any of the suggestions, but it’s like-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:20:54)
The micromanagement.
Lex Fridman
(02:20:55)
… just the micromanagement and the politeness, but the fake politeness. It just makes me feel like, I think, “What would Kubrick do?” Would he murder all of them right now?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:21:08)
He would just ban them after he became Stanley Kubrick, but he dealt with it for a while. By the way, I just went on a Kubrick binge. Man, he was awesome.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:16)
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:21:17)
I watched that World War I movie of his, the one from the ’50s. That is such an underrated film. I feel like people don’t… Whatever. We’ll get past it.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:25)
I guess she paid for-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:21:29)
A hundred grand, bro.
Lex Fridman
(02:21:31)
… and the Oprah thing. She paid for the interviews?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:21:35)
That’s another one. I do this for a living. As you can tell, I’m a very cynical person. I did not even know that celebrities got paid for their endorsements. I could never have imagined a universe where Oprah Winfrey has paid $1 million to endorse Kamala Harris. I’m like, “First of all, you’re a billionaire.” Second, “I thought you’d do this because you believe.”
Lex Fridman
(02:21:55)
No, to be fair, I think the million just helps do the thing you would like to do. It’s a nudge. Because I don’t think any celebrity would endorse-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:22:06)
Yeah, yeah, they’re not doing it because of the money. You should just do it for free. I can’t even believe that you’re doing this for money. The fact, what was it, Alanis Morissette, they had to cut her because they didn’t have the funds to pay her. I’m like, “First of all, if you believe, you should just play for free.” But second, again, as a person who is deeply cynical, I still am genuinely shook that we are paying celebrities for their endorsement.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:30)
Yeah, it’s really fucked up.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:22:31)
That’s insane.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:33)
Why do you think people on the left who are actually in the political arena are afraid of doing anything longer than an hour?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:22:41)
That’s a great question.
Lex Fridman
(02:22:42)
Let me just say, probably most of the people I’ve talked to on this podcast are left wing or have been for a long time. They just don’t out and say it. Most scientists are left wing. Most vaguely political people are left wing that I’ve talked to. But the closer you get to the actual political arena, and I’ve tried really hard, they just, “Nope.” I had a bunch of people, the highest profile people say 15 minutes, 20 minutes. I say, “Nope.”
Saagar Enjeti
(02:22:42)
I’m used to that, so welcome.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:20)
I just can’t imagine a conversation with Kamala or with Joe Biden or AOC-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:23:31)
Obama.
Lex Fridman
(02:23:31)
… or Obama that’s of any quality at all that shows any kind of humanity of the person, the genius of the person, the interesting nuance of the person in 30 minutes. I don’t know. Maybe there’s people that are extremely skilled that can do that. You just can’t.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:23:52)
You should be optimistic because a huge narrative out of this election is that the Democrats massively fucked up by not coming on this show or a Rogan show. Fundamentally, number one, that’s going to change dramatically-
Lex Fridman
(02:24:03)
I hope so.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:24:03)
… so be optimistic and keep pushing. Two, this is a good segue actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about, I know a lot of people listening to this show who are in tech and may have some influence on the admin, this is something I want people to take really seriously, is I was a White House correspondent for The Daily Caller, it’s a conservative outlet, in Washington during the Trump years. The most important thing I learned from that was that under the White House Correspondents’ Association, the way that the media cartel has everything set up for access for press to the President is fundamentally broken, anti-American, and bad for actual democracy. So let me lay this out at a very mechanical level because nobody knows this. I was a former White House Correspondents’ Association member, so anybody who says I’m full of shit, I was there.

(02:24:53)
For example, number one, all the seats in the Briefing Room, those seats are assigned by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not by the White House itself. The White House Correspondents’ Association requires you to apply for a seat. That adjudication process can take literally years for bylaws, elections, and all these things to do. This means that they can slow roll the entrance of new media online outlets who are allowed into the room. The reason it really matters not having a seat is if you don’t have a seat, you have to get there early and stand in the wings, like I used to, and raise your hand like this and just hope and pray that the press secretary can see. It’s extremely inconvenient. I’m talking, I have to get there hours early at a chance during a 15-minute briefing.

(02:25:32)
So one of the things is that Trump has is he owes a huge part of his election to coming on podcasts and to new media. Now, because of that, it’s really important that the White House Correspondents’ Association, which is a literal guild cartel that keeps people out of the White House and credentials itself and creates this opaque mechanism through which they control access to asking the press secretary questions, is destroyed. There are a lot of different ways you can do this. Because what nobody gets, too, is that all of these rules are unofficial. For example, they’re just traditions. The White House is like, “Yeah, it’s our building, but you guys figure it out,” because that’s a longstanding tradition.

(02:26:15)
Let me give you another insane tradition that currently exists in the White House. The Associated Press or the Associated Press correspondent gets to start the briefing, traditionally. They get the first question. They also get to end the briefing. When they think it’s been enough time, they’ll be like, “Okay, Karine Jean-Pierre, thank you,” and that calls the briefing over. What? You’re not even in the White House Correspondents’ Association. You literally just happen to work for the Associated Press. Why? Why do we allow that to happen? So number one, stop doing that. To their credit, the Trump people didn’t really do that, but it’s a longstanding tradition.

(02:26:49)
The other thing is that what nobody gets either is that the first row is all television networks for logistical reasons so that they can do their little stand-ups with their mic and say, “I’m reporting for [inaudible 02:27:00].” Well, what people don’t seem to know is that all the television networks are basically going to ask some version of the same question. The reason they do that is because they need a clip of their correspondent going after the White House press secretary all out, Robert Mueller, like whenever I was there. So you get the same goddamn version of the stupid political questions over and over again.

(02:27:23)
The Briefing Room is designed for traditional media, and they have all the access in the world. So in an election where you owe your victory, at least in part, to new media and recognizing the changing landscape, you need to change the conduit of information to the American people. And in an election, I don’t know if you saw this, but election night coverage on cable news was down 25%, just in four years, 25%. That’s astounding. Cable news had a monopoly on election night for my entire lifetime, and yet, my show had record ratings that night.

(02:27:58)
Look, I’m a small slice of the puzzle here. We’ve got Candice Owens, Patrick Bet-David, Tim Pool, David Pakman, TYT, all these other people. From what I understand, all of us blew it out that night because millions of Americans watched it on YouTube. We even partnered with some Decision Desk HQs, so we had live data. We could make state calls. We’re just a silly little YouTube show. My point, though, is that in an election where the vast majority of Americans under the age of 55 are listening to podcasts, consuming new media, and are not watching cable news, where the median age of CNN, which is the youngest viewership, is 68. 68 is the median. Statistically, what does that tell us? There’s a decent number of people who are watching CNN who are in their ’80s and in their ’90s.

(02:28:46)
Yeah, I’m glad you brought up Alex, because he deserves a tremendous shout out, Alex Bruesewitz. He was the pioneer of the podcast strategy for the Donald J. Trump campaign. He got on your show. He was able to get on Andrew Schulz’s show, Rogan. He was the internal force that pushed a lot of this. My personal hope is that somebody like Alex is elevated in the traditional White House bureaucracy, that the number of credentials that are issued to these mainstream media outlets is cut, and there’s a new lottery process put in place where people with large audiences are invited.

(02:29:19)
I also want to make a case here for why I think it’s really important for people like you and others who don’t have as much traditional media experience to come and practice some capital J journalism because it will sharpen you, too, giving you access in that pressure cooker environment. Having to really sit there and spar a little bit with a public official and not have as long necessarily as you’re used to, it really hones your news media skills, your news gathering skills, and it will make you a better interviewer in the long run.

(02:29:50)
Because a lot of the things that I have learned have just been through osmosis. I’ve just lived in DC. I’ve been so lucky, I’ve had a lot of cool jobs, and I’ve just been able to experience a lot of this stuff. So I’m really hoping that people who are listening to this who may have some influence or even the viewership, if you want to reach out to them and all them, this is a very easily changeable problem. It’s a cartel which has no official power. It’s all power by tradition, and it needs to be blown up. It does not serve America’s interests to have 48 seats, I think, in the White House Press Briefing Room to people who have audiences of like five. It just makes absolutely zero. Workspace, seats, access, credentials, and also credentials that are issued to other new media journalists at major events should take precedence. Because it’s not even about rewarding the creator. The American people are here. You need to meet them. That’s your job.

(02:30:48)
I’ll just end with a historical thing. Barack Obama shocked the White House Press Corps in 2009 because he took a question from the Huffington Post, a brand new blog, but they were stunned because he knew, he said, “These blog people, they went all in for me, and I got to reward them.” So there’s a longstanding precedence of this. They’ll bitch and they’ll moan. They’ll be upset. But it’s their fault that they don’t have as much credibility. It’s incumbent upon the White House, which serves the public, to actually meet them where they are. So I really hope that at least some of this is implemented inside of it.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:22)
If you break apart the cartel, I think you can actually enable greater journalism, frankly-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:31:29)
Of course.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:29)
… with a capital J. Because actually in the long form is when you can do better journalism from even just the politician perspective. You can disagree. You can get criticized because you can defend yourself.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:31:41)
I had an idea, actually. You tell me what you think. I think a really cool format would be there’s a room right near the Press Briefing Room called the Roosevelt Room. A beautiful room, by the way. It’s awesome. It has the Medal of Honor for Teddy Roosevelt, and it has a portrait of him and a portrait of FDR. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the White House.
Lex Fridman
(02:31:41)
Fuck, yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:31:56)
It’s so cool. So my idea would be in the Roosevelt Room, which traditionally used for press briefings and stuff, is you as the press secretary sit there, I think there’s like 12 seats, something like that, and you set it all up. You have, let’s say, Shure microphones like this, and that secretary is going to commit to being there for two hours. New media people can sit around the room. All of this being streamed live, by the way, just like the White House Press Briefing Room.

(02:32:24)
The expectation is that the type of questions have to be substantive. Obviously, nothing is off limits. You should never, ever accept, “I’m not going to be asked about this.” Especially as a journalist, you can’t do that. Every time they’re like, “Hey, please don’t ask about this,” it’s like, actually, that’s probably one thing you should ask about. My point being that the expectation is that there’s no interference on the White House side, but that the format itself will lend exactly to what you’re saying to allow people to explain.

(02:32:51)
Again, in a media era where we need to trust the consumer, my show is routinely over two hours long on cable television. On cable television, the Tucker Carlson program, whenever it was on Fox News, without commercial breaks was about 42, 43 minutes, something like that, of runtime. So I’m speaking for almost triple what that is on a regular basis. The point is is that millions are willing to sit and to listen, but you just have to meet them where they are. So I really hope that a format like that, like a streamer briefing or something like that, I think it’s… Look, I know they would dunk on it endlessly, but I think it could work.
Lex Fridman
(02:33:31)
Yeah, I think the incentives are different. I think it works because you, like you saw, don’t have to signal to the other journalists that you’re part of clique.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:33:41)
Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up because that was another lesson I learned. I go, “Oh, none of you are asking important questions for the people. You’re asking questions because you all hang out with each other, and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait.'” So this entire thing is a self-reinforcing guild to impress each other at cocktail parties and not to actually ask anything interesting. I remember people were so mad at me because, this was 2018 or maybe 2017, and I said, “Do you think that Kim Jong Un is sincere in his willingness to meet with you?” something to that effect. They were furious because I didn’t ask about some bullshit political controversy that was happening at the time. So in the historical legacy, what was more important? The Mueller question, or Donald Trump breaking 50 years or whatever of tradition with America’s relationship with North Korea and meeting him in Singapore and basically resetting that relationship for all time?

(02:34:36)
As you can tell, I read a lot of books. I like to take the long view. Every time I would ask a question, I go, when the future Robert Caro is writing books and he’s reading the transcript of the White House press briefing, he doesn’t even know who this kid is, he goes, “Oh, that was a pretty good question right there. That’s pretty relevant.” You got to think about all the bullshit that gets left on the cutting room floor.
Lex Fridman
(02:34:57)
I love that view of journalism, actually. The goal is to end up as one line in a history book.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:00)
The goal is to end up as one line in a history book 50 years from now.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:35:05)
Yes. I just want a quote of what the president said to something that I asked.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:07)
Yes, in a book.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:35:08)
That’s, “I would be happy. I would die happy with that.” If you told me that when I’m like a nine-year-old man, I’d be like, “Man.” Right? That means I succeeded.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:15)
When the AIs write the history of human civilization.

2020 Election

Saagar Enjeti
(02:35:19)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:19)
One of the things I continuously learned from you, when looking back through history, is how crazy American politics has been throughout history. It makes me feel a lot better about the current day.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:35:31)
It should.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:32)
Corruption.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:35:32)
Yes.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:34)
Just the divisiveness, also. Just the insanity-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:35:38)
It’s been way worse.
Lex Fridman
(02:35:41)
… of stealing elections at all levels of government, and direct stealing and indirect stealing, all kinds of stuff. So, is there stuff that jumps out to mind throughout history that’s just like the craziest corruptions or stealing of elections that come to mind?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:35:59)
I’ll give them the micro and the macro. So my favorite example is Robert Caro, who I’ve probably talked about him a lot. God bless you, Robert. I hope you lived to write your last book because we really need that from you.

(02:36:10)
But Robert came to Texas. He only intended on writing three books about Lyndon Johnson. He’s currently completed four and he is on his fifth, and it’s taken over 40 years to write those. And one of the reasons is he just kept uncovering so much stuff. And one of them is book two, Means of Ascent. He never intended to write it, but as he began to investigate Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senate election, he realizes in real time how rigged and stolen it was. And so I often tell people, “What if I told you that we lived in the most secure election period in modern history?” They wouldn’t believe it. But if you read through that shit, I’m talking about bags of cash, millions of dollars, literal stuffed ballot boxes.

(02:36:57)
It’s great to be back here in Texas because I always think about that place down in Zapata and Starr County. I’m talking like basically Mexico, where these dons were in power in the 1940s. They would literally stuff the ballot boxes with the rolls, and they wouldn’t even allow people to come and vote. They just check marked it all for you based upon the amount that you paid. Means of Ascent is the painstaking detail of exactly how Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 Senate election. And nothing like that, as far as I know, is still happening.

(02:37:31)
Macro, we can talk about the 1876 election. Rutherford B. Hayes, one of the closest elections in modern history. It was one of those that got kicked with the House of Representatives. That was an insane, insane time. The corrupt bargain that was struck to basically end reconstruction and federal occupation of the South. And of course, the amount of wheeling and dealing that happened inside of that was absolutely bonkers and nuts. That was what an actual stolen election looks like, just so people know.

(02:37:59)
So on a micro and a macro, yeah, that’s what it really looks like. And so look, I understand where people are coming from. Also, let’s do, what? 1960? That was pretty wild. In 1960, there was all those allegations about Illinois going for Kennedy. If you look at the actual vote totals of Kennedy-Nixon, wow. I mean, it’s such an insanely close presidential election. And even though the electoral college victory looks a little bit differently, Nixon would openly talk about. He’s like, “Oh, old Joe Kennedy rigged Illinois for his boy.” And he’d be like, “And we didn’t even have a chance in Texas with Lyndon pulling.” Like, Lyndon stuffing the ballot boxes down there. And this is open on the…

(02:38:42)
They openly admit this stuff. They talk about it. So actually, there’s a funny story. LBJ lost, I think, his 1941 Senate primary. And it’s because that his opponent, Pappy O’Daniel, actually outstole Lyndon. So they were both corrupt, but Pappy O’Daniel stuffed the ballot box in the fifth day of the seven days to count the votes. And FDR loved LBJ. And it’s interesting, right? FDR recognized Johnson’s. His talent. And he goes, “Lyndon? You know in New York, we sit on the ballot boxes until we count them.” Because he’s admitting that he participated in a lot of this stuff.

(02:39:25)
So, this high-level chicanery of stolen elections is actually an American pastime that we luckily have moved on from. And quite a lot of people do not know the exact intricate details of how wild it was back in the day.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:40)
Yeah, it’s actually one of the things. It’s harder to pull off a bunch of bullshit with all these cameras everywhere now.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:39:45)
Mm-hmm. Transparency too, lack of cash, banking regulations. There’s a variety of reasons, but yeah.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:50)
So that said, let’s talk about the 2020 election. It seems like forever ago. Do you think it was rigged the way that Trump claimed?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:39:58)
No.
Lex Fridman
(02:39:59)
And was it rigged in other ways?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:40:02)
Look, this is the problem with language like rigged. And by the way, when I interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy, he said the exact same thing. So for all the MAGA people who are going to get mad at me, Vivek agrees. All right? And if…

(02:40:14)
Okay. I have observed, and I’m going to put my analyst hat on. There are two theories of Stop the Steal. One I call Low IQ Stop the Steal, and one I call High IQ Stop the Steal. Low IQ Stop the Steal is basically what Donald Trump has advocated where Dominion voting machines, and bamboo ballots, and Venezuela and Sidney Powell, and all of the people involved basically got indicted by the state of Georgia. I’m not saying that that was correct. I’m just like, that’s what that actually looked like. Rudy Giuliani, et cetera.

(02:40:46)
High IQ Stop the Steal is basically… And actually, these are not illegitimate arguments. The school of thought is it was illegitimate for the state of Pennsylvania and other swing states to change mail-in balloting laws as a response to COVID, which enabled millions of people more to vote that wouldn’t have, and that those change in regulations became enough to swing the election. I actually think that that is true. Now, would you say that that’s rigged? That’s a very important question because we’re talking about a Republican state legislature, a Republican state supreme court. Right? The two that actually ruled on this question. So, could you say that it was rigged by the Democrats to do that?

(02:41:26)
Another problem with that theory is that while you can say that that’s unfair to change the rules last time around, you can also understand it to a certain extent. And I’m not justifying it, I’m just giving you an example. So for example, after the hurricane hit North Carolina, Republican officials were like, “Hey, we need to make sure that these people in Western North Carolina who were affected by the hurricane could still be able to have access to the ballot box.”

(02:41:51)
And people were like, “Oh, so you’re saying in an extraordinary circumstance that you should change voting access and regularity to make sure that people have access?” So, my point is you can see the logic through which this happened. And the high IQ version is basically the one that was adopted by Josh Hawley whenever he voted against certification. He said that the state of Pennsylvania, particularly election law, and that those changes were unfair and led to the, quote-unquote, rigging of the election against Donald Trump. Now, there’s an even higher IQ, Galaxy Brain Stop the Steal. Galaxy Brain Stop the Steal is one that you saw, with great love and respect, my friend JD Vance, at his debate with Tim Walsh. When Tim Walsh asked him, [inaudible 02:42:36]. He said, “Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”

(02:42:38)
He’s like, “Tim, I focus on the future.” And then he started talking about censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story. If you take a look at the Joe Rogan interview, Rogan actually asked JD this. He’s like, “What do you mean you’re in the election? Some version of that.”

(02:42:52)
And JD was like, “Well, what I get really frustrated by is people will bring up all of these insane conspiracy theories, but they ignore that the media censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, and that big tech had its finger on the thumb for the Democrats.” Now, that is empirically true. Okay? That is true, right? Now, would you say that that’s rigged? I’m not going to use that word because that’s a very different word. Now, would you say that that’s unfair? Yeah, I think it’s unfair.

(02:43:19)
So there’s another, a lot of MAGA folks picked up on this one. There was a Time Magazine article in 2020 that’s very famous in their crowd, called the… It was like the fight to fortify the election, and it was about all of these institutions that put their fingers on the scale for Joe Biden against Donald Trump. So I will put it this way, was Donald Trump up against the Titanic forces of billionaires, tech censorship, and elite institutions who all did absolute damnedest to defeat him in 2020? Yes, that is true. And in a sense, the Galaxy Brain case is the only one of those which I think is truly legitimate.

(02:44:03)
And I’m not going to put it off the table, but this is the problem, that’s not what Trump means. Trump, by the way, will never tell you what I just told you. JD will. If you go and you ask any of these Republican politicians when they’re challenged on it and they don’t want to say that Trump loss at 2020 election, they’ll give the hype, the Galaxy Brain case that I just gave. And again, I don’t think it’s wrong. But it’s like, guys, that’s not what he means when he says it. And that’s the important parsing of the case, right?
Lex Fridman
(02:44:33)
So first at a high level, Trump or otherwise, I don’t like anyone who whines when they lose. Period.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:44:38)
Yeah. Although, he did tell you he lost. Did you notice that? That’s the only time he’s ever said it. Ever.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:43)
I did.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:44:43)
You’re famous. You’re in history for that one.
Lex Fridman
(02:44:45)
Lost by the whisker.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:44:46)
Yeah. “I lost by a whisker.”
Lex Fridman
(02:44:49)
I mean, there is a case to be made that he was joking, I don’t know. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with humor, where sometimes it’s sarcasm, sometimes not, much easier to showcase in a three-hour interview, I’ll say.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:45:03)
Good call. Go ahead.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:04)
I couldn’t even play with that when you have 40 minutes.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:45:08)
I know, bro.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:08)
You’re like… I could do just 40 minutes on weaving alone.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:45:13)
For your style, it doesn’t work. And I can tell you how the way I interview politicians is I just do pure policy. So the first time I interviewed Trump, I compiled a list of 15 subjects, me and my editor Vince Coglianese. Shout out to Vince. The two of us sat in an office and then we had questions by priority in each category. And if we felt like we were running short on time, we would move around those different ones.

(02:45:36)
But that was purely, he’s the president. We’re asking him for his opinions on an immigration bill or whatever. For what you do, it’s impossible to do it for you.
Lex Fridman
(02:45:43)
Yeah. I just want to say that thank you for everybody involved for making my conversation with Donald Trump possible, but I’ve learned a lot from that. That if I’m told that all I have is 40 minutes, I’m very politely sparing, in that case, Donald Trump, the 40 minutes and just walking away, because I don’t think I can do a good job. [inaudible 02:46:06]
Saagar Enjeti
(02:46:05)
I think that is the correct decision on your part.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:07)
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:46:08)
And I also would encourage you to have the confidence at this point, that you are in a position of something that we call, in the business, the ability to compel the interview. And to compel means to be able to bring somebody else to you and not the other way around. And I think that you and Rogan and a few others are in that very unique position, and I would really encourage you guys to stick to your guns on things that make you feel comfortable.

(02:46:34)
Because those of us in news, we will always negotiate. We’re willing to do short form because we’re asking about policy. But for the style that you help popularize, and I think that you’re uniquely talented and good at, that’s very important not to compromise on.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:47)
Thank you for saying those words. And that’s not just in the interest of journalism and the interest of conversations, it’s the interest of the guests as well.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:46:54)
Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(02:46:54)
To bring out the best in them.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:46:55)
Yeah. I mean, I would feel really adding to service. And I would feel like people would not get a unique understanding of my own thought process and my backstory if I was not able to sit here for literally hours, and to explain in deep detail how I think about the world. Not that anyone cares that much, but it’s just like all I can do is I hope it’s helpful. I want to help people think.

(02:47:18)
Because when I was growing, I was grew up not far from here, 90 minutes from here, in College Station. I felt very uniquely closed off from the world. I found the world through books, and books saved my life so many different times. And I hope to encourage that in other people. I really… No matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter how busy you are, if you have some time, to either sit down with a book or put on an audiobook, and you can transport yourself into a different world. It’s so important. And that’s something that your show really helps me with, too. I love listening to your show whenever. Sometimes when I’m too into politics and I need to listen to something, I’ll listen to that Mayan historian guy. I love stuff like that, absolutely.
Lex Fridman
(02:47:59)
I’ve been in a deep dive on Genghis Khan, reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:48:04)
Yeah. Jack Weatherford. Fantastic.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:06)
Yeah, he’s coming on.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:48:07)
Is he?
Lex Fridman
(02:48:07)
Yeah.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:48:07)
Amazing.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:09)
And again, shout out to Dan Carlin.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:48:11)
The goat, the OG. Dan, I’ve never met you before. I would love to correspond at some point. I love you so much. You changed my life, man.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:19)
I met him once before, and it felt any else-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:48:22)
I was in your interview with him.
Lex Fridman
(02:48:22)
I was starstruck. Very, very starstruck. And his… I mean, there’s so much Painfotainment that I’ve listened to it many times.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:48:29)
I think one of his best series that he gets no credit for, Ghosts of the Ostfront. Nobody gives him credit for that one. That’s OG. This is a 2011 series. But his Ghosts of the Ostfront on the eastern front of the Nazi war against Russia fundamentally changed my view of warfare forever. And also at that time, I was very young. And to me, World War II was saving Private Ryan. I wasn’t as well-read as I am.

(02:48:53)
Now, and I was like, “Oh shit. This entire thing happened which actually decided the Second World War, and I don’t know anything about this.” So, shout out to Dan. God bless you, man.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:04)
And his, quote-unquote, short episodes I think on slavery in general, Throughout Human History-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:49:10)
That was an awesome episode. I actually bought a bunch of Hugh Thomas books because of that episode. I’d never really read about African slavery or the slave trade outside of the Civil War context. So again, shout out to him for that one. That was an amazing episode.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:23)
Hugh-
Saagar Enjeti
(02:49:23)
His Japan series, too. I’m going to Japan in a few days, and I keep thinking of what he always talked about in his Supernova in the East, ” The Japanese are like everyone else but only more so.” And the…

(02:49:34)
God, I love that quote.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:35)
Okay, he’s great. And we ironically arrived at this tangent while talking about the 2020 election.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:49:45)
Yeah. That’s why podcasting is fun.
Lex Fridman
(02:49:47)
Because he said lost by a whisker. And now, were dragging us, screaming back to the topic. One of the things I was bothered by is Trump claiming that there’s widespread, as you’re saying, low IQ theory, the widespread voter fraud. And I saw no evidence of that that he provided.

(02:50:11)
And all right, let’s put that on the table. And then the other thing I was troubled by, that maybe you can comfort me in the context of history, how easily the base ate that up. That they were able to believe the election was truly rigged based on no clear evidence that I saw. And they just love the story. And there is something compelling to the story, like this DNC type. Like with Bernie, the establishment just state they’re corrupt and they steal the will of the people. And the lack of desire from the base or from people to see any evidence of that, what’s really troubled me.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:50:58)
I’m going to give you one of the most depressing quotes, which is deeply true. Roger Ailes, who is a genius. Shout out to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. That book changed my life too, because it really made me understand media. People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed. That is one of the most fundamental media insights of all time.
Lex Fridman
(02:51:17)
Oh, fuck. What a line.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:51:18)
Roger Ailes, a genius. A genius in his own right who… He changed the world. He certainly did. He’s the one who gets credit for one of the greatest debate lines of all time because he was an advisor to President Reagan. Whenever he broke in, and he was like, “Mr. President, people want to know if you’re too damn old for this job or not.” And he inspired that joke that Reagan made, where he was like, “I will not use age in this campaign. I’ll not hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him.” That was Ailes, man. He did the Nixon townhalls. He did it all. He’s a fucking genius.

(02:51:56)
And I’m not advocating necessarily for the world he created for us, but he did it, and people should study him more. If you’re interested in media in particular, that book is one of the most important books you’ll ever read.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:05)
You know what? That quote just really connected with me because there’s all of this talk about truth. And I think what people want to… They want to feel like they’re in possession of the truth.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:52:19)
Correct.
Lex Fridman
(02:52:19)
Not actually being the possession of the truth.
Saagar Enjeti
(02:52:23)
Yeah, I know. It hit me, too. Actually, Russell Crowe does an amazing job of delivering that line in the Showtime miniseries. So if you have the chance, you should watch it. And look, this is the problem. Liberals will be like, “Yeah. See these idiot Republicans?”

(02:52:37)
I’m like, “Yeah. You guys have bought a lot of crazy stupid shit, too. Okay?” And if actually, I would say liberal misinformation, quote-unquote, is worse than Republican disinformation because it pervades the entire elite media like RussiaGate or Cambridge Analytica or any of these other hoaxes that have been foisted on the American people. The people who listen to the Daily and from the New York Times are just as brainwashed, lack of informed, want to feel informed as people who watch Fox News. So, let me just say that out there. It’s an equal opportunity, cancer in the American football.
Lex Fridman
(02:53:10)
Actually, we started early on in the conversation talking about bubbles. What’s your advice about how to figure out if you’re in a bubble and how to get out of it?
Saagar Enjeti
(02:53:22)
That’s such a fantastic question. Unfortunately, I think it comes really naturally to someone like me because I’m the child of immigrants and I was raised in College Station, Texas. So, I was always on the outside. And when you’re on the outside… This isn’t a sob story. It’s a deeply useful skill because when you’re on the outside, you’re forced to observe. And you’re like, “Oh.” When I was raised was the Bible belt, and people really… People were hardcore Evangelical Christians. So, I could tell. I’m like, “Oh, they really believe this stuff.” And they were always trying to proselytize and all of that.

(02:53:56)
And then the other gift that my parents gave me is I got to travel the entire world. I probably visited 25, 30 countries by the time I was 18. And one of the things that that gave me was the ability to just put yourself in the brain of another person. So one of the reasons I’m really excited to go to Japan, and I picked it as a spot for my honeymoon, was because Japan is a first-world developed country where the vast majority of them don’t speak English. It’s distinguishably non-Western and they just do shit their own way. So they have a subway, but it’s not the same as ours. They have restaurants, things don’t work the same way. They have…

(02:54:34)
I could