#335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump

Fiona Hill is a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 off – Calm: https://calm.com/lex to get 40% off premium – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack EPISODE LINKS: Fiona’s Books: There Is Nothing for You Here: https://amzn.to/3TR0nN9 Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin: https://amzn.to/3WiGU9F PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (06:24) – Education and career (17:10) – Donbas in the 20th century (25:28) – Soviet Union (36:03) – Donald Trump’s foreign policy (48:03) – Testifying against Donald Trump (54:54) – US administrations (1:16:28) – Impeachment of Donald Trump (1:36:44) – Why people like Donald Trump (1:45:49) – Vladimir Putin (2:05:58) – Invasion of Ukraine (2:21:03) – NATO implication in Ukraine war (2:33:54) – Interviewing Vladimir Putin (2:46:22) – 2024 elections (2:49:30) – Alexei Navalny (2:54:03) – Nuclear war (3:05:54) – How Ukraine war will end (3:12:40) – Hope for the future (3:15:48) – Advice for young people

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. She has served the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump. She has made it to the White House from humble beginnings in the north of England, a story she tells in her book, There's Nothing for You Here.

• 0:25Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick, second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Miz and Amane for style, Calm for meditation, Athletic Greens for multivitamins and happiness, and Element for electrolytes and also happiness. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads, as always. No ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. They bring me happiness, and maybe they will bring happiness to you as well.

• 1:02Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by Miz and Amane. I'm wearing a Miz and Amane shirt right now. They make comfortable, stylish. I'm not sure why there was an increase in intonation. Maybe I've been spending a little too much time in San Francisco recently. Just kidding, friends, just kidding. The maker of comfortable, stylish dress shirts is what Miz and Amane is. I just have their black dress shirts. They have a bunch of stylish ones, but you know, minimalism, simplicity sets my soul ablaze. It feels like an expression that nobody says anymore, or maybe ever said ever. The way it fits, the way it feels, it's breathable, it's lightweight. It just feels great.

• 1:47Lex Fridman?

  My favorite dress shirt that I've ever worn. So when I'm not wearing a suit and tie, and I'm not wearing a T-shirt, like the in-between is usually a black dress shirt, and which I've done for many, many, many years. And when I discovered Miz and Amane, that was just like an upgrade, physically and spiritually. Right now, you can get a special discount. Just go to MizAndAmane.com and use promo code Lex. This show is also brought to you by Calm.

• 2:21Lex Fridman?

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• 3:03Lex Fridman?

  and fears and hopes and just the roller coaster of life. And through that, you have to remain centered. And meditation, guided meditation is great for that. I can highly recommend Calm. You can get a discount on their premium subscription, which includes hundreds of hours of programming. Check it out at calm.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by one of my, if not the favorite sponsor of all time, the greatest of all time, the GOAT of sponsors. Not really. I don't, I don't, I don't think there's a ranking. There's not an elo rating for sponsors, but I really enjoy those guys. They're great. Anyway, it's Athletic Greens.

• 3:46Lex Fridman?

  They make a drink that I drink twice a day now, AG1. It has all the nutritional stuff in it that you'll ever need. It's basically replaces the multivitamin and helps you achieve peak mental and physical performance, whatever the heck crazy stuff you do every day, which I do as well. Fasting, keto, all that kind of stuff, stress, whatever the heck is going on with my life. Maybe I forget to eat, or maybe I eat a bunch of nonsense that I shouldn't have eaten. All of that together, combined is okay, as long as you have the basis with Athletic Greens and they have travel packs, which I travel with. And when I forget to bring them with me, I have an existential crisis.

• 4:29Lex Fridman?

  No, I, I'm okay, but it does make me feel better. It makes me feel like I'm at home when I bring them with me. They'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com/lex.

• 4:43Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you, this is like the goats of sponsors on this episode today. I mean, yeah, I mean, some sponsors I use a little bit, some sponsors I use a lot, and this is a lot. So Element electrolyte drink mix, I drink many times a day. Like, I'm about to go on a run now, I'm gonna drink some Element to make sure I'll have the electrolytes I need in case I'm feeling pretty good about myself and I'm gonna do like more than 10 miles, 10, 12, 14, 15. One of these days, I'm just gonna keep running. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull a Forrest Gump. I'm just gonna keep running. There's not gonna be a podcast. All my responsibilities, the people waiting for me on meetings, all the stuff at MIT,

• 5:28Lex Fridman?

  and my personal life, tweets, all of that, it's just gonna disappear. And there's gonna be me with a beard, running somewhere in the middle of the country. And the only thing I'll have with me, besides maybe coffee and the diners I'll stop along the way, is Element. Anyway, get a simple pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement, L-M-N-T dot com slash Lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill.

• 6:24Lex Fridman?

  You came from humble beginning, in a coal mining town in northeast England. So what were some formative moments in your young life that made you the woman you are today?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I was born in nineteen sixty five and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already. And, you know, basically, my father, by the time I came along, had lost his job multiple times. Every coal mine he worked in was closing down. He was looking constantly for other work and he had no qualifications because at age fourteen, he'd gone down the mines. His father had gone down the mines at thirteen, his great grandfather, you know, around the same kind of age. I mean, you had a lot of people, you know, at different points, going down coal mines at twelve, thirteen, you know, fourteen. They didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, pay you're going to go down the mine like everybody else in your family.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  And then he didn't really have any other qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labour. So he worked in a steelworks, that didn't work out, a brickworks, that closed down. And then he went to work in the local hospital, part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, as a porter, an orderly. So basically, somebody's just pushing people around. There was no opportunity to retrain. So the big issue in my family was education. You've got to have one. You know, you've got to have some qualifications. The world is changing, it's changing really quickly. And for you to kind of keep up with it, you're going to have to get educated and find a way out of this. And very early on, my father had basically said to me, there's nothing for you here.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  You're going to have to, if you want to get ahead. And he didn't have any kind of idea that as a girl, I wouldn't. I mean, actually, in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy. There was no expectation that I would go into industry. Uh, there was, you know, uh, some kind of idea that maybe I, you know, if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse. My mother was a midwife. And so she'd at age sixteen, left school and gone to train, you know, as a nurse and then as a midwife. I had other relatives who'd gone to teach, you know, in, in local schools. And so there was an idea that, you know, women could get educated. Uh, and there was a kind of a range of things that you could do. But the expectation then was Go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years, as I mean, I was trying to sort of find my way through life and looking forward.

• 8:52Lex Fridman?

  First of all, what does that even look like, uh, getting educated, given the context of that place? You don't know, there's a whole world of mystery out there. So how do you figure out what to actually do out there? But was there moments, formative moments, either challenging or just inspiring? Where you wondered about what you want to be, where you want to go?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were, I mean, there were a number of things. I mean, I think like a lot of kids, you know, you, you, you talk to people and particularly from blue collar backgrounds said, what did you want to do? Boys might say, I wanted to be a fireman, you know, or you got, you know, kind of, I, at one point as a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse. I had a little nurse's uniform like my mother. I didn't really know what that meant, but you know, I used to go around pretending to be a nurse. I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy and I used to read this. And, you know, kind of, that was one of the formative ideas. We also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area. And, you know, I'd be out in the, the fields all the time and I'd watch farmers, you know, with their animals. And I'd see vets coming along and, you know, watching people deal with the livestock. And there was a kind of a famous story at the time about a vet called James Herriot.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  It became here in the United States as well and was a sort of a TV mini-series. He'd written a book and he was the vet for my, uh, one of my, uh, great aunt's dogs. And people were always talking about him and I thought, oh, I could be a vet. And then one day I saw one of the local vets with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field. And he got his hand stuck and the cow was kicking him. And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe not actually, no, I don't think I want to be a vet. So I cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education, but the whole sense was you had to apply your education. It wasn't an education for education's sake. It was an education to do something. And when I was about fourteen or fifteen, my local member of parliament came to the school. And it was one of these, you know, pep talks for kids in these, you know, deprived areas.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  He had been quite prominent in local education and now he was a member of parliament. He himself had come from a really hard scrabble background and had risen up through education. He'd even gone to Oxford and done. Philosophy, politics and economics. And he basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really gonna get ahead and go to elite institutions. Look, you can get an education, you don't have to be held back by your circumstances. But if you do get an education, it's a privilege and you need to do something with it. So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do? Okay, an education is a qualification to do something. Most people around me, I didn't, I knew didn't have careers. I mean, my dad didn't really have a career, he had jobs. My mum, you know, thought of her nursing

• 11:21Speaker 01

  as a career though, and it genuinely was. And she was out there trying to help women survive childbirth. My mother had these horrific stories, you know, basically over the dining room table. I wish she'd stop. She'd leave out her nursing books. And I'd tell you, if everyone had had my mum as a, as a mother, there'd be no, there'd be no reproduction on the planet. It was just these grim horrific stories of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, oh my god, you know, what? Please stop. So I thought, well, you know, I don't necessarily want to go in that, in that direction. But it was the timing that really cinched things for me. I was very lucky that the region that I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive

• 12:03Speaker 01

  decline, deindustrialisation and the complete collapse of the local government system, around me still maintained money for education. And they also paid for exchanges. And we had exchange programmes with cities in Germany and France, also in Russia, in Kostroma, near Yaroslav, for example, an old textile town, similar, you know, down in its kind of region, but, you know, quite historic in the Russian context. In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham, you know, was quite a distinguished historic area in the, in the British context. And so there was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages, I studied German, I studied French. And then in nineteen eighty-three, there was the war scare.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Basically provoked by the Euromissile Crisis. So the stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War. And this Euromissile Crisis over SS-20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977, so when I was about 11 or 12, you know, all the way through into the later part of the 1980s. And in 1983, we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict. It was very much another rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. So 20 years on, same kind of thing. The Soviets misread, although I didn't know this at the time, I know a lot of this, you know,

• 13:33Speaker 01

  after the fact, but the tension was palpable. But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises. Operation Able Archer that the United States was conducting and actually thought that the United States might be preparing for first nuclear strike. And that then set of a whole set of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union. Eventually, it was recognised that, you know, all of this was really based on misperceptions. And of course, you know, that later led to negotiations between Gorbachev and Reagan for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces, the INF Treaty. But in 1983, that tension was just acute. And for as a teenager, you know, we were basically being prepped the whole time for

• 14:16Speaker 01

  the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon. There were TV series, films in the United States and the UK threads the day after. We had all these public service announcements telling us to seek sanctuary or cover in the inevitability of a nuclear blast. And, you know, my house was so small, they said, look for a room without a window. There were no rooms without windows. My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window, you know, and said if there was a nuclear flash, you know, we'd have to, you know, get down on the floor, not look up, but the curtains would help. And we were like, this is ridiculous, Dad. And then we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs, a cupboard under the stairs, like Harry Potter. And it was all just, you know, totally nuts. Or go, or you had to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside. And I thought, well, this this isn't going to work.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And one of my great uncles, who had fought in World War Two, said, well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona. Why don't you go and study Russian? Try to figure it out, figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up. Because, you know, during the

• 15:10Lex Fridman?

  Go talk to them.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Exactly, during World War Two.

• 15:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  The United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union had all been wartime allies. And my uncle Charlie thought, well, there's something going wrong here. Maybe you can figure it out. And as you said, go talk to them. So I thought, OK, I'll study Russian. So that's really how this came about. I thought, well, it's applying education. I'll just do my very best to understand everything I possibly can about the Russian language and the Soviet Union. And I'll see what I can do. And I thought, well, maybe I could become a translator. So I had visions of myself sitting around, you know, listening to things in a big headset. And in a best do translating perhaps at some, you know, future arms control summits.

• 15:48Lex Fridman?

  So how did the journey continue with learning Russian? I mean, this early dream of being a translator and thinking, how can I actually help understand or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict that threatens the existence of the human species? How did it actually continue?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I read everything I possibly could about, you know, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. And, you know, I started to try to teach myself, you know, Russian a little bit.

• 16:20Lex Fridman?

  It was always in context of nuclear war?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  It was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point. But also in historical context, because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies in World War Two. So I tried to understand all of that. And also, you know, I, like many other people, I'd read, you know, Russian literature in translation. I'd read War and Peace and, you know, I'd loved the book, actually. I mean, particularly the, you know, the story parts of it. I wasn't one really at that, at that time when I was a teenager. I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, you know, in terms of his theories of the great man and of history and, you know, kind of social change. Although now I appreciate it more. But when I was about fourteen, I was like, this man needed an editor. You know, could he have just got on with the story? What an amazing story, what an incredible, you know, kind of book this is.

• 17:04Lex Fridman?

  I still think he needs an editor, but

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think his wife tried, didn't she? But he got, he got quite upset with her. And then I kind of thought to myself, well, how do I, how do I study Russian? Because there were very few schools in my region, you know, given the impoverishment of the region, where you could study Russian. So I would have to take Russian from scratch. And this is where things get really quite interesting. Because there were opportunities to study Russian at universities, but I would need to have, first of all, an intensive Russian language course in the summer, and I didn't have the money for that. And the period is around the miners' strike in the United Kingdom in nineteen eighty-four.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Now, the miners of County Durham had, very interestingly, had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbass, going back to the nineteen twenties. And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots of contacts between, you know, Bolshevik Soviet Union, the early period after the Russian Revolution, but even before that, during the imperial period in Russia, between the Northern England and the Russian Empire and the old industrial areas. Basically, big industrial areas like the northeast of England and places like Donbass were built up at the same time, often by the same sets of industrialists. And Donetsk, in the Donbass region, used to be called Husevka, because it was established

• 18:26Speaker 01

  by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales to help, you know, kind of develop the coal mines there, and also the steelworks and others that, you know, we're hearing about all the time. And so I got very fascinated in all these linkages and, you know, famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union, like Yevgeny Zamyatin, worked in the shipyards in Newcastle upon Tyne, and there was just this whole set of connections. And in nineteen eighty-four, when the miners' strike took place, the miners of Donbass, along with other miners from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany, or miners in Poland, sent money in solidarity to the miners of County Durham.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  And there'd been these exchanges, as I said, going back and forth since the nineteen twenties, formal exchanges between miners, you know, of the region, the miners' unions. And I heard, again from the same great uncle who told me to study Russian, that there were actually scholarships for the children of miners, and it could be former miners as well, for their education. And I should go along to the miners' hall, a place called Red Hills, where the miners of County Durham had actually pooled all of their resources and built up their own parliament and their own, you know, kind of place that they could talk among themselves to figure out how to enhance the welfare and wellbeing of their communities. And they'd put money aside for education for miners.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  There was all kinds of lecture series from the miners and all kinds of other activities supporting soccer teams and artistic circles and writing circles, for example. People like George Orwell, you know, were involved in some of these writers' circles in other parts of Britain and mining communities, for example. And so they told me I could, you know, go along and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian. So I show up and it was the easiest, you know, application I've ever come across. They just asked me to, uh, my dad came along with me. They asked me to verify, you know, that my dad had been a miner and they looked up his employment record on little cards, you know, kind of a little, a little tray somewhere. And then they asked me how much I needed, you know, to basically pay for the travel

• 20:38Speaker 01

  and some of the basic expenses for the, um, the study. And they wrote me a cheque. And so thanks to the miners of Donbass and this money that was deposited with the miners of County Durham with the Durham Miners' Association, I got the money to study Russian for the first time uh, before I embarked on my studies at university.

• 20:58Lex Fridman?

  As you're speaking now, it's reminding me that there's a different way to look both at history and at geography and at different places is, um, you know, this is an industrial region.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:12Lex Fridman?

  And it echoes and the experience of living there is more captured not by Moscow or Kiev, but by, at least historically, but by just being a mining town and industrial town.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  That's right, in the place itself.

• 21:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there are places in the United States and Appalachia and West Virginia and in Pennsylvania, like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place. And the northeast of England, you know, was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley, which has its own. I would say contours and frames. And when you come to those industrial areas, your previous identities get submerged in that larger framework. I've always looked at the world through that lens of being, you know, someone from the working class, the blue collar communities, from a very specific place with lots of historical and economic connotations. And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems that the Donbass has experienced

• 22:13Speaker 01

  over, you know, the last thirty years, that people came from all over the place to work there. Of course, there was a population that one might say is indigenous, you know, might have gone back centuries there, but they would have been, you know, in the smaller rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the northeast of England. And people, in the case of the northeast of England, came from Wales, they came from further in the south of England, the Midlands, they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland. I have all of that heritage in my own personal background. And you've got a different identity. And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity on you from the outside that things go awry. And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in the case of Donbass. It's a place, it's a part in many respects, historically, and in terms of its evolution

• 22:58Speaker 01

  and development over time. And, you know, particularly in the case of, you know, Russia, the Russians have tried to say, well, look, you know, because most people speak Russian, there is the lingua franca. I mean, in the northeast of England, of course, everyone spoke English, but lots of people were Irish speakers, you know, Gaelic Irish speakers, or, you know, some of them might have certainly been Welsh speakers. There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh as their first language who came there, you know, but they but they created an identity. It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster, you know, the northern province of, you know, the whole of the Irish island, you know, the part of Ireland that is still part of the United Kingdom. That was also a heavily industrialized area, high manufacturing, mass manufacturing, shipbuilding, for example.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  People came from all over there, too, which is why when Ireland got its independence in the United Kingdom, Ulster, Belfast, and that whole region, you know, kind of clung on because it was, again, that melting pot. It was kind of intertwined with the larger industrial economy and had a very different identity. And so that, you know, for me, growing up in such a specific place with such a... Special in many respects heritage gave me a different perspective on things. When I first went to the Soviet Union in nineteen eighty seven to study there, I actually went to a translators institute, what was then called the Morris Sures, which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  I was immediately struck by how similar everything was to the north of England. Because it was just like one big working class culture that's sort of broken out onto the national stage. Everything in northern England was nationalized. We had British steel, British coal, British rail, British shipbuilding. Because after World War Two, the private sector had been devastated and the state had to step in. And of course, the Soviet Union is one great big giant nationalized economy when I get there. And it's just the people's attitudes and outlooks are the same. People didn't work for themselves, they always worked for somebody else. And it had a quite a distortion on the way that people looked at the world.

• 24:59Lex Fridman?

  Do you still speak Russian?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I do, yeah.

• 25:02Lex Fridman?

  You speak Russian?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, of course, because I'm Chinese.

• 25:05Lex Fridman?

  Ah, you know, you have to say something, you have to think about what we are saying now.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody. And you have an advantage on me because it's your native language as well.

• 25:14Lex Fridman?

  For people wondering, the English speakers in the audience, you're really missing a lot from the few sentences we said there. Yeah, it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across a very large part of this world. So there you are in nineteen eighty seven, an exchange student in the Soviet Union. What was that world like?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period. Because it's the period that's just around the time of the peak of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president, well, he wasn't quite president at that point, he was Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, trying to transform the whole place. So I arrived there in September of nineteen eighty seven, just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty. It was just within, you know, kind of weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Euromissile Crisis by finally having an agreement on, you know, basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And also, at this point, Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up. So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before. Um, not just, you know, in Moscow, which is where I was studying, it's translated into, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia. Went all the way to, uh, Habarovsk in the, uh, the Russian Far East. All the way around, you know, kind of Moscow and there was, uh, uh, at this point, it was also the, uh, Kreshin Yerush, which has become very important now. This is the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of, um, of Russia. Uh, which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's, but you know, nine eighty-eight. Uh, cause I was there eighty-seven to eighty-eight.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And at this point, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period. You suddenly have the church stepping out as a, a non-governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. Uh, so that, um, uh, was, you know, something that I wasn't expecting to, to witness. Also, I mean, being in Moscow, this is the cultural capital of a vast empire at this point. I'd never lived in a major city before. It's the first big city I lived in. I'd never been to the opera, you know, I, I, the first time I got an opera, it's at the Bolshoi. And I'd never seen a ballet. I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture. When you're kind of growing up in a, in a mining region, you know, there's, there's very limited opportunities for this kind of thing.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir. My parents signed me up for absolutely everything, you know, they possibly could. Education wise, but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this. So, you know, I was kind of astounded by the, the sort of wealth of, uh, the cultural experience that one could have in Moscow. But the main thing was I was really struck by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs. Because this was Moscow, you know, I, I got this image about what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first about what I would see there, even at the big nuclear superpower. And since I got there, it was just this like, as if a huge weight that I'd been carrying around for years of my teenage years just disappeared. Because it's just ordinary people in an ordinary place, not doing great. This is the period. Of, you know, what they call deficitne vremje, you know, so the period of deficits.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Well, there was no food in the shops.

• 28:33Lex Fridman?

  Um.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  There was, you know, very little in terms of commodities because the um supply and demand parts of the economic equation were out of whack because it was total central planning. You know, you'd go into, you know, a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pair of boots, all in the same size and the same colour. I actually lucked out because once I was in this um Hungarian boot shop that was right next to where my hall of residence was, and I was looking for a new pair of boots, and every single pair of boots in the shop were my size.

• 29:02Lex Fridman?

  Um.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And they were all women's boots and not men's boots at all, you know, because there was been an oversupply of boots and that size production. But you could really kind of see here that there was something wrong. And, you know, in the north of England, everything was closed down, the shops were shuttered because there was no demand, because everybody lost their jobs, there was mass unemployment. You know, when I went off to university in nineteen eighty four, ninety percent youth unemployment in the UK, meaning that when kids left school, they didn't have something else to go on to unless they got to university or vocational training or an apprenticeship. And most people were still looking, you know, kind of months out of uh leaving school. And so shops were closing because people didn't have any money. You know, I had fifty percent male unemployment in um some of the towns as the steelworks closed down and the uh the wagonworks, the railways, for example, in my area.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  But in Moscow, people in theory did have money, but there was just, there was nothing to buy. Also, the place was falling apart, literally. I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street, balconies fall off buildings, you know, one accident after another. And then there was, you know, this real kind of sense, even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope of the Gorbachev period, a real sense of the this the Soviet Union had lost its way. And of course, it was only a a year or so after I left from that exchange programme and I'd already started with my degree programme in Soviet studies at Harvard, that the Soviet Union basically unraveled. And it really did unravel. It wasn't like it collapsed. It was basically that there were so many debates that Gorbachev had sparked off about

• 30:30Speaker 01

  how to reform the country, how to put it on a different path, that, you know, no one was in agreement. And it was basically all these fights and uh debates and disputes among the elites at the centre, as well as, you know, basically a loss of faith in the system in the periphery and among the general population, that in fact pulled it apart. And and of course, nineteen ninety one, you get um.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian Federation, then a constituent part of the Soviet Union, together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union, getting together and agreeing of essentially ending it. And Gorbachev, you know, so basically I'm there at the the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation and thinking about the future. And within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone and it's on a different track entirely.

• 31:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, I wonder if we reran the 20th century a thousand times, if how many times the Soviet Union would collapse.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wonder about that, too. And I also wonder about what would have happened if it didn't collapse and Gorbachev had found a different direction.

• 31:36Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's, you know, we see a very divisive time now in American history. The United States of America has very different cultures, very different beliefs, ideologies within those states, but those are, that's, that's kind of the strength of America is there's these little laboratories of ideas.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Until though, that they don't keep together. I mean, I've had colleagues who have described what's happening in the West right now as a kind of soft secession with states, you know, going off in their own direction.

• 32:04Lex Fridman?

  In what, in which states?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there are these kinds of conceptions that we have now, divisions between red and blue states because of the fracturing of our politics. And I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible in somewhere like the United States or, you know, many other countries as well, because there wasn't that ethnic dimension. But in fact, many of our, the way that people talk about politics has, has given it that kind of appearance in many respects. Because, look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union and the Soviet period and from where you're from, you know, originally in Ukraine, that language is not the main signifier of identity and that identity can take all kinds of, of other forms.

• 32:44Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting. I mean, but. There has to be a deep grievance of some kind. If you took a poll in any of the States, in the United States, I think a very small minority of people would want to actually secede, even in Texas, where I spend a lot of my time.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:01Lex Fridman?

  I just, I think that there is a common kind of pride of nation. You know, there's a lot of people complain about government and about how the country's going, the way people complain about the weather when it's raining, they say, oh, this stupid weather, it's raining again.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:20Lex Fridman?

  But really, what they mean is, we're in the smock together. There's a together there that I.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  I also feel that when I go around, because I mean, I've spent a lot of time since I wrote my book in last October, in this last year going around, I find, I find the same feeling. But you know, when I traveled around the Soviet Union, back in the late 1980s, I didn't get any kind of sense that people wanted to see the end of the Soviet Union either. It was an elite project. There's a really good book called Collapse by Vladislav Zubok, who is a professor at London School of Economics at LSE. And Zubok is pretty much my age, and he's from, you know, the former Soviet Union, he's Russian. And I mean, he describes it very quite aptly about how it was kind of the elites, you know, that basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And there is a risk of that, you know, here as well, when you get partisan politics and people forgetting, you know, that they're Americans and they are all in this together, like a lot of the population thing. But they think that their own, you know, narrow partisan ideological precepts, you know, count for more. And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also a power play, you know, in a, in a way that actually can't quite play out in the United States, because it was the equivalent of governors, in many respects, who got together, three of them, you know, in the, in the case of the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who then, you know, got rid of, you know, basically the central, the central figure of Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be a little difficult to do that, the dynamic is not the same, but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  In the late nineteen eighties and the early nineties, I was, I spent, you know, a lot of time in the, uh, in Russia, uh, as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus, Central Asia and, you know, other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that you, you kind of see the same elite divisions here in the United States pulling in, you know, in different, in different directions and straining, you know, the overall body politic and the, the way that national politics gets imposed on local politics. And whereas that I, it certainly wasn't when I first came to the US in nineteen eighty nine, I didn't honestly, in nineteen eighty nine, when I first came here, I didn't know anybody's political affiliation. I mean, I rarely knew their religious affiliation. And, and, you know, obviously, race was a, was a major phenomenon here that was a shock

• 35:41Speaker 01

  to me when I, when I first came. But many of the kind of the class, regional, geographic, you know, kind of political dimensions that I've seen in other places, I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now.

• 35:55Lex Fridman?

  And you take a lot of pride to this day of being nonpartisan. That said, so you served, uh, for the George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, uh, always specializing in Eurasia and Russia. You were the top presidential advisor to President, former President Donald Trump on Russia and Europe, and famously testified in his first impeachment trial in, uh, two thousand nineteen, saying, "I take great pride in the fact that I'm nonpartisan foreign policy expert." So, given that context, what does nonpartisan mean to you?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Well, it means being very careful about not putting any kind of ideological lens on anything, you know, that I'm analyzing or looking at or saying about foreign policy, for one thing, but also not taking, you know, kind of one stance of one party over another either. To be honest, I've, I've always found Um. American politics somewhat confounding.

• 36:59Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Because both the Democratic and the Republican Party are pretty big tents. Some of their coalitions. You know, in in Europe, it's actually kind of in some respects easier to navigate. The parameters of political parties because you you know, you have quite clear platforms. Um. You know, there's also a longer history in many respects, obviously. I mean, there's a long history here in the United States of the development of the parties, you know, going back to the late eighteenth century. But in the United Kingdom, you know, for example, in the twentieth century, the development of the mass parties, you know, was quite easy to get a handle on. You know, at one point in the UK, for example, the parties were real genuine mass parties with people who were properly members and took part in regular meetings and paid dues and.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  You know, it was easy to kind of see what they stood for. And the same in Europe, you know, when you look at France and in Germany and um, that Western Germany, of course. Italy and and elsewhere. Here in the United States, it's kind of pretty amorphous. You know, the fact that you could kind of register, you know, randomly, it seems to be a Democrat or Republican, like Trump did.

• 37:55Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  At one point, he's Democrat, next thing, he's Republican. And then you kind of usurp a party apparatus. But you don't have to be, you're not vetted in any way. You're not kind of, you know, but they don't check you out to see if you have ideological coherence. You know, you could have someone like Bernie Sanders on the other side, on on the left, you know, basically calling himself a socialist and, you know, running for the the Democratic. Uh. Presidential nomination. So, you know, kind of in many respects, parties in the United States are much more loose movements. And I think you can, you know, it's almost like a kind of an a la carte menu of of different things and uh that people can pick a pot, pick out. And it's more over time, as I've noticed, um, become more like a kind of an affiliation even with the sporting team.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I I get very shocked by the way that people say, well, I couldn't do this because, you know, that's my side and I couldn't do anything and I couldn't support someone for the other side. I mean, I have a. Uh. A relative in my extended um family here who um is a is a um, you know, died in the war Republican and. On, you know, family holiday, there was a book on their table, said a hundred reasons for voting for a Democrat. And I said, hey, are you um thinking of shifting party affiliation? Then I opened the book and it's blank. It was pretty funny. I had to laugh.

• 39:08Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  I thought, well, there you go then. You know, there's just, there's no way that, you know, people can pull themselves out of these frames. So for me, it's very important to have that independence of thought. I think you can be politically engaged on the issues. But, you know, basically without taking a stance that's defined by some ideology ideology or some sense of kind of partisan affiliation.

• 39:30Lex Fridman?

  I think I tweeted about this, maybe not eloquently, in the statement, if I remember correctly, with something like, if you honestly can't find a good thing that Donald Trump did, or a good thing that Joe Biden did, you're not, you're not thinking about ideas, you just pick the tribe. I mean, it was more eloquent than that, but it was, it was, it's basically, this is a really good test to see, are you actually thinking about like how to solve problems versus like you're a red team or a blue team, like a sporting team. Can you find a good idea of Donald Trump's that you like, if you're somebody who's against

• 40:14Lex Fridman?

  Donald Trump, and like, acknowledge it to yourself privately, oh, that's a good idea. I'm glad he said that.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions, which he often did, actually. I mean, obviously put them in a way that most of us wouldn't have done, but there was often kind of questions about why is this happening, why are we doing this? And, you know, we have to challenge ourselves all the time. So, yeah, actually, why are we doing that? And then you have to really inspect it and say whether it's actually worth continuing that way, or they should be doing something differently. Now, he had a more kind of destructive quality to those kinds of questions, you know, but maybe it's the real estate developer in him that was, you know, taking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of, you know, sacred edifices and things like that. But often, if you really paid attention, he was asking a valid set of questions about why do we continue to do things like this? Now, we didn't often have answers about what he was going to do in response, but those

• 41:02Speaker 01

  questions still had to be asked, and we shouldn't be just rejecting them, you know, out of turn.

• 41:08Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, the, then another strength, the thing that people often, that criticize Donald Trump would say is a weakness, is his lack of civility.

• 41:19Lex Fridman?

  Can be a strength because I feel like sometimes bureaucracy functions on excessive civility. Like, actually, I've seen this, it's not just, it's bureaucracy in all forms, like in tech companies as they grow. Everybody kind of, you know, you're getting a pretty good salary, everyone's, everyone's comfortable. And there's a meeting and you discuss how to move stuff forward. And like, you don't want to be the asshole in the room that says, why, this is, why are we doing this this way? This is, this could be unethical, this is hurting the world, this is totally a dumb idea. Like, I mean, I could give specific examples that I have on my mind currently that are technical.

• 42:04Lex Fridman?

  But the point is oftentimes the person that's needed in that room is an asshole.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:09Lex Fridman?

  That's why Steve Jobs worked, Elon Musk works, you have to roll in, that's what first principles thinking looks like.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name calling, you know, kind of inciting violence against, you know, the people that they disagree with. So that was kind of a problem because, I mean, often, when, you know, when I was in the administration, I had all of Europe in my portfolio as well as Russia. And there were many times when, you know, we were dealing with our European colleagues where he was asking some pretty valid questions about, well, why should we do this if you're doing that? You know, for example, the Nord Stream two pipeline, the United States has been opposed to Europe's reliance on gas and oil exports from Russia, you know, the Soviet Union since the seventies and eighties. And Trump kept pushing this idea about, so why are we, you know, spending so much money on NATO and NATO defense?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  And we're all talking about this if you're then, you know, basically paying billions, you know, to Russia for gas. Isn't this, you know, contradictory? And of course it was, but it was the way that he did it. And I actually, you know, one instance had a discussion with a European defense minister. Basically said to me, look, he's saying exactly the same things as people said before him, including, you know, former Defense Secretary Gates. It's just the way he says it, you know, so they took offense. And then as a result of that, they wouldn't take action because they took offense at what he said. So it was a kind of then a way of, could you find some other means of? You know, massaging this communication to go and make it effective, which we would always try to focus on because it's it's a kind of the it was the the delivery.

• 43:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  But the but the actual message was was often spot on or in those kinds of issues. I mean, he was actually highlighting, you know, these ridiculous discrepancies between what people said and what they actually did.

• 43:54Lex Fridman?

  And it's the the delivery, the charisma in the room, too. I'm also understanding the power of that of a leader. It's not just about what you do at a podium. But it's in in a room with advisors, how you talk about stuff, how you convince other leaders.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't do it through gratuitous insults and incitement to violence. That's one of the things you just you don't get anywhere on that front.

• 44:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, it's possible.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Tough measures and maximum pressure often though does work.

• 44:22Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Because there were, you know, often times where, you know, that kind of relentless, you know, nagging about something or constantly raising it actually did have results where it hadn't previously.

• 44:33Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  So there's, you know, the maximum pressure. If it, you know, kind of kept on it in the right way and, you know, often when we were, you know, coming in behind on pushing on issues, you know, related to NATO or, you know, other things in this same sphere, it would actually have an effect. It just doesn't get talked about because it gets overshadowed by, you know, all of the other kind of stuff around this and the way that, you know, he interacted with people and treated people.

• 45:02Lex Fridman?

  What was the heart, the key insights to your testimony in that impeachment?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Look, I think there is a straight line between that whole series of episodes and the current war in Ukraine because Vladimir Putin and the people around him in the Kremlin concluded that the US did not care one little bit about Ukraine and it was just a game. For Trump, it was personal game. He was basically trying to get Vladimir Zelensky to do him a personal favor related to his desire to stay on in in power in the 2020 election. And generally, they just thought that we were using Ukraine as some kind of proxy or some kind of instrument within our own domestic politics, as that's what it looked like. And I think that he knows a result of that.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Putin, you know, took the idea away that he could, you know, do whatever he wanted. We were constantly being asked even prior to this by people around.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Putin, like Nikolai Patryshov, the head of the National Security Council equivalent in Russia, who we met with frequently, what's Ukraine to you? We don't get it. You know, why do you even care? So they thought that we weren't serious. That we weren't serious about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence, or it is a national security player. And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate the political space in the United States. Actually, he could, because what he was doing was seeding all this dissent and fueling, you know, already in debates inside of US politics, the kinds of, you know, things that we see just kind of coming out now. This kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden, that Ukraine was, you know, basically just

• 46:46Speaker 01

  trying to extract things from the United States. Ukraine had somehow played inside of US politics. Trump was convinced that the Ukrainians had done something against him, that they had intervened in the elections. And that was kind of, you know, a combination of people around him trying to find excuses to, you know, kind of what had happened in the election to kind of divert attention away from Russia's interference in 2016 and the Russians themselves poisoning the well against Ukraine. So you had a kind of a confluence of circumstances there. And what I was trying to get across in that testimony was the national security imperative of basically getting our act together here and separating out what was going on in our domestic politics from what was happening in our national security and foreign policy.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I think we contributed in that whole mess around the impeachment, but it's the whole parallel policies around Ukraine to the war that we now have.

• 47:44Lex Fridman?

  Yes, signaling the value we place in peace and stability in that part of the world, or the reverse, by saying we don't care.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we seemed to not care. It was just a game.

• 47:54Lex Fridman?

  But, I mean, the US role in that war is a very complicated one. That's one, that's one of the variables. Just on that testimony, did it in part break your heart that you had to testify essentially against the President of the United States? Or is that not how you saw it?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  I don't think I would describe it in that way. I think what I was was deeply disappointed by what I saw happening in the American political space. I didn't expect it. Look, I was a starry-eyed immigrant. I came to the United States with all of these expectations of what the place would be. I'd already been disabused of, you know, some of the, um, let's just say, rosy, uh, perspectives I had in the United States. I'd been shocked by uh, the depths of racial problems. It doesn't even sum up the problems we have in the United States.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I couldn't get my head around it when I first came. I mean, I'd, I'd read about, you know, slavery in American history, but I hadn't fully fathomed. You know, really the kind of the way that it was ripping apart the United States. I mean, I'd read Alexis, you know, Tocqueville, and he'd commented on this, and it obviously hadn't, you know, kind of changed to the expect, what the way that one would have expect all this time, you know, from the eighteenth, you know, century onwards. So that was kind of one thing that, you know, that I realized the civil rights, uh, movement and all of these, you know, acts of expansion of suffrage and everything else were imperfect at best. You know, and I was born in sixty-five, the same, same time as the Civil Rights Act, and there's a heck of a long way still to go. So I wasn't, let's just say, you know, as

• 49:38Speaker 01

  starry-eyed about everything as I'd been before, but I really saw an incredible competence and professionalism in, you know, the US government. It was, you know, and the, in the election system and the integrity of it. And I, I mean, I really saw that. I saw that the, the United States was the gold standard for, you know, kind of some of its, you know, institutions. And I worked in the National Intelligence Council, and I'd seen the way that the United States had tried to address the problems that it had, um, had faced in this whole botched uh, analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of, um, honestly, a crime in my view of invading Iraq and, but the way that people were trying to To deal with that in the aftermath. I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council, the DNI, the director, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong

• 50:24Speaker 01

  in the whole analysis about Iraq in two thousand and three. You know, in the whole wake of people trying to pull together after nine eleven and to learn all of the lessons from all of this. And I saw, you know, just really genuine striving and deliberation about what had gone wrong, what lessons could we learn from this? And then suddenly I found myself in this, I couldn't really describe it with this totally crazy looking glass, thinking of, you know, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass version of American politics. I mean, I'd seen everything starting to unravel over a kind of a period of time before I'd been asked to be in the administration, but I did not expect it to be that bad. I honestly didn't. I mean, I'd been warned, you know, by people that this was, you know, kind of a really a very

• 51:06Speaker 01

  serious turn that the United States had taken, but I really thought that national security would still be uppermost in people's minds. And it was, I mean, a lot of the people that I work with. But what I found, you know, if you want to use that, you know, term of heartbreaking, was the way in which all of these principles that I had really bought into and tried to uphold in the United States government and then the things that we were trying to do with me and my colleagues was just being thrown out the window. And that, you know, I would have to step up in defense of them and in defense of my colleagues who were being lambasted and, you know, criticized and given death threats for actually standing up and doing their own jobs.

• 51:46Lex Fridman?

  In particular on the topic of Ukraine?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Uh, uh, not just on Ukraine, but on national security overall. So, I mean, I'd gone through this whole period even before we got to that point. And seeing non-partisan government officials being attacked from all sides, left and right, but especially the right, and being basically accused of being partisan hacks, you know, deep state.

• 52:08Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Uh, coup plotters, you know, you name it. The, um. Patriotism being questioned as well. And a lot of people I worked with in government, like myself, naturalized Americans, a lot of them were immigrants, many were refugees. And many people had fought in wars on behalf of the United States, and Iraq and Afghanistan being blown up. And, you know, they'd put their lives on the line. They'd put their family lives on the line, you know, because they believed in America. And they were just, they were reflections of Americans from all kinds of works of life. It's what really made, you know, that cliche of America great. It wasn't, you know, whatever it was, it was being, you know, bandied around in these crude, crass political terms. It was just the strength of an incredible set of people who've come together from all kinds of places and decided

• 52:52Speaker 01

  that they're going to make a go of it and that they're going to, you know, try to work towards the whole idea of the preamble of the Constitution, towards a more perfect union. And I, you know, I saw people doing that every single day, despite all of the things that they could criticize about the United States, still believing in what they were doing and believing in the promise of the country, which is what I felt like. And then here we were, people were just treating it like a game and they were treating people like dirt. And they were just playing games with people's lives. I mean, we all had death threats, you know, people's, you know, whole careers, which were not just careers for their own self-aggrandizement, but careers of public service, trying to give something back, were being shattered. And I found, you know, I just thought to myself, I'm not going to let that happen.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Because, you know, I've, I've come from a, well, are they going to send me back to Bishop Auckland in County John? Fine, I'm totally fine to go back, you know, because I could do something back there. But I'm not going to let this happen. I've made this choice to come to America, I'm all in. And, and these guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots and they're ruining it, you know, they're ruining it for everybody.

• 53:51Lex Fridman?

  So the personal attacks on, on competent, hardworking, passionate people who have love for what they do in their heart. Similar stuff I've seen for virologists and biologists, so colleagues, basically scientists in the time of COVID, when there's a bunch of cynicism and there was just personal attacks, including death threats on people that, you know, work on viruses, work on vaccines.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're going around in, you know, basically with protective gear on in case somebody shoots them in the street. That's just absurd.

• 54:24Lex Fridman?

  But let me zoom out from the individual people.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:29Lex Fridman?

  And actually look at the situations that we saw in the.

• 54:35Lex Fridman?

  In the George W. Bush, Obama and Donald Trump presidencies, and I'd like to sort of criticize each by the, not the treatment of individual people, but by the results.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, I think that's fair.

• 54:53Lex Fridman?

  So if you look at George W. Bush, and maybe you can give me insights. This is what's fascinating to me. When you have extremely competent, smart, hardworking, well-intentioned people, how do we, as a system, make mistakes in foreign policy? So the big mistake, you can characterize in different ways, but in George W. Bush is invading Iraq.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:21Lex Fridman?

  Or maybe how it was invaded, or maybe how the decision process was made to invade it. Again, Afghanistan, maybe not the invasion, but details around like having a plan about, you know, how to withdraw, all that kind of stuff. Then Barack Obama, to me, similarly, is a man who came to fame early on for being somebody who was against, a rare voice against the invasion of Iraq, which was actually a brave thing to do at that time. And nevertheless, he, I mean, I don't know the numbers,

• 56:03Lex Fridman?

  but I think he was the president for years over increased drone attacks, increase, like, everything from a foreign policy perspective. The military industrial complex, that machine grew in power under him, not shrunk, and did not withdraw.

• 56:27Lex Fridman?

  From Afghanistan. And then with Donald Trump, the criticisms that you're presenting, sort of the the personal attacks, the chaos, the partisanship of people that are supposed to be nonpartisan. So that, you know, if you do sort of the steel man, the chaos, to to make the case for chaos, maybe we need to shake up the machine, throw a wrench into the engine, into the gears. And then every individual gear is going to be very upset with that because it's the wrench. It's not, it's not, it's an inefficient process, but maybe it leads for government, it forces the the system as a whole, not the individuals, but the system to reconsider how things are done.

• 57:12Lex Fridman?

  So obviously, all of those things, the actual results are not that impressive.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  You could have done that on the latter, you know, shaking things up, because I'm all one for questioning and trying to shake things up as well and do things differently.

• 57:25Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  But, you know, the question is, if you bring the whole system down with nothing ideas of putting it to place, like, I mean, like many people, I've studied the Bolshevik Revolution and, you know, many others as well. And, you know, kind of what's, you know, what's the pattern here, you know, that actually fits into what you're talking about here, is a kind of rigidity of thought on the part of revolutionaries in many cases as well. And also narcissism. In fact, I think it takes a pretty, you know, strong sense of yourself, you know, kind of an own yourself to want to be president of the United States. For example, we see that in, you know, many of our presidents have been narcissists to different, you know, kind of degrees. You think about Lenin, you know, for example, and people can go back and read about Lenin. He formed his views when he was about eighteen and he never shook them off. He never evolved. He he he didn't have any kind of diversity of thought.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  And when systems go awry, it's when they don't bring in different perspectives. And so, you know, Trump, if he brought in different perspectives and actually listened to them and not just, you know, believed that he himself knew better than anyone else and then tried to divide everybody against each other, it would have been a different matter. It's a tragedy of a completely and utterly lost set of opportunities because of the flaws in his own nature. Because, I mean, again, there was all kinds of things that he could have done to shake things up. And so many people around him remained completely disappointed. And of course, he divided and pitted people against each other, you know, creating so much factionalism in American politics that, you know, people have forgotten they're Americans. They think that they're red or blue, you know, parts of teams. And, you know, if you go back over history, that's a kind of a recipe for for war and, you know, internal conflict.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  You go back to, you know, the Byzantine Empire, for example, there's the famous episode of the Nike riots uh in uh Constantinople where the whole uh city gets trashed because the Greens, the Reds, the Blues and these various sporting teams in the Hippodrome get whipped up by political forces and they, you know, they pull the place apart. And that's, you know, kind of where we've been heading on some of these trajectories. But the other point is when you look back, you know, at Bush and Obama as well, there's a very narrow circle of decision making. You know, in Bush period, it's the focus on the executive branch, um with Dick Cheney as the Vice President being very fixated on it. And Obama, it's, you know, he and, you know, kind of the bright young things around him,

• 59:36Speaker 01

  you know, from uh he himself is, you know, kind of intellectually, um, you know, one might uh say arrogant in many respects, you know, he was a very smart guy. And, you know, he's convinced that he has and he ruminates over a lot of things, but he's the person who makes, you know, a lot of the decisions. And um basically George W. Bush used to call himself the decider as well, right? I mean, they're all the people who make the decisions. It's not always as consultative as you might think it is. And for Trump, it's like, I'm not listening to anybody at all. You know, it's just me and whatever it is that I've woken up today and I've decided to do. So I think, you know, the problem with all of our systems, why we don't get results, because we don't draw upon, you know, the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of, you know, people out there. Like, you do that in science.

• 1:00:18Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  I mean, when, I mean, all of my friends and relatives are in science. They've got these incredible collaborations with people, you know, across the world. I mean, how did we get to these uh vaccines for the Covid virus? Because of this incredible years of collaboration and of, you know, sharing results and sharing on ideas. And our whole system has become ossified. You know, we think about the congressional system, for example, as well, and there's, you know, this kind of Rapid, you know, turnover that you have in Congress every two years, you know, there's no incentive for people, you know, basically to work with others. They're constantly campaigning. They're constantly trying to appeal to whatever their basis and they don't really care about, you know, some do, you know, of their constituents, but a lot of people don't.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  And the Senate, it's all kind of focused on the game of uh of legislation uh for for so many people as well, not focusing again on that kind of sense about what are we doing like scientists to kind of work together, you know, for the good of the country to push things along. And also our government also is siloed. There's there's not a lot of mechanisms for bringing people together. There ought to be in things like the National Security Council. The National Intelligence Council actually did that quite successfully at times for analysis that I saw. But we don't have, you know, we we have it within the National Institutes of Health, but we saw the the CDC break down on this, you know, kind of front. We we don't have sufficient of those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  You know, and one of the other problems that we've have with government, with the federal government over, you know, state and local government, is it's actually quite small. People think that the federal government's huge, because of course we've got postal service and the military that are part of it, but your actual federal government employers is a very small number. And, you know, the senior executive service part of that is the older white guys, you know, who kind of come up all the way over the last, you know, several decades. We have a really hard time bringing in younger people into that kind of government service unless they're political hacks, you know, and they want to, you know, kind of or they're kind of looking for power and, you know, sort of influence. We have a hard time getting people like yourself and other, you know, younger people kind of coming in to make a career out of uh public service and also retaining them.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Because, you know, people with incredible skills often get poached away into the private sector. And, you know, a lot of the people that I work with on the national security side are now at all kinds of, you know, high end uh political consultancies, or they've gone to Silicon Valley and they've they've gone to this place and that place. Because after a time as a younger person, they're not, you know, rising up particularly quickly because there's a pretty rigid way of looking at the the hierarchies and the promotion schemes. And they're also getting lambasted by everybody. People like, ah, you know, public servants. They're not really public servants. There's this whole lack and loss um of a kind of a faith in public service. And you know, the last few years have really done a lot of damage.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  We need to revitalize our government system to get better results. We need to bring more people in, even if it's, you know, for a period of time, not just through expensive contracts for, you know, the, the, the big consulting companies and, you know, other entities that do government work out there, but getting, you know, people in for a period of time, expanding, expanding some of these management fellowships and the White House fellows and, you know, bringing in, you know, scientists, you know, from the outside, giving, you know, that, that kind of opportunity for collaboration that we see in other spheres.

• 1:03:42Lex Fridman?

  I think that's actually one of the biggest roles for a president that, for some reason during the election, that's never talked about, is how good are you at hiring?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Lex Fridman?

  And, and creating a culture of like attracting the right, I mean, basically chief hire, when you, you think of a CEO, like the great CEOs are, I mean, maybe people don't talk about it that often, but they do more often for CEOs than they do for presidents. It's like, how good are you at building a team?

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Well, we make it really difficult because of the political process. I mean, and also because we have so many political appointments, we ought to have less, to be honest. I mean, we, we look at other governments around the world, you know, that are smaller. It's much easier for them to hire people in.

• 1:04:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  You know, some of the most successful governments are much smaller. And it's not that I say that the, you know, the government is necessarily too big, but it's just thinking about each unit in a, in a different way. We shouldn't be having so many political appointments. We should kind of find more professional appointments, more lone parties and appointments. Because, you know, every single administration that we've had over the last, let's see, span of presidencies, they have jobs that are unfulfilled because they can't get their candidates through Congress and the Senate because of all the kind of political games that are being played. I know loads of people have just been held up because it's just on the whim of, you know, some member of Congress, even though that the actual position that they want is really technical and doesn't really care about what, you know, what political, you know, preference they, they particularly have.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  So I think we have to try to look at the whole system of governments in the way that we would over, you know, other professional. Sectors and to try to think about this as just as you said there that this is a government that's actually running our country. This is an operating system and you wouldn't operate it like that if you were, you know, looking at in any kind of rational way. It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan tainted.

• 1:05:39Lex Fridman?

  So you're.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  At every level anywhere. So I would actually just say, uh, make a bid for a more non-partisan approach to a lot of the parts of government. You can still kind of bring in, you know, the political and premature, but also you have to explain to people writ large in America as well that this is your government.

• 1:05:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  And that actually you could also be part of this, you know, things like the Small Business Administration, the Department of Agriculture, you know, all these kinds of things that actually people interact with, but they don't even know it, the Postal Service, you know, all of these things. I mean, people actually, when you ask them about, uh, different functions of government, they have a lot of support for it. The National Park Service, you know, for example, it's just when you talk about government in an abstract way, like, oh, yeah, no, too much bloated, you know, not efficient and effective. But if you kind of bring it down more to the kind of local and federal levels, that's kind of, you know, when people really see it. If people could see kind of themselves reflected in many of the people who've gone into public service, I think that they would.

• 1:06:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  You know, have a lot more support for it.

• 1:06:34Lex Fridman?

  More like superstars, like, uh, individuals that are like big on social media, big in the public eye and having fun with it and showing cool stuff that is not, because right now, a lot of people see government as basically partisan warfare and then it, it just, it makes it unpleasant to do the job. It makes it uninspiring for people looking in from outside about what's going on inside government, all of it, the whole thing. But you, you are, you know, just with all due respect, you're a pretty rare individual in terms of non-partisanship. Like it, it just, actually your whole life story, the, the, the humbling aspect of, of your upbringing and everything like that.

• 1:07:19Lex Fridman?

  Uh, do you think it's possible to have a lot of non-partisan? Experts in government, like can you be a top presidential advisor on Russia for ten years, for fifteen years and remain nonpartisan?

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  I think you can. I don't think that's advisable though, by the way, because I mean, I don't think anybody should be there.

• 1:07:40Lex Fridman?

  So your first advice is to fire yourself after ten years?

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Well, you should, you should, you should definitely have term limits, just like you should in everything, right? I mean, it's just like tenure in university.

• 1:07:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, we all have term limits.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you kind of, you know, we do, we have natural term limits, but you know, you're kind of, you know, basically bottling it up for other people. I mean, you know, what I'm trying to do now, I'm fifty seven now, and I always try to work with, you know, people from different generations for me, just like, you know, I've, I've really benefited from these, you know, kind of mentorships of people older. You can, you know, mentor up and well and mentor down. I mean, I would, you know, try to get, you know, people from different backgrounds and different generations to work together in teams, honestly. I'd like to more team networked kind of approach to things, the kind of things that you get again in science, right? I mean, all these ideas are going to come from all kinds of different perspectives. Age and experience does count for something, but you know, fresh ideas and coming in and looking at a problem from a different perspective and seeing something that somebody else hasn't

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  seen before. I mean, I just, you know, kind of love working in a, in an environment with all kinds of different people and people who don't agree with you. You need people to take you on and say, absolute, that's crap, you know, kind of, where did you come up with that from? And you go, hang on, well, well, explain to me why you think so? And then, you know, you have this kind of iterative process back and forth. I mean, I would always encourage my colleagues to tell me when they thought it was wrong. I mean, sometimes I didn't agree because I didn't see the, the, you know, the reasoning, but other times I'm like, they're right, you know, that, that was a complete mistake. I, I need to admit that and, you know, kind of, we need to figure out a, a different way of doing things. But the one point I do want to get across is there were a lot of people who were nonpartisan that I worked with.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, in most of the jobs that I had up until more recently, I had no idea about people's political affiliation. It's just when you get into this kind of highly charged partisan environment, they kind of force people, you know, to make decisions. And when you have, you know, one political party, political faction that's trying to usurp power, it does make it quite difficult. I mean, that's the situation that we're in right now and, you know, we're seeing some of the things happen in the United States I've seen and studied in other settings or seen for myself happening. You know, when you have a president who wants to cling on to power. You know, you've got to, you've got to call that out. You know, is that a partisan act or is that a kind of, you know, defense of that larger uh political system that, that, that you're part of?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  You know, so I think we've got to recognize that even if you're not partisan, you can be politically engaged. And, you know, sometimes you just have to stand up there and speak out, which is, you know, what I did and what, what others did as well. None of those people who spoke out, you know, can initially saw that as a partisan act, even if some of them since then have decided to make political choices they hadn't made before. Because in the situation actually forced people into, you know, taking sides. It's very hard to still stay above the fray when you've got, you know, someone who's trying to perpetrate a coup.

• 1:10:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just to linger on that. I think it's hard and it's the courageous thing to do to criticize a president and not fall into partisanship after. Because the whole world will assume if you criticize Donald Trump, that you're clearly a Democrat. And so they will just, everybody will criticize you for being a Democrat. And then, so you're now stuck in that, so you're going to just embrace that role. But to still walk the nonpartisan route after the criticism, that's the hard road. Uh, so not let the criticisms break you into a, you know, in, into a certain kind of ideological set of positions.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  I mean, our political system needs revitalization. We need to be taking a long, hard look at ourselves here. And I think what people are calling out for, look, there's a vast swathe of population like me who are unaffiliated. You know, maybe some lean in one direction over another and, you know, unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views about things and political opinions and, you know, you may sound quite extreme on, you know, some of those, you know, either from a left or right perspective. What people are looking for is a kind of an articulation, you know, things in a kind of a clear way that they can get a handle on. And they're also looking for a representation, somebody who's going to be there on, you know, for you. You know, not part of a kind of a rigid team that you're excluded from, you're the ins and the outs. But what people are looking at now, they're looking at that in the workplace because they're not finding that.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  In politics, you're actually getting workers, you know, pushing the, people talk about the rise of the workers. People just saying, hang on a sec, you know, the, the most important space that I'm in right now is my workplace, because that's where my benefits are from. They're not coming from the state. I mean, that's a peculiarity of the United States system, you know, the Britain, you've got the National Health Service and you've got all the kind of nationwide benefits. You know, you're not tethered to your employer like you are in the United States. But here now, we're asking people, you know, people are pushing for more representation. They're asking to be represented within their workplace, be it Starbucks, where baristas are, you know, and other Starbucks employees are trying to unionize. We have unions among our research assistants, the Brookings Institution where I am, you know, kind of teaching assistants in big universities are doing the same kind of thing as well.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Because they want to have their voice heard, they want to kind of play a larger role and they want to have change. And they're often pushing their companies or the institutions they work for to make that change because they don't see it happening in the political sphere. It's not just enough to go out there and protest in the street, but if you want something to happen, that's why you're seeing big corporations playing a bigger role as well.

• 1:13:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and of course, there's, you know, it's a longer discussion. There's also criticisms of that mechanisms of unions to, to achieve the giving of a voice to a people.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  This goes back to my own experience, growing up in Northern England. The Durham miners that I was part of for generations, you know, first person in my family not in the mines on my dad's side.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  They created their own association. It wasn't a union per se at the very beginning. Later they became part of the National Miners Union. They lost their autonomy and independence as a result of that. But what they did was they pooled their resources. They set up their own parliament so they could all get together. Literally, they built a parliament. And it, you know, opened in like the, the same time as World War One, and they all got together because they didn't have the vote. They didn't have suffrage at the time because they didn't have any money. You know, so they didn't, couldn't pay the tax and they, you know, they couldn't run for parliament. And this is, you know, the kind of the origins of the organized labor parties later. But they create this association so they could talk about how they could deal with things with their own communities and have a voice in the things that mattered. You know, education, you know, improving their work conditions.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  It wasn't like what you think about some kind of like big political trade union with, you know, left wing, you know, kind of ideas. In fact, they actually tried to root out later after the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union, even when they were still having ties with places like the Mines of Donbass in the nineteen twenties, Trotskyites and, you know, kind of Leninists and, you know, communists. They were more focused on how to improve their own wellbeing. You know, what they called the welfare. They had some welfare societies where they were kind of trying to think. And that's kind of what baristers in Starbucks want or workers in Amazon. They're looking about their own wellbeing. It's not just about pay and work conditions. It's about what it means to be part of this larger entity. Because you're not feeling that same kind of connection to politics, you know, at the moment.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Because, you know, you're being told by your representative, sorry, I don't represent you because you didn't vote for me. You know, if you're not a Democrat, you're not a Republican, you're not red, you know, you're not blue, you're not mine. And so people are saying, well, I'm in this workplace, this is kind of my collective. You know, this is, this is, you know, therefore this is why I'm going to have to try to push to make change. So, I mean, this is kind of happening here and we have to, you know, realize that, you know, we've kind of gone in a way full circle back to that, you know, kind of period of the early emergence of sort of mass labor. And, you know, the way that that's where the political parties that we know today and, you know, the kind of early unions came out of as well. The sort of feeling of a mass society, but where people weren't really able to get together and implement or push for change.

• 1:15:40Lex Fridman?

  You know, with unions at a small scale and a local scale, it's like every good idea on a small scale can become a bad idea in a large scale.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  On a large scale, yeah.

• 1:15:52Lex Fridman?

  So like, uh, marriage is a beautiful thing, but at a large scale, it becomes the marriage industrial complex that tries to make money off of it. Combined with the lawyers that try to make money off the divorce. It just becomes

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:16:07Lex Fridman?

  caricature of a thing.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:09Lex Fridman?

  Or like Christmas and the holidays. It's like, it's just

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  I don't disagree, but what I'm saying is there's people are basically looking for something here and you know, kind of, this is why, I mean, I myself start to think about much more local, you know, kind of solutions to a lot of these, you know, kind of problems. It's again, the teamed networked approach.

• 1:16:28Lex Fridman?

  On the impeachment, looking back, because you're part of it, you get to experience it. Do you think they strengthened or weakened this nation?

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  I think it weakened in many respects, just the way that it was conducted. I mean, there's a, there's a new book coming out by a couple of journalists in the Washington Post. I haven't actually seen it yet, but I really did, you know, kind of worry that myself that it became a spectacle.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  And although it actually, I think in many respects was important in terms of an exercise of civic responsibility and, you know, gave people a big massive lesson in civics. Everyone's kind of running out and looking up the whole process of impeachment and what that meant and kind of congressional prerogatives. I was as well. I was, you know, like running off myself and, you know, trying to learn an enormous amount about it because I was in the middle of a lot of this. That it didn't ultimately show responsibility and accountability. And that in itself was kind of was weakened because on, on, you know, both sides, there was a lot of partisan politics.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that there was a dereliction of duty in many respects.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  I mean, especially I have to say on the part of Republican members of Congress who were, you know, kind of, they should have been embracing, you know, Congress's prerogatives. You could have, you know, kind of basically done this in a, in something of a different way. But the whole thing is because it was this larger atmosphere of polarized.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  I don't even apologize, but fractured fractured politics. And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say, in many of the members of Congress on the Republican side. I mean, there's a lot of grandstanding that I really didn't like, but on the Democratic side either. And and not admitting to mistakes and, you know, not kind of addressing head on, you know, the fact that they'd, you know, kind of been pushing for, you know, Trump to be impeached and, you know, talking about being an illegitimate president, you know, kind of right from the the very beginning. And that, you know, as a result of that, a lot of people just saw this as kind of a continuation of, you know, political games, you know, coming out of the twenty sixteen election. But on the Republican side, it was just a game. There was people I knew who were, you know, basically, you know, one point, one of them winked at me.

• 1:18:41Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  You know, in the middle of this, you know, kind of impeachment, it's just like, don't take this personally, you know, this is.

• 1:18:46Lex Fridman?

  It's a game.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  This is a game. And I just thought, this isn't a game. And that's why I think that it, you know, kind of weakened because, I mean, again, on the outside, it weakened us. The whole process weakened us in the eyes of the world because, again, the United States was the gold standard. And I do think, I mean, again, in the in the terms of the larger population, although a lot of people, they did actually see the system, you know, standing up, trying to do something to hold people accountable. There still was that element of circus and a big political game and people being careless with the country.

• 1:19:15Lex Fridman?

  But I do think that the Democrats were the instigators of the circus. So as a, it's perhaps subtle, but there's a there's a different way you talk about issues or concerns about accountability when you care about your country, when you love your country, when you love the ideals and when you versus when you just want to win.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  And stick it to the other side. No, I agree. I agree. I mean, there were people who I actually thought managed that, that made it about the country rather than about themselves.

• 1:19:52Lex Fridman?

  But I guess there's no incentive to do that.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were others who did a lot of grandstanding. Yeah. And that's that's another problem of our political incentive structures, that the kind of sense of accountability and responsibility tends to be personal, you know, people, whether people decide to do it or not, it's not institutional. If that makes sense, we've had a kind of a breakdown of that kind of that sense. Now, I took an oath of office, and I'm assuming that most of them did too. You know, I had to be sworn in, you know, when I I took those positions, I took that seriously. But I already took an oath of citizenship. There's, you know, presumably you did too, you know, you you kind of started to become an American citizen. It's not something you take on lightly. And, you know, that's why I felt this deep sense of responsibility all the time, which is why I went into the administration in the first place.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  I mean, I got a lot of flak for it because, you know, I thought, well, look, I've been asked, and there's a real issue here after the Russian interference and, you know, the whole influence operation in the twenty sixteen elections. And I knew what was going on, and I should do something. You know, i- i- if not me, then, you know, okay, someone else will go and do it. But can I live with myself just sitting on the sidelines and criticizing what people are doing? You know, and kind of, you know, worrying about this? Or am I actually going to muck in there and, you know, just go and do something? It's like seeing your house on fire and you see that, you know, okay, this is pretty awful and dangerous, but I could go in there and and do something.

• 1:21:12Lex Fridman?

  To clarify, the house on fire, meaning uh the cyber war that's going on, or cyber attacks, or cyber security?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Well, in the twenty sixteen, you know, when the Russians had interfered in the election. You know, I I mean, basically, this was a a huge national security crisis. And our politics, we'd gone mad as a result of it. And we, in fact, we were making the situation worse. And I felt that I could, you know, kind of, at the time, maybe I could do something here. I could try to clarify, I could, you know, work with others who I knew in the government from previous stints in the government to push back against this and try to make sure it didn't happen again. And look, and I also didn't have this, you know, mad, you know, kind of crazy ideological view of Russia either. I mean, I knew the place, I knew the people had been sitting it a long time and quite calm about it. I don't take it personally. It's not kind of an extension of self. It's, you know, something I've spent a long time trying to understand for myself,

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  going back to that very beginning of why were the Russians trying to blow us up? There must be an explanation. There was, there was a very complicated and complex explanation. It wasn't as simple as how it sounded. And also, there's a long tail to twenty sixteen. You know, Putin's perceptions, the kind of things that he thought were going on. The the, you know, the whole way that What they did was actually fairly straightforward. They'd done this before in the Soviet period during the Cold War. Classic influence operation. It just had gone beyond the bounds of anything they could have anticipated because of social media and just a confluence of circumstances in the United States as well. We were very fragile and vulnerable. And I remember at one point having a discussion with the Russian ambassador

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  where, you know, we were complaining about the Russian intervention. He said, are you telling me that the United States is a banana republic, that it's so vulnerable to these kinds of efforts? He actually looked genuinely mystified. Although, you know, obviously it was probably, you know, part of a, you know, kind of political shtick there, but he had a point. The United States had never been that vulnerable as it suddenly was in 2016. And in the time that I was in government and going back to what you asked about the whole impeachment and the whole exercise in Congress, that vulnerability was as stark as it, you know, ever could be. Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem as anything else. They were the kindling to all of the fires.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Putin didn't start any of this, of the kind of problems domestically, he just took advantage of them. And, you know, basically added a bit of an accelerant here and there.

• 1:23:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the interference, I mean, that's a much longer discussion.

• 1:23:47Lex Fridman?

  Because it's also for me technically fascinating.

• 1:23:52Lex Fridman?

  I've been playing with the idea of just launching like a million bots, but that are doing just positive stuff and just being kind.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always kind of wonder if is it possible to do something on this scale that's positive? Because, you know, a lot of people seem to be able to use all of this for pretty negative effect. You've got to kind of hope that you could do this, use the same networks for positive effect.

• 1:24:10Lex Fridman?

  I think that's actually where a lot of the war, I think from the original hackers to today. What gives people like me, and I think a lot of people that in the hacking community pleasure is to do something difficult, break through the systems and do the ethical thing.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:30Lex Fridman?

  So do the, because if there's something broken about the system, you want to break through all the rules and do something that you know in your heart is the right thing to do. I mean, that's what Aaron Schwartz did with releasing journals and publications that were behind paywalls to the public.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:24:51Lex Fridman?

  And they committed.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Lex Fridman?

  But to me, it's fascinating because I, maybe you can actually educate me, but I felt that the Russian interference in terms of social engineering, in terms of bots, all that kind of stuff, I feel like that was more used for political bickering than to actually understand the national security problem. Because I would like to know the actual numbers involved in the influence. I would like to, I mean, obviously, hopefully, people now understand that better than are trying to defend the national security of this country. But it's just, it felt like, like, for example, if I launch one bot and then, and then just

• 1:25:34Lex Fridman?

  contact somebody at the New York Times saying, I launched this one bot, they'll just say,

• 1:25:40Lex Fridman?

  MIT scientist hacks, you know, like, they'll just, and then that's.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  But that's exactly what happened. It was, you know, kind of, I think that, you know, Putin and some of the people around him understood because, again, propaganda state, they spend an awful lot of time thinking about how you, you know, basically put out your own content and how you get maximum effect through performance. Putin himself is a, you know, political pop performance artist. I mean, he, Trump understood exactly the same thing, they were actually operating in parallel, not in collusion, but in parallel. You know, basically, Trump understood how to get lots of free airtime, you know, how to get himself at the center of attention. Putin, you know, did that through a kind of, I think, a less organic kind of way, and he had a lot of people working around him. I mean, that's the old, you know, Bolshevik agitprop and, you know, kind of then the whole Soviet propaganda machine.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, Putin, kind of growing up in that kind of environment and having, you know, the kind of the Kremlin press office and all the kind of people around him. Got kind of a massive machine, knew how that worked. I mean, they haven't done, you know, what the Chinese did in Russia of like, you know, blocking everything and having a big firewall. It's kind of putting out lots of content, getting into the, you know, the sort of center of attention. Trump's doing the same kind of thing. And the Russians understood that, you know, if you put a bit of things out there and then you call up New York Times and people are going to run with it. And what they wanted was the perception that they had actually swayed the election. They loved it. This was the huge mistake of the Democrats and everything. I mean, I kept trying to push against this. No, they did not elect Donald Trump.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Americans elected Donald Trump and, you know, the electoral college was a key part. Vladimir Putin didn't make that up. You know, and basically I also remember, um, you know, at one point, the, um, Russian ambassador, you know, talking to me about when we were doing the standard, you know, here we are, we're lodging our complaints about the interference. You know, he didn't, he basically said, well, we didn't, you know, kind of invent Comey. And, you know, basically the, you know, the decision to reopen, you know, Hillary Clinton's emails. Or, you know, kind of Anthony Weiner and, you know, kind of his, um, you know, emails on his computer. And I was like, yeah, he's right.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, there were plenty of things in our own system that created chaos and tipped the election. Not, you know, kind of what the Russians did, but, you know, it's obviously easier to blame the Russians and blame yourself when, you know, things are kind of. Or, or those random forces and those random factors. Because people couldn't understand what had happened in 2016. There was no hanging chads like 2000 where there was, you know, kind of a technical, uh, problem that actually, you know, ended with the intervention of the Supreme Court. There was, you know, pure and simple, the electoral college at work. And a candidate that nobody'd expected, including the Republicans in the primaries, you know, to to end up getting kind of elected or put forward in a different twenty sixteen, suddenly becoming the president.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  And they needed a meta explanation. It was much better to say Vladimir Putin had done it and Vladimir Putin and, you know, the Kremlin guys were like, oh, my God, yeah, fantastic. Champagne cock, pop cocks popping, this is great, our chaos agents. They knew they hadn't done it, but they'd love to take credit for it. And so, you know, the very fact that other people couldn't explain these complex dynamics to themselves, basically dovetails beautifully with Vladimir Putin's uh attempts to be the kind of the Kremlin gremlin in the system. And he's he's, you know, basically was taking advantage of that forevermore. And I wanted, you know, to basically try to work with others to cut through that. And the thing is, then, you know, people lost faith in the integrity of the election system because people were out there, you know, suggesting that the Russians had actually to start the elections. People written books about that.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  They said, you know, that they hacked the system when, you know, they were trying to hack our minds. But again, we were the fertile soul for this. I mean, we know this from Russian history, the role of the Bolsheviks, you know, the the whole nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties with Stalin, the fellow travelers and the, you know, socialist, you know, international. I mean, the the Russians and the Soviets have been at this for years about kind of pulling, you know, kind of people along and into kind of a broader frame. But it didn't mean that they were influencing, you know, directly the politics of of of countries, you know, writ large. There were plenty of interventions. It's just that we were somehow, it was a it was a confluence of events, a perfect storm.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  We were somehow exquisitely vulnerable because of things that we had done to ourselves. It was what Americans were doing to themselves that was the issue.

• 1:30:11Lex Fridman?

  You think that's the bigger threat than large scale bot armies?

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Those can be a threat. Obviously, they do have an impact, but it's it's how people process information. It's kind of like the lack of critical thinking. I'm just not on the internet to that extent. I go and looking for information. I'm not on social media. I'm in social media, but not by myself. You know, I don't put myself out there. I'm not, I haven't got a Twitter feed.

• 1:30:35Lex Fridman?

  You don't have a Twitter one, yeah, but there is a.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  There's one about Fiona Hill's cat, you know, I have all kinds of strange things. It's Fiona Hill's cat, which I kind of like, you know, occasionally have people send things to me.

• 1:30:44Lex Fridman?

  You have so many fans, it's hilarious.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  But what I what I what I try to do is just be really critical. I mean, my, you know, my mom sends me stuff and I'm like, what is this?

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  It's just, you know, your your your own mother can be as much of an agent of misinformation as, you know, kind of Vladimir Putin.

• 1:31:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  I mean, we're we're all, you know, kind of, we all have to really think about what it is we're reading. There's one thing from my childhood that was really important. I mean, I always think every kid in school should have this. My next door neighbour, um, who uh was um, he was actually very active in the in the Labour Party. And he was, you know, kind of really interested in the way that opinion, you know, shaped people's political views. And he was Welsh, he was a native Welsh speaker, so, you know, he was always trying to explore English and how, you know, there was kind of the reach of, you know, the English culture and, you know, kind of, and how it's kind of shaping the way that people thought. And he used to read every single newspaper, you know, from all the different spectrums, which was quite easy to do, you know, back in the seventies and eighties, because there weren't that many in the UK context.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  And every Sunday, he would get all the different Sunday papers from all the different kind of ideological vantage points. And then when I got to be a teenager, he'd invite me to look at them with him. Because he was my godfather and he was just an incredible guy. And he was just super interesting and, you know, kind of culturally, you know, an outsider, always kind of looking in. And he basically ran through, you know, what The Guardian looked at, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Sun, you know, kind of all of these, you know, The Telegraph, all of these newspapers and how you could tell, you know, their different vantage points. And of course, it's complicated to do that now, I mean, in the in this, you know, incredibly extensive media space. I look at what it is that they're saying. And then I try to, you know, read around it and then, you know, look at what other people are saying and why they're saying it

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  and who are they, what's their context. And that was kind of basically what I was taught to look at. And and I think everybody should have that.

• 1:32:36Lex Fridman?

  And certainly, that's something that people in politics that are in charge of directing policy should should be doing.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  They should be.

• 1:32:43Lex Fridman?

  Not getting lost in the um.

• 1:32:47Lex Fridman?

  In this sort of the hysteria that can be created, it does seem that the American system somehow, not the political system, just humans, love drama. Very good, like the Hunter Biden laptop story. There's always like one, two, three stories somehow that we just pick, that we're just gonna, this is the stuff we're gonna fight about for this election.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  And everyone's got an opinion on it. Everybody. Yeah.

• 1:33:15Lex Fridman?

  And it's the most like Hillary Clinton's emails, Russians hacked the election.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had John Podesta's pasta recipes for a while, you know, that we were kind of all obsessing over. I don't know, people running out and trying them out, you know, or something like that.

• 1:33:28Lex Fridman?

  And there's fun, I mean, there's all, there's the best conspiracy theories about Giuliani. I just love it. We just pick a random story. Sometimes it's ridiculous.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  And it detracts from what the larger question should be, which is about the family members of, you know, senior officials and whether they should be anywhere near any of the issues that they're, you know, there's ethics, there's government ethics and things there, you know, kind of across the board. But there's a bigger story in there, but that becomes a distraction. It's a look over there, you know, the oldest trick in the book, you know, kind of idea.

• 1:33:58Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  And politicians are really good at that because it detracts from the larger question because every single member of Congress and, you know, government official, their family should be nowhere near anything they're doing.

• 1:34:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, that I could push back and disagree on. I mean,

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on what they do. If they're making money out of it, you know, and kind of basically being in business is what I mean, you know, kind of this is a, this is an issue. So it's not, you know, Hunter Biden on his own. It's, you know, kind of basically the kids of, you know, the Trump family, that, you know, you name it.

• 1:34:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. In general, like that, I just think it's funny. Like, there's a lot of families that, you know, they work very closely together, do business together, and it's very successful. I get very weird about that. It just feels like you're not, in fact, I don't even like hiring or working with friends.

• 1:34:51Lex Fridman?

  Initially, you you make friends with the people you work with.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  That's right. No, I have the I have the same worries as well because it kind of clouds. You know, I would encourage, you know, my daughter to do something completely different.

• 1:35:02Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Not going to the same field. Now, look, it's different if you're, you know, in science or, you know, mathematics or something like this. And, you know, maybe, you know, kind of you've got a family, maybe you're kind of building on some of their theories and ideas, you know, if Albert Einstein had a, you know, kind of an offspring who was in mathematics and took, you know, fathers thinking, you know, further, that would be very different. But if it's, you know, kind of you're in business and other things and it's just, you know, it's the nepotism problem that no one has there.

• 1:35:27Lex Fridman?

  Well, it says that too, in a space of ideas.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Well, they do if they're not people aren't coming in and building on the ideas in a constructive way.

• 1:35:33Lex Fridman?

  Right. But even for son, daughter of Einstein, you want to think outside the box of the previous.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's what I'm meaning. But I mean, it's just, but they shouldn't be sort of told, no, sorry, you can't go and study math because, you know, whatever physics, you know, because of.

• 1:35:47Lex Fridman?

  But a lot of that you can't actually make it into law. Well, you could, I suppose. But honestly, if you do that kind of thing, you should be transparent. There should be just an honesty about it.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  It gets back to what I was talking about before. We need diversity of views and diversity of thinking and you can't have other things. It's like being partisan or, you know, rooting just for a team. You know, if if something is going to cloud your judgment or constrain the way you think about things and become, you know, kind of a barrier to moving on out. And look, that's what we see in the system around Putin. It's kind of kleptocratic and it's, you know, it's filled with nepotism. All of the kind of like the people who you kind of see out there in prominent positions are the sons or daughters of, including Putin himself. I mean, that's when a system has degenerated. And that's, you know, kind of, and I suppose in a way, this is a symbol of the degeneration of the system. But again, it's just a diversion from, you know, kind of the bigger issues and bigger implications

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  of things that we're discussing.

• 1:36:43Lex Fridman?

  So critics on the left often use the straw man of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

• 1:36:51Lex Fridman?

  Uh, why does Donald Trump arouse so much emotion in people?

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  It's just the nature of the person. I mean, I don't feel particularly emotional about him. Um, I mean, he's kind of a, he's a very flawed guy, to be honest. And this may seem bizarre, I felt sorry for him. Because this guy is so vulnerable, so wrapped up in himself. But, I mean, he, he's just exquisitely open to manipulation. And I saw people taking advantage of him all the time. He has zero self-awareness. I mean, I kept thinking to myself, my God, if this guy didn't have this entourage around him, how would he function? I mean, I felt sorry for us as well. I mean, that he ended up being our president, because that should not have happened. I mean, in terms of character and in terms of fit for, fit for the job.

• 1:37:38Lex Fridman?

  But were you?

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Although I saw this, you know, kind of over a period of time, but I didn't feel, you know, kind of

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  any, you know,

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  sense of derangement, you know, kind of around him. He didn't drive me nuts in that way. I just became, I was just very worried about, you know, the kind of the impact that he was having on, on many particular issues.

• 1:38:00Lex Fridman?

  Here's the important thing. So what, what I noticed with people that criticized Donald Trump

• 1:38:06Lex Fridman?

  is they get caught up in the momentum of it and they're unable to see.

• 1:38:14Lex Fridman?

  First of all, let's start with some ground truth, which is approximately half the country voted for the guy, right?

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Yep, and more voted in 2020 than voted in 2016 for him. Yep.

• 1:38:29Lex Fridman?

  And I, I just, I just feel like people don't load that in when they're honestly criticizing.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  A lot of those people didn't vote for him and his personality and often could, because I know a lot of people who voted for him by first time and second time. And they could disassociate.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  You know, kind of the, all of the kind of features of Donald Trump that drives other people nuts from, you know, what they thought that in actual fact he could achieve in terms of, and it wasn't just this kind of sense about, well, I couldn't possibly vote for a Democrat. Sometimes it's just like, well, look, he shakes things up and we need things to shake, to be shaken up and.

• 1:39:05Lex Fridman?

  Some people might have voted for him for a person. See, this one.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, some of them, no, some of them did as well, but I'm just saying that not all of them did either.

• 1:39:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, we don't know that data. That's the thing.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  But I, I, yeah, I can't say how much it is. I'm just saying anecdotally, I know people have voted for him because he's him. From the charisma and, and others who voted because he's shaking things up and, you know, he's keeping people on their toes and, you know, kind of, we need that, you know, I, I, idea.

• 1:39:29Lex Fridman?

  But the way to avoid Trump derangement syndrome to, to me, me as a, as a doctor, I'm sort of prescribing to the patients on this syndrome, this, uh, this issue is I feel like you have to empathize with the people. Well, you have to imagine in your mind all the difference, like, um, strengths that the people who have voted for Donald Trump see and really understand it, really feel it, like walk around with it and then criticize. Like, I just feel like people get lost in this bubble of criticism in their own head. And forget like the tribe you're in or whatever. In their own head, they're not able to see, like, half this country that we're a part of voted for the person.

• 1:40:14Lex Fridman?

  Same with Biden. Half the country voted for the guy. The people that are criticizing Biden and they're doing this, the way Biden is currently criticized is not based on policy.

• 1:40:29Lex Fridman?

  It's based on personal stuff, similar like to Trump.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know it is. I mean, that's what people do. Look, I think part of that is, I mean, look, first of all, I want to say I completely agree with you about understanding where our people are coming from. And I think it's very important for people to listen to other people and their views. I try to do that all the time, try to learn from that. You know, I mean, everybody's got a a perspective and a context. We all live in a certain context. We're all living in history, our own personal histories matter a lot, and also the the larger context and the environment in which we're living in. And where we live and who we live with. And, you know, the kinds of lives that we lead as well, those are all extraordinarily important. I mean, I know that from, you know, myself. Everything, you know, that I've done in my life has been shaped by where I came from, who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things. You can't take yourself out of that.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  I mean, you can do it in some, you know, like a science or something else, but, you know, it's still your own views and maybe some of the ideas that you have. And pursuing an experiment might have been shaped by your larger context, you know, depending on what it is that you work on. But the other thing is the nature of the political system. The presidential election is like a personality contest, a beauty contest. It's like a kind of a referendum on, you know, one person or another. It's kind of like what we see in Russia, honestly, with, you know, Putin or not Putin or Putin and Putin before. You know, it's all about Putin and, you know, what do you think about Putin? It's not about what a president should be doing and, you know, kind of what their policies are. That's kind of the bizarreness of the US political system. Look, we've just seen this happening in the United Kingdom.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  You've got this core of a couple of thousand, a couple of hundred thousand, rather, people in the Conservative Party have just voted for, you know, three leaders in a row, the rest of the country isn't, and they're just looking at, you know, whether they like that personality and, you know, what they say to them, rather than what they're necessarily going to do for the country. I mean, which is, you know, kind of pretty absurd. And the the, I mean, again, the presidency is a weird hybrid in the United States. You know, we were talking before about it's the person should be running the country, it's the chief executive or the prime minister in another setting. But we don't think of it like that. You know, we often think about whether we like the guy or not, or, you know, would like to hang out with him or the, you know, one of my younger relatives, and I said, so why did you vote for Trump? He said, well, he was great. He was funny. I went to his rallies. I got, you know, all kind of charged up.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  And I said, could you see yourself voting for Biden? No, he's too old. And I said, well, you know, he's only just a little bit, you know, kind of. Older than Trump, or is, you know, the same age as your grandma, do you think your grandma's old? Oh, no, not at all. But it's just this kind of perception is boring, you know, so there's, people are actually sometimes, you know, basically being, you know, kind of motivated by just a feeling, you know, kind of that, that kind of sense, because that's the sort of nature of the, you know, the presidency, it's this kind of how you feel about yourself as an American, or how you feel about the country at large, the kind of the symbol of the state. Look, you know, in Britain, you, you had, you know, Queen Elizabeth second, and everybody, you know, seemed to, for the most part, not everyone, I guess, but most people respected her as a person, as a personality, as a kind of symbol of the state, even if they actually didn't really like the institution of the monarchy.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  There was something, you know, kind of about that particular personality that you were able to, you know, kind of relate to in that context. But in the United States, we've got all of that rolled into one, the head of state, the symbol of the state, the kind of queen, the king, the kind of idea. The chief executive, the kind of prime ministerial role, and then the commander in chief of the military. It's all things, you know, kind of at once, but ultimately, for a lot of people, it's just how you feel about that person. Oh, I couldn't go vote for them because of this, or I couldn't vote for them because of that. And in twenty sixteen, you know, Hillary Clinton actually did win the election in terms of the popular vote. So it wasn't that, you know, kind of people wouldn't vote for a woman, I mean, more people voted for her on the popular level, not obviously, you know, through the electoral college, in the electoral college vote, so

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  it wasn't just, you know, gender or something like that, but it was an awful lot of things, for people found Trump attractive. Because he was sticking up the big middle finger to the establishment. He's an anti-establishment change character. There was a lot of people voted for Barack Obama for the same reason and voted for Trump. We know that phenomenon, what was it, eleven, you know, twelve percent of people, you know, so they could vote for some completely totally different, radically different people, because that sort of sense of change and charisma. I mean, I had people who I knew voted for Trump, but would have voted for Obama again if he'd run again. Uh, because they just like the way that he spoke, they like the way that, you know, cause they said, um, I mean, this is all my own anecdotal things, doing about one of my relatives said, I could listen to Obama all day, every day. I just love the way he sounded.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  I love the way he looked, you know, I love just like the whole thing about him. And then say about Trump, well, he was exciting. He was interesting, you know, he was kind of like, you know, whipping it up there. You know, so there's this, just this kind of feeling, you know, we always say about, you know, could you have a beer with this person? And people, people decide they couldn't have one with Hillary Clinton. And, you know, maybe they could go off and have one with Barack Obama and uh, with Donald Trump. They didn't want to have one with Joe Biden, you know, for example. And remember George W. Bush didn't drink, so you wouldn't have had a beer with him. He'd have gone out and got a soda or something with him. But, you know, there's this, there's that kind of element of just that sort of personal connection in the way that the whole presidential election is set up. It's less about the parties.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  It's less about the platforms and it's more about the person.

• 1:45:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and picking one side and like sticking with your person, really like a support team.

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. Yeah.

• 1:45:49Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about Vladimir Putin, the man and the leader?

• 1:45:55Lex Fridman?

  Let, let's actually look at the full, you've written a lot about him, the, the recent Vladimir Putin and the full context of his life.

• 1:46:05Lex Fridman?

  Let's zoom out and look at the last twenty plus years of his rule. In what ways has he been good for Russia? In what ways bad?

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  Well, if you look to the first couple of terms of his presidency, I think, you know, on the uh, overall ledger, he would have actually said that he made a lot of achievements from Russia. Now, there was of course, the pretty. Black period of the war in Chechnya, but you know, he didn't start that, that was Boris Yeltsin. That was obviously a pretty catastrophic uh event, but if you look at then other parts of uh the ledger of what Putin was doing. You know, from the two thousands, you know, onwards, he stabilized the uh Russian economy, uh brought back, you know, kind of confidence. Uh and and and the Russian economy and financial system.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  He built up a a pretty impressive team of technocrats for everything, the central bank and the economics and, you know, finance ministries. Uh who um, you know, really got the the country back into shape again and solvent, paid off all of the debts. And, you know, really started to um build the country back up again domestically. And, you know, the first couple of terms, again, putting Chechnya, you know, to to one side, which is a little hard, because, I mean, there was. A lot of atrocities and I have to say that, you know, he was pretty involved in all of that because the FSB, which he'd headed previously. You know, was in charge of wrapping up Chechnya and it created, you know, kind of a a very strange sort of system of fealty, almost a feudal system.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  And the kind of relationship between uh Putin at the top and Khadirov in Chechnya, and there was quite a lot of distortions, you know, kind of as a result of that. And the way that the Russian Federation was run, you know, a lot more of an emphasis on the. Security services, for example, but there was a lot of pragmatism, you know, opening up the country for business. Um, you know, basically extending our relationships. I would say that, you know, by the end of those first couple of terms of Putin, Russians were living their best lives. Um, you know, there was a lot of opportunity for people. Uh people's labour, you know, was being paid for, they weren't being taxed, the taxes were coming out of the extractive industries.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  Uh there was, you know, kind of a, I guess, a sense of much more political pluralism, um but it wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Yeltsin period. And then you see a shift. And it's pretty much when he comes back into power again in two thousand and eleven, two thousand and twelve. And that's when we see a kind of a different phase emerging.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  And you know, part of it is the larger international environment, Putin himself has become kind of convinced that the United States is out to get him. And part of it goes back to the decision on the part of the United States to invade Iraq in two thousand and three. There's also, you know, the recognition of Kosovo in two thousand and eight and, you know, the whole kind of machinations around all kinds of, you know, other issues of NATO expansion and elsewhere. But Iraq in two thousand and three, and this kind of whole idea after that, that the United States is in the business of regime change, and perhaps, you know, has him in his crosshairs as well. But there's also then kind of, I think, a sense of building crisis after the financial crisis and the Great Recession, two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, because

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  I think Putin up until then believed in, you know, the whole idea of the global financial system and that Russia was prospering and that Russia, you know, part of the G eight and actually could be genuinely one of the, you know, the major economic and financial powers. And then suddenly he realizes that in the West is incompetent, that, you know, we totally had mismanaged the economy of our own, the financial crash in the United States, the kind of blowing up of the, of the, the housing bubble, and that we were feckless, and that that had global reverberations. And he's prime minister, of course, you know, in this kind of period. But then, you know, and I think that that kind of compels him to kind of come back into the presidency and try to kind of take things under control again in two thousand and eleven, two thousand and twelve.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  And after that, he goes into kind of a much more sort of focused role where he sees the United States as a, as a big, bigger problem. And he also, you know, starts to, you know, kind of focus on also the, the domestic environment because his return to the presidency is met by protests and he genuinely seems to believe, because again, this is very similar to belief here in the United States, that Donald Trump couldn't possibly be elected by Americans, there somehow was some kind of external interference because the Russians interfered and had an impact. Putin himself thinks at that time, it's one of the reasons why he interferes in our elections later, that the United States or another had interfered because he knew that people weren't that thrilled about him coming back, that kind of like the Medvedev period.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  And the protests in Moscow and St Petersburg and other major cities, he starts to believe are instigated by the West, by the outside, because of, you know, funding for transparency in elections and, you know, all of the NGOs and others, you know, they're operating, State Department, embassy funding, you know, the, and, you know, the whole attitudes of, oh, God, he's back, you know, kind of thing. And so after that, we see Putin going on a very different footing. It's also somewhere in that period, 2011, 2012, we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine. And he's always, you know, I think, been kind of steeped in that whole view of Russian history. I mean, I heard at that time, I was in, I've written about this and many of the things that, you know, I've written about Putin, but in

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  that same timeframe, I'm going to all these conferences in Russia where Putin is and Peskov, his press secretary, and they talk about him reading Russian history. I think it's this in this kind of period that he formulates this idea of the necessity of reconstituting the Russian world, the Russian empire. He's obviously been very interested in this. He's always said, of course, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of the 20th century, but also the collapse of the Russian empire before it. And he starts to be critical about Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine as the same country, Ukrainians and Russians being one and the same. And this is where the ledger flips, because, I mean, the initial question you asked me is about,

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  has Russia, has Putin been good for Russia or not? And this is where we get into the focal point of, or the point where he's not focusing on the prosperity and stability and future of Russia, but he starts to obsess about the past and start to take things in a very different direction. He starts to clamp down at home because of the rise of opposition and the fact that he knows that his, you know, brand is not the same as it was before, and his popularity is not the same as it was before, because he's already gone over that, you know, that period in Anybody's, you know, professional and, you know, political life that, you know, if you stay around long enough, people get a bit sick of you.

• 1:52:57Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  You know, as we talked about that before, should you stay, you know, kind of in any job for a long period of time, you need refreshing. And, you know, kind of Putin is, you know, starting to look like he's going to be there forever and people are not happy about that. And would like their chance as well to kind of move on and move up and, you know, with him in southern place, that's not going to be particularly possible. And that, you know, it's around the time when he starts to make the decision of annexing Crimea. And that's when the whole thing flips, in my view. The annexation of Crimea in twenty fourteen is the beginning of the end. Of, you know, Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia. Because if you pay very close attention to his speech on the annexation of Crimea.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  In March of twenty fourteen, you see all the foreshadowing of, you know, where we are now. It's already of kind of his view of kind of his obsessions, his historical obsessions, his view of himself has been kind of fused with the state to kind of a modern czar. And his idea that the West is out to get him and it becomes after that almost a kind of like a messianic mission, you know, to turn things in a different direction.

• 1:54:03Lex Fridman?

  And who are the key people to you in in this evolution of the human being of the leader? Is it Patrushev? Is it Shoigu, the Minister of Defence? Is it, like you mentioned, Peskha, the Press Secretary? What role do some of the others like Lavrov play?

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  I think it's more rooted in the larger context. I mean, individuals matter in that context, but it's this kind of like this shared worldview. And if you go back to the early nineteen nineties, immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Yeltsin, you know, and the his counterparts in Ukraine, Belarus pull it apart, there was an awful lot of people who, you know, wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, not just Putin. I mean, you remember after Gorbachev tried to have the new Union Treaty in nineteen ninety one, and there was the Emergency Committee set up the coup against Gorbachev. It was because they were worrying he was going too far and unraveling, you know, the Union then as well. They were opposed to his reforms. There's always been a kind of a very strong nationalist contingent, they've become Russian

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  nationalists over time, rather than Soviet, you know, hardliners, who, you know, basically want to maintain the empire, the Union in some form. And in the very early part of the nineteen nineties, there was a lot of pressure put on Ukraine and all the other former Soviet republics, now independent states, by people around, you know, Mayor Lushkov, for example, in Moscow, by, you know, other forces in the Russian Duma, not just, you know, Vladimir Zhernovsky and others, but, you know, really serious, you know, kind of what we would call here, like, right-wing, you know, nationalist forces. But it's, you know, pervasive in the system. And it's especially pervasive in the KGB and in the security sector. And that's where Putin comes out of.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Remember, Putin also was of the opinion that one of the biggest mistakes the Bolsheviks made was getting rid of the Orthodox Church as an instrument of the state. And so there's this kind of restorationist wing within the security services and the state apparatus, the one to kind of bring back Russian Orthodoxy as a state instrument, an instrument of state power. And they were kind of, you know, looking all the time about strengthening the state, the executive, the presidency. And, and so it's everybody who takes part in that. And it's also others who want power, honestly, and they see Putin as their vehicle for power. I think people like Sergei Kirienko, I knew Kirienko back in the nineties. I mean, my god, that guy's all in.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Or like Dmitry Medvedev, you know, who was, you know, a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin, certainly had a totally different perspective, wasn't he, in the KGB?

• 1:56:41Lex Fridman?

  Did you say warmer, fuzzier version?

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  A warmer, fuzzier version, yeah. I mean, he's kind of like, he was literally a warm personality. I don't know if you watched him during the September thirtieth annexation, the guy had all kinds of facial twitches and looked so rigid and stiff that he looks like he might implode. I mean, that wasn't, you know, how he was, you know, earlier in his career, and he, you know, had a different view of Perestroika. We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia during Perestroika, he was in Dresden, watching the East German state fall apart.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, dealing with the Stasi and in a kind of place where you weren't getting a lot of information about what was happening in West Germany or even what was happening back home in Perestroika. And he has that kind of group of people around him, the Patrichevs and Botnikovs and others, and Sergei Ivanov and others, you know, from, you know, the different configurations of his administration, who have come out of that same kind of mindset and are kind of, you know, wanting to sort of put everything back together again. So there's a lot of enablers, there's a lot of, you know, power seekers, and there are a lot of people who, you know, think the same as him as well. He is a man of his times, a man of his context.

• 1:57:46Lex Fridman?

  You, as a top advisor yourself and a scholar of Putin, do you think actually now in his inner circle, are there people he trusts?

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  There are people he trusts for some things, but I don't think there's people he trusts for everything. I don't think he's the kind of person who tells anyone everything at all. I don't think he's got some deeply confided. No, he's, I think he compartmentalizes things. He's often said that the only person he trusts is himself, and I think that's probably true. He's the kind of person who keeps his own counsel. I mean, people talk about Kovalec, for example, or, you know, kind of some of the other people who are, you know, friends with him that got to go back to his time in St Petersburg. You know, at various points, he seemed to, you know, spend a lot of time, you know, way back when, talking to people who were, you know, people think of kind of more moderating forces like Alexei Kudrin, but, you know, doesn't seem to be interacting, you know, with them.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  You know, there are obviously aspects of his personal life, you know, does he speak to his daughters? Does he, you know, speak to, you know, kind of lovers, you know, kind of in a way people speculate about, you know, kind of who might he confide in, but I would greatly doubt that he would have deep political discussions with them. He's a very guarded, very careful person.

• 1:59:02Lex Fridman?

  What about sources of information then? So trust a deep understanding about military strategies with, for certain conflicts, like the war in Ukraine, or even special subsets of the war in Ukraine, or any kind of military operations, getting clear information?

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  I think he's deeply suspicious, you know, of people and of information. And I think a part of the problems that, you know, we see with Putin now.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I've come from isolation during Covid. I'm really convinced that, you know, like many of us, you know, a lot of Putin's views have hardened and the way that he looks at the world have been shadowed in very dark ways by the experience of this pandemic. You know, obviously, he was in a bubble, different kind of bubble than most of us. I mean, most of us are not in bubbles with multiple, you know, kind of palaces and, you know, kind of the Kremlin. But, you know, we've seen, you know, so much, obviously, a lot of this is staged, that isolation, you know, they're kind of making it very clear that he's the Tsar, the guy who is in charge, making all the decisions, you know, one end of a table and everybody else is at the other end. But, you know, it's very difficult then to bring, you know, information to him in that way.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  He used to have a lot of information bundled for him in the old days by the presidential administration. I mean, I know that because it was a lot more open in the past and I have a lot of meetings with, you know, people in the presidential administration who brought outside, you know, it's all source information, you know, for him and, you know, kind of funneled in information from different think tanks and, you know, different viewpoints and maybe a kind of more eclectic, diversified set of information. He would meet with people, you know, you've heard all the stories about where he had once called up Maschegen, you know, and had to, you know, come in, you know, obviously, you know, a very different character as a journalist and a critic. You know, we've heard about Venedicta from Echo Moskvi, the, you know, the radio programme, the editor,

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  who Putin would, you know, talk to and consult with. He'd reach out. People like Lyudmila Alexeva, for example, the head of Memorial, he had some respect for her and would, you know, sometimes just, you know, talk to her, you know, for example. All of that seems to have come to a halt. And I think, I think a lot of us worry, I mean, us who, you know, watch Putin, about what kind of information is he getting? You know, is it just the information he's seeking and gathering himself that fits into his worldview and his framework? We're all guilty of that, of looking for things, gets to our social media preferences. Are people just bringing to him things that they think he wants to hear, like the algorithm, you know, kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard? Or is he himself, you know, tapping into source of information that he absolutely wants?

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  And remember, he is not a military guy. He's an operative and he was sort of trained in operations and, you know, contingency planning. Sergei Shoigu, the Defence Minister, is a civil engineer, was the former Minister of Emergencies. He wasn't a military planner. You know, somebody like Gerasimov, the head of the Chiefs of Staff, maybe a military guy, you know, in this, you know, case from the army, but he's also somebody who's in a different part of the chain of command. He's not somebody who would spontaneously start, you know, telling Putin things. And Putin, you know, comes out of the FSB, out of the KGB of the Soviet era, and he knows the way that, you know, intelligence gets filtered and works. He's probably somebody who wants to consume raw intelligence.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  He doesn't probably want to hear anybody else's analysis. And he thrived in the past of, you know, picking things up from people. You know, I've taken part in all of these meetings with him, gone for hours, because he's just collecting. He's collecting information. He's sussing people out. He wants to know the questions they ask. He learns something about the questions that people ask, the way that they ask them. You know, so he's kind of soliciting information himself. And if he's cut off from that information, you know, because of circumstances, then, you know, how is he formulating things in his head? And again, getting into, you can't get into his head, but you can understand the context in which he's operating. And that's where you worry, because he clearly made this decision to invade Ukraine behind the back of most of his security establishment.

• 2:03:16Lex Fridman?

  You think so?

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's pretty apparent.

• 2:03:19Lex Fridman?

  What, uh, what would the security establishment, what would be?

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  Well, that would be the larger, you know, thinking the funneling in information from the presidential administration, from the National Security Council. It looks like, you know, he made that decision with a handful of people. And then, you know, having worked in these kinds of environments, and it's not that dissimilar, you filter information up. So think about, you know, you and I are talking for hours here. If you were my, you know, basically, you know, senior official and I'm your briefer, I might only get 20 minutes with you. And you might be just like, you know, looking at your watch the whole time and thinking, hang on a second, I've got to go and I've got this meeting and I've got that meeting and yeah, your point, you're not going to wait there. So I give this long explanation. I've got to get to the point and then I've got to then choose for myself, what's the information I'm going to impart

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  to you. After the 20 things that I think are important, you know, okay, I've got 20 minutes, maybe I only suddenly get two minutes. Maybe, you know, you get called out and and somebody, you know, kind of interrupts, something happens, I'm going to get one minute, two minutes.

• 2:04:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I once remember I had to give a presentation when I was in government,

• 2:04:26Lex Fridman?

  real.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  you know, to Henry Kissinger, you know, for that Defence Policy Board. And we planned bloody weeks on this thing, you know, PowerPoints were created, teams of people were brought together. And, you know, people were practising this. We had all these, you know, different people there. And I said, look, Henry Kissinger is an academic and a former professor and, you know, I haven't, you know, I've got to watch him in action. He's gonna like, you know, five seconds in, if we're, if we're lucky, we get that far, ask us a question and just throw off our entire presentation. What is it that we want to convey? And that's exactly what happened. And then, you know, people aren't really prepared, or they wanted to convey and they're, you know, they've prepared a, you know, a nice sort of fulsome, you know, PowerPoint like approach.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  We never even got there. And so God knows what, you know, he took away from it at the end of it. And that's, you know, think about Putin, he's going to be kind of impatient. He's, you know, we see the televised things where he, you know, kind of sits at a table, a bit like, you know, people won't necessarily see us here. And he puts his hands on the table and he looks across at the person and he says, so, tell me, you know, what's the main things I need to know? And of course, the person's mind probably goes blank, you know, with the, the kind of the thought of like, oh God, what's the main thing?

• 2:05:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  And they go, they start, well, Vladimir, Vladimirovich. And, you know, they, they, they start the kind of, you know, they're, they're revving up, you know, to get to the point. And then he cuts them off. So you think about that and then you think about, well, what information has he got? And then how does he process it? And is he suspicious of it? Does he not believe it? And what, and what inside of his own history then, you know, leads him to make one judgment over another? He clearly thought the Ukrainians would fall apart in five seconds.

• 2:06:03Lex Fridman?

  We don't know if he clearly thought that, but that there was a high probability, maybe. I mean, you could guess.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I think he, I think he pretty much thought it, because I think he thought that, you know, kind of Zelensky wasn't very popular. There was an awful lot of, you know, pro-Russian sentiment in whatever way he thinks that is, because people have Russian speakers. And that, you know, they're kind of, you know, in polling, that, you know, they expressed affinity with Russia. I mean, certainly in Crimea, that worked out because a majority of the population had, you know, higher sentiments or feelings of affinity with Russia. And, you know, obviously, you know, that, that kind of, they got traction there. But it's more complicated. We talked about Donbass before, about being a kind of melting pot. When, you know, they tried the same thing in Donbass, Donetsk and Luhansk, because they tried in Crimea in 2014, didn't kind of pan out. In fact, you know, a whole war broke out.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  They tried, you know, to kind of in, um, uh, you know, many of the major cities are now under attack, including Odessa, to kind of ferment, you know, pro-Russian movements and they completely, utterly fell apart. So Putin was thinking, you know, I'm pretty sure based on polling and the FSB having infiltrated, you know, an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchy, as we now seeing is quite apparent with so many of the dismissals in Ukraine. He was pretty sure that, you know, kind of he would get traction. And that it would be like 1956 in Hungary or 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Remember, he comes out of the Andropov levy, as it's called, a kind of cohort of people who come and, under, into the KGB under Yuri Andropov.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  And Yuri Andropov has presided over a lot of these anti-dissident, you know, kind of movements inside of Russia itself and how you suppress opposition. But also over, you know, how you deal with, um, you know, kind of the uprisings in, you know, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And there's all these lessons from this, that, you know, you can put everything back in the box. And yeah, there might be a bit of violence and a bit of fighting, but ultimately, you, you think you've got the political figures and you decapitate the opposition. So they thought Zelensky would run away, Yarokovich ran away, but, you know, that was kind of a bit, you know, a sort of a different set of circumstances. And they thought that all of the local governments would, you know, kind of capitulate because they had enough Russians in inverted commas in there. Again, mistaking language.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  And, you know, kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity or how people would react in the time and not understanding people's, you know, linkages and, you know, kind of importance of place, the way that people feel about who they are in a certain set of circumstances, a place.

• 2:08:39Lex Fridman?

  But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is unlike anything that he was ever involved with.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  But I don't think he thought it would be, you know, because it's this kind of, if he looks back into the past, you're right, though, he wasn't involved in 68 or 56 or what happened in the 1980s in Poland.

• 2:08:59Lex Fridman?

  But there's a very wide front and it's the capital and I mean, this isn't going

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  This isn't Chechnya, this isn't, you know, kind of Syria or, for example.

• 2:09:08Lex Fridman?

  This is a major nation.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:09:10Lex Fridman?

  Like a lar- it's large, the size.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  It was more like Afghanistan, but they didn't realise that because, again, Ukrainians are us, this is kind of inability to think that people might think differently and might want something different. And that 30 years of independence actually has an impact on people and their psyches. And if I look back to the 1990s, I mean, I remember being in seminars in the Tavet at the time, and we were doing a lot of research on, you know, what was happening in, you know, the former Soviet Union at the time, because the early 1990s, just after the, you know, the whole place fell apart. And there was already under Yeltsin, this kind of idea of Russians abroad, Russians in the near abroad, Russian speakers and the need to bring them back in.

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  And I remember, you know, we had seminars at the time where we talked about at some point, there'd be some people in Russia that would actually believe that those Russian speakers needed to be brought back into Russia, but that the people who spoke Russian might have moved on, because they suddenly had other opportunities and other windows on the world. I mean, look what's happened in Scotland, you know, for example, most people in Scotland speak English. The Scottish language is not the standard bearer of Scottish identity. There's just, it's almost a civic identity, a different identity than not just national identity, just like you see in Ukraine. And there's lots of English people that moved to Scotland and now think of themselves as Scottish, or Brazilians or Italians and, you know, all kinds of people who've moved in there.

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a smaller population, obviously, it's not the scale of Ukraine, but. You know, people feel differently. And there's been a devolution of power. And when Brexit happened, you know, Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all. And they wanted to kind of still be, you know, having a window on Europe. And that's kind of historic. And lots of people in Ukraine have looked west, not east. You know, it depends on where you are, not not just in Lviv, you know, or somewhere like that. But also in Kiev and and Kharkiv, you know, was kind of predominantly a Russian speaking city. But Kharkiv was also the center of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian literature, you know, at different points. People have different views. I grew up in the north of England. We don't feel like the south of England.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  There's been a massive divide between north and south of England for millennia, not just centuries. So, you know, people feel differently depending on where they live and, you know, kind of where they grew up. And Putin just didn't see that. He didn't see that.

• 2:11:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, hold on a second. Let me sort of push back at the fact that I don't think any of this is obvious. So first of all, Zelensky before the war was unpopular.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  Oh, he was, what was it, thirty eight percent, something like that, but but best in the popularity? Yeah.

• 2:11:49Lex Fridman?

  Let me sort of make the case that the the calculation here is is very difficult. If you were to poll every citizen of Ukraine and ask them, what do you think happens if Russia invades? Just like actually, each put each individual Ukrainian in a one on one meeting with Putin and say, what do you think happens? I honestly think most of them will say that they will they will agree with the prediction that the government would flee, would collapse. And the the the country won't unite around a cause because of the factions, because of all the different parties involved, because of the popularity.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  You might have said the same thing about the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded in nineteen forty one. You see, the problem is Putin always reads history from one perspective over another. I think most countries basically rise to their own defense. So this is actually one of the first times that Russia has been on the offensive rather than on the defensive.

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  You know, so there's kind of a bit of a flip there.

• 2:12:57Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously Afghanistan, but you know, that was more complicated because it was up, but it was also supposed to be an intervention, right? I mean, it wasn't supposed to be to annex Afghanistan. It was to, right, try to, you know, prop up, you know, kind of or reinstall, you know, a leader there. Syria, you were in there to, you know, help your guy Bashar al-Assad, you know, turn away the opposition. Chechnya was a debacle. The Chechens fought back big time. And it was only by dint of, you know, horrible, violent persistence and ruthlessness and nasty, dirty tricks. That, um, you know, kind of Putin prevailed there. But and then, you know, you wonder, did he prevail? Because what happened?

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  You know, Chechnya sometimes describes the most independent part of the Russian Federation and Ramzan Kadyrov, you know, plays power games in Moscow. Yeah, his predecessors, um, even his father and others wouldn't have done that. Ahmed Kadyrov and, you know, before that, Dadyev and Masadov. I mean, they were, they were willing to make a compromise, but, you know, they wouldn't have had, you know, the same position that Kadyrov has had. So, you know, I think that, again, it's, it's your perspective and where you stand and what, which bit of history you start to read. And that's why I say that, you know, can I think Putin? It's again, it's the information, the way that he processes it. I think most Russians also can't believe that they've done something wrong in Ukraine. I mean, maybe at this point, things are changing a bit.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  But that's why there was, you know, so much kind of support for this in a right way. I mean, I have Russian friends, again, to support, look what, you know, was happening in Donetsk. Look what was, um, you know, the Ukrainians were doing to our guys. You know, look what was happening to Russian speakers. You know, we were defenders. We were not, you know, we're not invaders. I think, you know, again, the special military operation, you know, idea now, I think it's flipping, obviously, in the way that with the war going on there. But Putin wasn't, you know, kind of looking at what would happen. I mean, most of the kind of glory parts of Russian history, when you kind of go in, you know, you chase Napoleon back to Paris. Or you chase the Germans back to Berlin, you put the flag above the Reichstag.

• 2:15:04Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

  That's a very different set of affairs. When you've been fighting a defensive one, you've been invaded from a war where you invade someone else.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  And even the most fractured populations, like you had in the Soviet Union, the rally round and, you know, World War One, that that that fell apart. I mean, the Tsar didn't manage to rally everybody around. I mean, the whole thing fell apart. And World War Two, Stalin had to, you know, revive nationalism, including in the republics in Central Asia and elsewhere, to revive nationalism. And Ukraine suddenly found nationalism, you know, the kind of sense of...

• 2:15:43Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting, because it's not, it's not obvious, especially what Ukrainians went through in the 1930s. It's not obvious that that, I mean, my grandfather was Ukrainian and he was proud to fight a Ukrainian Jew. He was proud to fight and willing to die for his country. It wasn't like...

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  His country then was the Soviet Union.

• 2:16:08Lex Fridman?

  The Soviet Union, right, sorry to clarify.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  But he might fight now for his country, Ukraine.

• 2:16:12Lex Fridman?

  Yes. But I I'm just like, lingering on the point you made, it was not obvious that that united feeling would be there.

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  No, and again, it wouldn't have been obvious for the Soviet Union.

• 2:16:25Lex Fridman?

  That's, sorry.

• 2:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:16:28Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, I was referring to my grandfather, the Soviet Union. We're both saying the exact same thing.

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we know, yeah, we are.

• 2:16:33Lex Fridman?

  You're saying it's a really powerful thing, because I take it, because you take history as it happened, you don't realize it could have happened differently. It's kind of, it's fascinating.

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  It's that whole counterfactual, right?

• 2:16:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because, I mean, if you, if you've kind of, that's, that's why we all need in the United States to really examine our own history. Because, you know, there's a lot of lessons from that, that, you know, we, we should treat very cautiously. It doesn't mean that, you know, history repeats or even rhymes, you know, it's the old axiom all the time. But there are a lot of things that you can take away differently from...

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Putting a different perspective and a different slant on the same set of events. I mean, I always used to wonder, like, how many books can be written on the French Revolution? Or even on the Russian Revolution? You know, I studied with Richard Pytts. I remember he was really offended after he'd written his great Microsopus on the Russian Revolution, two volumes, that other people would, you know, kind of write about the Russian Revolution. He said, I've written it all. And I thought, well, actually, maybe you haven't. It's like, there might be some completely different angle there that you haven't really thought of. And that's Putin. You know, I remember Peskov saying Putin reads history all the time, Russian history. And I thought, well, maybe he should read some world history. You know, maybe he should, you know, kind of read some European authors on Russian history, not just, you know, reading Laminosa for, you know, Russian historians on Russian history. Because you might see something from a very different perspective.

• 2:17:51Speaker 01

  And look, and the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam, right? I mean, they saw Vietnam as kind of weak, manipulated by, you know, kind of external forces, China, Soviet Union. But the Vietnamese fought for their own country. They suddenly became Vietnamese. And Ho Chi Minh became, you know, kind of basically a kind of a wartime fighter and leader, you know, in a way that, you know, perhaps people wouldn't have understood either.

• 2:18:18Lex Fridman?

  You said the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam. And that, for some reason, sprung a thought in my head. Has the United States, since World War Two,

• 2:18:31Lex Fridman?

  had anything that's not a mistake in terms of military operations abroad?

• 2:18:38Lex Fridman?

  I suppose all the ones that are successes, we don't even know about, probably. So it's like very fast military operations.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  I mean, Korea is divided. I mean, I don't know if it's successful, but, you know, kind of, I mean, there was a solution found that, you know, some people are promoting, you know, in this case as well, of a sort of division and a, you know, the DMZ and, you know, one side over the other and, you know, kind of perpetuating a division, which. I think it's particularly successful. But if you think about World War One and World War Two, the United States came in, you know, under some very specific sets of circumstances. In World War One, they did kind of come in to help, you know, kind of liberate, you know, parts of Europe, France and, you know, kind of assist the UK and, you know, everything else, Great Britain and the war towards the end of it. World War Two, you know, there was that whole debate about whether the United States should even be part of the war.

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  I mean, we know it wasn't fought to, you know, overturn the Holocaust and all of the kind of things you kind of wish it would been fought for. But it was because of Pearl Harbor and, you know, the Japanese pulling in. But, you know, ultimately, it was easy to explain why you were there, you know, particularly after Pearl Harbor and what had happened. It was harder to explain Vietnam and Korea and, you know, many of the others. That's kind of going to be a problem for Putin. That's why there is a problem for Putin. All of his explanations have been questioned. You know, started off on NATO or this or that or the other. And, you know, kind of all liberating, you know, Ukraine from Nazis or, you know, kind of basically stopping the persecution of Russian speakers. And all of this has now got lost in just this horrific destruction.

• 2:20:13Speaker 01

  And that's what happened in Vietnam as well. It became, you know, a, a, a great degradation of the Russian military with atrocities. And people wondering why on earth the United States was in Vietnam.

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  I mean, even that kind of happened in Britain in the colonial, you know, kind of period as well. Why was the United Kingdom doing, you know, committing atrocities and, you know, kind of basically fighting these colonial wars? Northern Ireland, why was the United Kingdom still, you know, kind of militarily occupying Ireland? Cyprus, there's all kinds of, you know, instances where we look at this thing. So what Russia was doing now, Putin is trying to occupy another country. Irrespective of, you know, kind of the historical linkages and, you know, the kind of the larger meta narratives that he's trying to put forward there.

• 2:21:03Lex Fridman?

  What role did the United States play in the lead up and the actual invasion of Ukraine by Russia? A lot of people say that, I mean, obviously Vladimir Putin says that part of the reason the invasion had to happen is because of security concerns over the expansion of NATO. And there is a lot of people that say that this was provoked by NATO. Do you think there's some legitimacy to that case?

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  Look, I think the whole situation here is very complicated and you have to take a much longer view than, you know, what happened in, you know, 2008 where they opened the door for Ukraine and Georgia, which actually, by the way, I thought was a strategic blunder, just to be very clear, because there wasn't any kind of thinking through about what the implications of that would be and, you know, what it actually would mean for Ukraine's security. And also, bearing in mind what, you know, Putin had already said about NATO expansion, they came on the wake of the recognition by the United States, pretty unilaterally, of Kosovo. And it also comes in the wake of, as I mentioned before, the invasion of Iraq, which really is very important for understanding Putin's psyche. So I think, you know, we have to go back, you know, much further than it's not just

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  talking about kind of NATO and what that means. NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine going in a different direction from Russia, just as so as the European Union. Remember, the annexation of Crimea comes after Ukraine has sought an association agreement with the European Union, not with NATO at that particular point, even though, you know, the EU on the security, common security and defense policy basically has all kinds of connections with NATO at, you know, various different levels in the European security front. It was all about Europe and going on a different economic and political and ultimately legal path, because if you have... An association agreement, eventually you get into the Akki Komite, and it just transforms

• 2:23:04Speaker 01

  a country completely, and Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet period or the Russian Empire period, it becomes, you know, on a different trajectory, like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, you know, another country, it becomes a different place, it moves into a different space, and that's part of it. But if you go back again to the period at the very beginning of the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, well, there's no discussion about NATO at that point and NATO enlargement, there is a lot of pressure, again, as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine, trying to bring it back in the fold, and wanting to make what was then, you know, this mechanism for divorce,

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  more of a mechanism for re-managed Commonwealth of Independent States. And in the early 1990s, when Ukraine became an independent state, it inherited that nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union. Basically, whatever was stationed or positioned in Ukrainian territory at the time became Ukraine's, strategic and, you know, kind of basically intermediate and tactical nuclear weapons. And, you know, in the United States at the time, you know, we had all this panic about what was going to happen with all of that. I mean, I think, you know, as a scientist and, you know, kind of technically it would have been difficult for Ukraine to actually use this, I mean, the targeting was, you know, done centrally, they were actually stationed there, but nonetheless, Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan, suddenly

• 2:24:27Speaker 01

  became nuclear powers. And, you know, Ash Carter, the former US Defence Secretary, who's just died tragically, and Dave was talking about, you know, talking together today, was part of a whole team of Americans and others who, you know, tried to work with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to get them to give up the nuclear weapons. And back in the early period of that, ninety three, ninety four, you go back, and I mean, I was writing about this at the time, I wrote a report called Back in the USSR, which is, you know, kind of on the website of the Kennedy School with some other colleagues. And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations coming out of Moscow, the Defence

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  Ministry and the Duma, the Parliament and others, that Ukraine was trying to find a way of making a dirty bomb, using its nuclear weapons, you know, becoming a menace. And, you know, kind of Ukraine might have to be brought to order. So a lot of the dynamics we're seeing now were happening then, irrespective of NATO. Basically, the problem was always Ukraine getting away. Yeltsin himself, when he unraveled the Soviet Union, didn't really want it to unravel, but he didn't have the wherewithal to bring, you know, the countries back again. Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its economy imploded. It had to give sovereignty to all of these constituent parts of the Russian Federation in terms of a sort of devolution of authority. It had the war in Chechnya, which Yeltsin

• 2:25:50Speaker 01

  stupidly sparked off in nineteen ninety four. You had Tatarstan, one of the regions, the whole rich regions, you know, basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow. You had the whole place was kind of seemed like it was falling apart so that, you know, you couldn't do anything on Ukraine because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it. And then when, you know, kind of basically Russia starts to get its act back together again, all of these security nationalist types who would never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova or anywhere else to kind of move away, they didn't worry that much about Central Asia, to be frank, but they know they did want, you know, the core states in their view to come back. And Moldova was part of that, even if it's not Slavic, but, you

• 2:26:32Speaker 01

  know, they wanted Belarus and northern Kazakhstan and probably Kazakhstan as well, which wasn't really thought about being as part of Central Asia, back in the fold as close as possible. So anything that gave those countries an alternative was seen as negative. It, you know, could have been in association with China, you know, them joining, you know, kind of an association with Latin America or Africa or something else like that. But of course NATO has all of those larger connotations of it being, you know, the Cold War opposing entity. And Putin has always seen NATO as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact, which is, in other words, just something dominated completely by the United States. Now, of course, is why, getting back to Trump again, Trump was always going, you know, to the Europeans.

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  If this is really supposed to be collective security in a mutual defence pact, why are you guys not paying? You know, why does the US and States pay for everything? But, you know, NATO was actually conceived as collective defence, you know, mutual security. And it was set up by, you know, the United States, along with the UK and France and, you know, Germany and Turkey and, you know, other countries. And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden. They didn't have to join NATO. They didn't want to join NATO for a long time. They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel and, you know, the countries partner with NATO. But once they thought that their security was really at risk, they wanted to be part of it. And so, you know, kind of, you're now really seeing, you know, that NATO is something other than just being, um, you know, a creature

• 2:28:01Speaker 01

  or an instrument of the United States. But that's how Putin always saw it. So, you know, what this debate about NATO is all about, or Russia being provoked, is wanting to kind of return to an old superpower bipolar relationship, where everything is negotiated with the United States. It's to try to deny that Ukraine or Belarus, well, Belarus has kind of been absorbed by this point, you know, by Russia, or Moldova, or Kazakhstan, or any of the other countries have any kind of agency. Not even Poland, or Hungary, or, you know, kind of France and Britain.

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  For years and years and years, senior people like Putin and people around the Kremlin have demanded a return to the kind of what they call the old Concert of Europe, or the Concert of Vienna, where the big guys, which now means the United States and Russia, just sit down and thrash everything out. And so, I mean, Putin by saying, look, it was provoked, it's the United States, it's NATO, it's a proxy war, or it's this, or it's that, or this is going to be a nuclear confrontation. It's like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or it's the Euro Missile Crisis. It's basically just saying, you know, I want to go back to when the Soviet Union and the United States worked things out. I want to go back to the whole, you know, period of the 1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan just kind of got together and figured things out.

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  Or, even better, back to Yalta, Potsdam and Tehran and the big, you know, meetings.

• 2:29:26Speaker 01

  At the end of World War Two, where we resolved the whole future security. We've had a war, we've had the Cold War. Now we've got another war. We've got a real war, hot war. We've got a war in Ukraine. It should be the United States and Russia that sort this out. So this is where we see the United States waffling about as well, trying to kind of like figure out how to handle this. Because it has to be handled in a way that Ukraine has agency. Because if Ukraine doesn't have agency, nobody else has agency either. Nobody else has any kind of decision making power. And, you know, we have an environment in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players. There's the United States and Russia and China. And maybe occasionally it might be India and perhaps Brazil or some other, South Africa or some other country like maybe the BRICS at some point.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  But, you know, ultimately, it's like the old days, big powers resolve everything. And so this war is also about Russia's right, Putin's right, you know, to determine things, you know, strong man to strong man, big country to big country. And, you know, determine, you know, where things happen next. That's why he's talking about things being provoked and it's being the United States' fault.

• 2:30:30Lex Fridman?

  But aren't there parts of the United States establishment that likes that kind of three party view of the world?

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  Oh, there's always going to be people who like that part, that that approach. Of course there is. But then they don't necessarily dominate. That's the kind of thing that people kind of think about. I mean, you know, Putin can, you know, read, you know, all the various articles and hear the kind of pronouncements of people. But, you know, this gets back to, you know, the way that the United States operates. You know, Putin saw that, you know, Trump wanted to have a, you know, top down, you know, vertical of power. And other presidents have wanted to have that. But the United States is a pretty messy place and we have all kinds of different viewpoints. Now, of course, we know that in Russia, everything, even criticism of the Kremlin is usually fairly orchestrated, usually to kind of flesh out, you know, what people think about things.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  When we had these hardliners saying, you know, we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less, and that, you know, the army wasn't doing enough. It was in many respects, you know, kind of encouraged by the Kremlin to see how people would react to that. You know, to kind of actually create a constituency for, you know, being more ruthless than you had before. Because, you know, they wanted to clamp down. In the United States, I mean, I can say whatever I want. It doesn't mean that I'm speaking on behalf of the White House. And, you know, even if I have been an advisor to this president, that president and the other, it doesn't mean I'm, you know, basically speaking on behalf of the US government. But there's kind of always an assumption from the Russians that, you know, when people, you know, say this and people do advocate one thing or over another, that they're, you know,

• 2:32:02Speaker 01

  it's operating, there's a lot of mirror imaging, thinking that, you know, we're operating in the same kind of way. So, yes, there are, of course, constituencies who think like that and would love it, you know, to be back to that. And there are many people out there with their own peace plans, all kinds of people, you know, out there trying to push this.

• 2:32:19Lex Fridman?

  There does seem to be, uh, the engine of the military industrial complex seems to give some fuel to the hawks and they seem to create momentum in government.

• 2:32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but other people do too. I mean, there's always, you know, kind of a checks I mean, again.

• 2:32:36Lex Fridman?

  You believe in the tension of ideas.

• 2:32:37Speaker 01

  I think there was a lot of tension. I mean, I've seen it. I've seen it inside of the government now, you know, and people can push back. And that's why I speak out and I try to lay it out so that everybody can, you know, kind of figure it out for themselves. I said the same to you as I say to everybody. This is how I see the situation and, you know, this is, you know, how we can analyze it here. Now, look, do I think that we've handled, you know, the whole Russia account, you know, for years? Well, no, we haven't. I mean, we've, we've, we've taken our eyes off the ball many times. We've failed to understand the way that people like Putin think. You know, you talked earlier about, you know, we need to have empathy for, you know, all the people who like Trump or like Biden and some of how they think. We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've

• 2:33:19Speaker 01

  got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does. You know, he, he has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context. We've got to understand that. We've got to understand that he would take offense of something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessary to blame by taking actions, but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly, or, you know, take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something.

• 2:33:54Lex Fridman?

  So you've been in the room with Putin. Um, let me ask you for some advice. And it's also just a good philosophical question for you or for me. If I have a conversation with Vladimir Putin right now, can you advise on what questions, topics, ideas to talk through to him as a leader, to him as a human? What would you like to understand about his mind, about his thinking?

• 2:34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, remember what I said before that Putin always tries to, you know, reverse things. He wants to hear the questions that that people have. Because remember, he himself, at different points, has been a recruiter, which is, you know, the way that you're operating now as well, right? You're asking an awful lot of questions. Your questions also betray, you know, often the times where you're thinking about things, you know, the kind of context.

• 2:34:45Speaker 01

  You know, kind of any kind of dialogue like this reveals a lot about the, you know, the other person.

• 2:34:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:51Speaker 01

  And I've actually often, you know, noticed in these settings that Putin likes to have a lot of give and take. So I think he would actually enjoy having a conversation, you know, with you. But again, he would always be trying to

• 2:35:05Speaker 01

  influence you, inform and influence. That's kind of, you know, part of the way that he always operates. So what you would have to, you know, be trying to think about, so what is it you would want to elicit information from him? You're trying to understand the guy's worldview. And what we're trying to also understand is if there's any room there where he might compromise on something. You know, so if your goal was to go in there, you know, to talk about Ukraine at this particular moment. I mean, one of the problems that I've often seen in the sort of the meetings we've had with Putin, he just ends up in sort of mutual recriminations. You know, kind of, no, well, what about what you've done? Or no, you've done that about, you know, and there's always this what aboutism. I mean, it often say, well,

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  you're saying that I've done this, but you've done that. The United States invaded Iraq. What's the difference between, you know, what I'm doing and all of the things that you've been doing here? I mean, what you would have to try to do is kind of elicit information about why or what he is thinking about this particular moment in time and why he thinks it.

• 2:36:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the what aboutism is a failure case, I think that shows from all the interviews I've seen with him, that just shows that he doesn't trust the person on the other side.

• 2:36:19Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't.

• 2:36:20Lex Fridman?

  Right, but I I'm not cynical like people's, they seem to think he's some kind of KGB agent that doesn't trust anybody. I disagree. I think everybody's human. And from my perspective, I'm worried about what I've seen is I think whether it's COVID, whether it's

• 2:36:44Lex Fridman?

  other aspects that I'm not aware of, leading up to the invasion, he seems to be less willing to have a charismatic back and forth dialogue.

• 2:36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, an open discussion. You know, actually, I mean, I said, you asked me before about, you know, that issue of trust, and he often says he only trusts himself. And I said, you know, he's often distrustful of people, but he does trust some people for certain things where he knows it's within their competence.

• 2:37:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  So he has people he trusts to do things because you know, he knows they'll do them, and he knows that they'll do them well, which is why, you know, he has his, you know, old buddies from, you know, St. Petersburg, because he's known them for a very long time. And he knows that they want, you know, try to pull a fast one over him. But he also knows their strengths and their weaknesses, and what they can be trusted to do. I mean, he's learning that, you know, some of the people in the military that he, you know, thought were competent, or people on other things are not, right? That they're, and he intends to actually have a lot of loyalty to people as well. Or he also kind of thinks it's best to keep them inside the tent than outside. And he moves them around, you know, he kind of, okay, you know, he gives them multiple chances to redeem themselves if they don't. It's not like he has them done in. I mean, yeah, there is a lot of that in the system. But the people

• 2:37:55Speaker 01

  that he's worked with for a long time, you know, he moves them around to something else, perhaps where they can do less harm. Although, you know, we've often see that he has quite a small cadre of people that he's reliant on, and often, you know, they're not up to the task, which is kind of what's happening here. But he also, in the past, has been more straightforward, just like you were saying here, more pragmatic. And I think, you know, if you were engaged with him in Russian, while you're actually literally speaking the same language, because there's so much lost in translation. I used to jump outside of my skin, listening to some of the phone calls. Because, you know, the way that they kind of relayed, you know, with an interpreter.

• 2:38:32Lex Fridman?

  Oh, because you're listening to the translation.

• 2:38:34Speaker 01

  No, because I know I'm listening to the Russian and the translation.

• 2:38:36Lex Fridman?

  And the translation.

• 2:38:37Speaker 01

  You know, in real time. And having been at a translator's institute is really difficult. Look, an interpreter is trained in the moment to do something, you know, the synchrony period of the synchronized or the real time translation. So translation is an art as well as a skill. If you're doing simultaneous translation, that's the word in English, and it's synchrony period in Russian, you're kind of focused in the moment on the fragments of the discussion, trying to render it as accurately as you possibly can. And when you come out of that, you can't relay the entire conversation. And often, you know, what translators do is they, you know, they take this little shot, I know, like journalists do.

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  And afterwards, you know, they've just been caught up in the moment and they haven't got the big picture. Consecutive translation is different, you know, kind of you're trying to convey the whole mood of like big chunks of dialogue that have already been there. But, you know, sometimes you might not get that right either. And it breaks up the flow of the discussion.

• 2:39:38Lex Fridman?

  That's terrible.

• 2:39:39Speaker 01

  And often, it's, you know, the kind of the person who translates, it's different. You know, some of our best translators are women. But, you know, hearing a woman's voice, you know, translating a guy who has a particular guy's way of speaking and a macho way of speaking and a crude way of speaking, you know, be that Putin, or I've seen that happen with Erdogan, the president of Turkey, you know, and it gets translated by a much more refined, you know, female speaker, you've just lost the whole thing. And, you know, many of the translators on the Russian side are not competent in English in the way that you would hope they are. They're not, it's not just that they're not native speakers, they're just not trained to the same high standards they used to be in the past. And you just got, you lose the nuance, you lose the feel.

• 2:40:24Speaker 01

  You know, you almost need, you know, kind of the interpretive actor, you know, doing, you know, the kind of the interpretation for that. You need to match it as much as you can in the way that you, you know, do voiceovers in film. The best way to talk to Putin is one on one.

• 2:40:41Speaker 01

  In his own language. And I have a really great friend here who is one of the best interpreters. Putin is often asked by the, you know, the media to interpret for him. He was at the institute that I was at. I know him from that kind of period. And he is just excellent, just like Pavel Palashenko was absolutely phenomenal at interpreting Gorbachev. Now, he didn't always interpret him accurately because Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaffes. And sometimes was, you know, Gorbachev himself would joke that Palashenko, you know, spoke better for Gorbachev than Gorbachev could himself. But Putin is actually quite precise and careful in the way that he speaks. Because there's a lot of menace sometimes to things deliberately. Other times, there's lots of humor and he's telling a joke for a particular reason.

• 2:41:23Speaker 01

  And all of it is, I mean, he actually uses the richness of the Russian language and the crudity of language. It can't be conveyed in English.

• 2:41:28Lex Fridman?

  But also facial expressions that go along with it.

• 2:41:31Speaker 01

  Body language, the way that he sits back in the chair and slouches. The kind of the way that he makes fun of people and he, you know, kind of uses irony. Just some of it is just lost and it needs to be conveyed.

• 2:41:41Lex Fridman?

  The depth of humor and wit. I met quite a few like political leaders like that in this peak only Russian when I was traveling in Ukraine.

• 2:41:53Lex Fridman?

  I don't know how you translate that. I think it's almost, the other person that reminds me like that a little bit is Obama. There's, Obama had a wit and an intelligence, but like he would smile as he said something that add a lot to it, like that he's trolling you or he's being sarcastic. Or like, I don't, it's me converting into words. It's obvious to all English speakers, if they listen to Obama. But if you had to translate to a different language, I think you're going to lose a lot of.

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when I watched the, I mean, I watched many of Putin's speeches, you know, kind of just in Russian, not looking at any of the, you know, the subtitles or anything. And it's just watching the way that his body language is at the, at the time when he's saying things. The way that he'll smirk, he'll sneer, he'll laugh. He'll, he'll ad lib, you know, kind of from something that obviously kind of, you know, wasn't there on the prepared speech. And it's really critical. And, you know, kind of a lot, some people speak, you know, like Trump, it just needs kind of, just. Words. Put uh Putin, the words are very important. Trump, it's the atmosphere, it's the the kind of the way you feel about things, it's the buzz you get, you know, it's revving people up.

• 2:43:02Speaker 01

  It's the kind of slogans and Putin is, you know, he's conveying a lot in what he's saying there.

• 2:43:08Lex Fridman?

  I think, I mean, of course, I don't know much because I only speak Russian and English. But I have, in English or Russian, have not met almost anyone ever as interesting in conversation as Putin. The I think he shines not in speeches, but in interactions with others.

• 2:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you watch those interviews and things with him, and I've, you know, been at many of these sessions, it's been hours of him parrying questions. And it's like watching um a boxer sparring, you know, in a kind of training bout. Yeah, come on, give me another one, you know, and it's kind of like, and he prides himself and uh and he's made mistakes often, but the the breadth of, you know, the issues that he's often covered has been interesting, has been fascinating, and I used to just take, you know, kind of really detailed notes about this because you learn a ton. But it's also about his worldview again. I mean, he does live in a certain box like we all do. And, you know, again, his world experience is not as extensive as, you know, you would hope it would be. But that's why you have to really pay attention. That's where we've messed up.

• 2:44:14Speaker 01

  That's where we haven't really paid a lot of attention to what he's been saying. He's been telegraphing this grievance, this dissatisfaction, this I'm gonna do something for years.

• 2:44:28Lex Fridman?

  And the thing is during wartime,

• 2:44:33Lex Fridman?

  the combined with propaganda and the narratives of resentment and grievance that you dig in on those. Like, maybe you start out not believing it, but you're sure it's all gonna believe it eventually.

• 2:44:48Speaker 01

  Well, you convince yourself over time. Yeah. Look, the longer You're in a position like Putin, twenty two years now, come on, twenty three years. Could be out there for thirty six years. You become more and more rigid. I mean, this is again, you know, something that you see in history. You know, you look at, you know, people through history have moved from kind of being kind of left wing and, you know, in their perspectives to hard right. They kind of have a, but kind of a sort of an ossification or rigidity emerges in their views. I mean, again, I used to have these arguments with Professor Pyes about Lenin. Because he would talk about Lenin, I said, but he didn't change his mind from being eighteen. Have you not thought about that? I mean, it's like, we're not formed, fully formed in, uh, individuals at eighteen.

• 2:45:30Speaker 01

  You know, we don't know anything. We know something, but not everything. I mean, that, and obviously the younger context, you know, the kind of the way that you kind of grow up, the place you grew up, the things that happened to you, the traumas you have. I mean, all of these have an impact. But then if you don't grow beyond all of that, and Putin's been stuck in place since two thousand, when he became president, he's not out and about. You know, kind of being a man of the people. You know, he, you know, he's not doing the kind of things that he used to do. Yeah, he gets out there and he goes to Kazakhstan and, you know, got him Tajikistan and. He goes to China and he does this and that. And then to COVID, he didn't go anywhere. I mean, very few places. And so he got, he's got stuck. And I, that worries me a lot because you could see before that he, you know, had a bit more of flexibility of thought.

• 2:46:12Speaker 01

  And that's why nobody should be in place forever. You should always kind of like get out there and go out there and learn a new skill, you know, kind of. He needs some, he needs to sort of, you know, he needed to get out more and do something different.

• 2:46:23Lex Fridman?

  You had an interesting point you've made that both Vladimir Zelensky and Putin are thinking about. They're just politicians. They're thinking about the twenty twenty four election, which is coming up for both of them.

• 2:46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've said that in some of the other interviews. Yeah, that's true.

• 2:46:39Lex Fridman?

  That's so interesting. I mean, I.

• 2:46:42Speaker 01

  Because their election is going to be pretty much at the same time.

• 2:46:44Lex Fridman?

  As the US election also.

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  Oh, those will be before. I mean, because it's sometime in that, you know, early part of the year of the presidential election.

• 2:46:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And also, I don't know if you know about US elections, but they actually last way longer than a year.

• 2:46:56Speaker 01

  We're in it now, aren't we? You know, already.

• 2:46:57Lex Fridman?

  Already starting. So there's going to be a significant overlap.

• 2:47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you're right.

• 2:47:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that actually comes into play in their calculus?

• 2:47:07Speaker 01

  I think it was one of the reasons why Putin invaded in February twenty twenty two, because it was gonna be two years. I mean, he thought it'd be over by March of twenty twenty two, and he got two years to prepare for, you know, the election. And you got a big boost, you know, not only, he got a boost from Crimea. I mean, I didn't mention that before. I mean, one of the reasons for invading Crimea. And annexing or invading Ukraine the first time annexing Crimea was, look what happened to his ratings. They went from kind of declining, and it was still pretty good, you know, by anybody's standards, to just rocketing off into the stratosphere. I mean, I didn't really meet anybody in Russia who thought that annexing Crimea was, you know, kind of a bad thing. I mean, even, you know, kind of people who opposed Putin on so many other things, Crimea was, you know, Krimnash, they kept saying, you know, this is kind of, you know, we got it back.

• 2:47:49Speaker 01

  You know, it should never have gone away. It was ours, you know, but, you know, this is more complex. And he wasn't, I don't think at the time, planning on annexing all of Ukraine. Uh, when he went in this special military operation, he was gonna try to turn it into what Belarus has become, you know, part of a, you know, bring back the Commonwealth Independent States or the Union, then a new union with Belarus and Ukraine and Russia over time. But certainly, you know, remove Ukraine as a major factor, independent factor on the world stage and, you know, consolidate Crimea and maybe, you know, kind of incorporate Donetsk and Lukas, you know, kind of, that was, that was also a possibility. But it wasn't, it wasn't in his intention in any case to have something on this kind of scale.

• 2:48:30Speaker 01

  He wanted to get on with then, preparing for what was gonna be, he would think, the cakewalk, the shoo-in of the next presidential election. I mean, last time around, he had to invite a bit of competition with this person who's reputed to be his goddaughter, Ksenia Subchak. You know, for a bit of, you know, kind of entertainment for people. You know, this next time around, you know, maybe he wasn't really planning on running, you know, against any other, you know, serious opposition. He was just gonna have the acclaim of, you know, the kind of the, the great leader, like President Xi um in China. You know, Putin, you know, was basically, I think, you know, he also hoped that he would be able to devolve some authority away, you know, kind of. So he's more like the, you know, the, the supreme leader kind of figure, the Tsar-like figure, the monarch.

• 2:49:13Speaker 01

  And then, you know, other people get on with the chief executive, prime ministerial running the country. And he could kind of like step back and just enjoy this, you know, maybe there was gonna be again a new union of Belarus, Russia and um. An Ukrainian in some, you know, fashion and he could preside over that.

• 2:49:30Lex Fridman?

  So, speaking of opposition, you've criticized the famed Putin critic, Alexei Navalny. What's the nature of your criticism?

• 2:49:39Speaker 01

  Well, it's not really been a kind of a criticism in the way that, you know, people have implied, but more just reminding people that Navalny isn't some stooge of the West as other people have, you know, kind of depicted him in the, in the Russian firm, but, you know, saying that this is kind of, you know, he's pro-Western. He's, he's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. You know, in the past, uh, he's articulated, you know, things are not sort of dissimilar from some of the people around Putin. And it's more just reminding people that, you know, just because you kind of see somebody, you know, as a kind of in an opposition figure or somebody who might be more palatable from, you know, your perspective, looking from the West, they're not always going to be, you know, what you think they are. And Alexei Navalny is, is a Russian.

• 2:50:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, in a particular Russian context, he's different from Putin, but he wouldn't necessarily, you know, kind of run, you know, the Russian system in ways that we will like. So that's, this is kind of, it's not a kind of a criticism, it's more of a critique of the way that we look at things. You know, I think it's a mistake to always, you know, say, oh, this is pro-Western or this is a, you know, liberal, I mean, what the heck does that mean, pro-Western? I mean, he, he's a Russian, he's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. And he's often, you know, been, you know, quite critical about immigration. Um, he's had some negative views about, you know, one part of him, he said, don't feed the Caucasus, you know, kind of played upon some of the, you know, the racial and ethnic tensions inside of, you know, Russia itself as well.

• 2:51:03Speaker 01

  Now, he is a pluralist and then he's kind of, and he wants to have, you know, a different uh, set of political actors there, but he also isn't promoting revolution. He's not Lenin, he's not one to bring down the state. He, he wants to kind of, you know, change the people who are in charge. That's what he's been basically focused on and, you know, he might have, and have things done to things that, you know, we elsewhere might not like.

• 2:51:29Lex Fridman?

  And I guess the bigger picture there is.

• 2:51:33Lex Fridman?

  It's not trivial to know that if you place another human in power to replace the current human in power, that things are going to be better. They could be a lot worse. Because there's a momentum to a system. A system is bigger than just its leader, even when that leader has a huge amount of power.

• 2:51:52Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right. And, you know, he grew up in that, you know, same system. Now, he's younger than Putin. So he's got a different generational perspective. And he's not wedded to the Soviet Union. Or, you know, kind of some concept of Russian Empire. He doesn't seem to spend a lot of time. I don't know what he's doing. You know, in jail, but he's probably not sitting around, you know, reading Lomonosov and, you know, the kind of the great kind of tracts of Russian history. Could be, actually. But I mean, I think, you know, Navalny has a different worldview and a different perspective, just like Medvedev was different, you know, in his time and presidency and made some, you know, changes and some innovations there. But don't think that they're going to be radically different. Because look, Gorbachev, I mean, he was so different from Andropov and Chernenko and others as a person.

• 2:52:36Speaker 01

  But he was also constrained by the system. And he wanted to have change, but he wanted evolutionary change. He didn't know how to do it, but he didn't want to bring the whole system down. Look at Khrushchev. When he came in, you know, after that whole period of, you know, everybody trying to figure out what to do after Stalin had died and it was all this kind of back and forth. And eventually Khrushchev emerges and, you know, he tries to make changes to the system, but he's also a creature of a very specific context. He's grown up in the same system and, you know, kind of brings all kinds of elements of chaos there, you know, to the whole thing. And, you know, gets into a standoff with the United States. That we know as the Cuban Missile Crisis. And eventually, you know, gets removed. You know, we're looking at what's happening in the United Kingdom right now.

• 2:53:19Speaker 01

  You know, they've just churned through three. Uh, prime ministers and actually five prime ministers in, you know, kind of as many years, but all of those prime ministers have come out with the context of the Conservative Party and they're all, you know, kind of just shades of, you know, the same thing. They've all come out of the same academic and, you know, kind of privileged backgrounds. Even Rishi Sunak, the new, um, prime minister, who's the first, you know, Indian or Anglo-Indian uh, prime minister in, um, in British history, it was a kind of phenomenal, you know, kind of as a child of in- in Indian immigrants, but also, um, a person of great privilege from the same academic and party background as the others. You know, so there, there, there are always differences with those human beings, but those contexts matter a lot.

• 2:54:03Lex Fridman?

  What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon?

• 2:54:08Speaker 01

  Well, Putin's definitely been thinking about it, right? I mean, he is the kind of person, if he's got an instrument, he wants to figure out how to use it. You know, we look at Polonium, we look at Novichok, you know, we look at all kinds of things, you know, that, uh, he's also presided over in Syria. He has, you know, put in charge of the war in Ukraine now. Uh, General Sverikin is known as General Armageddon, you know, the kind of person who, you know, pretty much facilitated the use of chemical weapons in Syria, you know, for example. So, you know, don't think that Putin, you know, hasn't thought about how ruthless he can possibly be. The question is really the calculation, it's, it's his estimation of the probability that it will get the desired effect. We keep talking about this idea of escalate, de-escalate.

• 2:54:52Speaker 01

  That's not what the Russians, you know, how they call it, but it's the whole idea that you do something really outrageous to get everybody else to back off.

• 2:54:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:00Speaker 01

  Now, when you talked about the precedent that the United States set of detonating uh, the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what, you know, he obviously meant the precedent of using nuclear weapons, of course, which of course, we would then say, well, we showed then. How the impermissibility of ever doing that again. But what he's talking about is the precedent of escalating to such an extent that you stop the war, because he reads that saying, well, you know, the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war was brought to a quick conclusion. And of course, there's a huge debate in America about whether it was necessary to do that, whether the war was ending anyway. Did that really, you know, kind of change the minds of the Japanese high command? I mean, there's all kind of books and being written about that.

• 2:55:45Speaker 01

  And of course, you know, the revulsion that people felt in the wake of that was just, you know, just the shock of what actually happened. And we've spent, you know, 70 years, you know, basically coming to terms with the fact that we did something like that. You know, the firebombing, you know, we've also looked at all the bombing, you know, in Vietnam and everywhere and, you know, the, the, the, all these massive bombing campaigns and realising they actually often had the opposite effect. Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have contributed and there's a lot of, you know, scholars suggesting it did to the end of the war. But a lot of the big bombing campaigns, the destruction actually prolonged wars because they made people fight back, as we're kind of seeing in the case of Ukraine. So Putin has to calculate the probability that if he uses some tactical nuclear weapon,

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  that it will get the desired effect, which is get us to capitulate and Ukraine to capitulate. Us to capitulate, meaning the United States and Europeans not supporting Ukraine anymore, pushing towards a negotiating table, negotiating Ukraine away. And Ukraine's saying, okay, we give up, like happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or in Japan. So it's, it's his calculation, you know, as much as anything else, which is really important. He said, we have to show him that he won't get that out of it. It's kind of less our probability and, you know, kind of the odds of it. It's just how he calculates that probability of getting what he wants.

• 2:57:00Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I guess that's how the game of poker works. It's your probability and your estimate of their probability and your estimate of their estimate of your probability and so on and so forth.

• 2:57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it goes on. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:57:13Lex Fridman?

  I think he has two tools, right? So one is the actual use of nuclear weapons and then the threat of the.

• 2:57:18Speaker 01

  Oh, the threat is very effective.

• 2:57:20Lex Fridman?

  And the more real you make the threat.

• 2:57:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:57:25Lex Fridman?

  So it's like, uh, the more you approach the actual use, like get very close to using.

• 2:57:30Speaker 01

  He's already using Chernobyl, Zaporizhzhya and then usual Ukraine's the other.

• 2:57:37Speaker 01

  Nuclear reactors. So he's using civilian nuclear reactors as a dirty bomb. So, you know, it's ironic that he has Sergei Shoigu, his defense minister, calling people up to say, "Ukraine's are going to use a dirty bomb." They're already doing it. I mean, what is, you know, kind of more destructive than stirring up all the radioactive dust in Chernobyl as you send your troops through, you know, for example, or shelling, you know, the Chernobyl plant and the sarcophagus and putting it at risk. And Zaporizhzhya, you've got the International Atomic Energy Agency running out there in utter panic and, you know, kind of also trying to intervene in the conflict. So you're putting, you know, civilian nuclear reactors at risk. I mean, that also has a great added effect of cutting off Ukraine's power supply because

• 2:58:18Speaker 01

  Zaporizhzhya in particular, it was, what was it, a third of Ukraine's power generation or some, you know, really high percentage. I'll have to go back and, you know, take a look at that. But that's a twofer. You know, it's a kind of a double effect there of undermining power generation, also frightening Germans and others who've already been very worried about nuclear power and, you know, increasing your leverage on the energy front, but also scaring people from the perspective of the use of nuclear weapon. Those reactors also become a nuclear weapon tactically deployed. And as you said, the discussion of using a nuclear weapon and engendering all those fears. And he's already got an effect. Everyone's running around talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis and secret

• 2:59:03Speaker 01

  diplomacy and how we negotiate away Ukraine in return for Putin not blowing up a nuclear weapon. So he's got a lot of people obviously talking about that.

• 2:59:10Lex Fridman?

  So, sorry for the difficult and dark question. It could be for you directly or more like, do you think we have a plan for this? What happens if he does drop a nuclear weapon? Do you have a sense that the United States has a good plan?

• 2:59:32Speaker 01

  I know we're talking about it. I think we probably have several plans because it depends on what, where, when, how.

• 2:59:40Lex Fridman?

  But that don't, and also don't these things happen very quickly?

• 2:59:45Speaker 01

  Well, there's also signaling and signs and signs of of movement there. I mean, I want to be very, you know, kind of careful about this. But then the thing is, it's also very important that we do this with other nuclear powers. So the other thing that's different from how it might have been in the past, and particularly different from the Cuban missile crisis, near missile crisis, we're not the only nuclear players. China, I mean, has a major nuclear arsenal now, less on the strategic side, but building it up, but very much on the intermediate range and tactical. Kim Jong-un is firing off weapons left, right, and centre at the moment in North Korea. We've got other rogue states. Putin's behaving like a rogue state, just to be very clear. And this is what we've got with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. We've also got India and Pakistan, and we've got other states we're

• 3:00:30Speaker 01

  not supposed to talk about that we know have nuclear capacities and others that would like to have nuclear capacity. And the whole question here is about also proliferation. Getting back to that time when Ukraine had nuclear weapons, at least there on its territory in sort of Belarus and Kazakhstan, you've got to wonder, was it wise for them to give it up? We were worried about, you know, kind of loose nukes, nuclear weapons, you know, kind of getting out of hand. Proliferation at the time, we wanted fewer nuclear powers. Russia wanted that too. Now we're going to have more. We've got more. And what Putin is saying is, well, that was stupid of Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons. In fact, my colleagues and I, back in our report and back in the US, kind of suggest they shouldn't give them up. And then that's why we had the Budapest memorandum. That's why the United

• 3:01:15Speaker 01

  States, the United Kingdom in particular, have, you know, basically some responsibility and obligation going back to 1994, when they promised Ukraine that gave up the nuclear weapons, that territorial integrity and sovereignty would remain intact, some obligation to actually do something to step up. If we step back from that, this is the thing that people are not talking about. You know, what about nuclear proliferation? If you're South Korea or Japan, you know, you're any other country that's kind of worrying about your neighbors, um, and you know, what might happen to you? And just like India and Pakistan are both like, whoa, you know, we've got to kind of keep our strategic nuclear balance here. Everything is up for question. Saudis will want a nuclear weapon. The Turks already want one. They've talked about one for years. You know, why should the Iranians be the only one with an Islamic nuclear weapon?

• 3:01:59Speaker 01

  You know, and if, if we know that, you know, Iran has breakout capacity now, the Saudis and all the other, you know, states that are in opposition to Iran will also want to have some nuclear capacity. And the United States before wanted to maintain everything under the nuclear umbrella. You know, one of the reasons why Sweden and Finland are joining NATO is because of suddenly all of these nuclear threats. Sweden was actually the last country on the planet to want to have nuclear weapons. They were actually pushing for a ban on nuclear weapons, the United Nations. Now that Putin's doing the nuclear saber rattling, you know, they're talking about joining and on the verge of joining a nuclear alliance. You know, see what, what's happening here. So we have to make it more and more difficult for Putin to even contemplate that.

• 3:02:42Speaker 01

  That's why people are saying this is reckless, this is irresponsible. Putin is actually making the world less safe for himself down the line either, but he's thinking short term here. He's thinking, what can I do? What do I actually have? You can also destroy lots of infrastructure as he's doing. You can use subversion, you know, we're worried about all of the undersea cables, all these weird things happening, you know, off Orkney or in the Mediterranean or, you know, all these other things that are happening, Nord Stream two, pipelines, other infrastructure. There's all kinds of other things that you can do as well here. It's not just, you know, again, this is civilian nuclear threat of blowing up, you know, one of the reactors. Now it's got to be sure about where the wind turns and the wind blows. And there's all kinds of things to, you know, factor in here, but Putin is definitely sitting

• 3:03:27Speaker 01

  around calculating with other people, what can I do to turn this around? I mean, he still thinks that he can win this. Or in other words, he can, or he can end it in, on his terms. Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhya.

• 3:03:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, capitulation or recognize as being part of Russia.

• 3:03:52Speaker 01

  Oh, he can freeze it and then, you know, kind of figure out where it goes from there. What other pressure he can put on. I mean, I'm sure he's confident he can get rid of Zelensky. And and he can prevail over us. I mean, look, I mean, the UK is going through prime ministers, you know, faster than I'm changing my socks, you know, so it's like, you know, he can, he can, you know, prevail on the, you know, basically, he can, he can have an impact on the political scene in Europe and elsewhere. I mean, again, everyone's talking about winter coming and I know Putin's thinking, yeah, great, I've, you know, destroyed the infrastructure of Ukraine.

• 3:04:26Lex Fridman?

  Are you worried about the winter?

• 3:04:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but I mean, look, the other thing is that we have to start preparing. I mean, we have to start thinking about this. We've got a wartime economy situation. That's where we are. We've got the home front to think about as well. Putin has declared war on us. He did that on September 30th and so he's done it at other points as well. We've just not paid attention. But he pretty was pretty explicit in September 30th. I mean, go back and watch that speech. And, you know, he is gambling that, you know, people will go back, you know, to basically taking Russian gas and oil, but it's not going to be that simple as well. And do people, and then, you know, the question has to be, do we really kind of think he's going to play fair after that? When he's kind of also shown that he can leverage that.

• 3:05:12Lex Fridman?

  It's such a complicated world.

• 3:05:14Speaker 01

  It is complicated. It's very complicated.

• 3:05:16Lex Fridman?

  It's never, I mean, this, it feels like things are heating up, like, and China is very quiet right now.

• 3:05:26Speaker 01

  Because they're watching what happens. I mean, for President Xi, you know, he's trying to consolidate his power even further after the party congress, but he doesn't want to look like he made a mistake by backing Putin. I mean, he thought Putin was also going to be in, out and Ukraine would probably be open for massive Chinese investment. China was the largest investor in Ukraine before the war. Largest single investor. I mean, the EU was bigger, of course.

• 3:05:54Lex Fridman?

  How do you hope the war ends in Ukraine?

• 3:05:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I I do hope it ends, you know, with a ceasefire and a negotiated solution, but it has to be with Russia compromising on something. And that's not where we are right now.

• 3:06:08Lex Fridman?

  Do you think both sides might be willing to compromise?

• 3:06:13Speaker 01

  Most wars always end in that way. I mean, nobody's ever happy.

• 3:06:16Lex Fridman?

  But they don't seem to, either side, like legitimately doesn't want to compromise right now.

• 3:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, I mean, look, the thing is that for Ukraine, right now, anything is a compromise at its expense, right? Vast devastation, unbelievable casualty rates, biggest refugee crisis since World War Two. Russia's just said, sorry, this is our territory, it's not just Crimea. I think there could have been a negotiation over there. But, you know, Donetsk and Lukansk, I mean, we've got all kinds of formulas we've had all the way through history of, you know, putting things under a kind of guardianship, receivership of territory, the United Nations, all kinds of different ways of formulating that. We could have easily been creative, but Russia's basically saying, no, sorry, we've taken this. And any other, any negotiation is just you recognizing this for us not doing more destruction.

• 3:07:06Speaker 01

  I mean, that is not the basis for a negotiation. And, you know, having, you know, kind of people come and just sort of laying those terms down is not a starting position. I think Russia is also, you know, in a, in a dilemma of its own making now, because Putin has made it very difficult, you know, to compromise just by everything that he's said. Now, for Ukraine, they've already won a great moral, political and military victory. It's just hard to see it, right? At the particular moment. They've done what the Finns did in the Winter War, which the Finns were devastated by the Winter War as well, but they pushed them back. Now, the Finns lost a lot of territory, they lost Karelia and, you know, huge spheres of territory, but they got to be Finland.

• 3:07:49Speaker 01

  And now they're, you know, joining NATO, but they've been part of the EU. The question is how to. You know, get Ukraine to be Ukraine in a success.

• 3:08:00Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:08:01Speaker 01

  But, you know, is, and that's the challenge. Now, again, they've already won psychologically, politically, militarily, because Putin hasn't succeeded in what he wanted to do, but he has succeeded in completely and utterly devastating them. And this is the kind of the old Muscovite, the old Russian imperial, old silver mentality, you know, going all the way back to when the Muscovites were the bagmen for the, you know, the horde, the, for the Mongols. It was destruction. You know, you don't play with us, we'll destroy you. You know, people talk about it as mafia, but it's older, you know. All you have to go does is go and see Tarkovsky's Andrey Rublev. I mean, I remember, you know, seeing that film when I was first as a student in Moscow and just

• 3:08:40Speaker 01

  being, whoa, this is so brutal. I mean, this is just unremittingly brutal, because the whole point is that you show people who's the boss. The destruction is the point of things as well, because, you know, you are emphasizing your domination. And that's what Putin is doing right now, is saying, okay, you want to go in a different direction, so be it, but I'm going to make you suffer. Remember when Hodokovsky got out of the penal colony when Putin let him out eventually?

• 3:09:16Lex Fridman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:09:16Speaker 01

  He said he's suffered enough. But he suffered for ten, eleven years. I don't think Putin feels that Ukraine has suffered enough at this point, or we have suffered enough.

• 3:09:27Lex Fridman?

  So there's a part of this invasion that's punishment for something.

• 3:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's medieval. I mean, look, we're all capable of the same things, right? There was all that destruction and that's what Assad was like in Syria, like his father. He destroyed because he'd teach them a lesson. And look, Britain did that in the colonial era. I mean, all the history of British colonialism is exactly the same. I mean, all the Mao-Mao, you know, and Kenya, you know, up until recent times, brutality. Teaching people, you know, you have to, teaching them a lesson, you have to suffer. The US did it. I mean, we did it with the Native Americans, you know, did it all over the place, you know, as well. This is kind of what big, you know, states do.

• 3:10:08Speaker 01

  At different points in history, just that, you know, Russia has not moved on from that. And we've learned some lessons later, I hope, you know, we've fully internalized them of, you know, things that we've done, you know, kind of the past United States. Ideally, you're trying to do better and most of Europe's trying to do better as well. Think about France and Algeria, you know, again, you know, we can see this in many different settings. But I think, you know, for Putin right now, he hasn't taught all of us sufficient a lesson.

• 3:10:34Lex Fridman?

  I just, I talked to hundreds of people in Ukraine and the tough thing, the inspiring thing is that there's a unity, the tough thing is a lot of them speak intensely of hate towards not just Russia, but Russians, Russians.

• 3:10:52Speaker 01

  That's how Europeans felt about Germany and Germans at the end of World War Two.

• 3:10:57Lex Fridman?

  And generational hate, like, I don't think that hate is gonna pass.

• 3:11:04Speaker 01

  Well, it might, it might well take a generation. I mean, I, when I was a kid in the seventies, I went on exchanges to Germany. And that was like, you know, thirty years, more than thirty years after the end of the war. My grandfather, who'd fought in World War One, wouldn't speak to my parents when they sent me on a,

• 3:11:22Speaker 01

  I mean, he hadn't fought in World War Two, he fought in World War One, he hated the Germans. And he, and he did not want me going, you know, to Germany as an exchange student. He refused to meet, you know, kind of the German kid who, you know, came to stay at my house. You know, for example, I mean, it takes a long time to, it takes a long time to get over that. But, but you do, I mean, and we have, we have in Europe. And that was the whole point of, you know, all of that kind of exercise of European unity after World War Two. Now, the big challenge is, what do we do with Russia? Because a lot of people are talking now, we can't have European security without Russia. Other people are saying, we can't have a Europe, you know, kind of with Russia. You know, so how do we deal with this?

• 3:12:02Speaker 01

  We, we've got a basically kind of, it's gonna be like Japan and Germany after World War Two, after this. Just the level of the atrocities that have been carried out, as you said, the level of hatred.

• 3:12:15Speaker 01

  But we found a way of doing it.

• 3:12:18Speaker 01

  Now, a lot of it will require change on the part of Russia as well, and Russians, and really thinking about this. I mean, Gorbachev before tried to do in the late nineteen eighties with the black spots in, with Glasnost, with openness and talking about Russian history, just kind of never sort of withered on the vine as time went on.

• 3:12:40Lex Fridman?

  What gives you hope about the future?

• 3:12:43Speaker 01

  Well, my hope comes into the fact that we've done things before, that we've got ourselves out of tough times and we've overcome stuff. And in people, because I meet amazing people. You just talked about hundreds of people that you've met within Ukraine. And, you know, people all think differently, contexts and circumstances change, and people can evolve. Some people get stuck, Putin's got stuck, but people can evolve. And, you know, I do think that if we all pull together, and we've seen this in so many contexts, we can find solutions to things. Just like we get back again to our discussion about scientists and just the kind of amazing breakthroughs of, you know, what we did on Covid or done on, you know, kind of other, you know, diseases and things.

• 3:13:24Speaker 01

  And, look, there is some similarities, there's the pathology around war and conflict. Years ago, in the nineteen nineties, I worked on, you know, a lot of the projects that were funded by the Carnegie Corporation of the United States under the then presidency of David Hamburg, who was a scientist. And I actually did see a lot of parallels between the sort of like the pathology of disease and, you know, kind of the pestilence, you know, conflict kind of idea. And of course, these, you know, parallels, I had to be very careful because, you know, they're not neat. But there was kind of like an idea in there, and how do you sort of treat this? How do you deal with this? And we did come up with all kinds of ideas and, you know, things that are still out there.

• 3:14:05Speaker 01

  We've created institutions that have helped to keep the peace. We just have neglected them, allowed them to degrade, just like the United Nations. And, you know, we've created problems inside them, like the veto power of the permanent powers on the.

• 3:14:21Speaker 01

  UN Security Council, but we can change that. You've just got to have a will. And I do think out there, there are sufficient people with a will. And we've just got to get people mobilized. I mean, I'm always amazed by how people can mobilize themselves around a crisis. Remember Winston Churchill, I don't quote all the time because I can never remember half his quotes. But I do remember the one about never let a good crisis go to waste. And I always think that that, you know, yeah, that we should, we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste. And something else can come out of this, just like in Ukraine, that we worried before about corruption in Ukraine, the influence of the oligarchs, we've got our own oligarchs here in the US we need to, you know, deal with as well. But this is a chance to do it differently. Yeah, it really is a chance to do things differently.

• 3:15:03Lex Fridman?

  And a part of that is young people. I have to ask you.

• 3:15:07Speaker 01

  It is young people. I mean, I'm feeling a bit on the older side now, but I still feel I've got, you know, a bit of, you know, kind of youth within me yet. At fifty seven, I'm not that old, but I'm not that young. But we have to work together with younger and older people.

• 3:15:17Lex Fridman?

  You remind me.

• 3:15:18Speaker 01

  Together in coalitions of, you know, across generations.

• 3:15:21Lex Fridman?

  You remind me of, of, of kids who just graduated college and say, and I, I'm, I feel old. So, yeah, no.

• 3:15:29Speaker 01

  I don't actually feel old, but it is a number age. And, you know, when, you know, you kind of think about when I was.

• 3:15:34Lex Fridman?

  I thought you don't like math.

• 3:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know, things like that, yeah. But I find it interesting. But, you know, when I was, I remember when I was a little kid, I kept thinking about the year 2000. And I thought, oh, my God, I'll be dead, I'll be thirty five.

• 3:15:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:46Speaker 01

  Twenty two years ago.

• 3:15:48Lex Fridman?

  You've overcome a lot of struggle in your life, based on different reasons, as you write about. Class being one of them, your funny sounding accent being another, or just representation of class. But in general, through all of that, to be at the White House, to be one of the most powerful voices in the world, what advice would you give from grounded in your life story to somebody who's young, somebody who's in high school and college, thinking of how they can have a big positive impact on the world?

• 3:16:27Speaker 01

  Look, we all have a voice, right? We all have agency. We all actually have the ability to do something. And you can, you know, start small in your local community or, you know, even in your own classroom, just helping, you know, somebody else out or speaking up and advocating on behalf of things. You know, when I was, I was like about eleven years old, I got involved with other kids on Save the Whales. You know, we had all this, you know, kind of, we were hardly Greta Sundberg, but we, you know, we kind of got together in a kind of network, writing to people and, you know, trying to raise money to, you know, help save the whales. Now, actually, the whales of the world are doing somewhat better. I can't say that that was because of me and my network. But, you know, it was kind of a way of organising and, you know, kind of joining in at a, in a larger movement. Everybody can be part of something bigger.

• 3:17:11Speaker 01

  The, the thing is, is it's all about working together with others and giving other people a chance as well. I think, you know, one thing is that our voices have more impact when they're amplified. They don't have to be the voices of Discord or the voices of hate. Uh, you know, you've been, you know, trying to do this with your podcast, you know, kind of give people a voice, give them a kind of platform. And, you know, get them to join in with other people. And, you know, one of the things that I've been trying to do is, you know, kind of go and talk to just as many people as I possibly can and say, look, you know, we can all do something here. We can all, you know, lend our voices to a cause that we care deeply about. We can be kind to each other. We can give other people a chance. We can kind of speak out when we see that, you know, something is wrong. And we can try to, you know, explain things to people.

• 3:17:56Speaker 01

  And, and what I'm trying to do at the moment is just sort of explain, you know, what I've learned about things and, you know, hope that that helps people make informed judgements of their own and that, you know, kind of maybe take things further and learn something more. It's like kind of like building up on, you know, the knowledge, you know, that, that I have, you know, to try to impart to others. And everybody can do that different ways. You can kind of write, reach back. Yeah, if you're fourteen, help somebody use seven. If you're twenty-one, help somebody use fourteen. You know, kind of if, in, you know, the kind of, uh, my age now, I'm always trying to, you know, reach back and, you know, work with, uh, younger people, listen to younger people, help them out, make connections, uh, for them.

• 3:18:34Speaker 01

  Listen to what they have to say about something, try to incorporate that and, you know, things that I'm saying as well. The, the main point is that we've all got a voice, we've all got agency. And it always works better when we work together with other people.

• 3:18:45Lex Fridman?

  But sometimes it can feel pretty hopeless. It can feel, I mean, there's low points. You, you seem to have a kind of, uh, restless energy, a drive to you. Were there low points in, in the beginning when, um?

• 3:19:03Lex Fridman?

  In your early days, when you're trying to get the education where it may have not been clear to you that you could be at all successful.

• 3:19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there always, there always were. I mean, there were lots of points where I was just despondent. But then, you know, I'd meet somebody who would just suddenly turn things around. I was this luck or was I out there looking for it? You know, sometimes, you know, you're just, if you're open and receptive to, you know, kind of hearing something from someone else. I mean, I, you know, there were often times where I felt so despondent, you know, in such a black mood, I didn't think I'd be able to go on. And then I'd have a chance conversation with somebody. I mean, I once remember, you know, I was sitting on a bench, I was probably eleven or twelve, just crying my eyes out, just really upset. And an old lady just came and sat next to me, put her arm around me, said, oh, it's all right, pet. What's the matter? You know, it can't be that bad, can it? And it was just this human embrace. It's like somebody, you know, just basically reaching

• 3:19:55Speaker 01

  out to me that snapped me out of it. And I thought, you know, here's somebody just, you know, she didn't know who I was. She just felt really bad that I was, you know, sitting, you know, crying. And I mean, I can't even remember what it was about anymore. You know, now it just seems inconsequential. At the time, I probably thought my life was at an end. Just, you know, sometimes people making eye contact with you in the street and saying something to you can kind of pull you out of something. And, you know, it's kind of a, I think you just have to open yourself up to the prospect that not everyone's bad. Just like you were saying before, that there's, you know, good in everybody, even during, you know, that really difficult period of impeachment. You know, I was trying to listen very carefully to people. And I thought, we always, we still have something in common here. We need to remember that. You know, kind of when people are kind of

• 3:20:40Speaker 01

  forgetting who they are, or, you know, the context in their operating, there's always something that can, you know, can pull you back again. There's always that kind of thread.

• 3:20:49Lex Fridman?

  So I'm sure you were probably attacked by a lot of people. And you were still able to keep that optimism that.

• 3:20:58Speaker 01

  Well, I kept it into kind of perspective. Like when I was a kid, I mean, you know, things were going to be fine. I got bullied, you know, kind of, again, and I tried to understand, why are they doing this? One of the most amazing things that happened, you know, really on was my, my dad was a pretty incredible person and he would always open my eyes to something. I was getting bullied really nastily by a girl at school. And my dad started asking me questions about her. And one day, my dad said, we're gonna go for a walk. And my town's very small. Remember, it's very depressed, really, you know, deprived area. And we go to this housing estate, public housing place that's not too far away from where I live. And it's really, you know, kind of one of the most rundown places and already rundown place. My dad like knocks on the door and I said, what are we doing dad?

• 3:21:41Speaker 01

  And he says, well, we're going off to, you know, we're gonna visit somebody, an old family friend. I think even, you know, a distant relative knocking on the door. This old man answers the door and he's, oh Alfie. My dad's name was Alf Alfie, you know, kind of, oh, fancy seeing you here. I haven't seen you. Come on in, have a cup of tea. What are you doing? He said, oh, I'm just walking past my daughter. We're going for a trip. There we're going for, going for a walk. And then suddenly I see that girl and she's in the kitchen. And I'm thinking, oh my God, bloody hell, you know, British expression, what's this? And it turns out that dad had figured out who she was. And he knew her grandfather and she was living with her grandfather and she'd been abandoned by her parents. And she was living in, you know, pretty dire circumstances and she'd been getting raised by a grandfather and she was just miserable.

• 3:22:25Speaker 01

  And the reason she was bullying me was to make herself feel better.

• 3:22:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:29Speaker 01

  And after that, she never bullied me again. I mean, we didn't even talk. Cause there was a connection made and suddenly she realized that her grandfather, who was the only person she had, knew my dad and there was some, they were friends or they were even family, some, you know, kind of relationship there. I mean, I, I was related to half north of England. I had no idea how we were related, you know, everybody was some relative. Cause people have lived there for generations together in this very small area. And that turned things around. So just remember you might have, and that's kind of suddenly talked to me, there's always a reason why somebody's doing something. A lot of the times they're really unhappy with themselves. Sometimes there's something else going on in their lives. Sometimes they just don't know any better. And I shouldn't take it personally because I don't have a personal connection with half these people who are up there saying that they want this and that to happen to me.

• 3:23:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, thank you for the kindness and empathy you still carry in your heart. I can see it through all the, you must have gone through in the, in the recent couple of years. It's really inspiring to see that. And thank you for everything you've done, for the work you've written, for the work you continue to write and to do. This seems like a really, really difficult time for human civilization on a topic that you're a world expert in. So don't mess it up.

• 3:23:39Speaker 01

  No, I know. But that's how I say to everybody out there, let's just, let's just keep it together, right?

• 3:23:43Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 3:23:44Speaker 01

  Let's just keep it together.

• 3:23:45Lex Fridman?

  Your words have a lot of power right now. So it's a, it's a really, really tricky time. So thank you so much, given how valuable your time is to sit down with me today. It was an honor.

• 3:23:55Speaker 01

  No, thanks, thanks. No, it's a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you as well. No, thank you.

• 3:23:59Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Fiona Hill. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from John Steinbeck. Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts. Perhaps the fear of the loss of power. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.