#286 – Oliver Stone: Vladimir Putin and War in Ukraine

Oliver Stone is a filmmaker with 3 Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations. His films include Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Scarface, JFK, Nixon, Alexander, W, Snowden, and documentaries where he has interviewed Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Novo: https://novo.co/lex – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour EPISODE LINKS: Oliver’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheOliverStone Chasing the Light (book): https://amzn.to/3ywb3J2 A Bright Future (book): https://amzn.to/3yvuGAX 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 (09:35) – Nuclear power (22:33) – Russia and US relations (27:48) – JFK and the Cold War (33:05) – Interviewing Putin (56:44) – Invasion of Ukraine (1:06:01) – Why Putin invaded Ukraine (1:20:25) – Propaganda (1:27:43) – Interviewing Putin in 2022 (1:34:59) – Nuclear war (1:41:09) – Advice on interviewing (1:44:50) – Interviewing Hitler (1:48:11) – Putin interview language barrier (1:49:22) – Love (1:51:17) – Advice to young people (1:54:23) – Mortality (1:55:25) – Regrets (1:57:22) – Meaning of life

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 Oliver Stone. He's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time with three Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations. His films tell stories of war and power, fearlessly and often controversially, shining a light on the dark parts of American and global history. His films include Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Scarface, JFK, Nixon, Alexander, W, Snowden, and documentaries where he has interviewed some of the most powerful and consequential people in the world, including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin. And in this conversation, Oliver and I mostly focus our discussion on Vladimir Putin,

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  Russia, and the war in Ukraine. My goal with these conversations is to understand the human being before me, to understand not just what they think, but how they think, to steel man their ideas, and to steel man the devil's advocate, all in service of understanding, not derision. I have done this poorly in the past. I'm still struggling with this, but I'm working hard to do better. I believe the moment we draw lines between good people and evil people will lose our ability to see that we're all one people in the most fundamental of ways, and lose track of the deep truth expressed by the old Solzhenitsyn line that I return to time

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  and time again, that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. Oliver Stone has a perspective that he extensively documents in his powerful controversial series, The Untold History of the United States, that imperialism and the military-industrial complex paved the path to absolute power and thus corrupt the minds of the leaders and institutions that wield it.

• 1:56Lex Fridman?

  From this perspective, the way out of the humanitarian crisis and human suffering in Ukraine and the way out from the pole of the beating drums of nuclear war is not simple to understand, but we must, because all of humanity hangs in the balance. I will talk to many people who seek to understand the way out of this growing catastrophe, including to historians, to leaders, and perhaps most importantly, to people on the ground in Ukraine and Russia. Not just about war and suffering, but about life, friendship, family, love, and hope. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

• 2:39Lex Fridman?

  We got Novo for banking, Blinkist for nonfiction, Simply Save for security, ExpressVPN for privacy, and NetSuite for efficiency. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I hate those, frankly. I try to make these ads here interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Novo, which is a business banking app. The process is simple. You sign up, they'll mail you a Novo debit card, and you get free ATM use. Who doesn't love free ATM use?

• 3:20Lex Fridman?

  And the flip side of that, who doesn't hate ATM fees? Frankly, if there's any industry that needs to be disrupted, it's the old school banking industry. So I'm really glad that Novo exists. It needed to be done, it needs to be done. I'm glad somebody's doing it. Novo is backed by FDIC insurance, that's important. There's no hidden fees, unlike traditional banks. No monthly fees or minimum balance requirements. It's easy to use mobile apps, great customer service, free transfers, mail checks, and incoming wires. Integrates with other small business tools like Stripe, Shopify, QuickBooks, and more. Refunds all ATM fees, like I said before. Get your free business checking account in just 10 minutes at novo.co/lex.

• 4:05Lex Fridman?

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• 4:16Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I can recommend so, so many books on there. Sapiens, one of the great nonfiction books of all time is there. Even greater than that is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Beginning of Infinity by David Doach. Probably the most recommended book to me by friends and colleagues and so on. There's a lot more. All the biggest, most impactful nonfiction books are on there. So if you don't have time to read all of said books, you just want the summaries, great. If you already read it and you want to remind yourself as to the key insights,

• 5:01Lex Fridman?

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• 5:23Lex Fridman?

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• 6:04Lex Fridman?

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• 6:49Lex Fridman?

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• 7:33Lex Fridman?

  That's why for many years I've used and loved ExpressVPN. You can go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod. This show is also brought to you by NetSuite. NetSuite allows you to manage financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, and many more business-related details, all in one place. Running a company is tough. It's like a factory floor. There's so, so many components that don't involve the sort of brilliant innovation or the cutting edge of the design and the engineering or the product and the customer

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• 8:59Lex Fridman?

  You can head to NetSuite, that's N E T S U I T E dot com slash Lex to get their one of a kind financing program. That's netsuite dot com slash Lex, netsuite dot com slash Lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Oliver Stone.

• 9:35Lex Fridman?

  You're working on a documentary now about nuclear energy.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:40Lex Fridman?

  So it's interesting to talk about this. Energy is such a big part of the world, about geopolitics of the world, about the way the world is. What do you think is the role of nuclear energy in the 21st century?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Good question. And first of all, obviously, everyone's talking about climate change, right? So here I wake up to that a few years ago and clearly were concerned. I picked up a book by Josh Goldstein and his, his co-author, who's Swedish. Those two wrote a book called Bright Future, A Bright Future. It came out a few years ago and I lapped it up. It was a book fact-based, clear, not too long and not too technical. And it was very clear that they were in favor of all kinds of renewables, renewable energy, yes.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  They hated, made it very clear how dangerous oil and gas were, methane, and made it very clear to the layman like me. And at the same time, said that this renewables can work so far, but the gap is enormous as to what, how much electricity this kind, the world is going to need in 2050 and beyond. Two, three, four times, we don't even know the damage. But we have India, we have China, we have Africa, we have Asia coming on to the scene wanting more and more electricity. So they address the problem as a global one, not just as often in the United States, you get the ethnocentric United States point of view that we need, we know, we're doing well, blah, blah, blah.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  We're not doing well, but we, we, we sell that to people that we're comfortable, we spend more energy than anybody, this country, per capita than anybody. And at the same time, we don't seem to understand the global picture. So that's what they did, and they made me very worried. So the only way to close that gap, the only way in their mind, is nuclear energy. And talking about a gap of building a huge amount of reactors over the next 30 years, and starting now. They make that point over and over again. So obviously, this country, the United States, is not going to go in that direction, because it just is incapable with it of having that kind of will, political will.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And fear is a huge factor. And still, a lot of chibelles, a lot of myths about nuclear energy have confused and confounded the landscape. The environmentalists have played a huge role in doing good things, many good things, but also confusing and confounding the landscape and making accusations against nuclear energy that were exaggerated. So taking all these things into consideration, we set about making this documentary, which is about finished now, almost finishing, it's an hour and 40 minutes, and that was the hard part, getting it down from about three and a half hours to about this, something more manageable and- Is it interviews?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  It's interviews, among others, but essentially, we went to Russia, we went to France, which is the most perhaps advanced nuclear country in the world, Russia.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  And the United States, we went to the Idaho laboratory and talked to the scientists there, as well as the Department of Energy people that are handling this. Idaho is one of the experimental labs in the United States, it's probably one of the most advanced, and they're doing a lot of advanced nuclear there. We also, we studied, well, Russia gave us a lot of insight. We're very cooperative, because they have some of the most advanced nuclear, actually the probably most advanced nuclear reactor in the world, at Belarusk, at the Ural Mountains. So we did an investigation there. And in France, they have, they have some very advanced nuclear reactors, and they're building. Now they're building again.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  They had, the Green Party came into power, just not into power, but became a factor in France, and there was a motion, when Hollande was president, they started to move away from it. Actually, they were beginning to just abandon, they let, not complete their, in other words, let, close down some of the nuclear reactors, there was talk of that, but thank God, France did not do that, and Macron came in and recently reversed it, reversed it, and they're building as fast as they can now, especially with the Ukraine war going on. There's an awareness that Russia will not be providing, may not be providing the energy Europe needs. So, and then China is the other one, too. That's the other factor.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I'm talking about the big boys. They are doing tremendous work, and fast, which is very hopeful. But of course, China is building in all directions at once. Coal continues to be huge in China, and methane, too. But basically, coal, coal in India, in China, are the biggest users of coal. And we know, as you know, Germany went back to coal a few years ago. So all these factors, it's fascinating picture globally. So we try to achieve a consensus that where nuclear can work. And where it will be working, where it will be used more and more.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  The question is how much carbon dioxide China and Russia will be putting out. France is the only one that's not putting it out. The United States has not changed with all the talk and all the nonsense about renewables and the new lifestyle and all this. It's, it's great for your guilt complex, but it doesn't do anything for the total accumulation of carbon dioxide in the world.

• 15:29Lex Fridman?

  Who's going to lead the way on nuclear, do you think? You mentioned Russia, France, China, United States. Who's going to lead?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it's going to be a United Nations kind of thing because the world doesn't seem capable of uniting. We don't, we go to these conferences, Kyoto, and we talk and we agree, but then we don't actually enforce. I don't think it can happen that way. I think it's going to be an individual race with countries. They're going to just be, do it for their own self-interest, like China is doing it. China, the thing is, if it works, and I'm praying that it will really work on a big scale, China will back away from coal naturally. The same thing will be true of India. They will see the benefits because if you go to India, you see the cities, the pollution. You walk around in that stuff and you know, you get, it's not, there's no hope in this and you sense it.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  So people will move in this direction naturally because nuclear is clean energy. And the rate of casualties of nuclear is the lowest on the industrial scale for energy producing from coal down to oil, everything, the lowest casualty rate, very lowest, point zero zero two or something is nuclear. So not that many people have died from nuclear, not that many. I think 50 people at Chernobyl, which was the worst accident. Nobody had died at Fukushima. Nobody died at Three Mile Island. And that's what you hear all over and over again, these, these accidents. The environmentalists have sold us the idea that they're dangerous.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  And it's a lot of environmentalists, thank God, have changed it. They've come off that routine and they have saying this, we were wrong. We've done a lot of good work. Greenpeace did a lot of good work. Whale, whale, saving this, saving that. But they admit themselves, not they don't, but people who have been in the organization have said, we were wrong. In 1956, we show the, the articles in the New York Times that came out. The Rockefeller Foundation, which of course is a big producer of oil, the Rockefeller family. And the foundation came out with a study, which was weighted.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  They tipped the scale, put a thumb on the scale. But it was a scientific expose of radiation in the, in the, in the, in the study that came out in the, printed in the New York Times, because the New York Times publisher Sulzberger was on their board. He was one of the board members. So they got a lot of strong publicity condemning radiation from, which killed, started the process of doubting nuclear energy. The radiation levels that they pointed out were very minor. And of course, if you go into a scientific analysis of this now with what we know, it's just not true. But it tilted the scale back in the 50s, 60s and started the question, questioning the

• 18:35Speaker 01

  nuclear business.

• 18:37Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that was malevolence or incompetence?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  No, I think it was competition. I don't think it was conspiracy as much as it was a sense that we don't want this nuclear, nuclear energy is going to end the dominance of oil. Absolutely. And it will. And it will anyway, because it's the only sane way for the world to proceed. But the world will have to learn through adversity.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  So in other words, this situation could get worse, much worse. And certain countries are just gonna have to adapt like we always do. When things become too hard, you've got to go, you have to change your thinking.

• 19:14Lex Fridman?

  And humans are pretty good at that.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yes, talking about human nature, they're very adept at that. Germany, for example, I mean, they were, when the Fukushima happened, they went out of the nuclear business. That was shocking to me. They just pulled out and they destroyed, destructed several of their nuclear reactors that were still functioning and put up coal or, yeah, put up coal and oil, replaced it. And as a result, Germany drifted into this place next to France. Their electricity bills went up and France stayed the same. They don't have that, they have a different system in Europe, but you know, more or less, no question that France was doing a lot better than Germany.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And now, with this Ukraine issue, it's a very interesting fulcrum point, whether Germany is, what direction they're gonna go now? How can they, how can they keep going with coal? They just can't.

• 20:12Lex Fridman?

  What's the connection between oil, coal, nuclear and war? Sort of energy and conflict. Do you, when you look at the 21st century, when you were doing this documentary, were you thinking of nuclear as a way to power the world, but is it also to avoid conflict over resources? Is there some aspect to energy being a source of conflict that we're trying to avoid?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  I don't have the energy, the history of energy at my fingertips and it's a very long history here, but I would say in my, apparently not. It does seem that individually each country can answer its needs by building. And up until now, we haven't had conflict, except in this issue of Russia supplying Europe. The, the, obviously the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 has been closed and Nord Stream 1 is also probably gonna be phased out and.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  The concept of Russia supplying gas to Europe is now up in the air. And who knows what's gonna happen? I just don't see how Europe can get away from using Russian gas. But Russian gas is not the solution because it's methane, too. And it goes up into the atmosphere. Methane is, in the, in the short term, is just, is worse than coal. Worse. There's all kinds of charts we show in the film. We try not to be too over factual, but methane is not the answer. It's a short term answer. The...

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Will countries go to war over energy is, is a question that... I'm trying to think of all the wars that happened. You could say Germany, of course, during World War II needed oil very badly and they... It dictated their strategy.

• 22:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  With Romania, et cetera, and getting the oil fields open. But I don't really, I can't, I'm not, I haven't thought that one through. I'd have to make a documentary on it to really understand how energy and war interface.

• 22:28Lex Fridman?

  It's always part of the calculation, but it's a question of how much.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:32Lex Fridman?

  Right, that's the question. You've, I, I just have to ask, because you mentioned your mom was from France. You've traveled for this documentary and you traveled in general throughout the world. In Russia, Ukraine. What are the defining characteristics of these cultures? Let's, let's go with Russia. So I, you know, as, as I told you, I came from, I'm half Ukrainian, half Russian. I came from that part of the world. What are some interesting, beautiful aspects of the culture of Russia and Ukraine?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  I can't really speak honestly of Ukraine. I was there only in 1983, when I visited the Soviet Union under the communism. And I, Kiev was beautiful. It was one of the nicer places I went. But they were very much stultified by the communist system. They all were. The best places to visit in Russia were always in the south, whether Georgia or the Muslim countries. It was always a better culture in terms of comfort. But communism was rough and that was the end of it, pretty much. Brezhnev regime and then Andropov. Gorbachev was three years in the future when I was there.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  So I can't talk about Ukraine with, and they've, they're not been friendly to me since, of course, since I made the Putin interviews, you know, Ukraine has banned me, I believe. They've been very tough on people who are critical. I think the Russian people have been very special to me. I, and perhaps because of my European upbringing, but I, I enjoy talking to them. I find them very open, very generous and they appreciate support. They appreciate people who say, you know, I understand why your government is doing this or this or this. This is, I've tried to stay open minded and, and listen to both sides. The thing that I have seen as an American is of course, this American enmity towards Russia from the very beginning.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  I grew up in 1940, 46, I was born, in the 50s, it was, it was so anti-Russian. They were everywhere. They were in our schools, they were in our State Department, they were spying on us, they were stealing the country from us. That was the way the American right wing, not even the right wing, I'd say the Republican party, pictured the Russians. They were actively engaged in infiltrating America and changing our thinking. Yeah. And television shows were based on this. It was very much the J. Edgar Hoover mentality, that communism was even behind the student protests of the 1960s. This was the direction in which the FBI and the CIA were thinking.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  So I grew up with, with a prejudice and it took me many years. My father was a Republican and he was a stockbroker and he was a very intelligent man, but even he, because he was a World War II soldier, he was a colonel, had fallen under the influence. It had, in order to be successful in American business in the 1950s, you had to have a very strong anti, anti-Soviet line, very strong. You wouldn't get ahead if you expressed any kind of, let's end this Cold War, any kind of activity of that nature, you'd be cast aside as a, as a pinko or somebody who was... Not completely on the board with the American way of doing business, which was capitalism works, communism doesn't.

• 25:57Lex Fridman?

  And in particular communism is embodied by the Soviet Union is the enemy. So hence, hence.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the way you were.

• 26:09Lex Fridman?

  The narrative behind the Cold War.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  That's correct. And it basically lasted. I mean, you saw the ups and downs of it. When Reagan came in, I was, well, first of all, we had the crisis of 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis. And Kennedy proved himself to be a warrior for peace. He resolved that with Khrushchev. That was a big moment, huge moment. And people don't give him credit enough for, for really saving us from a war that could have, could have affected all of mankind.

• 26:40Lex Fridman?

  But it still didn't avert.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  No, because the moment he was killed, honestly, there was a lot of, we can talk about that. And as you know, I've made a film, JFK Revisited is a documentary we released this year about the movie I made in 1991. But with the moment he was killed, I would argue that Lyndon Johnson went back immediately to the old way of thinking, the old way of doing business, which was the Eisenhower, Truman way, since we, which we, which we had adapted since World War II. That was an interim. You have to think about it from Roosevelt dies in 45. Roosevelt has an interim of 16, 15 years where he, he has, he has more of a democratic regime, more liberal.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  He establishes, he recognizes the Soviet Union for the first time since the revolution. And he actually has a relationship with them. He sends ambassadors who are friendly and he wants, he has a relationship with Stalin, et cetera, and Yalta.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And, uh, no, Tehran, rather, is where he had the relationship.

• 27:49Lex Fridman?

  Do you think if JFK lived, we would not have a Cold War?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. I, and we go into great depth on that in the film, and I'd urge you to see it because it goes into all the issues around the world. Kennedy was being very much an anti-imperialist, it turns out, and many people just don't understand that. But you have to look at all his policies in Middle East with Nassar, he had a relationship with Sukarno in Indonesia, uh, with Latin America, he made a big effort with the Alliance for Progress. And, uh, when Africa, above all, with Lumumba, he was very shocked at his death and tried to defend the right, the integrity of the Belgian Congo with Dag Hammelsjod of the UN. He made a big effort. Unfortunately, it didn't work out because they were, Dag

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Hammelsjod was killed and then Kennedy was killed and Congo descended into the chaos of Joseph Mabutu's dictatorship. But Kennedy was very active in terms of, as an Irishman, not as an Englishman, he was an Irishman. And I say that because, well, we'll come back to that because Mr. Joe Biden is an Irishman, but it's a different kind of an Irishman. They're both Catholic Irish, but Kennedy really made an effort to change the imperialist mindset that it still was very strong in America and Europe. And Lyndon Johnson changed back to the old policy and we were never able to really keep the talk going with the

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Russians. Briefly had it with Carter, but then Brzezinski came in. Brzezinski was his national security advisor. He was put there by Rockefeller and Brzezinski was a Pole. He got revenge from Poland. Poland has always been attacking Russia as far as I remember, back to another century. I mean, the two world wars that occupied Russia and so tragically, uh, entry points were always through Poland and Ukraine. Uh, so, uh, Brzezinski got his revenge and Carter ended up being an enemy of the Soviet Union and creating, as Brzezinski took pride in it, he created the atmosphere, the trap for the Soviets to go into Afghanistan

• 30:00Speaker 01

  in 79. That trap was set, he says, he said in 1978.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  So there was never, except for brief moments, periods of détente with the Soviets. And I grew up under that. I didn't really know anything of this going on, because I was, I was learning, I was educating myself as I was going, learning movies and trying to be a dramatist and this and that. So I wasn't thinking about this. Then, when Reagan came in, I was worried again, because it was a beat, the old beat, which was there, the most evil empire. I mean, it goes on in American history, it doesn't end. Reagan got a lot of points for that. And of course, when Gorbachev came in, it was a beautiful moment for the world. It was a great surprise. It was probably the best years for America,

• 30:52Speaker 01

  at least from my point of view, in terms of this relaxation in the mood. 1986 to 1991 were great years in terms of ability to believe, once again, that there could be a peace dividend. But the world changed again in 1991, 92. There's an internal mechanism, who knows? You could blame, you can blame the United States, you could blame Russia for... Gorbachev was perhaps not the right man to try to administer that country at that point. He had great visions, he was a man of peace, but it was very difficult to hold together such a huge empire.

• 31:31Lex Fridman?

  So vision is not enough to hold together the Soviet Union?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  I think the details are interesting. I followed up on that a little bit, because I was recently in countries like Kazakhstan, talked about the negotiations that were going on and the breakup of the Soviet Union. It's a very interesting story, because it involves everything. Ukraine, of course, everything is going on now. Some, what is it, 30 million Russians were left outside of the Soviet Union when it collapsed. They had no home anymore. They were homes in other countries, such as in Ukraine. Uh, so it's an interesting story with repercussions today. Kazakhstan is a good example of keeping a balance, keeping it neutral.

• 32:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  He played both sides and he, because Yeltsin wanted him to join the Russian Confederation in a certain way where he'd be supporting against Gorbachev. There's a whole inward battle there. I think the Ukraine came along with Yeltsin as well as

• 32:41Speaker 01

  you'd have, I'm sorry, I don't remember now, but two other, two other regions came with him. And that was a block that broke up the Soviet Union. It was Yeltsin's plan to, and it was make the Russian Federation, and they did.

• 32:56Lex Fridman?

  I would love to return back to JFK eventually because he's such a fascinating figure in the history of human civilization, but let me ask you, fast forward in 2000, Yeltsin was no longer president and Vladimir Putin became president. You did a series of interviews with Vladimir Putin, as you mentioned, over a period of two years from 2015 to 2017. Let's, let me ask with a high level question. What was your goal with that conversation?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, came out in 2017. I guess I started him in 2014. At that point, the Snowden affair had happened and I was working on a movie on Snowden. That happened in 13. Ukraine happened in 14.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  And one thing after another, by 14, Putin was enemy number, again, becoming a wanted man on the American list. He was enemy, he was certainly in the top five or, uh, and, but the animosity towards Putin had been growing since 2007 at Munich. I remember that speech when he made it, uh, it's in my documentary. That's a four hour documentary, four different conversations. I mean, we talked over two years, two and a half years. But I remember that image of him at Munich making a very. Important speech about world harmony, about the balance necessary in the world. And I remember the sneer, the sneer on John McCain's face.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  He was in Munich, obviously eyeballing Putin and hating him. And it was so evident that McCain had no belief whatsoever that the, that this, he was almost treating him like these are the communists are back. And we know that Putin was not a communist. We know that Putin is very much a market man. And he made, he made it very clear and tried to keep an open climate, a new relationship with Europe. But the United States always, certain people in the United States always saw that as a threat, like Putin is trying to take Europe away from us as if we own it, as if we have the right to own it. But Putin was making the point, it's very important, about sovereignty. Sovereignty for countries is crucial for this new world to have balance.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  That's sovereignty for China, sovereignty for Russia, sovereignty for Iran, sovereignty for Venezuela, sovereignty for Cuba. This is an idea that's crucial to the new world, and I think the United States has never accepted that. Sovereignty is not an idea that they can allow. You have to be obedient to the United States idea of so-called democracy and freedom. But it's much more important is sovereignty for these countries. And the United States has not obeyed that, has not, has not even acknowledged it. And it never comes up.

• 35:54Lex Fridman?

  So from the perspective of the United States, when power centers arise in the world.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:00Lex Fridman?

  You start to oppose those, not because of the ideas, but because they have, merely because they have power.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Isn't that at the heart of the doctrine of the neoconservatives? In the new, the pact for the new American century, they wrote that in 1996, '07. They said, "There shall be no emergence of a rival power." It was very clear it was about power. And they have, they've stuck to that doctrine, which is if you, if you start to get dangerous in any way or have power, we're going to knock you out. Now, that won't work. I don't believe it can work. And that is fortunately a policy the United States is following. And the neoconservatives group, which is very small, but it's very strong apparently, and their idea has resonated. It was it was behind the George Bush's invasion of Iraq.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  It was part of not only Iraq, but cleaning out the whole world, draining the swamp, going to Afghanistan first. And then although Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda's attack, going after Iraq.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  And of course, sixty some other countries that where terrorism had some had some signs of wherever America judged would be a dangerous country, we had the right, you're either with us or against us. Now, that is a disastrous policy and led to one thing after another. The Iraq war never learned a lesson. The neoconservatives were never fired, never thrown out of office. The people who prosecuted that war are still around. Many of them are still around and they're they're obviously guiding America now.

• 37:41Lex Fridman?

  Let me return to this question of power.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Don't forget the sneer that I saw there. That emblemized the United States reaction. Also, there were several other American representatives who were laughing, kind of mocking Putin. It was very serious. I felt there was a divide there. So since then, I mean, in a certain sense, the Europe reaction to Putin is crucial. And they were they were more with him back then. And a big thing for America was always to keep NATO, to keep Europe in its pocket as a satellite. And with this recent war, of course, they've succeeded in all beyond their dreams. The Russians have fulfilled the fantasy of the United States

• 38:27Speaker 01

  to finally be this aggressor that they have pictured for years.

• 38:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  We can talk about that later.

• 38:32Lex Fridman?

  But at that time, there was Europe had significant support for Putin. And the United States was sneering at Putin.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  That's correct. You can say that.

• 38:44Lex Fridman?

  And then so there's this, it was.

• 38:51Lex Fridman?

  There was uncertainty as to the direction, as to the future of Russia. And that's exactly when you interviewed Vladimir Putin.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  I wanted to know what they thought because we couldn't get the the information war that the United States was fighting against Russia was in evidence back then. It was full out. The condemnation of Russia on all fronts. I never saw a positive article about Putin. And although when I traveled in the world and I traveled a lot doing documentaries, it was very clear in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, there was respect for him, that he was a man who was getting job, his job done in the interests of Russia. He was, as I said in the documentary, a son of Russia, very much so. In the positive sense, a son, a son of Russia, not that he's out there

• 39:41Speaker 01

  trying to destroy the interests of other, of other countries. No, that he was out there to sell, to provoke the interests of Russia. But at the same time, keep a balance, keep it, keep it, keep the world into a harmony. This has always been his picture. Peace was always his idea. In other words, he always referred to the United States in all these interviews as our partners. And I said, will you stop using that word? They're not.

• 40:07Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And he was a little bit slow in waking up to what the United States was doing.

• 40:12Lex Fridman?

  Well, that said, he's one of the most powerful men in the world. He was at that time. And let me ask you the human question. As the old adage goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Did you see any corroding effects of power on the man? Forget the political leader, on just the human being that carries that power on his shoulders for so many years.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Keep in mind that he's been, unlike most modern leaders, he's been in office off and on because there was a Medvedev as president and he was not. Literally in charge. He was, he was, he was, uh, he took another appointment at that point and he, but he was still very much involved. But for 20 years, more or less, he's been at the administrator of the state, the protector of the state. And he's apparently done a good enough job that the Russian people have kept him there. Because contrary to what many people think, I really believe that if the Russian people didn't want him, he would be out. I firmly believe that. I don't think you can let, you can go against the will of the people.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Now, it expresses itself in many ways, at the ballot box and so forth, but also in other ways in Russia. There's a strong currents of opinion. So contrary to what the, the, the position of him as a dictator, he wouldn't last if he was unpopular, number one. Number two, Russia is much more divided than people know. There's other factors in Russia. He is, there's, there are always tensions in, in, around the Kremlin, who, who has power, who doesn't have power. That's been going on for a hundred years. But the, the factions in Russia are very much there. So when people refer to Russia as Putin, they're, they're mistaken. And they do this regularly in the New York papers and all this.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  They say Putin did this, Putin did that, Putin's doing that. But it's Russia that's doing it. And that's what, uh, there's a distinction there that I, it's changed. In the old days, I would read about Khrushchev, but it was never Khrushchev personally. It was about the Soviet Union. Uh, there was respect for a country. And now, when it started to get personal with Putin, it, it changed. And the, our thinking changed in a, in a negative way. We, we no longer respected it as a country. We were seen as a man. And the man we had trashed repeatedly, repeatedly as a poisoner, as a murderer, and none of which has ever been proven, but which has always been repeated and repeated to the point

• 42:48Speaker 01

  at which it becomes like an Orwell mantra. It becomes like, he is, of course, a bad guy.

• 42:54Lex Fridman?

  Can I just ask you, as a great filmmaker, as a human being, what was it like talking to one of the most powerful men in the world?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Honestly, and I'm not naive, I've talked to a lot of powerful people. In the movie business, there are powerful people, and many of them are corrupted. I've talked to many people in my life, I've been in the military, I've seen, I've had other jobs. I have to say, I found him to be a human being. I just found him to be reasonable, calm. I never saw him lose his temper, and I mean, you have to understand that most people in the, most people in the Western way of doing business get emotional. I don't see that. I saw him as a balanced man, as a man who had studied this like you have. There's a calmness to you, that it comes from studying the world and having a rational response to it.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  His, his, it's interesting, his two daughters, one of them is very scientific, and the other one's doing very well in another profession, but they, they're thinking, they're a thinking family. His wife, too, was. I can't talk for the new wife, because I don't know about it, but he's, he kept his family with great respect. He's raised his, his daughters right. He served Yeltsin, the way he looked at it, he served Yeltsin well, and he, and he still, and he never trashed Yeltsin. Certainly, a lot of people did, but, you know, I asked him repeatedly, you know, was he an alcoholic, this or that, but he wouldn't even go that far, just respect. And this man, Yeltsin, was in, was in many ways ridiculed, but in, by the Russians, and

• 44:31Speaker 01

  he turned over the power because he felt like he was overwhelmed. He turned over the power to this man because, why? How many people had he fired before him? Several, several prime ministers, this, that. Why did he turn power over to Mr. Putin? Because he respected him for his work ethic and his balance, his maturity. And that's what I can say is I saw in him. A, a, a poor person, a poor, from a poor family, who worked his way up. Through the KGB, Americans keep saying he's a KGB agent, but it's like saying, you know, George Bush was a CIA agent, but you know, he became a, you grow, you grow in your life. And he went from this KGB to this technocratic position. He dealt with

• 45:14Speaker 01

  many problems, including the Chechen war, which was a very difficult situation, as well as the Russian submarine problem. Several things happened early in his, that gave him a lot of experience. And he handled them all pretty well.

• 45:30Lex Fridman?

  Do you think he was an honest man?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  I do. Now, of course, the question of money, the charge is that he's the richest man in the world, ludicrous, certainly doesn't live like it or act like it. If you're rich, I've been around a lot of rich people in my life. You'd probably have too. In America, you run into them. So many of them are arrogant.

• 45:49Lex Fridman?

  I'm actually good friends now with the richest man in the world.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. I saw your interview with Mr. Musk, who I appreciate. At least he speaks freely. I, I'm positive about him owning Twitter because Twitter has become censorship city, as has all the major tech. I mean, the censorship that we are now seeing in the United States is so un-American and shocking to me.

• 46:15Lex Fridman?

  And he is a resistance to that. That is true.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like, I like Musk for that, just for that only. But I also appreciate him, his adventuresome, his nature and his desire to, to explore the world and to ask questions.

• 46:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's certain ways you sound when you speak freely. There's certain ways you sound, a man sounds when he speaks freely.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:39Lex Fridman?

  And he speaks freely. And it's refreshing.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:43Lex Fridman?

  No matter whether you're rich or not, it doesn't matter. When you speak freely, it's a beautiful thing.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Actually, Musk, a major point on going back to nuclear energy, you know, he was, he never believed in it at first, apparently. He was going for batteries, right? And he did, put a lot of money into batteries. He made them bigger and bigger batteries. But it just, as Bill Gates has said, it's just, it's not going to get us there.

• 47:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  And now I think Musk is on another path. He understands the need for nuclear.

• 47:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he's a supporter of nuclear.

• 47:14Lex Fridman?

  We're jumping around.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Putin never asked for one thing, never. It was an interview, it was free form. Ask anything you want. No restrictions, no rules. As with Castro, frankly, Castro did the same thing as did Chavez. So I've had good luck in interviewing free-ranging subjects, people willing to express themselves. He's much more guarded than Castro or Chavez. Because, as you know, he's setting government policy when he speaks. And anything he says is going to be taken out of context.

• 47:45Lex Fridman?

  But there was no restrictions on what to talk about, none of that?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Nor any desire to see anything before we published it. No need to check it with them. It was completely...

• 47:58Lex Fridman?

  Do you think he watched the final product?

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Yes, I do, but I don't think he made judgments on it. I think he was pleased. He doesn't go either way. You see, he's pleased, I mean, it went well, he was happy for us. But I don't think he had great enthusiasm, expressed it to me. He trusted me, and you could see the way he dealt with me each time. He warmed up to me. Four times, you know, the first time it might have been a little stiff. You're asking, you don't know who you're dealing with and so forth. I understand that. But he's used to it now. He's done a lot of press. The worst press he's done, frankly, has been the American press. And not because of his fault, but because of the way they have treated him. If you look at the interviews, they're awful.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  They put, first of all, I noticed one thing as a filmmaker right away. They use a dub, an overdub. They put a Russian speaker for everything he says, who's much harsher. He speaks Russian in a much harsher manner than actually Putin does. Who's very, on my interview, I left him in his original language with translator. And I think that's important because he expresses himself very clearly and calmly. When you listen to the American broadcast, it's a belligerent person who looks like he's about to bang his shoe on the table. And secondly, the questions are highly aggressive from the beginning. There's no sense of rapport, there's no sense of, well, it's why, Mr. Putin, did you poison this person? Why, Mr. Putin, did you kill this person? Why are you a murderer?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it's blunt. Blunt negative television.

• 49:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's not just aggressive. So I obviously speak Russian, so I get to appreciate both the original and the translation. And it's not just aggressive, it's very shallow. They're not looking to understand. To me, aggression is okay if that's the way you want to approach it. But it should be, there should be underlying kind of empathy for another human being in order to be able to understand. And so the, some of the worst interviews I've ever listened to is by American press of Vladimir Putin. So NBC and all those kinds of organizations, it's very painful to watch.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  And you saw the reception to the Putin interviews in America was hostile without seeing it. So many people criticized my series without having seen it. Even, even, I went on a show, a television show with this famous Colbert, you know, he's very famous in America. And I was shocked on the show to find out that he hadn't seen anything of the four hours. He was just attacking Putin. And he threw me. I was complicit, therefore I was a, I was a Putin supporter. And he, the show, the show was a disaster. It's, it's one of my worst television shows. I actually, I had to, to shut up and get off the air. I mean, at some point, it was embarrassing. Because the audience too was clapping for Colbert on anything he said.

• 50:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, as an interviewer in that situation, because between you and Vladimir Putin, there was camaraderie, there was joking, there was, are you worried, do you put that into the calculation when you're making a film with somebody that could be lying to you, that could be evil? You talk about Castro, you talk about, so are you worried about how charisma of a man across the table from you can?

• 51:33Speaker 01

  No, I take that into account. I absolutely take that into account. I know, I mean, doing Castro is, he's a wonderful speaker, he's charismatic. So is Chavez. Look at those interviews. I took it into account. But Putin doesn't play that game. He doesn't charm you. He doesn't try to overwhelm you with his. Bon ami at all. He just said, I'll ask your question, I'll give you my answer straight. Here it is. And he analyzes it. This is the history of NATO. This is the history of our relationship with the United States. How many times have we tried to talk to them about such and such and such and such? And each time we get nowhere. In fact, it's a very. I would like to get along with the United States so much. He's saying it.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  He's saying it so clearly in all his words.

• 52:19Lex Fridman?

  So to play devil's advocate.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  But he's not making a big deal about it.

• 52:23Lex Fridman?

  But there is a charisma and a calmness.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yes, there is.

• 52:26Lex Fridman?

  So like, let's just calm everything down. It's simple facts. That you can.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:32Lex Fridman?

  You can, you can call. So there's like the Hitler thing, which is screaming, being very loud, charismatic, strong message and so on. And then there's a Putin style. I'm not comparing those two. There's the Putin style of communication of calmness.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:48Lex Fridman?

  And, and that, at least to me, my personality, that can be very captivating. Is bringing everything down. The facts are simple. But then when you say the facts are simple, you can now start lying. And you don't know what's true and what's lies.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  It behooves you to do some research.

• 53:04Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And frankly, when coming to research, you're going to have a problem. Because if you go to the Americanized versions of Russian history, you're going to run into a problem. And that includes even Wikipedia. They will tell you things that are just not factually supported. So it was a problem in terms of. If you read all the books in the American library about Putin, there's nothing positive about it. They're awful. They're awful. And a lot of them, I had a good relationship with Professor Stephen Cohen, who's the most, I think, one of the most informed men on Russia. He'd done a lot of research all his life and knew Gorbachev very well.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And was very analytical about all these situations that happened before his death in 2019. I'm not quite sure when Stephen died, but I knew him well. And he was the, he gave me the best information I could get. I would go to Stephen and I'd say. I'm confused here. Tell me the history of this accusation of poisoning against this person and so forth. And he'd explain it to me in, I think, very, the clearest ways that I understood. And he said to me once, he said, most of these people who go to Russia and write this stuff about Putin are going off internet. The internet has really been a source of a lot of fractured facts here. He said, pure analysis. You have to go back

• 54:26Speaker 01

  to the texts, all the documents, and to really fully understand. But he spoke Russian. And his wife and him, Katerina Van Huvel, who's an editor, publisher of The Nation magazine, would go to Russia several times a year and talk to their friend Gorbachev. Gorbachev's an interesting character. I've talked to him, interviewed him, not interviewed him, but talked to him at length, and I like him very much. And I saw the divide, as you saw in the Putin interviews, between Gorbachev and Putin. Early on in the interviews, you sense Putin doesn't particularly care for Gorbachev because he, in his point of view,

• 55:08Speaker 01

  he screwed up the administration of Russia and is responsible for so much of the disaster of leaving all those people outside the Soviet Union. So, these are problems that continue into the future. But, they see each other at the, or he sees, he knows he's there at the May Day parade, we filmed, and his attitude is funny, it's very humid. He says, you know, he's welcome, he's got his pension, he's a pensioner, he's done his duty. There's no, there's no animus towards it. Even when Gorbachev, in the early days, as you remember, criticized him for his manners in terms of democracy, but I don't know that that...

• 55:54Speaker 01

  You know, that becomes a quarrel, but frankly, by the, by the end of the situation, it's very clear that Gorbachev is now moved closer and closer to the, says Russia is now really under attack. This is, he sees, he sees where the United States has made a concerted effort to undermine Putin. And he does, and he's repeated this several times about Ukraine. I think you've seen what he said. You can quote it. And Gorbachev is, we have no respect for Gorbachev even, even at this juncture. When can you see Gorbachev's ideas printed in most American newspapers? Very rarely, very rarely, and not, and recently not at all. So Gorbachev, who was our hero back in, in the American hero back in 1980s, 80s,

• 56:39Speaker 01

  has now been condemned to the garbage can, so to speak of history.

• 56:42Lex Fridman?

  Well, in this complicated geopolitical picture you just outlined, can we talk about the recent invasion of Ukraine? You wrote on Facebook, a pretty eloquent analysis, I think on March 3rd. Let me just read a small section of that, just to give context, and maybe we can talk a little bit more about both Russia and the man Putin. He wrote, although the United States has many wars of aggression on its conscience, it doesn't justify Mr. Putin's aggression in Ukraine. A dozen wrongs don't make a right. Russia

• 57:25Lex Fridman?

  was wrong to invade. It has made too many mistakes. One, underestimating Ukraine's resistance. Two, overestimating the military ability to achieve its objective. Three, underestimating Europe's reaction, especially Germany, upping its military contribution to NATO, which they've resisted for some 20 years. Even Switzerland has joined the cause. Russia will be more isolated than ever from the West. Four, underestimating the enhanced power of NATO, which will now put more pressure on Russia's borders. Five, probably putting Ukraine into NATO. Six, underestimating the damage to its own economy,

• 58:06Lex Fridman?

  and certainly creating more internal resistance in Russia. Seven, creating a major readjustment of power in its oligarch class. Eight, putting cluster and vacuum bombs into play.

• 58:20Lex Fridman?

  Nine and underestimating the power of social media worldwide. And you go on for a while, giving a much broader picture of the history and the geopolitics of all of this. So now, a little bit later, two months later, what are your thoughts about the invasion of Ukraine?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's very hard to be honest in this regard because the the West, the West has brought down a curtain here. And anyone who questions the invasion of Ukraine and its consequences is is an enemy of the people. It's, it's become so difficult. We, I've never seen in my lifetime, ever such a wall of propaganda as I've seen in the West. And that includes France, too, because I was there recently in England. England is, of course, really vociferous.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's shocking to me how quickly Europe moved in this direction. And that includes Germany. I have German friends who expressed to me their shock over Ukraine. I have Italian friends, same thing. And Italy, of course, has been the, perhaps the most understanding and compassionate of countries. So it's, it's quite evident that there's a united and this attests to the power of the United States. And of course, you have Finland and Finland, which has generally been reasonable, jumping and talking about joining NATO and Sweden, too. Generally, there's been some more restraint in the, in the, in Europe. That's what surprised me the most, Europe.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  How quickly they fell into this NATO basket, which is very dangerous for Europe, very dangerous. This goes back to my idea, what I was saying earlier about sovereignty. These countries have, don't really give me a sense that they have sovereignty over their own countries. They don't feel

• 1:00:29Lex Fridman?

  The European nations.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm obviously intuition here is working. I just don't feel that they have freedom to say what they really think, and they're scared to say it. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I remember with great, in a sense, satisfaction that at least France, Chirac, who I had not really know much about, stood up and said, "The United States, we're not going to join you in this expedition," basically into madness. Schroder in Germany, same thing. Of course Putin condemned the invasion, and Putin had been an ally of the United States since 9/11, if you remember correctly.

• 1:01:10Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  And had called Bush, and they were getting along. So even Putin said, "I won't go, don't go into Iraq. This is, this is not the solution." He didn't oppose Afghanistan, but he opposed Iraq. So Chirac and Schroder stood for the old Europe. I'm, I remember de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle. He was independent of the United States. Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO because he saw the dangers of NATO, which is to say, "You have to fight an American war." When they say, and they put nuclear weapons on your territory in England and France and Italy and Germany, when they do that, you're hitched to this superpower

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  and you have no say in what they're going to do. If they declare war and they use your territory, you're going to be involved in a major conflict. I'm talking about sovereignty. Where is that sovereignty? They don't have it. And that has influenced their mindset for years now, since 1940, since, well, de Gaulle was the 60s. He was, he actually reversed the whole flow and he was, it was, I think it was Sarkozy who put France back into NATO. And now it's Macron, I, I hope, because he was talking to Putin, would at least have an independent viewpoint that could be helpful here. But he, so he rolled it up. He, he may have told Putin something else, but within days, he'd rolled it up and gone along with

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  the United States position, which was enforced by the United States in a very fierce way. The propaganda, as I say, I don't know how much time you spent in America, but it was vicious and everything was anti-Russian. Russia were killing all these people, were shooting down civilians. Although there was no proof of it, there was just, these are the accidents of war. But all of a sudden, it was a campaign of criminality and they were talking about bringing Putin into war crime trial. Well, why didn't they talk like that when Iraq was going on and Bush was killing far more people?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Or for that matter, why were they not talking about the killings in Donbass and Lugansk during that 2014 to 2022 period? That is what is, it's a crime. There were so many people that were killed, many of them innocent, many of them innocent.

• 1:03:32Lex Fridman?

  So what would be the way for Vladimir Putin to stop the killing in Donbass without the invasion of Ukraine?

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a very good question and I've asked that several times and I don't have the, I have not talked to him since about two years now. It's a very good question.

• 1:03:54Lex Fridman?

  What's the mistakes? What the human mistakes and the leadership mistakes means.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  It's a very good question. You see, what the American press has not said and the Western press has not said is that on February 24, was it? That was on that day when they invaded. The day before, if you check the logs of the European organization that was you supervising, was in the field in Ukraine. These are neutral observers. They were seeing heavier and heavier artillery fire going into, into Donbass from the Ukrainian side. So they had, apparently Ukraine had 110,000 troops on the border. They were about to invade Donbass. That was the plan. That's what I think.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Russia as a, because of the buildup on the border of Donbass brought 130, they say 130,000 troops to the area near Donbass, right? So you have buildup of forces on both sides, but you wouldn't know that from reading the press in the West. You would be, you'd believe that the Russians suddenly put all these men into. Into the situation with the with the idea of invading Ukraine, not only Donbass, but invading all of Ukraine and getting rid of the decapitating the government there, which is all assumption. We don't know what they would intended to do.

• 1:05:18Lex Fridman?

  But you, at the time, as that a lot of people thought that the all the talk of the invasion, Russian invasion of Ukraine is just propaganda. It's not going to happen. It's very unlikely to happen.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  I think many of us thought that the United States is building this up into an invasion. In other words, that is the nature of false flag operations. When you you create this propaganda, they are going to invade, they are going to invade. And then when they invaded, the United States was completely ready and all their allies were completely ready for the invasion, correct? So why did Putin do that? He fell into this, theoretically into this trap set by the United States. Here you're telling all your allies across the board, they're going to invade. But you.

• 1:06:02Lex Fridman?

  Why do you think he did it? So here, is it madness?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  No, no, it's not madness.

• 1:06:08Lex Fridman?

  Strategic calculation?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Perhaps. This one I cannot answer you faithfully, because, first of all, we don't know what he was told. If he was indeed getting the right intelligence estimates, from what I said earlier in that in that essay I wrote, you would think he was not well informed, perhaps, about the degree of cooperation he would get from the Ukrainian Russians in Ukraine. That would be one factor, that he wasn't, he didn't assess the operation correctly. Remember this, Mr. Putin has had this cancer, and I think he's licked it,

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  but he's also been isolated because of COVID. And some people would argue that the isolation from normal activity, which he was, he was meeting people face to face, but all of a sudden, he was meeting people across the table, 100 yards away or whatever, 10 yards away. It was very hard. Perhaps he lost touch with, contact with people.

• 1:07:11Lex Fridman?

  So it's not just power, it's the very simple fact that you're just distant from humans?

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I'm speculating. I don't know. I see that. And I also, perhaps he thought in his mind that there would be a

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  A faster resolution that the Ukrainian, because the evidence had been that the Ukrainian Russians, the Ukrainian army had folded so many times and that they were only backed up and they were stiffened by the resistance of the Nazi oriented Azov battalions. That was a factor, of course. And that is a big factor for the Russians because these people are very tough. They rush. See, what people don't understand is that Ukraine, since 2014, has been a terrorist state. They've been run. Anytime a Ukrainian has expressed any any understanding of the Russian Ukrainian position, they've been threatened by the state.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  From 2014 to 2022, there's been a set of hideous murders that people don't even know about in the West. Journalists, people who speak out, liberals, people who, I interviewed Viktor Medvedev, who they make out to be some kind of horrible person. But Medvedev was a very important figure in the administration of Kushma, the first Ukrainian prime minister in the 1990s. And he did a great job on the economy. He was a very thoughtful man. If you'll see my interview, it's called "Ukraine Revealed." He's very thoughtful about the future of Ukraine. He doesn't want to go back and join Russia. He wants it to be an independent country. Ukraine is independent. And he wants it to be a functioning economic democracy, more or less a democracy,

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  if you can get that, but between, that exists in a neutral state, a neutral state, which Ukraine used to be before 2014. It was neutral from 91 to 2014. Neutral, very important. Under Poroshenko, it just immediately went into an anti-Soviet Cold War position as an ally of the United States. And

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  My point was that it was a very dangerous place, Ukraine. People were being killed. Death squads were out there. Medvedev, they stripped him of his television stations. Very suddenly, this is Zelensky, the new president. Zelensky was elected on a peace platform. Remember that. Seventy percent of the country was for him to make peace with Russia. Did he ever have even tried to make peace with Russia? Did he attend any of the Minsk II agreements? Did he visit? Did he pay any attention to Putin? Did he go to Russia? No, not at all. The moment he got into office, I'm convinced that the militant

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  militant sector of the right sector parties of Ukraine let him know that you will not make a deal with Russia. There will be no concessions to Russia. This is very dangerous. This is where this attitude that's very, very hostile to Russia has hurt us. The whole world is being hurt by this. And no one calls them out. No one calls them out. Zelensky backed off from his platform as running for president. And as president, has been ineffective. Did nothing to promote. On the contrary, went the other way and seemed to support the Ukrainian aggression.

• 1:10:37Lex Fridman?

  Well, he found his support in this war. You've revealed through your work some of the most honest and dark aspects of war. Nevertheless, this is a war and there's a humanitarian crisis. Millions of people, refugees escaping Ukraine. What do you think about the human cost of this war initiated by

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  It's horrible.

• 1:11:03Lex Fridman?

  Whoever, just as you write, whatever the context, whatever NATO, whatever pressure, as you wrote, Russia was wrong to invade.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, let's get back to the original question. You said, what was he thinking at that time? We never answered that.

• 1:11:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Now, by the way, you know, among those people who have been ruined by this war, you have to include the 2014 to 2022.

• 1:11:33Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Ukrainian Russians, 14,000 were killed, not necessarily by, some of them by maybe accident, this and that, but certainly a large number of that is responsible to the Ukrainian military and the Nazi-related battalions who have done a good job of death squatting that whole area. And remember, I did a film about Salvador. I know a little bit about death squads and how they work, and I know about paramilitaries, because in South America, they're all over the place. America supports, hates Venezuela, goes on about Venezuela. But do they tell you anything about Colombia, its next-door neighbor? Colombia, for years, has been plagued by paramilitaries that are right-wing, and the United States has said nothing about them, except occasionally, there's a newspaper report now. So this is

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  a, this support of death squads by the United States is all over the world. It's not just in South America and Central America, where we see plenty of evidence of it. It's here too, and this is what's horrible about this whole thing, this hypocrisy of America, that they can support such evil, such evil. Now, going back to your larger question about, yes, it's a terrible refugee disaster, but again, we have to get the numbers, let's get the numbers and get evidence, because I would ask you, I'm not sure at this point whether more civilians were killed before 2022 in Donbass than have been killed in this latest.

• 1:12:57Lex Fridman?

  So we can't talk about this without, we can't talk about the invasion of Ukraine without considering the full war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  That's correct, absolutely. And

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Take the toll on both sides and you might be surprised by the result. I think the Russian military, of course, I'm not there and I'm not, this could be, this is speculation. The Russian military has slowed down and part of that reason is not to, to keep the civilian corridors open. And I think that Ukrainian military has made it more difficult on purpose. Especially some of these battalions that are death squad battalions have gone out of their way to keep the civilians locked into these cities in danger because it's in their interest to do so. So there's no reason why Ukrainian military, who have killed Ukrainian civilians for years, would change their policies. They would have no compunctions about wiping out, for example, people with white armbands in Buka.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Okay, as to what Putin was thinking at the time, I, I wondered this and I still do. I said, okay, so Putin can say, when, let's say, the Ukrainian government wants to now invade Donbass. This is on February 23 and they have artillery, they're peppering the whole place. They're going to go in and they're going to get Donbass back. What do you do? And you, you have Russian separatists who are, Russian Ukrainians who are on, who are going to fight.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  How far do you go in supporting them? Can Russia at this point say, well, we can't help you. You have to get along, you have to somehow, you have to be absorbed by the Kiev. You're going to be absorbed by them and they're going to be, they're not going to give you autonomy and you have to live with them. And there's going to be a price to pay. You could do that and you can also say, well, we open our borders to Donbass. You can come into our country, you can leave and we will help you to, to resettle. And that's, that would be a reasonable approach. So you take it to the next stage as Putin's thinking, you take it to the next stage. You, you stall, it's harder for your people. Of course, there's pressure on Putin from inside his own government to say, what are you going to do? I mean, you can't do this to, there's a lot of nationalists in Russia.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  They would certainly bring, he, it would be to his, they'd say Putin is weak and that's the biggest rap you can ever give a Russian leader is you're weak, you can't get anything done. So there would have been some damage, but let's say he goes with that and he says, okay, we know what the United States intention is. It's to. Get rid of me, regime change, and to get another Yeltsin in. That's what they want. And they will go to any ends. They will destroy Ukraine if necessary, but they want regime change in Russia. And then after they do that, of course, they'll go after China. But that's the ultimate policy of the United States. This is a country that has no compunctions about going all the way. And it will use hypocrisy in all the news propaganda in the world to get what it wants.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  This is the equivalent, frankly, of Germany's goals in World War II. World domination. There's no question in my mind. But we're going about it in our way as opposed to Hitler's way. So just to finish your thought, where do they go? What's stage two? Okay, let's say they take, Ukraine takes back Donbass. Let's say people get killed in large quantities. So we now to the next stage. We're finished with the Minsk II agreements that were never adhered to. So what does Russia do? They wait for the next aggression, which is going to come in one form or another. Perhaps in Georgia, perhaps, I don't know what happened, what the US is thinking.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  But they would have, the US cannot say Russia has done anything. They have not used violence to stop Donbass from belonging back to Ukraine, right? So you're in a new setup now. It's a whole thing rearranges. Now you have, but you still have nuclear weapons. You still have Russian nuclear weapons, and they're serious weapons. They're very well developed, crude, but not as refined as the American nuclear force, but powerful. That becomes another game. Then you open another chessboard and no, you still haven't been condemned. The sanctions haven't been imposed. That's a new, it's a new game. Could he have done, could he have lived with that? That's the question I ask myself.

• 1:17:20Lex Fridman?

  So you see ultimately Ukraine today as a battleground for the proxy war between Russia and the United States?

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  The United States would have then NATOized, NATOized Ukraine or certainly put more weapons. And, you know, the United States has already done a lot in Ukraine with intelligence, with training advisors. The intelligence aspect of the Ukrainian army has been raised enormously by the United States contribution.

• 1:17:45Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible for you to steal man, to play devil's advocate against yourself and say that Vladimir Zelensky is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation? And in a way, against Russia, but also against the United States, it just happens that for now, the United States is a useful ally. But ultimately, the man, the leader, is fighting for the sovereignty of his nation.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  I would think, he thinks so, yes, and he could be, he could say that, but he's not acknowledging that the sovereignty of his nation was stolen in 2014 with a coup d'etat that brought, that brought this right sector into power. And they have controlled the country since then. It's thuggery, what they've done. The Medvedev case is a case in point. They just take what they need. They go to a house and they have a, how many people have been killed? Serious people, journalists killed by the, these battalions. That's what people don't realize. In other words, you can't speak out, you can't, a person like me would have been on the death list on day, day five. You don't, there's no opposition to Zelensky.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  So he doesn't have a real sovereignty. It was a stolen sovereignty.

• 1:18:58Lex Fridman?

  Do you think President Zelensky would accept an interview with you today?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Actually, from, since I made Ukraine on Fire documentary, which perhaps you've seen, which records the incidents of 2014 and the, and the My Dan demonstrations and shows you the dishonesty behind it. No, I think that they've been very negative and they would kill me if I was in Ukraine. I mean, they don't have any, these people are very tough. These are as rough as they come, in my opinion. And I've seen rough in my life. I mean, these guys are not playing with fair at all. These are death squads. No, I don't think, and Zelensky would have nothing to do with it, but of course, it would be dangerous for me. And they've been very hostile in their, in their policies to any, any Ukrainians abroad

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  are also threatened. In other words, you could be in Paris, but if you speak out too much, I think Ukrainians know that they're going to be targeted. And I think that's part of the reason they don't talk. A lot of them, you have to take the anti-Russian line, but I think a lot of them are divided.

• 1:20:07Lex Fridman?

  So you think you would be killed and Zelensky wouldn't even know about it? So there is...

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think, if I was killed certainly abroad, no, they wouldn't kill me abroad. I think they'd figure out a way.

• 1:20:18Lex Fridman?

  No, no, no, no. If you travel to Ukraine, I mean.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  I wouldn't get in, except through Donbass. There are some Americans in Donbass who are reporting on the war there. And I read their reports, actually, they're pretty interesting, because they show you the cruelty of what's going on, but never mentioned in the West, never. That's what's so strange about this. This is the modern world that we're living in, and yet that information is not coming out to the mass of the people. And on the contrary, the United States has closed down all the RT, all the information centers that are possible alternative news getting to the American people. They've seriously made an effort, and the BBC, the English, and France. I was shocked when France closed RT down, because RT is actually pretty good.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Yes, they may, there are distortions, but you know as well as I do, because you speak, that RT has done a very brave job of putting correspondents into the field in very dangerous positions, and they've gotten great footage of some of the violence that's going on.

• 1:21:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, given the wall of propaganda in the West, I also see the wall of propaganda in Russia, the wall of propaganda in China, the wall of propaganda in India. What do we do with these walls of propaganda?

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yes, let's talk about Russia, because you would know more about it. But my last experience there, newspapers, it was more interesting. Put it this way, when I went to Venezuela, the United States was saying back then that Chavez controlled the press. I get to Venezuela, and there's nothing but criticism of Chavez in the press. It was owned by the oligarchs of Venezuela, who hated him. So it was across the board. That's why Chavez opened the state television, spent more money on it, and advertised his point of view through state television. But in Russia, what I saw was criticism. I met with a publisher who got the Nobel Prize of that famous newspaper.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  And his point of view at that time, when I spoke to him a few years ago, was we're operating, there is criticism of him, but you know, you can't call for the overthrow of the government, nor in Venezuela, nor in the United States, for that matter. If you call for the overthrow of the government of the United States, you're going to be in deep trouble.

• 1:22:36Lex Fridman?

  Well, all right. So to push back on that, it's interesting. It's so interesting because we mentioned Elon Musk, and there's a way that people sound when they speak freely. When I speak to, I have family in Ukraine, I have family in Russia. When I speak to people in Russia, let's put my family aside. When I speak to people in Russia, I think there's fear. I think they don't, um, sometimes when you call for the overthrow of government, that's important, not because you necessarily believe for overthrow of the government, but you just need to test, test the power centers and make sure they're responsive to

• 1:23:21Lex Fridman?

  the people. And I feel like there's a mix of fear and apathy that has a different texture than it does in the United States. That worries me because I, I would like to see the flourishing of a people in all places.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Well, as I said, my impression was that there's far more freedom in the press than was pictured by the West. And that means different points of view because the Russians are always arguing with themselves. I've never seen a country that's so contentious. There's more, there's more intellectuals in Moscow and the cities than you can believe. And you know, the Russian people, they're, they've been fighting government for years, back from the 1870s, Tsarist times, they're always plotting against the government. And the intelligentsia has known through history as being contentious and anti-government in many ways. And we see the same thing, educated people turning against Russia. I don't appreciate those people because I think they're very spoiled and they don't understand

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  some of the stuff that's going on in the West. But we have a lot of Russians in Europe and America. That attack Russia and sometimes don't understand that they are under pressure from the United States and they don't understand the size of the pressure. And it, that's why Putin connects with the people because he, he represents the common, more the common man who's, who's saying to you, your interests are threatened. Russia is threatened. We are representing only the interests of Russia, not, we're not an empire, we're not going to expand. He, he has no empire intentions, although the West paints it as empire. I, I see no evidence of it. Why didn't he do something in all these years? Nothing.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  He did nothing except defend the country in Georgia and in Chechnya.

• 1:25:11Lex Fridman?

  So the imperialist imperative is coming more from the West?

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  It's imperialist, it's the imperialist agenda. Going back to, I'm sorry, where we left our discussion off. I mean, I was going to go on with America not only being censored, has closed down now, closed down. And you say it's, it's not fear. Well, it is fear. I am scared because if you get your Facebook page suspended or your YouTube, your, your Twitter account thrown off, a lot of good people are getting their, thrown off. You can't say, you can't speak out. It affects your business. It goes back to the 1950s when my, my father's world, when you could not express any sympathy for a Soviet Union without endangering your job, without basically being not trusted.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  You had to be part of the program to get along, to go along. Same thing when UK, United Kingdom, I mean, for all their talk, this Boris Johnson is an idiot, but all their talk about, do you remember their policies with the IRA in Ireland? When Ireland was threatening them? They cut off the IRA completely. Jerry Adams, who was a wonderful guy, I met him, was not allowed to even be heard in Britain during certain years. In France, all constantly through the Algerian war, the Algerians were not allowed to be heard. The Algerian war for independence divided France greatly.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  You could not even show Paths of Glory, a World War I film in France for, I don't know, 20 years after it came out. Censorship is a way of life when democracies also feel threatened. They are much more fragile than they pretend to be. A healthy democracy would take all the criticism in the world and shrug it off and say, okay, that's what's good about our country. Well, I'd like to see that in America. There are times that it's been like that, but it's so scary now. So it is scary. That's what I was trying to say. It's not unscary to me. In China, I would say to you, yes, it's much scarier to me because there is the Internet wall that they cut off. And I got into problems in China too, because I said something years ago about you have

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  to discover your own history. You have to be honest about Mao. You have to be, you have to go back and let's make a movie about Mao. That upset them, you know, and show his negatives. So China has been much more sensitive than Russia about criticism, much more. And it is a source of problems, but on the other hand, China has a lot of grievances, a lot going back to the 19th century and the British imperialism of that era and the American imperialism.

• 1:27:43Lex Fridman?

  If you could talk to Vladimir Putin once again now, what kind of, what kind of things would you talk about here? What kind of questions would you ask?

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Well, one thing I would certainly ask is what you were thinking on February 23. And I would ask him to reply to my question about what if you took this to phase two? You surrendered in Donbass, you know, no ego about it, you just surrendered, it's in your interest to your country, and you invited all the refugees from Donbass into Russia as much as they can? What would you do now? What's the US next move? And in your opinion, how are you gonna, okay, where are we gonna go? That's, that would be the key question because it's. But he didn't go that way. He chose to take the sanctions and to go this way.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Why he did that is a key question for our time. Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps it was his judgment. Perhaps, as I said, but I don't, knowing the man I did, I don't think so. I think it was calculated.

• 1:28:50Lex Fridman?

  Now, this is projection and speculation, but there's something different about him. In the past several months, it could be the COVID thing, the isolation that you mentioned.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Lex Fridman?

  I've listened to a lot of interviews and speeches in Russian and there's a there's something about power over time that can change you, that can isolate you.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Well, when I was there, no, he'd been in office for already 15 years. He had power. He didn't misuse it, in my opinion. He was very even. I saw him go on television and talk to his fellows the same way he always talked to them. He grew with it. He grew in intelligence and knowledge because he had dealings with the whole world. Now, people had come to him. He was very well known in Africa and Middle East, certainly Syria. And I just never saw misuse of his power. I saw humility in him, actually.

• 1:29:45Lex Fridman?

  So perhaps there was a calculation and he calculated wrong in terms of what happens if he doesn't invade. Perhaps there was a calculation. Perhaps he had a calm and clear mind and he calculated wrong.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Well, he also made the point that he had the talk of Zelensky saying well, nuclear weapons were going to come into Ukraine. There was talk about that right before the invasion too, and certainly that would have set off alarms. You know, the United States is already kind of doing that by not only putting its intelligence and its heavy weaponry into Ukraine, but you've got to deal with a question, the next question that comes up, the most immediate question is, is the United States gonna start? And I'm saying this is going, they're making a lot of noise, the United States press, about Russia using nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. That's a lot of noise.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  Again, going back to my analogy, when the United States starts that, it starts the conversation going. It's in the interest of the United States for Russia to be pinned with any kind of chemical or nuclear. Incident, except for example, it'd be very not simple, but it would be possible to explode a nuclear device in Donbass, in Donbass and kill thousands of people. And we would not know right away who did it, but of course the blame would go right to Russia, right to Russia, even if it didn't make sense, if there was no motivation for it, it would just be blamed on Russia. The United States might well be the one who does that false flag operation. It would not be beyond them.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  They would, it would be a very dramatic solution to sealing this war off as a major victory for the United States.

• 1:31:32Lex Fridman?

  That's terrifying.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  No, but it can happen. It can happen. A one kiloton device, low yield, this, it's possible.

• 1:31:39Lex Fridman?

  So when you walk across that line, you can potentially never walk back.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think the United States is calculating that it's a dangerous, yes, I agree, but I think the neoconservative arrogance is such that they really believe they can push their advantage to the max now, because of all these propaganda successes up to now. The Ukrainian army could be wiped out for all we know. There's all this lefters are neo Nazi brigades, but they're being advised very well by US. And they're sending the weapons in our huge amounts of weapons. What about American budget? No one talks about how much money we're giving to Ukraine. We, it's a billion dollars already in weaponry and not most of it just poured in.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  What about, you know, the Russian budget is, defense budget is sixty some billion dollars a year. It's nothing compared to the United States, one fifteenth of it. But yet we, we've put so much weaponry into Ukraine, the money we've spent on Ukraine is equivalent almost to what we spent on, on COVID in our own country. It's astounding the distortion of our priorities. There's also chemical, don't forget chemical is probably the easier way to go, but in Syria there was far too many incidents of, of America in its quest to demonize Assad and the Russians

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  of all these chemical attacks that were happening that they were vowing came from Russia and In spite of the fact that Russia just pulled out of the, signed the agreement on chemical arms and not, and apparently destroyed its stock several years ago. It's, it's strange that the, the strangest incidents happened in Syria. You go back to, trace every one. Good journalism was done. The White Helmets got a lot of fame, but they were corrupted. And many good journalists tried to point out the inconsistencies in the American accusations. Robert Perry among them, who was one of my mentors at Consortium Press.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  A lot of good, you'd have to go back, but trace each, like you would trace each time they made an accusation against Putin of murder. You need that same kind of Sherlock Holmes intensity investigation. And they don't do it because the United Nations or the chemical, not the United Nations as much as the chemical people, the, the organization has been tampered with. If you remember correctly, there was accusations that the chemical, chemical investigative, I don't know the name of it, was tampered with. And people quit. People who were working on that commission quit and said that this is not legit. So very interesting, that Syria story is wacko. So the United States is willing to use chemical in Syria freely. It did it three, four times.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  If you remember correctly, Trump was challenged that he did not attack after a chemical incident in Syria. All these newscasters in the United States, the most heaviest of them were saying, well, President Putin is, President Trump is now finally acting like a real president when he attacks, when he drops missiles in Syria. They actually said that. In other words, they wanted Trump to go to war on Syria, but he didn't.

• 1:34:59Lex Fridman?

  Chemical weapons.

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  Chemical and nuclear.

• 1:35:01Lex Fridman?

  Nuclear is really terrifying. Do you think, now, combine this with the fascinating choice in your interviews with Vladimir Putin to watch Stanley Kubrick's

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Doctor Strange.

• 1:35:16Lex Fridman?

  Doctor Strange, love, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. And given the fact that that, you did that, now looking at the fact that the word nuclear, and it feels like the world hangs on the brink of nuclear war. Do you think that that's overstating the case?

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  No. That's what worried me from the beginning, and that's probably why I got involved in all this stuff, because I go back to the 60s when I was a, you know, when we were so close to nuclear war. I lived through that period, and I thought, as many people did, that this was, it was gonna, it was gonna come now. So I've lived through that, and some, I didn't sense the period in 83 when Reagan took us to the edge, if you remember correctly, Able Archer was an exercise that almost brought us to, because Russians were really paranoid at that point, and they, they were responding to our military exercise on Able Archer. There was also the Korean airliner that went down. There were numerous

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  incidents in the 80s, but I never felt the fear. I thought Reagan was testing the limits, but perhaps if I'd been younger, I would have felt it. But anyway, no, we come close. The United States has risked this several times. If I told you, it would be hard for you to believe, if I could set a scene for you in a trauma, in 1962, when Kennedy has a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, and they talk about a plan, a military plan, to first strike the Soviet Union and China. Okay, it was called, it was an Eisenhower plan that had been put into, put into potential operation in the,

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  in early 60s or 50s, in late 50s, S I O P 62. This was an attack on the Soviet Union, first strike. That's why the United States has never given up the concept of first strike. It's interesting that the Russian policy, nuclear policy posture is more defensive than the American one, which leaves options open. The same options are open in neoconservative agreements that we see from the late 90s, where they say, The emergence of a rival power will not be tolerated. That's a very broad statement and allows you to do a lot, including nuclear.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  So you have to understand the United States is always, first of all, it breaks so many treaties. We know that from the Putin story about the anti ballistic missile treaty in 2002. And then the INF treaty of the break, they broke that one. That was the intermediate missiles. That was 2019. I don't know when they broke it off, but the United States has not been very faithful on its nuclear agreements. And so I don't know that we can even deal with the United States diplomatically. It seems to be impossible. Now, brings me to Biden.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  Yes. And this is the opposite. This is the opposite of Kennedy. Kennedy was a Catholic Irish anti imperialist. Biden seems to be the opposite. He seems to be a go along, get along, go along guy who's been not only old, but he's also gone along with this program, which I voted for Biden because I feared Trump, but I thought Biden at a certain age would mellow. I really did. He's not mellowed. Apparently he's still listening to these people and he believes them. And it seems that his, that horrible woman, Victoria Nuland, who was under secretary of state, he appointed her to these, to this sector of the world. She's very influential and she's been one of the worst people on Ukraine. She obviously is behind the coup.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  She's, she was the one who boasted that, you know, we got our man in, Yats, whatever is Yats, Yatsinuk. And also remember the famous statement, fuck the EU, all these things. But she's back and she said the other day about if the Soviets, if the Russians use nuclear weaponry of any kind, there's going to be a horrible price to pay. That was, she was out of the blue. I said, what the hell is she doing? She's talking nuclear all of a sudden. And then since that day, everybody in the US press, all the shows have gone, talk nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. Secretary of state has done it. Blinken is.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  It scares you. If you think about it, the United States scares me.

• 1:39:49Lex Fridman?

  So that's the military industrial complex, machine, fully functional, fully operational behind this whole thing?

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  Certainly is.

• 1:39:56Lex Fridman?

  Is that what's to blame?

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  Certainly is. That's why I showed him Strange Love, because I wanted him to show him. I wanted Mr. Putin to say, "Look at this film. You never saw it. How can you not say you don't..." It's a seminal film in American history to those people who care. And it shows you the... Kubrick had a anti... had a pacifist, thank God, anti-war mentality, which he showed in Paths of Glory, as well as Strange Love. And it's such a dire, well-done scenario that I wanted Mr. Putin to be aware of the way the United States thinks.

• 1:40:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the absurdity of escalation, the absurdity of war at the largest scale, the absurdity of nuclear war especially. Can we walk back from the brink of nuclear war?

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Can we?

• 1:40:45Lex Fridman?

  Can we?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:40:47Lex Fridman?

  What's the path to walk back?

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  Reason.

• 1:40:50Lex Fridman?

  Between who and who?

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Reason and diplomacy. There's no reason. I mean, talk to the guy. Mr. Biden, why don't you calm down and go and talk to Mr. Putin in Moscow? Why don't you just sit across the table from him and try to have a discussion without falling into ideologies and stuff like that?

• 1:41:10Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you for advice? You did some of the most difficult interviews ever. Do you have advice that you can give to someone like me or anyone hoping to understand something about a human being sitting across from them about what it takes to do a good interview?

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  You're doing one.

• 1:41:31Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, but there's a... Listen, there's levels to this game. And interviewing somebody like Vladimir Putin, also language barrier. Sit across from the man, try to keep an open mind.

• 1:41:47Lex Fridman?

  Try to also ask challenging questions, but not challenging with an agenda, but seeking to understand and understand deeply. How do you do that?

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Seeking the truth. It's very simple. Seeking the truth, being a questioner like you are. You want to know what is really going on. I could not get anywhere with Biden or Bush, or for that matter, Obama. They'd be opaque with me. There's no interview possible with the President of the United States because he's got to stand for all the stuff that they stand for, which is imperialism, which is control of the world. How can you defend that? You can't. No one's going to come out and say that. They're always going to blame the enemy. They're going to blame Iran. They're going to blame China.

• 1:42:28Lex Fridman?

  So for some people, it may not be possible to break through the opaqueness.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  You can't. I mean, have you ever seen an interview with the President, besides being personable, where he actually discussed American policy?

• 1:42:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, not really, but maybe after they're President. I could see Obama being able to do such an interview. I could see George W. being able to do such an interview. Or are they not able to reflect at all?

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  George W. Hasn't shown much conscience into thinking about what he's done. You've seen that. You ever seen my movie, W? I think that's one of my best movies because it shows a man who's just out of his depth and has no... He has a conscience at the end of the movie. If you remember correctly, he talks to his wife and he says, "I don't get it. I'm trying to do good in the world. I've done, I believe in good and right. And why do people not understand that, you know, that kind of complaint?" As if he can't get outside himself to understand the way other people think. Empathies, walking like a dramatist is what I do. You walk in the footsteps of other people. When I did a movie about Richard Nixon, it wasn't because I liked him. It was because I wanted to...

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  I think I understood a part of him because of my father, and I think I wanted to walk in his footsteps. That's not to say I sympathize with him, because I didn't. I don't think he helped the American cause at all, but it was empathize as opposed to sympathize. Same thing with Bush. People were shocked when I did the Bush movie. They said, "How can you be in any way..."

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Anyway, receptive to this guy. That's wrong. Dramatists don't have political positions. They walk in the shoes of. That's why Bush movie perhaps was surprising to many people didn't care for it. Maybe that's what, but that's, you've got to go there. No, if you did a movie about a villain, you have to go there.

• 1:44:19Lex Fridman?

  You have to walk in their shoes.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:22Lex Fridman?

  So see them, because they usually villains usually see themselves as the hero.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:28Lex Fridman?

  So you have to consider, what is it like to live in a world where this person is the hero?

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:36Lex Fridman?

  Is that a burden? Is that hard?

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Not for George W. Bush. He's bitching because they didn't understand him. But he had a good vision, he said, of democracy and, you know, democracy forgives a lot of sins.

• 1:44:50Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a hard question on that?

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Yes, sure.

• 1:44:54Lex Fridman?

  So because empathy is so important to a great interview, let's ask the most challenging version of empathy, which is when you're sitting across from a man on the brink of war that, that leads to tens of millions of deaths, which is Hitler. So if you could interview Hitler in 1939, as the drums of war start to beat, or 1941, when they're already full on war, but there's still a lot of pacifists, there's still a lot of people unsure, what are the motivations behind what Hitler is doing? How would you do that interview?

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  Well, it depends when you do it. If you do it in 38, I certainly would have. No, you have to, if you sit down across from Hitler, you empathize. What is your beef? What do you, what do you, where have you been? What is your consciousness? Why do you hate Jewish people? Why, why? What is, you know, all these questions that come up. His sense of grievance as a result of World War I, there's justifications there, et cetera. But if I, and by the way, Churchill was trying to make a deal with him in 38. That's a fact that people don't know. Churchill himself. You know, there was still the desire in England to make peace with Germany. And it was seen as a possible.

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  What Churchill really wanted was Hitler to go against Russia. And he, anything to destroy the Bolsheviks. So he was using Hitler as much as he could to go after Russia. But Hitler was too elusive to get, to pin him down. But if you remember, Hitler was very kind at the end. Kind is not the right word. Was, did not go after the British Empire when he had France. And he could have. He had another objective, which was obviously the East. So Hitler's goal, I think, he always had an admiration for England. It's interesting story, always.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  And the, the empire. Yes. And certainly Churchill, we have no doubts now from history revisionism that Churchill's interest, main interest, was not Germany. It was the British Empire. Yes. And preserve it to India, the road to India and all that. And Middle East. Churchill fought the entire war with the concept of preserving the British Empire. All his goals, he sent America on a goose chase into Italy. You could argue, instead of establishing a sincere second front in Western Europe.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Interesting man. So I would have tried to get, you know, I think I would approach it the same way. In 1939, it would have been a different story because at that point, he'd attacked Poland and in 1940, France. So there's, it's another ballgame. But certainly, if whatever, at whatever point you talk to him, you, I would try to understand his point. So I would, I'm not judging you, Hitler. I'm saying to you, tell me what you're thinking. Why are you invading Russia? What's your thought? That's all an interviewer should do. He shouldn't be expressing his contempt for Hitler, which is like an American journalist interviewing Putin. It's, I'm getting brownie points for, for expressing my contempt. Yeah. For you? That, that does, I don't, that doesn't wash with me. That's ugly. Yeah. Seek to understand. Yes.

• 1:48:12Lex Fridman?

  This is a technical question, but was language a barrier as an interviewer?

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  To some degree. It's very hard to learn Russian. But I had very, they have excellent translators in the Kremlin, excellent. They are people who are trained very seriously for months or years before they, they, these people are young and they're very bright. I was very impressed with the Russian translator.

• 1:48:36Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting. I mean, I'm impressed as well, but there's a humor that's lost. There's a wit, a dry wit. There's stuff said between the lines. That's not actually how much content, but it's more kind of the things that make communication more frictionless. It's the, there's a, there's a kind of sadness to Russian humor that permeates all things and that sometimes is lost in translation. The translation is a little bit colder, meaning it just conveys the facts.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  Would you call it sardonic humor?

• 1:49:12Lex Fridman?

  I would say so, yeah. And so it's interesting, but I think you could see that from facial expressions when you're sitting across from the person and you can, you can feel it. Let me ask you in general, what's the role of love in the human condition? In your life, in life in general, you've talked, you looked at some of the darkest aspect of human nature. What's the role of this, one of the more beautiful aspects of human nature?

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  I think without love, I wouldn't, I don't think I'd be able to carry on. I think that love is my, love is the greatest, the ability to love is the greatest virtue you can have. It's, it's the ability to share with another, with your family, with your children, with your wife, with your lover, your partner. It's an ability to extend yourself into the world and it brings empathy with it. If you love well, I think you expand it to the human race too. And I, it's, it's, it's the strength behind the great novelists, the great artists of our time. I think.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Part of the reason, I suppose, we're scared of science sometimes is because the scientists sometimes don't express that clearly.

• 1:50:26Lex Fridman?

  You can lose that when you focus on the facts, on empirical data, on the science of things. You can lose the humanity that's between the lines.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  I'm often struck by when I talk to scientists, and I've talked to a few, at how arrogant they can be about, they don't talk to you if you don't understand their world, and they talk to each other, and there's an arrogance, a closed circle kind of thing. Oh, he's not at my level, I can't, there's no discussion to be had with this person, he's a human being.

• 1:50:57Lex Fridman?

  That arrogance is terrifying to me because it's next door neighbor to closed mindedness, which then can be used by charismatic leaders, as it was in Nazi Germany, to commit some of the worst atrocities. The scientist can be used as pawns in a very cruel game.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:18Lex Fridman?

  What advice would you give to young people? You've done, first of all, some of the greatest films ever. You've lived a heck of a life. You were fearless and bold in asking some really difficult questions of this world. What advice would you give to young people today, high school, college, about career? How to have a career they can be proud of, or how to have a life they can be proud of?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Well, I have three children, so obviously I'm not necessarily the best advisor in the world. And I do find that the children, I've raised them with a sense of freedom, and they do what they want. In the end, it's their life, their destiny, their character. That's what comes out. You can try to influence it, but you can try to get your daughter to wake up at a certain hour in the day, but it never works, you know? So I long ago gave up on that, and my children are all grown now. But aside from that, I think... If I was a teacher in a school and teaching film, I'd say to the students,

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  get an education. You can't just look at film. You can look at it because it's not a full education. It's not the spectrum. I don't think you should teach film as a. I think you need a base in other in other worlds. One of the greatest courses I took at NYU was, and I was a war veteran on the GI Bill. So I was older than the other students. One of the great, I took a class outside the film school in Greek classics. Because I hadn't had much history or, and I wanted to know more about the world of Homer and so forth. And the teacher opened my eyes to so much in that class. And I wrote about it in my memoir. It's called Chasing the Light, about Professor Leahy and what he did to me.

• 1:53:13Speaker 01

  He just, he gave me the concepts clearly of consciousness, which is the Homeric theme for of Odysseus. And, and also lethe, L E T H E, which is sleep. And how most of the crew, Odysseus's crew, were experiencing lethe and how necessary it was to stay awake. So it's not just film. It's just you have to learn the world as much as you can when you're young. And so that I think is the basis of a good education and a classic one is important.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  A basis. I think then you go on and you can learn computer if you want to. But that's specialization, you know. If you're a computer geek, is that a life? Does that give you enough satisfaction? Do you get the joy out of, out of people?

• 1:54:11Lex Fridman?

  No, just like filmmaking is a skill.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Yes, right.

• 1:54:13Lex Fridman?

  You need to have the broad.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:16Lex Fridman?

  Background to understand the world, literature.

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:19Lex Fridman?

  Uh, history.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:54:24Lex Fridman?

  So one of the things about being human is life is finite. It ends. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of your death?

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Absolutely. You have to come to terms with death. And that's a tough one for many people. It's always there. I'm older than you, obviously. And I'm getting closer to it. Couldn't happen any day, actually. When you get to a certain age, you can't assume that you're gonna be alive tomorrow. So I try to deal with that.

• 1:54:51Lex Fridman?

  Are you afraid of it?

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Much less so than I was when I was younger. Remember, I was in Vietnam, but I thought I dealt with it there. But when I came back, I realized that I wanted to live. So, yes, I've learned over time to get more and more used to it and get ready for it.

• 1:55:09Lex Fridman?

  What's a good answer to the question of why live? So the realization that you wanted to live. What was the reason to live?

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  Because it was better than being one of those corpses that I saw in the jungle. You know, I saw how finite death is.

• 1:55:26Lex Fridman?

  Are there things in your life you regret?

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Too many.

• 1:55:36Lex Fridman?

  Is there something you wish you could have done differently? Like if you could go back to do one thing differently? Or that regrets all?

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Did you ask Musk this? I'm curious. What'd he say?

• 1:55:45Lex Fridman?

  Offline all the time. No, no.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  You'd be curious to know.

• 1:55:53Lex Fridman?

  And he's an engineer, too. And engineers really value mistakes.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Engineers value?

• 1:55:59Lex Fridman?

  Value mistakes and errors because that's an opportunity to learn. They, I mean, this is what you do with systems, is you test them, then test them, and test them. And errors is just information. He did that with the rocket.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  The same thing is true in its way of filmmaking. There are certain things you learn as you build films and you make mistakes. It's like putting an engine together and you, oh, the film is flawed in that way. You know it. Other people may or may not see it, but the car runs, or it made money, or it didn't make money. It can be good, and it didn't make money, but it didn't. The point is that everything is a build. Every film is a construction. Same thing as he goes through on a Tesla, we go through on each film.

• 1:56:41Lex Fridman?

  Uh, but films are art.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, the thing is, one film does not lead to a lifetime guarantee of copyright.

• 1:56:52Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, you have, uh, the movie game, as you've called it.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Lex Fridman?

  Is, uh,

• 1:57:01Lex Fridman?

  is a complicated and cruel game.

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  But it takes enormous amount of work, enormous amount of work to make a film. People underestimate that. It's extremely complicated to have something be successful.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  Because it has so many elements of luck involved and reception and so forth.

• 1:57:23Lex Fridman?

  What do you think, I apologize for the absurd question, but what do you think is the meaning of life? Why are we here? The why.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  I think to realize ourselves, to realize more of what you are, to realize what life is, to appreciate it, to grow, to honest honor our life, to honor the concept of life and to understand how precious life is.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  The preciousness of life, as the Buddhists say, and of course, the immediacy of death all around us. The causes of death are all around us. And our life is like, as they say, is like a lantern in a strong breeze among existing, among the causes of death. So, life is so precious. And at the same time, we, immediacy of death, and then, of course, the continuation of life in whatever form it's going to take.

• 1:58:17Lex Fridman?

  But in this life, to wake up to the preciousness of it, to the preciousness.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a wonderful thing. By the way, I didn't have that when I was young. I took it for granted.

• 1:58:28Lex Fridman?

  Oliver, like I said, I'm a, I'm a huge fan. You're an incredible human being, one of the greatest artists ever. So, it's a huge honor that you sit with me and talk so deeply and honestly about some very difficult topics. Again, you're an inspiration and it's an honor that you will spend your valuable time with me.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 1:58:48Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for talking to me.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  Fun being here.

• 1:58:51Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Oliver Stone. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Oliver Stone in the untold history of the United States. To fail is not tragic. To be human is. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [Music]