Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering About this episode Skye Fitzgerald is a two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, his films include Hunger Ward, Lifeboat, and 50 Feet from Syria. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Skye’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/spin_film
Skye’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/spin_film
Hunger Ward (movie): https://hungerward.org
Lifeboat (movie): https://lifeboatdocumentary.com
50 Feet from Syria (movie): https://50feetfromsyria.com
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(06:34) – World hunger
(12:37) – Hunger Ward
(35:04) – Language
(40:15) – Famine
(50:59) – Authoritarianism
(57:27) – Storytelling
(1:11:01) – Access
(1:15:24) – Trust
(1:19:06) – Film equipment
(1:23:52) – Editing
(1:30:21) – Filmmaking
(1:43:20) – Favorite Films
(1:54:28) – Lifeboat
(2:01:53) – Breaking rules
(2:04:48) – Fear
(2:08:27) – 50 feet from Syria
(2:13:24) – Money and distribution
(2:21:02) – Advice for young people
(2:24:07) – Books
(2:26:01) – Darkest moments
(2:30:32) – Meaning of life
(2:32:30) – Mortality
Transcript 23,759 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Sky Fitzgerald, a two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who made the films Hunger Ward, about the war in Yemen, Lifeboat, about the search and rescue operations off the coast of Libya, and 50 Feet From Syria, about the war in Syria.
0:20 Lex Fridman? 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. We got Notion for note-taking, Missed Main for fashion, BetterHelp for wellness, Onnit for focus, and Aids Sleep for rest. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This show is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more in one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed.
1:03 Lex Fridman? People just don't shut up about telling me how much they love Notion. The teams, like programming teams, design teams, engineering teams, that's what I work with, editors, sort of like creative teams as well, they use Notion. They use Notion for the collaboration aspects. So it's not just individual note-taking, it's also the collaboration. And that's actually the latter thing, is what Notion wants me to tell you about, which is that it's a full-on operating system for running every aspect of a startup. It's running a special offer for said startups. You get up to a thousand bucks off Notion's team plan by going to notion.com/startups. To give you a sense, that's almost a year of free Notion for a team of 10. Go to notion.com/startups. That's notion.com/startups.
1:52 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by Miz and Main, the makers of comfortable, stylish, dare I say sexy dress shirts and other menswear. I wear their black dress shirt and I love it. It combines comfort and flexibility of athletic wear with the fit and style of a custom dress shirt. It's lightweight, breathable, and moisture-wicking. I really definitely like the way it feels. It seems to fit the body well, like there's an athletic cut to it, but it doesn't feel constraining, so you can move around pretty freely, especially in the, you know, hot Austin spring or summer. Anyway, they have all kinds of styles. I just happen to be wearing the black dress shirts because, you know,
2:37 Lex Fridman? that's the color and the minimalism style that I like. Right now, if you go to MizAndMaine.com and use promo code Lex, you'll receive 35 bucks off any regular price order of $125 or more. So go to MizAndMaine.com and use our promo code Lex.
2:58 Lex Fridman? This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, Help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional in under 48 hours. Ever since I had that conversation on the podcast with Carl Dyseroth, who's a psychiatrist, I've been thinking a lot about this dream I had long ago of becoming a psychiatrist. There's power to conversation. It doesn't have to be in a clinical setting. It doesn't have to be in a kind of patient-doctor relationship, just two humans.
3:30 Lex Fridman? Two humans trying to help each other, trying to figure each other out. I guess one being the lead, one being the follow. Maybe one during this particular moment, this particular day, needing more help. That's what conversation is about. Truly making a person feel heard. Anyway, I'm a fan of this kind of thing. If you want it as a service, BetterHelp is a good way to go. It's easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com Lex. That's betterhelp.com Lex.
4:03 Lex Fridman? This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain, which is a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. I take it when I need extra help for a deep work session, the first one in the day usually, when I know there's going to be a two, three hour segment of time where I'm going to have to think deeply about a problem. So whether that's designing a project for programming, or doing the actual detailed programming, debugging stuff, or thinking through more idea level stage of a project, through that to maintain focus,
4:45 Lex Fridman? to maintain sort of mental speed, that horsepower, that's, that requires effort. And sometimes I'll take AlphaBrain to help me out in this effort. Anyway, go to lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain. That's lexfridman.com/onnit.
5:07 Lex Fridman? This episode is also brought to you by Aidsleep and its Pod Pro mattresses. It controls temperature with an app, is packed with sensors, and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. There are very few things I enjoy in life more than a good power nap. Andrew Huberman is a fan of this power nap. I think Matt Walker, not so much. That's the great nap debate. Maybe I'll do many, many episodes on the nap debate. Good for you, or do they rob you of a full night's sleep? For me personally, I think naps reinvigorate my body and mind, not even like a full night's sleep can. It just resets everything, and I really, really, really enjoy them.
5:49 Lex Fridman? And I enjoy them the most on a nice Aidsleep Pod Pro cover. You can get one of those if you go to aidsleep.com/lex and check out their Pod Pro cover and save 200 bucks at checkout. Aidsleep currently ships within the United States, Canada, and UK. That's aidsleep.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Sky Fitzgerald.
6:34 Lex Fridman? Nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today, and 45 million people are on the edge of famine across 43 countries. How do you feel? How do you make sense of that many people suffering from hunger and famine in the world today?
6:51 Speaker 01 I don't know if I can make sense of it, Lex. I mean, I think it's deeply disturbing to me that, as a global community, we've allowed this number of people to go hungry when the food to feed them exists and the resources to feed them exist. I think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures is that many of those who are starving today or going hungry today are the net result of war and intentional acts by leaders to starve entire populations. And that's the most deeply disturbing part to me.
7:35 Speaker 01 You know your history, and we all know that deeply embedded in the Geneva Conventions post-World War II, the intent of one of those articles was to ban the use of starvation as a weapon of war because of what Hitler did during World War II. That's been reiterated multiple times over the years in international humanitarian law, including in 2018 because of the Saudi blockade over Yemen. And yet, to this day, starvation as a weapon of war continues to be used in Ethiopia, obviously in Ukraine right now, and in Yemen with the blockade over the country. And that disgusts me, that the law is in place, but it won't be enforced by the international bodies
8:20 Speaker 01 and the nation-states that make up the international community.
8:24 Lex Fridman? So starvation is a result of actions, human decisions. That's especially... Painful to make sense of.
8:34 Speaker 01 For me personally, yeah, I think that if you and I sitting here didn't eat for three days and had to, you know, lay our head on the sidewalk for a couple nights, I think we would take, you know, hunger and homelessness a lot more seriously. And I think that's, for some reason, that's missing at this moment in history tragically. And I think until that we can generate enough empathy that's immediate for all of us to understand what that means to go hungry, I'm not sure we're gonna sort of marshal the global community to solve it.
9:13 Lex Fridman? I did just that, by the way, fasted for three days recently. It's fundamentally different, I think, because the thing that would be terrifying to me is not the fasting, but the hopelessness at the end of the fast, like, I wouldn't know when the next meal is coming. I always had the freedom to have the meal.
9:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:35 Lex Fridman? The fear for not just your own ability to eat and survive, but your family's, if there's loved ones, that's the other thing I don't have. I'm single. And so I feel like the worst suffering is watching somebody you love that you're supposed to be a caretaker of, and you can't take care of them.
9:57 Lex Fridman? And if all of that is caused by leaders in, as a weapon of war, that is especially painful. So how can we, how can we help?
10:15 Lex Fridman? What are the ways to help?
10:18 Lex Fridman? How do we alleviate this, this suffering?
10:22 Speaker 01 Well, I think on the, you know, I think on the humanitarian front, we have to be aggressive and attentive and intervene in significant ways. And I think on the political front, we have to hold players accountable for their actions.
10:40 Lex Fridman? So the leaders that start the war, so when you say we have to speak up about the, the decisions and the humans making those decisions.
10:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:48 Lex Fridman? That lead to the starvation.
10:49 Speaker 01 For example, let's make it concrete. So, you know, when I was, I don't want to jump ahead, but when I was filming Hunger Ward in Yemen, you know, I met.
11:01 Speaker 01 A mother who, when she gave birth, weighed seventy pounds. The mother weighed seventy pounds. And so her da- daughter was starved in the womb, right? When she was born, um, there were, she was born into a world with no breastmilk, very little formula, right? So she was starved before birth. She was born into a world where she continued to be starved, right? By a mother who herself was starved. I watched that child, her name is Asila, die in front of me, right? Asila had no chance for all those things we hope for, for a child in this world.
11:46 Speaker 01 She, she didn't have a chance to grow up. She didn't have a chance to discover love. She didn't have a chance to have a career. She was robbed of all of those things because of the insidious nature of hunger that she was born into. She didn't have to die. She, she, you know, she was not starving. She, her mother was being starved, right? Because of the blockade over the country. Now, who instituted that blockade? MBS in Saudi Arabia with the reinforcement and sort of tacit approval of the United States, our own government here. And so there are people who are responsible for the starvation of children, and I think we need to hold them accountable.
12:29 Speaker 01 Now, that's incredibly difficult to do. But just because it's difficult doesn't mean it not, it ought not to be done.
12:37 Lex Fridman? And we'll talk about many cases like these throughout history and going on today. Let's talk about Hunger Ward.
12:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:44 Lex Fridman? Let's dive in. You are, you've been nominated for an Oscar twice. This is one of the times for a documentary.
12:55 Lex Fridman? Can you please tell me what Hunger Ward, The Last Hope Between War and Starvation is about?
13:01 Speaker 01 Hunger Ward is a short documentary that really is an attempt to illustrate the effects of the conflict on Yemen, specifically on civilians. And we document it in both the north and the south of the country because it's a bifurcated country. The south is held by the globally recognized government in the south, which up until last week was run by, at least on the surface, by President Hadi, holed up in Riyadh. He was essentially removed from office last week by, most people would agree, the Emiratis and the Saudis to put in place a presidential council.
13:46 Speaker 01 So we wanted to show that starvation was happening in very similar fashions, both in the south and the north. So, and we wanted to do this film because so few people in the West know anything about the conflict in Yemen, nor the US's complicity in it. And so my intent with the project was to try to bring it to a larger Western audience as an attempt to intervene and change the political status quo, which allows the use of starvation in Yemen to continue.
14:18 Lex Fridman? So, US complicity, who are the bad guys?
14:24 Lex Fridman? The world unfortunately cannot be painted in black and white of good guys and bad guys. But for the purpose of conversation, who is doing, causing suffering in the world in this situation? Who started the war? Why? And then, of course, the roots of war go back in history.
14:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:48 Lex Fridman? But let's start at the top.
14:51 Speaker 01 Well, there are bad actors and there are less bad actors.
14:54 Lex Fridman? Right.
14:54 Speaker 01 Right. I mean, I think that's always the case in war, probably.
14:57 Lex Fridman? And everybody loses in war.
14:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, I I concur with that statement. In the case of the sort of the status quo in Yemen right now, it's a completely asymmetrical war. And so the Saudi coalition, which is made up of primarily Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis, United States, France, Britain supplying weapons, but it's really driven and catalyzed by Saudi Arabia. And it's asymmetrical to a great extent just because of the incredible firepower by air that the Saudis use continuously to pummel northern Yemen.
15:38 Speaker 01 When I was there, the sheer volume of airstrikes is is hard to describe. And we show the result of only one in the film, really. But it's an asymmetrical war. The de facto authorities of the north, Ansarallah, also known as the Houthis rebel group, you know, they they don't have an air force, right? They have a drone force, but they don't have an air force. And so it's a, from a military standpoint, it's completely asymmetrical. The Saudis really don't commit troops to the ground. They use only proxies to fight on the ground.
16:11 Lex Fridman? What is the narrative they use to justify war? So there's a story on every side in war. Some of it is grounded in truth, some of it is not at all grounded in truth, also known as propaganda. What's the narrative used by the Saudis for this war?
16:32 Speaker 01 The Saudi line is essentially that the Houthis are an illegitimate government and that that it's really a proxy war between Iran, who supports the Houthis nominally, and the rest of the world. That's the Saudi narrative. The reality is something altogether different. While the Houthis do receive support from Iran, this is a war started by and sustained by MBS in Saudi Arabia.
16:59 Lex Fridman? Who's MBS?
17:00 Speaker 01 Mohammed bin Salman.
17:02 Lex Fridman? And who is he?
17:03 Speaker 01 He is the the son of the ruler of Saudi Arabia.
17:07 Lex Fridman? What's his power? I'm asking basic dumb question.
17:10 Speaker 01 He's the de facto ruler.
17:12 Lex Fridman? Of the military and the.
17:14 Speaker 01 Yes, he seized controls, the control of the country several years ago, even though he, on the surface, you know, is not the ruler of Saudi Arabia, he is, he's the crown prince.
17:22 Lex Fridman? And sorry to interrupt often, but who is he as a man? What's your sense of the?
17:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, so you know, I've never met him and I I likely will never meet him, hopefully. But he is, I know a lot about him through his actions, sort of in in the Mina region, Middle East and North Africa region. And he is one of three, in my view, as an American sitting here in the US, three people in the world that I think has caused such an incredible volume of misery and suffering and murder on this planet that I think if if he weren't around, the world would be a lot better place.
18:10 Speaker 01 And and I'm not a violent person by nature, but there are three human beings that I think the world would be better off without.
18:17 Lex Fridman? Do you mind, before I ask other questions, mentioning the three?
18:21 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, Assad is one in Syria, and that comes out of an earlier project that I did in Syria and Turkey, and and what I saw Assad as a as a ruler do to his own people. And Putin would be the third. Those three human beings are murderers on a scale beyond imagining.
18:45 Lex Fridman? On MBS, are you able to think as a documentary filmmaker, as a human being, as a scholar, as a thinker, with an open mind about a man like that who does evil onto the world? And what that must feel like to be inside the mind of that man? So basically, consider his worldview. With most evil people, with all people probably, but with people who do evil onto the world, they think they're doing good.
19:14 Speaker 01 They're the hero of their own story.
19:15 Lex Fridman? Right.
19:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:16 Lex Fridman? And so to be able to place yourself, I feel like for me, to understand a person, I have to literally, like the way actors kind of have to do. You know, live inside the body of the person they're trying to study.
19:31 Speaker 01 Inhabit the character.
19:32 Lex Fridman? Inhabit the person.
19:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:33 Lex Fridman? So are you able to do that? Or because you are also studying the people who suffer as a result, as a consequence of their actions? You just, you put, put them in a box and you say, I hate the person in that box. Going to move on.
19:51 Speaker 01 This goes back to your black and white statement at the beginning, right? It's like the, the world as a whole, of course, you know, is every gradation of gray. Right? My background is theater, like, and so I was trained long before I picked up a camera to inhabit other characters. Right? I, I have two degrees in theater. And so that level of sort of like walking in other people's shoes and trying to understand and empathize with their worldview is fundamental to how I live my life and how I do my work. So in the case of those three that I named Assad, MBS and Putin, yeah, I can, I can go there and think through how they came to be who they are. Right? From afar. Right?
20:33 Speaker 01 And, and after I go through that process, I still don't think there's any way that one can justify what they've done.
20:44 Lex Fridman? We're going to talk about each of those people.
20:47 Speaker 01 Sure. Well, I'm not an expert on.
20:50 Lex Fridman? Well.
20:50 Speaker 01 Any of them.
20:51 Lex Fridman? You're a human being, which makes you a partial expert on human nature. Cause nobody's an expert. You're just as good as anyone else. Anybody who actually carries a camera and listens and observe others isn't especially an expert of human nature. Who's willing to take that leap and truly understand somebody of any level, not leaders. I feel like to understand a leader, you have to first understand humans. And to understand humans, you have to see humans that they're worse than their best, which is something that you've definitely done. So let's, let's stick on Hunger Ward. This lens that you've chosen to look at this is through a single, maybe, maybe you can speak to that. You've mentioned.
21:37 Lex Fridman? The starvation as a result of war. What is the documentary? Like, what is the lens you've chosen to give the world a peek at the results, at the suffering that's a result of this war?
21:52 Speaker 01 People, a lot of times will ask me if they've seen Hunger Ward. You know, they ask where the hope is, right? You read the byline earlier, "The Last Hope." And what I try to focus on in many of my films, including Hunger Ward, is in the very difficult context of war, as the case is in Hunger Ward in Yemen. I look for hope and I look for inspiration. And I do that through people who are doing incredible things under the most difficult circumstances.
22:30 Speaker 01 So when I set out to do a film about starvation in Yemen, right? I mean, just listen to that statement, "Where's the hope there?" Right? And yet, what I found, what I discovered, were human beings that we could tell the story through, who are incredible, inspirational, human beings doing amazing things every day. One of those is Makia Maji, a nurse practitioner in the north of the country at a small rural clinic. And another is Dr. Aida Al-Siddiq, who is a pediatrician in the south of the country. And so, we chose to tell the story sort of through their experiences as caregivers,
23:12 Speaker 01 devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort, this entire generation of children that has been born into starvation. And that's an incredible, difficult task, but equally inspirational to watch these human beings devote every minute of every day to save a child. I mean, in my view, nothing is more important than that action.
23:38 Lex Fridman? Maybe on that point, real quick. So there is suffering at scale, starvation at scale. There's, I mean, the numbers, maybe you can mention in Yemen, what are the numbers in terms of people and starvation, but from a perspective of a nurse practitioner or a doctor, you're always have, you're treating one person in front of you. So how do you make sense of that calculus of like, there's a huge number of people suffering and then there's just the person in front of you? Is that all we can do as humans is just to help one person at a time? Is that the right way to think and to approach these problems?
24:23 Lex Fridman? Or can you actually make sense of the numbers?
24:26 Speaker 01 Speaking just as a human being, I think the scale of suffering is so great in Yemen that I think I'd be overwhelmed, right? If I focused on that scale, you know, you've probably heard that, you know, a child dies every 75 seconds in Yemen from hunger. Right? So we've been sitting here how long? You know, 35 minutes or so? That's a good handful of children that have already passed away. So to overcome sort of, I think, that danger of psychic numbing, which can happen when you think about suffering on such a large scale.
25:06 Speaker 01 As a filmmaker, as a human being, I have to focus in on the individuals, on those, those human beings in front of me. And I think that's exactly what Dr. El-Sadiq and Makiya do to keep going each day. And one of the amazing things about these two healthcare providers that we showcased in the film is that they treat anyone who shows up, right? They don't have to have money. They don't have to have any resources. They just have to get to the clinic or the hospital. And it's incredibly moving to see sort of the flexibility of their thinking in terms of how they make that work. Makiya, for example, I saw her in the north of the country. It's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at.
25:48 Speaker 01 And so, so it's like a magnet for all the cases in the north of the country. People come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes for specialty treatment of pediatric malnutrition. And I, one time I saw a child come in and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in. And, you know, just because of sort of the gender dynamics in Yemen, you know, there had to be a parent or a relative there to stay with the child while they're at the clinic. And it was a male relative. And so, you know, what many doctors in that instance would do would just turn them away. And instead, what Makia did is she walked into one of the rooms, talked to one of the other mothers and convinced them to become
26:32 Speaker 01 the temporary guardian, essentially, of this child until a female relative could, could arrive. So, you know, she's flexible. She, she finds solutions rather than allowing the problems to deter solutions.
26:45 Lex Fridman? One child at a time.
26:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, one child at a time.
26:50 Lex Fridman? You mentioned that you saw a child die in front of you. So when you're filming this as a filmmaker, what's that like? Psychologically, philosophically, creatively as a filmmaker, as a storyteller? What, what do you do there as a human and as a filmmaker? What's that whole experience like? Because you get to, like you said, you take it through the whole journey of a starving mother giving birth to a starving child.
27:28 Speaker 01 It's not something I want to film. It's not something that I certainly wanted to happen or seek out. But it happened. And the sad truth is that it happens every week at that hospital. And so when it happened in this instance, I felt an incredible responsibility to do justice to that reality, to acknowledge that a child had just died of starvation-related causes. And, and to find some way, if the parents wanted us to, to integrate that into this story we bring back to a, a Western audience. And, and, you know, I,
28:19 Speaker 01 I've filmed many difficult things over the years. And usually, I really love filming. And I didn't love filming Hunger Ward. It was not a process that I enjoyed on any way should perform sadly, because of the content. Because, you know, who wants to watch a child die in front of them? I don't. But I did, and I had to. And when that happened, I felt an incredible responsibility again to go deep, right? To go deep with that family, to tell the story of this hospital with every ounce of focus and talent that I could bring to the story.
29:02 Speaker 01 Because people should know that children are dying of starvation right now as we sit here. And that that doesn't have to happen. And it is happening because of political dynamics that we can intervene on.
29:16 Lex Fridman? Is there times you wanted to walk away? Quit the telling of the story?
29:25 Lex Fridman? Come back to the United States? Where you can just appreciate
29:36 Lex Fridman? the wonderful comfort you can have just sitting there and having food? And freedom to do whatever you want? Those kinds of things. Doesn't have to be in the United States. In a lot of places in the world.
29:51 Speaker 01 Well, that dynamic of survivor's guilt, you know, on some level, definitely exists. One of the hardest things filming Hunger Ward actually was eating, right? Because we were in these malnutrition clinics. They're called TFCs, therapeutic feeding centers. Where, you know...
30:13 Speaker 01 Over a long period of time, children lost the ability to eat normal food, right, and couldn't digest it and just, you know, were literally starving. And the practitioners were trying to bring them back to a state of thriving. But to leave those clinics, right, and to go to our camp or to go to our hotel, and then to have access to food, right, because we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels. I mean, it was a very intentional act throughout the course of the shoot to look at a piece of bread, right, or to look at a bowl of rice and think about that child in the TFC
30:54 Speaker 01 and think about how the privilege of having that bowl of rice that I could eat and digest. So it certainly, every day, helped me appreciate, right, the privilege I had.
31:08 Lex Fridman? Every bite you take.
31:09 Speaker 01 With every bite, absolutely. And so I wouldn't call it guilt, it wasn't exactly guilt, but it was definitely mindfulness, right?
31:17 Lex Fridman? Like meditate on the suffering of people who can't.
31:22 Speaker 01 That's right, exactly. So that knowledge, sort of, it was catalytic in some ways. It sort of moved us forward, really wanting to shape the most powerful story we could because we were surrounded by so much suffering every day.
31:37 Lex Fridman? How did filming that movie change you as a man? As a human being? You filmed a few difficult documentaries. That one is a heavy one. When you think of the person you were before you filmed it, and now when you wake up every morning, you look yourself in the mirror, how is that person different?
31:59 Speaker 01 Every documentary I do changes me in a different way. Like, I am not static in that sense, right, and preformed. It's like I change with every project because so many of them are difficult and challenging, right? And so in order to do them, I have to allow myself to change and be changed by them. In the case of Hunger Ward, you may remember the girl Omema, who's the 10-year-old girl who we showcase in Aden, in the south of the country. And, you know, we were there when she was admitted to the hospital.
32:38 Speaker 01 And when she was admitted, you know, this 10 year old girl weighed 24 pounds and she could barely stand up. And we started, you know, with the permission of the family to start to document her treatment and to see what would happen with this young girl who is so severely malnourished. And we watched her be treated by the nurses and the doctors in Sadaka Hospital. And slowly, over the course of a couple of weeks, we saw her change. We saw her start to sort of gain strength and start to recover. And she also watched
33:22 Speaker 01 the caregivers very carefully. And I watched her watch them. And I'll never forget, there was a moment where about two and a half weeks, I think, into her treatment, we walked into her room and I saw her offering a capful of water to another younger child who was also starving, right? The shot's actually in the film. And, and so to see Omema, this child who's starving, giving sustenance to a younger, more vulnerable child who was
34:01 Speaker 01 also starving, moved me deeply, right? So I saw her learn from the caregivers around her, right? And as a human being, as a filmmaker, I was incredibly inspired by Omema.
34:18 Lex Fridman? That capacity for compassion is there.
34:20 Speaker 01 Even within a 10 year old girl who's starving, right? And so, so you asked what changed me, that's one moment, right? I, rather than being crushed by such heavy content, it was actually the opposite, where I came away inspired by a 10 year old girl. And, you know, I didn't anticipate that, but I didn't think that's what this content would do, but it's what it did. It reinforced for me sort of this incredible capacity we all have as human beings, right? To do good, right? To even within the most difficult circumstances, to choose who we become and what we do. And, and, and a 10 year old girl taught me that'll reinforce that for me.
35:02 Lex Fridman? Were you able to?
35:05 Lex Fridman? Feel the culture, the people, so the the language barrier. Were you able to break through the language barrier, the culture barrier, you know, to understand the people? You know, um, because even even suffering has a language of of sorts, depending on where you are. The way people joke about things, the way they cry, the way. I this is an interesting thing I actually want to ask you. Sorry, I'm asking a million questions. I find that the people, you know, I've been talking to people in Ukraine and Russia. But in general, I've gotten a chance to talk to people who've been through trauma in their life. And there's a humor.
35:50 Lex Fridman? They have about trauma and hard times.
35:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:56 Lex Fridman? It depends on the culture, of course. Certainly Russian speaking folk. I mean, the the more suffering you've experienced, for some reason, the more they joke about it. It's almost like they're able to see something deep about humanity now that they have suffered. And they're able to laugh at the absurdity, the injustice of it all. And, you know, you could also say it's a way for them to deal with it. But that that humor has a kind of profound, like, um, understanding within it. About what it means to be human that I just. And and then you to really understand it, you have to know the language.
36:37 Lex Fridman? So I guess I'm asking, were you able to really feel the humans on the other side of the language?
36:45 Speaker 01 I'd like to think so. I mean, I mean, as you noted, you know, there there are universals in life that that transcend language. Right? I mean, suffering is suffering. Love is love. Compassion doesn't take place only through language, right? It's through actions. And so was there a language barrier? Absolutely, right? Did we try to bridge that through other means? And sort of universal emotions and experiences? Absolutely. That's one of the things I always think about when I'm filming is how do we distill down to universals? Right? Through imagery, right? Through the vocabulary of cinema, right?
37:28 Speaker 01 Because I believe so deeply that that vocabulary should be visual, right?
37:32 Lex Fridman? So the words, what's the most powerful way to express the universal? Is it visual or is it language, words?
37:41 Speaker 01 I think it's visual.
37:43 Lex Fridman? And we're talking about the human face or human face, human body, everything?
37:48 Speaker 01 Through actions as well.
37:49 Lex Fridman? Actions, the dynamic.
37:50 Speaker 01 I'm thinking about a woman named Salha in the film, who isn't named, but she's, you see her multiple times throughout the film. And she's basically the matron of the ward in the south. And she's the gatekeeper for the ward. So no one enters that ward without her permission. She's literally the gatekeeper at the door. So no one comes in unless Salha allows them to come in, right? But then she also is sort of like the first point of contact for compassion in the ward. So when mothers and families are admitted, she forms relationships between the moms and the grandmothers, for example, who are admitted and who are living there on the ward.
38:34 Speaker 01 And she does it through hugging, right? She does it through bringing them food, right? And she forms these really rather quickly deep relationships of compassion with the families. And so It's amazing to watch and no language is needed, right? To bear witness to this. And, and she also suffers because of that. Right? And so at the, near the end of the film, if you recall, when, when another child dies and the mother is wailing, we actually cut away to Salha, who's in the hallway, who walks into another room and begins sobbing.
39:17 Speaker 01 She's not a family member, but she has a deep relationship with that family that she forged as soon as they stepped into the ward. So that's universal, right? To see a woman weep because a child has died, even if they're not related to that. That's a universal sort of emotion experience we can all relate to. So that's what I mean by visual vocabulary.
39:41 Lex Fridman? And it's especially powerful because she has seen much of this kind of suffering and she's still, maybe she has built up some callous to be able to work day to day, but it's still, there's still an ocean underneath the ice.
39:59 Speaker 01 She's kept her heart open. Despite all the pain that she sees and feels every day. Somehow she's a human being who's able to do that, which is a very difficult thing to do, right? She still allows herself to be vulnerable. And maybe that's why she can do what she does.
40:17 Lex Fridman? What lessons do you draw from other famines in history? So for me personally, one that's touched my family and one of the great famines in history is in Ukraine, Khodorki in the 30s.
40:30 Speaker 01 Thirty-two, thirty-three, right?
40:31 Lex Fridman? Thirty-two, thirty-three with Stalin. Maybe you could speak to the universals of the suffering here. What lessons do you draw from those other famines? If you've looked at them or in general about famine that are manufactured by the decisions of, let's say authoritarian leaders?
41:02 Speaker 01 Famine doesn't have to exist, or the bulk of famines on this planet, I believe, don't have to exist. And most of them, or at least a good number of them, are manufactured by the leaders that choose to use famine as a weapon, right? And Ukraine is one of the obvious examples right now, you know, with siege tactics that are happening in different parts of the country. And, you know, we built international humanitarian law for a reason, right? Many years ago, and it continues to be written to this day. And it's there to prevent what's happening in Ukraine right now. It's there to prevent
41:47 Speaker 01 what's been happening in Yemen for seven years. And yet, there hasn't been any teeth behind it. And that's what disturbs me, is that we can see how these famines are being used as weapons in war. And yet, we aren't sort of using the levers of power that exist in order to, I think, to call out, in important and powerful ways, those who are causing them, and to make sure that we hold them accountable on the global stage. Now, to some extent, that seems to be happening in Ukraine in a way that hasn't happened for a long time. And that, that gives me hope, right? And yet, I don't believe we've done
42:32 Speaker 01 enough. And I think the international community needs to do far more than we are, both in Yemen, in Ethiopia, and in Ukraine right now.
42:43 Lex Fridman? There are certain kinds of things that captivate the global attention, and it seems like starvation is not always one of them.
42:52 Lex Fridman? For some reason, murder and destruction gets people attention more. It's the death, of course, is easy to enumerate, but it's the suffering that's the problem.
43:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. You know, when we went to film Hunger Ward, that was one of the creative questions that I was really concerned about because starvation, you know, it's not a quick action, right? It's a long, slow, insidious process, right? Just like hunger, right? And yet, when you're hungry, right? It takes you over. It becomes the most important thing, right? It's just absolutely fundamental to life. It's like drawing breath. And so I really, before I filmed Hunger Ward, I struggled to sort of answer how we could creatively approach that. Because, you know, someone sitting in a clinic, right?
43:48 Speaker 01 Starving or being treated for starvation, you know, that's a pretty static scene, right? And what we found was that because of the volume of cases and because of the nature of sort of how quickly people were coming and going is that it was more dynamic than we anticipated.
44:10 Lex Fridman? And there's something also about starvation. You get tired. It's almost like it's a quiet suffering.
44:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:18 Lex Fridman? Like, and by the way, there's something about when I think about dark times, I mean, you'll hear me chuckle, for example. I don't know what that is. That's almost like, it's almost like you have to kind of laugh at, you can't help but laugh at like the injustice and the cruelty in the world. Somehow that helps your mind deal with it. I mean, I see this all the time. Like, when you're struggling, you can't feed your family, you lost your home. The last thing you have is jokes about.
44:55 Speaker 01 Is humor.
44:56 Lex Fridman? Yes, humor. It's like, ah, the fucking man fucked me over again. And there's jokes all around that.
45:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:04 Lex Fridman? And then, and then you laugh and you drink vodka and you play music. I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is.
45:12 Speaker 01 It's gallows humor, right? It's, it's, it's a way of, a way of, I think, simultaneously acknowledging and allowing yourself to move forward. Right? Beyond the pain and, and the suffering.
45:23 Lex Fridman? So you mentioned Ukraine and you mentioned Putin. What are your thoughts about the humanitarian crisis? And generally the suffering that's resulting from the war in Ukraine?
45:36 Speaker 01 Well, first off, I think the conflict is just going to exacerbate, you know, sort of the global challenge we have with displacement, right? My, the last entire trilogy I did was about displacement to a great extent due to war. And, you know, this is a huge displacement of human beings, regardless of the cause. And that is going to sort of have a ripple effect across the globe for many, many years to come, regardless of, even if the conflict ended today. So there's that, that's going to set up a whole nother strain on sort of the, the global sort of resources that, that come into play to deal with refugees.
46:21 Speaker 01 You know, there were 79 million displaced people on this globe prior to the Ukrainian conflict. Right? You probably know the numbers better than I do in terms of what the current estimates are for displacement from Ukraine.
46:34 Lex Fridman? Four to six million.
46:36 Speaker 01 So what are we up to now? Seventy-three, seventy-four million individuals on this planet now who are displaced? That's a significant bump.
46:46 Speaker 01 I wish that the levers of power were used differently in situations like Ukraine and Syria, for example.
46:53 Lex Fridman? So, what are the levers of power?
46:56 Speaker 01 Well, military might, let's take that for one. So, I have always felt, after working in Syria and Turkey, that we completely missed our opportunity as a player on the global stage with military capability to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria. We had the ability and we didn't leverage that ability. The fact that I talked with so many Syrians during the course of doing that project,
47:36 Speaker 01 who told me their stories of living in their house, and having a Syrian helicopter fly over their house and drop a 55-gallon drum full of explosives and shrapnel in their neighborhood, over and over and over again. Not focused on any military targets, only meant to kill in so fear. And, early in the conflict, we could have stopped that. Before Russia got involved, we could have intervened and created a no-fly zone.
48:14 Lex Fridman? We, the United States?
48:16 Speaker 01 We, the United States, or a coalition that we were a part of. Yeah. And we didn't do it. And we could have, and I think that's an example where we have the military capability to actually do good in a situation like that, and we don't usually use it for those purposes. And I think that's what a military ought to be used for, beyond just defending our borders, is to save others with the privilege that that power affords.
48:38 Lex Fridman? What do you think about the power of the military versus the power of sanctions versus the power of conversation?
48:46 Speaker 01 They're all different tools, right? To be used at different moments. But if if words fail, if sanctions fail, right? I think there are moments in history where power is justified, right? And I think Syria was one of them. I think when barrel bombs were, you know, dropping on civilian neighborhoods for months and months and months with no intent to do anything other than kill Syrian civilians. That's an instance, I think, where might is justified to shoot those helicopters out of the sky.
49:19 Lex Fridman? Here's the difficult thing. We've talked about Yemen. Where's the line between good and evil for US intervention in different countries and conflicts in the world? It's easy to look back 10, 20, 30 years to know what was and wasn't a quote unquote "just" war. In the moment, how do we know?
49:43 Speaker 01 I think it's incredibly difficult to answer that, right? And I think that's why leaders make the wrong choices so often, right? Is they second guess themselves. I think you take all the data at your fingertips, all the intelligence that you have, right? And you look at it all very carefully and you make a decision, right? There are some instances, though, where it's very clear what's happening, right? And leaders still don't act, right? In Yemen right now, for example, it's very clear what's happening, right? Children are being starved because of a blockade. All the US would have to do is ensure that blockade, now there's a two-month ceasefire
50:24 Speaker 01 in place now, but remains lifted beyond that ceasefire and children will stop starving. That's pretty simple. You can trace, it's a direct connection. And we haven't had the sort of the moral wherewithal to make that decision because we're too, too interested in maintaining positive ties with Saudi Arabia where oil flows from and so much influence. Because Saudi Arabia has so much influence throughout the MENA region, we want to keep that relationship tight despite sort of the moral wounds that that come from that.
51:00 Lex Fridman? About half the world is under authoritarian regimes. Everybody operates under narratives. And there's a narrative in the United States that freedom is good.
51:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:11 Lex Fridman? Democracy is good.
51:14 Lex Fridman? I have fallen victim to this narrative. I believe in it.
51:20 Lex Fridman? I'm saying this jokingly, but not really. Because who knows the truth of anything in this world? I eat meat, factory farmed meat. And I seem to not be intellectually and philosophically tortured by this, and I should be. There's a lot of suffering there.
51:39 Lex Fridman? What do we do to lessen the suffering of the people under authoritarian regimes? Again, the same question. Military conflict,
51:52 Lex Fridman? diplomacy, sanctions, all those kinds of things.
51:57 Lex Fridman? Or is, does that lessen suffering or increase the suffering from what you see in Yemen? Is it, is it something that has to be healed across generations? Or can be healed on a scale of months and years?
52:13 Speaker 01 I'm just a guy with camera legs, you know? But as a guy with a camera, I've seen a lot, a lot of things in a lot of places. And, and I've seen the effects these decisions made by authoritarian leaders have on their own citizens. And, and that's what drives my thinking on this.
52:38 Speaker 01 And, and that's what drives and motivates me each day to raise the red flag through my films and say, "Listen, Biden, you campaigned for president in part on a platform that said that we would regain our prominence on the moral stage of the world, right? And that we would prioritize, right? Sort of a moral paradigm over relationships with authoritarian regimes, Saudi Arabia being one, right? And yet, when the CIA report came out that clearly articulated in detail
53:22 Speaker 01 that MBS was responsible for Khashoggi's murder and for cutting his body into pieces and probably burning it in the backyard of the embassy. What did Biden do? He didn't really make a pariah out of MBS like he said he was going to, right? What if he'd done something else and actually done what he said he was gonna do, which was make MBS... What if he had... would remove the ability for MBS to fly to the United States, for example? Now, that's a sanction, right? That's a sanction that's individual and concrete and would be hugely embarrassing for MBS. That would have been Biden saying, "This is unacceptable behavior," right?
54:06 Speaker 01 This is something which, because you executed such a horrendous act on someone living in the United States, right? We are not going to give you a stage here at least, right? Within the borders of our country. Those are the things that leaders can do that I don't think they do often enough. And certainly, our leader right now isn't doing it in the way I wish he were. He certainly has taken a different stand on Ukraine, you know, and been very vocal. But there's so many instances we could talk about where I feel like the political gamesmanship, right? Often falls into maintaining relationships, like with MBS and Saudi Arabia, rather than doing the right thing.
54:51 Speaker 01 Rather than, then, as a nation, a leader of a nation saying, "This is unacceptable. We have a higher standard than this." Because I think when leaders do that, it becomes aspirational, right? It becomes aspirational for other leaders, in the progressive world at least. And also, it rings the alarm bells for other authoritarian leaders and says, "You know what? There are lines, right? There are things that can't be done, or there will be significant consequences, like you will not be able to fly into our airspace anymore." And sanctions, I think, need to be concrete and individual to some... in addition to the larger scope.
55:32 Speaker 01 But when they're concrete and individual, I think often they're felt in a different way.
55:38 Lex Fridman? You mean, felt, obviously, by the individuals? And so, the ripple effects of that is... might have...
55:49 Lex Fridman? The power to steer the direction of nations.
55:52 Speaker 01 Because of the nature of authoritarian regimes, right?
55:55 Lex Fridman? Yes, individuals have so much power.
55:57 Speaker 01 Exactly, right. So, you know, if Putin is, you know, put on trial in The Hague at some point, or at least there's the threat of that, right? Now, that's likely never to happen, of course, because someone has to be in custody to go on trial, right? And he's never going to allow that to happen. But, but just knowing that that's an, you know, that danger exists is going to change his travel plans in the future, right? MBS not being able to fly to the US, he's going to feel that and be embarrassed by that. So I think they have a special meaning and consequence in authoritarian regimes because of that.
56:38 Lex Fridman? You said you're just a guy with a camera?
56:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:41 Lex Fridman? I would say you're a brilliant guy with a camera. I'm also a kind of guy with the camera.
56:50 Speaker 01 You're a guy with a couple of cameras.
56:50 Lex Fridman? A couple of cameras. I have more.
56:52 Speaker 01 Couple of mics, too. You've got a couple of mics, a couple of cameras, a robot over here.
56:57 Lex Fridman? When you can't, when you can't beat them with quality, you bring the quantity.
57:01 Speaker 01 That's right.
57:02 Lex Fridman? So to me, that's also an interest, partially because I also speak Russian.
57:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:08 Lex Fridman? And a bit Ukrainian. I want to study that part of the world. I want to talk to a lot of people. I want to talk to the leaders. I want to talk to regular people. To be honest, and I would love to get your comments on this. The regular quote unquote people are way more fascinating to me. As a filmmaker, how do you figure out how to tell this story? I'm sure a guy with a camera, you're looking at war in Ukraine, but also what's going on in Yemen, Syria, and other places in the world. I mentioned North Korea. That's a super interesting one. Hard to bring cameras along. China? You know, like in Canada, the truckers, there's all kinds of fascinating things happening in the world.
57:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:53 Lex Fridman? So you as a scholar of human suffering and human flourishing,
58:00 Lex Fridman? how do you choose how to tell the story?
58:03 Speaker 01 How do I choose a story? How do I choose?
58:04 Lex Fridman? Both the story and how, I assume those are coupled. So how do you choose which story to tell?
58:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:12 Lex Fridman? And how do you choose how to tell that story?
58:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, in terms of how to choose which story,
58:21 Speaker 01 you know, it's a bit of a mystery potion for me, frankly.
58:27 Speaker 01 I go often on instinct, but there's also a highly intentional piece of it for me as well. And the intentional piece is, I guess I'd call it the do I care threshold, you know, or the so what threshold?
58:42 Lex Fridman? You personally, just something in your heart just kind of gets excited or hurts or just feels something.
58:49 Speaker 01 So one of the things that disturbs me about American culture, Lex, is that, you know, we seem to be a people that's fascinated by reality television. For example, like, like, look at how many of us here in America watch reality television, right? That deeply disturbs me. Not that I've never watched an episode. I've shot a whole season of it once to make a living, right? So it's like, I know it, right? But I feel like the things we should be paying attention to are the things, personally, are the things I choose to film, right? As a human being, as a dad, as a filmmaker, I think we should be paying attention to the fact that children are being starved in Yemen.
59:33 Speaker 01 I think we should be paying attention to the fact that Ukrainians are being displaced by the millions. So there's this so what threshold that I use. And I feel like it has to be a topic that if we don't cover and we don't put out in the world. In the largest possible way, in the hope of intervening, in the hope of marshaling maximum resources and attention to solving the problem, that's what I'm dedicated to as a filmmaker. Because I didn't pick up a camera initially to film puppy dogs, right? To make people smile. I believe the camera is a tool for change. I believe the camera is a powerful tool that we can use to raise awareness and marshal
1:00:18 Speaker 01 resources and help people understand the impact that these geopolitical decisions have on real people's lives. And that's the intent I create each film with. Now, how I choose each story, that's the magic potion piece of it, right? And often, one flows rather organically into another, frankly.
1:00:40 Lex Fridman? So you just kind of, like you said, you go with instinct a little bit?
1:00:44 Speaker 01 To some extent, but oftentimes, I choose the next project based on relationships I've developed in the last film, right? And so one often flows into another through relationships I develop. And then a colleague will share a detail about something that's happening in a certain place, and I'll go, hmm, really? I didn't know that, right? And it usually it's before it's hit the world stage in a big way. And so I start to do due diligence, and often that it reveals it to be a much bigger and more pressing topic that I want to learn more about.
1:01:18 Lex Fridman? Before I talk to you about Syria and Lifeboat, you mentioned a camera is the best weapon. Maybe just-
1:01:31 Speaker 01 Well, it can't take out a tank, right? But it's a good weapon.
1:01:34 Lex Fridman? Second, top three. I love the humor throughout this. I really appreciate it. We were talking about such dark topics.
1:01:45 Lex Fridman? It resets the mind in a way that allows me to think. So, thank you.
1:01:51 Lex Fridman? As a filmmaker, almost wanna talk about the technical details.
1:01:59 Speaker 01 Uh oh.
1:02:00 Lex Fridman? How do you choose to shoot stuff? Again, so maybe you can explain to me. I work with incredible folks that care about lenses and equipment and so on. I tend to be somebody that just wants to kinda go as like a guerrilla shooting. Like not plan too much, just go with gritty. I'm trying to come up with words that sound positive.
1:02:36 Lex Fridman? Do a positive spin on what I try to do, but like gritty, don't overplan. Use, like we had a big discussion, if you see this light.
1:02:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:46 Lex Fridman? It's on a stand that's a very ghetto stand.
1:02:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, you need a sandbag on that, man.
1:02:51 Lex Fridman? Exactly. So, no, see, no sandbag. And like the stand is actually bending under the weight of that thing.
1:02:59 Speaker 01 It could fall on us.
1:03:00 Lex Fridman? It could fall.
1:03:01 Speaker 01 It probably won't reach us, but it could fall.
1:03:02 Lex Fridman? But the danger, live under that danger, embrace that danger, love it.
1:03:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:08 Lex Fridman? Because that thing is easier to transport than a heavier one.
1:03:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:12 Lex Fridman? Sandbag, that's extra weight. So, if you keep, like, people tell me, there's the right way to do stuff. Like, here's these giant cases with all the kinds of padding for transporting stuff. I transport most of the equipment in a garbage bag.
1:03:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:26 Lex Fridman? So, I, that's just a preference because that's somehow, that chaos allows me to sit, to ignore all the stupidity of loving the equipment and focusing on the story. So, that said, I've never shot anything like worthwhile.
1:03:46 Lex Fridman? Like, uh, there is power to the visual.
1:03:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:03:50 Lex Fridman? Like, definitely. And so finding a certain angle, a certain light, whether it's natural light or additional artificial lighting, just capturing a tear, capturing, um, when the person forgets themselves for a moment and looks out into the distance, missing somebody, thinking about somebody. All of those like moments you can capture, a lens, a camera can do magic with that. I don't even know the question I'm asking you, but how do, both technical and philosophical, how do you capture the visual power that you're after?
1:04:28 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, so many of my films, I think, are built on the premise of access, right? Built on this notion that, um,
1:04:41 Speaker 01 the, the biggest hurdle to the story is getting there, being there in the room, or being there on the boat while a crisis is unfolding. And that access typically is really nuanced and difficult to gain. And, and then trust flows from that, right? Because usually it takes a long time to gain that access. Because that access is so hard fought,
1:05:11 Speaker 01 it necessarily informs how we film, right? To be in a room at Sadaka Hospital in southern Yemen, I can't have five people in that room, right? I can't have a boom mic over a scene. I want creatively the opposite of that as well. So it's not just a logistical question, it's also a creative question. To capture intimate moments where...
1:05:41 Speaker 01 Families are dealing with suffering children and dying children and caretaking is active and ongoing all the time. You don't want to interrupt that moment. And so that informs how I do things. So we go fleet and nimble and small.
1:05:56 Lex Fridman? Those are all really good words for.
1:05:59 Speaker 01 But, but, but it's so it's logistical on the one hand, but it's also a creative choice, right? So when we filmed Hunger Ward, two people were filming the entire film, right? Me and my director of photography.
1:06:10 Lex Fridman? Those the two people in the room?
1:06:11 Speaker 01 Two people in the room. Yeah.
1:06:13 Lex Fridman? Wow.
1:06:14 Speaker 01 That's it. The whole film, right? We had a field producer as well in these parts of the country, but in terms of camera, it's just two people and we're doing everything. And we have lenses that, you know, are long enough that we don't have to move to capture the film. So we can tuck into a corner sometimes, right?
1:06:30 Lex Fridman? So just what's long mean? That means they're standing farther away and they can.
1:06:34 Speaker 01 Zoom lens. It's not a prime lens. So it's not a fixed focal length, right? Because a fixed focal length, you have to move a lot more in order to capture action. With, with a zoom lens, you know, maybe a 105 at the long end, you know, I can tuck into a corner and just film from 15 feet away instead of having to get right up on someone, right? So you'd, you'd less like to interrupt the scene and, and you can kind of become the fly on the wall sometimes. So, so, you know, I'm very intentional about that piece of it so that we can, we can capture those vulnerable moments and not interrupt them.
1:07:10 Lex Fridman? That's really fascinating too, because the access, I don't often think about this, but that's probably true for me as well. Part of the storytelling is to be in the room.
1:07:26 Speaker 01 And that's the hard part. Yeah. For, for me, most of my films, that's the hardest part. Actually, as hard as Hunger Ward and Lifeboat were to film and 50 Feet From Syria. The getting their piece of it for the last two was much harder.
1:07:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and it's also, it's a creative act. It's, I don't know if it is for you, but it's the kind of people you talk to. It's, it's like how you live your life. Like, the kind of people I talk to right now, they steer the direction of my life and steer the direction of things I'll film. So like, it's not just like you're trying to get access. It's like, it's everything. It's like, it builds, it builds and builds and builds.
1:08:08 Speaker 01 Builds on itself. Yeah, yeah.
1:08:10 Lex Fridman? I mean, part of the thing, even saying, you know, talking about some of these leaders and conversations with them. It's almost like steering your life into the direction of the difficult. Of like, taking the leap. And if you're a good human being,
1:08:30 Lex Fridman? and a lot of people know who you are as a human, like, not, not as a name, but as really who you are. That, like, putting that attention out there, it's somehow the world opens doors where the access becomes, the access that was once seemed impossible, becomes possible. And then all of that is a creative journey to be in the room. I think that probably is, I mean, it's true even for fiction films, probably, is like, everything that led to that, like, to be in the room, the journey to be in the room and to shoot the scene is maybe more important than the scene itself.
1:09:14 Lex Fridman? And like, really focus on the creative act of that. Yeah, that's really fascinating, and especially, I mean, with a documentary, you get one take.
1:09:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can't say, hey, reset, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:09:25 Lex Fridman? Ah, that is so interesting, because you're in some of the most difficult parts of the world, in the room with some of the most difficult stories to be told.
1:09:36 Speaker 01 And yet, I think that's why I keep doing these stories, right? Because it's, it's, once you have that lived experience, for me.
1:09:49 Speaker 01 It's moving. It moves me to bear witness to these inspiring people under difficult circumstances. And I can't come back to the US afterwards and walk down the grocery aisle where there's 50 different choices for canned peas, right? And not sort of feel that lived tension, right? That lived tension of the privilege that I have here in the US. And then I have a choice about what to do with that privilege, right? And the last thing I want to do is start, you know, doing stories
1:10:33 Speaker 01 about dandelions, right? There's far more important things to do on this very limited time that I have on the planet. And, you know, I think that's catalytic for me. Like, I feel that mortality each day. And my goal is to tell as many of these stories
1:11:00 Speaker 01 before I'm gone.
1:11:01 Lex Fridman? Could you speak to the getting access? Is this just, you know, is there interesting stories of how weird or funny or profound ways that led you to get access to a room?
1:11:19 Speaker 01 Each one is a different adventure. And it's definitely
1:11:21 Lex Fridman? It's an adventure.
1:11:22 Speaker 01 Everyone's an adventure, yeah. Probably one of the easiest ones I ever had in the recent past was for 50 feet from Syria, where, you know, I literally broke my hand in a bicycle race. And after many months of trying to get an appointment with an orthopedic hand surgeon, you know, a specialist, I finally did. And he was Syrian-American. And the Syrian conflict had just begun and we started talking about it. And after, you know, he looked at my hand in the first five minutes, he's like, yeah, you need surgery. Right. Great. But then somehow we started talking about Syria. And like five minutes in, he just stood up and like, put the privacy curtain around us. Supposed to be a 15 minute appointment or so.
1:12:07 Speaker 01 And we talked for an hour. Right. So, you know, those moments of sort of mysterious confluence happen. Right. And I think you have to be open to them when they do happen because I'm a storyteller. I'm always looking as well. Right. So, so because he then contacted me later and said, Sky, I am going back to the Syrian border to volunteer. As a surgeon, do you want to come with me? That was an easy one. That's probably the easiest one I could give you, but it came out of this interesting moment, very personal moment. Right. Lifeboat and Hunger Ward were completely different.
1:12:41 Speaker 01 And I had to really work hard to gain access to those stories.
1:12:46 Lex Fridman? So you intentionally thought like, what? I want to get access to the story.
1:12:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12:52 Lex Fridman? And then what are the different ideas? And they often might involve. A doctor or a dentist or just being, being maybe intentionally and aggressively open.
1:13:05 Lex Fridman? To experiences that lead you into the room. So be like, it's funny you mentioned the doctor because I have similar experiences now. I've just gotten. Access to all kinds of fascinating people.
1:13:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:22 Lex Fridman? In the same, in the same way.
1:13:23 Speaker 01 They're all around us.
1:13:24 Lex Fridman? They're all.
1:13:25 Speaker 01 They're all around us. You just have to look.
1:13:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah, exactly.
1:13:27 Speaker 01 It's like, there's fascinating people everywhere who are doing incredible things.
1:13:31 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:13:31 Speaker 01 But we have to be open and keep our eyes open and realize that there are amazing human beings. Everywhere.
1:13:38 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there's networks that connect people just through life. You meet people, you share a beer or a drink, or just you fall in love. Or you, or you share trauma together. You go through a hard time together and those little sticky things connects us humans. And if you just keep yourself open and embrace the curiosity. And then also the persistence, I suppose. Like if you, like, how long does, have you chased access? Does it take days, weeks, months, years?
1:14:13 Speaker 01 Like, I'm not the most talented filmmaker in the world. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I think if there's, there's qualities that have served me well in my career. It's persistence and tenacity, right? I'm always been sort of a slow burn human being. Like I, I, I would never hit a home run, but I hit a first, right? A single to first, and then I'd hit another single to first. And then, so, you know, I ran a marathon when I was 18. And I think that is illustrative of sort of how my career has been. I, I just keep going and, and I believe in this notion of incremental evolution.
1:14:54 Speaker 01 That with each project, I try to learn from it and take away lessons learned and improve my craft. Right? And improve how I, how I leverage that craft and improve how I tell the story from a narrative standpoint each time so that on the next project, it's a little bit better. And that's the arc of my career is learning, learning, evolving, evolving. So that I can, I can make a little better film the next time.
1:15:24 Lex Fridman? How do you gain people's trust? Like, for example, there's a line between journalists and documentary filmmakers. Nobody really trusts journalists.
1:15:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, right, exactly.
1:15:37 Lex Fridman? But a documentary filmmaker, of course, I'm joking, half joking, I don't know which percentage joking, but some truth, but documentary filmmaker is a kind of storyteller, an artist.
1:15:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:50 Lex Fridman? And somehow that's more trustworthy because you're on the same side in some way. I don't know.
1:15:57 Speaker 01 Maybe, maybe on the same side, yeah.
1:15:58 Lex Fridman? Maybe. Is there something to be said, how you gain the trust of people to gain access? You just, are you just trying to be a good human being?
1:16:08 Lex Fridman? Is there something to be said there?
1:16:09 Speaker 01 Well, so I do draw a distinction between journalism and filmmaking because I think you're right, they're different. And there are some filmmakers who do hew to sort of the journalistic tenets of who, what, where, when, why, fair and balanced on both sides, right? Make sure everyone has a voice. I don't.
1:16:27 Lex Fridman? If you say fair and balanced, you're rarely either fair or balanced.
1:16:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:32 Lex Fridman? I've seen that with journalists. Journalists often, unfortunately, in my perspective, sorry to interrupt you rudely and go on a rant, but they seem to have.
1:16:40 Speaker 01 Go on a rant, do it.
1:16:41 Lex Fridman? They seem to have an agenda.
1:16:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:43 Lex Fridman? As opposed to seeking to truly tell a story or to truly understand.
1:16:49 Lex Fridman? Especially when they're talking to people
1:16:55 Lex Fridman? who have some degree of evil in them.
1:16:58 Speaker 01 Well, we all have an agenda, right? I think in anything we do, whether it's like to seek truth or, you know, some, some larger principle.
1:17:06 Lex Fridman? Sure.
1:17:07 Speaker 01 I, I always have an agenda. Like I chose to work with civilians and, and caretakers in Yemen on Hunger Ward rather than to go interview MBS, right? That's what I'm interested in is bringing that to the world, right? But in terms of, in terms of building relationships and trust, it's, it's really, I think about transparency as much as anything else and going in in a collaborative sense. So I don't.
1:17:40 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't think of, of the people that I film with as subjects, for example. I think of them as collaborators. So it's a different mindset that I go into projects with.
1:17:51 Lex Fridman? That's beautiful.
1:17:52 Speaker 01 And it's based on relationships, right? You have to build relationships with other human beings, however you can. And that takes time, and it takes listening, and it's active. So it's, it's, I've talked about the notion of consent before, which, which, you know, is so important in nonfiction film. And, you know, I hew to this idea that, um, you know, you don't just slide a piece of paper and from someone, a release form and have them sign it, right? And then you're done. You know, that's not the nature of true consent in my mind. It's, you have to, you have to work on a foundation of active consent every single day that you're working with someone. And that's based on relationship, right?
1:18:35 Speaker 01 And it's based on dialogue. So, so it's trust that I'm always aiming for. It's, it's the building of relationships, which I'm always aiming for, which is why, you know, yesterday I got a bunch of photos from Dr. Al-Sadiq in the south of Yemen. And she sends me photos all the time of the children that she's currently treating because we have an active relationship that's, continues on and probably will for many years to come. You know, so that it's, it's, it's, it's going to continue. And that's the only way that I can do these kinds of films.
1:19:06 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you about silly little details of filming before, before we go to the big, big picture stories. Cameras, lenses.
1:19:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:18 Lex Fridman? Do those, how much do those matter? You mentioned director of photography. What, what's your, how much do you love the, the feel, the smell of equipment that does the visual filming? You know, there's some people, they're just like,
1:19:34 Lex Fridman? They they they love lenses. How much do you love that and or versus how much do you focus on the story or access and all this kind of?
1:19:43 Speaker 01 I'm not a tech geek. But because during the bulk of my career, I um I've worked as a director of photography myself for other people in order to pay the bills over the years. You know, I know the technical side of it because I I've had to know it and I've had to train myself and learn it. So I see them as necessary tools. And again, because I believe, you know, film and cinema is is and should be visually driven and not verbally driven. I want the best tools possible within my means, right?
1:20:23 Speaker 01 And within the the logistical ability of the project because we have to go so small, right? I can't I can't afford nor can I bring a huge hundred thousand dollar lens.
1:20:34 Lex Fridman? So if I gave you a trillion dollars.
1:20:36 Speaker 01 A trillion dollars?
1:20:37 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:20:38 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:20:39 Lex Fridman? Unlimited.
1:20:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:40 Lex Fridman? There's still huge constraints that have nothing to do with money.
1:20:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:43 Lex Fridman? Like you just said. So what what cameras would you use?
1:20:47 Speaker 01 You know what I'd do with the trillion dollars? I could do a lot of trillion dollars.
1:20:51 Lex Fridman? You're only allowed to fund the film and no corrupt stuff where you like use the film to actually help children. No, you're not allowed to do any of that.
1:21:00 Speaker 01 What I would do with the trillion is I wouldn't invest in it. Well, I guess I wouldn't invest in it. I would I would increase capacity to do more films. What I would do so is I would buy basically the perfect little, you know, mini equipment set, right? But then I would train three teams, maybe to do the same thing that I've been doing. So we could multiply and scale up.
1:21:22 Lex Fridman? More and more stories.
1:21:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what I would do with the money.
1:21:25 Lex Fridman? But the actual setup.
1:21:26 Speaker 01 Would remain small and nimble. Yeah.
1:21:30 Lex Fridman? And what about lighting? Do you usually use natural light? Do you ever do? I mean, sorry for the technical questions here, but.
1:21:43 Lex Fridman? Highlighting the drama of the human face.
1:21:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:47 Lex Fridman? That's the visual. That's art. That's like to reveal reality.
1:21:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:54 Lex Fridman? At its deepest is art. And do you use lighting? Lighting is such a big part of that.
1:22:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:22:01 Lex Fridman? Do you ever do artificial lighting? Do you try to do natural always?
1:22:04 Speaker 01 You know, the best lighting instrument in the world?
1:22:07 Lex Fridman? Is the sun.
1:22:08 Speaker 01 At the right moment of the day. And so I predominantly use natural light.
1:22:18 Speaker 01 At certain moments and just shape natural light during the course of these small human right stocks. That's not to say we don't bring instruments sometimes, but when we do, they're very small and again, compact. So, for example, I have this small little tube kit. That's just three instruments, right? That you can charge with USB because electricity is often a major issue where we go. So there's just three little tube lights with magnetic backs that if we find in a situation where, you know, we can't get enough exposure for a hallway or something, and we have the time to throw it up. We'll throw it up if people are walking, if collaborators are walking down that hallway a lot, for example, at night, just so we can see them, right?
1:23:04 Speaker 01 So it's instances like that. Or if we do do an interview, which we don't do very often, but if we do, just so we have a key light on the face, right? And always bring a reflector or two, you know, just to shape natural light as well in ways. But it's, um, it's about shaping rather than producing light for us.
1:23:27 Lex Fridman? Got it. As we sit surrounded by black curtains in complete natural life. So just, just so you know, this room.
1:23:36 Lex Fridman? Is like a violation of the basic principles of of using the sun. So behind the large curtains are giant windows.
1:23:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:47 Lex Fridman? So this whole.
1:23:48 Speaker 01 Shall I rip them open?
1:23:49 Lex Fridman? Exactly.
1:23:53 Lex Fridman? How much of the work is done in the edit? That's another question I'm curious about. And how much do you sort of anticipate that? Like, when you're actually shooting, are you thinking of the final story as it appears on screen? Or are you just collecting, as a human, collecting little bits of story here and there? And in the edit is where most of the storytelling happens?
1:24:20 Speaker 01 I've developed this sort of mental paradigm for myself over the years that speaks to that. And and I call it the three creations, right? And so when I'm doing a film, the first creation for me is, you know, my preconception or visualization of what the film is going to be before I shoot it. Right? So I have this this entire vision of of what a film's gonna be. And and sometimes it can be pretty specific, like I'll I'll think through the scenes if I if I know the locations and everything. And I'll have this idea of what I'm going to create, right? And then I'm there filming, right?
1:25:00 Speaker 01 And always, without fail, reality is something altogether different than what I thought it would be.
1:25:07 Lex Fridman? But it's still good to have the original idea.
1:25:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, but if I tried to hold to that original vision, right? And to create a film out of that idea, they'd be crap. All the films would be crap. So we I have to adapt. I have to evolve my approach and then embrace what is actually occurring with the people who are actually doing it. And then re-envision. So that re-envision is very active during the entire filming process. And so that's the second creation. That's the the rethinking and revisualizing based on what we're actually experiencing and seeing, what this film is going to be.
1:25:42 Speaker 01 And then I finished filming, right? And we're, we bring the hard drives back and we plug in the hard drives in the edit bay. And oftentimes, you know, because it's two of us filming most of the time, I haven't seen all the footage. Because in the field, it's all about just filming, right? And then just transferring the footage and getting it safely, you know, cloned to multiple drives. I don't have a chance to review everything. I can't do rushes like you do on a large feature. So because I'm filming half of it, I know what I filmed, right? But I haven't seen everything the director of photography has filmed, right? So the next stage for me is reviewing every single frame of what's been filmed.
1:26:26 Speaker 01 And that's where discovery happens the third time, right? Or second time, rather, is, wow, now I thought we'd filmed this, but actually, there's this over here. And then I have to open up this second vision and turn and transform it into a third vision for the film, based on what's actually on the hard drive.
1:26:47 Lex Fridman? So is this like a daily process?
1:26:49 Speaker 01 So what I do, my process is that once, if it's a really difficult project, I'll take a break before I go through this. Just, just for healing, you know, and some space away and fresh eyes. And usually that's about a month. And then, once I reengage, I reengage whole hog. I reengage fully and I review every single frame. And as I do that, I create a spreadsheet. And for Hunger War, that spreadsheet was, I don't know, 1,500 lines long or something, where it's basically log notes. And I, and I watch every scene and I take notes. And I, I know really what we have. And once I've gone through that process that takes about a month,
1:27:31 Speaker 01 and I really know what we came back with, I create an outline for the film from that. And that's the third visioning, right? That's usually completely different than my original vision for the film, to some extent, right? But I have to stay open to that entire process. Or, or I'd be trying to create something that I can't really create. So I think that's, those are the three creations for me.
1:27:56 Lex Fridman? That's so cool to, to know what we have. Just to lay it all out and to load it in into your mind.
1:28:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:06 Lex Fridman? Cause like, this is the capture of reality we have. It's a very kind of scientific process too, cause um, you know, in science, you collect a bunch of data about a phenomenon.
1:28:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:16 Lex Fridman? And now you have to like analyze that data, but now your phenomenon is long gone.
1:28:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, right, right. Now you just have the data.
1:28:21 Lex Fridman? Just the data and you have to uh, write a paper about it, like analyze the data. It's similar things.
1:28:27 Speaker 01 It is.
1:28:28 Lex Fridman? You have to like load it all in, where's the story, how, how, how do you, that last probably profound piece of doing the editing, like in your mind, like what, uh, how to lay those things out?
1:28:44 Speaker 01 Well, it's almost like the scientific process, right? I have a hypothesis, a creative hypothesis, right? Not a scientific one.
1:28:50 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:28:50 Speaker 01 And, and, but then I'm testing the hypothesis during the course of filming, right? And I have to stay true to what the data tells me in the end creatively. So it's very similar to the scientific processes. I don't know what we should, we should probably coin that.
1:29:04 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's pretty good.
1:29:05 Speaker 01 Creative scientific process or something like that.
1:29:08 Lex Fridman? But then you actually do the edit and then you watch, that's also iterative in a sense. Cause maybe uh, when you have a film that's 20, 30, 40 minutes, or if it's feature length,
1:29:24 Lex Fridman? like it, and it, do you ever have it where it sucks? Like it's not at all.
1:29:29 Speaker 01 Is there a stage where it sucks?
1:29:30 Lex Fridman? Like a stage where, right, right. It like is where it's like, no, this is not, this is not what I was meant. Like when it's all put together in this way, this doesn't, this is not working right. This is not right. Or, or do you, is it always like an incremental step towards better and better?
1:29:47 Speaker 01 It's incremental. Yeah, it's incremental. Yeah. And there's always some moment in the editing process where there's a breakthrough. Where suddenly I understand how it fits together more fully.
1:29:58 Lex Fridman? And you have to be, like you said, resilient. You have to be patient that that moment will come.
1:30:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:30:03 Lex Fridman? Are you ultra self-critical or are you generally optimistic and patient?
1:30:09 Speaker 01 I don't think those are mutually exclusive.
1:30:12 Lex Fridman? Right. So you just oscillate or you, or they're like dance partners or something?
1:30:16 Speaker 01 They're dance partners. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely dance, you know, all the way through the process.
1:30:21 Lex Fridman? By way of advice, you know, to young filmmakers.
1:30:26 Lex Fridman? How to film something that is recognized by the world in some way?
1:30:34 Speaker 01 I would say, you know, first off, learn your craft, right? Because I think craft is incredibly foundational, right? To creating a powerful story.
1:30:48 Lex Fridman? I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say craft, do you mean just the raw, technical? The director of photography, like the filming aspect? Is it the storytelling, is it the actors, the whole thing?
1:30:58 Speaker 01 I think craft is more than just knowing how to push record on a camera or what lens to use, right? That's part of it, right? But I think, at least in nonfiction, you know, I'm a product to some extent of having to know how to do it all, right? Having to teach myself how to do it all, because I didn't go to film school, you know?
1:31:22 Speaker 01 But I became so enamored of telling stories through a camera.
1:31:28 Lex Fridman? Where was the leap, by the way, from theater to storyteller?
1:31:32 Speaker 01 Oh, I just had needed an extra class in grad school. I was in an MFA directing class and I needed an extra class. And I just sort of like talked my way into a television directing class and fell in love with it.
1:31:45 Lex Fridman? And the actor became the director?
1:31:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I wasn't an actor, but I had to act. I had to know the craft of acting because I was in the theater, you know?
1:31:57 Lex Fridman? Did you love it, though? Did you love, did you love acting?
1:32:01 Speaker 01 The theater? The first, yeah, as an undergraduate, yeah. But then I learned pretty quickly that I was pretty bad at it, or at least not very good. And that my skills lay elsewhere in more sort of behind the scenes and shaping a story.
1:32:16 Lex Fridman? When you started, you know, taking a class, but also telling stories as a director, did you quickly realize that you're pretty good at this or was it a grind?
1:32:30 Speaker 01 That's a good question, Lex. Um, I think I definitely knew right away that it was more my wheelhouse. Right. And, and I think part of that was because I, um, I, I grew up in sort of a world of imagination. And I think that act of imagination as a child really lent itself well to the skillset that a director needs. Right. Um, to shape story, to shape narrative, to shape performances. So I think it was a much more natural fit for me. Was I excellent at the beginning? Heck, no, no. You know, I think few people are, but I learned.
1:33:10 Lex Fridman? Where was the biggest struggle for you? Is it, so your imagination clearly was, uh, something that you worked on for a lifetime. So I, I'm sure that was pretty strong.
1:33:20 Speaker 01 Books, came from books.
1:33:21 Lex Fridman? Books. But the actual conversion of the imagination, you said, shape the story. Where was the skill most lacking in the shaping of the story initially?
1:33:33 Speaker 01 Technical side.
1:33:33 Lex Fridman? Just technical.
1:33:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'd like, you know, cause I taught myself everything. What kind of microphone should I use? Right. What kind of camera? What does this lens do? What's that lens do? I didn't know any of that. And so I essentially was, I have been self-taught technically.
1:33:48 Lex Fridman? How do you get good technically? Would you say when you're self-taught?
1:33:50 Speaker 01 Doing it over and over again.
1:33:52 Lex Fridman? And what, what kind of stories were you telling? Like, like?
1:33:54 Speaker 01 I began shooting local commercials, um, for, for.
1:33:58 Lex Fridman? For money?
1:33:59 Speaker 01 For money. Yeah, yeah.
1:34:00 Lex Fridman? So you're doing professional projects?
1:34:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And so I kind of learned on the job as I did it.
1:34:05 Lex Fridman? How many hobby projects did you do? Just for the hell of it? Were you trying to focus on the professional?
1:34:09 Speaker 01 Well, I was trying to make money, right? Right out of grad school, just to pay the rent.
1:34:13 Lex Fridman? And that, that, you know, that's a forcing function to, I mean, I, I personally love having my back to the wall or financially you're screwed. Succeed. So that's nice.
1:34:24 Speaker 01 I mean, I lived out the trunk of my car for a couple of years after grad school, just freelancing, you know? Just like, but, but that couple of years really helped me learn fast because I had to learn fast, you know? So I did a couple, uh, I did a couple of voyages around the world for this group called Semester at Sea. That is a floating university that where they go out three and a half months at a time with, with about 500 college level students and about 35 professors. And so you're shooting every day for three and a half months in like nine different countries. And so. That really was like instrumental to me becoming a pretty good camera person pretty quickly.
1:35:01 Lex Fridman? And you were doing most of the work yourself?
1:35:03 Speaker 01 Well, one man, one man bad. Yeah. The second, the second voyage, I at least had an editor with me. Yeah, but I was shooting everything.
1:35:11 Lex Fridman? Yeah. What's the perfect team? Is it two people? For, for nonfiction, Asking for a Friend? Yeah. I'm kind of interested in some storytelling, not of the level and the sophistication that you're doing, but more.
1:35:25 Speaker 01 I think you have to allow the story to dictate what the size of the film should be. For these small human rights docs I do, I think two or three. You know, it means you work your butt off, right? Cause you're doing everything, right? But it allows you to tell intimate stories and have that access. I, I'm doing a film this summer that's a, that's a scripted piece where we'll probably have 25 crew people.
1:35:44 Lex Fridman? Oh, wow.
1:35:45 Speaker 01 You know, so it's completely different, different endeavor altogether.
1:35:48 Lex Fridman? But doing it yourself, what do you think about that? Even though you, you have that trillion dollars.
1:35:55 Speaker 01 Oh, I have that trillion dollars again? Sweet. You can write that check before I leave.
1:35:59 Lex Fridman? I will.
1:35:59 Speaker 01 Great.
1:36:02 Speaker 01 I've never seen a check for that big. It's gonna be interesting. How many zeros is that?
1:36:05 Lex Fridman? I write them so often, I've, I've lost track. Or the United States government sure as heck writes them often. Okay, anyway, um, I mean, like, is there an argument, can you still man the case for a single person?
1:36:18 Speaker 01 You know, not for me. Um, not for me. And, and here's why.
1:36:27 Speaker 01 What I've found is that, um, by, by being a team of two filming with a field producer, by two people filming,
1:36:39 Speaker 01 it allows us to double our footage, first off, right? So we have twice as much footage in the time we're filming to come back with as opposed to one person filming.
1:36:50 Lex Fridman? So you're each manning a camera?
1:36:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, constantly.
1:36:53 Lex Fridman? And how much, how much, uh, sorry to keep interrupting, but how much interaction, interplay there?
1:36:59 Speaker 01 Sometimes the director of photography is in another room filming a different scene, if it makes sense. Sometimes we're cross-shooting in the same room.
1:37:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:37:06 Speaker 01 Right? It just depends on the needs of the moment. So, so we come back with double the footage is one thing. But as a director, so that's, you know, and given how access is some, sometimes shaped by the event so that we can only, something, you know, in Lifeboat, for example, you know, a rescue operation may only happen three, three days, right? So you want as much footage of that as you can. But the other piece of it that's really critical for me, I found is that by having another human being I'm filming with, who I'm co-shooting with, it frees me up as a director to not always have to be shooting either. I can do all the other work to build relationships, right?
1:37:45 Speaker 01 To have side conversations with people, to, to sort out the right way to tell a story, right? Or to transfer footage, knowing that the director of photography is still filming during all that. So it frees me up to think of a, as a director, rather than just an image acquirer.
1:38:04 Lex Fridman? Yeah, cause there's also, I don't know how distracting is, you've obviously done it for years, but setting stuff up, it, uh, pre, it, it preoccupies your mind, like pressing the record button.
1:38:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:16 Lex Fridman? And like framing stuff and all that, that's still, that takes up some part of your mind where you can't think freely.
1:38:22 Speaker 01 That's my choice, right? That's how I work best. That said, the caveat there would be, that's not the only way to do it, obviously, right? Like, one of my favorite documentary time, documentaries of all time, um, is, is a documentary called A Woman Captured, shot in Hungary, uh, by a single filmmaker with a single camera, with a single lens, right? And it's brilliant and powerful and moving and interventional. It's, it's incredible filmmaking and it was a single human being who created that film with, with, um, with a collaborator or subject. So it can be done, it's just not how I work best.
1:39:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah. How much personally would the other person?
1:39:05 Lex Fridman? How important is the relationship with them outside of the filming?
1:39:10 Speaker 01 Like uh With the director of photography?
1:39:12 Lex Fridman? The director of photography, say, like how how much drinking and if you don't drink, whatever the equivalent of that is, do you have to do together? How much soul searching or is it more like two surgeons getting together? Is it is it surgeons or is it a jazz band?
1:39:29 Speaker 01 Well, it could be either, right? Hopefully not the same time, though, because I don't think surgeons and jazz bands go well together. Probably.
1:39:36 Lex Fridman? They're both good. They're both good with fingers, I suppose.
1:39:39 Speaker 01 Exactly, but I'd rather maybe not play jazz while they operate on me.
1:39:43 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:39:43 Speaker 01 But but I think for me, I think there are moments of both, but usually not at the same time. Right? There are surgical moments where the moment is so pressing, you really have to be that task driven, right? To capture as thoroughly as possible, whatever's unfolding, right? But I think there's other times where you do improvise like jazz, right? And where where you have a lot of choices ahead of you and and you're doing it maybe a dance with the other camera person, right? In order to capture a scene as creatively and fully as possible during a fixed duration.
1:40:21 Lex Fridman? How much you said shaping, because it is nonfiction. But I feel like there's so many ways to tell the same nonfiction that is bordering on fiction.
1:40:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:32 Lex Fridman? This is well, it's storytelling.
1:40:37 Lex Fridman? And how much shaping do you see yourself as as doing? Like, how important is your role and how you tell the story?
1:40:48 Lex Fridman? I suppose the question I'm asking is, how many ways can you really screw this up?
1:40:54 Speaker 01 Every day you can screw it up.
1:40:57 Speaker 01 I mean, that's really the, I think what you're asking about is really the ethos of documentary filmmaking. Right? I allow a lot of things to guide my choices.
1:41:08 Speaker 01 One of them being, am I being fair? Right? Not balanced, right? But I, am I being fair to what I'm witnessing?
1:41:17 Lex Fridman? Does the camera capturing in a fair way, the truth of the reality, some fundamental?
1:41:23 Speaker 01 And it also speaks to consent, right? Am I being fair in a sense of consent? Do I have active consent in this moment? Right? Regardless of whether I have a signed piece of paper. I always find some way to document it, whether it's just direct address to camera or, you know, a translated release.
1:41:39 Lex Fridman? So there's, actually that's an interesting little, so they say something to the camera that they consent or they sign the thing?
1:41:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. So for example, you know, the large, you know, broadcast companies have this formalized process where they present a piece of paper.
1:41:54 Lex Fridman? Right? Yes.
1:41:55 Speaker 01 And the subject reads it and they sign it and then you have permission. And that's irrevocable, right? So it'll hold up in court. That's not how I operate, right? And so it's, it's just, for example, that doesn't work if someone's illiterate and can't read that piece of paper.
1:42:15 Lex Fridman? Right.
1:42:15 Speaker 01 Right? What if they don't know how to sign their name? Right? So instead you have to have a conversation, ask questions, have them ask questions, come to a complete understanding before you even know whether they understand what you're asking. Right? And then in that case, if someone's illiterate, then you have that conversation, you sit down, it takes a long time sometimes, but you have to do it. And then if they still want to participate and they give you their consent, you know, they can't sign a piece of paper. Right? So then you just do in their native language, right? Direct consent to camera in their language.
1:42:48 Lex Fridman? Interesting. But also you're speaking to the consent that's just a human placing trust in you.
1:42:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:54 Lex Fridman? You make a connection like this.
1:42:55 Speaker 01 That's the most important consent.
1:42:56 Lex Fridman? Right.
1:42:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:57 Lex Fridman? I hate papers. I hate papers and lawyers. Because they, they, exactly for that reason, yeah, okay, great, but.
1:43:08 Lex Fridman? You should be focusing on the, on the human connection that leads to the trust, to the like, real consent and consent day to day, minute to minute, because that can change.
1:43:17 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And it does change.
1:43:21 Lex Fridman? You mentioned a woman captured. What the, this is, I'm sure you can't answer that, but I will force you. What are the top three documentaries of all time? Short or feature length to you? This is not your opinion. This is objective truth. Maybe the top one. What's, what's the greatest? We got,
1:43:46 Lex Fridman? let's see, March of the Penguins? That's probably number one for me.
1:43:49 Speaker 01 Really?
1:43:50 Lex Fridman? No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. I, I do seem to, the metaphor of penguins huddling together in hard, cold, like, in the harsh conditions of nature. That's something, it's kind of beautiful.
1:44:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:08 Lex Fridman? I don't love all nature documentaries, but like, something about March of the Penguins. I, I think Morgan Freeman.
1:44:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, he narrated it.
1:44:17 Lex Fridman? Narrates it. So maybe everything, just any documentary with Morgan Freeman, I'm a sucker for that. Werner Herzog, Life in the Taiga, The Simple People.
1:44:28 Speaker 01 I love Grizzly Man.
1:44:29 Lex Fridman? Grizzly.
1:44:30 Speaker 01 I love Grizzly Man. I think that's one of his best works, you know?
1:44:33 Lex Fridman? Yes. I think that's Joe Rogan's favorite, favorite documentary. It's both comedy and, and, I mean, it's
1:44:40 Speaker 01 Tragic comedy.
1:44:41 Lex Fridman? Tragic comedy, yeah.
1:44:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:43 Lex Fridman? Is there something that stands out to you? I mean, I'm joking about like best. Something that was impactful to you?
1:44:49 Speaker 01 Just to put it out there, I don't think there's any, any way to say that they're objectively, you know, the best three documentaries of all time. But for me, and you may find this interesting, given your background, is that I think
1:45:03 Speaker 01 My top three are all from the Eastern Bloc, actually. So, so Aquarella by Kosogowski. Viktor Kosogowski is one of my favorite. It's a couple of years old now, which is sort of a meditation on the place water has on our planet and in our lives. I, I think A Woman Captured that I mentioned, which was shot in Hungary.
1:45:28 Lex Fridman? Is a feature length one?
1:45:29 Speaker 01 Both, both are feature lengths, yeah. It is just brilliant and it, I think, has yet to find distribution here in the US, you know? But it's the perfect example of, of what they call, you know, verite or direct, um, nonfiction filmmaking.
1:45:47 Lex Fridman? A European woman, this is the synopsis. A European woman has been kept by a family as a domestic slave for 10 years. Drawing courage from the filmmaker's presence, she decides to escape the unbearable oppression and become a free person. Wow, so the filmmaker is part of the story.
1:46:06 Speaker 01 Part of the story becomes, it didn't start that way, but during the course of the story, the filmmaker becomes, comes to understand that this is actually modern day slavery. And rather than just allow it to be, actually enables and assists this woman to, to free herself from slavery and become a free woman.
1:46:25 Lex Fridman? I wonder, sorry, on a small tangent before we get to number three, like Icarus is interesting too. How often do you become part of the story? Or the story is different because of your presence? Like, like you, you changed the tide of history.
1:46:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, back to like one person at a time that we keep talking, you know, we keep coming back to that theme on some level. So, so this could tie in interesting to one of my, one of my favorite films, actually. So, um, The last two films that I would mention for my top four list would be, the third Eastern Bloc one would be a film called Immortal in 2019, which was shot in Russia by a Russian woman. That sort of examines the place of the state in shaping individuals to be vehicles for the state. I mean, that's my own synopsis, but that's one of my takeaways from the brilliant 60-minute doc or so. Again, Russian filmmaking, right?
1:47:28 Speaker 01 It's really quite, quite good and powerful. The fourth one would be a Frederick Wiseman film, Tidicat Follies, which was filmed in the US decades ago inside basically the bowels of an insane asylum or a mental health institution. And I bring up Wiseman because he is really the godfather, so to speak, of direct cinema or cinema verite. And when early in my career, I really believed in what he expressed as the place of the verite filmmaker,
1:48:07 Speaker 01 which is simply fly on the wall, which is only observational in nature. Right? And I believe that that's how I should be as a nonfiction filmmaker, that I was there only to bear witness, to observe, and not to intervene in any way, shape, or form. And that was the sort of foundation for how I operated for many, many years. And then some things happened. So one of those things that happened was I filmed Lifeboat. And during the course of filming Lifeboat, which covered rescue operations in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya.
1:48:51 Speaker 01 In the first three days of that rescue mission,
1:48:57 Speaker 01 you know, we came upon over 3,000 people asylum seekers floating in flimsy rafts in the water. And we were on the Zodiacs and we were filming. And within the first couple hours, you know, we would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape and people would be pushed off and people would jump off and people would fall into the water. And some of them couldn't swim. And so we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice. We could film someone drown in front of us or we could put our cameras down and pull
1:49:42 Speaker 01 them out of the water. And so that's what we did. We put our cameras in the bottom of the Zodiac and just started pulling people out of the water. And, um, you know, if I was Wiseman, right? According to his paradigm, then we should have just filmed. And I didn't anticipate that moment beforehand. I had no sort of foreknowledge that I was going to find myself faced with that dilemma of the moment as a documentarian. But there was no question in my mind that I had to put my camera down and pull that fellow human being out of the water. And I don't regret it at all. So I've come to a different place. I've evolved to what I believe for the kind of film that I do is more appropriate. Right?
1:50:26 Speaker 01 Like I can go to sleep at night knowing that regardless of how the film would have been different if I hadn't made that choice, I made the right choice as a human being. So I think of it as being a human being first and a filmmaker second in moments like that.
1:50:42 Lex Fridman? That's beautifully, beautifully put. But I also think like you could be a human being in small ways too, like silly ways and put a little bit of yourself in documentaries. I tend to see that as really beautiful, like.
1:50:58 Speaker 01 Like the meta piece of it?
1:51:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah, like, yeah, just, just put yourself into the, into the movie a little bit because like break that third, fourth, whatever the wall is, is realize that there's a human behind the camera too. For some reason, me as a fan, as a viewer, that's enjoyable too. I think there's a real authenticity there. Behind the struggle, especially with these hard stories that you're doing that there's a human being struggling to like observing the suffering and having to
1:51:34 Lex Fridman? bear the burden that this kind of suffering exists in the world and you're behind that camera living that struggle and there's small ways to show yourself in that way.
1:51:46 Speaker 01 As you know, I don't do that in a big way, but you know, I actually, there are subtle moments where I allow that presence to live just for a second. Like, I hate belly button docs. That's what I call them. I don't know.
1:52:01 Lex Fridman? What's the belly button?
1:52:01 Speaker 01 Belly button doc is navel gazing, right? Where it's sort of a narcissistic filmmaking where someone just studies their own place in the world, right?
1:52:12 Lex Fridman? I see, yeah.
1:52:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think my, you know, I'm more concerned with how I can intervene, right?
1:52:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah, well, you're trying to really deeply empathize.
1:52:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:27 Lex Fridman? So like, if you deeply empathize, who am I?
1:52:30 Speaker 01 I don't want to center myself in these stories. It's not about me, right? I am so unimportant. What is important is what's happening, what's unfolding in the world that we need to act upon. And right? And I think it's selfish and narcissistic to, to, you know, push myself into these stories unnecessarily. Now that said, I think there is some small value in what you're saying, just to remind viewers that there's obviously a filmmaker at play. So sometimes the way that I do that is just like through a question on camera. I'd allow the audio to live of a question or during a conversation I'm having with someone so they can, they can just hear how it's posed, for example, right? And to me, that's enough.
1:53:11 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I do like moments when people recognize that you exist. They look at the filmmaker past the camera. And yes, you ask the question in the interview or something like that. And they respond to that.
1:53:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:27 Lex Fridman? Like, they respond to this, like, new perturbation into their reality that was created by this other human.
1:53:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:34 Lex Fridman? And I especially like when those questions or those perturbations are like a little bit absurd. And like, add something very novel to their situation. And that novelty reveals something about them. So as opposed to capturing the day to day reality of their life, you do that. Plus, the perturbations of like, something novel.
1:53:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:53:57 Lex Fridman? That, but of course, there's, there's, there's all kinds of ways to do this. Let me, what was number five, by the way?
1:54:03 Speaker 01 Only, I only gave you four.
1:54:05 Lex Fridman? You just.
1:54:05 Speaker 01 I'm just gonna stay at four. There's a short doc I like, I mentioned, they're called The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima. I know, I know.
1:54:13 Lex Fridman? I apologize.
1:54:14 Speaker 01 I know, I know.
1:54:15 Lex Fridman? It's dark.
1:54:16 Speaker 01 It's a great title, though, right?
1:54:17 Lex Fridman? It's a great title.
1:54:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, great title. It's, it's, no one's seen it, but it's great.
1:54:21 Lex Fridman? It's, it says what it sounds like.
1:54:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like, but really brilliantly executed.
1:54:29 Lex Fridman? Well, let me ask you about Lifeboat, because it's extremely.
1:54:34 Lex Fridman? I don't.
1:54:38 Lex Fridman? It's a really moving idea, just, just the fact that this exists in the world. That there's, as a metaphor, as a reality, that there is a set of people trying to flee desperately. It's the desperation of it. And now there's refugees, the desperation of that, of, of trying to escape towards a world that's full of mystery, uncertainty, doubt, could be hopeless at times. And you're willing to do a lot for your own survival, for the survival of your family and all those kinds of things. That's kind of the, the human spirit. And you just capture it.
1:55:20 Lex Fridman? And Lifeboat, can you tell me the story behind this film, as you started to already tell? Can you tell me, what is it about?
1:55:30 Speaker 01 So Lifeboat really seeks to sort of lift up and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the Mediterranean when it was at its height in 2016. And it came to be, for many reasons, but but one of those reasons is colleagues in the NGO community really shared with me that when the borders between Greece and Turkey were shut down, that the the flow of Syrian asylum seekers that was initially going across
1:56:12 Speaker 01 from Turkey to Greece was going to shift westward across the Mediterranean. So I started to research that and discovered that was exactly the case. And then further stumbled upon the fact that nation states hadn't really stepped up to address it and that there were hundreds of asylum seekers, often drowning in these flimsy crafts that were pushed off from the shores of Libya because the EU wasn't doing its duty to patrol those waters from a humanitarian standpoint. And so the net result of that was that this whole sort of like humanitarian community sprung up and it was civil society based that that tried to meet the needs of those
1:56:55 Speaker 01 asylum seekers to to just ensure that fellow human beings weren't drowning, simply put. And one of those was this small little NGO called Sea Watch, which, when they discovered what was happening, just cobbled together a coalition of of volunteers, bought a research vessel, retrofitted it and motored down off the coast of Libya to start pulling people out of the water. And again, I found that inspiring, right? I found that inspiring that this group of volunteers was doing something that our leaders wouldn't, right? And it was something as basic and simple as saving human beings.
1:57:37 Speaker 01 And I thought there was an inspiring story there. And as it turned out, there was.
1:57:43 Lex Fridman? Have you ever saved someone's life?
1:57:47 Lex Fridman? As part of making these documentaries directly? And directly, I think you probably have countless lives. But directly, were you put in that position?
1:57:59 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't, I don't wanna.
1:58:02 Speaker 01 I mean, I certainly poured people out of the water who couldn't swim.
1:58:06 Speaker 01 I did that.
1:58:07 Lex Fridman? And that's again, speaking to the basic humanity. Put down the camera and help. Yeah. So this is people coming from Libya, trying to make it across the Mediterranean Sea on a crappy tiny boat. From a filmmaker's perspective, how do you film that? Was there decisions to capture the desperation?
1:58:29 Speaker 01 Well, we were, you know, we were going back to this idea of access and how that's so fundamental to my approach.
1:58:39 Speaker 01 You know, we were bound by the strictures of the rescue operation on this sea watch vessel, which was 30 meters long. And we were two of a crew of 15, right? So we had to multitask all the time because the only reason we were on that boat was by agreeing that if needed, we would do whatever necessary, right? To, to help, right? And so it was very active on multiple levels. And, and we were making decisions each and every day that were not only filmmaking and creative decisions, but also decisions about how,
1:59:23 Speaker 01 how to live that duality, right? Of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously. And the greatest example I can share of that was with my director of photography in that project, Kenny Allen. He, Kenny's a big guy. It's like, he's got like arms like tree trunks and, and he, because he was so physically able and strong, the head of mission.
1:59:55 Speaker 01 Really tasked him to be on the Zodiacs to pull people out of the water because he could literally with one arm reach down and just oftentimes pull someone out, right? Whereas usually it would take two or three people. And so when we were at the height of triage and there were people in the water all over and rafts were sinking, Kenny was out pulling people out of the water. And this went on for like 24 hours, right? And at the end of that first day, I remember like looking over on the deck and seeing Kenny like help people up from the ladders to walk them back, right? And his camera was nowhere to be seen. And so I walked over to him and I just grabbed him by the shoulders and said, Kenny, where's your camera?
2:00:41 Speaker 01 And he didn't know. He had no idea where his camera was, right? And so I just said, Kenny,
2:00:49 Speaker 01 we're here to do what you're doing,
2:00:53 Speaker 01 but we're also here to film it, right? To make sure that we document what is unfolding in front of us so that we have a record of it, right? So we can bring it to a larger audience. So you need to go find your camera so we can also document it.
2:01:08 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:01:08 Speaker 01 And that kind of pulled him out and he went and got his camera and started filming again. But, but that gives you a sense of sort of this world that we had to live in in order to get the story done.
2:01:17 Lex Fridman? But I think to be a great director of photography, to be a great director, you have to lose yourself like that in the story too.
2:01:27 Speaker 01 But usually with a camera in your hand, right?
2:01:29 Lex Fridman? But sometimes you forget the camera. I mean, there's a, I feel like if you're obsessed with the camera too much, you can lose the humanity of it. You get obsessed with the film and the story.
2:01:44 Speaker 01 Can become clinical.
2:01:45 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:01:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's, you know, I, yeah, absolutely. And, and we don't want to become, I don't want to become clinical in my films, certainly.
2:01:53 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you a strange and perhaps edgy question. So some filmmakers believe it's justified to break the rules in order to tell a powerful story. Werner Herzog.
2:02:07 Lex Fridman? I read this somewhere, teaches young filmmakers to pick locks and forge documents and so on.
2:02:13 Speaker 01 I didn't know that. Interesting.
2:02:15 Lex Fridman? What do you think about that? Bending the rules in service of telling a story?
2:02:20 Lex Fridman? You would, of course, never break the law. But is there, does that, just generally speaking, bending the rules and so on? You know, just to elaborate on this question, perhaps, I'm distinctly aware that there's parts in the world where the rule of law is not like enforced as cleanly as it is in the United States, as fairly as it is in the United States, that there's a kind of, there's a lot of bribery. There's a lot of, like, you don't really know to trust, you can, you don't know if you can trust the cops
2:03:01 Lex Fridman? or basically anybody. So like, the rules are very hazy kind of concept. And a lot of them, especially like, it's funny, but authoritarian regimes often have a giant bureaucracy build up that's full of rules. There's more rules than you know what to deal with. And you can't actually live life unless you break the rules. Anyway, laying that all out on the table, do you ever contend with that?
2:03:27 Lex Fridman? On what are the rules I can break or should break to keep to the spirit of the story?
2:03:34 Speaker 01 I think you have to ask yourself, are the rules just, and why are they in place? Right? So, for example, coming into the airport in southern Yemen, right? If I just tried to walk through the airport with all my equipment, even with all the permissions beforehand, like we had, without having a fixer at the airport beforehand to make sure we didn't go through the standard line, right? We would have been caught up for three hours at least negotiating over our equipment and eventually paying a bribe to get it through.
2:04:06 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:04:07 Speaker 01 Right? That's just reality in a place like Yemen. And so, of course, knowing that, right? Having talked to colleagues who had taken that path previously, I took a different path, right? Where we hire a fixer beforehand to sort it out beforehand, right? Rather than spending three hours of our time and paying a series of bribes. Instead, we're going to get it fixed beforehand so that we can walk through a different line and have no one look at any of our equipment. That's a pretty good trade off in my mind.
2:04:40 Lex Fridman? What about security when you're traveling in these places? Do you ever have bodyguards?
2:04:46 Lex Fridman? Well, several questions around that. Are you ever afraid for your life when you're filming in a war zone? Is there any way to lessen the probability of death?
2:05:01 Speaker 01 I don't have a death wish. I try to mitigate risk however I can, however I can. But one of the ways I can't do it in a conflict zone is by having armed security with me. And the reason for that is because, especially in a place like Yemen, right? If you have armed security, you become a target in a way that if you're operating under sort of the auspices of international humanitarian law, I actually have more protection. So I don't bring security. If you're working in northern Yemen, for example,
2:05:34 Speaker 01 you're going to have someone from the de facto authorities with you anyway, the entire time you're there. So the authorities are with you in form anyway.
2:05:46 Speaker 01 Regarding fear?
2:05:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course. I mean, fear is a natural human emotion, right? And I think we have a weird mindset, this sort of heroic mindset surrounding fear in the US, which I don't pay tribute to. I believe as a natural human emotion, it's an alarm bell that I need to pay attention to, right? And, and I think rather than pretending to be brave, right? I think you have to just acknowledge that fear has a place to keep you alive. And I think it's a matter of not letting the fear arrest you, right?
2:06:35 Speaker 01 And allowing the fear to live and then acting anyway.
2:06:39 Lex Fridman? Don't you think as a documentary filmmaker, the fear is a really good signal for potentially a good thing to do because there's a story there? So is fear as an indicator that you shouldn't do it? Or is it an indicator that you should do it?
2:06:53 Speaker 01 It's probably an indication you should do it, right? And, you know, and strangely, I think that's why. I think that if there's something unusual about the work I do in some part, it's because of these types of stories, right? They're hard to access, but you also have to have a threshold of willingness to do them when you can't, you know, there is no guarantee of physical safety, right? And maybe that's why you should do them.
2:07:26 Lex Fridman? I'm very much motivated by the things that scare me, that they seem to direct the things that are worth doing in this all too short life. How often do you interact with our friendly friends at the police departments of various locations? Like, because of the humanitarian nature of your work, are you able to avoid all such friendly conversations? Or are you often in making friends with our?
2:07:55 Speaker 01 I try to avoid the friendly police people all over the world as much as possible. But in some instances, it's important to be proactive, right? And make sure that they know what you're doing before you do it. So it's all about the context and the situation. For example, working in northern Yemen, you couldn't film for five minutes if you didn't have paperwork because you'd be taken away. So you have to make sure you have all those permissions ahead of time.
2:08:27 Lex Fridman? Fifty feet from Syria, I would love to talk at least a little bit about this film. First, can you, high level, can you tell what this documentary is about?
2:08:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was early in the Syrian uprising and we returned to the Syrian-Turkish border with a Syrian-American orthopedic surgeon who was volunteering, operating on refugees as they flowed across the border from Syrian to Turkey. And it was an attempt at the time, before a lot of films had come out about the conflict, to... Really show again the effects of the war on civilians. You've heard me echo that sentiment multiple times now, but it, you know, people knew there was, there was a major conflict in Syria,
2:09:21 Speaker 01 but didn't really understand the form that that was taking and the impact it was having. And so we, we embedded into the, at the time it was the only clinic in Turkey that was sanctioned by the Turkish government to treat Syrian refugees. And so we filmed there with surgeons as they operated on war victims. And we also went into Syria, into some of the camps as well.
2:09:48 Lex Fridman? So in this film, there's a man who crosses the border every day to retrieve the wounded and ferry them safety and care. And you also mentioned about heroism in the United States. Can you tell me about this man and just people like him? Like, what's the heroic action in some of these places that you've visited?
2:10:09 Speaker 01 So in that instance, you know, I thought of him as the Turkish Schindler, right? Because he was a human being who, of his own volition, volition, no one was paying him to do this, but he was spending much of his time. He was just a local businessman who really saw the need in the camps right across the border, 10 K away. And, and, and he saw the medical need in particular, and how hard it was to get people in desperate medical conditions across the border where there was a clinic just right across the border. But because of the security and the layers of security, they couldn't get out by themselves.
2:10:54 Speaker 01 So he took it upon himself as a Turkish person to build relationships with the Turkish guards, which was relatively easy. And then he built relationships with sort of the, the guards in the no man's land between the Syrian guards and sort of those who lived in the, the middle area. And then also with the Syrian guards at the camp. And he would drive out there daily and bring them food. Right? Talk them up and build relationships. And so every day, he would bring these guards food and build relationships with them. And, and what that meant was eventually, right? He had this avenue of access to and from the camps. And so he started using it and he would drive this avenue of access
2:11:39 Speaker 01 through the three layers of guards each day. And then they would open the gates for him because he had made himself trustworthy in their eyes. And he would receive the most desperate medical cases that were coming from all over northern Syria. Right? To receive medical treatment. And he would, as you see in the film, he would ferry them into the back of his car. Right? And then drive them to the hospital where they would receive operations. And then he would bring them back if they wanted, after they'd healed and recovered back to Syria. If they wanted to return at post recovery. And, you know, he didn't get paid for that. He was spending his own money to do it because he saw other human beings in need.
2:12:23 Speaker 01 And it's like we were talking about earlier. That's heroic, right? That's selfless. That's, that's aspirational for me. Right? Here's, here's someone who is spending their time on the planet, doing something of value and good to other human beings.
2:12:41 Lex Fridman? I mean, if you draw parallels to Schindler, I feel like the fascinating thing about Schindler is that he's kind of a flawed human and is not the kind of human that does these things usually.
2:12:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:12:55 Lex Fridman? But you just can't help it.
2:12:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:12:57 Lex Fridman? And that's like the basic humanity, despite who you are, the basic humanity shines through.
2:13:04 Speaker 01 I think that, you know, the whims of war test people in those ways, right? They, they ask of you things that you may not even know were going to be asked of you. And then it speaks to who, who you are fundamentally as a human being.
2:13:18 Lex Fridman? They reveal who you are as a human being, just as you said.
2:13:25 Lex Fridman? Let me ask a kind of stupid, technical question about publications of movies and so on. I've been recently becoming good friends with Thomas Toll, who was the producer. His company Legendary funded some of the big sort of blockbuster films and so on. And so obviously money is part of filmmaking.
2:13:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:13:45 Lex Fridman? It's interesting, but also the release of movies. And me as a consumer, you know, with Netflix, with YouTube, you know, that's one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of YouTube is it's like out in the open.
2:14:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:00 Lex Fridman? Access, especially historical access, like over time, you can look back years later. If you pay some money, you can watch some of the great films ever made. YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, I don't know what other services there are, HBO, Paramount.
2:14:18 Speaker 01 Paramount Plus.
2:14:18 Lex Fridman? Paramount Plus. Anyway, there's all these platforms. Spotify now. It's, I understand they want to create paywalls and so on. It makes sense, but I'm a huge fan of openness and I'm really kind of torn by this whole thing. Anyway, that's a discussion for perhaps another time. But the, the short question is, why is it so hard to watch your documentaries and other films, other incredible films on the internet? If I want to pay unlimited amount of money, I want to pay a lot of money.
2:14:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:59 Lex Fridman? To watch it. Why is it so hard?
2:15:02 Speaker 01 Well, Lifeboat is streaming free on the New Yorker.
2:15:06 Lex Fridman? Yes, I saw that, but it's the, which is interesting. That doesn't make any sense. And then also Hunger Ward is on Paramount Plus, but also.
2:15:16 Speaker 01 Pluto TV.
2:15:17 Lex Fridman? It's also streaming free.
2:15:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. So you can either go through a paywall or you can watch it with ads.
2:15:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:15:24 Speaker 01 With Big Macs interspersed.
2:15:26 Lex Fridman? Big Macs.
2:15:27 Speaker 01 Sometimes.
2:15:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah, the contrast.
2:15:29 Speaker 01 It's tough.
2:15:31 Lex Fridman? Well, no, it really reveals the power of the documentary.
2:15:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:15:35 Lex Fridman? No, but like, it's still not, even those platforms are, I mean, they're not, they're not as easily accessible. Cause you have to like.
2:15:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:15:43 Lex Fridman? You have to use, you have to think.
2:15:46 Lex Fridman? And you have to chase a particular.
2:15:47 Speaker 01 You have to chase it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess from an economics standpoint, the answer to that is pretty clear, right? It may not be what people want to watch. Maybe people want to watch reality. Maybe people want to watch
2:16:03 Speaker 01 animal rescue shows, right, here in the US. Which is exactly why, in part, I think it's so vital that we continue to do stories on things that aren't about flowers and puppy dogs, right?
2:16:18 Lex Fridman? I would push back on that. So
2:16:22 Lex Fridman? there's TikTok. And you could say, well, look, humans just want to watch really short content. Because they seem to be addicted to that kind of thing. That's partially true. But they also watch two, three, four, five hour podcasts. And.
2:16:40 Speaker 01 On TikTok?
2:16:41 Lex Fridman? No, there's different platforms for that. There's a place called YouTube. I'll teach you about it.
2:16:46 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah, I've never heard of it.
2:16:48 Lex Fridman? It's a good place to publish documentaries, I think. I, you know, humans are interested in a lot of things. And I've seen many times a thing that you think is a niche thing become a very big thing. But for them to become mainstream, they have to have a platform that allows for the mainstream to happen.
2:17:09 Speaker 01 Access.
2:17:09 Lex Fridman? The access, the dumb, simple, frictionless access. The frictionless access is a really important thing. You know, paywalls create friction. And not just because of the money. It can be free, but if you have to click on a thing, or maybe sign up. Or put your email. It's just not, it creates a.
2:17:35 Lex Fridman? It prevents you to enjoy the thing you would really enjoy and you know you would enjoy, but your baser human nature prevents you from enjoying because you can just open up TikTok and keep scrolling. So that's just something to say about platforms because I think the things that need platforms the most are things like your films, the things that I think a lot of people would love watching. They're very important and they can have viral impact on the world that is fundamentally positive. You know, it's just, it makes me sad that there's not a machine for celebrating those films.
2:18:16 Speaker 01 There are lots of machines to celebrate them, but they're just not as always accessible as YouTube, right? I mean, as soon as you write me that check for a trillion dollars when I walk out of here, then I'm gonna put all my films on YouTube because then I won't have to worry about, you know, selling them in order so I can make the next film. Because, you know, film is not just an art. It's also an industry, right? And that tension between the two is a constant interplay that is a reality for me. So I always have to think about, um, how can I access the largest audience, but also, right, go out and shoot the next film?
2:18:52 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:18:52 Speaker 01 Right? So that longevity question is also an issue and the finances are part of that sort of equation that I constantly have to rewrite over and over again.
2:19:03 Lex Fridman? How often as a creative mind, do you feel the constraints, the financial constraints?
2:19:11 Speaker 01 I wish I could do a lot more films that I can't always because of financial constraints.
2:19:18 Lex Fridman? So it's the number of films?
2:19:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:19:22 Lex Fridman? And are you, is a film that you do currently, is a film that you do at any one time as you're filming it already funded? Or is it the funding from previous stuff that you're trying to use?
2:19:35 Speaker 01 Before Hunger Ward.
2:19:39 Speaker 01 I would just take a flyer on my films, right? Where I would just say, this meets the so what threshold? This is a story that has to be told and I want to tell it. And then I could just go shoot it and usually on credit, usually on a credit card. Right? So, so based on a belief that, that Lifeboat was done that way.
2:20:01 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:20:02 Speaker 01 Right? Fifty Feet from Syria was done that way.
2:20:03 Lex Fridman? So you're on a boat, broke.
2:20:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, but it's free food, right? And free lodging because there's a bunk on the boat. But, but I do that, I do that not intending to stay broke, right? But, but based on a foundational belief that if I, if I bring to bear all of my sort of, you know, quiver of creative arrows to it, right? That I, I can create something of value, right? In the world, but hopefully also financially, that then I can sell to someone. And, you know, every time I've done that, Lex, I've gotten into the black. So it's a risk and I have to have a certain risk threshold financially to do that. But I believe so deeply in these stories that I'm willing to do that. I didn't have to do that with Hunger Ward.
2:20:51 Speaker 01 Luckily I had funders for that film.
2:20:55 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah, take risks in this life. It's gonna pay off. Which reminds me of, let me ask you, I already asked you for advice about, for a filmmaker, how to win an Oscar.
2:21:08 Speaker 01 Well, I haven't won an Oscar.
2:21:09 Lex Fridman? How to get nominated for an Oscar, that's true. Or just how to make great documentaries, how to make great film. But let me ask even zoom out bigger. You mentioned some of these things, doing the things that you think matters. What advice would you give to young people, high school, college? Dreaming of, uh, living a life worth living. What advice would you give them about career or maybe just life in general? How to have a life they can be proud of?
2:21:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't know how you're gonna react to this, given, given sort of your expertise, but I, I would say, um.
2:21:48 Lex Fridman? Uh oh.
2:21:49 Speaker 01 Put down the smartphone.
2:21:50 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:21:51 Speaker 01 Step away from the monitor, right? Because real life is not a screen.
2:21:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:21:57 Speaker 01 Right? I, I believe that sort of the foundational skills which are, which are conducive and important to success, um, aren't necessarily those technical skills which we're going to learn, learn in trade schools or, or university. I think the, they're more foundational than that. They're learning how to interact, um, and listen.
2:22:22 Lex Fridman? With humans?
2:22:22 Speaker 01 With humans, yeah, to, to really see and listen, right?
2:22:27 Lex Fridman? And observe.
2:22:29 Speaker 01 And, and observe, right? And how to step out of your door and if the electricity goes out, right? And you're five miles away from your house, you don't need a smartphone to get home because you've set visual markers for yourself on how to get back to where you live, right? I think we're in danger right now of living in a world where if the satellites stop functioning, right? Then a whole lot of people have become completely dysfunctional, right? Because we're so reliant upon the screens in our lives. So I think there's a lot of foundational skills that have nothing to do with technology that we need to learn that, that, and everything rests upon those.
2:23:12 Speaker 01 So I would say learn those foundations, learn how to write well, read a lot, right? Um, it's a different kind of knowledge and wisdom that comes out of that.
2:23:20 Lex Fridman? So reading is kind of the equivalent of listening and observing and writing is, um, kind of, uh, integration of all of that that you've observed and listened to and tried to express something with that.
2:23:34 Speaker 01 So I think my training in the theater has served me so well in the documentary world, right? Because it's all about interaction and listening and talking and dialogue, right? And that's what I do in documentaries, right? Is I listen.
2:23:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I, yeah, I'm, we mentioned fear. Being an introvert, I'm very afraid of people, but I'm drawn to them. Been fascinated by them because of that.
2:24:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:24:01 Lex Fridman? Enjoy listening to them.
2:24:02 Speaker 01 Totally.
2:24:03 Lex Fridman? And observing them. And you mentioned reading. You mentioned books as a catalyst, as a stimulator of your imagination. Is there books in your life, a couple, one, two, three, that kind of
2:24:19 Lex Fridman? left an impact or, or, or a little bit of spark of inspiration early on in life that stand out from your memory?
2:24:28 Speaker 01 I, I was given The Prophet by Céline Dubran when I, as a graduation present from my eighth, from my high school English teacher. And I still have that book in a special place on my bookshelf because I think it speaks to the nature of human experience, right? And I return to it all the time because there's wisdom there, you know? But, but there's many, many books, so.
2:24:52 Lex Fridman? Fiction or nonfiction, what, what connects with you usually? In the past, when the.
2:24:56 Speaker 01 Non, I, I read mostly nonfiction, most of the time. Ten Points is a book I love a lot.
2:25:03 Lex Fridman? What is it, what is Ten Points?
2:25:04 Speaker 01 Ten Points is, I think his name is Bill Strickland. He was the editor of, I think Bicycle Magazine. And it's sort of his personal memoir of
2:25:16 Speaker 01 his experience growing up with a lot of abuse and how that transformed him as a human being. You know, one instrumental book for me that I bumped into in my early twenties? Boy, these are all nonfiction, except for The Princess Bride.
2:25:31 Speaker 01 Have to mention, it's an outlier. No, no, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
2:25:36 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:25:37 Speaker 01 I read that in my early twenties.
2:25:39 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:25:39 Speaker 01 And I found so many of the principles in that book.
2:25:45 Lex Fridman? What are, what are the habits from that one?
2:25:48 Speaker 01 Seek first to understand, then to be understood is one of them. You know, the notion of proactivity is one of them. It's, it's really, and so I, I've held on to some of those principles through my life as well, for sure.
2:26:02 Lex Fridman? What have been, you've observed?
2:26:07 Lex Fridman? Suffering darker aspects of human nature in your own personal life. What has been some of the darkest moments in your life? Darkest times in your life? Is there something that you went through? And then perhaps you carry it through your work?
2:26:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. Probably one of the darkest moments was an experience that I had. Again, in my early twenties and I was living in Southern California. And I, you know, the Pacific Coast Highway that goes north and south along the beach. And there's that little concrete path that people jog and ride their bikes. And I was riding my bike on the, on the PCH. And I was coming up to a corner on it. And I heard this tremendous crash. And it was really loud. And I came across the corner, around the corner. And it was a car accident, a car crash. It was a multiple, multiple vehicle crash.
2:27:12 Speaker 01 And what had happened is that a Volvo had hit another car. And then when it hit it, it went over the top of the car and hit a Volkswagen van. And it peeled away the top of the Volkswagen van when it hit it and then landed. So three vehicles and it just happened. And lying in the middle of the road was a body, decapitated. And there was another person from one of the cars lying in the middle of the road, still alive. And then on the hood of the Volvo was this woman who had come through the windshield.
2:27:56 Speaker 01 Just a mess, blood everywhere, moaning back and forth. And a bystander ran into the middle of the road and started administering first aid to the person lying in the road. And.
2:28:15 Speaker 01 I stood there watching the scene and every fiber of my being
2:28:22 Speaker 01 wanted to run to the woman on the hood of the Volvo and do something, anything, right? Just to be there. And it was obvious to me that she was, she was gonna die. But I felt like at least if I ran there, I could offer some comfort for her last moment. And right then, the sirens started to blare and I knew that there'd be paramedics there within minutes, that, that people would come to help.
2:28:54 Speaker 01 And I froze. And I was scared.
2:28:59 Speaker 01 And I didn't do anything. And I watched while this woman died on the hood of the Volvo.
2:29:09 Speaker 01 And that experience is sort of seared into my consciousness.
2:29:16 Speaker 01 The fact that I watched and didn't act, I, I feel is one of the great failures of my life. That I wasn't able to act in a moment of need, no matter how small. And from that, I made a decision out of that experience that if I ever found myself in a situation where I had the ability to act and I could act to help another human being in such need, that I would act. That I wouldn't let fear freeze me. Instead, I would allow that fear to catalyze me into action and do something and intervene in whatever way I could, even if I didn't have the skillset.
2:30:02 Lex Fridman? And in some ways, all of that echoes in your documentaries. You're not gonna let fear stop you from trying to help.
2:30:11 Speaker 01 I think that experience, that, that experience of failure, what I, what I framed as just human failure on my part, is, is foundational probably to my work. Like, I don't want that to happen again, Lex. Like, like, I, I don't want to be that person who watches. I want to do what I can, when I can.
2:30:32 Lex Fridman? If we zoom out.
2:30:35 Lex Fridman? You were just one human that witnessed that, that trauma. You've, you, one human that witnessed so much suffering in different parts of the world. And as we zoom out across space and time and look at Earth, why do you think we're here on this earth? What's the meaning of human civilization? What's the meaning of your life, of individual human life? And broadly speaking, what is the meaning of life? Sky Fitzgerald.
2:31:09 Speaker 01 Oh, boy. Yeah.
2:31:15 Speaker 01 For me, I can speak personally on that only. And that's that I believe that the meaning of my life is to try to make the world a little bit better before I go.
2:31:28 Speaker 01 You know, I,
2:31:31 Speaker 01 when I was in theater in grad school,
2:31:37 Speaker 01 I directed a play called Shadowlands by C.S. Lewis. And there's a quote from that, it goes like this. "We are like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect."
2:31:57 Speaker 01 Now, I would take away the perfect part, right? But I think I've remembered that quote for so many years because I believe in the underlying notion that the blows of the chisel, which are the experiences that we go through, shape us, right, necessarily so. And hopefully, shape us into a better human being. And in my case, a human being that I hope can make the world a little better, you know, through those blows.
2:32:27 Lex Fridman? Before it's over?
2:32:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, before it's over.
2:32:30 Lex Fridman? Before you go, as you said, do you think about that? You think about the going part?
2:32:37 Lex Fridman? Your mortality, you ever think about that? You said you don't have a death wish. You tried to minimize risk, but eventually it's gonna be over.
2:32:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, for all of us. Absolutely.
2:32:47 Lex Fridman? Well, speak for yourself.
2:32:49 Speaker 01 Well, you've got other plans to sound like.
2:32:50 Lex Fridman? I tend to merge. I'm going to merge with robots. I'm embodying.
2:32:55 Speaker 01 Nice.
2:32:56 Lex Fridman? Not at all. Yes, for all of us, unfortunately or fortunately, or who the heck knows. But do you ponder your mortality? Are you afraid of it?
2:33:09 Speaker 01 I live with my mortality, knowing that it's fleeting, that my life is fleeting and that I'm gonna go into the ground, just like everyone else, or maybe as ashes, you know? So I live with that knowledge every day, but I don't allow it to stop me or hold me up. Rather, I really, it drives me. It drives me to try to get as much done as I can before I go.
2:33:37 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so the knowledge of your death is a kind of dance partner. And you try to dance beautifully. Skye, you're an incredible human, incredible artist and filmmaker. And it's a huge honor that you would sit and spend your really valuable time with me today. I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
2:33:56 Speaker 01 I did too. Thanks for having me, Lex, and thanks for doing what you do.
2:34:00 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Skye Fitzgerald. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Eli Wiesel. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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