Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine About this episode Stephen Kotkin is a historian specializing in Stalin and Soviet history. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Stephen’s Website: https://history.princeton.edu/people/stephen-kotkin
Stalin: 1878-1928 (Vol 1): https://amzn.to/3NvokpC
Stalin: 1929-1941 (Vol 2): https://amzn.to/3wIYqsT
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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
(10:17) – Putin and Stalin
(21:07) – Putin vs the West
(43:59) – Response to Oliver Stone
(55:05) – Russian invasion of Ukraine
(1:34:33) – Putin’s plan for the war
(1:42:32) – Henry Kissinger
(1:48:26) – Nuclear war
(1:59:00) – Parallels to World War II
(2:21:45) – China
(2:29:54) – World War III
(2:37:23) – Navalny
(2:41:40) – Meaning of life
Transcript 23,239 words · 3 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 Stephen Kotkin, his second time on the podcast. Stephen is one of the greatest historians of all time, specializing in 20th and 21st century history of Russia and Eastern Europe. And he has written what is widely considered to be the definitive biography of Stalin in three volumes, two of which have been published, and the third focused on World War II and the years after. He is in the midst of writing now. This conversation includes a response to my previous podcast episode with Oliver Stone that was focused on Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. Stephen provides a hard-hitting criticism of Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
0:44 Lex Fridman? weighed and contextualized deeply in the complex geopolitics and history of our world, all with an intensity and rigor, but also wit and humor that makes Stephen one of my favorite human beings. Please also allow me to mention something that has been apparent and has weighed heavy on my heart and mind. This conversation with Stephen Kotkin makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Russia. The previous conversation with Oliver Stone makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Ukraine. This makes me sad, but it is the way of the world.
1:27 Lex Fridman? I will nevertheless travel to both Ukraine and Russia. I need to once again see with my own eyes the land of my ancestors, where they suffered but flourished, and eventually gave birth to silly old me. I need to hear directly the pain, anger, and hope from both Ukrainians and Russians. I won't give details to my travel plans in terms of location and timing, but the trip is very soon. Whatever happens, I'm truly grateful for every day I'm alive, and I hope to spend each such day adding a bit of love to the world. I love you all.
2:12 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 Lambda for hardware for deep learning, and we've got Scale for data, data annotation for deep learning. Then, we also have Athletic Greens for performance, ExpressVPN for privacy, and Roka for style. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I tried to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too.
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9:50 Lex Fridman? That's roka.com and enter code Lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Stephen Kotkin.
10:17 Lex Fridman? You are one of the great historians of our time specializing in the man, the leader, the historical figure of Stalin. So let me ask a challenging question. If you can perhaps.
10:31 Lex Fridman? Think about the echo of 80 years between Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin. What are the similarities and differences between the man and the historical figure, the historical trajectory of Stalin and Putin?
10:47 Speaker 02 Thank you, Lex. It's very nice to be here again with you. It's been a while. Good to see you.
10:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah, good to see you as well.
10:54 Speaker 02 You're looking good. I see this podcast stuff is doing you right.
10:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 02 So, we can't really put very easily Vladimir Putin in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin. Stalin is a singular figure and his category is really small. Hitler, Mao, that's really about it. And even in that category, Stalin is the dominant figure, both by how long he was in power and also by the amount of power, the military industrial complex he helped build and commanded. So Putin can't be compared to that. However, Putin's in the same building as Stalin. He uses some of the same offices as Stalin used.
11:45 Speaker 02 On some of those television broadcasts that we see of Putin at meetings and Putin inside the Kremlin, Stalin used to sit in those rooms and hold meetings in those rooms. That's the Imperial Senate, built by Catherine the Great, an 18th century building inside the Kremlin. It's a domed building and you can see it on the panorama, the top of the building, at least you can see it on the panorama when you look over the Kremlin wall from many sites inside Moscow. So... If he's not comparable to Stalin, he still works, as I said, in those same buildings,
12:27 Speaker 02 those same offices, partly. And so therefore, he's got some of the problems that Stalin had, which was managing Russian power in the world, from a position of weakness vis-à-vis the West, but from an ambition, a grandiosity, in fact. And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, right, of not being as strong as the West, but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West. That's the dilemma of Russian history for the past many centuries. It was the dilemma for the Tsars. It was the dilemma for Peter the Great. It was the
13:08 Speaker 02 dilemma for Alexander. It was the dilemma for Stalin, and it's the dilemma for Putin. Russia is smaller now compared to when Stalin was in that Kremlin. It's got pushed back to borders almost the time of Peter the Great. It's farther from the main European capitals now than any time since that 18th century. And the West has only grown stronger in that period of time. So the dilemma is greater than ever. The irony of being in that position, of sitting in the Kremlin, trying to manage Russian power in the world, trying to be a
13:49 Speaker 02 providential power, a country with a special mission in the world, a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization, and yet not having the capabilities to meet those aspirations, and falling farther and farther behind the West. The irony of all of that is the attempted solutions put Russia in a worse place every single time. So you try to manage the gap with the West, you try to realize these aspirations, you try to raise your capabilities, and you build a strong state. The quest to build a strong state and use coercive modernization.
14:33 Speaker 02 To try somehow, if not to close the gap with the West, at least to manage it. And the result is different versions of personalist rule. So they don't build a strong state. They build a personal dictatorship. They build an autocracy. And moreover, that autocracy undertakes measures which then worsen the very geopolitical dilemma that gave rise to this personalist rule in the first place. And so I call this Russia's perpetual geopolitics. I've been writing about this for many, many years.
15:09 Speaker 02 What's important about this analysis is this is not a story of eternal Russian cultural proclivity to aggression. Right? It's not something that's in the mother's milk. It's not something that can't be changed. Russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency to aggression. This is a choice. It's a strategic choice to try to match the power of the West, which from Russia's vantage point is actually unmatchable. But it's a choice that's made again and again, and Putin has made this choice just as Stalin made the choice, right?
15:51 Speaker 02 Stalin presided over the World War II victory, and then he lost the peace. After he died in 1953, there was, of course, other rulers who succeeded him. He was still the most important person in the country after he died because they were trying to manage that system that he built and, more importantly, manage that growing gap with the West. By the time the 90s rolled around, former Soviet troops, now Russian troops...
16:23 Speaker 02 withdrew from all those advanced positions that they had achieved as a result of the World War II victory, and it was Napoleon in reverse. They went on the same roads, but not from Moscow back to Paris, but instead from Warsaw and from East Berlin and from Tallinn and Riga and all the other places of former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics in the Baltic region. They went back to Russia in retreat. And so Stalin in the fullness of time lost the peace. And Putin, in his own way, inheriting some of
17:04 Speaker 02 this, attempting to reverse it, when, as I said, Russia was smaller, farther away, weaker. The West was bigger and stronger and had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact countries and Baltic states because they voluntarily begged to join the West. The West didn't impose itself on them. It's a voluntary sphere of influence that the West conducts. And so that dilemma is where you can put Putin and Stalin in the same sentence, and the terrible outcome for Russia in the fullness of time also has echoes.
17:45 Speaker 02 But of course, Putin hasn't murdered 18 to 20 million people, and the scale of his abilities to cause grief, with the nuclear weapons aside, is nothing like Stalin's. And so we have to be careful, right? Only Mao put bigger numbers on the board from a tragic point of view than Stalin.
18:06 Lex Fridman? And numbers matter here. If we compare these singular figures.
18:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, Mao killed more people than Stalin because Mao had more people to kill. The most amazing thing about Mao is he watched Stalin do it.
18:24 Speaker 02 He watched Stalin collectivize agriculture and famine result. He watched Stalin impose this communist monopoly and all of those people sent to prison or given a bullet in the back of the neck. He watched all of that and then he did it again himself in China.
18:42 Lex Fridman? Do you think he saw the human cost directly that, when you say he saw, do you think he was focused on the policies? Or was he also aware distinctly as a human being of the human costs in the lives of peasants and the lives of the working class and the lives of the poor?
18:59 Speaker 02 I think the prima facie evidence is that he didn't value human life. Otherwise, I don't think after seeing the amount of lives that were taken in the Soviet experiment, he would have done something similar after that. I think the answer, Lex, is it's very hard to get inside Mao's head and figure out what he was really thinking. But if you just look at the results that happened, the policies that were undertaken and the consequences of them, you would have to conclude that there was, let's say, no value or little value placed on human life. Unfortunately, that's characteristic not only of communist dictators, right, of post-communist
19:42 Speaker 02 dictators as well, but the scale of the horrors that they inflict, as horrific as they are, just can't compare. And so we're in a situation where Eurasia, that is to say, the ancient civilizations of Eurasia, which would be Russia, Iran, China, all have some version of non-democratic, you know, illiberal autocratic regimes. And they're all pushing up against the greater power of the West in some form. Sometimes they coordinate their actions and sometimes they don't.
20:23 Speaker 02 But this is a very longstanding phenomenon, Lex, that predates Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in Iran.
20:35 Lex Fridman? So we'll talk about this, I think, really powerful framework of five dimensions of authoritarian regimes that you've put together. But first, let's go to this Napoleon in reverse retreat from Warsaw back.
20:54 Lex Fridman? Putin has called, from the perspective of Putin, this retreat, this collapse of Stalin is one of the great tragedies of that region of Russia.
21:07 Lex Fridman? Do you think there's a sense where as Putin sits now in power for 22-plus years,
21:16 Lex Fridman? he really dreams of a return
21:21 Lex Fridman? to the power, the influence, the land of Stalin? So while you said that they're not in the same place in terms of the numbers of people that suffered due to the regime, do you think he hopes to have the same power, the same influence for a nation that was in the 30s, in the 40s, in the 50s of the 20th century under Stalin?
21:52 Speaker 02 If he does, Lex, he's deluding himself.
21:56 Speaker 02 We don't know for sure. Very few people talk to him. Very few people have access to him. A handful of Western leaders have met with him for short periods of time. Those inside Russia barely meet with him. His own minions in the regime barely have FaceTime with him. We don't know exactly what he thinks. It could be that he has delusions of reconquering Russian influence, if not direct control, over the territories that broke away. But it's not going to happen. Let's talk a little bit about this guy Nikolai Patrushev.
22:41 Speaker 02 Nikolai Patrushev is probably not well-known to your listeners. He's the head of Russia's Security Council. And so you could probably call him the second most important or second most powerful man in Russia. Certainly inside the regime. Arguably Navalny is the second most important person in the country, and we'll talk about that later, I'm sure.
23:06 Lex Fridman? In terms of influence, yes.
23:07 Speaker 02 Yes, but Patrushev is a version of Putin's right-hand man.
23:15 Speaker 02 And Patrushev has been giving interviews in the press. You probably saw the interview with Nizavissimaya Gazeta not that long ago. He writes also his own blog-like interventions in the public sphere using the few channels that are left. And what's interesting about Patrushev, and this could well reflect similar thinking to Putin's, which is why I'm bringing this up, is that he's got this conspiratorial theory that the West has been on a forever campaign to destroy Russia, just like it destroyed
23:59 Speaker 02 the Soviet Union, and that everything the West does is meant to dismember Russia, and that Russia is fighting an existential battle against the West. And so, for example, the CIA and the American government wanted to bring down the Soviet Union. Never mind that the Bush administration, the first Bush, the father, was trying desperately to hold the Soviet Union together because they were afraid of the chaos that might ensue and the nukes that might get loose as a result of a Soviet collapse. And it wasn't until the very last moment where Bush decided, his administration decided,
24:43 Speaker 02 to back those Republican leaders who were breaking away from Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, right? So never mind the empirics of it. Never mind that Bill Clinton's administration, following George Bush, sent boatloads of money, Western taxpayer money, to Russia. We don't know exactly how much because it came from different sources. People talk about how there was no Marshall Plan. It was tens of billions of dollars from various sources, from the IMF and other sources. And Lexit disappeared. It's gone, just like the German money that went to Gorbachev for unification disappeared even before the Soviet collapse.
25:27 Speaker 02 The money disappeared, but the West sent the money. So how is that a plot? And then you could go all the way Obama's administration, George Bush trying to do business deals and reset the relations, and Obama administration trying to reset the relations and doing nothing after the Georgian war and slapping Putin on the wrist following the seizure force of Putin. And you could go on and you could go on all the way through the Trump administration, telling Putin that he's right, Trump believes Putin and doesn't believe US intelligence about Russian efforts to interfere in American domestic politics.
26:07 Speaker 02 So despite all the empirics of it, you have Potemchev and likely Putin talking about this multi-decade Western conspiracy to bring Russia down. At the same time as that's happening, the Germans are voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russian energy, voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russia. So here's the conspiracy to bring Russia down. The French, who fantasize about themselves as a diplomatic superpower, are constantly, the French leaders are constantly running to the Kremlin to ask what Russia needs, what concessions from the West Russia needs to feel respected again.
26:52 Speaker 02 The British provide all manner of money laundering and reputation laundering services for the whole Russian oligarchy, including the state officials, who are looting the state and using the West, British institutions, to launder their money. So all of this is happening, and yet Potemchev imagines this conspiracy to bring Russia down by the West. And so that's what we've got in the Kremlin again. Stalin had that same conspiratorial mentality of the West. Everything that happened in the world was part of a Western conspiracy directed against the Soviet Union and now directed against Russia, even though the West is trying to
27:35 Speaker 02 appease, the West is offering its services, the West is trying to change Russia through investment in a positive way, but instead, the West is what's changing. The West is becoming more corrupt. Western services are being corrupted by the relationship with Russia. So you have to ask yourself, who are these people in power in the Kremlin who imagine... That while they're availing themselves of every service and every blandishment of the West, while they're availing themselves of this, that they're fighting a conspiracy by the West to bring them down. So this is what they call the abyssia, right?
28:19 Speaker 02 In Russian, which is a term, as you know, that means those who are resentful, or you might call them the losers, the losers in the transition. So when the Soviet Union fell and there was a diminishment, a very substantial diminution in Russian power and influence in the world, a lot of people lost out. They weren't able to steal the property, they weren't able to loot the state in the 90s, and they were on the outside. They gradually came back in, they were the losers in the transition domestically, and for them, right, they wanted to reverse being on the losing side.
29:04 Speaker 02 And so they began to expropriate, to steal the money, steal the property from those first thieves who stole in the 90s. And the 2000s and on have been about re-stealing, taking the losers in the transition, taking the money from the winners, and reversing this resentment, this loser status. Those are your pathrushers and your Putins. But at the same time, this blows out to, let's reverse the losses, being on the losing side, the roiling resentment at the decline of their power internationally, let's try to reverse that too.
29:48 Speaker 02 So you have a profound psychological, whole generation of people who are on the losing end domestically and reverse that domestically. That's what the Putin regime is about. Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos? Remember all the companies that are now owned by Putin cronies because they were taken away from whoever stole them in the first place? And now they're trying to do that on the international scale. It's one thing to put domestic opponents in jail, it's one thing to take away someone's property domestically.
30:25 Speaker 02 But you're not going to reverse the power of the West with the diminished Russia that you have. And so that project, that Patrushev project, which we see him expressing again and again, he speaks about it publicly. It's not something that we need to go looking for, a quest, the secret, we can't find it, what are they thinking? It's right there in front of our face. And Putin has spoken the same way for a long time. People point to the 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference that Putin delivered, and certainly your listeners could use a snippet or two of that, just like they could
31:06 Speaker 02 use a couple of quotes from Patrushev to contextualize what we're talking about. But it predates the 2007 Munich speech. The reaction to Ukraine's uprising in 2004, attempt to steal the election inside Ukraine, right? Which the Ukrainian people rose up valiantly against and risked their lives and overturned, right? So there were public statements from Putin already back then, the statements about Kharkovsky in 2003, when he was arrested and expropriated. This is a longstanding psychological, deeply psychological issue, which is about managing
31:50 Speaker 02 Russian power in the world, as I was saying, the gap with the West, but has this further dimension of feeling like losers and wanting to reverse that. That's their life experience.
32:01 Lex Fridman? Abyziania. So there's that resentment that fuels this narrative, fuels this geopolitics and internal policy. But so resentment is behind some of the worst things that have ever been done in human history. Hitler was probably fueled by resentment. So resentment is a really powerful force, yes. Just to... Maybe not push back, but to give fuller context on the West. You said there's a narrative from Putin's Russia that the West is somehow an enemy. You position everything against the West.
32:43 Lex Fridman? But is there a degree, and to what degree, is the West willing to feed that narrative? That it's also convenient for the West to have an enemy? It seems like in the place, in the span, it seems like in geopolitics, having an enemy is useful for forming a narrative. Now, having an enemy for the basic respect of humanity is not good. But in terms of maintaining power, if you're a leader in a game of geopolitics, it seems to be good to have an enemy. It seems to be good to have something like a Cold War. We can always point your finger and says, "All our actions are fighting this evil," whatever that evil is.
33:27 Lex Fridman? It could be like with George W. Bush, the war on terror. Terrorism is this evil. You can always point at something. So you've made it seem that the West is trying. There's a lot of forces within the West that are trying to reach out a friendly hand, trying to help, sending money, sending compassion, trying to sort of...
33:46 Speaker 02 Trying to integrate Russia into global institutions.
33:49 Lex Fridman? Exactly.
33:50 Speaker 02 Which was a longstanding, multi-decade effort across multiple countries and multiple administrations in those countries.
33:58 Lex Fridman? But is there also warmongers in the West?
34:00 Speaker 02 Of course, Lex, of course, you're right about that. But let's put it this way. People talk about the Cold War, and they're usually looking to assign blame for the Cold War, as if it's some kind of mistake, a misunderstanding, or a search for an enemy that was convenient to rally domestic politics. So Lex...
34:24 Speaker 02 There's a coup in Czechoslovakia and somebody installs a communist regime in February 1948. No reaction to that, that's just okay? There's a blockade of Berlin. Is that cool by you? Where they try to strangle West Berlin so that they can swallow West Berlin and add it to East Berlin? You cool with that? How about Korean War, invasion of North Korea, invasion of South Korea by North Korea? You cool with that? How about the murders and the show trials up and down Eastern Europe in the late 40s after the imposition of the clone regimes? You good with that?
35:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's very convenient to have an enemy, I agree with you. But, you know, there were some actions, Lex. There were some threats to people's freedom. There were some invasions. There was some aggression and violence on a mass scale, like collectivization of Eastern Europe. We could go on, Lex, with the examples. I'm just giving a few of them. And so the Cold War was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding. We don't have to blame someone for the Cold War. We have to give credit for the Cold War. The Truman Administration deserves credit for standing up to Stalin's regime, for standing
35:49 Speaker 02 up to these actions, for saying, "Yeah, we're not just gonna take this. We're not gonna let this go on. We're not gonna let this expand to further territories. We're gonna create the NATO alliance. And we're gonna rally democratic liberal regimes to stand up to this illiberalism, this violence, and this aggression." And so, yeah, Lex, it's always convenient to have an enemy. But there was an enemy. Nikolai Leonov, who recently died, he died in April 2022, and he had a major funeral. He was the last head analyst of the Soviet KGB.
36:34 Speaker 02 And Leonov is one of the most important figures for understanding the Soviet collapse. And he has the best memoir on the Soviet collapse, which is known in Russian as "Licholetya." You will understand that, and you'll help your podcast listeners understand. There's a singularity to that kind of expression, "Licholetya." Leonov just died, but one of the things, and in fact, the people who were supposedly arrested by Putin as scapegoats for the Ukraine war, the main one, Sergey Besseida, gave the eulogy
37:14 Speaker 02 at Leonov's funeral in April 2022, showing that it's a lie, that all of these people have been arrested and purged and other nonsense in social media. But to get back to what Leonov said and get back to your enemy point. Leonov said, you know, "The West spent all this time blackening the image of the Soviet Union, all these resources and propaganda and covert operations to blacken the Soviet image." And they did, Lex, the West did do that. And then Leonov wrote in the next sentence, and you know what? "We gave them a lot of material to work with to blacken our image."
37:55 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so you're saying a kind of sobering reality, which it is possible to some degree to draw a line between the good guys and the bad guys.
38:06 Speaker 02 Freedom is better than unfreedom, Lex. It's a lot better than unfreedom, and a guy like you understands that really well.
38:14 Lex Fridman? Well, so, yes, but those are all, you know, there's words like justice, freedom. What else? Love, you can use a lot of words that Hitler himself used to describe why he is actually creating a better world than those he's fighting. So some of it is propaganda. The question is, on the ground, what is actually increasing the amount of freedom in the world?
38:42 Speaker 02 Institutions, Lex, right? We're not talking about propaganda here. When we use words like freedom, we're talking about rule of law. We're talking about protection of civil liberties. We're talking about protection of private property. We're talking about an independent and well-funded judiciary. We're talking about an impartial, non-corrupt, competent civil service. We're talking about separation of powers where the executive branch's power is limited, usually by an elected parliament. In fact, yes, let's talk about elections. Let's talk about freedom of speech and freedom of the public sphere. We're not talking about freedom as a slogan here.
39:26 Speaker 02 We're talking about a huge array of institutions and practices and norms ultimately, right? And if they exist, you know and you live under them. And if they don't exist, you fully understand that as well, right? Ukraine was a flawed democracy before Russia invaded. It's utterly corrupt, many ways dysfunctional, especially the elites were dysfunctional. The gas industry in Ukraine was absolutely terrible because of the corruption that it generated, the oligarch problem, a handful of people stealing the state resources.
40:08 Speaker 02 And yet, Ukraine had an open public sphere and it had a parliament that functioned. And so despite its flaws, it was still a democracy. The regime in Moscow, you can't say that, Lex.
40:26 Speaker 02 It's not a comparable regime to Ukraine. You could say, oh, well, there are oligarchs in Ukraine and there are oligarchs in Russia. There's corruption in Ukraine, there's corruption in Russia. So really, what's the big difference? And the answer is, well, Ukraine had the open public sphere. Ukraine had a real parliament. Can you call Russia's Duma a real parliament? I don't think so. I don't think you can. Can you say that there were any checks whatsoever on the executive branch in Russia? Can you say that the Russian judiciary had any independence? Or really, full level of competence, even compared to the Ukrainian judiciary, which was nothing to brag about. No, you can't say that, Lex.
41:10 Speaker 02 So we can differentiate between the very flawed, corrupt oligarch, oligarchic democracy in Ukraine and the very corrupt oligarchic autocracy in Russia. I think that's a fair distinction.
41:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah, we should say that Russia and Ukraine have the great honor of being the number one and the number two most corrupt nations in Europe by many measures. But there is a fundamental difference, as you're highlighting. Russia is a corrupt autocracy. Ukraine, we can say, is a corrupt democracy. And to that level, there's a fundamental difference.
41:52 Speaker 02 Ukraine is not murdering its own journalists in systematic fashion. If journalists are killed in Ukraine, it's a tragedy. If journalists are killed in Russia or Russian journalists are killed abroad, it's regime policy.
42:07 Lex Fridman? And the degree to which a nation is authoritarian
42:11 Lex Fridman? means that it's suffocating its own spirit, its capacity to flourish. It's, we're not just talking about
42:21 Lex Fridman? sort of the freedom of the press, those kinds of things. But basically, all industries get suffocated. And you're no longer being able to, yeah, flourish as a nation, grow the production, the GDP, the scientists, the art, the culture, all those kinds of things.
42:37 Speaker 02 Yes, Lex, you're absolutely right. And so before the invasion, the full-blown invasion of February 2022 into Ukraine, because, as you know, the war has been going on for many years at a lower level compared to what it is these days, but still a tragic war with many deaths prior to February 2022. Before this latest war, we could have said that the greatest victims of the Putin regime are Russian, domestic. That the people who are suffering the most from the Putin regime are not sitting here in New York City, but in fact are sitting there in Russia. Now, of course, with the invasion of Ukraine and really the...
43:23 Speaker 02 Atrocities that have been well documented and more are being investigated. We can't easily say anymore that Russians are the greatest victims of the Putin regime. But in ways other than bombing and murdering civilians, children, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers. After you include that, then of course, the larger number of victims of the Putin regime are not Ukrainians, but ultimately Russians. And there's how many of them now that have fled?
43:58 Lex Fridman? So your powerful, precise, rigorous words are, then, in a stark contrast, I would say, to my very recent conversation with Oliver Stone. And I would love you to elaborate to this agreement you have here with his words and maybe words of people like John Mearsheimer. The idea is that Putin's hand in this invasion of 2022 was forced by the expansion of NATO, the imperialist imperative of the United States and the NATO forces.
44:42 Lex Fridman? You disagree with this point in terms of placing the blame somehow on the invasion, on forces larger than the particular two nations involved, but more on the geopolitics of the world that's driven by the most powerful military nation in the world, which is the United States.
45:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, Lex, so let's imagine that a tragedy has happened here in New York and a woman got raped. We know the perpetrator. They go to trial and Oliver Stone gets up and says, you know what? The woman was wearing a short skirt. And there was no option but for the rapist to rape her. The woman was wearing lipstick. Or the woman was applying for NATO membership and just had to be raped. There's, I mean, didn't want to rape her, but was compelled because of what she was doing and what she looked like and, and the clothes she was wearing and the alliances
45:47 Speaker 02 that she was, under international law, signed by Moscow, all the treaties that sovereign countries get to choose whatever alliance they belong to. A treaties that, the UN Charter, signed by Russia, Soviet Union. The 1975 Helsinki Agreement, signed by the Soviet Union. The 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed by the Soviet Union. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, signed by the Russian government, the post-Soviet Russia. All of those documents, signed by either the Soviet regime or the Russian regime, which
46:30 Speaker 02 is the legally recognized international inheritor, right, successor of the Soviet state. All of those agreements are still in force and all of them say that countries are sovereign and can freely choose their foreign policy and what alliances they want to join. Let's even go farther than that. I mean, you don't have to go farther than that, but let's go farther than that, Lex. Is an autocratic, repressive regime that invades its neighbors in the name of its own security, something new in Russian history? Did we not see this before? Is this, does this not predate NATO expansion? Does this not predate the existence of NATO?
47:15 Speaker 02 Would Oliver Stone sit here in this chair and say to you, you know?
47:20 Speaker 02 They had to impose serfdom in the 17th century because NATO expanded. They had no choice, their hands were tied. They were compelled to treat their own population like slaves because, you know, NATO expanded. I mean, I could go on through the examples of Russian history that predate the existence, let alone the expansion of NATO, where you have behavior, policies, actions, very similar to what we see now from the Kremlin. And you can't explain those by NATO expansion, can you? And so that argument doesn't wash for me because I have a pattern here that predates NATO
48:04 Speaker 02 expansion. I have international agreements, founding documents, signed by the Kremlin over many, many decades, acknowledging the freedom of countries to choose their alliances. And then I have this problem where when you rape somebody, it's not because they're wearing a short skirt, it's because you have raped them. You've committed a criminal act, Lex.
48:33 Lex Fridman? That's a, I think there's a lot of people listening to this that will agree to the emotion, the power and the spirit of this metaphor. I was struggling to think how to dance within this metaphor because it feels like it wasn't precisely the right one, but I think that it captures the spirit.
48:52 Speaker 02 I'm not suggesting, Lex, that everything the West has done has been honorable or intelligent. Fortunately, we live in a democracy, we live in liberal regimes, we live under rule of law, liberal in the classical sense of rule of law, not liberal in the leftist sense.
49:15 Speaker 02 We live in places like that and we can criticize ourselves. And we can criticize the mistakes that we made, or the policy choices, or the inactions that were taken. And there are a whole lot of things to answer for. And you can now discuss the ones that are your favorites, the dishonor or the mistakes. And I could discuss mine. And we could spend the whole rest of our meeting today discussing the West's mistakes and problems.
49:46 Lex Fridman? And we won't end up in prison for it.
49:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, Alex, and so that's, I'm thankful for that.
49:51 Lex Fridman? Yes.
49:52 Speaker 02 And I'm thankful that people may disagree and that people make the argument that NATO expansion is to blame. But, but you see, I'm countering two arguments here. I'm countering one argument, which is very deeply popular, pervasive, about how Russia has this cultural tendency to aggression. And it can help but invade its neighbors and it does it again and again. And it's eternal Russian imperialism and you have to watch out for it. This very popular argument in the Baltic States, it's really popular in Warsaw, it's really popular with the liberal interventionists, and it's, it's very, very popular with those who were part of the Iraq War squad that got us into that mess.
50:37 Speaker 02 So I'm against that. And the reason I'm against it is because it's not true. It's empirically false. There is no cultural trait inherent tendency for Russia to be aggressive. It's a strategic choice that they make.
50:51 Lex Fridman? Every time it's a choice made, it's not some kind of momentum. Every time it's a choice that we should judge for the choice that it is, for the decision.
50:59 Speaker 02 And therefore, they could make different choices. They could say, we don't have to stand up to the West. We don't have the capabilities to do that. We can still be a great country. We can still be a civilization unto itself. We can still be Russia. We can still worship in Orthodox cathedrals, or we can still be ourselves.
51:20 Speaker 02 But we don't have to pursue this chimerical pursuit, this elusive quest to stand up to the West and be in the first ranks of powers. So I'm countering that argument. I'm saying it's perpetual geopolitics. It's a geopolitical choice rising out of this dilemma of the mismatch between aspirations and capabilities. It's not eternal Russian imperialism. And I'm also countering the other argument here, Lex, which is to say that it's the West's fault. It's Western imperialism. Very popular on the left, very popular with realist scholars, very popular with some of the people recently on your podcast.
52:03 Speaker 02 And so it's neither eternal Russian imperialism, nor is it Western imperialism. The mere fact that the West is stronger than Russia is not a crime on the part of the West. It's not a crime that countries voluntarily want to join the West, that beg to get in, either the EU or NATO or other bilateral alliances or other trade agreements. Those are voluntarily entered into, and that's not criminal. If the West's sphere of influence, which is open, an open sphere of influence, which, as I say, people voluntarily join, if that expands, that's not a crime, nor is that a threat to Russia ipso facto.
52:48 Speaker 02 NATO is a defensive alliance, and the countries are largely pacifists who are members of NATO. And NATO doesn't attack. It defends members if they are attacked. And so the idea that Ukraine, which had the legal right, might want to join NATO and the EU, which was not going to happen in our lifetimes and was not a direct threat to the Putin regime, since the Western countries that make up the EU and NATO...
53:19 Speaker 02 Decided that Ukraine was not ready for membership. There was no consensus. It was not going to happen. But it's Ukraine's free choice to express that desire. And if your government is elected by your people, freely elected, meaning you can unelect that government in the next election, and that government makes foreign policy choices on the basis of its perceived interests, that's not a crime, Lex. That's not a provocation. That's not something that compels the leader of another country to invade you. That is legal under international law, and it's also a realist fact of life.
54:00 Speaker 02 The realists like to tell you that Russia here was disrespected, Russia's interests were not taken into account, et cetera, et cetera. But the real world works in such a way that treaties matter, that international law matters. That's why people like me were not in favor of the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, Lex, because it wasn't legal, in addition to the fact that we thought it might backfire. But, you know, Lex, like I said, there are a lot of things about the West that we ought to criticize as citizens, and we do criticize. But we have to be clear about where responsibility lies
54:44 Speaker 02 in these events that we're talking about today.
54:47 Lex Fridman? So you get to trouble. It's largely erroneous to think about both the West or the United States from an imperialist perspective and Russia from an imperialist perspective. It's better, clearer to think about each individual aggressive decision on its own as a choice that was made. So let's talk about the most recent choice made by Vladimir Putin. The choice to invade Ukraine or to escalate the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Now, we're a few months removed from that decision, initial decision. Why do you think he did it?
55:29 Lex Fridman? What are the errors in understanding the situation, in calculating the outcomes, and everything else about this decision, in your view?
55:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, Lex, when you don't, when a war doesn't go well, it looks like lunacy to have launched it in the first place.
55:50 Lex Fridman? Does it ever go well?
55:52 Speaker 02 War never goes according to plan. All war is based upon miscalculation, but not everybody is punished for their miscalculation. All aggressive war we're talking about, not defensive war, is based upon miscalculation. But you can adjust, you can recalibrate. You know, when, when you're driving down the road and that very annoying voice is telling you in a thousand feet, "Make a right", and you fail to make a right, it recalibrates, right?
56:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
56:24 Speaker 02 It tells you, "Okay, now, you know, go turn around, or U-turn, or make a left", it doesn't say you're an idiot and turn around and make a U-turn, but it does recalibrate. So you can miscalculate, and the problem is not the miscalculation usually, it's the failure to do that adjustment, right? People I know who are hedge fund traders, they, I ask them, you know, "What's your favorite trade?" And the line from them all, and this is a cliche, is, "My favorite trade is when I made a mistake, but I got out early before all the carnage." So their favorite trade is not when they made some brilliant choice, but it's when they miscalculated,
57:07 Speaker 02 but they reduce the consequences of their miscalculation by recalibrating quickly, right? So let's talk about the calculation and miscalculation of February. Let's imagine, Lex, that you've been getting away with murder. I don't mean murder in a figurative sense. I mean, you've been murdering people. You've been murdering them domestically, and you've been murdering them all across Europe. And you've been murdering them not just with, for example, a car accident, a staged car accident, or using a handgun. You used Novichok.
57:46 Speaker 02 Or you use some other internationally outlawed chemical weapon.
57:53 Speaker 02 And let's imagine that you did it and nothing happened to you. It wasn't like you were removed from power. It wasn't like you paid a personal price. Sure, maybe there was some sanctions on your economy, but you didn't pay the price of those sanctions. Little people paid the price of those sanctions. Other people in your country paid the price. Let's imagine not only were you murdering people, literally, but you decided to entice the idiotic ruler of Georgia into a provocation that you could then invade the country.
58:32 Speaker 02 And you invaded the country and you bid off these territories of Khazia and South Ossetia. And what price did you pay for that?
58:41 Speaker 02 And then you decided, you know, I think I'll now invade Crimea and forcibly annex Crimea. And I'll instigate an insurrection in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk and Donetsk. Let's imagine you did all that and then you had to stick out your wrist so that, you know, it could be slapped a couple of times. And you said, you know, I can pretty much do what I want. They're putting a sanction here and there and they're doing this and they're doing that. And you know what? They're more energy dependent on me than before. I got better money laundering and reputation services than anybody has. Maybe the Middle East and the Chinese would disagree with you that you have better than them, but yours are pretty good.
59:26 Speaker 02 And the Panama Papers get released, revealing all of your offshoring and your corruption. And what happened? Nothing happens, Lex. So the first and most important consideration here is, in your own mind, you've been getting away with murder, literally, as well as figuratively. And you think, you know, I probably can do something again and get away with it. And so the failure to respond at scale, in fact, the indulgences, the further dependencies that are introduced, the illusion that trade is the mechanism to manage authoritarian regimes. You know, that great German cliche,
1:00:10 Speaker 02 "Wandel durch Handel", right, "change through trade", or "transformation through trade", one of Angela Merkel's favorite expressions, right? You're going to get the other side to be better, rather than confront them in a Cold War fashion, where you stand up to their aggressions and you punish them severely in order to deter further behavior. So that's the first and most important part of the calculation miscalculation. There are a lot of other dimensions.
1:00:41 Lex Fridman? Can we pause on that really quick? So this is kind of idea of it's okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, which is a more generous description of what you're saying, that you don't incorporate into the calculation the amount of human suffering that decisions cause, but instead you look at sort of the success based on some kind of measure for you personally and for the nation, not in terms of, in a humanitarian sense, but in some kind of economic sense, and a power, geopolitical power sense.
1:01:20 Speaker 02 Yeah. You're not sentimental, Lex. You say to yourself, "The cause of Russian greatness is greater than any individual life", Russia being in the first rank of the great powers, Russia realizing its mission to be a special country with a special mission in the world, a civilization unto itself.
1:01:48 Speaker 02 The first rank of the great powers, maybe even the greatest power, that's worth the price that we have to pay, especially in other people's lives. Right? We have a lot of literature on the Putin regime, which talks about the kleptocracy. The place is a kleptocracy, and it is a kleptocracy. We all can see that, and anybody in London, living the high life, servicing this kleptocracy, can testify that it's a kleptocracy. And not only in London, of course, right here in the United States, in New York. But you know, it's not only a kleptocracy, Lex. That was the problem of the Russian studies literature.
1:02:33 Speaker 02 It wasn't just about stealing, looting the state. It was about Russian greatness. You see those rituals in the Kremlin, right? In the Grand Kremlin Palace, in the St. George's Hall, some of the greatest interiors in the world. And you see award ceremonies, and you see marking holidays, and all of these looters of the state have their uniforms on with their medals, and someone's giving a speech or singing a ballad, and their eyes are moist. Their eyes are moist because they're thieves and looters? No, Lex. Because they believe in Russian greatness.
1:03:15 Speaker 02 They have a deep and fundamental, passionate commitment to the greatness of Russia, which, in unsentimental fashion, they're all sentimental to the max. That's why their, their eyes are moistening. But they imagine unsentimentally that any sacrifice is okay, a sacrifice of other people's lives, a sacrifice of their conscripts in the military, a sacrifice of Ukrainian women and children and elderly. That's a small price to pay for those moist eyes about Russian greatness and Russia's position in the world.
1:03:51 Lex Fridman? Well, that human thing, that sentimentality, is a thing that can get us in trouble in the United States as well, and lead us to wars, illegal wars and so on. But the United States, there's repercussions. For breaking the law, you're going to pay for illegal wars in the end. You're saying that in authoritarian regimes, the sentimentality can really get out of hand. And you can, by charismatic leaders, they can take that to manipulate the populace to make that in the span of history led to atrocities and in today's world, lead to humanitarian crises.
1:04:28 Speaker 02 It's not just the kleptocracy, it's a belief system. It's passion, it's conviction, it's, it's, it's, you can call them illusions, you can call them fantasies, whatever you want to call them, they're real, they're real for those people. And so, yes, they're looting that very state that they're trying to make one of the great powers in the world. And they resent the fact that the West doesn't acknowledge them as one of those great powers. And they resent that the West is more powerful. People talk about how Putin doesn't understand the world and that he gets really bad information. Lex, if you're sitting there in that Kremlin and you're trying to conduct business in
1:05:12 Speaker 02 the world and you're getting reports from your finance minister or your central bank governor, your whole economy, everything that matters, somehow, all your trade is denominated in dollars and euros. Do you have any illusions about who controls the international financial system? I don't think so, Lex. You're looking over your industrial plan for the next year and you're looking over how many tanks you're going to get and how many cruise missiles you're going to get and how many submarines you're going to get and, and, and fill in the blank. And you know what? It says right there in the paperwork where the component parts come from, where the software comes from, comes from the West, Lex.
1:05:57 Speaker 02 Your whole military industrial complex is dependent on high-end Western technology. And then, and let's, and let's say you're in Beijing, not just in Moscow, and you go to a meeting in your own neighborhood. You're the leader of China, you go to a meeting with other Asian leaders. Do they all speak in Chinese with you? No, Lex, they don't speak Chinese. You go to an international meeting as the leader of China and guess what language is the main language of intercourse? Yes, the same one you and I are speaking right now. And so you live in that world. You live in the Western world and it's very hard to have illusions about what world you live in. When you're under that, you need those Western banks.
1:06:42 Speaker 02 You need that foreign currency, right? You need that high-end Western technology, that technology transfer. You're speaking, or you're forced to speak, or your minions are forced to speak at international gatherings in English. And I could go on. All the indicators that you live in, and so Putin lives in that world. He's no fool.
1:07:02 Lex Fridman? Well, to push back, isn't it possible that, as you said, the minions operate in that world? But can't you, if you're the leader of Russia, or the leader of China, or the leader of these different nations, still put up walls where actually when you think in the privacy of your own mind, you exist not in the international world, but in a world where there's this great Russian empire, or this great Chinese empire?
1:07:30 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:07:31 Lex Fridman? And then you forget that there's English, you forget that there's technology and iPhones, you forget that there's all this US keeps popping up on all different paperwork. That just becomes the blurry details that dissipate, because what matters is the greatness of this dream empire that I have in my mind as a dictator.
1:07:52 Speaker 02 I would put it this way, Lex. After you absorb all of that from your minions, and it impresses upon your consciousness where you live, you live in a Western-dominated world, that the multipolar world doesn't exist. Your goal is to make that multipolar world exist. Your goal is to bring down the West. Your goal is for the West to weaken. Your goal is a currency other than the dollar and the euro. Your goal is, is an international financial system that you dominate. Your goal is technological self-sufficiency made in China 2035, right?
1:08:35 Speaker 02 Your goal is a world that you dominate, not that the West dominates. And you're going to do everything you can to try to attain that world, which is a Russian-centric world, or a Chinese-centric world, or what we could call a Eurasian-centric world.
1:08:54 Speaker 02 And it's not going to be easy, Lex, just for the reasons that we enumerated before. But maybe you're going to get a helping hand. Maybe the West is going to transfer their best technology to you. They're going to sell you their best stuff. And then you're going to absorb it and maybe copy it and reverse engineer it. And if they won't sell it to you, maybe you'll just have to steal it. Maybe the West is going to allow you to bank, even though you violate many laws that would prohibit the West from extending those banking services to you. Maybe the West is going to buy your energy and your palladium and your titanium and
1:09:36 Speaker 02 your rare metals like lithium, because you're willing to have your poor people mine that stuff and die of disease at an early age. But Western governments, they don't want to do that. They don't want to do that dirty mining of those very important rare earths. But you're willing to do that because it's just people whose lives you don't care about as an autocratic regime. So that's the world you live in, where you're trying to get to this other world. You're at the center of the other world. You dominate the other world. But the only way to get there, Lex, is the West has to weaken, divide itself, maybe even collapse.
1:10:19 Speaker 02 And so you're encouraging, to the extent possible, Western divisions, Western disunity, Western lack of resolve, Western mistakes, and West invasion of the wrong country, and Western destruction of its credibility through international financial crises. And one could go on. So if the West weakens itself through its mistakes and its own corruption, you're going to survive and maybe even come out into that world where you're the center. And so Russia's entire grand strategy, just like China's grand strategy, Iran, it's hard to say they have a grand strategy because they're so profoundly weak.
1:11:06 Speaker 02 But Russia's grand strategy is, we're a mess. We don't invest in our human capital. Our human capital flees, or we actually drive it out. It goes to MIT, like you did, or it goes to fill in the blank, right? We can't invest in our people. Our healthcare is terrible. Our education system is in decline. We don't build infrastructure, Lex. We don't improve our governance. We don't invest in those attributes of modern power that make the West powerful. We can't, because when we try, the money is stolen. We try these grandiose projects of, national projects they're called. We're gonna invest in higher ed.
1:11:50 Speaker 02 We're gonna invest in high tech. We're gonna build our own Silicon Valley known as Skolkovo. We're gonna do all those things, and what happens? They can't even build an airport without the money disappearing. The Sochi Olympics, Lex, officially cost them $50 billion. You look around at the infrastructure that endured from that $50 billion expense, and you're thinking, you know, that's like the Second Avenue subway. You get almost nothing for your money. And so, yeah, it's corruption, Lex, but it's also because they don't want to do that. They don't want to invest in their people. They couldn't do it if they wanted to, and when they try, it doesn't work.
1:12:34 Speaker 02 But why invest in your own people? Invest in your hardware, your military hardware, right? Invest in your cyber capabilities. Invest in all your spoliation techniques and your hard power. And invest in further corrupting and further weakening and further dividing the West. Because, as I said, if the West is weak, divided, lacking resolve, you don't invest in your people, you don't build infrastructure, you don't improve your governance, but you'll muddle through. That's Russian grand strategy.
1:13:12 Lex Fridman? So, invest in the hard power, weaken the West. Those combined together means you're going to be
1:13:19 Speaker 02 Survive.
1:13:20 Lex Fridman? heavily incentivized to escalate any military aggressive conflicts.
1:13:25 Lex Fridman? That are around you or create new ones or
1:13:28 Speaker 02 If you can get away with murder. But what happens Lex if it's a Harry Truman like response? What happens if somebody says, you know, we're going to stand up to this? We're not going to allow this to happen. We're not going to launder your money anymore. We're not going to be dependent on you for energy in the long term. We're going to make a transition. We're going to punish you for that kind of behavior instead. And, and, and the West is now switched to that only because of the courage and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people.
1:14:09 Speaker 02 The Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression was one of the greatest gifts the West has ever received. The sacrifices that the Ukrainians are making. Right now as we speak, meaning they're fighting a war by themselves against a major military power, their neighbor Russia. Nobody's fighting it with them. Yes, we are giving them weapons so they can conduct self-defense, which by the way is legal under international law. Unlike the Russian invasion, which is illegal under international law. Western supply of weapons, including heavy weapons,
1:14:52 Speaker 02 including offensive weapons to Ukraine for its self-defense in the invasion by Russia is actually legal under. And so, thank God, the Ukrainians surprised everybody. They surprised me. They surprised Putin and the Kremlin. They surprised the Biden administration. They surprised the European Union. Not with the fact that they would resist. We knew that. We had the Orange Revolution in 2004. We had Maidan in 2013, 14, where they rose up against a domestic tyrant, and they were willing to die on behalf of their
1:15:32 Speaker 02 country then, let alone against a foreign tyrant invading their country, right? So we knew they would resist. We didn't know just how successful, certainly I didn't know, they would be on the battlefield. It's been breathtaking to watch. That sacrifice, that gift, enabled the West to rediscover itself, to rediscover its power, to revive itself, to say, "To hell with this energy dependence in the long term. To hell with this money laundering and reputation laundering. To hell with this running back and forth to Moscow to try to see what Putin needs in order for him to feel respected, what appeasement
1:16:10 Speaker 02 he needs," right? So we'll see if it endures, but this shift comes from the Ukrainians. And so it's no longer getting away with murder, Lex, and we thank the Ukrainians for that.
1:16:23 Lex Fridman? The people and the leadership and the separate factions that make up Ukraine uniting, it's the unification, the uniting against the common enemy.
1:16:35 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:16:35 Lex Fridman? Standing up before anyone knew that they would be backed by all of these other nations, by this money and all this kind of stuff.
1:16:43 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:16:43 Lex Fridman? Standing there, especially with President Zelensky, where it makes total sense to flee, he stood his ground.
1:16:52 Speaker 02 Yes, Lex. Let's take that point that you just raised, which is a deep and fundamental point, and I thank you for that.
1:16:58 Lex Fridman? Do you guys hear that? I think that was a compliment. There we go. Let's go.
1:17:02 Speaker 02 Lex.
1:17:03 Lex Fridman? Zelensky or unification?
1:17:05 Speaker 02 I'm sitting here in front of you.
1:17:07 Lex Fridman? Thank you. It's an honor.
1:17:08 Speaker 02 And it's a mutual honor. So Ukraine, before the war, is run by a TV production company. Right, you're one guy running this fantastic incredible podcast. Yeah. There's 20 guys or so running a country the size of Ukraine. Yeah. And, and one's a producer and one's like a makeup person and one's a video editor and, and they're fantastically talented people if your country is a TV production. So before the war, Zelensky had what 25% approval rating? And he couldn't get much done and it wasn't working. He got elected with 73% as you know, and then he was down to 20.
1:17:52 Speaker 02 That's a pretty big drop. And so you're thinking, maybe having a major, large size, 40 million plus population European country run by a TV production company is not the best choice. And then what do we see? We see President Zelensky decides to risk his life on behalf of his country, Ukraine. He decides to stay in the capital. He's not gonna flee. He, they're gonna stay and fight. And he could be killed. He can die. It's a decision where he put his life on the line.
1:18:30 Speaker 02 Obviously, he's Jewish descent, Russian speaking, childhood and upbringing. Russian speaking, Jewish descent puts his life on the line for the country of Ukraine. It's a pretty big message, don't you think? And it's crucial. And it turns out, not only that, Lex, but they're good at TV. They're good at information war. And in a war, Yeah. it's a TV production company and a TV personality. Those, that's exactly what you want running a country. Because they're crushing in the information war. And he's spectacular.
1:19:11 Speaker 02 European Parliament, US Congress, Israeli Parliament. There's no room on Zoom, let alone in person, that he can't win over. He's just so effective. You know, this is the first time reality TV. Has been about reality instead of fake. Reality TV is just this completely fake nonsense. But Zelensky, this is real reality TV. And, and, and he means it. And, and the nation is behind him. And, and they're just as courageous and just as ingenious in many ways. And it's spectacular. And so, yeah. Who saw that coming? I didn't see that coming, Lex.
1:19:56 Speaker 02 In fact, the Biden, we talk about Putin's miscalculation. The Biden administration, as you alluded to, offered him an exit from the country. They didn't say, you know, you want to stand and fight? We'll back you. They said, we'll get you out. You want to come now? And famously, you know that quote, right? What he said about how he doesn't need a ride? Remember that? Yeah. Moment? The Biden administration was poised to do another Afghanistan moment. That ignominious exit from Afghanistan was almost what happened in Ukraine. When Biden administration offered him that ride out of there. And fortunately, he declined and helped rally.
1:20:41 Speaker 02 And the people from below also rallied to stop the invader without the presidency and without the government in Ukraine, saving the Biden administration and, and the European leaders who latched on. Fortunately, they had the presence of mind to latch on to this gift, this bravery and ingenuousness of, of Zelensky and the rest of the Ukrainians and flipped and decided to support Ukraine's resistance. You know, first with 5,000 helmets only, as the Germans initially promised, and now with really heavy weapons. And so that's something that wasn't foreseen. I certainly didn't foresee that.
1:21:23 Speaker 02 I foresaw the Ukrainian society being courageous and resisting. But I didn't foresee a television production company.
1:21:33 Speaker 02 Being exactly what you want to run a country in a war. A President Zelensky willing to sacrifice, lay down his life and rallying others in the country to do that. And then the country being so effective, not just at courage, but at battlefield resistance to the Russian invasion. So I stand corrected by the Ukrainians and I'm ecstatic that I didn't, that I was wrong, that I was proven wrong.
1:22:02 Lex Fridman? And like I said, there's clear factions of the West and the East of Ukraine. And here's a person that, like you said, was in the high twenties, low thirties percentage approval in the country before the war and now was able to use-
1:22:18 Speaker 02 He's in the nineties now.
1:22:19 Lex Fridman? In the nineties.
1:22:20 Speaker 02 He's in the 90% approval rating. I mean, I think they stopped doing the polling. Once he hit 91% or whatever it was in the previous poll, I think they all understood that for now, they didn't need any more polling, that it's pretty clear the nation. So 25% to 90 something percent. And just like the 25% was deserved, the 90 something percent is also deserved, fully deserved.
1:22:49 Lex Fridman? And the question is how that all stabilizes. It feels like this set of events, I may be paying attention to Twitter too much, which is a concern of mine, whether the change I see is just surface level or deep level. But it seems like we're in a new world. That something dramatic has shifted. That this power that's rooted, I mean, in your study, of the 20th century, it's so deeply rooted in history, there's this power center of the world is now going to, has been shaken by this event.
1:23:31 Lex Fridman? And how that changes the world is unclear. It's unclear what lesson China learns from watching this, what lesson India learns from watching this. Both nations, as far as you can get polls about Chinese population, but both nations are largely in support of Putin. So Russia, India, and China are still supporting of Putin quietly.
1:23:55 Speaker 02 I would maybe elaborate a little bit on that point, Lex.
1:24:01 Speaker 02 I think you're right. The feeling that we're in an inflection moment, you know, an inflection point. I think that's widespread. And I think it's widespread for good reason. We might be. But I also share your, let's say, modesty about where it's going and how hard it is to predict where this might go. It's only an inflection point if the trends continue, right? If the trends endure. There are plenty of non-inflection points. After 9/11, the whole world rallied around the United States after it was attacked,
1:24:43 Speaker 02 after the bombing of the towers here in New York City and the hitting of the Pentagon. And that didn't last. And it was not really an inflection point, was it? It felt like it might be, but it wasn't. And so this is not a comparable moment in terms of what happened, but it has the feeling that it might be a watershed. And maybe we'll squander it the way we squandered the post-9/11 rallying around the United States. Maybe we'll actually consolidate it and it'll endure, or maybe it'll endure despite ourselves. And we can't tell and we can't know yet.
1:25:25 Speaker 02 And it depends in part on what we do and what we don't do. But here's a few things that we understand already. The idea that the West was in decline and that the rest of the world had risen and was more powerful and that we lived in a multipolar world, that turns out to be empirically false. It's not true. I mean, it's just factually not true. There are no major, important multinational institutions, organizations that are run on behalf of or led by a South African, a Nigerian, a person from India.
1:26:09 Speaker 02 Even the Chinese don't run these institutions. They would like to, and they're trying, but they don't. And so whatever you pick, the IMF, the World Bank...
1:26:23 Speaker 02 The Federal Reserve, which is the most powerful multinational institution, which is actually only a domestic institution and doesn't have a legal mandate to act multilaterally, but does. It's got the most power of any institution in the world. NATO, the bilateral alliances that the US has up and down Asia. What organizations that have tremendous leverage on the international system, on the international order are non-Western? The UN is the most encompassing, and of course, we know that the five, it has five members
1:27:05 Speaker 02 of the Security Council with a veto, one of which is Russia, one of which is China, and the others are the US, Britain, and France. Not India, not South Africa, not Indonesia, not all of these other countries where the people live, right? The bulk of the population of the world and where the population is growing, like on the African continent. So it's not a multipolar world. We talked already about the international financial system. It's Western, not multipolar. We talked about the US military and NATO, or we could talk about the Japanese military, which is just very formidable, enormous number of platforms.
1:27:48 Speaker 02 Even the Australian military, we could talk about, Lex, right? And so it's a Western-dominated world. And the West, remember, is not a geographic concept. It is an institutional and values club. The Japanese are not European, but they're Western, just like Russia is European, but not Western, because European is a cultural category and Western is an institutional category, where you have rule of law and separation of powers and free and open public sphere and dynamic open market economy. And, okay. And then we have another thing, which is pretty clear.
1:28:29 Speaker 02 The West is powerfully resented, powerfully envied and admired simultaneously. PJ O'Rourke, the comedian who died this year.
1:28:43 Speaker 02 Fantastic. It was a big loss for the culture. He said, "There are two things that are always characteristic of any American embassy abroad. One is a political protest outside, and the other is the longest line you've ever seen for visas." And those things are true simultaneously, and that's the world we live in, meaning that non-Western countries envy and admire the West, but they also resent the power of the West. Western hypocrisy, right? The West invades countries when it wants, but when others do that, it's illegal, right?
1:29:28 Speaker 02 The West arrests you for money laundering, but it's Western money laundering that is where you go when you need to launder money, right? So they see the hypocrisy, they see the excessive power that the West has, and they resent it. And they say, "Who elected you to run the world? We have a billion-plus people, or we have a 200-plus million people, and we don't have a say. You're the self-appointed guardians of our world. Who did that?"
1:30:08 Speaker 02 And so it's incumbent on the West not only to remember the power that it has, but also to exercise that power legally and with restraint, and also to think about how it can expand institutions to be more encompassing, so that other parts of the world are not on the outside being dictated to.
1:30:35 Speaker 02 But instead are on the inside. Too often, right? Western power is not consultative in a decision-making fashion. It's consultative after the fact. Okay, you know, we got together in the EU, or we got together in NATO, or we got together at the Federal Reserve, and here's our decision, and we're announcing it today. And so your economy gets destroyed because the Federal Reserve decides it has to raise interest rates. Or you now go into default. You can't pay your debt because Western banks lent you money, and now the West has changed
1:31:19 Speaker 02 interest rates or other considerations, and you're in big trouble now. And so this is something which we fail to address. It's very hard to address. It's very hard to reform international institutions. It's very hard to share power. It's very hard to acknowledge that you have too much power, and that maybe having too much power is not good, not only for the rest of the world, but for yourself. And so it's great to rediscover the West and rediscover its values and rediscover its authority and credibility and power. But that's not sufficient. So we know this now.
1:32:03 Speaker 02 We know that the rest of the world is not necessarily jumping on the Western bandwagon, right, to condemn Russia for its actions, because the West can do things like sanction your central bank, take away your reserves, deny you technology. It pretty much can do whatever it wants. And it can say that it's legal, and it can go through various mechanisms, and it can freeze your property. And you say to yourself, should anybody have that much power? And when do they come after me? Now, there's a caveat here. And the caveat, Lex, is they don't like the West having all of that power, and they
1:32:47 Speaker 02 didn't join in the condemnation of Russia. But they also didn't join in Russia's aggression. So Russia's domestic civilian...
1:33:03 Speaker 02 Aerospace, aircraft industry, right? Civilian aircraft industry is in big trouble now because of the export controls on spare parts and software. Brazil is a major power in aircraft manufacturing. Do they rush in and say, you know, Vladimir Putin, we didn't condemn necessarily your actions in Ukraine? Okay, that's one thing. And how about we give you all of our aircraft technology and we help you rebuild your domestic aircraft industry? And you can have the aviation that the West is... Did that happen, Lex? Didn't happen.
1:33:45 Speaker 02 And you can look at India, and you can look at China, and you can look at South Africa, and you can look at what they've done in practical terms. Yes, they haven't always joined in a full-throated condemnation. Maybe they've been neutral, or maybe they've been playing both sides of the fence, like Turkey, for example. But are they rushing in to join Russia? To join Russia's aggression? To supply... And the answer is no. And the answer is no for two reasons. One, they actually don't want to be party to that. And two, they understand that Western power. And they don't want to be on the receiving end by crossing the West and then getting
1:34:30 Speaker 02 caught up in a sanctions regime or worse.
1:34:33 Lex Fridman? Can we go to the mind of Vladimir Putin? Because what you just said, China, India, they seem to sit back and say, we're not going to condemn the actions of Vladimir Putin and Russia, but we would really like for this war to be over. So there's that kind of energy of, we don't just stop this because you're putting us in a very, very bad position. And yet Vladimir Putin is continuing the aggression. What is he thinking? What information is he getting? Is it the system that you've described of authoritarian regimes that corrupts your flow of information, your ability to make clear-headed decisions?
1:35:16 Lex Fridman? Just as a human being, when you go to sleep at night, is he not able to see the world clearly? Or is this all deliberate systematic action that does have some reason behind it?
1:35:29 Speaker 02 We've got to talk a little bit about China, too, but let's answer your Putin question directly.
1:35:36 Speaker 02 So on Twitter, you've lost the war. Or, as they say, you know, there are these two Russian soldiers having a smoke in Warsaw. And, you know, they're, they're taking a break, having a smoke, and they're sitting there in Warsaw on top of their tank, and one says to the other, "Yeah, you know, we lost the information war."
1:35:57 Speaker 02 And there they are, sitting in Warsaw, having that smoke, right? So, yeah, on Twitter, Russia has completely lost the war. In reality, they failed to take Kiev, they failed to capture Kiev, and they failed in Phase 2, as they called it, or Plan B, which is to capture the entirety of the Donbass. We're three months into the war. If you had made a judgment about, let's say, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a definitive judgment after three months, you might have got the outcome wrong there. If you had judged the Winter War, the 1939-40 Soviet invasion of Finland, after three months, you would have got that wrong, too, of what the outcome was going to be.
1:36:41 Speaker 02 So we're early in the game here, and we have to be careful about any definitive judgments. But it is the case that so far, they failed to take Kiev, and they failed to capture the entirety of the Donbass, Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, eastern Ukraine, a part of eastern Ukraine. And they've been driven out of Kharkiv and, and the area immediately surrounding Kharkiv. They never captured Kharkiv, but they came close, but now the Ukrainians drove them back to the Russian border in that very large and important region. So those look like battlefield losses that are impossible to explain away
1:37:27 Speaker 02 if you're the regime in Russia, except by suppression of information.
1:37:32 Speaker 02 And as you know from Russian history, like,
1:37:36 Speaker 02 leaders in Russia have an easier time with a state of siege and deprivation than they do with explaining a lost war.
1:37:47 Speaker 02 But let's look at some other facts that are important to take into account. One, the Russian army has penetrated farther into Ukrainian territory since February 2022, including in Kherson region, the famous Mariupol siege that just ended. They have built a large presence in areas north of Crimea, on the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea littoral ultimately, that they didn't previously hold.
1:38:30 Speaker 02 They're still fighting in Luhansk for full control over at least half of the Donbass, and Ukrainians are resisting fiercely. But nonetheless, you can say that they've been driven out, on the contrary, farther penetration than the beginning. Ukraine doesn't have an economy anymore. They have somewhere between 33% and 50% unemployment. It's hard to measure unemployment in a war economy. But their metallurgical industry, that Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, is a ruin now. And a lot of farmers are not planting the fields because the harvest from the previous
1:39:14 Speaker 02 year still hasn't been sent, sold abroad because the ports are blockaded or destroyed. And so you don't have an economy, and you need $5 billion, or $7 billion, or $8 billion a month to meet your payroll, to feed your people, to keep your army in the field.
1:39:37 Speaker 02 That's a lot of money per month, and that's indefinite. That's as long as this blockade lasts. And so you don't have an economy anymore. You're indigent. And even if you take the lower number, 5 billion, as opposed to Zelensky's, ask for 7 billion. 5 billion is 60 billion a year. That's 60 billion this year. That's 60 billion next year. And so who's got that kind of money? Which Western taxpayers are ready? And if you use the 7 or 8 billion, you get up to 100 billion a year. The Biden, uh, the, the, just signed, the Biden, President Joe Biden just signed the bill, making it law, 40 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine.
1:40:21 Speaker 02 It's just an enormous sum. The economic piece of that is a month and a half, two months of Ukrainians, uh, covering Ukrainian expenditures. That's it. And they're asking the G7, they're asking everybody for this. So you have no economy and no prospect of an economy until you evict the Russians from your territory. And then you have a Western unity, Western resolve, it lasts or it doesn't last, Lex. So you're President Putin, and you've got more territory than before, and you've got
1:41:01 Speaker 02 a stranglehold over the Ukrainian economy, and you've got a lot of the world neutral, and you've got the Chinese propaganda supporting you to the hilt with those Oliver Stone and Mearsheimer lines about how this is really NATO's fault. And you've got Hungary dragging its feet on the oil embargo against Russia, and you've got Turkey dragging its feet on the recent applications of Sweden and Finland for NATO expansion. And you're saying to yourself, Lex, maybe I can ride this out. I got a lot of problems of my own and we can go into the details on the Russian side's challenges.
1:41:46 Speaker 02 But he's got, he's, he's on Ukrainian territory unless he's evicted. And he's got a stranglehold on their economy. And he's got the possibility that the West doesn't stay resolved and doesn't continue to pay for Ukraine's economy or supply those heavy weapons. And so you could argue that maybe he's deluded about all of this and maybe he should go on Twitter. You know, I'm not on Twitter, but maybe Putin, who famously doesn't use the internet, should go on Twitter and see he's losing the war. Or you can argue that maybe he's calculating here that he's got a chance to still prevail.
1:42:25 Lex Fridman? Wow, that is darkly insightful. If I could go to Henry Kissinger for a brief moment, and people should read this op-ed he wrote in the Washington Post in March 5th, 2014, after the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine, but before Crimea was annexed. There's a lot of interesting historical description about the division within Ukraine, the corruption within Ukraine, that will, if people read this article, will give context to how incredible it is what Zelensky was able to accomplish in uniting the country.
1:43:07 Lex Fridman? But I just wanted to comment, because Henry Kissinger is an interesting figure in American history. He opens the article with, "In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end, and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins." So he's giving this cold, hard truth that we get, we go into wars excited, are able to send $40 billion financial aid, military aid, our own men and women. But the excitement fades.
1:43:51 Lex Fridman? Twitter outrage fades. And then a country that's willing to wait patiently is, is willing to, to pay the cost of siege versus the cost of explaining to its own people that the war is lost. That country just might win outlast.
1:44:10 Speaker 02 Let's hope not because Ukrainians resistance deserves to prevail here. Russia deserves to lose. No war of aggression like they've committed here against Ukraine should prevail if we can do anything about it. I support 1,000% the continued supply of heavy weapons, including offensive weapons to the Ukrainians as long as they're willing to resist and it's their choice. It's their choice when to negotiate. It's their choice how much to resist. It's their choice what kind of sacrifices to make.
1:44:50 Speaker 02 And it, and it's our responsibility to meet their requests more quickly than we have so far and at greater scale. But ultimately wars only have political ends. They never have military ends. You need a political solution here. So if the Ukrainians are able to conduct a successful counteroffensive at scale in July or August, whenever they launch. Right now, the heavy weapons are coming in and they're being moved to the battlefield and more are coming. You know, the dynamic, Russia bombs a school, Russia bombs a hospital.
1:45:34 Speaker 02 Americans and Europeans decide to send even more heavy weapons to Ukraine. Right? That's the self-defeating dynamic from the Russian side. They commit the atrocities, we send more heavy weapons. Once those heavy weapons are on the battle lines, we'll see if Ukrainians cannot just defend, which they've proven they're able to do in breathtaking fashion, not just conduct counterattacks, where the enemy moves forward and you cut behind the enemy's lines and you counterattack and push the enemy back a little bit, but whether you can evict the Russians from your territory with a combined arms operation,
1:46:18 Speaker 02 where you have a massive superiority in infantry and heavy weapons, but more importantly, you coordinate your air power, your tanks, your drones, your infantry at scale, which is something the Ukrainians have not done yet. It's something the Russians failed at in Ukraine. And they come from the same place, the Soviet military. We hope this Ukrainian counteroffensive at scale, this combined arms operation succeeds. And if it does succeed, there's the possibility of a battlefield victory. Whether that also includes Crimea, which as you know is not hostile, on the contrary, to the Russian military,
1:47:03 Speaker 02 remains to be seen. But however much they regain territorially back towards the 1991 borders, which is their goal, their stated goal, and which we support them properly in trying to achieve, however much they achieve of that in this counteroffensive that we're anticipating, that will set the stage for the next phase. And either Russia, which is to say, one person, Vladimir Putin, will acknowledge that he's lost the war because the Ukrainians won it on the battlefield, or... He'll try to announce a full-scale mobilization,
1:47:48 Speaker 02 conscript the whole country, go back and instead of acknowledging defeat, try to win with a different plan, recalibrate. Remains to be seen. Will the Ukrainians negotiate any territory away? Or must they capture also Crimea? Which puts a very high bar on the winter, on the summer counteroffensive that we're going to see, which could last through the fall and into the winter as a result. We don't know the answers to that. Nobody knows the answers to that. People are guessing. Some people are better informed because they have inside intelligence. People are also worried about Russian escalation to nuclear weapons or chemical weapons
1:48:33 Speaker 02 if they begin to lose on the battlefield to Ukraine.
1:48:36 Lex Fridman? Are you worried about nuclear war? The possibility of nuclear war?
1:48:43 Speaker 02 I think it's necessary to pay attention to that possibility. That possibility existed before the February 2022 full-blown invasion of Ukraine. The doomsday arsenal that Russia possesses is enough to destroy the world many times over. And that's been the case every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And so, of course, we're concerned about that. We do know, however, Alex, that they have a system known as dual key. Dual key for their strategic nuclear weapons. Strategic nuclear weapons means the ones fired from silos,
1:49:26 Speaker 02 the missiles, the ones delivered from bombers or the ones fired from submarines.
1:49:32 Lex Fridman? And they're ready to go.
1:49:34 Speaker 02 They're intercontinental. We watch that very, very closely. We watch all the movement of that and the alerts, et cetera. We have tremendously, let's say, tremendous inside intelligence on that. But dual key means that President Putin alone cannot fire them. He has one key, which he must insert. He must then insert the codes for a command to launch. That then goes to the head of the general staff.
1:50:07 Speaker 02 Who must, has his own key and separate codes and must do the same, insert that key in codes for them to launch. And so, will the general staff chief go along with the destruction of the world over a battlefield loss in Ukraine? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know if anybody knows the answer to that. Will those people flying those bombers, if they get the order from, if the dual key system goes into action, and both keys are used and all the codes are implemented, will those young guys flying those bombers let those bombs go? Will those at the missile silos decide to engage and fire?
1:50:52 Speaker 02 We don't know, but you can see that it's more than one man making the decision here in a system of strategic nuclear weapons. As far as the tactical, the so-called low-yield or battlefield nuclear weapons, we're not sure the system that they have in Russia these days for their implement, for their use of such tactical nuclear weapons. It could well be that Putin and just himself, he alone can fire them or order them be fired. But you know, Lex, there's no tactical nuclear weapon fired at Ukraine that's not also fired simultaneously at Russia.
1:51:36 Speaker 02 If the Kremlin is 600 miles from Ukraine, and if the wind changes direction, or the wind happens to be blowing east, northeast, the fallout hits your Kremlin, not just Ukraine. Moreover, you have all those border regions, which are staging regions for the Russian offensive, and they're a lot closer than 600 miles. They're actually right there. And so you fire that weapon on Ukrainian territory, and you can get the fallout, just like the Chernobyl fallout, spread to Sweden, which is how we got the Kremlin to finally,
1:52:19 Speaker 02 first they denied, they said, "Oh, we don't know why there's a big nuclear cloud over Sweden. We don't know where that came from." But eventually, they admitted it.
1:52:28 Speaker 02 So Russia can't actually use a nuclear weapon, tactical battlefield, one in Ukraine, without also firing it at itself. And in addition, it's that same dynamic I alluded to earlier, which is to say, you bomb a hospital, you bomb a school, there's more heavy weapons going to Ukraine from the West.
1:52:51 Lex Fridman? You can't get away with any of the... There's always going to be a response that's either proportional or greater than proportional.
1:52:57 Speaker 02 You could well have Europe signing on to NATO direct engagement, both Washington and Brussels, direct engagement of the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine.
1:53:11 Lex Fridman? You think that's possible to do that without dramatic escalation from the Russian side?
1:53:17 Speaker 02 Yes, I do think it's possible, but it's very worrisome, just like you're saying. But if Putin were to escalate like that, he's firing that weapon at himself and he's potentially provoking a direct clash with NATO's military, not just with the Ukrainian military. If you're sitting in the Kremlin looking at those charts, Lex, of NATO capabilities, and you can't conquer Ukraine, which didn't really have heavy weapons before February 2022 at scale, and you're thinking, okay, now I'm going to take on NATO, that would be a bold step on the part of a Russian leader.
1:54:02 Speaker 02 And let's also remember, Lex, that there's another variable here. You're a despot as long as everyone implements your orders. And so if people start to say, quietly, not necessarily publicly, "I may not implement that order, because that's maybe a criminal order." Or, "My grandma is Ukrainian." Or, "My wife is Ukrainian." Or, "I don't want to go to the hog. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the hog." Or whatever it might be. At any point along the chain of command, from the general staff all the way down, right, to the platoon,
1:54:47 Speaker 02 you're a despot, provided they implement your orders. But who's to say? That somewhere along the chain of command, people start to say, you know, "I'm gonna ignore that order." "Or I'm gonna sabotage that order." "Or I'm gonna flee the battlefield." "Or I'm gonna injure myself, so that I don't have to fight." "Or I'm gonna join the Ukrainian side." And so it could be that's what's left of the Russian army in the field, begins to disintegrate. Even if the Ukrainians are not able to mount that counteroffensive at scale, that combined arms operation.
1:55:31 Speaker 02 The Russian military in the field, which has taken horrendous casualties, as far as we understand, something like a third of the original force. So you're talking about 50,000 to 60,000. That includes both dead and wounded to the point of being unable to return to the battlefield. Those are big numbers. Those were a lot of families. A lot of families affected. Their sons, or their husbands, or their fathers are either missing in action, or the regime won't tell them that they're dead, as you know, from the sinking of that flagship, Moskva, right, by the Ukrainians. And so a disintegration of the Russian military,
1:56:16 Speaker 02 because there are orders that they either can't implement or don't wanna implement, is also not excluded. And so you have these two big variables: the Ukrainian army in the field and its ability to move from defense to offense at scale. And we're gonna test that soon. And then the Russian ability in the field to hold together in a war of conquest and aggression, where they're... Their conscripts, or they're fed dog food, or they don't have any weapons anymore because there's no resupply. So the disintegration of the army can't be excluded. And then, of course, all bets are off on the Putin regime.
1:57:01 Speaker 02 More long term, there are these technology export controls. We were talking about how the military industrial complex in Russia is dependent on foreign component parts and software. And so if you have export controls, and you have firms voluntarily, even when they don't fall under export controls, leaving Russian business, refusing to do business with Russia. And we see this not just in the civilian sector, like with McDonald's, or many other companies. We see this in the key areas, like the oil industry, with the executives fleeing. That is, the Western executives fleeing, giving up their positions.
1:57:46 Speaker 02 So Russia's ability to resupply its tanks, to resupply its missiles, resupply its uniforms, resupply its food to its soldiers in the field, and their boots. We see a lot of stuff under tremendous stress. And in the long term, there's no obvious way they can rebuild the military industrial complex to produce those weapons, because they're reliant on foreign parts that they can't get anymore, and there are no domestic substitutes on the immediate horizon. That's at the earliest a two-year proposition to have domestic substitutes.
1:58:30 Speaker 02 And for some things like microelectronics, they've never had domestic substitutes, going back to the Soviet times, as you know well. And so there's that pressure on Russia from the technology export controls, which, if you're in the Security Ministry or the Defense Ministry, if you're in that side of the regime, you're feeling that pain as we speak, and you're wondering about the strategy.
1:59:00 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you about, again, the echoes of history. And it frustrates me in part when people draw these parallels. But maybe there is some deep insight about those parallels. So there's a song that goes:
1:59:23 Lex Fridman? So Operation Barbarossa, the bombing of Kiev by Hitler, there is sort of an eerie parallel. And you have to be extremely careful drawing such parallels and such connections to this unexplainable war that is World War II. But is there elements of this that do echo in the actions of Vladimir Putin? And more specifically, do you think that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal?
2:00:04 Lex Fridman? Can that label be assigned to the actions of this man?
2:00:09 Speaker 02 A war criminal is a legal determination, and it requires evidence and due process and the ability to defend oneself. We don't just decide in the Twitter sphere or on a podcast that somebody is a war criminal. They can be a suspected war criminal. And we can gather evidence to try to prosecute that case. And then the issue for us, Lex, is which court does it go to? What's the appropriate place? Does it happen in Ukraine because they're the victims? Does it happen in the Hague because there's an international criminal court there? Does it happen inside Russia because there's regime change at some point?
2:00:54 Speaker 02 And some of these people become, let's say, they get arrested by their own people inside Russia.
2:01:03 Speaker 02 So those are all important questions that have to be pursued with resources and with determination and by skilled people who are excellent at gathering that evidence. And that process is underway. And Ukraine has a trial underway now of one alleged war criminal who's pleaded guilty. And we'll see what the outcome of that trial inside Ukraine is of a lower level official, not obviously Vladimir Putin, but the commander of a tank group. So, yes, the names are eerily familiar.
2:01:44 Speaker 02 Izium, Kharkiv, Kiev, right? Those are the names we know from the Nazi invasion and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. And it's very deeply troubling to think that this could happen again. And there's a bizarre sense that the Russians claiming, as Putin says, to de-Nazify Ukraine, have invaded the same places that the Nazis invaded back in 1941.
2:02:20 Lex Fridman? As somebody who's working on volume three of your work on Stalin, going through this period, is it eerie to you?
2:02:30 Speaker 02 Yes, it is, Lex.
2:02:31 Lex Fridman? That you're...
2:02:33 Speaker 02 I've written the chapters of volume three. I've drafted the chapters on the war. And, and as I said, the place names are very evocative, unfortunately. But, but, you know, the Nazis failed ultimately. They captured Ukraine for a time, but they were evicted from Ukraine. There was massive partisan or guerrilla warfare resistance behind Nazi lines the whole time that they were allegedly in control of Ukraine. If you look at the maps on cable TV, they show you the sign of Russia, they show you
2:03:16 Speaker 02 the coloring, Russian control, and they draw a line and then it's colored in. But the word "control" is misplaced.
2:03:24 Speaker 02 They don't actually control it. It's Russian claimed or extent of farthest Russian troop advancement. Because behind the Russian lines in Ukraine, Crimea excepted, you have insurgencies. You have armed insurgency. In Melitopol, for example, which is a place that you know, in southeastern Ukraine, there is a guerrilla war now underway to hurt the Russians who are in occupation of that city and region. And we're going to see that continue, even if the war becomes a stalemate, even if
2:04:06 Speaker 02 it stalemates more or less at the lines we're at now, which would mean that anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive at scale proves unsuccessful, the Russian army doesn't disintegrate, and you end up with a stalemate where there could be a ceasefire or not a ceasefire, but neither side is attempting an offensive for the time being. There will be resistance behind those Russian lines, and it will be fierce resistance, the kind of resistance we saw to the Nazi occupation. Ultimately, it took the Red Army reinvading the territory of Ukraine and succeeding at
2:04:51 Speaker 02 combined arms operations at scale. A massive counteroffensive, much larger than anything we're talking about today. Ultimately, it required that to evict the Nazis from Ukraine. But in the meantime, they did not have an easy occupation regime there. Ukrainian partisans, Soviet partisans, killed Nazi officials, Wehrmacht soldiers, Wehrmacht officers, blew up the infrastructure they were using, made them pay a price for their occupation. We could well see, if unfortunately this ends in a stalemate for the time being, we
2:05:36 Speaker 02 could well see that type of insurgency gain momentum behind Russian lines and try to evict the Russians that way. And then remount the counteroffensive at scale later on in the future if the first one doesn't succeed. So that would be further echoes of the World War II experience. The scale, once again, is much smaller. The size of the armies here, they're not in the many hundred, eight hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand, a million two, a million four. That's not what we're talking about today. But the weapons, the cruise missiles, right?
2:06:21 Speaker 02 Artillery fire. You know, artillery fire used to be very inaccurate and it was like saturation. You would just fire towards the enemy lines and if you hit something, you hit something and if you didn't, you just kept firing. Now you have drones, Lex. And so artillery fire is now sniper fire. Because you can coordinate the direction of the artillery fire with the drones. The drones can take a picture and show you where the enemy is precisely located. And you can align that artillery to hit them instead of just indiscriminately bombing an area, a territory. And the NATO-supplied artillery goes really far.
2:07:06 Speaker 02 And you can fire into Russian positions and yourself not be exposed to Russian fire because your artillery fires farther than theirs. So that's coming. And we're going to see that in action. And so the scale is not the same, but the weapons, the precision of some of the weapons and some of the NATO. We're not sending all of our stuff, but as I said, the dynamic is Russia commits atrocities, Russia bombs schools, Russia bombs hospitals, Russia kills civilians, and more and heavier and more lethal Western weapons go to Ukraine.
2:07:47 Speaker 02 Their willingness to risk their lives is really so impressive and the reason that we, it's, it's our duty, we're obliged to supply those weapons. And so the Russians don't have that resupply and the Ukrainians do. And so the Russians are now digging in, Lex. They're digging in deeply in the areas that they've penetrated. And they're trying to build unassailable positions. For when the Ukrainians transition from mostly defense to full-scale offense. And we'll see if that now, I mean, they're digging everywhere.
2:08:29 Speaker 02 You know, as they say, kapayut, kapayut, right? They're digging everywhere behind.
2:08:34 Lex Fridman? Your Russian is beautiful.
2:08:36 Speaker 02 Digging in. I wish, Lex, like yours. But so, so there are these things that we can't predict, but there are these things we're watching and watching closely.
2:08:48 Lex Fridman? And on top of that, something that's not in World War II, or for the most part, is cyber attacks and cyber warfare, which is much less perhaps convertible into human words because it happens so quickly, it's at large scales, so difficult to trace and all those kinds of things. It's not bullets, it's electrical signals and that.
2:09:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, but those Ukrainian people, they're like you, Lex. They're young and they're technically really proficient.
2:09:20 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:09:21 Speaker 02 And they've been amazing. You know, they spent those teenage years in the basement.
2:09:26 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:09:26 Speaker 02 Playing video games.
2:09:29 Lex Fridman? It's useful after all.
2:09:31 Speaker 02 It turns out it's more than useful. You can save your country that way. And so they're not alone. They're getting support. And that support is important. But really, predominantly, it's Ukrainians on the cyber battlefield. And their skills have been very impressive. And they've been preparing for this for a number of years. And they have a whole army of young people on the cyber side. It's their civilian population. These are not people conscripted into the military or volunteering, wearing the uniform. And so even in cyber warfare, the Ukrainians have been extremely impressive.
2:10:09 Speaker 02 And so let's remember that all of these aspects of warfare, whether it's how far your cruise missiles go and how accurate they are, what size your cyber capabilities are.
2:10:27 Speaker 02 It's really ultimately about the people. It's about the human capital, right? It's about their willingness, their skill level, but also their willingness to fight and to put their lives on the line. And there's no substitute for that. And so what's called morale, or courage, or bravery, or valor, that's really the ultimately decisive, provided you have enough sufficient arms, right, to conduct the fight. And if you don't, you use a Molotov cocktail, right? Grandma calls in the coordinates of the Russian tank on her iPhone, and you have a Molotov cocktail
2:11:12 Speaker 02 that the people who used to work in the cafeteria are now stuffing flammable liquid into bottles. And you carry one right up to the tank, and you smash it against the tanker, or you drop it in one of the hatches in the tank, right? There's no substitute for that kind of stuff, that level of resolve, willingness to die for your country. That's a really big lesson that we need to absorb in our own country. We've been going to war more frequently than we should, and like you said, without the justification all the time. And then, like Henry Kissinger said, without understanding how this was going to end. It's easy to start a war.
2:11:57 Speaker 02 It's very difficult to win a war, prevail in a war, or end a war on terms that meet your original expectations, right? We've been fighting wars, but we haven't been fighting wars as societies. We've been fighting wars as a small sliver of our population. Something like 1% of our population is involved with the military because we have an all-volunteer force. And that means that it's easier for our politicians to go to war because they don't face conscription. They don't have the draft, which affects every family in the country. And because...
2:12:40 Speaker 02 The number of people in the volunteer force is such a narrow stratum of the population. And so they've been getting away with this because the professional army is much better than the conscript army. And an all volunteer force is much preferable from a military point of view. But from a societal point of view, it enables you to go to war too easily as a politician, and it doesn't engage the society the same way that the Ukrainian society is completely engaged from those young hackers all the way up to those grandmothers.
2:13:18 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you, you're a scholar of history, a scholar of geopolitics, and you're also a human being.
2:13:27 Speaker 02 That's kind of you, Lex. I'll take that.
2:13:31 Lex Fridman? What's the value? What's the hope? What's the power of conversation here? If you could sit down with Vladimir Putin and have a conversation versus bullets, human exchange words, is there hope for those? And if so, what would you talk about? What would you ask him?
2:13:52 Speaker 02 Well, Henry Kissinger, you alluded to his op ed. He's had many private meetings with President Putin over a long time. And President Biden, the previous presidents, secretaries of state, officials below secretary of state, the head of the CIA evidently met with President Putin in the fall when he was massing the troops on the border before he invaded. And we sent the head of the CIA and Putin received him, somebody he evidently respects
2:14:35 Speaker 02 or was at least willing to meet, unlike other members of the administration. So a lot of people are talking to him in some form or another for the 22 years he's been in power. And I'm not sure it's had what I would call their desired effect.
2:14:55 Lex Fridman? Well, the nature of the conversation is interesting, too, and also the timing, which is post-February 22nd, is a different time. And also, another aspect,
2:15:08 Lex Fridman? which Oliver Stone mentioned, interestingly, that there's something about COVID and the pandemic that creates isolation, the distancing. It's such a silly little nuance thing, but maybe it's actually has a profound impact on the human being, the human mind of Vladimir Putin, that there is something about an in-person meeting, and not across a table that's far too large.
2:15:33 Speaker 02 Yes.
2:15:34 Lex Fridman? But sort of the intimacy of one, human-to-human, in-person conversation, that there's something distinctly powerful about that reminder that, as Putin says in the narrative, in the propaganda, that we're all one people. There is truth to that, that this entirety of humanity is one people. And you're kind of reminded by that when you're sitting together.
2:16:00 Speaker 02 People who have sat across the table from him, whether at 30 yards or at three,
2:16:10 Speaker 02 have remarked upon this feeling of isolation that has affected him, the pandemic. I think there must be something to that, if several people who've been in the room with him are remarking on it.
2:16:26 Speaker 02 Everybody that I know, and I've been able to talk to, who's had a meeting with him in the past 10 years,
2:16:34 Speaker 02 including Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State.
2:16:40 Speaker 02 Has said that Putin spends a lot of time enumerating his grievances. He goes through a monologue of his grievances. And then the West did this, and then the West lied to us about that, and then the West cheated us on this. And so it's not the conversation that you're encouraging of common humanity. It's that roiling resentment volcano that's just exploding and exploding.
2:17:11 Lex Fridman? The resentment.
2:17:12 Speaker 02 And, and by the time he gets through the monologue of the grievances, the time of the meeting is, is expired or, or overtime.
2:17:23 Lex Fridman? That's a brilliant statement, but that's where the skill of conversation comes in. Like when you're facing a bull with a red cloth, you have to learn how to avoid the long list of grievances and get to the humanity. That's, that's a really important skill.
2:17:37 Speaker 02 It's a skill, for sure. It's a skill and it's the highest level skill of a diplomat to be able to reach some type of common understanding when interests and, and worldviews clash so much. But here's your challenge, Lex. Your challenge is Russia wants to impose a closed sphere of influence on its neighbors. It wants to dictate what its neighbors can and can't do. It wants to exert influence, not by the power of its example, not by the freedom of its
2:18:15 Speaker 02 people, not by the dynamism of its diversified economy, but it wants to exert influence just because it deserves that, just because it's a great power, just because, and on and on and on. It's a civilization unto itself. And it wants that and we can't give that.
2:18:39 Speaker 02 The reason that Russia was not integrated into the West was not for lack of trying. It was because Russia ultimately spurned the integration because it was about what terms the integration would come on. Would you come into the West and observe Western rules and be another country, meaning just another country? There's Poland, and there's Austria, and there's little tiny Monaco, and there's Russia. And you're just one of those countries. And Russia's answer to that was, no, we're not just one of those countries.
2:19:23 Speaker 02 We need special rules. We need special conditions. We'll integrate, but only as a special country, meaning like at the UN, where all countries are sovereign, all countries are members, but Russia has a veto on what countries can and can't do. Those were the terms on which they were willing to integrate. And those were the terms that no leader of a Western country, or the United States, or the G7, or fill in the blank, can grant to Russia. It's very well-known that Vladimir Putin was one of the first, maybe the first person,
2:20:05 Speaker 02 first leader, foreign leader, to call President Bush after the 9/11 tragedy. They didn't connect right away. President Bush was not in Washington, but eventually they did speak. He condemned the terrorist attack. He offered Russian support, which he delivered on, the use of some Russian logistics for our Afghanistan operations.
2:20:31 Speaker 02 And a lot of people point to that and they say, there it is. Russia wanted to cooperate and did cooperate and we spurned them. Or we failed to appreciate Russia's cooperation. And so therefore Russia was cheated, or Russia was lied to, or Russia's grievances are legitimate. But here's the problem with that argument, Lex. In exchange for that support, Vladimir Putin asked in return from President Bush for a free hand in the former Soviet space. That closed hierarchical sphere of influence.
2:21:11 Speaker 02 Where Russia would exert influence coercively over countries that were sovereign. And no American president could grant that. And President Bush was right. He said no. And so the attempted cooperation blew up. But whose at fault there? Should there be a non voluntary sphere of influence? Should that be granted? Or should you face up to attempts to do that? You know, let's take a little detour here into China for a second. China had this brilliant grand strategy.
2:21:56 Speaker 02 Which was, sure, America is hostile because America is hegemonic. America wants to control the world. America will never let China rise. America will do everything it can to hold China down. So we're going to have hostility from America. We don't want to decouple because we need that high end technology transfer. Either we buy it or we steal it. Because America and the rest of the West has all the technology that we need. We have some of it domestically, more than before by a lot. But we're still dependent, so we can't decouple. So we'll have the hostility, but there'll be a line we don't cross just so that we don't lose the technology transfer.
2:22:39 Speaker 02 Till made in China 2035 is accomplished. And we're self sufficient domestically in AI and every other area that's critical.
2:22:50 Speaker 02 But hostility from America. But we have an ace in the hole. Our ace in the hole is Europe. Europe hates conflict. They're all about trade. It doesn't matter how evil you are. They love to trade because "von der durch handeln", change through trade. They have this illusion that you're going to become a better country if they trade with you. And you won't have conflict, war, and hostilities if you trade. And so we have this European ace in the hole. We're hostile with the Americans. We're still buying or stealing their technology. And better than that even, the Europeans are not hostile to us at all. They love to trade with us and they they want to trade more and they're
2:23:33 Speaker 02 our biggest trading partner already. And low and behold, Xi Jinping sides with Vladimir Putin in the aggression in Ukraine. He doesn't side with him providing military equipment. He doesn't provide technology transfer. But he provides public support and massive pro-Russian propaganda to the whole Chinese population. And the Europeans say, wait a minute. This is an invasion of a sovereign country in Europe. What do you mean? You're not condemning Vladimir Putin's invasion. And so that wedge that the Chinese had, that was the basis of their grand strategy,
2:24:16 Speaker 02 that wedge between the US and Europe when it came to China policy, that wedge is gone now. Xi Jinping destroyed it. And the Europeans and the Americans are coming close together on Ukraine and Russia policy for sure, but also more and more on China policy. And so that was a pretty big sacrifice for the Chinese leader to make. And what did he get in return?
2:24:44 Speaker 02 He gets hydrocarbons from Russia at reduced prices. And the Chinese get hydrocarbons from a lot of countries. They have a completely diverse supply chain for their energy.
2:24:58 Lex Fridman? So what do you think Xi Jinping is thinking now? Was it a mistake?
2:25:02 Speaker 02 I'd like to know, Lex. I'd like you to be able to sit down with him across from this table here on your podcast and pose that same question to him, because we have no idea.
2:25:13 Lex Fridman? There's a language barrier that's fascinating. By the way, you as a scholar of Stalin, do you think we'll ever break through the language barrier to China? Not ever, I apologize, in the next few years? Because there is a gigantic cultural and language barrier between the West and the Chinese.
2:25:31 Speaker 02 China is a great civilization. China predates the United States by millennia. China's accomplishments are breathtaking. But China's also led by, let's be honest, a Communist Party monopoly, which engages in a lot of criminal behavior. Lex, Tibet is Ukraine. Xinjiang is Ukraine. Hong Kong is Ukraine. Let alone support for Putin. This is before we've even discussed Taiwan. And so now the Europeans are coming to see this and the Americans are coming to understand
2:26:13 Speaker 02 this, that maybe trading with a regime like that, morally, politically, criminally, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, how is that different from what Putin is doing in Ukraine? I'd be hard pressed to differentiate that ultimately, even though the analogies are not exact. And so the Chinese, it's like that guy Leonov, the author of Lichletia, the great memoir of the late Soviet period, the end of the Soviet Union. You know, that they spend all this time and all these resources blackening our image,
2:26:56 Speaker 02 but we supply them with endless material to blacken our image? That's where Xi Jinping's regime is right now, Lex. And so they have a big dilemma on their side. It's a Western world, and they've united the Western world and reawoken the rest of the world to the fact that China is a threat to the values, the institutions and values of the West, and that trade is not transforming China, quite the opposite. We'll see if this endures. Maybe it doesn't endure, maybe it's a fleeting moment, maybe this is not an inflection
2:27:36 Speaker 02 point, maybe the war in Ukraine ends more quickly than we think, and maybe, like you said, the Chinese and the Indians and the rest of them, the leaders there, they get their wish that it ends and the world moves on and forgets, or says, "Let's try again to resume our mutual understanding, our mutually beneficial trade and everything else." Maybe it's a passing phase, we can't exclude that. I'm very poor at predicting the future. But the moment is not a good one for the Chinese regime, let alone the fact that he's
2:28:14 Speaker 02 trying to impose an unprecedented, in the modern era, third term for himself as president in the fall at the next party congress, becoming president for life, de facto, a Mao-like figure. And he's now got to do that with, in this environment where he has damaged Chinese grand strategy and damaged the reputation of China and its relationships across the world. Maybe not permanently, but significantly, in addition to the problems they have at
2:28:55 Speaker 02 home, demography, as you know, a middle-income trap, and then the regulatory insanity of Chinese communist rule that we've seen with the tech companies that you know well, where they've destroyed all of that value. With the blow up of their property sector because it was a massive bubble and that's still playing out and this time it's the same, meaning this time it's not different. When it comes to a property blowout, it has enormous effects on middle-class balance sheets and their ability to be, to remain consumers and drive the economy, which is
2:29:38 Speaker 02 the model that they have to share. So he's got a litany of challenges, independent even of the fact that he sided with his pal, Vladimir Putin, and their bromances costing China very, very significantly.
2:29:54 Lex Fridman? If you close your eyes.
2:29:56 Speaker 02 Yes.
2:29:57 Lex Fridman? And a hundred years ago, 1922, and you think about the future, I wonder if you can hear the drums of war predicting, the 30s predicting the Great Depression and the resentment that builds, the economic resentment, the cultural resentment, the geopolitical resentment that builds and leads to World War II. It, at least to me, when I close my eyes, I can hear the drums of war that are still ahead of us. And it's possible that we're, their 2022 will materialize in a similar way as did 1922.
2:30:42 Speaker 02 I have my eyes closed, Lex.
2:30:45 Lex Fridman? Do you hear anything?
2:30:46 Speaker 02 And I sure hope that that's not what happens. But I'm looking at 1922, it's an epoch I know well, and I don't see the future that unfolds. I would not have predicted it had I been alive then. I see the war behind us. I see prosperity on the horizon, yes, inflation in Germany and some, many other difficult issues, but there are more democracies now than there were before the war and the old empires are gone. And there's a cultural efflorescence and there's modernism in the arts and and there's women entering the public sphere and there's all this fantastic new technology
2:31:31 Speaker 02 like automobiles and I'm looking at the future from 1922 and and I'm not seeing the Great Depression and I'm not seeing World War II and I'm not seeing the Holocaust because I don't predict the future and nobody in 1922 could see that future although I guess there were some clairvoyants who predicted it but
2:31:54 Lex Fridman? But you're not one of them.
2:31:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm not one of them and and but but this is what I know Lex from studying history. What I know is stuff happens.
2:32:05 Speaker 02 In other words
2:32:06 Lex Fridman? Very deep insight.
2:32:07 Speaker 02 In other words Lex, we're watching Ukraine war right now and all of our attention is focused on that. And it's like the economists say in their textbooks when their their powerful models are employed and there's this line that says all other factors held constant, comma, and then the model works. And you get this really great result. It's very powerful predictor and analysis the model. And and the whole game is all other factors held constant. So the Russia-Ukraine war that we've been discussing and this could happen
2:32:47 Speaker 02 and that could happen, but you know what stuff could happen, Lex? For example, the Israeli government could decide this summer that it's going to bomb Iran because no Israeli government will tolerate Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. And since President Trump exited, unilaterally exited from the multipower nuclear agreement, Iran is now much closer to the bomb than they were when they were still in, when the United States was still in that agreement. And you tell me the Israeli government that says, sure, it's fine. It's okay. Iran could get the bomb. And so maybe that happens. And maybe that happens as early
2:33:29 Speaker 02 as this summer as Iran gets closer and closer and closer. Maybe that guy in North Korea decides it's his time, just like his grandfather, right? In 1950, decided, you know, it's time we're going to quote reunify, unquote, the Korean Peninsula.
2:33:51 Speaker 02 Maybe, I don't know Lex, fill in the blank. Something's gonna happen. It's not gonna be what I predict. It's not gonna be what I'm watching. It's gonna be obvious only after it happens, not before. And then it's gonna upend the table. And all of a sudden.
2:34:10 Lex Fridman? Everything changes.
2:34:11 Speaker 02 We're gonna be in a different environment, different circumstances. And is Ukraine still as central at that point as it seems to be right now? I don't know the answer to that question.
2:34:23 Lex Fridman? Let me ask two rapid fire questions. You're only allowed to have one minute and it's about predicting the future. Okay. Question one. Vladimir Putin, when will he no longer be in office? And will he step down or be overthrown? What's your prediction and a brief explanation of that prediction? Now, nobody can predict the future, but what's your sense now? Some people are saying the pressure is building. He's going to be overthrown or step down at the end of this year. And some people say surely he's going to last, outlast Stalin's rule of 30 plus years.
2:35:07 Speaker 02 No evidence of a coup yet. None whatsoever, yet. He's pretty much at life expectancy for a Russian male. Those are bad numbers. He's what, 69? Gonna be 70? So he's lived the life of a Russian male already. But he's got better doctors than the majority of the Russian males in that, let's say, comparison set. So he could live a very long time with good doctors.
2:35:46 Speaker 02 So there could be a coup at some point, but there's none today in evidence. He could go because he's reached the life expectancy, or he could stay for a long time. The thing to watch about this is an organization that nobody pays attention to. The FSO, the Federalная служба охраны, which is the Praetorian Guard, the self-standing bodyguard directorate, the only one, the only organization in Russia that has any access to him. We've seen no disloyalty, no breaking of ranks, no defections, nothing in the public realm
2:36:30 Speaker 02 and in open sources about any divisions or problems in the FSO, in the Praetorian Guard. So if you can't break that, change that, elicit defections there, you can overturn him. Authoritarian regimes, Lex, they're terrible. They fail at everything. They can't feed their people, they have trouble achieving any goals. They only have to be good, however, at one thing. They only have to be good at the complete suppression of political alternatives. If you can suppress political alternatives, you can fail at everything else, but you
2:37:13 Speaker 02 can survive as an authoritarian regime. So you watch Navalny.
2:37:17 Lex Fridman? That's question number two. That's my question number two. That's my, the second rapid-fire question is what happens to Navalny? What are the possible conclusions of, well, you said quite possibly the second most influential, powerful figure in Russia? Is there, is he going to die in jail? Will he become the next president of Russia? Well, what are the possible?
2:37:44 Speaker 02 I wish I knew, Lex. I've been surprised that he's still alive. I've been worried that he will be killed in prison in a staged fight. You know, some security officer, prison guard, puts on a prison outfit, takes a lead pipe, goes into the cell, they have a quote "fight," and Navalny is killed. I've been afraid of that, but he's still alive, even though he's serving a long sentence. So that leads me to guess that people inside the Putin regime, and maybe President Putin himself, understand that Navalny is their ticket to lift sanctions.
2:38:27 Speaker 02 That Navalny is even more popular outside of Russia than he is inside of Russia. You know, he's the leader, in many ways, of the political opposition in the country, even while still in prison. His organization's been destroyed, but he doesn't have majority support in the population by any stretch of the imagination, but he's a big figure in the West, including here in the US. And so Navalny could be their ticket, their kind of get out of jail card, meaning they release him from prison, he gets appointed, I don't know, prime minister even by the Putin regime, if he were willing to accept such a position, and I have my doubts about that.
2:39:10 Speaker 02 And then that's how they lobby to remove the sanctions against them. So he's a card that President Putin could play, and so maybe that's the reason he's still alive, or maybe there are other reasons that we don't know. And so some alternative to Putin is more likely to arise inside his gang, Putin's "shaika," as they say, right, inside his gang, where they tire of his mistakes, they tire of his self-defeating actions, and they say patriotically for Russia.
2:39:51 Speaker 02 We need to do something against, move against this guy because he's hurting our country and also because I could do better. I'm ambitious as well as patriotic. But once again, the problem there, Lex, is Putin is surrounded by this cocoon known as the FSO. He meets on Zoom predominantly with the rest of the government, including with the defense and security officials. They don't have frequent access to his person. And as you alluding earlier to the pandemic, they have to quarantine for two weeks before
2:40:32 Speaker 02 every meeting with him. And moreover, you know, Lex, they don't know where he is. You see, when they're on Zoom with him and the room, it's the Valdi. His office in the Valdi region looks the same as his office in Sochi, or his office outside of Moscow in Novo Agor Yover. They're made up to look very similar on Zoom. And sure, some signs, they're looking, where is it? But maybe they don't know. And so you're gonna move on him, and you're gonna jump him in his Kremlin, his dacha, outside Moscow. And it turns out he's in Sochi, or
2:41:17 Speaker 02 vice versa. And it turns out the FSO is loyal to him and won't let you anyway. So, Lex, we don't know, but we watch this FSO really closely. And we think that the elites, if not Putin, but maybe Putin too, understand Navalny as a really big potential political card that they could play.
2:41:39 Lex Fridman? And one last question, the biggest question. You studied some of the darkest aspects of human history, human nature. Let me ask the why question. What are we doing here? What's the meaning of our existence, our life here on earth? What are we humans trying to get at here?
2:42:02 Speaker 02 I can't answer that question either. But I can say that having a purposeful life is actually not that hard.
2:42:14 Speaker 02 You can't, you're not Gandhi, right? You're not President Roosevelt. You're not going to transform a country or civilization or become immortal because of your courage and your insight and your genius at critical moments. But you live in an environment, you're in a school, you're in a workplace, you're somewhere where you can affect other people in a positive way. It can be not just about yourself, but it can be about them. And you can have a positive impact on other people's lives through the work that you
2:42:55 Speaker 02 do, whether that's your employment, or your charity, or your spare time, or your work time. It can be by modeling proper behavior, right? Admitting your mistakes, hard to do but necessary, remembering that you don't know everything, you can't predict the future, but you don't even know everything in your areas of expertise. Painfully reminded of that humility at times, but remind yourself to. So you can lead a life that can show others what good values are, and you can lead a life that dedicates yourself not only to your own material well-being, but to the well-being
2:43:40 Speaker 02 and to the development of others around you. And it can be on a humble scale. It can be in a small classroom, or a small workplace, a small work team. But it can be done, and you can be reminded that having a positive impact even on one other person gives far greater meaning to your own life, and is profoundly satisfying, much more satisfying than the attention you might get, let's say, on social media, or awards you might receive. There's nothing wrong with pursuing those. People pursue them, and it's a free society.
2:44:20 Speaker 02 But leading a purposeful life intentionally is possible.
2:44:26 Lex Fridman? Even just one person, I love the expression, save one life, save the world. Just focusing on the local, on the tiny little difference you can make in the world can somehow ripple.
2:44:39 Speaker 02 Every day, if you think about that every single day,
2:44:44 Speaker 02 you're a better person, we're a better society.
2:44:47 Lex Fridman? And maybe you get to add a bit of love to the world after all. Stephen, this is a huge honor for many reasons, one of which is I can just tell how much care you put into this conversation and how much, you know, I use the word love a lot, but I just feel the love that just even the respect you give me, which I can't tell you how energizing that is, how much that gives me strength for my own silly little pursuits.
2:45:22 Lex Fridman? Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you for not just talking today, but giving me so much respect, just with everything you're doing is I really appreciate that. It makes me feel special. So thank you so much for sitting down and talking today.
2:45:34 Speaker 02 Mutual, Lex, thank you as well, and thank you for the respect that you've shown me. These are really difficult issues that don't have simple answers, but that doesn't mean we give up. We have to keep thinking and learning and trying and finding solutions in everything we do, including on these these big global tragedies that we live through. And it's heartbreaking what's going on. It just breaks my heart every day. A person who studies this has been studying this for decades, and it keeps happening. And you think, again, and yes, it is again, but we still have to keep trying.
2:46:17 Speaker 02 And we have to be inspired by those people who are more courageous than we are and sacrifice more than we sacrifice. You know, for me, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, is experienced in my study at home and in my office at Princeton or my coming office at Stanford, when I moved full-time to Stanford in September. Or it's experienced far away in safety and in comfort. And we have to remember that, too, when we talk about these things, when we answer your questions, right? That as we speak and as we comment and think we're experts on these things
2:46:58 Speaker 02 from the comfort of our existence, that there are people in those tragedies right now.
2:47:05 Lex Fridman? With no power, with no food, with no, with full uncertainty about the future of the health of their children.
2:47:12 Speaker 02 That's it.
2:47:13 Lex Fridman? And I've also seen, because I have family in both places, homes that were home for, buildings that were homes for generations now in rubble. So...
2:47:28 Speaker 02 Yes, Lex, it just, it hurts. And it's Syria, where 350,000, at least by UN estimates, died. And Russia participated in that. And it's Yemen. And it's so many other places that don't have the same degree of attention that a European country like Ukraine has. But, but yeah, we have to remember also that in addition to Ukraine, and then there's things right home here in New York City, where children are without food, which is just inexcusable in a country this rich.
2:48:09 Lex Fridman? So we shouldn't forget, in our study of leaders and our study of geopolitics, that ultimately it's about the humanity, it's about the human beings.
2:48:18 Speaker 02 Okay, Lex.
2:48:19 Lex Fridman? Human suffering. Thank you so much, Stephen.
2:48:21 Speaker 02 Thank you.
2:48:21 Lex Fridman? This is amazing conversation. Talk to you again soon.
2:48:24 Speaker 02 My pleasure.
2:48:26 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Stephen Kotkin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi. "When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall."
2:48:56 Lex Fridman? Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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