Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I do too. But one of the things that bothers me most … I love to hear that, what you just said about Kyiv, but I’m not really surprised. One of the things that I’m most ashamed of is the bigotry that I felt towards Slavic people, also toward Muslims, I’ll just be totally honest because I lived through decades of propaganda from NBC news and CNN where I worked, about this or that group of people and they’re horrible or whatever. And I kind of believed it. I see it now, we can’t even put the word Russia at Wimbledon because it’s so offensive. Well, what does the tennis player have to do with it? Did he invade Ukraine, I don’t think he did. Stealing all these business guys yachts and denouncing thing was oligarchs, what do they have to do with it? Whatever. Here’s my point. The idea that a whole group of people is just evil because of their blood, I just don’t believe that. I think it’s immoral to think that, and I can just tell you my own experience after eight days there. I think it’s a really interesting culture, Slavic culture, which is shared by the way, by Russian and Ukraine, of course, they’re first cousins at the most distant. I found them really smart and interesting and informed. I didn’t understand a lot of what they were saying. I don’t understand the way their minds work because I’m American, but it wasn’t a thin culture, it’s a thick culture and I admire that. I wish I could go to Ukraine. I would go tomorrow. I think after you did the interview with Putin, you put a clip, I think on TCN, your analysis afterwards. It wasn’t much of an analysis.…

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