Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…let me say that I’ve read a lot, listened to a lot, and had a lot of private conversations with people on the ground. I have many flaws. But being unprepared for this conversation is not one of them. Two low effort attacks got to me a bit, if I’m being honest though I am learning to take it all in stride. First attack is that I’m unprepared, uninformed or naive. I don’t give a damn about the trolls, but I want people who listen to me, who support me, who care about my words, to know that this is not the case. It never will be the case for future conversations, especially ones of this importance. I work extremely hard to prepare. Second low effort attack that got to me a bit is that I’m a shill for Zelensky or a shill for Putin. Both accusations were hurled readily and freely by the online mob of all persuasions by the left and the right in the United States and Europe by the pro and the anti-Zelensky people in Ukraine or of Ukrainian origins and by the pro and anti-Putin people in Russia or of Russian origins. As I’ve said over and over, this is not the case. I will never be the case. I’m a shill for no one. More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber. It’s an ongoing battle of course, because social media algorithms and the various dogmatic groups and tribes out there want to pull you in to their warm embrace of belonging. And humans want to belong. But the cost of the path I have chosen is that I will never belong to any one group. In the end, like many of us must, I walk alone. And I try to do my best to do what is right to my independent heart and mind, not what is popular with any one group. My goals for this conversation were twofold. First, give a large platform to President Zelensky to explain his perspective on the war and to do so in a way that brings out the best in who he is as a leader and human being. Second goal was to push for peace, and to give him every opportunity possible to signal that he’s ready to make peace, and to provide his vision for what that might look like. And just to be clear, by peace, I mean long-lasting peace that minimizes suffering of people in the region and maximizes the flourishing of humanity in the coming decades. The war in Ukraine has led to over one million casualties and growing every single day. For some people torn apart by loss, tormented, and forced into a state of anger and hate, peace is a dirty word. To them, nothing less than justice must be accepted. I hear this pain. I’ve seen the bodies and the suffering. It’s true. Peace will not bring back your loved ones. But it’ll prevent further slaughter of more people, each of whom are someone else’s loved ones. So again, the second goal of this conversation was to push for this kind of peace. So how did I approach it? Every conversation is its own puzzle. So let me try to explain my approach for this one. As I’ve said, I read and listened to a lot of material since February 24th, 2022. There would be many weeks over the past three years where I would spend every day over eight hours a day of focused reading and research. d and listened to a lot of material since February 24th, 2022. There would be many weeks over the past three years where I would spend every day over eight hours a day of focused reading and research. There were several rabbit holes that I consistently returned to and researched. But the most important line of inquiry was always peace talks, not just in this war, but in other wars in modern history. For this specific war, as part of the background prep, I would take notes on every single perspective I could find on every single major diplomatic meeting and negotiation that happened in Ukraine-Russia relations since 1991. There is a lot of material to go through. And there are a lot of perspectives, even on the very 2019 meeting that President Zelensky spoke about in this podcast. Just as a small but important example, Andrii Bogdan was interviewed twice by Dmytro Gordon and gave a deep inside look of the administration of President Zelensky, including that very 2019 meeting. The two interviews are seven and a half hours by the way. And from my interviewer perspective, are a masterclass of interviewing. Andrii Bogdan worked directly with President Zelensky as the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine. He was there for the 2019 face-to-face meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin at the Paris Summit, along with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This was part of the Normandy Format Peace Talks. In those two interviews, Andrii Bogdan gave a very different perspective on that 2019 meeting than did President Zelensky to me in our conversation, the perspective being that the failure to negotiate a ceasefire and peace was not a simple one-sided story. I don’t think this is the right time for me to dive into that data point and be critical. I’m not interested in being critical for the sake of criticism. I am interested once again in productive conversations, critical or otherwise, that push towards peace, the kind I described earlier. This is merely an example of a data point I was collecting in my brain. There are many, many others. But all of it taken together made it clear to me, and I still believe this, that it is indeed very difficult but possible to negotiate long-lasting peace with Vladimir Putin. It’s certainly true that Ukraine is best positioned to negotiate from a place of strength. After the invasion of February 24th, 2022, I believe there were three chances where peace was most achievable. First chance was March and April of 2022 with a successful defense of the north. Second chance was the fall of 2022 with the successful counteroffensive in Kherson and Kharkiv. The third chance is now. As he has stated multiple times publicly, Donald Trump is very interested in making peace. It is likely that the US financial support for this war will continue to dwindle. So the leverage and the timing for peace negotiation is now. There is unlikely to be another chance like this for a long time. kely that the US financial support for this war will continue to dwindle. So the leverage and the timing for peace negotiation is now. There is unlikely to be another chance like this for a long time. Just to zoom out on the conversation piece of this, I interviewed Donald Trump and may do so again. I interviewed Volodymyr Zelensky and may do so again. And it seems likely that I will interview Vladimir Putin in Russia in the Kremlin. I understand the risks and accept them. The risks for me are not important. I’m not important. I merely want to do my small part in pushing for peace in a moment in history when there’s a real chance for that piece to actually be achieved. I may be speaking too long, I’m sorry, but I can probably speak for many more hours. So this is in fact me trying to be brief. So again, my two goals were to bring out the best in the President Zelensky as a leader and a human being, and to give him every opportunity possible to signal that he’s ready to make peace and to lay out his vision for what that piece might look like. Like I said, step one through 10 is prepare well. I did. But step 11 is the actual conversation. They’re the specific psychological and personality quirks and qualities of the guests matter a lot. My job is to try to cut through the bullshit walls we put up as human beings and reveal directly or indirectly who the person truly is and how they think. With Zelensky, he is a deeply empathic and emotional human who personally feels the suffering of the people of Ukraine in this war. This is a strength and perhaps also a weakness, but it is an important part of the reason why I said many times that he is a truly historic figure. Very few leaders in recent history would be able to pull off what he did, to stay in Kiev, to unite the country, to convince the west to join the war effort to the degree they did. He is also a showman. To borrow the title of the biography, I recommended a man with many layers of humor and wit, but also ego and temper, sometimes fully self-aware and sometimes losing himself in the emotional rollercoaster of a painful memory or a turn of phrase that he can use as a springboard for a angry soliloquy. Add to this, the fact that we didn’t agree to anything, what we will talk about or how long we will talk about it. The interview could have easily been five minutes or three hours. So I had to quickly gain his trust enough to open up and stay for a long-form conversation, but push him enough to reveal the complexities of his thought process and his situation. This is where humor and camaraderie was essential. And I would return to it often though it was very difficult given the stakes, the heaviness, the seriousness of the topic of the war. So in this case, the approach I followed for this conversation is constant nudges and questions about peace, often using almost childlike statements or questions.…

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