Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Alex especially convinced me because Alex has a high tolerance, and he said, “Okay, they still had some.” So I said to him, “Can I have some also?” And I took one, and he’s like, “And this was, we were standing in my writing tower, which is at the river in Berlin,” and he was like, “I took one, and I could feel something. Then I took another one…” and then it’s, you know, I could feel more. And then I took a third one. Typical Alex, he would take three, you know. Instead of just taking one, he took three methamphetamine tablets from the ’40s, and he said, “And then I felt like…” and he looked at the river, and there was a big cargo ship going by, and he said, “I felt like this ship.” Suddenly there was this, “Shoop,” he said in German, like a motion that was like energy that was grabbing me, and I felt so powerful. And he told me this, and I was like, “Wow, this is like…” And I Googled “methamphetamine Nazi Germany.” This was in 2010. And there was this one professor at the university in Ulm who said, “The Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine.” So I called up this guy, and he said, “Sure, I’ll meet you.” And then he gave me the signature for the archive. Then I went to the archive, and then I really started to do my own research. And then I went to different archives, and I tried to find everything on Nazis and drugs. And that came… Everything is in the book. So that crazy meeting with Alex in my writing tower, that kind of got me on this research journey. It makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives. Do you think there’s stuff like that in there that we deeply don’t understand? I mean about, for example, there’s a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand, maybe about the concentration camps, maybe about the Eastern Front, the interplay between Stalin and Hitler. Maybe, maybe about Britain, that could be discovered in the letters, in the data that were completely missing. I think so. And I think that also there are archives that are not open. Let’s say the Vatican archive. Some secret archives that some very powerful structures have, structures that we might not even know now off the top of our head, which still have a huge influence. So I think that human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that’s just one version. I think there are several versions, and I think that it goes much deeper and is much more interesting. And so, I guess, this history is a very active thing, which I also didn’t know. You know, I was writing a historical nonfiction book, and I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool because history defines the future or is very connected. Our history teacher always said, “If we don’t know where we come from, we cannot know where we go.” And that is, I think, true. That is what I’m now really interested in for my next book. I’m trying to really understand human history. And obviously, I’m not the first. There are a few, you know, alternative historians that go like… Because you have to go back in time quite a bit, and then it’s not easy to write about it, but it’s very interesting to think about. And I would love to find the truth on Atlantis, which I don’t believe in actually, and we can also talk about that. But maybe there’s an archive where we can actually see that they had this king ruling. I don’t think this could be found, but I think we can still also find a lot of documents, but I think especially in closed archives. So we won’t find them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.