Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I have a friend. He’s a DJ, and we talked about Berlin. We’ll probably talk about it more, and he takes a lot of drugs. And he knows his drugs, let’s put it that way. He knows his drugs. And one day he said to me when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next, he said, “The Nazis took a lot of drugs. You should write about that.” And I said, “The Nazis didn’t take drugs,” because, you know, when you grow up in Germany you get educated about the Nazis quite intensely, especially in West Germany. They teach you everything, but they don’t teach you drugs. Now they do, maybe, you know. But it was not known, so, and the Nazis always had this aura of being law and order. No drugs, of course. No chaos. Everything… My grandfather, he was a Nazi, always said, “Well, at least there was discipline in the country. There was law and order.” So this doesn’t match with drugs, you know? You know, I should also say I think that’s the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling that the Nazi ideology was all about law and order and purity, and surely they would not be doing drugs. So this really blew my mind. I think I wasn’t quite ready, similar to Richard Evans. This is a big, like, okay, a narrative transforming into a deeper, more complicated understanding what Nazi forces and the Hitler inner circle actually looked like. That’s why I didn’t believe Alex.…

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