Lex Fridman: commitment

Transcript context

…Thank you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And now, let me ask you some questions and try reflect on and articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you would like to submit questions or get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. First, let me give a shout out to the amazing team around the Prime Minister. Everyone was super kind, excellent at what they do, efficient, great communication, and just great people all around. And since I spoke English and Prime Minister Modi spoke Hindi, I have to comment on the interpreter who was doing simultaneous interpreting for both of us. She was absolutely amazing. I can’t sing her enough praises. From the equipment used to the quality of the translation, to just the human touch of it all. And in general, my travels around Delhi and India revealed to me some early glimpses of what felt like another world, almost like another planet, different culturally from anything I’ve experienced before. A chaos of human interactions, out there, big dynamic personalities and characters. Obviously, India’s composed of many distinct subcultures and Delhi represents just one slice. Much like neither New York or Texas or Iowa alone represent America. They’re all different flavors of America. On my visit, I walked around and rode rickshaws everywhere, just aimlessly wandering the streets, looking to talk to people about life. Of course, like many places on earth, there are always some people, especially those that have something to sell, who will at first see me as a tourist, a foreign traveler, one with some money to spend. Like always, I avoided such shallow interactions and went straight past the small talk to the meaningful conversations. Shooting the shit about what they love, what they fear, what kind of hardship and triumph they’ve experienced in their lives. I think the cool thing about people anywhere on earth is they quickly do see the real you past the facades that strangers put up for each other, if you’re vulnerable and honest enough to let them. And I tried to do just that and I should say that for the most part, everyone was super kind in the genuine human way. Even when they didn’t speak English, it was always easy to understand. Probably more than any other peoples I’ve interacted with in India, people’s eyes, faces, body language, all communicate a lot of information, a lot of emotion, not reserved at all. When I traveled through Eastern Europe, for example, in contrast, reading a person is much tougher. The meme does have some truth to it. There’s often a protective layer between the heart of the person and the outside world. In India, it’s all there on full display. So I had a lot of epic conversations and interactions as I walked around Delhi for a couple of weeks. r between the heart of the person and the outside world. In India, it’s all there on full display. So I had a lot of epic conversations and interactions as I walked around Delhi for a couple of weeks. In general, on the topic of reading people, I do believe the eyes can often say more than words can. We humans are a fascinating bunch. There really is a deep turbulent ocean behind the surface waves we show the world. In some sense, what I try to do in conversations, on and off the mic, is to get to that depth. Anyway, the few weeks I spent in India were a magical experience. Traffic alone was a wild time, like the world’s most difficult test for self-driving cars. It reminded me of watching nature documentary videos of swarms of fish when it’s thousands of them swimming around at insane speeds, seemingly in complete chaos. And yet when looking at the big picture of it it all works like a perfectly tuned orchestra. I will, most certainly, travel around India with my friend Paul Rosalie in the near future, maybe with some other friends all around from the north of India to the south. Now, allow me to also comment about one of the books that first drew me toward India and to its deep history of philosophical and spiritual traditions. The book is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I first read most of Hesse’s major work as a teenager, but then reread them again through the years. It first found me, Siddhartha, when I was immersed in a very different kind of literature of Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Orwell, Hemingway, Kerouac, Steinbeck and so on. Many of these explore the same human condition that puzzled me when I was a young man and still puzzles me today, even more so. But Siddhartha was my introduction to the Eastern way of looking at these puzzles. It was written by Hermann Hesse. And by the way, please allow me this pronunciation of his last name. I’ve heard some people say Hesse, but my whole life I’ve always said Hesse. So, anyway, it was written by Hermann Hesse, a German-Swiss Nobel Prize winning writer during one of the darkest periods of his own life. His marriage was failing, World War I has shattered his pacifist ideals and he suffered from debilitating headaches, insomnia, and depression. During this period, he began psychoanalysis with Carl Jung, which, in part, led him to explore Eastern philosophies as a way to heal his fractured psyche. Hesse immersed himself in translations of ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts studying the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. And so, the writing of Siddhartha was in itself, for him, a journey that paralleled that of the main character in the book. Hesse started writing the book in 1919 and finished three years later experiencing an extensive psychological crisis in the middle. The book follows Siddhartha, a young man in ancient India, as he leaves behind wealth and comfort to search for meaning. You can feel his personal struggle in every page. Siddhartha’s restlessness, his dissatisfaction with conventional wisdom, his need to find truth, the direct experience. comfort to search for meaning. You can feel his personal struggle in every page. Siddhartha’s restlessness, his dissatisfaction with conventional wisdom, his need to find truth, the direct experience. Again, the book wasn’t simply a philosophical exploration for Hesse, it was psychological survival. He was writing his way out of suffering and towards his own enlightenment. I won’t go into a deep analysis of the book here, but I will mention two key lessons I took away and carry with me to this day. First lesson comes from the scene in the book that to me is one of the great scenes in all of literature. Siddhartha is sitting by a river just listening, and in that river he hears all of life. All sounds, all voices, all of time, past, present, future, flowing together as one. That scene gave me the experience and the notion that while in some grounded human sense, the linear arrow of time does exist. In another sense, time is a kind of illusion that, in fact, everything exists simultaneously. That our lives are both momentary and eternal. It is hard to describe these ideas with words. I think they must be experienced as personal revelations. I’m reminded of the fish story that David Foster Wallace, another one of my favorite writers, described in a commencement speech 20 years ago. The story goes, “Two young fish are swimming along when they encounter an older fish swimming the opposite way. The older fish nods and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The young fish swim on, and eventually one turns to the other and asks, ‘What the hell is water?'” The illusion of the forward progress of time is water in this metaphor. As humans, we’re fully immersed in it, but enlightenment, in part, involves being able to step back and get a glimpse at another deeper perspective on reality where all things are inextricably interconnected across both time and space. Another key lesson from the novel that was especially formative to me as a young man was that one should not blindly follow others or learn about the world exclusively through books. But rather forge your own path and thrust yourself into the world where the lessons of life can only be learned by experiencing them directly. And every experience, both positive and negative, mistakes, suffering and even seemingly wasted time is all an essential part of growth. To this point, Hesse draws a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge can be taught by others. Wisdom can only be gathered through experiencing the full mess of life yourself. In other words, the path to understanding isn’t through rejection of the world, but through complete immersion in it. Those are my early steps in seeing the world through the lens of Eastern philosophy. But many of Hesse’s books had an impact on me. I would recommend to read Demian, when you are younger, Steppenwolf, when you are older, Siddhartha throughout your life, especially in moments of crisis, and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning.…

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