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Transcript context

…[foreign language 02:42:02] Yeah. You started. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this conversation with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And now let me answer some questions and try to reflect on and articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama. Or to contact me for whatever other reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. First, I got a bunch of questions about this, so let me chat about the topic of language and let’s say the mechanics of multilingual conversation. Perhaps the details are interesting to some people. It also allows me to reflect back on the puzzle of it in this episode and what I can do better next time. I already explained in the intro the symbolic, historic, and geopolitical complexity of the choice of language in the conversation with President Zelenskyy. As I said, the Russian language is one that the president speaks fluently and was his primary language for most of his life. I speak Russian fluently as well. It’s the only common language we are both fluent in, so any other combination of languages required an interpreter, including when I spoke English. He did need an interpreter when I spoke English, and just like I was, was visibly encumbered and annoyed by the process of interpretation. This is why I tried to speak in Russian to the president instead of English, so that he can directly understand me without an interpreter. I’m willing to take the hit for that, as I am for everything else. I’m not trying to protect myself, I’m trying to do whatever is best for the conversation for understanding, though it has been getting harder and harder to stay open, vulnerable and raw in public while the swarms of chanting internet mobs stop by with their torches and their color-coded hats, flags, frogs, pronouns, and hashtags. Anyway, there is a lot of nuanced aspects of the conversational language that I would like to explain here. I’ll try to be brief. I can recommend a lot of books on this topic of language and communication that reveal just how amazing this technology of language is. For example, for a good overview, I recommend John McWhorter’s books and especially his lecture series for the Great Courses on language. There are several. In the Story of Human Language series, he gives a great discussion on spoken language versus written language, and that spoken language often relaxes the rules of communication. It uses shorter packets of words, loads in a bunch of subtle cues and meanings, all of which, like I’m trying to describe, are lost when there’s an interpreter in the loop. the rules of communication. It uses shorter packets of words, loads in a bunch of subtle cues and meanings, all of which, like I’m trying to describe, are lost when there’s an interpreter in the loop. Let me also describe some relevant characteristics of my peculiar language “abilities” in quotes. I was never good at speaking. I listen to think and understand better than I speak. For me, this is true for both English and Russian, but it is especially true for Russian. The Russian language allows for much more room for wit, nonstandard terms of phrase, metaphors, humor, rhyme, musicality, and let’s say deforming of words that create a lot of room for creativity and how meaning and emotion are conveyed. You could do the same in English, but it’s harder. I actually find that Brits are sometimes very good at this. One of my favorite humans to talk to is Douglas Murray. Setting the content of the conversation aside, the sheer linguistic brilliance and wit of dialogue with Douglas is a journey in itself. I think Christopher Hitchens had the same, and many others, like I said, especially Brits. Anyway, I’m able to detect and understand a lot of dynamism and humor in the Russian language, but I’m slow to generate it in part because I just don’t practice. I have very few Russian-speaking friends. Funny enough, most of them are Ukrainian, but they speak with me and each other in Russian. But of course, as I mentioned, this is slowly changing due to the war. But I tried to speak to the president in Russian so he would avoid needing an interpreter as much as possible. One of the things I want to improve for next time is to make sure I get very good equipment for interpretation and arrange for an interpreter I trust to be exceptionally good for the dynamism and the endurance of a three-hour conversation in the style that I tried to do. Just to give you some behind-the-scenes details of the experience, equipment-wise, funny enough, it’s not actually so trivial to set up wireless connections from us, the two people talking, to the interpreter, and then back to us in a way that’s super robust and has clean audio. The audio I had in my ear from the interpreter had a loud background noise, so the whole time I’m hearing a shh sound with the voice of the interpreter coming in very quietly. What a wonderful experience this whole life is, frankly. Plus, his translation was often incomplete, at least for me, so I had to put together those puzzle pieces continuously. But again, it worked out. And hopefully our constant switching of languages and having a meta-discussion about language provided good insights as to the complexity of this fight for a nation’s identity and sovereignty that Ukraine has gone through. Behind the scenes, off-mic on a personal level, President Zelenskyy was funny, thoughtful, and just a kind-hearted person. And really, the whole team were just great people. It was an experience I’ll never forget.…

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