Lex Fridman Podcast · 2025-03-30 · 196 min

Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza | Lex Fridman Podcast #463

Lex FridmanDouglas Murray

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TL;DR

Ukraine’s battlefield signal is exhaustion rather than imminent victory or collapse. Murray found troops focused on “a job to do,” but the confidence he saw around the 2022 liberation of Kherson—including hopes of retaking Crimea—had faded after three years with no decisive territorial breakthrough. For investors, that points toward a negotiated pause, continuing rearmament, and persistent European defense risk rather than a clean postwar normalization.
A rushed peace process risks extracting concessions from Ukraine simply because Washington can pressure Kyiv more easily than Moscow. Lex wanted Trump, Zelensky, and Putin in one room quickly; Murray warned that urgency could “reward the aggressor and effectively punish the victim,” even if it stopped the immediate killing. Their shared problem was the absence of a security guarantee Ukrainians could trust without NATO membership, which Murray considered unavailable.
Murray expects any settlement to involve Ukrainian territorial losses, but he rejects treating occupied land as an abstract bargaining chip. He cited Russian schooling, forced ideological assimilation, attempted military recruitment, and an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children taken from their country. His likely end-state was an eastern concession followed by Ukrainian rearmament because a ceasefire might be only “a temporary pause” before another Russian advance.
Economic interdependence is a peace instrument, not a sufficient deterrent against ideological or imperial ambition. Lex proposed surrounding Ukraine with American, European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and perhaps Chinese commercial interests; Murray countered that foreign capital did not prevent previous takeovers. “Some people don’t dream as you dream”: markets can restrain rational actors, but may rank below territory, power, religion, or regime survival.
October 7 exposed both an Israeli institutional failure and the bankruptcy of the assumption that Hamas preferred corrupt governance to ideological war. Murray described a brigade-sized assault, delayed military response, disguise-based confusion, and a “conception” that Hamas had become comfortable ruling Gaza. His account portrays resources entering Gaza being converted into tunnels, weapons, and leadership fortunes rather than productive capacity—the destruction of a potential normalization and development thesis.
Lex and Murray agreed that Gazan civilian suffering is immense but clashed over how broadly to assign moral responsibility. Lex warned against projecting evil onto a desperate, indoctrinated population and invoked America’s post-9/11 overreach; Murray argued that Hamas’s targeting, hostage abuse, and celebratory recordings require “the lexicon of evil,” while categorically rejecting the claim that Israel conducted indiscriminate collective punishment. That disagreement is the episode’s central unresolved moral risk: legitimate defense, urban-war implementation, and civilian catastrophe cannot be collapsed into one metric.
Israel’s near-term political durability is tied to military outcomes, while Iran remains the structural regional risk. Murray held October 7 against Netanyahu but argued that hostage returns, Hamas’s degradation, and the destruction of much of Hezbollah’s leadership helped restore his standing; he also framed Tehran’s proxy network as a regime-survival system sustained by ruthless internal repression. His deepest warning is that fanaticism can outrank prosperity: movements chanting “Long live death” cannot be modeled as ordinary economic stakeholders.

Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. The front line strips away the media’s political abstraction

Murray’s dominant impression from Ukraine was the clarity of people defending “their country, defending their homes, defending their families.” That reality remained separate from the daily political and media “noise” surrounding them.
His two visits marked a psychological change. During the 2022 liberation of Kherson, Ukrainians still imagined recovering every occupied territory, even Crimea; Murray thought that was overreach. On his recent return, soldiers seemed more exhausted after three years without decisive gains by either side.
Watching the Trump-Zelensky confrontation from a Ukrainian dugout sharpened that separation. One soldier said troops were advised not to follow every political turn and returned to the essential point: “I’ve got a job to do.”

2. The Oval Office rupture came before either side was ready

Murray thought the meeting happened “far too early”: the mineral agreement appeared forced, Zelensky had barely expected to travel, and no adequate pathway to peace had been prepared. His only charitable strategic interpretation was that Washington might have been signaling toughness toward Kyiv to extract movement from Putin.
Zelensky arrived visibly exhausted and already angered by Washington’s suggestions that Ukraine started the war and that he, rather than Putin, was the dictator. Murray called that an “Alice in Wonderland situation” and considered the ensuing breakdown an awful political moment.
The clothing question was not merely poor manners in Murray’s reading. A visitor from “the realm of war” should receive some concession from people using destruction as political metaphor; Zelensky’s wartime clothes served, like Churchill’s fatigues, as a reminder that war was not metaphorical for him.
Lex added that Zelensky’s English denied him the wit and response time he has in Ukrainian or Russian. Using an interpreter might have cooled the encounter, just as avoiding the reporter’s petty provocation might have preserved a genuine negotiating opportunity.

3. Meme politics turned Ukraine into a domestic American identity test

Lex’s diagnosis was brutally simple: once liberals adopted Ukrainian flags and “Putin bad, Zelenskyy good,” parts of the American right reflexively chose the opposite side. Murray understood irritation at performative flag-posting but called retaliation against an entire country’s cause unserious.
Murray described the modern task as “the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the memes.” A nation’s fate, he said, cannot sensibly depend on anyone’s momentary tolerance for annoying social-media signaling.
Lex nevertheless faulted Zelensky’s political execution. Narendra Modi could remain India-first while cultivating Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Biden, and Obama; Zelensky needed to thank America, acknowledge the change from Biden to Trump, and appeal to Trump’s identity as a great negotiator. Murray agreed he failed, without making the failure entirely his fault.

4. Putin is intelligible, but that does not make him benign

Murray’s indictment was categorical: Putin is a bloody dictator, suppressor of opposition, and kleptocrat who enriched himself and his circle. He also cited killings and attempted killings on British soil using polonium and nerve agents as evidence that Putin’s coercion does not remain within Russia.
When Lex asked whether Putin might still be genuinely popular after eliminating opposition, Murray’s answer was dry: “It definitely helps a chap if he’s killed all of his opponents.” He contrasted scrutiny of Ukraine’s postponed wartime election with the absence of meaningful free competition in Russia.
Murray interpreted Putin’s stated project as reconstituting the Soviet sphere. He treated Baltic defense spending and fear as sincere, recalled Russia’s 2008 action in Georgia, and rejected assurances that Ukraine is necessarily the final territorial objective.
He did grant the realist steelman: Russia believes it has a sphere of influence, and outside powers may have limited ability to stop it. But “realist” can become self-flattery; the actual calculation is how much latitude to grant a rapacious regime without creating a NATO tripwire for World War III.

5. Territorial compromise contains people, not merely acreage

Murray’s regrettable forecast was that Ukraine would cede some eastern territory, then use the pause to rearm. He refused to specify all four regions because those terms must be negotiated and because premature maps conceal the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians affected.
In occupied areas, children receive Russian-language schooling and Putin’s version of history; families resisting it must hide. One teenage boy told Murray that officials delivered papers ordering him to report for Russian military service the following week.
Around 20,000 Ukrainian children were thought to have been taken, some from orphanages and others through “summer camps” from which they never returned. Murray contrasted the limited attention with the roughly 300 Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram.
His explanation was partly strategic: kidnapped children become hostages, and public attention can increase their value as bargaining chips. That same leverage, he argued, was visible when Israeli hostage families pressured their own government because they could not pressure the captors.

6. The best propaganda defense is to retain the central fact

Murray’s test for narrative distortion was whether someone explains every cause of February 2022 except Putin’s decision to invade. NATO history and geopolitical context can matter, but omitting the initiating act turns sophistication into evasion.
He illustrated the trap with a debate that became lost in Polish iron ore and intricate theories of World War II. Asked for the essential cause, historian Andrew Roberts answered: “World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland.”
Firsthand reporting does not eliminate propaganda, but Murray said it “steels” a journalist for the moment when people insist that what he personally witnessed never happened. The important fact is often forgotten precisely because repeating it feels boring.

7. No paper guarantee can solve Ukraine’s credibility problem

Trump might broker peace, Murray allowed, and his desire to stop the war seemed genuine. The harder obstacle was that no written Western promise could reassure Ukraine after previous security assurances failed; NATO membership was, in Murray’s view, not realistically available.
Lex proposed an implicit guarantee through overlapping military and commercial partnerships with the United States, Europe, the Middle East, India, and perhaps China. Enough stakeholders with capital at risk could make renewed invasion financially and diplomatically costly for Russia.
Murray rejected American miners as a physical buffer: Americans were present in regions invaded in 2022 and left quickly, while international financial interests did not prevent authoritarian takeovers elsewhere. Capital exposure is not equivalent to a defense commitment.
Murray favored cooperation but disputed its primacy for “despots, tyrants, extremists”; Lex maintained that global interconnection is one reason the modern world has fewer wars.

8. Victory creates the strength to negotiate—and the temptation not to

Murray’s case for Zelensky began with extraordinary wartime leadership: he was elected, unified Ukraine at maximum peril, and successfully mobilized international support. The unresolved question is whether the leader who galvanizes resistance can also make the necessary peace.
Having seen so much destruction, Zelensky may find compromise with its author almost psychologically impossible. Murray’s recurring image was the visitor from the land of war confronting advice from the land of peace; both perspectives can be right, as when forgiveness is urged upon someone whose child died from shrapnel.
Lex argued that Ukraine may have missed negotiating windows after defending Kyiv in spring 2022 and after the Kherson and Kharkiv successes that autumn. Strength made peace possible, yet the sight of victory—“a man walking through the desert seeing water”—made continued fighting irresistible. Murray conceded that reading was possible.
The paradox reaches beyond Ukraine: amassing an army creates its own pull toward use. Stopping short of a real victory can be disastrous, but anticipated victory can also prove illusory, prolonging war while leaders worry about corruption investigations, historical judgment, and losing their heroic status.

9. October 7 shattered Israel’s governing security conception

Murray described a brigade-sized Hamas assault that breached the Gaza fence, overwhelmed an observation base, attacked kibbutzim and towns, and massacred young people at the Nova festival with rifles, grenades, RPGs, and other weapons. Attackers penetrated roughly 20 kilometers into Israel.
In his account, Hezbollah was supposed to mount a similar northern assault and began rocket fire within 24 hours, while Iran knew the broader plan. Murray speculated that Hamas withheld exact timing because it feared that communications with Hezbollah would be intercepted.
Israel’s major error was “the conception” that Hamas had become comfortable with corruption and governing Gaza—that ideology would remain rhetorical while enrichment took priority. October 7 demonstrated that Hamas’s stated objective had not become secondary.
Survivors had reassured children that the army would arrive within minutes; in many places it took hours. Murray preserved the distinction between systemic failure and individual initiative: some units and unauthorized “self-starters” moved south rapidly and fought amid extraordinary confusion.

10. Disguise and fog made the initial response lethally uncertain

Hamas fighters wore uniforms and equipment taken from dead Israelis, complicating identification. An Arab Israeli Muslim doctor responding to an emergency initially mistook armed men for Israeli soldiers; they fired on him, used him as a human shield, shot him, and left him alive.
A Nova attendee escaped by car, reached another community, and obeyed someone she believed was a policeman. He was a Hamas fighter in police clothing; she was subsequently killed, after her boyfriend had already been shot in the head.
Female observers had reportedly warned about suspicious border exercises in preceding weeks. Senior commanders’ response was that such activity occurred repeatedly, capturing how a correct warning can disappear inside routine noise without requiring a conspiracy.
Murray therefore resisted assuming deliberate internal sabotage simply because Israeli intelligence had a formidable reputation. “The fog of war is a very real thing”: retrospective visibility is not the information available to commanders during the event.

11. Hamas made its ideology unusually explicit

Murray argued that Hamas is comparatively easy to understand because “they say what their ambitions are” and tend to act accordingly. Its objective is not merely leverage over Israel but destruction of the state, grounded in both political and religious anti-Jewish ideology.
He cited the charter’s use of a hadith depicting rocks and trees calling Muslims to kill a hidden Jew. Some observers dismiss such texts as obsolete rhetoric; Murray’s point was that October 7 made that dismissal harder to sustain.
Yahya Sinwar embodied the error. Imprisoned in Israel for killing Palestinians, he survived a brain tumor after an Israeli dentist recognized it, then left in the Gilad Shalit exchange with more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. In prison he warned: “One day you’ll be weak and then I’ll come.”
The targets included peace activists such as Vivian Silver, who drove Gazan children needing specialized treatment to Israeli hospitals. Initially believed kidnapped, she was eventually identified as having been burned alive in her home; so little DNA remained that confirmation took time.

12. Proportionality does not mean equal body counts

Murray recalled demands for a “proportionate” Israeli response beginning around October 8, before Israel had responded. He distinguished lawful proportionality from the popular idea that Israel could kill only as many people as Hamas killed.
Scaling October 7 from Israel’s roughly 9 million people to America, he estimated an equivalent of 44,000 Americans killed and 10,000 kidnapped in one day. No American government, he argued, would avoid using major force to destroy the responsible group and recover its citizens.
Lex’s pushback was implementation, not the emotional legitimacy of retaliation. America’s post-9/11 wars demonstrated that an initially justified response can expand into strategic failure, financial damage, destabilization, more terrorists, and acts “bordering on war crimes if not downright war crimes.”
Israel declared two aims: return the hostages and destroy Hamas. Murray believed it had gone far toward both, but not completed either; hostages, including a young American, remained, while Hamas was severely degraded rather than eliminated.

13. Gaza turned civilian infrastructure into a battlefield advantage

Murray said Israel initially avoided rushing blindly into Gaza, including a proposed rapid assault on the Shifa complex that might have recovered hostages at enormous cost. Dense urban terrain and a population that had nearly doubled since the 2005 withdrawal intensified every operational choice.
His central accusation was that Hamas systematically exploited the laws of war: fighters wore civilian clothes and operated from hospitals, schools, mosques, and other places of care. That created a “two for one offer”—military utility first, then propaganda whenever Israel struck back.
The tunnel network stored weapons, protected fighters, and confined hostages, but was not built to shelter Gazan civilians. Murray’s compressed distinction was between governments that build “bomb shelters for its citizens” and one that built “bomb shelters for its bombs.”
Soldiers told him that every second or third house contained weapons, explosives, rockets, or a tunnel entrance. He described Hamas leaders as billionaires and argued that resources entering Gaza were diverted into private wealth and “the infrastructure of terror.”

14. Eighteen years of Hamas rule consumed Gaza’s development option

Hamas won an election, then violently eliminated Fatah rivals in 2007, including throwing opponents from rooftops and dragging bodies behind motorcycles. Thereafter it possessed enough time—from a child’s birth through formal education—to shape an entire generation.
Murray’s counterfactual was not utopian: Gaza after the 2005 Israeli withdrawal could at least have pursued productive institutions and a Palestinian state. Instead, Hamas prioritized Israel’s destruction, militarized the territory, and produced what he called marked radicalization among the people of Gaza.
He cited Arabic copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in homes as the most banal evidence of that education. Yet he rejected translating political responsibility into indiscriminate punishment, categorically insisting Israel had not carpet-bombed Gaza without military purpose.
That claim did not settle Lex’s concern. Urban targeting may be concerted and still produce devastating consequences, while the population’s election of Hamas cannot erase civilian status or automatically resolve whether particular operations went too far.

15. Lex resisted turning mass celebration into collective evil

Murray emphasized released hostages’ reports that they encountered no Gazan kindness, crowds celebrating captives, and escapees being returned by civilians. The most horrific recording was a fighter calling home to boast: “I’ve killed 10 Jews with my own hands,” as his parents and brother listened.
Lex accepted the darkness but questioned what share of the population such scenes represented. Celebration might reflect indoctrination, hatred, desperation, or the psychological need to recast violence as liberation; wartime dehumanization also appears in Ukrainian and Russian soldiers’ calls home.
Murray rejected that analogy at its limit. Lex had used the image of filming an elderly woman’s killing and celebrating rape and massacre as an illustration of how unusual such conduct would be even in war; Murray argued that the Nova massacre and other Hamas actions exceeded ordinary battlefield hardening and required describing some actions and perpetrators as evil.

16. Empathy for Gazans coexists with a dispute over political agency

Murray witnessed civilians moving south through a humanitarian corridor while Israeli forces checked people for bombs and suicide vests, particularly young men of military age, as Israel tried to keep hostages and Hamas’s leadership from moving farther south. He called it a “tide of human misery” and said empathy could coexist with anger at Hamas for bringing catastrophe upon the governed population.
He accepted that the wider conflict did not begin on October 7, while insisting this particularly intense round did. His foundational question was whether Palestinian leadership wants a state beside Israel or wants to destroy the Jewish state; repeated pursuit of the latter has been “a total disaster” for Palestinians.
Asked to steelman Gaza as an “open-air prison,” Murray rejected the description: Gazans could trade and move, while increasing numbers worked in Israel for higher wages. Egypt was less willing to admit them, and international pressure had been pushing Israel toward greater cross-border employment.
October 7 destroyed that normalization path. Murray said attackers possessed accurate house-by-house maps, including the location of community security chiefs, supplied by Gazan workers and others coming in and out. People who had advocated economic integration concluded they could never trust it again.

17. Israeli coexistence held better than the worst forecasts

Immediately after October 7, fear extended toward Israel’s roughly 20% Arab population. Murray nevertheless counted the absence of a general uprising as one of the few positive developments: coexistence inside Israel largely held despite isolated acts of terror.
Israeli operations and some cooperation from the Palestinian Authority also limited a broader escalation in the West Bank. The feared full war spanning Gaza, Lebanon, and an internal intifada did not materialize in that form.
Murray did not minimize the exceptions. He had personally been present during an attack in Hadera and acknowledged Arab Israeli perpetrators acting in sympathy with Hamas, but argued that such incidents remained far below the scale that October 7 might have triggered.

18. Netanyahu’s strongest indictment and defense come from the same war

The devastating case against Netanyahu is that October 7 happened on his watch. Murray invoked Golda Meir taking responsibility after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and added the possibility that Netanyahu bore responsibility for the complacent security “conception” as a lasting charge.
Judicial reforms had also divided Israel, exhausted police, and filled streets with protests. Hamas may have interpreted that as the weakness Sinwar awaited, though Murray preserved the counterargument: October 7 had been planned before the reform crisis began.
Lex suggested Netanyahu was increasingly unpopular; Murray corrected him with polls that had recently placed Netanyahu at an all-time high. Criticism remained broad—political self-preservation, prioritizing Hamas versus Hezbollah, or the reverse—but Murray believed virtually any Israeli leader would have mounted a similar response.
The defense is performance: most hostages were returned, Hamas fell far below its November 2023 capability, and much of its senior leadership was killed. Murray also credited Israel with dismantling Hezbollah’s leadership and, after Assad’s fall, destroying Syria’s air force in a day—an operation he noted ranked only fourth on the BBC site.

19. Fanaticism survives because democracies misread both power and conscience

Murray argued that democracies pressure the actors who might listen. Israeli hostage families protested Netanyahu because Sinwar, Hamas’s Qatari hosts, Hezbollah, and Iran would not care; this same asymmetry can turn pressure for peace into punishment of the more accountable side.
His explanation of antisemitism was a low-resolution theory of causation focused on a small, prominent, disproportionately accomplished minority. Jews can be hated simultaneously as rich and poor, religious and secular, cosmopolitan and nationalist—an unusually adaptable target for grievance.
Borrowing Vasily Grossman, Murray called antisemitic accusation a mirror: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” He extended it to Western guilt—people taught that their societies embody colonialism and genocide can transfer that burden onto Israel in the present.
Iran supplied the episode’s clearest model of ideological power. Murray compared Khomeini’s 1979 flight to Tehran with Lenin’s train to Petrograd, argued that the Basij crushed the 2009 Green Movement through lethal terror, and linked Khomeinism to the cry “Long live death.” His closing distinction mattered: Putin is not necessarily a millenarian madman and might be negotiated with, but leaders must remember that some movements really do say, “We love death more than you love life.”
Lex’s discussion of conspiracies supplied the institutional corollary: powerful people are usually human, governments firefight one crisis per day, and competence is more visible among soldiers, engineers, and craftspeople with bounded tasks. Murray allowed that some dismissed conspiracies prove true, but called grand unified plots a poor model of chaotic statecraft.
On interviewing leaders, Murray advised curiosity without submission: if someone is a liar, “get them to reveal that they’re a liar. Don’t just call them a liar.” Lex’s hesitation over Netanyahu and prospective Putin interviews became a question of whether understanding can add compassion without turning the interviewer into a propagandist.
Murray’s guide was Churchill’s eulogy for Chamberlain: history repeatedly changes who appears right, so “the only guide to a man is his conscience.” His source of hope was smart young people; his darker consolation was war’s “terrible clarity,” where absurdity, intimacy, courage, and humor become so intense that traumatized soldiers can still miss feeling fully alive.

Lex Fridman

They end up chanting in front of him, "Viva Lamuete, long live death." They have their counterparts today. They are the people who who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, "We love death more than you love life." The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The War in the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his new book on democracies and death cults. We talk about Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly. As I always try to do for all topics, I will also talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including on the next episode of this podcast. We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sickopants, and sociopaths roam the vast, beautiful, dark land of the internet. It's hard to know who to trust. I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others. Some are insightful and some are delusional. The problem is it's hard to tell which is which unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor. I recommend you listen to many sources who disagree with each other and try to pick up wisdom from each. Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face to face with people who have spent most of their lives living there, whether it's Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia. Let's try together to not be cogs in the machine of outrage, and instead to reach toward reason and compassion. There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today. Plus, there are thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire. Human civilization hangs in the balance. The 21st century is a new geopolitical puzzle all of us are tasked with solving. Let's not mess it up. This is the Lexman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray.

What have you understood about the war in Ukraine from your visits there, just looking at the big picture of your understanding of the invasion on February 24, 2022, and the war in the 3 years since?

#463

Well, several things. There are political angles, which are forever changing, but on the human level, as you know, if you visit frontline troops, you have that admiration for people defending their country, defending their homes, and defending their families.

I'm struck by the way in which that is at a remove from the political noise and the media noise. It's very easy to get caught up in the to-and-fro of today's news, but that, to my mind, is the single thing that struck me most in my visits there: the people I've met who are fighting for a cause which, at that level, is unavoidable and undeniable.

Lex Fridman

So the thing that struck you, that's different from the media turmoil, is just the reality of war.

#463

Yeah, of course. People who have either lived under Russian occupation from invading armies and then come back out into the world having been liberated, as in late 2022, or the people now organizing most recently there, in recent weeks, are just getting on with their job as soldiers while the world is talking about them.

Lex Fridman

When were you there?

#463

The first time was early on in this escalated war of 2022. I was with the Ukrainian armed forces when they retook Kherson, and I was back in recent weeks. I was there when the Trump-Zelensky blowup happened. In fact, I was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when I was watching it.

Lex Fridman

How's the morale? How has the content of the conversations you've heard differed between the 2 visits, separated by, I guess, 2 years?

#463

On one level, nothing has changed much. It's not a total standoff, because intermittently each side gains territory from the other, but there have been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.

I think my experience of the soldiers, the people of Ukraine, early on in the war, was that there was intense optimism about the outcome of the war. There was a sense that they were going to win, and the definition of what “win” meant was that all the territory was going to be won back.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, I certainly became quite familiar with people on the front lines facing Crimea who thought that the Ukrainians, in late 2022, would even be able to get Crimea back.

#463

That struck me even at the time, and I said I thought that was an overreach. Now I think the people—the soldiers, at least in my experience, when I visited the second time—are more exhausted. The morale, the dreams, and the certainty of victory have maybe faded from the forefront of their minds.

Lex Fridman

Well, 3 years of war will tire out anyone. What did you think of the blowup between Zelensky and Trump as you were sitting there in the dugout?

#463

It was a very disturbing place to watch it from. Perhaps anywhere would have been. It was obviously a meeting that shouldn't have happened. It was far too early.

Lex Fridman

Why do you think so?

#463

There weren't enough actual pathways to peace on the table. I think the mineral deal—I love the fact that everyone's now an expert in Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits. As I've learned, and we'll talk about Israel and Palestine, everybody's an expert on geopolitics and the history of war on the internet, and now mineral deposits, obviously.

I'm really speaking at the edge of my mineral-deposit knowledge here, but from what I could see, the deal that the American administration was trying to get the Ukrainian government to sign was too early to force. The Ukrainians weren't ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure. I think certainly Zelensky wasn't expecting to go until pretty much the day before. He was visibly tired and exhausted, as you are after that amount of pressure for that long a time.

No, the thing that struck me—and I said this in my column in the New York Post from there—was that I said to some of the soldiers I was with, “What do you make of this?” One of them just said to me, “We're advised not to follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this.” Of course, everyone has Instagram or scrolls among dog pictures and hot women or whatever, so they see what happened in the Oval Office. But what struck me was this same guy saying, “I've got a job to do.”

Lex Fridman

Right. There's a clarity and a wisdom to that. But your job is bigger than that, right? It's to understand the politics as well. What do you think about the politics of that moment? That was a real opportunity to come together and make progress on peace, right? By all accounts, it was not a successful step forward.

#463

I don't think by any account it was a successful step forward, unless to some extent it was a play from D.C. to say to Putin, “Look, we did a number on Zelensky, and now give us something.” That's the only remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it.

I think it was just one of those extremely awful political moments. Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated by the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington. It was only a week after the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator, and people in the administration implying that Ukraine had started the war. That must be, for Zelensky, a pretty Alice-in-Wonderland situation to be in. I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering, because it would be bewildering.

Lex Fridman

I think the sad thing to me, also on the mundane details of that meeting and just the unfortunate way that meetings happen, is that it's true that he was also exhausted.

Yes, there was a dumbass of a reporter—Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend—who asked a question about the outfit in a way that—listen, Zelensky, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. He's an emotional being, for better or for worse.

#463

He is.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. The things you know. See, you're a real journalist.

#463

He's from one of the new media outlets. I'm all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of thing, but it means that you get some people in who are from Blogland. There's nothing wrong with that, but it means that you get somebody who will do something like that.

The problem with that interaction, as I saw it, was that the guy asked that disrespectful question. I'll very quickly say why I think it was disrespectful. When a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect, or at least concede that the other man has come from the realm of war.

If you're sitting in a political environment where you talk about people being destroyed, decimated, and defenestrated, and much more, to a man for whom none of that is metaphorical, I think that's extremely hard to accept. I think that probably, at that moment, there was a sense of Zelensky being disrespected by being asked about what he was wearing.

As everyone knows, Churchill during World War II used to wear his fatigues on foreign visits to remind people, “You're coming from the realm of war.” I think that probably, in that moment, one of the things that would have been going through his head would be, “If this was Putin sitting here being assaulted by a journalist, you'd hope your host stepped in and defended you.”

Let me try this one out: if a journalist in the Oval Office, with Putin sitting there, said to Putin, “Everyone knows you've had a lot of facial work done, and word is you've used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use”—

Can you comment on that? You'd say, “Well, that's a kind of disrespectful question for journalists to ask, and it's a little bit off what needs to be gone over.” It's the same thing with Zelensky and the outfit. I think it was just petty and threw things off in a bad way.

It was also poorly researched, because I think Zelensky was explaining this 3 years ago, at the beginning of the war, why he wears what he wears, and he's been consistent in wearing the same. It's also, by the way, an example of the frivolity of a lot of the attempts to understand what's going on. My view is that, since most people—in fact, everybody—cannot be an expert on everything, one of the things that we always do is seize on minor and really quite unimportant things.

Every side does it. Look at the way in which the American right, for years, talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office during the Obama years. I didn't want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after 8 years, because it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama's foreign policy. It was just an easy shorthand. I think it's the same. We're always tempted to do that.

But the thing is, I think you mentioned Putin. I think Putin would have been able to respond himself to that journalist effectively, and he would have done it in Russian.

Lex Fridman

Oh, yeah, the language thing.

I wanted to lay out several unfortunate things that happen in these situations. I think it happens in all peace negotiations, and it's funny how history can turn in moments like this. I do think there's a rapport, combined with the fact that, with all due respect, Zelensky's English sometimes is not very good.

#463

Yes. Apart from anything else, if he had agreed not to do it in English, he would have bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, and have the wit.

#463

The guy is funny, witty, intelligent. He could do that in the native language, whether it's Ukrainian or Russian, to be able to respond and get the interpreter. So all of that is really unfortunate, because in those little moments, it's a dance and there's an opportunity there.

The Republicans—the right wing—in the United States have a general kind of skepticism of Zelensky, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way. It can turn, it can change, it can evolve. It's very interesting why it has happened.

Lex Fridman

Why do you think it's happened?

#463

The politics in the United States is so dumb that, at the very beginning, it could just be reduced to: “Well, the left went, ‘Putin bad, Zelensky good, rah-rah Ukrainian flags.’ Therefore, the right must go the opposite.” It sometimes is literally as dumb as that: let's each pick a side and call the others dumb.

Lex Fridman

I had a line I used recently: the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the memes. It's sort of like that, isn't it?

#463

Yes. I can understand the people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or pride flags or trans flags in their bio then put Ukrainian flags in their bio, despite almost certainly not knowing where Ukraine was. If that happens, the inevitable instinct of a lot of people who aren't really thinking is to say, “That's really annoying. These people are really annoying. I'll sock it to them.”

But that's where you've got to try to rise above that and say, “Actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn't depend on my tolerance for memes online today.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah. So I think the memes can be broken through in meetings like the one that happened between Zelensky and Trump. There can be real camaraderie. I've seen the skill of that just recently, having researched deeply and interacted with Narendra Modi.

Here's somebody who has the skill, for his country and for his situation, of somehow being friends with Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Biden, and Obama, while still being strong for his country and fundamentally a nationalist figure who's very much not globalist, not anything but pro-India, India first, nation first. In fact, nation first with a very specific idea of what that nation represents.

#463

Sure. Zelensky could do all of those things, but he would have to have the skill of navigating the Trump room, because every single leader has their own peculiar quirks that need to be navigated.

The obvious one—I mean, I don't want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky's fault—but the obvious one was, at the beginning of the meeting, to say yet again, as he has done for 3 years, “Thank you to America, the American people, and American politicians from across the aisle for your support for my country and its people. We're deeply grateful.” Because, for once, he forgot to say that—

Lex Fridman

I think it's not that simple.

#463

It's one reason. Saying thank you—he didn't need to say thank you. That was what Vance leapt in on; he's just picking a thing to leap on. There's a whole energy you have to acknowledge in your way of being: you have been very Biden, buddy-buddy with the left for the last 4 years. There are ways to fix that.

Listen, these people are complicated narcissists—all of them: Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that. You basically have to say a kind word to Trump, which is like feeding the ego. There are many ways of doing that, but one of them is acknowledging that he is one of the world's greatest negotiators: “I'm glad we're able to come to the table and negotiate together, because I believe you are the great negotiator and mediator who can actually bring a successful resolution to this.”

That's opposed to having an energy of, “It should be obvious to everybody that Ukrainians are the good guys and Russia is the bad guy.” There's this whole energy of entitlement that he brought. He forgot that there's a new guy. You've got to convince the new guy that this global mission that this nation is on, this war that is, in many ways, the West versus the East, has ideals and whole histories behind it—that this is a war worth winning. You have to convince him, right?

Lex Fridman

Yeah, no, sure. He obviously failed on that occasion. But, as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war, right? And Zelensky, not Putin, being the dictator.

#463

I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the president's comments on that, saying that the big picture was Putin just saying, “Right, this is a dictator.” I think people can be alive enough to recognize that. You can make criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn't mean you have to fall for Putin. Again, unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don't have that capability.

Lex Fridman

Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin?

#463

He's a dictator who's very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, including internal opposition. He's a kleptomaniac of his country's resources. He's enriched himself as much as he could, as have the cronies around him.

He's not just acted to destroy internal opposition in Russia, but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth, and killed people on our soil using, as it happens, weapons of mass destruction. The use of polonium in the center of London is not good. The use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of people in a charming cathedral city like Salisbury—not good.

If the sort of apologists for Putin say, “Well, he's just a sort of tough man who's looking after his house business,” well, I don't think, even if you think he has the right to do that, that he should be doing it in third countries, deliberately using weapons that could take out tens of thousands of British citizens. Yeah, I mean, that's just for starters.

Lex Fridman

What do you make of it? Do you think he's actually popularly elected?

#463

No.

Lex Fridman

Do you think the results of the elections are fraudulent?

#463

Yes.

Lex Fridman

I mean, do you think it's possible that the opposition has been eliminated and he's legitimately popularly elected?

#463

It definitely helps a chap if he's killed all of his opponents.

Lex Fridman

Something about using the term “chap” in that context is just marvelous.

#463

But seriously, if people are worried about this—this is another of the slightly Alice-in-Wonderland things recently about Zelensky. People are saying, “Why hasn't he? He's a dictator because he hasn't held elections during a total war of self-defense.” It's like, well, if you're really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods, you'd at least notice that Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense.

But this doesn't mean that you have to say that, therefore, they should have Western-style elections and freedom, that Russia is ready to go and become a Western liberal democracy. It doesn't mean any of that at all. Let's just at least note that this is what Putin is.

Lex Fridman

What do you think is the motivation for his invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

#463

It's what he's said for years, which is basically the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.

Lex Fridman

Do you think there is an empire-building component to that motivation?

#463

I would trust most of my friends in Eastern and Central Europe, who certainly do think there's a reason why the Baltic countries are the countries spending the highest percentage of GDP on defense, and it's because they're very worried. I don't think they're faking it.

I don't think they're faking it for me or for anyone else. I think the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians, and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.

Lex Fridman

Do you think there's a possibility that the war continues indefinitely? Even if there's a ceasefire and peace is reached, will the war resume?

#463

He will seek expansion even beyond Ukraine. Yes. The most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire, it will be a temporary pause, and whoever comes in as president after Trump, Putin will use the opportunity to advance again.

One of the things that I have heard from parts of the American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine, that all he wants is Ukraine, and that he has no history of rhetoric or actions that suggest anything else. It's one of the reasons why it's useful to travel to places and see things with your own eyes, because I very much remember being in the country of Georgia after Putin tried to invade in 2008.

People don't have to be the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause just to recognize that it doesn't seem to be the case that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin's vision.

Lex Fridman

Do you see value, and maybe depth and power, in the realist perspective of all this? Somebody like John Mearsheimer's formulation of it—that in these invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, Russia is using military power to expand its sphere of influence in the region, in a cold calculation of geopolitics.

#463

It's interesting. One of the fascinating things about the last few years is that there's been an act of necromancy involving certain figures who were totally debunked. In the area of Ukraine, Mearsheimer, and in the case of Israel, people like Finkelstein. It's been interesting, because these are people that one hadn't heard of for some years because they were not listened to, usually for good reason.

By the way, I'm very skeptical of the term “realist” in foreign policy, because most people, to some extent, will say that they are realists in foreign policy. Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists. I would like to meet them—a surrealist foreign policy analyst. We did mention Alice in Wonderland, so maybe we should introduce the term.

If you want to look gimlet-eyed out across the world, you're a realist. I think the steelman of their argument would be: Russia has, or believes it has, a sphere of influence, and that's regrettable, but there's very little we can do about it. That would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.

Lex Fridman

Well, to expand on that steelman, isn't this how superpowers operate in the dark realist-surrealist way? The United States uses military power to have a sphere of influence over the whole globe, really. China appears to be willing to use military power to expand its sphere of influence and political power.

More importantly, in the case of China, it's political power—nonkinetic warfare—to take over areas, Hong Kong being the obvious one. But behind that, isn't there always a kinetic threat?

#463

Oh, yeah. Of course. You disappear some booksellers, and students are protesting. Of course.

But to go back to this: yes, of course, countries believe they have, or would like to have, spheres of influence. I do think that at some point the so-called realists have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious regime. It's not always the easiest calculation to make.

You have to work out whether, for instance, it is true that if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kyiv in the first weeks of the war in 2022, he would have gone straight on to other places. Maybe he would have done that; maybe he would have taken his time; maybe he wouldn't have done it. This is a very fine calculation that changes every week, let alone every year.

My friends in Georgia, I thought, were wildly off the mark when they believed that after 2008 they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership. I thought that was completely unlikely, and I still think it's unlikely and almost certainly undesirable for Europe and for NATO, because you've got to be very careful. Obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine, and has been since the 1990s: are you going to set up a tripwire to start World War III? That's not a small thing to consider.

Lex Fridman

So what do you think the peace deal might look like? What does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months?

#463

I have thought it would be, regrettably, the Ukrainians ceding some territory in the east and then making sure they rearm during whatever peace period comes afterward, and probably all 4 territories under Russian occupation. You couldn't lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated.

I think the ease with which non-Ukrainians are currently speaking about Ukrainian ceding territory is concerning, because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin's rule, people who have families in the rest of Ukraine, and much more.

I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian-occupied areas, and it's brutal for a Ukrainian to grow up in that territory. When people say, “Obviously, Donetsk has to be given to Putin,” I think that's not as easy a thing if you're in Ukraine as it is if you're sitting in New York, say.

By the way, I think there's a school of thought that President Trump, to some extent, was floating in recent weeks, which is that if a deal is done—a business deal in relation to minerals or anything else—you get a kind of buffer zone of American businesses and investment, and therefore American businesspeople in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to invade.

I don't follow that idea, not least because there were Americans in the regions that were invaded in 2022, and they left fast. We know from Hong Kong and other places that just because there are international financial interests in a region does not mean that a dictatorship will not either militarily or covertly take over. I don't see American miners as being an effective buffer zone against Putin.

Lex Fridman

What did you learn from talking to the Ukrainian children from those regions?

#463

It's heartbreaking, because the only schooling is Russian schooling—obviously teaching the Russian language, Putin's view of history, and effectively indoctrination. People can quibble with that term, but it's Putin's indoctrination schools. Any children or families that do not want that effectively have to hide and not go out.

I spoke to children and parents who had school friends who, for instance, were sent to Russian summer camps set up in 2022 and 2023 for children from some of the areas that had been occupied. The children went off to the camps, and then they didn't come back. They were just stolen. It's thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been stolen in this fashion. That's not a small thing.

It hasn't received very much attention, but I spoke to children who would hide whenever the Russian troops came to the door. One teenage boy described to me how, when his mother was out, a woman came around to the house, knocked on the door, gave him his papers, and said that he had to attend the following week to sign up for the Russian army.

This is not good. That's obviously what life is like for thousands of people behind the Russian lines in Ukraine. I have it in mind when people say, “Obviously, these regions have to be handed over.” It's very, very hard if you're Ukrainian to concede to that.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Even if they are handed over as part of the negotiation, I think it'll probably be generations, or never, before that could be accepted by the Ukrainian people.

#463

Absolutely. I would have thought never.

Lex Fridman

What do we know about this kidnapping of children—the stories of the thousands of children that the Russian forces kidnapped?

#463

Some of them were in orphanages in eastern Ukraine. Not all, by any means, but some were. It's a very complicated story, actually, because many children were taken from their families. The Russians said, “Look at these Ukrainians. They don't even look after their children. Therefore, we will look after them.”

When I was recently there, I was looking into this story because it's a very interesting question as to why it hasn't had more attention. One thinks of, for instance, the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls some 12 years ago in northern Nigeria and that appalling abduction of 300 girls by Boko Haram. It completely gained the world's attention, and I was very interested in why the Ukrainian children who had been taken by the Russians had not gained similar attention.

There's a slight similarity with the war in Israel, which I'm sure we'll come to. I do think that one reason is that they were effectively hostages, and the Ukrainians knew this. My estimation of the situation is that the Ukrainians knew that if they made a great deal about this—as it were, more than they did—the children would effectively be the most effective bargaining chip.

I do think there's considerable truth in that, because if you look, for instance, at the way in which pressure has been put on the Israeli government by the Israeli population about the kidnapped Israelis, you'll see that it's a pretty effective tactic for any totalitarian regime or terrorist group to operate in a way that means the population of the country you're attacking pressures their government to do something in terms of a concession.

It's a very effective tool, and I think that story was partly played down not just outside Ukraine but also within Ukraine, partly for that reason.

Lex Fridman

As a truth seeker, as a journalist, how do you operate in that world where, at least to me, it's obvious that there's just a flood of propaganda on both sides?

Now, of course, when you go there and directly experience it and talk to people, those people are still also swimming in the propaganda. So unless you witness stuff directly, sometimes it's hard to know. I speak to people on the Russian side and, hilariously enough, they almost always say that there's no propaganda in Russia.

Of course. Which makes me realize that you can be completely lied to. Maybe I am in the United States as well and just be unaware. Maybe Earth is run by aliens. Maybe the Earth is flat. So I don't know. Maybe you've taken mushrooms. I have before this, and I finally see the truth. And it's you that are deluded, Douglas.

Okay, but back to our round-Earth discussion, round-Earth shills that we are: how do you know what is true?

#463

You can tell it when the bare facts become not true. You can tell it when somebody is willing to claim that everything caused the invasion of 2022 except for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. There's a hilarious thing that happens, and I think you've actually spoken about this: people are generally just much more willing to criticize the democratically elected leader, always, always.

#463

Well, yes, of course. To some extent, there's a very irritating type of question asker at any event: the person who says, "I was disappointed that in your 30-minute talk you didn't address X."

I tend to say, "I'm looking forward to coming to your next talk, where in 30 minutes you'll cover everything that could possibly be covered." There's always stuff that's going to be left on the side. There's always going to be stuff that's left unaddressed. There's always going to be other angles. There's always going to be somebody else who has this interesting perspective, and you can't cover it.

Nevertheless, if you cover everything other than the central things, then it's suspicious. Many years ago, I was at a debate in London about the origins of World War II. Pat Buchanan, talking of necromancy, was one of the speakers, and the historian Andrew Roberts was one of the people on the other side.

At one point, they got so completely stuck into issues of iron ore mining in Poland and things like this that the moderator—I remember it was just a melee—turned to Andrew Roberts and said, "Andrew Roberts, why did World War II begin?" He said, "World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland."

It was a magnificent moment because everything had become a morass. They were so lost in all the intricate, clever, and interesting things that you can talk about regarding the origins of a war that you forget to mention the thing that's most important.

Certainly, my experience as a journalist and writer is that one of the reasons why you need to go and see things with your own eyes is because people are certain to tell you that what you've seen with your own eyes didn't happen or hasn't happened, and it helps to steel you.

Lex Fridman

Yes, for that moment. It's a gradual thing that happens where the obvious thing starts being taken for granted, and people stop saying it because it's like the boring thing to say at a party. Then, all of a sudden, over time, you almost start questioning whether the obvious thing is even true. I don't know how that happens psychologically.

#463

Yeah, I think it does. I've observed it in a lot of different places. The important thing is the only thing you do forget. Everything else is what you remember. Some of us are, for some reason, wired in a way where we try not to forget the important thing. Remember the obvious thing.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

#463

Yes, and as you say, not wanting to be the boring guy at the party who reiterates what is true, because what a douchebag you'd be if you were that guy. Nobody likes Captain Obvious at a party.

Lex Fridman

Is it possible that Donald Trump is a mediator, a successful negotiator, that brings a stable peace to Ukraine?

#463

It's possible. We'll have to see. I think it's just too early and complicated to tell. That he wants to bring peace seems to me to be obvious. He has stated it a lot of times. Whether he can, we're just going to have to see.

It's extremely hard to see some of the parameters of the peace still. I would suggest that one of the most difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe.

It doesn't matter because some of the countries in the West have said it before, that we'd secure their peace, and we haven't. Other than NATO membership, which is not possible in my view, what would reassure the Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured? I can't see it.

Lex Fridman

I think there's not going to ever be a guarantee that you can trust. I think the way you have a guarantee is through implicit guarantees, by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as possible.

So you have partnerships with the Middle East, you have partnerships with India, perhaps even with China, with the United States, with many nations in Europe. All of which still suggests that if there's enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another Russian invasion. There would be financial pressure.

#463

Yeah, there would be financial pressure.

Lex Fridman

Russia needs to be friends with somebody, either China or the West. I think a world that's flourishing would have Russia trading and being friends with the West and the East.

#463

That would be ideal. It would be ideal if the regime in Moscow wanted it. But that's not—again, you get into the thing of people being accused of Russophobia.

I do believe that after the fall of the wall, Russia was ill-treated by the West, not treated with some of the courtesy that it required. I do think that. At the same time, that doesn't justify the actions of Russia in the last 20 years, right?

Lex Fridman

But let's descend from the surrealist to the realist. It's very possible for Russia to be on the verge of military invasion of these nations and for that to be wrong, while also not doing it because it's afraid to hurt the partnerships with the West and with China. It's possible.

#463

It's possible, but this sort of rogue alliance they've formed with China, to a considerable extent, North Korea—which is not useful—and Iran is something they seem to find bearable. It's not a very good alliance in most people's analysis, but it's an alliance. It's bearable.

I don't think—maybe you disagree with this—I don't think the Russian people or even Putin wants to be isolated from the West. I think he wants to be friends with the West and with the East and with everybody. He just also wants Ukraine, right?

Lex Fridman

How does the Rolling Stones song go?

#463

Which one?

Lex Fridman

Not "Satisfaction." "Sympathy for the Devil."

#463

That's the one. You got me on that one.

Lex Fridman

No, there are interests where expanding the sphere of influence is one thing on the table. But that can be put aside if you want to maintain the partnerships with these nations. If Ukraine has strong economic partnerships with those nations, then that prevents Russia from invading.

Okay. Well, I would argue that in the 21st century, one of the reasons we have much fewer wars is because of the much more robust tools here on the geopolitical stage. One of them is that we're just much more interconnected economically, globally interconnected, and that is always a present pressure on the world to keep peace.

There's a lot of money to be made from peace. There's also a lot of money to be made from war. There's a lot of interest and tension, and I'm just presenting one of the tools that a leader should be using.

The alternative is military force. That is an interesting one, sometimes a useful one, but unfortunately it has its downsides also. After 3 years of war and the hundreds of thousands dead, you have to start wondering what are the options on the table.

#463

I agree. I'm obviously for economic cooperation, but my only caveat is not to think that that is something which is of ultimate interest, or even at the top of the list of interests, of despots, tyrants, and extremists who want something else.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. But can you read the mind of Vladimir Putin?

#463

No.

Lex Fridman

A lot of the ideas I hear about peace are: Putin is bad, victory must be achieved, and NATO membership is required. You have to come to the table to end the killing and have different ideas about how to have a nonzero chance of peace.

It seems to me that the likeliest option—not the only option—is a lot of strong economic partnerships. There are, of course, other radical options. There’s Russia joining NATO, or something like this. There’s flirting with World War III, essentially giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine, or something like this.

There’s crazy stuff: a totally new military alliance with France, Britain, Germany, other European nations, and Ukraine, or some weird network of military power that threatens Russia in some way. Or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between India, China, and Ukraine—something like this. Just some really out-there ideas.

I think that’s how the world finds a balance and realigns itself in interesting ways.

#463

And look, it could be. I hope your idea is right. I think it’s certainly the most peaceful way for this to be resolved. My only caveat, as I say, is to never forget to factor in that people want different things in this world, and some people don’t dream as you dream. I think we’ll talk about that.

Lex Fridman

So, in your new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, that one is easier for me to understand—the story that you’re describing. I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy to leaders of major nations.

#463

Sure. Yeah. I’m not by any means urging you to regard Vladimir Putin as a millenarian madman who cannot be understood in any way. I think he could be negotiated and reasoned with.

Lex Fridman

From your lips to God’s ears. Can you steelman the case for and then against Zelensky as the right leader for Ukraine at this moment? Is he the right person to take it to the point of peace?

#463

We’ll see. If he can, then, of course, he is. He deserves enormous respect for galvanizing his people, for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation at a time of incredible peril, and for playing the international game of getting support for his country.

Sometimes the person who does that—there are many people like that—can be the person who also brings about a peace deal, and sometimes not. I think there’s a degree to which he may have seen too much suffering of the people and the land he loves to be able to sit down at a table with a world leader who did the destruction and be able to compromise on anything. That’s possible.

Lex Fridman

Again, it puts the onus on him, though. It sort of presupposes that Putin doesn’t have the same human instinct in that.

#463

It is extremely hard. I’ve noticed this in a lot of conflicts. It’s extremely hard when outsiders come in—people who haven’t seen what you’ve seen or gone through what you’ve gone through—and say, “You know, it’s time to get around the negotiating table.”

You think, “You didn’t see what I saw. You didn’t go through what I went through. Who are you to tell me?” It goes back to that thing of the visitor from the land of war and the visitor from the land of peace.

The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about getting around negotiating tables, but the visitor from the land of war has seen other things. It’s very hard for somebody who hasn’t seen it to tell the person who has that they should act differently.

The sad thing about humanity is that both the person from the land of peace and the person from the land of war are right.

Lex Fridman

Yes. That’s a struggle. That’s definitely a struggle.

#463

It’s like asking somebody to forgive. I’ve seen that at a lot of the ends of conflicts. People say, “The important thing is that we forgive and move on.” And then the other person says, “Your child didn’t die of shrapnel wounds.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah. I got a lot of heat for my interview with Zelensky. By the way, people privately—the people who messaged me—it was all love and support. Even the people who disagreed with me in Ukraine, soldiers, and so on.

People online are ruthless. They’re misrepresenting me. They’re lying. People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying.

#463

Yeah. Good God, Lex. You’ve discovered a new phenomenon. I’m a real radical intellectual. Nothing misses your eye. You see the truth and you’re unafraid to point it out.

Lex Fridman

No. There’s a degree to which this idea that you need to compromise with the leader of a nation you’re at war with means, to some degree, forgiving their actions. The actual feeling you have is that you want it to be fair.

The definition of fair, when you’ve seen that much suffering, is for him and everybody around him—and maybe even all of the people on the other side—to just die, because you’ve seen too much suffering.

But the other side of that is: yes, there are children who have died, but you’re preventing other children from dying.

Speaker 1

Yes, of course. And so there’s just—you had this kind of way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective, that it’s naive to say to come to the negotiation table. It is, for a person from the land of war.

But the very smart, intelligent, and not-naive person from the land of peace, who is often right in some deep sense about the long arc of history, is also right that it is the right thing to come to the negotiation table to end the more killing.

Lex Fridman

The one thing I would add to that, though, is: don’t forget that it also depends on whether or not there’s a clear shot at winning.

Speaker 1

Sure. If there’s a clear shot at winning—and that’s the most important thing. The most important thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that. It’s simply winning and losing.

If you have a clear shot at winning and you can take it, and you’re near it, then having somebody else come in and saying, “Why not stop just before victory?” is very hard. That’s one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we’re talking about.

Lex Fridman

You know what’s the other big complexity of that? The clear shot at winning is like a man walking through the desert seeing water. It could be. During war, it really is an illusion.

Here’s what happens: the really complicated aspect of negotiation is that, in order to negotiate peace from a place of strength, you have to have victory in sight.

Speaker 1

Yes.

Lex Fridman

The temptation from that position is not to negotiate, but to keep pushing forward to achieve victory. I would say, with the benefit of hindsight—hindsight is 20/20—that this was the failure in 2022, on 2 occasions, to negotiate a ceasefire and peace.

One was in the spring, because Ukraine was in a real position of strength, having fended off the Russian forces around Kyiv. That’s 1. Then, as you mentioned, in the fall of 2022, with Kherson and Kharkiv, they had a lot of military success.

They were in a place of strength, and from that place they decided to keep going because victory was in sight. But that was also an opportunity to make peace. It’s perfectly possible.

Speaker 1

Yes. That’s the hard thing. It’s very hard. It’s all hard. But, again, victory can be won in wars and is often won in wars. You’re right, they can also grind on because nobody has the capability to make a breakthrough.

It’s a case—I mean, the wisdom about civil wars tends to be that they sort of burn out after about 10 years or so, for similar reasons.

Lex Fridman

When you’re in the war, can you actually know that a victory can be won?

Speaker 1

It’s a very good question. Do you mean troops on the battlefield, military leaders, or political leaders?

Lex Fridman

Military and political leaders. It just feels like, as I said, a man in the desert seeing water.

Speaker 1

I think there’s a sense that victory is so close.

Lex Fridman

There are times in a war when you feel like victory is close.

Speaker 1

No, you’re right. And it just slips away.

Lex Fridman

Yes. It’s an interesting insight.

Speaker 1

It’s like the way in which there’s a force in nature: if you amass an army, amassing it will pull you into using it.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. It’s extremely hard to amass an army somewhere and then say, “Let’s go back.”

Speaker 1

Yes, you’re right. It’s one of the many, many interesting aspects of warfare.

Lex Fridman

I think the sad thing about successful wars, at least in the modern day, is that it takes a great military leader, which I would argue Zelensky really was in unifying Ukraine in this fight at the beginning of the war. You have to be that kind of leader.

As you said, after you amass the army and have military success, being able to step back and make peace—those 2 things just don’t often go hand in hand. Again, as a wartime leader, especially one who has seen the suffering firsthand, walking away is tough.

That’s especially combined with the realities of war, where there is probably corruption. There are things—you know, once the war ends, there have to be investigations, because the war wasn’t won. You might not turn out to be, when history looks at it, the good guy, and a leader always wants to be the good guy.

There are just all these psychological complexities. If you look at this whole picture in the basic sense, if you want Ukraine to flourish and you want humanity to flourish, you ask the question: What is the thing I would like to see?

There are so many historical analogies you can give, but surely not rewarding Putin’s actions in any way would be a good way to deter him and other dictators from trying to grab land in the future.

Speaker 1

Yeah, but this is nuanced. It’s probably very good to be the boring person at the party who says, “Dictatorships are bad. Democracies are good.” Many of the ideals of the West—that democracies are better—are better.

Yes, that sounds like Animal Farm, but yes: two legs better. Democracy is better, and invading countries is bad. But World War II is bad too. So after you say something is bad, what's the next step? Because military intervention in a lot of these conflicts will be about deterrence.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. But what's effective deterrence? That's something we're going to have to keep going over for a long time to come. My question is: how can we achieve peace in April, in May? The adults at the table all seem to tell me, "Well, it's a process. It's complicated." It just feels like this is a thing that might go into next winter, and there's still maybe an initial ceasefire, then the ceasefire is broken, and there are more people dying.

Speaker 1

Sure. And it's that mess. It seems like civility and politeness ignores the fact that people are dying every single day.

Lex Fridman

I mean, of course. Almost everybody—not everybody, but almost everyone—would like the killing to stop immediately.

Speaker 1

No, I think that is the boring thing at the party.

Lex Fridman

Yes, but they don't say it often enough.

Speaker 1

Not often. There has to be a frustration.

Lex Fridman

There has to be a frustration. I don't understand why Putin, Zelensky, and Trump can't just meet in a room together without signing anything. Leaders meeting and discussing, and the human connection there—there are so many layers of diplomats. It's the problem I have with the managerial class. They schedule meetings really well, but they don't get things done. I would love it if people got things done, so the soldiers get things done. They are fighting the reality of the war, and then the leaders have the capacity to get things done on the scale of nations and geopolitics.

Speaker 1

No, I agree. I share your frustration about that. At the same time, I share your frustration because I've seen a lot of it with my own eyes. I mean, there was a battalion I was with the other week, and they were hit just after I left their base. You wouldn't believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body. I share your frustration with that.

At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing—and I've seen this elsewhere—is that you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize, and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can't pressurize. That is one of the worrying things that could happen with this.

Simply, America can put extraordinary diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military pressure on Ukraine, and it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it's much easier to pressure Zelensky. That's one of the many things that makes it harder. The temptation to rush for peace—accepting that peace is the most desirable thing, accepting the horrors of war, which we can linger on—but if somebody says, "We've got to get peace today, with the 3 of them around a table," the most likely thing is that the person who can be pressured most easily will be the person who is pressured. As a result, you have an outcome which might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim. That's an extremely ugly and common thing to happen.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. And that's the other boring thing to say—the boring truth that the easy shortcut here is to punish Ukraine, and you just have to not do it. Let's keep being the boring people at the party.

Well, nobody's going to invite us. All right, let's go from one complicated conflict to perhaps an even more complicated one: Israel and Palestine. Can you take me through what happened on October 7th, as you understand it and as you outline at the beginning of the book?

Speaker 1

Well, the book, On Democracies and Death Cults, is a mixture of firsthand reporting and observation, interviews, and a wider reflection—not just on the war that's been going on since October 7th, but on the war that's been going on a lot longer. Also, I suppose, on what for me is one of the overwhelming questions, which I'm sure we'll get to: the reaction in the rest of the world.

Obviously, on the 7th itself, it was a brigade-sized attack on Israel from Gaza. Hamas broke through the security fence and attacked all the softest targets they could. They swiftly overwhelmed things like the observation base in Nahal Oz. They ran through the communities in the south—very peaceful, peace-loving communities of the kibbutzim, as they're called—and murdered, raped, burned, and kidnapped. From their point of view, they also had the great good fortune of coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party, and rampaged through that with RPGs, Kalashnikovs, grenades, hammers, and more.

They got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel, in places like Ofakim and Sderot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well. We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah would do the same thing from the north. Hezbollah joined in the war within 24 hours by starting to fire rockets, again in very large numbers, into northern Israel from southern Lebanon. But the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north, carry out similar massacres, and effectively be able to meet in the middle and gut Israel from the center.

The interesting reason why they didn't coordinate better—I think it will be found out in the future—was that Hamas didn't trust any line of communication with Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were going to do it without being intercepted. The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and trains and arms them, knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn't get close to that. They got worryingly closer than people might have thought they were capable of.

I think from the Israeli side, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most, catastrophic intelligence and military failures since the foundation of the state. I think there are several reasons why. One is a perception problem. What a lot of military commanders and others described to me as "the conception"—the conception that had prevailed in Israel's security and military establishment for some years—was that Hamas was content with being corrupt, governing Gaza, lining their pockets, living in Qatar, and becoming billionaires. The assumption was that, like many other terrorist groups and cults, they would end up becoming just corrupt—not losing their ideology, but with the ideology becoming secondary.

That was the first thing: there was a massive error in the conception in Israel. Then there were the multiple, manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to it. There have already been quite a lot of people held to account for that, and there doubtless will be in the future as well.

The single thing I heard most, and which was most distressing in a way, was the number of people who described to me—people who survived the massacres in the south—how they had said to their children, "Don't worry, the army will be here in minutes," and the army wasn't. In many places, it was many hours until the army got there.

There are reasons for that. Some reasons will be military failings and leadership failings. Other things I discovered were very human failings. I don't want to overstress the failure of the army, because actually certain units got down very fast. There was a unit of Dan who got down to the junction within about 90 minutes of the massacres starting and joined in the fight. Then there were self-starters, extraordinary people whom I write about in the book, who just broke orders, realized the magnitude of what was happening, said, "We're needed in the south," and went and fought very hard for hours—days, in some cases.

But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable. As usually happens in warfare, what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You can see it in hindsight, but you can't see it when you're in it. One of the things that made it very complicated was Hamas coming in, taking uniforms off dead Israelis, wearing them, and coming in with Israeli-style apparatus on them.

There's a Muslim doctor I quote in the book whom I interviewed. He is an Israeli Muslim Arab, and he was going to his shift at the hospital at 6:30 in the morning. The rockets started coming in, because the rockets started first and then came the full invasion. He described to me how he's one of the members of United Hatzalah, which is a first-responder group. They get an alert, and it tells them that a car has crashed nearby. They put on their first-aid kit and so on and go.

He got one of those alerts at one of the junctions and realized there was a car where something had happened, and there were some dead bodies. He stopped and saw these men dressed as soldiers. They started firing at him, and he just thought, "What the hell? What the hell is going on?" They turned out to be Hamas dressed as Israeli soldiers. They used him as a human shield to try to protect themselves from any air assault. In the end, they shot him and left him, and he survived. He's a very, very brave man.

There was a lot of confusion like that. There was a girl whose father I interviewed. She was at the Nova party, and I met him at one of the reunions of the party in the weeks after—the reunions of the survivors and the families. He described how, in the last moments of his daughter's life, she phoned him on her phone, like a lot of people.

He reassured her that the army would get there, and so on. Her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap. She was obviously panicked, and they managed to get into a car and escape the party, but they went to a community where they thought they’d be safe in the south of Israel.

They were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman, and he wasn’t the policeman; he was Hamas dressed as police. She died. She was shot and killed as well. So there was a lot of confusion like that. Hopefully, we’ll find out exactly what went wrong. Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe, but it was a complete catastrophe.

Lex Fridman

Do you have a sense of how such an intelligence failure could have happened? There’s a bit of a temptation to go into conspiracy land because it’s such a giant intelligence failure. It seems that there was some manipulation on the inside for political reasons, or for—

Speaker 1

You don’t need to go into conspiracy land. I think there are people who say that there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were withholding the information. I don’t know. Again, people will find out. There’s an awful lot of politics inside Israel, and it’s hard to know that at this stage.

I think most people, Israeli and not Israeli, including people who are anti-Israel, just believe that the Israeli military, and particularly its intelligence dominance, is so strong that there must have been some kind of conspiracy. Otherwise, how could this have happened? I don’t think you need to go into that.

For instance, some of the young women at the observation base are on the record. I’ve spoken to them myself, and they said that they had been warning, in the weeks running up to the 7th, that they were seeing maneuvers and training by the border, which suggested that Hamas was going to do something like this. They say that they were ignored.

You speak to some of the more senior commanders about that, and they say, “The thing is that this stuff was happening all the time.” So it’s very hard to know at the moment.

Lex Fridman

Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history, and the governing ideology of this group?

Speaker 1

Hamas is, in a way, quite easy to understand because they say what their ambitions are. They say what their beliefs are. They’ve said it from their governing charter onwards. You also have the advantage, in trying to understand Hamas, that they tend to do what they say and act on what they believe.

The primary aim of Hamas is to destroy the state of Israel. They’re not an unusual group. Sadly, the part of it that is hard for some people to understand is that they really do mean what they say, and that they really do mean what they say they want to do.

I give a number of examples in the book, but the most obvious is the case of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who is generally regarded as having orchestrated and arranged the 7th of October. We know a fair amount about him because he was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza.

He was released in the prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier. He was one of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners inside Israel who were released in the swap. Yahya Sinwar, while in prison in Israel, spoke to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his life because Sinwar had a brain tumor.

The dentist identified this and actually sent him to the hospital. The Israelis famously removed the tumor and saved Sinwar’s life. The dentist used to speak to him in prison fairly regularly, and he had related his conversations with Sinwar to, among others, The New York Times.

Sinwar said in one of those conversations, “At the moment, you, Israel, are strong, but one day you’ll be weak, and then I’ll come.” That’s what he did.

Lex Fridman

Is it a hatred of Israel, or is it a hatred of Jews? Is it on the level of nations, or on the level of religion?

Speaker 1

Both. It originates from a religious mindset, but it’s political as well. The Hamas charter—some people think the Hamas charter is of no significance, and I often notice this sleight of hand that people do. Again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier: forget everything other than the most important basic things.

The Hamas charter, among other things, quotes the hadith that the end times will not come until all of the rocks and the trees shout out, “Oh, Muslim, there’s a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.” Hamas is both obviously anti-Israeli and obviously anti-Jewish.

By the way, one of the many painful stories I tell in the book is the fact that so many of the people in the communities that they attacked—it’s not as if there’d be a right community to attack and a wrong community to attack—were communities which deeply, deeply dreamed of the idea of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors.

There’s a woman whose name has become relatively famous since, and certainly famous inside Israel, Vivian Silver, who was a peace activist. She spent every weekend driving Gazan children from the border to Israeli hospitals if they had very rare medical needs that could not be attended to inside Gaza. She spent every weekend doing that and worked for all of the left-wing peacenik organizations in Israel.

For a while after the 7th, her neighbors and others thought that she had been taken captive into Gaza. There was actually a hostage poster for her, and there were appeals by the various peacenik organizations for Hamas to hand her over. But it turned out she’d been burned alive in her home.

This wasn’t discovered for quite a long time because there was so little DNA left of her that it was very hard to identify the remains as being hers. There were a lot of people in the Gaza envelope, as it’s called in Israel—the area around Gaza—who would have been the people who wanted to live peacefully with the Gazans someday.

Among the many pains of the day is that, so overwhelmingly, these were the people that Hamas brought hell to.

Lex Fridman

Can you steelman the case that Israel went too far?

#463

The case that critics of Israel started making very early on was the claim that Israel must act proportionately in response. I think I first heard it on about the 8th of October, before Israel had done anything in response.

I have a critique of this, which is that there is such a thing as proportionality in warfare. At the same time, Israel is always accused of acting disproportionately. The proportionality that the rest, or much of the rest, of the world seems to think Israel should express in warfare is to have an equal level of suffering or killing on both sides.

I don’t think there’s any law of war that says that if you kill 1,200 people and kidnap another 250, the other side is allowed to do the same back. But that’s what a lot of people think. Then, when they see the death toll escalating on the Gazan side, they say Israel has acted disproportionately and has overreacted.

That one is tricky because it’s my belief that, again, this is a basic thing but it has to be stated: 9 million citizens of Israel, if you extrapolate that out to what the 7th of October would have meant in American terms, would mean a day on which, if the attack had happened in America, 44,000 Americans were killed in 1 day and 10,000 American citizens were taken hostage.

Nobody can tell me that if such an atrocity occurred, America would not do whatever it needed to destroy the groups that had done that and to retrieve the hostages who had been taken.

Lex Fridman

So just on that point, I agree with you 100%. America would hit hard back, and I think a lot of Americans would feel justified in that. But it’s also possible that the military-industrial complex and the politicians would do something like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means extending far beyond hitting back and actually doing something destructive to everybody, including America financially, the flourishing of America, the flourishing of humanity broadly, the region, stability, and the war on terrorism, if that’s a real thing.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan did not necessarily succeed in defeating terrorism or even making progress. It probably made more terrorists than not. So there’s a justified feeling of hitting back and going after somebody like Bin Laden in the case of 9/11. Then there’s the actual implementation.

It seems like the implementation can sometimes, unintendedly, have consequences that are bordering on war crimes, if not downright war crimes. This is a general statement, and now we’ll look at Israel, where things are small and everything is very compact. There are a lot of complexities that are well studied and that we’ve talked about extensively.

#463

The 2 stated aims of the Israelis after the 7th were to get the hostages back and to destroy Hamas. Many people said that you could do one, but not both. I actually think they’ve gone a long way toward doing both.

By no means everything. There are still hostages being held in Gaza as we speak, including a young American, and Hamas is not completely destroyed. It is very significantly degraded, but it is not completely destroyed. But those were the 2 aims.

I believe that—I mean, I've seen as much of the war as any outside observer. I don't know; there are some exceptions, maybe. But I think I can say with considerable certainty what the Israelis have and haven't done.

There were various operations at the beginning and various plans that didn't happen, like storming straight in and getting as many hostages as possible out of the Shifa complex, which is called a hospital but is also, at the very least, the Hamas command headquarters. There was a plan to maybe go and do that fast, but it was avoided because of the number of deaths on all sides that would likely have happened.

The Israelis did actually hold back at the beginning. There was a period of making sure that when they went into Gaza, they didn't do so in any way blind. Gaza is a very built-up area and, population-wise, is very densely populated.

Something which, by the way, the people who frivolously claim that Israel has been committing genocide never take account of is the fact that the Gazan population has boomed since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. It's almost doubled.

But it's a densely populated area, and it's an incredibly difficult place for the theater of war because of one thing in particular, which goes back a bit to our conversation earlier. This is a much more extreme example. I mean, Hamas really doesn't play by the rules.

In fact, they use the rules of war, the laws of war, completely to their own advantage. It has to be reiterated: You are not meant to disguise your army as civilians. You're not meant to use places of care, like hospitals, as bases for your military operations. You're not meant to use schools and places of worship as operating centers of war. Hamas does all of these things and has always done so.

It does so for the very obvious reason that, for them, the whole thing is a 2-for-1 offer. You get to operate everywhere, and if the Israelis operate anywhere, you claim that this is a war crime because, how could they attack this group of civilians? These people are dressed as civilians; these people are merely fighting from a mosque, and so on.

That's why everybody who's been to Gaza, who's seen the fighting, knows the same thing: This is incredibly difficult warfare of a kind that American troops have seen in the last 20 years in Fallujah and elsewhere. Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga, saw it when they were fighting as our frontline troops in the war against ISIS—similar house-to-house fighting, but by no means with the same entrenched bases.

Again, it can't be stressed enough that Hamas has used the years since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 to build this vast underground tunnel network. It's obvious, but it has to be remembered: When they build their tunnels—and I quote one of the Hamas leaders in the book saying this in an interview—they do so in order for the tunnels to be used by Hamas to store their weaponry, secure their fighters, and hold hostages.

They do not build their underground tunnel networks for the safety of Gazans and civilians avoiding aerial bombardment. The difference in the world, it seems to me, is between a country that builds bomb shelters for its citizens and a government that builds bomb shelters for its bombs.

Lex Fridman

Can you discuss the flow of money here? How does Hamas—how does the Hamas leadership—use the money? You started to talk about the tunnels, but how much corruption is there? Can you just lay it all out? I think that's an important part of the picture here.

#463

It's totally corrupt. Every Hamas leader who's now dead died a billionaire—with a B, with a B. To say that they used Gaza's resources, or the resources that came into Gaza, for their own ends is to vastly understate matters.

Hamas used everything that came in to build the infrastructure of terror that allowed them to carry out October 7 and everything since. They militarized the whole of Gaza. By the estimations of troops I've been with there, every 2nd or 3rd house had weaponry stashed there: bombs, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, rockets, tunnel entrances. The network that they had embedded all these years was total.

One of the many tragedies of this is that, whatever your reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, it was an opportunity for Gaza to become something else. It could have become a thriving state. It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It's just that Hamas, like the PLO before them, decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create a Palestinian state.

And that is to the great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza, to put it at its mildest.

Lex Fridman

So, just to outline here: The leadership of Hamas is stealing the money that gets sent by Qatar, by everybody. They're putting it in their pockets, and that's paid for by the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as well.

#463

Yes. Yeah. But I mean, it's not just about stealing the money. It's about using the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor. Those are 2 things, but the corruption is a signal from an economic perspective. It's also a signal of deep moral corruption, because they're screwing over the Palestinian people.

Lex Fridman

Yes. A cynicism. Yeah. Okay. And then with the money they do spend on the Palestinian cause, they're not doing that to build up Gaza. They're doing it to strengthen the militaristic capabilities—

#463

Yes, of the terrorist organization of Hamas.

Lex Fridman

Hamas has said that the people of Gaza have some significant responsibility for the actions of Hamas because they've elected them. You can correct me on this.

#463

They elected them. The what-ifs are endless, but it was very unwise of the George W. Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza after 2005. Hamas was elected, and then, in 2007, they killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main challenger, Fatah. They killed them, threw them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes through Gaza, and from that point they had total control.

This is difficult because you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way justifying collective punishment if you talk about this. But it should be borne in mind that Hamas had effectively 18 years to run Gaza, and that's the time it takes from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education.

In 18 years, they could have presided over and produced a generation of young Gazans who were productive—productive for their people, for their society, for their neighbors, and for the rest of the world. They didn't. They spent 18 years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into a genocidal hatred, which obviously was most dangerous to the Israelis, but was also obviously disastrous for the people of Gaza.

There is just—if you speak to soldiers who were there in 2014, when Hamas started a war again, one of a set of rounds of war since 2005, you hear the same thing. If you speak to the soldiers who were there in 2014, going house to house, and who were also involved in the wars since 2003, they all say the same thing: the marked radicalization of the Gazan population and the marked increase in just—I mean, it's so banal in a way to even cite it, but the number of copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and so on.

There were so many what-ifs and other paths that Hamas could have taken, but that was the one they took. They decided to use their time in power to build up their infrastructure, radicalize their population, and encourage them to believe that they could destroy the state of Israel. On October 7, they gave it their best shot.

By the way, there is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza. Collective punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas—carpet bombing, this sort of thing. This is simply not what the IAF and the IDF have done since October 7.

They have been fighting a house-to-house war against this terrorist group. They do conduct aerial strikes. Gaza is very badly beaten up as a result. The buildings—I mean, the infrastructure that existed—there aren't many buildings standing, but this is not the result of just wild and imprecise bombing by the Israelis. It has been extremely concerted and extremely difficult.

When people say, "This must be collective punishment," I think that the people who say that are simultaneously saying something that isn't true. There is not a hostage who has come out—President Trump made this point recently—who I've spoken with who found any Gazan Palestinian who expressed even the slightest human kindness toward them.

If you look at the footage from October 7 that Hamas recorded themselves, of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on, you will notice that the trucks and motorbikes are not stopped by horrified Gazan civilians saying, "Why have you got this Israeli girl whose tendons you've cut, and why are you bringing her here?" It's all celebration. It's all celebration.

There are also a couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses where they were being held and were immediately returned by the citizens they met.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, the celebration—I do wonder what percentage of the population they represent—but there’s something really dark. There are several ways to explain the celebration. It could be that there’s a deep indoctrination where you do legitimately hate Jews. There could also be a place of deep desperation, and it’s a kind of relief that you have to convince yourself that you’re on the side of fighting for freedom in order to justify to yourself that this is the right way to fight out of desperation, out of extremely harsh conditions.

The way we’re speaking about this, with the celebration, it’s very easy to project a kind of evil onto the populace that I’m just very hesitant to project, especially on the general populace.

#463

You don’t have to project it onto them. You can just listen to their own words. I’m sure you’ve heard one of the many audio recordings from that morning. I’m sure you’ve heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of Israel and calls back home. Have you heard that?

Lex Fridman

Yes, I’ve heard it.

#463

I quoted it in the first chapter of the book. He calls back home and says to his father, who picks up—it’s on WhatsApp, I think. He’s on the phone, saying, “Turn on WhatsApp because I can show you.” He says, “I’ve killed 10 Jews with my own hands. Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews.”

His father is saying, “Where are you? Where are you?”

He says, “I want to show you, Dad. I want to show you. I’ve killed Jews with my own hands. Your son has killed 10 Jews. Put Mother on the phone.” Mother comes on the phone. The brother comes on the phone. This is one of many stories from that day that suggest something which I would say is not just indoctrination, but evil.

Lex Fridman

First of all, those phone calls are uniquely horrific. But I’ve also heard recordings of phone calls made by Ukrainian soldiers to their parents and Russian soldiers to their parents. They have not been as intense or as horrific, but they have a similar nature. There is an aspect of war where you dehumanize the other side in order to fight that war.

So we have to remember that that element is going to be there in a time of war, in a time of desperation. It would be a strange type of simple pride in war to go into an 80-year-old woman’s house and kill her on her floor, then film her dead body and send it around to all of that woman’s friends on her phone or Instagram account.

You may have heard different things from me, but I would be surprised if even the most vociferous Russian soldiers were phoning back home to Moscow and saying, “Mom, you won’t believe my luck. I managed to rape and kill this 80-year-old woman.” That’s quite unusual, even in warfare. That’s one of the things about Hamas, and what I describe as the death-cult types, that makes them different from other people.

But that’s the channeling of evil and hatred and anger in the human spirit. That doesn’t make that person evil.

#463

No, I disagree. You commit that once, and I think that there is such a force as evil in the world. I think it can descend and it can be used. It’s very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this, but of everything I’ve seen, there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the 7th that cannot be described as anything other than evil.

The things that happened at the Nova Festival were especially appalling. It was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because it’s a sort of party which people like you and I—or at least you and I when we were younger—might have been at. Everyone knows the world of an all-night dance party, a rave in the desert, to commune with nature and the universe, to take some psychedelics, and to expand your consciousness and your love.

The fact that people doing that at 6:30 in the morning then encountered people coming into the party on trucks and military vehicles, massacring them and raping them—I give examples of the firsthand accounts of people who survived—but it’s beyond belief, almost more than anything else I’ve covered in war.

An army facing another army is one thing. A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing. But a terrorist group facing a group of young people at a dance, unarmed, and doing what they did is pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere.

Lex Fridman

So, that stated, can you empathize with the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, with the destruction that resulted as a response?

#463

Yes. What has happened in response is terrible—terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there in the first couple of days of the ground invasion, when the citizens of Gaza were coming south. I was in the middle of the strip, and the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages from being taken farther south into Gaza and to try to stop the leadership from making it south.

It didn’t really work because they had already gotten a lot of the hostages south. It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north, so as not to be dragged all the way in. In the end, they were dragged all the way in anyway.

Watching the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor—you know, everyone was being checked for bombs and suicide vests, particularly young men of military age—you look at this tide of human misery and think, “This is terrible.” But this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been misgoverning the place where they lived.

Of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this. At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger that they had come to this point because they had elected a terror group to run their territory.

One of the things, obviously, is that a lot of people like to say—and it’s true, of course—that this didn’t all start on October 7th. Absolutely true. This particular round, this particularly intense round of war, started on October 7th. Without doubt, Hamas did not have to attack on October 7th. It wasn’t like they were forced to liberate themselves, as some of the defenders of Hamas claim.

The conflict, of course, goes back a lot earlier. But you will always have to contend with the fact that there is one central issue in the paradigm of that conflict—what used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict and has now become, interestingly, rebranded as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There is one absolutely essential issue to this which cannot be forgotten: Do the Palestinians want a state, or do they want to destroy the Jewish state? If they want to destroy the Jewish state, as they’ve tried many times, it’s a disaster for them. It’s a total disaster for them.

If they want to create their own state, they’ve already had several very good shots at it, one of which is Gaza post-2005. But they’ve never shown in their leadership a desire to live with a Jewish state, and that’s a catastrophe for the Palestinians.

Lex Fridman

Can you steelman the case of the lived experience of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices that describe the Gaza situation as an occupation? The West Bank, too, and in the case of Gaza, an open-air prison.

#463

To take them in order, there’s nothing about Gaza that was an open-air prison. They had the ability to trade. They had the ability to move in and out in increasing numbers. Egypt wasn’t so keen on allowing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, and still isn’t.

At the time of October 7th, one of the things the international community was pushing for was for more Palestinians to come into Israel every day through the crossings and work in Israel, because they can make a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza. This normalization route was slowly being attempted and was being pushed on Israel by the international community, a little bit too fast for Israel’s comfort, but it was happening.

Lex Fridman

Can you clarify the dream—the normalization relationship between Gaza and Israel—is gone?

#463

There will be—yeah, no normalization. Not after that. One of the reasons is the number of people I’ve spoken with who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians, worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to come from Gaza in order to work in Israel. These were their brothers and sisters, and so on and so forth.

One of the reasons why the massacres of the 7th were so successful in the kibbutzim, the communities in the south, was because of the number of terrorists who came in with detailed, house-to-house maps of those communities. I spoke with one man whose community had a security officer, a chief, and Hamas came in. They knew to go and kill him and his family first, and then they knew which families to target. I’ve seen the maps myself. They came in with incredibly accurate information about these communities.

Lex Fridman

How did they have them?

#463

Because they were given to them by the brothers, by the workers, by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out. So there is nobody who will trust that ever again.

Lex Fridman

There are a lot of Palestinians who have lived and flourished inside Israel. What are they saying? What are they feeling? And what are the Israelis feeling about them? Is there still camaraderie to some degree, or is it completely destroyed?

#463

My observation at the beginning was that everyone was extremely wary.

If you’ve worked beside somebody and then found out they sold out your family, you will never trust them again. In a small country like Israel, the word of that happening goes out very fast. At the very beginning, there was intense fear about that, including among the 20% or so of the population who are Arab Israelis.

I actually think one of the few positive news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has, by and large, held. There hasn’t been an intifada. One of the reasons why there hasn’t been more terrorist activity in the West Bank—Judea and Samaria—is because the Israelis have been very careful, along with the Palestinian Authority to some extent cooperating, to keep that down. There wasn’t a full war on 3 fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening.

I think that coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some terrible examples, far too regular, but not as regular as they could have been, of Muslim Arab Israelis carrying out acts of terror in sympathy with Hamas. I was in the middle of one such attack myself late last year, in a town called Hadera. Those things have happened, but that particular catastrophe has not occurred.

Lex Fridman

Can we talk about Benjamin Netanyahu? For a lot of people who speak of evil, they refer to him as evil on the spectrum between good and evil as a leader. Where does Netanyahu fall?

#463

Well, he’s certainly not evil. It’s interesting if people looking at this conflict were reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister. It would be telling, I would say.

Lex Fridman

Can we linger on that point? There is a point you’ve made multiple times, which is that we’re more eager to criticize, and maybe even overexaggerate the criticism of, democratically elected leaders.

#463

Yes, it’s a dark, weird quality of discourse at aforementioned parties, isn’t it? Not to be flippant for a moment, but it’s a little bit like: Who do you show your worst sides to? The people you love. My intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me, because if I expressed it to absolutely everybody I met at a party or in a social setting, it would be hard. There’s a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it.

Something similar happens in international politics. You pressure the people who will listen. One of the things you hear a lot in recent years is people—ignorami in governments in places like Britain—saying, “We need to put more pressure on the Israelis to do X.” You go, well, in part that’s because they will listen. If you say, “We need to put more pressure on the ayatollah in Iran to persuade them that Hamas are really bad and they shouldn’t be doing this,” what the hell do you think they’re going to do? They’re going to listen? They’re going to give a damn? You’re talking about totally different worlds. It’s not just a different language; it’s a different world.

That happens in Israel as well. I mentioned it earlier, but it happened when the Hostage Families Forum came about. I spent a lot of time there and got to know a lot of the families, and they’re remarkable. One of the things you did notice from them was that a lot of them protest outside Netanyahu’s house. They clang pots and blow horns to make sure he can never sleep. They put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied hands, and so on.

I have as much sympathy as you can for these families. The plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year, a day, or an hour is intolerable. But there’s a reason why the families protested Netanyahu, and that’s because Sinwar didn’t care. That wouldn’t work if you said, “Do you understand my plight? I’m a Jewish mother and my daughter is sitting in a tunnel.” Do you think Sinwar and the heads of Hamas care? Do you think the leaders in Qatar who host them care? The Qatari emir’s mother praised Sinwar when he was killed. You couldn’t talk that language to these people.

But you can talk that language to the elected prime minister of Israel, because, first of all, he’s somebody who might listen. Your pressure could pressure him. Secondly, he’s simply the only person you can pressure. There’s no one else. Hamas doesn’t care. Hezbollah doesn’t care. The Iranian revolutionary government doesn’t care.

Lex Fridman

Let’s just say once again the obvious thing: While it is possible to discuss Hamas soldiers as freedom fighters, I’m not one of the folks that can take that perspective. It’s a tough one to take. I don’t see how you can call them freedom fighters.

So this goes to the man from the land of peace and the man from the land of war. There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza. If you fully load that into your brain in a real way—not using the words of good and evil, but in a very deep human sense—from that place of desperation, when your home and your family are destroyed, it doesn’t matter why. It doesn’t matter if there’s evil all around you that caused it. The facts are the facts. From that place, somebody who’s fighting for you can feel like a freedom fighter.

I think it should be called out that, yes, it can feel that way from the lived experience, but Hamas is very clearly—since we’re talking about Netanyahu—evil. You can still, in that context, discuss the degree to which Netanyahu is the right leader for this moment and whether he goes too far, whether he’s too politically selfish in the decisions he makes, whether he’s too much of a warmonger, whether he’s utilizing the war for his own political gains, and whether he’s not caring about the death of civilians in Gaza, for example, but caring more about maintaining his own political power.

That’s a perspective that I could steelman. That’s a perspective worth discussing, and that’s a perspective many in Israel hold when they criticize Netanyahu. He’s increasingly less and less popular.

#463

That’s wrong. Polls last month, when he was in Washington, showed him at an all-time high.

Lex Fridman

You know, but you were saying, “I make my own poll, and according to my poll, I’m the greatest. I’m the nicest and the coolest person in the world. One hundred percent of people agree.”

#463

I didn’t mean to laugh that much.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, you laughed a little too much. It’s more than the joke. Yeah, but you were saying—I mean, the… Yeah. Okay. Let’s steelman the criticism of Netanyahu. Can you then steelman the case for him that he’s the right leader at this moment?

#463

The most devastating thing that anyone could hold against Netanyahu is that October 7 happened on his watch. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Golda Meir, who was a very distinguished prime minister of Israel and a remarkable woman, effectively took the political hit for the invasion by Israel’s Arab neighbors happening on her watch. I would have thought that most fair-minded critics of Netanyahu inside Israel and outside it would always hold that against him.

One of the criticisms you hear a lot is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before October 7 because of the judicial reforms. I think there’s a strong case for judicial reforms in Israel, but it’s a niche Israeli governance issue, which we don’t have to get into. The point is that Netanyahu and his government were pushing these reforms through, and they were very divisive. On the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities, every weekend there were protests, and the police were tired because they’d spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned raucous, if not violent—though they were sometimes violent.

You could say, well, if you see that something is dividing your country this much, mightn’t you stop? There is a claim by some people that one of the things that prompted October 7 was that Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society. They saw the Israeli population, a significant chunk of it, every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services, and so on, and thought, “Good. Now’s the time.”

In other words, what I quoted Sinwar as saying earlier, when he was in prison in Israel, was, “One day you’ll be weak, and then I’ll strike.” Maybe that is one of the things that Sinwar thought: Israel was very weak. It had been divided, and therefore the time to strike had come. There’s an argument against that, which is that October 7 was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began.

You can look at it several ways, but you could use that. You could say, “Look, if your nation was divided, don’t push through any more of that.” There are lots of things like that. You could say that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception of October 7. There were critics of his, including critics who were in the war cabinet, who thought that he was too focused on Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah. Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. There are those and many other criticisms that people make of him.

I’ve interviewed, I think, every political leader in Israel, from right to left, pretty much. I have to say, I don’t think there’s any of them who wouldn’t have responded similarly to October 7 in the way he has.

Lex Fridman

Okay, so that’s inside Israel. Outside of Israel, despite what you said, he is one of the most hated people in the world, just the raw quantity of it.

#463

He’s hated by a lot of people, but there are a lot of psychological effects that might explain that.

Lex Fridman

I mean, it's sort of strange to ask: If there is a widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of 8 to 9 million people, that might mean something more than a hatred of the military actions and the policies of 1 person.

Speaker 1

Yeah. That might mean something more than a hatred of the military actions and the policies of 1 person. There are an awful lot of people to hate in the world. There are a lot of wars in the world. It's always of interest to me, and obviously some of the things I go into in On Democracies and Death Cults, is this question of why this is so galvanizing for so many people. I think that is a very, very interesting question.

By the way, let me do a quick addendum to that. You can notice something else when people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy in the last 30 years or so. It's very interesting. There's a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfowitz.

Lex Fridman

Yeah.

Speaker 1

And they will say, "Well, you know, Wolfowitz—you mean the deputy undersecretary of defense under George W. Bush? You think he guided everything? Why would that be, other than the fact that his name, as Mark Steyn once said, starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish?" I mean, that's a good one.

So, I do think there are very deep things at play.

Lex Fridman

It's a good line, you know.

Speaker 1

There are very deep things at play. Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does, is a kind of devil for a lot of people. You have to say, well, why is that?

Of course, some people will say, "Well, that's because of his terrible hawkishness and his actions," and so on and so forth. The case for Netanyahu is that he sees it as his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people, and that that's his life's mission. On that basis, I think he's been, by any measure, a historic leader. He has warned the world about the threat from the mullahs in Tehran. He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism across the region—across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

After 7 October, he has held together a very, very difficult set of challenges to keep international pressure at a tolerable level, to do all sorts of things, but most importantly to oversee the 2 war aims that he set out at the beginning.

I thought, like a lot of people, when I heard about the hostages, my immediate instinct was, "They're all dead. They're all going to be dead. We'll never see them again." That was the attitude of a lot of Israelis. Although there are still hostages being held, and as I've always said, the war could end tomorrow if they were handed back—or at least the beginning of the end of the war could begin tomorrow if they were handed back—nevertheless, because of the actions of not just Netanyahu but the Israeli government, most of the hostages have been returned. I did not expect this to happen.

Hamas has not been completely destroyed, but it has been very, very significantly degraded. It depends on the definition of what a total destruction of Hamas would look like, but they are nowhere near the capability they had in November 2023. Their leadership has almost all been killed. The second tier of leadership is almost all gone. This is a just response to what Hamas did.

Netanyahu's reputation in Israel was at a low point early on because of what had happened. But, as I say in the final chapter of the book, General Slim had this phrase: "From defeat into victory." Israel isn't at victory yet in this conflict.

But in September last year, there were a set of operational successes so extraordinary that every day's news seemed to contain another one. I remember when, after the Assad regime fell, the Israeli Air Force took out the entirety of the Syrian Air Force in 1 day because they didn't want it falling into the hands of the new jihadist administration in Syria. It was story number 4 on the BBC News website.

The leadership of Hezbollah was gone. The second and third tiers of Hezbollah were gone or wounded. Iran's Rolls-Royce was destroyed. These are very, very significant military achievements, and in my mind are a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies to destroy the Jewish state.

Would another Israeli leader have been able to hold firm as Netanyahu has? I don't know. But I do know that any of them would have done something similar, or would have tried to do something similar, because there's no country on Earth, no democracy on Earth, which could possibly not respond to such an atrocity.

To the underlying point you made—why do so many people want to call him evil?—the implication is that it's not just a hatred of Israel. There's an ocean of hatred for the Jews.

Lex Fridman

Yes. Why is there so much hatred for Jews in the world?

Speaker 1

I would say there's 1 reason in particular. It's a stupid and gullible person's easy answer. Why do certain things happen in the world? What is our explanation of chance or unfairness or any number of things? The easiest, stupidest person's explanation is, "There's a small group of people doing it."

Lex Fridman

Let's not say "stupidest," because there's something in the human mind that craves a nice, clean theory of everything, right? Something that explains all the problems. It's not just stupid. Let me rephrase: lowest-grade, right? Because I have that desire too, to simplify everything.

Speaker 1

Like, be a bit antisemitic?

Lex Fridman

What?

Speaker 1

We've all been a bit antisemitic here and there. Just get a few vodkas.

Lex Fridman

I mean, no. Maybe as a mathematician, it's like finding a simple explanation for everything, right?

Speaker 1

Actually, it's nice. Historians do this.

Lex Fridman

Absolutely. I agree. Analyzing why the Roman Empire collapsed, it's so nice to have 1 explanation, especially if it's a counterintuitive explanation. It's 1 of the favorite go-tos, right? An explanation for all the problems in the world. It's the lowest-resolution analysis imaginable. Why is there traffic? Why did my wife leave me? Why was my wife cheating on me? Why did I lose my job? Why did I not get the job?

Speaker 1

So, even on the personal level—

Lex Fridman

Oh, especially on the personal level. Why did I not get everything? Somebody must have held me back.

Speaker 1

Yeah. And it's just that hatred of Jews has been such a popular go-to throughout history. You always return to the hits, I guess.

Lex Fridman

What is special about the Jews as a group that people love to hate? Is it just because it's a small number of people?

Speaker 1

I think several things. They are successful, they are small, and, without by any means saying this is a general rule, disproportionately highly accomplished in certain fields at certain times. "Prominent" is a word I would use—prominent slightly beyond their numbers in certain places. It's not a full explanation.

There are all sorts of historic reasons why Jews were involved in banking, but there are lots of historic reasons why the Scottish people—my own—were involved in banking. To this day, you don't find many people who blame all international finance problems on the Scots. So, there are just easy grooves for people to fall into, it seems to me.

We should also mention banking. For some reason, money is a thing that people go to. But Jews have been disproportionately successful in the sciences, engineering, mathematics, the arts, and so on. A sensible person would try to work out why that is and see what is replicable.

I don't want to use the word "stupid" again.

Lex Fridman

Now, a different type of person—I'm triggered already.

Speaker 1

A different type of person would look at that and say, "That must mean they took something from me." That's the most zero-sum game there is.

It's an endlessly fascinating subject because it seems to me that antisemitism is almost certainly a sort of ineradicable temptation of the human spirit at its ugliest and cheapest. But because it's back in our day, it bears some analysis again.

I would say 2 things about it. 1 is, as I and others have said many times in the past, 1 of the fascinating things about antisemitism is that it can cover everything at once. Jews get hated for being rich and for being poor, both for being the Rothschilds and for being Eastern European Jews escaping the pogroms. They can be hated for being religious and for being antireligious, and for producing Marxism, for instance—hated for religiosity and secularism.

They can be hated, most recently, for not having a state and therefore being ruthless cosmopolitans, and also hated for having a state. That makes it something very unusual in the history of human bigotry, bias, and ugliness.

But the real thing is that 1 of my great heroes, Vasily Grossman, says in Life and Fate almost everything that is worth saying about antisemitism. It's Grossman's genius that he could say in 3 to 4 pages what most people couldn't say in an entire life, even after a life of study.

There's this passage in Life and Fate that I quote in my book which bowled me over when I read it some years ago. He says, you know, the interesting thing about antisemitism is that you can meet it everywhere—in the Academy of Sciences and in the games that children play in the yard.

Grossman's great insight is that everywhere it tells you not about the Jews but about the person making the claim. The most important gift he gives in his analysis is when he describes it as a mirror to the person who is making the claims, culminating in this phrase I've been trying to make popular: He says, "Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I'll tell you what you're guilty of."

It's a searingly brilliant insight. The Iranian revolutionary government accuses Israel of being a colonial power.

The Iranian revolutionary government has been colonizing the Middle East throughout our lifetimes. The Turkish government accuses the Jewish state of being guilty of occupation. Do you know Northern Cyprus? The Turks have been occupying half of Cyprus since the 1970s. Cyprus is an EU member state, and Turkey is in NATO.

You can do this on and on. The people who accuse the Jewish state, like the people who accuse Jews of something, are almost without fail guilty of the thing they're accusing them of. Look at the supporters of Hamas and Hamas itself. One of the things they say is that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate killing. Hamas, hello. What were you doing on October 7?

You see, there are these crazy people online who repeatedly claim that, for some reason, Israeli soldiers will rape Palestinians when they meet them, whether in a prison, on the battlefield, or in a hospital. It erupts occasionally. These people go around saying, “Oh my God, the IDF are rapists.”

Excuse me. You're the ones who spent the years after 2016 saying, “Believe all women.” Then, from October 7, you said, “Believe all women except for Jewish women who say they've been raped or seen their friends raped.” Then you say, “Aha, the Jews are rapists.” You've been carrying water for rapists and then go and accuse the Jews of rape. I mean, it just works. Every way you do it, it works.

I do think the thing of psychological projection in the case of Israel is wild. It is wild. By the way, there's an interesting thing on this that I try to get into in the book, which is: Why did so much of the world respond the way it did?

We're sitting in New York. There was not 1 protest against Hamas in New York after October 7. The “Believe All Women” crowd didn't come out against Hamas's rapes. The Black Lives Matter movement did not turn their attention to the killing of Israeli children or anything. Nobody did it. Nobody did it.

The 1 thing that did happen very prominently was that people came out to attack the people who'd been attacked. As I say in the opening of the book, I saw that myself down the road from here in Times Square on October 8. October 8—the protests are in Times Square against Israel, justifying the attacks that were still going on.

This deserves deep self-examination on behalf of people in the West who've seen this movement overwhelm parts of our society. Degraded parts, but parts—bits of the universities and so on. I think there's an explanation for it, by the way, which again goes back to that issue of projection.

When you and I last talked on camera, we were talking about my last book, The War on the West. I remember saying to you there that one of the things I was talking about in that book was the deeply, wildly biased, unfair, and inaccurate estimation of the Western past, whereby America's original sin had to be identified, and the original sin is slavery.

So America has an original sin. Does Ghana have an original sin? No one knows. No one really would think it polite to point 1 out. You go on and on with these things that I identified in The War on the West: these sins of the West.

In recent years, they have been reduced to the claim that countries like the 1 we're sitting in are guilty of what? Colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, genocide, and a couple of others you can throw in.

One of the things I remember saying to you when we spoke about that was that 1 of the deep problems of setting up that system of thought—pseudothought, nonthought, would-be thought—is that there's nothing you can do about it. Even if it was true, there's nothing you can do about it.

If it turned out that your ancestors in the 18th century once owned a slave, what are you going to do? There's no mechanism to forgive or be forgiven, because you didn't do it and there's no 1 alive who could accept the apology. I remember setting it up there in The War on the West as this very, very risky, dangerous, unforgiving thing that had been set up about our societies.

Since October 7, there has been an answer for a certain type of person, which is: “I am from a society where I have been told I am guilty of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and more. I've been told all of these things. I have been put in an un-get-out-of-able situation of moral burden that can never be relieved, because I can't ask anyone's forgiveness and nobody can forgive me.

“But here's a country which I can accuse of all of these things in the here and now, load my energies, my guilt, and my burdens onto Israel, and what's more, I might be able to end it. By doing so, I would relieve myself.”

In other words, I tweak Grossman with the people in America and elsewhere who've fallen into this trap. I tweak him by saying, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I'll tell you what you've been told you're guilty of.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah, it's an interesting kind of projection. Just to observe some of the sociological phenomena here on top of all this, it does seem that hatred of Jews gets a lot of engagement online. I watch it like a curiosity, like I'm an alien observing Earth. Is this dangerous to you, or is it just a bunch of trolls and grifters, let's say, cosplaying as Nazis?

Speaker 1

It could be both—fun to trigger the libs. It could be all of those things. I think it is, and a lot more.

Taboos can be fun to break, I suppose. There are some people online who have grown up knowing that, since the Holocaust, antisemitism was taboo, and they've run out of taboos. It goes back to what we were saying earlier: they've sort of run out of them. They've got bored of that—“Holocaust, schmocaust,” they'd say. “I heard enough about that.” Maybe those people have gone off in a direction as a result.

But I don't think that's the main thing. I think that's a detail compared to the real thing. The real thing is that antisemitism is back, and there is a certain type of person who's loving it.

Lex Fridman

Is it really back?

Speaker 1

Well, it never goes away. It's just that since the 7th, I think it's had a great resurgence. This isn't to say that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. No, it doesn't.

But as I have often said, if you don't ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims in Syria, any interest in the genocide in Sudan, or the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, but on October 8 you're on the street with a placard attacking Israel, I'm sorry, you're an antisemite for sure. You may not know you are, but that's what's motivating you.

Lex Fridman

It gets a lot of engagement. I watch it.

Speaker 1

It does. I watch it. But it's 1 of several things you can always see get huge engagement. It's like if you say that there's a massive pedophile ring run by prominent politicians. It might be total horseshit—likely it is—but it'll also get a hell of a lot of engagement.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, but that's still—the pedophile ring, like Epstein Island, that kind of stuff, which is very interesting. It's like, “Great. All right, cool. Let's get behind that conspiracy.” But the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews, is still the greatest hit.

Speaker 1

It is. You see it with some of the people who've made minor celebrities of themselves with a made-up version of history, with a smattering of this and a little bit of that, and then the “just asking questions” and “I'm not saying, but...” There are certain rhetorical sleights of hand that have helped this along.

As I said earlier, it's just the lowest-grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking for a pattern and looking for meaning. I can give you 1 quick example of why, in the case of Israel, this is so extraordinary: the number of otherwise semi-intelligent people who will tell you that the problem is simply that the Israelis need to give the Palestinians another state, and that if they do, it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world.

Irrespective of the fact that the Palestinians have been offered several states, the claim that this particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be seen on its face to be preposterous. There is no reason why, if the Palestinians got another state, either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—there is any reason why we should expect the economy of Yemen to boom. It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women or anything else.

The most likely thing is you'd simply have another failed Arab state run by a sort of proxy of Tehran. That's the best-case scenario. By the way, even lifelong defenders of the Palestinian cause, like Salman Rushdie, have said recently, “I've always been a supporter of the Palestinian people and their cause, but it is an unavoidable fact that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it would simply be, at best, another front for the Iranian regime in Iran.”

So why the passion? Why the unbelievable, wild passion about this? Some of it can and should be argued out, and some of it can be explained, but there's definitely a realm of it, a layer of it, which is simply: “This excites something within me. This excites something within me.”

You see it with the prominence of otherwise semi-prominent people who are willing to play around with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job and somehow it was done by the Israelis or the Jews.

Lex Fridman

I mean, look at this. This is going around. I have to admit, there’s a part of my brain that’s pulled toward conspiracies. There’s something compelling and fun about a simple explanation for what’s really going on behind the scenes, because the real world, when you don’t look at the conspiracies, first of all, is complicated, and second of all, is kind of boring. It’s a bunch of incompetent people usually opening up Pandora’s boxes they don’t understand.

Speaker 1

Yeah. It’s just buffoons. I’ve walked around and hung around with a lot of powerful and rich people, and the thing I learned is they’re just human beings. I’m yet to be in a room where exceptionally brilliant psychopaths are plotting.

Lex Fridman

You never got that invite.

Speaker 1

No. In fact, a lot of people in positions of power are just not good. I’m continuously disappointed that they’re not ultra-competent.

Lex Fridman

I love competence.

Speaker 1

Yeah. The places where I’ve seen inklings of it are in low-level soldiers, like low-level—what do you call that? People who do stuff with their hands. Builders of different kinds, engineers, craftsmen. I’ve seen competence there.

Lex Fridman

Yes, because you’ve got a very specific task that could be highly complicated.

Speaker 1

Yes, but you get to apply yourself to it and solve it.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. Over years, you master it. It’s passed across generations and so on. But statecraft and that kind of stuff—

Speaker 1

Well, it’s because there are so many variables. This is one of the reasons why, when you were trying to lure me into prognostications on Ukraine earlier, I was saying, “I’ve seen enough to know that I just don’t know,” because I know the amount of things that can change all the time.

Some years ago, I was talking to a former public servant in the UK, when Boris Johnson was prime minister and COVID started. I mentioned to this friend, “Well, it’s pretty bad luck for Boris that he came in to do one thing, which was Brexit, and then there’s a global pandemic from Wuhan, and he’s got to mug up on that and then gets it really wrong.”

Anyway, I was really struck by the fact that this man—a man of great insight who happened to disagree politically—said to me, “But, Douglas, it’s always like this.” He said, “Look at Tony Blair. He came into power in 1997 wanting to reform education in the UK and ends up trying to remake the Middle East.”

And I do—I mean, as I say, one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists and most conspiracy theories—not to say that there aren’t some that do actually turn out to have something in them. A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true. But in general, the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall into this is that it’s a very low-grade, low-resolution look at the world by people who clearly have never seen the wildness of actions in the world, the way that they reverberate, and the number of events involved.

I once spoke, some years ago, to a politician who literally said to me—I won’t name the country—“Can you help us out with just how to cope with and understand the day-to-day struggle we’re having with the cycle?” I said, “What are you talking about?” They said, “Our experience in government is that every day something comes up which we have to firefight, and that’s what we do that day. Then the next day, something else comes up which we have to firefight, and we’re not getting our policies done.”

I just thought, for me, that rings an awful lot truer than that country getting the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family telling them—yeah, I just, you know, it’s like, come on.

Lex Fridman

So, before I forget, I do want to ask you about Iran. What role do they play in this conflict? It’s fascinating how it seems like Iran’s fingerprints are everywhere in the Middle East. It’s also fascinating that I have a lot of friends—my best friend is Iranian. It’s fascinating that the Islamic Revolution in Iran took the country, from a leadership perspective, backward in such a drastic way, and that they’re still in power. That confuses me, because I don’t know the people of Iran.

I’m sorry to make the obvious statement, but I just have a lot of friends in Iran, and everybody I know there opposes the regime. They’re brilliant, educated, thoughtful, worldly people. It confuses me that this is one of the greatest nations on Earth, certainly one of the great cultures on Earth. You look at the people of Iran, and then you look at the leadership, when they’re behind most of the terror groups in the region, certainly. Can you just speak to that, and how is it still the same regime since 1979?

Speaker 1

As you know, I start On Democracies and Death Cults with the flight taking the Ayatollah from Paris to Tehran—the flight that you say you wish never happened. I think it’s one of the 2 worst journeys of the 20th century.

Lex Fridman

What’s the other one? Was it Lenin’s train getting to Petrograd?

Speaker 1

Yeah, it’s always about the transportation.

Lex Fridman

Yes, I know. I’m really a transport guy.

Speaker 1

No, wait till my book of 10 best journeys across the world.

Lex Fridman

No.

Speaker 1

Just as the train to the Finland Station brought the bacillus of Bolshevism into Russia, so the flight coming from Paris, bringing the Ayatollah to Tehran, brought the bacillus of Khomeinism—the most radical form of Shiite Islam—to Tehran and to Iran. It’s one of the great tragedies of the modern era, what happened there.

I have a lot of Persian friends, and I had the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close, late friend who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah, and so on. Her father had been an ayatollah before the overthrow of the Shah, but everyone had criticisms of him. When you saw what came after him, it just—

Among other things, what I learned from her and other friends from that region was, I suppose, 2 things. One is, of course, a sort of central conservative insight: things can always be worse. They can always be worse. Never say this is rock bottom, because you might have a Shah with hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells, but you could always have a regime butchering them all, including the people who helped the Ayatollah get to power, like the communists and the trade unionists who were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful for the Ayatollah until he didn’t need them anymore.

The other thing I learned from that particular friend and others was this thing that is very hard for the Western mindset, and very hard for the American mindset in particular: there is such a thing as fanaticism. Real fanaticism, real ideological and real religious fanaticism. The thing that I describe as the death-cult mindset is something that is very easy for the West to forget because we haven’t seen it in a while.

We get very distant echoes of it in our own societies, really, and we’re highly attuned to hear them, which is good in some ways. But Khomeinism not only vastly set back the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed to keep it in subjugation since 1979. Your question of why gets to one of the really biggest questions, which has to be understood.

It’s what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says at one point in The Gulag Archipelago, in that passage where he describes, “When we heard the footsteps on the staircase and the knock was on our neighbor’s door, and we knew our neighbor was being taken away, why did we not stop them?”

In the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, it’s the same answer as with the people in Gaza—whoever the people in Gaza are who would have liked to have seen them overthrown. People don’t realize that, despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other guy might kill you.

When the Green Movement in 2009 started in Iran, why was it put down? Why didn’t it work? Why, like the Iranians who I really hope one day get their country back, after they came out, why was it put down? It was put down because the Basij militia will shoot you in the head, and they’ll take you to a prison, as they did with the Iranian students, and they’ll rape you with bottles and kill you.

Even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way to tell the rest of society not to do it again. We know it happens like that from films, but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale, on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate brutality. That’s how they stay in power.

And one other thing on that, by the way, which I was reminded of the other day: thinking about this sort of problem in democracies is that we like to think everyone thinks like us. We’d like everyone to be like us, and we believe fictions that we’re taught in films, like everyone basically wants the same things as us. You haven’t stepped outside the walls of the city if you think that.

But the second thing is this thing about the death cults, about why we singularly fail to understand that this is possible. Khomeinism is both very specific and also very strongly linked to totalitarian, radical, and extremist death-cult movements that are not that far in our past. I mean, there’s a moment when Oriana Fallaci interviewed Khomeini in 1979, one of the very few Western journalists to do so.

She says to him, “These people in the street, this movement, this revolution you’ve begun, it’s guided by hate. It’s hate. It’s all hate.” And Khomeini says, “No, no, it’s love. It’s love.” It’s actually a scene that appears in The Satanic Verses by Rushdie, where that exact same thing happens.

I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, how can you explain to a Western mindset that that’s something that’s going on? There are people directed by this hate that calls itself love. I was reminded of a book I haven’t read since I was probably a teenager that made a great impression on me then. Did you ever read The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno, the great Spanish existentialist philosopher who died in the ’30s?

Unamuno had an encounter with students at the university in the ’30s, when he realized—I mean, this was the early period of Francoism—and all those people were at this meeting. The chant goes up from the eager students who have already fallen into this sort of Falangist ideology. As he’s trying to defend the principles by which he has lived his life, they end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la muerte.” Long live death. Long live death.

And he tries to explain to them, “This is a necrophilic chant.” But those young men in Francoist Spain shouting “Long live death”—they have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, “We love death more than you love life.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah, that’s the line you return to. That’s a really difficult line to take in, because if you base your whole existence on that notion, then, well, you’re a danger to the world. That’s a good foundation for committing evil.

I have to ask, because you mentioned that interview. You had a good interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7, and I’ve been very fortunate to get the opportunity to interview a few world leaders. It looks like I’ll interview Vladimir Putin and others.

First, I have a general question about how you interview people like this. Maybe you could put your historian hat on: how do you approach the interview of world leaders such that you can gain a deeper understanding, in the hope that that adds to the compassion in the world?

I have a deep sense that understanding people you might hate helps, in the long arc of history, add compassion to the world. But even just to add understanding is difficult in those kinds of contexts. Maybe it’s more useful to think about it from a historian’s perspective: how do you interview somebody like Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, or FDR during World War II?

Speaker 1

I think about this a lot, especially if it’s a 2-, 3-, 4-, or 5-hour conversation. There’s a lot of weight on you when you do those conversations. Who’s watching? Is it historians 20 years from then? Who knows? I mean, the whole data might be wiped.

I suspect there’s a weight on you because every major world leader you interview—and you’ve done some amazing ones—presumably you have a set of people saying, “You’ve got to ask him about this. You can’t not address this.” That’s a very challenging one because, of course, although an interview with a politician should not be supine, nor can it be endlessly interrogative. You’re not the prosecutor, and they don’t have to be the guilty party answering to you.

I’ve noticed the number of people who interview world leaders and others who go in with a set of those things, and at some point the other party can just say, “I don’t need this.” People criticizing you don’t realize that you just can’t do that.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. I suppose that’s why journalists behave the way they do, although I have increasingly less and less respect for the average journalist. I have more and more respect for the great journalists as my respect for the average journalist decreases, because a lot of journalists seem to be signaling to their own in-group.

There is a lot of pressure on people in that situation to ask what I would say is the dumb question. Why is it the dumb question? The adversarial question that the world leader, the person, is ready for. They’ve answered that question, and what you’re trying to do is, I guess, 1) signal that you’ve asked the question, and 2) push them.

You’re trying to create drama, because really, what people who ask you to ask that question want is for you to embarrass that person. They hate them, and they want you to make them piss their pants or start crying and run out. They want them to walk out in a way that’s embarrassing for them, so they can say, “Look at that pathetic person.”

That reveals to me nothing except maybe the weakness of the interviewee—that they can’t stand up to a tough question. But mostly, I’m starting to have to do a lot of thinking, because you get attacked a lot. If you ask questions from a place of curiosity that actually have a chance to reveal who the person is—

Speaker 1

There’s a very interesting line that Robin Day, who was quite a distinguished interviewer back in the day, said about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in the UK. Robin Day, who was quite good at being rude to politicians, but carefully, said the problem with the new approach, as he saw it from the ’90s, to political interviewing was, he said, “If you think the person you’re speaking to is a liar, you should get them to reveal that they’re a liar. Don’t just call them a liar.”

Lex Fridman

Yeah, and I think that is, again, something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don’t realize. It may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn’t do anything, and it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that’s something else.

Speaker 1

Yes. I mean, I hear you. Obviously, you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do. It’s also difficult because one of the things that I don’t think anyone really understands is that, in the end, it’s just you.

Lex Fridman

Yeah. I’m sure you have this about Putin, too. People say, “I know exactly how you can do this,” and they could give endless advice. In the end, it’s you sitting down talking to him. It’s like everybody knows how to behave on the presidential debate stage, but only a few people have done it.

Speaker 1

In person, it’s actually pretty difficult. It’s very difficult because you’ve got all this weird behind-the-scenes stuff as well. You’ve got all of the games that people play.

Lex Fridman

I mean, yeah, I interviewed Zelensky. I’m pretty fearless in general, and he was a very human and fascinating human, but there were soldiers with guns standing all around.

Speaker 1

And you didn’t have anyone? No one was packing on your side?

Lex Fridman

I had 1 friend, a security person, who was also Ukrainian, so you never know. You could be infiltrated.

Speaker 1

You’ve been infiltrated.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, that doesn’t have any effect. By the way, I should mention that because it’s hilarious to me. Process-wise, with Netanyahu and with anyone, they said it was scripted and all this kind of stuff. I would never do anything scripted. They don’t get to have a say in anything I ask.

I have complete freedom. Sometimes you’ll have people on the team very politely nudge you, like, “Hey, can you—” and I’ll very politely say, “Thank you,” and smile, but that doesn’t mean I have to do it. I could do whatever the hell I want.

With world leaders, it doesn’t happen. It happens more with CEOs because they usually have PR and communications people. They’ll just be very politely saying, “Hey, you know that thing about the sexual assault and harassment charges they’ve had? Could we just—there’s no reason to really linger on that. We don’t have to do that.”

Speaker 1

One of my favorite things anyone has ever said in an interview—although I know of only a couple of cases of this happening in private—was when a friend of mine, years ago, was debating something to do with the Middle East. This was before the civil war in Syria. One of the people on the other side was the then-Syrian ambassador in London.

The Syrian ambassador said something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and my friend stood up and started talking about Assad senior’s massacre in Hama, where they killed about 10,000 people in a day. My friend started talking about the Hama massacre by Assad senior, and the big, fat Syrian ambassador stood up to respond and said, “That is none of your business.”

My friend was like, “Oh, I thought we were going to get into denial.”

Lex Fridman

Let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu, because I also have the opportunity to do a 3-hour interview with him at this stage, and I’ve been, if I’m just being honest, very hesitant to do it. I just don’t know how a conversation there could help add compassion to the world.

That particular topic, no matter how well you do it, means you take on a very large number of people who will just make it their daily activity to hate you, write about it, post about it, and accuse you of things. In some sense, I don’t want to lose the part of me that’s vulnerable to the world.

Speaker 1

People have very little understanding of things if they’re willing to say that because you’re sitting down and talking with somebody, you are platforming them, advancing their cause, being used, being a shill, or whatever. You might actually just be finding some things out, which I think you do expertly.

Another thing that your critics wouldn’t realize is that life is long, and hopefully, God willing, we’ll both be around for a long time. Therefore, you don’t blow everything up at the request of someone online.

#463

Mhm. But I do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care about and worry about, and no one else's, really, and just keep your own guiding light. That's what's always done it for me. I've always said I wouldn't really care if I was the only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me, but it doesn't fundamentally matter.

I'll send you Churchill's great speech on the death of Chamberlain. I mean it. He says one of the most wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelensky, because one of Churchill's great qualities was his magnanimity.

When his great political opponent Chamberlain died in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, he could have used the opportunity—and we might even say that some politicians in our day won't be able to resist the opportunity—to say, "You see, I was right, and Chamberlain didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he'd led us into this mess. You should have all listened to me," because that would have been a good time.

Lex Fridman

Yeah, it would have been a good time to say that. That would have been one for the win, as they say.

Douglas Murray

But Churchill doesn't do that in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the world and how you can do it successfully. He very movingly says—he doesn't even mention the name of Hitler—what Neville Chamberlain's flaws were. He says, "Desiring human peace, seeking peace," and that the curse he had was that he was led astray by a very wicked man.

Then he has this great passage, a beautiful, resonant passage, where Churchill says it's not given to men, happily for them, because otherwise life would prove intolerable, to foresee or predict to any great extent the unfolding course of events. He says, in one phase, men seem to have been right, and in another, they're proved wrong. Then a different scale of values emerges.

He says, "What is the worth of all this?" He says, "The only guide to a man is his conscience. The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and the sincerity of his actions." He finishes by saying that, however the fates may play, if you have this shield to guard you, you march always in the ranks of honor.

All that can guide a man is that if you lose sight of it—and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point—then it's a challenge, and you get buffeted by the to and fro of the waves of popular opinion. That's dangerous. But if you keep sight of and hold on to what you believe, a million billion foes don't matter.

Yeah, that is the path. We were talking offline about a great biography of Churchill. Churchill himself made mistakes and admitted the mistakes and, we can even say, was proud of the mistakes. I mean, learn from them.

Douglas Murray

Learn from them. That's all the best you could do.

The worst you could probably do is be afraid of making mistakes. That's what Theodore Roosevelt famously said about them in the "Man in the Arena" speech.

Douglas Murray

TR.

Yeah, the old TR. Those two have made quite a few mistakes, but are, in the end, some of the greatest humans ever created. Norm Macdonald, Churchill, and TR. I think we did it before coming on air.

Douglas Murray

Oh, before coming on air.

Yeah. Well, he's always and everywhere in the air around us. One of the great comedians.

What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on, human civilization? You've been covering some of the darker aspects—the madness of crowds, the madness of geopolitics, the madness of wars. Sometimes, when the sun shines through the clouds and there's a smile on Douglas Murray's face, what's the source of the smile?

Douglas Murray

The warmth. Endless numbers of things. Endless numbers of things. I get enormous encouragement from smart young people, actually. That's just the best thing ever.

I was in Kyiv the other week, and I was asked to speak to students at the university. Irrespective of the rather tricky situation that they are in, it's just great to speak to a room full of students about things and then hang around afterward and answer all the questions you can, and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do.

You remember what you were like at their age and how goofy you were, how much you were going to get wrong, how much you had to learn, and how much you were going to enjoy it. You see the opportunities they have in front of them if things go right, and smart young people give enormous encouragement all the time. That's the best thing.

You can see endless possibility in their eyes, and they're not burdened by the cynicism that builds up. Even the cynicism, though, you can resist that. I've got quite a deep wellspring of it, but you can't only fall into that because there's so much else it doesn't cover. It'd be like spending your life being ironic.

So, that said, you have seen a lot of war, especially recently and directly—Ukraine, Israel. Has that changed you? Has that dimmed some of that warmth and light?

Douglas Murray

That's a very difficult question to answer. I don't know. It differs day to day. Sometimes there's a heaviness there because of the things you've seen.

Yeah.

Douglas Murray

At times, you regret going as much as you have to the front lines.

No, no.

Douglas Murray

One of the reasons why war is, for a writer, kind of the ultimate subject is because you see life weirdly at its ultimate. It's a very strange thing, but it is the truth. Death, when it's in front of you, is something which gives a terrible clarity to everything.

You see how people will love and even sometimes laugh more. Everything's just more. The real thing is that you see the very, very best of people and the very worst, and they're beside each other.

I've gotten a bunch of chances to interact with soldiers on the front line in Ukraine, and all the niceties, or whatever it is, of civilian life are stripped away. It just seems more honest somehow.

Yes, absolutely.

Douglas Murray

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. There's a wild clarity about things, not because of enemies or anything like that, but because of the absurdity of life.

I joked—I think I mentioned I joked about this to some Ukrainian soldiers in 2022. One of the cigarettes—and we stepped outside. I accompanied them outside because they weren't allowed to smoke indoors in this hotel, while there were rockets falling.

I said to them, "Isn't it strange that fear of secondhand smoke has superseded this?"

Seeing the humor in that when you're on the front line, when you're fighting in a war, is somehow perfectly delicious. You could just laugh all day about that. The absurdity of life is right there, and it's so honest and so beautiful.

That's why a lot of soldiers are traumatized and destroyed by war, but they also miss it.

That's right. That's right. Absolutely. Oh, my God. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's an intimacy to the whole thing.

Douglas Murray

Absolutely. War—I mean, everyone says, "You never felt more alive," you know.

Yeah.

Douglas Murray

And I wouldn't do anything different.

Well, I hope, just like Churchill, you keep fighting the good fight and not listening to anybody. I'll try to learn to do the same. I'm a huge fan. Thank you for doing this.

Douglas Murray

It's been a great pleasure. Right back at you. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Bertrren Russell. The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves. And wiser people so full of doubts. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.