Norman Naimark: Genocide, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Absolute Power

Lex Fridman (01:25.540)

you know, which has a lot of kind of religious

Lex Fridman (01:27.940)

and moral connotations.

Lex Fridman (01:30.700)

And, in that sense, yes, I think he was an evil man.

Norman Naimark (01:33.320)

I mean, he, you know, eliminated people

Lex Fridman (01:36.920)

absolutely unnecessarily.

Norman Naimark (01:38.760)

He tortured people, had people tortured.

Lex Fridman (01:43.040)

He was completely indifferent to the suffering of others.

Norman Naimark (01:48.400)

He couldn't have carried a wit, you know,

Lex Fridman (01:51.080)

that millions were suffering.

Lex Fridman (01:54.880)

And so, yes, I consider him an evil man.

Lex Fridman (01:58.600)

I mean, you know, historians don't like to.

Norman Naimark (02:01.160)

Use the word evil.

Lex Fridman (02:02.000)

Use the word evil.

Norman Naimark (02:02.840)

It's, you know, it's a word for moral philosophers,

Lex Fridman (02:05.380)

but I think it certainly fits who he is.

Norman Naimark (02:11.640)

I think he was delusional.

Lex Fridman (02:14.080)

And there is a wonderful historian at Princeton,

Norman Naimark (02:18.000)

a political scientist, actually, named Robert Tucker,

Lex Fridman (02:20.680)

who said he suffered from a paranoid delusional system.

Lex Fridman (02:26.480)

And I always remember that of Tucker's writing

Lex Fridman (02:30.360)

because what Tucker meant is that he was not just paranoid,

Norman Naimark (02:35.280)

meaning, you know, I'm paranoid.

Lex Fridman (02:37.640)

I'm worried you're out to get me, right?

Lex Fridman (02:39.960)

But that he constructed whole plots of people,

Lex Fridman (02:44.960)

whole systems of people who were out to get him.

Norman Naimark (02:48.880)

So, in other words, his delusions were that there were

Lex Fridman (02:51.760)

all of these groups of people out there

Norman Naimark (02:55.320)

who were out to diminish his power

Lex Fridman (02:58.080)

and remove him from his position

Lex Fridman (03:01.840)

and undermine the Soviet Union, in his view.

Lex Fridman (03:04.840)

So, yes, I think he did suffer from delusions.

Lex Fridman (03:10.320)

And this had a huge effect,

Lex Fridman (03:12.240)

because whole groups then were destroyed by his activities,

Norman Naimark (03:18.160)

which he would construct based on these delusions.

Lex Fridman (03:23.480)

He was not incompetent.

Norman Naimark (03:24.800)

He was an extremely competent man.

Lex Fridman (03:26.760)

I mean, I think most of the research that's gone on,

Norman Naimark (03:30.040)

especially since the Stalin archive was opened

Lex Fridman (03:34.080)

at the beginning of the century,

Lex Fridman (03:36.040)

and I think almost every historian who goes in that archive

Lex Fridman (03:38.960)

comes away from that archive

Norman Naimark (03:40.800)

with the feeling of a man who is enormously hardworking,

Lex Fridman (03:45.800)

intelligent, you know, with an acute sense of politics,

Norman Naimark (03:49.880)

a really excellent sense of political rhetoric,

Lex Fridman (03:56.160)

a fantastic editor, you know, in a kind of agitational sense.

Lex Fridman (04:00.200)

I mean, he's a real agitator, right?

Lex Fridman (04:02.400)

And of a, you know, a really hard worker.

Norman Naimark (04:07.400)

I mean, somebody who works from morning till night

Lex Fridman (04:09.560)

a micromanager in some ways.

Lex Fridman (04:12.400)

So his competence, I think, was really extreme.

Lex Fridman (04:15.680)

Now, there were times when that fell down,

Norman Naimark (04:18.240)

you know, times in the 30s, times in the 20s,

Lex Fridman (04:21.400)

times during the war where he made mistakes.

Norman Naimark (04:24.040)

It's not as if he didn't make any mistakes.

Lex Fridman (04:26.720)

But I think, you know, you look at his stuff,

Norman Naimark (04:29.080)

you know, you look at his archives, you look what he did.

Lex Fridman (04:31.920)

I mean, this is an enormously competent man

Norman Naimark (04:34.560)

who in many, many different areas of his life,

Lex Fridman (04:38.560)

areas of enterprise, because he, you know,

Norman Naimark (04:42.440)

he had this notion that he should know everything

Lex Fridman (04:44.840)

and did know everything.

Norman Naimark (04:46.640)

I remember one archive, it's called, you know,

Lex Fridman (04:50.880)

a kind of folder that I looked at

Norman Naimark (04:52.360)

where he actually went through the wines

Lex Fridman (04:56.280)

that were produced in his native Georgia

Lex Fridman (04:59.480)

and wrote down how much they should make

Lex Fridman (05:03.360)

of each of these wines, you know,

Lex Fridman (05:05.080)

how many barrels they should produce of these wines,

Lex Fridman (05:10.000)

which grapes were better than the other grapes,

Norman Naimark (05:12.160)

sort of correcting, in other words,

Lex Fridman (05:14.280)

what people were putting down there.

Lex Fridman (05:16.640)

So he was, you know, his competence ranged very wide,

Lex Fridman (05:20.800)

or at least he thought his competence ranged very wide.

Norman Naimark (05:23.440)

I mean, both things, I think, are the case.

Lex Fridman (05:25.680)

If we look at this paranoid delusional system,

Norman Naimark (05:27.800)

Stalin was in power for 30 years.

Lex Fridman (05:29.840)

He is, many argue, one of the most powerful men in history.

Norman Naimark (05:35.760)

Did, in his case, absolute power corrupt him

Lex Fridman (05:38.560)

or did it reveal the true nature of the man?

Lex Fridman (05:40.960)

And maybe just in your sense,

Lex Fridman (05:43.440)

as we kind of build around this genocide

Norman Naimark (05:45.520)

of the early 1930s, this paranoid delusional system,

Lex Fridman (05:50.280)

did it get built up over time?

Lex Fridman (05:52.760)

Was it always there?

Lex Fridman (05:54.560)

It's kind of a question of did the genocide,

Norman Naimark (06:00.240)

was that always inevitable, essentially, in this man,

Lex Fridman (06:03.200)

or did power create that?

Norman Naimark (06:05.880)

I mean, it's a great question, and I don't think you can,

Lex Fridman (06:08.440)

I don't think you can say that it was always

Norman Naimark (06:12.200)

kind of inherent in the man.

Lex Fridman (06:14.440)

I mean, the man without his position and without his power,

Norman Naimark (06:18.680)

you know, wouldn't have been able to accomplish

Lex Fridman (06:21.000)

what he eventually did in the way of murdering people,

Norman Naimark (06:25.000)

you know, and murdering groups of people,

Lex Fridman (06:26.520)

which is what genocide is.

Norman Naimark (06:28.800)

So, you know, I don't, it wasn't sort of in him.

Lex Fridman (06:32.720)

I mean, there were, and again, you know,

Norman Naimark (06:34.120)

the new research has shown that, you know,

Lex Fridman (06:36.960)

he had his childhood was, you know,

Norman Naimark (06:39.520)

not a particularly nasty one.

Lex Fridman (06:42.320)

People used to say, you know, the father beat him up,

Lex Fridman (06:45.720)

and it turns out, actually, it wasn't the father,

Lex Fridman (06:47.480)

it was the mother once in a while.

Lex Fridman (06:49.320)

But basically, you know, he was not

Lex Fridman (06:51.920)

an unusual young Georgian kid or student even.

Norman Naimark (06:56.960)

And, you know, it was the growth of the Soviet system

Lex Fridman (07:01.040)

and him within the Soviet system,

Norman Naimark (07:04.720)

I mean, his own development within the Soviet system,

Lex Fridman (07:07.800)

I think that led, you know, to the kind of mass killing

Norman Naimark (07:13.040)

that occurred in the 1930s.

Lex Fridman (07:15.360)

You know, he essentially achieved complete power

Norman Naimark (07:19.720)

by the early 1930s.

Lex Fridman (07:22.440)

And then as he, as he rolled with it,

Norman Naimark (07:25.640)

as you would say, you know, or people would say,

Lex Fridman (07:29.200)

you know, it increasingly became murderous.

Lex Fridman (07:32.800)

And there was no, you know, there were no checks

Lex Fridman (07:36.680)

and balances, obviously, on that murderous system.

Lex Fridman (07:39.800)

And not only that, you know, people supported it

Lex Fridman (07:43.160)

in the NKVD and elsewhere, he learned

Lex Fridman (07:45.600)

how to manipulate people.

Lex Fridman (07:46.880)

I mean, he was a superb, you know, political manipulator

Norman Naimark (07:51.480)

of those people around him.

Lex Fridman (07:54.720)

And, you know, we have, we've got new transcripts,

Norman Naimark (08:00.960)

for example, of, you know, police bureau meetings

Lex Fridman (08:03.960)

in the early 1930s.

Lex Fridman (08:05.920)

And you read those things and you read, you know,

Lex Fridman (08:07.640)

he uses humor and he uses sarcasm, especially,

Norman Naimark (08:12.640)

he uses verbal ways to undermine people, you know,

Lex Fridman (08:17.000)

to control their behavior and what they do.

Lex Fridman (08:20.600)

And he's a really, you know, he's a real,

Lex Fridman (08:25.280)

I guess, manipulator is the right word.

Lex Fridman (08:27.200)

And he does it, he does it with, you know,

Lex Fridman (08:31.400)

a kind of skill that on the one hand is admirable.

Lex Fridman (08:35.920)

And on the other hand, of course, is terrible

Lex Fridman (08:39.760)

because it ends up, you know, creating the system

Norman Naimark (08:43.560)

of terror that he creates.

Lex Fridman (08:48.040)

I mean, I guess just to linger on it,

Norman Naimark (08:50.680)

I just wonder how much of it is a slippery slope

Lex Fridman (08:54.160)

in the early 20s, 1920s, did he think he was going

Norman Naimark (08:58.600)

to be murdering even a single person,

Lex Fridman (09:00.520)

but thousands and millions?

Norman Naimark (09:04.920)

I just wonder maybe the murder of a single human being

Lex Fridman (09:14.080)

just to get them, you know, because you're paranoid

Norman Naimark (09:17.760)

about them potentially threatening your power,

Lex Fridman (09:19.920)

does that murder then open a door?

Lex Fridman (09:22.240)

And once you open the door,

Lex Fridman (09:23.960)

you become a different human being.

Norman Naimark (09:25.960)

A deeper question here is the soldier Knitsen,

Lex Fridman (09:29.040)

you know, the line between good and evil runs

Norman Naimark (09:31.040)

in every man, are all of us once we commit one murder

Lex Fridman (09:34.600)

in the situation, does that open a door for all of us?

Lex Fridman (09:37.960)

And I guess even the further deeper questions,

Lex Fridman (09:41.760)

how easy it is for human nature to go

Lex Fridman (09:45.400)

on the slippery slope that ends in genocide?

Lex Fridman (09:49.040)

There are a lot of questions in those questions.

Norman Naimark (09:52.400)

And, you know, the slippery slope question

Lex Fridman (09:55.920)

I would answer, I suppose by saying, you know,

Norman Naimark (10:00.400)

Stalin wasn't the most likely successor of Lenin,

Lex Fridman (10:04.120)

there were plenty of others, there were a lot

Norman Naimark (10:07.880)

of political contingencies that emerged in the 1920s

Lex Fridman (10:12.680)

that made it possible for Stalin to seize power.

Norman Naimark (10:16.680)

I don't think of him as, you know,

Lex Fridman (10:19.880)

if you would just know him in 1925,

Norman Naimark (10:22.880)

I don't think anybody would say much less himself

Lex Fridman (10:25.960)

that this was a future mass murderer.

Norman Naimark (10:28.840)

I mean, Trotsky mistrusted him and thought he was,

Lex Fridman (10:32.040)

you know, a mindless bureaucrat.

Norman Naimark (10:36.360)

You know, others were less mistrustful of him,

Lex Fridman (10:39.520)

but, you know, he managed to gain power

Norman Naimark (10:41.760)

in the way he did through this bureaucratic

Lex Fridman (10:43.600)

and political maneuvering that was very successful.

Norman Naimark (10:49.040)

You know, the slippery slope, as it were,

Lex Fridman (10:52.000)

doesn't really begin until the 1930s, in my view.

Norman Naimark (10:55.600)

In other words, once he gains complete power

Lex Fridman (10:58.840)

and control of the Politburo,

Norman Naimark (11:01.360)

once the programs that he institutes

Lex Fridman (11:05.880)

of the Five Year Plan and collectivization go through,

Norman Naimark (11:10.120)

once he reverses himself and is able to reverse himself

Lex Fridman (11:14.040)

or reverse the Soviet path, you know,

Norman Naimark (11:17.160)

to give various nationalities their, you know,

Lex Fridman (11:20.560)

their ability to develop their own cultures

Lex Fridman (11:22.960)

and sort of internal politics, once he reverses all that,

Lex Fridman (11:27.960)

you know, you have the Ukrainian famine in 32, 33,

Norman Naimark (11:32.160)

you have the murder of Kirov,

Lex Fridman (11:34.400)

who is one of the leading figures, you know,

Norman Naimark (11:38.040)

in the political system, you have the suicide of his wife,

Lex Fridman (11:41.080)

you have all these things come together in 32, 33

Norman Naimark (11:45.480)

that then, you know, make it more likely,

Lex Fridman (11:50.600)

in other words, that bad things are gonna happen.

Lex Fridman (11:53.920)

And people start seeing that, too, around him.

Lex Fridman (11:57.760)

They start seeing that it's not a slippery slope,

Norman Naimark (12:00.880)

it's a dangerous, it's a dangerous situation

Lex Fridman (12:06.160)

which is emerging, and some people really understand that.

Lex Fridman (12:10.000)

So I don't, I really do see a differentiation

Lex Fridman (12:13.160)

then between the 20s.

Norman Naimark (12:14.640)

I mean, it's true that Stalin, during the Civil War,

Lex Fridman (12:17.360)

there's a lot of, you know, good research on that,

Norman Naimark (12:21.240)

you know, shows that he already had some of these

Lex Fridman (12:24.080)

characteristics of being, as it were, murderous

Lex Fridman (12:27.520)

and being, you know, being dictatorial

Lex Fridman (12:32.720)

and pushing people around and that sort of thing.

Norman Naimark (12:34.680)

That was all there, but I don't really see that

Lex Fridman (12:38.560)

as kind of the necessary stage

Norman Naimark (12:40.800)

for the next thing that came, which was the 30s,

Lex Fridman (12:43.520)

which was really terror of the worst sort,

Norman Naimark (12:46.800)

you know, where everybody's afraid for their lives

Lex Fridman (12:49.360)

and most people are afraid for their lives

Lex Fridman (12:51.600)

and their family's lives and where torture

Lex Fridman (12:54.440)

and that sort of thing becomes a common part,

Norman Naimark (12:57.120)

you know, of who, what people had to face.

Lex Fridman (13:00.360)

So it's a different, it's a different world.

Lex Fridman (13:03.160)

And you know, people will argue,

Lex Fridman (13:04.840)

they'll argue this kind of Lenin, Stalin continuity debate,

Norman Naimark (13:10.240)

you know, that's been going on

Lex Fridman (13:11.280)

since I was an undergraduate, right?

Norman Naimark (13:13.120)

That argument, you know, was Stalin the natural

Lex Fridman (13:16.160)

sort of next step from Lenin

Lex Fridman (13:19.120)

or was he something completely different?

Lex Fridman (13:23.040)

Many people will argue, you know,

Norman Naimark (13:24.400)

because of Marxism, Leninism, because of the ideology

Lex Fridman (13:27.760)

that, you know, it was the natural,

Norman Naimark (13:30.840)

it was a kind of natural next step.

Lex Fridman (13:32.680)

I don't think so.

Norman Naimark (13:33.960)

You know, I would tend to lean the other way.

Lex Fridman (13:36.280)

Not absolutely.

Norman Naimark (13:37.240)

I mean, I won't make an absolute argument

Lex Fridman (13:40.120)

that what Stalin became had nothing to do with Lenin

Lex Fridman (13:43.520)

and nothing to do with Marxism, Leninism.

Lex Fridman (13:45.560)

It had a lot to do with it.

Lex Fridman (13:47.360)

But you know, he takes it one major step further.

Lex Fridman (13:51.560)

And again, that's why I don't like the slippery slope,

Norman Naimark (13:53.800)

you know, metaphor,

Lex Fridman (13:54.680)

because that means it's kind of slow and easy.

Norman Naimark (13:57.240)

It's a leap.

Lex Fridman (13:58.320)

And we call, you know, I mean,

Norman Naimark (14:00.480)

historians talk about the Stalin revolution,

Lex Fridman (14:03.400)

you know, in 28 and 29, you know,

Norman Naimark (14:05.960)

that he, in some senses, creates a whole new system,

Lex Fridman (14:11.200)

you know, through the five year plan,

Norman Naimark (14:13.400)

collectivization and seizing political power

Lex Fridman (14:15.760)

the way he does.

Lex Fridman (14:17.800)

Can you talk about the 1930s?

Lex Fridman (14:19.440)

Can you describe what happened in Holodomor,

Norman Naimark (14:21.680)

the Soviet terror famine in Ukraine

Lex Fridman (14:23.560)

in the 32 and 33?

Norman Naimark (14:25.200)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (14:26.040)

That killed millions of Ukrainians.

Norman Naimark (14:27.200)

Right.

Lex Fridman (14:28.040)

It's a long story, you know,

Lex Fridman (14:29.720)

but let me try to be as succinct as I can be.

Lex Fridman (14:34.120)

I mean, the Holodomor, the terror famine of 32, 33

Norman Naimark (14:40.160)

comes out of, in part, an all union famine

Lex Fridman (14:46.120)

that is the result of collectivization.

Norman Naimark (14:49.800)

You know, collectivization was a catastrophe.

Lex Fridman (14:52.200)

You know, the more or less, the so called kulaks,

Norman Naimark (14:56.000)

the more or less richer farmers,

Lex Fridman (14:57.960)

I mean, they weren't really rich, right?

Norman Naimark (15:00.160)

Anybody with a tin roof and a cow was considered a kulak,

Lex Fridman (15:03.160)

you know, and other people who had nothing

Norman Naimark (15:05.040)

were also considered kulaks if they opposed collectivization.

Lex Fridman (15:09.160)

So these kulaks, we're talking millions of them, right?

Lex Fridman (15:12.360)

And Ukraine, it's worth recalling,

Lex Fridman (15:15.040)

and I'm sure you know this,

Norman Naimark (15:16.480)

was a, you know, heavily agricultural area,

Lex Fridman (15:19.280)

and Ukrainian peasants, you know,

Norman Naimark (15:22.520)

were in the countryside and resisted collectivization

Lex Fridman (15:27.120)

more than even Russian peasants resisted collectivization,

Norman Naimark (15:33.120)

suffered during this collectivization program.

Lex Fridman (15:35.480)

And they, you know, burned sometimes their own houses,

Norman Naimark (15:38.600)

they killed their own animals,

Lex Fridman (15:41.480)

they were shot, you know, sometimes on the spot,

Lex Fridman (15:45.120)

and tens of thousands and others were sent into exile.

Lex Fridman (15:50.000)

So there was a conflagration in the countryside.

Lex Fridman (15:53.280)

And the result of that conflagration

Lex Fridman (15:55.640)

in Ukraine was terrible famine.

Lex Fridman (15:58.080)

And again, there was famine all over the Soviet Union,

Lex Fridman (16:01.000)

but it was especially bad in Ukraine,

Norman Naimark (16:04.800)

in part because Ukrainian peasants resisted.

Lex Fridman (16:07.880)

Now in 3233, a couple of things happen.

Norman Naimark (16:12.400)

I mean, I've argued this in my writing,

Lex Fridman (16:14.480)

and, you know, I've also worked on this,

Norman Naimark (16:18.160)

I continue to work on it, by the way,

Lex Fridman (16:19.960)

with a museum in Kiev that's going to be

Norman Naimark (16:24.160)

about the Holodomor.

Lex Fridman (16:25.840)

They're building the museum now,

Lex Fridman (16:27.480)

and it's going to be a very impressive set of exhibits,

Lex Fridman (16:32.000)

and talk with historians all the time about it.

Lex Fridman (16:34.280)

So what happens in 3233, a couple of things.

Lex Fridman (16:37.360)

First of all, the Stalin develops,

Norman Naimark (16:41.360)

develops an even stronger, I say even stronger,

Lex Fridman (16:46.240)

because they already had an antipathy for the Ukrainians,

Norman Naimark (16:49.240)

an even stronger antipathy for the Ukrainians in general.

Lex Fridman (16:53.120)

First of all, they resist collectivization.

Norman Naimark (16:55.920)

Second of all, he's not getting all the grain he wants

Lex Fridman (16:59.120)

out of them, and which he needs.

Lex Fridman (17:02.000)

And so he sends in, then, people to expropriate the grain,

Lex Fridman (17:07.080)

and take the grain away from the peasants.

Norman Naimark (17:09.480)

These teams of people, you know, some policemen,

Lex Fridman (17:12.840)

some urban thugs, some party people,

Norman Naimark (17:16.560)

some poor peasants, you know, take part too,

Lex Fridman (17:19.320)

go into the villages, and forcibly seize grain

Lex Fridman (17:23.880)

and animals from the Ukrainian peasantry.

Lex Fridman (17:28.480)

They're seizing it all over.

Norman Naimark (17:29.920)

I mean, let's remember again,

Lex Fridman (17:30.960)

this is all over the Soviet Union, in 32, especially.

Norman Naimark (17:34.760)

Then, you know, in December of 1932, January of 33,

Lex Fridman (17:42.360)

February of 33, Stalin has convinced the Ukrainian peasantry

Norman Naimark (17:49.000)

needs to be shown who's boss,

Lex Fridman (17:52.960)

that they're not turning over their grain,

Norman Naimark (17:55.600)

that they're resisting the expropriators,

Lex Fridman (17:57.880)

that they're hiding the grain,

Lex Fridman (17:59.120)

which they do sometimes, right?

Lex Fridman (18:01.480)

That they're basically not loyal to the Soviet Union,

Norman Naimark (18:05.560)

that they're acting like traitors,

Lex Fridman (18:07.480)

that they're ready, and he says this, you know,

Norman Naimark (18:10.320)

I think it's Kaganovich he says it too,

Lex Fridman (18:12.560)

you know, they're ready to kind of pull out

Norman Naimark (18:14.160)

of the Soviet Union and join Poland.

Lex Fridman (18:15.840)

I mean, he thinks Poland is, you know,

Norman Naimark (18:17.440)

out to get Ukraine, and so he's gonna then,

Lex Fridman (18:21.880)

essentially, break the back of these peasantry.

Lex Fridman (18:23.960)

And the way he breaks their back

Lex Fridman (18:26.880)

is by going through another expropriation program,

Norman Naimark (18:30.480)

which is not done in the rest of the Soviet Union.

Lex Fridman (18:33.320)

So he's taking away everything they have,

Norman Naimark (18:36.200)

everything they have.

Lex Fridman (18:38.240)

There are new laws introduced,

Norman Naimark (18:40.080)

where they will actually punish people,

Lex Fridman (18:42.680)

including kids, with death, if they steal any grain,

Norman Naimark (18:47.600)

you know, if they take anything from the,

Lex Fridman (18:49.600)

you know, from the fields.

Norman Naimark (18:51.120)

So, you know, you can shoot anybody,

Lex Fridman (18:53.680)

you know, who is looking for food.

Lex Fridman (18:55.640)

And then he introduces measures in Ukraine,

Lex Fridman (18:58.720)

which are not introduced into the rest of the Soviet Union.

Norman Naimark (19:02.120)

For example, the Ukrainian peasantry

Lex Fridman (19:05.200)

are not allowed to leave their villages anymore.

Norman Naimark (19:08.880)

They can't go to the city to try to find some things.

Lex Fridman (19:11.120)

I mean, we've got pictures of, you know,

Norman Naimark (19:13.000)

Ukrainian peasants dying on the sidewalks

Lex Fridman (19:15.880)

in Kharkiv, and in Kiev, and places like that,

Norman Naimark (19:19.560)

who've managed to get out of the village

Lex Fridman (19:21.240)

and get to the cities, but now they can't leave.

Norman Naimark (19:24.040)

They can't leave Ukraine to go to Belorussia,

Lex Fridman (19:28.080)

or Belarus today, or to Russia, you know, to get any food.

Norman Naimark (19:32.800)

There's no, he won't allow any relief to Ukraine.

Lex Fridman (19:36.760)

Number of people offer relief, including the Poles,

Lex Fridman (19:39.600)

but also the Vatican offers relief.

Lex Fridman (19:42.120)

He won't allow any relief to Ukraine.

Norman Naimark (19:44.400)

He won't admit that there's a famine in Ukraine.

Lex Fridman (19:47.280)

And instead, what happens is that Ukraine turns into,

Norman Naimark (19:52.280)

the Ukrainian countryside turns into what my now past

Lex Fridman (19:58.280)

colleague who died several years ago, Robert Conquest,

Norman Naimark (1:00:01.260)

I mean, these are all essentially political movements

Lex Fridman (1:00:04.820)

where the polity state is seized, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:00:08.140)

by a ideological or, you know, party, single party movement

Lex Fridman (1:00:14.180)

and then is moved in directions

Norman Naimark (1:00:15.780)

where mass killing takes place.

Lex Fridman (1:00:18.500)

The other question, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:00:20.380)

let's separate that question out.

Lex Fridman (1:00:22.620)

The other question is why do ordinary people participate?

Norman Naimark (1:00:26.780)

Because the fact of the matter is,

Lex Fridman (1:00:31.060)

just ordering genocide is not enough.

Norman Naimark (1:00:33.780)

Just saying, you know, go get them is not enough.

Lex Fridman (1:00:36.620)

There have to be people who will cooperate

Lex Fridman (1:00:39.140)

and who will do their jobs, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:00:41.420)

both at the kind of mezzo level,

Norman Naimark (1:00:43.060)

the middle level of a bureaucracy,

Lex Fridman (1:00:45.340)

but also at the everyday level.

Norman Naimark (1:00:47.060)

You know, people who have to pull the triggers

Lex Fridman (1:00:48.700)

and that kind of thing and, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:00:50.380)

force people into the gas chamber

Lex Fridman (1:00:52.220)

and grab people, you know, in Kiev in September 1941

Norman Naimark (1:00:56.740)

at Babin Yar and push them, you know, towards the ravine

Lex Fridman (1:01:00.540)

where the machine gunners are gonna shoot them down.

Norman Naimark (1:01:03.900)

You know, and those are all different questions.

Lex Fridman (1:01:06.740)

The question of, you know, especially the lower level people

Norman Naimark (1:01:11.940)

who actually do the killing is a question

Lex Fridman (1:01:14.460)

which I think we've been talking about,

Norman Naimark (1:01:15.980)

which is that within all of us,

Lex Fridman (1:01:19.420)

you know, is the capability of being murderers

Lex Fridman (1:01:21.980)

and mass murderers.

Lex Fridman (1:01:22.940)

I mean, to participate in mass murder.

Norman Naimark (1:01:25.460)

I won't call them laws of social psychology,

Lex Fridman (1:01:27.860)

but the character of social psychology.

Norman Naimark (1:01:31.220)

You know, we will do it in most cases.

Lex Fridman (1:01:33.380)

I mean, one of the shocking things that I learned

Norman Naimark (1:01:35.700)

just a few years ago studying the Holocaust

Lex Fridman (1:01:39.020)

is that you could pull out.

Norman Naimark (1:01:41.860)

In other words, if they order a police battalion

Lex Fridman (1:01:44.340)

to go shoot Jews, you didn't have to do it.

Norman Naimark (1:01:48.780)

You could pull out.

Lex Fridman (1:01:49.620)

They weren't gonna, they never killed anybody.

Norman Naimark (1:01:51.500)

They never executed anybody.

Lex Fridman (1:01:53.260)

They never even punished people for saying,

Norman Naimark (1:01:54.820)

no, I'm not gonna do that.

Lex Fridman (1:01:56.420)

So people are doing it voluntarily.

Norman Naimark (1:01:58.540)

They may not want to do it.

Lex Fridman (1:02:01.100)

You know, they give them booze to try to, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:02:03.780)

numb the pain of murder,

Lex Fridman (1:02:06.460)

because they know there is pain.

Norman Naimark (1:02:08.300)

I mean, people experience pain when they murder people,

Lex Fridman (1:02:11.660)

but they don't pull out.

Lex Fridman (1:02:13.860)

And so it's the character of who we are in the society,

Lex Fridman (1:02:16.700)

in groups, and we're very, very influenced.

Norman Naimark (1:02:20.220)

I mean, we're highly influenced by the groups

Lex Fridman (1:02:22.660)

in which we operate.

Norman Naimark (1:02:24.780)

And, you know, who we talk to,

Lex Fridman (1:02:28.020)

and who our friends are within that group,

Lex Fridman (1:02:30.900)

and who is the head of the group.

Lex Fridman (1:02:32.820)

And I mean, you see this even,

Norman Naimark (1:02:34.740)

I mean, you see it in any group, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:02:36.420)

whether it's in the academy, right, at Stanford,

Norman Naimark (1:02:39.620)

or whether it's, you know, in a labor union,

Lex Fridman (1:02:42.300)

or whether it's in a church group in Tennessee,

Norman Naimark (1:02:44.980)

or wherever, you know, people pay attention to each other,

Lex Fridman (1:02:49.180)

and they are unwilling, frequently, to say no.

Norman Naimark (1:02:54.180)

This is wrong.

Lex Fridman (1:02:56.220)

Even though all of you think it's right, it's wrong.

Norman Naimark (1:02:58.260)

I mean, you just don't do that, usually,

Lex Fridman (1:03:00.900)

especially in societies that are authoritarian,

Lex Fridman (1:03:06.260)

or totalitarian, right?

Lex Fridman (1:03:08.100)

Because it's harder, because there's a backup to it, right?

Norman Naimark (1:03:10.940)

There's the NKVD there, or there's the Gestapo there,

Lex Fridman (1:03:13.380)

and there are other people there.

Lex Fridman (1:03:14.780)

So you just, you know, they may not be forcing you to do it,

Lex Fridman (1:03:18.900)

but your social being, plus this danger in the distance,

Norman Naimark (1:03:26.900)

you know, you do it.

Lex Fridman (1:03:28.460)

But then, if you go up the hierarchy,

Norman Naimark (1:03:31.260)

at the very top, there's a dictator.

Lex Fridman (1:03:33.460)

Presumably, you know, you go to, like, middle management

Norman Naimark (1:03:36.340)

to the bureaucracy.

Lex Fridman (1:03:39.860)

The higher you get up there,

Norman Naimark (1:03:41.140)

the more power you have to change the direction

Lex Fridman (1:03:44.340)

of the Titanic.

Norman Naimark (1:03:45.540)

Right, right, right.

Lex Fridman (1:03:46.940)

But nobody seems to do it.

Norman Naimark (1:03:49.180)

Right, or what happens, and it does happen.

Lex Fridman (1:03:52.580)

It happens in the German army.

Norman Naimark (1:03:54.620)

I mean, it happens in the case of the Armenian genocide,

Lex Fridman (1:03:57.660)

where we know there are governors who said,

Norman Naimark (1:03:59.140)

no, I'm not gonna kill Armenians.

Lex Fridman (1:04:01.460)

What kind of business is this?

Norman Naimark (1:04:02.460)

They're just removed.

Lex Fridman (1:04:04.540)

They're removed, and you find a replacement very easily.

Norman Naimark (1:04:07.880)

So, you know, you do see people who stand up.

Lex Fridman (1:04:10.580)

And again, it's not really predictable who it will be.

Norman Naimark (1:04:13.680)

I would maintain.

Lex Fridman (1:04:14.540)

I mean, I haven't done the study of the Armenian governors

Norman Naimark (1:04:18.120)

who said no.

Lex Fridman (1:04:19.220)

I mean, the Turkish governors who said no

Norman Naimark (1:04:21.120)

to the Armenian genocide.

Lex Fridman (1:04:23.420)

But, you know, there are people who do step aside

Norman Naimark (1:04:28.980)

every once in a while in the middle level.

Lex Fridman (1:04:31.060)

And again, they're German generals who say,

Norman Naimark (1:04:32.600)

wait a minute, what is this business in Poland

Lex Fridman (1:04:34.420)

when they start to kill Jews or in Belorussia?

Norman Naimark (1:04:37.920)

And, you know, they're just pushed aside.

Lex Fridman (1:04:40.420)

You know, if they don't do their job, they're pushed aside.

Norman Naimark (1:04:42.980)

Or they end up doing it.

Lex Fridman (1:04:44.060)

And they usually do end up doing it.

Lex Fridman (1:04:47.540)

What about on the victim side?

Lex Fridman (1:04:49.700)

So, I mentioned man's search for meaning.

Lex Fridman (1:04:52.740)

What can we learn about human nature,

Lex Fridman (1:04:55.340)

the human mind from the victims of genocide?

Norman Naimark (1:04:59.620)

So, Viktor Frankl talked about the ability

Lex Fridman (1:05:02.340)

to discover meaning and beauty, even in suffering.

Norman Naimark (1:05:07.360)

Is there something to be said about, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:05:10.140)

in your studying of genocide

Lex Fridman (1:05:11.720)

that you've learned about human nature?

Lex Fridman (1:05:15.740)

Well, again, I don't, I have to say,

Norman Naimark (1:05:19.420)

I come out of the study of genocide

Lex Fridman (1:05:21.140)

with a very pessimistic view of human nature.

Norman Naimark (1:05:24.340)

A very pessimistic view.

Lex Fridman (1:05:25.740)

Even on the victim side?

Norman Naimark (1:05:26.900)

Even on the victim side.

Lex Fridman (1:05:28.960)

I mean, the victims will eat their children, right?

Norman Naimark (1:05:33.640)

Ukrainian case, they have no choice.

Lex Fridman (1:05:36.080)

You know, the victims will rob each other.

Norman Naimark (1:05:38.720)

The victims will form hierarchies within victimhood.

Lex Fridman (1:05:44.020)

So, you see, let me give you an example.

Norman Naimark (1:05:46.740)

Again, I told you I was working on Majdanek.

Lex Fridman (1:05:50.860)

And there's, in Majdanek, at a certain point in 42,

Norman Naimark (1:05:57.340)

a group of Slovak Jews were arrested

Lex Fridman (1:06:02.500)

and sent to Majdanek.

Norman Naimark (1:06:04.940)

Those Slovak Jews were a group,

Lex Fridman (1:06:08.460)

somehow they stuck together, they were very competent,

Norman Naimark (1:06:11.340)

they were, you know, many of them were businessmen,

Lex Fridman (1:06:14.900)

they knew each other,

Lex Fridman (1:06:16.460)

and for a variety of different reasons within the camp.

Lex Fridman (1:06:19.900)

And again, this shows you the diversity of the camps

Lex Fridman (1:06:22.340)

and also, you know, these images of black and white

Lex Fridman (1:06:24.560)

in the camps are not very useful.

Norman Naimark (1:06:26.780)

They ruled the camp.

Lex Fridman (1:06:29.060)

I mean, they basically had all the important jobs

Norman Naimark (1:06:31.160)

in the camp, including jobs like beating other Jews,

Lex Fridman (1:06:35.780)

and persecuting other Jews, and persecuting other peoples,

Norman Naimark (1:06:41.780)

which they did.

Lex Fridman (1:06:43.540)

And this Polish guy who I mentioned to you,

Norman Naimark (1:06:46.340)

who wrote this memoir, hated them

Lex Fridman (1:06:48.740)

because of what they were doing to the Poles, right?

Lex Fridman (1:06:53.540)

And he, you know, he's incensed

Lex Fridman (1:06:57.460)

because aren't these supposed to be the Untermenschen?

Norman Naimark (1:07:01.180)

He says, and look what they're doing,

Lex Fridman (1:07:02.680)

they're treating us, you know, like dirt.

Lex Fridman (1:07:06.220)

And they do, they treat them like dirt.

Lex Fridman (1:07:08.780)

So, you know, in this kind of work on Majdanek,

Norman Naimark (1:07:11.460)

there's certainly parts of it that, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:07:16.020)

were inspiring, you know, people helping each other,

Norman Naimark (1:07:20.860)

people trying to feed each other,

Lex Fridman (1:07:23.100)

people giving warmth to each other.

Norman Naimark (1:07:24.920)

You know, there's some very heroic Polish women

Lex Fridman (1:07:30.420)

who end up having a radio show called Radio Majdanek,

Norman Naimark (1:07:33.780)

which they put on every night in the women's camp,

Lex Fridman (1:07:36.480)

which is, you know, to raise people's spirits.

Lex Fridman (1:07:39.420)

And they, you know, sing songs

Lex Fridman (1:07:41.420)

and do all this kind of stuff, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:07:43.100)

to try to keep themselves from, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:07:47.980)

the horrors that they're experiencing around them.

Lex Fridman (1:07:51.100)

And so you do see that, and you do see,

Lex Fridman (1:07:54.220)

you know, human beings acting in support of each other.

Norman Naimark (1:08:00.420)

But, you know, I mean, Primo Levi is one of my favorite

Lex Fridman (1:08:06.560)

writers about the Holocaust and about the camps.

Norman Naimark (1:08:10.340)

And, you know, I don't think Primo Levi saw anything.

Lex Fridman (1:08:15.100)

You know, I mean, he had pals, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:08:17.420)

who he helped and who helped him.

Lex Fridman (1:08:20.060)

I mean, but he describes this kind of, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:08:25.700)

terrible inhuman environment,

Lex Fridman (1:08:27.520)

which no one can escape, really, no one can escape.

Norman Naimark (1:08:30.460)

He ends up committing suicide too, I think,

Lex Fridman (1:08:32.260)

because of his sense of, we don't know exactly why,

Lex Fridman (1:08:37.500)

but probably because of his sense

Lex Fridman (1:08:39.460)

of what happened in the camp.

Norman Naimark (1:08:41.460)

I mean, later he goes back to Italy,

Lex Fridman (1:08:42.900)

becomes a writer and that sort of thing.

Lex Fridman (1:08:44.580)

So I don't, I don't, especially in the concentration camps,

Lex Fridman (1:08:49.340)

it's really hard to find places like Wickel Frankel

Norman Naimark (1:08:52.940)

where you can say, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:08:54.420)

I am moved in a positive way, you know, by what happened.

Norman Naimark (1:09:02.620)

There were cases, there's no question.

Lex Fridman (1:09:04.300)

People hung together, they tried to help each other,

Norman Naimark (1:09:06.360)

but, you know, they were totally, totally caught

Lex Fridman (1:09:11.460)

in this web of genocide.

Norman Naimark (1:09:15.740)

See, so there are stories, but the thing is, I have this

Lex Fridman (1:09:19.420)

sense, maybe it's a hope, that within most,

Norman Naimark (1:09:22.900)

if not every human heart, there's a kind of, like,

Lex Fridman (1:09:26.620)

flame of compassion and kindness and love that waits,

Norman Naimark (1:09:34.820)

that longs to connect with others,

Lex Fridman (1:09:37.240)

that ultimately en masse overpowers everything else.

Norman Naimark (1:09:41.020)

If you just look at the story of human history,

Lex Fridman (1:09:43.380)

the resistance to violence and mass murder and genocide

Norman Naimark (1:09:50.500)

feels like a force that's there.

Lex Fridman (1:09:54.140)

And it feels like a force that's more powerful

Norman Naimark (1:09:57.220)

than whatever the dark momentum that leads to genocide is.

Lex Fridman (1:10:04.700)

It feels like that's more powerful, it's just quiet.

Norman Naimark (1:10:08.740)

It's hard to tell the story of that little flame

Lex Fridman (1:10:10.740)

that burns within all of our hearts,

Norman Naimark (1:10:14.060)

that longing to connect to other human beings.

Lex Fridman (1:10:16.580)

And there's something also about human nature

Lex Fridman (1:10:18.940)

and us as storytellers, that we're not very good

Lex Fridman (1:10:21.580)

at telling the stories of that little flame.

Norman Naimark (1:10:24.060)

We're much better at telling the stories of atrocities.

Lex Fridman (1:10:27.020)

No, you know, I think maybe I fundamentally

Norman Naimark (1:10:30.220)

disagree with you, I think maybe I fundamentally,

Lex Fridman (1:10:32.580)

I don't disagree that there is that flame.

Norman Naimark (1:10:36.120)

I just think it's just too easily doused.

Lex Fridman (1:10:38.920)

And I think it's too easily goes out in a lot of people.

Lex Fridman (1:10:43.340)

And I mean, like I say, I come away from this work,

Lex Fridman (1:10:49.060)

a pessimist.

Norman Naimark (1:10:50.820)

You know, there is this work by a Harvard psychologist,

Lex Fridman (1:10:54.640)

now I'm forgetting his name.

Norman Naimark (1:10:55.480)

Stephen Pinker.

Lex Fridman (1:10:56.540)

Yes, yes, Stephen Pinker, that shows over time, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:11:01.260)

and you know, initially I was quite skeptical of the work,

Lex Fridman (1:11:03.420)

but in the end, I thought he was quite convincing

Norman Naimark (1:11:05.820)

that over time, the incidence of homicide, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:11:12.420)

goes down, the incidence of rape goes down,

Norman Naimark (1:11:14.900)

the incidence of genocide, except for the big blip,

Lex Fridman (1:11:18.900)

you know, in the middle of the 20th century goes down.

Norman Naimark (1:11:22.300)

Not markedly, but it goes down generally,

Lex Fridman (1:11:24.820)

that you know, more than norms, international norms

Norman Naimark (1:11:27.860)

are changing how we think about this and stuff like that.

Lex Fridman (1:11:30.100)

I thought he was pretty convincing about that.

Lex Fridman (1:11:33.060)

But think about, you know, we're modern people.

Lex Fridman (1:11:37.220)

I mean, we've advanced so fast in so many different areas.

Norman Naimark (1:11:41.980)

I mean, we should have eliminated this a long time ago,

Lex Fridman (1:11:45.180)

a long time ago.

Norman Naimark (1:11:47.420)

You know, how is it that, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:11:50.860)

we're still facing this business of genocide in Myanmar,

Norman Naimark (1:11:54.380)

in Xinjiang, in, you know, Tigray, in Ethiopia,

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.860)

you know, the potentials of genocide there.

Lex Fridman (1:12:02.380)

And all over the world, you know, we still have this thing

Lex Fridman (1:12:06.900)

that we cannot handle, that we can't deal with.

Norman Naimark (1:12:10.220)

And, you know, again, you know, electric cars and planes

Lex Fridman (1:12:14.340)

that fly from here to, you know, Beijing.

Norman Naimark (1:12:18.700)

Think about the differences between 250 years ago

Lex Fridman (1:12:21.260)

or 300 years ago and today, but the differences in genocide

Norman Naimark (1:12:25.500)

are not all that great.

Lex Fridman (1:12:26.760)

I mean, the incidence has gone down.

Norman Naimark (1:12:28.680)

I think Pinker has demonstrated, I mean,

Lex Fridman (1:12:31.360)

there are problems with his methodology,

Lex Fridman (1:12:32.820)

but on the whole, I'm with him on that book.

Lex Fridman (1:12:35.420)

I thought in the end, it was quite well done.

Norman Naimark (1:12:38.940)

So, you know, I do not, I have to say,

Lex Fridman (1:12:44.500)

I'm not an optimist about what this human flame can do.

Norman Naimark (1:12:48.960)

And, you know, I once, someone once said to me,

Lex Fridman (1:12:53.020)

when I posed a similar kind of question to a seminar,

Norman Naimark (1:12:56.300)

a friend of mine at Berkeley once said,

Lex Fridman (1:12:57.900)

remember original sin, Norman, well, I don't, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:13:01.620)

that's very Catholic and I don't really think

Lex Fridman (1:13:05.320)

in terms of original sin, but in some ways, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:13:09.080)

her point is we carry this with us, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:13:11.800)

we carry with us a really potentially nasty mean streak

Norman Naimark (1:13:20.220)

that can do harm to other people.

Lex Fridman (1:13:22.380)

Well, we carry the capacity to love too.

Norman Naimark (1:13:24.620)

Yes, we do, yes, we do.

Lex Fridman (1:13:26.240)

That's part of the deal.

Norman Naimark (1:13:28.520)

You have a bias in that you have studied

Lex Fridman (1:13:32.100)

some of the darker aspects of human nature

Lex Fridman (1:13:34.880)

and human history.

Lex Fridman (1:13:36.580)

So it is difficult from the trenches, from the muck,

Norman Naimark (1:13:42.540)

to see a possible sort of way out through love.

Lex Fridman (1:13:46.860)

But it's not obvious that that's not the case.

Norman Naimark (1:13:50.500)

You mentioned electric cars and rockets and airplanes.

Lex Fridman (1:13:54.800)

To me, the more powerful thing is Wikipedia, the internet.

Norman Naimark (1:13:58.820)

Only 50% of the world currently has access to the internet,

Lex Fridman (1:14:02.400)

but that's growing in information and knowledge and wisdom,

Norman Naimark (1:14:05.900)

especially among women in the world.

Lex Fridman (1:14:08.180)

As that grows, I think it becomes a lot more difficult

Norman Naimark (1:14:12.680)

if love wins, it becomes a lot more difficult

Lex Fridman (1:14:15.200)

for somebody like Hitler to take power,

Norman Naimark (1:14:16.820)

for genocide to occur, because people think,

Lex Fridman (1:14:20.940)

and the masses, I think, the people have power

Norman Naimark (1:14:23.680)

when they're able to think,

Lex Fridman (1:14:26.180)

when they can see the full kind of...

Norman Naimark (1:14:30.140)

First of all, when they can study your work,

Lex Fridman (1:14:34.040)

they can know about the fact that genocide happens,

Lex Fridman (1:14:36.340)

how it occurs, how the promises of great charismatic leaders

Lex Fridman (1:14:40.500)

lead to great, destructive mass genocide.

Lex Fridman (1:14:44.700)

And just even studying the fact that the Holocaust happened

Lex Fridman (1:14:48.940)

for a large number of people is a powerful preventer

Norman Naimark (1:14:53.260)

of future genocide.

Lex Fridman (1:14:55.340)

One of the lessons of history is just knowing

Norman Naimark (1:14:58.500)

that this can happen, learning how it happens,

Lex Fridman (1:15:01.580)

that normal human beings, leaders that give big promises,

Norman Naimark (1:15:07.180)

can also become evil and destructive.

Lex Fridman (1:15:09.580)

The fact, knowing that that can happen

Norman Naimark (1:15:12.020)

is a powerful preventer of that,

Lex Fridman (1:15:13.900)

and then you kind of wake up from this haze

Norman Naimark (1:15:16.860)

of believing everything you hear,

Lex Fridman (1:15:19.800)

and you learn to just, in your small, local way,

Norman Naimark (1:15:25.700)

to put more love out there in the world.

Lex Fridman (1:15:28.940)

I believe it's possible, it's not too good,

Norman Naimark (1:15:31.460)

sort of to push back, it's not so obvious to me

Lex Fridman (1:15:35.300)

that in the end, I think in the end, love wins.

Norman Naimark (1:15:40.040)

That's my intuition, I've had to put money on it.

Lex Fridman (1:15:43.020)

I have a sense that this genocide thing

Norman Naimark (1:15:46.620)

is more and more going to be an artifact of the past.

Lex Fridman (1:15:51.260)

Well, I certainly hope you're right.

Norman Naimark (1:15:53.100)

I mean, I certainly hope you're right.

Lex Fridman (1:15:54.500)

And it could be you are, we don't know.

Lex Fridman (1:16:00.160)

But the evidence is different.

Lex Fridman (1:16:04.020)

The evidence is different.

Lex Fridman (1:16:05.260)

And the capacity of human beings to do evil

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.260)

to other human beings is repeatedly demonstrated.

Norman Naimark (1:16:17.820)

Whether it's in massacres in Mexico,

Lex Fridman (1:16:20.140)

or ISIS and the Yazidi Kurds,

Norman Naimark (1:16:25.060)

or you can just go on and on.

Lex Fridman (1:16:27.640)

Syria, I mean, look what, I mean,

Norman Naimark (1:16:29.700)

Syria used to be a country, and now it's been a mass grave,

Lex Fridman (1:16:35.700)

and people then have left in the millions

Norman Naimark (1:16:39.300)

for other places.

Lex Fridman (1:16:41.100)

And you know, I'm not saying, you know, I'm not saying,

Norman Naimark (1:16:46.580)

I mean, the Turks have done nice things for the Syrians,

Lex Fridman (1:16:48.980)

and the Germans welcomed in a million or so,

Lex Fridman (1:16:51.120)

and actually reasonably absorbed them.

Lex Fridman (1:16:53.360)

I mean, I'm not saying bad things only happen in the world.

Norman Naimark (1:16:57.660)

They're good and bad things that happen,

Lex Fridman (1:16:59.100)

you're absolutely right.

Lex Fridman (1:17:02.220)

But I don't think we're on the path

Lex Fridman (1:17:04.860)

to eliminating these bad things,

Norman Naimark (1:17:08.380)

really bad things from happening.

Lex Fridman (1:17:10.160)

I just don't think we are.

Lex Fridman (1:17:11.180)

And I don't think there's any,

Lex Fridman (1:17:12.980)

I don't think the facts demonstrate it.

Norman Naimark (1:17:15.500)

I mean, I hope, I hope you're right.

Lex Fridman (1:17:17.300)

But I think otherwise, it's just an article of faith.

Norman Naimark (1:17:22.240)

Well.

Lex Fridman (1:17:23.580)

You know, which is perfectly fine.

Norman Naimark (1:17:25.500)

It's better to have that article of faith

Lex Fridman (1:17:27.260)

than to have an article of faith which says,

Norman Naimark (1:17:29.940)

you know, things should get bad, or things like that.

Lex Fridman (1:17:32.180)

Well, it's not just fine.

Norman Naimark (1:17:33.900)

It's the only way if you want to build a better future.

Lex Fridman (1:17:36.860)

So optimism is a prerequisite

Norman Naimark (1:17:38.760)

for engineering a better future.

Lex Fridman (1:17:40.540)

So like, okay, so a historian

Norman Naimark (1:17:43.400)

has to see clearly into the past.

Lex Fridman (1:17:46.100)

An engineer has to imagine a future

Norman Naimark (1:17:51.700)

that's different from the past,

Lex Fridman (1:17:54.220)

that's better than the past.

Norman Naimark (1:17:55.980)

Because without that,

Lex Fridman (1:17:57.420)

they're not going to be able to build a better future.

Lex Fridman (1:17:59.500)

So there's a kind of saying,

Lex Fridman (1:18:01.240)

like you have to consider the facts.

Norman Naimark (1:18:02.620)

Well, at every single moment in history,

Lex Fridman (1:18:05.540)

if you allow yourself to be too grounded

Norman Naimark (1:18:10.120)

by the facts of the past,

Lex Fridman (1:18:11.300)

you're not going to create the future.

Lex Fridman (1:18:12.800)

So that's kind of the tension that we're living with.

Lex Fridman (1:18:15.140)

To have a chance, we have to imagine

Norman Naimark (1:18:16.820)

that the better future is possible.

Lex Fridman (1:18:19.500)

But one of the ways to do that is to study history.

Norman Naimark (1:18:23.980)

Which engineers don't do enough of.

Lex Fridman (1:18:25.940)

They do not.

Norman Naimark (1:18:26.780)

Which is a real problem.

Lex Fridman (1:18:29.260)

It's a real problem.

Norman Naimark (1:18:30.980)

Or basically a lot of disciplines in science

Lex Fridman (1:18:33.180)

and so on don't do enough of.

Lex Fridman (1:18:36.620)

Can you tell the story of China from 1958 to 1962,

Lex Fridman (1:18:41.360)

what was called the Great Leap Forward,

Norman Naimark (1:18:44.980)

orchestrated by Chairman Mao Zedong

Lex Fridman (1:18:47.420)

that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people

Lex Fridman (1:18:49.780)

making it arguably the largest famine in human history?

Lex Fridman (1:18:55.020)

Yes.

Norman Naimark (1:18:55.840)

I mean, it was a terrible set of events

Lex Fridman (1:18:59.860)

that led to the death.

Norman Naimark (1:19:02.220)

People will dispute the numbers.

Lex Fridman (1:19:07.060)

15 million, 17 million, 14 million,

Norman Naimark (1:19:11.300)

20 million people died in the Great Leap.

Lex Fridman (1:19:15.540)

Many people say 30, 40, 50 million.

Norman Naimark (1:19:17.420)

Some people will go that high too.

Lex Fridman (1:19:18.980)

That's right, that's right.

Norman Naimark (1:19:21.060)

Essentially, Mao and the Communist Party leadership,

Lex Fridman (1:19:25.260)

but it was mostly Mao's doing,

Norman Naimark (1:19:28.500)

decided he wanted to move the country into communism.

Lex Fridman (1:19:33.220)

And part of the idea of that

Norman Naimark (1:19:35.980)

was rivalry with the Soviet Union.

Lex Fridman (1:19:39.660)

Mao was a good Stalinist,

Norman Naimark (1:19:41.220)

or at least felt like Stalin

Lex Fridman (1:19:43.300)

was the right kind of communist leader to have,

Lex Fridman (1:19:46.380)

and he didn't like Khrushchev at all,

Lex Fridman (1:19:48.100)

and he didn't like what he thought were Khrushchev's reforms

Lex Fridman (1:19:51.220)

and also Khrushchev's pretensions

Lex Fridman (1:19:54.180)

to moving the Soviet Union into communism.

Lex Fridman (1:19:57.180)

So Khrushchev started talking about giving more power

Lex Fridman (1:19:59.700)

to the party, less power to the state,

Lex Fridman (1:20:01.740)

and if you have more power to the party versus the state,

Lex Fridman (1:20:04.480)

then you're moving into communism quicker.

Lex Fridman (1:20:07.220)

So what Mao decided to do was to engage in this vast program

Lex Fridman (1:20:12.340)

of building what were called people's communes.

Lex Fridman (1:20:16.980)

And these communes were enormous conglomerations

Lex Fridman (1:20:22.300)

of essentially collective farms,

Lex Fridman (1:20:25.500)

and what would happen on those communes

Lex Fridman (1:20:28.380)

is there would be places for people to eat,

Lex Fridman (1:20:31.540)

and there would be places for the kids to be raised

Lex Fridman (1:20:34.920)

in essentially kind of separate homes,

Lex Fridman (1:20:38.020)

and they would be schooled.

Lex Fridman (1:20:39.980)

Everybody would turn over their metal,

Norman Naimark (1:20:42.700)

which was one of the,

Lex Fridman (1:20:43.540)

actually it turned out to be a terribly negative phenomenon,

Norman Naimark (1:20:46.780)

their metal pots and pans to be melted to then make steel.

Lex Fridman (1:20:51.700)

Every of these big communes would all have little steel plants

Lex Fridman (1:20:55.700)

and they would build steel

Lex Fridman (1:20:57.300)

and the whole countryside would be transformed.

Norman Naimark (1:21:01.340)

Well, like many of these sort of,

Lex Fridman (1:21:03.420)

I mean a true megalomaniac project,

Norman Naimark (1:21:07.660)

like some of Stalin's projects too.

Lex Fridman (1:21:10.220)

And this particular project then,

Norman Naimark (1:21:12.980)

the people had no choice.

Lex Fridman (1:21:15.260)

They were forced to do this.

Norman Naimark (1:21:18.740)

It was incredibly dysfunctional for Chinese agriculture

Lex Fridman (1:21:25.820)

and ended up creating, as you mentioned, a terrible famine

Norman Naimark (1:21:32.500)

that everybody understood was a famine as a result of this.

Lex Fridman (1:21:36.460)

I mean, there were also some problems of nature

Norman Naimark (1:21:40.380)

at the same time and some flooding and bad weather

Lex Fridman (1:21:42.740)

and that sort of thing, but it was really a manmade famine.

Lex Fridman (1:21:46.140)

And Mao said at one point, who cares if millions die?

Lex Fridman (1:21:52.820)

It just doesn't matter.

Norman Naimark (1:21:53.940)

We've got millions more left.

Lex Fridman (1:21:55.340)

I mean, he would periodically say things like this

Norman Naimark (1:21:57.820)

that showed that like Stalin, he had total indifference

Lex Fridman (1:22:03.140)

to the fact that people were dying in large numbers.

Norman Naimark (1:22:06.340)

It led again to cannibalism

Lex Fridman (1:22:08.140)

and to terrible wastage all over the country

Lex Fridman (1:22:13.780)

and millions of people died

Lex Fridman (1:22:15.060)

and there was just no stopping it.

Norman Naimark (1:22:18.180)

There were people in the party

Lex Fridman (1:22:19.260)

who began to kind of edge towards telling Mao

Norman Naimark (1:22:22.620)

this wasn't a great idea and that he should back off,

Lex Fridman (1:22:26.260)

but he wouldn't back off.

Lex Fridman (1:22:28.460)

And the result was catastrophe in the countryside

Lex Fridman (1:22:32.060)

and all these people dying.

Lex Fridman (1:22:33.220)

And then compounding the problem was the political elite,

Lex Fridman (1:22:38.180)

which then if peasants would object

Norman Naimark (1:22:41.140)

or if certain people would say,

Lex Fridman (1:22:43.340)

no, they'd beat the hell out of them.

Norman Naimark (1:22:45.020)

They would beat people who didn't do

Lex Fridman (1:22:47.860)

what they wanted them to do.

Lex Fridman (1:22:49.140)

So it was really, really a horrific set of events

Lex Fridman (1:22:54.980)

on the Chinese countryside.

Norman Naimark (1:22:59.220)

I mean, and people wrote about it.

Lex Fridman (1:23:02.540)

I mean, we learned about it.

Norman Naimark (1:23:04.460)

There were people who were keeping track

Lex Fridman (1:23:05.940)

of what was going on and eventually wrote books about it.

Lex Fridman (1:23:09.100)

So we have, I mean, we have pretty good documentation,

Lex Fridman (1:23:13.020)

not so much on the numbers.

Norman Naimark (1:23:14.140)

Numbers are always a difficult problem.

Lex Fridman (1:23:17.700)

I'm facing this problem, by the way,

Norman Naimark (1:23:19.100)

this is a little bit separate with the Holodomor,

Lex Fridman (1:23:23.100)

where Ukrainians are now claiming

Norman Naimark (1:23:25.060)

11.5 million people died in Holodomor.

Lex Fridman (1:23:27.980)

And most people assume it's somewhere

Norman Naimark (1:23:29.740)

in the neighborhood of four million, 4.5 million maybe.

Lex Fridman (1:23:33.180)

So you have wildly different numbers that come out.

Norman Naimark (1:23:36.380)

Then we have different kinds of numbers,

Lex Fridman (1:23:37.900)

as you mentioned too, with the Great Leap Forward.

Lex Fridman (1:23:41.540)

So it was a huge catastrophe for China

Lex Fridman (1:23:45.220)

and now only backed off when he had to.

Lex Fridman (1:23:47.820)

And then revived a little bit

Lex Fridman (1:23:50.620)

with the Red Guards Movement later on

Norman Naimark (1:23:53.860)

when he was upset that the bureaucracy

Lex Fridman (1:23:57.980)

was resisting him a little bit

Norman Naimark (1:24:00.260)

when it came to the Great Leap.

Lex Fridman (1:24:01.620)

But he had to back off.

Norman Naimark (1:24:03.260)

It was such a terrible catastrophe.

Lex Fridman (1:24:05.940)

So one of the things about numbers

Norman Naimark (1:24:07.620)

is that you usually talk about deaths,

Lex Fridman (1:24:10.380)

but with the famine, with starvation,

Norman Naimark (1:24:14.780)

the thing I often think about

Lex Fridman (1:24:16.820)

that's impossible to put into numbers

Norman Naimark (1:24:18.580)

is the number of people

Lex Fridman (1:24:21.180)

and the degree to which they were suffering.

Norman Naimark (1:24:24.020)

You know, the number of days spent in suffering.

Lex Fridman (1:24:28.780)

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:24:30.020)

And so, I mean, death is,

Lex Fridman (1:24:36.300)

death is just one of the consequences of suffering.

Norman Naimark (1:24:39.700)

To me, it feels like one, two, three years or months

Lex Fridman (1:24:43.740)

and then years of not having anything to eat is worse.

Lex Fridman (1:24:51.780)

And those aren't put into numbers often.

Lex Fridman (1:24:55.260)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:24:56.100)

And the effect on people long term,

Lex Fridman (1:24:57.940)

you know, in terms of their mental health,

Norman Naimark (1:24:59.540)

in terms of their physical health,

Lex Fridman (1:25:02.540)

their ability to work, all those kinds of things.

Norman Naimark (1:25:05.180)

I mean, Ukrainians are working on,

Lex Fridman (1:25:07.180)

there are people working on this subject now.

Norman Naimark (1:25:09.260)

You know, the longterm effect of the hunger famine on them.

Lex Fridman (1:25:13.020)

And I'm sure there's a similar kind of longterm effect

Norman Naimark (1:25:16.220)

on Chinese peasantry of what happened.

Lex Fridman (1:25:18.100)

You know, I mean, you're destroying.

Norman Naimark (1:25:20.060)

Multigenerational.

Lex Fridman (1:25:21.020)

Yes, multigenerational.

Norman Naimark (1:25:22.300)

That's right, that's right.

Lex Fridman (1:25:23.620)

And you know, it's a really, you're absolutely right.

Norman Naimark (1:25:26.580)

This is a terrible, terrible way to die.

Lex Fridman (1:25:29.140)

And it lasts a long time.

Lex Fridman (1:25:31.500)

And sometimes you don't die, you survive,

Lex Fridman (1:25:34.340)

but you know, in the kind of shape

Norman Naimark (1:25:37.220)

where you can't do anything.

Lex Fridman (1:25:39.780)

I mean, you can't function.

Norman Naimark (1:25:42.060)

Now your brain's been injured, you know.

Lex Fridman (1:25:44.900)

I know it's a really, these famines are really horrible.

Norman Naimark (1:25:49.180)

You're right.

Lex Fridman (1:25:50.020)

So when you talk about genocide,

Norman Naimark (1:25:50.980)

it's often talking about murder.

Lex Fridman (1:25:52.620)

Where do you place North Korea in this discussion?

Norman Naimark (1:25:55.180)

We kind of mentioned it.

Lex Fridman (1:25:56.940)

So in the, what is it?

Norman Naimark (1:25:58.860)

The Arduous March of the 1990s,

Lex Fridman (1:26:03.860)

where it was mass starvation.

Norman Naimark (1:26:08.340)

Many people describe mass starvation

Lex Fridman (1:26:10.860)

going on now in North Korea.

Norman Naimark (1:26:13.140)

When you think about genocide,

Lex Fridman (1:26:14.340)

when you think about atrocities going on in the world today,

Lex Fridman (1:26:18.740)

where do you place North Korea?

Lex Fridman (1:26:20.740)

So take a step back.

Norman Naimark (1:26:22.300)

When the, there were all these courts

Lex Fridman (1:26:24.780)

that were set up for Bosnia and for Rwanda

Lex Fridman (1:26:28.180)

and for other genocides in the 1990s.

Lex Fridman (1:26:34.060)

And then the decision was made

Norman Naimark (1:26:37.340)

by the international community, UN basically,

Lex Fridman (1:26:39.860)

to set up the International Criminal Court,

Norman Naimark (1:26:43.100)

which would then try genocide in the more modern period

Lex Fridman (1:26:47.500)

and the more contemporary period.

Lex Fridman (1:26:49.540)

And the ICC lists three crimes basically.

Lex Fridman (1:26:54.540)

The genocide crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Lex Fridman (1:27:03.100)

And subsumed to crimes against humanity

Lex Fridman (1:27:07.180)

are a lot of the kinds of things

Norman Naimark (1:27:08.660)

you're talking about with North Korea.

Lex Fridman (1:27:10.780)

I mean, it's torture, it's artificial,

Norman Naimark (1:27:13.700)

sometimes artificial famine or famine,

Lex Fridman (1:27:16.900)

that is not necessary, right?

Norman Naimark (1:27:21.060)

Not necessary to have it.

Lex Fridman (1:27:22.980)

And there are other kinds of, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:27:26.020)

mass rape and stuff like that.

Lex Fridman (1:27:28.340)

There are other kinds of things that fit

Norman Naimark (1:27:31.140)

into the crimes against humanity.

Lex Fridman (1:27:33.460)

And that's sort of where I think about North Korea

Norman Naimark (1:27:36.380)

as committing crimes against humanity, not genocide.

Lex Fridman (1:27:39.180)

And again, remember, genocide is meant to be,

Norman Naimark (1:27:44.660)

I mean, some people, there's a disagreement

Lex Fridman (1:27:46.860)

among scholars and jurists about this.

Norman Naimark (1:27:48.820)

Some people think of genocide as the crime of crimes,

Lex Fridman (1:27:51.900)

the worst of the three that I just mentioned.

Lex Fridman (1:27:55.140)

But some think of them as co equal.

Lex Fridman (1:27:56.980)

And the ICC, the International Criminal Court,

Norman Naimark (1:28:00.460)

is dealing with them more or less as co equal,

Lex Fridman (1:28:03.300)

even though we tend to think of genocide as the worst.

Lex Fridman (1:28:06.500)

So I mean, what I'm trying to say is that,

Lex Fridman (1:28:08.940)

you know, I don't wanna split hairs.

Norman Naimark (1:28:11.660)

I think it's sort of morally and ethically unseemly,

Lex Fridman (1:28:15.460)

you know, the split hairs about what is genocide,

Lex Fridman (1:28:18.020)

what is the crime against humanity.

Lex Fridman (1:28:20.700)

You know, this is for lawyers, not for historians.

Lex Fridman (1:28:22.980)

But terminology wise.

Lex Fridman (1:28:24.100)

Yeah, yeah, you know, you don't wanna get into that.

Norman Naimark (1:28:28.340)

Because it, I mean, it happened with Darfur a little bit,

Lex Fridman (1:28:32.180)

where the Bush administration had declared

Norman Naimark (1:28:35.660)

that Darfur was a genocide.

Lex Fridman (1:28:37.820)

And the UN said, no, no, it wasn't genocide,

Norman Naimark (1:28:41.700)

it was a crime against humanity.

Lex Fridman (1:28:43.380)

And then, you know, that confused things

Norman Naimark (1:28:45.260)

versus clarified them.

Lex Fridman (1:28:47.260)

I mean, we damn well knew what was happening.

Norman Naimark (1:28:49.300)

People were being killed and being attacked.

Lex Fridman (1:28:52.500)

And so, you know, on the one hand,

Norman Naimark (1:28:55.220)

I think the whole concept and the way of thinking

Lex Fridman (1:28:59.820)

about history using genocide as an important part

Norman Naimark (1:29:04.060)

of human history is crucial.

Lex Fridman (1:29:08.020)

On the other hand, I don't like to, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:29:12.700)

get involved in the hair splitting,

Lex Fridman (1:29:13.900)

what's genocide and what's not.

Lex Fridman (1:29:15.340)

So that, you know, North Korea, I tend to think of,

Lex Fridman (1:29:18.580)

like I said, as committing crimes against humanity

Norman Naimark (1:29:22.620)

and, you know, forcibly incarcerating people,

Lex Fridman (1:29:25.540)

torturing them, that kind of thing.

Norman Naimark (1:29:28.100)

You know, routinely incarcerating, depriving them

Lex Fridman (1:29:30.940)

of certain kinds of human rights

Norman Naimark (1:29:33.620)

can be considered a crime against humanity.

Lex Fridman (1:29:35.700)

But I don't think of it in the same way

Norman Naimark (1:29:37.980)

I think about genocide, which is an attack

Lex Fridman (1:29:39.940)

on a group of people.

Norman Naimark (1:29:40.780)

Let me just leave it at that.

Lex Fridman (1:29:42.780)

What in this, if we think about, if it's okay,

Norman Naimark (1:29:45.820)

can we loosely use the term genocide here,

Lex Fridman (1:29:48.140)

just let's not play games with terminology.

Norman Naimark (1:29:50.860)

Just bad crimes against humanity.

Lex Fridman (1:29:56.900)

Of particular interest are the ones

Norman Naimark (1:29:58.620)

that are going on today still,

Lex Fridman (1:30:01.620)

because it raises the question to us,

Lex Fridman (1:30:04.460)

what do people outside of this,

Lex Fridman (1:30:07.940)

what role do they have to play?

Lex Fridman (1:30:09.300)

So what role does the United States,

Lex Fridman (1:30:12.380)

or what role do I, as a human being who has food today,

Norman Naimark (1:30:18.700)

who has shelter, who has a comfortable life,

Lex Fridman (1:30:21.420)

what role do I have when I think about North Korea,

Norman Naimark (1:30:26.100)

when I think about Syria,

Lex Fridman (1:30:27.340)

when I think about maybe the Uighur population in China?

Norman Naimark (1:30:33.140)

Well, I mean, the role is the same role I have,

Lex Fridman (1:30:36.060)

which is to teach and to learn

Lex Fridman (1:30:38.380)

and to get the message out that this is happening,

Lex Fridman (1:30:43.620)

because the more people who understand it,

Norman Naimark (1:30:45.740)

the more likely it is that the United States government

Lex Fridman (1:30:48.580)

will try to do something about it,

Lex Fridman (1:30:53.460)

within the context of who we are and where we live, right?

Lex Fridman (1:30:56.660)

And so, I write books, you do shows,

Norman Naimark (1:31:02.020)

or maybe you write books too, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (1:31:04.620)

I do not write books, but I tweet.

Norman Naimark (1:31:08.500)

Okay, that's good too.

Lex Fridman (1:31:09.700)

Ineloquently, but that's not the,

Norman Naimark (1:31:11.380)

I guess that's not the, yes, so certainly this is true.

Lex Fridman (1:31:14.300)

And in terms of a voice, in terms of words,

Norman Naimark (1:31:17.020)

in terms of books, you are, I would say,

Lex Fridman (1:31:19.420)

a rare example of somebody

Norman Naimark (1:31:21.220)

that has powerful reach with words.

Lex Fridman (1:31:25.060)

But I was also referring to actions.

Lex Fridman (1:31:28.300)

In the United States government, what are the options here?

Lex Fridman (1:31:31.780)

So, war has costs,

Lex Fridman (1:31:35.140)

and war seems to be, as you have described,

Lex Fridman (1:31:39.100)

sort of potentially increase the atrocity, not decrease it.

Norman Naimark (1:31:44.380)

If there's anything that challenges my hope for the future

Lex Fridman (1:31:48.460)

is the fact that sometimes we're not powerless to help,

Lex Fridman (1:31:52.940)

but very close to powerless to help,

Lex Fridman (1:31:55.980)

because trying to help can often lead to,

Norman Naimark (1:32:00.260)

in the near term, more negative effects than positive effects.

Lex Fridman (1:32:04.660)

That's exactly right.

Norman Naimark (1:32:05.620)

I mean, the unintended consequences of what we do

Lex Fridman (1:32:10.180)

can frequently be as bad, if not worse,

Norman Naimark (1:32:13.540)

than trying to relieve the difficulties

Lex Fridman (1:32:17.060)

that people are having.

Lex Fridman (1:32:17.900)

So I think you're caught a little bit,

Lex Fridman (1:32:21.500)

but it's also true, I think, that we can be more forceful.

Norman Naimark (1:32:25.220)

I think we can be more forceful without necessarily war.

Lex Fridman (1:32:29.620)

There is this idea of the so called responsibility

Norman Naimark (1:32:33.700)

to protect, and this was an idea that came up

Lex Fridman (1:32:37.820)

after Kosovo, which was what, 1999,

Lex Fridman (1:32:42.820)

and when the Serbs looked like they were going to engage

Lex Fridman (1:32:48.500)

in a genocidal program in Kosovo,

Lex Fridman (1:32:50.540)

and it was basically a program of ethnic cleansing,

Lex Fridman (1:32:53.180)

but it could have gone bad and gotten worse,

Norman Naimark (1:32:56.220)

not just driving people out, but beginning to kill them.

Lex Fridman (1:32:59.540)

And the United States and Britain and others intervened.

Lex Fridman (1:33:05.260)

And Russians were there too, as you probably recall.

Lex Fridman (1:33:08.860)

And I think correctly, people have analyzed this

Norman Naimark (1:33:13.940)

as a case in which genocide was prevented or stopped.

Lex Fridman (1:33:19.940)

In other words, the Serbs were stopped in their tracks.

Norman Naimark (1:33:22.020)

I mean, some bad things did happen.

Lex Fridman (1:33:23.460)

We bombed Belgrade and the Chinese embassy

Lex Fridman (1:33:25.660)

and things like that.

Lex Fridman (1:33:27.100)

But it was stopped, and following upon that,

Norman Naimark (1:33:32.340)

then there was a kind of international consensus

Lex Fridman (1:33:35.620)

that we needed to do something.

Norman Naimark (1:33:36.900)

I mean, because of Rwanda, Bosnia,

Lex Fridman (1:33:39.500)

and the positive example of Kosovo, right?

Norman Naimark (1:33:42.580)

That genocide did not happen in Kosovo.

Lex Fridman (1:33:46.580)

I think that argument has been substantiated.

Norman Naimark (1:33:50.740)

Anyway, and this notion of the,

Lex Fridman (1:33:55.460)

or this doctrine or whatever,

Norman Naimark (1:33:58.460)

of the responsibility to protect them

Lex Fridman (1:34:00.860)

was adopted by the UN in 2005, unanimously.

Lex Fridman (1:34:06.500)

And what it says is there's a hierarchy of measures

Lex Fridman (1:34:11.820)

that should be, well, let me take a step back.

Norman Naimark (1:34:14.980)

It starts with the principle that sovereignty of a country

Lex Fridman (1:34:21.060)

is not, you don't earn it just by being there

Lex Fridman (1:34:24.820)

and being your own country.

Lex Fridman (1:34:27.300)

You have to earn it by protecting your people.

Lex Fridman (1:34:30.980)

So every, this was all agreed

Lex Fridman (1:34:32.820)

with all the nations of the UN agreed,

Norman Naimark (1:34:35.140)

Chinese and Russians too,

Lex Fridman (1:34:37.820)

that sovereignty is there because you protect your people

Lex Fridman (1:34:43.340)

against various depredations, right?

Lex Fridman (1:34:46.380)

Including genocide, crimes against humanity,

Norman Naimark (1:34:49.740)

forced imprisonment, torture, and that sort of thing.

Lex Fridman (1:34:52.820)

If you violate that justification for your sovereignty,

Norman Naimark (1:34:59.980)

that you're protecting your people,

Lex Fridman (1:35:01.460)

that you're not protecting them,

Norman Naimark (1:35:03.260)

the international community has the obligation

Lex Fridman (1:35:06.860)

to do something about it, all right?

Norman Naimark (1:35:09.900)

Now, then they have a kind of hierarchy

Lex Fridman (1:35:11.860)

of things you can do, you know, starting with,

Norman Naimark (1:35:15.220)

I mean, I'm not quoting exactly,

Lex Fridman (1:35:17.020)

but, you know, starting with kind of push and pull,

Norman Naimark (1:35:19.380)

you know, trying to convince people,

Lex Fridman (1:35:20.860)

don't do that, you know, to Myanmar,

Lex Fridman (1:35:23.380)

don't do that to the Rohingya people, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:27.780)

Then it goes down the list, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:35:29.500)

and you get to sanctions or threatening sanctions

Lex Fridman (1:35:32.300)

and then sanctions, you know, like we have against Russia,

Lex Fridman (1:35:36.700)

but you go down the list, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:38.540)

You go down the list and eventually

Norman Naimark (1:35:42.260)

you get to military intervention at the bottom,

Lex Fridman (1:35:44.380)

which they say is the last thing, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:35:46.860)

and you really don't wanna do that.

Lex Fridman (1:35:50.100)

And not only do you not wanna do it,

Lex Fridman (1:35:52.020)

but it, just as you said, just as you pointed out,

Lex Fridman (1:35:54.740)

it can have unintended consequences, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:58.180)

And we'll do everything we can short,

Lex Fridman (1:36:01.460)

you know, of military intervention,

Norman Naimark (1:36:03.420)

but, you know, if necessary,

Lex Fridman (1:36:06.300)

that can be undertaken as well.

Lex Fridman (1:36:09.140)

And so the responsibility to predict, I think,

Lex Fridman (1:36:11.140)

is, you know, it was not implementable.

Lex Fridman (1:36:16.060)

Oh, one of the things it says in this last category, right?

Lex Fridman (1:36:20.620)

The military intervention is that the intervention

Lex Fridman (1:36:23.500)

cannot create more damage than it relieves, right?

Lex Fridman (1:36:29.020)

And so for Syria, we came to the conclusion,

Norman Naimark (1:36:34.500)

you know, that, I mean, the international community

Lex Fridman (1:36:36.740)

in some ways said this in so many words,

Norman Naimark (1:36:39.620)

even though the Russians were there, obviously,

Lex Fridman (1:36:41.460)

we ended up being there and that sort of thing,

Lex Fridman (1:36:43.220)

but the international community basically said,

Lex Fridman (1:36:45.420)

you know, there's no way you can intervene in Syria.

Norman Naimark (1:36:48.220)

You know, there's just no way without causing more damage,

Lex Fridman (1:36:52.100)

you know, than you would relieve.

Norman Naimark (1:36:54.220)

So, you know, in some senses,

Lex Fridman (1:36:56.820)

that's what the international community is saying

Norman Naimark (1:36:58.460)

about, you know, Xinjiang and the Uighurs too.

Lex Fridman (1:37:02.060)

You know, I mean, you can't even imagine

Lex Fridman (1:37:05.660)

what hell would break loose

Lex Fridman (1:37:07.100)

if there was some kind of military trouble, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:37:10.300)

to threaten the Chinese with.

Lex Fridman (1:37:12.740)

But you can go down that list

Norman Naimark (1:37:16.340)

with the, you know, the military leadership of Myanmar,

Lex Fridman (1:37:19.740)

and you can go down that list

Norman Naimark (1:37:21.140)

with the Chinese Communist Party,

Lex Fridman (1:37:23.460)

and you can go down the list, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:37:25.460)

with others who are threatening, you know, with Ethiopia

Lex Fridman (1:37:31.300)

and what it's doing in Tigray.

Norman Naimark (1:37:33.860)

And, you know, you can go down that list and start pushing.

Lex Fridman (1:37:37.900)

I think what happened,

Norman Naimark (1:37:39.220)

you know, there was more of a willingness in the 90s,

Lex Fridman (1:37:44.380)

and in, you know, right at the turn of the century,

Norman Naimark (1:37:48.860)

you know, to do these kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (1:37:50.780)

And then, you know, when Trump got elected and, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:37:53.260)

he basically said, you know, America first

Lex Fridman (1:37:55.380)

and out of the world,

Norman Naimark (1:37:56.260)

we're not gonna do any of this kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:37:58.620)

And now Biden has the problem

Norman Naimark (1:38:00.780)

of trying to rebuild consensus

Lex Fridman (1:38:02.460)

on how you deal with these kinds of things.

Norman Naimark (1:38:06.740)

I think it's not impossible.

Lex Fridman (1:38:08.660)

I mean, here I tend to be maybe more of an optimist than you.

Norman Naimark (1:38:12.500)

You know, I think it's not impossible

Lex Fridman (1:38:14.540)

that the international community can, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:38:16.700)

muster some internal fortitude

Lex Fridman (1:38:20.620)

and push harder, short of war, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:38:25.660)

to get the Chinese and to get the, again, Myanmar,

Lex Fridman (1:38:30.860)

and to get others to kind of back off

Norman Naimark (1:38:34.100)

of violations of people's rights

Lex Fridman (1:38:36.020)

the way they are routinely doing it.

Lex Fridman (1:38:38.300)

So that's in the space of geopolitics.

Lex Fridman (1:38:39.980)

That's the space of politicians and UN and so on.

Norman Naimark (1:38:42.820)

The interesting thing about China,

Lex Fridman (1:38:44.420)

and this is a difficult topic,

Lex Fridman (1:38:47.020)

but there's so many financial interests

Lex Fridman (1:38:53.540)

that not many voices with power and with money

Norman Naimark (1:38:59.380)

speak up, speak out against China

Lex Fridman (1:39:03.460)

because it's a very interesting effect

Norman Naimark (1:39:06.700)

because it costs a lot for an individual to speak up

Lex Fridman (1:39:12.260)

because you're going to suffer.

Norman Naimark (1:39:13.820)

I mean, China just cuts off the market.

Lex Fridman (1:39:16.980)

Like if you have a product, if you have a company

Lex Fridman (1:39:19.980)

and you say something negative, China just says, okay,

Lex Fridman (1:39:22.780)

well then they knock you out of the market.

Lex Fridman (1:39:25.100)

And so any person that speaks up,

Lex Fridman (1:39:27.420)

they get shut down immediately financially.

Norman Naimark (1:39:29.780)

It's a huge cost, sometimes millions or billions of dollars.

Lex Fridman (1:39:33.180)

And so what happens is everybody of consequences,

Norman Naimark (1:39:36.540)

sort of financially, everybody with a giant platform

Lex Fridman (1:39:39.540)

is extremely hesitant to speak out.

Norman Naimark (1:39:41.260)

It's a very, it's a different kind of hesitation

Lex Fridman (1:39:45.260)

that's financial in nature.

Norman Naimark (1:39:46.820)

I don't know if that was always the case.

Lex Fridman (1:39:48.700)

It seems like in history, people were quiet

Norman Naimark (1:39:52.380)

because of fear, because of a threat of violence.

Lex Fridman (1:39:55.860)

Here, there's almost like a self interested

Norman Naimark (1:39:59.940)

preservation of financial, of wealth.

Lex Fridman (1:40:04.300)

And I don't know what to do that.

Norman Naimark (1:40:06.220)

I mean, I don't know if you can say something there,

Lex Fridman (1:40:09.380)

like the genocide going on

Norman Naimark (1:40:14.380)

because people are financially self interested.

Lex Fridman (1:40:18.340)

Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think the analysis is correct.

Lex Fridman (1:40:21.980)

And it's not only, but it's not only corporations,

Lex Fridman (1:40:26.100)

but it's the American government

Norman Naimark (1:40:28.180)

that represents the American people

Lex Fridman (1:40:30.300)

that also feels compelled not to challenge the Chinese

Norman Naimark (1:40:37.940)

on human rights issues.

Lex Fridman (1:40:39.300)

But the interesting thing is it's not just,

Norman Naimark (1:40:41.900)

you know, I know a lot of people from China

Lex Fridman (1:40:44.340)

and first of all, amazing human beings

Lex Fridman (1:40:47.060)

and a lot of brilliant people in China,

Lex Fridman (1:40:49.020)

they also don't want to speak out

Lex Fridman (1:40:50.860)

and not because they're sort of quote unquote,

Lex Fridman (1:40:52.980)

like silenced, but more because they're going

Norman Naimark (1:40:56.140)

to also lose financially.

Lex Fridman (1:40:58.500)

They have a lot of businesses in China.

Norman Naimark (1:41:00.580)

They, you know, they're running,

Lex Fridman (1:41:02.500)

in fact, the Chinese government and the country

Norman Naimark (1:41:06.700)

has a very interesting structure

Lex Fridman (1:41:08.460)

because it has a lot of elements that enable capitalism

Norman Naimark (1:41:11.340)

within a certain framework.

Lex Fridman (1:41:13.820)

So you have a lot of very successful companies

Lex Fridman (1:41:16.540)

and they operate successfully.

Lex Fridman (1:41:18.180)

And then the leaders of those companies,

Norman Naimark (1:41:19.900)

many of whom have either been on this podcast,

Lex Fridman (1:41:24.620)

or want to be on this podcast,

Norman Naimark (1:41:25.900)

they really don't want to say anything negative

Lex Fridman (1:41:28.180)

about the government.

Lex Fridman (1:41:29.380)

And the nature of the fear I sense

Lex Fridman (1:41:32.740)

is not the kind of fear you would have in Nazi Germany.

Norman Naimark (1:41:37.300)

It's a very kind of, it's a mellow,

Lex Fridman (1:41:40.180)

like why would I speak out when it has a negative effect

Norman Naimark (1:41:44.940)

on my company, on my family, in terms of finance,

Lex Fridman (1:41:47.460)

strictly financially.

Lex Fridman (1:41:50.060)

And that's difficult.

Lex Fridman (1:41:53.860)

That's a different problem to solve.

Norman Naimark (1:41:56.020)

That feels solvable.

Lex Fridman (1:41:57.620)

It feels like it's a money problem.

Norman Naimark (1:42:00.060)

If you can control the flow of money

Lex Fridman (1:42:03.940)

where the government has less power

Norman Naimark (1:42:05.580)

to control the flow of money,

Lex Fridman (1:42:06.780)

it feels like that's solvable.

Lex Fridman (1:42:08.740)

And that's where capitalism is good.

Lex Fridman (1:42:10.300)

That's where a free market is good.

Lex Fridman (1:42:11.540)

So it's like, that's where a lot of people

Lex Fridman (1:42:13.180)

in the cryptocurrency space,

Norman Naimark (1:42:14.380)

I don't know if you follow them,

Lex Fridman (1:42:15.980)

they kind of say, okay, take the monetary system,

Norman Naimark (1:42:19.660)

the power to control money away from governments.

Lex Fridman (1:42:22.500)

Make it a distributed,

Norman Naimark (1:42:23.420)

like allow technology to help you with that.

Lex Fridman (1:42:26.300)

That's a hopeful message there.

Norman Naimark (1:42:28.700)

In fact, a lot of people argue

Lex Fridman (1:42:29.980)

that kind of Bitcoin and these cryptocurrencies

Norman Naimark (1:42:31.940)

can help deal with some of these authoritarian regimes

Lex Fridman (1:42:38.460)

that lead to violations of basic human rights.

Norman Naimark (1:42:41.860)

If you can control, if you can give the power

Lex Fridman (1:42:44.300)

to control the money to the people,

Norman Naimark (1:42:46.060)

you can take that away from governments.

Lex Fridman (1:42:47.940)

That's another source of hope

Norman Naimark (1:42:49.700)

where technology might be able to do something good.

Lex Fridman (1:42:52.740)

That's something different about the 21st century

Norman Naimark (1:42:54.820)

than the 20th is there's technology

Lex Fridman (1:42:57.100)

in the hands of billions of people.

Norman Naimark (1:42:59.700)

I mean, I have to say,

Lex Fridman (1:43:01.700)

I think you're a naive when it comes to technology.

Norman Naimark (1:43:04.660)

I mean, I don't, I'm not someone who understands technology.

Lex Fridman (1:43:07.900)

So it's wrong of me to argue with you

Norman Naimark (1:43:11.620)

because I don't really spend much time with it.

Lex Fridman (1:43:13.820)

I don't really like it very much.

Lex Fridman (1:43:15.940)

And I'm not, I'm neither a fan nor a connoisseur.

Lex Fridman (1:43:21.060)

So I just don't really know.

Lex Fridman (1:43:23.860)

But what human history has shown basically,

Lex Fridman (1:43:27.700)

and that's a big statement.

Norman Naimark (1:43:28.980)

I don't wanna pretend I can tell you

Lex Fridman (1:43:31.020)

what human history has shown.

Lex Fridman (1:43:32.860)

But technology, atom bomb,

Lex Fridman (1:43:37.180)

I mean, that's a perfect example of technology.

Lex Fridman (1:43:39.780)

What happens when you discover new things?

Lex Fridman (1:43:42.100)

It's a perfect example.

Lex Fridman (1:43:43.300)

What's going on with Facebook now?

Lex Fridman (1:43:45.020)

It's an absolutely perfect example.

Lex Fridman (1:43:47.980)

And I once went to a lecture by Eric Schmidt

Lex Fridman (1:43:52.260)

about the future and about all the things

Norman Naimark (1:43:54.700)

that were gonna happen and all these wonderful things

Lex Fridman (1:43:57.060)

like you wouldn't have to translate yourself anything,

Norman Naimark (1:43:59.860)

you wouldn't have to read a book,

Lex Fridman (1:44:02.780)

you wouldn't have to drive a car,

Norman Naimark (1:44:04.140)

you don't have to do this, you don't have to do that.

Lex Fridman (1:44:05.660)

What kind of life is that?

Lex Fridman (1:44:07.340)

So my view of technology is it's subsumed

Lex Fridman (1:44:13.220)

to the political, social and moral needs of our day

Lex Fridman (1:44:18.140)

and should be subsumed to that day.

Lex Fridman (1:44:20.340)

It's not gonna solve anything by itself.

Norman Naimark (1:44:22.340)

It's gonna be you and me that solve things.

Lex Fridman (1:44:25.460)

If they're solved, there are political system

Norman Naimark (1:44:27.420)

that solve things.

Lex Fridman (1:44:28.380)

Technology is neutral on one level.

Norman Naimark (1:44:31.420)

It is simply a human, I mean, they're talking now

Lex Fridman (1:44:35.060)

about how artificial intelligence is gonna do this

Lex Fridman (1:44:38.180)

and is gonna do that.

Lex Fridman (1:44:39.780)

I'm not so sure there's anything necessarily positive

Norman Naimark (1:44:43.620)

or negative about it except it does obviously

Lex Fridman (1:44:46.220)

make work easier and things like that.

Norman Naimark (1:44:48.660)

I mean, I like email and I like word processing

Lex Fridman (1:44:53.940)

and all that stuff is great,

Lex Fridman (1:44:56.180)

but actually solving human relations in and of itself

Lex Fridman (1:45:04.420)

or international relations or conflict among human beings.

Norman Naimark (1:45:11.580)

I mean, I see technology as causing as many problems

Lex Fridman (1:45:14.860)

as it solves and maybe even more.

Norman Naimark (1:45:18.460)

You know, the kind.

Lex Fridman (1:45:19.300)

Maybe.

Norman Naimark (1:45:20.140)

Maybe even more. Maybe.

Lex Fridman (1:45:20.980)

Yeah.

Norman Naimark (1:45:21.820)

The question is, so like you said, technology is neutral.

Lex Fridman (1:45:25.220)

I agree with this.

Norman Naimark (1:45:26.900)

Technology is a toolkit, is a tool set that enables humans

Lex Fridman (1:45:32.460)

to have wider reach and more power, the printing press.

Norman Naimark (1:45:36.700)

The rare reason I can read your books is I would argue,

Lex Fridman (1:45:41.380)

so first of all, the printing press and then the internet.

Norman Naimark (1:45:45.540)

Wikipedia, I think, has immeasurable effect on humanity.

Lex Fridman (1:45:52.020)

Technology is a double edged sword.

Norman Naimark (1:45:53.900)

It allows bad people to do bad things

Lex Fridman (1:45:57.260)

and good people to do good things.

Norman Naimark (1:45:58.780)

It ultimately boils down to the people

Lex Fridman (1:46:02.780)

and whether you believe the capacity for good

Norman Naimark (1:46:05.700)

outweighs the capacity of bad.

Lex Fridman (1:46:07.460)

And so you said that I'm naive.

Norman Naimark (1:46:09.820)

It is true.

Lex Fridman (1:46:10.660)

I'm naively optimistic.

Norman Naimark (1:46:12.340)

I would say you're naively cynical about technology.

Lex Fridman (1:46:16.020)

Here we have one overdressed naive optimist

Lex Fridman (1:46:20.460)

and one brilliant, but nevertheless,

Lex Fridman (1:46:23.780)

technologically naive cynic and we don't know.

Norman Naimark (1:46:27.060)

We don't know whether the capacity for good

Lex Fridman (1:46:30.340)

or the capacity for evil wins out in the end.

Lex Fridman (1:46:34.860)

And like we've been talking about,

Lex Fridman (1:46:37.060)

the trajectory of human history seems to pivot

Norman Naimark (1:46:39.940)

in a lot of random seeming moments.

Lex Fridman (1:46:43.060)

So we don't know.

Lex Fridman (1:46:45.020)

But as a builder of technology, I remain optimistic.

Lex Fridman (1:46:51.020)

And I should say kind of when you are optimistic,

Norman Naimark (1:46:56.220)

it is often easy to sound naive.

Lex Fridman (1:47:02.780)

And I'm not sure what to make of that small effect.

Norman Naimark (1:47:06.300)

Not to linger on specific words,

Lex Fridman (1:47:07.780)

but I've noticed that people who kind of are cynical

Norman Naimark (1:47:13.540)

about the world somehow sound more intelligent.

Lex Fridman (1:47:18.180)

No, no.

Lex Fridman (1:47:19.020)

The issue is how can you be realistic about the world?

Lex Fridman (1:47:23.820)

It's not optimistic or pessimistic.

Norman Naimark (1:47:25.780)

It's not cynical.

Lex Fridman (1:47:27.260)

The question is how can you be a realist, right?

Norman Naimark (1:47:29.500)

Yes, that's a good question.

Lex Fridman (1:47:31.140)

Realism depends on a combination of knowledge and wisdom

Lex Fridman (1:47:39.340)

and good instincts and that sort of thing.

Lex Fridman (1:47:42.700)

And that's what we strive for, is a kind of realism.

Norman Naimark (1:47:47.340)

We both strive for that kind of realism.

Lex Fridman (1:47:49.140)

But I mean, here's an example I would give you.

Lex Fridman (1:47:53.420)

What about, again, we've got this environmental issue,

Lex Fridman (1:47:56.580)

and technology has created it.

Norman Naimark (1:47:59.300)

It's created it.

Lex Fridman (1:48:01.780)

I mean, the growth of technology,

Norman Naimark (1:48:04.140)

I mean, we all like to be heated well in our homes,

Lex Fridman (1:48:06.980)

and we wanna have cars that run quickly and fast on gas.

Norman Naimark (1:48:11.980)

I mean, we're all consumers and we all profit from this.

Lex Fridman (1:48:16.980)

I don't, not everybody profits from it,

Lex Fridman (1:48:20.060)

but we wanna be comfortable.

Lex Fridman (1:48:23.100)

And technology has provided us with a comfortable life.

Lex Fridman (1:48:25.580)

And it's also provided us with this incredible danger,

Lex Fridman (1:48:29.620)

which it's not solving, at least not now.

Lex Fridman (1:48:32.180)

And it may solve, but it may, it's only,

Lex Fridman (1:48:34.820)

my view is, you know what's gonna happen?

Norman Naimark (1:48:37.700)

A horrible catastrophe.

Lex Fridman (1:48:39.340)

It's the only way, it's the only way

Norman Naimark (1:48:42.260)

we will direct ourselves

Lex Fridman (1:48:44.140)

to actually trying to do something about it.

Norman Naimark (1:48:48.100)

We don't have the wisdom and the realism

Lex Fridman (1:48:53.100)

and the sense of purpose, you know, what's her name?

Norman Naimark (1:48:59.020)

Greta goes blah, blah, blah, something like that

Lex Fridman (1:49:01.580)

in her last talk about the environmental summit

Norman Naimark (1:49:08.020)

in Glasgow or whatever it was.

Lex Fridman (1:49:11.340)

And, you know, we just don't have it

Norman Naimark (1:49:15.900)

unless we're hit upside the head really, really hard.

Lex Fridman (1:49:19.420)

And then maybe, you know, the business with nuclear weapons,

Norman Naimark (1:49:25.460)

you know, I think somehow we got hit upside the head

Lex Fridman (1:49:27.860)

and we realized, oh man, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:49:30.380)

this could really do it to the whole world.

Lex Fridman (1:49:32.940)

And so we started, you know, serious arms control stuff.

Norman Naimark (1:49:36.660)

And, you know, but up to that point, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:49:41.460)

I mean, there was just something about, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:49:43.500)

Khrushchev's big bomb, his big hydrogen bomb,

Lex Fridman (1:49:46.060)

which he exploded in the times,

Norman Naimark (1:49:48.340)

I think it was the anniversary or something like that.

Lex Fridman (1:49:50.420)

You know, I mean, just think what we could have done

Norman Naimark (1:49:52.460)

to each other.

Lex Fridman (1:49:53.580)

Well, that's the double edged sword of technology.

Norman Naimark (1:49:55.620)

Yeah, I agree, it's a double edged sword.

Lex Fridman (1:49:57.300)

There's a lot of people, there's a lot of people

Norman Naimark (1:49:59.260)

that argue that nuclear weapons is the reason

Lex Fridman (1:50:01.980)

we haven't had a World War III.

Lex Fridman (1:50:03.780)

So nuclear weapons, the mutually assured destruction

Lex Fridman (1:50:06.860)

leads to a kind of like,

Norman Naimark (1:50:08.540)

we've reached a certain level of destructiveness

Lex Fridman (1:50:11.220)

with our weapons where we were able to catch ourselves,

Norman Naimark (1:50:15.660)

not to create, like you said, hit really hard.

Lex Fridman (1:50:20.300)

This is the interesting question about kind of hard,

Norman Naimark (1:50:25.580)

hard and really hard upside the head.

Lex Fridman (1:50:28.620)

With the environment, I would argue,

Norman Naimark (1:50:31.620)

see, we can't know the future,

Lex Fridman (1:50:33.860)

but I would argue as the pressure builds,

Norman Naimark (1:50:36.180)

there's already, because of this created urgency,

Lex Fridman (1:50:41.700)

the amount of innovation that I've seen

Norman Naimark (1:50:44.580)

that sometimes is unrelated to the environment,

Lex Fridman (1:50:47.180)

but kind of sparked by this urgency,

Norman Naimark (1:50:49.940)

it's been humongous, including the work of Elon Musk,

Lex Fridman (1:50:52.940)

including the work of just,

Norman Naimark (1:50:54.980)

you could argue that the SpaceX

Lex Fridman (1:51:00.580)

and the new exploration of space is kind of sparked

Norman Naimark (1:51:03.580)

by this environmental like urgency.

Lex Fridman (1:51:06.020)

I mean, connected to Tesla and everything they're doing

Norman Naimark (1:51:07.940)

with electric vehicles and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:51:09.740)

There's a huge amount of innovation

Norman Naimark (1:51:11.260)

in the space that's happening.

Lex Fridman (1:51:12.660)

I could see the effect of climate change

Norman Naimark (1:51:16.660)

resulting in more positive innovation

Lex Fridman (1:51:19.780)

that improves the quality of life across the world

Norman Naimark (1:51:22.700)

than the actual catastrophic events that we're describing,

Lex Fridman (1:51:26.340)

which we cannot even currently predict.

Norman Naimark (1:51:28.420)

It's not like there's going to be,

Lex Fridman (1:51:29.620)

there's going to be more extreme weather events.

Lex Fridman (1:51:31.540)

What does that even mean?

Lex Fridman (1:51:32.780)

There's going to be a gradual increase

Norman Naimark (1:51:35.260)

of the level of water.

Lex Fridman (1:51:38.420)

What does that even mean in terms of catastrophic events?

Norman Naimark (1:51:40.740)

It's going to be pretty gradual.

Lex Fridman (1:51:42.260)

There's going to be migration.

Norman Naimark (1:51:43.460)

We can't predict what that means.

Lex Fridman (1:51:45.100)

And in response to that,

Norman Naimark (1:51:47.500)

there's going to be a huge amount of innovators born today

Lex Fridman (1:51:52.420)

that have dreams and that will build devices and inventions

Lex Fridman (1:51:56.820)

and from space to vehicles to in the software world

Lex Fridman (1:52:01.700)

that enable education across the world,

Norman Naimark (1:52:03.700)

all those kinds of things that will on mass, on average,

Lex Fridman (1:52:07.740)

increase the quality of life on average across the world.

Lex Fridman (1:52:11.020)

So it's not at all obvious that these,

Lex Fridman (1:52:14.500)

the things that the technologies

Norman Naimark (1:52:16.220)

that are creating climate change, global warming,

Lex Fridman (1:52:19.940)

are going to have a negative, net negative effect.

Norman Naimark (1:52:23.500)

We don't know this.

Lex Fridman (1:52:24.740)

And I'm kind of inspired by the dreamers,

Norman Naimark (1:52:28.860)

the engineers, the innovators and the entrepreneurs

Lex Fridman (1:52:32.780)

that build, that wake up in the morning,

Norman Naimark (1:52:36.380)

see problems in the world and dream

Lex Fridman (1:52:38.340)

that they're going to be the ones who solve those problems.

Norman Naimark (1:52:40.740)

That's the human spirit.

Lex Fridman (1:52:42.980)

And that I'm not exactly,

Norman Naimark (1:52:44.460)

it is true that we need those deadlines.

Lex Fridman (1:52:46.700)

We need to be freaking out about stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:52:48.900)

And the reason we need to study history

Lex Fridman (1:52:52.060)

and the worst of human history is then we can say,

Norman Naimark (1:52:55.060)

oh shit, this too can happen.

Lex Fridman (1:52:57.900)

It's a slap in the face.

Norman Naimark (1:52:59.340)

It's a wake up call that if you're,

Lex Fridman (1:53:01.380)

if you get complacent, if you get lazy,

Norman Naimark (1:53:03.580)

this is going to happen.

Lex Fridman (1:53:04.820)

And that, listen, there's a lot of really intelligent people,

Norman Naimark (1:53:08.340)

ambitious people, dreamers.

Lex Fridman (1:53:10.660)

Skilled dreamers that build solutions

Norman Naimark (1:53:14.740)

that make sure this stuff doesn't happen anymore.

Lex Fridman (1:53:17.180)

So there's, I think there's reason to be optimistic

Norman Naimark (1:53:19.740)

about technology, not in a naive way.

Lex Fridman (1:53:21.780)

There's an argument to be made in a realistic way

Norman Naimark (1:53:25.380)

that like with technology, we can build a better future.

Lex Fridman (1:53:29.220)

And then Facebook is a lesson in the way Facebook

Norman Naimark (1:53:33.300)

has been done is a lesson how not to do it.

Lex Fridman (1:53:37.220)

And that lesson serves as a guide

Norman Naimark (1:53:42.420)

of how to do it better, how to do it right,

Lex Fridman (1:53:44.380)

how to do it in a positive way.

Lex Fridman (1:53:46.540)

And the same, every single sort of failed technology

Lex Fridman (1:53:49.980)

contains within it the lessons of how to do it better.

Lex Fridman (1:53:53.260)

And I mean, without that,

Lex Fridman (1:53:56.660)

what's the source of hope for human civilization?

Norman Naimark (1:54:00.620)

You know, that, I mean, by way of question,

Lex Fridman (1:54:05.620)

you have truly studied some of the darkest moments

Norman Naimark (1:54:09.300)

in human history.

Lex Fridman (1:54:11.620)

Put on your optimist hat.

Lex Fridman (1:54:14.380)

Where?

Lex Fridman (1:54:15.220)

That one.

Norman Naimark (1:54:16.060)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (1:54:16.900)

There are glimmers of it.

Norman Naimark (1:54:19.660)

Yes, what is your source of hope

Lex Fridman (1:54:22.300)

for the future of human civilization?

Norman Naimark (1:54:26.020)

Well, I think it resides in, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:54:31.100)

some of what you've been saying,

Norman Naimark (1:54:32.460)

which is the, in the persistence of this civilization

Lex Fridman (1:54:37.700)

over time, despite, you know, the incredible setbacks,

Norman Naimark (1:54:43.180)

you know, two enormous world wars, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:54:45.820)

the nuclear standoff, the, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:54:50.500)

the horrible things we're experiencing now

Lex Fridman (1:54:52.740)

with climate change and migration and stuff like that,

Norman Naimark (1:54:56.060)

that despite these things, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:54:58.820)

we are persisting and we are continuing.

Lex Fridman (1:55:02.420)

And like you say, we're continuing to invent

Lex Fridman (1:55:04.580)

and we're continuing to try to solve these problems.

Norman Naimark (1:55:07.700)

And, you know, we're continuing to love as well as hate.

Lex Fridman (1:55:11.300)

And, you know, that, you know, I'm basically,

Norman Naimark (1:55:17.740)

I mean, I have children and grandchildren

Lex Fridman (1:55:20.380)

and I think they're gonna be just fine.

Norman Naimark (1:55:23.780)

You know, I'm not a doom and gloomer, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:55:27.700)

I'm not a Cassandra saying the world is coming to an end.

Norman Naimark (1:55:30.300)

I'm not like that at all, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:55:33.500)

I think that, you know, things will persist.

Norman Naimark (1:55:38.260)

Another, by the way, source of tremendous optimism

Lex Fridman (1:55:41.380)

on my part, the kids I teach, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:55:45.580)

I teach some unbelievably fantastic young people,

Lex Fridman (1:55:49.140)

you know, who are sort of like you say,

Norman Naimark (1:55:51.580)

they're dreamers and they're problem solvers

Lex Fridman (1:55:54.260)

and they're, I mean, they have enormously humane values

Lex Fridman (1:56:01.420)

and ways of thinking about the world

Lex Fridman (1:56:02.980)

and they wanna do good.

Norman Naimark (1:56:05.740)

You know, if you take the kind of,

Lex Fridman (1:56:08.460)

I mean, this has probably been true all the way along,

Lex Fridman (1:56:11.900)

but I mean, the percentage of do gooders,

Lex Fridman (1:56:14.820)

you know, is really enormously large.

Norman Naimark (1:56:16.740)

Now, whether they end up working

Lex Fridman (1:56:18.100)

for some kind of shark law firm or something,

Norman Naimark (1:56:20.740)

you know, or, you know, that kind of thing,

Lex Fridman (1:56:24.900)

or whether they end up human rights lawyers

Lex Fridman (1:56:26.780)

is they all wanna be, right?

Lex Fridman (1:56:28.380)

You know, is a different kind of question,

Lex Fridman (1:56:33.700)

but certainly, you know, these young people are talented,

Lex Fridman (1:56:38.180)

they're smart, they have wonderful values,

Norman Naimark (1:56:41.100)

they're energetic, they work hard, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:56:44.100)

they're focused and of course, it's not just Stanford.

Norman Naimark (1:56:48.860)

I mean, it's all over the country,

Lex Fridman (1:56:50.300)

you know, you have young people

Norman Naimark (1:56:52.540)

who really wanna contribute and they wanna contribute.

Lex Fridman (1:56:55.940)

I mean, it's true some of them end up,

Norman Naimark (1:56:58.900)

you know, working to get rich.

Lex Fridman (1:57:02.100)

I mean, that's inevitable, right?

Lex Fridman (1:57:03.700)

But the percentages are actually rather small,

Lex Fridman (1:57:07.460)

at least at this age, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:57:08.780)

maybe when they get a mortgage and a family

Lex Fridman (1:57:10.660)

and that sort of thing, you know,

Norman Naimark (1:57:13.820)

financial wellbeing will be more important to them.

Lex Fridman (1:57:16.260)

But right now, you know, you catch this young generation

Lex Fridman (1:57:19.980)

and they're fantastic, they're fantastic.

Lex Fridman (1:57:22.060)

And they're not what they're often portrayed as being,

Norman Naimark (1:57:26.220)

you know, kind of silly and naive and knee jerk leftists

Lex Fridman (1:57:30.980)

and that, they're not at all like that.

Norman Naimark (1:57:33.620)

You know, they're really fine young people.

Lex Fridman (1:57:36.700)

So that's a source of optimism to me too.

Lex Fridman (1:57:40.380)

What advice would you give to those young people today,

Lex Fridman (1:57:43.980)

maybe in high school, in college, at Stanford,

Norman Naimark (1:57:47.100)

maybe to your grandchildren about how to have a career

Lex Fridman (1:57:52.380)

they can be proud of, have a life they can be proud of?

Norman Naimark (1:57:55.500)

Pursue careers that are in the public interest,

Lex Fridman (1:57:58.540)

you know, in one fashion or another

Lex Fridman (1:58:00.020)

and not just in their interests.

Lex Fridman (1:58:03.900)

And that would be, I mean, it's not bad to pursue a career

Norman Naimark (1:58:07.100)

in your own interests.

Lex Fridman (1:58:08.020)

I mean, as long as it's something that's useful

Lex Fridman (1:58:11.060)

and positive for their families or whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:58:16.060)

But yeah, so I mean, I try to advise kids

Norman Naimark (1:58:19.860)

to find themselves somehow, you know, find who they wanna be

Lex Fridman (1:58:24.380)

and what they wanna be and try to pursue it.

Lex Fridman (1:58:27.100)

And the NGO world is growing, as you know,

Lex Fridman (1:58:30.140)

and a lot of young people are kind of throwing themselves

Norman Naimark (1:58:34.420)

into it and, you know, human rights watch

Lex Fridman (1:58:39.820)

and that kind of stuff.

Norman Naimark (1:58:41.020)

And, you know, they wanna do that kind of work

Lex Fridman (1:58:43.340)

and it's very admirable.

Norman Naimark (1:58:46.940)

I tend to think that even if you're not working

Lex Fridman (1:58:50.700)

in human rights, there's a certain way in which

Norman Naimark (1:58:53.580)

if you live with integrity, I believe that all of us

Lex Fridman (1:59:01.300)

or many of us have a bunch of moments in our lives

Norman Naimark (1:59:05.860)

when we're posed with a decision.

Lex Fridman (1:59:07.980)

It's a quiet one.

Norman Naimark (1:59:09.300)

Maybe it'll never be written about or talked about.

Lex Fridman (1:59:12.340)

But you get to choose whether you, there's a choice

Norman Naimark (1:59:17.340)

that is difficult to make, it may require sacrifice,

Lex Fridman (1:59:22.580)

but it's the choice that the best version

Norman Naimark (1:59:27.140)

of that person would make.

Lex Fridman (1:59:29.860)

That's the best way I can sort of say

Lex Fridman (1:59:31.420)

how to act with integrity.

Lex Fridman (1:59:32.540)

It's the very thing that would resist the early days

Norman Naimark (1:59:35.260)

in Nazi Germany.

Lex Fridman (1:59:36.180)

It sounds dramatic to say, but those little actions.

Lex Fridman (1:59:40.260)

And I feel like the best you can do

Lex Fridman (1:59:43.940)

to avoid genocide on scale is for all of us

Norman Naimark (1:59:47.940)

to live in that way, within those moments,

Lex Fridman (1:59:51.860)

unrelated potentially to human rights, to anything else,

Norman Naimark (1:59:55.460)

is to take those actions.

Lex Fridman (1:59:57.420)

Like I believe that all of us know the right thing to do.

Norman Naimark (20:01.120)

called a vast Belsen.

Lex Fridman (20:04.040)

And by that, you know, the image is of bodies

Norman Naimark (20:06.320)

just lying everywhere, you know, people dead.

Lex Fridman (20:10.080)

And dying, you know, of hunger, which is, by the way,

Norman Naimark (20:16.200)

I mean, as you know, I've spent a lot of time

Lex Fridman (20:19.520)

studying genocide, I don't think there's anything worse

Norman Naimark (20:21.640)

than dying of hunger from what I have read.

Lex Fridman (20:24.080)

I mean, you see terrible ways that people die, right?

Lex Fridman (20:27.160)

But dying of hunger is just such a horrible, horrible thing.

Lex Fridman (20:31.200)

And so, for example, we know there were many cases

Norman Naimark (20:35.680)

of cannibalism in the countryside

Lex Fridman (20:37.240)

because there wasn't anything to eat.

Lex Fridman (20:38.760)

People were eating their own kids, right?

Lex Fridman (20:41.800)

And Stalin knew about this.

Lex Fridman (20:43.120)

And again, you know, we started with this question

Lex Fridman (20:45.840)

a little bit earlier, he doesn't,

Lex Fridman (20:47.920)

there's not a sign of remorse, not a sign of pity, right?

Lex Fridman (20:54.360)

Not a sign of any kind of human emotion

Norman Naimark (20:58.960)

that normal people would have.

Lex Fridman (21:01.680)

What about the opposite of joy for teaching them a lesson?

Norman Naimark (21:08.280)

I don't think there's joy.

Lex Fridman (21:09.560)

I'm not sure Stalin really understood

Norman Naimark (21:12.880)

emotion, what joy was, you know.

Lex Fridman (21:15.120)

I think he felt it was necessary to get those SOBs, right?

Norman Naimark (21:21.920)

That they deserved it.

Lex Fridman (21:23.680)

He says that several times, this is their own fault, right?

Norman Naimark (21:26.720)

This is their own fault.

Lex Fridman (21:29.480)

And as their own fault, you know,

Norman Naimark (21:32.360)

they get what they deserve, basically.

Lex Fridman (21:36.000)

How much was the calculation?

Lex Fridman (21:37.400)

How much was it reason versus emotion?

Lex Fridman (21:39.920)

In terms of, you said he was competent.

Norman Naimark (21:45.640)

Was there a long term strategy

Lex Fridman (21:47.600)

or was this strategy based on emotion and anger?

Norman Naimark (21:51.520)

No, I think actually the right answer is a little of both.

Lex Fridman (21:56.400)

I mean, usually the right answer in history

Norman Naimark (21:58.200)

is something like that.

Lex Fridman (21:59.040)

A little of both?

Norman Naimark (21:59.880)

No, you can't, you can't.

Lex Fridman (22:01.360)

It wasn't just, I mean, first of all,

Norman Naimark (22:03.920)

you know, the Soviets had it in for Ukraine

Lex Fridman (22:08.600)

and Ukrainian nationalism, which they really didn't like.

Lex Fridman (22:12.080)

And by the way, Russians still don't like it, right?

Lex Fridman (22:15.760)

So they had it in for Ukrainian nationalism.

Norman Naimark (22:18.040)

They feared Ukrainian nationalism.

Lex Fridman (22:22.280)

As I said, you know, Stalin writes, you know,

Norman Naimark (22:24.760)

we'll lose Ukraine, you know, if these guys win.

Lex Fridman (22:29.400)

You know, so there's a kind of long term determination,

Norman Naimark (22:34.120)

as I said, you know, to kind of break the back

Lex Fridman (22:37.240)

of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian nationalism

Norman Naimark (22:43.160)

as any kind of separatist force whatsoever.

Lex Fridman (22:46.840)

And so there's that rational calculation.

Norman Naimark (22:50.040)

At the same time, I think Stalin is annoyed

Lex Fridman (22:53.560)

and peeved and angry on one level

Norman Naimark (22:59.560)

with the Ukrainians for resisting collectivization

Lex Fridman (23:02.880)

and for being difficult and for not conforming, you know,

Norman Naimark (23:08.040)

to the way he thinks peasants should act in this situation.

Lex Fridman (23:13.240)

So you have both things.

Norman Naimark (23:14.480)

He's also very angry at the Ukrainian party

Lex Fridman (23:17.600)

and eventually purges it for not being able

Norman Naimark (23:20.160)

to control Ukraine and not be able to control the situation.

Lex Fridman (23:23.880)

You know, Ukraine is in theory the bread basket, right?

Norman Naimark (23:26.440)

Of Europe.

Lex Fridman (23:27.280)

Well, how come the bread basket isn't turning over to me

Norman Naimark (23:30.280)

all this grain so I can sell it abroad

Lex Fridman (23:32.200)

and, you know, build new factories

Lex Fridman (23:35.160)

and support the workers in the cities?

Lex Fridman (23:37.520)

So there's a kind of annoyance.

Norman Naimark (23:39.600)

You know, when things fail,

Lex Fridman (23:41.720)

and this is absolutely typical of Stalin,

Norman Naimark (23:43.720)

when things fail, he blames it on other people

Lex Fridman (23:45.920)

and usually groups of people, right?

Norman Naimark (23:47.720)

Not individuals, but groups again.

Lex Fridman (23:50.920)

So a little bit of both I think is the right answer.

Norman Naimark (23:54.880)

This blame, it feels like there's a playbook

Lex Fridman (23:57.720)

that dictators follow.

Norman Naimark (23:59.560)

I just wonder if it comes naturally

Lex Fridman (24:01.360)

or just kind of evolves.

Norman Naimark (24:03.960)

Because, you know, blaming others

Lex Fridman (24:05.680)

and then telling these narratives

Lex Fridman (24:06.960)

and then creating the other

Lex Fridman (24:08.340)

and then somehow that leads to hatred and genocide.

Norman Naimark (24:10.700)

It feels like there's too many commonalities

Lex Fridman (24:14.720)

for it not to be a naturally emergent strategy

Norman Naimark (24:18.960)

that works for dictatorships.

Lex Fridman (24:20.680)

I mean, it's a very good point.

Lex Fridman (24:23.080)

And I think it's one, you know, that has its merits.

Lex Fridman (24:27.680)

In other words, I think you're right

Norman Naimark (24:30.400)

that there's certain kinds of strategies

Lex Fridman (24:32.220)

by dictators that, you know, are common to them.

Norman Naimark (24:35.540)

A lot of them do killing, not all of them

Lex Fridman (24:37.880)

of that sort that Stalin did.

Norman Naimark (24:40.060)

I've written about Mao and Pol Pot, you know, and Hitler.

Lex Fridman (24:43.840)

And, you know, there is a sort of, as you say,

Norman Naimark (24:46.840)

a kind of playbook for political dictatorship.

Lex Fridman (24:51.780)

Also for, you know, a kind of communist totalitarian way

Lex Fridman (24:56.540)

of functioning, you know?

Lex Fridman (24:59.080)

And that way of functioning was described already

Norman Naimark (25:01.520)

by Hannah Arendt early on

Lex Fridman (25:02.960)

when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Lex Fridman (25:06.360)

And she more or less writes the playbook

Lex Fridman (25:10.280)

and Stalin does follow it.

Norman Naimark (25:12.760)

The real question, it seems to me, is to what extent,

Lex Fridman (25:17.200)

you know, and how deep does this go

Lex Fridman (25:19.780)

and how often does it go in that direction?

Lex Fridman (25:22.220)

I mean, you can argue, for example,

Lex Fridman (25:25.040)

I mean, Fidel Castro was not a nice man, right?

Lex Fridman (25:27.520)

He was a dictator, he was a terrible dictator.

Lex Fridman (25:30.920)

But he did not engage in mass murder.

Lex Fridman (25:33.280)

Ho Chi Minh was a dictator, a communist dictator

Norman Naimark (25:36.760)

who grew up, you know, in the communist movement,

Lex Fridman (25:39.800)

went to Moscow, you know, spent time in Moscow in the 30s

Lex Fridman (25:43.360)

and went to find, found the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Lex Fridman (25:47.720)

You know, he was a horrible dictator.

Norman Naimark (25:49.240)

I'm sure he was responsible

Lex Fridman (25:50.460)

for a lot of death and destruction.

Lex Fridman (25:52.580)

But he wasn't a mass murderer.

Lex Fridman (25:55.120)

And so you get those, you know.

Norman Naimark (25:57.920)

I mean, I would even argue, others will disagree,

Lex Fridman (26:02.000)

that Lenin wasn't a mass murderer.

Norman Naimark (26:04.120)

You know, that he didn't kill the same way,

Lex Fridman (26:06.660)

you know, that Stalin killed.

Norman Naimark (26:08.200)

Or people after him, they're communist dictators too,

Lex Fridman (26:10.840)

after all, Khrushchev, you know, was a communist dictator.

Lex Fridman (26:13.560)

But he stopped this killing.

Lex Fridman (26:16.320)

And, you know, he's still responsible for a gulag

Lex Fridman (26:19.080)

and people sent off into a gulag and imprisonment

Lex Fridman (26:22.000)

and torture and that sort of thing.

Lex Fridman (26:23.800)

But it's not at all the same thing.

Lex Fridman (26:25.400)

So there are some, you know, like Stalin, like Mao,

Norman Naimark (26:29.800)

like Pol Pot, you know, who commit these horrible,

Lex Fridman (26:32.680)

horrible atrocities, extensively engaging,

Norman Naimark (26:36.960)

in my view, in genocide.

Lex Fridman (26:39.800)

And there are some who don't.

Lex Fridman (26:42.100)

And, you know, what's the difference?

Lex Fridman (26:44.680)

Well, you know, the difference is partly in personality,

Norman Naimark (26:47.680)

partly in historical circumstance, you know,

Lex Fridman (26:50.400)

partly in who is it that controls the reins of power.

Lex Fridman (26:54.200)

How much do you connect the ideas of communism

Lex Fridman (26:57.040)

or Marxism or socialism to Holodomor, to Stalin's rule?

Lex Fridman (27:03.080)

So how naturally, as you kind of alluded to,

Lex Fridman (27:05.640)

does it lead to genocide?

Norman Naimark (27:09.780)

That's also, I mean, in some ways,

Lex Fridman (27:13.220)

I've just addressed that question by saying

Norman Naimark (27:14.800)

it doesn't always lead to genocide.

Lex Fridman (27:17.100)

You know, in the case, again, you know,

Norman Naimark (27:18.980)

Cuba is not pretty, but it didn't have,

Lex Fridman (27:23.080)

there was no genocide in Cuba.

Lex Fridman (27:25.040)

And same thing in North Vietnam.

Lex Fridman (27:27.800)

You know, even North Korea, as awful as it is,

Lex Fridman (27:30.720)

is a terrible dictatorship, right?

Lex Fridman (27:32.480)

And people's rights are totally destroyed, right?

Norman Naimark (27:37.560)

They have no freedom whatsoever.

Lex Fridman (27:39.880)

You know, it's not, as far as we know, genocidal.

Norman Naimark (27:43.580)

Who knows whether it could be

Lex Fridman (27:45.120)

or whether if they took over South Korea,

Norman Naimark (27:47.000)

you know, mass murder wouldn't take place

Lex Fridman (27:49.080)

and that kind of thing.

Lex Fridman (27:50.200)

But my point is, is that the ideology

Lex Fridman (27:53.240)

doesn't necessarily dictate genocide.

Norman Naimark (27:57.120)

In other words, it's an ideology, I think,

Lex Fridman (27:59.680)

that makes genocide sometimes too easily possible

Norman Naimark (28:05.520)

given, you know, the way it thinks through history

Lex Fridman (28:09.200)

as being, you know, you're on the right side of history

Lex Fridman (28:11.600)

and some people are on the wrong side of history

Lex Fridman (28:13.800)

and you have to destroy those people

Norman Naimark (28:15.640)

who are on the wrong side of history.

Lex Fridman (28:17.080)

I mean, there is something in, you know, Marxism, Leninism,

Norman Naimark (28:21.040)

which, you know, has that kind of language

Lex Fridman (28:23.840)

and that kind of thinking.

Lex Fridman (28:25.520)

But I don't think it's necessarily that way.

Lex Fridman (28:31.500)

There's a wonderful historian at Berkeley

Norman Naimark (28:34.140)

named Martin Malia who has written, you know,

Lex Fridman (28:37.680)

wrote a number of books on this subject

Lex Fridman (28:39.640)

and he was very, very, he was convinced

Lex Fridman (28:43.840)

that the ideology itself, you know,

Norman Naimark (28:49.680)

played a crucial role in the murderousness

Lex Fridman (28:53.080)

of the Soviet regime.

Norman Naimark (28:54.660)

I'm not completely convinced.

Lex Fridman (28:56.840)

You know, when I say not completely convinced,

Norman Naimark (28:58.600)

I think you could argue it different ways.

Lex Fridman (29:01.640)

Equally valid, you know, with equally valid arguments.

Norman Naimark (29:05.680)

I mean, there's something about the ideology of communism

Lex Fridman (29:10.680)

that allows you to decrease the value of human life.

Norman Naimark (29:15.200)

Almost like this philosophy, if it's okay to crack

Lex Fridman (29:17.560)

a few eggs to make an omelet.

Lex Fridman (29:19.680)

So maybe that, if you can reason like that,

Lex Fridman (29:23.040)

then it's easier to take the leap of,

Norman Naimark (29:26.240)

for the good of the country, for the good of the people,

Lex Fridman (29:28.460)

for the good of the world, it's okay to kill a few people.

Lex Fridman (29:31.620)

And then that's where, I wonder about the slippery slope.

Lex Fridman (29:37.200)

Yeah, no, no, again, you know,

Norman Naimark (29:38.640)

I don't think it's a slippery slope.

Lex Fridman (29:40.240)

I think it's, I think it's dangerous.

Norman Naimark (29:44.080)

In other words, I think it's dangerous,

Lex Fridman (29:45.700)

but I don't consider, you know,

Norman Naimark (29:48.660)

I don't like Marxism, Leninism any better than the next guy.

Lex Fridman (29:51.680)

And I've lived in plenty of those systems

Norman Naimark (29:53.520)

to know how they can beat people down

Lex Fridman (29:56.640)

and how they can, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:00:00.420)

I know that's right.

Lex Fridman (2:00:01.500)

I think that's right.

Norman Naimark (2:00:02.700)

You put it very well.

Lex Fridman (2:00:04.020)

I couldn't have done it better myself.

Norman Naimark (2:00:06.660)

No, no, I agree.

Lex Fridman (2:00:07.940)

I agree completely that there are, to live with truth,

Norman Naimark (2:00:13.980)

which is what Václav Havel used to say,

Lex Fridman (2:00:17.300)

this famous Czech dissident talked about living in truth,

Lex Fridman (2:00:21.100)

but also to live with integrity.

Lex Fridman (2:00:24.980)

And that's really super important.

Norman Naimark (2:00:27.780)

Well, let me ask you about love.

Lex Fridman (2:00:29.140)

What role does love play in this whole thing

Lex Fridman (2:00:31.300)

in the human condition?

Lex Fridman (2:00:33.260)

In all of the study of genocide,

Norman Naimark (2:00:35.340)

it does seem that hardship in moments

Lex Fridman (2:00:39.220)

brings out the best in human nature

Lex Fridman (2:00:41.260)

and the best in human nature is expressed through love.

Lex Fridman (2:00:44.340)

Well, as I already mentioned to you,

Norman Naimark (2:00:46.180)

I think hardship is not a good thing for,

Lex Fridman (2:00:52.380)

you know, it's not the best thing for love.

Norman Naimark (2:00:53.980)

I mean, it's better to not have to suffer

Lex Fridman (2:00:57.700)

and not have to, yes, I think it is.

Norman Naimark (2:01:00.940)

I think it's, you know, as I mentioned to you,

Lex Fridman (2:01:05.700)

you know, studying concentration camps,

Norman Naimark (2:01:08.340)

you know, this is not a place for love.

Lex Fridman (2:01:10.460)

It happens, it happens,

Lex Fridman (2:01:13.780)

but it's not really a place for love.

Lex Fridman (2:01:15.260)

It's a place for rape.

Norman Naimark (2:01:16.660)

It's a place for torture.

Lex Fridman (2:01:19.380)

It's a place for killing.

Lex Fridman (2:01:20.460)

And it's a place for inhuman action one to another,

Lex Fridman (2:01:25.500)

you know, and also, as I said,

Norman Naimark (2:01:27.860)

among those who are suffering,

Lex Fridman (2:01:30.500)

not just between those who are,

Lex Fridman (2:01:33.140)

and then there are whole gradations,

Lex Fridman (2:01:34.820)

you know, the same thing in the gulag.

Norman Naimark (2:01:36.340)

You know, there are gradations all the way

Lex Fridman (2:01:38.260)

from the criminal prisoners

Norman Naimark (2:01:41.020)

who beat the hell out of the political prisoners,

Lex Fridman (2:01:42.940)

you know, who then have others below them

Norman Naimark (2:01:44.900)

who they beat down, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:01:46.020)

so everybody's being the hell out of everybody else.

Lex Fridman (2:01:48.460)

So I would not idealize in any way suffering as,

Lex Fridman (2:01:53.380)

you know, a source of beauty and love.

Norman Naimark (2:01:57.260)

I wouldn't do that at all.

Lex Fridman (2:01:58.100)

I think it's a whole lot better

Norman Naimark (2:02:00.700)

for people to be relatively prosperous.

Lex Fridman (2:02:03.220)

I'm not saying super prosperous,

Lex Fridman (2:02:04.820)

but to be able to feed themselves

Lex Fridman (2:02:06.380)

and to be able to feed their families

Lex Fridman (2:02:08.260)

and house their families and take care of themselves,

Lex Fridman (2:02:14.820)

you know, to foster loving relations between people.

Norman Naimark (2:02:21.140)

And, you know, I think it's no accident

Lex Fridman (2:02:24.980)

that, you know, poor families have much worse records

Norman Naimark (2:02:31.940)

when it comes to crime and things like that, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:02:34.580)

and also to wife beating and to child abuse

Lex Fridman (2:02:39.820)

and stuff like that.

Lex Fridman (2:02:40.820)

I mean, you just, you don't want to be poor and indigent

Lex Fridman (2:02:46.580)

and not have a roof over your head, be homeless.

Lex Fridman (2:02:49.420)

I mean, it doesn't mean, again, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:02:51.420)

homeless people are mean people.

Lex Fridman (2:02:53.300)

That's not what I'm trying to say.

Lex Fridman (2:02:54.580)

What I'm trying to say is that, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:02:56.940)

what we want to try to foster in this country

Lex Fridman (2:02:59.060)

and around the world, and one of the reasons, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:03:03.660)

I mean, I'm very critical of the Chinese in a lot of ways,

Lex Fridman (2:03:07.180)

but I mean, we have to remember they pulled that country

Lex Fridman (2:03:09.260)

out of horrible poverty, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:11.100)

And I mean, there's still poor people in the countryside.

Lex Fridman (2:03:14.540)

There's still problems, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:03:16.620)

with want and need among the Chinese people.

Lex Fridman (2:03:21.620)

But, you know, there were millions and millions of Chinese

Norman Naimark (2:03:24.380)

who were living at the bare minimum of life,

Lex Fridman (2:03:26.540)

which is no way to live, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:03:28.260)

and no way, again, to foster love and compassion

Lex Fridman (2:03:31.300)

and getting along.

Lex Fridman (2:03:33.820)

So I want to be clear, I don't speak for history, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:37.740)

I'm giving you, there used to be historians,

Norman Naimark (2:03:41.140)

you know, in the 19th century who really thought

Lex Fridman (2:03:43.000)

they were speaking for history, you know?

Norman Naimark (2:03:45.500)

I don't think that way at all.

Lex Fridman (2:03:47.020)

I mean, I understand I'm a subjective human being

Norman Naimark (2:03:49.540)

with my own points of view and my own opinions, but.

Lex Fridman (2:03:54.020)

I'm trying to remember this in this conversation

Norman Naimark (2:03:56.120)

that you're, despite the fact that you're brilliant

Lex Fridman (2:03:58.900)

and you've written brilliant books,

Norman Naimark (2:04:00.640)

that you're just human with an opinion.

Lex Fridman (2:04:04.300)

That's it, yeah, no, no, that's absolutely true.

Lex Fridman (2:04:07.060)

And I tell my students that too.

Lex Fridman (2:04:09.660)

I mean, I make sure they understand

Norman Naimark (2:04:11.240)

this is not history speaking, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:04:12.940)

this is me and Norman and I'm, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:04:15.780)

and this is what it's about.

Lex Fridman (2:04:18.420)

I mean, I spent a long time studying history

Lex Fridman (2:04:21.100)

and have enjoyed it enormously.

Lex Fridman (2:04:24.940)

But, you know, I'm an individual with my points of view.

Lex Fridman (2:04:29.460)

And one of them is that I've developed over time,

Lex Fridman (2:04:34.100)

is that, you know, human want is a real tragedy for people

Lex Fridman (2:04:40.180)

and it hurts people and it also causes upheavals

Lex Fridman (2:04:44.260)

and difficulties and stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:04:46.720)

So I feel for people, you know, I feel for people in Syria,

Lex Fridman (2:04:49.500)

I feel for people in, you know, in Ethiopia, in Tigray,

Norman Naimark (2:04:54.580)

you know, when they don't have enough to eat.

Lex Fridman (2:04:56.260)

And, you know, what that does, I mean,

Lex Fridman (2:04:58.500)

it doesn't mean they don't love each other, right?

Lex Fridman (2:05:00.540)

And it doesn't mean they don't love their kids.

Lex Fridman (2:05:03.020)

But it does mean that it's harder, you know, to do that.

Lex Fridman (2:05:06.620)

And to, and...

Norman Naimark (2:05:08.420)

I'm not so sure, it's obvious to me that it's harder.

Lex Fridman (2:05:11.220)

It's, there's suffering, there is suffering.

Lex Fridman (2:05:13.260)

But the numbers, we've been talking about deaths,

Lex Fridman (2:05:16.580)

we've been talking about suffering,

Lex Fridman (2:05:17.820)

but the numbers we're not quantifying.

Lex Fridman (2:05:19.980)

The history that you haven't perhaps been looking at

Norman Naimark (2:05:22.740)

is all the times that people have fallen in love,

Lex Fridman (2:05:24.660)

deeply with friends, with romantic love,

Norman Naimark (2:05:27.940)

the positive emotion that people have felt.

Lex Fridman (2:05:31.460)

And I'm not so sure that amidst the suffering,

Norman Naimark (2:05:34.320)

those moments of beauty and love can be discovered.

Lex Fridman (2:05:36.700)

And if we look at the numbers,

Norman Naimark (2:05:38.340)

I'm not so sure the story is obvious.

Lex Fridman (2:05:41.020)

That, you know, I mean, again,

Norman Naimark (2:05:43.700)

I suppose you may disagree with Viktor Frankl.

Lex Fridman (2:05:46.860)

I may too, maybe depending on the day.

Norman Naimark (2:05:49.540)

I mean, he says that if there's meaning to this life at all,

Lex Fridman (2:05:52.540)

there's meaning to the suffering too,

Norman Naimark (2:05:53.940)

because suffering is part of life.

Lex Fridman (2:05:56.220)

There's something about accepting the ups and downs,

Norman Naimark (2:06:01.660)

even when the downs go very low.

Lex Fridman (2:06:03.820)

And within all of it, finding a source of meaning.

Norman Naimark (2:06:07.780)

I mean, he's arguing from the perspective of psychology,

Lex Fridman (2:06:09.880)

but just this life is an incredible gift,

Norman Naimark (2:06:13.420)

almost no matter what.

Lex Fridman (2:06:15.420)

And I'm not, it's easy to look at suffering

Lex Fridman (2:06:20.660)

and think if we just escape the suffering,

Lex Fridman (2:06:22.780)

it will all be better, but we all die.

Norman Naimark (2:06:28.620)

There's beauty in the whole thing.

Lex Fridman (2:06:30.380)

And it is true that it's just,

Norman Naimark (2:06:34.020)

from all the stories I've read,

Lex Fridman (2:06:35.340)

especially in famine and starvation, it's just horrible.

Norman Naimark (2:06:39.360)

It is horrible suffering.

Lex Fridman (2:06:41.280)

But I also just want to say that there's love amidst it,

Lex Fridman (2:06:45.940)

and we can't forget that.

Lex Fridman (2:06:47.300)

No, no, I don't forget it, I don't forget it.

Lex Fridman (2:06:50.300)

And I think it's from the stories.

Lex Fridman (2:06:52.860)

Now, I don't want to make that compromise or that trade,

Lex Fridman (2:06:56.760)

but the intensity of friendship in war,

Lex Fridman (2:06:59.580)

the intensity of love in war is very high.

Lex Fridman (2:07:04.520)

So I'm not sure what to make of these calculations,

Lex Fridman (2:07:07.220)

but if you look at the stories,

Norman Naimark (2:07:08.820)

some of the people I'm closest with,

Lex Fridman (2:07:10.580)

and I've never experienced anything

Norman Naimark (2:07:12.300)

even close to any of this,

Lex Fridman (2:07:14.260)

but some of the people I'm closest with

Norman Naimark (2:07:15.740)

is people I've gone through difficult times with.

Lex Fridman (2:07:18.280)

There's something about that.

Norman Naimark (2:07:20.020)

They're a society or a group where things are easy.

Lex Fridman (2:07:24.860)

The intensity of the connection between human beings

Norman Naimark (2:07:27.580)

is not as strong.

Lex Fridman (2:07:29.020)

I don't know what to do with that calculus

Norman Naimark (2:07:31.420)

because I too agree with you.

Lex Fridman (2:07:32.740)

I want to have as little suffering in the world as possible,

Lex Fridman (2:07:37.540)

but we have to remember about the love

Lex Fridman (2:07:39.360)

and the depth of human connection

Lex Fridman (2:07:40.980)

and find the right balance there.

Lex Fridman (2:07:44.800)

No, there's something to what you're saying.

Norman Naimark (2:07:46.800)

There's clearly something to what you're saying.

Lex Fridman (2:07:48.460)

I was just thinking about the Soviet Union

Norman Naimark (2:07:50.700)

when I lived there and people on the streets

Lex Fridman (2:07:53.440)

were so mean to one another and they never smiled.

Lex Fridman (2:07:56.740)

You grew up there?

Lex Fridman (2:07:57.580)

No, but you were, you're too young to.

Norman Naimark (2:07:58.900)

No, no, I remember well.

Lex Fridman (2:08:00.500)

I came here when I was 13, yeah.

Norman Naimark (2:08:01.820)

Okay, so anyway, I remember living there

Lex Fridman (2:08:04.660)

and just how hard people were on each other on the streets.

Lex Fridman (2:08:07.100)

And when you got inside people's apartments,

Lex Fridman (2:08:09.020)

when they started to trust you,

Norman Naimark (2:08:11.260)

the friendships were so intense and so wonderful.

Lex Fridman (2:08:15.080)

So in that sense, I mean, they did live a hard life,

Lex Fridman (2:08:19.700)

but there wasn't a food on the table

Lex Fridman (2:08:21.460)

and there was a roof over their heads.

Norman Naimark (2:08:23.060)

There's a certain line.

Lex Fridman (2:08:24.040)

There's a certain, there are lines.

Norman Naimark (2:08:25.980)

I don't think there's one line,

Lex Fridman (2:08:27.200)

but it's kind of a shading.

Lex Fridman (2:08:29.940)

And the other story I was thinking of as you were talking

Lex Fridman (2:08:32.100)

was not a story, it's a history,

Norman Naimark (2:08:36.460)

a book by a friend of mine

Lex Fridman (2:08:38.460)

who wrote about love in the camps,

Norman Naimark (2:08:43.940)

in the refugee camps for Jews in Germany after the war.

Lex Fridman (2:08:48.260)

So these were Jews who had come mostly from Poland

Lex Fridman (2:08:51.300)

and some survived the camps,

Lex Fridman (2:08:54.100)

came from awful circumstances.

Lex Fridman (2:08:56.180)

And then they were put in these camps,

Lex Fridman (2:08:58.820)

which were not joyful places.

Norman Naimark (2:09:00.840)

I mean, they were guarded sometimes by Germans even,

Lex Fridman (2:09:03.100)

but they're basically under the British control

Lex Fridman (2:09:06.260)

and they were trying to get to Israel,

Lex Fridman (2:09:08.100)

trying to get to Palestine right after the war.

Lex Fridman (2:09:11.940)

And how many pairs there were, how many people coupled up.

Lex Fridman (2:09:16.060)

But remember, this is after being in the concentration camp.

Norman Naimark (2:09:18.660)

It's not being in the concentration camp.

Lex Fridman (2:09:20.580)

And it's also being free to, more or less free,

Norman Naimark (2:09:26.780)

to express their emotions and to be human beings

Lex Fridman (2:09:30.860)

after this horrible thing which they suffered.

Lex Fridman (2:09:34.360)

So I wonder whether there's, as you say,

Lex Fridman (2:09:36.880)

some kind of calculus there where the level of suffering

Norman Naimark (2:09:41.560)

is such that it's just too much for humans to bear.

Lex Fridman (2:09:47.180)

And which I would suggest,

Norman Naimark (2:09:51.100)

I mean, I haven't studied this myself.

Lex Fridman (2:09:52.620)

I'm just giving you my point of view,

Norman Naimark (2:09:54.700)

my off the cuff remarks here.

Lex Fridman (2:09:57.480)

But it was very inspiring to read about these couples

Norman Naimark (2:10:00.020)

who had met right in these camps

Lex Fridman (2:10:01.840)

and started to couple up and get married.

Lex Fridman (2:10:06.020)

And tried to find their way to Palestine,

Lex Fridman (2:10:09.420)

which was a difficult thing to do then.

Lex Fridman (2:10:11.540)

When did you live in Russia and the Soviet Union?

Lex Fridman (2:10:14.460)

What's your memory of the time?

Norman Naimark (2:10:16.100)

Well, so a number of different times.

Lex Fridman (2:10:18.460)

So I went there, I first went there in 69, 70.

Norman Naimark (2:10:22.220)

Wow. A long time ago.

Lex Fridman (2:10:23.740)

And then I lived in Leningrad mostly,

Lex Fridman (2:10:28.740)

but also in Moscow in 1975.

Lex Fridman (2:10:31.620)

So it was detente time.

Lex Fridman (2:10:33.700)

But it was also a time of political uncertainty

Lex Fridman (2:10:39.500)

and also hardship for Russians themselves,

Norman Naimark (2:10:44.780)

standing in long lines.

Lex Fridman (2:10:46.060)

I mean, you must remember this for food

Lex Fridman (2:10:47.980)

and for getting anything was almost impossible.

Lex Fridman (2:10:51.780)

It was a time when Jews were trying to get out.

Norman Naimark (2:10:56.820)

In fact, I just talked to a friend of mine from those days

Lex Fridman (2:10:59.880)

who I helped get out and get to Boston

Lex Fridman (2:11:01.740)

and the lovely people who had managed to have a good life

Lex Fridman (2:11:06.260)

in the United States after they left.

Lex Fridman (2:11:08.780)

But it wasn't an easy time.

Lex Fridman (2:11:10.020)

It wasn't an easy time at all.

Norman Naimark (2:11:11.740)

I remember people set fire to their doors

Lex Fridman (2:11:13.940)

and their daughter was persecuted in school

Norman Naimark (2:11:18.340)

once they declared that they wanted to immigrate

Lex Fridman (2:11:21.460)

and that sort of thing.

Lex Fridman (2:11:22.380)

So it was a very, it was a lot of antisemitism.

Lex Fridman (2:11:27.420)

So it was a tough time.

Norman Naimark (2:11:28.580)

Dissidents hung out with some dissidents

Lex Fridman (2:11:32.340)

and one guy was actually killed.

Norman Naimark (2:11:35.620)

We think by the, nobody knows exactly by the KGB,

Lex Fridman (2:11:38.560)

but his art studio was,

Norman Naimark (2:11:40.900)

he had a separate studio in Leningrad,

Lex Fridman (2:11:43.500)

St. Petersburg today, just a small studio

Norman Naimark (2:11:48.620)

where he did his art and somebody set it on fire.

Lex Fridman (2:11:51.380)

And we think it was KGB, but you never really know.

Lex Fridman (2:11:56.380)

And he died in that fire.

Lex Fridman (2:11:57.900)

So it was not, it was a tough time.

Lex Fridman (2:12:01.460)

And you knew you were followed,

Lex Fridman (2:12:04.660)

you knew you were being reported on

Norman Naimark (2:12:06.540)

as a foreign scholar as I was.

Lex Fridman (2:12:08.860)

There was a formal exchange between the United States

Lex Fridman (2:12:12.360)

and the Soviet Union and they let me work in the archives,

Lex Fridman (2:12:16.620)

but then Ivanov got to work in the physics lab

Norman Naimark (2:12:22.300)

at Rochester or something like that.

Lex Fridman (2:12:24.460)

So it was an exchange which sent historians

Lex Fridman (2:12:29.220)

and literary people and some social scientists to Russia

Lex Fridman (2:12:33.620)

and they sent all scientists here to grab what they could

Norman Naimark (2:12:36.660)

from MIT and those places.

Lex Fridman (2:12:39.380)

How's your Russian?

Lex Fridman (2:12:41.860)

Do you have any knowledge of Russian language

Lex Fridman (2:12:44.560)

that has helped you to understand?

Norman Naimark (2:12:46.300)

Oh yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:12:47.500)

I mean, I can read it fine.

Lex Fridman (2:12:50.180)

And the speaking comes and goes,

Lex Fridman (2:12:52.940)

depending on whether I'm there or I've been there recently

Norman Naimark (2:12:55.900)

or if I spend some time there,

Lex Fridman (2:12:57.500)

because I really need, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:12:58.660)

I have Russian friends who speak just Russian.

Lex Fridman (2:13:00.460)

So, you know, when I'm there, I then, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:13:04.340)

I can communicate pretty well.

Lex Fridman (2:13:05.780)

Well, I can't really write it unfortunately.

Norman Naimark (2:13:08.120)

I mean, I can, but it's not very good,

Lex Fridman (2:13:11.900)

but I get along fine in Russia.

Lex Fridman (2:13:13.980)

What's your fondest memory of the Soviet Union, of Russia?

Lex Fridman (2:13:17.980)

It's friends.

Lex Fridman (2:13:18.820)

Friends?

Lex Fridman (2:13:19.660)

It's friends, it's friends.

Lex Fridman (2:13:20.940)

Was it vodka involved or is it just vodka involved?

Lex Fridman (2:13:25.180)

Little bit, you know, I'm not much of a drinker.

Lex Fridman (2:13:27.420)

So I would, you know, they'd just make fun of me

Lex Fridman (2:13:29.580)

and I'd make fun of myself and that was easy enough.

Norman Naimark (2:13:32.980)

I don't really like, you know, a heavy drink.

Lex Fridman (2:13:35.720)

I've done a lot of that, not a lot.

Norman Naimark (2:13:37.860)

I'd done some of that, but I never really enjoyed it

Lex Fridman (2:13:40.180)

and would get sick and stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:13:42.580)

But no, it's friends.

Lex Fridman (2:13:45.340)

You know, one friend I made in the dormitory, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:13:49.540)

it was a dormitory for foreigners,

Lex Fridman (2:13:51.460)

but also Siberians who had come, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:13:56.220)

to Leningrad to study.

Lex Fridman (2:13:58.740)

And so I met a couple of guys

Lex Fridman (2:14:00.380)

and one in particular from Omsk became a wonderful friend.

Lex Fridman (2:14:04.580)

And we talked and talked and talked outside.

Norman Naimark (2:14:06.940)

You know, we would go walk outside

Lex Fridman (2:14:08.300)

because we both knew they were, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:14:10.500)

people were listening and stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:14:12.060)

And he would say, well, this is, he was an historian,

Norman Naimark (2:14:15.020)

you know, and so we would talk history.

Lex Fridman (2:14:16.700)

And he'd say, well, this was the case, wasn't it?

Norman Naimark (2:14:18.580)

I said, no, I'm sorry, Sasha, it wasn't the case.

Lex Fridman (2:14:21.100)

It was, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:14:23.180)

we think Stalin actually had a role in killing Kirov.

Lex Fridman (2:14:26.460)

I mean, we're not sure, but he said, no.

Norman Naimark (2:14:28.980)

I said, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:14:29.900)

You know, so, you know, we had these conversations

Lex Fridman (2:14:32.100)

and he was, what I would,

Lex Fridman (2:14:36.580)

I don't know if he would agree with me or not.

Norman Naimark (2:14:38.260)

I mean, we're still friends.

Lex Fridman (2:14:39.220)

So he was a naive, maybe he'll listen to the blog

Norman Naimark (2:14:43.980)

or I'll send it to him or something.

Lex Fridman (2:14:45.260)

He was a kind of naive Marxist, Leninist.

Lex Fridman (2:14:48.180)

And he thought I was, you know, I was, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:14:51.260)

I had this capitalist ideology.

Lex Fridman (2:14:52.780)

He'd say, what ideology you have?

Lex Fridman (2:14:54.260)

And I said, I don't have an ideology.

Norman Naimark (2:14:56.380)

You know, I try to just put together kind of reason

Lex Fridman (2:14:59.980)

and facts and accurate stories

Lex Fridman (2:15:02.620)

and try to tell them in that way.

Lex Fridman (2:15:03.860)

No, no, no, no, you must, you know, you're a bourgeois,

Norman Naimark (2:15:06.700)

you know, this or that.

Lex Fridman (2:15:07.540)

I said, no, I'm really not.

Lex Fridman (2:15:09.140)

And so we would have these talks

Lex Fridman (2:15:11.940)

and these kinds of arguments.

Lex Fridman (2:15:13.140)

And then, I mean, sure enough, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:15:16.740)

we corresponded for a while

Lex Fridman (2:15:19.220)

and then he had to stop corresponding

Lex Fridman (2:15:20.940)

because he became a kind of local official in Omsk.

Lex Fridman (2:15:25.620)

And he sort of migrated more and more to being a Democrat.

Lex Fridman (2:15:29.540)

And he was then in the, you know,

Norman Naimark (2:15:31.620)

democratic movement under Gorbachev

Lex Fridman (2:15:34.900)

and, you know, in the council of people's deputies,

Norman Naimark (2:15:38.500)

which they set up, which was, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:15:41.660)

elected as a Democrat from Omsk

Lex Fridman (2:15:45.180)

and had a political career through the Yeltsin period.

Lex Fridman (2:15:49.460)

And once Putin came along, you know, it was over.

Norman Naimark (2:15:53.980)

He didn't like Putin and, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:15:56.180)

and Putin didn't like the Yeltsin people, right?

Norman Naimark (2:15:59.140)

Who were, tried to be, some of them tried to be Democrats.

Lex Fridman (2:16:02.620)

And Sasha was one who really did.

Norman Naimark (2:16:04.180)

He just published his memoirs in Russian, by the way,

Lex Fridman (2:16:06.580)

which are very good, I think.

Norman Naimark (2:16:08.020)

I think I've been hearing it.

Lex Fridman (2:16:11.220)

Komanderovkifovlast, that's what it's called.

Norman Naimark (2:16:15.660)

It's hard to translate in English, Komanderovkifovlast.

Lex Fridman (2:16:19.460)

But I mean, I translated it full points once for him.

Norman Naimark (2:16:22.020)

This is so beautiful.

Lex Fridman (2:16:23.060)

Like the, do you find that the translation is a problem

Lex Fridman (2:16:26.540)

or no?

Lex Fridman (2:16:27.380)

It's such a different language.

Norman Naimark (2:16:28.380)

Yes, translation is very difficult.

Lex Fridman (2:16:30.140)

With the Russian language, I mean,

Norman Naimark (2:16:31.300)

it's the only language I know deeply except English.

Lex Fridman (2:16:35.660)

And it seems like so much is lost of the pain,

Norman Naimark (2:16:38.780)

the poetry, the beauty of the people.

Lex Fridman (2:16:40.700)

And translators are to be treasured and good ones,

Norman Naimark (2:16:44.380)

to be, I mean, those who do the translations,

Lex Fridman (2:16:47.780)

when you read things in translation,

Norman Naimark (2:16:50.620)

sometimes they're quite beautiful,

Lex Fridman (2:16:52.100)

whether it's Russian or Polish or German or anything French.

Norman Naimark (2:16:55.380)

Yeah, I'm actually traveling to Paris

Lex Fridman (2:16:57.500)

to talk to the famous translators that Dostoevsky told story.

Lex Fridman (2:17:02.620)

And I'm just gonna do a several conversations with them

Lex Fridman (2:17:04.580)

about like, you could just sometimes just grab

Norman Naimark (2:17:06.860)

a single sentence and just talk about the translation

Lex Fridman (2:17:09.380)

in that sense, that's, and also, as you said,

Norman Naimark (2:17:14.820)

I would love to be a fly on the wall

Lex Fridman (2:17:16.180)

with some of those friends that you had

Norman Naimark (2:17:17.580)

because the perspective on history, nonacademic,

Lex Fridman (2:17:21.700)

sort of without just as human beings is so different

Norman Naimark (2:17:26.060)

from the United States versus Russia.

Lex Fridman (2:17:28.380)

When you talk about the way the World War II is perceived

Lex Fridman (2:17:30.660)

and all those kinds of things, it's fascinating.

Lex Fridman (2:17:35.260)

History also has, in it, opinion and perspective.

Lex Fridman (2:17:39.500)

And so sometimes stripping that away is really difficult.

Lex Fridman (2:17:41.820)

And then I guess that is your job and at its highest form,

Norman Naimark (2:17:44.980)

that is what you do as a historian.

Lex Fridman (2:17:47.500)

Well, Norman,

Norman Naimark (2:17:48.860)

Spasibo bashoi shto sivonya samaya katorini.

Lex Fridman (2:17:52.700)

I really appreciate your valuable time.

Norman Naimark (2:17:54.500)

It's truly an honor to talk to you

Lex Fridman (2:17:55.980)

and thank you for taking us through a trip,

Norman Naimark (2:18:00.260)

through some of the worst parts of human history

Lex Fridman (2:18:02.740)

and talking about hope and love at the end.

Lex Fridman (2:18:06.340)

So I really appreciate your time today.

Lex Fridman (2:18:08.020)

Okay, thank you.

Norman Naimark (2:18:08.860)

Thank you.

Lex Fridman (2:18:09.700)

Thank you for having me.

Norman Naimark (2:18:11.300)

Thanks for listening to this conversation

Lex Fridman (2:18:12.820)

with Norman Namark.

Norman Naimark (2:18:14.220)

To support this podcast,

Lex Fridman (2:18:15.460)

please check out our sponsors in the description.

Lex Fridman (2:18:17.900)

And now let me leave you with some words from Stalin.

Lex Fridman (2:18:21.180)

A single death is a tragedy.

Norman Naimark (2:18:23.700)

A million deaths is a statistic.

Lex Fridman (2:18:26.220)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Norman Naimark (30:01.340)

destroy human aspirations

Lex Fridman (30:03.280)

and human interaction between people.

Lex Fridman (30:06.500)

But they're not necessarily murderous systems.

Lex Fridman (30:11.840)

They are systems that contain people's autonomy,

Norman Naimark (30:15.600)

that force people into work and labor and lifestyles

Lex Fridman (30:20.000)

that they don't want to live.

Norman Naimark (30:21.820)

I spent a lot of time, you know,

Lex Fridman (30:23.680)

with East Germans and Poles, you know,

Norman Naimark (30:27.620)

who lived in, and even in the Soviet Union,

Lex Fridman (30:32.120)

you know, in the post Stalin period,

Norman Naimark (30:34.200)

where people lived lives they didn't want to live,

Lex Fridman (30:37.120)

you know, and didn't have the freedom to choose.

Lex Fridman (30:40.660)

And that was terrifying in and of itself,

Lex Fridman (30:44.040)

but these were not murderous systems.

Lex Fridman (30:46.560)

And they, you know, ascribed to Marxism, Leninism.

Lex Fridman (30:51.480)

So I suppose it's important to draw the line

Norman Naimark (30:54.200)

between mass murder and genocide and mass murder

Lex Fridman (30:58.480)

versus just mass violation of human rights.

Norman Naimark (31:02.680)

Right, right.

Lex Fridman (31:04.920)

And the leap to mass murder, you're saying,

Norman Naimark (31:10.700)

maybe easier in some ideologies than others,

Lex Fridman (31:13.240)

but it's not clear that somehow one ideology

Norman Naimark (31:15.960)

definitely leads to mass murder and not.

Lex Fridman (31:17.520)

Exactly.

Norman Naimark (31:18.360)

I wonder how many factors, what factors,

Lex Fridman (31:21.080)

how much of it is a single charismatic leader?

Lex Fridman (31:24.000)

How much of it is the conflagration

Lex Fridman (31:28.000)

of multiple historical events?

Lex Fridman (31:30.640)

How much of it is just dumb, the opposite of luck?

Lex Fridman (31:38.240)

Do you have a sense where if you look at a moment

Norman Naimark (31:40.680)

in history, predict, looking at the factors,

Lex Fridman (31:46.840)

whether something bad's going to happen here?

Norman Naimark (31:49.520)

When you look at Iraq at when Saddam Hussein

Lex Fridman (31:52.440)

first took power, well, you could,

Norman Naimark (31:55.840)

or you can, you know, go even farther back in history,

Lex Fridman (31:58.680)

would you be able to predict?

Lex Fridman (32:00.240)

So you said, you already kind of answered that

Lex Fridman (32:02.200)

with Stalin saying there's no way you could have predicted

Norman Naimark (32:04.640)

that in the early 20s.

Lex Fridman (32:07.000)

Is that always the case?

Norman Naimark (32:08.000)

You basically can't predict.

Lex Fridman (32:09.280)

It's pretty much always the case.

Norman Naimark (32:11.080)

In other words, I mean, history is a wonderful,

Lex Fridman (32:14.960)

you know, discipline and way of looking at life

Lex Fridman (32:17.480)

and the world in retrospect, meaning it happened.

Lex Fridman (32:21.880)

It happened.

Lex Fridman (32:23.040)

And we know it happened.

Lex Fridman (32:24.960)

And it's too easy to say sometimes it happened

Norman Naimark (32:28.600)

because it had to happen that way.

Lex Fridman (32:30.720)

It almost never has to happen that way.

Norman Naimark (32:33.840)

And, you know, things.

Lex Fridman (32:36.760)

So I very much am of the school that emphasizes,

Norman Naimark (32:43.560)

you know, contingency and choice and difference

Lex Fridman (32:48.020)

and different paths and not, you know,

Norman Naimark (32:50.480)

not necessarily a path that has to be followed.

Lex Fridman (32:54.940)

And those, you know, and, you know,

Norman Naimark (32:59.900)

sometimes you can warn about things.

Lex Fridman (33:02.900)

I mean, you can think, well, something's going to happen.

Lex Fridman (33:06.100)

And usually the way it works,

Lex Fridman (33:08.420)

let me just give you one example.

Norman Naimark (33:09.620)

I mean, I'm thinking about an example right now,

Lex Fridman (33:11.580)

which was the war in Yugoslavia, you know,

Norman Naimark (33:13.280)

which came in the 1990s and eventually

Lex Fridman (33:16.180)

ventuated in genocide in Bosnia.

Norman Naimark (33:19.780)

And, you know, I remember very clearly, you know,

Lex Fridman (33:23.180)

the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia,

Lex Fridman (33:25.780)

and people would say, you know, there's trouble here

Lex Fridman (33:28.260)

and, you know, something could go wrong.

Lex Fridman (33:31.260)

But no one in their wildest imagination

Lex Fridman (33:33.900)

thought that there would be outright war between them all.

Norman Naimark (33:36.860)

Then the outright war happened, genocide happened,

Lex Fridman (33:39.300)

and afterwards people would say, I saw it coming.

Norman Naimark (33:42.860)

You know, so you get a lot of that,

Lex Fridman (33:45.700)

especially with pundits and journalists,

Lex Fridman (33:48.820)

and that's, I saw it coming, I knew it was happening.

Lex Fridman (33:51.040)

You know, well, I mean, what happens in the human mind,

Lex Fridman (33:53.620)

and it happens in your mind too,

Lex Fridman (33:54.980)

is, you know, you go through a lot of alternatives.

Norman Naimark (33:58.180)

I mean, think about January 6th, you know, in this country,

Lex Fridman (34:00.460)

and all the different alternatives

Norman Naimark (34:03.300)

which people had in their mind,

Lex Fridman (34:05.020)

or before January 6th, you know, after the lost election.

Norman Naimark (34:10.480)

You know, things could have gone in lots of different ways,

Lex Fridman (34:13.180)

and there were all kinds of people

Norman Naimark (34:14.580)

choosing different ways it could have gone,

Lex Fridman (34:16.300)

but nobody really knew how it was going to turn out.

Norman Naimark (34:20.020)

It wasn't as smart people really understood

Lex Fridman (34:22.020)

that there'd be this kind of cockamamie uprising

Norman Naimark (34:24.260)

on January 6th, you know, that almost,

Lex Fridman (34:26.980)

you know, caused us enormous grief.

Lex Fridman (34:28.980)

So all of these kinds of things in history,

Lex Fridman (34:31.640)

you know, are deeply contingent.

Norman Naimark (34:33.620)

They depend on, you know, factors that we cannot predict,

Lex Fridman (34:37.320)

and, you know, and it's the joy of history that it's open.

Norman Naimark (34:41.380)

You know, you think about how people are now,

Lex Fridman (34:43.500)

I mean, let me give you one more example,

Lex Fridman (34:45.020)

and then I'll shut up, but, you know,

Lex Fridman (34:47.460)

there's the environmental example.

Lex Fridman (34:49.700)

You know, we're all threatened, right?

Lex Fridman (34:51.020)

We know it's coming.

Lex Fridman (34:51.940)

We know there's trouble, right?

Lex Fridman (34:54.440)

We know there's gonna be a catastrophe at some point,

Lex Fridman (34:58.260)

but when?

Lex Fridman (34:59.260)

What's the catastrophe?

Lex Fridman (35:00.980)

Yeah, what's the nature of the catastrophe?

Lex Fridman (35:02.380)

Everyone says catastrophe.

Lex Fridman (35:03.220)

And what's the nature of it, right, right, right.

Lex Fridman (35:04.060)

Is it gonna be wars because resource constraint?

Lex Fridman (35:06.380)

Is it going to be hunger?

Lex Fridman (35:07.400)

Is it gonna be, like, mass migration of different kinds

Norman Naimark (35:10.780)

that leads to some kind of conflict and immigration,

Lex Fridman (35:13.260)

and maybe it won't be that big of a deal,

Lex Fridman (35:16.320)

and a total other catastrophic event

Lex Fridman (35:19.020)

will completely challenge the entirety

Norman Naimark (35:21.180)

of the human civilization.

Lex Fridman (35:22.220)

That's my point, that's my point, that's my point.

Norman Naimark (35:25.980)

You know, we really don't know.

Lex Fridman (35:28.100)

I mean, there's a lot we do know.

Norman Naimark (35:29.700)

I mean, the warming business and all this kind of stuff,

Lex Fridman (35:32.060)

you know, it's scientifically there,

Lex Fridman (35:34.260)

but how it's going to play out.

Lex Fridman (35:36.540)

And everybody's saying, you know, different things.

Lex Fridman (35:39.700)

And then you get somewhere in 50 years or 60 years,

Lex Fridman (35:42.980)

which I won't see, and people say, aha,

Norman Naimark (35:45.500)

I told you it was gonna be X,

Lex Fridman (35:47.060)

or it was gonna be Y, or it was gonna be Z.

Lex Fridman (35:49.420)

So I just don't think in history you can,

Lex Fridman (35:54.620)

well, you can't predict.

Norman Naimark (35:56.360)

You simply cannot predict what's going to happen.

Lex Fridman (35:59.020)

It's kind of when you just look at Hitler in the 30s,

Norman Naimark (36:02.260)

for me, oftentimes when I kind of read different accounts,

Lex Fridman (36:07.140)

it is so often, certainly in the press,

Lex Fridman (36:09.100)

but in general, me just reading about Hitler,

Lex Fridman (36:11.880)

I get the sense, like, this is a clown.

Norman Naimark (36:15.020)

There's no way this person will gain power.

Lex Fridman (36:18.420)

Which one, Hitler or Stalin?

Norman Naimark (36:20.260)

Hitler, Hitler.

Lex Fridman (36:21.420)

No, no, no, with Stalin, you don't get a sense

Norman Naimark (36:23.260)

he's a clown, he's a really good executive.

Lex Fridman (36:26.060)

You think, you don't think it'll lead to mass murder,

Lex Fridman (36:28.540)

but you think he's going to build a giant bureaucracy,

Lex Fridman (36:32.460)

at least with Hitler, it's like a failed artist

Norman Naimark (36:37.260)

who keeps screaming about stuff.

Lex Fridman (36:39.500)

There's no way he's gonna, I mean,

Norman Naimark (36:42.380)

you certainly don't think about the atrocities,

Lex Fridman (36:44.820)

but there's no way he's going to gain power,

Norman Naimark (36:47.580)

especially against communism.

Lex Fridman (36:48.860)

There's so many other competing forces

Norman Naimark (36:50.620)

that could have easily beat him.

Lex Fridman (36:54.220)

But then, you realize, event after event,

Norman Naimark (36:58.900)

where this clown keeps dancing,

Lex Fridman (37:00.380)

and all of a sudden, he gains more and more power,

Lex Fridman (37:02.900)

and just certain moments in time,

Lex Fridman (37:04.940)

he makes strategic decisions in terms of cooperating

Norman Naimark (37:11.500)

or gaining power over the military,

Lex Fridman (37:13.180)

all those kinds of things that eventually

Norman Naimark (37:16.300)

give him the power.

Lex Fridman (37:17.300)

I mean, this clown is one of the most impactful

Norman Naimark (37:21.500)

in the negative sense human beings in history.

Lex Fridman (37:25.260)

Right, and even the Jews who are there

Lex Fridman (37:27.980)

and are being screamed at and discriminated against,

Lex Fridman (37:30.580)

and there's a series of measures taken against them

Norman Naimark (37:33.860)

incrementally during the course of the 1930s,

Lex Fridman (37:37.420)

and very few who leave.

Norman Naimark (37:39.020)

Yeah, I mean, some pick up and go and say,

Lex Fridman (37:40.660)

I'm getting the hell out of here, and some Zionists

Norman Naimark (37:44.580)

try to leave, too, and go to the United States and stuff,

Lex Fridman (37:46.820)

but go to Israel and Palestine at the time,

Norman Naimark (37:51.620)

but, or to Britain or France.

Lex Fridman (37:55.540)

But in general, even the Jews who should have been

Norman Naimark (37:59.020)

very sensitive to what was going on

Lex Fridman (38:01.460)

didn't really understand the extent of the danger,

Lex Fridman (38:06.100)

and it's really hard for people to do that.

Lex Fridman (38:08.740)

It's almost impossible, in fact, I think.

Lex Fridman (38:12.060)

So most of the time, in that exact situation,

Lex Fridman (38:16.860)

nothing would have happened,

Norman Naimark (38:18.340)

or there'd be some drama and so on,

Lex Fridman (38:20.220)

and it'd be there's some bureaucrat,

Lex Fridman (38:22.240)

but every once in a while in human history,

Lex Fridman (38:23.860)

there's a kind of turn,

Lex Fridman (38:25.900)

and maybe something catalyzes something else,

Lex Fridman (38:28.740)

and just it accelerates to accelerate,

Norman Naimark (38:31.060)

escalates, escalates, and then war breaks out,

Lex Fridman (38:34.060)

or totally, you know, revolutions break out.

Norman Naimark (38:37.820)

Right.

Lex Fridman (38:40.180)

Can we go to the big question of genocide?

Lex Fridman (38:43.580)

What is genocide?

Lex Fridman (38:44.860)

What are the defining characteristics of genocide?

Norman Naimark (38:48.380)

Dealing with genocide is a difficult thing

Lex Fridman (38:50.580)

when it comes to the definition.

Norman Naimark (38:53.540)

There is a definition, the December 1948 UN Convention

Lex Fridman (38:58.540)

on the Prep Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

Norman Naimark (39:02.220)

is considered the sort of major document of definition,

Lex Fridman (39:07.220)

in the definitional sense of genocide,

Lex Fridman (39:09.700)

and it emphasizes the intentional destruction

Lex Fridman (39:16.460)

of an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group,

Norman Naimark (39:22.100)

those are the four groups, again, comma, as such.

Lex Fridman (39:26.660)

And what that means, basically,

Norman Naimark (39:27.900)

is destroying the group as a group.

Lex Fridman (39:31.900)

In other words, there's a kind of beauty in human diversity,

Lex Fridman (39:36.700)

and different groups of people, you know,

Lex Fridman (39:39.580)

Estonians, you know, a tribe of Native Americans,

Norman Naimark (39:43.500)

South African tribes, you know, the Rohingya in Myanmar,

Lex Fridman (39:48.880)

there's a kind of beauty humanity recognizes

Norman Naimark (39:52.180)

in the distinctiveness of those groups.

Lex Fridman (39:55.360)

You know, this was a notion that emerges really

Norman Naimark (39:58.060)

with Romanticism after the French Revolution,

Lex Fridman (40:00.920)

then the beginning of the 19th century,

Norman Naimark (40:03.280)

with Herder, mostly.

Lex Fridman (40:04.500)

And this beauty of these groups, then,

Norman Naimark (40:08.260)

you know, is what is under attack in genocide.

Lex Fridman (40:13.840)

And it's with intent, you know,

Norman Naimark (40:16.100)

the idea is that it's intentional destruction.

Lex Fridman (40:19.840)

So this is a kind of, you know,

Norman Naimark (40:23.180)

analogy to first degree, second degree,

Lex Fridman (40:25.860)

and third degree murder, right?

Norman Naimark (40:27.100)

First degree murder, you know,

Lex Fridman (40:28.280)

you're out to kill this person, and you plan it,

Lex Fridman (40:31.220)

and you go out, and you do it, right?

Lex Fridman (40:34.180)

That's intent, right?

Norman Naimark (40:36.100)

Manslaughter is not intent.

Lex Fridman (40:37.780)

You end up doing the same thing, but it's different.

Norman Naimark (40:40.980)

So, you know, the major person behind the definitions,

Lex Fridman (40:46.700)

a man named Raphael Lemkin, I don't know if you heard

Norman Naimark (40:49.620)

his name or not, but he was a Polish Jewish jurist

Lex Fridman (40:53.540)

who came, you know, from Poland,

Norman Naimark (40:55.980)

came to the United States during the war,

Lex Fridman (40:58.340)

and had been a kind of crusader for recognizing genocide.

Norman Naimark (41:05.780)

It's a word that he created, by the way,

Lex Fridman (41:08.620)

and he coined the term in 1943,

Lex Fridman (41:11.300)

and then published it in 1944 for the first time.

Lex Fridman (41:14.940)

Geno, meaning people, and side, meaning killing, right?

Lex Fridman (41:18.060)

And so Lemkin then had this term,

Lex Fridman (41:20.900)

and he pushed hard to have it recognized,

Lex Fridman (41:23.420)

and it was in the UN Convention.

Lex Fridman (41:24.940)

So that's the rough definition.

Norman Naimark (41:27.340)

The problem with it is the definition,

Lex Fridman (41:30.500)

the problems with the definition are several.

Lex Fridman (41:33.940)

You know, one of them is, is it just these four groups?

Lex Fridman (41:38.460)

You know, racial, religious, ethnic, or national?

Norman Naimark (41:42.340)

See, this comes right out of the war.

Lex Fridman (41:44.620)

And what's in people's minds in 1948 are Jews,

Norman Naimark (41:48.740)

Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs sometimes,

Lex Fridman (41:51.740)

who were killed by the Nazis.

Norman Naimark (41:53.060)

That's what's in their mind.

Lex Fridman (41:54.580)

But there are other groups, too, if you think about it,

Norman Naimark (41:56.980)

you know, who are killed,

Lex Fridman (41:58.900)

social groups or political groups.

Lex Fridman (42:01.380)

And that was not allowed in the convention,

Lex Fridman (42:05.220)

meaning for a lot of different reasons,

Norman Naimark (42:07.900)

the Soviets were primary among them.

Lex Fridman (42:10.740)

They didn't want other kinds of groups,

Norman Naimark (42:12.820)

let's say Kulaks, for example, to be considered.

Lex Fridman (42:16.620)

That's a social group.

Norman Naimark (42:18.620)

Or peasants, which is a social group.

Lex Fridman (42:21.500)

So, or a political group.

Norman Naimark (42:23.140)

I mean, let's take a group, you know, communists killed

Lex Fridman (42:28.580)

groups of people, but non communists also killed

Norman Naimark (42:31.900)

groups of people in Indonesia in 1965, 66, they killed,

Lex Fridman (42:35.780)

you know, I don't know exactly,

Lex Fridman (42:37.100)

but roughly 600,000 Indonesian communists.

Lex Fridman (42:40.100)

Well, is that genocide or not?

Norman Naimark (42:42.500)

You know, at my point of view, it is genocide,

Lex Fridman (42:45.260)

although it's Indonesians killing Indonesians.

Lex Fridman (42:48.460)

And we have the same problem with the Cambodian genocide.

Lex Fridman (42:51.060)

I mean, we talk about a Cambodian genocide,

Lex Fridman (42:53.860)

but most of the people killed in the Cambodian genocide

Lex Fridman (42:56.940)

were other Cambodians.

Norman Naimark (42:58.620)

They give it the name, they're ready to recognize

Lex Fridman (43:01.140)

this genocide because they also killed some other peoples,

Norman Naimark (43:04.340)

meaning the Vietnamese, Aham people who are,

Lex Fridman (43:08.060)

you know, Muslim, smaller Muslim people in the area,

Lex Fridman (43:13.300)

and a few others.

Lex Fridman (43:14.700)

So the question then becomes, well,

Norman Naimark (43:18.100)

does it have to be a different nationality

Lex Fridman (43:20.300)

or ethnic group or religious group for it to be genocide?

Lex Fridman (43:23.140)

And my answer is no.

Lex Fridman (43:24.780)

You know, you need to expand the definition.

Norman Naimark (43:26.460)

It's a little bit like with our constitution.

Lex Fridman (43:28.100)

We got a constitution, but we don't live

Lex Fridman (43:30.460)

in the end of the 18th century, right?

Lex Fridman (43:32.060)

We live in the 21st century.

Lex Fridman (43:33.660)

And so you have to update the constitution

Lex Fridman (43:36.660)

over the centuries.

Lex Fridman (43:38.340)

And similarly, the genocide convention needs updating too.

Lex Fridman (43:42.700)

So that's how I work with the definition.

Lex Fridman (43:45.140)

So this is this invention.

Lex Fridman (43:48.060)

Was it an invention, this beautiful idea,

Norman Naimark (43:51.060)

romantic idea that there's groups of people

Lex Fridman (43:53.540)

and the group is united by some unique characteristics?

Lex Fridman (43:57.660)

That was an invention in human history, this idea?

Lex Fridman (44:01.620)

Not to see as individuals?

Norman Naimark (44:03.460)

In some senses, it was.

Lex Fridman (44:05.180)

I mean, it's not, you know,

Norman Naimark (44:06.740)

there are things that are always constructed

Lex Fridman (44:09.380)

in one fashion or another and the construction,

Norman Naimark (44:12.940)

you know, more or less represents the reality.

Lex Fridman (44:15.860)

And what the reality is always much more complicated

Norman Naimark (44:18.540)

than the construction or the invention of a term

Lex Fridman (44:21.940)

or a concept or a way of thinking about a nation, right?

Lex Fridman (44:26.420)

And this way of thinking of nations, you know,

Lex Fridman (44:29.740)

as again, you know, groups of religious, linguistic,

Norman Naimark (44:37.900)

not political necessarily, but cultural entities

Lex Fridman (44:42.300)

is something that was essentially invented, yes.

Norman Naimark (44:45.500)

Yeah, so I mean, you know, if you look at...

Lex Fridman (44:47.460)

There are no Germans in the 17th century.

Lex Fridman (44:50.380)

There are no Italians in the 17th century, right?

Lex Fridman (44:52.740)

They're only there after, you know,

Norman Naimark (44:54.860)

the invention of the nation, which comes again,

Lex Fridman (44:59.380)

mostly out of the French Revolution

Lex Fridman (45:01.900)

and in the Romantic movement,

Lex Fridman (45:03.700)

a man named Johann Gottfried von Herder, right?

Norman Naimark (45:08.420)

Who was really the first one who sort of went around,

Lex Fridman (45:11.420)

collected people's languages and collected their sayings

Lex Fridman (45:14.700)

and their dances and their folkways and stuff

Lex Fridman (45:16.980)

and said, isn't this cool, you know,

Norman Naimark (45:19.460)

that they're Estonians and that they're Latvians

Lex Fridman (45:21.780)

and that they're these other,

Norman Naimark (45:23.140)

these interesting different peoples

Lex Fridman (45:25.900)

who don't even know necessarily

Lex Fridman (45:28.420)

that they're different peoples, right?

Lex Fridman (45:30.620)

That comes a little bit later, right?

Norman Naimark (45:33.140)

Once the concept is invented, then people start to say,

Lex Fridman (45:36.060)

hey, we're nations too, you know?

Lex Fridman (45:39.020)

And the Germans decide they're a nation and they unify.

Lex Fridman (45:41.820)

And the Italians discover they're a nation

Lex Fridman (45:43.900)

and they unify instead of being, you know,

Lex Fridman (45:46.260)

Florentines and Romans and, you know, Sicilians.

Lex Fridman (45:52.100)

But then beyond nations, there's political affiliations,

Lex Fridman (45:55.340)

all those kinds of things.

Norman Naimark (45:56.180)

It's fascinating that, you know, you start,

Lex Fridman (45:59.500)

look at the early Homo sapiens

Lex Fridman (46:01.580)

and then there's obviously tribes, right?

Lex Fridman (46:04.220)

And then that's very concrete.

Norman Naimark (46:06.660)

That's a geographic location and it's a small group

Lex Fridman (46:09.500)

of people and you have warring tribes probably connected

Norman Naimark (46:12.940)

to just limited resources.

Lex Fridman (46:16.180)

But it's fascinating to think that that is then taken

Norman Naimark (46:18.620)

to the space of ideas, to where you can create a group

Lex Fridman (46:22.900)

at first to appreciate its beauty.

Norman Naimark (46:27.020)

You create a group based on language,

Lex Fridman (46:30.020)

based on maybe even political, philosophical ideas,

Norman Naimark (46:34.340)

religious ideas, all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (46:36.380)

And then that naturally then leads

Norman Naimark (46:38.580)

to getting angry at groups and making them the other.

Lex Fridman (46:42.860)

And then hatred.

Norman Naimark (46:43.900)

Right.

Lex Fridman (46:44.740)

That comes more towards the end of the 19th century,

Norman Naimark (46:47.660)

you know, with the influence of Darwin.

Lex Fridman (46:50.100)

I mean, you can't blame Darwin for it,

Lex Fridman (46:51.940)

but neo Darwin, Darwinians, you know,

Lex Fridman (46:54.300)

who start to talk about, you know,

Norman Naimark (46:55.860)

the competition between nations, the natural competition,

Lex Fridman (46:59.340)

the weak ones fall away, the strong ones get ahead.

Norman Naimark (47:03.220)

You know, you get this sort of combination also

Lex Fridman (47:05.500)

with, you know, modern antisemitism

Lex Fridman (47:08.460)

and with racial thinking, you know,

Lex Fridman (47:09.980)

the racial thinking at the end of the 19th century

Norman Naimark (47:12.420)

is very powerful.

Lex Fridman (47:14.060)

So now, you know, at the end of the 19th century

Norman Naimark (47:16.860)

versus the beginning of the, you know,

Lex Fridman (47:19.780)

the middle of the 19th century, you know,

Norman Naimark (47:22.580)

you can be a German and be a Jew

Lex Fridman (47:24.020)

and there's no contradiction.

Norman Naimark (47:26.220)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (47:27.060)

As long as you speak the language and you, you know,

Norman Naimark (47:28.860)

you dress and think and act and share the culture.

Lex Fridman (47:32.420)

By the end of the 19th century, people saying, no, no,

Norman Naimark (47:35.340)

you know, they're not Germans.

Lex Fridman (47:37.100)

They're Jews, they're different.

Norman Naimark (47:37.940)

They have different blood.

Lex Fridman (47:38.780)

They have different, they don't say genes yet,

Lex Fridman (47:40.580)

but you know, that's sort of a sense of people.

Lex Fridman (47:43.740)

And that's when, you know,

Norman Naimark (47:45.420)

there's this sense of superiority too, and inferiority.

Lex Fridman (47:49.220)

Yeah.

Norman Naimark (47:50.060)

You know, that they're inferior to us.

Lex Fridman (47:51.700)

Yeah.

Norman Naimark (47:52.540)

You know, and that we're the strong ones

Lex Fridman (47:55.380)

and we have to, you know, and Hitler, by the way,

Norman Naimark (47:57.460)

just adopts this hook line and sinker.

Lex Fridman (48:00.260)

I mean, there are a whole series of thinkers

Norman Naimark (48:03.020)

at the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th century

Lex Fridman (48:05.100)

who he cites in Mein Kampf, you know,

Norman Naimark (48:06.900)

which is written in the early 1920s,

Lex Fridman (48:09.300)

that, you know, basically pervades this racial thinking.

Lex Fridman (48:15.180)

So nationalism changes.

Lex Fridman (48:16.780)

So nationalism in and of itself is not bad.

Norman Naimark (48:19.860)

I mean, it's not bad, you know,

Lex Fridman (48:21.220)

to share culture and language and, you know,

Norman Naimark (48:25.220)

folkways and a sense of common belonging.

Lex Fridman (48:29.980)

There's nothing bad about it inherently.

Lex Fridman (48:32.780)

But then what happens is it becomes, you know,

Lex Fridman (48:35.540)

frequently is used and becomes, especially on fascism,

Norman Naimark (48:39.620)

becomes dangerous.

Lex Fridman (48:42.380)

And it's especially dangerous

Norman Naimark (48:44.580)

when the two conflicting groups share geographic location.

Lex Fridman (48:48.980)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (48:49.820)

So like with Jews, you know, I come, you know,

Lex Fridman (48:54.260)

I'm a Russian Jew and it's always interesting.

Norman Naimark (48:58.780)

I take pride in, you know, I love the tradition

Lex Fridman (49:05.900)

of the Soviet Union, of Russia.

Norman Naimark (49:07.500)

I love America.

Lex Fridman (49:08.540)

So I love these countries.

Norman Naimark (49:10.100)

They have beautiful tradition in literature and science

Lex Fridman (49:13.340)

and art and all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (49:15.380)

But it's funny that people, not often,

Lex Fridman (49:19.220)

but sometimes correct me that I'm not Russian.

Norman Naimark (49:24.060)

I'm a Jew.

Lex Fridman (49:24.900)

And it's a, it's a, it's a nice reminder.

Norman Naimark (49:29.980)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (49:30.980)

That that is always there,

Norman Naimark (49:34.220)

that desire to create these groups.

Lex Fridman (49:37.260)

And then when they're living in the same place

Norman Naimark (49:39.780)

for that division between groups,

Lex Fridman (49:42.100)

that hate between groups can explode.

Lex Fridman (49:45.940)

And I just, I wonder why is that there?

Lex Fridman (49:49.540)

Why does, why does the human heart tend so easily

Lex Fridman (49:53.420)

towards this kind of hate?

Lex Fridman (49:58.420)

You know, that's a big question in and of itself.

Lex Fridman (50:02.580)

You know, the human heart is full of everything, right?

Lex Fridman (50:04.820)

It's full of hate.

Norman Naimark (50:05.740)

It's full of love.

Lex Fridman (50:06.660)

It's full of indifference.

Norman Naimark (50:07.820)

It's full of apathy.

Lex Fridman (50:09.700)

It's full of energy.

Norman Naimark (50:10.700)

So, I mean, hate is something, you know, that,

Lex Fridman (50:17.660)

I mean, I think, and, you know,

Norman Naimark (50:22.460)

along with hate, you know, the ability to really hurt

Lex Fridman (50:25.300)

and injure people is something that's within all of us.

Norman Naimark (50:28.260)

You know, it's within all of us.

Lex Fridman (50:30.340)

And it's just something that's part of who we are

Lex Fridman (50:35.140)

and part of our society.

Lex Fridman (50:37.860)

So, you know, we're shaped by our society

Lex Fridman (50:39.980)

and our society can do with us often what it wishes.

Lex Fridman (50:44.740)

You know, that's why it's so much nicer to live in a

Norman Naimark (50:47.660)

more or less beneficent society

Lex Fridman (50:49.780)

like that of a democracy in the West

Lex Fridman (50:52.500)

than to live in the Soviet Union, right?

Lex Fridman (50:55.060)

I mean, because, you know, you have more or less

Norman Naimark (50:59.020)

the freedom to do what you wish

Lex Fridman (51:01.740)

and not to be forced into situations

Norman Naimark (51:04.380)

in which you would have to then do nasty to other people.

Lex Fridman (51:09.620)

You know, some societies, as we talked about,

Norman Naimark (51:12.460)

you know, are more have proclivities towards,

Lex Fridman (51:16.700)

you know, asking of its people to do things

Norman Naimark (51:19.940)

they don't want to do and forcing them to do so.

Lex Fridman (51:24.380)

So, you know, freedom is a wonderful thing.

Norman Naimark (51:27.820)

To be able to choose not to do evil is a great thing,

Lex Fridman (51:30.860)

you know, whereas in some societies, you know,

Norman Naimark (51:33.900)

you feel in some ways for not so much for the NKVD bosses,

Lex Fridman (51:39.060)

but for the guys on the ground, you know, in the 1930s

Norman Naimark (51:41.900)

or not so much for the Nazi bosses,

Lex Fridman (51:44.820)

but for the guys, you know, in the police battalion

Lex Fridman (51:50.340)

that were told, go shoot those Jews, you know?

Lex Fridman (51:53.740)

And you do it, not necessarily because

Norman Naimark (51:57.540)

they force you to do it, but because your social,

Lex Fridman (52:02.060)

you know, your social situation, you know, encourages you to

Lex Fridman (52:07.580)

and you don't have the courage not to.

Lex Fridman (52:09.940)

Yeah, I was just, as I often do,

Norman Naimark (52:12.500)

rereading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

Lex Fridman (52:15.940)

and he said something, I just, I often pull out sort of lines.

Norman Naimark (52:22.420)

The mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard

Lex Fridman (52:25.180)

or a prisoner tells us almost nothing.

Norman Naimark (52:28.340)

Human kindness can be found in all groups,

Lex Fridman (52:31.180)

even those which as a whole, it would be easy to condemn.

Lex Fridman (52:36.220)

So that's speaking to, you feel for those people

Lex Fridman (52:41.220)

at the lowest level implementing the orders of those above.

Norman Naimark (52:49.780)

Right.

Lex Fridman (52:51.740)

And also you worry yourself what will happen

Lex Fridman (52:54.700)

if you were given those same orders, you know?

Lex Fridman (52:56.740)

I mean, what would you do?

Norman Naimark (52:59.020)

You know, what kind of reaction would you have

Lex Fridman (53:01.700)

in a similar situation?

Lex Fridman (53:03.380)

And you know, you don't know.

Lex Fridman (53:07.740)

I could see myself in World War II

Norman Naimark (53:10.340)

while fighting for almost any country that I was born in.

Lex Fridman (53:17.140)

There's a love of community, there's a love of country

Norman Naimark (53:20.260)

that's just, at least to me it comes naturally,

Lex Fridman (53:23.180)

just love of community and countries wanting such community.

Lex Fridman (53:27.260)

And I could see fighting for that country,

Lex Fridman (53:29.460)

especially when you're sold a story that you're fighting evil

Lex Fridman (53:33.660)

and I'm sure every single country

Lex Fridman (53:35.300)

was sold that story effectively.

Lex Fridman (53:38.540)

And then when you're in the military

Lex Fridman (53:41.300)

and you have a gun in your hand

Norman Naimark (53:42.420)

or you're in the police force and you're ordered,

Lex Fridman (53:47.660)

go to this place and commit violence,

Norman Naimark (53:53.100)

it's hard to know what you would do.

Lex Fridman (53:55.420)

It's a mix of fear, it's a mix of,

Norman Naimark (53:59.020)

maybe you convince yourself, you know,

Lex Fridman (54:01.020)

what can one person really do?

Lex Fridman (54:03.540)

And over time, it's again, that slippery slope.

Lex Fridman (54:05.900)

Because you could see all the people who protest,

Norman Naimark (54:09.020)

who revolt, they're ineffective.

Lex Fridman (54:13.900)

So like, if you actually want to practically help somehow,

Norman Naimark (54:17.460)

you're going to convince yourself that you can't,

Lex Fridman (54:19.300)

one person can't possibly help.

Lex Fridman (54:22.180)

And then you have a family, so you want to make,

Lex Fridman (54:24.140)

you know, you want to protect your family.

Norman Naimark (54:25.700)

You tell all these stories and over time,

Lex Fridman (54:28.660)

it, you naturally convince yourself to dehumanize the other.

Norman Naimark (54:32.540)

Yeah, I think about this a lot,

Lex Fridman (54:38.580)

mostly because I worry that I wouldn't be a good German.

Norman Naimark (54:42.380)

Yeah, no, no, that's right, that's right.

Lex Fridman (54:44.580)

And one of the, you know, one of my tasks as a teacher,

Norman Naimark (54:48.460)

right, our students, and I have, you know,

Lex Fridman (54:52.060)

classes on genocide, I have one now.

Lex Fridman (54:55.900)

And another one, by the way, on Stalin.

Lex Fridman (54:58.900)

But the one on genocide, you know,

Norman Naimark (55:01.100)

one of my tasks is to try to get the students to understand

Lex Fridman (55:05.820)

this is not about weird people who live far away

Lex Fridman (55:09.100)

in time and in place, but it's about them, you know?

Lex Fridman (55:12.620)

And that, you know, that's a hard lesson,

Lex Fridman (55:15.300)

but it's an important one, you know,

Lex Fridman (55:17.100)

that this is in all of us, you know, it's in all of us.

Lex Fridman (55:20.540)

And there's nothing, you know,

Lex Fridman (55:22.780)

and you just try to gird yourself up, you know,

Norman Naimark (55:25.620)

to try to figure out ways that maybe you won't be complicit.

Lex Fridman (55:29.460)

And that you learn how to stand by your principles,

Lex Fridman (55:33.580)

but it's very hard, it's extremely difficult.

Lex Fridman (55:36.140)

And you can't, the other interesting thing about it

Norman Naimark (55:38.700)

is it's not predictable.

Lex Fridman (55:40.300)

Now, there's, they've done a lot of studies of Poles,

Lex Fridman (55:42.660)

for example, who during the war saved Jews, you know?

Lex Fridman (55:45.860)

Well, who are the Poles who saved Jews

Lex Fridman (55:47.780)

versus those who turned them in?

Lex Fridman (55:50.060)

It's completely unpredictable.

Norman Naimark (55:51.780)

You know, sometimes it's the worst anti Semites

Lex Fridman (55:53.820)

who protect them because they don't believe

Lex Fridman (55:55.420)

they should be killed, right?

Lex Fridman (55:57.540)

And sometimes, you know, it's not predictable.

Norman Naimark (56:01.180)

It's not as if the humanists among us, you know,

Lex Fridman (56:04.300)

are the ones who, you know, consistently show up,

Norman Naimark (56:08.980)

you know, and experience danger, in other words,

Lex Fridman (56:13.980)

and are ready to take on danger

Norman Naimark (56:16.740)

to defend, you know, your fellow human beings.

Lex Fridman (56:18.900)

Not necessarily.

Norman Naimark (56:19.820)

I mean, sometimes simple people do it,

Lex Fridman (56:21.540)

and sometimes they do it for really simple reasons.

Lex Fridman (56:24.780)

And sometimes, people you would expect to do it don't.

Lex Fridman (56:29.860)

And you've got that mix, and it's just not predictable.

Norman Naimark (56:33.540)

One thing I've learned in this age of social media

Lex Fridman (56:37.260)

is it feels like the people with integrity

Lex Fridman (56:39.780)

and the ones who would do the right thing

Lex Fridman (56:41.900)

are the quiet ones.

Norman Naimark (56:44.660)

In terms of humanists, in terms of activists,

Lex Fridman (56:46.860)

there's so many points to be gained

Norman Naimark (56:50.300)

of declaring that you would do the right thing.

Lex Fridman (56:53.460)

It's the simple, quiet folks.

Norman Naimark (56:58.700)

Because I've seen quite, on a small,

Lex Fridman (57:01.300)

obviously much smaller scale,

Norman Naimark (57:03.460)

just shows of integrity and character.

Lex Fridman (57:05.900)

When there was sacrifice to be made and it was done quietly.

Norman Naimark (57:09.380)

Now, sort of the small heroes, those are,

Lex Fridman (57:13.660)

you're right, it's surprising, but they're often quiet.

Norman Naimark (57:17.260)

That's why I'm distrustful of people

Lex Fridman (57:18.900)

who kind of proclaim that they would do the right thing.

Norman Naimark (57:21.380)

Right, right.

Lex Fridman (57:23.580)

And there are different kinds of integrity, too.

Norman Naimark (57:25.500)

I mean, I edited a memoir of a Polish underground fighter,

Lex Fridman (57:34.940)

member of the underground who was in Majdanek

Norman Naimark (57:37.180)

in the concentration camp at Majdanek.

Lex Fridman (57:38.900)

You know, and it was just an interesting mix

Norman Naimark (57:41.180)

of different kinds of integrity.

Lex Fridman (57:43.540)

You know, on the one hand,

Norman Naimark (57:45.140)

it really bothered him deeply

Lex Fridman (57:50.340)

when Jews were killed or sent to camp

Norman Naimark (57:52.820)

or that sort of thing.

Lex Fridman (57:53.660)

On the other hand, he was something of an anti Semite.

Norman Naimark (57:56.780)

You know, he would, you know,

Lex Fridman (57:59.660)

sometimes if Jews were his friends, he would help them.

Lex Fridman (58:02.780)

And if they weren't, sometimes he was really mean to them.

Lex Fridman (58:06.340)

You know, and you could, in their various levels,

Norman Naimark (58:08.180)

you know, a concentration camp is a terrible social experiment

Lex Fridman (58:13.180)

in some ways, right?

Lex Fridman (58:15.460)

But you learn a lot from how people behave.

Lex Fridman (58:19.940)

And what you see is that, you know,

Norman Naimark (58:21.300)

people behave sometimes extraordinarily well

Lex Fridman (58:23.980)

in some situations and extraordinarily poorly in others.

Lex Fridman (58:26.660)

And it's mixed and you can't predict it.

Lex Fridman (58:28.740)

And it's hard to find consistency.

Norman Naimark (58:32.380)

I mean, that's the other thing.

Lex Fridman (58:33.500)

It's, you know, I think we claim too much consistency

Norman Naimark (58:37.180)

for the people we study

Lex Fridman (58:38.460)

and the people we think about in the past.

Norman Naimark (58:40.380)

You know, they're not consistent any more than we are

Lex Fridman (58:42.660)

consistent, right?

Norman Naimark (58:45.140)

Well, let me ask you about human nature here on both sides.

Lex Fridman (58:48.060)

So first, what have you learned about human nature

Lex Fridman (58:53.100)

from studying genocide?

Lex Fridman (58:54.700)

Why do humans commit genocide?

Lex Fridman (58:56.820)

What lessons, first of all, why is a difficult question,

Lex Fridman (59:01.540)

but what insights do you have into humans

Lex Fridman (59:04.860)

that genocide is something that happens in the world?

Lex Fridman (59:07.820)

That's a really big and difficult question, right?

Lex Fridman (59:10.380)

And it has to be parsed, I think,

Lex Fridman (59:13.900)

into different kinds of questions.

Lex Fridman (59:16.420)

You know, why does genocide happen?

Lex Fridman (59:19.620)

You know, which the answer there is frequently political,

Norman Naimark (59:24.380)

meaning, you know, why Hitler ended up killing the Jews.

Lex Fridman (59:28.940)

Well, it had a lot to do with the political history

Lex Fridman (59:32.020)

of Germany and wartime history of Germany, right?

Lex Fridman (59:35.380)

In the 30s, and, you know, it's traceable to then.

Norman Naimark (59:40.500)

No, like you mentioned it yourself,

Lex Fridman (59:42.980)

you can't imagine Hitler in the mid 20s

Norman Naimark (59:46.020)

turning into anything of the kind of dictator

Lex Fridman (59:49.580)

he ended up being and the kind of murderer,

Norman Naimark (59:53.180)

mass murderer he ended up being.

Lex Fridman (59:55.540)

So, and the same thing goes, by the way,

Norman Naimark (59:58.860)

for Stalin and Soviet Union and Pol Pot.