#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Serhii Plokhy, a historian at Harvard University and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, also at Harvard. As a historian, he specializes in the history of Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Ukraine. He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia, the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters, and on the current war in Ukraine. A book titled The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We got Eight Sleep for naps, Shopify for making stores, NetSuite for business stuff and AG1 for just health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfreedman.com.com. Now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. Now, let's talk about naps. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod 3 cover. It cools the bed down to whatever you want. There's a setting from, I guess, to 10 I guess when it's on 10, like a negative 10, it'll probably get you down to as low as 65 degrees. That's such a cool feeling upon unintended. It's just this comforting chill that goes to your body while you have a warm blanket on top. It actually reminds me of desserts I've had a long time ago. One of the things with eating very low carb is you don't really partake in desserts, but I love watching other people enjoy desserts. I just love being together with people and enjoying cool food. If that requires eating desserts, I will. It's not like I'm very strict on the whole thing. Anyway, the reason I mention it is I remember first discovering how incredible it is to have a hot brownie, let's say, or any kind of chocolatey cake thing with ice cream on top. So you got the hot and the cold and it combines beautifully. I don't understand why that is, but even thinking about it now makes you want to throw my life away for just a brownie with some ice cream on top of it. That's how I feel when I'm taking a nap on Eight Sleep. Anyway, you can feel the same kind of thing if you check them out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, the platform I use to make a store. I think the address is lexfreedman.com/store. It forwards you to whatever the Shopify thing is and there you can get a few shirts. If you want to sell shirts, if you want to sell all kinds of stuff, you can use Shopify, super easy. You know what is best? Capitalism is a system that empowers the little guy. As long as you got a cool thing, you can find a person that wants to buy that cool thing and if the thing is super cool, then there's going to be word of mouth, people that use it are gonna tell others to use it and then you can build a giant business on it. Small businesses, medium-sized business, giant business, at its best. The competition of the market can enable that. So it's nice to have sort of systems like Shopify that make that easy, the e-commerce aspect of that easy. Low cost, accessible, super easy to use, using the power of the internet to really scale whatever business you're doing. It's interesting. It's pretty cool, the machine of it all. I still and always have believed in the land of opportunity that is the United States. I really do believe that no matter where you come from, from all walks of life, more than almost any other nation on earth, probably any other nation on earth, you can really make something of yourself. It's not easy. And the system will try to mess with you. Will try to make it difficult. But all systems do that. The powerful want to put their foot down on the little guy. In America, more than on any other nation on earth, the little guy has a chance. Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lower case. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by the birthday boy or gal NetSuite. The reason I say birthday boy or gal is because they turned 25 this year. Happy birthday. I don't know why that brings me so much joy to say. I like it when companies survive. Usually, it means they've been doing something right. A company is not just the company, it's the people that built it, and the people that work together, show up every single day to work together. They got families and they leave those families for a few hours to then collaborate on a difficult thing, make a thing happen. The machinery of it, the camaraderie of it is beautiful. Anyway, NetSuite is an all-in-one cloud business management system that enables, that empowers, that deals with all the messy things like HR, financials, all that. 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. It's the machine that runs the machine, the machine inside the machine, the central machine that enables the different, disparate parts of a company to communicate, to work together. The metamachine of it is the company and the metametamachine is capitalism. This is a very capitalism focused set of ad reads today, friends. There are things to criticize about capitalism, but overall it is one of the more beautiful things that humans have created. I do want to say that we tend to seem to want to criticize more than celebrate in the society. Social media, journalism seems to get clicks on the criticisms, and those are important, but it should probably be done in proportion to the full thing. We should celebrate and criticize properly in proportion. Anyway, you can download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex for your own KPI checklist. This episode is also brought to you by the thing I'm drinking right now, AG1. It's an all-in-one delicious, healthy drink to support better health and peak performance. Every time I talk about AG1, I think about Andrew Huberman, who I'm going to see in a couple of days. A beautiful person, an important person, a great communicator of science, a great friend, a good person. I think I already said that, but worth saying again. He's a big fan of AG1. We're big fans of a lot of similar things in life. And speaking of celebrating, I'm really happy that people like him can succeed in this world. And I'm just truly happy that he has found success. He has found his voice. He's found a way he can maximize sort of showing to the world who he is as a scientific thinker, as a communicator. It's like such a great example that we're all different. Communication wise, he's different from me, different from Rogan, different from a lot of really great podcasts I listen to. But it's different but beautiful. So big fan. And so here I'm raising my AG1 as a toast to the great Andrew Huberman. Anyway, I drink the thing usually twice a day. I'm drinking it now and then I'll probably go for a super long run in a few hours. And then after that, I'll drink AG1 again. It just makes me happy. It's delicious, refreshing. Love it. It's basically a super awesome multivitamin. Everybody should have multivitamins as part of their life. This is a super awesome one. Okay, that's all I need to say. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.