#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Vejas Liulevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the rain and the fall of communism. Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics, the communist ideology that has led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century. We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG1 for health, BetterHelp for your mind, Notion for team collaboration, Element for electrolytes and Aidsleep for naps. Shoes-wise, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Speaking of peak performance, I'm trying to figure out in my life how many times a week to train Jiu-Jitsu. There's a long stretch of my life where Jiu-Jitsu was a big part of my life. I would often train twice a day. And basically my life was about sort of recovery from that training session. And during the recovery, I would be doing sort of the deep study or the deep work of programming for my Ph.D. and then beyond. And it might sound counterintuitive, but when you're so passionately pursuing a thing and it becomes such a big part of your day, it's actually much easier to integrate it into your life. And in fact, your body gets accustomed to that kind of hardness of training. If you're doing it correctly in terms of nutrition and in terms of avoiding injury. In fact, I never got any major injuries, knock on wood, any sort of breaking of anything, doing, you know, I don't know how many years, over 20 years, 25 years. And I find that now that you just this is a much, much smaller part of my life. It actually does become a different puzzle. It's a puzzle of how to avoid injury, how to still have fun, but also how to keep growing and learning and adapting to the changing environment of grappling. No geek grappling especially. So it's been a fascinating puzzle to try and solve. Back to AG1, they'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. I remember speaking of jiu-jitsu, one of the tougher things mentally for me, for anyone that does jiu-jitsu, that's one of the wonderful benefits you get from it is you get humbled. And there's all kinds of ways to get humbled. But there's just some training sessions. And it might not have to do with the skill of the people you're training with. It might just be one of those days that you just get smashed, as they say in the MMA community when they're talking about Habib Namaga Medov. You just feel powerless. You know, somebody just crushes you knee on belly or mount or back control and you just over and over get submitted or just guard pass, whatever it is, just stuff is not working. And you just feel like there's nothing in the world that you can do. Right. You feel like you'll never get better. That it's just hopeless. And that feeling, especially in combat sports, where there's kind of a masculine competitive energy, you just feel like this is it. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. This is it. And that feeling is a beautiful feeling because you just sit in that moment and sit with that pain, that disappointment, that emotional turmoil, and you channel that feeling into growth, into improving, into strengthening the engine of perseverance. And all of that is in the mind. And you should take care of your mind by checking out betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It's probably my favorite integration of AI into the writing process. I haven't used it that much for the team collaboration aspect, but for the note-taking aspect. But I've heard really great things about the team collaboration thing. I've been preparing extensively to interview the cursor team. Cursor is an editor and IDE for programming that is a fork of ES code. It makes AI assistant coding a foundation based on which they're building the feature. So it makes AI the primary citizen. And I've seen that Notion does the same kind of thing. They really focused on empowering AI to help you, not just for a single document, but across entire projects and wikis and all that kind of stuff. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com/lex, to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar delicious electrolyte mix. Whenever you see me drinking, sometimes I'll have something that looks like a powerade bottle with a clear liquid. The clear liquid is cold water with one packet of watermelon salt, Element. It's a thing I drink before a run, after a run, before and after a hard training session, and just as throughout the day, it's a delicious way to consume water. I continually am surprised how much of physical and psychological problems can be solved with getting the right amount of electrolytes. I think that's like a meme on the various social media platforms of like a girlfriend complaining about something being wrong. And the suggestion is, well, have you tried drinking a glass of water? That the implication is that she's simply thirsty, but she doesn't want the boyfriend to give a solution to the problem. In fact, she wants to just be heard. That's the meme. But to sort of dig for the wisdom within the meme, really, you could solve so many problems by drinking water and getting enough electrolytes. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase. Try it at www.drinklmnt.com/lex.