#456 – Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Ukraine, War, Peace, Putin, Trump, NATO, and Freedom

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine. It was an intense, raw and heartfelt conversation, my goal for which was to understand and to do all I can to push for peace. Please allow me to say a few words, first about language, then about the president, and finally about history. Please skip ahead straight to our conversation if you like. We spoke in a mix of languages, continuously switching from Ukrainian to Russian to English. So the interpreter was barely hanging on. It was indeed in many ways a wild ride of a conversation. As the president said, the first of many. Language, like many other things in a time of war, is a big deal. We had a choice, speak in Russian, Ukrainian or English. The president does speak some English, but he's far from fluent in it. And I sadly don't speak Ukrainian, yet. So Russian is the only common language we're both fluent in. In case you don't know, the Russian language is one that the president speaks fluently and was his primary language for most of his life. It's the language I also speak fluently, to the degree I speak any language fluently, as does a large fraction of the Ukrainian population. So the most dynamic and powerful conversation between us would be in Russian, without an interpreter, who in this case added about two to three second delay, and frankly translated partially and poorly, for me at least, taking away my ability to feel the humor, the wit, the brilliance, the pain, the anger, the humanity of the person sitting before me, that I could clearly feel when he was speaking fluently in the language I understand, Russian. But all that said, war changes everything. The Ukrainian language has become a symbol of the Ukrainian people's fight for freedom and independence. So we had a difficult choice of three languages, and faced with that choice, we said yes, to all three, to the consternation and dismay of the translators. We make captions and voice over audio tracks available in English, Ukrainian and Russian. So you can listen either to a version that is all one language, or to the original mixed language version with subtitles in your preferred language. The default is English overdub. On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer. English, Ukrainian, Russian. To listen to the original mixed language version, please select the English UK audio track. Big thank you to 11 Labs for their help with overdubbing using a mix of AI and humans. We will continue to explore how to break down the barriers that language creates. With AI and otherwise. This is a difficult but important endeavor. Language, after all, is much more than a cold sequence of facts and logic statements. There are words, when spoken in the right sequence and at the right time, that can shake the world and turn the tides of history. That can start and end wars. Great leaders can find those words, and great translators can help these words reverberate to the outskirts of a divided civilization. On another note, let me say that President Zelenskyy is a truly remarkable person and a historic figure. I say this as somebody who deeply understands the geopolitical complexity and history of the region. I am from this region. My parents were both born in Ukraine, Kiev and Kharkiv. Both my grandfathers, too. I was born in Tajikistan and lived for time there, then in Kiev, then Moscow, then United States. And while I am now for almost 30 years and to the day I die, I am a proud American. My family roots grow deep in the soil of nations that comprised the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Tajikistan. I've gotten to know and have spoken for hours with members of the president's team and people close to him. I spoke to hundreds of Ukrainians since 2022, including soldiers, civilians, politicians, artists, religious leaders, journalists, economists, historians and technologists. I've listened to hundreds of hours of programs that both support and criticize the president in Ukraine, in Russia, in the United States. I've read countless books about this war and the long arc of history that led up to it. A force to recommend too, at this moment, I would say the Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plohy and The Showman by Simon Schuster, which is a good personal behind the scenes biography of the president focused on 2022 But there are many, many more. This is why I can comfortably say that he is a truly singular and remarkable human being. It was an honor and pleasure to talk with him on and off the mic. Now, it is true that I plan to travel to Moscow and to speak with President Vladimir Putin. And I hope to be back in Kiev as well. As President Zelenskyy said, this was our first of many more meetings. In all these cases, I seek to do my small part in pushing for peace. And in doing all this, I'm deeply grateful for the trust people have given me on all sides. For the people attacking me, sometimes lying about me, for the critics in the stands, chanting the latest slogans of the mass hysteria machine, like the sheep and animal farm. I love you too. And I assure you that drawing lines between good and evil on a world map is much easier than seeing that line between good and evil in every human being, including you and me. This is what I try to do. I'm simply a human being who seeks to find and surface the humanity in others. And as I've said, no amount of money, fame, power, access can buy my opinion or my integrity. Now, finally, please allow me to briefly overview some history to give background for several topics that President Zelenskyy references in this conversation. I recommend my conversation with Sarihi Plohi and many others about the history of the region. But here, let me start with 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence and the Soviet Union collapsed. From this point on, Russia-Ukraine relations were defined in large part by whether Ukraine aligned more with Russia or with the West, meaning Europe, United States, NATO, and so on. In 2004, with the Orange Revolution, a pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, became president. In 2010, it went the other way, a pro-Russia candidate, Viktor Yurikovych, became president. The internal tensions grew, and in 2013, Yuriy Maidan protests broke out over Yurikovych's decision to suspend talks with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. This set forward a chain of important events in 2014 On the politics front, Yurikovych was ousted and fled to Russia, leading to the election of a pro-Western president. Also in 2014, on the war front, Russia annexed Crimea, and war broke out in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, which eventually killed over 14,000 people, and continued all the way to 2022, when on February 24th, 2022, Russian forces initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This is when the world started to really pay attention. Now some history of peace talks. Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the presidency in 2019, and he discusses in this conversation the ceasefire agreements he made with Vladimir Putin in 2019, which was one of many attempts at peace from the two Minsk agreements in 2014 and 15 to a series of ceasefire agreements in 2018, 19 and 20, all of which failed in part or in whole. All this shows just how difficult ceasefire and peace negotiations are, but they are not impossible. It is always worth trying over and over again to find the path to peace. I believe that Presidents Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump should meet soon after January 20th this year and give everything they got to negotiate a ceasefire and security guarantees that pave the way for long lasting peace. We discussed several ideas for this in this conversation. As I said, this was one of my main goals here, to push for peace. This trip to Kiev and this conversation was a truly special moment for me in my life. It is one I will never forget. So to reflect, I say a few more words and answer some questions at the very end, if you like to listen. But here, let me say thank you to everyone for your support over the years. It means the world. 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. There are no sponsor reeds in the middle, so you can skip these. But I do try to make them interesting in case you stick around. In either case, still please check out the sponsors. Buy their stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for notes and team collaboration, GitHub for all things programming, including with the help of AI. AG1 for health, Element for electrolytes, 8 Sleep for naps, and Better Help for your mind. If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now on to the full ad reads. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. I believe I mentioned at the end of the podcast is something I use regularly as a big part of my podcast prep and research process. I currently only use it at the computer when I'm doing really sort of rigorous, systematic note taking. But it is, like I mentioned, really the best integration of AI that I've used in any note taking application. I'm a bit delirious at the moment because through the insane amount of work that had to be done to bring together the translation for this episode with President Zelenskyy, I've gotten very little sleep. So here I am trying to put together a few words when the neurons required to assemble said words are just not firing. Anyway, the amount of research, the amount of note taking that had to do, just the chaos, the, the world pool, the overwhelming amount of notes that I took across many books and blog posts. And I was listening to just a, a large number of conversations from all different kinds of perspectives. And I'm not sure those notes were sort of directly useful, but they're building up a knowledge base. They're building up an intuition. They're making sure that I have a chance to understand. So anyway, Notion played a big part of that. 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 a new sponsor, but obviously one I've used for many, many years. It's GitHub and GitHub Copilot. So GitHub for people who somehow don't know if you're listening to this, and you're not a developer, it's basically a place where developers go to be happy, and to collaborate and to share and to build, especially for people who are part of the open-source world. So it really is a magical place. Also, they were pioneers in the AI-assisted coding space with GitHub Copilot. Now GitHub Copilot is not just available in VS Code. It's also available in Neo Vim. It's available in all the JetBrains IDEs. I've used JetBrains for a long time and loved it, and eventually drifted away. Still have not tried Neo Vim. I probably should. Vim, Neo Vim. That's what all the cool kids are using. Anyway, GitHub Copilot and all the different features of AI-assisted coding that they're continually developing are available in those IDs. As I mentioned at the end of the episode, I was an Emacs user for probably over 20 years, way more than 20 years. And so I don't remember exactly when, but a few months ago, I switched to VS Code and that was just such a light bulb moment. It took a little bit of time to get adjusted. You know, I missed a bunch of stuff in Emacs, especially because I customized everything with Lisp, which is what Emacs is written in. And it's the sort of the back end customization is written in Lisp. And Lisp is its own sort of programming language with an aura and a spirit that permeated my being for a long time. So it took a little bit of time to get used to VS Code, but really the magic of copilot is the thing that allowed me to transition so quickly. And they're facing a lot of steep competition right now. So I'm excited just how seriously they're taking this competitive space of AI-assisted coding and developers win. The more competition, the more features, developers win. And I, as a developer myself, just full of joy when I get to pair a program with a good LLM. Anyway, get started with GitHub Copilot for free today at gh.io.