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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:36 - Nature of evil
9:33 - Is violence and force fundamental to human civilization?
14:41 - Will we always have war?
24:21 - The Russian front in World War II
32:15 - Ideologies of the US, the Soviet Union, and China
44:58 - Putin
57:33 - Journalism is broken
1:04:58 - Genghis Khan
1:19:19 - Greatest leader in history
1:27:04 - Could Hitler have been stopped?
1:44:03 - Hitler's Antisemitism
1:49:54 - Destructive power of evil
1:59:09 - Will human civilization destroy itself?
2:11:14 - Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX
2:19:36 - Steering around the iceberg - wow do we avoid collapse of society?
2:41:43 - Advice on podcasting
2:44:55 - Joe Rogan, Spotify, and the future of podcasting
3:00:02 - Future episodes of Hardcore History podcast
3:15:04 - Is Ben real?
3:15:48 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History and Common Sense Podcasts.

To me, Hardcore History is 1 of, if not the greatest podcast ever made.

Dan and Joe Rogan are probably the 2 main people who got me to fall in love with the medium of podcasting, as a fan and eventually as a podcaster myself.

To me, he was not just a mere human like the rest of us, since his voice has been a guide through some of the darkest moments of human history for me.

Meeting him was like meeting Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, and all of the most powerful leaders in history all at once in a crappy hotel room in the middle of Oregon.

It turns out that he is in fact just a human and truly 1 of the good ones.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

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As a side note, let me say that I think we're living through 1 of the most challenging moments in American history.

To me, the way out is through reason and love.

Both require a deep understanding of human nature and of human history.

I am, perhaps hopelessly, optimistic about our future.

But, if indeed we stand at the precipice of the great filter, watching our world consumed by fire, think of this little podcast conversation as the appetizer to the final meal before the apocalypse.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, Finally, here's my conversation with the great Dan Carlin.

Let's start with the highest philosophical question.

Do you think human beings are fundamentally good, or are all of us capable of both good and evil, and it's the environment that molds the trajectory that we take through life.

Evil seems to be a situational eye of the beholder kind of question.

So if we define evil, maybe I can get a better idea of, and that could be a whole show, couldn't it?

That's a slippery 1, but I think there's some way in which your existence, your presence in the world leads to pain and suffering and destruction for many others in the rest of the world.

So you steal the resources and you use them to create more suffering than there was before in the world.

So I suppose it's somehow deeply connected to this other slippery word, which is suffering.

As you create suffering in the world, you bring suffering to the world.

But here's the problem, I think, with it, because I fully see where you're going with that, and I understand it.

The problem is the question of the reason for inflicting suffering.

So sometimes 1 might inflict suffering upon 1 group of individuals in order to maximize a lack of suffering with another group of individuals, or 1 who might not be considered evil at all might make the rational, seemingly rational choice of inflicting pain and suffering on a smaller group of people in order to maximize the opposite of that for a larger group of people.

Yeah, that's 1 of the dark things about, I've spoken and read the work of Stephen Kotkin, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the historian, and he's basically a Stalin, Joseph Stalin scholar.

of the things I realized, I'm not sure where to put Hitler, but with Stalin, it really seems that he was sane and he thought he was doing good for the world.

I really believe from everything I've read about Stalin, that he believed that communism is good for the world.

And if you have to kill a few people along the way, if it's like you said, the small groups, if you have to sort of remove the people that stand in the way of this utopian system of communism, then that's actually good for the world.

And it didn't seem to me that he could even consider the possibility that he was evil.

He really thought he was doing good for the world.

And that stuck with me because he's 1 of the most, it's to our definition of evil, he seems to have brought more evil onto this world than almost any human in history.

So fascinated by it that the very first hardcore history show we ever did, which was a full 15 or 16 minutes, was called Alexander versus Hitler.

And the entire question about it was the motivations, right?

So if you go to a court of law because you killed somebody, 1 of the things they're going to consider is why did you kill them, right?

And if you killed somebody, for example, in self-defense, you're going to be treated differently than if you malicious killed somebody maliciously to take their wallet, right?

And in the show, we wondered, because, you know, I don't really make pronouncements, but we wondered about If you believe Hitler's writings, for example, Mein Kampf, which is written by a guy who's a political figure who wants to get off.

It's about as believable as any other political tract would be.

But in his mind, the things that he said that he had to do were designed for the betterment of the German people, right?

Whereas Alexander the Great, once again, this is somebody from more than 2000 years ago, so with lots of propaganda in the intervening years, but 1 of the views of Alexander the Great is that the reason he did what he did was to, for lack of a better word, write his name in a more permanent graffiti on the pages of history, right?

And if that's the case, does that make Alexander a worse person than Hitler because Hitler thought he was doing good, whereas Alexander, if you believe the interpretation, was simply trying to exalt Alexander.

So the motivations of the people doing these things, it seems to me, matter.

I don't think you can just sit there and go, the only thing that matters is the end result, because that might have been an unintentional byproduct.

In which case, that person, had you been able to show them the future, might have changed what they were doing.

So were they evil or misguided or wrong or made the, you know, so, and I hate to do that because there's certain people like Hitler that I don't feel deserve the benefit of the doubt.

At the same time, if you're fascinated by the concept of evil and you delve into it deeply enough, you're going to want to understand why these evil people did what they did, and sometimes it can confuse the hell out of you.

Who wants to sit there and try to see things from Hitler's point of view to get a better understanding and sort of commiserate with.

So, but I'm obviously, first history show, I'm fascinated with the concept.

So do you think it's possible if we put ourselves in the mindset of some of the people that have created so much suffering in the world, that all of them had their motivations, had good intentions underlying them.

No, I don't, Simply because there's so many.

I mean, the law of averages would suggest that that's not true.

I guess it is pure evil possible, meaning you, again, it's slippery, but the suffering is the goal.

And I think that there's historical figures that 1 could point to, but that gets to the deeper question of, are these people sane?

Are they twisted from something in their youth?

You know, these are the kinds of things where you start to delve into the psychological makeup of these people.

And I actually believe that some people are.

I think the DNA can get scrambled up in ways.

I think the question of evil is important too because I think it's an eye of the beholder thing.

I mean, if Hitler, for example, had been successful and we were today on the sixth or seventh leader of the Third Reich, since I think his entire history would be viewed through a different lens because that's the way we do things, right?

Genghis Khan looks different to the Mongolians than he does to the residents of Baghdad, right?

And I think, so an eye of the beholder question, I think comes into all these sorts of things.

As you said, it's a very slippery question.

Where do you put, as somebody who's fascinated by military history, where do you put violence?

As in terms of the human condition, is it core to being human or is it just a little tool that we use every once in a while.

So I'm gonna respond to your question with a question.

What do you see the difference being between violence and force?

I'm not sure that violence is something that we have to put up with as human beings forever, that we must resign ourselves to violence forever.

But I have a much harder time seeing us able to abolish force.

And there's going to be some ground where if those 2 things are not the same, and I don't know that maybe they are, where there's certainly some crossover.

And I think force, you're an engineer, you'll understand this better than I do, but think about it as a physical law.

If you can't stop something from moving in a certain direction without pushing back in that same direction, I'm not sure that you can have a society or a civilization without the ability to use a counterforce when things are going wrong, whether it's on an individual level, right, a person attacks another person so you step in to save that person, or on, you know, even at the highest levels of politics or anything else, a counter force to stop the inertia or the impetus of another movement.

So I think that force is a simple almost law of physics in human interaction, especially at the civilizational level.

I think civilization requires a certain amount of, if not violence, then force.

So, and again, they've talked, I mean, it goes back into St.

Augustine, all kinds of Christian beliefs about the proper use of force, and people have philosophically tried to decide between, can you have a sort of an Ahimsa Buddhist sort of, we will be nonviolent toward everything and exert no force, or there's a reason to have force in order to create the space for good.

Now we can talk, and I've not come up to the conclusion myself, if there is a distinction to be made between force and violence.

I mean, is a nonviolent force enough or is violence when done for the cause of good a different thing than violence done either for the cause of evil, as you would say, or simply for random reasons.

I mean, we humans lack control sometimes.

We can be violent for no apparent reason or goal.

And that's, I mean, you look at the criminal justice system alone and the way we interact with people who are acting out in ways that we as a society have decided is intolerable.

Can you deal with that without force and at some level violence?

Can you maintain peacefulness without force?

Just to be a little bit more specific about the idea of force, do you put force as general enough to include force in the space of ideas?

So you mentioned Buddhism or religion or just Twitter.

I can think of no things farther apart than

Is the battles we do in the space of ideas, of the great debates throughout history, do you put force into that?

Or do you, in this conversation, are we trying to right now keep it to just physical force?

In saying that you have an intuition that force might be with us much longer than violence?

So take, Because it's always my go-to example, I'm afraid, and I'm sure that the listeners all hate it.

But take Germany during the 1920s, early 1930s, before the Nazis came to power.

And they were always involved in some level of force, you know, beating up in the streets or whatever it might be.

But think about it more like an intellectual discussion until a certain point.

It would be difficult, I imagine, to keep the intellectual counterforce of ideas from at some point degenerating into something that's more coercion, counterforce, if we want to use the phrases we were just talking about.

So I think the 2 are intimately connected.

And at a certain point, I think especially when 1 is not achieving the goals that they want to achieve through peaceful discussion or argumentation or trying to convince the other side that sometimes the next level of operations is something a little bit more physically imposing, if that makes sense.

We go from the intellectual to the physical.

Yeah, so it too easily spills over into violence.

So you kind of implied a, perhaps a hopeful message, But let me ask it in the form of a question.

I think it goes to the force question too.

I mean, let's play with nation states now, although I don't know that nation states are something we should think of as a permanent constant forever.

But how is 1 nation state supposed to prevent another nation state from acting in ways that it would see as either detrimental to the global community or detrimental to the interest of their own nation state.

You know, and I think we've had this question going back to ancient times, but certainly in the 20th century, this has come up quite a bit.

I mean, the whole second world war argument sometimes revolves around the idea of what the proper counterforce should be.

Can you create an entity, a League of Nations, a United Nations, a 1 world entity maybe even, that alleviates the need for counterforce involving mass violence and armies and navies and those things, I think that's an open discussion we're still having.

It's good to think through that because having a, like a United Nations, there's usually a centralized control.

So there's humans at the top, there's committees, and usually like leaders emerge as singular figures that then can become corrupted by power and it's just a really important, it feels like a really important thought experiment and something to really rigorously think through.

How can you construct systems of government that are stable enough to push us towards less and less war, and less and less unstable and, another tough word, which is unfair, of application of force.

You know, that's really at the core of the question that we're trying to figure out as humans as our weapons get better and better and better, destroying ourselves, it feels like it's important to think about how we minimize the over application or unfair application of force.

There's other elements that come into play too.

You and I are discussing this at the very high intellectual level of things, but there's also a tail wagging the dog element to this.

So think of a society of warriors, a tribal society from a long time ago.

How much do the fact that you have warriors in your society and that their reason for existing, what they take pride in, what they train for, what their status in their own civilization, how much does that itself drive the responses of that society, right?

How much do you need war to legitimize warriors?

You know, that's the old argument that you get to, and we've had this in the 20th century too, that the creation of arms and armies creates an incentive to use them, right?

And that they themselves can drive that incentive as a justification for their reasons for existence.

That's where we start to talk about the interactivity of all these different elements of society upon 1 another.

So when we talk about governments and war, we need to take into account the various things those governments have put into place in terms of systems and armies and things like that to protect themselves, right?

For reasons we can all understand, but they exert a force on your range of choices, don't they?

You're making me realize that in my upbringing, and I think upbringing of many, warriors are heroes.

You know, to me, I don't know where that feeling comes from, but to sort of die fighting is an honorable way to die.

I've always had a problem with this because as a person interested in military history, the distinction is important.

And I try to make it at different levels.

So at base level, the people who are out there on the front lines doing the fighting.

To me, those people can be compared with police officers and firemen and people that fire persons.

But I mean, people that are involved in an ethical attempt to perform a task which ultimately 1 can see in many situations as being a saving sort of task, right?

Or if nothing else, a self-sacrifice for what they see as the greater good.

Now, I draw a distinction between the individuals and the entity that they're a part of, a military, and I certainly draw a distinction between the military and then the entire, for lack of a better word, military industrial complex that that service is a part of.

I feel a lot less moral attachment to those upper echelons than I do the people on the ground.

The people on the ground could be any of us and have been in a lot of, you know, we have a very professional sort of military now where it's a very, a subset of the population, but in other periods of time, we've had conscription and drafts and it hasn't been a subset of the population.

And so it is the society oftentimes going to war.

And I make a distinction between those warriors and the entities either in the system that they're part of the military or the people that control the military at the highest political levels.

I feel a lot less moral attachment to them and I have a much harsher about how I feel about them.

I do not consider the military itself to be heroic and I do not consider the military-industrial complex to be heroic.

I do think that is a tail wagging the dog situation.

I do think that draws us into looking at military endeavors as a solution to the problem much more quickly than we otherwise might.

And to be honest, to tie it all together, I actually look at the victims of this as the soldiers we were talking about.

I mean, if you set a fire to send firemen into to fight, then I feel bad for the firemen.

I feel like you've abused the trust that you give those people, right?

So when people talk about war, I always think that the people that we have to make sure that a war is really necessary in order to protect are the people that you're going to send over there to fight that.

The greatest victims in our society of war are often the warriors.

So in my mind, you know, when we see these people coming home from places like Iraq, a place where I would have made the argument and did at the time that we didn't belong, to me, those people are victims.

And I know they don't like to think about themselves that way because it runs totally counter to the ethos.

But if you're sending people to protect this country's shores, those are heroes.

If you're sending people to go do something that they otherwise probably don't need to do, but they're there for political reasons or anything else you want to put in that's not defense-related, well, then you've made victims of our heroes.

And so I feel like we do a lot of talk about our troops and our soldiers and stuff, but we don't treat them as valuable as the rhetoric makes them sound.

Otherwise we would be much more careful about where we put them.

If you're gonna send my son, and I don't have a son, I have daughters, but if you're gonna send my son into harm's way, I'm going to demand that you really need to be sending him into harm's way, and I'm going to be angry at you if you put him into harm's way if it doesn't warrant it.

And so I have much more suspicion about the system that sends these people into these situations where they're required to be heroic than I do the people on the ground that I look at as either the people that are defending us, you know, in situations like this, you know, the Second World War, for example, or the people that turn out to be the individual victims of a system where they're just a cog in a machine and the machine doesn't really care as much about them as the rhetoric and the propaganda would insinuate.

it would be nice if we could talk about there's a gray area in the places that you're talking about.

But when that gray area is part of your own blood, as it is for me, it's worth shining a light on somehow.

Sure, give me an example of what you mean.

So you did a program of 4 episodes of Ghosts of the Ostfront.

My grandmother, who just recently passed away, was raised in Ukraine.

She, it's a small city on the border between Russia and Ukraine.

The interesting thing about the timing of everything, as you might be able to connect, is she survived.

She's the most badass woman I've ever encountered in my life and most of the warrior spirit I carry is probably from her.

She survived Polymore, the Ukrainian starvation of the 30s.

She was a beautiful teenage girl during the Nazi occupation.

And of course, family, everybody, so many people died through that whole process.

So, and 1 of the things you talk about in your program is that the gray area is, even with the warriors, it happened to them just like as you're saying now, they didn't have a choice.

So my grandfather on the other side, he was a machine gunner that was in Ukraine that- In the Red Army?

And they threw, like the statement was that there's, I don't know if it's obvious or not, but the rule was there's no surrender, so you better die.

So you, I mean, you're basically, the goal was when he was fighting and he was lucky enough, 1 of the only to survive by being wounded early on is there was a march of Nazis towards, I guess, Moscow.

And the whole goal in Ukraine was to slow them into the winter.

I mean I view him as such a hero and he believed that he's indestructible, which is survivor bias, and that bullets can't hurt him.

And of course, basically everyone that he quickly rose to the ranks, let's just put it this way, because everybody died.

It was just bodies dragging these heavy machine guns, always slowly retreating, shooting and retreating, shooting and retreating.

Like I always, I grew up thinking that he was the 1 that sort of defeated the Nazis, right?

And, but the reality that there could be another perspective, which is all of this happened to him by the incompetence of Stalin, the incompetence and men of the Soviet Union being used like pawns in a shittily played game of chess, right?

So like 1 narrative is of him as a victim as you're kind of describing.

And somehow that's more paralyzing and that's more, I don't know, it feels better to think of him as a hero and as Russia, Soviet Union saving the world.

I mean, that narrative also is in the United States that United States was key in saving the world from the Nazis, it feels like that narrative is powerful for people.

I'm not sure, and I carry it still with me, but when I think about the right way to think about that war, I'm not sure if that's the correct narrative.

There's a line that a Marine named Eugene Sledge had said once, and I keep it on my phone because it makes a real distinction.

And he said, the front line is really where the war is.

And anybody, even a hundred yards behind the frontline doesn't know what it's really like.

Now, the difference is, is there are lots of people miles behind the frontline that are in danger, right?

You can be in a medical unit in the rear and artillery could strike you, planes could strike, I mean, you could be in danger.

But at the front line, there are 2 different things.

1 is that, and at least, and I'm doing a lot of reading on this right now and reading a lot of veterans accounts.

James Jones, who wrote books like "'From Here to Eternity," fictional accounts of the Second World War, but he based them on his own service.

He was at Guadalcanal, for example, in 1942.

And Jones had said that the evolution of a soldier in frontline action requires an almost surrendering to the idea that you're going to live, that you become accustomed to the idea that you're going to die.

And he said, you're a different person simply for considering that thought seriously, because most of us don't.

But what that allows you to do is to do that job at the front line, right?

If you're too concerned about your own life, you become less of a good guy at your job, right?

The other thing that the people in the 100 yards at the front line do that the people in the rear medical unit really don't is you kill and you kill a lot, right?

You don't just, oh, there's a sniper back here, so I shot him.

It's we go from 1 position to another and we kill lots of people.

And what that tends to do, not universally, because I've read accounts from Red Army soldiers and they're very patriotic, right?

But a lot of that patriotism comes through years later as part of the nostalgia and the remembering.

When you're down at that front 100 yards, it is often boiled down to a very small world.

So your grandfather, was it your grandfather?

At the machine gun, he's concerned about his position and his comrades and the people who he owes a responsibility to.

And those, it's a very small world at that point.

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Dan Carlin: Hardcore History | Lex Fridman Podcast #136