Alert Update: Zelensky's Interview with Lex Fridman

Ground Breaking, Interesting, and Illuminating

I’m sorry to spam your inboxes today. But I thought it important to get my thoughts out on this as soon as possible. Forgive me.

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History was made on January 5th, 2025. An interview, a “podcast,” was posted online of Lex Fridman, a popular Youtuber, interviewing Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. It is historic not just because a head of state at war with Russia was on a podcast. But also because Lex has employed cutting edge AI to transform the interview into languages that all interested parties could digest.

Fridman used ElevenLabs, a Polish company specializing in AI Text-to-Speech, to replicate Zelensky’s own voice, tone, and timbre in the translated version of the interview. I’ve experimented with this technology myself, and it’s impressive. You can take any speech, translate it, feed it into ElevenLabs, and it will play back the speech in any voice and in many languages—provided you have enough samples of the “voice” to train the AI model. While not perfected yet, ElevenLabs’ capabilities are groundbreaking. If I had to guess, the company used its most advanced AI models for this event, likely ones not yet available to the public.

When I used this software less than six months ago, it struggled with reading URLs, producing a jumbled word salad. Despite these imperfections, this remains a historic interview—marking the first time the sitting wartime president granted an interview to a podcaster, albeit a very popular one. It has been rumored that Joe Rogan declined an interview with Zelensky. At first, I blamed Rogan for this decision, but now I understand why he may have refused. He would have been embarrassed by Zelensky’s adroitness compared to his own tentative grasp.

In the interview, Zelensky pushed back against Russian propaganda points and resisted Lex Fridman’s odd narrative. Fridman repeatedly pressed Zelensky to discuss, and even agree to, a possible “dream” meeting between Trump, Zelensky, and Putin. While not entirely unreasonable, the way Fridman doggedly pursued this idea made Zelensky appear statesmanlike while making Fridman seem naive, with a child’s understanding of the war. Fridman referred to this notion as his “dream,” which came across as dismissive of the suffering of Ukrainians. At one point, Fridman suggested that Putin loves Russia and its people. Zelensky firmly countered this, pointing out that a ruler who presides over rapes, murders, war crimes, and the deaths of countless Ukrainian civilians and nearly 800,000 Russians cannot be considered “loving.”

Twice during the interview, Fridman used the phrase “war is hell,” seemingly to downplay Putin’s actions or equate blame. Fridman has long been accused of being a Putin apologist. Personally, I’ve mostly seen him as opportunistic and ignorant rather than an outright stooge for Putin. Zelensky, on the other hand, navigated the interview skillfully. He offered effusive praise for Trump, likely aware of Trump’s short attention span and susceptibility to flattery. While Zelensky occasionally rambled, he remained mostly on point, articulating the horrors inflicted by Russia on Ukraine and refusing to let Fridman diminish the gravity of these crimes.

Zelensky also made an intriguing argument that I hadn’t considered before: NATO membership would bring safety not only to Ukraine but also to Russia. Ukraine has been systematically targeting and assassinating Russian officers inside Russia at a rate of nearly one per month. There’s no reason to believe this will stop when the war ends. Zelensky implied that justice will continue to be served—any officer who ordered attacks on civilians is a legitimate target. However, if Ukraine were to join NATO, such actions would have to cease. Without NATO membership, Russia can expect Ukraine to adopt Russia’s own tactics to eliminate war criminals. A lot of former generals and commanders may continue to "fall off balconies."(My statement, not Zelensky’s.)

In the interview, Zelensky demonstrated a strong grasp of the issues at hand. Confronted by someone who had not done the necessary homework on the horrors of the war, Zelensky refused to let Fridman hide behind generic statements intended to minimize and both-sides like “war is hell.” Finally, it’s worth noting that Lex Fridman was born in the former Soviet Union—in Ukraine. He speaks both Russian and English but appears to romanticize the USSR. Fridman seems to identify more with the Soviet Union than with Ukraine, which is unfortunate. Ukraine is the more interesting and culturally rich nation that has endured and thrived despite Russia’s attempts to erase and appropriate its heritage.

It’s a long interview. Take the time to watch it. It’s very instructive.