Lex Fridman Podcast
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
Sun, 30 Mar 2025
Douglas Murray is the author of On Democracies and Death Cults, The War on The West, and The Madness of Crowds. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep463-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/douglas-murray-2-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Douglas's X: https://x.com/DouglasKMurray Douglas's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasmurray Douglas's Instagram: https://instagram.com/douglaskmurray Douglas's Website: https://douglasmurray.net On Democracies and Death Cults (book): https://amzn.to/4jahsxL The War on the West (book): https://amzn.to/38L7B36 SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Call of Duty: First-person shooter video game. Go to https://callofduty.com/warzone Oracle: Cloud infrastructure. Go to https://oracle.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drink. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (02:04) - Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (09:31) - War in Ukraine (13:17) - Trump and Zelenskyy (27:47) - Putin (48:40) - Peace (58:31) - Zelenskyy (1:13:11) - Israel-Palestine (1:23:57) - Hamas (1:38:30) - Corruption (1:41:40) - Gaza (2:02:18) - Benjamin Netanyahu (2:19:29) - Hate (2:43:59) - Iran (2:54:48) - Interview advice (3:09:12) - War PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips SOCIAL LINKS: - X: https://x.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://instagram.com/lexfridman - TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://facebook.com/lexfridman - Patreon: https://patreon.com/lexfridman - Telegram: https://t.me/lexfridman - Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
Chapter 1: Who is Douglas Murray and what are his views on global conflicts?
The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The War in the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his new book on democracies and death cults. We talk about Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics, and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly.
As I always try to do for all topics, I will also talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including on the next episode of this podcast. We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sycophants, and sociopaths roam the vast, beautiful, dark land of the internet. It's hard to know who to trust. I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth.
But some are more correct than others. Some are insightful and some are delusional. The problem is it's hard to tell which is which unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor. I recommend you listen to many sources who disagree with each other and try to pick up wisdom from each.
Also, I recommend you visit the places in question, as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who have spent most of their lives living there, whether it's Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia. Let's try, together, to not be cogs in the machine of outrage, and instead to reach toward reason and compassion. There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today.
Plus, there are thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire. Human civilization hangs in the balance. The 21st century is a new geopolitical puzzle all of us are tasked with solving. Let's not mess it up. And now, ladies and gentlemen, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
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Since a lot of folks in the survey, lexfreedom.com slash survey, said they actually like the random non-sequitur things I talk about. To my great surprise. And they've also said that they're happy to just skip when they felt like it. Some folks are some timers, meaning they listen to these ads sometimes. Some folks are every timers. They listen to all the ads.
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Chapter 2: What is the current situation in Ukraine and how has it evolved?
And I'm actually looking forward to doing many, many podcasts with video game designers, with engineers. It just brings me so much joy. And there's technical, philosophical things to explore with video games. How do you create immersive worlds that can be ultra realistic or ultra non-realistic and super fun or super dark or terrifying or exciting or hopeful or dreamlike?
All of those worlds, the geniuses behind those worlds, Inspire me. I admire, I respect, I'm a big fan of the worlds that Call of Duty franchise has created. And the Verdansk map looks incredible. You can download Call of Duty Warzone for free and drop into the Verdansk map on April 3rd. Rated M for Mature. This episode is also brought to you by Oracle.
a company providing a fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platform services. I think compute is going to be one of the resources that are most prized in the 21st century. Whatever physical form, whatever cyber software form that compute takes, we do not know yet.
Of course, there's folks like Oracle that are pioneering that, but it's very possible in a century, in two centuries, we're going to be surrounded by... Some orb where the computation is done maybe in deep space that's orbiting Earth. Something like this. Maybe because of the heat and the energy requirements, it's going to be impossible to host it on Earth without destroying Earth.
Of course, Earth is such a priceless planet for us humans, but I actually believe... Maybe not in our galaxy, but certainly in our vicinity. It's going to be very, very difficult to colonize other planets. Of course, humans are incredible at doing the difficult thing, but we should protect this Earth. Anyway, props to Oracle for constantly innovating and building in this space.
Cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. Offer is for new U.S. customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify at oracle.com. That's oracle.com. This episode is brought to you by Element. my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that I'm drinking now because after I say the words I'm saying to you right now, I'm going for a long, long run along the river.
And I'm listening to an audio book by James Holland. It's volume one of his trilogy called The War in the West. I believe it's focusing on 1939 to 1941. It's just an extremely well-written trilogy. perspective on those years. So it's the Western front. I think those years are really important to understand. The years leading up to 1939 and 39, 40, 41 themselves. Because there's a lot of
Let's say geopolitical negotiations, meetings, carrots and sticks that could have been done. A lot of insights, a lot of mistakes avoided. It's such an important moment to understand. Probably the most destructive, the most terrifying, the most earth-shattering war this world has ever seen. With the bigger-than-life personalities of Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, FDR. I think James Holland calls it...
the most dramatic set of events in human history. And anyway, element before, element after, it brings me joy. Watermelon salt is still and forever the flavor of choice for me. Get a sample pack for free. With any purchase, try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance, my daily companion.
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Chapter 3: How has the war in Ukraine affected international relations?
Yes, the obvious one, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky's fault, but I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to say yet again, as he has done for three years, thank you to America and the American people and American politicians across the aisle for your support for my country and its hour of need. We're deeply grateful.
And because he, for once, forgot to say that.
I think it's not that simple.
It's not that simple. It's one reason.
I think saying thank you, he didn't need to say thank you. That was what Vance leapt in on. He's just picking a thing to leap on. There's a whole energy. You have to acknowledge in your way of being that you have been very Biden buddy-buddy with the left for the last four years. There's ways to fix that. Listen, these people are complicated narcissists, all of them, Biden, Trump.
You have to navigate the complexity of that. And you basically have to say a kind word to Trump, which is like... There's many ways of doing that, but one of them is saying, feeding the ego by acknowledging that he is one of the world's greatest negotiators.
I'm glad we're able to come to the table and negotiate together because I believe you are the great negotiator, mediator that can actually bring a successful resolution. As opposed to have an energy of like, It should be obvious to everybody that Ukraine are the good guys and Russia is the bad guys. There's this whole energy of entitlement that he brought. He forgot that there's a new guy.
You got to convince the new guy that this global mission that this nation is on, this war that is in many ways the West versus Russia, the East, that there's ideals, there's whole histories here, that this is a war worth winning. You have to convince them, right?
Yeah, no, sure. And they obviously failed on that occasion. But as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky not Putin being the dictator.
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Chapter 4: What are the criticisms of Putin and his motivations for the invasion?
Yeah.
Good God, Lex. You've discovered a new phenomenon.
I'm a real radical intellectual. Nothing misses your eye. I see the truth, and I'm unafraid to point it out.
No, there's a degree, this idea that you need to compromise with the person, with the leader of a nation you're at war with, and in so doing, to some degree, are forgiving their actions.
because the actual feeling you have is you want it to be fair and the definition of fair when you've seen that much suffering is for him and everybody around him and maybe even all of the people on the other side to just die because you've seen too much suffering. But the other side of that is yes, there's children that have died, but you coming to the negotiation table.
Will stop other children from dying, yes, of course. And so there is just, you had this kind of way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective, that it's naive to say to come to the negotiation table. And it is for a person from the land of war, but the very smart, intelligent, and not naive person from the land of peace that is often right in some deep,
sense about the long arc of history, for them, it is the right thing to come to the negotiation table to end the more killing.
The one thing I would add to that, though, is don't forget that it also depends on whether or not there's a clear shot of winning. Sure. If there's a clear shot of winning, and that's the most important thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that. It's simply winning and losing. And if you have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you're near it,
then having somebody else come in and saying, why not stop just before victory is very hard. That's one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we're talking about.
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Chapter 5: Can economic partnerships prevent future conflicts like the Ukraine war?
Hamas, I was in the middle of one such attack myself late last year in a town called Hadera. And those things have happened, but that particular catastrophe has not occurred.
Can we talk about Benjamin Netanyahu? For a lot of people who spoke of evil, they refer to him as evil. On the spectrum between good and evil, as a leader, where does Netanyahu fall?
Well, he's certainly not evil. Interesting if people looking at this conflict were to be reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister, it would be sort of telling, I would say.
Can we just actually linger on that point? There is a point you've made multiple times, which is we're more eager to criticize and maybe even over-exaggerate the criticism of democratically elected leaders. It's a dark, weird, other quality of discourse at parties, aforementioned parties.
Isn't it also, I mean, not to be flippant for a moment, it's a little bit like Who do you show your worst sides to? The people you love. My intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me because if I express it to absolutely everybody I met at the party or a social setting, it would be hard.
There's a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it. And something similar happens in international politics. You pressure the people who will listen.
I mean, it's one of the, I mean, one of the things you hear a lot in the last year, you know, people sort of ignoramuses in the governments in places like Britain, you know, will say we need to put more pressure on the Israelis to do X. And you go, well, you know, in part, that's because they will listen.
If you go, we need to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs in Iran to persuade them that Hamas are really bad and they shouldn't be doing this. What the hell do you think they're going to do? Are they going to listen to you? Are you going to give a damn? You're talking totally different worlds. Not just a different language, it's a different world. And by the way, that happens in Israel.
I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel. When the hostage families forum came about, I spent a lot of time there, got to know a lot of the families, and they're remarkable. But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that a lot of them They protest outside Netanyahu's house. They use klaxon horns to make sure he can never sleep.
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Chapter 6: What led to the October 7th attack on Israel and what are its implications?
The then Syrian ambassador in London says something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. And my friend stands up and starts talking about Assad senior's massacre of the Palestinians in Hama, where they killed like 10,000 Palestinians in a day.
Um, and my friend starts talking about the hammer massacre by, uh, Assad senior and the, the big fat Syrian ambassador like stands up to respond. And he says, that is, that is none of your business. And my friend was like, Oh, I thought we were going to get it in denial.
Uh, let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu. Um, Because I also have the opportunity to do a three-hour interview with him at this stage. And I've been, if I'm just being honest, very hesitant to do it. And I just don't know how a conversation there could... help add compassion to the world.
And that particular topic, no matter how well you do it, you do take on a very large number of people that will just make it their daily activity to hate you and to write about it and to post about it and to accuse you of things. In some sense, I don't want to lose the part of me that's vulnerable to the world.
People have very little understanding of things if they're willing to say that because you're sitting down and talking with somebody, you are ego-platforming them, advancing their cause, being used, being a shill, or whatever like that. You might be actually just finding some things out, which I think is something you do expertly.
And another thing your critics wouldn't realize is that life is long. And, you know, hopefully, God willing, we were both around for a long time, and therefore, you don't blow everything up at the request of some twat online. But I do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and worry about their opinion and no one else's, really.
And you just keep your own guiding light. That's what's always done it for me, is that I... I've always said, I just don't really, I wouldn't care if I was the only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me, but it doesn't fundamentally. That's not why I'll send you Churchill's great speech on the death of Chamberlain.
I mean, it, he says the bet. He says one of the most wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelensky, because one of Churchill's greatnesses was his magnanimity. And when his great political opponent Chamberlain died in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, he could have used the opportunity.
And we might even say that some politicians in our day won't be able to resist the opportunity. He could have used the opportunity to say, you see, I was right. And Chamberlain didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he's led us into this mess, and you should have all listened to me. Because that would have been a good time. It would have been a good time to say that.
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