Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
20 Sep 2024
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with Wejas Lulevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the reign, 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.
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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 in my life where jiu-jitsu was a big part of my life and 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 PhD 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 jiu-jitsu 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.
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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.
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