World Government Summit

And that spooked the Russian government into canceling the interview. So I've been trying to do this, but my country's intel services were working against me illegally. And that enraged me, because I'm an American citizen. I'm 54.. I pay my taxes.

I obey the law. And there was no expectation in the America that I grew up in that my government and its intel services, NSA and CIA, which were always outwardly focused on our foreign enemies, would be turned inward against American citizens. And I'm shocked by that. And I'm infuriated by that. And so, once I discovered that that was happening, and I confirmed it was happening, and they admitted that they did it, then I was totally determined, monomaniacally dedicated to doing this interview, not simply because I want to know what Vladimir Putin is like and what he thinks about a war that is resetting the world and really gravely damaging my country's economy, but also because they told me I couldn't, on the basis of illegitimate means and for no really clearly stated justification.

And I thought, that can't stand. I want to live in a free country. I was born in one. And I'm going to do whatever small thing I can do to maintain this society that I love.

And you went to Putin because you are pro-Trump and anti-Biden?

I'm not sure how I would characterize them. They're changing as quickly as the world itself is changing. And, as a matter of principle, I think that your views should change when the evidence changes and assumptions that you had in the past are proven wrong. That has happened to me virtually every month of my life. If you pay close enough attention, you can rate your own performance, just as if you're betting on sports.

You know, I lost that one. And when you do, when it turns out that the things you thought were true were lies, you should admit it. So what are my views? I'm not certain. Tell the truth is my main view.

And I plan to do that to the best of my ability. So Trump played no role in this whatsoever. There's obviously an election in my country coming to fruition in November. I have no idea what's going to happen. I think that the current administration is very obviously incompetent and the president is senile.

That's not an attack. Everyone knows it. It has now been confirmed, I would say, this week in the report that you're all familiar with. And that's very sad. But it had sort of nothing to do with the interview.

I wanted to interview Putin because he's the leader of a country that the U.

S. government is sort of at war with, though not in a declared way.

And I say that as an American, and I don't have another passport, I don't plan to ever leave my country. My family's been there hundreds of years, and I love it. I am a patriotic American. And I grieve when I see that the president is non-compass menace, and that in my country it is considered very rude to say that. And you sort of wonder, how did you get to a place where you have an incompetent president who's driven not simply the standard of living, but life expectancy downward, and no one feels free to say that?

That's not a political observation. It's a statement of fact, which is provable empirically. And the most radicalizing thing I would just say for me in the eight days I spent in Moscow was not simply the leader of the country, who of course is impressive. It's the largest land mass in the world. And it's wildly diverse, linguistically, culturally, religiously.

It's hard to run a country like that for 24 years, whether you like it or not. So an incapable person couldn't do that. He is very capable, and many of you know him, and you know that. What was radicalizing, very shocking, and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I'd never been, the biggest city in Europe, 13 million people. And it is so much nicer than any city in my country.

I had no idea. My father spent a lot of time there in the 80s when he worked for the U.S. government and barely had electricity. And now it is so much cleaner and safer and prettier aesthetically, its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States that you have to... And this is non-ideological.

How did that happen? How did that happen? And at a certain point, I don't think the average person cares as much about abstractions as about the concrete reality of his life. And if you can't use your subway, for example, as many people are afraid to in New York City because it's too dangerous, you have to sort of wonder, like, isn't that the ultimate measure of leadership? And that's true.

By the way, it's radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow. I didn't know that. I've learned it this week. To Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Because these cities, no matter how we're told they're run and on what principles they're run, are wonderful places to live.

They don't have rampant inflation where you're not going to get raped.

And what I have discovered is that's a voluntary choice. As inflation is, as you heard in that fascinating last panel, inflation is the product of choices made mostly by the central bank, not exclusively, but by policymakers. Crime, same. You don't have to have crime, actually. If you don't put, my children, don't smoke marijuana at the breakfast table.

Why? Because I won't allow them. It's very simple. It's a short conversation. No.

And you can run your country the same way. We're not going to put up with that. So don't do it. And people understand that. Filth, graffiti, Paris, one of my favorite cities, New York, one of my favorite cities, are filthy.

And part of the reason they're filthy is because people spray paint obscenities on buildings, and no one cleans it up. So that encourages more people to do the same. And our policymakers, for some reason, don't notice this. London, another one of my favorite cities. You see English girls begging for drugs on the sidewalk.

And I thought to myself, if I'm Boris Johnson, who briefly and very badly ran that country, I would ask myself, wait a second. My countrymen are begging for drugs on the street. Maybe I should do something about that. But no, he'll show up and give some speech about Ukraine and how we need to send more cluster bombs to the brave Ukrainians. What are you doing?

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His position is clearly hardening. Russia has been rebuffed by the West. I mean, Vladimir Putin, I'm not flakking for Putin. I'm an American. I'm not going to live in Russia.

I don't love Vladimir Putin. I'm stating the facts. He asked Bill Clinton to join NATO. He tried to make a missile deal.

But we refused. And so, I mean, just meditate on that. Go, sit in the sauna for an hour and think about what that means.

So I hope whatever comes out of this is nothing like those. But first things first, Putin wants to get out of this war. He's not going to become more open to negotiation the longer this goes on. One of the things we've learned in the course of the last two years is that Russia's industrial capacity is a lot more profound than we thought it was. When Russia's having an eat Russia, this country, we were assured, was a gas station with nuclear weapons, has a pretty easy time making missiles, rockets, and artillery shells, whereas NATO doesn't.

So we should think about what that means, one.

Two, the West doesn't spend any time, or our policymakers in Washington spend no time thinking about what are the achievable goals here. I have heard, personally, U.S. government officials say, well, we're just gonna have to return Crimea to Ukraine. Well, you don't need to be a Russia scholar to know that's not going to happen short of a nuclear war. That's insane, actually.

So even to say something like that reveals that you're a child, you don't understand the area at all, and you have no real sense of what's possible. And so as long as our leaders, and not simply in the U.S., but NATO, and I really mean Germany,

don't take the time to learn about what's possible, we're not gonna get anywhere.

What they lack is any perspective at all. So a conversation with a U.S. policymaker about the history of the region would begin and end with a conversation about, of course, Chamberlain and Churchill and Hitler, period. So the American policymaker historical template is tiny. In fact, there's only one, and it's a two-year period in the late 1930s, and everything is based on that understanding of history and human nature, and that's insane.

And so, actually, American policymakers have convinced themselves that Vladimir Putin is gonna take over Poland. And it is not a defense of Putin. I don't mean to defend Putin. I'm not a fan of Putin's, and I'm not a subject of Putin's. I'm an American.

However, there's no evidence that Putin has any interest in expanding his borders. He is the largest country in the world, and it's very hard to run. They don't need natural resources. There's nothing in Poland he wants. There's nothing he will gain by taking Poland, other than more trouble.

That is, if you're saying that he's gonna invade Poland,

So if you're showing up voluntarily at the Munich Security Conference and saying, hey, Zelensky, why don't you allow us to put nuclear weapons on Russia's border? You're cruising for a war, because you know that's the red line. Because Putin has said that, and any close observer of the area already knows.

But I can't imagine what their motives would be. I didn't go to Russia, of course, to promote Vladimir Putin, and if that was my purpose, I'd say so, because I'm not embarrassed. I went because I felt that most Americans in whose name all of this is being done don't really know what's happening, and they know nothing about the guy they're supposedly at war with unofficially. And I just felt that my job, if I have a job in this world, is to bring information to people so they can decide. And so I wanted to do the longest interview I could with Vladimir Putin that contained the most amount of Vladimir Putin talking, not me grandstanding about what a great person I am.

When an American journalist interviews someone like Vladimir Putin, the whole point of the interview is to say, I'm a good person, and you're not. And that interview was aimed at his colleagues in the newsrooms in the United States. I'm a good person, why are you such a bad person? You're committing genocide.

Okay, that's not fruitful, and that's certainly not my role. I care what God thinks of me, what my wife thinks of me, and what my four children think of me, and that's all I care about. So I don't need to prove that I'm a good person. I wanna hear Vladimir Putin talk, so people in my country can assess what's happening.

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wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

you didn't talk about freedom of speech in Russia. You did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about the restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.

That press restriction is universal in the United States. I know because I've lived it. I've asked my former, I've had a lot of jobs, and I've done this for 34 years, and I know how it works, and there's more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States, but there's a great deal in the United States. And so at a certain point, it's like people can decide whether they think, what countries they think are better, what systems they think are better. I just want to know what he thinks.

That was the whole point.

Either you consider him an enemy, or you consider him a friend, or you consider him a dictator, but you should understand how the man thinks. Now, the question.

And so it's a perilous moment. If we're a democracy, purportedly, and a prerequisite for democracy is information, so that the electric can make up its mind and decide who to choose. And so if you don't have access to information, you don't have democracy. And we're in this sort of weird spiral where our leaders lecture us ever more about democracy and how sacred it is, even as they choke it off, choke it to death. And so I think the people who provide information, who bring the facts to the public, have a critical role to play.

And right now it's difficult. I'm not facing any great, I don't mean to cast myself as a hero. I'm certainly not a hero at all. But I do think it's tougher and tougher to do that. And that means we have a greater obligation to do it.

And I'm not even referring to any specific region or conflict. I mean, generally. And I'm deeply offended by that, deeply. And it's something that I try to express. And I'm often called a traitor for saying that.

It's the opposite. I say that because I believe in the United States. I think it's a moral, it has been a morally superior country. And if we allow our leaders to use our power to spread destruction for its own sake, that is shameful. It's a binary, okay?

It's a black and white. It's a zero and a one. You are either creating or you're destroying. You're improving or you're degrading. And that's how you know whether something is good or bad, whether it's virtuous or evil.

If you just judge the fruits, by its fruits, you will know it. And I'm very distressed and concerned that we are entering an era where this awesome force for good is instead being used for evil.

And to me, that is the pure sign of wisdom, because wisdom grows from humility. Wisdom grows from the recognition that you are not God. And in the United States, we had a period where we were sort of having this debate about, are some religions good and some religions bad? I'll tell you my view on it, and it's a hardened view. It's a sincere view.

I divide the world, not between Muslim, Jew, and Christian, or Buddhist. I divide the world between people who believe they're God and people who know they're not. And the only people I trust are in the second category, because that is the beginning of wisdom. When you know you are not God, that you cannot affect every change that you want, you can't foresee the future, that you're not omnipotent, then you are much more likely to make good decisions, wise, humane decisions. By contrast, when you believe you have the power to shape the world and other people, as we were hearing this morning, through biohacking, when you think you can create a better human being through technology, you're very dangerous because you don't understand your own limits.

You will get a lot of people killed when you have those false beliefs, in my opinion.