Narendra Modi: Prime Minister of India - Power, Democracy, War & Peace | Lex Fridman Podcast #460

My strength lies not in my name, but in the backing of 1.4 billion Indians and thousands of years of timeless culture and heritage. So wherever I go, I carry with me the essence of thousands of years of Vedic tradition, the timeless teachings of Swami Vivekananda, and the blessings, dreams, and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians. When I shake hands with a world leader, it's not Modi, but 1.4 billion Indians doing so. So this isn't my strength at all. It is rather the strength of India. Whenever we speak of peace, the world listens to us, because India is the land of Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, and Indians aren't hardwired to espouse strife and conflict. We espouse harmony instead. We seek neither to wage war against nature nor to foster strife among nations. We stand for peace, and wherever we can act as peacemakers, we have gladly embraced that responsibility. My early life was spent in extreme poverty, but we never really felt the burden of poverty. You see, someone who is used to wearing fine shoes will feel their absence when they don't have them. But for us, we had never worn shoes in our lives, so how would we even know that wearing shoes was a big deal? We weren't in a position to compare. That's just how we lived. When I became prime minister, I specially invited Pakistan to my swearing-in ceremony so we could turn over a new leaf. Yet every noble attempt at fostering peace was met with hostility and betrayal. We sincerely hope that wisdom prevails upon them and they choose the path of peace. I believe even the people of Pakistan long for peace. Look, regarding what you said about criticism and how I deal with it, if I had to summarize in one sentence, I welcome it. I have a strong belief that criticism is the soul of democracy. I want to tell all the young people the following: No matter how dark the night may seem, it is still just night, and morning is bound to come.

The following is a conversation with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India. It was one of the most moving conversations and experiences of my life. Allow me here to say a few words about it. Please skip ahead straight to our conversation if you like. Narendra Modi's life story is incredible. He rose from poverty to lead a nation of 1.4 billion people, the biggest democracy in the world, where he won epic-scale elections for prime minister three times. As a leader, he fought for ideas that unite his nation of India, a nation that is composed of a large number of highly varied and disparate cultures and peoples who have a long history marked by religious, social, and political frictions. He's known for taking decisive, at times controversial actions, for which he's loved by hundreds of millions of people and is also criticized by many. We discuss all of this at length in this conversation. On the world stage, he is respected as a peacemaker and friend by most major world leaders, even those whose nations are at war with each other, from United States to China to Ukraine and Russia to Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East, and everywhere else. Now, at this moment in history, it is clear, at least to me, that the flourishing of human civilization hangs in the balance, with several wars on the brink of escalation to regional and even global conflict, rising tensions between nuclear powers, technological developments from AI to nuclear fusion that aim to completely transform society and geopolitics as we know it, and of course, generally increasing political and cultural turmoil. So now more than ever, we need great leaders, great peacemakers who build bridges, not destroy them, who may preserve the identity of their nations but still celebrate the common humanity of all of us, all people on Earth. For this and many other reasons, this conversation with Prime Minister Modi was one of the most remarkable I've ever had. You may hear such words and think that I'm just enamored by power or access. No. Never was, never will be. I do not idolize anyone, especially those in power. I'm generally skeptical of power, money, and fame because of their natural corrupting influence on the mind, the heart, the soul of a person. The whole point of all the conversations I've had in my life, on mic and off mic, is that I try to see and explore the full complexity of every human being, the good and the bad.I believe we're all the same in a deep, fundamental sense, all capable of good, all capable of evil, all carry stories of pain and stories of hope, whether you're a world leader or a truck driver, a coal miner, or a farmer in the American Midwest. And by the way, I will be talking to a lot of the latter kind of folk this year off-mic, and maybe even on-mic as I travel the US and the world. My brief statements here about Narendra Modi are about both him as a leader and especially him as a human being. In the extensive time I spent with him and spoke with him, off-mic and on-mic, it was a deeply personal human interaction characterized by warmth, kindness, humor, inner and outer peace, and absolute focus on the conversation between us in the present moment as if nothing else existed. I have heard from many people that he treats everyone he meets in this empathic way, no matter where they come from or what their position is in this world. So for those and many other reasons, this really was an incredible experience I will never forget. Oh, and by the way, we make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in English, Hindi, and other languages. You can also listen to the original mixed language version where I speak English and Prime Minister Modi speaks Hindi. Separately, you can choose to turn on subtitles in your preferred language. On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking Audio Track, and then selecting the language you prefer. For fully English overdub, select English. For fully Hindi overdub, select Hindi. And to listen to the original mixed language version where I speak English and Prime Minister Modi speaks Hindi, please select Hindi (Latin) audio track. So you can listen either to a version that is all one language or to the original mixed language version with subtitles in your preferred language. The default is English overdub, where thanks to ElevenLabs and a great team of translators, we do our best to bring the Prime Minister's voice to life with AI voice cloning in English. I promise that we will continue to work very hard to break down the barriers that language creates and try to make these conversations as accessible as possible to everyone in the world. Anyway, let me pause one more time to say a big thank you. What a wild ride this life has been. It's an honor for me to be on it with all of you. I love you all. This is a Lex Fridman podcast, and now, dear friends, here's the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. So I should also say I'm fasting right now. It's been almost two days, 45 hours, uh, so just water, uh, no food, in honor of this conversation, just to get in the right mindset-