Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World

Today I talk to Pradyu Prasad (blogger and podcaster) about the book "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" https://www.amazon.com/Hirohito-Making-Modern-Japan-Herbert/dp/0060931302 by Herbert P. Bix. We also discuss militarization, industrial capacity, current events, and blogging. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/rsJxlybPByM. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/26-pradyu-prasad-imperial-japan-the-god-emperor/id1516093381?i=1000559160293, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5pKlbJfPUYPXbnWFu3vvFy?si=Hin3GJ_yS7iCAShqKcq7Bw, or any other podcast platform. Podcast website here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/pradyu-prasad. Follow Pradyu on Twitter https://twitter.com/PradyuPrasad. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for updates on future episodes. Follow Pradyu's Blog: https://brettongoods.substack.com/ Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Intro (0:01:59) - Hirohito and Introduction to the Book (0:05:39) - Meiji Restoration and Japan's Rapid Industrialization (0:11:11) - Industrialization and Traditional Military Norms (0:14:50) - Alternate Causes for Japanese Atrocities Richard Hanania's Public Choice Theory in Imperial Japan (0:17:03) (0:21:34) - Hirohito's Relationship with the Military (0:24:33) - Rant of Japanese Strategy (0:33:10) - Modern Parallel to Russia/Ukraine (0:38:22) - Economics of War and Western War Capacity (0:48:14) - Elements of Effective Occupation (0:55:53) - Ideological Fervor in WW2 Japan (0:59:25) - Cynicism on Elites (1:00:29) - The Legend of Godlike Hirohito (1:06:47) - Postwar Japanese Economy (1:13:23) - Blogging and Podcasting (1:20:31) - Spooky (1:38:00) - Outro Please share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, today I had the pleasure of speaking with Pradhumna Prasad about the book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Ficks. Pradyu is an incredibly smart young guy. He has a blog and a podcast called Bread and Goods, which you can find at breadandgoods.substack.com. Just some context, in the last quarter of the conversation, we are discussing our budding blogs and podcasts, and that discussion was recorded before the crazy events of the last week or two happened. But, you know, it might give you some interesting window into how we were thinking

• 0:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  about these projects of ours before, you know, the crazy shit started happening. But yeah, I hope you enjoy, and thanks for watching.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 0:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Pradhumna Prasad, who is, who's recently graduated high school in Singapore, and now he just received an Immersion Ventures Grant very recently, to continue work on his great podcast and blog. Excellent, excellent. So yeah, you got the Immersion Ventures Grant. What are your plans? What are you doing?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  What I'm gonna do with it, I, at the moment, I'm working on a bunch of stuff on reserve currencies. It was, it has been an obsession of mine for a very long time. So it's, all the, all the reading is going to end up in writing at some point. On the longer term, I want to have a blog where I can answer every single economic history question, or economics question I don't know the answer to, and nobody else has the answer to, I can answer it here. So, pretty much going to be a mini encyclopedia of questions I'm interested in.

• 1:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  Excellent, excellent. Okay, yeah, I'm looking forward to what's produced. And for the time being, today we're discussing this book you recommended to me, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix. And so just to give a little bit of context, well, actually, just to let us say who Hirohito was, right? He was the Japanese emperor.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  He was the, he was the third emperor after the, after, after, I mean, third emperor after the Meiji Restoration. He was the first one to see Japan as an international power. He was the first and last one to handle it as an international power. And yeah, Hirohito was a guy responsible for a lot of stuff that happened in East Asia across the mid 20th century.

• 2:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, including, by the way, World War II, right? So he was Japanese emperor during World War II. And there's a, there's a big controversy around Hirohito because he, he was in charge of Japan during the time that Japan invaded China and committed all the atrocities that we know, we know happened there, including the Rip in Nanking. And he was also the Japanese emperor during World War II, during Pearl Harbor, obviously. So the book takes a very critical stance on Hirohito. It claims that Hirohito could have stopped, or at least in many ways dulled, these atrocities. Like he had that authority.

• 3:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  The opposite view, I guess, which is the conventional view, is that Hirohito was kind of a constitutional monarch, much like a British monarch, and that he didn't really have the authority to intervene in politics. And then to the extent that he did, he did his utmost to lessen the impacts of the war, for example, by surrendering in 1945. So now, what were your overall impressions of the book? Of how well he did defending the cease of the Hirohito, should have been tried as war criminal?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I think, I think the book sort of goes like a synthesis of these two. It says that Hirohito was a constitutional monarch, but he was a constitutional monarch because he chose to be a constitutional monarch. So, yeah, he, he, in, in, in theory, on paper, he couldn't do it. It's, it's, it's, it's one of those things where Japanese constitutional law wasn't very well done. I mean, it, for any...

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Anocracy constitutional law is well done and much more so for Japan. But Hirohito could have done something he did not. He chose to be a constitutional monarch. So anyways, the book was was well written towards the end, poorly written towards the start. I think the difference between a collection of events and a biography is a story. And there was no story at the start. So I think that book could have been much improved. But I also think that it's very hard to find people who read through original language sources. In this case, Japanese into small, a very small extent, Chinese and English. And then put it into English. But I think the author deserves a lot of commendation for that.

• 4:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, excellent. Yeah, yeah, so I I agree. The most interesting part about the beginning, and I agree, was pretty dull. Was the author talking about how much the Hirohito was influenced by his grandfather Meiji. So, you know, like Meiji was the emperor during the time where Japan rapidly, rapidly, rapidly industrialized. And kind of became a, went from being a kind of like a semi-colonized power to becoming a colonial power itself. You know, having colonies in Korea and Taiwan under Meiji. So it's very interesting, you know, I have friends who kind of think that.

• 5:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  I have one friend who thinks that many of the differences you see between countries can be explained largely by genetic differences. And I think one of the strongest like counter arguments to that is just like how different Japan has been over like the last hundred and fifty years. Like how many different evolutions it's gone through. And whenever you see these stories of rapid industrialization, it's just very, like, you can kind of understand how it can happen over many hundreds of years. How it happens in the case of Japan during the major restoration so fast. It kind of sends me. So I know you've been doing a lot of reading on Chinese industrialization as well, as well as like industrialization and many rapid industrialization in many other East Asian countries. Can you explain what happened during the major restoration? Like, how did they get everything up and running so fast?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Right. The main difference between the pre eighteen sixty eight Japan, which was called the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the Meiji era was that Japan had a lot more centralized power. There was one king running the place instead of feudal lords all over. Japan was a lot more open to the rest of. The world, you know, uh, there was the death penalty for for Japanese who interacted outside of Japan during the war struggle, very, very uh brutal in today's words. And um Japan basically a lot did what what would be called the holy trinity of industrialization. It had open labor markets, government investment, and basically allowed foreign capital to come in.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  And so you across East Asia and and and across parts of Africa like Botswana and to a smaller extent, South Africa and Nigeria. The best way to get rich historically for countries when there are already other uh rich countries is to uh take all capitals from the from these countries, copy their their innovations and uh use all their knowledge on how to get rich, to get rich yourself. And then start to slowly push away on their hegemony. And the results of it are somewhat mixed. The the US did okay as well, Japan didn't do well, and we're seeing it with China now.

• 7:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. Uh, is there any particular reason it happened first in Japan as far as these Asian countries go?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I mean, okay, that is, uh, I'm not a, I'm not a very good um source on this because I I tried to avoid the the historic griffy of this because it's it's it's full of too many uh details. Historians haven't done a very good job of it. But my take on it is that uh I think it's very much elite dependent as in the uh first is that the Japanese elite didn't have as much of a rent-seeking class as the Chinese elite did, you know, in in China, because the country was so big, they they invented a whole bureaucracy to administer it. The problem was you end up leaving too much power to the people in between you and the uh general public.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So they they end and ended up being sort of uh the barriers to modernizing and opening up. But uh in Japan, that was less so. The second thing is Japan already had a small tradition of worshipping the emperor's god and became politically convenient for their shogunate to now uh reemerge. They actually had a small civil war and the it's so happened and this just an an accident of luck that the uh winners of the civil war happened to be the ones who wanted to open up and make Japan great again. So uh one part is that. The second thing is being a small island nation really uh. Makes you see the realities of life much dear.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  One explanation for why small countries would have better economic policy than large countries is that if you're a small country, the realities of life are very often more in your face. So when Japanese elites saw the American ships coming, they're like, whoops, you know, we can't afford to be irrational anymore about it. And they were forced to modernize. Compare that to a lot of East Asia, where they either could live in their own alternative reality, for example, Indian kings and the Qing dynasty in China. You know, the Japanese were just forced to deal with reality a lot faster.

• 9:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I also read on your recommendation Lee Con Yoo's biography. And so this is not the book we're discussing now. So but just to tie it with this, it was really interesting to read him, just go over all the different issues Singapore had to deal with at when it got started. Like, you know, the fact that it had hostile neighbors, the fact that basically it was going to lose like 25% of GDP when the British left their naval bases. And there's something about the fact that you're just like on an island, you know, open to any sort of, open to all the elements, basically, that I guess concentrates the mind.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. A very undoubted measure of leader competence is how close to reality are you? And you see, like, to skip to 2022 today, right? You saw it over the last two years, where leaders were more in touch with reality, responded faster to COVID, got better vaccines, tightened up faster, but also opened up faster. So basically, the Japanese elite in the 1860s was a lot more in touch with reality than other countries. And so they knew they were forced to open up. And next part of it was they opened up and they opened up quick. Quick, they got American industries to come set up in Japan.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  And they, basically, a lot of the history of economic development is also the history of intellectual piracy, which just had what is euphemistically called forced technology transfers, so they can learn how to make all the pullbacks that the Americans had. And by around the 1910s and 1920s, they got. Rich enough to project their power onto the rest of East Asia. By nineteen oh five, they fought a war with Russia. And then in, you know, in nineteen fifty, I I around the same time, they they invaded China. And then later they invaded China again. They just didn't deal with the uh sudden transitions of being a power that is coerced by the Americans.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  But two about coercing other countries.

• 11:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right now, um, I mean, there's a way to view this where, I don't know. If you have that kind of transition happen slowly in a country, you can have norms evolve from um. I I don't know how to put this in a way that's not uh derogatory, but norms that are very kind of brutish. And very much geared towards like uh traditional norms of war, which is like you destroy the enemy, you pillage and you loot. Uh, which is like, which might make sense if you can like loot a village, right? But when you're talking about the capacity of modernist or a war and you can do that to like millions of people. That can become extremely brutal. And I I don't know, it seems like in the West, uh, once industrialization happened, there was like enough time for things to simmer down. Before these countries were introduced to the worst weapons.

• 12:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  And I you you could argue that the world wars are a counter example, but even still um on the on the um on the eastern theaters. Uh, the, sorry, I mean, the the western theater, the the the there were there just weren't the kind of atrocities that you saw the Japanese uh make in the Pacific theater and in China. So I I like one of the downsides of rapid industrialization is your cultural norms don't catch up to your technology. And so you have like almost these these people who have like uh very, very traditional norms around war with very modern weapons. And it gets pretty scary.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And a good of scholars stage is a very good essay on honor culture versus respect, which is just if I'm I'm paraphrasing here. But overall, less industrialized societies have strong, better actual cultures. Because uh for better or worse, it's the men who who end up doing. The work and they got more of the respect and there's a lot of debate and literature about this. More or less my understanding of it, right? So you're right that the norms don't catch up. But I think you're wrong that even in the West, the norms didn't catch up for a long time, right? Think of colonialism. Only very, very few people in the House of Commons thought they should impeach Juan Hastings for his atrocities in East India, to the East India Company.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  So it's not only in Japan that that norms didn't catch up. It's almost everywhere that norms didn't catch up. Norms take a lot, a lot of time to catch up. And in Japan, well, the first thing is that Japan you see today is mostly, is artificial in the sense that it is, it is an artifact of America, of the, of the Americans jumping in and putting a gun to the Japanese cabinet and saying, you better accept the constitution way make. And some parts of the Japanese left really liked it, some parts didn't. And but they basically forged a coalition of only people who, who liked it and old people, and people from the older gene who willing to accept the new reality. So norms can change quick, but they, but when they do, they change with the barrel of

• 14:48Speaker 01

  a gun, not by some internal organic cost. Ask me a question of why was there so much atrocity? You, you are correct in saying that norms didn't change. But I also think that public choice theory is what explains a lot of Japanese war crimes across the nineteen hundreds, I mean, the entire early twentieth century, right? The, my entire understanding of the book was that it could have been written by any public choice theorist and been, and would have ended up, ended up the same. So let's think of it this way. The Japanese army was powerful historically from the eighteen sixties. They fought a war in nineteen oh five. They were always scared in Soviet Union after when, after response was going to invade

• 15:30Speaker 01

  them as historical vengeance, also because it was just a lot better run than the Stalinist Russia. The problem was the depression hit and then the army and navy got mad that their spending was cut. They just kept inventing problems in East Asia for them to have their budget increased. And some part of inventing problems involves lying about them. All allowed bureaucracies exaggerate their problems. For the army, it took the more extreme step of creating problems itself. And then they're like, uh, we created this mess and we need money to solve it or else you're gonna die. And then the Japanese government was weak enough to give them money and got drawn into World War Two.

• 16:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, so let me just, um, let me just like fill in the details for the audience. So in nineteen thirty one, um, in a Japanese-controlled military area, the Japanese military stages a sort of attack on one of their railroads, if I remember correctly. And it's like pretty obvious that it's staged by the military. It's not even that big of a attack, um, or sorry, it's staged by the Japanese military. And it doesn't cause major damage, but the military then uses that justification to invade the rest of China without permission from the emperor or with the rest of the civilian government. But yeah, so basically, uh, what you have, and then so public choice theory comes in because you have like these

• 16:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  political factions in Japan who are like trying to control the Japanese policy, not in the best interest of Japan itself, but because of what they're, uh, what is in the best interest of themselves as a faction. In fact, I interviewed Richard Hanania recently on my podcast. And as you know, he has a book out called Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grant Strategy, where it makes exactly this point, where he's arguing that the unitary actor model does not apply to nation-states, uh, because they're very influenced by these sorts of factions and individuals and special interest groups, like, for example, the military in, um, uh, the military and then specifically the imperial way faction in Japan.

• 17:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  But so there's many examples of this, where like, um, uh, army officers just like killed the prime minister at one point. And I think it was nineteen thirty six. And when they go to trial, they just say, yeah, we did this war because we're like loyal to the emperor. And the prime minister was, you know, he wasn't nationalistic enough. And they get like very light sentences.

• 17:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, so you, you, you know, it's called the government by assassination, uh, what the government was like at this time.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  I agree. A few things here, right? The first thing is that Japan had a very unique constitutional model, as far as it could be called a constitutional model, which is just ad hoc. As you know, a big problem in people's understanding of history is that they just don't realize that a lot of times, big events are just some guy deciding things. And so a lot of these things end up exactly as you would expect, some guy who ended up deciding them. And so the big problem here is that, well, the way the Japanese constitution was designed was that the civilian government, more, I mean, elected by men with property, I don't remember the exact details, they had control only over every part of the government except the military.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  And most countries, like in the US, you have a requirement that all defense secretaries should not have served in the military, or if they have served, there has to be something, I think, a five-year or a seven-year gap to ensure that you have civilian control on the military, right?

• 18:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. The secretaries can't have certain...

• 19:01Speaker 01

  No, no. You have to have a five-year gap or something. And if you don't meet that gap, you have to get a waiver from Congress.

• 19:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. I didn't know that, yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's to maintain civilian control on the military. And a lot of countries don't do very well on that, right? To go a sort of a tangent, Pakistan is one of those places where you have very poor civilian control on the military. The military just keeps like doing stuff, and the government is forced to react to it. Then in most Western democracies, it's the other way around. The crazy Western does something, and the military's like, whoops, now we're in this war, and we've got to deal with it. In Japan, the problem was your army ministers were part of the army. They weren't representing the civilian government. They were representing the army. Give an example. It's a funny thing. The Indian ambassador, so in the 1960s, India was having a, was having high tensions with China,

• 19:54Speaker 01

  which ended up in a war in 1962. I think it was VK Menon who was India's ambassador to China. And you know, we came in, came and told Nehru, you know, this happened, that happened, Chinese won this and Chinese won that. And Nehru asked him quite annoyed, are are you our ambassador to them or are you their ambassador to us? And it's the it's the it's the same problem with the army minister being part of the army. Is he representing the civilian government or the or the army? Nobody knows. And that led to a sort of elite capture of the civilian government by the army. There's another great book, I I I forgot the title, but it was discussed on on on China Talk a lot.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Um, it basically explains that the army took control of the entire civilian government, basically said, you got to prepare for total war. Why? Because we said so. And they basically and they reorganized the functions of government a lot to um to achieve this objective.

• 20:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, there's a there's like a pretty well-known quote about the Pakistani um military, which can be applied equally as well to Japan in this era, which is that in most countries, the government has a military in Pakistan, and I guess in this case, Japan, the the military has the government, right?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  So that's what's playing into here. And now the the claim of the author is that at various points where the military's power is growing and it's doing more morbidious things, it's like directly contradicting the will of the civilian government. The civilian government says like, hey, what are you doing? Like invading these other parts of China? Like, you know, stop this. And the good the the military leaders are just like, oh, yeah, fuck it, we're we're going in. And so at this point, the um um Bix is like the author, he's like um the emperor who's because like he has a unique role here where he has such moral authority because the army is claiming to like in the US, it's not like if there was um if there is a sort of like military coup, the government,

• 21:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  um assuming the president's not in favor of it, the government, the army, military is not going to be like, we're doing this in the name of the president, right? Uh, whereas in Japan, it was like, well, for the glory of the emperor and the empire, we're, you know, we're gonna invade. So the Bix is like, yeah, he could have just been like, yeah, this is not in my name, right? And he doesn't do that. He he issues like these very mild, if at all, condemnations um whenever these kinds of things happen. And so they keep escalating and escalating. Um, and so, yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a few things about that, right? So a lot of it, there's a question in waiting about history is how much of it is contingent on,

• 22:35Speaker 01

  you know, structural forces and how much of it is contingent on actual people? And fallen policy is one of the three places of history where things are contingent on actual people. And one of those actual people was Hirohito. The problem with Hirohito was that even as a child, he was very mild mannered. His tutors described him as, you know, he wouldn't win any debates, wasn't a very good public speaker. And the Japanese government and Japanese state are very different than Japanese government. Very concerned that the public support for the emperor was going down. So they went to, so they went to, to England to learn how England did it. And the problem was that Hirohito was not the right person for this job.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Because the job demanded a little closer to what a modern day politician's job demands. A lot of public opinion formation, a lot of, how to put it, dealing with various factions inside. And, you know, lying to a lot of people and keeping them quiet. But Hirohito was just not politically swave enough to do it. And that was the, the clear problem here was that he didn't understand. Even if he understood, he didn't, he didn't understand clearly the level of impact he had. And, and, and he had this personal teams mindset of, I, we probably link to this. He had this, this, this personal teams mindset of like, it's not worth it.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  But then, you know, that's what led to his downfall in the end. To what extent was Hirohito responsible for this? My, my answer is, it depends on your definition of responsible. Could he have stopped it? Probably. Could he have lessened it? Definitely. Could he have led to, have it have lesser, have it have a less stupid direction of the, of the war, right? One of my biggest beliefs is that the entirety of Japanese military strategy across the world war was completely stupid. They were shooting themselves in the head. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to go on a rant here if that's fine with you.

• 24:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, please do.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so basically Japan was really, really scared of a war with the Soviet Union. For obvious reasons, they're the largest neighbor and they were getting, and they were getting richer, richer under Lenin and Stalin. Because, you know, Transformations of agriculture to industry, I mean, every single country, which, okay. The problem was Japan was smaller with lesser people and obviously they would have lesser ammunition and military power during a war. The Japanese war planning said, okay, we're gonna plan for a war with the Soviet Union. Naturally, if you're gonna plan for a war with the Soviet Union, you should plan for a war with the Soviet Union. You should not plan for a war with China or with the Philippines or with America or with Malaya, right?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  But what they did in the nineteen thirties was they said, oh, we have this. And public choice problems forced them into into entering China. And so, you know, the the Japanese army wanted to be relevant, the Japanese navy wanted to be relevant, it just kept like nothing, provoking the the Chinese into attacking them. So what the initial plan was, we will use our assets in Manchuria to fight the Soviet Union. And we need Korea and we need Manchuria because to protect our assets in Korea. A sort of a early twentieth century version of domino theory. And then they they did that.

• 25:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sorry, just a turn up for the audience. Manchuria is this region in China and like the the northeast.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the northeast of China.

• 26:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, that's Korea. Uh, resources that Japan needed, yep.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's very rich in iron and minerals and so on. And the initial plan was that they would use their resources in Manchuria for doing it. But why did they want to use their resources in Manchuria in general? The answer is that Japanese military planners saw this. The model they built, their government, the government, the entire thing, including trade policy and everything, was Imperial Germany. The problem was Imperial Germany lost World War One, so they did this entire sort of like self reflection period, why did they lose World War One? The answer was Imperial Germany really never had the resources to win World War One. They're blockaded by the by the British and so on, right? So their answer was, we're gonna get Manchuria and we're gonna use it so that in future wars, we don't we we don't lose.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Finally, uh, if you don't wanna lose any future wars, a good way of not losing wars is to not get into ones you can't win. And so, but they didn't do that. They just walked into Japan. That was mistake number one. The problem with walking into, into, into, into, into China in the nineteen thirties, I said Japan earlier, my bad.

• 27:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Problem with, with walking into China in nineteen thirties is that it's a, it's a war that pisses off a lot of people, right? So, uh, here it'll be, uh, more Japan mentions it. The Americans were quite outraged by it. Because it was the, uh, what would be called the neutral China principle. All colonial powers would be completely, uh, fair in, in, in using Chinese resources for their own industrialization. You know, a very, a very modern report to say, but that, but that's how morality was back then, like, whatever, okay? And so, the point was this pissed off the, the, the Americans and the British and the French and, and you know, that it's, it's, it's useful to have powerful friends, especially when, when your end goal is world domination, right?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  So they did that. And then, the, the problem is you can't really, uh, China doesn't have much oil, Japan doesn't have much oil, and, and all that oil was imported from the US. All the atrocities in China led to very bad publicity in the, in the US, you know, American public opinion on China, especially because the answer historically for governments has been, don't piss off, don't piss off the church too much. And Japanese governments, uh, didn't know about that because, well, they were their version of the church. But the Japanese atrocities in East China led to A- American missionaries, missionaries in China going to America and reporting it to the American public. The American public got very outraged by it.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So by the nineteen thirties, you had this sort of like mini movement among the more religious people saying, we should not have American resources in, uh, involved in the Japanese pilgrimage of China. And so, uh, there was a lot of domestic pressure on the American end trying to, uh, stop them. Japan, so mistake number two was pissing off the A- Americans, right? The problem with pissing off the, the Americans almost all the time is that almost all of Japanese oil imports came from America, right? Saudi Arabia wasn't a thing back then. So all of, uh, all of Japanese oil imports came from America.

• 29:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Like, it's like ninety-seven percent or something like that.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, yeah, in the, yeah, in, in the, in the high nineties. And they, and it sounded like wanted to make synthetic oil, but that didn't, didn't work very well. The history of oil of like countries thinking they can, they can make their own oil is kind of funny. Because then shopping almost like thirty four, forty years after this thing told his cabinet that. China would finance its industrialization because it had some oil plants. And it kind of didn't work out because, you know, it takes a lot of resources to make oil which China didn't have. And Japan doesn't, didn't have it at that point in time. Anyways. That aside, that, that aside, aside, you basically have mistake number two was pissing off the, the US.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  And so, you know, Eto, you know, to what extent was the emperor responsible for this? I don't, I, here's where I will put my structural hat on and, and tell you that. You know, he was not prepared to deal with these challenges. The first thing was, no country had ever dealt with total war before in East Asia, right? Wars used to happen in East Asia, obviously, but they were sort of like the European wars before World War One. You send a few people to fight, and you fight it down, you can lose, well, it sucks. But you never mobilized your, your, your entire economy. There was a new type of war which he wasn't, didn't know of. You, you could model it, but the guy wasn't kind of smart, you know, he, he, he wasn't the, the sharpest tool in the, in the, in the shed.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  He really wasn't prepared to model this, this sort of war.

• 30:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  Huh. I mean, but wasn't the typing rebellion like one of the deadliest things in history or something like that? Yeah. It seems like a civil war, but.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a civil war, but the difference between a conventional war and, and a civil war, in a conventional war. The, the, the typing rebellion didn't have much organization. They were just people going and killing each other. There, there was no ammunition factory that said this month we were going to make X thousand guns. Because the soldiers need, need, need to fight it. Compare that to World War Two, you know, you had the, you had a bunch of lots of economic planning in the, in the US. They successfully managed to say, we, we, we have to make these many guns and these many bombs to fight the German and Japanese, right? But that sort of thing was very underdeveloped. In a, a very different aside, a, a big problem with having your, in, in, in not having high level manufacturing.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Like America had with automobiles is that you don't, in one time, what is useful is. Being able to coordinate large amounts of resources to their desired purpose. And people like, people make the joke that, that Amazon and Walmart are centrally planned economies. And it's totally off a joke because in World War Two, when the US needed central planning, it, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't go to the Department of Commerce. It went to, it went to Ford and GM and said, we have like, like a five times bigger version of you. And we need your managers to run this because you, you're the only people who know how to. But Japan didn't have that sort of experience. The Japanese planning board, you know, it talks about their biggest problem, supplies didn't come. And like, is he responsible for this?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  And he didn't, in the end, the, the emperor is responsible. But, but also because the guy couldn't do it, he didn't have the tools to do it. And the reasons for that are, are much deeper than Hirohito himself. It's that if you read through the first part of the book, Hirohito didn't have much of an education in, in economics or science or, or, I mean, science for a small extent because it was considered a, a noble subject. But all, uh, engineering, right? If you, if you ask him a question, which, uh, the answer to which I learned in seventh grade, how do you expect Ireland? He probably wouldn't know it. He, he, he, he wouldn't be able to think to model through those things.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  So the problem was no economy was prepared for a total war because it never done it before. But Japan was the first country to say, yeah, let's do it. And they paid the price for it.

• 33:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you, you bring up the, you, you're bringing up pissing up America. I think, so we, we picked this war before the Ukraine, we picked this book before the Ukraine thing happened. But people have been making this analogy, so we might as well talk about it. So a, as you know, that people are making this analogy between Ukraine today, the situation in Ukraine today, and what was happening with China and Japan before World War Two. So the idea is that, uh, what happened with Japan was they were, they invaded China. They did all these atrocities, they invaded different parts of Indochina. Um, and this was stuff America, so America embargoed, um, iron, steel, copper, and most importantly, oil, uh, exports to Japan. They froze, uh, their assets in the US, which basically prevented them from buying oil.

• 33:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  And the Japanese war machine required oil. So then basically Japan decided, um, we're going to have to invade other parts of Indochina to get this oil. Let's do that, we're going to need to, um, We're gonna need to invade America's sphere of influence like places like the Philippines. And to do that, we're probably gonna first need to disable America's ability to wage war in the Pacific. And to do that, we're gonna have a bomb per harbor. So the analogy goes that what we're doing with Russia is similar in the sense that we're, you know, just as Japan invaded China and we responded, the US responded back then. Russia has invaded Ukraine and we're responding very strongly with sanctions now. And maybe Russia feels like it's gonna become backed up in a corner and therefore it decides to launch like a conventional attack against,

• 34:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't know, NATO headquarters in Europe or something. And from there, you have an all out war. So what do you think of this analogy? Do you think it's valid or?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'd be very stupid to do that, but historically Putin's actions have have been more stupid. So you can't model into your, that's the model. To what extent does the analogy apply?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  To much less extent. The first thing is Russia can, okay, actually, it does apply, but in a different way. Russia is dependent on the Western world in not in terms of oil. They have a lot that are there themselves, but in terms of things like, you know, dentists shops in Russia have shut down because the crow is in, which is in the sort of stuff you need to do to make fillings are made in Germany and the and the US. They really depend on, you're sort of like highly specialized, small scale things. And you can't find that outside, outside the West. So, yeah, are they gonna have another war? Are they gonna escalate it? Base rate says very low, I'm gonna go slightly higher than a base rate, very low but small possibility.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  So does the analogy apply? Probably not. Japan was a militant country in the sense that the, you don't see the level of elite capture you had in Japan today in Russia, right? It just didn't exist back there, exist as it as it is now. So that's your first problem. The second problem is Russia wants Ukraine and it knows through historical experience, right? Putin was your KGB left and corner. He he knows that. What are the costs of a protracted level of a tank of military tension with the US? And it's very, very obvious to anyone watching here right now that if the EU decides to rearm

• 36:33Speaker 01

  and the US continues, just continues its current level of armament. I am not predicting a, a level of armament towards the 1980s, right? They will overpower Russia in every single margin. So will they do that? I don't think so, but I think the main objective right now for Western powers maker should be get Putin to save face and back out without, you know, pushing him into a corner. Are they going to push him, push him into a corner? I don't think so. It can be very bad for people living in Russia now, but so far he's not as stupid as to go and invade Poland or Estonia or literally go to the Netherlands and kill the NATO Secretary General.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  That'd be, that would suck a lot because of, well, it's World War III. I'm stuck in Singapore, I started halfway between the East and the, and the, any West sucks for me. But I doubt the, the analogy applies because they're not captured enough by the military for the rest of the government to care.

• 37:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, as far as the stupidity goes, you could continue the metaphor by saying that it was very stupid of Japan. People were saying this back then. I think, I think Hirohito said it himself, right? Which was like, listen, the US has like a much higher GDP per capita. It even has a higher population. So that, the idea that we're going to be able to win a war against them is, you know, it's very stupid. And even if you like plan out everything, like we're going to have this offensive that in a few months, we're going to capture all these islands in the Pacific and we're going to destroy their Pacific fleet. Even then, it's like, it was just such a, it was such a daring scheme. Like, I don't know what it would have taken for the whole scheme to work. But, you know, so like, I don't know.

• 38:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't, I don't think we should underestimate the stupidity of a nation state.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  I was doing some work on this last week. Allied GDP was almost always greater than Axis GDP for the entire of the war, not counting colonies of either. And for majority of the war, the Allies had a GDP twice that of the Axis powers. So they were very stupid. It would be like, what's a good analogy here? It would be like Denmark going to war with UK. Like, maybe you'll, maybe you'll capture a bit of Scotland. But swear to God, once the UK starts to rearming, there's no way you could quit.

• 39:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, so, you know, reading this, because I was looking at the same numbers earlier today, or not the same, but those kinds of numbers. Where, like, at the time, Japan had, in 1935, it had a GDP per capita that was like almost a tenth of the US's. And, you know, I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about in the future, like, let's say-

• 39:21Speaker 01

  It wasn't a tenth, actually. I'm not sure where you got your numbers from, but I have a book I open called The Exotic World War II. It's around forty percent, yeah. US was 5,800 something, Japan was 2,700 something.

• 39:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  That sounds way more reasonable. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. But, and then you also had a bigger population, right? So it's a total, bigger total-

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's a GDP that matters here.

• 39:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, so I was thinking about this, like, with the potential that in the future, if there's a conflict between the US and China, you know, like, the analogy is like, oh, we have a bigger current military, like, we spend way more on the military now than China does. But if it has a higher industrial capacity, if it has a higher GDP, maybe in like a year, or like a couple of months of conflict, all these stuff you have so far is kind of useless. Or, you know, it doesn't matter as much as your capacity as the India, as, I'm sorry, as the US had during the World War II. It just like produced more stuff.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I agree. So to what extent would like that, I think the first thing is that in a short term conflict, you you would have the US outmatched Syria in in like every single thing, right? Not because of the US, but it's US plus EU. And thing is, it's so if you tell somebody in nineteen twenty two, a hundred years later, the EU is like what we call Europe today is disarmed, they will laugh at you. This is totally not the norm for for European countries to not spend illogical amounts of their economy on defense, right? It's because like they they fight a lot and now they they're fighting a lot again. So it's a conflict

• 40:58Speaker 01

  on continent. So basically, I find that very up. And the like, the the moment you attack the US, you are also uh some more or less attacking with or without NATO. A lot of countries dependent on the US. So a lot of those countries, so in a short term conflict, you would obviously be depending on only American defense because only power ready to wage war in like fifteen minutes time. But in a fifteen month span, you would uh no other grouping of countries can match what the West has now, just because the West is technologically superior. So maybe in the time span of like six months to twelve months, you you would see a lot of Chinese advances.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  But in the time span of uh twelve months plus, it would be very quick for the West to the arm and, you know, because the West doesn't sense of complicity about about about about wars. All the wars that they fought on the Middle East, they're very far away, right? So at least uh the moment it starts hitting you, right? The moment you have bombs flying on their head, you're like, it becomes a lot more real to people. So uh there's no question that you would have a similar scenario.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  UK plus EU, so US plus EU GDP is like thirty one trillion and China plus Russia GDP is like forty trillion. Maybe I don't know, I'm just ballparking numbers here, but China plus Russia GDP is like maybe thirty trillion. I can guarantee you this forty trillion is a lot more productive than this thirty trillion because a lot of it is just, you know, for all the chaos that the American economy goes through, the chaos makes it more productive. So you're gonna have, you have a lot less ghost cities and a lot less corruption on this end of the new Cold War.

• 42:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I guess one concern is, I don't know how true this is, I just heard from like this zeitgeist is the idea that we don't have the industrial capacity that we used to. So the GDP is higher, but it's the industrial capacity, we've shipped elsewhere. I don't know how true that is.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I, I, I think that industrial capacity is overrated, please. It's twenty twenty two. First thing being, right, a lot of initial war is gonna be very high tech, you've gotta have underwater drones that like.

• 43:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  What is an underwater drone?

• 43:21Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's an autonomous vehicle that's underwater. It's like a, you, you take a drone that can swim.

• 43:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  It's really what it sounds like, right? You have drones and you have a lot of satellite, like the satellites targeted for you and then you bomb them. You're using the, the satellite imagery, right? Initially in a war, human intelligence is gonna be very important. And now there've been some pretty embarrassing parts for the US on this, like in twenty fifteen, there was a China hack, the Chinese hack of the DHS employee database is very embarrassing because, yeah. And then, you know, a lot of CIA assets in China mysteriously disappeared in the years after that.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  So, uh, sucks, but I also think that the industrial capacity argument goes like this, you know, America's outsourced manufacturing to China. If you have a war in China, they're not gonna send it to us and. They won't be able to do it. My answer is, uh, this sort of like the story where, you know, the two guys running and there's, there's a pair and you, and only one guy has to outrun the, the other. The first thing is, the nice part of, of being the largest consumer for your, for your largest trading partner is if you cut your taps off, it will hurt you a little. But it's gonna hurt them a lot. Where they're gonna get the resources to start to, to, to re-industrialize again, right? The Chinese state, uh, economy is not known for its efficiency.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Okay, the second thing is, if we need to, if the West needs to, they could absolutely always rearm very, very quickly. That it is, it is, it is, it will be painful, right? Your software engineers who spend maybe forty percent of the time working will be forced to work in some stupid factory that, uh, makes Javelins. But regardless of the annoyance of it, it will, it will happen. Okay? Finally, Dan Wang has the best critique of this. He says that cloud apps don't, don't win wars and he's right about it. Some conductors win wars and the US has the nice advantage of being the only and largest ally of Taiwan.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  And you know, thing with the US is, a lot of its economic potential is put into stock by, by stupid regulations. Zoning, nuclear regulations, and you know, there, there's a whole Twitter universe dedicated to exposing them. I'm not gonna spend time on those. The thing is, once you get into the, once you have Bob's dropping across London, it'll be very obvious that these things have to go. So, you know, it's, these sort of things are a luxury belief for vested countries. They can believe in it because, yes, these guys can get a house in New York, but it's not materially harming us in a way that, that is obvious to us now.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  I want to start becoming obvious, you know, no elected leader is gonna listen to some, is gonna listen to the people who are currently harming American or British or German industrial cap- capacity. They're gonna say, uh, sucks about the pollution, but we've got a war to win. So it's, it's, it's, it's going to disarm very, very quick. And we, one of the reasons I'm very optimistic about the future is that we have, we have a lot of spare capacity left like this because of stupid rules. And well, once we started removing those stupid rules, you, you, it's, it's, it's just, you know, rocket take off. And, you know, it's, I'm, I'm being animated because it is going to be very animated like that.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  People fundamentally under the benefit of like a liberal-ish democracy, which you can change very, very quick and not blow up while, while doing it. A good historical example is that America had a lot of mess ups early in World War II, right? So there, so during the phony war, the phony war was this, uh, sort of like lull in nineteen, in the nineteen thirty, nine forty, kind of member in, in, uh, Yara. Whereas they were starting fighting, but they started war and it started like a stalemate. This was called a phony war for that reason. And American, the, uh, Congress didn't want America to get involved in because they were isolationist and they had good reasons, right?

• 47:38Speaker 01

  And F D I wanted to, but once it became clear that American interests in Britain, uh, were going to be harmed by it. Even the most isolationist Congress members changed their mind because of overwhelming public support. So it is going to happen and the thing is people just, um, they're, they're, they're right to assume that, uh, the U S doesn't have industrial capacity. But as long as you, that it will never have industrial capacity.

• 48:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I, I, I hope you're right. I hope you're right.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  I know I'm right. That's, that's okay. I know I'm right. That's okay.

• 48:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  So you brought up earlier that, you know, we look at the failures of, we look at the failures of, you know, American military and Russian military in the Middle East. But, you know, we weren't as seriously invested because it didn't directly threaten us. I mean, speaking of the Middle East, you like our occupation in Japan, like Japan was a country with a hundred million people. It had a very serious and very like, very like, very proper, you know, like, just supremely convinced public that was like supremely hardcore about the ideology of the imperial way and stuff like that.

• 48:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  And, you know, this public, it didn't take that much at all for, you know, the Western, the Western occupation to be able to put in a liberal democratic constitution and basically just like turn around the entire trajectory of the country. And whereas if you look at countries that are way weaker, like, you know, Afghanistan has like, like, one thousandth of the GDP of America or something like that, and we can't, we can't occupy it. Right? So like, what was it about Japan or about our military at the time that made it such a successful occupation? You could say, of course, one major factor is that we had Hirohito was somebody debuted in such a, almost as a deity, we had him basically surrendering and cooperating. And that counts for a lot.

• 49:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  But it also explains why he wasn't tried as a war criminal afterwards.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 49:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. But is there anything else? Like, why was the occupation in Japan so successful?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Okay, I, I thought a lot about this. There's a great book on this called Embracing Defeat, which you should read because it's about the exact thing. It's what Japan after World War II and how the Americans did. So why was Japan a lot more successful than Afghanistan? The first thing is stability is sort of like Lindy, you know? Once, once you have stability under the relatives, stability again, under the imperial government, they just change the people at the top. And you can only compare it to Afghanistan because there was chaos before, chaos after. You weren't solving the root problems of chaos. It's like you had ethnic tensions. In Japan, the thing was there was a lot of stability. People were really tired after what.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  After when Hirohito had his surrender address, the concern among imperial household, the imperial household was that there would be protests ahead of the, outside the palace. The problem was, I mean, that was the most, in their view, that was the optimal end, that people would be angry with them that they were at the end of the war. Thing was, there were no protests. A few people were happy because the war ended. A few people were sad that they lost, but the Japanese public in general had a very, very difficult war. Fun fact, Japanese GDP per capita in 1937 was only achieved back again in 1952.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  So you can imagine how bad the Japanese public had it. So in some sense, they were much happier under the Americans. I mean, it's kind of fun fact, interesting fact, which is quite sad. And when the war was ending, right, there was large scale looting of Japanese military supply, because they knew food would be scarce for the next few months or so. And so you had army colonels and majors just stealing food. It was completely lawless for a few months till the American military police came and it sort of calmed things down. The American army in Japan was successful because even the Japanese government was like, "Yeah, we're gonna get done with this. We're gonna get back to making Japan great again, again."

• 52:05Speaker 01

  And that was the most important, also very interesting, not fun, but interesting. Mekoto spoke the Japanese. Mekoto, I don't think he addressed the Japanese public ever, okay? That's very sad if you're occupying first. They worked through the mechanisms of the previous Japanese government. So also interesting.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  A lot of Japanese, I think I made this joke on Twitter a while ago. I have a Japanese political family. Our grandfather was a war criminal, not executed because Hirohito asked Mikado not to. Father was finance minister in the eighties. Colin Kidd is number five in the LDP leadership election. And like, the answer is, the elite of Japan was not changed after the war. I mean, very easy, very convenient to continue. They had this, this mass hallucination that, oh no, the, what is it? I'm blanking on the, on the guys. And yeah, Toji made us, made us do it and the, and the, and the army made us do it.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  It just continued with the old elite again, you know? It didn't change much. So you see a lot of these, like, it is also very interesting that elites don't change after revolution. It is not a well-appreciated fact, but after the, so this is great paper. Let me, let me, let me find it. But it basically shows that the Chinese elite in nineteen eighties when the country was formed was the same as Chinese elite in nineteen twenties when the country was having economic growth. The same thing with Japan, in nineteen sixty and seventies, the same family connections made them, you know, they were powerful again, right? The next thing is that America didn't really change, another really big part of Japan.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Japan was occupied, as in its formal structures were changed. But it would be, you would be, I'd have to be a little crazy to call it a democracy till like nineteen ninety or something. It was just, Bernhard has this great post about East Asian industrialization. I think it's, it's, it's on Medium, it's quite popular. And one part of it was the Ministry of Industry and MIT, I, I forgot that, their, their full form. And their policies were basically rubber stamped by the lower house of the, of the D. And, you know, he's like, wasn't, there wasn't much difference between. Those guys and the Soviets upstart. So yeah, Japan was a democracy, but it was a democracy. It didn't, it didn't change much.

• 54:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, the fact that the elite to begin with was, I guess, open to Western ideas. Uh, it, it kind of raises the question of why this elite, where, where, where was this elite during the nineteen thirties?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Many of them were suppressed. The first Japanese time in World War Two, I'm lying on his name again, but like he was a left wing leader and, you know, he's basically on this ad, we, we shouldn't war, we should not war. The Japanese equivalent of the girl offering the flower to the American police guy during the Vietnam War. And those guys were obviously suppressed because it was inconvenient for them. But the, a lot of the, a lot of the Japanese, but also interesting, the Japanese Communist Party welcomed the American occupation. So, yeah. So like they were seen as the anti teachers of this, but Article nine of Japanese Constitution, which you put to,

• 55:33Speaker 01

  this is a don't know, it says a Japan counter the army can roughly, right? It says, it says that the car, uh, the Japanese state uh, gives up war as a means of, of, of policy. So that basically like guarantees, guarantees, but uh, gives the, gave the uh, new elite a good excuse to stop fighting, to, to stop with that. But the, the problem is where were those people? The ideology is fake. It just what, we just want help them to, to, to, to get them into power. So now it's, if fascism helped them gain the power, I guarantee you, Hideki, uh, Toji would have, would have become Mother Teresa. That, that, that, that, that's, that's not the, the, the video.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  I don't think many of them really believed in what they, in what they did, given that they all switched like six months later after nineteen forty five. Very, very hard to me, the case, they were idealists. They were just opportunists.

• 56:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure about that. I mean, um, I, I did, maybe this is specific to those elites. Uh, I'll tell you, but if you look at like the actual soldier class, there you cannot question that you, you had like just ridiculous levels of devotion.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  True.

• 56:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  That's true. But the but the but this sort of class was like sort of like selected out of the Japanese elite.

• 56:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. So I was just thinking about this earlier, which was that, you know, one of the reasons, one of the ways you could explain this, um, uh, like why, where does all this nationalism of the fervor go? Is that it died in the Pacific, right? Like all all those nationalist people were sent out to the front lines and they were just like massacred. In some cases, like literally by their own uh superiors. Like there's there's so many examples where.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, the the Japanese generals just send out their uh as it send out. A useless charge, like direct charges with like suicide missions, basically. I'm not talking about kamikaze. I'm talking about like DNA charges.

• 57:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  And it just like.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  The defense of of of Okinawa was a great example of that. More people died in that than the uh atom bombings. So.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred thirty thousand people. There's al- almost half the population of Okinawa.

• 57:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  So there's like, it was like very, very brutal.

• 57:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  There there's a great quote of that, uh, uh, what was his name? The guy? You know, one of those like famous, uh, one of those legends that he was the guy in um, one of these Pacific Islands and he was a Japanese soldier. And he didn't realize that Japan had surrendered and it was like decades later and he's still like killing like random civilians because he doesn't know that that Japan has surrendered. And they like dropped down leaflets and uh and then like newspapers to like show him that, oh, you know, Japan today, this is what it looks like. You we've surrendered. He like still wouldn't believe it. And eventually they got him, uh, they got him back to Japan. It's like later on, he wrote a book about it and he's like. The reason I didn't believe uh Japan could have surrendered i- is that the motto at the time was that hun- one hundred million souls will die for the empire.

• 58:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  And so, um, uh, uh, Japan could not have lost a war because if Japan had lost a war, there would be no Japan, right?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, there would be no Japanese left, like, yeah.

• 58:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, uh, but so but like, uh, so then why do you think the elites were cynical? Do you think like the elites are generally more cynical when it comes to ideology than the average person?

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all like self-selects for that because to get the top, you you've got to lie and you've got to move with the irony and you've got to be within the things of the day. And yeah, so, uh.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  That's pretty much the main point, which is that they're elites knew that they couldn't re-militarize again, it's gonna find less to re-militarize again to buy two. And so you can, they just basically uh decided not to do it. But like, the last ten minutes is more than speculation from my part, because I have not read into the elite mechanics of Japan before and after World War Two to a good level of detail.

• 59:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, dude, so like my, my kind of uh, my kind of prior on elites is not that they're not ideological. I do agree that often their ideology is cynical, but like, but if you look at like elites in America, for example, like I, I think many of them are like genuinely very, well, you know, like, put in all the stuff you can put in the bucket of left wing, right? But like, they genuinely believe those things, right? Like, in ways that are even kind of productive with them.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  No, but it never gets passed, right? Even they don't pass it, like, even if you, there's always like one senator who believes that we should nationalize the oil companies, but they never introduce it onto it, they never make the, they never make the, the arguments for it, they never, I mean, like, there are people who are ideologically left-wing, they'll just never stay elected for too long, they'll just, the thing is, the competitive nature, I mean, to whatever extent it's competitive, of American democracy forces you to temper your, your views, and the only way to get ahead is do what the public, what the orderly define wants. So, yeah.

• 1:00:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, okay, so to bring it back to Hirohito, uh, one thing, um, one thing that I found like very interesting, very confusing, is how this guy got so much fucking adoration? Because, you know, physically, he was not so imposing, um, interpersonally, he was not that charismatic, uh, from what it seems, like, he, he just wasn't that, uh, uh, communicative. Um, uh, he wasn't like his grandfather, Meiji. Uh, you can, there's a, actually funny picture of him on the internet where you can see, uh, him next to MacArthur, uh, you know, the, the general that was in charge of occupying Japan after the war. And, you know, like, MacArthur is like two feet taller than him, i- i- i- i- like, he looks like a midget in comparison to MacArthur.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Thanks. It's true, yeah.

• 1:01:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, so like, I don't understand, like, how are all these, like, super right-wing militaristic guys, uh, the Tarnation, really, like, that they're, they're willing to, like, die for the empire? You know, I, the, one of the things that, like, really made him not like him was, uh, not like Hirohito was, uh, wh- wh- when the book is talking about how these, uh, Japanese soldiers are, you know, like, the, the last few years of the war, that they knew that Japan was gonna lose. The reason that these Japanese soldiers are dying is so that, well, the idea is, instead of an unconditional surrender, we'll try to, like, uh, we'll try to show the, uh, the West that we can, we can basically sustain, um, we can basically sustain this kind of, uh, uh, war for a long time, even if we're gonna lose.

• 1:01:53Dwarkesh Patel?

  And if we wanna avoid this, we won't do an unconditional surrender. And the purpose of that was so, well, one of the purposes of that was, is so that to make sure that in the unconditional, in the conditional surrender, rather, that Hirohito is not tried as a war criminal. Like, that's, that's one of the things that these, uh, you know, like, these millions of, what was it, more than a, how many, 1.5 million, no, 3 million Japanese died, but 1.5 million of Japanese died in the last year of the war.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, and the, the, a lot of them died so that the, the emperor wouldn't be tried as a war criminal, right? Uh, uh, yeah. Like, I, I don't know, the, the, the idea that he could have stopped the war earlier, or at least potentially could have stopped the war earlier, and he didn't, and these people are just dying for him, uh, in his name, I, I, I didn't.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, the people aren't dying in his name. There's this great, uh, I don't know, you, you should read the other book, which, which is, uh, Japan, so, uh, let me find it. Japan prepares for, yeah, the book is titled, uh, Japan prepares for total war, okay? The thing is, nobody thought the emperor was God, that he was godlike, but it sounded like, he, he was like, um, it's easier to, to imagine for him, he was, I guess, he was a godlike figure, he's, he's not God, and they, they sort of saw him as their model leader. Right? The first thing that they were dying, they, they went into war because the army paid a lot of money, it was a lot better than we, in declining Japanese firms at the time, quantity was pretty low.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  So, uh, they didn't have much of a thing, they didn't have much of- Things to do otherwise, you know, uh, also interesting, uh, the first original, the first public health system in Japan was encouraged by the military because they would saw all their concepts being so undernourished and uh ill that they're like, oh, we can't solve this on the military level. We have to have a systemic response to this. Okay. The second thing is really that, uh, why did they die for the emperor? A lot of them believed it and so they they died for it. Why did they believe it for such an unconvincing persona? Because he was not a politician. He was his persona, his

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  his stature derived from the fact that he was the descendant of the gods. So, you know, it's it's it's it's it's it's not a charisma thing. In authoritarian systems, people don't derive their power from the consent of the governed. They derive it from something else. In this case, something else was I'm the descendant of the of the sun goddess.

• 1:04:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 1:04:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, although I, doesn't that contradict what you said earlier where you

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:04:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Didn't believe that he was like a literal D O T or the

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, no. He didn't believe, okay, see, there's a godlike figure and there's a god. So his sun goddess, her name starts with A, I forgot it. She's the god, but he's a godlike figure.

• 1:04:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Yeah, but I, I, I, no, I mean, I understand that. I, I, I guess, I, I kind of feel like semantics to me, but uh

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  No, it, it, it wouldn't be semantics. I mean, if it, if it was semantic, they shouldn't have been happy about the surrender.

• 1:05:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, but, but, but many of them weren't, right?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  No, but a large portion of the Japanese public were just meh, okay, fine, move on now. Which there was a case, let, let, let me put you in like very economics terms. There is a, uh, there's a reservation price they have for a god and they have a, there's a reservation price they have for a godlike figure. And for the godlike figure, the reservation price was pretty low, it was two years of starvation, which for a god, two year, I mean, look at the, look at the, like, they weren't prepared to fight the Americans for very long.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  If you either was a real god figure, they they would have been prepared to fight him for fight the Americans and British for much longer.

• 1:05:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I guess my point, my original point is that because they believed him to be a godlike figure.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  They've made many sacrifices for him as a person, as an individual person.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  Separate and apart from the sacrifices they made for Japan as a nation.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  But but but he was inseparable from Japan as the nation, right?

• 1:06:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Oh, I mean, which is another thing you can critique, though, right? But.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, too.

• 1:06:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  So like, like, to to make it clear there, it would be, it would be like, they were prepared to make the initial sacrifices. First, it was convenient for them to make it, you know, you they had the Japanese economy was very, very bad across the thirties. Right? And the second thing was, it it was sort of like a, how how to put it, sort of like a, not signaling, but like quasi signaling. I'm going to fight for the emperor. But when the fighting got bad, like, ah, wait, the emperor is not worth that much. It's okay.

• 1:06:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  All right. So, yeah, so let's continue talking about what happened after the war. So, uh,

• 1:06:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  you probably know much more about the post-war economy in Japan than I do. I actually know close nothing about it, except for uh, there is, uh, the Manfred Paulsen very famously, uh, explained why Japan and Germany had uh, growth rates that were so high after the war and were able to catch up relative best is his claim, uh, I mean, bringing back public choice theory. His claim was all these factions that accumulate in democracies were abolished in abolished in the war. And so they basically got a fresh start without all this accumulated grudge. And because of that, they had extremely high growth rates. And, you know, as you know, in the nineteen eighties, um, you there are fears like Japan, this economy would like overtake Americas. Uh, and in fact, if they had never a population collapse, uh, you know, who who knows what would have happened. But.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, more or less correct. All the intergroups were destroyed, although they could.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  I mean, actually, all the industries were in this, so they were just replaced with better ones. Their industries are bad, but they're good industries and bad industries. And they're sort of like the Japanese, the new in, in, in industry in Japan were the Gyarados, Gurami, trade, industry. I haven't, I know, I know a little about it, it's not too much, but there are a few big things here, right? One of the problems the Americans saw in Japan was that, ah, well, there were too many, the biggest industry group was these zaibatsus, the Japanese conglomerates that no, like the war, because it gave demand for their goods. They, they, they tried to break them up, okay? And here's where the intersection between that and the new Japanese industrial policy comes. The Americans put a sort of like an FTC thing where they said, you know, you're gonna

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  get too big, and otherwise this commissioner is gonna sue you in court, and the court is gonna be independent, and the prime minister can drive the judge and whatever, okay? The thing is, the Japanese kept the farm of this anarchist law, but just made enough loopholes and inferred to be like, yeah, we had anarchist law, but, and we have a trade commissioner, but nobody enforced it because, no, it's, it's, it's, it's convenient not to. And then, so the Japanese economy changed, they, they sort of used these previous zaibatsus, they, they, they formed themselves into kireitsus, which is, you know, probably just a more financialized version of a, of a zaibatsu. And then they, ah, so for, for listeners who don't know, zaibatsu was just this huge

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  conglomerate that emerged in Japan over the nineteen, the, the nineteen hundreds, that was one of the biggest, ah, ah, it, it was one of the entities that benefited the most from the war, because they were mining industrial, was, was required a lot of mining and industry, so they made a lot of money. And the, the Americans tried to break up the, the zaibatsus, but like, almost all the zaibatsus still exist today in, in the form of kireitsus. And the kireitsu guys get really mad when you ask them about it, because they want to, they want to be associated with the, with the reaper of the king, they want to be asso- associated with nice Toyota cars, okay? So, that's the thing, that the Japanese post-war economy was very much influenced by the

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  fact that the, the, the Americans were semi-incompetent at breaking down these zaibatsus, they just re-emerged again. Uh, standard economic growth theory tells you when you have a lot of broken buildings, uh, it's, it's very easy to repair them back to what you got. So that's where a, a lot of the initial growth came from and.

• 1:10:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  But it, uh, sorry, uh, maybe you were going there anyways, but there's almost a super compensatory, compensatory mechanism here where it's like you, you damage the thing, get more benefit than you would.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. No, I mean, obviously it is suboptimal. Uh, it is obviously worse than not damaging them. But once you, you damage them, like it's, it's not like Bastia's broken windows thing, right? If you, if you break the, the windows, it, it increases consumption and Bastia's like, but it increases consumption here, but you know, they're going to spend the money on something else and those guys are hurt. I'm like, yeah, it's true. And same thing over here. Obviously.

• 1:10:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  I, I'm making the opposite point, uh.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Then.

• 1:10:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Where that, the, the, the damage, uh, kind of factually speaking, in the long term, the damage actually causes a benefit, uh, in the long term. Because, uh, you're, you're getting rid of these, uh, special interest groups that would have, uh, hampered growth for a long time.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably, but I, I mean, yes, but also no, because especially in Japan, didn't really disappear. I mean, yes, in the sense that the bad ones went and slightly better ones came up, which is true. But that should not be your main explanation because a lot of Japanese growth in the fifties, which was, was, was just catch up. The, the, the rebuilding there, the broken buildings and the bombed cities and burned houses. So, eh, partly true is my, is, is my scope's fact check, right? No. And the other thing is like, uh, Japanese industrial policy was very much a feature of the war.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Without the war, you would have had this level of government control of the economy, which led to a higher level of, uh, how do I put it? A higher level of, uh.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Planning, I don't think planning is the right word, it's too many connotations of and basically, they got export driven growth because of this, because of you had a lot of social capital between the planners and the company executives and it's really easy for them to say, okay, I'll give you a few billion yen, you're gonna use this to sell cars in the US, but in three years, if you, if your cars don't sell well enough, you're gonna shut down and merge with your rival who will be more successful. So that was one of the drivers of Japanese growth, that's one of the reasons why the Kritsus and the industrial policy systems existed. So that's one of the parts of growth after the war and also having played

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  with America, this makes you better off for the obvious reason that Americans are rich and they buy a lot of your stuff.

• 1:12:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, yes. Um, all right, yeah, yeah, okay. This was a very, very interesting, this was extremely interesting. And then, yeah, I'm really glad we did this. I hope we do this with more books, because this was actually like a very good way to, and you, you, you happen to know a lot about the attention topics, so this is, um, it's very useful.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Super fun for me.

• 1:13:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't know if you feel, is there anything else we're talking about with pressure to Japan and Hirohito or?

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  No, nothing else. I'm probably hitting some edge of my knowledge in like one more question, so let's not go there.

• 1:13:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, all right, so we're done with that topic, I guess we can talk about a general thing, which is that we're kind of doing similar things, at least for the time being, I guess, you're doing, I guess we're both doing it part time. So like, you're, what's your age?

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  I'm eighteen, I turned eighteen last October.

• 1:13:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, so I mean, how are you structuring your reading, writing, podcast?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Oh, man, man, oh, my God.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so uh mornings in when I travel, I get a lot of my Twitter time done, right? Because Twitter is like my biggest source of things that go on. It's not a good source, but it's my good source. So uh yeah. Uh how is up to my reading? Right now, uh I think a lot of my reading is I go for I go for deep dives in books. I was doing Japan, so I did Hirohito, I did uh Embarrassing Defeat, I did Japan's First Total War. I did Mark Harrison's The Economics of World War Two. Uh not a very detailed book, but a very good book in terms of the statistics it it it gives you, right?

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna do that and I I like to have my stuff uh to combine the learning data visualization in Python. I'm gonna do that with a bunch of World War Two economic numbers. So like I both like learn how to use the very difficult map plot lab and you know this and that. Uh a lot of my reading is ad hoc. I have this set of PDFs I read, which is uh a lot of time you just spend staying at my phones. I just it's it's second nature. A lot of my writing is a lot more difficult to structure because first it it it requires a level of calm that I usually don't get apart from weekends. So that does much harder. And as for your question of how do I get my my reading?

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Uh all the usual sources, the listeners of this podcast will know marginal revolution, econ law. Uh I read I read I read a lot of Dohit Krishna, Matt Matt Clifford. I read a lot of, I don't know, uh Les Daugherty, Yeh Follam and please try and ask to correct step. But really, a lot of my uh stuff comes from just going through the bibliographies of books I like to read. So that is where a good, luckily, uh don't pirate books, pirating books is bad, but. Yeah. It's the, it's the, it's the cheapest way for, for, for most people. So basically that. Uh, what else?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  I think being in university thing gives me a better sense of ideas. I'll get talk to other people. My biggest source of like things I I should work on is talking to people like you or other people or, um, other things. I also have a lot of time staring at a wall doing nothing because of nature of my work. That give me a lot of time to contemplate. Finally, I'm, I'm applying to college, so I have to, you know, figure out how to legible, how to make my achievements legible to a college, uh, admissions person. A lot of my time goes around doing that.

• 1:16:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. What are your long-term plans? I, I, I nerd.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  What are my long-term plans? I have no long-term. Okay, I have a long-term plan to ask me.

• 1:16:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  You're going for computer science, go to college?

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  I'll probably. So my next thing is, okay, computer science is, is a compromise because it's the. I want to CS, I want to do like econ-related, econ plus like quant-related things. The best end of that in Singapore is computer science plus econ. Because the government puts a lot of money into computer science and I might as, as well add econ because it's my interest. So yeah, CS plus econ at, at NUS is what I'm aiming for. They already got accepted for CS there. I'll be applying to the UK with my, because, okay, let me go, let me tell you one thing. The, uh, for all that I like to criticize America, the British are infinitely worse. So, uh, British, uh, college courses haven't changed since like nineteen seventy something.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  In America, you can pick and choose your, your major. In Singapore, you can get a lesser extent. But in Britain, you, you've had the same courses since sixteen twenty, I guess. And the big problem is no course there. I'm looking for LSE, Math and Econ if I can get in and I find, and I find a part of money somewhere.

• 1:17:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Have you not already with the Emergent Ventures Grant?

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, college in the UK costs like 200,000 Singapore dollars. I'd expectably, my wallet's in my pocket, I don't have 200,000 Singapore dollars there. For, for American listeners, that's like 180,000 USD or something, on, on that range.

• 1:18:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  But honestly, I would not be surprised if you were somehow able to, if you managed to up the law like sponsorships and grants.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Enough to like sustain yourself.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  So if I was like more into it, I, I would do macro econ and make my newsletter pay. It's, it's, it's kind of obvious, like even like 500 bucks a month makes my life super easy, so. Yeah, but that would be like if, if and when I finish my college, how do I put it? Self-imposed military time.

• 1:18:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, and, but, but what is the topic you're reading about now?

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  I'm doing a bunch of, I mean, I'm not reading about this, I, I knew my before, but I'm writing about the US dollar reserve system, like a timer. I read about it yesterday, it's like, why do countries hold US dollar reserves? And the answer is, they hold US dollar reserves because central banks likely use their reserve for insurance reasons. Like, wait, why do central banks need US dollars for, for insurance? The answer is, US, US dollar is a main currency used in trade. So it is really, really important to have it in case your currency depreciates too much or appreciates too much. And now you can sell it and, and get USD. The other reason is that the number one source of, of financial crises for developing countries in last few year, in last two decades has been,

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  we need dollars to pay our dollar debts, we don't have enough dollars. So we're broke, and central banks keep it for that very specific insurance reason of.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Financial crises and next comes the question, well, why can't the remnant be or the like what's normally called the B P one replace this. The answer is nobody use it for trade, nobody use it for trade because you can't use it outside China, the capital controls. So like, wait till China takes out its capital controls, we can't do it. Yeah, pretty much. Next question comes, why can't we use Bitcoin? The answer is you would be very crazy to structure international trade with Bitcoin. You know, it's too volatile. Sorry, next month your your price doubles and your and your and your income doubles, the debt cost doubles. It's never going to happen. And most importantly, Bitcoin is a risk asset, can't use it as insurance.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  When your NASDAQ falls 10%, Bitcoin falls 25%, the US dollar falls like 1.5% or or or even goes up. So you can't really do that. That's like my current um writing, but as of 2020 at March, it's it's going to change as and when I find interesting things to write about. Now, I have a question for you. What is one good thing I should be doing, but I'm not doing?

• 1:20:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, I don't know what you're doing, so I'm not sure.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  I I told you what I'm doing. I'm just I'm just writing about it now.

• 1:20:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  It's all I'm doing.

• 1:20:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, the the answer to that question is probably something I should be doing as well. Um, it it sounds like you have been on the side of like just uh doing some computer science from what I've talked to you separately about. So.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, if you're doing that anyways, yeah, that's fine. Uh, one thing that I haven't done enough, but like when I have done it, it's been like super useful and like. It is just that uh if I just randomly network with people over Twitter or something, if I just like just send them a Cowenley link or something. Uh, and and you just like learn, oh, this person is like way more um uh it's just like way more connected than I I thought he was.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Like he he's just super interesting. Um, that has led to some really uh really cool.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Super fun, yeah. I I have started doing this like one Zoom call a week with like friends and and we perform for the uh and I make it like five or sevens. It's very, very fun. More people should should do it. It's it's my cheat code to life.

• 1:21:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and what is one thing I should be doing that I'm not doing?

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  I think you should scale this up very much. What is your estimate of your of your impact via podcast versus writing?

• 1:21:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, roughly zero both ways. By impact, do you mean the audience or?

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like, like, like, like, like, like, how much, like, vaguely defined, how, uh, do you think your podcast gives you more impact on your writing?

• 1:22:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think they're both like zero impact. As far as like impact doesn't, I don't know, like, improving the world in some way.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  No, I mean, but impact on you, like, a very crude approximation is views.

• 1:22:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, I, I, for, for time spent, uh, like how much I'm learning and so on. I think of writing, probably I'm learning more than I'm doing learning podcasting. Although, yeah, I think it depends on the guest. So I, I, what, what did you mean when you said scale it up a way more?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Okay, what would a self-sustaining lunar society podcast look like?

• 1:22:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  Self-sustaining, meaning like?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Uh, you could work on this full time without any outside capital.

• 1:22:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, it would have to be way more regular and it would have to be way more broadly appealing.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sucks because broadly appealing stuff is almost always dumbed down. So, I mean, like, nobody can do broadly appealing. So, yeah.

• 1:23:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  My, my friend, just recently discussing this, like, you know, Lex Freeman's podcast?

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, like, he's clearly a very smart guy, but, uh, at least in his, whatever his, uh, research area is, like, he must be right. Or at least I'm told so. Uh, but, uh, but, yeah, you, you can clearly see, uh, that to reach his million subscribers or whatever. And this is not to just like, um, this is not just to take copium by the spoonful, but, uh, but there is a little, to, uh, but I mean, by definition, to appeal to the majority of the population, you had to appeal to midwits, right? By definition, what a midwit is. Um, and, uh, I, there are exceptions to this, right? Like, for example, there's conversation with Tyler, which actually does appeal to a lot of people. Um, and it's not midwitted.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  That's right. But he started off with a lot of social capital. He can't compare that.

• 1:23:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  No, that's true. That's true. Uh, I, I, it, like, in my case, it's ended up being the case that the money you make, like, you make, I, I could, like, start Patreon or something, but it would be, like, so much less money than just, like, random grants people offer you.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Which is, like, very nice of them, extremely, extremely nice of them, and they, uh, I'm very grateful for it. And then they, like, um, and that is, like, that's orders of magnitude more than I could make if I had a Patreon, you know what I mean?

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I, I agree. I think, like, an easier way of this is, uh, I'm gonna plug in my friend, Chris Koopcham here, who has this very cool thing called a, and we heard it's called a learning public offering, where you tell people, I'm go, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna learn about this, and six, six months later, I will teach you everything you need to know about this, and I'll have Zoom call with you, I'll give you an NFT, or whatever your preferred model is, and you basically say, you pay me enough money to cover some part of my expenses now, and we can, and six months later, I'll, I'll teach you everything you need to know.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  And if it's popular enough, you would probably do that. It's, it's, like, open source should work, like, it doesn't, but it's, it's sort of like a model of how these things should work. And another easier way is to have, uh, it's, it's pretty easy if you do on the econ, like I do, uh, I, I, I, I can just have an econ user that are focusing on normie things, like, where will industries go next month, and what does that mean for stocks, and have a better user doing things I, I like to do. So, very, uh, I don't know how to put it. The other thing, like, more people, why, emergency is an application, the thing I found most strong about, more people should do company-level analyses, so I am, I, because it, one, it pays, and two, because it's

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  underrated by econ's and overrated by stock people, and I consider you're very much in more econ than stock person. So, uh, yeah, I think it's very, very useful to sort of, like, uh, commercialize it, coming down, so class subsidize your intellectual pursuits by the, uh, commercial part.

• 1:25:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes, yes. Um, yeah, yeah. Uh, I, I, the thing is, I, I don't think I wanna do the intellectual pursuits thing as a main thing for my career. So, it's not-

• 1:26:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  And I don't need like a lot of money. I don't, it's not like I, I'm, you know, I, I need the, I need to make the rent this month or something. So um, I, I think it would just make more sense for me to like not worry that much about monetization of this kind of stuff. And then just make my money as a software engineer or like whatever else I decided to do, right?

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:26:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, so uh, but there, there's a separate question about uh, like having, because

• 1:26:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think the much harder question is like, how do you actually be a good public intellectual? Right? Public intellectual is like a kind of cringe word to use, but you know what I mean, right? Like, how do you actually produce content that's original and interesting? Especially when you're young like us, where you don't have that much life experience or just general knowledge about the world.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Public intellectual is strange, but, but thought leader is worse. You didn't do that.

• 1:27:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  You, the first thing is if you do a bad job, you'll come to know pretty obviously. Like every time my mind is bad, it gets like low engagement. People are like, yeah, it's me. I'm like, oh, that sucks. But you, you come to know that, obviously. The second thing is to uh, have a circle of competence and be great at it. So you, you, you can be, I have a, I have a, I have a friend who's a fan of the guy who's, who's the, you, you know who's on the post, are you?

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Uh, he's a former New York Fed guy who works at, I don't know, Fed with a dodgeback mount. Where he knows every single thing about Fed plumbing. So how to uh, in, how to access reserve gets, get transported. Uh, where, how did, does the bond sales happen, et cetera, et cetera. He knows every single thing about that. And if you want to be a good public intellectual, a public, whatever you do, whatever your, your placement for that word is. Be, be very great at one thing and draw on your credibility from there. It's not very hard. If you're coding, it is, it is very easy to demonstrate your competence in something. Just, you know, build something cool and people are like, oh, this is really interesting. You're super good. But if you are writing or speaking, it, it is much harder.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  It is obviously an open problem. But I mean, a podcast is, is, is like one way of demonstrating your gritted. Because people you, people whom other people respect say, oh, I like talking to you for one hour. We should do this again. Like, oh, super cool. But the other, like. You have to basically somehow build a proof of work and show it to people. My answer to that is doing constant people like and at some point of time, if possible monetize it. Which only works if your thing is commercially oriented. So I can't do a history of the gold standard. That sucks.

• 1:28:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. And but even you like you.

• 1:29:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  The proof of work thing, I I I mean, you you could say that the proof of work is like the amount of engagement you get. But I've noticed in like things I've gotten a lot of engagement on, even when it's like on a specific topic, like for example, I have like some posts on like talent that got some attention, right? On like spotting talent. And I I could tell you that I I know less about spotting talent than like the median manager at Best Buy, right? I I know close to nothing about uh uh finding talent. And you know, you can have blog posts to get attention. I'm not saying that like, you know, they got viral and anything, but they did get like one of them was on the marginal revolution.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  And so like, that's another thing that kind of makes me skeptical about the value of being a public intellectual in the first place is that like, I I actually generally don't know uh uh uh anything about practically identifying talent. But then you can get, you can like just put out these like sort of inside porn things and you get that good attention. And I I don't know what kind of value that's generating for the world, or you know what I mean?

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  No, I I agree. But I also joke to my friends that that that that among our circle, I'm the best at evaluating talent. Because all my tutor mutuals end up getting famous. So I like, yeah. So like, uh on the object level issue, uh it doesn't matter because you are not, you know, you're not, you're not selling your fish of stupid fish, you're selling it to to fishermen. But on the on the meta level, uh the thing with citing about.

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  About about like the sort of general things is that nobody knows how to how to do it unless you have thirty years of of experience. So like, don't worry about it. If they if they liked it, you can do it. Okay. The the second thing is people are not appreciating your object level thing on talent. That's okay. That nobody's going to make you the head of McKinsey's recruiting thing. The there's a very big difference in knowing something in in doing something and being able to explain it. And you're like, um, it's okay. I think your personal talent or like anything you write about barbell about the barbell uh strategy.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  The value provided to people is not the barbell strategy. It is explaining it in ways they can understand. And so I'm sure they knew it, right? Everyone has the idea that like this month will be super fit and next six months I'm going to do nothing. Everybody everybody has that those things, but the point is giving it some sort of form and structure.

• 1:31:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny that that post in particular, because it was it was just like hanging out in my Google Drive. I I I think I've written this uh like a few weeks or months ago. It was just like a almost like a throwaway thing. Uh.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  I those these things could seem kind of like barbell strategies. And then uh and it compared to like other bad posts where I've like put in way more effort. It was just it was literally just kind of a throwaway, right? But then um but then Alex.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Alex, really? Yeah.

• 1:31:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, he he says something very nice about my blog, but he but he used that uh blog post as like the thing to retweet to like say the nice thing about the blog. And so now this this like random blog post had like a hundred and fifty likes or something. And it was just like a throwaway thing, right? Like a little. And these other ones are like spending a lot more effort on. They're like five likes, you know?

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know.

• 1:32:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, you know, a plant of nature is that uh you know the blogger?

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, he had someone where he's like, but um he he just goes through like how many subscribers he has a graph and he's like, you see these big jumps? They're not like posts I spent a lot of effort on or something. They're just posts that happened to get featured on MR.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:32:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, you like my other like I I shouldn't be worrying too much about distribution. I mean. The question is if you, like, one part of me is like, oh, maybe I could, I, I, because what, every single time I read financial news, I'm like, no, I could improve on this. I could, I, I, I could do a five X better job at explaining this. Cause I know a lot of financial journalists and they're like, yeah, the, the, the job requires me to dumb things down. I'm like, no, you could do an intelligent one. I'm like, yeah. So every time I see these sort of things, I realize that you have a pretty clear take on between writing, yeah, I, I put it in a different way. When you grow on the internet, your, your audience shapes you as much as you shape them.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  So it is important not to write too many stupid things that go viral, because you will be incentivized to write stupid things that go viral. You have to play that, that better game of not writing stupid viral things. And so like, I refuse sometimes to write about popular things because I don't wanna, I, I, I, I don't, I don't want it to go viral. It is, it is, it is a, it is a liability than an asset because it's gonna be stupid and I'm gonna be known as, as, as the guy who did the, who, who, who did this, which is like, people say I'm a long bug, they say, you know, any, any attention is good attention or something like that. But I'm like, no, it's, you've got to be knowing the right thing. So. I don't know how to deal with that. I deal with it with not, with, with forcing myself to not put stupid things that go viral.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  I think your viral strategy was, wasn't stupid things that went viral, but I know that you know that you can let stupid things that, that go viral. Don't do it.

• 1:34:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  I did it myself.

• 1:34:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I didn't go viral exactly, but they, they were stupid. They, they ended up being a little more popular than my, uh, more thoughtful things.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  So what is your, uh, long-term plan as far as like the intellectual stuff goes? Like, are you planning on keeping up the blog and podcast?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yes, yes. At least for the next two years, at, at least till August twenty twenty three, I will, I'll keep doing this. And then it's like, I'll be, I'll, I'll be in college then, and it depends on the amount of, the amount of free time I have. And I'll probably keep it because it's my only way of socializing with people. So, yeah, it better stay.

• 1:34:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. You have like a surprising amount of leeway in like, I guess, in my experience of like, at least US colleges, just like, if you want to spend like sixty hours a week on your college work, you can. If you want to spend twenty hours, you can. And the difference is not going to be, or maybe, maybe it's smaller gradient, but there's ways to compress the amount of time you have to spend in college so you can work on the other stuff.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. I don't know. I want to go to the UK for the fact that, one, you have pretty short term, you have a lot more free time. And, two, I find it very humiliating to describe my entire life story to get into college. I'm sorry, please, just, just, just ask me, why, why do math? And, and, and, and let me in.

• 1:35:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, no, no, they're asking you to be cynical. And when they ask, it's like, you know, vague questions about like, oh, yeah, to tell us about what led you to this point in life? Where are you applying here? What is your life story?

• 1:35:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  The honest answer is you have a lot of, you have a strong credential, and I want that strong credential, right?

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  The answer is I like money.

• 1:35:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  So, yeah, here we go.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  That is, I like money, and you're my nicest path to getting that. And nobody likes that. And so I don't like the selection effect of selecting for people who can lie well. It's not going to end up well.

• 1:36:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  So, not like, on a, on a model level, I refuse to engage in.

• 1:36:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  Well, did you not apply? Like, what did you do for those kinds of questions?

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  I'm going to apply this September, so I'll find out.

• 1:36:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  But also, like, I optimized my life in high school for doing things I like. I was a guy who was in lunch and sitting in a corner with six books, and I read six books a week, so.

• 1:36:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  I I I wish I'd done that because like I ever in middle school like my mom was convinced I needed to become an Eagle Scout or like become a Boy Scout in order to like

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I'm like, I pretty much fed off all those kids. They're like, no, I can't play a tabla. I can't play the piano. I've I've I've I've probably Please, no, no, no. Just being incompetent at anything else is a good until until keeping your time.

• 1:37:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, yeah. No, I I I because I I like what you ended up doing in high school, I ended up doing in college. So if I did, basically, you had like a three or four year I'm twenty one, you're eighteen, so it's three year advantage on me in terms of this stuff, right?

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Which I which I wish I'd just done earlier.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  No, that's okay. You have a lot of time, a lot more than longevity works.

• 1:37:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes, yes. Let's hope for that. Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be taking some kind of drug right now, like metformin or something.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I think of that, but it's like kind of awkward to justify it to a pharmacist. They're like, this is a controlled. I'm like, yeah, I know. And like, did you have diabetes? Not exactly. What do you want it? Uh, why do they set it in time that he takes it?

• 1:37:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Yep.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  So that's okay. My answer is just run a lot and do weights and eat and eat healthy and whatever.

• 1:37:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, which I think I'm doing to at least some sort of reasonable extent. Yeah, dude, this was really interesting and fun. I mean, if there's a I'll I'll keep track on your Twitter and see what you're reading. And if there what another title comes up that I find interesting, maybe we can do this again.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, definitely. I'd love to do it.

• 1:38:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep. Awesome, man. Thanks a lot for your time.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  See you. See you. Bye.

• 1:38:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, hey, hold up. Sorry, sorry. Before we go, just to plug your stuff again. So you're on Twitter, your your handle, and you know, obviously, this will be in the this will be in the description.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's at Paudy Beshad.

• 1:38:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, and then with the P, both Ps with capital.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it doesn't matter.

• 1:38:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  It doesn't? Okay, I didn't know that. And then and then the bread and goods, that's with two Ts, dot substack dot com, and the same name for the bread and goods.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Podcast, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, but and you you've had some pretty notable guests on, right? So Matt Clifford, Bern Hoibert. Definitely worth checking out. Highly recommend.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:38:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yep. Awesome, man. Yeah, thanks for your time.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Thank you, bye.