Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I will say that, just drawing on what we were talking about a moment ago, that investing in institutions that work for the majority of your subjects, even if indirectly—like they have to pay a cost for them, but you have to explain to them why they’re paying that cost—is to the benefit of the ruling classes as well. Because you’re, you’re– ideally, you’re thinking about long-term success and not just your own short-term, you know, gain. And I think that’s what this society tends to do well. You know, the Romans generally, you know how they built roads for the centuries and the millennia. They built institutions too. You know, one of the institutions they built was, like, the Christian Church. Like, they build things to last. And I think that’s a, that’s a good lesson beyond even the roads. I think institutions that explain, you know, to people why they exist is… Yeah, I think we could we could use some of that. And also the first point you made about the East Roman Empire. I think you’ve said that US foreign policy sometimes has a, quite a large gap between the rhetoric and, in modern times, the rhetoric and the action. Oh, yeah. Yeah.…

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