Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Well A, this institutional rivalry is terrible all over the place. Alright, more concepts that are useful: It's really helpful in looking at people when you have disagreements with them, to ask: who is their primary adversary or rival? Not their secondary - they probably have a whole list of people who annoy them - but who's the number one? And then, where is the primary theater of wherever that disagreement is? Look at that. And then, on the disagreement, how big a deal is it? Is it existential? Japan thought- the reason it was undeterrable, that we didn’t figure out- they thought their entire existence was at stake, that they absolutely had to have territory in China to survive. Now, whether that's correct or not is a completely different story. If they believe it, that's what's motivating them. 02:05:00 So, on these, when you're looking at the war on the Allied side, who's the primary enemy? Hitler. Where's the primary theater? Germany. Even though there's Japan, it was Germany first. And what about the ultimate goals? Well, actually, that doesn't align at all because the Russians want a communist wonderland, we want everyone decolonized, and the British want the empire on which the sun never sets. But they all shared an intermediate objective that Hitler has to go, and that's a superglue of an alliance. Now, let's flip it to the Axis. Okay, Italy, what does Italy want? Roman Empire, whatever it is. So, who's the primary enemy? Well, Britain, because that's where British interests are. Okay, Hitler, what's he all about? He wants to do his Lebensraum, Nazi wonderland all over Eurasia. So, who's his primary enemy? That would be Russia. 02:06:04 Japan, what do they want? They want the big Japanese empire. Who's their primary enemy? It's China. And then when they get us in, they got a whole new problem in their hands. None of this aligns, and so the Axis aren't going to be trading many resources with each other, whereas the Allies... and it really goes back to your original question about the British. Part of their way of running wars is you absolutely coordinate with allies. You give them serious resources, which is what they finally figured out at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, where they're paying big money to support different allies, and then you've got to put skin in the game, actually send your armies. So the British, and we take this from them, we're students of the British on this, do massive sharing with Lend-Lease. And Stalin isn't sharing too much with us. And then we've got the unified commands with the British because they're all about doing that. The Russians won't even let us on their territory to do things. And there are only little bits with the Arctic convoys going up to Murmansk, and it's hardly anyone who's up there. This is a different cultural tradition on how to deal with things. All right, we've come full circle. I think that's a great place to close things. This was excellent. Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you for coming.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.