Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think it’s a country that incorporates different regions or areas around the world into sort of a giant sphere of influence without incorporating those territories actually into the state itself. So you had this thing called the British Empire and it controlled areas like India, North America, and Kenya, just to pick a couple instances at different points. Singapore would be another example. Australia would be another example. So these were all entities that were part of the British Empire and the United States has taken a stab at empire after the Spanish American War, for example, with regard to the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico, but we never got serious about it. There’s never been an American empire. This is not to say the United States is not an incredibly powerful country that goes all around the world building military bases and stationing troops here, there and everywhere, but we’re not running an empire the way the British Empire was run or the French Empire. So the question for me is why did those empires go away? Why did the British Empire go away? If you ever look at a map of the world in 1922 after World War I, it’s truly amazing how much of that map is controlled by Britain. They had a huge empire and it’s disappeared. Probably by far the biggest in terms of area empire in human history, I think so. I think that’s right. It almost has to be.…

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