Dwarkesh Patel: recommendation

Transcript context

…Oh, no. I can make bad spelling errors in numerous languages. [Laughter] I read these things slowly with lots of large dictionaries. You say you've got my book, Wars for Asia, go take a look at the footnotes in the back. You'll see they're in Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Yeah. It is perhaps the best military history I've ever read. And also, I've really enjoyed your book on Japan, The Japanese Empire. And you also have these other textbooks and collections of essays, which I highly recommend because of the thorough nature and the diversity of sources. Let's actually talk about your research. Maybe tell me more about where you've done research around the world and throughout your different projects. Because I think people might not know the extent to which you've dug into the trenches on these over the years. I have co-edited a series of books on naval operations with my husband Bruce A. Elleman. United States is a maritime power. If you want to understand the maritime underpinnings of US security, go to those. Particularly a book on peripheral operations called Expeditionary Warfare, which is what we do. The expedition will be crossing the ocean to get there. And commerce rating and blockades which is a key to US foreign policy. And the problem is if you exercise a continental foreign policy, you're prone to get into all sorts of wars you don't need to get into. But because we have huge oceans that separate us from our problems, it's a major point of strategy of whether to intervene or not intervene. So it's important to understand the maritime position in the United States. So there are these maritime books that if you're interested in learning about that. They're not fun reads. [Laughter] But they exist. You were asking me about research. Back in the day, I spent a year in the Soviet Union, when it was, and then a year in PRC right after Tianmen was delayed for a year. That was quite exciting. There were armored trucks all around Beijing University, not to protect the students, but to neutralize them and then it happened. And then three years in Japan over the years and three years in Taiwan over the years of just reading deeply in the archives. Donald Rumsfeld has been much vilified as the former secretary of defense. But one of his quotations that I love is, he said he wasn't worried about the known unknowns because he'd go after those, but he's worried about the unknown unknowns. And that's why you do archival research. What is it that I know nothing about that is actually terribly important? So I did a bunch of archival research in Japan. That dries up after World War II, you can get into military archives and their foreign ministry archives, but then it's much less afterwards. Well, China and Russia, they've both closed down. There's no way I wouldn't go into either country at this stage.…

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