Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedRecommends Shanghai and Beijing.
9 Nov 2023 Lex Fridman Podcast #400 – Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity
“I mean, I recommend somebody just go to Shanghai and Beijing, look at the buildings and go to take the train from Beijing to Xian, where you have the terracotta warriors.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Elon Musk
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 9 Nov 2023
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Maybe a good question to ask is, what are some things about China that people don’t understand, positive just in the culture? What’s some interesting things that you’ve learned about the Chinese? Well, the sheer number of really smart, hardworking people in China is incredible. There are really say how many smart, hardworking people are there in China? There’s far more of them there than there are here, I think, in my opinion. And they’ve got a lot of energy. So I mean, the architecture in China that’s in recent years is far more impressive than the US. I mean the train stations, the buildings, the high speed rail, everything, it’s really far more impressive than what we have in the US. I mean, I recommend somebody just go to Shanghai and Beijing, look at the buildings and go to take the train from Beijing to Xian, where you have the terracotta warriors. China’s got an incredible history, very long history, and I think arguably in terms of the use of language from a written standpoint, one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest written language, and then China, people did write things down. So now China historically has always been, with rare exception, been internally focused. They have not been inquisitive. They’ve fought each other. There’ve been many, many civil wars. In the Three Kingdoms war, I believe they lost about 70% of their population. So they’ve had brutal internal wars, civil wars that make the US Civil War look small by comparison. So I think it’s important to appreciate that China is not monolithic. We sort of think of China as a sort of one entity of one mind. And this is definitely not the case. From what I’ve seen and I think most people who understand China would agree, people in China think about China 10 times more than they think about anything outside of China. So it’s like 90% of their consideration is internal. Well, isn’t that a really positive thing when you’re talking about the collaboration and the future piece between superpowers when you’re inward facing, which is focusing on improving yourself versus focusing on quote, unquote improving others through military might.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.
Named in this claim