Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…There is some truth in that, right? I mean, yeah, and words matter a lot. It feels our current President Biden is meeting with Xi Jinping, and I think the words exchanged there are really important. I have a notion that leaders can stop wars just as much as they can start wars. Well, leaders matter. There’s no question about that, no question, but just on rhetoric, you want to remember that Putin has on more than one occasion, very subtly rattled the nuclear sword, and it has been very effective because Joe Biden has paid attention, and Joe Biden wants to make sure we don’t end up in a thermonuclear war, and thank goodness he’s thinking that way. So all Putin has to do is mention the possibility of nuclear war. Just to go back to Taiwan, switch areas of the world. If you’re interested in containing China and you’re interested in deterrence, and let’s go back to those various scenarios where the Chinese win, we win, Chinese win, but they do it at great cost. One could argue that, that discussion that I laid out before it didn’t take into account nuclear weapons and all President Biden or any of his successors has to do is just very subtly rattle or employ the nuclear threat and just sort of remind the Chinese that you start a war over Taiwan, it could easily escalate into a nuclear war. You want to understand we both have nuclear weapons, and if either one of us is put into a desperate situation, we may turn to those nuclear weapons and oh, by the way, Xi Jinping, you want to understand that we’re out here in the water and using nuclear weapons in the water, it’s not the same as using war nuclear weapons on lands. So we may very well use them. I’m not saying we will, but anyway, a little saber rattling. Right?…

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