Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think he would appreciate it. I think Milei is a much more of an Austrian-inspired thinker, but I think he definitely appreciates Friedman. And on the macro level, Friedman always understood it’s really painful to treat inflation, but the more you put it off, the harder it is. So I think he would be trying to get him as he’s doing to just message that short-term pain, long-term gain. I think he’d be very supportive. I think he’d be thrilled to see, also, that Milei is very good at explaining these abstract ideas and putting his policies in the framework of the bigger picture. That was really meaningful to Friedman. I don’t know how politically persuasive it is overall. Milei’s very intense. He doesn’t have the same gifts of salesmanship and setting people at ease that say someone like Ronald Reagan had, but it seems to be that’s what his country was calling for right now. Yeah, he is more chainsaw-less, like warm blanket. Javier recollects this line from Milton Friedman. I don’t know if this is accurate, but “If you strive for equality over freedom, you often get neither. But if you strive for freedom, you often get both.” You think there’s truth to this? I think on the big picture, definitely. We’ve seen focusing too much on equality can be… Because equality is such an alluring word, it can lead you to downgrade all kinds of other things that are really important. But I really think it depends on how you’re defining freedom. The statement is too big and too broad, right? So, if by freedom you mean not having to pay taxes if you’re successful, that can have all kinds of knock-on effects. The idea that people are able to prosper when they’re educated. Where is education going to come from? How is that going to be paid for and supported? And again, to go back to Knight, if you’re generating too much inequality or people are feeling that you’re generating too much inequality, sometimes they value that more than they value freedom, and so I think there has to be more of a balance, and it’s hard to make such global statements. You have to break them down into what actually do you mean. But again, Milei is coming from a very different context, a very different country that has seen so much upheaval, so much government intervention, so much inflation, so much political turmoil. He’s probably thinking about it differently than Friedman was thinking about it.…

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