Dwarkesh Patel

And the numbers show just how massive the oil bust actually was.

But you can't tell this just from a glance at a table.

So we wanted a way to visualize the data to make the trends super clear when we released the episode.

Google's image generation tool, Nano Banana Pro, has been extremely useful for this.

In this case, we just took a screenshot of this slide from Sierra and asked Nanobanana to make line graphs from it.

And it did it perfectly.

Of course, oil wasn't the only reason the Soviet Union fell apart.

Another big reason was the Sino-Soviet split.

The border between China and Russia is enormous, and it took a massive percentage of the Soviet Union's GDP to defend it.

We found this helpful map of the 69 border conflict on Wikipedia, but it's dense and hard to read if it's just on screen for a few seconds.

So again, we just had Nano Banana clean it up.

And now it's much easier to see the border itself and also where some of the fighting took place.

You can try Nano Banana Pro now in the Gemini app.

Go to gemini.google.com to get started.

All right, back to Sarah.

Okay, here's what I don't understand about the arms buildup during the Cold War.

So the Soviet Union is spending, I think, 2% of their GDP just on nuclear weapons alone at its peak.

And arms control advocates will make this quip, which is that, look, we've already got enough weapons to destroy the world many times over.

Why do we need more?

But that is sort of an interesting question.