Dwarkesh Patel

They just don't shoot.

Okay, this is what I wanted to ask you about.

So you had the Tocqueville quote about how revolutions happen when governments start to institute some kind of reform.

Gorbachev is doing perestroika, glasnost, and there's the conservative reactionary part to the Communist Party, which, by the way, is a phrase I wouldn't expect to have said, but...

Um, they're, uh, they're trying to resist this.

And so Gorbachev goes about dismantling the party secretariat, um, and instead devolving power down to the individual republics.

And we know what happens later is that these republics are say, look, we want our own country now.

But this raises the question of, OK, if you do inherit a brutal regime and now you say, I want to do reforms and you know this dynamic that De Tocqueville pointed out, which is as soon as you start reforms, actually what tends to happen is that you lose power, not that people people consolidated under you.

What actually should you do?

Right.

Because you're like, I want to improve people's lives.

But as soon as you try to do that, the whole thing's going to fall apart.

I do think there's an interesting lesson here of whenever we look at a country from the outside, we have this thing of like, well, just reform everything and just fix your economy.

And whenever we understand the system better, for example, in the United States, healthcare is 20% of GDP.

And this idea that

Trump or Obama or Biden, whoever could just come in and be like, well, I'll just fix health care.

We recognize that this is a wildly implausible thing to happen.

But then we have this expectation that in Russia, Gorbachev or Yeltsin could have just been like, this is 100 percent of my economy is messed up and I'm just going to fix it.

I think there should be big deductions for podcasts.

It should count as research and development.