Dwarkesh Patel

So it's a mistake to think about how expensive things seem at the moment.

It's just like another huge country that you've turned.

To try to add a different thesis on you.

Yeah.

Through this period, the Soviet Union is also trying to buy off other countries, especially when it thinks this economy can grow, and especially when oil... So after the 1973 oil crisis, oil prices...

just skyrocket and this is why some soviet citizens remember the brezhnev era favorably just that oil made it possible for um the soviets to not only import stuff but also to through the brezhnev for you it actually there's a net export of resources to eastern european satellites rather than the other way around that's probably their data

But the larger question being that it's not like the Soviet Union didn't think of doing things like the Marshall Plan.

Obviously, nothing to that extent.

But this idea that you can win people's favors by providing them military aid, providing them foreign aid.

It's just that they didn't have the resources to do it to the extent that the U.S.

could.

Mm-hmm.

Economics is such a big part of the story of why the Soviet Union fell apart that if you don't look at the numbers, you really can't understand this lecture.

There's this one slide that Sarah has that shows the yearly budget deficits and declines in GDP that you saw in the late 80s in the Soviet Union.

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.