Dwarkesh Patel

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.

We'll work on it.

So there's a very interesting book about North Korea, I forget the title, where the author is pointing out that North Korea could not do... You couldn't even start doing reforms today because as soon as there was some sort of information...

from the outside world that North Koreans could see, which would be part of any reform, they would immediately realize that everything the government has told them is false, that South Korea is enormously wealthier, they have this terrible standard of living.

And obviously, this is the same experience that Eastern Europeans had, were literally, in many cases, a country that is, you know, this is the exact same country, it was just bisected in half, and the other half is living so much richer.

And in those situations, I guess this goes back to the question of, well,

today in North Korea, how would it even kick off if Kim Jong-un just had a change of heart or if somebody else came into power?