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Pradyu Prasad

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2022-04-27

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2022-04-27

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1. “Thing with the US is a lot of its economic potential is put into stock by stupid regulations, zoning nuclear regulations, and there's a whole Twitter universe dedicated to exposing them. I'm going to spend time on those. The thing is...”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The two guys running, and there's a pair, and only one guy has to outrun the other. The first thing is, the nice part of being the largest consumer for your largest trading partner is if you cut your taps off, Hurt you a little bit, it's gonna hurt them a lot where they're gonna get the resources to start to reindustrialize again, right? The Chinese state-run economy is not known for its efficiency. The second thing is if we need to, if the West needs to take it absolutely always rearm very, very quickly, it will be painful, right? Your software engineers who spend maybe 40% of the time working will be forced to work in some stupid factory that makes javelins, but regardless of the annoyance of it, it will, it will happen. Finally, Dan Wang has the best critique of this. He says that apps don't win wars and he's right about it.”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “It's exactly what it sounds like it's an autonomous vehicle that's underwater. It's like you take a drone that can swim. Initially in the war, human intelligence is going to be very important. And now there'd been some pretty embarrassing parts for the US on this. in 2015 there was a the Chinese hack of the DHS employee database was very embarrassing because yeah and then you know a lot of CIA assets in China mischief disappeared in the years after that so sucks but I also think that the industrial capacity argument goes like this you know america's outsourced manufacturing to china if you have a war with china they're not going to sell it to us and they won't be able to do it my answer is uh there's sort of like these story where”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I think that industrial capacity is overrated. Please, it's 22. First thing being, right, a lot of initial war is going to be very high tech. You've got to have underwater drones and like”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “To people, so there's no question that you would have a similar scenario. UK plus EU GDP is like 31 trillion and China plus Russia is like 40 trillion maybe. I don't know. I'm just ballparking numbers here, but China plus Russia's GDP is like maybe 30 trillion. I can guarantee you this 40 trillion is a lot more productive than this 30 trillion because a lot of it is just for all the chaos that the American economy goes through the chaos makes it more productive. So you got to have you have a lot less ghost cities and a lot less corruption on this end of the new Cold War.”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “On the US. So a lot of those countries, so in a short term concept, you would obviously be depending on only American defense because the only power ready to wage war in like 15 minutes time. But in a 15 month, no other grouping of countries can match what the West has now just because the West is technologically superior. So maybe in the time span of like six months to 12 months, you would see a lot of Chinese advances, but in the timestan of 12 months plus, it would be very quick for the West to rearm and sense of complex sense here about wars. All the wars, they fought on the Middle East very far away, right? The moment it starts hitting you, right? The moment you have bombs flying on their head, you're like, it becomes a lot more real.”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “No, I agree. So, to what extent would it like that? I think the first thing is that in a short term conflict, you would have the US outmatched in every single thing, right? Not because of the US, but it's US plus EU. And thing is, so if you tell somebody in 1922 at 100 years later, the EU is like what we call ya today is disarmed, they would laugh at you. This is historically not the norm for European countries to not spend illogical amounts of their economy on defense, right? It's because they fight a lot and now they're fighting a lot again. So it's a conflict continent. So basically, I find that very, like the moment you attack the US, you are also more or less attacking with or without NATO a lot of countries depending.”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Wasn't a tenth, actually. I'm not sure you got the numbers of them, but I have a book, I hope, and colleagues. And it's around 40%. Yeah, US was 5,800 something, Japan was 2700 something. That sounds”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Was doing some work on this last week. Allied GDP was almost always greater than GDP for the entire of the war, not counting colonies of either. And for majority of the war, the Allies had a GDP twice that of the Axis powers. So they were very, very stupid. It would be like what's a good analogy here. It would be like Denmark going to war with UK. Like maybe you'll capture a bit of Scotland. But swear to God, once the UK starts rearming, there's no way you could quit.”

   2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Directing a level of RMN towards the 1980s, right? They will overpower Russia in every single margin. So will he do that? I don't think so. But I think the main objective right now for Western policymakers should be get Putin to save face and back out without pushing into a corner. Are they going to push him into a corner? I don't think so. It can be very bad for people living in Russia now. So far he's not as stupid as to go and invade Poland or Estonia or literally go to the Netherlands and kill the NATO Secretary General. That would suck a lot because it's World War III. I'm stuck in Singapore sort of halfway between the East and the West sucks for me. But I doubt the analogy applies because they're not captured enough by the Mezzi for the rest of the government to care.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Going to go with slightly higher than the base aid, very low with small possibility. So does the analogy apply? Probably not. Japan was a militant country in the sense that you don't see the level of elite capture you had in Japan today in Russia, right? It just didn't exist back then, exist as it is now. So that's your first problem. The second problem is Russia wants Ukraine and it knows through historical experience colonel. He knows that what are the costs of a protracted level of military tension with the US and it's very, very obvious to anyone watching here right now that if the EU decides to rearm and the US continues, just continues its current level of armament.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “They'd be very stupid to do that, but historically, Putin's actions have been more stupider. So you can't model him through the actual actor model. To what extent is the analogy apply to much less extent? The first thing is Russia can, okay, actually it does apply, but in a different way, Russia is dependent on the Western world, not in terms of oil. They have a lot better than themselves, but in terms of things like, you know, tentative shops, Nazi have shut down because the clouds and bitches and the sort of stuff you need to do to make fillings are made in Germany and the US, they may depend on the sort of like highly specialized small scale things. And you can't find that outside the West. So yeah, are we going to have another war? Are they going to escalate it? Base rate says very low.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I mean, science to a small extent because it was considered a noble subject or engineering, right? If you ask him a question, the answer to which I learned in seven theater, how do you expect islands? He probably wouldn't know it. He wouldn't be able to think to model through those things. So the problem was no economy was prepared for total war because it never done it before, but Japan was the first country to say, yeah, let's do it. And they pay the price for it.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Purpose and people like people make the joke that Amazon and Walmart essentially planned economies and it's half a joke because in World War II when the US needed central planning it didn't it didn't it didn't go to the department of commerce it went to it went to Ford and GM and said we have like a five times bigger version of UN we need your managers to run this because you're the only people who know how to But Japan didn't have that sort of experience the Japanese planning board you know it talks about there were various problems supplies didn't come and like is here either responsible for this and he didn't in the end the emphasis is responsible but but also because the guy couldn't do it he didn't have the tools to do it and the reasons for that I'm much deeper than Hilarito himself is that if you read through the first part of the book Hilarito didn't have much of an education in economics or science”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “It's a civil war, but the difference between a conventional war and a civil war in a conventional war, determining rebellion didn't have much organization. It would just keep going and killing each other. There was no admunitions factory that said this month we're going to make x thousand guns soldiers need to fight it. Compare that to World War II, you had the prizes, you had a bunch of lots of economic planning in the US very successfully managed to say we have to make these many guns and these many bombs to fight the German and Japanese, right? But that sort of thing was very underdeveloped in a very different aside, a big problem with having your in not having high level manufacturing like America had with automobiles is that you don't in wartime, what is useful is being able to coordinate large amounts of resources to their desired”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “The first thing was no country had ever dealt with total war before in East Asia, right? Wars used to happen in East Asia, obviously, but they were sort of like the European wars before World War I. You sent a few people to fight and you fight there and you lose. Well, it sucks. But you never mobilized your entire economy. There will be a new type of war, which you wasn't.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “In the high 90s, and it sounded like wanted to make synthetic oil, but that didn't work very well. The history of countries thinking they can make their own all this kind of funny because Deng Xiaoping almost like 30 for 40 years after this thing told his cabinet that China would finance its industrialization because it had some oil plans and it kind of didn't work out because you know it took out a bit resources to make oil which China didn't have and Japan didn't have it at that point of time anyways that aside that that aside aside you basically have mistake number two was pissing off the the US and so you know it though you know to what extent was the emperor responsible for this I don't here's where I will put my structural hat on and tell you that etho ETO was not prepared to deal with these challenges”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And trying to stop them. Japan, so mistake number two was pissing off the Americans, right? The problem with pissing off the Americans almost all the time is that almost all of Japanese oil imports came from America, right? Saudi Arabia wasn't a thing back then. So all of Japanese oil imports came from America.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Right, so they did that, and then the problem is you can't really, China doesn't have much oil, Japan doesn't have much oil, and all that oil was imported from the US. All the atrocities in China led to very bad publicity in the US, you know, American public opinion on China, especially because the answer historically for governments has been don't piss off the church too much. And Japanese governments didn't know about that because, well, they were their version of the church. But the Japanese atrocities in East China led to American missionaries in China going to America and reporting it to the American public. The American public got very outraged by it. So by 1930s, you had this sort of like mini movement among the more religious people saying, we should not have American resources involved in the Japanese village of China. And so there was a lot of domestic pleasure on the American.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “But they didn't do that, they just walked into Japan. That was mistake number one. The problem with walking into China in the 1930s, I said Japan earlier, my dad. Problem with walking into China in 1930s is that it's a war that pisses off a lot of people, right? So Hirita Mikhail of Marjal mentions it. The Americans were quite outraged by it because it was the what would be called the neutral China principle. All colonial powers would be completely fair in using Chinese resources for their own industrialization, a very moderately poetic to say, but that's how morality was that whatever, okay. And so the point was this pissed off the Americans and the British and the French. And it's useful to have powerful friends, especially when your end goal is world domination.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Yeah, it's very then in mineral and so on. And the original plan was that they would use their resources in Manchuria for doing it. Now why did they want to use their resources in Manchuria in general? The answer is that Japanese military planners saw this the model they built their government the entire thing including trade policy and everything was imperial Germany The problem was imperial Germany lost World War I so they did this entire sort of like self-reflection period why did they lose World War I? The answer was imperial Germany really never had the resources to win World War I they were blockaded by the by the British and so on right so their answer was we're going to get Manchuria and we're going to use it so any future wars we don't we don't lose it finally if you don't want to lose any future wars a good way of not losing war is to not get into ones you can't win and”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Japanese, maybe wanted to be irrelevant, they just kept like nudging provoking the Chinese into attacking them. So what the plan was we will use our assets in Manchuria to fight the Soviet Union and we need Manchuria because to protect our assets in Korea, a sort of early 20th century version of domino theory. And then they did that.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Okay, so basically Japan was really, really scared of a war with the Soviet Union for obvious reasons. They're their largest neighbor and they were getting richer under Lenin and Stalin because transformations of agriculture to industrial made every single country rich. The problem was Japan was smaller with lesser people and obviously they would have lesser ammunition and military power during a war. So Japanese war planning said, okay, we're going to plan for a war with the Soviet Union. Naturally, if you're going to plan for a war with the Soviet Union, you should plan for the war with the Soviet Union. You should not plan for a war with China or with the Philippines or with America or with Malaya, right? But what they did in the 1930s was they said, oh, we have this and public choice problems forced them into entering China. And the Japanese army wanted to be relevant.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “So, a few things about that, right? So a lot of it, there's a question in way thinking about history is how much of it is contingent on structural forces and how much of it is contingent on actual people and foreign policy is one of the three places of history where things are contingent on actual people. And one of those actual people was Hilohito. The problem with Hilohito was that even as a child he was very mild mannered his tutors describe him as, you know, he wouldn't win any debates. He was a very good public speaker.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “And then the last, I'm quite annoyed, are you our ambassador to them or are you their ambassador to us? And it's the same problem with the army minister being part of the army. Is he representing the civilian government or the army? Nobody knows. And that led to a sort of elite capture of the civilian government by the army. There's another great book. I forgot the title, but it was discussed on China talk a lot, and basically explains that the army took control of the entire civilian government basically said, you got to prepare for total war. Why? Because we said so. They reorganized the functions of government a lot to achieve this objective.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “So that's a maintained civilian control on the military. And a lot of countries don't do very well on that, right? To go on a sort of a tangent, Pakistan is one of those places where you have very poor civilian control on the military. So the military just keeps like doing stuff and the government is forced to react to it than in most Western democracies the other way around. The crazy Western does something and the military is like, whoops, now we're now in this war and we gotta deal with it. In Japan, the problem was your army ministers were well part of the army. They weren't representing the civilian government. They were representing the army. Give an example. It's a funny thing. The Indian ambassador, so in the 1960s, India was having high tensions with China, which ended up in a war in 1962. I think it was VK Menon, who was India's ambassador to China. And VK Men came and told Nehru, you know, this happened, that happened. Chinese won this and Chinese won that.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “No, no. You have to have a five year gap or something, and if you don't meet that gap, you have to get a waiver from Congress.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “A few things here, right? The first thing is that Japan had a very unique constitutional mod as far as it could be called a constitutional model, which was just ad hoc as a big problem in people's understanding of history is that they just don't realize that a lot of times big events are just some guy deciding things. And so a lot of these things end up exactly as you would expect some guy who end up deciding them. And so the big problem here is that, well, the way the Japanese constitution was designed was that the civilian government elected by men with property, I don't remember the exact details, they had control only over every part of the government except the military. And most countries, like in the US, you have a requirement that all defense secretaries should not have served in the military, or if they have served, there has to be a five-year sector.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “My entire understanding of the book was that it could have been written by any public choice theorist and would have ended up the same. So let's think of it this way. The Japanese army was powerful historically from the 1860s. They fought a war in 1905. They were always scared the Soviet Union after it was formed was going to invade.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “That Japan you see today is mostly artificial in the sense that it is an artifact of the Americans jumping in and putting a gun to the Japanese capital and saying you better accept the constitution we make. And some parts of the Japanese left really liked it. Some parts didn't. But they basically forged a coalition of only people who liked it and old people from the old regime who were willing to accept the new reality. So norms can change quick, but when they do, they change with the power of a gun, not by some internal organic process. Ask your question of why was there so much atrocity? You are correct in saying that norms didn't change, but I also think that public choice theory is what explains a lot of Japanese war crimes across the 1900s. I mean, the entire early 20th century, right?”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Of scholar stage is a very good essay on honor culture versus the spec versus justice. I'm paraphrasing here. But overall, less industrialized societies have strong patriarchal cultures because for better or worse, it's the men who end up doing the work and they got more of the spec and there's a lot of debate and literature about more or less my understanding of it, right? So you're right that the norms don't catch up. But I think you're wrong that even in the West the norms didn't catch up for a long time, right? Think of colonialism. Only very, very few people in the House of Commons thought they should impeach one hastings for his atrocities in East India to the East India company. So obviously it's not only in Japan that norms didn't catch up. It's almost everywhere that norms didn't catch up. Norms take a lot of time to catch up. And in Japan, well, the first thing.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “To make all the full gaps that the Americas had, and by around the 1910s and 1920s, they got rich enough to project their power onto the rest of East Asia by 1905 they fought a war with Dussia and then in 1950 around the same time they invaded China and then later they were China again They just didn't deal with the sudden transitions being a power that is coerced by the Americans by a power coercing other countries”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Exactly, a very undated measure of leader competence is how close to reality are you. And you see, like, to skip to 2022 today, right? You saw it over the last two years where leaders were more in touch with reality, respond faster to COVID, got better vaccines, tightened up faster, but also opened up faster. So basically the Japanese elite in the 1860s was a lot more than touch with reality than other countries. And so they knew they were forced to open up. The next part of it was they opened up and they opened up quick. They got American industries to come set up in Japan and they basically, a lot of the history of economic development is also the history of intellectual piracy. It just had what is euphemistically called force technology transfers so they can learn.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Makes you see the realities of life much easier. One explanation provides small countries would have better economic policy than large countries is that if you're a small country, the realities of life are very often more in your face. So when Japanese elites saw the American ships coming, they're like, whoops, you know, we can't afford to be irrational anymore about it. And they were forced to modernize. Compare that to a lot of East Asia where they either could live in their own alternate reality. For example, Indian kings and the Qing dynasty in China, you know, the Japanese were just forced to deal with reality a lot faster.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Mean I'm not a very good source on this because I try to avoid the historic cliffy of this because it's for the too many details. Reemerged, they actually had a small civil war, and it so happened. I mean, this is just an accident of luck that the winners of the civil war happened to be the ones who wanted to open up and make Japan great again. So one part is that the second thing is being a small island nation really.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Other rich countries is to take all capitals from the rich countries, copy their innovations, and use all their knowledge on how to get rich, to get rich yourself, and then start to slowly push away on their hegemony. And the results of it are somewhat mixed. The US did okay as well, Japan didn't do well, and we're seeing it with China now.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “The main difference between the pre 1868 Japan, which was the worst called the Tokugunate and Emiji and the Meiji era, was that Japan had a lot more centralized power. There was one king running the place instead of feudal lots all over. Japan was a lot more open to the rest of the world, you know. There was the death penalty for Japanese who interacted outside of Japan during the talk about struggling very, very brutal in today's words. And Japan basically did what would be called the holy trinity of industrialization. It had open labor markets, government investment, and basically allowed falling capital to come in. And so across East Asia and across parts of Africa, like Botswana and to a smaller extent, South Africa and Nigeria, the best way to get rage historically for countries when they're already”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Anocracy constitutional law isn't well done, and much more so for Japan. But here in Italy could have done something he did not. He chose to be a constitutional monarch. So anyways, the book was well written towards the end, poorly written towards the start. I think the difference between a collection of events and a biography is a story and there was no story at the start. So I think that could have been much improved. But I also think that it's very hard to find people who read through original language sources, in this case Japanese into very small extent Chinese in English, and then put it into English. So I think the author deserves a lot of commendation for that.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “It says that Hirigito was a constitutional monarch, but he was a constitutional monarch because he chose to be a constitutional monarch. So yeah, in theory, on paper, he couldn't do it. It's one of those things where Japanese constitutional law wasn't very well done.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “He was the third emperor after the Meiji restoration. He was the first one to see Japan as an international power. He was the first and last one to handle it as an international power. And yeah, was a guy responsible for a lot of stuff that happened in East Asia across the mid-20th century.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “What am I going to do with it? At the moment, I'm working on a bunch of stuff on the reserve currencies. It has been an obsession of mine for a very long time. So all the readings going to end up in writing at some point. On the longer term, I want to have a blog where I can answer every single economic history question or economics question. I don't know the answer to. And nobody else has the answer to. I can answer it here. So pretty much going to be a mini encyclopedia of questions I'm interested in.”

    2022-04-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source