YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Paine

lines on the record: 145
first: 2025-01-16
most recent: 2025-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“As I go put, put reading and archives, and then others can skim it and see if there's anything worthwhile. If not, I tried, right?”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's going to be looking at all the strategies that the Russians play, that we played, what medium flowers played, and what worked and what didn't. And it's going to be organized around concepts to understand these things. So on the one level, if I can do it right, it'll be a history of the Cold War from one year to another year. So there's that. And then there's another one about strategy. Okay, people are trying to achieve objectives and they're trying different things and integrating different elements of national power, so it'll be that. And then what I found helpful in my own career are these concepts like limited and unlimited war or primary adversary, primary theater, or frozen conflict or veto player. I find these things helpful. And so I'm going to put as many of those things in there as possible. And I'm of a certain age. So it's passing the baton to the next generation. This is what I've managed to figure out.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slowly. Oh, I've been working on it for years. It'll be a culmination of previous research. Starts in 1917, it will end in 1991-ish. Why 1917 is we may not have noticed that these crazy communists in Russia were serious, but they did declare war on the capitalist order. It is really clear the documentation is just there. And they were trying to fund people to overthrow governments in Europe all around the world immediately. This is in the teens and then certainly in the 20s. So just because they weren't remotely powerful enough to do it, but they were like, what is it, a Maoist phase one insurgency where people aren't paying attention? They're like below the radar, but they're doing stuff.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The orphans, a lot of them were put into orphanages and then they wound up being set up to join the KGB in other places. So probably some of the execution battalion people, I don't know the details, but there's some of that going on. And the cruelty in Russia was remarked by Europeans who are traveling there in the, I don't know, 17th century. So it goes back a long time about the level of Peter the Great back in the day, he tortured his son to death. Who does that? He didn't have a replacement son either.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then maintaining So it's if you look at their language, it's so coercive. And I think probably if you're living in a really dangerous piece of real estate, which they are, no defensible boundaries, so you're always fighting people, and their answer to surviving that is to be meaner than anybody else. And they just do scorched earth. You mess with them. They kill everybody. And they just don't care. And, okay, you want to, we have the modern world now, where we can deal with each other with international law. So none of that stuff is necessary. But the Russians have not pulled from that tradition. And you can read the newspaper how absolutely cruel they are to their men in service, right? They don't allow any of them to retreat. They've got the execution battalions behind them. So any kid who turns around, they're immediately murdered by their compatriots. Who treats their own people like this?”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know the answer, but I know I've just recently read the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I should have read it years ago when it came out, but I didn't. So I finally read it. And if you read that, look at the level of cruelty. It's mind-blowing. It isn't simply that the prisoners are mean to each other or that the prison guards are mean to the prisoners or the guards are mean to each other. All that's true. And it's not simply that the civilians outside of the gulag are mean to everybody. It's family members who are mean to people who are in the gulag. The neighbors are mean to the family members who have anyone who's in the gulag. And you start looking at going, who's not being mean in this place? They're all being mean. And then you look at, oh, then I haven't got the list of all the words, but then I was reading a lot of Russian stuff last winter.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also thought I don't want to be sunning the United States. That's where I'm from. And I want to learn about other countries. Also, my presumption is my bias would be pretty bad about the United States or things I wouldn't see. I'm going to study other places because I don't have any family ties. I mean, I'm not a descendant of Russian immigrants or Chinese or Japanese immigrants, obviously. So these are places that I'm not related to and just curious.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I grew up during the height of the Cold War and listened to family dinner time conversations all about it. And then you listened to people describing the Russians as being totally evil. And I thought, well, I'll learn more about this. I'm curious. And then I realized, whoa, it's just unbelievable how cruel the Russians have been to each other and others. It's like they're a class by themselves. I don't make it up. And then the question is why and learning more about it. And then I in history you do a minor field as well. And I think the typical minor field for Russian history would be French or German. I thought, no, I want to learn about China. And just curious and then learn about China and then I realized that Russia and China have relations, but then Japan always weighs in. So then I had to learn more about Japan. So that's where all of that led.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of anybody's. We're just professors as we teach mid-level and senior officers and then most of them never become flag rank or the kind of leaders you're thinking about. So, I mean, I've talked to the occasional flag officer, but I'm just a minion.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not all my colleagues publish much of anything, so it varies. The Naval War College has always had a few very A-less people, and the most famous person by far every work there is Alfred Ther Mahan. And he's 19th century. Well, he dies early 20th century. But he's the guy who when the United States had been doing manifest destiny continental paradigm because we're expanding, taking territory all the way to the Pacific. And he's the guy who says, hmm, you know, power and position of the world really is about trade. He writes these enduring books that have lasted to the president. So there are these occasional people like Alfred Thayer, Mahan, who are very special. And as for some...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's your class been like? They're wonderful people. And also, I don't look at people like linear. I just, it's a classroom. It has wonderful people in there. They're the next generation. And I will do everything I can for every single one of them to catapult them as far forward as I possibly can. So that's what it is.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess the idea, because I wasn't doing women's history, and this was a serious topic that women don't do serious topics. So I guess I'm glad I did it. So it looks like I'm a Briton, right? Because Britons love all the initials. And then why do I have all the initials? It's because my dad named all of, from his side of the family are my three older brothers, and there's me and my mom felt that some names from her family ought to be Dumped on me, and so since there were three older brothers, anyway, she had a lot of extra names going around. So she gave them to me. And I had no say in this.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While it's interesting, when I first started out, I just wanted my books to be read by what the content of the book was. I didn't want it to be read whether I was male or female. Just read it for being a book. And then when the first reviews came out, it was he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he. By Americans doing this. And I thought, wow.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 million people die. It doesn't, although the effect on Russia is to overthrow the government. In fact, it winds up overthrowing one government after another. I think as that war goes on and as that you lose a lot of people, then you start, then the objectives become more unlimited, whereas like originally it was just get back into German territory after a while is no, we want to overthrow your government for doing this.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's limited or unlimited. Well, it's useful in warfare to think about limited versus unlimited objectives. So if you look at Ukraine today, Putin has one of the most unlimited kinds of objectives from Ukraine. He not only wants to topple the Ukrainian government, but he wants to eliminate Ukrainian culture. And if you look up genocide in the dictionary, genocide can mean kill everybody, but it can also mean destroy their culture. That also applies to genocide. So Putin has a very unlimited objective. Kiev, on the other hand, does not have an unlimited objective. I mean, as much as they like Putin to go, they just... They want Russia to get out of Ukraine, right? Just get out of Ukrainian territory, stay in Russia. That's their objective. So the Ukrainians have a limited objective. Putin has an unlimited objective.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the other, he takes that, and the French never forgive him, and that leads into World War I later. But by the time it's over, he's overthrown the balance of power in Europe. that all of a sudden Prussia, which was the weakest of five great powers, suddenly has a central position, the Germanic states, and it owns the whole thing. And Britain and others who'd been asleep at the switch, like because they could have weighed in on the scale at any point in these things.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once a Danish war, no one thinks too much about it. Prussia gets an extra province as part of Denmark, no big deal. But then he fights the Austro-Prussian war. And then what he's after is there are all these little Germanic states, and Austria had dominated a bunch of them. And in that war, a whole bunch of them as a result of that war He collects a whole bunch of these other states. And no one is really paying attention that he's actually upending the balance of power in Europe. They're just looking at it. It's limited. He's not toppling the Austrian government. He's not toppling the Danish government. And then he fights the Franco-Prussian War where he takes Alsace-Lorraine, which are these provinces. If you look at it, it's like a salient into one country.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Limited and unlimited objectives. Yeah, Bismarck does illustrate that. An unlimited objective is the simplest way to look at it is regime change. So if I have an unlimited objective against you, I win the war. You're going to be out of power. versus I win the war and yeah, you lose a province, but you'll be in power. So what Bismarck does, he's very clever. Well, he's operating in an age of kings and actually his achievements illustrates why you truly don't need royal families running the show. It's breathtakingly incompetent. So initially he fights the Danish war. So that's way up north. And it's over these two provinces. And he wants to set his fingers on the scale of the more northerly province because then that'll give him the rights to march troops, I think, through the more southerly one to cause problems later. So war number one.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's hard. Well, also because the way they define civilization, there's only one everybody else are barbarians. People come and kowtow to China. Okay, great, but this doesn't set you up to learn from others.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas, and of course, that's nonsense because they were conquered by Manchus and actually absorbed a lot of Manchu institutions, but that's not the story they're telling. Whereas the Japanese are well aware they're absorbing Chinese institutions originally, Western institutions later. And so that isn't anathetical to who the Japanese are.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communism is a really lousy system, so they did that. In the 19th century, they have all these peasant rebellions where they're literally losing tens of millions of people that are just devastating the country. So that's why the 19th century is a lost century of all of that going on. So it's hard. And then there's another piece that's hard for the Chinese. If you've been such a successful civilization in Asia the way they had been, they were the center of everything culturally, science, governmental institutions. You name the area of human achievement. And the Chinese were at the top of it all in Asia, with that kind of success, it's pretty hard to reform yourself. And so they also fed themselves the Kool-Aid that the Chinese never absorb foreign ideas. It was always foreigners absorbed there.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have some alien army come and just open all the vaults and take everyone's money. So there are these institutional things. And then the British trading countries like the Dutch Empire want to have, to be able to trade in peace. So they want people just follow laws. So it's not surprising that the founding father of international law is a member of the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius. And so it's all, it's this gravitation the Romans are gravitating towards law and institutions and then these competing places so no one controls. I think the question is why do these what's special about Europe rather than why it should have been somewhere else?”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tremendous innovation, and you look at things long prior like Michelangelo and things, Leonardo da Vinci. It's just a lot of these really bright people. Oh, yeah, it's my guess. It's related to all of this. And I think the Industrial Revolution doesn't begin in England. And the Industrial Revolution isn't strictly industry. Yeah, it's about textiles and steam engines and railroads and things, but it's also about institutions. One of the big things for the British was insurance, so that when you do your trading vessel and the whole thing sinks, you don't bankrupt all your investors because you've got that boat insured. And then banking, banking rules, so you can't just rip off everybody's cash. And so Britain, because it's surrounded with the moat, becomes a banking center because it's unlikely in a war.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of trade going on. And then it was no one's ever been able to make a big empire in Europe stick. The Romans did quite well for quite a bit of time. Napoleon tries, not so good. Nazis not so good at all. And I guess the French tried on and off and it didn't succeed. So you have all of these competing countries. And I think a lot of that was essential to the Industrial Revolution of having you're focusing on commerce and you've got a lot of competing places. So you don't have one big empire that can just sit there, be fat, dumb, and happy, that you have to innovate in order to survive against all these other little states.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are whole books on the subject that I haven't read that look into this, but I would flip it around and go well, the industrial revolution starts in Europe. That's the unusual thing. So the question isn't why China didn't, but why Europe did? And I have some guesses, but they're really very thoughtful books on this subject. You can go find them and have fun reading them. But if you look at Europe, it's a peninsula and then it's got the Mediterranean there. And so the Europeans, and they've got quite a very good river system.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you mean Joe and Lai absolutely got the oxide chin plateau? Yeah, he offered the deal to Nehru. Nehru wouldn't take it. It's like, okay. I don't think you can say both have nuclear weapons. I don't think that kind of play is probably the play to make. But as long as Putin's desperate for whatever ordinance and other things, Putin's getting himself into a grand old corner.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been able to be negotiation of just you get them in a corner and say, okay, buddy, this is what we want, this, this, this, this. And then he'll want some things from them.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the question of whether the she Putin bromance is going to end, it's when. And I assure you the Chinese will pick the moment that is least convenient for Putin.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, they still played. It's interesting. Putin has Russia lost the Soviet Union's fractured at precisely the time that China's rising. So during the Cold War, China's really weak and Russia's in the dominant position. Well, I guess that's reversed. So Putin is dumping all his ordnance on Ukraine. His Cold War stockpile. And he is leaving Siberia open, wide open to Chinese predations and I believe Siberia has precisely the resources that China covets on lands the Tsars stole. And I think there's a big body water out there called Lake Baikal that's 20% of the world's fresh surface fresh water. China is chronically short of freshwater in North China. Baikal is the only fix and I think it's flat enough that you could pipe it around. So I don't think the question is.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision to reassess and do something else. It's going to be a long wait until the Chinese reassess or the Russians reassess. So then you have to think about protecting yourself and working with allies, your friends.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, but there are things that you just cannot convince other people. Another key thing and strategy is you can have a very worthy goal, but you need to look at it carefully and go, is it feasible? I don't think it's feasible to make Xi Jinping change his mind because he's of a particular background and this is what he believes and he has a whole bunch of other Chinese people around him who believe the same thing. And we're in the Second Cold War. It's going to be a long wait till they change their mind. If you think about Gorbachev's generation, they decided, Gorbachev said over and over again, we cannot live like this anymore, that the realization is that their standard of living was lousy compared to the West, so clearly they needed to reform and do things. But that was his decision and his generation.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A compounded rapid compounded growth. You go, well, how's it possible that China had this rapid growth for a while and their dictatorship? How'd that work? It's because they had the growth when they cooperated with the international order, when they rejoined the family of nations. Yes, when they prospered. Well, now Jinping is going to do a U-turn on that. Have fun. We will not be enriching.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else or it's negative sum. You're going to fight over it. You're going to destroy it in the process. Whatever. And the Europeans are a great example to us all of just call it a day. Let everybody travel. Go get a rental property somewhere, right? And run your businesses. You really don't need to own Luxembourg or whatever it is. And what a hassle. You want to offload their crazy domestic problems anyway and just run your transactions. This is the miracle of the rules-based order. It is the only way to have”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is modern international law. And I don't know when you'd have to be a lawyer, it's probably a lawyer in here who actually knows of when you decide modern international law begins. But certainly by the time you're getting through World Wars, we're in modern international law, and that's the problem with what Putin's his magic he's working on Ukraine, is they signed multiple times at the breakup of the Soviet Union. And then afterwards, what Ukraine's borders were, and they're violating all of that. Well, have fun with it because the Chinese can play that game in reverse on Siberia, and we'll see how happily that one ends. But I think there's this real, there is a realization that these disputes go back forever. And it's like musical chairs. We're now freezing, whatever chair you're in, that's it. And that's modern international law. And it turns out that those countries that focus on territory are ripping it off from someone.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we stopped it very rapidly at the end of the war. So, yeah, the British were appalled how rapidly the Lenlease aid stopped because they desperately needed it because they'd been wrecked by the war. So yeah, we did cut it off. But”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had been available to him. Maybe he would have been in better shape to then put on a better showing in the Civil War, also not look to the Chinese people as like a serial loser. And it's not his fault. It's because he's an industrialized country trying to deal with the Japanese, whom we found very difficult to fight. So why wouldn't he find them difficult?”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aviation fuel plus the airplanes, and then you're going to try to bomb Japan from China. Imagine flying in aviation fuel. It's like a non-starter. And I think the best argument you can make is on that is that rather than getting Shankai Shak to do the Burma campaign 4344, and he was dead against it, is let him keep all that equipment, whatever you got over the hump, instead of sending it over to Burma, which is strategically irrelevant, turns out in this war. Let him keep everything because when the Japanese try to do Ichigo, it's their biggest offense of the war. They're going right down through central China because the United States is cutting off so much of their maritime stuff. They want to be able to have railways all the way through central China. Anyway, Shankai-shek gets wrecked in that maybe if more of the equipment.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We couldn't get it in. It's because if you want to deliver Len lease A, this is a problem in World War I. It's why did Russia fall in World War I? Why would you ever let that happen? There's no way to get the AIDN because Russia hadn't built its Murmansk railway, which goes way up north, and it hasn't completed the Trans-Siberian Railway. It doesn't do those things until Murmansk is early in 1917 and the Trans-Siberians in 1916. That's like right before the Tsar falls. Couldn't aid Russia in World War I? It falls for lack of arms. And then the blockade that the Japanese did was really effective. So to get aid in, you need railways and you need ports. And they owned all the railway systems. So the only way we could get stuff in is we're flying over the hump, the Himalayas. Okay, so you're going to fly in.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that is a peripheral operation. It is peripheral to the main theater. And if the Russians hadn't been doing Bagration, this big operation that coincides with Normandy, no way would we ever have gotten on to the continent. And that's in 1944. So cutting Len lease aid insane. You're eliminating the problem of fascism until people have forgotten what fascism meant, but you're left for the problem of communism.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because you're assuming that World War II was not a closely run thing. I think it's a much more closely run thing than you think. And there's no one's sure of how it's going to turn out. Everyone knows if it goes longer, it's more of my kids who are dying. So there's no way you are going to cut aid to the army that's fighting World War II. All right, here's a concept for you. There's a main theater in the war. How do I know what the main theater is? That's where most of the people fighting are. That's the main front, main theater. Russians fought between two-thirds and three-quarters of the Nazi army always. That makes the Eastern Front the main theater. So you all think that you all think that Normandy invasion was a big deal.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World War II, generosity to the Germans, it's over. Look at Europe. If you study European history, they're all trying to butcher each other for centuries. And then they realize, what a waste. Let's just trade, play by the rules.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't with India and Pakistan, it was so intense because of partition of so many people who died. And it was recent, right? 47. And so you wouldn't expect that those on animosities to die down. And also their new states trying to establish their legitimacy. So that was particularly difficult. I don't know that most countries in the world necessarily want to kill all of their neighbors. And then you can look at things forever Britain and France were going at it and then Germany became the primary problem between World War I and World War II. So then Britain is teaming up with France, its former primary enemy, and that whole problem goes away. And then you have the generous peace after World War II, not one, World War I was not a generous peace. And also we have the mismanaged Great Depression that allows fascists to rise all over the place.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Cold War is all our leaders all the way through Bush Sr. We're all veterans of World War II in one way or another they'd serve some of them on the battle line like Bush Sr. had and others near enough so that they understood how dangerous it was and like all the Soviet leaders Bereshnev and all those people had seen all sorts of people be butchered so they were cautious in a way I don't think Vladimir Putin is.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a miracle we're all here. I think in the Cuban Missile Crisis it came down to a Soviet subcap. They had like the political commissar, the military commissar. I have to reread this, but I don't know whether you needed a vote of two out of three to launch a nuclear weapon or whether one guy was senior and you have to get him to come along. I have to read the data. But basically someone put their foot down in the Soviet sub not to launch a nuke. Okay, we lucked out of that one.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's how he dies. So, you're going to be guaranteed a free for all. So if there's a free-for-all for something like Ukraine, they will probably have to call that off because they've got to focus on Moscow. That's what happened with the Korean War. Why is the Korean War and Stalin dies, Russians want it over because they got all kinds of unrest, various prisons in their own gulags are having riots, they're having, I think, some Bulgaria, maybe East Germany as well, and they got problems, so they don't want to deal with the Korean War anymore. It's like, who cares? Forget about it. You would be guaranteed that, which might be highly beneficial for Ukraine, but knowing Putin, he's an evil man, he'll probably stick around forever.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My estimation in that kind of system is there's going to be a leadership struggle. That's the problem with dictatorships. They're absolutely brittle, and that's what's wonderful about having elections. You just every four years or whatever it is, you have an election, whoever it is is going to be whatever it is. But in these dictatorships, no one knows. And so everyone, so Stalin literally, I think he didn't show up at breakfast. No one wanted to open the door. And then probably they decided, hmm, let's not open the door. Let's just let that door stay shut for a few days. And then when it starts stinking, well, no, perfect.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is long enough that people are horrified and don't want to have it, they don't want to live that way anymore. So there's that piece of it as well.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been in The I don't know, but I think iconic leaders like Mao and Stalin, they were canonized by winning their wars. Stalin by winning World War II, the Russians revered him for doing that. And they had experienced every Russian experienced World War II. It was central to their lives to win that thing. So Stalin is canonized for doing that. And now the man who puts Humpty Dumpty back together again when no one else could and then fights the great powers, capitalist powers to a stalemate in Korea. He's again been canonized. Whoever comes after them is not going to have that level of prestige. It's just going to devolve. That's period. And then for the successors of Stalin, they were sick of being terrified about whether they're going to be purged. He kept putting bullets in people's heads, like Vladimir Putin.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deng Xiaoping, it ran in parallel what the economic reforms needed to be to produce wealth and what the party needed in order to be more powerful. But now that's running across purposes because for the party to maintain its monopoly, well these much more educated Chinese aren't going to be interested in that anymore. And so it's time to lock those people up and then you're going to have trouble with keeping your economic growth rate going.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How'd they pull this off? I don't think it's that they did exactly what anyone wanted, what the communist have is a really powerful doctrine for how you go from nothing to something in a failing state, how you start out with a bunch of people on some campus. Mao literally starts out as a junior librarian in Beijing University. So I don't, he's there with a librarians. I don't know the ladies. Who knows what it is? It's probably guys in those days. And then he's turning these people into cadres and eventually to guerrillas and eventually conventional army. But they have a really good program that works the world over and it's very effective for taking power within a broken state. It's lousy at producing prosperity thereafter, right? And you'll get the Communist Party today. They're really good at staying in power. For a while they're under.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source