Shane: Balaji man. I think the rest of the world is going to tell us never to talk again. The last time we talked, it was right before COVID and now we got the Ukraine/Russian thing going on.
Balaji: Well, I think that the world is going to be an eventful place over the years to come. So, probably every podcast will be a few months before something crazy. Correlation is not causation. This is not investment advice, various other incantations, perhaps with that we can begin.
Shane: What’s the most interesting or surprising thing you’ve learned or changed your mind about in the last three months?
Balaji: Last three months? I don’t know, but the last year I actually wrote an essay on this for Barry Weiss’s blog. And essentially what was surprising to me was that the reduction in state capacity was bipartisan, in the US. And that is to say under Bush or under Obama State capacity had been moderately high enough to do, even if you don’t agree with it, the invasion of Iraq is a logistically complicated thing. Even operations in Syria or there are domestic actions, foreign actions that were taken that required…Become a member to access the full transcript.