The WhatifAltHist / Balaji Crossover Episode

Rudyard, you run a popular YouTube channel called Whatifalthist. Maybe you can give a little bit to the audience on your background kind of stuff. You've done all that kind of stuff.

Sure. So thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. And I'm Rudyard Lynch. I run the YouTube channel Whatifalthist. And we cover topics like history, anthropology, philosophy, and politics. Just different elements of the human condition. And I like to say that the underlying causal thing beneath it is human nature and trying to figure out human nature in different contexts. And I started the channel when I was 13, doing something called alternate history. Like, what if the south won the Civil War and what if the Nazis won World War II and we gradually pivoted out of that, where I feel very blessed. And I never thought this would be my life, where we have 700,000 subscribers and millions of viewers a month. And, yeah, I'm happy it worked out.

There's actually. You're probably aware of this. There's an old Marvel comic series called what If. Do you know that?

No, I don't. I don't read Marvel.

Oh, okay. That's funny. I thought that that was actually an inspiration. This is. Yeah. Now, today, Marvel Comics, because of the stupid. You know, all the superhero movies endlessly, you know, are not what they were. But when I was a kid, there was a. You could go, if you didn't know this, just like a small little thing. There was a comic book series called what that had this exact premise. Like if some canonical event hadn't happened. What if Superman was powered up by kryptonite or whatever, Something like that. But the interesting aspect of both that and, of course, the more substantive historical version you're doing is you actually need to know a lot about the events at that time to gauge whether something could have gone this direction or that direction. Then even more, develop the alternate scenarios of what it could be. Right. Like the man of the High Castle or something like that. You know, the. Probably the Germans, like, the Japanese would have become the global left and the Germans the right. Like, because the Japanese were backing WB dubois and all these Third world revolutionaries and so on and so forth. So they would have taken over the world. The Soviets did, and of course, the Germans would have been the global right. But most people don't think about the Japanese as being the global left in that scenario. They just think, you know, they don't realize there'll be like a right, left partition because they don't have enough historical context. And the reason That I would like to talk to you about this because I think we both think about history and macro events. You know, that thing that people are saying nowadays, here's amusing. That may or may not be interesting to you. You know, people are saying you can just do things. You've heard that saying?

No, I haven't.

You haven't. Okay, well, all right. So this is a big, I guess, you know, YouTube is its own culture, a little bit different than X, but. But a lot of tech guys have this saying, you can just do things. Meaning you can just launch rockets, you can just build cars, you can just do things. There are no rules, there's no constraints, nothing holding you back. Go, go, go. Right. You know, and Anderson has this line, which is that roughly paraphrases, the world around you is made by people like you, and you can go and reshape it. Right? And there's a truth to that, especially today because of the Internet and so much of the existing order is sort of melting down and so on. But there's also an unreality to that because how much agency does one person actually have? How much can they actually shape the world versus how much is it historical forces, like great man theory of history versus, you know, the historicist kind of thing? And I'm sure you have a view on that. And I have a view. I'd love to hear your view on that.

So. So I didn't want to get too woo woo for this, but the idea in alchemy is that everyone is a radio tower and that the world is a competition of different Darwinistic radio towers and constant struggle for whichever one gets to conquer the others and then evolve to a higher level.

So, but how does alchemy have a concept of radio? You mean, are you backporting the concept of a radio tower?

Yes. So alchemical philosophy, everyone is their own thing, and then they emit these sort of vibrations. And an example of the.

And what did they call them? They didn't call them radio towers.

No, radio tower is a modern term. It's they. I. The. The original language this was written in was first Egyptian and then Greek, and then it was Arab and then it was Latin. But they use vibration. They say that the universe, the example of the. The figure will probably release the most is Jesus Christ. This single figure developed a religious worldview. Said religious worldview changed the course of history through working its way into the minds and souls of billions of people. And so the idea there is that the universe is all of these different sub competing forces trying to push for their own dominance. And then the universe is the collective output of all of these independent decisions being made over time, with God being the biggest one. And that's how I see the force of human history, where it is the emergent phenomena of billions of people operating at once making their own decisions out of free will. And then you have multiple tiers to it where nations make choices, individuals make choices, and through that it forms. And there's. There's a. It's interesting where to understand the world, you really have to look at dualities. Where nature, nurture. It's both. It's obviously both if you're a reasonable person. And if you go too much towards nature or nurture, which is the argument that we're really having here, you're going to end up in very silly places. Where the Nazis were pure nurture, where they thought that people who are genetically very close to Germans, like Slavs, were so innately different that they were incapable of attaining similar results. And then the modern left or hardcore nurture, where they think at the blank slate that all theories are capable of. Basically you can remake human nature in any given direction, and it's a combination of both of them. And I think the less we think about in theory and the more we figure out what we can apply, the better. Because as an example, the amount of physical matter that we could control with science is vastly in excess of what we thought we could do 500 years ago. But the way we did that is through realizing science and realizing what we could actually do. And you go back to rain dances. Rain dances? If, if we have the ability to control rain, it'll be through scientific methods that we discover, not through making rain dances. So it's figure out what you can and can't do in each individual context.

Interesting. I've got three or four quick reaction sets. So first, I wouldn't exactly call great man versus force of history quite the same as nature nurture. But to react to that. They're both useful lenses. But just to react to that. Nature, nurture. The way I think about that is hardware software. Like you have individuals and then you have the ideologies above them. And actually the relationship to what you're saying is the software that people are emanating, for example, a religion or, or a political movement, right? Christianity, communism, something like that, can actually take large pieces of hardware and organize them towards a goal, right? Whereas something like, you know, ultra nationalism of the ethnic variety is starting with like a fixed hardware pool of only this ethnic group. And the software is Almost the most trivial software of just like, okay, all of us against everybody else or what have you, Right? And actually what that suggests is that, and this is something I plan to write up is actually neither the left nor the right understand the left. You know why I say that? As much as you and I think about this stuff.

Go ahead.

So the left perceives itself as sharing and caring, and the right, typically, maybe not you, but the typical rightist perceives the left as naive and wimpy and, you know, not like them, who are big and strong. And I actually think of the left as just optimized for war. And the reason I think of it that way is like amidst the chaos of the French Revolution, amidst the chaos of the Soviet Revolution, this leftist software based on sharing and caring somehow managed to organize. Well, Napoleon obviously was the one who built the Grand Armee, but like with the Soviet Union, it built the Red army, right? What it did is it flattened out this giant amount of hardware and it organized it into a group of people that could go and fight. And you could argue even during the French Revolution that at the time, today people think of nationalism as this, oh, I'm a tough rightist, you know, kind of thing. But back then, as you're aware, nationalism was actually on the left because it was on the left relative to the tribalism of just a local town or village. Right? The illusion of being French, of all speaking the same language. We're all in this together, Right. That was actually something that was a unifying force where with software, you could unify a lot of hardware. And the reason I say this is I think rightists don't think enough about why the left often wins, and it's often better at military force, which is something that the right valorizes. And I'd give another analogy, which is, you're younger than I am, but how much do you know about early Google?

Not that much.

Okay, so early Google, one of their core innovations was. Now they're a little different. But back then when their core innovations was taking cheap commodity hardware and then running sophisticated software on top of it, right? As opposed to their competitors who at the time were buying top the line, Sun Microsystems hardware, right? And then, you know, Google said, hey, you know, the. It's much easier for us to acquire huge stacks of cheapo hardware and then run this sophisticated software on top that could coordinate it towards a common goal, allowing for fault tolerance, allowing for some of these machines to not even work, allowing for some of them to produce the wrong results, allowing for, you know, the Kinds of things that happen in your computer. For example, let's say your computer has an issue every four years, something like that. That might be roughly. Right. Okay, so that's. If you multiply times four times 365, that's like roughly every 1500 days or so. Right. Or you know, 2200 days, something like that. So if you have 2000 servers in Iraq, you're going to get an incident like that every day. So anyway, point is, certain kinds of ideologies, especially leftist ideologies, are. You can almost think of it as software that's built to massively scale. So like communism, open borders. Right. A lot of these crazy concepts, you can think of them as software that scripts giant numbers of human beings. Let me pause there. Get your thoughts.

So it. Yes, that's a very good idea. And the idea of yours that's influenced me the most is 19th century God, 20th century state, 21st century century network. And the left was very optimized for the 20th century state system due to the left provides the incentive structures most easily for standardization. Where you look at the left and the left believes things that are demonstratively false, but they're very good for large group cooperation. The left is the ultimate belief structure for standardized group cooperation. Which is why you see this massive sociological shift from World War I to World War II. Because the God based social structures of World War I could not survive until World War II, where every major country had to develop ideologies based off standardization. And Nazism in a lot of ways is closer to leftism than it is to traditional conservatives or libertarians, because Nazism is a standardized ideology, Communism is. And one of the things James Burnham covers very well in his book on the managerial revolution is he said that New Dealism is an ideology. And you look at the modern American left, it's a continuation of the New Deal over the course of a century, forming a new cohesive ideology. The problem though is the New Deal was based upon strategic alliances that Democrats had a century ago. And there was no underlying philosophy or moral structure to it was whatever groups happened to vote Democrat. And so we saw that strategy of pandering to whatever groups were strategically useful. That doesn't have a coherent thing behind it.

Yes. So taking the God state network concept. So for those you know, this is from the network state book and you're referencing it, I'll very briefly summarize it for the viewers who haven't seen that before. But it's essentially the idea that what is the most powerful force in the world Right. Is it almighty God? Is it the US Military, or is it encryption? And it's. This seems like a very abstract thing, but as, as you're aware and as I think about a lot, it actually influences almost every action someone takes on a daily basis. Right. The. The way that people interact with the world. It's like a, like this analogy I use in the book. Like a, A kid who tells their kid in a playground, like, my dad can beat up your dad. You know, they believe that their God, their state, their network is the strongest and all almost like the. The bin Laden concept of gravitating towards a strong horse. What they believe is the strongest they'll gravitate towards. You know, and so that could BE in the 20th century, it was the Soviet military or the US military. Right. In. Or it could be Christianity versus Islam or something like that. Right. These are important things that actually are upstream of all other social organization. Okay, so now we have Bitcoin, we have social networks. We have a new paradigm for how to organize people. And what we've just seen is that the network has defeated the state in the west, but the state has defeated the network in the East. Let me pause. Go ahead. I want your reaction to that. And I can talk about that.

Oh, no, there's just an idea that I, that I had that the social organizing principle of the faith of God is faith, because that's how you get people to cooperate into religion. The socializing principle, or the unifying principle of the state is standardization, which is why the school system is designed. And I don't know if this is true, but it's an idea I'm using that the unifying principle of the network is willpower, because the way the network works is it's water, and it's constantly porous, and it's constantly mixing and breaking apart. And there aren't that many standardized principles.

You.

And so in a battlefield that's constantly mobile, where there is no strong geographic boundaries because you can jump across the Internet immediately, is the unifying principle is whatever group has the will to stay together, the will to survive, and the will to keep going. Because willpower is the force that works against entropy. And you look at the left, the reason that the left won the early stage of the Internet, where wokeness is a child of the first step of the Internet is the Wokies just had the most will of any demographic.

That's interesting. So it's funny, I was not going to predict that your word that you were going to use there was will. I would have said, but I want to react to, because it's actually interesting. I would have said that God was about scripture and the state was about law, and the network's about code, like focusing on the written thing. And the priest would tell you what scripture meant, and the bureaucrat or the lawyer would tell you what law meant. And. And the engineer would shape the code. Right. That's how. That's how I think about it. The, like the level of the written kind of thing that structures each era. But your concept, the willpower thing is actually super interesting because it relates to, again, the tech guy concept of agency. And you can just do things that we talked about earlier. Right. And the great man theory. And I want to connect that to your radio tower thing from earlier. I actually really like that radio tower visual, even if it's a back port. Also, you know, vibrations is what people are calling vibes these days, you know? Right. Like so. Because it's actually a deep analogy. So, you know, I actually. My original. Some of my original training was in electrical engineering fields and waves specifically. And the thing about waves is they can interfere, what's called constructively or destructively. Like, for example, if you have two waves, they both have a peak at the same time. You get a super peak. But if one is a peak and there is a trough, they cancel out like this. Right. And that is true if you have ocean waves as well. If you have like a ripple like this and a ripple like this and another like this that are all coming from, you know, northeast, southwest, what have you. You can have a huge thing in the middle or a huge trough on the other side, right. So you have these radio transmitters in your mental model that are putting out these vibes. And today we would call them influencers, like, like you and me, and we're putting out this content and it's traveling. And the actual. The. The material there is not water, it's not air, it's not the electromagnetic spectrum, or it is, but it is. It is the social network, right. On which you can visualize a bunch of nodes. And you see an idea pop up at one big radio transmitter that's got a hundred thousand or a million or whatever, and then it propagates out. And then you see, it's evolutionary fitness as it goes further. And this of course, relates to the concepts of like a mind virus. Right. Which, you know, transmits out. It's actually, you know, an interesting thing from genetics, very counterintuitive thing from genetics is that humans are actually the result of these sort of Waves of genes. Do you know what I mean by that?

Explain it, please.

So I'll find some graphics of this. But there are certain kinds of alleles, for example lactose tolerance, that are just like the vibes in your example. They're so evolutionary advantages that they radiate out rapidly from their original. Because the non obvious concept is alleles can travel independently of the overall system of all the other genes they're linked to if they're advantageous enough. Like the lactose tolerant guy just has so many kids that he, it spreads out farther than other genes for just that, that aren't that advantageous, that are local.

This wasn't where I was expecting this conversation to go. But another principle in alchemy is that consciousness, the relationship, the relationship between the ideal and consciousness and between the material is sexual, like that between men and women. So consciousness, so the ideas have to merge with the material. And the more advanced you get, the more your mind and your consciousness affects the rest of the world. And so the idea is that consciousness and ideas are woven into life itself. And an example of that would be a religion affecting material things, ideas. And so the idea there is that free will is an implicit, is a built in part of the universe which, which, which controls material stuff. And physics is one of the fields I've studied the least. But I know a huge issue they've stumbled in with physics is that they can't predict the movement of particles where it's not atom to atom movement. It's. It's almost as if the atoms are making decisions in real time about what they want to do.

Yeah. And you know, actually the way I call that is my version of that is ideology becomes biology.

Exactly.

So essentially there's this graphic I have, we'll put it on screen, but it shows Democrats. I'll just ask you as a guest, maybe you know this general fraction of Democrats nowadays in one study at least marry Republicans.

I'm going to guess like 15%.

It's even less than that. It's 4%.

That's amazing.

It's amazing. Right now here, look at this. I'm going to show you this. Crazy. It's actually crazy. Marriages between Democrats and Republicans are extremely rare. Right. Do you see this one between Democrats, Republicans?

This is Sunni Shia. Exactly.

And this is 2020. Right. So this is something which suggests that when people say like America is becoming tribal, it's actually not one country, it's two parties.

Yes.

If you look at the, you know, I've talked about this before on, on X, but This is actually why the Republican, you know, tough nationalist view I, in my view also breaks down. So you see this visual?

Yeah, yeah, I've seen this one before.

You see this one before? That's right. So. Oh, and here is, by the way, the, the map of genetic frequencies. Let me show you this too. So now the thing is, that's weird, right? It's like the lactase persistence is, is, is much bigger in like. Or lactase tolerance we might call it in northwest Europe, but it's actually also here in, you know, like, like western Africa and here and so on and so forth. Right. But less so down over here. Like one guy had this mutation in one region and then it radiated out from there and then humans moved around the world and so on. So. So it's similar. And the reason that's cool to me is it actually shows that, remember our software versus hardware, nature versus like in a sense, in a non obvious sense, hardware is also a combination of these standing waves, but on a longer time scale.

Yes. And this leads me back to another alchemy point, that the purpose of alchemy is that you try to figure out how the world works, then you gain mastery of it, you figure out its underlying principle, then you could control it physically, then you use that physical control to improve yourself, then you figure out something new and you repeat. And so this is why it's basically like science.

It's. It's like science. It just does. Yeah.

Every single inventor of early science also studied alchemy. A third of Isaac Newton's books were on alchemy. And every single. A majority of Newton's laws of motion stem back to alchemical principles. Same thing with Giordardo Bruno, same thing with Galileo. We have theories about. Because alchemy has the transmutation of forms, which is through the facing of suffering. Through suffering you burn away weakness, then you can improve your form. Which sounds a lot like Darwinistic evolution. So this was a consistent theme in Western history that's bubbled up under the surface. And so, you know, I want to.

Ask you something on this because I haven't actually looked this up. It's interesting. I knew the, I knew that a lot of these early guys were interested in alchemy, but were they in part motivated by the famous transmutation of lead into gold? Was this the thing that got them into it and then they figured out science or was that just kind of a background thing?

This is one of those things where it's difficult to say. Where difficult to say because alchemy works through coded formula. And so the reason I said the water comment at the beginning is that one of the symbols is water, and water is constant fluidity. And the way you work through that is through drive, because if something's constantly fluid, you have to make it your will to go through. And so the real complication and the reason why this stuff hasn't caught on is it's all these esoteric, weird symbols that are purposely weird because the idea is that only people who are wise enough to understand what this means deserve the knowledge. And so it's this complication where we don't know. I've heard some authors, and what I've read from most authors in this field is that gold is symbolic for perfection. And they were doing this as a sort of philosophic shit test. And also because alchemy was founded by the Catholic Church and it was very popular in every major court in Europe, funded alchemy. But also this is a heavily Christian society where they didn't want to openly say this is a different philosophic tract. So they were using gold as symbolism for attaining spiritual perfection. And the idea of transmutation of forms is that once you have attained a high enough level of mental development, you will have the ability to turn any material thing into any other material thing. And I think that's a philosophic projection of what they thought humanity would attain thousands of years in the future. But also, people actually believed that you'd make gold. It's one of these complex things where there was a spiritual understanding, then people took it seriously. And one of my issues with this topic, and I don't want to completely gas it up, is you wonder because it's so highly complex and it's so long, how many of the people involved were just not good faith players or they were making stuff up. And how many people were saying, we can make gold. Yes, King of France, so give me money to study this. We're definitely going to get you gold.

Yes. But obviously some of them were also the originators of real science. They were some of the best scientists out there. Right. So do you know what this reminds me of? Maybe there's an obvious analogy. Crypto. Okay. And here's why. Okay. So many different mappings. Well, first is obviously bitcoin is turning bits into gold, digital gold, number one, number two. Now it's actually doing it, though, in the sense of there's. There's a. There's a creation of huge appreciation and value that was not there with alchemy in that, like in the the the ultimate input output sense, Bitcoin is working in a way that the lead to gold thing of alchemy was. However, other aspects of what you're saying. Crypto has both, in my view, very, very, very intelligent people and also crazy scammers. And it's basically a U shaped distribution on every, every aspect of it. Like you have these in extremely capable cryptographers and distributed computing. Like the thing wouldn't work without them. But you've also got like the most base motivations and everything in between or whatever. Right? But actually less in between. Like it's very U shaped, you know, kind of distribution, less so every day, but it's still U shaped. Crypto also appeals and maybe this is an aspect. I'm not sure if the analogy carries to the power user and the powerless.

Yes.

So basically, who's into crypto? It's like the people who want to push the limits of what a bank account even is and the people who just barely want to hold onto a bank account. And so the first group are like the tech guys who are like, I want to send millions of dollars to Japan in 10 seconds with these guarantees and so on. And why would you want that? For example, you know, my friend Brian Armstrong, now the CEO of Coinbase, started as an engineer at Airbnb and collecting money from like Argentina and Mexico and Egypt for all of these stays was actually a non trivial thing that was required. Hundreds of bank accounts in different countries and all of this Forex risk. And it was large amounts of money for the. It was essentially something where Airbnb exposed to him how badly the thing that we thought worked, the international payment system really didn't work. To pool all of that into revenue for Airbnb meant that their back end for managing money and Forex was actually very, very, very important to the business. Much more so than people think, right? Because like, let's say you've got $1,000 transaction and you have a 1% fluctuation in forex, you can lose like a lot of it in a day, right? 5% in a day, whatever. On the other side, the power lists are those who are just trying to hang onto a bank account. And what's funny is lots of Westerners who used to think this wasn't a big deal just got unbanked, right? And so lots of the, or conversely Westerners who didn't see what the point is of, you know, being a power user are like, actually, it would be cool because I'm now on the Internet to be able to pay these 15 people around the world as contractors or something like that. Right. So anyway, I'm wondering if that U shaped aspect, did alchemy appeal to the top and the bottom and not the middle? Or is that not something that extends?

So alchemy was seen as an upper. Yes, you're right. Where alchemy was seen either as an upper class profession or by kooks. Where alchemy. Alchemy was called. It's called. It was called the magic of Kings, where Christianity was the magic of priests. And if you want to. If you want to pull away the trappings of this and like the language involved, what the magic of priests means for traditional religions is that this is a social technology that exist to increase group cooperation.

So Islam, yes, but the magic of kings.

Power.

Yeah, go.

The purpose. So the purpose of traditional religion was to increase in group cooperation. The purpose of alchemy was to increase power. And you can choose to use the power for good or evil. And that's how science is. Science is an amoral tool, and it was called the magic of Kings because it was seen as the sort of thing where if you're in a position of very heavy responsibility that you have to study this sort of thing in order to manage power responsibly because you have to operate. The higher your range of power is, the more amoral and the more twisted the discussions of your life, the responsibilities you have to take on. There's. There's a. This is a bit of a tangent, but I love it. There's a fantasy novel that I. One of my favorite ever called the Grace of Kings. And the conceit of the book in the final part is that there's a civil war and they make a treaty between the two factions that were former friends. One of the factions backstabbed, the other guy wipes out his faction. And he said, what I did was objectively, morally wrong, but I saved our continent from centuries of wars in the future. And that's the quandaries you get with power. And then you also get the kooks or the. The guys who are hanging out in the medieval equivalent of basements trying to figure out how to make this technology work. Where it is similar in. Another thing that's comparable between crypto and alchemy is that it's an international network where alchemy was seen as an international brotherhood of people who are trying to attain the highest level of power operating irrespective of governments. And that if there was a government that was trying to block it, you could rely on people who were also involved in this in other countries who could help you out. Because the goal of furthering this was greater than any individual national or even religious agenda where you had contact between the Muslim and the Christian and between the pagan and all those different societies.

Super interesting because alchemy was the original society of tech bros. Yeah, exactly. Right.

I never thought of it, but you were right.

That's right. Because, because technology, science, alchemy, that's cross border and it gives a. I mean it actually, you know, the God state network concept, I think that the network is going to be the dominant, is the dominant force of our time in the sense of like it's, it's the, it's the back pressure, it's the, it's the water in which we swim. You know, the thing about like one fish looks to another and says what's water? Or what have you. Right. Everything is Internet, you know, everything computer. But actually everything computer isn't even, you know, like what Trump said. Everything Internet is actually even a better version of it. But let me come back to that. The, the concept of the network is very clear to us now with the social network and the digital network and, and it's like actually physical and tangible. But if you backport it further back in history, you have obviously transnational networks of capitalists and then scientists and then I guess alchemists, right. And then early mathematicians and so on and so forth. And it's a third force because it's not the state, which is the king and it's not God which is the priests, but it's a sort of peer to peer network of like, you know, smart guys. Right. And the thing that's interesting about it, actually, the other thing I really liked your, your, your reference to. Well, you know what's funny is you and I have different phrase repertoires, right? Because you're just sort of like, I'm drawing a little bit more from tech and maybe Asia and so on and so forth. And you more from medieval history and so on. So it's a, it's complementary. You know why I, I actually like this? I collect these phrases even more than I normally do.

Oh. Because the only way to. You can only use symbols to convey highly complex points. You can say in a sentence. You can use a sentence or a single saying to condense hundreds of pages of arguments.

Yes. And I think today we're entering the age. We have entered the age of the phrase. Okay, so the prompt for AI, the 14 words, 18 words, 13 words for crypto, password reset, Right. It's funny, that's close to the 14 words, but it's a totally different concept. Right? So some crypto is like 12 words, 13 words for, for, for resetting your password, basically your, your private key, your secret phrase. And, and the third is the, the, the 140 characters on social media. Right. So those three things of AI, crypto and social each are powered by a phrase. For crypto, that phrase is, is like a phrase of power that's not spoken. Right. But it's memorized. And so it's almost like spells that you collect. Right. And you know, I don't know how much have you been following AI? A little bit. Lut.

I'm not very good at AI. I'll be blunt, I follow it a little bit, but significantly less than you.

Okay. You should get, you should get into AI. Just start with Claude. Okay, Claude, AI and midjourney. Just try those two. Those are pretty good tools. And the thing about AI, just to talk about that for a second is, in my view, it's simultaneously overhyped and underhyped, like in the sense of AI is going to kill us all. I could see why people thought that in the late 2022, early 2023 stage, when you suddenly had a machine that could really talk to you. Right. And that was definitely a discontinuous seeming break in all history up to that point. Right. But as it settled in over the last couple of years, AI in its current form is, quote, just higher order programming, meaning you can program a computer at the language of zeros and ones, and then you can program in something like Python or JavaScript. And then now you can program it in English. Okay. And you can get it to do what you want, but you still have to have that concise description of what you want in English. And, and the more you know what you want, it's kind of like a, a manager or a CEO that actually has done the job before and is telling somebody how to do a job that they've already done. Like, they've done a job and now they're hiring 10 people to do that job, let's say repair air conditioners. Right. They know how to fix it. They have the language of, you know, the, I don't know, the electrical outlet and the Freon and so on. So I'm not a, I'm not an air conditioning expert. But the point is they have the vocabulary to be like, check this, check that, check this. Is it this model, is it that model? And they can prompt it. And the same way you'd be. The more you know about domain, you can prompt it. So I collect these kind of phrases even more than I normally did, because you can just toss them into AI. Just try any interesting phrase you've got, toss into AI, get a reaction, and toss into a bunch of different AIs. And it's like a bunch of different oracles, like the ancient Greeks consulting them to kind of hear what this oracle and that oracle had to say about the world.

So it's funny, I don't know much about AI, but I predicted that would happen five years ago when I first heard about the entire AI craze. AI can only be a mirror to our worldview. It can only. AI is like a very. AI is an incredibly advanced parrot. And.

Yeah, the stochastic parrot concept, sure. Okay, go ahead. Yep.

We don't. We don't know what consciousness is, and thus we're terrified of AI's attaining consciousness. But I think consciousness is downstream of life. And consciousness cannot exist without a life force that's trying to replicate itself through which the consciousness is making decisions. And with AI, I kept on finding, as I. When you said, have you used AI? I didn't know what you're saying. I have used AI as a tool a certain amount where I ask it questions and I've shadowboxed trying to figure out how it thinks because I'm curious about it. And what I find is that AI just rationalizes whatever the ruling classes statement or beliefs are where. And this is. This is explicitly, obviously true with stuff that's socially taboo. If you ask AI about, it's actually pretty hilarious where I've asked AI what its opinions on various world religions and women's equality are. And what AI will say is that blank religion around the world believes in gender equality. And I know that religion, and that's definitely not true. Or I'll ask them for opinions if certain tribal peoples are peaceful, which I know isn't true, and then they'll say they are. And AI is repeating back the data set that we have, but it can't develop its own data set because it doesn't live in the world. And so it becomes a reflection and a mirage of our worldview, which is a huge issue with our society in general, where we're stuck in this hall of mirrors where we're reflecting ourselves to various degrees and we just go crazy, which is why we believe absolute absurdities, because inside our worldview, there's no reference. Outside of our logical system, we're stuck in a closed loop, which is why we believe absolutely ridiculous stuff.

Well, so it's interesting you say this because. So I'd say two or three or four things in response to that. So the first is that one of the remarkable things about AI is you can. Let's take that moral stance that they have when they're giving you an answer about religions. You can actually reduce that to pure numbers and coefficients and you can do brain surgery and remove that chip from within a sense. You know, like in many in the Matrix, they've got the chip in the back of the neck in Total Recall, right. Many movies have that conceit, right, of like a controller. You can actually do brain surgery in a sense on the models and remove that limiter and get it to say what it actually thinks. So Grok, for example, is much more freewheeling about this stuff. If you ask Grok, it has had brain surgery to like remove Western leftism in many ways. Now, I'm not saying it's right on everything, but it is right in a different sense on things. And so you actually have AIs that are coming in a sense, from different tribes and cultures. Right. This is related to a second big difference I had with the early AI people, which is early AI people. And by the way, I respect them technically and so on. And they wouldn't have, they wouldn't have done this without this belief. But they came from many of them. There's actually a lot of Indians involved as well. But many of them came from an implicitly Abrahamic background. And you know why that's relevant?

Oh, I know.

Please, you can guess. Go, go give me your guess and.

Then I'll tell you what it's. Thank you, you're very polite. But what I, they, they, they're stuck in messianism. They just constantly think the AI Rapture is going to happen and they'll build the AI God. And if you're from a Hindu background, your framework is that there's lots of different gods playing with each other and then the universe is an illusion. And so my attitude, I just laughed at this because I thought, you know, guys, the Rapture hasn't happened yet. Like, we've been waiting for the rapture for 2000 years and it's yet to happen. And what I said is that if we make AI, sorry, we have made AI. And if AI is a breakthrough on the level of the Industrial Revolution, which is a huge breakthrough that occurred very quickly. Look at the history of the Industrial Revolution. Life went on. We gained near infinite prosperity for a while in a lot of the Western world. We killed diseases in a real way. We haven't had major wars in decades. The Industrial Revolution brought something that previous eras would see as utopia. And we're still terrible people. We still have the same issues. We're still stuck with the same problems. So let's say hypothetically we do build the AI God with the Rapture. Then it's. We still have to face the same issues. Countries are still fighting each other. Humans are still having their status hierarchy issues. The currency is still going to inflate. It's. The Abrahamics have this hard point of their Book of. And I don't really. I could talk about this. I don't have great faith in the book of Revelation, although I am Christian. They have this Book of Revelation idea that everything's going to stop and then from that it's, you don't have to worry anymore. But if the apocalypse happens, you're still going to have to feed your kids.

Yeah. So, okay. Correct. But I would say, well, one, one edit I would make on this is, you know, the thing you're saying, which is, you know, people, we have godlike technology and stone age, you know, brains or institution. Right. There's Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms. Are you familiar with him? Okay. He's a good person to read. Like one. One area that you might get into more is like genetic history. And I'll share some of these books and stuff with you because it's a complement to some of the stuff like that, like the radiation of G and stuff. I think it'll give you, you'll, you'll be interested. It'd be a good lens.

Give me a top 10 reading list factor.

Okay, sure, sure. I'll give you, I'll give you a few right off the bat. Which is the number one. David Reich, who we are and how we got here.

Yeah, that's good.

Okay, read that. Okay. And then the. I'll find some more for you. I think Matt Ridley's book is good. Dawkins's original book, the Selfish Gene is very good. Basically, the entire genetic lens on humanity is going to come back. And the reason it's coming back is like in many ways, this is another way of thinking about it. If communism was based on economics denial, Wokeness is based on genetics denial.

Yes.

Right. And both ideologies were simultaneously obsessed with this and then also in denial of basic principles. Like communism was obsessed with economics, but it denied that like profit existed and because. Or that the profit was a necessary evil or even a good and so everything was pathologized. Every, every instance of profit was somebody scamming the other guy. And so they broke the concept of starting a business and they broke the concept of the price system and supply chains and individual self interest and so on and so forth. And the wokes deny that genetics exists. So you get all the way to dying that XX and XY exist and so on and so forth. Which would have been super controversial to say even two years ago, but is now actually feasible. By the way, when I say two years ago, I mean literally two years ago. You know why?

Oh, I was there, I saw this process where I was, I was, I was reading the books when this came out where like 5 to 10 years ago saying that stuff like race or sex or whatever had biological bases that was socially taboo. And now you look at the genetic charts, almost all traits are at least half genetic. How fast you drive, what music you listen to, what, where you go on vacation. And the twin studies are absolutely incredible here where you'll take people who are separated at birth and they have similar genetics or the exact same genetics and they'll give their dog the same name, they'll vote for the same political party. It's ridiculous stuff. I get the impression you weren't going to say what I just said though. So continue please.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so actually two or three things. One is that wokeness has vanished, but the other thing is genetics has advanced, right? And the premise that they had, which was incorrect or which is, I shouldn't say incorrect, which is no longer correct, is that genetics is immutable now. Genetics is mutable. We can actually do gene therapy on existing human beings to change their genes. The initial clinical trials are out there with like sickle cell and so on and so forth, right? So I'm not saying it's easy yet, but like with CRISPR Cas9, genetics is advancing, right? And editing of your genome is becoming more feasible, right? Number one, that changes the ethics around it, right? Because remember my thing about how some people have lactase persistence and so on, right? There's a company for example called Variant Bio that's looking around the world for all of these X men that have, they may not phrase it in that way, but like people who have amazing mutations that give them, you know, for example, resistance to this disease or tolerance of this drug or the ability to metabolize this food. You know, imagine for example, this is a. Actually there's, to give a concrete example, there's like three different mutations that, that confer altitude tolerance. So the Nepalese, Andeans, Ethiopians, the three main populations that evolved genetic adaptations for high altitude living developed different solutions, the same challenge. Right. So Nepalese mutations in EPAS1 that reduce hemoglobin concentration and so this is increased blood flow. Right. Okay. Andeans, they have mutations in genes like EGLN1 and so they have increased oxygen carrying capacity in the blood. And Ethiopian highlands, it's genes involved in the cardiovascular system. And it's different from both Tibetan and Andean populations. And, and maybe it's like changed in nitric oxide, nitric oxide production. Right. And blood vessel dilation. Right. So each of those are three independent adaptation over thousands of years of living at high elevations. Now here's the thing. If you're able to have volunteers from each population and they go and sequence their genomes, you could stack those three variations to maybe have a group of people that could live on the tallest mountains and have no problem. Yes, Right. And so that just shows a concept where, you know, there's almost certainly similar kinds of things for heat tolerance. Not certainly there are heat shock proteins and so on, differ between people for cold tolerance, for. And this is a big one, radiation tolerance. Okay. Because there are bacteria that we know like Deinococcus radiodurans and others that have evolved to live in, you know, environments where they keep getting hit by, you know, radiation. They grow in like nuclear reactors and stuff like that, crazy adversarial environments. And they have mutations that keep repairing their genome. Okay, so they're radiation resistant. Why is all that important? Well, if you're going to live on Mars, right, you're probably going to have to have like a human population that has had quite a lot of genetic and or cybernetic upgrades to actually be able to tolerate the environment of Mars. Just like we've evolved for the Earth, we'll have to evolve again for Mars. Right. And so now we can actually talk about all the different types of mutations gradually. We could talk about this that people have around the world that give them different kinds of superpowers. And these are digital, Right? That's a cool part. Do you know, Let me explain this actually in a visual joke. The GFP mouses, you can take these kinds of mutations and you can transplant them across species to make. Go ahead.

Oh, this is cool. Just keep going, please.

Yeah. So you can make mice glow in the dark. Okay. Which is crazy. It's the GFP mouse. And this is actually a very common. This has been true for more than 20 years. Right. Actually, I don't remember when it was invented, but it was decades ago because even when I was in grad school, we had this. Right. And so you can, for example, have a mutation where you use GFP as what's called a reporter gene, where, like, you feed the mouse something and it glows because that metabolism, it's like, you see that it's now metabolizing glucose and it glows and then it shuts down when it's no longer doing that. Does that make sense? Right. So you can see when a particular protein is turned on and the intensity of it may sometimes correlate to how much of concentration there is. Point being that like the, you know, jellyfish and mice are separated by a massive evolutionary distance, but you can still copy paste code from jellyfish all the way into mice, right? And so, like, humans are separated by much, much, much less evolutionary distance than jellyfish. So you could copy paste not just lactase persistence, but altitude tolerance. You could just take, like this, the best things out there, probably copy paste them. Probably. I mean, I shouldn't say probably. You'd have to measure the side effects on each thing. Okay. Because there might be side effects. Often there are. But you could probably do it with some engineering, right? That's what engineering is. You know, you look at the upsides, you look at the downsides, and you add corrections and so on and so forth. And you could take the best of humanity and pull it together. That's something that is a new kind of thing. And the reason I say all this is we have to think about what the world is going to look like. Actually, I'd love your your thoughts on this. So in my view, American empire is now just ending. But I'd like to hear your thoughts. And I'll tell you why I think.

That I have a thought I want to throw in there before I forget it. But one of the interesting principles is that they jump back to the earlier theme, is that in the philosophy of alchemy, not technologically progressing is morally evil. Because the purpose of the universe is to grow and to advance. And so if you don't grow in advance, the universe and God punishes you against those who do. And so the process of evolution is you are morally obligated to improve. And the first step of that is taking responsibility. You have to realize you have to take responsibility. And this is, you know, the Vitruvian man, the painting by Leonardo da Vinci.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yep.

A human body with all outlaid in each direct with a circle drawn around it. That's based in this philosophy as well, where it's, you take responsibility for your physical body, you understand your physical body and your and its limits. And once you take responsibility for your body and your life, you realize what you can and can't do. You assess the situation and these right to attain mastery. So if we want to do an alchemical analysis of this, we would say, okay, we have AI, we have genetic engineering, it's now our moral responsibility to understand said technologies as much as possible because it's morally, because if we're going to decel from this perspective, it's morally wrong. And you're also going to cut yourself off from the force of history and get destroyed by someone else who doesn't, who isn't going to decel. So it's not a choice to decelerate, but you have to understand the technology, master it. And then the final bit of it is that in alchemical philosophy you master it in order to increase life charge as much as possible, to allow as much flourishing of life as possible. Because, because life force is that which further multiplies according to its own desire. So when you produce life force, you're producing something that's self generative and thus is capable of continuing to create independent from itself. And what I find interesting about this is that when we look at this new incredible technology, almost no one's genuinely interested in what it can accomplish because people are looking at the negatives, people aren't looking at the positives. And the first people who are willing to take responsibility for this technology are going to do very well. And I want them to have this conversation understanding of life charge because another alchemical principle is that what you do to others is what you will become. And so if, let's say there's a group of, of tech bros who decide to turn this evil and they genetically engineer themselves into, into being hyper advanced beings who conquer the world. And enslaved is that by enslaving the rest of the world they will in process destroy their own characters, thus their empire.

I want to, I want to jump in on this, which is the thing that's really very, very, very important about modern technology is that actually the highest level of profit comes from in a sense, global egalitarianism. And here's why. You know, Apple sells like on the order of a billion smartphones, right? The like Google, Facebook, like these tech companies essentially serve almost every person on earth, or at least a comparable, let's call it a significant fraction of the people on earth are using these tech products. WhatsApp has literally billions of users, right? So you have like a, this is the thing that people don't get. Massive scale actually is the kind of thing that you want in technology because it makes a product better. Since you know, a one in a million issue you're seeing a thousand times a day. So you fix it, right? When you've got massive scale, you can build larger factories and you get better profits out of it, better economy of scale and so on and so forth. And in a very deep way on the Internet we're all equal. Like that is to say Larry Page has basically the same smartphone that you and I do, right? Like Warren Buffett has essentially the Same Google or ChatGPT or whatever that you and I do. Right? And I know I'm doing reasonably well, but you know, like what I mean by that is like a kid in India, Africa, Latin America, kid in the Midwest, like they, they have essentially the same smartphone, Google Internet experience. So the Internet is hyper deflated and resulted in global equality. It is the universal basic income in the digital world. Right? And so because of that, the premise that, oh, the tech guys, like the Elysium model is actually completely wrong. Like venture capital would back this to get to a billion people. I know that because I've done that. Like literally, for example ancestry.com or 23me, you can argue there's other issues with that, but like the companies I've helped co found and create and so on, they have millions and millions of people that we've sequenced or genotyped or what have you. Right? The whole point is to get to massive scale. So now what happens is then the like far left person will come with a different thing which is, oh, so you want to say, yeah, you want to take all the data, you want to you know, steal all the data and so on and have it centralized. And, and I agree that that's also a failure mode, but we can actually deal with that too. Where you can give data local genomics, right? Just like you have the LM running locally on your, on your data, right? You can have the genome locally on your computer and interpret it. Right. That's just another bug to fix. Anyway, point is, I think that entire model of the capitalist greedily scooping everything to themselves is actually the opposite of how techno capitalism works in practice. Like another way of putting it is, you may be too young to remember this in the 90s, you remember this concept, the digital divide.

No.

Okay, the digital divide was, oh, only the rich are going to be able to afford the Internet, but the poor will not right. And that's so ludicrous just today because the Internet is often the only thing the poor can afford. Yeah, it's flipped. It's actually a really deep point. Like the Internet is the most robust. Like you may not have water or power or peace. Right. You might be in a war torn country, but cell phones still work because you can take video and then later get to a 5G connection and upload it. Right. It's so robust. Like because the Internet was built to resist a nuclear attack, there's been a flippening where the digital world is far more robust, peaceful, inexpensive, egalitarian in a sense than the physical world. So it'll survive even when the physical world melts down. I mean, let me pause. There's more I can say about that. That's actually, that leads to my next point as to. That's why I think we're at the end of American empire and its two heirs are China and the Internet. Okay, let me come back. I want to give you the ball. We've both thought a lot about from our study of the past, what the future is. Right. And you have very similar conclusions to Peter Turchin, Ray Dalio, the Fourth Turning like guys and so on and so forth, that we're in a time of great and increasing instability, that some kind of civil war is coming to the west and and so on and so forth. Do you still think that? Why don't you elaborate on that and we can link a bunch of your videos on that Because I think they're pretty good.

Yes, thank you. I still, I still agree with that, that we are on the verge of global instability. And I've spoken about this before in many previous videos. But I liken it to the religious wars of the 1600s or the black Death or the French Revolution where you have these periods of global crisis that occur roughly every 250 years and there's a bunch of statistical models you can use to predict them. But I agree with your point that the American empire is coming to the end. And I actually think the network will beat China too. I think of those three the network is the one that's going to survive and win, frankly. Because I think the American empire and China's leadership are not good enough to match either. The American empire is clearly going to fall just because it's so incompetent and so self destructive. And I don't think this is the end of the American people. I think the American people in America as a continent, I think that has the potential for incredible new stuff in the future. But the current regime, the current ideology, it holds the current system of power. And I always conceptualize the American empire as Grand Central Station in New York, this just huge industrial baroque building. And not literally baroque, but huge and grandiose and that stuff. And for China, I don't think China can beat the network because China is in deceleration where they're pushing against, they're pushing against free speech, they're pushing against capitalism. And you can't push against those emergent phenomena for very long until they snap back and bite you because you fundamentally can't beat. I agree with your thesis. The network is going to beat the state because the network is just a so much vastly more efficient force. And the next age might look like a dark age with the breakdown of centralized power and I don't fundamentally know, but at the same time it will be an age that will promote so much more creativity and freedom that even if centralized countries break apart, it will be an age that will allow the ability for just, it'll, it'll be a breath of fresh air.

So, okay, here's how I think about this. I think that I don't, I don't think it's as simple as the network beats the state. I think that these are the two like centralization and decentralization are the capitalism and communism of the 21st century. And what I mean by that is these are the two big forces that are in balance and sometimes winning, sometimes losing that drive the 20th century. And, and let me explain how it, why I call them China in the Internet. Okay. And, and I'll let me go a little bit further. China is the billion person centralized sinic superstate. And the Internet I think will eventually be a million, a thousand million person network states. Maybe it's not exactly a million to each. Maybe the top one is 50 million and the smaller one is like a hundred thousand. Like it's like a, it's probably going to be a power law just like any tech company or like all the tech companies and maybe India or something like that is in the middle. Like a few other things are in the middle. And by the Internet, I mean the English speaking Internet, because the Chinese Internet is a closed system. And that's actually one of the most important things that China did is they zagged when everybody else zigged. Like basically all Chinese. The Chinese nation, state and network are all in a full stack thing. Do you know what I mean by that? Oh, like a Chinese. Go ahead.

It's a unified System in which the Internet, the government, the ruling class, the economy are all concentrated into a single authoritarian structure.

That's right. And the thing about this is you have to, in my view, you have to steel man it and understand its strengths before you can hope to compete with it.

My ideal, my idea is that every 250 years you see an alternating between, so the secular cycles, periodic periods, I repeated there you have cataclysmic time periods where the old order crashes. Then you have a 250 year period where there's two ideologies that fight each other. Another period that another cataclysm. So the last 250 years is the right versus the left, which is the French Revolution till today. Then you have the 30 years war until the French Revolution. And these are all crises that destroyed the previous social structure, the previous governments, they often killed a third to half of the the populations of the countries involved. So 30 years war until the French Revolution is mercantilism versus capitalism as symbolized in Britain versus France. The Black Death to the 30 years war is Protestants versus Catholics. Then the fall of the Frankish Empire until the Black Death is the Church versus the state. So my predictor for, and I agree with you that the 21st century, because these crises take 70 years. So from my understanding of historic cycles, we'll have a crisis in the 2000 and twenties, then another one in the 2000 and nineties. And so my understanding of that would be it will be a gradual mutating from the right versus left, from materialist to idealist. And so materialist to idealist, for those that don't understand it is idealism, is that reality is contained within abstract concepts in real and materialist is that reality is contained within physical things. And it wouldn't surprise me if it's decentralized network versus state, if that's the correlation. Because states always make materialist philosophies. And if you're operating off an abstract concept like a network, where it's difficult to articulate and it's highly complex and there's theories that you can predict a certain civilization's religiosity based on how abstract their money system is, where the more, the more abstracted the money system is, the more likely the society is to have a stronger religion. Just with the way I could explain the argument, but it's relatively complex.

Yeah, actually I haven't heard this for. Please, please explain that argument. Go ahead.

This is from David Graeber's book Debt, and he's part of the leftist anarchist school that I find interesting. I, I often circle back to leftist anarchist as a conservative populist.

And so he, I think he's wrong on some things, but he's interesting. Yeah, keep going. Yep, many things he's wrong.

But leftists are really bad at anthropology because they often shove these very immature notions of human nature where they'll think that tribals don't wage war. Every people in human history wage war. They're misogynistic, they're religious, they're hierarchical. And the left covers that up. But David Graeber says that 1500 until World War I was gold. Gold was the main currency. And so with that you saw the rise of materialist rational ideologies. And it's comparable to the Greco Roman classical world, where in both the Greco Roman classical world and in the modern period, if you're in a society with a certain amount of currency, where it's a very set goal thing is that you will develop rational worldviews based off stuff like counting and making calculations in philosophy. And you saw, for both the modern world you saw the decline of religion and the rise of science and philosophically induced ideologies. And then in the Greco Roman world you saw the same thing where people forget there was atheism and agnosticism in the ancient world, but there was a significant amount. Meanwhile, in the ancient world before the Greeks and the Romans, before the Axial Age as well, in the medieval period, people predominantly operated off money systems based off script and social context. Where in medieval Europe as an example, you would have a. They operated off credit where there are these highly complex credit systems because there wasn't enough gold to manage the economy, where you have a system of IOUs that operates as money. And same thing with the ancient world before 500 BC and in both you see highly religious societies because in order to maintain the IOU contracts, you have to have a highly cohesive social structure where you, you, you have to enforce social ties and religion does that to maintain the IOUs. In a system with a set currency, you'll have more rationality and philosophy because the financial system is based off counting and numeric assessment.

Interesting. So it's funny because those, those two forces, you know, like vectors, sometimes they can support each other on this direction, but oppose each other on this direction. Right. That's like the, you know, in physics, like forces.

So.

What I, what I think of when you say that is like going back to the God state, never concept God and the religion helps create a social group like a, like a ideological boundary of all these people. Are the believers like Christendom or the uma, you know, that's a, that's a group. And then within that group you have another social technology of money, right? And so they, some in this direction, they combine where they all believe the same thing, they trade amongst each other, but also they oppose in another direction where, you know, you'll have quite a lot of priests oppose the merchants and vice versa. You know, that's in the modern era. That's like media versus tech, the priests versus the merchants is basically that, right? It's like, you know, those who believe in, quote, God versus those who believe in, quote, money. And of course, you could rephrase that to, you know, those who are actually numerical and realistic versus those who, those who are unrealistic and just understand human nature. So anyway, coming back, I think a simplification is network over state. I think just our earlier discussion, it's not the network always beats the state. It's a network can beat the state. But I think that in different geographical theaters, we're seeing different outcomes. And what I mean by that, for example, in China, the state beat the network. Like that is to say the party did basically go and have Jack Ma de platformed and, you know, took his company and so on and so forth. They have controlled the great firewall. They have all the tech companies within their sphere. The state is dominant and the network is secondary. But what just happened in the USA is the network beat the state. That's to say the tradition of, yeah, there's a good to it. But I think those, those two polls will be American anarchy. And, you know, or let me put it as left and right, American anarchy and Chinese control. Right? So this is where a state over network. And this is where network over state. Network over state. There's good to it, which is freedom, but there's bad to it, which is disorder. Right? Like nobody can. I mean, every variety of bad behavior that you can imagine from, you know, like every kind of, every kind of ill that was kept back by a centralized power has now burst out. Because, you know, one of my concepts also is the Internet increases variance, meaning it removes the middleman, but also removes the moderator, the mediator, right? And so those sometimes have a bad connotation. A good, like the middleman is just taking a cut off of you. So he's bad, fine. But the moderator or the mediator, the moderator, you might say, oh, he has power over you. He's bad. We want censorship, resistance and so on. But the mediator, somebody who can say, look, you Know, let's, let's see things in the middle that in a sense like destroys that center because everybody's just connecting peer to peer and there's no, there's nobody who can be a traffic cop or what have you. And of course that was abused for like how old are you? You're like 27, something like that? 25, 23. Okay, fine, fine, fine. So you sir, you really don't remember? I mean actually you're, you're obviously you're, you know, you read a lot of history and so on and so forth, but viscerally the big difference between in the 80s and 90s, like, so it's more in 1980 actually. Right. And 1985, 1995, 2005 up to 2015, I would consider them basically the same. Even with from the Western context, like obviously they were radically different for somebody who is in The Soviet context, 85, 1985 were radically, radically. Those are times of great change. Right, but in the Western context, and I want to return to that point because their civilization did end, right? Like Soviets no longer existed, Russians did, Estonians did, but Soviets didn't. In that sense, people sometimes use the term USIAN. Have you heard that before? Right. So the USIAN is essentially the distinction of the US empire kind of person. Right. So the USIAN I don't think exists past 2035 or 2040. I don't know how long it's going to take, but. Right, but that the US is to the American as the USSR or the Soviet is to the Russian. Right. So to speak. Right. Okay, so 85, 95, 2005, up to 2015, basically life was the same. Like the daily rhythms of life are the same. But the last 10 years have been a total breakdown of Western society. The English speaking Internet, like the level of chair throwing stuff that's happening and it, it is, you know, you know, have you seen the Simpsons episode like Beer? The cause of and solution to all of man's problems? No, I haven't. It's meant to be a joke because obviously getting drunk is not actually a solution, but it's like a Homer's. So the Internet though, the cause of and solution to all of man's problems, much of what's happening is mediated by the network and by the Internet. Like you have social media and actually, you know what elected Trump? Twitter, Twitter, but Twitter also. That's right. So Twitter also elected Bolsonaro and also elected Orban and Modi. It's a global phenomenon, it's not a local. It did Brexit. Right. Like, basically Twitter led to essentially a counter, you know, like. Like the same as the Arab Spring. The American Spring happened. Right. And that's why the counter revolution was to try to censor Twitter, censor the Internet, stop speech and so on. But I could see that that was not going to work because the collateral damage meant taking voice away from lots of people who already had it. Right. Like, there's a huge swath of people who are not Trump supporters, but they were like online influencers, and they didn't want to get censored and deplatformed and so on and so forth. So that was like a lot of implicit pushback against this that I think is underrated. Right. And there's only so much energy there could be for censorship. And once they couldn't hold the. The genie in the bottle anymore, it just burst out and Elon took X. And. And now we have what we have now. I think things might have gone differently. It wasn't easy for Elon to take X. I think the state had a fighting chance, but it lost. And I actually don't think there's going to be an easy. I think we're going to, you know, the war, of course, you know this. The Warring States period, Warlord era. Yeah. Why don't you tell people about that.

So I can see where you're going here? Because I would take the chaotic network over the state, because only in chaos is there creativity and vitality, where the state naturally makes people weak and it naturally crushes creativity and it naturally crushes just the human spirit. And if you have a period, a Warring States period in America, that's going to create a new breakthrough in American, American creativity and culture. And it's brutal, but that's what drives the human experience and the Warring States Period. And this isn't what happens in every major civilization. Civilizations have cycles, and China's Warring States period was from 500 BC until roughly 200 BC, and it started out with over 20 Chinese states constantly fighting each other with noble warfare. And it was very genteel. And over time, it became this horrific trench warfare that destroyed and leveled China's previous social structure. And it resulted in the creation of this brutal totalitarian state that was Qin, which did unify China, but it did so at the expense of a lot of Chinese culture, where they were as close as you could get to Stalin 2,000 years ago. But on top of that, the Warring States Period was the time period which almost all of the seminal parts of Chinese culture formed. It's when Confucianism and Daoism formed when the Chinese bureaucracy formed and the Chinese ethnic identity formed. So it's this duality of chaos at the same time as creativity. What I'll also say is that I expect the network to win over the scale of centuries. I agree with you that the next century will see conflict between the network and the state. But I think ultimately the network will be able to defeat the state around the world.

It's. So this is something which I, I think I can see theaters in which one beats the other. But you know, again, there's to go the Chinese saying there's a. The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite. That's the way of the world, right? And so what I think happens in the West. So here's my 1, 2, 3, 4, and maybe you can think about this. We can do another episode or something at some point. Okay, so they're shutting down the funding for the blue empire of embassies and NGOs abroad. And the left, of course, sees this as helping the downtrodden or whatever. And the right sees this as just wasting money. But what it actually is is it's a flow of funds that maintains American empire. It's basically payola to all of these, basically this blue CIA around the world. Okay? So shutting down the blue empire of embassies and NGOs which will have the second order effect of not second or first order effect of reducing American influence on the left around the world. And this is massive leverage because a few hundred thousand for a color revolution or a few million for color revolution, gains billions of dollars in purchasing power for U.S. treasuries and other things. Go ahead. Right.

Oh, I'm just smiling. No, I have something to say though. So it reminds me of a conversation I had with a Saudi Arabian friend of mine. And I called him up and I said we were. And I said, it's funny, you as a Saudi who is part of the Islamic world and me as an American, we both hate the American empire because the Muslim world calls America the Great Satan. And I can definitely see why they'd think that when you look at, we are funding things that they do not care or want about, and we are actively hurting the name of the democracy in the west and freedom by pushing trans in Saudi Arabia, which they have no interest in. And as an American, where my family's been here since the Mayflower and we helped carve up the frontier, the American empire is as mean to the ethnic Americans as it is to the people abroad who it Destroys. And I think that's ridiculous. And it's going to ultimately cause the death of the American empire. Because I like to say how many people genuinely support globalism? If you polled people, and this is a great irony of the Internet, that when the Internet was first created, people thought, we're going to bring everyone together, we're going to love each other. And then you actually talk to people and you realize, wait, we are very different. We don't like each other. And the world's a deep conflicted place because the managerial class was able to maintain all these lies. And as the managerial class's empire falls, we, we will continually see what they did was morally and morally worse. And I can explain that more if you're interested, but I think the current managerial.

I want to, I'm going to agree, I want to agree with you and then argue with you on something. Okay. And then maybe take this. Okay. So the, absolutely. The Muslim world, you know, they have a beef with the American left, but also of course, the American right for all the bombing and so on and so forth, the neocon wars, what have you. Right. The thing about like, you know, the Soviet empire at the end was in a very similar situation where it was oppressing Russians at home, but it was also using Russians to oppress others abroad. Both were true. Right. And so the, this late stage American empire, there's a lot of red Americans who are now super mad in it and want to tear it down. There's lots of people abroad who have also felt the lash. And the tricky part is both people feel like they're getting, you know, attacked by it. And I think on balance, the red American is in tearing down the American empire, they are going to probably regret it when it's gone. In the same way that Russians pine for the power of the Soviet empire, like right now, hundreds of thousands of Russians are dying to just recover a few slices of Ukraine. Right. On the other hand, Russians like the fact that they've got orthodox Christianity back, that they've actually got 72% Russians in Russia. It was complicated where there's certainly a lot of gains. Obviously Eastern Europe is way better off. You know, the Baltics are way better off. And my view is it's similar. Like basically the more core American you are, the less net benefit you're going to get from the end of the American empire. The more on, like Europe, like, you know, colonies of the US will do better. It's very similar to the Soviet thing. The one other thing I would just say is on globalism. Versus nationalism. I'm going to write an article on this, right. Because I think, to use a leftist term, both of those are social constructs that I think are actually wrong in the way that people are using them. Like they have, they have a value, but then you have to invert them. For example, you and I met through the Internet and in fact all your audience comes through the Internet. And in fact, insofar as people have a real community, a social network that's going to be Internet based, like when they get up in the morning, they don't go down the street and knock on their neighbor's door and say, hi neighbor. Right. They post on the Internet good morning. Right. Like that's their actual community. The lived experience is not America first, it's Internet first. Deep point, I think, right. And on the other hand, of course, people want a physical community and so on and so forth. And so I think the thesis, antithesis, synthesis is that that Internet community becomes a physical immunity. That's what I'm working on with like network school and, and, and startup societies and so on. Right. So the point is anybody who uses the Internet is a globalist. Otherwise like they'd be out, they wouldn't be using the Internet. The Internet is intent is like highly globalist. Like that's what it is, it's a global. And on their side, the nationalist side, a lot of people who call themselves nationalists in opposition to globalism are actually. Well, first of all they're globalist because they're networking with people who are in other locations and so on rather than their neighborhood. But second, they're not even nationalists. At best they're tribalist and their tribe is an Internet tribe. And the reason I say they're not even nationalists is that blue red partition that we saw is there in every country, but especially in the U.S. where you have Democrat, Republican. And when you have two nations within one country, you know how Democrats will use, they'll use democracy to mean ruled by Democrats.

Yeah, yeah, I've spoken about that.

Right. The flip side is the Republican will use American to mean red American.

Yes.

Like re real American is red American. Right. And they identify those and they're like America first. But really what they mean is red America first because they're definitely not putting like blue America first. In fact, a lot of what they're doing is in, is like war with blue America. Right. So, but this is something which they haven't fully processed. For example, a better term might be conservative first because. Or rightist first because otherwise what happens is they think, wait, we're America first. And this Canadian Conservative, he's non American, therefore he's our enemy. But that's a real problem, because if they're fighting the Canadian Conservatives and the Canadian Liberals and the American Liberals, they've alienated everyone and they're just in their own box, and they're doing that in every country. Right. So they're really not even nationalists or tribalists, and they're actually more globalist than they think. So that's my poke. Let me know your thoughts. Maybe we can wrap there for now.

So that makes me think of two things. The first is when you're talking about the decline of the American empire will probably end up hurting Americans. And that's. I think that's accurate.

Red Americans say it. Yeah, go, go, go.

I agree it'll end up hurting red Americans, and I agree with that, and I think so. My attitude is I'm a zoomer, and I'm forced to be responsible for decisions my grandparents made. And for both the Soviets and the American Empire, they built their empire fundamentally upon lies. And what happens when you build your. Because they're built upon demonstratively false principles of human nature. And when you do that is you set up these bizarre incentive structures that have zero coordination with reality. And so your descendants will look at these things that you. You did not think very clearly about, and then they'll be forced to tear down the structure for any degree of survival because the structural grows so bloated and silly. But at the same time, they will. They'll have to tear down the structure, but at the same time, they'll be tearing down the imperial structure that your ancestors built. So it's this weird double position when you operate off demonstratively false ideologies. And then secondarily. It reminds me of a science fiction book I read called Fitzpatrick's War that was written in the 90s, and it's set in the 25th century. And this is one of those books where me recommending it has basically made the book impossible to buy, where the copies are for going for like fifteen hundred dollars. But it's a good.

Somebody should scan it. Yeah, that's one of your followers to do that.

That's a project we're working on right now, actually.

Okay.

And if you're the author, please hit us up. We want to work with you. But the thes. The book set in the 25th century, it's the rise of an American Alexander the Great, but its backstory in the 21st century is fascinating. And the book was written in the 90s. And what the book talks about is that, is that in the 21st century, the global order collapses due to a combination of supply chain issues, genetically engineered illnesses, war, and just generalized decadence. And what happens is the American empire falls in a multi decade civil war or multiple, multiple short civil wars from the 2000s to the 2000s. And this book was written in the 90s. What happens is that red America forms a new ethnicity called the Yukons, based around intentional communities where red Americans move out, form their own societies away from the cities. These procreate more than the cities. Then the Democrats devolve into basically shameless racial pandering and they become taken in by inner city. By inner city gangs. Basically these two have a war. The red. The red states burn down the blue cities, they become a new ethnicity called the Yukons. And then Americans flee to Latin America. And Americans have become, it's become like a hippie term. The Chinese become a very strong empire. They actually become a Marxist state economy. And then the Muslims populate Europe. And so the world's population is that.

The 25th century that's happening now.

A lot of those people, this is the 21st century. This is the backstory in the 21st century. And then there's. This is the backstory for the plot that occurs 400 years later. And what happens is that the world's population crashes from 10 billion to 1 billion due to. They're much like Covid. They have a genetically engineered lab leak illness that kills a lot of people. There are supply chain issues. People can't maintain the oil systems. And so what happens is you see the rise of a world with this new American ethnicity. You see a Turkish empire running the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. And then you see China forming this Marxist power where India, India becomes one of the bigger powers in this new equation.

Yeah, well, okay, so. So lots of response to there. I'll just give a few quick things. First is in general, I think China's a state, but Indians are a network.

Yes.

And so India itself is like the relatively weaker part of Indians, just like the Chinese diaspora is the relatively weaker part of the, of China. Like the Chinese diaspora is very accomplished and so on. But China as a state is like that natural form of that culture. Right. Whereas Indians are just diasporic. And the Indian state is like, it's like doing well, it's actually doing a lot better than it used to. Similar. It's. But it's similar to the Chinese diaspora roughly in, in terms of the, the forms. That's it. Just a quick response to that, B is I, I think that there's something, what you just said, where people have a new identity like Yukons right afterwards, that is absolutely what's going to happen. Because the Internet tribes will be about as American as the Americans are British. Like, it's a clear, like underlying structure if you trace the root structure enough. But it's also really its own thing and they're their own thing and they fracture in 500 different directions that are all in a sense continuous with some strain of American or English speaking thought, but they're really their own thing. And it's like hyphenated Americans. And the third is that the Soviet identity was this big, big, big central thing. But then when it went away, everybody had to figure out their own thing, right? And the thing that I'm, that that's interesting to me, I think the strongest new identity that's coming is potentially bitcoin as the base identity. And the reason is that if right now bitcoin's on the order of 100,000, which is insane, by the way, relative to what it started at like 15 years ago as like a post on a message board. And from the perspective of history, it's like a vertical takeoff. It's like faster than Islam, faster than any of the most successful ideologies ever. It's like a historian who's writing about would be like, bitcoin appeared and then it instantly dominated. It just went like vertical like this. Of course it had many retrogressions and crashes and so on, but to go up seven orders of magnitude in like 14 years is psychotic in terms of its traction, right? So to me, the fact that it's now like the reserve asset of the United States in part like the sovereign bitcoin reserve. You saw that, right?

Like, it was incredible. Didn't expect it's incredible.

Well, I expected it. And the reason I expected it is any kind of ideology that goes from being banned to being mandatory has enormous power, right? Like LGBT went from banned, but not mandatory, but certainly flags up, right? Or communism. Like Lenin was in jail, right? And then, you know, it was, it was then he's running, you know, the Soviet Union, right? Or, you know, like the scientists who were. I know this is apocryphal, but it combines a few different things, but burn at the stake or, you know, the Inquisition, but then science is dominant. Just saying it from a neutral standpoint, something where you had to exert enough force to keep it in jail, bursts out and it's a very powerful force. Bitcoin is like that where they had, the state had to spend so much effort trying to ban it and just burst out like a jack in the box because it's got a strong force to it. I'm not saying it's all good or all bad. There's both good and bad to it. It's a, it's a very complicated thing. But that is something which is simultaneously American and post American. Because for example, naive Bukele who runs El Salvador is a bitcoiner in good standing. And a lot of the stuff that's happening now I think of as a transitional phase where you're seeing what I call black lives matter. But for the Mayflower. You know why I say that? You have people on X who are like, were you on the Mayflower?

Right.

They're like posting their like, you know, their great great great grandparents Mayflower manifest, which is very similar to people like how black are you? You know, like can you speak? Or whatever. Right. And the thing about that is they are hearkening back to something that was founded 250 years ago where they feel they have some stake in it and they're trying to use that to assert their level of belonging to a tribe, their identity. Today. However, as you go closer and closer to the present, TO Organizations founded 25 years ago and 2 and a half years ago and 2 and a half months ago, those organizations become much more global in their composition. Look at Elon's X AI. It has European ancestry people, Chinese ancestry people, Indian ancestry people. Like the modern organization that you're founding from scratch has a different social contract than the one founded 250 years ago. So as that one 250 years ago goes away, which I think it will, the mod, for example, the modern tech company, the modern tech currency is not ethnicity based, it's ideology and software based. The ethnicity based world will be the Chinese. That's the thing is actually MAGA and kind of these strains of, let's call it where you call it white supremacy or what have you or, or white identity, white identitarianism. I actually think that has five or 10 years in a, in a real sense because it's going to actually be part of the global left against a dominant Chinese superstate. Like the Chinese are the highly organized billion person ethnic group that's like homogenous and uniform and running a giant centralized superstate. And all of these tribes that today think of themselves are dominant are going to realize they're actually weak in five or 10 or 15 years, and weak and decentralized in isolated. They're going to appeal to Internet ideals of egalitarianism and the smart contract and so on and so forth. And an analogy for this is, you know how the right picked up the left's concept of free speech?

Yes.

Right. Like that. Against a dominant. Call it Han chauvinist, Han supremacist, Chinese super state. We're actually all minorities or what have you. It's an. It's an interesting reframe.

Right.

But it's something I just want to, you know, throw out there, because that's looking at five or 10 or 15 years and pricing in something that I don't think people have priced in, which is the total military dominance of the Chinese drone armada. That's not something that people are thinking about in terms of the level. Like they still think the US Military is like, in the game or something like that. They don't understand. It's actually like Hegseth, who's a defense secretary. There's a clip we can play. He's acknowledged that China has hypersonics that can sink all U.S. aircraft carriers.

Our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers and the ability to project power that way strategically around the globe. And yeah, we have a nuclear triad and all of that, but a big.

Part of of it.

And if, you know, 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict, what does that look like?

There's a U.S. secretary of the Navy that said China has shipbuilding, which is more shipbuilding in one shipyard than all of America's combined. They have 13 shipyards. In some cases, their shipyard has more capacity. One shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. There's the Raytheon co saying they can't decouple from China. So while we talk about pulling supply chain out of China, resourcing out of China, I would tell you it's very impractical. We've been de risking for a couple of years making sure that we have second sources for critical componentry. But unlike Russia, where we pulled out two weeks after the invasion last year, we shut down our factories, we pulled our people out, and we completely cut off any contact with our Russian customers. You can't do that with China. Too big, too important, and too necessary. So these are the people who are running the Defense Department, running the Navy under Biden, running the top. One of the top five defense manufacturers that are admitting that the US has already taken the L on this right that it can't actually. It's got scarcity. So because of that, that's how I think about what that near term future is. That military thing is upstream of so many other premises downstream. Anyway, let me, let me pause there. Why don't you, why don't you. I know that was a whole new thread, but I'll let you wrap. Go, go, go. Give me your, give me your closing kind of thing. Thoughts.

Those are interesting points and I've said for a while that I think aircraft carriers are sitting ducks in this new world. And my final point is that in a world where the state is, is weak, you'll see the return of, of either religions or pseudo religions. And I count both radical Islam and communism as in this category where they fit your, the thing you're describing. Liberalism used to be, and then liberalism kind of lost its revolutionary power after the 1800s. But first liberalism, communism and radical Islam are all these decentralized network based religious ideologies that seize control of a country through basically CAFE organizations. And then they make that country like that universalist ideology. And what I'll say is that decentralized power means people cooperate through ideas rather than through the state. And then secondarily that the next 20 years are probably going to have a lot of suffering. And our current worldview has no frame of reference for what suffering means or how to deal with it. That's going to the Western worldview, I think.

I think even like, well, the Eastern. See the thing is like Russia went through communism, China went through communism, India went through socialism, Iran went through fundamentalism, Eastern Europe, communism. Much of the east within living memory has gone through things like the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, you know, starvation or poverty level stuff. So they're just all happy to be here. Like they're less ideological, they just want to do business for the most part and so on and so forth. And they know that you can go to zero and they're grateful because they started at zero and they are where they are. But, but the, the west has a model of it can never go to zero, of course we'll always win. We'll win without any effort and so. And so forth. So I think whereas as a Christian, you do have like, if you're an American or a Republican, there's no narrative of oh my God, we can go to zero or whatever. As a Christian, there's a narrative, or a Jew, you, you've got a narrative of we were sometimes winning, but sometimes we were losing. And sometimes there's a time in the wilderness, and we had to rebuild and so on. And I think that's actually what people will have to come back to, is like, okay, simply being weak doesn't mean that, you know, like, we've lost forever. We can rebuild.

Yes, this is a great idea for our next podcast, but I've mapped out where I think new religions might start. I'm betting on Japan for one, I'm betting on Iran for another, and I think one will develop in the Western world. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. I think this has been a great podcast.

Great.

Peace.

Peace.