Why Europe Matters for America’s Future w/ Samo Burja

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today, we're releasing a conversation from Turpentine's show Live Players with Samo Burja. Samo and I do a deep dive on Western civilization, how American politics influence global politics, the cultural significance of Europe, and more. Please enjoy.

Let's start here. I just spent 10 days in Australia, and when they found out that I was from the States, they wanted to get my opinion on Trump right away. And people in Australia have opinions on Trump, and I don't have any opinions on Australian politicians. I can't even name who they are. And so it is sort of fascinating how important it is who's in power in the US to the rest of Europe and the broader Western sort of Anglo world. Why don't we talk about that phenomenon and, and, and sort of what's, what's underneath it?

We've seen many small indicators of this over the years, such as political interests in the U.S. and political factions, ideological factions, pick favorite countries that they hold up as models. And the countries they pick and favor as models are almost always other countries from the Western world. It almost never looks At countries outside of that. Even if the UAE is pretty objectively wealthy society, or if Saudi Arabia is an objectively wealthy society, you'll never really hear someone lift that up as an example of how the U.S. should do things or how it should run things. The most exotic people are willing to go is suggesting that there are certain things about how Singapore is governed that we might want to emulate in the Western world. But interestingly, of course, Singapore is this strange fragment of the British Empire itself. English is a prominent language. It has both economic relations with the West and political alliances going back decades. Conservatives might say, think highly of Hungary's family policies. Progressives 10 or 20 years ago in the United States thought highly of the Scandinavian model. Now, as you point out, they usually couldn't say who, you know, the Prime Minister of Australia is or the Prime Minister of Sweden, though occasionally Americans, you know, cared about to some extent what Angela Merkel thought of US politics, right? They occasionally cared about whether Orbán is being endorsed or condemned, right? Progressives especially painted Orbán as like a pseudo-Putin-like figure. Which I think he's not. He has much less power within Hungary than, say, Putin has within Russia. So even if one disagrees with their cultural politics, it's, it's sort of, uh, still exists in the kind of Western, broadly democratic milieu. But people would bring up various countries as model countries all the time. And, you know, the whole refrain of, oh, I'm moving to Canada, right? If Trump wins, or even if George W. Bush wins, which now Looking back decades ago, you know, even Democrats are like sort of, they don't really feel that George W. Bush was there. At the time though, a lot of the negative sentiment was comparable to that, that they now have about the Trump administration. The conservative version of this was also often like tended to look at these few countries like Hungary, some of the Eastern European countries. And I think the reason that everyone's constantly looking over the shoulder is that we have not yet escaped the fact that Western civilization as a political unit continues to exist. Now, it's transformed beyond recognition in the last 100 years, but it's undoubtedly true that we have one set of standards for thinking about European countries or some East Asian countries and a different set of standards for thinking about the rest of the planet, be it Latin America, be it Africa, be it Asia. And likewise in Europe, this strong focus on the United States, it's kind of the times envy, times a kind of culture war hatred that when there's a right-wing president, there's kind of almost a rebellion. in the provinces, in the client states of the American empire. But there is unwavering focus and all ideological concepts, like for example, trans rights as a movement and liberal ideological priority started in the United States and was picked up by Europe. It didn't independently evolve in Europe, right? Maybe it would have eventually happened. But as a priority, it began in blue states of the United States. So the more you look at this, the more you realize that you have strange phenomena like people in Poland or Slovenia or Romania becoming very interested in gun rights.

Why is that?

That is a complete ahistorical import from imitating basically American-flavored libertarianism. Why? Because the political diet they consume online is American or heavily geared towards US interests. So even when it's doing like a European take on American daily politics, that is a take on American daily politics, right? In a sense, Western civilization is perhaps more a single unit today than it was 30 years ago. Because we all use the same websites, at least for now. X.com hasn't been banned. We all watch YouTube, Instagram. The single internet is no longer a global internet because China has its own very developed internet ecosystem, but it kind of is a Western internet with still only a minority of, say, people from India or from Nigeria participating. And when they do participate, they don't really drive the news or share interest. So it's not that a story from Nigeria would algorithmically become the dominant thing in your feed. Like that just will tend not to happen. The Western world is still interested in the United States and Western priorities, sometimes in rival powers such as China or Russia, and everyone else is sort of along for the ride. For what is still a pan-Western news cycle. Now, this pan-Western news cycle tends to favor the highest level of politics over local politics. So in a way, every single generation of young Europeans today knows less and less about European politics, or at least the reality of how European politics is done, because they no longer watch the local news TV station, right? The TV station set in the local language. I think that it's about 50/50. If you ask Romanians under 25, do you watch the news or do you follow political news on Twitter? If you follow political news on Twitter, do you follow it in English or do you follow it in Romanian? A minority probably only follows it In English, but still I bet they follow it mostly online on the various social media sites, and I bet they probably don't watch Romanian national TV very much if they're politically interested. And in a way, the focus then becomes on pan-European politics, on these big sometimes on the EU. One one possible perspective on this is that actually the European Union. can at times be so annoying in its commentary on US politics because it is competing for the attention not of Americans, but young Europeans. If you're a 20 or 25-year-old European and you're interested in politics, even if you're very mad at Donald Trump, you are spending a lot of time thinking about Donald Trump. And the only way the European Union or presumably your career will continue could possibly matter is if it has something to say about Donald Trump. And that already shows that it's, it's in a way subordinate, right? The US presidency is more important for Western civilization than the European Commission. The European Commission though is probably more important than the governor of Idaho. So this old Westphalian perspective where you have legal sovereignty and economic, and let's say this globalist perspective, we had economic globalization, both failed to capture what is actually happening, which is a synchronization of attention across the Western world, all of these countries leading to a somewhat synchronized status hierarchy. There's nothing objective or universal about any human status hierarchy. Within China, Xi is like the most important person. You know, within Bulgaria, Xi is pretty important, but you know, maybe Xi is less important than the president of Bulgaria. Still, I think even within Bulgaria, president of the United States is more important than the president of Bulgaria or its prime minister if they were to visit. And this phenomena, the synchronization points to something that's not quite a single polity, but it is some sort of commonwealth. So the reality is what we call the Western world is completely cross-penetrated politically. And this goes forward not just to things like attention, it goes to the operation of various nonprofit organizations. USAID was, you know, in the news recently where all of this money was found that has been sent around the world, sent to Europe, sent to Latin America, basically advancing various progressive causes such as trans rights and so on. This set of priorities, this set of spending that has ideological impact where you're trying to synchronize the social norms and the political priorities of countries that, you know, there's no direct national security reason or national interest reason to do so. It just feels like the right thing to do. There is not a communist international, but there is a liberal international. And in the last few years, there's now a conservative international, and they're both centered on US terms of discussion, and they are centered on US social media. And currently there's a power struggle as to Whether Silicon Valley is more important or is it European governments? So in other words, the European governments sort of want, they want the world where nominally there is freedom of speech, but you control what happens on national TV. You can with laws like they have in France tame the media. You can not just with laws, but with indirect influence funding. Staffing semi-control what state-funded media does. Now, to my American listeners and viewers, it's good to know that almost every European country has their equivalent of the BBC. There is one news org speaking in the native language of the European country that is government funded. Also, of course, by the way, the BBC partially received its funding Not just from the British government, but from USAID. So it, it, there is something strange happening when the US is funding British state media. If you were thinking about it in a Westphalian nationalist way, you know, there's nothing wrong with thinking about it that way, but politically what we have is an elite level mess. And then an algorithmic mesh, and then a series of economic, political, and military interdependencies centered on the United States and to a lesser extent on Atlantis's ties. And if we view this from the perspective of world history, I think we would come to the view that something like a very decentralized state has come into being. Let me put it this way. The politics, priorities, and geopolitics of Lithuania, Spain, Britain, Australia, Japan, and the United States are much more closely coordinated than the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Kingdom of Prussia were in the Holy Roman Empire. Yet when we draw the historical map of medieval Europe, while we acknowledge the Holy Roman Empire is a very decentralized state, We map it as one state. So there's no such thing on paper as a Western Union. But arguably, even when you compare, say, Portugal, Sweden, and Hungary, they have about as much in common with each other in terms of political priorities and economic strategy, even though they're all in the European Union, as they do with Australia, Canada, or the United States. There is a very interesting way in which There is no formal expression of a de facto union between the Anglosphere and continental Europe. And currently there's a cultural war that's being fought very viciously between the European governments, which are allied with blue state America versus sort of red state America and red state America trying to find allies within the coalition, such as Hungary, And Italy to side with them in these pan-Western culture wars.

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And how influential do you think Elon and sort of the broader, you know, surging sort of right When sort of vibe shift will carry over to Europe? How big of an audience is there for it? I mean, do you think AfD or parties like it will win, or what do you think might be the impact here?

I think the impact will be significant if X.com becomes much more popular among normal everyday Europeans. I think the majority of people are not yet using X for their news. Because at first it's sort of indignancy. Well, who are these foreigners to tell us how we should do things? I mean, it's the same for Americans, right? If Europeans critique you, the knee-jerk response is to immediately be anti-European. The Europeans' first knee-jerk response will be to be anti-American. But in this sense, things like J.D. Vance's Munich speech, where J.D. Vance points out something that Europe used to speak about plainly. He points out that actually Europe doesn't seem to be run as a democracy very much. It seems to be bureaucratically dominated. Europe used to talk about this 10 or 20 years ago. There was this term in use called a democratic deficit, where it was believed that the European Union needed to have democratic legitimacy and more democratic processes. to be politically sustainable. They quietly stopped talking about it after the European Constituent, key referendums. And at that point, I think they started quietly changing practical definition of democracy to be something rather different. And, you know, in the speech, he pointed out, Judy Vance pointed out that It's very hard to talk about common values if the Romanian election can just be canceled because they didn't like the result. And this isn't an EU election or an EU referendum. This is just the national election was just invalidated by a court for some amount of Russian meddling in it. But you know what? If €100,000 of Russian propaganda Can invalidate your election. Maybe your democracy's like not that strong anyway. Maybe actually the speech space is extremely limited. And maybe the only reason the Russian propaganda has high impact is because it occasionally highlights things that the Romanian media or Western media chooses to ignore. The best way to defeat it would be to not ignore it, right? Don't leave weaknesses for foreign adversaries to point out because the most devastating thing in the world is true propaganda. True propaganda is very effective because it's true. And even if it's selective truth, that still doesn't eliminate its impact. So anyway, this, the speech was notable because I don't think we've ever had a U.S. president comment as directly into European politics. And I think in an almost, if we step back and look at this bigger political picture, what we're seeing is a push for social media growth, the growth of engagement and the growth of user time in Europe centered on the US, the elimination of what was de facto almost like a great digital firewall of Europe. Which allowed European governments to exert control over which stories were prioritized in European countries. In a way, it was inevitable they would be defeated unless there were European social media giants. They didn't go all the way into a digital Cold War. Now, it's possible that Europe will escalate this and that there will be a European Great Firewall, right? Comparable to the firewall of China. And that they will create their own versions of social media companies centered in Europe. And I think while the Eurocrats would like this, it is going to be very difficult for them to change course towards allowing the creation of such powerful companies. Because think about it, even if you push out X and YouTube and all these American media now with their newly found Free speech tendencies, right? Where free speech is good for engagement. It's good for user retention. All these like totally profit-seeking reasons why, let's put it this way, free speech is good for business for X.com, assuming you can't get banned. And then why can a European government ban you if the US takes it very seriously and the US says, we're going to tariff you 20% if you ban X.com? I'm not sure European governments have enough economic autonomy to do that anymore. I think you've become too economically intertwined with the US, right? So we'll see a set of very exciting political revolutions in Europe if free speech comes to Europe for the first time ever. I think you will have a massive change in voter behavior. This is when I talk to my American friends, you know, and I don't endorse The annexation of Canada. But I think if you annex Canada, within 10 or 20 years, Canadian voters would behave like American voters. They wouldn't just all become blue state. Some of them would become blue state voters and some of them would become red state voters. I think Alberta would very quickly develop a Texas-like culture, right? And Ontario would very quickly develop something like a A less functional New England culture, right? And all of the talented Canadians would leave provincial and state politics to go into national US politics. And they would migrate to places like California and New York. And you know, Canadians, you can't tell a Canadian from an American unless they tell you. Like, you can't. It's, it's, it's, it's the most pre-assimilated nationality that exists in the world. Australians are much easier to spot. British people are easy to spot. Canadians, though, unless they tell you, you're not going to know they're Canadian. So why am I talking about this? I think we might see something very surprising where Europe might suddenly shift in a very libertarian direction, which will surprise everyone. And I think the reason is implicitly we assume that voter behavior regulates sort of state politics. And policies, but I suspect the European voter is created by Europe, by European governments. The voter is created by government policy. So change the government policy, change the voters' preferences. And this is very, very strong. And this is secretly the reason why assimilation works because. You take a voter from a place like Germany or from a place like Canada and you move them to the U.S., you know what? They stop voting for social democracy. Like, not immediately, but over a 10-year period. The data is very strong on this. Actually, if you imported 50 or 60 million voters from Europe, they would actually very quickly assimilate to U.S. norms. But the same also goes the other way. If you say abolish progressive taxation in Eastern European countries, If you make a middle-class society, if you allow gun rights, suddenly the people, and they talk about politics, sound more like US Republicans than traditional hyper-Catholic social democrats, right? Christian democracy was the old European political formula. If the free speech dominoes, like, start tipping over and free speech comes to Europe, I think European and American politics will be even more synchronized. And here's an argument for why this is good for U.S. national security interests. I think synchronizing places like Canada, Australia to the United States in terms of attention and ideology, be it through, you know, universal progressive gay, Black, trans rights for everyone, right? That's the Democratic. Universal American empire. And then let's say there's the, like, you know, based MAGA, make Europe great again, free speech, European revival option. Either one of these options successfully achieved the geopolitical goal of synchronizing Europeans with Americans and making, say, American interests in Ukraine hard to disentangle from European interests in Ukraine. But more importantly, Whatever America does with China, it makes that compelling to Europeans. And I think it's become sort of apparent that the magnitude of the scale, the sheer scale of the challenge of China means the United States will need some form of an international alliance. And that's why, you know, that means that while the second Trump administration is nationalist, They sort of care. They sort of favor, say, a Meloni government in Italy, right? Or an Orbán government in Hungary, because these governments are objectively likelier to go with the U.S. on any sort of trade war policy with China, let alone any sort of military backing up of the U.S. in East Asia.

So. What I'm gathering from you is basically you think that there is this latent demand for free speech within Europe that is going to be unleashed at some point because the—

Well, it'll be created. Yeah.

Or yeah, it'll be created.

Imagine that we have a conversation here and there's a room and there are 5 Europeans and 5 Americans and the Europeans and Americans disagree and a European says something and then both the Americans and the Europeans see a policeman walk in. Arrest the European and take them out of the room. No matter what the remaining 4 Europeans think, it is obvious on a monkey level that the Europeans are lower status. Digitally, this has been happening for 20 years. British people are confused by the fact that they don't have freedom of speech. They're confused that they don't have the First Amendment. They reference the First Amendment. Why? Because they feel like peers to Americans. So the assumption is, why shouldn't I have the same rights? So in a way, this assumption of free speech didn't exist before the internet, but I think the internet naturally favors a kind of free speech while paradoxically it makes it easier to police speech at scale. So it's the internet can't remain half free and half government policed. Socially, this doesn't work. So either free speech will be eliminated in America, or free speech will come to Europe, or the European and American internets will be legally separated and the websites mutually blocked. If that happens, that is a geopolitical disaster for the United States because then there will be a resentful Latin America-like kind of impoverished, kind of too powerful to ignore continent. That could potentially make deals with China, right? Like that's, that's a not favorable situation. So the US has the black trans rights for everyone, universal revolution, overturning Western civilization, you know, whatever. And then the sort of like weird MAGA reactionary, make all countries great again platform. And they're both consistent. One of them is hate speech should be illegal in the United States. The other one is for Europe to be considered a democratic place with common values, it must have free speech. And, you know, let's, let's remember the, like, First Amendment stuff was actually, like, a little bit on the way out during the Biden years. And even the Obama years, people were floating various legal theories for why the free speech stuff doesn't It doesn't cover online speech, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Like that was being done and we should memory hole that. And I think this is the evidence here is very strong that political change in the United States is at this point inextricably linked from political change in Europe. And I think because of that, I think we should stop pretending that European countries are sovereign because they're not. Like they don't have the ideological or intellectual preconditions for sovereignty. And this doesn't even necessarily mean that they are exploited or oppressed by the United States because they have influence over US politics right back. You know, labor politicians being flown in into the United States to work on Democratic Party campaigns. I don't know about you, but that sounds way more involved than €100,000 of media spend of Russia in Romania. It feels to me that the vassal states, the client states of the United States, be they places like Canada, like Europe, like Saudi Arabia, like Israel, like Australia, have a surprising amount of influence on American politics. They have a voice. It's just the voice is not coming directly from the citizens. It's coming from the elite classes of these countries.

Yeah. Fascinating.

Yeah. The influence on domestic politics is important.

Well, it's interesting because what we learned in the US is that a heavy censorship regime was covering up this sort of big pushback to a lot of wokeness or overly progressive ideas and policies. Basically, there's a question of if and when there is just much more free speech in Europe, are we basically going to find out there's been this groundswell of— or is there like much more left-wing populism than we thought? Like, what are we going to find out when we can find out what everyone thinks, basically?

I think in Europe, almost all of the key political authorities have been trying to tamper down On basically right-wing populism. So if you introduce free speech to Europe, Europe automatically goes more right-wing. Depending on the country, it might go economically right-wing or it might not. The key problem with Europe is the same problem Japan has, which is gray democracy. It'll be relatively easy to win votes. What do I mean by gray democracy? We could call it silver democracy. The median voter is Very old. Old people will not vote to defund the welfare state because old people are beneficiaries of the European welfare state. And, you know, this hits these older problems where I think some amount of deregulation could happen, some amount of economic growth, some amount of a nuclear buildup, some amount of rearmament. But fundamentally, I think Europe will continue just because of the older voters to have a very welfarist model. However, cultural shift rightward is almost certain because there have been massive coverups, right? Stuff like the Rotterdam scandals in Britain, things like various shady aspects of the The meddling of the German intelligence agencies into German electoral politics, and in fact, electoral politics in multiple European countries and so on. This is stuff that Europeans did not know about. And let's be real, it's stuff that Americans didn't know about 5 minutes ago until it was re-brought into attention by Elon and The algorithms of X.com. I think there's this really interesting political experiment here where I think we might see a very rapid change in priorities in Europe. Political identities are so fluid as well. Very few people have consistent memories about even who they voted a few years ago. It sounds funny. You would think people could recollect this accurately. But when studies were done, like literally polling the same people over and over again, their story of who they voted for a few years ago changed. So when you did longitudinal voter behavior studies, the voters who themselves, like in 1977, would say, oh, you know, I voted for this guy or that guy, I voted for Reagan or voted for George W. Bush or voted for Clinton. Their stories tend to change over time to match their current identity. And I don't think they're even lying to the pollsters. I think they just sort of retcon themselves as, oh, I've always been a left-wing voter, or I've always been a right-wing voter, or the party changed, I didn't change. So I think in Europe, the attribution will be to a sudden new development. And the reality though is that The voter behavior will be co-created with the new environment. So I really think that there is demand for change in Europe. There is no understanding of any kind of the causes of the economic, political, and social problems faced by Europe. And there is no understanding as to how downstream European politics has been of American geopolitics. So there will not be an accurate interpretation for the causes and consequences of the problems, but there will be an accurate understanding that the problems are very significant and there will be a shift in priorities towards, let's call it the style of like, you know, not quite Malay, more like something like national greatness populism. So there'll be less government efficiency stuff, more, hey, you know, we should secure our borders. We should rearm. We should achieve energy independence. We should drop the green agenda. I think a lot of the European political fights will be fighting the green agenda, sort of like, you know, anti-immigration versus pro-environment, implicitly multicultural thing. I think that'll be a political fight.

So I guess what I was curious about is, is there mass support for something different in Europe that there isn't mass support for in the US?

I think we'll see very soon. The German elections are coming up. The British elections are coming up. I don't think anyone knows if enough Germans are using X.com for the AfD to have made significant gains because of X.com. But we know enough people in Britain use X.com. So if there's a massive swing away from the establishment parties in the UK, I think that is evidence that the same will be true of other European countries once those barriers are removed. And like, again, I'm emphasizing, let's put it this way. I think COVID has demonstrated that citizens around the world, be it China, America, or Sweden, just comply with governments by default. So it's not like that there's pressure that's held down. It's just that certain information is not available. And if this information is brought to their attention by the algorithmic systems, people's preferences will change and produce the political fuel needed for the transformation. So it's like, I keep harping on this in different ways, but I think it's extremely important to understand that I think in the modern information landscape, voters are extremely valuable. It's only a question of who gets to have the tools to influence it. And I do think the voters would prefer to know these things. So I think that, you know, after the transformation happens, the Europeans will be very happy that it happened. But unless it happens, They won't be missing anything and those governments will not be in danger, if that makes sense. So they'll be happy to have addressed the compounding injustices and dysfunction of the last 50 or so years of like Western style, normal liberal politics. But unless that's pointed out to them, they're, they're not going to really do anything about it. So I am hopeful that this kind of kickstart a European revival or renaissance, because I think, you know, that would be good for the development of Western civilization and also in the long run, and even in the short run, be good for the U.S. I mean, the U.S. has signaled very clearly that Europe will have to mind its own defense against Russia. The only way Europe can do that is with more economic growth. And with more military spending, which means the military is not a bad thing, which means that if you want recruits in the military, well, then patriotism can't be that bad a thing. Wait, if patriotism is not that bad a thing, you see how it's like tips a bunch of dominoes politically? Yeah.

The, yeah, it's fascinating.

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Which countries are sovereign?

I think that currently the United States is somewhat sovereign. If we consider this, let's put it this way. The American empire is a great sovereign power. And then the United States government at times takes a lot of inputs from its ostensible allies, but there's this almost undeclared political union between these countries at the highest level, like through institutions like the World Bank, et cetera. So that, that is a sovereign country. I think that China is sovereign. I think that Russia It's becoming dangerously economically dependent on China, but it seems that its isolation there is going to end in the near future. It seems that within the next 2 years, one way or the other, the Ukraine war will end. So I think Russia remains sovereign. I think India is becoming more and more sovereign because India will have its own social media giants. India has its own foreign policy. It maintains relationship both with the West, where the West, we routinely invoke India as the counterbalance to China. Yet at the same time, India is part of BRICS, right? So India buys military equipment from Russia. So India is clearly pursuing its own center of power. I think for a while it seemed that the European Union was attempting something like sovereignty, but I think they ran out of steam in the early 2010s. So I think it's best to just model them as part of the Western world. The most strategic autonomy in Europe, I think France has the most strategic autonomy where we'll carry out an independent foreign policy. It'll set an economic, at times a technological agenda. I think it's telling that no European country, let's put it this way, no European government Other than France has an AI strategy worth a name. Like they are the only ones that have a story for how France will end up taking the future of artificial intelligence or a story where France is relevant to the future of artificial intelligence. In Germany, I think they want to pretend AI is not happening because it's bad for CO2 emissions. Until China built all of the world's batteries and solar cells, Germany could pretend that it was at the forefront of a kind of green energy revolution and that they were going to build all the solar cells and batteries. But I think they've sort of let go of that dream, but are still bizarrely committed to zero emissions as a target, even though there's no realistic economic or technological path for them to be a leader in that, or at least a leader anyone wants to follow. If being green means impoverishing your country, even if Germany does that, no other country will do that. So, but to go back to the question of sovereignty, in theory, I think a country like Brazil could be sovereign, but it would have to be much more functional. There is a resource prerequisite at the end of the day. Countries that are truly large, such as Russia, China, the United States. I mean, in theory, even a place like Canada. Have all the resources a modern industrial base needs. So if you control enough of the Earth's surface, as we discussed in some of the other episodes, inevitably you'll discover something, right? Turns out America has some rare earths. Turns out Russia has some rare earths. Turns out it's not just China, right? Canada has some rare earths. It's inevitable once you're that size. So let's just say that the bare minimum size to be resource independent. Is probably a bit bigger than India. So Brazil fits the bill. Canada fits the bill. Russia, China, the US. Canada's population is vastly too low and it's overshadowed by the US. The same is true of Australia. So you also need to have a large enough population to have a workforce that can sustain a great industrial economy. It seems to me that Currently, to be globally industrially relevant in more than one sector, you need about 50 million people. So the bare minimum is sort of Italy and South Korea for industrial relevance. So if we add all of these things together, your elites have to think independently from the elites of a different sovereign power. You need to have resources needed for Enough autarky that while you do trade perhaps for economic efficiency, you are not dependent on imports necessarily. Say China might import oil from the Middle East, but it has enough shale oil and it's electrifying its fleet of cars fast enough that were war to break out, they could pump oil in mainland China to sustain themselves and not have famine. So there's like a resource minimum and then there's a population minimum of a disciplined, well-educated workforce working in various industrial centers, basically so that you can make your own artillery shells and your own drones. The example of South Korea wasn't random. You remember South Korea, first off, South Korea makes drones that China doesn't. China makes more drones than South Korea, but South Korea can independently make drones. Second, you probably recall that North Korea was sending artillery shells to the Russians and South Korea was sending many artillery shells to the Ukrainians. It wasn't the U.S. that manufactures even its own artillery shells. The U.S. was paying South Korea for South Korea to manufacture artillery shells to give them to Ukraine. So, you know, I think that that kind of explains some of the problem with a place like Brazil. It's just not industrialized. And then to add another one, I think digital sovereignty is very important. I think China, India, Russia, and the US each have social media platforms that are compatible with their country's political economy. This is a more subtle concept than saying that it's free, Or that it's not free. Those are relevant dimensions. But I think in a very important way, I think the kind of government you have in Britain or Germany, it's not the only democratic adjacent government you could have, or Western-style government. But I think you just can't govern in the digital age with that type. It's in a way a 20th century dinosaur. It rests on the TV station. It rests on broadcast, right? It's not algorithmic upregulation. It rests on broadcasting. You know, it's like MI5 shows up and says, you know, this story about the royal family is not going to fly. You know, BBC, you have to change this. And then someone at the BBC is like, okay, we're not going to run that story. And then they're like, good. And then it's like based on a handshake. That's that's done. You know, that's not the algorithmic incentive. That's not what would go viral on X.com. Any story about the British royal family could go viral on X.com. So there's a lot to say here, but to re-summarize it: a large enough territory that you probabilistically, because you can never predict the future, have all the resources; a large enough population that you can sustain a modern industrial base; intellectual and status. independence of your elites. Your elites must not wonder what people in Brussels think or what people at Harvard think or what people in the New York Times think. They should only care about what is thought of in your capital because your capital to your elites should feel like the center of the universe, right? I guarantee you to Russian elites, Moscow feels like the center of the universe. To Chinese elites, Beijing feels like the center of the universe. For us here, it's like San Francisco and DC feel like the center of the universe and so on and so on. Because I do think elites are somewhat self-selected to be— people describe them as power-seeking, but I think it's not quite right. I think they're status-seeking. I think most elites actually are very happy to give up real power in exchange for prestige. Arguably, that's why constitutional The deal was you get to stay king, you get to live in your nice house, you have the highest honors, the press will speak kindly of you, and you hand over the running of the country to parliament and power of taxation, and you agree on all foreign policy stuff. And in a way, US Congress took that deal. US Congress is happy to be talking in soundbites. And when writing legislature, listening to lobbyists and deferring to bureaucracy, right? They're happy to do that. They still have their status. So I think elites are status seeking and that's why status independence matters because otherwise your elites will just sell out your country to a different country. And, you know, I think the world has room for about 5 to 7 sovereign Blocks, maybe 8 if Africa develops very well. And as a result, I honestly think that's good for the world. I think we need several different sovereign-ish countries and blocs and civilizations doing different things because otherwise humanity, it's going to, it will overfit. It will not explore all the possibilities of a human society. And because of that, all of us will be diminished and future civilization will be less impressive than it could be. So here's maybe my joke. Samuel Huntington wrote about the clash of civilization in the late 1990s. And, you know, it was considered almost like this grim realist prediction that countries around the world have really different cultures, different deep values, different approaches to technology. technological modernity, and that they're going to clash and compete militarily, economically, ideologically. I wish that were true. I wish there were as many active life player civilizations in the world as Samuel Huntington thought there were. Currently, I'm seeing a somewhat anemic, occasionally spasming Western civilization, a clearly still in decline, but like bitterly clinging Russian civilization, a recreation or an attempted recreation of an Indian civilization that's still very early in its history. And like a strange Marxist Confucian hybrid of a Chinese civilization, right? We already talked about how Chinese civilization is very Westernized in its assumptions. Look, you went to Red Note, you realize a lot of Red Note was sharing consumer recommendations. Like, if that's not like, wasn't that like striking how capitalist that seemed, or at least consumerist, right? So clearly they picked up some of our DNA when developing this society, like Western-style democratic, like they picked democracy, but they picked like Marxism. And then confusingly, they also picked consumerism. And it's like, it's kind of those like, can you press both buttons? And China just pressed both buttons. If you know the meme, right? Yeah. The sweating guy meme. And then it's like, you press both buttons. And, you know, I think the Chinese challenge is healthy for Western civ. I mean, without it, if it actually was the end of history, would we have even done anything? Like, it feels like everything that's happening left or right currently in the US is a little energized by the fact that there is a Chinese challenge. around the corner. So maybe we should look forward to a future of more competing civilizations.

Yeah. Fascinating. Why are we so much better at exporting our culture than say China or other players?

In a way, the US is culturally closer to so much of the world than China is. So the first one is very similar to this thesis that despite the US being the leader and the transformer of Western civilization, and maybe Western civilization as we knew it before World War I is over, but clearly there's a common heritage. It's like, well, let's start. Who spread English around the world? It's not just Hollywood, okay? A lot of the world was already speaking English when the first Hollywood movie hit international markets, right? The British Empire spread English. And then when Western leaders talk about Christianity, why do several billion people around the world resonate with this? Why are themes of forgiveness or grace and all of that stuff that is common fare, even if secularized in Western media, why does that resonate with so much of the planet? Well, you know, the Spanish and the Portuguese and the French and the British, they All did their share of spreading that. And then we add to this that the U.S. was a leader in the development of information technology and entertainment because it was the most commercial society. The U.S. was the first society to truly deeply commercialize cultural production. Like Hollywood was a world historical development, but Broadway was a historical development. Right? Broadway is a different mode of cultural production than, say, Russian ballet or German opera. And of course, Russian ballet and German opera were very influential, including influencing Hollywood and Broadway and all of that. But I think it was the power of basically free market cultural production that just produced stuff that was extremely profitable. So that's the third reason. And then I think free speech genuinely helps with the commercialization of culture. And also, you know, you can still have dumb studios. Like, let's be real, Disney execs probably have lost the plot. They probably don't know what the people want. So even in a semi-free speech, free market environment, it's possible for the cultural titans to lose touch with what actually works. new cultural titans, even in a free market environment, but all else equal, you know, a sort of free market, free speech environment allows for cultural startups and allows for churn and allows for the commercialization of new culture. So I think these are the reasons and let's not lose sight of the reason that humans, I think we tend to deny it, but we always admire military power. I don't think Roman culture would be admired for so long with things like Stoicism, et cetera. That's like, you know, kind of their take on Greek philosophy and so on, or Roman law. I don't think people would emulate it unless they had a weird intuition that something about Roman culture leads to military greatness. Let's put it this way, the legionary's broom helmet or whatever that Hollywood invokes Of humanity's great symbols of military power, you have that and you have the medieval knight and you have the American aircraft carrier. When China recently put like this video of a carrier group, a Chinese carrier group on social media, many Chinese citizens falsely thought it was an American carrier group. Now, this is concerning, right? In the sense that it means that, you know, China has a strong navy, but it's kind of interesting that even the Chinese, which are predisposed to believe in Chinese national greatness, when they see an aircraft carrier accompanied by other ships, like, whose country is that? Well, that's America, right? That's America. That's what feels like America. That and like, you know, Chinese pilots having Top Gun references, right? That is not just the genius of Hollywood. Okay. That is the genius of the jet aircraft. And the aircraft carrier. There's a way in which military power directly translates into cultural power that I think we want to deny because we want to pretend we're a much more peace-loving species than we are. But the truth is, any country or culture that is militarily formidable will inspire admiration, not just of their military, but of whatever culture they have. I mean, Erik, isn't the ultimate evidence of this Thousands of years of people vaguely loving Sparta.

Yeah. Yeah.

Incredible.

Right. That's, that's almost all a side effect of their military. If you just rewrote Spartan history and, and add at the end, and they were military losers, I think there would be no Sparta admiration or love. They would have all of those good things of like, you know, equal relative equality between the citizens, arch Serious upbringing, et cetera. No, it's admiration of martial culture with more steps. So I think that's, this is what the U.S. has going for it. I think this is why the U.S. remains a cultural giant. And in fact, I think, you know, I think people will admire the U.S. for 1,000 years after one day its civilization inevitably fails because, you know, all countries have a golden age that ends. Right.

Whether it's 100 years out or 1,000 years out.

Exactly.

Samo, thank you as always for a great discussion. And until next time.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store.