#11 - Applied History with WhatIfAltHist

28:48So 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 was called, it was called the magic of kings, where Christianity was the magic of priests. And 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 exists to increase group cooperation.

29:28So 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 use 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.

30:10This is a bit of a tangent, but I love it. There's a fantasy novel, one of my favorite ever, called The Grace of Kings. And the conceit of the book and 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 backstab 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 uh 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 and 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.

31:03And 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're right. That's right. Because technology, science, alchemy, that's cross-border. And it gives a – I mean it actually – the God State Network concept, I think that the network is going to be the dominant – is the dominant force of our time.

31:52In the sense of like it's the back pressure. 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 concept of the network is very clear to us now with the social network and the digital network. 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?

32:32And 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 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 complimentary.

33:05You know why I actually like this? I collect these phrases even more than I normally do. You know why? 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 a crypto password reset, right? It's funny that it's close to the 14 words, but it's a totally different concept, right? So some crypto is like 12 words, 13 words for resetting your password, basically, your private key, your secret phrase.

33:50And the third is 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 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? A lot? 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 into AI. Just start with Claude. Okay, Claude.ai and MidJourney. Just try those two. Those are pretty good tools.

34:33And 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. 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.

35:15And then now you can program it in English. OK, and you can get it to what you want, but you still have to have that concise description of what you want in English. And the more you know what you want, it's kind of like 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, but now they're hiring 10 people to do that job, let's say repair air conditioners, right? They know how to fix it. So they have the language of, you know, the – I don't know, the electrical outlet and the Freon and so on and so forth.

35:48I'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, the more you know about a 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 it. 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, you know, this oracle and that oracle had to say about the world.

36:21So 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. Yeah, the stochastic parrot concept. Sure. Okay, go ahead. Yep. 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 understand what you were saying.

37:11I have used AI as a tool a certain amount where I ask it questions and I've shadow boxed 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 class's 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.

37:52Or 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 in 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.

38:30We'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 – in a sense, you know, like in many – in the matrix, they've got the chip in the back of the neck and total recall, right? Many movies have that conceit, right, of like a controller.

39:16You 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.

39:51And 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 of Oslo, but many of them came from an implicitly Abrahamic background. And you know why that's relevant? Oh, I know. Please. You can guess. No, give me your guess and I'll tell you. It's thank you. You're very polite. But what I they they're stuck in messianism. They just constantly think the A.I. Rapture is going to happen and they'll build the A.I. God. And if you're from a Hindu background, your framework is that there's lots of different gods playing with each other.

40:27And right. 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.

41:06we 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. 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.

41:45They have this book of Revelation idea that everything is going to stop. And then from that, 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 edit I would make on this is the thing you're saying, which is people – we have godlike technology and Stone Age brains or institutions, right? There's Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms. Are you familiar with him? OK. He's a good person to read. Like 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 compliment to some of the stuff like that, like the radiation of gene stuff.

42:30I think it'll give you – you'll be interested in it. It'll be a good lens. Give me a top 10 reading list after. Sure, sure. 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, I've read that. Okay. And then the – I'll find some more for you. I think Matt Ridley's book is good. Dawkins' 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.

43:13Yes. 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 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 they get all the way to denying 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.

43:56By 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 reading the books when this came out where like five to ten 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, 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.

44:39It'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?

45:12So 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?

45:48Imagine, for example, this is a, actually there's, to give a concrete example, there's like three different mutations that confer altitude tolerance. So the Nepalese, Andeans, the Ethiopians, the three main populations that evolved genetic adaptations for high altitude living developed different solutions to 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.

46:30And it's different from both the Tibetan and Andean populations. and maybe it's like changed in 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, you know, 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.

47:14Not 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.

48:01We'll have to evolve again for Mars, right? And so now we can actually talk about all the different types of mutations. Gradually, we can talk about this, that people have around the world that give them different kinds of superpowers. And these are digital, right? That's the cool part. Do you know what? Let me explain this actually in a visual. Do you know what the GFP mouse is? 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 uh 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 uh 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.

49:02Does 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.

49:38Probably. 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 thoughts on this. So in my view, American empire is now just ending.

50:09But 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. But one of the interesting principles is that in the – so you 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, you are morally obligated to improve. And the first step of that is taking responsibility. You have to realize you have to take responsibility.

50:47And this is, you know, the Vitruvian man, the painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yep. A human body with all outlayed 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 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 then you try to attain mastery. So if we want to do an alchemical analysis of this, we would say, OK, we have AI. We have genetic engineering.

51:22it's now our moral responsibility to understand said technologies as much as possible because it's morally because if we're going to decel um 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 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 life force is that which further multiplies according to its own desire.

52:07So 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 understanding of life charge, because another alchemical principle is that what you do to others is what you will become.

52:45And so if let's say there's a group of tech bros who decide to turn this evil and they genetically engineer themselves into being hyper advanced beings who conquer the world and enslave, is that by enslaving the rest of the world, they will in process destroy their own characters. Thus their empire will fall. 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?

53:27Right. 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 a 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 um you know a one in a million issue you're seeing a thousand times a day so you fix it right um 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 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 chat gpt or whatever that you and i do right uh 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 uh 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?

54:50And 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, like 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 up with a different thing, which is, oh, so you want to take all the data.

55:28You want to steal all the data and so on and have it centralized. 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 LLM running locally 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 of the digital divide?

56:02No. 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 to us 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 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.

56:52so 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 is to I that's why I think we're at the end of American empire and it's two heirs are China and the internet. Anyway, 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 so on and so forth.

57:32Do 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 um we are on the verge of global instability and i've spoken about this before uh in many previous videos but i 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.

58:11And 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 um the american empire is clearly going to fall uh 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.

58:52And 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 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.

59:40And 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 will be a breath of fresh air. So, OK. Here's how I think about this. I think that – 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.

1:00:30And let me explain why I call them China and the internet, OK? And let me go a little bit further. China is the billion-person centralized cynic 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 100 ,000. 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.

1:01:08And that's actually one of the most important things that China did is they zagged when everybody else zagged. 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? Like the 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 idea is that every 250 years, you see an alternating between – so the secular cycles, periodic periods – I repeated there.

1:01:55You 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 until 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 populations of the countries involved. So 30 years war until the French Revolution is commercialism is mercantilism versus capitalism as symbolized in Britain versus France.

1:02:38The 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 2020s, but another one in the 2090s. 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 and materialist is that reality is contained within physical things.

1:03:23And 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, like 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 off their – based on how abstract their money system is. Where 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.

1:04:03Yeah, actually, I haven't heard this before. 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 often circle back to leftist anarchists 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 on, but interesting. Leftists are really bad at anthropology because they often shove these very immature notions of human nature where they'll think that trebles 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.

1:04:39But 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 gold thing, is that you will develop rational worldviews based off stuff like counting and making calculations and philosophy. And you saw for both the modern world, you saw the decline of religion and the rise of science and philosophically induced ideologies.

1:05:35And 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 were 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.

1:06:11And 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 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 um so it's funny because those those two forces uh 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 um so what i what i think of when you say that is um like going back to the god state never concept god and the religion helps create a social group, like a ideological boundary of all these people are the believers like Christendom or the Ummah, you know, that's a group.

1:07:17And 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 priest versus the merchants is basically that, right? It's like those who believe in, quote, God versus those who believe in, quote, money. And, of course, you could rephrase that to those who are actually numerical and realistic versus those who are unrealistic and just don't understand human nature.

1:08:01So anyway, coming back, I think a simplification is network over state. I think the – just to our earlier discussion, it's not the network always beats the state. It's the 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 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.

1:08:44But 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 two poles will be American anarchy and – 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 ill that was kept back by a centralized power has now burst out.

1:09:30Because, 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, let's see things in the middle, literally in a sense like destroys that center because everybody is just connecting peer to peer and there's no – there's nobody who can be a traffic cop or what have you.

1:10:09and of course that was abused for like how old are you you're like 27 25 23 okay fine fine so you so 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 but in the 80s and 90s, like, so it was more in 1980, actually, right? And 1985, 1995, 2005, up to 2015, I would consider them basically the same, even from the Western context. Like, obviously, they were radically different for somebody who was in the Soviet context. 85 and 1995 were radically, radically. Those were times of great change, right?

1:10:56But 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 USEN. Have you heard that before? Right? So the USEN is essentially the distinction of like the US empire kind of person, right? So the USEN 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 USEN is to the American as the USSR or the Soviet is to the Russian, right, so to speak, right? OK. So 85, 95, 2005 up to 2015, basically life was the same.

1:11:42Like 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 is – 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 homework. 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?

1:12:23Twitter. 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 – 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. Like there's a huge swath of people who are not Trump supporters.

1:12:58They 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 genie in the bottle anymore, it just burst out. And Elon took X. 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.

1:13:38The 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 creativity and culture. And it's brutal. But that's what drives the human experience. And the Warring States period, and this is something that happens in every major civilization.

1:14:19Civilizations 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 in which almost all of the seminal parts of Chinese culture formed.

1:15:08It's when Confucianism and Taoism 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. And 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. So this is something which I think I can see theaters in which one beats the other. But, you know, again, there's to go to the Chinese saying there's the empire long united must divide, long divided must unite.

1:15:47That's the way of the world. Right. And so what I think happens in the West – so here's my one, two, three, four. And maybe you can think about this and we can do another episode or something at some point, OK? 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, OK? 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. OK? So shutting down the blue empire of embassies and NGOs will have the second order effect of – not second or first order effect of reducing American influence on the left around the world.

1:16:31And this is massive leverage because a few hundred thousand for a color revolution or a few million for a color revolution gains billions of dollars in purchasing power for US treasuries and other things. Go ahead. Right? Oh, I'm just smiling. Oh, 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, 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.

1:17:13And we are actively hurting the name of democracy in the West and freedom by pushing like 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 um 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.

1:18:05And as the managerial class's empire falls, 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 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 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.

1:18:47Both were true, right? And so this late-stage American empire, there's a lot of red Americans who are now super mad 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 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 percent Russians in Russia.

1:19:33It was complicated where there's certainly a lot of gains. Obviously, Eastern Europe is way better off. 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 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 actually 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.

1:20:21Like 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 their hand, of course, people want a physical community and so on and so forth. And so I think the thesis and synthesis is that that internet community becomes a physical community. That's what I'm working on with like network school and startup societies and so on, right? So the point is anybody who uses the internet is a globalist.

1:20:53Otherwise, like they'd be out, they wouldn't be using the internet. The internet 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 globalists 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 tribalists 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 US, where you have Democrat-Republican.

1:21:28And when you have two nations within one country, you know how Democrats will use, they'll use democracy to mean rule 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 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.

1:22:20And 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, 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.

1:22:52And that's, I think that's accurate. Red Americans. 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 did not think very clearly about, And then they'll be forced to tear down the structure for any degree of survival because the structure will grow so bloated and silly.

1:23:40But at the same time, they will 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 write 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 going for like 1500 but it's it's a good somebody should scan it yeah that's that's a project we're working on right now actually um okay and um if you're the author please hit us up we want to work with you But the book set in the 25th century, it's The Rise of an American Alexander the Great.

1:24:30But its backstory in the 21st century is fascinating. And the book was written in the 90s. And what the book talks about 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 short civil wars from the 2060s to the 2070s. 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.

1:25:21These procreate more than the cities. Then the Democrats devolve into basically shameless racial pandering, and they become taken in by inner city gangs, basically. These two have a war. 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 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 that's that's happening now. A lot of this is the 21st century.

1:26:02This is this is the backstory in the 21st century. And then there's the 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 the Turkish empire running the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. And then you see China forming this Marxist power where India becomes one of the bigger powers in this new equation.

1:26:45Yeah. Well, OK. So lots of response to that. I'll just give a few quick things. First is in general, I think China is 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 China. Like the Chinese diaspora is very accomplished and so on. But China's estate 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. But it's similar to the Chinese diaspora roughly in terms of the forms.

1:27:23That's it. Just a quick response to that. B is I think that there's something you just said where people have a new identity like Yukon's 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 all 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?

1:28:13And the thing that I'm, 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 it, 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 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, you know, just went like vertical like this.

1:28:53Of 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 yeah it was 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 uh communism like lenin was in jail right and then you know it was then he's running the Soviet Union, right?

1:29:37Or like the scientists who were, I know this is apocryphal, but it combines a few different things, but burn at the stake or 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 very complicated thing.

1:30:11But that is something which is simultaneously American and post-American because, for example, Naib Bikeli, 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 uh 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 you know their uh you know 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 two and a half years ago and two and a half months ago, those organizations become much more, quote, global in their composition.

1:31:09Look 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, 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 – what do you call it? White supremacy or what have you or white identity, white identitarianism.

1:31:49I actually think that has five or ten years in a real sense because it's going to actually be part of the global left against a dominant Chinese super state. Like the Chinese are the highly organized billion person ethnic group that's like homogenous and uniform and running a giant centralized super state. And all of these tribes that today think of themselves as dominant are going to realize they're actually weak in 5 or 10 or 15 years and weak and decentralized and isolated. And 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?

1:32:32Yes. Right? Like that, against a dominant, call it Han chauvinist, Han supremacist Chinese superstate, we're actually all minorities or what have you. It's an interesting reframe, right? But it's something I just want to throw out there because that's looking at 5 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 U.S. military is like in the game or something like that. They don't understand it's actually like Hegseth, who's a defense secretary.

1:33:08There'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 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 a shipbuilding, which is more shipbuilding in one shipyard than all of America's combined.

1:33:39They 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 CEO saying they can't decouple from China. So while we talk about pulling supply chain out of China, and 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.

1:34:14You 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 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 pause there. Why don't you – I know that was a whole new thread, but I'll let you wrap. Go, go, go. Give me your closing kind of thoughts.

1:34:45Those 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 weak, you'll see the return of either religions or pseudo religions. And I count both radical Islam and communism as in this category where they fit 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 the country through basically cafe organizations.

1:35:26And 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 thing is like Russia went through communism. China went through communism. India went through socialism. Iran went through fundamentalism. Eastern Europe, communism.

1:36:06Much 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 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 on 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.

1:36:45As a Christian, there's a narrative or a Jew, 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. 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.

1:37:20It's been a real pleasure. I think this has been a great podcast. Great. Peace. Peace.