Explaining Inner Asian History

Summary

History 102 with WhatifAltHist’s Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett

Episode: Explaining Inner Asian History

Date: September 4, 2025
Host: Turpentine
Participants: Rudyard Lynch, Austin Padgett

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Overview: Main Theme and Purpose

This episode explores the often-overlooked region of Inner Asia—spanning modern-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and the mountainous "Zomia" region between China and Southeast Asia. Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett aim to illuminate the complex historical, cultural, and civilizational dynamics that have shaped these crossroads between major civilizations (China, Islam, Europe, India). The discussion covers everything from prehistoric settlement, Indo-Aryan invasions, religious and cultural flux, to brutal conquests, Russia’s and China’s colonial expansions, and the current geopolitical landscape.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining "Inner Asia" and The Gap in Historical Coverage

• Rudyard’s Motivation:

  • The episode was partly a challenge to himself: “It's a topic… I see it as sort of moral duty… to cover the gaps in knowledge. And I keep a map of the main geographic location of every History 102 episode... I see this enormous gap in Central Asia, or what I call Inner Asia.” (01:00)
  • Decision to use antiquated/historic names like Khorasan and Turkestan for accuracy across eras.
  • Inclusion of Zomia, the mountainous region between China and Southeast Asia.

• Why It Matters:

  • "This is all of the areas of Asia you never think about because they're shoved in the middle of the map… the crossroads for the entire world system." (02:58)
  • Differentiation between the Eurasian steppe (home to nomadic raiders like Mongols) and the mountainous, desert regions further south.

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2. Zomia: The "Anarchy Zone" and Theories of State Avoidance

• Anthropology and State Formation:

  • Zomia popularized by James C. Scott, representing mountain/jungle borderlands resistant to centralized state control.
  • Discussion of “emergent cooperation”—societal order arising from voluntary, decentralized action rather than top-down power. "He’s one of those RFK style authors… from being a libertarian left wing hippie to being a libertarian right wing icon." (04:20)

• Real-World Parallel:

  • Austin shares experiences with the Karen people (Myanmar border tribes), illustrating how such regions foster “anarchy” but also collectivism, even among gun-toting Baptist communities.
  • Rudyard notes, “They take the drug addicts, throw them into sort of rehabilitation centers… then put them into reintegrated communities… And the author is like 'these guys are so oppressive'. I listen to this and thought, what's the problem here? This sounds pretty good.” (08:36)

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3. The Periphery as the Center: Rethinking Inner Asia

• Challenging Historical Viewpoints:

  • Traditionally, central governments are viewed as the core and these mountainous/desert peripheries as the margins; Rudyard asserts the opposite:
    "Rather than perceiving these, this area as the edge, it's actually the middle of the system... the central hub that acts as the sort of duality to it and spits out stuff to the other four civilizations." (12:40)

• Historical Parallels:

  • Scythians/Hittites to Mesopotamia and Egypt.
  • Dynamic of mountain/steppe “barbarian” peoples playing pivotal roles in transformation, invasion, and patterning the rise and fall of states.

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4. Geographic and Ethnic Fault Lines—Mountains, Valleys, and Crossroads

• Overview of major mountain ranges—Himalayas, Pamir, Hindu Kush, Tian Shan—shaping movement and contact.
• "Afghanistan's up in the Hindu Kush in the Pamir Mountains, which operate as this hinge of Asia… the hinge of Asia." (16:00)
• Afghanistan’s unique, resilient identity, historically unconquered except by the likes of Alexander, the Arabs, Genghis Khan, and Cyrus the Great.
• Noteworthy: anecdote about almost hiking the Wakhan Corridor with "Lord Miles" (20:24).
• "My father once said, the most conquering people on earth is the Afghanistans. And the most conquered people on earth are the Indians. And he said, that's not a mistake, it's by design, because they're in a dualistic relationship with the other.” (26:44)

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5. Ancient Ethnogenesis, Aryan Invasions, and Cultural Transfer

• Genetic and Linguistic Origins:

  • Discussing David Reich's genetics work and the settlements of proto-Indo-European and East Asian peoples.
  • Discovery of "Tarim mummies"—ancient European-looking peoples in western China, later replaced by Turkic/Mongolic migrations (39:30).

• Aryan Migrations:

  • “Enormous Aryan invasions starting around Ukraine and southern Russia, which went east as well as west… The Aryans established [a] cultural population in Turkestan around the Oxus River.” (41:41)
  • Cultural terms: Aryan = Sanskrit for noble; Afghanistan as “Ariana.”
  • “The modern Persians are a genetic combination of these sort of European populations coming from down from Central Asia with the local farmer peoples who mixed together.” (48:17)
  • Extensive influence of Aryan, Persian, and Indian mythology, religion, and structures across the region.

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6. Civilizational Kaleidoscope: Greeks, Scythians, Persians, and the Silk Road

• Conquests and Hybrids:

  • Scythians as “land Vikings”—warrior ethos, gender roles, and resistance, notably killing Cyrus the Great (58:37).
  • Alexander the Great’s eastward push—founding cities like Alexandria on the Oxus, Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Kingdoms.
  • Cultural flow in both directions: Greek art in India (Gandhara sculptures), Indian (and especially Buddhist) influence moving north and east via Central Asia.

• Key Quote:

  • “You had this fault line between the Persian Empire and the Scythians, who were ethnic relatives, where under Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire formed in a single lifetime… The Persians stabilized at a borderland with the Masagti Scythians… and Cyrus invaded into the Scythian territory and was killed by the Scythian queen Timuris because Scythian culture gave women significantly more social status…” (58:37)

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7. Religious Flux: Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, Islam

• Transmission and Syncretism:

  • Central Asia as a highway for the diffusion of Buddhism to China and the rise (and fall) of Nestorian Christianity from Syria to China (76:19).
  • Manichaeism as a bridge religion.
  • "[Afghanistan] was the center of this sort of religious nexus… multiple sects of Christian, you have the Buddhists, you have the Manichaeans… Mazdakism…" (79:02)
  • “It’s funny that the nomadic peoples of Central Asia who conquered China, they converted to Buddhism and which is a religion of peace and disattachment, while these very peoples were some of those violent and greedy and destructive ever. It's a real cosmic duality.” (73:29)

• Islamic Conquest:

  • The Arab and then Turkic Muslim waves, explained as both connective and destructive.
  • Emergence of “Islamo-Persian” high culture in cities like Samarkand and Merv. (101:09)

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8. Collapse, Ruin, and Remaking: Turks, Mongols, Tamerlane, and Russia/China

• Barbarian Invasions and Catastrophe:

  • Turks move in as the new nomadic power, displace Persians, become both conquerors and state-founders.
  • “And you saw a demographic replacement of the Persians and the European peoples from Central Asia from the Roman through the early modern period.” (104:03)
  • Mongol (Genghis Khan) devastations—“from being one of the wealthiest, most advanced places on earth to a total backwater” (105:10); followed by Tamerlane, whose genocidal campaigns made recovery impossible.

• Modern Colonial Dynamics:

  • Russian expansion (“the new Mongol Empire”).
  • Soviet “development,” identity juggling, and discrimination against local populations.
  • “And the Russians built the railroads. They incorporated the modern technology. So it's a similar paradox with Russian colonialism in Central Asia as European colonialism in the rest of the world.” (113:47)
  • China’s re-conquest and brutal control of Tibet and Xinjiang/Uyghurstan. “I think China has put millions of people into camps. I think they're carrying out a horrifying atrocity, especially so against ethnic minorities they're trying to subdue.” (116:15)

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9. Modern Realities: Economic Peripheralization and Fragile Regimes

• Fragmented Dictatorships:

  • Most of the “Stans” are autocracies to varying degrees; oppressive, often cut off geographically and economically.
  • Kazakhstan as “enlightened” and wealthy (mining), Turkmenistan as “the North Korea of Central Asia.”
  • Belt and Road projects—local resistance and conceptual failure as viable global trade routes. “The Belt and Road… was just a way for the Chinese to extend the, like, Ponzi scheme of their construction industry.” (122:36)

• Contemporary Threats:

  • Un (and under-) employment, poverty, overpopulation, and potential for radical Islamic movements.
  • Economic prospects look poor, with the possible exception of Kazakhstan.

• Geopolitical Habitus:

  • Central Asia is “one of the very few places where the American empire has practically no influence… the modern globalist order is mostly an oceanic based system. So the poorest places on Earth are places without coastlines, like the Sahel in Africa or Central Asia.” (118:30)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Neglect of Central Asia in History:

  • “Part of being a man is that you have to fill enormous voids with your essence.” (01:25) —Rudyard Lynch

• Rudyard’s Personal Anecdote:

  • “I’m in contact with Miles. He’s still alive. And he called it, in classic English fashion, he called it his little vacation. Because the Taliban… let him have a PlayStation, he could order doordash. He became an honorary member of the Muahideen afterwards.” (23:12)

• On Civilizational Cycles and Religion:

  • “Christianity worked because it sort of cut the Gordian knot for all of the civilizational trajectories beforehand. And it did so so effectively that we lost gratitude for it.” (70:10) —Rudyard

• On the Fate of Tibet and Analogies to Today:

  • “He [Amaury Duriankor] kept on wandering around the Buddhist elite telling them, your society is going to fucking die now you need to fix this. To the unanimous reaction of just 'We don’t care.' And this is how the Western elite feels.” (90:20) —Rudyard

• On Mongol and Tamerlane Destruction:

  • “Genghis Khan utterly destroyed Inner Asia. He took it from being one of the wealthiest, most advanced places on earth to a total backwater. Historians… comment on how utterly empty it was… they built literal piles of skulls…” (105:10)

• Austin’s Rating:

  • “Your power level ranking, based on all the references you pulled up in the obscurity of that region, I'm going to have to say was over 9,000.” (127:44) —Austin

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:00 – Why cover Inner Asia / Framing the Episode
• 04:20 – Zomia, James C. Scott, and "Seeing Like a State"
• 08:36 – Karen (Myanmar) rebel society, anarchy, “demimonds”
• 12:40 – Barbarian peripheries as dynamic centers: flipping the historical script
• 16:00 – The “hinge” of Asia—Afghanistan, major mountain chains, geography
• 26:44 – Afghanistan: “the most conquering people on earth”
• 39:30 – Genetics of early Europeans and East Asians in Inner Asia
• 41:41 – Aryan and Indo-European migrations, Oxus River
• 58:37 – Scythians, Persians, and Cyrus’s death
• 73:29 – Religious complexity, Buddhism’s path to China, cosmic duality
• 101:09 – Khorasan and the Islamic Golden Age
• 105:10 – Mongols, Tamerlane, utter devastation
• 113:47 – Russian colonialism, Soviet “development” & reality
• 116:15 – Chinese genocide in Xinjiang / Tibet under the CCP
• 122:36 – Belt and Road’s local rejection and global misinterpretation
• 127:44 – Power-level humor and wrap-up

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Conclusion & Takeaways

• Inner Asia, though marginalized in pop history, has acted as both the periphery and engine room for civilizational change, invasion, and exchange across Eurasia.
• Geography—mountains, deserts, and rivers—plays a central role in facilitating or hindering powers, technologies, and religions moving between east and west.
• The region’s recurring themes: resilience, cultural blending, periodic devastation, and the “barbarian” dynamic as both destructive and creative.
• Modern realities—autocratic governments, peripheral economies, external control by Russia and China, and demographic flux—retain echoes of past eras.
• The “forgotten crossroads” is essential to understanding the rhythms of Eurasian (and thus world) history.

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Next Episode Tease:
The next episode will focus on the patterns and consequences of European colonialism in Asia, building on threads introduced here.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Red lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[A]

Hola. Como estas, everybody? This episode is on Inner Asia. I am Rudyard lynch and with our contiguous co host, Austin Padgett.

[C]

Hello.

[A]

So this video mostly exists to basically test my skill level because there are certain topics that no one else will cover. And it bugs me where this is not a topic I know a tremendous amount about, but I do know enough to make a several hour episode about it. And it's a topic that I see it as sort of moral duty and to cover the gaps in knowledge. And I keep a map of the main geographic location of every History 102 episode. So I have a map and I say for each of these historic events, what's the geographic location of the most important historic event in this? And I see this enormous gap in Central Asia, or what I call Inner Asia. And part of being a man is that you have to fill enormous voids with your essence. And so this is an episode about Central Asia. And I'm going to use the antiquated terms for this because a lot of these current names are very specific to the last few centuries, where Kazakhstan, the Kazakhs are only like 5, 400, 500 years old. The Uzbeks are the same age. Dingjiang is the Chinese term for new frontier. But we're going to cover what I'm going to call Khorasan, which is like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, southern part of Central Asia. It was Khorasan when it was inhabited by Persians. Then it became Turkestan. We're also going to cover Afghanistan, as well as Xinjiang or Western China and Tibet. And I am going to throw in Zombia, which is the area, the mountainous region between China and Southeast Asia. So this is all of the areas of Asia you never think about because they're shoved in the middle of the map. This is not. The next video is on the peoples of Eurasian steppe. And so the Clarification I'm going to make here is that the Eurasian steppe is an area with a climate roughly comparable to the American Great Plains that stretches from Wallachia and Romania to the west to Mongolia and the edges of China in the east. It's been inhabited by nomadic tribes who have raided across the world, killed over 100 million people, and dominated a lot of the pre modern world. We're talking about the region south of it. This is an area of desert and mountains and it's the crossroads for the entire world system. It's where China, Islam, Europe and India meet. It's the spine of Asia, plus that.

[C]

Extra region, what's called Zeonium.

[A]

Zamia.

[C]

Zamia, okay, right. Which is a pretty obscure area as well. So I'll give you, at the end of the episode, I'll give you a power level rating on a scale of 0 to 9,000.

[A]

Thank you. And I use zamia because it's a term from one of the best anthropology books I've read, Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott and, and James C. Scott is one of. He's one of those RFK style authors who made the switch from being a libertarian left wing hippie to being a libertarian right wing icon. And James Scott's whole shtick is about how oppressive the state and central planning is and how you need to build society around emergent cooperation. With his most famous book being Seeing Like a State, which has become a libertarian classic. Where it's at how the modernist world is made about what looks good on a spreadsheet. So our society is designed what looks good on a spreadsheet, what doesn't actually not what actually serves people's interests the best. And it's really a brilliant book because it talks about the importance of context and local knowledge in understanding things and it gives you a really good frame for the world. So I'd really respect. I really recommend Seeing Like a State. He also has another great book called against the Grain, which, which is an analysis of how the start of agriculture was intertwined a lot with slavery and serfdom. And then one of the best anthropology books I've ever read is the Art of Not Being Governed. And it's an anarchist history of Southeast Asia where he develops the term called zamia. And I'm throwing it in because no one talks about this region and I see it as a sort of historic parallel to inner Asia where I'm going to cover it in the beginning and then use it as a sort of parallel for inner Asia because they operate in a Similar frame where Zamia is the. Yeah, go ahead.

[C]

Well, that's funny because I think I've told you before, this is kind of a similar region around Southeast Asia where you have a borderland or a mountainous jungle area and they describe them as anarchy zones. And I went with my friend from work whose dad was from Hong Kong and a wannabe British explorer Chinese guy who spent a lot of time there in the seventies in the anarchy zone, just shooting guns, crazy stuff going around. And we went out with his friends there who were the Myanmar border tribe. Yeah, Karen. Yeah. And we shot a bunch of guns. And I think they were Baptist or something.

[A]

They are, yeah. From American creatures.

[C]

And so it was very much. And that, you know, anarchy, libertarian, left, right. It all kind of is connecting to this. Like you normally consider that a anarchy left wing thing, but it's Baptist with guns, so. And I like the idea of emergent cooperation because it shows that individualists can cooperate. They just prefer it to be voluntary.

[A]

Yeah. The thing with the Karen, or I call them the Karens because it's funnier, is I joke that my hometown in Pennsylvania is on the. The border zone between Karens and rednecks and they butt heads. And the thing with the Karens is they, they are Baptists, they are fighting a war against the centralized Burmese government. And they. I read this, I went through a big Southeast Asia reading binge. I read a book called hello Shadowlands, which is about this lib journal from North Carolina who was wandering around Southeast Asia hanging with people in the demimond. The demimond is a term I love. It's for people who exist outside the structure of normal society. So people in the demimond are actors and singers, criminals, aristocrats, very high performers, travelers. Demimans are people where they don't fit into the normal structure of society. And so he was, he hangs around all these demimonds in Southeast Asia between like rebels, drug addicts, drug dealers, adventurers, all these people. And he's hanging with these Karen hill tribes who are Baptists with rebelling against the centralized government. And he keeps on hating on them because they'll do things like Southeast Asia has crippling drug addiction. And so they'll take the drug addicts off the street because they'll take a lot of forms of meth because they'll work 14 hour days. You take the meth. So this monotonous job isn't so soul crushing. And then you get hooked on it. And. And so these Christian rebels who are fighting against the centralized government, who are trying to turn them into serfs. They, they take the drug addicts, throw them into sort of rehabilitation centers or just basically wooden shacks, have them go through drug withdrawal and then put them into reintegrated communities where they reintegrate back into society doing work. And they put, they, they don't really punish them. So they're fighting against the government, they're spreading Christianity. They're also healing these drug addicts. And the author is like this. These guys are so oppressive, they're destroying society. I listen to this and I thought, what's the problem here? This sounds pretty good.

[C]

Yeah. Why was he so upset about that?

[A]

Because he said it was oppressive that they were controlling the drug addicts and making them stop being addicts. But this is a collectivist society where everyone's dependent on everyone else. So the drug addicts are actively degrading the social structure of the society and there's no mechanism to rehabilitate them. And they've. If someone's high on meth, they're not in their own right mind.

[C]

Yeah. Those rural areas in Asia on these borderlands is. First of all, it's interesting because it's kind of an area where these weird groups of characters, like you said, can escape the predominant Asian culture. But it's also. I forgot what I was. Well, I forgot what I was saying off of your point. But they didn't like. Oh yeah, yeah. So it's like it would be the same thing on the frontier. Like when things are hard and, you know, there's not a lot of room for error. They're not just going to let somebody be a raging alcoholic without some sort of like, reeling him in.

[A]

Yeah. I watched this interesting documentary yesterday about Nepeta, which is the new capital of Burma. And Burma's old capital was Yangon or Rangoon. And they moved it up, up the hundreds of miles up the Irawadi in the middle of the jungle in Napital, and they built this completely artificial city with 20 lane highways with no traffic on them. It's a city this is larger than Shanghai or New York, but it's got less than a million people. It's built by the Burmese government in order to control their own people. Because down in Rangoon, there's the public can mutiny and try to destroy the government, but up, hundreds of miles up the river, they can't do that. And so they build these enormous highways to fly planes in and out really easily for military support. And the reasoning for this in the transition I'm going to use for the rest of inner Asia is that when you're dealing with the Karen peoples in these Burma and Thailand and all of these Southeast Asian governments fight these wars on the fringes and to insert the local populations, because Burma is this autocratic military dictatorship, basically enslaves the fringe peoples, forces them to work for the government, and then so these, these frontier peoples rebel against the centralized force. And the thing that's so brilliant about James C. Scott's book is it takes the normal history of Southeast Asia and China and then flips it on its head. And where in most cases they study these countries from the royal courts outwards. And there's this intermediary region called Zomia, which is the edge between China, Burma, India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, it's this mountain region between all of the central rice heartlands of these societies. And he moves it out from saying, rather than perceiving these, this area as the edge, it's actually the middle of the system. Because the old histories of Southeast Asia treat the growth of the government as this positive. While the reality is that all these Southeast Asian states were slave cultures. They were taking people from the mountains, enslaving them. Three quarters of Thailand and Burma's population in the 18th century would have the mark of their slave owner seared into their space so that they couldn't run away. And so it was this dualistic tension where because you could run away to the hills, it meant that there was this selection pressure for the people who didn't have those traits, stayed in the slave, in the slave areas, then people ran away to the hills. And on top of it all, the vast majority of the states in that area had ruling classes who came from the mountain barbarians. So Thailand, sorry, the modern Burmese are descendants from people who came down from the mountains. The modern Thais are from the Thai people of southwestern China. And so it's this dualistic pressure between the anarchic barbarism of the mountains and then the slavery and civilization of the valleys. And so I'm trying to get you to flip your perception of this on your head, where rather than seeing inner Asia as the place where the four great Eurasian civilizations aren't, it's rather the central hub that acts as the sort of duality to it and spits out stuff to the other four civilizations.

[C]

So it would be like the Hittites to Babylon. Yes, and normally it's not given that much importance.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And maybe it wasn't as relatively important, but it fills a similar dynamic and role.

[A]

It's really hard to get sources on the Bronze Age Besides Mesopotamia and Egypt. And it's still hard to get civilizational sources on Mesopotamia and Egypt. I have to read another one or two books at least on Egypt before I make a civilization video. I read a really good book by Breasted on the topic where I thought I had enough. But I have a sort of intuitive sense when I can make these videos. But if you want to study the Hittites and. Or Elamites or. There was this Syrian civilization that had a lot of impact on the future Canaanites and Jews and those people. Sorry, the Canaanites were part of the Syrian civilization. You're really out of luck if you want to study the Bronze Age outside of Egypt or Mesopotamia. And it's quite comparable where the Hittites consistently beat the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, they were the terror of their region, but at the same time, they don't get the sort of historic recognition.

[C]

Were they the more mountainous people, Kind of like Elamites, Right? Yeah. So they may have. They may have dominated Babylon more than these inter Asian regions dominated China. But it's. It's the same kind of dynamic.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And so it's basically more than just the Mongols that play this role in the region.

[A]

Yes. So we've covered Zamia and let's go east, where there's this rift zone from the eastern to the western half of it. And it's the continental divide of Eurasia, where west of it is generally peoples who are white and east of it is peoples who are yellow or Asian for some reason. You can say white and black, but you can't say yellow and red. Those. You can say brown, white and black. You can't say yellow or red, which. That seems weird. And who's red? Red is Native Americans.

[C]

No, I thought you were saying there was a red in Asia, right?

[A]

No, there isn't. You're allowed to correlate certain races with certain colors, but not races with other colors.

[C]

Well, we're gonna bring the Redskins logo back, so we'll see then most.

[A]

So I don't really care about it, but most Native Americans aren't offended. So this seems like a stupid debate. They've literally pulled most Native Americans at Chief Wahoo and they don't care. But. So the hinge of Asia. And if you. I don't know why I was watching propaganda material for the government of Afghanistan's education system. This is what I do in my free time. And they were. The song they're making the kids sing is we are the heart and the hinge of Asia. And I Thought that sounds pretty cool because Afghanistan's up in the Hindu Kush in the Pamir Mountains, which operate as this hinge of Asia, where there's this line of mountains that goes through the. That. There's. There's the Taklamakan Desert, there's in western China, there's the Tarim Basin north of it, and then there's the Tian Shan Mountains, which separate China from Central Asia. You have the Altai Mountains north of them in the Hind region between Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Russia. Then south of them, you have the Pamir and the Hindu Kush Mountains, which go through Afghanistan. Iran is all a central mountain chain which stretches out to Turkey and then the Balkans and then Italy, where there's default line through the Mediterranean, which separates the African from the European tectonic plates. And then you have the Himalayan Mountains, which separate. You have the Himalayan mountains, which separate India from China. So you have this sort of triangle mountain shape where the middle of the triangle is Afghanistan. Above that is the mountains that separate China from Central Asia until you hit the Eurasian steppe, which is the corridor across the region. And then you have the Himalayas, which go out to Zombia, separating India from China by this enormous wall. And Tibet is. Tibet is flat enough that it's somewhat habitable. Not really, but Tibet is really high up. It's this plain which exists, I would guess, 10,000ft above sea level. I need to check that. And then you have the Iranian mountains. And so the region that separates the Western, basically, anthropologically, you call Middle Easterners and Europeans, who are the same race, West Eurasians. The area that separates the West Eurasians from the East Asians is the area around the Wakan Corridor. So this divides inner Asia in half.

[B]

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[C]

And is that isn't that the mountain that Lord Miles was going to hike in Afghanistan?

[A]

I was going to say that story. Thank you so you know, thank you Austin. Thanks for being my wingman. But I have the story here. So I've been good friends with Lord Miles for over three years. He's one of the friends I've kept the longest from. There's he's one of the few public figures I met right after I dropped out of school and we've stayed in touch where he was going to hike the Wakan Corridor and I was going to go with him. We were going to be, we were going to be the first Westerners to hike the region since World War II. And the Wakand corridor is if you look at a map of Afghanistan, it's this tiny valley that stretches from central Afghanistan out to China, where north of it is, I believe, Kyrgyzstan and south of it is Pakistan. It's this little strip and it's not controlled by the central Taliban government that the rest of Afghanistan is. It's populated by Kyrgyz tribes who have their own thing going on. And so Miles invited me to go. I said yes, I was and I agreed to because we wouldn't actually be touching Taliban territory. We we'd be going to the Kyrgyz tribes who are more chill. But my concern with hiking it was it ends in China. And I gave Miles a hard no that I would never set foot in China again because I have called the Chinese Communist Party as evil as Nazi Germany. And I've shadowboxed, why China? How China could have a revolution. So I'm concerned that if I set foot in China, bad things might happen.

[C]

So I told him those are basically their two hottest buttons.

[A]

Yeah, Yeah, I think I've also said I believe in one China and that China is Taiwan. Right?

[C]

Yeah. If Brad Pitt got banned for his Tibet movie, then you're probably in trouble for your YouTube channel.

[A]

There was, there was a Chinese sponsor which said you must support the One China Project in order to have this sponsorship. I said, I do. It's called Taiwan. And so I was concerned of going to China. Then what happened is that one of my buddies gave a conference for the Air Force. And so I spoke at the conference and I told Miles, no, I'm not going to go to Afghanistan because I'm going to get us all killed. Because they'll see my online affiliation with the Air Force and I promise I'm not a fed. I don't do other activities with the military. It was a one off thing. And so a few months later, Miles got captured by the Taliban. For six months, I just assumed he died. And it was me and Callum from Lotus Eaters who had to figure out what was going to happen. So I, I, yeah, it was a.

[C]

Strange, that was a big drama.

[A]

Did I know you at that point?

[C]

No, I don't think so. I, but I may have just seen it play out online where everyone was like freaking out and you guys were like, we're responsible for relaying a message. That's all we're gonna say.

[A]

No one believed me. I said at the time, I'm in contact with Miles. He's still alive. And he called it, in classic English fashion, he called it his little vacation. Because the Taliban, they let him keep a man servant. They let him have a PlayStation, he could order doordash. He became an honorary member of the Muahideen afterwards.

[C]

And it was great because it was the first diplomatic event where both sides were handled by zoomers.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

Affiliated with the government in this like post military invasion country.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that. You're fun. You're right. That's hilarious. And so that they had to okay everything Miles watched. And Miles is very open about this stuff. I'm not sharing secrets because Miles tells the story. Miles has said all this stuff already, but the Taliban had to record every video he watched. And so he was watching my content. So the Taliban had to okay it and they marked it as culturally significant.

[C]

Right. You're in their Smithsonian of culturally significant materials.

[A]

So the. The Wakan Corridor. It's also where the man who Would Be King is set. And that's by Rudyard Kipling, my namesake. And I have another story about Kipling where the day I was supposed to be born, my parents were gonna name me Noel. And then I was born and they said Rudyard has too much energy to be named Noel. We're going to name him Rudyard because he's going to grow up to be an author.

[C]

It's more ruddy.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I have a rutulent hue to me.

[C]

And Black Irish is called no, we.

[A]

Are not the Black Irish. And so I just think it's funny, my parents predicted I grew up to be a writer the day I was born.

[C]

Yeah, that is crazy. Especially with Rudyard lynch and the connection. Right. It's like Tyson Fury and Mike Tyson.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Nominative determinism. But Rudyard Kipling, writing in the 19th century, he made this story about British, British adventurers where they're talking about set in the 1850s and they're complaining about how India has been taken over by bureaucracy and there's no space to do adventurous things in India anymore because with the move from the East India Company to the Raj that occurred. And so they went out to Afghanistan, a region called Kafiristan, where a kafir is a Muslim turn for a term for a pagan, where the central region of Afghanistan converted to Islam fairly early. But you had pagans up by the Kyrgyz territory pretty late. So they heard about this land and it's crazy that the last records they have of it is from Alexander the Great and Alexander. Three people conquered of all of Afghanistan. Alexander the Great, actually four people. Alexander the Great, the Arabs, Genghis Khan and Cyrus the Great. George W. Bush, we didn't really conquer it. We took Kabul in a few provinces. What the. In the Afghans beat the British, the Russians and the Americans. And so when the people who beat you over your 3,000 over your 3,000 year history are Genghis Khan, the Prophet Muhammad's buddies, Cyrus the Great and Alexander, that's just respect. Like you can claim never been conquered when that's your lineup and you beat. Yeah.

[C]

Even if you counted the British and Soviets and Americans under some definition of military supremacy, that would still be no shame because those are the other biggest empires of all time. Yeah, it's pretty insane.

[A]

My. My father Once said, the most conquering people on earth is the Afghanistans. And the most conquered people on earth are the Indians. And he said, that's not a mistake, it's by design, because they're in a dualistic relationship with the other.

[C]

Well, they're cheating. They're racking up the stats against each other.

[A]

There was a Russian scholar of the 19th century who said that there have been, I think it's 19 invasions of. Of India from the northwest, and 18 of them have worked.

[C]

Right, right.

[A]

And this was part of the whole great game, which we'll get to when the Russians and the British vied over the region. But in the man who Would Be King, these British adventurers go to Afghanistan, they introduce firearms to this valley region, they take it over, and then the locals don't realize they're divine, realize they're not divine, and then they team up on them. They don't. They have like 20 guns. And that's not enough to hold down the entire population once the myth of their supremacy is over. And I watched the movie about this a lot when I was a child. My parents showed it to me. And now that I'm saying, saying it again, I'm realizing, wait, Rudyard Kipling was doing a allegory for European colonialism? Because we've boxed Kipling in a certain category where we think he's this hyper imperialist, racist authority. But I've read like six books of his, and he has significantly more subtle views than most other authors of that era. Because he grew up in India. He's written quite favorably of Indian and Asian culture. He has written things that are quite racist by this era's perspective. But in that era, he was considered to be more sort of open to non Western cultures than the vast majority of. Of intellectuals of that time, even Karl Marx. I would say Karl Marx was significantly more racist than WR Kipling was.

[C]

Yeah, it's. It sounds like a man who would be king kind of attitude.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Where it demonstrates, like, this kind of attitude of superiority in a way that's highlighting the hubris of, like, what you're messing with or the way you're doing it. And so in that way, I guess you could say he had more. He had more respect, at least for the integration or the system balance of those things in a way that wasn't as disrespectful as Marx, who wanted just kind of a universalist, totalizing, universalist communism in which they would probably be like slaves or something.

[A]

Yeah. We have records of Marx's attitudes towards Asians and black people. He said Asians existed in a state of Oriental despotism outside of history and that only Europeans could propel history. And that was due to. That was from Hagel. Hagel has the same attitudes. Hagel said that the slave trade was good because you were bringing blacks into his sort of arc of history. He said if you bring someone into the arc of history, it's moral. If it's through slavery, that makes sense.

[C]

Because it's moral, even if it's through genocide. And yes. So it's. Yeah.

[A]

Hegel's worldview has been used to justify really evil things because he's part of that whole 19th century European philosophy, philosophic school of saying definitions to mean anything. So Hegel said that his definition of freedom was submission to the state. He said the ultimate goal of history was using the state to realize the goals of history. And since your ability to play in the game of history was your freedom, submission to the Prussian totalizing state was the ultimate freedom. And at that threshold, you're just lying. You're just using words to lie. And so Marx also, he was racist even for his time. His daughter was gonna marry a Cuban who was mostly white. And he said, no, he might have traces of black blood. You're never allowed to date him. And then he's also said very racist things about black people. And the thing with Kipling is my metaphor for the man who Would Be King is that it was the bluff of European colonialism, where for the British they were outnumbered in India a thousand to one. So the British held India down because the local Indians had not attained national consciousness yet. And that was true across European colonialism. And it's part of the reason why the rise of Japan was such a precipitous event for European colonialism in the east. Because once the Asians realized that other Asians could beat the Europeans, that the European superiority was not innate, that Asians could figure out the things the Europeans did and beat them, that taught the Asians that they didn't have to be under European colonialism. And so when the man who Would Be King was written, Kipling, who was a quite intuitive and sort of far seeing author, he saw this tension going on that as the Asians saw more of the Europeans, they realized they weren't divine and they had all these failings. And I think World War I was a big realization for non Western cultures of that. In another one of his books, Kim Kim is about this white boy who grows up Indian who later realizes he's white. And it's him stuck between these two worlds, Asian and Western. And the thesis of the book is that Asia has this sort of. Asia's lost, this. They have this sort of spiritual acceptance of the world and the west has this domineering, better technological and political structure. And the thesis of the book is that you have to combine them to have a successful world society.

[C]

Yeah, kind of like something in the Art of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a big famous book that kind of does that fusion. And then. Yeah, it sounds like. With Marx, so much of it is just semantic that just gets spun into like predictable justification. So it's.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Not even worth taking his analysis like semantically, literally. And then it sounds with the, with the US and Asia or with the Japanese beating the Russians and stuff, it sounds like the plot of Independence Day when they take out the first alien ship and then all the countries start trying and then to think of the psyche on the rest of the world. The impact in the psyche from World War I is really interesting. I never really considered that, like, how did the rest of the world see that? Like the. I mean, how much exposure did they get to exactly what it looked like. What were the, you know, newspaper networks at that point?

[A]

So by the time you get to the 20th century, Europe was very open with other societies of what was going on with Europe and its own flaws. Keep in mind, these elites were going to Western universities which were staffed predominantly by socialists who hated the West. That goes back at least a century. Most of the left wing globalist politics we're dealing with today have roots in the 19th century at least. So they were getting. Their elites who were studying the west were getting very negative anti Western narratives. And on top of it, the west went through these cycles of self loathing after World War I that included Dada or Post or subjectivism or nihilism and that rippled across. And before World War I you had this understanding, there was this ideal. And we're going to talk about inner Asia after this because we've passed my threshold, my tangent threshold. But you had this understanding of a unified European civilization that was propelled under shared notions of Christianity, science and liberalism. And then with World War I, this idea of a unified European civilization was utterly shattered. And you saw the moral barbarity of European society. And this is why Joseph Conrad's the Heart of Darkness was so important, because. And I read the Heart of Darkness when I was a teenager and I thought, this is boring. I already know human nature sucks, but for them it was a heart of darkness. As Europeans go into Africa, they realize their own barbarity in that Africa makes them wild. And that didn't affect me because I already knew humanity was barbaric. But for people a century ago, it was a real wake up call. And a lot of the Europeans used non western troops in the trenches of World War I, especially the British with Indians and the French with Senegalese. So they actually saw the front and then it spread around there. And actually let's make our next video European Colonialism in Asia because we keep on touching these themes.

[C]

Cool.

[A]

So you can split Asia, this region, east to west and I'm going to talk about their prehistoric settlement patterns first and then we're going to go through the development of civilization.

[B]

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[A]

In the eastern side of those mountains you have the Tibeto, the language family of China. And most of interior Southeast Asia is the Chinese Burmese language family, which stems from the foothills of the Himalayas or the Zamia region. And in East Asia saw mass genocide events during the last ice age, with one genetic population starting around the Yangtze river, another around the Yellow River. The Yangtze population had rice agriculture, the Yellow river population had millet. David Reich's book talks a lot about this and they mixed together to form the Chinese. The millet farmers spread into Tibet, forming the local Asian population. Actually, I don't know. I think, Sorry. The East Asians moved in Tibet, becoming the genetic population there. The Yangtze people migrated south, genociding the indigenous Australian, Aboriginal and Filipino inhabitants of Southeast Asia. And so you saw this East Asian population formation with the last ice age. And East Asians have lots of sort of genetic and anthropological tells that during the last ice age, they might have come from a cold climate. It's part of the reason why they might have smaller eyes to protect against basically cold weather.

[C]

I guess there's different strategies for protecting against cold weather because Europeans have round, bigger eyes and also in the cold.

[A]

Both East Asians and Europeans have a lot of Arctic genetic traits. The ancestors of Europeans, this is actually a great transfer, are from Siberia and Central Asia. The ancestors of Chinese are also from Siberia and Central Asia, or they're from the frozen areas of the last ice age that were modern China. But they have lots of arctic genetic tells. And it's interesting that in the genetic PCA charts, East Asians and Europeans are as diametrically opposed as you can be within Eurasia. Africans are four times as diverse as anywhere outside Africa. So they're off in their own dimension. But East Asians and Europeans are supposedly both from Siberia, but they're very, very different, which probably means different timescales or different contexts or different parts of Siberia. The first genetic European person we've ever found is the Malta Boy from the place called Malta in Siberia, not to be confused with Malta off the coast of Italy.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And to. The Malta boy is from 30,000 years ago. He's genetically pretty close to modern Europeans. And the ancestors of the Europeans are indigenous to Central Asia. We have mummies from western China from 4,000 years ago, which are genetically identical to Europeans. And they have red hair and they're wearing top. So.

[C]

Yeah, I would love to see a movie on that. It's also amazing because it's the same as the Vikings, where some of the Germanic people spawned out of literally the cold zone.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's pretty amazing the potential for these, like, huge populations to spawn out of these, like, remote northern cold zones, like Game of Thrones or something.

[A]

Yeah. It's because the. You need to be tough to survive.

[C]

Cold weather, and you don't associate it with, like, big population. But if you're stable and you're continually spawning.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And no one can compete with you.

[A]

I've been reading Ibn Khaldun, and he talks a lot about how harshness of climate breeds successful peoples. And that's true. It's true. The Mongols and the Turks and the Germanics are all from cold regions. And so you saw these. The population of Central Asia and Western China was genetically European. For a lot of. For in the ancient world. And then there was a migration from the Turks and the Mongols over the Roman and medieval period to replace them. So if you want to go to the year 1000 BC in Inner Asia, you have a lot of different things are going on. So I don't want to simplify that. You had the enormous Aryan invasions starting around Ukraine and southern Russia, which went east as well as west. So they went west into Europe, but they also went into Inner Asia. And so the Aryans established the this cultural population in Turkestan around the Oxus River. And the Oxus river is going to continue to be a hinge in this video because it flows from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan to the Aral Sea. And the Aral Sea is this inland sea in Central Asia. It used to be pretty big. And then Soviet failed attempts at irrigation agriculture destroyed it and.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And so that's caused ecological devastation in Central Asia in what could potentially be a crisis, because the Aral Sea created rainwater for the neighboring regions. And with its removal, you see that region turning into desert. It's another one of the casualties of communism. And so the Oxus river is the hinge of Transoxiana. And the Aryans migrated there and that became the spring springboard for the new culture, where it's a highly consistent pattern that invaders start in Transoxiana they come from. So I call the area around Kazakhstan and the area of the steppe adjacent to Inner Asia, I call it Turan, because that's the old name. Turan is the term from the origin of where the Turkic peoples are from. But I think it's an older name than that. And then you have they enter into Transoxiana and then they go into Afghanistan, build up population. Afghanistan to invade India. This is what Babur with the Mughals did. It's what the Ghaznavid Turks did, the Mongol invaders of India, when they occurred, it's what Tamerlane did, it's what the Aryans did. So it's this highly consistent pattern. Start in Central Asia, go to Transoxiana, go to Afghanistan, go to India. Oh, it's what the cush the cushions did too.

[C]

And so it basically is following that mountain range down that you described earlier. Yeah, top to bottom, right of the triangle.

[A]

And so there was a colony of the Indus Valley Harappan civilization in Uzbekistan, where the Indus Valley Harappan civilization was based out of modern Pakistan. They're nearly as old as Mesopotamia and Egypt. And they were the largest and the most populous of the Bronze Age. Civilizations, and we don't know that much about them. We have a few guesses. They were. They seem to have been at the archaic level of civilizational development, where they would worship stuff like these huge Venus figurines or like snake penis gods. They had complete uniformity across all their city designs, where they had grid streets, they had aqueducts and plumbing. They had complete uniformity and stuff like pots or cartwheels. They didn't have enormous temple structures or like any signs of large religiosity in their civilization. And so it suggests a society that might have been something like the ancient Soviet Union. Their core area of strength was Delhi in India to the mountains. But they had a colony in Central Asia. And I've always wondered what that colony was doing, because it's just out, way far out from their center of sense of civilization.

[C]

And they're not the kind of civilization that you would think would sustain that kind of colony, because it was really based around a standardized. Yeah, sedentary population base. Maybe it was like their one big external colony like their city B.

[A]

So this is highly schizo. But hysteria is powered by schizo people figuring out how to apply autism to their schizophrenia. But what if we get so good at genetics results that we can look through people's genetic things to figure out sort of genetic memories in a hundred years that might actually be possible.

[C]

Oh, like Assassin's Creed.

[A]

Yeah. What if we. Because I'm trying to figure out, is there any way for us to get more information on the Indus Valley? And we're probably gonna have such enormous breakthroughs in genetics technology over the next century that in two. I mean, imagine explaining to someone in 1900 what we're doing with genetics technology now and then expand, expand it outwards. Could we use hyper advanced genetics to pick up enough epigenetic switches inside a population to recount their historic changes? Because that might be our only tool to figure out what was going on in a society like the Indus Valley. We which lived there for thousands of years. It was huge, all those things.

[C]

Maybe if you plugged it into neuralink so that there was a way to like translate the material outside of words or pictures, which wouldn't be stored in there unless it was like a. An eyeball or something.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But yeah, it was funny you mentioned that, because I was just thinking I would love to see some, you know, I would say books, but I really mean movie or TV show about like a period like this, like an insane period piece about Bronze Age culture that we don't normally focus on. But how are you going to construct something like that? How are you going to predict how they talk or their social structure? I mean, I guess you'd have to guess a lot. I think someone like you maybe could help them make it good enough to kind of get an artistic impression.

[A]

You could make it up, right?

[C]

That's what you have to do.

[A]

Yeah. You could use it as a foil for lots of interesting ideas. And one of the things Will Durant talks about is he believed there might have been an earlier civilization in Transoxiana from the Bronze Age period. And a few other authors have spoken about that. I don't know if it's true. It's one of those things that I don't think there's a lot of archaeology in that area. I don't think the Soviets did a lot of archaeology in now, Central Asia is a bunch of bunker regimes which don't really fund that stuff. We do know that there was a Bronze Age civilization on the edge between the farmer peoples of Iran and then the Aryans further north. And it was a line of fortress cities from the borderlands of Iran and Central Asia. And this was quite important. This was before the Silk Road, but Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley did have trade with each other. So these fortress cities in the edges of Iran and Central Asia from the Bronze Age period, the Aryans butted up against them on the border between Persia and Central Asia. And a lot of the Aryan culture came from interacting with these people. What then happened is that a group of Aryans came down from the north, conquered these hillfort peoples, destroyed them. One interesting thing is, this is a really fascinating tell, is that the Aryans who invaded India, they had a word for fortress and city destroyer. But they didn't have cities, which means they destroyed the previous cities because they couldn't build them themselves.

[C]

Like the Mongols.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And so the modern Persians are a genetic combination of these sort of European populations coming from down from Central Asia with the local farmer peoples who mixed together. And then it was this gradient where the further north you'd get into Khorasan, the more genetically European they were, and the further south, the more Middle Eastern. And then once you get into India, you saw this migratory pattern come down from the mountains of Afghanistan into India. And there was this meme on X, which I think it's funny, where they said, is this person Welsh? Or Afghanistan, where there's a certain. A lot of British people have a sort of swarthy like skin tone to them. They could be Italian or Spanish. So you can take one of Those swarthy Britons and then compare them to one of the lighter Afghans and you can't tell the difference. There's a Pakistani prime minister who looks like Will Ferrell.

[C]

Oh, that's funny. When I was in Syria. No, not Syria, Turkey. Wearing, like, a leather jacket and a hoodie. Everybody thought I was a local. Everybody just talks about I had a summer tan or whatever, and I guess that was enough.

[A]

Yeah, it's funny. When I was in Turkey, everyone automatically knew I was white.

[C]

That's funny. And it's wearing that polo.

[A]

I was actually wearing a tartan, which made it so I was wearing. I was wearing a jacket with a tartan. That was only one day, though, right? Or only a handful of days. And blue eyes are a huge tell. And my mom lived in Iran. It freaked out the locals that she had green eyes. Red hair is also a weird thing where my mom had red hair. And that also, like, my mom lived in Iran when she was a child, local people would walk up to her and pet her red hair, because that was like something in Iran where it related to their mythic customs. I don't know exactly, but they had some local mythic thing about red hair. But so a lot of Afghans, especially the Pashtuns, look quite European. And there's this town in Afghanistan where it's the descendant of Alexander the Great, great soldiers. And even today, they have blonde hair and blue eyes. But then Afghanistan is quite ethnically diverse. You have the Pashtuns, who look more European. You have the Hazaras, who are the descendants of Genghis Khan soldiers. They're up in the mountains. They're more Asian. You have the Persians, who are also Indo Aryan, but they're slightly more brown. And I'm going to put the edge of inner Asia at the Indus river, because the Indus river is the edge between India proper, where India proper was historic India. Modern India is smaller than historic India, and then the regions west of it. And the ancient Indians called the people west of them Yavannas, or Ionians, because when they fought Alexander's men, they were disproportionately Ionians, where Ionians were the Greeks from modern western Turkey. So they would call the later Arabs and Persians Yavanas. And even today, Pakistan's nearly a failed state. And the Pashtuns are reclaiming territory in northwestern Afghanistan. And the Baluchis of western Pakistan are trying to get independence. It's a running joke among my staff that I love the Baluchis people. Like, it's one of my things, like, I support. I've supported Bellucci Independence because I don't think it's. I don't think it's fair. They've been crushed under conquerors for centuries. So when people in my staff see things at Bellucci Independence, they text it to me. It's not actually.

[C]

It's like Steve Bellucci.

[A]

No, the Belluccis are. I know you're joking, but the Belluccis are. Steve Bellucci's ethnically Albanian. I think the Belluccis, they're this Persianate people who live at the cross section of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, which was the desert of Gedrosia, where when Alexander invaded India, he marched his army across the good Rosie and desert killing, I think, like half of them as punishment for not conquering all of India with him. And so it's this independent region that has oil, where the Pakistani government horrifically oppresses them to take their oil and then keeps them in poverty. And that just doesn't feel fair.

[C]

Right. So it's just like a hardcore region to root for, with a little bit of Alexander's legacy thrown in there for.

[A]

The memes not being that serious. One of those things like if Pakistan. Please don't kill me. But it's one of my passive things where whenever I see Baluchistan move towards independence, I smile.

[C]

Right. It's like the Kurds. Everybody smiles a little bit when one of their four corners gets a little luck.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

I. I wonder if the red hair connection has like a red heifer kind of connection in terms of significance. Probably not. But I was also wondering, like, there was an Aryan to Iranian genetic and cultural transfer. Was there any, like, cultural transfer from Iran into the Iranians? Because normally we think of Europeans and the Middle east interacting through the Mediterranean, but it's interesting that there's some preceding 4,000 year old, 3,000 year old interaction further in Asia.

[A]

So I'm glad you asked that. There's cross section where Aryan is a term from Sanskrit for noble, so it's a nobleman. And so you have this sort of broader cultural region where Afghanistan's old name in the ancient world was Ariana, or the land of the Aryans. And then the Indians would call themselves Aryan due to the noblemen. And Arawn is an old, ancient term for it's also. It's land of the Aryans. So it was this broader ethnic regional term that when 18th century philologists went through Sanskrit, that was the name they made for the invaders of India and then increased it outwards for the entire migratory thing. From Ireland to Bengal. And there's a lot of cultural similarities where for example, one of the great Vedic gods was Mitra. One of the big gods of Persia was Mithras, which later became Mithraism, one of the big cults of the Roman Empire. Indra was another similar God. Ancient Hinduism was highly dependent on a psychedelic from Afghanistan called soma. And they would drink soma to reach up to the gods. And so you saw this cultural divergent where the original Vedic Indians, when you had the migration from Afghanistan across India and they knocked out the entire Gangetic plain, creating an Aryan ruling class on top of the local population in India, I think it's like India has a lot of Aryan ancestry. It has a lot of ancestry from Middle Eastern farmers and also the indigenous Australian aboriginal hunter gatherers. So India has all three. And the area by Assam in the northeast is more like East Asian ancestry. But as they conquered India, the Aryan invaders assimilated into the local population. And so the old Vedic gods were very much like the Greek or Germanic pantheons. You have the top God, you have the thunder God who slays the dragon, you. The gods valorize glory and war and adventure. And then over time you saw the local culture consume the invaders culture. So you saw the local traits where the fertility gods or the the gods of being rather than doing one. And so this is also correlated with India with the priest class beating the warrior class, where in the Vedic period the warriors had an advantage over the priests. But then as they had to integrate into India, the priest class who were working with the locals beat out over them.

[C]

Similar to China.

[A]

Yes. And so inside India there was this tension of the more western like Aryan invaders with the more eastern like local population. And the more local population won. But then India installed the caste system 4,000 years ago to stop intermixing because the Aryans became paranoid about this process.

[C]

It's funny how like when there's a little bit more distance when you're talking about European and Indian kind of connection, it's like fun to talk about. But then when you get a little bit closer and you talk about Pakistan to India connection, then it's like a lot more controversial. I mean, because they don't want to have anything to do with each other.

[A]

Yeah. In Pakistan I'm going to make a controversial claim. In most ways Pakistan is more in common with India than it does with other Muslim countries because you have the previous layer of Islamic culture. But then before that they were the same country and Pakistan was part of India as late as the 1940s.

[C]

Oh, yeah, exactly.

[A]

And I mean, the Indian historians still deny the Aryan invasions, or they say it started in India, which is utter madness considering we have genetic proof, we have archaeological proof, linguistic, mythological, so many other things. Right.

[C]

They deny the Aryan and say it was Persians and that they stopped the Persians and that they hate the Persians and they hate the. The Pakistanis who are.

[A]

Or they say that the Aryan invasion started in India and then went out to Europe, which is just demonstratively not true.

[C]

We know they play uno reverse.

[A]

Yeah, we know the Aryan invasion started in the Pontic steppe lands of Ukraine and South Russia, the Kuban region. I love seeing Cuban and then tripping people up with Cuba, the country, and then the Kuban region of Russia. So we've gotten through the ancient period and let's get to the year 500 BC. And as of 500 BC, you have the Scythian and Massage peoples, where the Scythians were a broader cultural region that stretched from Wallachia and Ukraine in the west out to the Altai region across the steppe lands. And the Scythians were very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, where, if you read European leaders, European authors of that era, to be a Scythian was synonymous with being savage and barbaric and tough. Where they frequently compare the new Russian empire to the Scythians and noble savage admiration.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

And the Greeks admired the Scythians. The Scythians would sell them slaves. The Scythians would fight as mercenaries. And the Scythians were also ethnically European. And it's interesting with Herodotus, and we found Herodotus is largely correct here. Herodotus is weird where he writes these highly insane stories. And then there was a historiographic tradition of saying Herodotus was wrong. And then over the 21st century, we found a lot of the things Herodotus said were actually true. It's just the ancient world was reasonable, really, that schizo. But he was. I. He still says some stuff that's too schizo. So the Scythians, or their manifestation in Central Asia, the Masagatai, they would. They were sort of. Dan Carlin describes them well. They were sort of land Vikings. They were a warrior people. They would smoke weed, they would have long hair. They were a culture where it was a man's duty to die in battle, and they loved freedom. And so inside Inner Asia, you had this fault line between the Persian Empire and the Scythians, who were ethnic relatives, where under Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire formed in a single lifetime where Cyrus was one of the greatest men in history. And up until the 18th and the 19th centuries, European authors saw Cyrus as one of the greatest men ever. In the Bible, he is one of like three guys who get to be honorary Jews because he helped the Jews a lot and he was just wildly respected. And Cyrus built his empire single handedly, stretching from Greece out to the Indus River. And so he was pushing up against Central Asia. And the Persians stabilized at a borderland with the Masagti Scythians around Transoxiana, where I think Samarkand is a very old city built by the Persians. And Cyrus invaded into the Scythian territory and was killed by the Scythian queen Timuris because Scythian culture gave women significantly more social status than a lot of others. Where the Greek myths of the Amazon stem from the Scythians, where we have graves of Scythian warrior women. And there's a story when the Persians were dealing with the Scythians where they sent a delegation and the Scythians brought to them a bird with an arrow, a rabbit with an arrow, and I believe either a fish with an arrow. When the Scythians were telling the Persians is if you swim, fly or walk, we will kill you. And the Scythians were able to wipe out the Persian army. They killed Cyrus the Great, who had already conquered basically the entire known world. The Persian Empire had over half the world's population at point this, this point because it had most of the centers of civilization. And this wasn't even the only time the Scythians beat the Persians. The Persians, and we forget this, they launched an invasion of Ukraine through the Balkans over land. And then the Scythians in both Khorasan and in modern Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and in Ukraine slaughtered the Persian armies.

[C]

So it sounds like Alexander pushed Cyrus out into the metaphorical ocean where he got eaten by the sharks played by the Scythians.

[A]

Alexander is like 150 years later.

[C]

Oh, I thought, oh, right. Because he just came into Cyrus's empire. He didn't actually fight.

[A]

You had in between. So Cyrus died, then you had Cambyses and you had Darius 1 and Darius 2 there. I think I'm missing. Persia also had a civil war in between. So Persia went through its own anime arc in this process.

[C]

Got it. So but basically the structure that Cyrus created contributed. Alexander pretty much dropped into his father's empire and then like jumped right through Cyrus's empire, which helped him like speed over to India.

[A]

Thank you for the transition, Alexander. So the Persians, they were known for collapsing into decadence very quickly, where they were great conquerors, where they controlled the entire region from Macedonia to India. But like the Spanish, they seized it very quickly over one or two generations. Then the Persians fell into degeneracy very easily and they actually became dependent on Greek mercenaries for over a century before the Greeks conquered Persia. And so when Alexander the Great invaded the Persian Empire, he kept going east and he actually conquered further into the region than the Persians had ever done. He pushed up against Central Asia. And I think he. I forget if he built Sam. I think he did extra stuff with Samarkand. Samarkand is the big regional center in Uzbekistan. And he built Alexandria on the oxygen. This Alexander the Great built like a dozen Alexandrias, not just the one in Egypt that we know the most about. And he also invaded into Afghanistan where the Persians had most of Afghanistan, but Alexander conquered further out and he took an area called Bactria. And this is where the story gets weird because Alexander's empire fell pretty soon after his death. And the Asian part of the Macedonian empire were governed by the Seleucid Greeks who were based out of Syria and Iraq. And you saw strange things where there was a cult in northern Iran which would worship the Greek God Hercules. Hercules was a demigod. The demigod Hercules and the Parthians, who were another Scythian horse tribe who were more closely related to the Persians, they knocked out a lot of the eastern part of the Seleucid empire because the Seleucids had trouble power projecting over the mountains of the Iranian plateau because Iran is a high dry region that was governed by a proud warrior nobility. So lots of European governments like the Romans or the Macedonians or the Ottomans could govern Iraq and Anatolia, but not Persia. And so the Parthians took back a lot of that region. And then you saw the survival of the Greco Bactrian kingdom in the mountains of Afghanistan, vastly longer than people expected. Where until 150 BC, this Greek colony state in northern Afghanistan, where Bactria is a region of eastern Afghanistan, it's where India and, and Tajikistan and Afghanistan meet. And so the Greco Bactrian state, they had colonies of Greeks and they worked the local population. And this is where it gets crazy. They even conquered all of northern India, where under the. The leader Demetrius, they invaded northern India and they conquered as far as modern Bangladesh, where we have records of Greek armies out by Bangladesh in India before 1000 AD is so poorly recorded that we only we know this happened, but we only have a handful of records of it where it's funny, not a single Indian record mentions Alexander the Great, although he conquered over this region to the Indus river. And the Greeks and the Seleucids had fought the new Indian Mauryan state over northwest India. And Alexander's invasion of India was highly seminal to, to a lot of Indian history because the void it created allowed the creation of the Mauryan empire, which was made by the alliance of a chieftain and a strategist, Chandragupta and Kautila, who basically formed up with their buddies and formed the largest Indian empire up to its point that unified almost all of India out of their private initiative. And so this region of India and Afghanistan, just a constant kaleidoscope of conflict and regional transfer where you saw this mixing of Scythian, Persian, Greek and Indian culture.

[C]

That's fascinating and also keeps with the theme of Cyrus opening up the lanes for Alexander, Alexander opening it up for that next north Indian empire. And also the fact that one of Alexander's colonies in Bactria actually completed his mission and made it to the ocean.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

On the other side of India is pretty, that's like a pretty fun, relevant detail that normally you'd think would be a follow up for that story.

[A]

Yeah. For extra context. Alexander's dream was he wanted. He saw the Oikou Mene or the known world as ending in Bangladesh. And so his goal was to reach the world ending ocean in Bangladesh. Little did he know that if he did, he would just be forced to fight another thousand miles to China.

[C]

But he also would have got some more direct information about China because it's directly touching Chinese trade.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's correct. And he, his soldiers mutiny because they had already been fighting for 11 years and they were meeting up against several Indian armies vastly larger than them. And so they had already defeated one or two Indian armies significantly larger. And his men said, look, Alexander, we already conquered the entire known world. Like we can either sit on our gains or all die trying to conquer all the rest of India and then not be able to hold the empire together. And then that's when Alexander marched his men through Gedrosia to kill them for revenge.

[C]

Right. So it's basically like they're at Vegas or like we gotta leave the blackjack table. You're up, up. And as punishment, he takes them through like a strip club or something when they all want to go to home.

[A]

Alexander had basically gone crazy by that point. That's a whole different subplot. He made his Men worship him as a God, and he was tr. Trying to, like, make a new integrated culture between Persian and Greek civilization, and he was trying to conquer the entire world, etc.

[C]

It was too successful. So there's like a huge danger of a Huber's trap. They were probably all freaking out about that.

[A]

Another.

[C]

Yeah, go ahead.

[A]

Another thing is that if Alexander happened after the rise of Christianity, he would have had the Christian moral framework to calm himself back down, because Christ sort of sets a moral frame that allows you to do that. But because he was part of Greco Roman classical civilization, once you pass a threshold, you become a God, and then you start challenging the gods, and the gods punish you for hubris, where part of the reason Christianity was so influential was it created a trap to break out of the classic hubris structure. Because in Greco Roman classical civilization, the more you succeed, you challenge the gods, the gods take revenge for you.

[C]

Wow, that's fascinating, because the hubris trap is something people fall into all the time in contemporary culture. So it's really interesting to look at it through that lens. Like winning. Winning for a long period of time is really, really difficult thing to navigate when conditions change.

[A]

It's also interesting to compare it to Norse mythology, where in Norse mythology, the higher you rise, the more you see. And so all the Norse gods know the exact day they're going to die. And so in Norse culture, you don't have the hubris trap. You have the can I live with the information I know trap. And so in Norse mythology, once you gain the forbidden knowledge, you have to sit on it and have the willpower to sort of survive with knowing things you shouldn't have to know.

[C]

So that's kind of like the black pill conception, when. Yes, when you associate red pilling with black pilling. And then the Christianity is like the way out of the hubris into a white pill, maybe, or something. Yeah, that's conceptually.

[A]

This is a conversation I had recently with a friend where I had to tell her that Christianity, we forget its impact because it solved lots of psychological issues so thoroughly that we don't. We forgot about them. It solved the issue of only being able to associate through clan lines, through having these highly rigid social traditions that you couldn't get around through how to end the system of slavery and social dominance, how to enter the system of sort of extractive class warfare, the hubris trap, the trap of these Asian societies that had gone on for thousands of years. So Christianity worked because it sort of cut the Gordian knot for all of the civilizational trajectories beforehand. And it did so so effectively that we lost gratitude for it. And this is a good transition because this era where the age of empires is complex in inner Asia, because you have all of these interlocking forces that are occurring at once, because it's finally once the region gets connected, where, as an example, the Chinese explorer we've spoken about in previous podcasts who the Chinese were fighting against the Huns. And the Huns had a cavalry advantage, and China didn't have the good horses in the same way. So the Chinese sent out an explorer who was captured by the Huns. They made him marry a Hunnish bride. He escaped. He then went west to the Yuetzi. And the Yuetzi had another name for them is the Takarians. And they were the ethnic European inhabitants of modern Uyghurstan or Xinjiang, who lived on these desert road cities. And it's funny, they're called the Takarians in the Western tradition, they're called the Yue Chi in the Chinese tradition. The Huns in the Western tradition are called the Huns. And in the Chinese tradition, they're called the Xuan Nu. So you can see the same name, same people, other sides of Eurasia's names for them. And so The Chinese, around 150 BC, finally discovered the existence of the rest of the world, which must have been a real science fiction moment. And they got as far out as Iraq, where they found the existence of Persian Indian Greco Roman civilization. And the Chinese explorer reached Bactria within, I think, two to three years of the fall of the Greco Bactrian state. So they would have known they were Greeks in the area, but it was right after their defeat. And so you saw this cultural mixing where from one element is the Chinese conquered west, and they took the Tarim Basin under the Han dynasty, and they fought as far west as modern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. And this created a central axis of the Silk Road. Watch the Silk Road video that connected all of Eurasia together, from the Romans out by the Atlantic to the Chinese out by the Pacific. And so this was one of the first. McNeil is a great word about this. I'm forgetting one of the first unifications of the Eurasian system, the ekumene. It was the first ekumene of the Eurasian system. And so you saw the Chinese influence spreading west. We spoke before the Greco Roman civilization going east, where there's a style of Indian art from an area called Ganhara in modern Pakistan that's heavily influenced by Greco Roman sculpture. Then you have the Indian Influence going northwest where Afghanistan and Central Asia were Buddhists. And Buddhism actually entered China through Central Asia. And you how these. You had these enormous, beautiful Buddhist structures in Afghanistan that the Taliban destroyed. They didn't want to remember that their ancestors were Buddhists and Transoxiana converted to Buddhism. And then it's funny that the nomadic peoples of Central Asia who conquered China, they converted to Buddhism and which is a religion of peace and disattachment, while these very peoples were some of those violent and greedy and destructive ever. It's a real cosmic duality. Then Buddhism spread to China partly through going over these really difficult mountain passes, up across the sort of Kashmiri region to Central Asia, and then up through Mongolia into northern China. So it was this arc region, which is why Buddhism changed so much in India and China, where it very rarely actually spread through the Himalayas in the direct route, but in this sort of arc and in the other direction the Chinese fought, the Huns pushed the Huns west. The Huns pushed the Yuet Chi west. The Yuehi became the cushion peoples. Like these kinds of cushions. The Kushins invaded northwest India and became lords of there. And then the Huns kept going west out to France and Central Europe. So you can see these dualistic pressures where from one direction, Buddhism is going from west to east. And then you have the migrations from the Huns which go east to west.

[C]

So it kind of cycles around the Himalayas. Yes, like that.

[A]

So you have a variety of cultural intermixing. Watch the Silk Road video. And there was this sort of Central Asian Christian civilization that didn't fully develop where the Tarim Basin actually converted to Christianity, as did a lot of the Altaic peoples, where it was Nestorian Christianity, this eastern distinct civilization of Christianity based out of Syria in Iraq, that got wiped out by the Muslims. But they had their own distinct architectural style, they had their own distinct art style. They used their own languages, they had their own sacred texts. And it had a civilization of millions of people stretching from Shi' an in western China out to Syria.

[C]

That was like the real John Prater or the mythical priest. That would have been a better example than Ethiopia, maybe, or something bigger civilization.

[A]

When people were writing the myth of the immortal wizard Prester John, who lived in the other side of Islam, who had an area the size of India filled with enormous herds of cattle, they were thinking of, we know there are all these Christians in Central Asia where Genghis Khan's favorite bride was a Nestorian Christian, because these Syrian Christians had gone out across Asia becoming one of the Dominant merchant caste in India and Goa. When one of Christ's apostles went to India, he went to Goa. So you have. When the Portuguese reached India, there was this pre established Christian community that dated back to the Roman period.

[C]

Oh wow. So that. So that's why partly they settled and grew out of Goa. It's not like Portugal gave Goa its Western cultural elements. Well, it helped, but that's why it was compatible.

[A]

Exactly. The other thing is that there were several other religions where Manichaeism is a fascinating religion where it's a bridge between Buddhism and Christianity and the Persian religions like Zoroastrianism. Manichaeism was founded by this guy called mani in the 2nd century Iraq under the Persian empire who like Christ was killed for disturbing the peace. But although he was originally supported by the Persian court, I believe. And then they killed him after when he got too controversial. Controversial, but Manichaeism is a bridge between Gnosticism and Christianity where it has the ideal that reality is evil and there's this stark duality between good and evil and you should reject the evil physical body to be with the spiritual God where it's the bridge between them. It takes Christianity's moral structure in the Gnostic cosmology. And this entire region of the world is a sort of clusterfuck of different religions which Islam just utterly nuked. It's funny, Afghanistan's the most cultural. It's the most religiously unified country in the world. 99.999% of Afghans are Sunni Muslims. And I saw this funny video of the last two Jews in Afghanistan arguing with each other. And of course they don't get along. One of them, one of them is named Zamiel. No, Zabulon. Zabulon was claiming. The other guy was. Zabdulon was claiming that Dan was a wizard. And this was in the early 2000s.

[C]

Do they control both sides? Just those two guys?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to say anything because anything I say here will be construed negatively either by the pro or the anti. Semite.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

And it's funny that Afghanistan was the center of this sort of religious nexus. And I'm not giving this full justice. You have multiple sects of Christian, you have the Buddhists, you have the Manichaeans. There was another religion coming out of Iraq called Mazdakism, which I do not understand, but apparently it had many adherents. You have Gnosticism, you have various Greek sects, many things. I'm sure you had Hindus and a lot of Greek philosophy like the Cynics was based off Indian philosophy where when Diogenes was living naked in a barrel that was based off there were Indian philosophers of that same era, the yogis who did the same thing. And when the Greeks invaded India, the Indians said, see, you also have naked philosophers who don't indulge in society. We know you are also men of culture. This was a conversation Alexander had with the Indian yogis where oh no way. Cynics. They said, oh, we get you're also men of culture.

[C]

Oh, you also do naked yoga. You get it.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

What's a funny example of that? Like yeah, oh you, you like a modern ironic example of it would be like oh, you play Star Trek or a recognizable game that someone else another country would play.

[A]

It's one of those things when anime fans where there was this. Someone in my community shared this image of me as a rat, furry. And I was like, why did you do this? I never asked for this. And but like it's weird things like that where I saw this thing online where this Italian jockey got like an anime image of his horse and then he was showing it around and all the anime fans are like oh, this is awesome. And I listen to Japanese music. I've seen like two or three anime shows. I'm not a man of culture. I look at that and it feels, it feels comparable where anime fans nerding out about specific anime subculture cultures.

[C]

Right. A lot of examples would be food oriented in terms of non ironic.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Culture probably. But it's really funny you said the not they were gnostic Christians in Syria.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Before they got wiped out by the Muslims. Because like if Europe or the west go Christianity goes in a gnostic direction, then they could also get wiped out by the Muslims.

[A]

So this is profoundly un PC but a lot of people really crap on Islam. But one of the things I like about Islam is that it gives civilizational stability to areas where I do not think would happen otherwise. Where in areas of the fringe of the Middle east or the Sahel in Africa. Islam provides sort of moral order to those places in a way I don't think Christianity could have.

[C]

Really?

[A]

Yeah, because Islam is more direct where the Quran is a list of rules and it's also enforced in the communitarian level. Where I was reading a book by a Christian missionary talking about how Christianity's impact on the third world is enormous because just introducing implicit individualism radically shifts their social structure. Where Christianity, even the non western variants do teach a certain degree of individualism because Christ rebelled against the Social structure. Islam is collectivist where it's. How do you. Christianity is for the individual, Islam is for the society. So the Koran is how to make these social rules. So there's lots of highly collectivist societies where I think Islam gives them this degree of moral stability and it might.

[C]

Be easier for them to adapt sooner than Christian.

[A]

Yeah. There's a map of STDs in Africa, and the Christian areas have vastly more STDs in the Muslim areas. The second you go to Muslim areas, STDs drop to 0%.

[C]

Well, I guess that's the most important metric.

[A]

Not literacy. Not, not. Not freedom. So the region is a kaleidoscope. Around 100 AD, you have the states, Central Asia. Transoxiana was part of the Kushan monarchy, which spread from there down to Pakistan over Afghanistan. Then you have the Persians, the Parthians, later replaced by the Safavids, and then you have the Chinese, and it's part of this broader Silk Road ecosystem. But then the Dark Ages arrive, and the Sassanids survived the fall of Rome period better than any other state. India, the Romans and the Chinese all had a Dark age. So you saw the end of the first civilizational ecumen. And so you saw peoples like the White Huns, unrelated to the other Huns, attack down into India, also known as the Hephthalites, through Persia. And you saw the rise of night warfare emerge on the frontier between Persia and Central Asia, where in order to fight off the horse archers of Central Asia, the Persians invented cataphract knights who had these feudal estates to build themselves out against these Central Asian nomads, because the Persian monarchy and Ctesiphon in Iraq was too far away. Then the Byzantine Eastern Romans fought against the Persian knights, incorporated cataphract warfare themselves, and then it spread into Western Europe, eventually becoming night warfare and feudalism. And similarly to gunpowder, the Europeans took a military trend from Asia and then boosted it themselves so that European knights could consistently beat heavy cavalry from anywhere else.

[C]

What's the cataphract?

[A]

Cataphract, it's Greek for boiling pots. Boiling kettles. Because when they were out in the deserts of Syria and Iraq in covered head to toe in heavy armor, the joke is like you're a boiling tea kettle.

[C]

Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Like the Crusades.

[A]

And so Afghanistan, for this entire period, in the area of Ariana, you had the cities like Herat, or what later became Kabul. And these were the Silk Road cities between Afghanistan and Persia, India and Persia. And outside these fairly cultivated cities, which still exist Today, if you talk to Afghans, a lot of Afghans and Kabul, like a friend in Kabul, he's very culturally Western, and that's normal for people of his set. And then the neighboring countryside is stuck thousands of years ago. And that's been normal for Afghanistan's history, where you have the cities on the trade routes, and then you have the barbarian peoples who consistently attack into India. And they're also frequently gateways from tribes from Central Asia into India, where the Central Asian tribes go to Afghanistan, pick up allies, and then attack India. So now you have on the next eumene, around 700 AD, where the Arabs arose and they conquered all the way out to the Indus river, taking over Persia and then up to Transoxiana. Then you have the Chinese moving west, retaking the Tarim Basin. And they butted heads with the Arabs at the Battle of Talas river, where the Arabs and the Chinese had a battle where the Arabs won, partly because they heavily outnumbered the Chinese. And then the Arabs stole the Chinese artisans, taught them how to make paper, and then paper spread through the Middle east and Europe due to this.

[C]

Oh, wow.

[A]

When a Persian army fought a Chinese army centuries earlier, the per. The Romans were guys that. Crassus. Crassus, the Roman general, fought the Persians. The Persians took his Roman armies. Then they fought the Chinese, and they settled down in Afghanistan or somewhere in Central Asia. And so the Chinese have records of fighting. They think they called them, like, fish scale soldiers.

[C]

Right? Yeah, that's. That's a really fun one. And so did the Chinese. Were they the ones that wiped out Bactria, the Greek colony in Bactria?

[A]

No, that was the. That was the Yuetzi or the Takar. That was the.

[C]

Okay, so the cushions got them. And then. So the Chinese never had an interaction with the Greeks and the Romans. Just the Romans.

[A]

Yeah. And this period was an apex of the Silk Road. We talked about the Silk Road in another video. And this was a golden age for both Khorasan and Tibet. For Tibet, you saw the rise of their national consciousness, where there were several Tibetan empires that went toe to toe with the Chinese. If you read out the Dark Age period, the Tibetans several times formed empires that conquered north into Central Asia and Mongolia. And they even sacked the Chinese capital of Xi' an multiple times.

[C]

Mongolia.

[A]

Yeah. The Tibetans had an empire that stretched up to Mongolia during the Dark Age because they took Gansu Province and the Tarim Basin. And the Chinese were several times forced to acknowledge Tibet as an equal empire and marry Chinese princesses to the Tibetan noble line.

[C]

I could see Tibet working also with the south as colonies to fight the north too, who were already kind of fighting the south. Like different layers of ease of conquest.

[A]

Tibet became. It's funny that they were in contact with China, but they were a sort of descendant of Indian civilization where the Tibetan monarchy was based off Indian models. They were Buddhists from India and Buddhism took a while to work through. In Tibet in the Dark age period, the government was. But they kept a lot of their pagan traditions. But by the time of the Mongol Empire, Tibet became a Buddhist theocracy and then Mongolia, their version of Buddhism is the same as Tibetan Buddhism Ramaism, not Chinese Buddhism. So Mongolia took a lot of cultural influences from Tibet, but that's sort of later thing. And the Tibetans were really ferocious warriors. And this was during China's Dark Age when they faced near constant threats from the north, from Turkic peoples, Mongolian, Manchu peoples who conquered north China many times. And the Tibetans were another one of these barbarians peoples. And the Chinese had to fight hard against the Tibetans. But what ultimately happened was that Genghis Khan genocided Tibet's entire ruling class and the Tibetans stopped having a warrior nobility and they become became ran by the Lama istic Buddhist ruling class. And that also happened in Mongolia. Once the Qing monarchy or the Manchus conquered it, it where in both Mongolia and in Tibet, there was a point when a third of adult men were Buddhist monks. Because once these warrior cultures stopped having the ability to fight and they were conquered, the men had nothing to do except to go into religion.

[C]

Right. Monk service is huge in Thailand. Like yeah, a ton of people do it for like a year or longer. But so they ultimately, basically the Chinese ultimately tamed the hill people. And Tibet is a much more formidable, significant example of the hill people relative to agrarian society than people give credit for.

[A]

Yes, because Tibet's super lightly populated today. If you look at the demographic chart of China, you have basically no people in the north and the west. Then you have the huge populations of China proper. And the industrial revolution gave the Han a demographic leg up against the mountain in the desert people. But it was still 100 to 1 in the pre industrial world. And they were able to use military advantages to offset their weaknesses. And I frequently think of my favorite writer, Amaury Duriankor. He went on his own trip in the night after World War II, before the Chinese Communist Party conquered Tibet in 1949. It must have been 1946 or 1947 because Amori was an Orientalist. He had studied a lot of the cultures of India and China. He could read their native texts and then he put their ancient histories on the Spanglerian civilizational organic arc. And those are really good books. But he walked over the Himalayan mountains with a porter, went to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and met with the Tibetan ruling class, which is pretty based because there was no way to reach Tibet before then except stepped over land. And so we have his travelogues of going through Tibet. He talks about the geographic diversity of you go up in the mountains and then it's like you're going through different continents with different elevations with. Ori thinks a lot of the Indic character of fatalism stems from the enormous geographic disconnect between the Himalayas, which they called the mountains of the gods, and then the heat of the Indic plain, which. Where you see this enormous polarity of radically different geographies. And it makes you think, the gods control the world, humanity doesn't. And so we crossed the mountains and the Himalayas are frigging huge. They're bigger than any other mountain on Earth. It's absolutely insane. You need gas masks to climb to the top of Everest. He crosses over the mountains, has a lot of adventures. He goes to Lhaza, and he actually speaks pretty highly of the Tibetan peoples. The Tibetans practiced like a form of infanticide, so their birth rate wasn't super high. So they kept their population artificially low to keep the standard of living up. And I think they also practice Eskimo brothers to keep the population down, where brothers will share the same life, which is weird. And so they did all these different things to hobble them. And I frequently think of Amori talking to the Tibetan nobility. Not the nobility, the Lama Istic ruling class, because it's how I feel talking to the current Western elite. And especially so a lot of Christians where Amore said, you know, guys, you are going to get conquered by Communist China within the next five years, and the Communists are going to destroy your entire civilization. And the entire unanimous reaction among the Buddhist elite was, we don't care. Worldly things don't matter. In Amor said, you're betraying your own people here. You, your people need you to fight back. And the Buddhist said, nah, the Buddha says that reality is billions of years old and we can just check out of this, so we're not going to do anything. And Amaury said, the British are happy to help you. So he kept on wandering around the Buddhist elite telling them, your society is going to fucking die. Now you need to fix this. To the unanimous reaction of just we don't care. And this is how the Western elite feels. And it's how I feel talking to a lot of Christian elites because they'll obsess over slight doctrinal things. Don't think you guys are totally ignoring the Marxist takeover of your civilization. You're going to care about these doctrinal disputes in different sect of Christians and then ignore the Marxist destruction of your entire society. And I think there's the sort of philosophic idealists and materialists and we're a highly materialist society. Materialism is just thinking that reality is only things that exist within materia. The issue with materialistic societies is they get very short sighted and greedy so they blow their entire sort of cultural technologies on very short things. The issue with idealist societies and they funny, they have a horseshoe is in the idealist societies you just end up in radical delusion of because we will follow the gods, the gods will help us, thus we don't have to interface with material reality. And this is why I am a material idealist dualist and that I jump between either paradigm depending on how effective they are in a context. Because once you get to radical materialism or radical idealism, you just hit radical delusion.

[C]

Yeah. And if you try to talk about them in an aggregative way, you're almost always going to get accused of doing one or the other. Because the materialist and the idealists are completely programmed towards just identifying the opposite thing.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

And labeling that as what's bad whenever you try to kind of integrate it. And I saw a really good episode with biology talking to Peter McCormick and he really eloquently described the situation of like the US diplomats harmonizing international regulations and taxes into a bureaucracy. And how the left like kind of briefly tried to fight China but now has kind of given in to China because their highest priority is just protecting their bureaucracy and their little nest egg and their little, you know, corner. And it's like very similar kind of to Tibet in terms of like, oh, it doesn't matter, all we care about is our own ideology and be able to operate within the spheres of dominance that we're used to. And then the other side of the America is like either just totally cocky or missing the solution with these insane internal fracturing debates, which is basically like the only thing that could possibly stop us from being successful against China by actually returning to our values.

[A]

It's a universal of human nature. And you see it with Christ with the Pharisees, where the Pharisees totally ignored Christ's Potential. And it's because once you build social structures that operate over centuries, the social structures take on a life of their own, independent from their original intention. And when you build out the social structures, people are operating inside their neurological left hemisphere where they view the world as controlled, dead materia. In reality, you have to see the world as an organic living whole, relate to whatever context you're in and change for it. And so what happens with these Buddhist structures or modern American institutions or with the Pharisees, is they had built out a social institution that was not reactive to reality. They had never taught the people in charge how to react to reality. So they get stuck in these mental loops. And I see it a lot with American elite institutions. It's just sad. And it's the thing with Lamast Buddhism is it's more shaman shamanic. There's the individual personality of the Lama. And the Lama is seen as like a sorcerer where he amasses his own personal Buddhist philosophy and then he teaches it to his students. And amalry would meet these lamast masters in, in. In Tibet. They were widely respected. And he said they would do things like. He talked a lot, he said he saw weird things, like they had the ability to levitate. I don't know how much I believe that, that. Or he would say things like they lock themselves in a cave for years straight because without interacting with the outside world or sunlight, they would start to see insane things of Buddhist cosmology they could see into. They could basically do crazy things. And that's what the Tibetan Book of the Dead is about. Where it's basically the journey is of their lamastic masters.

[C]

It's like site deprivation, hallucination.

[A]

Exactly, yes. So we've covered Tibet now for the western area under the Muslim governance, where first, under the Umayyads and the Abbasids, Central Asia and Afghanistan, where the Arabs took all of Afghanistan. They're one of the first people. They used Persians and Arabs and frontier peoples to conquer it. Because the Arab migrations, the first wave of, was under the centralized government. And then they would send out intrepid commanders out of their own initiative, would go to the frontiers and establish it for themselves. So the Muslims would go to Persia, conquer the Persians. Then Persian commanders would go into Central Asia and then conquer it. Or distinct Arab tribes would migrate out of their own initiative. Where Khorasan, which is northeastern eastern Iran, and then Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, these areas that was conquered a lot by these independent commanders. And Khan, a golden on his book on Genghis Khan, he calls the Khorasanis Arabs and that really got under my skin. But I've. It's one of those like bell curve things where I still don't think it's right to call 12th century Central Asians Arabs, but the Arabs and their tribes, because the Arab migrations was mostly tribal, they'd migrate out to tribes to predominantly Khorasan in northeastern Iran, because it was the unpopulated frontier and they would build out these Arab colonies. And I read a fascinating book by. Actually, it wasn't fascinating, it was okay. I read an okay book by Bulliet about the cotton boom of khorasan in the 9th century, where due to a wet climate, they started growing cotton on a near industrial scale in 9th and 10th century Khorasan. And you saw the rise of these huge cities of hundreds of thousands of people in the open plateaus of Khorasan, nowhere near to any water source. And Khorasan or Central Asia was one of the wealthiest and the most advanced places on earth in the high Middle Ages, where you had cities like Merv or Samarkand or Nishapur, which were incredibly wealthy, they had capitalist economies where this cotton farming, it was funded by Arabic VC capital. And it was Arabs who made the cotton, not the Persians. And so you saw the rise of this parallel Arab society in Central Asia, where most of the best scholars of the Islamic Golden Age were Khorasanis. And they had these beautiful cities. And so you had capitalism, you had science, you had learning, you had the Silk Road, you had beautiful art, you had cities of hundreds of thousands of people. And so Khorasan had this incredible golden age during the Islamic High Middle Ages.

[C]

Fascinating. Another example of underrated development and far off corners.

[A]

Exactly. Then you started seeing the barbarian migrations which ultimately destroyed Coruscant, where the first one was under the Turks, who gradually displaced the Persians from Central Asia, where the Sogdians, who were the ethnic Persians of Khorasan or the Iranic people of Khorasan, they were quite instrumental in several Chinese dynasties, as you should see with our Imperial China video. They were displaced by the Turks. And the first wave of the Turks were the Golk Turks, who had this empire stretching from the area around the Caspian out to Mongolia. And the Gok Turks formed this confederacy which fought against the Muslims. And then you saw the Ghaznavid Turks come down from Turan and Kazakhstan through Central Asia. Then they attacked India, through Afghanistan, they did the same thing. And they were the first big Indian Muslim dynasty to take the north Gangetic plain. And so they brought Islamic culture into India. And they were Turks who were working with this Persian civilization where Central Asia created the Islamo Persian culture, which was big across all of Asia. It was really influential in Turkey, in Iraq, in Armenia, Persia, Central Asia, Indonesia, Islam. The Taj Mahal is the most famous example. And you had loads of really relevant Persian authors, like Rumi is the most famous Persian poet of that era. But he was part of an entire genre of Persian art that had its own distinct style. And so you saw the mixing of Turkic and Afghan and Islamic and Persian culture to make this new beautiful Islamic civilization, which became the ruling class of the Mughal India. And also you saw the rise of the Seljuk Turks come down from Central Asia. They seized Transoxiana by being mercenaries where he installed them. I forget, it might be Alp. It wasn't Alp Arslan, it was one of his ancestors. He seized Transoxiana from the local Sogdian Iranic peoples, became Turkic military dictator. And then the Selyuks use this as a bridge to conquer the entire Middle east, out to Byzantium and then down to Israel. So this the Turks, who later became the rulers of most of the Muslim world under the first the Seljuks and then later the Ottomans or the Kajars or these peoples or the conquerors of India, they started from Central Asia and then used it as their springboard to migrate out.

[C]

So they. They caught the Turks conquered through the Islamophobia Persia network.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Kind of similar to the Cyrus Alexander example again.

[A]

And you saw a demographic replacement of the Persians and the European peoples from Central Asia from the Roman through the early modern period. So by the end of the Roman period, you had lots of East Asian ancestry in Central Asia. And then by the time of like the 17th century, the Persians had been more mostly replaced from Central Asia, where the Sogdians and the Persians were the town dwellers. And then the countryside was taken up by these nomadic Turkic tribes. And as of now, Central Asians look Eurasian. They look like a mix of a European and a Chinese person. And because the Turks displaced the countryside, the Persians got stuck in the cities. But because the cities weren't ethnically replaceable, the Turks gradually totally displaced the Persians from Central Asia. Except for Tajikistan, which is the last ethnic Persian country in Central Asia.

[C]

Oh, right. Because Iran's only about 60% Persian. Yeah. So Tajikistan is also Persian. Interesting.

[A]

Same thing as a lot of Afghanistan. And now you have the rise of Genghis Khan and we talk about this more so in the Mongol Empire video. But Genghis Khan utterly destroyed Inner Asia. He took it from being one of the wealthiest, most advanced places on earth to A total backwater. Historians would wander through the travelers would wander through the region. In his comment on how utterly empty it was and how they didn't have cities anymore because the Mongols built literal piles of skulls from their defeated opponents. And they destroyed the irrigation trenches which made Central Asia the core region that it was. And so the Mongols wiped out the population, genocided possibly a majority of the population, and Central Asia never recovered from it, where the last gasp was under Tamerlane, who was this Uzbek warlord who amassed this enormous empire, rising up as military dictator. And a big issue Central Asia faces is because it's highly regionally and geographically diverse, where in Transoxiana you have desert areas, you have grassland areas, you have irrigated regions. And if you look at videos of Afghanistan, there's sub regions of Afghanistan that look like the American Northeast, where it's temperate woodland. And so it's one of the most geographically diverse areas on Earth. But one of the issues is that you can't build out large centralized countries off it. So you're stuck in these countries that are sort of clan alliances that build up power but can't stabilize it, because there's not enough irrigated land to make a stable country like Iraq. There's not enough grassland to make a stable country like Kazakhstan. There's not enough forest land to make something like. There aren't really many forest countries in the Middle east anymore, but parts of Turkey, parts of Lebanon, Europe, whatever. And so the geographic diversity means that you can have sort of quick regimes here that are military dictatorships, but you can't centralize or unify power. And Tamerlane is one of the best examples of that.

[C]

Right. There's just too many geographic barriers.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's interesting to think of the trees because a lot of those countries are actually in climates and habitats which could support forests. So it'd be interesting to see how that changed. If parts of the Middle east develop or like the stands, recover from the drained lakes and dusty grasslands.

[A]

I think it was significantly more forested. But then centuries of civilization cut down the trees. For example, the Mediterranean in the Middle east in the ancient period was just covered in trees, and then they cut the trees down due to civilization. I think it wasn't as extensive extensive in Central Asia, but it was more so true. And they used to have a significantly wetter climate, which has been pushed down by deforestation, because deforestation exacerbates itself, where deforestation means that there's less condensation in the climate, which means that it's a Cycle that gets worse and worse. But Tamerlane conquered. His core territory was Central Asia and Persia. But then he attacked Delhi several times. He raped India, he fought out to Moscow, taking out a lot of the Russian empires. And then he fought out to Ankara in Turkey and out to Syria. So Tamerlane was this just mass conquest. He nearly went to China. And there's an interesting book by Darwin called not the first Darwin, the less famous Darwin, who's a historian in recent times about After Tamerlane, where he treats Tamerlane as this civilizational tipping point, where Tamerlane utterly destroyed every region neighboring Uzbekistan, where he killed 15 million people after the Mongols killed 80 million. And this region never recovered from that. And so he was also a devout Muslim. And he really cemented a lot of Muslim authority in the region, which ultimately grew afterwards, where the Kazakhs and a lot of the Central Asian peoples only converted to Islam because the Russians convinced them to do so. When the Russians conquered Central Asia, they convinced the native nomads to convert to Islam because it was easier to manage than the pagan traditions. But Tamerlane was a devout Muslim who mostly fought other Muslims, which is ironic. And he just devastated the region once again, killing more people than World War I. And so after the period of Tamerlane, this region was so traumatized it could never recover. Where you saw this beautiful architecture in Samarkand, an artistic renaissance. But everywhere else was devastated. Where Persia, we talked to this last episode. It got stuck in these low trust cycles of practicing, drug addiction and abortion. Ruled by foreign Turks, Central Asia wasn't able to build cities or build real irrigation canals, which left the region utterly empty. And so the thesis of the book is that after Tamerlane had utterly destroyed the connecting variable of this year of the Asian system, that being Inner Asia, the center of world authority moved to Europe, which had not been destroyed by the nomadic migrations because there was some trade where Central Asia treated with India to get horses from the Mughal Muslim rulers of India, who were also part of this pattern of Uzbeks and Mongols who used Afghans and Persians to conquer India. They were dependent on horses from Central Asia and Arabia. Peter Frankopon's book talks about that. The first book, half of the book is really good. The second half of the book is propaganda. The establishment loved that book, Silk Roads by Peter Frankopon. But the rise of European colonialism short circuited the center of Asia's Silk Road dominance, which is what ultimately allowed the Russians to conquer the region because they had lost their pre existing sort of glory, which you saw under Khorasan becoming an utter impoverished backwater.

[C]

Right. So they. They blocked off the Europeans from trade, forcing the Europeans to take another route, which got them screwed over by the Russians.

[A]

Yes. And the early modern period saw the emergence of what's called the Great Game, where the Russians conquered Central Asia pretty late, where I think they took most of Turkestan, even Samarkand, modern Turkmenistan after 1880, where, keep in mind, the Turks. The Russians only conquered Kazakhstan in the 19th century because the Kazakhs were nomadic horsemen who. Who had enough of a military advantage that they could keep defeating Russian armies until past the Napoleonic Wars. The Russians were ultimately able to fold Kazakhstan into their coalition. And there was a brief period in the early 20th century when Kazakhstan was majority ethnically Russian. Then you saw the Russians conquer the entire region and they treated it as their backwater. They were convinced that they were going to populate all of Central Asia with ethnic Russians in the same way the US populated the American west with Anglos. And the Russians viewed the centralizations with contempt, where the Soviet Union modeled itself as this radical egalitarian society. But there was still plenty of discrimination against the Asian peoples like the Central Asians. And when the Russians did a nuclear program, they put it in Kazakhstan as a sort of at least a little bit of a sign of that. And it's also interesting that the Russians maintained the largest. They maintained what was one of the largest colonial empires in history up until the 1990s, when all of their propaganda said that colonial empires were bad. At the same time, Russia dragged Central Asia into the modern world because all of Central Asia's modern ruling class were people who were taught and educated by the Russians. And the Russians built the railroads. They incorporated the modern technology. So it's a similar paradox with Russian colonialism in Central Asia as European colonialism in the rest of the world.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, from the Stan's perspective, Russia was practically bringing them capitalism at that point from, like, how different it was. And yeah, the internationalism of the Soviet Union is kind of a semantic myth because it's really just the Russian Empire.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And they. Yeah, go ahead.

[A]

Oh, they knew that at the time. And so you saw a division of the region. All of Central Asia was taken either by the Manu Chinese or the Russians. They divided that up. And Erstan was. Functionally, it was governed by Uyghurs for a while. And the Chinese genocided it in the early 18th century in the Zungar War wars, killing nearly a million people. And then the modern Uyghurs migrated into the region afterwards in the 18th century. And Uyghurstan and Mongolia gained self governance after the Chinese revolution in the early 20th century. It's just Mongolia was under Soviet protection, so the Chinese government couldn't take it back. Then Mao reconquered Uyghurstan and Mao reconquered Uyghurstan and it was governed in one of the most brutal ways out of any region of communist China in China. The governor they had who subdued uyghurstan in the 50s, he's still a byword for brutality. So the Chinese government, when they say we're going to be brutal, they use his name because he would just shoot the Muslims on rank whenever they try to resist. And with Tibet, it's similar where they killed the Dalai Lama. The Chinese governments made their own fake voice version of Dalai Lama. They've ordered the Dalai Lama is not allowed to reincarnate in a new form because in Tibetan Buddhism their Pope is the Dalai Lama and each generation he reincarnates. And they look around to figure out who has the signs of the Dalai Lama's reincarnation. Well, they'll look for old traits of the old Dalai Lama. But the Chinese maintain this brutal colonialism over the region. And you can see that in the pretty old overt genocide the Chinese are committing against the Uyghurs now, where even the Uyghur Justin Bieber Abrajan has been shoved into a camp where the Uyghurs aren't allowed to. They're forced to tie their knives to the tables at restaurants. Their entire elite have been thrown in camps. Probably millions of Uyghurs are in camps and the Chinese are mass moving Han Chinese out to the region to depopulate it. And so I think China's going through what is now a mass atrocity event that the Western media is covering up. I think China has put millions of people into camps. I think they're carrying out a horrifying atrocity, especially so against ethnic minorities they're trying to subdue. And I think it's morally disgusting. The Western media covers it up, right.

[C]

Because the globalist left media is on the side of China. So they're not. They don't want to stir it up. And then the kind of more dissident right media is often just reflexively anti empire. So they don't want to contribute to what they see as propaganda against having a military response against China.

[A]

And it's terrible. We're so myopic and more we didn't know about Mao or Stalin at the time? Mao, Hitler, Stalin. We didn't know about their atrocities at the time. It was covered up by the media. We only figured it out later. And it would really be damning if the. If this happens again and the west can't figure out again at the time. I'm going to make a video about China on the main channel soon. But to cover up the last few points, I know you have to get going in five minutes. The great games are really interesting historic event because the Russians were going down through Central Asia and it's sort of like a horror movie where the Russians are taking more and more of Central Asia. And the British were terrified that the Russians would build an alliance with the Afghans and invade India in the manner that had happened so many times before in history. And in retrospect, maybe the British were being paranoid, but paranoia is often stopped by making correct choices. So maybe the British were being paranoid, but they did enough other things to offset it. Where the British invaded Afghanistan multiple times to conquer it, to create a buffer state against the Russians. The British and the Russians had their own complex games of diplomacy across Central Asia to manipulate the region in their favor. And Persia and Afghanistan were both British puppet states against the Russians at certain points because both of them faced fairly constant military threats from Russia. Where the Soviet invasion of the 1980s is part of this lengthy trend of the Russians trying to take Afghanistan.

[C]

Right. And this makes total sense within the context of the Middle Eastern creating a Silk Road choke point. The Europeans going around it, then the Russians come down into that space. The Europeans go all the way around and get to India. But there's still this new opening for Russia to get into India through the land base. As a result of disempowering the previous blockade.

[A]

The Russians are almost like a new Mongol Empire where they're filling the same niche of basically Eurasian, enormous Eurasian empire. And so with the fall of colonialism, you saw the failed Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the stands becoming new countries. And the stands are interesting because they're one of the very few places where the American empire has practically no influence and they're cut off for the rest of the world. And the modern globalist order is mostly an oceanic based system. So the poorest places on Earth are places without coastlines, like the Sahel in Africa or Central Asia. So they're kind of operating in their own dimension. And practically all the states in Central Asia are dictatorships, but to differing levels of brutality. Kazakhstan is known for being fairly enlightened. They're one of the few peoples involved who were steppe peoples, they weren't farmer people. So they have less cultural issues due to that. Because steppe peoples tend to have more fluid cultures. They're wealthier because they have more mining deposits and they're lightly populated. Then you have Uzbekistan, which is the big farmer country, and they're very heavily populated. They're somewhat on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. And there's a huge thing where these Central Asian peoples migrate to Russia. Work is under skilled labor in Russia, where it's similar to Mexicans and Americans. And Russia has one of the highest rates of slavery of any country on Earth because the local Russian employers will frequently exploit the Central Asians and not pay them. Because that's just the way incentives work here.

[C]

Right. That's just what they can get away with with the bargaining power through the isolation. The stands are a fascinating region. I like that idea that Russia was thinking they could develop it like a West, because right before you said that, I was wondering about the development potential of the stands.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And the. The genetics of the people is super interesting. The way they look is just kind of like, fascinating. That Eurasian. I don't know, is it Arabic or just Eurasian and Aryan mix?

[A]

They're east, so they're Mongol or Turkic. They're East Asian, European mix.

[C]

Right. Okay.

[A]

They're like, more north. They don't have as much of the Middle Eastern farmer ancestry. It's interesting. A lot of these places have climates like the American west, where Kyrgyzstan is frequently compared to Wyoming in climate. And Kyrgyzstan is known as the Switzerland of Central Asia. We'll have to see if that's valid. Turkmenistan is the North Korea of Central Asia. They have a horrifically oppressive government where the president does weird stuff like banning mustaches because he lost his mustache. They have these enormous statues with empty streets. The president will ride his. I'm making them sound way more cool than they are. He'll ride a sports car around a flaming oil pit the Russians made as a PR move. And they've shut off the Internet multiple times. So I don't want to overstate. This is a genuinely oppressive regime. And the big issues with Central Asia for development, I'm not overtly optimistic because, first of all, they're utterly cut off from the global economy. They have basically nothing the global economy wants to offer. They are these oppressive, secular bunker regimes where it's interesting, radical Islam hasn't had the popularity in Central Asia it's had elsewhere in the Muslim world, because the Soviets really cracked down on that. Although there is a Real potential due to the oppressive bunker regimes. And they had a potential for the Belt and Road because China was building a lot of infrastructure projects across Central Bank Asia to connect China with the rest of the world. But the thing is, the local populations hated the Belt and Road because they saw it as Chinese imperialism. And there's also not a lot the Belt and Road. The Chinese have faced a lot of issues of building it out. And a lot of the trade routes are not super feasible, especially in the current economics where. Right.

[C]

They're not. They don't pay off. People misinterpreted what the Belt and Road was about. Thought it was going to be this giant power projection thing. But it was just a way for the Chinese to extend the, like, Ponzi scheme of their construction industry, which had, like run out of its ability to get loans inside of China. And so they extended that through these financing agreements with Third World countries that would never get paid back.

[A]

Yes, very well said. And I think we're in a new Great Depression. I think people aren't honest about it, but you look at most economies on Earth, China's economy is not doing great. Ours isn't doing great. Europe's, Indonesia, Japan. And so in the 2010s, you had lots of highly ambitious schemes, like, let's build up Brazil, let's build a train that unifies Asia, let's invest in Africa. And all of those highly ambitious schemes from the 2010s have aged very poorly. There is the acronym called the BRICs of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. And almost all of those countries are jokes. A decade ago, there was the idea that, oh, these are the countries of the future. But now you can only say one or two of them are super promising.

[C]

It's funny how much of a lag there is between productive capacity and reserve currency status, because they've hardly even made a dent in it. And it was like something that was anticipated to be a threat 20 years ago.

[A]

So this is inner Asia's history. I feel kind of bad about not talking more at the modern history, but I don't think there's that much. I don't know what details about its modern history I should have said, but I didn't.

[C]

And we got a little more time. Arthur's late, so.

[A]

Okay. I was always wondering if I was. If I was allowed to say your son's name. So. No, I think I said. I think I said the things I need to say. The Russians conquered the region. They built out the. The local SSL. SSL. I think SSRIs, but the Soviet Socialist Republics, which all had their own distinct identities, but they didn't. Where they the Soviets would larp as giving their independent countries status, but in reality they were all governed out of Moscow. And Matthew White, who's a great historian, he said that the rate of historic change switches how we perceive the world. Where during the Cold War, the Russian Revolution was considered one of the most important historic events because it created communism as its global competitors of the West. After the end of the Cold War, people cared less at the Russian Revolution and then they cared about the independent histories of these SSRs, states like Kazakh SSR, Uzbek SSR, which beforehand no one took seriously because they knew they were governed by the Russians. And now Central Asia exists this moment of critical tension where it could go in a variety of places. I'm frankly surprised that their regimes have not faced more issues already because they have experienced overpopulation, they have economic issues, they have lifestyle issues where in a lot of these countries people can barely put food on the table. At least that's what I know of Pakistan. And I suspect it to be similar in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan. And I had a researcher, I paid him to write a report on IsIs of K Isil of Kandahar, where it was maybe not Kandahar. It was this Islamic radical breakaway group in Afghanistan that was facing towards Central Asia. And his prediction was that if there was a global crisis, this group might start attacking from Afghanistan into Central Asia. Because you have large Islamic populations that are dissatisfied with the bunker regimes, that they could support a movement like this.

[C]

Because they could see the bunker regimes in the stands as being similar and just combined with the discontented local population.

[A]

Because populism in the Islamic world is Islamist. It's why when you give Islamic populations the right to. They'll vote in the Muslim Brotherhood. So next video is on Asian colonialism. Any other points?

[C]

Yes. In terms of the cultural impact of the stance, I think the biggest visible thing recently has been the MMA fighters. Yeah, all my favorite MMA fighters are. The ones that I'm most interested in are those kind of invincible seeming guys that. That come out of that area. I remember there was one from Mongolia as well. But yeah, all the stands. It's just very interesting to think of them like being connected to an ancient, ancient fighting knowledge. And then I just have to say the word Borat because we're talking about the region. So yeah, needs to be referenced.

[A]

I never watched that movie. It was.

[C]

Oh really? It was. It was a huge cultural phenomenon. When I was in high school, it.

[A]

Was before my time. I think I saw part of it. I thought I saw the first 20 minutes. I thought it was gross, and I turned it off.

[C]

Right.

[A]

But cool. Okay, I'll catch you next week.

[C]

Oh, and your power level ranking, based on all the references you pulled up in the obscurity of that region, I'm going to have to say was over 9,000.

[A]

So, first of all, that's flattery, but thank you.

[C]

It's just Dragon Ball Z.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

All right, Catch you later. Peace.

[B]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.