← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Pax Americana
02:25:45
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- [00:01]
A
Spring is here, and there's a whole new way to chai at Starbucks that's made perfect for you. Choose your sweetness, dial it up or keep things light. Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry or vanilla, or make it a spring classic with lavender. Because this season, there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks. Welcome to History102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth historic Rudyard 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. Hi, everybody, I'm Rudyard lynch and this is our co host Austin Padgett. And today's episode is going to be on the Pax Americana.
- [00:47]
B
Excellent. Big topic, very controversial, very relevant, possibly eternal. Relevance. Don't worry, not the empire.
- [00:57]
A
The 20th century is the weirdest era of history if you have a perspective grounded in any other century. The problem is that a long shadow hangs over the 20th century. In a lot of rooms I'm in, I'm the only person in the room who's never lived in the 20th century. And so it's really hard to shake people out of the sort of norms of the 20th century. And you have to be really careful about how you do it, because when you try to inculcate cultural change too quickly, it comes across as demented and psychotic. And so if you were to show someone the culture they live with, in even 20 years, they would think that culture is psychotic, but over the gradual dribble of time, they're going to end up agreeing with it. And if you were to show people in the year 2000 what we believe, they'd think it was psychotic.
- [01:50]
B
It was.
- [01:51]
A
If you were to show people in the year 1940, if you were to show people in the year 1940 what people in the year 2000 thought, history moves very quickly. And the 20th century is one of the very few eras where a singular generation is an era of history, where the assumptions of that generation only make sense in that generation and they don't make sense 30 years before or after. And I say this because the Pax Americana is the world we live in. The Pax Americana has a relationship to our current reality comparable to what Rome did around the birth of Christ. The issue though is the Pax Americana is an innately post modern empire. It is the most successful empire in history by some metrics, but it is also avowedly an anti empire like the Soviet Union, where it has to carry out the purpose of an empire while through the framing of being an anti empire. And this creates really weird results that are normal to us because it's again, the manufactured projector screen that we spoke about in the neoliberalism video, but would come across as deeply strange and manipulative and backhanded to other eras of history.
- [03:09]
B
It's complicated because if you reject that, the anti imperial, imperial ethos, it can make you look like you're more pro empire, even if as you're dismantling the globalist empire's infrastructure.
- [03:24]
A
Yeah, people set psychological traps. And a lot of psychological traps are very sticky where in trying to reject them, you still get stuck in them. And that's how the left won. Where if you reject the left, you're playing into one of their secondary illusions where they can call you racist, they can call you bigoted, whatever. You can see it in the dating market, where if you reject the dating market and then you go into the alpha, the alpha bro system, you go into work, you go into coping there the system traps you. And so when you look at life today, there's the shared system. And then the system has ways of trapping dissenters and neutralizing them. Where you see that with the Nazi discourse that got trapped and neutralized into being useless, you see with the red pill that became performative and lame. And so it's what you, it's what you say when, when you have a complex system like this, it can trap both its attractors and its detractors. In past a certain threshold, it's unclear who even built the system or who benefits from it because it become. It became its own ecosystem, if that makes sense.
- [04:40]
B
Yeah, and it's just funny that the empire's ethos is anti empire. So if you're anti empire, then it makes you anti anti empire. I don't know, it's. Yeah, they trap you in the semantics.
- [04:56]
A
This is why you have the iron rod. Because the thing you know is what you exist in that given moment where just hold the metal stick and breathe because you, you cannot trust the abstractions, but you can know the moment is
- [05:11]
B
that the relevant lesson from the fact that everybody basically has assumptions from their own period of history that change radically every 20 years and it's not even in one direction or another. It's like if it goes more progressive or if it goes more conservative, where whatever, wherever it goes, people are always surprised. So I guess sticking inside of your own frame might be a way to transcend that. It is a little bit.
- [05:35]
A
Because modern history is a roller coaster. And so you need to breathe and zoom out in order to be able to stay sane. And you have to remember that the thing you are being tested for in this era of history may be the exact opposite of the thing you're being tested for a century from now. But both of them are just sort of dots in the river of time. And so you could get your cultural technology and your underlying values, assumptions, and change them 300 years down the road, but then 300 years up the river. But then you don't realize that later on that cultural shift you made was not actually useful and it wasn't true. And so when we're looking at the west trying to deal with mouse utopia now,
- [06:33]
B
the.
- [06:37]
A
We did lots of cultural shifts over the course of centuries that were not true, but then we had not actually stress tested Western civilization's dominant cultural operating system. So we got all of this slack and untrue beliefs until our entire worldview became untrue. And so you have to go back through your cultural hard, your cultural operating system. See, this thing works, this thing doesn't work. And you need to have some sort of external ideal of this is just a moment in time. I am going to hold the stick and breathe until it changes.
- [07:16]
B
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's why people say people don't learn from history, right? Like when people say that you don't learn, what they really mean is that people are stuck inside a temporary frame and that frame is going to be associated with it, with some knowledge gaps that are identifiable.
- [07:35]
A
The more you grow as a person, the more your personal experiences are applicable to others. And so there are certain authors that are become indicative of, they spoke the spirit of their given era. There are other authors or people where they spoke to the spirit of their nation, where they wrote about things that could relate to their national character over the centuries. De Tocqueville is an example in America. And then there are people like Jesus Christ or Buddha who can make teachings that relate to the entire human condition. And so the more you sort of work on yourself and the more wisdom you get, the more you are tapping into currents of the human consciousness that are vastly more applicable in most people's lives, are only useful to people in their periphery because they haven't sort of built up their character to understand or be able to do things that are useful for people who do not exist with context like them. And so when you see people who are highly successful across disciplines or high value leadership, the reason they're so valued is, is there's very few people who are capable of being that useful across different contexts and at that level of complexity
- [08:54]
B
and it's, it kind of fits with. I mean, I'm trying to think, is there a way out of this historical trap? Like, you have, you have basic empire cycles, right? Where, where the classic thing is when the culture degenerates and the spending hits this level and the empire expands, then the next part of the story isn't that. And then everything magically got better. Yeah, but like, because people see the system isn't working, or they're stuck in the system without being able to change it. And then if you, if you wanted to actually address it intelligently, you would look at different areas and you would realize, oh, there are dependencies, so you can't just get rid of it. But that doesn't mean it's good or you have to justify it. So then you strategize how to minimize those dependencies. And if everybody understood that that was a viable path, like with empire, you give it. You pass on security obligations to regional allies, or with glyphosate immunity and farming, where you enable farmers to have more savings so it accelerates, like the improvement of the soil without collapsing the system. Like, how do we manage the transition of, of welfare? And people kind of don't have those conversations. But if we showed that, hey, this is actually possible to solve this impossible problem, the reason it doesn't get solved is because historically people get caught in these bubbles. But we can kind of zoom out and look what's going on and how many people are in this room with us right now? Like 40,000, 100,000. You know, how, how much does it take? Because a lot of these things are. It's not hard to make things a lot better fast because we're messing up in such obvious ways. But if you don't do anything, then you will just die.
- [10:32]
A
The Hermetica is a concept I like a lot here called the universal person, which is when you strip away the different context, what are the bedrock underlying things of human nature that relate in every era of history? And once you get to places where none of your core assumptions relate to that, basically once the underlying character of human nature changes enough, we've evolved into a different species, but we can read authors from ancient Greece and relate to an underlying human character. And so when you strip, when you strip everything away, you have human nature. And then human nature relates across different contexts. And you have to adjust the expectations put on people based on the context. And figuring that out is intensely difficult. But a logical trap modernity gets into is we don't have to generate all the answers. Now we can say something is unclear and then have generations of future thinkers pick at it. Where one of the things I like to say is, as a society, we use science to paper over things we don't actually know the answer to. And then we attack people who question whether or not we know the answer. What we should do is say we don't know, which then opens up a legitimate void for thinkers to enter into it and try to figure it out. And then you argue over it. So if what I would like to do is make sort of an opening here to say we don't know how to do cultural change over time, as a society, these are the underlying rules that I understand. And this is open source so that future thinkers can think about this and figure out, okay, if we have a society which switches people over to mass dependency in these large organizations, these are the cultural institutions we should generate that that doesn't hurt the underlying human character too much. If our government falls apart studying history, this is how you craft cultural incentives that can adapt to that. And you have to get people aware that we as individuals are in the driver's seat for cultural change. And when you sort of set out we don't know this thing, rather than having the experts force you to give an answer, is that you democratize people's sense of agency and cultural change on a radical basis so that their entire relationship as a person to their environment changes. Does that make sense?
- [13:05]
B
Totally. And then you feel suddenly under pressure, like your cortisol spikes to give an answer, and you just. You give an answer no matter what, and it undermines the underlying line of questioning, which was often you even misinterpret the question entirely to give an answer that prevents you from discovering anything. It's just like a reflex.
- [13:34]
A
Yeah.
- [13:35]
B
Probably because of the lack of comfortability with uncertainty. Right.
- [13:38]
A
Yeah. I'm going to say this point we should actually get back into topic. Although this is a useful digression. Modern people default onto basic problem solving for all issues. And if you zoom out, you realize you could zoom out and analyze the entire situation strategically. You could wait and watch. You could try to figure out if there's an extra counterpoint. You could empathize, or you could sort of try to negate the issue and then focus on something else. Where once you realize that you are an active player in reality, the amount of responses that you think you have is radically greater than the ones you're trained to have.
- [14:27]
B
Right. And usually when someone does that, they give you an answer that's something you already know. And you're like, I know that, but I'm asking because I'm trying to figure out this
- [14:37]
A
yes. So for the Pax Americana, when I talk about the sort of disjoint between the American Empire's role in its social stat, there's a great book that articulates this by man. I started reading his book, his four volume series on the history of power over history and how people manifest power. And he has a book about the American empire that I haven't read. But I read the thesis and I agree with the thesis that the core issue of the American Empire is the disproportionate use of force, where because America is a mass appeal democracy and you can't do the sort of things that European colonial empires did who came from an aristocratic background of the clinical use of force, where the British Empire was governed by an aristocracy through the 20th century. And so as examples, the British would conquer an area and they built their sort of model off the Romans of we will work with the local aristocracy and help them govern the population for us and culturally assimilate them into our frame. And the British would set up monarchies in places where they thought, where they wanted to establish stable rule, like Belgium or Greece or a litany of other places. And when you look at the British Empire, they were constantly manipulating the European balance of power to stay stable between just all of these European balance of power wars. And when you're looking at America, we tend to either over index or under index because we are a mass state where for the Vietnam War as an example, that should not have been a conscript war where the idea of bringing the American public in its entirety to Vietnam is something that if you sort of zoom out, you realize this is going to breed a lot of resentment. We're going to have to justify this to voters and this will be something that is turned into a sort of symbol for whether the American empire works or not. And I do not. I'm not obsessed with the Vietnam War discourse in the same way the baby boomer generation was. It's not a topic that I build my identity of America's 20th century history off in the way many older people do. But America should have looked at Vietnam, assessed its general value, assessed the amount of weight and force we should have applied there, and then finally figured out how much force and weight to apply before sort of the situation snaps. And we didn't do that. We first of all did not. We actively encouraged the Europeans to get rid of their colonial empires because we were anti colonial. And so when the French lost in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu, they pulled out. Then there was no management of what occurred afterwards. So of course the communists would seize power because they were the ones who had fought off the Japanese and the French. Then we made the south weak, so they looked sort of ripe for the north to take them. We brought more men in. Then the war appeared to be losing. So we drafted our entire military and we drafted our entire youth. And I think another element of this is that the greatest generation were sort of envious of how good the boomers had it. So they wanted to have a war to toughen up the next generation. And then when the war became deeply unpopular, we weren't able to either just conquer the north and take the risk that the Chinese would start a conflict with us. So we got stuck in this waffling midpoint and, and the war then became a public relations disaster which nuked a lot of our, which nuked over a decade of our public sort of credibility during the Cold War. And if you had dealt with a European colonial empire in the 19th century, they would have solved this nearly immediately. They would have assessed Vietnam's either worth keeping or taking. We will surgically strike. If this doesn't work, we'll pull out. And because America was a mass society, you, if any given act cannot be done by any different person, then the American empire cannot do it. Because mass societies do not allow sort of non conforming subsets of the population. Everyone has to be part of the broader system which creates this really sloppy element where, because America, America's foreign policy has to do with the American voters, not with the area we're assessing with. And so when FDR was orchestrating his policy in Eastern Europe During World War II, his predominant aim was the opinions of Polish American voters that he was dependent on in his rust belt states or in his industrial core states. And we invaded Iraq, I think probably due to sort of subjective emotional attachments to 9, 11. I don't want to get into that now, but, but it was sort of, it made sense in a sort of emotional sense. And then after the Iraq war started, we were not able to build a coalition with Saddam's forces. We basically had to work with Saddam's old guard because they were the people who could have stabilized a centralized regime in Iraq. But we didn't due to the, due to that sort of feeling icky then. We weren't able to stabilize authority either as sort of a conquered state or as a Monarchy or as sort of a controlled dictatorship that could have actually secured authority. And so it became a democracy where the majority Shia population voted in a regime that was friendly to Iran and directly hostile to the Americans. And at this whole process, the American government could not say to the American public, Iraq is fundamentally a country that is not ready for democracy. It's a tribal society where if you give them a universal suffrage democracy, the majority Shia population or the plurality Shia will vote in regimes that, that will oppress the Sunnis and also their neighbors. Iran and Saudi Arabia are trying to point pwn them off where we had to give the American people a sanitized image of what was going on in the region. And that meant that actual Iraqi people suffered. And there was and this, you see this across the American empire where there's just this profound mishandling of things. And because the entire reality is this fourth level sort of simulation. When you deal with a place like Greece, the European Union established by the Americans, overextends itself, makes centralized currency, peripheral country blows itself out. No ability to handle this. In each time Greece was arbitrated by the Americans because in this fourth level simulation the only people at top were the Americans. So the Americans had to bail out the Europeans, but the Europeans in turn hated the Americans. And so do you see just the layers of stuff going on here?
- [22:12]
B
Yeah, it's complicated to think of the, the different nature of the way of engaging based on having strategic goals versus being more, I don't know, liable to public opinion. Even though traditionally people say they aren't very liable. It's clearly more of a factor, of course. Does it mean, does it mean you have no chill? Like either way you can't chill?
- [22:34]
A
Yes. So there is either chilling and there is going hard and one can do neither. True chill would be saying I do not care at the democratic public. We are just going to have passed no laws, we are not going to do anything as the President and let the system hum along. And that's what 19th century presidents did, that's what Calvin Coolidge did. And having total no chill would be we are going to declare war on the Soviets and try to reconquer Eastern Europe. And I say many things, I do not support all of the things I'm speaking as a sort of mental exercise to map out options. I would not support a war with the Soviets, of course, I don't want hundreds of millions or billions of people to die. And also I think there are times the President has to do stuff. But in the American system, everything has to sort of operate around what the congealed. What the congealed mass population wants in the moment. And so the entire world becomes indicative of this projector screen talked about in the neoliberalism video of. It's. Adam Curtis calls it like the hyper reality.
- [23:46]
B
Part of the disjoint in reality too, is that you're thinking, well, the, the Iraq war was really unpopular, Vietnam was really unpopular. And that's true maybe around year three or 10, but public support after nine, 11 was like 90% or 85% or something like that.
- [24:04]
A
Yeah.
- [24:04]
B
So, yeah, even Ron Paul voted for the war in Afghanistan.
- [24:08]
A
I hope this video, I hope this video doesn't feel disjointed to people because as I try to articulate it, I am trying to. Apologies for the background noise, by the way, one of my neighbors is mowing his lawn, but I am trying to articulate a moment of history we currently live in that we are enmeshed inside its illusions, which combines an entire world with complex psychological manipulation. So I apologize if this is disjointed, but it's like trying to shove shards of glass together to make an image you can see your reflection in.
- [24:45]
B
Right. When are you categorizing the altered reality? When are you talking about the real reality?
- [24:50]
A
Yes. And if you guys are just entering this show and you think me talking about like multiple layer government illusions is schizo, please just keep watching and see if it clicks for you. Because this is an era of history that it's quite overt that this stuff was happening. You can see it as. We'll talk about the foundation of the American Empire in the early 20th century around World War I, when this stuff was established. And remind me later to talk about how America was the culmination of sort of the global Anglo system that developed around World War I that was this huge cultural force in the early 20th century as a reaction to World War I, where the song when the Germans and the Nazis were talking about sort of like global. I can't get into that now. I'm sorry. The Germans, the Nazis often talked about this global system that was working against Germany and was sort of against empires and Nietzsche and greatness and whatever. They were in large part insane. But at the same time, the British had built that in large part to fight against them during World War I, where the British had maintained the Pax Britannica as a complex system of alliances and mutual trade dependencies to make up for Britain's not very large population or military. So the British became very Good at using indirect means. And the Americans inherited the British system in a lot of ways because we're culturally and genetically and lingually their kin. And the Pax Britannica dominated the world over the 19th century. And there was a nearly seamless transfer from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. So you had multiple centuries of Anglo Saxon global dominance. And many people around the world, especially non Western cultures, could not reconcile that there was really a difference between the British and the Americans, especially the Indians and the Chinese. They would write about us as if we were the Soviet. They would write about us as if we were functionally the same. And it's complicated where there are profound differences between the British and the American empires. But there was this pass off that occurred where, and you can see it in a litany of things between the, the, the nuclear program that started in Britain and where they made all the science and they shifted it over to America because we had the scale to do it, or the shift of the global financial system from London to New York around World War I. The Enigma code that started out with these, with British hackers that the Americans were brought on to, my grandfather was one of them. And so you see this transfer of global authority from the British to the Americans. And one of the things that the British did around World War I was they built this global public opinion system which they used against the Germans. And I think the Germans were unfairly maligned in World War I, where they weren't.
- [28:18]
B
You mean the Huns?
- [28:19]
A
Yeah, exactly. They weren't markedly worse than the British or the French, but the British PR turned against them. And this created a profound sense of resentment against the Germans which made them basically go crazy and go Nazi. Not to say that that was justified. It was the outcome of the situation they were in. And the Germans and the Japanese and the Russians, they felt they were boxed in by this global system that the British and later the Americans had. And they felt they were reaching against it. But it was mostly sort of a psychological, in a symbolic system that the West Europeans agreed to that we already have global dominance. So let's turn up the temperature so that it's impossible for future empires to emerge. And this is something that the Japanese and the Germans and the Soviets really railed against. They saw it as hypocrisy that the West Europeans used the 19th century to build up their global empires and become wealthy and then made it taboo for other people to conquer afterwards. And basically every people except the Anglo Saxons and I guess even the Anglo Saxons will have to soon have rebelled against modernity with their big populist revolt. The French Revolution was a rebellion against modernity. The Nazis were. The Soviets were rebellion against the earlier variety of modernities. They jumped to like sort of their own collectivist hyper modernity. But
- [29:51]
B
when.
- [29:52]
A
So the British maligned everything the Germans did with World War I, and they treated the Germans in World War I as if they were equivalent to the Mongols or the Nazis or the Soviets. And this world order was fairly soft on communism, which is weird. And it only makes sense to do incentives and worldviews of the people who managed it, because this was fundamentally a liberal system where the Pax Americana has been a liberal empire for our entire history, where conservatives were by and large opposed to it. Until you get to the neoconservatives and
- [30:26]
B
you can say progressive, Progressive era.
- [30:28]
A
Yes, exactly. That's a good point. We should tease it out later. So you have this system and the Americans stepped in to maintain it. And it's very easy to get stuck in these sort of like conspiracy theorist arguments. And you have to walk a fine line because as of 2026 it is clear that we've been manipulated and a lot of this is an obfuscation. But again, you have to hold the metal stick and breathe the stay calm to be able to disentangle. This thing is honest, this thing isn't. And this thing fits together. So you have to sort of look at this dispassionately and add up what levels make sense. Where Quigley, one of my favorite authors, talks about the Anglo American establishment or these small social clubs in Britain that went over to America that controlled global geopolitics. And I do not blame cabals of small groups of people unless I have to, because it's normally emergent phenomena stemming from class interests and different social interests where it's not that there's a small group of people who are manipulating these outcomes, you should see it more so as sort of like an archetypal emergence of incentive structures where you don't need to have a small cabal of people managing this. You have to create sort of an industrial priest class who you train in set institutions, have them work in set organizations, and then these enforce conformity because most people have a herd switch where if you set up the incentives right, they will share the opinions of everyone else in their herd. And that's right.
- [32:07]
B
And it's.
- [32:08]
A
Go ahead.
- [32:09]
B
It's even worse than a cabal because it's a system wide kind of incentive and you can't just eliminate it by clearing out corruption. Because if you have a system for global control, it's going to attract the corruption that comes with the unaccountable layers of that power.
- [32:27]
A
Yes.
- [32:28]
B
So a good way to see how it works from a systems perspective. And it's not even that these are why, these are the mechanisms of making the decisions. But by tracking this, you can reveal how consistent it is with a set of interests. If you look at the Department of Commerce, everything that they talk about, all if you've ever been on like investment conferences where countries are promoting trade or they're talking about specific import export categories, everything that the State Department does, all the countries they focus on the policies, they focus on the politics they try and advance. Exactly matches with the demands of and the research of the Commerce Department.
- [33:10]
A
Yes.
- [33:11]
B
And that's. It's not even necessarily because they're reading the Commerce Department's report and then taking orders is just because it's naturally aligned.
- [33:19]
A
So to take a step to stop and breathe. Do you guys understand the points I have said so far? Is there anything else you want to re. Clarify?
- [33:28]
B
One way I would clarify it maybe to the audience and I don't want to repeat it because it's something we say a lot. But this, this basically comes down to the international cartel point. That's where the incentive is on the. On the policy layer to maintain certain policies that standardize rules so that their. Your market share is protected in various regions.
- [33:48]
A
Yes. And I like to say that modernity is the alliance of the hysterical feminine, the autistic masculine. And as I study modernity's culture that points keeps on coming up again and again and again. Because the autistic masculine establishes a structure where the only way to interface with reality is through a system or through dead matter where there's no place for human agency. And so in that sort of. Because the system is assessing its moral code. If you're going to ask a system what something is, the system will tell you that it needs the system. Where. When your reality is dictated by universities and NGOs in these systems, of course if you ask the system, the system will tell you you should trust the system. And that removes the place for human agency. And at a point I'm going to say this so I don't forget is something that really matters here is America is one of the most sexually bifurcated societies ever with a hyper masculine elements and then hyper feminine elements. And that's because anthropologically Celtic culture, which America pulls from, is one of the ones with the highest sexual polarity David Hackett Fisher talks about that. And Amorid Riancourt also is the person who gave me my point that America is this huge sexual bifurcation and then the hysterical feminine is basically we. Because when I grew up in the wake of 911 and it was so crazy because even as a child I thought 4,000 people die. I play that's a single battle in Rome, total war. And everyone was terrified.
- [35:32]
B
Aren't real deaths right?
- [35:34]
A
Everyone was terrified of 9 11. And I don't want to discount the tragedy. It was truly horrible. But adults didn't tell me 911 happened till like age 10 or 11 because they didn't think children should hear about this stuff. But the adults were valuing all of their assumptions around 9 11. And so after 9 11, the rational thing to do would be a sort of surgical strike against Afghanistan or Pakistan or whatever to sort of clean the honor ledger to say, you fucked with us, we're gonna fuck with you. The American people demanded that you sort of go full throttle on it to basically revenge our honor. And so we got stuck in a 20 year war where we couldn't engage in the brutality necessary to occupy Afghanistan, one of the hardest countries to conquer ever. But we also couldn't pull out. And it's the same masculine feminine polarity where America was the country that ravaged the Middle east due to 9 11. And that's a hyper masculine warrior culture streak. And when I was growing up, every year we'd have an event where the teacher would basically talk about how 911 insulted America's honor and we need to take revenge. And we'd often plant a tree that day to signal rebirth. And then you have the hysterical element kicking in of oh my God. We have to hyper analyze how we're doing this and we have to do we have to add extra peacekeeping in and add in sort of extra goodies. Where I remember a Young Turks clip I saw as a teenager where they said the way to beat ISIS is to give them more stuff. Where they said if we give ISIS enough goodies, they're going to like us. And.
- [37:25]
B
And that's right, that works.
- [37:26]
A
Completely demented. And it's just not going to work. They'll just see you as gullible and easy to manipulate.
- [37:32]
B
Is that when Obama funded isis?
- [37:35]
A
Probably that might have been. Oh my God, you're right.
- [37:39]
B
I forgot that he did that.
- [37:40]
A
Oh my God, their propaganda machine is so well oiled. It's so impressive. I remember when Kamala, when we switched from Biden to Kamala within 12 hours on social media. You saw these pro Kamala dances, and I thought, the Democrats have such a good propaganda machine. They can make a complete u turn within 12 hours and you can suddenly see it spread around. And that means they just greased every single thing. So you can get from orders from the DNC to Kamala dances on TikTok instantaneously. Because those things take work to figure out as well.
- [38:17]
B
I remember that when Kamala ran and there was like this when she announced, there's this three days of like really big faux excitement. And they're just really good at getting on board with like the dialectic or the subtle marketing plan from an individual level. We talked about that before. It's pretty impressive.
- [38:35]
A
Yeah.
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B
But also a little creepy.
- [38:36]
A
That's because the left has a strong comprehension of human nature solely through the variable how to psychologically manipulate people.
- [38:44]
B
Right. They're not as autistic, which gives them an advantage there.
- [38:48]
A
Yeah.
- [38:48]
B
With the Iraq thing, like, or in 9 11, you know, it gave us an impetus. There was a rational honor response. But then obviously it was also taken advantage of to then enact plans that were like, slightly unrelated or in their playbook for like 20 years. Right. Things they wanted to do already.
- [39:05]
A
And the reactivity of the system means that the American people actually often get screwed over because the system is so reactive and it lacks foresight so that the American leadership class can enforce terrible things on the American people. But it's entirely short term, it's entirely long term. So stuff like any sane person should have been able to look at the Patriot act and know that. That this would end. Because when I was growing up, people would say, if you.
- [39:39]
B
If you don't have anything to hide.
- [39:40]
A
Yeah. Then. Then don't worry. And I could hear that. And I remember thinking, that's going to be so abused. Like, why would you trust these people? Because of course this is going to end up with a system where they're going to monitor people through their phones. People are addicted to their phones. And so the government can see everything and stuff like that, or the industrialization or globalization or the mass immigration. You end up in these toxic, unhealthy dependency relationships where you basically see these hysterical outbursts from the American people which get institutionalized through the society. And then the autistic masculine uses this as a way to grow their power to sort of drag the society down to entropy. And what gets lost is the organic living character of America.
- [40:32]
B
Yeah. And that gets back to our point about art and entertainment where the left understands, like, the human part. Ironically, Even though they're anti human.
- [40:42]
A
We are officially in a different era of history from the 20th century now
- [40:48]
B
the Age of Aquarius and Y2K. Whoa, man, you didn't see Y2K? Dude, it was crazy. Everything shut down. Yeah, yeah, we had to use Flint.
- [40:58]
A
The only two other empires that the American Empire can be compared to are the Roman Republic and the British Empire. Or at least comparisons that fit, because both of them are democracies and empires. And people like to think that democracies and empires are not sort of coterminous, that they don't fit together. And that's not true. Oftentimes republics form the biggest empires because republics tend to exacerbate a people's character. So very effective populations like the Romans or the British or the Athenians or the Americans, they can use republics to become the most successful societies ever in history. Out of the top 1% of historic societies, a vastly disproportionate amount of them are republics. However, in lower trust societies, the republic ends up enabling the population's issues, which is why Brazil did much better under a monarchy than a republic. It's why France has done better under monarchies than republics over its history, et cetera. And high social trust, which is a downstream from 10 other variables, is really the variable that holds democracy together. And so when you look at the Romans, the Americans and the British, all of their histories emphasize the same thing, that they were basically reluctant empires and they became empires because their cultures had so much dynamism and energy. They just filled the void. And so with the fall of the Roman Republic, or, sorry, with the rise of the Roman Republic, the Romans were a people who were anti imperialist, they were populist, they were freedom loving. We project all of these attitudes from the Roman Empire across all of Rome's history. But republican Rome was very similar to America by a variety of metrics. In Italy at the time was basically middle America. It was this agricultural, middle class, high trust society. And so you, during the Republican period, you could go across Italy and it would be like driving across the Midwest 20 years ago. And the Romans dominated the Mediterranean because they were put into this visceral nemesis conflict with the Carthaginians, who they beat. And the Greeks were so decadent that the Romans just filled the entire Mediterranean. The Romans did not want an empire. They were just so dynamic that they got one. And for the British, practically every history of the British Empire talks about how sort of unplanned and unwanted a lot of the British Empire was. Where if you were to go to Parliament at any given time, the parliamentary figures would say, we don't want an empire, we want Britain to keep its costs low. We want Britain to focus on our European interests. But what happened was that British capitalism and science in parliamentary democracy was such a dynamic system that the British as a people just flooded the entire world. They were able to beat the French and the Spanish in North America, they're able to beat the French in India, various other players around the world. And so the governments at any given time, especially in republics, will often say, we don't want an empire. But the underlying culture is so dynamic, it does so anyway. And so the reason America dominated the world is we survived as a functioning society later than the other cultures in sort of the great forgetting where modernity has a way of killing organic cultures. And that occurred across the world, where in the non west colonialism totally destroyed their national self confidence and they didn't know what to do with that. And then Europe's national confidence was destroyed by the world wars and America was the only society with dynamism past that point. And much like frontiers, the industrial revolution created either the mass slave empire of the USSR or the or America being a free society, but also power can ennoble, but it also corrupts at the same time. And you have to be careful if you're getting power. Is this ennobling you or is this corrupting you? And so America could dominate because there were certain points right after World War II when a majority of the world's economy was American and America, much like the Romans and the British, did not want an empire. It was reluctantly forced upon us. And this created a crisis of national identity because America were the people who fled Europe's empires. America were the people who tried to avoid this. And then it was forced upon us. And we had to take responsibility for the global order. But in the process, it so conflicted with both our governmental institutions and the American people that the imperial institutions that manage this global empire turned on the American people and tried to wipe out the culture. And that's not too insane for what happens in historic empires where it occurred both for the British and for the Roman Republic, where in both cases the imperial. In all three of these, the imperial elites tried to cooperate with the conquered peoples and with the sort of external peoples of the empire to secure power over their home country.
- [46:49]
B
Right. So this is kind of what you can say being tired of winning really means or really feels like because you get undermined by your own success. And it's interesting with the origin of it. Because you mentioned, like, we realized we were powerful. Right. So we had a responsibility. So things kind of flo flew out of that or flowed out of that.
- [47:13]
A
Done.
- [47:13]
B
Flynn. But maybe it's possible we could have avoided that decision to like, create this empire. But once we have, then that responsibility is indisputable because there's security dependencies. But it's like, how. Why don't people ever resist that empire if they grow so powerful? And it's probably because you only have to make the mistake once. Right. You can have like every generation do it. Right, Right, right. The first generation that does it. Wrong. You're in the dynamic we took. Or maybe it's inevitable.
- [47:45]
A
Anyways, we rose to empire because the alternative was too horrifying. And you don't have easy answers in the 20th century. Again, hold the metal stick and breathe. Because every decade of the 20th century you're going to have an existential threat and it's going to change every next decade. And the global order was growing so disturbed that the only other alternative was the total domination of totalitarianism over Europe and over much of the rest of the world, where you had a series of sort of disturbances to the global order. And each time America was tested. Do you want to do this or not? And each of the three times we had, we rose to the occasion to greater and greater degrees. And so let's start with World War I, go through. World War II, go through. Then you have the Cold War where there's. And I'll start before then as we can, we can hit the chronology of. Of sort of the turning point from frontier era America to imperial America. And that was a seamless shift and occurred instantaneously because you have to keep in mind America is. Americans are a very dynamic and energetic people. And so you can't really keep us in one place. In a lot of ways, the culture. The closest cultural parallel to the Americans is the Vikings, because America is a North Sea culture. If you were to take the peoples around the greater North Sea, that's where most Americans are from. And the frontier peoples from that area are the ones that Americans have the closest parallel to. So the Icelanders who had a democracy with total freedom, with no government a thousand AD, it's a similar population. And so you take these North Sea populations, put them on frontiers, and then they'll form cultural traits a lot like Americans. And so you have to look at the Vikings sailing from everywhere, from North America to Kazakhstan or the English circumnavigating the world and having these Huge empires of the Dutch. So these traits are in those populations. And so when America spread across the entire frontier, and within a year or two of defeating the last native tribe up by Montana at the Battle of Wounded Knee, the Americans were attacking Cuba and the Philippines. And so the same process that got us to colonize the American continent through the frontier meant we couldn't stop. And so we expanded over the rest of the world. And the first tipping point from America being sort of a transcontinental nation to a global nation was the Spanish American War, where colonialism was incredibly popular. And this is again why you need to see each decade of the 20th century differently. Because in 1890, any Western country which did not have colonies felt bad about it, because colonies were the cool thing to have. Every serious country was taking on the white man's burden, and America didn't have any. But we were near the decaying Spanish empire that was a remnant of the world of the 16th century, and the Spanish held Cuba and the Philippines. And so as an example of priority, we faked the USS Maine getting attacked as a false flag to justify a war against the Spanish. And that was a huge issue. Same thing as the Boer War, where in the 1890s these were sort of the sensational big topics like Ukraine or Gaza today, and we were able to wipe out the Spanish really quickly. And in Philly, there's the USSS New Jersey across the river in Camden, or this huge battleship that was used in those wars. Battleships are so impressive, if you don't see them, they're like floating mountains with these huge guns. And aircraft carriers are even more impressive. These huge floating decks, basically floating fields. You can land planes on and off. But. So we conquered Cuba, and we didn't make Cuba a colony, we made it a dependency where American interests bought out Cuba. And we,
- [52:09]
B
we,
- [52:11]
A
we really invested a lot in sugar because that's what the Spanish economy was dependent on. And we also conquered the Philippines. And if you compare the Americans to the Spanish, the Americans are so vastly nicer. It's not even comparable. Where I was reading, I've read histories of both the Philippines and Cuba. I don't know why I have, but I have. And I was reading the Bacardi Rum Company and in their history, the Americans showing up is like a light going on because the Americans instantly brought electricity, sanitation, English teaching courses. And you also see it in the Philippines. And I wish the woke people kept track of the Moro War, because the Moro War was a conflict where we had to kill hundreds of thousands of a Muslim minority in the south Philippines. And because the Spanish had held parts of the Philippines, but not all of it. And the south had been functionally independent because it's a Muslim area due to the Muslims in Indonesia. And the Moros fought back. And you have multiple eyewitness accounts of the Americans just saying, oh, yeah, we'd shoot entire villages. And I wish the woke people would talk about this war because it so perfectly fits all of their criteria, but they don't read enough to know it happened.
- [53:42]
B
You don't care if they propagandize it. You just want people to know about it at all. Yeah, I'm like, you can.
- [53:47]
A
You guys, you should commit to your skill. You should commit to your art. If you want to talk about American racist colonialist wars, this is a perfect conflict for you.
- [53:57]
B
I wonder if that was left out of the narrative back then for other reasons. And I guess it just never made it back in. But it would be something they could pick up. Good tip for all you communists out there. Go crazy.
- [54:08]
A
Yeah. And so we had the same thing in the Philippines. And in all of America's colonial endeavors, there's this huge undercurrent of guilt where we felt the need to be nicer than the British of the French, who were nicer in turn than other colonial empires to make up for us ourselves being a former colony. And so McKinley, who was the president during the Spanish American War, he had a spiritual experience where he was praying to God every day to see if he should make the Philippines an American colony because he felt it was at conflict with the American character. And what God eventually told him was that, yes, he should make it an American colony for basically white man's bird. And Rudyard Kipling reasons.
- [54:52]
B
It's funny because as you talk about this inevitable transition into empire, you can see all, like, the deep resistance and, like, internal confusion and contradictions because, like, they're like, well, empire is bad, but they're Spanish colonies anyways. So then an American colony is still better than a Spanish colony, even if empire is bad. And you still need to, like, false flag to kick it off. And then it's, like, racked with that. That guilt. What are the. Like, what are the other driving interests? Like, what do we get out of Cuba?
- [55:30]
A
The deciding variable for the Philippines was so the Japanese didn't take it right.
- [55:35]
B
Yeah, that's a big topic.
- [55:36]
A
Same thing as Hawaii, which was an independent Polynesian kingdom that was a de facto puppet state under New England sugar farmers who sailed the long way around the bottom of South America. I have to mention this so I don't forget Yankee. The Yankees used to be absolutely incredible with the New England Yankees. They would sail the bottom, sail around the bottom of Africa, use Madagascar as a naval base and then raid traffic in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesia and the. They'd steal ship Royal Muggle ships. New England Yankees sailor on the bottom of South America. They populated the coast of California and the west coast. A lot of the old families there are from New England. They turned Hawaii into a de facto colony. They would sell furs from the Canadian Arctic and Kamchatka out to China. Became very wealthy doing that. They would hunt whales off the coast of the Pacific coast of Antarctica and up by Siberia. So these New England Yankees were sailing the long way around the world. And this started in the early 18th century. And America also destroyed the Barbary Corsairs who were pirates off the north coast of Africa starting in the late Middle Ages, raided European traffic and the Europeans made all of these implicit deals with them saying, oh, we'll pay you off to not steal our traffic. America thought that was lame. So we just sent men to North Africa, a handful of guys, hired mercenaries and then wiped out Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli.
- [57:18]
B
It was amazing how few boats we had or even sent and how easy that was. But this is a fascinating period of history that it doesn't get really covered in any contemporary culture or movies or anything. I've seen it because I've watched a couple Korean shows on the 1800s, like period pieces and I mean, and all throughout the 1800s you have basically Yankee looking troops right. In Korea in formation in the 1800s, like it's a crazy.
- [57:47]
A
Yes.
- [57:48]
B
Visual and it's a huge part. And they. And in the Korean shows, they, they show the Americans as like, pretty nice and they show the Japanese as awful. So it's like it is true that we were better like than the Spanish and the Japanese in various ways.
- [58:05]
A
I'm glad you brought that up because I would have forgotten to otherwise. But America's had a presence in Asia going back to the 1800s, where during the Taiping Rebellion when Hong Shu Kuan said he was the younger son of Christ and he launched this war that killed 30 million people. Both the Taipings and the Imperials used American mercenaries and the war was at the same time as the US Civil War. So you had groups of Union and Confederate soldiers who would skirmish each other in Shanghai.
- [58:31]
B
No way.
- [58:31]
A
Mercenary. No, really. Stephen Pat's got a book about this that's wild. Yeah. And there's a lot more stuff like that where there was this guy from Chester county, where I'm from Pennsylvania, who made himself Lord of this valley in Afghanistan in the 1800s.
- [58:48]
B
That's the inspiration for that man who Would be King. Yeah, that's such a good movie. Yeah, I was just thinking about rewatching it again.
- [58:55]
A
There was this. So I like to think that America and Japan have a sort of like tsundere relationship where America constantly prods Japan, then we don't commit, and then Japan becomes progressively more obsessed with us. We're in the 1860, 1850s under Matthew Perry with our steamships. We just showed up in Japan and said, hey, we're going to force you to trade with us. And we had conquered California like two years before. So we were that obsessive. Like we just conquered California. We might as well get the Japanese to trade with us. That forced Japan to go through a period of radical change, that being the Meiji restoration of westernizing and industrialized brought about by America. Then when the Japanese were forming their empire in the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt was the guy who arbitrated the Russo Japanese War. And that was a big deal because America was. I think they. I think they arbitrated it in like Rhode Island.
- [59:55]
B
Interesting.
- [59:56]
A
I might get that wrong, but it's. So America arbitrated the Russo Japanese War to sort. Because we were a impartial viewer of the Japanese and the Russians. And that was something that the, the Japanese thought a lot about because they thought America was indirectly saying that that like Japan was a real power by arbitrating this because in their shame based culture, that's how they work indirectly. So they were annoyed when America later did not treat them as a real imperial power. And then In World War II, we cut off their oil supply to the Japanese. We cut off the oil supply from Indonesia from the rest of the world they were using. So they attacked Indonesia to get their own oil supply and then we destroyed them and nuked them and handed power back. So from a Japanese perspective, I can imagine the American is just like this sniper who periodically kills people from thousands of miles away and then goes back to the forest.
- [60:53]
B
Right? It's like, do you love me? Do you not love me? Why are you doing this to me? Just leave me alone. Why are you hanging with me?
- [60:58]
A
Why are you hanging out by yourself in the forest all the time?
- [61:02]
B
Well, yeah, and this is. Well, this is a really important point for the transition from the Anglo to the American empire because you mentioned that it was basically a perfectly smooth transition. And a lot of the major transitions around World War I were giant, instant, comprehensive things. But there were some instances where there was a lull and there was a gap in hegemony. And one of the clearest examples of that is England's relationship to Japan, where they signed a treaty with Japan in the late 1800s, a Sino, Anglo, something for. For them to take over security in the Pacific, right. Of the shipping lanes or whatever. And trade continued to go up for another couple decades. But the US didn't trust that relation. We wanted to take England's, England's spot. And so when Japan was dealing with England, maybe Japan's thinking, oh, we finally got respect. But maybe the only reason England actually did that is because they were declining power. And about three seconds later, another one came in. And so that's, that's another pole push dynamic within between England and the US like the same as us and us.
- [62:12]
A
There's two dynamics I want to explore there. First of all, Asia has this cultural thing where they demand approval from other Asian powers as part of their social structure. So the Chinese will demand submission from every neighboring country. The Japanese have depend demanded it. So when the Japanese related to the west, they were expecting the Western powers to give them this sort of imperial approval. And this idea comes across as psychotic in Europe because there's so much military competition that asking for another country's approval to exist, it's just incomprehensible and right.
- [62:48]
B
It's more about like, you gotta earn your spot, buddy. Like you, you make it, you make yourself.
- [62:53]
A
Yes, which is why when America got independence through its own right, the other European powers gradually accepted it until the British. And the second thing is that the British were doing that because it was a declining power. And a lot.
- [63:12]
B
Exactly.
- [63:13]
A
A lot of the arms control deals of this era were those dynamics where the Hague Convention, which was supposed to limit military technology development, was made by the Russians to manipulate West European sort of pacifists under the guises of Russia has a manpower advantage. If we stop military technological development, the West Europeans cannot have a breakthrough that negates our manpower advantage. And so when the British were doing this thing, we're like, we want to help other powers develop. So let's make this deal where the Japanese and the Americans get to have enough ships per hour ships so that they have an incentive to grow. Well, we can manage our decline. And so the Japanese and the British, for example, had a close relationship for decades until it hit a point where the Japanese wanted to conquer the Orient. Because the Japanese and the British and the Americans were allies against the Czar, sorry, the Kaiser. And so they were part of that World War I constellation where America was already a Pacific power by that point. And then when the Japanese wanted to conquer the entire orientation, the Americans and the British became their enemies. But you have a country like Japan. Japan is unclear if the Americans, the British, are different at all. Even the Germans sort of have that attitude where they box them together.
- [64:35]
B
And that's why, like, they. Even though England and the US Are different countries, that can still fit the rug pole dynamic that you described later, because they see England and the US as exactly the same or similar. But it is funny that they thought they were getting respect, right? Because they're like. It's kind of like when people argue about countries right to exist or right not to exist. It's like they either exist or they don't. And they thought they were getting that treaty because of respect, but they were just getting it because they were existing better.
- [65:05]
A
The conflict that really was the first test for the American empire on a global scale was World War I. And World War I was seen as a European balance of war conflict where the American public did not want to get involved because they thought, why is America fighting over Austro Hungary and Bosnia? What happened over time, though, is that World War I became seen as possibly the most important war in Western history. And you saw the division inside America for both world wars where the Republicans were against intervention and the Democrats were for it. And the Republicans were the party of Northern industrialists. They were biggest Northern industrialists and Northern Protestants, where the hub for the Republican Party was the Rust Belt in the Midwest. And the Democrats were a coalition of literally everyone else between Southern whites, Northeastern Catholics, trade unionists, socialists. And so the Democrats, they were sort of against the Republican isolationists. And that diverse coalition meant that the Republicans had. The Democrats sort of developed this imperial elite that could manage all of these different populations. And so when you look at modern America, it's a descendant of FDR's ruling coalition, and we'll explain that over the course of the video. But when you look at Woodrow Wilson, who was the first real imperial American president, because Teddy Roosevelt looked at global interests, McKinley conquered the Philippines, Woodrow Wilson was a Southerner. And this was at the peak of American racism where most sort of. Most people look into this, see that racism in America did not peak in the 19th century. It peaked around World War I, when KKK membership was the highest, when you had the most lynchings across the South. And so Woodrow Wilson was part of that Southern, that Southern white supremacist school where he was very overtly an Anglo supremacist. I read. I was flicking through his four volume history of America and it's the story of English Americans because he's saying the English Americans are a unified people. And so this is the story of America as the English Americans. And all of the foreigners are these people who are like attaching themselves onto this organic body. So, right.
- [67:37]
B
He's like, well, yeah, there were some Corps d' Bois and some Spanish guys. Yeah, they were around here. But they relate to us. This is what we were doing.
- [67:46]
A
And so that was what he was a part of. But he was also part of the Northeastern Progressives. And Thomas Sowell writes about this. Where American Progressivism was originally a sort of ideology that existed at the time but doesn't exist now. Where Marxism was really the mutating variable in the history of the right over this entire era. Where the Marxists were the people who were doing the cultural changes and then the right was adjusting to them. So America had a huge Marxist up, swelling mostly from recent immigrants around World War I, which then caused an astonishing Red scare, which was way bigger than the one in the 50s. At the same time as the Spanish influenza and AS and disease outbreaks increased social conservatism, which is interesting, but you saw this unification of the American elite run sort of northeastern ivy League universities, WASPs, that occurred around World War I. And this was the American ruling class. And the ideology that Woodrow Wilson was based around it was, we will do sort of Anglo Saxon nationalism with eugenics, with government intervention. I would compare them to the Nazis, but I think that's so tired that it's not really worthwhile. But they were sort of authoritarian right wing imperialists and well, it was so
- [69:12]
B
early in Progressivism that it was before like the two side distinction became more clear. It was like it was like a combination of Nazis and communists together, but only a small percent. Like they also had more of a base in American culture.
- [69:29]
A
Yeah, that's well put. Because keep in mind that the Nazis and the Soviet and the Communists, they were part of the same social clubs in the 19th century because both of these started as social clubs that metastasized into political movements. And during the social club phase, people's political ideas were totally amorphous and untested. You could just hang out with your buddies and say stuff. And as they actually got power where across the entire industrial world, sort of the, the mass mob, the mass, the mass, the mass politics, people won. So that involved creating Ideologies that would work as surrogate religions which you could market across the entire population. And in Britain, France, America, this was a sort of form of utopian progressivism. In Japan, Germany, Spain, it was fascism, and in Russia, China it was communism. And these were all the attempts to create mass ideologies. And when you look at the Democrat party, this sort of progressive school was not that powerful because they had to pull from Catholics or southern whites who were more sort of centered and reasonable than that. But this northeastern ruling class, they evolved into FDR style progressivism where FDR was able to unify his broad coalition which had grown to also include northern blacks, communists, large corporations and sort of like proto shit libs. And by the time we get to the World War II, which is when the American empire really sort of became an actual player rather than just In World War I, we sort of spiraled out, got tired, pulled back. World War II, we had to actually cement a global system of dominance. They were very much liberals and liberals in a vein that would be comprehensible to today, where if you look at FDR's cabinet, FDR himself was sort of center left from what I've read. He was a cunning political actor and quite intelligent and he was aware of these things. But he was not serious at the failings of human nature. So he constantly enabled communists and socialists inside his own group. He played to these corrupt sort of industrial politics that helped hollow out the Rust belt.
- [71:55]
B
But with FDR, it's representative of the contradictions in later politics like FDR's own administration.
- [72:01]
A
Exactly. And, and once James Burnham's writing in the 1960s, you already have the current liberal order. But the liberals were stuck in this issue, which I it's the only thing that explains the last century of you give the society gives concessions to sort of well meaning liberals who say, who back in the 20th century liberals were genuinely super for free speech. They were for free associated expression. They were, they were growing up. People would say there's Vermont liberals and then there's sort of like city liberals. Vermont liberals like man let you smoke weed and have cows, you can have guns, don't bother me. And then city liberals are like, we're going to build this entire complex structure. And so you saw way more Vermont liberals back then. And that was the people who thought they were building America's institutions. And then behind it all these Caesarean handlers who were operating out of cynically or ideological Marxist where people institutionalized it. So for civil rights law as an example, that was passed under the idea of let's make it illegal for blatant discrimination like what's occurring in the South. What they didn't factor in was that this law would be enforced by Marxists or people who are functionally Marxists, because once you build these large bureaucratic structures, the herd mechanism sets in where everyone has the opinions that allow the growth of that institution and they bully out anyone who doesn't.
- [73:35]
B
Right. Like Vermont, even to this day, still has more of a libertarian progressive ethos, but they still end up electing Bernie Sanders, who wants as much government as you can imagine. And back in 1890, like we said, anybody who wanted the state to do more stuff was going to be seen as more similar to each other than the opposition. So that's why like Nazi commies kind of like lumped together. But by the same token, from today's perspective, like the Nazi commie or pro state progressive side in 1890 or 1910 looks like an extreme libertarian from the place we've ended up now.
- [74:13]
A
Yes.
- [74:13]
B
And even Woodrow Wilson, technically, from. If you're talking about changes to the system from now, he would be an extreme libertarian. He'd get rid of almost everything except for the Fed.
- [74:22]
A
Yeah, that's. And it's the whole thing of again, hold the metal stick and breathe. Because if you don't, you'll get stuck in the individual moment too much. And you. Because people. People treat the rest doing the things the rest of history did as unimaginable because they have conformity bias. That is the sole reason when people say we can't return to the economic positions of the 19th century. The sole reason they are saying that is conformity bias. Because with AI and computers, we could just ax the bureaucratic state.
- [74:55]
B
When you look at literally the people who put those policies in place would disagree with them. They'd be like, guys, this was a mistake.
- [75:01]
A
Yes. Or if you're like, why can't. If Alexander the Great could conquer the entire Middle east, why can't we? We have the same capability. It's just we have a limiting mindset bra. And so when you look at, I'm going to start with World War I and we'll go through each decade. This would be a period where the chronology fits better because it's so many rapid changes at such a quick period. So World War I. Woodrow Wilson campaigned on not bringing us into the war, although he wanted to. And once America got involved In World War I, we were likely the tipping point where. This is a huge point of contention among historians whether World War, whether America changed the course of World War I because we came in at the end when the Germans had conquered East Central Europe, they had knocked Russia out of the war, and the Germans were hammering France. And the first Battle of the Marms at the start of the war, where the Germans could make it within sort of, they could see the city of Paris. And then the French stopped them through sending in their Algerian reserves to hold the front at the final point. And then Second Battle of the Marne. European historians like to say that whatever their country turned the tide. The French historians say that, that they turn the tide. The British historians say that they turn the tide. I am an American historian, I think my opinion is correct, but of course I do. And I think we turned the tide because if you look at the sort of troop deployments, the French army was mass mutinying. And then at that very same time, within a week, America entered the war on their side and the French stopped mutinying.
- [76:54]
B
And this was the exact same time. If they're in, we might as well try.
- [76:57]
A
And this was the exact same time as the Russian civil War as well. And then during the Marne, if you look at the casualties, the Germans, the British and the French had all suffered so much casualties and horror that they were all giving up at the same time. The Germans could pull on Central and East Europe, so they were using that to do their back end and also recruiting soldiers from there. And what happened was the Americans had this mass influx of soldiers. And my great great grandpa fought in World War I and that radically boosted morale. And when the attacks occurred, they used the Americans as shock troops. And so when the Germans saw the Americans were coming, they gave up because they realized that they couldn't deal with this extra influx of guys. And also at the Second Marne, when the Germans had pioneered stormtrooper warfare and they punctured nearly as close to Paris as in the first Battle of the Marne, the people who filled the gaps in the dying British and French armies were the Americans. And so the World War I with this very tight conflict where as of 1918, Germany had appeared to win the entire war while the west was getting embattled and dying and losing men. And what America did was radically alter the water pressure because we were so much more populous and hadn't sustained the same casualties that the Germans just gave up. And when the German military gave up, it was sort of a nervous system failure of the German armies to just mutiny because they knew they couldn't beat America.
- [78:31]
B
Right? And maybe they had a better long term plan than Europe because they could trickle pull from Eastern Europe so they were in a better long term position. But then the surge kind of changed that whole dynamic because it didn't give enough time for the. The trickle. And like when you're. You put a tremendous amount of energy to break holes into things, if those get filled up, then it's not just like the numbers count more than the numbers. Right. Because you need a whole nother surge to break through again.
- [79:02]
A
Yeah. And this is also an example of public opinion really determining history, because the Germans didn't like public opinion. They were very much of the Prussian school of, of like, you should whip the peasants until they work. And they thought that this was like an unmasculine and sort of like, like not a lordly way to deal with the world.
- [79:25]
B
Stop asking for permission from your wife to go to poker night. Okay.
- [79:28]
A
Yeah, yeah. And the. And so they made a handful of staggering errors. One was where they. The Zimmerman telegram, which was just a terrible decision because they send it to Mexico when Mexico was in the middle of its bloodiest civil war. So you're not going to get a country that's in the middle of its bloodiest civil war that killed like 300,000 people to invade the neighboring country that is 30 times as powerful. And so they told the Mexican government that they could take Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. And then the British intercepted the message and sent it over to the Americans. That was a PR defeat. And there was also a practice where the German submarine U boats were trying to starve Britain by shooting traffic. And the Germans said, we will shoot any ships that we suspect to be carrying British military traffic. And the USS Lusitania was in fact carrying British military traffic. The Germans shot it down. This became a huge PR attack in America. And then they lied that it wasn't. It was a peaceful ship. The Germans are shooting civilian ships so we can't go on vacation to Europe anymore. So these two PR events caused the American nation, which did not want to have a war, to allow Woodrow Wilson to bring us into the conflict.
- [80:55]
B
And I heard the Lusitania was also a false flag. I don't know if I'm remembering that correctly. So I feel like I looked that up 10 years ago.
- [81:03]
A
I don't know. They genuinely knocked the ship down. I don't know what false flag entails because we were already at a state where we did media stories in a highly structured way. So that goes back to the yellow journalism of the USS Maine off Cuba. And by World War I, you already had Walter Lippmann. And Bernays and these figures studying unconscious motivators in psychology to manipulate the population. And so this was already in place by World War I where the advertising industry and the propaganda industry were the same thing, same people, same experts.
- [81:41]
B
So there's like a different way to do a false flag. It's like you're prepping, you're just changing the ideas instead of an event either way, when the event happens.
- [81:49]
A
I've read books by Edward Bernays and by these authors. And so they were of a very managerial bent where they thought the population were dumb animals who should be manipulated towards higher aims. And so propaganda was originally a good term of sort of like good pr. And PR is a term from Edward Bernays. Propaganda got so overused in World War I that it picked up bad connotations. So the flip over to advertising.
- [82:16]
B
Right, that's funny.
- [82:18]
A
Century of the Self is an incredible documentary by Adam Curtis about this as well as hyperreality. Adam Curtis is a genius. He's one of the best filmmakers out now. And so with the end of World War I, America intervened and the Versailles Treaty was a mess because Woodrow Wilson was in very poor health and his wife was the one de facto governing America at the time. And this was something that they covered up where his wife was the one doing all the orders and the political stuff while her husband was too sick to be sentient. Woodrow Wilson had earlier intervened in the conflict in a big way to say America needed to make a moral statement of this is the new way we do power. And Woodrow Wilson's big point was national self determination which for him only applied to white people. But that national self determination is, let's get rid of Austria, let's put in Czechia or Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Serbia, these small ethnic countries where each nation can self determine. And so this was his thesis. The British and the French went along with it because they wanted an extra player to arbitrate because the British and the French hated the Germans from the war. And the Americans came with an understanding of the underlying dynamics. And so the Americans were shoving this national self determination frame onto Europe, which I think it is good that these countries can get independence ones like Poland or I don't know, like Romania, which were conquered for centuries, they can finally be free. But this void created monsters like Hitler or Stalin because you got rid of the old aristocratic systems that kept this region of the world stabilized. And also the Americans were not fully invested. So we established the frame, but we couldn't hold it. And the Republicans immediately got power after Wilson hated everything. Wilson did. And so America made the League of Nations, or the proto un, which was Woodrow Wilson's great passion project. He was an intellectual, so he loved these abstract concepts. The Republicans hated it, which is why we come across as schizophrenic to other countries where Woodrow Wilson made the League of Nations. Republicans won the next election in a landslide, one of the biggest in American history. Pulled out of the League of Nations. So America made the League of Nations and we were the only industrial country which refused to be a member because the Republicans, like, you guys can go fuck yourselves. We're not joining your League of Nations.
- [84:53]
B
This is so America. I mean, we created like the WHO and the waf. We're the main players behind all of those. And we're also the first to pull out.
- [85:02]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [85:04]
B
I would make a crash sound like they were. They replaced the aristocracy with the UN and, and they didn't. If they didn't really change the national picture because it was like you still had separate nations or territories. It's just they changed how they coordinated with each other from aristocracy, the un
- [85:23]
A
and it's, it's this dysfunctional division between the masculine and the feminine America, because the masculine is the one who sort of builds, who builds the stuff in America. And America is some of the most masculine archetypes in the world. I mean, the recent Chadley guy who killed Maduro, who captured Maduro, he's an example where the cowboy is a hyper masculine archetype because the cowboy exists distinct from society as sort of an individual apart from the culture. So he's peak masculine agency. And then America also has hyper femininity like Hollywood or woke, and these exist in the same country because America is in fact a series of sub nations under a federated government. And so you have both of these elements that are in profound discord in America and you need to have them cooperate. But they became progressively more dysfunctional. And so as you get to the late 20th century, you have the American northeastern media constantly crapping on the American empire, where the way that the liberal media dealt with Vietnam was just profoundly traitorous. Like that actress who went to Hanoi. Or them. People like youth, like putting up images of Mao and saying they loved these horrible communist regimes. But those people were also the exact enablers and best supporters of the American empire when it supported their contexts. And then the people who died in these wars were sort of the red state silent majority that Nixon talked about. But this population was quite willing to sort of give away responsibility for the American empire. And they were also the People who were against it. So it was the highly dysfunctional relationship between both the imperial elite who had often backstabbed the American empire while maintaining it, as well as the sort of more masculine American public who were expected to staff it, but they were sort of middle. America has this thing I dislike where they say, oh shucks, I'm just a normal guy, don't expect too many things from me. I'm just here to support my family. And between them and the self loathing liberals, there's no legitimate leadership.
- [87:47]
B
Even though they're like one of the most productive and potentially powerful or potentially productive and powerful places in the world. Right? Yes, they have, it's like that false humility kind of thing. And the, the Japan, the male, female thing reminds me of the Japan rug pull because we basically did a similar rug pull as we did on Japan, but onto the entire world. Like yeah, we got almost every country in the world and their elite class to adopt our ideology and commit to our systems, our systems of control and become personally invested in it to the point where we're like, hey guys, actually that's not a good idea. That they're like, they're kind of like in turmoil and distraught. And then you can also see how the feminine impulse or the left are, are and shambles are like really crushed by this because like they actually did manage to kind of take over the world and we're just kind of dismantling there.
- [88:42]
A
Yeah, this is, this is why the projector screen in the neoliberalism video is so important, where you should probably pair this video with the neoliberalism video because it's so complicated to disentangle. And let's, let's get to World War II because you bring up a point that'll make more sense where we intervene in World War I, break up the old Austrian, Russian and German empires and the Turks. We preside over that. We didn't do all of it. We then leave, become hyper isolationist in the twenties. And Paul Johnson makes an interesting point that we only judge the 20th century by what progressive things worked. Where the 20s, for example, was an era of incredible prosperity and technological growth. But we don't remember it because it was under hyper capitalist governance like Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover, where we remember Wilson well, we don't remember the negative. The 20s, then the 30s are remembered sort of well under FDR, but his economic interventions didn't really work and covered up a lot of corruption and growth of the state. And then we see the 50s as conservative, while in reality they were significantly more progressive than any earlier period. And so our narratives about this are sort of distorted, like you're staring through a funhouse mirror. And so the 20s, and by the time it gets to the 30s, the Democrats are back in power and FDR felt the need to get involved in World War II to stop the Nazis from taking over the continent. And there's a whole complex school of history here. Where should America have gotten involved in World War II? That's not the thing I want to answer. I think it was our destiny to do so. And so we sort of accepted a greater destiny that we had to take responsibility for. Where? Think at the beginning of Princess Mononoke when Ashitaka has this huge sort of. This is a Japanese movie, by the way. Ashitaka is an Ainu prince. He has this huge gash on his body and he has to ride across the west, across all of Japan, to end a conflict between the industrial Irontown people and the forest spirits. And so he's forced to take this. And whether or not Ashitaka does this, it's not really a moral decision, but he opens up this timeline of accepting his hero's journey. And America sort of did that. Where we saw the rest of the world falling. Will we step in and intervene it? And so after you make that choice, it's not really a moral calculation because it opened up this entire new void where every Disney movie starts with the lead making an objectively bad decision that they then have to sort of ride the entire rest of the story for.
- [91:31]
B
It almost doesn't matter. It was like an impulse and then we're in. And then the rest of the story is what's more relevant. Like how it unfolds from there. Yeah. And like we could cover earlier, that impulse may have been eventually impossible. Resist. Because it's like a fragile. The object, a reverse fragility dynamic where, like, the power is there, the opportunity is there. So you like eventually, one. If there's a 1 out of 10 chance each generation does it, eventually someone's going to do it. The longer the timeline goes, the more inevitable it becomes.
- [92:03]
A
As Master Oogway said, you often meet your destiny in your road to avoid it.
- [92:09]
B
Well, and that's very much like the 20s thing. Right. Because you said the 20s are kind of viewed as a mistake, stake and covered up, even though they were prosperous. Because it's viewed as leading to the Great Depression and is viewed as different from Wilson. But the. One of the big reasons why there was such a large cycle in the 20s is because the Fed was created a few years earlier and that was kind of its express purpose. So like that contributes to that picture. And then so we say the 20s are bad because it was like it was growth. But that's why we had the Depression when in reality we had that because of Wilson. And then during the Depression we extended our recovery longer than we've ever had one before because we didn't let the economy heal.
- [92:52]
A
Yeah, the, the US government started really growing in every dimension with fdr. And Will Wilson was the first person who put it into motion. FDR put it in a super drive and it's control over the economy in America as well as the entire global system. And. We got pulled into the greater world through two independent events where FDR did this sort of presage earlier, where he was helping out the Russians and the British and the Chinese, where he wanted us to get involved in a war. But at the time, three quarters of the American public were against a larger war. And so you had to get a time when there was an agreement, sort of like things are bad enough, we intervene. And the Germans. So the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor. And the reasoning for that was that they had been trying to conquer an empire in the Pacific and they had just taken French Indochina after the Japanese, after the Germans conquered France itself. And so America thought that was not okay. So we blocked off all oil supplies to Japan. And then the Japanese had this moment where they said, we will either face glory or stagnation. Let's die with glory. So they attacked across the entire region, taking everything including Indonesia, out to Burma, the edges of India, New guinea, and they attacked Pearl harbor in the longest military operation in history, from Hokkaido out to Hawaii. And people think that FDR knew about this and planned this was likely not true because even though the Americans had several heads up that it was going to attack, which they ignored. And when you deal with large organizations like this, you don't have to be conspiratorial. You have to realize in large organizations people sometimes share information so that the information doesn't percolate through large bodies of people. So you have all these complex interests and things you'll listen to and don't listen to. But we left our battleships in Hawaii and then we had had the aircraft carriers out on patrol. So the Japanese knocked out all of our battleships, which were the big top military vessels of the era, where we had to over rely on the aircraft carriers. And this became historically decisive because the aircraft carri carriers had enormous utility that we didn't know about. Because we had to rely on them. And we realized the aircraft carriers had negated the battleships because you could just fly over the battleships and drop bombs on them so that their huge cannons were no longer useful. And so if we had planned for Pearl harbor, it would have been the inverse where our most valuable ships would not have been wiped out. And Pearl harbor unified the American people in a way that we forgot where into the 21st century. Pearl Harbor Day was a holiday. People would talk about it, people were aware of it. And Pearl harbor instantly flipped the American people from three quarters not supporting a war to practically all of the American people wanting to utterly destroy Japan. And During World War II, Japan was seen as the great country America had a grudge with that we needed to defeat Japan. And there were still enough German Americans that the antipathy to Germany was not as great across the war where Japan
- [96:30]
B
was like another new kid on the block. It's like the two new kids at the school fighting each other to see who's like the.
- [96:37]
A
The Japanese were also over accepted one. The Japanese were also overtly brutal in a way that no one else we dealt with. Were where the Japanese would treat POWs terribly because they thought you should die in battle. The Japanese would behead American soldiers and put their heads on spikes. They would torture their enemies. And the Japanese did not like the Germans understand the new rules of the global system. And the Japanese thought these were just tricks made by the Westerners to weaken them. And my attitude to this is I do not support putting my enemy's heads on spikes. I do not support killing POWs. I do not support the rate of the rape of Nanjing. Reality is complex and multifaceted.
- [97:23]
B
And they didn't understand the restraint of being super powerful. They're like a teenager who makes his face like this and acts extra tough but doesn't understand. Yeah, everything that comes with it.
- [97:35]
A
Yes. And then in one of the worst decisions in history, Hitler declared war on America because the Japanese did. Because he thought as FDR was giving the British and the Russians all this aid that he was going to get America to declare war on Germany anyway. Because no one involved understood America's system where the elites generally did not have enough power to force America to have a war. Because World War II is the tipping point where during World War II you had to actually get Congress to okay America fighting wars afterwards. After that point, Congress signed away the power so that the president in the executive branch could launch police conflicts. So America has not declared a single war since 1942 when we declared War on Hungary and Romania and all those places where Vietnam, Iraq were all police actions. And the reason that they signed away that power was with the threat of nuclear war. The president would have to respond immediately. But it's part of the Imperial presidency that a lot of authors like Amelie Derincourt talk about.
- [98:49]
B
And it's funny because people talk about the US as kind of a new country and say it's kind of immature for that reasons. But if you think about it from a civilizational perspective, the U.S. is not a new country. It's like directly connected to English civilization, which is more advanced and more mature than a lot of what Germany was doing or what Japan was doing. So it's almost in a way we're like a more mature country because we've higher level of civilization.
- [99:17]
A
The American masculine is very mature and it stems from a very sort of like developed tradition in North Europe. And the issue though is it's very frontier wise where it doesn't perceive other countries as having agency in ways that Americans don't. Americans are very good at tangible issues, like what you deal with on a frontier. We're bad at cultural or soft issues because our sort of like our natural elites deal with the material world. They don't deal with diplomacy or art or culture. So America can be capable of staggering degrees of maturity in some ways and then profound immaturity in other ways due to how we sort of selected our skills.
- [100:05]
B
Interesting. I guess that kind of fits in with some of the modernity problems too, like certain habits or cultural institutions or social, like eating meals at the same time even, which does.
- [100:18]
A
The rest of the world calls Americans cowboys. And that's a real thing that really sticks out to them because in America the idea of leaving civilization and leaving your culture is normal. And in the rest of the world, that's seen as death. And so the European other cultures, look at America, think of they have these people who ride in the wilderness by themselves, who settle the frontier. And people like this are the ones who are ruling the world. And this is what makes the Europeans freak out, that they are so reliant on their cultures and their societies, that the American individual is a direct rejection of socialism because it proves people who are genetically identical to them can live without the socialist state.
- [101:00]
B
That's fascinating because it also fits within the overlying globalist versus non globalist competition where they kind of want to insulate themselves from change and we want to unleash like dynamic.
- [101:13]
A
Yes.
- [101:14]
B
Consequences.
- [101:16]
A
Yeah, exactly. America is a naturally Nietzschean nation in that regard.
- [101:22]
B
And I Was gonna say. It reminded me earlier of, like, that you mentioned a point about them being jealous of us being jealous of not having colonies. It's like, oh, they could do it, and now we can't. Is very similar to how Europe, like, developed and then wanted to tell Africa, hey, no, you can't have oil. Yeah, it's very similar.
- [101:45]
A
It is. And again, hold the metal stick and breathe. Your individual era of history will say crazy things. So decenter yourself from your era of history and hold on to the things that are universally true. And so In World War II, America, quote, mogged the rest of the world because we had so much more power and America could produce staggering amounts of goods. I've seen stats about this, and it's really remarkable where we, In a lot of things, we produce more than the entire rest of the world combined. We produced enough bullets to kill the entire human race 11 times over. We practically fed the Soviet Union. We supplied the Soviet Union its trucks, its weapons. It's a debate among historians if the Soviet Union could have survived that American aid.
- [102:44]
B
That's significant, the number of bullets, because to put it into context, the Soviets didn't have enough bullets to kill their political prisoners. Yeah, we could have killed everybody in the world 11 times. Like, it's a lot more bullish, crazy.
- [102:57]
A
I personally think the Soviets could have probably made it without us. But we did do a lot of stuff. And one of the great things with these larger videos is you can watch the World War II video, we have two of them, to look at the different fronts of the war. Where in the Pacific, it was island hopping, where you had MacArthur after we were beaten in the Philippines, and the Japanese treated the American prisoners of war in the Philippines absolutely terribly. The Bataan Death March. And MacArthur moved down to Australia to push up against the front in New guinea from the south. And the Australians did most of the fighting in New Guinea. And then across the Pacific, we fought the Japanese at Midway, which is an island, one of the closest places near Hawaii, but there's nothing near Hawaii. And in both the war against the Japanese and the Germans, we had breakthroughs in code hacking, so we could see the Japanese plans before they were ready. So when the Japanese fleet came out to Midway, we knew it was there. And then, like the Battle of Marathon, we did an early strike, wiped out their entire fleet from aerial bombardment when they were still preparing their ships.
- [104:19]
B
And that was a crazy battle. It was one of those battles where it gives more credence to the view that if we zig right versus left Everything would have changed because it was literally like one plane slipping through, luckily identifying a target, where if they didn't, it would have been reversed and we would have been wiped out. And then we would have had no ships. We would have been like a lag in production and they would have pushed all the way through.
- [104:42]
A
Victor Davis Hansen has a whole bit about how this is symbolic of the Western way of war between Marathon to Midway. And I don't want to get into this. I don't fully agree with Victor David Hansen's thesis, but you can draw the parallel. And we wiped out the Japanese Navy at Midway, which was a huge turning point of the war, because before then the Japanese were always on the offensive, and then after that they never were. And the second battle was at Guadalcanal, off the Solomons, where we had to push the Japanese out of each individual island in these horrible wars on these small jungle islands. And Guadalcanal was one of the worst. We had to fight them again at Iwo Jima and Saipan and all of these places to get to a position where we could attack the Japanese home islands and do like short distance bombing. We also reconquered the Philippines as sort of MacArthur's return. In Europe, we first of all supported the Russians and the British and we helped stabilize Britain because they were really hurting under the German submarine blockade. So the Germans had blocked off food access to Britain because Britain had become very heavily dependent on grain supplies from the New World. So the Germans were trying to starve Britain out. And America just launched so much stuff. We were like the Roman Republic in that regard. We just had so much scale that we can outpace our opponents in both quality and quantity. To secure the Atlantic trade, the Atlantic route, wiping out the German submarines. We then attacked North Africa in a combined operation where we sailed across the Atlantic to attack Morocco and Algeria. And we captured a German field army outside Tunis, invading up through Italy, which was a grinding multi year conflict where Mussolini and his forces gave up. The Germans then conquered Italy, captured Mussolini, and starting in 1943 or 1943, we were at the bottom of Italy. And then by the time of D Day, we were up by Rome and finally in Europe. We spent years preparing a military operation across the English Channel to attack the line of German fortifications along the entire French Atlantic coast. And by the time you have an American army in Normandy as well as in Italy, the Germans were going to lose the war because they were also losing in the east. So the Germans held most of the European continent until 1940 but then when the Americans opened up an additional front in Italy and in northern France, the Germans just got compressed and crushed. And you can't overstate America's importance where in a lot of these fronts in the western, in Western Europe, in 44 and 45, there were more American soldiers than every other military formation. German, British, Canadian, American combined. And the British and the Canadians were totally dependent on our industrial base. And by this point of the war, the British had sort of agreed to fold themselves into the American imperium, which Winston Churchill had negotiated in with the, with the Americans because his mother was American, he had a lot of connections to America, where Winston Churchill made the calculation that in a world of continental totalitarian European powers, the British would have to cooperate with the Americans. Their traditional liberal free values in sense of the global order would survive. And what happened was that Churchill made that decision, but then the unified interests of the British socialists and the Americans killed the empire.
- [108:50]
B
And that wasn't even a hypothetical, that they needed America to survive going into the future or something. That was just something that just happened.
- [108:57]
A
Yeah.
- [108:58]
B
And your point about the aircraft carriers speaks to why England was in such a bad spot. Because for England it's kind of an all or nothing strategy. If they dominate the Navy, they can dominate the continent. But if they're cut off from a navy perspective, they're completely screwed. They're going to dwindle. And basically they didn't have aircraft carrier, they didn't need aircraft carriers in Germany because they had a land that they can launch plane from, planes from. And it was that air force that destroyed the navy. So that flipped like England's key previous advantage as well as the submarines. Yeah, that's a very above and below the water. It's pretty crazy.
- [109:42]
A
That's a very good point. And you see it also with nuclear weapons that the scale of the scientific technology was so great you needed a continental sized country. And, and one of the points Carol Quigley made is that the 20th century descended from these nation states like France or Britain, which had these large empires to the transcontinental powers like Russia, America, China. And that was partly due to the scale of the technology you're operating under, that the two great European diasporas, or the Russians and the Anglos who had built out their support through conquering out frontiers, could turn back in and divide up Europe. And you saw the division of the First, Second and the Third Worlds at the end of World War II, where America nuked Japan multiple times. The Japanese were going to keep fighting till the end and we had gave them such a show of force that they basically gave up and surrendered. And America militarily occupied Japan, Korea, Germany, Italy for brief periods. And then we gave them their power back, which was. We were profoundly generous to all of them. A degree that is not paralleled in history. America was deeply generous to the conquered Axis nations.
- [110:55]
B
That must be behind Japan's unique relationship with the US today, right?
- [110:59]
A
Yes.
- [110:59]
B
I mean, how they're. We're more loyal to them or like we have a better partnership with them than we do with most of Europe. And same for them with us versus China.
- [111:10]
A
We were the only Western. We were the only Western country that conquered an Asian country and did not make them a colleague colony.
- [111:18]
B
Right.
- [111:19]
A
And we also did not publicly humiliate them by like, by going through a lengthy period of basically trying to desecrate their culture or sort of like defile their cultural traditions or whatever.
- [111:32]
B
Although it did, it might have actually kind of tricked them into accepting some of the globalist left stuff which they were on board with. But it's funny to see how they've also pivoted away from that pretty strongly where not every other country has.
- [111:45]
A
Yeah. They're also less culturally Marxist than basically any other industrialized country. Marxism hasn't seeped into their cultural assumptions. And that's because they had a unified cultural elite they maintained over this entire period from the World wars forward. And they thought feminism and communism were like the ultimate two worst evils.
- [112:06]
B
And that might be why it's also hard to make them Christian or because they have such a strong anti bot cultural antibody response or defensive response. So you can see like maybe a positive and a negative.
- [112:18]
A
Yes. And so we had the Marshall Plan in Europe, we had plans to rebuild Japan. And America's very good, much like the Romans at turning our former enemies into allies. If anything, we were too generous. Where the Europeans have grown resentful of the American sort of sphere because we protect them so much that the Europeans can operate in this very low trust, envious place because they're not responsible for their own protection. They have their own dwindling welfare states. And so America has this element where we do periodically use force in a way that's not strategic or not really good or exorbitant force. But we're also too soft in other places where we should have managed the relationship with Europe now, because when you give someone a favor so big they can't repay it, they grow to resent you. And we've also stripped Europe of leadership, same thing as Japan, where The American empire offers these originally proud warrior countries capitalism as a way to sort of deal with their own loss of their empires. And they often become more dependent on these American cultural technologies than the Americans themselves.
- [113:32]
B
And there's. I mean, there's a similar situation of dependency between Japan and Europe. And there's also been resentment in Japan. There's been a lot of resentment of the US controlling them. The fact that they don't have a military because of the US but the same groups that continue, the same groups that are resentful of that are also, like, aligned with our. Are. Right. Because we're encouraging them to develop their military. It's like the schizophrenia of America strikes again.
- [114:04]
A
Exactly.
- [114:05]
B
We're also mad, just like Japan. We're mad at the US The Americans are for the same reasons.
- [114:11]
A
Yeah, it's awfully queer. And so you see the division of the first, the Second and the Third World, and this is the Cold War distinction, where First World is the American Allies, free capitalist countries, sort of agnostic. Progressive socialism is the dominant belief structure. And it's based upon psychological manipulation. The Second World is based upon total manipulation by the government of every element of your life. It's the Iron Curtain, the former Mongol Empire. And then the Third World is the former European colonial empires. And the Europeans gave up their colonial empires as part of a combination that they lost the national will to maintain those empires where the Europeans could have if they wanted to, because they had such a marked military and technological advantage, but they lost the will to maintain them. And America enabled that because we were a former European colony ourselves, and we wanted those places to be free. And I think there is an element of nobility in that. But on top of it, when you look at the Suez conflict as an example, where the French tried to maintain their empire more, and then after Dien Bien Phu and Algeria, they just lost the will to do so. And then for the British and the French, they were trying to rein in their former client state, Egypt, the Suez crisis, because Nasser, who was one of the first sort of post colonial strongman, he tried to take the Suez Canal for his own purposes. The British and the French did so. The Americans told the British and the French they wouldn't back them in reconquering Egypt. And because the British and the French were so dependent on this global publicity system the Americans had, they could not convince their own populations to do it. And so it was sort of an unbindling of the European order that created a Third World that the first and the Second World competed over.
- [116:15]
B
This is another example of like going too far and not going far enough and oscillating between those dynamics. Because, yeah, it wasn't just that they ended colonialism. They, they banned it like before you could have these adventures or private players that are still trying to make an impact or fulfill a security role or do whatever. And then they took over and did it way more than those private interests were. And then when they stopped, they're like, okay, nobody can do it. And then you create like a freeze and then Russia or China fills in the gap.
- [116:51]
A
Yes, exactly. And keep in mind, the difference between it being not cool to have colonial empires to having colonial empires being socially taboo was a generation. It was 1900 to 1945. So it's very rapid. And it was not a discussed shift. It was just like a cultural, spiritual, mass transformation in the Western world.
- [117:14]
B
And it makes sense as the beginning of the anti empire colonial empire because it's like the US was like, ha, we've ascended to global control, no more empire.
- [117:23]
A
Yes. And you can see it, you can see it through a mate suppression perspective. I mean, right, the. Sorry, I'm just thinking, I think so much about how many of the terms I use in the collective unconscious that we see on the right today are concepts that we developed in the last five years. And that means we've seen a radical historic shift since the 20th century.
- [117:46]
B
Right. Mate suppression as a concept similar to like when people post the airplane meme about confirmation bias or something with all the holes in it. Yeah, not where the plane was strongest, but the planes that survived happened to not get shot in the key areas. Like that's a concept that's percolated throughout the culture. It's like a new word or a new.
- [118:05]
A
Yes, facts. And so for Mackinder was an author from the sort of turn of the 19th to 20th centuries who made this area called the heartland. And his thesis was that whoever controls the former Mongol empire and East Europe will rule the world because they have the largest contiguous landmass. And then there's the natural exteriors to the Eurasian system, which includes America and Western Europe and India. And we tested this thesis and Mackinder was wrong. Because the Cold War, which is going to be our next video, was a near perfect map of Mackinder's heartland versus exterior. And the exterior, in fact, one where you saw America get pulled into this situation where to stop the rise of global communism. And that generation of Americans was divided. You had lots of people in FDR's cabinet who very much enabled the communists. You had the general American public and the Republicans going on these huge anti communist sort of red scares. And so we saw the Communists expanding out from the former Mongol Empire. And this created a series of political issues and complications around the entire periphery of the Eurasian system. But. And you have to see these as sort of like the same sort of publicity events we're talking about where you had the Soviets try to block off the Western satellite in Berlin, and then the Americans had to fly in all the supplies for months on end to show that we would still support this tiny island even with the Soviet aggressions. You had the. The liberal upswellings in Czechia and in Hungary that their communist governments briefly sort of lessened the leash. And then we did not. We did not support the. The Hungarians or the. The Czechs, really. They thought we would support them. But much like the Eastern Europeans, like the Polish resistance and the people who were conquered by the Soviets in Eastern Europe, we were general. We cooperated with the Soviets so that they could control their areas of Eastern Europe, although later on we would send in propaganda and cultural influences and that stuff to subvert Eastern Europe. And you had Yugoslavia, which was sort of vaguely a Western ally because they were the one communist country at the time who was anti Stalinist. And the civil war in Greece, we forced the Russians to get out of Iran. We had Turkey, Iran, Pakistan as our allies. And. And then you have the wars in the east, which we'll get to next, like Vietnam and Korea.
- [121:00]
B
Excellent. Over to Asia.
- [121:03]
A
Yeah. So sorry. I just bought a book called Post War by Tony Judd. And it made me realize I want to read up about post World War II European history because it's so important to see how Europe made its transition out of global. Global dominance. But it's not something people study because people don't really study entropy. But interesting in the East. I read this history of Korea recently written by a Marxist, and it's funny where he said that he made the North Koreans sound better than the South Koreans because he was saying the Americans in South Korea were racist and imperialist and the Soviets sort of like mixed governance systems based on equity. And he was saying the North Koreans were like less racist and they were less imperialistic. I'm like, dude, killing half your population is not okay. You can't add these labels on, because once you read that stuff, you're thinking, oh, this author is a doctrinaire Marxist.
- [122:05]
B
I've heard people say, and not even Marxist, just one of my buddies who actually spent a lot of time in North Korea and was the one who translated for Dennis Rodman with Kim Jong. So he spent weeks in Kim Jong's house, and he was talking about how, like, on some metrics, North Koreans are happier, you know, and that might relate to, like, some problems of modernity, but that. That just shows how stupid, like, the just pure modernity griping is. Because you're like. The key is to deal and transcend the problems of modernity and. And not to, like, go back to the forest or even worse, like, North Korea.
- [122:42]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [122:43]
B
At least what's his name, the Unabomber, you know, wanted to go to the, like, forest, not have a. Yeah, that's crazy. Concrete surveillance station.
- [122:53]
A
What else did he say about North Korea?
- [122:59]
B
That. That they. So what he did was he taught. He was teaching the North Korean elites critical thinking, bruh. So, yeah, it was, like, a thing that they were into. Like, all the elites are learning critical thinking. They're like, holy crap, this is crazy. That was like. But they didn't teach it to anybody else in the population.
- [123:19]
A
So when I went to high school, we had a lot of courses in critical thinking. This was critical thinking, in the woke terminology, of not being a rational person, of critiquing the underlying structures of society in a postmodernist way. And it always.
- [123:33]
B
This is, like, traditional Western critical thinking that this guy is teaching.
- [123:36]
A
I don't actually believe that. I think in North Korea, they would. They would say they're teaching critical thinking, but it's really how to engage in propaganda more easily.
- [123:46]
B
Well, sure, yeah. Critical thinking can give you that ability. Like the example with my wrestling coach where he taught me never to touch my headgear because people will shoot on you when you touch your headgear. You can use that knowledge to mess up somebody's headgear and then shoot on them when they lift their hand. Like, so that's probably what they're doing. But you're still learning the same thing. It's just, like, how you use it, I guess. But I think that's different than the Marxist version of critical analysis.
- [124:12]
A
Yeah. So we fought. We fought the wars in Korea and in Vietnam. And how much of this do I put in the Cold War video? How much do I put in this video? I don't know.
- [124:26]
B
I feel like we've kind of touched on these indirectly. So, like, let's try. We can talk about all the topics, but how is it in context of the Pax Americana?
- [124:34]
A
Yes. We established an Asian periphery in Korea and Vietnam, where we lost Vietnam, and we kept the border in the 38th parallel in Korea. And we built our naval base in Okinawa, in Japan, where Japan was our top ally. And these conflicts precipitated the radical economic rise of basically the Asian tigers like Singapore or Hong Kong or Korea or Japan, because these were places that could flourish under the American empire, where we allowed them to be democracies. We didn't force them to have a military to survive. They were part of our broader trade segment. And I think Peter Zeihan does a really good analysis of this era of history where America saw the rise of global communism and we realized we were really wealthy and these were tired countries. So we basically bribed everyone to be on our good side against the Communists. So we let these Asian countries have preferential trade deals, and all of their economies, especially Korea and Japan, restarted due to them building out manufacturing for the Korean and the Vietnam wars, as well as hosting American troops. And we gave them a significant amount of aid money. And so we bribed the world system because we were so wealthy. And then this created all of these entitlements that both created dependency and weakness among these, these sort of parts of the Apax Americana. There was no ability for America to actually enforce discipline on these populations to make them less sort of resentful and envious. And this created profound resentment in America because we couldn't get rid of these liabilities afterwards. So it created this weird system around the world. And when Peter Zeihan talks about how the American empire doesn't have an incentive because we don't have the threat of global communism anymore, the American people have grown tired of it. And America is genuinely not dependent on the rest of the world for really anything anymore. We make our oil, which was the last thing we were really dependent. We could. We need to figure out how to make semiconductor chips, some industrial stuff, but that's tenable. And so when you look around the entire American empire, you have the core regions of starting in North America. And it's remarkable how Latin America has been on and off where Americans have intervened in Latin America periodically in places like Guatemala or Venezuela, or generally, we intervene directly in the Caribbean Basin. And when you look at. So Woodrow Wilson sent ships down to Haiti. America militarily occupied Haiti for 20 years. We treated Cuba as a de facto colony for decades. And our issue with Latin America is the issue we have everywhere, where Americans don't really have the will or the interest to militarily occupy the Dominican Republic for decades. So we'll go in, move things around, normally make things worse because we're not using. We're not applying force correctly. And as early as FDR you see the current shit lib sentiment emerge in our relationship with Central and Latin America where FDR pulled out Woodrow Wilson's various military operations there. And you see weird things or as an example, we felt bad about supporting the old strongman in Cuba, Batista. So the American government helped back Castro because Castro modeled himself as a Castro helped model himself as like a new person who would break up the feudal estates and make Cuba a smallholder liberal society where he was very amelior to the Americans until he seized power and showed that he was a radical Marxist. In Guatemala there's a party that is supposed was supposedly sort of democrat. Let's split up the plantations. America treated them as communists, wiped them out, installed one of the old white serf elite on top to keep hold of Guatemala for the American banana company. Venezuela was a place America sort of used as an ally for oil. But then the issue was that they entered into a relationship of dependency to their own oil supply where they elected socialists which pushed them into poverty. But we didn't intervene in either Cuba or Venezuela, which are two communist societies whose own populations probably want us to set them three. But then we intervened in lots of places we shouldn't have, like Haiti or across. We attacked Mexico multiple times In World War I we attacked Mexico due to Pancho Villa, but we didn't intervene when the Mexicans took the American oil company. And so the American policy in Latin America is by and large marked by confusion. And we very rarely directly intervened after FDR took power. Where Marxists love to use America's relationship to Latin America as an instance of America keeping them in poverty. But the American empire generally radically increases economic ability, especially if you look at places more directly sort of under our influence. And in every single case, and I'm confident in saying this, the thing that kept Latin America in poverty was the corruption of the local elites. Where whenever the elites lessened their corruption, they. They would grow wealthier because they would see the free market. And then Latin America has its normal reaction of sliding back into corruption. And America intervened less than people think. And especially so in South America, in places like Brazil or Argentina or Chile, the Americans would indirectly support these regimes, but their politics were the outcome of their own military dictatorships and local elite seizing power. And across the third World, the Soviet and Americans were using these local alliances and local coalitions and then backing whichever one was either slightly more left wing or slightly more right wing right.
- [130:58]
B
And it wasn't even necessarily if they Were like left or right wing. Sometimes it was just if they were strategically aligned at, at the moment and I forgot what I was going to say. I'll try and get back to it.
- [131:14]
A
So you have Latin America and Latin America is oscillated. Latin America goes through its own sort of like biological rhythms where across the, in a certain decade in Latin America there'll be a certain political philosophy or sort of political way of this is a military dictatorship decade. This is a socialist decade. This is a right wing reaction where Latin America will take ideological fads and ripple across the entire region and whatever side is not in power picks foreign powers to blame their internal issues on.
- [131:50]
B
Yeah, and I to speak to your point about how we've had less impact in terms of intervention than people kind of think or how all these single simple narratives that we've caused all the problems or haven't caused any or whatever is just silly because confusion, like you said, is a much better way to look at it because it's chaos. And I asked one of my leftist friends, like, okay, like the US is responsible for everything bad in South America because we intervened. Can you give me an example of a country that we've never intervened in in South America? And this was before last year, but he said Venezuela. I was like, great, like, how did that work out? And we had. The point I was going to say is we know what system it is. We've gone over it in our other videos. It's the Spanish like oligarchical colonial machine.
- [132:42]
A
And when you look at a lot of these places, America is basically twitching its fingers. But because America is so powerful, that's a determining factor for their history. So America's crisis over the Panama Canal, where in the 70s their local dictator took it back and we thought should be. Should we let them take it? No, we're going to send battleships down, which was one of the last times America used battleships. That's one of the most important events in Panamanian history as well as building the canal in the 1890s. But we don't even register it as Americans in Africa. We spent a truly tiny amount of our total, total sort of imperial budget there. Although we've sent I think like 20 Marshall plans worth of money to Africa as Americans. And it has not had the same effects because, but because we sent some in a world where the European powers weren't playing out in Africa. In a lot of these Cold War era African civil wars, the determining factor is small amounts of Soviet or American money. And so you can see things like The American empire influence places like the Sahel in Africa. But America never thinks of the Sahel. And this is writ large across America's relationship with the world, where America has often been a determining value in the Middle East. And the Middle east was a huge part of American foreign policy in the mid to late 20th century because we were forced to sort of take the mantle of the former European colonies, where if you look at the power transfer in places like Saudi Arabia or Iran, it was the British companies that set up these oil drilling facilities that caused the Westerners to have influence in the Middle East. The Americans literally moved into these old companies, set up their own parallel ones. So it was a seamless transfer. From the Middle East's perspective, it's the same elite. If you look at Israel split apart into Palestine and Israel by the British, then the Americans came in to ally with the Israelis. And so you see the Americans force sort of enter into the Middle east. And we were genuinely dependent on Middle Eastern oil in the late 20th century. So when Saddam the Iraqi invaded Saudi Arabia invading Kuwait, and he wanted to invade Saudi Arabia, if he had conquered the eastern part of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq, he would have had a majority of the world's oil supply in the 1990s. So that's why. That's a huge reason the Middle east was geopolitically contentious. At the same time, America did not conquer Venezuela, which has a huge oil supply. And when we invaded Iraq, we actually did not exploit Iraq for oil. American companies did not enter in and take Iraq's oil. It wasn't really a consideration. The ones who did were Europeans. And so America could invade a place like Iraq under the guises of we want their oil, but we didn't actually do that. And so it's still the theme of confusion. Or in Iran, as an example, they were an American ally where the Shah was a military dictator who installed himself emperor and tried to make a totalitarian state. But then when the these sort of like schizo Islamist Shia messianists took power, America didn't know how to respond to them. So they captured the American Embassy, creating a sort of crisis. And Iran then became America's great enemy. But then the Democrat Party will consistently give Iran conciliatory measures. Like, we do this. We did this negotiating thing with Iran's nuclear program where we said, if we give you stuff, will you stop doing this? And we had zero comprehension that in a Middle Eastern country, they're not going to take giving them stuff as a sign of goodwill. They're gonna Take it as a sign of weakness. And you have to be hard to get concessions. You can't like give people stuff and then expect you to give them concessions.
- [136:44]
B
What was the other example that related to this? You mentioned this in another dynamic. I don't know if it was the, the Asia part or.
- [136:52]
A
I said it many times.
- [136:53]
B
Yeah. Basically it's a recurring theme. Right. And then the other thing about the Middle East, Right. Is we. So we have, we take over from the British and then in 1991 when the Soviet Union falls, the seven countries we identify in the Middle east as our next targets are literally the seven former Soviet client states.
- [137:16]
A
Yeah.
- [137:16]
B
So it's like perfectly paralleled with taking over the former Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe. Like we're just immediately stepping in on the territory.
- [137:26]
A
This video ports too well into the Cold War and the neoliberal video because this is the start of the, of the neoliberal video. And you can see how the Pax Americana developed. But with the end of the Cold War it really proved this decentralized emergent empire that the Americans had, which was it's simultaneously decentralized and emergent, but also hyper centralized and hyper artificial. Whoa, man, reality is complicated. That beat the Soviets because the Soviets were sort of testing the centralized authoritarian command economy model and we were testing the corporatist capitalist model. And our model outperformed them in every single way. And so the end of the Cold War was a sign that the American empire was so fundamentally better than the Soviets that the Soviets really gave up without a fight. And much like Carthage defeating Rome, there was. Hannibal gave a curse to the Romans upon defeating them that in their victory the Romans would grow so wealthy and decadent as to lose everything that made their nation great and they would degenerate. That also happened to America. So watch the neoliberalism video to see. After our victory of the Cold War and we lost our partner, the Soviets, because the Soviets were both our partner and our rival in the global system. We converged in the Soviets in many ways becoming more atheist, more managerial, more leftist. But then we also used the Soviets as opposition in many other ways. And America went crazy when it became the sole world's power because it caused a crisis of identity that we never wanted to be a world empire. And this was forced upon us reluctantly. And this created the great crisis of America's soul that we're seeing now. And I want to say this explicitly, as I've said it many times indirectly, that the core issue of the American empire is that Europe had a Higher level of cultivation and civilization which they used to conquer the world. And they did not transfer that to America very seamlessly. So America was forced to to take its institutions which existed as a sort of republican nation, a frontier republican nation, and then use it for a global empire while cutting off the existence of an aristocracy where you can't let aristocracy develop in America. And aristocracy are the kinds of people who are used to using power in this sort of imperial manner. And so when you look at a lot of the failings of the Pax Americana, of just the really disgusting corporate culture, people letting their entire society die without being willing to say anything, the how it's just so much less intelligent. The European world that came, the European dominated world of a century ago is that we forced America took this mantle of leadership before it had the time to develop the traits that would help them govern it. And when you look at the Europeans, they went through an even greater soul death beforehand. So their leadership class had lost all confidence. So you're seeing the 20th century as this increase in wealth and prosperity at the decrease of the cultural traits that would allow you to manage it. Which is why we are where we are now.
- [140:49]
B
This gets back into the Woodrow Wilson thing because like he's talking about nations or whatever. Yeah, it doesn't really matter. There's always kind of nations. You just get back to this trade off between aristocracy and bureaucracy. And yeah, it's interesting to think of the European empires versus the American empire in that same context because I mean they're even more bureaucratic than us. And. And then also like the world burden that you take on through an empire explains like the European issue with oil in the Middle East. Like why would America care if Europe had a source of oil from the Middle East? Maybe it's because their only other external continental pipeline is to Russia who we're defending them against. And that's why Qatar became such a big player, because turns out they have 60% of Iranians natural gas reserves. The shared field 60% is Qatari. So now suddenly you don't need Iran anymore. And that changes the dynamic in the Middle East.
- [141:51]
A
I feel ashamed I did not say this, but a huge centralizing mechanism for the American empire was the way we do tribute. Because historic empires often do tribute, is we imply that countries which pay out our dollar and support the economic value of the dollar will get our military protection. So the Saudis and the Chinese have been doing that. Some Europeans have done it for a lot. The Japanese did it because the idea was that we maintain the US dollar, we can inflate the US dollar. Countries in the American empire can buy out valuation of the US dollar so that we can inflate our currency infinitely. And so it's a shared global system these people are using as a sort of symbol for we are propping up the American global order. And so the Chinese for a while bought out the second, the most of any national thing country of the US Dollar because the calculation they were making is America is our biggest trade partner. We were like a quarter of their foreign trade and the west was like, I think we're either a quarter to 40% of their trade at some point. So we're going to prop up the value of the dollar artificially to increase their buying value to decrease the valuation of our currency so that we can produce things cheaply without the value of our currency growing up. And so this dollar diplomacy is a central variable which I am surprised has not fallen out yet because we've so exploited this to print infinite money. And it's because the rest of the world is dependent on this American operating system to keep their currencies up. What do you think is a great.
- [143:33]
B
Even more.
- [143:34]
A
Yes. It's not.
- [143:35]
B
It's crazy.
- [143:37]
A
So.
- [143:38]
B
But it's funny how everything gets paid for. Right. In the end. Like we talk about how like, okay, the American empire, we're doing all this security for you and you're not paying us and probably people aren't paying us enough and we're losing money off of it. But there is a taxation mechanism because like you said, the countries who we end up securing is very highly correlated with the percent of US dollars they hold, which gives us an ability to tax them or off. Right. Half of our inflation globally. So we literally are. There is. There is like if something's bought and sold, there's like an exchange and this one's just invisible. But it still exists.
- [144:16]
A
Indeed. So this was a good episode. I thought that's a good place to end on. I hope I elucidated your understanding of the current worlds better. And I say these things, sort of put these ideas out so you people can think this through and develop your own ideas. It's back to the point at the beginning. So next video is going to be the Cold War.
- [144:39]
B
Yes. Yeah. And like I have plenty of opinions on Empire anti Empire, the 1800s. But like in this video, it was fun to just kind of go through it and try and parse out the reality without a hypercharged narrative on. On either side. I feel like it's useful.
- [144:52]
A
You must relate to things as they are and figure out them for all of their complexities and judge later.
- [144:59]
B
Yep. Otherwise you'll run into a wall.
- [145:01]
A
Indeed. Okay, Bye bye.
- [145:02]
B
All right.
- [145:04]
A
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.