Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rudyard Lynch. He's a YouTuber and a historian. Is the modern world weird? Whether it's incels, brat summer, a broken media landscape, godlessness, or a decline in institutional trust? It seems like lots of modernity. It's odd. From the fall of empires to the rise of new world orders, how does our current timeline compare with the rest of recent history? Expect to learn whether we are actually living in a unique time, what a far-right backlash might look like, why the left is seen as more feminine, what would have happened if Trump had actually been killed, what it will take for young men to feel happy and fulfilled again, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify, which is why they're the global force behind Gimshark, Skims, Allo, and Neutonic. When it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36 % better on average compared to other leading e-commerce platforms. And their shop pay means that you can boost conversions by up to 50 %. Best of all, their award-winning support is there to help you every step of the way.

Look, you're not going into business to learn about how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use at Newtonik with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. Com/modernwisdom, all lower case. That's Shopify. Com/modernwisdom to upgrade your selling today. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rudd yard Lynch. As a guy who has spent a lot of time studying history, how unusual do you think that the time we're living in right now is?

We are the most absurd era in history by a very significant margin. I can get into why I think that's true. I think there's only one... There's one easy underlying variable that explains all of it. But I invented an acronym called SAW. Saw is Studies in Ancient Wisdom. What that means to convey is that there's an underlying shared truth that all the world religions share, all the world's folk ways going back thousands of years. Then this is corroborated by modern evidence. I think this podcast is a great example. You might be one of the biggest saw content creators, where what you do is you compare ancient teachings with what modern science says. There is a strong tether between the two. The 20th century is just a bizarre century, and that's true for about a dozen different reasons. The 20th century established different intellectual precedents as it related to mating, as it related to the idea of community, the nation, religion, how economic conditions worked. You could call the blue pill era of history from roughly the World Wars until COVID or now. It's really the century of social engineering. Our era of history is incredibly bizarre.

The irony is that we judge everyone else according to our standard, but our standard is incredibly strange. I like to say that a fish in a pond cannot know its place in the world because it only knows the water. We are that fish. The reason we don't study history is because if we started looking for what it taught us, we'd realize we're doing something very, very wrong.

How so?

Oh, a variety of ways. The largest example, and something I frequently like to say, is the idea that's killed the most people in history is the idea that humans are inherently perfectible, where the crisis that started or the world wars in the 20th century's totalitarianism killed over 150 million people. That's larger than anything else. It's in any way comparable in history. That was based upon the assumption that you can break and mold human nature to be whatever you want. The blank slate or the idea that all people are born the same all people are born with the same capabilities, sounds nice on paper, but in reality, it's immediate next jump is totalitarianism, to socially engineer people to reach whatever aim you would like. That's just one example where there's so many of these, the idea of infinite financial progress no matter what. This is the idea the left holds up a lot, which is the left sees money as something to divide, not something to create. The reality is money is created every single year by people producing it. If you look at most history, most of civilization, stagnation is the norm. It's you have an empire rise, the empire exploits the peasants, they grow weak, they fall, barbarians restart the process.

Only for pretty small slivers of history, including ours, for creating up certain incentive structures, do you see very rapid progress? But we take that completely for granted.

Economically, very unique. What else would be in the top few, the top wrongs?

The idea that men and women are the same, which is something that our ancestors would view as completely ridiculous. We view our ancestors as stupid. Our ancestors, if they saw us, if you took a Greek philosopher or a medieval philosopher and brought them to our day, they would say that we had a weird combination of autism and schizophrenia, where the thing with... There's a lot of psychology about this, but we have very few records of autism or schizophrenia from the pre-industrial world, where the mental illnesses a society has are driven by the social structure in the neuroses it puts in the society. In the Middle Ages, after the Black Death, you would have entire towns break up into dancing as the mania, or people would become witches or people would have demonic possession. Different society, different psychological neuroses. I have a friend who is an anthropologist in Cambodia for a bunch of years, and the natives in Cambodia, they literally saw magic in their daily lives. That's an example. They magic. They believe in witchcraft completely. That was just an obvious part of their worldview. That's something that separates us from the past, where every single other society in history, and even people in pretty recent history, like Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Karl Marx, Queen Victoria, believed in the spirit world.

Belief in the spirit world was completely common among educated people until around 1900. To just go through the list, the idea that history doesn't have any lessons to teach us, that's modern. Men and women are the same. That culture doesn't matter. That genetics doesn't vary across differing populations. That human nature is perfectible. That there is no divine, that there is no spirit world, that economic progress is assured, that war will end, and basically that war is unnecessary, where the past had this very, you could call it, realistic sense of the world, where they Modernity is motivated by this concept that if we get it right, we can break the entire game and win forever. The rest of history would view that as completely insane. I think one of the biggest things my channel talks about is I think we are on the edge of what I call the crisis of the 21st century, which is what I think will be... It's easy to say that it's going to be the bloodiest crisis in history because in World War II, just 70 years ago, the world had one-quarter its current population. It's very easy to have the bloodiest crisis in history when you have eight times as many people as the pre-industrial world.

But I think the crisis that we're about to face in the next 30 years will be the bloodiest crisis in history.

Why?

I'm looking at a bunch of different models here, and I've triangulated a bunch of different equations to find that we are on the verge of the crisis of the 21st century. I think it's going to be a global crisis. Let me tell you the different things I'm looking at. One One of them is that Peter Turchin is... And Peter Zyhan has also tapped into this pretty well. I think Zyhan came on your podcast before. If you know Zyhan, you know one side of this, and I have a lot of respect for Zyhan. I think he's done a good job. Peter Turchin, pulling from David Hackett-Fischer, saw that the world has these global crises every 250 years that can be predicted by three variables in a computer model. Plugging these three variables retroactively, historically, off these, you can predict the years these crises happen. What happens in each case is that there's mass war, famine, the decline of the global population, and a change of the social structure as there's political disturbances. In the Western world, the last example of this was the French Revolution in Napoleon. That was 250 years ago. Before then, the religious wars of the 1600s that killed a third of Europe's population.

Before then, the Black Death, which killed half of Europe's population. Before then, you have the fall of the Frankish Empire that destroyed centralized government in Western Europe. You can push these as far back as you want to look. You've got the Bronze Age collapse, you have the fall of the Roman Republic. These are predicted off three variables. One of my favorite books ever is The Great Wave by David Hacketfischer. He uses inflation to predict this. You can look at inflation rates to predict when these crises happen. But the three variables are income inequality, decline in average wages, and competition for elite jobs. These three variables can predict when societies have revolutions to the years they take place in. Because the way this variable works is that all things end up leading to their end, as Aristotle said. Everything ultimately culminates, as Aristotle said, something's great strength will become its greatest weakness when pushed to its extremity. With a period of peace and population growth, what happens is the value between labor and capital gets destabilized. As the value of labor shrinks, the value of money to manipulate it grows, so inequality goes up. This explains why the post-World War II era had one of the lowest inequalities in recorded history, while our era has one of the highest inequalities ever.

Inequality today is easily in the top 5-10 worst periods ever in history. Thus, what happens once the inequality gets that bad and wages stagnate, because We have done literally everything we could do to depreciate wages. We have doubled the population through natural population growth since World War II. We've imported 50 million immigrants, and that's a low ball number. We've globalized to countries like Mexico, China, Malaysia that have lower labor value. We've imported women into the workforce, and they're 75% of the population. We've done automation, which is actually... People don't think about automation, but it's already probably the second or the third most important variable there. We have increased the supply of labor by 40%, but we've increased the supply of labor by 40% over what the demand is. So that's why wages go down. It's why Homer Simpson was a lower middle class loser, but he had a wife and kids. His wife stayed at home, three kids, owned his house, could have gone multiple vacations a year. For upper middle class people today, upper middle class young people, that's out of reach. So the quality of life has declined precipitously since the postwar period.

This is something that we've been really gaslighted about. You can look at a variety of metrics between spending power, between ability to own a home, even stuff like height or sleep quality or obesity. For example, over history, whenever the average age of marriage goes above 28, you're going to have a political crisis. Before the Black Death, people were getting married past age 28.

But you're not saying that people getting married after 28 caused the Black Death? No.

What I like to say is humans are designed to breed first and be rational a little later. What happens when you pull out the incentive structure with the society? Because we live in a society where people are working too many hours, they can't afford a house, they can't be successful enough to attract a mate. Thus, their ability to reproduce declines. Once the ability to reproduce gets weaker, it means people start to tear the system apart because if you're screwed in the current system, you're going to roll the dice to get a different outcome. Because if you're screwed in the current route, you have an incentive to roll the dice with a revolution or a political crisis, even though it means you could die because that gives you at least some shot. What happens as inequality grows, quality of life decreases, is the population splits up into different sub-factions based on the self-interest of different groups. So in medieval France, it was the Armagnacs versus Burgundians. In 17th century England, it was the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists. And all of these underlie some underlying class or ethnic or regional difference, where Royalists versus Cavaliers was the old nobility based out of Western England versus the capitalists based out of Eastern England.

And then you have the Whites versus the Reds in the Russian Revolution, the Optimates versus the Populares, Parties in Republican Rome. And in us, it's the right versus the left. The right versus the left underlies... There's a couple of different correlations you can stack, but the one I go after most is college-educated versus uncollege-educated. Every single thing the left pushes makes the college-educated better off. Every single thing the right pushes, pushes mostly the merchant class, but also religious and military interests. There's other stuff you can stack, like cities versus countrysides, male versus female, high agency versus low agency. If you have low agency at your work, you're almost certainly going to be a leftist. Even if you have high agency, like you're a small business owner or a farmer, even if you're poor, you're going to be conservative. This is the underlying difference. As times get worse, what happens is that people get desperate, and so they their faction over the centralized government, because the centralized government is not going to give you any stuff. You don't appeal to moderates because the moderates aren't going to... They haven't done crap for you. You're going to support a radical that supports your self-interest.

And so the right and the left have become further and further radicalized until what I predict will happen is that America will have a civil war or revolution within the next one to five years. I can explain that more if you'd like.

You are someone that spent a lot of time thinking about alternative histories. What do you think would have happened if Trump had been shot?

That's a great question. The reason I've been thinking about that, and I actually predicted Trump would be assassinated two years in advance, because there are four historic conflicts I use as parallels for our current era. What I do is I look, it's almost like string theory where you can find certain historic parallelisms and you follow them, and they often turn out to be true. Those four historic periods are the English Civil War, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, and the fall of the Roman Republic. With the fall of the Roman Republic, what happened is that Rome became a great nation and conquered the world. For those that are the known world, from Syria to Spain. For those that don't know, Rome was a democracy. It had two political parties that competed against each other, the Optimates and the Populares. From my study, I found that the Populares are more so Republicans and the Optimates are Democrats. The Optimates were more so the Roman deep state, and they had allies in Rome's foreign Allied countries. In the same way the Democrats have allies in Europe or Canada or Australia, the Optimates had allies in Greece or North Africa or Turkey.

What happened was that Rome became this great country, and Rome imported a third of its population as slaves. The slaves depreciated the local labor of the native Romans, and so they fell into poverty. So When income inequality became absurd, where you had men who were equivalent to Zuckerberg or Elon Musk who could buy entire countries. Then what happened is Rome also saw a feminist movement, degradation of its moral code, collapse of its religion, and collapse of traditional Roman culture, as the Roman middle class died, Rome spiraled into immense political polarization between the optimates and the populares. The Groccy brothers, in our parallel, because there are multiple cycles I look at, the largest one I know of is the civilization organizational cycle in which America parallels Rome very strongly. The Groccy brothers were wealthy tycoons who operated off a platform of make Rome great again. They wanted to reinstall the Roman middle class and bring back traditional Roman values at the expense of the wealthy elites and the deep state. What happened first is that the populares, is that the optimates deep state, they slandered the Grotties and then said that they were trying to make themselves tyrants.

They couldn't run for office, but because they were trying to destroy the democracy and to make themselves tyrants. Then when that didn't fail, they assassinated the gracky brothers. What then happened is that the populares, or their version of what I think are the Republicans, spiraled into warlords. This is a great parallel for what I think is going to happen to America. I think the right will crush the left, but the right lacks so little internal ideological unity, that the right will spiral into ideological warlords who will kill each other. In the same way that for the populares beat the and then inside the populares, where you had various strong men like Augustus, like Julius Caesar, like Marius, Octavian. The problem with both the populares and the Democrats is that they can't pull on groups of fighting men. Because if you're the populares or the populists, they can get all these young Roman men to fight for them by offering them stuff. But once you've alienated that, you have to rely on foreign mercenaries, which is what I think the left would do if it was caught in an actually violent conflict conflict where they would try to build up a military of people from Mexico or Europe or Southeast Asia or whatever.

So the obvious thing that people think is something like, Rudia, the nice idea, lessons from history, but we're beyond that barbarism now. We're a an ascended species. Look, I can predict the weather in Venezuela tomorrow, and I can track what's going on with global news, and I've got air conditioning, and I've got a car to take me around. The interesting thing that you said at the very beginning is this assumption that we've mastered the world. We've mastered social movement, social psychology, human psychology, health, science. Everything is within our control. And if you believe that, then you don't need to learn from the lessons of history because you assume that you're out and apart from that. What would you say to someone that says, Yeah, it's a nice idea that that happened in Rome or that happened in the French Revolution or whatever. I don't see the parallel. There's not going to be a land war. We're not going to see a kinetic altercation between left and right in America. That seems unbelievable.

I'm going to answer that question, but I'll posit another question to you first. If we don't use history to study the world, what else are we supposed to look at?

I don't know what people think that they're using.

Exactly. What I say is that if you're not using history to study the world, you're making stuff up. Because the reason we don't like this, and I said before, the reason people like studying history is that you're expected to be accountable to it because there's this shared truth. We've had people who have been analyzing history from as long ago as Herodotus, the Bible, Ibn Khaldun, the Chinese historians like Sima Chan, and they all hit the same points. We are actually part of their narrative, but we can't explain their narrative. I'll explain what that means, where the reason we don't want to do this is the left, which is... One of the things I like to say is that even conservatives are leftists today because the left has built up the modern worldview so much that even if you try to escape the leftist worldview, you're still operating off leftist assumptions. I just brought up class analysis. That was something Marx invented. The idea of equality being good, that's a Marxist idea. The idea that the government should help people push for greater social betterment is Marxist. The left wants to project its basically religious vision of the world, and the only way they can do that is by saying history is not important.

It's a tale as old as time inside history that wealthy eras get arrogant, where it's called decadence. It happened to the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians, the Chinese. We are decadent. Decadent societies think they've mastered everything. They think they've accomplished everything. Then they grow weak, and then a new stronger faction emerges and wipes them out. You can explain our hubris by being an extreme form of decadence that we are the wealthiest society in history, and thus we are even more delusional. What I would say is that every single era, to differing degrees, thinks their era is special. Then you look back and no one is special. If you see these patterns going back thousands of years and it always comes back around, and if we think we are special and we're unwilling to look at the dozens of times before we weren't special, that's legitimately a form of madness. If you want to completely ignore the outside evidence and then just believe your inner truth, that it fits the definition of madness.

What's this got to do with Trump being shot at?

You have to look at the parallels between the future and the past in which things can get bad because they have consistently gotten bad. If you choose not to look at it, it's going to catch you in the dark and slit your throat. I would say, because I can talk about all these ideas, I can talk about the abstractions, the statistical models, But what I'd say is look outside. Go to Los Angeles, go to New York City, go to parts of Austin, and things aren't good. Then compare it to a photo reel of the 1960s. Look at your own personal life. Look at the lives of everyone around you. Most people are depressed, poor, lonely, sexless, angry, have mental health issues. Most people's lives aren't good. That's true on both a statistical and anecdotal basis. Furthermore, in the last month, Trump was nearly assassinated. The Democrats had to pull Kamala out as a candidate. Sorry, they had to replace Biden with Kamala. There have been states that have taken Trump off the ballot. The last two elections have been disputed. For each case, these are things that have only happened in the previous American Civil War.

Just look outside. We've had enough warning shots at this point.

I'm not sure that I would agree with the Everybody's life anecdotally is worse than it would have been in the 1960s. I don't know enough specifically about America.

20% has it better, 80% has it worse. It's comparable to dating, where what happened with income inequality and various things is the top 20 % did vastly better and the bottom 80 % did worse. So I'm using everyone colloquially.

I see. I don't know. Maybe I'm not fornicating with the 80 % sufficiently well, but I don't know, man. I understand what you mean. There is certainly an awful lot of problems, whether it's coming from the maintenance side, whether it's coming from economics, whether it's coming from real wages and what they can buy, whether it's coming from a psychological health standpoint, a psychic health standpoint. But I look around me and I don't only hang around with high, fluten, super successful people, and many of those people are flourishing. Not only that, but almost all of them are in relationships. Almost all of them are getting married. Almost all of them are having kids. And their teachers, their builders, their plumbers, their fucking Uber drivers, they're not that homogenous when it comes to being in some super-up-rachelon. So my lived experience is different. That being said, I do see the data. So I have this discordance between what is being reported to me and then what I sometimes experience in my own life. All of that to say, what would have happened if Trump had been shot? What would have happened? How would How would the world be different?

I thought I answered that the right would spiral in the factions, where the issue with the right today is that there's no unifying ideology. The right is a various coalition of various anti-left factions. And so the right has libertarians, it has populists, it has religious people. It has boomer cons, fascists. The right is held together by Trump's cult of personality. I think this is something Conservatives have to be careful about, that Trump's in his '70s. In no timeline is he going to live for the next few decades. What happened with the fall of the Roman Republic with the death of the Grochies is that after the death of the Grochies, the Basically, Republicans lose faith in the system, so you start seeing violence. There's in and out violence in which people lose faith that the system has any service for them, and so they lose the incentive to cooperate with others. What would happen is I think that there would be blood in the street if Trump got shot. I think parts of the military would mutiny. I think various militias and stuff would kill people. There'd be riots in major cities. I don't know how bad the blood would be.

The death of Trump is not my first target, is not one of the dominant variables I would use to predict a civil war, but I completely think that there would be violence. The thing is, even the reason the left is... Or the reason both sides are incredibly weak now, the Democrats and the Republicans are not operating under strong platforms, and so anything could knock them over at this point. Then inside them are various subfactions where the left has been eaten up by wokeness, which is this... It just gets more and more radical each time it happens, while the right is all these different subfactions. I would guess, and I'm just throwing this out here, you would see maybe someone like an Elon, someone like a Republican senator rise to a new leadership, and then you would compete with other Republicans for dominance inside the coalition.

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Com. Drinklmnt. Com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt. Com/modernwisdom. How does this relate to your predictions for a coming far-right backlash?

The reason I say that we're going to have a far-right backlash is the same reason why I think that we are going to have a revolution. Because what I see now, and I've looked at this through various different ways, is the elite now is incredibly stupid and foolish and arrogant, and they don't know how little they don't know. Meanwhile, you have this giant population of young men who are very well-armed. They have nothing to lose. They're hopeless, and they can be easily manipulated. That's first two variables. Third variable is that wokeness. Wokeness is very poorly constructed because it establishes no incentives for cooperation. If you're a straight white man, wokeness will never be nice to you no matter what you do. Meanwhile, they can't control the behavior of the people who are in their preferred racial or ethnic groups, where if you're a Black, Muslim, gay person, everything you do is fine. They can't control your behavior. Wokeness has got a lot of structural issues, and I can't believe they did it because they've pushed wokeness so hard that it's basically built up this obvious resentment against it, and that resentment is going to get loosened somewhere.

To repeat, foolish arrogant elite, young white men, and also DEI and the economy have really screwed over young white men so they can't succeed in the current corporate system. Then you have a suicidally delusional ideology. It's like you have two rooms. One building up pressure and one without enough pressure, and they're going to hit an equilibrium.

Me and you have spoken about this a couple of times before. My male sedation hypothesis versus your in-cell far-right uprising. Give your insight about where you think young men are at at the moment, mental health, their desire for revolution and such.

I've had this debate a bunch. I've had this discussion a lot of times, and The point that we've often ended up, I'm jumping three points ahead in the conversation, is that the conversation we often have is what I say is most young men won't want to fight. There's small cadres of radicals who will push for it. Then what happens is that those radicals are the people in charge. So if you look at these conflicts, the Jacobins were the French Revolution. They were less than 1% of France's population. This is such a cool fact. You could look at the political subfactions of the French Revolution based off what cafés they went to. Ditting me. No, really. Different political radicals in the French Revolution went to literally different cafés in Paris. You could map out the political radical factions based off what streets the cafés they went to were. So you're operating off groups that are that small. The The Bolsheviks, where they won the Russian Civil War, all communists were 3% of their population, and the Bolsheviks were a minority of that. The Puritans who won the English Civil War, they were 10% of the population.

The American Revolution, no one wanted the American Revolution five years before it started, and then it just got ratcheted up over time. When people ask me, Rudd-Yard, what are the different subdivisions inside the right? I say, Most people have no clue what's happening. Most people don't know what's going on. They don't really have a concept of of what's going to happen next. Then you have these factions of radicals that jockey. Before the English Civil War, people said the English have grown too weak to fight. This was in the 1600s. It had been over a century since England had a Civil War. What happened then is that the The Royalists and the parliamentarians, they just conscripted people. Same thing with the French Revolution, same thing with the Russian Civil War. The normies don't organize. They don't say, Let's have a riot for normies. Let's push normies, normies forever. The radicals organize, and then they conscript the normies. Most of the population can just want to play video games and do sports. What you need is you need to have small factions of radicals that are capable of conscripting the normies.

What was that stat that you came up with? 20% are motivated, 60% will do whatever somebody says.

What's that thing? I pulled that from game theory, where it's a bunch of different things, where in game theory, you've consistently found... I've studied multiple game theory studies on this. In general, 60% of the population will do what the group tells them to do. We have various game theory studies. One is, do you contribute to the pot or do you take away? 20% of the population always contributes, even if against their self-interest. 20% tries to cheat whenever they can. Then 60% just does whatever the group consensus is. For certain things, will you put up this sign in front of your house? For various studies, if you can change the neighborhood consensus, that will move 60 points. If the neighborhood consensus says, Don't put this sign up, 18% of people do it. If the neighborhood consensus changes, it moves up to 78%, yes. Most people today are in ennui. They don't know what they really want. They don't know what they're really doing.

What's an ennui for the people that don't know?

Oh, yeah. Ennui is a French word for a lack of connectiveness to your world and a lack of feeling connected to your life.

It's like an existential angst.

It is, yes. Most people don't know what's happening because the 2010 mind cannot comprehend our world, and most people are still mentally stuck in 2010. I like to say that the way I would explain life today to my teenage self is I would say, We became a sci-fi dystopia. But most people can't reach that conclusion, and so they're stuck in this middle ground. Our current period is a period in which all of these factions are squabbling over who will become the dominant culture in a way that's comparable to the Jacobins squabbling among other French radicals, the Bolsheviks squabbling among other Russians, various. We're in the building up period. As Lenin said, there are hours in which decades happen, and there are decades in which nothing happens. So history works. You don't realize it's going to happen until it slams you in face, like the start of World War I or the fall of the Soviet Union. This is just how things happen. Tensions gradually build up. If you're the person to look for this stuff, you see it. Otherwise, you can consider your life, and then it just hits.

You're really stretching my historical and imaginative abilities. Just trying to run forward with your idea of how easily swayed certain people are. Certainly, summer of 2020, we saw a lot of people, I think, get involved in a victim Jim hood narrative and identity politics that probably wouldn't have done previously, probably didn't actually have that much insight. I mean, we've seen it when you go to these protests and people are chanting from the river to the sea, and they say, Which river? Which sea? And they don't know what they're talking about. You've seen the same thing any time that you push groups on the far right or the far left to actually understand what they're talking about. It's pretty evident that most of these people are just holding on to the coattails of a movement that they think is the right or righteous thing to do. So I actually do see, even from my own experience, I do see that domino effect, this mass domino effect happening where only a small few groups at the start can rally many downstream.

What do normal people believe in?

I have no idea.

Exactly. What I've told... So one of the takes I've made is I think this war will be the bloodiest war. It'll be fought horribly. I think there's going to be purges. I think people burn cities down. And I was talking on another podcast. They said, Why do you think that? I said, If you can't actually... There are no deep values that are imprinted in people. Wokeness is very, I call it mask morality. It's this very exit. It's this very performance There's an affirmative morality that doesn't actually require that you change your character. I said that this is one of the great irony is that removing a Christian value system and replacing it with subjective postmodernism, there's something people don't realize, that is what got the Nazis or Stalin. Because once you think everything's subjective and everything is according to interpretation, you don't have an argument for killing people for your goals. You don't have an argument for killing millions of people to reach utopia. I think normal people, when they don't believe in anything, they are capable of doing absolutely horrible things. To bring back a question you asked at the start of the podcast, the reason I think this is possible is because the bloodiest events in history, the bloodiest wars, the worst genocides, the worst slave states in history happened within living memory.

Memory. You could call up people who are at the Holocaust or who were in Stalin's goulags now. And do you think we've really changed in the lifetime since?

So I think my position has been for quite a while, and I've put this to you, too, that there is just so much sedation of the populace, specifically the cohort that you're talking about through porn, through video games, through social media and screens, that there is this mass opium, this- Copium. Copium, indeed. And And my... I mean, fucking hell. Me laying the sanity and safety of the future of the West at the feet of porn websites, video games, and social media doesn't exactly sound like a glowing review. But I do think that there is so much... It could be so different that it's no longer just a difference of degree. It's genuinely a step change difference in what we're able to do and able to calming down this uprising desire, even when many other people are out there doing it, because it involves getting out of the house, getting dressed, utilizing the latent executive function that you haven't ever used.

Why do you think porn would have a strong enough effect for that to work?

I think that porn is able to curtail men's desire for reproduction, not satisfactorily, but I think it is able to at least stop them from feeling what in the past. I mean, what was that example from Portugal? I'm pretty sure you taught me about that. The first son got to marry the second, third, and fourth son. Oh, right. They were all put on galliant ships. Go explore the new world. What were they doing? They were trying to fix the sex ratio there. That basically, I I think that it gives a titrated dose of sexual satisfaction to men who without that, it would be just one more thing, the same as I don't sit at home and wonder about whether my life has meaning. I've got Netflix or I've got Xbox Live or whatever. I don't go out and spend sufficient time with my local cohort of friends to actually create a little revolutionary group that can go and push over granny and set cars on fire because I'm busy watching social media.

Why do you think porn has a strong enough effect to do that?

Not on its own to be able to do all of it. I think porn has a sufficiently strong effect to be able to sedate men's desire for women, just that men are largely mechanical creatures. The fact that you look at a four-inch across screen and see a naked woman and your brain tell your limbic system, some sex is about to happen. You can look around the side of it. You know that it's not real, and yet it's able to kid you. It's just so easily fallible that I think it's enough or it has been thus far enough to keep men unsatisfactorily. Yeah.

I'm 23, so I know a lot of the people in the demographic we're talking about explicitly. I think I think that for a part of men, that's true. I think human nature isn't like that, though. I think human nature is not that stupid, where if people don't actually have... I think the subconscious is very deep. If people don't actually have reproductive options, if they don't have pride, if they don't have self-respect, if they don't have the ability to move socially, I don't think they can trick their minds through various distractions. I think the easiest example of that is the cripplingly bad mental health mental health issues, because the mental health issues are a sign that subconsciously we just can't trick ourselves. I would agree with your thesis if this wasn't hitting elite aspirant men, because if you get a degree... It's a multivariate thing. It's not just a dating crisis. It's not being able to get a good job, cost of living being too high. I think it's 10 different things that pile up. If it was just the dating crisis, we wouldn't have this, but the other things add up, too. I think all of that adds up so that it creates enough of a sense of desperation among elite aspirant men that you could have this.

The example I'll give is, remember the Columbia protests?

No.

Not Columbia, Bogotá, Columbia, New York City. No. These were really remarkable to watch. People often ask me, Ruddard, How come you think the right will get this crazy? The reason I say is the left got this crazy already. If you They looked back for the things that let the left to get this crazy, it's a lot less bad than what we're facing now. Columbia protests. The thing that really shocked me is I'm the same age as these kids, and so I know that they went through seven years of indoctrination against the Holocaust. The second they get out of the school, the second they get out of the cradle, they're immediately shouting Antifada from the river to the sea. That means the programming is very weak. It also, it was crazy because I've studied the history of communism, and they're speaking Communist. Communists have verbal tics that they use to signal to each other that other people don't know. They were saying all the Communist verbal tics. They were marching in ranks. They were saying, You must always keep the revolution in your hearts, that we must destroy the imperial core. The left is all projections.

When they said, The right only speaks the language of genocide, what they were really saying is, We We want to do that. I was watching another Columbia student who she was saying, and she was a young black lady, she was talking to a camera where she said, I'm not a violent person, but if a Zionist were to get in my way, I don't know what I would do. Looking at her body language, it was just horrifying. I think most young men can be sedated. I don't think you can trick the human subconscious through surrogates because our current mental health demonstrates that doesn't work. Even with the dating issues, I think there's enough other stuff that's piled up where the human mind, and we ascribe rationality that human mind which isn't true, humans also care about pride and dignity and social status and that stuff. I think wokeness by itself, it humiliates young white men enough to build up resentment for it. I spend a lot of time on right wing Twitter. I know people say Twitter is not real life, but I would argue Twitter in some ways is realer than real life.

You have a guy Just like a guy that spends all his time on Twitter would say.

Let me explain this. Some ways, exactly. Because let's say you know a nice guy at work and he posts far-right stuff on Twitter. The thing him at work is this façade he puts up. Well, the thing he posts on Twitter is what he actually believe.

Did you ever read Everybody Lies by Seth Steep? That's a great book. Yeah. So basically, the thesis is that people tell Google things that they don't even tell their partner, their friend. Yeah, exactly. Or sometimes themselves. They've got this weird lump on the back of their ankle that they've not allowed to arise in consciousness for ages. But they'll give it a quick Google. So from aggregated, deepersonalized Google search terms, you can work out all sorts of- Glad you said that.

So I have a buddy. He does really interesting stuff. He runs AI and has systems where you can look at how you move your head, how you twitch your hand. And from that, he makes a four-factor Jungian model of your personality.

The most Rudd yard Lynch fucking friend I've ever heard.

Okay, go on. Yes. He also studies the verbal language of the internet. We're hitting basically sociopathic... We're hitting sociopath levels on the internet. Keep in mind, the general populace doesn't have to do this stuff. Just small groups of radicals. I can definitely say that there are large groups. There are large small groups of radicals who would definitely do this. We would agree that this stuff on the left. We would I agree that there are people on the left who want to do this. What I'd say is, look at the ruling class. Look at the Democratic Party was trying to take Trump off the ballot. The news constantly lies. Let's go through all the big content creators. Destiny said it was okay. He wouldn't be against killing Conservatives. Vausch said progressives should get guns to fight against Conservatives. You've had... Hassan Piker has offended Houthi pirates. On the right, we know that nick Fuentes, this is the stuff he's definitely not against. These people repeat back to their audiences what their audiences want to hear. I struggled to find a single institution in our society that is not on the... A single institution that reflects the public consciousness of the population, that's not just in a really, really scary place now.

So are you saying the people who have some of the loudest megaphones have the extremist voices?

They have those extremist voices because it's what the people want. They're reflecting, and I'm a content creator, I know how this works, where you, as a content creator, I like to joke, I'm married to my audience, so I tried to maintain a good relationship with my audience because we're stuck together. I'm a college dropout. I have to make this work. And so the content creators normally have a pretty good comprehension about what their audience wants to see, and they're very glued into this. If all of these content creators are saying, Violence is okay, that means it's what their audience wants to hear. I've given 15 different proxies. It's yet another proxy for the public wants this.

Yeah, I think there's definitely something interesting about the displeasure and the disgust that some elements of the far left have with big chunk of the West, which is white guys. If you're a white man, you are the very, very bottom of the victimhood hierarchy. You get no points at all. You had this quote, which I really thought was interesting. Don't gloat over your conquered foe. It gains you nothing and makes the Conquered more dangerous. Yeah. And that, to me, it is indicative of this really... Well, actually, just explain that quote to me. Why was that so interesting?

I mean, if you look at the history of empires, it's obvious. If you want to conquer someone, you need to have a relationship with them. It doesn't have to be a good relationship, but let's look at the British Empire as an example. When the English subjugated the Irish and the Scottish, they gave them social status if they fought for the Empire. You could be an Irish or a Scottish guy, go to India, and you'd be treated like an English person. That was a way to get rid of all of the aspirational, aggressive, young Irish and Scottish guys. With the Romans, if they conquered you, you were a sharp young guy, they would let you into Roman culture. When you conquer someone, you still have a relationship with.

Assimilate in some way.

Exactly. The left always really shocks me because their complete lack of strategy is insane, where they do not look at the... The left's great strength is the ability to manipulate people, where they can, especially women, the left has 10 different hooks in the collective psyche of women that they can pull from to get them to do what they want. They're horrible at grand strategy, though. It's really shocking where they just set up their entire coalition. Their coalition building is really bad, which is, I could explain that if you'd like. They've established no incentive for white men to cooperate inside the system, and they keep on ritually humiliating them. I don't think this would be this bad if the lefts didn't turn every single vector of culture into ritual humiliation of white men. Even if they just let Hollywood not be woke, I think it would make things a lot better. But normies can't not ignore Hollywood. I'm going to throw this point in here. We're at a point where the democratically elected governments of the West are purposely committing civilization occupational suicide. If we've reached this threshold, and we can't talk about it, something's very wrong, where the governments of the West, a lot of them are doing degrowth, the degrowth of an industrialized economy.

They're bringing in immigrants, not out of economic self-interest, but to to replace the local population. They're trying to overregulate the economy. They're trying to get rid of Western heritage and Western culture and even destroy statues of the West former leaders. The point of this is not some... It's not some warped self-interest. It's suicide. We are a civilization that's openly committing suicide.

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Com/modernwisdom and the code MW20. 20 at checkout. I saw an interesting one of the three morning takes from PirateWise today talking about this guy that's coming up with a technology. Is it sulfur technology that they spray into the atmosphere to reflect the Sun's rays away. So basically, we can curtail some of the effect of carbon emissions in the atmosphere in global warming by getting up above the carbon reflection and reflecting it back before it comes down to the Earth. And this has been loudly, loudly denounced by all of the pro-green environmental movements. It was the theory on pirate wires. The reason for that is that it cuts off at the knees the degrowth movement.

Yes, exactly. I was talking to some people I know, and they asked me, they're from the Northeast. They said, Do Texans feel guilty for using air conditioning all year? And I said, No chance. It's a non-negotiable for this to be an industrialized civilization. If Texas didn't have AC, we'd be having this conversation in Pennsylvania or California.

It's a vital system.

Exactly, yeah. The crazy thing is that... The reason they're pushing against air conditioning. And air conditioning, do you explain this further? You could nuke the entirety of Northwestern Europe, and it would have little effect on carbon emissions. The thing that really is pushing carbon emissions is China and India installing 100 100 coal-powered factories every second. If you really cared about fixing the climate, you would build nuclear power. France or Hungary are mostly driven off nuclear power. But the point, and I just released a video on the Unabomber, and the thesis I say with the video is that there are psychological pressures implicit to industrial civilization that we don't understand that create psychological issues which mean that people are actively pushing for the death of civilization. The reason, I think, is I don't think humans... This is a whole different tangent. I don't think humans evolved to live outside villages. I don't think humans evolved to live in cities and away from the Earth. I think it creates weird psychological pressures. It's not a coincidence that the places that have been industrialized for the longest, such as the northeastern US, the Netherlands, Britain, are the places they're trying to commit civilizational suicide.

Because I think industrial civilization, we We haven't figured out the cultural compatibility with it in the same way that for the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, looking through the archeological record, we find that there were very rapid fluctuations in population. Population goes up, crashes by 80%, goes up again, crashes by 60%. That happened a couple of times as agriculture was inventing because people didn't know how to deal with an agricultural society.

I think that- What do you think happened? What causes so many people to pass?

This is super cool. You know how when the Europeans came to the New World, the diseases wiped out the natives? The reasoning for that is that from the period between 10,000 BC and 5,000 BC, the Eurasians started dealing with domesticated animals like cows and pigs, and almost all of our diseases are from domesticated animals. What happens when you start living with them very closely is that you get all these diseases. Agriculture was invented in 10,000 BC. The first cities were around 4,000 BC. The world's population was stagnant even after the invention of agriculture long term because we were hit by so many waves of diseases that we didn't evolve for. The Eurasians went through this disease gradient that wiped out the Native Americans who didn't have domesticated animals in the 10,000 BC to 5,000 BC period. I would say disease is the biggest cause, but we also know that agriculture was spread by genocide, and so it's very difficult to get a non-agricultural population to take in agriculture. The middle Middle Eastern has genocided a lot the western half of Asia against the native peoples. But we have archeological records that the native peoples could launch...

The native hunter-gatherer peoples were able to launch counterattacks that could wipe out hundreds of miles of farmer land. We know from archeology, there was a native Confederacy in Scandinavia that launched a genocidal war across Poland and Germany 7,000 years ago.

That is so cool. Just touching on a topic that seems quite timely at the moment when we're We're talking about population decline, birth rates at the moment. How do you fold the current declining birth rates into this discussion?

I was hoping we'd get to this. Do you know Mouse Utopia?

Assume I don't.

Okay, great. So Mouse Utopia, and this is one of my best videos for people watching, Mouse Utopia was a study that was run 30 times in the '60s and '70s. The way the study works is that you drop nine mice a cage that can hold 6,000 mice with perfect conditions. Then what happens is that the mice population balloons. There's infinite food, no predators, perfect climate, no disease. They were doing this at the time because this was the era when the world's population went up five times over in the 20th century. For reasonable reasons, they were worried about what the effects of that would be. Then past the 2000 mark, and again, that's one-third the carrying capacity, bizarre How far things happen. The mice split up into different subcategories of antisocial behavior. You had autistic mice who couldn't socially interact. You had sociopathic mice who would kill the mice that would continue to breed. You had the beautiful ones who would just groom themselves all day, but they would never breed. You had female mice who refused to mate, and they just hang out isolated. You had homeless mice who would wander around the center of the colony, allowing themselves to get beaten up.

The mouse social structure completely broke down, and then the birth Earth rate crashed to completely zero as the mice lost the ability to have communities or socially interact with each other.

How much have we, as humans with frontal lobes, got to learn from the social structure of mice? Yes.

The mouse and the human brain structure is similar except for one variable, that being the prefrontal cortex, as you teased out, where we have the amygdala and we have the lizard and the mammal brain, and those control for automatic functions. How we process fear, or horniness, or jealousy, or happiness, or excitement, we process that similarly to a dog, or a horse, or a cat, because we have the same lizard brain and the same mammal brain. So automatic functions and emotions are comparable across mammals. Now, finally, the thing that we do have that the mice don't is we have a vastly enlarged prefrontal cortex, which is the ability to plan and think and abstract. That's what allowed the creation of human civilization. With mouse utopia, you're seeing fundamentally hormonal changes where the mice aren't rationally thinking to themselves that I don't want to have kids. I hate everyone around me. I'm going to be depressed. The mice just act on impulse because the hormones change. It's comparable to people with mental health conditions or who catch diseases. We humans, You could, let's say, catch a horrifying disease tomorrow, and then it would completely change how you feel the world on a personal basis.

Our minds are not buffered from the world. We would see the same hormonal changes as the mice, but we would have the ability to think about them abstractly. But what I'd say for mouse utopia is every single thing in mouse utopia has already happened. It just it hasn't fully played through its logic.

What is the underlying dynamic that caused that to happen? In mouse utopia? I don't understand why you get to one-third the carrying capacity of a perfect environment and all of these weird side effects. What's media? Is there a fucking spirit that gets in there and goes, Oh, they hit the 2000 thing. Time for the ethereal mouse poltergeist to go in and make everybody crazy. What's the dynamic? What's going on?

It's hard to say. I mean, if you look at the fall of Rome as an example, it's unclear what caused the fall of Rome, where people... It's often a Rorschach test for what care about. You can say the fall of Rome was caused by change in military structure, Rome civilisational cycle ending, climate change, population decline, decline in values, etc. So complex historic events, it's often very difficult to figure out what actually caused them. Why did Genghis Khan become such a great conqueror? I could give you 10 reasons. I don't know which one is accurate. And Mouse Utopia's comparable, where the guy who ran the experiment, Calhoun- He did Did he do the same, all 30? Yeah, he did 30 together.

Oh, so he did them all at the same time?

No, no. He did over a very long period of time, and he did 30 experiments. Understood. Yes. So he, after doing all the experiments, said that it was lack of agency. That the mice, once they lived in a perfect world that was overcrowded, they stopped feeling like they could actually go out in the world and do things. It's very comparable to what Ted Kuzinski said, the issue with modern civilization, which is over socialization.

Do Be into that for me.

This is my last video as well, so it's pretty topical. The Unabommer said that industrial civilization would either collapse or we would use genetic engineering to change humans into cogs over the course of the 21st century. For those that don't know, the Unabommer was a terrorist in the 1990s. The reason he did his terrorism was to get the message out so that people could deal with it. But what the Unabommer said is that the complex interconnected system that is industrial civilization is so difficult to get to flow together that you need to have the individual sacrifice lots of their animal nature and lots of their individuality to get the system to work.

How so?

I'm going to use an example I did from the last video. There was no concept of employment in the pre-industrial world. Everyone was a renting farmer, and they worked for themselves. In the pre-industrial world, the family was an economic unit. You Your father was your boss. You worked with your father. Your mother helped manage the economic system that was the family. You knew everyone around you. In the pre-industrial world, society was a community of people you know. Every single service, whether your religion, whether your insurance, whether your military defense, whether your people you work with for your job, they were all people you knew. It was a community. The idea of splitting people up into all these different subcomponents of their lives. It didn't exist back then. Now, modern civilization is a bureaucracy. I like to say a normal person knows significantly more bureaucracies than they have friends, where there's the bureaucracy that handles waste, there's the school, there's your work, et cetera. The thing with bureaucracies is you can't build up intimate social connections. What happens here is that because society gets atomized and split up due to the sheer scale of industrial civilization, it means a person has to wear their mask all the time.

They can't be authentic. They have to wear their mask with their boss. They have to wear their mask often with their families, with their friends. We've consistently found in all the great big universities like Harvard and Columbia have studied this, the most important component for happiness is social connection. That would have significant social effects that we wouldn't even mentally process. It's not a side dish, it's the main course. One of the most interesting books I've read is The History of Manners by Norbert Elias. It's a history of manners in the Western world from the Middle Ages until the present. The fascinating thing is in the Middle Ages, if you wanted to cook something, you would cut up the animal carcass in front of your friends. In the Middle Ages, it was completely normal for friends and family to have sex in front of each other. Knights would write poetry about how much they loved the act of killing. It was a society where there was no concept of privacy. Those are things that we find disgusting in our society because we deal with so many people we don't know that we don't want to see people we don't know do those things.

The argument that the Unibomber made, and this is really crazy, where the left societies in collapse normally push their worst trait even further. That's a fascinating historical trend where when the Aztecs knew they were going to die as a civilization, they killed more people. When the Nazis knew that they were going to lose World War II, they killed more Jews. When the Muslim world realized the European colonialists would wipe them out, they became more conservative. What the left did upon dealing with the underlying issues of industrial civilization is that they doubled down on using social engineering to control people. If you're a leftist, you're not allowed to like your country, you're not allowed to be possessive in romantic relationships, you're not allowed to want to kill people, you're not allowed to be chauvinistic and naturally push your own self-interest, you're not allowed to use magical thinking or believe in the divine. Where if you look at the left's worldview, and I know lots of people like this, people who are just the inner elite or the low-level elite of the managerial class is completely socialized. If you look at someone like, let's say, a local bank branch manager or someone who works in the bureaucracy of Google, there are people who can't change out of the corporate America setting.

They don't show a wide variety of emotions. They don't think things they're not told to. They do whatever their elites say.

They believe- Has that not always been the way? Has it not always been the case that you've got chattel class that just does what the elites expect of them and want to model what their betters are doing?

It's the degree of control. I mean, everything... One of the things I like to say is everything is a matter of range, and so the range is everything. The degree of socialization we have now is completely unparalleled. Where you look at the left, the left wants to shut down human nature. They want to push for a society where you don't have kids, where you don't push for your nation's self-interest, and all the things I said before. So there are differing degrees of control, and I don't think it's that much... It's not a top-down control. It's not the Soviet Union, where if you don't follow orders, the Polit Bureau shoots you. It's more so that through the process of education and socialization, we have an incredibly rigid social code that doesn't have place for human nature.

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What are they facing, printing around?

That's a great question. The video I'm writing now is the Anthropology of the Left. The video I'm going to write next is The Anthropology of the Right. I study the left and the right as if they were tribes in the Amazon of the Congo. I look at the demographics that formed them, their philosophic assumptions, their strengths and weaknesses. The right has no shared coherent ideology. The right doesn't... Thomas Sowell has said that the right is whatever the left isn't. If you look at Conservatives, you have the Taliban, you have libertarians, you have Nazis, you have monarchists, You have religious fundamentalists, you have classical liberals. These people share nothing except the left's coherent vision of the world. The future is whatever the left says, and the Conservatives build their worldview off a past that never really existed. When we're talking at the right, we're talking at different factions. I think the boomer cons in the old school right are, frankly, am I allowed to swear in the show? Of course. Oh, yeah, they're cucks. The boomer cons are cucks. They don't go hard enough. They don't have any concept of what's going on in the world.

The new right are sociopaths. The Christian right is delusional. Yeah, you can just give me factions and I can criticize them.

Well, it seems to To me, at least looking at good portions of the right, maybe more the manosphere right, the young men's movement, there is so much fucking cynicism. It is a very uninspiring movement to be a part of.

Exactly. I say the biggest issue of the new right is that the biggest issue of our entire society is it lacks a soul. There's a wonderful book by an Orthodox theologian that says, The modern world is divided between those who numb itself to its meaninglessness through various substances and various hedonisms, and for those who realize it and go crazy. Exactly.

When I look at a lot of the, even the more right-leaning content at the moment, Even the hopeful messages are guised within a, you have to do this because if you don't do this, then everything's going to go to shit. Like your hopefulness is delivered at the end of a barrel of a gun.

Yeah, exactly. And Yeah, it's just depressing. The thing I see with a lot of the new bright is it's very cynical. You're right. It lacks any sense of inner authenticity or inner truth. It's funny. The people who tell you to be authentic are the least authentic people in the world. Some random red neck from my hometown in Pennsylvania is much more authentic than a person who says, be yourself, love yourself, be authentic. It also gets stuck on weird points Where this is a big issue. We've lost the ability to change settings. The new right obsesses over a couple of different topics, like abortion or the Jews or physical fitness or just hatred of the left, and they lose the ability to see the bigger picture. Every ideology now is hyper materialist in that it only sees things from their material good, and it lacks any concept of the inner soul or character of things. Yeah. I mean, I think that it's a lot of desperate people who look for some hedonism as a way to get out of desperation because they don't have a better idea.

Yeah. I wonder what the combination of extreme cynicism with a fractured, fragmented inner is. I'm always really cautious. I've got four rules of how you can tell if a content creator is being honest and truthful. One of them is, is there in-group bound together over the mutual hatred of an out-group or the mutual love of their in-group? Yes. I think I see an awful lot of... On both sides, their identification is, we don't know what we are necessarily, but we know that we're not that, and that is the other side.

Yes, exactly. It's why for my channel, I've said that the value that I try to build my channel around is honor, because I said the right now is based around hatred of the left. I say a lot of the factions of the right, there It's a rationalization for killing people. I think that's going to end up in a very bad place. You need to create an active value. It's why I said, We stand for... When I released one of my videos, I said, Honor, truth, and freedom. I think those are important values. I think that we're in a winnowing event for political content creators. I don't think 80 % will make it in the next three years.

I think we're going to see- Not if this fucking 2024 keeps going the way it is. Dude, I think that the last four four weeks has been the highest revenue for the guys that are like, balls deep in the political. Daily Wire, for instance. I would wage a money that they have made more cash in the last month than they will have ever made before.

Damn, that's cool. But what I see with a lot of content creators is just they're having horrible mental health issues or they're having serious... They're having like... So you had Hassan, he had his breaking point where he threatened to kill himself. Vausch had his pedo scandal. Destiny had his scandal about... What am I going to call it again? You know what I'm talking about, saying that you're allowed to shoot Trump voters. The Daily Wire had internal drama. Back in my head, I've got a list of 10 of those. You could throw... There's probably three times as many. But I think that we are in a critical three-year window in which the world, both for content, for politics, for our nation, will change very much in the next three years. It's comparable to... Do you remember the world before COVID? Yeah, briefly. Yeah. It's not the same world as today. I remember I think in music, and in 2020, there are different songs I use to symbolize different mental states I have. I want to change how I think I change the music. I have a song in my mind that's symbolic for the age that came before.

I remember listening to this in 2020, and I thought to myself, I'm going to listen to this song now knowing that in the future, I will look back on this and realize that this time is gone, but I didn't know what will come next.

Right. Okay. Yeah. Again, another very you thing to do. One interesting insight, just going back to the right, the anti-intellectual culture that they have at the moment. What's the role that you see that playing?

Because I don't know. It seems to me that that's a shitty thing to embody. It is. Yeah. My thing here is that the managers and the experts have really screwed over people over the last 40 years. I have a text wall where I talk about 10 different ways the experts massively lied. One, saying that fat is the end all, be all of health, and that, sorry, you should just cut out fat, don't care about sugar, caused massive issues. When I was growing up, we had the food pyramid. The food pyramid said you needed to have carbs, the most of anything, and that lean meat was bad for you. That's example one, saying men and women are the same. That's a massive expert lie, saying genetics has no value. I'm from Pennsylvania. My part of the country got hosed by deindustrialization. Then the experts all said, We're going to get you coding jobs. We'll make sure it's fine. Philadelphia now is a lower population than it did in 1950. Besides that, there was this whole neoliberal globalist project that everyone said it would bring about utopia, and it brought out the opposite. I could fund 30 examples where the experts have just massively lied.

I think A lot of the right is people who don't have high enough... A lot of, most of the world is people who don't... Let me back up. I like to say that if you're not an intelligent person, there's a couple of strategies. You realize that you are not intelligent, so you try to figure out someone more intelligent to model your behavior off.

If you're in that category, which is not as genetically intelligent, and you've realized the people on top keep lying to you, and you don't know or trust anyone who's more intelligent, who has your best interests in mind, you're just going to hate them as a demographic. That's interesting. Yeah. I previously would have followed a group that I could reliably use as a waymarker for me to track my future. I don't necessarily I don't necessarily have the agency all the time. I'm so busy that I don't actually have the opportunity to do the reflection that's needed. So I'll model behavior of those people. But this massive loss in trust in organizations, in media, in science, just trust the science now is It's used ironically. So, yeah, that's interesting. And we're seeing a good bit of this. Candice Owens had her, well, is the world round? Is the Earth really round or is it flat? Because I don't trust it. And that's taking this to the absolute most extreme Dream.

Tucker Carlson is bringing creationism back to the front. Well, evolution, we've got a lot of questions that we need to ask there.

It's almost like, I believe that these people believe it, but I also know that they can get away with the because it is the tip of the spear of a huge shaft, which is all of this anti-intellectual scientific skepticism.

Yeah, we lack wisdom, and the wise man doesn't know what he doesn't know. What about the left? How did the left end up getting so feminine in that way? Why are there no strong masculine figures standing with the working class? That's really a great question. In the video that I'm writing now, and I'm going to release in the next week, I split the left into the Western left and the Eastern left. The Eastern left is Marxism. The Western left is our left. It goes back to the French Revolution. There was a thinker in 1810s France called Saint-Simon. Saint-simon pushed for liberating the third world to launch a revolution in the first world, the destruction of sex and trans. He pushed for the creation of a new man, creating a religion of science where you built secular rituals to worship the experts, and the breakdown of creation of complete equality. Everything in the left today, you can find in French thinkers from the revolution 200 years ago, you can view a tremendous amount of the current left as a resentful, spurned lover against the working classes. Because the aim of the working classes was largely to get more money, and the left saw the working classes as this wedge to get them into power.

The leftist elite is all either are basically academics or thugs. This was an earlier Communist. The communists elite was either academics, then when the revolution worked, the thugs killed the academics. Stalin and Castro and Mao were literally like bandits for parts of their lives. What happened with the spurning of the working classes is that the left redirected towards women. Women were a demographic that was easier to manipulate and socially control. I just read two incredible books about this. One is The Leviathan and its Enemies by Sam Francis, and the other one is the Total State by Oren McEntire. Both of them are books on how the ruling class controls the population, because I'm going to make a video series talking about the mechanisms of power. They both call the leftist elite foxes. Foxes are the kinds of people who manipulate through cunning. They're good people at running systems. They're good people at getting inside the levers of bureaucracy itself. It's comparable to when an empire falls, there's always either a child Emperor or an old fool surrounded by eunix, harem girls, and bureaucrats. Our elite are eunix, harem girls, and bureaucrats. The left went through the left because the left doesn't like using actual physical force, thus their levers of power come through manipulation.

That's indirectly a lot of the PSYOP stuff and the psychological manipulation comes from advertising. The people who made the advertising industry were the exact same people with the people who made propaganda during the World Wars. World War I created the advertising industry for that reason. The left is able to use women and psychologically manipulate them. And women agree to this because the state can fill the void that men used to be. So the state can keep you from being attacked. It can feed you with welfare. It can make sure you have good health. It can give you insurance. So the state was able to make, and the bureaucracy was able to make a bargain with women where in exchange for us replacing men, you give us unquestioning loyalty in exchange for your freedom from the patriarchy. And so that's the calculation that's going on. The problem is that the left is desperate and they can't renegotiate that.

They're pushing up against the end of their lever. They're stuck pushing this equation and this bargain more and more to desperately maintain power, and they lack the ability to form a new coalition.

Yeah, that is interesting. What's the role of multiculturalism in this? Yes. The modern supply chain is very complex and it's very large. This shirt, I think it's probably made in Vietnam. It's designed in, I don't know, Europe, made in Vietnam. Now we're in Texas. The globalization of the economy requires a tremendous amount of cooperation by different different nations. That's reason one. Globalism, and multiculturalism, allows greater accreation of wealth by large multinational companies. Second reason is that by watering down the West's culture, and the West is the most individualistic society ever, they can dominate their own populations only by taking an immigrant from elsewhere and by making globalist values do get rid of those pesky Western values like pride and freedom and in individual rights. It's inside the self-interest of the elites to push for globalism, either to weaken the strength of their enemies inside their own countries, to get value and strength from other countries or from the ability to cooperate transnationally more easily. Does the globally interconnected world and the fact that we are so multicultural, does that change any of the dynamics that you were looking at previously? This is a great question, and it brings up, I think, possibly this is my best video.

It's not the one that I look back upon most fondly, but this is probably my best video, Modern Civilization.

Civilization, because one of the angles I look at is civilizational analysis. I study the strengths and weaknesses and the origins of Western, Greco-Roman, Chinese, Indian civilization. I found that starting around the time of the World Wars, You saw something that looked independent from the other civilizations, where if you go to Egypt or Italy, Egypt especially, you can look at the Persian, the Greek, the Roman, the British, the Islamic architecture, and you know that that was a different civilization with a different idea. After the World Wars, block architecture took over the world. These concrete square blocks, they don't symbolize anything. When I briefly lived in California, I'm from rural Pennsylvania. In rural Pennsylvania, most people are white, Christian. They wear European European-style clothes. They live in European-style houses. They have a European political philosophy. California, clothes aren't European. Most people aren't white. They operate off postmodernist political philosophy. They're not Christian. They wear clothes invented in California. So implicit in that is the creation of a new cultural formation that I call modern civilization. And Sam Francis has said that the managerial class is trying to create a new civilization independent of Western civilization, similarly to how the communists launched the cultural revolution against the old Russian or Chinese civilizations.

So the elite is trying to make a new civilization. The problem is that new civilization doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't have any deep roots it can pull from, so it's doomed to fail. It seems interesting to me to think about, we were talking, are we in post-history? Are the lessons of before no longer applicable now? And one of the things, whether it be science, technology, social order, this belief that we all have in the back of our minds that we're no longer driven by the same things that drove rat utopia, mouse utopia, or our previous history.

And I do wonder how much of a hedge or how stabilizing it is that everybody is so interconnected from a global perspective that we don't want to cause too much of a ruckus or that other states are going to step in to be ballast. You know what I mean? Yes. There was an author named Angel before World War I who made that exact same argument. Before World War I, Angel's argument is that the global economy is interconnected enough that there's not an incentive to have war. The irony is that Statistically, it produces the opposite. The more interconnected a system is, the more likely it is to break down.

Why do you think that is? There's something called complexity theory. And complexity theory was used first for traffic jams, and then we later used it for the Bronze Age collapse, where once When you have throw more complex variables into an interconnected system, one of them can go wrong, and then it spreads across the system. For example, the Silk Road tied Europe together in the Middle Ages, but then that meant that the Black Death could spread from China to Europe in a five-year period. What happened with the Bronze Age collapse, and this is something people forget about, is the Middle East and the known world 3,000 years ago was pretty advanced. You had cities, you had markets, you had writing, you had a banking system, all that stuff, advanced governments. But they were dependent upon long-distant trade where it's funny, the regimes in Syria, they would source tin from Britain because it was so... Tin is a vital subcomponent of bronze. The only way that they could source tin was from Britain and Afghanistan. So very complex system. What happened in the Bronze Age world is that once one country fell apart, the entire Bronze Age system fell apart.

The Greeks fell apart, the Hittites fell apart, the Syrians dead. There were similar collapses in India or China. What happened in World War I was that the system was very complex, but it also created competitivity where The reason World War I happened, the British and the French were scared the Germans would out-competed them. The Germans were scared the Russians would out-competed them. So inside that globalist market system came competition and a greater degree of strife. I I mean, this argument has been used before. I don't think... We often project our social attitudes onto other countries where we're a very market-focused, very wealth-focused society. But look at China. China just shut itself off from the world. Western journalists aren't allowed in China. They've been just stealing money from people. They're killing millions of Uyghurs. China just shut itself off from the global economy, and they made that for political calculations. Before and people thought that was impossible because from the Western mind, you're thinking, they're trying to get their people to be more rich, right? And the Chinese were thinking, no, we want to stay in power. And so we shouldn't assume that all the players involved have comparable motivations to us.

One of the interesting stats that I learned was the increase in the use of the word racist or racism in the New York Times. I think it was from 2008 to 2018.

It goes up by this, it's like 42 times increase or something like that. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the data suggested that real racism had been declining. And then we've seen in the last 2-3 years or so, at least for me, being exposed to stuff on the Internet, way more latent anti-Semitism than I ever knew existed. I wasn't around that many Jewish people growing up. Jews don't have that same foothold culturally in the UK that they do in the US. I did live near, I think, one of the densest Jewish populations outside of Israel, which is just north of the River Tine in New Castle. Wait, you're from New Castle? Is the other side of the river, it's like Bamberg? What's the name of it? Bambra is Bambra. Bambra is one of them. Yes. But Gateshead and just a little bit above that is where this particular area is. What do you lay the recent increase in anti-Semitism at the feet It feels like Kanye's fucking fired the starter pistol and it's just been going from there. I'm glad you brought that up because that's something I've seen, and I exist in conservative spaces where it's just ugly now.

Like the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, whatever, it's not good. I think I really dislike this sentiment, the left did it, and thus we have to be the opposite of the left.

It's very reactionable. Because the left is so accepting, even if it's only performatively of these things. The left is that, therefore we are whatever the opposite is. Yes. Yeah, in baboon colonies, if one superior kicks an inferior baboon, that baboon will kick a further inferior baboon. Packing order type. Exactly, yeah.

It's the displacement of aggression. People's lives suck now, and so they look for a scapegoat. The Jews are a convenient scapegoat.

There's an element of truth to everything where Jews are disproportionately left wing. They are disproportionately in positions of authority. They make an easy scapegoat because they... If you want to scapegoat the Chinese Communist Party, good luck. If you want to scapegoat Islam, again, good luck. What do you mean when you say that? Why good luck? If you're one of those content creators like Sir Pensa or Lauey that constantly criticizes the Chinese Communist Party, you get a lot of crap for that. You don't want to be enemies with Islam or the Chinese Communist Party or the American Deep State. If you criticize the Jews. Most people don't know other Jews.

The Jews are in this sweet spot in this uncanny valley that they're powerful enough to be a scapegoat, but they're not powerful enough that you're actually threatened by scapegoating them.

Does that make sense? You go back to history, and this is... Man, this is something I'm researching. I've got a 2000-page reading list because I'm reading up on Jewish civilization because I want to make the definitive answer on why the Jews get persecuted so much. What about whatever the situation is that justifies that. But I mean, this is super common. Antisemitism is just incredibly common over history. It's just a continuation of the pattern. The thing that shocks me is I was fed so much the Holocaust stuff as a kid that it's crazy that the programming was so skin level. It wasn't sticky enough to stick around. I remember this family guy sketch where it's these Jews that are helping to build the pyramids, and they're being whipped by one of these Egyptians as they're going up. And the one that's carrying the first big brick turns around to the guy that's behind him, and he says, All nations have to put up with their amount of persecution.

Us Jews are getting ours out of the way early. After this, it's just going to be clean sailing. And it's so right because you think, my God, this is a particular group of people that just keep on being on the wrong end of a whole host of pretty nasty outcome. Yeah. This is basically historical fan fic, but I sometimes imagine... Because we know that Abraham existed, because all the descendants of Abraham, we've praised everyone who claimed the descendant of Abraham, and they have a shared Y chromosome in that place that time. I do wonder, is like historical fanfic, if Abraham made a deal where in exchange for suffering, the Jews could create so much stuff.

Because suffering allows greatness. It kills off the weak people. It push harder. You look at the Jews, they've produced Christianity, they've produced Judaism, they've produced Einstein's physics. Spinoza was a Jew, Marx was a Jew. It's crazy to see this population where they've suffered so much, but on top of that, they've produced so much. They're the same variable. What are your thoughts on Nik Fuentes? Oh, did you hear my recent beef with him? You had beef? Oh, yeah. My most successful tweet ever came out. I sent it out last week, and I called him a fed. It got 3 million views, and I detailed all the reasons why I think he's a fed. Give me the portfolio. Give me your proposal.

The short answer is I was looking at his various self-interests, and I realized the calculations he was making were not actually...

The calculations he were making were not what made sense for him. So he targets all the other figures inside the hard right, which doesn't really make sense unless he's a fed because you'd think these would be coalition partners. Instead, what he's doing is he targeted Menchis Moldeburg, Bronze Age pervert, Zero P. Lovecraft. I think There's some evidence for Solbra. He's targeting all these people, many of them for being Jewish. But these are the kinds of people that could genuinely... I don't agree with their ideas, but I respect that they have intellectual grit. Then on top of that, he portrays the hard right in the least sympathetic light possible. He's openly a Tradcath, Incel, anti-democracy, Holocaust-denying fashion obnoxist. If I was in his shoes, I would say, Yes, I love democracy, but what we have now is not real democracy. I support real democracy for the people. The only way to have real democracy for the people is to centralize it in the hands of a leader who can represent the will of the That's what I would say if I was him. I would not say those things. He attacks other right-wing thinkers. He makes himself look very bad.

He got off really light for J6, which you'd think that the legal system would go after him punitively, where the legal system would go after him punitively because he's exactly the person who they'd like to make a symbol out of. But no, he got off very light. I think what happened is that I don't think he's genetically a fed. I think it was something that was forced on him in exchange for not going to jail, where I think he genuinely is a conservative, but I think he's forced to do some stuff in order to not go to jail. That is a serious conspiracy theory. I suppose as well, regardless of what you think about his politics, he's not a total stupid person. No, that's what I said at the end of the tweet. I said that I could tell his mind works very quickly, but the things he say doesn't match the speed of his mind. I can look at him and I can see the gears are moving very quickly, but there isn't an alignment between the external show and his underlying conscience.

Does that make sense? So what does that portray to you? For certain people, you can look at them and you can see a unity of their character in that from front to back, they're the same person.

When I see a disjoint like that, it means that there's... Because whenever I talk to someone, I get a vibe. What do I know about this person?

What don't I know?

For a lot of people, I get the impression there are three important facts I don't know. And so when I see a disjoint like that, what it tells me is that his underlying motives are not what the external appearance is. I've had a couple of conversations with people that are like that. One a while ago, and I'd done It's a big episode, and we sit down and we have this chat, and then we finish up. And there was this moment where I paid a compliment at the end, and there was a flash on the face of this change in this narcissistic inflation.

This narcissistic inflation, this ego came out, and then really quickly it clamped down and it came back over the top. And that was the most disturbing part of the whole episode. And I thought, oh, okay, that 1.3 second element really betrayed everything. Frankly, this is not a very trustworthy industry. I think content creators are significantly less trustworthy than the general population. Well, the thing that drives anybody to seek the Fame and status at the expense of their sanity for the most part, probably not a particularly healthy psyche inside.

One of the things, I guess, maybe that a lot of people might be feeling after this conversation is, well, fucking hell, Ruddia.

Thank you for that. A very fatalistic, nihalistic, cynical view of the future. I know that you try and have worked hard, both for yourself and for your audience, to come up with rules and a worldview and strategies to actually be hopeful and to counter a lot of the bad advice that's given to young men. Yes. Where do you go to for that, given all of the potential chaos in the future and it's all going to be hard and blah, blah, blah? What's some firm footing? What do you rely on when it comes to this discussion? That's a good question. In Eastern mysticism, in Hinduism and Buddhism and stuff, there's this concept of, do not look at the associations your mind makes of things. Let's say you feel sad. Just focus on the feeling of being sad. Don't think of what it reminds you of.

Don't think about what your mind immediately jumps to. The mind naturally makes lots of things that it doesn't actually relate to the thing that you are directly speaking about. I tell you what I believe to be the truth. I tell you this because I see it as my duty to tell you the truth. What you choose to do with it is your choice. I think there's no right answer for everyone. Whenever people give advice to everyone, I don't think it's useful because everyone's so different. Whenever a friend ask me for advice, I say, What do you like to do? What are you good at? What are you better vis-a-vis everyone else. Look for the asymmetric advantage. I'm not going to give your entire crowd advice because I don't know who you are, a random guy listening in Florida. What I will say, though, I have a couple of different things I say. The First is that just live your life. One of the things I tell myself is the world could go to crap, but I'm still here to chill. I'll still do cool events. I'm still going to do what I want to do.

I'm still going to make friends, travel to places, read new books. That doesn't have a bearing on the outside world. You read about Winston Churchill lived through so many horrifying wars, but he had a great life. That's what I think you can do. What I would say is try to mind, I think religion is the biggest thing that helps people with this stuff. When you have a grounding in the world, irrespective of the outside world, it's like you have a soul. Once you have a soul, you have an ability to have a differentiation between the insanity of the world and yourself. What I tell young men, especially, and I gather your audience is probably majority male, is what are you willing to die for? Because for men to have something worth living for, you need to have something worth dying for. If you're dying in a ditch, what cause do you want to be dying in a ditch for? Figure out your asymmetric advantages, figure out what you want to die for, find some spiritual grounding, and I mean, Nietzsche said, Don't get stuck in the house of morality. This is something I see with a lot of creators, especially conservative creators.

They're so stuck on hating the left. Assume the left is completely evil, just for this one sentence argument. What's next? If the left is evil, what do you do next? That's my answer for this. I went through, upon realizing these things, I went through a one or two year grieving process where I had to think, okay, because people say it's weird or schizo to be obsessed with politics. But no, politics is life. If it's World War II, and it's differing to Greece, politics isn't life in 1984. If it's World War II, you're dying in a ditch in Stalingrad. Politics became your life. These macro political decisions became your life. My assumption growing up was that we would live in this John Hughes Simpson's America, where you go to college and you get a good job and then you get married. I realized that wasn't going to happen. I thought to myself, What's next? Because if that's not going to happen, what am I going to do next? Over time, I realized I prefer this to the old life. It's better to play a difficult game and feel your heart breathe than play a boring game.

Yeah, I think this is so much about the advice that's given to young men, which has perverted the difficult situation. I mean, you both agree on this, wildly unpopular among most of the people that are male content creators, which is that the crisis of femininity and the impending female psychological problems are maybe going to at least compete with what guys are suffering with at the moment. Yeah, I agree. That's something that you and I are in agreement on.

And I actually think women have it than men in that I think women are more dependent upon their community and society. Thus, if that goes bad, they have less of an ability to handle the toughness or adjust than men. Every single girl in the age of 25 I've met has at least one mental health condition. At this point, it's a game where I try to guess which in advanced. It's crazy that there's an entire... I mean, Zoomers are split between 20% who are very effective and 80% who are ineffective. I mean, I think there's enough suffering in the world. Why do we have to add more? I mean, women are suffering, men are suffering, the poor are suffering, the rich are suffering. Having a competition like that. One of the very odd things about that that I was thinking about as I was doing some research this morning for this episode is that the framing of intersectionality, victimhood hierarchy that is heavily criticized by guys on the right is also used by them to Well, yeah, but women don't have it as bad as me.

Exactly. I've lived a bizarre life, and so I've met a lot of different people, rich people, poor people, famous people, not famous people.

Everyone's got a person. Everyone's a person. Everyone's got a soul. Just because someone has an identity that's not your, it doesn't mean they don't have a soul. The thing I can't compromise on is that once you start treating your political enemies like they don't have souls, that's just evil. Bad things are going to happen. Your victimhood argument is interesting, where the further right you go, the more psychologically you end up like the left in a bunch of different ways. Do you want me to explain? The far right, and ironically, they were the same movement until around 1850, and then they were both part of the revolutionary movement Then you had national revolutionarism, and then you had leftist revolutionarism. Nazis and communists were the same in the early 19th century. Hard right, obsession over your social status, obsession Ression over blood, lack of a concept of a soul, the idea that the government should run society, ideas of manicheeism or everything is good versus evil, ideas of revolutionarism, You have... I mean, the Nazis and the Soviets both had gulags. They killed different people, but they both had the death camps. What about the left? What's the equivalent?

Far left. Oh, yeah, it's the communists. I I mean, the far left equivalent, they also think the government should run everything. They also think that your birth determines who you are. If you're born upper class, you're part of the bad guys. If you're born working class, you're a good guy. They also don't believe in a concept of the soul. They both believe that if we kill an outgroup, the world becomes perfect. That's either the Jews or the capitalists. They both don't see the world as an organic living place. They both really don't have a concept of God either. It's funny that the most hard-right Christian, the most hard-right guys are philosophically the least Christian people in the political spectrum, where the left and even the techno-optimists, they take a lot of implicit Christian assumptions. The hard-right fascist guys are the least philosophically Christian, even though they often say, I'm Treadcath. They also think that they're both authoritarian and they both think that in order to achieve these, they're both often rationalizations for killing people, too. Where would you send somebody if they said, This is interesting. It sounds like you've had a nontypical education. What are some of the books that you think would be good for me to read that are accessible for somebody stepping foot into this world?

If you want to learn history as a person who's not a historian, the best book to read is The Invention of Yesterday by Tamim Amsari. That's a book that looks at history from the perspective of what ideologies people in different societies use.

It explains how an ancient Greek person saw the world, how a communist saw the world, et cetera. Atrocities by Matthew White is also very good. It's a history of the world from the perspective of the top 100 bloodiest atrocities in history. Very hopeful. No, it's actually great because it's not a biased narrative when you realize, damn, a lot of history happened in medieval China. Because most histories are written like, We are going towards progress.

This is our agenda.

Top 100 atrocities, just death is the arbiter. It's a pretty objective look at human life. Then my favorite author, the author who I keep on pushing up, is Amaury Doreacourt. Amaury Doreacourt was a French Orientalist of the World War II era. He wrote several... He made five intellectual jumps that are absolutely brilliant. One of which is he said he wrote a book, Sex and Power in History. Which is how the relations between the sexes inform the rise and fall of civilizations. He wrote The Eye of Shaiva, which compares the teachings of modern science to Hinduism and how the Hindus 2000 years ago reached a lot of similar philosophic conclusions to modern science. The Coming Caesars is about the parallels in America and Rome. That's where I got the groccy stuff from. Then he wrote The Soul of India and the Soul of China, which is about the mental system and the character of Indian and Chinese civilization. Looking Looking at some of the summaries of his work, not perhaps the most accessible in the world. How easy did you find that stuff to get through?

I was going through a comment set. You can just go on Amazon and order it or all Libris.

I mean, how accessible was the book? How easy was it for you to read and retain?

He's not a particularly difficult writer. No, he's a pretty clear writer.

I mean, it depends. No, I think a normal person would be fine reading that. Okay. If it's normy approved, that's good. Rudia Lynch, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I really appreciate you. Where should people go?

They want to check out more of your stuff. You should check out my channel, What If Alt Hist, and I have a second channel called History 102.

With Eric Thorenberg? Yes, exactly.

Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate you, man.

You too.

Peace.