Eric Czuleger recounts his travels to unrecognized nations like Somaliland and Lieberland, detailing his six-week stint as acting ambassador where he secured aid after Cyclone Sagar and navigated complex diplomatic photo ops. He explores how internal divisions and conflicting national identities, exemplified by schismogenesis in Kosovo, threaten state stability, while contrasting these realities with the rise of sovereign individuals and digital currencies that may eventually dismantle traditional nation-states. Ultimately, the narrative suggests that while small entities strive for global recognition through soft power, the future of geopolitics lies in shifting from coerced states to voluntary communities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Tiny Arctic Town Expeditions00:03:28
I was in the Arctic right before.
What?
Yeah, yeah.
I just came back from Svalbard, which is.
Where's that?
It's in the Arctic Circle.
So it's like the last point that there is an inhabited city.
I mean, it's a town, a really tiny town, before you get to the North Pole.
So it's like the only place that you can sort of set off in an expedition from the North Pole or to the North Pole.
Okay.
It's not like it has some relationship with Norway, but it's not technically a part of Norway.
So you actually like cross out of the border of Norway to get to Svalbard.
And there's like one tiny town there that's like mostly a coal mining town and scientific research.
But like it's crazy.
Like the sun never sets there.
So, yeah.
So, cool people there.
Oh, yeah.
The town was dope.
I was, I mean, and you meet everybody within like the first.
15 minutes that you're there because it's that tiny.
Oh, shit.
So, like, we were up there.
I sort of convinced my buddies to go and do a marathon in Svalbard, which is like the northernmost marathon in the entire world.
And it's the only one with polar bear guards.
So, they have like dudes with guns just like hanging out and just in case like marathon runners get attacked by polar bears.
Is it one of those marathons where they swim and run or just run?
No, those exist.
But I just thought it would be like a one of a kind bachelor party for my buddy.
So, yeah, convinced him to come up to the Arctic Circle with me.
And we did our best on the marathon.
Nobody got eaten by a polar bear, which is awesome.
I had a guy in here once that did one of those.
Also eaten by a polar bear?
No, no.
They were in the.
Where were they?
He was swimming across that channel between Russia and Alaska.
Can you do that?
Yeah, he swam across it.
There's like a little island in the middle.
Yeah, I've heard about that.
Isn't that like, don't they call that like, like tomorrow island or yesterday island?
Yes.
Yep.
Yep.
It's like one of the only places in the world where I don't even, like, I've descended into the Twilight Zone even trying to figure out or to explain it.
So it's like the day moves forward, but it doesn't move forward on that island for some reason.
Is that the deal?
I don't know what the exact time difference is, but like, the, Basically, if you swim, if you move from like this one part of land to this island that's, I think, less than a mile away, the time changes by like eight hours or something crazy.
Whoa.
Or maybe 12 hours.
I'm not sure, but it's like you're definitely in the next day.
Yeah.
Was there anybody there to like greet him?
Yeah, there were some people.
There's like a small village of people that live there.
Like a very few people live there.
It's a very remote place, but apparently they get by.
I mean, this is like one of the.
You know, the sort of like dream projects is to like just go to literally the most remote places in the world and just see what people do there.
What is the most remote place you've ever been?
Remote.
Remote's not really what you're going for, but.
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the Somali desert.
Remote Village Hallucinations00:06:33
Oh, shit, okay.
It certainly felt really remote.
Svalbard, like in terms of, you know, you're just far away from any metropolitan city center, but there was infrastructure out there, but.
You know, when we went out into the desert of Somaliland, it's like you're basically driving through wadis, which are these sort of dry riverbeds, and there's no infrastructure whatsoever.
So your driver just kind of has to know how the desert looks.
As far as I understand, I mean, you know, I didn't speak enough Somali or any Somali to ask him exactly how he's navigating.
But yeah, we were in jeeps in a sort of armed convoy for like maybe eight hours, no roads.
And then eventually just sort of came upon a nomad village.
And I was like, this.
Did you chew any of that cat?
I did.
Did you really?
How was it?
It's pretty great.
What is it?
How does it make you feel?
It's like, okay, the best I could describe it, at least my experience with it, is like.
It's like you have the energy of having drunk like 12 cups of coffee, except without any of the anxiety.
Yeah.
So it's just like sort of mildly euphoric, you know, like maybe what I'd imagine a low dose of MDMA would be like, something like that.
But it's, yeah, it was funny.
When I took Cot, I decided to, you know, give it a try because I was sort of finished up my work in Somaliland and I was like, okay, well, I'm going to.
I'm going to get really high on cotton because I deserve it.
That sounds awesome.
I was listening to Rick Strassman talk about how he was growing it in his yard.
Can you do that?
Apparently.
I don't know.
Well, it's interesting.
I mean, the plant's pretty interesting from an economic point of view, too, because it's like, from what I understand, cotton has to be transported every day because it has to be quite fresh for it to be psychoactive.
So, in the middle of a desert, it's hard to get really green leaves.
And that's the first thing you notice when you chew cotton.
You strip some of the branches away, and it's like this sort of really vibrant green chlorophyll flavor.
Imagine biting a plant, and that's exactly what it is.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
And then it turns your tongue like this vibrant neon green.
But it kind of sneaks up on you.
I went to this hotel that was in the area, and I was like, all right, I'm going to eat a bunch of mildly hallucinogenic East African leaves and just see what happens.
And so I was like, okay, you know, put like five leaves down.
And they say that you have to eat like the leaves of 10 branches or something.
You don't actually eat them, right?
So it depends.
From what I understood, unless somebody was messing with me, which is totally possible, in Yemen, they tend to spit it.
Like they spit out the sort of mash.
Stick stuck up there.
And then in Somalia, they tend to swallow the full mash.
Totally possible somebody was just like messing with me and just trying to get me to eat leaves.
That is 100% possible.
But if it worked, it worked.
Yeah, I mean, look, I ate a lot of leaves.
I had a belly full of leaves.
And I think it took like maybe 30 branches.
But since it snuck up so slowly, I was like, you know, I've eaten maybe 20 branches of this stuff.
And I was just sort of washing it down with non alcoholic beer.
And it's not like it tastes good by any stretch of the imagination.
So I came up with a strategy where I just sort of mash.
The leaves together into this like tight ball, and then just like put it in the back of my jaw and sort of like chew it as hard as I could and then like swallow it.
And then I just felt like an absolute idiot because I'm like, I've literally just been eating leaves for like the last 20 minutes, maybe an hour.
I don't know.
So, like, I was like, I'm going to go home.
So, I went back to where I was staying.
And then I realized as I was sort of like looking at this like really gorgeous sunset and having these, you know, remarkable feelings of warmth and gratitude towards the universe that I was still like eating the leaves.
Like I had never stopped and I was just like, well, that's interesting.
And then immediately I was just like, you know what?
My clothes have no idea how much I care about them.
And I was like, I gotta wash my clothes.
And I, at this point, was like, maybe I'm getting a little bit high right now because I've never really thought about my clothes' feelings towards me before.
But at that point, I was just sort of tearing through branches of cotton, doing laundry, and, you know, sort of like a firework show of gratitude about, you know, the world at large.
And at a certain point, I was like, while I was doing, you know, laundry high on East African leaves, I looked at myself in the mirror and I realized my whole mouth was just like slimer green.
Like glowing green.
I was like, I think the cot worked.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah, you see the photos and the videos of those guys that do it all the time, and they're like, their whole jaw is like decaying.
Yeah.
Well, so that's an interesting part about it, too.
And so, at least how it was explained to me was that cot actually has a different effect the longer you use it.
So, you might start out with these sort of like, you know, this rapturous, almost hallucinogenic experience.
But then, as you get addicted to it, it starts to be more of a sedative.
So, when you see kot shacks, and you know, in Somalia is the only place that I've really seen them, Somaliland, I should say, then you know, what you're essentially seeing is people like laying on these rattan mats, and you know, maybe they have like a bottle of water or like some tea next to them, but they look strung out as hell.
And that was the exact opposite of my experience with it.
My experience was it was like super energetic and effusive.
And my mouth was green.
I was essentially just like, you know, a three year old just running around doing laundry and chewing on these leaves.
Big Wave Skills Venn Diagrams00:11:17
I had a guy in here the other day who was trying to teach me all about this stuff, Kratom.
I guess I've heard about this.
Yeah, there's bars that are dedicated to it right all around here.
This is a Florida thing, right?
I think so, yeah.
Yeah, I had a hippie give that to me one time and it was just weird murky water.
Yeah, I don't know what it is, but a lot of like recovering alcoholics and a lot of recovering opioid addicts sometimes use it.
And I guess it helps them sort of like kick.
The alcohol or the pills they were taking before.
Yeah, I've heard of that.
And it's like, because it's like, has a similar effect to alcohol.
But this guy was also telling me that it has a very similar effect to Adderall.
He's like, I drink it with my coffee and it makes me like supercharged.
It's like drinking 20 cups of coffee.
Was this a guy that was on the podcast?
No, he was not on a podcast, but he was here with one of my guests and he was telling me about it.
I guess it's like he has a cradle in business and he was trying to teach me all about it.
Isn't there also like a Kava bar deal out here?
Kava, yeah.
I think it's the same thing.
Is it?
I have no idea.
I'm not sure.
Because kava is like, is from the South Pacific somewhere.
I think it's like, Kiribati is like one of the main places that they have it.
And from what I understand anyway, it's like a root that used to be sort of like chewed up.
And then you would like, like, like, I think they had like kids that would like chew it up and then spit it out.
And then you'd sort of drink this water out of shells.
So as the drug would take effect, you'd like, you'd, you know, be like, oh, I'm two, three shells in.
And then, you know, suddenly be, um, You know, impermeable to pain.
I have no idea.
I've never tried it before.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I've never tried it either, but I'm going to definitely try that kratom stuff.
Yeah.
Anyways, so thanks for coming.
Yeah.
And tell people how you got into this journey of traveling all over the world to these non existent states or nations.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I don't actually know the right word either.
Like, I should know about it.
Like, neutral zones, right?
Something like that.
I would just say, like, unrecognized countries at this point.
And after, like, studying it for five years, I was just like, I don't think I've gotten any further to, like, understanding.
Like, I did a bad job at research.
Yeah.
I should know more about this.
But you started out working in intelligence?
Yeah, briefly.
How did you get into intelligence?
This is super weird.
Oh, so yeah, I'm Eric Zulager.
Tell everybody who you are.
I'm a writer, I'm an author, and I've got a book out today called You Are Not Here Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist.
So basically, I spent a year.
Oh, at the poster?
Yeah, yeah, at the poster.
Here it is.
Yeah.
Can people see it?
Let's see.
Yeah.
Up a little bit.
Yeah.
Perfect.
You are not here.
Travels through countries that don't exist.
That's right.
What is the picture?
The picture was done by Erebuza of Aparat Studios in Kosovo.
And it's kind of like an amalgamation of various landmarks and the five unrecognized nations that I went to.
So down here, we've got the Citadel, which is an old monument in the center of Erbil, which is the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
We've got a MiG jet from Somaliland.
This is some stuff from Kosovo.
We've got little bits from Libra land here.
But yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, we kind of wanted to go for a Where's Waldo vibe.
Okay, I like it.
Very few people are going for the Where's Waldo vibe these days.
Yeah.
But yeah, I decided to write the book because I just kind of.
Followed a really dumb question that I came across while I was working briefly as an intelligence analyst.
And yeah, I got that job in potentially one of the stranger ways that one gets a job.
Basically, I had been a Peace Corps volunteer before and I had always been a writer.
So I was working mostly Peace Corps volunteer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Peace Corps Albania, 2011, 2013.
Yeah.
Well, they sent me to Northern Albania.
I was in a small.
Small town called Byram Suri, shout out Byram Suri, in the district of Tripoia.
So, like, the claim to fame of that area is that, like, the bad guys in the movie Taken were from Tripoia.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I mean, it's a beautiful area in Albania, but it does have somewhat of a reputation for being the seat of more traditional Albanian culture.
But also, they've had an issue with organized crime there, too.
And so, they decided, you know, they need to send American Peace Corps volunteers there to make sure that everybody stays nice and peaceful.
Well, it's interesting you transitioned from that into not the CIA, but you worked for a contractor of the CIA, right?
They weren't a contractor, no.
So, like, what they were was a geopolitical forecasting company.
So, like Stratfor?
Yeah, just like them.
Mm hmm.
Just like them.
So, what happened was while I was in the Peace Corps, I, you know, I had come out of university with a degree in theater.
And as soon as you leave university with a degree in theater, you're like, that was a mistake.
Yeah.
It was an error for me to get a degree in theater.
Like, there are zero people out here.
Zero crossover.
Nobody wants me to do two contrasting monologues.
Nobody wants to know about Shakespeare, so I should probably go and get some skills.
And so I went to Albania.
And while I was there, I was still writing, I was producing plays that were going back to the States, and they were kind of like live blogs that were performed back in the States.
And then the money would come over to Albania, and we'd started a mobile library out there in Tropoia.
But as I started doing more like nonfiction stuff, I was like also reading a lot more nonfiction.
And so, guys like Christopher Hedges and Sebastian Younger, and I read this one fantastic book about like big wave surfing called The Wave.
I can't remember who it's by.
Okay.
Have you ever heard of it?
No.
Oh, it's awesome.
And like, I never, you know, you're fairly starved for books in the Peace Corps.
Like, the library has what the library has.
So, you know.
What did you learn from the big wave surfing book?
Well, it was.
Because I'm not a surfer.
I'm pretty well an indoor child.
And I found it really engrossing.
And I was sort of struck by this journalist who was following these big wave surfers who were basically taking their own lives in their own hands.
And nobody could quite understand why they were doing this.
It's like if you're not successful on this 100 foot wave, you'll either die or be injured greatly.
And the book was largely about, like, why do people take these tremendous risks?
And what I found in that book was, you know, that it was uniquely meaningful to them.
And that the, you know, the proximity to danger was inspiring and life affirming to not only them as athletes, but to the community around them.
And so as I was reading that, I was also reading, like I said, Christopher Hedges and Sebastian Younger, all these, like, incredible, like, Geopolitical writers and war correspondents.
And I was thinking that, like, well, journalism felt, especially international journalism, seemed a lot like the sort of like big wave surfing of writing.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, and also I was sort of coming into a time where I was thinking, like, I have a certain amount of skills, and then this sort of like weird Venn diagram of like, you know, wanting to go to places that are a bit more unusual.
Being decent at putting a sentence together and being interested in history, it's like, how can I be the most useful writer possible?
And I didn't think that writing an American realist play was going to be the most useful thing for me to do with my skills.
So I was like, okay, well, I want to start being an international journalist.
And so I basically knocked on the doors of a bunch of journalists and I was like, how do you do this?
How does one do any of this?
Who'd you talk to?
I talked to a couple of people who were reporting in, I think it was Israel and a couple of Middle Eastern journalists.
This was like over 10 years ago now.
But basically, a lot of the feedback that I got from them was just like, just go, you know, just go and start reporting.
And, you know, at this time, Syria was the crisis that everybody was writing about.
And I had some understanding of Turkey.
And I was like, well, it seems like a reasonable thing to do to go throughout Turkey and just try and get some stories sold.
But of course, meanwhile, I had to save up some money to go right in Turkey for a little bit.
So I got myself a job as the head camp counselor at a summer camp in Boston.
And because I, in the Peace Corps, I had education training and then I worked in special ed for a little bit.
So I could run a summer camp.
I can tell people to tie their shoes and stop running.
Boy, can I. Really prepared me for War Zones, man.
Really?
I've seen some.
Some shit you wouldn't believe.
Yeah, some literal shit.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah.
So while I'm at the summer camp in Boston, I'm kind of like, you know, getting my ducks in a row and I have this whole trip planned out where I'm going to work my way down to the border of Turkey and Syria.
And I'm kind of, you know, considering how I want to write about this kind of stuff.
And I'm realizing that, well, in a certain way, there are a lot of.
There are a lot of good hearted journalists and especially Western journalists who are going into these places to cover conflict.
But sometimes that also ends up with them in the way of conflict and potentially making a dangerous situation for them, making a dangerous situation for other reporters on the ground.
And so since I was just sort of starting out and learning to write from these areas, I was like, I don't really want to talk about the conflict directly.
I want to write about stuff that was on the side of it.
To maybe write human interest stories about things that were not getting covered because the war was the story.
That's always the most interesting stuff because everybody focuses on the big thing.
Alien Summoning Sky Beliefs00:11:47
Yeah.
And it's like, I think that warfare, as it is now, as it probably always is, is like, it's so fascinating to people and it gobbles up so much of the news cycle that it's easy for people to forget that there are just.
You know, real people having normal days and, and, you know, struggling through life and, you know, getting up and cooking eggs for their kids and complaining about work, even though a couple miles down the road there's, you know, bombs going off.
And I think that that sort of, you know, parallel universes are pretty interesting to me.
Yeah.
Parallel universes, subcultures, and the fact that, like, they can just exist right next door to you and you would never know.
I've always found that kind of.
Thing fascinating, yeah.
That is that is very fascinating.
That's what you know, that's what I like.
That's some of like the best documentaries that I find on YouTube or stuff.
That like when people are just like picking up rocks and looking under rocks and finding the things that like no one's shined a light on before.
And like even if they just follow like a small group of people and how what their lives are like, you know, it's maybe affected by like the bigger picture, whether it be a war or genocide or something like that.
But just like seeing how their lives are.
Did you ever see you may have even called it out on the show or had him as a guest?
But do you ever see love and saucers?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had the guy who made that documentary in here.
Incredible, incredible work.
I mean, it's like.
That's beautiful.
That was a beautifully shot film.
100%.
And I thought it was incredible because it's like one, we're taking the sound.
Brad Abrams, that's his name.
That's right.
I've heard him on a couple of different things.
And it's like, he takes the subject so seriously.
Like, he's not, you know, sort of like, there's no snickering at the subject.
You know, this is.
So, for those of you who don't know, like, Love and Saucers is a documentary about this.
This guy who feels that he had a relationship with an alien throughout his entire life.
Lost his virginity to an alien.
Correct.
And then he's a painter, so he kept painting this alien for basically his entire life.
And does he live in Brooklyn or something?
Yeah, in Brooklyn.
I don't know if it's Brooklyn, but it's somewhere around there.
Around there.
Yeah.
So then it was like his first art show.
And, you know, these are the neighbors that you pass in the street every day.
Like people are quietly involved in their own galaxies.
And, you know, it's amazing if you ask the right question, you can turn the key and suddenly be involved in that.
So that has always been like, you know, these are the best stories as far as I'm concerned.
That's one of those things that, you know, that I think about too is like that guy truly believed that happened to him.
Yeah.
Like if you watch that movie, It's like a 30 minute movie.
He truly believes that happened to him.
I mean, he talks about every little detail and paints all these beautiful pictures of these like hybrid human aliens that like took him into the woods and fucked him.
Yep.
Yep.
And like the alien had real human tits.
Yeah.
A real nice set of tits on it.
And like the large breasted alien was like a prominent figure of that film.
He impregnated the alien and gave him babies or gave her babies.
And like, man.
Years ago, I was doing a story that was killed, sadly.
I was doing a thing about UFOs and I went to like these three different UFO things in Los Angeles.
And I went to this like abductee support group that happened like randomly every, you know, every like third Saturday in Marina Del Rey.
And it was just like in a random strip mall.
And for some reason, I had to like pay $5 to go into a support group.
But I think it was because like some, you know, fancy alien guy was there.
I can't remember what his name was, but he.
Fancy alien guy, that's great.
He was the dude who was like one of the leading experts in removing alien implants.
Okay.
But he was a podiatrist, and shockingly, every implant that he removed was from the foot.
Anyway, I saw him talk.
But like, you know, people would get up and they would sort of say their piece.
And at a certain point, you know, somebody was like, okay, well, how many people have been abducted in this room?
And, you know, it's a room of like maybe 80 people, and I figured, you know, 12 hands would go up, and then it's like, I was the weird one, because, like, I mean, you know, at this point, I have not been abducted by an alien.
Still, still to this day.
My working theory on alien abduction, you're familiar with John Mack?
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
My working theory on the alien abduction thing is that some people, like a certain percentage, maybe 1% or less of the human population, has like something, an advanced, Version of their brain.
Some people think it's the basal ganglia that lets them tap into like another dimension a little bit.
Like they're able to receive signals, right?
Like, similar to a radio antenna, where they can somehow receive signals from elsewhere sometimes.
Like, when you think of some people who talk about they see ghosts or like they see certain things, whether they're ghosts or not, or aliens, like I think that might be something when you're talking about this guy, David Huggins, the old guy who talked about.
Fucking the aliens.
That's right.
Yeah.
I think it, that might be what it is.
It might be something in their brain that they're actually experiencing.
And I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's real from another dimension or if it's all just hallucinations in their mind or it's like, it's like the whole DMT thing.
Like when you take DMT and you go to that, that world with the dancing, yeah, the electronic machine elves or whatever.
Yeah.
When you go there, like, are those elves real or are they in your head?
Well, look at reality.
Yeah.
Reality is all in your head.
It's all a construct of your senses.
So that's, that's the, That's kind of like how I think about it right now.
That's my working theory.
Your brain is a reality generating machine, and then on top of that, or sometimes, like, you know, the pathway in is like, you know, what are the things that you really believe?
And it's amazing how, like, something as ephemeral as what you believe has real world effects.
You know, like, that guy believed that he had a hybrid alien child.
Like, try and convince him that he's wrong.
This is not that dissimilar from somebody in an unrecognized nation.
Or somebody in a recognized nation saying, you know, this place still exists.
Like, we're no matter what you tell me, I like this is the best country in the world.
I have an absolute religious belief about this thing.
And one of the things that I find fascinating is how that abstraction can be leveraged to change how people behave.
You know, obviously, believing in aliens and believing in countries are totally different things, but there is this human mechanism.
For generating beliefs about how their realities work, that is one, it's able to be manipulated, and two, it's deeply important to us collaborating with one another.
You know, because like when I was at the alien abductee support group, you know, afterwards, honestly, I think the most fascinating part about the whole thing was like afterwards, all of these alien abductees went out to Denny's together.
And it's like, that's awesome.
Yeah.
And I'm like, I felt myself like so sort of like glad for them that like these people could like hang out and have a moon's over Miami and like talk about their abduction experiences.
Like, you know, they have community and they had this shared lexicon and that, you know, was able to bring them together.
Like, it may not make sense for all of us.
That's fine.
But like, they were certainly like together in their own belief structure.
After that thing, I went up to.
Man, you get some wild stuff in meetup.com.
Yeah, cheaper than a movie.
Just go into the depths of meetup.com and you'll find some.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
So I went to an alien summoning from meetup.com.
Okay.
Summoning.
Summoning.
Yeah, I learned how to summon.
What was this?
It was a park in Los Angeles.
And now, when you're imagining a UFO summoning, are you thinking about it at night?
Probably.
Noon.
Really?
In July.
Very hot day.
And so I walked up.
I pulled my buddies along with me to this thing because I was like, guys, we're.
You want more people to show up at noon?
Well, I was just like, guys, we're going to go to an alien summoning.
Did you film it?
No, I didn't.
Yeah, I'm a writer.
I'm not technical at all.
But I showed up, and there's a lot more people there than I thought it was going to be.
It was like maybe 30, 40 people in this park.
Really hot day.
And I was always just like, pretty honest about people.
I'm like, oh, hey, I'm a journalist.
I'm working on a project here.
And then they're like, oh, great, that's awesome.
You should talk to our science lead.
And I'm like, okay, cool.
Who's the science lead?
And they're like, that's Hans.
And so this guy named Hans comes over and he's like, I got to show you the book of UFOs.
And I was like, okay, sweet.
Let's look at the book of UFOs.
And he opened up a bunch of pixelated, highly pixelated photos.
And he was like, see that?
That's a balloon.
That's not a UFO, but that is a UFO.
And then you just flip the page and be like, Balloon, UFO.
And then he flipped the page and he'd be like, That's a UFO pretending to be a balloon.
And I'm like, Hans, what kind of doctor are you?
He's like, I'm a dentist.
And I'm like, I'm having less confidence in the summoning.
And he's like, We'll just wait for the summoner to get here.
I'm like, Okay, sweet.
He's going to teach everybody how to summon.
So I was like, This sounds great.
That's a skill that's a little bit better than a theater major.
So everybody in the park kind of comes up around this summoner.
And he's like, okay, this is a three step process.
I'm like, okay, sweet.
And he's like, first, you pick a point in the sky.
Everybody's just, you know, 40, 30 people, just like in the middle of a park in July, just like looking at the sky.
And he's like, okay, now telepathically bring aliens to you.
And then you just repeat that until they come.
I was like, step two should have had more steps, I feel.
Like it was, I'm like, and like, you know, you got to.
Try so, right?
You're just like standing in a field with like all of these people just sort of staring at the sky, and then eventually somebody will just say, Oh, there's one, there's one, and then the crowd will just like rush over to somewhere else in the field and like point at something in the sky.
And everybody's just like trying to, you know, see whatever they're seeing, and then it would happen again somewhere else.
And it's like, I have no idea.
I didn't, I mean, I did you see anything?
I have no idea.
I, I, I, nothing that I would define it as UFO, right.
And to add insult to injury, there was definitely a birthday party going on in the park, and like some balloons totally flew away.
And I was like, realized that that had happened.
I'm like, I think it's probably time to go home from the summoning.
Fake Coup Image Collecting00:02:30
Yeah.
But it's like, you know, convince those people that they're wrong.
Like, no, that's their community, and it's also something that they feel passionate about, and it gives them some kind of place and understanding in the universe, right?
Literally, the universe for them.
And I mean, who am I to tell them that that's not a real thing?
Right.
Yeah.
There's some wacky people out there, man.
And, you know, they're beneficial to the government when they want to cover up or use false information to either cover up real stories or push narratives that they want.
They can easily use these people as like a.
Well, it's like, you know, one of the things that I always think about with like.
With these sort of like broad sweeping movements, like, and especially how media often works is like, you, the loudest voices are generally like not the most informed voices.
Yes.
Right.
And they're the most extreme.
Exactly.
Like, you know, not to get super political, but like the image that we have of January 6th is who?
Like the QAnon shaman.
Like, it's the dude with horns on his head.
Yeah.
You know, pitch perfect.
And when you have this image to collect an entire group of people under, you know, it's like, oh, you're going to be like that crazy person, then it becomes really easy to discount anything that might be a legitimate complaint on either side.
Yeah.
And I have always, like, that's one of the reasons that I always thought it was interesting to genuinely go to places to find out what's actually happening on the ground.
Because there's only so much information that we get in the United States.
And oftentimes it's so salacious, it's so sort of filled with fear and with anger that it's hard to understand that there are real people who are actually living lives in these places.
And that was kind of the goal when I wanted to go to Turkey in the first place to find maybe some of the more quiet stories.
And then I didn't end up going to Turkey because they had a coup.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Terrible Travel Letter Ideas00:02:35
So this is back during, I can't remember what year it was.
Was it 2016?
Must have been.
I thought it was more recent than that.
No?
Was this the fake coup?
I have no idea if it was fake or not.
It was a, I know that they had, while I was working at the summer camp, there was this like, you know, telling kids not to run and like listening to reports about how there were like, Tanks in the street of Ankara and Istanbul.
And at that point, I was like, well, shit, I have a ticket to Istanbul pretty soon.
And I didn't quite know what I should do with that because I was like, this, you know, I specifically didn't want to put myself into a situation where I'd be a liability for the community or like that I would get myself, you know, into a situation that I couldn't get out of just because I was trying to learn how to be a journalist.
And so.
I was talking to my folks about it.
My dad was close with this geopolitical forecaster guy.
I'll call him Frank.
Oh, your dad was close with him.
Yeah, yeah, he was close with him.
Well, they were like pen pals.
He was like, I like your geopolitics.
And then the guy was like, Thanks, I'm going to keep.
I like your geopolitics.
That is like the most dad compliment ever.
Everybody's dad, once they get old enough, they're like, you know, I really like either the Civil War or World War II, or my dad is World War I.
Okay.
So, yeah, he's mad stoked on geopolitics.
Okay.
So, your dad introduced you to Frank.
Yeah, he introduced me to Frank.
And he's like, why don't you write Frank and see what Frank says?
And so I wrote him, and I had heard that Frank thought this was a terrible idea.
And I was like, okay, well.
He thought what was a terrible idea?
Me going to Turkey.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I was like, hey, Frank, that's me, Eric.
I hear you think it's a bad idea for me to go to Turkey.
So, I still want to learn to write about the Middle East and what's going on.
Kind of had in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something about travel.
And I was thinking about maybe trying to do like a non political travelogue of the Middle East, which I realized immediately was fucking impossible.
It's like trying to write like Moby Dick without ever using the word whale or like the letter A.
So I was like, told him these ideas.
And then he wrote me back and he was like, well, here's why you're going to end up in Turkish prison and you're not going to make it.
NAD Levels Longevity Genes00:02:52
And I'm like, oh, well, Okay.
Well, if you look back to my first letter, I said, What should I do?
And then Frank was like, Okay, go to Lebanon and I'll coach you.
And I was like, Okay.
I mean, I don't know what that means.
I've never met this old man.
But sure.
Yeah.
I'll buy a plane ticket to Lebanon and have this old man coach me.
Why not?
So I bought a plane ticket with my summer camp money to go to Beirut and I was there for like a month.
And so I was like, you know, got to Beirut to my hostel.
And.
I was like starting to freelance stories, and I emailed Frank and I was like, Hey, I'm here.
What do I do?
And he's like, okay, well, you got to go meet this man and he'll send a car for you.
And I was like, okay.
Wow.
Great.
This guy was connected.
I mean, maybe.
It seemed like it.
I was just, you know, an eager beaver with a laptop.
So I would just like go and like, I just like went and met a random car outside of a place called Burj Hamoud in Beirut.
And the guy waved me down.
He didn't speak any English.
I didn't speak any Arabic or French.
And, you know, we start driving on the outside of town.
And I'm like, this, like, it's at that point, I was like, This might have been a poor choice for me.
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Counterterrorism Expert Email00:02:36
Like, I'm already like five minutes in.
The car.
And at that point, I'm like, hmm, I'm at a.
This might have been an error of judgment.
That was a point of no return.
Yeah, it was.
But then he ended up dropping me off at this, you know, this office park in a place called Junet.
And I went into this office, and the guy was like, oh, you're from Frank, right?
And I'm like, yeah.
Yeah, I'm definitely from Frank.
And then he's like, well, so how is he?
And I'm like, he's good.
He's really good.
And he's like, okay, have a seat.
I'm like, great.
So, guy turned out to be a counterterrorism expert.
And he was just like talking about counterterrorism, specifically the Islamic State at the time.
Did he work for any agencies?
I have no idea.
He was just a guy in an office.
Okay.
I was just taking notes.
And at a certain point, he was like, do you have enough?
I'm like, mm hmm, totally.
Yes, I do.
I have enough for Frank.
And then, driver took me back.
And I was like, well, that was strange.
And then the next day, like, not the next day, probably like a week later, I went to go meet like, uh, Political scientist at the American University of Beirut.
And sort of the same thing happened.
How's Frank?
He's good.
How's his wife?
Like, I didn't know he had a wife, but she's great.
She's doing good.
So, chatted with him for a long time.
And then the final interview was a guy who identified himself as a Lebanese general, still have no idea.
And we talked about the Islamic State for a bit.
And then he kind of set me on my way.
And then I was like, well, this was a strange trip through Beirut.
And, you know, I got some articles published, met some good people.
And eventually I was like, hey, I want to keep learning about this stuff and writing about this stuff.
So, like, what do I do now?
And Frank was like, okay, well, I'm going to train you to be a geopolitical forecaster.
And so you're going to go through my training.
I was like, cool.
And then I got an email that day.
I was like, intelligence analyst position.
Ooh, intelligence analyst.
I know.
Which tells you, I would be the worst spy because immediately as soon as I got that email, I was like, you know what I am?
Hey, mom, guess what?
You know who's an intelligence analyst?
Don't tell anybody.
Yeah, right.
So, but I mean, ultimately, like what the work sort of boiled down to was like being a really advanced newsreader, right?
So he sort of trained us to have this working model of the world.
Terrifying Intelligence Analyst Role00:14:49
And you break that down into whatever the constraints and imperatives of major nation states are.
And by major, I mean the people who sort of wield the dominant economic, military, social media powers, right?
And so every nation has a certain amount of.
Imperatives, things they have to do, things that they're forced to do, and then they're constrained by certain things.
So, I mean, using the United States as an example, it's like, well, the imperative is to maintain the ability to project power across the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously.
Constraint might be something like dwindling middle class.
So, economically, we might not be able to support that power projection over a certain amount of time.
You can start to look at how a nation will behave based upon what their imperatives are and what their constraints might be.
And what that ends up making is a model of the world where you have, as he termed them, fault lines and flashpoints.
So, certain areas of the world where there might be this tectonic shift of power, where there are these areas that if something is going to change the power relationships in the world, a flashpoint, It will happen there.
So, an example of this might be the Bab al Mandab, which is near the Gulf of Aden.
So, this is a big power corridor that it's where I think it's, last I heard, it was like 60% of the world's oil travels through to the Red Sea.
So, yeah, huge, important choke point for energy.
So, you're talking about countries' ambitions and what they're trying to do and what the downside of that ambition is.
So, an example would be would that like If you relate that to America, of spending trillions of dollars on the military and the dwindling middle class is what takes the downside of that.
Like, we don't have roads with potholes, but we're spending $16 trillion a year on the military.
Yeah.
So it's less the things that are blocking us, but the things that are holding us back, right?
So we're constrained by, you know, if we have a dwindling middle class, that also means that we have a dwindling tax base to pay into, you know, military adventurism.
Got it.
Yeah.
And so, and you know, some, in fact, a good deal of like geopolitical constraint is actually just damn geography.
You know, it's incredibly hard to fight a war in Afghanistan, as history has told us constantly.
And it's just because there's so many damn mountains.
Like, it's Alexander the Great was turned back, Napoleon, Russia, the United States.
We have the best geography, right?
Well, I mean, best according to what?
Right.
Like, because we're surrounded by the two oceans.
Yeah, so we've got.
I mean, we have like, I can't remember which geopolitical guy called it this, but he called the United States this sort of the idea of this inevitable empire, right?
And the idea was that we have so many natural features that make us highly defensible.
You know, you've got the Appalachian, Appalachian, I'd say Appalachian, I'm from California.
We have those mountains over there.
We've got this robust system of arable land and rivers, which allows for incredible amounts of agriculture to happen right in the center of our country, which is obviously highly defensible.
Huge lakes on top of us, a damn desert beneath us, Rocky Mountains bracketing everything.
So, invading the United States is a genuinely insane thing to do.
Right, right.
We're also all super heavily armed.
So, yet another reason.
Right, right.
I think I can't remember who it was.
I actually meant to look this up, but I think it might have been Lincoln.
But he said I'm not even going to attribute it.
It was some early president who either had a powdered wig or a really cool beard.
Said something about the fact that because the United States was so blessed geographically, the death of the U.S. as a nation would never come from outside, that it would be by suicide.
I can't remember who said that, but.
Maybe you can find that quote.
Goes hard.
That is a hard quote.
I know.
Man, it sounds like it seems like what's going on in the last couple of years.
Internal division is another constraint, it's a geopolitical constraint.
But you, you know, in a society that.
Presumably, permits and encourages freedom, you have to tolerate an amount of internal division.
But as you divide away the singular vision of a nation, then suddenly there's conflict that arises within it.
You know, everything is ultimately a trade off.
Yeah.
And who was it?
Oh, hell yeah.
It was him.
Yeah.
America will never be destroyed from the outside.
Whoa.
Oh, shit.
Continue with Facebook, said Lincoln.
If we falter and lose our.
Freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Wow, Lincoln, Abraham, dude.
I know they don't give Lincoln credit for his sick flow.
Have you seen that recent video of all those guys pledging allegiance to Trump?
It was like two days ago.
That doesn't surprise me, but no, it is terrifying.
Man, it looks like a giant warehouse and they're lined up.
They're lined up.
Where's the here's the video?
Look at this.
No, what.
This was a MAGA thing.
Whoa.
And they did this as Trump was going into court.
I have questions about this warehouse.
Like, where's the warehouse?
Look close out of it and see if you can find some more context on the tweet.
And just like, is there.
Is there like a Kmart next door?
Yeah, maybe.
They've got.
I can't read it.
It's too small.
But yeah, man, that's fucking crazy.
That's insane.
But this.
So, this is exactly the thing that I find so fascinating about the idea of nationalism.
Because nationalism is this huge abstraction.
And what your nation is, is something that's collectively generated by the people within the nation, right?
Like.
How you believe about whatever America is somehow gels with how every other American thinks about America, and that creates the picture of our country, right?
It's something that we're all generating together.
But when you have such radically different visions of what that is, then suddenly you can see a bifurcation of the nation, or you can even see sometimes they use the term a Balkanization in reference to the Balkans, right?
It's almost a shattering into various person groups because people are aligning with whoever they feel their affinity group is.
And I mean, you know, tell the thing that I find fascinating, terrifying about this is that it's verging on a religious belief.
Yes.
Like, this is a religious belief.
Yes.
And I think that people need to continually check themselves is my belief well founded or is it a religious one?
And the best sort of like, Rule of thumb for religious beliefs has always been to me anyway.
Do I know what information could be provided to me that would make me change my mind?
Right?
So if I say, you know, I believe in gravity, you know, I use it every day, haven't floated once.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, pretty convinced.
But if, you know, somebody is to come floating over to me and be like, oh, gravity's bullshit, man, and be like, man, that's.
It's pretty compelling.
Like, yeah, dude.
So it's like you can have certainty to a certain extent, but at the point that you're saying no, absolutely not to these facts, absolutely not to reality on the ground, then you have a religious belief.
Then the thing that's powering you is faith and your own personal identity.
Your own personal identity is so involved in what you think that you can be manipulated dramatically.
What was the quote you said?
You said, the number one revolutionary in the revolution becomes the staunchest conservative the day after the revolution.
That's right.
Yeah.
Because now they own the state.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's it's like people when I and I think that there's this sort of romanticized idea of revolution in that respect too.
It's like, and then, you know, there's the sort of musical theater version of, you know, dude waving a flag and, you know, then suddenly everybody's equal.
But the question is equal according to who?
Right?
So the revolutionary, the day after the revolution, now controls what equality is.
Now they control what freedom is.
They're controlling what the abstraction is.
And so if we're all going to agree on this consensus reality, how are we going to generate that consensus?
And that's ultimately what statecraft is about.
I don't know if, definitely not Lincoln, but somebody said, I can't just keep leaning on Lincoln this whole time.
But somebody said that, you know, statecraft is all about it's the generation of consent by the governed, right?
And so there's a lot of ways to generate consent amongst the governed.
Like right now, we're the governed, you know, in the United States anyway.
So somebody can come in this room and put a gun to our heads and, you know, make us participate in a phony voting, you know, charade.
Cool.
Do they have our consent?
Well, yeah, I don't want to get shot.
Right.
Yeah, super.
You do have my consent.
Yeah.
Um, Another way to do it, and the way that at least we in the United States have settled upon doing it, is through representative government.
And representative government is how we go about doing the tasks of governance, which is identifying problems, creating paths to solving those problems, and then enacting those solutions.
But the belief in the United States is that if we sort of crowdsource the idea for how best to move forward as a nation, then we'll come up with not only a better solution, but It will be fully supported by everybody who gave their opinion on that thing.
Now, that's the ideal version of it.
Whether it works that way or not, you know, who knows?
Some of the most successful countries, you know, monetarily and military power wise, right now, are certainly not democracies.
Right.
You know, they're autocracies.
Right.
Andy Bustamante explained this to me beautifully in this diagram he calls the creation of a state pyramid.
Where he says the foundational level.
Can you explain that?
So, yeah.
So, he says the foundation of the pyramid, the bottom level of the pyramid is individualism.
And that's basically whatever I hunt, I eat.
Every man for himself.
Yeah.
The second level is tribalism.
And that's where four, eight, or 12 of us were a tribe.
I may be a good hunter.
You may be a good gatherer.
I go out and hunt the food.
You have your garden and we share in our resources, right?
I can't go into your house, club you over the head, and drag your wife out because we have these rules, right?
Because we're this own little tribe.
So we've given up certain freedoms, right?
I can't just go take your wife.
Above that is the creation of a state where there's a governing body or people that you elect to basically run this nation or state or whatever.
And that could be a collection of resources like taxes to have, so you have clean water, you have.
Food that's safe to eat, you have electricity.
And basically, what he was getting at is that we have to be okay with giving up certain freedoms for everything that we have.
And we were talking about the context of the conversation, started out talking about Snowden and talking about like privacy and stuff like that.
He's like, I'm willing to, I'm willing to, his position on this, which I'm kind of coming around to, but I don't know what I feel about it.
He said that he was okay with the government.
Looking at the porn that I watch, or like looking at my browser history, if it's going to keep us safe from terrorists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, this is, I think, the sometimes called like the neo Hobbesian point of view, right?
So the whole Hobbes thing is like, you know, man is in his natural state is, you know, this sort of feral creature that, that, you know, just loves to kill and rape.
And then we, as we sort of ascend this, this pyramid, um, Things get better because we are able to sublimate these natural tendencies towards violence into the state.
We give the state the monopoly on violence so that we can have order, right?
And, you know, that certainly makes sense.
But it's kind of like the who watches the Watchmen type of thing, right?
And it's like, how much transparency, one, do you want?
And two, are you comfortable with?
Yeah, I think one of the things he said was he asked me if I had kids, and I was like, Yeah.
He's like, Do you tell your kids everything you do?
I've heard that before.
Yeah, I was like, No.
He's like, Yeah, because you're trying to protect them.
Pointing Rifles Statecraft Heroes00:03:29
Right.
But now that I have the ability to watch it and listen to it, and I'm like, it's not the government's job to be my parent, right?
It's supposed to be for the people, by the people.
They're supposed to be the servants to us.
Yeah.
I mean, that's certainly the abstraction, right?
Yes.
I'm sure you've probably seen a video of somebody on YouTube yelling at a cop, being like, I pay your salary.
How well does that go?
Right.
I don't imagine it ever goes good.
It rarely, yeah.
At no point is the The police officer who's the sort of like emissary of the state at that point.
Right.
Like, oh man, I sorry about that.
Yeah.
Right.
Like, that, that, like, yes, that, that person certainly believes that.
But in point of fact, is that actually happening?
I mean, not if they end up in handcuffs and with a black eye.
Right.
I mean, it's that's that to me is the, the, the fascinating thing about, about statecraft in general is like, how, how do different Places navigate this way of creating consent amongst the governed because it's a cultural issue, it's a geographic issue, it's a historical issue.
So, I live in Albania, I live in Toronto, Albania, because after Peace Corps, I just went pro.
And so, I've lived there for like on and off for probably four years altogether.
And at a certain point, I was in an Albanian art gallery.
I was looking at old pieces of artwork and paintings, and a lot of it is sort of like Soviet realist stuff because Albania was one, it was the world's first atheist state because religion was outlawed there for 50 years.
And two, it was under a sort of brutal North Korean style dictatorship under a guy named Enver Hoxha.
But one of the things that I found really interesting was in a lot of the Albanian paintings, most of the Albanian paintings, the people with rifles were never painted pointing their rifles up.
They were always painted pointing them either straight or down.
And I started thinking about that because I think of Western statues and artwork that I've seen in the United States.
And then I realized, well, Albania is a mountainous country.
People weren't pointing their rifles up, they were pointing their rifles down when they were defending against the Ottoman Empire.
Oh, wow.
And so the geography determined a lot about how the governmental structure ended up, the geography and the culture.
Even though the Balkan Peninsula is sort of full of all of these Slavic languages and Slavic people, Albanians are not Slavic.
Their language is not Slavic.
It forms its own branch of the Indo European language tree.
And they're also surrounded by mountains.
So isolationism seemed to be this way of generating consent amongst the governed there because they were already not only geographically isolated, but they're culturally isolated.
And so in the United States, we have.
This sort of frontier culture because for the dominant part of our history, we were moving west until we ran out of west to move.
Right.
So the geography determined who ended up being most successful and then who ended up generating the culture that was propagated throughout our country.
American Heroes Pseudonymous Names00:04:45
Right.
Interesting.
You know, you can tell a lot about a country based upon the people that are their heroes.
You know, I mean, who are some American heroes?
Like when you think about like the people that, that, Point to and say, it's like, oh, that's an American hero right there.
Right.
Probably people with guns.
Yeah.
Either that or people who are like, it's like, you know, people who are leading freedom movements.
You know, Martin Luther King Jr.
Right.
Yep.
Yep.
John Wayne.
John, I was going to say John Wayne.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's, I feel like he's the main one.
Right.
Yeah.
Or people who died.
Rosa Parks, you know?
John F. Kennedy.
People who are going their own way.
Like, we, and I don't, I think that that goes, you know, we in the United States and, I mean, for every country, it's hard to see the water that you swim in.
And so we don't, we take for granted what an individualistic culture we are.
There's certainly Albania is a more collectivist culture.
And that's not just because of the fact that communism was deeply embedded in their history, but it's because their family units are remarkably.
Is that Hillary Clinton?
Oh, it is.
Oh, no.
What am I looking at here?
It's more like Bill.
I'm Googling American heroes and looking at photos.
Oh, look at all those American heroes.
Look at all these powdered wigs.
Yeah.
Einstein.
Einstein was not American.
He was, as far as I know, might have to go check in history about that.
Oh, that's hilarious.
So, yeah, I mean, I feel like, where did we get off to?
Lebanon.
Lebanon.
Well, no, I want to go back.
Yeah, you were in Lebanon.
What were you talking about?
You were in Lebanon and.
That was in Beirut.
I was just reading.
Oh, geopolitics.
Frank was like, come back and be an intelligence analyst.
Yeah, so I did that.
By the way, Frank is a pseudonymous name.
It is a pseudonymous name.
And if you Google around about me, you'll figure out who it is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You did an amazing podcast.
Who was the guy's podcast you did?
Chris Ryan.
Shout out.
And Chris Ryan said he was going to.
Fuck Frank's wife.
God damn it.
Thank you so much for keeping it in Sudan.
Jesus.
There that goes.
I'm going to be dead by now.
Nice knowing you, Danny.
If my book comes out, You Are Not Here, travels through countries that don't exist, and I died, I hope it sells well.
You Are Not Here, travels through countries that don't exist.
I can cut that out if you want to.
I'd appreciate it.
No, I don't know.
Keep it in if you like it.
So, yeah.
So, you're working for him now.
So, I'm working for him.
And basically, it entails being just a very detailed newsreader.
Yeah.
So, what a working day is like, I'd get up really early in the morning.
So, I was up at like four in the morning.
I was living in Los Angeles at this point in an art colony, which is a very weird place to be an intelligence analyst.
Art colony.
Yeah.
Brewery art colony.
And he's a brewery art colony.
Dude, it's like, it's like, The musical rent, but like so much dirtier.
Wow.
Yeah.
It was cool.
Like you get like a big old art warehouse, and then it's like, you know, build your own walls and, you know, do really, really edgy artwork.
Yeah.
You all say fuck a lot.
Los Angeles is a strange place.
Yeah, man.
Almost as strange as Miami, but not quite.
I've never been to Miami.
Yeah, I've never been.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
It's such a great place.
I literally.
It's so close to the U.S.
I just went to my memory and I was like, what do I know about Miami?
And I think a Pitbull music video just started playing.
And that's it.
That's all I know about Miami, really.
It's crazy.
Totally different animal than out here.
The traffic is almost as bad as LA.
It might be worse sometimes.
I guess it's depending on the time of day, but it is very similar to LA.
It takes two hours to drive two miles.
Yeah.
Sounds about right.
And everybody is Cuban.
Yeah.
It must be great sandwiches and awesome cars.
Beautiful, beautiful women, great cars, lots of rich people, lots of great food, but just so many people packed into this tiny place.
It's a great place to go.
It's a great place to go for like a day or two.
That's not at all the.
I mean, like I said, my stereotype is literally only Pitbull music videos and Big Willie style.
Okay.
That is the.
So anything outside of a music video, I have no concept.
You got to go, man.
All the places you've been, you've never been to fucking Miami.
This is the first time I've been to Florida, man.
Belarus War Words Irrelevant00:15:49
Oh, my God.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
I honestly haven't explored the U.S. that much.
I've spent most of the last 10 years, you know, in unrecognized countries.
Right, right.
Can't blame you.
Yeah.
But when we were training, I went out to Texas, which was like, so training, and like, I don't know, I got an email and it was like, okay, you're coming out to training.
And I was like, okay, sweet.
It'll be like a weekend or something.
It was like a month.
And I'm like, what?
And like, it was like the three, no, it was three other people that I was training with, you know, to be an analyst.
I feel like I should do this the entire time.
I mean, honestly.
Air quotes.
Yeah.
Air quotes.
I was a very, very advanced newsreader and future guesser.
Yeah.
Learned a lot though.
I mean, fascinating, fascinating work.
But like, we were, you know, me and three other strangers who turned out to be amazing.
Shout out to Cheyenne, Xander, and Lawrence.
Great people.
So, like, we stayed in this like house in like suburbia outside of Austin.
And every day we were just sort of like power learned geopolitics and like had to like read through this huge book about World War II.
And then, you know, we'd go over to Frank's ranch and he'd like hold globes at us and be like, this is the Philippines.
I'm like, oh, cool.
And he's like, well, it's a bayonet going into China.
And then tell us all of the history of the Philippines and what America's geopolitical positioning around the Philippines was.
And we were just trying to pack as much geopolitical knowledge into our heads as possible.
And each one of us kind of got some area of the world to look at.
And so the goal of that was to take as much open source information.
About that area, so publicly available information, and try to determine based upon the constraints and imperatives of that country what might happen, what they might want to do strategically, or what might occur to them, right?
So, I, and you know, after two whole weeks of learning about geopolitics, I was like, my tinfoil hat was like firmly on.
I was like looking at Belarus and just.
Dreaming about Alexander Lukashenko.
At a certain point, I was just like, you know, Alexander Lukashenko doesn't think about me nearly as much as I think about him, which is a shame.
And I was like, oh, okay, so, you know, it's like Russia and Belarus, they're like, right now anyway, they're like, you know, having this sort of weird war of words.
I think Belarus was saying, you know, you're using us as a 10 million person human shield against, you know, invasion from NATO countries and stuff like that.
And then NATO or Russia was like, ah, shut up, or something.
I can't remember.
That's the exact quote.
Right.
Vladimir Putin, shut up.
And so I was like, I was, you know, talking to Frank about this, and he's like, well, like, what do you think is going to happen?
I'm like, are they going to fight or whatever?
He's like, no.
I'm like, well, why aren't they?
And he's like, research it until you find out why.
And I was like, what?
Okay.
And so just kept reading more and more, and then you find out that, like, The energy infrastructure of Belarus is like completely indivisible from Russian energy infrastructure.
There's oil there, but it's unproven, so it would take years and years for them to actually get that oil out of the ground.
So the constraint is they certainly can't break away from Russia.
They can't have a war with Russia.
So why are they having this public war of words?
And at that point, that's when real analysis happens you're looking at what is actually going on when you know what the constraints and imperatives are.
Okay.
And so that was kind of the training area for me.
It was just like, oh, you know, write up a report about Belarus.
So I wrote.
What was going on?
What'd you figure out?
I don't remember, actually.
Okay.
Nothing.
Yeah.
And that's the other great thing about one of the wonderful things about learning about geopolitical analysis is like most of the time, the world is not burning down.
Like most of the things don't mean a lot.
I had the best example of this was.
One day, a colleague of mine sent me an article about, I think it was Tajikistan, and some guy had blown up in Tajikistan.
And she was like, What do you think of this?
It was like one line email.
And I was like, Okay.
So I started researching Tajikistan.
I was researching it for a week.
And then I was like, Okay, well, you know, is there some relationship with the Taliban?
Is that happening?
Are they going through the Wakhan corridor?
Was it a bomb maker?
And then it turned out it was like a science teacher who accidentally blew himself up.
And it's like, yeah, sometimes people just accidentally blow themselves up.
Sometimes stuff just isn't that important.
And sometimes things are totally geopolitically irrelevant.
And depending on how you look at the world, that can either be very comforting or very not.
Because it could mean that nothing is significant and you shouldn't worry about anything.
Or it could mean that the most mundane thing is deeply significant and you should worry about everything.
Right.
So, I mean, for me anyway, at that time when I was doing that work, I was the opposite.
So, as I was doing that work, and in the book, I start out the book writing about this time that I was analyzing an Islamic State beheading video.
And I was like trying to sort of like impress the boss.
Why are you analyzing that video?
So, that video was, it had cropped up at some point.
Point.
I think it came out in the Islamic State magazine.
I think it was called Dabak.
But if it's just a regular video, them sort of talking about the normal stuff, then it's probably geopolitically irrelevant and you can kind of toss it.
But this one specifically was in Farsi.
So it wasn't in Arabic.
And the people who were being beheaded were in the uniforms, anyway, of the popular mobilization units who are Shia backed.
Or Iran backed shield militias that operate in Iraq.
And so I was watching the video to see if there was a way of determining that this was definitely an Islamic State message to Tehran, right?
And as I was watching this thing and realizing that I was finding myself becoming more and more paranoid and liking the world a whole lot less the more I studied warfare, I mean, go figure.
I was realizing that there's no way for me to actually determine this.
Right, because yeah, like you can put those uniforms on anybody, you can put that insignia on anybody, right?
Um, so does it mean that something's going to happen tomorrow?
Like, is the Islamic State going to roll some tanks into Iran?
Or not tanks, anyway.
Like, you know, Toyota Hiluxes.
Like, are they going to do that?
Like, probably not.
But it was like, that was the only thing that I had to analyze that day.
And, you know, you get on these cryptic phone calls and they're like, what do you have?
And you have to, like, spit out this brief without, like, stumbling on a single word.
And by the end of my brief, they were like, nope, that's irrelevant.
Don't worry about it.
So, like, I had, you know, in my art colony in Los Angeles, I'd spent the morning, like, watching beheading videos.
And it wasn't even seven in the morning yet.
Like, my coffee shop wasn't even open yet.
Before you had your coffee, people's heads get cut off.
Yeah.
And so, like, I was like, and I remember, like, looking at, you know, because I definitely had, like, I leaned into the stereotype, like, I had a yarn wall in my room.
It never really got to yarn wall status.
I bought yarn, but I never, like, put anything up that was, like, too arts and craftsy for me.
I know it.
I know.
I wish I had a picture of that.
But, yeah, like, I was looking at all the maps on the wall and, I'd done a lot of traveling before and I love traveling and I like liking the world.
And I realized as I was looking at now, after a couple of months of just researching how the world was tearing itself apart, that I really not only didn't like the world, but I was pretty afraid of it.
And that was not a great headspace to be in.
And at the same time, I was also like the worst person to sit next to at a bar because I'd just be like, oh, did you hear about these missiles?
Like, you know about the range of that missile?
You ever hear about this World War I treaty?
It's like nobody wants to sit next to that guy at a bar.
Right.
So, like, I had to make a change.
And fortunately, I got fired like a month later.
So, I was, but while I was looking in the Middle East, especially the Islamic State at the time, you know, the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan were this enormous force and beating back the Islamic State out of, you know, out of North, what is it?
Northeastern Iraq.
Right.
And so they were using this political capital that they had at the time.
So this was in 2017 in order to launch a referendum on independence from Baghdad.
Right.
And so I had been reading about this area constantly.
And of all of the stories that you read in the news, it's so rare that you find one where you're like hopeful about it.
And it's like, And it's exciting where you're like, this is an independence movement.
Not only is it an independence movement, but it's one that's done through basically democratic means.
Like, it's a new country that could potentially vote itself into existence.
Right.
And so, as I started researching it, I was like, and as I was done watching beheading videos, I was like, you know, because anytime you lose your job, you're like, oh man, well, if I could do anything in the world, what would I do?
And I was like, I want to go see the referendum on independence.
In Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
And so, like, I Googled jobs in Iraqi Kurdistan and I found a job as a third grade teacher.
And so, like, two weeks later, I had a ticket to Northern Iraq.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Teaching what English?
I was basically third and fourth grade.
In the book, I call it the Kurdistan International School, but it's a Lebanese school system called Sabas.
And they, you know, put me up, gave me an apartment, and, you know, and paid me okay for the area.
But it was third grade, fourth grade.
Social studies, homeroom, and English.
By yourself.
Yeah.
Jesus.
I mean, there were other international teachers at the school, but yeah, just went out there, and that was like a great way to basically start trying to figure out about, you know, trying to start writing about things where it wasn't the world tearing itself apart.
It was actually new things being created.
But of course, that didn't actually end up happening for the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan.
So while I was there, I was obviously teaching.
But I was also meeting other journalists and talking to NGO workers, made great friends with some of the locals, and was watching and waiting as this vote for independence was happening.
And it's amazing how the city or Beale started to feel as it got closer to this vote because there was so much uncertainty in the air.
The larger regional powers did not want and still do not want.
This independent Kurdish region.
And the reason for that is because the Kurds are the largest stateless group of people in the world.
So there are about 35 million Kurds.
They're spread across in one sort of unbroken band, across from the Zagros Mountains in Iran and Iraq, all the way down to Syria and through a large portion of Turkey.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
That's a big Wikipedia version of Kurdish nationalism.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, the notable Kurdish dynasties.
Shout out to Saladin the Great.
He was the leader of the Ayyubid dynasty.
So, yeah, so where did they come from?
So, they were a nomadic person group that was, I mean, you know, they're originally from the Zagros Mountains area.
Right.
So, where did the word Kurd come from?
So, I've heard that, and sometimes, like, I don't know if this is just like a general reading of it.
I've heard that it relates to tent dwellers, so nomadic tribespeople.
But I didn't include that specifically in my book because I couldn't confirm it, basically.
So, this is the flag of Iraqi Kurdistan.
And it's important to understand, too, that there are many different Kurdish governments, Kurdish languages, and Kurdish groups that are contained within the larger area that the world would consider Kurdistan, or certainly Kurds would consider Kurdistan.
So there are, you know, there's a Kurdish region of Iran, there's a Kurdish region of Turkey, there's a Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, and also Iraq.
Each has ostensibly different governmental systems and even sometimes different languages.
So, Kurdish languages.
So in Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, They speak a language called Sorani, but you also have Kurmanji, which is a majority Kurdish spoken language.
And one of the reasons that these regional powers don't want any sort of independence movement from certainly Iraqi Kurdistan is that it'll animate independence movements in these other countries.
So Turkey doesn't want a Kurdish independence movement to happen within its borders.
Yeah.
So this red area here, this is the Disputed area between Iraqi Kurdistan, which is in the green, and then, yeah, the disputed area is in the red there.
And so while I was there, the Kurdish referendum on independence happened.
But immediately, Baghdad was like, hey, you super aren't independent.
And you're also not taking Kirkuk with you.
So the reason that Kirkuk is important is because this majority, I mean, a huge amount of oil comes out of Kirkuk.
Okay.
Back in the day, Saddam Hussein was like, I got too many Kurds on that oil land.
So I got to move a bunch of Arabs up there and what he called Arabize the area so that he would have.
So which part of this map were you at?
Erbil, right there.
That's where I was teaching third grade.
Erbil.
Yeah.
Kurdish Referendum Disputed Areas00:16:00
Okay.
You were in Erbil.
I was.
So it's the green zone right here.
Yeah.
Correct.
And why is that green?
What does that say on the bottom?
What's that little.
So that's the area of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Okay.
Got it.
So it's an autonomous region within Iraq.
Got it.
Okay.
It's just an autonomous region that Iraq, they leave it alone.
I mean, yeah.
It's.
To an extent.
To an extent.
Yeah.
It's a.
Is it kind of like similar to how Eastern Ukraine was sort of like a lot of Russians were there?
There was a differentiation in government.
Okay.
Definitely.
Yeah.
So there is a government that is run independently, but it has direct relationship with Baghdad.
It's under the control of Baghdad.
Okay.
And so when they tried to vote themselves independent in 2017, Baghdad reasserted its control and decided to basically go to have a small war over Kyrgyzstan.
Cook with the Kurdish fighters to ensure that Kurdistan, the Iraqi Kurdistan, never took the oil producing region with them.
And so at the same time, Iraq basically said, okay, also all your airports belong to us and we're shutting down your airspace.
And at this point, I was sort of early on in wanting to write about unrecognized nations and I didn't realize that my book wasn't going to just be about Iraqi Kurdistan.
That's what I thought it was going to be.
But then I decided to leave Iraqi Kurdistan because I was going to see my girlfriend, who was a Fulbright scholar in Bulgaria at the time.
So, what the school had told me was, like, okay, well, if you leave, you might not be able to come back in because you certainly can't come in through the air because Iraq or airspace.
Yeah, Baghdad shut down the airspace.
So I was like, okay, I'll leave Iraqi Kurdistan on a bus.
I'll just take a bus across the border and then fly from this place called.
I don't know if that's how it's pronounced in eastern Turkey.
So, yeah, I went across the border and spent Christmas with my girlfriend at the time.
And then we decided to just go back through Turkey for New Year's because I was like, okay, well, I have to go back through Turkey over land anyway to get back to Iraq.
I have my apartment there, I have my job there.
And so there's a great train that you can take from Sofia, Bulgaria to Istanbul.
So, we're taking that train.
And, You know, they take us off the train at like three o'clock in the morning and they're like, you know, passports and give them our passports.
And they start looking at us a little funny and they're like, where do you live?
And then my girlfriend, Savannah, was like, oh, I live in Bulgaria.
She's a Fulbright scholar.
And I fucked up massively and I said, I live in Kurdistan.
And immediately they were like, oh, you got to come with us.
And so they took both of us and I got a, I got a, a, Probably about an hour and a half, two hour interrogation from the Turkish authorities.
And what they thought was that I was some kind of political agent, either operating on behalf of the United States or operating on behalf of the PKK, who are the Kurdish Workers' Party.
Right.
Because, I mean, frankly, it just didn't look good.
There's probably so many CIA agents in that area of the world.
Probably.
Yeah.
There's got to be.
I mean, yeah, I would imagine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I ran into mostly third graders.
Absolutely none of them seemed too shadowy to me.
Yeah.
So they pulled you to side, too.
Yeah.
Interrogated me.
Any physical beatings?
They swatted my legs a little bit.
Really?
Just because I don't know.
I didn't know if it was offensive or not.
But I crossed my leg, just like crossed my leg.
And dude hit my leg and he's like, sit up straight.
And I was like, oh shit, this is real.
Wow.
And so he's like, so, you know, You work for PKK?
Do you work for CIA?
Like, who do you work for?
I'm like, dude, I'm a third grade teacher.
I'm trying to write a book about unrecognized countries.
Good cover, by the way.
See, I know.
And that's the worst part.
And then they Googled me and then they found all the writing that I had done for the previous geopolitical forecasting company, which was a lot of stuff about Turkey.
And then they were like, let me see your camera.
And I had just previously been to a rally, like an independence rally for Iraqi Kurdistan.
So, like, the whole memory card was just nothing but like, Hyper nationalistic Kurdish imagery.
And I'm just like, I'm fucked.
Yeah, I'm so fucked.
And I was just like, I was thinking two things basically at the same time.
I was like, one, like, how mad is my girlfriend going to be at me for getting us, like, kicked out of Turkey?
Or two, am I going to Turkish prison tonight?
Oh, was it a fatalities map?
Of what?
What is this?
What a.
It said PKK.
Turkey PKK conflict, a visual explainer.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh, wow.
And I should say, I never really went into the Kurdish area of Turkey for the research for my book.
Right.
And I haven't been back to Turkey since because they banned me.
They banned you?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm straight up banned still.
How did that happen?
They handed me some papers that said you're banned.
Right after they interrogated you?
Yeah, and they said walk.
We were on the border of both.
Do you still have a picture of those papers we can pull up?
I don't have it on my note.
Holy shit.
No.
I'm sure I can find it, though.
I'll send it to you.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, what would happen if you went back?
Beheaded?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think they'd be headed.
I actually tried to go back one more time.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Well, because we thought that it was some kind of, you know, we thought that there was like a term limit on it.
Like, because there was some sort of antagonism between the United States and Turkey at that time.
And we thought maybe this was like, you know, not that big of a deal.
Turns out it's a really big deal.
So, they banned me from entering Turkey.
I can fly through Turkey.
But as far as I know, I haven't tried.
You're leaving the airport.
Yeah, I haven't tried to go back into Turkey since.
But yeah, they kind of left us at the border of Bulgaria and Turkey.
And we're like, okay, well, you know, walk.
It's December and three o'clock in the morning in Bulgaria.
So.
What was the temperature?
Super cold.
But fortunately, a cab was coming through the border at that exact moment.
I was like, we waited a little bit, and the cab was coming through because there's a bunch of casinos on the other side.
And this absolute saint, a guy named Demeter, he.
He picked us up and drove us to a small town called Svilingrad, Bulgaria.
But at that point, I'm just like, oh shit, there goes my book.
And this is also my thesis project.
I was working, I was getting my master's degree in writing from Oxford at the time.
So I was like, this totally torpedoed my whole book.
And also, I lost all the stuff I had in my apartment.
I lost my job.
Like, I'm starting from ground zero here.
And this is not looking good.
So I was like, okay, well, I've got to continue on this journey of unrecognized countries.
There are other unrecognized countries.
So what if I just like, Make my year about trying to go to other unrecognized nations at these sort of like politically relevant times for them.
And so I decided originally to go back to Kosovo.
So, Kosovo is, you know, you're going to have a lot of mad Serbian listeners right now.
According to the Serbs, Kosovo is a part of Serbia.
According to over 100 nations in Europe and around the world, Kosovo is its own independent nation.
So, when Yugoslavia fell, Kosovo fought a war to break apart from Serbia.
And actually, it's pretty geopolitically active right now.
There's a lot of things happening in northern Kosovo where Kosovo meets Serbia.
Yeah.
So, Yugoslavia broke up and Serbia there was Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania?
So, Albania was never a part of Yugoslavia.
Okay.
But so, Montenegro.
Northern Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia Herzegovina, Slovenia.
I'm missing one.
Did I say Serbia?
Serbia.
Yes.
So all of the Serbians are the ones that were massacring everybody, right?
Yeah.
So it was a Serbian genocide.
Yeah.
It was the Serbian led.
So it was under a guy named Slobodan Milosevic.
Right.
And so, yeah, there we go.
These maps are awesome.
Yeah, right.
So, the reason for that dotted line around Kosovo is because it's not recognized by everybody in the world.
Ooh.
Right?
And so, I was there for the 10 year anniversary of Kosovo.
And so, in, and, you know, oftentimes countries don't recognize Kosovo because they have a close relationship with Serbia or because they have their own independence movements that are within their countries.
So, weirdly, Spain doesn't recognize Kosovo.
Because they have independence movements in Catalonia.
So it looks a little bit strange for them to say, hey, yeah, we recognize your independence movement, but not ones that are going on in our own backyard.
Right?
So when you're building a country, essentially it boils down to declaration and recognition.
So you can declare being a country all you want.
In fact, I just saw some DJ in the California desert decide to declare his own country called Slow Jamistan.
Really?
Yeah, look up Slow Jamistan.
Slow Jamistan.
Slow Jamistan.
So he's declared.
Where in the world is this at?
This is Southern California.
Oh, perfect.
Yeah, yeah.
Joshua Tree.
There we go.
The Republic of Slow Jamistan.
Stop it.
That's right, man.
Stop it.
Travel advisory.
Non Americans wishing to travel to Slow Jamistan.
Sultan invites you to join the Sultan.
He's a Sultan, too.
And so, I mean, and these types of movements, like, essentially, they're not the exception to the rule.
They are the rule.
This is, you know, this is fucking goofy.
But at the time, when a group of violent revolutionaries decided to meet in a bar, they created a country called the United States.
Yeah, it was probably a pretty goofy idea to some people at the time, but it ended up working.
Because they're able to gain recognition.
Not only could they generate consent amongst the governed, but they could generate consent amongst other countries to say, yes, you exist.
And that's the thing that Iraqi Kurdistan was missing, certainly.
They needed support from the United States.
We didn't support them.
We supported them to help us fight the Islamic State, certainly, but not enough to do that, but not enough to fight back against Baghdad to have a revolution within territorial Iraq.
And when was that?
When did we arm them?
2017.
2017, we armed them.
Well, we've worked pretty closely with the Kurds for a long time.
In, I want to say, 1992, there was an operation called Operation Provide Comfort, which installed a no fly zone.
Over Iraq, and this was to help the Kurdish population along the border who were fleeing ethnic cleansing from Saddam Hussein.
Oh, wow.
So we've had a close relationship with them, but we're constrained by our relationship with Turkey and with federal Iraq so that we would never actually support an independence movement with them.
At least that's my understanding of it.
I'm a geopolitical numbskull, so I apologize for the dumb question.
Well, look, nobody consulted me as to whether or not.
Like they should support Kurdish independence.
I was, you know, teaching sentence structure to Kurdish.
Let's take a break.
Eight year olds.
I got to fix this AC.
We're both Zinan right now.
Oh, Zinan.
We're on the Zimbabwe.
So I was in.
Nicotine conversation, by the way.
We're back from our bathroom break.
Nicotine conversations and unrecognized nations.
Bars.
Not Lincoln esque bars, but bars nonetheless.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I was in Mitrovica, which is this area in Kosovo.
Oh, Kosovo's gone.
So, it's this area in Kosovo, which is like disputed between the Serbs and the majority Albanian population.
I should say that the majority of Kosovo is Albanian and Albanian speaking, but there are other ethnic minorities that live there, and there are also Serbs that live there.
Right.
Yeah, there it is.
That's Mitrovica.
And so I wanted to go up there because, I mean, look, I'm an American and I live in Albania.
So that certainly tilts my point of view on Kosovo because America sort of led the charge for the NATO bombing campaign that stopped Milosevic and led to the establishment of Kosovo as an autonomous state.
And so they really like Americans.
That's what Beck was saying.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I really like Albanians.
So I'm massively biased towards that point of view.
And so while I was working on this book, I was like, well, I also need the Serb point of view.
I need to understand what living in a country that essentially they don't consent to is like for them.
So I went up to northern Mitrovica, and there's this bridge that crosses over a river.
It's called the Ibar River.
River.
And it's sort of patrolled by all of these UN peacekeepers, Italian Carbonieri, who are sort of keeping the Serbian side and the Albanian side separate.
Because if anything's going to pop off, if war is going to start again in the region, then it's going to start probably at Mitrovica or in one of these borderland areas.
And so I went up there and I was like, well, I need to cross the bridge.
I need to go, you know, like just talk to somebody.
And as I was crossing the bridge, I was like, you know, I immediately felt like this intense sense of, you know, anxiety because I was like, it quite literally felt like I'm crossing over from the side of us, just from my own, like, nationalistic conceptions to the side of them.
Because I know for a fact that the United States is revered in Kosovo because they helped stop Milosevic's genocide.
Crossing Bridges Nationalistic Anxiety00:14:48
And I know for a fact that the Serbs do not.
Love America because we bombed their Capitol.
In fact, the bombed out buildings are still sort of kept as monuments.
Oh, wow.
Right?
And so, feeling yourself change, you know, how you feel in a place based off of how other people are perceiving you, like that's kind of the essence of the illusion of statecraft, right?
I'm just crossing a bridge.
Like nothing's changed, but everything's changed about my internal life.
Suddenly, I feel like the other.
And so, I cross the bridge.
And, you know, I'm kind of doing what I usually do as a travel writer, which is just, you know, try to make friends.
Right.
And so I go to this bar.
Same thing a spy would do.
Yeah.
Except they'd have health care.
Yeah.
Be awesome.
Hire me.
CIA, what's up?
Not doing anything right now.
Except for my book, You Are Not Here Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist.
CIA recommended.
So I go to this coffee shop.
And I'm kind of just sitting there having a drink and smoking a cigarette and minding my own business, but also trying to, you know, trying to make friends.
And at some point, this guy looks over to me and he's like, You Balkan?
And he says it in English.
And I was like, Nope, not.
Why'd you think that?
And he's like, Well, you drink like a Russian, you smoke like a Turk, and you look like a Jew.
I was like, Damn.
Whoa.
That was.
Accurate, man.
I'm like, so I'm like, hey, can I buy you a drink?
And he's like, I'm Muslim.
No, but you can buy me a coffee.
And I'm like, cool, man.
So we start chatting.
And so Muslims don't drink?
I mean, some do.
But obviously, more Orthodox Muslims don't drink.
It's haram to them.
Wow.
And he was.
And so I was a fascinating conversation with the guy.
He's Bosniak, right?
And so.
A part of Milosevic's genocide was Bosniaks, was Muslim men and boys.
Like the Srebrenica massacre was this horrifying massacre in Bosnia.
And yet, there I have a Bosniak guy who's sitting next to me in the Serbian dominated side of Mitrovica in Kosovo, a majority Albanian country.
And I'm like, what are you doing here?
And he's like, what are you doing here?
I'm like, I'm trying to write a book about unrecognized nations.
And I'm like, Can you explain, you know, can you explain how you sort of see your national identity to me?
And he's like, Oh, you're not, you're not Balkan at all.
You would understand this.
I'm like, No, I'm not.
Like, you know, he's like, look, I speak Serbian.
I have the same religion as many of the Albanians.
I even speak Albanian.
But I know that I, and I grew up in Yugoslavia, but I know I'm not Albanian because my father says that I'm Bosniak.
And certainly I'm Slavic, but I know I'm not Serbian.
And I know I'm not Croatian because I'm not Catholic.
And I'm like, okay, so what you're saying is that you understand your identity based off of the things that you're not.
That's a big portion of what your identity is.
And there's even a term for this.
It's called schismogenesis.
And the idea is that national identities, group identities, can often come from another group that you're being different than, that you're identifying yourself away from.
Yugoslavia was the land of the Southern Slavs.
That's what Yugoslavia means.
And so there are all these different groups within Yugoslavia.
Croatians, Slovenians, Macedonians, Serbians, Bosniaks, and they all had different national characters.
And so when Yugoslavia fell apart, they divided along cultural lines.
And so he understood himself, his own personal identity, how his identity plugged into the rest of what he felt his nation was as a Bosniak, specifically because his parental lineage, his religious beliefs, and also who he said he wasn't.
And so at that point, I was like, okay.
One, you're right, I'm definitely not Balkan.
And maybe I would understand that a little bit better if I didn't grow up in Southern California.
And then, two, what's it like living in a Serbian city after there was this massacre of Bosnians?
He's like, Well, do you want to see how Serbs treat Muslims now?
I'm like, Yeah.
He's like, You should go to a funeral.
I'm like, Okay.
He's like, You want to come to one tomorrow?
I'm like, What?
And he's like, Yeah.
I'm like, Who died?
He's like, My mother.
Like, Okay, yeah, I'll come to your.
And it wasn't like a funeral, it was a wake.
And so I was like, yeah, I'll totally.
So I was staying on the Albanian side of the bridge and decided to.
Shout out to Ertan, by the way.
What's up, man?
The really cool guy.
He definitely watches this.
Yeah, totally.
Ertan.
So I, you know, and it had the weirdest experience, too, because I was like, okay, yesterday I felt like all this anxiety about crossing the bridge and like.
You know, am I them?
Are people going to, you know, think badly of me because I'm so squarely on the opposite side of things?
I mean, even literally physically, because it's a damn bridge.
But then the next day, I'm like, okay, I'm going to like awake.
So I better like bring something because it's like rude to show up empty handed.
So I went over to an Albanian bakery and like got some baklava.
But then I was like, oh shit, this box is written in Albanian.
I'm like, is that going to be offensive?
And I'm like, no, fuck it.
Baklava is just great.
Like, I'll just bring.
You know, bring baked goods to this thing.
And so I walked across and, you know, and sort of sat with his family as, and, you know, it was a, I don't know if that's a typical Bosniak wake, but we all just sort of like sat around and, and kind of like held silence for, for his mother who had passed.
And after a little bit, he was like, well, you want to come out and have a cigarette with me?
And I was like, okay.
So we went outside and, um, and he was like, let me, let me show you what my mom looked like.
And so he goes over to this sort of like death notice and it's sort of stapled to one of the light poles in the area.
And he's like, the green box is because she's Muslim.
But as you can see, you know, this house is full of Serbs, Bosniaks, like, you know, we're trying to move on.
And like at a certain point, like the dead don't care about their nationality.
And then I had a similar conversation with a Kosovar.
Who was he running the Reuters bureau in Pristina at the time during the war?
And I asked him, you know, was there a time that he sort of felt this like elation, right?
I mean, you know, this is going to be released on July 4th.
And Americans have this sort of like, at least I do.
Let me speak for myself.
Like, I have this sort of like assumption that, like, At the point that the Declaration of Independence was signed, and you know, the flag is waving, like, there's this sort of like glorious elation that, like, we have a country and we did it.
And I think that might actually be fiction because I asked him about that.
Like, was there ever this point of, of like, you know, absolute joy that you, you won?
He's like, no, no, because then you have to build a nation.
Yeah, you won it, but like, you have to build it.
You have to build institutions now.
You have to, you have to do all the hard work.
You have to clean up all of the, the buildings.
You have to, You have to help repair the shattered lives.
You have to deal culturally with a genocide.
There was no moment of elation.
And I was like, so when does the work of building a nation actually stop?
And he looked at me and he was like, look, there's a graveyard on the border of Albania and Kosovo.
Their work's done, they don't have any work to do.
But the rest of us, we're still creating a nation.
And I went back to Kosovo fairly recently and I was there for the 15th year anniversary.
And, you know, I talked with Serbs and Albanian Kosovars.
Of course, there are other, you know, minority groups there as well the Guarani, there's Bosniaks, there's Turks.
There's a lot of people there.
But I talked with one Serbian guy.
He's a docent at a monastery called Gratianica.
Enclave, a Serbian majority enclave in Kosovo.
And, you know, I'm in a Serbian monastery and immediately asked me where I'm from.
It kind of surprised me.
And normally I would say California, but I'm like, you know, some cool.
But I was like, United States.
And he was like, oh, okay.
And then kind of went the other way.
And so, you know.
They don't like Americans though, right?
We bombed them, man.
Right.
Yeah.
Like Kosovo has a statue of Bill Clinton.
Really?
Yeah, and he has a really big hand.
See if you can find the statue of Bill Clinton.
Why do they have a statue of Bill Clinton?
Because he was the sort of leading force in the bombing campaign against Milosevic's forces.
Wow.
Yeah.
Bill Clinton's.
Oh, yeah, you said it was 91, right?
Yeah.
Oh, no, later.
It was.
Oh, shit.
Look at that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's Bill.
There he is.
Savage.
Yeah, they also have like a clothes shop called Hillary's.
Huge hand.
Just absolutely enormous.
But, you know, I was talking with this guy, and he's like, you know, it's my job to protect this monastery.
And, you know, he starts walking me through the alternate history for him, you know, the alternate Serbian history.
And it's not like he's just sort of like spouting off propaganda that he's memorized.
Like, he's deeply affected by this, too.
And he's saying, and he used this phrase to me he's like, you know, this is halftime in the football game.
It's not over.
You know, Serbia is going to come back.
It's going to get.
This area, again, even though this area is deeply within Kosovo.
So it's again, it's like that people's ability to construct reality around themselves can lead them to believe whatever promises them a future tense.
And so while he looks around outside of the village of Grazinica and he sees everything in Albanian.
Writing, and he sees, you know, the EU trying to sponsor institution building in the country.
He's saying to himself, Well, in the future, it's not going to be like this.
In the future, it's going to be part of Serbia again.
And this is something that I think is always something to look out for with political leaders because political leaders tend to promise you either a future or a past.
And the reason that they promise you a future or a past is because it's not something that's happening right now.
You won't be able to determine the results of it.
So, Look at make America great again, right?
Cool, when exactly?
Like, was it, you know, when we had this robust driving middle class after World War II because the manufacturing infrastructure of the world was destroyed in Europe and we had shipping lanes across the Pacific and the Atlantic?
Was it then?
I mean, it wasn't great for everybody, so who is it great for?
Right, and the answer to that is his voters.
And then sometimes political leaders are promising you the future.
What do you mean, his voters?
Well, that's who he's talking to, you know, MAGA voters.
When do they believe that again was?
I don't know.
I'd be curious.
Like, there's this sort of, from what I understand anyway, there's this Norman Rockwell version of America.
And I'm certainly not a person who will just, you know, write off the United States.
I think the United States is great.
I mean, we've done remarkable things.
But to look at your own nation through only rose colored glasses, It is to not actually see your nation.
You know, every nation, much like every person, contains some really incredible bright parts, but also incredible shadows.
And any nation that's able to elicit violent force and domination on the world has done horrifying things.
And this goes all throughout antiquity.
Like, that is the state of a nation.
And so, how people perceive that.
Whether or not they perceive that as greatness, that's something that a political leader can use to guarantee them a future that is brighter than their current present.
Okay.
You know?
That makes sense.
Or take, for example, you know, the Soviet Union.
We're moving towards communism.
We're moving towards pure communism.
Right now, we need to hand over all of this power towards strongmen so that resources can be redistributed.
And then we'll have.
You know, this fair, equitable, non hierarchical government structure.
But first, we have to, you know, we have to do this sort of like really intense autocracy.
Right.
And so, again, political leaders are promising the future or they're promising the past.
The important thing is they're promising something that's not immediately visible because they need your consent.
It makes me think about where we are right now in the country and like where do most Americans believe that we're going?
What is the message?
Like, I mean, Trump had a great marketing campaign.
Yeah, nobody can deny that.
And I don't see any other presidents doing that.
Having a great marketing campaign?
Not just having a great marketing campaign, but promising some sort of future.
Capitalism Price Point Purpose00:16:12
Yeah.
Or like you say, a past.
Like, they're not really giving any sort of grandiose vision of.
Something that people can get behind.
Like Trump had something that people got behind.
And like you said, they made it their religion.
Yeah.
Well, that's the, I think it's Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism.
She talks about this sort of like this human need to have a right to the future tense, right?
And so a right to the future tense is this idea that when you can project your own personal identity into the future reasonably and you can say, I'll be more productive, I'll be more wealthy, I'll be more secure.
My children will be thriving and healthy.
When you can do that, you don't have many problems with the system at hand.
But when you can't do that, when your vision of the future becomes dimmer and darker, and when it looks like things are actually getting worse for you, or when it looks like things are getting worse for you, then suddenly you're going to cling to any ideology that promises you that future tense, even if it doesn't actually bear any resemblance to reality.
Because we as human beings need that.
Like, we need to feel that our future is going to be secure.
That we have some sort of purpose.
Exactly.
And you can so easily pour purpose into national identity.
You know, as I was talking with the guy in the Serbian monastery, he was, you know, he's almost to the point of tears talking about like how Serbia is going to reclaim this monastery that he cares so much about.
Like, he has to believe that because his identity is so deeply involved in it.
Right.
When everything around him.
Is telling the exact opposite of that.
It's so interesting to see these tools used in nations that are unrecognized or that they're building up their own national identity or that they've won a national identity partially, or pardon me, or that they've won national recognition, but not throughout the entire world.
And then to come back to the United States and see that, like, We've grown up in a nation where we think of that as immutable, right?
We've grown up in a nation thinking that the United States has been around, always will be around, and it's not going anywhere.
Right.
And that's just not the case for most nation states, right?
Right.
You know, the USSR crumbled into its constituent parts as soon as independence movements started moving through the country.
That was a 250 million person country.
It's the biggest landmass in the world.
Right.
And it disappeared.
So, what do you call yourself?
Like, I mean, what do you call yourself?
I've run this question all the time.
Like, America disappears tomorrow.
Right.
Like, what am I now?
I would probably still identify as an American.
I wouldn't be a Californian.
Right.
I mean, I live in Albania.
I'm not Albanian.
You know, would I go back to like whatever my grandparents were?
Oh.
What do you think you would do?
I don't know.
I ask the question though to a lot of people all the time like, what would they do if the United States was no longer the world's superpower?
Like, would we become some huge target to some of the other superpowers?
Like, would we become a vulnerable target to Russia and China?
Would they, how much of a grip would they have on us?
And how much security would we have living here if we were no longer the number one superpower?
So that's a super interesting point of view on it.
I think it's like a super, it's definitely like the dominant American point of view because it's like, I think one of the things that defines the American character is self determination.
Pardon me.
One of the things that defines the American character is like self determination.
But on the flip side of that, the shadow of that is paranoia, right?
It's like, I'm going to be the one who's leading this thing.
I'm going to go out and make it on my own.
I'm going to, you know, dominate world markets.
I'm going to innovate.
I'm going to do all these things.
But what happens when I'm no longer on top?
Will other nations treat me like I've treated other nations?
Right.
And I simply don't know.
I mean, if I were to assess that, I think you'd have to look at.
Really, the geography.
Like, how much can we decentralize to produce the things that we personally need to survive?
We have an enormous amount of arable land.
We have drinkable water.
We have navigable waterways.
We've operated in a sort of like federated mode before.
And does it make sense to invade us?
Like, does it genuinely?
Does China want our land?
They have a lot of land.
Right.
They have quite a bit.
So, you know, what would be the imperative?
Why would somebody be forced to act violently on the United States?
You know, it does, it's interesting when you think about like the geography of the United States and how we are surrounded by the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.
And it may not make sense to put boots on the ground in the United States if you're another country, but you could, you could sort of take over the United States in other ways, which is a lot of people talk about how China is doing that with us through like TikTok and trying to make us dumber, like, right?
With like every kid.
Between the age of 12 and 20, in their 20s, they're just scrolling through mindless TikTok stuff all the time.
China is putting fentanyl, you know, literally like shipping fentanyl to Mexico, which is getting into the drugs, which is, you know, killing a lot of people in the US.
They're doing it in these weird subversive ways.
They're sort of like injecting themselves into us, like this negative, all these negative aspects of drugs and media.
Detective, which is killing us from the inside.
Like, yeah, that quote, like Abraham Lincoln said, that we would like rot from the inside, which seems like what's happening right now.
It's like, it's like an end stage, late stage capitalism empire kind of thing.
Yeah.
It's, well, it's interesting too.
So, it's a really interesting assessment.
And I think that that's something that a lot of people feel right now, especially when I come back to the States.
I think the first thing that I notice when I go back to the States is there is so much.
Paranoia.
There's so much fear here constantly.
It's.
And there's so much political polarization.
As soon as I have any conversation with anybody, they're sort of probing for whatever my politics are.
Like, I mean, I can say something as innocuous as blue hair.
You already have a political picture, right?
Right.
And you already have a menu of beliefs that, like, this person, like, I literally said two words.
And so, like, that's.
Astounding, right?
That is.
That Americans are constantly probing one another to say, are you on my side or are you on their side?
Because if you're on their side, I want nothing to do with you.
And that is so corrosive to any nation.
But going back to your point about China, I mean, I'm in no way any sort of expert really on anything, certainly not on China.
But, you know, you'd have to ask yourself what's the imperative behind it?
Like, I think if I'm moving towards being a dominant power in the world, and a dominant economic power, certainly, I want markets.
Right.
You know?
I don't care about turning somebody Chinese.
I want wealth to come from outside markets into my country.
I want to maintain the wealth within my country and use that for the betterment of my people.
This is ultimately the reason that I think we're in this stage of reconceptualizing what a nation state is.
Because, frankly, the nation state just hadn't been around for that long.
Previously, it was empires, it was kingdoms, it was fiefdoms.
And it was clan.
So, like, as we go down to that base level of the pyramid, it becomes more and more decentralized and it becomes more communal.
But what happens when you have a global economy, capitalism doesn't care about your borders, it cares about maximizing the benefit of business, and it will fall to the point that the price point for labor is the lowest.
And it will rise to the point that they can sell goods for the highest.
Right.
And so we've had this drain of low value added work that's been exported.
And so our GDP looks great because it's like, wow, all these businesses, they're multi trillion dollar businesses.
Right.
But who's doing the labor?
Like it's going to Foxconn.
Right.
And, you know, the, the, and so from what I understand, our GDP is not that great.
We're like on the border, we're like borderline in a recession.
But the reason that they're the way they're keeping us out of a recession is by funding the wars, like the military industrial complex, like funding more money into these private military contractors, all these billions and billions of dollars is keeping us above that line of us falling into a quote unquote recession.
Well, I in no way can speak on whether or not we're in a recession or not because I don't think anybody actually can.
I mean, there's, you know, the last thing that I heard is people will always say, well, the target is 2% inflation.
Okay, but like what is it actually?
And also, how do you define that?
But what you have is you have these really high producing businesses.
And so, as we've sort of evolved as a nation economically, we're not in the sort of post World War II era where manufacturing is being done in the United States and it's being shipped off to other nations to sell our goods there because we're just the only game in town.
Europe used to be, but its infrastructure was destroyed and nobody could ship to both the Pacific and Atlantic.
And so suddenly we had this robust working class where not only are we building in the United States, but we're innovating in the United States and people are getting richer and richer.
That's the point where people are talking about that's when America was great again.
Right.
Right.
When people had this assumption that their life was just getting better.
Because, I mean, I look at my parents and my grandparents, they came from being very small town subsistence farmers.
To my dad's a judge and my mom's an author, to being metropolitan, highly educated, wealthier people than their ancestors could have imagined.
And so when people in the sort of Make America Great, when people in the Make America Great, how do I again?
Yeah.
When people in the MAGA movement are saying, Make America Great Again, I think what they're calling for is give me a future I can actually believe in again.
And that was happening in a massive economic way post World War II.
But then, you know, we become, instead of a labor based economy, instead of a value added based economy, we become a knowledge based economy.
So suddenly you need one Steve Jobs instead of a thousand workers at a Ford plant.
Right.
And suddenly labor goes to India, it goes to China, it goes to wherever the price point is the lowest.
It goes to wherever the price point is the lowest because.
Wow.
Wow.
Huge dick on that guy.
Loud pipes.
Yeah.
Because money ultimately doesn't care about borders.
Right.
Yeah.
And so that's one of the reasons that I think that we're having this reevaluation of what a country is.
In fact, there are some people who think that we're moving towards this statehood as a service model, right?
Citizenship almost as a subscription model.
I mean, think what does your country do for you?
Right.
It provides protection.
Sometimes it provides health care.
It provides a galvanizing sense of national identity.
But what does that mean when we can have relationships across the entire world?
You know, people are playing online with, you know, players from Russia and from all over the world.
They have an affinity group that doesn't live where they live.
And they're working.
I mean, I've worked.
From Albania for American companies for a bunch of different companies, and you know, never once lived in the United States.
Well, I did live in the United States, but right, right, yeah.
So, so what you know, what does a country do for us in this world where we are all becoming sort of like digital global citizens?
That's kind of creepy.
That is interesting that you know, that's that's one of the things that people talk about when they talk about like type zero to type one, two, and three civilizations.
As they say, right now we're a type zero civilization.
And to become a type one civilization, we have to become a global civilization.
Yep.
And we're kind of on our way there because we have the internet.
The internet has made us far more global.
But we're also experiencing these enormous growing pains.
And because of these growing pains, it's leaving, I think, a lot of the world with this huge identity crisis.
And that's why it was so interesting to look at unrecognized nations, where it's like, for example, the next place I ended up going to is a place called Transnistria.
Have you heard about?
Only from you.
Oh, yeah.
So, yeah, Transnistria, sometimes called the Black Hole of Europe.
It's this sort of like little slip of an autonomous zone.
It's only recognized by three other countries who are also themselves unrecognized.
It's a Russian protectorate, even though Russia doesn't recognize Transnistria as its own sovereign nation.
That's the center of Tiraspol.
That's their flag.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
And.
Try to find a map of it.
Yeah, it's.
Really tiny little slip of land, and it's right on the border of Ukraine.
Oh, okay.
Right by Odessa?
Yep, correct.
It's only, I think, like an hour or two away from Odessa by train.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, what made you want to go to Transnistria?
So, they were having Russian elections.
So, I was in Kosovo for the 10 year anniversary, and that's in the book.
And then I realized, like, wow, you know, Russian elections are happening outside of Russia.
Super interesting.
So, in this country where even Russia doesn't recognize that it's its own autonomous country.
They're hosting Russian elections because it's a majority Russian area.
Right.
And the reason that it is a majority Russian area is because, literally, because Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans back in the day.
And they took this little slip of land because, what, you can see the sort of border there?
Yeah, there's this river, the Dniester.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, the Dniester River, hence the name Trans Dniester.
Trans across.
Zoom out a little bit so I can see kind of like the whole area.
And so what it does is.
Okay, okay.
Sheriff Lieberland Transnistrian Flags00:15:35
It lets you have access to the Black Sea.
Right.
And so Catherine the Great saw this as a geopolitical imperative.
We've got to push the Ottomans off of this area so we can gain access to the Black Sea.
And then when the Soviet Union sort of took a hold, the Bolshevik Revolution kicked off, and suddenly they needed to gather up all of these areas.
They needed to gather up Moldova.
They needed to push their borders all the way out to Central Asia.
But they needed to install that galvanizing sense of identity.
Within the people that are there, right?
So suddenly, you're not a Moldovan, you're a Soviet.
But there are all these Russian speaking people who were in the Transnistrian area.
And so they're sort of sandwiched in between Ukrainians and Moldovans.
And as the Soviet Union started to rattle apart, they were like, no, we want to keep the dream alive.
And so that's why they still have Lenin statues.
That's why they still have portraits of Stalin.
I mean, it's literally like going.
Back in time to like what the Soviet Union would look like today, except in this sort of weird oligarchic way.
Like, a lot of the things in Transnistria are run by literally a grocery store brand called Sheriff.
Wow.
Yeah.
Look up grocery stores.
Yeah.
I mean, if you think about it, it's a great idea to, if you want to sort of like have control over an area, like what do grocery stores do?
They're responsible for supply lines, they're responsible for large amounts of real estate.
They partner with local businesses and they control the food, right?
Right.
So, Sheriff, second largest.
The second largest company in the unrecognized breakaway state, Transnistria, Sheriff Supermarket under construction in the city of Bendri.
Yep.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So, they own the majority of everything in Transnistria.
And, you know, it's a way of having a sort of de facto government.
A great way of doing that is keeping control over the food.
It's keeping control over how resources are brought in, supply lines.
And since Moldova has this, has a sort of agreement with their companies, you can do business so long as they're considered Moldovan companies.
Now, Sheriff is kind of the only game in town because they have relationships with them.
Look at that logo.
It's a literal Sheriff Star.
Yep.
Yep.
In fact, they even have their own.
Did that come from like the US?
Was that inspired by like.
So I've heard different things that I in no way can confirm.
But I heard that the inspiration from it was the fact that the sort of, you know, the lawmakers in the town, the sort of secret police and the, yeah, so the lawmakers that were still active in Transnistria were like, okay, well, what are we going to call our company now that we need to have a legitimate company?
It's like, well, what are we?
We're the sheriffs of this town.
Sheriff Star.
Whoa.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I really have no idea.
That's so funny.
That Sheriff Star exists for a reason.
They even have their own football team.
Sheriff football team?
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Really?
Like soccer.
Soccer football.
Yeah.
And I think they did pretty well this last year in something.
But yeah, it's a bizarre, bizarre place.
And it kind of feels like you're being watched all the time.
It feels like you're being followed there.
I don't know if I was.
It certainly seemed to be the case.
Mm hmm.
And, but it also feels like you're kind of living in this fossil.
You know, people in Transnistria have like five, six passports because they need to have some recognition outside of Transnistria because nobody.
Recognizes a Transnistrian passport.
So they'll have, you know, they'll have Moldovan, Romanian, Russian passports.
Okay.
And, you know, it's, you look at that place and what it feels like being in that place is like, well, what's the future that people want here?
Is it that they're once again subsumed into larger Russia?
I don't know.
What kind of sense did you get from the people there?
I got the sense that people considered themselves Russian.
But they also knew that they were kind of between this rock and a hard place.
That, and I certainly can't speak for all Transnistrians, but that they were sort of on this island, which they clearly are.
And a lot of the stuff with the Ukraine war now, too, is like, well, is Transnistria, is the Transnistrian military going to activate and go into Ukraine?
Because they have Russian tanks that are over there, and they have a Transnistrian military.
So, I'm actually surprised that it hasn't really activated the same way.
I'm actually super surprised that Transnistria has not really been a part of the war effort at this point.
But from what I understand, anyway, there is this strategy of trying to connect the land bridge.
If you go along from southern Transnistria all the way across to the occupied territories in Ukraine, That would sort of help them gather up the larger Ukraine or that would help them gather up the larger Russian forces.
So, what side would they be on, Ukraine or Russia?
The Transnistrians?
Yeah.
Likely Russia.
They're Russian speaking.
Right.
Yeah.
That's like with a lot of areas in Ukraine, right?
Like Crimea is mainly Russian.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what I've heard.
I don't know.
I've never been to Ukraine.
Right.
So, yeah.
I mean, that's just what I've seen in documentaries.
Totally something that I've heard and seen.
Yeah.
But I truly don't know.
Yeah, it's a really strange place.
But at this point, I, you know, I was sort of three countries down that were all unrecognized.
And during this time, I had met this journalist in Iraq and I told him about my project.
And he was like, oh man, if you like unrecognized nations, you should get a load of Lieberland.
I was like, what's that?
Lieberland.
Where's this at?
It is an island in the middle of the Danube River.
The Free Republic of Lieberland.
How big is it?
Seven square kilometers.
It's about as big as the Vatican.
That's their flag.
And so this journalist.
These people call it better flags.
You know, I agree.
I agree.
That flag is a little busy for my taste.
So this journalist was like, Yeah, well, you should check out Libra Land.
Do you want the president's email?
I was like, Yeah, totally.
I'll take that.
So I basically just started bothering the government of Libra Land for months while I was in.
Well, once I got kicked out of Turkey and then I was in Kosovo and then I was in Transnistria, just started bothering them.
And eventually they wrote me back while I was in Transnistria and they're like, look, if you want to come and visit us, you can come for our 30 year anniversary.
And I was like, done.
Let's get to the Danube.
And so ran basically all the way across from Eastern Moldova to Novi Sad, Serbia, which is where they were sort of having their 30 year anniversary celebrations.
And somebody was like, okay, if you want to make Libra landers, you got to go up to Apetin Harbor.
Now, I didn't really know much about Libra land at the time.
I knew that they were the world's first libertarian microstate.
And that was it.
Like, that's all I knew.
And so I go up to the small harbor in Apetin, Serbia.
And I see a boat, just like a houseboat, hanging out in the harbor.
And it's flying the Libra land flag.
And I'm like, Is that Libra land?
Where is it?
And so there's their website.
Great website for our country.
I know, right?
And so I go up to the boat and there's like, you know, this shirtless Dutch dude on top of it.
And he's like, are you a Libra lander?
And I'm like, no.
And he's like, well, come aboard.
Let's change that.
And I'm like, okay.
So I go up on this boat and I start talking with this dude.
And I'm like, this is what I've been working on.
And so he starts talking about how, like, They are not only the world's first libertarian nation, but they're this sort of crypto anarchist nation that's funded based off of cryptocurrencies.
Oh, wow.
And so, what, you know, they've done this really fascinating little trick of statecraft, right?
So, when Yugoslavia fell, there was this declared no man's land between Serbia and Croatia.
And in that no man's land, that was the Danube River, there was this island, that island right there, that nobody really claimed.
Croatia decided that they weren't going to claim it.
Serbia decided they weren't going to claim it.
So nobody was on this island.
Cut to the future and a libertarian political scientist guy.
Well, I guess I'm just going to call him.
So anyway, I don't know what to call him.
The president of.
Sounds good.
Yeah.
Cut to the future.
The president of Lieberland is like, I think I can start a country there.
And he's a Bitcoin millionaire.
He goes up and he's like, puts a flag in and he's like, I got a country.
Now, I just got to work on recognition.
Because remember, if you start a country, it's two things it's like declaration, recognition.
And so they start building actual infrastructure.
They have Lieberlandians that are living on this.
And mostly they're just like Bitcoin millionaires who are just like, this is the future of statecraft.
What we're going to do is we're going to have this sort of libertarian paradise where we fund ourselves off of cryptocurrencies and we don't have to interact with the legacy financial system.
And so that's why I'm talking with this shirtless dude on.
A houseboat in the middle of the Danube River.
And I'm like feeling kind of two ways about this because it's like on one hand, I've been through all of these countries that have had these violent revolutions, you know, blood and treasure to draw a line on a map.
And meanwhile, a bunch of cryptocurrency millionaires decide, well, we can take this land because nobody wants it.
And we can start our nation here.
And we can sort of live parallel to the laws of the world by making our own laws on this little island.
Because again, now we're in a place where that's the future plan.
That is the future plan, yeah.
Hmm.
So these crypto guys are going to fund all this?
I mean, that's what they're trying to do right now.
I ended up with them for their, like I said, the 30 year anniversary.
And eventually, after bothering the Libra landers as much as possible, I ended up in this sort of cryptocurrency conference in Novi Sad, Serbia.
And I was just talking with the various Libra landers.
And at one point, somebody was like, Hey, that's the secretary of state.
Just go talk to him.
And turns out he was coming to find me.
And so, you know, after talking with the sort of shirtless Dutch crypto anarchist, I was like, Is this just kind of like a Burning Man thing?
Like, what is Lieberland at this point?
And this dude is like this really genteel, super smart English guy.
And so we sit down and start talking about statecraft.
And I'm like, What are we doing here?
And he's like, We're making a country.
I'm like, Legitimately?
And he's like, Yeah.
And I'm like, How?
And so he sort of starts talking me through like the various ways they're gaining recognition.
And one way was actually pretty fascinating.
So they kicked everybody off of Lieberland, Croatia did.
Serbia nominally supports them.
And so the Croatians kicked people off of Serbia, or pardon me, the Croatians kicked people off of the Lieberland island because they said it was an affront to their sort of national integrity.
But through treaty, they actually say that they have no claim over the island.
The president of Lieberland ends up getting himself arrested by the Croatian authorities.
And so, what that does is it makes them have to make a legal decision.
Do you have claim over this territory or not?
Because according to this treaty, you don't.
But you arrested somebody who's a European citizen for apparently illegally entering your country.
So, either you have a claim or you don't.
And so, by taking them to court, they were able to sort of start carving out recognition from Croatia.
And then, meanwhile, at the same time, Croatia starts running patrols up and down the river, hoping that people just don't go to the island.
But what does that do?
It gives them a de facto border.
So it's almost like this Aikido move.
And so I find out from the Libra Landians, Libra Landers, I still can't remember which it is supposed to be.
Libra Landians sounds good.
It does sound good.
So I find out from them that this whole thing is going to be like we're not allowed to step foot on the island, but the third year anniversary is going to be this boat party.
Right.
And so they have all these boats, like the sort of flotilla of boats that's going to like take off from the harbor and then everybody's just going to go look at the island.
And I was like, I got to talk to the president.
I just, I got to, like, this is my mission for the day.
And so I find the biggest boat and I get on that boat because I assume he's going to be on that boat.
And I mean, it's a boat.
So there's only so many places to look for the president.
I can't find him anywhere.
And then we take off and we're sort of floating down the Danube River.
Suddenly Croatian patrol boats start coming alongside of us and they're like, Making sure that we don't eventually go to the island.
And it's like this sort of party like atmosphere where everybody's drinking like Lieberland wine, which is called Tierra Nullis, and just like out of red solo cups and like dancing to top 40s hits.
And I can't find the president until I see him like, until I see the president like speeding along on a jet ski throughout all of the different boats and in between the Croatian police.
And so that's Vidjadlika.
And what he's doing is he's like going to each of the boats, giving a little speech, and then like coming back and like giving another speech to somewhere else.
And I'm just like looking, I'm zipping around on this jet ski, like between Croatian police and all these Bitcoin millionaires on like tiny boats and big boats.
And I'm just like, I got to get on that jet ski somehow.
Like, this is, this is.
Hop on the back?
This is, yeah, I'm like, how can I get on this jet ski?
And I'm, you know, staring off the side of the boat and I'm looking for the jet ski.
Somaliland Ambassador Embassy Stay00:14:47
And I hear this guy from behind me.
He's like, you want to get on the jet ski?
And I'm like, yeah.
And he's like, I'm the foreign secretary.
I'm like, can you just, is everybody just like nominating themselves?
Like, at this point, a hobbit could have come up to me and been like, oh, yeah, I'm the diplomat of Libra land.
And I'm like, okay, yeah, sounds good.
And he's like, so turns out the foreign secretary is this guy named Tom.
I think he lives in Florida.
And he's like trying to create diplomatic relations with other countries for Libra land, for recognition of Libra land.
So he ends up waving down the president.
On his jet ski, and I finally get on the back of the jet ski with the president of Libra Land.
And that is like the weirdest first impression that you can make on somebody.
Did you have to hold on to him?
That's exactly what I did.
Do you wear a life jacket?
No.
Ooh.
Yeah, I probably should have.
Now that I think about it.
Yeah, so I'm just like clutching on to the president of Libra Land.
It's beautiful.
It was the strangest first impression.
I'm like, hi.
And it's also loud because, you know, there's boats everywhere, there's Russian police, and oh, there he is.
What's up, Vic?
Oh, man.
Yeah.
And so I'm like holding on to him like a spider monkey, and he's like, hold on.
And then we just sort of blast off him like, hey, I'm Eric.
And he's like, I know who you are.
You've been sending a lot of emails.
I'm like, okay, well, this is going to be a short ride.
Like, I'm like, God, okay.
I can't think of a single question to ask the president of a country that just got created, even though I've been like on this, like, at this point, eight month journey through unrecognized nations.
And the only question I could come up with, and I'm like yelling it in his ear.
I'm like yelling it in this dude's ear.
I'm like, so you created a nation.
What advice would you give to other people who want to start a country?
And he kind of like idles his engine a little bit and he seems to like consider it while the Croatian police are on this one side and then like Katy Perry songs are coming from the Libra land boats.
And he's like, everybody should start their own country.
And then he just like busts out a sick 180 and then like speeds me back to the boat and deposits me there.
And I'm like, Like, I don't know if I'm impressed.
I don't know if, like, this is how nations will be created in the future.
I'm just sort of dumbstruck by a failed referendum and subsequent violent conflict in Kurdistan, butted up against a boat party and a president on a jet ski in the middle of the Danube.
Hmm.
And so I'm just like standing on the boat, and I start talking to the foreign secretary.
And he's like, So, where's the final stop on your trip?
I'm like, oh, I'm going to go to Somaliland.
It's like an autonomous region in northern Somalia.
And he's like, we have an embassy there.
It's like all these nation states that are trying to become nation states are like convicted somehow.
Yeah, they recognize one another.
Yeah.
And they're the first ones.
Yeah.
They're the early adopters.
That's right.
Yeah.
And so he's like, you want to stay at the embassy?
And I was like, I mean, yeah, totally.
Yeah, that sounds great.
And so I have like a little bit of downtime in between going to Somaliland.
And I'm kind of waiting in Bulgaria and I am not hearing anything from the brass at Libra land.
And so I start sending like furious text messages.
I mean, you know, polite but firm text messages.
I'm like, hey, remember when you said I could stay at the embassy in Somaliland?
Because, like, at this point, I have no money.
Like, all my resources are drained.
And, like, there's no way to stay, like, safely in, you know, Somaliland.
It's a safer place in the Horn of Africa, but it's not the safest.
And I think I had like $300.
So I really needed to.
Stay somewhere.
And so I get a call from the president, and he's like, So we had a problem.
And I'm like, What's the problem?
And he's like, Well, we lost our ambassador to Somaliland.
So I'm like, Fuck.
Like, there's no way I can just show up in Somaliland not knowing anybody, not knowing like anything, or not having a place to stay.
And so I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do at this point.
And then he's like, Well, I don't know if this would mess up your book, but like, would you want to do that?
I'm like, what?
And he's like, do you want to be the Libra Land Ambassador to Somaliland?
I was like, can I stay at the embassy?
And he's like, yeah, I mean, yeah, but you also have to do stuff for us.
And I was like, yeah, okay, totally.
So I became the Libra Land Ambassador to Somaliland.
Are you still currently the Libra Land Ambassador to Somaliland?
No, no, no, no.
I was just the.
Oh, you resigned?
I resigned, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I was there for like six weeks.
If you, I don't know, if you look up my Instagram, you can probably find my embassy.
Wow.
Yeah.
So you went there.
Yeah.
So I went there and like in the.
Where exactly is Somaliland?
So you have the Horn of Africa and you basically take the full top part of it, right?
So it goes up into the Horn and then on the Horn is another sort of unrecognized nation called Puntland.
And then there's Federal Somalia.
Then there's Federal Somalia.
Of course, according to Federal Somalia in Mogadishu, the entire Horn of Africa is theirs.
Yeah.
But Somaliland is trying to create its own autonomous state on the Horn of Africa.
Can you zoom out so we can see like the whole bottom of Africa?
Okay, right there.
Yeah.
So if you look up Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland.
That's right.
Wow.
Google recognizes it.
Google recognizes it, but probably with a dotted line.
That'd be my guess.
So if you click on the map, that's called the breasts of Hargeisa, those mountains.
Ah, look at this.
Dotted line, red dotted line.
That's just around the city, as far as I know.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
But if you go back a little bit more.
Yeah.
Oh, it doesn't even have a dotted line.
Hmm.
Yeah.
So in the beginning, I basically had two jobs as ambassador to Somalia.
In the beginning, I had like two jobs as acting ambassador from Libra Land to Somaliland.
First job was to buy furniture for the embassy because it was just like an empty mansion.
Mm hmm.
And then the second one was to establish diplomatic relations between Libra land and Somaliland.
I'm like, I have no idea what any of that means, but like, sounds fun.
Yeah, let's do it.
I can buy furniture, definitely.
Let's figure out that other stuff too.
So they had set me up with a contact who was like their attache to the UAE, and he was like building roads in Somaliland.
Okay.
And so he kind of gave me a contact in the Somaliland government.
So I ended up having like a meeting with the vice president of Somaliland.
And it was astounding at this point because I was like, I'm just some dude who was on the back of a jet ski.
Like, I just showed up in Somaliland.
I have no idea what's going on right now.
But I have to go ambassador.
And I was shocked because, as soon as I got in front of the vice president of Somaliland, I was like, all right, let's just say whatever a politician would say.
Let's try and say diplomatic stuff.
And I was like, oh, yeah.
Ah, so that's Abdul Rahman.
He was my main contact.
Okay.
And he kind of plugged me into the infrastructure of Somaliland.
Incredible guy.
Sadly, he's passed.
Oh, no.
How did he die?
I don't know.
But he was a truly, truly incredible man.
Yeah.
Really, really wonderful human being.
Right now, we're in the middle of the Somali desert because that relates to the third job that I had when.
So, I'd spent about like a week in the country and then all the internet just kind of shut off and had no idea what was going on.
And I went to the sort of like local international hotel and I was like, Do you guys have internet?
And they're like, No, there's no internet anywhere.
And I had like zero clue what had happened in the country.
When the internet came back on, we found out that a cyclone had blown through the country, Cyclone Sagar.
And yeah, there we go.
This is news from our embassy in Hargeisa, Somaliland.
Thank you, Eric.
Currently working on getting aid.
Cyclone victims, on behalf of LibraLand underscore or, we will have food to 100 families before EID.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the third goal that I had, other than buying furniture and establishing diplomatic relations, was to deliver aid.
And I'm like, I'm.
I'm a Peace Corps volunteer.
I taught English to Albanians for two years and worked on a mobile library.
I have no idea how to deliver aid.
And specifically, I have no idea how to get money into Somaliland.
So I started a Somali bank account on behalf of LibraLand.
And that was a wild conversation because I literally had to go to a bank in Hargeisa and be like, I am the ambassador from LibraLand to Somaliland.
And I would like to use your bank as our official embassy treasury.
I have no idea what they thought I was, but they thought it was hilarious.
They opened up this bank account, but then when the cyclone came through, I was talking with the Secretary of State, and he's like, Well, that's not going to work because we can't get the money there soon enough, and we need to get it to our aid team.
And I'm like, Who's the aid team?
They're like, It's you.
I'm like, Oh, nice.
Good.
And so they transferred money to the guy who I was working at his office, the Syrian guy.
And Bitcoin.
And then he just like handed me $15,000, like in cash.
And in US cash?
Yeah.
So the money in Somaliland is kind of funny, to say the least.
So, it's like it's so depreciated from inflation that it's you pay for things in like blocks of cash, or you use like sort of a digital transfer where you text somebody to bring a certain amount of cash.
So, like the de facto currency is the US dollar.
So, I just had like $15,000, which was like super unsatisfying how few bills that was.
Like, I was kind of hoping for like a big metal case or something, but it was just, you know, small stack like that of $100 bills.
And I'm like, okay, well, I have to use this money to.
Yeah, there's Puntland.
I have to use this money in order to figure out how we deliver aid.
And so, again, I go meet with the vice president.
I think if you go to my Instagram, you can see a picture of me with the vice president and Abdul Rahman.
Sorry, I'm sending you all over the world.
I'm out of.
Do you have any pirates?
No, no.
I was pretty far from the ocean.
I did go to the ocean at one point to a port called Berbera.
Um, but it's uh, I mean, Somalia is a big place, yeah, and so that that certainly is an element that exists in Somalia, but it's not, it's not like you know, you're not seeing like you know, people being like, I'm a pirate, right?
Um, at least I didn't, um, so it's like a largely nomadic culture.
Um, how far is that from the Red Sea?
I think it took me about two hours to get there, okay.
That was that was a weird road trip, um, because.
So, this is a total sidebar, but like there's this one hotel that's kind of like the international hotel in the area.
And I walk in one day and there's this white dude there.
And like we stand out in Somalia.
Like, oh, yeah.
Definitely stand out.
And this guy sees me in the coffee shop and he stands up and he's like, you want to have coffee with us?
I'm like, I mean, I guess.
And so he's with, from what I understood, a preacher, Reverend Anthony.
And This guy is named Robbie, and he was also with a Chinese student that was studying in Ethiopia.
And I'm like, What are you guys doing in Hargeisa right now?
And they're like, What are you doing in Hargeisa right now?
And I'm like, Yeah, I guess, I mean, whatever story you have probably isn't as weird.
So, fair point.
And so, what they were doing, Robbie used to be in the American military.
Preacher, they connected while he was in, I guess, some military school in Coronado.
And I never quite got an understanding of who the Chinese student was.
He didn't speak anything that I spoke.
Right.
But Robbie spoke Cantonese and he also speaks Swedish.
And so what he was there to do was to open businesses in what he called blue water markets.
So anytime there is some geopolitically unstable area, he goes in and he has manufacturing in China.
And he decides to sell cell phones or whatever in these areas.
And the dude had a passport like that.
Wow.
I mean, if anybody.
He was a fascinating guy.
But anyway, he invited.
I think you can see Reverend Anthony.
And I don't know if you have my Instagram up.
But anyway.
So, anyway, we're having coffee for a bit.
I tell him that I'm the LibraLand ambassador to Somaliland.
And he's like, oh, cool.
Well, we're going on a road trip to Berbera tomorrow.
Do you want to come?
I'm like, I mean, I'd like to, but to travel outside of Hargeisa, you need armed guards.
And I'm like, I don't have the money for armed guards.
And he's like, oh, it's fine.
Goats Palestine Israel Thought Experiments00:15:56
We got them.
I'm like, okay.
So, decided to just like get in this like small convoy with Robbie, Bishop Anthony, and then this, this like Chinese student that was calling himself David.
And we just like went sightseeing together.
Like we went to these caves and saw like old cave paintings.
Then we went to Berbera Port and we were like just sort of looking around.
And we're like, yeah, it's a port.
He's like, so I'm going to start a cell phone business here.
I'm like, Cool.
Literally, none of that made it into the book because I'm like, I have no idea what happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Super interesting, dude.
But anyway, yeah.
So the cyclone comes through.
I have to figure out how to deliver aid.
Meet with the vice president again.
And I'm like, okay, we're trying to make an aid delivery on behalf of Libra land to Somaliland.
All I'm asking is will you provide translators and guards to take us out to the affected area?
And will you give us an idea of like, You know, what these people's needs are.
And he's like, fine.
And so I take, I think it was like $8,000, me and Abdul Rahman, and we just bought like tons of food.
We brought, we bought like, I think it was like bags of flour, oil, sugar, salt.
And just all these workmen just sort of loaded it up in this enormous car, enormous truck.
And they drove it out in the center of the desert.
And I was like, okay, great, we've delivered aid.
And then Abdul Rahman is like, no, no, like, you know, that's not delivering aid.
Like, I'm like, what are you talking about?
Like, we sent the food out there, right?
And he's like, no, like, you have to go out there because, like, we need pictures and stuff.
I'm like, oh, right.
Like, diplomatic aid is soft power.
So it's not enough that, like, we're just giving food to people who need food.
It's a mat.
What matters is the story around the aid, right?
And so we all traveled out to the middle of the desert.
To find this group of nomads who were really affected by it.
The cyclone had come through, pulled a lot of water pumps out of the ground where they were irrigating their animals.
A lot of the wealth in Somaliland is kept in the form of goats, killed a lot of goats, even killed a lot of the people in the area.
But then there are also these second knock on effects of a disaster because when you don't have this sort of robust system to deal with.
A disaster like a cyclone, then there are these secondary effects which are even worse.
So nobody has pumps to get clean water.
So suddenly there's a cholera outbreak.
And so we drive for like eight hours through the desert.
We're in the center of just this sweltering, sweltering heat, you know, nothing but mountains and a couple of like improvised structures around us, sort of like these stick tents.
And nobody's there.
And I go up to Abdul Rahman, I'm like, where is everybody?
He's like, oh, they had deaths from cholera today.
Oh, yeah.
So this is over there is the vice president of Somaliland at the time.
On my left is Abdul Rahman.
I don't know if you could tell.
I'm the one in the white shirt.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
I see now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have the glasses.
Right.
Yeah.
Your hair looks great.
Thanks.
But, you know, we're just sort of sitting there in this empty village.
And he's like, we got to wait for people to come back from the funeral.
And I'm like, oh, God.
Like, can't this doesn't seem like a photo op time?
Like, can't we just leave?
The food for the people.
And he's like, no, no, you know, this is the point.
This is what we're doing.
And I'm like, it was at that point that I was like, you know.
Hearts and minds.
Exactly.
I'm not an aid worker.
I'm a political tool.
Right.
And that just like, so the sort of head of the village is walking me through and he's showing me the affected areas where the pumps had been taken out and all of the goats that I mean, they looked like stone because they'd been sort of sandblasted.
And they died sort of embedded into the ground.
I think you can probably see some of them.
And he showed me all of these goats that look like they're running away from the storm.
But of course, that's their wealth.
And he's telling me, you know, we need this, we need that, we need the other things.
You know, we need new pumps, we need livestock again.
Right.
You know, food's great, but we need all of these things.
And I'm listening to him and I'm telling him through my translator, it's like, I'll relate all this information back to Libra Land.
I'll relate all this back.
But at the same time, I'm also like, I know that my job here was to be a political tool and it wasn't to have sustained aid.
And it was at that point where I was like, you know, as an acting politician for like the briefest amount of time, I realized so quickly that like I was behaving like a politician.
I was, you know, the beneficiary of respect that I didn't earn because I was just operating on behalf of something that was slightly more powerful than myself.
People were treating me in a way that was like respectful and deferent.
People were treating me in a way that was respectful and full of deference because they assumed that I had power, which I got because I was just on the back of a random jet ski.
And I was acting as the role determined that I acted.
And so I was like, I'll tell the president.
But I didn't know at that point is it cruel for me to give this person a certain amount of hope that LibraLand will come and help them more?
And so I came back from that day after delivering aid.
And I was like, I don't know.
I like.
I was the beneficiary of the illusion of state backed power.
I was a political tool for a photo op.
I brought food to people.
Cool, but to what end?
Right.
Is it just to gain recognition?
I mean.
It's interesting, man.
It's like this, just the very smallest scale of what some of the biggest nations in the world do on just a massive scale.
Yeah.
And that's one of the things that you notice in smaller countries where, you know, the writing on the wall is so much clearer, right?
That a nation has to push to gain recognition in whatever way possible.
Again, it's like that concept of how do you generate consent, not just of the governed, but how do you generate consent to do business with you as a place that's doing your best to carve out a new line on a map?
How do you get somebody to say, I'm here and you're here.
And, you know, you can do that at the end of a gun.
That's the way it's been done throughout a lot of history, or like a sword.
But you can also do that through gifts, through aid.
And yeah, those are.
Is that one of the goats?
Those are, yeah.
Yeah, it was, I mean, the day, oddly enough, the day after, like I basically done all the other, like I gave aid and I made diplomatic relations with Somaliland, you know.
And then I had been like putting off buying furniture because I was like, I don't really care how much furniture costs.
I'm going to try and give as much money to the aid donation as possible.
Right.
And so, like, my last week, I was like, I got to buy furniture for this embassy.
Like, I said, I would do it.
So, I went out with one of my buddies and just went, I guess, to the Somaliland version of an IKEA.
We were just like looking at bed frames and offices, and there was a surprising amount of bed frames that, like, Glow in the dark and had like lion heads roaring on them, really.
Yeah, I mean, really fancy.
Sounds pretty cool, actually.
It was, but I was like, this is not embassy furniture.
Yeah, I did think briefly, like, get them like the glow in the dark lion head furniture.
I didn't do that though, so I ended up buying them the furniture.
Uh, as far as I know, the Libra Land Embassy in Hargeisa is still going.
Um, really, yeah, I think so.
With your furniture that you got, with Libra Land's furniture, Libra Land's furniture, Libra Land, yeah, that.
Are you looking up Somali furniture?
You're trying to find the lion head glow in the dark furniture.
I mean, we went to like a couple of stores and it was like a theme.
I was like, you know, it was like.
How do you think about the.
Like, after all these crazy experiences, like seeing what it's like on the ground, like dealing with these people firsthand, which you didn't expect to experience, but it was a great learning experience.
Yeah.
How do you think about like what's going on, for example, between Israel and Palestine?
Don't know.
At all.
No.
No.
I, you know, I was, so when I was, when I was, you know, briefly an analyst, like my area was like, I was researching a lot of the Levantine area.
So, like, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, yeah, pretty much southern Turkey over to Iran.
I never once, like, touched on Israel and Palestine.
Well, talking about what, like, the way you're speaking about, Like these states and how they look at the future and the past.
Yeah.
Israel's a very interesting one.
Super.
Probably one of the most interesting ones.
They have, from people I've talked to, they have like the best intelligence agency that exists on earth.
And like, person for person, like, I don't, if there was a war between the US and Israel, I don't think that they would win the war.
But when it comes to like their intelligence apparatus, it is far more effective.
And, They're willing to go way farther than we're willing to go.
And I think in Israel, I think the citizens are, it's mandatory they have to serve in the military for a certain amount of time.
So, I mean, like I said, I've never, I really have not ever researched Israel and Palestine that much because my work really never touched on it.
And also, specifically with this book, anyway, You Are Not Here travels through countries that don't exist.
With that, I tried to stay away from kind of the big, highly politically charged, unrecognized nations.
Because, I mean, especially in the case of Palestine, I think the last thing that the world needs is like some dude from Los Angeles being like, I got it, guys.
Right.
I figured it out.
For sure.
Yeah.
But I think that to your point.
But they like what I'm saying is like when you think about that and you think about Israel, it's like.
Like, they have more of a national galvanizing, for lack of a better word, story than anybody.
Like, look at the history.
It's a great one.
Yeah.
Look at the history of Israel.
And, like, if anyone has more will to continue to thrive into the future, it's them.
Well, I mean, I'm sure there's other countries too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that from one perspective, you should look at the constraints and imperatives of Israel, right?
You know, they're a small nation and they are surrounded by antagonistic nations to them.
So, what does that necessitate that you do?
Like, turn everybody into a soldier.
Like, have an incredible defense apparatus.
Right.
Have strong international relations.
That's the imperative there.
They're constrained by their landmass because they don't have, like, they're constrained by their landmass because they don't have the natural buffers that we have.
Right.
So that's a big part of it.
But I think, I mean, and in terms of national story, sure.
I mean, you know, according to, I wouldn't speak for an Israeli, but like it goes back to the Bible times.
So, right.
Right.
Like that's a pretty compelling story.
Yes.
You know, I mean, I think that when I think about the countries that I stayed away from, I mean, largely I was constrained by the fact that, like, one, I didn't know I was going to go throughout all of these other unrecognized countries because I didn't.
Didn't think I was going to get banned from Turkey.
You know, crazy.
But the other thing was like, I wanted to sort of shine a light on this conversation as it is globally.
Like, these aren't the only unrecognized nations that exist in the world.
There's literally probably about a hundred of them, as far as I know.
And that's, you know, there's, you look at Taiwan too.
You know, there's partial recognition of Taiwan.
Tibet is another one of these areas.
There's constant independence movements in Spain, obviously.
Romania even has an independent contingent in it.
So I think that there are independence movements in the Transylvanian area.
So this is kind of indicative of where we're moving globally, in my opinion, anyway.
Because now the things that previously, you know, we're not a part of empires anymore.
Like, we're not a part of the Ottoman Empire.
The time of empire is largely spent.
And now we're, as you say, like trying to become a global community.
But what does a global community mean?
Right.
Can you separate your own national identity away from the pool of wealth that your nation controls?
Right.
And its ability to do violent force, presumably on your behalf.
And that I don't know.
You know, what it kind of goes back to the question about, like, us as Americans, right?
So, without the American military, without it being a wealthy and presumably prosperous nation, like, what makes us Americans?
I think so.
Here's a good thought experiment that I think about sometimes.
Let's say, you know, America goes away, and there's a huge refugee population of Americans, people calling themselves Americans who've spread throughout the entire world.
Mm hmm.
Billionaires Sea Nations Taxes00:10:19
How do we group up?
How do we what?
How do we group up?
Okay.
Let's say there's an American contingent in Beijing.
Do we have an America town?
Do we carve out our own little neighborhood where only Americans go?
I don't know.
Probably not.
I think we would separate differently than that.
Because, again, it goes back to the individual nature.
It goes back to the individual nature of being an American.
Hmm.
Would we go back to whatever our previous nationality was?
I don't know.
Like, how do you find those people who believe the same national story as you do?
And because of that, even though you don't know that person, you have a shared affinity with them.
Right.
I mean, right now we're seeing this movement of people who are, I think they're calling them the passport bros.
So, yeah, like, there are these golden passport schemes.
This is huge in the crypto universe where it's like, Okay, well, I have a bunch of wealth, but the US makes it really difficult to cash out my cryptocurrency.
Or it's, you know, my businesses are not protected in any sort of legal framework in the United States.
So, what do I do?
Get a new passport.
Malta is like this huge place for this.
You get a Maltese passport, suddenly you get access to the EU, and they have pretty liberal laws in terms of working with alternative finance.
And so, we're already seeing wealthier classes of people.
Start to find alternatives to their citizenship so that they can benefit more.
Wow.
And there's even, oh man, this is such a great point, and I can't remember what it's called exactly.
The Seafarer Movement.
Can you look that up?
Seafarer?
Oh, this is crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
This is really dope.
It's like billionaires who are starting their own nations on the sea.
Try Seafarer or Peter Thiel.
Libertarian Seasteading Utopia from Peter Thiel.
Whoa, what is this?
Silicon Valley billionaire's dream of a floating libertarian utopia may have finally been killed.
Peter Thiel's dreams of a.
Okay, that's the same title.
Keep going down.
Wow.
What was this all about?
So, the sea studying movement, from what I understood, was again, it's this movement where you can have all the benefits of coming from whatever nation you come from, but you can also resist any detriments that come in the form of taxation.
Ah.
Right?
So, hey, I don't live in America anymore.
I live on these crazy libertarian boats.
Right.
Or maybe on an island in the Danube River or in the metaverse.
Right.
And now you don't have to pay taxes.
This is the thing that I'm talking about about the statehood as a service model, right?
It's citizenship that provides for you the things that a nation provides for you, but it's essentially the wealth and protection of the nation state without actually.
The culture or the story of the nation state.
Right.
So if you're a guy who's like a billionaire like Peter Thiel living on a yacht being a seafarer, you could still have businesses in America and make tons of money, not have to pay taxes, but you just don't get, but can you still benefit from having residents there?
I have no idea.
So if you were a seafarer like this, would you be able to legally be a citizen of the United States as well as like some other country?
So there are certain countries that allow for like dual citizenship.
Yeah.
And the US is like one of the two countries in the world that taxes you no matter where you live.
Actually, weirdly, the other one is Eritrea.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that I don't quite understand.
Well, that's an interesting thing that people always complain about in media, too.
They complain about all the billionaires, like Elon and Bezos and Zuckerberg, putting all their bank accounts overseas so they don't have to pay taxes.
Right.
So, what happens if you put your life overseas so that you don't have to pay taxes?
Right.
Then you, you, this is sort of spelled out in a book.
It's actually pretty haunting.
I think it was written in 1997.
It's called The Sovereign Individual.
And so, what it does is it predicts the rise of the failure of nation states to provide what citizens would need or want and the rise of self sovereign individuals who can provide their own goods, services, and protection.
Right, right.
And so, like, I mean, I'm, and you'll see in the book, like, I'm of a couple of minds about like the libertarian leanings that exist, especially in the cryptocurrency space and in Libra land, certainly, because I think that there's like two ways that you end up becoming a hardcore libertarian.
And it's like, one, you're wealthy enough to afford only private services.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
The other way is your state's collapsed and suddenly you're a libertarian overnight because the state isn't there to provide any services for you.
So suddenly you just became a libertarian.
And so I think the people on the one side of things where they've become wealthy enough to afford only private services, to sort of dance in between the borders of the world and to fund themselves beyond borders and oftentimes laws.
They look at the rest of the state based population and they're like, well, we did it.
Why can't you?
And it's like, well, because it takes a lot of capital to sort of reach the escape velocity of the nation state.
Right.
And at the point that you reach that escape velocity, you're not believing that national story anymore because you just don't care, in my opinion.
Right.
Yeah, man.
That's probably true.
Like, what does the U.S. do for.
You at the point that you provide your own protection, you provide your own health care, you provide your own everything.
If you move out to a boat.
Well, at some point, like, okay, let's take Elon Musk, for example.
He relies on a lot of government contracts for a lot of his businesses, like SpaceX or Tesla or whatever it may be.
So he kind of depends on the U.S. for this stuff.
So if the U.S. wanted to strong arm him into paying taxes, they could.
They could say, okay, we're just going to get rid of all your contracts and basically, like, choke off all this money from your companies.
With, um, same thing with Bezos, right?
Because the US could, if they wanted to, they could decide to restrict Amazon or like put their boot on the neck of Amazon and sort of like cut off.
Like that, that's what's happening with, um, that's what's similar to what's happening with in the FDA right now with, um, supplement products.
So there's, there's in the FDA and with pharmaceutical companies, they, I don't know if you're familiar, but they have like, yeah, I heard your bit on that.
There's these patents, right?
These patent laws where pharmaceutical companies can basically get patents on certain drugs and make a ton of fucking money on these drugs.
But there's this weird blurry line between certain supplements and patentable drugs.
And if one of these big pharmaceutical companies, which they work in cahoots with the FDA, like they literally, like somebody who works for the FDA, can get hired to work at a pharmaceutical company, it's like a revolving door.
So if the FDA decides that they want to help this pharmaceutical company by making this supplement, A quote unquote drug under a patent, the FDA can strong arm Amazon into taking all that shit off of Amazon.
So the government can do things to manipulate these big companies that these billionaires, oligarchs rely on.
It's totally accurate.
But when we say the government, you're talking about the American government.
American.
Yeah.
And suddenly we're seeing the fact that America isn't the only game in town.
You know, there's an enormous amount of wealth that's coming up in China.
In Southeast Asia, in Africa especially, there's an enormous amount of wealth there.
And when you have a business, let's say a digital business, where you're trading bits and not atoms, then you'll put your business in whatever country is the most permissive and has the best deal for you.
So, yeah, certainly the US could stomp on Elon Musk's companies, but what would the US miss out on?
What wouldn't they have access to?
Right.
You know, and a lot of the ethos has been privatized in the U.S., right?
Privatize RD and stimulate businesses that are doing things in our national interest.
Right.
So if you stomp on businesses that are within your national interest, then what happens to your country?
You know, and this is the dangerous thing about money not caring about borders.
And so what happens then when there's.
An enormous amount of fiscal flight to more permissive areas.
Like, what happens to the people that are left within those borders?
Are they just customers that are stuck believing a national story?
Right.
Forever War Global Citizen Chaos00:05:18
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, the sovereign individual sort of predicts that everybody will have a certain amount of sovereignty, but This will come after a period of, you know, chaos as people are emerging from sovereign nation states where their identity is plugged into a nation state to being a global citizen.
Yeah.
And I mean, like, there, and of course, in the sort of like conspiracy theorist community, there's like this huge antagonism towards, like, well, they want one world government.
And it's like, like, One who's they.
And Ed Schwab, Bill Gates.
So, I hear from the YouTube videos that I watch at like three o'clock in the morning.
Tin foil hat strapped on.
But yeah, it's like, what do we progress towards?
Do we progress towards a globe that's just dominated by one power?
Or is it a group of nation states that are subject to the most powerful nation state?
I don't know.
I think it ultimately depends on our reassessing of what national identity is.
And can you separate that away from, again, military power and financial power?
Like, does that happen?
I don't know.
I can't even fucking wrap my head around what that would look like.
I can't either.
I like, there's some really cool sci fi books about these things kind of happening.
Really?
Yeah.
There's one, oh, it's a fantastic book called Forever War.
It's not, there's a Forever War book by Dexter Filkins, and that's about Iraq.
But then Forever War is about, I think it's by Joe Halderman.
And it was written in the 1970s, I want to say, incredible, incredible book.
But it's about this soldier who's sort of shipped off to war and he has to, on another planet, you know, some galaxy far, far away.
And he has to go through a wormhole every single time.
So every single time he leaves and comes back, like, Earth is like a couple hundred years in the future.
Right.
It's super cool.
He stays the same age.
He stays the same age.
And also, since his military paycheck is constantly getting dumped into his account, since he constantly gets paid from his military paycheck, he's wealthy beyond imagination.
And he doesn't really know what to do with himself.
And this was a book, from what I understand, it was a book about the sort of dislocation that soldiers returning from Vietnam felt as soon as they.
Came back to the United States.
And so, in one of these versions of Earth that the soldier comes back to, the world, or at least the United States, has sort of subdivided into these farming communes, which are, you know, they're well fed, but they're also sort of workhorses.
And then the sort of like decadent city centers, which are quite dangerous.
And people are doing more like knowledge based labor, but everybody's.
Sort of scrapping to find work.
And so you have like this massive polarization in the community of the United States.
And so if we have, and sometimes they even, this isn't the exact same topic, but they call this the barbell economy.
And this is something that we'll see, you know, that people predict we'll see with AI, which is like you'll have an economy that instead of going, you know, like this, where you have like people earning more and more, and then in the center you have this sort of Like I said, a robust middle class, you'll only have people who are like the laborers on one side and then the sort of like highly paid technocrats on the other side.
And then everybody else will be sort of operating on like UBI, which I think is in the book.
Yeah.
Wow, man.
Well, we just did like four hours.
Did we?
Yeah.
Almost.
Like three hours and 45 minutes.
Look at that.
So thanks.
Happy.
You just broke my brain.
Sorry, dude.
Happy Independence Day.
Happy Fourth of July.
Yes.
Happy Fourth of July.
Happy Independence Day.
Perfect day to drop this.
Everybody, Go out and buy.
You are not here.
Where can they buy it?
Where are they finding this book?
So, this will just be on Amazon for right now.
You can get it in paperback or you can get it in digital and then other stores to come.
I think it's right now just in wherever Amazon ships to in Europe and the United States.
Perfect.
More places to come.
Where are you going next?
So many places, man.
So I'm going to New York.
Yeah, I'm actually just going to friends' weddings.
I'm not going anywhere interesting at all.
Yeah, I'm going to go back to Albania and chill out for a while.
It's been a lot of pushing on this book to make it happen.
So.
Seed Vault Data Future Book00:03:19
So, yeah, I mean, there are some other thoughts of projects that I want to do with like weird travel stuff.
I kind of want to do.
Back to the Arctic.
So, that's one thought of it.
It kind of is like a future book.
I was thinking about doing this like travel book about like how to love the future.
Because it's like, I don't think anybody takes seriously that the human race is going to stick around for a thousand years.
Right.
Right.
But like, don't we have to?
We got to get off the planet.
Yeah, man.
And so, it's like, I'm curious about.
I'm curious about places and technology that actually sees that as a serious thing.
And actually, in the Arctic, in Svalbard, they kind of have a project where they're doing this kind of work where they have the Arctic Seed Vault, which is this crazy vault that's built under a mountain.
And obviously, Svalbard is as close to the North Pole as you can get, where there's human habitation.
And so they have all of the world's seeds that are donated by seed.
Banks of respective nations, so that if there is a cataclysmic event and some type of species is wiped out, then they can go back to the seed vault in Svalbard, which is under this mountain.
Yeah, it's actually been used a couple of times in Syria.
That's wild.
And on top of that, they also have, I want to say it's like the Global Memory Project, which is a store of the world's data.
And it's literally in a mine.
Like, I went to, and nobody's allowed in it.
Like, even the king of Norway is not allowed in.
And it's sort of operated as like a global service to the world on behalf of Norway.
And so the memory project is like, okay, so we have this.
If you look up the seed vault, it actually looks like a level from 007.
Yeah.
Oh, that's the seed vault?
I've seen this.
Yeah, it's cool, huh?
That looks like something from Star Wars.
Super.
Yeah.
It's not as big and impressive as you think.
No.
Which is unfortunate.
But it.
Whoa.
You have to go into this mine to actually see the entrance of it, and it's like super highly, highly guarded.
What do they keep in there?
People's fucking crypto wallets?
I have no idea.
Just the seeds.
They didn't let me in.
No, they keep seeds in there, but then they also keep like treasure troves of the world's data.
Oh my God.
But the thing that they told me about it, which is really interesting, is that they're like, we're kind of at a problem.
It's called the Global Memory Project.
They're like, we have a problem because, again, if we take this whole.
You know, the human race is going to be around for the next thousand years, even if there's some sort of cataclysm.
We have the problem of the decay of the data.
Like, what do we store it on?
And, you know, I'm at the bottom of this mine with this, like, you know, really nice Norwegian tour guide.
And she's like, you know, the future of this is really storing data on DNA because, like, it won't decay at the same rate.
And we're just, I'm just like in the middle of a mine listening to this lady talk about storing, like, the world's information on DNA.
Mine DNA Information Storage00:01:05
Whoa.
Yeah, so that's one thought.
There's some spooky shit, man.
Super, super.
And then, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
If somebody wants me to do a crazy travel thing, I'd love to do it.
The other thought is to do a back in time travel bit and recreate what's called the Hippie Trail, which is an overland journey from Austria to Calcutta that hippies used to do back in the 60s.
It was only around for like 10 years or so.
But it's not around now because, like, you know, it goes through Afghanistan, it goes through Iran.
And I had an idea of like, Doing it with no technology that existed past 1969.
Oh, that's great.
It'd be cool.
Yeah, you'd have to film the whole thing.
Exactly.
The only technology you'd be allowed to have is cameras.
No, no, no.
Film it on film.
On film?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Fuck yeah.
Be really cool.
That would be great.
If anybody wants to pay me to do that, that'd be pretty cool, man.
Well, we'll get you back in here to talk about it.