What is happening with Bernardo Kastrup November 10th, 2024

Summary

Andrea engages in a deep, unfiltered conversation with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, addressing the rawness of current world events and their personal impressions. The dialogue explores the anxiety-provoking state of global politics, the essence of good and evil, the nature of truth, and how narratives shape our understanding and response. Andrea shares her recent experiences in the United States post-voting, while Bernardo reflects on the parallels between historical and current events, particularly concerning U.S. and global politics. The discussion critically examines media's role, technological impact, and ultimately, the importance of maintaining humanity amidst the chaos.

Highlights

• Andrea just returned from voting in the U.S., sharing her fresh reflections on the heated political climate 🔥.
• Bernardo discusses the historical parallel fears of authoritarianism, highlighting the erosion of truth standards ✍️.
• They tackle the danger of moral relativism and the need for firm moral grounding to combat existential threats 🥊.
• The discussion includes how definitions of good and evil can be politically weaponized and the importance of contextual understanding 🎭.
• Bernardo reflects on his personal journey in understanding and conveying truth through the lens of analytic idealism 🧠.
• The dialogue navigates through the evolving role of technology in shaping narratives and public perceptions 📱.

Key Takeaways

• Andrea and Bernardo explore the complexity of truth in politics and media, highlighting the manipulative nature of narratives and the importance of discerning historical patterns 🕵️‍♀️.
• Bernardo draws parallels between current political climates and historical events, urging for understanding and responsibility in recognizing potential dangers 🛡️.
• The conversation touches on the influence of technology and AI, focusing on their potential impacts on society, truth, and politics 🤖.
• Bernardo emphasizes the criticality of retaining humanity and decency in times of hardship, advocating for truthful and mature discourse 🙌.
• Both speakers reflect on personal philosophies and experiences, advocating for a grounded approach to navigating modern societal challenges 🌏.

Overview

The conversation, led by Andrea and joined by Bernardo Kastrup, ventures into the murky waters of today's socio-political climate and its philosophical undertones. Andrea reflects on her voting experience and the overwhelming nuances of American elections. Kastrup offers a historical lens, drawing parallels with past worldwide authoritarian shifts, cementing the urgency of historical awareness and moral clarity in handling today's challenges.

They delve into the importance of narrative control and the impact of becoming disengaged with established truths due to overwhelming falsehoods or relative moralities presented politically. The dialogue delves into the need for leaders who can uphold truth and integrity amidst a climate saturated with manipulation and performative politics.

As the discussion veers into technology, Bernardo sheds light on the implications of AI in today's society and the philosophical questions it raises about consciousness and existence. Through their reflections, both Andrea and Bernardo underline the necessity of maintaining a connection to our basic humanity, advocating for compassion and truth in navigating the increasingly complex global narrative.

What is happening with Bernardo Kastrup November 10th, 2024 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey everyone it's Andrea this is a conversation I just had with bernado castrop I'm actually posting our first conversation later this week and I already had it ready to post and then I was just writing with him about that and some other things and we decided to just kind of jump on and have a talk about everything that's happening in the world as I just got back from the United States and from voting and I think I'm just going to post our conversation just raw as it is
• 00:30 - 01:00 is I don't really know how I feel about everything any of this that's going on in detail I know how I feel about it but it's all still I'm still trying to understand everything that's happened and maybe you are too and maybe it helps to just hear us talk about it off the cff without any kind of notes or or whatever we we just had a few things we thought we'd talk about and we talked about them that was what we did today it was all very impromptu
• 01:00 - 01:30 and yeah I really appreciate Bernardo he hung out for like three and a half hours to talk about this stuff even though I think it was his back was hting and who knows what else so we both hung out a while to talk about it because it feels important to just talk and try to understand what's going on and how we feel about it and I send you all a lot of love no matter where you are or what side you're on or what's going on I hope we all find good ways together
• 01:30 - 02:00 honest ways authentic ways motivating ways exciting ways and that's all I can say right now I just want us to find the best way we can be alive together I know that sounds idealistic Bernardo would probably think that's very idealistic but yeah analytic idealism I mean it's in the title so anyway here it is here's Bernardo and I talking and talking and talking
• 02:00 - 02:30 all right I think it's all good okay so I already asked you how you are in the aftermath of all that is going on in the world now but so yeah how are you berardo given the circumstances and the times we live in I'm I'm doing all right my little microcosm here you know my family my friends my life is is doing okay of course I am worried about the world yeah were you shocked by what happened in the US recently on November
• 02:30 - 03:00 no no I think um for those paying attention the writing was on the wall um I had the a hope that things would go in a different way um not not that I was you know cheering and supporting the other side I think unfortunately Americans found themselves in a situation where you had to choose the lesser of two evils um
• 03:00 - 03:30 but um evil is a strong word do you really mean that or is it just no I just use the word because it's part of a norm more expression that that I don't mean that well yeah evil true evil insinuates itself in a way that um most people would never use the the the word evil for when it's beginning to insinuate itself that's what we've seen historically true evil
• 03:30 - 04:00 when it begins doesn't looks like doesn't look like evil it looks even reasonable um so maybe the word is applicable here but it's not the reason I used it I used the word simply because it's you know it's a normal expression used in daily life yeah but it gets used a lot and I guess it also gets to this dichotomy thing that interests me a lot based on these themes too but and I do wonder about your views on that because I think it relates to everything that's going on now like do you believe there's this Good and Evil Vil in a really kind
• 04:00 - 04:30 of absolute sense well there are these things that happen in the world that we call evil right that's an empirical fact is the word evil the appropriate one well that we can have a a discussion on that do what do we mean by evil do we mean fundamental evil or do we mean something that that because of ignorance ends up doing harm but it's not fundamentally evil so those discussions we can have but in colloquial language this stuff we refer to generally as evil
• 04:30 - 05:00 that stuff happens uh look at Europe right now great evil is being done completely innocent people are being killed for absolutely no good reason other than to push the geopolitical mystical hallucinations of a dictator if you if the word evil is not appropriate for that no what is it appropriate for so evil does happen and and it insinuates itself very productively uh
• 05:00 - 05:30 in the beginning how do we deal with the fact that from different positions the word is defined differently though because like even the situation that you just brought up from the position that you and I are in I know exactly what you mean and would agree with you but if I were in the position of the people doing that for example I don't think they would agree with that and they might even have very kind of legitimate from their point of view and their development reasons to say maybe that
• 05:30 - 06:00 where we sit right now or someone else is is evil so that's a very confusing and hard hard thing to deal with and talk about how do you think about that I think it's very dangerous that we find ourselves in a relativistic moral moras in which we say that good and evil are relative and there is no truth it's all about points of view I don't think that is valid I think there is a reality to human suffering that when it is imposed osed
• 06:00 - 06:30 uh on someone unfairly um it should be called evil and and that's an absolute thing it's not a matter of point of view we have all experienced Injustice so so we know we all know what I mean by that um the problem is that since we are conceptually thinking monkeys um we tend to replace the rawness and of certain absolute reality with inter narratives and we lose sight
• 06:30 - 07:00 of the direct acquaintance with the reality of an evil deed we replace that direct experience with conceptual Frameworks and narratives that sort of muddle the waters makes everything sort of unclear um and we think that that's the reality then that that lack of clarity belongs in the world instead of just in our own mind our own narrative making uh
• 07:00 - 07:30 about the world once we slide down that slippery slope um we get into an abyss in which there are no clear moral guard rails you can justify anything by telling yourself uh an appropriate story about it so I'm am sure that Putin doesn't see himself as evil he thinks that he is ensur uring the future safety
• 07:30 - 08:00 and prosperity of the Slavic peoples and that the prize to pay for that even though it may be very high in terms of the direct suffering and murder and torture of the Slavic peoples today he may calculate that in his fantasized conceptual hallucination that that is a worth price to pay for future generations of course that's a delusion um put is engaged in mystical thinking
• 08:00 - 08:30 here he thinks that there is such an entity as russan the Slavic peoples that is above the actual lived reality of the Russian and Islamic peoples today and and there is no such other mystical entity such an abstraction that makes it worth to pay a horrible price in the concrete real life today it's not there but one one can delude himself or herself uh uh um to think along these
• 08:30 - 09:00 lines Hitler thought he was bringing the German peoples out of misery yeah I it's not that I don't agree with you on these things but I find that it's very hard to nail it down I mean like do we just end up saying okay well we just all fight for our position and like in the end it all comes out in the case of Hitler for example like over time it becomes clear to most people what that really was right and so we could maybe think that
• 09:00 - 09:30 like what's going on in the world today over time it's going to become clear because it is evil and and there is this kind of these these regularities show themselves with time but you brought up narrative a lot in there too and that's a word like with the US election that's been used a lot and you know there's all this kind of everything's about the narrative and how strong your narrative is and as we know like you just said like Putin probably believes his narrative and there's some kind of weird thing that happens um I mean maybe you could say what you think about this but I see it that people really believe in
• 09:30 - 10:00 their narratives and therefore they there's a power to that that convinces others that they're true and I'm not sure just rely on this time and that history will tell feels adequate either it almost feels yeah I wonder what you think like because I'm someone who I don't I I do sort of believe with time the truth comes out and I'm not a person who wants fighting and I would you know say like if you're killing people it's already like on the side that I don't want to be on but of course there's
• 10:00 - 10:30 exceptions but you know that that that sort of narrative too can have its trouble so I guess I just wonder how you deal with it because it's a it's a paradox that we have to hold but I I think it's hard to hold that the more you believe in your narrative even if it's wrong the more you're going to convince others it's right often yeah I I agree with you that ultimately the truth comes out and you might then ask well why don't we learn then historically well it's because our lifetime time is so short we are
• 10:30 - 11:00 mayflies um a lot of young people alive today have no relationship W with what happened in the 1930s they never met someone who was alive as an adult in the 1930s like I did because those were my grandparents they were alive at that time and then so you actually you heard firsthand those yeah I heard the stories some of the people telling me the stories told me as okay look at that how could you be so poolish and other people
• 11:00 - 11:30 in my youth old the old people of my youth they had uh seemingly plausible and reasonable justification for what happened and to their into their old age uh they thought it was justified uh what Hitler did what musolini did so I I was exposed to that um I I I remember real alive people very close to me in my life who who experienced that but if you talk
• 11:30 - 12:00 to to an 18-year-old today it's um it's very abstract it's something far in the past and of course in in the absence of a of at least an indirect relationship with that um you may have to learn all over again um and some people who maybe did have a relationship with that maybe they didn't have a close enough relationship people my age maybe they didn't have a close enough relationship maybe they were far far away they were in another
• 12:00 - 12:30 continent um and so they they didn't retain the warning that the ability to detect the warning signs they don't become emotionally alarmed enough when those warning signs repeat themselves that they can anticipate where things are going because there original relationship with the historical learning was was not close enough they were not close enough to those
• 12:30 - 13:00 experiences so that happens but yes truth will come out and you know every three generations we may have to learn it all over again now narratives I think the greatest danger of our age is the surrender to the pernicious idea that uh all of reality is just narratives that there is no such a thing as truth as fact uh this is how people
• 13:00 - 13:30 are being manipulated uh in the early 21st century um in the 19th century manipulate manipulation uh was done by by the creation of an alternative reality in other words they would just lie to you and uh and I'm not talking only about Soviet Russia here I think it's important that that we in the West also recognize that um the liberal media has
• 13:30 - 14:00 lied and manipulated us for decades this whole thing started forgive me for for going on a on a rent now but this whole thing started because the entire Western World the Allies after they beat Germany they learned from Germany because Germany invented propaganda and um in the west we realized the power of that the power to manipul people and how it could be used
• 14:00 - 14:30 for profit and and so the discipline of public relations started how do you talking about like bernes and Floy and that all that connection of kind of well that that came before that but you know studying the human psyche to the point that you know how to influence it for manipulative purposes the Nazis was were very good at that they basically invented um propaganda at large scales that's how they they got their people to
• 14:30 - 15:00 do what they did yeah but what is that exactly do you think is it is it knowing more than the people that you're trying to swing one way or the other and using kind of emotional tactics yeah I mean is it just as simple as that like because sometimes I just feel like it's a stance right it's for example like music if you hit certain chords you're gonna elicit certain feelings and yeah it was just that realization do you think that that that's possible and so they had power because the other people had realize that yet is that even if you realize
• 15:00 - 15:30 that this is what's been done to you it still works yeah it's weird that's true because we are all human psyches and the human psyche has the ability to turn in upon itself and study itself yeah and and if you make that your your your life your study you will find out know many methods to effectively get us to buy certain products to want certain trips or to vote in a certain way so we learned that from from uh the Germans
• 15:30 - 16:00 after the war and that has become public relations propaganda marketing you know things that we consider consider acceptable and the liberal Elites have employed that onto their peoples for decades and I it's important to acknowledge that even if we I mean forget MAA that that election already has happened it's water under the bridge but even if populism in general um is something that we do not agree with we have to acknowledge that the root
• 16:00 - 16:30 grievances are are valid and it's not only this it's not only that we have been manipulated and lied to by by liberal media liberal Elites for decades which we have it's not as evil as people portray it but we have um there are other reasons also almost like a habit that everyone's in even people who use social media you you kind of assume the stance of that's what you have to do in order to participate in a very I mean there's degrees of
• 16:30 - 17:00 course but do you know what to manipulate yeah but I mean even something like I I don't use social media so much but I always hear people talking about like on Facebook you basically are putting your what you want other people to think about your life on on there and that's a very like gentle kind of a manipulation and it even has some effect of helping you feel better about your life and it's completely understandable and so forth but I guess what I'm saying is just is infiltrated to such a degree that it's almost like
• 17:00 - 17:30 we assume that stance is the only kind of stance you take when you are trying to somehow have some effect or agency over the way people see you I even don't think that is too dangerous I think it's psychologically dangerous in the sense that it could lead you to depression unnecessarily but the we are narrative making monkeys and and we we are not going to be otherwise anytime soon and and it's part of what it means to be a
• 17:30 - 18:00 human that we experience reality through the intermediation of narratives that started happening 30 to 50,000 years ago when we started thinking symbolically when we started replacing direct empirical facts of reality with symbols that represented them like words like uh paintings when we started replacing reality with our own symbol making we erected this wall of narratives between us and the the absolute facts of reality so what we
• 18:00 - 18:30 experience is in fact how our narratives are modulated by reality not reality there is always this layer of narrative making between and that's part of what it means to be human it's not good or bad it's just the way it is I think what is incredibly dangerous is when we say there is no reality behind the narratives there are only the narratives that's the posttruth world and it's a much more pernicious world because its
• 18:30 - 19:00 effect is to reinforce that which it is meant to combat so what are what is the original grievance the original grievance is we have been lied to and manipulated for decades is this true come on who would who who has looked into the facts would would deny this um you can have a discussion on to to what degree we have been like to a manipulated but that we
• 19:00 - 19:30 have been lied to a manipulated it it's just it's a fact um and then we upon waking up to that we be we become angry and we try to combat that but in the process of doing it we have fallen into the Trap of not trying to find out what are the true facts but we've become cynical and now we say you know what there are no facts because so
• 19:30 - 20:00 until today it's it's all been AE my entire lifetime it has all been AE anyway and um how can we dig the facts it's impossible to dig the facts everything is too complex so we fall into the Trap of saying there are no facts and that's a reaction to being lied to the problem is that you just ensured by denying the existence of facts you ensure that you're much more manipulatable than you were before because before the attempt was to see
• 20:00 - 20:30 the facts behind the lies now because you don't believe in facts you don't even try to do that so now it's a matter of who can manipulate you more effectively not who can tell you the truth because if someone tells you the truth you will not recognize it because there is no such a thing as truth and you will just go for the manipulator that is most capable of grabbing you through the doors of your most Basic
• 20:30 - 21:00 Instincts your biggest prejudices the one who mobilizes your Primal energies uh most viciously that's the one who who you will follow because you are no longer even looking for the facts and if that works and is as it's proving to work it's contagious because even the ones who in principle would be willing to tell you the truth they now realize they will lose if they do that they realize that that's not the game to be
• 21:00 - 21:30 played anymore now the game is how can I be even more manipulative more effectively manipulative than the other guy how how do I do with that so what populism is teaching all politicians is that it pays off to lie and manipulate which is precisely the reinforcement of the very problem that mobilized people to react against the moro Elites to begin with and that to me is the greatest catastrophe it's to see people
• 21:30 - 22:00 who have a legitimate grievance um going about dealing with that grievance in a manner that only reinforces the problem they fairly uh grieve and which may bring about and this is not exaggeration or alarmism but it may bring about the end of human civilization because once you lose not only access to truth but once you lose truth as a value as something to be desired as something
• 22:00 - 22:30 to be aimed for if you lose that if you lose the desire for truth um you can only be manipulated from that point on you can no longer be treated with respect you can no longer pass moral judgment on things because not only do you not have a relationship with truth you don't even think it's you should have you don't even think it exists there is no such a thing as truth
• 22:30 - 23:00 and facts you know the example of the US election um which is what under the bridge right there there we're not trying to resolve anything there because it's resolved one won the other one lost this is it for the next four years uh but to to pick that as a as a learning example I heard a lot of people online say yes uh Trump lies but at least he's an honest liar in
• 23:00 - 23:30 the sense he knows everybody knows that he's lying so now you get the concept of an honest liar W because he lies so much and all the time uh we everybody knows that he's lying so at least that at least we go for the liar that everybody knows is a liar the moment you you you you slip down that that into that hole you become unable to pass
• 23:30 - 24:00 value judgments anymore you cannot pass judgment anymore because you've lost entirely your relationship with fact and truth so you can't pass any judgment and in the Democracy where every vote counts the same this is a catastrophe gosh you talked on you touched on so many things that I've been thinking about like first of all just that there is truth and how hard that is to prove in a weird way and um I I I
• 24:00 - 24:30 almost think of it like a blockchain right like there things really are happening and they're really are regularities and it really is continuous so if we could actually Trace all of these paths and trajectories of all the decisions we make there is one way it happened right even though there's many possible ways it could have happened um for me I mean like that's a very simplistic way of putting it but I I do think there's a way in which that is that holds um even if we can even if like memory sometimes we all all forget
• 24:30 - 25:00 what really happened and so on there's a kind of intention that actually is kind of blockchained or like a path of links that can be followed if only we knew how to do it and so that's in the sense that I I think okay the truth does eventually come out because it's just there right and all that's going to eventually kind of resonate and whether it's like that Civilization has to end in the way you just said or whatever it is um it will all come out and we do all kind of feel it too even there's a kind of you know
• 25:00 - 25:30 you were talking about the liar that's honest um this is this is something I would like to dig into and I don't know how to understand and that bothers me not necessarily the results of the election but that the mood or like the what has kind of happened in terms of what is acceptable um for but that isn't acceptable I don't know it's all it's all about trying to hold the Paradox but here here here I'll just give you an example and then maybe that helps but but so um with this election it's like
• 25:30 - 26:00 you I I for example that want to trust and believe in truth and all of this and you want a party that that can tell you that kind of stuff but then when they're using the same tactics as the party that's lying all the time even though honestly it becomes very confusing for example I get emails I've gotten emails from both sides of the campaign because I like seeing how everyone's talked to and on the side that's supposed to be honest right in the real way not an
• 26:00 - 26:30 honest liar the tones are just I can hardly read them because it's always asking me for money or screaming about um end of the world is going to happen so we have to save it it's like this tone which is just very much using the tactics of the the other honest liar if you know what I mean but it doesn't work because they're supposed to be the honest honest do you know what I'm saying so there's something uh very very difficult about it um that that one side that's supposed
• 26:30 - 27:00 to be honest honest takes on the tactics of the other and therefore you do end up feeling as if there's no truth and as if there's no meaning and you know and those kind of things I don't know if you've if that makes sense to you or you've heard that from others look there may be no truth in political discourse today and and going forward this will be worse
• 27:00 - 27:30 because what we have learned over the past eight years is that U lying and manipulating works and and it the more cross and obviously you do that with the least subtlety the more you just try to latch on the most primitive um um emotional reactions that people have the more it works in the short term yeah we've learned that over the past 8 to 10 years we we've
• 27:30 - 28:00 learned that this works and politicians do what work because elections are set up as a contest as a competition to be won or lost politicians would try to do what wins and they are learning now that uh that crass manipulation works better than subtle manipulation which is what we've we've had before so everybody will started doing that because and they even more morally Justified to themselves by
• 28:00 - 28:30 saying if I don't do that too the evil guys on the other side will always win so I owe it to my constituency to do what works in order to save the world and and of course that's precisely how the world Goes to Hell uh when everybody loses their moral grounding for for I I would use the word they would use for pragmatic reasons um I wanted to say something else but uh um
• 28:30 - 29:00 I've lost it now look I I think the most important distinction for us to make is that although there may be no truth in political discourse there is such a thing as truth whether it is in political discourse or not whether it's captured or reflected in political discourse or not there are facts and we we tend now to think and and this is a propaganda tool this is what Russian propaganda does and and and populism in
• 29:00 - 29:30 the west is picking it picking that up directly from Russia and using it in the west what they try to convince you of is that even if there is such an elusive thing as truth it is so difficult to access that it might as well not exist and and and why do they do that why do they want you to believe that well it's because if you lose your relationship with truth you cannot pass judgment and you become even easier to manipulate than you were before because before you were just misinformed now you
• 29:30 - 30:00 don't even want to be informed um but the fact is that uh we can access simple obvious truths if we don't make it too complicated in our minds we can access some basic facts that if we develop a relationship with them it will make it less likely that we will destroy ourselves um for instance that let's just connect
• 30:00 - 30:30 to things that that are very accessible and they are important um number one there is such a thing as truth we may not know what it is but it's there number two we should want to access truth because otherwise we are operating in a fantasy world that somebody else created for us for their benefit and not ours right if we don't want want to live in a manufactured world that was
• 30:30 - 31:00 invented to benefit somebody else um then we should want to access the truth that's the second point the third point is Character Matters decency matters um if you are a conservative like I am people think I am a liberal in the US sense I'm a liberal conservative which in the US is a contradiction but in the Netherlands you know that there is no contradiction here at all it's one
• 31:00 - 31:30 of a landscape of 16 major political parties uh in in the Netherlands um if you are a true conservative like I consider myself to be um then honesty is important character is important doing the right thing is important not lying is important I only learned that the people lie after my father died I was 12 years old and and then I realized that people Li Li and I thought this is
• 31:30 - 32:00 amazing this is a superpower people can lie what you have to did they try to convince you it was all okay or something oh no I I just you know my father died and suddenly I was more exposed to the world than I was before and I was growing up and I turned 13 14 and I realized that people just lie people just how did you realize that like well because people say something and you look at the facts and it's something else so of course people are lying right I I didn't grow up in an environment people Li it and I didn't
• 32:00 - 32:30 you know if my father would confront me and say what did you do you know there was there was no other thinkable option but to tell the truth whatever the consequence would be um so where I'm trying to go with this I'm what I'm trying to say is that um populism is latching onto a conservative mindset but it is always also betraying that conservative mindset um and that the basic values of conservatism are are
• 32:30 - 33:00 well grounded in truths that are accessible they are not complicated the truth of acting with decency towards your neighbor is not a complicated truth your neighbor is another human being like you it's a fact they suffer like you it's a fact so these basic truths there is truth we should want to access the truth other human beings are like us decency and character is important more of our values are important and not complicated moral
• 33:00 - 33:30 values very easily accessible moral values like don't do to your neighbor something you don't want done to yourself uh don't be evil don't be destructive don't don't be an ass you know be decent you know these truths are accessible and we can pass already a lot of political judgment through these simple accessible truths it doesn't need to be a
• 33:30 - 34:00 complicated story about the statistical abnormalities of vaccine trials well it would be nice if we could access those truths as well but usually we need to trust authority to access those truths because we may not have an education in microbiology or or biochemistry U but there are other truths that we have all of us each and every one of us are perfectly capable of accessing and we should not lose sight from that they do not require the intermediation of
• 34:00 - 34:30 narratives they do not depend on storytelling they are very immediately grounded in in humanness in Being Human we should not surrender the truth the accessible truth of our Humanity we should not become less than human and if we do that I think that is sufficient to prevent a catastrophe already but we are so taken in by all the narratives including the narrative that there is no such a thing as truth or if there is
• 34:30 - 35:00 it's unaccessible that we become very very easy targets for manipulation and true conservatives are now acting as the antithesis of conservatism conservative is not about being dishonest it's not about lying it's not about committing crimes and being convicted conservatism is not about treating your neighbor like the like an enemy this is not conservatism whatever it is it's not conservatism it's a knee Jer jerk
• 35:00 - 35:30 emotional reaction to a true um misdeed of governing Elites that was true we have been lied to a manipulated but you don't solve that by going for the guy who is lying and manipulating you even more or the woman who is lying and manipulating you even more who has convinced you that facts don't matter that what matters is is a that is the road to hell and why do I
• 35:30 - 36:00 say that I'm not saying that because I'm an alarmist I'm saying that because I'm a student of history and and and this isn't this isn't even ancient history I've known a lot of people who were alive as aults when this stuff happened let me give you an example well it will be an example that would be comparable to the US election but I would do that only for illustrative purposes uh the US election is a done deal I don't think people online are telling me what should we do now we
• 36:00 - 36:30 should keep fighting I'm like no no that's not how it works in a democracy once the results are out and they have and they are fair and these are fair as far as we know there there have been no massive irregularities uh uh this is it you fight the battle or the b battle is going when the battle is over there is no more battle to fight uh until when it comes up again but um I I'm using this only for illustrative purposes for the of other elections happening elsewhere in the western world uh in the coming
• 36:30 - 37:00 four years um when when Hitler came to power in 1932 he was not the Hitler of 1939 that started the second world war he was a firecracker but um the German governing Elites at the time they thought uh he was harmless that they they could keep him under control they could build guard rails and and that was the whole rationale for why he was appointed prime
• 37:00 - 37:30 minister um of Germany and then proceeded to completely change the rules of government in Germany in order to create a totalitarian party which was the Nazi party the na Nazi comes from nationalism that's yeah national socialism and that actually relates to what you were saying before with the propaganda because that whole beer hall Pooch Pooch however you say that word the uprising where he really noticed that you know through getting attention and and creating this narrative that that people buy then you can kind of
• 37:30 - 38:00 bypass all that other stuff so yeah that's that's and and he hired people who are very good at that like Joseph Gobles he was very good at yeah and he studied it I mean he he really like looked at himself and studied the voice and I mean it was a complete performance that he you know created to get that effect yeah Hitler he studied his movements he would photograph his movements to study them afterwards he studied his tone of of voice he could use Voice simplification through electronic means for the first time at Large scale yeah right exactly we don't think about that the microphone and
• 38:00 - 38:30 actually not social media no but but using like what we talking about earlier hitting those emotional points in order to get that feeling that that is it almost you know it just it does have a physical effect even if you can kind of counteract it yes yeah yes and uh people would think that I am inventing this but you're probably a student of history and you know that I'm not the main theme of Hitler's campaign was to make Germany great
• 38:30 - 39:00 again maybe these words were not used but that pretty much captured they suffered World War I so they had no they had were giving money and they were the losers and they were looked at in a terrible way and it was that was all about that what that propaganda did I mean I hadn't thought of it in those terms but yeah it was about saying you're not a loser and you're strong and we're gonna show them yeah so and in justice has had been committed to the German people that was a treaty of Versa that was incredibly unjust for the Germans said Hitler yeah
• 39:00 - 39:30 is what Hitler was saying yeah yeah well it was unjust you know the the terrible kind of so much uh monetary compensation and yeah oh other things even in on an ongoing basis um in in Western Germany the French had the right to go in and take coal to heat their houses in the winter and leave no call for the Germans today we we talk about factory jobs now
• 39:30 - 40:00 others can come in and take our factory jobs and we can't eat our houses in the winter because we don't pay our salaries so the equivalent of that was taking coal away from the Germans um uh um if a French officer would pass on the street and you are a German citizen you had to remove your hat if you wouldn't do that you would be beaten up you'd be lynched on the streets by by French soldiers so the Germans were uh humiliated people that's the word humiliation and
• 40:00 - 40:30 being inhumane really as if as if the people weren human they had a sense of lost dignity which is what a lot of people in the west have for for good reasons this is not a hallucination liberal Elites have treated Heartland people with disdain for decades this is not a hallucination this this has really happened so that sense of being disempowered disenfranchised and and uh and um of losing your dignity was very
• 40:30 - 41:00 palpable then as it is now yeah and that's what you're like the griev the Grievances are real as you said the Grievances yeah yeah but you were comparing this before I went on the history rant because I find this also interesting and um but you were you were sort of comparing you were gonna say something about the lesson I'm getting there yeah I'm getting there but the point I want to make is how one can use or misuse legitimate grievances to manipulate a whole people into doing something that is good for that person
• 41:00 - 41:30 and not for the people themselves because that that's exactly what Hitler did so he prayed on the true grievance of loss of dignity of the Germans he prayed on the fact that inflation was very high in Germany that people couldn't make uh ends meet they would get their salary in the beginning of the month and then at the end of the month uh it it was worth uh uh measurably less um he prayed these are those stories of people like taking wheelbarrows full of
• 41:30 - 42:00 money just to like pay for the trim or something too it just got completely yeah these are anecdotes but sit I think people will recognize those those yeah inflation was high enough to be a real problem this regardless of the anecdotes but uh Hitler who was not originally a politician he wanted to be a painter but he although he was technically clever he didn't have any creative he didn't have that extra thing that characterizes an artist yeah so he he make it an art
• 42:00 - 42:30 school he didn't make it to art school and then he became a Corporal dur during the first world war when the war ended he thought it was a you know a humiliation for the German peoples he after the war he continued in the in the sphere of influence of the army even though he he was not a member of the army anymore until one of his previous commanders asked him to infiltrate Communist Party meetings as a spy that's how he got into politics he was
• 42:30 - 43:00 informally asked by the Army to be a spy and that's how his political career began because he realized that he could speak well and then later on his whole platform was based on this gut gut emotional reaction of the German peoples who wanted their dignity back and he realized there was a tremendous Collective psychic power behind that true grievances are things that if you can manipulate they give you enormous power you can play people like marionet
• 43:00 - 43:30 because that emotional force uh is Unstoppable in the human psyche if you can Channel it in a direction that favors you your the country is now uh uh they are your servants uh now so Hitler deliberately focused on channeling that and trying outwardly trying to restore dignity to the German peoples and speaking from their point of view speaking with anger because that's what they felt when people are angry and you
• 43:30 - 44:00 speak with anger you connect with the speaker never nonethe despite it being a a clear in your face form of manipulation it still works um and in the case of Hitler it was even more plausible than in the case of trump because Hitler was a man of the people and Trump was born in a golden crib as a product of the elites of New York so it's it it less plausible but it worked still it still worked um so we we
• 44:00 - 44:30 have historical presences for all this and this is why I'm so worried about the future because the EOS are uncanny Hitler tried a p before he was he really elected and um he hardly served anything he was convicted of insurrection he was convicted of insurrection he wrote that's true there's a criminal thing I had thought of that also so was kind of parallel yeah but his jail cell was kind of very
• 44:30 - 45:00 nice right and he was getting letters writing books didn't he write his book in jail yeah yeah yeah he could receive friends and know he basically had free lodging and meals he wrote this great propaganda book or something yeah yeah right yeah my my my my struggle my struggle my struggle um and when he came to power people also thought no I know this the system is robust there our guard rails he can't just do what he wants his worst
• 45:00 - 45:30 instincts we can manage them we can keep them under control and um and then he became the Hitler of 1939 with no guard rails with complete control over all three branches of government he controlled the courts he controlled the legislative and he controlled the executive um oh gosh another parallel close parallel almost parallel the man of the people who was angry and populist but people thought no cannot be so bad
• 45:30 - 46:00 right and he has been around for 20 years and yes he tried an Insurrection but only a couple of people were shot and and killed it was not a big thing he hardly served any time anyway although he was convicted and probably you know it's he shouldn't have served anytime at all because he was trying to do the right thing even though it was against the law who can trust the law anymore in Germany you know given what's happening you know the government is now our enemy and an enemy of our enemy is our friend
• 46:00 - 46:30 that's how the thought goes and um throughout it nobody understood what it would become otherwise it would have stopped once people began to understood that they tried to kill Hitler 32 times if I remember and um and uh he he never died there was always a strike of luck this indestructibility which is also a theme yeah yeah and and it's something for us to heat what it tells us is the
• 46:30 - 47:00 way to combat these things is not through crime it's not through taking them out one it doesn't work two even if it did the next guy is worse and will be will feel even more vindictive and the whole thing will just become reinforced you start creting Marts and mobilize those ugly energies which are human but are dangerous even more um so that's the reason of my concern it's historical parallels and Hitler is just one and
• 47:00 - 47:30 people may say oh you're exaggerating well when people in 1932 started raising the alarm that's exactly what they were told you're exaggerating now he's just an army corporo you know he's a silly guy you know he's not even very intelligent what could he do I mean no what can go wrong right so that's my concern I'm I'm not saying that this will happen again I I I literally pray every night to be wrong
• 47:30 - 48:00 and for the people that um are against me to be right um but um no I'm I'm very concerned here here's what bothers me too is that um so in a way I I feel I feel like comma did kind of take the high road so to speak in terms of not that she was like perfect and not taking on those tactics but I do think there was an attempt not to
• 48:00 - 48:30 fall victim to that pattern that obviously seemed to be working in terms of um yeah like using those propaganda tools however the campaign was kind of built on saving the country from basically what you just laid out but not laid out in that way um while at the same time uh this attrition that I think you're describing had already been taking place because we'd had four years with him in the United States and the world didn't end um
• 48:30 - 49:00 and there's some kind of weird attrition and also accl alization that's happening where you just he's become so normal and that Spirit has become so normal that it it's very easy not to take seriously and then but at the same time it's it's still very attractive because it's entertaining so you know there's this element of of the truth can be kind of boring or or um it's not I mean like
• 49:00 - 49:30 this is a lot of this is about time and hopefully we can talk about that in in a minute because these different nested layers of time matter a lot right but in the moment right these tactics are more exciting and everyone when I was so I went I was in Georgia to vote because that's my residency but then I went to New York because that's where I needed to do some work and I lived a lot but everywhere I went everyone's on their phone looking at Tik Tok you know and or these like very short little videos so TimeWise I think we're very addicted to
• 49:30 - 50:00 these entertaining quick kind of zaps right of of things that get our attention and all the stuff you've been talking about is true but I'm not sure like we we like the time feels different it feels like a lot of people aren't really taking the time to realize they're being manipulated um and if they do realize they're being manipulated it doesn't really seem to matter as much because of the way the time is moving so so quickly and um so
• 50:00 - 50:30 yeah I don't know I I guess just do you think this like attrition and this where we just kind of get used to it it's almost like the frog in the water I don't even know if that story is true and you turn it up slowly slowly slowly um it seems to be happening at once that we've gotten used to it and also we still need more and more hits of entertainment like Trump is going to be much more entertaining the next four years you know that seems to matter a little bit in certain in C certain unconscious I don't really know about the term unconscious but in ways we
• 50:30 - 51:00 haven't thought about or these things happen slowly the the the metaphor of you know the the frog in the water you know the water gets slowly warmer but the frog doesn't notice it because it goes slowly until the Frog boils and dies uh historically that's how things have happened that's how the French Revolution has happened that frog was boiling very slowly very slowly very slowly until it blew and and and the Royals were killed and hundred thousands of people were killed by the guillotine if if you change the temperature quickly
• 51:00 - 51:30 the Frog jumps out but if it's slow it's also what dooville wrote about in the US right with the Sheep kind of in the pasture this this this mentality that over time people just kind of go with white the temperature of the waterers look the democracy is the least bad form of government we have figured out so far and there is nothing better uh than it because any other form of government um starts conflating um the person in power with the institutions and the country
• 51:30 - 52:00 and and once that conflation happens now you're back to field theism and dictatorships and the end of those is not pretty and the people are not going to have a good future we know that historically too but um in democracy every vote counts the same whether the person who votes is thoughtful or not and we are not going to change that because that's just the spectrum of human beings some people are impulsive other people are less impulsive it's just the variability of
• 52:00 - 52:30 our characteristics and there is nothing good or bad about it it's just what we are it's just how we are put together um but um because a lot of people will not be thoughtful about it and they will vote irresponsibly um I think why the other side takes on those tactics right in that emergency situation it feels like you just have to do everything you can which means you just kind of take on the propaganda stand in order to try to to just convince them because of what you
• 52:30 - 53:00 just said well in an emergency situation yes but even outside emergency situations uh governments calculate that the true reasons for some of the stuff they do uh are too subtle and nuanced to be communicated and they would be misunderstood and and and and exploited for the wrong reasons and therefore governments don't explain certain things they do I'll give you an example which is worldwide applicable now well
• 53:00 - 53:30 in the whole Western world it's applicable now we have enormous frustration about illegal immigration this is not only a US issue it's perhaps an even bigger is issue in in in Europe Western Central and Eastern Europe um it's baffling to us that governments are so slow to tackle illegal immigration by the way I am against illegal immigration because I am against everything that is
• 53:30 - 54:00 illegal I think uh we should if we think that something is positive for the country we should make it legal and then implement it but not implement it until it has first been made legal even if it leads to delays so I am against illegal immigration I think the frustration people feel in Western Europe is real and valid but they are not being told why governments are so LAX about immigration because the story it's not even complex but they think it's it's not simple enough for a
• 54:00 - 54:30 political message which has to be a sort of vill format and the reason for that is that we are having an inversion uh an inversion of our demographic pyramid for the first time in human history it's not that that we don't have enough people you know 100 years ago we had a lot less people and we were fine so the problem is not that uh um that we are we are becoming too few and therefore we need immigration to compensate that's not the problem the problem is the inverted pyramid for the first time in history
• 54:30 - 55:00 all of history there soon will be a lot more old people than there are young people and through all of history it has been the opposite you have much more younger people than you have old people and that's a healthy uh demographic pyramid because it's the young people who take care of the old it's the young people who pay for the pension of the old my pension contributions today are going to the people who are retired today they don't keep it they don't stay
• 55:00 - 55:30 in a pot waiting for my retirement that's not how the economic game works so when I retire in 19.9 years when I'm 69 years and 9 months um um when that happens there will be there will be a lot less people in their 30s uh contributing to my pension there will be a lot people a lot a lot less people who are nurses in hospitals uh to take care of me when I get sick and when I need to
• 55:30 - 56:00 stay a weake in hospital there will be a lot less people to clean my gutter to do my garden to to do maintenance um and that is the problem the problem is not that there are few people the problem is that there will be a lot of old people and very few young people so in that situation which is not talked about openly by by politicians because it's considered a difficult message to give um when Angela Amco Mama
• 56:00 - 56:30 Marco who used to be the the chancellor of Germany uh when she saw 1 million educated syrians at the door young and educated it was like Santa Claus had just come it's the salvation of German industry German industry now suffers from three problems all of them equally bad Chinese competition higher energy prices because of Russia's Vio invasion of Ukraine and lack of work force don't find we
• 56:30 - 57:00 don't find people to operate the machines to maintain the machines know to do the jobs that we need uh to be done so when she saw the 1 million there she thought my God that's a Christmas it's a Christmas gifts a present from God it and then of course the message is oh we Germans we are nice people you know we we care about other people so we will let them in that's also true but it's not the reason why a politician takes a major political gamble that the
• 57:00 - 57:30 reason she did it is that she saw something that she knew couldn't be just sincerely and openly communicated with the population because they thought people are too unthoughtful too dump too gouble to to to to to be included into a mature conversation about future problems right and then of course it's to backfired because you can't just bring a million people in just like that you know there is no cultureal
• 57:30 - 58:00 climatization and then it went bad in the Christmas of 2015 I was there when that happened when this oh really gangs of syrians started man handling women and abusing women there was one rape um so that's not how you do immigration anyway I'm not defending what Marco did I'm actually against it I think she she made a major mistake there I am against illegal immigration I don't think it should happen but I understand the rationals for why governments are so
• 58:00 - 58:30 lack enforcing immigration rules amongst people who study these things um you know people are looking at the future of different Western Nations the US is considered to be in the most enviable position of all Western Nations because um US the US has a ready source of immigration for young people coming from Latin America um the us has um um uh raw
• 58:30 - 59:00 materials you know the US doesn't even import oil anymore it's a net exporter of I mean it Imports but it's a net exporter it exports more than it than it Imports Energy Products so the US is in the most enviable and sustainable position going forward and one of the factors for that is that it has a already source of immigration now why don't governments have that adult discussion with us and stop thinking that everybody's stupid um what has happened in the US recently
• 59:00 - 59:30 is not going to improve this situation because the lesson that the others are learning is that um manipul no flat out in your face liing manipulation works so now the chance that they will engage in a thoughtful mature conversation with their constituencies is even lower maturity is down the drain adulthood is down the drain uh what we have now is teenage politics that appeal to Raw
• 59:30 - 60:00 emotions and not reason not not fact and not truth it's entirely based on manipulation it's going to get worse why because obviously it is working and if even the people who would rather not do that they would justify to themselves looking in the mirror that they have to do it because otherwise the other side the evil guys will always win and that's how the world goes to hell we will try to out compete each other other in dishonest behavior and we will still morally justify that because the other
• 60:00 - 60:30 side is more dishonest and the other side is thinking the same the other side is thinking you know the liberal Elites who have been in power for for decades there has to be a reaction to that we cannot let that game keep on going it's ridiculous they have they have to pay a price for this they have to be put in their place so we will vote for the rabbit deranged hyena and destroy the system um some people may think like that others think that uh inflation was so high they
• 60:30 - 61:00 can't pay for their groceries anymore they have to vote somebody in who is different all the thoughtfulness is lost uh in these Dynamics for instance um every political or economic uh cause produces an effect with a delay in geopolitics that L can be several years in economics at least a couple of years no economic decision today has an
• 61:00 - 61:30 economic effect next month that's not how it works that's not the systems are too complicated the the the impact of of a new action has to just tramit through a complicated system until it produces any effect on the other hand and that takes time so people are now judging government for the effects uh produced by other governments for instance the whole world was suffering from inflation that's
• 61:30 - 62:00 still a niik of the 2008 financial crisis uh and and things that happened later but governments are being judged from day one for the inflation that's happening at that moment we don't think retroactively how did we end here what was done to end here uh in the US I was alarmed by how many people on my social media feed were saying uh Trump there were no Wars in Trump's government so Trump's decisions are conducive to peace
• 62:00 - 62:30 he he was saying that that was his line he was saying that so everyone else was saying he was pumping it into social media yeah it works and people will repeat it people believe it because it sounds reasonable he says it in his in his speech when he wins oh there were no Wars we were we're gonna be the most peaceful we were the most peaceful yeah I stopped watching the news uh because I have to protect my sanity I can't expose myself to to that too much but uh it's plain to anybody who thinks about it that one of the key causes of the
• 62:30 - 63:00 Ukraine war was the fact that in his first term Trump weakened the Western Alliance and severely weakened Western deterrence and that's what people lose from sight military deterrence prevents Wars if we were to stop military spending tomorrow there would be a World War very very quickly because we are not alone in the world Western values the Western Alliance is not alone in the world there are the other guys totalitarian dict
• 63:00 - 63:30 dictatorships uh uh totalitarian systems that uh we want to have a very large piece uh of our pie of yeah you have to have a very strong military in order not to use it in order not to have wars and look this has worked for 8 years in the European continent we have not had a major land war in the European continent for for about 80 years yes we had the Yugoslav wars they were terrible they were catastrophe it's it's a shame that
• 63:30 - 64:00 they happened we must do everything we can to prevent those kinds of conflicts but they were not a major land War at the at the the scale we are having now in Ukraine why did the Ukraine war happened because Putin thought he could get away with it NATO was weakened the Western Alliance was in disarray there were disagreements Trump threatened to even leave NATO uh uh and Putin saw an opportunity now once he sees the opportunity of course it takes a couple of years to prepare an invasion like that things don't happen immediately in
• 64:00 - 64:30 economics in politics in geopolitics we have to think with a lag you have to build a lag into your conclusions and that's what people don't do um you can look it's understandable why people don't do that but that doesn't mean that they don't have the moral responsibility they still carry the moral responsibility and I think uh what Trump did carries moral responsibility for what we are facing in this continent right now military deterrence stops conflicts you don't
• 64:30 - 65:00 create peace by dismantling deterrence by dismantling existing alliances that have maintained peace for 80 years which is an empirical fact despite all the tensions in this continent where I am in which all of you came from if you trace your history far enough yeah we're all immigrants it's a fact that we had a lot of built-in tensions here and we were solving those tensions as they should be solved through Commerce through
• 65:00 - 65:30 diplomacy through talks through changes of law through International agreements until one country thought that takes too long and I see an opening the West is weakened the West is in disarray I can get away with genocide and here we are and there is another danger a populist tends to be um impulsive populism is an impulsive
• 65:30 - 66:00 movement the the populist that the populist politicians that are in a position of leadership arrive in that position because they are the best politicians to mobilize the people uh along their lines of thinking and the best people to mobilize uh uh um uh their population through emotion like anger like uh the need for Revenge to be one upon the other guys who have lied to you for so for so long the best
• 66:00 - 66:30 way to mobilize people through these raw emotions are impulsive people impulsive people impulsive people speak the language of emotions so they are the politicians that find themselves in power and in populism that's what you find impulsive politicians uh in power that character trait is such that um you can you can easily find yourself in a situation in which you have a populist politician who is sincerely going for peace I I have no doubt Trump
• 66:30 - 67:00 sincerely wants peace I have no doubt about that at all it's not part of his agenda to start a war it makes his life more complicated but because of impulsiveness not only his but many other uh uh uh populist politicians posttruth politicians in their efforts to bring about peace if they perceive for a moment that the other state actor involved are not respecting them not taking them seriously poo pooing their
• 67:00 - 67:30 efforts or offending them in some way they liable to instantly switch to the Other Extreme which is to show you that I've got a bigger rocket if you know what I mean and in a situation of tremendous geopolitical tension in the world today with a liberal s of s of uh nuclear weapons uh impulsive as is is incredibly dangerous particularly when you don't really have checks and
• 67:30 - 68:00 balances anymore because you control all branches of government through a a policy of loyalty above reason this is incredibly dangerous yeah I definitely I definitely agree with you on that one and I can see how um we aren't seeing that side of it I mean a lot of people think like Trump and Putin kind of go together or or all these these people the Macho kind of personalities like they're goingon to team up and somehow um become buddies
• 68:00 - 68:30 yeah but the the danger is actually more the opposite that there will be impulsive kind of ego manipulations going on um there are other dangers other dangers you can U you can force peace I mean the US has enough leverage to force peace on anything anywhere in the world um but that's just um um semblance of Peace because what you did you bottled up a conflict that will flare up again at a much larger scale because the because both parties
• 68:30 - 69:00 will have time to reconstitute and rearm even better than before and the whole thing blows up again uh Tito enforced peace in Yugoslavia for decades tto forced it the tensions were all there nothing was fundamentally resolved no grievance no disagreement nothing was resolved you just enforced peace and we all know what happened gery I mean there's a lot of yeah yeah so you can
• 69:00 - 69:30 bottle up the Ukraine conflict now are you soing it no it will blow up again it will be maybe 10 times worse so that's the other danger as well I wonder though because have you when is the last time that you were in the United States was it recently or couple of years ago yeah because um it feels different there like I'm always shocked by it and it's when I actually in like enter that
• 69:30 - 70:00 atmosphere things always look very different to me than they did when I'm here in Europe there's there's something about like even like going back this time and you just kind of I kind of felt it's it is a kind of country that's looking at the things that seem to be in the Optics of the Trump Administration in terms of like money and in terms of what I was saying about just this over our overall Spirit or habit that that
• 70:00 - 70:30 many of us have of looking at that third space that you were describing that we've made with language and art and videos and stuff mostly it's it's via videos now or it's via podcast or YouTube or there's this other kind of world there that is very hard to distinguish from the choices you're making in reality and I guess that connects to what you were saying about truth but I think it becomes it feels much more complicated at there and also much simpler in a way that there's not all this philosophical mediation that
• 70:30 - 71:00 it's it's a it that emotional queuing is actually working on a on a really immediate and fast level that seems at a pace that's hard to even notice or or stop like it just without maybe some kind of of a big disaster or or I don't know but um and there's also this feeling of that yes I know you we Trump might not think he's telling the truth or he might I don't know but there's this honest liar kind of thing about it
• 71:00 - 71:30 but there's also this feeling which I I heard from a lot of people of yeah but you know he's getting better and he's he's um he's G to change and and there's actually some truth like if he actually did become a person who cared and put other people first he would have an incredible amount of power towards doing good things that's actually true right because he he really could he really is in the position where a lot of people would follow him if he really decided to kind of do good things in the world it's
• 71:30 - 72:00 it's really true and and I heard a lot of people saying well he's gonna change he's he's now that you know he had this death threat and he almost died and like he's you know there's that story too going on so I feel like it's in a way much more complicated than it seems and also much more immediate and visceral and emotional and Optical um the advantage you I think even the the people who vote for him are now realizing okay we did what we did
• 72:00 - 72:30 and he's he has complete control yeah what did we do what is this nobody knows of course they would spin a positive Nar narrative um I sincerely wish that that narrative turns out to be true I sincerely wish that's what would happen but this was before the vote this was when I was talking to people about their vote even people who had voted for Biden and now were going to vote for Trump or something that it was almost like um and and I UND like from here that seemed crazy to me but when I went back into
• 72:30 - 73:00 the country I don't know almost like you go into the atmosphere and I understood it better and I understood that kind of um confusion between him being familiar and that feeling like um you could trust it and it was going to turn in a good way uh and also you know of course all the other underlying layers that we we think we've come farther in the states than we have in terms of what people
• 73:00 - 73:30 will vote for um yeah I don't know it just felt like there's so many complicated themes in some ways we've progressed so far I could tell you stories you know of things when I was a kid that now are normal in terms of more Justice and fairness and acceptance but then on the other level there's all these very very real emotional threads that I think are actually making the decisions in an immediate kind of way that has nothing to do much with
• 73:30 - 74:00 contemplation or yeah I don't know oh yeah that's very human yeah um I the final week of the campaign I followed the words of both candidates and people ask me which which broadcaster did you use are watching CNN you'll be manipulated no forget this I'm I'm listening to the words they said I'm not listen listening to political commentary um I was appalled by Trump saying that this Cheney should be shot
• 74:00 - 74:30 in the head by with nine barrels pointed to her face um I think those were the kind of alarming statements that overshadow any other possible rationale you could have about the candidate for the leadership of the Free World it it just overrides everything else you don't need even to look at the competition whether the competition is good or not that that's a disqualifying
• 74:30 - 75:00 attitude to take and that happened after both attempts at his life so I do not see any sign that his empathy is growing or that he will put the interest of the people above his own um all signs I see are warning signs every every more or less levelheaded person he worked with in his first Administration actively campaigned against him there was only one exception um so no I I I do not see any
• 75:00 - 75:30 positive signs which doesn't mean that it won't be positive it may be positive despite the complete lack of signs that it may be and that's that's what I what I hope now I I think we should also um not be too naive and put all the blame on the lies the deception the the in your face emotional manipulation of legitimate grievances um we should not put the blame in the lack of thoughtfulness of
• 75:30 - 76:00 Voters these are all facts but if we don't also look to the other side and understand that part of the failure was the inability of the system to produce a plausibly positive alternative and and and and I don't want to insult CA Harris or her voters that's not what I'm trying to do but I think the only alternative to
• 76:00 - 76:30 populism is a political movement that for the first time um will actually be sincere honest and treat people like adults as opposed to using na created forms of political manipulation and propaganda that we've learned in the 1940s I think you're I'm sorry to interrupt you but that's exactly what I was trying to say with those emails and and things that although I think they she did that in certain ways like
• 76:30 - 77:00 there's difference between the person and then this third mediated space of all the stuff that you get in social media and so on which you know I love what you're saying about just can we just be direct about here's the reason we need immigration and can we just be like treat people like they can handle it and for me that's what I wanted in this election and what would have would have showed the truth about certain statements that like the ones you just said from Trump which are just over overwhelmingly wrong right and and people know it but they don't hear them
• 77:00 - 77:30 or see them that way they just think oh it's just you know crazy stuff and he doesn't mean it um because there's no clear contrast of just the truth because the truth seems so hard to say you know and because those tactics are the ones you're still like you hear the same tone in maybe not her but in in the people that are representing her to you and in these other ways so that also adds to that where it just doesn't seem like there's a contrast right um yeah but just being like treating PE coming
• 77:30 - 78:00 honestly why is that so hard to just treat people like you know in that way it's hard because you think that you don't get enough air time that people not give you enough attention span for you to actually make your case it's hard because our political parties um are in a kind of a competition game in in the ideal world you would say what you think regardless of whether the
• 78:00 - 78:30 polls are telling you that the population agrees with you or not right um You would say what you think and then people decide whether it's in agreement with their views or not but what we have now is politicians adjusting their message according to the polls so they're trying to say what they think the people want as opposed to what their their knowledge and their awareness of the situation informs them
• 78:30 - 79:00 about which is what they should do because vote is an instrument of trust um it is impossible for each and every one of us to inform ourselves to the degree that our representatives in Congress or in the executive can inform themselves about the relevant issues because it's their job to do that while I have to go to work every day and you have to go to work every day we are busy with other things so we Outsource a study of the relevant facts facts to our
• 79:00 - 79:30 representatives and then we try to trust their judgment um but politicians know that that's not we do that's not what we do what we do is we think we can judge better than them and we will vote for the candidate that tells me what I want to hear right that they're going to send you a paycheck more more or less was the message yeah we are not Outsourcing that job of evaluating the the mountains of
• 79:30 - 80:00 data and facts and rationals that we can't evaluate ourselves because we have other jobs that's not our job it's their job we don't have this mentality of Outsourcing trust uh uh we think we know better that's an example of the um Dunning Krueger effect we don't know enough to understand that we don't know enough and that leads to a vicious uh Circle we think we know better yeah um and politicians know that so that's why they don't treat us as partners they
• 80:00 - 80:30 don't just give us their rationale based on what they know for for what they want to do they they they they they try to win instead and po politics has become a game like a football game in the stadium you root for one team you root for the other and you know you see who wins um if books is going to publish a book precisely on this theme a fantastic book it's it's coming in a few months um that's why we are not treated as adults
• 80:30 - 81:00 for instance um the current chancellor of Germany is trying to treat people as adults he's going to lose the election because he has also not been very effective now his government is a bit of a mess you know different members of government are trying to do different things there is no coordination so yeah there is a level of incompetence there but he did try to tell the fact and it has backfired um I think we should try
• 81:00 - 81:30 somebody some political movement should have the courage to once at least try to say it as it is right now their their calculation let's take two examples let's take immigration um their calculation is the following I want to win I want to stay in power what is the worst of the two options here now option number one I I do not enforce immigration rules but I
• 81:30 - 82:00 will make sure that in four years there are enough nurse nurses in the hospital and then I'll suffer a backlash from immigration but if I don't do that and they really enforce immigration rules a few years down the pike people will land in hospital and there will be nobody to take care of them and that will be a massive National Scandal they would think they became a the country became a third world country a Banana Republic how can it be my father needed surgery
• 82:00 - 82:30 and they couldn't operate on him because there aren't enough nurses in the hospital incompetent government they think the latter would be worse so they take the Fallout of the former that's the calculation I think a political force should emerge that just tells people here are the facts here are our judgments of the facts it's our job to spend our full time looking at these facts analyzing scenarios uh uh uh gaming it out through simulations and
• 82:30 - 83:00 here are our conclusions and therefore we will make this Choice instead of that choice let's try to treat people as adults for once for once as opposed to just doing PR and playing a game of who is better at manipulating the public I think if we try to do that the the result may be surprising because we just haven't tried in 80 years we haven't bloody tried well you just kind of gave an
• 83:00 - 83:30 example of that someone who's tried here's what I think I think that's totally true and at the same time it's not either or because I think there's still um there still needs to be some kind of performative aspect to it like can you be performative and um attention grabbing in a way that's also presenting the truth because I think we need like both because it's it goes back to that just
• 83:30 - 84:00 physical reaction of what gets your feeling and attention and emotion and most people are go are going to go with that so can you be a honest person and still create your message in a way that is emotional in that sense because those I feel like we we seem to think that if you're doing that then you must be evil right if you're using propaganda um and that feels like maybe that's not right either because like why shouldn't we try to I
• 84:00 - 84:30 mean I I sort of talk to myself too because I'm one of these people I don't wear makeup I you know I'm just like very oh always kind of as I am and I've started thinking maybe it's you know like maybe you do kind of owe people something in a way to help them keep their attention um or maybe you know I need to rethink that if you're trying to look a C way or put on a certain performance that that necessarily means you're not being authentic or true maybe those two things aren't either or and maybe trying
• 84:30 - 85:00 to separate them is also kind of creating these these more of these divisions to where um like you know this inertia is pushing us into certain kinds of categories that we can't break out of because you know the truth doesn't have to be boring right yeah it's fine to polish the message so long as you treat people as a otherwise you're feeding the opposition I give you another example it is true
• 85:00 - 85:30 that the covid vaccine Studies have shown could have terrible Side Effects by the way that was true for just about every other vaccine humankind has invented and which are directly responsible for the massive Improvement in childhood survival that we've had over the past 150 years or so 100 years um it it is true catastrophic things happened to certain people it is true that vaccines were not 100% sa safe
• 85:30 - 86:00 Studies have shown that plenty of studies but instead of having this adult conversation with the population and saying despite this the statistics and the models show us that if we deploy the vaccine then certain people have terrible side effects but if we don't deploy the vaccine hundreds of thousands more will die we think that we should bite a bullet take the risk and vaccinate and we think you should choose to be vaccinated because your chance of
• 86:00 - 86:30 dying of covid without a vaccine outweighs your chance of having a serious side effect it is a risk you will be taking a risk but you'll be taking a risk either way by vaccinating or not vaccinating and all data indicates that the risk is lesser if you do vaccinate and then you vaccinate and you have terrible side effects well you've been treated that like an adult you knew what the stakes were you knew what the rationale were uh was but if
• 86:30 - 87:00 instead we tell people vaccines are always safe which is what happened you're feeding the opposition because of course those cases in which the vaccine was not safe they will pop into the media and then the other side will tell you look they have been lying to you H so you always hand gifts to the populist demagogues by not treating the population as adults okay I agree and also what about this though because
• 87:00 - 87:30 um we're not like so if if if you come on and you say the truth right then and you say both sides then you know one hour later maybe you're going to see a sound bite where you just see one side presented and so then that is going to be spread everywhere um this happens right and then it's also become a sign of weakness right because that's the the the presentation of trump is a very self-help
• 87:30 - 88:00 oriented um thing that sort of says You must always say what you want to happen and you never concede that you've done anything wrong you never say anything bad about yourself you never admit to doing wrong like your language itself every little detail is always on one side which is the side that you are right and that things are positive he's very very much followed that Playbook which is a self-help kind of Playbook but it could also you know taken to extreme it is um and he's he's
• 88:00 - 88:30 schooled in that I mean he he learned from that some of the teachers of that of that self-help philosophy you know as young so he's very much doing that in the most direct way and so if you just come with what you just said and and you say things as they are at least in the short term all that's going to hap all that's going to happen is he's going to say or something it doesn't have to be him but yeah it will get said they said this and it'll just be half of what you said that was taken and that's the only
• 88:30 - 89:00 thing anyone will ever hear and at least most people and so the narrative we've back to narratives has been completely changed from the way that you've put it into the world now if everyone was doing that over time and time you know maybe in over time it would change the pattern and and what is now kind of accepted as normal would change and hopefully maybe that's even what's happening but if we just look at Short term people who try to be honest don't get the honest thing that they said uh represented in that third world media
• 89:00 - 89:30 Land look in in a normal situation um there will be F fact you will make publicly available as an honest government that treats the people as adults they will put the entire story out publicly Avail publicly available to everyone and then what you describe will happen but there will be also those voices uh uh calling them out and saying
• 89:30 - 90:00 he showed you only half the clip here's the whole thing available in the usa.gov website whatever uh whatever it is and um through social media uh peerto peer criticism uh will work out in a way that eventually given some time like you described everything will go back to to the original statement because the original statement will be fully open uh and social media will ensure that you
• 90:00 - 90:30 know through through this self checks and self-criticisms that the truth will emerge why does it is it not working right now it's because uh populism um is well crafted enough to preemptively insulate the Dynamics I just explained and the way they preemptive preemptively prevent this Dynamic from happening is by denying the very existence of Truth or fact it's by there is a political philosopher called
• 90:30 - 91:00 Vlad Drexler who has a very nice YouTube channel he has explained this uh aium in a very accessible way but the game here is to say whatever you will see even if you see the complete original statement you cannot stress even that either because there is nothing to trust and how do they do that they do that by inserting conflicting messages into the airwaves that's what Russia Russian propaganda uh does Soviet propaganda
• 91:00 - 91:30 would present you an alternative reality but an internally consistent one Russian propaganda would tell you it is a next day they say no no it's B and then the next day it's C and A and B and C are all contradictory and the idea is that it will cause you to throw your arms up and give up on the very idea that truth exists or that you can ever hope to to learn it so that's that's the mechanism
• 91:30 - 92:00 that is used to prevent what I just described otherwise what I just described would eventually work even if to if it took time but people are now uh manipulated into giving up on Truth as a value even if you can't access it at least you want it now now people people have given up on the very idea of there being something that was actually true that's something that was was actually said but it's for that exact reason isn't it
• 92:00 - 92:30 that there's something very strange like I always think if people understood that they're being manipulated and if they understood that they need to check double check everything um that would change a lot of this but how do you really I mean if you're just in the moment being stimulated and going with your stimulation you don't really most people aren't going to take the time go check on us.gov or whatever and first of all that that whole thing is going to have to be controlled by people who are doing the right thing too I mean so you know
• 92:30 - 93:00 there's so many layers to it all that I guess that's what I was saying about maybe we need a performance kind of aspect to it because you're going to have to start right with the emotional and somehow that at that level you're going to have to introduce this way of being able to hold the Paradox and being able to say nothing I hear is 100% true and there is truth right so like you really can't trust anything you hear because it's coming from a particular perspective and there is truth right
• 93:00 - 93:30 like how do people get that you need a sound bite almost you need like a that message needs to be somehow understood it's not an easy one populism is very well crafted um those people know what they are doing and so they are actively preempting all of those Alternatives uh we are discussing now um I'll give you another example um if you abandon the very value of
• 93:30 - 94:00 Truth um all that is left for you is to destroy there is nothing to construct because the foundation of construction is a is a foundation of what is true right what is good that's a really important point which I it speaks to all these crisis right like meaning crisis meta crisis poly crisis all this crisis um you vote in someone because that someone you think is going to
• 94:00 - 94:30 destroy the system that You' have come to hate you're not voting to reform or reconstruct or rebuild you're voting to destroy that's that's the human emotional primordial gut emotional reaction or you're voting to identify and become more confident you mentioned humil humiliation earlier which I think is a very much a motivating Force I'll tell you a story really quick I'm sorry to interrupt you but you want to go ahead and finish your point first no no no no no now I want to hear okay well I
• 94:30 - 95:00 was in a cab I I had a lot of interesting cab conversations in the states right or um you know or or Lyft or or Uber or whatever and one of them was a young man who he had voted for Kine he was um I think he'd been in the states like 15 years um and but he was telling me most most of his friends who he described as black women had voted for Trump and that he was shocked and he was also telling me
• 95:00 - 95:30 that how um he'd had a a person get in his car recently before the election who had pretty much harassed him like was grabbing his hoodie and knocking his hat off and and telling him he better vote for Trump because you know he's an he basically also accusing him like where did you get this car did you steal it I've I've been I was born in America I don't have a car as nice as this um so the two things in that story that I think are important and I wonder how it
• 95:30 - 96:00 fits with what you're saying is the Macho thing and that people feel like they don't want to be humiliated and they want to feel powerful and that's what's being represented by that Macho mindset which is kind of disgusting right and it's the same reason he couldn't believe the women had voted for Trump because in his mind as he told me like how they're they're treating women as if they own them you know um but that's very real and it works that that
• 96:00 - 96:30 power of if you feel weak or you feel vulnerable or you feel insecure identifying with someone who tells you they're strong and you're strong do you know what I mean um we handed it to them because you know I'm again in the Netherland this is perfect ly coherent in the US it's a contradiction in terms but I'm a liberal conservative um I believe in values I
• 96:30 - 97:00 believe in the islands we we say um norms and values um traditional ones even if they're not wrong we keep whatever has worked traditionally we should keep on doing right that's why I'm a traditionalist I'm not a traditionalist in the sense of sticking to costumes that were terrible and refusing to reform them that's that's just blindness it's stupidity but I like to hold on to what works so I'm largely a conservative for us standards um and I therefore see that um because
• 97:00 - 97:30 in the US there are only two options right there is no space for nuance uh there are only two drawers you have to classify everything in only two drawers because of that a lot went into the other drawer the liberal drawer it was exaggerated um I think the origins of the what we call the woke movement today were based on decency and their respect to human
• 97:30 - 98:00 Freedom if some people are born with male sex but U psychologically they belong in the female gender who are we to tell them that their experience is wrong and who are we to force them to live in a way that's not natural to them as long as they don't infringe on my freedom I shall not infringe on theirs as long as they allow me to live as I want I will not infringe on their right to live as they want this is a very very
• 98:00 - 98:30 conservative discourse right it's the preservation of individual freedom but it went well over the top and that was a gift that the left hand over to populism it's the exaggerations of woke um we've got to the point where even though maybe no politician ever actually said this but it the idea has come to dominate the airwaves now that according to woke men and women are equal well they have equal rights they
• 98:30 - 99:00 have equal value they are complementary but to ignore a biological difference and a difference in certain mental dispositions is silly statistically those differences are there and that was a gift to the other side because they can misportrayed they can misuse it to convey this message that um they are after your manhood that
• 99:00 - 99:30 being a man is now a bad thing um that uh all mess is male toxicity or toxic masculinity um and although none of this was actually said quite in this way because of the exaggerations of woke we handed over a gift to the to the other side to portray things in this way and that has made young men and when you are young you are insecure let's be honest
• 99:30 - 100:00 you're still testing your sexuality I mean most people are insecure and there are afraid of things I mean that's just yeah just how it you create this threat that the other side handed over to you like a gift and you use it to create a threat that plays exactly on male insecurity young male insecurity something that seems to invalidate their very mhood and um and they will react to that and then people will leverage that Jordan Peterson has leveraged this
• 100:00 - 100:30 liberally saying out Traditional Values and mhood a lot of that I agree with I just disagree with how blatantly misused it is it is misused um so the other side Bears a responsibility um because of the exaggerations the extremes uh and the inability to provide a truly viable alternative um it is not difficult to
• 100:30 - 101:00 present someone who will appeal to people's Humanity more than an an orange overweight uh um unhinged angry man right it's not difficult to find an appealing alternative to something like that but I mean I have to say I don't I mean I think that's kind of not helpful or true either to like it's
• 101:00 - 101:30 something I've done too is just think of him in that way because what he's not he doesn't appear that way actually in the states to the people he's not a joke anymore in that way which is kind of a shock for me when I went back there even to me he doesn't appear that way um I don't think he's he's very familiar and he's not monster likee which is much more dangerous than it was eight years ago he was you know when I say an angry man I don't mean a monster when I say deranged I don't mean
• 101:30 - 102:00 crazy but uh when somebody goes on television says his political opponent should be put against the wall and shot from nine barrels if that is not somebody operating without guard rails then what is it when a political candidate for president of the nation of the world's most powerful Nation does not have enough moral guard rails to not call for the assassination of a political opponent if this is not
• 102:00 - 102:30 deranged what is of course the hell of course he wasn't calling for the assassination I mean no he was literally was but people say wow it's it's just Trump you know it's it's what he does he doesn't really mean it so you think he was literally saying no no no I don't think it's a that that's what he said I mean I honestly I haven't watched him actually say it so he said that L Cheney belongs in front of nine
• 102:30 - 103:00 barrels so he he literally said that her place is in a in front of an execution Squad he you he said the words it played back it's there he said the words now you may say he doesn't really mean it it's just Trump being Trump that's how Hitler was in 193 it's not only that phrase there's so many phrases about so many things so but I
• 103:00 - 103:30 guess what I'm trying to say is that it doesn't it's so shocking and so awful that you don't take it seriously it's it's some kind of weird spiraling kind of movement where it's very hard like it's almost like um for some reason I think of indead Poet Society with this movie which I like when the woman's H uh son actually dies and she doesn't accept it it was always really hard for me to watch that part like she she acts like he's still alive because some things are just
• 103:30 - 104:00 so glaringly awful or wrong that you don't you can't process them as what they are I feel like there's something like that going on when again I'm I'm not saying that Trump is Hitler I'm drawing parallels here because the parallels exist and the fact that there are parallels doesn't mean that everything will go now the way they went after 1932 they may but I'm not saying that that's going to be the case I'm I'm just justifying simply my
• 104:00 - 104:30 concern um when Hitler was campaigning in the election of 1932 which by the way he didn't really win the Nazi party was not the biggest party he was just you know the one that U was eventually selected to to to lead the country after talks of Coalition and all that but um that's how people reacted he had some
• 104:30 - 105:00 extreme statements that people thought yeah it's just the Corporal being the Corporal you know it's just that he's full of passion and he really cares about the Dignity of the German peoples so he says these things but uh no he he's never going to do that he's not going to do that um until he did and the way he start then right even when people knew what was happening they didn't see it no no no when he actually started doing that and he actually started doing that against
• 105:00 - 105:30 his own people he killed the leader of the brown shirts which was his own political movement but because the guy was growing too powerful and too visible Hitler saw him as as a threat so killing is and that happened to Putin as well killing is a wonderful way to solve your problems because it's a definitive solution when when your problem is what another person is doing killing is addictive once you get that path of solving your problems by
• 105:30 - 106:00 killing nothing else is as good nothing else is as immediate as complete as sure and as easy to do uh and that was the downward spirro of Hitler too as it was a downward spirro of uh Putin who started killing in the early 2000s um political opponents journalists and all that um when Hitler actually started doing that the effect was then oh yeah he's doing that but you know he has been saying for years that he was going to do that so at no point there is
• 106:00 - 106:30 that moment of alarm because when he's saying it and not doing oh he's just saying it when he's do water again yeah yeah but when he's actually doing oh but he said it all long night it's okay people get got used in Russia to put in killing for 25 years well 20 years people got used to that you know he started killing 2004 I think journalist in St Petersburg and in the beginning well was it really him he denied it and there was legitimate doubt
• 106:30 - 107:00 by The Fifth Assassin assassination it's like okay then there is somebody who is not puting and who is killing every puting enemy by coincidence but then it was like it's already the fifth or sixth time yeah that's what he does you know what I mean yeah then it's become too removed it's not yeah you can't even no point you get an an an alarm alarming uh point and when the second world war started um with the invasion of
• 107:00 - 107:30 Poland well the invasion started before the invasion of Poland right when Hitler Hitler annexed Austria the population welcomed him not everybody but the ones who didn't didn't make it resist produced films uh that conveyed the news um and then they invaded the sodan land which is a part of today's Czech Republic where German lived they also didn't fire a bullet so that started normalizing things and then they invaded Poland which was by treaty linked with
• 107:30 - 108:00 France and and United Kingdom so both had to declare war on Germany but then nothing happened you know it was it was a fake war war was declared but nobody was shooting at the other side and Poland was invaded uh from the west by Germany and from the east by Russia Russia started the second World War together with Germany but of course what they call the Great Patriotic War didn't start in 1939 that part is not in their
• 108:00 - 108:30 history books they started 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union that's when the Great Patriotic War started that's what Russian children are taught they are not taught that their country started the second world war as an Allied of Russia invading the same country from the other end so so what what was the Tipping Point do you think there and does it relate to what could be the Tipping Point here in terms of recognition of it there was no moment of great alarm I mean the opposite what
• 108:30 - 109:00 because now the narrative is so different right if if you stop there if if we just follow that thread then it seems like we're going to get to a point where Hitler owns the world or whatever and like we were just continually kind of accepting more and more and but at some point it turned the opposite way to where he became the kind of most evil human in the world and after the war yeah but but why the war we didn't know there were concentration camps so it was more the physical effect of soldiers seeing that and telling the
• 109:00 - 109:30 story of it and yeah and then time and retrospective and the power of of retroactive site is know it's 2020 um but as those events um unfolded nobody was alarmed uh uh the reason why there were 6 million Jews killed in concentration camps is that that even the Jews who Hitler was overtly saying a Vermin are the enemies within should be
• 109:30 - 110:00 cleaned up even they didn't take that quite serious even after the the the the night of broken glasses when Jewish businesses across Germany uh were U were invaded and broken rioted even then people thought ah it's just just a thing of now just a thing of the moment if we stay quiet we don't need to run away because mean it's that like to what Trump was saying or to these other things that it's we
• 110:00 - 110:30 can't see it and we can't accept it and we never do when you are wit witnessing history in the making you don't have the context that allows you to see what's actually happening we prefer to believe in an optimistic scenario because it it um creates a a reality for ourselves a reality of narrative in which we do not have to take very difficult action and so the Jews didn't have to didn't need to run away because it was just a thing
• 110:30 - 111:00 of the moment it could fizzle out um the Western World went to war um be um slowly because at no point they really understood what was happening when in when England and France the United Kingdom and France declared war against Germany that Declaration was just in a piece of paper nothing happened uh uh no shot was fired Russian sorry Poland was carved in two half for Russia half for Germany have stayed there I mean that
• 111:00 - 111:30 was Hitler doing something similar right just going along with what everyone wants and saying yes and doing what he wants exactly contrary to what he said he would do and and at every turn people would think yeah this is bad but it's not going to get worse and then it gets a little worse and then people say yeah this is bad but it's not going to get worse in the second world war it only actually happened uh when Germany invaded the low countries in the north of France and then the British expeditionary force was cornered at dunker and then there was the Dunkirk
• 111:30 - 112:00 evacuation and only then we realized [ __ ] this this is actually a war and the Germans will now try try to invade England and even at that point the US was saying we are not getting into the war it's a it's an European thing it's not going to affect us we are Continental country on the other side of the world why are you going to know send our youth our young men to die in the feuds of Europe you know it's not that
• 112:00 - 112:30 it's not our problem it's not going to affect us until guess what per Harbor yeah and and could could it have been prevented if people had seen the signs yes but that's how history has always unfolded we slide dreamly into war every time every we never say oh it's going to get really bad now no we think it's bad now but it will fizzle out and we we coat it up we put warm towels on it because it makes us feel more
• 112:30 - 113:00 comfortable because we want to focus on our lives as they are now and you know get your kids education now pursue your hobby make sure that you have enough money to retire and pay your medical bills we don't have time and energy to start thinking about what we have to do to prevent the next World War and that's why we slide gently into that we always did and it's only when something happens that disrupts your day if you can't watch Tik Tok or you can't do all these things anymore or you
• 113:00 - 113:30 actually see the violence then then it it's disrup way that's G change yeah Andrea we like to believe what connects with our most basic emotional reactions I'll give you an example of how this is done the political system in my country Benin is is an example for the world 16 countries 16 parties and uh they all get seats in government more or less and they have to do coalitions and it's the Coalition at
• 113:30 - 114:00 governs so having to understand the other side and make compromises is is the blood of our political system there is no space for extremist approaches because even if you win the election you're not government you not form a government government because nobody will want to govern with you uh which is happening has happened in Austria has happened in NE um despite that even in a political system that's pretty good if in the last election there is a party
• 114:00 - 114:30 here um there is a populist party it's the pvv uh it's an extreme right party I wish all extreme Trump like personality or uh uh here vilder is is the blonde guy who people say is the Dutch Trump I don't think there is any parameter of comparison uh no but I understand why people would say but it's flashy in the way we were talking talk about it gets your attention he gets your attention in a similar he gets your attention he not similar he says things that are morally inadmissible like taking entire
• 114:30 - 115:00 so-called ethnic groups in the country and singling them out as criminal no that the reality is not as simple as that right um and he says these things because he knows it it's a hook that grabs people by their by their most primitive emotions yeah and mobilizes people it works in the same way at least what I've seen yeah so let give you one example of of how these things are done um if you were a care of enough
• 115:00 - 115:30 voter before the last Dutch election to actually read um the the the platforms of each party each party puts a written platform online and that platform is then scrutinized by experts that build a website called the stem visor um uh voting um I don't know how to translate that it's a it's a help for you to vote so it it asks you like 50 questions what your
• 115:30 - 116:00 position is on 50 questions and then it will show you which political platforms are closer to your opinions they put it in a graph with all the 16 parties and the ones that are closest to you are highlighted and then you can see what their platforms are so every political party has to put those platforms in writing what they what what do they plan to do uh uh online we can all access that and I went through the trouble of reading the platform of The Proposal the document of this party and there is one
• 116:00 - 116:30 point where they say the Netherlands is handing over dozens of our F6 jet fighters to fight a war far away instead of defending our our own country which is what uh these Fighters were acquired to do we should not do this we should use these fighters to defend our own country reasonable right and it appeals to people's emotions like why am I going
• 116:30 - 117:00 to make my country vulnerable in order to defend some people far away it takes 18 hours by car for me to get to the front line uh which for you guys is like it's like going to the next state yeah I think people don't realize how close it really is yeah we are very close I mean here it seems far but for us that's very close in the states no now what that document didn't tell you is the following the Netherlands is a very tiny country surrounded by a bigger one
• 117:00 - 117:30 Germany if foreign troops get to our borders we already lost the war so we have to prevent them from even getting to our borders by helping the countries that surround ours because we are so small if foreign military is already at the border and only then we start fighting we already lost it's gone it's only 18 million people a tiny Army and we have a limited number of airfields and limited number of fighter pilots because we we are not now we the size of
• 117:30 - 118:00 a city we're the size of New York the grand New York area that's the Netherlands um those Fighters those f-16s were already in the secondhand Market to be sold because we had already bought f35s and we just don't have pilots and air bases to have the x16s and the f-35s nor is that militarily required we could we can't have it and even if we could that's not how the military Doctrine put together so we were already getting rid of those f-16s
• 118:00 - 118:30 and that's why they went to Ukraine they wouldn't be defending Dutch borders anyway because we are acquired we acquired F35 they but that's not said anywhere in the that's not said in that document now did they know it of course Builders has been in Parliament forever for for many years he's not stupid he's not that impulsive either I wish every and I say this in a qualified way if every outer right-wing
• 118:30 - 119:00 politician were like hurt Builders our problems would be less because despite his rhetoric he's now in government and he stroke a reasonable compromise with other parties and all the vile aspects of their program are not implemented and he accepted that and he's even being accused of um betraying his voters because some of his voters really wanted him to do stuff
• 119:00 - 119:30 that was outright racist and morally unacceptable but he he's not doing it and he agreed to a fairly maybe not ideal but a fairly balanced govern government program so um if but I've heard other people say other things too I I think I guess the a thread through a lot of this I mean we just I wasn't here for it but you probably know more about it but with the football match there's this big thing that
• 119:30 - 120:00 happened in the Netherlands um relative to the war yeah and I mean there's a lot of controversy right and um I've heard people say what you just said about Wilders but I've also heard the opposite like but I think the through line that I wonder I wonder if we can like look at is this us against them or there's always an enemy whether it's and it's usually the Foreigner right whatever however you want to name what that is whichever
• 120:00 - 120:30 within uh or the Enemy Within that's how you manipulate people you you you select within the Border you or within the of course of course but that has always been done in Germany it was the Jews the enemies within that's what I mean that's the thread right and that's also in the states why that was the main thing that I heard was like I like I just told you about the guy in the taxi he was mad that the immigrants had better cars than him and he was born in America which is a kind of a a story I mean I didn't tell you but the the guy said when he dropped
• 120:30 - 121:00 him off the guy had four nice cars in his in his driveway so it wasn't even really true but it's kind of the story that the immigrants come and then they take everything that belongs to you and they're doing better than you which is very different from the way you were presenting why we should have immigrants but I think the the threat is that us them you like this this that the enemy is the reason that you're feeling bad whatever you're feeling bad about or the the enemy is the Foreigner and that's why you're suffering and if we just get
• 121:00 - 121:30 rid of that everything's going to be okay this story is the story of all the things we've been talking about isn't like how do we address this story what's that about well the thing about this is that um they they rely on certain things that are true you can lose your job to an immigrant who will accept a lower salary and that is a problem um but then they use these but does it depend on the Immigrant I mean it could be AI it could be someone who
• 121:30 - 122:00 has a better could is it always do of course it can be a change in in in in the in the industrial process that renders certain skills no longer relevant like uh you don't need to have the skills of making paper manually like you needed to uh 200 years ago uh so you lose your job because of that because an of Technology because of AI because of the immigrant because of geopol but also what we were saying before that we need people to do these kind of jobs that
• 122:00 - 122:30 other people don't want to do anymore I mean there's even a kind of weird judgment or elitism in that very notion that we have to take a million immigrants in to do all the jobs that nobody wants to do here anymore yeah um yeah the plague is you start from facts that are real and then you draw the absolutely wrong implication from that that's how you are manipulated because how do we get people to understand that that's happening on a wide level and
• 122:30 - 123:00 would that change anything I can give you how I wish it could be done and I can and I can answer you based on how I think it will happen um what will happen it goes back to um the philosophy of History um in in um Hegel uh um we learn through the dialectics of History we learn by making making the wrong choices and suffering the consequences the problem is that we
• 123:00 - 123:30 don't leave leave long enough for all of that learning to be conveyed to the Next Generation things happen too fast and the Next Generation largely has to relearn it again but not to the extent of the previous one a small percentage less and then they pass some of that on to the generation after them who have to relearn most of it again but not as much as the previous you see and slowly after going through this spiral multiple times
• 123:30 - 124:00 [ __ ] up multiple times paying the consequences for it multiple times eventually centuries from now we will be more mature that's how it will happen now I if we make it that far right if we make it that far because now there are plenty of nuclear and Conventional Weapons around to just end human civilization not the planet not even the ises there is always the Australian Aboriginal who will survive the African Bushmen who will survive the northern inate that will survive but civilization
• 124:00 - 124:30 uh uh may end we may end it so if yeah if we make it that long I think we learn it that way uh I wish that reason can Prevail through the much more extensive forms of communication and recordkeeping that we have now um the second world war is still remote to us because in my youth it was just grainy black and white images very few audio so it was basically words on the pages of a book
• 124:30 - 125:00 very far removed but the moment 100 years from now people can watch this video in 4k with our voices our realities and they see yeah these are people just like us they look exactly like us they're facing issues just like us now the the recorded memory will have much more emotional appeal than the abstractedness of medieval paintings and drawings or even early 20th century grainy black and white film yeah in a
• 125:00 - 125:30 positive way that dialectic I think that spiraling movement actually we are becoming what I was talking about before this kind of blockchain is becoming more and more obvious because there's so much documentation and it's so hard to erase it and if you you know if you really want to do the work you can figure out what's been been manipulated and I guess that'll get easier and easier as time goes by so maybe it will be easier to kind of not find the whole truth because everyone's going to have a little bit of a different one but the regularities that really happened um but this time
• 125:30 - 126:00 thing is interesting like and it comes up a lot of just how how do we how do we stay motivated if it's all gonna only matter you know hundreds of years from now or or not matter at all because I think that speaks to that just just go with your immediate feeling and the impulsiveness that's dangerous and all that too like I mean can we have some kind of paradigm shift in terms of the way we think of self too like is there
• 126:00 - 126:30 maybe there's a whole other way of living and understanding meaning and stuff that isn't stuck in these these ways like why do we have to always think of the Foreigner and the opposite and like this this theme that keeps playing out and just like killing people and you know what what is this why do we have to have this like can't we I don't know it just it just feels like to accept the dialectic of that I just wish that we could think think outside the dialectic itself
• 126:30 - 127:00 could be something a little bit more regenerative not focused on opposites you know understanding the world is not dichotomous or maybe you think it is but um no uh I I think U most of it is a m is a matter of degree um it's like saying that I am either a liberal or a conservative I reject that profound yeah you're very good at holding paradoxes I mean analytic idealism is itself holding a paradox it's not a paradox it seems to
• 127:00 - 127:30 be a paradox if you well that's the point of the Paradox right if you hold the Paradox you actually get to what's not a paradox so there are certain things that are true paradoxes like if I say this sentence is not true if it is true then it's not true and if it's not true then oh then it's true exactly but if you hold that space then you have both things existing as they are you don't need to decide on one or the other and you understand that it's not an either or situation actually I I think
• 127:30 - 128:00 the seeming Paradox between conservative and liberal is just Flatout false there is nothing paradoxical there at all the moment you start elaborating on what these words mean you realize that there is no conflict it's not a paradox at all it the story that it is has been sold to you I acknowledge that uh but anybody who looks more deeply into it will see that there is no Paradox I mean there's a there is a party in my country called vvd they are the liberal conservatives and I mean it's not a problem for any
• 128:00 - 128:30 Dutch person to understand that this is not a paradox it's just a narrative has been created in the US in which it is well I think you're assuming that a paradox means it's IR irreconcilable or and I'm I'm saying a paradox is is a signal that it's already reconciled yeah I mean I think if you really look into what a paradox means and what Xeno everyone it's basically alerting you to things that seem oppositional but actually aren't which is exactly what you're saying too so it's to that
• 128:30 - 129:00 dialectic movement is what I'm I'm trying to get at because and and why why I brought up why there's always an opposite and we're always fighting The Foreigner that's against us I mean I don't know if you disagree but it does seem like we're we seem in these ruts these dualistic rut of it's always one against the other and we can't like understand that there's this complex nestedness going on that is actually kind of a portal into a very much more interesting way of living and finding
• 129:00 - 129:30 meaning and yeah you know all of that but we we instead we're fighting other that's never really an opposite you know so we can never resolve it yeah I think both Extremes in in this space are to be avoided one is to say everything is black and white well it's just not true the other is to say everything is relative there's nothing absolute that's just as dangerous as to say everything is black
• 129:30 - 130:00 and white you're lost in both cases because you will Overlook all the subtlety and Nuance that actually constitutes what we call life and you will completely lose your ability to pass reasonable judgment value judgments on what's going on and therefore lose your ability to vote in a sane way um I think to say nothing is absolute doesn't mean nothing is right or wrong I think there's a difference it just means that everything is always ongoing there's no end so how could you have an absolute but you can have a right and a wrong
• 130:00 - 130:30 still it's just that or do you well I'm not sure this is not contradictory what you just said I think there are certain things that constitute what we call evil and there is no moral relativity there I I was outraged When J events the other day was saying yeah there American leaders they they pick sides in the conflict in Ukraine you know it shouldn't Pi
• 130:30 - 131:00 shouldn't pick any side as if the thing were relative as if the Russian Story the Russian narrative were as much based on morals as the Ukrainian narrative as if you couldn't discern there who is the good guy and who is the bad guy I think that is morally irresponsible and abhorent one country crossed internationally recognized Border Lines to invade another and kill and mangle and torture and rape the other country
• 131:00 - 131:30 the one invaded is defending itself so no there is no moral relativism here there is an absolute there one country infringed uh uh uh International laws and and spread Terror into another it it this is not relative moral relativism is danger is when you start using it to justify anything because if you lose moral ground to this degree you can no longer pass
• 131:30 - 132:00 judgment I guess I just I don't think it's relative I don't think it's relative but I also don't think it's absolute in the sense that from every position it looks the way you just described it even if we could somehow kind of understand it as that all of us it's going to take different kinds of ways of understanding it so there's not going to be one absolute way in which that's going to become clear um and there's not going to be one one story for why that's clear so
• 132:00 - 132:30 I think that's even even within that spectrum of it being true there's it's not absolute because there's going to be so many different ways in which it's going to be understood and and that doesn't mean those ways are wrong but it does not mean that it's relative that it's like just because it could be understood from a million different ways then therefore there's no right or wrong to it I think that's very hard to understand that that that's like a different way of thinking to understand that do you know what I mean but if you just say it's absolute then it's just
• 132:30 - 133:00 for me I mean you could prove me wrong I just feel like that's playing into the same way that our language is set up so that we are always putting ourselves on one side or the other which means we're always going to be fighting and there's always going to be like ways to say that what we're fighting for is the right thing and what they're fighting for is the wrong thing um in dialogue that the other side is not going to take seriously I think we lose our souls on
• 133:00 - 133:30 both extremes we lose our souls and we say it's reality is too complicated there is no solid moral ground everything is relative so know you lose our soul there because now you you may find a justification for why a criminal can invade the house of an old retired lady and rape her for the whole night and then SL slid their throat and set the fire the set the house on fire well from his point of view because of his education and the way his genes are put
• 133:30 - 134:00 together and the neurotransmitters in his brain and the abuse he suffered that that and I understand that I understand that no that doesn't mean it's right that doesn't mean it's right if you understand whatre why that happened you can even say more forcefully why it's wrong correct correct correct we must understand evil but we should not use this need to understand evil as an excuse for evil or an argument to say everything is too complex everything is
• 134:00 - 134:30 relative therefore there are no absolute moral judgments I think we lose our soul there we equally lose our souls when we portray everything as a black and white moral call without Nuance you're either liberal or conservative now you lost all Nuance you lost any hope of a sane political discourse the moment you do that so I think in both extremes we lose ourselves we have to recognize that most most things we have to make choices
• 134:30 - 135:00 about are nuanced subtle and complex you cannot see them as black and white at the same time that we have to accept it that there is a moral ground of absolutes because if we lose sight of that too we also lose um our Humanity because now we start being able to create a narrative to justify anything know I give you like the Simplicity things that you brought up right of the categorical imperative or the golden rule or these like very basic would you
• 135:00 - 135:30 do unto this person the way you want to have like would is this how you want to be treated you know it's a very simple kind of way in which you can understand right or wrong if if you allow but that doesn't mean that understanding The Narrative of how someone got to a different place and the coherence because it's coherent like I think we confuse that coherence with must be okay and that's not right but you can still understand the coherence of the narrative and how it happened and you need to without because it's coherent doesn't mean it's sanctioned like right
• 135:30 - 136:00 now that's a very big confusion I think even in the states where even translates into well he got elected so he must be okay to be elected you know because you can understand the coherence of it it happens all the time but how do how to get that apart the coherence doesn't mean it's legit it's valid yeah yeah so we have to understand evil we have to understand why serial murderers do what they do we have to understand why Psy Psychopaths act the way they do we have
• 136:00 - 136:30 to understand why narcissists uh do what they do we have to understand but understanding doesn't mean that it has valid moral ground uh it's different than to say that because we understand then it's also relative it's a relative judgment call relative moral no I think if you really understand it it's not relative at all it's it it becomes much more clear that it's not relative yeah let me give you an example um it infuriates me to see discourse online about
• 136:30 - 137:00 um um why the only way to help Ukraine is to call for talks and to sit and have a conversation with all sides you know all sides have a claim have a story a narrative that they think is valid so let's come together and discuss and try to solve our issues this is a very it's it's a liberal discourse that has been co-opted
• 137:00 - 137:30 by the by populist demagogues and it's also sorry but it's also really doesn't understand The Narrative of what's happening in Russia and Putin we can we can because it's assuming they're goingon to go that's going to work and that's that's not at all even close to the regularities by which sitting down discussing and it's more what you're saying is correct but it's more complex that I want to get across what I want to get a message across through a metaphor what I just said is entirely equivalent to the following
• 137:30 - 138:00 scenario um I I'll speaking I'll be speaking to men now because I think this this has more appeal to men since it's men that are promoting this story um you are a man and you are in your house in your neighborhood and you you have a kid you have a cat and a dog and your wife and you're there in your house living your life you're not in infringing with you're not going across the borders of your property you're not bothering your neighbors you're not causing any trouble
• 138:00 - 138:30 you're just there having your life in your house and occasionally you talk to some friends that maybe your neighbors don't like much they don't like those friends of yours but it you're just talking to them and it's your life you know it's your freedom to do that whether your neighbors like it or not the point is you're not infringing with the ability of your neighbors to live the way they want you're in your house living your life and then um a gang of criminals kicks your door down invades your house they rape your wife in front
• 138:30 - 139:00 of you they pour gasoline on your cat and set your cat a light just to watch your cat running desperately around and knocking against walls then they shoot your child and throw your child through a closed window through the glass and then they start setting your house on fire with you inside and then your neighbors come and say we should all sit together and have a conversation because the people who
• 139:00 - 139:30 invade your house they also have their point of view they also have their Grievances and what we should do now is not to help you defend yourself defend your loved ones defend your property what we should do now is to bring all of you together on a table so we can have a discussion about it this is this is what it means that's what we are saying that we should do to Ukraine they their women are being raped their men are being killed their country is on fire their pets are on fire and we
• 139:30 - 140:00 are telling them they should sit and discuss what would happen in a society that is grounded in basic morals what would happen is the following we will help you kick them out and put down the fire in your house and save your loved ones after we do that now we will have a conversation about Prosecuting crimes and preventing this from happening in the future by having a dialogue amongst all parties in this
• 140:00 - 140:30 order that's the order in which you do this if you don't want it to happen again and if you want to be morally grounded and we lose sight of that because we make things more complicated than things are we all understand what I said when it relates directly to them their house their loved ones their person but somehow when it gets into geopolitical abstraction and Nations and econ economies we lose sight from basic moral grounding and I think that is the end of us if we relativize everything
• 140:30 - 141:00 just as it is the end of us if we make everything black and white if we do if we do the latter it's third world war if we do the former um there will be no boundaries there will be no justice and human life would be disastrous yeah I'm glad you I was going to ask you you I'm glad you added the that last part because it's not that sitting down and discussing it is a bad idea but to ask in that very powerful story you just told while that's going
• 141:00 - 141:30 on and still happening to ask people to sit down and discuss it while it continues on you know maybe even in the same room that you have to watch it but you're going to just sit down and talk about it is is more the case and how it must feel and how insane it is right it's not it's not that saying we could discuss it and try to talk about it but you're not going to do it while it's happening in your house you're going to defend yourself and Andrea um you could say well not even the Biden Administration was helping Ukraine as much as they should have so everybody's
• 141:30 - 142:00 in the wrong here right and and and then it comes back to a point we discussed before which is governments not treating us as mature adults the Biden Administration was not telling us why it was playing this game of helping Ukraine just enough so Russia doesn't win but not enough so the problem is actually solved why did they do that they never explained this because they think people will not understand it they think it's too complicated they think it will be misused in social media so I would tell
• 142:00 - 142:30 you the story I'll take the risk I'll stick my neck out and I'll tell you the story that politicians don't want to tell you the war that is coming is against China and it's probably going to happen before the end of this decade and the reasons for that that that's a whole other discussion and I'm not going to pass judgment on that uh it's likely going to happen uh the US's play is Russia is a geopolitical counterbalance to China if Russia is weakened or uh
• 142:30 - 143:00 unstable China just takes over vast swats of land in the Far East of Russia including uh the old manua Vlad vosto which is now major Russian Metropolis was used to be China they would take all that over they have access to much more oil today uh China Imports about 8 % of their energy and they can only do that because the US Navy guarantees the safety of a commercial Lanes across the seas so most of China's energy comes
• 143:00 - 143:30 from the Middle East through the straight of Oman which is Patrol and vou safed by the US Navy which is the only Navy that has a worldwide reach the Chinese Navy is bigger in terms of the number of vessels but they are all small vessels they can't go very far the US Navy is the only one that has worldwide reach um if China so so that's a deterrence against China because if China tries to take the wealth and the prosperity of Taiwan which we helped
• 143:30 - 144:00 them build and steal um Western technology that is in Taiwan such as asml liography tools which I worked on for 15 years and which we cannot send to China um if they do that um there is a very simple way to to um defeat China you just make sure that they they don't get their energy and you can do that far away from China and you close their ports 50% of their food comes from abroad as well if you close their ports
• 144:00 - 144:30 you are in a situation in which 400 million people die of starvation within three months um so China is deterred because of all this if they take large swats of Russian territory that's a very different story so Russia is an important counterbalance to China that's why the bind and Administration doesn't want Russia to win because if they win the next thing line are NATO countries like in the baltics and then now the US is in the fight and they have to be in the
• 144:30 - 145:00 fight because Europe is responsible as a sort of symbiotic partner for a large part of us uh wealth and prosperity and all of you would feel it in your pockets very quickly if Europe Falls there is a symbiotic relationship between us all of your semiconductors are made with Dutch technology and that's just one example of of the symbiosis um so it will be much more expensive that's why they are in this charade now they cannot let
• 145:00 - 145:30 Russia win but they cannot destabilize Russia because the real war is still coming so why don't they just explain this to people because that's what the theory of democracy is a government is accountable and a government reports to their boss which is the people who voted them the people who gave them the job reports to their bosses the people why they're doing what they're doing and you treat people like adults and and the reason why Trump wants peace at any cost
• 145:30 - 146:00 with Ukraine that's not deranged he too is not telling you the real reason it's because he knows the real conflict is coming with China and we cannot afford to have Russia disintegrate into 15 different States armed with nuclear weapons most of which have incredible natural resources that who make a war with China a lot more difficult to prevent um because what prevents war is deterrence it's not flowers and holding
• 146:00 - 146:30 hands and singing the Kumbaya that's not what prevents Wars what prevents war wars is deterrence the US has deterrence China is trying to eliminate that by expanding their military presence in the South China Sea why are they doing that because they really think they they are historically entitled to that no it's because if they get control over the southern China Sea they have control over certain commercial choke points like Straits that go between Indonesia and Malaysia these are narrow Straits uh
• 146:30 - 147:00 that they depend on to get their food and their oil if that is not under their control the US can just close those lanes and then they're screwed and and and that's the US deterrence that's why they're doing what they're doing that's the the why the US is doing what it's doing um Europe is much more clear in this respect because for Europe Europe a rampaging Mafia State like Russia rampaging Europe directly affects our security and for you guys in the US it
• 147:00 - 147:30 only indirectly does so in time it will completely compromise your ability to have a prosperous and secure life just like it happened in the second world war in Japan and per Harbor threats to the to to the to the West Coast in California Oregon all those states were threatened um the same thing same thing would eventually happen again but not at first That's Why Us politicians are more pragmatic in this regard Than People Like Us here we who are much more
• 147:30 - 148:00 directly threatened and and but now that there are North Korean soldiers on the European territory fighting a war now for us it's like the two conflicts are merging into one for South Korea too if these soldiers are gathering experience here testing weapons learning how to fight Wars it's a threat to them so the South Koreans are now going to Ukraine that's how World Wars are constructed you know one step at a time so this is why this stuff is happening
• 148:00 - 148:30 but the governments either side in the US there are only two sides not 16 as here but government either side there they are not telling you the whole story they are both busy at figuring out what's the best way at manipulating you and right now the best manipulators are the ones who won previously the best man Poors were the liberal Democrats that's how politics is done because politicians do what works not what is right that's powerful that's
• 148:30 - 149:00 powerful what you just laid out is very powerful and even knowing all that I'm gonna have to like think through it a bit more because a few of those things I really hadn't made those connections and but knowing all that you're very passionate about Ukraine is because it's just wrong right it I mean where is that coming from for you even if you understand all those Dynamics and what could happen and um like where where is it is it a is it back to the good and evil and knowing
• 149:00 - 149:30 which side you want to be on and second to that I wonder if someone asked you to come on and be maybe they even have a consultant or like work with the government and try to help um on these problems do you think there's a way you could say yes and help or is it that the whole thing is just like you can't possibly enter enter into it and do any kind of help helpful thing or I guess I mean more in the states too not necessarily in the Netherlands but oh no the in the states I'm not a US citizen
• 149:30 - 150:00 so not consultant no yeah there is a way I could possibly say yes I'll leave it at that um um for me in Ukraine it's first and foremost a moral issue no a gang of criminals has entered somebody's house raped somebody's wife set somebody's cat on fire killed somebody's child and in my mind that moral issue has overwhelming precedence over everything else but I still have
• 150:00 - 150:30 pragmatic reasons for why this should be stopped um in this a and age if a state consolidates a gain by infringing international law the Precedence that this creates is is devastating uh because it will tell other potentially Rogue states that this may pay off this may work that it it may pay
• 150:30 - 151:00 off to invade another country kill pillage destroy and rape get away with it and still have a profit so I think it's very important that this President not be created and that moral relativism and geopolitical pragmatism does not get in the way of preventing this president from being created because it starts a domino process if it works once that's the lesson it teaches uh Rogue States and they will do it again and if it pays off again they do it again until one day
• 151:00 - 151:30 that wave and knocks at your front door and even if it doesn't knock at your front door human decency should still bring us into action even if we don't get directly involved um for me that's the key point that said I understand the Biden administration's um tight rope Balancing Act help enough so they don't lose so Russia doesn't win so we don't create
• 151:30 - 152:00 that precedence but don't help so much that you destabilize Russia I think morally morals are not for this tight RPP Balancing Act I think morality tells us we have to get those criminals out of my neighbor's house as soon as possible and before more rape before more killing before more suffering and then we sit together and see what to do about preventing it in the future that's not what they are doing because they're being geopolitically pragmatic just like
• 152:00 - 152:30 JD V and Trump are geopolitical geopolitically pragmatic about the real conflict being elsewhere I think that is morally reprehensible but I understand it I don't think it's right but I understand it and I understand you don't see it's a trolley problem kind of a thing you don't no it is it is a trolley problem it is a trolley problem so either way it's because even if we do what you want us to do if if exactly then they're going to be repercussions that create more of that
• 152:30 - 153:00 possibly in other places I recognize that if we if we help Ukraine to the point where we get the criminals out of their house that would be profoundly destabilizing to the Russian government which is a mafia government so I uh I don't mind if that government collapses because it's a mafia state um but uh I recognize that destabilizing the current government in Russia will not produce a follow-up government that is stable it will probably break the country up or
• 153:00 - 153:30 prevent them from have from being a counterweight to the China's uh presence in the Far East and that could complicate um the situation when it comes to preventing a war with China through uh deterrence and create a much bigger problem that may lead to even more suffering more catastrophe it may even lead to a limited scale nuclear war I don't think there will be a full scale nuclear war but a limited scale nuclear or could happen which would be
• 153:30 - 154:00 catastrophic for many countless millions of people so I recognize that it is a trolley problem but I I have moral imperatives that seem to overwhelm my thinking in that regard when I see my neighbor's house on fire and criminals inside raping and pillaging and torturing and setting them on fire I my sole moral imperative is to stop the Carnage first and then think about the rest later but I recognize I
• 154:00 - 154:30 may be the one who chooses the train to kill one person by by uh by by changing the tracks and I think we can just find some way to change the complete trolley thing at some point I me get out of these that too is that dichotomy that I I I feel like we need to lift out of but nonetheless every action has some repercussions and I definitely can hear people in different countries that I know sometimes listen to this saying
• 154:30 - 155:00 well you know we have this in our country too can you help us um you know because this people are treating people badly in a lot of places and uh yeah it just gets there's trolleys everywhere and um but before we could get into that but there's a layer here which we haven't talked about which is the kind of you know close to you too the the way that technology is changing this and that the layer of um
• 155:00 - 155:30 algorithmic uh war or or or change and of course you know now a lot of this isn't in the hands only of nation states and countries I mean some of it's in the hands of individuals who own satellites in space and things that that can change so I wonder if you've thought about that much too or if you see this as a like a shift in power dynamics on that level too of where a lot of what we're talking about
• 155:30 - 156:00 now depends on power being in traditional places but if we think of it algorithmically and in terms of Technology that's changing too on different levels I mean even on the level of I think this election in the United States was heavily influenced by podcasts you know yeah by who did or did not go on this or that podcast and by which particular kind of personality is swaying popular you know sentiment this is not new maybe yeah it's Joe Rogan now
• 156:00 - 156:30 but it used to be Walter conkrite a few decades ago instead of the eight Walter kronite both parties would have went on and in in Joe Rogan there was a kind of feeling that oh we can't like go on we can't I mean I'm going back to when Bernie Sanders remember when Bernie Sanders was on Joe Rogan and it was wonderful and um Joe Rogan even I think was like oh I like this guy and probably was going to even endorse him or did and everyone on the left was like so mad not
• 156:30 - 157:00 everyone but a lot of people were so mad that Bernie went on Joe Rogan you know because you're not supposed to cross the line and go over to that Macho side and that Trend kind of played itself out to where we are now I mean I'm cartoonized making it cartoonish but it's that dichotomy again of you know and I don't think that was true with R to konai maybe it was I don't know I think it was yeah really I think there I think subtle manipulation was enough then now it's not enough anymore so things are much more visible uh but I think media
• 157:00 - 157:30 organizations have always either openly or secretly endorsed certain political streams and not others and worked towards one thing and not another but this is the reverse of that it's not Joe Rogan endorsing it's the party itself not wanting to be aligned with that kind of a thing so it would be like I understand too they made the same choice is that also always been around or like would someone have chosen not to go on Walter kronite because it was too
• 157:30 - 158:00 left or right leaning because I I think that's the reason a lot of people didn't engage with this sort of side of Joe Rogan which also extends to people like Peterson and there's a whole kind of way in which there's not a lot of nuance there um because of the machoness or because of how visceral the reactions can be for certain people and I'm not saying one way is right or wrong I am completely understand it but it just
• 158:00 - 158:30 feels like something's a little bit different there but maybe not maybe it's just Amplified no there is a difference there there is a real problem there is a book that talks about it I forgot the name of the author the problem is called techn feudalism in which techn feudalism yeah oh yeah in which major technology organizations media organizations which are now merged with technology organizations they may um exert the powers of State they they may have power um uh uh commensurable with um the
• 158:30 - 159:00 powers that only the state should have uh because in democracy the powers of state are given by the people but u in techn fism those powers are guard Garden it Garner it in a different way not through vote that's why feel ISM but they end up defining the future or the path of Nations as much as powers of government and that's an issue for democracy to survive technical feudalism
• 159:00 - 159:30 has to be combed you cannot have one person sitting at top City on top certain uh companies that are so powerful that they can do their own foreign policy or take decisions that only States should decide in democracies because nobody voted for them in an election they were they just got lucky or were good in business that doesn't mean that they should have powers of state so that's an issue that's a real problem and I think we should our legislative po should pass laws that
• 159:30 - 160:00 prevent the accumulation of that kind of power beyond a certain level and people would say oh it's socialism it's all a matter of degree uh there is a point where you have to say individuals cannot become more powerful than their states because at that point you no longer have a democracy at that point you have an autocracy or maybe even a meritocracy which sounds nice but
• 160:00 - 160:30 it's still not Democratic because you may have reason the ranks in the corporate world through Merit but not the kind of Merit that would give you Democratic powers in other words you may not have worked in the interest of the people but solely in the interest of shareholders and and that's fine if you're a corporate leader but that shouldn't Grant you powers of State because the process of getting those powers are very different based on different values different criteria and
• 160:30 - 161:00 they shouldn't be mixed so there is a case to be made against Wealth Beyond a certain level and against powers that are uh comparable to the powers of the state as far as defining the directions of the country in inside and also in terms of foreign policy there is a case to be made that to should legislate that risk away and i would support that if the effort uh uh uh is made of course in the US that effort will not be made at least during the next four years um but
• 161:00 - 161:30 maybe in Europe something can be done uh in that regard maybe something can be done even in the US uh in the future further away but I do not conflate what I just said Andrea with um media personalities having sway because I think that has always been the case it's just that there was a time in which the manipulation was so subtle that we thought they were not biased um but they were and that's the
• 161:30 - 162:00 most dangerous bias is when you are being manipulated in a certain direction and you don't even see that that that's what's happening I rather have Joe Rogan say maybe too late but he did say at some point Andor Trump if that was already the path which he was falling in a very subtle way appealing to young man uh I rather have that be open and over it yeah just to be clear I wasn't
• 162:00 - 162:30 criticizing Joe Rogan um because I think Joe Rogan is doing what Jo Rogan is and does and that's you know you can have your opinion on that but I was more thinking about again I mean I'm thinking through these Beyond dichotomy and trying to get but it just that railroad rutting that I was talking about has become so powerful that I feel like there's something about Joe Rogan and that side that and Jordan Peterson and all these people who who who identifies
• 162:30 - 163:00 in a is familiar to a huge section of the voting population and you said we should take grievances seriously and I think that means taking that seriously that's happening it's been happening and that's something about that isn't recognized I guess in a way that isn't reactive and I'm talking even to myself because I remember you know when all this stuff happened with Jordan Peterson and the woman and like it's it's visceral and it's kind of like you you feel like you have to take a side rather
• 163:00 - 163:30 than un somehow look at this differently and um yeah it just became I think it just it seems like it accelerated whatever all that was towards becoming more of itself and less of a dialogue less of like what's the real Grievances and how do we talk about it and more like you can't possibly associate yourself with that because it's fascist or something like this which you know is just doesn't make a lot of sense I think I prefer a world in which media organizations uh explicitly
• 163:30 - 164:00 endorse or or or the opposite uh political candidates and provide a rationale for why they are doing it um like the New York Times has always endorsed certain candidates and provided an an editorial in which they explain why Scientific American Ed CA Harris in the last election cycle and they provided an long editorial explaining why so did The Economist I prefer that to a world in which media organizations
• 164:00 - 164:30 manipulate implicitly through reporting bias and pretend that they don't really have a position pretend that they are neutral while their editorial decisions are clearly or or maybe less clearly but effectively biasing the population one way or the other I prefer a world in which op iions are made clear and they are all overtly on the table so um we can judge people accordingly I chose to not go to The Joe Rogan podcast if I'm
• 164:30 - 165:00 invited again I made that choice I think Joe Rogan had the right to endorse I think it is correct that he made that endorsement explicit explicit in instead of through hidden manipulation but it's also an endorsement that for me is morally reprehensible and I do not want to associate myself um with where that kind of movement is going look the summary of
• 165:00 - 165:30 my position is the following the Grievances are legitimate but the reaction to the Grievances are going to exacerbate the problem that led to the grievance in the first place as opposed to solving it that's the problem and that and and that reaction not only exacerbates the problem I think it's morally reprehensible because it does away with this very clear moral Foundation that is not
• 165:30 - 166:00 subtle is not relative it's not complicated it's just playing human decency and an appreciation for truth truth is a value and that's why I think that's wonderful but not not but I mean Bernardo that's so important what you're saying that to me I mean maybe I'm being idealistic but if you it sounds like you were invited to be on Joe Rogan and you said no and that I completely respect that but what if like what if that audience could have heard you say that and they haven't heard that from anyone
• 166:00 - 166:30 else or because you know Bernie Sanders was a big hit on that show and um made changed a lot of I mean I remember someone in my family who's definitely not didn't vote the same way as I um wanted to vote for Bernie after that so you know like should we put each other so I you because I'm this way I should only talk to the New York Times or this or this or like because it's it's very tricky right because maybe if you went on that show then it seems like you endorse what he's
• 166:30 - 167:00 saying but the people who would listen to it would know you don't and I don't know I just am I being too idealistic to think yeah I'll explain to you no I didn't say no to Joe Rogan I did get an invitation years ago and my reaction was not yet when I go to the US again and then I went to the US again and I didn't contact him so it it was the we left it open and I never said a direct no to him so that that's where where I was coming from today I I I'll not say anything but if I
• 167:00 - 167:30 if I get an invitation today I would say okay this time it's an explicit no I I don't want to do that now why do I not want to do that um this will sound precious in this day and age um I want to reach people who will take my philosophical story seriously for the right reasons I do not want to reach people who will almost certainly take me seriously or even believing me outright
• 167:30 - 168:00 for the wrong reasons and and and in this day and age people just want to be heard and taken seriously right there is something in me I do not want to reach people who will believe me for the wrong reasons I actively do not want that to to happen and I've suspected not say I knew who am I to know anything I suspected that in the Joe Rogan podcast I would be believed
• 168:00 - 168:30 for the wrong reasons Nam what would that be can you tell me what a wrong reason would be well um as your audience may know because it's not the first time we talk about it I am an idealist philosopher I think there is an external real world but it's mental and I think materiality is not a thing it's a representation it's the way we represent the things we perceive but the things in themselves are mental processes the whole world is mental there is no materiality at the foundational level of nature this is a very anti-mainstream
• 168:30 - 169:00 position not anti-mainstream but it contradicts the mainstream which tells us the opposite it is matter that really exists and mind is just a representation that arises within material constructs uh it's just a sort of a a digest of material activity in the brain that's that's what we call mind that's what Daniel dennet used to say materialist philosopher who died um not long ago so the whole thing about My Philosophy
• 169:00 - 169:30 carries this or may be perceived as carrying this rebellious attitude against Elites against the mainstream something that you know will stick up to the man who will put the Elites in their place or even because it's a philosophy that tells everything is mind it may be construed as a philosophy that denies absolute truths as a philosophy that uh forments the thought that no everything is relative
• 169:30 - 170:00 it's my reality you are in your reality I have mine truth doesn't exist or it doesn't matter it may be construed that way well in fact it doesn't say that at all it's a philosophy that says there is there are real facts they are mental but they don't depend on my or your mentation they are mentation out there even if you were not here they would still be where they are these are real objective facts there is such a thing as truth and such a thing as falsity or lies no they are not relative but I
• 170:00 - 170:30 suspect that My Philosophy would be appreciated under certain political currents of thought C certain social currents of thought and feeling um that uh would play into this thing that I do not support I do not support relativizing reality I do not support post truth I do not support relativizing moral morals I do not support being main
• 170:30 - 171:00 anti-mainstream for the sake of being anti-mainstream I think mainstream materialism is false because it's materialism not because it's mainstream uh if the mainstream is reasonable I am all for the mainstream I am for reason not against the mainstream I'm simply for reason um so I I judged at the time and my judgment is stronger now that uh it's dangerous to reach people who will believe you for the wrong reasons
• 171:00 - 171:30 because the effects of that belief will be the opposite of what I'm trying to achieve in other words there will be a wave of misunderstanding that will snowball and create the a monster of my own making that that doesn't represent what My Philosophy is all about out is not consistent with My Philosophy so for me it's important to know how to reach people and to reach the right people I've never convinced anybody of anything
• 171:30 - 172:00 everything that has happened so far is people who already know or think that my philosophy is true when they read my philosophy it gives them the words it gives them the conceptual operatus that confirms what they already knew within I never convinced anybody of something they didn't already know intuitively within so those are the people I'm trying to reach um because the effect of reaching the wrong people who will believe me for the wrong reasons and I'm
• 172:00 - 172:30 not blaming them for that it's it's just normal human stuff human dynamics but because I understand it I carry the moral responsibility to at least try to prevent it and therefore to try to the extent that I can make that judgment to not reach the people who will believe me for their wrong reasons wow that's really a strong thing to say and it actually puts a lot in perspective of what we've been talking about because it's not that Spirit of just do
• 172:30 - 173:00 what's going to get you the most attention or or money by selling books or money or it's really kind of thinking through it and I don't know for some reason it makes me wonder um first of all I want to say congratul ations on analytic idealism in a nutshell very cool and and and you put it so clearly in the beginning what you just said which I think is very important because like yeah it's like this is this is what it is if you're going to go any further um
• 173:00 - 173:30 anyway it's really great and but as you were talking I was wondering was there ever a time in your life you might have gone on like gone that way of wanting the just going with the inertia of attention and um maybe even that you would have voted more towards that or have you always like I don't know has there was there ever a time you might have uh thought differently about this in a radical a radical way a way that I won't say you
• 173:30 - 174:00 would vote for Trump but closer to thatd in the Netherlands a couple of times um the liberal conservatives um no I don't think there was a time in my life in which I would have voted for populism um populism and post truuth is the antithesis of what I stand for I Stand For Truth analytic idealism stands for getting closer to Truth for
• 174:00 - 174:30 reforming mistakes once they become clear um not for denying truth or relativizing everything or outright and deliberately manipulate people that's not what I'm what I stand for and I never never stood for it so no I don't think there ever was a time in my life in which I would have been susceptible to that Temptation it's not even a Temptation for me I would not say that there was never a time in my life in which I wouldn't have done something
• 174:30 - 175:00 just to sell more books because um in the early days you know this whole philosophy thing is not something I ever planned I was happy in the corporate world climbing the career leather know helping produce amazing technology um that fulfilled me it's what I wanted to do a kid it's what I was doing it's what Bernardo KAS was and is still all about this philosophy thing happened to me it sort of parachuted into into my life out of some place you know in my inner mind
• 175:00 - 175:30 that I didn't even know existed it's like an imposition it's a it's a it it's a distra a dayon kind of connection or is it huh is it connected to the Daymon absolutely yeah that's what I call it because it doesn't seem like it's me it's something that is opposed on me and um there was a time you know but isn't that more you in a way too than that it's not cast now it may be but that's what I mean without the yeah yeah maybe maybe that's what people refer to when
• 175:30 - 176:00 they say well your true self maybe that's what it is I don't know but it's not the true self doesn't need the self I guess but anyway sorry that another it's not Bernardo it's not the thing I identify with it's not The Narrative of VI that yeah yeah so in the beginning when these first five years when this was imposed on me my inner attitude was the following I need to do this as fast as possible now run the burn this through as fast as possible get to whatever I need to get achieve whatever
• 176:00 - 176:30 objective it thinks it needs to achieve so I can free myself from it as quickly as possible you want you didn't want it anymore I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible so if the way to get rid of it was to have a international bestseller and settle the metaphysical question for Humanity so I could go back and work with electronics then then I would have done that because that that's how I felt today I have accepted that this will always be a theme of my life
• 176:30 - 177:00 there is no freedom from it it will always be there and I it's not going to go away ber yeah I'm not in a hurry to get rid of it anymore so I more thoughtful I am less stupid um but there was a time in the first five years in which well I don't know whether I would have gone to any podcast or do what whatever against my moral judgments I don't know whether I would have that but I could maybe I wouldn't but I as far as I know today looking back I I can't guarantee that I wouldn't but you can
• 177:00 - 177:30 get a little bit of a sense of how people in the moment make those little choices of just do whatever is most expedient you know you can kind of understand how that might start that inertia and then you're I don't yeah yeah I um I I I know I understand that um it's very important or at least very tempting attractive for most people to sort of grow their egos
• 177:30 - 178:00 become rich and famous as you guys say in the US like rich and famous as if they were the same thing they're completely different things right don't know why they come together why does you need why do you need to be famous but provide some kind of egoic validation I understand this I am person a natural introvert I am an extrovert by adaptation I am a natural introvert I personally do not feel any need
• 178:00 - 178:30 to get tremendous Public Credit or be exalted as a differentiated human being who is great or whatever to be very honest with you I this I I find this very uncomfortable I I find um being flattered very uncomfortable um I I I I know I cannot act upon that discomfort because people will think it's arrogant like if I go
• 178:30 - 179:00 and give a public talk and then people come to me and say wow you're great your philosophy changed my life I smile and I thank them for sharing that with me and I will sign the books they they bought I play the role because I know it would be misunderstood otherwise but to me that's the worst part of any public event is being flattered afterwards um it makes me uncomfortable now people listening to this you don't you don't need to feel guilty if you ever flattered me I'm I'm a grown-up man I'm 50 uh I can deal with
• 179:00 - 179:30 it then no problem I'm not hurt no I'm not feeling bad um but I never had finally answer your question I never had that motivation of doing something because it would flatter me or make me famous uh this is Foreign Waters for me I know it exists I know it's part of what Being Human means because most of people seem to have it but it's not something I can personally relate to very much um my
• 179:30 - 180:00 first you never struggled with ego I mean I get I know there are different things but of course because a lot of this like the root of it is pretty simple to go back to your what you were saying at the beginning about there's simple answers and there's also simple troubles with this I mean a lot of it is wanting attention wanting love wanting power feeling not like wanting confidence I mean it's I think it's very much true that the people who are the
• 180:00 - 180:30 strongest and the most powerful and the most confident we rarely see that much unless they're forced to you know um unless they have to take on the role maybe in a way that you're describing where you just like it's you it's not that they went out and were seeking it in the way that we associate with those things because really when you're most confident and Powerful you don't need to seek it and and seeking it is going against kind of whatever that demon spirit is but that doesn't mean we don't have like ego issues right I mean oh I
• 180:30 - 181:00 of course I started with ego um okay I I don't take well to being disrespected um and that's that's a reflection of there being an ego in me otherwise who is there to be disrespected right it would just not matter uh but I don't take well to this day less now but especially when I was younger and I was climbing the leather in the corporate world very early I was 33 years old I was promoted to Senior Management which in most us companies
• 181:00 - 181:30 would be a vice president position um I CERN or where huh where were you then were you at CERN I was at asml as okay yeah yeah so you were I mean but you were already so successful that yeah anyway I'll let you continue okay still I didn't take well to being disrespected what is what was disrespect for you was it similar to what bothers you about what's happening in Ukraine was it some kind of inhumanity or something or I mean it seems connected to the reason
• 181:30 - 182:00 you don't like it to be flattered there was one uh we were having a meeting with a customer and somebody contradicted what I had just said uh that there was an issue that became a problem I escalated it that became a problem um and addressed it in pragmatic language like uh it didn't help us get that customer but uh truthful truthfully if I'm honest to you and myself it bruised my ego I took that as
• 182:00 - 182:30 disrespect um or if somebody's bringing their dogs walk in front of my house and let their dog poop in my front yard oh I I react explosively to that um so uh there there is I have an ego in that sense obviously uh obviously to me right knowing that I have those experiences I know I have an ego but it has never been an ego that sought Fame visibility U Fame and visibility tend to make me rather
• 182:30 - 183:00 uncomfortable when I wrote my f first book I wanted to write it under pseudonym but because I didn't have a platform back then my publisher said look we believe in your book but you're starting author um if you're going to start what is already a very difficult journey to Market your m materal if you're going to start that already under the veil of a pseudonym it will make it so difficult to Market your book because you can't give an interview like we are having right now unless I wear a mask and do a public event um so and and they
• 183:00 - 183:30 said no if you want us to publish you have to put your name and and then I agreed with that but my original tendance was I don't even want to be known as the author and if it would be want to be SE you'd rather not be visible yeah or something like that yeah I am I am I know I'm keenly aware that I am just the carrier of something that doesn't yeah I was about to say if you if it's really what's moving through you though you you
• 183:30 - 184:00 can separate those things I guess but yeah but uh and I do but come to figure that my face still has to be there yeah yeah I know because I'm the carrier of the thing and I and and so no I never had the temptation to do the talk circuit or the podcast circuit in order to be famous or in order to sell my books I was never financially dependent um on selling books um thank goodness I'm financially I'm and have been okay
• 184:00 - 184:30 for for a while so I I don't have that concern and I also don't have great material Ambitions meaning if I had $100 million in my bank account tomorrow very very little would change in my life I would still be using an 8-year-old uh uh oh that's beautiful iPhone XE 2016 I would still be driving my Volkswagen Passat from 2014 10 years old
• 184:30 - 185:00 um I probably would still be living in my house which is a nice house it's a freestanding house for Dutch standards it's a pretty high level house yeah uh for American Standards it would be an average house it's made of bricks not of wood but it's in terms of size it would be a average house with an average backyard so very little would change so I don't even have the motivation to be rich let alone be famous um I wouldn't mind a little more money to guarantee a better pension than
• 185:00 - 185:30 I would have if tomorrow I didn't have an income anymore I could make it but U not as comfortably uh as I would like so I wouldn't mind a little more money but I wouldn't know what to do with a lot of extra money and I don't feel comfortable with a lot of Fame either whatever to whatever small degree I am known publicly today that already makes me uncomfortable especially now that I'm becoming better known in the Netherlands in the beginning it was good because I
• 185:30 - 186:00 was known in the UK and in the US and I was living in the Netherlands so nobody would recognize me on a in a restaurant the other day I was eating in a very nice restaurant in einhoven um and it's a very small restaurant it's a michelan two star restaurant so only a couple of tables so every everybody who's there SE whoever else was in there and I was there quietly having my once a year very nice meal which one of the few indulgences I give myself is once a year a very nice meal was it for your
• 186:00 - 186:30 birthday wasn't it your birthday recently it was my my my partner's birthdayfriend was for a birthday yeah um and um the one thing happy birthday to your partner by the way yeah that's was that was several months ago a while ago okay um but then was the first time it happened to me in an that um I was not even in a public event in the Netherlands it was just I was in a restaurant a pretty exclusive exclusive restaurant there aren't many people there and at the end of my dinner
• 186:30 - 187:00 the people in the next table who probably recognized me the moment they entered I was already sitting there and they said uh you're Bernardo cast we very much appreciate your work and I was like I I was happy that yeah that's nice that's a nice thing to say nice thing to say and I'm happy that my work has had a positive impact but there was another thing in me like oh [ __ ] this is the beginning starting yeah yeah yeah and I
• 187:00 - 187:30 very much appreciate being and just one more of us I find it so really understand you I mean I was around Fame really early and it scared me it really scared me to see uh uh well first of all how lost people could get by it and trying to keep it even though the people around me weren't like that they were very grounded but you're in that world and you just it just felt weird you know but
• 187:30 - 188:00 also what you're saying that I've always had trouble even it's hard to be seen right like I don't like people looking at me um and that feeling of if you're going to go out in your neighborhood and people like you can't go anywhere without being recognized it's kind of weird but lately I've thought maybe there's something wrong with that and I mean it connects to your dayon thing and letting things flow through you and I've started to feel like maybe I'm I was taking myself a little too seriously to
• 188:00 - 188:30 be so concerned but then I don't know because privacy and being sane are very connected to me for me too so yeah for me I I've spent a long long time thinking about why I am like this because most people don't seem to be like this they don't have a problem yeah and I'm like why why why do I have this problem so I spent years thinking about it and the conclusion I arrived at so far I may change my mind as we go forward but the threat I sense is to be
• 188:30 - 189:00 robbed of my Humanity because when when when you're just a normal person there is no question of your Humanity you're just one of the gang one more person on the streets one more person you know having to make ends meet at the end of the month um you're as human and as folable as everybody else as um susceptible to failure and to to error to mistake as everybody else and that I find extremely
• 189:00 - 189:30 soothing because it doesn't place a heavy weight of moral responsibility on your shoulders you carry the same weight everybody else carries and you are within that web of human Mutual reassurance when you suffer the other people who suffer console you the year later you are one of the people who are suffering and console another sufferer so you are surrounded by your own kind that's reassuring comforting and when people start looking
• 189:30 - 190:00 up to you they they it's not I don't say that they do that maliciously it's not what they're trying to do but the effect is that um they're kicking you upstairs mhm I experience it as being robbed of my humanity and being invested with a weight of responsibility that is incommensurable with my fallibility as a human
• 190:00 - 190:30 being and that's what makes me uncomfortable this this elevation this this exiling me this like kicking me away from the web of mutual human reassurance from the you feel like they're distancing you from what you need which is just connected to humanity yeah yeah I I I am fiercely connected to my Humanity yeah I will instinctively and emotionally react to false but perceived threats to my humanity and
• 190:30 - 191:00 being elevated as the wise philosopher the the one people want to listen to that's that's a huge threat to my Humanity it doesn't is it a threat if you don't take it seriously I mean if you are you worried you'll start believing it no no it's just that you can't connect anymore because people aren't seeing you they're seeing no I can I can connect the fear is they can't they will not treat me they're not
• 191:00 - 191:30 connecting to who you really are or something or precisely yeah they're seeing an image of you or something precisely they they are seeing their own projections and I I went to the point of discussing this with a therapist he'll probably be listening to this and because I talked about this before but um this got to a point where I started actively trying to prevent projections by exaggerating on my
• 191:30 - 192:00 fallibility by by exaggerating on all the ways in which I'm playing human so by talking about your weaknesses or something how yeah yeah you mean publicly or in books or yeah yeah I've I've exaggerated certain things oh please guys the AUD audience don't start going scrutinizing all my previous interviews it's subtle stuff it's not obvious yeah I'm starting I I kind of see a little bit but but you're you Rite in so many different voices you know
• 192:00 - 192:30 you're I don't mean the same voice but you can be academic you can be conversational you yeah yeah but this the this therapist told me Bernardo the more you try to go against people's tendency to project on you the worst you make because now now oh look how modest he is he's the real deal he's the real master you know what I mean it backfires that's so true yeah and uh so he con you have to be an arrogant jerk if you
• 192:30 - 193:00 really want people to treat either is that's terrible though that goes against everything we've been saying this whole conversation so I that goes too much against my nature I I couldn't play I'm not good enough an actor but look it reminds me of something I remember reading in spiritual Traditions when I was like a kid about um I don't know if it was Jesus or the Buddha I was always trying to understand these things and one of the stories was like I don't remember I'm sorry everyone who knows this but some
• 193:00 - 193:30 spiritual figure says in some texts that the more uh the closer you get to kind of being present or being enlightened or whatever the terminology is in whatever text I'm talking about the more solitary you are yeah or the more lonely you are lonely isn't the right word but something similar to what you're saying I think in terms of not feeling as connected even though you're 100% connected yeah I heard this well I
• 193:30 - 194:00 don't have that problem because I'm not Enlighten but but no but you I guess what there's something I mean I've heard it also in Academia or in philosophy where I I think it comes back around I guess is what I'm saying because I don't really think that's true what I just said I think it's true for a while because you you start to it's almost like um what we were talking about with the people who are doing the propaganda understanding um the way things work
• 194:00 - 194:30 more than the people around them and so there's a kind of like a a power thing and it might seem like that at first when you delve into philosophy or text because you you seem to be getting some information that others don't have or it seems to be separating you but then the further you go into it it becomes opposite of that like you're more you don't understand anything actually even though you can understand all these patterns and even though you you have peace like I guess that's what I try to talk about with holding the Paradox but actually you become more connected so I
• 194:30 - 195:00 mean I wonder if maybe you're going through that process in a completely different way but so that it might it might not be that that people can rob you of your Humanity in a way oh no I they can't but they can treat me um as if and that's my problem I don't think they will actually rob me of my Humanity no I'm I cannot be anything else it's what I am they will not change what I am but your feeling is what bothers you
• 195:00 - 195:30 that you feel like you're not I don't want to be treated as different yeah but you are Bernardo we all are I mean you're you're giving something different in the sense that everybody is unique but that's why we are the same we are the same in our uniqueness I don't want to be treated as if were in some sense more or especially unique or as if I I had higher capability of something look I am meta conscious enough I'm
• 195:30 - 196:00 self-conscious enough to know how things can go wrong in here yeah know I can I I know I mean I can't hide from myself my own [ __ ] yeah you're doing a lot of checks and balances like like how can I pretend that I I I don't her and don't [ __ ] myself sometimes that sometimes I don't react emotionally in unfair way I mean for me that would be the the thing I would feel if I were you that I wouldn't want people to assume that I don't have all that stuff because I'm going to show you that I do because I'm human and also there's something scary
• 196:00 - 196:30 about it I mean I've been in a few situations where people treat me in a certain way and there's something almost like um sleepwalking is about it and I don't mean the people who are doing it but if you participate in it it becomes almost like a trance or something because it's not really reality it's there's something weird about it do you know what I mean almost uncanny or something well I don't really have that problem in the sense that uh none of it convinces me that I am other than the human I am
• 196:30 - 197:00 yeah I just don't want to be Tri treated as if I were otherwise that's what makes me uncomfortable but um I'm very much in touch with my Humanity I I have when I was in the corporate world it was one of the reasons I didn't want to believe I resisted for so long to leaving and starting a Sensa Foundation although people were asking me to do that for 5 years before I actually did it really well at work it's kind of amazing how life just gives you your path like
• 197:00 - 197:30 almost forces you on your path yeah absolutely absolutely my next year's book will talk about it okay but at work um the culture at the SML was a culture of uh Mutual criticism like we we kept each other sharp we were always looking how we were deluding ourselves what were we not seeing what were that sounds very healthy yeah yeah so we always sort of poked each other and I loved that culture because it kept me very grounded
• 197:30 - 198:00 and nobody looked up to me even when I became boss and all that stuff at the asml you know maybe you have a higher management position but that means that doesn't mean that you're better it only means that you have a certain number of respons responsibilities that others don't have you're one of the gang that happens to have management responsibilities that's all you know if if an issue would come up in a board meeting at ASL that was very technical and the person who knew
• 198:00 - 198:30 about that issue was the lowest level engineer the CEO of the company would pick up the phone during the board meeting call that person and say come up and that person would take part in the board meeting that's great nobody was better yeah just different skills everybody had a role to play and that was it and that was very grounding and I had that for 15 years I didn't want to lose that so now in the foundation because it's a foundation around philosophy and touches on spirituality even though we are not a
• 198:30 - 199:00 spiritual Foundation philosophy always touches on the great questions and of of meaning and being touches on spirituality so I I uh I'm much more vulnerable to being treated in a in in in this dehumanizing but not dehumanizing in a way of putting me down dehumanizing in a way of putting me up and where you have to make the decisions I guess and I seek to balance it by for instance by engaging with hobbies in areas where nobody looks up
• 199:00 - 199:30 to me like I'm a computer restorer I work with uh two or well it will be three I work currently with two different museums uh one in one in Belgium I restore rare I love those computerss I told you last time or whenever we talked about I love this computer like retro looking they're so cool oh I restore really rare stuff on that table me now there is a salt 20 oh my God home computer I can completely like that stuff just makes me kind of crazy to think about yeah I I very rare
• 199:30 - 200:00 stuff uh lenss here because uh I I take on certain Restorations that most other the restorers will not touch wow because it's too rare and they they are afraid that they would you know screw it up yeah in that world of vintage Computing history technology nobody looks up to me except that not reallying up no I'm a good restorer so people come to me for that and then after that we all go for a
• 200:00 - 200:30 beer and we make jokes and we talk nonsense and I can be cross and vulgar and nobody will raise an eyebrow because Bernardo cast just told a vulgar joke because I'm just the bloody computer restorer yeah yeah so no that's kind of the trick you know is to be in different not only dependent on this one this one little bubble world you know where you are super kind of famous or whatever did you never look up to
• 200:30 - 201:00 people though have you never treated people like that I always I do I tend to do that with dead people I look up to Yung I look for example yeah with leaving people it it almost doesn't happen happens only a little bit I have three living Heroes uh five five living heroes in technology U I don't have a living hero in philosophy and that tells you something about how I judge the state of philosophy in the early 21st century uh
• 201:00 - 201:30 I I have people in philosophy that I'm thankful for their influence like David chowers who opened certain doors in my mind 25 years ago uh I'm thankful to him I think he's a very valuable philosopher but I don't put him on a pedestal no I don't do that I only do that with Dead Philosophers and in word of technology I put five people in a pedestal yeah you're not going to tell me I guess one of your technological yeah I put
• 201:30 - 202:00 Martin V the brink who was oh my more or less distant Mentor for 15 years he used to be the CTO of asml he retired this year I look that's really powerful that you work for that place for so long and you still have such positive feelings legit yeah yeah Martin taught me to be viscerally and uncompromisingly honest in other words to not give up until you have looked
• 202:00 - 202:30 under every stone of your own your own mental [ __ ] landscape that's wonderful that sums up a lot of what's great about your work for me he was difficult to work with because he could be absolutely brutal and some people just couldn't you know bear that but I got used to that and I brutal because of Truth not coding it not coding the truth kind of thing or brutal with intention no but the intention wasn't brutal or was it no
• 202:30 - 203:00 just for clity it was on content not on personality it was on because that matters you know I mean yeah if you came to him with a story that was weak and full of holes he he would crucify your story that's so refreshing though I really trust that I really like that when I mean that's part of being famous too right that you you you want people to still do that because it's such a service well you famous people don't do that to you anymore yeah but that's mean did because I was nobody you know I was a kid of 31 years old when I started
• 203:00 - 203:30 working with him and then he was merciless Martin is the antithesis of woke not that he he's racist is not not because he discriminates he doesn't but he doesn't care about the social coating he doesn't sugar coat anything he he is brutal in his commitment to what is true and um and that influenced My Philosophy a lot because it made me brutal against physicalism against
• 203:30 - 204:00 materialism like I wouldn't sugarcoat why it's [ __ ] set helped set the tone of how I speak philosophy yeah it says a lot about you but also that it's because those are heavy words especially in the context of everything we've been talking about and it's really important that those words are used like towards authenticity and honesty and these kind of intentions not towards people or towards um you know like what scares you or you know like it's interesting that
• 204:00 - 204:30 because I do think that's part of the attraction right of the clarity that and also when reading your stuff you can tell you've done all the work you know even talking to you about these issues you you're you're obviously quite hard not hard on yourself but yeah you don't seem to talk about stuff unless you've really looked at it as in a very deep way which is refreshing yeah I Me It's Perfectly Normal in my in the way I experience
• 204:30 - 205:00 life you only talk about things you have looked at carefully right otherwise you're just pouting out sounds without meaning but but Martin was one of them another one is federo fajin the inventor of the microprocessor and M silicon gate technology yeah I think personal friend in contact with him yeah he has become a philosopher as well an idealist philosopher he wrote a book recently about Consciousness too right yeah several essal Foundation published one of them in English Okay um another one
• 205:00 - 205:30 is Bill MCH one of the designers of the 6502 microprocessor in the 70s wow who I also happened to know personally to have the privilege of knowing personally uh Sophia Wilson the designer of the arm instruction set the processor that is is now everywhere everything is an arm processor now Sophia Wilson designed that in the mid 1980s oh cool I didn't know that I don't know her personally I haven't had the privilege of meeting her personally but she is a living hero of mine and
• 205:30 - 206:00 um uh the guy who designed the micro Electronics of the arm processor I'm drawing a blank on his name now I wish I could help Steve F yeah so Sophie Wilson and Steve Ferber were T in a box uh they were designing the arm the first arm microprocessor that came out in 1985 and it's now everywhere it's the processor uh Steve was doing the micro architecture Sophie was doing the instruction set architecture so the two
• 206:00 - 206:30 of them are are living Heroes of technology and certainly living Heroes of mine it's kind of a paradigm shift or something there with that do you think uh look they they did what uh is what you can see in My Philosophy they looked for ways to make things simple an arm processor is as good as it is because it's simple it took away complication it took away uh uh um clutter and it made which I understood
• 206:30 - 207:00 it better but I that's kind of what I was getting at is the paradigm shift that we need right now is how getting to that where that's the because there's something so powerful and attractive about it and it's kind of not what we are seeing right now but maybe even in all these other Realms we've been talking about that could be like people could feel that right what you feel what I feel a little bit which I don't understand the technology well enough to feel it
• 207:00 - 207:30 totally but I know I this one reason I love those retro computers I know that feeling of it being simple enough that you can understand how it works right and um still doing even better that and there's something about that that I could be very interesting if other people understood the power in that which may trying to I I I know it's not a secret in the sense that I'm not hiding it but not many people know I
• 207:30 - 208:00 started an AI company this year with a group of friends um very clever people and um we are trying to create an AI processor an AI chip it's actually a sea of processors and AI chip that um will be will be so simple so elegant so optimized for AI that it will prevent what's happening today which is AI data centers demanding enormous amounts of
• 208:00 - 208:30 electrical power enormous quantities of water for cool yeah why why does it have to be like that I always wonder okay it may cost you know to to train a new large language model today you're talking order of magnitude 10 billion the next one maybe 100 unless you do something about it and the way to do something about it is to go back to metal level design you know because we are so used now to building on top of layers and layers
• 208:30 - 209:00 and layers of abstraction of things that are already designed and just adding more of that uh because it's faster to design that way we lost contact contact with the metal level with the bare level starting something from complete scratch nobody designs that way anymore and because of that we have built up layers and layers and layers of suboptimal solutions that we just want to reuse and so what we are trying to do is much like what Sophia Wilson and Steve Ferber did in the early
• 209:00 - 209:30 80s which is take a step back let's look at the problem I knew and let's design something absolutely from scratch from the level of an individual transistor from the level of an individual copper line a wire in a chip oh wow that's really exciting Bernardo I didn't know that's what your company was about wow we want to prove that the way to go is Simplicity not clutter yeah sandbagging not complication we want to prove that we can do it so simple and then if we
• 209:30 - 210:00 succeed in that I'll be in an excellent position to explain it to people and say it is not conscious it is a simple mechanism it creates the illusion of Consciousness by giving you completely understandable answers but the meaning you seeing it is the meaning you a project un it and the meaning that the people who produce the training set the texts the thing that was trained on the meaning that those writers embodied in the words the thing in itself sees no meaning experiences no meaning it's just
• 210:00 - 210:30 sort of a natural language interface to searching human knowledge but um I'm years away from making that case right now we have to prove that we can be a lot better than Nvidia gpus Google tpus and the npus of arm and the rest once we prove that then I'll be in a position to try to reach my real goal which is not to become rich because my life will not change anyway um but to enter it's okay
• 210:30 - 211:00 to become rich though you can give money to other things yeah I can give money to essential Foundation yeah that that would be that would be nice guarantee money is good if you give it so if you do it it's very difficult to spend money responsibly I have I count several uh very wealthy people as personal friends and their main and they all have their hearts in the right place their main difficulty is how to spend money productively and responsibly it's very difficult to do it but I I have Essentia foundation and I will not be so rich that I'll get more money than I can use at essena foundation so that's good but
• 211:00 - 211:30 I want to cement a very um solid position for myself um in the field of AI because the whole discussion about philosophy and metaphysics know philosophy of mind that discussion is going to go under the umbrella of AI and for the first time in history become a mainstream discussion as opposed to an academic discussion which is how it started in Ancient Ancient Greece um and I see that move happening started in ancient Greece yeah the the schools of
• 211:30 - 212:00 ancient Greece you mean philosophy not well Western philosophy Western philosophy of Mind started in what would later become academic institutions but they were the schools of the Greek yeah walking around for some reason I thought you meant but I see what you mean no no no philosophy of mind so for the first time in in the two and a half thousand year of the history of philosophy in the West in the western tradition philosophy of mind what is mind what is reality will become a mainstream topic as opposed to
• 212:00 - 212:30 topic for schools for Academia um and I want oh yeah that's I see what you're saying yeah yeah it's a it's a everyday kind of thing to think about in matters yeah so although I am established as a philosopher of Mind in Academia I happen to have a in computer engineering as well I in a good position to independently establish a strong foothold in raw AI so if I say something people respect me not only because I'm a philosopher of mind but because because
• 212:30 - 213:00 I build the AI stuff I helped build the chip I think it goes the other way around too maybe all this thinking simply and learning how to because there's a process of learning how to clarify your thought process and simplify and but also to do all this like take in everything in the way that you do that's not an easy thing to learn but I can imagine that that would be helpful towards reimagining what a large language model could be or what a a chip could be or
• 213:00 - 213:30 like you know if you could look at where you've gotten you could maybe see different ways to get there maybe maybe it helps yeah yeah and my experience in in the community of history of computing I mean I I have in my mind the entire history of computers from Charles babage all the way to to the first valve based computer the aniac all the way into the know home computers of the 80s and into today's gpus and supercomputers i' I've been in in that world of semiconductors
• 213:30 - 214:00 for 25 years um so having a background in philosophy of mind and a background in the history of computer is indeed useful if you want to start a design from scratch without any baggage without reusing anything with no sandbagging at all just from scratch and you build the edifice all the way up again with the knowledge of how this things were done before right and wrong how they improved so you have all that historical knowledge uh um and you can apply so yes
• 214:00 - 214:30 it's helpful um and psychologically for me and that goes back to the discussion we just had about my being a philosopher and not really being comfortable with becoming known um it's a great excuse for me to spend my time in the obscurity of an Electronics laboratory yeah and and keeps you grounded yeah entertaining entertaining my my the the desires I had as a kid
• 214:30 - 215:00 when I was a kid I wanted to be a computer engineer now I'm feeding that I'm nurturing that again I'm not doing this alien thing philosophy that was imposed on me at some point and and I can do that without feeling guilty because I know that by doing this I will be contributing to my philosophical work because the philosophy discussion will become an AI discussion so for me it's a great scenario I can indulge my true feelings my true desires and do it
• 215:00 - 215:30 without guilt because it helps with the object on me yeah yeah it it seems I mean I can't connect the dots yet but even even if we do away with all the isms and we just look at where we are in terms of all the different things we been talking about it seems like we're trying to figure out I mean like all this is connected the way we're dealing with technology the way technology is built and our stance towards what
• 215:30 - 216:00 Consciousness and mentality are and also um all this kind of what we get Swept Away by you know which is very technologically based now why we get Swept Away by it and like how that all shifts it does seem really connected because right now it seems like a mystery the way everything works in technology to people um such that we try to make it conscious which is like somehow obscuring the fact that
• 216:00 - 216:30 it's changing our Consciousness as a tool you know so there's some very like it's hard to for me to connect the dots exactly but that paradigm shift I'm talking about that would raise us out of this rots of dichotomy could come just with a Simplicity that could be understood in those across those levels in a way that would just help people reorient um yeah you know towards how they understand what Consciousness is and and what meaning
• 216:30 - 217:00 is and what technology does to that I can't give you names yet but we even have a wellestablished neuroscientist in the in the group oh great because he will be in a good position to say I understand the brain I understand this thing because I am in this company as well I understand how this thing was designed because we've designed it from the individual gate level up yeah um and I can tell you we have no reason to think that it is conscious we cannot refute that it might be conscious
• 217:00 - 217:30 because we cannot refute the Flying Spaghetti Monster either there are very few things we can refute I love your Flying Spaghetti Monster what we can say is whether we have good reasons to entertain the possibility that this this thing is conscious of itself uh uh or not and um and we will be in a good position if we succeed to say that we have no reasons to think that that what we've created and hopefully it will be so good everybody will use it uh and we'll be able to say we've created it
• 217:30 - 218:00 and and it is a mechanism it's a clever mechanism produced out of the intell the the aware intelligence of humans it's a mechanism a very nice clever one very efficient and it will do all your llms your AI tasks it will help um the world deal with the inverted demographical demographic pyramid because if llms can replace humans saying call centers then those humans maybe can be retrained to
• 218:00 - 218:30 be nurses and you soften the impact of this unique new thing in the history of humanity which is an inverted population population pyramid um we may be just in time just in time to do that because the critical point is the 2040s 2050s that's when the population bombs will explode around the world not only the west but in Russia mainly in China they have the biggest problem in Brazil in in the global
• 218:30 - 219:00 South so we are always doing we also doing something good for the world of course it creates problems of its own um you may lose your job to an AI and that's why I have having thought about these issues carefully over the years I am a supporter of um unconditional basic income Universal basic income because it's a net gain for Humanity that we can automate certain tasks so we
• 219:00 - 219:30 have more time to live the way we want right it should be a net gain so long as the benefits are equally spread across the population and and doesn't just go into the hands of a few shareholders that will maximize their profits by firing people and still charging the same amount of money for what they do or government that will continue to collect taxes and not give people a universal basic income so if we get the social
• 219:30 - 220:00 aspect well sorted AI is a great net positive for Humanity it will spare us from manyal tasks will allow us to focus on what is important and to live our lives the way we want to live in addition that's so true yeah I think it's happening I mean people think AI is a big Revolution and it is but I don't think it is in the way we think I think it's more in the way you're you just described that and I think it's related to what's possible for us in terms of Consciousness and I think that you know that would be a
• 220:00 - 220:30 whole other discussion I just realized we've been talking really a long time like three and a half hours so I should let you go I have a um um back problem that reflects go radiates to my arm okay let's go my arm is really painful right now I need oh no you should have told me no no it's okay it's okay Bernardo you should have told me thank you sorry no don't you shouldn't feel guilty about it we were talking about important topics okay well I still feel a little guilty but in any case the point is um yeah I
• 220:30 - 221:00 think it has to do with how we experience Consciousness too and that that might actually be could become a different experience within itself um but I'll leave it at that and is there anything you want to say before we go other than that your arm hurts and I kept you too long no no you didn't keep me for too long it was important to do this um no I think we've covered everything we had originally planned to cover so I'm a happy camper okay I'll probably just post this one and not like I'll edit a
• 221:00 - 221:30 little bit or something but mostly I just put it up is there anything you want me to not call it or call it or just post it because I don't know what to call it do whatever you like it's okay I I will not Backtrack on anything I said I didn't expect that all right well I hope your arm feels better I'm really sorry about the problem and uh thank you you're welcome thanks for having me and doing this I really appreciate you okay have a good we have a good week going forward yeah
• 221:30 - 222:00 you have a good week too and hopefully I think it's going to be kind of nice in the middle of the week in the Netherlands so I I'll will post it I don't have much of a social media presence anymore but to post it on YouTube oh okay post What on YouTube sorry I was saying about the weather but but oh the weather I thought you were talking about uh the video coming out in the middle of the week and then I said well you can post that too yeah feel free post it wherever you want I'll send it send it to you but no I was saying I hope I think it's going to be a nice week with the weather so you can enjoy I I don't look at the weather forecast I
• 222:00 - 222:30 take it as it comes all right okay I'm gonna let you go because I feel bad about your arm but thank you no problem have a good night talk to you soon oh I should stop recording