Danny Jones Podcast - #192 - Rogue Explorer Discovers Mysterious 'Ghost Nation' Inside Europe | Eric Czuleger

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

In the last decade Eric has lived and worked in over 45 countries as an aid volunteer, journalist, and tech storyteller. He is focused on using emerging technology to solve persistent challenges in emerging economies, conflict zones, and thriving ecosystems alike. EPISODE LINKS https://amzn.to/3ppXZ6b https://twitter.com/eczuleger SPONSORS VERSO - Go to https://ver.so/koncrete to save 15% on your order. FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny https://twitter.com/jonesdanny JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon OUTLINE 0:00 - Traveling in the North Pole 4:26 - Hallucinogenic east African KHAT leaves 11:48 - Becoming an intelligence analyst 22:45 - Alien abductions 35:31 - Lebanon 42:55 - Intelligence training & geopolitical forecasting, state craft, & geographical advantage of United States 1:07:07 - Geopolitics crash course 1:12:48 - Analyzing Islamic State execution videos & quitting intelligence 1:24:58 - Getting banned from Turkey 1:36:07 - National identity / the Balkans 1:56:06 - How easily could the United States empire crumble? 2:06:01 - The definition of a ‘country’ is changing to citizenship by subscription model 2:07:57 - The black hole of Europe: Transnistria 2:16:04 - The billionaire run libertarian country: Liberland 2:28:58 - Becoming Ambassador to African Ghost Nation 'Somaliland' 2:35:01 - Delivering aid to Somaliland cyclone victims & being used as a political tool 2:51:26 - Isreal's constraints & imperatives 2:56:22 - What defines America? 2:59:00 - Peter Thiel’s floating billionaire libertarian utopia & how soon will globalism emerge? 3:12:44 - Eric’s next project: The global memory project Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was in the Arctic right before. What? Yeah, yeah, I just came back from Svalbard, which is like... Where's that? It's in the Arctic Circle. So it's like the last point that there is an inhabited, like, city. I mean, it's a town, a really tiny town, before you get to the North Pole. So it's like the only place that you can sort of set off in an expedition from the North Pole or to the North Pole.

Okay. And it's not, like, it has some relationship with Norway, but it's not technically a part of Norway. So you actually, like, cross out of the border of Norway to get to Svalbard. And there's, like, one tiny town there that's, like, mostly a coal mining town and scientific research. But, like, it's crazy. Like, the sun never sets there. Whoa.

Yeah. So, yeah. You meet you cool people there? Oh, yeah. The town was dope. I was, I mean, and you meet everybody within, like, the, first 15 minutes that you're there because it's that tiny oh yeah so like we we were up there I sort of convinced my buddies to to to go and and do a marathon in in Svalbard which is like the

northern most marathon in the entire world and it's the only one with polar bear guards so they have like dudes with guns just like hanging out and just in case like marathon runners get attacked by polar bears. Is it one of those marathons where they swim and run? No. No, those exist. Yeah. But I just thought it would be like, it'd be a one-of-a-kind bachelor party for my buddy. So, yeah, convinced him to come up to the Arctic Circle with me. And we did our best on the marathon. Nobody got eaten by a polar bear, which is awesome. I had a guy in here once that did one of those. Also eaten by a polar bear? No, no. He, um, they were, were in the, where were they, he was swimming across that channel between Russia and Alaska.

Can you do that? Yeah, he swam across it. There's like a little island in the middle. Yeah, I've heard about that. Isn't that like, don't they call that like Tomorrow Island or yesterday island? Yes. Yep, yep. It's like one of the only places in the world where, I don't even, like, I've descended into Twilight Zone even trying to figure out or to explain it. So it's like the day moves forward, but it doesn't move forward on that island for some reason. Is that the deal? I don't know with the exact how with the exact time differences, but like that basically if you swim, if you move from like this one part of land to this island that's, I think, less than a mile away, the, the time changes by like eight hours or something crazy. Whoa. Or maybe 12 hours.

I'm not sure, but it's like you're, you're definitely in the next day. Yeah. Was there anybody there to like greet him. Yeah, there were some people. There's like a small village of people that live there. Like a very, very few people live there. It's a very remote place, but apparently they get by. I mean, this is, like, one of the, you know, the sort of like dream projects is to, like, just go to literally the most remote places in the world and just see what people do there. What is the, what is the most remote place you've ever been? Remote. Remote's not really what you're going for, but. Yeah. I mean, I think maybe, Maybe the Somali Desert.

Oh, shit, okay. It certainly felt, it felt really remote. Svalbard, like, in terms of, like, you know, you're just far away from any metropolitan city center. But there was infrastructure out there. But, you know, when we went out into the desert of Somaliland, it's like you're basically driving through wadis, which are these sort of dry riverbeds and there's no infrastructure whatsoever. So your driver just kind of has to know how the desert looks. As far as I understand, I mean, you know, I didn't speak enough Somali or any Somali to ask him exactly how he's navigating.

But yeah, we were in jeeps in a sort of armed convoy for like maybe eight hours, no roads. And then eventually just sort of came upon a nomad village and I was like this. Did you chew any of that cat? I did. Did you really? How was it? it's pretty great what is it how does it make you feel it's like okay the best i could describe it at least my experience with it is like it's like you have the energy of having drunk

like 12 cups of coffee except without any of the anxiety yeah so it's just like sort of mildly euphoric um uh you know a like a like a maybe what i'd imagine a low dose of MDMA would be like like something like that. But it's, yeah, it was funny when I, when I took Cot, I decided to, you know, give it a try because I was,

I was sort of finished up my work in Somaliland. And I was like, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get really high on Cot. Because I deserve it. That sounds awesome. I was listening to Rick Strassman talk about how he was growing it in his yard. Can you do that?

Apparently, I don't know. Well, it's interesting. Like, I mean, the plant's pretty interesting from an economic point of view, too, because it's like, from what I understand, like, the, like, cot has to be transported, uh, every day because it has to be quite fresh for it to be psychoactive. So, you know, in the middle of a desert, it's hard to get really green leaves. And that's the first thing that you notice when you chew cot is you, you know, strip some of the branches away. And it's like this sort of really vibrant green chlorophyll flavor. Like, I mean, it, it's, you know, you know, you know, strip some of the branches away. And it's like, it's like, it's sort of really vibrant green chlorophyll flavor. Like, I mean, imagine biting a plant, and that's exactly what it is. Oh, shit. Yeah, and then it turns your tongue, like, this vibrant neon green.

But it kind of sneaks up on you. Like, I went to this hotel that was in the area, and I was like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to eat a bunch of mildly hallucinogenic East African leaves and just see what happens. And so I was like, okay, you know, put like five leaves down. and they say that you have to eat like the leaves of 10 branches or so. You don't actually eat them, right? So it depends.

From what I understood, unless somebody was messing with me, which is totally possible. In Yemen, they tend to spit it and like they spit out the sort of mash. Keep it stuck up there. And then in Somalia, they tend to swallow the full mash. Totally possible somebody was just like messing with me and just trying to get me to eat leaves. That is 100% possible. But if it worked, it worked. Yeah, I mean, look, I ate a lot of leaves.

I had a belly full of leaves. And I think it took like maybe like 30 branches. But since it snuck up so slowly, I was like, you know, I've eaten maybe 20, you know, 20 branches of this stuff. And I was just sort of washing it down with non-alcoholic beer. And it's not like it tastes good by any stretch of the imagination. So I like came up with a strategy where I just sort of like mash the leaves together into this like tight ball and then just like put it in back of my jaw and just sort of like chew it as hard as I could and then like swallow it. And then I just felt like an absolute idiot because I'm like I've literally just been eating leaves for like the last 20 minutes, maybe an hour. I don't know.

So like I was like, I'm going to go home. So I went back to where I was staying. And then I realized as I was sort of like looking at this like really gorgeous sunset and having these, you know, remarkable feelings of, of, you know, warmth and gratitude towards the universe that I was still like eating the leaves. Like I had never stopped and I was just like, well, that's, that's interesting. And then immediately I was just like, you know what? My clothes have no idea how much I care about them. and I was like, I got to wash my clothes. And I, at this point, was like, maybe I'm getting a little bit high right now because

I've never really thought about my clothes feelings towards me before. But at that point, I was just sort of tearing through branches of cotton, doing laundry and, you know, sort of like, firework show of gratitude about, you know, the world at large. Oh, wow. And at a certain point, I was like, while I was doing, you know, laundry high on East African leaves, I like looked at myself in the mirror and I realized my whole mouth was just like slimer green, like glowing green. I was like I think the cot worked. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, you see the photos and the videos of those guys that do it all the time and they're like their whole jaw is like

decaying. Yeah. Well, so that's an interesting part about it too is and so at least how it was explained to me was that cot actually has a different effect the longer you use it. So you might start out with the sort of like, you know, this rapturous, almost hallucinogenic experience. But then as you get addicted to it, it starts to be more of a sedative. So when you see cot shacks and, you know, in Somalia is the only place that I've really seen them. Somaliland, I should say, then, you know, what you're essentially seeing is people like laying on these retan mats and, you know, maybe they have like a bottle of water. or like some tea next to them, but they look strung out as hell. And that was the exact opposite of my experience with it.

My experience was it was like super energetic and effusive. And my mouth was green. I was essentially just like, you know, a three-year-old just running around doing laundry and chewing on these leaves. I had a guy here the other day who was trying to teach me all about this stuff, cratum. I've heard about this. Yeah, there's bars that are dedicated to it, right? All around here.

This is a Florida thing, right? I think so, yeah. Yeah, I had a hippie give that to me one time, and it was just weird murky water. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but a lot of recovering alcoholics and a lot of recovering opioid addicts sometimes use it. And I guess it helps them sort of like kick the alcohol or the pills they were taking before. Yeah, I've heard about that. Because it's like has a similar effect to alcohol, but this guy was also telling me that it has a very similar effect to Adderall. He's like, I drink it with my coffee. It makes me like supercharged. It's like drinking 20 cups of coffee.

Was this a guy that was on the podcast? Or we just talking to him outside an A.m. He was not on. on a podcast, but he was here with one of my guests. Oh, gosh. Tell me about it. I guess, like, he has a crowd on business. He was trying to teach me all about it.

Isn't, isn't there also like a Kava bar deal out here? Yeah, I think it's the same thing. Is it? I have no idea. I'm not sure. Because Kava is, like, is from the South Pacific somewhere. I think it's like, uh, Kierbadi is, is like one of the main places that they have it. And I, from what I understand anyway, it's like a root that, that, that, that,

used to be sort of like chewed up and then you would like like like I think they had like kids that would like chew it up and then spit it out and then you kind of drink this water out of shells so as you as the drug would take effect you'd like you'd you know be like oh I'm two three shells in and and then you know suddenly be um you know impermeable to pain I have no idea I've never tried it before yeah yeah it's interesting I've never tried it either but I'm gonna definitely try that crowd um yeah anyways so thanks for coming yeah and uh tell people how you got into this journey of traveling all over the world to these non-existent states or nations.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't actually know the right word either. Like I should know about. Like neutral zones, right? I would just say like unrecognized countries at this point. And after like studying it for five years, I was just like, I don't think I've gotten any further to like understanding. Like I did a bad job.

at research. Yeah. I should know more about this. But you started out working in intelligence? Yeah, briefly. How did you get into intelligence? This is super weird. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer?

Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. If you love diving into culture and comedy,

like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no-one coasts. The studio crew, with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down,

makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters, and the personalities keep things lively. Watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on T&T, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max. Oh, so yeah, I'm Eric Zooliger. Yeah, yeah. Tell everybody who you are. I'm a writer. I'm an author, and I've got a book out today called You Are Not Here, Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist.

So basically, I spent a year. Hold the poster. Yeah, yeah, the poster. Here it is. Yeah. Do people see it? Up a little bit? Yeah. Perfect. You are not here.

Travels through countries that don't engage. That's right. What is the picture? The picture was done by Arabouza of Apparot Studios in Kosovo. And it's kind of like an amalgamation of various landmarks and the five unrecognized nations that I went to. So down here we've got the Citadel, which is an old monument in the center of Urbeil, which is the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. We've got a mig jet from Somaliland. This is some stuff from Kosovo.

We've got little bits from Libra land here. But yeah, that's cool. Yeah, we kind of wanted to go for like a where's Waldo vibe. Okay, I like it. Very few people are going for the where's Waldo vibe these days. Yeah. But yeah, I decided to write the book because I just, just kind of followed a really dumb question that I came across while I was working briefly

as an intelligence analyst. And yeah, I like, I got that job in potentially one of the stranger ways that one gets a job. Basically, I had been a Peace Corps volunteer before and I had always been a writer, so I was working mostly. Peace Corps Volunteer. Yeah. Yeah, Peace Corps, Albania, 2011, 2013. Yeah.

sent me to northern Albania. I was in a small town called Byram Surrey. Shout out Byram Surrey. In the district of Trojolla. So the claim to fame of that area is that the bad guys in the movie Taken were from Tripoya.

Okay. Yeah. And I mean, it's a beautiful area in Albania, but it does have somewhat of reputation for being the seat of more traditional Albanian culture. But also, they've had an issue with organized crime there too. And so they decided, you know, they need to send American Peace Corps volunteers there to make sure that everybody stays nice and peaceful. Well, it's interesting you

transition from that into not the CIA, but you worked for a contractor of the CIA, right? They weren't a contractor, no. So like what they were was a geopolitical forecasting company. So. Stratfor? Yeah, just like them. Mm-hmm. Just like them. So what happened was while I was in the Peace Corps, I, you know, I had come out of university with a degree in theater. And as soon as you leave university with a degree in theater, you're like,

that was a mistake. It was an error for me to get a degree in theater. Like there are zero people out here. Zero crossover. Nobody wants me to do two contrasting monologues. Nobody, nobody wants to know about, Shakespeare, so I should probably go and go and get some skills. And so I went to Albania. And, you know, while I was there, I was still writing, I was producing plays that were going

back to the States. And they were kind of like live blogs that were performed back in the States. And then the money would come over to Albania and we'd started like a mobile library out there in Tripoya. But as they started doing more like non-fiction stuff, I was like also really, reading a lot more nonfiction. And so guys like Christopher Hedges and Sebastian Younger, and I read this one fantastic book about like big wave surfing called The Wave. I can't remember who it's by.

Okay. Have you ever heard of it? No. Oh, it's awesome. And like I never, you know, you're fairly starved for books in the Peace Corps. It's like the library has what the library has. So, you know. What did you learn from the big wave surfing book?

Well, it was, because I'm not a surfer. I'm pretty well an indoor child. And I found it like really engrossing. And I was sort of struck by this journalist who was following these big wave surfers who were basically taking their own lives and their own hands. And nobody could quite understand why they were doing this. It's like, you know, if you don't, if you're not successful on this 100 foot wave, like you'll either die or be injured greatly. and the book was largely about like why do people take these tremendous risks and and what I found in that book was, you know, that it was uniquely meaningful to them. And that the, you know, the proximity to danger was, was inspiring and life affirming to not only to them as athletes, but to the community around them.

And so as I was reading that, I was also reading, like I said, Christopher Hedges and Sebastian Younger, all of these, like, incredible, like, geopolitical writers and war correspondents. And I was thinking that, like, well, journalism felt, especially international journalism seemed a lot like the sort of, like, big wave surfing of writing. Yeah. You know, it's like, and also I was sort of coming into a time where I was thinking, like, I have a certain amount of skills. and in this sort of like weird Venn diagram of like, you know, wanting to go to places that are a bit more unusual, being decent at putting a sentence together, and being interested in history, it's like, how can I be the most useful writer possible? And I didn't think that, you know, writing an American realist play was going to be the most useful thing for me to do with my skills. So I was like, okay, well, I want to start being an international. international journalist. And so I basically knocked on the doors of a bunch of journalists.

And I was like, how do you do this? Like, what, how does, how does one do any of this? And who'd you talk to? I talked to a couple of people who were reporting in, I think it was Israel and a couple of Middle Eastern journalists. This was like over 10 years ago now. But basically, a lot of the feedback that I got from them was just like, just go, you know, just just, just. Right. Just go and start reporting. And, you know, at this time, Syria was the crisis that everybody was writing about.

And I had some understanding of Turkey. And I was like, well, it seems like a reasonable thing to do to go throughout Turkey and just try and get some stories sold. But, of course, meanwhile, like, I had to save up some money to, like, you know, go write in Turkey for a little bit. So I got myself a job as like the head camp counselor to summer camp in Boston. And because I, you know, in the Peace Corps, I had education training. And then I worked in special ed for a little bit. So, you know, I could, I can run a summer camp.

Okay. I can't. I can't. And, and stop running. Boy, boy, can I. Really, prepared me for warrants, man. Prepared me for warrants, man. Really, I've seen, I've seen some shit you wouldn't believe.

Yeah, some literal shit. That's exactly what I'm talking about. So while I'm at the summer camp in Boston, I'm kind of like getting my ducks in a row and I have this whole trip planned out where I'm going to work my way down to the border of Turkey and Syria. And I'm kind of considering how I want to write about this kind of stuff. And I'm realizing that, well, in a certain way, there are a lot of good-hearted journalists and especially Western journalists who are going into these places to, you know, cover conflict. But sometimes that also ends up with them in the way of conflict and potentially making a dangerous situation for them, making a dangerous situation for other reporters on the ground. And so since I was just sort of starting out and learning to write from these areas, I was like, I don't really want to talk about the conflict directly. I wanted to write about stuff that was on the side of it.

I wanted to maybe write human interest stories about things that were not getting covered because the war was the story. That's always the most interesting stuff. That's what I thought. Everybody focuses on like the big thing. Yeah. And it's like, I think that, you know, warfare, as it is now, as it probably always is, is like, it's so, it's so fascinating to people and it gobbles up so much of the news cycle that it's easy for people to forget that there are just, you know, real people having normal days and, and, you know, struggling through life and, you know, getting up and cooking eggs for their kids and complaining about work, even though. a couple miles down the road, there's, you know, bombs going off. And I think that that sort of, you know, parallel universes are pretty interesting to me.

Yeah. Parallel universes, subcultures, and the fact that, like, they can just exist right next door to you and you would never know. I've always found that kind of thing fascinating. Yeah, that is very fascinating. That's what, you know, that's what I like, that's some of like the best documentaries that I find on YouTube or stuff that, like, when people are just, like, picking up rocks, looking under rocks and finding the things that like no one's shining a light on before. And like even if they just follow like a small group of people and how what their lives are like, you know, it's maybe affected by like the bigger picture, whether it be a war or a genocide or something like that.

But just like seeing how their lives are. Did you ever see, you may even called it out on the show or had him as a guest, but did you ever see love and saucers? Yeah. Yeah. The guy who made that documentary in here. Incredible. Incredible work. I mean, it's like, that's beautiful. That was a beautifully shot film.

100%. And I thought it was incredible because it's like, one, we're taking the sub. Brad. Brad Abrams. That's his name. That's right. I've heard him on a couple of different things. And it's like, takes the subject so seriously. Like, he's not, you know, sort of like, there's no, there's no snickering at the subject.

You know, this is, so for those of you who don't know, like, Love and Saucers is, it's a documentary about this guy who feels that he had a relationship with an alien or throughout his entire. Lost his virginity to an alien. Correct. And then he's a painter, so he, like, kept painting this alien for basically his entire life. And does he live, like, Brooklyn or something? Yeah, in Brooklyn. And so it was like, I don't know if it's Brooklyn, but it's somewhere around there. Yeah.

So then it was, like, his first art show. And, like, you know, these are the neighbors that you pass in the street every day. Like, people are quietly involved in their own galaxies. And, you know, it's amazing if you ask the right question, you can turn the key. and suddenly like be involved in that. So that has always been like, you know, these are the best stories as far as I'm concerned. That's one of those things that, you know,

that I think about too is like that guy, that guy truly believed that happened to him. Like if you watch that movie, it's like a 30 minute movie. He truly believes that happened to him. I mean, he talks about every little detail and paints all these beautiful pictures

of these like hybrid human aliens that like took a minute. into the woods and fucked him. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. And like the alien had real human tits. Yep. A real nice set of tits on it.

And like... The large-breasted alien was like a large-breasted alien. Prominent figure of that film. He impregnated the alien and gave him babies. Yep. He gave her babies. And like, man. Years ago I was doing, I was doing a story that was killed, sadly.

I was doing a thing about UFOs. And I went to like these three different UFO things in Los Angeles. Angeles and I went to this like abductee support group that happened like randomly every you know every like third Saturday in Marina del Rey um and it was and it was just like in a random strip mall and for some reason I had to like pay five dollars to go into a support group but I think it was because like some you know a fancy alien guy was there um I can't remember what his name was but he fancy alien guy that's great he was he was the dude who was like the one of the the leading experts in like removing alien implants.

Okay. But he was a podiatrist and shockingly every implant that he removed was from the foot. Hmm. Anyway, I saw him talk. But like, you know, people would get up and they would sort of say their piece and at a certain point, you know, somebody was like, okay, well, how many people have been abducted in this room? And, you know, it's a room of like maybe 80 people and I figured, you know, 12 hands would go up and then it's like, I was the weird one because like, like, I mean, you know, at this point, I have not been abducted by an alien. Right.

Still, still to the stay. My working theory on alien, you're familiar with John Mack? Mm-hmm. Yeah. My working theory on the alien abduction thing is that some people, like a certain percentage, maybe one percent or less of the human population, has like something, an advanced version of their brain. Some people think it's the basal ganglia that lets them. tap in to like another dimension a little bit.

Like they're able to receive signals, right? Like similar to a radio antenna where they can somehow receive signals from elsewhere sometimes. Like when you think of some people who talk about they see ghosts or like they see certain things whether they're ghosts or not or aliens. Like I think that might be something when you're talking about this guy, David Huggins, the old guy who talked about fucking aliens. That's right.

Yeah. I think that might be what it is. It might be something in their brain that they're actually experiencing. And I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's real from another dimension or if it's all just hallucinations in their mind or it's like, it's like the whole DMT thing. Like when you take DMT and you go to that,

that world with the dancing. Yeah, the electronic elves or whatever. Yeah. When you go there, like, are those elves real or are they in your head? But look at reality. Yeah. Reality is all in your head. It's all a construct of your senses.

So that's that's the that's kind of like how I think about it right now. Well it's like your your your brain is is a reality generating machine and and then on top of that or sometimes like the the pathway in is like you know what are the things that you really believe. And and it's amazing how like something as ephemeral as like what you believe it has real world effects. You know like that guy believed that he. had a hybrid alien child, like try and convince him that he's wrong. This is not that dissimilar from somebody in an unrecognized nation or somebody in a recognized nation saying, you know, this place still exists. Like, we're, no matter what's, no matter what you tell me, I, like, this is the best country in the world. I have a, you know, an absolute religious belief about

this thing. And, and one of the things that I find fascinating is how that, that abstraction can be leveraged to change how people behave. You know, obviously believing in aliens and believing in countries are totally different things. But there is this human mechanism for generating beliefs about how their realities work that is, one, it's able to be manipulated. And two, it's deeply important to us collaborating with one another. you know because like when when I was at the alien abductee like support group you know afterwards

honestly I think the most fascinating part about the whole thing was like afterwards like all of these alien abductees went out to Denny's together and it's like yeah I and I'm like I felt myself like so sort of like glad for them that like these people could like hang out and have a moons over my hammy and like talk about their abduction experiences. Like, you know, they have community and they had this shared lexicon and that, you know, was able to bring them together. Like, it may not make sense for all of us. That's fine. But like, they were certainly like together in their own belief structure. After that thing,

I went up, man, you get some wild stuff in Meetup.com. Yeah, cheaper than a movie. Just go into the depths of meetup.com and you'll find some. Oh yeah, absolutely. So I went to an alien summoning from meetup.com. Okay. Summoning. Summoning. Yeah, I learned how to summon. Where was this? It was a park in Los Angeles. And now when you're imagining a UFO summoning, are you thinking about it at night? Probably. Noon. Really? In July. Very hot day. and so I walked up I pulled my buddies along with me to this thing because I was like guys were

you're more people to show up at me well it's just like guys we're gonna go to an alien summoning did you film it? No I didn't yeah I'm a writer I'm not tactical at all but I showed up and you know there's there's a lot more people there than I thought it was gonna be it was like maybe like 30 40 people in this park

really hot day and I you know I was always just like pretty honest about people. I'm like, oh, hey, I'm a journalist. I'm working on a project here. And then they're like, oh, great, that's awesome. You should talk to our science lead. And I'm like, okay, cool, who's the science lead?

And they're like, that's Hans. And so this guy named Hans comes over. And he's like, I got to show you the book of UFOs. And I was like, okay, sweet, let's look at the book of UFOs. And he like opened up these, this like a bunch of like pixelated, highly pixelated photos and he was like, see that, that's a balloon. That's not a UFO, but that is a UFO. And then you just flip the page and be like, balloon, UFO. And then you flip the page and he'd be like, that's a UFO pretending to be a balloon. And I'm like, Hans, what kind of doctor are you? He's like, I'm a dentist.

And I'm like, I'm having, I'm having less confidence in this summoning. And he's like, we'll just wait for the summoner to get here. I'm like, okay, sweet. He's going to teach everybody how to summon. So I was like, this sounds great. You know, that's a skill. That's a little bit better than a theater major. So everybody in the park kind of comes up around this, this summoner, the summoner.

And he's like, okay, this is a three-step process. I like, okay, sweet. And he's like, first you pick a point in the sky. Everybody's just, you know, 40, 30 people, just like in the middle of a park in July, just like looking at the sky. And he's like, okay, now tell. telepathically bring aliens to you, and then you just repeat that until they come. I was like, step two should have had more steps, I feel.

Like, it was, I'm like, and like, you know, you got to try. So you're just like standing in a field with like all of these people just sort of staring at the sky. And then eventually somebody will just say like, oh, there's one, there's one. And then the crowd will just like rush over to somewhere else in the field and like point at something in the sky. and everybody's just like trying to like you know see whatever they're seeing and then it would happen again somewhere else and it's like I have no idea I didn't I mean I did you see anything I have no idea I I I I I nothing that I would define it defined as UFO right and and to add insult to injury there was definitely a birthday party going on in the park and like some balloons totally flew away um and I was like

realized that that had happened I'm like I think it's probably probably time to go home from the summoning. Yeah. But it's like, you know, convince those people that they're wrong. Like, no, they're, like, that's their, clearly it's their community. And it's also something that they feel passionate about. And it gives them some kind of place and understanding in the universe, right? Literally the universe for them.

And I mean, who am I to tell them that that's not a real thing? Right. Yeah. There's some wacky people out there, man. Mm-hmm. And, you know, they're beneficial to the government when they want to cover up or use false information to either cover up real stories. Yeah.

Or push narratives that they want. They can easily use these people as like a... Well, it's like, you know, one of the things that I always think about with like, with these sort of like broad sweeping movements, like, and especially how media often works is like, you the the loudest voices are generally like not the most informed voices yes right and they're the most extreme exactly like you know uh not to get super political but like the image that we have of january 6 is who

like the qanonan shaman like it's the dude with exactly the dude with horns on his head yeah um you know pitch perfect um and and when you have this image to collect an entire group of of people under, you know, oh, it's like, oh, you're going to be like that crazy person. Then it becomes really easy to discount anything that might be a legitimate complaint on either side. Yeah. And I have always, like, that's one of the reasons that I always, that I thought it was interesting to genuinely go to places to find out what's actually happening on the ground. because there's only so much information that we get in the United States.

And oftentimes it's so salacious. It's so sort of filled with fear and with anger that it's hard to understand that there are real people who are actually living lives in these places. And that was kind of the goal when I wanted to go to Turkey in the first place. was to find maybe some of the more quiet stories. And then I didn't end up going to Turkey because they had a coup. Oh, wow. Yeah. So this was back during, I can't remember what year it was.

Was it 2016? Must have been. I thought it was more recent than that. No? Was this the fake coup? I have no idea if it was fake or not. It was a, I know that they had while I was working on the, working at the summer camp there was like telling kids not to run and like listening to reports

about how there were like tanks in the street of Ankara and Istanbul. And at that point I was like, well, shit, like I have a ticket to stumble pretty soon. And I didn't quite know what I should do with that because I was like this, you know, I specifically didn't want to put myself into a situation where I'd be a liability for the community. or like that I would get myself like, you know, into a situation that I couldn't get out of just because I was trying to learn how to be a journalist. And so I was talking to my folks about it. My dad was close with this geopolitical forecaster guy. I'll call him Frank.

Oh, your dad was close with them. Yeah, yeah, he was close to them. Well, they were like pen pals. He was like, I like your geopolitics. And then the guy was like, thanks, I'm going to keep doing it. I like your geopolitics. That is like the most... That's a great compliment.

It's like the most dad compliment ever. Like, everybody's dad, once they get old enough, they're like, you know what? I really like the, either the Civil War or World War II. Or my dad is World War I. Okay. So, yeah, he's mad stoked on geopolitics. Okay. So your dad introduced you to Frank.

Yeah, he introduced me to Frank. And he's like, well, don't you write Frank and see what Frank says. So I wrote him, and I had heard that Frank thought this was a terrible. idea and I was like, okay, well. You thought what was a terrible idea? Me going to Turkey. Okay. Yeah.

So I was like, hey, Frank, it's me, Eric. I hear you think it's a bad idea for me to go to Turkey. So I still want to like learn to write about the Middle East and, you know, what's going on. And I kind of had in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something about travel. And I was thinking about maybe trying to do like a non-political travel log of the Middle East, which I realized immediately was fucking impossible. It's like trying to write like Moby Dick without ever using the word wail or like the letter A. So I was like told him, you know, these ideas.

And then he wrote me back and he was like, well, here's why you're going to end up in Turkish prison. And you're not going to make it. And I'm like, oh, okay. Well, if you look back to my first letter, I said, what should I do? And then Frank was like, okay, go to Lebanon and I'll coach you. And I was like, okay, I mean, I don't know what that means. I've never met this old man. But sure, yeah, I'll buy a plane ticket to Lebanon and have this old man coach me.

Why not? So I bought a plane ticket with my summer camp money to go to Beirut, and I was there for like a month. And so I was like, you know, got to Beirut to my hostel. And I was like starting to freelance stories. And I emailed Frank and I was like, hey, I'm here. what do I do? And he's like, okay, well, you got to go meet this man and he'll send a car for you. And I was like, okay. Wow. Great. This guy was connected. I mean, maybe. It seemed like it. I was just, I was just, you know, an eager beaver with a laptop.

So I would just like go and, like, I just like went and met a random car outside of a place called Burj Hamoud in Beirut. And guy waved me down. He didn't speak any English. I didn't speak any Arabic or French. And, you know, we start driving on. the outside of town and I'm like this like it's at that point I was like this might have been a poor choice for me sorry to interrupt but this episode of the podcast is brought to you by verso we all know how important it is to get the right amount of nutrition exercise and sleep as we age it's something i'm really passionate about and have discussed at length with doctors and nutritional scientists on this podcast that is why i use verso verso is a company dedicated into translating scientific breakthroughs into products that hold the potential to increase longevity i take cell being every day

to help combat aging by increasing my NAD levels with powerful ingredients such as NMN, trans resveratrol, and TMG. NAD plus is arguably one of the most powerful molecules in the body, but declines with age. Keeping NAD plus levels high helps guide longevity genes called Sertuans. Sertuins are called longevity genes because by activating them, they support overall health and slow down aging-related effects by regulating important processes inside of cells. High NAD plus levels can improve your metabolism, repair damage DNA, and ramp up energy production in your brain, immune system, and muscles.

Now, you can't take NAD plus as a supplement because it's too big for the cells to absorb. But NMN directly converts to NAD plus, while Resveratrol activates your Sertuans, which increases their attraction for NAD. These two molecules act synergistically and increase your NAD plus more than just NMN on its own. Verso also publishes third-party testing from each batch produced to absolutely guarantee you're getting what you pay for. Head on over to v-e-r.s-o and use the coupon code concrete at checkout to save 15% off your entire order. Or go to v-E-r-S-O-O-F-N-C-R-E-E-E-T-E right now. It's linked below.

Now back to the show. Like, I'm already like five minutes in the car. And at that point, I'm like, hmm, I might have, this might have been an error of judgment. That was the point of no return. Yeah, it was. But then he ended up dropping me off at this, this. you know, this office park and a place called Junet. And I went into this office and the guy was like, oh, you're from Frank, right?

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm definitely from Frank. And then he's like, well, so how is he? And I'm like, he's good. He's really good. And he's like, okay, have a seat. I'm like, great. So a guy turned out to be a counterterrorism expert. And he was just like talking about counterterrorism, specifically the Islamic State of the time.

Did he work for any agencies? I have no idea. He was just a guy in an office. I was just taking notes. And at a certain point he was like, do you have enough? I'm like, mm-hmm, totally. I guess I do. I have enough for Frank.

And then driver took me back and I was like, well, that was strange. And then the next day, like, not the next day. Probably like a week later, I went to go meet like a political scientist at the American University of Beirut. And sort of same thing happened. How's Frank? He's good. How's his wife?

I didn't know he had a wife, but she's great. She's doing good. So, chatted with him for a long time. And then the final interview was a guy who identified himself as a Lebanese general, still have no idea. And we talked about the Islamic State for a bit. And then he kind of set me on my way. And then I was like, well, this was a strange trip through Beirut. And, you know, I got some articles published, met some good people.

And eventually I was like, hey, I want to keep learning about this stuff and writing about this stuff. So, like, what do I do now? And Frank was like, okay, well, I'm going to train you to be a geopolitical, geopolitical, geopolitical forecaster. And so you're going to go through my training. I was like, cool. And then, you know, I got an email that day. I was like, intelligence analyst position. Ooh, intelligence analyst.

I know, which tells you, like, I would be the worst spy because immediately, as soon as I got that email, I was like, you know what I am? Hey, mom, guess what? You know who's an intelligence analyst? Don't tell anybody. Yeah, right. So, but I mean, ultimately, like, what the work sort of boiled down to was, like, being a really advanced news reader, right? So he, he sort of trained us to have this working model of the world. And you, you break that down into whatever the constraints and imperatives of major nation states are. And by major, I mean the people who sort of wield the dominant economic, military, social media powers. Right. And so every nation has a certain amount of imperatives, things they have to do, things that they're forced to do. And then they're constrained

by certain things. So, I mean, using the United States as an example, it's like, well, the imperative is to maintain the ability to project power, a current. the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously. Constraint might be something like dwindling middle class. So economically, we might not be able to support that power projection over a certain amount of time. And so you can start to look at how a nation will behave based upon what their imperatives are and what their constraints might be.

And what that ends up making is a model of the world where you have. have, as he termed them, fault lines and flashpoints. So certain areas of the world where there might be this tectonic shift of power, where there are these areas that if something is going to change the power relationships in the world, a flashpoint, it will happen there. So an example of this might be, you know, the Bab al-Mandab, which is near the Gulf of Aden. So this is a big power corridor that it's where I think it's, you know,

Last I heard is like 60% of the world's oil travels through to the Red Sea. So, yeah, huge, like, important choke point for energy. So you're talking about, like, countries' ambitions and what they're trying to do and what the downside of that ambition is. So, like, an example would be with that, like, if you relayed that to America, us spending trillions of dollars on the military and the dwindling middle class is what takes the downside of that. Like, our road, we don't, we have roads with potholes, but we're spending $16 trillion a year on the military. Yeah. So we're, it's, it's less, um, it's less the things that are blocking us, but the, uh, the things that are, yeah, like holding us back, right? So we're, we're constrained by, you know, um, if we have a dwindling middle class, that also means that we have a dwindling tax base to pay into, you know, military adventurism.

Got it. Um, and so, and, you know, some, in fact, a good deal of. of like geopolitical constraint is actually just damn geography. You know, it's it's incredibly hard to fight a war in Afghanistan as history has told us constantly. And it's just because there's so many damn mountains. Like it's Alexander the Great was turned back, Napoleon, Russia, the United States. We have the best geography, right? Well, I mean, best according to what?

More. Because we're surrounded by the two oceans. Yeah. So we've got, I mean, we have, like, I can't remember which geopolitical guy called it this, but he called the United States this sort of the idea of this inevitable empire, right? And the idea was that we have, we have so many natural features that make us highly defensible. You know, you've got the Appalachian, I don't know, I'd say Appalachian, I'd say Appalachian. Yeah.

California. Oh, we have those mountains over there. We've got this robust system. of arable land and rivers, which allows for incredible amounts of agriculture to happen right in the center of our country, which is obviously highly defensible, huge lakes on top of us, a damn desert beneath us, rocky mountains bracketing everything. So invading the United States is a genuinely like insane thing to do. We're also all super heavily armed. Right. Like yet another reason. I think I can't

remember who it was. I actually meant to look this up, but I think it might have been Lincoln, but he said, I'm not even going to attribute, it was some early president who either had a powdered wig or a really cool beard, said something about the fact that because the United States was so blessed geographically, the death of the U.S. as a nation would never come from outside that it would be by suicide. I can't remember who said that, but. Maybe you can't remember who said that, but maybe you can find that quote goes hard that is a hard quote i know man it sounds like it seems like what's going on in the last couple years internal division and uh yeah internal division is is another constraint it's a it's a geopolitical constraint but you you know in in a society

that presumably permits and encourages freedom you have to tolerate an amount of internal division but as as you divide away the the singular vision of a nation then suddenly there's conflict that arises within it you know everything is is ultimately a trade-off yeah and who was it was it oh hell yeah it was america will never be destroyed from the outside oh oh continue with facebook said lincoln if we falter and lose our freedoms it will be because we destroyed ourselves Wow. Lincoln. Damn.

Abraham. Dude, I know. They don't give Lincoln credit for his sick flow. Have you seen that recent video of all those guys pledging allegiance to Trump? It was like two days ago. That doesn't surprise me, but no. It is terrifying, man. It looks like a, it's like a giant warehouse and they're lined up.

They're lined up. Here's the video. Look at this. No, what? this was a maga thing and they did this as trump was in like going into court what i have questions about this warehouse like where's the warehouse close out of it see if you can see if you can see some find some more context of on the tweet

just like is there is there like a kmart next door yeah maybe they've got it's too small but yeah man that's that's fucking crazy that's insane but this so this is exactly the thing that that like I find so fascinating about about the idea of of nationalism because nationalism is this this huge abstraction and and you know what your nation is is something that's collectively generated by the people within the nation right like how you believe about whatever America is somehow gels with how every other American thinks about America and that creates the picture of our country, right? It's something that we're all generating together. But when you have such radically different visions of what that is, then suddenly you can see a bifurcation of the

nation. Or you can even see, sometimes they use the term of balkanization in reference to the Balkans, where it's like, it's almost a shattering into various person groups. Because people are aligning with whoever they feel their affinity group is. And I mean, you know, tell the thing that I find fascinating, terrifying about this is that it's verging on a religious belief. Yes. Like this is a religious belief. Yes.

And I think that people need to continually check themselves as like, is my belief well-founded or is it a religious one? And the best sort of like rule of thumb for religious beliefs has always been. to me anyway, do I know what information could be provided to me that would make me change my mind? Right? So if I say, you know, I believe in gravity, you know, I use it every day, haven't floated once. Like, I mean, pretty convinced. But if, you know, somebody is to come floating over to me and be like, oh, gravity's bullshit, man.

And be like, yeah, that's pretty compelling. Like, yeah. So it's like you can have certainty to a certain extent. But at the point that you're saying, no, absolutely not to these facts, absolutely not to reality on the ground. Then you have a religious belief. Then the thing that's powering you is faith and your own personal identity. Your own personal identity is so involved in. what you think that you can be manipulated dramatically.

What was the quote you said? You said, the number one revolutionary in the revolution becomes the staunchest conservative the day after the revolution. That's right, yeah. Because now they own the state. Right, yeah.

And that's, it's like people when, and I think that there's this sort of romanticized idea of revolution in that respect too. It's like, and then, you know, there's the, there's the sort of musical theater version of, you know, dude wave and a flag. And, you know, then suddenly everybody's equal. But the question is equal according to who, right? So the revolutionary, the day after the revolution, now controls what equality is.

Now they control what freedom is. They're controlling what the abstraction is. And so if we're all going to agree on this consensus reality, how are we going to generate that consensus? And that's ultimately what statecraft is about is, I don't know, definitely not Lincoln, but somebody said, I can't just keep leaning on Lincoln this whole time. But somebody said that, you know, statecraft is all about, it's the generation of consent by the governed, right? And so there's a lot of ways to generate consent amongst the governed. Like right now, we're the governed, you know, in the United States anyway. So somebody can come in this room and put a gun to our heads and, you know, make us participate in a phony voting, you know, a charade.

Cool. Do they have our consent? Well, yeah, I don't want to get shot. Right. Yeah, super, you do have my consent. Another way to do it. And the way that at least we in the United States have settled upon doing it is through representative government. And representative government is how we.

go about, you know, doing the tasks of governance, which is identifying problems, creating paths to solving those problems, and then enacting those solutions, right? But the belief in the United States is that if we sort of crowdsource the idea for how best to move forward as a nation, then we'll come up with not only a better solution, but it will be fully supported by everybody who gave their opinion on that. thing. Now, that's the ideal version of it. Whether it works that way or not, you know, who knows. The most, some of the most successful countries, you know, monetarily and military power-wise right now are certainly not democracies. Right. You know, they're autocracies. Right. Yeah. Andy Bustamante explained this to me beautifully in this, uh, this diagram he calls the creation of state pyramid,

where he says the bot, the foundational, yeah, explain that. So yeah, so he says, the foundation of the pyramid, the bottom level of the pyramid, is individualism. And that's basically whatever I hunt, I eat. Every man for himself. The second level is tribalism. And that's where four, eight, or 12 of us were a tribe. I may be a good hunter. You may be a good gatherer. I go out and hunt the food. You have your garden and we share in our resources, right? I can't go into your house club you over the head and drag your wife out because we have these rules right because we're this own little we're a little a little tribe so we've given up certain freedoms right i can't just go take your wife above that is the creation of a state where there's a governing body or people that you

elect to basically run this nation or state or whatever and that could be a collection of resources like taxes to have so you have clean water you have food that's safe to eat you have electricity and basically what he was getting at is that we have to be okay with giving up certain freedoms yeah for for everything that we have and we were talking about the context of the conversation started out talking about snowdon and talking about like privacy and stuff like that he's like i'm willing to i'm willing to his position on this which i'm kind of coming around to but i don't know what what i feel about it he said that he was okay with the government looking at the porn that I watch or like looking at my browser history if it's going to keep us safe from terrorists.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, this is I think the sometimes called like the Neo-Hobsian point of view, right? So the whole Hobbs thing is like, you know, man, in his natural state is, you know, this sort of feral creature that, you know, just loves to, to. kill and rape. And then we, as we sort of ascend this pyramid, things get better because we are able to sublimate these natural tendencies towards violence into the state. We give the state the monopoly on violence so that we can have order, right? And, you know, that certainly makes sense.

but it's kind of like the who watches the watchman type of thing right and it's like how much how much transparency one do you want and two are you comfortable with um yeah i think one of the things he said was uh he asked me if i had kids and i was like yeah he's like do you tell your kids everything you do i've heard that before yeah i know i was like no he's like yeah because you're trying to protect them right but now that i have like the ability to like watch it and listen to it And I'm like, it's not the government's job to be my parent, right? It's supposed to be for the people, by the people. Like, they're supposed to be the servants to us.

Yeah. I mean, that's certainly the abstraction, right? Yes. Like, that's, like, it's like, I'm sure you've probably seen a video of somebody on YouTube being, you know, yelling at a cop being like, I pay your salary. How well does that go? Right. You know, it's good. I don't imagine never goes good.

It rarely, yeah, at no point is, is, you know, the police officer who's the sort of like, emissary of. of the state at that point. Right. Like, oh, man, I, sorry about that. Yeah. Right. Like, that, like, yes, that person certainly believes that. But in point of fact, is that actually happening?

I mean, not if they end up in handcuffs with a black eye. Right. Right. Right. I mean, it's, that to me is the, the fascinating thing about statecraft in general is, like, how do different places navigate this way, of creating consent amongst the governed. Because it's a cultural issue.

It's a geographic issue. It's a historical issue. So I live in Albania. I live in Toronto, Albania, because after Peace Corps, I just went pro. And so I've lived there for like on and off for probably four or four years altogether. And at a certain point,

I was in an Albanian art gallery. I was looking old pieces of artwork and paintings. And a lot of it is this sort of like Soviet realist stuff because Albania was, one, it was the world's first atheist state because religion was outlawed there for 50 years. And too was under sort of brutal North Korean style dictatorship under a guy named Enver Hoja. But one of the things that I found really interesting was in a lot of the Albanian paintings, most of the Albanian paintings, the people with rifles were, were never painted pointing their rifles up. They were always painted pointing them either straight or down. And I started thinking about that because I think of, you know,

Western statues and artwork that I've seen in the United States. And then I realized, well, Albanian is a mountainous country. People weren't pointing their rifles up. They were pointing their rifles down when they were defending against the Ottoman Empire. Oh, wow. And so the geography determined a lot. about how the governmental structure ended up, the geography and the culture. You know, even though the Balkan Peninsula is sort of full of all of these Slavic languages and Slavic people, Albanians are not Slavic.

Their language is not Slavic. It forms its own branch of the Indo-European language tree. And they're also surrounded by mountains. So isolationism seemed to be this, you know, way of generating consent amongst the governed there because they were already, not only geographically isolated, but they're culturally isolated. And so in the United States, we have, you know, this sort of frontier culture, because for the dominant part of our history, we were moving west until we ran out of west to move, right? So the geography determined who ended up being most successful, and then who ended up generating the culture that was

propagated throughout our country, right? Interesting. You know, you can, tell a lot about a country based upon the people that are their heroes. You know, I mean, who are some American heroes? Like, when you, when you think about, like, the people that, that individuals point to and say, it's like, oh, that's, that's an American hero right there. Right. Probably people with guns. Yeah. Either that or people who are, like, it's like, you know, people who are leading freedom movements, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. Right. Yeah, yeah. John Wayne. I was going to say John Wayne. Yeah, he's, I feel like he's the main one. Right. Yeah.

or people who died. Rosa Parks, you know. John F. Kennedy. People who are going their own way. Yeah. And I think that that goes, you know, we, in the United States and, I mean, for every country, it's hard to see the water that you swim in. And so we don't, we take for granted what an individualistic culture we are. There's certainly Albania is a more collectivist culture.

And that's not just because of the fact that communism was, you know, deeply embedded in their history. But it's, it's because, you know, their family units are remarkably. Is that Hillary Clinton? Who it is? Oh, no. What am I looking at here? It's more like Bill. Oh, Googling American heroes and looking at photos.

Oh, look at all those American heroes. Look at all these powdered wigs. Einstein. Einstein was not American. He was, well, as far as I'm. I know. I might have to go check in history about that. Oh, that's hilarious. So, yeah, I mean, I feel like, where do we get off to? Oh, Lebanon. Lebanon. Well, no, I want to go back. Yeah, you were in Lebanon. We were talking about.

We were, you were in Lebanon and. That was in Beirut. I was just reading. Oh, oh, geopolitics. Frank was like, come back and be an intelligence analyst. Yeah, so I did that. Um, it was, I was actually, by the way, Frank is a pseudonymous name. It is a pseudonymous name. And if you Google around about me, you'll figure out of who it is. Yeah, yeah. You did an amazing podcast. Who was the guy's podcast you did?

Chris Ryan, shout out. And Chris Ryan said he was going to fuck Frank's wife. God damn it. So much for keeping it. Jesus. That goes. I'm going to be dead by noon. Nice knowing you, Danny.

If my book comes out, you're not here, travels to the countries that don't exist. died. I hope it sells well. You are not here. Travels through countries that don't exist. I can cut that out if you want to. I'd appreciate it. No, I don't know. Keep it in if you like it. So, yeah, so. You're working for him now. So I'm working for him. And basically it entails being just a very detailed newsreader. So what a working day is like. I had to get up really early in the morning. So I was up at like four in the morning. I was living in Los Angeles at this point

in an art colony, which is a very weird place to be an intelligence analyst. Art colony. Yeah, a brewery art colony. A brewery art colony. Dude, it's like the musical rent, but like so much dirtier. Wow.

Yeah. It was cool. Like you get like a big old art warehouse, and then it's like, you know, build your own walls and, you know, do really, really edgy artwork. Yeah. You all say fuck a lot.

Las Angeles is a strange place. Yeah, man. Almost as strange as Miami, but not quite. I've never been to Miami. What? Yeah, I've never been. Oh, my God. It's such a great place.

I literally... It's so close to the U.S. I just went to my memory and I was like, what do I know about Miami? And like, I think a pit bull music video just started playing. And that's it. That's all I know about Miami, really. It's crazy.

Totally different animal than out here. The traffic is almost as bad as L.A. Might be worse sometimes. I guess it's depending on the time of day, but it is very similar to L.A. It takes two hours to get to drive two miles. Yeah. Sounds about right. And everybody is Cuban.

This must be great sandwiches and awesome cars. Beautiful, beautiful women, great cars, lots of rich people, lots of great food, but just so many people packed into this tiny place. It's a great place to go. It's a great place to go for like a day or two. That's not at all the... I mean, like I said, my stereotype is literally only pit bull music videos and Big Willie style. Okay.

That is the, so anything outside of a music video, I have no concept. You got to go, man. All the places you've been, you've never been to fucking Miami. This is the first time I've been to Florida, man. Oh, my God. Really? Yeah. Wow. I honestly, I haven't explored the U.S. that much.

I've spent most of the last 10 years, you know, in, well, in unrecognized countries. Right, right. Can't blame you. Yeah. But when we were training, I went out to 10. Texas. Okay. Which was like, so training and like, I don't know, I got an email and it was like,

okay, you're coming out to training. And I was like, okay, sweet, it'll be like a weekend or something. It was like a month. And I'm like, what? And like it was like the three, no, there's three other people that I was training with, you know, to be an analyst. I feel like I should do this the entire time. I mean, honestly.

Air quotes. Yeah, air quotes. I was a very, very advanced newsreader. future guesser. But learned a lot though. I mean, fascinating, fascinating work. But like we were, you know, me and three other strangers who turned out to be amazing. Shout to Cheyenne, Zander and Lawrence.

Great people. So like we stayed in this like house in like suburbia outside of Austin. And every day we were just sort of like power learned geopolitics and like had to like read through this huge book about World War II. And then, you know, we go over to Franks Ranch and. And he'd like hold globes at us and be like, this is the Philippines. I'm like, oh, cool. And he's like, well, it's a bayonet going into China.

And like then tell us like all of the history of the Philippines and and what, you know, America's geopolitical positioning around the Philippines was. And we were just like trying to pack as much geopolitical knowledge into our heads as possible. And each one of us kind of got some area of the world to look at, right? And so the goal of that was to take as much open source information about that area, so publicly available information, and try to determine, based upon the constraints and imperatives of that country, what might happen, what they might want to do strategically, or what might occur to them, right? So I and you know after after you know two whole weeks of of learning about geopolitics I was like Yeah my tinfoil hat was like firmly on it was like looking at Belarus and and just just dreaming about Alexander Lukashenko at a certain point I was just like you know Alexander Lukashenko doesn't

think about me nearly as much as I think about him um which is a shame and I was like oh okay so you know it's like Russia and and and Belarus, they're like, right now anyway, they're like, you know, having this sort of weird war of words. I think Belarus was saying, you know, you're using us as a 10 million person human shield against, you know, invasion from NATO countries and stuff like that. And then NATO or Russia was like, ah, shut up or something. I can't remember the, that's the exact quote. Right.

Vladimir Putin shut up. And so I was like, I was, you know, talking to, uh, to Frank. about this and he's like, well, like, what do you think is going to happen? I'm like, um, like, are they going to fight or whatever? He's like, no. I'm like, well, why aren't they? And he's like, research it until you find out why. And I was like, what? Okay. And so just kept reading more and more. And then you find out that like the energy infrastructure of Belarus is like completely indivisible from Russian energy infrastructure. Um, you know, there, there's oil there, but it's, it's unproven. So it would take years and years for them to actually.

get that oil out of the ground. So the constraint is they certainly can't break away from Russia. They can't go, they can't have a war with Russia. So why are they having this public war of words? And at that point, that's when real analysis happens is you're looking at what is actually going on when you know what the constraints and imperatives are. Okay. And so that was kind of the training area for me it was just like, oh, you know, write up a report about Belarus. So what was going on? What did you figure out? I don't remember, actually. Okay.

Nothing. Yeah. And that's the other great thing about the one of the wonderful things about learning about, you know, geopolitical analysis is like most of the time, the world is not burning down. Like most of the things don't mean a lot. I had the best example of this was one day a colleague of mine sent me. an article about I think it was Tajikistan and some guy had blown up in Tajikistan

and she was like, what do you think of this? It was like one-line email and I was like, okay, so I started researching to Jikistan. I was researching it for a week and then I was like, okay, well, you know, is there some relationship with the Taliban? Is that happening? Are they going through the Wakon corridor?

Like, what's, was it, was it a bomb maker? And then it turned out it was like a science teacher who accidentally blew himself up. Like that the and it's like yeah, sometimes people just accidentally blow themselves up. Sometimes stuff just isn't that important and sometimes things are totally geopolitically irrelevant. And depending on how you look at the world, that can either be very comforting or very not because it could mean that nothing is significant. You shouldn't worry about anything. or it could mean that the most mundane thing is deeply significant

and you should worry about everything. So I mean, for me anyway, at that time when I was doing that work, I was the opposite. So as I was doing that work and in the book, I start out the book writing about this time that I was analyzing

an Islamic State beheading video. And I was like trying to I was trying to sort of like impress the boss. Why are you analyzing that video? So that video was, was it had cropped up at some point like it was I think it came out

in the Islamic State magazine it's called I think it was called Dabak but you know if it's just a regular video them sort of talking about the normal stuff you know then it's probably geopolitically irrelevant and you can kind of toss it but this one specifically was

in Farsi so it wasn't in Arabic and the people who were being beheaded were in the uniforms anyway of the popular mobilization units who are Shia-backed or Iran-back-shealed militias that operate in Iraq. And so I was watching the video to see if there was a way of determining that this was definitely an Islamic state message to Tehran, right? And as I was watching this thing and realizing that I was finding myself becoming more.

more and more paranoid and liking the world a whole lot less, the more I studied warfare. I mean, you know, go figure. I was realizing that there's no way for me to actually determine this, right? Because, yeah, like, you can put those uniforms on anybody. You can put that insignia on anybody. Right. So does it mean that something's going to happen tomorrow?

Like, is the Islamic State going to roll some tanks into Iran? Or not tanks anyway, like, you know, Toyota Hyluxes? Are they going to do that? Probably not, but it was like that was the only thing that I had to analyze that day. And, you know, you get on these cryptic phone calls and they're like, what do you have? And you have to like spit out this brief without like stumbling on a single world word. And by the end of my brief, they were like, nope, that's irrelevant. Don't worry about it.

So like I had, you know, in my art colony in Los Angeles, I'd spend the morning like watching beheading videos. And it wasn't even seven in the morning yet. Like my coffee shop wasn't even open yet. before you had your coffee and those heads get cut off yeah and so like I was like and I remember like looking at you know because I definitely had like

like I leaned into the stereotype like at a yarn wall in my room it never really got to yarn wall status I bought yarn but I never like put anything up that was like two arts and crafts even I know I know I wish I had a picture of that but yeah like I was looking at all the maps on the wall and

I've done a lot of traveling before and I love traveling and I I like liking the world. And I realized as I was looking at now after, you know, a couple of months of just researching how the world was tearing itself apart that I really not only didn't like the world, but I was pretty afraid of it. And that was not a great headspace to be in. And at the same time, I was also like the worst person to sit next to at a bar because I'd just be like, oh, you hear about these missiles? Like, you know about the range of that mess? You ever hear about this World War I treaty?

It's like that nobody wants to sit next to that guy at a bar. So like I had to make a change. And fortunately I got fired like a month later. So I was, but while I was looking to the Middle East, especially in the Islamic State at the time, you know, the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan were this enormous force in beating back the Islamic State out of, you know, out of north. Northeastern Iraq. Right. And so they were using this political capital that they had at the time. So this was in 2017 in order to launch a referendum on independence from Baghdad, right?

And so I had been reading about this area constantly. And of all of the stories that you read in the news, it's so rare that you find one where you're like hopeful about it. And it's like, and it's exciting where you're like, this is an independence movement. Not only is it an independence movement, but it's one that's done through basically democratic means. Like it's a new country that could potentially vote itself into existence. Right. And so as I started researching it, I was like, and, you know, as I was done watching beheading videos, I was like, you know, because anytime you lose your job, you're like, oh, man, well, if I could do anything in the world, what would I do? And I was like, I want to go see the referendum on independence in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

And so like I googled jobs in Iraqi Kurdistan and I found a job as a third grade teacher. And so like two weeks later had a ticket to northern Iraq. Oh shit. Yeah. Teaching what English? I was so I was basically third and fourth grade. In the book, I call it the Kurdistan International School. But it's a it's a Lebanese school system called Sabas.

and they put me up, gave me an apartment and, you know, and paid me okay for the area. But it was third grade, fourth grade, social studies, home room, and English. By yourself. Yeah. Jesus. I mean, there were other international teachers at the school, but yeah, just went out there. And that was like a great way to basically start trying to figure out about, trying to start writing about things where it wasn't the world tearing itself apart.

It was actually new things being created. But of course that didn't actually end up happening for the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan. So while I was there, I was obviously teaching, but it was also meeting other journalists and talking to NGO workers, made great friends with some of the locals and was watching and waiting as this vote for independence was happening and it's amazing how the city or Beale started to feel as it got closer to this vote because there was so much uncertainty in the air the larger regional powers did not want and still do not want this independent

Kurdish region. And the reason for that is because the Kurds are the largest stateless group of people in the world. So there are about 35 million Kurds. They're spread across, in one sort of unbroken band, across from the Zagros Mountains in Iran and Iraq, all the way down to Syria and through a large portion of Turkey. Yeah. Oh, okay. That's a big... Wikipedia version of Kurdish, the Kurdish nationalism.

Yeah. And so, yeah, the notable Kurdish dynasties. Shout out to Celadine the Great. He was the leader of the Ayubid dynasty. So was there, so, yeah, so where did they come from? They were, so they were a nomadic person group that was, that was, I mean, you know, they're originally from the Zagros Mountains area. Right. But why, so what did the word Kurd come from? So I've heard that, and sometimes like, I don't know if this is just like a general reading of it. I've heard that it relates to tent dwellers, so nomadic nomadic tribes people. But I didn't include that specifically in my book because I couldn't confirm it, basically.

So this is the flag of Iraqi Kurdistan. And it's important to, yeah, it's important to understand too that, there are many different Kurdish governments, Kurdish languages, and Kurdish groups that are contained within the larger area that the world would consider Kurdistan, or certainly Kurds would consider Kurdistan. So there are, you know, there's a Kurdish region of Iran,

there's a Kurdish region of Turkey, there's a Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, and also Iraq. Each has ostentably different governmental system, and even sometimes different languages. So Kurdish languages. So in Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, they speak a language called Sorani, but you also have Khrmanji, which is a majority Kurdish-spoken language.

And one of the reasons that these regional powers don't want any sort of independence movement from certainly Iraqi Kurdistan is that it'll animate independence movements in these other countries. So Turkey doesn't want a Kurdish independence. movement to happen within its borders. Yeah. So this red area here, this is the disputed area between Iraqi Kurdistan, which is in the green, and then, yeah, the disputed area is in the red there. And so while I was there, the Kurdish referendum on independence happened.

But immediately Baghdad was like, hey, you super aren't independent, and you're also not taking Kierkuk with you. So the reason that Kerkuk is important is because this majority, I mean, a huge amount of oil comes out of Kerkirko. Okay. Back in the day, Saddam Hussein was like, I got too many Kurds on that oil land, so I got to move a bunch of Arabs up there and what he called Arabis the area. So that he would have. So which part of this map were you at? Erbil, right there. That's where I was teaching third grade. Erbil. Okay, you were in Arbiel. I was. So it's the green zone right here. Yeah, correct. And why is that green?

What does that say on the bottom? What's that little? So that's the area of the Kurdistan regional government. Okay, got it. So it's an autonomous region within Iraq. Got it. Okay. It's just an autonomous region that Iraq, they leave it alone.

I mean, yeah. It's, there's. To an extent. To an extent. Yeah. It's a, it's a. Is it kind of like similar to how eastern Ukraine was sort of like a lot of Russians, were there and there was there was a there's a differentiation in government okay definitely yeah so there is

there is a government that that is run independently um but it has direct relationship with bagdad it's under the control of bagdad okay and so when they tried to vote themselves independent in 2017 um bagdad reasserted its control and decided to basically go to have a small war over kirk cook with the Kurdish fighters to ensure that Kurdistan, the Iraqi Kurdistan, never took the oil-producing region with them. And so at the same time, Iraq basically said, okay, also all your airports belong to us and we're shutting down your airspace. And, you know, at this point, it was, I was, sort of early on in wanting to write about unrecognized nations. And I didn't realize that my book wasn't going to just be about Iraqi Kurdistan. That's what I thought.

it was going to be. But then I decided to leave Iraqi Kurdistan because I was going to see my girlfriend who was a Fulbright scholar in Bulgaria at the time. So what, you know, the school had told me was like, okay, well, you know, if you leave, you might not be able to come back in because, like, we don't, you certainly can't come in through the air because Iraq or airspace. Yeah, Baghdad shut down the airspace. So I was like, okay, I'll leave, I'll leave Iraqi Kurdistan.

on a bus, I'll just take a bus across the border, and then fly from this place called Siernach, I don't know if that's how it's pronounced, in eastern Turkey. So, yeah, I went across the border and spent, you know, Christmas with my girlfriend at the time, and then we decided to just go back through Turkey for New Year's because I was like, okay, well, like, I have to go back through Turkey over land anyway to get back to Iraq, because, you know, I have my apartment there, my job there. And so there's a great train that you can take from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Istanbul. So we're taking that train.

And, you know, they take us off the train at, like, 3 o'clock in the morning, and they're, like, you know, passports and give them our passports. And they start looking at us a little funny, and they're like, where do you live? And then my girlfriend, Savannah, was like, oh, I live in Bulgaria. She's a full bright scholar. and I fucked up massively and I said I live in Kurdistan and immediately they were like, oh, you got to come with us. And so they took both of us and I got a probably about an hour and a half, two hour interrogation from the Turkish authorities. And what they thought was that I was some kind of political agent either operating on behalf of the United States or,

operating on behalf of the PKK, who are the Kurdish workers party. Right. Right. Because, I mean, frankly, it just didn't look good. There's probably so many CIA agents in that area of the world. Probably. Yeah. There's got to be. I mean, yeah.

They, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. I ran into mostly third graders. Absolutely none of them seemed too shadowy to me. Yeah. They pulled you to aside. Yeah.

Yeah, so interrogated me. Any physical beatings? They swatted my legs a little bit. Really? Just because I like, I don't know. I didn't know if it was offensive or not. But I like crossed my leg. Like, you know, just like, cross my leg.

And dude, like, hit my leg and he's like, sit up straight. And I was like, oh, shit. Like, this is, this is real. Wow. And so he's like, he's like, so, you know, you work for PKK? Do you work for? Who do you work for? I'm like, dude, I'm a third grade teacher.

I'm trying to write a book about unrecognized countries. A good cover, by the way. See, I know. And that's the worst part. And then they Googled me. And then they, like, found all the writing that I had done for the previous, you know, geopolitical forecasting company, which was a lot of stuff about Turkey. And then they were like, let me see your camera.

And I had just previously been to a rally, like an independence rally for Iraqi Kurdistan. So, like, the whole memory card was just nothing but, like, hyper-nationalistic Kurdish imagery. And I'm just like, I'm fucked. Yeah, I was so fucked. And I was just like, I was thinking two things basically at the same time. I was like, one, like, how mad is my girlfriend going to be at me for getting us like kicked out of Turkey? Or two, am I going to Turkish prison tonight? Oh, was it a fatalities map?

Of what? What is this? What a Turkey PKK conflict, a visual explainer? Oh, yeah, yeah. And I should say I didn't I never I never really went into into the the Kurdish area of Turkey for for you know for the research for my book right and you know I haven't been back to Turkey since because they banned me they banned you yeah yeah I'm straight up banned still how did that happen they handed me some papers that said you're banned

right when after they targeted you and they said walk like we were on the border of of books you still have those paper have a picture of those papers we can pull up I don't have it on me no I'm sure I can find it though I'll send it to you That's, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what would happen if you went back? Beheaded? No, I don't think so. I don't think they'd behead.

I actually tried to go back one more time. Oh, really? Yeah, well, because I, I, I, we, we thought that it was some kind of, you know, we thought that there was a, there was like a term limit on it. Like, there, because there was some sort of antagonism between the United States and Turkey at that time. And we thought maybe this was like, you know, not that big of a deal. Turns out it's a really big deal.

So they, they banned me from entering Turkey. I can fly. through Turkey. But as far as I know, I haven't tried the airport. Yeah, I haven't tried to go back into Turkey since. But yeah, they kind of left us at the border of Bulgaria and Turkey and we're like, okay, well, you know, walk. It's December and three o'clock in the morning in Bulgaria. So what was the temperature? Super cold. But fortunately, a cab was coming through the border at that exact moment. I was like, we waited a little bit and a cab was coming through because there's a bunch of casinos on the other side.

And this absolute saint guy named Demeter, he picked us up and drove us to like a small town called Sfielandrad, Bulgaria. But at that point, I'm just like, oh, shit, like, there goes like my book. And this is also my thesis project. I was working, I was getting my master's degree in writing from Oxford at the time. So I was like, this like totally torpedoed my whole book. And also I lost all the stuff I had my apartment. I lost my job.

Like, I'm starting from ground zero here, and this is not looking good. So I was like, okay, well, I've got to continue on this journey of unrecognized countries. There are other unrecognized countries. So what if I just, like, make my year about trying to go to other unrecognized nations at these sort of, like, politically relevant times for them? And so I decided originally to go back to Kosovo. So Kosovo is, you know, you're going to have a lot of mad Serbian listeners right now. According to the Serbs, Kosovo is a part of Serbia.

According to over 100 nations in Europe and around the world, Kosovo is its own independent nation. So when Yugoslavia fell, Kosovo fought a war to break apart from Serbia. and actually it's pretty geopolitically active right now. There's a lot of things happening in northern Kosovo where Kosovo meets Serbia. Yeah, so Yugoslavia broke up and Serbia, there was Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania? So Albania was never a part of Yugoslavia. Okay. But so Montenegro, Northern Macedonia, Kosovo.

Kosovo Bosnia-Herzegovina Slovenia I'm missing one Did I say Serbia? Serbia Yes So all Serbians are the ones that

Were massacring Everybody right Yeah so it was a Serbian Genocide Yeah it was the the Serbian lead It was under a guy named Slobodan Milosevic

Right And so yeah there we go These maps are awesome Yeah right So the reason reason for that dotted line around Kosovo is because it's not recognized by everybody in the world. Ooh. Right?

And so I was there for the 10-year anniversary of Kosovo. And so in, and, you know, oftentimes countries don't recognize Kosovo because they have a close relationship with Serbia or because they have their own independence movements that are within their countries. So, weirdly, Spain doesn't recognize Kosovo. because they have independence movements in Catalonia. So it looks a little bit strange for them to say, hey, yeah, we recognize your independence movement, but not ones that are going on in our own backyard. Right?

So when you're building a country, essentially it boils down to declaration and recognition. So you can declare being a country all you want. In fact, I just saw some DJ in the California desert. decided to declare his own country called a slow jammistan if you really yeah look up slow jammistan slow jammistan so he's declared what part of the world is this at this is something california oh no perfect yeah joshua tree there we go the republic of slow jammistan stop it that's right man stop it travel advisory non-americans wishing to travel to slow jammistan

you to join the sultan. He's a sultan too. And so, I mean, and these types of movements, like, essentially they're the, they're not the exception of the rule. They are the rule. This is, this is, you know, this is fucking goofy. But at the time when, like, a group of violent revolutionaries decided to meet in a bar, you know, they created a country called the United States.

Like, yeah, it was probably a pretty goofy. idea to some people at the time, but it ended up working. Right. Because they're able to gain recognition. Not only could they generate consent amongst the governed, but they could generate consent amongst other countries to say, yes, you exist. And that's the thing that Iraqi Kurdistan was missing, certainly. They needed support from the United States.

We didn't support them. We supported them to help us fight the Islamic State, certainly. But not, we armed them enough to do that. But not enough to fight back against Baghdad to have a revolution within territorial Iraq. And when was that? When did we arm? 2017. 2017, we armed them.

Well, we've worked pretty closely with the Kurds for a long time. In, I want to say in 1992, there was an operation called Operation Provide Comfort, which installed a no-fly zone over Iraq. And this was to help the Kurdish population along the border who were fleeing. ethnic cleansing from Saddam Hussein. Oh, wow. So we've had a close relationship with them, but, you know, we are constrained by our relationship with Turkey and with federal Iraq. So that we would never actually support an independence movement with them.

Right. At least that's, you know. Okay. That makes sense. That's my understanding of it. The, you know. I'm a geopolitical numskull, so apologize for the dumb question. Well, look, nobody consulted me as to whether or not, like, they should support Kurdish

independence. I was the, you know, teaching sentence structure to Kurdish. Let's take a break. Eight year olds. I got to fix this AC. We're both Zinnan right now. Oh, Zinnon. We're on the Zimbabwe. So as in nicotine conversation, by the way. We're back from our bathroom break.

Nicotine conversations. And unrecognized nations. Bars. Not Lincolnesque bars, but bars nonetheless. So I was in Mitrovica, which is this area in Kosovo. Oh, Kosovo is gone. So this area in Kosovo, which is disputed between the Serbs and the majority Albanian population. I should say that the majority of Kosovo is Albanian and Albanian speaking, but there are other ethnic minorities that live there.

and there are also Serbs that live there. Right. Yeah, there it is. That's Mitrovica. And so I, you know, I wanted to go up there because, I mean, look, I'm an American and I live in Albania. So that certainly, like, tilts my point of view on Kosovo because America sort of led the charge for the NATO bombing campaign that stopped Milosevic. and led to the establishment of Kosovo as an autonomous state. And so they really like Americans.

Right. I thought Beck was saying. Yeah. Yeah. And so I really like Albanians. So I'm massively biased towards that point of view. And so while I was working on this book, I was like, well, I also need the Serb point of view. I need to understand what they're, what living in a country that essentially they don't consent to.

is like for them. So I went up to northern Mitrovica and there's this bridge that crosses over a river. It's called the Ibar River. And it's sort of patrolled by all of these UN peacekeepers, Italian Carbonieri, who are sort of keeping the Serbian side and the Albanian side separate. Because if anything's going to pop off of war is going to start again in the region, then it's going to start probably at Mitrovica or in one of these borders. land areas. And so I went up there and I was like, well, I need to cross the bridge. I need to go, you know, like just talk to somebody. And as I was crossing the bridge, I was like, you know, I immediately felt like this intense sense of, of, you know, anxiety because I was like, it quite literally felt like I'm crossing over from the side of us, just from my own like nationalistic conceptions to the side of them. Because I know for a fact that the United States is revered in Kosovo because they helped stop Milosevic's genocide. And I know for a fact that the Serbs do not love America because we bombed their capital.

In fact, the bombed out buildings are still sort of kept as monuments. Oh, wow. Right. And so feeling yourself change, you know, how you feel in a place based off of how other people are perceiving you. Like, that's kind of the essence of, of the illusion of statecraft, right? I'm just crossing a bridge.

Like, nothing's changed, but everything's changed about my internal life. Suddenly, I feel like the other. And so I cross the bridge, and, you know, I'm kind of doing what I usually do as a, you know, as a travel writer, which is just, you know, try to make friends.

Right. And so I go to this bar. Same thing a spy would do. Yeah, except they'd have health care. Yeah. Be awesome. Hire me. CIA, what's up?

Not doing anything right now. Except for my book, you are not here. Travels through countries that don't exist. CIA recommended. So I go to this coffee shop and I'm kind of just sitting there having a drink and smoking a cigarette and minding my own business but also trying to, you know, trying to make friends and at some point this guy looks over to me and he's like

you balkin? He says it in English and I was like Nope, not Why'd you think that? And he's like Well, you drink like a Russian You smoke like a Turk and you look like a Jew Damn Whoa

That was accurate man I'm like So I'm like hey can I buy you a drink And he's like I'm Muslim No But you can buy me me a coffee. And I'm like, cool, man. So we start chatting. So Muslims don't drink? I mean, some do. But obviously more Orthodox Muslims don't drink. It's haram to them.

Wow. And he was. And so I was a fascinating conversation with the guy. He's Bosniak, right? And so a part of Milosevic's genocide was Bosniaks, was Muslim men and boys. Like the Shrebinitsa massacre was this horrifying massacre in Bosnia, and yet there I have a Bosniak guy who's sitting next to me in, you know, the Serbian dominated side of Mitrovica in Kosovo, a majority Albanian country. And I'm like, what are you doing here? And he's like, what are you doing here? I'm like, I'm trying to write a book about unrecognized nations. And I'm like, can you explain, you know, can you explain how you sort of see your national identity to me? And he's like, oh, you're not, you're not Balkan at all. You would understand this.

I'm like, no, I'm not. Like, you know, he's like, look, I speak Serbian. I have the same religion as many of the Albanians. I even speak Albanian. But I know that I, and I grew up in Yugoslavia, but I know I'm not Albanian because my father says that a Bosniak. And certainly I'm Slavic, but I know I'm not Serbian, and I know I'm not Croatian because I'm not Catholic. And I'm like, okay, so what you're saying is that you understand your identity based off of the things that you're not.

That's a big portion of like what your identity is. And there's even a term for this. It's called schismogenesis. And the idea is that national identities, group identities, can often come from. from another group that you're being different then, that you're identifying yourself away from. Yugoslavia was the land of the southern Slavs. That's what Yugoslavia means.

And so there are all these different groups within Yugoslavia, Croatians, Slovenians, Macedonians, Serbians, Bosniaks. And they all had different national characters. And so when Yugoslavia fell apart, they divided along cultural lines. And so he understood himself, his own personal identity, how his identity plugged into the rest of what he felt his nation was, was as a Bosniak, specifically because his parental lineage, his religious beliefs, and also who he said he wasn't. And so at that point, I was like, okay, one, you're right. I'm definitely not Balkan. And maybe I would understand that a little bit better if I didn't grow up in Southern California.

Yeah. And then, two, what's it like, you know, living in a Serbian city after there was this, you know, massacre of Bosnians? He's like, well, you want to, do you want to see how Serbs treat Muslims now? I'm like, yeah, he's like, you should go to a funeral. I'm like, okay. He's like, you want to come to one tomorrow? I'm like, what? And he's like, yeah, I'm like, who died? He's like my mother. Like, okay, yeah, I'll come to your, and it wasn't, it wasn't like a funeral as a way. And so like I was like yeah, I'll totally, so staying on the Albanian side of the bridge and decided to shout out to Ayrton by the way. What's up man? The really cool guy. You definitely watches this. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Ayrton. So I, you know, and it had the weirdest experience too because I was like, okay, yesterday I felt like all this anxiety about like crossing the bridge and like, you know, am I, am I them? Are people going to. you know, think badly of me because I'm so squarely on the opposite side of things. I mean, even literally physically because it's a damn bridge. But then the next day, I'm like, okay, I'm going to like awake. So I better like bring something because it's like rude show up empty handed. So I went over to an Albanian bakery and like got some Baclavar.

But then I was like, oh shit, this box is written in Albanian? I'm like, is that going to be offensive? And I'm like, no, fuck it. Bachlovaz is great. Like I'll just bring, you know, bring baked goods to this thing. And so I walked across and, you know, and sort of sat with his family as, and, you know, it was a, I don't know if that's a typical Bosniak wake, but we all just sort of like sat around and kind of like held silence for his motherhood passed. And after a little bit, he was like, well, you want to come out and have a cigarette with me? And I was like, okay. So we went outside and, and he was like, let me, let me show you what my mom looked like. And so he goes over to this sort of like death notice. and it's sort of stapled to one of the light poles in the area. And he's like, the green box is because she's Muslim.

But as you can see, you know, this house is full of Serbs, Bosniaks. Like, you know, we're trying to move on. And, like, at a certain point, like, the dead don't care about their nationality. And then I had a similar conversation with Koso. who was he was running the reuters bureau um in uh in uh pristina at the time during during the uh during the during the war and i asked him you know was was there a time that he sort of felt this like elation right i mean you know this is going to be released on on july 4th and americans have this sort of like at least i do i can let me speak for myself like i have this

sort of like assumption that like at the point that the declaration of independence was signed and you know the flag is waving like there's this sort of like glorious elation that like we have a country and we did it and I think that might actually be fiction because I asked him about that like was there ever this point of of like you know absolute joy that you you won he's like no no because then you have to build a nation yeah you want it but like you have to build it you You have to build institutions now. You have to do all the hard work. You have to clean up all of the buildings.

You have to help repair the shattered lives. You have to deal culturally with a genocide. There was no moment of elation. And I was like, so when does the work of building a nation actually stop? And he looked at me and he was like, look, there's a graveyard on the border of Albania and Kosovo. Their work's done. They don't have any work to do. But the rest of us, we're still creating a nation.

And I went back to Kosovo fairly recently, and I was there for the 15th year anniversary. And, you know, I talked with Serbs and Albanian Kosovo. So, of course, there are other minority groups there as well. The Guarani, there's Bosniaks, there's Turks. There's a lot of people there. but I talked with one Serbian guy he's a docent at a monastery called Gratjanica

and it's like this sort of enclave a Serbian majority enclave in Kosovo and you know I'm in a Serbian monastery and immediately asks me where I'm from it kind of surprised me and normally I'd say California but I'm like you know sucks some cool

but I was like in the United States and he was like oh okay and then kind of went the other way. And so, you know, um, they don't like Americans though, right? We bombed them, man. Right. Yeah. Um, like, Kosovo has a statue of Bill Clinton. Really? Yeah, and he has a really big hand. See if you can find, uh, the statue of Bill Clinton. Why do they have a statue of Bill Clinton? Because he, he was the, uh, he was the sort of leading force in the bombing campaign against, uh, against Bolosovich forces. Yeah. Bill Clinton's Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You said it was 91, right? Yeah. Oh, no, later. It was, uh, he was, uh,

it was, uh, oh shit, look at that. Yeah. Yeah, that's Bill. There he is. Savage. Yeah, they also have like a clothes shop called Hillary's. Huge hand. Just absolutely enormous.

Um, but, you know, I was talking to this guy and he's like, you know, it's my job to protect this monastery. And, you know, he starts walking me through the alternate history for him, you know, the alternate Serbian history. And it like, it's not like he's just sort of like. spouting off propaganda that he's memorized like he's deeply affected by this too and and he's said and he's this this phrase to me he's like you know this is half time in the football game it's not over you know Serbia is going to come back it's going to get

this area again even though this area is deeply within Kosovo so it's again it's It's like that people's ability to construct reality around themselves can lead them to believe whatever promises them a future tense. And so while he looks around outside of the village of Gratzenica, and he sees everything in Albanian writing, and he sees the EU trying to sponsor institution building in the country, he's saying to himself, well, in the future, it's not going to be like this. In the future, it's going to be part of Serbia again.

And this is something that I think is always something to look out for with political leaders, because political leaders tend to promise you either a future or a past. And the reason that they promise you a future or a past is because it's not something that's happening right now. You won't be able to determine the results of it. So look it, make America great again. Right. Cool, when? Exactly.

Like, was it, was it, you know, when we had this robust driving middle class after World War II because the manufacturing infrastructure of the world was destroyed in Europe and we had shipping lanes across the Pacific and the Atlantic? Was it then? I mean, it wasn't great for everybody. So who is it great for? Right. And the answer to that is his voters. And then sometimes political leaders are promising you the future. What do you mean his voters?

Well, that's who he's talking to. you know, MAGA voters. When do they believe that again was? I don't know. I'd be curious. Like, there's this sort of, from what I understand anyway, there's this Norman Rockwell version of America. And I'm not, I'm certainly not a person who will just, you know, write off the United States. I think the United States is great.

I mean, we've done remarkable things. But to look at your own nation through only rose-colored glasses is. to not actually see your nation. You know, every nation, much like every person, contains some really incredible bright parts, but also incredible shadows. And any nation that's able to

elicit violent force and domination on the world has done horrifying things. And this goes all throughout antiquity. Like, that is the state of a nation. And so how people perceive that Whether or not they perceive that as greatness, that's something that a political leader can use to guarantee them a future that is brighter than their current present. Okay.

You know. That makes sense. Or take, for example, you know, the Soviet Union. We're moving towards communism. We're moving towards pure communism. Right now, we need to hand over all of this power towards strong men so that resources can be redistributed. And then we'll have, you know, this fair, equitable, non-hierarchical government structure. But first, we have to, you know, we have to do this sort of like really intense autocracy.

Right. And so, again, political leaders are promising the future or they're promising the past. The important thing is they're promising something that's not immediately visible because they need your consent. It makes me think about where we are right now in the country and like where do most Americans believe that we're going? what is the message? Like Trump, I mean, Trump had a great marketing campaign. Yeah, nobody can deny that. And I don't see any other presidents doing that. Having a great marketing campaign. Not just having a great marketing campaign, but promising some sort of future. Or like you say, a past. Like, they're not really giving any sort of grandiose vision of something that people can get behind.

Like Trump had something that people got behind. And like you said, they made it their religion. Yeah. Well, that's the, I think it's Zuboff in surveillance capitalism. She talks about this sort of like this human need to have a right to the future tense, right? And so a right to the future tense is this idea that when you can project your own personal identity into the future reasonably and you can say, I'll be more productive, I'll be more wealthy, I'll be more secure, my children will be thriving. and healthy. When you can do that, you don't have many problems with the system at hand. But when you can't do that, when your vision of the future becomes dimmer and darker, and when it looks like things are actually getting worse from you, or when it looks like things are getting worse for you, then suddenly you're going to cling to any ideology that promises you that future tense, even if it doesn't actually bear any resemblance to reality. Because we as human beings need that. Like we need to feel that our future is going to be secure. That we have some sort of

purpose. Exactly. And you can so easily pour purpose into national identity. You know, as I was talking with the guy in the Serbian monastery, he was, you know, he's almost to the point of tears talking about like how Serbia is going to reclaim this monastery that he cares so much about. Like he has to believe that because his identity is so deeply involved in it. Right. When everything around him is telling the exact opposite of that. It's so interesting to see these tools used in nations that are unrecognized or that they're building up their own national identity or that they've won a national identity partially,

or pardon me, or that they've won national recognition, but not throughout the entire world. and then to come back to the United States and see that like we've grown up in a nation where we think of that as immutable, right? We've grown up in a nation thinking that the United States has been around, always will be around, and it's not going anywhere.

Right. And that's just not the case from most nation states, right? Right. You know, the USSR crumbled into its constituent parts as soon as independence movements, started moving through the country. That was a 250 million person country. It's the biggest landmass in the world.

Right. And it disappeared. So what do you call yourself? Like, I mean, what do you call yourself? I run this question all the time. Like, America disappears tomorrow. Right. Like, what am I now?

I would probably still identify as an American. I wouldn't be a Californian. Right. I mean, I live in Albania. I'm not Albanian. you know, would I go back to like whatever my grandparents were? Oh, I don't know. What do you think you would do?

I don't know. I asked the question, though, to a lot of people all the time. Like, what would they do if the United States was no longer than the world's superpower? Like, would we become some huge target to some of the other superpowers? Like, would we become, like, a vulnerable target to Russia and China? Would they, how much of a grip would they have on us and how much secure? would we have living here if we were no longer the number one superpower?

So that's a super interesting point of view on it. I think it's like a super, it's definitely like the dominant American point of view. Because it's like, I think one of the things that defines the American character is self-determinate, pardon me, one of the things that defines the American character is like self-determination,

but on the flip side of that, the shadow of that is paranoia. right it's like I'm going to be the one who's leading this thing I'm going to go out and make it on my own

I'm going to you know dominate world markets I'm going to innovate I'm going to do all these things but what happens when I'm no longer on top will other nations

treat me like I've treated other nations right and and the I simply don't know I mean I if I were to assess that I think

you'd have to look at really the geography. Like how much can we decentralized to produce the things that we personally need to survive? We have an enormous amount of arable land.

We have drinkable water. We have navigable waterways. We've operated in sort of like federated mode before. And does it make sense to invade us? Like does it?

Genuinely? Does China want our land? They have a lot of land. Right. They have quite a bit. So, you know, what would be the imperative? Why would somebody be forced to act violently on the United States?

You know, it does, it's interesting when you think about, like, the geography of the United States and how we are surrounded by the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean. And it may not make sense to put boots on the ground in the United States if you're another country. But you could, you could sort of take over the United States in other ways, which is a lot of people talk about how China is doing that. with us through like TikTok and trying to make us dumber like right with like every kid between the age of 12 and 20 in their 20s they're just scrolling through mindless TikTok stuff all the time China is putting fentanyl, you know literally like shipping fentanyl to Mexico which is getting into the drugs which is you know killing a lot of people in the US they're doing it in these weird subversive ways they're sort of like like injecting

them themselves into us like this this negative all these negative aspects of of drugs and media which is killing us from the inside yeah that quote like Abraham Lincoln said that we would like rot from the inside which it seems like what's happening right now it's like it's like end stage late stage capitalism empire yeah kind of thing yeah it's well it's interesting too so it in the it's a it's a really interesting assessment and I think that that that That's something that a lot of people feel right now, especially when I come back to the States. I think the first thing that I noticed when I go back to the States is there is so much paranoia. There's so much fear here constantly.

And there's so much political polarization. As soon as I have any conversation with anybody, they're sort of probing for whatever my politics are. I mean, I can say something as innocuous as. as blue hair. You already have a political picture, right? Right. Right. And you already have a menu of beliefs that like this person, like I literally said two words. And so like that's astounding, right?

That is. That Americans are constantly probing one another to say, are you on my side? Or are you on their side? Because if you're on their side, I want nothing to do with you. And that is so corrosive to any nation. But going back to your point about China, I mean, I'm in no way any sort of expert really on anything. Certainly not in China. But, you know, you'd have to ask yourself, what's the imperative behind it?

Like, I think if I'm moving towards being a dominant power in the world, and a dominant economic power, certainly. I want markets. Right. You know, I don't care about turning somebody. you know, Chinese. I want I want wealth to come from outside markets into my country. I want to maintain the wealth within my country and use that for the betterment of my people, right? And this is, this is ultimately the reason that I think that we're in this stage of reconceptualizing what a

nation state is. Because frankly, the nation states just hadn't been around for that long. Previously, it was like empires, it was kingdoms, it was fiefdoms. And it was clans. So like as we go down to that base level of the pyramid, it becomes more and more decentralized and it becomes more communal. But what happens when you have a global economy, capitalism doesn't care about your borders. It cares about maximizing the benefit of business and it will fall to the point that the price point for labor is the lowest, and it will rise to the point that they can sell goods for the highest, right? And so we've had this drain of low, of value-added work that's been exported. And so our GDP

looks great because it's like, wow, all these businesses, they're multi-trillion dollar businesses, right, but who's doing the labor? Like, it's going to Foxconn. And, and, you know, the, and so. From what I understand, our GDP is not that great. We're like on the border. We're like borderline in a recession. But the reason that the way they're keeping us out of a recession is by funding the wars, like the military industrial complex, like funding more money into these private military contractors, all these billions and billions of dollars, is keeping us above that line of

us falling into a quote unquote recession. Well, I, in no way can speak on on whether or not we're in a recession or not because I don't think anybody actually can. I mean, there's, there's, you know, the last thing that I heard is people will always say, well, the target is 2% inflation. Okay, but like, what is it actually? And also, how do you define that? But what you have is you have these really high producing businesses. And so as we've sort of evolved as a nation economically, we're not in the sort of post-World War II era where manufacturing is being done in the United States and it's being shipped off to.

to other nations to sell our goods there because we're just the only game in town. Europe used to be, but its infrastructure was destroyed. And nobody could ship to both the Pacific and Atlantic. And so suddenly we had this robust working class where not only are we building in the United States, but we're innovating in the United States and people are getting richer and richer.

That's the point where people are talking about. That's when America was great again. Right, right. When people had this assumption that their life was just getting better because, I mean, I look at my parents and my, you know, grandparents, you know, they came from being very small town subsistence farmers to my dad's a judge and my mom's an author, to, you know, being metropolitan, highly educated, wealthier people than their ancestors could have imagined. And so when people in the sort of make America great, when people in the make America great, how do I think again?

Yeah. When people in the MAGA movement are saying, make America great again, I think what they're calling for is, give me a future I can actually believe in again. And that was happening in a massive economic way post-World War II. But then, you know, we become, instead of a labor-based economy,

instead of a value-added-based economy, we become a knowledge-based economy. So suddenly you need one Steve Jobs instead of a thousand workers at a Ford plant. Right. Right. And suddenly, labor goes to India. It goes to China. It goes to wherever the price point is the lowest. It goes to wherever the price point is the lowest. Because, wow. Wow.

Huge dick on that guy. Hypes. Yeah. Because money ultimately doesn't care about borders. Right. Yeah. And so that's one of the reasons that I think that we're having this re-evaluation of what a country is. In fact, there are some people who think that, like, we're moving towards this, like,

statehood as a service model, right? Citizenship, almost as subscription model. I mean, think what does your country do for you? Right. It provides protection. Sometimes it provides health care. It provides a galvanizing sense of national identity. But what does that mean when we can have relationships across the entire world?

People are playing online with players from Russia and from all over the world. They have an affinity group that doesn't live where they live. And they're working. I mean, I've worked from Albania for American companies for a bunch of different. companies and you know never once lived in the United States well I did live in the United States but right yeah so so what you know what does a country do for us in this world where we are all becoming sort of like digital global citizens that's kind of creepy that is interesting that you know that's that's one of the things that people talk about when they talk

about like type zero to type one two and three civilizations as they say like right now we're a type zero civilization. And to become a type one civilization, we have to become a global civilization. Yep. Yep. And we're kind of on our way there because we have the internet. The internet has made us far more global. But we're also experiencing these enormous growing pains. And because of these growing pains, it's leaving, I think, a lot of the world with this huge identity crisis. And that's why it's so interesting to look at unrecognized nations, where it's like, like for example, the The next place I ended up going to is a place called Transnistria. Have you heard about it?

Only from you. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, Transnistria, sometimes called the Black Hole of Europe. It's this sort of like little slip of an autonomous zone. It's only recognized by three other countries who are also themselves unrecognized. It's a Russian protectorate, even though Russia doesn't recognize Transnistria as its own sovereign nation. That's the center of Tirass ball. That's their flag.

Oh, wow. Try to find a map of it. Yeah, it's a really tiny little slip of land, and it's right on the border of Ukraine. Oh, okay, right by Odessa? Yep, correct. It's only, I think, like an hour or two away from Odessa by train. Okay. Yeah.

And what made you want to go to Transnistria? So they were having Russian elections. So I was in Kosovo for the 10-year anniversary, and that's in the book. And then I realized, like, wow, you know, Russian elections are happening outside of Russia. Super interesting. So in this country where even Russia doesn't recognize that it's its own autonomous country, they're hosting Russian elections because it's a majority Russian area. And the reason that it is a majority Russian area is because literally because Catherine

the Great went to war with the Ottomans back in the day. And they took this little slip of land. Because what, you can see the sort of border there. Yeah, there's this river, the Dinoester. Okay, yeah. Yeah, the Denae River, hence the name, transdenistria. Trans across. Zoom out a little bit so I can see kind of like the whole area.

And so what it does is it lets you have access to the Black Sea. Right. And so Catherine the Great saw this as a geopolitical imperative. We've got to push the Ottomans off of this area so we can gain access to the Black Sea. the Black Sea. And then when the Soviet Union sort of took a hold, the Bolshevik revolution kicked off and suddenly they needed to gather up all of these areas. They needed to gather up Moldova. They needed to push their borders all the way out to Central Asia. But they needed to install that galvanizing sense of identity within the people that are there. So suddenly,

you're not a Moldova and you're a Soviet. But there were all these Russian speaking people who were in the transnistrian area. And so they're sort of sandwiched in between Ukrainians and Moldovans. And as the Soviet Union started to rattle apart, they were like, no, we're, we want to, we want to keep the dream alive. And so that's why they still have Lenin statues. That's why they still have portraits of Stalin. I mean, it's literally like going back in time to like what the Soviet Union would look

like today. except in this sort of weird, oligarchic way. Like, a lot of the things in Transnesee are run by literally a grocery store brand called Sheriff. Wow. Yeah. Look up a grocery store. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, it's a great idea to, if you want to sort of like have control over an area, like, what do grocery stores do?

They're responsible for supply lines. They're responsible for large amounts of real estate. They partner with local businesses, and they control the food, right? Right. So, Sheriff, second largest. The second largest company in the unrecognized breakaway state, Transnistria, Sheriff's supermarket, under construction in the city of Bendry. Yep.

Whoa. Yeah, so they own the majority of everything in Transnistria. And, you know, it's a way of having a sort of de facto government. A great way of doing that is keeping control over the food. It's keeping control over how resources are brought in supply lines. And since Moldova has this, has a sort of agreement with their companies, you can do business so long as they're considered Moldovan companies. Now, Sheriff is kind of the only game in town because they have relationships with that. Look at that logo.

It's a literal sheriff star. Yep. In fact, they even have their own. Did that come from like the U.S.? Was that inspired by like... So I've heard different things that I in no way can confirm. But I heard that the inspiration from it

was the fact that the sort of, you know, the lawmakers in the town, the sort of secret police and the... Yeah, so the lawmakers that were still active in Transnistria were like, okay, well, what are we even call our company now that we need to have a legitimate company? It's like, well, what are we? We're the sheriffs of this town.

Sheriff Star. Whoa. I don't know if that's true or not. I really have no idea. That's so funny. That sheriff star exists for a reason. They even have their own football team. Sheriff football team?

Yeah. Really? Like soccer. Soccer football. Yeah. Uh-huh. And I think they did pretty well this last year in something. But yeah, it's a bizarre, bizarre place.

And it kind of feels like you're being watched all the time. It feels like you're being followed there. I don't know if I was. It certainly seemed to be the case. But it also feels like you're kind of living in this fossil. You know, people in Transnistria have like five, six passports because they need to have some recognition outside of Transnistria because nobody recognizes a Transnistrian passport.

So they'll have, you know, they'll have Moldovan, Romanian, Russian passports. Okay. And, you know, it's, you look at that place and what it feels like, being in that place is like, well, what's the future that people want here? Is it that they're once again subsumed into larger Russia? I don't know. What kind of sense did you get from the people there? I got the sense that people considered themselves Russian,

but they also knew that they were kind of between this rock and a hard place. That, and I certainly can't speak for all Transnistrians, but that they were sort of on this island, which they clearly are. And a lot of the stuff with the Ukraine war now, too, is like, well, is Transnistria, is the Transnistrian military going to activate and going to Ukraine? Because they have Russian tanks that are over there, and they have a Transnistrian military. So, wow. I'm actually surprised that it hasn't really activated the same way.

I'm actually super surprised that Transnistria has not really been a part of the war effort at this point. But from what I understand, anyway, there is this strategy of trying to connect the land bridge. You know, if you go along from southern Transnistria all the way across to the occupied territories in Ukraine, that that would sort of help them gather up the larger Ukraine or that would help them gather up the larger Russian forces So what side would they be on? Ukraine or Russia? The transnistrians?

Yeah. Likely Russia. They're Russian speaking. Right. Yeah. That's like with a lot of areas in Ukraine, right? Like Crimea is mainly Russian. Yeah.

I mean, that's what I've heard. I don't know. I've never been to Ukraine. Right. So, yeah, I mean. That's just what I've seen in documentaries. Totally something that I've heard and seen, yeah. but I truly don't know.

Yeah, it's a really strange place. But at this point, I, you know, there's three countries down that were all unrecognized. And during this time, I had met this journalist in Iraq, and I told him about my project. And he was like, oh, man, if you like unrecognized nations, you should get a load of Lieberland. I was like, what's that?

Leberland. Where's this at? It is an island in the middle of the Danube River, the Free Republic of Libra Land. How big is it? Seven square kilometers. It's about as big as the Vatican. That's their flag. And so this journalist...

These people could come up better flags. You know, I agree. I agree. That flag is a little busy for my taste. So this journalist was like, yeah, it was. you should check out Libra Land. Do you want the president's email? And I was like, yeah, totally.

I'll take that. So I basically just started bothering like the government of Libra Land for like months while I was in, you know, once I got kicked out of Turkey and then I was in Kosovo and then I was in Transnistria. Just started bothering them.

And eventually they wrote me back while I was in Transnistria and they're like, look, if you want to come and visit us, you can come for our third year anniversary. And I was like, done. Let's get to the Danube. And so ran basically all the way across from Eastern Moldova to Novisad, Serbia, which is where they were sort of having their third-year anniversary celebrations.

And somebody was like, okay, if you want to mate Lieberlanders, you've got to go up to Appetine Harbor. Now, I didn't really know much about Libreland at the time. I knew that they were the world's first libertarian micro-state, and that was it. Like, that's all I knew. And so I go up to the small harbor in Appetine, Apatine. So I go up to the small harbor in Apatine, Serbia, and I see a boat, just like a houseboat hanging out in the harbor, and it's flying the Libra Land flag, and I'm like, is that

Liberland? Where is it? And so, yeah, there's their website. Great website for our country. I know, right? And so I go up to the boat and there's like, you know, this shirtless Dutch dude on top of it and he's like, you, are you a Librelander? I'm like, no.

And he's like, well, come aboard. Let's change that. And I'm like, okay. So I go up on this boat and I start talking with this dude. And I'm like, this is what I've been working on. And so he starts talking about how like they are not only the world's first libertarian nation, but they're this sort of crypto anarchist nation that's funded based off of cryptocurrencies.

Oh, wow. And so what, you know, they've done this, this really fascinating little trick of statecraft, right? So when Yugoslavia fell, there was this declared no man's land between Serbia and Croatia. And in that no man's land, that was the Danube River, there was this island, that island right there,

that nobody really claimed. Croatia decided that they, They weren't going to claim it. Serbia decided they weren't going to claim it. So nobody was on this island. Cut to the future. And a libertarian political scientist guy, well, I guess I should just, I'm just going to call it. So anyway, I don't know what to call him. Sounds good.

Yeah, cut to the future. The president of Libra Land is like, I think I can start a country there. And he's a, you know, Bitcoin millionaire. He goes up and he's like puts a flag. again and he's like, I got a country. Now I just got to work on recognition. Because remember, if you start a country, it's two things. It's like declaration, recognition. And so they start building actual infrastructure. They have Libralandians that are living on this. And mostly they're just like Bitcoin millionaires who are just like, this is, you know, the future of statecraft. What

we're going to do is we're going to have this sort of libertarian paradise where we fund ourselves off of cryptocurrencies and we don't have to interact with the, you know, legacy financial system. And so that's why I'm talking with this like shirtless dude on a houseboat in the middle of the Danube River. And I'm like feeling kind of two ways about this because it's like on one hand, I've been through all of these countries that have had these violent revolutions, you know, blood and treasure to draw a line on a map. And meanwhile, a bunch of cryptocurrency millionaires decide, well, we can take this land because nobody wants it. And we can start our nation here and we can sort of live parallel to the laws of the world by making our own

we can live parallel to the laws of the world by making our own laws on this little island because again now we're in a place where that's that's the that's the future plan that is the future plan yeah hmm so these crypto guys are going to fund all this I mean that's what they're trying to do right now um I ended up with them for their uh their like I said the third year anniversary and eventually, you know, after bothering the Libra Landers as much as possible, I end up in this sort of cryptocurrency conference in Novisad, Serbia. And I was, you know, just talking with the various Libralanders. And at one point somebody was like, hey, that's the Secretary of State, just go talk to him.

And it turns out he was coming to find me. And so, you know, after talking with the sort of shirtless Dutch crypto anarchist, I was like, is this just kind of like a Burning Man thing? Right. What is Libra Land at this point? And this dude is like this really genteel, super smart English guy. And so we sit down and start talking about Stacraft. And I'm like, what are we doing here?

And he's like, we're making a country. I'm like, legitimately? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, how? And so he sort of starts talking me through like the various ways they're gaining recognition. And one way was actually pretty fascinating. So they kicked everybody off of Liberland, Croatia did. Serbia nominally supports them. And so the Croatians kicked people off of Serbia, or pardon me, the Croatians kicked people off of the Liberland Island because they said it was a front to their sort of national integrity. But through treaty, they actually say that they have no claim over the island. So the president of Liberland ends up getting himself arrested by the Croatian authorities. And so, What that does is it makes them have to make a legal decision.

Do you have claim over this territory or not? Because according to this treaty, you don't. But you arrested somebody who's a European citizen for apparently illegally entering your country. So either you have a claim or you don't. And so by taking them to court, they were able to sort of start carving out recognition from Croatia. And then meanwhile, at the same time, Croatia, starts running patrols up and down the river, hoping that people just don't go to the island. But what does that do? It gives them a de facto border. So it's almost like this Iquito move.

And so I find out from the Libralandians, Librelanders, I still can't remember, which is supposed to. Libelandian sounds good. It does sound good. So I find out from them that like this whole thing is going to be like we're not allowed to step foot on the island, but the third year anniversary is going to be this boat party, right? And so they have all of these boats, like the sort of flotilla of boats that's going to like take off from the harbor and then everybody's just going to go look at the island. And I was like, I got to talk to the president. I've just, I got to like, this is, this is my mission for the day. And so I find the biggest boat. I get on that boat because I assume he's going to be on that boat. And I mean, it's a boat. So there's only so many places to look for

the president. I can't find him anywhere. And then we take off and we're sort of floating down the Danube River. suddenly Croatian patrol boats start coming alongside of us and they're like making sure that we don't eventually go to the island and it's like this sort of party-like atmosphere where everybody's drinking like Lieberland wine which is called Tierra Nullis and just like out of red solo cups and like dancing to top 40s hits and I can't find the president until I see him like until I see the president like speeding along on a jet ski throughout all of the different boats and in between the Croatian police.

And so that's Vidjadlika. And what he's doing is he's like going to each of the boats, giving a little speech and then like coming back and like giving another speech to somewhere else. And I'm just like looking, I'm zipping around on this jet ski, like between Croatian police and all these Bitcoin millionaires

on like tiny boats and big boats. And I'm just like, I got to get on that jet ski somehow. Like this is, this is. Hop on the back. Yeah, I'm like, how can I get on this jet ski? And I'm, you know, staring off the side of the boat. I'm looking for the jet ski. And I hear this guy from behind me, he's like, you want to get on the jet ski?

And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, I'm the foreign secretary. I'm like, can you just, is everybody just like nominating them? Like at this point, a Hobbit could have come up to me and been like, oh, yeah, I'm the, I'm the diplomat of Libra land. And I'm like, okay, yeah, sounds good. And he's, so turns out the foreign secretary is this guy named Tom. I think he lives in Florida. And he's like trying to create diplomatic relations with other countries for Libra Land for recognition of Liberland.

So he ends up waving down the president on his jet ski. And I finally get on the back of the jet ski with the president of Libra Land. And that is like the weirdest first impression that you can make on somebody. Did you have to hold on to him? That's exactly what I did. Do you wear a life jacket? No. Ooh.

Yeah, I probably should have. I don't let I think about it. Yeah, so I'm just like clutching on to the president of Libra land. It's beautiful. It was the strangest first impression. And I'm like, hi. And it's also loud because, you know, there's boats everywhere. There's Christian police.

And there he is. It's up it. Oh, man. Yeah. And so I'm like holding onto him like a spider monkey and he's like, hold on. And then we just. sort of blast off. I'm like, hey, I'm Eric. He's like, I know who you are. You've been sending a lot of emails.

Okay, well, this is going to be a short ride. Like, I'm like, God, okay, I can't think of a single question to ask the president of a country that just got created, even though I've been like on this, like, at this point, eight-month journey through unrecognized nations. And the only question I could come up with, and I'm like, yelling it in his ear. I'm like yelling it in this dude's ear. I'm like, So you created a nation? What advice would you give to other people who want to start a country? And he kind of like idles his engine a little bit.

And he seems to like consider it while the Croatian police are on this one side and then like Katie Perry songs are coming from the Libra landboats. And he's like, everybody should start their own country. And then he just like bust out a sick 180. And then like speeds me back to the boat and deposits me there. And I'm like, like I don't. know if I'm impressed. I don't know if like this is how nations will be created in the future. I'm like I'm just sort of like dumbstruck by a failed referendum and subsequent violent conflict in Kurdistan

butted up against a boat party and a president on a jet ski in the middle of the Danube. And so I'm just like standing on the boat and I start talking to the foreign secretary. And he's like, so where's the final stop on your trip? I'm like, oh, I'm going to go to Somaliland. It's like an autonomous region in northern Somalia. And he's like, we have an embassy there. It's like all these nation states that are trying to become nation states are like connected somehow. Yeah, they recognize one another.

Yeah. They're the first ones. Yeah. They're the early adopters. That's right. Yeah. And so he's like, you want to stay at the embassy? And I was like, I mean, yeah, totally.

Yeah, that sounds great. And so I have like a little bit of downtime in between going to Somaliland and I'm kind of waiting in Bulgaria. And I am not hearing anything from the, you know, the brass at Libra Land. And so I start sending like furious text message. I mean, you know, polite but firm text messages. I'm like, hey, remember when you said I could stay at the embassy in Somaliland? because at this point I have no money

like all my resources are drained and like there's no way to stay like safely in you know Somaliland it's a safer place in in the Horn of Africa but it's not the safest and

I think I had like $300 so I really needed to stay somewhere and so I get a call from the president and he's like so we had a problem and I'm like what's the problem and he's like well we lost our ambassador to Somaliland.

So, and I'm like, fuck. Like, there's no way I can, like, just show up in Somaliland, not knowing anybody, not knowing like anything or not having a place to stay. And so I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do at this point. And then he's like, well, I don't know if this would mess up your book, but like, would you want to do that? I'm like, what? And he's like, do you want to be the Libra Land ambassador to Somaliland?

I was like, can I stay at the embassy? And he's like, yeah, I mean, yeah, but you also have to do stuff for us. And I was like, yeah, okay, totally. So I became the Libre Land ambassador to Somaliland. Are you still currently the Librarian ambassador to Somaliland? No, no, no, no, I was just the- Are you resigned? I resigned, yes.

Yeah, yeah, I was there for like six weeks. If you, I don't know, if you look up my Instagram, you can probably find my embassy. Wow. Yeah. So you went there. Yeah, so I went there and like in the- Where exactly is Somaliland? So you have.

the horn of Africa, and you basically take the full top part of it, right? So goes up into the horn, and then on the horn is another sort of unrecognized nation called Puntland. And then there's Federal Somalia. Then there's Federal Somalia. Of course, according to Federal Somalia, according to Federal Somalia in Mogadishu, the entire Horn of Africa is theirs. But Somali land is trying to create. its own autonomous state on the Horn of Africa. You zoom out so we can see like the whole bottom of Africa. Okay, right there you go.

Yeah. So if you look up Hargeisa. Capital of Somaliland. That's right. Wow. Google recognizes it. Google recognizes it. But probably with a dotted line.

That'd be my guess. So we click on the map. That's called the breasts of Hargeza, those mountains. Oh, look at this. Dotted line. Red dotted line. That's just around the city as far. I know.

Oh, okay, I guess. Yeah. But if you go back a little bit more, yeah. Oh, it doesn't even have a dotted line. Hmm. Yeah. So in the beginning, I basically had two jobs as ambassador to Somali. In the beginning, I had like two jobs as acting ambassador from Libra Land to Somaliland.

First job was to buy furniture for the embassy because there was just, it was just like an empty mansion. And then the second one was to like establish diplomatic relations between Libra Land and Somaliland. I'm like, I have no idea what any of that means, but like... Sounds fun. Yeah, let's do it. Let's, I can buy furniture, definitely. Yeah. Let's figure out that other stuff, too.

So they had set me up with a contact who was like their attache to the UAE, and he was like building roads in Somaliland. Okay. And so he kind of gave me a contact in the Somaliland government. So I ended up having like a meeting with the vice president's Somaliland. And it was astounding at this point because I was like, like, I'm just some dude who was on the back of a jet ski. Like, I, I, I'm just, like, I just showed up in Somaliland. I have no idea what's going on right now.

But, like, I have to go ambassador. And I was shocked because, like, when I, as soon as I got in front of the vice president of Somaliland, I was like, all right, let's just say whatever. a politician would say, like, let's try and say diplomatic stuff. And I was like, oh, yeah, ah, so that's Abdul Rahman. He was my, he was like my, my main contact. Okay. And he kind of plugged me into the, the infrastructure of Somaliland. Incredible guy. Sadly, he's passed. Oh, no. How did he die? I don't know. But, but truly, truly incredible man. Yeah, really, really wonderful human being. Right now, we're in the middle of the Somali desert, because that relates to the third job that I had. So I spent about like a week in the country, and then all the

internet just kind of shut off. And I had no idea what was going on. And I went to the sort of like local international hotel, and I was like, do you guys have internet? And they're like, no, there's no internet anywhere. I don't know, had like zero clue what had happened in the country. When the internet came back on, we found out that a cyclone had blown through the country, Cyclone Sagar. And yeah, there we go. News from our embassy in Hargiza, Somaliland. Thank you, Eric. Currently working on getting aid. Cyclone victims on behalf of Liberland underscore Orr, we will have food to 100 families before EID.

Yeah. Yeah. So the third goal that I had other than buying furniture and establishing diplomatic relations was to deliver aid. And I'm like, I'm a Peace Corps volunteer. Like, I taught English to Albanians for two years and, like, worked on a mobile library. I have no idea how to deliver aid. And specifically, I have no idea how to get money into Somaliland.

Right. So I'm like, so I started like a Somali bank account on behalf of Lieberland. And that was a wild conversation because, like, I literally had to go to a bank in Hargiza and be like, I am the ambassador from Libra Land to Somaliland. And I would like to use your bank as our official embassy treasury. I have no idea what they thought I was, but they thought it was hilarious. They, like, they opened up this bank account. But then when the cyclone came through, I was talking with the Secretary of State. And he's like, well, that's not going to work because we can't get the money there soon enough.

and we need to get it to our, you know, our aid team. And I'm like, who's the aid team? They're like, it's you. I'm like, oh, nice. Good. And so they transferred money to the guy who I was working out of his office, the Syrian guy, and Bitcoin. And then he just like handed me $15,000, like in cash. And in U.S. tax cash?

Yeah. So the money in Somaliland is kind of funny, to say the least. So it's like, it's so depreciated from inflation that it's, it's, you, you pay for things in like blocks of cash. Or you use like sort of a digital transfer where you text somebody to bring a certain amount of cash. So like the de facto currency is the US dollar. So I just had like $15,000, which was like super unsatisfying how few bills that was. Like I was kind of hoping for like a big metal case or something, but it was just, you know, small stack like that of $100. bills. And I'm like, okay, well, I have to use this money to, yeah, there's Puntland. I have to use this

money in order to figure out how we deliver aid. And so, again, I go meet with the vice president. I think if you go to my Instagram, you can see a picture of me with the vice president and and Abdul Rahman. Sorry, I'm sending you all over the world. I'm out of any pirates? No, no. That's, um, uh, uh, I was pretty far from the ocean. I did go to the ocean at one point to a port called Berbera. But it's, I mean, Somalia's a big place. Yeah.

And so that certainly is an element that exists in Somalia, but it's not like, you know, you're not saying like, you know, people being like, I'm a pirate. Right. At least I didn't. So it's like a largely nomadic culture. How far is that from the Red Sea? I think it took me about two hours to get there. Okay.

That was a weird road trip. So this is a total sidebar, but like there's this one hotel that's kind of like the international hotel in the area. And I walk in one day and there's this white dude there and like we stand out in Somalia. Like definitely stand out. And this guy sees me in the coffee shop and he stands up and he's like, You want to have coffee with us? I'm like, I mean, I guess. And so he's with, from what I understood, a preacher, Reverend Anthony. And this guy is named Robbie. And he was also with, like, a Chinese student that was studying in Ethiopia. And I'm like, what are you guys doing in Hargeisa right now? And they're like, what are you doing in Hargeisa right now? And I'm like, yeah, I guess, I mean, whatever. whatever story you have probably isn't as weird.

So, fair point. And so what they were doing, Robbie used to be in the American military. Reverend Anthony was his preacher. They connected while he was in, I guess, some military school in Coronado. And I never quite got an understanding of who the Chinese student was. He didn't speak anything that I spoke. Right. But Robbie spoke Cantonese, and he also speaks Swedish.

And so what he was there to do was to open businesses and what he called blue water markets. So anytime there is some geopolitically unstable area, he goes in and he has manufacturing in China and he decides to sell cell phones or whatever in these areas. And the dude had a passport like that. Wow. I mean, if anybody, he was a fascinating guy. I was but anyway he invite he

I think you can see Reverend Anthony and I don't know if you have my my my Instagram up but anyway so anyway we're having coffee for a bed

I tell him that I'm the Libreland ambassador to Somaliland and he's like oh cool well we're going on a road trip to Berbera tomorrow do you want to come I'm like I mean I'd like to

but you know to travel outside of Hargezi you need armed guards and I'm like I don't have the money for armed guards guards and he's like oh it's fine we got him i'm like okay so decided to just like get in this like small convoy with robbie bishop anthony and then this this like chinese student that was calling himself david and we just like went sightseeing together like we went to these caves and saw like old cave paintings then we went to berbera port and we're like just sort of looking around and we're

like yeah it's a it's a port he's like so i'm gonna start a cell phone business here i'm like Cool. Literally none of that made it into the book because I'm like, I have no idea what happened. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Super interesting, dude. But anyway, yeah, so Cyclone comes through.

I have to figure out how to deliver aid. Meet with the vice president again. And I'm like, okay, we're trying to make an aid delivery on behalf of Libra Land to Somaliland. All I'm asking is we provide translators and guards to take us out to the affected area and will you give us an idea of like you know what we what these people's needs are and he's like fine and so i take i think it was like eight thousand dollars me and abdul rahman and we just bought like tons of food we brought and we bought like i think it was like bags of flour oil sugar salt um and uh just all these workmen just sort of loaded it up in this enormous car

enormous truck. And they drove it down in the center of the desert. And I was like, okay, great, we've delivered aid. And then Abdullah Haman is like, no, no, like, you know, that's not delivering aid. Like, I'm like, what are you talking about?

Like, we sent the food out there, right? And he's like, no, like, you have to go out there because, like, we need pictures and stuff. I'm like, oh, right. Like, diplomatic aid is soft power. So it's not enough that like we're just giving food to people who need food. It's a matter. What matters is the story around the aid, right?

And so we all traveled out to the middle of the desert to find this group of nomads who were really affected by it. The cyclone had come through, pulled a lot of water pumps out of the, out of the ground where they were irrigating their, their animals. A lot of the wealth in Somaliland is kept in the form of goats, killed a lot of goats. even killed a lot of the people in the area. But then there are also these second knock-on effects of a disaster, because when you don't have this sort of robust system to deal with a disaster like a cyclone, then there are these secondary effects which are even worse. So nobody has pumps to get clean water, so suddenly there's a cholera outbreak.

And so we drive for like eight hours through the desert. We're in the center of just this sweltering, sweltering heat. You know, nothing but mountains and a couple of like improvised structures around us, sort of like these stick tents. And nobody's there. And I go up to Abdul Rahman. I'm like, where is everybody? He's like, oh, they had deaths from cholera today.

Oh, yeah. So this is, over there is the vice president of Somaliland at the time. On my left is Abdulahman. I don't know if you could tell. I'm the one in the white shirt. Oh shit. Okay. I see now. Yeah, yeah. I have the glasses. Right, yeah. Your hair looks great.

Thanks. But, you know, we're just sort of sitting there in this empty village. And he's like, we've got to wait for people to come back from the funeral. And I'm like, oh, God, like, can't this doesn't seem like a photo op time. Like, can't we just leave the food for the people? And he's like, no, no, you know, this is the point. This is what we're doing. and I'm like, it was at that point that I was like, you know.

Hearts and minds. Exactly. I'm not an aid worker. I'm a political tool. Right. And that just like, so the sort of head of the village is walking me through and he's, he's showing me the affected areas where the pumps had been taken out. And all of the, all of the goats that, I mean, they looked like, they looked like stone because they'd been sort of sand. blasted and they died sort of embedded into the into the ground. I think you can probably see

some of them. And he showed me all of these goats that look like they were running away from the storm, but of course that's like that's their wealth. And he's telling me, you know, we need this, we need that, we need the other things. You know, we need new pumps. We need livestock again. Right. You know, food's great, but we need all these things. And I'm listening to him and I'm telling him through my translator, it's like, I'll relate all this information back to Libra Land. I'll relate all this back. But at the same time, I'm also like, I know that my job here was to be a political tool. And it wasn't to have sustained aid.

And it was at that point where I was like, you know, as an acting politician for like the briefest amount of time, I realized so quickly that I was behaving like a politician. I was, you know, the beneficiary of respect that I didn't earn because I was just operating on behalf of something that was slightly more powerful than myself. People were treating me in a way that was like respectful and deference. People were treating me in a way that was, people were treating me in a way that was, people were treating. treating me in a way that was respectful and full of deference because they assumed that I had power, which I got because I was just on the back of a random jet ski. And I was acting as the role determined that I acted. And so I was like, I'll tell the president.

But I didn't know at that point, like, is it cruel for me to give this person a certain amount of hope that Libraland will come and help them more? And so I came back from that day after delivering aid And I was like I don't know I like I was the beneficiary of You know the illusion of state backed power I was a Political tool for a photo op I brought food to people

Cool but like to what end Right Is it just to gain recognition I mean It's interesting, man. It's like a, it's like this just like very, the very smallest scale of what some of the biggest nations in the world to do on just a massive scale. Yeah. And that's that's one of the things that you notice in smaller countries where, you know, the writing on the wall is so much clearer, right? that a nation has to push to gain recognition in whatever way possible. Again, it's like that concept of how do you generate consent,

not just of the governed, but how do you generate consent to do business with you as a place that's doing your best to carve out a new line on a map? How do you get somebody to say, I'm here and you're here? And, you know, you can do that at the end of a gun. That's the way it's been done throughout a lot of, history or like a sword um but you can also do that through gifts through aid and yeah those are that one of the goats those are yeah yeah it's it was i mean the day fun oddly enough the day after

um like i i'd basically done all the other you know like i i gave aid and i um uh and i and i made diplomatic relations with Somaliland, you know. Yeah. And then I had been like putting off buying furniture because I was like, I don't really care how much furniture costs. I'm going to try and give as much money to the aid donation as possible. Right. And so like my last week, I was like, I got to buy furniture for this embassy.

Like I said, I would do it. So I went out with one of my buddies and just went like to, I guess the Somali land version of an IKEA. We were just like looking at bed frames and offices. And there was a surprising amount of bed frames that like glow in the dark and had like lion heads roaring on them. Really? Yeah.

I mean, really fancy. Sounds pretty cool actually. It was. But I was like, this is not embassy furniture. Yeah. I did think briefly like get them like the glow in the dark lionhead furniture. I didn't do that though. So I ended up buying them the furniture.

As far as I know, the Libreland Embassy and Hargues. Giza is still going. Really? Yeah, I think so. With your furniture that you got? With Libraland's furniture. With Libreland's furniture. That Libreland got.

Yeah, that, that, are you looking up Somali? Somali furniture? You got up on the lion head glow in the dark furniture. I mean, we went to like a couple of stores and it was like a theme. Yeah. I was like, you know, it was like. How do you think, how do you think about the, like, after all these crazy experiences, like seeing what it's like on the ground, like dealing with these people firsthand,

which you didn't expect to experience that was a great learning experience. Yeah. How do you think about like what's going on, for example, between Israel and Palestine? Don't know at all. No. No.

I was, so when I was, when I was, you know, briefly an analyst, like my area was like, I was researching a lot of the Levantine area. So like Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan yeah pretty much Southern Turkey over to Iran I never once

like touched on Israel and Palestine well talking about what like the way the way you're speaking about like these states and how they look at the future and the past yeah Israel's a very interesting one super probably one of the most interesting ones they have from people I've talked to they have like the best intelligence agency that exists on earth.

And like person for person, like I don't, if there was a war between the U.S. and Israel, I don't think, I don't think that they would win the war. But when it comes to like their intelligence apparatus, it is far more effective. And they're willing to go way farther than we're willing to go. And I think in Israel, I think the citizens are, it's mandatory, they have to serve in the military for a certain at a time. So, I mean, like I said, you know, I've never, I really have not ever researched Israel and Palestine that much, because my work really never touched on it. And also specifically with this book, anyway, you are not here, travels through countries that don't exist. With that, I tried to stay

away from kind of the, you know, the big, like, highly politically charged unrecognized nations. because, I mean, especially in the case of Palestine, I think the last thing that the world needs is like some dude from Los Angeles being like, I got it, guys. Right. I figured it out. For sure. Yeah. But I think that to your point, but they, like, what I'm saying is like when you think about that and you think about Israel, it's like they like they have more of a like national galvanizing, for lack of a better word story. anybody like look at the history it's a great one yeah look at the history of israel and like like if

anyone has more will to continue to thrive into the future it's them well i mean i'm sure there's other countries too yeah yeah well i mean i i think that that from from one perspective you should look at the the uh the constraints and imperatives of of israel right you know they're a they're a small nation and they are surrounded by antagonistic nations to them. So what does that necessitate that you do? Like turn everybody into a soldier. Like have an incredible defense apparatus. Right. Have strong international relations. That's the imperative there. They're constrained by their land mass because they don't have, like they're constrained by their landmass because they don't have the natural buffers that we have. Right. So that's a big.

part of it. But I think, I mean, and in terms of national story, sure. I mean, you know, according to, I wouldn't speak for an Israeli, but like, it goes back to the Bible times. So, right. Right. Like, that's a pretty compelling story. Yes.

You know? I mean, I think that when I think about the countries that I stayed away from, I mean, largely I was constrained by the fact that, like, one, I didn't know I was going to go throughout all of these other unrecognized countries because I didn't think I was going to get banned from Turkey. You know, crazy. But the other thing was, like, I wanted to sort of shine a light

on this conversation as it is globally. Like, these aren't the only unrecognized nations that exist in the world. There's literally, probably about 100 of them, as far as I know. Wow. And that's, you know, there's, you look at Taiwan too

you know there's partial recognition of Taiwan Tibet is another one of these areas there's constant independence movements in Spain obviously Romania even has an independent contingent in it so I think that there are

independence movements in the Transylvanian area so this is kind of indicative of where we're moving globally, in my opinion anyway. Because now the things that previously, you know, we're not a part of empires anymore. Like, we're not a part of the Ottoman Empire. The time of empire is largely spent. And now we're, as you say, like trying to become a global community.

But what does a global community mean? can you separate your own national identity away from the pool of wealth that your nation controls and its ability to do violent force, presumably on your behalf. And that I don't know. You know, it kind of goes back to the question about us as Americans, right?

So without the American military, without it being wealthy and pretty, presumably prosperous nation, like what makes us Americans? I think, so here's a good thought experiment that I think about sometimes. Let's say, you know, America goes away. And there's a huge refugee population of Americans, people calling themselves Americans who've spread throughout the entire world. How do we group up?

How do we what? How do we group up? Okay. Let's say there's, you know, an American contingent in, you know, Beijing. Do we have a America town? Like, do we carve out our own, you know, little neighborhood where only Americans go? I don't know, probably not.

Like, I think we would separate differently than that. Because, again, it goes back to the individual nature. It goes back to the individual nature of being an American. Would we go back to whatever our previous nationality was? I don't know. Like, how do you find those people who believe the same national story as you do? And because of that, even though you don't know that person, you have a shared affinity with them. Right.

I mean, right now we're seeing this movement of people who are, I think they're calling them the passport bros. So, yeah, like, there are these golden passport schemes. This is huge in the crypto universe where it's like, Okay, well, I have a bunch of wealth, but the U.S. makes it really difficult to cash out my cryptocurrency. Or it's, you know, my businesses are not protected in any sort of legal framework in the United States. So what do I do? Get a new passport. Malta is like this huge place for this. You get a Maltese passport.

Suddenly you get access to the EU, and they have pretty liberal laws in terms of working with alternative finance. And so we're already seeing wealthier classes of people start to find alternatives to their citizenship so that they can benefit more. Wow. And there's even, oh, man, this is such a great point and I can't remember what it's called exactly. The Seafarer movement, can you look that out?

Seafarer? Oh, this is crazy. Yeah, yeah. This is really dope. It's like billionaires who are starting their own nations on the sea. Try Seafarer or Peter Thiel. Libertarian C-steading utopia from Peter Thiel.

Mm-hmm. Whoa, what is this? Silicon Valley billionaire's dream of a floating libertarian utopia may have finally been killed. Peter Teal's dreams of a... Okay, that's the same title. Keep going down. Wow. What was this all about? So the sea-steading movement, from what I understood

was, again, it's this movement where you can have all the benefits of coming from, you know, whatever nation you come from, but you can also resist any detriments that come in the form of taxation. Ah, right? Okay. So, hey, I don't live in America anymore. I live on these crazy libertarian boats.

Right. Or maybe on an island in the Danube River or in the Metaverse. Right. Now you don't have to pay taxes. This is the thing that I'm talking about about the statehood as a service model, right? it's it's citizenship that provides for you the things that a nation provides for you but it's essentially the wealth and protection of the nation state without actually the culture or the story of the nation state right so if you're a guy who's like a billionaire like peter teal living on a yacht

being a seafarer you're still you can still have businesses in america and make tons of money not to pay taxes but you just don't get, but can you still benefit from having residents there? I have no idea. So if you were a seafair like this, would you be able to legally be a citizen of the United States as well as like some other country? So there are certain countries that allow for like dual citizenship. Yeah.

And the U.S. is like one of the, if one of the two countries in the world that taxes you no matter where you live. Actually, weirdly, the other one is Eritrea. Okay. Yeah. So that I don't quite understand. Well, that's an interesting thing that people always complain about in media too. They complain about all the billionaires like Elon and Bezos and Zuckerberg, like putting all their bank accounts overseas so they don't have to pay taxes.

Right. So what happens if you put your life overseas so that you don't have to pay taxes? Right. Then you, this is sort of spelled out in a book. It's actually pretty haunting. I think it was written in 1997. It's called The Sovereign Individual. And so what it does is it predicts the rise of the failure of nation states to provide what citizens would need or want and the rise of self-sovereign individuals who can provide their own goods, services, and protection.

Right, right. And so, like, I mean, I'm, and you'll see in the book, like, I'm of a couple of minds about, like, the libertarian leanings that exist, especially in the cryptocurrency space and in, in Liberland, certainly. Because I think that there's, like, two ways that you end up becoming hardcore libertarian. And it's like, one, you're wealthy enough to afford only private services. Yes. Right? Yeah. The other way is your state's collapsed.

And suddenly you're a libertarian overnight because the state isn't there to provide any services for you. So suddenly you just became a libertarian. And so I think the people on the one side of things where they've become wealthy enough to afford only private services to sort of dance in between the borders of the world and to fund themselves beyond. borders and oftentimes laws, they look at the rest of the state-based population. They're like, well, we did. Why can't you? And it's like, well, because it takes a lot of capital

to sort of reach the escape velocity of the nation state. Right. And at the point that you reach that escape velocity, you're not believing that national story anymore because you just don't care, in my opinion. Right. Yeah, man. that that that that's probably true like what does the u.s do for you at the point that you provide your

own protection you provide your own health care you provide your own everything if you move out well at some point like okay let's take let's take Elon Musk sure for example he relies on a lot of government contracts for a lot of his businesses like space x or Tesla or whatever maybe so he kind of depends on the US for this stuff So if the U.S. wanted to strong arm him into paying taxes, they could. They could say, okay, we're just going to get rid of all your contracts and basically, like, choke off all this money from your companies. Same thing with, same thing with Bezos, right?

Because the U.S. could, if they wanted to, they could decide to restrict Amazon or, like, put their boot on the neck of Amazon and sort of like cut off. like that that's what's happening with um that's what's similar to what's happening with in the FDA right now with um supplement products so there's there's in the FDA and with pharmaceutical companies they I don't know if you're familiar but they have like yeah I heard your bet on that there's these patents right these patent laws where pharmaceutical companies can basically get patents on certain drugs and make a ton of fucking money on these drugs. But there's this weird, blurry line between certain supplements and patentable drugs.

And if one of these big pharmaceutical companies, which they work in cahoots with the FDA, like they literally are like somebody who works for the FDA, I can get hired to work at a pharmaceutical company. It's like a revolving door. So if the FDA decides that they want to help this pharmaceutical company by making this supplement a quote unquote drug under patent, the FDA can strong arm Amazon into taking all that shit off of Amazon. So the government can do things to manipulate these big companies that these like billionaires, oligarchs rely on. It's totally accurate. But when we say the government,

you're talking about the American government. American, yeah, exactly. And suddenly we're seeing the fact that America is the only game in town. You know, there's a enormous amount of wealth that's coming up in China, in Southeast Asia, in Africa, especially. There's an enormous amount of wealth there. And when you have a business, let's say a digital business where you're trading bits and not atoms, then you'll put your business in whatever country is the most permissive and it has the best deal for you. So yeah, certainly the U.S. could, you know, stomp on on

Elon Musk's companies. But what would the U.S. miss out on? Right. What wouldn't they have access to? Right. You know, and a lot of, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the ethos

has been privatize in the U.S. Right. Privatize R&D and stimulate businesses that are doing things in our national interest. Right. So if you stop, on businesses that are within your national interest, then what happens to your country?

Hmm. You know, and this is, this is the, the dangerous thing about money not caring about borders. And so what happens then when there's an enormous amount of fiscal flight to more permissive areas, like what happens to the, the people that are left within those borders? Are they just customers that are stuck believing in national? story. Right. I mean, I don't know. I mean, the sovereign individual sort of predicts that everybody will have a certain amount of sovereignty, but this will come after a period of, you know,

chaos as people are emerging from sovereign nation states where their identity is plugged into a nation state to being a global citizen. Yeah. And I mean, like, there, and of course in the sort of like conspiracy theorist community, there's like this huge antagonism towards like, well, they want one world government. And it's like, like, one, who's they? Cloud Schwab, Bill Gates. So I hear from the YouTube videos that I watch at like 3 o'clock in the morning.

tinfoil hat strapped on. But yeah, it's like, what do we progress towards? Do we progress towards a globe that's just dominated by one power? Or is it a group of nation states that are subject to the most powerful nation state? I don't know. I think it ultimately depends on our reassessing of what national identity is. and can you separate that away from, again, military power and financial power? Like, does that happen?

I don't know. I can't even fucking wrap my head around what that would look like. I can't either. Like, there was, there's some really cool sci-fi books about these things kind of happening. Really? Yeah. There's one, oh, it's a fantastic book called Forever War. It's not, there's a, there's a forever.

War book by Dexter Filkins. And that's about Iraq. But then Forever War is about, I think it's by Joe Halterman. And it was written in the 1970s, I want to say, incredible, incredible book. But it's about this soldier who's sort of shipped off to war and he has to on another planet, some galaxy far, far away. And he has to go through a wormhole every single time. So every single time he leaves and comes back, like Earth is like a couple hundred years in the future.

Right. It's super cool. He stays the same age. He stays the same age. And also since his like military paycheck is like constantly getting dumped into his account, since he constantly gets paid from his like military paycheck, he's like wealthy beyond imagination. And he doesn't really know what to do with himself. And this was a book from what I understand. it was a book about the sort of dislocation that soldiers returning from Vietnam felt as soon as they came back to the United States.

And so in one of these versions of Earth that the soldier comes back to, the world had, or at least the United States, has sort of subdivided into these farming communes, which are, you know, they're well fed, but they're also sort of workhorses. and then the sort of like decadent city centers, which are quite dangerous. And people are doing more like knowledge-based labor, but everybody's sort of scrapping to find work. And so you have like this massive polarization in the community of the United States. And so if we have, and sometimes they even, this isn't the exact same topic, but they call this the barbell economy. And this is something that we'll see, you know, that people,

people predict we'll see with AI, which is like you'll have an economy that instead of going, you know, like this, where you have like people earning more and more and then in the center, you have this sort of, like I said, a robust middle class. You'll only have people who are like the laborers on one side and then the sort of like highly paid technocrats on the other side. And then everybody else would be sort of operating on like UBI, which I think is in the book. Yeah. Wow, man.

Well, we just did like four hours. Did we? Yeah. Oh, fuck. like three hours and 45 minutes. Look at that. So thanks. Happy.

You just broke my brain. Sorry, dude. Happy Independence Day. Happy Fourth of July. Yes, happy Fourth of July. Happy Independence Day. Perfect day to drop this. Everybody go out and buy.

You are not here. Where can they buy it? Where are they finding this book? So this will just be on Amazon for right now. You can get in paper. So you can get in paperback or you can get in digital. And then other stores to come. I think it's right now just in.

in wherever Amazon ships to in Europe and the United States. Perfect. More places to come. Where are you going next? So many places, man. So I'm going to, I'm going to New York. Yeah, I'm actually just going to Friends Weddings. I'm not going into any interesting at all.

Yeah, I'm going to go back to Albania and like chill out for a while. It's been a lot of pushing on this book to make it happen. So, yeah, I mean, there are some other thoughts of projects that I want to do with, like, weird travel stuff. I kind of want to do... Back to the Arctic. So that's one thought of it. It kind of is like a future book. I was thinking about doing this, like, travel book about, like, how to love the future.

Because it's like, I don't think anybody takes seriously that the human race is going to stick around for a thousand years. Right. Right. But, like, don't we have to? We got to get off the planet. Yeah, man. And so it's like I'm curious about, I'm curious about like places and technology that actually sees that as a serious thing. And actually in the Arctic and Svalbard, they kind of have a project where they're doing this kind of work where they have the Arctic seed vault, which is this crazy vault that's built under a mountain.

And obviously Svalbard is as close to the North Pole as you can get, you know, where there's human habit. And so they have all of the world's seeds that are donated by seed banks of respective nations. So that if there is a cataclysmic event and some type of species is wiped out, then they can go back to the seed vault and Svalbard, which is under this mountain. Yeah, it's actually been used a couple of times in Syria. That's wild. And on top of that, they also have, I want to say it's like the, uh, global memory project, which is a store of the world's data. And it's literally in a mine. Like I went to, and nobody's allowed in it. Like even the king of Norway is not allowed in.

And it's sort of operated as like a global service to the world on behalf of Norway. And so the memory project is like, okay, so we have this. If you look up the seed vault, it actually looks like a level from a 007. Yeah. Oh, that's the seed vault. I've seen this. Yeah, it's cool, huh?

That looks like something from Star Wars. Super. Yeah, it's not as big and impressive as you think. No? Which is unfortunate. But if you have to go into this mine to actually see the entrance of it and it's like super highly, highly guarded.

What do they keep in there? People's fucking crypto wallets? I have no idea. Or just the seeds? They didn't let me in. No, they, they, they, They keep seeds in there, but then they also keep treasure troves of the world's data. Oh, my God.

But the thing that they told me about it, which is really interesting, is that they're like, we're kind of at, we have a problem. It's called the Global Memory Project. They're like, we have a problem because, like, again, if we take this whole, you know, the human race is going to be around for the next thousand years, even if there's some sort of cataclysm, we have the problem of the decay of the data. Like, what do we store it on? and, you know, I'm at the bottom of this mine with this, like, you know, really nice Norwegian tour guide.

And she's like, you know, the future of this is really storing data on DNA because, like, it won't decay at the same rate. And we're just, I'm just like, in the middle of a mine listening to this lady talk about storing, like, the world's information on DNA. Whoa. Yeah, so that's one thought. That is some spooky shit, man. Super, super. And then, yeah, I mean, I don't know. If somebody wants me to do a crazy travel thing, I'd love to do it.

The other thought is to do a back-in-time travel bit and recreate what's called the Hippie Trail, which is an overland journey from Austria to Calcutta that hippies used to do back in the 60s. It was only around for like 10 years or so. But it's not around now because, like, you know, it goes through Afghanistan. it goes through Iran. And I had an idea of like doing it with no technology that existed past 1969. Oh, that's great. It would be cool.

Yeah, you'd have to film the whole thing. Exactly. The only technology would be allowed to have his cameras. No, no, no, no, film it on film. On film? Yeah, dude. Yeah. Fuck yeah.

It'd be really cool. That would be great. If anybody wants to pay me to do that, that would be pretty cool, man. Well, we'll get you back in here to talk about it. Absolutely. To talk about that shit, too. Dude, thanks so much for having me. Honestly, huge fan.

All right. Good night, bitches.