Julian Dorey Podcast - 😱 [VIDEO] - 36 Days Alone Inside Deadliest African "GHOST NATION" | Eric Czuleger • 164

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Eric Czuleger is a Diplomat, Author, & Renegade Country Explorer. For the past 11 years, Czuleger has lived and traveled across Europe, Asia, and Africa –– getting himself into wild situations that include managing diplomatic relationships between unrecognized countries. Eric insists he is *not* in the CIA –– but absolutely no one believes him. His life memoir, “You Are Not Here” came out earlier this year.  EPISODE LINKS: - Get 15% OFF MudWTR (PROMO CODE: “JULIAN”): https://mudwtr.com/julian  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://legacy.23point5.com/creator/Julian-Dorey-9826?tab=Featured   - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/ubyXDkWx - BUY “You Are Not Here” by Eric Czuleger: https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Here-Countries/dp/B0C87SH7Q8  CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edit by Alessi Allaman - Danny Jones Podcast w/ Eric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2eMKUAR2A0&t=3765s  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Eric becomes Liberland’s Ambassador to Somaliland; History of Somaliland 10:46 - Meeting VP of Somaliland 14:11 - Settling in out in Somaliland; Iran & Kish 21:43 - Armed Guards in Somaliland; Horn of Africa 29:26 - Somaliland Economy; Somaliland vs Somalia War 33:56 - War Atrocities in Somaliland; The Somalian Cyclone 44:44 - Eric provides Liberland’s “Aid” to Somaliland Government 48:56 - An Overturned Bus; Cholera Outbreak 55:48 - Dead Goats; “Soft Power” 1:02:06 - Eric’s family in the dark; Liberland Embassy Upgrades 1:13:10 - Going to Transnistria; Eric’s higher power theory 1:17:45 - Eric leaves post; Attempted Kidnapping (Twice!); Returning to Europe 1:25:55 - Kosovo, Albania, & The Balkan Nations 1:33:55 - History of Kosovo; the Atrocities upon Albanians; Illyrian History 1:46:05 - Ottoman Empire; The Crusades & Holy Land History 1:53:58 - Peter the Hermit; Failed Crusade 2:01:23 - Israel; Benjamin Netanyahu; “The Man in the High Castle” 2:13:29 - Archduke Franz Ferdinand & WW1 History 2:20:15 - Serbia claims Kosovo Monastery; Good vs Evil 2:30:11 - Serbia-Kosovo War History 2:36:57 - Dua Lipa Albania-Kosovo Tweet Controversy 2:41:07 - Why people love deeper thought these days 2:43:48 - Jordan Peterson 2:48:01 - City on edge of Moldova; Russian Elections 2:57:37 - The Strange Company that owns Transnistria; Eric stays too long in Transnistria 3:02:23 - Eric gets tailed by Secret Agents in Transnistria 3:11:38 - The “Russian Ribbon”; Liquid Democracy 3:17:52 - The last Podcast EVER in South Jersey ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 164 - Eric Czuleger Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need your help with three quick things, and if you're watching me on Spotify video right now, you can see this timer to my right. It is going to be fast. Number one, if you are not already following the show, please hit that follow button on Spotify or whatever audio platform you're on. Number two, if you're on Spotify right now, on our show's homepage in the description, you will see a link to our Spotify podcast clips channel. That's right. We are posting clips from this podcast every single day on there. There is a whole library. So go over there and follow. And finally, number three, if you are on Spotify or Apple, please leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. Now let's get to the episode. I found out that I had a third job to do as ambassador from Liberland to Smalleyland.

When the internet was out for all of those days, I couldn't get any information in about what was going on. Before the internet came back on, I hired a satellite phone from some guy for like five bucks. And I called my girlfriend at the time and was like, hey, like, what's going on? She's like, are you okay? Like, I heard about the cyclone. I was like, what cyclone? She's like, there's there was a cyclone all throughout Somalia. I was like, what the fuck? There was a cyclone? Next couple of days, the internet clicks back on. I get a message and a call from the secretary of state of Liberland. And he's like, this actually works really well for us

because we're going to give aid and we're the only ones with the diplomatic team on the ground to give aid. And I was like, who's the team? What do they even have? All right, so Eric, for people who aren't familiar with you and your story, as a world traveler, one of the many things you've done is you found yourself in the situation where you go to all these nation states that aren't even recognized by a lot of the world, but are trying to draw their own borders and become places correct so what

happened you you were in liberland and something happens somebody dies and the president asks you to be the official ambassador for liberland which you are not even a citizen of at this time to another unrecognized country that actually has a lot of people called Somaliland. Correct. Yeah. And where is Somaliland? It's the northern portion of the Horn of Africa. And I should say that I don't know anything happened to the former ambassador. I just should have asked, and I didn't,

because I just needed someplace to stay in Somaliland. And so, yeah, I agreed to become the ambassador from Liberland to Somaliland. And then I was, I said, you know, what do I have to do as that? Well, first, I just confirmed that I could indeed stay at the embassy and he's like yeah but it's also empty we'll see if we can put a bed in there for you and i was like so i have electricity it did running water it did no it did not have running water um yeah so uh shit with a towel or some shit uh i showered out of a water bottle. I detail how to do that in the book, too. What's the name of your book?

You Are Not Here? You Are Not Here travels through countries that don't exist. And this is the fifth segment of the book. The fifth chapter is when I end up in Somaliland as the ambassador from Libra land. And also, any good Peace Corps volunteer knows how to shower out of a water bottle really well. Yeah.

I'm stellar at it. So anyway, I'm talking with the Secretary of State at this point. I'm like, what do I have to do? What do I need to do as an ambassador and he's like well uh you have to buy furniture for the embassy because it's like we said it's empty and i was like fine okay i can figure out how to buy furniture in somaliland during ramadan which makes it even harder um yeah they don't have an ikea there unfortunately yet yeah it's a it's a blue water market for Ikea, I think. And then he's like, the second job is you need to establish diplomatic and political ties between Liberland and Somaliland.

Oh, yeah. Sure, sure thing. No problem. I was like, done. Yeah. I've done that before so many times. And I should say, I've never even bought furniture before. The furniture that I had previously was a dumpster-dived couch from some place in Los Angeles.

And an ancient mattress that was on the floor. I wasn't doing great, let's say. So I'd never bought furniture before. For up to 72 months. With an available 5.3 liter V8 engine. 20 inch high gloss black painted aluminum wheels. Off road suspension with available 2 inch factory installed lift kit. Plus a towing capacity of up to 13,200 pounds. You'll be ready for anything this truck month. Truck month is on now. Ask your GMC dealer for details.

I've never been an ambassador before. And I'm just out here saying yes to life. And this is in 2018 2018 correct so um i get to hargeisa uh i land in in hargeisa and i'm told that i'm gonna have a contact out there uh and that contact is the attache to the uE on behalf of Liberland. So he has some relationship with Liberland, and he's an engineer working in Somaliland. That's all I know about him. And I also know that he's Syrian. Okay.

I'm like, cool. So show up. It's really easy to tell who's not from Somaliland as soon as you get out. People knew. They could tell that I wasn't a local. I was shocked. I was like, wow, I thought I was blending in so well.

And so I saw my contact. I think everyone can use their imagination. That's right. Fill that one in. Yeah, yeah. So I saw my contact, and he's like, oh, hey. I knew he was Syrian, so i was like shlona which is like i guess the the like syrian version of what's up in arabic and he's like you're a cia agent and

i'm like this is going so bad it's not going well immediately everybody seems to think i'm more competent than i am you're a perfect plant perfect little plant talk about like i'm the most useful idiot i am the i am the swiss army knife of idiots so anyway uh i i go with him to his office and he's like, look, I'll be your sort of Virgil and help guide you through all the machinations of Somaliland. I'm going to set you up with different contacts here and then they'll help you do whatever you need to do. And then I'm leaving for Ramadan because it's boring here during Ramadan. And have a good time and i was like okay cool and he introduced me to a wonderful guy named abdul rahman and um i'm sorry i kind of asked this already but i'm i'm putting the screenshot of the map in the corner of the screen again

this is somalia yeah and this right here is Somaliland. Yeah, so the entire horn currently, as far as the world is concerned, the entire horn is Somalia, is federal Somalia. However, there are two active independence movements. One is in Somaliland with its government government in hargeisa and then the other one is in a place called puntland and that's um depending on who you ask i mean you know these borders are always depending on who you ask um but puntland is um towards the tip of the horn um somaliland is uh it was also the sort of brit British protectorate back in the day. Okay. So during the great – I think it was called – historically it was called the Scramble for Africa.

The Italians and the British were really keen on fighting over Somalia. And for the most part, the Horn of Africa was... What year was this again? Oh, the Scramble for Africa? I have it in my book. All right, I'll look it up. Yeah, look it up. Ooh, let me see if I'm right, though. I want to say it's like the 30s.

It's like 30s? Taking a look. The Scramble for Africa began in the 1880s not even close man by 1914 the only african countries not controlled by european power were liberia and ethiopia yep so uh the italians came in they they took over large portions of somalia uh the british also fought them for that. And the previously – so Somaliland was previously a British protectorate. And then as they – as the British withdrew and – But did they call it – did the British refer to it as Somaliland? Correct.

Interesting. And so as the British began withdrawing from the business of colonization like some cool guys, Somaliland existed as this independent area for I think it was only a couple of days before deciding to merge with the rest of federal somalia or what we now know as as what the globe shows us is somalia and you said that there's different languages that are spoken across here there's different tribes uh somali as far as i know is spoken is spoken very widely in the large swath of area which Somali people live in. Because remember, Somali culture is – there is a large nomadic portion and pastoralist portion of Somali culture. So there are active nomads and pastoralists who travel from the Horn of Africa all the way up to Kenya, to Djibouti.

And so they themselves are a bit of borderless individuals. And this became pretty important as I was working on my two goals, buy furniture and establish diplomatic connections between Liberland and Somaliland, I was able to meet the vice president. And that was cool. I have a picture of that on my Instagram, if you want to take a look at that. I'll put your Instagram behind here so you can help me point it out. So this was... Scroll up. A little more. Yeah. I'll put your Instagram button here so you can help me point it out scroll up a little more

up a little bit more stop there this one right here god you look like a fed so I'm the one wearing the white shirt here I have the glasses on so yeah

I met the vice president of somaliland and um so i didn't i should say at this point i was really kind of fascinated but also weirdly disappointed in myself because as soon as i like got in this official capacity even though i was just on the right jet ski at the right time um I started talking like a politician. Like, I just started thinking about the things that a politician would say, and I was like, we at Liberland believe in self-determination of nations, and we share that we would like to extend to you brotherhood. I was just saying nonsense,

and it took nothing. It just took somebody to call me Mr. Ambassador one time, and suddenly I was so full of shit. I was like, where did I learn to talk like that? I was like, well, we at Liberland feel that there's a shared fight for self-determination and recognition amongst the globe. Dude, you are a Judd Apatow movie. You are a living embodiment of a Judd Apatow movie. Like, tell either Judd Apatow or or the cia i

don't care who employs me i just need a job hey we know we know a few people yeah let me know i'm happy to take a lie detector test oh my god yeah no no keep going so anyway um i otherwise i'm just like you know meeting people, and getting into trouble in Somaliland and, and then communications go out in the country for like a week. Um, and I was like, that's strange. Uh, and, and it's kind of unnerving and a bit dangerous because obviously I'm, I'm communicating with the folks at Liberland. I'm communicating with my family.

I had a girlfriend at the time in Bulgaria. So I need to let people know I'm alive. And there was no internet anywhere. I go to the sort of main hotel there. It's called the Ambassador Hotel, ironically. Of course it is. And that's a crazy hotel. You meet some quiet Americans at that hotel, and I'm clearly not one of them.

What do you mean, quiet Americans? Meaning that they're people who are there for very clear purposes, and then there are people who are there for purposes which might be involved in either warfare or cowboy capitalism is what i would say so either they are uh military contractors uh doing god knows what uh i usually wouldn't chat with those guys and they don't really want to chat but then you'd also meet like ngo workers who are doing interesting projects and then you would meet, like, just totally random dudes. Like, the one guy, shout out to Robbie, this story didn't make it in the book, just because it's so random. So I go into the Ambassador Hotel one day, and there's another blonde American guy who's just there and he sees me and you know clearly i i also am a bit of fish out of water and and uh he's sitting with a chinese guy and he's sitting with

a african-american guy and he's like do you want to have coffee with us and i was like okay of course yeah yeah that sounds great like strangers i, not doing anything else in my time. Still have no idea how to buy furniture. That's all I'm thinking about today. So, I sit down across from him and I meet Robbie. He is a former military Marine that ended up meeting his friend, Bishop Anthony, who is a preacher in San Diego, California. Mind you, that's why they're there. They're buddies.

And Robbie is, he is, I would say, sort of a cowboy capitalist. Like he's going into blue water markets, sometimes markets that either are totally untouched because they have weird regulatory issues or just because there's been conflict there recently. So he can be the only game in town. And he does large scale manufacturing. He wants to sell cell phones in Somaliland.

And then next to him is a Chinese guy named David. And I was like, what's up with david and then he's like oh well david uh he studies uh poetry and philosophy in ethiopia and he only speaks uh mandarin and uh and amheric i'm like and what amheric is the language of of ethiopia and i was like that's and so like robbie and david can like speak together. And I'm like, what are you guys doing here? And then they're like, what are you doing here? I'm like, I mean, I guess it's fair. Yeah, we both, it's, we're just a bunch of weird guys doing weird stuff in Somaliland, huh?

That's just, that's the four of us. Weird guys table over here. And so, I tell Robbie about Liberland, and he's super into it, and he's like, so how can I become a citizen? I'm like, I mean, go to our website. Is there, like, a join here button?

Yeah. Oh my god. Absolutely. Oh my god. I mean, and I also feel like, I mean, this is far too late for me to lodge this complaint, but I feel like I should have gotten some kind of kickback for feel like, I mean, this is far too late for me to lodge this complaint, but I feel like I should have gotten some kind of kickback for, like, getting Robbie to be a

citizen. Like, I should have gotten, like, 10% of his citizenship or something. What? I just feel like I told him about it. Maybe I should have gotten some more Liberlandian merits for making a new Liberlander. But aren't, didn't, they weren't making making they still weren't making you a citizen at this point no no i was still not a citizen i'm still not a citizen is that just because you didn't ask

probably yeah so yeah but you wanted 10 how do you get 10 of someone's wanted more liberland merits you have to pay five thousand dollars to become a liberland citizen oh there is a cost there's a real joint here cost and then you and then you get paid back in liberlandian merits in in what liberlandian merits the fuck is that i don't know but i got six thousand of them yep from my work as an ambassador still think i'm cia yes yes i do so anyway robbie is like um yeah i'm sorry like and his passport was like as thick as my thumb i mean he was insane and he had been everywhere like he was like i have a factory in dahook outside of dahook is like a city on the border of turkey and kurdistan what a name yeah that's off the hook the hook. That's off the hook.

The hook. It's off the hook. That's good. Listen, if there's Kurdish rappers out there, take it. It needs to exist. Okay. Off the hook.

So, yeah, everywhere that I, he told me that he had, like, he was one of the primary umbrella importers to North Korea. He's the guy who told me about the isle of quiche which previous and he's like yeah i've been to iran a lot it's great the isle of quiche quiche it's a um it's an island that's a free economic zone off of the coast of iran so like if you want to go to iran as an american you can just go to the isle of quiche are you sick of the coffee jitters from drinking it too many days in a row? How about that dreaded afternoon crash?

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And at checkout, use promo code JULIAN to get 15% off the best coffee alternative you'll ever find. Once again, that's promo code JULIAN, J-U-L-I-A-N, at checkout to get 15% off your own Mudwater today. And by the way, they're going to throw in a free frother as well. Everybody wins. Now let's get back to the show. How do you spell quiche? K-I-E-S-H, I think. Quiche Iran?

Yep. I'll just start with that. I've got to pull this over here. Yep, there it is. Son of a bitch. Where is this on a map? Persian Gulf. No way.

Robbie knows all, man. Dude. Yo, this is a little too dangerously close to Iran for me, but like, this looks beautiful. It literally is. But it's an economic free zone correct and and the ayatollah lets this happen got me i i'm i'm barely an expert in liberland the isle of quiche was just some place that robbie told me about and people just live here

they live there and they do business there so what does their passport say iran if they if they're from there then yeah yeah i mean look there's a free economic zone between uh north korea and south korea like there are north korean workers i believe that work in factories that benefit south korea dude even when you think you know a little bit about the world yo right and let me highlight how I think I know a little bit. Yep. You then have conversations like this, and you're like, you know fucking nothing. It is so liberating to embrace feeling dumb. Yes. It's so liberating.

I so agree, man. It's like... That's why I do a podcast. God damn right. Yeah, well done. Well done on that. Yeah, cheers. I mean... I have no water in this. No one right here, but... That's the I do a podcast. God damn right. Yeah, well done. Well done on that. Yeah, cheers. I have no water in this.

No one right here. That's the symbol that matters. I keep the one down below deck, you know? No, but like, so anyway, he's just dropping this knowledge on me. And places I've never heard about, like, you can speak Chinese and also Swedish, and you also are in Somaliland for some reason. Bishop Anthony is a random Baptist reverend. What's happening here?

What is going on? And he's like, yeah, we're starting this cell phone business. And he was like, we're going to go to Berbera Port tomorrow. Do you want to go with us? And I was like, I mean, I'd love to go to Berbera because it's the port city in Somaliland. And I said I'd love to go, but I don't have enough money for armed guards because you have to pay for armed guards if you leave Hargeisa. Why? They just make foreigners do it.

And there's, you know, you can get real fucked up out there. They have dissident groups. They have. Still within Somaliland. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and there's very little. Well, what's the, I'm sorry to cut you off.

I just want to know details. What's the terrain like? Once you go outside Hargeisa, are you going into open desert? Yeah. Little villages or? Rocky desert with, villages or rocky desert with um uh yeah rocky desert lots of horizon um not not desert like you think of the sahara with sort of like rolling sand dunes think like the land before time mixed with dr seuss

like we're in the dr seuss part weird trees that look like they might talk uh um you know jagged mountains that kind of like like jut up oh so now jagged mountains that that uh sort of jut up into the sky uh really like rocky outcrops that that sort of descend into what are called wadis or these uh dry riverbeds and that's the since there's no roads really that's how you you travel through the country is you drive on these dry riverbeds called wadis um bunch of damn uh i think they're uh i might be wrong, but I think they're baboons. Some kind of ape is just like running around through underbrush all the time. You see them on the roads, horrifying looking things.

But you said there's all kinds of horizon. This is so weird. Yeah, no, it's, and it's, and you have to understand how much of it there is. It's huge. Right. Like, I never quite realized, like, how vast the Horn of Africa is. And Berbera is maybe about two, three hours from Hargeisa. And how are you getting there? So we're taking a four-by-four with armed guards.

And so we all pile in. We have an armed guard driving the car and then we have another uh four by four behind us as a follow car and just like dudes with ak-47s that we rented and what how much did the armed guard cost i want to say it was like i mean it's not much like i think it was like 250 a day maybe per guard um but like is he good is he like they didn't shoot at anything for us fortunately um yeah i mean they they were nice yeah i mean it's not really the first trade i'm looking for in my arm guard yeah okay i mean they they they held guns and rode along with us so they didn't they didn't do too much but anyway we like we go

out to um uh you know we see some caves like literally we're just like sightseeing together with like me this like random chinese guy who speaks i'm harrick robbie and this this baptist preacher what a crew i oh weirdest road trip i've ever been on trying to think what and i just keep going keep going i'm gonna keep percolating and since i'm since i'm the new one like since i'm the one who like you know i mean they invited me but like i felt like i invited myself um i'm like don't worry i'll take the center seat so i'm just like in between uh bishop anthony and uh and robbie unplug that you good yeah sorry and i'm just like clutched in between them and actually bishop anthony was in the front seat uh and uh and david was next to me so i can't talk to david at all because i don't speak any languages

that he speaks so it's just like he and i are just sort of exchanging thumbs up every once in a while and then we'd like get out and look at some cave paintings and be like wow look at these cave paintings in the middle of this desert and there's like a little like museum there and we'd be like nice what do you mean there's a little museum little hut little little museum hut yeah just in the middle of nowhere and just there's little cave paintings. Yeah, I can't remember. I think they're called the something giel cave paintings. They're super old. They're like 7,000 years old.

Oh, I've got a picture of it in my Instagram if you look at it. Oh, shit. Okay. Go down? Go down? Yeah. Is before the vice president picture? Yeah, there it is. That's David. No shit. Yeah. What's on these? I can't really see what it is. That's David. No shit. What's on these? I can't really see what that is. It's like a bunch of

cows and wildlife. Interesting. I want to say some of them are like the cows banging too. Now what's the cultural significance of cows fucking? Don't know.

I think that the meaning of these cave paintings are lost. It's, yeah. Do we know when they're from? I want to say it was like something like 7,000 years. Like they're very, very old. 7,000. Now that's interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Super, super old. That's an interesting number. And how are they carved? Like they're carved into it or is it like drawn with something I have no idea the guy who was like the docent of the like the guy who showed us around there's a picture of him

down um but the guy who showed us around was that guy with the stick he only spoke Somali he only spoke somali corner of the screen he only smokes he only spoke somali yeah so like we we got very few questions answered by it we knew that that they were discovered by like some french archaeologists they didn't give you like a trend trends oh i'm gonna come back to that in a second they didn't give you like a translator or

something no no we were just out there okay we had plenty of guards where were these people okay that's different yeah no the dogon i think the dogon people were i was gonna say it's not ethnically mall from molly yes that's fascinating fascinating people about these french fucking archaeologists and the french researchers they're just out there yeah they're just out there being being french people yeah i guess until they find some old shit and they're just out there yeah they're just out there being being french people yeah i guess until they find some old shit and they're like this was okay god did you see the cave paintings the cows are fucking um yeah so then we continued on to berbera port and the red sea and you see any sharks out there no we saw some some kids playing in it it's hot as fuck out there

i think it's the hottest i've ever i've ever experienced humid hot humid hot humid hot and so robbie and i just like rolled up our our little pants and like stood in the red sea and we're like we did it and we went for lunch and uh then they dropped me off back at the hotel and never saw him again. And again, this is an unrecognized country, but they're autonomous around here. Yeah. Somalia. And they have their own military force too. Did you say they pay taxes to Somalia?

That I would not believe. I don't think that they would. So how are they not recognized? So they are in fact, you might, if you have Somali listeners, like, because I wrote an article. We have a few. I wrote an article a couple years ago

where, actually it was about Robbie, and it was, I was just saying that people are investing in Somaliland. Right? That is a pretty milquetoast article. And I got people sliding in my dms with like death threats just for even talking about somaliland podcasts are great because they help us make the most out of our routine we learn about the fall of the ottoman empire while we drive keep up with

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Whoever it was, I mean, you know, they didn't identify themselves, but they were like, hey, don't talk about Somaliland. But isn't all they would really have to do, and this is probably such a dumb point, but I still got to bring it up. Isn't technically all they would have to do... Well, first of all, what's their, what's their main resource? What's their main economic driver? Opportunity.

Minerals. Minerals are huge there. What, what minerals, cobalt, stuff like that. I've heard different things. And I know that there's a lot of people looking into mineral extraction in Northern Somalia. Okay. Somalia or Somaliland? Somaliland. I'm pretty much always going to be speaking about Somaliland. So isn't all they'd have to do is play like fantasy draft power countries and pick out any one of, say, the top ten GDP drivers in the world and say, we're going to make a deal with you for minerals,

and then that plays depending on who it is. Now, if it's just a European country, they've got to go through the eu and shit like that so it's difficult but if it were like the u.s yeah or if it were russia or it were china if one of those countries just said fuck yeah we got you let's do some trade fam well look and then they recognized it isn't that a big enough domino that money talks and then potentially they're actually recognized as a bordered country? Yep, but that would also trigger a war with federal Somalia. Are they even there though? Yeah.

They are. And there is no love lost between these two countries. But they're in their country. There's a sort of demilitarized strip of desert between them. I asked somebody at one point, like, would you ever fly or would you ever drive from Hargeisa to Mogadishu? And they just started laughing. They're like, if you want to get killed, yeah, that's exactly what you would do. And Somalia, I mean, to be clear, not to be like crass, but it's a shit show. It is a – there are – it is not a very powerful central government and there is constant – It's a shit show. It is a – there are – it is not a very powerful central government and there is constant –

It's a shit show. Yeah, constant violence. Pirates, terrorists, everything. You know, it's poverty stricken. Well, this is something I touch on in the book too, which is this idea of like, you know, the failed state, right? So like, when you think about that, oftentimes Somalia is brought up as like this, the poster child for failed state, but ultimately, you have to take a step back from what that term means. Most generously, a failed state is a place where the central government has lost the trust of its people for whatever reason and is no longer able

to collect taxes and provide services to its citizenry. Moreover, they have broken that ability to generate consent amongst the governed, right? That's the whole statehood thing. So what happens then is you have this large centralized power vacuum, and so power decentralizes to strongmen, and the regional strongmen fight over power, and usually they're breaking down along a more stable portion of the Horn of Africa is because there's less clan diversity there. So the Isak tribe is the dominant power in Somaliland, right? And then I think there are like a couple of others. There's, I want to say over 30 dominant clans in federal Somalia. So you have more of a power structure or you have more interests in fighting over power than, in Somaliland. So back in the day, one of the reasons that this – that there was conflict between Hargeisa and Mogadishu was because Said Barre, their dictator, saw the Issaq tribe as a problem for him. There's a bunch of reasons why he might have found that to be the case, but for whatever reason, the Isak were the people that he had the biggest bone to pick with. And so he even, I think he even couched in the terms, we're going to solve the Isak problem.

And so this led him to creating a genocide in northern Somalia, in Somaliland. So, to this day, you can see there's a, I think it's in my, you can see in Freedom Square, there should be a picture of a MiG, a MiG jet. Maybe up. Maybe, actually down, probably. Oh, yeah, up, up. Sorry. Up a little bit more yeah so this this jet yeah but now if you click on it notice this is something that i think is put this in the corner

of the screen yeah this is something it's a certain marble feel to it, right? It's removed from the past. It makes the horrors of war seem glorious and righteous this statue is about the bombing of Hargeisa the leveling of Hargeisa and the 80s by these make jets right and if you look at the the bottom here you literally see the scene of a battle it's somebody walking through shooting an ak-47 in the air you see a man directly next to the other person with no hands this is a monument unlike you would ever see in the world because the history is so fresh it was such an f well i wouldn't maybe it's not an ethnic cleansing but it was such a genocide against the Asaq. Yeah, this is like – And that's why Hargeisa –

It's not celebrating it, but it's remembering it with the visuals of the bad that happened. Yeah, and that's why – It's like having a Holocaust statue where it's showing the gas chamber. Exactly. And that's why Hargeisa is known as the Dresden of Africa is because it was absolutely leveled. Oh, my God. Mm-hmm. 1988.

Yep. Oh my god. 1988. is in many ways more stable than Mogadishu. Mogadishu is the recognized capital of Somalia, whereas Hargeisa remains unrecognized. And it's in, yeah. Right? So this becomes incredibly difficult when you're talking about giving aid, right? So how do you give aid when money has to go through Mogadishu

or when organizations are... They'll never get there. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So this brings me to what happened next in Hargeisa while I was living there. I found out that I had a third job to do as ambassador from Liberland to Smalleyland. When the internet was out for all of those days, I couldn't get any information in about what was going on.

And then finally, the internet came back on. Or no, before the internet came back on, I just like hired somebody, hired a satellite phone from some guy for like five bucks. And I called my girlfriend at the time and was like, hey, like, what's going on? And she's like, you know, it's pretty crackly online. She's like, are you okay? Like, I heard about the cyclone. And I was like hey like what's going on and she's like uh you know it's pretty crackly online she's like i thought are you okay like i heard about the cyclone and i was like what cyclone she's like there's there was a cyclone all throughout somalia and i'm like i'm okay just you know tell my parents i'm good um you know i i had one choice like either call my mom or call my girlfriend and i was like my girlfriend has my mom's number, so I'll call her.

Just let her know I'm good. And then I heard about this cyclone. And I was like, what the fuck? There was a cyclone? And next couple days, the internet clicks back on. I get a message and a call from the Secretary of State of Liberland. Oh, he's back. He's back.

And he's like, are you okay what's going on and he's i'm like i'm good like i didn't didn't even know there was a cyclone and he's like well it was cyclone sagar was pretty bad and uh this actually works really well for us because we're gonna give aid and we're the only ones with the diplomatic team on the ground to give aid and i was like who's the team and what do they even have no i know but what kind of aid do they have besides you just being on the ground they're like hello we at liberland believing yeah that was the aid that was the aid we're here for moral support and basically they were like figure out how to do it just figure out how to give aid and i was like okay you got it no problem i'm so good at this former peace corps volunteer have you heard about any wars coming out of

albania recently no you're welcome for my service so then I had this third job and fortunately my dear friend who's passed recently Abdul Rahman I contacted him and he said okay well we'll figure this out

we'll figure out something you just need to get money from Liberland and then we'll figure out how to give aid. Get some fucking Libercoin. Well, so I opened a bank account which... Now when you open a bank account are you saying I'm like representing

Liberland? I walked into a bank in Hargeisa, Somaliland and I said, hello, I am the ambassador. Sir, I am the ambassador sir i am the ambassador from libra land to somaliland and i would like to make dhabshi bank the official bank of libra land the look that this guy i think i made his whole fucking week he thought that was the funniest shit he'd ever heard and then he was like i need you to go to the office next door and find the guy with the biggest desk and tell him exactly what you just told me and i was like i will so i go in and i i can't believe you didn't get taken away by some guards and tortured in a bottom room in

a basement somewhere that no one even knows exists. I'm so glad that never happened, man. Yeah, you were like this close so many times. Oh, yeah. Well, two times get close in the book. So anyway, I go to the guy with the biggest desk, and I'm like, hello. And it's I, the ambassador. And eventually he's like, look, we can give you an account,

but you can only put $1,000 in it. And I was like, I deem this acceptable. Your terms are acceptable, sir. Liberland will smile upon you. But then I also, I should say, I have this bank account open to this day, like, with my passport. So, who knows? U.S. passport. Yeah.

As the ambassador of Liberland. That's right. Occupation. Ambassador. Ambassador. I'd probably put that down on a form somewhere. And so, then I call the Secretary of State. I'm like, I have a bank account.

And he's like, how much can we put in it? Enough. And I'm like, $1, account and he's like how much is is can we put in it enough i know like a thousand dollars he's like that's not enough because you need to buy furniture too and i was like fuck and so uh he's like look we're gonna just transfer bitcoin to the syrian guy here he's just gonna give you fifteen thousand dollars i was like okay well yeah i guess that sounds good plan guys um and so i go back to the office and he has his secretary just like walk across the room with fifteen thousand dollars in an envelope and she's like i think this is for you and opens it up and then just spread. Honestly, it's like so unsatisfying how few hundred dollar bills that is. I thought it would be like, you know, like steel briefcase or something. But it was it was just like a stack.

And so I was like, OK, this is the treasury of Liberland. The embassy of Liberland. And I'm going to use this to buy aid. And Abdulrahman is going to help me figure out what to do with that. And he's like, we got to go meet with the vice president again. I'm like, sweet. Let's go meet with the vice president. Love those guys.

I'm sure they're wondering what's been up with me since the cyclone. When you meet these guys, is it a handshake? Yeah. Yeah. Was there another cultural norm you were supposed to know hope not didn't know it you didn't try to dap them up i no i did not i was worried though because i just seemed like the guy would have walked in there like yo what's up how's it how's it going uh i like i i had really like i my boots are just covered with shit all the time so

i was so worried because i mean i already look I mean, I looked like I had been rescued from a desert island, basically. Like, I was showering out of a water bottle. I was living out of a backpack. Like, I didn't look my best. But, like, shoes are important, especially in, like, you know, the Middle East and Africa region. And so, like, we walk into, like, you know, the Middle East and Africa region. And so, like, we walk into, like, this big banquet hall thing. That's where that photo is from.

And I'm like, fuck, he's going to look at my shoes. My shoes are, like, just garbage hiking boots, and they're covered in shit. You looked good in this picture. I'll put it back in the corner of the screen so people can see it. It's somewhere here. That was... Where the fuck did I put it? Did I lose it? Yeah, that was the nicest shirt that i had it was right

here yeah by far the nicest shirt i had but fortunately uh you take off your shoes before going into a banquet hall so i was like oh thank god yeah okay so so anyway um again i like start Again, I start talking like an ambassador, and I'm like, we, on behalf of Liberland. Did you put an accent on? No. This is just how I sounded in my own head. We want to help with the affected area of Cyclone Sagar, and therefore we will make an aid donation. And all I require of you, the vice president, is a security detachment and an idea of like where the affected area is and what we can do. And he was like, okay, cool. I'll tell Abdulrahman what you're supposed to do.

And I was like, great, thank you. And Abdulrahman was like, we need $ thousand dollars and i was like look i'll spend less money on furniture and more money on aid make it eight like i'm the ambassador whatever we can buy less are they talking to each other in their language during this whole time oh no i i we had the money conversation while it was just me and abdulrahman just the two of you just chilling yeah i wasn't gonna we used to just like drinking some whiskey no no it was ramadan oh right yeah not drinking anything that shit yeah uh so we were just sitting in his car he just had this big like mercedes this story just when they're making this for hollywood just a little editor's note we need some whiskey little cigar you know we gotta make it look a little more presentable

a little more cool a little more mad manish very temperate man he was a great guy he doesn't have to be in the movie though that's true he can be like you know a drug-infused guy who fucks hookers at night and is the vice president in this crazy place could never have done it with abdulrahman that man was was thank god for him i would have gotten killed if it wasn't for him. Anyway, he's like, look, we're going to buy this much food. And it was something like a couple tons of food. And it was enough food for this village, this nomadic group of people to survive for one month. And it was – everybody got like a big bag of flour, a big bag of rice, oil, sugar, salt. So – and you can see us buying that.

Buying the food? Yeah, you can see the – You put a picture of it? I got to go back here and scroll down. I'm sorry, man. No, you're good. You're good. I keep losing it.

This is back in 2018. All right. That's 2017. So you have your page. No, no. Go down. Down, down, down. There it goes.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. So this is the food, right? That's what your money bought? Yeah, dude. We bought a lot of food did you get like the costco like wholesale deal or i mean yeah i think so but everybody's speaking somali around me i have no idea i literally just like handed abdulrahman yeah that could feed a

few people what is that like rice and shit yeah yep yeah rice oil if you uh go to the next one um i don't want to lose it because I have to put these pictures in later. Click the X. I know, but I don't want to lose that picture because I'm not going to remember what the picture was. Oh, I see. You see what I'm saying?

I have to go edit this out. Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about it then. But yeah, it was a shitload of food. So we had it all loaded up. Had our worker guys load up this enormous truck. It was the biggest truck I'd ever seen. And drive it out to this nomadic village. And then Abdulrahman was like, well, okay, you're going to come with me and we're going to go out to the village together and give the food to the people and i was like well i mean

we sent the food like can't we isn't that good like we we gave aid and then he's like no no like you have to you must feed you have to you have to feed them no no he's like you have to take pictures and stuff like and i was like oh right oh politician shit yeah take credit i was like i'm i'm not an aid worker oh right i'm a fucking politician like yeah this is tossing the paper towels like trump yeah this is with the jump shot just tossing paper towels be like yep got those no matter and it's just like it made me feel like, I don't know, I had been touching upon it the entire time. Like, I would have these moments where I would find myself sort of becoming compromised by this albeit ridiculous position that I was in. I mean, yeah, I was an ambassador because I was on the right jet ski at the right time.

Literally, yeah. Quite literally. Yeah. I was an ambassador name only. And at the point that people started treating me as if I was this person with political power, in certain way, I started acting like it. Like, I started, like like feeling like a politician and it was because i had this unearned power and i had uh the the respective people who i could i could you know make i had the ability to uh to allow people to think that I had some kind of power, which of course I didn't.

And that kept coming up in my brain as I noticed how I would behave, even though I realized every single day that as I came back to this empty mansion that had no new furniture in it, that like, I'm a fraud. But at the same time time this is real people these are real nomads that actually need food and it's like well it doesn't really matter at the end of the day if i'm like a fake ambassador or not i gotta get this food out there but technically to go back to the story element that you and i have touched on before like every country starts somewhere yep you could call everything that happens the moment someone like in the bar you were talking about in the last episode we did about you know the revolutionary war right and one dude was like fuck it let's leave britain takes takes one one two or three fraud yeah they're a fraud right

there yep now i know this whole story is kind of funny because it's literally a thing called Liberland and it's seven kilometers and they're into crypto and shit and jet ski and X to crows. But still. No, but you're right. And that's the crazy thing about it because it's like where the rubber met the road was me in the middle of a desert talking to real people with real needs that we were trying to fill and also prioritizing getting photo shoot alongside of it so that like a good politician yeah and i i say in the book i think the the you know the the the line is something along the lines

of like you know if you give aid and no one's around to take a picture, did you actually give aid at all? So sad that the world works that way, but it does. It's soft power. And I was for better or worse, I was the object of, I was the instrument to deliver soft power on behalf of Libra land to Somaliland. And that was a very strange day because not only you're, you're going, you're traveling so much further. I mean,

the most remote place I've ever been in my entire life. It was eight hours of traveling on no roads, armed guards. Uh, we're traveling with the, the vice president secretary. He's operating as as my um um as my translator uh abdul rahman's there at one point we i think i have a picture of it

here uh we just come across a bus that's just overturned yeah yeah it just and mind you we're like four hours away from anything that would look like a building. Right. And. Why was it overturned? It just fell over. I guess they took a turn too quickly. And then everybody gets out of the bus and they, like, it's like no words are exchanged.

It's like they've seen this happen before. So they all, everybody piles out of the bus. And I'm like, Abdullah Rahman, like, what's going on? What are doing here and he's like oh the bus fell over and i was like no i know i got that but like what do we what do we do about it and he's like oh well you know get some ropes so we all just like attach ropes get over here ambassador yeah just just we just pull this bus back onto its wheels and then you know they're like see ya now when you're coming across like regular people they don't speak english obviously no but do you know what they were calling you in their language were they calling you like mr ambassador oh i have no idea

you have no clue i have no clue what's i would have totally been like i'm the ambassador of liberland every once in a while i would hear the word like liberland and and like you know like otherwise like i just learned my i mean you had to had to put on the game face man i couldn't i couldn't just start giggling you do look intense like the the pictures we were looking at you in that picture like you look like you look like seth rogan in the movie where he has to act serious for a minute i mean and he just like goes full neutral you know neutral grip face yeah yeah it was so this is this is the um uh the leader of the village um but where we show up into this this basically it's just just a patch of

desert um and there's like some temporary buildings some like stick houses things like that and nobody's there and i go up to ab Abdulrahman, who's sitting under this tree. I'm like, where is everybody? He's like, oh, they're coming back. And also all of the aid is like portioned out and sitting in the middle of the desert. And so it's like for everybody to take. Granted, it's been there for a couple of days. And it's like, dude, can they just take the food? Food has been waiting there for them for a couple of days and it's like dude i don't like can they just like just take the food like why like food has been waiting there for them for a couple of days but like the

vice president says we got to get this photo shoot and like this is how it's got to happen anyway i go up to abdulrahman and i'm like hey where is everybody and he's like oh there's a funeral because there's an outbreak of cholera here. Oh, shit. Because remember, when the cyclone blows through, water pumps get taken out of the ground. No way to feed the animals. And it trickles down. So you can't water the animals. The animals have to drink from groundwater. They have to use the restroom somewhere.

People start drinking that. And then, you know, when you lose something as simple as a water pump, then you also get a cholera outbreak too. And so they're coming back from a funeral and I'm just sitting there under this tree with Abdul Rahman being like, do we like, do we have to do like this sort of political dance right now? And he's like, yeah,

yeah, it's fine. It's fine. Like what? For all 10 followers of the Liberland Instagram? Seemingly. like this sort of political dance right now and he's like yeah yeah it's fine it's fine like what for all 10 followers of the liberland instagram seemingly okay i know and so we go and do it i talk with the the sort of leader of the uh i talk with the leader uh through my my translator um there's a there's a video of that up there um and say, you know, as best as possible. And, you know, I'm trying to not, I'm trying as hard as possible not to be full of shit here.

Because it's like such not the moment to be a goofy ambassador guy. I'm just like, you know, we hope that you enjoy the food and that this helps. You know, this is on behalf of Liberland, and please, you can tell me anything that you might need, and I will make sure to put that in my report to the president, right? And so then he takes me to the desert, and he shows me this image of this image of the one down here yeah yeah so those are those are goats dead goats obviously yeah dead goats so they they were running away from the

cyclone as it came through and and it basically looks like um the goats almost look like they're made of stone. They've been sandblasted until they're almost bones. And you can see the phone numbers written on them, because that's how people keep track of their goats there. Wait, what? You can still see

that? How do you see that? Pictures in the corner of the screen for people to take a look. You can't see it on these ones, do you see that pictures in the corner of the screen for people to take a look yeah you you can't see it on these ones but but you can see it on where would it be written it'd just be on their sides like right here where my mouse is yeah that's that you is it in like pen no no like spray paint yeah it's not like carved in blood right no no no it's it's written in spray paint so that you can keep track of your goats because they have cell phones and stuff okay um so yeah i mean he's like look this is what happened and they keep wealth in animals and sure now the sort of base level of their keeping their animals the the pumps are gone

they're ripped out of the ground now their animals are dying clearly there's this even worse knock on effect that that their people are getting sick because of the lack of water because of the animals. So, like, this is, you know, countries that have an emergent economy, countries with the infrastructure to withstand a disaster that have the ability to come back from a disaster can deal with these things. But people who are living so deeply into the fringes of the developed world, when something bad happens, it goes from bad to catastrophic so quickly. Real quick, to all my Discord people out there, the Julian Dory Discord is officially live. I put the link down in the description below. So go hit that, join the community, and say what's up. There's all kinds of features in there,

and I look forward to hearing from you guys. Let's get it poppin'. And so I'm sitting there, well, I'm not sitting there, I'm just talking with the man as we sort of walk through this really hot desert. And I'm just saying, you know, I will tell everything to the president of Libra land. And I'm like knowing full well,

there's nothing I can do to influence whatever decisions that they make with the Libra land money. Because this was an optical decision. It was soft power. Soft power. Soft power is diplomatic power. Think carrots, not sticks. So Peace Corps is a version of soft power.

It's diplomacy on behalf of the state. It's something that potentially helps out your government. It provides free workers for you so long as they learn something. That's soft power. Diplomatic aid, soft power. And so I was just promising this guy, I'll tell the president everything,

but at the same time I was like, is there a kind of cruelty here for me even saying that? Does that give this individual a kind of false hope if I'm just telling him that I will tell the president of a nation about his specific problems? He doesn't know that Liberland is an empty island in the middle of a Danube. Oh problems he doesn't know that libra land is an empty island in the middle of a danube oh he doesn't know that no he's a he's a nomadic he's a nomadic

you know no shit sherlock yeah i mean a very it's very likely like i'm i'm one of the first foreigners he's ever seen so he's looking at you as like a potential savior, but you only have a jet ski. That's not even here with you. I didn't even have the jet ski. You have a pontoon boat too. And that nice little houseboat. Yeah. So I was like,

you know, that, that was, like I said, that sort of rubber meets the road moment of like being a politician. I found myself. So this is the, to tie it back to the perverse incentives right to malik this is that moment where i realize my incentives are to project this sensibility that you can trust me and that i have your best interests in mind and that I also have a certain amount of

power which I can wield and will do so in a just way. That is the incentive of a politician and certainly the incentive of a diplomat. However, the perverse part oftentimes, they don't have any of those things. So, it led to me having a, doing that in a false way, because I didn't, I didn't know that I was going to be a diplomat in, you know, two weeks before I became one. I didn't know I was going to become a diplomat three days before I landed in Somaliland. And so, it became quite a moral quandary at the end of the day, and I was eventually offered the position of Liberland ambassador to Somaliland full-time. Oh, so you were only a part-timer for this one. You were the substitute teacher for Liberland. I was the acting ambassador and that's not what you

told the vice president hey look you said on behalf of liberland as the ambassador i was acting like it dude i was acting yeah i was the method actor no no you weren't well that's the this is this is drosberg versus adler yeah it's a total a total sidebar. But I think method is sort of blown out of proportion. At least the way modern acting is taught, you can take little bits from each method and you don't have to be an acolyte of one. Right, right. But yeah.

But some of them are torturous. Like the Strasberg method is pretty torturous. That's what they say. I mean, the way that I think about it is, and granted, I'm not an actor anymore. actually though i have been in an albanian sausage commercial recently damn it yeah all right just just just fucking put that aside you can i can show you i can show you the albanian sausage that's fucking awesome i was also in an help anyway um Um, so, uh, so yeah, I, I was like, well, I, at the end of the day, I was offered the position of ambassador full time.

And then I was like, oh my God, I can actually do it. I can actually figure out a way to drive some more aid. And then I didn't have to be a liar in front of that guy. And then I was just sort of feverishly trying to figure out how I was going to readjust my life to like live in Somaliland now. then is that a phone call coming into you like yo you want to do this full time i think it was a email it was an email did it have a signature at the bottom or just like a regular little gmail like yo what's up fam a very casual relationship with with my uh my my former uh uh employer and and then i like i was did you demand a salary

that i would have um if i actually took the position full-time um well i i talked to them i was talking to my family back home and they were like no the fuck you're not yeah what have you what where is you like your dad and mom in this like when have Did you not talk to them after 2013? Oh, yeah. No, they're great. They're awesome. They're very supportive. I mean, and Lord knows I've-

And you're just calling them from these countries like, yo, what's up? I'm the ambassador of Liberland. And they're just like, cool. Yep. Sounds good. That's right. That's it. My mom was the one who was like, I told her about, granted i was like not not well while i was in

in somaliland for that entire time i mean like i said i'm showering out of water bottles i'm i i'm surviving off of of pringles and cans of tuna did your parents send you any money at all no no i if i would have sent you some money thanks man i would appreciate it it'd have to be in bitcoin so i could get if you were my son and i'm like yo my kid's an ambassador and he's poor i'm saying i'm somebody well i he's doing he's doing god's work but my mom was was like like i because i told her about the ambassador position and and then i was like you know feverishly like oh i think i could do some good here and blah blah blah and she's like no no you can't you're not living black hawk down you dumb fuck i mean more or less that and and like normally i you know if apologies mom i know i put you through a lot but like normally it's just like

it's like oh i'm gonna do this thing that i think is really neat and they're like okay all right cool do whatever you want like you know just be safe i love that your mom's like get the fuck out at this point she was like no you're not gonna be the ambassador you need to get out of somaliland and get some air conditioning because your head's all fucked up because you've been sweating and being eaten by mosquitoes for like six weeks and i was like you're right i i gotta get out out of here. Yeah, got out of Somaliland. So you answered my question before I got to ask it. You were there for a full six weeks.

Six weeks, yeah. That was your ambassadorship. Boom. You put that on LinkedIn? I thought about it, but it makes me sound fucking crazy. No, you got it. You think I should?

I don't think it'll help. LinkedIn, no one's even on that. Well, people are on that, but they're all weird at this point. Oh, but you know what though? I forgot the most important. You're not all weird. I'm sorry. No one's even on that. Well, people are on that, but they're all weird at this point. Oh, sorry. You know what, though? I forgot the most important. You're not all weird. I'm sorry.

I forgot the most important part. I got furniture, too. I bought all the furniture. Did you go to Ikea outside the country? No, it was like me and- You found an Amish guy in Somalia? I wish. They got some similar beards.

Dude. Got some similar beards. The Amish fucking carpentry unreal i know you're not watching right now because like not electricity like people but like just for the record out there great shout out can i can i talk about somali furniture in this case um you can talk about whatever the fuck you want look i went to i went to like three different furniture makers in somaliland and i figured this was gonna be a lot easier than it was because for some reason there were so many bed like like bed boards with just like roaring lion faces and just like a lot of swoops and

mirrors and glitter all over everything. And I'm like, this is not furniture for an embassy. I need like the most muted, dull furniture that you can get. So like, and like some had like neon lights and shit in it. I need elevator music. Think that. Yeah. Like, like I want the most boring furniture.

And then like after like the third store, I'm like, fuck it. I'm just going to get Leverland the most boring furniture and then like after like the third store I'm like fuck it I'm just gonna get Leverland the wackiest furniture eventually I found some good bedroom sets and like I bought like a whole like banquet table how much are you spending on this? I spent $5,000 on it so not like the whole budget

almost I had at least you left them with good furnishing no look I had a little bit under $2,000 left over I had I had at least you left them with good furnishing no look I had your position I had a little bit over to a little bit under two thousand dollars left over at the very end of it and mind you I am poor as fuck at this point I'm so poor and I'm thinking to myself like I nobody in the world knows that this little stack a hundred100 bills exists. I could just easily pocket this money and survive.

Like, I think I probably had $200, maybe $100 left in the world because I was waiting for, yeah, I mean, like, my own personal money. You're definitely the poorest ambassador in the world. Fuck, yeah, because I wasn't corrupt, and that was the thing. I was a good ambassador. You're goddamn right I was. I was like, at the end of my service, I was like, you know, it would be fine to just take a couple bills. Like, it's a down payment.

The power was getting to your head. And I was like, no, man. Like, if I do that, like, I am no different than any other corrupt politician. However, admitting it, because I've admitted it in print already, I did take some money. I took $5. No. And I went and I bought, it's a drug called COT. It's an East African hallucinogenic.

You spent government money that the taxpayer pays to you on drugs. Yep. I'm admitting it officially. Find God. You, sir. You're a disgrace. Have besmirched the name of Liberland. You're a fucking disgrace.

You're just like the rest of them. I know. A corrupt, greasy, stealing politician. I got so much caught for $5. What the fuck is caught? It's this leaf that's widely eaten. It's legal in Somaliland. And also Yemen, it's pretty popular too.

You get like a big branch of these leaves and you either strip them off or eat them one by one. Some places swallow them. Some places you just like mash it up in your teeth. And then you get like this sort of mildly hallucinogenic euphoric effect from it. It's like having the energy of like 12 cups of coffee but no anxiety it's awesome interesting really good yeah i had a great time um it's a pain in the ass to actually like get to having an effect because you have to eat so many leaves and like the leaves taste like i mean leaves like so you're just like mash them up and put them in something? So what I did was, my method was I would, because after.

You're a good, you're an organized drug user. That's right, yeah. Oh, boy. It's, you know, I'm an old man. I'm not my first rodeo. So I would, like, because I ate one leaf, and then I'm like, God, that's disgusting. And it's just like eating a leaf. And so it's like, well, I leaf and then i'm like god that's disgusting and it's just like eating a leaf and so it's like well i mean i gotta get high so let's like we're gonna eat these

leaves somehow um so i like would mash like five of them into a little ball and then i just put them in my back teeth and just like chew as hard as I could and then wash it down with a non-alcoholic Somali beer. A non-alcoholic Somali beer. Actually pretty tasty. Good stuff. What's the point? It's just a soda. They just call it a non-alcoholic beer.

It was good. Very refreshing. Apple was my favorite. So then I just washed down the cot with that. And I felt like nothing after, you know, an hour of eating leaves. And then I was like, well, I better take a lot more. Because that's always a good idea. You always know that there's no consequences to not feeling any drug and then just deciding that you're going to take a shitload more of it.

And so I did. And then, like, I was sitting at home. I was sitting at the embassy. You know, I was kind of, like, walking through. And now, like, all the rooms are full of furniture. And, you know, we've done the aid thing. And I was, like, I had nothing else to do as ambassador. I was leaving the next

day or two i just kind of like sat on on my uh my balcony and it's just like looking at the the sunset and are you near the coast no pretty far you're totally inland at this point yeah just desert desert as far desert and then on the horizon you'll see um there are these two mountains that are actually called the breastsasts of Hargeisa. And so these two sort of twin peaks. Now, because this is not necessarily a highly industrialized part of the world, can you see the clear stars? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Gorgeous. Really, really cool. That's awesome. So it was, yeah. And that's when I started really feeling like these, you know, sort of euphoric effects. And also, like, I was, regardless of the intense amount of ambiguity from an ethical level, like, I was very proud that we were able to get that food out to those people. Like, I was very glad that nothing horrible happened to me. And that, I mean, this was the end of my year of living statelessly.

Like, this was a weird idea that metastasized into this insane trip where I went from being a third grade teacher in Iraqi Kurdistan to being an ambassador in Somaliland. Didn't take long, bro. This is all like. Yeah. This is under a year, kind of. It's about a year, almost exactly.

So you went from teacher with warmongering chick. Yeah. Somehow to, what was it? Kosovo. No, no, no. Getting banned from. No. What was the country?

Bulgaria. Yeah. You get arrested in Turkey. Briefly. And then banned from Turkey. from turkey sent back out go to end up in end up in liberland hold on so i go to kosovo after after i got banned from turkey lived there for the 10-year anniversary moved to transnistria uh i was in transnistria for we're gonna come back to all this month or so. Where's Transnistria? It's between Moldova and Ukraine. It's the...

It's protected by Russian soldiers. Yeah, it's definitely a spicy area. You are a loaded weapon. Well, by that point I was like, yo, I gotta put my SIM cards in my boot. my boot is so full of important

shit at this point like i don't know how you're not dead dude me neither man i i i yeah you know i i think no i think i i think there is a sort of karmic thing about this though like and and it's something that i try to pay attention to as much as possible, because, you know, I'm a recovering Catholic as well, and, like, you know, I don't, the best relationship that I have with the divine is, you know, on good days, I'm, like, such a California Eastern religion person where I'm just like, yeah, I'm just like enjoying the moment. And then on terrible days, I'm running back to like bearded sky God being like, why did I do all these things that make me miserable? Why am I like this? Sorry for all the stuff I did because I wanted to. Like, that's my relationship with it. But I think that there is this kind of, there's this middle ground with karma where it's like,

if you genuinely try to do good things and make it a point to, you know, to treat people as well as you can. And your aims really aren't malicious. I think that, and you trust people and you give people the benefit of the doubt. I think more often than not, the world does meet you halfway and takes care of you in a good way. I mean... I think you would know.

Yeah, I've had a lot of close calls. And I'm... When they happen, good way. I mean, I think you would know. Yeah, I've had I've had a lot of close calls. And and I'm when they happen, and I'm sure that that something like this will happen again. It's a bit too common. But it's something I'm trying to move away from lifestyle wise these days, for obvious reasons. But for whatever reason, I am still walking around and I can put these sentences down in a book. And I feel really, really grateful to be able to do that. Fuck yeah, man. It's an amazing story.

Once again, obviously, as we're continuing the conversation here, the book is You Are Not Here, which is a fucking amazing title, by the way. Thanks, man. And I am going to be reading this because, like I said, I haven't read this yet, because we did this pretty last minute. Oh, I hope you enjoy it. I have to read it now, for sure. And everyone out there, the link will be down in the description. Show some love to this book. It's what, like 300? 360 pages, something like that.

Yeah, beautiful, man. And the thing that we haven't talked about, which I'm going to save for people in the book, are the kidnapping attempts. Son of a bitch. You can't just do that. No, man. Alright, okay. Alright, you're going to have to buy the book book are the kidnapping attempts. Son of a bitch. You can't just do that. No, man. You're going to have to buy the book on all the kidnapping attempts. You were the kidnapper.

Yeah, I didn't kidnap anybody really well. I was like, you want to get in this car? No? Okay. Well, have a good day. Bye. Alright, well, right before I do want to get to the balkans now finally i've been waiting for this all day but just wrapping up the very end of liberland so you end your six

week stint you don't accept the long term nope why didn't you accept it because i was gonna lose my mind i i was it was so stressful to be i mean look okay so i'll I'll briefly touch on the kidnapping attempt. I had two attempts and also one mugging attempt while I was there. Like, it's, you know, Somaliland's a great place. It is. Sounds great. Sounds wonderful. Can't wait to go.

I'm struggling in a lot of ways, and that is in no way the fault of the people. That's the fault of history and colonialization colonial colonization um but it's not a safe place so yeah it's like i was on my guard a lot and that's just not good for your brain to live that way because they would have wanted if you're the ambassador you gotta live there full-time well and i'd have to have more i i mean you know i'd have to live like i my my guard guarded the embassy it didn't he didn't guard me so like wait explain the difference well it's not like he would leave the embassy with me right his job isn't at the correct so like if i went out on the town um then how big was the embassy nine bedrooms why didn't you just live there well i mean it was empty it was just but it's just a big empty mansion why didn't you live there i didn't

want to i know i did live there and that's where i was staying so he did guard you yeah but like i would leave i would go other places so like if you want to like the wawa yeah if i was going to the hargeisa wawa actually there they did have they did have like little like convenience store set up so like a 7-eleven in hargeisa so there were like these these um uh shipping containers that had you know sort of staple foods in them uh but like i think that was just kind of a a setup for um like a lot of the aid agencies were right next to where my work not my where the embassy was so it's like doctors borders had their compound um norwegian relief council had their compound the unhcr whoever

everybody had their compounds there and so like i would get know, tubes of Pringles. I don't know. I can just say this on record. I have no idea how Pringles does it, but Pringles is in every single place in the entire world. How the fuck? They're the cockroach of food. They just don't die. It's insane. I mean, look, I can't hate on them because I've survived off of Pringles so much. But, like, that sounds terrible.

It's not. That took some years off your life. Not good. Not good at all. There's, like, a lot of seed oils in that shit, right? I know. Yeah. Gotta be some bad shit. so much but like that sounds terrible it's not took some years off your life not good not good at all there's like a lot of seed oils in that shit i know yeah gotta be some bad shit i felt bad yeah i didn't didn't feel natural didn't feel good after six weeks there no just covered in mosquito bites and pringles and just pringles yeah so they're salted so you're thirsty as fuck yeah how's the water there is it like flint

michigan uh it came out yellow in the in the embassy yeah so not good that's not that's not great that's not a good combo so these are all reasons why i didn't accept the position right so did you like not accept it via email like your gmail and just like sorry fam yeah i'm out i i sent ambassador out yo i dropped my diplomatic papers what'd they say no problem pretty much well and then

it's funny too cause like I you know every once in a while you know foreign secretary Tom it was my birthday yesterday he got on my facebook he was like happy birthday like thanks tom hope you're good he lives in florida oh my god he's he's always traveling he's i really like tom he's cool i think he was working for xpedia.com when

he wasn't making a making a country son of a bitch i know it so you turn it down and then you had a couple hundred dollars to your name? A couple hundred dollars to my name. Where'd you go? I went to Marseille. In France? Yeah, I stayed. How'd you get there? Plains.

Oh, no, I didn't. I actually took... Of course you did. We were... Of course you did. Well, so I was staying with my girlfriend at the time. I caught up with her in Bulgaria, and we just kind of chilled out for a bit. How'd you get to Bulgaria with a couple hundred bucks like ryanair oh i mean i the reason i had a couple hundred bucks because

i had already pre-purchased all these flights okay you know like like i could get out all right i didn't have much you had a get out plan yeah like any good cia spy you had a you had an extraction plan yeah my extraction plan was like ryan. Hey, listen. You got first thing about CIS, be forgettable. That's right. Blend in. I have a problem with being forgettable, as you might imagine. No, no. I think you're very forgettable.

Thanks, man. You kind of like roll in, you know, do your thing. You're not an attention whore. You know what I mean? Like that's a compliment. Thanks, man. You're forgettable. Yeah.

I appreciate that. That's great. Like I said, look, CIA, I need a compliment. Thanks, man. You're unforgettable. Yeah. I appreciate that. That's great. Like I said, look, CIA, I need a job. Judd Apatow, I need a job. One of you guys could help me out a lot. But you get back to Bulgaria. Well, I got to Dubai, and I was in Dubai for like 24 hours, and that's so culture shocking.

After, like, what the fuck like oh oh people walking around on gold on like gold heels and shit oh my god it was i my like my i could feel i felt like my brain was like i could hear the cracking of my brain as i like emerged and into dubai as I emerged into Dubai. And then I immediately went to find the nearest air-conditioned place and eat something that was like a vegetable. That was awesome, but then fucking expensive. So yeah, we caught up in Bulgaria. She finished her Fulbright service. And then neither of us was really ready to go back to the States yet.

I had some, some paychecks come in from articles that I was writing. Cause I was still freelancing. It just, that it takes, it's slow to get those checks. And so we just shoestringed it in Marseille for a summer. And that was actually great.

Like it was, it was a perfect town to do on the cheap. They had, you know, the beaches are free, and they had cool public events that were easy to do. You could rent a bike for like a euro. So yeah, wonderful, wonderful summer. But the cool thing was that was the summer that France won the World Cup world cup oh shit right so it was like the perfect and i didn't realize it until i when i was finishing this book but it was like the perfect moment of trying to figure out what a country is where it's like suddenly there's this arbitrary

goal and i mean literally a goal this arbitrary, there's a bunch of people who are kicking a ball around somewhere in Russia, and that is bringing all of these people together. Wow. Suddenly, I am as French as possible. I don't even give a shit about football. But like, it was, I felt the sort of like, borders of my own individual identity blurring a bit as we were all hoping that, you know, you free wine and and they're shooting off fireworks and it's like holy shit like this is this is the the reason that we create these national stories to feel this to feel that you're a part of this one glorious thing that like yeah even though i didn't i don't even care about football even though i I didn't kick that goal to win the World Cup, I feel a little bit like I did just because I was in France at the time. And I was like that's what nationalism – It's a culture that brings people together.

Yeah. Yeah. Real quick, I got to go to the bathroom. We'll be right back. Yeah. All right. We're back. So we're finally going to go – you were just talking about Marseille and going there after the whole liberland thing to cool off with your girl

yeah we're gonna go back to the thing we've kind of skipped over yeah which was in between being banned from turkey and going to to liberland yeah which is you spent time in kosovo now kosovo and transnistria were between those yeah and we're going to talk about that because that's involved with the russia ukraine war that's fucking crazy so this is we're going to get into this right now but the whole balkan concept like kosovo and stuff like that about a year and a half ago i saw something i think it was if i remember correctly i think it was a like a picture of time magazine in 1999 with the famous NATO bombs on Kosovo. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, what the fuck is that?

And I started to look into it and I realized how insane the 1990s power vacuum of the Balkans was. Huge. And then I started looking into the history of the Balkans because things are tied to the land and the people it's just giant culture thing but essentially for people out there who aren't familiar and i'm going to let you explain a lot i just want to set some of the the the groundwork here the balkans used to be what was it yugoslavia yeah um depending on how far back you go. But that was during the Soviet era. They were one nation. Except for Albania.

Albania was never a part of Yugoslavia. Albania was not a part of Yugoslavia. But among these nations in this area, and I'll put a screenshot of this area in the corner of the screen for people to see. But among these nations, you have Slavic people, right? And you have the Serbs. You have the Croats, who are a little different. You have the Bosnians, who are different. And then you have the Albanians, who are

offshoots of, like, the Ottoman times. Illyrians. Right, the Illyrians. And Beklover, when he was in here for No. 95, he explained a lot of this, and we're going to have Bek in again at some point. He's a great guy. We're going to make this move, because this is the last

podcast that's happening in this studio. Banking a bunch of stuff for you, man. I think I may put this out even last because I filmed a bunch this week. So I don't know the order, but maybe I'll put this one out last of all of them. So you'll be the last one ever. Sick, man. But we're making this move up to Hoboken and moving the studio and everything. So I know Beck is up there.

So when we get up there, he's going to come on and do one. But we had talked about a year and a half ago, something like that, on the podcast. And Beck is obviously full Albanian. Yeah. We'll tell everyone who knows about it. Almost 150%, I think. Yeah, he is. That man is Albanian to the core.

He really is. But he had talked about the Illyrians and stuff like that. But the Albanians over time ended up spread across a bunch of countries. Now they were concentrated in the area of Albania, which I believe became a country in the – like after World War I? 1912, yeah. Okay, so right before World War I. and also the reason for the cozy relationship between Albania and the United States is because the person who spearheaded

or who championed Woodrow Wilson in fact I live in Tirana near Shashi Woodrow Wilson yeah they fucking love the US they got a statue of george w bush that and that's hard to do that isn't that crazy that's all right now watch this draft yeah i know

like mission accomplished statue there's even a there's a a bakery in um uh in the same area that it's like like i guess he sat in at one point and and they were like okay well this seat is reserved for george bush whenever he comes back to the bakery. Oh, my God. Well, he's got something around the world. That's right. Yeah. But when Yugoslavia forms to go more towards today, they're in the Soviet bloc.

Soviet Union breaks up by 91. Yugoslavia now has all these different tribes, right? And they all had a giant vacuum as i pointed out that caused all kinds of violence and it's an ignored time in history because the 1990s were like a great time in the u.s men in black was coming out i think everyone independence day everyone was focused on the blow job in the oval office like that was the most important thing right so people are forgetting about all this shit in europe which involves a lot of. And I believe you had like the Bosnian genocide. And then you also had, which is obviously any genocide is horrible, but it was terrible.

And then you had, and actually when I had Sean Ryan in here. Oh, he's great. I like his podcast. Yeah. Really cool. That was a fun episode. When you're in Baghdad in that time period, you could just hear the car bombs going off all day, all night. Hear the gunshots, hear the gunfights, and it was just bombs, terrorists, suicide bombers all the time.

People coming back all f***ed up, seeing these vehicles getting blown up, seeing what's left of them. If anything, I mean, it was, this guy died, this guy died, this died this guy died this guy died and that's why we're so busy we were killing these guys they were making the bombs we were killing the guys that were planting the bombs we were killing the guys that were detonating the bombs and it was saving american lives but sean was actually the guy who he was supposed to go in as a navy seal undercover and try to get some of the guys who did that. And he ended up being pulled. He was trained by MI6 to do it and then he was pulled to Afghanistan.

So he didn't go in. But anyway, then a very ignored one is Kosovo. And so the Albanians – I started to say this a few minutes ago. But the Albanians, as I understand it were spread all over yugoslavia they were and then outside of yugoslavia they had their main hub in albania but these are people who are in macedonia they were in serbia they were in croatia and they were heavily concentrated to the point where they were like 90 of the population in this land that was you know a part of of Yugoslavia that when it was broken up was given to Serbia where there's like no Serbs.

And so in the 90s, the people there, the Albanians, wanted to form their own country. This country in 2008, as you've already mentioned, ended up becoming Kosovo, which is still not recognized

by some countries around the world. Not entirely. It's over 100 countries. And I think there's some finer points. That's a good breakdown the world. Not entirely. It's over 100 countries. And I think there's some finer points. That's a good breakdown of it. Very, very good. Some of the

finer points that I think are worth mentioning, right? Because, you know, one of the things that I mention in the book is that since this history goes back so many, I mean, centuries, you know, one of the most important historical moments for Kosovo was the Battle of Kosovo, and that was in 1389. But you talk to people in the Balkans today, and they bring up the Battle

of Kosovo that happened in 1389, and you might as well think that it happened last Wednesday, you know? The curse and the blessing of a long history is there's a great deal of cultural wisdom that trickles down through a long history, but the curse of it is there's also a lot of cultural antagonism that exists in a long history. And so in the Balkans, there is this patchwork quilt of love and hate and legacy conflicts and alliances that have been forged and then broken again and then forged again. And so what the area is left with, it's also, and this bears mentioning because I think it's absolutely critical about the Balkans that people oftentimes overlook, is that during the Crusades, this was the overroute land to get from Rome and Western Europe to the Holy Land, right?

So this is one of the reasons that it was constantly a thoroughfare for world events. And it also constantly bred conflict. Holy shit, I never thought about that. Yeah, it's overlooked, but it's deeply important. And that's why, you know, there are similar cultures there, certainly. But there's also vast differences between each of the cultures. So going back to the sort of like proto-state level, and I'm going to say – I'm going to do both sides' version of it uh and this is an overly simplistic way of talking about kosovo uh because it is i mean you know whole books are written on on coasts um and uh but and the

genocide there that's what blew my mind no one talks about that yeah it's a serbian genocide against kosovars albanians i should say i, holy shit. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. But from the, let's say, the Albanian point of view, this is, so I'll steel man their point of view on this and then sort of do the same with the Serb point of view. Sure. And that will kind of get us to why this is, you know, such a combustible place, right? So from the Albanian point of view, these are ancestral Albanian lands.

The Albanian people consider themselves the indigenous people of the Balkan Peninsula. Slavic intrusion or Slavic migration, depending on who you ask, of course. And can you define what a Slav is? It's hard to do, actually. And of course, full books can be written about this, too. But it is what some people, I think the general current understanding of Slav is that it is a, so the word Slav, some people believe is an antonym for the word word, meaning that the Slavic people are united by Slavically based languages. They use similar language. So they come from a similar language group.

And oftentimes, though this is not always the case, because of course there's an enormous amount of diversity in any person group. As we were talking about the Kurds earlier, there are many different Kurdish languages, many different Kurdish dialects, different belief structures, government structures. No person group is completely homogenous, and the Slavs are the same way. But I digress. They are oftentimes Christian, and they speak similar language groups, and they are people who some believe came down from the steppe country of Central Europe. And so during that time, and I can't remember why exactly, so I won't guess, but anyway, there was Slavic migration, this was during the year, like the

year 600 or so, Slavic migration going from the east coming towards the Balkans. And so, that's where we start seeing the first Slavic artifacts and the first – like the original Slavs who are moving into the Balkan Peninsula. At the same time, you have the Illyrian tribes and the Albanoi tribes, so the Albanians, people who speak Albanian, which is totally different from any Slavic language. And they were already there. Already there, correct. And the Illyrians, who were the Illyrians? So Illyrians were the sort of original people of the Balkan Peninsula. But my understanding, though, of that word is it's like it's a blanket term for the person, the people on that peninsula. So there were various tribes that existed within there.

And the Albanoi tribe was the namesake of the albanians um in kosovo specifically the first sort of organized uh group was the i think it was called the they called it the kingdom of dardania which has um uh has like archaeological roots how do you spell that d-a-r-d-a-n-i-a okay there's even you can even see the flag of dardania um it looks like an albanian flag but with some blue in it um and so albanians are all pointing to this stuff saying look we've been here forever we've been here forever we've been here forever um the serbian point of view is yeah you may have here, but we were the first people to organize this as a state. You don't have a state. This is an astroturf state. Like, we established churches here, and that's a good portion of why there's so much conflict there, is that it became a

spiritual heartland for Serbs and for Serbian Orthodox Church. There's a very important monastery there, the Monastery of Gračanica. And there's also a really important site of the Battle of Kosovo, which was led by Serbian Prince Lazar. and this is a point that absolutely bears mentioning. I talk about two different cultural heroes in Kosovo, in the Kosovo section, right? I talk about Prince Lazar, and I talk about the Albanian freedom fighter, Isabel Latini. So, both had similar aims. They wanted the Ottoman Empire to get the fuck out of the Balkans. They wanted to self-determine. They didn't want their sons to have to go become Janissaries. And they wanted their people to have their own land, right? Now, they lived 500 years, there's 500 years in between the two of them. And so, Prince Lazar and Issa Boletini also both did something that is remarkable, knowing the Balkans as we do today, which is they worked together across ethnic lines in order to try and repel

the Ottomans, right? So So in the Battle of Kosovo, it's not just Serbs who are fighting the Turkish Empire or the Ottoman Empire. It's Serbs, it's Macedonians, it's Bulgarians, it's Albanians. Everybody was lined up. Everybody. Because that particular area might as well just be,

you know, a super highway for a medieval army. It's a flat land and it's got it's got two big rivers on it. So if you're an invading army, and you're trying to invade the Balkans, you've got to go through Gachanins, or pardon me, you have to go through Gazemistan. Anyway, that's why that battle was going to be there. And so what happened with that particular battle, a lot of it's lost to history. But we know two things about it. We know that Prince Lazar died during that battle. But we also know that the Ottoman Sultan Murad I died at that battle. In fact, Murad –

What year was this again? 1389. Yeah. Yeah. And this is where Skanderberg comes from right is skanderbeg comes from uh from albania um or like what we would know as the country of albania today this is where his this was where his legend was made this time period a little bit before a little bit after a little bit let me pull him up yeah look it up i i'm i'm my time might be off but i i want to say that he was

contemporary with um vlad tepish oh yeah 1405 to 1468 yeah so so pretty much just just right after got it yeah and he so he was led a rebellion against the ottoman empire and what is today albania north macedonia greece kosovo montegro, and Serbia. A member of the noble Castrioti family. He was sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court. He graduated from the Enderum. Oh, this is going to go through his whole bio. I think I actually – Treaty of Gaeta in 1451.

Yeah, Skanderbeg was – so he helped repel the Ottomans once they had actually occupied Albania. The Battle of Kosovo was to sort of stop the invading army from taking up more of the Balkans, basically. And he came from a place called Mirdita, which is in northwestern Albania. Wonderful place. Beautiful. I've been to his village before. There's a little shrine to him. Pretty cool. Beautiful. I've been to his village before. There's a little shrine to him. Pretty cool.

Yeah. So anyway, what you have here is you have from the Serbian point of view, they say, well, yes, this battle, we didn't stop the Ottoman Empire entirely, but we really did a lot of damage,

and we put up a wall between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of, from potentially their point of view, I don't want to speak for all Serbs, but like, this is the dominant narrative, right? From their point of view, we've also protected Christian Europe from invasion from outsiders. From the point of view of, you know, albanians it's like well you lost the battle like you know your your czar was killed and also we've been here before this battle like you guys came in in the year 600 and we've been living on this land and it's not like they don't have land either like the slavs like the serbias. Serbia has Serbia. Croatia has Croatia. And the issue here is with Serbia, but they're trying to claim – because Albania has its own country, as we said, but then there of the balkans and i think it's it it it bears understanding with empathy right um and i i say in a bit in the book that there's everybody in

the balkans has two maps there's the map that exists and then there's the map that sort of lives in your soul and for everybody in the the Balkans, they'll negotiate these two maps where an Albanian will talk about what they call Shibria Moth, which is Greater Albania, which stretches all the way up to Northern Macedonia, or stretches into Northern Macedonia, goes to Montenegro, bits of Greece, that's Shipriamoth. It's this place that doesn't exist on a map, but if Albania had its true borders, according to them, that's what it would look like. But wait, at the same time, there's also greater Macedonia.

And also, at the same time, if you talk to most Bulgarians, they'll be like, well, Macedonia is actually Bulgaria at this point in time. And if you talk to Serbsians, they'll be like, well, Macedonia is actually Bulgaria at this time. And if you talk to Serbs, they say, well, but what about greater Serbia? And then on top of that, there's Republic Srpski, which is this breakaway autonomous zone, which is like hugely Serbian nationalist, but it's in Bosnia. And they have political power in Bosnia-Herzegovina. So that's the Balkans. If you're confused great that's that's what the area is and why did you say as a little side note here you and i were talking in

the car about this very quickly earlier i'm not going to say it as smart as you did but you were talking about how the balkans are like the representation of like the formation of europe and i think you said it's because if they had if the balkans hadn't defended all of europe which you kind of just outlined but like all of europe would have been muslim muslim rather than christian so like if you look at i'm definitely saying no no i think you're i mean you're it would be, the goals of the Ottoman Empire was quite clear. You know, it's an empire. Its goal was expansion. And how long was the Ottoman Empire around?

Like 1,000 years, 900 years? I want to say it's some like 800. It's in the book somewhere. Because, I mean, like all of these places, the majority of these places came, the places that I profiled anyway, they either came from the Ottoman Empire or they came as a result of the Ottoman Empire. Do you want me to talk about what the Ottoman Empire was?

Please. Because you know what? When we think about some form of history being written in ways that we're supposed to study things and not supposed to study others, when you look at the history of like, don't know like post jesus and nazareth or whatever we talk a lot about the romans then we skip a lot yep we talk a lot about you know the william wallace and the formation of what we know is like royal england yeah then we get as like Royal England. Yeah. Then we get to like the American Euro world.

Mm-hmm. And smack there, very skipped in the middle, are the many centuries of the Ottomans. Yeah. So, let's lay that out. Well, so, first, it's important to understand that like it was all, these are all various overlapping empires, right? The Roman Empire was the, it was eventually subdivided into four different parts. There was, and those four different parts were ruled because no one person could rule over all of these four different parts. The Western Roman Empire began falling. The Byzantine Roman Empire was hanging in there.

But it was also eventually taken over by cultural intrusion from, I believe it was the Seljuk Turks. Yeah, I'm sorry. I want to make a clarification here too because I totally, in that explanation, skipped the Byzantines, who are the people who actually like took Rome, I think. Right? And then the Ottomans came after that, but we totally ignore that. They all were Roman Empire at one point. So the Western Roman Empire was the,

was when we talk about the fall of Rome, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about the fall of the Western Roman Empire, you know, in Byzantium, like which was centered around Constantinople, which eventually becomes Istanbul, you have a more or less functioning ecosystem still. So while the West falls and perishes into the Dark Ages,

the East begins thriving. But you also have cultural intrusions coming in through the form of the Seljuk Turks, the Ayyubid Empire, which was actually run by a Kurdish guy, by Saladin the Great. So I think it was like the Middle East that comes from there that we're not usually taught in schools just because we put this huge dividing line between East and West. Even though if it wasn't for the East being this generator of knowledge and this repository of culture, we would have never gotten out of the Dark Ages, right? From the East, we get algebra, we get, you know, all of the science learning. Oftentimes, people will say that the Enlightenment originally started somewhere in Central Asia. There's a wonderful book about this called The Lost

Enlightenment. I think it's by Frederick Starr. But it basically lays out the case that as Central Asians came down, they were also bringing these enormous treasure troves of knowledge and learning. And the reason that we don't have, you know, the cultural artifacts from them is because oftentimes their homes were made nomadically. But you have like some of these wonderful primary documents of like, and this is from somewhere in Central Asia, right? You have a primary document of like this treasure trove of like mail that somebody buried in like a pot out there. And what the mail was, was like it was a wife and her husband sort of going back and forth. And the wife was like, oh, you left me in Bishkek.

Like, come on, man. Like, I got to, you know, go somewhere else. And it's a pretty casual conversation, but that's a remarkable thing, archaeologically speaking, right? Because what does that tell you? One, it tells you that they had a mail system that could travel for thousands and thousands of miles. Two, women could read and write. Three, paper was plentiful enough to waste it on casual conversations. This is an enormous amount of learning and stuff that we completely lost in the Western Roman Empire when it fell. So, I mean, these are – that's why – anyway, I've gotten away from the Ottoman Empire, but the Ottoman Empire – That's just great. Do you have a map of the Ottoman Empire?

Probably be good to pull that up. Ottoman Empire map. I love the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, so I mean look at this. I'll put it in the corner of the screen for people. I mean just to think about how vast this area is, you know, you're going over to the Caspian Sea, and you're also going all the way over across North Africa. All of the Holy Land.

This is an, yeah, and of course, the Holy Land, which is so deeply important as like this, like, you know, you want to talk about how you create a nation how you galvanize consent what is one of the best most compelling stories that's ever been told i can tell you about three of them and guess what they're all in jerusalem yes that's why it's a really important place like we can take and what are your three for that oh uh islam christianity and judaism oh you're going like the straight full story absolutely yeah i mean take the divinity out of it like even if you take the divinity out of it there's there's a reason that that that place has been fought over for centuries yeah this is great but just the full scope of it like you said all the balkans greece turkey the entire holy land the northern part of

north of the holy land the syria area part of iraq into the oil field so to speak not that that was like the big deal but all the way down into the peninsula towards yemen all of egypt northern africa all the way to algiers by this damn near the Strait of Gibraltar. I mean, goddamn. Well, and it's – a lot of the reason, at least from my understanding, like a lot of the reason that the Catholic Church was trying to sort of push its forces out into the Balkans was specifically because it's like they're trying to stem the rising tide of the Ottoman Empire. Because once Rome fell, well, then who took over as the dominant power center? Well, it was the Catholic Church. Right?

So, again, let's think about that idea. So it becomes holy again. Think about that idea of how you generate consent amongst the governed, right? I know I'm harping on it, but I just want to sort of show you the myriad ways that you get to this. And one great way of doing it is say, you know how miserable your life is right now? Okay, well, great. You're going to go to heaven. Yes.

And heaven rules. But you got to do some t. Yes. And heaven rules. But you got to do some tithing. You got to give us some money. But you also got to go do some crusading. Yep. And suddenly, if you control that narrative, if you control that abstraction like we were talking about earlier, then you become the most powerful thing in the area you be your god you're

the representation of god yeah you go get me some islamic scalps you bring them back here you're going to heaven that's right and you also you think i mean here's a great example of not that they had a southern accent no but church i just need to channel brad. That's good. I love Ottomans. I want my scalps. I love me some Ottoman scalps. So here's a good example of how belief can move people. I think this is – you know what? Before I even start talking about it, will you just look it up just to make sure it's real?

Look up Peter the Hermit and the peasants crusade peter the hermit and the peasants crusade yeah okay so this is great which you want the wiki uh yeah sure okay so peter the hermit also known as little peter peter of amiens peter of cherries it definitely fucked that up was a roman catholic priest of amiens and a key figure during the military expedition from france to jerusalem known as the people's crusade okay yeah so this this is this is great and this is a perfect example of how belief animates and and animates well it's this thing that we're talking about in terms of like the constitution too you know of how belief animates. Belief animates.

Well, it's this thing that we were talking about in terms of, like, the Constitution, too. You know, people wrote a couple paragraphs down on a big sheet of paper, and then they signed it, and then suddenly we have a revolutionary war, and the next thing you know, we're walking on the goddamn moon! Like, belief animates.

Like, this is... You know, I try not to be pretty woo-woo, but like, it's fucking magic if you can get people to believe in things. And so, Peter the Hermit was this guy, and when they were popularizing the Crusades, they would send, like, bishops around to the various towns, and, you know, they would be these sort of stirring storytellers, and they would be like, you're gonna go and crusade and we're gonna, maybe you'll die and don't worry, you're gonna go to heaven. You know, these awesome Catholic pitchmen were going out there. And all of the young men in the village would volunteer and they would place like a cloth cross on their like lapel to say, yeah, this guy, he's going to the crusade.

And of course, you'd feel terrible if you didn't like have your cross when everybody else did. So everybody was like, you know, whipped into a frenzy about going to crusade. And then Peter the Hermit comes along. And he's like, yeah, we're going now. And people are like, what? And he's like, no, no, like, get your shit. We're going to go crusade right now. The bishops who were the sort of crusade pitch men, like they were just tilling the soil and like, you know know do some training in a

couple years we're gonna like make an army and everything like that but peter the hermit was like nope get shit fucking going bro which way is jerusalem we're going and he just led this crusade and he just started marching and people followed him because because they were, like, so, you know, swept up in this idea of crusading, that he accidentally started this first crusade, or, as it's called, the Peasants Crusade. People just fucking followed this guy, and it, in one way, caused some big problems later down the road, but it also caused some, you know, opportunities. So Peter the Hermit marches everybody straight into Ottoman territory.

They follow him for that long. And at this point, the Crusaders have, like, you know, a decent, people are all right with them. Like, you can forage off of our land. You can make camp here. Like, it's all good you know go go give those ottomans what for um and you know they're not disciplined they're not a professional army at all so they start pissing off locals anyway peter the hermit marches them into ottoman

territory and i can't remember who the sultan at the was, but he's like, wait, like, that's the army? That's their whole crusade? Just wipes them all out immediately. Just wipes them off the face of the earth. I think Peter the Hermit actually survived. Did he survive? They thought they had God on their side. Yeah, and they just had, like, some dude named Peter.

Peter the Hermit. Yeah. It looks like later life yeah yeah he survived he survived that shit fucking guy made it back he got everybody killed and then he lost a lot of good men out there he really did like a lot of like dumb peasants and so when the first crusade actually started the like you know when the professional boys like made their way there first of all people were pissed off because they're like well i thought you guys i thought you were crusading and like this army's a lot bigger and like now i don't

really want you to use my land or forge off of my stuff um but the sultan at the time is like oh well it's another one of those crusades okay this is gonna be fine and then they run into a real army and then suddenly the first crusade is on. But it's Peter the Hermit that started it off just because he was like, we're going down. Get a bag of apples. Let's go. Yeah. You got a shovel you can use as a sword or something.

Like, let's let's get crusading, boys. He was just a guy. So you're bringing this up, though, in the context of the religious power that took hold out of Italy in this case. The power of story. That is now, if you're going to, and I don't mean this literally for the way we look at the map today, but for Europe's sake, and just south of Europe, we're separating east and west. Yes. And so this guy leads the first, like the unofficial first crusade whatever people die in the meantime the ottoman empire has i'll put that map back in the corner of the screen this is where they are they're controlling basically a backwards sea they've been

yeah they've they've kicked out the the christians from jerusalem they have the area but again there's that that area in the b Balkans where it's constant traffic between the East and the West, right? And that is where you have not only the development of all of these different cultural microclimates, but you also have like the repositories of so much history and conflict because at some point, like, people just stay in their area. You have a mixing of different people groups. You have Bulgarians, Bosnians, like, you have all of these different religions and belief structures that are a checkerboard. And then when the empire falls,

who am I, right? I mean, this is a really good question that I think everybody should ask themselves. Like, if your country dissolves tomorrow, like, what are you? And a lot of people have experienced this. Like, millions and millions of people have experienced this like millions and millions of people have experienced this um

and fortunately we have never once experienced the complete collapse of our nation but i think it's a good thought experiment to run every once in a while like who am i if i'm not an american what would i call myself if amer America just disappeared into the ocean? It's so – it's such a radical concept because we have no understanding of that, that you can't wrap your head around it. And I think if you're not a part of a generation that experienced that or rebuilt a country or built a new country, perhaps even you can't understand it unless it's incredibly well passed down, which there are some cultures that do that. You know, if you listen to like Netanyahu talk about Israel, I mean, first of all, that guy, you say what you want about him, he's a student of history for sure.

But he talks about it like it was all yesterday. Like he talks about them being kicked out like 1300 years ago like and so we were kicked out and we left the country this is a solid name and we went that was pretty good really good yeah he's from philly though so there's there you go so we left the country and suddenly we were it was like being kicked out of our apartment and if you're kicked out of your apartment well one day you go back and it's still your apartment. And so we came back and there was no such thing as Palestine. It was not real.

Right now I'm just like hearing like all the war drums. Simple explanations have launched so many missiles. What a lie. That's a bar bro oversimplifying a situation is paving the way towards military incursion i'm not and listen from my perspective especially for that conflict i'm not trying to judge yeah like i i studied that a lot and i understand i understand both sides and i think I understand. I understand both sides. And I think there's both wrong on both sides. There's reactions that happen.

But when you hear a guy like that talk about this stuff, he is talking about it not from like my grandfather, my great-grandfather. Like my fucking – you can't even map them on a page, ancestor, because this shit is quite literally biblical. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so they come back and they're able to get back on their land. And by the way, do what we talked about with all these other countries that are – or all these other people who don't have a state like the Kurds and stuff like that. The Jewish people got their state back.

They were stateless people for centuries and centuries and centuries and and you think about it it's like man oh man oh man there's there are some people who can build it in but to go back to the original point like with us we don't we don't get that we don't imagine like have you ever seen the show man uh the man in the high castle no but i heard it's great, and I love Philip K. Dick. Yeah, so Philip K. Dick, legendary author, sci-fi author who was really on to some shit. Dude was next level. He's one of my – I used to write science fiction, and he was one of my – Of course you did.

What haven't you done? Christ. Sports. He wrote – he was so ahead of his time, that guy. But they made a show that I will now say was a little bit ahead of its time. It was 2015 to 2019. It was on Amazon Prime. It was four seasons.

It's very good. Called The Man in the High Castle, which was one of his stories that he wrote. And the concept is simple. We lost. The year is 1964. It's the United States. We lost the war. Everything east of the Rockies is run by Nazi Germany war everything east of the rockies is run by nazi

germany everything west of the rockies is run by the japanese empire and the the central premise is that there are certain characters within there who can tap into alternate realities right and those realities exist across multiverses of other universes and they can see tapes where the allies won the war right and all the while the not i mean a straight nazi like trying to take over the world shit so it's like very fun plot wise but like the nazis are developing technology that allows them to travel through the multiverse as future humans into or into other realities to be able to make sure that they win and things like that yeah and like time warfare when you watch this because you know the show's taking place in new york and there's a

goddamn nazi flag right flying over new york like yeah listen well every time i see that i feel a certain type of way even though it's a show yeah yeah and and you think about like you are one really bad decision away fucking with the wrong place from something like that. Yeah, yeah. Well, and Philip K. Dick too was – I feel like he became – even as he lost his mind, he was obsessed with this idea of multiple concurrent realities. Have you ever heard of his book Valis? No. Valis is interesting it's a um it is the book that he wrote while he was actively losing his mind uh philip k dick do we know what officially happened to him in losing his mind was there a health on it like a health

term i can tell you from his perspective what he felt had happened. The story goes that he was – did he kill himself? I can't remember. He died in 1982. Let's go to his death. Let's just make this easy. Death. On February 17, 1982, after completing an interview, Dick contacted his therapist, complaining of failing eyesight. He was advised to go to the hospital immediately but did not.

The following day, he was found unconscious on the floor of a santa ana california home yeah having suffered a stroke on february 25th 1982 dick suffered another stroke in the hospital which led to brain death five days later he was disconnected from life support yeah so he when he he was actively sort of entering this psychosis psychosis stage he he was presumable, and this was right before he wrote Valis, he was, I think he had like oral surgery or something like that. Anyway, he had a toothache and he was waiting on a prescription to come to his apartment. Somebody drops off this prescription in his apartment

and he sees that she has the like sort of Christian fish around her her neck at this point from what I understand he feels that a beam sort of hits him in his sort of third eye center and conveys to him that there's like all these multiple realities going on at the same time and Valis is written sort of from his point of view as he's like almost like bifurcating into different yeah different

realities and one of the things that he consistently says so he calls himself um horse lover fat in that um in that book like he that's the the name that he gives himself which I guess is like some reference to his like english name um but one of the things that he consistently says in the book is the uh you know the empire never ended the roman empire never ended the roman empire never ended it's

constantly this this this refrain in the book and then there's's another Philip K. Dick short story that I think is creepy as fuck. I mean, it's chilling because it's a goofy concept, but it is so perfectly done. Basically, you have this woman who is able to travel into these alternate dimensions. And she's sort of a war profiteer. So in the dimension that she's going to, there's all of this money, just hundreds of thousands of dollars just strewn on the, like it's worthless now because the state has collapsed.

But of course it's worth a lot in the dimension that she's from. And so she brings them, you know, various things that they need enough food to sort of survive but what she doesn't realize is that the people on the other side in this universe where they have all this useless cash that she wants is they're building a machine of their own in order to break out of their dimension and into a better dimension

where they're not starving and dying. And then when she finds out that they're trying to break out of their dimension, mind you, she still wants all of the useless money to them. She takes an action to circumvent them from making their machine that will allow them to travel into a better universe so it's a chilling story of basically like multi-dimensional war profiteering um what if that's happening right now i mean it could be in some ways it is like in there there are people who are you know i mean you can you

can look at it as simple as uh you know the the the fruit wars in south america like people people starting wars over over making sure that like uh companies like dole can sell like the fruit from south america like that's that's profiteering absolutely right i mean that's that's the great thing about philip k dick is like yeah he's taking us to a a universe that's just diagonal to our own like it's so close that it it's almost like it's so close to our own that it's chilling um i i the way that i i feel like philip k dick for me is like i'll i'll take a couple of his his like short stories as vitamins um just because it's like i i don't necessarily enjoy the reading but the concepts in it are so powerful that it gives you a way of reconceptualizing what's going on around us there's even this one that's super goofy i think it's called like the swizzle i think that

literally and and it's it almost is this uh the schismogenesis issue that we were talking about like um so you maybe can write swizzle but i think it's called swizzle anyway keep going anyway so the the idea is that um uh there's this sort of like interdimensional salesman and um he comes and he's he's repairing a swizzle and the the like he gets to a house and like she's like i think that's the wrong door and he's like oh man my bad i i got into the wrong dimension it's fine and then she's like what's a swizzle and he's like oh well the world is largely divided divided into like two types of people people who have swizzles and people who don't have swizzles so you should probably have a swizzle and she's's like, well, I don't think I want one.

What does it do? And he's like, well, I can't tell you that. And it's like, I mean, if that isn't like, you know, the perfect example of schismogenesis of like arbitrarily dividing human beings for the purpose of generating power or economic enfranchisement like that's that's the the perverse incentive that that propels warfare this was this was a great tangent on what we were doing we just went on like a good yeah 40 minute i think we went from the ottoman empire to philip k dick to to owls yes Yes. No, that was good.

That's why I love doing this job. You never know where it's going to go. But back to the original point, the reason we were on the Ottomans was because it had to do with the Balkans and the formation. And we went through the Crusades and all that. Oh, I got a good Balkan thing too. All right. Go for it. The sandwich heard around the world. The potential sandwich.

The sandwich? It's a good question. How do you hear a sandwich? Well, it's – Are you chewing too loud? This is a question that historians have actually asked about or have written about. So the – World War I starts when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-hungarian empire is murdered by the black hand who are serbian nationalist group in sarajevo i can't remember the year anyway he gets shot by a guy

named 1914 i think sounds like it could be yeah it sounds right check me in the comments yeah check them in the comments but don't look up the olfact because that's awesome impress impress your friends at bars with that good one so good um so gavrilo prinkup is the is the the the trigger man and he kills uh archduke franz ferdinand this tips off world war one um uh it's like the the shot heard around the world basically except you know not not the american revolution um that is how it started but if you descend into the specifics about the story of how Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot, it becomes way more fascinating.

And the basic level of this. So you've always been picky about your produce. But now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first. Restrictions apply. See in-store or online for details. ...says that Gavrilo Princip was walking out of a coffee shop

or like a little delicatessen at the time. And some people believe that he was eating a sandwich and, and historians have, have argued whether or not he was eating a sandwich or not. If you, yeah, if you, wow,

he was Archduke Prince Ferdinand was not a good looking guy. No. Yeah. Mustache was strong though. Oh yeah. It's a strong mustache. Absolutely man. So people argue whether or not he like had a sandwich in his hand when he was like about shoot archduke franz ferdinand but i

think the more important part of this is it shows how uh history oftentimes the most important parts of history are not these devised moves, but in fact, it's that whole, it's stumbling into changing the world. So when Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to Sarajevo, Sarajevo is a sort of notoriously long city. It goes along this river. I can't remember the river's name. But he's touring the city and he's saying, hey, you're all part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now. Blackhand is really not about this. And they're like, we're going to kill this guy. And they are, you know, not going to underdo it. So they take, I think it's something like 19 assassins.

And they're all spread out along the parade route and the first assassin ship and just to be clear just so we don't get body bagged here was print ship and the five other conspirators it wasn't 19 oh thank you sorry no no I appreciate it yeah sure we get it right yeah but it's a lot of people that's a lot of people yeah so it was uh maybe they arrested 19 in in total with anyway um but yeah so there were all these other assassins that were along the uh the route that were trying to take out archduke franz ferdinand first time that somebody tries to take him out they throw a grenade at him and it bounces off the car and like blows up the car in back of him anyway they scrubbed the parade and they're like well we we're not doing this anymore

um and you know franz vernon is still a politician so he's like it's a good idea for me to go to the magistrate and be like that was really messed up let's not have that happen again now i'm going to go visit the um you know the wounded and so his driver takes him around he realizes he's gotten lost um and he's stuck on this bridge he's trying to back up and you know it's a it's a pre-world war one car so it's not not doing so hot now the other assassins that were along the route they disbanded but gavrilo prinkep went to go get a sandwich presumably nobody nobody actually knows and there's there's actually been papers written on what he was doing in that coffee shop but the the legend goes that he was eating a sandwich in a coffee shop which i think you can still go to in sarajevo i'm actually

headed to sarajevo uh next two weeks i'll send you a picture of it oh that's cool yeah um so through no fault of his own through this twist of, he walks out of the coffee shop at the exact same time as Archduke Franz Ferdinand is stalled on a bridge in a topless car. And Prinkip has the gun in his pocket. Mm. And so even though they scrubbed the parade, even though it didn't go according to plan, he has one chance to stand there and kill the guy that his bosses want him to kill. And he pulls the trigger and the modern world. Yep. Because he randomly went to that coffee shop and he randomly had that gun on him. In another multiverse though the card moved

and he missed and nothing had Hitler's probably an artist somewhere got accepted into school. I wonder what would have happened. I mean so there's the the I've heard one reading of it that you know the I wonder what would have happened. I mean, so there's the... I've heard one reading of it that, you know, that Gavrilo didn't matter,

that this was a war that was going to happen anyway because you have two empires expanding into... Something was going to happen. Right, and it's expanding into the Balkans. One of the reasons that I think it's unfortunate that people don't know more about the Balkans is because

it's not settled history yet. I talk with one guy in the book about... It's a Serbian guy who's like the docent at the monastery of Gratjanica. And, you know, he's a little bit frosty to me in the beginning, but then we start talking. And I'm like, you know, do you think that Serbia will take over this area again? Do you think that the borders of Serbiabia will will include grachanitsa

again and he was like oh yeah absolutely wait a second am i mixed up grachanitsa is where grachanitsa is a serbian enclave in the center of kosovo got it got it got it okay yeah i should have said that so yeah it's a serbian enclave in the center of kosovo and i was that's where like the seven percent of the people who are in Kosovo who are Serbian are mostly... It's there. It's Mitrovica. It's... That's on the north end, right? Yeah, and there are little villages here and there. And so, you know, he and I are, and I mean, like the scene, sometimes like reality really just hands you some great shit.

Oh, sure. Because like the scene just kind of like wrote itself. I was going to this monastery because it's a protected Serbian monastery, and I'm just trying to get the Serb point of view on things. Walk in, on the wall is painted the Last Judgment. So, like, on one side, it's like, you know, sinners being tortured, and on the other side, it's like, you know, everybody in heaven. And this docent, Trojan, he comes up and he's like, where are you from? And I normally would say Los Angeles just because it kind of, you know, it's not like I'm from the USA, Serbian guy.

And he's like, okay. And then he's pretty frosty to me. And I'm trying to make conversation. It's like, I think he might be a good person to chat with. And I'm like, hey, who's this one saint in the picture of paradise, right? And he's like, do you know your Bible? And I was like, I mean, decent enough from Catholic school. And he's like, well, there was a thief that was crucified next to Christ.

And I was like, ah, St. Dismas. My buddy Dave took it as his confirmation name. Otherwise, I would have – Wait, that guy became a saint? Yeah, dude. Did Robert – There was one that didn Wait, that guy became a saint? Yeah, dude. Did Robert to the... There was one that didn't, that denied him. The other one was like, we should be here.

You'll be on my right hand in paradise today. Yeah, I'll be in paradise. Yeah, so that's Saint Dismas. And so he's a bit... Shout out Mel Gibson. Shout out Saint Dismas. So anyway, Trayon was like okay this guy this guy can hang with his bible facts and we started chatting for a bit and i was like you know from your perspective

do you think that serbia will retake greta nenica that you're just holding on to this monastery helping protect this monastery until it becomes part of Serbia again and he's like oh yeah definitely when was this conversation couple weeks ago no couple months ago maybe two three months ago

and he was like we're at what I would call half time in the football match it's not over and i mean the guy is visibly upset as he's telling me this he's not just a propaganda spouting machine he genuinely wants serbia to retake this area and he genuinely believes it again that that right head center of kosovo yeah it's not even like on the border or something no man even on the right side on the east side yeah dude and he thinks serbia is going to come into the dead

center of kosovo and take just this area yes he talk no no he thinks he thinks that it's all gonna be kosovo yeah see that doesn't i know i'm an outsider here that makes no sense these are all albanians here there's these little enclaves of serbs i don't know why they feel like this is their land none of their people are there it's like us saying like oh mexico's ours what well think about the generators of belief that are there. I mean, because that's more important, I think, than the reality of the population, right? You have this monastery. You have Gratianitsa.

You've got the site of the Battle of Kosovo. Imagine, which is Gazemistan, which is like, I don't know, maybe an hour away from this site. I'll put the map in the corner of the screen. You have these deeply, deeply important cultural touchstones for the Serbian national story there. And those are important generators of nationalism. They're important generators of the story of of serbia and the the story of kosovo so it i mean at least for gazemistan it's almost like if gettysburg was in cuba right yeah but it's way longer ago dude yeah you're right is way longer ago but i mean just like what you're talking about

with Netanyahu it doesn't matter like when we but Netanyahu a lot of Jews were there they're not here they're in one little spot another little spot

somewhere else there's such a small percentage of this I don't understand it i think that the the way the way that i've kind of squared the circle with this for me and again like you know i mean the only way that i can really talk about it is like in these sort of like magical terms it's like at a certain point to create a nation you have to weld a story to the land and one of the best ways to like absolutely make that story as undeniable as the color of the sky is to have somebody die on that land it could be a soldier that fell for a cause, or it could be somebody who died of old

age and made a family that thrived there. But when somebody calling themselves a Serb, somebody calling themselves an Albanian, somebody calling themselves a Russian or an American dies on that land, suddenly the story is married to that land. And that is very, very hard to change, especially hard to change without violence. I agree. Because then when more violence happens on that land, it's a battle of two stories, right? It's crazy how the world is. I know. Well, because it has everything to do with your own individual identity.

Yes. Like, and people don't think about their identities as something they'll fight to the death for until it's threatened, until part of it is threatened. Right? I mean, but you, so you're talking with this guy in the bar. He's Serbian. In that monastery. I'm sorry, in the monastery. Far from a bar. But I kept on picturing this in the bar he's serbian in that monastery and i'm sorry in the monastery that's far from a bar but i kept on picturing this in a bar so i i go to a bar right after i have a

chapter called a big glass penis full of booze oh nice yeah all right i won't even ask on that yeah i don't you should read the book read the book you can read about the big glass penis full of booze this guy's serbian though yeah Are you speaking English to him? English, yeah. Okay, because you don't speak Serb but you speak – Albanian. You speak Albanian. Yeah. Okay. So when you went to this country though, you already spoke Albanian because you had been in Tirana from 2011 to 2013 and learned it.

I had been in Tripoya. So that was like my Peace Corps village. You're in Tirana now. But both in Albania. Correct. So you spoke Albanian. Yeah. Kosovo is which Beckck lover claims there is no

such thing just albanians beck lover claims a lot of things albanians speak albanian yeah they and and they specifically speak uh a dialect called gegrist and um in kosovo and northern albania so like i i learned northern albanian dialect what would you say that's like British versus American English type deal? More like deep Mississippi South versus versus like

highly educated New York fancy talk. So the Northern dialect is a lot rougher and it's a lot older. It takes – the southern dialect is called Tosk, and it's taken some more Italian words, Turkish words. They sound a bit different, and sometimes they're not intelligible with one another. There's a lot of dialects in Albanian.

Well, to focus on Kosovo, though, which is a landlocked country. It doesn't have a high GDP. Its population is what? A few million? Not even. Like a million? 1.5. Yeah, yeah.

So it's not that big. And it's shrinking. Shrinking. Why is it? Oh, because they're leaving. People want to leave. Right. But some of the people leave for Albania, no?

At least some. i think that's that's definitely possible i don't hear about it often because there's like a dream to unite those countries as one which a lot of people in the eu have an issue with some people think that way some people think um i mean i really couldn't speak for kosvars or Albanians on this. I've heard both sides. I've heard people say that's a ridiculous idea. I've heard other people say one day greater Albania will be a thing again, which is, you know, it's another future tense that people are promising themselves, just like Trojan is saying that, you know, eventually Serbia will take over the monastery of Gratianica again.

And then he also says, you know, like, we're heading for this battle of good and evil, and you need to, like, figure out which side you're going to – That's what people say, man. I'm hearing that in the U.S. now. This is how people – I hear it a lot. This is how people other everyone else. They say we're good, and the opposite is all evil.

It's everything or nothing. Yeah. It's wrong. You know, now look, is it not? Is it wrong when you're looking at Nazi Germany? No. But that's what people do. They try to equivocate everything to Nazi Germany, which also I think is a legitimizes

the the sheer evil that that was. I think it's just, you know, now when someone calls someone hitler doesn't even mean anything of course not yeah which is so wrong but you know looking at looking at kosovo here i read a great book about a year ago maybe a little over a year ago by elliot behar who it was called tell it to the world and he was i believe a a Canadian prosecutor in The Hague who prosecuted war crimes against Serbian leaders during the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Kosovo of Albanians. And look, any genocide is awful, and I don't want to differentiate them. But when you read about it, it's horrific. And I would highly recommend the book to people. But he talks about what happened, and this is not long ago. This is in 1998, 1999. Becklever lost 28 family members in this. you see that these serbians came in to what they viewed as their land to all these foreign people

who have occupied that land for forever and you see what they did to them the idea like as because again you said something in our previous episode that's brilliant our enemies are governments not people right so i'm not blaming all it's not like all the serbian people stood for this or whatever but it's it feels very it feels lacking self-awareness to me when a serbian who may live within that nation says something like this yeah when this just happened to these people now look were there responses from the kla the kosovo liberation army that you know did some things against serbians yes but again it's like a response to what was happening because their land was invaded in this post-yugoslavian time

by these serbs who was claiming it was theirs and i'm not dignifying some of the things like potential organ harvesting and stuff that happened which was bad which is being prosecuted in the hague by the way that's it whatever his name is the former president who was a kla gender right or gender commando you know he is in i believe he's at the hague right now and is being prosecuted potentially for what allegedly happened there but like how could you when you know what happened and how this had to end with nato Milosevic, the Serbian leader, basically out of fucking Kosovo. Like the fact that not all countries even recognize Kosovo now and the fact that Serbians within there, both things, are like, no, no, we're going to go take this. And Serbians outside of it are like, no, no, that's Serbia. We're going to go take it.

Normal people, not hateful people or anything. I don't understand it. Like, how do you, outside of that conversation you've already laid out with that guy, like, how do Kosovars look at this? And how much lacking of nuance is there when you talk to Serbians about this? I think that this is, well, it depends on who you talk to serbians i think i think that this is well it depends on on who you talk to certainly but i think that this is the important like the the important thing to think about is is this that whole right right to a future tense thing right if you don't have a

reasonable right to you know a reasonable understanding that your future is going to be better than your current situation it's very easy to get you to believe a fiction that promises you that. So Trojan is clearly unhappy with his situation as the docent of Gratianitsa. He's more than willing to believe in a story, even if it doesn't bear a lot of relationship to what the on-the-ground reality is. He's more than happy to believe a story that guarantees him a future that's better than his present. And I think that that's a trap that we can all fall into. And I don't at all believe, like, I think he's a totally rational person.

I, I, you know, I understand the, at least as much as I can, the cultural context that he's, he's living in. And I also know that,

that I'm massively biased towards the point of view that, that I'm specifically connected with, you know, I'm an biased towards the point of view that I'm specifically connected with. You know, I'm an American that lives in Albania, speaks Albanian, and have worked for the Albanian people for a long time. And also, you know, America led the NATO bombing campaign. So I have plenty of reasons to agree with their point of view, but a lot of the work that you have to do if you're writing something like this specifically, which is radioactive in certain circles. Your book. Yeah, absolutely. Because of some of the countries you're, like, recognizing.

I mean, I say the word Kosovo and, you know, it's like – And that's radioactive in certain circles just to say it. Oh, my God. Somaliland, same. It's on Google Maps. I know. Well, look at it on Google Maps. Kosoosovo it's right there dotted line oh fuck yep oh wait is this the thing where it's recognized on apple but not on google sometimes depends it actually it depends

on what country you're into which is wild but also not to like swing around the big dick of america or whatever but like america recognizes kosovo yep like russia doesn't but many of the european countries do you need to have an enormous amount of violence uh you need to have an enormous capability to do violence if you're going to create a country and you need to have the recognition of other countries that have the capability of enacting violence. I mean, ultimately, that really is the idea. Liberland is a weird case, right?

Think about this whole concept of, you know, the story being welded to the land in some respect. It's no man's land. Nobody was living there. There was no there there was no story there right so there are and there are no resources there so because of that bitcoin millionaire can ride a jet ski up park his thing and and you know goddamn country buckaroo let's let's get some let's get some embassy set up remember that from South Park

buckle up buckaroo it's been a while I need to listen Caitlyn Jenner just plowing over people in the car I need to listen

to watch South Park more often that's a wonderful show yeah you'd be a good South Park character for sure thanks man

you'd fit right in thanks man I appreciate it I mean that in all the best ways yeah no I take it I didn't say you were going to be like Randy marsh absolutely hey man much respect to randy i love randy more pure-hearted individual oh you could say that something like that enormous testicles that one episode yeah oh but it's it's fascinating that you were that you've been there and now you're

in albania yeah which is a definitely similar culture different vibe yeah right very much so yep i love i love um spending time in kosovo uh i how often do you go there these days maybe once every six months or so and how easy is it it's it's very easy to cross the border obviously there's no border anymore it's like kind of the same thing yeah it's like two hours oh there's no border there's no arbitrary border they don't they don't stop you anymore um because it's all there see shipriya mod yeah they're what how did they say that shipriya mod is greater albania yeah yeah they they at some point they stopped they stopped like like you know the official border checks i remember dualipo put out a tweet a couple years ago it was like summer i want to say it was summer of 2021 dualipa the

world famous pop star for people who actually have a proud proud kosovo proud kosovo and she's interesting because she lived her life growing up between the two countries she was born in britain as a child of like you know her parents left there basically and went back and was the student when kosovo formed as a country ended up coming back to britain to then get her career but she's a proud kosovo and everything and she put out a tweet with the albanian map the albanian flag which by the way is the coolest flag in the world it's so fucking cool like that thing like i want that yeah i know it's great i would i would wear that on everything i when i saw that was my peace corps country i was like fuck yeah because they just threw a dart at a map i could have been they could have thrown me anywhere i'll put the

flag in the corner of the screen so people can see it. But that's why they all do the eagle symbol like this. It's very, very cool. But she put out a tweet. I can put the tweet in the corner of the screen as well that she got a lot of shit for. I'm sure she did. Where it had – I believe, if I remember correctly – the point is going to be correct, though. She had the map of greater Albania with the flag over it that included Kosovo. Right, right.

Or Kosovo. Right, right. Or Kosovo. And people flipped the fuck out. Now, a lot of Albanians liked it, but people were like, oh, this is like a hardcore nationalism or whatever. And she had to do like damage control on this. So it is a radioactive story trying to be made. I I like I have this literally my first my first bit of this

is like it's called covering my tush cause you have to like you have to attack it head on and it's like you know the sentences are like I understood at the outset of writing this book that talking about unrecognized country has the potential

to make me more enemies than friends one person's burgeoning nation state is oftentimes another's rogue den of terrorists that was certainly the case when a group of violent revolutionaries met in secret to start what is now known as the united states ideology gives ways to words which catalyze action that leads to violence, and eventually another line is drawn on a very crowded map. Right? Interesting. So I knew that, and I was prepared to have these conversations, which, you know, float in between goofy cryptocurrency jet ski,

and that's another genocide. Yes. Both exist in the same place. Literally. Quite literally. I mean, look, Liberland is also in the Balkans, man. And that's why people get charged about it, though. And I'm a fan of Do It.

Like, she's great. And she actually has a fucking amazing podcast. Very, very smart girl. Do It Leap It Is? Yeah. Oh, that's dope. It's actually, like, really good, dude. Fucking cool, man.

I listen to it. It's like my liberal podcast. I try to have, like, a conservative podcast and a liberal podcast because I'm a no-man's land myself. So she's, like, my liberal podcast. That's why I like listening to you and Danny it's everything let's hear some and I like how every once in a while there's just somebody who's like

I don't know maybe I'm that guest where it's just like yeah this guy's batshit insane let's go people have nuance man I don't get lost in that we bring the world to our table. There's wisdom in it and if they are able to articulate their ideas in a way that makes you think, well, you know, maybe I did discount this idea for far too long.

Because here's this totally reasonable person saying something that I've discounted as hogwash, even though I haven't spent much time thinking about it. I mean, look, one of the most freeing things that I ever heard is that I don't try and change anybody's opinion unless they ask me to. Great way to look at life, man. You don't have to. Yeah, I always say on this this show and i'll say it till i'm blue in the face i won't get tired of saying this i'm a podcaster if you are a fan of this

show i'm so honored by that and i i appreciate it so much i always i engage with as many possible fans as i can because it blows my mind that like people support this thing that will just i'm honored by that right but if you are agreeing with everything i say because you like me you got to stop doing that i change my opinions like i change my underwear when i'm presented with better evidence i fucking change yeah i don't have a leg to stand on on certain things even once in a while if i might get passionate about something maybe i don't have a leg to stand on on certain things even once in a while if i might get passionate about something maybe i don't have a leg to stand on with it yeah and you need to be and i'm a human i'm wrong yeah you need to be open to that i get worried about you know people not just podcasters but anyone with like platforms without their intention forming opinion cults i think that's a huge problem and by the way it's not the fault in in most cases of

the people who are at the top end of that they're just talking and they have the biggest bandwidth and a lot of fans their hearts are in the right place they just get so they feel like you know the creator they like is someone who really speaks to them in a way which is a beautiful thing but it can get you in that unitary mindset of, therefore, I must agree with what this guy says. And please don't do that. Don't agree – and we don't have a problem with this, but like don't agree with guests and shit they say. Like continue to disagree with guests. Agree with guests.

Like you shouldn't do everything or nothing. And once again, you should have nuance. You should have both, and you shouldn't get so upset when something like doesn't jive with you. It's like we were talking earlier about the uh the jordan peterson thing too it's like i like a lot of the things that he said like i think we're talking off cam on that yeah i think some of the stuff is is decent i also think that some is completely neutral and inoffensive off the rocker and then some i'm like you missed the mark entirely you crazy old coot yeah it's like it sort of descends into you know old man yells at cloud yeah for people who obviously everyone listening who wasn't in our car conversation on that the way i brought that

up to you was you know i think jordan is a victim what's that sg thing called again that term schismogenesis schismogenesis i think jordan is a prime. What's that SG thing called again, that term? Schismogenesis. Schismogenesis. I think Jordan is a prime example of that. And I don't want to rip Jordan. I think there's a lot of good that he still does for people. But, you know, I don't, I stay away from him on social media. I was never, like, I listened to him on podcasts when he would go on, usually like Joe Rogan. I can't say I was like one of the guys who went and listened to all his speeches and stuff so there's less i know than the people who are big

fans and again i don't want to rip people too much i just think jordan peterson had so many scumbags attack him for nothing and for things that he wasn't to the point that in some ways he has taken on some of those things some of those you know more very hardcore yelling at you opinions yeah that maybe he didn't once have because he got so much abuse and i empathize with that a lot i don't i don't want to sit here and like overjudge the guy or whatever but yeah like is his twitter brutal yes it is like i i like i'm like you need to get off twitter i look at the guy i'm like stop yeah dude stop i don't even follow him on twitter i know i hit not interested and it still shows up in my feed yeah and it's like dude go touch grass that's exactly right christ

yeah you know and it's and it's just i hate to see that happen with people. Well, I think when people become acolytes of anything, it means they need to have more stuff to think about. Yes, oh my God. Because you can't just export your independent thought to somebody else to do it for you. You've got to, you know, put in the intellectual labor to figure out how and why you think about the things that you think about. And it's, I mean, the thing that is great about it is that you at least can walk back why you think something. And that's a solid level of introspection. And it sort of steals you from being, you know,

being manipulated by trash ideas. But the other problem with it is, the difficulty is you may never feel like you have your feet on any sort of solid philosophical ground and that that is i think a good deal of life is is you know the information is continuing to come at you um the world is changing on a consistent basis you can i think it's it's great to have principles that continue to work in across many different environments um but also to have a healthy way of challenging what those principles are is is and what you believe is is absolutely critical you are a smart and you're well you're very well spoken and and you're a great

communicator and i'm sure like when i read your book like i'm gonna see that in your writing oh critical you are a smart motherfucker and you're well you're very well spoken and you're a great communicator and i'm sure like when i read your book like i'm gonna see that in your writing oh thanks man i i wanted to get to the we this has been a marathon podcast i know it yeah i don't know yet i'm just thinking this in my head and this might be like obviously not happening if people are listening right now but i might put out the second one first or maybe i won't we'll figure it out it's been a... I think we've been talking for over six hours. We have a Patreon episode in there somewhere.

I would do the first one first because at least it... I'll talk with you about it. We'll talk about this off. But I wanted to talk with you about the city on the edge of Moldova and Ukraine that has Russians guarding it or some

shit yeah yeah so where when were you there and what is this uh so in between um uh kosovo and libra land i was in transnistria how do you spell that t-r-a-n-s-n-i-s-t r-i transnistria got it okay i'll put the map in the corner of the screen so when you were there N-I-S-T-R-I-A. Transnistria. Got it. Okay, I'll put the map in the corner of the screen. So when you were there, when again? So directly?

Yeah, it would have been 2018. So it was right after I was in Kosovo. So I saw the 10-year anniversary of Kosovo you know, since I was kind of rearranging my year on the fly since Kurdistan was out, um, I was like, well, I'll find some events that are happening in all of these places and maybe that'll be a good way to organize, um, you know, uh, organize my year. And so 10 year anniversary in Kosovo that you know definitely was a great thing to organize my uh my journey there around and then uh there were russian elections happening in transnistria russian elections yeah for local officials no for vladimir putin son of a bitch so

they're having pirate elections in a place that is an unrecognized country that is only recognized by other unrecognized countries. I know we're getting into like turtles all the way down territory here, but that's what it is. So there are all these, I think they even have like a name for what their organization is, but I can't remember what it is right now so transnistria is recognized by a place called osedia or pardon me south osedia a place called artsock and one called abkhazia and these are all these russian satellite statelets that are nominally protected by russia and they're all around the black sea um and they have they they operate operate as sort of like pseudo states that are under the Russian sphere so Transnistria basically Yugoslavia

the USSR that's what it was so the USSR falls and that process, as I was writing about, I was revisiting, you know, the history of it. And it's like, the process is fascinating, because it, I mean, basically like 1991, 1990, 1991, you have the Russian satellite states just being like, no, we're not, we're not doing this anymore. We're, we're gonna denationalize these things, we're going to. So, and revolutions are sort of shrugging off this centralized control of flagging communism. And then you have the independent republics within the USSR who are chafing at the chains of the USSR. So it's like, within a couple

months, it's like Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, they're all saying, no, no, no, we want national governments. We don't want this top-down thing. So, over here in Moldova, we have this place called Transnistria. It's known as Prednistrovia or the Republic Prednistrovian Moldovsky, something like that. I don't speak Russian or Moldovan. But this area of land was originally settled by Catherine the Great. And it's important because it's interesting. It's important because Catherine the Great was seen as a sort of Enlightenment-era leader for Russia, right?

She was bringing these new Enlightenment values for, like, non-hierarchical, big public works. Russia is now a part of Europe. We need to bring Russia into the status of being this great European nation, and we also need to expand our borders. Expanding the borders meant going down into the Black Sea area. So in order to get down into the Black Sea, they need to take a river called the Dniester River. Transnistria means like across the Dniester River. That's where it gets its name.

And so she had to specifically Russianize the area because who was there beforehand was our friends, the Ottoman Empire. So her general, Alexander Sovorov, goes down there to do some conquest and kick these Ottomans out of this river that goes into the Black Sea. And suddenly she has this sort of like mashup of different ethnicities and identities that are down there. But she needs to turn this area into a Russian place. And so how do we do, how do we create a country on land again? We have to marry the story to the land.

And usually that happens through warfare or it happens with generations living and dying on that land. So she moves Russians down to that area along the river, on both sides of the river. Capital city there is called Tiraspol. It is a sort of hub for artisans who are working in wood and also cognac inventors because, you know, Black Sea is sort of known for wine production, cognac vinters uh because you know black sea is sort of known for wine production cognac making uh and so to this day some of the best cognac that you can get is it comes from the covent cognac factory in in terraspol transnistria um it's pretty good and it and this is a total

strange sidebar but it just bears saying because it's so strange they have a baseball museum in the basement of their cognac factory because they love baseball because the cubans taught them baseball during the time of the ussr son of a bitch fucking weird right yeah so here's the other weird part about this katherine the great not russian that's a problem no it wasn't german and uh she's german had German ancestry, lived in Stetten, Poland, took the name Catherine. Her name was originally Sophie. So it's like you look at this idea of nationalism, then you realize how squishy the concept actually is. It's problematic for how it ties together.

That's right. But they just – they went with the legend, I guess, of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, I didn't know that Catherine the Great wasn't Russian until I started working on this book. There you go. But it just goes to show you how the story is oftentimes more important than the reality. Yes.

Because it's whatever. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka. Soda. Natural flavors. vodka soda natural flavors so what should we talk about no sugar added neutral refreshingly simple yep whatever galvanizes a people together so you have this

russian area um ages you know generations of russians living on along this river people who are calling themselves russians i should say um on the other side you have moldova um on the on the other other side you have ukrainians all different identities and ethnicities you also have some turkish folks that are in there too um they're in a place called gagauzia which is is also a sort of unrecognized nation but won't touch on gagauzia we're gonna leave gagauzia out of this god damn it so anyway um then the soviet union bolshevik revolution 1917 i want to say um bolshevik revolution nicholas and his whole family killed yep so i've got like the the imperative is i have to generate a single identity out of all of these people right so you're you're a part of the ussr even though part of your identity is moldovan right? So you're a part of the USSR, even though part of

your identity is Moldovan, part of you is Russian, part of you is whatever. And so the Russian identity was the strongest in Transnistria, because that's where, you know, Catherine the Great originally pushed the borders off to. And also, there was a great war story because they pushed the Ottomans away. This is fine until the USSR falls. And again, it goes back to that question. What are you if your country goes away? Are you from New Jersey? Like, at least for them, they're like, no, no, no, we're still Russian. We're still doing this thing. Because we're not Moldovan, and we're not Ukrainian, and we're going to fight for our own self-determined borders. And how big is this area again? Land mass-wise, I don't know, but it's about 500,000 people. So it's very small. But it's sizable. You're not talking the Libra land.

Well, and they also have an army. Their own. They um their own they have their own army but they are but their borders are protected by russian regular troops because they're not in a recognized country russia doesn't even recognize them which makes it even crazier but are they russia not really no so are they moldova no not really so are they ukrainian no definitely not no they are they Ukrainian? No, definitely not. No, they are just, they're Transnistria. They're an autonomous.

But they're not. They're not a part of, they have a, the region has a sort of co-working agreement with Moldova. So their companies, in order to do business internationally, have to be run. This is going to get a lot weirder real fast. So their companies have to do business with Moldova in order to operate internationally. So how does that work from a governmental point of view?

Well, the country is largely run by oligarchs. Of course it is. And the most important company, I would say, is a grocery store brand that is a sort of de facto government there because they run so many of the institutions and own so much of the stuff. What brand? It's called Sheriff. Of course it is. Yep. Look it up.

Is it spelled like Sheriff? Yep. Come on. Yeah. Sheriff. is that a russian word no it's called sheriff sheriff transnistria there you go the fuck god damn it sheriff star oh my god so i heard... You cannot make this shit up. I know. So they own everything in Transnistria. Like, they own everything. And it's like, there's Sheriff Gas Station, Sheriff Supermarket Chain.

I mean, honestly, it's a pretty good supermarket chain. And I've never seen a place where you can get a liter of vodka for 20 cents. But you can get it there um uh sheriff i think i even saw sheriff yoga studio the share like the official football team that i support is sheriff fc they have their own football team what league i have no idea some european league they actually did pretty well from what i remember uh this last year um but some european league they have a whole stadium that's the sheriff tiraspo yep that's it what are they the first league 88 89 what league does it super liga who's in that the moldovan super so they're

in the moldova super liga so they i guess they someone there can possibly qualify for like champions i think so yeah i mean so you're you're sort of surrounded by sheriff at all times while you're there and then there's other like main businesses but it's how long were you here six weeks maybe longer too long how much to do too long way too long um why so i was uh i was staying at a really rough hostel um and it was just a very uncomfortable place um and there was this dude who is a american white supremacist that was living there he's living in the hostel too i call him dave the white supremacist in the book um nice yeah and well so there are there are other things that i i've i've heard but i can't i i can't like act absolutely say are true i have heard that there

are there are servers that that run um let's say spicier internet content out of transnistria for this would be the place to do it well because there's no extradition from the fbi so sometimes sometimes uh transnistria is known as the the the black hole of europe because if you want to go there and just be anonymous you can be um yeah it's a fascinating place um and it's in that area it's in towards that eastern block area where it's just fucking yeah it's two hours two hours one hour two hours away from odessa by train um two hours away from kishinau um when the people there did you you felt they viewed themselves as kind of Russian?

Yeah, that was, that was my understanding. So there were these two guys, shout out to Vladimir and Victor. Good, good dudes, man. I don't know to this day if they were like following me, but I think they were. I don't know if they're a secret police or something. I've never, i never confirmed you know how many flow charts you're probably on around the world intelligence wise like i'm a connector between like vladimir and victor and like yoshi from the cia's most comedic asset

that's right this eric zuleger character so you're being talked about in the kremlin i'd be super cool if i was kremlin anybody i'm i'm clearly not opposed to doing any work um oh even for the kremlin you are just i shouldn't say that no yeah you shouldn't say that one out loud um it's not a good look right now we don't like it it isn't it isn't good look they're very not good so uh okay so i um uh i you you get followed in transnistria um in terraspil and um i was i lost my camera uh like the you know i bought a nice camera before i left i lost it. And I know that it was on this number three bus. It's a tiny town. I was like, okay, well, all I have to do is go to the central bus station, wait for all of the number threes to come through.

I'll eventually find the driver that had my camera. And, you know, I'm not doing anything else that day i'm just looking for my damn camera because i spent a lot of money on it and it's like the most valuable thing i owned at the time so um i you know it was like my second day in terraspil and so i get out and um i think i'm on the right bus and then i realize i'm not i'm going the wrong direction and so like no big deal i'll just get out of the next bus station cross the street but i realized that they're these two dudes behind me and uh i'm like oh okay well whatever they must have gotten on the wrong bus too so i get out and cross the street and these two dudes are still behind me

and i was like okay well it's weird they're still behind me but I mean I'm not doing anything you're not scared? no no they seem you know they don't they're not an imposing presence certainly go all the way to the central bus station and I'm just sitting

on the bench there at the central bus station I'm waiting for all the number threes to cycle through. Now, meanwhile, every other bus is cycling through, and my two guys are just hanging out on the bench in back of me. I'm like, well, clearly they're not going anywhere because I've seen every single bus cycle through. I'm just waiting for the right number three bus to come

because I'll recognize the bus guy. Anyway, I go onto each bus, and I'm like, hey, camera? Where is it? And everybody tells me, and I go sit on my bench again. I'm like, this is all I'm doing all day. Finally, all the buses go through,

and I'm like, well, this is weird. First of all, it's weird because they're not going anywhere like what like if you're following me i'm not doing anything i'm just a weird guy doing weird shit and i get that that's strange but like i'm kind of over being followed right now so it's like look if you are like genuinely curious about me or if you're working for the state or whatever you probably speak english so i'm just gonna like go up to you and you balls of steel motherfucker nothing to lose i mean literally nothing to lose i was like hey do you speak english and then vladimir god bless him i was like i was like yes um. Yeah, a little.

And I'm like, oh, okay, cool. So I lost my camera. And I wonder if maybe you know where it is. I was on this bus yesterday and I lost my camera. And then he was like, Victor doesn't speak English. And he was like, he said something to Victor. And then he was like, you know, I english and he was like he said something victor and then he was like you know i think i heard about that camera yeah i think it's i think it's on uh vk which is like

a russian the russian version of facebook and he lo and behold opens up vk and there's a picture of my camera on the number three bus and he's like is this it and i'm like yeah that's my camera weird that you knew about it yeah and just happened to be here and then i was like yes i find it for you well that's like you know can you help me find it he's like oh of course i can you know you come with me well i kind of invited myself along because so so they were like they were like um they're like look you know the the thing isn't he's not driving anymore today you're looking for a guy named um oh i don't know his name's in the book anyway a very russian name um and he's like you're looking for a driver named this you have to come back tomorrow

and then maybe you'll find him. Well, you will find him, because there's only one driver who's doing this. And I'm like, okay, cool. And then he's like, so what will you do now? I'm like, I don't have any other plans other than just look for my camera, and now I can't do anything until the morning. And then I'm like, what are you guys doing? And then they're like well we're gonna go

make lunch do you wanna come I was like yeah of course I do so I like went over to Vladimir and Victor's apartment and we just like had lunch and watched opera videos on YouTube

for hours it was great and that was it we watched opera videos on youtube for hours it was great and that was it yeah no we we watched opera forever and then uh they uh they they inject you with anything no no they were chipped up i i ended up going back because they were like we gotta we gotta teach you how to make mama liga and i'm like was mama liga and he's like oh it't worry about it. Transnistrian dish. Yeah. So, yeah, I just, like, I don't know. Like, it certainly seemed that they were following me,

but I ended up making Mama Liga with them, and that shit's delicious. How long after the Mama Liga did you leave the country or zone? I probably had about another week or two there. I saw them a couple of times. Yeah, but, you know, then you just have other weird shit where you just see the same people over and over again

in different, like, circumstances. Well, there you go. Yeah, like, at one point, I was in Sheriff, and I was at the pickle counter, and all these people just, like, entered the Sheriff at the same time. Not good. And I was like, that's weird. Because they were all just, like, around just the pickle counter,

but, like, nobody was, like, buying anything. It's almost like once you go in there, you're like Truman in the Truman Show. That's exactly what it feels like. That's exactly what it feels like. That's exactly what it feels like. You're never far away from somebody who knows exactly where you just were. And that might just be small town vibes or it might be totalitarian state vibes. Yes. So I was like, you know, in the midst of all of these people like, you know, just doing random stuff that didn't look like it belonged in a grocery store.

Like it looked like they it looked like they were fake looking at groceries or whatever and i was i thought to myself well i'm just gonna go to a random row and that i don't need anything in and i'm just gonna see if they gravitate towards where i am and so i just like went to a random place in the store and then lo and behold, people just start coming over. It's super weird. Really, really strange place. But then I went to this, this punk rock show. I don't, I don't remember who told me about it, but like some, somebody who I'd made friends with was like, yeah, come to this, this, it's to this basement underground punk rock show.

And it went the hardest until like 9 p.m. sharp. And then everybody just turned on the lights and went home. Really? Yeah. Like, it was such a... Very not punk of them. Super not punk. But at the same time, there was people with body mods and full black eye contacts in.

One dude was just cutting himself and getting all Gigi Allen on it. And then as soon as 9 o'clock came around, just... Wow. What a weird place. Have you heard anything about what it's like right now, given the outbreak of the war? I'm curious about it. I, I, I should ask Victor.

Um, uh, I, I, he and I missed calls with, with each other a couple of times. Um, uh, pardon me, Vladimir. Um, Victor doesn't speak English. Cause their location's odd. Cause it's on, you know, it's still close to ship, but it's on the other side. Oh. Like my friend, Nick Kifiak, who was episode 55 on this show who owns unbelievable sneaker store up in a couple of them up in north jersey like the high end kind of shit yeah an online store too but

he he's moldovan and i was talking to him months ago now well he would know a lot about transnistria well i didn't talk to him about that because i didn't know about that but like moldova is even in a weird spot there super you know because it's like oh how's this gonna go eastern side of the country is is very uh russian oriented one of the thoughts when when transnistria again sort of schismogenesis one of the concerns for the transnistrians or prednistrovians depending on how you want to what name you want to call them by, was that Moldova would link up with Greater Romania. Because they speak an interoperable language.

In fact, there's even a Moldovan... Oh my god. Yeah, there's a Moldovan portion of Romania. It's called Moldavia, right? So, a perfect example of Romania. It's called Moldavia. Right? So, a, like, perfect example of this. So, like, I walk out of Transnistria, as I'm transiting through to, I think, maybe, I was going back to school, because, like,

I was doing Oxford as a part-time student, so I'd leave Transnistria and go to Oxford. Vladimir and Victor had given me this ribbon to wear, and they were like, I'm like, what me this ribbon to wear. And they were like, I'm like, what's this ribbon? They're like, oh, it's like the Russian thing.

Like, you know, it's our thing. I'm like, okay, cool. That's very kind of you. And, you know, for the viewers who know, it's like a gray and orange ribbon, which is specifically a ribbon that is like in support of the Russian military. So I just like have this thing randomly on my,

on my lapel or whatever. And I get off of the, the bus in Kizhi now. And as soon as I get off the bus, like somebody like just beelines towards me from the market that they drop you off and grabs me by the arm and is like, you know, yelling at me in Moldovan, like, what's this? What's this?

And I was like, I don't know. It's a ribbon. And then somebody comes over and explains. He's like, that's a that's a Russian thing. You don't you don't have that here. Take that off. And I was like, OK, my bad. Yeah.

Whoa, man, i had no clue um but i mean i even i talk about that in the book a bit where it's like you know real real politics don't happen when you go and and tick a box for who you want your leader to be real politics happens when you you put on a hat or when you put on a ribbon or when you buy extra food at the grocery store because prices are going up and you don't understand why real politics happens when you like don't talk about something that you care about. Real politics happen when you talk about something that you have no idea about, but you're deeply passionate about it because you're animated by something that you saw.

And real politics happen when you can't sleep at night because you think that somebody who has more power than you is doing something with your money that you don't agree with, but you have to get up in the morning because you have to go to work. And real politics happens when your money is worth so much less than it once was, and you don't understand why that is the case. at home from a economic personal beliefs or communication standpoint yep to break that all down and and put in the base terms that's politics well i mean think about it like you could we have we have an election coming up soon and it I hear the war drums of it already, and nobody wants it. But it's also like this, you know, it's this circus, right? Yeah, exactly what it is.

It's this entertainment circus. Now, presumably, because there are all these things that are not politics, that are completely immaterial, but they're just talking, right? Because they're playing the game. Yes. Now, presumably, I think that if I was in a coma right now, tomorrow I go into a coma and I wake up from my coma the candidates are and feel to feel like and figure out where I feel I land and who represents my point of view fine without a year and a half of the Opera yep drama it really is but that's that's the thing we've we've conflated entertainment with governance. Yeah, yeah. That ship has sailed, my friend. Oh, there's no way. You know, in France,

they're only allowed to have like two-week election cycles, something like that. See, and I don't, that's not the answer either. But at the same time, I'm jealous of that. But it's still,

people still drag politics during their term that becomes about the next election. Well, I think this is also like the, the perverse incentive thing. So when I was working in, um, I,

I, after being the ambassador, I started working in the cryptocurrency industry as like a writer, um, is a small industry. And, uh, and I needed a job and a lot of stuff is,

is passively interesting enough. Like that isn't like, you know, all this sort of like moon boy, like to the moon shit moon shit, like, that's pretty, that can be taxing to listen to. But there is really interesting concepts in it. And like, one of them is this concept of liquid democracy. And this is, it's a governance system that uses blockchain to basically turn your vote into a digital good, right? So think about how different the election cycle would be if you could withdraw your vote from a candidate. Dude. Right?

It's weird, though. It does. It's real weird. I i'm gonna make it even weird now what happens if you can delegate your voting power to somebody else that you think knows more about a particular issue like say there's you know um nah yeah i'm out on that yeah no that's a slippery slope not gonna touch that I'm so out on that official stance of the dude you're gonna break my brain if we go into that yeah we probably should

we should probably call it man Eric this has been a pleasure this is the last podcast we're ever recording in this studio which is trippy barn burner man I've basically lived here for three and a half years but i i got two episodes and a patreon episode somewhere in there out of this hell yeah like six and a half or seven hours this isn't that long this just barely beat the record of the longest recording i ever did in one sitting on completely unplanned but dude you have

lived a crazy life your book is you are not here the link is in the description everyone should go check this out i've not read it yet but if it communicates anything like this guy does this is going to be done in about six hours one enjoy guys fucking awesome thanks listen brother thank you so much thanks for being the last one here absolutely and it's an honor everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me see you in motherfucking hoboken thank you so much for watching this episode, everybody. Before you leave, please smash that subscribe button, hit that like button. And also if you'd like, check out another episode from the show by clicking right here.