Welcome to Caribbean Resumes. I am honored to have on show Anatoly Karlin, who is a writer many of you have enjoyed for a long time. He writes for unds.com and various other things, blogging on various matters of the future, of technology, of Russia, very many insightful things that we have all enjoyed a long time. And now he also has a substack, I will tell you in a moment. but he is here from, I'm not only welcome to show you, you're in Moscow right now, yes? Is that correct? Yes, correct. I've been here since 2016 for that matter. Yes. What is mood right now in Russia? Everyone curious to know because, you know, media situation in West highly controlled. I am very curious to know what are Russia people feeling of what is moved on the street and so forth? People are fine.

I mean, it's obviously vastly exaggerated. There's no shortages in the shops like some Juno Lloyds are trying to claim. The financial system works fine. Again, some people have issues with using MasterCard, using Google Pay, those like Western platforms. But we have our own fintech ecosystem. So we just use near-pay instead. We can't buy video games at Steam any longer, but the chat approaches to pirate them anyway, pirate all of this for that matter. So yeah, I mean, who cares if Netflix is down or would have no longer accessible to versions? I mean, yeah, hard to really say that we're like suffering We are suffering and in anguish and determined to overthrow the Putelet regime for depriving us of our material comforts, which are 95% still there anyway.

Yes, but are people, how is their response to this? Did they know there would be an invasion? So I should tell audience, you were one of the few writers who predict this invasion almost to the day, I believe you got the date right, and many others, you explained how it would take place, from which parts Ukraine would be invaded. But many people, even on Russia's side, for example, my friends, Russians with Attitude podcast, they didn't think the invasion would happen. What is moving Russia? People surprised by the invasion, and are they more pro-Putin now than before? Are they with this or are they upset at what's going on? Well, I mean, according to the opinion polls, some 60 to 70 percent of Russians do support

the war or the special military population as it's supposed to be called here. And that number hasn't fallen over the past few weeks, if anything. It has probably, there isn't anything to go by. So I don't think it's unpopular. I mean most people were not expecting this, this did come out of the blue to a lot of people but I mean yes I was looking at two movements and they told their own story like from a game theory perspective it made sense that if they she was going to dissolve the ukrainian issue sooner or later then now would be a particularly continuous time to do it probably the best one since the initial opportunity elapsed back in 2014. It certainly would become increasingly realistic if Doshi was to wait another eight years, for instance.

So, yeah, I mean, I wasn't surprised for those reasons, and I mean, you can check out my article of the Gathering of Doshi lands on my substack, accountin.substack.com, where I sort of cited the reasons why I thought it would be this way. I mean, I was admittedly done about the speed of the Russian advance and how it started with the Ukrainians would exist. But otherwise it seems to have been correct that my consistent opinion again has been that Putin's goals are pretty maximalist. Frankly with the sanctions the way yet they are and the fact that many of them are de facto irreversible, it doesn't make sense not to be maximalist at this point anyway, from my perspective of Putin, and so yeah, I mean, I think that my predictions

that we're looking at least at the return of the eight obelisks that constitute another IC in the south, at least at the minimum, possibly all the way up to the 1939 borders is the likeliest outcome. Yes, so I just want to tell audience, if you want to find Anatoly Karlin articles, you You go acarlin.substack.com and, Karlin, I will link these when I put show announcement. But for the Putinist position from a Russian point of view, because our audience knows I am pro-Russian and pro-Putin, but you could say I have my own self-interested reasons to be this way. If you want a Russian nationalist position, I would say a very measured, reasonable Russian nationalist is what I would call Anatoly. But he has two very good articles stating this position for Western audiences who do

not know it, who this position is hidden from them. One of them is the article he just mentioned on his substack, The Gathering of the Russian Lands. Another one is an older article, I think, is it from 2019, about how I learned to stop – how I stopped worrying and learned to like Putin, something like that. And in this connection should be noted that Anatoly, you are not a Putin booster in other words, you say in the older articles that your opinion of him has shifted over time. You used to be for him, then you even called him putlet. You didn't have such good opinion. And then you changed again toward a more favorable view. But would you care to summarize this, your ideological, I don't like the word ideological. What are the main reasons why you support Putin?

How would you put this to American audience if you want to talk about it? If not, I'm just curious about ideological change in Russia. Sure, yeah. I mean, I think for what it's worth, my sort of capstone article on the Russian nationalism and Putin's employees of Russian nationalism for that matter is Russia's Nationalist Fund, which I published last year on the news review. That was my last major article for the human studio, in fact. And so, yeah, I mean, it's not as if my sort of personal positions have shifted that drastically, so much as, like, frankly, the policy of the Putin estate has. I mean, I'm not like one of those people who thinks it's a good idea to rely very strongly on like the personality of politicians and so on, because, I mean, they might find it

politically-perpetuous to support different policies at various points. So we know that Orban started off as a sort of like a very western, really liberal person and then they evolved into what he is today and I mean we were also familiar from those of us who were familiar with the Pepe culture and the offline culture of the mid-2010s that we had some worship that was happening back then that it sort of ended up being a bit disappointing in general. My position is that with Russian nationalism a person needs to be a de facto Russian nationalist you have to perform or fulfill some basic conditions. So one of them is that you should would sort of recognize that the Russian state is a state for and by the Russian people, primarily for ethnic Russians in particular.

And I mean that's not to demean or diminish the realm of ethnic minorities, but I would point out that, not just I have pointed out, that Russia is at the end of the day about 85 percent of Russia, and if Israel, which is nearly 75 percent Jewish, doesn't feel any undue immodesty about calling itself a Jewish state, then I'm sure the Russians hesitate about naming themselves a Russian state. Well, in the constitutional amendments of 2020, Russia was de facto defined in the constitution as the the parents of the Dushy language were defined as state-forming people of the Dushy Federation. And in some documents in the addendum it was clarified that the Dushy language carriers the fact that it's late into Dushy because it mentioned the thousand-year history of Dushy statehood.

So essentially, in this respect, Dushy has become a sort of like a soft, ethnical state, much like Poland or Hungary. and like all those other like countries which they vote their constitutions after communism. So that was very encouraging. Secondly, immigration policy has become more sort of orientated towards doing ethnic relations in particular. That's another thing. Thirdly, the article took on the data too, which is Russia's equivalent of the hate speech laws, which had finally gone into overdrive by the mid 2010s to late 2010s it was decriminalized in 2019. So-called hate speech was decriminalized by the putler regime you're saying? Yes well I mean basically you can still get the double but you really have to try as in like march down the street, seek

highlight and that kind of stuff. So it's sooner a filter for stupidity at this point. Because the first offense in any single year is decriminalized, so you just get a small fine or whatever. So I mean, if you manage to, it only becomes a crime if you do it twice. So just like, if it happens to you, just take the time out from social media or whatever. But I mean, Yeah, in taxes the problem is that by the mid-coincidence the sort of the center against extremism, which is the organ task for doing this, it had gone into over-dive and there was like the ridiculous cases against people, just like for historical posts on that contact, which had a swastika on them for talking about facial cues and stuff like that. So there were a few such pretty bizarre cases.

So yeah, clearly it was just a bunch of guys who were going to focus and that clearly got out of control and that was decriminalized. Let me ask you, sorry to interrupt, on the question of hate speech in Russia, I want to, just for audience, there are these prosecutions of formal state prosecutions, formerly criminal, now decriminalized of speech online and so forth, the same way that there are, by the way, in West Europe, but what about what goes on in United States where there isn't state prosecution yet, although my friend Ricky Vaughan, he was arrested for posting funny memes during the 2016 election. So they started actually to arrest people in America also. But in America it's mostly this quote unquote informal, it's not really informal, but where

businesses fire you and then you are unable to get a job, you are basically blacklisted from life, from being able to make a living. Does that happen at all in Russia, that kind of cancellation? Well, not really for nationalists per se, because nationalism and even racialism isn't a heavily taboo topic in the way that it is in Western Europe and the U.S. and hopefully it remains like that. I mean, one of the positive sides of sanctions, frankly, as I see it, is that it contributes to a certain distancing, social distancing in the sort of like COVID terminology between the West and Russia. Considering that, in my opinion at least, that Western culture has become extremely toxified by various sort of like her woke mind viruses, essentially. I think that might well be a positive development

in the long term. But yeah, I mean, that aside, the fact that free speech isn't free, like even in the U.S., I mean, it's not like many of the nationalist thinkers are unaware of that. So Igor Khomagoda, for instance, he's a guy who's, some of whose articles I translated into English, like a friend of mine has as well. He called it Society to Human Data, So there she had article 282, which is now decriminalized. The US has society's say whatever you want, although yes, I mean, if you make some slight mistakes, so slip up, so whatever, then yeah, you could still be daily loaded into jail, like they keep on and so forth. But even if you don't, even if you just like keep clear, don't actually do any openly sort of things that could be interpreted to be illegal,

then, well, you can do that, but that will no longer give you card hides, you'll no longer get food deliveries, your financial accounts might be closed down, your centralized crypto exchanges will seize your wallets and so forth. So, in fact, it's obviously if you end up, like, instead of having, like, a centralized sort of persecution of the business that is just like this entire big tech-oriented society which sort of, like, blocks you out of their services in its entirety, then the effect And that does not take place in Russia, you're saying, this kind of light social credit score system? I mean, it does happen, but it's frankly targeted against the literal Western opposition at this point in time, almost exclusively.

I mean, it sucks for them. They are obviously better off in the West. And yes, maybe quite a lot of them are now anything. Yes, yes I see. No, but this this very interesting mood in Russia I wanted to I wanted to ask you does the war fit in with This domestic ideological change that you have observed in Russia, and how would it affect it going forward? absolutely because Like the fourth major plant of Russian nationalism in my opinion as I as I sort of define them does the vulva down the gathering of Russian lands which includes Belarus and Ukraine, this is a civilizational space that has existed since the 4th millennium essentially. Although, Ukraine and Belarus both spent several centuries sort of torn apart from Russia as

sort of Russian integralists see it, and the unification was sort of something that was to claim to be very much an intensive goal of Russian statehood by white emicade thinkers such as Ivani Linn and like the national Soviet dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Benikin, who were quite, quite irregeneral, still more irregeneral. So I mean, I mean, these are the sorts of people who Putin takes his views from in one study of the people who put in size more frequently than any other, it was actually Ivan Ivien who took time of place and yes I mean he warned that the Soviet regime was unstable and collapsed and that it would collapse and that then it would be taken over by a bunch of And there would be all kinds of separatisms sort of glistening across its territory, which

was at the mark of the accurate prediction, but yeah, sort of the base two is being sort of like, has been 8.30, but now it's time to reverse this. Yes, by reverse this you mean Putin near-term goal is to unite the Russia populations below Russia Ukraine and I know you quoted Solzhenitsyn saying that Kazakhstan should also belong with Russia. Is that for historical territorial reasons or because it has a very large Russian minority in Kazakhstan? Well, I mean Northern Kazakhstan is ethnic Russian essentially. So, I mean, and the centralization is obviously a pretty different civilization, though it's in relations. I mean, Kazakhstan has been a pretty laid-back multicultural type of state, but if it goes

nationalist, say, which is perfectly possible, then it will probably make sort of obvious sense to simply divide the country eventually, if that happens. Yes. Well, I want to ask you about, you said in your prediction, I think, yes, in this gathering of the Russian lands article, your prediction about this war, you mentioned that Russia had been taking care to insulate itself, to protect itself from possible sanctions, asking large corporations, if they were ready for sanctions in the lead-up to this war, and so forth. One of the things you mentioned is the $600 billion or more than $600 billion foreign reserves. But I read reports that, you know, America and other nations, but America primarily was planning to seize that. Is that still the case?

And if they just seize it, is that an act of war? What are Russia's recourses? Any news on that? know what happened with that. Oh, I mean, yes, the sanctions clearly were much more hardcore than I think anybody in the Russian government was expecting. I mean, obviously, this seizure of settled bank assets is a huge escalation in economic terms. So, I mean, it remains to be seen how it plays out, whether they are released or not. But if they are not, well, I mean, the West has a lot of assets in Russia as well. So, So I fully expect that if there is no resolution, then they will simply be seized in compensation essentially. So you have sort of like a counter-nationalization of Western assets within Russia.

I mean, one sphere which that seems to have already taken place is the aircraft fleet which were being leased to Russia. So that's something to be dealt with somewhere, something like $20 billion, I think. Yes. Do you hear also talk of this no-fly zone, this beating of no-fly, no-fly all the time on television in the West? Do you think that Russia will increase missile attacks now, since that wouldn't be affected in any case by no-fly zone? But in any case, that question aside, what you make of this, do you think the West is crazy enough to escalate to where they would try to shoot at Russian airplanes? I mean, I said that I didn't think that the no-fly zone would, that I don't think it would happen. But obviously, I mean, I was banking on the war lasting several weeks instead of

several months, as it's now looking to be the case. So yes, I mean, obviously, the longer it lasts, the greater the potential for escalation that exists. But still, though, I think that this is highly unlikely because I mean the main player for that to happen would be the U.S. itself and Biden has some several occasions capital that we will put out. So it's hard for me to see how that happens short of you playing successfully doing some kind of false light chemical attack which I will, I won't put it past them obviously But still, I mean, that's a tall order. And by themselves, I don't think like countries like Poland and so forth, in a position to do a no-fly zone. I mean, they even ended up sort of like pussyfooting out of supplying nicks, oat nicks to Ukraine.

There was that idea several weeks ago, which I actually said is entirely unrealistic because those oat nicks would simply become scrap metal. very quickly. But in any case, even that limited idea didn't go ahead, so I'm sort of cautiously optimistic that there will be no end of set. Yes, I still think Russia will win. I think the Western media and the Ukraine propaganda machine completely delusional, because I think that Russia cannot afford to lose, because if Ukraine fall into Western hands, NATO hands, it will be used as a base from which to destabilize Russia and to break up Russia into various ethnic components. So you'd have the state of Perm and various other statelets or whatever these crazy people want to put into Russia, with Masha Gessen as the dictator of Perm.

She actually, in that city, Perm, I don't know if you know this Anatoly, but Masha Gessen gay married a gray alien in Perm in 1993, this little-known incident from, I don't know if people know this person, Masha Gessen. So I don't think Russia can afford to have Ukraine under any circumstance. So it will just escalate the war to whatever it needs to be to take over Ukraine and achieve If it's aimed there to demilitarize, this is my opinion, so that Russia will win. But obviously I don't want to talk day-to-day thing, because it's very hard for anybody to know what's going on. But I wanted to ask you, OK, I assume you agree with me that Russia will win, but why you think—has progress been slower than you expected, and why, just in the broad,

major things of the war, not the day-to-day, what are your impressions about the war's progress up to now and going forward? Okay, yeah, sure. Basically, at the outset, I, like many analysts, made a number of mistakes and assumptions which we added up. I underestimated the level of shock and awe that Russia would employ in the beginning stages of the conflict. So overall it was pretty subdued and the initial assaults were on the use of like 25 to 30 percent of the PTGs that had been concentrated on the Ukrainian borders. But, yes, in combination with those mistakes, it does seem that this is a content that is simply going to last several months instead of several weeks and is going to involve urban sieges, which, like them, they always take a long time, unfortunately.

So it's really sick to see it over quickly. But the main reason that I think that she will win is simply because of the massive fire power superiority and air power superiority. So essentially, the Ukrainians have no good way of resupplying their fortified troops. Whenever they go out to the cities and reopen, they are decimated by the vast superiority of pollution artillery power. So that's the main point I would mention. Yes. Is the Ukrainian military, my impression is that it's pinned down in the east, in Donbas, and that Russia is advancing slowly because it tried not to create too many civilian casualties, because civilian casualties would get in the way of, well, of the aims you laid out, which to reunite all the Russias, to reunite the Russian peoples.

Am I being too pro-Putin in that claim? Is that why the Russian military is advancing slowly? I mean, yes, and I think also to keep its own casualties down, because in the beginning stages you had a lot of accidents due to ambushes and so forth. So now it's clear that since the conflict is going to last several months anyway, anyway. There's no particular rush to sort of like encircle everybody because, I mean, because the Ukrainians can't really do anything about it anyway because, as I said, because of the Russian artillery dominance. So now that this situation has clarified itself, you might as well take your time. So securing the vehicle areas and making sure convoys are detected. I mean, one thing that she could certainly do more with is, more importantly,

I think that's like the main weakness, that she has a lot of firepower and a lot of equipment, but it doesn't have a lot of infantry, I don't agree enough. So it does, in my opinion, need more infantry to secure supply lines on the occupied territories. So I mean, this is where the Belarusians are going to come in. I think that it would be very wise to just like do a partial mobilization of volunteers, some of them deserves, but for whatever reason they're not interested in doing that. So presumably the general staff thinks that what they have is sufficient for the task at hand. Well, we'll see how it goes. But on a more general point, one thing I would say is that yes, I mean a lot of people were sort of like hoping that this would

be like ADAC in 2003, which basically lasted three weeks. It's been three weeks now and obviously it's not going to be three weeks, it's going to be more like three months. So what are the two differences between the two countries? Well, I mean, ADAC was an 85 IQ country which was fighting, which was not, which don't have any supply lines, like literally no words, it was supporting them. and frankly a lot of the back is very moralized because i mean they they knew they'd lose and whereas the ukraine is in 95 i do complete uh which is which is being supplied from the west although many of those convoys have been blown up uh but nonetheless i mean this is a massive military alliance which is like a large percentage of all the javelins in the world

have been poured into uh into ukraine uh and uh the ukrainians themselves are more competent fighters than the evacuees for HPD reasons. So in combination with that, it's ultimately not that armed in combination with the fact that the course of the opinion polls most companions who think that they're going to win. So Mazzales is high for now. In combination with those factors, it's not that surprising at the end of the day that the conflict is more Yes, yes, which is very unfortunate because me and my friends do not want to see either Russians or Ukrainians die in a conflict where I think the outcome is decided because Russia cannot accept the loss. And I am very much against these people in the West, Anatoly, who cheer on Ukraine from

the safety of their homes and fight for your homeland in this and just brave with other people's lives. Most of all, Zelensky, who appears to be on a Hollywood set somewhere, but asks 16-year-olds from Kharkov to throw themselves under a tank. But Anatoly, you mentioned yourself a human biodiversity component. I think what do you say if we take a short break and we come back to discuss some of Other things you've written about such as human biodiversity, HPD, the IQ problem, technology and some not just war related things. What do you say we come back? Okay, yeah, sure. Very good. We have hard commercial break. We go to break now. Thank you. Back to show I'm here with Anatoly Karlin. We talk many big questions this segment about future of world and technology and mankind.

But before we move to that, I wanted to ask one more thing about Ukraine-Russia crisis. I have many friends who are European nationalists, and they, in particular one girl, had very good, I thought, argument, hard to argue with, and I wanted to ask your opinion on it only, because she say, well, even if Russia wins the military struggle, its political aims have already been thwarted, because the message it sent to the world was that it would be welcomed with open arms, because the Russian people and the Ukrainian people are one people, that the Ukrainian people have been held hostage by, well, what I would call occupational elite, people who rule against their wishes, and that they would gladly rejoin the Russian

fold, but that now, even if Russia wins militarily, it's already lost, because the public perception around the world will have been that Putin is occupying Ukrainians who don't want to be with Russia, and that this is going to be true even if, as I believe, that many Ukrainians are being held hostage. For example, in Mariupol and other places, I believe this, that Ukrainians are being held hostage by so-called Azov battalion. Many are foreigners, a lot of them are crazy, in any case, they're a minority in Ukraine. But her point is, Bep, it doesn't matter. Now because of this extended struggle and slow progress and because they haven't been welcomed with roses on the streets, Russia has already lost its political aims. What do you answer to that? I would make two points.

Secondly, the world at large doesn't care outside of the highly moralistic West. Frankly, much of the third world, especially China, they view it as a sort of white people struggle, which they don't really care about. They do care that the prices of commodities are going sharply up because of this upheaval and they should be responsible for a large percentage of the exports of these commodities. So that's the kind of thing that they care about. And yes, I mean, some of them are sort of like, not that happy to see Russia getting a one-up over the, what they view as sort of like Western Supremacism in many of these territories. I mean, this is, in demographic terms, that's partly the majority of the world. So I think these sort of like obsessions

about the opinion of the international community, I mean, the international community is basically the EU and the US. So, we need to bear that in mind. The second point that I want to make is that public opinion is highly malleable, especially in Ukraine. Because, I mean, as recently as 2014, back in 2014, during the Yudomaidan opinion on whether to go with the EU, which was, well, I mean, falsely portrayed as the reality, basically, like decades of accession processes, joining Gurdashe's customs union, the Eurasian union. Opinion was basically split 50-50 back then, according to our opinion polls, and yes, I mean, over the last eight years, when the, like, coalition sentiment has become highly tabooed in the insane, I mean, not just like in terms of pure public sentiment, but just

like sort of like policy because uh uh the coalition media has been shut down the uh coming the uh parties have been have been shut down over the years so they shouldn't language schooling has been uh uh terminated uh a couple of years ago uh so uh i mean with the with these sorts of shifts it's not that surprising that uh that Ukraine has shifted as a whole in a sort of sharply isolation direction, but to a large extent that is artificial because I mean in the DNR and the LNR, which I mean, I'm not going to claim that they're sort of like the paragons of democracy and the popular will, that would be equally ridiculous, but nonetheless I mean they have a sort of different media, the elite orientation, media structures and so on, and they've sort of

like Afghan to identify much more closely with with Russia and we even see that if anything in the decent combat in in in Ukraine the T&R and L&I units have been some of the most combat effective so these are the dumbest yeah yeah yeah so they're not like a faith to to go in and and fight with the idea is sort of like much more aggressive than actually the addition of the people. There was even like a further theme going about the about like the virgin addition, service versus the charted DNR, like militia. Yeah, the DNR, you mean the Donbass, just to clarify for the audience. Absolutely, yes. Yes. Yeah, so I mean, I mean, like spent five, 10 years is in a sort of different, easy environment. It's not like Russia is going to down up Ukrainians

into camps or whatever the latest sort of nonsense that the U.S. State Department is claiming. I mean, the Putin news, like Russian nationalists on Putin for that matter view, the Ukrainian militia people is one people. So I mean, obviously that sort of like leaves any atrocities of this nation. So it's not like there's going to be a wave of sort of ethnic professions, that's ridiculous. But what you have is like five, 10 years in a different sort of like political structure, media environment, and as you had over the next 10 years, people's opinions I'm sure will also shift correspondingly, as has always been the case.

In 1991, the only parts of Ukraine which voted against staying in the Soviet Union for that matter were the city of Kiev and the westernmost obelisks, like in Galicia, which had never been part of the Russian Empire. Yes, those are basically Polish lands or something like this, right, or the Austrian at times. But not Odessa, right? Most Ukrainians I've known are from Odessa. Some of them are Jews. They all speak Russian and have no like at all or no sympathy for Ukrainian nationalism, at least in the West. I don't know if that's still the case, but these are just the people I've known. They are totally crucified in Odessa. But look, this may have a Ukraine overload. Maybe you have also written at length on various other matters, so-called human biodiversity,

the IQ problem, the IQ differences between different nations, and about technology. And I wanted to ask you, in terms of technology, you have read a long article talking about how Russia technology has suffered since the fall of Soviet Union. Do you have anything to say about that? Has the situation improved recently? We saw use of hypersonic weapons the other day. Well, I mean, yeah, obviously the Soviet Union had to be self-sufficient in technology partly on account of it being sort of like a non-capitalist and market economy that was very much isolated from the world economy at large, and in particular subject to technological sanctions. So obviously it built up a very large superstructure, scientific superstructure, that had some interesting

ideas of its own like for instance some specific like even like medicines or like supplements which were not not very well known in the west but yeah i mean obviously this went the way of the dodo after the collapse of the soviet union i mean in the 1990s so she was basically semi-banked up so i mean many of these researchers did better ones at any rate And once that happens, you basically need a generation to store the generation of scientific researchers. It wasn't really a very attractive career choice for even during the first half of the Putin era, simply because the salaries there were very low and it wasn't a very attractive career choice. But yes, I mean, some of these have gone up over the past five years, quite sharply.

So I do think that it's sort of being decalibrated, but it's going to take a long time. It's not something that appears in the year at all. Yes, is Russia still experiencing a brain drain, as East bloc all did with stem people leaving and so forth, the physics and math and computer people living in this? Well, I mean, obviously, to an extent it's happening, but it's an order of magnitude lower than it was in the 1990s. So, I mean, my own family was basically one of those, like, R&D, scientific families who stopped being paid in the 1990s and emigrated to the West. So, yeah, I mean, that was a much more prevalent phenomenon back in the 20, 30 years ago. That's the first thing. The second thing is that it's also much much lower scale than it is in Poland,

but not because Russia is more prosperous than Poland or Czechia or whatever, but simply because there's a lot more freedom of movement. So, I mean, frankly, the lack of, sort of, like, lack of labor, easy labor mobility between Russia and the EU is to some extent, one might say, a blessing in disguise. Yes, and the EU and China don't have a problem of wokeness so much yet destroying science. But in the United States, I think people are aware every day even more that science STEM fields have not escaped this woke onslaught. It's still, at least talking to Americans who are in technology, they tell me they would never dream still of moving to China or somewhere else because there's so much talent still in America.

But I think slowly it's situations being made worse and worse, especially in academia. And I wanted to ask you, I know you've written at length about IQ, differences between nations, the HPD, so-called problem human biodiversity. One of my long-term concerns is can technological civilization sustain itself with a decrease in human capital, which can take place two ways. On one hand, people of high skill being excluded through political and ideological tests, as is increasing, happen now in United States. The second problem is that a lot of tech people, engineers and so on, just don't have a lot of children anymore. A lot do not have really quite difficulties with modern women. This is a big reason that the game so-called community came up in the late 2000s, because

many, let's say, engineers and so forth, who in a place like China or the Cold War Soviet Bloc or Cold War America, for that matter, could easily get some type of wife and have a family, but they noticed that really Western women are not going to marry an engineer anymore. But let's say even if they do, then they have one child and it's late in life, the child become autistic, who knows. So there's just this one of my concerns. Can technological civilization advance at all with a decreasing biological base of high IQ people? And I guess Russia is trying in part to solve this problem by absorbing millions of Belarusians and Ukrainians back into the Russian fold. That's many, many millions of potentially high-IQ engineers. But the West is having the opposite problem.

It's getting very few from abroad, except, you know, from the Latrine countries and so forth. Do you... I don't know if you want to comment on this, you know. Okay, Yeshua. I mean, one thing I mean, I'd agree with you is that, yes, I mean, a disproportionate amount of world scientific test does actually do have to ditch high IQ countries essentially, to the extent I think the reduction patterns are pretty much universally across the world, although at different dates are dysgenic, that is to privilege the lower IQ. This is going to become a problem. and essentially we are in some kind of place between disgenic reproduction patterns and the accelerating technological focus. So, I mean, when we get to like machine super intelligence, I mean, if we get there,

while the sort of reality infrastructure is still intact and functioning. Well, I mean, if that happens, I mean, I'm not going to speculate this as a whole other topic. as highly divergent opinions and ideas of when, if we will see machine super intelligence, might be five to 10 years ago, of course, like the most optimistic or perhaps pessimistic, those things might never happen. So if it doesn't happen, then yes. I mean, if the degenerative production tends production tends don't get diverse, then yes, we will. And I don't agree, very likely see something like a trade in the film in geography where huge new generation is a decreasingly less capable of supporting the technological base that advocates modern civilization. Now, another I don't think actually though, however,

this is something that I think many fewer people have noted, is that one thing that is hyper competitive in the post-confusing environment, which is the one we live in right now, is the propensity to have children, because natalism essentially. Because this is hyper competitive, sort of like a post-confusing society. I mean that because virtually all children survive. Like in the modern welfare state, even if you have like 10 kids, you're very poor and sometimes they're going to die. So they would have two, two centuries ago. So one sort of, I don't think like feasible, not, I mean, feasible scenario, I think, although it's, some might say it's a bit far-fetched is that we, at the same time as we get the sort of

like etymocracy, we might also get a reversal of the historically low fertility dates that the industrialized world is observing right now, back to above the placement level dates and then the assumption of population growth to whatever the limits are of the modern industrial economy. So it's going to be a pretty paradoxical place. So eventually we might, we might actually like the, well, population might actually go to a pretty high number. And like, actually sort of like an unprecedented that we have now to imagine a society, which I have to term the age of Malthusian industrial life, the age of Malthusian industrialism in a number of essays at the once a year, which you can check out if you wish. But yeah, basically in which Malthusian

and reasserts itself, and so does Klavkin's selection for a theft of intelligence. Yes, I see. I don't see how that process can come about without complete destruction of modern states. But on this subject, I want to ask you about the young in Russia, because the Russian with attitude guys who were on this show a few times, and other friends I have who have gone to Russia on scientific conference and so forth. They tell me that the young Russians, if you go on Tinder, they are Russian girls. And in general, the young Russians, they want to be—a lot of them want to be Western, they want to be Westernized, they like this global homo, pro-EU culture. Is that, are the, you know, and I think that's true also in East Europe, in Hungary, Croatia,

so forth, are prospect long-term Zen of nationalism in Russia, are the long-term prospects bad, you know? Well, I mean, first of all, I think that the sort of like the wave of theophobia, which engulfing the West right now, which is in my opinion, I mean, I don't judge it. I mean, it's geopolitical, justifiable in the context. But at a certain level, I would say that it might actually be a good coalition. Well, I mean, much in the way that say, moderate anti-Semitism is probably good for Israel, because it basically, like, motivates some Jews to abate the East. in that you could get a similar dynamic with respect to the issue or at least prevent the sort of the post sanctions thing from getting too bad. The other thing I would point out is that

you'll see considerably less of this of the sort of like Western cargo cult amongst the very youngest generations in China. This is largely an account of the IT ecosystem being a largely self-segregated space thanks to the great firewall and the restrictions on Google and Facebook and so on. So I mean they're not really partaking of Western conversations and they're largely insulated from the needs that are circulating in the West. So again, ironically, and this is sort of like perhaps a like another Whitefield interpretation, but but possibly another benefit of the, like the bifurcation between the Russian world that the, the way to West, that it seems quite likely to happen now over the next decade is that Russians, they claim their own sort of nomadic space

where they can discuss their future and how to be themselves without, without being assaulted by the image of a Western ideal that plays itself as superior with these overweight Black women in Nike adverts. Sort of like the symbol, perhaps, of Westernism as a prestige symbol. Yes, no, you had a good article about the idea of swine right, which I think comes from another writer, Arpad Virag, you told me. But your article, I thought, was very good, the problem, I forget the title of it, what is it, the problem with the right, the right human capital problem. I think that's a very good title because many nationalists and people, not just nationalists but on the right, opposed to globohomo for whatever reason, nationalism, social conservatism, they don't like globohomo in America or the West.

They maybe don't see that in East Europe and in Russia, the nationalists so-called, many Many of them are highly unattractive. They are the kind of low-IQ provincial who stomp his foot. And he used to, let's say, be an official who used to be communist. And you put it the right way. He switched the hammer and the sickle for the cross and the country. And his plans for you, if you are a young high-IQ guy in Ukraine or Hungary, maybe not Hungary, but Ukraine, that whole area, their plan for you is to put a uniform on you and get you killed in some stupid war over petty reasons, whereas on the other hand the West offers you economic opportunities, a promise of freedom. And the negative aspects of it, the migrations and so forth, there are no migrants there,

so that's not immediate threat to you. And I think you make very good points there that as time goes on, the nationalist or hard it's not even right-wing, but that position, the nationalist position, gets identified with low IQ, low status bigots, essentially. And so the prospects of nationalism in some of these places long term are not so good, And that the innovation of your argument is that it's for good reasons, that if you're high IQ and young in those places, it's just not much to offer you, someone like Lukashenko maybe. Do you want to comment on that? Because I think that actually points to a quite profound problem, not just in East Bloc but West as well. What is possible path forward for some type of nationalism?

I'm concerned with stopping third-world migrant flows into the West, and, well, more on that in a second, but what, do you want to elaborate on that at all? Okay, yeah, sure. I mean, I do want to point out that the argument was made by Atpad Birak, and I think that he will make a much better limit than I did, since he's the originator, although I do agree with this, and I can certainly vouch for it objectively, that it's much collect, in the sense that yeah even if you do a like a correlation plot of of people who vote for which party in Moscow say then you'll generally see the people with with no university degrees voting for United Russia which is Putin's party and Paryanovsky like the higher key ones voting

for the Iranian century which is which is yeah pretty sad to me but indeed not surprising because because the, I mean, speaking from a Russian perspective, at any date, the West has a cashier to it, like a lingering cashier, which in Jewish, despite ideological, despite like the West, drastic questioning of the relations of the past decade. I mean, Russians were some of the world's biggest American ophiles back in the 1990s, according to the opinion of most, incidentally. So yeah, but it's sort of like preserved itself to this decline in like geopolitical attitudes as a sort of like a cultural status symbol because high IQ people tend to be namely more cosmopolitan and more wired than to what this sort of procedures. I mean, it's basically a function of social intelligence.

Then it sort of stands to reason that they would more closely associate themselves with these movements, especially amongst the youth. Because this is especially pronounced not so much amongst like the older people, but amongst the youngest generations who sort of like, I don't really remember the 1990s if you're talking about zoomers. So I mean, they've built up and they sort of like very capitalist society which there's not some very attractive, obviously, elements to Russian society as well, such as I mean the corruption, like high corruption and so forth, and oligarchy and monopolies. I mean, this is all pretty undeniable, if you're speaking relative to most Western countries. I mean, it's a different question whether sort of adopting a Western cargo-couple would

actually be more effective at solving these problems than they have to be announced, on that matter. I mean the EUFANE was essentially a running experiment on whether sort of like westernization like results in data transparency and the over-hologization and so forth, but if so it hasn't been a very successful experiment. But so far there's sort of like 105 IQ embedded reading type bitwits are concerned, that's this sort of like a logical, in my opinion, conclusion. So it's not surprising that amongst them, my opinion stands towards this action. As I said, as I said, I mean, I think that the, what is likely to happen, theification of big tech. So, I mean, Doshi has all the mainstays of data defined social media. So VK is our Facebook and Yandex is our Google.

So we have all of this and if there's sort of like an increasingly sharp separation between them, well, I mean, at any rate, you can't access Facebook or Twitter without VPN any longer. So if that continues and people who might base towards largely exclusively the issue populated platforms, then our national conversation could indeed become largely divorced from the West as it isn't in China, to a less extent, even in Japan. So we sort of like a, what in my opinion would be a sort of healthy end. social attitudes in general? Yes, yes, no, yes. Well, I'm just, I was just concerned that perhaps young high IQ people in the West, you know, they realize all the, not all of them, there are midwits and others and so forth, and not just midwits, but there are many who are not convinced yet,

but I'm saying many high IQ people in the West realize that liberalism as it exists now and the left is a failure, The promise of cosmopolitanism is false, and the world is degenerating into this oligarch-controlled, joyless version of Latin America. But I am just afraid that in the East Bloc and the ex-East Bloc, the younger people are maybe not seeing the bad part yet and still somehow seduced by the promise of the West. And you're saying that simply cutting off the internet, having your own social media environment would be a cure to that. It remains to be seen. Do you want to comment at all on the West going forward? I've heard Europeans say that the Danish model, where, you know, the social democrats, the gay left, essentially, has adopted a version of immigration restriction.

Do you think that is the path forward for the West? I don't think so, but there are people who say, and the only way, basically, to save it from hatization, from becoming an extension of aid-free car and such things, I don't know if... And more broadly, do you want to comment on the long-term threat posed by the global south to the civilized world? I don't know if this is too spicy to talk, but I've always wanted an alliance long-term between the West and Russia, because I think both are faced long-term with this same problem of the global south, which I know you seem friendly to China, but I think China is very happy to be the leader of the world colored revolution of the global south. I don't know. Do you want to comment on this? Oh, yeah, sure.

I mean, I'm friendly towards countries that are friendly to me, and I basically see the reason and a lot of counter-attacks and reasons, frankly, for my position as a sort of like a person who identifies with Russian interests to being sinophobic. Because yeah, I mean, you do have the Russian nationalists who are sinophobes. I mean, well, I mean, frankly, a lot of nationalists have had a focus on each other, I mean, that's what we have. But they've consistently refused to impose sanctions, and in general, I mean, basically our main outlet now towards some, like, technologies which Russia will find it very hard to replicate. So I mean, Russia does have like 150 million people and a relatively sophisticated economy,

I mean at least relative to Iran for instance, but still a modern chippad which it produces like the latest smaller superconductors, it costs 50 billion to set up and I mean Russia isn't going to be able to do that, I mean the only country that can sort of force that kind of thing through would be China. So just on like tactical considerations, that's important for the ship. I mean, I'm not a European, I'm American or whatever, and I'd be happy to cooperate with them as sort of like their own sort of civilizations once things settle down. Whether they can stand the sort of the refugee crisis in the future. Well, I mean, one thing I'd point out is that it's literally, I think, at this point, speaking about Africa, essentially, because outside Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa, pretty

much all the entire world is going to sub the place of level fertility rates, or somewhere close to that. I mean, Mexico is below that level, so I mean, the potential for, like, funneling a lot of people is sort of diminishing in most of the world, with the very marked exception, of of course, of sub-Saharan Africa, which according to UN projections is going to increase from 1 billion people to 4 billion people. They feel that 10% of them decide to immigrate. Well, I mean, 10% of 4 billion is 400 million. That's basically the population of Western Europe. I mean, Europe basically becomes like, I don't know, Georgia essentially, essentially right with those kinds of demographics. Whether that will happen will depend on the Europeans quite frankly.

I mean, I don't think the show is in a position to influence them or whatever. And really it's got a lot to do with the choices Europeans make themselves. So, I mean, my impression would be that a sort of like an internalization of HBT, like observations, such as the DW gap, which is one of the most consistently duplicated results in the psychological sciences, possibly the most duplicated. I mean, I mean, we all know it's true, but official ideology, flatly, blackly denies, denies that this. So I'm just use Sub-Saharan Africans as basically these freely substitutable units of labor that can replace workers in Europe as the population ages. So well, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is one solution. I guess another solution would be like more consumerist ones, like, I don't know, like

radical life extensions that Europeans live for longer. So so like more implicitly that sort of like implies more rights, like the main space, or perhaps there's some other pretty exotic possibilities. So for instance, there's various opinion polls on the acceptability of using genetic editing to increase IQ. So funnily enough, most of the high IQ world includes not just Europe and America, but also China. Funnily enough, contest stereotypes is popular opinion doesn't support doing that, but it is a pretty okay idea in India, funnily enough. I don't know about Africa. But yeah, I mean, if like Indians start doing this, then yeah, I mean, they might sort of like have a break out, like even more exotically if Africans are okay with it, well,

I mean, we're going into sort of sci-fi territory. You never know what happens in a century's time. But I mean, yeah, my core argument, like to return to base is that this is something that will depend on the Europeans, but I don't really see much to be white felt about right now because, I mean, policymaking is highly emotional. I mean, Mevken was saying that multiculturalism is a dead end, but then a couple of years later, she accepted a million Middle Eastern refugees. And now things have been going the other direction, but now you think ISIS has itself in soil and commodity prices which might well unleash another big refugee wave, and is Europe in a position to resist that? Well, no, probably not, because populism, populist forces have

actually waned in the past few months due to recent events. So, I mean, people like like Mactan have done strongly, you know, Mactan who likes hugging sort of like these muscle-black chats. So without like this ideological base built on like, it doesn't have to be like super conservative or like even super nationalist, like just like a recognition of reality and the relationship of intelligence to national prosperity and institutions, like these basic HBT observations, so long as they're not anchored within a society and so long as policy-making is so reactive to events and so emotional, I do not see much cause for optimism. Yes, I am afraid of what you just say, emotionalism, the fact that, West especially, but I think

actually China, but that is a longer talk, is run by really reckless, mentally ill people who act on petty sexualized grievances. And yes, I include China in that. In fact, our friend Menaquin On4 believes that China will eventually perhaps start nuclear war based on that. But that's for another show. Anatoly, you are much too optimistic, I think, about the future of science. I don't see anything with AI or life extension or nanotechnology. I think these are all phantom technologies. They will never exist, really. If they could ever exist, the world would never get there because of what we've been talking about, decreasing human potential. And I believe this same decreasing human capability or biological intelligence will lead to collapse

of modern states, and so I'm curious about what will come after. But we don't need to talk that. Before we go, I have one more question for you. What you see for future of Russia, let's say, after Putin, I'm not saying Putin is going to fall or anything, but he will die like everyone does, and eventually he will be replaced by someone else, where he will have a successor or something else. What do you think are possible futures for Russia, and what do you think is the likely future? Well, I mean, as I said, the Ukraine crisis has clarified a lot of things. I've been on the deck very early that Putin's aims are indeed maximalist. Thankfully, if you are going to anchor your entire historical political reputation on

success of this sort of geopolitical venture and basically like creating your economy for this year at any date and possibly create the world economy because I mean we I don't think that the sort of solving commodity prices that have resulted from other ships basically becoming a black hole so far as like the world economy is concerned has been fully priced in yet so if you're going to go go to those lands that nothing but maximalists make sense and bearing in mind that I do believe that the aims are maximalist that also implies that the sanctions are going to stay for a long time and I mean they're pretty severe sanctions I mean these are islands here sanctions essentially possibly actually more so because I mean Italians can fly to the EU but I mean all of European air

spaces is block proof versions for instance. So if anything it's actually even more severe. So what's going to happen is that yes I mean I think much of this sort of like these cutting off connections is for the long term. This is going to, this will survive because I mean that maintains a commercial aviation sector. It's a country of 80 million people. This will be a country of close to 200 million people, I hope, and like it produces its own airplanes like the MC-21 and Superjet, so I don't really see CP feasible that that will collapse, so it will be a more sort of like a an autarkic country that produces more of its own stuff. There'll be knock-on effects on prosperity because some things, I mean it's more efficient to buy

many things I've thought, but on the other hand it could also be stimulatory in terms of domestic R&D and so forth. There will also be a major shift towards economic ties with Asia again for obvious reasons as I said. This funnily enough, it was an Indian acquaintance of mine who actually made the observation that like an alien visiting Earth would think that the U.S. Ukraine is some kind of base war because it's basically 30-wide countries which like almost are supporting Ukraine except Serbia and like pretty much all the non-wide countries except Japan and Korea but to a less extent are supporting Ukraine essentially. So yeah, obviously the reorientation of economic ties to East Asia, China in particular, but to a lesser extent also India and so forth, I mean China for the technology.

To a lesser extent probably South Korea because they seem to be less sort of like ideologically committed to the sanctions than the West Europeans are doing it more for show frankly. So in terms of domestic politics, I think Putin is going to stay until 2030 at least, because the next elections are going to be in 2024. I don't think that would be the time, I mean, the version would actually be dealing with the fallout from the sort of like the occupation of much of Ukraine that I assume is going to be happening around this period. It seems like too sensitive over time to just step aside. Plus, no obvious successor has yet been nominated. There have been some proposals, like the first union and then the first of the younger, who were like rumored to be the successors,

but nothing has come out of it. You need to start showing them on TV to get people ready for them, but that hasn't happened. So I'm assuming that Putin is in power until 2030 and is basically going to be, I mean, I hope it's going to basically be built in the Slavic fantasy Wakanda for the next decade, actually. Do you think a possible return of Russia Empire with its forms or Byzantine Empire or something exciting like that, or, you know? Well, I mean, as I said, my sort of default assumption right now is essentially Russia swallowing, essentially, Belarus and Ukraine up until, like, at the minimum, Novotestia, possibly all the way up to the 1939 borders. I don't think they'll list here, but who knows. My sort of means and guess is the 1939 borders, Transnistria, and possibly,

if there's like a crisis in Kazakhstan, possibly northern Kazakhstan breaks away. But I don't see that she expands it beyond that, quite frankly, because, I mean, I mean, ideologically Putin has always identified with the Solzhenitsyn's vision of the Italian Russian people, Russians and Ukrainians being in one state, and there's... No, no, but I mean, will he be crowned? Will he be crowned Tsar? Will he be crowned Tsar or return of Byzantine Empire? Like the 10 of Empires, me in that, like, literally that turned to the age of empires, like, like, McDon supposed. Yes, I think it would be exciting if he returned the Byzantine Empire, called himself emperor and protector of all Orthodox around the world, I don't know.

Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, yeah, I mean, there's elements of that, and frankly, there's a lot of things that, that started out as cosplay, but which, that simply became reality. So, I mean, the reason the Donbas, the DNR exists is because literally a historic of the creationists called the Hof went into Donbas and basically decided to create a sort of like a dish in the public there when the Ukraine was in chaos. And out of that started... And I mean, the layer, even before that, But the initial conception of Ambassador Publix was actually a sci-fi data school, like we meet together in cafes in Paris. So you know, these sort of like lapping weirdos, the both of them were also that at the beginning,

like totally marginal freaks who were infighting amongst themselves all the time, and engaging in their own drama. They later entered history, right? So it is my opinion that great men do make their own fortune and that if you pursue greatness, then it will come to you. Yes. Well, on that note, it's good note to end show. I think Anatolia, I've been keeping you for a while. I just, I know you have Russian audience. I just want to tell you and the Russian people, you already know this, but there are many people in the West who are cheering Putin and Russia on as a counterweight to our common enemy, what we call globohomo. And I say, you know, glory to Putin and to Putler and to the Russian people. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

And wish you luck on the American, the countries of American institutions likewise. Yes. Very good. Very good, Anatoly. I hope you come back. And until next time. Very good. Until next time, thanks for having me on your show. Yes, very good. It's going to be a reason I have with me special guest. We are actually here together trying to avoid constant Ukraine risk, Ukraine conflict talk. And we are actually in the Kuban overlooking the Black Sea. We are here hunting wild men on the path of the Anenarba and enjoying the blood of mountain goat. This is, of course, my old friend Stone Age Herbalist, he has come back to show, to discuss amazing new things. Hello, Mr. Herbalist. Hello, Stone Age Herbalist. Welcome back. Hi, Bab. Thanks for having me on again, man. How are you? Yes, okay.

Have you heard of this, by the way, that there were reports of hominids in the Russian Kuban and also Africanoid type-looking peoples in Georgia, the country Georgia owns the Black Sea. Have you heard of this? No, no, this is news to me. We should start tracking though. I'll get some of my best guys on it. I've heard this. I've heard many different things about this area of the world. First of all, that there were seven-foot-tall Yamnaya people discovered in the Kuban and Then that there were rumors of wild men with hair all over body in the kuban. And unrelated that there was a type Africanoid population in Georgia, which may have been imported later by the Ottomans as a slave or some other kind of population movement.

Or that the ancient Colchis, you know, because Herodotus actually, he makes an aside, especially about the Colchis. He says that they are swarthy and curly-haired. And he says this doesn't prove that they're descended from the Egyptians, because many others are swarthy and curly-haired, too. But they are also circumcised. So I know Swarthy and Curlyhead in comparison to Egyptian doesn't mean sub-Saharan African, but some people say it's related somehow. I don't know. I don't know if you've ever heard these reports. Maybe this is the last holdout of Homo habilis hiding away in the Georgian mountains. Yes. No, I believe this. I've also seen some of them in Little Odessa, New York, but that's another story. They're called mountain Jews. I don't know if people should look this up.

It's, they're Jews, but they're from the Caucasus mountain and behaviorally and in their mannerisms, they're very much like Chechens and other such thing. But look, I'm sorry, I had to go on tangent. You didn't come today to discuss this. What have you been studying lately? What you have on mind today? I've been diving recently into Hmong shamanism. So it's one of those areas that I found really interesting. I was looking at this weird event in the 1980s where a whole load of Hmong refugees to the States suddenly started dying in their sleep, reporting this terrifying demon nightmare preceding their death. So sorry to interrupt. Just audience, because you have unusual English accent and audience, Hmong you're referring to a population from where, Southeast Asia, correct?

Yeah, North Vietnam, North Lao area, yeah. Yes, go on, sorry to interrupt. No, no, it's okay, yeah. Yeah, they're an interesting group of people with this interesting belief that they have this demon figure that stalks them in their dreams if they don't properly worship their ancestral gods. And this group of refugees seem to start dying out of nowhere in their sleep. and the medical authorities at the time couldn't work it out and they put it down to sudden, unexplained nocturnal death syndrome. But the Hmong shamans were convinced that it was because they were incorrectly worshiping their ancestors. And so this demon figure was coming to their men at night, sitting on their chest and strangling them and killing them. So I was interested in this.

Yeah, this is one of those fascinating little wrinkles of time. Hello, herbalist that is still on. Oh yeah, I'm still here, I'm still here. Yeah, I was just saying I believe in this, but yes, go on please. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I have a soft spot for all of these kinds of stories. So, you know, I was thinking about shamanism in general and just about the origins of shamanism. See, to me, there's only really, there's kind of two, there's two real central places for shamans in the world. There's the Amazonian shamans, and then there's the Siberian shamans, which I think is probably a legacy of the Upper Paleolithic, sort of wide step area. I think that's probably where that kind of shamanism emerges from. So this has been on my mind about this kind of thing.

That's what I've been thinking about. Yes, no, this very interesting. Please say more. By the way, when you say Amazonian and Siberian, is possible that Amazonian are one of the tribes from Siberia, is that possible or am I? Yeah, I don't know, it strikes me as one of those things. I put it down to the reindeer and the jaguar. This is the metaphor that I used, is the reindeer and the jaguar. You've got these two forms of shamanism. One is to do with the hunt and the big sky and the tripartite world vision, the psychopomp, the man who can, or the woman who can send their soul to another world and retrieve the ill, the dead, or spot the animals hunting. And then you have this kind of Amazonian tradition that's a lot darker, I think. It's a lot more to do with,

you have this kind of dark assault, sorcery kind of shamanism, and it's much more focused around the jaguar and ideas of revenge and death and some really quite brutal rituals that go on in the Amazon. And I think it's probably the result of the collapse of the Amazonian civilizations and the kind of dispersal into the Amazon and deep into the rainforest, where the kind of Guyanese Highlands and places like that. No, this is very interesting. Actually, I want to ask you about these rituals, but you mentioned something about the origin of shamanism. You have some thoughts on this? Yeah, I think most human groups have the capacity to have something like a shamanic figure, but I think there's only two. There's one real true root, which is kind of Eurasian shamanism.

And you can see it spread down into China and into Southeast Asia and across into the Americas. So that's, to me, where it kind of originates as a kind of cold step tiger, kind of very, very, very wide sky, groups of animals like reindeer. That to me is where it emerges from, a kind of a gravitian upper paleolithic, I think. And it spreads from there. Yes, but do you have any thoughts on how it came about? What is it? I mean, you have a tribe of people, you know, they're trying to survive, etc. You know, do you have a George Frazier type explanation of how the shaman first comes about? Yeah, that's a good question. I think a lot of the early explorers into the Siberian regions often noticed that the shaman figure was a kind of hysteric or a neurotic, that they were

imagining the kind of genius temperament, people who are very, very highly strung, you know, you're very agitated by noise perhaps or by loud sounds, irritations, they would get angry unnecessarily at things or just start crying, they might have seizures. You just have people like this in your tribe and especially if it's if you're living somewhere where it's dark for a lot of the year, where it's very very cold, you have a very strange mixture I think of temper and emotions and then also living on a kind of a hunting economy where you're totally dependent on being able to gather large numbers of animals and find them. I think that lends itself perfectly to the need for a figure who can potentially be in touch with the forces

that control nature, that are outside of your control. I think that's where it originates from. Yes, I've read reports of this that Eskimos in general, even to our day, can be extremely irritable and can fly into unpredictable rages and when they are asked why it's sometimes because of a very slight noise or something that disturbs their peace. But I spoke to friend recently and he says that this is a symptom of vitamin A overdose. I don't know if you have thoughts on that or or any biological crude, let's say crude biological explanation like that or having to do with drugs, you know with mushroom you know, hallucinogenic mushroom use of this? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I haven't heard the vitamin A overdose as a theory. It might make sense.

I think there's a long tradition in the Arctic where you can get a kind of hysteria to do with the environmental conditions of just total sensory deprivation for long periods of time that can just make you completely hysterical. But there have been other arguments for the biological origins of shamanism that go back a long way. People like David Lewis Williams have written extensively on the idea of things like entoptic visions in the eyes when you have things like migraines that lend themselves to sort of a shamanic explanation and things. And it's often the case that shamans suffer from, Excuse me, they often suffer from all sorts of strange maladies like epilepsy or auditory hallucinations, tingling in the hands, just all sorts of really strange, strange things.

So yeah, I think all those things combined, you can see why it would give birth to something like a strange sort of shaman figure. Yes, I just must say, I don't like this kind of extreme, crude biological explanation, oh, they have some type of vitamin overdose or deficiency and that causes this problem and that's even beneath Frasier type explanations, which I don't like either because Frasier, of course, denies the truth and power of prophecy and he just thinks it's the primitive mind's crude misunderstanding of physical forces that, I mean, you know what he says with sympathetic magic and this kind of magic. But in ancient world, among people smarter than all of us, the ancient Greeks believed that the kind of prophecy or augury that you get from divine madness is much truer, much

better than what you get, for example, from studying the flight of birds or the entrails of birds or these types of things, which, you know, this latter they consider a kind of cruder mechanical type of fortune telling, whereas the divine madness is much better. And when you talk about a guide on the steppe who find animal, readers of the Iliad will remember the prophet Calcas, and he's described as going into a divine madness for the sake of Apollo, and he able to find the road on the sea to Troy through this divine madness. This was their guide on the seas. So I don't know if I'm mixing up things. Would you consider that a shaman, or perhaps even the priestesses at Delphi who went nuts over, you know, the python? They say gas is emanating from the earth, but whatever.

Are either of those similar to the shaman you think, or am I mixing things up? No, I think I'm like you, I don't particularly like the kind of biological or strictly kind of materialist explanations. And I do think that both the Norse and the Greek have inherited a certainly a flavor of sort of step shamanism, that's sort of Siberian in origin, I think. The Orphic mysteries have got a shamanism written all over them, with the kind of dying and rebirth, the kind of Dionysian parts of it and the particularly, yeah, like you say, the kind of ecstatic madness that fits in perfectly with the kind of Siberian traditions of shamanism. Yes. Less so I think the Amazonian ones, definitely more the Siberian ones, where there's kind of very, I can't think what the word is,

kind of furious, rage-like, totally chthonic, sort of out of control madnesses that give you some kind of glimpse into the potential different worlds that are out there. Yes, Apollo and Dionysus are the same, but this very profound topic, maybe we leave for another time. I want to ask you in this connection, is the shamanic rites, anything in the shamanic studies you've come across ever connected to a Eurasian wolf cult, to a so-called wolf cult? Have you encountered this at all? There is that one very well-documented site by David Anthony, the sort of Koryas midwinter steppe wolf excavations. Other than that, the wolf cults, the idea of the wolf being quite well, sort of well-integrated into the shamanic systems of Siberia I think it goes back a long way there's certainly Mesolithic

evidence for for long-standing contacts between wolf dog and and and Siberian sort of reindeer hunter herders I don't know about the sort of worshipping them strictly as as sort of cultic phenomena I think it tends to be more bare in in those regions. There, I see, yes. Because in various folklore, maybe, I don't know enough about Siberian, but in various European and I think Turkic folklores, the wolf is a sign of some, is associated somehow with the transport of between the dead and the living. I don't, this part of why I bring it up. But yes, well, I want to ask you, you mentioned Amazonian shamanism, some brutal rituals, would you mind talking about those? Yeah, I mean, if your audience has got the stomach for it, there's a fascinating book by- Yes, yes, they like blood, yeah. Yeah.

There's a fascinating book called, what's it called, Canaima and Dark Shamans by an anthropologist called Neil Whitehead. And he documents this form of assault sorcery, which goes on in the kind of Guyanese Highlands. And it still continues by the Waro people. And there's a few others as well. So this particular ritual, the Kanema ritual, is probably one of the best documented. And it's essentially a kind of, it's essentially a sort of revenge slash, spiritual cannibalism, physical and spiritual cannibalism, where a particular member of a group is targeted as being one who's selected for the process, either because there's some kind of petty vengeance or revenge being against them in their personal life, or because they're seen as being spiritually powerful in some way.

And then they are attacked over a period of a number of years, and it leads up to this crescendo of this really, really quite disturbing ritual. And then after their death, what they do to the body kind of seals the deal and kind of finishes it off. But I have a passage here I can read for you if you- Yes, please. Yeah, so I'll do that. So this is from, yeah, from Neil Whitehead's book on the salt sorcery and shameless. So, the victim will first become aware of an impending attack when the Canemas approach his house by night on a lonely forest trail, making a characteristic whistling noise. A direct physical attack might come at any point, even years thereafter. For during this period of stalking, the victim is assessed as to their likely resistance and their suitability as food.

In some attacks, the victims may have minor bones broken, especially fingers or joints dislocated, especially the shoulder, while the neck may be manipulated to induce spinal injury or back pain. This kind of attack is generally considered to be preliminary to the actual death and mutilation. Fatal attack will certainly follow, but informants stress this could be months even years later. When the physical attack is intended the victims are always struck from behind and physically restrained. A variety of procedures intended to produce a lingering death are then enacted. The victim has their tongue pierced with the fangs of a snake. He's turned over and either an iguana or an amadillo tail is inserted into their rectum so that the anal muscles can be

stripped out through repeated rubbing. Then, pressing on the victim's stomach, a section of of the sphincter muscle is forced out and cut. Finally, the victim's body is rubbed down with astringent plants and a thin flexed twig is forced into the rectum so that it opens the anal tract. Packets of herbs are then rammed in as deeply as possible. This is said to begin the process of autodigestion, creating the special aroma of canema enchantment of rotting pineapple. As a result of the completion of these procedures, the victim is unable to speak or to take any sustenance by mouth. Bowel control is lost and the clinical cause of death becomes acute dehydration through diarrhoea. The killers then try and discover

the burial place of their victims and await the onset of putrefaction in the corpse that usually occurs within 3 days. When the gravesite is discovered, a stick is inserted through the ground directly into the cadaver, then the stick is retracted and the honey-like juices are sucked off. If the corpse is indeed sufficiently sweet, it will be partially disinterred in order to recover the bone material and ideally a section of the anal tract. The use of previous victims' body parts is necessary to facilitate the location and the killing of the next victim. What do you think of that, huh? No, no, it's good. It reads like alien abduction. I mean, maybe that's where it comes from. Maybe aliens are Amazon civilization that took to the skies. No, but that's really,

so this is still practiced. Yes, yeah, this still goes on, this particular ritual. It's not obviously as prevalent as it used to be, but it's still there and it's the fear of it that keeps a certain kind of social order and control in place. As you can imagine, you don't want to be the victim of that kind of attack. Yes. And why do they eat the body in that condition? Do they think it gives powers or why, why do they eat it? Yeah, so it provides the killers with particular power, so the body of the victim, so the person is chosen for certain kind of spiritual potency and then the death itself if it's done properly then you'll get these particular smells and tastes and then if that taste is correct enough

then the body can be dug up and then the bones can be taken out and then I think they're kind of curated in special places so that they're kept either with the killers or sort of kept it certainly around the community so you have this kind of constant back and forth of kind of material and spiritual power within the group but what powers the bones give you levitation what do they give no I think it just provides the the killers with particular status and power I don't I don't know if it gives them anything that there's that there's any kind of direct sort of what's the word there's no kind of all performative aspect to it I was hoping it'd give some levitation and then I would have proposed us to go there and to learn this art ourselves. I don't know if you're interested in this.

We can ask for a grant from MacArthur Foundation, is that what it's called? The guy who went out and did this, he writes in the book how a previous anthropologist had emailed him to say, this is all my material I have on this. I stopped doing it because as soon as I started looking into this subject, I had the most horrific nightmares that just didn't stop until I left, until I abandoned my research and then the nightmares finished. So there's clearly forces there to keep people away. Yes, no, this is frightening to me. Maybe we change subject back to Eurasia. You're saying that steppe-type shamanism spread to the rest of Eurasia. Do we spread it to China as well? Yeah, so there is a long tradition of Chinese shamanism in different forms, in different manifestations.

It was kind of codified, I think, when it became a sort of imperial religion, that it's looser, more traditional forms. I think it's called the Wuist tradition, and it dates back to at least the Neolithic, but certainly I would say older than that. Most shamanism comes from hunter-gatherers, so I imagine that the Neolithic communities must have inherited it from their northern neighbors. But it's, I mean, Taoism has a kind of shamanic origins to it as well. So you can see in the way that it's been codified that they've taken up certain kind of shamanic ideas. Yes, and it's still practiced even today in China? I mean, by Han Chinese or? I think it's practiced by more of the different minority groups to the north. I see.

But yeah, this is something I want to research more and I'm planning to do a video on Chinese shamanism. So I think it's a really interesting and less explored area. Yes, this, what about Tibetan, the original Tibetan religion before Buddhism, the Bon magician religion, the Bon sorcerer, is that also a shaman? I think a lot of these things have, they often have a shamanic root to them and then they become codified and made more into a traditional type of religion. But it's certainly there in certain types of Tibetan Buddhism, especially to do with things like body parts and skulls and different liquids in the body having different potencies and powers. just smacks of, yeah, of definitely a kind of shamanic origin. Yes, so you're saying almost all shamanism has

this kind of cannibalistic overtones, is that true? Yeah, I think it's unavoidable when you're dealing with, because the line between human and animal becomes blurred in this kind of shamanism, their soul can move between the human and animal world and because they're so often related to hunting and the act of gaining consent from the animal to be hunted and then you have to dispose of the animal in the correct way at the end. And given that the line between the different kinds of souls becomes blurred, they're often sort of said to be eating people or that you're eating a certain kind of person. And then often in the, certainly in the Siberian shaman tradition, in their initiation ritual when they their souls are said to descend to the different worlds

they're often stripped down to the bone and their bones are kind of disarticulated and taken apart and then put back together so when they're when they return back to their body they often feel like that there's something wrong with their bones or that there's a bone missing but there's an extra bone and that they might have been boiled or cooked by their ancestors and put back together Yes. No, this is very good. And I guess this, has there been any study of Indo-European, you know, I mean, the obviously comparative Indo-European religion, Dumezil and others, did that? Has anyone thought to trace shamanic elements in Indo-European religions? At least known of them? Yes, I think that each religion, so like you're kind of Norse or Etruscan or Celtic,

has had the shamanic treatment. I don't know of any systematic one where it's been properly taken back to its root, but I would argue that once you get a kind of a warrior class emerging, you see the diminution of the shaman as a powerful force in that society anyway. I think often the shaman can be quite a sclerotic figure and, you know, using a kind of cannibalism metaphor, they often feed off the life force of the youngest in their society, particularly if that shaman is part of a secret society. And those secret societies usually involve capturing the kind of youthful energy and redirecting it towards the preservation of the old. I think you see a real break in the Bronze Age where you get the rise of both the shepherd

and the warrior, both of which can free themselves from that kind of rule of the elderly and the rule of the elderly female, and you get them sort of breaking away. So I think Indo-European religions have a different flavor to shamanism, it's not there, I just think that it's slightly different. Yes, yes, maybe the shaman becomes the prophet-seer like Kalkas, who is subservient to the warrior class. But what you said right now about the evolution from sclerotic gerontocracy to warrior youthful based societies is of much interest to me, of course. And in some way George Frazier discusses this progression when he talk that very, very ancient societies were ruled entirely by tribal custom of elders.

And then it was a sorcerer, I guess by which he could also mean a shaman, who through superior terrors and use of knowledge of magics manages to wrest power away from that, let's say, that early elder-based society. But then through him, by having one man at the head of the tribe, Zen is introduced other possibilities later also, such as the coming of the warrior class of one king. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think that that story is slightly, in the face of the evidence, I think it's slightly wrong. I think often the elderly and the shaman work hand in hand within the secret society framework. So ethnographically, most societies have a secret society and they almost always involve a kind of performative magic that's designed to terrorize the women and the children

and the non-members of that society. And it almost always involves kind of capturing male energy. And it's sometimes really disgusting you know, you can get real kind of like the symbiote people of New Guinea and people like that. It's just kind of really sort of holding back the young men and then sort of being very, very deliberately violent and terrorizing towards the weaker members of the tribe. I think that overall breaks when the warrior rises. I think that, yeah, go on. Well, it's just the New Guinea people you mentioned. Yes, can you elaborate on them for the moment. I'm curious. You said it's disgusting. Oh, the Symbiote people. Yeah, they're a Papua New Guinean tribe and they're famous for having

a secret society that sort of initiates young boys very, very young. And they learn to practice oral sex both on the kind of older boys, but particularly on the men and the older men And the whole point of the kind of rituals is that they get good at it. And the whole point is that the older men are kind of ingesting the vital energies of the younger boys. And that's quite literally the idea is that they sort of have designed their society to just kind of ingest the physical power of the younger boys. and the boys are then kind of commanded to perform until they reach a certain age, at which point they sort of have the younger boys do the same to them. Yes, I see, yes. Well, this sound like Washington, DC, this how political world works in America and Hollywood, I believe also.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds similar probably because there is something deep in the human psyche that can quite easily flick back to that, unfortunately. Yes, David Lynch studies this in movie Mulholland Drive, but, well, I know I'm keeping you and you're busy Stone Age herbalist, but before we close this segment, I hope you can come back for another segment in a few minutes, but before we close this one, do you want to speculate just, because what you mentioned now about very primitive societies, where you have a secret society that hides its power and that works on keeping back especially youths and young men and terrorizing people with rights of magic and these kinds of false beliefs. To me, that sounds a little bit like modern Western societies, which I'm not going to

speculate about, you know, Q-type thing with Pizzagate and other thing. But certainly whoever rules is ruling secretly and indirectly. I guess I want to ask you, do you want to speculate at all on the psychological aspect of what it is in mankind or a portion of mankind that wants to rule by hiding its power? Because when you look at history, you know, many men want to displace that power. They want to enjoy it and to have it be known. I know this is a bit outside anthropology, but what do you think leads people to want to rule in this hidden indirect way? Let's go with something like Eliade's Wounded Healer archetype, so a man who is physically handicapped and incapable of exerting themselves in the kind of traditional male ways will

resort to using different methods to push their power into society, and it's usually quite a spiteful, gossipy, backstabby, but also using tricks, ventriloquism, sleights of hand manipulation, that kind of thing. And that's often how those secret societies conduct themselves. Their power is visible but it's visible in a very underhanded and kind of scheming sort of way as opposed to a glorious kind of demonstration of physical strength. I think it comes from resentment, most probably. It comes from people who have a disconnect between their will and their abilities, and because they're frustrated, that comes out in ways that can be harnessed for social control, but I'm not sure that it produces the best societies in the end.

Yes, yes, and if audience is interested in a restatement, a very early restatement of this in the language of, you know, western reason and philosophy, you might want to read the dialogue between Calicles and Socrates and Plato's Gorgias, where Calicles attacks very early societies for ruling precisely how you just said, Stone Age herbalists. And Socrates, of course, ends up defending that through various underhanded means, which shows Plato to be the, as Nietzsche said, the tyrant's lickspittle that he really was. but maybe that's for a different time to talk. Stone Age Herbalist, I've been keeping you for quite long on this segment. What do you say we take a smoke break, we smoke medicinal tobacco and we come back for another segment? Let's do this. The shamans of South America smoke

four foot nicotine filled cigars. I think we should continue in that vein. Yes, yes, you must teach me this. We come right back. Come back to show I am here Stone Age Herbalist Then on this story, tell me, you've been terrorized in certain restaurants. There have been ketogenic and paleolithic diet protests in London from what I hear. There have been counter protests by Mediterranean diet. I don't know what's going on. There are this controversy, but you've been studying ancient diets, something like this from what I hear, yes? Yes. I've made diets one of the topics to tackle on Twitter. In fact, I call myself herbalist in part because when I first joined Twitter, there was a lot of people on the carnivore diet.

And I started my Twitter's career by fighting quite aggressively against this idea that all of our forebears were pure carnivores. So yeah, it's something of a hobby horse of mine. Yes. Can you, yes, please elaborate on this because I think there are some misunderstandings about hunter-gatherer diet, you know. Yeah, I mean, the big one that's been going around for a long time is that hunter-gatherers don't eat any carbohydrates, and even further than that, don't eat any plants at all. I've seen both of those claims thrown out quite confident from a number of places. The idea that they don't eat plants should be self-evidently obvious from just the ethnographic record. And the archeological record is pretty clear. But the carbohydrates one has definitely,

I think probably gone further into the psyche of people. The idea that especially your kind of upper paleolithic mammoth hunters and things were keto adapted. And this kind of idea that they lived almost entirely on saturated fat and mammoth meat. And it's just not true, almost everywhere we look. And wherever there's good organic preservation, there's evidence for at least some use of wild cereal grains and plants. There's a number of Upper Paleolithic sites. Harlow too, on the coast of Israel, Kostenki, Pavlov-6 in Czech Republic. It's all over the Upper Paleolithic world. they were making of plants. A Harlow II is a specialty goose. They found something like 150 different species of plant in the fireplace, which just goes to show how many they were collecting. Were they eating them

or were they making medicine with them? A Harlow II, they were definitely eating them because they had grinding stones and lots and lots of starch grains and phytoliths were everywhere. So it's almost certainly the case they were collecting. There's also lots of flint with what we call sickle gloss, which is where you can see on the flint that it's been used to harvest silica grass, so grains. And they were almost certainly grinding them and turning them into flour. And potentially there's an oven on the site as well. So they were turning them into some kind of baked good. Yes. And the evidence of, these were mammoth hunters though. They were large game hunters. They followed large herds. Well, the Ohalo ones were more fisher hunters, but there is evidence from,

so Kostenki is just outside of Moscow. It's one of those big, where they've got the big mammoth bones arranged in sort of houses or built sort of like huts, big huts. So they were definitely big, big mammoth hunters. And Pavlov-6 is like near Dolivestanichi, so it's Pavlovian against a big game, gravitian, gravitian culture. So they were definitely, definitely big mammoth hunters, but they were also eating plants whenever they could get hold of them. And it's the same with the Neanderthals. So you can go back to Neanderthal diets and we find that they were eating plants as well. Yes, but I am curious because just how much ice was there? Because the image people have is that these people lived on some kind of ice planet, that there were no plants. They were just animals, you know?

No, I mean, they tended to stick, like most animals did, they tended to stick to the valleys. So yes, you do have glaciers blooming in the background. And yes, there are definitely areas where it's so cold and the windswept, that you have very little plant life. But in the valleys and sort of small little microclimate areas where plants could thrive, you both had animals and humans making use of what they could find. Yes, it's interesting. And what about evidence from among contemporary hunter-gatherers? Because people always like to bring up the eskimos but not others, you know? Yeah, eskimos are an interesting one because their diet, traditional diet anyway, it doesn't have that much saturated fats. It's a lot of polyunsaturated fat, a lot of fish oil and they're genetically

adapted to very high levels of omega oils in their blood. But there's also no, there isn't a ton of studies on this, but the studies that have been done, there's no evidence that they are always in ketosis. Not only do they use berries when they can find them in season, but they also eat a lot of raw meat and raw muscle meat is quite high in glycogen, which will tip you out of ketosis. So their diet is, one, it's very, very unique in terms of the sort of human adaptation. Most people are not genetically able to thrive on a purely Inuit diet, but also it's not the diet that people think it is. Yes. I heard they also drink seal blood. Is this true? Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean blood is a classic where you can get it.

I think people usually tend to drink it, it's warm, it's nourishing, it's full of iron and vitamins and minerals, it's clean, you know, you're not chancing any kind of waterborne infection. Yes. It's where you can get it. Why not? Yes. No, I like this. I like Spanish blood sausage of various types, but I like the cured kind, not the fresh kind. I like it. I like black pudding. That's one of my favorites. The kind of English black pudding. Yes, I hear you use English. I can only understand about 20-30% of what you're saying. I don't understand this so-called English accent. I speak pure American. You sound like my friends. You don't understand what I'm talking about. English breakfast is a well-known hunter-gatherer inheritance.

But I wanted to ask you, what about one hunter-gatherer from our time that people like to mention to counter the ketogenic diet people, are they from Namibia or that area of Africa? And they eat a large amount of honey, I think. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, in the 60s there was a bit of an obsession in anthropology with kind of counting calories. These poor people suddenly found themselves deluged by lots of anthropologists who were really interested in exactly the weight of all their food and stuff. And as they did do these studies, and they've been done very heavily on the pygmies of the Congo and for people like the San and the Hadza and the Sandawe, those people, they found that, especially for the rainforest, they now call them rainforest hunter gatherers

when they mean pygmies, that up to 70% of their calories in certain seasons can come from honey and they can eat it by the pound, you know, they can just sit and eat pounds and pounds of honey. So yeah, I mean, any idea that they're keto adapted is just a nonsense. But rainforest hunter gatherers are a special case because rainforests don't produce a ton of fat. So most rainforest hunter gatherers have a very, very high protein and high fiber diet and very low fat diet. There isn't a ton of work done, but there is some studies on Amazonian hunter gatherers and their testosterone levels. and there's a good study, I think it's on the Ache people, and it shows that their testosterone levels are, compared to Westerners, or what Westerners should be, very, very low, and I think that's probably

because they don't have a lot of saturated fat in their diet, so they've become very well adapted, I think, to that kind of insect and small monkey, small game, and lots and lots of fruit in their diet. Yes, actually, this bring up bigger, because I think for Hadza, actually, have similar testosterone level compared to civilized sedentary men. This subject of testosterone very big now. Someone contacted me recently to ask me about it and I told them I'm not expert on this. Menaquinone-4, when he was around, he knows the studies in and out. And before he left, he was developing quite nuanced view of hormone because it's not so, it's not entirely what people think. I think some part of story's worse than they think some part of story's better, but statistics like this that you mentioned

about some hunter-gatherers that have lower testosterone than modern sedentary so-called civilized men, and on the other hand, I've seen that a wild animal have less testosterone also than the domesticated, the domesticated counterparts. Now that doesn't explain or excuse why within one domesticated or half-domesticated species like modern civilized men, why his testosterone would decrease over several generations, which has supposedly happened. But yes, this view of hormones people have is also not entirely correct, but against, I don't know if you've heard this about domesticated versus wild, it's an unusual story, but what about the tribes of Polynesia? Now they're not considered hunter-gatherer, or are they?

No, they're considered more horticulturalists, I think, just because they rely so heavily on things like breadfruit and taro and sweet potatoes and stuff. Yes, yes, but that is termed also paleolithic diet, even though it's horticultural, if I'm not wrong. Is that not also called paleolithic? And so much of their calories then come from tubers. But so they used to be lean, and now they are very fat, especially Samoa and some other places. So… Yeah, it's unfortunate. Yes, but their obesity then is not explained by extra reliance on carbohydrates, as people claim. It's explained by something else, I don't know. Yeah, I think there is some work done particularly on the properties of modern wheat and of course

things like oil, large amounts of oil combined with it in the diet, but just saying that carbohydrates alone are responsible for the obesity doesn't make any sense because their diet was primarily kind of aquatic and then some pig and then the rest of it is essentially fruit and tubers so it's very high in carbohydrates and of course from all the records we know of when they met they were in superb physical shape so as you say it's got to be something else other than just you know other than just pure carbohydrate causing a problem. Yes. What about claims that a lot of the plants that were used, and especially the grains, weren't really used for eating but to make alcohol, and that this is the first use of plants

by man, by these hunter-gatherer tribes? I've definitely seen that put forward. That's an old argument for grain domestication, that it kind of beer precedes bread, that they first properly domesticated grains were used for alcohol and I don't think that there's, I mean there's there's some there's probably some truth to that that certain foods also have a kind of ritual component to them but as far as we know it would be very hard to find evidence in the Paleolithic for alcohol brewing but as far as we know they were grinding them just for just for food but of course if you leave something in water it begins to ferment quite quickly So, given that these people were living in one area for thousands of years, I wouldn't

put it past them to have worked out that it could produce something alcoholic. Most societies have some kind of alcoholic beverage in their diet. Yes. How is the bone and tooth and other health, the general health and sturdiness of these Skeletors that these societies you're talking about, these hunter-gatherers who ate not just meat, but also plant and proto-grains. Well, the Upper Paleolithic Europeans, probably some of the healthiest people who've ever lived, I think, the average height in places like Italy and the Balkans around about sort of 25,000 years ago, We don't see heights return to that, to those levels, which averaged about six foot, so it wasn't uncommon to find a six foot six person. We don't see those levels return until the 20th century.

So, I mean, it's not that I have anything against eating large amounts of animal protein. I think that those societies perfectly fine-tuned their diet to what they had, and they were eating huge amounts of animal protein supplemented with smaller amounts of plants. And by all accounts, their teeth, their bone robustness, their general health and their height put them as some of the healthiest people that we know of in the record. Yes. Once the Holocene kicks in and you get many, many more plants and fish becoming available into the Mesolithic, the height does drop slightly. And that's probably to do with more plant protein being eaten than animal protein. So plant protein is generally a poorer quality than animal protein. So it does start to drop. And then of course, once the Neolithic,

not in all places in the Neolithic, but in general, most Neolithic communities, their health begins to deteriorate quite rapidly. So there's one site, Abu Hurayra, which is a well-known Neolithic site that extends from the Paleolithic into the Neolithic across the domestication span. And you can see in the fossil record their health just turns abysmal. And not only from the diet, but also from the rituals that the diet requires. So sort of getting down on your hands and knees and grinding grain, this kind of backbreaking labor. You know, it does your knees no good. You can see deformities in the spine start to appear. And then of course their teeth just begin to get just, it's awful. And not just because grain is awful, but also because grinding grain with stones

This is a surefire way to introduce a huge amount of grit into a diet Yes And so even if even if the grain itself, you know Even if they were brushing their teeth or whatever and they had perfect oral health Just the sheer amount of stone that they would have been consuming would be terrible for your teeth. Yes So so you're not advocating when you say to eat some plant material or the you're not advocating the neolithic diet or Or even worse, the modern standard diet that depends on industrial grains. You're not advocating Armenian rug merchant with hummus chickpea ground up in their pocket offering you. I actually would prefer to eat a small amount of grains rather than eat things like chickpeas and lentils and pulses. I find those horrible in the diet.

I think most Europeans, given the length of exposure they've had to grains, are slightly better adapted than other populations in terms of things like diabetes, sorry for eating diabetes. No, diabetes is a good coin, I'm sure. That's a good, yeah. If that hasn't been coined already, that's weird. I think people can tolerate small amounts of grain, especially if it's been pre-fermented, so you break down some of those plant defenses, so things like sourdough bread and whatnot. But most people know this kind of advice and I think people who do go on sort of strict keto carnivores tend to find themselves coming off it relatively fast, is usually within about six months or so. I actually don't think it's a bad diet sort of medicinally as an intervention,

I just don't think that it's a long-term diet and it's certainly not a long-term diet for a community of people to try and thrive on. Now as an intervention diet and really an elimination diet to eliminate possible things that make you very sick from either modern tainted grains or dairy or et cetera, I think pure ketogenic diet probably is good if you have serious problem. But yeah, not as you say, not for this. But I want to ask you how you feel about root. Well, before I ask you about roots and tubers, You're really advocating, correct me if I'm wrong, but the ideas of Western aid price rather than ketogenic diet, is this correct? You like him? Yes, but I do also like dairy. I'm a massive dairy lover. So I would say if you can consume dairy genetically, then you definitely should.

I mean, it's probably one of the best adaptations to come out of the Neolithic is the transformation of that protein saturated fat mixture into kind of a stable and healthy and portable food. I think dairy's an incredible food stuff. I'd probably give up meat before I gave up dairy, I think. Yes, yes, I see. I mean, speaking of these things, I wanted to ask you about tubers and potato because you seem to be a pro-tuber in everything you're saying. So then, important question. Are you for mashed potato? And yes, because... Yeah, I love mash. Mash and butter with cream, got lots of it. Yes, this is traditional English hunter gather food with sausage bangers, I heard. And so, yes. And blood pudding. Yes, I have Hakan on the line. I have Hakan, I'm in touch with him.

And I asked him what I should ask you regarding the hunter-gatherer diet. And he bring up idea of fruit. So I asked him, what do you mean Hakan? What should I ask Stone Age herbalist about fruit? He asked, is it based or is it cringed? You know, modern fruit. What's your opinion on this? I actually think that there's nothing too bad about eating lots of fruit. I think eating fruit is generally designed be consumed, that's what the plant offers you. It offers roots for storage and it offers fruit to be eaten. And I think even modern fruits, although they've been bred to be extra sweet, I think that they're probably a good thing to eat a fair amount of, rather than, I think eating loads and loads of kale has been a sign that you should probably be eating lots of pineapple and grapes.

Yes. Pineapple, also you said, the shamans make pineapple-flavored cannibal human. Yeah, pineapple vapors, you see, there's something magical going on there. Yes. No, this is interesting. So what, I mean, I don't assume you're asking people to reenact the hunter-gatherer diet from Upper Paleolithic. No. I think there have also been Yamnaya skeletons found, they were six foot seven, six foot nine, they probably had a more pastoral diet. What general advice might you have for people who hear this who are curious about living well with eating and so forth? I mean my general advice is not especially new. I think most people who experiment with these kinds of diets come around to the same conclusions, which is animal protein, dairy, well cooked vegetables, roots

and tubers, some grain, honey for sort of sweet snacks and stuff. And then I do advocate a lot of smaller sort of plant uses, supplemental plant uses, things like bitter herbs, I think are also very good for health, not to be consumed as a sort of part of a meal, but as a sort of medicinal part of your diet. I think there's a lot of very interesting compounds in a lot of very, very simple and basic plants that we could be making better use of for health. But in general, I think it's more about cutting out all the kind of modern trash from your diet and restoring. And not only that, but choosing very, very good quality food I think is essential. If you're just living off awful bacon that's just been fed on some god-awful diet, that's not gonna do you any good.

You'd probably be better off cutting that out and eating some kind of vegetable that was at least of a higher quality. Yeah, yes. How do you feel about the difference between the compositional of modern agricultural animals, livestock versus pre-modern are, or rather, pre-agricultural species of same animal is the ancestors? It's a travesty. The ancestors are crying, I think. I mean, yeah, not only is it obviously an abomination for the animals themselves, but in terms of human health, it's been dire. I mean, the animal is only as good as what it's fed on, and it's only as good as the breeding stock that it comes from, and we've collapsed both quite rapidly and they're basically eating garbage and so that's what they will be producing for us.

And so even if you're trying to focus your diet around meat, if you're eating trash meat, I think you'd be better off cutting the meat down to as small a portion as you can of very high quality. Yes, I've tried to tell people this, that an especially animal product, including dairy, but especially the fat of the animal is what takes up atrazine and other pesticides the most, which again is true that your liver filters a lot of it out as an adult, but is, I think, very bad for developing children to eat atrazine meat. I don't want to keep you too long, Stone Age herbalist. Would you mind elaborating a little bit on the bitter herbs you mentioned, because I'm also a fan of bitter herbs in numerous ways. Some of them, like warmood and berberine,

I've recommended to people for various things. But then there are others that are just, they are good as condiments or delicious to eat. I know you don't mean that, but you mean for medicinal purposes. Do you have any favorites and do you want to talk at all about that? Yeah, I'm a big I'm a big fan of bitters as a drink, the kind of liquid bitters, and there's a few different ways you can do that. I mean, there's obviously the aperitif style of having a kind of alcoholic bitter beverage, which I think is good. It's good for digestion before and after food, but at the moment I'm taking a kind of bitters supplement. It's kind of like a Swedish bitters, so it's got lots and lots of different plants in it

extract by alcohol but you can get water extracts as well and wormwood is definitely one of my favorites in there. I've written an article on my sub stack about wormwood and its properties. It has just some incredible properties both for kind of neurological health, for sort of reducing inflammation, all kinds of stuff and most if you were kind of approaching is from a Lindy perspective. Almost all ancient authors on diet and health recommend bitter herbs and most medicinal culinary traditions have some wisdom around bitter herbs both being good for digestion and being good for health in the long run. So they usually tend to incorporate them somewhere in the diet either adding them into the main dishes or using them as medicines on the side. Well, I didn't know you wrote this on wormwood.

I will certainly promote this. One of my favorites, it's generally known as an anti-parasitic, but even if you don't have parasite, it has immediate effect if you have any stomach problem or anything. It has, as you say, anti-inflammatory. I would caution people that if you use, for example, wormwood pills or something like for more than 10 days, one drink of alcohol, I don't know if this is true for you Stone Age herbalists, but for me one drink of alcohol was equal to five. It definitely changes something about how you process alcohol and other things. So I would say caution for long-term use, you know. I wonder if it plays around with liver metabolism or it down regulates some enzyme production or something. That's interesting. I have to look into that one.

Yes, before we close, do you have any other favorites besides wormwood? I am very interested in this idea of medicinal bitter plants. There's cassia bark that's in one of my mixtures at the moment, and aloe, I'm trying to think what's in the mixture I'm using at the moment. I think it's cassia bark and aloe, and there's an African one that's on the tip of my tongue that I can't remember. can't remember they're all mixed together because I'm afraid of dandelion you know the bitter dandelion thing that that kind of bitterness very hard to take I don't know always yeah you have to pick those sorts of plants very very very young to avoid the extreme bitterness otherwise yeah it starts to taste like a plank of wood and starts to taste almost unbearably bitter the

The bitter shots that I take, I usually mix with apple cider vinegar just to kind of cut it down a little bit otherwise you can't drink a ton of it and I usually have a small amount of that. That kind of helps. Some people really like it though. Some people really get into bitter flavors but most people find it's just part of the mouth's genetic inheritance. Just bitter flavors are naturally unpleasant so you kind of have to force yourself to eat them. like radicchio and endive are really wonderful but the dandelion very hard for me to to eat and then that Okinawa is it the bitter gourd or bitter melon whatever and they ascribe it's a melon seed yeah they say that Okinawa people live so long I think one of the highest life expectancies in the world they say

it's because of this bitter melon I can't eat that I don't know if that's I guess if you can't eat them, most of these things can be found powdered and then you can make your own capsules or add them into mixtures or something. I've tried bitter melon seeds and it just makes your mouth instantly dry, astringent and you can't swallow it. And I don't think it has anything to do with the longevity of Okinawans. I knew an Okinawan girl and she told me we are sluts because we're a tropical people and I believe that is the longevity reason, but I don't know if you agree with this. Look, Stony Cherbalist, I don't want to keep you. I know the wild men of the Kuban are circling around us and we must make our escape to Crimea.

But what you say we end show now and leave it until next time, more discussion of diet. Until next time. There's always more to talk about. Yes. I hope you come back. It's wonderful to have you on and very good. Until next time. Bap out.