Welcome to this Caribbean Rhythms special guest episode. I have Mr. Star. If you are on X, you may have seen his account blow up. A commentary on China, on economy, on many modern things interests me very much. And some people suspect Mr. Star is some kind of sinewy creature, a crawl out of Yunnan, the cave swamp there in Yunnan. Others say he is a Chinese communist man, a balding 50-year-old in a basement in Beijing. He's the kind who manages TikTok trends. I believe he's a Latino man. It doesn't matter what he is. Very insightful commentary on Asia and America. Many things. Welcome to the show, Mr. Star. Oui. Ni hao. Oh, sorry. Forgive me there. I was reverting to my baser instincts. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on, Mr. Pervert. Your account has been a great inspiration.

I'm a big fan of your book. Well, sorry, forgive me, I've actually never read your book. I'm only vaguely aware of you, and I would like to disavow your account and everything that's ever stated in its entirety, of course. You should. Sometimes I worry about going into China with my book and so on, because it is one of most anti-Han book, they say. However, although I wrote this, I am not a silly man who goes by—wrote, I think you see online now, very many, especially European nationalists, American nationalists, underestimate China, don't understand what go there for the last few decades, and especially the last five to ten years. And Mr. Starr, your inspiration, your account and your commentary, you are in part inspiration

for this article I wrote on Chinese strides recently, great strides made in industrialization. I was not basing that on my own knowledge. It was in part you, in part this other mysterious poster, Menaquin On4, who disappeared. And I hope if he listened, he returned. And I hope both him and you write extensively on this, because so many misunderstandings. But even I, let's say, someone metaphysically, spiritually opposed to Chinese example, never Nevertheless, I have to concede the great strides made, and you have opened many people's eyes also to this. Yes, well, I believe it is a matter of critical importance for understanding the trajectory of just, you know, the arc of history, and in particular, large parts of Western nations as well.

My fascination with the Chinese, of course, is at this point almost completely just an academic exercise in their own society. I feel, in fact I said something earlier today about this, about my interest in Sinofuturism and in Chinese self-perception and in their own kind of module of how they intend, how they will alter the world as their society continues to progress forward, they continue to mobilize ever vaster quantities of industry and economic mobility and talent and such And what particular ends they decide to dedicate these things towards is there is a very large, very powerful spinning top here that is going to be directed, well, could be directed in any number of directions. Yes. And I don't know, it's going to be very, very curious to see where it ends up going and

what ends up happening over there. Yes. Mr. Starr, you have said that so many people in China were raised out of poverty over the last few decades, leaving aside the recent advances in technology and manufacturing that they've made, which I want to also ask you about. But this is a story, I think, more familiar to more listeners, that since Deng Xiaoping in the 70s, I guess he listened to advice of Lee Kuan Yew, decided to change Chinese economy from pure communist model to whatever it is they call it now or have now. And many people in China have grown up only knowing improvement in their standard of living. Is that so? Yes. Well, there's a specific set of numbers that stay on my head all the time when I talk about China and that I like to cite a lot.

And this is, you know, today, this year, 2025, if you're 55 years old in China today, when you were 20 in the year 1990, China's GDP per capita was roughly, you know, $350. It's a little hard to estimate in real terms when we're talking about a subsistence agriculture economy, but basically very, very poor, equivalent to sub-Saharan Africa. When you were 30 years old in the year 2000, China's GDP per capita crossed $1,000 for the first time ever. Now this year, I think the official number is somewhere around 17,000, adjusting for PPP. like I somewhere between early or lower 20,000s to like mid 20,000s I'm of the opinion quite frankly that Chinese GDP is probably slightly underestimated in real terms so the point is really is they went from incredibly incredibly

poor in very recent memory you know this is the memory of like their equivalent of Gen X to not you know rich but middle-income and rapidly rising and And there's a huge number of people who are literally rich and a massive amount of investment of course in infrastructure, in general build-out across the entire country, improvements in standard of living. So yes, that is a very key part to me of understanding China and also just something incredibly interesting to observe. It's this kind of like transition out of poverty at a scale that I don't believe we've really observed in human civilization. It's very interesting. Well I could maybe bring up South Korea a counter example. South Korea after the war especially this figure that they were about Africa level of

development and now of course, but I don't know how long that took, but it was especially I think the dictatorship of Park that turbocharged Korea. But China has made this, but I want to ask you actually, you've been to China recently And I've seen you post threads and I think photographs of you enjoy especially the second or third tier cities, even you've recommended to people that they don't just stay in Shanghai, but perhaps some of the northern cities. Would you mind commenting on this because this kind of abstract thing about GDP and so on, but you have seen day to day what is day to day life like in Chinese cities, the young people, the other people, what what is mood? tell you, you know, you go to these places and these are places that no one's ever really heard of in the West.

I don't think I had heard of it until I planned the trip there. You know, Changchuan is somewhere like six or eight million people, a lot of infrastructure built by the Japanese, it's a planned Euro-style kind of city, lots of Euro-style buildings from the Japanese occupation era, and there's just this remarkable amount of growth and infrastructure expansion that you can kind of directly observe in the day-to-day life of much of the population there. I mean, here's a very simple example of this. Sorry, hang on. There's some kind of surf or static feedback from your end? Absolutely not. As I was saying though, in this city you can directly observe the way that infrastructure build-out kind of affects and modulates the life of people at this very base level.

The example I would like to cite is- Yes, Mr. Star, what you're saying, sorry to interrupt, Mr. Star, but I was just thinking, as Small Boy grew up in East Block, there was, although it was late-stage communism and decay everywhere, very close connections, of course, both with China and North Korea in a country I was a small boy in, but there was construction, like you say, infrastructure development everywhere, where I found it very romantic as memories of a small boy playing in abandoned construction sites. But there were also many abandoned factories, like in American Upper Midwest Rust Belt. Sorry to interrupt, it's just impressionistic memory from what you You are saying, I'm sure, mood in China very different as it is expanding economy, not contracting decline. Yes.

Well, it's kind of funny you bring that up, because in Manchuria, in Dongbei, this area is kind of like the Rust Belt of China, or at least it used to be described as such, because of the fact that during the initial period of build-out of export-oriented companies in southern China, and during the Asian financial crisis, many state-owned firms in the Northeast laid off large amounts of workers. This was the coal industries that had, you know, heavy steel and things like this. So there actually was a significant kind of Rust Belt presence, very similar both to the American Rust Belt, but also probably more so to the Eastern European, you know, former Soviet Union nations in this respect. It didn't feel like that there now.

There's been a very distinct initiative by the center, the CCP, to redirect economic prosperity more so throughout the rest of the country, besides just your southern kind of megacities, broader industry belt. It is still, I don't want to say significantly, but it's still distinctively poorer in a certain way. of like a like older you know it's it's it's graying if you will um what you mean the demographics or the buildings oh both both both uh the the buildings are old but also it is the oldest part of china the birth rates there are lower um quite significantly lower actually than the south um hovering around i believe like south korea levels partially because of course all of the young adults leave for the south so they can go get jobs and actually go to

universities that are well respected outside of the handful in the northeast that are seen as good. Yes, that's interesting. Sorry to interrupt, but I remember you were talking to me about walking around this city. I forget the name. Sorry, Chongwen, is that the name? Chongchuan, yes. Chongchuan, well, you throw a can down the stairs, you know the joke. It's all like that to me. But I think you had some very nice images of walking around the city, being in the park, seeing young people enjoying themselves, just to maybe counter some of what people think about China as this drab totalitarian state with social credit system. But that's not the mood you saw, correct? No, not at all. I was incredibly impressed because before going there,

before properly seeing this, my perspective had always been this bird's-eye view and I'm not a big fan of the bird's-eye view because basically your choice is either this like, you know, Peter Zaihan, Gordon Chong, like meta-narrative about Chinese collapse, or it's this like, Arnaud Bertrand, you know, like, look at the Chinese light, lights on the building and the drone shows, oh it's so advanced and all this, you know, and then you go and you touch down on the feet on the ground there and the thing that really shocked me was just how pleasant of a place it is to be it's just a very pleasant very nice place to be in many ways the parks especially in the Northeast are just fantastic they're well built out they're beautiful they're

beautifully manicured and maintained they're always full of people especially the elderly the elderly are a near-constant presence unlike in in Ameriqua where they're shuffled off to nursing home or to take up lots inside a five-bedroom home in the middle of what should be a thriving family suburb. They live in apartments and they all congregate in the parks and dance and sing karaoke and do tai chi. It feels very lively. Everywhere you go kind of feels very lively, partially because of course it's poorer. For instance, I mean, nightlife, there are very few bars, there's a handful of billiard halls and such, but most people when you, you know, like at nighttime on like a Friday or Saturday, or a lot of the time, any night of the week, they just go out and they grill

some meat skewers and they drink beer on little tables they set up outside their apartments or outside of restaurants or family businesses and such. And that was the thing that I really liked about it there, is that it still kind of has that third world, second world tinge of poverty, where it feels very human, but at the same time the infrastructure, the trains, the amenities, restaurants are very high quality, at least the right places are, there's endless accessibility of first world to your goods. No, it's pretty good. remind me somewhat, I mean, not the exact things you're saying, but the discrepancy between people's views and the reality. I was in Seoul in South Korea. And when people talk about it, you hear Oh, the TFR, the birth rate, which I want to talk to you, in general

later on this episode, we'll talk about this issue. But they say TFR in Korea is low, nobody having children, it's only old people, 1.07 TFR or something. Plus, so don't go there because it is neoliberal hell. It's only people working, working all day. And walk around Seoul, you don't see this at all. It's full of Korean young people. They're out at cafes. They are well-dressed. They seem happy and relaxed. They are friendly to foreigners. And yes, you walk around downtown Seoul at night, you see office building lights on, and they have meetings. But that shows a city alive with industry and enterprise. I don't know, it sounds like a discrepancy, I mean, between what people think China is and so on,

but were the people friendly to you as a foreigner? I mean, I know you're a Latino man and so on. Yes, well, as a Latino man, I'm constantly confused up there for Russian, actually, because in the Northeast, they receive a considerable quantity of Russian tourists from the far east. And I on the whole did not receive any negative treatment. I will say there was one time in Beijing where a fellow mean mugged me, but that this you know this is kind of to be expected in a lot of your large major tourist metros that receive a lot of foreigners and such. In in Manchuria it was it ranged from just kind of like meh to very warm very very palpably warm treatment I don't know I personally am not a big fan of like the kind of

foreigner freakout thing you know I've been to well parts of Latin America parts of you know other parts of the third world and encountered the whole kind of slavish attitude a lot and that occurs in a lot of these places because you're you know like seen as a big stack of US dollars distributed around you know it's not like that there they don't you know and in fact this was another thing that's kind of surprised me was how there are next to no scams that are discernible. I mean you have the usual kind of like unofficial taxis and such you probably have to be careful careful of but by and large you know I found everything to be very very nice very solid even even in like street markets it wasn't a huge haggling wasn't a huge deal I probably

got did get ripped off somewhat but it wasn't some of the egregious treatment that's you know I'm sure you've encountered throughout the world and that I've definitely I definitely have before except except for at the Great Wall they do try to like just really scram every penny out of you at the Great Wall you see it's not like you go sir dwell there hey my friend I have a papyrus from my grandfather inherited from pharaohs here please buy in this kind of constant yes and haggling over they want to sell you something that's that's a good thing I think that's refreshing. I should say one of my favorite political songs, I think I showed it to you Mr. Star. It's this one from Hong Kong where they say very negative things about, but it's older,

it must be at least maybe 20 or more years old song where they are talking about how their business culture is being corrupted by mainlander Chinese and they exclusively associate them with fake noodles, formaldehyde noodles, scams and so on. But maybe within China, maybe this has changed by now. Who knows? Yes. I mean, you know, I can't really speak to that to a great extent, but I didn't get the vibe of that present at all. You know, I never had any kind of problems like that. I mean, you know, like worst encounters I've had are things like like street markets in Southeast Asia where they'll use your ignorance of local currency exchange rates to sell you $40 flip flops, you know, things like that. None of that ever happened, which was very surprising to me.

yes it was a it was just on the whole very people treated me surprisingly like a native is kind of the way i was so i i would see it and you know i don't want to physically describe myself too much but i uh i certainly don't look like a china man yes there is a rumor mail there is a rumor mail about what you look like mr star i will not get into that but yeah is Latino. But seriously, I want to actually, I want to ask you about Chinese industry and technology advances in a moment. But before that, since we are talking about travel within China, it's a sensitive issue that, you know, I know many men who travel to East Asia, to Southeast Asia, to Japan, and including China, they always tell me go to Peking, go to Shanghai, you will sleep

with dozens of Chinese girls. They just love Europeans and so on. But just to clarify, you are not, if I may, as far as I know, you are not the connoisseur of East Asian female beauty. But was there, let's say, the native people maybe being weird or upset about that phenomenon? Did did you get that vibe at all? I did not get, yes, well, you know, I personally am not, I do not like Asian girls, basically, at all. I have heard reports from people who, you know, white men who are out on dates with Asian girls will get sometimes attacked in places like Beijing, where there's very strong nationalist sentiment. I did not encounter any of that, personally. People did not seem to treat me any differently in that respect, you know,

taxi drivers and such were very curious, especially about American politics, they would strike up conversations with me about these things. I had a few men make jokes that I should get a Chinese wife or a Chinese girlfriend or something like this, which is a usual kind of thing, I don't think there was really any real meaning there, but I personally did not encounter that at all. I know it is an issue though in parts of urban China where there is a particular nationalist kind of sentiment around that. Yes, the South Chinese, have you encountered this where Chinese friends I've had think that there is a very much South Chinese personality style where they're extroverted, businessman, talk a lot, as opposed to maybe what you're describing North China is

more reserved. Is that true or I don't know if you've encountered this? Well, what I've heard now is that, that stereotype is kind of true, yes, what I hear now though is that the Northeasterners are actually fairly congenial, fairly warm, fairly welcoming in opposition to the South, because they're slightly less developed, so it's more of that like, you know, like warm friendship culture, now I don't really know, I haven't spent enough time in South China to really compare and contrast the two, but I, you know, I would say that there's probably is some truth to that I mean you know it's it's the same the same kind of principle of like you know the old extroverted Guangdong merchant trader and such versus the austere kind of Manchu you know

bureaucrat type I don't know maybe it's hard for me to say. Mr. Star you have unusual way of pronouncing certain words I believe some of them are intended as slight jabs or insults. For example, you said instead of slavish, you said slavish, referring to the Third World. I believe you were referring secretly to the Slavic, but it's true, the Slavic hairy apes deserve to be reminded of that work. But listen, tell me in recent years, I made this point in an article, again, Menaquinone IV inspired me very much in this direction, but also things you've written. And then I read online, there are certain few accounts that talk about this, that it is true that before, let's say 2010 or so, China was basically making cheap

trinkets or basic industrial washing machines, etc., which has a clear upper limit for both technologically and what the country can profit from that. But in recent years, they've very much accelerated in manufacturing and industrial technology. I know you've thought about this. Do you have anything to say about that? I mean, there's a bunch of different things I could say about that. I mean, the first thing I would say is that it's very important to understand that this kind of thing, it didn't just come out of nowhere. It's not like China reached the upper limit on the washing machine, you know, tech treatier, and then they progressed to making electric cars. There was a very deliberate set of policy decisions and kind of like investment decisions made in the early, very early in

this, you know, like this century and like the mid and late 2000s that led to a lot of this stuff we're seeing now. So that's one point I would, you know, really hammer home on. It seems like there's this tendency to try to kick that kind of under the rug or ignore it, treat it like it's just this organic emergence. It's like, no, no, that there was very specific decisions that were made, partially by the CCP, partially by local leaders, to invest in mastering technological sectors that have become incredibly relevant in recent years. Best exemplified, of course, by batteries and, you know, EV cars, solar panels, things like this. So that's the first thing I would say, because I see this misconception, you know, quite a bit. Not to say that you're spreading it, of course.

But I see that kind of misunderstanding made a lot, I think. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that to understand industry, you have to really understand the game of value capture. And when we're talking about value capture, you know, you have this chain of, in like modern globalized economies, you have a chain of fingers in the pie of the product, right? So take an Apple iPhone. You have Foxconn, which is the Chinese manufacturer that does the iPhone screen glass and parts of the assembly and such, and they have their own finger in the pie, right? Foxconn collects, I forget the exact numbers, but it's something ridiculously low. The $800 or $1,000 sales price of an iPhone, they collect like $20 or $40 or something like this.

You know, something not even a full 10%. Apple as the IP owner of the entire process, the owner of the finished product and the owner of the brand value collects somewhere around, it's basically like half of the total sales price of the iPhones collected by Apple and then of course expanded a lot in marketing and things like this but you get the point. So I think that's one very key thing to understand is that no one really wants to be a perpetual manufacturer because manufacturing does not give you this value-added portion it does not allow you to extract the largest quantity of value because manufacturing is fundamentally iteratable, it's replicable, you can take you know the iPhone and you can manufacture

the screen glass and assemble it somewhere else it might be more expensive it might happen networks quality but you can do it you know meanwhile you cannot literally make another Apple right you cannot just snap your fingers or you know build a factory and produce another Apple style brand with that brand presence and that psychological value you know so that's a really key thing I think to understand when talking about industry is it's a lot it's all about value capture and the Chinese are very dedicated to climbing this value at value capture chain and the third the third and last point that I would kind of make in this respect just you know kind of rambling and piecing these things together here is the Chinese model is very very unique when it comes to

business and when it comes to trying to achieve specific things and in particular one thing I focus on and I've written a few threads about this recently one about ice and snow technology and their development of low cost, more effective snow manufacturing for ski facilities, and another on aquaculture and on construction of both floating ship-based container ship, not literal container ship, but like ship model based aquaculture systems and free-floating net systems and things like this. Chinese, in the modern day, are uniquely mercantile in that they're a particular strategy when it comes to corporate governance, and this emerges both as a political prerogative at the direction of local party leaders who often fund, through literal local VC offices, the

founding of new companies, and also at kind of like a cultural level, I think. It's built around just absolutely ruthless, breakneck, merciless competition to drive down prices and improve standards and really do what capitalism was kind of intended to do, which is make as many things as possible available to the largest consumer base possible and sell as much as you possibly can. Can you comment? This is funny. Snow manufactured. Please say more about this. Yes, well, I wrote a thread about this because it's a very interesting and unique example. I'm fascinated by these little sectors that the Chinese have been working on for years that no one in America discusses because they're too busy focusing on EVs or whatever if they

are even interested in China, but where they have made these really meaningful strides in just very little things. But basically, the Chinese back in 2016, they won the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. And they started this initiative, they started this specific research group to gather together and to conduct extensive research into just a whole set of these like frontier, there's a specific term for it, it's like cryo, it might be cryosphere, but like cryosphere kind of industry. And one thing that they did is that they, I don't want to say they mastered because I can't actually speak to the quality of snow or ice I'm kind of a pedant when it comes to skiing to be frank and I was actually told by someone that the Beijing Winter Olympics

that the ski was widely disliked by the the people who went there but you know point is they they had a specific research team dedicated to doing this and they figured out a number of different ways little technical improvements in things like snow and ice manufacturing for artificial ski hills. I think there was stuff too with how the glacial blankets and things like this, and what this ultimately has led to now is this boom in China in the artificial, well both artificial and natural, but artificial especially, ski industry. There are massive, massive constructions of ski projects still taking place, and I think the largest fake ski facility opened in Shenzhen about three, two or three years ago. And just so people know, Shenzhen is a sister city to Hong Kong. It was, yeah. Yes.

Part of the Greater Bay Area. Yes. And now, of course, the same exact thing, too, is happening in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia, I hear. This is basically just the core of the Chinese model is figure out these little things and then start you know just just flip the switch and go all in on this kind of thing and and make you know build a hundred ski facilities that everyone can now buy their way into and amortize costs and I think it's great example it's a micro example I think of point I was trying to make earlier which I maybe it was inherited from Singapore and one of my favorite rally political speeches is Lee Kuan Yew explaining in broad strokes just this in 1980 saying we started with port and logistics and so on, we want to move up the production chain.

And I guess that's in miniature what we are talking now with this snow and aquaculture and other things that maybe industrial policy people have an outdated or image of China as they want to produce entire supply chain and focus on steel pipes or whatever. And in fact, they very much for, you say since the 2000s, maybe before then have a plan to move up the production chain, make higher products. And now, of course, China produces some huge percentage of the drones in the world and in the United States. My objection to the Trump tariffs was primarily that they do nothing to increase this aspect of the United States industry. Even China is moving away from toilets and steel pipes. They want to do these more profitable things and the outdated images that you need the

entire chain and to do this and that. But in fact, under the Trump tariffs, it would have always been cheaper to buy a Chinese drone than to produce one in the United States, because the subcomponents that you have to import, you have to pay a premium on – again, I'm only repeating things you and Mena have already said. But what do you think about this relation to maybe American industrial policy type's misconception of Chinese industry? Well, I think what I consistently see is this dramatic underestimation of how difficult it actually just is to build out a modern industrial supply chain. I mean, if you think of all of the composite parts that go into a DJI drone, for instance, You're not just talking about, I mean, what I see is this kind of notion of, you know,

oh, you get the parts and you slap them together, but where do the parts come from? Okay, well, you have the plastic pieces. Where do those come from? Well, that's coming from, you know, produced, unrefined plastic, which is coming from plastic manufacturing facilities, which is either coming from recycling. I mean, you know, you could dive into every part of this from the circuit board to the, you know, the handheld remote controller, silicone, to the, you know, each individual plastic piece to the carbon fiber that you might have if it's a more advanced and expensive model, to the copper wiring. Every single piece of this puzzle here comes together as assembled in the modern economy. It's incredibly complex.

I mean, we really have no idea how much ... It's miraculous, you know, just looking at it from an objective perspective. I'm someone who's fascinated by logistics, but I mean, you know, some people during the During the tariff saga they were talking about, people bring this up every now and then, but during the tariff saga I saw it again, the fact that there are fisheries in South America, in Peru, that harvest fish which is then frozen and then shipped to Asia, shipped to Thailand or shipped to China, processed, refrozen and then shipped back across the ocean, even sometimes back to Peru to be sold in consumer markets. And people look at this and they ask, they ask why is this? There's no possible conceivable way this is more efficient than, you know, like build

it just by having people process the fish themselves. But this is because they don't understand the sheer advantages of scale and the sheer advantages that you can get if you run the largest conglomerated fish processing plant in the entire world. You know, so there's this idea that I see repeated a lot where I think it's this notion that we can replicate every part of the supply chain and create a bunch of good middle-class jobs in America and then just start piecing this whole modern global economy together ourselves via autarky. And it's just, it's caped shit, it's bullshit, it's not true. You can't do that because each step along the way there, each step along the way of you know, reshoring the supply chain, you lose efficiencies that are made very, very

real in the global market, you know. I mean, maybe there are some people who will still say, of course, you know, oh yes, we can, well, we should say fuck it, we should cut our living standards significantly in order to reshore manufacturing. That's a real choice to make. You know, I don't want to act like there haven't been very significant losses from globalization. In fact, I would have completely done it very differently myself, you know, if I was dictator of the United States back in 1970 when this process really kicked off. But the point is, there's no attempt to really grapple with the real meaning of global supply chains and the real complexities of reindustrialization. It's this endless kind of capeshit hand-waving thing that everyone plays.

Because to really get into this, to really consider this kind of prospect, you almost have to act like a central planner, you know. I mean, it's no coincidence China, of course, is not, I would call them neither capitalistic or communistic. I don't really even care to indulge myself in those terms, as they don't mean anything in the modern day. But there's a reason why it has been so successful, and part of that reason is because the state has figured out very, very well how to direct capital, and how to direct, in particular, the Chinese system, local governments, to allocate capital in their localities very efficiently, or at least in a method that adds up to, on a national scale, very high efficiency. Yes. Mr. Starr, we should not do- Yes, but I don't mean to ramble. Yes. No, no.

Please go on in detail. I think audience appreciates so-called, I don't like the sword, but so-called autistic or spur details on these matters very much, because so little is known about—you mentioned that people talk about electric vehicles or solar panels. I think, actually, only even very few people know about Chinese strides or dominance in those industries to begin with. But before we go to commercial break, which is coming up, I don't think you mean to paint a hopeless picture that the United States, Europe, etc., Japan, are destined necessarily to be second fiddle to China, or maybe you are, because I do want to emphasize that despite the recent strides, there are significant, very important things where industry technology,

manufacturing technology, is more advanced, for example, in Japan, Europe and United States, than it is in China, things having to do, for example, not exclusively but having to do with lithography, the semiconductors process, many other machine tools, machine tools in particular is what I think is very relevant. Yes, many, many other such things. So I do think that opportunity for these countries to even exceed China as long as they wake up to what's going on and acknowledge the facts on the ground and so on. But before we go to commercial break, Do you have anything to say on this? I think the first thing I will say, and I'm going to be very explicit when I say this because I think it's important to be very explicit, I think at this point that it is

now baked in that China is going to become the world's largest economy, probably both in real nominal terms, I know there's been capeshit around this, but also just on the basis of scale and on the basis of their economic advancement, I think this is unavoidable at this point. The second thing I will say though is that I don't, I think this matters much less than a lot of people think. I don't think, you know, I look at Europe and I look at America and I look at Japan and I don't even see a situation. I regard China, quite frankly, as a kind of a triviality. I think that with whether or not China existed, our countries would still be in more or less the same state of decline because almost all of our problems are directed from this kind of internal. Yes.

I mean, you know exactly what it is, but this complex of various aligned interests ranging from progressive leftism to, you know, this kind of financial harvest conservatism established interest kleptocracy that want to fleece young people and want to steal away the real productive value of the country and sell it off for the short term and, you know, all these other things. Yes. I've heard you mention just that a kind of symbiotic thing even is possible with China, where the United States, Japan, etc. are doing extreme high advanced manufacturing and so on, and it can exceed China in those terms, but of course would require solution of the more significant problems you mentioned. Yes. And no, you know, I don't even think by any means that this, any of this could be, you know, hopeless.

I think there are absolutely methods. Even in a world, you know, where the best case scenario doesn't occur and the things I mentioned earlier, America, our human talent is so incredible here. Europe still has so much incredible human talent, Japan too. There are many fields and many sectors where there easily could be pitched battles fought and won over just just speaking in economic terms over against like Chinese competition in fact well one thing you see what what sectors just trying to really dominate in well they're sectors with that are not that we're not established you know 20 years ago electric vehicles drones I mean you know things like aquaculture things like like this these are things that were not

meaningfully existent 20 years ago and this is something I would like to hammer home too is that a large part of Chinese success is figuring out what the next big thing is and then just going all in on that and pushing incredibly hard on that particular thing and dominating that new thing but of course you know I mean that's exactly what like Henry Ford did with the automobile it's a large part of the reason why America was so industrially dominant but you know at the same time it's a little different because it's not like the world is going to lose out on the need for machine tools and whatnot in 50 years. So yeah, I concur with you. This very good, Mr. Star. Hard commercial break coming up. Let's come back and discuss related matters some more.

I want to ask you more about this question, human capital. Why don't we take a quick smoke break and come back? What do you think? Yes. Yes, perfect. And we are back with Mr. Star talking about China and industry and many related things. And Mr. Star, I was reading a while ago this article, I forget from where, about, I think it was Apple or something like that, trying to move their factories from China to India and encountering all kinds of unexpected problems there, having to do primarily with differing work culture. Work culture in India reminded me actually of Lord of the Rings, you know, where the The hobbits take first breakfast, the second breakfast, whatever, and in India they wanted to have breakfast break and then tea chai, you know, chai and snack break, and many other

just people not showing up. And as we are recording, I see this tweet by Arctotherium. He said, comparison between China, India, and the United States. I don't know what he's quoting. It doesn't matter. I agree with what he's saying. He say, only China has the scale and quality of workforce to encompass the whole industrial supply chain by itself. The United States must rely on allies and the Indian workforce is inferior for, quote unquote, reasons that we will not get into now. I just wanted to emphasize this and to ask, since you brought up human capital, this question about Chinese workforce characteristics, Chinese workforce quality. I don't know where Arctoth, I'm sorry to interrupt, I don't know where Arctotherium got this,

but he's quoting from the Sentimental Party and the Industrial Party. Sorry, the Party of Industry and the Party of Sentiment, which is a source that I have recommended very heavily to people on here, and I just posted it linking in my substack archive on China resources, because it's a critical essay to understand the Chinese perspective and approach to modern economics. But yes, it's very good to see this being spread more. fascinating article I recommend I recommend very heavily but but yes so sorry please finish no that's what I wanted to say and if you wanted to comment on this matter of the Chinese Chinese workforce quality yeah the Thai King apparently a hundred years ago or something like this put out a statement

complaining about the high productivity of the local Chinese workers in Thailand that they were encouraging a bad work culture and so on because nobody could compete with how hard they work. And I think this has long been stereotype about Chinese workers, which, okay, it's a good thing for them that they have this incredible work ethic. But on one hand, you have the third world, let's say, what people think is the third world work ethic, which is yes, taking many breaks, being truant, having chai tea break and so on. On the other end of things, you have the suicide nets at Foxconn, the famous Northeast Asian leading kind of work culture that can lead easily to internment in a mental asylum or suicide. And I think the focus of people for a long time has been, oh, China

China is possibly out competing on lower grade industries because they have cheap labor that's willing to work basically slaves as slaves, you know. But I think that's misunderstanding of seriousness of the problem because it's not just the work. What you're saying is it's also they have, yes, they work very hard, but they're also They're smart enough, let's put it that way, compared to other peoples, they're smart enough. And also, yes, there is a stereotype that the Chinese are low trust, a corrupt society, but that is also changeable, it's reformable and suppressible through law and order initiatives. And then there is other issue that the Chinese possess, which is, I know you've mentioned this too, but it's simply hunger for material success, which other nations, including the

Indian example I gave and so on, do not have nearly as much. And what I'm getting at is that this is quite a very formidable opponent that can be competitive on multiple dimension spectrum, not just, oh, they work like slaves and they can produce a lot, etc., of steel pipes. It's a formidable adversary that even in what I just read now, that tweet, I've made that point myself that together with Japan and West Europe or Europe, the United States can have enough people, enough scale, enough technology to stand against this. But without them, and if they don't wake up and they do not see how formidable this adversary is, there's real danger. I guess this is long way of commenting on this human capital differences. What do you think? Yes.

Well, I mean, the whole issue is that if we take this perspective that the Chinese human capital is incredibly high quality, which I believe it is incredibly motivatable or incredibly disciplined in some respects. I think the lust and hunger for material goods plays a big part of it. There also just seems to be this kind of Asian, you know, acceptance of longer hours and harder work cultures in some ways. Well, I mean, I would say you have a country of 1.4 billion people who are reasonably smart and willing to work incredibly, incredibly hard. That could be quite a formidable threat, you know, in just about anything. And especially now, of course, you know, the younger generations are smaller and such,

But applied at scale to a whole set of industrial technological corporate business problems, it could be incredibly challenging, yes, for Western incumbents, I would say. But, you know, at the same time, too, once again, I think that you can agglomerate and mobilize Western human talent in the same way. I think it would be very good, in fact, I think it would be very good to have a technical kind of war, technical corporate kind of war between Western countries and China trying to outcompete each other. I think this would lead to many great strides. In the West in particular, a few things I would comment on. I think that we probably need to reduce borders to human capital mobility here. I see absolutely no reason, it makes absolutely no sense considering the present immigration

policies at the very least of the United States and of the EU, that talented American workers cannot move to France and French, talented French workers can't move to the United States and you know, so on and so forth, makes it completely zero, retarded, you know, like yes, it's an incomprehensible mistake. At the same time, too, though, I would say that I think a large part of this is also just the inherent structure of the economy. I think something that I've talked about quite a bit in the past, I haven't talked about it so much recently, but I've talked about it in more explicit terms, is this coalescation on calcification of the economy around rent-seeking interests who turn their attention away from industry and from innovation as methods of, you know, acquiring wealth and, you know,

making their way in the world, and turn towards harvesting of, you know, scalping kind of from the middle, off the middle class, and, you know, extracting rents from the government and such. I mean, that's the best way to get rich in modern America, is to find a way to get the government to pay you, you know. Yes. I don't, maybe that's somewhat true in China in a certain way, but, well, it's quite different there, you know, there is a very tangible difference in the way that our economies reward behaviors and I think that plays a large part as well. I want to talk to you about this in a moment because yes the problems in in the West with corporate culture economic policy and so on I know you have many thoughts on that I want

to ask you that in the moment but before we do just to stay on China sort of I want the audience to understand I mean they know this I myself do not like China at least spiritually or metaphysically what they've stood for throughout history. And I think what China has been throughout history, you mentioned they are recently a mercantile people, they've always been seen as a mercantile merchant population. In history, when you look at the nations around China who tried to resist signification, including actually the Manchurians, desperately tried to resist it, took over China, and enacted most thoroughgoing, apartheid ruling regime of that whole realm. And nevertheless, they were completely absorbed within Chinese civilization. We don't need to talk about that. It's a long issue.

I just want the audience to understand, I am not on the side of China, but it's very foolish to underestimate this adversary. But without going into the deep spiritual problems that I see the Chinese have, would Could you address for the audience your opinions on, let's say, the day-to-day things regarding the famous Chinese corruption? Because I was surprised when Nick Land came on this show and he was talking about how you can leave your bike or whatever outside in Shanghai and be sure to come back, this social trust thing. The Chinese nation is not at all famous for social trust. In fact, in recent years, there are videos of people running over someone multiple times to make sure there are no witnesses or being indifferent to Chinese lying dead in, you

know, their own Chinese lying dead in the street and so on. And something that really gets to me, and I wanted to, maybe you don't want to talk about this, it's sensitive matter, but the Chinese attitude toward animal, where daily you see horrible videos of mistreatment, torture, even gratuitous torture of animals, not just livestock, but beloved cats and dog and many other such thing. I don't know if you want to comment on any of this before we move to problems in the West, but I don't think you are pure sinophile either. I don't know if you have opinions on these negative qualities of the Chinese people. Yes, I'll address both of those. First of all, the first thing I'm going to say is that I call myself a sinophile partially because I like to be shocking and inflammatory.

And because there are a lot of people on right-wing Twitter who are just incredibly stupid on this one particular thing And I want to make them angry and it works. So, you know, it's very successful But First thing I'm gonna say in response to that is that I'm not a particularly big fan of Chinese culture quite frankly I don't I just don't I don't get a lot You know part of the reason why I don't really like Chinese girls that much is that I find their culture to be very odd I find that the ways they construct and present themselves in the world to be very odd. I Probably could not live in China I could I could you know go I could live there for a while I suppose but I don't think I could see myself Retiring there or living out my life there. Yes

So, you know, I'm not that I don't have any particular reservations about this I don't know. I find a lot of those criticisms though to be thrown out by very fucking stupid people quite frankly Um, especially the point on this well some of the criticism on the basis of the animal stuff But I'll get to that in one second. Let me start it first of all with the high trust narrative I don't know. I mean, it's kind of hard for me to speak to it I wasn't traveling to China when these things were very common in like the 2015, you know, like 20 2010 kind of era and such One thing I will say though is that China absolutely did used to be a low trust civilization In fact, there have been multiple massive crackdowns on crime in the past 30 years.

The first one, actually, I've been reading about it recently. It's almost impossible to find anything about this in the West. And I'm probably going to publish at some point down the line some original writing on it because it is something that seems to be basically completely unknown. I mean, there's a Wikipedia article, a skeleton of it, but, you know, it is almost never discussed in the West, but the Chinese crime crackdown in the 1990s, you go look this up and the first result is Tiananmen Square and all this, but there was a sincere and real effort, mobilization by Deng Xiaoping of the army and deployment with the police and literally tens of thousands of people arrested and executed as part of this crackdown on nationwide organized crime networks.

But that's a very simple and obvious one is that it there was probably quite a massive crime epidemic that we don't really Understand probably never will have the numbers on in China following the Cultural Revolution years and this kind of social deconstruction of the entire nation Second thing I would point to too is that what I've heard from friends and what I've read is that in between like 2015 and 2019 there was another massive crime crackdown against petty mugging, petty street theft things like this that used to be very very common in places like Shanghai you know you had kind of usual tourist crime and that has I mean you know speaking only in my experience that has completely disappeared I never once felt

unsafe I saw people leave their stuff everywhere there was near I don't want to say constant police presence but in tourist destinations there was a constant police presence yes surprisingly there were relatively few police out on the streets I still think I saw less than I normally do in urban America before you move to the next point because just related to this yes you're talking about crime what about personal manners and and hygiene because I can tell you in Japan when you go out restaurant or so on and you see these I will not use untoward words on this radio show because because we have to be polite, but you are, let's say, nog-rich Chinese, and you can always tell they're Chinese. And any Japanese waiter at someone will tell you that Chinese are the worst tourists.

In other countries, they say the same, by the way. They belch, they eat with their mouth open. I cannot stand to be around Chinese eating, for example. I guess that's not absolute criticism because peasant people, you know, and they are recently peasant people and they can maybe move away from that. But at least for now, there is that issue too, no? Yes. It's funny, I didn't see too much of that in China. In fact, on the whole, it seems like a lot of that is better or has improved. The worst behavior I've seen has been from overseas Chinese, in particular in Chinatowns in both Australia and the United States, just a kind of complete lack of physical manure, you know, grace of any kind. So yes, I would say there definitely is some of that, especially surviving, I think, outside of China.

I don't know, I didn't see, I didn't see, the worst things I've seen though have definitely been in, actually in America, in American Chinese restaurants and such, where there's of just a, I don't know, it's like this almost derisive kind of refusal to engage in the most basic of personal courtesies. Yeah. Well, sorry to interrupt, you were saying, yes, so there's a crime crackdown. I'm saying, I agree, I think the social trust thing can be maybe not fundamentally improved, but mitigated greatly by law and order. What about the animal thing, you're saying that's not true? Well, I grow very frustrated of this because, quite frankly, I don't think anyone who consumes meat in the West, where we use factory farms, has any ground to stand on in criticizing

Chinese treatment of either pet animals or farm animals. I don't know, not to reveal too much about my personal life, but I was raised in a kind of greeny, hippie, eco-friendly family, and I personally, of course, am not a vegan or vegetarian. I eat factory-farmed meat regularly, but I do so because I kind of have a nihilistic perspective about life, you know? So I won't, I just cannot take it seriously. I think it's a stupid bullshit criticism. I think it's especially stupid and bullshit because it isn't even like an attempt to insult the Chinese on the basis of something that matters. It's more so this kind of empty moral posturing that I don't think the West has any real ground to stand on. Now, I will say, you know, there is animal cruelty there, it's quite egregious, it's

disgusting in my opinion, but at the same time, I think that emerges too from the peasant culture kind of aspect, you know, one thing too, when I was there, I did not see dog meat eaten anywhere outside of across from the Korean border, which of course is something that doesn't seem to get discussed because the South Koreans, who still eat, I believe per capita the largest quantity of dog meat in the world, probably by far, they're not despised in the same way that the Chinese kind of are. Another thing too that I want to address real quick, and this in particular is where I start to, it just makes me roll my eyes, I sounded frustrated probably earlier when I first addressed this, because it's just a mind-bending, there are a number of ways in which it's mind-bendingly

But we've seen this kind of thing about the Chinese fishing fleets and whatnot go viral several times now on Twitter over the past couple months past, you know, year or so or whatever and What I find kind of hilarious about this is that first of all, there's two separate mistakes. I always see in the first one is This attempt to conflate the behavior of Chinese anywhere in the world with the CCP So a lot of the times there's there's this talk about like fifth generation warfare warfare, and how the CCP is deploying Chinese fishing fleets to, you know, dredge the bottom and eliminate hatcheries all across the world, so that only the Chinese will have aquatic resources or whatever. To which I would say capeshit, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and shut the fuck up.

It's just... no, that doesn't... like, you have to prove that, that's not how it works. That happens because the Chinese just want to get really fucking rich, and they'll happily go out and start picking your coastal fisheries free, and I mean, you know, people say things like the Argentinians should go and drop bombs on the Chinese fishing fleets. Sure, I agree with them, yes, they absolutely should. I hope it happens, quite frankly, I don't think we should over-fish and do things like this, but I want to be very clear here that this isn't some kind of state-directed action, It's the action of Chinese fishing fleets as kind of autonomous entities. The second thing I would say too to that is that, well, the reason why Chinese fishing

fleets are the ones doing this is because China exports fish to the rest of the world. So Chinese fishing fleets are picking hatcheries in South America and in the Indian Ocean and such clean so that they can export fish to, I mean of course a lot of it is consumed in the Chinese domestic market, but they also export a ton to Korea and Japan and oh wait what's this to the United States to I think Europe as well although I don't know I mean that's just kind of doming off the top of my head. Well it's amazing last I checked I think it was Peter Schiff who said I didn't check he He said it something 15 years ago, something that the United States has these huge coastlines between two oceans and imports 95% of its seafood. That's, that's crazy.

But let's move on for a moment to what you started to say about the West, the problems in the West and the United States. I think well, I hope I don't reveal too much you are you are zoomer. And I think special perspective on this. I think the way young people especially are treated in West Europe and the United States by these moribund, old-truun-run economies is a complete scandal. And I saw a recent thing by an Irish nationalist saying that something like 30-50%, or maybe even more, of Irish people under the age of 29 or 30 were living at home with their parents that if they tried to move and to live the way that their parents did, they would be essentially living in already the equivalent of favelas, given the money that they have or don't have.

And, you know, it's very different style of, let's say, it's a different feel from somewhere like China, where I hear cities like Xiamen and others, there's a lot of young people that are out and about, even if their standard of living is not high, they have, let's say, hope. Actually, you know, I did hear that young people from China want to leave China, which isn't the same, you know, I don't know that many young people from the U.S. want to leave. I would actually advise them to do so, at least my friends. But look, that aside, it's horrible situation in the West with work culture, corporate culture, mistreatment of especially its most intelligent and ambitious young which is not as far as I know the case in China but let's stick to the West now I know

you have many thoughts on this what what do you think is problems with this Western economies now I would point to several key areas and mistakes that we've made and the first one that I think just let's just address very specifically the United States here I was talking with a friend the other night actually, a very smart gentleman, and he made this point that the United States has always had this issue of persistent rot that creeps up in our society that then gets purged away in some kind of massive state effort generally connected to war. And I think that's correct, I think that's obviously true, and I think what we see after After the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, is we just let a lot of things get gunked

up with this persistent layer of muck that we should not have, and that is now coming back to bite us very, very hard, because now the muck is entrenched, and there are a lot of people who got rich off the muck, and they don't want us to clean it, you know? They don't want us to clean it. The second thing I would say, though, and I think this is something that's very key that isn't discussed nearly enough in relation to modern Western ailments is that what we are really living in is the shadow of a civilization that could have been. And this to me strikes particularly when looking at nuclear technology and the potential of nuclear energy. I believe that this period of 1970 through the year 2000 was meant to be the launch of

basically after the industrial revolution, the next stage of civilization in the atomic age built around endless clean energy available everywhere from uranium and various other radioactive materials. I think that our failure to exploit this was a profound mistake of course, continues to be a profound mistake, and ultimately is the cause of much of the ailments that we presently exist under. I think fundamentally what it is is that the West no longer, I don't want to say cares, because that's not the right word, but we are no longer cognizant of material prosperity. And we are no longer cognizant in particular of efforts to improve material prosperity. It doesn't seem like there is an actual desire to improve the relative material abundance

of goods available to us um and of course you know now you have this entire abundance movement among this you know breakaway prog class i personally think it's capeshit it's not going to come to anything they're not going to be willing to fight the real battles they would have to fight with the hard left progressives to achieve anything but i mean you know this is kind of exactly what i'm talking about is there's this this kind of like blanket assumption in our politics that oh yeah we want to get how we want to fix the housing thing and we want to do healthcare better and we want people to be able to buy stuff but if you look tangibly at what people talk about in relation to these things they're not talking about these as actual objectives there's no real focus on strategy it's just

this this kind of like blanket thing that is left of the outlier so really what I think it is is that I think the West isn't interested in matter I think we've become obsessed with very stupid well I don't even want to say very stupid because a lot of this these topics are actually critical critically important to understand but I think we've become increasingly fixated on spiritual philosophical not spiritual a little sense but you understand what I mean like these bizarre bizarre running meta narratives that relate to our history and our place in the world and things like this and I don't know personally as a kind of autistic brains matter stem type you know I I look at this and it just makes me like shake my head it's like we could we can resolve these things we should resolve these

things in particular ways of course but we should resolve them well part of part of the resolution too is ensuring that our people have a baseline standard of living and but more importantly a baseline standard of upward mobility is I think what's really critical I think a lot of what this comes down to you you You talk about Chinese people wanting to leave, and I won't harp on China too much, but that's absolutely true, but one thing is that young people in China are tangibly more upwardly mobile than their parents were. They have more opportunities. Do young people in Ameriqua, do young people in France have more opportunities than their parents did? I think that's a more complicated question than many people make it out to be.

I don't think that this mythology of the boomers having it easy is exactly right, but there There are a lot of ways in which they did have it significantly easier and just very simple and baseline things that, you know, the Gen X did not have to worry about. It's very simple baseline things that they did not have to fixate or concern themselves with. No, this is very interesting. And again, I bring up the speech I encourage everyone to watch from among his many good speech is Lee Kuan Yew's rally speech to the People's Action Party in 1980, where he gives in defense of his lifetime political career, he gives exactly what you just said. He said, if you were around in 1970, we had X many two-bedroom apartments, and in 75, it improved by that much and by our time.

And he goes through the different apartment types and explains that someone who had been born in Singapore in 1960 or something, would have just been seeing constant concrete improvement, their family moving into a bigger place and this kind of thing. And what you say about nuclear energy makes, I think, very vivid and concrete. Something else you could bring up is Asian cities have skyscrapers and so on. And instead, in the West, there's this bizarre commentary, both from the left and the right, that doesn't address, why don't Boston and San Francisco, why aren't they grander than Tokyo or Shanghai or Hong Kong, why don't they look like that? It makes it sound like it was some spiritual, moral choice not to look like that when in

fact whether or not it was, the West for whatever reason doesn't have the capability, the will to build these kinds of things. I know you have some thoughts on this aspect of the West, especially its poor corporate culture. Why are companies like Intel, like Boeing, Moribund, why are their products suck? You go to work for, and not only these, many, just American corporate culture, the work environment is geared, I believe, to the needs of entrenched old people who you are calling rent seekers and, you know, I don't know if you want to address this in a polite aspect, but the needs of women who are also a different kind of rent seeker and it is not quite that way or not to the same extent in places like we're talking about in China and so on, where they allow more progress.

But it's this kind of encrustation or calcification that you're talking about that it makes work life in the United States very depressing. I thankfully, you know, no jinx, I don't want to throw it in people's—I don't work and I don't think I could work in corporate environment. But I have many friends who do. They have just horrible stories, including in tech and in not so much startups, but anything like that. It's horrible work environment. We complain about overworking in Japan or China, but in United States, it's just depressing, way up type of work environment because of these encrusted interests you mentioned? Yes. Well, I think I'm going to redirect this to a particular consternation I have with modernity and a point that I like to make very clear.

I regard modernity as the state of the hyper concentration of capital, infrastructure, talent corporations literal resources and so on in urban environments you know and so I think you know when you talk about why do Boston and San Francisco and even cities like London you know cities like maybe London is the best example but you know I certainly think that London is not what it could be in a more permissive planning environment Why do these not look like Tokyo? Why do these not look like the greater Bay Area and China? Why do they not look like even, I don't know, like Bangkok, you know? Understanding that and solving it is critical to ensuring the West remains competitive on a global stage, I believe, because I think the agglomeration advantages

of modern urban systems of cities are absolutely critical to exploit to you know run a modern economy to run modern corporations that remain competitive pushing large numbers of people together in the same geographic areas with access to great infrastructure and resources and things like this just that's that's That's the core of modernity. So yeah, I think that is an absolutely, you know, I don't like to use these terms because they're associated with a bunch of things that just bring baggage, but you know, yimby nimby kind of thing in Ameriqua, and of course elsewhere throughout much of Western Europe as well, the UK, the whole Anglosphere really, this is a national security issue. absolutely critical to ensuring that our economies, our societies remain competitive.

I don't really know, I don't understand it honestly, I can't point to any particular things as to why we've apparently decided that San Francisco, which should be in real terms, San Francisco should be a metropolitan that rivals New York in my opinion. I think if we constructed that demand it easily could reach, I think New York is 8 million, I think, you know, the like San Francisco, Oakland kind of region could reach the broad Bay Area could reach easily eight million people. You could build incredible public transit infrastructure. You know, I spent a lot of time on the West Coast, especially in like Seattle. Seattle actually, they do they do an acceptable job for an American city of building things. And even even they it's like, you know, so limited in scope and scale.

We should have so much more, you know. Listen, Mr. Star, I want to talk more with you, especially about the Tia Farda. If you have time, we come back for another segment. But before we go, is there one or two major things that you think could be addressed to correct? Forget address to correct. What do you think is fundamentally the cause of this stagnation in American corporate and work culture? I don't think it's one thing, but do you have any main culprits? The sociology of having old trunes and sensitivities of not just women, I don't want to blame it purely on that, but on that personality suite where you are open competition of the cutthroat type you describe in Asia isn't allowed. And I am astounded to see people mention Singapore as a place where the state owned businesses.

The state did not insulate the businesses that it owned from the kind of cutthroat capitalist competition you're talking about, whereas in the United States, private companies, that kind of competition not allowed internally for all kinds of reasons. You just wouldn't make it from what I hear in an American corporation with that kind of mindset in general, it's subdued by something and replaced by, you know, old risk averse managers, it's a kind of risk aversion in these large companies like Intel. Okay, I think I have my answer. I think disparate impact and in particular its application in relation to women in American corporations is responsible for a huge portion of this. It's responsible on a number of different axes.

First of all, I should discuss this, I won't take the time to fully lay it out in more proper terms, but it must be understood that modern economies are basically engines for distributing surplus, and we solved scarcity more or less, so now we're figuring out different ways to send out money and to have people keep consuming. In Asia, the particular path that they've chosen, at least Japan has, is a kind of stagnation while maintaining these vast service economies, very, very inefficient service economies as employment engines. In the West, what we chose to do instead was we chose to create these massive regulatory environment schemes through a combination of both direct lawfare and just general internal

precedent that created bureaucracies and administrative departments and legal teams of all kinds dedicated to preventing violations of very obscure credo credos and such and a huge part of this goes back to ties back to disparate impact and first of all the need to generate hiring positions for a large number of women who quite frankly are simply just not necessary in the white collar world but also the need the needs to the broader cultural changes that these women brought and ensconced inside a number of, you know, just industries of all kinds as they brought that with them. At the same time too, I would also say that I think the financialization of the American economy plays a large part as well.

I'm not against finance at all, we've discussed this before I believe, and you know finance is a key and critical part of our national economy and it's a massive boon to America as a whole to have such liquid and deep capital markets, but it's incredibly, we have placed so much of our economy under the direction of finance, and I forget, I ran the numbers on this at one point counting the total market cap of the NASDAQ and the Dow versus the global GDP and the GDP of America versus like 50 years ago and of course it is a massive portion now of those numbers when it was not so as much 50 years ago and that represents a very tangible cultural change where more of our economy is now run for the direction of profit making from the perspective of financial centers.

Well, of course, Mr. Star, what you just said, and let's not even take the health care part of economies, at least a fifth of the American economy, so-called education and things. This kind inevitably leads to just the mood of nihilistic stagnation. But listen, Mr. Star, I have a hard commercial break coming up. I've been keeping you. I hope, would you have time for a quick segment? Come back? I know it's late when you are in your yacht off the coast of the Bahamas, but we will have maybe another short segment after the smoke break, yes? Yes, no, no, it's fine. I have a selection of beautiful prostitute, male and female, waiting for me outside. I will enjoy after this. They can wait a little longer, yes, please. Yes, very good. Well, I come over. Next we talk TFR and many other things.

We will be right back. We are back. I know, Mr. Starra, you are quite distracted on a prostitute yacht in near Bahamas, but let's talk a more 20, 30 minute segment on, I want very much to this TFR issue, this fertility rate, birth rate discourse, very big, especially, I don't even want to call it the right, but whatever this new media thing, including it's a special obsession of Mr. Elon, and I was just looking at this graph relating to China, actually, IQ versus fertility graph, plotted against the different provinces and cities of China. And it's just a big line downward where the high IQ and city people have very low TFR and then is very high in the low IQ provinces. But that aside, what you make of all, I know you have thoughts on the birthday thing anyway.

Yes, well, I don't know, I don't, you know, I sometimes tend to exaggerate when I say this, like I say, oh, it's capeshit, not a real problem or whatever. I don't want to do that here because it is a real problem, of course, especially in Western nations with developed pension systems and democracy and things like this. But you know, what I would say to that is that I don't, I do not believe it is going be the collapse that many people say it is and in particular I think the thing that not enough people presently attribute is presently correctly attribute is that our I think our societies are meaningfully overpopulated in relation to what we can actually produce meaningful employment in particular for but also just in relation to like in particular status distribution hierarchies

and how we distribute status and recognition in society and how we distribute status goods and things like this. And so I regard this TFR decline, this population kind of wind down that's going to occur this century as being representative of just a real change in modernity in much the same way the kind of reduction to the three child kind of post baby boom was like this, although I don't want to like harp on that point too much of course because that was just part of a broader fertility drawdown, but point is really is that I perceive this as just being a result of modernity, I don't think it's a disaster, I think we're going to have to adapt, we're going to have to alter the way our societies work in order to meet this

particular challenge but you know personally I'm I don't know I find I find this whole new right you know you call it like the new media sphere I find this whole thing very frustrating and I'm very concerned about the way it's approaching this particular issue I think that it's going to be able to command some kind of political influence in the future and I don't see the solutions it implements either being particularly effective or for that matter having good outcomes on society in the world I'm very concerned for instance about things like birth rate subsidies we know through both you know simple research and just basically thinking it out that most of these proposals are incredibly dysgenic in real terms you know I mean there was

this talk of doing like a $5,000 child care credit or childbirth credit and such well let me tell you this you know I know a lot of middle upper middle class white girls, not a single one of them would have a child if you offered them $5,000. I also know a lot of lower class black and Hispanic girls and every single one of them would happily have a child for $5,000, they would, well that's not exactly true, but you get what I mean. That kind of thing would select immediately for people who are just very, very short sighted and very willing to do stupid things for large, relatively small amounts of money. And meanwhile, there's all this talk about this, and I know so many people who are deathly afraid of having children still, I don't know, I personally am very, well, in my personal

life I'm kind of, I shrug my shoulders at a lot of these things, even in Ameriqua where this kind of thing can be ruinous in some respects in relation to birth control, I find thought of condoms kind of anathema, but you know I mean like there are there are a very large number of things in America you know like we teach young people to be kind of afraid of pregnancy and childbirth and such and that's you know like like things like that aren't discussed in relation to this nearly enough in comparison to these proposals to do things like you know pay people to have kids and one more point I'll make is too that I reject this entire frame that we're going to be under populated in the future or that you know anything

all the real consequences of this TFR thing are going to come from pension systems supporting the elderly and you know like this this inverse population pyramid we're not going to be lacking in real terms, people. And so I think completely rejecting this frame of, oh, we need more population is critical as well, because of course this is one of these things loved by the mass immigration advocates is to say, well, we're not having kids, so we need to bring in Somalians, which of course never doesn't work out, leads to economic disaster in the real world. The frame of the argument is deeply distorting, I agree with you. On a side note, before we continue to talk about this, I want to remind the audience again, Mr. Starr is a zoomer, and he brought up in first segment or before that he does

not have much tolerance for so-called philosophical discourse, mystical discourse. And I want to remind both you, Mr. Starr, and the audience that that is a very good thing because what this new media sphere, whatever it was, really it was just the free internet and that's no longer the case, but the free internet on various forums, boards and Twitter to some extent before 2016. It was very much, when it was impressive and when it made an international splash, brought international attention to new ideas, it was very much based on the kinds of things that appeal to you, Mr. Star, which are facts, science, economics, biology, technology, and scientific matters. And I think as the focus switched to philosophy, religion, mysticism, and so on, it's become

more irrelevant, less relevant, it's become bullshit, it's become bullshit. And I myself don't come from, let's say, my posting and so on and the things I write. I'm not really from, let's say, the science fact thing. I do come from philosophy and history type—well, history bridges things anyway. But I am interested in philosophy, but I also have personal aversion to bullshit. And aside from that, I don't think that what I do should be the mainstream or most of what frogs do, they should be doing what Mr. Star and people like him were doing before 2016. I think these are very healthy instincts to be for science and fact. And now, whenever they do address, let's say, percentages, studies, graphs, and so on today, it's at a very low level.

And the birth rate discourse, perfect example of that, where all that Elon does, he presents just let's say, soundbite level, very stupid sensationalistic alarmism about birth rates without ever, as far as I know, he's the richest man in the world and without, as far as I know, he's never done any studies asking people, why don't you have children and doing careful study by study, excuse me, country by country studies, making distinctions between different types of people, because the reasons why birth rate might be lower in the third world, and I know you have some special thoughts on that, Mr. Star, in the third world falling birth rates, we talked about this in the moment, but those reasons are very different reasons

for why middle class, upper middle class person in their 20s in the United States or Europe is delaying fertility or not having children, very, very different reasons. And no effort whatsoever to distinguish between that. And yes, all the policy recommendations are just the equivalent of the soundbite sensationalism. Five thousand dollar credit. And frankly, to be cynical, Mr. Starr, I don't think the people proposing them care about the consequences, the negative, because they may even know what you're saying. But they want to show that they care about it. They want to show that they're based and they know what time it is, and that they're exercising power and making moves in that direction. Second of all, a lot of them are religiously obsessed, theologically obsessed, let's say,

co-lures. And to them, it doesn't matter if—you see, because if the Holy Father or whatever has the pews full of people with dull eyes that were had because their parents wanted a $5,000 credit, it doesn't matter to them, you see. But yes, I wanted to go on that tangent, but yes, regarding what you say, I think the problems are precisely this, too many olds, but these people don't even know when they say, oh, Japan is dying culture. They don't know there are 120 million people in Japan. It's wildly overpopulated in terms of human biomass. But there are then these problems, Mr. Starov, yes, too many olds. What do you think about that? I mean, that will make the stagnation worse, no? All over the world. Yes, maybe.

But, you know, my response to this is that I, quite frankly, don't give a shit that people should be having 2.1 kids to keep pension systems going. I think it's unjust to tax young people in the first place to raise money to hand over to the olds. I think that's a fucking tyrannical, insane way to organize your society. And if it's unsustainable because you're a moron and didn't realize of course that inevitably not offering enough opportunities to young people, not ensuring upward mobility of young people would lead to them not having children, well then I think the system deserves to fall apart and I hope it falls apart in a way that leads to the old people carrying the wrong end of the stick but the alternative really is just endless slavery for young people.

I mean, you know, another thing too that I will say is that I really do firmly believe that we're living in post-scarcity civilization. Is there anything stopping us from taking every single old person in America? We remove Social Security completely and we find a way to ensure all of them have, you know, like a concrete room and a mattress and like food and like that's that, you know, they can live out their retirement in some, you know, I don't know, scattered alley part of the country. Well, sorry to interrupt you, but it would have been cheaper during COVID rather than what they did, which is to imprison you. And I hope you and your generation will take revenge for that because they took 10 percent of your lives. I can't imagine what that's like. I managed to outrun

all the all the lockdowns. But I know many, many young people in their 20s, they took two years of their lives. They could not outrun. Anyway, I think it would have been cheaper to say to all all the old people, we are going to give you Club Med style resorts in the third world and you go sequester there for the duration of this. That would have been cheaper than what they did. Yes, well, and I've talked about that solution too, you know, this outsourcing to the third world of just building resorts. I mean, Jesus Christ, Social Security can buy you a pretty good retirement alone in, you know, Jamaica, imagine industrializing that. But you know really another thing too that I don't think enough people are considering

too is this advent of healthspan and lifespan, well healthspan I'm very personally I'm kind of skeptical of lifespan extending science but you know I mean things like Ozempic, things like you know Retatrutide which is another GLP-1, things like these recent developments in plasmid-based, you know, gene therapy related to like phallostatin and now discussion of like knockout in relation to the knockout gene therapies in relation to the same thing. I mean, we're approaching a time here in 10 or 20 years, I think, where there will be very real, very immediate medical treatments that will eliminate a lot of these pressing age-related concerns we have in, you know, just in relation to the ability of people to keep themselves like physically able to operate and things like this so yes you know

that's what I would say is that I just I doubt on a number of acts well I disagree first of all with this idea that we need we should keep this system going in the first place I think it's bullshit I think that it's a fundamental problem we chose to arrange our societies in the wrong way and we need to correct that and also I would just say that I don't think that there are enough considerations of the pre- and post-factors that are going to affect this. I mean, you know, once again, I don't want to say that this isn't going to be a problem, but here's my fundamental prediction. If you take right now the median Western state and you have them apply a set of feasible and practical solutions, things that they could implement to the TFR crisis on the basis

of like, you know, the ideas that presently exist in this new dissident, new media sphere. And then you took that state and you compared it to a roughly similar one that did nothing for TFR. My guess is that those two would have roughly similar outcomes, and in fact that the latter would probably have slightly better outcomes, because once again, I think that all of these proposed solutions are going to backfire in various ways and probably catastrophically in some cases if they are ever implemented. And yeah, so that's my main set of consternations with this TFR kind of obsession thing, I don't know. There are a lot of very smart people who talk about this, of course, Arctotherium, who we talked about earlier, he's a great poster, good guy, I know he's very concerned about

it, but I just see so much casual kind of capeshit bullshit retardation spewed out by just, you know, loads of commentary accounts and Musk and related, you know, new media people. Yes, it just leaves a very acrid taste in my mouth around this entire topic. Yes, well, their solutions are, I agree, foolish and they have never once, I understand the sensitivities problem and that you can't openly say, well, I only want high IQ, I only care about the reproduction rate of high IQ people or capable people. They cannot put it that way, but they can use proxies. They could use proxies, but I never see even any effort for that. And I'm afraid, yes, frankly, that it's being misused by religious colors and then colors like Elon, who I think do want this pretext for mass migration. Exactly.

Because no government today, Star, is able to plan 20 years really into the future. So if you have a workforce problem and you go on that premise, the only thing that will happen is increase of migration. But look, I am very concerned, however, the presence of mass democratic society does mean that olds are going to have giant voting bloc going forward. I am wondering, does that mean, do you have then to choose between an old, truned, senile, stagnant nursing home society on the one hand, where everybody's wages go to 60, 70 percent of the economy is caring for old or does it mean therefore that you have to abandon democracy, that young people should exercise some type of dictatorship or does it mean on the third

hand that young people will simply out migrate and there will be effective youth colonies or countries that act as youth colonies around the world. This is what I wanted to ask you because I travel a lot in the third world and people don't understand that they have had recently similar problems. For example, Brazil has had decline in fertility for quite some time now. We'll talk about this specifically, yes. But it's not just Brazil. It's many other parts of the world. The Southeast Europe is being depopulated of young people, they're leaving. So everywhere I go now is depressing, is old through in society, the kind of youthful vitality people think that is in the third world is usually not there.

still in Africa, I think, but it's not for long, maybe. So I don't know, before we talk about the decline of fertility in the third world, do you have any maybe science fiction related thoughts on solution to this? Well, I personally am very, very concerned with what I see as, you know, you talk about this prospect of like young dictatorship versus like old, old, true democracy. I don't even think this is necessarily the divide, because recently we had a set of protests in France related to the pensions and such, and I was seeing polls coming out saying that amongst the youngest there, that it was the 18 to 30-year-old demographic that has the highest support for raising pensions. So I think really, I think there are a set of problems to this that are kind of untethered from age.

It might just be a simple, I don't really know, it might just be financial ignorance, it might be something else, I'm not quite sure, but yes, that's one thing I would say. But I would say too, I think the youth colony thing is a very real prospect, and in particular I'm very interested in the Gulf states, I think there's Southeast Asia as well. I think we're going to see out migration from these pension-heavy, tax-heavy Western states until they start resolving their internal issues. In particular Europe, Europe is, well, in particular in Europe, the United Kingdom, but there's just a set of very large systemic issues that are going to adversely affect the ability of these states to hold on to their young people and in particular their young human talent.

Well, I don't like that fact, but it kind of is a fact, and the same thing is probably going to happen here to a certain extent here in the United States, although we do have certain advantages in this respect. Political inertia everywhere indicates that what you are saying is right. That's probably the easiest solution, so that's what will happen, but what is this about decline in birth rates in the third world? I know you've had some thoughts about that. Yes. Well, there's this very common idea we see thrown around of like this notion of the third world outbreeding the first and how it's going to be this whole, you know, camp of the saints type thing. I think this is very wrong. First of all, of course, I should start by saying that it doesn't fucking matter

whether people in Nigeria are having eight kids or two kids. Those kids will want to move to the Western world just as much. And quite frankly, you know, I mean, Nigeria could have a population of 10 million, and our present Western political system would try to move all 10 million of them if it could. Migrationary pressures can be stopped completely by changing the political incentives in countries that receive migrants. These aren't people, aren't, you know, step-by-step barbarians or whatever. It's not like that. But you understand this point already, yes. But the thing I'm going to say is that something that not a lot of people are aware of is that Colombia's TFR this year is now basically at 1. I think it was 1.1 last year or something like that, something absurdly low.

These are numbers that by the way, by the way, Japan now sits at 1.16 or 1.24 or something like that. So it's very funny to see people talk about Japan or South Korea, and South Korea of course is a uniquely poor example but very funny to see people talking about Japan as like a uniquely of course you know the quintessential example of low fertility when there are now half a dozen countries in South America and you know like three or so in Europe that are now not well below Japan's I mean Italy, Spain, Colombia, Chile have all kind of conglomerated around one. Still dropping too, might I add, in Colombia. I have no idea how low that can go, but I have this theory very fundamentally. I think third world civilization, third world societies are going to be hit even harder

by TFR decline than the West is, for a variety of reasons. First of all, because I think a lot of TFR decline is due to status, due to the inability to perpetuate upward mobility in the populations, in populations writ large, and that this is especially exacerbated in the third world because there simply is very little upward mobility at all. It's also caused by cell phones, in particular how cell phones change status differentials. Cell phones change our zone of comparison and this is especially true in third world societies where the wealth gap is so concentrated. They introduce people to new ideas and yes as such they lead to shifts of course in mating patterns and TFR patterns, as the well-known Brazilian soap opera study, great proof of this. Another thing, too, is that...

Just to make clear for audience, if they don't know, people have surmised that Brazil's decline in fertility was caused by this, by that, by democracy, by economic, or by even a common A talking point on the right is, which I somewhat agree with, that female education causes decline in TFR. You know, Iran has actually very, very low birth rate, but very high female graduate degrees and so on. But more than these, it's these media introduction things, I believe, of which education is just a proxy. And in Brazil, it was happening among rural communities when they got TV access to these entrancing, you know, for a popular audience, entrancing a Brazilian telenovela is so popular, just to clarify for audience.

Well, another thing, too, speaking on the particularities of the women issue, that is partially true, and it's especially true in the third world. I think it's an overly, heavily over-exaggerated factor in the West, quite frankly, because I think at least a large part of the TFR decline here is also driven by male behavior. But in Brazil, in places like this, especially in Colombia too, when a feminist type woman says like, I don't want to get married because my husband will beat me or rape me, that's a very real prospect in her life, you know, that's not a bizarre or foreign thing at all in these places. In particular in Colombia, I think they have one of the highest rates of childhood sexual molestation in the world.

So you know, my kind of rough prediction is that it's going to flow, it's going to start of course in South America because there are new world societies, and it's going to flow to the subcontinent. The subcontinent will be the next to fall below replacement. I think India just fell below replacement last year. Yes. India is going to hit, yeah. Then it's going to hit the Middle East, and then it's going to hit Africa. Yes. And when it comes to Africa too, I think Africa is a special case worth talking about. I've talked about this quite extensively, as have many others. population numbers are just kind of meh I don't know I don't think they're complete lies I but you know like it's it's just meh there are there are I

don't really know how many people live there it's probably below a billion or whatever they they claim it is I think I don't know I mean I just think that there's just a lot of kind of well just to give to illustrate what you're saying in Somalia the way they were estimating and they're always estimates estimating population is by visually estimating how many people went to such and such well or watering hole and extrapolating from that to a whole district. That's about the level of population statistics science coming out of Africa. Yes. I don't know, the social media thing is a big – I've said this before, I agree very much with you. you look at Jakarta and to me that probably hell on earth which this uh you walk by some electrified

shit ditch and fall in and get electrified and um a city that is so overpopulated that uh um I guess at least now they're talking that building a new capital um because the actually Jakarta sinking into the sea, but it's so overpopulated, the traffic so hellish, you cannot, you can't reserve an air ticket ahead of time because you might not get to the airport that day because of the traffic. But I'm imagining, excuse to repeat, I may have said this before on this show, but I'm imagining the mindset of someone who grow up there and has some fat wife and think, oh, yeah, I live in this, you know, overpopulated, I'm going to fuck a sixth kid into the wife. And they were doing that. And to me, that's an example of some kind of speciation that has to be spiritually a

different species than me, because if I lived in that circumstance, I would just shut down completely. I'd become completely autistic. I wouldn't be able to speak or talk to anyone or any woman. But somehow they breathe in that circumstance. And yet, Mr. Starr, that is stopping now, I think, because of this cell phone, iPhone, iPotato issue. And do you think that added to, excuse me, what you said about status differential, do you think that actually it is your generation of Zoomer girls who are essentially psychologically castrating these men abroad because they dance on video, and then these men compare it to their wives and they say no I will not fuck a second or third kid into this fat why I want

I want that girl on the the video and which they can't have so they they you know do you think that's an issue I absolutely I do I do think that in these places that kind of thing is probably an issue another thing too that I think is worthwhile mentioning I regard the cell phone as the most most perfigious device of Anglo cultural victory ever unleashed on the world. Just as a pure concept, the cell phone is this complete synthesis of Anglo-Saxon values, this idea of individualism, of algorithmic, you know, like self-selection into pools of online content. And of course, you know, the ideologies that flow from this feminism, you know, in kind of materialism, commodification of things, is very at core with the Anglo-Saxon nature.

So really I perceive this as the last part of the grand plot by Her Majesty, herself, to bring about our complete victory over the entire world. Well, their complete victory, of course, because I'm a Letinx, I'm a 4-9 Guatemalan man. But yes, you know, you are very correct when you talk about this, that there is this massive part played in like just the sexual mass cucking of the entire third world by, you know, White Floyd. But also of course this infiltration, I mean this is another thing too, you see the exact same thing play out in the inverse when it comes to K-pop idols and like subcontinental girls um it's a running joke on twitter now that pakistani girls are the ones running these k-pop stan accounts and you know like masturbating flicking the flicking the bean uh to use a

colloquialism over these korean men but it's not just uh it's not just that it's in uh russia too let's uh i think the russian girls that you know they don't i don't know what it's called now gopnik or muzik but they have this novy up uh muzik uh you know in a wife beater uh kind of russian man beat beat you up and so on and so the russian girls they like the k-pop they like the k-pop stars the the korean yes same same idea you know yes yes but uh no mr star this this very interesting i don't want to keep you much longer i think that uh i i i do here in in in background sirens are calling for you, but I wanted to ask you before we go, yes, what do you think most likely trajectory of... Well, it's a big question. Would you want

to answer likely trajectory of world in five to 10 years? Do you see any people always hope for? They don't say they hope for it. They don't say they hope for it, but I think they hope for black swan catastrophic events i don't know that any such thing will happen but uh how do you see things uh developing in in five or ten years and you can say united states or world whatever appeals to you um well in the political sphere i think what we're observing right now in the western world writ large is this kind of collapse of post-1945 liberalism um and when i say collapse you know i want to be very clear about what this means i don't really think this ideology is being discredited I honestly don't think that there are met like these new narratives

that have emerged from the right wing that are all that strong or the left wing for that matter I think more so it's just that for whatever reason the politicians of the liberals fear in the West have decided to throw away the core foundational values of our well not foundational but you know the core values of our societies for a very long time for no real reason to do their attachment to importing third-world immigrant populations this is a very bizarre choice I don't understand it I don't think it can last much longer I honestly think that we're heading I don't think we're going to see mass immigration continuing past 2035 so you know about a decade and in fact I honestly recent developments have convinced me that it will probably

likely grind to a halt before 2030 or so but maybe I'm too optimistic I don't know that's that's the core trend I see in our nations in the political sphere in the technological sphere I see a lot of acceleration actually of technology um it used to be kind of in vogue to say that this is stagnated in some respects I feel like that's less true now it feels like you know obviously there's there's AI I I'm not a big fan of modern AI tech I think a lot of a lot of what people say about it is capeshit maybe I'm wrong once again I don't really know but you know I see a lot of cool stuff now coming out in biology and material sciences I think the Chinese objective or desire to create more like real that China bringing online its human talent is going to play a large part in some

kinds of new kind of innovation yes nuclear very interesting things happening in that world as well so yes I think I think there's there's a cool kind of opposing trend where I'm broadly pessimistic about society in the West, kind of optimistic about technology in some respects. Mr. Star, I don't mean to interrupt you, but on the major point you made about the decline of liberalism or its discardment even by liberal elites, among younger people, I think you've You've told me that leftism, or at least hardcore leftism, or the orthodox leftism is being abandoned by many zoomers. Is this, or it's discredited among them? Is this true or a large portion of them? I don't know that many zoomers who are what I would call liberals, it seems to, young

people seem to have conglomerated either around vague apoliticalism, generally defined by by like a rough kind of like set of leftist, like lefty lib principles that mostly just conform to like what's kind of in vogue at the time. Then there's like this right wing caucus. It's, you know, I think there used to be like a hard split between like dissident rights and like, you know, mainstream rights. I think now amongst young people, it's more like this kind of big swamp And all, you know, it's just all of these people with a bunch of some of them very rational, some of them very odd beliefs kind of converging and discussing together and more or less agreeing on things. But, you know, I how useful this particular aspect is going to be, I am skeptical somewhat.

And then there's there's the the kind of dysgenic left. But even amongst the I don't I don't know, I feel like the dysgenic left is much smaller amongst zoomers than it was in like the millennial generation um yes i i i don't know i it zoomers honestly they feel in a lot of respects apolitical they feel very cynical i think about politics about political solutions writ large politics just largely seems to exist as a status thing to them um or as a signaler of other values particularly those in relation to like race yes and the The cynicism and skepticism observation, I think, is very important because people assume that just if the choice, there must be a choice, there must be a choice between religion on one hand or science on the other.

It's very possible people are becoming simply cynical and skeptical, even in a popular, not philosophical sense. I think that's very possible. But your name online before we go, I hope I not keep too much, but your name online is favela overlord and uh do you believe this plausible path for the world in next 10-20 years that it does become one giant uh well maybe not haiti but let's say the slums of of kolkata rio or nairobi some giant favela covering more or less the entire earth and if so i don't think that is necessary for despair is never too late i think there are ways to prosper even within favela but yes i would say that it is very plausible that we end up with this kind of like global favela world and in a certain respect um i i don't take it as cause either though for

despair or hopelessness or even sadness like i say you know i take a kind of nihilistic approach to all of these things um i i just hope that you know like if this does happen then well i don't hope i know I know very very very intimately that if this does happen then me and my friends are going to figure something out you know I think that's kind of what is meant by my name it's like this idea of you put me in the favela I'll be the overlord or you know something along these lines you know like I like I can imagine a picture of like Thomas Shelby you know with that kind of the the Instagram script over this of course is like a motivational image yes yes when When you are favela overlord, don of giant section of United States southeast favela,

I hope, yes, you, I will come be Aristippus at your court, sir. We're going to put you in a jester costume and permit you to dance, yes, this, this. This very good. Well, I've been keeping you, I've been keeping you a long time, Mr. Star, and I want to thank you and you come back on the number one sex show Caribbean Rhythms any time. Until next time then, we say BAP out!