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    6:17PM Nov 21, 2023

    Speakers:

    Razib Khan

    Mark Safranski

    Keywords:

    talking

    people

    war

    podcast

    ukraine

    russia

    military

    warfare

    great

    china

    idea

    work

    world

    generation

    libya

    strategic

    neoconservative

    united states

    write

    ukrainians

    This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy, these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning.

    All right, everybody. This is Razib Khan. I am here with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And I am here with Mark Safranski who is the I don't want to say mastermind, but kind of the mastermind behind Zen Pundit, which is a long term blog that's been around for I think, 20 years now. And that's kind of how I know Mark, in terms of, you know, I started blogging around 2002. And so I was around back then, you know, in the days of yore, in the ancient days, but, you know, so we've known each other online for a long time. And I was thinking about just people that I have engaged with over the years, and who I've never had a discussion with, like this. And so you were one of the people. So I reached out, you know, there's gonna be for the listeners out there. There'll be some, you know, you will notice people who have like, long, long internet footprints coming on this podcast, I think, a little bit more in the next year. That's one of my plans, because I think there's a lot of people out there who've been doing things for a long time. And, you know, putting their voice out there, their thoughts, their ideas. And, you know, just this is another, another venue. We're not doing a tick tock here. We're not that advanced, very Gen X elder, geriatric millennial podcasting, right. So we're not, we're not going so far, you know, no live streams here. But you know, I want to talk about some of the things you're interested in. So Zen Pundit is a blog that's been focused on foreign policy, military affairs, that sort of thing, international relations, I've seen it over the years, in terms of commentary. And obviously, it's mostly disjoint, I would say, with the type of stuff that I focus on and write about, but, you know, we both come out of that same early era of 2002, 2003, 2004. And no matter what you did, as, you know, let's say your like, narrow focus specialty, it was hard to avoid touching on Iraq, and, you know, our nation at war. Some of you youngsters out there don't know what I'm talking about, aside from the history books, or maybe the documentaries or the YouTubes, that you've seen, but, you know, there was a whole zeitgeist, you know, back then, and we were all part of it. You know, it was, you know, not totally ideologically polarized, I would say, there was a few doves, but really, it was what type of Hawk were you? And, you know, what should we invade? And who should we invade, you know, so that was the whole thing, and maybe we'll get to that later. But I want to start out actually, you know, as we're recording, there is the Israeli invasion of Gaza. And there is basically, I think, the biggest set piece type battles since World War Two, maybe the Korean War, I don't know, in eastern Ukraine in the Donbass region. So a lot is going on. And, you know, back 20 years ago with Donald Rumsfeld, you know, there was this idea of kind of, like his technological Advanced Warfare with a lighter infantry footprint, maybe we had some ideas, I wasn't, you know, deeply involved in the technical, or the literature, so to speak. But, you know, I did superficially run into this sort of stuff. And you know, we are in 2023 I have a supercomputer in my pocket all the time. As opposed to you know, back in back in 2002 I had a I think it was like a some was it was a Samsung flip phone of some sort though, it was Samsung, but it was a flip phone and it had like I'm making a gesture like you guys won’t see because we’re not doing a video of this. You guys will not see but you know, I had to like pull open like an antenna. That's what I had to do back that it was before it was before the Nokia phones so you know, we have so much technology now and yet you know, in Ukraine, they're in trench warfare and then it seems like the operation that the Israelis you're doing is pretty old school in a lot of ways like I know that they have you know they have those rockets that do that intercept the dumb the dumb bombs that the Hamas throws at them or Hezbollah, but you know, when it comes to going into Gaza seems pretty old school. So I guess the question that I have for you, is like let's you know, and I put this in the notes like bracket between 9/11 to 10/7 The main thing What I'm thinking is like how's warfare changed? The main thing that I'm gonna bring up right now is like that I as a as a layperson can think of is drones, which was wonder weapons, Bob Woodward first wrote about them in the 2000s. And now like, I see drones around, like I see drones around in Austin,

    Drones actually go back to World War One. The first drones were used in the Western Front real primitive aircraft essentially to be a dumb bomb. So it's an old technology that's been refined and stabilized and made increasingly miniaturised and precise. So you're seeing right now in Ukraine, you're seeing soldiers doing a lot of screening with netting, and metal wire, it's an attempt to prevent some of these micro drones from getting close enough to essentially be a flying grenade and kill you. The the learning curve is - somebody like John Rob would talk about is really fast right now in places like Ukraine, because both sides are, especially the Ukrainians are attempting to innovate on the fly. And that's where you see your greatest creativity in tactical warfare, is when people who are actually fighting are making those jerry rigged adjustments or people close to the line who have engineering capacity, they're trying things out and seeing if they work experimental weapons in the field. We also did that during Vietnam, and it didn't work out quite so well, for us when we're doing that, but the Ukrainians and other groups that are often irregular, do seem to be very effective, because they have to be it's existential for them at that level to to prevail over the near enemy who's seen maybe 200 yards away from them. So yeah,

    I mean, I guess, you know, what I'm wondering about is the pervasiveness of information technology, you know, there used to be walkie talkies and other things. But, you know, everyone's got cell phones, the early days of Ukrainian war, Donbass, or whatever you want to call it, there's a lot of talk about how they're using Star Link, they were using Western information technology, to really coordinate in a way that the Russians could not because the Russians were not as advanced, although a little skeptical of that, because, you know, cell phone technology are pretty widespread, and they're pretty cheap and commoditized. So I'm not sure if it was the technology or the institutional abilities, but in any case setting that aside, over the last, you know, 20 years, like, let's say, literally 20 years 2003 to 2023. How has information technology changed warfare on the ground? Like if you're an infantry man, if your tank guy, you know, I mean, I'm assuming that they have, they have probably the internet, right, they have the internet.

    You know, it's kind of interesting that you bring this up with the 2001 piece, because going Rumsfeld, my aunt worked for him, by the way, for many, many years. So I have some family insight into the way he operates. But he was very enchanted with the idea of a revolution in military affairs. And in particular, which is an idea that goes back to the, to the mid 1970s. He was particularly enchanted with an advisor, Admiral Cebrowski and Cebrowski had come up with a theory of network centric warfare, where you would be able to, and he was looking ahead because the technology was not as robust or as widespread as it is today. Because this isn't around 1998 He was writing this paper, that you would be able to essentially empower everyone down the chain of command to act more rapidly more autonomously through the sharing of information, and Rumsfeld liked that, because it would allow him to reform the Defense Department to make it lighter, faster, more lethal more mobile than it had been at that time. These plans were partially implemented. But when 911 happened, that a lot of the transformation plans had to be set aside for dealing with the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. So Cebrowski foresaw all of this. But going into a long counterinsurgency wars delayed, the adaptation of maximizing this technology, by the US military and what was adapted, was used in exactly the wrong way, which was to centralize decision making, at a far removed from where the ground truth was happening, essentially the hierarchy, big army used that to restrain and control, even down to the squad level. Sometimes in Afghanistan, you would have a major general who was playing Captain instead of attending to general things because the technology made it possible for him to, quote ride along. In fact, the the president, President Obama and his close advisers rode along on the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. They were right there on on video the whole way they weren't exercising comand, fortunately, but they were there essentially in the room with the shooters and operators who were attacking bin Laden’s compound.

    Oh, yeah, I want to actually, as you're talking about this, and kind of how 911 Sounds like it's short circuited or at least interfered with some of the natural organic development that you're talking about. I hear terms like fourth generation and fifth generation warfare. I don't really know what these generations are. Can you go from first to fifth?

    Well, if this is a theory that was developed by a guy named William Lind, William Lind was an associate one of many associates of a strategist named John Boyd. John Boyd was an Air Force colonel, who had been originally if you've probably watched the Top Gun movies, Boyd coming out of the Korean War was was one of the first Top Gun instructors and his job was essentially to assess why we were not doing so well in the Korean War against against the Soviets because they were flying the North Korean planes, why they were shooting down so many American planes. So through many years of iteration, you came up with a strategy, which is generally known, you've probably seen the OODA loop. About orientation, observation orientation, decision, action feedback loop, you will gain an advantage over the enemy if you can go through this decision cycle faster and deeper than your opponent. Boyds acolytes, the people around him, went in different directions after the Cold War, and William Lind was who had worked for Senator Gary Hart as an arms and military defense adviser, which is odd because William Lind is very right wing, and Gary Hart was not, but he was postulating this idea that there were four essential generations of warfare and the the first generation warfare, which which would be the close order drill of early you know, musket fighting. Gustavus Adolphus and people in the cabinet wars of the 18th century where the muskets had to line up shoulder to shoulder in order to be an effective firing weapon, that it required a lot of disciplined going into second generation which then would be the static defensive warfare of the Western Front, or what Lind referred to as all that French crap. Third generation warfare, which, in layman's parlance would be blitzkrieg, a combined armed motorized assault, planes. And then fourth generation warfare. It's not exactly guerrilla warfare. In Lind’s thinking it was and also another Israeli military historian named Martin van Creveld also was a major contributor to this idea. The idea behind fourth generation warfare is you got these regular fighters who were not trying to do what Maoist guerrillas had done, which is have a revolution and seize the state, but to essentially destroy the state and either replace it with nothing or carve out an autonomous zone of operation where the fourth generation warfare group could pursue whatever it’s illogical or economic aims. So you can fold in a lot of kinds of religious groups, ethno sectarian groups, criminal insurgencies all fit under this fourth generation rubric. And it seemed to really fit the moment of al Qaeda and other non state actors being able to make strategic attacks on even a superpower like the United States, and have far reaching political strategic effects from these attacks. Lind's theory was not well liked by I would say the Orthodox thinkers in the US military and there are some problems with it because it's historically flawed theory. But it's a nice concept for for organizing different forms of tactical warfare. The fourth generation people got a lot of things right about the trend of where warfare was going. Fifth generation warfare is, and I was involved in this so, so as one of the people thinking about it was an attempt to come up with ways that could balk or smother or suppress fourth generation insurgents like, like al Qaeda. It wasn't terribly coherent, though there were some good ideas with me. And I, one of the books that I contributed to has an outline on this. For me, the answers are not very satisfying, because one of the answers to deal with this sort of, of a political group that isn't seeking to replace the state, but is destabilizing society completely, is genocide. To crush one of these groups, the state takes off the gloves, and really does everything they can to shred the social networks of whatever sub population is supporting the group. And there's quite a bit of historical evidence that shows different regimes had done this, with this purpose in mind. Even Stalin's purges, which look entirely random, and there was a large random element to it had certain targeted populations within it. Ethnic Poles, Chechens, members of certain pre revolutionary parties, where the lethality was upwards of 90%. So this is a tactic that a regime that is not very technically sophisticated or has a lot of financial resources can implement. You don't need to be an advanced industrial society to implement this type of a strategy. The other way to do it, but actually, we saw something similar. We saw this in Sri Lanka, with the crushing of the Tamil Tigers. They crushed a lot of Tamils with the Tigers. In order to end that war, it works most of the time. The other way is the American way of war with massive surveillance and traditional counterinsurgency tactics, and building up power centers in the society that can handle the fourth generation warfare or insurgent group, it requires an awful lot of money to fight a war that way. And not many countries are willing to foot that bill.

    On my substack, I did write about, I did write about the Dzungar genocide in the 18th century. And that's basically what you're talking about insofar as the the Manchu dynasty, the Qing decided, look, these people keep rebelling, we get rid of the people, no more rebellions. I mean, and so they got rid of the people you know, northern Xinjiang is not Mongol. It's not Oirat, it's not Dzungar anymore, because they got rid of the , you know, they were eliminated them, you know, and with pre modern, you know, genocides, you know, it's not like they need to round them up industrially. It’s just like, people just starve, you know, they can't really just survive out in the wild in the elements, you harass them, and that's one thing I read. I mean, it was that was one of the books about the new world where, like, so many people starve because they were sick, or there was just disturbances and warfare. You can't plant your crops, you know, when you’re at your Malthusian limit, you're done. You know. People don't have like massive store houses. They can't go to Costco to stock up, you know, it's like, think about it, like they're always on the edge. So I think that's one thing to consider. I want to ask you, though, Mark, just going back to like, what I want to start out with in terms of how things have changed. Like, I'll give you a concrete example, not related to, you know, your, your competencies, but like, for example, the 1990s, I think we're of a certain age, do you know, the optimism about the internet? Like I have told this story on this podcast before as you know. It was like, I was like, what are people going to be doing in the 21st century on the internet, and I remember, like, in 1995, being like an 18 year old thinking, Oh, my God, they're just gonna read so many books, like all the books are gonna be out there, and we’re going sit there and read the books, and like, read the books over and over again. So what are people doing in 2023? They're screaming at each other on the internet. They're watching retarded tiktoks. And, okay, in hindsight, all of this makes sense. I mean, I was not thinking clearly. About what, like, a lot of bandwidth would bring. Yes, people were not going to be reading Shakespeare with their be bandwidth. Okay, I got it. I got it. So, you know, that's what I think about where it's like, oh, like I had this image of the internet, and it was just a bigger library. That is not what people want it. So in terms of like when you see warfare today, compared to the year 2000, you know, I mean, what, what, what is what surprises you and what doesn't surprise you.

    The transformation that happened with with warfare is it has to do a lot with the uniqueness of, of America's position in the world, another country that that lacked our economic and military primacy could not have done so many stupid things. And persisted in doing them, without that economic surplus behind it. So what we essentially did was we took a we took a military that was essentially still, in reduced size, a Cold War military and changed it into largely a heavy land base constabulary force to do counterinsurgency, and small wars type fighting to deal with Islamist deal with Islamist irregulars. And this is supplemented by counterterrorism strikes, and we begin seeing actually, you mentioned drones, you, you began seeing the shift from cruise missiles, which are inordinately expensive. I think tomahawks are a couple million a copy to Predator drones of the big, large flying platforms. And, of course, these these drones, you know, AI was not advanced, and people have moral scruples about about letting a machine have autonomous killing authority, we could do it now. It's just do we want to do that and have the legal consequences and moral political consequences of doing that. Someone will do it and the less powerful you are, or the less responsible you are, the more likely it's, you know, it's probably going to be a non state actor or a small, a small regime that will, will do that for the first time. And because just allow it to indiscriminately kill whatever is comes into its path until it runs out of ammunition. But we've transformed into a heavy land based counterinsurgency force. And now we are trying to shift gears again, and become a high tech, long range fires force designed to undertake a, you know, a deterrence of China, which is a very strong peer competitor. And the Marines are actually doing a really good job of it. The Marines are, are far ahead of the other services and making this transformation. It was a bitter, inside debate inside the Marine Corps. But they have actually gotten to the point now where when we Wargaming conflict with China, over Taiwan, the United States is no longer consistently losing these war games. So and we were that's kind of what shook up the military is about three years ago, we were losing every war game in. Yeah. So one of the biggest changes is, is we now have a peer competitor, that is, in many ways stronger than either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever was relative to the United States, because its economy is two thirds the size of the United States. And,

    Yeah, so I mean, yeah, you have an outline of the questions. This is actually pretty much what I wanted to ask you about. So again, I have some younger listeners, you know, so you know, on my substack, I have podcasts and I have written stuff. I have taken surveys, believe it or not, the average age of the people that focus on the text is higher than the people that listen to the podcast. So I'm just gonna put that out there. And just candidly, so I know that the age is a little, a little younger. So I you know, I'm just gonna go back to the late 1990s You know, 1999 the best year in the history of the world, maybe, you know, it was Bill Clinton, and we didn't know he was a rapist, and we’re having fun. You know, Russia with our poodle. China was still eager. I mean, you remember those days? Not not a worry in the world. So you know. Yeah, it was very, uh, you know, and again, like, we thought the internet was going to be the information superhighway, not the, not the adult adult superstore. But,

    You know, we should have we shouldn't have really kind of known that because I don't know if you're Are you old enough to remember Usenet groups?

    Yeah, I've actually started I started out on Usenet 1994

    Okay, every platform, every usenet, or Hnet, that group starts out is like a utopian paradise and ends, it's as a dumpster fire, every single one. And we should have known that this would also happen to anything else that that we created.

    So the issue is, you know, the issue that we're talking about here and like warfare, like, some of the stuff we're talking about is the same. The technology is what it is, what do you with it, you know, and we're humans and humans are going to do stupid things with it. And that's, that's the fundamental reality. Okay. But, yeah, so I mean, you know, this was a time where, you know, Charles Krauthammer, like I'll use him as a late neoconservative thinker. You know, he wrote about the Unipolar Moment, America was basically a world hegemonic, and when 911 happened, this was just in the wake of the budget surpluses. You know, Bill Clinton had really shaped that up, you know, because we were worried about the deficits in the bond markets, okay. We had money, we had a dividend. Bush was gonna do tax cuts, but also, you know, after 911, we went on a spree of like, these wars, and all this, you know, adventures abroad and anything was possible. And yes, it Iraq in particular turned into a quagmire, but people don't remember the feeling of almost like invincible power in a way that we wanted to project, I think after the shock of 9/11 because that was, that was kind of a mote in our eye of the unipower. And so it was a non state actors. So they leveraged surprise, you know, okay. So as you said, here's a really important point, you know, I've read like, Azar Gat’s work on war in history. And one thing he points out, which is obviously true is in modern, in the modern world, industrial capacity really matters a lot. The union versus the Confederacy or the Confederacy on a per soldier basis had a better professional officer corps, obviously, like just because right then they talked about at the time, but the Union just wore them down, Soviet Union and the United States versus, you know, Nazi Germany, people don't like to hear this, but Nazis were actually more efficient per soldier. Okay, so we just overwhelm them with our material with our resources with our manpower, person power. And, you know, just our resources like America, North America is a bonanza, right, and, you know, Russia also has a lot of resources, a lot of strategic depth. Okay. So China, is not quite at our economy side, but it's not that far. And its manpower is massive. So obviously, you compared to the Soviet Union, you pointed out the Soviet Union is population was somewhat larger than the United States. But as you point out, its economy was always puny. And the only way that they matched us militarily was expending well over I think, 50% of their budget, on the military, while we spent, like, closer to like, you know, 10-20%, whatever, you know,

    Part of the reason they're estimates. Because there's this whole debate with the red team, the famous Red Team debate about Soviet estimates, with the CIA that, you know, people like that it was Richard Perle, were involved in, among others, maybe I have that wrong, he might be the wrong person. But we grossly underestimated how much the Soviets were actually spending on the military, because we just didn't think that was possible. So we will be, but we gauge their economy as much larger than it actually was. Because we couldn't conceive of someone spending 25% 30% of their GDP in peacetime on the military. So we overestimated what the Soviets were capable of. By quite a bit at that time.

    Yeah. So are you worried? I don't think I'm I don't think we're worried that we are miss estimating China. China's they lie. But we as people can go, or until recently, they would go to the cities of eastern China. And also we import a lot of things from them. So we know what their production capacity is,

    Yeah. They get more bang for the buck for what they spend also in military hardware. But here's here's the nutshell of the problem. If you go back to 2000, the United States, GDP was about 10 times the size of China's you go to 2023. We now have a $26 trillion economy. But in the same period of time, we had 10 trillion in 2000. At the same time, China's gone from 1.2 trillion In two 18 trillion, that's that's growth like no one has ever seen in the entire recorded history of the world. So, structurally, there was nothing that was going to stop a more polycentric world from forming. Thinkers and Richard Nixon was one of the probably the most prominent person to foresee this. But he wasn't the only one. You have people like Herman Kahn, Andrew Marshall, all saw that the world was trending in this direction. So there was nothing that the United States could do to maintain its economic advantage to the same degree without growing at eight, nine 10% a year in which is not really possible in a mature economy in peacetime. But we really, really made some strategic errors that have compounded this relative decline. Absolutely, we're more powerful than we were in 2000. But relative terms, we are less powerful. And we've had about four major strategic disasters that ranged from medium to colossal sides that have aggravated this relative decline. Deindustrialization, starting in the 90s, with a particularly unwise move of moving our industry, to a country that was likely to become an adversary. And that was done for a neoliberal political economy reasons to lower worker wages, to increase Wall Street bonuses, it was was all done for economic largesse for the for the 1%. That was, that was a terrible, terrible mistake, that everyone, I'm sure at the time understood what they were doing. But they did it anyway. Then there is the invasion of Iraq, and the entire war on terror. We lost two wars, and we won half a war against al Qaeda, at the cost of at least a trillion dollars. And it occupied us for a good part of 20 years, while the rest of the world continued on.

    I want to I want to just interject right here, you can just continue exactly. One thing about those wars. I have a friend who's a neurologist, and he says it's very easy. Well, I don't wanna say easy, but he has work until he retires in 30 years, because of those wars. So we don't think about the cumulative impact of people. Well, first of all, obviously, people young men who died, young man, but people who died. But aside from that, there's many, many people whose lifetime morbidity is going to be increased, and whose lifetime productivity is decreased And I don't think that that's actually put into all the calculations all the time, anyway.

    Oh no, it's it definitely is not. It's part of the reason why the VA budgets have gone up is because we have a lot of people who are surviving injuries and wounds and traumas that in prior wars, they would not have survived. I mean, it's great that they have but it's it's a marker of, of what we put people through. And before I go back to the debacles, I have a friend for example, Pete Turner is a former intelligence and special ops guy who actually runs a podcast called The Break It Down show. He had 72 months of combat in theater in Afghanistan and Iraq, either doing intelligence work, Human Terrain work, or active combat. That's crazy. That's unlike any other war. In Vietnam. If you did two tours of combat, that was heavy duty. We've got guys who had 5,6,7, 9 tours of combat. That's we've never asked American soldiers to carry that type of - or not just soldiers, Marines, airmen, personnel in any other war that we have ever fought. And it was really unfair. The degree to which that burden was not equally distributed throughout society in this time, and that probably contributed to many of our problems. In terms of the other things that were huge strategic debacles is well we really couldn't have done anything to prevent China's growth, given its given its size, economic growth catching up towards us. The naval decline that we have engineered for ourselves, is a complete own goal. 2000 we were the only blue water Navy on Earth. I think we had something like 14 carrier groups, maybe 15 at the time.

    Razib: I've heard that term Mark, what does Blue Water mean?

    Blue Water Navy is a navy that can operate anywhere on the world's oceans and militarily project power, effectively. And with the decline of the Royal Navy and the decline of the Soviet Navy, which essentially rotted in the docks, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russia could not afford to maintain its navy. And a lot of the fleet is what we used to joke because the Russian ships were all rusty, you know, and they looked like you know, like, they were garbage scows, that's how our ships look now. Unfortunately, the US Navy ships are covered with rust, for lack of maintenance, it drives the navalists on Twitter, crazy. But in 2000, we had 320 warships, and that was down from a Cold War peak of 550. Today, we have 280 warships. At the same time, China went from 223 warships, most of which were coastal in nature to 355, including two aircraft carriers. And they are projected to go to 435 ships by 2030. There they're launching 23 New warships a year. United States is struggling to launch two a year. Yeah.

    I have a question. Actually. I have a question. I didn't know any of this. Great. Great. Well, it's great to know this not to hear this, if that makes sense. Yes. I think a lot of people are like, I mean, I, I feel like I'm relatively well informed about like politics, international stuff that I'm like, I'm a little taken aback by this, because I took for granted that we have a badass Navy, that was our thing ever since after World War Two. So talking about this, but I do want to ask now, you'd mentioned industrial capacity. There are things I mean, look, during the Cold War we produced better ships, better weapons better everything. There are things that it's really difficult for American manufacturers to do now that the Chinese can do, is that going to come? Because I you know, when you're saying like Chinese aircraft carriers, could they actually like potentially make better aircraft carriers and us or are they still kind of substandard?

    That's a really great question. And I do not claim to be a navalist. But my here's, here's my non expert opinion on that is no, their stuffs not going to be as good as ours. But the fact that they can build and experiment and learn on a much larger scale indicates that they're going to get a lot better. I mean, we have 11 carrier groups right now. And that's that's a tremendous advantage. But it's neutralized somewhat by if we're fighting over Taiwan, they don't need as many aircraft carriers, because they have the mainland Air Force with 2500 planes. So their country is an aircraft carrier for the for the neighborhood. But it while they may be a green Navy, in the sense that the PLA, PLA Navy is not blooded in any sort of way. And and our practice with complex operations, they're learning. They're trying and they're learning. They're learning with their mistakes. And they've got a much, I think, greater political tolerance for losing ships if a conflict ensues. And there are forces buttressed by something that naval is called the maritime militia, which is essentially using quasi military Coast Guard ships which look nothing like our or any other countries, Coast Guard ships, and all kinds of civilian ships to swarm and dominate a space. They can simply bring to bear more hulls in an area than any other naval force on earth. And our Navy is shrinking rather than growing.

    All right, this is yeah, this is concerning. So would you say that they are the biggest military threats since the Soviet Union then obviously

    Mark: Oh, absolutely.

    And do you think they're a bigger military threat to the Soviet Union?

    because they do not have the same power projection capability yet that the Soviet Union did. And they have while they are building out their nuclear force, which is something else that's very disturbing. They've had a rapid increase from about, you know, maybe 100 to 200 weapons to 500. In just a couple of years with new ICBM fields being laid. It's still far behind the United States. They don't have the ridiculous amount of nuclear warheads that the US and the Soviet Union Morni at each other. The thing that's troublesome is the United States except in the nuclear realm. And on the High Tech Edge of military equipment, we've lost the quality that military thinkers in the US military call overmatch. Our ability to to dominate the opponent through sheer firepower, force, logistical mass, we do not have that anymore. With China, that is gone. Which is why we are not winning all the war games when we work game scenarios with the Chinese military because we lacked that overmatch it's China has become a peer. And the Navy that's struggling to be struggling to maintain parity is the US Navy, because we lacked the shipbuilding capacity have from having de industrialized, and the Chinese have a massive, massive shipbuilding capacity that we will not be able to catch up to for 1015 years. And that is if we dove in right now, with a massive federally subsidized expansion of shipyards and steel mills. We have really let things slip in that regard.

    Yeah, I mean, you know, I, what you're alluding to here is, once you deskill, you can't just rescale overnight. So yeah, yeah. Like there's there's people that have retired that, you know, they took their knowledge with them, you know, they're not going to come back. So I let me just ask you is, are concerned with non state actors that we have? That's still a thing?

    It is, it is. You know, I have not the greatest tech expert in the world. But one of the things that back during the strategy blogosphere that we used to talk about, was the super empowered individual, somebody who was able to do a strategic level attack on minimal resources. The Unabomber would be an example of that. Commanding national government attention for 17 years, killing people. The attack of 9/11 really a very small group, causing, you know, huge amounts of economic and political damage and changing the changing the policies in the United States pretty dramatically. If someone is leveraging technology, and here's like a fear, somebody's leveraging gene splicing technology, for example, to to alter viruses or bacteria and then releasing them in a population. If that person is not making a heavy digital footprint, if they're not engaging in extremist rhetoric, if they're doing absolutely nothing to draw attention to themselves. They will always have that surprise, one shot, ability to do an effective attack, and no amount of surveillance is going to help because you won't be looking for such a person. So that that possibility is still there. The possibility of mass destruction attacks that are done by relatively clever people with engineering backgrounds is always a possibility. And groups in you know, non state actor groups can leverage these skills just as much as a lone wolf could could leverage these skills. So it's it's a threat, but I don't know how seriously we are taking that threat.

    I mean, that that was a that was a problem before 9/11. I remember, you know, I remember. I think it was the summer before 9/11 I think Anthony Shaheed, the late Anthony Shaheed was writing in the New York Times about being in, you know, Taliban. Well, I think what we call Taliban controlled Afghanistan or Pakistan, you know, that area, and it was, you know, bin Laden was mentioned in it, you know, and bin Laden had been a thing in the late 90s, you know, a big player and he that's why we you know in Sudan. And so it was always, like, all the everything was there telling us that that that was something, you know, tail risk, whatever you want to say, a black swan, it was gonna happen, probably. I think I'm going to put this out there. I think one of the reasons that it has diminished in from the Middle East and Islamic world, I think it's demographics. The average age was very young 20 years ago, and there's a massive demographic transition. Until recently, we had a higher total fertility. I mean, before like the millennials really started not having children we had a higher fertility than Iran. Saudi Arabia has gone through demographic transition all of these countries, and most of the 9/11 bombers were Saudi, which, you know, there's a little propaganda operation Uh, for people to kind of memory hole that, you know, but most of them were Saudi, they're Saudi nationals. Our great ally. And so I think one of the reasons we're not seeing so many of these, you know, movements, non state actors is like the raw material of, you know, young hotheads is not there to some extent. So, I mean, that's positive. On the other hand, we are now back in a complicated and interesting world. I mean, from your perspective, there's a lot of things to look at a lot of things to think about, from my perspective, as business owner, as an entrepreneur. I'm pissed, you know, not to be like, you know, really selfish, because like, there are people who are dying out on battlefields, but this is uncertainty. This is nonzero. This is zero sum, you know? Why are we doing this? You know, like, Okay, so let's talk about like Russia, Ukrainian, like I talked about this, like a year ago, a year and a half ago, with several people. I haven't paid too much attention to it. I'm not I never put on like Ukraine flag on my like social media. Like being in general. I'm not like pro Ukraine. I'm not anti Ukraine. I'm not like super invested in this idea. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what they're doing. You know, I mean, what are they fighting over? This is insane. Right? Am I crazy?

    Yeah, they're they're fighting over this. This gets until our last strategic debacle, which is, which is how the United States has handled Russia policy since the end of the Cold War. And again, kind of Richard Nixon pointed out, things could go south, if we didn't handle this, right. And there's a lot of blame. On both sides of the equation, the people who screwed up their country were the Russians. But we also, on occasion, greased the skids for them. So we kind of treated Russia when it was down with some with a degree of benign neglect, and dismissal. And then as it got stronger, the the Russians seem to particularly get angry between Iraq, between Iraq and Libya. The Russians were turning away from the west. And that was in part for ideological reasons. It was in part for ego reasons. Putin didn't believe that his investments in diplomacy with George W. Bush were bearing sufficient fruit. And we were disregarding Russian interests in places like, like Libya, where they had an oil interest with with the Gaddafi regime. And it was swept aside by the British and French who are eager to have the same, especially the French to have those concessions, rights on paper, and they never really got it because Libya is still a shitshow. But that that kind of turned the ruling group the siloviki, around around Putin into a much more hardline and aggressive direction. And when they began going that direction, instead of addressing the aggression, which ranged from interventions in Georgia, and doing breakaway republics, on the fringes of its territory, to assassinating people in Western countries with pretty much blatant abandon. We strangely were passive under the Obama administration. And when they did the little green men and took Crimea away from the Ukrainians, and intervene there, the again, the Western response was greatly underwhelming. So that's another. I mean, we would we have gotten to the full out invasion of Ukraine, if we had not badly mishandled Russia's depredations earlier, and essentially ignored them. Would we be there today? You want I can go into what Putin is up to if he would like to.

    Yeah, let's talk about that. I want to get your take on that because that honestly, I just want to be over bro.

    This is actually one of the things in my wheelhouse. So Iwas a Diplo history guy in originally, but and it was a US Soviet relations were the things that I was delving into academically when I - back in the days when I thought I would become a professor. The tie between Ukraine and Russia is long. It's cultural Ukrainians are not the same as Russians. But it's a very strong close relationship in terms of religious orthodoxy. Languages is relatively similar, but the similarity diminishes as you go westwards because the Western Ukraine had more Polish and Western influence than than eastern Ukraine, but Ukraine was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, the black earth region is kind of like Illinois and Indiana, the topsoil is incredibly deep. And it's a breadbasket for the world. But largely this, Putin, this Putin's Eurasian ideology that he's adopted, which is a mix of, of turn of the century, philosophers who are so obscure that most people have never heard of them, for Russian nationalism and mysticism to what's called national Bolshevism. He decided that re conquering Ukraine was absolutely necessary for Russia's return to great power status. For the industry and the in the agriculture, that's certainly helpful and undisputed control the Black Sea, but it really was more keeping Western influence out and away from his territory. Ukraine didn't want to have that sort of relationship with Russia, most of the people want a Western orientation, and that's, that's threatening to Putin's regime, which is not ideologically very solid.

    Okay. So I mean, I guess that one thing that I'm wondering about, okay, so I, you know, I will cop to, you know, kind of thinking it was okay, for the Obama administration, actually, at the time to just kind of ignore the issue because, look, Libya happened, Iraq happened, Afghanistan will still go in. I mean, I think a lot of Americans were just fatigued, you know, with all this stuff. And so that's, that's honestly, it's how I felt I was just like, honestly, I'm gonna say, like, just give them Crimea, and just like, shut them up. Like, who cares? Mostly Russian speaking anyway, you know, so? Yeah. So I was just, you know, that was my attitude. And I think it was a lot of people's attitude, obviously, you give them an inch, they go for a mile. That's obviously what they did. That's, that's true. But, you know, do we have I mean, I mean, do we have the capacity? I mean, like, it seems like right now, we're winding that we as in the West, we're winding down that war, because now we're focused on Israel. And also just in general, there's just an exhaustion. on the European side. Yes, you need to decouple from Russia. But, you know, the manpower, the material. And I mean, Ukrainians are losing people every day. Like we don't think about it, or I met we in America, don't think about it, like regular people don't, you know, but yeah, they're gonna run out of people at some point. And it looks like the borders. I mean, Russia gained a little bit. But they’re not that far from where they were at the beginning of the invasion, which is like, who gained what I mean, I guess the main upside for the Ukrainians is like, they really are into being Ukrainian now. I know Ukrainians You know, now, and, you know, a lot of them, most of them were Russian speaking, growing up. But now they're, like, super into being Ukrainian. Russia created Ukraine, if Ukraine didn't exist as that, you know, coherent nation state before then Russia just created that. But it seems like Russia has weathered some of the sanctions pretty well. But it's not a great power. It's not. It seems like it's relying on China. It's aligning with Iran, like it's trying to create another circle of, of allies to buttress it. But, you know, it's a Petro state, you know, and that's what it is. Its population is shrinking. I mean, Russia is going to, I think, almost, I think it might already have a smaller population that Pakistan, you know,

    The Russians, they've lost quite a few people because their, their ministry of defense is stupid. It's the military bureaucracy is is incompetent. The Russians were actually quite good at it and high end, small, small sized operations squad and company. But you know, platoon, doing special ops, they were actually extremely skilled. They were not set up to to have a long war initially, which is how Russia has actually entered most of its wars. This is a very familiar historical pattern. There are very few wars that that Russia, the Soviet Union entered, where everything went well, in terms of the of defense and logistics and supplies. It's often a debacle. But Russia while they're losing lots of guys, they can do as you pointed out, they can do a war of attrition much better than the Ukrainians who have, you know, a third of the population that the Russians do. I don't know why the Ukrainians are - and I'm not an expert on tactics and I don’t hold myself out to be one I focus on strategy. But I don't know why they did a an offensive that went right into the teeth of Russian fixed defenses. They may have had good reasons for it, I think we found it bewildering and frustrating. The only way they're going to be able to handle, you know, much larger forces if they have some innovation, speed and mobility and in a different tactics, but you know, military bureaucracies like to do what they know, they don't like to do what's new. So,

    Yeah, yeah, that seems that seems correct. From what I can tell. Um, so, uh, you know, I want to ask you about the blob, which I don't talk about, like, you know, foreign policy very much on this podcast. So the blob, just so, you know, listeners who don't listen to like Bob Wright, or somebody, you know, is just like the foreign policy establishment in DC, you know, just, you know, all the think tanks and, obviously, State Department and everything like that they developed these consensus, and one thing I will say is, you know, I am old now. And so I have seen the fact that, like, they actually don't know that much a lot of the time. They proudly and boldly assert something and it just blows up in their face. They're like, okay, whatever, there's so like, let me like, concretely, I was in Andronikos, in Berkeley listening to my iPod Shuffle, when the Libya thing went down, and I just remember, this is not going to be good. This is not going to be good. And, you know, I was listening to something on something on like, you know, WBUR, whatever. And, you know, the host was not an expert, but the host was like, we sure we want to do this. We we’re already doing these two other wars. And do we do we want to deal with this in Libya? And everyone was like, and there were some Libyans on or Libyan dissidents, and they're like, you know, yeah, we got to go in there and like, liberate Libya from Qaddafi. And, and I'm like, wait, we did this. Like, didn’t we just go through this? And so I remember that, you know, I remember that. So you know, not, it's not just that event. It's just like, I don't, I don't care. Like, they don't know what they're talking about. Maybe they’re right sometimes, but I'm just saying like, you know, they're not like your surgeon, you know, you're not going to like a specialist that's going to like save your life. They know, some more than you. But there's also like other interests, like people always say, oh, there's a lot of money. You know, for example, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, you know, they're throwing money out there. So, you know, I mean, what why did we not highlight that most of the bombers on 9/11 were Saudi. Because we have an alliance with them, and they give a lot of money to rich Americans, you know, right.

    That's correct. I think we have a specific to Libya. I'll be real brief with this, the Libyan debacle, but it was a sign that the heavyweights, cabinet members in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Gates, were beginning to lose influence to Obama's staffers who come from a different generation. And because both of them were very reluctant about Libya, Gates thought it was stupid. And it was something pushed by Obama's staff. Like, for example, Ben Rhodes. I cannot think maybe, maybe you can. Can you think of anyone in the millennial or Gen X generation who is in the national security political class? Who has the strategic thinking of Kissinger, a Nixon, a Andrew Marshall, a George HW Bush?

    Yeah, I don't know. I think wasn't that supposed to be Samantha Powers? That didn't work out.

    Yeah. And that's not even our best. If you if you go back to the World War II, early Cold War, the wise men were of a caliber higher than the people I just mentioned. And the generations that have come through our best schools are, I would to be fair, they're very generally very bright people. But they're bright people in aggregate with very stupid ideas, very theory driven ideas, and a very superficial knowledge of the world. Lacking in depth for history, for languages, for culture, and this love of theory, whether it's political science theory, or some of these race and gender garbage fields, They have not served them well in national security. They don't know what they're doing. I've been told reliably by somebody in the government, that Biden's NSC has been spending up until recently, this is before the Israel Hamas war, were spending 80% to 90% of their time on Ukraine. That's completely out of balance for what the NSC is for. It shows a lack of ability to prioritize - well, they prioritize the Ukraine war, a lack of ability to look at the strategic big picture. And it also is a sign of a dysfunctional NSC, because they should be managing things in a completely different way rather than micromanaging one particular conflict. So the generations that we have in Washington now don't have a grasp on strategy, or geopolitics. And largely what they understand of geo economics is bad, because it's the neoliberalism that has gotten us into this de industrialized state of affairs. And a dysfunctional relationship with China. There's - the pipeline is not good to the highest levels of government. We are producing people to be leaders who lack any qualities of leadership, despite intellectual gifts. They've been they've been mis educated by and large.

    All right, so the skepticism of the blob that I hear from, you know, both the right and the left, actually, you're, you're basically saying it is warranted? Theyre full of it?

    Mark: Yeah.

    Yeah. I mean, because like, you know, there's this whole thing, you're not an expert, you gotta you gotta trust the experts. And I'm just like, you know, I've been around since the 20th century. And in this area, experts don't seem like they know, much, you know, what I'm saying? And so I think, you know, people need to be a little more skeptical. I also think, like, you know, I don't know all the details, cuz I'm not in DC. But it does seem like there is, you know, foreign governments are endowing, you know, especially the Arabs are very prominent, I'm sure. It's not just them, China. Yeah, China, that's what I'm thinking. And so that has an effect on you, you know, you have this, you know, abstract idea of what you're supposed to do, but you gotta like, pay your mortgage, and other things like that. I think people just Americans need to think about these sort of stuff is gonna get captured, you know, and I think we add a Pollyanna-ish, I probably part of it, too. You know, we had a pollyannish idea of globalization. And like, basically, there's only like, these evil actors, like al Qaeda, and everyone else is pretty much good. You know? Yeah, It was kind of an assumption there, you know, and during, like, you know, George W. Bush's, like the democracy promotion period. Democracy promotion in Gaza, you know, democracy promotion. I mean, like, for example, Iraq, you know, it's like quite an Iranian puppet. But, you know, Iran has it as like a semi satellite state. It's like a joint joint satellite state between Iran and the United States. That was not free. That was not the idea. You know, we remember it was going to be a Jeffersonian democracy, it was going to be like, vibrant. Now, what really happens is like, people just vote on, like, ethno linguistic religious blocks. And it's like, a negotiation between these blocks. And sometimes Iran, like, you know, pushes up, the pressure pushes up the heat, and we have to react and it's, it's a mess. It's a mess, you know. So, that hasn't worked out. I want to ask you, you know, I listened to the commentary podcast. I did a lot during the pandemic, a little bit less now. And I will tell you why I'm not neoconservative. And the whole neoconservative thing, Ok, your 21st century, neoconservatism was foreign policy. You know, a friend of mine would always say like, well, you're basically a 1970s neoconservative. Because, you know, I like the Manhattan Institute, and my attitudes towards urban policy are very similar to a lot of the neoconservatives. I agree with them. In any case, I love listening to commentary podcast with John Podhoretz and you know, at the time when they're talking about it, when they're talking about like New York City, where they're talking about urban issues, you know, even if I disagree on some of the details of domestic policy, I find that quite reasonable a lot of the time. And now on foreign policy. I just have like, Okay, I know what you're gonna say, like, we gotta like, invade everything. Yeah, you know, Israel, Israel, Israel which is, you know, like, I'm on the pro Israel side, I would say, but, you know, like, let's just like, we're not Israel. We're America. And I, you know, we had a neocon moment, after 9/11 and they kind of disappeared. We had America First we had Trump and a real pivot away from the sort of internationalism but now I feel like they’re come back like, Do you think I'm just being paranoid or what?

    In some ways they never went away. There's a big difference between the second generation of neoconservatives and the first generation that people like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. And people, in the sense that many of the people in that first generation had at one time been on the left, or even far to the left, and they had moved over time to the right Jean Kirkpatrick being another example. Moving to the right, the second generation, Bill Crystal's generation, they were never left in the first place. And they were solidly ensconced in in the conservative movement, or at least a subgroup within. They are not. They don't have the same approach. They're not as intellectually rigorous. They don't have the diversity of perspective. And it's not a Cold War framework. So what they have become is essentially, an interventionist party. By and large, and a national security party. And there are some, there's some good to them in the sense of they sometimes, you know, they have some use as John Bolton being an example, we'll keep getting jobs forever, until he dies. Because his main utility is to go in and get rid of bureaucratic opposition to the president, fire people, put new people and get a policy in place, get it, get it moving, after which point he's usually fired, because no one can get along with him. But he does have his uses. And I can see him being hired in another Republican administration. Because when the bureaucracy is resisting the President's policy, it's important for democracy that the President prevail. That's the person who was elected to make foreign policy, not people who have, you know, who are SES level civil servants are or appointees who are disenchanted, it's the either you get on the team or or get out, resign. And Bolton helps people find the door. So he'll get a job again. But some of the other ones will not. I think the Kagan's will continue to be influential. But they're never really going to be gone. They're a part of the blob. And they're, they're well funded. And they're DC establishment figures. Now they're not they're not intellectual or political insurgents in any sense of the word.

    Okay, I do have to say, I do have to say you're, you're saying like, Bill Kristol was never on the left. Yes. You went for the right to the left. That's why I am

    okay. All right. Fair, fairly set. Americans

    for the non Americans Bill Kristol was a speechwriter for Dan Quayle. He was the editor at, you know, Weekly Standard for a while and you know, but he was always, you know, editor at large. So he's like, this neocon eminence, you know, he helped push Sarah Palin forward in 2008. So he's like a very, very big mover and shaker in Republican politics or he was, and then Trump happened. And now he is basically on the left and I have friends who are Democrats, and he actually like now does coordination with liberals and Democrats and he's talked about its a little harder to coordinate democratic interest groups, you know, like, he appreciated being on the right but now he's like, you basically pro choice he used to be pro life but he's basically pro choice now from what I can tell. He's pro trans. You know, he, I remember like, in the early teens, he tweeted something where he made fun of a cover about trans people to New Republic, you know, and you know, I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna get the details of what I've heard like privately but he had very different ideas. He had very what is would now be politically incorrect opinions about gay people in the 90s and I'm gonna say that okay, you could like cup you can infer that from Weekly Standard what they print.

    I will also add in the neoconservative movement, as with the conservatives, generally, the grip the grifting has become extremely strong. The Neo cons you know, I have a lot of sinecures and foundations. They do some good in terms of putting policy alternatives out there, but it's it's become a lifestyle and a career path in a way that it wasn't in the in the late 70s and the 80s. And even the 90s. It there's there's a bit of insincerity and, and grafting on to the new shiny thing a lot with people like like Bill Kristol. So,

    It’s interesting to see how people evolve. You know, Glenn Greenwald became on the right. And now he's on the left again because of Israel. You know, we’ve talked for a while, we've seen a lot of things. You know, my focus is not too much on politics, I just kind of like, observe it. But I wanted to, like close out this conversation. It's been a great conversation.

    Mark: Oh, Thank you.

    But I want to close out the conversation. Let’s talk about, like the blogosphere commentary writing online, how you’ve seen it evolve over the last 20 years, the rise of the fall of the blogosphere, the rise of Twitter and X now the fall of Twitter and X the rise of tiktok, you know, YouTube, like, you know, streamers, here's one thing I'm gonna say. Just for the people out there, I think I've said this, but just something. So I write and I do podcasting, I do go out on YouTubes other people who are just YouTube people, you know, so I'm gonna put a name out there cuz he's so big that I don't think I think I'm gonna get criticized, but something like Michael Knowles, okay. He went to Yale. You know, conservative Catholic. He does. He's a good talker. He's a great talker. But you know, I think he majored in philosophy. He could write a lot, but he doesn't, because it's just bandwidth. And so he's a he's a commentator, on, on, you know, video, you know, whatever. And sometimes, you know, I will say, like, I was in a conservative group, okay. And we were just like, someone posted something about Michael Knowles like, This guy's such a jackass. And he sounds so dumb, like, What's up with him? And I'm just like, he's not dumb. Maybe he's a jackass. I don't know. I don't know him. But he knows what gets engagement. And he knows what works in video and like audio visual medium, which is a different thing than if he was writing 1000 word essay. So I will say, medium is the message like, I don't want to, like get into like the exact details. But on the high level, I do see these differences over time. And I feel like the early blogosphere, which was text based despite the downsides. There was a density, and an aspiration towards depth and complexity, even if it was a stretch goal that we failed a lot of the time. Honestly, I'm not I'm not gonna lie. Like, it's hard to do that on these live streams.

    Yeah, I some of this is generational, because I see this with my children. And I see this with my students. Going through people in their 20s Is there kind of a culturally post literate generation that they are definitely almost all of my students if they wanted to find out something would rather watch a video than read something about it, they go to go to YouTube and get a how to video or a quick explanation, then actually read something long form. And while that's not everybody in the generation, if you if you want to communicate with young millennials and Zoomers and get a political message out, you're going to have to operate at the level that, you know, if you want to reach them, you have to go where they are. But it cognitively talking is talking is great. But there are things certain complexities, as you mentioned that only that worked better in long form writing or an exchange of ideas and the blogosphere that you mentioned, you can't really go home again. There was the strategic, the strategic blogosphere in a way it was like an ecosystem. And it had importance because there were people who were quite powerful who were listening to it because there was a desperation in a phase of the war on terror and Iraq and Afghanistan for new ideas. That was part of a listserv called the warlord loop. And top people in the US military and defense department were were members of this group, just to listen to the ideas. And they would have aides designated, including famous people who've, who I won’t mention, but who are on a comeback tour right now with a new book would participate in these things to get these new ideas. So you had sites like the small wars journal, and Andrew Exum's blog Abu Muqawama later on strategy bridge and war on the rocks. John Robb, Thomas PM Barnett. My blog played a role. A lot of people like scholar’s stage I love scholar’s stage. But Tanner Greer started as a commenter and blogger in that time period, as well. And it was a great intellectual exchange that it would be nice to recreate that but I don't see how you can you need a culture that supports that. A culture of reading and analysis and in relatively semi civil commentary, that's difficult to maintain in a polarized moment.

    Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I do I do have to say this is podcast is hosted by substack. And I think substack has brought some of that. I think what substack is lacking. What what I have seen, it's lacking - Tanner Greer of scholar’s stage who I love, he's been on this podcast. He has brought this up. It is not as networked. It is not an integrated ecosystem. It is more brands, you know, you know, I’m a brand I guess Matt Iglesias is a brand. Andrew Sullivan is a brand. And so it is a way for us to leverage our brand, capture value. And you know, put the message out to our subscribers now. I will say I have a friend who is a Zoomer? He is Zoomer. He's 25. So that's a Zoomer? And he was like, I think it was 23 or 22. When I started my substack he's like, Oh my god, I'm so happy you have a substack because I just feel like a boomer having to go to a website. He just wants it pushed to him. And you know, we're like older guys here. Like I don't want to like be like crapping on the youth, but they're very passive. So, you know, like subscribing to a podcast. That is a millennial act. Okay. Zoomers, what they love is the stream. They love to get like the algorithm pushing content to them. This is why after two weeks, I upload all of my podcasts to YouTube for discovery, because that's what the Zoomers need and want. They listen to podcasts on YouTube. They do not listen to podcasts with Apple podcasts because that requires a proactive choice and agency and they lack that.

    Yeah, you're right. You're 100% right.

    Yeah, yeah, that's what I love Tik Tok, they love the algorithm, they love the feed, you know, they love to be pushed content. So we're old enough to remember, like, you know, there was a whole period where push technology was going to be big. It didn't work out, mostly because there's like the bandwidth could the scale at the with, you know, the internet, the dial up speeds and stuff like that. So push technology disappeared. But it came back. We live in a world of push technology, people open up YouTube, and that's how they consume content. people open up to TikTok and that's how they get news about the world. And, you know, I think we're still here, we're doing our thing. And, you know, not everybody is in this, like, low attention span, you know, universe. And I think, look, it's not, there's not that much value in a lot of this. It's entertainment, it's infotainment. And so I think that there's still going to be a space for people like us, who try to think deeply and broadly, and not in two minute chunks. Two minute verbal, ejaculations basically, you know, just like spitting stuff out, you know, bangers, whatever. It's like, in some ways, I mean, I don't like again, like this is like, I'm definitely like, Get off my lawn mode right now. But basically, what I'm trying to say is like, you know, we are, we've taken the worst things out of cable, television, soundbite sound bites and cable television, we scaled it across the internet, which, you know, you know, even even in like, the early 2000s of the internet was gonna be this great thing where everyone was going to know everything, and we're gonna get better information and look where we are now. So I mean, that's, that's the pessimistic part of the optimistic part is like, you know, we're having this conversation here, if you want to use your agency, and you want to look, it is still possible to find a lot of great stuff. In fact, there's more great stuff than ten years ago, it's just the matching of the algorithms of the incentives. And that's a whole different conversation for a whole different podcast, and I've kept you while we've talked about a lot of different things, you know, finally figured out what all these generation warfares is and little disturbed about the navy issue, which I was totally ignorant of Now, I know,

    You should, you should have a navalist come on, who can speak with greater authority and information about how big a debacle it is. Because I feel I have probably understated the problems.

    Yeah, I feel like I look, I you know, it's because, like, you know, I grew up with the cold war end of the Cold War, you know, the Navy, we have that, you know, I was just like, I took it for granted, I didn't really understand that it that it degraded that much. But you know, one of the things with, you know, third world developing nation militaries is they will buy shiny toys, but they won’t maintain it. And you're kind of describing that with America. That's a little disturbing to me, you know, but the truth is the truth. We got to we got to figure it out. I'm hoping, you know, as we're recording, there's still stuff going on in Israel and Gaza. You know, I'm hoping that winds down you know, I don't know how. I didn't want to get into it because we're not going to solve that in a podcast. Nobody knows what's going on really, really. Hopefully the Ukraine Russia situation is winding down a little bit. And so maybe, you know, you don't have to pay attention as much to the world. No you always do. There's always stuff happening. There's always stuff happening right. Let's keep it real but it was great talking to you, Mark.

    Mark: It was great talking you too Razib

    Yeah, and everyone can find Mark on social media. You’re a great follow, so I will, the link will be in the show notes so you guys could find that. But thank you for your time, man.

    Thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation

    Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorite podcast.