00:00:00.000i once described by the way i once described it that if you think about like the way that different
00:00:05.440countries play geopolitics that the americans we play football the chinese play go the russians
00:00:15.680play chess and the israelis play poker in a mob house basically is how it works and like game
00:00:23.760Game theory can be used for both closed and open games, because obviously geopolitics, everyone can see, for example, if the United States is actually moving thousands and thousands of troops to the Middle East, for example, that will be an open part.
00:00:40.720But then trying to suss out Trump's statements. What is the deal in Pakistan? That's sort of closed. But game theory would basically approach it of, okay, what is everyone's different kind of move here?
00:00:55.780Now, reflexive theory would be more about playing the person.
00:01:01.040It would be more psychological, and the idea is that you want to have your opponent make a decision within a very close parameters of possibilities that doesn't matter actually which way they choose, that their choice has now been dictated by you to some extent.
00:01:23.540So you're like putting, instead of playing the board and playing the pieces, you're playing the person more, and you're trying to get them to actually do what you want them to do to some extent.
00:01:35.280Now, there's parts of game theory that will go similarly to some extent, but this is really, I think, what we really see in terms of these kinds of very Russian deep penetration kinds of operations.
00:01:48.900It's basically, here, take up our poor Jewish Soviet refugee, Ayn Rand, let her come in and give the right an entire cult around rebellion and being the new man who doesn't need the old world to some extent.
00:02:05.060Interesting. So let's go back to what you were talking about before of the sort of left and right nihilism. So we stipulate the right wing nihilism is pure individualism. I'm not going to even pay my parking tickets. I am so liberated from the community. Something like that.
00:02:28.020I've been liberated in that sense for many years, in fact, but there's that aspect of right wing nihilism. And then there's the left wing nihilism of Kojep, which is a which is an end of history concept in the sense that there's in a way nothing more to do.
00:02:50.220there's no point in conquest at this point because it makes so much more sense not to go in and take
00:02:57.480anything but to simply trade with that person and establish division of labor and there's nothing
00:03:05.620more that you could conceivably want and everyone will soon be recognized in the sense that everyone
00:03:12.860will be a citizen of some country that might be in a larger block but there's really no point in
00:03:21.580striving and effort francis fukuyama the subtitle of or the forgotten other half of the title the
00:03:27.920end of history is the end of history and the last man which is a nietzschean concept and it's this
00:03:32.240is again why i think fukuyama is maybe deeper than he's given credit for in the sense that
00:03:36.180he's at least recognizing the possibility that we could enter a state of like that Disney film
00:03:43.800WALL-E where everyone's like in chairs watching television and they're like horribly fat and
00:03:50.500they don't engage in any sort of effort. I haven't seen it in years, but I think
00:03:54.420the final statement or the climax is they like push themselves out of their chair and they're
00:03:59.560Like, I'm going to do something and not just be fed and entertained.
00:04:03.820So that is a grotesque, cartoonish version of Nietzsche's Last Man.
00:04:09.160Nietzsche's Last Man knows that God is dead.
00:04:11.680Also, he's wise in a way, but he doesn't care.
00:04:18.860So long as I have a good rate of return, yeah, every God is dead.
00:04:22.940It never had any meaning whatsoever, but I have this new timeshare I'd like to talk to you about.
00:04:27.600It's that type of attitude that the Nietzsche was getting at and Nietzsche hated, obviously. But let me back up. So you have the sort of left wing collectivism that in some ways has no real opposition to neoliberal capitalism.
00:04:43.100This is something even Paul Gottfried talked about this a while ago when I was speaking with him. There's some point where a Hegelian Soviet spy in Kojev, who's deeply versed in all of this stuff, one of the few people who can even read Hegel, not to mention explain him, and he's sympathetic towards communism and all this kind of stuff.
00:05:08.060But on some level, there's no real opposition between him and a neoliberal corporate guy or a neoliberal bureaucrat in the sense that we're all going in the same, we're all moving in the same place, actually.
00:05:23.100There's a hidden hand of history, a cunning of reason that's bringing the GE corporation close to what Kojev might have imagined with the European Union.