RadixJournal - How Russia Plays Geopolitics

In this episode, I speak with the brilliant philosopher, philosopher, and philosopher-turned-cryptozoologist, Robert Kiyosaki. We discuss a wide range of topics, including: Why is Nietzsche so important to us? What does it mean to be a narcissist? What is the role of the ego in our understanding of the world? Why do we have to have a good rate of return in order to be good at something? And why does it matter that God is dead? All of these questions and many more are answered in this episode.

00:00:00.000 i once described by the way i once described it that if you think about like the way that different

00:00:05.440 countries play geopolitics that the americans we play football the chinese play go the russians

00:00:15.680 play chess and the israelis play poker in a mob house basically is how it works and like game

00:00:23.760 Game 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.

00:00:40.720 But 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?

00:00:55.780 Now, reflexive theory would be more about playing the person.

00:01:01.040 It 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.

00:01:23.540 So 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.

00:01:35.280 Now, 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.

00:01:48.900 It'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. 0.96

00:02:05.060 Interesting. 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.

00:02:28.020 I'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.

00:02:50.220 there's no point in conquest at this point because it makes so much more sense not to go in and take

00:02:57.480 anything but to simply trade with that person and establish division of labor and there's nothing

00:03:05.620 more that you could conceivably want and everyone will soon be recognized in the sense that everyone

00:03:12.860 will be a citizen of some country that might be in a larger block but there's really no point in

00:03:21.580 striving and effort francis fukuyama the subtitle of or the forgotten other half of the title the

00:03:27.920 end of history is the end of history and the last man which is a nietzschean concept and it's this

00:03:32.240 is again why i think fukuyama is maybe deeper than he's given credit for in the sense that

00:03:36.180 he's at least recognizing the possibility that we could enter a state of like that Disney film

00:03:43.800 WALL-E where everyone's like in chairs watching television and they're like horribly fat and

00:03:50.500 they don't engage in any sort of effort. I haven't seen it in years, but I think

00:03:54.420 the final statement or the climax is they like push themselves out of their chair and they're

00:03:59.560 Like, I'm going to do something and not just be fed and entertained.

00:04:03.820 So that is a grotesque, cartoonish version of Nietzsche's Last Man.

00:04:09.160 Nietzsche's Last Man knows that God is dead.

00:04:11.680 Also, he's wise in a way, but he doesn't care.

00:04:15.420 It doesn't mean anything.

00:04:16.840 So what if God is dead?

00:04:18.860 So long as I have a good rate of return, yeah, every God is dead.

00:04:22.940 It never had any meaning whatsoever, but I have this new timeshare I'd like to talk to you about.

00:04:27.600 It'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.

00:04:43.100 This 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.

00:05:08.060 But 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.

00:05:23.100 There'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.

00:05:35.280 And it's this remarkable thing.

RadixJournal - March 30, 2026

How Russia Plays Geopolitics

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