That's

funny you mentioned Japan because I always thought Japan was the most different place I'd ever been to because it was very, you know, very industrialized, very modern, completely modern and beyond modern cities, but there was something different about them. So it was like the familiarity made it almost even more strange versus Southeast Asia. I could kind of chalk up to more extremely different cultural expressions. But when you see something done similarly and it still be different, then it really uncovers some deep underlying. That's

a great point anthropology is often incredibly paradoxical and i think the paradoxes of life reality is innately paradoxical and so the human experience reflects that where for example i'm a celt i'm from an honor culture and i look at the japanese according to most cultural metrics the japanese and the celts are the exact opposite however you see these hollow similarities where they horseshoe like obsession with honor obsession with fighting to the death obsession with pride of craftsmanship that stuff and that's how anthropology works and i see it with uh because i've gone through i've gone through a phase of my life where i thought all americans are the same and then i thought amer was super different. And I leaned more on people are super different across America. Because when I was in Los Angeles, Los Angeles had the thing you described. It was close enough to Pennsylvania that I could recognize it. Like we speak the same language, same currency, a lot of the same movies and culture. And then when you can see the similarities, you realize, wait, we are actually very different. Yeah,

it's funny. Again, going into the paradox, it's true that everyone around the world is actually similar. There are similarities. There's underlying grains that you can relate to and there's underlying patterns that humans tend to engage in, but there's also differences. So you can say both those things and be right and you have to look into it because like in thailand for example um i found very very little difference between the socialist eco-monarchists arguments and the american new york left ecosystem that i grew up in. It was a very similar ideology. Just basically technocracy, managed economy. They also have this thing going on where they'll look at that, you know, Asia got successful from adopting property rights. And then they look at Europe and America and see these big regulated economies. And they think the same thing we do often, which is that, oh, unless we get these similar institutions and regulate our food or something, then we're never going to reach the standards of the West. When it's really the opposite, where the standards are driven by the underlying, the distribution of technology and knowledge within society. And you can't set a standard beyond the level that that society is able to function at. So if you applied American farm regulations onto Thailand, you would close down 60% of their farms. Or if you applied child labor laws, which weren't passed in the US or Europe until it was basically eliminated to India, then you get an increase in child labor in the black market. So it's, it's kind of like, all the arguments are, are the same in both places, when I'm talking politics.

Yeah, you gave me a really interesting story when i was at your place where you said that in thailand or no i want to i think it might be sri lanka when they banned child labor the rate of child labor went up because what they found found in in that country as well as across history in the developing world is the second countries get wealthier enough to do it parents immediately make their kids stop working. It's like automatic. It's one of the most baseline things for a developing country because parents don't want to see their kids work. It's also, you see with women as well, we're in the 1800s, middle and upper class women didn't work. And that was because work was fucking disgusting. You were in an industrial, you were in a mine, you were working in a factory. And so it was seen as like a protecting your woman thing. And the other thing you said is that when they had the child labor laws, child labor increased because the parents couldn't get the labor from their children working legally. So they were forced to have the children work illegally because they would starve if they didn't. And it's this whole thing where I say, follow the Tao to both wealth and wisdom. The Tao was in the Tao Jones and the Tao was in Taoism because there is innate force of life and you follow the force of life. And sometimes your people are poor and the kids have to work and that's just the nature of life and you should accept it yes

and we are able to kind of hide from the conditions of nature but you know coming right out of that i mean bangkok is a completely modern huge city it has more sophisticated european food in the grocery stores than you'll find in america but 20 years ago they were using elephants for construction yeah i mean these are extremely rapid shifts it's of kind of amazing to see because it's one thing when you see Austin pop up or something, you see the time lapse of the American city construction. It's another thing when something like New York pops up in what was previously a rural undeveloped

area. Yeah, you're totally right. And we're hitting a lot of different useful themes for this topic, because a really funny thing is that as I've read out the historiography of Southeast Asia, and historiography is the science of how you write history, both the right and the left had to rationalize why there was no change over a thousand-year period. So from 800 in Southeast Asia until 1800, there was very little social change. Or that's half true, where at the same time, so the organization of centralized states with bureaucracies and greater trade routes, it was developing upwards. So there was change, but from the outside, it didn't appear like it. And the rightist narrative was basically the Southeast Asians were lazy. And the leftist narrative was that their innate folkways were so well adapted to their environment, they didn't have to change. And when you look at Southeast Asia, you're seeing a couple different things. And a binary we keep on touching is something that James Scott's the man, I'm going to continue shilling him, he's a really important libertarian philosopher. And this book, The Art of Not Being Governed, is a, I wish there were more books written like this. It's an anarchist history of Southeast Asia. And the thesis he talks about is that Southeast Asia has this critical duality between the mountain, the mountain tribal peoples and the state land empires. And what he talks about is that these land empires developed around rice cultivation in the river valleys, and they were slave states, where in 18th Thailand and Burma, three quarters of the population were slaves, they would have these tropical societies invariably tend to be slave societies, where they brand your forehead with the mark of your master so you can't run away. And so you have these slave states that were the main generative civilizational force, where they built the temples, they did the trading, and they had the empires. And they were built off taking people from the mountains as slaves. And there was this critical duality between the slave peoples and the free mountain peoples. And the free mountain peoples were, I'm going to be blunt, they were barbarians. And they would have these messianic religious cults built around radical Buddhism where they'd fight wars against the valley people. And the thesis the book keeps touching on is that these two are in critical tension, and frontiers bring about freedom or slavery, where you saw the mirror image of both freedom and slavery, and they had more in common with each other than they realized because they were trading, they're people who knew the other way's way of life. And this is one of the best written anthropology books I've ever read.

That also gets back to our theme of things being similar around the world, right? Like so many of these themes of industrialization we're seeing parallel perfectly with Thailand, with the rural areas being more conservative and the being more liberal and it's the same with the ancient history where you have the mountain versus valley people constant struggle yeah

the way southeast asia started is southeast asia is always cursed to be stuck between the two sons of china and india where the way the Orient works is that China and India both have – so historic India is not the borders of current India. Historic India has nearly 2 billion people, and China's got 1.5 billion. Actually, no, it's way lower because they're lying about their numbers. But these are lots of people. And this last video we talked on the Silk Road, I had this story from the 1600s where the king of Goa in South India, or it might not be Goa, it's like Trevancore, some neighboring state. He was talking to the king of Siam or Thailand, and he said, your land is bigger than mine, but I rule people and you rule mosquitoes. And that was saying Southeast Asia doesn't have people because in the pre-industrial world, China had a hundred million people. This is like the year 1600. China had a hundred million people and India had like a hundred million people. And then Thailand had like 3 million people, or like 4 million people. And so it was just this hugely depopulated area between India and China. And India and China had to trade, and they were part of the Silk Road system that led out to Europe and the Middle East. Where first of all, it's fucking huge. Indonesia, and this is the thing you have to realize, in a place like Northwest Europe, there's too much pressure inside the equilibrium. And so it just results in these constant wars because the Dutch are next to the English, we're next to the Germans, next to the French. All these agro peoples stuck on too little land. And it built up this critical tension. In Southeast Asia, it's the exact opposite. It's not enough people spread over too much land in a place where the soil wasn't fertile and where it's always hot all year. And so when you look at Southeast Asia, you're seeing a place that didn't have enough centripetal forces to give it the basically suffering to propel it to make its own civilization. So it's permanently stuck in this limbo between significantly larger civilizations. And Southeast Asia is going to get, we're going to see four different civilizations play with Southeast Asia. And when you're looking at this time period, you're seeing these small river valley civilizations stuck in an infinite line of jungle where the distance from west coast of sumatra to new guinea is london to kyrgyzstan it's wider across than the united states and just new guinea which looks tiny on the map stretches from london to moscow right

and it's it's island hopping it's all broken up I wonder how populated the area was before the end of the Ice Age.