#11 - Applied History with WhatIfAltHist

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

Rudyard, you run a popular YouTube channel called WhatIfAltHist. Maybe you can give a little bit to the audience on your background, kind of stuff you've done, all that kind of stuff.

Rudyard Lynch (0:09)

Sure. So thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. And I'm Rudyard Lynch. I run the YouTube channel WhatIfAltHist. And we cover topics like history, anthropology, philosophy and politics, just different elements of the human condition. And I like to say that the underlying causal thing beneath it is human nature, and trying to figure out human nature in different contexts. And I started the channel when I was 13, doing something called alternate history. Like, what if the South won the Civil War? What if the Nazis won World War II? And we gradually pivoted out of that, where I feel very blessed and I never thought this would be my life, where we have 700,000 subscribers and millions of viewers a month.

And yeah, I'm happy it worked out.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:59)

There's actually, but you're probably aware of this, there's an old Marvel comic series called What If. Do you know that?

Rudyard Lynch (1:05)

No, I don't. I don't read Marvel.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:07)

Oh, okay. That's funny. I thought that that was actually an inspiration. This is, yeah, now today, Marvel comics, because of the stupid, you know, all the superhero movies endlessly, you know, are not what they were. But when I was a kid, there was a, you could go, if you didn't know, this is just like a small little thing. There was a comic book series called What If, that had this exact premise, like if some canonical event hadn't happened, what if Superman was powered up by kryptonite or whatever, something like that. But the interesting aspect of both that, and of course, the more substantive historical version you're doing is, you actually need to know a lot about the events at that time to gauge whether something could have gone this direction or that direction, and then even more to develop the alternate scenarios of what it could be. Like the man of the high castle or something like that. Probably, the Germans, like the Japanese would have become the global left and the Germans the right. Because the Japanese were backing WB. Dubois and all of these third world revolutionaries and so on and so forth. So they would have taken over the world, the Soviets did, and of course, the Germans would have been the global right. But most people don't think about the Japanese as being the global left in that scenario. They just think, you know, they don't realize they'll be like a right-left partition.

You know, because they don't have enough historical context. And the reason that I would like to talk to you about this, and because I think we both think about history and Macro events, you know that thing that people are saying nowadays, here's amusing, that may or may not be interesting to do. You know, people are saying, you can just do things. You've heard that saying?

Rudyard Lynch (2:44)

No, I haven't.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:45)

You haven't? Okay, well, all right, so this is a big, I guess, you know, YouTube is its own culture, a little bit different than X. But a lot of tech guys have this saying, you can just do things, meaning you can just launch rockets. You can just build cars. You can just do things. There are no rules. There's no constraints, nothing holding you back. Go, go, go, right? You know, and Anderson has this line, which is that, roughly paraphrased as, the world around you is made by people like you, and you can go and reshape it, right? And there's a truth to that, especially today because of the Internet, and so much of the existing order is sort of melting down and so on. But there's also an unreality to that, because how much agency does one person actually have? How much can they actually shape the world versus how much is it historical forces, like Great Man Theory of History versus, you know, the historicist kind of thing. And I'm sure you have a view on that and I have a view. I'd love to hear your view on that.

Rudyard Lynch (3:46)

So I didn't want to get too woo-woo for this, but the idea in alchemy is that everyone is a radio tower and that the world is a competition of different Darwinistic radio towers in constant struggle for whichever one gets to conquer the others and then evolve to a higher level.

Balaji Srinivasan (4:08)

So but how does alchemy have a constant of radio? You mean you're backporting the concept of a radio tower?