Interview with Scott Powell

He is the author of the History of Now and its sequel, the History of Tomorrow, which together present his integrated view of history, which he refers to as present centrism. Excuse me. Along with his partner Heather Schwartz, which I hope I pronounced correct, he is the co founder of Knowable World, the world's only fully integrated history curriculum for students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

He is currently working on a science fiction novel about time travel and the true power of history entitled the 14 Points. Welcome, Scott.

And the unserious study of history that has kind of been spawned by a variety of ideological movements in, in modern times is really focused on the present, very much at the expense of the past and very much, you know, dependent on prejudices and presuppositions in the, in the present. And then there's the process of cherry picking and, and all of the typical things that corrupt what serious historians, quote, unquote, serious historians consider to be the proper study of the past.

And you can see in both of these options, which are the two, basically the, the four false dichotomy that currently dominates the study of history. You can see that on the one side you have the past, which historians are dedicated to, serious historians are dedicated to, but the problem is at the expense of the present. And then you have people that are activists, have a variety of reasons why, but they emphasize the present, of course, at the expense of the past.

Well, what's missing, of course, is a proper integration of the two. Right. We could simply refer to that as past, present integration. And so that's what present centrism is about. Present centrism, if you want me to give you a formal definition, it is a mode of historical inquiry that seeks to achieve an integrated historical awareness of the world we live in. There's a lot to unpack there, but basically that's what it is. You can see the object of study is not the past.

The object of study is the world we live in. The past doesn't exist anymore. Right? Okay, it once existed. That's an important thing to recognize. But why does it matter? Why it matters is because of how the well of cause and effect has brought us to where we are now and where it's taking us. And so we live today. There's only one reason for us to study the past.

That's in order to empower us with the knowledge that it can provide us the insight and instruction that is available by studying this amazing spectrum of experiences that all of humanity has gone through and deriving what we need from it, right? Finding some positive mental intellectual outcomes from it and allowing us to navigate through the world and hopefully to shape it for the better. So that's where we are. We're in the present. We need to live well.

And so the idea of present centrism is we need to be able to use the past, not merely study it as an end in itself, but to use it as a means to an end, to better shape the world we live in.

In order to pass the test and then promptly forget it and then develop, you know, this. This perspective, of course, that history is useless. And the problem, of course, is though, that because history is vast, essentially about 5,000 years worth of decent recorded information because it's so vast and because it involves so many cultures that we have to have a method of organizing, condensing and essentializing the vastness of it so that we can render it into something useful now.

So, you know, because there you go, right? Present centrism, the goal is to. For us to. To embody the idea that knowledge is power. Well, how can we generate powerful knowledge? So in the. In the problem of studying History, we encounter something that I know some of your listeners are interested in. Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand, as a philosopher, fascinating.

Gave us fascinating insight into the importance of concepts in terms of how they allow us to condense our perceptual experience and arrive at this really powerful conceptual level of awareness. As it turns out, with regard to history, which is a massive stream of one of a kind events which are linked in this web of cause and effect, there's a different problem.

It's a problem that is not quite akin to the need that we face on a general basis of processing the concretes that we find in our experience and integrating them into concepts. There's a different problem. There is a problem of this absolutely unique stream of events, a procession and succession of events that are constantly unfolding. And how do we. How do we render that into some sort of useful mental outcome? And I discuss this on a theoretical level as part of the History of Tomorrow.

Broadly speaking, I refer to the need to employ what I refer to as constructs. Now, there's a. We could probably spend an entire podcast on what are the difference between concepts and constructs. I don't think it's probably the best place for us to go right now. But periods, historical periods, are examples of constructs because they are composed of absolutely unique events which combine in some way. We have to mentally integrate them in order for them to add up to something, use.

And to now circle back around a little bit to your original question in order to take now, American history, relatively short compared to, let's say, Chinese history or something else. Right. So we're talking 1776 word, if we're going to be strict about it. There's the colonial period before that. But, okay, let's talk 1776 onward. Well, that's still, you know, we're coming up on 250 years worth of stuff, right? And so that's a lot.

And most people try to memorize a few things and forget and can't integrate. All right, so how do we integrate those things? Well, first of all, we have to definitely be selective about how we approach it. And the foundation of the method of periodization that I employ in present centrism is to identify what I refer to as anchor facts. And so that's the beginning of the answer. There are certain facts. Let's talk about the biggest one of all.

1776, the 4th of July, 1776. To my mind, the single most important anchor fact, what I call a cardinal anchor fact with regard to world history at this time. The reason Why I say that is because it's an America centric world. And so the United States is overwhelmingly the most important country in the world. It's not a matter of good or bad. We all know it's also good. But it's a matter of what is the significance of American culture in terms of shaping the world.

And it's overwhelmingly the most important. And so where does that come from? How did that come about? Well, the 4th of July, 1776 clearly is an anchor point we want to talk about eventually. We want to recognize, of course, the fullness of something called the American Revolution and so many other things. But basically, how did there even come to be an America? Well, of course, there's a birthday. And so the country got started at a certain point, Right.

And then there are other anger facts that have brought about the transformation of American culture into what it is today. And there have been, to my mind, two overarching successions. There was an original American culture that of course, was dedicated to individual rights. We have the classic statement in the Declaration of Independence concerning life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And we have other statements by the founders as well that are really wonderful. And we see that.

We see also, unfortunately, the inability of that generation and later generations of politicians to abolish slavery. Right. So we have a strange problem. We have a contradiction embedded in what I refer to as American culture, the original incarnation. And there are other elements to that as well. There's. There's political economy, There. There are a number of other dimensions that can be thought of. There's the level of industrial development.

There are a variety of factors that go into the construct that I refer to as the American period. And in my view, that period basically ended in the. In simple terms, with World War I, at which point America began to exhibit a number of new cultural traits. Up to that point, its foreign policy was one of political separation as embodied by the Monroe Doctrine. And then America began to embark on this quest to quote, unquote, Quote, unquote, make the world safer. Democracy.

Actually, that's not an exact quote. It's always hard to quote that one because Woodrow Wilson said the world must be made safe for democracy. So we have to carefully quote. But. And then, of course, you know, there was a backlash. And then America began to, you know, got dragged into World War II. And then there's the Cold War, and now there's. There's been the war on Terror and all of that. That's foreign policy as well.

The United States became focused on civil rights rather than Natural rights. The political economy shifted from one of encouraging industry through mercantilism to now one of regulation and a mixed economy and growing elements of socialism. So you can see that there are a variety of trends.

And when you try to encompass those and say, okay, we've got one way that America was at the beginning, and we still have America, but it's clearly not the same thing, well, how do we then, you know, how do we then capture that fact? And so I refer to the more modern inter incarnation of the United States as Americanistic. If I can. I'll just elaborate on that just a little bit, because I think there's something powerful here. Please, some of your. Some of your listeners will enjoy.

The reason why I adopted that terminology is because in my studies of history, I came upon a really interesting periodization by another thinker. And actually it was a delimited one. It was meant to be one that was applicable only in the area of art history, but it really struck me as being more widely applicable. And so it was the work of a German historian named Droysen, Gustav Droysen, something like that.

And what he identified was that back in ancient Greece, there was a succession of two different fundamental artistic styles. And he referred to the first as being Hellenic. In other words, you know, the essential one, the. The one of Praxiteles and. And the other, you know, great sculptors of that era. And then he said, after Alexander the Great, he referred to the. The merger and hybridization of Greek art with Asiatic elements as Helenistic. So you can see it as interesting.

What he's trying to say there is that there was something essentially Greek and then there was something else which was derivative and involves some sort of mixture and hybridization and unfortunately also a downgrade. And he called that Hellenistic. So that's a terminology that I really found empowering. And I said to myself, well, that's exactly what happened to America.

America had this original culture, which in terms of fundamentals and especially on an aspirational level, as expressed by the founders, is really as good as it ever got. And now we have this lesser version, and it's got all of these elements in it, especially from Europe. The hybridization of American culture, the invasion of European ideas, especially the social theory of rights as advocated during the French Revolution by Rousseau and then the thinkers of the French Revolution.

And then you get this organization and this takeover, because Europe's always been more intellectual than America. And so there's a lot of powerful ideas circulating in European culture all the time. And America's had this way of being the younger kind of prodigal culture. But it's always kind of been getting closer and closer and losing its distinctiveness and becoming more European. So that's my thinking. Is that similar this year?

And then, if possible, I like to see if I can investigate, well, what's feeding into that and what are some of the conditioning aspects. And I would. That's the way that I would characterize religion so far in American politics as being a conditioning element, not a dominant element, but always present, always conditioning things, you know, and so we could refer. We could talk about that in relation to progressivism. We could talk about it in relation to conservatism. You know, you can see it.

Right? You can see it, but it's not always obvious how does it play into the development. So. So it's not a basis of periodization for the time being in my thinking, but it's just a recognized conditioning element.

And then you've got this very strange element of Britain and how does it relate? And then you've got these adjunct cultures which play a role and, you know, every once in a while rise to prominence, like Italy and Spain and so on. But typically, it's a Franco German condition that dominates the history of Europe. And so in my. In my presentation in the History of Now, I tried to ask myself, well, how do we properly characterize the history of Europe?

Because it's very easy to get totally dragged into the past at the expense of the present when you're studying Europe, because you're talking 1500 years now, so it's already a problem when you're dealing with the United states, which is 250 years. But if you want to start the history of Europe, let's say, with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, when you're dealing with 1500 years, okay, so now you got a big problem.

I came to this view that European history is best understood currently because present centrism demands that it be characterized according to what we need to know now in order to navigate through the world we live in it. Basically, the question of European history is where did the European Union come from? This is what the Europe fundamentally is today. This is the dominant construct in politics and in culture. Right. And what does the European Union represent?

Well, it represents something very technical, Europe, always very ideological and very complex. It represents an ideological point of view which is known as supra nationalism. So supra means over and above. Above and clearly the root word nationalism, right, is the point of view that the nation, fundamental unit of reality and standard of value in human affairs. And so the.

The issue is that the history of Europe all the way up until the World wars, was the history of separate and increasingly mutually alienated nations, right? The tribes coalescing into countries, early kingdoms and so on, always wars, wars, wars. We've got the extra element, here we go, a good example of religion as a conditioning factor. We have the element of the Reformation and religious wars, introducing sectarianism. And so we've got all of these various factors producing alienation.

And then while in modern times you have the advent of the freedom French Revolution, so now you get politics as alienating. Everybody gang, young ganging up on France. You've got, of course, Britain with its own traditions, staying relatively separate. And so you've got all these various factors leading to the Europeans always being at war. I mean, that's why the founders. That's why George Washington said, let's not get entangled in that mess, right? Let's stay at it.

That was his farewell address. He said, we. We stay out of those wars. And. And James Monroe, of course, followed that up with the Monroe Doctrine and basically said, the political system of Europe is fundamentally different from that of America. There's no benefit to us getting entangled in that. And so that's why America's original policy of political separation was so valuable to the United States in, in terms of Europe, though, right? They just kept going, going. It got worse.

There was paired with imperialism and then it. It culminated in the crescendo and the climax of the world war, World War I. And then that doesn't resolve anything, largely because of America. And then you've got World War II, which of course is the catastrophe, at which point. And leading up to that, there was already some thinking along these lines. Internationalism, meaning fundamentally diplomacy, this hadn't cut. It wasn't working.

The League of Nations, none of that managed to really put a dent in the alienation of the various national peoples and their collective identifications then. So they said to us, how do we. How do we solve this problem, right? And so they said, we've got to. Now, the Europeans have never been able to shed collectivism. And so they've all. It's always been a very collectivist culture.

And so basically what they came up with was, we've got to have some greater good, that we're going to some identity that is overarching, that permits us to suppress the alienating factor of nationalism. What's that going to be. It's going to be Europe as a whole, something over and above of the nation as a fundamental value. So that's what's ideologically referred to as supra nationalism. And, and if you look at the history of now, you can see, okay, they did a prototype of it.

It's called the European Coal and Steel Community. The whole idea there was put the government of the, of the. This new union in charge of these industries so that we can ideologically transform our thinking about how we use resources and make war materially impossible, supposedly. Right. And. And then they kept on working on it. They created the European Community, and then it gradually evolved and, and in 1993, they just went all in with the European Union.

And, you know, that's what we have today. Of course, what we have today is largely a crisis. And in its present form and the ways in which it functions, it's not viable in the long term. And there's a lot of reasons why, fundamentally, it's collectivist, so it's always going to be a problem. But also the European Union, you'd wish that it would be in some way truly dedicated to freedom.

And it has some elements which are positive, such as freedom of travel within the European Union and things of that nature and free trade within the European Union. But these are very much collectivists. So it's a tariff barrier that insulates Europe from the rest of the world, and then there's the Schengen Zone, which insulates Europe from the rest of the world. And so it's really. Now it's organized. It's trying.

The idea is to organize Europe into a peaceful whole, but create a cultural block that can stand on its own and largely also supposedly stand up to the United States. But as it turns out, it's not working in any. It's not working in so many regards that it's, it's, it's going to be a long, long road here. A lot of problems. I'm not predicting that it's going to collapse entirely, but it's in trouble. It's in trouble. If you want to talk details, maybe that's another podcast. Let me throw.

And so I just could get away with it in high school. I didn't care. And so I got to college and the difficulty level went way up and I failed my first class. And that was my wake up call. And, and so I said to myself, okay, how am I gonna grow up, right? How am I gonna put. Pull this back together here? And I have this promise. You know, one of the things that I can be thankful for in.

My father was somewhat of a, an eclectic intellectual and, but he had strangely made mention of Ayn Rand at one point and, and, and, and purchased a book for me called the Early Ayn Rand. And it was on the shelf, I wasn't touching that. He was very critical of my own reading, which was entirely science fiction. And so it was like, for me, it was all about Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and, you know, Robert Heinlein and that kind of stuff.

And so it's like, okay, Ran character floating around. Okay, I don't know what that's about. But you know, at that point where in, in my, in my college career where I flunked out of a class and I was like, okay, I gotta get my act together. And so how do I, how do I mature intellectually? How do I get my act together? I thought, okay, maybe there's something here that I have to investigate in the form of philosophy. And it took me a while. I won't tell the whole story.

I'll tell the short version. And I saw the back of the Early Iran and it said, it's really playing up Iran. It's talking about these amazing novels, the Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged. And I'm like, okay, let's see what that's about. So I just, you know, headed over to the public library and I see the COVID of, of the Fountain Head and it's this dramatic, you know, weird art deco like thing with the architect looking up the skyscraper. And I'm like, hey, that's kind of cool.

And so, all right, start reading it, right? And all of us, that first reading experience of on it blew me away. I couldn't believe it. I, I'M like, I can't believe it. This is exactly what I need. It was unbelievable, as I like to joke, it was Howard Roark that prevented me from becoming an architect because, you know, I was. I was studying civil engineering, and I didn't think it was that interesting. That was kind of leaning towards architecture. Funny thing happened about Howard Rourke.

And I said, that's not for me. I'm gonna go into philosophy. I'm gonna go. And then. And I became interested at that point and what's going on? Where did this Iron man character come from? And I said to myself, well, let me study the history of philosophy. Let's see, you know, what's going on. And now, immediately after reading the valentine, like, immediately, I just went right back to the bookshelf and I picked up Atlas Shrugged and started in on that.

Right. So I was like, I couldn't wait and pour through that. It was absolutely hectic reading. I couldn't believe it. And. And that. That right there, of course, is the magnum opus. It's just incomparable in so many regards. And that was. That's it. I was that. That I was. I was. I knew. That's what I. This is it. This. These are the right answers. And. And then, you know, there's mention of Aristotle in there. There's some really interesting things, right? So I'm like, okay, we're.

What happened? Where did the Sein Rank character come from? And what's the. What's the background story to this? And why are her ideas so good? And why have I never heard them from pretty much anybody else up until now? And that was a. That was a tough slog. The history of philosophy is not fun. I mean, I enjoyed studying the Presocratics and then the rise of Plato and Aristotle. I found that totally fascinating.

I really had, you know, memorized and forgot. And so therefore, that became my new interest, and I started studying that when I finished my. My engineering degree, went out, got a job. I was working and stuff like that. But I started studying history part time in college and that was, that was a disaster in the sense that everything that I was being told to learn was just unbelievably tedious and useless. And I was really upset by that. And I didn't know what, what I could do with this subject.

It felt overwhelmingly complex and there didn't seem to be any application of philosophy at all. So how, how could I solve that? And, and I think I'm giving you a bad timeline because I know that it's earlier than 96. The reason why I know that is because I'm thinking more along the lines of 94. Because I went to my first Objectivist conference in 1997, which was a Lyceum conference in Orange County, California. I was there at that conference. Yeah, where are you?

So at that conference, the highlight for me there were a lot of highlights that was quite. Back then we had some heavyweights really doing some great stuff. But the highlight of that conference for me was John Ridbath. And John Ridpath gave a lecture on Locke and the American Revolution versus Rousseau and the French Revolution. Oh boy, did that, that right there was super exciting. And so I also happened to met my wife at that conference. I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences.

Anyway, we, we had a long distance relationship there for a while and, and, and she was pushing me to ask me figure things out about my life and where I was going. And I said, well, I'm, I think I'm in transition to becoming a historian. I wasn't absolutely convinced. And, and I said okay. And, and she pushed me and, and ultimately I said, you know what, I think what I need to do is go study with Redpath. And lucky for me he still was teaching and I think he retired in 2002.

So I, I headed to Toronto and I went to study with him for two years, two, 2000 to 2002. And that was big in a number of regards. It took economics from him. We studied intellectual history. That was, wow, there was some wonderful stuff there. And, but as good as that was the pivotal moment for me, which looking back on it was just a really huge moment for me, historiographically speaking speaking, the big moment was 9 11.

I remember being on campus that morning walking through, it happened to be the economics walking through and there was a student lounge there with a big screen tv, walking from the parking lot to, you know, the social science building, whatever, and there you go, you're seeing the first of the tower smoking and pretty soon the other one's getting struck. And that, of course, was extremely traumatic.

And that's, you know, that's for me, for my parents generation, it's like, where were you when JFK was assassinated? Everybody remembers, right? And for me, it's two things. It's the Challenger disaster in 1987 and 9 11. Those are the moments in my life where I remember exactly where I was when those things happened. Never forget. But more than that, I was on my way to a history class. And so. And of course, all the students were on their phones. There was a big buzz. Everybody was very upset.

And I remember thinking, well, so here we are in academia. Here we are in the place where we have these wise men, these people that are learned and that are going to give us insight into what's happening. And so there was, you know, there were some questions about what's going on. And the historian in that class basically said, you know, that what we need to do now is we need to study the terror, because we were studying the French Revolution, not.

Not the war, not, not the terrorism of 9 11, but the. The terror of 1793. Yeah, I think that's what he was saying. History is the study of the past. And I have nothing to teach you. I cannot tell you anything about the world we live in. I can only tell you about the France of the late 18th century that I've been studying my whole life. And that's all I know. Right. So this was a really tragic confession on his part, but it stuck with me for the rest of my life.

And so then, you know, graduating from that, I went on to teach at a school you've probably heard of in Southern California called Van Damme Academy. And I started teaching history there to young kids. And that was the most wonderful experience of all in so many regards, including the fact that it didn't work.

There was a problem which was hard for me to accept and to identify, which, as it turns out, fundamentally stemmed from the same problem that I was experiencing in college, which is I hadn't yet figured out that the past divorced from the present, doesn't mean anything, has no objective value. And so I was a good storyteller. I got a good sense of humor.

I had the kids laughing and rolling around, and I had them loving, you know, everything from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr. And so they were fine with all that. They enjoyed it, but it didn't stick, and it didn't produce results for them that I could really point to and say, yeah, this is a better person because they're studying History, and they actually know it and it has significant intellectual outcomes for them in the long run.

And so I just began to challenge this question of what is it and why isn't history working? And after being there for a few years, I started teaching homeschoolers as a private business. And that's now what I do with my company, that's called Knowable World, with my partner Heather Schwartzen. And on that journey, just at some point became an epiphany and that the problem is the lack of past, present integration and how do we achieve that.

And just, you know, there's just so much to say about that. But fundamentally that's how I came to my view of present centrism. So there you go. That's kind of the story it wound up.

It's tough project, but we're working on scaling it and really reaching a really huge audience. And I think at some point, because it's overwhelmingly the best curriculum there is, that it will take over the homeschooling market and from there we'll try to get into the private schools. And by then hopefully public school will have been abolished, so we won't have to worry about that. So anyway, we'll see.

Our curriculum is literally From K to 12. So in other words, we have a program called History Detectives, which is the first year of a three year program that's still under Development. But history Detectives, level one is complete. It's basically a lesson, lesson a week for the youngest possible kids. Not every child at a kindergarten level is going to be ready, but some are. And I've had the pleasure of teaching 5 year olds that are totally ready.

So it's sometimes the case that they're not ready until 6, 7, 8. But, you know, basically you just start it when they're ready. But we start at the kindergarten level and then the live classes and recordings are for basically for about second or third graders on up. And we have an elementary program and a junior senior high program.

And for the first time ever this year, I'm teaching something called the advanced history program, which is for my absolute elite students because we're graduating students up through the ranks and they're just getting so good at history. It's unbelievable. And so they're pushing me to the highest levels of requirements for me and my own learning. It's basically far beyond anything you can get in college, but they're doing it in high school, so. So, yeah, that's our project Noble World.

And so we know how hard that is, and it's very difficult a lot of the times. And of course, history, who, who actually knows history. And so that's a lot of what homeschoolers do, is they try to find experts, resources out there where they can find somebody to do subjects that they themselves are not equipped to do. Right. And so that's exactly what Knowable World is about.

I know that there's no way that you, as a homeschooling mom or dad, are going to have time to not only figure out the entire curriculum and manage the day and what. And study history and teach it to your kid properly. Thank you. I've been studying history for 20 years, more than 20 years. And I know how hard it is and that's been full time. Thank you very much. So, so no, it's not going to happen. Right. So that's why it's nice that there are experts like myself.

You know, I'll just give a shout out here to Luke Travers, who's, who runs a program called Literature at our house. And so, so you know, there's another example of, okay, you want to have some literature, you want to have some poetry, you want to have a resource like that, great. So you just hire an expert. And so knowable world is your place where basically history check, you're done. You get your kid in there as soon as you can and you're done. That's taken care of.

The whole thing is taken care of. And in most cases, you know what I like the best is when parents are invest, are really invested in their child's education. It's quite frequently the case that they will just sit in and they'll listen and they're like, wow, this is what I was supposed to learn when I was a kid. Wonderful time being in my elementary class because that's about the level of adults when it comes to history. So you may as well just get in on it, right, and just listen and learn.

And then I've got a recorded class in fact, two of them on the history of Church Tomorrow. And I've also got one on the History of Now I shouldn't fail to mention. So that's really for most adult readers, the History of Now and the History of Tomorrow. That's a very deliberate sequence of two books. You can't read the History of Tomorrow without having read the History of Now for reasons which are explained in the, in the second of the two books.

And so basically there is a, there's a, there's the History of Now as a book. And yeah, for anybody that's really interested in understanding what's going on in that book. The History of Now course is a recorded session with 10 lectures, which is absolutely critical to gain insight into how it works and how you can help yourself reprogram your own thinking about history and make your own thinking present, centric. And then the History of Tomorrow is the next level.

The fourteen Points is probably actually gonna have to be a trilogy because I've got so much to write. But that's the title of the novel that I'm writing. It's called the 14 points. And the obvious source of the title of the book is that Woodrow Wilson, announced in 1918, made a proclamation that is known as the Fourteen Points. And it has to do with America becoming the world police power, effectively. Right. And so, without spoiling too much, right.

In my time travel novel, that ain't gonna happen. And so there's going to be. You know, one of the things I particularly enjoyed about the foundation series was that effectively, historians are the heroes. They're psycho historians. Okay, but they're historians, if you ask me. And so Harry Seldon is a historian. Right. So historians are the heroes. Well, in my novel, historians are the heroes.

So it's going to take a combination of a brilliant physicist And a brilliant historian to figure out how to save the world effectively. So anyway, anybody that's interested can just go to the 14 points reading group on Facebook and there's a trickle there. It's. I'm just gonna pick up again. I'm. And I've got the 14 points channel on YouTube where I'm talking about the way things are going there. And. And the first chapter is available in the first draft.

I have to say it's being massively edited at this point. So. Because I'm not a natural fiction writer so I've got a lot of skills to develop and so I'm really massively editing. I've written 250 pages and I know that there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to fix it up as a fiction story. So. So. But it's. Yeah, it's still fun. I still love science fiction, of course, and I'm hoping to make a science fiction masterpiece, which is of course a tall order for a first novel.

But I'm gonna try to do it right off the bat.

Well, when I think about it, the division of North Korea and South Korea, I don't think that's ever gonna be united because the border of North Korea is China. And if it's going to be one way, it'll probably be swallowed up. But I hope that doesn't happen. What do you any thought on that? Because I. I have not gotten to yourself.

It's, it's not really communist, it's in fact much more akin to Nazism than just about anything else in the world today. And, and so it's a virulently ultra nationalist ideology. And there's another problem for Korea, and that is that Korea, like Japan and now China, is facing a demographic cliff. And so this is a country which is going to begin to strain rapidly. And so if they don't get their act together and start procreating, they're in big trouble.

And so that's another factor over the next couple generations that these countries are in big trouble. And. Yeah, so Korea, no unification. No, that's not, that's not. The only, the only possible thing is something completely unpredictable, like a coup within the, you know, the highest ranking families in the strangely ideological, you know, aristocracy of North Korea. But there's no reason to expect that that would produce any really positive results. So. No, I don't see it. I don't see it.

But basically, you know, North Korea is, is checkmated. Right. There's nothing they can do. They know that if they make the wrong move, they cease to exist. So that's the story. It's, there's really, there's almost nothing to it. It's tragic for the people there, but hey, if they want better, they got to get their act together.