Conversations with My Father

Just finished recording a 3-part, six hour conversation with one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable people I know: my father.

He's had a remarkable life too:

In his mid-20s, he was making vaccines and working at a Soviet nuclear facility.

By age 30, he was a successful businessman who was recruited into the Russian government. The department in which he was a junior minister was tasked specifically with rebuilding the Soviet Union.

By age 35, he was living abroad and on the run under a cloud of false charges stemming from political disagreements over the direction of Russia.

Today, in his early 60s, exonerated of all the false allegations, he spends his time thinking and writing about history, geopolitics, the battle of civilisations, mysticism and a lot more.

My dad and I have different opinions of many things but he was always been able to talk about anything, including our differences. At points, the conversation was difficult as we see the world from different perspectives, especially when it comes to Putin, the war in Ukraine and Russian foreign policy but I think that itself will be illuminating.

We talked about:

- Growing up in the Soviet Union

- Why "communism is a religion"

- How the USSR fell apart

- Why America today reminds him of communism

- His views of COVID and COVID vaccines as someone who used to make flu vaccines

- The crazy 1990s in Russia

- Why Russians "won't trust the West for at least 2 generations"

- How he went from being a scientist to co-founding one of modern Russia's first banks

- Why he went into politics

- Power struggles in the Yeltsin Government

- Why he believed in attempting to rebuild the Soviet Union after it collapsed

- How pro-Western forces destroyed his government department and forced him to flee the country

- Why he respects Vladimir Putin

- The history of Russia

- Arnold Toynbee and the battle of civilizations

- Why the war in Ukraine was "inevitable"

- Was Russia provoked?

- Will Russia stop at Ukraine?

- Can humanity survive the battle of civilizations in the nuclear age?

- The future of the Middle East

- Lev Gumilev's theory of ethnic group dynamics

- What is happening to Western civilization?

- Mysticism

- His model of how societies are made up of 4 different groups whose values determine their attitudes and behaviours

- Why societies went from being run by priests/holy men to being run by warriors/commanders to now being run by businessmen

- How to work out your life's purpose

- Why the scientific method is "important but not sufficient" for understanding reality

- Will science ever answer questions about the origin of the universe, life and consciousness?

- Does God exist?

- Non-scientific tools for understanding the world

It's going to take a while to get this edited, translated and dubbed but it's going to be 🤯🤯🤯

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