Interview: AMRX Mark II
“Resisting the Regime in the Random People Zone of Hawaii.”
Talking in-depth with writer, linguist, and anon AMRX Mark II, a dissident voice from the Pacific on escaping the cults of ideology, the yearning for identity in a "no place" like Hawaii, and what it means to walk away from ideological affiliations. Political beliefs as personal alibi, the sickness of escapism, the craving for heroes, identity formation and linguistics, cultural alienation and mimicry. Objectivism and disillusionment, the false theatre of Hawaiian sovereignty movements, the psy-op of Mauna Kea, the flattening hybridization of Pidgin, and Hawaii as a laboratory of empire. We talk about Substack as a space for intellectual deprogramming/engineering, the ritual of purging belief systems, and the existential loneliness that drives the search for meaning. Code-switching, mirror languages, sovereignty as theatre, linguistic education, the bridging importance of Sanskrit, to finally becoming your own guru—no cope, no hero, no group—emphasizing self-improvement and personal responsibility.
Excerpts
On Hawaiian Local Identity
Here is where cultures seem to come to die. I see everyone around me losing their heritage. Like all the kids I grew up with - they're all children of immigrants, and they did not identify with their parents' languages or cultures at all. In many cases, they couldn't speak their parents' language, and they were trying - they were like me. They were trying to find some alternative identity, and so we were all alienated. And I think that's quite common here, but people just don't talk about it.
On Hawaiian Pidgin
Pidgin is a very complicated thing in Hawaii because people have this strange relationship with it. People use it as a marker of local identity, but it's also something that they're ashamed of…
As a thought experiment for decades now, I've been thinking about how pidgin can become like this new fusion identity in Hawaii. And one idea I had for a Stack was writing about how the Hawaiian sovereignty movement here totally rejects pidgin
On Mauna Kea as Psy-op
I think the purpose of the psy-op was to distract from the military operations going on near Mauna Kea
On The Role of Social Dynamics in Political Affiliations
One of the major reasons I got sucked into all of this was just social, really. That's the sad thing. I am an extreme introvert, and I find it very difficult to talk to people. The thing about all these different cults is that if you believe that everyone you deal with is on the same page as you, then socialization becomes very easy.
On Affiliations as Surrogate Identity
I've noticed that a lot of Objectivists are in the same - are in a similar position to me. There's like these Objectivists who come from non-white backgrounds and they want to be some sort of weird and some sort of new thing.
Ayn Rand herself and her own inner circle - they were all Jewish, but they were - they wanted to be something other than Jewish. They were trying to run away from it. And I was like them. I see that in hindsight now. I didn't wanna be Japanese. I wanted to be like this weird - like New - what I've called the New Objectivist Man, that was, not Japanese, not Asian, not anything. So all these ident - all these cult identities were attempts to run away from who I was, and I just regarded so - as just so cringe now. Not that I embrace who I am. I still have identity issues, but I don't think signing up for a group and is really the answer anymore. But it - it was just so easy.
So I poured all my energy into learning Japanese and I went to university in Japan. And that was just a complete disaster. Because I realized I really did not fit in there. The language is not the problem. I could do the classes. I could do the tests. I could write the papers.
That was not the issue. I - it made me realize how superficial my idea of Japanese identity was just because I could speak, read and write Japanese didn't mean I really belonged there. And I realized, yeah, this is just not for me anymore. And then I started doubling down on the Objectivist stuff, because as I just mentioned, Objectivism is like a - is like for non-main, like people of color…like this weird surrogate identity.
Time Stamps
00:46 Discovering AMRX
01:18 Motivations Behind Writing: Disillusionment with MAGA
07:16 Political Evolution: From Neo-Conservative to Anarchist
11:07 College Years: Questioning Leftist Ideals and Embracing Ayn Rand
13:50 Disillusionment with Objectivism and NeoConservatism
23:54 The Role of Social Dynamics in Political Affiliations
26:45 Identity Issues and Cultural Alienation
36:08 Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement and Local Identity
54:45 The Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement: A False Narrative?
57:18 The Maoli Haoli Alliance and Hawaiian History
01:08:22 The Psyop of Mauna Kea Protests
01:21:15 Escaping Ideological Binaries: A Personal Journey
01:33:37 The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Relationships and Beliefs
01:37:02 AI and Technology: Optimism vs. Pessimism
01:45:18 The Influence of Japanese Media
01:49:17 The Fascination with Sanskrit
01:56:48 Views on China and Language Learning
02:04:12 The Complexity of Korean and Other Languages
02:09:47 Thoughts on Social Engineering and Personal Growth
02:17:54 Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans
Interview Transcript:
(I recommend listening to the conversation as the medium is the message. Apologies in advance for many transcription errors and inaccuracies to the recording.)
Introduction: Escapism and Identity
AMRX: So all these cult identities were attempts to run away from who I was and I just regarded so - as just so cringe now. Not that I embrace who I am. I still have identity issues, but I don't think signing up for a group and is really the answer anymore. But it - it was just so easy.
Just this big need for escapism and part of my agenda at NO COPE is to kill escapism. To make people realize - stop fantasizing.
Guys, look at yourselves. What are you doing in your own lives?
Are you becoming a stronger person?
Start looking in the mirror, start examining yourself. Be your own hero.
Discovering AMRX
Leafbox: So AMRX, I've been following your writing and I think the first time I found your writing was about your kind of breakdown of the Trump assassin. I think it was that number two, the Ukraine guy and then
AMRX: Oh yeah. That, yeah.
Leafbox: So I found that, and then your logo was so intriguing, the Sanskrit. So I was like, what is this about the Sanskrit in Hawaii? And you had a balanced take on the supposedly Trump assassin.
So maybe we can start there, but what motivated you to start your Substack and start writing? And just to get a perspective out from Hawaii?
Motivations Behind Writing: Disillusionment with MAGA
AMRX: What motivated me? I've been passively reading Substack now for, I don't really know, maybe off and on for years now, but what drove me over the edge - what made me want to start writing was the fact that around the middle of last summer - so maybe nine months ago or so after the first Trump assassination - I started getting really disillusioned with the MAGA stuff that I had been involved with for about almost 10 years at that point.
The person that is on my Substack now - the way I write now - is not who I was as of what, June or July, 2024. I was at that point - I was still very reluctantly - but still vaguely on board with the whole MAGA train stuff and with the assassination that - with that first assassination attempt, which I initially bought into and freaked out about and then started questioning. I started feeling severe doubts about Trump even as early as 2017. I publicly disavowed Trump, and I voted for him with great reluctance in 2020. And last year I was going to vote for him again but with extreme disgust. And just because he was the lesser evil. However, reading many people on Substack I - last year - I - my feelings about Trump changed from, oh God, I guess I'll vote for him to what the hell have I been doing?
And so last summer I underwent this massive metamor- - not totally massive, for what, seven years? 2017 to 2024. I had been a very reluctant supporter of Trump. I didn't like most of what he did, but I just figured, you know what? He's better than the alternative. And then I saw arguments against the - my whole lesser evil mindset.
I realized that I looked very ridiculous having screamed about the whole vaccine and covid stuff for four years. And I knew in the back of my head the entire time that Trump had played a role in it. But I had just denied it to myself because everyone in my MAGA world similarly denied it.
And then I - then on Substack last year, I saw these people pointing out that - reminding me actually, of - about Trump's role in the whole CONvid mess. And then I had this epiphany: wait, I can't - I've spent four years whining about CONvid, and this Trump guy has been part of it, and I knew it, and I was in denial of it.
And everyone I knew who was in MAGA was also in denial of it. And I realized, okay, that's it. I was on the edge of dropping out of the MAGA stuff anyway. And that was the last straw when something I should have realized years ago finally just became extremely obvious. Now, if I had been some kind of vaccine supporter, then there would've been no contradiction, and I guess I could have just supported him.
But I just realized that. If I am against all this CONvid nonsense, I can't support the Operation Warp Speed guy. I can't support the Father of the Vaccine anymore. And that in turn started me rethinking a lot of other things. And I became more and more alienated from all the MAGA people I had known for the past several years or more.
I had - I then tried to convince the MAGA folks of my position and went absolutely nowhere.
So I then conducted what I've described on my Stack as the Third Purge. The First Purge was - was letting go of the people who bought into the whole CONvid stuff. The Second Purge was letting go of the people who were fanatical Putin supporters. I wanna make clear that I belong to the Rurik Skywalker school of thought. So I'm not some kind of Zelenskist or something. I just got sick and tired of being told for three years that Russia is winning and just keep waiting and trust the plan. And then whoever was left after those two purges - all the MAGA people - that's - they were the subject of the Third Purge. And so toward the end of last year, I think I - I just - I was just so fed up with everything, and I had no one to talk to - nowhere left to go - so I just started venting on Substack.
So that's how that starts. Sorry that was so long-winded.
Political Evolution: From Neo-Conservative to Anarchist
Leafbox: I think, so, AMRX, how would you, I don't want, I don't know how comfortable you are sharing details about yourself, but maybe you can give us a little bit of context about - you write about it in your Substack - about your kind of political evolution and I think you were a neo-conservative before and anarchist and socialist.
You've had a lot of transitions going back and forth between the left right dichotomy and now it feels you're in this third position where you see the theater - there is the left and right are just part of the same. So maybe you can just walk us through some of your biography or whatever you feel comfortable sharing and then how Hawaii maybe fits into it as well as this third place.
AMRX: Okay. Alright.
Hawaii's Dysfunctional Government and Early Political Views
AMRX: As a child it was incr- - it was just incredibly obvious to me that Hawaii was a very dysfunctional place. At least in terms of its government. I love Hawaii. I never want to leave. But I always thought its government was a mess. And when I was young, I knew absolutely nothing about the right or anything.
So I figured that the only solution was to go further left. And so then I became enamored with communism. And this was in the eighties. So the mass media was feeding me as a kid all this message that Republicans and Reagan was evil. So I totally bought into that. But at the same time, I regarded the Democrats running Hawaii as evil.
So my conclusion as a kid with no guidance whatsoever - no one was pushing into anything - was that communism was the answer. Then I slowly drifted toward away from communism and toward socialism and then anarchism. At one point I was heavily influenced by a a sixties radical I used to know.
And interestingly. I told him how indebted I was to him, and he told me something that had stuck with me for almost four decades now, which is: Do not become a leftist because of me. And at that time, I just wrote that off and just filed it in the back of my head. But many years later, I came to see the wisdom of his words that I shouldn't, shou - choose some ideology.
I actually, I don't even believe in ideology now, but I shouldn't choose my politics because of my personal connection with him. And that's something that's a theme that I just recently wrote about actually, in my, in the stack I just wrote last night. Because I see that in MAGA now where all these people I knew in the MAGA movement - they've just dumped all of their principles.
You can argue their principles are right or wrong or whatever, but they just look really foolish because all these free market guys now - they're always screaming free market. And all the guys who are like anti corporation or whatever - they have nothing to say.
When I mentioned Palantir, they have nothing to say negative about tariffs. Because they're all enamored with Trump. So anyway, my point is that as a kid I got a good lesson that I shouldn't be sucked into a cult of personality and that the sixties radical did not want me to be following his footsteps just because I was en- - enamored with - anyway I went to college then thinking that, disregarding my guru's words.
College Years: Questioning Leftist Ideals and Embracing Ayn Rand
AMRX: I went to college thinking, yeah, man, I'm gonna be a radical and I'm gonna fight the system or whatever. And I then started questioning the leftist stuff in college. It was funny because I went to college. I specifically went to college hoping to be just like my guru. And seeing the actual left there turned me off. Moreover, I got sucked into Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which is something I'm going to write a Substack about - at - on Substack, about at great length eventually.
I had a roommate who was heavily into Ayn Rand. It wasn't his fault. I had been reading her stuff even before I met this roommate. It was just a pure coincidence I met this guy. I had no idea he was a Randite. And he gave me very good advice. He told me that I should never join an Objectivist group on campus.
And being an introvert, it was - it was easy for me not to join, but that turned out to be very good and lazy, but a good choice. But anyway, I was a hardcore Ayn Rand Objectivist for many years. Maybe, depending on where you - I faded out of it - but 20-odd years. Anyway, that's a story for - I, I'd like to tell in more depth on Substack, but that was a major phase of my life as well.
And I met a whole bunch of people through that. And it's been funny now watching them all, go MAGA and take positions that are totally against the Ayn Rand cult, but they don't even seem to notice it. It's been pretty bizarre. When I was MAGA I had no problem with Trump's positions that contradicted Rand's because I had abandoned Rand at that point.
But it's been pretty weird seeing all these Objectivists and libertarians and conservatives just support stuff that if it didn't have the orange sticker on it, they'd scream bloody murder. It's just been weird.
Disillusionment with Objectivism and NeoConservatism
AMRX: Anyway I became gradually disillusioned with the Objectivist stuff as well. I - and by the time 2015 came along, by the time Trump came on the scene, I shift - I shifted toward that.
Oh, actually, I forgot. You mentioned the NeoCon neoconservative stuff. Conservative. There's a sect of the Objectivist that are hardcore NeoCons, and I ended up getting involved with them. So I was a NeoCon blogger for several years. I wrote complete garbage that I totally disavow now. Just embarrassing utter nonsense. I was deathly terrified of another 9/11 and out of pure fear, I just wrote just utter nonsense. I feel that who I was even just a year ago is very different from where I am now and where I was 20-odd years ago, even more I was 20-odd years ago, I was hardcore invested in the whole left-right paradigm. I was screaming about Islamism and leftists and as hardcore into cultural war stuff, even as recently as last year until - I was hardcore to this cultural war nonsense.
But yeah, the NeoCon stuff - it - I'm sorry to jump all over the chronology here. So this is about 20 years ago, I was a big supporter of the Afghanistan stuff. Not initially, but I mean my initial impulse after 9/11 was, Afghanistan's gonna be a disaster, but I got sucked into NeoCon world and I started cheerleading that - I cheerleaded for the Iraq War. What changed though was just the obvious fact that I was beating my drums for a few years and then it started slowly dawning on me that, wait a second, where's this alleged victory? Where's this victory? Where's this great, new, exciting democracy?
And I had a similar but much faster shift with the Ukrainian invasion because the people I was involved with at the time - so this is 2022, - I was involved with the pro-Putin people, and they're all clamoring. They're all saying that, Russia's gonna win. It's gonna be any day now.
And then I started having doubts about that. So my NeoCon experience actually prepared me for my later disillusionment with stuff, because just as the NeoCon adventure turned out to be a huge disaster, we in what looked like, yeah, man, Russia fighting NATO, Russia striking back in early 2022 also trying to be a complete disaster.
And both cases, all the people I thought who were my friends just kept on cheerleading no matter what. While I was like, I don't know, man. So by last year I was sick of the Putin cheerleaders. I was sick of the MAGA stuff. The JD Vance thing was another element that made me sick of everything I had been involved with in my circle, in my MAGA circles overnight.
JD Vance was just worshipped. I just was stunned. And like people were just saying out of the blue that, oh, he - his autobiography was like the most moving book ever. And I'm like, really? You? None of you guys ever mentioned his autobiography before. It just felt creepy and AstroTurfed and I was - I felt like I was in some kind of psy-op, and on Substack I saw people at - Rurik Skywalker question this Vance character. So that was another element that made me alienate -
Leafbox: AMRX. Can I ask you a question? Yes. Have you ever, don't take offense at this, but have you ever studied cult dynamics?
AMRX: No, I'm, no, I'm very ignorant of a whole lot of things.
Leafbox: It just, it feels like instead of, relabel these political movements as different cults, it's like Soka Gakkai or Aum Shinrikyo, or Scientology, it just feels like you've been jumping between different groups, trying to find some either identity or longing or being enamored by the cult dynamics.
There's exclusion factors. Your members or your, the people exclude you. It's the same thing a cult leader does, right? You have to follow the party line. You have to follow the group line, you have to follow the cult line. What's interesting thing is that just like the guru, I don't know if there's psychological operations that the guru does or that the government does.
There, there's this third awakening that you seem to be having. Instead of jumping from one to the next one, socialism to libertarianism, to Ayn Randism, to Neoconservatism, to MAGA, to now, you seem to be just no cult. That's who you want, right? No, that's the,
AMRX: Yeah. Yeah. That's why I called - yes.
That, yes. That's why I call my stack NO COPE because I came to realize that every person I knew was addicted to some sort of drug. Not literally, but they all hoped that their favorite hero would save them somehow. I'm just so sick of this whole hero paradigm, and I realized that everyone I knew had their alleged ideology, but that ideology actually was just a bunch of words.
I know all these Christ - Christians, and they aren't actually that interested in Christianity. They go through the motions. They pay tons of money to the church. And on the surface they look really pious, but they promote stuff like Andrew Tate and that just - it just doesn't make any sense.
And then they promote Trump. I - ha, yeah. So yeah, I really should go look into the cult dynamic stuff. I am - this is just so classic, right? People who are in a cult don't realize it. Yeah. I, when I read about Aum Shinrikyo, I read about Scientology - I've - I should go back and look at my Scientology stuff, because when I read about Scientology in the past, I was like, oh, I'm not like these people.
Actually I was, and here's a funny story about cult switching - is when right after I graduated high school, I found a used copy of a book called What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? And in it are all these portraits of various students who graduated from high school in 1965 in the United States.
And the authors tracked down what they did for the following decade or something, 15 years? I forgot. And out of all the portraits in the book, the one that stuck out to me at the tim - so this is 35 years ago, but it's haunted me for 35 years. And now I realize, wow, looking in the mirror, it's like looking in the mirror or something.
One of the portraits was a person who, you know - who fit what you just said - actually who fit - who is like myself. This guy jumped from cult to cult. And at the time when I read it I didn't see myself in this guy at all. You - because I'm like, haha, I'm smarter than this guy.
Actually, no, I wasn't. The only real difference is that I now affiliate with no one. I don't have any guru. I, I quote Rurik Skywalker a lot, but I just - I'm - he has no power over me. I am - I'm my own person. I can like people on Substack. I can - but I don't have this. I don't worship them.
I - they're not my leader or anything. And one of Rurik's positions is he's against ideology and so am I. Anyway, back to this Class of ’65 guy - his life story and mine are actually very similar. The only difference is that yeah, in the end he just kept jumping cults. So the last I heard of him - so I looked up this guy and he seems to have stabilized as some sort of white supremacist or something.
Oh. But yeah I have - so in the end, yeah, no, I did not have that fate - white supremacist or any kind of cult. I've gotten away from that. But what's embarrassing, though, is that I've only been free of this for about a year, and I just feel like such a different person. It - in June 2024, I was still like, man, I don't really like this Trump guy, but I was still trying to vaguely rationalize stuff.
Leafbox: I think that's one of the reasons why I wanted to interview you to understand one, why you were so attracted to finding, I'm gonna use the word cult.
Where do you think, yeah. Where do you think that comes from? And then what lessons you can give others to just get out of the paradigm.
AMRX: Great questions. Wow. Yeah. Why did I do this? On my Stack, I wrote an article about why I got sucked into the whole NeoCon thing, but, and I can't even remember it, so I'm just gonna reinvent it right now.
The Role of Social Dynamics in Political Affiliations
AMRX: One of the major reasons I got sucked into all of this was just social, really. That's the sad thing. I am an extreme introvert, and I find it very difficult to talk to people. The thing about all these different cults is that if you believe that everyone you deal with is on the same page as you, then socialization becomes very easy.
Like in NeoCon world, for instance. But this applies to any other thing, like a MAGA - it doesn't matter. I'm just gonna use the NeoCons as an example. In the NeoCon case, I had a new job. I was, oh no. Sorry. I'm getting the chronology wrong here. When the NeoCon - when I jumped on the NeoCon bandwagon after 9/11, I had lost my job.
I was isolated. I had no friends. And out of sheer boredom, I started blogging. And an acquaintance of mine had joined the NeoCon Cult. He had done a 180. This guy was an - was a veteran, but he had turned anti-military. But after 9/11, he just - I don't understand his transformation. He flipped. And I used to be like rabidly anti-military too, but I was jobless.
I had no friends. This guy I vaguely knew - I was reaching out to this guy - vaguely knew - his blog linked to mine. And because he was linked with all these other NeoCons, their blogs started linking to mine. And so I got sucked into this whole social web and I was so desperate to talk to people that this just became a very easy way for me to make connections.
And to this day, all these guys are still in my Rolodex, so to speak, 20-odd years later. I don't really say anything to them anymore because they're all on the MAGA stuff. But you have - social thing is huge. This is just such classic, you -
Leafbox: That's why I brought the cult thing. It just seems - yeah, it's it is exactly why people join religions or why people join.
AMRX: Oh, yeah.
Leafbox: Yeah. So I'm just wondering where that, if there's any relation to your personal history or is it Hawaii? I think you're Japanese American, right? Yeah. I don't know, I don't wanna psychoanalyze you, but I'm just curious where you think it comes from. Is this just individualization and you're - yeah.
You touching on these points? It's very interesting.
AMRX: Yeah. About - about how my background ties into this.
Identity Issues and Cultural Alienation
AMRX: I have always felt very - well, this is something I'll expand upon in future essays, I hope, but I have severe identity problems - severe identity issues. I can't go into them not because of privacy, but just because I'm sure you have other questions. Your questions are just awesome, and I love them, and I wanna discuss other things too.
But in brief, I've had severe identity issues and these cults fulfilled that, because I have always felt like isolated from my own family. The co- - the covid stuff made it even more extreme where my family banned me. That was just great. But I've always felt isolated from my own family. I come from a Japanese American background and there are a zillion Japanese Americans in Hawaii, but for whatever reason, I never really clicked with any of them. And I've always had friends of non-Japanese backgrounds, so I've always felt alienated and isolated. And one thing I - and so through these cults - yeah, that's just - I'm glad you - I'm gonna adopt that term - that from now on, because you're right. That's what these things were. These cults were my attempt to find an alternative identity.
I, in my piece - on my future piece and Objectivism - I've noticed that a lot of Objectivists are in the same - are in a similar position to me. There's like these Objectivists who come from non-white backgrounds, and they want to be some sort of weird and some sort of new thing. A lot of Objective - Ayn Rand herself and her own inner circle - they were all Jewish - but they were, they wanted to be something other than Jewish. They were trying to run away from it. And I was like them. I see that in hindsight now. I didn't wanna be Japanese. I wanted to be like this weird like new, what I've called the New Objectivist Man that was not Japanese, not Asian, not anything. I was just gonna be like this new recreated being and part of this, oh God, it just sounds so stupid. But yeah. So all these ident- - all these cult identities were attempts to run away from who I was, and I just regard it so - as just so cringe now. Not that I embrace who I am. I still have identity issues, but I don't think signing up for a group and is really the answer anymore. But it, it was just so easy.
Leafbox: Going back to one question, I know I don't want to bring up too much, but you have written about, you had disillusionment, I think, did you study in Japan? You tried to, I think you speak,
AMRX: Oh god, that was a disaster. Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing I wanna write, extensively, I wanna write it in depth about, but -
Leafbox: Yeah, I'm very curious about that because Japanese culture has such a strong group dynamic, and you as a Japanese American are immediately separated from that being Nikkei or whatever generation you are.
There's this very strong also American importance of self identity. So I'm just curious how your experience was going into Japan or what that was like. Was that another rejection?
AMRX: Oh yeah. That was another rejection. So at at one point, so this is what, almost four decades ago or something.
I mentioned, you know how I was disgusted by Hawaii, at least politically, and I had this bizarre idea that I was going to dump Hawaii, put it forever behind me, move to Japan and just become Japanese. Now, like almost four decades later, I see these young teenagers who want to become Korean. I - like in these forums, I see these - like these young girls or whatever saying, I wanna move to Korea and become Korean, and I wanna speak Korean.
That was me when I was a teenager. I, and so I poured all my energy into learning Japanese and I went to university in Japan. And that was just a complete disaster. Because I realized I really did not fit in there. The language is not the problem. I could do the classes I could do the tests, I could write the papers.
That was not the issue. I - it made me realize how superficial my idea of Japanese identity was just because I could speak, read and write Japanese didn't mean I really belonged there. And I realized, yeah, this is just not for me anymore. And then I started doubling down on the Objectivist stuff, because as I just mentioned, Objectivism is like a - is like for non-main- - like people of color, or it can be like this weird, and for Jews, it's like this weird surrogate identity.
And so I adopted that from years afterward.
Leafbox: No I can see it now with the new alter what is it? Effective altruists. That's another cult type dynamic. AMRX, I assume you have just talking to you and your interests. Seems like you have a high IQ. Have you ever taken again, I don't wanna be offensive if I'm psychoanalyzing, but maybe the introverted nature has like autistic tendencies, right?
And you're fitting, yeah. The lack of family dynamic with this larger cult dynamic, to fit that family need or the group need. Did - where was your interest in linguistics come from? Is that what you studied and were you - what is the role of language itself fall into this kind of, or is that an opposite thing?
I'm just curious. You have so many interesting. I have, the thing I like about your Substack, that you write all, Thai script and Sanskrit and Russian language, and there's just a lot of interesting linguistic awareness that you brought me to. So that's, I just wanna see what, where does linguistics fit into your kind of identity formation or identity lack of cohesion.
AMRX: Great question. Yeah.
Linguistic Interests and Cultural Identity
AMRX: Being in Hawaii, I'm just surrounded by all these different languages. And as a kid, because I ran away for, I had this weird dynamic where on the one hand, I wanted to embrace my Japanese identity and run away to Japan. So I had that crazy fantasy. But at the same time, in - in my - so that - but at the same time in my real life, I didn't actually have any Japanese friends, either Japanese or Japanese American friends.
So I hung out with people of different backgrounds and I got interested in their languages and their cultures. So I was a wa- I - I've always been a walking contradiction and that's how I got interested. I got really interested in languages. When I was a very young kid I just thought there were like two languages in the universe, Japanese and English.
And then by chance, the library I found a Mandarin textbook. So this is when I was about age eight. I started reading it and I was like, wow, this is, it's got Chinese -obviously it's Mandarin, right? So it's got Chinese characters - so it's familiar just visually, but wow, this is just so different at the same time.
And then I made Chinese friends and just - things just spiraled from there. In one of the big-life changing experiences I had was in high school where we had to - where I had to take an Asian study - Asian history class, and the teacher said, we can't - we don't - I don't have time to cover like all the countries of Asia.
So in - so in the class we did Chinese history, Japanese history, and Indian history. And she said, okay, for all the other countries in Asia, what I'm gonna have you do is you kids - you - I'm gonna - I'm gonna assign countries to you kids or something like that. I don't remember if we - they were assigned to us or we had to pick, or - I don't,- but somehow I ended up with Korea, and I had Korean friends, and everything just suddenly we clicked, and then I got sucked into Korean studies. I even picked my university because it was one of the few places with Korean studies and it also had a strong leftist reputation. So that's how,
Leafbox: So did you learn Korean as well?
AMRX: Yes. Yeah. So that's how I - that's why I'm interested in the phenomenon of these weird Korea wannabes.
I see on - like Quora - like these people, saying, why shouldn't I move to Korea? Why can't I just go there? And I'm like, wow, you guys are like me 40 years ago.
Leafbox: And then what, you, you've been writing about this concept called the Global American Empire, which to me seems like a leftist concept.
How do you feel like the role of Hawaii is this laboratory of, you call it no place? Yes. Maybe we can expand on that and how that maybe fits into your case.
AMRX: Okay. Yeah.
Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement and Local Identity
AMRX: Why it's no place. As a kid, for instance, going to school, I had all this American stuff drilled into me and it just felt like really performative and artificial.
And it just strikes me in hindsight that - why the am I doing all this? And I've tried to - because I was in MAGA world, and because I was, involved with neocons and so I've known - I know a lot of - I don't know how to put this delicately, wealthy white conservatives, and I've known these people for like decades now, and it is impossible to make them understand that there's like a universe other than theirs, and they just think it's so totally normal that everyone worships the Constitution.
And I had that shoved down my throat as a kid. And so that - that kind of also made - drove me to - I'm gonna be a - I'm gonna be a communist or. So I just felt like all this American stuff was really alien and irrelevant.
On my blog, I - I write a lot about how distant Hawaii is from all of this. It just seems odd to me. Most people here don't seem to think about that, but even as a kid, I was like, what am I doing? Why am I pledging allegiance to all this stuff? I don't get it. So I've never identified with America.
I - and that's, so that's why, yeah, people have told me that even, long after I allegedly converted to the right and all that, that I still sound like some kind of leftist, anti-imperialist and - yeah, you can - so the global American Empire stuff that I got from Academic Agent, you can say it's still an echo.
That now - about the no place stuff - I've - I want to expand on that in future Stacks. I'm sorry to say - keep saying that during this interview, but I have this huge long list of topics. I could just go on forever. But anyway, about the no place concept - it’s not just about me - the - my personal alienation.
It's that I don't - I - here is where cultures seem to come to die. I see everyone around me losing their heritage. Like all the kids I grew up with - they're all children of immigrants and they did not identify with their parents' languages or cultures at all in many cases. They couldn't speak their parents' language, and they were trying - they were like me.
They were trying to find some alternative identity, and so we were all alienated. And I think that's quite common here, but people just don't talk about it. And that's why, like I say on my blog, it seems that the only thing people here have in common are just pop culture stuff, like Marvel movies or whatever.
Because they, I think - people here become nowhere people. They don't really belong in their ancestral cultures. Even the native Hawaiians here, and this is just pure heresy. This is why I don't write under my real name. Like these - like the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. It just strikes me as so bizarre because these people keep yammering on about our people and our this and our that.
But the - I'm not the first person to say this. The interesting thing about the Hawaii sovereignty movement people is that there's actually not nothing very Hawaiian about these people. They're not interested in Hawaiian culture or language at all. They and their ideologies, like I just pointed out on my blog the other day, their great lead- - their great late leader Haunani-Kay Trask was trained in Wisconsin.
They - so they've built this weird imported leftist identity, and they just put this Hawaiian stamp on it. And so they too - they, they've lost touch with their own culture. And part of this is just modernity in general. You - it's a trope and it's a cliche, but there are people who go to Japan and they're just shocked at - why isn't everyone in Japan practicing Zen?
Or whatever stereotype. And yeah, part of it is modern. Everybody seems to be losing their roots or whatever. That's true. But in Hawaii it just seems even more accelerated because eve- - because everyone here has, at least in Japan, they still speak Japanese here. Everyone has lost their original language, including the native, almost all native Hawaiians.
Everyone's cut off from that, and everyone is trying - I just get this feeling that everyone is trying to run away just like me. My case is extreme, but people are just running away into consumerism and -
Leafbox: AMRX, I was gonna use one of your leftist lenses, right? It's just the neoliberal agenda, right?
It wants to flatten people into an easy consumer. Correct. And easy. Yes. The lack of diversity. True diversity means that we all buy the same products, that the machine makes. Yeah. So that's like a very leftist position to me.
AMRX: Yeah.
Leafbox: I just wonder if you look at more, yesterday I spoke to someone and he was very pro, I guess cosmopolitanism is the opposite.
I brought up the concept maybe on the right, people call it the global homo, global homogenization. I'm - I don't know where I stand. I grew up, I'm very cosmopolitan. My background is - I grew up in South America. I speak Japanese also. All over. I have British roots and Chilean roots.
I have the same identity issues that are complicated, but sometimes I look at it as a hybridization and trying to choose the best. Just like Japan, they import, katakana and language and memes get absorbed into the main culture. But here in Hawaii, you get a sense that it's almost like the pidginization.
I don't know if it's a reduction. Yeah. So I wondered, maybe your linguistic lens can apply to it. There's a loss of the depth of English. You speak to someone from England and they have such a range of vocabulary, right? Yeah. Not to reduce pidgin, but there's a flattening, right?
There's a reduction. Yeah. So I don't know where to stand on it. If I use a neoliberal kind of critique lens, like a Marxist would, it seems bad, but other people might see it, and anthropologists might see it as it's hybridization. It's a new thing that's gonna emerge, right? A new concept of not Hawaiian, but like being this third place people, right?
I don't know how you feel about that, but maybe that's part of why you're lacking of this true core identity, you're trying to fi, fi figure it out, right? You're trying to because of the general environment, so unstructured, right?
AMRX: Yeah. I'm glad that you brought up pidgin because that language is something on my write list because I think it's greatly misunderstood. And about flattening. Yeah.
Leafbox: Yeah. So I don't know where I don't know where to stand on it. Is flattening good or bad or just natural? Is it hybridization? Is it cosmopolitanism? Or is it,
AMRX: I can argue. I can argue all those things actually. I have to say that with my background, having jumped around from belief system to belief system one reason I can't, I - I'll - I promise I'll get back to the pidgin stuff because I love that, but I just wanna make a short point first because to this day, my Rolodex has people from all over the ideological map.
I know a lot of Democrats, Ob- and leftists. Even now I can talk like all - I - and I can, I do talk like all of them to them, just socially. I - and I can argue for or against pretty much anything. Substack is the only place where I really just let it all hang out. And I have no pre- and I'm not saying I try to fool people.
I - I just, don't like, like arguing. Anyway, back to the pidgin stuff. Yeah, I can argue pidgin all sorts of ways. I have - I like what you said about being - taking the best of different things. When - with the Japanese stuff, for instance, I've never a hundred percent rejected my Japanese background.
I've been trying to find ways to make it work - make it part of something else. And I've, as a thought experiment for decades now, I've been thinking about how pidgin can become like this new fusion identity in Hawaii. And one idea I had for a Stack was writing about how the Hawaiian sovereignty movement here totally rejects pidgin.
And not overtly. None of the leaders have ever said pidgin is evil or something. But they - all their rhetoric is in this mainland English. And I - and that's interesting to me because they speak in the lang, you know what I would have said? Actually, I've said - yeah, I - they're speaking the language of the oppressor. and it's just funny that they're not using the language that they hear and all around them.
Yeah, pidgin is a very complicated thing in Hawaii, because people have this strange relationship with it. People use it as a marker of local identity, but it's also something that they're ashamed of. And for instance, they are ver- - they like to write pidgin as if it's English, and they, yeah - it - they and I have very mixed feelings toward the whole thing.
And although I - I have zero experience in places like Ukraine or Belarus, I wonder if the situation is similar there in some ways. Because if replace, ooh, obvious - if you replace the role of English with Russian - I, yeah, I think pidgin could become part of a new Hawaii identity. Rurik Skywalker has written about how ident- - new identities can be created - new nations can be formed. And I've wondered about pidgin's role in that for a future, dare I say, sovereign Hawaii. But I haven't really worked out how that would work, and being an introvert, and now being totally isolated with no friends or anything.
I have zero chance of ever making it work, but -
Leafbox: It's funny you bring up pidgin because to me that's like the biggest sign of someone who's local. To me, living in Hawaii, I've only been here five years. My, my partner, she's Polynesian. But from Tahiti. She's from Tahiti.
So Tahiti has a very different relationship to language. 'cause when you watch on the television, Tahiti, everything's bilingual. Tahitian, people speak Tahitian. Tahitian is still a alive language. It's used. Yes. And here in Hawaii, one of the first things that was so shocking to me was when I took the bus, they had the sign in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, English. Spanish. And I was like, what is Spanish doing here? I guess there's some Puerto Ricans, but there was no native Hawaiian. Yes, there was the, I forgot the name of the voiceover guy who does the Hawaiian voice. He would announce, but there was no Hawaiian written. And I know Hawaiian's an oral language, but to me that was so strange to me that it wasn't, you can find the Bible in kind of this pidgin, you can find the Bible in Hawaiian, but on the bus it wasn't a live language.
And then I learned that supposedly Hawaiian is the second official language of the state. Yes, it is. It's so subjugated, like you said, and the, to me it's extreme because, you go to the and they'll either have, like you said, the colonial academic English, the oppressor's language as the movement of Hawaiian studies, or like perfect Hawaiian that is, I don't speak any Hawaiian, maybe a hundred words or something, but it's this dichotomy where they don't use pidgin, which is interesting to me.
And that's, to me, the signifier of the true local. You have the port, like the real local guys. You go to big island and you hear pidgin. Yeah. And I can't do it. And that's that guy's local, he doesn't have to Hawaiian. He could be how third generation Scottish guy, but they speak and drop into that. So can you code switch like that? Are you good at vision or do you
AMRX: No. That's even - no. See, this is - this is part of, my identity problems as well because, because, oh wow. I lo- I love the stuff you bring up. This is just great. The, no, I can't really code switch. That's - this is part of my shame as well. This is part of the joke is that I - oh, I remind - I - I I'm reminded of, oh gosh, I hope I don't get this name - guy's name wrong.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who's like the founding father of Pakistan, because apparently. I could just be totally getting this wrong. He couldn't read or write in Urdu or something and he couldn't even speak it. And he was just English dominant. And yet he's the father of Pakistan. And I feel like that because I understand pidgin, having been surrounded by it forever.
I have an uncle who is pidgin monolingual, basically. I've never heard him speak anything like American English. But - and when I was a kid, yeah. My - everyone I knew spoke - almost everyone I knew spoke pidgin.
It's a class signifier. Yeah. 'cause like my uncle is very working class, and my branch of my family we all strive to speak ‘correct’ English. And so I - and - but at the same time though, I have been told, people tell me that I have an accent or something and people say, oh, that they - that I still don't speak whatever their concept of properly is.
So I felt that just added to my identity issues. And then every time I've tried to speak pidgin, people are like, oh my God, that's awful.
Leafbox: AMRX, I always take it as a positive thing. If you're trying to stay out of the cults.
AMRX: True. Yeah.
True. Yeah. Yeah.
Here's the funny thing, the only person in my entire life whoever liked the way I spoke English was a Chinese guy with perfect accentless American English. And he's wow, you are just so easy to understand. I'm like, some people - I'm like, thank you.
But yeah, yeah, when I moved to the mainland, I got told that I had some weird accent. I'm like, okay. And in Hawaii, yeah, people give me the stink eye as they say. So yeah, I - so that - that's - so that added to my whole - yeah, I'm gonna run away and become an Objectivist and I'm gonna go to Japan and all this other nonsense runaway stuff I've given up on.
I'm like - just that. That's it. I'm not gonna, I'm not running anymore. To quote a John Mellencamp song.
Leafbox: Dropping back into the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement. Yeah, you've written some interesting things and there was that, I love some of the words. You like the Hi- - Hipsta Pravda. They had that piece in there about, a demand for sovereignty, whatever the article you referenced.
And it was interesting because she's a non, she's, I know who the writer is and race doesn't matter so much, but it's interesting to have someone writing and, but it wasn't a true sovereignty movement. I'm like, do you remember a few years ago there was this group here in Hawaii that was a militia of some form, and then they were on the North Shore of Oahu, and they were doing some type of training and they had some land battle issue, and they were actually arming themselves and they were calling themselves, I forget like the, Hawaiian army or Hawaiian land army.
And it was disappeared. It was literally disappeared. And I don't know if they were a true revolutionary, if they were on the right left, but they seemed to be like militarizing their call for independence or sovereignty, and maybe they only had five members or something and they were all arrested, or maybe they were an FBI psy-op don't know what it was, but they, it all disappeared from the local news.
Meanwhile, this article calling for the sovereignty and this kind of false way seemed pushed right? Like it, like you've written about how the sovereignty movement is just really kind of part of the left allowed, I guess the term would be oppositional or what is a controlled opposition versus, so maybe you can talk about that.
AMRX: I'm gonna confess straight up that I've never actually heard of this group, but that you just mentioned, and I should go look into it. I confess that my media diet here is pretty awful. It's limited to what I call Hipsta Pravda, which is my name for - I'm just naming this for anyone who's listening - Civil Beat, which is this online-only magazine, and what I call Pravda, which is the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the only surviving daily paper in Honolulu.
That's pretty much my media diet. I used to read the right wing news in Hawaii, but it - and there - there was recently this new website, I've even - I've forgotten what it's called, but I checked it out briefly. Some conservative on the mainland funded this new conservative site. And I looked at it, and it was just garbage.
And when I say garbage, I don't - it looked like it had no original reporting. It looked almost like a spam AI generated garbage site. It was just nothing. Because of this garbage media diet, I don't know anything about this group you're talking about to now have to go and -
Leafbox: I was - I just remember this very small article about it, and they had some land battle and they were like dressed in fatigues and there's a bunch of native Hawaiians.
And I'm sure either they were won an FBI psy-op that Yeah. Or they were actually a legitimate, and then immediately the state, they got, if you actually had a bunch of Hawaiians go to the court or to the capitol with guns, Governor Green would be quickly not he would not be calling for Mauna Kea.
So it is all, it's all theater to me.
The Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement: A False Narrative?
Leafbox: If actually there was a true native Hawaiian uprising of some form
AMRX: Yep.
Leafbox: I don't even know what that would mean. And I thought it was very inter It was very interesting because your article, you wrote that, the Republic of Fiji, the all these, Samoa, all these, Samoa is still a protectorate.
But you listed like 80 coun- 80 tiny islands in the Polynesian Hemisphere that have gotten independence from the UK or France or - yeah. And Hawaii's, they don't even bring this up that it's even a potential possibility whether or not the economics or the, if it's worth becoming independent or not.
That's a separate, but they don't even imagine it. That's why I thought the article was so interesting that they don't actually want it. So you've written about how it's - it's a false movement, right? Yes. And I want to hear your thoughts about that.
AMRX: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Hawaiian Identity and Cultural Disconnect
AMRX: One of the strange things about Hawaii is that there is, and this is, I guess, part of the no place thing too, is that there seems to be like very little acknowledgement of the fact that Hawaii is part of Oceania and is part of Polynesia specifically.
There seems - nobody ever talks about - even though we actually have real Samoans and Tongans here, they're treated like aliens from outer space. Okay, that's a bit much. They're not aliens from outer space, but it - there's no sense of brotherhood or anything here. And it - just see, and as you say, all these sovereignty - the - so the alleged sovereignty movement here never talks about in - these other models for independence.
Like for example, the Hawaii language thing. Okay. To, to their credit, the Hawaiian language movement here does point out that well, but actually this is - this shows you, the controlled aspect, right? So in Hawaiian language circles, they talk a lot about, like my Hawaiian language teacher talked about New Zealand and the Maori movement - language restoration movement there, but they never talk about Tahiti, for instance.
Where Tahitian is still alive. They never talk about Samoan or Tongan.
Yeah. It - they - and there's no interest in that. And it just struck me. It just struck me as well, why are you guys obsessed with this Maori stuff from another colonized people?
Why don't you find your models from independent peoples, or at least nominally independent? We can argue that all day. But it is really weird. And -
The Maoli-Haole Alliance and Hawaiian History
AMRX: This may tie into an idea I've been exploring, which is what I've - what I call on my blog, the Maoli-Haole Alliance, where
Leafbox: Yeah, that's very interesting. Give non-Hawaiians definitions of those words and then also how, yeah, the flag fits in perfectly with that,
right?
AMRX: Yeah. So Maoli is the Hawaiian word for native, and it's cognate to Maori.
It's a pan-Polynesian word. Haole or “howley” in an Americanized pronunciation is the Hawaiian word for white person. And Hawaiian history is traditionally looked through. Via two different lenses. The left le - the left lens, and the right lens. And I've dealt with and I'm - and this is the paradigm I was stuck in for a long time myself.
The left lens is - Hawaiians are oppressed by evil white people. And this is my view for a long time. The right lens is that Hawaiians were liberated and they became part of America. And that narrative, it sounds an awful lot like the Chinese narrative about Tibet, and you know - that Hawaiians should be grateful, that they now have freedom and the Constitution and all that.
So anyway, though, the reality, though, is a lot more complicated than poor oppressed native or liberated New American. It - the truth is very - it's much more complex. And as far as I know, I'm the only person who has written about this, at least in public. The great secret of Hawaiian history is the complex interrelationship between native Hawaiians and the white missionaries. Kamehameha's conquest of Hawaii, which was not even a unified country until he unified it, was made possible by Europeans and European technology.
The Hawaiian monarchy was heavily connected to Europeans. The last princess, as I've mentioned on my blog - the last princess of Hawaii was the daughter of a guy from Scotland and she was educated in England.
The Hawaiian Flag: Symbolism and Misconceptions
AMRX: The - you mentioned the Hawaiian flag The Hawaiian flag. And everyone thinks this is - everyone here thinks this is like some great, oh, not everyone, but most people here think it's some great symbol - anti-Western, anti-colonial symbol.
But it has the Union Jack. And I think - because of people's lack of awareness, I would not be surprised if a large percentage of people here have no idea what the Union Jack is. And they think it's solely on the Hawaiian flag. That just sounds crazy, but it might even be true. But yeah, the flag does perfectly symbolize stuff, because to me, when I look at it, I just see British colonialism.
But most people here see it as - it's so quintessentially Hawaiian. And it is because Hawaiian culture incorporated European aspects. The Hawaiian monarchy - the state church was Anglican. When the Queen was deposed, what did she do? She went to New England because spiritually she was a New England Protestant.
And the last princess, where did she go when Hawaii was taken over? And she fled to Europe. And she identified as Victorian royalty and to the - and I saw it. So when I see the modern day alleged sovereignty proponents using the Queen's English. Okay. Not with a British accent, but you get the point.
I - but it's sort of part of that, and no one here asks the obvious question of - why is the great leader of the sovereignty movement - why is her name Trask? Why are all these Hawaiian leaders - why do they have English names? Because they are part-English, because they are part-European. And there is actually very little Hawaiian culturally about these people.
They don't speak Hawaiian. They don't practice Hawaiian religion. They - their val- - they - their language is taken from classrooms in Wisconsin and they are promoted as the face of Hawaiian sovereignty. While this group - I never even heard of it. You mentioned they may or may not be real, but they are suppressed.
Just like the covid protests here were suppressed. I learned about one covid protest from a MAGA in New England who saw it in her Facebook feed or something. I was like, what? This happened and I didn't know about it.
Leafbox: Do you have any thoughts about, why are you scared of sharing these perspectives?
Because to me, this is a very leftist. It's almost Fran, what's Frantz? Fanon - the double consciousness. You could wake up people and if you truly want sovereignty, if you're a true native Hawaiian and you want independence, learning these things would be liberating in a way, wouldn't it?
Or is it just controlled opposition? They don't want to break free from that paradigm. What do you think the reasoning is there? There's two questions. Why are you scared of sharing this? Maybe you don't wanna create conflict, and then two, you don't think you would liberate these people, or they would get de totally destabilized.
I don't want you to start a revolutionary movement, but I if they were truly, I mean, it's just, I don't know what the la it's a whole, I went to Berkeley and it just feels like they were just shoving, decolonization all down our throats all day long. As a good thing, right?
So I, I don't know what is it? Just controlled opposition, like the state, the American hegemonic state, just they need a valve, right? Like you're saying they need a valve to release some of this stress. So they do this in this way, this academic.
But then like you said, they're all living off, they work for the state themselves.
AMRX: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Why amb- okay, why am I afraid? Because Hawaii is a very, this is obvious to you, but it - because you live here, but I don't know if people listening to this have any idea of how small a place Hawaii is, I walk everywhere. I don't even take the bus. And so it would be very easy for - you can say this is - maybe this is just paranoid, but the loudmouthed fake sovereignty movement at the University of Hawaii - Hawaii is very vocal.
They're very tiny, but they're very vocal. And I just get paranoid that I'll get harassed if I post this stuff with my real name. Because they don't want - I don't - it - it's not in their interest to have real sovereignty perspectives out there particularly from a non-Hawaiian because their one claim to whatever - to their movement - whatever is that they do have Hawaiian ancestry and that's the only thing that is really Hawaiian about this thing.
The whole thing just seems to be like this weird imported leftist. You can argue that I'm a leftist too, where what, fine, but it just seems to be like this bizarre university of Wisc - Madison at Wisconsin transplant and they don't want some - someone pointing out the elephant in the room that this is just all fake. These people have tons of - have lots of money. I'm not saying they drive Lexuses necessarily. I've posted pictures of their subcampus of - I mean, it's very pretty. I've - I've gone there and just taken pictures 'cause it's nice.
I - I paid for it. But yeah, they don't want - they don't want their cozy thing taken away from them. And so I think they would be very angry to see this. And they like the - this fake dynamic of us versus the Americans. They don't want this non-American perspective.
That's mine. I'm not, I don't buy into this whole, we are now American stuff and I don't believe in their romantic, weird, one-dimensional picture of pre-colonial Hawaii either. Yeah I don't think they'd react very well to someone endangering their meal ticket.
Leafbox: When you were around, you were in the seventies here, right?
Yes. Weren't, that's when the movement really started, right? To resurge, right? Yes. Yes. After statehood, yes. What was the vibe then? Were they more revolutionary? Were they like black, nationalists trying to really, were they trying to model themselves after like Jamaican independence or were they more vigorous and I revolutionary in spirit or were they less, or what was their vibe like?
AMRX: Okay. In the seventies there was, what they - what we call the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. The word that - especially the word to emphasize is “cultural”, because there was no talk of sovereignty as far as I knew. Now obviously at that time, Haunani-Kay Trask, the late leader of the movement - she - I think at that point she was already faculty at - but she didn't get very much press back then. I heard her name in the eighties, but it was like a - it was like background noise. Mostly. It was just this renewed interest in Hawaiian language and culture through the seventies and eighties.
And it was only really in 1993 with the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, overnight people who had no interest in Hawaiian history just started talking about sovereignty. This - “sovereign, sovereignty, sovereign," and that's not a everyday word here. You've talked about the, like the flattening and the pidginization.
And people here don't use words like sovereignty.
Around that time I was re - I was reading this memoir of a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime. And one part of the book that stuck out was how these peasants would suddenly start using this jargon like “independence-sovereignty” and Khmer normal - native Khmer words are monosyllabic, and all their sophisticated vocabulary is taken from Sanskrit and Pali.
So words like “independence-sovereignty” are these long multi-syllabic Indic words. And they just stood out as weird. So the survivor was saying, what the heck? Why are these peasants spouting this jargon? And just as I was reading that book, just as I was reading that book, suddenly everyone around me is going, sovereign sovereignty, sovereign, sovereign.
And then after that it just sped up. And the - and it seemed like -
Leafbox: so you're saying it was an imported meme, right?
AMRX: Yeah. It seemed - or encouraged or something because it was just overnight. It was like the Mauna Kea stuff, which is a topic I wanted to write about.
The Psy-Op of Mauna Kea Protests
AMRX: I'm gonna summarize the Mauna Kea case situation for people who are not familiar with it.
Because that was a - I consider Mauna Kea to be a ps-yop. There was a huge controversy here in 2019 over whether to build a mo-, a telescope on Mauna Kea, which is a mountain in Hawaii, the island of Hawaii, as opposed to the archipelago of Hawaii.
And overnight, people just became fanatical about this. And everywhere I saw sticker -bumper stickers and signs. People would put them in their houses.
Leafbox: And is that when the rasta stuff flag was introduced, or was that older than that?
AMRX: That's older. The - oh, that's older. The pseudo-Rasta flag is from the nineties, but it really didn't become popular until Mauna Kea because - I confess, I never saw the flag until the Maunakea stuff - suddenly, boom.
Yeah, that flag was all over the place. And I consider that to be a psy-op. It just seems so AstroTurfed and so artificial, just the overnight interest in it, and it all went away immediately because of Covid. Boom. Gone.
Leafbox: So going back in time for a second, why, just to, for listeners, this, the summary was there was a battle about the Sacred Mountain and building the telescopes, and eventually, I forget, Canary Islands was another.
Yes. Potential site. Yes. And Governor Green made his first introduction, in fame in that Mauna Kea. He was on Oh yeah. That's when he really started getting the press and Yes. Hugging the leis and it just seemed, yeah.
And yeah, I just, who was doing the psy-op? Who do you think was doing the psy-op? Was this, where was the psy-op or what's your conspiratorial lens? Okay. Yeah. You, why, and who was doing it and for what purpose?
AMRX: I think the purpose of the psy-op was to distract from the military operations going on near Mauna Kea.
There is a training facility there, and it just struck me as absolutely insane that you have the military doing all this vile stuff to the Sacred Land, and nobody has a word to say about that. There have been protests about the military operations in Mauna Kea, but they all stopped.
Leafbox: Oh, that's a very interesting lens.
Because the big, yeah, the biggest problem in Hawaii. It's just like in Okinawa the military here.
AMRX: Yeah. Yeah.
Comparing Hawaii and Okinawa: Military Presence and Cultural Parallels
AMRX: I'm glad you branched in Okinawa too, because that's another case where I think. People should look to more pa - there's a whole bunch of parallels and that are underexplored.
I say under and not unexplored because I've talked to Okinawan studies people here. They are perfectly aware of the parallels between Okinawa and Hawaii. But a bunch of people at - is one thing at the University of Hawaii - is one thing, but it's not in the mass consciousness that Okinawa is in the same dilemma.
Leafbox: it's very interesting. Yeah. When I first learned, I lived in Japan and the average Japanese person has no knowledge of the Ryukyu kingdom or the history there, or yep. Island. Yeah. Even the, they're just very against American occupation, but they're not really against it. And then they go there and they just take pictures on the beach and then they fly back to Tokyo.
AMRX: There's no, yep. Yeah, I know what you mean because part of my education was - I went - I'm, I went to Japanese language school, which used to be a big institution for people of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii. Used to be. It's pretty much dead now. I'm part of the last generation that really went there.
I - the schools still barely exist, but it used to be that if you were of Japanese ancestry, you have to go there. It seemed obligatory. I was part of the last generation that it was semi-obligatory, and then it just totally vanished. Almost totally vanished.
The Influence of Japanese History on Hawaiian Perspectives
AMRX: You have - you have a school here in you - the school there.
Anyway, as part of that education, I had to learn Japanese history using Japanese Ministry of Education-approved textbooks. And that was a fascinating experience because - so I learned all this Japanese history in Japanese
Leafbox: From the Japanese perspective. So Pearl Harbor has a different reading than the Pearl Harbor from the American perspective.
AMRX: Oh yeah. And yeah, because there are a - whole depiction of World War II was just shocking. They like - my - one of - one of the - my ‘favorite’ parts was they say that Japan “entered” China. Yeah. They just walked in, what the heck? And yeah, it, the whole World War II section of the book - this is like in the mid eighties.
It was totally whitewashed. It was just ridiculous. But - and anyway, I bring this up because there was not one mention of Okinawa in the entire, in - in these books at all. And or Micronesia for that matter. So if I may go on a little tangent here, in the eighties at random on TV I saw some news story about Micronesia, and I was like, why do these Micronesians have Japanese first names?
And then I just forgot about it. And then in the mid-nineties, I started learning about Micronesian languages and history. And then I was like, oh my God, this is a whole chapter of Japanese history nobody ever told me about. So one of the things I wanna write about Substack in the future is about that whole chapter in Japanese history of the Micro-, of the Japanese rule of Micronesia and its effects to the present day.
You flip through a Micronesian dictionary - any Micronesian language, it doesn't matter. You're - I can recognize lots of words because the Japanese shadow is still there. And we have lots of Micronesians in Hawaii, but nobody knows their story. And that's a problem. And that's what I find so sad about Hawaii is that because Hawaii is so diverse - I'm not - I have a mixed - I have a mixed view of diversity.
I - part of me loves the diversity here. I don't want - I'm not - I can't really imagine living in a monoculture, but at the same time, I think it's sad that nobody here - maybe nobody can - can here really understand everybody else's story. There's just so many stories, and I try to read up as much as I can about Tonga, Samoa, Micronesia, Tahiti.
I have just so much to learn, and I don't - I - anyway, I - it just -
Leafbox: So to bring it, to commit the contemporary day, Yes. Reading this whitewashed Japanese historical account of World War II. Does that - how is that useful listeners, or even for you today to read the Pravda of today? So if you were able to see through that, through the lies or so uhhuh, does that help you today see through some of the lies of what's going on?
Or it didn't help you see through the lies, of the 9/11 stuff during that time? No, but I'm just saying if people can, I think it's very important that multilingualism to me is a way to escape the Oh yeah. Lens. Because if you have only one language lens, you can't reimagine the world. You physically can't. So I'm just curious how, what tips you have. I've never actually thought of Mauna Kea being a psy-op. That, that was very interesting to me. So what other tips can you give people to see through the paradigms?
AMRX: I was gonna write a Stack about this, but yeah it's my - it's on my to write list.
This very topic - actually, my advice would be to - would not necessarily to be to learn a foreign language because that's just so much easier said than done - that I also want - I - my advice would be to follow people to - when you - when one looks for news sources, diversify your news sources and look for people who are multilingual who do translate and also be aware of their agendas, obviously.
Because for example, with the Russian stuff, with the Ukraine war, for instance I read Rurik Skywalker on Substack, I read Edward Slavsquat on Substack. Both of those guys translate tons and tons of material from Russian. And it is absolutely nothing like the glorious Putin stuff I hear from a American monolinguals.
Leafbox: The - who live before AMRX before you go into the, I guess the ZAnon people that they're called, right? Yes. It's funny because that's still very obscure to the majority media message that, Zelensky is the hero and Ukraine. Yeah. So maybe give people a framework of what these, I guess Putin apologists are.
What they even are, what the ZAnon people are doing.
AMRX: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The ZAnon people are trapped in a false diactomy.
They're called Z- Rurik Skywalker coined the term Z-Anon because he - because they are like the - they are QAnon in the QAnon movement. There's this belief in this supposed entity called Q that knows all these alleged secret things about Trump and how Trump is our secret savior in QAnon.
The Z stands for the symbol used by the Russian military, which isn't even a Cyrillic letter, which is funny. But - and in the ZAnon movement, the idea is that Putin, rather than Trump is the secret savior. And that if you re- - read these weird, highly esoteric Z blogs, you'll get the truth about the Ukraine war and how Russia is just constantly winning.
And that movement reminds me of the - the we-won faction it in Hawaii. Also Brazil too. But in Hawaii, there was a group of Japanese Americans that were convinced for years after World War II that Japan was secret - had secretly won World War II, and Americans were just being fed lies by the media.
And the ZAnon position is that - it is trapped in a false binary ’cause they believe that, okay, if the New York Times says that Ukraine is the good guy, therefore Putin must be the good guy. And so they have this weird, this very silly opposite day mindset where they take everything in the mainstream media and they just totally flip it around.
And they have this bizarre fantasy version of Russia, which has nothing to do with the real thing. So they bel- - I've been told that, that Putin is like the greatest, most devout Christian ever, and that Russia has no gays. And Russia is like a theocracy and just total nonsense. I wanna - I plan to write about this topic more in the future because although I'm no expert on the topic, the Z - I - I have - I used to read z blogs.
I used to believe in it myself briefly. And it reminds me a lot of the bizarre to me, bizarre idealization of Tibet. There's a book I read a few years - a couple years ago about the western fetishization of Tibet. And if you swap Tibet for Russia, a lot of it sounds the same.
Leafbox: Oh, but just from the right.
So the left would idealize Tibet as this, story and then the right is idealizing Russia and Putin as some kind of, yeah, reactionary force against the right progressive agenda or whatever. Correct.
AMRX: Yeah. But I see both - both as the same syndrome and it's part of the identity syndrome as well because these America - I've noticed in like the MAGA movement that - I think MAGA itself is a surrogate identity search, like you said, it's a cult.
And in ZAnon, all these Americans who feel alienated about America, they start dreaming of this magic land where gold flows from the rivers, or I dunno, whatever. And so in Z - in the Z circles I was in, people are constantly saying, I wanna move to Russia. I wanna move to Russia. And these people have no - they've never lived abroad.
They don't know any foreign language and they have no concept at all of - of how difficult it is to move to a foreign country. And one Z guy even moved to Eastern Europe, and then he moved out and he's - he tried to explain to this little Z sect - I used to belong to that - hey guys, it's not that easy.
And they're like, and it - just totally blew him off. It - there's just this big need for escapism, and part of my agenda at NO COPE is to kill escapism.
Escaping Ideological Binaries: A Personal Journey
AMRX: To make people realize - stop fantasizing about faraway countries that you know nothing about. Start looking in the mirror, start examining yourself.
Be your own hero. Stop caring about Putin or Trump or Bobby Kennedy or Musk or whatever. 'cause all the MAGAs I know, all the Z people I know - you - you listen to them. It's constantly about what somebody else is doing, not about what they're doing in their own lives. It - to me, it's just very sad that they've all been reduced to spectators.
Like one guy was going like, oh, so what's Hamas doing now? I'm like, that's just insane. You - because this guy was like some anti-Zionist. And so he's just sitting at home expecting Hamas to do his fantasy. What - whatever one thinks of Hamas. That's just - to me, they're just crazy. I - It's this bizarre spectator sport aspect.
And it's funny is that most of these people they deride sportsball, but they engage heavily in it. And ZAnon is a variety of sportsball. You have all these people deeply invested in whether Russia has conquered like two more square kilometers or something. And it's - guys look at yourselves, what are you doing in your own lives?
Are you becoming a stronger person? I -
Leafbox: Just see the same parallels with the Native Hawaiian movement, right? They just, instead of saying what they could be doing for Hawaii, they're like the press are still oppressing us and there's still this kind of need for the dichotomy, right?
They're still blaming another one, the colonial force or in this case, right? It seems very similar, that horseshoe theory of politics, right? Yeah, it's the same. So where are you now? So you're, let's get to your third position now. So where do you, is it just all theater? Is it - are you totally blackpilled, or what's your perspective now?
Is Putin in on the game? What is your general take now or what's your optimistic take? Like that?
AMRX: My take on the world or?
Leafbox: No, just because now you've - you've escaped the cult dynamic, it seems you're not - just you're not. So what - tell us about the third position.
What's the benefit of that one and what's the downsides of the third position?
AMRX: Okay. Okay. One, well the great thing about the third position, I think, is that I don't care anymore what any of these world leaders are doing, or, I - Do you? Okay. That's a lie. I do care, but I don't care.
For instance, just the other day I was subjected every week I get these bizarre - like impromptu defenses of Musk or something. And I don't care. I don't have anything invested in these people anymore. I hit rock bottom with Objectivism when I found myself desperately looking through the collected wr- - writings of Ayn Rand for something, and I realized, why am I doing this?
It took me many more years to dump the Objectivism thing, but that was a big moment when I was like, I don't know if I should be like this. It's been freeing not to care not to worry about whether I'm a good fill in the blank. Am I a good socialist? Am I a good Republican? Am I a good this or that?
I don't care anymore. That is very free and that's very positive. I don't like the black pill terminology because it's misleading, I think. I don't spend all day crying. I don't spend all day in despair. My Substack posts are frankly awful, and because I spend about 90% of my day doing other things I - that I can't talk about, but they - that they make me feel fulfilled and make me a stronger person.
I know - so I'm very vague here, but I can't go into that. What the Substack - just my once a day, like an hour a day, I just spurt out stuff. That's it. I - and as nowhere near as good as I'd like it to be. But that's the balance I've found in my life so far, is I just put all this politics stuff into just this little one hour, two hour a day slop, and the rest of my day is doing better things.
In the past I would just spend hours, like in the Neo- - my NeoCon days, I would just spend hours and hours in this social theater. And that's what it is. It's social theater. I would talk to all these NeoCons about, our victory in Iraq and it was just all meaningless. We weren't doing anything.
We were just trapped in this goofy nonsense and I feel just so much better now. So that's the positive aspect is it's empowering. It - I focus on myself. I feel like a smarter person. I feel like a better person, not just because I've abandoned these ideologies, but just because I’m not spending time anymore on what is Trump doing now or something.
It is just better time management. So that's the plus. The negative side - I don't, I guess I - that's - I dunno why - I'm not - I am having a hard time with that. I think for a lot of people, I'm just guessing here because I think one huge problem that all humans face, myself included, is we all have a - we all have a hard time putting ourselves in other people's shoes.
I think most people would not like to be where I am right now. I have no friends. My family has still banned me, and I have almost no contact with any humans at all, other than I we- - weekly I talk to one MAGA person. And I still have occasional contacts with people across the spectrum.
But yeah, the isolation of this third position I can live with. I'm fine with it. I'm resigned to it. It's a price I'm willing to pay. Is it a price other people are willing to pay? I don't know. I think the social aspect is really big. Here's an example that's not me. I used to know a family that was atheist, but they belonged to a church and at least one of their kids even sang in the church choir.
And so on the surface, they look Christian. And why do they do it? Because of the social aspect. They - and I - that's how desperate, I guess - that's how much they needed socializing. They would just pretend to be Christian to go to this church. And, toward the end of my MAGA journey, I wa- I was at that point, I had lost Tr- - I had lost almost all faith in Trump by 2017 when he started bombing that, I wanted a peace guy and here he was, doing war and then he assassinated Soleimani a couple years later, and so angry about that. But my whole friend circle was - half my friend circle - I still know Democrats and stuff, but half my friend circle is still MAGA and so I reluctantly stepped with these people. Yeah, I - it's real - I see people on Substack sometimes talk about - I'm a lone wolf and I don't need people, and I'm like, yeah, you can say that, but I don't know if you really mean that.
And even me sometimes - you - but I don't know. I can't say that being totally by myself is all roses. And I think that's the, he - that's the big - that's the biggest problem with being third position is the pure isolation. You are the first person I've ever spoken to who is interested in what I'm saying and understands what I'm saying.
I've had typed conversations with people online, but that's different. No one I know in real life has views remotely like this. They are all on Team Trump, or they're all on Team Kamala Biden, that's it. Or they're - or they're on Team Trump plus Putin or something. They're all stuck in these binaries.
So the isolation I think is the biggest drawback. It's not one that hurts me. As much as I think it might hurt other people.
Leafbox: Yeah, no, it's very interesting. I would say I'm in the third position. I don't know, maybe it took me longer to get here. I don't know what my evolutionary progress was, but yeah, I think the, yeah, it's very frustrating because I don't even wanna talk about policies in the day-to-day thing because it's just crazy.
For instance, the tariffs right now, people, it, to me that seems like a very leftist Argentina type policy. And yeah, meanwhile, right wing libertarian people are, oh, this is great. This is defending. But then I also start questioning my own kind of neoliberal kind of thinking and what's good, what's bad?
And I just get to this third place I really don't know anymore. And I just, it's all very humbling as I get it more and more down the I guess the rabbit hole is the term. Yeah. But it's fascinating to see because the whole covid experience for me here in Hawaii was yeah, I lost some friends and some friends disappeared over my resistance to the whole totalitarian regime. But even now I've, I don't even know what to make of that whole, the psyop level is just so sophisticated and that even the people who seem to be on Team B, like the oppositional anti covid thing are probably part of the psy-op as well. And that's very interesting to me as well.
Just this Mauna Kea thing you brought up, I'm not even surprised anymore. Like that to me is just the military is and I don't wanna sound so conspiratorial that they're so powerful and so skilled, but it does, it just seems like a great reading that Yes. Why not create a illusionary protest to distract from their, poisoning of the big island.
It's just brilliant. And it's the same thing with, Putin hides his money in Switzerland or whatever while he, encourages the military complex, so it's not a left. It just seems like it's all have you ever read Thomas Pychon?
AMRX: No.
Leafbox: So I had an interview with this Marxist, who he's really into oil and hydrocarbon. He encouraged me to read Gravity's Rainbow. And everything just becomes this Pynchonian. He's really good at describing this kind of, it's just schizophrenic, this left right thing. You really, you have to jump out of it to see how insane it's so I'm trying always to try to just stay neutral, so not have reaction. And I tend to have kind of a Buddhist, I like Buddhism and that. Even though some of my friends think it's a psy-op as well. Yeah. Just trying to stay neutral instead of having reactions. But it's very hard not to get taken into the wave of the narrative.
So whatever the narrative is, which is interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And the only good thing is being here in Hawaii, sometimes I'm just surprised we're not. Just more people are just not against the mainstream narrative. Just being so far from it, it's still very strong here. If I if you, if people heard your position on Putin or just your prior position on Putin they think you're some type of, I don't know, fascist or war criminal.
They wouldn't even know how to handle it. But even though, I think a lot of those ZAnon people are very they themselves are psy-oped by this anti imperial model. Yes. So it doesn't even, to me it's a left disposition. They want to save the third world from the imperial oppression of the United States.
AMRX: Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And oh, it's even funnier. Is that, and I guess this is where my position, would differ from - would differ from like a Russian nationalist, is that they identify Russia as anti-imperial, and yet they totally ignore Russia's own imperial history.
Leafbox: Yeah. Or they're the, the battles in Angola or whatever the they've been fighting the same. Yeah. I don't you know though, it's the whole Orwell thing of east, what is it, the East Oh yeah. East Asian Oceania. They're just switching teams and it's all part of the same show.
But the darker second matrix of that is that when you realize that Orwell himself was part of the East. So it just becomes all very it's just hu - humorous in a way, right? You just - that's all you have to just laugh, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just surprised.
The Impact of COVID-19 on Personal Relationships and Beliefs
Leafbox: Going back to your Covid personal thing, so there's still what was your position on Covid?
You were - you - against the vaccine or just against the masks or against everything or just, and then your family against everything. So they just, against everything. You can't enter the Thanksgiving dinner because you're yep. Unpure Got it. Yep.
AMRX: Yep. No Christmas, no New Year's, no nothing.
Leafbox: Even though they've all had Covid and have had like X number.
AMRX: Yep. They've had covid multiple times. They've had the vaccine multiple times and they wear, they've wear masks around me and yeah it's just - what can - I'm like, what the -
Leafbox: So they don't see any of the lunacy in that, right? They just -
AMRX: Nope, Nope. They can't see through it.
Nope. Not at all. Not at all. And these are intelligent people. I- - it - the psy-op just blew my mind. I've known people who are like rabid anti-government and, government just lies and conspiratorial. And then with covid they were like, I'm gonna just do everything Dr. Fauci says. I'm like, what? And it's - I - part of not my blog is my attempt to write out in dribbles because I have limited time. My attempt to try to understand why are people - how psy-ops work. And now that you've mentioned, you've earlier mentioned and - Soka Gakkai, but that's, I - aha, yeah.
Leafbox: I don't even know if Soka Gakkai is a cult, but probably yes. For people, I would say. I would say, yeah, mainstream Buddhist sec, that feels like Scientology, but for people who don't know what Soka Gakkai - Gakkai is maybe obscure in the west, but big in Japan.
AMRX: Yeah. And so yeah, I should reread my, that stuff.
But anyway, yeah, my blog is my attempt to try to come to terms with this, the psy-ops around me, and it's an examination of myself. A lot of my entries are about what I did wrong and why, and of course, self-diagnosis is not necessarily accurate. I'm probably missing things. I'm probably misinterpreting things, but I just am driven not to be fooled again.
And I've said before, and I'll say this now, I'm probably fooled now by something and I don't even realize it. But the point is just to keep learning and to be, you mentioned humility, that's very important. And I think it's very hard for people. I've seen like none of the people from my NeoCon days - not one has apologized or retracted their views at all. That does not mean that they think the war is right, that they think that the Iraq war is right, but just that they have just conveniently forgotten their own position. One of the big loud cheerleaders I used to know - he still blogs after 20 something years, and now he's just writing about the stupid NeoCons, and it's just hilarious 'cause the guy has no self-awareness at all. No willingness to say I was wrong when I was a NeoCon blogger. One of my last was - I wrote I was wrong and I saw my readership just plummet, and I just didn't care.
That was very liberating not to care anymore about, I used to be obsessed with my stats like - how many people visited my blog this week? How many links did I get? And I just threw that all away and didn't care anymore.
Leafbox: One of the things AMRX, you haven't written about I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on, the evolving?
AI and Technology: Optimism vs. Pessimism
Leafbox: Are you a techno pessimist or optimist or AI? Any thoughts and part of the psy-op or you think people are becoming dumber as they, is that part of it?
Or what's your general thought on -
AMRX: Oh, that's a great topic. Yeah. Wow. I think a lot about that stuff. I know people across the spectrum. I have myself have undergone an evolution. So as part of my identity crisis stuff, I used to be a transhumanist. I had this big fantasy of becoming a machine.
And seriously, I loved like the idea of uploading the mind and all that stuff. So that's me like 20 odd years ago.
Leafbox: So you into the singularity and yeah. Got it.
AMRX: Yep. Oh, I was - I loved that stuff and I was so big into it that I sent my best friend - like - this book about the singularity.
I'm - I was trying to convert him to this, and I was very - that was part of the NeoCon stuff as well. Not to say that invading Iraq was directly connected to the positive futurism thing, but part of the appeal of the NeoCon movement that I belonged to was that the story that I was fed was that we're going to modernize Iraq, and we're gonna make it into this technoparadise, free from this irrational Islam, and it's gonna be this Western rational country.
That was the story that I believed in. And all like - the NeoCons I knew - they were all secular and some quite - some a- an- atheist, and they all believed in like this De-Islamization. It was just a total fantasy. So that was my position like 20 odd years ago. Now, as AI became more and more real, or at least what we call AI, my position in AI now is that it's not, it's certainly artificial, but it's not very intelligent.
I am not - my position is that I'm not rad- - I'm not like a Dune universe type person. I don't believe in let- you know, wholly - I'm not totally anti-machine or something. What's - I don't believe in Butlerian Jihad - I don't believe in that. But at the same time, I don't believe in the singularity anymore.
And I think AI is overrated. I've spent the last sev- I've spent the last, what, eight years heavily involved in playing with AI graphics and large language models. And the results have been amusing and scary. Scary in the sense that I don't want to have our lives handed over to this thing. So when I say Putin, for instance, promoting AI in that AI is gonna be part of the new Russia, I'm like, I don't know if you wanna hand over an already horrific government to a stupid machine. The stuff that, that AI has spewed out, it's just at times just ridiculous. I've tried to have AI write fiction for me, and the results are just off the wall. They're fascinating, but certainly not commercially usable at all. And AI graphics like my - I don't like - do these things even. It's just been very frustrating. I don't, maybe I'm just really bad at writing prompts, but for years and years, I've yet to master the prompt. Either I'm - either I'm not mastering prompts or AI sucks because wow, I'll write one thing and the AI will totally generate another.
I've - I've written prompts to describe people and I'll get a landscape, for instance. Yeah, I'm very pessimistic about AI. I enjoy using it for fun. I, but I don't - I could be totally wrong though about AI, and let me give you another example of my humility here. In the - in 1991, I read William Gibson's Neuromancer, and it just blew my mind.
And I thought that cyberspace would be just for techies. I knew a guy - I knew a guy in high tech, and I thought, oh, it's just for him. It's not for me. And I even wrote at the time, I even wrote a novel that was influenced by Gibson. Unpublished, obviously, and it had that worldview that cyberspace would just be for this weird caste of tech - techies or something.
And I wasn't one of them.
Reflecting on Changing Beliefs
AMRX: And then three years later, a boomer introduced me to email, and then I got on the Internet, and that was over 30 years ago. And then that was humiliating because I was like - I was just totally wrong. So yeah, who knows? Maybe I'm just totally wrong about AI. I encourage people to, keep an open mind.
I - I guess that would be my biggest - it's generic advice I know, but I think people just invest so much in this narrative or that narrative. I'm willing to abandon narratives given counter evidence. I believed in Putin. I believed in Trump, I believed in Ayn Rand, I believed in Marx. I believed in all sorts of things. You show me the counterevidence and I will shake my head at first.
I'm not denying it. I - and I will grit my teeth and go play along for some time. There was a very brief moment where I actually believed in the mask stuff. And then I realized - and then I read some studies and read some arguments and realized this is stupid. And I believed in the six foot stuff for a while, and then I learned otherwise. I've believed a ton of stupid things.
But I'm willing to change my mind, and I'm still willing to change my mind. I don't, anything I ha- - I hold today could be changed tomorrow. But my general position though is that once people turn out to be bad, I just lose all faith in them. So yeah, theoretically, Trump or whatever chosen - hero you choose, maybe at the last minute they could be - turn out to be a good guy.
I've seriously heard this ar- - I just saw this argument about RFK - that we just have to wait and then he's going to you, one day he will just ban all vaccines or whatever other utopian thing, but you just have to wait and, theoretically, yeah, I guess that's possible.
Leafbox: But no, it just, it keeps coming back to the religious I haven't studied enough religious studies, but everything just feels like cult dynamics, like this promised land, you just keep tithing, keep coming to the church, keep waiting, keep, it's gonna be better tomorrow. There's this promised land.
It's just very interesting to read it through that lens. I dunno if that's useful, but to me it's useful. I'm just trying to, how to keep, how to stay out of these cults. I've fallen into them before as well.
Pop Culture and Personal Identity
Leafbox: It is useful. Maybe one of my last questions, and I don't wanna take too much of your time, AMRX, but you have some interesting, pop cultural references and, some very obscure movies from Japan and anime and you brought up Neuromancer or what's your general, when you're not reading politics, your general, what are your, maybe you can make recommendations on your blog for you have some pretty interesting, I did watch that.
No virus. Yeah. What's your general take on popular culture and how does that fit into your worldview? Or is that an escapist thing or,
AMRX: Okay. Yeah. Great. Great question. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for bringing this up. I am, I haven't written as much about pop culture as I could, because I'm very hesitant to make recommendations because the things I really reflect things in my own life, which I can't discuss.
And in fact, just the other day I was telling someone this very - I was having this very conversation, but - so I can't really recommend anything to anyone. I don't like being told what to do and I don't like telling others what to do. I know I've contradicted that a few times in this talk, but in this interview, but in general, yeah.
The Influence of Japanese Media
AMRX: Now as for the world pop culture plays in my life. Maybe something I might write about in the future is the row Japanese television played in Hawaii. So you totally missed the golden age of Japanese TV in Hawaii.
One thing I try I like trying to impress on people, and it doesn't seem to ever work is how Hawaii is not like the other 49 states. And so in the 1970s when I was growing up, Japanese TV was huge here. People without any Japanese language background or Japanese cultural or ethnic background would watch Japanese TV.
And it was so big that at one point the NBC affiliate even imported a Japanese show on their own and dubbed it to try to compete. That's - that was unprecedented and bizarre that a American network affiliate would go to that trouble to try to fight an independent station showing Japanese language programs.
And so I grew up in that period. And -
Leafbox: were they in Japanese, the shows or they were dubbed or subtitled or what?
AMRX: Subtitled.
Leafbox: Okay.
AMRX: Other than the, but the NBC affiliate actually went to the extra expense to dub locally. They had a - they had Hawaii actors do it. But yeah, that - that was an amazing time because that's what really got me interested in Japanese - the Japanese language, because I became addicted to these shows and I wanted to learn more about their world.
So I got hardcore into manga and anime in the eighties. This is when a - this is before they became mainstream. It blows my mind now that I can get anime and manga totally translated. because back in the eighties that was not the case. You either had to learn Japanese or just fake it. I knew people who faked it. They irritated me.
I used to belong to this anime club, and this guy who clearly did not know Japanese would ‘interpret’ these videotapes that he showed to the club, and he just made up complete nonsense. And I was infuriated at the guy, and I quit pretty quickly. But that's what drove me into learning Japanese and this whole escape - this mindset.
I loved anime and manga so much that I drew manga and I used to read Shōnen Jump -the weekly Shōnen Jump. I used to have a subscription. I would get like stacks of issues every month and from a Japanese department store in Honolulu and in - in every issue of - and in Jump, they have - they - Jump solicits people to send submissions to become artists.
And I used to read the guidelines and I seriously wanted to do it. And so I have all this unpublished manga that I've drawn all in the eighties and nineties and 2000s. And that was my big dream at one time was to move to Japan and totally assimilate. And I've mentioned how that was a complete disaster, but yeah, so pop culture has been a big thing for me and I can't avoid referring to it.
I am not one of those stuffy academics. And this is a big stumbling block I always had with the NeoCons and the conservatives I know, because they're all hardcore into the Western canon. And I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't have anything to say about that. One of - one of the pretty embarrassing things, but my Substack is pretty much a big exercise in humility.
I - I just don't know tons of stuff. And for example, I've heard of Pynchon, but I've never read him. I've heard of Gravity's Rainbow, but I've never read it. Obviously. I really don't know the Western stuff at all. And then when I tell people that, I've read Buddhist scripture in Pali in the original - I've read, I- I've read Tibetan Buddhist stuff in Tibetan and I read Chinese Buddhist stuff. Nobody cares at all. It - I - it just drives me a bit nuts.
The Fascination with Sanskrit
AMRX: I just wanna end on a kind of positive note. I spend a lot of every day reading Sanskrit, and I may write about that on my blog. I love Sanskrit. It's my favorite language.
Leafbox: And which is interesting because the Western Canon loves Sanskrit too, right?
The English and all the writers, TS Eliot, they were all obsessed with Sanskrit. It's this perfect language, right? So I know nothing. I did live in India for a year, so I picked up some Hindi and I knew how to read Devanagari. But yeah, Sanskrit just seems like a whole esoteric world that you should write about. Yeah, please do.
AMRX: Thank you. Yeah, I just wanna say one thing about Sanskrit that fascinates me. And I think, if you're - if you consider yourself cosmopolitan, this is a big selling point. I think Sanskrit as the great bridge. See, this is why I don't think of myself as blackpilled, because I hate that term - because I think of Sanskrit as a great bridge between the east and west - because it's in India, it's in the middle between Japan and Europe.
And at the same time though, it is a Indo-European language. So it - it's connected to the West in that way, but through Buddhism it's - it's spread its influence eastward. So like my icon, my profile image, it's the s letter for A, i n San-, for Sanskrit. And it's in the Siddham script, which is still in use in Japan.
And it's - it died in India itself, but it's still alive in Japan among Buddhists. Buddhism is how I got into Sanskrit. I'm not Buddhist myself, but I've studied a lot of Buddhist stuff because it goes with the territory. But yeah, I think of Sanskrit as this grand bridge. You can find Sanskrit words deeply embedded in Japanese.
They're very disguised and they're written in kanji, and they don't look Indian at all to the eyeball, but they're there. And of course, Sanskrit, like words like guru and stuff have infiltrated English. So I think of Sanskrit as very global. And at the same time, it's also very local, because it's not a ‘pure’ Indo-European language.
It has borrowings from Dravidian, from the non- - from the major non-IndoEuropean language family in India. It has words of mysterious origin, maybe from pre-Dravidian, pre-Indus civilization, maybe the Harappa civilization, who knows. It - so it's got deep local roots, but at the same time, it's spread - it - it has relatives in distant places.
It has far-reaching influence. If you study Sanskrit, it - it gives you all sorts of free vocabulary in Thai - in Khmer. Sanskrit is the key to Pali. Pali is - okay, this will get me banned from Buddhist circles. But it partly to me feels like Sanskrit for dummies. It's dumbed down Sanskrit. Yeah.
Pali is very difficult, but it's less difficult than Sanskrit.
And anyway, so yeah. But so through Sanskrit I studied I learned and studied Pali, and Pali is the key, is a great key for Thai, Khmer and Burmese. And you can just see the Indic influence. And also, I can recognize words in Indonesian and because of Sanskrit wor - words in modern Indian languages, both Indo-European and Dravidian because of Sanskrit. Sanskrit is like the Latin and Greek of
Leafbox: Asia, correct,
AMRX: Yeah. Of Asia, yeah. Of non-Sinitic, of non-Sinospheric Asia. Anyway it, it is a powerful tool and I, I can't understand how anyone can learn it. It - for example, I just wrote about - I just wrote a little bit about Thai the other day about how Thai spelling is based on Sanskrit pronunciation.
And it, i- - it blows my mind that millions and millions of Thais don't know Sanskrit, and then spell all these words in this way that has no - that doesn't match their pronunciation at all. But if you already know Sanskrit, the spelling is easy because it - because you already know the word. So I love Sanskrit for that. Because it is global.
Okay, I'll just say one last thing is that I do find myself in a kind of contradictory position because on the one hand, I rail against imperialism, and - but at the same time, there is a cosmopolitan side of me and Sanskrit very much is part of that.
Leafbox: That's what, it's the same battle I had in this interview I had yesterday.
I don't know what to cosmopolitanism seems positive to me, right? You're learning from all these different worlds and
AMRX: Yeah.
Leafbox: But at the same time, your depth in them is maybe not as deep as it can. Oh, yeah. That's a huge problem. That's the problem. So I don't know if I had just grown up my whole time in, in South America, maybe I'd be, I don't know.
I think it's, is it better to have a breadth of knowledge or the depth that's the million dollar question? Yeah, that's
AMRX: Ah, yeah, that's an eternal - that's an eternal question. One that I've wrestled with, because I'm just gonna be upfront. I just - me - I'll just confess that, I've mentioned all these languages during this talk, but I'm pretty awful at all of them, seriously.
When I say I - I read Sanskrit, it is a very painful process. I have to look up words. I even cheat and look at the English translations, which are often misleading by the way. That's the - you're talking about earlier about foreign language sources and such.
And yeah, I'm looking at this translation of - so I'm reading the Laws of Manu right now in the original, and whenever I get stuck, I look at this translation and the guy just makes stuff up, and I'm like, what the heck? So that has made me super skeptical about Buddhism like that - these Buddhists I knew, they were like, I don't need to.
So like, when I was taking Sanskrit, these Buddhist guys were like, I don't have - they - they were like, blowing off the class, which really irritated me. And one guy was like, I don't really need to learn this stuff, because I'm just gonna read it all in translation. I'm like, I don't know, man.
Leafbox: That's a, yeah, that's a whole other topic because translation itself becomes a psychological engineering tool, to impose meaning on Yeah. Original sources, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think when you read, yeah. Translation is a whole, even, I don't, even if translation is even possible, right?
You're shifting entire mindsets. Yes. That's so until you start learning the language, it just feels different. The vibe is never the same.
AMRX: Yeah, I - yeah, I - yeah. Thank you for saying that. This - you're the very first person in real life I've ever heard say that. I say that, because I read a lot of stuff about polyglots and languages and linguistics.
I read it from other people, but it's great to hear it from an actual human being because in my circles, every - almost everyone I know is monolingual. And so they have no idea what I'm talking about. And I think they really believe that if they stick something in Google Translate, that's the answer.
I'm like, no. Like they - a few weeks ago I saw this video on YouTube where some cul - this pop culture channel I used to watch, but I quit because they were getting too pro-Trump and cultural warrior. For me, that's a whole ’nother topic. It's been weird watching these pop culture channels mutate into these big - the big channels, not the small ones. Big channels have turned into like - Trump apologists. It's creepy. Anyway, that channel was talking about how, oh yeah, we're gonna have - how like AI will be able to translate all anime on the fly. I'm like, no, I don't think so.
Views on China and Language Learning
Leafbox: Yeah, AMRX, maybe one of my last questions is, yes, we haven't talked about China at all, and that's the one psychological hole that I really don't know what to make of.
I have some friends who live in Shanghai and I've been to China and I was just in Taiwan. But what do you, or how do you. One, what's the relationship between Ha- - Hawaii and China and then how do you view, is that just another psychological dichotomy, China and the West or, it's much more complicated than that.
For instance, like this, the credit score, the social credit score. I have no idea if that's real or not. I talked to my friends in China. Me too. And they don't know what we're talking about. They don't have, it's, it seems like nothing to them, but I also don't know if I trust them, like the Xinjiang or Tibet seems like not an ideal situation to me.
But I also dunno if that's just an entire CIA creation. So I'm just curious how you applying your mono, your polyglot lens how do you view that conflict now that it seems like the west is gearing up for a new, another dichotomy, us as China.
AMRX: Yeah.
Leafbox: How do you escape from the cult side? The cult dynamics?
AMRX: Okay good question. Yeah, I am, and I'm glad you asked because I'm just gonna be upfront here and say that I'm pretty - I'm really ignorant about China stuff, which is really ironic because part of my quest for Japanese identity was to, this sounds, this may sound crazy to outside to people not in the know, but was to learn Chinese because one of my goal - I, I will get to the modern political stuff. Just stick with me. So when I was a teen, when I was in school I learned - I learned classical Chinese because every Japanese kid is forced to at least pretend to learn classical Chinese in school. They just totally forget it later. But I'm like, I wanna be like the average Japanese person because the Ja- - average Japanese person is superior.
Yeah. It was stupid. This is what I believed though, and, I wanna be like part of the solar tribe, so I'm gonna do it. So yeah, I studied classical Chinese. I went - when I went to college, I took courses in classical Chinese, in Japanese. I wrote papers about classical Chinese poetry.
And to this day I still read classical Chinese. I've also studied modern Mandarin. And - but, so you would think that I’m in this great ideal position to - to have anything really significant to say about China. But honestly, I don't. I have only spent a few days in China in my entire life. I've only spent a few, a couple, maybe two, three days in Taiwan in my entire life.
I've known people from both countries, of course, and I know people from Hong Kong, but I'm like you. Like the social credit stuff? I don't know if it's real or not. I - I - and I have noticed in the dissident or pseudo-dissident or whatever - I'm convinced now that dissident stuff is also a psy-op in general - there's this big pro China push. And I've - I knew like this hardcore pro Xi guy who's all - who actually did learn Mandarin that he loved. He - that's how pro-China he was. And he - and he and I had discussions about Mandarin. He really knew the language. He wasn't BSing me. He would talk about what he was reading in China, in Mandarin.
And - but yeah I don't trust anybody about China at all. And in - in a future article, and I wanna write about, how to deal with knowing about a country - about foreign countries. I'm going to point out that, yeah, a lot of the pro-China people do not speak, read or write any kind of Chinese whatsoever.
And a lot of - and one - and I - for that reason, they cannot be trusted. It's the same with the - a lot of the Z people - a lot of them are not Russian speakers and have no idea what the heck they're talking about. So yeah, in China, I'm pretty agnostic despite the language thing. I have only so many hours in the day and, I could read like propaganda of any stripe about China in Mandarin if I really wanted to, but I don't, and I'd rather, I - I'd rather work on Sanskrit, frankly. I spend a lot of my day doing Sanskrit. Other stuff I don't - I can't talk about. But yeah, a big chunk of my everyday routine is Sanskrit. I find the ancient world a big and welcome escape from modern reality, which I don't claim to understand.
I don't know who runs the world. I see all the stuff about Freemasons or Jews or whatever, and I'm like - and it's just so weird listening to these people who act like they've been to the secret meetings of the lizard people or something. I'm like, no, you have not been to the secret meetings of these people.
You don't know. You should focus on your own life. And that's what I'm gonna do after I hang up is - focus on my own life. I don't spend a lot of hours on Substack.
I feel guilty because part of me wants to like - listen to all your interviews or part of me wants to answer every comment I get. Part of me wants to read all the stuff in my inbox. I can't. I'm not - I don't have time, and the time balance thing I'm just a total failure at.
Leafbox: No, I think that's the message, just to stay grounded in reality. I think that's the actual message you're taking. Stay away from the cult dynamics and humble.
Be humble and I guess ground yourself in, passion projects that provide value. Yeah.
AMRX: Yeah. Yeah. What are you? Yeah, I would tell people what are you interested in? Follow that. Become better at, become a better person. However you define better, that's up to you. I don't know you. I don't. I'm just speaking to some imaginary person.
I - I have no idea, but just work on yourself. That's what shocks me now that I'm out of the cults, is how much they're - how other-focused they all are. It's all about what did Ayn Rand say? What did Trump say? What did Putin say? What did Hamas do? What did Israel do? I'm like, who cares? You don't live there.
You don't. Who cares? Just let it go.
Leafbox: AMRX one of my last questions. So just to summarize, you speak Korean, correct? Chinese? Very badly. Yeah, but I don't Japanese fluently English. Fluently, pidgin, half. Any Sanskrit? Any romantic languages or Spanish, Portuguese, anything like that? Or French?
AMRX: Oh, here. Oh, here's fun - here's a fun fact. I don't know any Spanish whatsoever, and which is really funny, given Spanish’s huge importance to the United States. It - and I - that's why I feel embarrassed talking to - I always feel embarrassed talking to people when I don't know anything about their language.
And every time I encounter Spanish, I just fake - when I see it written, I just fake my way through it with French, Italian, and Latin.
Leafbox: Yeah, but that gives you the majority of it. If you speak Latin, you can get, there's some Arabic influence, but most of it you could probably decipher.
AMRX: Yeah.
Leafbox: I'm just curious between the, because I've been studying Japanese forever. Is Korean harder? I have heard that Korean is tech, some people think is harder. I know what hard is as a language is very up to interpretation, Mandarin Chi, Japanese, Chinese, they're always and Korean are always battling for the hardest language.
Did you ever learn Arabic or anything that are supposedly even harder. But yeah.
The Complexity of Korean and Other Languages
AMRX: Okay. Okay. About Korean and Arabic. True. So here's a story - short story. So I was at lunch many years ago with people with backgrounds very similar to mine. So all three of us had backgrounds in Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese. And at lunch we're all discussing which is the hardest. And that lasted all of two seconds because all of us instantly said Korean.
Leafbox: That's what I've heard. I don't know anything about Korean language, but I just thought it'd be easier because they have the alphabet. But I've heard the grammar and the phonetic systems very difficult and -
AMRX: Yeah. People think the alpha- - yeah, the alphabet - the problem - the alphabet is very easy.
I learned the alphabet almost instantly. And a lot of people say that they did too. The alphabet is the easiest thing. The problem is that nobody talks about this. Korean spelling is etymological. So there are silent letters. Nobody ever talks about, ever. Everybody who talks about Korean seems to be like a newbie and they all seem to be fascinated by this K-pop stuff.
And they all take a couple Korean lessons and quit. That's my suspicion. I'm not saying that's literally true, but like all the rhetoric I've heard about Korean, it sounds so superficial to me. Did you guys really even learn at all? And yeah, so the phonetics is very difficult. And moreover, even though they don't use Chinese characters anymore, you ha- - if you really want to learn Korean seriously, you ev- - end up having to learn Chinese characters anyway and just to get the roots.
Leafbox: Yeah, that's what I assume. Yeah. Just
AMRX: Have to go the roots. Because if you're a native Korean speaker, yeah, whatever, you just live there, no problem. It's osmosis. But if you're a non-native speaker, you are in trouble because you'll just be flooded with all this weird vocabulary and you have to be able to under - put it together.
When I was doing Russian, one of the huge - hugest helps was my teach - My professor gave me an overt book. This is the Russian roots book. Go study this. And the book tells you how to spot the roots, how they change. And that's what you also learn in Sanskrit. You are explicitly taught these are the roots of Sanskrit. This is how they change. They're are like 5 billion rules. But once you learn the 5 billion rules, and I keep forgetting them, to be frank I'm never gonna be in - I acknowledge this. I can't stand - I'm just gonna be honest about this. I can't stand people who have - I can't stand - I'm always envious of people who have real talent - philologists because I sure don't have any, I suck at them.
I've been doing Japanese since forever and my entire life, in fact, and, people make fun of college students with bad ESL ESL - that was me in Japan. I was able to write papers, but when I get the papers back, they'd be like all marked up. Like my grammar was just so bad.
I was able to write about Chinese poetry in Japanese and make sense, but I sounded like an idiot. Yeah, no, Korean is even worse. Oh my God. Yeah. I, my, my Korean teacher said, wow, your Korean sounds really weird.
Leafbox: Meanwhile she probably barely spoke one language, right? So the, you shouldn't be so hard on yourself.
Just the range of languages you're bringing up is very impressive and very
AMRX: Well, yeah. That's always the, that's like you said, it's the tension between breath and depth. I do not have depth. I don't have depth in history. I don't, I but I do have breadth. And just for anyone who reads my blog or might wanna read it, on my to-do list, I'm gonna write about, some of my favorite people in history. Ho Chi Minh. Yeah, I was left. Okay. Mao. Pol Pot. But yeah. Am I an expert on Khmer history? No. Am I an expert on Chinese history? No. Can I read Khmer? Yes. Can I read Chinese? Yes. But yeah, I've only gone so far. I just - you brought up Arabic. I just wanna say, if you're curious, I just wanna say a few words about, yeah. Arabic scares the heck outta me.
I learned how to read the script 30 years ago, and so I've used that knowledge to stumble very poorly through Persian and Urdu. 'cause Urdu, what I do is I use my knowledge of Arabic script, and I use my knowledge of Sanskrit, which doesn't get me very far, but it gets me somewhere. But yeah, Arabic scares me because it, from the outsider, when I look at Arabic grammar, because I love reading grammars - but Arabic grammar, I've never actually, read more than a few pages at a time 'cause it just terrifies me. And I'm talking about classical Arabic, not the spoken language, because I'm told - I don't have any experience, but I'm told that, that, for example, I had an Israeli friend who learned Palestinian Arabic, and he's - oh yeah, it's really easy for him.
But yeah, Arabic has scared me. And it's too bad because I was saying earlier about how misleading translations are in - like in Hinduism and Buddhism, and a few weeks ago I was struggling with the Bible because I was looking up this Hebrew word and going down this big rabbit hole of what does it really mean?
And when I - I've read the Quran or a translation of it anyway, I've looked at other translations of the Quran, and I'm like, is any of this real at all? You know what?
So that, that gets us back to, the perpetual theme of, agnosticism.
Leafbox: Yeah. Towards everything. Just yeah. Intellectual and ideological humility.
Thoughts on Social Engineering and Personal Growth
Leafbox: Last question, AMRX, you were never recruited by the with your language ability. I'm just surprised you weren't recruited by any intelligence forces or anything just to do I don't wanna, what your day job is, but I'm just surprised you never.
You'd be a perfect engineer for social engineering, right? In the sense that you have all these language abilities and linguistic neuro pro- - neuro programming would be very up your alley, it seems like just in a different life, maybe a parallel life, right?
AMRX: Yeah. I'll just confess that at my - at the lowest point in my life, I've never been for - I dunno if you consider this - approached at the lowest point in my life, but maybe not the lowest - one of the lowest points of my life, I answered a government ad for a spook, basically.
Obviously it doesn't say spook and it doesn't say spy, but I answered the ad. I actually got interviewed, and I was asked about this kind of stuff we're talking about, and I answered truthfully and I never heard back. So that's all.
Leafbox: What was your answer that to that, that what was the question?
What was the answer?
AMRX: I don't know. They just asked about - what can you do with languages?
Leafbox: Got it. And then what did you say anything you want, or nothing's possible, or what was your answer?
AMRX: They wanted me to do intelligence work and I was so desperate for money at that point. I was like, yeah, whatever.
And so I just said yes to everything and I never heard back. I know they did a background check on me, because later a friend said, oh yeah, the government called me and I wonder if I failed the background check, because people knew about my left - they knew about my radical left background.
Leafbox: That, that would, that seems like a positive, right?
That would be a pro. A pro point. Yeah. And
AMRX: - knew it was weird too. And this is what puzzled me. I'm glad I didn't become - I'm really glad that never happened,
Leafbox: But, or so you say, right? That's the the joke,
AMRX: But.
Leafbox: Yeah.
AMRX: Yeah. Maybe I'm still in it. But the - but yeah, that was puzzling because at the time I thought, oh, because of my leftist background. Now, looking back decades later - this is many years ago - I'm like, maybe being a public NeoCon blogger was a liability.
And they thought, I would be because my - I was blogging under my real name, and I had - I had - I used to be on that NeoCon blo-, top NeoCon blogger list. Not toward the, not at the top. Obviously I'm not, but Instapundit or whatever. But I was on there, and I think that was a liability, even though I totally bought into the US government narrative at the time, the fact that I was a public, I was a marginal public figure might've been a minus, but that's all pure speculation. I have no idea why I was rejected. I'm glad that happened because I got to do other kinds of work after that. I've been very, oh gosh, I guess I'll semi out myself here.
I've been very lucky. I've been able to use my skills of - I've managed to find niches that value breadth over depth. I've never posed as like a master of this language or that language, 'cause I am not, but yeah, I've always found ways to take advantage of what I can do. I know this is very normie and people scream, what the heck?
But one of, and I'm not - this is not an endorsement of everything this guy says - but one of my favorite passages is Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator. He has a book about success and he says that he believes in breadth over depth, and perhaps 'cause I'm just rationalizing my own life. I'm not one of these people who devoted his life 24/7 to one thing.
Like these Buddhologists, I know they blow my mind because they know all this obscure stuff about this temple or this sect of Buddhism. And I'm like what? And then I remind myself that the average Japanese has absolutely no idea what the heck they're talking about even.
But yeah, Scott Adams says that the reason that he thinks, this is his narrative. Maybe it's BS too, who knows? But he thinks Dilbert became a success because he says, look, I'm not a great writer. I'm not a great artist. Nobody's gonna pay Scott Adams to draw. Seriously. Who's gonna pay Scott Adams to draw their portrait? Nobody. Is he a good artist? No. Is he a great writer? No. Was he great at business? No. He got like Cs in business school or for - was he a great employee in a bank? No, but he took his corporate experience, he took his ability to draw ugly cartoons, and he took his ability, his sarcasm, and he put it together into a cartoon and made tons of money.
Now, I have not made tons of money. That's why the only Substack person I subscribe to is Rurik Skywalker because my income is a joke. But I'm happy because I've managed to monetize my breadth. Barely. I didn't even, I didn't even know where this is going, but yeah. I'll just stop there. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No,
Leafbox: it's very interesting. My last question then is I'm really trying to find someone who's an actual, not a spook, but I wanna know how the actual social engineering is made.
I wanna mind find the sausage maker. That's where I'm at now. Like I, I'm already into the second matrix, I wanna see how, what the, like I want to see how the psychological I'm not even judgmental, I just wanna be anthropologically interested how they're doing it. Are they just creating A and B teams or not who they are, but just I would like to, that's where I'm trying to find out.
So I would love to be in that interview where you had and just be like, what do you want to do? Like, how are you doing? What's your plan with linguistics? Are you neuro linguistically programming societies? Is this all conspiratorial or, I know they're doing it right. So I would like to see how that sausage is being made.
So that's just my own interest. And every time I try to find someone that seems like that kind of, I've tried to reach out to people who are, clearly, like USAID, id fronts obscure thing. They just don't write back or they don't respond, or it's very difficult to and I know when I talked to Rurik, he was approached by yeah.
Both sides. Yep. So that's interesting too. So I don't know if that's just once you get into the third position, I guess maybe that's what happens. Or you weren't in the third position when you/ Oh, no, I wasn't. I wasn't. Yeah, you were. Yeah. You were a Trumper in Bush. Bush at the time. Yeah. So maybe, I don't know if that's, maybe they felt you had, you weren't loyal enough.
Like you didn't, they would've been fine with you being a communist if you were a communist the whole time. But the switching sides is maybe Oh yeah. Maybe that's the problem. Yeah,
AMRX: That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah. Because even back then, and my trademark throughout my whole life is, I'm totally honest about my transformations.
I have never pretended that I was the - I was one thing the whole time. I hate when people do that. It is very, I just - that just makes me furious when they pretend like some of the hi- like the anti covid people I know. They flipped overnight. That was just weird. Like you mean
Leafbox: They were pro covid.
Totalitarianism. And then they switched over. They, once they opened up,
AMRX: overnight. Yeah. This lady was calling me stupid over masks and her fri- because she was all - she believed in the power of the mask, and her friends all ganged up on me. And then overnight, all of all these people overnight, they were like - the mask is like the worst thing ever.
And I'm like, what? And they had - they did not apologize to me at all. Just clicked like a switch. It was like the JD Vance thing. That was just weird.
Leafbox: No, it's, it is, it's exactly like the cult dynamics. I keep coming back to the cult. So whatever the guru says, you follow, even if it's the opposite of what yesterday's message was.
Yep. Yeah. Very well I think you could, maybe that's your in addition to your linguistic searches, maybe start Yeah, I'd love to read your writing on Yeah. Anything you find about cult dynamics or anything you can, thank you. Yeah. The social engineering aspects, how the machine is operating would be very fascinating to learn.
Or if it's just all cult dynamics, I'd love to, maybe it's charisma or I don't know what it is, but AMRX, I don't wanna take more of your time.
Concluding Thoughts and Future Plans
Leafbox: I have to go soon, but we can keep going forever, probably. Anything else you wanna share or?
AMRX: No. I don't wanna sound negative but no, I think we should stop.
I think we should stop here. I could go on forever, but I - I'm, but I have to go as well. I will look into cult dynamics. Thank you so much. This is great. You have really inspired me. Unfortunately, because of my schedule, I - I can only dribble out those crummy one hour thingies.
But yeah I'm going to definitely look back at all the cult stuff because I ha - like I said, I've read about Scientology, but at the time I was like, ha, look at them. They're so stupid. Ha. With no awareness. Now I'm like - I read about Jonestown with no awareness. I'm like, yeah, look at these dumb dumbos, drinking Kool-Aid or Flavor Aid, actually. But it - I just stand back. I'm like, what a fool like -
Leafbox: Yeah. No, I think it's very interesting. AMRX anything you wanna share, otherwise people can find you on your, I'll link to the NO COPE Substack, but anything else you wanna share or?
AMRX: Nope, nope. That's it. NO COPE is where to find me. And thank you so much. This has just been so much - this has been wonderful. I - this has the first unfettered, totally real conversation I've had in a long time, because every ti - because every time I talk to people I have to, tiptoe around their MAGA beliefs.
And I'm just so tired of that. It's just great to say anything I want at all. And to have someone who understands and is willing to listen and who has interesting perspectives of his own. If I have one, if I may say one very last thing, I hope someone interviews you.
Leafbox: Oh no. Not interesting at all.
So I have my own I come up all the time too in the questions I bring. So hopefully that's enough people. I wanna erase myself from the interview. Just I'm interested in interviewing people, anthropological research.
AMRX: Yeah. I get that. But yeah, you do you do give fascinating hints and I ho I hope to learn more about you.
Someday. And I wish you well with your quest to learn about how the sausage is made, because that's what interests me now that I've escaped from all this or I escaped from it, who knows? I want to, I wanna learn too. I hope you succeed in your quest and I'm gonna keep looking. Thank you very much, and -
Leafbox: AMRX, have a wonderful day.
Thank you very much.