You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.

Hi, Anatoly.

Hello, Bob.

How are you?

How are you?

Yeah, very good.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us.

Let me introduce this.

I'm Robert Wright, publisher of Non-Zero Newsletter on Substack. This is the Non-Zero podcast. You are Anatoly Carlin. And introducing you is actually slightly complicated, I think. I mean, you have a number of facets. it may not be immediately clear to everyone what the connection among all of them is,

but we'll try to get to the bottom of that before this is over. For starters, you are Russian. You published online a pretty well-known essay shortly before the invasion of Ukraine called regathering of the Russian lands in which you predicted that Putin would in fact

invade, not based on just recent troop movements and so on, but on things Putin had been saying,

most notably in the previous summer in a long essay, he wrote. Now, that was a work of analysis

and prediction, not advocacy, that essay of yours, I mean.

But I gathered you supported the invasion. Certainly, as the military campaign went on, I gathered you supported it online.

At some point, you became kind of pessimistic as the early success that you and others had predicted on the battlefield didn't transpire.

And kind of more interestingly, I think, although you can correct me about this if I'm wrong, this may not be true.

I think you did a kind of a rethinking about, you know, what kinds of nationalism are and are not good for Russia kind of geopolitically?

And we'll get into that.

You can tell me if I'm completely wrong.

But meanwhile, as for some other facets of your stuff, you are a transhumanist, which is to say, I gather you have high hopes for the fusion of technology and human biology.

You're kind of a futurist more broadly.

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