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Conspiracy theories, startups and skepticism
tl;dr read some stuff , i am kinda skpetical of outlier startup founders being totally honest, but still will pursue this path lol
For the longest time, I have simply laughed at people like Alex Jones or David Icke because the Lizard and male supplements are obvious telltales of something being off. Something changed recently thanks to Twitter.
Ryan Breslow was one of the youngest billionaires. Stanford dropout started bolt, on the surface he sounds like the ideal YC candidate because no matter what Paul Graham may tell you, they absolutely care about your uni, especially Stanford, a cs undergrad dropout from there is about as blue chip a prospect you can be. Yet he never got in. Bolt was worth billions in 2022 and Ryan was doing well, one day he probably took more drugs than usual and went on a tirade against VCs. Pointing out how YC and Paul Graham (PG) wronged him as Bolt would go against Stripe run by Pauls golden boys. He also pointed out the Instacart incident where the VC firm Sequioa got Instacarts CFO as a partner so that he could make a report nitpicking the firms issue which would help them oust their founder and CEO as sequioa wanted them to IPO but the CEO did not. Well the dude got replaced and instacart IPOd.
Here is the interesting part, Ryan later nuked all of this. His allegations about VCs and the startup world being cliques came true because not only did he "leave" bolt but he got lawsuits and is worth way less than a billion now. The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this. At first, I was fairly convinced that this is because Ryan is not important but Bolt is worth more than Mistral or every single LLM wrapper put together. PG does have favorites who are objectively bad people. Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.
Here is where the conspiracies start, I read some stuff on chuckstack.com which prompted this thread. Charles C. Johnson is not a very good source of news which should not discourage us from throwing out everything he says. He gets a lot wrong but he clearly gets stuff right too. His posts on Thiel having worked for the FBI and how he stopped donating money the moment one of his boyfriends died under mysterious circumstances raise good points. He is also the first to mention the ties Andreesen Horowitz have to Saudis for raising money.
Edit - i could not find his post so posting the source he cited here
Now I am a middling or below middling wannabe tech startup guy in case you guys did not follow my previous accounts (u/practical_romantic being the latest before this one). My reason for pointing this out is to not be that one guy who blames everyone else for not succeeding, plenty of people do make a fuck ton of money despite zero help of any kind. I simply wish to put these as an example of the fact that there is a good possibility of there being far more happening at the very top of the VC/ founder space that we are totally in the dark about.
Human beings innately desire heroes in some capacity, Achilles in the Iliad is seen as a martyr however Aidan Maclear has a different reading where he points out that in the Odyssey, Achilles tells Odysseus that he regretted dying in the war for the higher good, thus him being a martyr is an incomplete reading as martyrs see their sacrifice as an honourable thing. My people have for the longest time considered Martyrdom or Veergati (our word for it) as the highest deed one can do besides ofc winning the war. Similarly, I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.
My relatives who work in politics and intelligence agencies share a similar nihilistic view towards the world and how most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated. The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world whereas the BJP is hyper-leftist, the first people or party to actively promote BR Ambedkar as a pan-national icon and pay people of lower castes to marry into higher castes. No publication that is popular or any public intellectual pieces this together. Nearly 100 percent of all Indians cannot see reality this way but it is pretty obvious when you take an objective look at things from a detached perspective.
Same goes for electoral politics. The average election has had enough booth capturing and suspect things happening that it would be considered rigged by Western standards yet you cannot prove it empirically. The west is not third world so me being skeptical may only make sense here but the underlying skepticism makes me not take anything at face value. Its not that you cant rig elections because of values but its always a question of how much you can get away with. How much of what is true, I am not sure, I just wanted to ask you guys for an honest opinion.
Yes, but I'm not sure what the conspiracy theory is. It seems like a paragraph or two was lost before the edit.
Not really, I mostly meant to state that I do not believe fully that all the super mega corps that are being run are completely clean entities that represent everything good about the world. Charles Johnson is a nutcase in many cases, the cases he makes for most of VC stuff being for show, where you do have mostly legit companies but the super mega corps most likely have fishy connections, motives and backstories is more believable than I was previously led to believe.
Nuclear technology did get stolen, most of what intelligence agencies do is classified and not reported on much universally in most nations. My theory is that a lot of what we are told about how the absolute outliers came about obfuscates a lot of things and there is a good chance that they are complicit in doing things with either domestic or foreign regimes for their own gain, where the incentives are far higher than what we can think.
Hollywood has casting couches, we know this, most of us know that if you are an actress, you very likely did have to sleep with some sleazy guy. Harvey Weinstein was caught but he was one of likely hundreds of thousands alive who did it. It still is happening and no one talks about it. In many cases, the people who later get hired by the actresses or their friends and families are unaware too. In such a scenario can it not be possible that there is quite a bit that happens inside Silicon Valley that we don't know about because none of us are founders of firms that are extreme outliers?
Your conspiracy theory is… big business probably has some skeletons in its closet?
Yep, a whole cemetery I guess and most new big businesses as opposed to old ones.
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Hell, Wells Fargo Bank got caught knowingly laundering money for the cartel, and they only got a slap on the wrist. I would not be surprised if all manner of shady business is occurring in lots of other industries and companies.
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My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.
There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.
Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.
Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.
That is fair but having a little more skepticism about the consensus on topics that you see in the startup sphere would serve all of us well. Johnson is incorrect about a lot but he is right about some stuff too, enough to warrant one to read and judge for themselves, I can point out for instance that his stuff about Yarvin and anything related to Indonesia is totally wrong but he is correct in pointing out that you have quite a lot of charlatans here.
He wrote pieces on lex friedman and eric weinstein where he at least did point out that both these people were immediately thrust into the limelight, how manufactured it all was and the ways they used credentials to later justify them being astroturfed. Lex went on JRE for the first time when he did not even have a podcast, even the views he got on his obviously incorrect tesla videos were very less. At that time, if you looked his name up (which I did) the first result was his BJJ match against Garry tonon. He would talk about MIT despite only being a post doc who spent little time there and had academic output that was about as good as Amy Chuas which zero.
Eric somehow got a job at Thiel Capital doing god knows what, claiming that his wife and he were noble science-winning minds or close to it and would throw fights whenever he was asked about his time spent in Jerusalem after his PhD and how somehow he has no output from that duration. For someone who worked as a managing director at Thiel Capital, I have never once heard him say anything about startups or investing at all that would indicate much interest or experience.
Chuck is the wrong to point this stuff out as he is not trustworthy and has a personal axe to grind.
Perfectly reasonable take. I guess I reacted fairly harshly to knowing this stuff and finding out that people who LARP as the bastions of everything good with the modern day world are well LARPers. In PGs case, he absolutely has favorites, no matter what bolt did later, them not selecting them seems fairly unreasonable. Adam Neumann of wework also somehow managaed to get another firm started post wework issues and still could raise money so people certainly have some form of strong preferences here.
The post I made here was somewaht difficult to write for me, I wish to be as good as one can be at what I want to do despite having been a total failure till now due to well just bieng lazy. In the case where I make an argument for favoritisim and other issues whihc for sure have to exist if you have money on the line, I kinda feel that I am making exuses but at the same time we all know that we are lied to on the regular about important things.
in my case here it would be
And that is hard to swallow. I have a hard time fathoming that Elon can work 4 jobs on his own and still be more onlline than me because time is limited, even if yu have all other attributes working for you, or how somehow the most important man in AI is sam altman even though he did not write down the code for the LLMs they use which use a combination of Transformers (Google) and Transfer learning stuff Jeremy Howard talked about in ULMFiT. Eric Schmiddts mistress, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried were mytholgical figures. I remember very clearly how much literally everyone, even the people over at ssc liked Sam becuase he would comment there occasionaly. If you told people that the same guy would end up in jail because of being incompetent and hiring an even more incompetent Stanford grad, no onew would have belieaved it. I personally would not have. I thought CZ was clean till he himself got sent to jail.
I hope I make sense. i dont want to end up on the same path as conspiracy theorists or make myself believe that you can onlly do well if you are a crook wokring for something or in the cabal but I just want to know what reality is. Obviously I know I will do well if I do things right but the mythos around it shaky at best.
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I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.
This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence :)
I think he would call themotte a cia psyop if he got to hear about it.
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I think the real question you need to be asking yourself is why do you find this "strange".
Or more pointedly what specific facet of your current worldview/model is it that this particular fact seems to invalidate or contradict?
My previous understanding was that people who build large firms do so entirely on their own fighting impossible odds and are helped by fellow founders, that unlike academia, there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people.
Reading this breaks that, how can you trust anything? Thiel was a legit FBI guy for a year and there is zero mention of it by anyone anywhere and this is not because of Palantir being related to him either. Similarly, Marc Andreessen is seen as this American patriot, /ourguy/ but a VC whereas his firm has taken money from Saudi Arabia and likely China too, how can you not have a conflict of interest then?
I used to take everything at face value before, I think I will probably lean towards believing things that I have seen as true instead of taking everyone else word for it.
Tbh that does sound incredibly naive. The start-up scene, or more generally capitalism, isn't good bc everyone involved is a perfect angel. It's because the competitiveness forces you to develop a good product that people actually want to buy, and to cut the slack and produce it reasonably cheaply. That's it. Worse yet, there are many tricks how people try to get around the competition with backhanded, negative-sum strategies, and you have to account for them & stop it. The problem with everything else, such as bureaucratic institutions, is that they often don't even attempt to account for these strategies so they run even wilder. Or worse yet they naturally incorporate the opposite.
It's douchebag who needs to please you vs douchebag you need to please. Nothing more, nothing less.
Kind of which is why I did thnk chuck was being too tin foily
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This is the most shocking thing I've read in months. No wonder I didn't understand what the conspiracy was. Surely you did school projects and saw people do little getting a lot of credit, surely you've heard of Enron, Theranos and thousands of other companies...? How could you suspend such a thought for so long? How did this Bolt guy of all things break the glass?
All I hear is how every founder who made it is an angel who is just better than everyone else, how all of them did it because you can too. Even here, I cannot fully say that I suspect that there is some chance that a lot of new-age tech firms likely cut deals with governments that we have zero clue about and how many of them can be astroturfed.
I did not want to believe it because I started reading PGs essays and thought that startups were the only fair thing in the world, how you cannot get ahead here without being super honest about everything, how everyone else is that way, how these are the saviours of humanity. Saying that Musk or Gates or Jobs may have actually done a whole bunch of shady shit that we conveniently wish to pretend could not have happened was my frame. I will get downvoted and get called a frustrated negative loser here, even though I hope Charles is incorrect. The idea that a lot of them happen to have fairly rich families that somehow did have connections with various agencies or services adjacent to them does seem fishy. Alexey Guzey made a post about Nobel prize winners and all their parents mostly worked white collar jobs like academics, engineers and maybe business owners but very few were active in politics.
Even in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos ran for years with VCs head of national agencies in the board and somehow never asked for a working white paper or patent, or how Adam Neumann raised money from a16z despite causing a lot of loss to people with his wework stuff. PG lies to people about how uni does not matter yet YC favors your undergrad and past experiences a lot more than most jobs do. Adam Neumann fucked innocent people over who lost money and jobs because of weworkm somehow he is still a better person than everyone else.
Last week on a thread before the elections got over I joked about voter fraud at which point I got a reply from a guy asking for substantial proof. This is the same thing as casting couches, if you actually investigate this stuff, it is very hard to prove as defection means punishment, with the P Diddy stuff, many who got raped by him will likely never come and accept it. How is it that most large crypto projects (exchanges) somehow have extensive money laundering issues to the point where if you run one, you likely fail jail sentences because you implictly either helped or rugpulled people
I don't want to be a conspiracy nut who thinks CIA or aliens or "the jews" run the world and do everything good or bad. The idea that there is still far more corruption in everything, especially startups, where the extent of the rot is sealed pretty well behind the personalities of founders and VCs who LARP as thought leaders whilst writing blogs that would make my incoherent ramblings look sane should make you suspcious.
In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, I think people were desperate for a female Steve Jobs. Don’t forget she never got significant amounts of VC money; she got the funds from blinding politicians and supermarket CEOs with science.
Great point, andreessen did support her but never invested money. Regardless, it's strange to raise 100s of millions without a working prototype for a single valuable feature for a firm that existed for close to a decade.
Wework, broadcast.com, ftx are some high profile blow ups but mostly VCs don't invest like dumbasses. Even if I were to believe that openai or something has obvious shady ties and origins and or founders of their backstories etc, they still made a ton of money. Not alleging that but I mean to say that even in such conditions, most people make money at least via valuations or exits and that most founders aren't scheming people, just that the probability of top top dogs doing this stuff seems high to me.
I think it's worth pointing out that the companies you named aren't exactly comparable. Taking them one by one:
Theranos was a fraudulent company that made an ineffective product, lied about its effectiveness, faked demonstrations and test results, and not only parlayed that into a ton of VC funding. The weird thing about it is that they nonetheless plowed forward by entering into contracts with large retailers that they couldn't possibly deliver on, and the whole operation was soon revealed as a sham.
FTX was a legitimate investment firm that fraudulently mishandled client funds. Years ago, my grandparents were victims of a similar fraud when their investment manager was telling them he was investing their money in the market but was really using it to make loans to his son's woodworking business. When the woodworking business couldn't cover the loans, he didn't have the money for investors withdrawing funds, eventually someone called the DA's office, and the guy was convicted and died in prison. This guy was a legitimate locally trusted investment manager that normal people used, not some obvious fraudster. When rumors started circulating that he was crooked, a lot of people, including my parents, pulled their money out, but my grandparents had been investing with him for years and said they trusted the guy.
WeWork was a legitimate company that was able to hype itself into a valuation so high it defied common sense. It was effectively a commercial real estate company that marketed itself as a tech company. The estimated valuation was so high leading up to the IPO that investors realized there was no real room for growth, not to mention that they were losing more money than could be reasonably explained. There were some questionable valuation processes (e.g. counting every desk job in a city where they were operating as a potential customer rather than a more reasoned analysis of the market for ad hoc office space), but none of this was exactly secret.
Broadcast.com was a successful company that Yahoo ran into the ground after acquiring it for a lot of money. I don't even know why it's included here because it was well past the VC stage at the time of purchase and it's just another failed acquisition.
So of the four companies, Theranos was the only one that engaged in fraud to attract VC money. FTX engaged in fraud to prop up another business. WeWork used non-fruadulent puffery to attract investment, and Broadcast was badly managed by a corporate giant.
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The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.
I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.
The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.
Do you know anything about the personality this guy had? Stories like this almost always pattern match to certain kinds of mental illness (in this case maybe Borderline Personality Disorder).
Unstable relationships, attractive and likely to get in a superficial relationship, aggressive and maybe suicidal when spurned, possibly paranoid...
Likely someone who knows the people involved would be like "oh yeah that checks out he was crazy."
But outside looking in it isn't as obvious and these other explanations pop up.
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I do wish to know more about this, there are barely any accounts on any of this at all but people on the inside are extremely tight. For instance, I do not know how Elon Musk can tweet at all hours of the day, play video games and still be involved in various firms, even part-time involvement in 4 different firms is enough to chew you out completely even if you work more than the hard-working Investment Banking guy. He probably is passive in what he does because I don't know how else you can do all that and still spend so much time online. These are not agencies that outsource Web Jobs to Indians, they are hard-tech firms, even if you spend 25 hours a week on one, you still get 48 hours for the rest of your week where you have to eat 21 times, meet your dozen kids, play your video game, tweet at all hours, go on podcasts and now work with the government.
I bring this up because I am certain that a lot of what we are told has pr spin on it combined with our innate desire to have heroes. You would rather want to believe that he does this and more than be told that a lot of what we are told is given charitable spins for preserivng ones image. He is certainly fairly capable, beyond what most people can comprehend but I doubt he is newton, far from it.
Apparently, he has quite a few more of them with him, his mistress (feel weird using it for a guy) did tell people that he was under threat a few days before his demise. Thiel got contracts even after 2020, donatng this time around would most certainly been helpful.
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Most of modern-day urban India is mostly leaning towards the casteless future BJP imagines or Congress did before it. There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry. BJP is not and never reactionary even when it first started out. They follow Arya Samaj which makes corrections to the Vedas to justify annihilating castes. Savarkar in his texts very directly talked about this. BJP has to appeal to upper castes because they vote for BJP in unison.
You cannot discuss any of this here publicly nor point out the HBD implications of castes, how brahmins in various parts Sanskritized people for money or how every single scripture is explicitly in favor of having castes and varnas. Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now. I am not some caste obsessed lunatic, I have to mention all of this since it gives a complete model for understanding religion, denying birth-based varnas is not far from denying the divinity of Christ. Anyone who does that is calling scriptures wrong, and not the fake new ones but the Vedas which are the equivalent of the bible in Hinduism. Again I am not asking for people to follow it, its just that you cannot believe in the Vedas, call them divine and then go against things they explicitly tell you to not do.
The reality of being poor plus having stark contrast with people who live beside you who not only inherit everything good but also were responsible for everything bad done to you and have slightly different ancestry is a recipe for disaster. Also why they push against Aryan Invasion Theory as it makes things even worse. On the flip side, most upper castes are people who got Sanskritised in that fold, their y haplogroups don't match those of others so there are no good outcomes.
Eh? I'm not aware of any reason to think the IVC had a caste system, and I couldn't find a reputable source that says so. We know fuck all about them really, their language is undeciphered, and their cities show only the same kind of social stratification that most civilizations do, in other words the elite living in the nicer places.
I don't know about you, but arranged marriages are very much a thing and far from deprecated. The BBC says that in 2018, 93% of all marriages in the country were arranged. That hasn't changed noticeably in the last 6 years.
Wow. I knew arranged marriages were a thing, but I didn't know they were that ubiquitous. With that many marriages being arranged, are the handful of people who don't go that route looked down upon as weirdos or anything?
Not really. For the middle class and above, nobody would really bat an eye unless the proposed spouse was otherwise socially undesirable.
If we're talking the lower class, it's still largely acceptance, albeit the picture becomes more murky when you consider the variation inevitable in such a large country.
The biggest issue is avoiding falling in love with the wrong person, defined as probably being poorer, in a bad job, wrong caste (which matters far less than it used to) and so on.
Even then, arranged marriages are nowhere near the popular misconception where the bride and groom only get to see each other before marriage (in most of the country). It's far closer to family-mediated speed dating, as opposed to having friends introduce prospective singles as is more common in the West (until dating apps steamrolled everything else).
Ever since you reach a Certain Age, your family, including bored aunts-twice-removed, begin putting out feelers or become more receptive to the same. Or they make a profile on a matrimonial site I guess. Then comes the carousel of cups of tea in living rooms, families and prospects vetting each other. Assuming both sides like what they see, the couple is encouraged to become familiar with each other, often unsupervised (or at least nobody in the living room) and them genuinely falling for each other, while not strictly necessary, is a welcome outcome. I'd be so bold as to claim the would be partners have veto rights throughout the process.
When everyone is happy and no skeletons or jilted lovers have turned up, then it's time for a big fat Indian wedding.
This isn't particularly different from a modal love marriage either! You take your partner home one day, introduce them, and then both families nigh inevitably begin giving each other a closer look. Objections may or may not be raised, but there's still a lot of reconciliation to do. You marry not just a person but their family, after all.
It's a pretty reasonable system, and God knows that there would be fewer NEETs and incels if more families in the West took hints from Indian mothers exasperated that their kids took their advice to ignore relationships and study for the NEET a little too seriously and need coaxing to produce grandkids eventually.
Uh, westerners trying to do the rough equivalent has mostly not worked very well, although the neuroses of fundamentalist Christianity may be a major explanatory factor there.
It's a civilizational issue. Westerners have this combination of individualism and guilt based moralism that prevents this sort of rigged-for-your-own-good type of institution from lasting in the face of principle.
If you want to make this idiotic romanticism manifest, try to argue openly that Romeo and Juliet are evil for engaging in a wholly destructive act of lust that shirks all their duties, and see people jump to defend vehemently characters whose ostensible fate is death.
This particular mode of being is not without its virtues, but we can plainly see the limitations of it now that it's been pushed to its logical conclusion.
You've baited me here. Romeo and Juliet have, even in death, done a great deal towards mending a wholly destructive blood feud between their families; if Shakespeare wasn't writing a tragedy of errors they would have been successful. What good would their duties have done?
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IVC did have jatis, jati or castes and varnas are different things, I heard Razib speak on this on clubhouse, but will need time to find some sources
It is not very common among the urban white-collar crowd to marry people of other castes. People still have caste based identity because of religion, poverty and the general state of bioleninism here.
My point about religion and caste still stands, hardcoding it in the vedas means that people intially will be against this, it would have worked to dissolve castes before but doing it now does not favor the OBC or below population as they get free things from castes existing.
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What do you make of the old anthropologist’s argument that the varnas are sublimated remnants of an ancient, long forgotten cow/bull sacrificial cult, with the Brahmins and accordant ritual purity taking the role of the bovine? (Sam Kriss is awful, but he has a brief summary here)
Incorrect, varnas are from Aryans, jati or caste from IVC, other Aryans and their descendants also had it, Scythians, Germanics etc. There is very little out there is honest about it though Razib Khab is pretty good.
Ancient germanics had a distinction between Noblemen and commoners, with nobles having priestly privileges, just like Ancient Rome. There’s no evidence for some kind of hardcoded up and down social hierarchy like the Indian caste system.
Survive the Jive (Tom Rowsell) would disagree. Germanics and Scythians especially had some kinds of castes not too far from the normal aryan way. He unlisted a few videos recently Aryans and their descendants absolutely had castes which did inspire even the Japanese later on.
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