Episode Details

Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the “Archetypes” episode.

When we are thinking about transforming our own mental models—our entire conception of human culture in our minds—this is hopefully really why you are going to be interested in Finding Manuland. Obviously, you may not accept everything I say, or you may Google it and go, “Oh, maybe this or maybe that,” but that doesn’t matter.

I’ll just say, as an aside, this week The Wall Street Journal has published an essay under the title “The Ancient Horseman Who Created the Modern World.” New DNA research shows that half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamna, who lived in Ukraine 5,000 years ago. That was published in The Wall Street Journal on the 8th of March, 2025.

So, we’re not chasing genetic evidence; we’re chasing the evidence of sound and meaning—the cryptotypic signifying system which I believe the “MN” sound signifies. We’re interested in tracing that sound, the MN sound, from Ireland to India. Across space from Ireland to India, and across time from around 4100 BCE until today—so, 6,000 years. In Finding Manuland, we achieve this feat through various means.

But that is not the only reason to listen to Finding Manuland. What really matters to me is that I can communicate to you my energy, my manner, my positive manner. Hopefully, I’ll do my best, as we all do, to communicate positive manner every day. Now we have this technology where we can communicate our manner, our meaning, our inner self, and our energy across the entire world and across time. Because obviously, as I record this, I don’t know when you’re going to listen to this. It may be in a hundred years. So, this is why hopefully there’s a big market for this.

The vehicle for this is this amazing story about how this one sound traveled with this one community of people, the Yamna, with an MN sound in their name. I believe the idea of having a reminder lodged in our minds helps. When we are in these moments—reminder, minds, moments, all MN words—when our emotions take control and troll us into perhaps making mistakes and communicating bad or negative manner, then we’ll remember Finding Manuland. That will remind us to communicate positive manner in this moment.

Then, we can just switch from being really annoyed at this poor person at the other end of the phone line, or our boss, or our pet who’s nagging us for food when we don’t have it, or when we can’t afford to do something. We get really annoyed, but then we just flick a switch, and we flick that switch into communicating positive manner, positive energy.

So, if you’re asking me what the most important element or the most important meaning of Finding Manuland is, it’s this: I want us to use Finding Manuland as a little mantra. As a way of obviously contemplating all the amazing aspects of our human history since 4100 BCE until today, across the space from Ireland to India, but ultimately, this only matters in the moment when we are perhaps communicating negative, neutral, or indeed positive manner. We recognize that in the moment, and we give ourselves a little pat on the back. A little bit of pride never hurt anyone.

So, part of the sign that our mental model of humanity and culture is being transformed is that our human relationships are being transformed. We’re better in conflict situations. We’re better in the moment when we used to get triggered into communicating negative manner.

But really, what I am trying to do in Finding Manuland, as you’ve probably picked up, is to transform the archetype—your archetype of our human history since 4100 BCE—in your mind, just as it has been transformed in mine. Just as that Wall Street Journal article is making a tiny drop in the ocean to transform people’s mental archetype of ancient Ukraine and where the Indo-European languages emanate from.

We saw earlier in February, on February 5th, Nature publi